Authors: Clarice Lispector
What kills me is the day-to-day. I only wanted exceptions. I’m lost: I have no habits.
AUTHOR: Angela has all this fairy-like illumination — and while she grows accustomed slow and mute and majestic and extremely delicate and fatal — to being a woman — she’s too modest for it, too fleeting to be defined. She told me that once on the street she approached an officer — and explained that she did so because he should know about things and to top it off was armed, which filled her with respect. So she said to the officer: sir, could you tell me, if you please, when does springtime begin?
Angela is mad. But she has a mathematical logic in her apparent madness. And she has a lot of fun, that scandalous creature. She gets too keen and then doesn’t know what to do with herself. To hell with her. Between the “yes” and the “no” there is only one way: choosing. Angela chose “yes.” She is so free that one day she’ll end up in jail. “In jail for what?” “For excessive freedom.” “But isn’t that freedom innocent?” “Yes. Even naive.” “So why prison?” “Because freedom offends.”
I wanted to defend Angela with strong Swiss military guards, so sinful is she, so much does she squander her life. Yet she’s happy as a military march.
ANGELA: I am an “actress,” I appear, say what I know then exit the stage. What more could such a rich person want who has a highly intelligent mechanism like a supercomputer?
AUTHOR: I’m worrying too much about Angela’s life and forgetting my own. I became am abstraction of myself: I’m a sign, I symbolize something that exists more than I do, I’m in the category of things that can’t be categorized.
ANGELA: Presence of princes, Amazons, Vikings, Atlantises, sprites, fauns, gnomes, mothers, prostitutes, giants, all with lips painted black and green nails. Roots tangled and angled, exposed, immobilization by the pain of having grown.
AUTHOR: She sometimes sees reality, a reality more invented and that never comes close to the truth, as if that entirely naked truth would frighten her. She is a superlative. She pretends she’s happy, but sometimes that happiness disturbs her.
ANGELA: I come from a long longing. I, who am praised and adored. But nobody wants anything to do with me. My irrepressible spirit frightens anyone who might come along. With a few exceptions, everyone’s scared of me as though I might bite. Neither I nor Ulysses bites. We’re gentle and happy, and sometimes we bark in anger or fear. I hide my failure from myself. I give up. And sadly I collect expressions of love. In Portuguese it’s “eu te amo.” In French — “je t’aime.” In English — “I love you.” In Italian — “io t’amo.” In Spanish — “yo te quiero.” In German — “Ich liebe disch,” is that right? Me of all people, the unloved. The most disappointed one of all, she who every night tastes the sweetness of death.
I feel like a charlatan. Why? It’s as if I weren’t revealing my final truth. So I have to take off my clothes and be naked in the street. That’s not so hard. But what’s hard is to have a naked soul. So I give myself to God. And I pray a lot that protection might be granted me. Am I from another planet? what am I? the humblest of the humble who is prostrate on the ground and presses her half-open mouth to the earth in order to suck its blood. Oh earth, but what a scent of wet grass. How comforting it is. And I also undress in the sea. Could it be I’ll have a tragic end? Oh please spare me. Please: because I am fragile. What awaits me when I die? I already know: when I die I’ll go transparent as jade.
AUTHOR: Angela is afraid to travel for fear of losing her I during the trip. She needs for at least one minute in her life to catch herself in the act. To catch what’s living and take her immobile picture and look at herself in the picture and think that the snapshot left a proof, that of the already-dead picture.
ANGELA: Suddenly an odd feeling. I find myself odd as though a movie camera were filming my steps and suddenly stopped, leaving me immobile in the middle of a gesture: caught in the act. Me? Am I the one who is I? But this is a mad senselessness! Part of me is mechanical and automatic — neurovegetative, the balance between not wanting and wanting, of not being able and being able, all of it sliding along in the routine of mechanism. The camera singled out the instant. And so it is that I automatically left myself in order to capture myself dazed by my own enigma, right there before me, which is unprecedented and terrifying because it’s extremely true, profoundly naked life merged into my identity. And this encounter between life and my identity forms a miniscule unbreakable and radiant indivisible diamond, a single atom and all of me feels my body go numb as when you stay in the same position for a long time and your leg suddenly “falls asleep.”
I am too nostalgic, I seem to have lost something who knows where or when.
AUTHOR: I shall write here toward the air and responding to nothing because I am free. I — I who exist. There’s a voluptuousness in being someone. I am no longer silence. I feel so impotent while living — life that sums up all the disparate and dissonant opposites in a single and ferocious stance: rage.
I finally reached the nothing. And in my satisfaction at having reached in myself the minimum of existence, only the necessary breathing — I am therefore free. All that’s left for me is to invent. But I immediately warn myself: I’m uncomfortable. Uncomfortable for myself. I feel ill at ease in this body that is my baggage. But that discomfort is the first step toward my — toward my what? truth? As if I had the truth?
I say nothing like real music does. It doesn’t speak words. I feel no longing for myself — what I was no longer interests me! And if I should speak, may I allow myself to be discontinuous: I have no obligation to myself. I go on accumulating myself, accumulating myself, accumulating myself — until I no longer fit within me and burst into words.
When I write, I mix one color with another, and a new color is born.
I want to forget that I never forgot. I want to forget the praise and the jeers. I want to re-inaugurate myself. And for that I’ll have to renounce my whole body of work and begin humbly, without deificaton, from a beginning in which there are no traces of any habit, foibles or abilities. I’ll have to put aside my know-how. For that reason I expose myself to a new kind of fiction, which I still don’t even know how to handle.
The main thing I want to reach is to surprise myself with what I write. To be assaulted: to tremble before what was never said by me. To fly low in order not to forget the ground. To fly high and wildly in order to let loose my great wings. Up until now I feel like I’ve never really taken flight. This book, I suspect, won’t let me fly either despite my desire to. Because nothing will be decided in this matter, in this matter all that counts is what happens when it comes from the nothing. But the worst thing is that the thought in the word has already been spent. Each loose word is a thought stuck to it like flesh to a nail.
ANGELA: I am what’s beyond thought. I write in the state of drowsiness, only a slight contact with what I’m living within myself and also an inter-relational life. I act like a sleepwalker. The next day I don’t recognize what I wrote. I only recognize my own handwriting. And I find a certain charm in the freedom of phrases, not worrying much about an apparent disconnection. Phrases have no interference from time. They could happen in the next century just as they could have happened in the last, with small superficial variations.
Could my individuality be dead?
AUTHOR: Everything goes by in a daydream: real life is a dream. I don’t need to “understand” myself. That I can vaguely feel, is enough for me. When I think without any thought — I call that meditation. And it’s so profound that I can’t quite reach and words disappear, manifestations. I meditate, and what emerges from that meditation has nothing to do with meditation: an idea comes that seems totally disconnected from the meditation. It seems it’s only useful to live interrogatively since every interrogation tossed into the air has a corresponding reply formed in the darkness of my being, that part of me which is dark and vital, without it I’d be empty. Whenever I do something deliberately nothing comes out, therefore I get distracted almost deliberately. I pretend I don’t want something, I end up believing I don’t want it and only then does the thing come.
Things happen indirectly. They come sideways. I’d swear it’s from the left side. (I get on better with my left side.) Which is battered like a look of sensitive melancholic tenderness. It’s the encounter between purity and purity and so we feel we’re allowed it, I don’t know what else to say. So — I don’t say it or maybe it would be better for me to say it. To be a being allowed to yourself is the glory of existing. To be able to say to yourself with shame and awkwardly: it’s you, too, you I love, a bit. I allow myself. Then I reach the ultra-sonorous. The one speaking, it seems to be me, but I’m not. It’s a “she” that speaks in me.
Sometimes I’m dense like Beethoven, other times I’m Debussy, strange and light melody. All accompanied by a breathing, three movements and pouring out from four wonders. My dream is accompanied by a breathing and by three instants from which seven wonders pour. I walk atop and along the sound of a single prolonged note. The translucent green morning with the chirping of hundreds of little birds still has something of the dark night’s nightmare: a dog barks in the harsh morning off in the distance.
As I was saying: it was God who invented me. And so too do I — as in the Greek Olympiads the athletes who ran passed forward the burning torch — so too do I use my breath and invent Angela Pralini and make her a woman. A beautiful woman.
Angela and I are my interior dialogue: I talk to myself. Angela is from my dark interior: she however comes to light. The tenebrous darkness from which I emerge. Pullulating darkness, lava of a humid volcano burning intensely. Darkness full of worms and butterflies, rats and stars.
I think in hieroglyphs (mine). And in order to live I must constantly interpret myself and each time the key to the hieroglyph, I’m sure that the dream — thing (mine) (worthless), not carried through — is the key to the same.
I write in words that hide others — the true ones. Because the true words cannot be named. Even if I don’t know which are the “true words,” I am always alluding to them. My spectacular and ongoing failure proves that the opposite exists: success. Even if success is not granted me, I’m satisfied to know it exists.
Occasionally I myself am writing this book.
So I’ll talk about the problems of writing. About the vortex which is placing oneself in a creative state. I feel that I have a triple star.
I, the author of this book, am being possessed by a thousand demons writing inside me. This need to flow, ah, never, never to stop flowing. If that source that exists within each of us stops it’s horrible. The source is of mysteries, hidden mysteries and if it stops that is because death is coming. I’m trying in this book a bit crazy, a bit ostentatious, a bit dancing naked in the streets, a bit the clown, a bit the fool at the court of the king. I, the king of sleep, I only know how to sleep and eat, I learned nothing else. As for the rest, ladies and gentlemen, I hold my tongue. I just won’t tell you the secret of life because I still haven’t learned it. But one day I shall be the secret of life. Each of us is the secret of life and the one is the other and the other is the one.
I must not forget the Franciscan modesty of the sweetness of a little bird. Speak marvelous things ah ye who wish to write life long or short as it may be. It is a cursed profession that gives no rest. I don’t know if it’s the dream that makes me write or if the dream is the result of a dream that comes from writing. Are we full or hollow? Who art thou who readest me? Art thou my secret or am I thy secret?
With a poor life (and what is a rich life?), with life poor I escape from it through the imaginary. But my imaginary doesn’t happen through actions but through the feeling-thinking that is actually a dream. I imagine marvelous words and I receive from them their dazzle. The word “topaz” transports me to the deepest part of my dream: topaz fascinates me in its luminous abyss of real stone. Once I dreamed there was a reality: it happened when I pondered the mute enigma of the dreamt reality that exists in topaz.
In the act of writing I attain here and now the most secret dream, the one I can’t remember when I wake up. In what I write the only thing that interests me is finding my timbre. My timbre of life.
I love Angela Pralini because she allows me to sleep while she speaks. I who sleep for a certain preparative experience of death. A beginner’s course because death is so incommensurable that I shall be lost within it. No — to speak sincerely — I can’t allow the world to exist after my death. My regrets to those I leave behind alive and watching television, regrets because humanity and the human condition are guilty without absolution for my death.
ANGELA: At night the dead walk the paths of the old cemetery and no one hears their cymbals. A clarinet goes out of tune sharp and mute. I tremble in my bed with a chill that shakes me and doesn’t. I don’t scream. No. But I am barely alive. I’m nothing but a stifled breath. I think low and slow-moving: if I am alive it’s because I shall die. The clarinet plays again. And now I’m going to turn out the light and sleep.
AUTHOR: (While Angela sleeps.) All the words written here can be summed up by an ever-present state I call “I am being.”
ANGELA: Not long ago I saw a slice of watermelon on the table. And, there on the naked table, it looked like a madman’s laugh (I don’t know how else to put it). If I weren’t resigned to living in a world that forces me to be sensible, how I would scream in fright at the happy prehistoric monstrosities of the earth. Only an infant isn’t shocked: he too is a happy monstrosity repeated since the beginning of the history of man. Only afterwards does fear come, the pacification of fear, the denial of fear — in a word, civilization. Meanwhile, atop the naked table, the screaming slice of red watermelon. I am grateful to my eyes that are still so frightened. I shall yet see many things. To be honest, even without watermelon, a naked table is also a sight to see.