Clarice Lispector's Agua Viva

"The present slips away and the instant too, I am this very second forever in the now." What is at stake here is the instant, and, by its very nature, the question of its origin. When does a moment begin and when does it end? What engenders and delivers the instant, and is it something we can experience, something we can enter into, or something that enters into us? The title of the text, Agua Viva, suggests images of streams, of reservoirs, perhaps oceanic in depth. And what quantity of water, and what quantity of life could there be but an excess? Impossible to tell where the stream begins and where it ends, where life begins and where it ends. And this is Lispector's crisis: the problematics of history, or, for her, since history begs the question of the proto- or the before-, the problematics of prehistory. That is: how to locate what precedes a moment? How to enter into, how to feel the palpations of a pulse that has not yet begun to beat?

We may read Agua Viva as a text which defies the beginning. It is maybe better viewed as a figuration, a pre-text of a text to come, which, like a mother, has not yet delivered itself. AV exists at that traumatic juncture between womb and world where pregnancy has not yet concluded and delivery has not yet occurred; a point at which the child’s body, its spiritual substance remains grafted both to the maternal interior and the traumatic exterior. For Clarice, such an instant is one which streams into another; where, as she writes in Hour of the Star, "One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.... and there was the never and there was the yes." This never characterizes the beginning of the world for Lispector: “It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began.” There is, in other words, no locatable point of the world’s beginning, no isolatable event in which the universe never was and then was. This impossible distance (perhaps also an impossible proximity) of the was and never was is Lispector’s insistent focus.

Though we are contending with the ‘before’ of history and of physical matter and its movement, there remains a palpable physicality to Clarice’s writing. With prehistoric art and cave drawings as exemplary in this text, they are no less brimming with existence, with semiotic density, pregnant with a message for someone despite their situation within prehistory:

My secret body tells you: dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and plesiosaurs, meaning nothing but their sound, though this doesn't dry them out like straw but moistens them instead. I don't paint ideas, I paint the unattainable 'forever.' Or 'for never,' it amounts to the same.

What characterizes this text is Lispector’s idea of the “secret harmony of disharmony”; the simultaneity of so-called opposites: the historicity of prehistory, the never and the yes from which the universe arose, the singular “I” the narrator invokes in all humility when really she understands that her identity is ensnared in and characterized by the other: "I am the are-you."

She speaks of silence so often, and is fascinated by the moment in which sound enters into the world. For her, this text she will come to write (since the text of Agua Viva is pre-text, as noted when she refers to her writing not as something occurring or already occurred, but yet to occur) has all of the harmony and cadence of song, and she frequently writes of the moments of adagio in her song, where the musical performance is slowed, because this text, though so incredibly joyous and streaming with life, is slow in its fetal passage towards arrival; it is a stream that has yet to begin streaming, a fathomless and boundless body of water that spans anywhere and everywhere already but has yet to begin moving. "More than the instant, I want its flow."

Clarice "slowly enter[s her] gift to [her]self, splendor ripped open by the final song that seems to be the first." The end - the final song - opens as origin for the first, like the death of one moment gives birth to the next. She enters her "writing slowly as I once entered painting," entering into her writing like a cave, "an ancestral cavern that is the womb of the world and from it I shall be born."

And if I often paint caves that is because they are my plunge into the earth, dark but haloed with brightness, and I, blood of nature - extravagant and dangerous caves, talisman of the Earth. ... I call the cave by its name and it begins to live with its miasma. I then fear myself who knows how to paint the horror.

So much talk of caves, of lighted darkness, interiors and depths, reserves and capacities, abstract concepts that bleed themselves into being, language as painting and movement, language-as-painting as naming, so much like the Jewish theological tradition in which, "in the beginning," creation arose by force of language and naming alone.

Clarice here is an animist par excellence, bringing the non-present into presence, immersed in the interior - the in - of the in-the-beginning, to introduce the moment into becoming. "I feel a voluptuousness in going along creating something to tell you. I'm living the initiation ceremony of the word." Her use (her initiation) of the word precedes the word; if she enters into her writing, she is within the word before her 'hieratic gestures' can speak them into existence, to fill them with the density of a history.

She says on the same page before this line (because we, too, must deal with the before of her own words), "I am before, I am almost, I am never." So close to coming into being, yet always there on the very threshold.

"I write to you as an exercise in sketching before painting. I see words. What I say is pure present." However, we must understand this 'pure present' as presence in its purest form. That is: so ineffably near absence, if not indistinguishable from absence, from the nothing-there.

"Eternity: for everything that is never began." Within this text, there is only the 'now' which is the almost-is. "Something that has begun - ...where would it begin? And that has ended - but what comes after ending?" We've seen prior that the end only opens into the beginning, that the beginning is so intimately near, and opens itself to, the end.

The one, therefore, is always two: always itself and other, in the same way the “I,” for her, is the “are-you.” What, then, "is the first element? immediately there must have been two to have the secret intimate movement from which milk gushes." If there was any solitary, identifiable one (one object, one thing; one atom, say, from which the universe arose) there must have been another, allowing for the sort of intimacy from which life, animation and movement could begin.

From this line begins Lispector’s musings on milk and pregnancy.

She has "been told that the cat after giving birth eats her own placenta and for four days eats nothing else. Only then does she drink milk." Clarice, in (re)making herself in the lines of her writing, and thus, in her interminable pregnancy, simultaneously delivering herself, she wishes to eat the placenta produced from her delivering herself, to rebegin the cycle and re-interiorize what has entered the outside of her self. "Birth and death. Birth. Death. Birth and - like a breathing of the world."

This taking-in of the placenta is something more like the drawing-in of breath; this same force - the breath, the spirit ("...all I have is the order of my breath. I let myself happen") which, once excreted, occurs as creation, as voice, as naming, as the raising of the Word, "the music of the air. The formation of the world," the "trumpets of the angel-beings echo[ing] in the without time."

The narrator here is in the position of the primal mother, something like the world Herself which is pregnant with and gives birth to what is of and in itself. Everything there is the “gush” and streams and flows of milk and blood. We've seen before the instant “drips and is thick with blood,” and that what she wants more than the instant is "its flow." The voice is the network of roots burrowed into the world, producing the air to create in, this same air which she breathes, the "energy" she is given life by and gives life to, this “fantastic” world which is fantastic because "for an instant [it] is exactly what my heart asks. ... My own strength frees me, that full life that overflows me."

Everything is life. Everything is breath. Everything is thick with blood and flows, and everything is born and being born. An endless interchange. A delivery that is simultaneous pregnancy. Holding and hearing the flowing of blood within herself (because the 'instant' is a woman pregnant with time, pregnant with herself, on the verge of delivering herself), swallowing "a mouthful of blood that fills me entirely," pushing out and taking in the placenta, but not for nourishment, because "I have neither hunger nor thirst: I am."

Pure primality, her "impulse connects to that of the roots of the trees," in connection with the depths of the world herself, within the soil and within those caves that are the “talismans of the earth.” Pure primality before the Name and before the beginning of creation, God must be given a name - "I shall give Him the name of Simptar. It belongs to no language. I shall give myself the name of Amptala. As far as I know no such name exists. Perhaps in a language before Sanskrit, it language." A language before the Word, a language of the it and thus of the is, a language which 'connects to the roots of the trees.

What I write to you has no beginning: it's a continuation. From the words of this chant, chant which is mine and yours, a halo arises that transcends the phrases, do you feel it? My experience comes from having already managed to paint the halo of things. The halo is more important than the things and the words. The halo is dizzying. I plunge the word into the deserted emptiness: it's a word like a slim monolithic block that gives off shadow. And it's a heralding trumpet. The halo is the it.

Everything has no origin. Nothing has every possible point of origin. The beginning of the it is every moment; the infinitude of the stream, the endlessness of that which flows, the boundlessness of the waters, the excess and hyper-plenitude of life.

This is Agua Viva, the flowing of water into water, dissolving the difference between bodies, which joins the four oceans of the world into the ocean. It is the breath of life that animates and raises, which creates and names, and which marks, through speakingwriting, the thing for death - this being, of course, the illusory 'end'point at which life begins (again) - "you place your mouth upon the other person's and breathe. And the other starts to breathe again. This exchange of breaths is one of the most beautiful things that I've ever heard about life." The mouth of the living upon the mouth of the dying to raise from the dead, to re-raise and re-suscitate so that they might continue re-living.

I will let Clarice lead us to the endbeginning of this post and to the end of her text itself; this (illusion of an) end which will or could never come because it is always yet to come, because it is always 'now' in its yet-to-come-ness:

Whatever will still be later - is now. Now is the domain of now. And as long as the improvisation lasts I am born.

"And now suddenly after an evening of 'who am I' and of waking at one in the morning still in despair - now suddenly at three in the morning I woke and met myself. I went to meet myself. Calm, joyful, fullness without fulmination. Simply I am I. And you are you. It is vast, and will endure.

"What I'm writing you is a 'this.' It won't stop: it goes on.

"Look at me and love me. No: you look at yourself and love yourself. That's right.

What I'm writing to you goes on and I am bewitched.