Água Viva

by Clarice Lispector

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 am almost free of my errors. I let the free horse run fiery. I, who trot nervously and only reality delimits me.

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

I live from an underlying layer of feelings: I am barely alive.

In my core I have the strange impression that I don’t belong to the human species.

Where am I going? and the answer is: I’m going.

I am a heart beating in the world.

I’m still not ready to talk about “he” or “she.” I demonstrate “that.” That is universal law. Birth and death. Birth. Death. Birth and—like a breathing of the world.

I was born a few instants ago and I am dimmed.

I know you all over because I have lived you all over. In me life is profound. The early hours find me pale from having lived the night of deep dreams. Though sometimes I float on a visible shoal that has beneath it dark blue almost black depths. That is why I write to you. On a waft of thick seaweed and in the tender wellspring of love.

Even for unbelievers there’s the instant of despair that is divine: the absence of the God is an act of religion. At this very instant I’m asking the God to help me. I’m needing. Needing more than human strength. I am strong but also destructive. The God must come to me since I haven’t gone to Him. Let the God come: please. Though I don’t deserve it. Come.

MEEEE BITCH

I’m restless and harsh and hopeless. Though I have love inside myself. It’s just that I don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it scratches like barbs. If I received so much love inside me and nonetheless am restless it’s because I need the God to come. Come before it’s too late. I’m in danger like every person who lives. And the only thing I can expect is precisely the unexpected. But I know that I shall have peace before death and that one day I shall taste the delicateness of life. I shall notice—as we eat and live the taste of food.

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. My crippled angel who contorts all elusive, my angel who fell from the heavens to the hell where he lives savoring evil.

I’ll tell you something: I don’t know how to paint either better or worse than I do. I paint a “this.” And I write with “this”—that is all I can do. Restless. The liters of blood that circulate in the veins. The muscles contracting and relaxing. The full-moon aura of the body. Parambolic— whatever that word means. Parambolic as I am. I can’t sum myself up because you can’t add a chair and two apples. I am a chair and two apples. And I cannot be added up.

Coagulated color, violence, martyrdom, are the beams that sustain the silence of a religious symmetry.