Authors: Clarice Lispector
ANGELA: I came up against the impossible of myself.
At that point, I went off key without meaning to. Unreal like music. I, sleepy and phantasmagoric in deepest night filled with smoke and we surrounding the bright yellowish lamp, light that will not let me sleep, like the intense spotlights that torturers shine on their victims to not let them rest.
I used to be a woman who knew how to make things out when I saw them. But now I committed the grave error of thinking.
AUTHOR: Angela lives stunned in great disorder. If not for me, Angela wouldn’t be conscious. If not for me, she’d be diaphanous like the perfume of a dream. For her to be more than the perfume of a dream I scatter across her vastness a hard cactus here, some more over there. Like milestones. Perfume of a dream? but she’s the immaterial substratum of me.
ANGELA: I’m like a sleepwalker. I want to compose a symphony whose scenario includes silence — and the audience wouldn’t clap because they would sense that the motionless musicians — as in a photograph — didn’t mean to say “the end.” The music is at its peak — then there’s a minute of silence — and the sounds start again.
AUTHOR: Besides my involuntary but incisive role of poor scribbler — besides that is the silence that invades all the interstices of my total darkness.
Music deeply teaches me a boldness in the world to feel itself. I seek disorder, I seek the primitive state of chaos. That is where I feel myself living. I need the darkness that implores, the receptivity of the most primary forms of wanting.
The small success of my books made it hard for me to write. I was invaded by the words of others. I must reencounter my difficulty. It comes from what is true in me. I must free myself of skills. These skills allow me to write even for the semi-literate. For I don’t even need myself. I’m free of myself. Terribly idle because I need nothing else. Not even the next day.
What sustains and balances a man are his little hang-ups and habits. And they enhance his development because whatever is repeated often enough ends up deepening a demeanor and allowing it space. But in order to experience any sort of surprise the routine of habits and hang-ups must be for whatever reason suspended. What am I left with? With critical depth or a stimulating surprise? I believe I’m left with both, anarchically intermingled or simultaneous. Simultaneity in creative work comes from deepening: sometimes, digging deep into the earth you suddenly see a sparkle — an unexpected gem.
I use the banking system and do not understand it. I use the telephone and do not comprehend its mechanism. I turn on the television and all I know about television is how to turn it on. I use man and do not know him. I use myself and . . .
ANGELA: . . . and I see everything with new perspectives: the table where I write stretches beyond the length of a table, my pen is enormously long and I must in order to write keep myself far from the table so that the tip of the pen can reach the paper that is whiter than paper. From the lampshade gushes a great triangle of light upon the paper and my hand and I make a huge shadow on the wall. Everything got larger. I, the paper, the light and the pen are free in the boundless field where golden wheat grows.
AUTHOR: I, alchemist of myself. Am I a man who devours himself? No, it’s that I live in eternal mutation, with new adaptations to my renewed living and I never reach the end of any of the ways of existing. I live from unfinished and vacillating sketches. But I try my best to balance between me and I, between me and others, between me and the God.
I live in darkness of the soul, and my heart beating, eager for future pulsations that cannot stop. But the occasional phrase escapes the shadows and rises light and volatile to my surface: then I note it here.
But what I wanted was to bring to my surface the rich darkness itself that would be like petroleum gushing dark and thick and rich.
I am not an informer but sometimes I happen to give news that surprises even me.
When I concentrate I concentrate without meaning to and without knowing how I manage to but I manage independent of myself. Or better yet: it happens. But when I myself want to concentrate then I distract myself and lose myself in the “wanting” and end up only feeling the wanting that comes to be the goal. And the concentration doesn’t happen. The desire must be hidden to not kill the vital nerve of what you wanted.
Who orders me around, if not me? For I can’t manage to reach myself.
What is the word that represents the “unknown” that we feel within ourselves? I’ve adhered to the unknown for a long time now. What is the reality of the world? because I don’t know. Nature is not casual. For it repeats itself, and repeated accidents become a law, those accidents that are not accidents.
I’m horrified and my brow is covered with cold sweat. Because if what I can barely sense really is true — then I must radically change my life.
What am I thinking? okay, I’ll try to explain with humid brow and slightly shaking hand: here goes:
Perhaps — perhaps whatever is correct lies precisely in error? If that’s true, how many fruitful “errors” I have lost. That would contradict everything I learned and everything human society taught me. Fearing the error, I degraded myself. To avoid the error, I ventured nothing great. I, standing in the street, cast a shadow on the ground. My shadow is my opposite of the “correct,” my shadow is my error — and that shadow-error belongs to me, only I possess it inside me, I am the only person in the world whose lot it was to be me. So is there an acquired right to be me? And now I want my errors back. I reclaim them.
I want to forget that readers exist — and demanding readers too who hope for I don’t know what from me. So I’ll take my freedom into my hands and write I-don’t-care-what?, truly awful, but me.
I am only sporadically. The rest is empty words, they too sporadic.
An attempt to sensitize the language so that it shivers and shakes and my earthquake opens frightening fissures in this free language — but I captive and in the process of not being I become aware and it goes on without me.
To get things started, let me assure you that you only live, real life, when you learn that even the lie is true. I decline to offer proof. But if someone insists on the “whys,” I’ll answer: the lie is born in the person who creates it and it brings into existence new lies from new truths.
One word is the lie of another.
I demandingly want you to believe me. I want you to believe me even when I lie.
ANGELA: I’m not — I hope — judging myself with excessive impartiality. But I need to be a bit impartial or else I succumb and get tangled in my pathetic form of living. Besides physically there’s something rather pathetic about me: my big eyes are childishly interrogative at the same that they seem to ask for something and my lips are always half-open like when you’re surprised or when the air you breathe through your nose is insufficient and so you breathe through your mouth: or the way lips look when they are about to be kissed. I am, without being aware of it, a trap.
Though I am wise, I don’t really understand what’s happening to me. And the world demanding decisions from me for which I am not prepared. Decisions not only about provoking the birth of facts but also decisions about the best way to be.
A tension of the string of a violin.
I don’t understand my remotest past, childhood and adolescence which lives without understanding and without paying attention. I was giddy. Now without the slightest support at the foundation of my life I am loose and perilous and events come at me like something always discontinuous, not connected to a previous understanding to which these events would be an intelligible succession. But no: events don’t seem to have their cause in me. I don’t properly understand what’s happening to me. And my point of view regarding honors is primary.
Why do I want to make a hero of myself? I in fact am anti-heroic. What torments me is that everything is “for the time being,” nothing is “always.” Life — from the moment you’re born — is guided, idealized by dreams. I plan nothing, I leap into the darkness and chew upon shadows, and in these shadows I sometimes see the luminous and pure sparkling of three inedible diamonds. So I rise to the surface with a diamond in each pupil of my eyes in order to pass through the opacity of the world and another between my half-closed lips so that when I speak my words will be crystalline, hard and dazzling.
AUTHOR: I wanted a very delicate, schizoid, elusive true kind of writing that would reveal to me the unwrinkled face of eternity. Obsessed with the desire to be happy I lost my life. I moved with the tension of a bow and arrow in an unreality of desires.
ANGELA: What’s missing in my writing is the dream. How secret living is! My secret is life. I tell no one I’m alive.
AUTHOR: We’re living at the fin de siècle, wasting away in decadence — or are we in the Golden Age? we’re on the verge of an unfolding. On the verge of knowing ourselves. On the verge of the year 2000.
The world? Its merciless and tragic history is my past. Could it be that the word topaz has already been drained of its thought? No, I still feel the shining of an energy in the translucent golden word called topaz.
I’m a beggar with a beard full of lice seated on the sidewalk crying. I’m no more than that. I’m neither happy nor sad. I’m exempt and unscathed and gratuitous.
ANGELA: To sleep . . . With my heart all shut and unsteady, my hand shaking, the intimate warmth of a sip of red wine. And getting into a bed full of pillows and choosing the best position. Then a murmur of prayer comes from my warm blood. But I never can capture the zero-instant when I fall asleep and sleeping I die.
It’s night and I went barefoot through the shadowy sands but the sea was a thick outpouring of the dark night — and I was scared like a little swallow. The black sea was calling me in the undertow of the low tide, black surf.
After hardly sleeping all night I’m in a state of rustic vigilance. And what my dreams should have been if I had slept at night started happening by day: in any case these dreams turned up and had to simply had to pass even through narrow gaps that the day opens within me. So it’s impossible for me to stop dreaming and letting my mind wander. I’m a skull that’s hollow and with vibrating walls and full of bluish clouds: they are the matter of sleeping and dreaming and not of being. I must simply must invent my future and invent my path.
I want the shining gravel in the dark brook. I want the sparkle of the stone beneath the rays of sun, I want death that frees me. I could manage to have pleasure if I abstained from thinking. Then I’d feel the ebb and flow of air in my lungs. I try to live without past without present and without future and here I am free.
It is morning. The world is as happy as an abandoned circus.
AUTHOR: It’s a very pretty day. There’s a misty rain, the sky is dark and the sea turbulent. Souls flutter about the cemetery, vampires are on the loose, bats huddle in their caves. Refuge for mystery and terror. If suddenly the sun appeared I would give a cry of astonishment and a world would crumble and there wouldn’t even be time for everyone to flee the brightness. The beings who feed on shadows.
I’m only interested in writing when I surprise myself with what I write. I can do without reality because I can have everything through thought.
Reality doesn’t surprise me. But that’s not true: I suddenly feel such a hunger for the “thing to really happen” that I cry out and bite into reality with my lacerating teeth. And afterwards give a sigh over the captive whose flesh I ate. And again, for a long while, I do without real reality and find comfort in living from my imagination.
How Can You Transform
Everything into a Daydream?
AUTHOR: The fact is more important than the text.
Facts trip me up. That is why I am now going to write about not-facts, that is, about things and their gaudy mystery.
The sensation of writing is curious. When I write I’m not thinking about the reader or myself: then I am — but only from me — I am the words strictly speaking.
ANGELA: I like words. Sometimes a random and scentillating phrase occurs to me, without having anything to do with the rest of me. From now on I’m going to write in this diary, on days when there’s nothing else to do, phrases almost on the edge of meaninglessness but that sound like words of love. Saying meaningless words is my great freedom. It matters little to me to be understood, I want the impact of dazzling syllables, I want the noxiousness of a bad word. Everything is in the word. What I’d give, however, not to have this mistaken desire to write. I feel like I’m being pushed. By whom?
I want to write with words so completely stuck together that there are no gaps between them and me.
I want to write really angry. As for me, I’m from far away. Very far. And from me comes the pure smell of kerosene.
AUTHOR: The word is the defecation of the thought. It glistens.
Every book is blood, it’s pus, it’s excrement, it’s heart torn to shreds, it’s nerves cut to pieces, it’s electric shock, it’s coagulated blood running like boiling lava down the mountain.
ANGELA: Oh I no longer want to express myself with words: I want to do so with “I-kiss-you.”
AUTHOR: I occasionally, I who am writing, seek for every word the unconscious pop of a mortifying feeling.
ANGELA: I want to write and can’t do it. I want to write a story called: “A Foot.” And another called: “You’re So Severe.” In what I write is there nothing between the lines? If that’s the case, I’m lost.