Água Viva

by Clarice Lispector

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

Because there is a logic in life, in events, as there is in a book. They follow one another, they must. Since if I took a fragment and wanted to move it further ahead, there wouldn’t be anywhere to put it. It was like a puzzle. I took all the fragments and collected them, kept them in an envelope.

“living water,” the words can mean a spring or a fountain, a meaning often suggested inside the book, but to a Brazilian the words will first of all refer to a jellyfish.

You don’t understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body. When you come to read me you will ask why I don’t keep to painting and my exhibitions, since I write so rough and disorderly. It’s because now I feel the need for words—and what I’m writing is new to me because until now my true word has never been touched. The word is my fourth dimension.

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.

The secret harmony of disharmony: I don’t want something already made but something still being tortuously made. 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.

And if I say “I” it’s because I dare not say “you,” or “we” or “one.” I’m forced to the humility of personalizing myself belittling myself but I am the are-you.

I know that my gaze must be that of a primitive person surrendered completely to the world, primitive like the gods who only allow the broad strokes of good and evil and don’t want to know about good tangled up like hair in evil, evil that is good.

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 construct something free of me and of you—this is my freedom that leads to death.

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

So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. When this non-word—between the lines— takes the bait, something has been written. Once whatever is between the lines is caught, the word can be tossed away in relief. But that’s where the analogy ends: the non-word, taking the bait, incorporates it. So what saves you is writing absentmindedly.

don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth.

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

My aura is mystery of life.

What color is the spatial infinity? it is the color of air.

In the core where I am, in the core of the Is, I ask no questions. Because when it is—it is. I am only limited by my identity. I, elastic being and separated from other bodies.

My painting has no words: it is beyond thought. In this land of the is-itself I am pure crystalline ecstasy. It is itself. I am myself. You are yourself.

so when I die, I’ll never have been born and lived: death washes away the traces of the sea-foam on the beach. Now it is an instant. Here is another now.

Read the energy that is in my silence. Ah I fear God and his silence. I’m myself.

have an important thing to tell you. Because I’m not joking: it is the pure element. Material of the instant of time. I am not objectivizing anything: I am having the real birth of it. I feel faint like someone about to be born.

Never is the impossible. I like never. I also like ever. What is there between never and ever that links them so indirectly and intimately?

This instant is. You who read me are.

It’s because of the simultaneity of time. And so I ask you questions and these will be many. Because I am a question.

I love the ugly with the love of equals. And I defy death. I—I am my own death. And no one goes further. The barbarian within me seeks the cruel barbarian outside me. I see in light and dark I the faces of people flickering in the flames of the bonfire. I am a tree that burns with hard pleasure. A single sweetness possesses me: complicity with the world. I love my cross, which I painfully carry. It’s the least I can make of my life: accept commiserably the sacrifice of the night.

The more accursed, the nearer toward the God. I deepened myself in myself and found that I want bloody life, and the occult meaning has an intensity that has light. It is the secret light of a knowledge of fatality: the cornerstone of the earth. It is more an omen of life than actual life. I exorcise it excluding the profane. In my world little freedom of action is granted me. I am free only to carry out the fatal gestures.

May the God help me: I am without a guide and it is dark once again. Will I have to die again in order to be born once again? I accept.

My aura is of the mystery of life. I surpass myself abdicating from my name, and then I am the world. I follow the voice of the world with a single voice.

The halo is more important than the things and the words. The halo is dizzying. I plunge the word into the deserted emptiness: it’s a word like a slim monolithic block that gives off shadow. And it’s a heralding trumpet. The halo is the it.

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? I live them but no longer have the strength. I don’t want to tell even myself certain things. It would be to betray the is-itself. I feel that I know some truths. Which I already foresee. But truths have no words. Truths or truth? I’m not going to speak of the God, He is my secret. The sun is shining today. The beach was full of a nice wind and a freedom. And I was on my own. Without needing anybody. It’s hard because I need to share what I feel with you. The calm sea. But on the lookout and suspicious. As if a calm like that couldn’t last. Something’s always about to happen. The unforeseen,

I want to paint a rose. Rose is the feminine flower that gives herself wholly and such that the only thing left to her is the joy of having given herself. Her perfume is a crazy mystery. When inhaled deeply it touches the intimate depth of the heart and leaves the inside of the entire body perfumed.

The sunflower is the great child of the sun. So much so that it knows how to turn its enormous corolla toward the one who made it. It doesn’t matter if it’s father or mother. I don’t know. I wonder if the sunflower is a feminine or masculine flower? I think masculine.

The violet is introverted and its introspection is profound. They say it hides away out of modesty. Not true. It hides away in order to capture its own secret. Its almost-not-perfume is a smothered glory but demands that people seek it. It never shouts its perfume. Violet says frivolous things that cannot be said.

The golden everlasting is always dead. Its dryness aspires to eternity. Its name in Greek means: sun of gold. The daisy is a happy little flower. It is simple and on the surface of the skin. It has but ...

The beautiful orchid is exquise and unpleasant. It isn’t spontaneous. It needs a glass dome. But it is a magnificent woman and that cannot be denied. Nor can it be denied that it is noble because it is epiphytic. Epiphytes are born on other plants without however taking nutrition from them. I was lying when I s...

The tulip is only a tulip in Holland. A single tulip simply is not. They need an o...

Cornflowers only grow amidst the wheat. In their humility they have the audacity to appear in various shapes and colors. The cornflower is biblical. In the nativity scenes of Spain it isn’t separated f...

But angelica is dangerous. It has the perfume of the chapel. It brings ecstasy. It recalls the Host. Many wish to eat it and fill their...

Jasmine is for lovers. It makes you want to put an ellipsis now. They walk holding hands, swinging their arms and giving each other gentle kisses...

Bird-of-paradise is pure masculinity. It has an aggressiveness of love and of healthy pride. It seems to have a cock’s comb and his crow. It just doesn’t ...

Night jessamine has a perfume of the full moon. It’s phantasmagoric and a bit frightening and is for people who like danger. It only emerges at night with its dizzying scent. Night jessamine is silent. And also belongs to the deserted street corner and in the dark and the gardens of houses whose lights are off and windows are shut. It’s highly dangerous...

As for the succulent flower of the cactus, it is large and scented and of a vivid color. It’s the succulent revenge that the desert plant makes. It is spl...

I can’t be bothered to speak of edelweiss. Because it’s found at an altitude of three thousand four hundred metres. It’s white and wool...

Geranium is the flower of window boxes. You find it in São Paulo, in the neighborhood of ...

Giant water lilies are in the Botanical Gardens in Rio de Janeiro. Enormous and up to two metres in diameter. Aquatic, they’re to die for. They are the Amazonian: the dinosaur of flowers. ...

The chrysanthemum is of a deep happiness. It speaks through its color and its unruly shock of hair. It’s a flower that untidily controls its own wildness.

and I felt the patient brutality with which the closed earth was opening inside in birth, and I knew with what weight of sweetness the summer was ripening a hundred thousand oranges and I knew that the oranges were mine. Because that is what I wanted.

All that’s guiding me is a sense of discovery. Beyond what’s beyond thought.

You are a form of being I, and I a form of being you: those are the limits of my possibility.

It’s like knowing how to arrange flowers in a vase: almost useless knowledge. That fleeting freedom of life must never be forgotten: it should be present like a fragrance.