lycanthropia

I wake up this morning with “Jackson” playing in my head, quiet but bell-clear, one of Lucinda Williams’ more resigned songs. Even with my eyes closed I know I will choke up if I try to sing it, to get it out of my ears.

once I get to lafayette
I’m not gonna mind one bit

once I get to baton rouge
I won’t cry a tear for you

It’s that inane time of the month where no matter what I do there’s an ex-shaped space in my chest. I work as many hours a day as I can, but in the interstices feel completely bereft all over again, to my vast frustration. Like it hasn’t been positively aeons of time for me to have amply understood/ accepted/dealt with/moved on from the obvious fact of his departure. A departure which he chose quite clearly yet with great solemnity and an attitude of reluctance, exactly as if he weren’t actually the one chosing it.

And he was so polite. He was so terribly regretful, but firm, and polite—

and for all your talk
you don’t say much that’s real
I think I know more than you
about the way that you feel

You know there is a difference between affect and mood, my best friend recently reminded me of this in an email and that difference is very apparent right now. My mood is stable, my baseline is calm and sanguine and actually unflappable. I bathe and I eat and I get to school on time and I do things and I sleep (except for the ridiculous nightmares, and the cat wanting affection at four a.m.). Yet my affect is completely rubber-band and volatile—almost anything brings me to the brink of tears, for days now. I hit pause, sternly, on all emotions when I go into a class or to teach, and can manage to sit still during a three-hour seminar; but must flee the classroom during the fifteen-minute break to pace outside, laugh, talk to myself, fight the lump in my throat and the pricking in my eyes. Being around other people is another way to hit pause; limbic resonance with other mammals still the ultimate distraction from it, from the it, from that cringing voice speaking out of the cavernous black region somewhere near the cardiac muscle.

(He was my best friend, where did he go? I know he never would have left me.—she whimpers fretfully, monotonously; and cannot be reasoned with.)

There’s all this misery, says my workshop leader disbelievingly, leafing through the poem-object like she doesn’t quite want to touch its pages (or that may be me, I’m increasingly paranoid these days, as my writing gets worse and worse)—why don’t you turn it around, rail against fate, camp it up? There is missed potential here for real tragicomedy, where the narrator could maintain more distance and play himself for laughs—

And here I am all this time thinking I was being funny, or wanting to be. No one ever got my lyric jokes but him. He always laughed during my readings while everyone else sat stony-faced because Poetry Is Serious.

This blog also seems serious, so serious, and I don’t know how to make it as outrageously ribald as I generally feel everything is. I laugh and laugh these days. What else am I going to do, when everythingisterrible.com? See, even if I say this, it will sound melodramatic and ghastly and like you should intervene and call my psychiatrist or something, but I think it’s funny: all my simmering wild young potential has gotten its fancy education and traveled overseas and divorced its first husband and decided it didn’t have time for children and, look, arrived at midlife and turned out not to be any big whoop after all, though I sacrificed everything I could lay my hands on for it—and it’s funny! it’s so goddamned funny! I’m not Nietzsche after all! or Dickinson or Hopkins or Anne Carson or Wallace or David Markson or any of my classmates like Zadie, Nicole, Jhumpa—, maybe because I wasn’t crazy enough, or because I was too crazy, or because I wrote too many journal entries, or not enough, or because I forgot to drop out of school, or because I am just plain old not talented enough to be even a minor poet—whatever happened, whatever made it all not pan out, I think it hysterically funny, I drive around Montrose laughing until my cheekbones hurt. Whatever needed to be there for an immensely gifted ambitious girl to become a productive achieved artist/thinker wasn’t there, didn’t happen, and now it’s just the usual bits of sweeping up, it seems to me, quite factually, without any drama whatever I say this—the aging ailing parents and the years of caretaking, the protracted physical struggle against gravity, the pouring of the self into service—generously, without bitterness, into teaching and students and the essential work of midwifing the next generation of writers, the devoted selflessness, the committee meetings, the inevitable lumps under the skin in six months or forty more years, the university memorial service. I find all this hilarious and wry. Novels could be written out of it, amazing hair-raising tear-starting novels, and have been, and will be, by people who aren’t me. I love them for doing it.

But me, I can’t make anyone see how funny this is. Not the way Beckett could; or Kafka, or Borges. You’ll just have to read them. They got the joke.

I am (believe it or not) trying to say I still say yes to all of it, a dogged humorous yes, or maybe more of an okay. Okay, why the hell not. Maybe not an outrageous campy yes, or a yes where anyone else feels inspired to join in, or feels I’ve said it for them, said it where they could not: but yes. Okay. The pointlessness and the stupid death following hard on the heels of a beautiful, energy-consuming life which nonetheless accomplished nothing (and what is there to be accomplished anyway)? Okay to the loss of all that. All the shimmering thoughts, all the complicated ideas, all the playful linkings of words and skillful touches of lovers, all the meticulously unravelled nightmares and dreams and the books read carefully multiple times and the laboriously achieved spiritual insights, all, all dissolving into materiality and leaking out of a deliquescing brainpan? Okay. And the universe reaching some inevitable grey-goo state of equilbrium eventually, with no more clinamen, no more atomic motion, no more contrast, nothing generative ever again, no more collapsing and expanding and reemergence of complex life forms, just a temperate equilibrated bland vague static existence of matter without differentiation? Sure, to that too, okay. I say okay.

(You have the chemical physicist next door to thank for this cheerful vision of cosmological entropy, by the way. It’s much less optimistic than my former Stuart Kaufman-inflected complexity theory worldview about life endlessly reevolving again and again—)

So yesterday I drove away from school, away from an tortuous three-hour seminar on Foucault (I still can’t figure out what it is—just painful boredom? brain zaps? fluorescent lighting? air-conditioning? those stupid little-kid desks with tops so slanted that your pens always roll off onto the floor? I don’t know why, but after about an hour of such a class my very bones start to hurt, the mental akathisia grows unbearable, I get flashes of jumping up, shrieking OTOTOTOI POPOI DA, enacting some strange and obscene prelanguage mystery ritual to break the stultified droning educational form, no matter how “enthusiastic” or “participatory” the conversation is it seems anguishingly dull and pro forma and predictable to me—teaching isn’t this way, but being in class makes me feel like I am going batshit insane—)

—driving, as I say, away from the campus, laughing at myself and half-weeping and playing Ani DiFranco (“cause I know the biggest crime / is just to / throw up your hands”), accepting that estrogen depletion has transparently made me into a sloshing bucket of emotionality, and I get to be that way in the car, no one will see, no one cares anyway. I pulled up in my driveway and the neighbor immediately apologetically asked if we could cancel our dinner plans—we were going to hit up some allegedly fabulous non-white-people fried-chicken place near campus, I had been furtively entertaining okra fantasies all day—because he had a more tempting engagement with a hot young number with whom he hooks up whenever she’s available, which apparently is seldom because “she’s really complicated,” and I couldn’t not laugh at the look on his face (dismayed yet helplessly allured) as he admitted all this. The sole source of my exasperation was that just a few hours before I had stood in the college library with all four disks of Brideshead Revisited in my hand, debating whether I should check them out, and put them back on the shelf telling myself no, I would have company tonight and then tomorrow I needed to work; and, I could have picked up my own damn okra on the way home and then fallen into the sofa-quilt-cat elysium and not left the house again for 24 hours; whereas now I would have to go back into the cruel world.

Which is what I did. I wound up blank-minded at Blockbuster, staring at those insensate walls of a zillion copies of the same movies, leaving with a strange random collection of DVDs (3:10 to Yuma, Mother, Interview with a Vampire) and stumbling equally thoughtlessly into the Boston Market next door, acquiring mashed sweet potatoes and cornbread. The last time I went there was Thanksgiving 2008—my ex and I had a tradition if you could call it that of nontraditional Thanksgivings, the best one was in Mexico and involved fish tacos is my memory, but buying a whole sweet potato pie five minutes before Boston Market closed one night might also be a candidate.

(Aside: why do I keep dividing my email into “Sent” and “Saved” on the one hand, and a file called “Houston” on the other hand? When will my new Houston friends stop being Houston friends and start being just friends? It will take many more months, but when that happens I will know I live here.)

Doesn’t this just happen every autumn semester, as it has since my first one in Santa Fe, confused about boys, flunking Greek quizzes, and wandering all day down by the river in the yellow aspens?

I can’t write today. I can’t. All blogs will melt and I’m not a funny poet, and today is the last possible day to write this book review. Also the cat doesn’t like it when I sing. She folds her ears back disapprovingly and narrows her eyes. Probably I would’ve been a great chanteuse if not for her. Probably I would have been a celebrated heartwrenching beauty like Emmylou Harris.

There never was that unfettered pipeline, the flute from the throat of the loon, for words to get from the inside of me to the outside. It’s okay. There was matcha and my favorite pair of panties with red rosebuds and the kindest friends anyone could have. And if I ever let another driver out ahead of me in traffic, or made the way slightly easier for someone, or gave a student an extension or a Kleenex, or said nothing when one of my parents was insulting, or held a door, or stayed up late talking someone off the ceiling, or shared my dinner with a friend, wasn’t that enough? In the parking lot I rolled down the window and let out a mosquito, so it wouldn’t have to spend all day stuck hungry in a hot car. The light slanted across the ugly supermarket construction, which apparently has replaced the last open space in Montrose, there was some argument about whether those remaining few wild acres should be a community park but of course instead it will be a giant chain store literally right across the street from the very sweet and wonderful neighborhood grocery that has been there for forever, I have already resolved I will never set foot in the new store. I drove past, a wet yellow light fell on the metal I-beams and the blacktop rollers and the men in hard hats and the sign telling how they dug up all the trees and carefully replanted them elsewhere, and I thought: how sweet it has all been, how sufficient, how very very fine. The gods are still here suffering alongside us, grieving along with us our laughable futility.

oh for the nightingale’s pure song and a fate like hers
but mine is the sheer edge of the tearing iron

(Ἀγαμέμνων 1148-49)

Read in Washington, November eighteenth, 1923, at the unveiling of a statue of three leaders in the cause of Equal Rights for Women.

Upon this marble bust that is not I
Lay the round, formal wreath that is not fame;
But in the forum of my silenced cry
Root ye the living tree whose sap is flame.
I, that was proud and valiant, am no more;—
Save as a dream that wanders wide and late,
Save as a wind that rattles the stout door,
Troubling the ashes in the sheltered grate.
The stone will perish; I shall be twice dust.
Only my standard on a taken hill
Can cheat the mildew and the red-brown rust
And make immortal my adventurous will.
Even now the silk is tugging at the staff:
Take up the song; forget the epitaph.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

Facts the reader may find of interest after reading this poem:

(1) Suffrage worker Inez Milholland collapsed while speaking at a rally in Los Angeles and subsequently died, due to complications from anemia which were due in turn to her taxing speaking schedule. She was only 30.

(2) National Women’s Party leader Alice Paul wasted no time in making her into a martyr for their cause; helpful to this end were Milholland’s previous glamorous appearances on a white horse, and her final public words: “Mr. President [Woodrow Wilson], how long must women wait for liberty?”

(3) Milholland had been happily married to Dutch importer Eugen Boissevain.

(4) Boissevain later married poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

(5) Both Inez and Vincent attended Vassar College, but a few years apart.

(6) In this admittedly kind of clunky sonnet, Millay does nonetheless succeed in wrangling to her own ends the conventions concerning the frailty of mortal beloveds and the questionable durability of memorializing same in verse.

(7) Millay wrote the sonnet, originally called “The Pioneers,” in 1921.

(8) American women were only granted the vote (not the right to vote) in 1920.

(9) The statue to which Millay is referring, by sculptor Adelaide Johnson, has been irreverently dubbed “Three Women in a Bathtub,” and it has moved around rather a lot, which is surprising since it weighs eight tons. You may currently see it, if you visit DC, on display in the Capitol building; it depicts Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

(10) While Millay was (so far) wrong about the statue crumbling to dust, she had a point: as long as the song of dissidence continues to be sung, that would’ve made Milholland happy.

Because (11) it hasn’t even been a hundred years since women were given the vote. Because as much as our country hates on its people of color, it actually manages to hate on women worse. Because even as a child I was taught that Susan B. Anthony dollars were wrong, were immoral, that she was a bad woman. And because, as I keep trying to tell my poor students, the real American history is that of civil disobedience and protest—not our ever fancier and increasingly resistant government, but our ongoing everloving refusal to sit down and shut up.

Or as another writer puts it:

I love my country; by which I mean
I am indebted joyfully
to all the people throughout its history
who have fought the government to make right;
where so many cunning sons and daughters,
our foremothers and forefathers
came singing through slaughter,
came through hell and high water
so that we could stand here
and behold breathlessly the sight:
how a raging river of tears
cut a grand canyon of light—

(ani difranco, “grand canyon“)

Reader, it is the week of spring break here in glorious Phoenicia. So far all this has meant for underemployed me is yet more unproductive day-sleeping and pointless (?) social networking; but also I am trying to take the opportunity to retool my thesis/book ms completely, converting it for once and for all from Still Falling into Cherry-emily (which mostly involves removing surprisingly tedious suicide narratives and replacing them with break-up lyrics, for it seems Cherry-emily is all about sex instead of death).

I did drive to the post office to mail out two copies to publishers yesterday, and want to post four more by the end of the month. I am not entirely sure why I continue to submit it, instead of just saving my money and self-publishing; but it seems the thing to do, the attempt to make, at least for a few more months. I think after December I’ll officially call it quits and start looking around for a good print-on-demand venue.

Otherwise there’s been a bit of poem-drafting, and a fair amount of Step Four writing. Also at some point there must be some paper-grading, but knowing me I will probably save that for Sunday night around, oh, 11 pm.

Thus, in the spirit of completely inappropriate frivolity, particularly given the fresh horrors unveiling themselves hourly in Japan, this will be a blogpost about pretty much nothing. Because nothing is what’s happening with me, and my mind is a blank. I know these paragraph breaks don’t make any sense. Really I just want to go out drinking with a friend, but everyone’s doing other things and I wouldn’t know where to go, or really with whom I could have the kind of conversation I want to have. It’s a deep loneliness, untouchable in its precision, but not uncomfortable, just unfillable; and I really don’t mind being alone rather than being with the wrong person.

Instead I go for a long slow stroll this evening around the ridiculously named Town & Country mall just north of where I live—it’s outdoors, but not quite a strip mall—there’s this kind of sad simulacrum of little cobbled streets and water fountains etc., but it’s a pleasant enough leg-stretch. And the orange trees are in blossom and the smell is so fragrant and sweet it makes your throat ache from the sugar of it. I go forth in quest of frozen yogurt, and lo, I obtain it from the self-dispensing machines, coconut and vanilla, with strawberries, papaya, and mango on top. Then meander elderly-fashion through the mall, huffing orange blossom and slurping yogurt, eating it with a wooden spoon I keep in my purse. (There’s nothing that makes me feel worse in the world than using yet another “disposable” plastic spoon. Well, maybe stomach flu. And nuclear meltdowns.)

I feel gentle and mildly happy, in my embroidered white hippie shirt I’ve had for years and my sloppy green Thai fisherman pants and my flip-flops. And I drive home with the car windows down, Ani DiFranco singing “present/infant” and it seems just for me, the way a song can.

lately I been glaring into mirrors
picking myself apart
you’d think at my age I’d have thought
of something better to do—

At a red light I consider the fact that, since Utah and Houston and Denver have already notified some of their acceptees according to the redoubtable Mr. Abramson, this presumably means I am not among them—at least, not unless someone turns down a spot, which they still might. I’m probably second-tier, reasonably speaking. I mean I did go to Cambridge.

And as the light turns green, I consider how unworked-up I am about the whole thing. That I really don’t care where I live next, only that I’m a tiny bit anxious only UNLV will accept me and I’ll have spend my forties in Las Vegas. But even that I don’t care about. I don’t care a thing about what happens to me. For now I have frozen yogurt and ashtanga and the cat, and I write poems. I am a stupid human, a simple thing, and, as the Clarice Lispector story says (and my ex loved to quote), today no one ate me yet.

I’ll find it for you, that story—it’s one of the best stories ever written. You’ll love it. It will redeem today even in my lazy eyes, if not me.

§

The Smallest Woman in the World.

In the depths of Equatorial Africa the French explorer, Marcel Pretre, hunter and man of the world, came across a tribe of surprisingly small pygmies. Therefore he was even more surprised when he was informed that a still smaller people existed, beyond forests and distances. So he plunged farther on.

In the Eastern Congo, near Lake Kivu, he really did discover the smallest pygmies in the world. And—like a box within a box within a box—obedient, perhaps, to the necessity nature sometimes feels of outdoing herself—among the smallest pygmies in the world there was the smallest of the smallest pygmies in the world.

Among mosquitoes and lukewarm trees, among leaves of the most rich and lazy green, Marcel Pretre found himself facing a woman seventeen and three-quarter inches high, full-grown, black, silent—”Black as a monkey,” he informed the press—who lived in a treetop with her little spouse. In the tepid miasma of the jungle, that swells the fruits so early and gives them an almost intolerable sweetness, she was pregnant.

So there she stood, the smallest woman in the world. For an instant, in the buzzing heat, it seemed as if the Frenchman had unexpectedly reached his final destination. Probably only because he was not insane, his soul neither wavered nor broke its bounds. Feeling an immediate necessity for order and for giving names to what exists, he called her Little Flower. And in order to be able to classify her among the recognizable realities, he immediately began to collect facts about her.

Her race will soon be exterminated. Few examples are left of this species, which, if it were not for the sly dangers of Africa, might have multipied. Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water, insufficient food, and ranging beasts, the great threat to the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes, a threat that surrounds them in the silent air, like the dawn of battle. The Bahundes hunt them with nets, like monkeys. And eat them. Like that: they catch them in nets and eat them. The tiny race, retreating, always retreating, has finished hiding away in the heart of Africa, where the lucky explorer discovered it. For strategic defense, they live in the highest trees. The women descend to grind and cook corn and to gather greens; the men, to hunt. When a child is born, it is left free almost immediately. It is true that, what with the beasts, the child frequently cannot enjoy this freedom for very long. But then it is true that it cannot be lamented that for such a short life there had been any long, hard work. And even the language that the child learns is short and simple, merely the essentials. The Likoualas use few names; they name things by gestures and animal noises. As for things of the spirit, they have a drum. While they dance to the sound of the drum, a little male stands guard against the Bahundes, who come from no one knows where.

That was the way, then, that the explorer discovered, standing at his very feet, the smallest existing human thing. His heart beat, because no emerald in the world is so rare. The teachings of the wise men of India are not so rare. The richest man in the world has never set eyes on such a strange grace. Right there was a woman that the greed of the most exquisite dream could never have imagined. It was then that the explorer said timidly, and with a delicacy of feeling of which his wife would never have thought him capable: “You are Little Flower.”

At that moment, Little Flower scratched herself where no one scratches. The explorer—as if he were receiving the highest prize for chastity to which an idealistic man dares aspire—the explorer, experienced as he was, looked the other way.

A photograph of Little Flower was published in the colored supplement of the Sunday Papers, life-size. She was wrapped in cloth, her belly already very big. The flat nose, the black face, the splay feet. She looked like a dog.

On that Sunday, in an apartment, a woman seeing the picture of Little Flower in the paper didn’t want to look a second time because “It gives me the creeps.”

In another apartment, a lady felt such perverse tenderness for the smallest of the African women that—an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure—Little Flower could never be left alone to the tenderness of that lady. Who knows to what murkiness of love tenderness can lead? The woman was upset all day, almost as if she were missing something. Besides, it was spring and there was a dangerous leniency in the air.

In another house, a little girl of five, seeing the picture and hearing the comments, was extremely surprised. In a houseful of adults, this little girl had been the smallest human being up until now. And, if this was the source of all caresses, it was also the source of the first fear of the tyranny of love. The existence of Little Flower made the little girl feel—with a deep uneasiness that only years and years later, and for very different reasons, would turn into thought—made her feel, in her first wisdom, that “sorrow is endless.”

In another house, in the consecration of spring, a girl about to be married felt an ecstasy of pity: “Mama, look at her little picture, poor little thing! Just look how sad she is!”

In another house, a clever little boy had a clever idea. “Mummy, if I could put this little woman from Africa in little Paul’s bed when he’s asleep? When he woke up wouldn’t he be frightened? Wouldn’t he howl? When he saw her sitting on his bed? And then we’d play with her! She would be our toy!”

His mother was setting her hair in front of the bathroom mirror at the moment, and she remembered what a cook had told her about life in an orphanage. The orphans had no dolls, and, with terrible maternity already throbbing in their hearts, the little girls had hidden the death of one of the children from the nun. They kept the body in a cupboard and when the nun went out they played with the dead child, giving her baths and things to eat, punishing her only to be able to kiss and console her. In the bathroom, the mother remembered this, and let fall her thoughtful hands, full of curlers. She considered the cruel necessity of loving. And she considered the malignity of our desire for happiness. She considered how ferociously we need to play. How many times we will kill for love. Then she looked at her clever child as if she were looking at a dangerous stranger. And she had a horror of her own soul that, more than her body, had engendered that being, adept at life and happiness. She looked at him atentively and with uncomfortable pride, that child who had already lost two front teeth, evolution evolving itself, teeth falling out to give place to those that could bite better. “I’m going to buy him a new suit,” she decided, looking at him, absorbed. Obstinately, she adorned her gap-toothed son with fine clothes; obstinately, she wanted him very clean, as if his cleanliness could emphasize a soothing superficiality, obstinately perfecting the polite side of beauty. Obstinately drawing away from, and drawing him away from, something that ought to be “black as a monkey.” Then, looking in the bathroom mirror, the mother gave a deliberately refined and social smile, placing a distance of insuperable milleniums between the abstract lines of her features and the crude face of Little Flower. But, with years of practice, she knew that this was going to be a Sunday on which she would have to hide from herself anxiety, dreams, and lost millenniums.

In another house, they gave themselves up to the enthralling task of measuring the seventeen and three-quarter inches of Little Flower against the wall. And, really, it was a delightful surprise: she was even smaller than the sharpest imagination could have pictured. In the heart of each member of the family was born, nostalgic, the desire to have that tiny and indomitable thing for itself, that thing spared having been eaten, that permanent source of charity. The avid family soul wanted to devote itself. To tell the truth, who hasn’t wanted to own a human being just for himself? Which, it is true, wouldn’t always be convenient; there are times when one doesn’t want to have feelings.

“I bet if she lived here it would end in a fight,” said the father, sitting in the armchair and definitely turning the page of the newspaper. “In this house everything ends in a fight.”

“Oh, you, José—always a pessimist,” said the mother.

“But, Mama, have you thought of the size her baby’s going to be?” said the oldest little girl, aged thirteen, eagerly.

The father stirred uneasily behind his paper.

“It should be the smallest black baby in the world,” the mother answered, melting with pleasure. “Imagine her serving our table, with her big little belly!”

“That’s enough!” growled father.

“But you have to admit,” said the mother, unexpectedly offended, “that it is something very rare. You’re the insensitive one.”

And the rare thing itself?

In the meanwhile, in Africa, the rare thing herself, in her heart—and who knows if the heart wasn’t black, too, since once nature has erred she can no longer be trusted—the rare thing herself had something even rarer in her heart, like the secret of her own secret: a minimal child. Methodically, the explorer studied that little belly of the smallest mature human being. It was at this moment that the explorer, for the first time since he had known her, instead of feeling curiousity, or exaltation, or victory, or the scientific spirit, felt sick.

The smallest woman in the world was laughing.

She was laughing, warm, warm—Little Flower was enjoying life. The rare thing herself was experiencing the ineffable sensation of not having been eaten yet. Not having been eaten yet was something that at any other time would have given her the agile impulse to jump from branch to branch. But, in this moment of tranquility, amid the thick leaves of the Eastern Congo, she was not putting this impulse into action—it was entirely concentrated in the smallness of the rare thing itself. So she was laughing. It was a laugh such as only one who does not speak laughs. It was a laugh that the explorer, constrained, couldn’t classify. And she kept on enjoying her own soft laugh, she who wasn’t being devoured. Not to be devoured is the most perfect feeling. Not to be devoured is the secret goal of a whole life. While she was not being eaten, her bestial laughter was as delicate as joy is delicate. The explorer was baffled.

In the second place, if the rare thing herself was laughing, it was because, within her smallness, a great darkness had begun to move.

The rare thing herself felt in her breast a warmth that might be called love. She loved that sallow explorer. If she could have talked and had told him that she loved him, he would have been puffed up with vanity. Vanity that would have collapsed when she added that she also loved the explorer’s ring very much, and the explorer’s boots. And when that collapse had taken place, Little Flower would not have understood why. Because her love for the explorer—one might even say “profound love,” since, having no other resources, she was reduced to a profundity—her profound love for the explorer would not have been at all diminished by the fact that she also loved his boots. There is an old misunderstanding about the word love, and, if many children are born from this misunderstanding, many others have lost the unique chance of being born, only because of the susceptibility that demands that it be me! me! that is loved, and not my money. But in the humidity of the forest, these cruel refinements do not exist, and love is not to be eaten, love is to find a boot pretty, love is to like the strange color of a man who isn’t black, is to laugh for love of a shiny ring. Little Flower blinked with love, and laughed warmly, small, gravid, warm.

The explorer tried to smile back, without knowing exactly to what abyss his smile responded, and then he was embarrassed as only a very big man can be embarrassed. He pretended to adjust his explorer’s hat better; he colored, prudishly. He turned a lovely color, a greenish-pink, like a lime at sunrise. He was undoubtedly sour.

Perhaps adjusting the symbolic helmet helped the explorer to get control of himself, severely recapture the discipline of his work, and go on with his note-taking. He had learned how to understand some of the tribe’s few articulate words, and to interpret their signs. By now, he could ask questions.

Little Flower answered “Yes.” That it was very nice to have a tree of her own to live in. Because—she didn’t say this but her eyes became so dark that they said it—because it is good to own, good to own, good to own. The explorer winked several times.

Marcel Pretre had some difficult moments with himself. But at least he kept busy taking notes. Those who didn’t take notes had to manage as best they could.

“Well,” suddenly declared one old lady, folding up the newspaper decisively, “Well, as I always say: God knows what He’s doing.”

(Clarice Lispector, translated by Elizabeth Bishop)

§

there’s nothing wrong with your face

love is all over the place
there’s nothing wrong with your face