Authors: Clarice Lispector
ANGELA: I am the contemporary of tomorrow.
When I’m alone for a long time, I suddenly don’t recognize myself and I frighten myself and get chills all over.
From now on I want more than understanding: I want superunderstanding, I humbly beg that this gift be given me. I want to understand understanding itself. I want to reach the most intimate secret of whatever exists. I’m in full communion with the world.
AUTHOR: Angela lives for the future. It’s as if I didn’t read today’s papers because there’ll be newer news tomorrow. She doesn’t live off memories. She, like a lot of people, including me, is busy making the present moment slide toward the future moment. She was fifteen when she started to understand hope.
ANGELA: I see the lamp that is lit. My interior is a mess. But I light myself up.
AUTHOR: She’s a girl who, while she doesn’t seem to disrupt the existence of the thought of the present, belongs more to the future. For her each day has the future of the tomorrow. Each moment of the day is futurized to the next moment in nuances, gradations, a gradual increase of subtle characteristics of sensibility. Sometimes she loses heart, she gets discouraged when faced with the constant mutability of life. She coexists with time.
ANGELA: My ideal would be to paint a picture of a picture.
I am so upset that I never perfected what I invented in painting. Or at least I’ve never heard of this way of painting: it consists of taking a wooden canvas — Scotch pine is best — and paying attention to its veins. Suddenly, then a wave of creativity comes out of the subconscious and you go along with the veins following them a bit — but maintaining your liberty. I once did a painting that turned out like this: a robust horse with a long and extensive blond mane amidst the stalactites of a grotto. It’s a generic way of painting. And, moreover, you don’t need to know how to paint: anybody, as long as you’re not too inhibited, can follow this technique of freedom. And all mortals have a subconscious. Ah, my God, I have hope postponed. The future is a past that has not yet come to pass.
Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?
I’m not a dreamer. I only daydream to attain reality.
AUTHOR: She, who is full of lost opportunities.
Her true countenance is so secret. The almost weightlessness of a spider’s web. Everything inside her is organized around an enigma intangible in its most intimate nucleus.
ANGELA: My enormous waste of myself. Even so I’m glutted and would like to dump even more my treasures hidden in the ark.
Where’s my current of energy? My sense of discovery: even if it took an obscure form. I’ve always expected something new of myself, I was a shiver of expectation: something was always coming from me or from outside of me.
The thing is I’m endemic.
I can’t stand a particular feeling for long because it leads to anguish and my mind becomes occupied with that feeling and I untangle myself from it however I can to regain my freedom of spirit. I am free to feel. I want to be free to reason. I aspire to a fusion of body and soul.
I can’t manage to understand on behalf of others. Only in the disorder of my feelings do I understand for myself and what I feel is so incomprehensible that I keep quiet and meditate on the nothing.
AUTHOR: The difference between a liberated imagination and a libertine imagination — the difference between intimacy and promiscuity. I (who have as a job to earn money the profession of judge: innocent or guilty?) try to neutralize the habit of judging because I can’t stand the divine role of deciding. I free Angela, I don’t judge her — I let her be.
ANGELA: I just entered myself and frightened already want to leave. I discover that I am beyond voracity. I’m an impulse split down the middle.
But once in awhile I go to an impersonal hotel, alone, with nothing to do, to be naked and without function. Is thinking having a function?
When I truly think I empty myself.
Alone in the hotel room, I eat the food with brutish and uncouth satisfaction. For a moment it is true satisfaction — then it quickly settles in.
And so I go to my castle. I go to my precious solitude. To retire. I’m all disjointed. But I already start to notice a shine in the air. A sorcery. My room is a smile. In it there are stained-glass windows. The colors are cathedral-red, emerald-green, sun-yellow and deep blue. And my room is that of a sensual monk.
Here there are evening gales. And sometimes the windows bang—as in ghost stories.
I’m waiting for rain. When it rains I want it to fall on me, copiously. I’ll open the window of my room and receive naked the water of the sky.
Gardens and gardens interspersed with musical chords. A bloody iridescence. I see my face through the rain. The stridulating clamor of the piercing wind that sweeps the house as if it were hollow of furniture and people. It’s raining. I feel the good summer shower. I have a hut too — sometimes I won’t stay in the palace, I’ll plunge into my hut. Smelling the forest. And enjoying the solitude.
The proof that I’m recovering my mental health, is that I get more permissive with every minute: I allow myself more freedom and more experiences. And I accept what happens by chance. I’m anxious for what I have yet to try. Greater psychic space. I’m happily crazier. And my ignorance grows. The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn’t say or do the things he thinks. Will the police come for me? Come for me because I exist? prison is payment for living your life: a beautiful word, organic, unruly, pleonastic, spermic, durabilic.
Ah, now I know what I am: I am a scribbler. Help me! fire! fire. Writing can drive a person mad. You must lead a serene life, well appointed, middle class. If you don’t the madness comes. It’s dangerous. You must shut your mouth and say nothing about what you know and what you know is so much, and is so glorious. I know, for example, God. And I receive messages from me to myself.
I know how to create silence. It’s like this: I turn on the radio really loud — then suddenly turn it off. And that’s how I capture silence. Stellar silence. The silence of the mute moon. It stops everything: I created silence. In silence you can hear noises more. Amidst the hammer blows I was hearing the silence.
I’m afraid of my freedom. My freedom is red! I want them to put me away. Oh enough with disappointments, I’m so beat up, the back of my neck hurts, my mouth, my ankles, I was flogged on my kidneys — what do I want my body for? what purpose does it serve? just to get beat up? A smack in the face that is swollen and ruddy. I take refuge in roses, in words. Little consolation. I’m inflated. I’m worth nothing.
I was interrupted by the silence of the night. The spacious silence interrupts me, leaves my body in a bundle of intense and mute attention. I’m on the lookout for nothing. Silence isn’t the void, it’s the completeness.
I read what I’d written and thought once again: from what violent chasms is my most intimate intimacy nourished, why does it deny itself so much and flee to the domain of ideas? I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.
AUTHOR: I don’t write like Angela. Not just because I lack the ability but because I’m more sober, I don’t spill myself scandalously. And I only rarely use adjectives.
Angela is a stray dog crossing the deserts of the streets. Angela, a noble mutt, follows the trail of her owner, who is I. But she often meanders away and heads off freely wandering toward nowhere. I leave her in this nowhere, since that’s what she badly wants. And if she finds hell in life she herself will be responsible for it all. If she wants to follow me then go ahead because that way I’ll be in charge and in control. But it’s no use ordering her around: that frivolous creature who loves diamonds and pearls escapes me as the unspeakable emphasis of a dream escapes. Hard to describe Angela: she’s just a mood, she’s just a way of being, a revealing expression of the mouth but revealing of what? of something I didn’t know in her and which now, with no possible description, I barely know, that’s all. She breathes to me in whispers what she is and, if I can’t hear her because of my own lack of acuity, I’ll lose her completely.
If Angela is a potential suicide, as I ended up realizing, do I make her commit suicide? No. I don’t have the courage: her life is very precious to me. It’s just that she has a taste for danger and so do I.
ANGELA: I faint for no reason.
The last time it only took a second. I fall happily into bed and there’s the void, and then just afterward I was saying to myself: it was nothing, it’s already over. Hello! Hello! Picasso! Come see me, as a special favor. I’m a plucked chick.
But what fireworks! Commemorating what? I wonder.
I look at myself from the outside in and see: nothing. My dog’s worried. There’s something in the air. A transmission of thoughts. Why don’t people look at me when they speak? They always look at someone else. I resent it. But God looks me right in the pupils of my eyes. And I face him. He is my father-mother-mother-father. And I am they. I think I’ll see God very soon. It will be The Encounter. For I take risks.
AUTHOR: Angela stirs my fauna and disturbs me. Does her destiny depend on me? Or was she already pretty much freed from my breath to the point of continuing herself? When I think that I could make her die, I tremble all over.
ANGELA: I ask questions out of nervousness. Dismayed. And ankles? are they very important?
I hear no reply to my question. May God protect my ankles. And the back of my neck. They are essential places in me.
Writing never worked out for me. Others are intellectuals and I can hardly pronounce my lovely name: Angela Pralini. An Angela Pralini? the unhappy one, the one who already suffered so much. I’m like a foreigner in any part of the world. I am from the never.
When I was small I twirled, twirled and twirled around until I got dizzy and fell. I didn’t like falling but the dizziness was delicious.
I was addicted to getting dizzy. As an adult I twirl but when I get dizzy I take advantage of that brief moment to fly.
I think that madness is perfection. It’s like perceiving. Seeing is the pure madness of the body. Lethargy. A tremulous sensibility making everything around more sensitive and making visible, with a small and impalpable fright. Sometimes a balanced imbalance happens like a seesaw that goes up then drops down. And the imbalance of the seesaw is exactly its balance.
AUTHOR: Angela is organic. She’s not stagnant. And she’s my impasse. Beyond her I can barely see, beyond her begins whatever I don’t know how to say.
ANGELA: Today I woke up feeling such nostalgia for happiness. My whole life I’ve never been free. I always persecuted myself within me. I became intolerable to myself. I live in a dilacerating duality. I have an apparent freedom but I am imprisoned inside me. I wanted an Olympian freedom. But that freedom is only granted to immaterial beings. As long as I have a body it will submit me to its demands. I see freedom as a form of beauty and that beauty is what I lack.
AUTHOR: She is unaware that she’s self-sufficient up to a point. So she depends on someone who’s got arrhythmia and never obtains the complete dependence that would be the surrender of herself, the abandonment of her soul.
ANGELA: My roots are in the earth and from it I arise naked.
Cascade — waterfall.
I want a great heroic panel — upon which I literally spread-my-self-out. I need grandeur and the smell of grass. I emerge from my abysses with hands filled with cold emeralds, transparent topazes and orchidaceous sapphires.
I am a vibrant and crystalline burst of clarinet.
AUTHOR: Even though I try to write what happens to Angela. There’s no point: Angela is only a meaning. A stray meaning? She is the words I forgot.
ANGELA: I’m impersonal even in friendship, even in love.
I’m an Anonymous Society. An open parenthesis. Please close me.
Every being is some other being, undoubtedly one but brittle, unique fingerprints ad saecula saeculorum.
AUTHOR: She’s always in a situation of at least semi-crisis. She applies intensity to things that don’t deserve it. To everything she lends a passion that exceeds the reason for the passion. And the frivolity is in giving such importance to the foam of life. Once she’s got something, she no longer desires it. Grabbing the moment is a synchrony between her and time: without hurry but without delay. An infinite present that neither leans toward the past nor projects itself toward the future. That is why she lives so much. Her life “doesn’t change the subject,” it’s not interrupted by imaginary life. Imaginary life is living off the past or for the future. The present brings her pain. But this highly inexorable present casts a shadow where she can regain her strength, the warrior’s repose. Emotional crisis.
She can’t adapt to human beings. As though other beings existed, besides animals.
ANGELA: Oh sweet animal mystery. Oh gentle joy. So fascinating. So tremendously fascinating is this challenge of the beast! Oh sweet martyrdom of not knowing how to speak and only bark. You’re the one who asks me if dying is sweet. I don’t know either if dying is sweet. Until now I’ve only known the death of sleep. I kill myself every night.
Contact with animal life is indispensable to my psychic health. My dog reinvigorates me completely. Not to mention that he sometimes sleeps at my feet filling my bedroom with hot humid life. My dog teaches me to live. All he does is “be.” “Being” is his activity. And being is my most profound intimacy. When he falls asleep in my lap I watch over him and his very rhythmical breathing. And — he motionless in my lap — we form a single organic being, a living mute statue. That is when I am moon and I am winds of the night. Sometimes, from so much mutual life, we trouble one another. My dog is as dog as a human is human. I love the doggishness and the hot humanity of both.