Meduza

by Clarice Lispector, Tanja Tarbuk (Translator)

Roman Clarice Lispector "Meduza" - na portugalskom "Živa voda" - zbiva se na duhovnom, psihološkom planu na kojem duša razgovara s cijelim tijelom. Čini se da glas u romanu govori sam sa sobom, uglavnom preispitujući svoj položaj u ‘određenom trenutku’. Trenutak se čas pojavljuje kao ljubavnik, čas kao noćna mora, beživotni sugovornik koji nema oblika, koji ne osjeća, ne odgovara, samo jest.

O čemu ova knjiga govori? O svemu što nije opipljivo. Može se početi čitati u bilo kojem dijelu, jer u njoj nema logičnog reda, ali cijelo vrijeme je prisutna napetost. Ovo je Clarice u svojoj biti. Sadašnji trenutak u nastojanju da ga se uhvati: “Da, ovo je život sagledan kroz život”

Clarice Lispector brazilska je spisateljica rođena 1920. u Ukrajini. U Rio de Janeiru je studirala pravo, tijekom kojeg radi kao novinarka i podučava matematiku i engleski. Otuda jedna od njezinih čestih tema - odnos profesor i učenik - opisan u prvom romanu "U blizini divljeg srca" (Perto do Coração Selvagem, 1943.), za koji je dobila nagradu Graça Aranha. Nakon što se udala za kolegu Mauryja Gurgela Valentea, živi u Europi i donosi na svijet dva sina. Nakon povratka u Brazil, Clarice se rastala i vratila novinarskom poslu.

Romani joj se pomalo prevode na druge jezike, sve je više pozivaju na kongrese o književnosti… Clarice Lispector umrla je u Riju 1977. , dan prije svog 57. rođendana. Postumno je objavljena njezina korespondencija, kao i roman "Dah života" (Um sopro de vida). Mnoge su studije napisane o njezinu djelu, međutim, Clarice uvijek izmiče konačnom definiranju. Objavila je osam romana i brojne zbirke pripovijedaka, kronika i priča za djecu.

Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Classics, Philosophy, Brazil, Literary Fiction, Literature

96 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1973

About the author

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she was brought to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.

She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.

She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família), the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.), and the novel many consider to be her masterpiece, Água Viva. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977.

She has been the subject of numerous books and references to her, and her works are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films, one being 'Hour of the Star' and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser.

Reviews

[Lucy Dacus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books ever written.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Água Viva – Living Water – in the Russian fairytales living water is a magical substance that heals all wounds and resurrects killed warriors so the story is written to revive our ability to think…

Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time. And to capture the present, forbidden by its very nature: the present slips away and the instant too, I am this very second forever in the now.

Every single instant is objectless but put together, instants become the imagery of life and awareness…

And I am haunted by my ghosts, by all that is mythic, fantastic and gigantic: life is supernatural. I walk holding an open umbrella upon a tightrope. I walk to the limit of my great dream. I see the fury of the visceral impulses: tortured viscera guide me.

This dramatic representation of personal life is obviously an artistic creation so it may be named quite adequately A Portrait of the Artist as a Mental Abstraction…

What beautiful music I can hear in the depths of me. It is made of geometric lines crisscrossing in the air. It is chamber music. Chamber music has no melody. It is a way of expressing the silence. I’m sending you chamber writing.

Human consciousness is the quintessence of all the things and phenomena that surround us.

[Gaurav Sagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I lose the identity of the world inside myself and exist without guarantees. I achieve whatever is achievable but I live the unachievable and the meaning of me and the world and you isn't obvious. It's fantastic, and I handle myself in these moments with immense delicacy. Is God a form of being:' the abstraction that materializes in the nature of all that exists:' My roots are in the divine shadows. Drowsy roots. Wavering in the dark shadows.



I am what I am,
I am sinful I am virtuous,
I am filth I am unstained,
I am ugly I am beautiful,
I am chaos I am order,
I am despair I am exultation,
I am black I am white,
I am privileged I am underprivileged,
I am fortune I am unfortune,
I am fire I am water,
I am tree I am obelisk,
I am earth I am sky,
I am the Sun I am the Moon,
I am fragment I am the whole,
I am extinct I am existing,
I am created I am annihilated,
I am known I am unknown,
I am success I am failure,
I am body I am soul,
I am logic I am nonsense,
I am captive I am free,
I am sorrow I am joy,
I am devil I am god,
I am heaven I am hell,
I am consciousness I am unconsciousness,
I am existence I am nothingness,
I am intermittent I am perpetual,
I am moment I am forever,
I was ever I will be ever,
I am dead I am alive,
I am death I am life,
I am finite I am infinite,
I am what universe comprises of
I am what universe is: I am the universe.




The abovementioned fragments of thought define essence of the book, if you just want to have superficial taste of the book then I guess that would be sufficient but if you are still reading it then welcome to the world of unconformity. These snippets pop up in front of me, when I finished the book- Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector. One of the most popular phrases- Nihilo ex Nihilo- of philosophy keeps knocking my mind right through the book, which translates to- nothing out of nothing. In other words, it means that universe is created from nothing, there is no break in-between a world that did not exist and one that did, since it could not be created from nothing in the first place. Life starts again with every stroke of death, its perpetual. The universe of Lispector also works on the principle of perpetuity, it may be realized only in instantaneous moments which reduce to nothingness as soon as you try to get hold of them. The title translates to ‘stream of life’ as it follows in rhythm wherever it finds way, logic doesn’t have much to say in it, like music or painting, you do not understand it, fully, yet you dance to the tunes of its music. It is life seen by life, may not have meaning but it has the same lack of meaning that pulsating vein has. The world of Clarice lispector is strange but absolutely like our own, formed about a strange vortex in which the matter, antimatter and soul of the universe is being churned up through the labor pains of creation to produce life, as we know in our everyday sense. Does it mean it’s about the act of creation? Or about the very act of writing about that ‘act’. Well one may not be able to tell about it confidently, it’s not in binary, it’s infiniteness and that’s the universe of Lispector, perhaps that what life itself is.

The book, as some of you might have already guessed by now, is without any characters, storylines, narrators, messages or anything else since there is no need of anything or anyone for that matter, as there is no such need in life itself. It moves on no matter what, perpetually, people, places, monuments, forms of life, planets, galaxies, universes are all temporary, just silly moments in the infiniteness of time which is perpetual. Lispector uses the meditation on the creation and the individual to convey what life is- boundless, free, incomprehensible by any logic or being. She uses the words she write as raw materials for the act of creation instead of using them as any vehicles to convey something else, as authors usually do. She keeps on creating- recreating the world through her words by instantaneous moments which vanishes to thin air as soon as one tries to comprehend them. She formulates a dense web of thoughts, facts and objects through the words, an interior monologue through which she reflects on life, what constitutes it, its being.


Agua Viva reminds me of The Book of Disquiet by Frenando Pessoa as both seem to address the similar issue- the life. You must have read about minimalist approach adopted by Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett, which is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description, but Lispector’s approach is somewhat different than that. It’s like trimming of grass until you find what you are looking for, the author here trims the narrative till its bare of everything which is superfluous and truth, just naked truth, manifests itself from underneath it. Clarice Lispector herself said once that it was ‘spineless’ writing which did not have any figure, reference or object to hold upon. The text has Nietzsche-esque aphorisms, which have being of their own gleaming from the words themselves, which questions the reality, its finiteness, identity, existence as the aphorisms of Pessoa force you to. These highly styled and remarkably condensed paragraphs may be read in stand alone manner however, the author manages to weave them in together through theme of being and nothingness, the flow of sentences she manages to maintain help her to transcends the ordinary limits of expression. It is somewhat like music which you hear to enjoy the rhythm though you do not always understand it or like painting, there are sensations which transform into ideas which free themselves from the slavery of words.


The book takes you through the ticklish sojourn of being and nothingness, about the being of an individual, being of the text itself and the underlying meaning or non-meaning it might be conveying; how it takes birth from nothingness to eventually become one with nothingness. And what this being comprises of, what is it about? Is it something which lies beneath us, hidden deep inside our heart to be guarded against the ravages of hell of nothingness? Or is it something related to our soul or the soul itself? Is it something from our brain, what we call consciousness which may act on our voluntary actions or unconsciousness which is beyond our voluntary control? Is it what our appearances comprise of- shape, size, color, or anything else tangible or is it intangible- the infinite, so does it mean it’s God. Actually, being comprises of everything about an individual, his color, shape, size, body, soul, consciousness, unconsciousness, thoughts, feeling everything constitutes the being. The being of an individual is not separated from that of other individuals, an object, world, or universe per se since everything originates from the same soup, in fact it was there forever and will be there forever. It all branches off the plant primula, which transforms into variegated forms which eventually annihilate, only to give birth life again- it is perpetual. We are one- the same universe which we comprise of, which we hold in ourselves, which hold us in it.

That very spring I was given the plant called primula. It's so mysterious that in its mystery is contained the inexplicable part of nature. It doesn't look at all unique. But on the precise day when spring starts its leaves die and in their place are born closed flowers that have an extremely dumbfounding feminine and masculine perfume.



The author takes you through the excruciating, probing questions of existence as it is. It may not be easy ride through the life since existence may be absurd, demanding, surprising and unmanageable since, at times, you may have to do away with morals which may not sustain the probing look of existence. The words of this wonderful book may sometimes pierce your heart like a dagger as they speak about bare truth which is generally harsh, probing and penetrating. However, the un-named narrator of the book is as brave as an individual could be in life, as she/ he does not surrender to the vagaries of life, the savage inquiry about her/ his being, authenticity of her/ his existence; instead the narrator chooses the joy of life over it. The existence itself may be cruel but the narrator realizes that perhaps the salvation lies in impersonal love and he rebels against the ‘God' (who may be the author), realizes ephemerality of existence-his being and chooses joy over sadness- the joy of being, joy of being alive.

My only salvation is joy. An atonal joy inside the essential it. Doesn't that make senser 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.


Clarice Lispector pushes the limits of her language as far as she could without risking incoherence. Despite the obvious strangeness and non-confinement of her text due to her unique choices of words, syntax and grammar, she manages to produce vibrant, lively sentences which veer towards abstraction without ever quite reaching there, as if she wants to rearrange the conventional language through subtle but surprising juxtapositions to find meanings which are unthinkable and unimaginable. I really can’t say how her prose appears in its original language but translating her must have been an extremely challenging task, for the place of one punctuation might change the meaning of these highly refined sentences. It is a non-novel, a non-narrative, and yet it works within a carefully constructed framework that manages to contain its strangeness inside a unified flow of thought. The narrative is completely devoid of any traditional notions, literature is associated with, you may forget all after finishing the novel but the quintessence, the soul of it will be with you thereafter, perhaps that’s exactly what the author intended with it.


As one would expect, the prose of Lispector is highly emblematic, she talks about death which as been one of the greatest fascinations of human kind, right from the outbreak of civilization. However the treatment given by the author is as unique as her prose, death may be just an event in the continuum of time, perhaps a sort of conclusion of our existence which annihilates itself to transcend again to a living (or non-living) form, but in any case it becomes one with universe and remains so. So death may actually be a kind of explosion as body no longer bear to be a body, and it may be actually a kind of pleasure, selfish though. The mirror is being represented as some sort to portal to understand the enigma of things- life, one has to approach its depth without leaving any traces of his/ her own image upon it. The author uses emblematic beings- “he” and “she” to symbolizes the masculine and feminine spirits of the world- feminine ostensibly being the creative, pro-genitor, caring while masculine full of pride, narcissism and other traits of destruction.


There are apparent traits of post-modernism in the novel wherein anything conventional is strictly denied to realize its existence by the god like hands of the author. She forays into world unconventional through the jagged, hypnotic and mystical prose to come up with cerebrally demanding but intellectually rewarding text which is intuitively sonorous. There is a perpetual ‘you’ throughout the novel, to which the un-named narrator addresses to, whenever he/ she wants, you ponders upon the possibilities of 'you', only to realize that the ‘you’ is actually you- the reader. The author gives freedom to the narrator to communicate his/ her feelings with the reader through the broken but alive sentences of her, we could sense the feel of metafiction. The text of the novel is self-reflective in nature, as if it has being of its own radiating through its existence, as the other book- The Hour of The Star- of Lispector is. It reminds me of Maurice Blanchot since the text negates itself to reveal true existence of it, it is true being truly self- reflective. Clarice Lispector uses her personal experience and transformed it into an universal poetry through the rearrangement of language and the inter play between the gaps of reality and fiction.




The instant is. You who read me.

Agua Viva is my second read by Clarice Lispector after The Hour of the Star and I enjoyed every bit of it. The book is truly existential as the other ones by the author are. However, if you are looking for something with easy flow of narrative in which you may dive to get fast-moving expedition then this book is not for you. If you are interested in experimental fiction, to make effort to understand what may lies beneath the words and between the lines, then it is for you.

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?

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

”I know that my gaze must be that of a primitive person surrendered completely to the world, primitive like the gods who only allow the broad strokes of good and evil and don’t want to know about good tangled up like hair in evil, evil that is good.”



There is an unnamed narrator, an artist who is turning his/her talents away from canvas and paint, and exchanging his/her brush for a pen to try and express himself/herself with words. Now that I finished the book I realize that I have no idea of the sex of the narrator. Maybe there was a designation, but I was happily content to see the narrator as androgynous. Does it really matter if the wisdom being shared is from a man or woman as long as that being shared is wise?

The book is a collection of thoughts loosely tied together with the struggles of the narrator to express a philosophy of life, of feelings, of being. The book shouldn’t really be categorized as fiction, philosophy, or anything. To designate it, to name it, is to tie straps to a book that was meant to be free.

I caught glimpses of the author, Clarice Lispector, peering out at me from where she was squeezed behind every letter I, quietly watching my reactions to her creation. As she was writing this book, she scribbled down thoughts on whatever was handy, ”a check, a piece of paper, a napkin” and shoved it into her purse. They all ended up “smelling of her lipstick”.

She knew she created a lot of anxiety for her editor with every manuscript she sent him, but this one in particular she knew would stretch the capacities of even his kind understanding. Translators had an equally difficult time trying to express what she was portraying without bringing a natural neatness and in the process eviscerating the concept. ”The world has no visible order and all I have is the order of my breath. I let myself happen.”



Lispector had doubts about this book, this “spineless book” that lacked a plot and each sentence was connected only by the fact that they came from the same brain, thoughts born as neighbors, but sometimes as different as Earth to Venus. Writers have always complained about some of their best writing ending up crumpled on the floor because it did not fit the plot. In this book, all Lispector kept was the best writing. All the connecting words that we use to keep the plot on a linear course are missing. The narrative is derailed, and now the train is moving as the crow flies. She wanted to cut a new path over hill and dale, through fences, crosscutting roads, so that her train can be seen where no train was meant to be seen. Words moving like an ocean liner gliding across the plains of Kansas.

The narrator talks about music. The way it makes us feel beyond, in many ways, where paint and pen can take us. ”I gently rest my hand on the record player and my hand vibrates, sending waves through my whole body; and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of reality’s realm, and the world trembles inside my hands.” When I can let myself go and just exist, a difficult thing for me, music is different. It penetrates deeper, making the core of me shiver, waking up slumbering DNA, and making me remember things that must exist in a future, or a lost present, or a different past.

”I want a clock woven from threads of solar gold.”

In the beginning, as I was licking the lips as the words were first cast, I was scared. The concepts threw my brain into a panic. I could feel myself sinking through the floor, merging with my chair, becoming something other than me. Things needed to be quiet. I needed just a dash of vodka to calm my nerves. I needed to stay away from mired thoughts caught in quicksand. A log of sanity held me up.

”I am before, I am almost, I am never.”

I was reading her sentences several times, grasping just a little bit more each time until I was nuzzling the edges of understanding. I kept holding the book closer and closer to my eyes as if thoughts were escaping as the words came from the page to my mind. At page fourteen, the mystical language of my brain turned some ancient keys, bricks shifted, walls buckled, and I was suddenly able to see more clearly what she was trying to tell me.



Gregory Rabassa, who translated one of her books into English, dedicated a whole chapter to her in his memoir. “The first thing I remember of her?” he said in an interview with the Forward. “Her physical beauty. When I first met her, I was entranced by her; she looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf — a good combination. She had eyes that may go back to her Ukrainian past, what Thomas Mann called krirgiesen Augen in ‘Magic Mountain.’” She may have been born in the Ukraine, but she was a Brazilian through and through.

”I follow the tortuous path of roots bursting the earth, I have a gift for passion, in the bonfire of a dry trunk I contort in the blaze.”

Don’t be afraid. Take hold of the snake’s tail and let yourself be pulled through the tall grass. What better way to meet a different version of yourself.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
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[elle · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading clarice lispector’s works often feels transcendental, and this was no different. but this one especially felt like running through a waterfall or a cascade of words rather than physically reading pages. the cadence and rhythm of lispector’s writing in this felt oddly hypnotic, and I felt like i was watching her stretch and fold sentences, making literature malleable in her hands. kind of a spiritual experience in a way.

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻
pre-read

love clarice lispector so much i'm trying to pace myself with her books, like how i'm saving jane austen's sandition for my deathbed so i continue to have a will to live.

[Nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The world has no visible order and all I have is the order of my breath. I let myself happen.”

Does breaking a conventional way of writing immediately make a piece of writing a masterpiece? That’s a question I kept asking myself as I was reading Água Viva. Within these pages, what usually constitutes a book — plot, characters, and names — is absent. As the book title suggests, it is more so of a stream of consciousness and thoughts; fragmented sentences flowing like living water.

Água Viva ultimately feels like a book of nonsensical ramblings, yet it is so deeply human and intimate that it becomes profound. It strips away that external look at life to reveal itself as a poetry of the self — a raw, visceral look at what life actually is like, so much so that you can even feel its vibrations, as the book often says.

Through an unnamed narrator, Clarice expresses her frustration with the inadequacy of language — the limitation of words. Throughout the book, there’s this recurring mention of the ‘instant-now’. But this structurally fractured book is so eccentric that it becomes difficult to even comprehend what Clarice intended to convey. One thing, however, is certain: that is the impossibility of describing life, or rather, the exactness of ‘now’ — if that makes sense.

Ultimately, the very quality often criticised as this book’s flaw — its lack of structure — is what has led many to see it as a masterpiece. Água Viva presents existence, the fleetingness of now, and the unknowability of the universe in an unconventional way that actually mimics a person’s mind. Clarice finds that the description of living does a disservice to the act of living; thus, she gave us an essay, a poetry — or a hybrid of both — to confront and highlight that existence, sensation, and experience come to us in moments that can never be lived again, and can never be fully captured in words. One can even say that Clarice’s appreciation for a chaotic, irrational, and visceral life is so profound that only an equally chaotically written work is able to reflect this exact sentiment.

“Waiting is feeling voracious in relation to the future.”

“For each one of us and at some lost moment of life — is a mission announced that we must accomplish? I however refuse any mission. I won't accomplish anything: I just live.”

3.8 stars

[Quirine · Rating 4 out of 5]

One long stream of consciousness that reads like a poem, sometimes even a prayer, a spiritual awakening and philosophical pondering. Dare I say even a witches’ awakening? I don't know - there's something there. I think you can get from this book what you want to get from it. So many beautiful lines that I know I will be coming back to often in the future.

[Luís · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had my first encounter with this Brazilian author on my TBR. Clarice Lispector is one of the great Brazilian writers. Coming from a family of Ukrainian immigrants who fled the Jewish pogroms at the beginning of the last century, she made her place in South American literature.
Agua Viva is a demanding, reflective, and poetic style of writing. When she published her first books, there was talk of Proustian and Woolfian influences, even though she had not read either Proust or Virginia Woolf.
Written in the 70s, I'm not sure to what extent she was influenced by American authors of previous decades, but like them, and like Proust and Woolf, she strives to live and write the IT, the moment, in all its intensity. In the form of images, sensations, and emotions, she transcribes this passage of experience, both ephemeral and timeless.
It is a book to read and reread because it is dense, complex, and beautiful.

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lispector siempre dijo que ganaba con la relectura, y no se si es eso, o simplemente que cada vez que la leo encuentro cosas distintas que me atraen y me atrapan. En esta novela, que no se si debería ser llamada novela como tal, o como prosa poética, o como qué, solo un libro de Clarice, no hay una historia. Son imágenes, muchas ya conocidas de sus otros libros, que para mi su cumbre llega en La Pasión Según GH. Está Dios, la naturaleza, el crear, las palabras, el amor, el presente, el destino.
No importa cómo se llega a el mundo de Lispector, lo importante, y bello, es que entrar en su mundo es una experiencia que no hay que perderse.



============================================================================
La magia de Clarice Lispector en este libro se siente desatada. Locura lúcida, podría llamarse. Una ausencia de anécdota real convierte esta novela en algo mágico. Porque sólo así se puede llamar a lo que hace Lispector con las palabras.
Es un desfile de sentimientos, reflexiones, donde se ven animales, flores, insectos, estaciones, el amamantar, la placenta, dios, el bien, el mal, la soledad, la libertad. Quizás si intento sacar algo de la historia podría ser esto, se trata de una mujer pintora, quien habla a un viejo amor, o quizás sólo habla a quien la lee. Habla sobre la vida, la creación, las palabras, todo contado por instantes. Es una novela de presente puro, no mira hacia atrás ni hacia adelante. Hay que leer a Lispector, porque sólo ella nos lleva hacia un lugar en donde el tiempo no existe, y todo a nuestro alrededor son palabras en movimiento, emociones latiendo.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Léa · Rating 5 out of 5]

every word astounds me (even on a reread)!

"simply I am I. And you are you. It is vast, and will endure."
"what beautiful music I can hear in the depths of me."
"I may not have meaning but it is the same lack of meaning that the pulsing vein has."

there's nobody doing it like her!

[emma]

short and philosophical are two of the best things books can be

[persephone ☾ · Rating 4 out of 5]

meant to be savored and not devoured, reread, annotated and quoted !

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A fantastical world surrounds me and is me. I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers. I'm a fruit eaten away by a worm. And I await the orgasmic apocalypse. A dissonant throng of insects surrounds me, light of an oil lamp that I am. I then go too far in order to be. I'm in a trance. I penetrate the surrounding air. What a fever: I can't stop living. In this dense jungle of words that thickly wrap around whatever I feel and think and live and transform everything I am into something of mine that nonetheless remains entirely outside me. I'm watching myself think. What I wonder is: who is it in me who is even outside of thinking:' I'm writing you all this because it's a challenge which I have to accept with humility. I'm haunted by my ghosts, by whatever is mythic and fantastical - life is supernatural."

Água Viva is a book I simply cannot easily define, it sits way out there all on its own. A non-novel in the form of a letter?, a novel in the form of an essay on the meditation of creation, a long prose poem?, a collection of obscure thoughts? a metaphysical theory?, regardless, Lispector kept me seduced within her realm in such a fascinating manner. In memory, I can't think of anything else quite like it. And I could have picked a passage of writing from any of it's pages. She paints a dark ethereal and otherworldly canvas, hypnotic, bewildering, and translucent, with metaphors aplenty, and Agua Viva felt like a refreshing break from the doldrums of a typically standard book. She admits to fear and uncertainty, but she chooses to wrap both arms and legs around each passing moment and find joy in just existing. She writes each instant like she is trying to catch her breath, and she does it with such exuberance that the reader cannot help but feel the same strange joys. There is an angular edge to her writing, with a curious monologue of tremendous depth, and it also comes across like a piece of chamber music being zapped by the building blocks of life.

The beauty of this book is undeniable, even if Lispector’s comparisons and images can be tricky to untangle. Indeed, some are impossible to fully grasp (hence the four stars and not five), and the reader’s work involved in navigating them is sometimes frustrating, sometimes delightful, but always felt with a sense of wonder. Much of what Lispector hinges on is the fragile narrative structure thrown over the piece like a thin blanket made out of a human soul, the idea that the narrator, a painter attempting to create art for the first time with words is writing an intimate letter to a single individual, presumably a lover. And yet really, the book could also be read as a letter from the author to her audience of readers. There is a certain intimacy of that contact between writer and reader, especially in light of her raw honesty throughout, which is at times is wonderfully overwhelming.

While this work is deeply conceptual, it mediates constant reminders of the material, sensational world. She profiles flowers and colors, a cigarette burn, she ruminates time and again on her own imminent death, whilst also calling out to us to run our fingers gently over each page.
I am baffled, stunned, and still trying to comprehend what I have just read. It might not have been the right introduction to Lispector's work. (One of her better known novels probably should have been a starting point), but one thing is for sure, she is a writer I will certainly not be forgetting any time soon.

[Brady Billiot · Rating 4 out of 5]

She wrote a whole lotta words in this book and they sounded very nice and unique together. I might not have understood every part but it was poetics and whimsical and amazing nonetheless

[Helga Martiros · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am before, I am almost, I am never.

Fragmented, with no definite structure, Água Viva is an unnamed narrator's intimate meditations about existence, time and rebellion.

The writing reminded me of the late Iranian poet, Forough Farrokhzad's work. The similarities were so striking that I wondered if Lispector was familiar with Forough's poems, especially her 'Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season' and 'Another Birth'.

I will quote a few random lines from Água Viva. Those who are familiar with Forough's work would know what I mean.

"I'm afraid of the accursed Sunday that liquidifies me."

"I am telling of the instants that drip and are thick with blood."

"I plunge into the almost pain of an intense happiness- and to adorn me, leaves and branches spring up in my hair."

"I let myself happen."

"And I sing the passage of time."

"...inside this night that is longer than life..."

"but what is a window if not the air framed by right angles?"

"In my night I idolize the secret meaning of the world."

"I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers. I'm a fruit eaten away by a worm. And I await the orgasmic apocalypse."

"I live the richness of the earth."


And just for reference, the following is fragments from Forough's poems:

(From Only the Sound Remains)

why should I stop?
I clasp to my breast
the unripe bunches of wheat
and breastfeed them

sound, sound, only sound,
the sound of the limpid wishes
of water to flow,
the sound of the falling of star light
on the wall of earth's femininity
the sound of the binding of meaning's sperm
and the expansion of the shared mind of love.
sound, sound, sound,
only sound remains.


(From Another Birth)

In a room as vast as loneliness
My heart which is the size of love
Looks at the simple pretext of its happiness...
...
I shall plant my hands in the garden
And I will grow I know I know oh I know
And in my hand's ink-stained hollow
The swallow
Shall lay its eggs.

(From Let us believe in the dawn of the cold season)

And here I am,
a lonely woman
on the threshold of a cold season
at the dawn of realizing earth’s sullied existence
and the sky's blue despair
and the impotence of these hands made of cement.

Time passed.
Time passed and the clock struck four times.
Four times.
Today is the winter solstice
and I know the secret of seasons,
know the language of moments.
The Messiah sleeps in a grave
and the earth—the hospitable earth—
beckons one to serenity.
...
I am cold.
I am cold and I think I will never feel warm again.
...
Perhaps the truth was those two young hands,
those young hands
buried beneath snow—
and in the coming year
when spring mates with sky behind the window,
fountains of green saplings will erupt—
saplings that bloom, beloved, my truest friend.

Let us believe in the dawn of the cold season...
------------------------------------------

If you like philosophical contemplation and self-examination novels that don't have a plot and are written without any breaks, the whole book being one long paragraph, you will like this book.

[Jill · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the market for some rambling unmitigated narcissism? Well take a seat, sonny; have I got the book for you.

Listen. I want to like Clarice Lispector. I keep trying. But for every moment of legitimate brilliance, sparkling clarity, or that thing where an author reads your thoughts way too well...there are TEN moments like this:

"Now is the domain of now."

"Are the facts of life lemon on the oyster? Does the oyster sleep?"

"I'm a heretic. No, that's not true. Or am I? But something exists."

and, paraphrased:
"I have experienced all that is dark and true in life. I know the depths of reality and I will try to convey them to you but unless you, too, have experienced in the exact way I have, you will never understand. I am so profound. I am a painter and a writer. I know another path, I feel deeper than everyone who lives, I am pure chaos and you might think I'm admitting a flaw when I say that but actually I consider it one of the grandest virtues there is. In fact, I am all virtue; every single one of my qualities is a gift and I have no flaws. Read my ramblings and grasp only the surface of me, for I am true brilliance at my core, unfathomable."

Kindly: shut up.

I have no patience for this kind of self-indulgent writing. I can't understand how it's considered a masterpiece. And if I'm missing something, I don't care what it is -- Lispector just does not resonate with me. And I keep trying, but there's always been something in her that frustrates me profoundly ------ I just can't stand the persona she conveys in her writing. Self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, self-...everything. And fine, that lends her a reflective nature -- even one I relate to -- that's cool.

But I can read my own damn journal entries. I don't need to read hers.

[yennie﹕. ݁ · Rating 5 out of 5]

clarice lispector doesn’t care for plot, she cares for feeling—her (ir)rational fear of death captured poetically in this tiny, beautiful volume.

„I‘m full of acacias swaying yellow, and I who have barely started my journey, I start it with a sense of tragedy, guessing toward which lost ocean my steps of life are leading.“

how do you fight your fear of death? or any fear, really. you lean into it. let it crawl under your skin until it softens into something almost beautiful. and that’s what she does.

“I find it hard to believe that I shall die. Because I’m bubbling in cold freshness. My life will be very long because each instant is. I get the feeling I’m about to be born and can’t. I am a heart beating in the world.“

this book is made up of little fragments of poetry and metaphors—it’s like having your therapist sing to you.
but it’s not always gentle. sometimes it tears you open with a tenderness that feels too raw, too real, and you’re left holding pieces of yourself you didn’t even know were there.
i am utterly bewitched—her writing is so elegant and feminine, it felt like i was dreaming.

just reread it after my physical copy arrived and i want to CRY. i feel completely understood even though this volume doesn’t have structure or a clear goal. clarice lispector i will take on you like a mother.

“I am still the cruel queen of the Medes and the Persians and am also a slow evolution that throws itself like a drawbridge to a future whose milky clouds I’m already breathing. My aura is of the mystery of life.“

[Bjorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before you read this review: go find a version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and put it on. (I'm sure you have it someplace. John Cale's version is recommended, but just about anyone will do.)

Back? Good. And I guess now I'll have to explain what Cohen has to do with Lispector - I suppose it's possible that Cohen's read the book, but it's not like they're all that closely related (apart from the fact that the book opens with a cry of "hallelujah"). But what they have in common is that approach, that ecstasy that's not necessarily religious but which might be the same feeling that's behind religion - not God, but that which some people fill with God. And the self-referential attempt to capture it all in words.

The Stream of Life is a letter from a her to a him, one long monologue that begins the day she wakes up with the sun and finds that life has gone on. It's an incredible feeling, an epiphany she has to try and catch: to describe LIFE in mere words, all that's beautiful and fucked up, the concrete and the abstract, the bits you can't help but paint or sing. But just like you supposedly can't dance about architecture you can't really write about feelings; the words are just words, they don't cover it. She needs time. She has to manipulate language, duck under their superficial definitions and get at the core meaning, while at the same time trying to stop time, freeze the NOW she's trying to describe before it's passed and the feeling of having understood something is lost to the pale cast of thought and everything becomes just more words.

Where does the music go after you've played it?

Lispector goes deep-sea fishing in her language, soul, philosphy, love, art and keeps bumping into the words we once used to represent emotions rather than the emotions themselves, "the it;" she treats language the way a saxophone player in jazz might treat notes, refusing to play the basic melody but playing around it, surrounding it from all directions, alternately divebombing it and caressing it before restating the theme at the end. The novel - if you can even call it that - is subjective taken to the extreme, the sheer experience of experiencing taken to the degree where everything becomes a subject - everything is "I," I am "it." Being as a conscious act of creation: "I am myself."

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," as a dull Austrian once put it. But Lispector isn't a philosopher, she's a fiction writer, and she refuses to be silent; she WILL force language to capture that second of clarity, jubilation, grief, extacy - like a Coltrane who's learned to paint, like Molly Bloom on E. This is prose that wants to top poetry. It takes her 127 pages and I'll be damned if she doesn't manage it. I can't sum it up - that would sort of defeat the purpose; maybe my attempt to use words to describe her attempt to use words to speak of that which cannot be spoken about, that secret chord that goes all the way to the divine, was doomed from the beginning. But on the other hand, if it could be easily summed up we wouldn't need literature, would we?

I don't want to feel the horrible limitations of living only by that which makes sense.

I just know that The Stream of Life lights up what, for lack of a better word, I call my soul. And that it's amazing, mankind's ability to watch everything go wrong and yet stand their with nothing on our tongues but "hallelujah."

[casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5, this reminds me a lot of a conversation i had with my dad a few years ago where he made a really “simple” observation that completely changed how i thought about something that had been a huge source of stress for me in years prior, but because of my proximity to it i just couldn’t see for myself until he noticed it. just crazy to think 80 pages can carry the amount of clarity it does, really enjoyed and definitely see myself revisiting this soon.

[pato]

what the fuck…, again, less than 100 pages n she rewired my brain. full stop.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 4 out of 5]

My, oh my, what the hell is this? Just over 80 pages, but at first I could barely make head or tail of it. Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) offers a chaotic collection of impressions and reflections, indeed a bit like running water or a life giving well, if you like. Intriguing and overwhelming, but also disruptive, confrontational, and sometimes even nauseating.
Only after a while do you recognize certain patterns. “I am” keeps returning: the writer who describes, explores and names herself, who tries to grasp herself in the “now”, with words, even though she knows all too well that she can hardly succeed. At times this seemed like an alternative version of Walt Whitman’s exuberant self-affirmation: “I am obscure to myself. I let myself happen. I unfold only in the now. I am rudely alive.”
And then again those animals that pass by: panthers, dinosaurs, and inevitably with Lispector also the cockroach. She clearly had a thing with animals, or rather: with the animalistic. In the same vein lies the focus on her own physicality. So it is the spark of life that intrigued Lispector so much, and therefore existence itself: “The most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is”. Ultimately, it is this realization that makes her see what a grace ‘existence’ really is.
I can’t really do this book justice in this review. Only: once again this is an overwhelming reading experience, like the one Lispector already provided in The Passion According to G.H., published 9 years before this book. What a writer.

[BrookeVu · Rating 1 out of 5]

Like being trapped in an incomprehensible modern art exhibit where they’re spinning you around, flashing lights in your face, throwing unknown objects at you, while you smell something faintly funky and you’re supposed to think it’s super interesting and novel and cool but really you just want to get the hell out of there.

[João Barradas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A água é um dos quatro elementos fundamentais que, segundo a sapiência da Grécia Antiga, constitui a base da Natureza. De facto, sabe-se que este é o constituinte principal dos seres humanos e da Terra. Não é pois de todo estapafúrdio ofertar-lhe o estatuto de pedra angular da própria vida, numa assunção que tem vindo a ser aproveitada por diferentes credos e religiões.

Este texto de Clarice, de difícil classificação – não deveria eu já estar acostumado? -, não se apropria dessas ideias, que deambulam entre o biológico e o místico; antes brinca com o nome de um animal disforme, mais comummente conhecido por medusa. Como ela, a personagem principal lança sobre o leitor os seus tentáculos pejados de ideias, numa orgia de palavras pintadas a aguarela, que deixa o último num estado electrificante. Tais pensamentos bucólicos são gerados ao sabor de um descontentamento notório perante a vida que lhe coube e não a preenche, deixando as pinturas para se imiscuir na escrita, que também garante imagens.

Ao longo deste fluxo de pensamento, ela defende fundamentalmente três termos para que a sua utilização se torne rotineira - "instante-já", "é" e "it". O primeiro associa-se ao arcaico "carpe diem", que exige aproveitar o agora para ter uma total experiência de existência - bem degustada. O segundo, de índole mais complexa, luta contra as regras gramaticais ensinadas e desvincula o verbo "ser" de qualquer predicativo, colocando o ênfase no existir - "pronto e ponto" -, indepententemente dos artifícios que o compõem. Adensando campos da metafísica, o último termo alerta para algo tão patente na escrita de Clarice - a inexistência de género, em primazia da pessoa-animal, que não tem de ficar conotada a algo pura e simplesmente por questões biológicas, mal resolvidas, por vezes.

Sem surpresas para um leitor expedito, este livro não encaixa em nenhuma das normas de estrutura pré-estabelecidas, sorvendo algo de vários tipos, numa amálgama informe mas acolhedora. E, apresentando os pensamentos de um alguém - de forma lírica e desconcertante -, obriga quem o lê a reflectir sobre a sua forma de encarar a vida. Bebam esta água, da melhor nascente!

"O que estou te escrevendo não é para se ler – é para se ser."

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this short book composed of fragments, Clarice Lispector seeks to create a language to capture the instances that comprise a life. It's a book about dissolving boundaries. Lispector looks to painting and music to provide her with the tools to understand creation and expression in the context of a lived life. The work she has crafted reads almost as a dreamscape, as she moves from meditation to meditation, exploring language, identity, flowers, animals, love, sex, religion:

"I tremble with pleasure amidst the novelty of using words that form an intense thicket. I struggle to conquer more deeply my freedom of sensations and thoughts, without any utilitarian meaning: I am alone, I and my freedom. Such is my freedom that it could scandalize a primitive but I know that you are not scandalized by the fullness I achieve and that is without perceptible borders. This capacity of mine to live whatever is rounded and ample —I surround myself with carnivorous plants and legendary animals, all bathed in the coarse and twisted oblique light of a mythical sex. I proceed in an intuitive way and without seeking an idea: I am organic. And I don’t question myself about my motives. I plunge into the almost pain of an intense happiness— and to adorn me leaves and branches spring up in my hair."

In order to use words in this generative manner, Lispector has had to change how she sees the world, seeing it slant, in a move that Emily Dickinson would recognize:

"It’s that I’m perceiving a crooked reality. Seen through an oblique cut. Only now have I sensed the oblique of life. I used to only see through straight and parallel cuts. I didn’t notice the sly crooked line. Now I sense that life is other. That living is not only unwinding rough feelings— it’s something more bewitching and gracile, without losing its fine animal vigor for that."

Lispector's voyage through words and language, image and song, leads her in the end confronting death. She chooses to end, not with fear, but with hope and joy, "in an allegro con brio":

"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."

Lispector enacts her joy in words, fixing this instant in time, and by doing so making this work a song, an allegro con brio. Joy in the face of uncertainty, creation as an act of humanity.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beguiling improvised abstractions about consciousness via short paragraphs about mirrors, flowers, horses, writing, being, painting perfume in the air, beatitude, joy, grace, how cats never laugh, always being born through thought, "is-ness," "it-ness," maybe best described/reduced as Beckettian Brazilian Beat prose-poetry? Unlike anything I've ever read -- much longer than its 88 pages. At times sophomoric, juvenile, ridiculous, superficial, zone-out-able, but then suddenly so much more, with perfect phrasing like "a horse with the open wings of a great eagle." But then it goes back to proto-stoner silliness like how "now" is always passing, by the time you say "now" it's no longer now, etc. Anyway, my first Lispector in the updated translations (a few years ago, I read The Hour of the Star in an old translation and wasn't into it at all) -- won't be my last.

[Ruxandra (4fără15) · Rating 2 out of 5]

OH MY GOD, WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE LIKE THIS BOOK?!

I'm actually impressed with myself for having managed to get to the end. This novella felt just like an interminable, horrible blog post – the way I see it, Lispector is trying way too hard to sound poetic and deep but ends up writing terrible and cringy passages most of the time.

See for yourself:

“No. It’s not easy. But it “is.” I ate my own placenta so as not to have to eat for four days. To have milk to give you. Milk is a “this.” And no one is I. No one is you. That is what solitude is.”

“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"."

“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. The full-moon aura of the body. Parambolic— whatever that word means. Parambolic as I am. I can’t sum myself up because you can’t add a chair and two apples. I am a chair and two apples. And I cannot be added up.”

“Am I explicit? I don’t really care. Now I’m going to light a cigarette. Perhaps I’ll go back to the typewriter or perhaps I’ll stop right here forever. I, who am never good enough.
I came back. I’m thinking about turtles. Once I said by pure intuition that the turtle was a dinosauric animal. Later I read that it really is. I have the strangest thoughts. One day I’ll paint turtles. They interest me a lot."

“I must interrupt to say that “X” is what exists inside me. “X”—I bathe in that this. It’s unpronounceable. All I do not know is in “X.” Death? death is “X.” But much life too for life is unpronounceable. “X” that shakes within me and I fear its pitch: it vibrates like the string of a cello, a tense string that when plucked emits pure electricity, without melody. The unpronounceable instant. An other sensibility is what becomes aware of “X.”

Um... please stop.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I write to you has no beginning: it's a continuation.

If I'm being transparent about how I view things today, I don't care about frequenting authors on social media to view real-time daily activities typed with accompanying hashtags, or face cards filtered and uploaded as reels or stories. Give me your thoughts in book form, give me your thoughts about books, disappear in real life so that I envision you creating the outer worldly, and when you do emerge, do so as an apparition that makes me hurry to your reading, panel or virtual talk; exist as a voice on the page, a mysterious being who I learn about through your art; lay your feelings bare, render your language lucid and luscious, let me peek through your writing to see you:

I want to write to you like someone learning. I photograph each instant. I deepen the words as if I were painting more than an object, its shadow. I don't want to ask why, you can always ask why and always get no answer—could I manage to surrender to the expectant silence that follows a question without an answer? Though I sense that some place or time the great answer for me does exist.

Don't be tempted to read this 88-page book quickly, for you will never grasp its beautiful oddity. In fact, this is probably not a read for all. Read it when it calls for you. I read Selected Crônicas a decade ago and Near to the Wild Heart two years ago, yet even after being familiar with Lispector's style, nothing prepared me for this book. It is now my favorite work of hers that I've read. It is sweetly strange and poignant.

This is not a book because this is not how one writes.

There is no story to be found here, as Lispector reminds her reader. It is fragmented, composed of instants, existing as a quest. I see it as a journey in poems, a series of prose poems, a meditative and lyrical journal, a trek to ascertain life, to cope with pain, to understand living, to prepare for death. It is a mixture of all things. It is an instant, and then it is gone:

Nothing is more difficult than surrendering to the instant. That difficulty is human pain. It is ours. I surrender in words and surrender when I paint.

Back to what I said earlier...can a writer whose thoughts are accessible via daily updates accomplish this sort of existential writing today? This is debatable. Even Lispector had a weekly newspaper column and most of those words appear in Selected Crônicas. Is it possible for one to disconnect from life, find solitude, and write about it like Mary Oliver successfully did and like Lispector does so well here? Most importantly, would anyone publish such a thing today without the forced social media presence that encourages some authors to become the worst versions of their writing selves? I couldn't help it, these were the thoughts I had as I considered this very strange, captivating, flummoxing, bewitching mixture of prose and poetry, which in some odd way, reminded me of reading not only Oliver, but also Petrushevskaya.

What beautiful music I can hear in the depths of me. It is made of geometric lines criscrossing in the air. It is chamber music. Chamber music has no melody. It is a way of expressing the silence. I'm sending you chamber writing.

This "thing that bubbles" is a sort of "unconscious realm" that a reader must be prepared to enter. In other words, it is best if your reading habitat is akin. Like Lispector's paintings, it is art that is appealing in texture but is also partly at the mercy of the beholder (a Brazilian musician read it "one hundred and eleven times"). She was a writer, lawyer, painter, wife of a diplomat, Ukrainian and Brazilian, poor and privileged, a woman who lived with pain on a mental and physical level, a writer who was deceased way too early. I'm now invested in learning more about her multifaceted life and plan on reading her biography soon.

[prashant · Rating 4 out of 5]

i cut out the pain of which i write to you and give you my restless joy!!!!

[Katia N]

Jean de Roquetaillade was a Franciscan monk and an alchemist. The 14th century, his time, was merciless: savage wars, diseases and infestation - life was short; death was everywhere. A bare survival of a man above thirty was akin to a miracle. Established dogma of the church didn’t help either. As the Black Death blazed through the land, Jean was imprisoned for voicing his protest against religious torture. However, he did not surrender his spiritual freedom nor he has stopped his alchemical experiments. He believed they’ve found an illusive life-giving 'fifth essence' or quintessence (existing alongside four others: water, earth, fire and air). He believed a body could be saved from corruption and decay by this essence while God would take care of the soul. The ‘fifth essence’ was produced through the process of distillation of wine: we know now that the substance was ethanol. However, Jean has come up with much better name for it. He called it ‘Aqua Vitae’ - the water of life.

Aqua Vitae was cold but made a person feel hot; it was wet but ‘dried’ the body and ‘fired’ the spirit. In moderation it healed and humoured (though it could be dangerous as well in excess). In the following centuries, the process of concoction of healing products on the basis ethanol has become quite sophisticated. Notably it has been widely used by the women-healers in the sixteenth-century Germany. They’ve followed in the footsteps of Jean de Roquetaillade, Hildegard of Bingen and the others. Hildegard, a medieval Benedictine abbess who was later canonised, was a true polymath. She has managed to combine her visions with composing music, healing with herbs and brewing beer. She inspired the future generation of healers. The one of the most celebrated recipes of Aqua Vitae was popularised by Anna of Saxony. It has required 387 components, 9 distillations and two years to prepare. Without any doubt, it possessed a unique healing powers and lifted the spirits of both the healers and the healed, especially considering a lack of viable alternatives.

Maybe there are fewer than 387 ‘components’ in this offering of a book by Clarice Lispector. But its distillation from many fragments is as well a creation of a very special alchemy. The resulting concoction is not a poetry, not a story, not an exhibition, not even purely a song:

I know that after you read me it’s hard to reproduce my song by ear, it’s not possible to sing it without having learned it by heart. And how can you learn something by heart of it has no story?

It is none of those things and all of them at the same time. It is a language made to work as a unique spell. Otto Resende, her friend, was warning: ‘Be careful with Clarice. It's not literature. It's witchcraft’.

Alchemy, witchcraft and Aqua Vitae - all of this sounds almost too esoteric, overpowering with mystery… isn’t it? Too fiery. There is this. But the title of this book is not to be confused with ‘Aqua Vitae”. It is 'Aqua Viva' - not mystical water of life but living water- just a few letters of a difference, but it is quintessentially different substance: more organic, more flowing; more intimate, ‘down to earth’ (or should we say: ‘down to water’). This substance does not make you feel hot, at least not always. More often it makes you experience the transience of coolness flowing through your fingers. Makes you ‘touch’ the moment. And, unlike Aqua Vitae, it flows in the direction from mind to body, not vice versa.

Alongside of being an element of a powerful alchemical concoction, each fragment of this book is a lived instant. In this writing, it is as if Clarice tried to hold on to a stream of water in her palm; and she knew it was impossible but she tried anyway and almost-almost captured it before it slipped away. In Portuguese ‘aqua viva’ also means ‘a jelly fish’, a transparent creature that is difficult to see in the water. It also slips through the fingers like water does, but it can unexpectedly sting sending a shock though all your systems; making you more attuned to the outside. Even if Clarice, cannot fully freeze the instant (no-one can), she can capture the flow and the beauty of the transition by describing these instances. And reading this is a similar experience: you cannot retain the meaning of a fragment while your eyes have already moved to the next one. And if you come back to it again, it would be a slightly different experience, slightly different piece of text even with the same words. According to that old man Heraclitus ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’: a similar feeling with these fragments. However, each time you would feel this alive pulsing flow of the world around you and far beyond as well as the presence of her consciousness.

Clarice seems to know the wisdom Proust has discovered earlier. She acknowledges that ’To live this life is more an indirect remembering than a direct living.’. But her project here is opposite to the Proustian one:

I try to see strictly in the moment in which i see - and not to see through the memory of having seen in a past instant. The instant is this one...The instant is in itself imminent. At the same time that i live it, I burst into its passage into another instant.’

That is how this text works - through this ‘bursting’ of instances. Helen Cixous, who admired this book called it ‘The text is full of springs’. In English this metaphor is incredibly apt. The word ‘spring’ is very versatile. It means a season, a physical mechanism, a water source, and an action. This text is all of this: change of seasons, ‘bursting’ into action like a a tense mechanical spring, but also slowing down and cooling after that like a mountain spring of water. Also in Italian ‘Aqua Viva’ is literally a spring of water.

I want to feel in my prying hands the living and quivering nerve of the today. says Clarice’s protagonist and that is exactly what she does. Moreover she conveys this state to her readers: 'This instant is. You who read me are.’ Have you just felt it - that you are? This instant is like a hall of mirrors reflecting each other: her moment is reflected in mine; and mine - in yours. And it goes on reverberating finding its way into eternity.

Language is discreet. It consist of separate letters, syllabus, words. But a meaning is continuous: it is changing, it is flowing. Instant is discrete but experience is continuous. Somehow those discrete bits give rise to this continuous flow. Or do they? Maybe it is actually another way around: a tiny part of this continuous experience just manage to slip through into the words to be available for sharing with the others? In any case, this play makes one feel connected and ‘ferociously alive’:

Listen only superficially to what i say and from the lack of meaning a meaning will be born as from me a high and light life is inexplicably born. The dense jungle of words thickly envelops what i feel and live, and transforms everything I am into some thing of mine that remains outside me. Nature is enveloping: it entangles me entirely and is sexually alive, just that: alive. I too am ferociously alive - and i lick my snout like a tiger who has just devoured a deer.

There is so much in these fragments: a birth, an intrigue with death, an emergence and disbanding of ‘I’, circles of time, a conversation, a letter, dreams, images, fables, pleas, reincarnations… ‘But I am kaleidoscopic: I’m fascinated by my sparkling mutations that I here kaleidoscopically record.' Does the order matter or is it like one entering an exhibition hall when each little text is like a stand-alone exhibit emanating the vision of its creator?. 'This text that i give you is not to be seen close up: it gains its secret previously invisible roundness when seen from a high-flying plane.’ The protagonist of this book is a painter.

This text is of nothing and everything with no beginning and no end.

***
Baruch Spinoza was leading a secluded life in a village outside Hague. It was the middle of the 17th century; earlier, aged twenty three he was expelled from his Jewish community in Amsterdam and condemned for the ‘heretical views’ on God and the Bible. But this has not precluded him from further contemplation. As a result, he has come with one of the most renowned long-lasting philosophical system. Through all these years he has supported his living by grinding lenses. He crafted each lens manually without using existing tools. That might cost him his lungs, but it has enabled his hands to get into unity with the object he was moulding, to feel the flow. It is as if his eyes can see through the shaping fingers noted the one of his biographers. It was as if he was shaping his special lens to get his unique focus on the world.

John Berger, a prominent art historian, writes in his sublime book And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos:

Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless ... In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses

Amazingly in case of Spinoza, he has appeared to be a grinder in both sense: he moulded physical objects with his hands and created a few texts of philosophy, an object of his mind. Perhaps, his mind and body worked in unison on this. Clarice is the grinder as well. ‘Aqua Viva’ is written from inside her body or definitely from somewhere deeper, more visceral than a verbal part of her mind.

According to Aristides Baltas, a prominent philosopher and Spinoza’s scholar, in crafting an object, the maker ‘has fully lived the moment of success as a present moment, the feeling, precisely, of having experienced eternity.’. Spinoza wrote in Ethics ‘We feel, we experience (sentimus, experimurque) that we are eternal.’. It seems that ‘Aqua Viva’ is this crafted object in Baltas’s sense. Each of the fragments-instants seamlessly merge into palpable presence of eternity emanating a profound feeling of awe.

Spinoza also believed that each of us is ‘a part of the Infinite, for the Infinite cannot be infinite if it does not include everything.’. Applying geometry and physics everyday to his work, he has come to this conclusion using a power of pure sequential logical arguments. However, perhaps the intuition he got through his grinding hands played at least as big a role. Clarice’s protagonist experiences this through something she calls ‘thinking-feeling’:

Am I free? There is some thing still holding me. Or am I holding it? It’s also this: I am not entirely unbound because I am in union with everything. Moreover one person is everything. It’s not heavy to carry because it simply isn’t carried: it is everything.

She also sees this ‘oneness’ in the objects surrounding her: ‘Mirror is light. A tiny piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.

In Transcendence for Beginners Claire Carlisle talks about Spinoza a lot. She believes that ‘Spinoza’s metaphysics suggests that we transcend our habitually circumscribed selves through our interconnectedness with other beings, which can flow into us and change our nature, and also through our connection to God.’

It is as if Carlisle talks about the metamorphosis by Clarice’s protagonist in this text. She often ‘flows’ into other alive beings. She identifies with the flowers. She can be a ‘fiery’ horse, but the one of the most striking mediation is when she identifies with a tiger. In one of the fragments mentioned earlier, it is a greedy, almost shocking but very authentic thirst for life: a tiger with a snout still dirty with the blood of a just eaten a deer. But another fragment is even more striking:

I then felt like a tiger with a deadly arrow buried in its flesh and now was slowly circling the fearful people to find out who would have the courage to come up and free it from its pain. And then there is the person who knows that a wounded tiger is only as dangers as a child. And coming up to the beast, unafraid to touch it, pulls out the embedded arrow.

Spinoza’s conception of selfhood was special as well. As Carlisle writes ‘its boundaries more porous and provisional, than the everyday notion of selfhood embedded in our grammar, which distinguishes the ‘subject’ from its own actions and properties as well as from the ‘objects’ it encounters. This metaphysical selfishness reinforces moral selfishness, and vice versa.’

This very fluid concept of self and its boundaries is everywhere in Clarice’s writing. She flows from being to being. She tries to ‘untangle’ her selfhood to get closer ‘to find within yourself the man of all men.’. It is even more pronounced in her other book, The Passion According to G.H. where she says:

Little by little peeling off your self, so carefully that you feel no pain, peeling away your self, like someone freeing himself from his own skin, his own characteristics. ...And because I depersonalize myself to the point of not having my name, I answer every time someone says: I.’

In this text this is present as well: ‘When i paint or write I am anonymous. My profound anonymity which no one ever touched. (p 28)’ . She merges objects with subject to the point of negating the distinction. The things that are ordinary considered as objects such as a mirror or a wardrobe are subjects of her sustained contemplation. She also rebels against people objectifying others. She rebels as a typewriter:

What am I in this instant? I am a typewrite making the dry key echo in the dark and humid early hours. For a long time I haven’t been people. They wanted me to be an object. I’m an object. An object dirty with blood. That creates other objects and the typewriter creates all of us. It demands. The mechanism demands and demands my life. But i don’t obey totally: if i must be an object let it be an object that screams. There’s a thing inside me that hurt. Ah how it hurts and how it screams for help. But tears are missing in the typewriter that i am. I’m an object without destiny. I am an object in whose hands? Such is my human destiny. What saves me is the scream. I protest in the name of whatever is inside the object beyond the beyond the thought-feeling. I am an urgent object.

‘An object dirty with blood does not seem to be a contradiction in terms; it does not seem to be a metaphor either in this text - it is truly credible state of being.

Another state of being in the flow of 'Aqua Viva' is something loosely defined as ‘beatitude’. She also refers to this as 'grace' elsewhere. It requires much more attention that there is space left in here. So whatever space left in these terms goes directly to Clarice:

I went to the dictionary to look up the word "beatitude," which I detest as a word, and I saw that it means pleasure of the soul. It speaks of tranquil happiness--I however would call it transport or levitation. I also don't like the way the dictionary definition reads: "a state of someone absorbed in mystical contemplation." That's not it. I wasn't meditating at all, there was no religiousness in me. I had just finished my coffee and I was simply living, sitting there with a cigarette burning down in the ashtray.

If ‘a secret of narration’, a text is a lens this one might definitely have a potential to refocus your understanding of this world. Instants, moments of being: no end, no beginning. Movement - just as water left free cannot stop flowing. Famously, Beckett’s character in ‘The Unnamable' has exclaimed: ‘I can't go on, I'll go on’. Clarice protagonist is less angsty and more life-affirming: ‘What i am writing to you goes on.’. And it does through the years and beyond the pages of this book.