Agua Viva
Clarice Lispector, Stefan Tobler
Language: English
Pages: 56
ISBN: 2:00259942
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Lispector at her most philosophically radical.
A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.
instant I’m asking the God to help me. I’m needing. Needing more than human strength. I am strong but also destructive. The God must come to me since I haven’t gone to Him. Let the God come: please. Though I don’t deserve it. Come. Or perhaps those who least deserve Him need Him most. I’m restless and harsh and hopeless. Though I have love inside myself. It’s just that I don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it scratches like barbs. If I received so much love inside me and nonetheless am restless
trees and especially the giant water lily. It’s there. And I look at her. Note that I don’t mention my emotional impressions: I lucidly speak about some of the thousands of things and people I look after. Nor is it a job because I don’t earn any money from it. I just get to know what the world is like. Is it a lot of work to look after the world? Yes. For example: it forces me to remember the inexpressive and therefore frightening face of the woman I saw on the street. With my eyes I look after
morning. And the light of the fainting dawn, cold blue steel and with the tang and tart sharp taste of the day being born from the dark. And that emerges upon on the surface of time, I livid too, I being born from the shadows, impersonal, I who am it. I’ll tell you something: I don’t know how to paint either better or worse than I do. I paint a “this.” And I write with “this”—that is all I can do. Restless. The liters of blood that circulate in the veins. The muscles contracting and relaxing.
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;
latitudes, and altitudes with the energetic action of electrons, protons, and neutrons, under the spell of the word and its shadow.” What I wrote you here is an electronic drawing without past or future: it is simply now. I must also write to you because you harvest discursive words and not the directness of my painting. I know that my phrases are crude, I write them with too much love, and that love makes up for their faults, but too much love is bad for the work. This isn’t a book because this