Daily, I reflect on vignettes from the past and how they contribute to an end where one might feel true and full and patient and understanding of life’s brutality and why that might have made love so precious and indefinable and actions so fragile.
Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart is brewed from these moments, allowing her to breathtakingly voice the ineffable – that which we so badly want to convey and make known but don’t know how to parse into pieces as measly as words.
I carry on always inaugurating myself, opening and closing circles of life, tossing them aside, withered, full of past. … Moments so intense, red, condensed in themselves that they didn’t need past or future in order to exist. They brought a knowledge that didn’t serve as experience – a direct knowledge, more like sensation than perception. The truth then discovered was so much the truth that it couldn’t subsist except in its recipient, in the actual fact that had provoked it. So true, so fatal, that it only revolves around its matrix. Once the moment of life is over, the corresponding truth is also drained.
Like there’s no way in shit I could have articulated that.
But I once dreamt of:
a room where a tide of your own tears rushes in, summoned by questions you ask of yourself while looking in a mirror
a tall, spectral woman in a fitted white satin dress with a Dalmatian at her side
a brotherly friend’s death from being struck by a car
a homecoming.
And remembered:
foggy months of artless sobbing upon making eye contact with anyone, especially myself
that my grandmother loved Dalmatians
how a friend I never told I loved and valued died on the freeway, struck by a car
the feel of loose tiles and the way grief seeps.
And told:
A man:
el amor regresa a tiA student in despair:
you’re falling down a pit with stakes at the bottom: find a trampolineA lover:
no puedo ser la mujer que quieresA friend:
I want you to cry over this bookAnother friend:
that guilt shouldn’t be yours and will kill you
But I can’t have words for the end if I don’t know who they’re for.
This is like that one time I wrote in a job application that I couldn’t propose ideas for fundraisers because I didn’t know all the intricacies of the situation and wanted to avoid offering the impossible. I basically ended with, “So you should hire me and we’ll figure it out.” I don’t work there.
I guess at the end we may all feel a little helpless, much as we did throughout the whole damn racket, but nothing like the start in which we had no reason for doubt or knowledge of life’s trials which infuse and drown us. That’s a romantic and ageist viewpoint. Babies are the smartest – doing the essentials and leaving it at that.
And in that case, I might again state “el amor regresa a ti.” Maybe your broken body will fuel a wayward seed.