I read Near to the Wild Heart on the Blue Line to Long Beach Airport. I was flying to Vegas to visit my girlfriend at her parents’ house for the first time. The whole journey — Expo Line to Blue Line to Long Beach Bus to Vegas — felt like a complete life experience. I wrote a poem about it:
on the tarmac
in Long Beach
at sunset
clarice lispector
the sound of the engine
and the sun
and the pleasure of smiling
and being smiled at
the woman on the bus
noting out loud
in a telling loop:
I’ve seen two little dogs that look like twins
how they make two little dogs look exactly alike?
Two devils.
She took better care of them than my dad took care of me.
He like Oprah. Oprah just be herself
majestic clouds outside the window
the sunset capped
beneath a tendril of weeping cloud
Thor’s own hammer
floating above the cloud ceiling
the horizon reddened and purple
like sand.
Luke,
you skip everywhere.
Everywhere.
You might notice that in the poem Clarice Lispector herself is included in a list of items that does not adhere to parallel structure. They are neither syntactically similar, nor are they similar in kind. Here is the clear influence of Lispector whose novel renders a sensory moment as an entire world.
She makes me wonder how I would capture my mother’s backyard.
Decoupage leaves lit
from above
sawing waves of cicadas buzz and hiss
and the breeze
and Burchfield.
If you’re going to write about synesthetes and Buffalo in the same breath, of course there’s Burchfield.
In Lispector, synesthesia is polyvalent. Not only sensations have colors, but thoughts feelings.
There are many authors whose work Lispector’s is compared to. For obvious reasons (isn’t stream of consciousness a European modernist thing? No, but yes. Kind of.) This pissed her off in her life. Yeah she used a Joyce line as an epigraph and title, but she only “discovered the quote, the title of the book, and Joyce himself once the book was already finished.”
I’m not hung up on influence or categorization — is she the female Joyce, or the Brazillian Woolf, or the Ukranian Brazillian? I point this out to say that many people have written works in a similar style — you don’t have to read the one (you know which one I’m talking about) that’s at the top of “Read before you die” book lists. You need to figure out how to make that list for yourself. Everything good is born of curiosity.
The focus of this text is a young woman’s development in all the ways a consciousness can develop in and through language and sensation. In her work perception is the progression from impression to feeling to revelation, all of which are in a constant state of flux over the course of a lifetime.
It is also about the persistence of childhood, which means memories free of nostalgia.
“‘Me neither,’ Joanna hastened to reply, ‘not for a second. I don’t miss it, you see?” And at this moment she declared out loud, slowly, enthralled, ‘I don’t miss it, because I have my childhood more now than when it was happening.’”
These reversals allow for a subversion of narrative closure. The story cannot be told completely because it hasn’t finished happening. And it’s being retold. And re-seen. And re-experienced.
If this can be reduced to Modernist introspection, or proto-postmodern solipsism, it is only so as an invitation to see how you see the world and see through it.