Free The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector Page B

but not dogmatic. It's suffused with the hope that two asymmetries will meet in symmetry, that as a third solution: synthesis. Hence, perhaps, the portals' ravaged look, their delicacy of a thing lived and then relived, and not the kind of inconsequential bravado of those who do not know. No, what's there isn't exactly tranquillity. There's a hard fight for the thing that, despite being corroded, keeps itself intact. And in the densest colors there's the lividity of something that though twisted is intact. My crosses are twisted by centuries of mortification. Are the portals a prefiguration of altars? Their silence. Their greenish hue takes on a tone of what may lie between life and death, an intensity of sunset.
    And in the quiet colors there's old bronze and steel —and everything amplified by a silence of things lost and found in the dirt of the steep road. I sense a long, dusty road until I arrive at the painting's resting place. Even if the portais do not open. Or is the portal already the church, and when you're in front of it you've already arrived?
    I struggle not to go beyond the portal. They are walls of a Christ who is absent, but the walls are there and are touchable: for hands also see.
    I create the material before painting it, and wood becomes as indispensable to my painting as it would be to a sculptor. And the created material is religious: it has the weight of convent beams. Compact, closed like a locked door. But gaps have been torn in the portal, ripped out by fingernails. And it's through those open breaches that one can see what's inside a synthesis, inside Utopian symmetry. Coagulated color, violence, martyrdom are the beams that hold up the silence of a religious symmetry.
    But now I'm interested in the mystery of mirrors. I search for a way to paint one or speak of it with the word. But what is a mirror? The word mirror doesn't exist, only mirrors exist, since a single one is an infinity of mirrors. Could there be a mirror mine somewhere in the world? A mirror isn't made, it's born. Not many are needed for the sparkling and somnambulant mine: two are enough, and one will reflect the reflection of what the other has reflected, in a trembling that in an intense and mute, insistent, telegraphic message transmits liquidity into which one can plunge one's fascinated hand and bring it back out dripping with reflections of that hard water that is the mirror. Like a fortuneteller's crystal ball, it drags me into the void which, for the fortuneteller, is a field of meditation, and in me is the field of silences upon silences. And I can scarcely talk, from so much silence unfolded into others.
    A mirror? That crystalized empty space that has inside it space to move forever forward without stopping: because the mirror is the deepest space that exists. And it's a magical thing: anyone who has a broken fragment could go with it into the desert to meditate. It's extraordinary to see oneself. Like a cat with its fur standing on end, my hair stands on end in the face of myself. I would also come back empty-handed from the desert, illuminated and translucid, and with the same vibrant silence of a mirror.
    Its shape isn't important: no shape succeeds in circumscribing and altering it. A mirror is light. The tiniest piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.
    Take away its frame or its contours and it spreads, as water pours.
    What is a mirror? It's the only invented material that is natural. Anyone who looks into a mirror, who succeeds in seeing it without seeing himself, who understands that its depth consists of its being empty, who walks inside its transparent space without leaving in it a trace of his own image—that someone has then perceived its mystery as thing. That's why you have to surprise it when its alone, when its hung in an empty room, without forgetting that in front of it the most fragile needle could transform it into the simple image of a needle, so sensitive is the mirror in its quality of very