Água Viva on mirrors

But now I’m interested in the mystery of the mirror. I’m looking for a way to paint it or to speak of it with the word. But what is a mirror? The word mirror does not exist, only mirrors exist, for a single one is an infinity of mirrors. Somewhere in the world there must be a mine of mirrors. Mirror is not something created but something born. You don’t need many to have the sparkling and sleepwalking mine: two are enough, and one reflects the reflection of what the other reflected, in a trembling that is transmitted in an intense and mute telegraphic message, insistent, liquidity in which you can plunge a fascinated hand and pull it out dripping with the reflections of that hard water that is the mirror. Like the seer’s crystal ball, it drags me toward the void that for the seer is his field of meditation, and in me the field of silences and silences. And I can barely speak, with so much silence unfurling into others.
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.
Remove its frame or the lines of its edges, and it grows like spilling water.
What is a mirror? It’s the only invented material that is natural. Whoever looks at a mirror, whoever manages to see it without seeing himself, whoever understands that its depth consists of being empty, whoever walks inside its transparent space without leaving the trace of his own image upon it—that somebody has understood its mystery of thing. For that to happen one must surprise it when it’s alone, when it’s hanging in an empty room, without forgetting that the finest needle before it can transform it into the simple image of a needle, so sensitive is the mirror in its quality of lightest reflection, only image and not the body. Body of the thing.