by Hilda Hilst
Lift me, Shining One
To the opulence of your shoulder.
With my dog-eyes I stop before the sea. Tremulous and sick. Bent, thin, I smell fish in the driftwood. Fishbone. Tail. I gaze at the sea but don’t know its name. I remain standing there, askance, and what I feel is also nameless. I feel my dog body. I don’t know the world, nor the sea in front of me. I lie down because my dog body orders it. There’s a bark in my throat, a gentle howl. I try to expel it but man-dog I know that I’m dying and I will never be heard. Now I’m a spirit. I’m free and fly over my miserable being, my abandonment, the nothing that contains me and that made me on Earth. I am rising, wet like fog.
The snares: As if a dead man
Believed the sunflower of life
To grow upon his chest.
Amós Kéres, 48 years old, mathematician, was nowhere to be seen. In the arbor, the she-dog looked to the sky, sniffing. His mother found a phrase on paper: God? a Surface of Ice Anchored to Laughter. And below it:
Notes
this page Ernest Becker (1927–1974) was a Jewish American cultural anthropologist and author of Denial of Death (1973), one of Hilst’s favorite books. She dedicated several of her books to him. José Antônio de Almeida Prado (1943–2010) was a composer and pianist. Mário Schenberg (1914–1990) was a theoretical physicist. Newton Bernardes (1931–2007) was a physicist. Ubiratàn d’Ambrosio (b. 1932) is a mathematician.
this page This translation of Copernicus appears in Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, a book Hilst had in her library in Portuguese translation. Koestler is probably responsible for the translation from German to English, which is used here; in The Sleepwalkers, he was citing the book Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Copernicanischen Lehre (Erlangen, 1943).
this page Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 13.
this page Amós’s reply is in fact the next sentence of the work cited by the dean, Russell’s Mysticism and Logic.
this page Guaraná is a popular Brazilian soft drink.
this page The name Osmo is a reference to a character from another of Hilst’s fictions. His name, like many others in her work, mimics the unfamiliarity of certain Hebrew biblical names.
this page This is another reference to Bertrand Russell. Hilst read Russell in Spanish translation; his original English terms are used here.
this page From the words “Is this, my friend, this silly thing” to “Mathematician, right?,” this text is in English in the original.
this page From the words “The little boy” to “How dog, daddy,” this text is in English in the original.
this page “… rodents dragged by the wind”: The Portuguese word for a cavy, a species of large rodent native to South America, is used in the original.