I'm the one who's listening to the whistle in the dark. I'm the one who is ill from the human condition. I rebel: I don't want to be a person anymore. Who? who has pity on us who know about life and death, when an animal I profoundly envy—is unconscious of its condition? Who has pity on us? Are we abandoned souls? delivered over to despair? No, there must be some possible consolation. I swear, there must be. I just don't have the courage to tell the truth that we know. There are forbidden words.
But I protest. I denounce our weakness, I denounce the delirious horror of death—and I respond to all that infamy with-exactly what's now going to be written down—and I respond to all that infamy with happiness. The purest, lightest happiness. My only salvation is happiness. The atonal happiness within the essential it. That doesn't make sense? But it must. Because it's too cruel to know that life is unique and that we have no guarantee except faith in darkness—because it's too cruel, I then respond with the purity of an indomitable happiness. I refuse to become sad. Let's be happy. If you're not afraid of being happy, of just once trying this mad, profound happiness you'll have the best of our truth. I am—despite everything, oh despite everything—I am happy this very instant that's slipping by if I don't stick it down with words. I'm being happy this very instant because I refuse to be vanquished: therefore I love. As an answer. An impersonal love, an it-love, that's happiness: even love that doesn't work out, even love that ends. And my own death and that of those we love must be happy, I don't yet know how, but it must be. To live is this: the happiness of the it. And I'll yield not as someone vanquished but in an allegro con brio.
Besides, I don't want to die. I rebel against "God." Shall we not die as a challenge?
I'm not going to die, do you hear, God? I don't have the courage, do you hear? Don't kill me, do you hear? Because it's infamy to be born only to die not knowing where or when. I'm going to remain very happy, do you hear? As an answer, as an insult. One thing I guarantee: we are not guilty. And I need to understand while I'm alive, do you hear? because afterward it'll be too late.
Ah, this flash of instants never ends. Will my song of the it never end? I'm going to end it deliberately, with a voluntary act. But it continues on in constant improvisation, creating always and forever the present which is the future.
This improvisation is.
Do you want to see how it continues on? Tonight— it's difficult to explain it to you—tonight I dreamed I was dreaming. Is it possible that death is like that? . . . the dream of a dream of a dream of a dream?
I'm a heretic. No, that's not true. Or am I? But something exists.
Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep—living is upsetting. You can't walk around naked, either in body or in spirit.
Didn't I tell you life presses in? Well, I went to sleep and I dreamed I was writing you a majestic largo and it was even truer than what I'm writing you now: it was fearless. I've forgotten what I wrote you in the dream, everything returned to nothingness, returned to the Force of what Exists and is sometimes called God.
Everything ends but what I write you continues on.
Which is good, very good. Still, the best hasn't been written. The best is between the lines.
Today is Saturday and it's made of the purest air, only air. I speak to you as a profound exercise, and I paint as a profound exercise of myself. What do I want to write now? I want some tranquil and unaffected thing. Something like the memory of a tall monument that seems taller because it's a memory. But, in passing, I want to have really touched the monument. I'm going to stop because it's Saturday.
Saturday continues on.
What is going to be later on — it's now. Now is the domain of now. And while the improvisation lasts, I'm being born.
And behold, after an afternoon of "Who am I?" and of waking up at one o'clock in the morning still in despair— behold, at three o'clock in the morning I awoke and found myself. I went to meet myself. Calm, happy, plenitude without fulminations. I am, simply, I myself. And you are you. It's vast, it will last.
What I write you is a this. It won't stop: it continues on.
Look at me and love me. No: look at yourself and love yourself. That's what's right.
What I write you continues on and I am bewitched.
Afterword
Hélène CIXOUS
Translated by Verena CONLEY
Is the text readable? One may have to find other modes, other ways of approaching it: one can sing it. One is in another world. The text does not keep, hold back, and one cannot retain it. Does this mean it is only water? Absolutely not. It is living water, full water. It escapes the first rule of text. It is not linear, not formally constructed whereas most other texts by Clarice Lispector are somehow constructed. As there is no story, one can start anywhere, in the middle, at the end. There is no exterior border. But there are a good many interior borders; there are some very precise ones that could be drawn. They have to do with the infinite line of separation between moments, epiphanies. There are no borders of montage, as in Joyce. The text is without ruse. It is always a question of beginnings. It is hard to imagine a text that would be more violently real, more faithfully natural, more contrary to classical narration. Classical narration is made of appearances, caught in codes. Here there are no codes. Yet Clarice is not mad; there are living codes with a beginning and an end. She says it: Now I begin, now I close, I leave and I come back. The text follows movements of the body and enunciation, but it also follows thematics. Rather than a narrative order, there is an organic order.
There are keys for reading. In Close to the Savage Heart, Clarice Lispector says that she continues to open and close circles of life. In Agua viva (The Stream of Life), she performs this statement. The question, constantly raised—because there is no life without somebody to live it—is: Who lives? Who lives there? "To pray, is to throw yourself in this transfiguring arch of light which spans from what goes by to what is about to happen. It is to melt in it in order to lodge one's infinite light in the fragile little cradle of individual existence." To pray is to call for Clarice. It is to throw oneself into this arch of light. That is what renders a reading so difficult. One cannot talk about Agua viva. One has to take a leap at the very moment at which what could be called "a now-instant'' or "an instant-already" is about to reveal itself. The only thing to do is to delve into the luminous arch. One has to give oneself to that which gives itself.
In Close to the Savage Heart, Clarice had recourse to the geometric form of the circle of life. Agua viva is its realization and its representation, which in style is rendered through the ubiquitous gerunds and present participles. The problem is that to delve into "the instant-al- ready" is complicated by the fact that we deal with depth and that the latter cannot be measured by the watch alone. Themes relate to life: there is the constant inscription of birth in innumerable ways. It is a process that recurs from circle to circle, often dealing with the birth of the subject itself, the birth of moments of the subject. First, there are moments of gestation during all the moments of gestation.
The subject is yet to come, and in place of a subject, one has that which constitutes itself, a pre-subject. It is stated all the time that "I write" or "I live" before she or he, before the subject differentiates itself, becomes personal, determines itself. Clarice dwells inside those moments, Heideggerian moments of coming onto being, in the space of the not yet and the already. There, in those moments, it is a question of pleasure, though Clarice does not say it. One can raise the question of saying-having pleasure-prohibiting (dire-jouir-interdire). Agua viva is the inscription of a certain kind of pleasure, of a pleasure which does not keep itself for itself. Generally, one holds back ones pleasure: I am having pleasure but I do not say it. This brings one back to the Lacanian predicament: she has pleasure but she does not know she has pleasure. She is incapable of saying it. Lacan said about women: They have nothing t
o say about their pleasure. This is not true. Pleasure is all Agua viva is talking about. It is caught between two prohibitions which are not the same. One is that about which Agua viva talks all the time. It is that to say and to have pleasure are not simultaneous. To say something always betrays something. That is the very theme of Agua viva. What is tragic is that the word separates. There is a difference in language between the subject who has pleasure and the one who says it. That is the theme of Agua viva where Clarice writes incessantly: Tm trying to capture the fourth dimension of the now-instant," "I want to take possession of the thing's is" "I want to possess the atoms of time," "I want to capture the present," "at the same time I live (the instant), I hurl myself into its passage to another instant." That is all she says. I want to capture my essence. I want to capture, not I capture. She knows it is a struggle. Beings resist being captured. Femininity always resists capture. Women know that something between having pleasure and capturing that pleasure is lost in the act of love. Says Clarice: "Time" is something "that one can't count." That is the point of departure. What will she do? She will struggle against the drive to capture to which she so strongly opens herself. Generally, culturally, women do not capture pleasure; they do not say it the way Lacan does. It is in their interest not to say it in a Lacanian scene where there are no sexual relations, because at that moment it is heard through a masculine ear which captures, which is dressed to capture on a mode which would not be a feminine way of capturing it. One must think of another way of capturing it, without appropriation. That is what Clarice tries in Agua viva.
The word separates, but that is not its only function. One must also struggle between truth and lie. When one is on the side of truth, one knows it, absolutely. But one is always carried off, delayed, seduced, and forbidden. As soon as prohibition comes from the outside, it is all over. At a certain level, Agua viva is a triumph. Clarice never drops the theme of the fault that the word itself constitutes. The text is tragic but without despair. She manages to produce a place where to have pleasure and to say it would not be absolutely antagonistic, where pleasure would flow into saying it, would not be extinguished through the act of saying it. As soon as the words come out, she lets go. They are words of thanks, words that say thank you. But to thank is a difficult task because it is possible to lie; one can thank when one has no gratitude. But here, she does say thank you, and with good cause.
To read Agua viva requires a double task. On the one hand, one can follow themes. There are themes in Agua viva. There is no harm done by respecting a certain order while remembering that the text is completely organic. One has to follow all that is of the order of truth, of genesis, of fatality. There are thousands of little themes that are of importance. On the other hand, one can follow that which brings pleasure. The text is full of springs. If one has pleasure, it shows that there is something in common between the reader and Clarice, something of a certain type of libidinal structure. If one takes a theme, it does not have to be absolutely isolated. In other words, if one takes a thread, one will see that it is not a thread but that it is going to produce a web. On the first page, Clarice repeats four times "I want," "I want to capture," "I want to possess," "I want to capture." This linguistic chain crosses the whole text. When Clarice says "I want," this "I want" is doubled, immediately. It is an enormous drive to take which is inaugural. She takes in fact not to keep. All Clarice does is put into syntax. These chains are of interest to the reader. There is a perpetual phenomenon of overflowing in the text. Agua viva deserves that one dare to let oneself overflow but that, at the same time, one not be afraid to border it.
Clarice talks a lot about flowers. To speak of flowers is such a forbidden thing, that one no longer knows that it is forbidden. We experience pleasure where she says it, but we wonder why. We should smell the flowers without letting go of the track and come back to her strange way of talking about them. What Clarice says about flowers can be put under the sign of a quotation by Kant in which it is a question of a flower. The quote is the flowered heart of Kant's aesthetics: "But a flower, zum Beispiel eine Tulpe, is held to be beautiful because in perceiving it one encounters a finality which, when judged as we judge it, does not relate to any end" This is inserted in the great general remark concerning the exposé of reflective aesthetic judgments. The story of the tulip does not come about by chance. There are philosophical and imaginary examples in Kant's work. What he says about the horse does not relate to a specific horse. But the tulip really existed. The tulip was seen during a
walk in the Alps by Mr. Saussure (not the linguist), who was an observer and botanist and who extolled when he saw a wild tulip: "I found in the woods above the hermitage, the wild tulip which I had never seen yet." This is taken up by Jacques Derrida in a work that focuses on the aesthetics of Kant, and which is entitled Parergon, that is to say which is on the side of the work, which constitutes the side of the work, its border, its frame. The page setting of this text is quite singular: the text sits in a system of corner, the text is put in a frame:
But a flower ... . . . does not relate to any end
Parergon works on the frame but while working on the frame, it works on the work itself; on the relationship between work and frame and, obviously, the outside of the frame. Therefore it is written with a frame everywhere which leads to something one could call the liberation of flowers. We can work on the following question of aesthetic judgment in Clarice: What is the beautiful? What does it mean? All this in relation to Agua viva. I will try to do something which in my reading perspective can only come afterward, but which according to the behavior of a philosopher or a literary critic would probably be the first step. It will justly be a first do not (ne-pas), a non-step. This is to say that I will attempt to theorize something of a reading practice, in order to work on art, on the art of Clarice Inspector.
Let us remember the story of Gertrude Stein: "A rose is a rose is a rose. ..." Here one could compare the two techniques, Clarice's and Gertrude Steins. The hidden message behind Gertrude Steins sentence would be something about the impossibility of language to be adequate to the object. Gertrude Stein seems to say: my creation escapes me. Obviously, one will never write creation, but one will write the signifier creation. What Gertrude Stein does is to be hyperlinguistic, that is to say through repetition of "a rose is a rose," she subverts something. She subverts something of what might be repressive in the use of language, the fact that the signifier always represses. If by multiplying the signifier she insists on this phenomenon which is the foundation of language, Clarice does almost the opposite. She makes a portrait of the rose, or, as she says, the story of a rose. "I write you this facsimile" is one of the definitions. She gives hundreds of them because she is someone who proceeds by definition. Yet to say "I write you this facsimile" is to refuse the phantasm of the book that is posited as object containing something that would be on the side of knowledge. When she says that, it is a declaration, a confession, it is also ruseful and ironic, because every book is a facsimile of expression, of representation, of reality, etc. In other words, she writes the books of books. Besides, that is true. Now, I will take it at the letter: in English, simile is a comparison or a metaphor.
If there is a subject of this text, or an object, it is on the question of writing. Agua viva is about writing, as a verbal activity. I write you. This is something active. The circulation of blood in this text, the vital theme of this text, is writing, all the questions of writing. Everything is organized around the mystery of writing. This mystery has to be read at the level of: why I write, how I write, from where I write, to whom I write, with what I write, of what I write, about what, toward what. All the questions of writing are right here. Its thematization can be regrouped. The question of silence, for example, is the silence in the spacing of music, but silence is the ground, the earth itself, where there is soil for the plant and where there is a surging of the plant from the ground. It is silence itself which becomes the ground for verbalization. When
she throws her voice up into the air—there is always something very corporeal that is being described—and at the same time the words are taken from silence as matter, silence is matter. At that moment the question of saying comes from somewhere else. Silence is matter whence the effects of voice are surging. But to speak becomes another story: to speak is the great battle with language; it is to speak in spite of language; to speak though language has already said everything. Clarice does not want to say what has not yet been said. It is not the inédit, which in any event the already said of language makes impossible. Her endeavor consists of speaking in such a way that what is normally condemned to mutism comes onto expression. Example: the flowers. Do flowers speak? They speak to us but generally one does not let them speak. This raises the question of: who speaks? Who has the word? Who takes the word in the text? What does the word take? What comes to be text? To speak comes in any case back to writing. The fact of writing is to withdraw the bodily voice from something that has been said. Clarice fights against the silence of the text, of paper, of the text. But to speak is what one does. As she says: "above all, I don't know how to speak to you in writing, I, who have become used to your being the audience." It is evident that when one speaks, it is in the present. As her strongest desire is to make things present themselves, it is to bring into presence. And since, by definition, when one writes, it is past, Clarice is constantly trying to reanimate, to recall
what there may be of an immediacy in the word: "To speak to you in writing."
The Stream of Life Page 8