In a post-clarice-lispector haze, i walk past a traffic cop drinking tea, a homeless girl with a child and a plastic tub with a few coins in front of her, a shop which exhales smoke, and a row of north-eastern food vendors. all of this is pure sight to me; i have covered my ears with the noise-cancelling headphones which are pumping Malayalam film music. Right now I am listening to ‘pramadavanam veendum’ on repeat. I am trying to catch the vibratoes Yesudas imparts to the word ‘polĂ©’ (po-ley; lit. like-that, as in, the sun is *like* Romeo). He sings it at least two ways, and possibly three. My thoughts are filled with Lispector’s attempts to catch the reality beyond abstractions, and with the vibrations of the ‘polĂ©’ they mix with each other and give rise to a new thought: there is a connection between how one sings the word ‘polĂ©’ and the many ways of representation. ‘Like-this’ is always about ’this’ and not really what the object of comparison is. So, when Yesudas brings ‘pole’ to a vibrato-filled life, it is this contradiction, or paradox, which comes to mind, despite how often people use ’like’ when they are stuck in thought. I think it was Terry Eagleton who wrote about people using ’like’ as a filler. The problem, however, is that I have absolutely no idea what this connection is, except that in ’like-this’ and the multiple ways in which ‘polĂ©’ can be sung, there is a lack of precision. You can have x like y, which is neither really x nor y, just like you can sing the word ‘polĂ©’ in infinity many ways, none of them alike each other.
I think what Lispector was trying to do was to capture the ’like-this’ of the moment of living, the present. She knew that words were just bait; she knew that what mattered was what we could fish out with words. Her work, then, is in the realm of the ’like-this’ which cannot be captured except as a likeness, a ‘polĂ©.’ A place where we have just words, and a job that had to be done using words. Everything else, especially the absolute reality of the present, is always beyond words.