Imagine to Remember

In the Passion According to G.H Clarice Lispector writes “Nostalgia is not for the God who is missing to us, it is a nostalgia for ourselves, for we do not sustain ourselves; we miss our impossible grandeur – my unreachable nowness is my paradise lost.” God is not missing to us and yet we are missing to ourselves. Our true self which is a kind of no-self stripped bare of all things, forms and identities, until only being is left, this how we can approach that which is divine. It is banging on a door only to realize it is unlocked, it as Rumi says to wander from room to room searching for the diamond around your neck, unable to reach the nowness, losing paradise with every breath.

To reach the nowness, we must have a desperate need. Neediness, as G.H. discovers, is essential, it is the vitalizing universal force, neediness is akin to passion. To not need is to be very, very alone. Our need is expansive, it is “our greater destiny”,  just as “as drops of mercury join other drops of mercury”. Love is inherent, although we are not always aware, sensitized to the truth of its presence. Need is the missing element. 

A certain intensity and force of need is required here; this is the agony and pleasure of the mystics. A need that burns, it is the alchemist’s fire of transformation. A desire is something else entirely, one can be with and just as easily without, but need is fatal. Needs gone unfulfilled can k!ll, and not just in the literal sense of the word. Understanding something of our own neediness is to be suddenly awake to the delicate, frail wholly dependent reality of being alive; and it is a horrifying discovery. And we avoid this knowing, with a compulsive precision, until one day, like G.H. when she k!lls a cockroach, we are forced into a confrontation with life.