Love can't even save us from love

Everything feels off today. Yesterday was brilliant, but today is off, like I got up on the wrong side of bed today, only it's the same side I always get up on, well, most of the time. Some days I get out on the other side of the bed, just because it's more practical, depending on how I've moved in the night, other days I deliberately get out of bed on the other side, just to, you know, mix things up. Today I got out on the right side of the bed, and it was the wrong thing to do.

Maybe I took a wrong turn somewhere. I walked into the bakery last weekend and discovered an insect on my arm, something winged and long, vaguely beetle-like, and I thought of the time beetle on Donna's back, and I had a déjà-vu-like flash of another insect on me not so long ago (Was it in the Sahara? No, not the scorpion, or the nonscorpion. It was something beetle-like.) that also reminded me of the time beetle, that I was also supposed to write about. I flicked it off my arm, there inside the bakery, and part of me actually expects my neighbourhood to slowly collapse around that point zero.

(Although. That insect that wasn't a scorpion, that pinprick in my finger, in the night in the Sahara, the night we smoked shisha in the bright night of the Sahara, and I thought you trickled a handful of sand down my top, only your hand was on my back and the sand was crawling up, it looked like twigs, like frayed straw, and I shrieked and scooped it off my chest, brushed it away, and something pricked my finger. That night when I thought my finger might fall off, my hand, my arm, when I thought I might die, and you said it was nothing, not a scorpion, maybe an insect, I rejected you and returned to my tent, and as I lay on my bed in my tent in the Sahara I remembered how Pierre had told me to go into the pain, but I hadn't known pain like this, and I thought if I went into the pain, I would die. But I had to go into the pain to be the pain so I could control the pain, push the pain back into the tip of my finger. And still I think it was a scorpion. It was 17 hours before I could feel my finger again, and still I thought, it left something inside me, still I thought I might die, or maybe it gave me a superpower. Maybe I can point my finger and wither false bluster or exact truths. Maybe it was a time scorpion, maybe my path diverged that bright night in the Sahara. ) 

I wanted to sit down this afternoon to write about the books I've read lately, but even that's not going to plan. Maybe I don't care enough about them to say anything. (Truly, I don't have much to say about The City We Became or Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982.) Other books, like Blue Flowers, I care too much about. Maybe. Maybe I don't know how to write about books anymore. I don't know how to write. 

I've been watching Fleabag, because I now have a trial of Amazon Prime. I thought it was supposed to be a comedy, and I suppose it is, but it's grim and painful and real. There's this bit at the end of season one where the bank manager mentions how cafés are a difficult business, and it unstoppers her outpouring.

I also fucked it into liquidation. ... And I fucked up my family. ... And I fucked my friend by fucking her boyfriend. ... And sometimes I wish I didn't even know that fucking existed. And I know that my body, as it is now, really is the only thing I have left, and when that gets old and unfuckable I may as well just kill it. And somehow there isn't anything worse than someone who doesn't want to fuck me. I fuck everything. Except for when I was in your office, I really wasn't trying to have sex. You know, either everyone feels like this a little bit, and they're just not talking about it, or I'm completely fucking alone. Which isn't fucking funny.

I feel like this a little bit, and sometimes I try to talk about it, and sometimes it wears me down — the feeling and the talking. I think about how I passed up a chance to fuck in the dunes of the Sahara.

I have Amazon Prime because I ordered a desk. I feel like I've made a pact with devil, both in ordering from Amazon, as the easy, logistically expedient, cheap thing to do, and in succumbing to the need for a desk. It's been made clear that the office will not be returning to normal anytime this calendar year. I think I've always known this, but refused to accept it. I don't like it, I hate it, I don't want to work from home, I don't want the work in my home. But the only way to cope with it now is to relegate it to one ugly little corner where after hours I may render it invisible, somehow filter it out of my perception. The ergonomic chair, however, not Amazon, as yet has no confirmed delivery date.

It's been a 121-day streak of German lessons on Duolingo, and I'm starting to tire of it. Some days I almost forget. It's been two years that I have an imaginary German lover whom I've never met, and every day I consider what lengths I would go to, what risks would I subject myself to, to touch him, kiss him, fuck him.

This week I'm dwelling on the things I meant to do while under stay-at-home orders but haven't: the violin that sits in the middle of the living room but which I haven't played; the sculpture for which I've yet to acquire clay (I want to sculpt time beetles, or time scorpions); the piece on male muses I started writing last winter for which all the tabs have stayed open; the shoebox of papers to sort.

This week I feel like an exceedingly selfish person. I wonder if I'll ever be less selfish. I wonder if I'll ever love someone to the point that I'll put them first. (To be clear, the responsibility and love I have for my daughter is quite outside of this equation.) 

There are bits of Blue Flowers by Carola Saavedra that echo Clarice Lispector's Passion According to G.H. (that's the cockroach I want to sculpt, to claim), the reference to something ancient, something primal and primeval. There are bits of blueness, and love, that touch me.

I was thinking about this yesterday, about love, about this insistence on love, as though love could save us from everything, as though love could save us from hate, from madness and even desire. Whoever came up with that idea? Love can't even save us from love.

We all carry our lives in us

Still in the process of becoming, the soul makes room.

Here's another meditative, highly interior novel that I find difficult to write about: Indelicacy, by Amina Cain. (I love the cover of this book, though possibly I like the US edition a little bit more.)

It's narrated by Vitória, formerly of the cleaning staff at the art museum where one day she met her wealthy husband-to-be. Vitória has always had ambitions to write, specifically to write about herself looking at paintings.

It's impossible then to not draw comparisons to Maria Gainza's Optic Nerve, which, while it didn't resonate with me emotionally, poked at something much deeper in me that I want to explore further. Ganza's narrator approaches art quite academically from the particular viewpoint that her educated privilege affords her. That is, she wants to write about paintings, and in so doing we learn something about the character, the life, that informs her understanding of art, but Optic Nerve to me was more about the art. Cain's narrator is the opposite — she comes to art cold (so in this way maybe she's more relatable). For her, art is a doorway into herself (in Gainza, even though it's a window onto the self, it's an escape from the self?). Vitória uses art to find — to create — her own story.

I am always fooled by these suggestions of other rooms we might go into, but never can, never will. Another space, but it is closed to us, even if it feels open. Thought of in a different way, if it is all suggestion, what is in the rooms is ours.

Cain describes and even names some paintings, but don't expect to learn about art here. This is not that book.

"You don't have to prove anything," he said over dinner, some kind of fancy stew. "You've been working since you were twelve. Try to enjoy yourself."

The sound of my fork on my plate was loud. I made it louder. Now I was eating a salad. "I am trying to enjoy myself."

"Well, then try to relax."

"I'm afraid I'll get bored."

"Then get bored. You deserve it."

I had never felt I deserved anything, and if I was to begin, I couldn't start here. Still, I ate my stew. I ate my salad. In a way no one would have predicted, I began to consume my husband, but it would a long time before either of us understood any of that."

Vitória spends time adjusting to her new life, reveling in it, but it's not long before she finds it unfulfilling and even distasteful, and eventually she turns her back on it.

If I'm bored, at least it's not coming from outside my own life. I chose the boredom I'm a part of.

When the novel opens, Vitória is alone, but we don't know the circumstances that brought her there. That would be the indelicacy in question — revealed late, it pervades the mood from the start. Is it to do with class boundaries? Is it how the writer intrudes on others' space, or the lengths a writer will go to for a story? Is it sexual?

The epigraph, from Clarice Lispector's The Apple in the Dark, begins "It's as if something that should happen is waiting for me..." Lispector's novel also features a Vitoria who lives alone in the country, as Cain's Vitória finally does. I've read only two of Lispector's books and some short stories, but they've had a profound effect on me. I can see a clear influence here. The relationship between the narrator and the maid, for example, is similar to that in The Passion According to G.H. The way Cain describes space and time also evokes The Passion, along with the presence of "plump insects."

It's strange being alone again. In the afternoons there's a spaciousness larger than I've ever wanted.

In Agua Viva Lispector's narrator wants to write the way a musician composes, guided by instinct and emotion; in Indelicacy, Cain's Vitória aspires to write like a painter.

I didn't want someone to wait on me. I wanted to walk on the beach. I wanted to look at things in the distance, be faced with the water; I wanted to swim. I had never spent time at the ocean before. Finally I saw it at night when I closed my eyes to sleep.

I find it curious that she sees things when she closes her eyes, after it's happened, after it's been considered and resolved. That's when you see something as it is, and in peace.

She's carrying with her that other time. We all carry our lives in us, not just our problems or nightmares, but something of what we were before.

Related
Excerpt:the opening scene
Excerpt: a scene with Antonietta
Interview: The Paris Review
Review: The Soul Makes Room in LARB

The mathematical irradiation of things

I have so much to say and no words for it.

— from Agua Viva, by Clarice Lispector.

This instant-now

A few weeks ago the poster in the metro caught my eye. I had to go see it. Momenta 2019, Biennale de l'image, presented works around the theme. The Life of Things. "The exhibited works testify to the different ways in which objects are experienced and what they tell us about how we think and live. Objects sometimes bear the fragments of the living, and, in other contexts, they have their own life."

Elisabeth Belliveau, Still Life with Fallen Fruit (after A Breath of Life, Clarice Lispector), still, 2017-19, video, 4 min 15 s.

The image that so engrossed me was a still from a video, Still Life with Fallen Fruit, by Elisabeth Belliveau, after A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector, as it turns out. I took it as a sign. Time to read more Lispector...

I opted to order Agua Viva, I don't know why, and when I opened it and began to read, I slammed it shut, holy shit, it's so eerily perfect for my now. Am I ready for the now?

Let me tell you: I'm trying to seize the fourth dimension of this instant-now so fleeting that it's already gone because it's already become a new instant-now that's also already gone. 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. Only the act of love — the limpid star — like abstraction of feeling — captures the unknown moment, the instant hard as crystal and vibrating in the air and life is this untellable instant, larger than the event itself: during love the impersonal jewel of the moment shines in the air, the strange glory of the body, matter made feeling in the trembling of the instants — and the feeling is both immaterial and so objective that it seems to happen outside your body, sparkling on high, joy, joy is time's material and the essence of the instant. And in the instant is the is of the instant. I want to seize my is.

— from Agua Viva, by Clarice Lispector.

Out with the old, in with the new

I don't often post year-end stats or best-of-the-year lists, mostly because they don't really mean anything to me.

I read, on average, a book a week, and that's held steady since about the time I became the sort of person who reads a book a week, about the time I started blogging. It's just not a very large sample to draw from for a top-ten list.

Aesthetic Apparatus
Michael Byzewski

But I can't help but call out some standouts from 2017. (They may be the standouts of my century so far.)

The Blizzard, by Vladimir Sorokin.
Not a nineteenth-century Russian novel. Although it is, only with some surprising elements, like zombie plague, Mongolian pharmaceutical kingpins, and small pyramids made of some unknown substance.

Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin.
Short and thrilling. Highly original in its form as well as in its story elements. Transmigration of souls. I loved puzzling over what the hell happened. (I am wondering, though, if my enthusiasm for this short novel might wane over time.)

My Heart Hemmed In, by Marie Ndiaye.
This is one of the most intense reading experiences I can recall. I didn't really notice the writing on the sentence level, but proof of its effectiveness lies in how this book seeped into my consciousness. I spent the week feeling anxious, paranoid, suspicious, confused, hemmed in.

The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector.
I'd been meaning to read this one for a while. Every book has its time and its place, and this one finally had its day. Absolutely a modern classic. I tried to read this one slowly, carefully. G.H.'s confrontation with a cockroach is rich with meditation on the meaning of life, the history of humanity, her place in the world. I can see myself returning to this book in a few years.

Short-term goals

Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer.
Read it before the movie hits theatres. Progress on this front: I used a Christmas gift card to finally acquire a copy.

The Idiot, by Elif Batuman.
By January 31, for New Reads book club.

Chronicle of the Murdered House, by Lúcio Cardoso.
By February 7, for Reading Across Borders book club.

Catch up on The Familiar, by Mark Z Danielewski.
I have time for bingeing on Netflix serials, I should make time this literary equivalent. I started volume 2, but volume 5 has already been released.

Read more Clarice Lispector.
I have the Complete Stories at my bedside.

That's enough.

[Maybe this is the year for The Book of Disquiet.]

Addicted to the condiment of the word

Ah, speaking to me and to you is being mute. Speaking to the God is the mutest that exists. Speaking to things, is mute. I know this sounds sad to you, and to me too, since I am still addicted to the condiment of the word. And that is why muteness hurts me like a dismissal.

I adore this book. I want to read it again. The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector, is a mystical, and sometimes mystifying, marvel.

But this book is not for everybody.

This is the story of woman who finds a cockroach. They stare into each other's being. This novel is about those minutes that turn into hours.

My love for this book is more about the reading experience it gave me than about the book itself. I can imagine failing miserably with this book at another time in my life.

While it is short enough to read in a weekend, it plunges to existential depths in liquid time. It did me good to read it over months, chapter by chapter, often rereading pages. It took me deep into myself, but also brought me out of myself. This book was a tool for introspection.

After a couple days of (mostly) sober reflection, I realize that the ending is a little disappointing, as a novel. What's astounding is that this should be considered a novel at all; it's a philosophical treatise, more Kierkegaard than Kafka. But amazingly, for most of the book, I turned pages based on that novelistic framework: what's going to happen next? how will it end?

As the novel closes there are some loose threads: Does the cockroach die*? (Can we consider G.H. to be a death-eater, a sin-eater?)

*[A few reviews summarize the ending — SPOILER ALERT — thusly: G.H. eats the dead cockroach. My reading tells me this: she eats the white matter that spurted from its body (this is a sexual passion before it is a religious one). She eats "of the roach," the paste of the roach, the roach's matter. G.H.'s initial slam did not kill the roach instantaneously; all G.H. learns she learns from the living roach, she describes the roach as dying (are we not all dying?), but there is no dead body. Fellow readers, what say you? And does it matter in terms of G.H.'s experience (I think it might)?]

How did G.H. get from yesterday to today? How did she leave the room? Presumably she is at a desk, writing about her experience. And now that's done, will she go dancing?

(I know one thing: if I reach the end of this story, I shall go, not tomorrow, but this very day, out to eat and dance at the "Top-Bambino," I furiously need to have some fun and diverge myself. Yes, I'll definitely war my new blue dress that flatters me and gives me color, I'll call Carlos, Josefina, Antonio, I don' really remember which of the two of them I notices wanted me or if both of them wanted me, I'll eat crevettes à la whatever, and I know because I'll eat crevettes, tonight, tonight will be my normal life resumed, the life of my common joy, for the rest of my days I'll need my light, sweet and good-humoured vulgarity, I need to forget, like everyone.)

This paragraph is so out of step with the rest of the book. (Later she decides against the blue dress in favour of the black and white one [p183].) Is this the old G.H.? Or the new G.H.? Do we all so desperately need to forget? (Yes!)

The first sentence of each chapter repeats the last sentence of the preceding chapter, which effectively pulls the reader along. While there's no secret message here, this list of first sentences provides an interesting summation of the novel's contents.

— — — — — — I'm searching, I'm searching.
Because a world fully alive has the power of a Hell.
Only I will know if that was the failure I needed.
Then I headed into the dark hallway behind the service area.
Then, before understanding, my heart went gray as hair goes gray.
That was when the cockroach began to emerge.
Each eye reproduced the entire cockroach.
I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist.
Forgiveness is an attribute of living matter.
I had committed the forbidden act of touching the unclean.
Then, once again, another thick millimeter of white matter spurted out.
Finally, my love, I gave in, and it became a now.
Since what I was seeing predated humanity.
Neutral crafting of life.
No longer even fear, no longer even fright.
Give me your hand:
Prehuman divine life is of a presentness that burns.
I was seeking an expanse.
I suddenly turned to the interior of this room which, in its burning, at least was not populated.
But there is something that must be said, it must be said.
Because inside myself I saw what hell is like.
Hell is my maximum.
I was eating myself, I am who am also living matter of the Sabbath.
She would feel like the lack of something that should have been hers.
Because the naked thing is so tedious.
I must not fear seeing humanization from the inside.
Infinitely increasing the plea that is born of neediness.
The taste of the living.
Our hands that are coarse and full of words.
Because I haven't told everything.
The divine for me is whatever is real.
All that is missing is the coup de grâce — which is called passion.
Giving up is a revelation.

The last sentence is:

And so I adore it. — — — — — —

The dashes bring us full circle to the start of the novel, suggesting there might be something cyclical thematically as well.

G.H. starts the book claiming to have lost something. Her humanity? Her inhumanity? What has she become?

The convoluted sentence structure (not to be mistaken for convoluted thought; in fact, Lispector (and her translator, Idra Novey) wields a precision of language in verbing and positioning subject and object in relation to each other) brings to mind Kierkegaard or Kant. Some of the concepts Lispector dances with: transcendence, consubstantiation, immanence. Being and nothingness. Divinity and humanness.

In addition: notions of time and history, and indirectly the cultural trappings of art and sexuality. Beauty.

It made me lose my bearings and helped me find them again.

Previous Passion posts
This book is like any other book
I lost my human form for several hours
Everything there was sliced-up nerves
I, whatever that was
A belly entirely new and made for the ground
The simple moistness of the thing
Feeling with hellish voracity

Feeling with hellish voracity

Because inside myself I saw what hell is like.

Hell is the mouth that bites and eats the living flesh with its blood, and the one being eaten howls with delight in his eye: hell is pain as delight of the matter, and with the laughter of delight, the tears run in pain. And the tear that comes from the laughter of pain is the opposite of redemption. I was seeing the inexorability of the roach with its ritual mask. I was seeing that that was hell: the cruel acceptance of pain, the solemn lack of pity for one's own destiny, loving the ritual of life more than one's own self — that was hell, where the one eating the other's living face was indulging in the joy of pain.

For the first time I was feeling with hellish voracity the desire to have had the children I never had: I wanted to have reproduced, not in three or four children, but in twenty thousand my organic hellishness full of pleasure.

— from The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector.

The simple moistness of the thing

Reading The Passion According to G.H. (Clarice Lispector) is an exhausting, but thoroughly rewarding, experience. I'm not sure I can maintain this slow pace. I build momentum, and start to zip along, then remind myself to stop and think. Then I reread, and absorb. What am I absorbing, though? Cockroach guts?

I've tried to summarize this book, or the experience of it, to a few people. It goes like this:

It's about a woman, an artist, who comes face to face with a cockroach. Eye to eye. Just that, really. A hundred pages in and maybe an hour has passed, maybe mere minutes, or less. She goes into the maid's room (who resigned the day previously), and the room is bright and dry and pristine white (except for the weird cave painting on the wall). But there in the wardrobe is a cockroach. And it petrifies G.H. And she tries to slam the door on it, but that only results in the white mucous spurting out. And then she confronts it.

And I'm on tenterhooks.

Will G.H. finally succeed in killing it? Will she forgive it, have mercy on it? Will she become it?

What the fuck is this about anyway? Is it about G.H. coming to terms with her classism or racism? Is there an element of lesbianism and/or homophobia vis-à-vis her relationship with the maid? Is it about getting in touch with her emotions? Her sexuality or sexual passion? Her primal being? (The language is startlingly erotic.)

Is it about fertility? What about fertility as creativity, as an artist? There is timelessness in being — the roach's being — but also in art. Is she pregnant?

And what about religious passion? Where's god in all this? (The language is startlingly religious, too.) Are we driving at some cosmic oneness? What transcendence is this?!

I don't want to feel directly in my very delicate mouth the salt in the eyes of the roach, because, my mother, I had been used to the sogginess of its layers and not the simple moistness of the thing.

Even the beauty of salt and the beauty of tears I would have to abandon. Even that, since what I saw predated humanity.

Is this about death? Does she die? (No, she can't die, she's relaying all this the next day.) Does the cockroach die?

What does this book give me? Every page has quotable aha phrases, but do they bring me anything new, anything I've not already internalizedin my life? Then why do I love this book so much?

Of all the books, this is the book I don't want to end. I started reading this book last February, I could easily devour it in an evening, but I deliberately prolong it, something tells me it's better this way, how long can I make it last?

The way it slows down time. The way it instills mindfulness, in a pre-bullshitty-coopted-by-yoga-culture way. [Maybe because I am witness to a slow parade of large black ants across my kitchen, one ant per day, each larger than the last. I kill them all, but I grow tired of my Sisyphean role. The book came before the ants, though.]

I'm halfway. I don't think I can hold myself back any longer. "Transcending is an exit." Everything becomes nameless.

This is gripping existential drama unfolding in slow motion! Feel the horror!

"Freedom is a secret."

A belly entirely new and made for the ground

What is there to forgive?

[Whom is she addressing as "my love"? Her lover? The reader? The cockroach? The maid?]

G.H. is compelled to organize, to organize hope. She needs some organizing principle by which to recover. She is aware that she managed to leave the room, but recovery is still required.

She lives so far above the world, she knows her life may suddenly collapse.

She questions why this happened to her. "What was it that called me: madness or reality?" (p 66).

She feels unclean. "And why was the unclean forbidden?" (p 67).

She comes to understand: "Becoming unclean with joy" (p70). Joy without redemption, joy without hope. (Is this a purer joy, or a more sinful one?)

More and more I had nothing to ask for. And I was seeing, with fascination and horror, the pieces of my rotten mummy clothes falling dry to the floor, I was watching my transformation from chrysalis into moist larva, my wings were slowly shrinking back scorched. And a belly entirely new and made for the ground, a new belly was being reborn.

What new being is this?

She lowers herself to the roach's level, and sees it as it is, beyond ideas.

And then there's more white matter spurting out! "The roach wasn't seeing me with its eyes but with its body." (p 73).

The wings are receding. "My convictions and my wings were quickly drying up" (p 73).

And she's just looking at the roach, and it's hideous and beautiful. And completely feminized: "Its two eyes were alive like two ovaries. It was looking at me with the blind fertility of its gaze. It was fertilizing my dead fertility" (p 74). Is G.H. indulging in a lesbian fantasy? [So the roach is meant to symbolize the maid, then?]

More white matter!

[How can this not be sexual?]

G.H. confides that she never experiences this — this slowing of time — by day; only at night. She is feeling pleasure in all this. "My love."

She claims to be asking for help, but it's not clear of whom or for what purpose exactly: what does she need help for?

But what I'd never experienced was the crash with the moment called "right now." Today is demanding me this very day. I had never before known that the time to live also has no word. The time to live, my love, was being so right now that I leaned my mouth on the matter of life. The time to live is a slow uninterrupted creaking of doors continuously opening wide. Two gates were opening and had never stopped opening. But the were continuously opening onto — onto the nothing?

The time to live is so hellishly inexpressive that it is the nothing. What I was calling "nothing" was nevertheless so stuck to me that to me it was... I? and that's why it was becoming the nothing. The doors as always kept opening.

Finally, my love, I gave in. And it became a now.

I, whatever that was

At long last I've returned to Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. This book deserves focus, which I feel I can now give. Part of me has delayed this moment: truly, I do not want this book to end, and part of me does not want to know how it ends.

At this point, the novel is all potential: me (because of course the reader relates to G.H.) versus the cockroach.

When we last left off, the cockroach began to emerge.

Here it is, causing such fear, "a fear much greater than myself," a catalyst to G.H. realizing herself, her power, her "I, whatever that was" (p 46).

And, oh my god, she slams the door shut on the creature! Because she can!

Because during those seconds, eyes shut, I was becoming aware of myself as one becomes aware of a taste: all of me tasted of steel and verdigris, I was all acid like metal on the tongue, like a crushed green plant, my whole taste rose to my mouth. What had I done to myself? With my heart thumping, my temples pulsing, this is what I'd done to myself: I had killed. I had killed! But why such delight, and besides that a vital acceptance of that delight? For how long, then, had I been about to kill?

For G.H., it's not about her capacity to kill so much as what she's killed. But no, it's not dead yet! Can she slam it again? No, G.H., don't look at it! She looks at it. All is lost.

She looks at it, and it is ancient. "It looked like a dying mulatto woman" (p 49). (Like the maid?)

"What I was seeing was life looking back at me" (p 51). Something primordial, raw matter. She fears it, and she recognizes herself in it, and she hates it for doing so. (She hates herself?)

Silence opens within her, and she's looking for the courage to abandon hope. The cockroach makes her do this. What does one achieve by abandoning hope? A truth beyond conventional expectations?

G.H. is reminded of the time she saw her own blood outside of herself, recognizing herself as existing in something external. As if this cockroach too is constituent of her lifeblood.

So I opened my eyes all at once, and saw the full endless vastness of the room, that room that was vibrating in silence, laboratory of hell.

To enter the room, G.H. must pass through the cockroach. This is not physically true. Unless she means another room, of a spiritual kind. Or to earn access back to the reality of the room we already know to exist.

The room is a places beyond "he" or "she," beyond "I." The room is an existential abyss, a desert that seduces. The cockroach seduces. G.H. becomes irreducible.

I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist.

Good god, the cockroach is oozing! Something thick and white and slow. She needs to scream a secret scream that will unleash all the screams. It sounds to me like a scream of sexual awakening — abandoned. To depart civilization (enter the desert?), scientists have permission, priests have permission, but women do not.

And the tension snaps (p 59). (Did she scream or not scream?)

G.H. is in the room. She is in the drawing on the wall. She is there with her fifteen million daughters (p 60). She is finally outside of herself. And by everything looking at everything, everything knowing everything, forgiveness arrives.

Everything there was sliced-up nerves

Reading notes on Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H., the fourth and fifth chapters.

The first sentence of each chapter repeats the last sentence of the preceding chapter. It makes for a nice sense of continuity, maybe a looping effect. (Should I skip to the end to see the very last sentence? No.) Każdy przecież początek to tylko ciąg dalszy... [Every beginning is but a continuation...] ("Love at First Sight," Wisława Szymborska).

I wonder if these sentences stack up to have a more direct message,say, à la If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Italo Calvino), where the chapter headings tell their own story.

In the fourth chapter, G.H. enters the maid's room to find the opposite of what she'd expected: it is orderly, clean, bright, dry, stripped bare — "as in an insane asylum."

The room seemed to be on a level incomparably higher than the apartment itself.

Like a minaret.

This is an effect of the angles and reflections, but the use of the word "minaret" connotes something spiritual yet foreign. One wonders if G.H. doesn't perceive it as higher morally, uncomfortable as the sight makes her.

This room is described so vividly, I think I can draw it. On one wall are drawn in charcoal a naked man and woman and a dog, with a coarse rigidity, hard motionlessness (p 31).

They were emerging as if they'd gradually oozed from the wall, slowly coming from the center until they'd sweated through the rough lime surface.

G.H.now tries to recall the maid, believing this mural is intended as a message for her, but has trouble doing so (p 32).

Abruptly, this time with real discomfort, I finally let a sensation come to me which for six months, out of negligence and lack of interest, I hadn't let myself feel: The silent hatred of that woman. What surprised me was that it was a kind of detached hatred, the worst kind: indifferent hatred. Not a hatred that individualized me but merely the lack of mercy. No, not even hatred.

G.H. describes the maid as having the features of a queen, and for this she is despised. I get the sense that the maid is physically superior, so G.H. tries extra hard to bring her down. The maid is also "invisible" (p 33). Class tensions are in play — did the maid intend the dog to represent G.H.? G.H. feels the maid, her inferior, is judging her. I'm reminded of Magda Szabo's The Door, for the force of the clashes between the employer and employee, each with a strong worldview entirely formed by where they came from.

Three old suitcases labeled G.H. are stacked along one wall. Barely noticeable. As if she herself had been boxed up, set aside, forgotten? Accumulating dust.

G.H. looks more closely at the room. Everything is dry, dusty, bleached, desert-like, in contrast to her habitual cozy, moist surroundings, their soft beauty. This is a place where things are exposed, over-exposed. "The room was the portrait of an empty stomach" (p 34). "Everything there was sliced-up nerves that had been hung up and dried on a clothesline."

Oh my god, this room is becoming an attack on all her senses. Charcoal scratching like needles on records and hissing and fingernails.

G.H. is planning on setting the room right, but she is summoning up a violent rage, the urge to kill. And then she goes i n(p 36). (She's been standing in the doorway this whole time?) She feels like the world is collapsing in on her. "Suddenly the whole world that was me shriveled up in fatigue." It's like some facade has crumbled, some pretense of being the kind of human being she'd fashioned herself to be. "And it's inside myself that I must create that someone who will understand." She's lost and needs to find herself, create herself anew.

Is it really the room that is triggering this existential crisis? Her relationship to the maid, and the existing class structures? The contrast of the room to the rest of her life that makes her question, I don't know, truth, purity, fullness? Or is it just that she's remembering how it unfolded yesterday, that now she reinterprets her perceptions then in order to make sense of her present state. The room is a void, a nothingness she's breached. She left pieces of herself in the hallway because she didn't fit.

She needs to refocus. The wardrobe. "The darkness inside escaped like a puff." The suspense! "And, as if the darkness inside were spying on me, we briefly spied each other without seeing each other." It's a Neitzschean moment, slightly sidestepped; what might you become if you saw each other? The door's blocked, move the bed over. Open the door! My god, it's a fucking horror novel!

A cockroach! Ancient, repulsive, obsolete, lurking in your wardrobe. Are there more?

"They're the miniature version of an enormous animal." What? Obviously that's not meant literally. A beast like Satan (though I don't recall him ever being described in insect-like terms)? Death? Life? Slow, patient, meaningless life? Something primal. Fear? What is this enormous animal?

Now the room is a sarcophagus, housing the roach and that maid. G.H feels herself limited, delimited by space. "I wasn't imprisoned but I was located." G.H. recalls an impoverished childhood (is she afraid of her past? ashamed of her past? afraid of denying her past?). Space and time are wholly palpable. And she needs to escape, needs to admit the danger she's in (what danger?).

"That was when the cockroach began to emerge." It really is a horror novel!

I lost my human form for several hours

I am reading Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. It is clearly a book that demands something of the reader. It hopes to be read by "people whose souls are already formed." I think I qualify.

I am forcing myself to read slowly, though I feel I could devour this in just a few hours. I want to document my understanding, my processing of it. I feel it's important.

The passion, the suffering. Of whom, what? Is this a Jesus story? And who is G.H.?

The epigraph is from Bernard Berenson: "A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die." Wikipedia tells me that Berenson was an art historian specializing in the Renaissance. Perhaps he and Lispector knew each other. They both had Jewish backgrounds, and emigrated from Eastern Europe (though decades apart).

The novel starts with series of dashes, blanks. "I'm searching, I'm searching. I'm trying to understand." the narrator is mired in profound personal disorder, existential chaos. To the narrator, nothing makes sense anymore.

Something happened yesterday (p 4). "Yesterday, however, I lost my human setup for hours and hours." But then (p 6), "I get so scared when I realize I lost my human form for several hours. I don't know if I'll have another form to replace the one I lost." So, is the narrator currently formless? That seems to be the case in terms of the narrator's consciousness and sense of self. But is this more than metaphorical? Did something happen to the narrator physically? This reminds me a little of Lila's "dissolving margins" and "dissolving boundaries" in Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, where the form of things breaks down to reveal some terrifying essence, only the self was somehow preserved from dissolving while experiencing the effects. Here, the self is lost too, and there seems to be trouble in regaining it.

The narrator refers to having lost a third leg, something that was essential but never existed and is no longer needed. An absence. An absence in relief, a positive absence.

The narrator has lost organization (acquired disorganization?) and lost courage (acquired cowardice?). But the narrator cannot yet feel freely, give over to disorientation.

There is something of a confession: that life is a disappointment. "Maybe disappointment is the fear of no longer belonging to a system?" Hence the fear of not being able to create order out of disorder (and disappointment when one stops wanting to try?)?

What the fuck happened yesterday?

The narrator is afraid of passion (p 7). But here, I think, the passion is in the sense of intense emotion.

Then may I at least have the courage to let this shape form by itself like a scab that hardens by itself, like the fiery nebula that cools into earth. And may I have the great courage to resist the temptation of to invent a form.

Do not make meaning. Give over to it.

Something was revealed. A secret the narrator is already forgetting. Relearning it would require re-dying. Did the narrator die? Literally?

The narrator breaks the wall so the reader can hold her hand (but I don't know yet that the narrator is a woman). But she cannot imagine a whole person because she herself is not a whole person (missing that third leg, I think).

This horror she has seen is the vastness of the truth. But truth of what? Maybe what she saw was love.

She has lost her fear of ugliness, and this is good and sweet.

"Creating isn't imagining, it's taking the great risk of grasping reality."

The narrator spends a couple pages trying to explain the difficulty of articulating any kind of truth; we've had ample evidence of this difficulty already.

"Three thousand years ago I went astray, and what was left were phonetic fragments of me" (p 14). Um, what? Is the narrator now claiming to be three thousand years old? Her consciousness in three thousand years old? Her missing third leg is three thousand years old?

Yesterday she went into the maid's room we learn at the start of the second chapter (though the chapters are not numbered), the maid who had quit the day before. She was having breakfast, deciding her day, she remembers.

She reflects on, trying to recapture, who she was before. In a photo, her face revealed a silence: The Mystery (mystery of faith?). "Courage isn't being alive, knowing that you're alive is courage." Here we are with the problem of self-awareness.

We learn that her suitcases are initialed G.H. We learn definitively that she is a woman (p 18). A so-called successful person, a sculptor. Her reputation placed her socially between men and women, "which granted me far more freedom to be a woman, since I didn't have to take formal care to be one." This was written in 1964.

More about the truth and false truths. How we reflect each other. Here personal life has "a light tone of pre-climax." Is this suggested sexually? Is that the kind of passion this book is addressing after all?

My question, if there was one, was not: "Who am I," but "Who is around me." My cycle was complete: what I lived in the present was already getting ready so I could later understand myself. An eye watched over my life. This eye was probably what I would probably now call truth, now morality, now human law, now God, now me. I lived mostly inside a mirror. Two minutes after my birth I had already lost my origins.

She describes her apartment, like herself, moist shadows and light. Elegant, ironic, witty. "Everything here actually refers to a life that wouldn't suit me if it were real" (p 22). She herself lives in quotation marks (p 23). She is a replica of herself. (Are we preparing to meet the real self?) She was devoted to not being.

The third chapter starts with G.H.'s plan to clean the apartment, starting with the maid's room. Before starting, she pauses and looks around her:

I was seeing something that would only make sense later — I mean, something that only later would profoundly not make sense. Only later would I understand: what seems like a lack of meaning — that's the meaning. Every moment of "lack of meaning" is precisely the frightening certainty that that's exactly what it means, and that not only can I not reach it, I don't want to because I have no guarantees. The lack of meaning would only overwhelm me later. Could realizing the lack of meaning have always been my negative way of sensing the meaning? it had been my way of participating.

(Participating in meaning? in life?)

This book is like any other book

I was feeling torn about what to read next, so I let the cat decide.

Rosie says, quite emphatically, paws down: The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector.

It opens with a note "To Possible Readers":

This book is like any other book. But I would be happy if it were only read by people whose souls are already formed.

This concerns me a little. I hope I'll be OK.

Lispector again blipped across my radar this week in a bookclub discussion of Pola Oloixarac's Savage Theories, when someone speculated whether there might be an intentional reference to The Passion in this passage:

A cockroach scuttled along the edge of the room. [...] I gave the order for Montaigne Michelle to set her ambush . . . Now! She purred toothily. The individual in question (a Blatella germanica) came forward a meter or so: Montaigne put it down with a single swipe of her paw. Flat on its back, its abdomen contracted in pain, the cockroach bent its antennae toward us. I believe that it sensed the formidable presence of its motionless adversary — perhaps, too, that of the impromptu Thucydides who sat nearby taking notes. Finally it managed to get back on its feet. And here is where this domestic tableau takes on transcendental dimensions: it was at this moment that, overawed by such brutality, irresistibly attracted to a power far superior to her own, the scene's victim advanced voluntarily toward the Predator, and bowed down to her, in a sign of Reverence.

Fittingly, it seems Lispector's novel offered itself up to the beast to be devoured in a similar way.