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fountains. When they move, it’s like hearing a voice, and when they concentrate (shaving or tightening a screw or copying a poem), they give off the same mystery as a priest does performing a liturgy. The old man I met was like this. And you are, too. (Here I give away the clue to our correspondence.)
    To be intimate is to re-find in oneself that which is most hidden and private; intimacy can also imply a marvellous, narrow relationship between two people. To be intimate is a way of listening to one’s internal sense, of listening to one’s own dialogue between the said and the unsaid. The second jubilant intimacy, the one which is (occasionally) shared, implies two listenings, two dialogues which overlap and couple.
    To put it differently, my argument is that such intimacy is the sine qua non for any INVITATION , whether it concerns art or bodies or (probably) souls. And without the first – intimacy with oneself – no other is possible …
    The late paintings of Titian are, I’m sure, the fruits of an individual intimacy. For him, whatever his disguise, for him, the man of power, the intimacy of feeding his art came from keeping marvellously in touch with his own truth.
    Show me – it’s a challenge – a painting which is the fruit of a shared intimacy between two people. Could you?
    Love, Katya
    PARIS
    Kut
,
    You end your letter by challenging me to name a painting in which we see or are allowed to feel a shared, double intimacy – that of painter and model, simultaneously.
    Yes, it’s rare but not, I think, as rare as all that. The Rubens of his wife, Hélène, with just a fur coat round her shoulders? The Caravaggio of the young man posing provocatively as Cupid? Several of Picasso’s paintings of Marie-Thérèse Walter? Each of these is about a shared sexual intimacy, and the act of love is very near.
    If one interprets intimacy in the wider sense of a shared and complicit openness in both parties (but without a sexual connotation), then there are certain icons by Rublev and a number of portraits by van Gogh in which the
thereness
ofthe model is complicit with the specific thereness of the painter’s vision, both so distinctly themselves that one thinks of them as being naked.
    Sensuality, you say, comes from a physical integrity, from a fidelity to the self in the body, and this is what attracts us – whether we are watching a lover, an animal, or a painting. Attraction begins with the surprise of coming upon the original, as it was before the world’s usage. And the art of attraction is the art of knowing this and of preserving what you name so beautifully as the vertical truth. Thus genius is comparable with a kind of natural grace.
    Yet I want to add something disconcerting about the nature of the painter’s contract with the visual. A contract that is never drawn up in clauses and that only consists of hunches. The visible waits to be seen. The visible is the painter’s first companion!
    The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the inner self, but from an encounter, the energy coming from both painter and model – even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty bottles. I cannot explain this, I just know that it’s true, which is why it’s disconcerting.
    Kisses, John
    ATHENS
    John
,
    OK. You win – a meeting takes place halfway between the painter and what he’s looking at. The promise of this meeting depends on a secret contract drawn up between the two of them. The miracle comes from doors being unbolted, from lock-gates being opened, and a fertilisation taking place. I still insist, however, that to open the doors and locks, the one who is looking, just as much as the one being looked at, has to be in a state of harmony, of grace, yes?
    Yesterday I started work again. The same bus, no. 222 or no. 235, the same dirt, the same stale air, the same inoffensive roughness, the same belligerent