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Crônicas: The Terror

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I am continuing my reading of Clarice Lispector’s Cronicas: Too Much of Life. The following piece was published on October 5, 1968. It is an amazing description of the birth of a newborn.

THE TERROR

There was too much light for his eyes. There was a sudden push; they were maneuvering him, but he didn’t know that: there was only the terror of those faces bent over his. He didn’t know anything. And he couldn’t move freely. The voices sounded to him like thunder, only one voice sang to him: he basked in it. Immediately afterward, he was put down again, and then came the terror, and he was screaming from behind the bars and saw colors, which, only later, he understood were blue. The blue bothered him, and he cried. And then there was the terror of colic. They opened his mouth and put horrible things in it, which he swallowed. When the voice that sang put horrible things in his mouth, he could bear it more easily. But he was immediately placed behind the bars again. Gigantic shadows surrounded him. And then he would scream. The one glimmer of light in all this was that he had just been born. He was five days old.

When he was older, he heard someone say, although without understanding what they meant: “He’s easy enough now, but when he was first born he kept crying and screaming. Now, fortunately, he’s much easier to manage.” No, it wasn’t easy, it never would be. Birth was the death of a single being splitting into two solitary beings It seemed easy now because he had learned to cope with the secret terror he had felt, a terror that would last until he died. A terror of being on the Earth, like a nostalgia for the sky.

Crônicas: How To Deal With What One Has

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Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

Clarice. I love her name. I love her high cheekbones and penetrating gaze. And most of all, I love the beauty of her thoughts and writings. She wrote in Portuguese, but she was born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector in Chechelnyk, Ukraine. To escape the horrors of the Civil War between the Red and White Russians, her Jewish parents fled with their infant daughter to Recife in northeastern Brazil. At an early age, it was discovered that she could write well enough to be published. And she became one of the great women novelists and short story writers of the 20th century.

I am reading short pieces she wrote for Brazilian publications. They are called Crônicas and were recently published in a volume called Too Much of Life, which I am slowly reading with great pleasure.

This is the first of several posts in which I will present one of her Crônicas. I hope you enjoy them.

HOW TO DEAL WITH WHAT ONE HAS

A being lives inside me as if he were entirely at home, and he is. He is a glossy black horse who, despite being entirely wild—for he has never lived inside anyone else and no one has ever put reins or a saddle on him—despite being entirely wild, he has, for that very reason, the primitive gentleness of one who knows no fear: he sometimes eats from my hand. His muzzle is moist and cool. I kiss his muzzle. When I die, the black horse will be left homeless and will suffer greatly. Unless he chooses another house that is not afraid of him being simultaneously both wild and gentle. I should say that he has no name: you just have to call him and that is his name. Or perhaps not, but summon him in a gently authoritative voice, and he will come. If he senses and feels that a body is vacant, he will trot silently in. I should also warn you not to be afraid of his neighing: we mistakenly think that we are the ones neighing with pleasure or rage.

Vidyādhara

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A Vidyādhara Couple

I am currently reading a book of Kashmiri tales that go back a thousand years or more. The book is Somadeva’s Tales from the Kathāsaritsāgara, written around AD 1050, but retelling from an earlier source. To understand the quote below, you must realize that Vidyādharas are celestial beings very much like angels—but angels who can mate with humans without losing their supernatural abilities.

The tale in question is called “Alaṅkāravatī,” which tells the tale of the promiscuous Anaṅgaprabhā, who has just jilted her lover, King Harivara:

When Harivara found out that Anaṅgaprabhā had left, he wanted to die of grief. But the minister Sumantra consoled him and said, “Why don’t you understand this? Think it over yourself. Anaṅgaprabhā left her husband, who had obtained the powers of a vidyādhara by means of a [magical] sword, the moment she saw you. Why would a woman like that stay with you? She has left for something trivial because she does not desire the good, like someone who is enamored of a blade of grass believing it to be a heap of jewels. She has definitely gone with the dancing teacher for he is nowhere to be seen and I heard they were in the dance hall together in the morning. Since you know all this, why are you so attached to her? A promiscuous woman is like the sunset which has a moment of glory every evening.”

Clarity and Emptiness

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Lute Player (After Frans Hals)

From time to time, I love to read books of original source material on Eastern Religions. The following is taken from the Visuddhi Maga as quoted in a collection edited by Anne Bancroft entitled The Pocket Buddha Reader (Boston: Shambhala, 2001):

When a lute is played, there is no previous store of playing that it comes from. When the music stops, it does not go anywhere else. It came into existence by way of the structure of the lute and the playing of the performer. When the playing ceases, the music goes out of existence.

In the same way all the components of being, both material and nonmaterial, come into existence, play their part, and pass away.

That which we call a person is the bringing together of components and their actions with one another. It is impossible to find a permanent self there. And yet there is a paradox. For there is a path to follow and there is walking to be done, and yet there is no walker. There are actions but there is no actor. The air moves, but there is no wind. The idea of a specific self is a mistake. Existence is clarity and emptiness.

“That Terrible Dusty Brilliance”

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I have been reading a fascinating book of stories by Gavin Lambert about Hollywood as it was in the 1960s. The book is called The Slide Area, after the crumbling cliffs overlooking the ocean from Santa Monica north to Pacific Palisades. It is some of the best writing about Los Angeles as it was then. Lambert, by the way, was also the author of Inside Daisy Clover, which was made into a Robert Mulligan film starring Natalie Wood. Oh, and Lambert also wrote a biography of Natalie.

Following is an excerpt from near the beginning of The Slide Area:

It is only a few miles’ drive to the ocean, but before reaching it I shall be nowhere. Hard to describe the impression of unreality, because it is intangible; almost supernatural; something in the air. (The air … Last night on the weather telecast the commentator, mentioning electric storms near Palm Springs and heavy smog in Los Angeles, described the behaviour of the air as ‘neurotic’. Of course. Like everything else the air must be imported and displaced, like the water driven along huge aqueducts from distant reservoirs, like the palm trees tilting above mortuary signs and laundromats along Sunset Boulevard.) Nothing belongs. Nothing belongs except the desert soil and the gruff eroded-looking mountains to the north. Because the earth is desert, its surface always has that terrible dusty brilliance. Sometimes it looks like the Riviera with a film of neglect over villas and gardens, a veil of fine invisible sand drawn across tropical colours. It is hard to be reminded of any single thing for long. The houses are real because they exist and people use them for eating and sleeping and making love, but they have no style of their own and look as if they had been imported from half a dozen different countries. They are imitation ‘French Provincial’ or ‘new’ Regency or Tudor or Spanish hacienda or Cape Cod, and except for a few crazy mansions seem to have sprung up overnight….

Los Angeles is not a city, but a series of suburban approaches to a city that never materializes.

Mister Care Wack Dreams About Girls

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New York Bathing Beauties Circa 1960

I am enjoying a collection of the miscellaneous writings by Jack Kerouac during his 63 days atop Desolation Peak in Washington State’s Northern Cascades. I have particularly enjoyed the chapters he wrote for a projected (but never completed) novel called Ozone Park in the “Duluoz Legend” series of slightly fictionalized autobiography. Here is a quote from a deleted chapter from a work that Kerouac (called Mister Care Wack by a hobo friend named Slim) abandoned.

O Kerouac, you poor fool, wandering the streets of night in search of romance in the golden nothingness of existence! Foolish as men are, they’re never more foolish than when they’re 21 years old and actually think that they do exist to be loved somehow either by a personal God who bends over them like a Guardian Angel with those wings of a loving destiny (mayhap I still believe that) or by a woman and women He sends to soul-soothe their sad predestined hugeness of being (“I am Jack Kerouac, there’s something about me that never happened before, she will notice it”) and so they sit at the windows of night smoking Frank Sinatra cigarettes, vain as veritable d’Annunzios, beautiful as the sea, mistaken as lost angels, lovable as God, misunderstood as secret saints, yearny as young girls, masculine as rocks and immovable as self-faith. And this is the reason why they eventually do get loved, but not for the reason they imagine to be foremost, their melancholy which they take to be the penalty is really the reward and is gained. A woman sees a man wrapped in self-torture, and when he smiles there’s already no need for smiles and come-ons.

Thoughts of a lonely young man stuck on a mountaintop.

Is the Emperor Happy?

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Solidus of the Emperor Petronius Maximus (Mar-May455)

I am greatly enjoying the second volume of The Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire, written by Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866). This is the volume that tells of the Huns and the Vandals. More and more, I am fascinated by classic 19th century British and American historians.

The following excerpt is from Apollinaris Sidonius, a fifth century Roman poet, diplomat, and bishop. He is writing about the emperor that followed Valentinian III, who was assassinated for his part in the murder of Aetius, the last great Roman general, who defeated Attila and the Huns at Chalons in CE 451.

I received your letter … dedicated to the praises of your patron the emperor Petronius Maximus. I think, however, that either affection or a determination to support a foregone conclusion has carried you away from the strict truth when you call him most happy because he passed through the highest offices of the state and died an emperor. I can never agree with the opinion that those men should be called happy who cling to the steep and slippery summits of the state. For words cannot describe how many miseries are hourly endured in the lives of men who, like [the Roman dictator] Sulla, claim to be called Felix [fortunate] because they have clambered over the limits of law and right assigned to the rest of their fellow citizens. They think that supreme power must be supreme happiness, and do not perceive that they have, by the very act of grasping dominion, sold themselves to the most wearisome of all servitudes; for, as kings lord it over their fellow men, so the anxiety to retain power lords it over kings.

A Civilized Man

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MƒEXICO D.F. 19 NOVIEMBRE2007.-El escritor Sergio Pitol, presento su nueva obra literaria que lleva como titulo “Trilog’a de la Memor’a” esto en la Casa del Refugio. FOTO: GUILLERMO PEREA/CUARTOSCURO.COM

Mexican author Sergio Pitol Deméneghi (1933-2018) was a man of the world. As a writer and diplomat, he traveled the world and wrote some fascinating books that were a curious mélange of literature, autobiography, and travel. The following is taken from his The Art of Flight.

[Italian philosopher] Norberto Bobbio offers a definition of the “civilized” man that embodies the concept of tolerance as daily action, a working moral exercise: The civilized man “lets others be themselves irrespective of whether these individuals may be arrogant, haughty, or domineering. They do not engage with others intending to compete, harass, and ultimately prevail. They refrain from exercising the spirit of contest, competition, or rivalry, and therefore also of winning. In life’s struggle [civilized men] are perpetual losers. […] This is because in this kind of world there are no contests for primacy, no struggles for power, and no competitions for wealth. In short, here the very conditions that enable the division of individuals into winners and losers do not exist.“ There is something enormous in those words. When I observe the deterioration of Mexican life, I think that only an act of reflection, of critique, and of tolerance could provide an exit from the situation. But conceiving of tolerance as it is imagined in Bobbio’s text implies a titanic effort. I begin to think about the hubris, arrogance, and corruption of some acquaintances, and I become angry, I begin to list their attitudes that most irritate me, I discover the magnitude of contempt they inspire in me, and eventually I must recognize how far I am from being a civilized man.

Yamaraja

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He Always Hid His Damaged Left Eye When Being Photographed

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was a true exotic. Born in Lefkada, Greece, he came to the United States and published several charming works of folklore, of which his Stray Leaves from Strange Literature (1884) was one title. And then he went to Japan, married a local woman, and published his best known works. These were collections of Japanese folktales in English. Masaki Kobayashi’s gorgeous color horror film anthology, Kwaidan (1964), was based on three of Hearn’s tales. Hearn changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo. Today he is revered by the Japanese for his works.

The following excerpt is from Stray Leaves from Strange Literature from the tale of “Yamaraja,” about a Brahmin who attempts to visit the Hindu god of the dead, who is called Yamaraja, to plead to bring his dead son back to life. It is this god who speaks:

“Verily thou hast not been fitted to seek the supreme wisdom, seeing that in the winter of thine age thou dost still mourn by reason of a delusion. For the stars die in their courses, the heavens wither as leaves, the worlds vanish as the smoke of incense. Lives are as flower-petals opening to fade; the works of man as verses written upon water. He who hath reached supreme wisdom mourneth existence only…. Yet, that thou mayst be enlightened, we will even advise thee. The kingdom of Yama thou mayst not visit, for no man may tread the way with mortal feet. But many hundred leagues toward the setting of the sun, there is a valley, with a city shining in the midst thereof. There no man dwells, but the gods only, when they incarnate themselves to live upon earth. And upon the eighth day of each month Yamaraja visits them, and thou mayst see him. Yet beware of failing a moment to practice the ceremonies, to recite the Mantras, lest a strange evil befall thee! …Depart now from us, that we may reenter into contemplation!”

An Attractive Fanaticism

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The following paragraph from from a 1949 British mystery novel by Edmund Crispin entitled Buried for Pleasure. In the novel Oxford Professor Gervase Fen is running for parliament, but gets sidetracked by a number of murders and other crimes in Sanford Angelorum. So instead of telling his constituents he no longer wants the job, he delivers the following speech the night before the polling. By the way, he wins.

I shall now tell you the reason why fanaticism of this sort is so attractive to humankind. A contemporary French writer—whose name I shall not mention, since you are probably too stupid either to recognize it or to remember it—has pointed out with unanswerable logic that men adopt ideas not because it seems to them that those ideas are true, or because it seems to them that those ideas are expedient, but because those ideas satisfy a basic emotional need of their nature. Now what emotion—I ask you—provides the chief motive power of the politically obsessed? You do not answer, because you have never given the matter a moment’s thought. But were you to do so, even you might dimly perceive that the reply to my question is the monosyllable hate. Never forget that political zealots are people who are over-indulging their emotional need of hatred. They have, of course, their ‘constructive’ programmes, but it is not these which supply the fuel for their squalid engines; it is the concomitant attacks, upon a class, a system, a personality; it is the lust to defame and destroy. Let no such men be trusted. That they have landed themselves, here and hereafter, in the most arid of all hells as a circumstance which I must confess does not greatly distress me, and with that spiritual aspect of the matter I do not propose to deal.