The Act of Writing

Thoughts on Clarice Lispector

By no means is it an easy task, bleeding out onto the page. It is fast and long. Tattooed into the skin of time.

“As hard as breaking rocks”

The splinters cut into my sight. A pouring out of fine edges until the lines of me and the lines of them blur. Become one. A film of soaked white, soft fibres and stitched words.

I am constantly chasing it, the shadow of time. My shadow in time. There, and then not. Lost. Bar from the steel words I try to find. A cosmic solitude in the act. It is the act I refer to, never the end. The end does not exist. Not in a shadow that changes with the rise and fall of the moon. I sometimes search for a point, a finality, the thought never comes.

Something is lost in forced words. Words forced into other words. An intellectualising of art. Like genre, like literature. Writing belongs to the shadows. It reveals itself, it is found not made. Not crafted nor intended. It is a painting.

I do not say this to be poetic, but to speak on truth. Writing is an image, one found in time, bled through the ink of a pen and steel splintering of breaking rocks. It is the moment, until it is not.

Writing is you, spread between the folds of a page. A moment, a fragment of something whole. A glimpse and slow revealing of time. Curved lines spelling out the flow of life. The lips and tips of a finger. Timestamps marked in fine liners. A scribble to announce your presence. I am here, says the holder of a pen, the keeper of words.

They hold the door open, ajar to a world. One of discovery. Intimate yet of the collective kind. Joint or alone, finding solace in language one seeks to immortalise it. A map, a trail and time of a place. Placemaking and infinite, part of a larger whole, yet small and passing.

These words found me, reader. Now they find you. A greeting. Never-ending and forever chasing itself. That is the act of writing.

It’s not writing it’s witchcraft they say of Lispector. It is not. It is presence, a presence you find when you stop seeking.