Where infinity is made equal to timelessness
Notes from biography on Clarice Lispector
Adventures in Note Taking
Notes from biography on Clarice Lispector
Chapters 1-13
ALL QUOTES ARE BULLETED, MY NOTES and COMMENTS ARE NOT
Person who Searches
Yet what I did I end up as a person who searches for what she deeply feels and uses the word to express it. It’s little, it’s very little. Clarice.
Clarice admits the All of the Small. Beckett does it too. His infinity in a nutshell thing. Which I believe comes from Shakespeare…
Hamlet replies: “O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.” Shakespeare.
Have a “thing” am exploring in Subliterate, where infinity is made equal to timelessness, and the eternal present.
Moser, author of this wonderful biography, mentions Clarice’s story: Sofia’s Disasters, have not read yet. Found some translation of online, here it is.
Hath Math
Pedro Lispector, Clarice’s Dad, was a would-be mathematician but Russia, war and escape from pogroms, got in the way.
Clarice too had passion for math, that Moser says she got (with encouragement) from her dad:
Mathematics and physics are not only the product of reasoning: they are as much an art as Bach. Clarice.
As an adult her interest in math reflected broader concern with abstraction and its connection to the divine. Moser Bio.
This is something I love about her. Mathematicians, they create exceedingly clever, quirky terms for logic, in which they (and I) take great joy. I cant seem to help but to explore math terms in my work, as part of the quirky cartoon versus abstraction complexity, that I find arises, along lines rendered from philosophy, religion, and the animal kingdom, which is a mortality.
I fell in love with doing this as a notsoinnocent bystander, and truly consider Clarice a big part of it. Camille, Clarice, Joan Didion, Kathy Acker and, of course, Emily. And also Sylvia, esp at the edges (where time blacks out).
I still have the power of reason—I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason—but now I want the plasma—I want to feed directly from the placenta. Clarice.
The dash thing, Clarice does it Pessoa does it Emily does it. I often find myself falling into dashes. Especially on instagram.
Covert Thing That Was Joy
Following quote is about her reading The Adventures of Lúcia Little Nose (Reinações de Narizinho), a childrens novel by Monteiro Lobato. A wealthier friend kept on promising to lend her, and then made her wait and wait and wait, weeks for it — finally her friends mother forced her into lending it, as promised:
Arriving back home, I didn’t start to read it. I pretended I didn’t have it, in order to have, later, the shock of discovering it. I opened it hours later, read a few marvelous lines, closed it again, walked around the house, put it off even more by going to eat a piece of bread with butter, pretended I didn’t know where I had left it, found it, opened it for a few instants. I created the most false difficulties for that covert thing that was joy. Joy would always be covert for me. Clarice. Italics mine.
Fcking a Clarice. Me too. Zizek talks about this. Lacan takes possession of it, splices it, in a very refined way, into categories, and with pyschology even, ramps up into philosophical symptoms, of “the is not is.” Zizek provides it with a language, that is, language of the wait, as a function of the bodiless, and a dire need for joy. But it can be found in Japanese Buddhism too (Kurosawa)-as byproduct of the greatness and tragedy of love.
Writing was always difficult for me even though I had begun with what is known as a vocation. Vocation is different from talent, one can have vocation and not talent. One can be called and not know how to go. Clarice.
Breadth of Readings
Increasing influence of Spinoza:
Why not give oneself over to the world, even without understanding it? It is absurd to seek an individual solution. That is spread out among the centuries, all mankind, all nature. And even your greatest idol in literature or science did nothing more than blindly add another element to the problem. Another thing; what would you, you individually, do if not for the evil in the world? It's absence would be the ideal for all mankind as a whole. For a single person, it wouldn't be enough. Clarice.
From Clarice’s first published book, Near to the Wild Heart.
Near to the Wild Heart, Perto do coração selvagem
Moser says, that the title for Clarice’s first book was suggested by wonderful gay writer Clarice fell hopelessly in love with, Lucio Cardoso. He suggested she borrow a bit from James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man:
He was alone, he was unheeded. Happy and near to the wild heart of life. James Joyce.
Her encounter with Lucio Cardozo caused Clarice a fever as intense as her discovery of Herman Hesse had provoked a few years earlier. Moser, Bio.
Know that feeling!!!
Joanna is name of the leading character in Clarice’s Near to the Wild Heart. The book is about Joanna her childhood, her marriage to Octavio. Over course of book, according to Moser’s biography, Clarice compares Joanna to a snake, a dog, a wild cat, a horse, and a bird. I too find myself incapable of resisting these animal allegories. Especially bird, bunny, dragon and horse.