Agua Viva

I’m expressing myself very badly and the right words escape me. My internal form has been carefully purified and yet my bond with the world has the naked crudity of free dreams and of great realities.

I love my cross, which I painfully carry. It’s the least I can make of my life: accept commiserably the sacrifice of the night.

I was born hard, heroic, alone, and standing. And I found my counterpoint in the landscape without picturesqueness and without beauty.

Ugliness is my banner of war. I love the ugly with the love of equals. And I defy death. I—I am my own death. And no one goes further.

I’m not promising you a story here. But there’s it. Bearable? It is soft and is oyster and is placenta. I am not joking because I am not a synonym—I am the name itself. There is a thread of steel going through all that I am writing you. There’s the future. Which is today.

It suddenly occurred to me that you don’t need order to live. There is no pattern to follow and the pattern itself doesn’t even exist: I am born.

What I’m writing to you is not for reading— it’s for being. The trumpets of the angel-beings echo in the without time.

I find it hard to believe that I shall die. Because I’m bubbling in cold freshness. My life will be very long because each instant is. I get the feeling I’m about to be born and can’t.

Before the appearance of the mirror, the person didn’t know his own face except reflected in the waters of a lake. After a certain point everyone is responsible for the face he has. I’ll now look at mine. It is a naked face. And when I think that no other like it exists in the world, I get a happy shock. Nor will there ever be.

And no one is I. No one is you. That is what solitude is.