The Song that Belongs to No One: Summer Chronicle #1

By Jim Miller

In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven-year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil (The Brazilian News) not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil.  As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes.  The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."  

What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles."  As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word."  It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.  

More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe.  Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector.  So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."  

Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it--for better or worse. So, for a few lazy weeks of summer I will, as I have for a few years now, try my hand at the form.  

*****

Fifty-six summers in and I’m still chasing the impossible.  Summer is the time when you get to stop, jump off the treadmill, and try to just be for a moment—not by “vacationing” in an image or engaging in a planned activity, but by truly occupying an instant.  

As Clarice Lispector declares in the opening of her masterpiece, Agua Viva, the idea is to seize:

[T]this instant now so fleeting it’s already gone because its already become a new instant now that’s also already gone.  Every thing has an instant in which it is.  I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space.  I want to possess the atoms of time.  And to capture the present, forbidden by its very nature: the present slips and the instant too, I am this very second forever in the now.

Like Lispector, I too believe that only love “captures the unknown moment” and leaves you “sparkling on a high, joy, joy is time’s material and the essence of the instant.  And in that instant is the is of an instant.  I want to seize my is.  And like a bird I sing hallelujah into the air.  And my song belongs to no one.”  

I try to dig into the instant as I stare into the faces of the people I love, the lines drawn by time and suffering, the spark in their bright eyes.  Lips kissed a myriad of times, kissed once more in this very moment savored as it passes.  

Yesterday was Father’s Day, a day to celebrate continuation.  What is at the heart of the mystery that was the child filled with joy and overflowing with presentness who is now a fine young man on the cusp of leaving home?  Everyday becoming, everyday dying.  

And that self who was not a father and became one is not the same self now as I try to fold the memories of my son’s life into a something to hold onto and let go.  I try to love each moment as it unfolds, full of grief, joy, and longing.  

Everything about this life is unimaginable.  

You get to know the lived texture of sweetness and pain.  You look in the mirror and you see your father’s face, hear your mother’s voice in the tenor of your own.  Look at your hand and they are there along with a host of others beyond the line of those whose names you know.  Those who came before you are you and you are those who will follow you.  

I am something that is part of a larger something.  In the midst of that is this instant in which I am.  

And this fifty-sixth summer is bursting with life, this radiant moment full of restless joy.  I can feel it on the path across the meadow to the woods, step by step it calls to me.  Underneath all the dread, pain, and suffering of the world is always the forever now with all its unspeakable beauty howling to us that the impossible is right there for us.  Only if we breathe it in and love it, surrender ourselves to the sacred song that belongs to no one.