Dinosaur Bees

excerpt from The Passion According to G.H.
Clarice Lispector

To add infinitely to the entreaty born of lack.

It isn't for us that cows' milk comes forth, but we drink it. Flowers weren't made for us to look at or for us to smell, and we look at them and smell them. The Milky Way doesn't exist for us to know its existence, but we know. And we know God. And what we need of Him, we get out of that. (I don't know what it is I'm calling God, but it can be called that.) If we know but very little about God, it is because we need little: we have of Him only what is destined to sustain us, we have of God what fits in us. (Nostalgia is not for the God who is missing to us, it is a nostalgia for ourselves, for we do not sustain ourselves; we miss our impossible grandeur- my unreachable nowness is my paradise lost.)

We suffer because we have so little hunger, although our small hunger is still enough for us to feel the profound loss of the pleasure we could have if we had a greater hunger. Milk people drink only as much as the body needs, and flowers we see only as far as the eyes reach and their fullness skims. However much more we need, the more God exists. However much farther we reach, that much more of God shall we have.

He enables us. (He wasn't born for us, nor were we born for Him, we and He are, at the same time.) He is uninterruptedly occupied in being, like all things are being, but He doesn't keep people from joining Him and, with Him, being occupied in being, in an interchange of living. He, for example, He uses us totally, for there is nothing in each of us that He, whose need is absolutely infinite, doesn't need. He uses us, and doesn't keep people from making use of Him. The ore in the earth isn't responsible for not being used.

We are very far behind and have no idea of how to take advantage of God in an interchange— as though we still hadn't discovered that milk is for drinking. A few centuries ago, or a few minutes ago we may perhaps say, in alarm: and to think that God was always there! the one who was there very little was I—just as we would say of oil that people finally needed enough to learn how to extract it from the earth, just as one day we will lament those who have died of cancer without using the cure that is at hand. Surely we still don't need to die of cancer. Everything is at hand. (Perhaps beings on another planet already know these things and already live in an interchange that is natural for them; for us, now, that interchange would amount to "holiness" and would completely confound our lives.)

Cows' milk we drink. And if the cow doesn't let us, we have recourse to violence. (In life and in death anything goes, living is always a life-and-death question.) With God too you can make your way through violence. He Himself, when he especially needs one of us, He chooses us and violates us.

But my violence toward God has to be a violence toward myself. I have to do violence to myself so I can need more. So that I become so desperately greater that I become empty and needy. I shall thus have touched the root of needing. The great emptiness in me will be where I exist; my extreme poverty will be a great will. I have to do violence to myself until I have nothing and need everything; when I need then I will have, for I know that it is only just to give more to the one who asks for more, my demand is my size, my emptiness my measure. You can also do violence directly unto God, with a love full of anger.

And he will understand that that furious, murderous avidity of ours is in fact our sacred, vital fury, our attempt to violate ourselves, the effort to eat more than we can so as to increase our hunger artificially—in the demand for life everything is legitimate, even the artificial, and the artificial is often the great sacrifice that is made to get to the essential.

But, since we are little and therefore need but little, why is little not enough for us? Because we sense pleasure. Like blind men who feel their way along, we have presentiments of the intense pleasure of living.

And if we have presentiments, it is also because we feel that we are being alarmingly used by God, we feel alarmingly that we are being used with an intense and uninterrupted pleasure— moreover, up to now our salvation has been one of being at least so used, we are not useless, we have been made intense use of by God; body and soul and life are for that: for someone's interchange and ecstasy. Disquieted, we feel that we are being used every minute— but that awakens in us the disquieting desire to use as well.

And He not only allows but needs to be used, being used is a way of being understood. (In all religions God demands to be loved.) For us to have, all we need is to need. To need is always the supreme moment. Just as the most daring happiness between a man and a woman comes when needing becomes so great that it is felt in agony and wonder: without you I will be unable to live. Love's revelation is a revelation of lacking—blessed be the poor of spirit for the sundering realm of life is theirs.

If I abandon hope, I am celebrating my lack, and that is the greatest solemnity of living. And because I have taken up my lack, life is at hand. Many have been those who have abandoned everything they had and set out in search of a greater hunger.

Oh, I have lost timidity: God is now. We have already been proclaimed, and it has been my own errant life that has proclaimed me to the right one. Beatitude is the continuous pleasure of the thing, the process of the thing is made of pleasure and of contact with what is gradually needed more and more. My whole fraudulent struggle came from my not wanting to assume the promise that can be fulfilled: I didn't want reality.

For to be real is to take up the promise itself: to assume innocence itself and take up again the taste we were never aware of: the taste of the living.

CLARICE LISPECTOR lived from 1920 – 1977. Born in a war-torn village in what is now Ukraine, Lispector was a Jewish and Brazilian novelist, short story writer, journalist, and author of children’s literature. She was known for her mystical, experimental, and stream-of-consciousness style that many compared to Virginia Wolf and James Joyce. Her numerous publications included Near to the Wild Heart, The Hour of the Star, The Apple in the Dark, The Stream of Life, A Breath of Life, The Besieged City, Family Ties, and An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures. She is considered one of the greatest and most innovative writers of the Portuguese language. Ledo Ivo wrote that Lispector’s first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, was “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language.” In an essay entitled “The Hour of Clarice Lispector,” Helene Cixous wrote: “Clarice Lispector: this woman, our contemporary, a Brazilian woman…it is not books that she gives us, but the act of living saved by books, narratives, constructions that make us step back. And then, through her window-writing, we enter into the frightening beauty of learning how to read: and we pass, through the body, to the other side of the I.”

Ricky Garni ::	How to Write Letters About God, pt. 1
	Yoo Hoo!

Larry O. Dean ::	The Sound Effects Bible

Nicelle Davis & Cheryl Gross ::	The Post-Partum Sideshow—or—What Do I Know About Being A Freak?

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming ::	You Don't Know Me

E.E. King ::	The Case of Dr. Dalton Plastic Surgeon

Dodie Bellamy ::	from “Cultured”

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz ::	List of Things You Have to Do
	The Happy Fun of Love

Stacey Wilson ::	Photographs of two found poems

Claudia Lamar ::	Ouija Board Transcripts
	excerpts

Claudia Lamar & Elizabeth Leavitt ::	fortunes + dibuixos

Caitlin Roper ::	Ransom Note Poem #5

Molly Gaudry ::	Die With Me When I Die

Travis Macdonald ::	Chapter Four from “The Story”