A Breath of Life

by Clarice Lispector

  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 real
ity 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.

  The novel I want to write would be “It’s Like Trying to Remember. And Not Being Able.”

  “There’s a book inside all of us,” they say. And maybe that’s why I wanted to expel from me a book that I’d write if I had the talent, and also the perseverance.

  I’m feeling like a mermaid out of water. On one half of me the scales are jewels shining in the sun of life. For I came out of the sea into life. And I wriggle my body atop a large rock combing my long salty hair. I don’t know why I wrote that, I think it’s so I won’t forget to take note of something.

  I don’t write, for I’m lazy and fluttering. I want to live so much and I think that writing isn’t living. That it’s enough to feel. I can’t do anything for myself in this sense: I’ve already freed myself from my typewriter and demand to be left to my destiny.

  AUTHOR: I don’t write because I want to, no. I write because I must. Otherwise what would I do with myself?

  Everything I’m being or doing or thinking has a musical accompaniment. There are entire and consecutive days that are accompanied by a powerful and gloomy organ. When I’m being hard on myself the accompaniment is a quartet.

  I almost don’t know what I feel, if in fact I feel at all. Whatever doesn’t exist comes to exist when it receives a name. I write to bring things into existence and to exist myself. Since I was a child I’ve been searching for the breath of the word that gives life to murmurings. The only reason I never became a real writer is because I get too lost between the lives and my life. And also because I need to put order in my life, in that chaos from which this grave and non-assimilable life is made. I can’t relate to my life.

  Serious like a boy of 13. Serious like an open mouth singing. The annunciation.

  How rude: making me wait.

  Seeing is a miracle. How can you describe a pyramid? How can you describe a light turned on?

  ANGELA: I’m so ashamed to write. Fortunately I don’t publish. When we speak to God we shouldn’t use words. The only way to make contact is by being alive and mute, like the needle of a wise and unconscious compass.

  AUTHOR: They objectify me when they call me a writer. I never was a writer and never shall be. I refuse to have the role of scribe in the world.

  I hate it when they tell me to write or expect me to write. I once received an anonymous letter spiritually offering me a musical recital as long as I kept writing. The result: I stopped completely. Who orders me around — only I know.

  ANGELA: I don’t write complicated. It’s smooth like a gentle sea with waves spreading out white and frigid: agnus-dei.

  But does anyone hear me? So I cry out: mama, and I am a daughter and I am a mother. And I have in me the virus of cruel violence and sweetest love. My children: I love you with my poor body and my rich soul. And I swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Entangled in terror. Amen.

  In the performance of my obligations I put each thing in its proper place. That’s right: the performance of my obligations. To refer to the “discharge” of my obligations would suggest a brown and ugly wound on the leg of a beggar and we feel so guilty about the beggar’s wound and its filthy discharge and the beggar is us, the banished.

  So delicate and trembling like picking up a station with the portable radio. Even new batteries sometimes refuse. And suddenly it comes in weak or too loud the blessed station I want, weightless as a mosquito. Has anyone ever talked about the dry and brief little noise that the match makes when the ember and orangish flame light up?

  I’m waiting for the inspiration for me to live.

  I like children so much, I’d love to publish a son named João!

  AUTHOR: What this book is missing is a bang. A scandal. A prison. But there will be no prison, and the bang is an implosion.

  Angela writes columns for the newspaper. Weekly columns, but she’s not satisfied. Columns are not literature, they’re subliterature. Other people might think they’re high quality but she considers them mediocre. What she would like is to write a novel but that’s impossible because she doesn’t have the stamina for it. Her short stories were rejected by the publishers, some of whom said that they were very far from reality. She’s going to try to write a story within the “reality” of others, but that would be debasing herself. She doesn’t know what to do. Meanwhile her current tapestry goes on: she weaves while her friends are talking. To occupy her hands, she weaves for hours and hours. In her first and only exhibition of tapestries. It seems she’s better at weaving than writing columns.

  Book of Angela

  ANGELA: “Ladies and gentlemen: I am afraid my subject is rather an exciting one and as I don’t like excitement, I shall approach it in a gentle, timid, roundabout way”

  [MAX BEERBOHM]

  “But I love excitement”

  [ANGELA PRALINI]

  “The only thing that interests me is whatever cannot be thought — whatever can be thought is too little for me”

  [ANGELA PRALINI]

  AUTHOR: I need to be careful. Angela already senses that she’s being driven by me. She must not detect my existence, almost as we can’t detect the existence of God.

  Angela apparently wants to write a book studying things and objects and their aura. But I doubt she’s up to it. Her observations instead of being fashioned into a book arise casually from her way of speaking. Since she likes to write, I write hardly anything about her, I let her speak for herself.

  ANGELA: I’d really like to describe still lifes. For example, the three tall and pot-bellied bottles on the marble table: bottles silent as if home alone. Nothing of what I see belongs to me in its essence. And the only use I make of them is to look.

  AUTHOR: Needless to say Angela will never write the novel that she puts off every day. She doesn’t know that she lacks the capacity to deal with the making of a book. She’s inconsistent. All she can do is jot down random phrases. There’s only one area in which she, if she really were someone to go through with a vocation, could have some continuity: her interest in discovering the volatile aura of th
ings.

  ANGELA: Tomorrow I’ll start my novel of things.

  AUTHOR: She won’t start anything. First of all because Angela never finishes what she starts. Second because her sparse notes for the book are all fragmentary and Angela doesn’t know how to bring together and build. She’ll never be a writer. That spares her the suffering of barrenness. She’s very wise to put herself on the margins of life and enjoy the simple irresponsible commentary. And she by not writing a book escapes what I feel when I finish a book: the poverty of soul, and a draining of the sources of energy. Could it be that anyone says that writing is the work of the lazy?

  This book the pseudo-writer Angela is making will be called “Story of Things.” (Oneiric suggestions and incursions into the unconscious.)

  Angela is someone who sees and studies things in order to use them for sculpture or because she likes sculpture. She’s such an autonomous character that she is interested in things that have nothing to do with me, the author. I observe her writing about objects. It’s a free-form study in which I take no part. Whereas for Angela things are personal for me the study of the thing is too abstract.

  ANGELA: Writing — I tear things out of me in pieces the way a harpoon hooks into a whale and rips its flesh . . .

  AUTHOR: . . . while I’d like to tear the flesh off words. For each word to be a dry bone under the sun. I am the Day. Only one thing connects me to Angela: we’re the human species.

  ANGELA: I don’t even know how to start. I only know that I’m going to speak of the world of things. I swear that the thing has an aura.

  AUTHOR: Everyone who learned to read and write has a certain desire to write. It’s legitimate: every being has something to say. But you need more than desire in order to write. Angela says, as thousands of people do (and they’re right): “my life is a real novel, if I wrote it down no one would believe me.” And it’s true. The life of every person is susceptible to a painful deepening and the life of every person is “unbelievable.” What should those people do? What Angela does: write with no strings attached. Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.