Agua Viva Read Online Free PDF Page A

of
air.
    We—faced with the scandal of death.
    Listen only superficially to what I say and from the lack
of meaning a meaning will be born as from me a high and light life is
inexplicably born. The dense jungle of words thickly envelops what I feel and
live, and transforms everything I am into some thing of mine that remains
outside me. Nature is enveloping: it entangles me entirely and is sexually
alive, just that: alive. I too am ferociously alive—and I lick my snout like a
tiger who has just devoured a deer.
    I write to you now, at the very moment itself. I
unfold only in the now. I speak today—not yesterday or tomorrow—but today
and at this actual perishable instant. My small and boxed-in freedom joins me to
the freedom of the world—but what is a window if not the air framed by right
angles? I am rudely alive. I am leaving—says death without adding that he’s
taking me along. And I shiver in panting breath because I must go with him. I am
death. Death takes place in my very being—how can I explain to you? It’s a
sensual death. Like a dead person I walk through the high grass in the greenish
light of its blades: I am Diana the Huntress of gold and all I can find are
heaps of bones. I live from an underlying layer of feelings: I am barely
alive.
    But these high summer days of damnation whisper to
me the need for renunciation. I renounce having a meaning, and then the sweet
and painful weakness grips me. Round and round shapes cross in the air. It’s a
summer heat. I navigate in my galley that braves the winds of a bewitched
summer. Crushed leaves remind me of the ground of my childhood. The green hand
and the golden breasts—that is how I paint the mark of Satan. They who fear us
and our alchemy stripped witches and sorcerers in search of the hidden mark that
was almost always found though it could only be known on sight for that mark was
indescribable and unpronounceable even in the darkness of the Middle Ages—
Middle Ages, thou art my dark subjacency and in the glare of the bonfires the
marked ones dance in circles riding branches and foliage which are the phallic
symbol of fertility: even in the white mass blood is used and there it is
drunk.
    Listen: I let you be, therefore let me be.
    But eternally is a very hard word: it has a granitic “t”
in the middle. Eternity: for everything that is never began. My small ever so
limited head bursts when thinking about something that doesn’t begin and doesn’t
end—for that is the eternal. Fortunately that feeling doesn’t last long
because I can’t bear it to stay and if it did it would lead to madness. But my
head also bursts when imagining the opposite: something that has begun—because
where would it begin? And that has ended—but what comes after ending? As you
see, it’s impossible for me to deepen and take possession of life, which is
aerial, is my light breath. But I do know what I want here: I want the
inconclusive. I want the profound organic disorder that nevertheless hints at an
underlying order. The great potency of potentiality. These babbled phrases of
mine are made the very moment they’re being written and are so new and green
they crackle. They are the now. I want the experience of a lack of construction.
Though this text of mine is crossed from end to end by a fragile connecting
thread—which? that of a plunge into the matter of the word? of passion? A
lustful thread, breath that heats the passing of syllables. Life really just
barely escapes me though the certainty comes to me that life is other and has a
hidden style.
    This text that I give you is not to be seen close
up: it gains its secret previously invisible roundness when seen from a
high-flying plane. Then you can divine the play of islands and see the channels
and seas. Understand me: I write you an onomatopoeia, convulsion of language.
I’m not transmitting to you a story but just words that live from sound. I speak
to you thus:
    “Lustful trunk.”
    And I bathe