On the (Im)possibilities of Touch: Clarice Lispector and Annie Ernaux's Affective Reading Contracts

“Now I know: I’m alone. I and my freedom that I don’t know how to use. Great responsibility of solitude. Whoever isn’t lost doesn’t know freedom and love it. As for me, I own up to my solitude that sometimes falls into ecstasy as before fireworks. I am alone and must live a certain intimate glory that in solitude can become pain. And the pain, silence. I keep its name secret. I need secrets in order to live.”

“And if here I must use words, they must bear an almost merely bodily meaning.”

Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“…a book can contribute to change in private life, help to shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed, and enable beings to reimagine themselves.”

Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize Lecture

Writing is a daring event. It is a consensual open- contract between the writer and the reader. Before any writing is published, the writer plays the role of the reader-writer, one who simultaneously writes, tries to understand, organize, and control. This control and organization involve collecting sensations and thoughts together, forming sentences with individual thoughts and letters, and bringing the text together by completing a puzzle, actualizing a portion of the self. Before any writing meets a reader, it is already going through the stages of understanding and being understood by the self who is writing but also reading that one who does not stop evolving. Publishing is letting go of control over what has been organized and collected. Each piece of writing expresses its own genre and style; regardless of the authority the reading-writing realm decides, the author becomes unique in her own way. Despite the literary authorities' descriptions of what constitutes fiction, prose, philosophy, or reality, authors like Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, and Clarice Lispector flow like water over the borders set by those who make the rules of writing.

The courage of these three women actualizes itself in the form of writing, where they do not fit the norm. They reinvent new forms of writing while reinventing themselves, as well as new forms of reading practices for the reader. Virginia Woolf takes the reader into her stream of consciousness; the reader learns to drown and surf in her writing, struggles to keep up with her mind, and lets themselves flow with the pace of Woolf's waves. The water and Woolf are not coincidental metaphors but intentional actants. The Waves and To the Lighthouse flood with the characters with an intense flow and Woolf's water-writing- being creates a realization that both water and the writing cannot be fully grasped and held. It is such a contestation and confirmation that we humans are made of seventy percent water. Only bodies like Woolf's dare to become one with what we came from, whereas some of us haven't made peace with the water and remain in the corner, fearing floods, for instance, the unknown.

In the auto-social biography of Annie Ernaux, the author reinvents and situates the self within the self and society. By challenging the narrative structure and exploring identity and existence, Clarice Lispector creates a unique, introspective approach that profoundly transforms the narrative in a way that defies traditional categorization. By incorporating mysticism and spirituality into the literary realm, Lispector expands the boundaries of what is considered fiction and reality, opening up enveloped mysteries and wonders. Transcendence, the divine, and the interconnectedness of all things lie within any paragraph of Lispector's works. These three women share that the flood becomes uncontrollable, and surrender is needed to make sense of the self and the world. Walking into the water with her pockets full of stones, Woolf surrenders to what she is and becomes what she has been all along: water. The stream of consciousness leads her to her destination, a destiny of self-drowning. Meanwhile, those of us who read her work are still surfing on the waves that she is. I am leaving Woolf here, to where she is, in this text's flow-flood, while simultaneously drifting with the writings of Ernaux and Lispector.

Ernaux and Lispector’s Writer-Reader Contracts: Surrender

At the beginning of The Passion According to G.H., Lispector directly addresses the reader and opens up their contract. She states that this book is for people whose souls are already formed, those who know that the approach happens gradually and painstakingly. She directly sets the tone of the reading experience, that this book is going to be an affective one, for the souls who are ready to approach with recognition that any process unfolds slowly and with great effort. As soon as the cover is opened, she desires the reader to surrender what is to come.

In Água Viva, she drags the reader into the journey of formation, a formation which the narrator attempts and fails to grasp the instant. She portrays the fluidity of life and the spontaneity of the human condition. The title, "living water" or "jellyfish," helps us realize that the self, the writing, and the consciousness are nothing to be grasped or grabbed but only to be surrendered to. Jellyfish are ancient organisms, mainly consisting of water, which allows them to float effortlessly. These creatures do not have brains or hearts; instead, they have "pockets, eyes" that allow them to perceive light, aiding them in floating towards it rather than actively moving. They possess tentacles, which extend long distances from their bodies and are used for capturing prey and as a defense mechanism. These tentacles give jellyfish a sense of distance and guard, making them appear slow and poisonous. They feed on the 'dirt' in the water, helping to maintain water quality and supporting a collaborative ecosystem for micro and macro-organisms. Apart from their poisonous nature, the texture of jellyfish makes them ungraspable; they would slip away even from a flat surface. Jellyfish contain multitudes and solitudes.

The jellyfish's tentacles remind us of Haraway's concept of tentacular thinking, which emphasizes the evocation of our senses. We do not solely think with our brains, but rather, the body as a whole is involved in the thinking process. This thinking engages our senses, including touch, smell, hearing, taste, as well as sight. Tentacular thinking is a mode of thought that embraces multiplicity, interconnectedness, and complexity. It draws inspiration from the image of the tentacle (spider, jellyfish), which is fluid, flexible, and capable of making unexpected connections.

The tentacular reading-thinking is in action when one reads Annie Ernaux. Annie Ernaux's journey of recollecting memory and sometimes losing her memory of an actual event makes us realize that past events are subject to the changing memory of the present. Thus, she complicates the reading practice with her revelation of memories, leaving the reader in the gap between fiction and reality and ultimately unconcerned about the distinction. The recollection of memories functions as a flood, where Ernaux confesses whether she remembers correctly or not. What is left for the reader to do is to let herself go with the flow of the narration, without the urge to make sense (Why isn't she leaving him already?) and to trust the narrator on the journey entirely. Surrender.

A Girl’s Story begins with contemplating the relationality between the self and the other. Before starting the story Ernaux states:

Everything you do is for the Master you have chosen for yourself. But as you work to improve your self-worth, imperceptibly, inexorably, you leave him behind. You realize where folly has taken you and never want to see him again. You swear to forget the whole thing and speak of it to no one.

In Simple Passion, she starts by stating what writing should aim: to replicate the feeling of witnessing sexual intercourse, that feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgment.

These opening scenes place the reader and writer in a shared space of witnessing a bygone era. In revisiting memories, Ernaux confronts the agony embedded in them, recognizing some truths are too harrowing to voice. However, as time progresses, the persistent presence of the girl from 1958 in her thoughts drives her to break her silence and speak of 'her.' Thus, the contract starts with the breaking of a promise that was made to the past- self.  The open contract potentially would evoke anxiety about witnessing a suspension and moral judgments.  In Simple Passion, which narrates her love affair with a younger Russian diplomat, Ernaux warns readers to anticipate and surrender to a blend of suspenseful tension and astonishment.

Ernaux and Lispector deterritorialize the territory of expression, and the role of the reader, and the text is not given or static. In the Deleuzian sense, "territory" refers to abstract spaces of identity, meaning, or social positioning. Writing becomes a way of navigating and expressing within these territories, potentially deterritorializing (breaking away from conventional meanings or uses) and reterritorializing (creating new meanings or uses). What Annie Ernaux and Lispector show us is that this territory (writing) and expression (becoming) do not mean one knows what they are about to express, but instead, one seeks to find out the meaning of themselves or for themselves to be collected on paper. For Ernaux, writing is crucial in forming existence, as she says in Getting Lost, “but as long as things are not spoken (or written down), they do not exist.” Thus, by writing, Ernaux breaks the promise to the past self that she would not speak of it to anyone. She actualizes herself to existence.

Similar to Ernaux, Lispector begins The Passion According to G.H. with, "I am searching, I am searching. I am trying to understand." Engaging in a monologue with the reader, G.H. requests the reader's hand while she attempts to actualize herself through narration. At the story's beginning, G.H. tells the reader that she will explain what happened to her the previous day. This past event is her realization and actualization of self through her unexpected encounter with a cockroach, where she kills and tastes it. This unexpected encounter with an alien Other helps G.H. lose control—the one who enters the maid’s room to organize (read: control). At the end of her journey within the house, yet in a strange territory (the maid's room), G.H.'s self meets the Other (the animal) and realizes how alien she is to the Other, as well as to her own (human) body/self.

Both authors include the Other in their writing as witnesses to their own existence, serving as a catalyst for feeling alive through their journey of self-(re)invention. Whether it's in a village in France (Ernaux) or within her own house (G.H.), both narrators give birth to themselves beyond the power and control of structures (society, religion, nonhuman realm, lovers), and they seek witnesses to their realization and actualization. And that witness is also the reader. Both authors situate the readers as tentacular witnesses, suggesting that sensorial awakenings would arise.

When Ernaux asks in Getting Lost, "Has he forgotten me?" teeters on the interplay of forgetfulness and remembrance, offering a chance to start anew. “I exist for him; therefore, I am.” Each meeting carries the risk of being forgotten, of not being repeated. Thus, the void nurtures hope within the threshold of loss—of the other, of the self, of the event. This suspension, as she says, “Hope keeps me alive,” becomes a form of masochistic pleasure-pain interplay, where the suspense incites pain and, thereby, a sense of aliveness. But Ernaux is not concerned with the reader’s voice or her lovers’. She wants them to witness her emerging existence.

In Getting Lost, Ernaux contemplates her relationship with her Russian diplomat lover through a series of introspective inquiries. She grapples with difficult questions internally, never posing them directly to her lover. "What binds us to each other? For me, it’s emptiness. I know. And for him?" A question like this becomes a shared concern with Ernaux and the reader, floating in-between space, unanswered. Soon, the reader surrenders and realizes that any answer coming from the lover would not change a thing. The lover's answer is not what Ernaux is after. She is after emerging her existence(s). She makes herself exist through writing. This form of writing is not for the other but for the self, as she has not revealed her journals for a long time. Thus, the territory of expression, writing, is an evolving and growing space where one actualizes herself in each event, as well as in each attempt.

The reading and writing contract between reader and writer is not static, but instead in the flow of the intra-action of both parties, without making and actualizing a promise. The contract between the author and the reader goes on, even after the practice of reading is concluded. Lispector knows this very well and states in the last line of Água Viva, “What I’m writing to you goes on, and I am bewitched.” Her statement is a confirmation of the reader-writer's open contract. While Ernaux says I’m not writing for the love of the reader, Lispector says, “Give me your hand,” and both authors have their control swayed by the reader. The presence of the author, reader, and text becomes enmeshed, leaving the reader and the author in the realm of mutual surrender. Thus, the text is becoming what the reader makes of it; the reader is becoming what the text makes of her. The publishing of the writing can only be important when it meets the eye of the reader, without the author’s control. The writing is in the realm of the reader’s interpretation, the author's intention remaining under the veil of interpretation.

Give me your hand

Clarice Lispector might best describe the relationship between reader and author. In Água Viva, she says, “But I want to have the freedom to say unconnected things as a deep way of touching you.” The touch, a deep way of touching the reader, exemplifies Lispector’s intentional affective writing. Breaking the boundaries of confinement of a text, Lispector wants to touch the reader. Deeply. This touch practice requires intimacy and vulnerability, as the narrator asks the reader to let go of the Reason and surrender to the deep touch, an affective unfolding. The open contract between Lispector’s readers and herself is that both parties must surrender to the flow.

When G.H. says, “Give me your unknown hand since life is hurting me, and I don’t know how to speak – the reality is too delicate, the only reality is delicate, my unreality and my imagination are heavier,” she knows that she is taking a risk by asking the unknown hand of the reader, but she needs a hand in making sense of the self. She chooses the hand of the unknown, already in the position of surrendering to the reader’s mercy. Through her journey of finding the stranger within, G.H. repetitively asks for the hand of the reader. She attempts to grasp reality and says, “Creating isn't imagination; it is taking the great risk of grasping reality. Understanding is creation.” Through the journey of understanding and creating, G.H. requests the hand of the reader. Because she, in the end, wants to “understand us.” Since “It is a forbidden subject not because it is bad but because we risk ourselves.” Understanding ‘us’ is risking ourselves. Thus, we need each other’s company. Otherwise, we might lose reality, and it is too delicate.

The journey of discovering the stranger within does not exclude the body; it requires the body as an actant. G.H. tastes the cockroach's paste, she feels revulsion and vomits. From the sickness of the body, she transitions to a transcendental stage to question the soul and the body. She says, "I had finally spit out my whole soul," suggesting a form of resetting the human form to the neutral, inhuman, dehumanized animal form. In this state, she finds the 'truth' of the self (God/nature). Through the body's painful journey, she reaches a state of grace, where she is alive with all her sensations, remains in the present, and gives up hope because hope concerns the future.  The body in the present makes her understand that solitude "is only the human destiny." In this solitude, one connects with others, the creator and the creatures, and becomes united. The taste of the cockroach makes her realize that the animal is not of her kind, "in the hour of love for a man, that woman is living her own kind. I understand that I had already done the equivalent of living the paste of the roach – for the law is that I must live with the matter of a person and not of a roach."A similar realization happens with Ernaux when she confesses in Simple Passion, “I had the privilege of knowing that we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.”

Both authors dare to share their solitude with the reader. By the end of the book, G.H. changes role with the reader and says that now she is in the state of grace – which is a full embrace of the solitude and being alive, as a human, as a woman, as something not a roach, which she has seen and tasted fully- she says, “and now I am not taking your hand for myself. I am the one giving you my hand.” 

The reader seems to have fulfilled her role, as G.H. says:

 “Now I need your hand, not so that I won't be scared, but so that you won't. I know that believing in all this will be, at first, your great solitude. But the moment will come when you will give me your hand, no longer out of solitude but as I am doing now: out of love. Like me, you will no longer fear adding yourself to the extremely energetic sweetness of God. Solitude is the only human destiny” 

What does it mean to hold hands with the narrator? What forms of touchings can evolve? Holding hands with the narrator, which requires touch without touching, keeps the reader awake to the meaning of touch. The reader is not a passive subject. Instead, she operates her own machine at that specific moment, within that specific societal time period, in that specific location, holding her own situatedness. The reader-author touch, then, is an active event, an intra-action of relationality, as Karen Barad would say. For Barad, touching is not a simple act where one entity actively reaches out and makes contact with another, assumed to be passive. Instead, she proposes a more complex, entangled understanding of interaction that she terms intra-action. The act of touching is not merely the coming into contact of two separate entities but an event that illustrates the mutual constitution of the entities involved. They do not merely interact but intra-act, highlighting that distinctions between entities are not fixed but are continually being constituted and reconstituted through their entangled relations.

Tact comes from ‘touch,’ paving the way to tactfulness, gentle relationality, and intimate closeness. What we touch as readers is the book’s form, a material, whether digital or paper; we cannot touch it as it is intended to be touched. However, the act of touching itself is complicated. It was Aristotle who complicated the physicality of touch in De Anima. There is a mystery in the action of touch since we do not know which organ is ‘responsible’ for touch. So, the eye following the letters on the paper is indeed touching the paper and the meaning, transferring all the tactfulness over the body-mind. The eye of the reader is the whole tactful, affective body. Thus, the tact-touch-hold my hand reminds the reader of the physicality of touch but also the untouchability of the other. This unrepresentable realm of touch, and the pulsation between the reader and the author who seeks to be touched, remains the drive of the continuity of life, a resonance without losing its pulse. A touch that never ceases once it is actualized.

Karen Barad complicates the question of touch by asking, “When two hands touch, how close are they? What is the measure of closeness?” Suggesting that the self is dispersed/diffracted through time and being, Barad delves into the explanation of quantum physics, stating that touch is the action of both the one who touches and the one being touched. Then, the action is complicated because that reaction always leaves the question of who is the one touching when two hands touch each other. Both of them and none of them because there is always a pulsating gap between two organs/skins, which cannot be foreclosed. In that gap, the toucher and the touched, both being the same body and the other, share their intra-actions with themselves. The touch, then, whether a physical act or a metaphorical request, is a realm with gaps, allowing one to touch the stranger within. Barad calls it the alterity that, therefore, I am.

Barad adds: “Together with Derrida, we might then say that “identity [...] can only affirm itself as identity to itself by opening itself to the hospitality of a difference from itself or of a difference with itself.”  This is what G.H. does by attempting to reach out to the reader’s unknown hand. She goes inwards to the stranger within, to conclude the “therefore I am.” The reader becomes the facilitator or catalyst, like every entity which is the Other to the self. Be it the lover of Ernaux, an apple that Lori bites, or the cockroach that terrifies G.H.; each is there to open a way inwards to the stranger within. Ernaux and Lispector dare go inward to understand and unearth those strangers without concern for being understood, letting themselves happen[1] while allowing the reader to come into being. Consequently, the complete touch of the other becomes impossible and, more importantly, not a matter of concern. As G.H. remembers her touching the cockroach, she says:

"And I was not even touching the thing. I was just touching the space that goes from me to the vital node- I was within the zone of cohesive and controlled vibration of the vital node. The vital node vibrates at the vibration of my arrival.” 

Solitude: A Gift

“… is it love to give one another one’s own solitude as a present? For it is the utmost thing we can give of ourselves.”

  July 8, 1972, Too Much of Life, Clarice Lispector

G.H.’s internal journey, prompted by her encounter with the cockroach, concludes with her surrendering the unknown, letting go of the need to control, organize, and understand things. “Giving up,” she says, “is a revelation.” (186). “I give up, and all of a sudden, the world fits inside my weak hand.” (187). She handed herself over "with the trust of belonging to the unknown." (189). Feeling all the vibrations surrounding her and realizing the ‘essence’ of the other, G.H. reaches a moment of joy. She adds: What I am feeling now is a joy. Through the living roach, I am coming to understand that I, too, am whatever is alive.

Holding hands, the touch, which can only be invisible and unsensual between the reader and the narrator, precedes its metaphorical form and becomes affective. The reader makes the narrator exist by becoming an addressee and hand holder, and the reader starts existing through reading, following, and holding hands with the narrator. But G.H. realizes that wholly touching is impossible; it is the solitude that one realizes in different forms of touches. The touch, which can be tasting the cockroach or holding the hand of the lover, in the end, reflects the reality that solitude exists and that one should surrender.

Annie Ernaux seems unconcerned about touch with the reader but writes to exist. With or without the explicit intention, the (im)possibility of a touch is in the air. As she has stated, she does not write for the reader, underscoring her indifference to the fate of the girl from the summer camp of 1958 or the woman who had an affair with a Russian diplomat. Perhaps this detachment stems from her having moved beyond these people. They have already been unearthed. In the intra-action of the girl reading-writing enmeshment, the act of touching without touch materializes in Ernaux’s writings, rendering the act of touch even more elusive. As she brings to light buried girls and women, their touch becomes more unattainable, confined to history. The girl’s body in A Girl’s Story is no longer a virgin; it has transformed over time, away from the reader’s gaze. This body is unearthed under the control of both the journal-writing girl and the narrator, Annie, preserved in time and space for the reader’s consideration. Neither the reader nor the narrator can touch that girl, not merely because such touch is an impossible assumption but also because she no longer exists in the present.

What remains, then, is witnessing the evolution of that girl through events and observing what she is becoming. Meanwhile, the reader embarks on a similar journey of becoming. Ernaux presents a path leading to the reader’s own transformation. The girl from the 1958 summer camp isn’t ‘done’ or gone; she manifests in the present in another form and interpretation. However, her ‘essence’ from ‘back then’ cannot be fully recaptured. This poses challenges due to the limits of memory, the control of the narrator, and changes in time and place. Yet, nothing prevents that girl from revealing herself in 2024, here in the Netherlands, before my eyes, as she has ‘haunted’ Ernaux throughout her life. Ernaux charts the journey of that summer girl, allowing the reader to observe and remember her as she is portrayed; memory flows like a river without the reader’s touch or even the possibility of grasping it. The moments pass, and the girl transitions from one internal wave to the next. The reader learns to surf through each event, holding hands with herself, the adrift girl, and the narrator.

The reader is not left preoccupied with what will happen between the girl and the Other (lover H., S., or friend R); instead, she is left wondering about the girl's becoming. This questioning phase dissolves soon after the reader gets on the surfboard, dives into the journey, and finds themselves unable to stop reading Ernaux’s books. The reader is left with the question, "What am I going to do with all these affective pulsations within me?" Is there more to satisfy my voyeurism of the Other(me), which seems to share the same insecurities and desires as mine? Or is there more to feed my desire to absorb the suffering and strength of the Other? Is there more to understand about the self through the other?

By presenting her lovers as entrants to her life and body, Ernaux shares the solitudes and multitudes of a woman. The solitude is rooted in her working-class upbringing in France, burdened with her parents’ insecurities and their aspirations for wealth and her intellectual elevation, all while navigating the stark realities of her own existence. Through Ernaux's candid narrative, the reader watches as the girl matures, confronting the raw truths. Annie Ernaux gifts her solitude to the readers, leaving them contemplative solitude, pondering what to do with this profound offering.

The unearthing of all the girls we have buried

Annie Ernaux seems to follow the advice of Hélène Cixous, who challenges us in The Laugh of the Medusa:

And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly." Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. (877).

By recollecting her journals and memories, Ernaux actualizes herself through writing and publishing, daring to expose herself to the reader’s gaze. As Derrida would say, Ernaux leaves her body to the hospitality/ hostility of the Other.  You write at the mercy of the other; someone will read your writing, something that emerges from your body. It requires intimacy and vulnerability, no matter the subject. Your body engages in an act, and through your writing, this act is witnessed by others. Reading is not a passive act either; you surrender yourself to the author’s mercy, following the narrator’s lead without knowing the impact it may have on you.

When Annie Ernaux challenges the literary realm and expands what constitutes literature, she recollects her memories, bringing together fragmented aspects of herself. Some might say she is confronting her trauma and seeking reconciliation with herself. Writing might have been her way of alleviating pain, understanding herself better, and releasing her multiple selves, but it might feel akin to removing a tight shoe at the end of a long day. This removed shoe becomes lodged in your feet, gradually constricting your feet; now, you have been provided with the tools to unearth the girls you’ve buried. Keep walking and surrender. Thus, facing the women Ernaux presents, you are not asked to do something with those women. As if she says, do something with what I have done to you. Do something that these women have done to me. Write. Surrender.

Without concern for what she might have done to the reader, or without the intention to do anything at all, she enables me to unearth the girls I have buried in my body’s archive. This is the point where the author and the reader part ways; the author’s job is done, and she need not worry about her influence. Every piece of writing affects someone in some way. Carrying those girls makes my chest and shoulders heavier; I should let them fly to move on or create more space for new girls to arrive, refreshing the air in my body. Reading Clarice Lispector and Ernaux made me realize the power of vulnerability and the fact that I am not alone in my loneliness. I am what I am, and what I am yet to become in the journey with the others, as you, the reader, here with me to witness my own daring act: writing.

Holding the hands of Lispector, Woolf, Cixous, and Ernaux, some of the buried girls have been awakening. My act of writing, too, was a form of understanding myself, as well as understanding those girls to whom I am a stranger now. I am a stranger and (soul)kin of those women described by these authors, and I came to the realization that each solitude is unique and that a gift is something courageous. Lispector and Ernaux dared to dive into the journey by surrendering what was to come and gave me a hand to unearth the buried girls trapped in me.

Reading these women cracked me slowly open and made me realize the sprout within, all those women that have been buried, ready to face the surface and embrace the sun. The past is still unknown to the present and the future itself, and one should surrender to the present. The present is yet to be unfolded before my eyes, and the unknown past lives before me with a completely different sense of meaning. The twenty-three-year-old woman, watching the spiderwebs in the corner of the police station, waiting to be picked up by a friend, does not know she cannot save the world. She has not yet forged a life of her own and is throwing herself into the cause of the collective. Or the twenty-year-old woman who was beaten by her boyfriend on her birthday doesn't leave him because she has developed feminist tools or a form of self-respect; she was scared of him and left him because she possessed the survival instinct of an animal. That girl who was searching for the meaning of love in others didn't realize that she first needed to love herself. She spent years giving herself away, at any cost, for the sake of being loved. She did not dare to get close to any man as she had done before, not because men are unworthy of seeking love, but simply because she was scared. The woman who is reading Lispector on a plane and watching the clouds has no clue that she is going to have one of the best days of her life; she falls from the sidewalk because of uncontrolled laughing, thinking she is on top of things while swimming in the magma of hell; the cold, indifferent, and cruel to the past self and the surroundings, this woman is following the apprenticeship of life and living. The coldness that becomes a “cocoon” and vehicle, as Deleuze puts it, is “both a protective millie and medium” and keeps trying to make sense with narrowed eyes.     

These women of many are not only me but also me, transforming the pain into anger and a kind of pulsation. Each woman is a particle of variation of selves; their desires and disappointments are down in my roots, waiting for my body to be tilled and embraced. They have been waiting to be remembered, forgiven and embraced. They come out to face the sun through their wounds. Each breath becomes a soothing wind on the scars, which were once openly bleeding wounds. It is thanks to these women and others for offering me an embrace to wrap up a portion of my solitude, paving a way to keep pulsing somewhere out there. Let Clarice echo me here: I am alive. Like a wound, flower in the flesh, the path of sorrowful blood is opened within me.

[1] In Agua Viva, Lispector repeatedly states that she is letting herself happen with the unconnected stream of thoughts.