dance #280, matter sensitized by the shiver of seconds

Saturday September 26, 2009

Matter sensitized by the shiver of seconds

“I want to possess the atoms of time. And I want to capture the present which, by its very nature, is forbidden me: the present flees from me, the moment escapes me, the present is myself forever in the now. Only in the act of love—by clear, starlike abstraction of what one feels—do we capture the unknown quality of the instant, which is hard and crystalline and vibrant in the air, and life is that incalculable instant, greater than the event itself: in love, the instant, an impersonal jewel, glitters in the air, a strange bodily glory, matter sensitized by the shiver of seconds—and what one feels is at the same time immaterial and so objective that it happens as if it were outside the body, sparkling on high, happiness, happiness is the matter of time and the instant par excellence.” Clarice Lispector, Agua viva, p. 4

1:00 a.m. Dorion reads from Clarice Lispector’s Agua viva (The Stream of Life). We are captivated. Reading and rereading. We pause between her “now-instants”. There is a dance in every one of her sentences.  I alight on the phrase, “matter sensitized by the shiver of seconds” and feel that as an energizing force moving through her prose. The drawing comes in the midst of the conversation like an electronic pulse, as we talk in excited tones and gestures. The rains arrived tonight, refreshing this parched city.

~ by nmyers on September 27, 2009.