Agua Viva Read online

  The true thought seems to have no author.

  And beatitude has that same quality. Beatitude starts in the moment when the act of thinking has freed itself from the necessity of form. Beatitude starts at the moment when the thinking-feeling has surpassed the author’s need to think—he no longer needs to think and now finds himself close to the grandeur of the nothing. I could say of the “everything.” But “everything” is a quantity, and quantity has a limit in its very beginning. The true incommensurability is the nothing, which has no barriers and where a person can scatter their thinking-feeling.

  This beatitude is not in itself religious or secular. And none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or non-existence of a God. What I’m saying is that the thought of the man and the way this thinking-feeling can reach an extreme degree of incommunicability— that, without sophism or paradox, is at the same time, for that man, the point of greatest communication. He communicates with himself.

  Sleeping brings us very close to this empty and yet full thought. I’m not talking about the dream, which, in this case, would be a primary thought. I’m talking about sleeping. Sleeping is abstracting yourself and scattering into the nothingness.

  I also want to tell you that after the freedom of the state of grace also comes the freedom of the imagination also happens. At this very moment I am free.

  And beyond the freedom, beyond the certain void I create the calmest of repeating musical waves. The madness of free invention. Do you want to see it with me? Landscape where this music happens? air, green stems, the spread-out sea, silence of a Sunday morning. A slender man with only one foot has one great transparent eye in the middle of his forehead. A feminine entity slinks up on all fours, says in a voice that seems to come from another space, voice that sounds not like the first voice but in echo of a primary voice that was never heard. The voice is awkward, euphoric and says by force of the habit of a past life: would you like some tea? And doesn’t wait for a reply. She grabs a slim ear of golden wheat, and puts it between her toothless gums and pads away on all fours with her eyes open. Eyes immobile as the nose. She needs to move her whole boneless head to look at an object. But what object? The slender man meanwhile has fallen asleep on his foot and let his eye fall asleep without however closing it. Letting your eye fall asleep is about not wanting to see. When it doesn’t see, it sleeps. In the silent eye the plain is reflected in a rainbow. The air is marvellous. The musical waves start again. Someone looks at their nails. There’s a sound in the distance going: psst, psst! . . . But the man-with-just-one-foot could never imagine that they are calling him. A sound starts up from the side, like the flute that always seems to play from the side —a sound starts up from the side that crosses the musical waves without a tremor, and repeats so long that it ends up carving out the rock with its uninterrupted dripping. It’s a highly elevated sound, without friezes. A lament that’s happy and measured and sharp like the non-strident and sweet sharpness of a flute. It’s the highest and happiest note that a vibration can give. No man on earth could hear it without going mad and starting to smile forever. But the man standing on his only foot—sleeps upright. And the feminine being stretched out on the beach isn’t thinking. A new character crosses the deserted plain and disappears limping. You hear: psst; psst! And no one is called.

  Now the scene my freedom created is over.

  I’m sad. An uneasiness that comes because the ecstasy doesn’t fit into the life of the days. Sleep should follow the ecstasy to attenuate its vibration of echoing crystal. The ecstasy must be forgotten.

  The days. I got sad because of the diurnal light of steel in which I live. I breathe the smell of steel in the world of the objects.

  But now I want to say things that comfort me and that are a little free. For example: Thursday is a day transparent as an insect’s wing in the light. Just as Monday is a compact day. Ultimately, far beyond thought, I live from these ideas, if ideas is what they are. They are sensations that transform into ideas because I must use words. Even just using them mentally. The primary thought thinks with words. The “freedom” frees itself from the slavery of the word.

  And God is a monstrous creation. I fear God because he is too total for my size. And I also feel a kind of modesty toward Him: there are things of mine that not even He knows. Fear? I know a she who is terrified by butterflies as if they were supernatural. And the divine part of butterflies is terrifying indeed. And I know a he who shivers in horror before flowers—he thinks that flowers are hauntingly delicate like a sigh of nobody in the dark.

  I am the one listening to the whistling in the dark. I who am sick with the human condition. I revolt: I no longer want to be a person. Who? who has mercy on us who know about life and death where an animal I envy profoundly—is unconscious of its condition? Who takes pity on us? Are we abandoned? given over to despair? No, there must be a possible consolation. I swear: there must be. What I don’t have is the courage to say the truth that we know. These are forbidden words.

  But I denounce. I denounce our weakness, I denounce the maddening horror of dying—and I respond to all this infamy with—exactly this that now will be written—and I respond to all this infamy with joy. Purest and lightest joy. My only salvation is joy. An atonal joy inside the essential it. Doesn’t that make sense? Well it must. Because it’s too cruel to know that life is just one time and that we have no guarantee outside our faith in shadows—because it’s too cruel, so I respond with the purity of an untamable happiness. I refuse to be sad. Let us be joyful. Whoever isn’t afraid to be joyful and to experience even a single time the mad and profound joy will have the best part of our truth. I am—despite everything oh despite everything—am being joyful in this instant-now that passes if I don’t capture it in words. I am being joyful in this very instant because I refuse to be defeated: so I love. As an answer. Impersonal love, it love, is joy: even the love that doesn’t work out, even the love that ends. And my own death and that of those we love must be joyful, I don’t yet know how, but they must be. That is living: the joy of the it. And to settle for that not as one defeated but in an allegro con brio.

  As a matter of fact I don’t want to die. I rebel against “God.” Let’s not die as a dare?

  I’m not going to die, you hear, God? I don’t have the courage, you hear? Don’t kill me, you hear? Because it’s a disgrace to be born in order to die without knowing when or where. I’m going to stay very happy, you hear? As a reply, as an insult. I guarantee one thing: we are not guilty. And I have to understand while I’m alive, you hear? because afterwards it will be too late.

  Ah this flash of instants never ends. My chant of the it never ends? I’ll finish it deliberately by a voluntary act. But it will keep going in constant improvisation, always and always creating the present that is future.

  This improvisation is.

  Do you want to see how it goes on? Last night—it’s hard to explain to you—last night I dreamed that I was dreaming. Could it be like that after death? 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.

  Ah living is so uncomfortable. Everything pinches: the body demands, the spirit doesn’t stop, living is like being tired and not being able to sleep—living is bothersome. You can’t walk naked either in body or in spirit.

  Didn’t I tell you that living pinches? Well, I went to sleep and dreamed that I was writing you a majestic largo and it was even more true than what I’m writing to you: it was without fear. I forgot what I w
rote in the dream, everything returned to the nothing, returned to the Force of what Exists and that is sometimes called God.

  Everything comes to an end but what I’m writing to you goes on. Which is good, very good. The best is not yet written. The best is between the lines.

  Today is Saturday and is made of the purest air, just air. I speak to you as a profound exercise, and paint as a profound exercise of me. What do I want to write now? I want something calm and without fashions. Something like the memory of a tall monument that seems taller because it is a memory. But I want to have really touched the monument along the way. I’m going to stop because it’s Saturday.

  It’s still Saturday.

  Whatever will still be later—is now. Now is the domain of now. And as long as the improvisation lasts I am born.

  And now suddenly after an evening of “who am I” and of waking at one in the morning still in despair—now suddenly at three in the morning I woke and met myself. I went to meet myself. Calm, joyful, fullness without fulmination. Simply I am I. And you are you. It is vast, and will endure.

  What I’m writing you is a “this.” It won’t stop: it goes on.

  Look at me and love me. No: you look at yourself and love yourself. That’s right.

  What I’m writing to you goes on and I am bewitched.

  A New Directions Book

  Copyright © 1973 by the Heirs of Clarice Lispector

  Translation copyright © 2012 by Stefan Tobler

  Introduction copyright © 2012 by Benjamin Moser

  Originally published as Água Viva. Published by arrangement with the Heirs of Clarice Lispector and Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells, Barcelona.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  The translator would like to thank Claire Williams and Benjamin Moser for their help and suggestions.

  First published by New Directions as NDP1223 in 2012

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper.

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lispector, Clarice.

  [Água viva. English]

  Água viva / Clarice Lispector ; translated by Stefan Tobler ; edited by

  Benjamin Moser.

  p. cm.

  eISBN 978-0-8112-2072-9

  I. Tobler, Stefan. II. Moser, Benjamin. III. Title.

  PQ9697.L585A7813 2012

  869.3'42—dc23

  2012005503

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue. New York 10011

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