.
Close-up of foam on the surface of a tide pool, Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, California. When plankton crushes ashore, it dies and disintegrates creating foam-like bubbles, which are left on the floor of tide pools floor after the ocean retreats. The bubbles display all the same properties as soap bubbles, displaying typical interference colors, except they last much longer than soap bubbles. The organic material of the plankton, which lowers the surface tension of the water (as soap does), and preserves the film, is responsible for these colors: photo by Brocken Inaglory, 1 March 2008
But now I'm interested in the mystery of the mirror. I'm looking for a way to paint it or to speak of it with the word. But what is a mirror? The word mirror does not exist, only mirrors exist, for a single one is an infinity of mirrors. Mirror is not something created but something born. You don't need many to have the sparkling and the sleepwalking mine: two are enough, and one reflects the reflection of what the other reflected, in a trembling that is transmitted in an intense and mute telegraphic message, insistent, liquidity in which you can plunge a fascinated hand and pull it out dripping with the reflections of that hard water that is the mirror. Like the seer's crystal ball, it drags me toward the void that for the seer is his field of meditation, and in me the field of silences and silences. And I can barely speak, with so much silence unfurling into others.
Mirror? That crystallized world that has in itself enough space to go ever ceaselessly forward: for mirror is the deepest space that exists. And it is a magic thing: whoever has a broken piece can go with it to meditate in the desert. Seeing oneself is extraordinary. Like a cat whose fur bristles, I bristle when faced with myself. From the desert I would also return empty, illuminated and translucent, and with the same vibrating silence of a mirror. Its form doesn't matter: no form manages to circumscribe and alter it. Mirror is light. A tiny piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.
Remove its frame or the lines of its edges, and it grows like spilling water.
Mirror? That crystallized world that has in itself enough space to go ever ceaselessly forward: for mirror is the deepest space that exists. And it is a magic thing: whoever has a broken piece can go with it to meditate in the desert. Seeing oneself is extraordinary. Like a cat whose fur bristles, I bristle when faced with myself. From the desert I would also return empty, illuminated and translucent, and with the same vibrating silence of a mirror. Its form doesn't matter: no form manages to circumscribe and alter it. Mirror is light. A tiny piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.
Remove its frame or the lines of its edges, and it grows like spilling water.
ClariceLispector (1920-1977): from Água Viva (1973), translated by Stefan Tobler, New Directions, 2012
Close-up on foam on the surface of a tide pool, Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, California: photo by Brocken Inaglory, 1 March 2008
ClariceLispector (1920-1977): photographer unknown, n.d.; image via VICE
ClariceLispector (1920-1977): photographer unknown, n.d.; image via André (SkyHeLL), 9 November 2004)
ClariceLispector (1920-1977): photographer unknown, n.d.; image via BrazilNYC, 12 November 2011André (SkyHeLL), 9 November 2004)
ClariceLispector: Four novels, 2012: photographer unknown, n.d. (via New Directions)
I want to write to you like someone learning. I photograph each instant. I deepen the words as if I were painting, more than an object, its shadow. I don’t want to ask why, you can always ask why and always get no answer -- could I manage to surrender to the expectant silence that follows a question without an answer? Though I sense that some place or time the great answer for me does exist.
(from Água Viva)