reading notes from Agua Viva, Clarice Lispecto.

from the Belgian artist Michel Seuphor: “There must be a painting totally free of dependence on the figure—or object—which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where line becomes existence.”

I see that I've never told you how I listen to music—I gently rest my hand on the record player and my hand vibrates, sending waves through my whole body: and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of reality's realm, and the world trembles inside my hands.

And when the day reaches its end I hear the crickets and become entirely replete and unintelligible.

So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. When this non-word—between the lines— takes the bait, something has been written. Once whatever is between the lines is caught, the word can be tossed away in relief. But that's where the analogy ends: the non-word, taking the bait, incorporates it. So what saves you is writing absentmindedly.

Is this word to you promiscuous? I would like it not to be, I am not promiscuous. But I am kaleidoscopic: I'm fascinated by my sparkling mutations that I here kaleidoscopically record.

The future is ahead and behind and to either side. The future is what always existed and always will exist. Even if Time is abolished? What I'm writing to you is not for reading— it's for being

And I plan nothing in my intuitive work of living: I work with the indirect, the informal and the unforeseen.

I stopped to drink cool water: the glass at this instant-now is of thick faceted crystal and with thousands of glints of instants. Are objects halted time?

I don't know what it is. But something is wrong and making me uneasy. Yet I am being frank and playing fair. I show my cards. I just don't tell the facts of my life: I'm secretive by nature. So what's wrong?

What am I doing in writing to you? trying to photograph perfume

Pay attention and as a favour: I'm inviting you to move to a new kingdom

I'm haunted by my ghosts, by whatever is mythic and fantastical—life is supernatural. And I walk on a tightrope up to the edge of my dream.

I lost the fear of symmetry, then of the disorder of inspiration. You need experience or courage to revalue symmetry, when one can easily imitate the falsely asymmetric, one of the most mundane originalities

Mirror? That crystallized void that has in itself enough space to go ever ceaselessly forward: for mirror is the deepest space that exists. And it is a magic thing: whoever has a broken piece can go with it to meditate in the desert. Seeing oneself is extraordinary. Like a cat whose fur bristles, I bristle when faced with myself. =46rom the desert I would also return empty, illuminated and translucent, and with the same vibrating silence of a mirror

Its form doesn't matter: no form manages to circumscribe and alter it. Mirror is light. A tiny piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.

One must understand the violent absence of color of a mirror in order to recreate it, as one would recreate the violent absence of taste of water.

Where is the fact? My story is of a calm darkness, of the root asleep in its strength, of the smell which has no scent. And in none of this does the abstract exist. It is the figurative of the unnameable. There is almost no flesh in this quartet of mine. A shame that the word “nerves” is linked to painful vibrations, otherwise it would be a quartet of nerves. Dark strings that, when plucked, do not speak of “other things,” they don't change the topic—they are in and of themselves, they surrender just as they are, without lie or fantasy.

No, I was never modern. And this happens: when I think a painting is strange that's when it's a painting. And when I think a word is strange that's where it achieves the meaning. And when I think life is strange that's where life begins

I'm an object without destiny. I am an object in whose hands? such is my human destiny. What saves me is the scream. I protest in the name of whatever is inside the object beyond the beyond the thought-feeling. I am an urgent object.

The true thought seems to have no author

Sleeping brings us very close to this empty and yet full thought. I'm not talking about the dream, which, in this case, would be a primary thought. I'm talking about sleeping. Sleeping is abstracting yourself and scattering into the nothingness

I'm a heretic. No, that's not true. Or am I? But something exists

The best is not yet written. The best is between the lines.