Authors: Clarice Lispector
AUTHOR: I write as if I were sleeping and dreaming: phrases disconnected as in a dream. It’s difficult, being awake, to dream freely about my remote mysteries. There is a coherence — but only in the depths. For someone on the surface and not dreaming the phrases mean nothing. Although even awake some know they are living in a dream within real life. What is real life? the facts? no, real life is only reached through that part of real life that’s dreamt.
Dreaming is not an illusion. But it is the act that a person does alone.
I — I want to break the limits of the human race and become free to the point of the wild or “divine” cry.
But I feel defenseless before the world that is then open to me. Who? who will accompany me in this solitude whose summit I, if it weren’t for you, Angela, would never reach? Or perhaps I’m wanting to enter the most remote mysteries that while I’m asleep only emerge in dreams.
Imagination precedes reality! Except I only know how to imagine words. I only know one thing: I am pungently real. And that I am alive photographing the dream. Anyone can daydream as long you don’t keep your consciousness too brightly lit.
My life is attempting to conquer that Unknown. Because God is from another world — the great ghost.
Real life is a dream, but with open eyes (that see everything distorted). Real life enters us in slow motion, including the most rigorous rationality — it’s a dream. Consciousness is only useful to me for knowing that I live fumbling around and in the (only apparent) illogic of the dream. The dream of the wakeful is real matter. We are such illogical dreamers that we count on the future. I base my life upon the waking dream. What guides me is the project by which tomorrow comes to be tomorrow. My freedom? my own freedom is not free: it runs on invisible rails. Not even madness is free. But it’s also true that freedom without a directive would be a butterfly flying in the air. But in the dreams of the wakeful there’s an inconsequential lightness of a brook, bubbling and coherent. The state of being.
What I dream at night and forget the next morning — that intimate discomfort of someone who ignores part of his life: death escapes me. Sometimes I don’t sleep all night hoping to dream while I’m awake and to be conscious of the mystery and depths of the dream. And actually, even without sleeping, out of fatigue, I start to daydream.
I am an abyss of myself. But I shall always be aslant. And the white horses fill my pupils with burning love. I own seven purebred horses. Six white and one black.
Daily life contains within itself the abuse of daily life: daily life has the tragedy of the tedium of repetition. But there’s a loophole: that the great reality is exceptional, like a dream in the entrails of the day.
I’ve never had a vocation for writing: the number is what fascinated me since I was a boy. If now I daily and clumsily make notes, it’s because my wife’s no good at conversation.
I used to try to write and thought it was fun, it’s an adventure, I never know what will happen to me in the form of words and what I’ll discover from day to day for my own good, I’ll do everything possible not to use the technical vocabulary that comes to me naturally because I studied physics.
ANGELA (
Depth: somnambulism
): Good morning and good afternoon and good night for whenever you like, oh charging rhinoceros and I must be careful with you. I’ll say it like this: careful-careful-careful. Careful with the high sky, it can come down and entangle me in mists and blue and my wings will fly in blind flight up into those dense mists of the blue that is not transparent because the blue of the sky is not transparent and in it are encrusted the stars, but the sun and the moon are in front of the blue, the blue is behind the sun and the moon, and the sun and the moon swim above in the air without color. What separates me from the blue of the high sky are the absolute kilometers of air without color and the air without color is round and is what I breathe, I don’t breathe the blue sky. And when you put your cold hand in mine, I, the warm one, feel a shiver down my spine and I kill, kill, kill you until you are completely dead and of no use to any other woman, again I kill, kill and kill you. I don’t want you at all, “mister” cold-hand. I’ll go off in search of a warm hand, and send you my true love back to the bitch that bore you, there’s a disturbing gap between us — that’s why I’m thinking of filling this gap and I have a lover to favor you and save you from the empty and hollow bottomless gap that is the void. What I’m writing now is meant for no one: it’s directly meant for writing itself, this writing consumes writing. This, my book of the night, nourishes me with a cantabile melody. What I write is autonomously real.
I want the thinking-feeling now and, no, to have it only had yesterday or going to have it tomorrow. I’m in a certain hurry to feel everything. I don’t want anything to get lost in the passage from the I-mine to the I-global. I want to reach within myself a landscape deep beneath the earth a spring of placid waters running — and my ecstatic soul that can’t be restrained and trembles in the lightest orgasm. Pure contemplation.
I never saw anything more solitary than having a new and original idea. Not if you’re supported by no one and barely believe in yourself. The newer the sensation-idea, the closer you seem to the solitude of madness. When I have a new sensation it thinks I’m strange and I think it’s strange. I also can’t stand the piercing and lonely happiness of feeling happy. I lack the serenity to accept good news. When I get happy, I become nervous and agitated. The light shimmers too brightly for my poor eyes.
AUTHOR: As a profession I wanted to be the one who rings the bells (but not to call the faithful). With what joy I myself would tremble at the translucent, potent and echoing vibrations in the air of life: vigorous ecstatic tolling. It is a sound even more splendid than Bach.
But my kingdom is not the clamorous transparency of the soul of the bells. To the contrary: tenebrous I feed off the black bitter roots of the trees, reaching them by digging into the earth with knotty hard fingers and dirty nails: I eat and chew and swallow the earth.
What am I saying! It is or isn’t the truth. I lie so much that I write. I lie so much that I live. I lie so much that I seek the truth of me. You will be my truth. I want the truthful seed of you. If I manage to cross the dense forest of deceptions. I’m a blunder in a labyrinth made of the bloody threads of nerves. And I don’t understand what you’re saying, Angela, I only understand what you’re thinking. Wanting to understand is one of the worst things that could happen to me. But through your innocence I am learning not to know. But I live in danger. Not the danger of facts but something more urgent . . .
ANGELA (
Somnambulism
): Dark gray your eyes of steel that fascinate me your mouth of edges lighter than your lips. You only embrace me too strongly when you want to but never guess when I want to.
Grapes, a bunch of grapes round and fleshy and liquid and falsely transparent because they give the impression of being transparent, but you can’t see the other side you are entirely opaque though you give the impression of transparency what the hell do I have to do with the opacity of things and yours the bull on the ranch is stocky the cows smelling of pastures and unheard-of pastures the pasture lies in the open air between pasture and sky I breathe the air that flies flies lightly when it starts to blow gently against my naked and uncontrolled crazy face when the windows bang and bang the gusts of winds I really like being touched by the wind as I like to expose myself to the gusts that bang against the doors and windows of the entire house. They bang and bang fast crazy we and the servants run to shut them and inside the shut mansion we suffocate in dying electric light listening to the whine of the violent and quick wind the shut doors and windows shake.
It’s said like this kissed by the cliché breeze I prefer to say that the breeze blesses me between slightly ochre and at the same time lightly astringent it’s also lightly sweet on lips that are polluted by the pollen brought by the veil of perfume that is the breeze.
AUTHOR: Angela, who knows why she had this idea: to count numbers from one to a thousand. And something in fact happens: as the numbers go higher, she herself reaches a state of extreme grace, so rarefied it’s almost unbreathable. It happens like a somnambulist hypnosis but with a slight touch of consciousness: just enough for her to be aware of herself. And to know she’s being carried off by her own self — all of a sudden, a stranger — to a realm full of fables.
Angela is a dream of mine.
I’m sleepy-headed and the words flow out of me coming from a flux that is not mental. Empty the way you get when you reach the purest state of thinking. To sprout into thought is very exciting, sensual. Though sometimes sultry weather, sun behind the clouds. As for me, I keep my strange power a secret. I’m not sure what kind of power — part darkness and perhaps of some strength. Who knows if that power is summed up in breathing? in thinking? in almost foreseeing? in being able to kill and not killing? It’s a contained power. Sometimes the thought that springs up tickles me because it’s so light and inexpressible. I have thoughts I cannot translate into words — sometimes I think a triangle. But when I try to think I get worried about trying to think and nothing comes up. Sometimes my thought is only the whispering of my leaves and branches. But for my best thought words are not found.
I discovered that I need to not know what I’m thinking — if I become conscious of what I’m thinking, I can no longer think, I can only see myself think. When I say “think” I’m referring to the way I dream words. But thought needs to be a feeling.
I now know how to think of nothing. It was a conquest. Not thinking means the inexpressible contact with the Nothing. The “Nothing” is the beginning of a free availability that Angela would call Grace.
ANGELA: I had insomnia last night.
I closed my eyes relaxed my body and tried not to think so I could fall asleep. Little by little I started having a strange awareness of abandonment. My (thought?) my essence was . . . My body was beside me and I saw it transparent and through the transparency pulsing arteries, living, full of blood that circulated as quickly as possible through all of my limbs: they looked like irrigation channels. I also saw air, water and a yellow liquid. I could see everything in full color. Everything in absolute silence. Not everyone is given the fleeting plunge into one’s own mysterious flesh. This body of mine that is autonomous and surely electronic. No machine makes me live. My body is alive and works like a factory working in absolute silence. My interior is one of the strangest and most beautiful things in the world. I am brilliant Nature. Only God, who is creative energy, could have made me with the perfection of the treasure that I have inside me. Afterwards my thought or visionary essence returned to me and that return was very comfortable and I felt fully satisfied. And with a delicate tenderness for possessing that inexplicable thing that worked for me. I don’t remember anything else. Right afterwards I felt a drowsiness slowly taking me over and I fell asleep beneath the blessing of the body of God.
AUTHOR: Angela thinks that the state of grace or of life lies in making the most of oneself in the external world. She even strives to conquer God, making Him the external world. But the one who lives in a state of grace, not permanently but with great frequency, is me. I managed this through a disinterest in the world. I live an emptiness that is also called fullness. Not having heaps blessings upon me. As for my practical life I managed to live in a big and turbulent city as if it were provincial and easy.
Angela writes the way she lives: projecting herself. But I am already free: I write for nothing. I clear a path for myself. I live without models. I write without models. Being free is what gives me that great responsibility.
I . . . I . . . I?
ANGELA: As for me, I’m cautious but I’m not stupid. Tonight — blustery — I dreamt such a gratifying dream. There was a boy of 14 and a girl of 13 who were running after one another, hiding behind trees, and bursting out laughing, playing. And suddenly they stopped and mute, serious, frightened looked into one another’s eyes: because they knew one day they would love.
AUTHOR: Angela is urgent and emergent. As a judge I am unfortunately more tied to the slow than I’d wish.
Here I am. I was enlisted and I introduce myself to myself. And a drop of gold falls. Reality is more unattainable than God — because you cannot pray to reality.
In the dream of the real it seems it’s not me I’m living but somebody else. That other person is Angela who is my daydream.
Am I speaking or is Angela speaking?
Reality does not exist in itself. What there is is seeing the truth through the dream. Real life is merely symbolic: it refers to something else.
Action — that is the aim of the sorcerer! The sorcerer tries to substitute himself for the Law, either for his own benefit, or for the benefit of the person who employs and pays him.
I wouldn’t exist if there were no words.
Angela goes from language to existence. She wouldn’t exist if there were no words.
I’ve been a writer a long time, and I can only say that the more you write the harder it gets. Am I competing against myself? For example, I’ve been wanting to write about a person I invented: a woman named Angela Pralini. And it’s difficult. How to separate her from me? How do I make her different from what I am? One thing’s for sure and it’s no use trying to change it: Angela inherited from me the desire to write and to paint. And if she inherited that part of me, it’s because I can’t imagine a life without the art of writing or painting or making music. What does Angela want from life? Little by little I’ll find out. At the same time I’ll find out what I want from life. It’s just that Angela is propelled by ambition and I by a chaste humility. To write I can’t lose sight of my paltry ability. I am a low musical note. Angela is a high note, she’s a cry in the air. I whisper, Angela, with a clear, high and limpid voice, sings her futilities that have the gift of looking like profound and fantastic realities. I lost my style: which I consider a gain: the less style I have, the purer the naked word that emerges. I must, in my solitude, confide in someone and that’s why I made Angela be born: I want to maintain a dialogue with her. But it so happens that, in pages predating these, in written pages I already tore up, I stated that my dialogue with Angela is a dialogue of the deaf: one of us says something and the other says yes but in response to something else, and then I come along saying no, and I see Angela’s not even contradicting me. Each of us follows a different thread in the plot, without really hearing the other very much. That is freedom. And I can’t complain: I myself gave Angela this freedom and independence. She almost always ignores me. I fight to maintain my style whatever that is and of which the critics have not yet purified me. — Angela fights to create her own way of expressing herself. So, because in a certain sense I am her owner — I force her to write simply. Angela — how can I explain — has a golden anxiety. I have the weight of an anguish in my chest, anguish without gold or crystal or silver. Angela is sun-gold, she’s glittering-diamond, she’s reflecting crystal. I also imagine her like an enormous emerald sparkling in the void of the air and her deep transparent green is magical. She is a waterfall of precious stones. I envy her, I who variably lose my opacity.