Free Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector Page A

writing
to you? That leaves me all alone. But I go and pray and my freedom is ruled by
the Order—I’m already without fear. All that’s guiding me is a sense of
discovery. Beyond what’s beyond thought.
    Following myself along is really what I’m doing when
writing to you and now: following myself without knowing where it will lead me.
Sometimes it’s so hard to follow myself along. Because I’m following something
that’s still nothing more than a nebula. Sometimes I end up giving up.
    Now I’m afraid. Because I’m going to tell you something.
Wait until the fear passes.
    It passed. It’s this: dissonance is harmonious to me.
Melody sometimes wears me out. And also the so-called “leitmotif.” I want in
music and in what I write to you and in what I paint, I want geometric streaks
that cross in the air and form a disharmony that I understand. Pure
it
.
My being is completely absorbed and grows slightly intoxicated. What I’m telling
you is very important. And I work while I sleep: because that is when I move
inside the mystery.
    Today is Sunday morning. On this Sunday of sun and
Jupiter I am alone in the house. I suddenly doubled over as if in the deep pain
of childbirth—and saw that the girl in me was dying. I shall never forget that
bloody Sunday. It will take time for the wound to heal. And here I am tough and
silent and heroic. Without a girl inside me. All lives are heroic lives.
    Creation escapes me. And I don’t even want to know so
much. That my heart beats in my breast is enough. The impossible living of the
it
is enough.
    Right this minute I feel my heart beating out of control
inside my breast. It’s reasserting itself because in the past few sentences I
was just thinking on my surface. So the basis of existence turns up to wash over
and erase the traces of the thought. The sea erases the traces of the waves on
the sand. Oh God, how happy I’m feeling. What ruins happiness is fear.
    I get scared. But my heart’s beating. The inexplicable
love makes the heart beat faster. The sole guarantee is that I was born. You are
a form of being I, and I a form of being you: those are the limits of my
possibility.
    I’m in a pleasure to die for. Sweet prostration as I
speak to you. But there’s the waiting. Waiting is feeling voracious about the
future. One day you said you loved me. I pretend to believe it and live, from
day to day, in joyful love. But remembering with longing is like saying farewell
once again.
    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. And I walk on a tightrope up to the edge of my dream. Guts
tortured by voluptuousness guide me, fury of impulses. Before I organise myself,
I must disorganize myself internally. To experience that first and fleeting
primary state of freedom. Of the freedom to err, fall and get up again.
    But if I hope to understand in order to accept things—
the act of surrender will never happen. I must take the plunge all at once, a
plunge that includes comprehension and especially incomprehension. And who am I
to dare to think? What I have to do is surrender. How is it done? I know however
that only by walking do you know how to walk and—miracle—find