The Passion According to G.H.

by Clarice Lispector

If I confirm my self and consider myself truthful, I’ll be lost because I won’t know where to inlay my new way of being — if I go ahead with my fragmentary visions, the whole world will have to be transformed in order for me to fit within it.

I lost something that was essential to me, and that no longer is. I no longer need it, as if I’d lost a third leg that up till then made it impossible for me to walk but that turned me into a stable tripod. I lost that third leg. And I went back to being a person I never was. I went back to having something I never had: just two legs. I know I can only walk with two legs. But I feel the useless absence of that third leg and it scares me, it was the leg that made me something findable by myself, and without even having to look for myself.

Until now finding myself was already having an idea of a person and fitting myself into it: I’d incarnate myself into this organized person, and didn’t even feel the great effort of construction that is living. The idea I had of what a person is came from my third leg, the one that pinned me to the ground. But, and now? will I be freer?

How could I explain that my greatest fear is precisely of: being? and yet there is no other way. How can I explain that my greatest fear is living whatever comes? how to explain that I can’t stand seeing, just because life isn’t what I thought but something else — as if I knew what! Why is seeing such disorganization?

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I had humanized life too much.

All sudden understanding is finally the revelation of an acute incomprehension. Each moment of finding is a getting lost. Maybe what happened to me was an understanding as complete as an ignorance, and from it I shall emerge as untouched and innocent as before. No understanding of mine will ever reach that knowledge, since living is the only height within my grasp — I am only on the level of life. Except now, now I know a secret. Which I am already forgetting, ah I feel that I am already forgetting. . . .

It’s not that I want to be pure of vanity, but I need to have the field clear of myself in order to keep going. If I go. Or is not wanting to be vain the worst form of vanity? No, I think I need to look without bothering about the color of my eyes, I need to be exempt from myself in order to see.

Dehumanization is as painful as losing everything, as losing everything, my love.

I’m not going to do anything for you because I no longer know the meaning of love as I used to think I did. Also what I thought about love, that too I’m bidding farewell, I barely know what it is anymore, I don’t remember.

But I also knew that ignorance of the law of the irreducible was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself by claiming I didn’t know the law — since knowing oneself and knowing the world is the law that, even unattainable, cannot be infringed, and nobody can be excused by claiming not to know it.

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How can I repay you? At least use me too, use me at least like a dark tunnel — and when you’ve crossed my darkness you’ll find yourself on the other side with yourself. You might not find yourself with me, I don’t know if I’ll cross over, but with yourself. At least you’re not alone, as I was yesterday,

Guess at me, guess at me because it’s cold, losing the lobster’s casings is cold. Warm me up with your guesses about me, understand me because I am not understanding me. I am only loving the roach. And it’s a hellish love. But you’re afraid, I know you were always afraid of the ritual. But when one has been tortured to the point of becoming a nucleus, then one starts demonically wanting to serve the ritual, even if the ritual means consuming oneself — just as in order to have the incense the only way to get it is to burn the incense. Listen, because I’m as serious as a roach that has cilia. Listen:

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am I feeling what I am feeling, or am I feeling what I would like to feel? or am I feeling what I might need to feel?

Wait for me, I know I’m heading for some thing that hurts because I am losing others — but wait for me to go a little further.

Listen, because I dived into the abyss I started to love the abyss of which I am made.

Neither do I want my feeling because it prettifies; and could I relinquish the sky moving in clouds? and the flower? I don’t want pretty love. I don’t want dusk, I don’t want the well-made face, I don’t want the expressive. I want the inexpressive. I want the inhuman inside the person;

The deheroization of myself is subterraneously undermining my building, coming to pass without my consent like an unheeded calling. Until it is finally revealed to me that the life in me does not bear my name. And I too have no name, and that is my name. And because I depersonalize myself to the point of not having my name, I reply whenever someone says: I.

My voice is the way I go in search of reality; reality, before my language, exists like a thought that is not thought, but inescapably I was and am compelled to need to know what the thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but as the earth precedes the tree, but as the world precedes the man, but as the sea precedes the vision of the sea, life precedes love, the matter of the body precedes the body, and in turn language one day will have preceded the possession of silence.

Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it — and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognize. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But — I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve.

Giving up must be a choice. Giving up is the most sacred choice of a life. Giving up is the true human instant.

Perhaps trusting is not a matter of what or whom. Perhaps I now knew that I myself would never be equal to life, but that my life was equal to life. I would never reach my root, but my root existed.

never again shall I understand anything I say. Since how could I speak without the word lying for me?