I am feeling the martyrdom of an untimely sensuality.
—Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (1973)

We sense with the nerve, vein, muscle, marrow; through laughter, saliva, tears, milk; with our mouths, scars, breasts, hair, fingertips. To begin in the body is to experience how time dilates into space and space contracts into time. In the intervals of silence, in and in-between solitudes: a clasp, a node, a space of tenderness, almost unbearable in its erogeneity.

Women in literature have spoken of this opening in consciousness through flowers: the tulip for Sylvia became her wound (‘their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds’); the rose for Clarice, a partner in being  (‘I and she had been able to live each other profoundly, as only can happen between beast and man’); the iris for Louise became consciousness of emergence and overflow (‘from the center of my life came / a great fountain, deep blue / shadows on azure sea water’). The human-centered self dissolves to glimpse another register of being. Mapping the rupture. Inscribing it. Or, in Deleuze: making the spasm visible.

For these three artists, the martyrdom of sensation is the door. For them, to live, and thus to create, is to build a city of evocation and remembrance within the body. Art enters at a wound. One is flayed open to pain, to trembling, to the flood of life itself. The soft spot: a wound-mouth, a pulsing cleft where perception and memory and imagination perform their secret congress. An engendering of nerve and image, a surge of impulse that is also flesh, then spills. Their works are penumbras of the self, thick with births and re-births, generating other alterities of self: absent selves, contiguous selves, selves that split and recombine, selves already gone, selves still becoming. The self, a swarm.

For Pam Quinto, it is a sunset in its instant-now. Not a sky becoming sunset, but becoming turned into sky. A wraith of periwinkle hidden under yellow that tends toward white—suddenly, the cut of sky blue. Violets creasing beneath the periwinkles, navy folding into midnight. Palette as body: strata, veils, skins. A palimpsest of sunsets she witnessed throughout her life to create an epidermis of color.

For Wipo, creation begins where thought has not coagulated, before the clot forms. In the loops of intuition that chart those ‘magic spots’—as the artist devises—of recognition, where perception blurs fear and wonder, one is stunned into tenderness. Form is only ever a trembling reconfiguration of that tenderness, not a finality. Dense swirls thicken and take on a muscular, almost bodily density. What is seen are the sediments of gestures rehearsed until the body itself becomes rehearsal, unfinished and infinite.

For Jed Gregorio, fountains are utterance, vessel and mouth at once, saying: this is who I am now. It is a figure for life as repetition without repetition. It is water’s destiny enacted, the ‘daily death’ Bachelard names, that is always flowing, always falling, always ending in ‘horizontal death’, only to surge up again, jubilant. He gathers the very matter of dream—color, texture, wetness, haze—and flings them onto surface, into form.

The swarm, then, is method. Seizing this spasm of selves, their fugitive, unreadable coruscation, was the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s reason for writing. Clarice, who wrote and recoiled at the form’s refusal. In 1971, she finished a manuscript called Beyond Thought: Monologue with Life and handed it to a translator, then withdrew it soon after. For years, she was convinced that her work was unpublishable: This isn’t a book because this isn’t how anyone writes, she confessed. Olga Borelli, her editor and confidante, pieced together the scraps Clarice had scrawled on envelopes, the backs of checks, napkins still perfumed with her lipstick. She arranged her detritus like a puzzle that would crystallize, later on, into Água Viva.

Out of these fragments, Clarice wrote: writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. When the non-word—the between-the-lines—takes the bait, something has been written. Elsewhere: I was born a few instants ago, and I am dimming. Elsewhere still: I want to seize my is.

(I am aware that now I am also gathering these into a constellation of Clarices. A swarm of Clarices.)

To these artists, too, creation begins in that wager: to give form to a self that vanishes and returns as matter, yet never congeals long enough for possession. An untimely sensuality or ecstasy-of-letting-be. From here, I think of another meaning of the ‘soft spot’: not tenderness but risk. A Lispectorian one. To stay in the wound. To make a dwelling in its hollow. To fling the bait and be taken. To be non-word, or to open to the luminous delay of what forever withholds itself. And one divines, in this slit of being-becoming, that something has been written.

—Zea Asis