The present as a way of being

Notes from: Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva...

Notes from novels are my personal approach to book reviews. Based on studies of quotes and critical articles I read. I pull out the lines I underlined while reading and use them as jumping-off points to explore what made a book stick with me. Sometimes there’s a clear theme, other times I just follow where the quotes take me. But here’s my rule: if I highlighted enough passages to fill one of these posts, the book earned at least 3 stars from me.

The Week: Água Viva, Clarice Lispector

Translated to English the title of this novel is The Stream of Life. I had only known this in retrospect to reading the novel. The Portuguese version, as my very limited Spanish proved me right, means ‘living water’. So I wonder my most recent editions keep the original title? The two have very different connotations to me.

I’m lingering on the title here because I think it’s actually key to understanding Lispector’s philosophical impulse that undercuts the novel. It can help you sail more easily through the meaning she is trying to grasp and also present to her readers. When I think of the stream of life, I think of Heraclitus (who seems to pop up everywhere for me at the moment!)

In sum, Heraclitus said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”. The narrator we follow in this novel (and in other Lispector novel’s) is always changing as her introspection develops. It’s what make’s her novels stand apart and why they resist definition and categorisation. All you can really define is that her philosophy is kind of concerned with flux, unity of opposites and the elusive nature of reality.

It is these themes and how it ties into the realm of writing or language in general that I will zoom in on in this piece.

“There must be a kind of painting totally free of the dependence on the figure—or object—which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought”

The novel begins by exploring the difference between forms of creative expression — music, art and writing. This line struck me as interesting because painting is tied to the object. Perhaps a person or a piece of fruit. Even if it’s just a landscape our eyes wander and focus on an object — a tree maybe. Even those abstract paintings of paint strokes, you still settle on a specific texture. Painting seems to never be devoid of an object.

She compares it to music which has this ability to have no object. To transcend to more into a feeling or unlock a new level of consciousness. It seems then hearing is more superior to sight. This is nothing new. Philosophers have been critiquing sight and empiricism forever. And I don’t think Lispector is necessary condemning sight or the senses, but rather she is searching for this way of experiencing that can project her beyond understanding what is empirically in front of her.

It resembles Plato’s Theory of the Forms. Where the physical world (understood through the senses) is just an imperfect reflection of a higher, eternal and unchanging realm — a realm of perfect forms of ideas. This is the true reality of which the blueprint of our experience. Lispector, I think, shares this metaphysics.

“So what’s the harm of moving away from logic? I deal in raw materials. I’m after whatever is lurking beyond thought.”

This line subscribes to what I feel about ascribing meaning to the world. Logic is flawed. It’s full of tricks and while claiming to be based on empirical evidence, jumps through too many loop holes. There are many logical fallacies out there that rely on this — the ontological argument for one.

Lispector is focusing a lot on introspection and personal beliefs. A more inward search. It’s intersting that she says raw materials because I do associate that with empiricism, but thus she must believe that there is something tangible that are brain is struggling to access. Some meaning that is just out of reach.

I placed this quote after the last because I think it’s a nice progression in her train of thought. She explored the flaws on the senses in creating meaning and is now seeking a new way to reach this deeper understanding, which leads me onto the next quote.

“The word is my fourth dimension”

It’s hard to conceive of words not being material. I don’t necessarily think by words Lispector means what leaves our mouths and when pen touches paper, but instead the process of generating these words. The thought process that leads to writing. That flow state you enter when writing. It’s those gaps in between that open up meaning. It’s the semantics — the interpretation that is happening write now as I write. It’s how we grasp at the deeper meaning in life.

Again, this is not necessarily an idea unique to Lispector. But the way she writes and delivers her philosophy feels more natural and introspective than say Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Or Descartes sitting in his dressing gown suspending all his beliefs.

“I write to you as an exercise in sketching before painting. I see words. What I say is pure present and this book is a straight line in space. It’s always current, and a camera’s photometer opens and immediately closes, but keeping within it the flash. Even if I say “I lived” or “I shall live” it’s present because I’m saying them now.”

Writing is a moment of being present. It doesn’t get much closer to existence than that. Lispector is deeply concerned with time in her work, and her focus on writing connects to her theory of time — that there is nothing more than the present moment, and that it is linear. You cannot go back or forward. Like a camera that cannot be edited or deleted, writing is that moment.

Writing is a process rather than a product. Words don’t just capture experience — they are the experience. We shouldn’t use writing as a way to store memories, but instead see it as a tool for the present. Language can never escape the now.

“I’m a concomitant being: I gather in me time past, the present and the future, the time that pulses in the tick-tock of the clocks.”

And thus we conclude our journey through these quotes onto Lispector’s understanding of who she is. The self is a container or a convergence point of time that acts simultaneously within conciseness. Phenomenologically this is true. The I is not some singular trajectory but much more knotted together. The I is this site of temporal overlap and to be human is not to just simply pass through it but to carry it. Past experiences are not behind us, futures are not ahead of us — both are actively shaping the present moment of being.