I.
On foot, I think of violence.
I think of a painter, the path that led me to his cottage.
It's not an expression: he really lived in a cottage, a small thatched house. There was a mill in ruin on an eminence that reigned over his estate.
It was a small estate, but it was his domain. That is, he knew him and welcomed anyone who came to his lands.
The night I arrived at his house, the fire burned in the hearth with oak wood. I began to tell him that I would stay a few days if he didn't mind - he didn't give me time. He cut me clean and told me that time was not his domain.
You see my boy, each one has his infinity, each one digs its infinity a little bit. I am painting, and the earth on which I walk every day. It's not much, but it's the only door I know of. You talk to me about days and I don't know what it is, you talk about when you're going to leave and I don't care.
You just got here.
Give yourself the trouble to show me a little attention so that my painting is a little in you and that you, the traveler (it's okay if I call you like that? bon), you give me a gift of your way, stones that you saw rise to each of the blades that caressed the earth since you are in progress.
Don't talk to me about time.
If time is your subject, if time is your art, then teach me. If not, tell me about yourself and I'll be happy to know you. A little bit.
We chatted around the fire, and the fire was our companion for that first night, bathed in the smell of moss, lichen and dried mushrooms.
I slept on a cut trunk that deserved the couch name.
The next morning he got up early and euphoric. He asked me if I wanted to go fishing. I said yes, and until the first fish bit our hooks of fortunes, we said no more words.
Look at the water.
The current.
See the sound a fish makes when it falls.
At the end of the day, when we returned home, I knew how to distinguish one fish from another. I mean, there was only one kind of fish that we caught in the river, but I knew a young man from an old man, a male from a female.
The painter tells me that some of those we took were hermaphrodite. And then he spoke in his beard and pulled a cigarette out of the pocket of his raincoat hole and silently fuma it.
I nodded as if I understood perfectly what he meant by that.
II.
Everything is important. Everything is important.
The painter.
When I watched him paint - he would let me take a look at his studio from time to time, and then, sometimes, he would accept my presence when he began to spread out the life of his fingers on the canvas, sometimes with a brush, sometimes without, with eternal delicacy. The first time, after about an hour, I asked him:"Am I disturbing you?
He looked at me, flabbergasted. That I can only think that kind of thing.
He answered:
You know, when I paint, even I'm not here, so you're not gonna bother me.
When I watched him paint, very slowly and then suddenly with gestures and fury, it was as if I was becoming invisible.
At the very beginning, when he spoke, I thought I was the addressee but very quickly I understood that he was only repeating the same bits and pieces of phrase, the same tune, like a prayer with no other purpose than himself. Or the instant.
He was saying:
Everything is important. Remember: everything is important.
He said other words, too, but I didn't understand them.
III.
A)
Doing is a way of not forgetting, a way of accepting the weight of things, the noise they make dancing.
And, by making us come to touch the rope of the day, the canvas, the stone, all that we hold dear to our hearts to remember that it also lives an intense and wonderful life.
You know, what we see is so little.
When I watched him do, and speak, in front of the painting, with gouache and pieces of wet earth on his palette, I felt the freedom widening between these walls, as if his very personal way of painting was simply a way of being free.
To watch the opening.
Perhaps even to be free was like seeing him (and here I speak only for myself) to allow me to place any opening in the heart of the other, the other who faces me, the other who stands before me. And perhaps this openness, this audacity to let go of the gesture, also allowed me to remember: I too am so, I too, I know this, the humble pride of giving myself the right, at last, to rise again, not to remain on my knees forever - the right and the possibility of realizing that we have never been on our knees and that it is over, no more believing, no more simply believing in everything that can put us on our knees.
