The Stream of Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

wearies me. I like landscapes of parched, dry earth with twisted trees, and mountains made of rock, and a dull, motionless light. Yes, that's where the hidden beauty lies. I also know that you don't like art. I was born hard, heroic, solitary, and on my feet. And I found my counterpoint in a landscape lacking all that is picturesque or beautiful. Ugliness is my battle standard. I love the ugly with the passion of equal for equal. And I defy death. I—I am my own death. And no one can go further than that. What is barbaric within me seeks the cruel barbarism beyond me. I see in shades of light and dark the faces of people who twist and sway in the flames of the bonfire. I am a tree that burns with hard pleasure. A single sweetness possesses me: collusion with the world. I love my cross, which I painfully bear. It's the least I can do with my life: accept compassionately the sacrifice of the night.
    The strange overtakes me: then I open the black umbrella and become agitated at a gala ball where stars shine brilliantly. The furious nerve within me that makes me writhe. Until the dead of night comes to find me bloodless. The deep night is vast and it devours me. The wind beckons. I follow it and break apart. If I don't join the game that unfolds as life, I'll lose my own life in a suicide of my species. I protect with fire my life game. When my own existence and the world's become no longer tenable through reason, then I'll free myself and pursue a latent truth. Would I even recognize the truth if it revealed itself to me?
    I'm making myself. I'll make myself until I reach the core.
    About me in the world I want to tell you of the force that guides me and brings me the world, of the vital sensuality of clear-cut structures and of the curves that are organically linked to other curved forms. My graphicness and my circumvolutions are powerful and the freedom that blows in the summer bears its own fatedness. The eroticism inherent in living things is scattered through the air, in the sea, in the plants, in us, scattered in the vehemence of my voice, I'm writing you with my voice. And there's the vigor of a robust trunk, of roots buried in the living earth that responds by giving them abundant food. At night I breathe in the energy. And all this in the fantastic. Fantastic: the world for one instant is exactly what my heart requires, I'm ready to die and form new compositions. I'm expressing myself very badly and the right words escape me. My internal form is finely distilled and yet my connection with the world has the naked rawness of free dreams and great realities. I know no limits. And my own strength frees me, that full life that overflows from within me. And I plan nothing in the intuitive labor that is my living: I labor with the indirect, the informal, and the unforeseen.
    Now, at dawn, I'm pale and panting and my mouth is dry in the face of what I achieve. Nature in a choral canticle and me dying. What does nature sing? the final word itself which is not I never more. The centuries will fall upon me. But for the time being a truculence of body and soul manifests itself in the rich avalanche of heavy words that knock each other over—and something savage, primary, and angry rises up from out of my swamps, the accursed plant which is about to deliver itself to God. The more accursed, the closer to God. I've looked into myself and discovered that I want raw, bloody life, and the occult meaning is so intense that it has light. It's the secret light of a knowledge of destiny: the bedrock of earth. It's more a presentiment of life than life itself. I exorcise it, excluding all that is profane. In my world little freedom of action is granted me. I'm free only to carry out fateful gestures. My anarchy subterraneously obeys a law where I deal clandestinely with astronomy, mathematics, and mechanics. The liturgy of dissonant swarms of insects that rise from cloudy and pestilent bogs. Insects, frogs, lice, flies, fleas, and crabs—