Authors: Clarice Lispector
Now the shadows are retreating.
I was born.
Pause.
Marvelous scandal: I am born.
My eyes are shut. I am pure unconsciousness. They already
cut the umbilical cord: I am unattached in the universe. I don’t think but feel
the
it
. With my eyes I blindly seek the breast: I want thick milk. No
one taught me to want. But I already want. I’m lying with my eyes open looking
at the ceiling. Inside is the darkness. An I that pulses already forms. There
are sunflowers. There is tall wheat. I is.
I hear the hollow boom of time. It’s the world deafly
forming. If I can hear that is because I exist before the formation of time. “I
am” is the world. World without time. My consciousness now is light and it is
air. Air has neither place nor time. Air is the non-place where everything will
exist. What I am writing is the music of the air. The formation of the world.
Slowly what will be approaches. What will be already is. The future is ahead and
behind and to either side. The future is what always existed and always will
exist. Even if Time is abolished? What I’m writing to you is not for reading—
it’s for being. The trumpets of the angel-beings echo in the without time. The
first flower is born in the air. The ground that is earth forms. The rest is air
and the rest is slow fire in perpetual mutation. Does the word “perpetual” not
exist because time does not exist? But the boom exists. And this existence of
mine starts to exist. Is that time starting?
It suddenly occurred to me that you don’t need order to
live. There is no pattern to follow and the pattern itself doesn’t even exist: I
am born.
I’m still not ready to talk about “he” or “she.” I
demonstrate “that.” That is universal law. Birth and death. Birth. Death. Birth
and—like a breathing of the world.
I am pure
it
that was pulsing rhythmically. But
I can feel that soon I shall be ready to talk about he or she. I’m not promising
you a story here. But there’s
it
. Bearable?
It
is soft and is
oyster and is placenta. I am not joking because I am not a synonym—I am the
name itself. There is a thread of steel going through all that I am writing you.
There’s the future. Which is today.
My vast night goes by in the primary of a latency. The
hand touches the earth and listens hotly to a heart pulsing. I see the great
white slug with a woman’s breasts: is that a human entity? I burn it in an
inquisitorial bonfire. I have the mysticism of the darkness of a remote past.
And I emerge from these victims’ tortures with the indescribable mark that
symbolizes life. Elemental creatures, dwarves, gnomes, goblins and sprites
surround me. I sacrifice animals to collect the blood I need for my witching
ceremonies. In my fury I offer up my soul in its own blackness. The mass
frightens me—me who carries it out. And the clouded mind dominates matter. The
beast bares its teeth and in the distance of the air gallop the horses of the
carnival floats.
In my night I idolise the secret meaning of the world.
Mouth and tongue. And a horse free with loosed strength. I keep its hoof in
amorous fetishism. In my deep night a mad wind blows that brings me scraps of
screams.
I am feeling the martyrdom of an untimely sensuality. In
the early hours I awake full of fruit. Who will come to gather the fruit of my
life? If not you and I myself? Why is it that things an instant before they
happen already seem to have happened? It’s because of the simultaneity of time.
And so I ask you questions and these will be many. Because I am a question.
And in my night I feel the evil that rules me. What is
called a beautiful landscape causes me nothing but fatigue. What I like are
landscapes of dry and baked earth, with contorted trees and mountains made of
rock and with a whitish and suspended light. There, yes, a hidden beauty lies. I
know that you don’t like art either. I was born hard, heroic, alone, and
standing. And I found my counterpoint in the landscape without picturesqueness
and without beauty. Ugliness is my banner of war. I love the ugly with the love
of equals. And I defy death. I—I am my own death. And no one goes further. The
barbarian within me seeks the cruel barbarian outside me. I see in light and
dark I the faces of people flickering in the flames of the bonfire. I am a tree
that burns with hard pleasure. A single sweetness possesses me: complicity with
the world. I love my cross, which I painfully carry. It’s the least I can make
of my life: accept commiserably the sacrifice of the night.
The strangeness takes me: so I open the black umbrella
and throw myself into a feast of dancing where stars sparkle. The furious nerve
inside me and that contorts. Until the early hours come and find me bloodless.
The early hours are great and eat me. The gale calls me. I follow it and tear
myself to pieces. If I don’t enter the game that unfolds in life I shall lose my
own life in a suicide of my species. I protect with fire the game of my life.
When the existence of me and of the world can no longer be borne by reason—
then I loose myself and follow a latent truth. Would I recognise the truth if it
were proven?
I am making myself. I make myself until I reach the
pit.
About me in the world I want to tell you about the
strength that guides me and brings me the world itself, about the vital
sensuality of clear structures, and about the curves that are organically
connected to other curved shapes. My handwriting and my circumvolutions are
potent and the freedom that blows in summer has fatality in itself. The
eroticism that belongs to whatever is living is scattered in the air, in the
sea, in the plants, in us, scattered in the vehemence of my voice, I write you
with my voice. And there is a vigor of the robust trunk, of roots buried in the
living earth that reacts giving great sustenance. I breathe the energy by night.
And all this in the realm of the fantastic. Fantastic: the world for an instant
is exactly what my heart asks. I am about to die and construct new compositions.
I’m expressing myself very badly and the right words escape me. My internal form
has been carefully purified and yet my bond with the world has the naked crudity
of free dreams and of great realities. I do not know prohibition. And my own
strength frees me, that full life that overflows me. And I plan nothing in my
intuitive work of living: I work with the indirect, the informal and the
unforeseen.
Now in the early hours I am pale and gasping for breath
and have a dry mouth dry in the face of what I achieve. Nature in choral
canticle and I dying. What does nature sing? the last word itself that is never
again I. The centuries will fall upon me. But for now a fierceness of body and
soul that shows itself in the rich scalding of heavy words that trample one
another—and something wild, primary and enervated rises from my swamps, the
accursed plant that is about to surrender to God. The more accursed, the nearer
toward the God. I deepened myself in myself and found that I want bloody life,
and the occult meaning has an intensity that has light. It is the secret light
of a knowledge of fatality: the cornerstone of the earth. It is more an omen of
life than actual life. I exorcise it excluding the profane. In my world little
freedom of action is granted me. I am free only to carry out the fatal gestures.
My anarchy obeys subterraneously a law in which I deal occultly with astronomy,
mathematics and mechanics. The liturgy of the dissonant swarms of the insects
that emerge from the foggy and pestilential swamps. Insects, frogs, lice, flies,
fleas and bedbugs—all born of the corrupted diseased germination of larvae.
And my hunger is fed by these putrefying beings in decomposition. My rite is a
purifier of forces. But malignancy exists in the jungle. I swallow a mouthful of
blood that fills me entirely. I hear cymbals and trumpets and tambourines that
fill the air with noise and uproar drowning out the silence of the disc of the
sun and its marvel. I want a cloak woven from threads of solar gold. The sun is
the magical tension of the silence. On my journey to the mysteries I hear the
carnivorous plant that laments times immemorial: and I have obscene nightmares
beneath the sick winds. I am enchanted, seduced, transfixed by furtive voices.
The almost unintelligible cuneiform inscriptions speak of how to conceive and
give formulae about how to feed from the force of darkness. They speak of naked
and crawling females. And the solar eclipse causes secret terror that
nonetheless announces a splendor of heart. I place upon my hair the bronze
diadem.
Beyond thought—even further beyond it—is the ceiling
I looked at when I was an infant. Suddenly I was crying. It was already love. Or
I wasn’t even crying. I was on the lookout. Scrutinizing the ceiling. The
instant is the vast egg of lukewarm entrails.
Now it’s early morning again.
But at dawn I think that we are the contemporaries
of the following day. May the God help me: I am lost. I need you terribly. We
must be two. So that the wheat can grow tall. I am so earnest that I’m going to
stop.
I was born a few instants ago and I am dimmed.
The crystals clink and sparkle. The wheat is ripe: the
bread is shared out. But with sweetness? It’s important to know. I don’t think
just as the diamond doesn’t think. I shine wholly limpid. I have neither hunger
nor thirst: I am. I have two eyes that are open. Toward the nothing. Toward the
ceiling.
I’m going to make an adagio. Read slowly and with peace.
It’s a wide fresco.
Being born is like this:
The sunflowers slowly turn their corollas toward the sun.
The wheat is ripe. The bread is eaten with sweetness. My impulse connects to
that of the roots of the trees.
Birth: the poor have a prayer in Sanskrit. They ask for
nothing: they are poor in spirit. Birth: the Africans have black and dark skin.
Many are the sons of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. The Africans to put me
to sleep, I newly born, intone a primary rigmarole where they sing monotonously
that the mother-in-law, as soon as they go out, comes and takes a bunch of
bananas.
There’s a love song of theirs that also says monotonously
the lament I make my own: why do I love you if you don’t return my love? I send
messengers in vain; when I greet you you hide your face from me; why do I love
you if you don’t even notice me? There is also a lullaby for elephants who go
bathe in the river. I am African: a thread of a sad and wide and sylvan lament
runs through my voice that sings to you. The whites whipped the blacks. But as
the swan secretes an oil that makes its skin impermeable—in that way the
blacks’ pain cannot enter and does not hurt. You can transform pain into
pleasure—a “click” is enough. Black swan?
But there are those who starve to death and all I can do
is be born. My rigmarole is: what can I do for them? My answer is: paint a
fresco in adagio. I could suffer the hunger of others in silence but a contralto
voice makes me sing—I sing dull and black. It’s my message of a person alone.
A person eats another from hunger. But I fed myself with my own placenta. And
I’m not going to bite my nails because this is a tranquil adagio.
I stopped to drink cool water: the glass at this
instant-now is of thick faceted crystal and with thousands of glints of
instants. Are objects halted time?
The moon is still full. Clocks stopped and the sound of a
hoarse carillon runs down the wall. I want to be buried with the watch on my
wrist so that in the earth something can pulse time.
I am so broad. I am coherent—my canticle is profound.
Slow. But rising. Rising still. If it rises much more it will become full moon
and silence, and phantasmagoric lunar soil. On the lookout for the time that
stops. What I write you is serious. It will become a hard imperishable object.
What is coming is unexpected. To be uselessly sincere I must say that now it is
six fifteen in the morning.
The risk—I’m daring to discover new lands. Where never
human steps trod. First I must pass through the perfumed vegetable matter. I was
given a night jessamine that is on my terrace. I’m going to start making my own
perfume: I buy the right alcohol and the essence of whatever is already crushed
and especially the fixer which must be of purely animal origin. Heavy musk. This
is the final low chord of the adagio. My number is 9. It’s 7. It’s 8. All beyond
thought. If all this exists, then I am. But why this unease? It’s because I’m
not living in the only way that exists for everyone to live and I don’t even
know which one it is. Uncomfortable. I don’t feel well. I don’t know what it is.
But something is wrong and making me uneasy. Yet I am being frank and playing
fair. I show my cards. I just don’t tell the facts of my life: I’m secretive by
nature. So what’s wrong? I just know that I don’t want cheating. I refuse. I
deepened myself but I don’t believe in myself because my thought is
invented.
I can already prepare for the “he” or “she.” The adagio
reached its end. So I start. I don’t lie. My truth sparkles like a pendant on a
crystal chandelier.
But it is hidden. I can stand it because I’m strong: I
ate my own placenta.
Though everything is so fragile. I feel so lost. I live
off a secret that glows in luminous rays that would darken me if I didn’t cover
them with a heavy cloak of false certainties. May the God help me: I am without
a guide and it is dark once again.
Will I have to die again in order to be born once again?
I accept.
I’ll return to the unknown part of myself and when I am
born shall speak of “he” or “she.” For now, what sustains me is the “that” that
is an “it.” To create a being out of oneself is very serious. I am creating
myself. And walking in complete darkness in search of ourselves is what we do.
It hurts. But these are the pains of childbirth: a thing is born that is. Is
itself. It is hard as a dry stone. But the core is soft and alive, perishable,
perilous
it
. Life of elementary matter.