VERONICA WASSON

Echoes

“I don't know what I'm writing about: I am obscure to myself.”

–Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“I feel like a character in a Clarice Lispector novel. And so I drink coffee and stare at this sentence.”

I wrote this in a short story about the death of my mother, not long before the death of my mother. A story about my inability to write about my mother.

(An aesthetic move borrowed from The Hour of the Star.)

What I meant by feeling like a character in a Clarice Lispector novel is a woman who might be in love, might have an ecstatic fit, might be a horse who tramples the sky, might try and fail to write, might encounter the Real without shuddering or looking away.

On editing: I want the cuts to show.

“Bonjour, Bonsoir” by Françoise Hardy (from her 1974 album Entr’acte (“Intermission”)) has just come up on my playlist. Du désordre et c'est tout … Disorder and that's all.

I was a bit of a goth girl in high school. My literary crush was Kathy Acker. I tried to write like her because I admired the stylized ugliness of her prose—the wrong lesson to draw, of course.

Like Acker I had a hostile relationship with my body. Blood & guts. Acker wrote about the visceral experience of female embodiment. In later life she took up weight lifting and maybe she found some peace there in her body, in its capacities.

If it hurts then you might be onto something. (The impossibility of speaking—or impossibility of understanding what is spoken.)     (I’ve always felt powerless in this way, the word is never the thing-in-itself.)      (And so I can only hope to find the space between.)      (The moment just after you take the leap.)      ( now … )

Decades later I started estrogen, embodying myself with my weekly injection. And then, only then, was I able to write.

Acker died when she was my age, killed by her body.

Colette wrote about fashion, flowers, animals, and her mother Sido, but even she in the end wrote of the blue lantern (death / the infinite).

“Is my course set for the open sea where there is no sound other than that of the lonely heart-beat?” –Colette, The Blue Lantern

(But also: “The art of selection … retaining the unusual while discarding the commonplace, has never been mine.” Colette always remained grounded in the world.)

In The Hour of the Star, the narrator attempts to write a story about a young woman. If inevitably he fails his task, it is only natural, because he is not God. Authoring myself, I attempted to author my mother. … A task I could only fail. My mother escaped, leaving something that is not quite a void.

In a life filled with elisions, it’s these moments of silent echo that speak to me. The voice that comes from the spaces between. When I least know myself, when I don’t know what I’m doing.

I can’t know it, I can only write it.

“Hear me, hear my silence. What I say is never what I say but instead something else.”

–Lispector, Ibid.