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167 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
There will be a year in which there will be a month, in which there will be a week in which there will be a day in which there will be an hour in which there will be a minute in which there will be a second and in that second will be the sacred not-time of death transfigured.Everyone has a ritual, yes? I'd say religion if the world were really as simple as Christianity/Judaism/Islam, a Big Three, would have us think. Even restricting the scope to those leaves the fringe dwellers of Raised This and Believe That, Taught This and Question All, Grown With These and Have Faith In None. One white philosopher proclaimed God a Watchmaker, another a Super Turnip (always implicated male for whatever reason), giving those atheists like me a choice between insanity and radiation when it comes to the Inquisition and co.
I read what I'd written and thought once again: from what violent chasms is my most intimate intimacy nourished, why does it deny itself so much and flee to the domain of ideas?
I wanted to write luxuriously. To use words that would shine wet and glistening and were pilgrims. Sometimes solemn in purple, sometimes abysmal emeralds, sometimes so light in the finest soft embroidered silk. I wanted to write random phrases, phrases that would go beyond speaking back to me: “the morning moon,” “gardens and gardens in shade,” “astringent sweetness of honey,” “crystals that break with a musical disastrous crash,” Or to use words that come to me from my unknown: trapilíssima avante sine qua non masioty—poor us and you. You are my lit candle. I am the Night.
And, yes, the murderous soul is rich.
‘This is the most important project of translation into English of a Latin American author since the complete works of Jorge Luis Borges were published a decade ago—I get excited when I talk about her.’ — Benjamin Moser (to Pedro Almodóvar)
‘—I found a paragraph that defines transgenesis in an exquisite and precise way. “I want the colourful, confused and mysterious mixture of nature. All the plants and algae, bacteria, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals concluding man with his secrets.” I can’t think of a more beautiful definition of transgenesis, though Lispector was thinking of something quite different. We are already publishing the screenplay of The Skin I Live In, and I’m going to suggest placing that quote at the beginning of the book. —This book has a similar effect on me as the first novels I read by J. M. Coetzee. Each phrase accumulates such a quantity of meanings; it is so dense, rotund, and rich that I halt before it as before a wall. I like it very much but am not qualified to accompany a text of such magnitude—Many thanks for thinking of me. I hope we meet someday.’ — Pedro Almodóvar (to Benjamin Moser)
‘Could I be betraying myself? Could I be altering the course of a river? I must trust that abundant river. Or maybe I’m damming a river? —I write for nothing and for no one. Anyone who reads me does so at his own risk. I don’t make literature: I simply live in the passing of time. The act of writing is the inevitable result of my being alive. I lost sight of myself so long ago that I’m hesitant to try to find myself—Existing sometimes gives me heart palpitations—They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.’
‘I live in the living flesh, that’s why I make such an effort to give thick skin to my characters. But I can’t stand it and make them cry for no reason—It is not autobiographical, you all know nothing of me. I never have told you and never shall tell you who I am. I am all of yourselves. I took from this book only what I wanted — I left out my story and (hers). What matters to me are the snapshots of sensations — sensations that are thought and not the immobile pose of those waiting for me to say, “say cheese!” Because I’m no street photographer.’
‘To create her I must plow the land. Is there some breakdown in the computer system of my ship while it crosses spaces in search of a woman? a computer made of pure silicon, with the equivalent of thousands of microscopic transistors fixed to its polished and gleaming surface with the noonday sun beating down in a mirror, (she) is a mirror. I want her to be the means by which the highest axioms of mathematics are solved within a fraction of a second. I want to calculate through her the answer to seven times the square root of 15 to the third power. (The exact figure is 406.663325.)’
‘—a yolk, but with a small black droplet in its yellow sun. That means: problem—She thinks that to stop writing is to stop living. I control her as much as I can, deleting her merely foolish comments. For example: she’s dying to write about menstruation just to get it off her chest, and I won’t let her.’
‘I’ve always wanted to find someday a person who would live for me because life is so full of useless things that I can only bear it through extreme muscular asthenia, I suffer from moral indolence in living. I tried to make (her) live in my place — but she too wants only the climax of life.’
‘I really like things I don’t understand: when I read a thing I don’t understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo.’
‘Between the word and the thought my being exists. My thought is pure impalpable insaisissable air. My word is made of earth. My heart is life. My electronic energy is magic of divine origin. My symbol is love. My hatred is atomic energy. Everything I just said is worthless, no more than foam.—an enigma intangible in its most intimate nucleus.—I feel within me a subterranean violence—.’
‘The most beautiful music in the world is the interstellar silence.’
‘Happy silence—And because I know how to hold my tongue. To hold your tongue is to be born again.’
‘When I am strong enough to be alone and mute — then I will free forever the butterfly from its cocoon. And even if it lives for only a day, that butterfly, it is already useful to me: may it flutter its bright colours above the green brightness of the plants in a garden on a summer’s morning. When the morning is still early, it looks just like a light butterfly. Whatever is even lighter than a butterfly. A butterfly is a petal that flies.’
‘Grapes, a bunch of grapes round and fleshy and liquid and falsely transparent because they give the impression of being transparent, but you can’t see the other side you are entirely opaque though you give the impression of transparency what the hell do I have to do with the opacity of things—It’s said like this kissed by the cliché breeze I prefer to say that the breeze blesses me between slightly ochre and at the same time lightly astringent it’s also lightly sweet on lips that are polluted by the pollen brought by the veil of perfume that is the breeze.’
‘Music deeply teaches me a boldness in the world to feel itself. I seek disorder, I seek the primitive state of chaos. That is where I feel myself living. I need the darkness that implores, the receptivity of the most primary forms of wanting—.’
‘An attempt to sensitise the language so that it shivers and shakes and my earthquake opens frightening fissures in this free language — but I captive and in the process of not being I become aware and it goes on without me—The word is the defecation of the thought. It glistens. Every book is blood, it’s pus, it’s excrement, it’s heart torn to shreds, it’s nerves cut to pieces, it’s electric shock, it’s coagulated blood running like boiling lava down the mountain.’
‘I’m a beggar with a beard full of lice seated on the sidewalk crying. I’m no more than that. I’m neither happy nor sad. I’m exempt and unscathed and gratuitous.’
‘Numbers . . . are they what’s hidden behind your mysteries, secret effluvia and succulent secretions or, maybe, sibilant and pointed questions without any answers? What do they hide, clouds?—But the bottomlessness of the sea blossoms inside me with the scare of a scarecrow.’
‘In luxury we become an object that in turn possesses other objects—The spirit can live on bread and water—Men kill for a yellow brick. A woman sells herself for a diamond.’
‘Living is a hobby for her. She thinks it has nothing to do with her and lives tossed to the side, without past or future; just today forever—I fear myself because I’m always ready to be able to suffer—I must want myself in order to give something to myself. Must I be worth something?—I’m worth something in relation to others — but in relation to myself, I am nothing.’
‘Sometimes I hurry to finish some intimate episode of life, in order to capture it in memories, and, more than having lived, to live. A living that already was. Swallowed by me and now part of my blood—But what I really like is a soccer tournament. Will I be alive during the next world cup? I hope not, my God—.”
‘This future of mine that shall be for you the past of someone dead. When you have finished this book, cry a hallelujah for me. When you close the last page of this frustrated and dauntless and playful book of life then forget me—Am I falling into discourse?—I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.’
"Ela é tão livre que um dia será presa. «Presa porquê?» «Por excesso de liberdade.» «Mas essa liberdade é inocente?» «É.» «Até mesmo ingénua.» «Então porque a prisão?» «Porque a liberdade ofende.»"
"O que me mata é o cotidiano. Eu queria só exceções. Estou perdida: eu não tenho hábitos."
"Fui trêmula ao encontro de mim — e achei uma tola mulher que se debate dentro das paredes de existir. Rompo as comportas e me crio nova."
"Nunca se esquecer, quando se tem uma dor, que a dor passará: nunca se esquecer que, quando se morre, a morte passará. Não se morre eternamente. É só uma vez, e dura um instante."
"In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it's a terribly dangerous void: it's where I wring out blood. I'm a writer why fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others — which? Maybe I'll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well"
i've always wanted to find someday a person who would live for me because life is so full of useless things that i can only bear it through extreme muscular asthenia, i suffer from moral indolence in living. i tried to make angela live in my place- but she too wants only the climax of life
ANGELA: Today I bought a long dress with tones of emerald-green, scarlet-red, loud-white, severe-black, king-blue, insane-yellow.
God is like listening to music: He fills the being.
AUTHOR: She doesnt seem to have what one might call “elevated feelings." She’s selfish and covetous. She won't let anyone go partly out of love, partly because she doesn’t know how to break things off - but party because of the nearly luxurious material comfort people give her. She's happy in the diamonds she receives from time to time.
She's not immobile: her active imperfections give her great mobility. It is in sin itself that Angela encounters her God. She’s frivolous. Everything she touches turns frivolous. But when I tell her that, she answers with a text she copied from Reader's Digest: “Joseph Haydn, criticized for the lightness of his music, smiled: I cannot make it otherwise; I write according to the thoughts I feel. When I think upon God, my heart is so full of joy that the notes dance and leap, as it were, from my pen; and since God has given me a cheerful heart, it will be pardoned me that I serve Him with a cheerful spirit.”
I've discovered why I breathed life into Angela's flesh, it was to have someone to hate. I hate her. She represents my terrible faith that is reborn every single morning. And it’s frustrating to have faith. I hate this creature who simply seems to believe. I'm sick of her empty God that she fills up with nervous ecstasies.
When did the hate in me start to happen and live? And I get all dizzy with the effluvia of a sentiment I ignored in myself for as long as I can remember.
Could it be that I want Angela Pralini in order to develop a feeling that is ardent and sleepless, the feeling of hatred I now need to exercise because she taught me to hate? Are we forever attached? I want her. I know that one day I’ll leave her, but my fear is that I won't forget her and shall ever beat that dark stain on my soul. This soul that's always surprised by the novelty of feeling.
Time is the indefinable. I quickly put myself in time, before dying. Life is very quick, when you see it, you've reached the end. And to top it off we’re required to love God.