Água Viva

by Clarice Lispector

The manuscript seems to capture an everyday voice utterly unrefined by literary or fictional artifice. Clarice reminisces about her pets and goes into great detail about her favorite flowers, one of which sends her back to her origins in Eastern Europe, a reference surprising because so rare:

Because there is a logic in life, in events, as there is in a book. They follow one another, they must.

Literally “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.

I am a little scared: scared of surrendering completely because the next instant is the unknown. The next instant, do I make it? or does it make itself? We make it together with our breath. And with the flair of the bullfighter in the ring.

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.

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

here I am, I and the cave, in the very time that will rot us.

I give myself over to a heavy life all in symbols heavy as ripe fruits.

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.

The night of today looks at me with torpor, verdigris and lime. I want inside this night that is longer than life, I want, inside this night, life raw and bloody and full of saliva. I want this word: splendidness, splendidness is the fruit in its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want distances. My wild intuition about myself. But my main thing is always hidden. I am implicit. And when I make myself explicit I lose the humid intimacy.

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

My small and boxed-in freedom joins me to the freedom of the world—but what is a window if not the air framed by right angles?

But eternally is a very hard word: it has a granitic “t” in the middle. Eternity: for everything that is never began. My small ever so limited head bursts when thinking about something that doesn’t begin and doesn’t end—for that is the eternal.

And so when I die, I’ll never have been born and lived: death washes away the traces of the sea-foam on the beach.

I am giving freedom to you. First I rip the sack of fluid. Then I cut the umbilical cord. And you are alive on your own account.

And in my night I feel the evil that rules me. What is called a beautiful landscape causes me nothing but fatigue. What I like are landscapes of dry and baked earth, with contorted trees and mountains made of rock and with a whitish and suspended light. There, yes, a hidden beauty lies. I know that you don’t like art either. I was born hard, heroic, alone, and standing. And I found my counterpoint in the landscape without picturesqueness and without beauty. Ugliness is my banner of war.

enervated

furtive

But these are the pains of childbirth: a thing is born that is. Is itself. It is hard as a dry stone. But the core is soft and alive, perishable, perilous it. Life of elementary matter.

What beautiful music I can hear in the depths of me. It is made of geometric lines crisscrossing in the air. It is chamber music. Chamber music has no melody. It is a way of expressing the silence. I’m sending you chamber writing.

Birds—I want them in the trees or flying far from my hands. I may one day grow intimate with them and take pleasure in their lightweight presence of an instant. “Take pleasure in their lightweight presence” gives me the feeling of having written a complete sentence because it says exactly what it is: the levitation of the birds.

turgescence

To live this life is more an indirect remembering than a direct living.

Could I no longer know what I’m talking about and is everything escaping me without my noticing? I do know—but cautiously because I’m a hair’s breadth from not knowing. I feed myself delicately with trivial daily life and drink coffee on the terrace on the threshold of this dusk that looks sickly only because it’s sweet and sensitive.

When I destroy my notes on the instants, will I return to my nothing from which I extracted an everything? I must pay the price. The price of someone who has a past that is only renewed with passion in the strange present. When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.

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.

I want to create an object. And that object will be—a wardrobe, for what is more concrete? I must study the wardrobe before painting it. What do I see? I see that the wardrobe looks penetrable because it has a door. But when I open it, I see that penetration has been put off: since inside is also a wooden surface, like a closed door. Function of the wardrobe: to keep drag and disguises hidden. Nature: that of the inviolability of things. Relation to people: we look at ourselves in the mirror on the inside of the door, we always look at ourselves in an inconvenient light because the wardrobe is never in the right place: awkward, it stands wherever it fits, always huge, hunchbacked, shy and clumsy, unaware how to be more discreet, for it has too much presence. A wardrobe is enormous, intrusive, sad, kind.

ineffable.

sophism

Sleeping brings us very close to this empty and yet full thought. I’m not talking about the dream, which, in this case, would be a primary thought. I’m talking about sleeping. Sleeping is abstracting yourself and scattering into the nothingness.

diurnal

Whatever will still be later—is now. Now is the domain of now. And as long as the improvisation lasts I am born.