The Stream of Life (12 page)

A few words on what presents itself as what one could call at the same time 'the most and the least' in this text. What does this mean? The least is that which does not announce itself. For example: "Now I'm going to speak to you about. . . flowers." It is a thread. It is inscribed over and again. It is also the earth of all that grows or of all that

swims in
Agua viva.
That is to say, it is a question of style. One has to laugh when one reads a sentence like: "I write you, seated by an open window." The only thing that Clarice did not deal with is grammar. Examples like I write you, I'm writing to you, I write, I write to you abound, yet the text is put together with few words. There are many repetitions, as in musical scales. The text practices its scales without stopping. There are also variations. I have the vertiginous impression never to know which page I am on. All these relations of false anteriority, posteriority are something of à
déjà vu
which is not
déjà vu.
There are recurrences, like chair or apples. This contributes to disorienting the reader. Disorientation is the orient of this text. It is not pure repetition of the identical. The same theme re- surges, draws a little flower, simply because there is never a radical cut. Because, on a vegetal mode, there is interminable ramification, with burial and resurgence. I am still in metaphors; I do not fear them; I obey what this text suggests. The text is metaphor itself, a metaphor which is not a metaphor but
agua viva,
living water, a metaphor without stop, a gigantic metaphor, a facsimile of a book, which permanently works with the counter-metaphor "with." If, for example, one says that one is going to work on a fragment, if one takes the text one is going to work on a priori, visibly, it becomes a very cut up text. Here, one could say, it is a coast. On the level of signification one cannot find a whole. One could find one on the level of form. Again, one must ask the question: what is form? It is what marks articulation. It is not the beginning or the end of an image, though that can happen. Clarice's gesture which listens to itself write does not hide it. It says it continually. The means of locomotion of this text are inscribed everywhere. The text is its own echo, like a person or a plant. Like a plant it buries itself and surges up, or like a person it reflects upon itself.

The text says what it says which makes reading very difficult. One has to read the very phenomena of writing, reading oneself.

Elsewhere, there is something of a first point, a first sentence. "It's with such intense joy." In Portuguese, the é, 'is,' has only one letter. At the limit, this would be the unit of reading of the text, a sentence-word, one and only word. A word of one letter alone. This first sentence is deceptive. It propulses the text: "It's with such intense joy." One waits for a proposition to come: that this text is born, for example. The sentence triggers a wait, a wait for something that is already there. The sentence does violence to the classical sentence. It sets the tone for what is to come. There are only beginnings, hundreds of them. We take off, without end. It is impossible to divide the text into fragments. There is no narrative, no story, none of the instruments of narrative functions here, so one can only obey the text. One reads in a circle. One obeys a breathing rhythm. All this explodes the temporal reference marks completely. It is put in place from the beginning by the systematic recourse to the present tense. The present imposes itself. One cannot not write this text in the present. Let us come back to the sentence: "I think I'm going to have to ask permission to die." One has two possibilities with such a sentence. Either one looks for where it comes from, in what kind of causal chain the expression is inscribed. But here
I
cannot, it is too late: "I listened to
Firebird—
and passed utterly away." This is quite an event. Here, if one goes back to see where this abrupt announcement of death comes from, one comes across the chrysanthemum: "The chrysanthemum is profoundly happy. It speaks through color and dishevelment. It's a flower that impetuously controls its own savagery." That is a finality without end, a wild tulip. It is a flower which, being disheveled, controls its own wildness. What

is the relationship with the following sentence? None, but the two are not without rapport. There is a
without
rapport. In a certain way one goes abruptly from the chrysanthemum to "I think I'm going to die." Are these two different worlds? There is a hidden rapport. One has to retake the path across the flowers. But if one looks at the passage of the flowers from close up, it too jumps all the time. True, there is a regrouping, there is an ensemble: the ensemble flower. Yet inside the ensemble, there are incessant breakages. There I pick up something again. Every reader is struck by the story of flowers, and this is not by chance. In the passage on the victoria regia, there is the phrase: "é de se morrer delas" literally "one could die" of the pleasure they give. This is the rule of the text. It consists of a release, of a setting in motion. There is an insistence until— I stay in metaphors—one arrives at the acme, at the incandescence of something that is orgiastic, but in a feminine mode, at something that goes over to the limit and then one can say no and everything starts up again. One needs to see the system of starting up again
(relance).
At times, the mechanism of pleasure can be read clearly. It may be the mechanism of breathing or else it may be called music. It always corresponds to bodily rhythms, but of a body that produces a reading of the world. The body is worldly, not brute. It makes love, it is taken in moments of exchange, of making love with the other, hence the rhythmic variations. It is not always the same rhythm. Yet, on the level of logic or of discourse, there is no plot, no evident causality. It makes reading difficult. If one takes the book as an ensemble, it openly declares that it does not interrupt itself. There are no chapters. True, the first thing, other than obviously writing itself, is: it is about. That is active. What this leads to on the level of the body is non-interruption. I will come back to this. First, let us return to the proof of non-interruption which is continuous, but which is inscribed in most obvious fashion at a certain moment. There is the sentence: "I think I'm going to have to ask permission to die. But I can't, it's too late." A few paragraphs later, we read: "I'm tired. I tire easily because I'm an extremely busy person." Now, if one works on this passage, for example on the sequence of sentences introducing the paragraphs: "I think I'm going to have to ask for permission to die," "I have to interrupt this because-didn't I tell you? didn't I tell you that one day something was going to happen to me?" and "I'm tired," if one reads these three introits, these three incipits of paragraphs, it so happens that they do inscribe interruption: "I think I'm going to have to ask permission to die . . . stop," "I must interrupt . . . interruption;" "I'm tired ..." that is to say I'm tired . . . I'm going to rest. Perhaps one goes toward an interruption, but more exactly: my fatigue comes, my fatigue is going to be put to work, and I'm going to work on the fatigue that overcomes me and makes me interrupt. If one looks at the temporal shuttle that this constitutes, one has: "I think I'm going to have to ask permission to die": one advances. "I can't, I can't, it's too late": it is already past. The time of interruption is the third moment of this paragraph which explains without giving an explanation. One never is in what would be of the order of liaison, of heavy binding: Period. "I listened to
Firebird!"—
one has the impression that this is juxtaposed—and if we followed the pun on "fire" in the Portuguese verb "afoguei," "I became enflamed entirely." First there is something like a premonition or preparation. It does not happen in the text, therefore we are told: "I can't." Truly, one could read: I am no longer. It is too late, but it has already happened. Obviously, death cannot "happen" other than in this way. Clarice died between two sentences: "It's too late," "I listened to
Firebird
and I became enflamed entirely." There are all the themes of
Agua viva
at once. One has: "First I listened," there has been sublation of "to be dying" through music and not through any kind of music: "I became the
Firebird
." I became music again by going through fire, through the ear and of course through writing. All this happens on the theme which is not mentioned, because that would be vulgar, the theme of the phoenix. The firebird in Brazilian is the sparrow of fire. At the level of the signifier, there is another very subtle play on the passage through fire and water because "afoguei" literally means "I drowned."

Clarice is the champion of the sublime metaphor. Generally, one cannot undo her mechanism which is so fast and so subtle that one is caught in it and carried off into the general motif of the text which is nothing but transport. A statement seemingly as banal as: Tm tired. I tire easily because I'm an extremely busy person," could be read from the point of view of the technique of writing as "to go on while following oneself." Clarice accompanies herself and follows herself. One could define her thus: She follows herself, she follows herself. "I'm tired." This leads to a paragraph on fatigue. She follows her own remarks which she remarks.

The middle paragraph of those three begins with "I have to interrupt this because." There is a staging of interruption. She effectuates the "didn't I tell you? didn't I tell you that one day something was going to happen to me?" I want to insist on the formulation, "didn't I tell?" because it is one of the most frequent marks of the text. There are a certain number of questions and the question is part of the general technique of the text. There are questions which at times are followed by answers and there are questions which remain without answer. If I distinguish between the two, it is because in the ensemble of the play questions/answers, the convention calls for real questions, not rhetorical questions. The questions here address themselves sometimes to you sometimes to herself. A question like "And what if dying tastes like food when you re really hungry?" has no answer. Another "What am I in this instant? I'm a typewriter," has an answer. "Or is the portal already the church, and when you're in front of it you've already arrived?" No answer. "Will my song of the it never end?" No answer. These questions inscribe the generality of a theme that could be called the "I don't know." Sometimes the question mark is the answer. One could talk of the putting into question of this text, as one could talk about its staging. "Didn't I tell you that one day something was going to happen to me?" What is inscribed in the interruption is the event. One has to interrupt so that something can happen. "Didn't I tell you," also inscribes the movement of retrospective anticipation. And then there is a kind of textual genesis: "A man named Joao just spoke to me over the phone. He grew up (literally "created himself') deep in the Amazon jungle." This can be read as a real event or as an imbedded allegory of some kind of a displaced genesis related to the verb. Here a man called Joao, a man already called, called. One has a narrative after the creation. "He says that there's a legend there about a talking plant." One finds again the thread of plants, of flowers. Now, the person who created himself tells something. We are still in the mode of the one: one word, one man, one thing, once. All this is a very distant displacement of genesis. It is unique. "One night he came home very late and as he was walking along the corridor where the plant was he heard the word "João." He thought it was his mother calling him and he answered: "I'm coming." We come back to a naming through the mother, that is to say through Clarice. And he answered: "I'm coming.' This reminds us of the Bible. But when Joao went upstairs, he found his parents fast asleep. There is a return to a kind of realistic scene.

There was a little narrative, a tiny little short story. That is a myth of the origin of the world. It is cosmogonical and minuscule. Of interest is that the paragraph started with "I have to interrupt this because," but what happens? Is it this story? Or did João tell the story? If one looks closely at the tenses, it is impossible to decide what the order is. It does not matter, because the reader becomes accustomed to being in a completely "fantasticated" tense, as Clarice would say. Here, one can be absolutely contemporary with
Genesis
. The text works on the notion of "contemporary," not "simultaneous," with time periods that are dislocated in relation to each other. Here there is a little bit of narrative time, that is to say a past tense, and that is noticeable. Here and there in the text we have these pseudo-narratives in the past, the man with one foot, the story of Zerbino. They deserve our attention because they are uprooted in relation to the classical space of narrative and re-inserted in a microscopic form in the vast elementary text of
Agua viva.
They are no longer simple narratives but are closer to plants or animals. In this passage, on João, there is a mass of associations since there is interruption and the opposite of interruption. The telephone re-establishes something: a non-cut between plant and man since the plant speaks. There is a whole system of relays, of callings. Through the system of relays of narration, of callings, everything is always bound.

Let us go back a few paragraphs: "The chrysanthemum is profoundly happy." It produces deep joy, comes from deep joy, distances itself, takes off. One is left not with death but with the life of the chrysanthemum: "It speaks through color and dishevelment." Afterward, one has the other system of the plant which speaks, the disheveled part. This is rather banal. It has been over-exploited by Georges Bataille in relation to the hair of flowers: there is growth, overabundance of the hair, excess, something uninterrupted, as one knows. Interestingly, it is a flower which is "descabeladamente," which is there, on the page, like a disheveled chrysanthemum. The word contains so many letters that it is through its dishevelment that the chrysanthemum controls its own wildness. In other words, it is through its wildness that it controls its own wildness. That is the text itself, its model of spending; it is because it is disheveled that something of the dishevelment becomes proper. When Clarice says proper, she introduces a tension between wild and proper. Wild is detached and proper comes back to the same. It also functions as a textual metaphor, hence the violent surging, while one is in full dishevelment, of "I'm going to have to ask permission to die." This is moving because it deals in addition with the problem of dying. Again, there is the whole question of interruption, of the recharging of energy which is going to be spent, hence a whole circuit of energies. But there is also the relation to human dying and that brings across what can be called passion, because it implies a calling of the other. In Brazilian, permission is license. One should work on license because in Latin it is
licet
, and that means: "does that please you?" It is not simply permission, it is "may I please die?" In other words, it still puts into question the system of pleasure: I need to die of pleasure, but perhaps you will not like it; my pleasure may perhaps bar your pleasure.