Água Viva

by Clarice Lispector

“Art is not purity: it is purification. Art is not liberty: it is liberation.”

I am a little scared: scared of surrendering completely because the next instant is the unknown.

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.

I paint painting. And more than anything else, I write you hard writing. I want to grab the word in my hand.

My unbalanced words are the wealth of my silence. I write in acrobatics and pirouettes in the air—I write because I so deeply want to speak. Though writing only gives me the full measure of silence.

I’m growing with the day that as it grows kills in me a certain vague hope and forces me to look the hard sun straight in the face.

This is life seen by life. I may not have meaning but it is the same lack of meaning that the pulsing vein has.

I, alive and glimmering like the instants, spark and go out, alight and go out, spark and go out.

I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all of this I won when I stopped loving you.

For I want to feel in my hands the quivering and lively nerve of the now and may that nerve resist me like a restless vein. And may it rebel, that nerve of life, and may it contort and throb.

What a fever—will I one day manage to stop living? woe is me, who dies so much.

The world has no visible order and all I have is the order of my breath. I let myself happen.

I am rudely alive. I am leaving—says death without adding that he’s taking me along. And I shiver in panting breath because I must go with him. I am death. Death takes place in my very being—how

why do I love you if you don’t return my love? I send messengers in vain; when I greet you you hide your face from me; why do I love you if you don’t even notice me?

To live your life yourself. And to suffer as much to dull myself a bit. Because I can no longer carry the sorrows of the world. What can I do when I feel totally what other people are and feel?

Though I have love inside myself. It’s just that I don’t know how to use love.

Do I not have a plot to my life? for I am unexpectedly fragmentary. I am piecemeal. My story is living. And I have no fear of failure. Let failure annihilate me, I want the glory of falling.

When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.

I am—despite everything oh despite everything—am being joyful in this instant-now that passes if I don’t capture it in words. I am being joyful in this very instant because I refuse to be defeated: so I love. As an answer. Impersonal love, it love, is joy: even the love that doesn’t work out, even the love that ends.

I’m not going to die, you hear, God? I don’t have the courage, you hear? Don’t kill me, you hear? Because it’s a disgrace to be born in order to die without knowing when or where.

Ah living is so uncomfortable. Everything pinches: the body demands, the spirit doesn’t stop, living is like being tired and not being able to sleep—living is bothersome.