A Breath of Life

  Angela is my aphrodisiac.

  Angela doesn’t seem to me to have subtleties. She scandalizes me a bit. Because she’s freer than I.

  Our extreme misery.

  Wanting to understand is one of the worst things that could happen to me. But through Angela’s innocence I’m learning not to know all by myself.

  I’m exhausted by Angela. And especially by me. I need to be alone from myself, so much so that I don’t even rely on God. And so I’ll leave a page blank or the rest of the book — I’ll come back when I can.

  I’m back. Because the pungency of Angela Pralini called me. Before her — as before a “masterpiece” — I feel an almost intolerable tightening in the chest, a desire to flee the emotion. That’s what I feel with Fellini’s movies.

  What our imagination creates resembles the process God has for creating.

  ANGELA: I take refuge in madness because the boring middle ground of the state of ordinary things is no longer left for me. I want to see new things — and I’ll only manage to do that if I lose my fear of madness.

  Life is little by little. Today I take half a step, the day after tomorrow I’ll take another half-step. Such impatience. I want to swallow life down in a single gulp and then maybe something like dying. But my own blood is slow.

  I want to show myself the dirtiest and lowest part of me — and only then can I forgive myself. I want to be forgiven for being so full of sensuality that it is an animal cry inside me, a taste of the harsh voice of the wolf desiring its prey, me! I who aspire to the great disorder of vile desires and the darkness that possesses me in the apocalyptic orgasm of my existence. My existence is the victim of a fatality. That is: I am, oh poor me human and weak and needy and begging. I want your smile, I want your velvet caress, I want the body-to-body struggle, both so intimate, so gullible lost children.

  I cry out for absolution! Oh mighty God, forgive me my life of errors and the worst habits of feeling, forgive me for existing in the pleasure so luxuriant and sensual of the absorption of the miasmas of the body-to-body. I want an abyss for you and to receive you like a queen of Sheba. Are my desires base? poor me, for I have an unhappy and unsatisfied body. Oh God of the desperate, find me, you have the power to distinguish my small noble part that barely glitters amidst the gravel, find me! Now! Right away! Ah . . . Ah . . . Ah . . . you found me . . . How my soul flies, liberated just a moment ago by the encounter with myself! God FOUND me. HALLELUJAH! Hallelujah! And I found God in my deepest unconsciousness, in the sort of coma in which I live I managed to stammer the vision of the God — in myself! I, also chosen by divine pity. What glory. Ah, but what glory.

  And death no longer has power over me because I AM NO LONGER AFRAID! I swim and sparkle in states of vibrating divine fruition. Now I understand: I used to try to open a path in the darkness, knowing only how to beg. But only when I became naked did the doors of heaven and perception open wide to let me pass. I who am such a spark. And so I join myself to You and punish myself no longer. I bubble so nice and calm, poor me. This is how it happened: when I saw that I could no longer bear the weight of myself, I went to bed and all coiled up as much as possible in the fetal position, this: reduced to zero, having therefore to surrender to whatever came to me, since I no longer knew the answer to what I was asking, I burning with a kind of inner fever. Then — having to surrender myself to the Nothing — the miracle happened: I could taste like food in my mouth the flavor of Everything. This flavor spread like light and the sensation of taste throughout my entire body, and I surrendered to God, with the delirium of a soul drinking water.

  Ah, how wide is eternity. For that is what I saw: the serene wideness of eternity, the taste of the eternal. Then the body once all weak and trembling found the vigor of a newborn in its first splastic cry in the world of light. And all of me became strong and roused, like a haughty stalk of blond wheat. Thus, standing like the stalk of wheat because that’s how it was, with natural nobility, I could face the grandeur of the God. Standing like a stalk of wheat, I burst into You and freed myself from having a distinct soul. I was the general soul of the world. I was no longer alone: I had found myself in the intimate and dazzling company of God. Whiteness. Infinite transparency. And my body radiated in circles of light. Of the light that receives me. And I, naked as a newborn, returned to God. And this return of the prodigal son that I was anointed me all over, anointed the fragile and strong stalk of wheat that I was. And God was the detector of lost souls. And I who once couldn’t stand the sensation of the abundance of myself, thinking fearfully that this encounter was too grandiose and would annihilate me. Poor me: I addressed myself like a slave adorned with garlands to please myself as a slave — and discovered the simplicity and the nudity of a queen, who, because she has everything, needs nothing more. Bless me, God: I extend to You a mouth lacerated by the fever of a long thirst, I extend to You my four paws torn and bleeding from trying to cling to You. Come and fill me completely with Your great gentle light, Amen, I owner of nothing, at last, warmed at last by the breath of an infantile sleep, by the rosy health of the soul, which emanates from me to myself and ennobles my way of existing, I, holy vestal, drugged by the essence of eternity, I protected by the luck of extreme penury that, because I could no longer stand it, becomes richness. I no longer need to ask: God gives. I who breathed in my own nourishing warm breath like a child tucked under sheets and sheltered from fear. Something touched my shoulder and called me and I didn’t recognize that it was God and I was afraid of the great solitude and the great silence that open in the soul when it is going to receive them. I was afraid of my own simple grandeur of a human person. I already had and experienced a bit of all kinds of tortured baseness and human ambitions — I am now almost free of the “sin” of the soul. I can finally give myself to the luxury of being free of myself and start to feel a certain Olympic peace.

  Living makes me so nervous, so on the edge of. I take sedatives just because I’m alive: the sedative partially kills me and dulls the too-sharp steel of my blade of life. I stop shaking a bit. And reach a more contemplative stage.

  AUTHOR: I think Angela’s pinnacle, one of her climaxes, is this “mystical” instant. Only Angela will someday know if it was mystical or mystifying. Anyway, from what it seems, Angela connected to the existence of a reality of life to which it is uncommon to adhere because everyday life often kills transcendence. Reality is fragmentary. Only the reality of the ultrasonic and ultralight of the infinite is whole.

  Perhaps the “union of Angela with Everything!” is no more than a great self-knowledge and a great acceptance.

  ANGELA: I’m still half-submerged in mystical sensations. I drank a bit too much of that strong beverage, I got a little drunk. I’ll say nothing about what happened to me, since, instead of mysticism, they might say it’s mystification. At the same time that I was receiving the God, I was turned inside-out and also felt that besides God I myself had made belief blossom within me coming from my medieval darkness. And I, trembling flower.

  I don’t like to explain myself. I prefer the penumbra of not-knowing.

  I live in provisional ecstasies. I live from the debris of a shipwreck that the sea rejects upon the sand.

  AUTHOR: Everything Angela doesn’t understand she calls God. She worships the Unknown.

  This ecstasy of illumination makes me suspicious. Is it spirit taking full possession of itself to its very fringes? Or is it a woman’s body brought to the point of crisis and then of mirages outside of her but that represent a “throwing away” for a few instants of the notion of lowness and sin? freed of the body for finally having acknowledged it, she, free of the heavy burden of sensuality, accepted the idea of the intimate union of two bodies — free, the great abundance of the universe is loosed, universe that has its voice in the absolute and expansive silence, silence brought to us by the air we breathe.

  This illumination of Angela’s cannot make itself known in words. As the word “scent” tries to express poorly wha
t we call “scent.” There are no words pure in themselves. They always come mixed with: “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  I’m starting to think that Angela’s state of grace might be real because the “illumination” happened right after a feeling of complete abandonment and suffering. Saint Catherine of Genoa said that “when God wishes to penetrate a soul, He first abandons it completely.”

  She reached an ecstasy upon losing the illusory multiplicity of worldly things and starting to feel everything as a whole. It is something that is nourished in the roots planted in the darkness of the soul and it rises until it reaches a “consciousness” that in fact is supernatural light and miracle.

  What Angela does not know illuminates her and dominates her more than what she does know. It’s not a knowledge that has consequences. In fact she doesn’t even know what to do with what she knows.

  ANGELA: Today I felt something absolutely terrible. I felt that I am not understood by God.

  AUTHOR: He who emphasizes the ritual of faith can lose the point of faith.

  Sometimes those who don’t believe are more likely to receive like a shining miracle the manna falling from nowhere. This “nowhere” is the air. And the air is what others call God. I call God as He wishes to be called. Like this: I open my mouth and as a means of calling Him let a sound escape me. This sound is simple. And it involves the vital breath. The sound limits itself to being only this: Ah . . .

  Ah . . . the absolute and good and shrewd indifference . . . Ah . . . and it’s toward this Ah that we as in a breath go with our Ah to meet Him.

  It’s a matter of the vital breath.

  Meditation is an addiction, you acquire the taste.

  And the result of meditation is Ah, which makes gods of us. That’s fine but now tell me what’s the point of being Gods or Humans?

  It seems to please us to be able to say Ah. So I end up shot through by the voice of God and here I say like one lightly exhaling: Ah . . .

  We were born to enjoy this Ah, could being be enough for me? I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m talking about.

  The plant needs water, light-heat-soil-air to justify being, and could it be that the Ah justifies us?

  There is someone waiting behind our left shoulder to touch us and to make us say Ah . . .

  When I say I love you, I am loving me in you.

  I’m not relative I’m infinite that’s why in each being I reflect myself in each being I encounter myself.

  The most perfect thing that exists in the universe is the air. The air is the God accessible to us. When I speak of things I’m not reducing life to the material, rather I am humanizing the inert. All of this is as I once said, I play fair. I’m not hiding any cards. And if I have any style, let it come and turn up because I do not seek it.

  Every birth presumes a rupture.

  I was invited to watch a childbirth but I’m not strong enough to watch the dramatic birth of the dawn in the mountains when the sun is aflame.

  Every birth is a cruelty. Things that wish to sleep should be left asleep.

  My wickedness comes from the poor accommodation of my soul in my body. It is squeezed, it lacks inner space.

  It’s what didn’t ever let itself be folded into four paws by the pain of existence, that pain which every once in a while we must obey in order to keep living our nice middle-class lives.

  I ask God: why others? And He answers me: why you? to all of our questions God responds with a greater question and that is how we broaden ourselves in spasms for a child within us to be born. But — but peace on earth and tranquil light in the air. God who is the nothing-everything sparkles in a gentle glow of an eternal present, let us therefore sleep until next week.

  And I? Could it be I won’t become my own character? Could it be I invent myself? All I know about myself is that I’m the product of a father and a mother. That’s all I know about creation and life.

  We want to penetrate the kingdom of God through sins because if not for sin there wouldn’t be forgiveness and we wouldn’t manage to reach Him.

  I took refuge in madness because reason was not enough for me.

  I wait for what’s happening. This is my only future and past.

  Comfort is an abundance.

  One day the comfort in God and no matter how paltry it was we learn this from being in the warm shelter of our birth.

  To be useless is freedom. To have meaning would belittle us, we are gratuitously just for the pleasure of being.

  And from the future we will consciously wait for the lack of meaning, a freedom in speaking, in feeling Ah . . .

  Happiness is nothing more than feeling an Ah with relief, then let us raise our glasses and modestly toast an Ah to God.

  Though it’s hard for me to finish it hurts so much to say goodbye doesn’t it? Well because in me it hurts Ah.

  Why God?

  Why not sit smoking and dying of hunger Ah it’s because you want to be able to say Ah.

  Do we exist simply to be relieved?

  I pay attention only to pay attention: deep down I don’t want to know.

  I don’t want anything.

  God is abstract. That is our tragedy.

  I am like the cicadas that explode from so much singing. When shall I explode? What do I sing? Do I sing the splendor of dying? Do I sing of my love that is so alive that it convulses? Do I sing the sorcery in the air? Do I sing the molecules of the air?

  I’m frightened by my own power which however is limboed: could I kill myself in my desperation for despair? No. I refuse to kill myself. I want to live until I become an old and meditative being, comatose from a deep even indescribable and unreachable lucidity of the senile semi-coma. This senile semi-coma resembles a numb almost-sleep of the upper layers of consciousness. In that state — I imagine based on the gazes I have seen in the gray, immobile old — in that state one can respond to questions and even conversations: the ultimate aims of the living man are easy to execute.

  What’s difficult and ultimately attainable is the half-unconscious and present lethargy — without past or future: like for a morphine addict. It’s a state of unavoidable truth without words. This state is milky and bluish with flickering ruby-red splinterings.

  I write to you so that beyond the intimate surface on which we live you might come to know my prolonged howl of a wolf in the mountains.

  I distilled myself entirely: I’m clean like rainwater.

  Quint-essence.

  Transfiguration.

  Let the author beware of popularity, otherwise he will be defeated by success. There is a time when you must take a picture of yourself. Hunger is always the same as the first hunger. The need renews itself empty and entire.

  AUTHOR: When something happens I don’t make the most of it. And then an illogical longing comes. But that’s because the present time, like the light of a star, only later does it reach me in light years. While it’s happening I can’t make out what’s going on. It seems to me that I am only sensitive and alert when remembering. I almost live, therefore, in the past because I can’t recognize the type of richness of the present moment.

  The forgetting of things is my escape valve. I forget a lot out of necessity. I’m even trying and succeeding in forgetting me, me minutes before, I forget my future. I’m naked.

  ANGELA: When I ask myself if the future worries me, I reply astonished or fake: the future? but what future? the future doesn’t exit. Am I complicated? No, I am simple as Bach!

  I fear the instant which is always unique. Today, walking into the house, I let out a profound sigh as though arriving from a long and difficult journey. Disappeared people. Where are they now? When someone finds out call Rádio Tupi. Where is the disappeared Francisco Paulo Mendes? Is he dead? He abandoned me, he thought I was really important . . . And the walls of China? Before I see Christ, I want to see them. I want a ten-year guarantee. I’m afraid of having a tragic end. I’m hungry. And so I eat three petals of a yellow rose.


  Ah, the intimate life I have with myself isn’t enough for me because bats and vampires cry out my name: Angela! Angela! Angela! And I cross measureless spaces to reach the era in which I live, I who came from afar. There are secret things that I know how to do. For example: remain seated feeling Time. Am I in the present? Or am I in the past? And what if I were in the future? How glorious. Or am I the fragment of a thing, therefore without time. The meaning of time elapsing is missing plot and suspense and mystery and climax.

  I remember the future. Harmony is foreseeing an instant-now the next musical phrase. The train of darkness connects commerce to commerce. Conclave and sponsorship. Oh! the wonder of mornings. I’ll live until Saturday. And I won’t be run over. How nice. The world in focus. Does next year exist? State of emergency?

  AUTHOR: I am the prophet of yesterday.

  The joy of life is.

  ANGELA: Two-twenty a.m. isn’t a time for anything especially on Saturday.

  I shiver thinking in parentheses, oh my God, careful: I’m going to speak of the year 3000 — help! And the year 40,000? I’m scared.

  In the year 40,000 I’m so dead. Even more than you. Careful, be very careful, sir. Help, oh inclement blue sky. I said as calmly as I could: please-help-me. It’s getting dark. And I without food or drink. I got hysterical, sorry. Am I by chance inside out? No, God save me. I want to be right-side out, ok? But it’s so hard.

  AUTHOR: You — I say to anyone — you’re to blame for the ants that will gnaw my mouth ruined by the mechanism of life. Angela doesn’t die death because she’s already dying in life: that’s how she escapes a fateful end by having a sample of total death in her day-to-day life.

  And suddenly — suddenly! a demonic and rebellious avalanche gushes inside me: because I wonder if it’s worth it for Angela to die. Do I kill her? does she kill herself? I pull back my reins though the horse complains. Because I just thought better of it. And I’ll only figure it out after Angela takes a position regarding death.