chewing on the walls. erezelcore.

“Then again,” Tamar says, shrugging. “Back then, I didn’t have myself, not really. There wasn’t much opportunity as a secondary school student to do anything with myself, carve out something that was myself. But now I have. And maybe that’s different. Look at me. My whole life, with what I’ve done to it. What I’ve done to myself. I’m blind…”

tamar’s conception of self is so…..not like incompatible or conflicting with, but so not-even-dialogueing-with, from-a-completely-different-framework-than the conception eliya’s been working on/within. no hint of explaining/justifying what she's like by extrapolating the source of why she does x, no referring to or explaining her actions or feelings or traits as a function of her soul; but almost the…..opposite? casually describing (without explaining!) her Self as something that she didn’t have once and has now via things she did to her life and to her self, way more creating/accumulating her self than discovering herself but also not not discovering (and ofc eliya is not not creating herself when she discovers/uncovers her self.) smth of the two of them leaning in from different arrangements of the metinian-the-old paradox (know yourself to act truthfully/act truthfully to know yourself) in the extreme difference in conceptions yet also having similar emotional experiences of internal recognition of a something-true that exists under/before knowing or doing (namely both their overwhelming instinctive inclinations of where to go where to look how to position oneself when the peak of delicately grasping and having Themselves happen).

fascinating issue about my insanity in my tamar bat-lispector tag is……….the issue where she would be so expressed by so much of lispector (and NOT all) but she never would bother expressing herself this way—or in any way with the sustained desire to communicate herself in words—the only time she has knuckled down and made a stab at it is when eliya was squeezing it out of her…..characters who just don’t really care about explaining themselves or indeed anything else are soooooo……strangles