The house of the rising sun

Eskişehir, Türkiye

Sunday 21 April 2024

“The brevity of life, the failing of the senses, the numbness of indifference and unprofitable occupations allow us to know very little.

And again and again swift oblivion, the thief of knowledge and the enemy of memory, makes a void of the mind, in the course of time, even what we learn we lose.”

Nicolaus Copernicus

Above: Polish astronomer Nikolaus Kopernikus (1473 – 1543)

I am a writer, because I write.

But I am not a writer if I am not part of a writing community.

I am beginning to realize that the feeling of being a part of that wider world could make the business of writing – the business of perseverance – seem less painful.

Yes, writing is something you do largely on your own, but there is a family of writers, too.

There are creative writing classes, courses and writers’ circles that you could join.

“The only sensible ends of literature are

• first, the pleasurable toil of writing
• second, the gratification of one’s family and friends
• and lastly, the solid cash.”

(Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Above: American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864)

There was a time when local authorities ran evening classes in almost everything and creative writing would definitely be on the curriculum somewhere.

These classes seem very much geared to the world of work these days and so finding those which develop the spirit or what Ted Hughes called “the imagination of the tribe” seems harder than it was.

Above: English poet Ted Hughes (1930 – 1998)

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.

Talent will not.

Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.

Genius will not.

Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education will not.

The world is full of educated derelicts.

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

The slogan “Press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.“

(Calvin Coolidge)

Above: US President Calvin Coolidge (1872 – 1933)

Literary festivals are great places to see and hear your favourite writers and to find out about the great writers of the future.

As well as talks and readings by writers, many literary festivals run workshops and master classes in which you can participate.

Conferences too, are places where writers gather and, in addition to the useful lectures and workshops, many important writing friendships can be formed at mealtimes and in the bar.

You might want to join a writers’ circle.

The idea behind this is that you read one another’s work (presumedly sitting in a circle) in turn. It gives you a chance to have your work read or heard by other writers who will provide valuable feedback.

When looking for a writers’ circle there are several things to consider:

• Frequency of meetings
• The venue
• Feedback – frank but never discouraging

National Novel Writing Month (https://nanowrimo.org)

NaNoWriMo takes place each November.

It is an attempt at inspiring people to get writing by encouraging them to commit to achieving 50,000 words during that month.

The uplifting feeling you get from being part of the mass scribbling helps to keep you motivated, which is important because it is a tough target to achieve.

If you are writing in what little spare time you are able to ike out each day, quality will have to be forgotten.

NaNoWriMo is about quantity, about gaining momentum and enthusiasm for your novel by recording your word count online each night and seeing how you compare to other writers across the globe.

You won’t have a complete first draft at the end of the month, but you will have progressed enough to feel confident about being able to reach the end.

Some writers meet up with other NaNoWriMo members during the 30 days to swap experiences, boost each other’s morale and review their work.

Writing 50,000 words in a month requires almost complete abdication of your social life.

It is helpful to remember that although you may feel isolated you are not alone in this remarkable endeavour.

National Novel Finishing Month (https://nanowrimo.org)

If you are not exhausted by your efforts in November, December’s goal is to complete your novel by writing an additional 30,000 words.

I should point out, of course, this will only result in the completion of your first draft.

Redrafting and improving your book will take more than a month to complete.

January Novel Writing Month (https://nanowrimo.org)

The targets continue with this New Year’s goal of 50,000 words, but whereas November’s event is aimed at the creation of new novels from scratch, this event permits writers to contınue existing projects and is flexible in its word count.

National Novel Editing Month (https://nanowrimo.org)

March is the time for those rewrites and this event encourages you to dedicate 50 hours to editing your 50,000-word manuscript.

National Poetry Writing Month (https://nanowrimo.org)

This takes place every April and participants aim to produce 30 poems in 30 days.

Like the prose-writing events, it is open to anyone.

There are neither winners nor losers.

It is merely a motivational challenge that can inspire writers and create a sense of team spirit and shared adventure.

National Novel Writing Year (https://nanowrimo.org)

This site offers a year-long strategy to nurture your rough 50,000 words into something sufficiently polished to submit to a publisher.

“People who study resilience in children have found that all a child needs is one adult who believes in the child, who conveys a sense of encouragement and faith, for the child to prevail.

And I think that is probbaly true for artists as well.

I think at some point you do need to be encouraged – told that it is OK to be creating and that what you are creating is worthwhile.”

(Diane Ackerman)

Above: American poet Diane Ackerman

Usually, writing is a solitary endeavour, but it becomes even more so if the people around you don’t understand and don’t support your creative activities.

It is not rare for aspiring writers to be treated with anything from condescension (“It’s nice that you have a little hobby.“) to outright negativity (“What makes you think anybody would want to read anything you have written?“).

There are lots of possible reasons for these attitudes.

Some people may be jealous.

Some may not understand how you can get excited about something that doesn’t excite them.

Some may be trying to help you avoid the pain of rejection by suggesting you give up before others judge your work.

The world can be divided into positive people (who expect to win) and negative people (who expect to be right).

Because most new ventures fail, the easiest way to be right is to be negative.

Whatever the reasons behind them, negative comments hurt writers and sometimes drain their energies so much that they do give up.

Let’s face it, writing is hard enough without that kind of negativity added to the mix.

Having even one person who believes in your dream can make a huge difference.

There are things that you can do to make it more likely that you will find support and encouragement from friends and family:

• Consider the intention.
• Make time for a talk.
• Acknowledge their positive intention.
• Let them know how their behaviour affects you.
• Be specific about what you would like them to do differently.
• Look for win-win situations.
• Point out infractions immediately.
• Find like-minded people.
• Find a writing buddy.
• Use the power of the Internet.
• Attend a writing class.
• Attend writers’ conferences.
• Consider hiring a writing couch or consultant.
• Get support and inspiration from reading magazines on the art and craft of writing and the biographies and memoirs of writers and artists. (For example, many a creative person has gained inspiration by reading the letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother.)

We writers tend to be solitary creations.

We sit in the penumbra of the light of our desks, anguishing over the inertia of a plot, crumbling up pieces of paper, biting our fingernails and hoping that the next cup of coffee will deliver more inspiration than jitters.

That is how we think of ourselves.

And it is true, a lot of actual writing tends to happen in solitude, but what often goes underlooked is that most writers’ work is actually spawned and supported by a creative community.

Consider C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

When they first met, they were just two men with a “writing hobby“, as Lewis put it.

They loved to talk about Nordic myths and epics, but they knew their colleagues in the Oxford English department would not give their fancıful tales any critical gravitas, so they met regularly at a pub to imbibe pints and stories.

As they shared their writing more and more, they met other other writers who felt like outsiders as well, so they formed the Inklings, a group of writers who were searching with “vague or half-formed intimations and ideas“, as Tolkien wrote.

Above: South African born, English writer John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892 – 1973)

The themes that would later appear in Lewis and Tolkien’s books first emerged during the Inklings’ weekly discussions.

Tolkien said Lewis’ “sheer encouragement” was an “unpayable debt“.

“He was for long my only audience.

Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby.“

Above: British writer Clive Staples Lewis (1898 – 1963)

Our culture celebrates the notion of a solitary heroic ideal, rugged self-starters who meet challenges and overcome adversity, whether it is the sports star who leads his team to victory or the scientist who cures a deadly disease.

Solitude no doubt plays an important element in writing, but if you trace the history of literature, you realize how it takes a veritable village to write a book.

Ernest Hemingway fed off the creative energy of Paris in the 1920s, not to mention the writing advice of Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson.

Above: American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961)

Above: American writer Sherwood Anderson (1876 – 1941)

(And what would Gertrude Stein have been without Alice B. Toklas?)

Above: American writer Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1976)

Above: American companion Alice Babette Toklas (1877 – 1967)

Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston defined their unique voices alongside each other as leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

(The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. 

At the time, it was known as the “New Negro Movement“, named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke.

The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.

Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood, many Francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the movement, which spanned from about 1918 until the mid-1930s. 

Many of its ideas lived on much longer.

The zenith of this “flowering of Negro literature“, as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, took place between 1924 — when Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance — and 1929, the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression.

The Harlem Renaissance is considered to have been a rebirth of the African-American arts.)

Above: American writer Langston Hughes (1901 – 1967)

Above: American author Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960)

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and the rest of the Beats tumbled, bounded and danced through their words as if they were an improv group riffing through a scene – creating each other as they created themselves.

(The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. 

The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks.

The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) are among the best-known examples of Beat literature.

Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States. 

The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.

The core group of Beat Generation authors — Herbert Huncke (1915 – 1996), Ginsberg, Burroughs, Lucien Carr (1925 – 2005), and Kerouac — met in 1944 in and around the Columbia University campus in New York City.

Later, in the mid-1950s, the central figures, except Burroughs and Carr, ended up together in San Francisco, where they met and became friends of figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance.

In the 1950s, a Beatnik subculture formed around the literary movement, although this was often viewed critically by major authors of the Beat movement.

In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie and larger counterculture movements. 

Neal Cassady, as the driver for Ken Kesey’s (1935 – 2001) bus Furthur, was the primary bridge between these two generations.

Ginsberg’s work also became an integral element of early 1960s hippie culture, in which he actively participated.

The hippie culture was practiced primarily by older members of the following generation.)

Above: American writer Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969)

Above: American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926 – 1997)

Above: American writer William Seward Burroughs (1914 – 1997)

Frissons of creativity tend to happen with others.

Think about your own life.

I bet there are dozens of people who have guided you along your path, whether it is a teacher who praised a story or drawing, a family friend who opened your eyes to new books or a babysitter who thrilled you with scary tales before bed.

Finding like-minded creative friends is important for those seminal imaginative sparks to catch fire.

“None of us is as smart as all of us.“, the saying goes.

An initial idea grows through the interchange of ideas – and then the light bulb of inspiration glows.

Think of a jazz group, where individual musicians riff on a melodic theme.

They don’t necessarily know where the song is going.

The group has the ideas, not the individual musicians, but unexpected insights emerge and a new song flows from the group.

Above: The Buddy Bolden Band (1900 – 1907)

When you work with others, you are naturally combining an assortment of different concepts, elaborating and modifying each others’ thoughts.

Meeting regularly to write with others or get feedback is important not just for your creativity, though.

It also keeps you accountable.

Think about it.

Are you more likely to stop writing when your plot plays dead while alone at home or in a room full of other writers?

And, unless you come from a family of writers, it is unlikely that your family will have any idea what you are talking about when you mention that you fear your main character is a cliché or that you are worried about the pace of your plot.

They will mention things like going to business school or helping with the evening dinner.

Only your fellow writers can understand why you haven’t showered or why you are more concerned about a character lost in the space-time continuum than your own lack of sleep.

As Bill Patterson, a NaNoWriMo writer from New Jersey likes to say: “Writing is a solitary activity best done in groups.”

Completing such an arduous task is just plain easier with others rooting you on.

Your writing community can be a goad, a check, a sounding board and a source of inspiration, support and even love.

There is a reason it is difficult to beat the home team in sports.

They have an extra teammate, the crowd.

Every novel is defined by the community of writers it belongs to.

A novel isn’t written solely by its author.

It is also a work of the people who support you creatively and remember to celebrate the gift of their collaboration and seek them out in times of need.

Engage in a writing group.

Either join a site like NaNoWriMo and enter the conversation with writers online or invite your writing buddies to form a writing group that meets regularly in person.

Once upon a time at a writing conference, a famous writer said that you shouldn’t really be friends with other writers.

You should, he said, be friends with, like regular people.

Plumbers, boxers, lawyers, whoever.

The idea was that making friends with normal non-writer folk grounds you a little bit.

It ensures that you are not just flying high in the clouds of Writerland, huffing Muse farts and whatever.

You break free of your own creative echo chamber bubble and it reminds you that there is a world out there you are writng for and about.

I don’t think this is bad advice, per se.

I think you should definitely be friends with non-writers, too, because being friends with one type of person from one type of career doesn’t sound particularly interesting.

Life is a buffet, so sample its wares.

But that being said, you should definitely have friends who are other writers.

Sometimes people believe that other writers are your competition.

This is untrue.

Other writers are your community.

Writing is an ultimately lonely, isolated and isolating job.

And there is a larger isolation, too, if you choose not to be friends with other writers. Because, to be honest, no one understands what writers do except other writers.

It is an amazing thing to be heard and understood.

It is an amazing thing to be there for another writer in the same way.

Especially because as writers we don’t have any naturally occurring communities available to us.

We don’t automatically gather in a workplace setting.

Conferences and conventions are an option, but not only are they once or twice a year, they can also be expensive and require extensive travel to attend.

The best we have is social media, which is both a “Thank God for this refuge.” and an “Oh, no, this bird-site is not a refuge, it is a Hell realm.“.

Communities of writers are formed with purpose, not by proxy, not by default.

It is important to keep your eye on your own work and career and ensure that whatever is happening in the group is there to help everyone.

A healthy community is one that exists because you like the people in it.

It is about having people to whom you relate and who can relate to you.

The thing you can control and the thing you can count on is writing the best thing you can write.

Rely on the work and not on your relationships.

Ultimately, it is just nice to be a part of some kind of community of people who get what we are going through.

Writers need to be complete creatures.

You can’t just be facedown in a puddle of your own work for the remainder of your existence.

We have a whole catalogue of needs and even we introverts still need social interaction at times to fill up those satisfaction meters above our heads.

It is important to form those relationships and ensure that those relationships are healthy and happy.

Be good to yourself.

Be good to others and demand they be good to you in return.

It really is as simple and as complicated as that.

Stuck between walls
I’m myself and the die:
I live separate from myself.
On all four sides
A taste for alacrities:
The chance to be thrown
Down your deep tunnel.

(Hilda Hilst)

Above: Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst

Hilda de Almeida Prado Hilst (21 April 1930 – 2004) was a Brazilian poet, novelist and playwright.

Her work touches on the themes of mysticism, insanity, the body, eroticism and female sexual liberation.

Hilst greatly revered the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and the influence of their styles — like stream of consciousness and fractured reality — is evident in her own work.

Above: Irish writer James Joyce (1882 – 1941)

Above: Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989)

Born in Jaú, São Paulo, Hilst graduated from the University of São Paulo in 1952.

Above: Jaú, São Paulo, Brazil

Above: Coat of arms of the Universidade de São Paulo

While studying there, she published her first book of poems, Omen (Presságio), in 1950.

After a brief trip to Europe, Hilst was influenced by Nikos Kazantzakis’ Report to Greco to move away from the São Paulo scene.

Above: Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis (1883 – 1957)

She secluded herself in an estate near the outskirts of Campinas.

Above: Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil

Deciding to devote her life to her literary creations, she constructed the House of the Sun (Casa do Sol), where she would invite several artists and intellectuals to live.

Above: Hilda Hilst, Casa do Sol

Writing 40 works over her lifetime, she was one of the most prolific writers of her generation.

Her works were mostly not well known outside of her home country until after her death, when several of her books were translated to English.

Above: Hilda Hilst

Hilda de Almeida Prado Hilst was the only daughter of Apolônio de Almeida Prado Hilst and Bedecilda Vaz Cardoso.

Her father owned a coffee plantation and also worked as a journalist, poet and essayist.

He was affected by schizophrenia throughout his life.

Her mother came from a conservative Portuguese immigrant family.

The conditions of her parents’ mental health (and the relationships they had with mental health) greatly influenced Hilst’s writing, and her books describe several experiences she had with her father. 

Her parents separated in 1932 while she was still an infant.

In the midst of the Constitutionalist Revolution, Bedecilda moved from Jaú to Santos, with Hilda and Ruy Vaz Cardoso, son from her first marriage. 

Above: Santos, São Paulo, Brazil

(The Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, also known as the Revolution of 1932 or Guerra Paulista, was the armed movement that occurred in the states of São Paulo, Mato Grosso do Sul and Rio Grande do Sul, between July and October 1932, which aimed to overthrow the provisional government of Getúlio Vargas and convene a National Constituent Assembly. 

The armed uprising actually began on 9 July 1932, precipitated by popular revolt following the death of four young people by Getulista troops, on 23 May 1932, during a protest against the Federal Government.

After the death of these young people, a clandestine movement called MMDC – initials of the names of the four young people killed: Mario Martins de Almeida (1907 – 1932), Euclides Bueno Miragaia (1911 – 1932), Dráusio Marocndes de Sousa (1917 – 1932) and Antônio Américo Camargo de Andrade (1901 – 1932) – was organized, which began to conspire against Vargas’ provisional government, articulating, together with other political movements, a revolt substantial.

There was also a 5th victim, Orlando de Oliveira Alvarenga (1899 – 1932), who was also shot that day in the same location, but died months later.

In the months preceding the movement, resentment against the President gained strength, indicating a possible armed revolt and the provisional government began to speculate that the rebels’ objective was the secession of São Paulo from Brazil.

However, the separatist argument was never proven reliable, however, this argument was still used in the propaganda of the provisional government throughout the conflict to instigate public opinion in the rest of the country against the São Paulo people, to obtain volunteers in the offensive against the constitutionalist troops and gain political allies in other states against the São Paulo movement. 

When the state of São Paulo precipitated the revolt against Vargas’ provisional government, its leaders expected the automatic adhesion of other Brazilian states, given the solidarity expressed by the political elites of the states of Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul and of what was then Mato Grosso.

Thus, São Paulo’s politicians expected only a brief military conflict with a quick march to Rio de Janeiro, where the country’s capital was then located, to depose Getúlio.

Therefore, the rebels did not organize a defensive system on their borders against possible military offensives from neighboring states.

However, the solidarity of those states did not translate into effective support, and, with São Paulo residents waiting for the supposedly promised support, Getúlio Vargas had time to articulate a military reaction in order to suffocate the revolution in its initial stages, forcing the state of São Paulo having to improvise in a short time a broad defensive military system on its borders against the offensive of troops from all Brazilian states, with the exception of Mato Grosso, which became the only state allied with São Paulo.

After almost three months of intense fighting in the four corners of the state, the conflict ended on 2 October 1932 with the surrender of the Constitutionalist Army. 

 In total, there were 87 days of fighting (from 9 July to 4 October 1932 – the last two days after the surrender of São Paulo), with an official death toll of 934, although unofficial estimates report up to 2,200 deaths, with numerous cities in the interior of the state of São Paulo suffering damage due to the fighting.)

Above: Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas’ (1882 – 1954) entourage (centre) passing through Itararé on the way to Rio de Janeiro during the 1930 Revolution

Three years later her father received the diagnosis of schizophrenia and thereafter spent much of his life in mental institutions. 

Her mother was also institutionalized at the end of her life, in the same institution as her husband.

Hilst grew up in Jaú, a town in the state of São Paulo, with her mother and half brother from her mother’s previous marriage.

Hilst attended elementary and high school at Collegia Santa Marcelina in São Paulo before enrolling in a bachelor’s degree program at Mackenzie Presbyterian University. 

Before Hilst started college, her mother told her of her father’s condition.

Hilst went to visit him in a mental institution for the first time.

After graduating from Mackenzie, Hilst began studying for her second degree at the law school at the University of São Paulo, where she met her lifelong friend Lygia Fagundes.

Above: Brazilian writer Lygia Fagundes Telles (1918 – 2022)

Hilst published her first book of poetry in 1950, Omen (Presságio), which received great acclaim from her contemporaries like Jorge de Lima and Cecília Meireles.

Above: Brazilian poet Jorge de Lima (1893 – 1953)

Above: Brazilian writer Cecilia Meireles (1901 – 1964)

It was not long before she published her second book, Ballad of Alzira (Balada de Alzira) in 1951.

That same year Hilst took over guardianship of her father.

Later in 1957, Hilst began her seven-month tour of Europe, travelling through France, Italy and Greece. 

There, she briefly dated singer-actor Dean Martin.

Above: American entertainer Dean Martin (1917 – 1995)

She impersonated a journalist, in an attempt to meet Marlon Brando.

Above: American actor Marlon Brando (1924 – 2004)

She asked him about his thoughts on Franz Kafka’s works, to which he dismissively replied:

“I won’t think about Mr. Kafka.”

Above: Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924)

Upon her return to São Paulo, she settled in the Sumaré neighborhood.

Above: Sumaré, São Paulo, Brazil

She was frequently in the company of other artists, such as Gilka Machado and Bráulio Pedroso. 

Above: Brazilian poet Gilka Machado (1893 – 1980)

Above: Brazilian writer Braulio Pedroso (1931 – 1990)

However, after reading Nikos Kazantzakis’ Report to Greco, and being influenced by its themes of self-isolation to achieve knowledge of the human being, Hilst decided to leave São Paulo in 1964 and return to her childhood home in Campinas.

She ordered the construction of a new house on the same property, nicknamed the House of the Sun (Casa do Sol), which she personally designed to be an artistic space for inspiration and creativity. 

Above: Casa do Sol, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil

When it was completed in 1966, she moved into the house with sculptor Dante Casarini, with whom she had a prior relationship.

In September of the same year, her father died.

Above: Brazilian sculptor Dante Casarini

(Casa do Sol is the residence where the poet Hilda Hilst lived from 1966 until 2004.

The residence located in the Parque Xangrilá condominium , in Campinas, is currently the headquarters of the Hilda Hilst Institute.

The House has a collection of all the author’s cultural production and has Luiza Novaes at the head of its board.

The idea of ​​creating the House, including its opening for visits and accommodation, came from the writer Mora Fuentes (1951 – 2009), Hilda’s ex-boyfriend, who lived there, even when they were no longer together.

Above: Spanish-born Brazilian writer Jose Luis Mora Fuentes (1951 – 2009)

In October 2011, the residence was listed by the Council for the Defense of the Artistic and Cultural Heritage of Campinas (Condepac).

The space is located on the land of the former Fazenda São José, which belonged to the poet’s mother and had illustrious visitors in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Maestro Jose Antônio de Almeida Prado and writers such as Lygia Fagundes Telles (1918 – 2022) and Caio Fernando Abreu (1948 – 1996). 

Above: Brazilian composer Jose Antonio de Almeida Prado (1943 – 2010)

Above: Brazilian writer Caio Fernando Abreu (1948 – 1996)

Casa do Sol houses the Hilda Hilst Institute, whose official mission is to disseminate the work and memory of Hilda Hilst.

The space, founded in 2005, houses a collection of Hilst’s cultural production.

The Institute was created by José Luís Mora Fuentes.)

Above: Casa do Sol

There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I’m one

My mother was a tailor
She sewed my new blue jeans
My father was a gamblin’ man
Down in New Orleans

Now the only thing a gambler needs
Is a suitcase and a trunk
And the only time he’ll be satisfied
Is when he’s on a trump

Oh, mother, tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun

Well, I got one foot on the platform
The other foot on the train
I’m goin’ back to New Orleans
To wear that ball and chain

Well, there is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I’m one

At the House of the Sun, Hilst was particularly prolific as she started writing her first theatre works, completing nine plays and one poetry compilation between 1967 and 1969. 

She married Casarini in 1968.

Although the marriage only lasted 12 years, the two continued to live together in the House of the Sun. 

Hilst lived somewhat secluded in Campinas for the rest of her life, accompanied by other artists.

The House of the Sun became a hub for artists and writers, who were invited to spend time there and enjoy the creative atmosphere.

Two prominent artists to do so were Bruno Tolentino and Caio Fernando Abreu.

Above: Brazilian poet Bruno Tolentino (1940 – 2007)

During her time at the House of the Sun, Hilst also engaged in her own experiments with electronic voice phenomena, an electronic recording method that supposedly interprets the voices of the dead.

 Above: A plot of normally-distributed white noise

In 1969, she built a second home, the Casa da Lua (House of the Moon).

Above: Casa do Lua

Her theatre writings finished in the same year, with her turning instead to prose fiction with her experimental text Fluxo-Floema a year later.

(Fluxo-Floema was the first prose work published (1971) by the author.

The book consists of five short stories: Fluxo, Osmo, Lázaro, O Unicórnio, Floema.

The work is marked by Hilst’s experimental style, in line with her production in other genres, in addition to the presence of central elements for the author, such as the anti-narrator, the simultaneity of the sacred and the profane, the figure of the Trinity, the anarchy of genres and the obscene.

Fluxo-Floema also represents a reflection by Hilda Hilst on her career and her creative process, since five stories focus, at different times, on the difficulty of narrating itself.

With the typical narration in the Hilstian stream of consciousness, which is constructed through dialogical means in a large part of the text, Fluxo begins with Ruiska, a writer who lives in a house far from the city, in a discussion with his editor (who at all times calls him “horned“).

Between the beginning of the dialogue and the return to it, the flow brings the writer’s thoughts, a description of the vegetation of the plain.

Ruiska depends on writing to survive, but he aims to write about “things inside”, while his editor warns him that writing from “inside the plains” is not interesting for him to get rich.

The cuckold suggests that he start with the inverse of “Uc” to give inspiration and says that the next day he will come looking for the first chapter of the book, that is, the first chapter of a book by the writer that is sellable.

Every time it would appear, the inverse of “Uc” is absent in the speech, as in a following sentence from the editor:

“Don’t be an idiot.

This is the first possibility.

Invent new possibilities around it.“

After some dialogues with his wife, Ruisis, in which there is an attempt to start the new book, Ruiska composes reflections in an interior monologue until the episode of the death of Rukah, his son.

The Trinity appears in this tale as Ruiska (the creator), Ruisis (representation of loving and religious values) and Rukah (the creature), the son of both.

Rukah, however, dies because his father used a mesoclisis and is replaced by another creation or facet of the writer: the dwarf, who came “from the sewer of the universe”.

The woman asks him why she raised and killed her son so quickly, a line that marks the writer’s power to conceive and invent.

All of the Trinity are within the narrator, an individual who unfolds into many, a persona-personae.

This, this “being of others”, Ruiska calls “coexistence”, an evidence of the character’s relationship with himself and with “the other”, a theme that appears in subsequent stories.

The creation of the dwarf is followed by another conversation about the new book, more discussions about language, until Ruiska produces another character from the story, Palavrarara, who leaves them when they ask her if she knows anything “about” [inverse of word “Uc“].

After that, Ruiska decides to leave the house through the skylight and push the dwarf down the well, so that they follow opposite paths: that of the sublime and the grotesque. 

The rest of Fluxo takes place in the interaction between these two characters, the protagonist and the dwarf, who leave the house, separate and meet again towards the city, where they are attacked in the middle of a march against the military because Ruiska explains that he is a writer of this “anguish from within”.

In the end, the author and his invention talk about coexistence while the latter fries fish.

Fluxo-Floema is a detective novel of sorts — pornographic, scatological, and spiritual — that ultimately references the failure and success of writing.

It is about vocabulary, astrology, dramaturgy, science, a story within a story within a story.

It is a celestial map to social interaction and the failure of connection, a crafted examination of the distortions of religion and piety.

Here we, the readers, visit nonsense, pathos, violence, and the flights of fancy of human coexistence.)

Júbilo, Memória, Noviciado da Paixão (Jubilation, memory, novitiate of passion) (1974) is considered the author’s most studied book and acclaimed by the public and critics.

(In 2005, the entire book was set to music by Zeca Baleiro, generating the literary album Ode Descontínua e Remota para Fluuta e Oboé – De Ariana para Dionísio (Discontinuous and remote ode for flute and oboe – from Ariana to Dionysus), made up of songs that were composed to set to music the story of Ariana and Dionísio’s impossible love.)

The Obscene Madame D (1982) is the first work by acclaimed Brazilian author Hilda Hilst to be published in English.

Radically irreverent and formally impious, this novel portrays an unyielding radical intelligence, a 60-year-old woman who decides to live in the recess under the stairs.

In her diminutive space, Madame D — for dereliction — relives the perplexity of her recently deceased lover who cannot comprehend her rejection of common sense, sex, and a simple life, in favour of metaphysical speculations that he supposes to be delusional and vain.

Hilst’s book tells the story of Hillé, a woman who, after “eating the flesh of God” decides to live in a recess under the stairs.

There, Hillé reflects on her relationship with her recently deceased husband, who was perplexed by her refusal of sex and social interaction in favor of metaphysical speculations.

In her solitude, Madame D confronts her relationship with God, her body, her imminent death, her society and her identity’s dependence on language.

Hilst’s Madame D, in her flight from the body’s “unparalleled glimmer”, implodes.

Her god is too small, too obscene to halt her descent into Hell.

This brief, lyrical and scalding account of a mind unhinged recalls the passionate urgency of Artaud and de Sade’s waking dreams in which sex and death are forever conjoined and love’s “vivid time” irretrievably lost.

Written in shifting tenses and voices that blend in and out of one another, The Obscene Madame D features a protagonist wracked by mental instability, tortured by her inability to reciprocate her husband’s sexual invitations.

She tells us that she is “I in search of light, sixty years in silent blindness, spent seeking the sense of things” and proceeds to introduce a series of memories written in stream-of-consciousness prose that, at times, resembles poetry.

In this way, Hillé confronts her human limitations, her corporeal existence.

Her husband, Ehud, is dead.

Her father is dead.

She is no longer able to deny the ghastly reality of her own body. 

Hillé knows that her body — its desire, its filth, its inevitable death — is keeping her from fully existing in the world of symbols.

The body is the only means through which one can possibly know anything, but man strives to escape his death and find meaning for his life in the world of symbols, in their cultural synthesis.

(For it is culture that imposes upon man his identity, his purpose, his sense of self and his superego:

“Our whole world of right and wrong, good and bad, our name, precisely who we are, is grafted into us.”)

But Hillé has eaten the body of God.

She has seen how this striving for bodilessness is folly, how our God, too, is bodily, and can die.

She can no longer use God or culture to deny her creatureliness.

This theme resonates as well in Hilst’s poems:

For a God, what a singular pleasure.
To be the owner of bones, the owner of flesh
To be the Lord of a brief Nothing: Man
Sinister equation
Attempting likeness with you, Executioner.

Men aren’t built to be gods.

A god can take in the whole matter of the world unfiltered.

A god doesn’t need what Becker calls a causa-sui project — an “energetic fantasy that covers over the rumbling of man’s fundamental creatureliness”.

Man’s neuroses stem from his need to filter the world, to take in a chosen part of its information.

In other words:

To deny the truth of existence.

Those who cannot do this are paralyzed.

They cannot function.

However, artists and psychotics take in the world in much the same way:

Completely, the only difference being artists’ ability to channel the information of the world into creations.

This becomes their causa-sui project, their stab at immortality.

Hilst shows us the problem with this.

Inhabiting the space under the stairs, Hillé fashions fish out of paper that disintegrates in water, a godlike activity that nonetheless depicts the transience of all bodies. 

The Obscene Madame D is ostensibly narrated from the present, yet time is nonetheless slippery, and the unattributed dialogue contributes to the feeling of disorientation.

Voices of neighbours, real or remembered, drift in from offstage — in the rafters, in the wings — calling Hillé crazy, labelling her perceived insanity, her self-imposed isolation, contagious.

This unreliable narration nonetheless leaves truth to question:

Is she really insane, or is she, with her recently acquired ingestion of the truth, perhaps the only one who is actually sane?

A hint at the autobiographical comes to a head at the end of the novel, when Hillé is seen with Ehud at the bedside of her dying father who says to Ehud:

“Don’t let her ask the same questions I asked.”:

She dives, wise, heavy, toward the bank of shells.

She wants to open them.

She believes she’ll find pearls and she may find some but, I’ll slip this to your ear, she won’t be able to stand it.

Do you understand?

There’s nothing inside the shells.

Inside the pearls, Ehud, nothing, empty, you understand?

A warning, but Ehud’s presence in the scene tells us this memory is distant, that it is already too late for Hillé.

Even before Ehud’s death, she had isolated herself, withdrawn from culture, sought truth by means of her personal dereliction.

She has been “subjected to the terrifying paradox of the human condition” and can no longer live the lies she must in order to integrate with her culture.

But is this the definition of sanity, or, rather, of insanity?

Certainly, truth and sanity aren’t synonymous.

Man has a tendency to yield to a superordinate authority, to transfer our fears onto someone or something that can sustain us beyond the threat of death.

As children, this is our parents.

As adults, it may be our culture, our religion, our lovers, or our government. 

The death of Hillé’s father, her failed sexual relationship with Ehud, her spiritual disillusionment, and her relationship with language can all be seen in the context of her struggle against, or with, transference.

While the political situation in Brazil doesn’t often appear at the forefront of Hilst’s work, it does figure into her work thematically, and in the way she uses language. 

The experimental prose of The Obscene Madame D especially can definitely be understood in the context of the military regime’s waning, and all the possibilities that this opened up.

In the sense that language is a cultural and political construct, Hilst breaks that construct, and in doing so, asking us to hear life’s eventual silence.

Hilst’s work is flesh and blood and bones and that is it.

It is body and bodies decompose, like the last pages of The Obscene Madame D.

Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene, and shows, in this discomfiting, hypnotic work, just how rarely those categories are what they seem.)

“With my dog-eyes I stop before the sea.

Tremulous and sick.

Bent, thin, I smell fish in the driftwood.

Fishbone.

Tail.

I gaze at the sea but don’t know its name.

I remain standing there, askance, and what I feel is also nameless.

I feel my dog body.

I don’t know the world nor the sea in front of me.

I lie down because my dog body orders it.

There is a bark in my throat, a gentle howl.

I try to expel it but man-dog I know that I’m dying and I will never be heard.

Now I’m a spirit.

I’m free and fly over my miserable being, my abandonment, the nothing that contains me and that made me on Earth.

I am rising, wet like fog.”

Hilda Hirst, With My Dog Eyes

Hilda Hilst wrote With My Dog Eyes when she was in her 50s.

As she aged, Hilst increasingly felt that serious provocative literature, literature to “wake people up” was absent in Brazil, including in her own writing.

She felt there was no writing brave enough to properly treat the banalities of modern life with its traditional values, apathy, commonplace poverty, and violence in a way that would, if not enlighten anyone, then provide a means to leave it.

Hilst had abandoned a law career in order to write, retreating to a small colony she established on the coffee estate to pursue a lifestyle of sexual freedom, unconventional and often sordid love arrangements, reading as she pleased, writing intensely.

Her poetry was universally well regarded.

Later she would focus on prose, which was viewed as less accessible and avant-garde.

With My Dog Eyes is the most novel-like of Hilst’s prose fictions.

She was drinking heavily and had become an eccentric and reclusive diva surrounded in her colony by beautiful young men eager to be poets.

Strapped for funds, she had begun selling off pieces of her family’s land in order to get by and was also lecturing at the University of Campinas in order to avoid selling more land.

It was as a lecturer that she began rubbing shoulders with scientists and mathematicians.

The middle-class, middle-aged math professor protagonist of this story grew out of this experience.

Above: Hilde Hilst

In With My Dog Eyes (1986) we have a middle-aged man, Amós Kéres, a professor of mathematics, who is being asked to take a break from teaching because he has fallen into the habit of saying nothing for 15 minutes at a stretch.

(“Professor Kéres”, says the Dean.

“Fifteen minutes is too much.”)

So far, so intelligible.

But after a few pages – and there are only 59 of them in the whole work – we leave the pathways of conventional narrative.

The entire story takes place in the professor’s mind.

You are never sure what is real or imagined.

The mind never takes flight, however.

Despising the life it observes, the mind doesn’t succeed in showing up banalities so much as being somewhat banal itself, as if Hilst did write this while maybe very drunk.

Amós Kéres, a professor whose mind rattles with visions, images and loose quotations from Bertrand Russell and Elias Canetti but who wants to be otherwise engaged, it seems:

“There are books all over the place,” he says, “and I can’t interest myself in them any longer.”

Thus, in appropriately Kafkaesque fashion, does Amós begin a transformation that puts him “beyond the other side of the mirror” and finds him in distinctly different form, though not without a few troubling, adult-rated visits (“Get drunk every night, and vicious, sputtering, shake my d*** time to time for Amanda’s friends.”) to points of interest in his biography and personal geography.

Conceived in the early 1980s, this novel speaks to the nexus between genius and madness — and it gets off a few growls at the state of things as they are.

He is asked to take a leave of absence.

While that may be just the right thing for the students, it doesn’t help Amós.

In fact, it may push him well past himself.

“A clear-cut unhoped-for was what he felt and understood at the top of that small hill.

But he didn’t see shapes or lines, didn’t see contours or lights.

He was invaded by colours, life, a flashless dazzling, dense, comely, a sunburst that was not fire.

He was invaded by incommensurable meaning.

He could only say that.“

Above: Hilda Hilst

Let me give you a taste:

“There are certain walls that should never be seen before we grow old:

Moss and ocher, dahlias across some of them, lacerated.

Sounds that should never be heard:

Pulsations of a lie, the metallic sounds of cruelty echoing deep down into the heart.

Words that should never be pronounced:

Hollow eloquences, the vibrations of infamy, the throbbing ruby-reds of wisdom.“

If you think this sounds like the word salad produced by certain kinds of insanity, you’d be getting somewhere.

We often talk about the connection between genius and madness, and sometimes we refer to what’s called the “descent from genius to madness”.

Here, though, while Amós’s mind is definitely on the wrong track, there is little evidence of “descent”.

He is still a genius.

Hilst is a genius for expressing his madness from the perspective of a genius trying to comprehend, someone “invaded by incommensurable meaning”.

Indeed, perhaps what Amós experiences is some kind of ascent into madness.

Is that the clear-cut unhoped-for?

“He had understood only in that instant.

And now never again?

He recalled everything perfectly.

He had gone like always to the top of that little hill.

He liked to be there, where you could still glimpse some dusky greens, a hurried lizard scurrying across a trail, and if he turned his back on the university building he would see fields of cotton and coffee.

He would stay there just looking.

Emptied.

Sometimes he would ponder his modest destiny.

Had he cherished any illusions?

As a youth, he desired the non-obvious to be demonstrated, a short and harmonious equation that would scintillate the as-yet unexplained.

Words.

These were the fine veins that he never had managed to wholly extract from the mass of hard and rough earth where they lay deposited.

He didn’t want deceiving effects, or empty sonorities.

As a child, he never figured out how to explain himself.

A hurricane of questions whenever he’d taken an aimless walk, just over that way to see the neighbors’ dog or the flock of parakeets that came around in the late afternoon.

I just went over that way, that’s all.

They’d say:

Why?

What for?

What dog?

At this hour?

To see what about the dog, what parakeet?

I’d respond:

Over that way because they’re pretty.

He’d blush saying the words over that way because they’re pretty.

Later, he’d get furious, when they’d ask him about feelings.

How to formulate exact words, various letters brought together, chained, short or long words, to extract from inside himself those fine veins that lay untouched there inside him?

They were there, he knew it, but how to extract them?

Everything would come undone.

He liked reading Japanese poets.

One of them, Buson, has a poem like this:

“Behold the mouth of Emma O!
It seems that she’s about to spit
A peony!“

Above: Hilda Hilst

Poetry and mathematics.

The black stone structure breaks and you see yourself in a saturation of lights, an unexpected clarity.

An unexpected clarity was what he felt and understood at the top of that small hill.

But he didn’t see shapes or lines, didn’t see contours or lights.

He was invaded by colours, life, a flashless dazzling, dense, comely, a sunburst that was not fire.

He was invaded by incommensurable meaning.

He could say only that.

Invaded by incommensurable meaning.

And the previous night?

His wife, the singular Amanda, ranted and raved from one corner of the room to another, her dark arms rising up and tumbling down agitatedly:

Amós, numbers are fine when it comes to a bank account, okay?

The nightgown is pale green, cotton, the one that sticks to her tits, her belly.

He thinks I couldn’t have married or had a kid, and then the kid comes into the room:

Mom, Dad is good at math.

Tell him to do this problem here.

No way, I say.

I touch myself.

I am also in light-green pajamas.

She is crazy about matching colours.

I look at the headboard.

In the middle there is a circular weaving, branchlike.

What colour?

Light green.

I feel a bit nauseous.

All beds should be dynamited.

This one.

I look at the back of my hands.

The veins seem more pronounced.

I think of what these hands might have done.

Carpentry would have been nice.

Tables, chairs, why not lecterns?

Would I be kneeling now?

Cots.

Just a single person fits in a cot.

Those narrow ones.

The boy starts crying.

I say, “Give it to me later.”

Amanda:

What’s the big deal?

He did the problem himself and just wants to check.

It is bedtime.

The boy keeps crying.

What a sham.

All this of kids and marriage.

I think of a shot in the chest and the other one is still ranting eternally in her light-green nightgown, her tits, her thighs.

A shot in the chest.

It is necessary to love, Amós.

After all, she is your wife, he’s your son.

Go to bed, son.

Do it yourself.

It’s better for you.

The boy leaves.

Come here, Amanda.

She doesn’t come.

It is a long lecture.

A few bits stayed with me:

Dinner, friends’ house, restaurants, sometimes dancing, why not?

Amanda dragged on.

Her arms continued their aerial battle.

Dancing. I’m remembering Osmo.

Whose friend was he?

I’m not sure.

I know he killed one or two women because of this obsession with dancing.

He was all tangled up with God, in abysses (He was a philosopher.) and they were always wanting to dance.

I try to make Amanda lie down.

She wants to keep lecturing.

A shot in my chest or in hers?

I tell her to lecture lying down.

She finally lies down.

Just what is it between me and Amanda?

What are feelings anyway?

How is it that they vanish without a thread of vestiges?

Were they ever there?

Everything leaves a trace.

In death, bones, later ashes.

Vestiges in an urn.

Someone’s footstep.

He was wearing sneakers.

This one was wearing boots.

Look at the mark of the heel, right there.

Threads of hair remain everywhere.

Preserved teeth.

They never go away if they’re well preserved.

In the mouth they rot.

In a metal box, that little tooth there:

Forever.

Your little baby tooth, look, son.

And a fully grown man of 50.

That tooth there.

Toujours.

In aeternum.

Where are you going, Amós?

I am going to go get my tooth from the drawer.

Now?

Yes, now, Amanda.

I open the drawer and peer in.

It’s there.

Well, now it won’t be.

I go to the toilet.

I flush.

It winds its way down through the pipes, I presume, winds its way down, and then to the sewer?

Forever in the sewer?

Or will it get all worn down as it would in a mouth?

Sewer-mouth.

What did you do, Amós?

Mouth-sewer.

Mewer.

I respond to the others.

To some.

I forget the “consider” “therefore” “let us assume” “thence it follows” and attempt the incoherency of many words, at first spelling some secretly beside my heart.

For example, Life, Understanding.

And if a question comes my way, empty a brass cylinder on the person who asks.

Died, eh?

Died of letters.

How so?

Well, he asked this mathematician something and the guy hadn’t spoken anything but numbers for years, you see, and hemorrhaged words.

What?

Just that, spurts of words.

The other couldn’t take it.

The most learned cadaver that I ever saw, a beautiful thing, man, all darkened with letters.

Above: Hilda Hilst

The book opens with Amós Kéres on his way to meet with the department dean.

He first pulls up at a university building which, he observes, is no different from other buildings, like a whorehouse or church.

Above: Hilda Hilst

He is consumed by the puzzles that seem attached to everything except math equations.

Kéres’ most ardent wish, his idée fixe, is to develop a mode of thinking — an algebra of symbolic logic — that would describe and account for, with mathematical rigor, all the complexity and chaos of human experience.

He recalls, as a young boy, wanting nothing less than to find “a short and harmonious equation that would scintillate the as-yet unexplained”.

Kéres’ efforts are a fictionalization of a real-world tradition, with a long history of its own.

The attempt at developing a general or abstract science of reasoning goes back at least to René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Above: French philosopher René Descartes (1596 – 1650)

Above: German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716)

More recently, Gottlob Frege did pivotal work, as did Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970), whose essays on the philosophy of mathematics explicitly influenced With My Dog Eyes.

Above: German philosopher Gottlob Frege (1848 – 1925)

Above: British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)

Kéres’ dream, his obsession, is to complete the project that these thinkers began, to complete the age-old pursuit of what, in his “Study of Mathematics”, Russell called the “world of pure reason”, which “knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying its splendid edifices.”

An external apathy has gripped Kéres, making him so aloof in his classrooms that he might begin a sentence, then pause fifteen minutes before finishing it.

For that reason, as well as a general suspicion that he is mad, the department dean is about to place Kéres on a leave of absence.

Perhaps because he is going to meet his punishment, Kéres remembers with self-revulsion the moment he learned of the death of his dog.

The boy Kéres throws himself on a patch of squash, hugs a “squash shaped like a twisted cylinder with an ochre head”, and chokes out: 

Why did his dog die?

His father simply says, with a destructive gesture of his fists: “He f***ed himself.” and calls his son a fool.

The placement on leave propels Kéres through a series of emotions and memories that feel naturally flowing from a man being told he is no longer fit for his life.

First, anger directed at the world at large at being expelled years ago as a boy for writing an obscene story.

Then, emptiness, a sensation of walking up a hill towards a “hurricane of questions” that had consumed him as a boy, involving the problem of how to extract meaning from behind the words of poets, a problem that doesn’t exist in mathematics, which invades him with “incommensurable meaning”.

Then to banalities of married life, with thoughts of Amanda, his ranting and raving wife, a university lecturer like himself, telling him that numbers are only good for a bank account, and to the matching colours of everything in his home, even his pyjamas, at which he has the urge to touch himself, which then leads toward a boyhood memory of a prostitute named Libitina and the multiple meanings of that name from passion to freedom to an old woman, none of the meanings being completely true, or completely false, in his remembrance of Libitina.

From here, Kéres’s thoughts become entirely unhinged for a large part of the 59-page story.

All his previous thoughts overlap and smash into one another:

Wife, kids, incommensurate meaning, the hill, crude and cruel father putting ants to death, delicate mother warning him against crude, handsome fathers, the pleasure and limitations of equations as applied to words, and interlacing wife and prostitute culminating in both sucking at his 48-year-old c***.

Suddenly, the mind calms.

Kéres is in an empty classroom, contemplating poetry and meditating on the sacrifices his wife has endured in making a life with him.

He thinks about the love between husband and wife, and while thinking this realizes that he lusts for a friend of his wife, and also thinks about the wetness of a prostitute friend of Libitina’s.

These thoughts seem to liberate Kéres toward thoughts on options.

Kéres becomes jubilant.

He resolves to leave his wife and son in order to do nothing more adventurous than look up two old school friends, one in particular, Isaiah.

Kéres is suddenly driving to Isaiah recklessly through city streets amidst a cacophony of horns, almost running over a dog.

Above: Hilda Hilst

Then “Hilde” appears, rubbing his leg like a cat, but isn’t a cat, as if by inserting a close variant of her name in the story as an animal of some kind Hilst is telling us through Kéres that it is through her eyes that Kéres sees, but “she [Hilde], as you can see, is also a polyhedron.

We don’t exist, get it?”

A dead dog having begun this story, a different dog also ends it.

As Kéres forgets about Isaiah and, instead, gets drunk in a bar and, while drunk, decides on suicide, he sees a stray dog —

A stray bitch appeared at dusk.

She is yellow.

She must have just given birth.

Her teats sagging, her ribs showing.

Her brown eyes have the vehement glint of hunger.

There are sparks that escape the flesh in misery, in humiliation, in pain.

Sparks show in animals too.

Then Kéres is dead or dying.

Alone, in a quiet and rare poetic moment, he feels himself to be “longer thinner”, arrived in some odd Heaven with cubes banging on his forehead and with women around him as he feels his “dog body”.

Above: Hilda Hilst

Hilst’s father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, her mother with dementia.

Hilst herself, who had been a great beauty and socialite in her youth, began to write seriously by her 30s, eventually confining herself to isolation in her home built in coffee fields inherited from her parents.

She devoted herself to literature, her dogs (“sometimes numbering more than one hundred“), and, for many years towards the end of her life, spending every evening getting drunk on cheap whiskey, drunk to the point of not remembering the things she said or the fights she provoked.

‘I drink because it’s the only way I can tolerate reality.’

Insanity, or a radically fractured view of her intolerable reality, is what her work both is, and is about.

Above: Hilda Hilst

She revered Samuel Beckett and James Joyce.

She considered herself to be carrying on their work.

In that sense she could be said to have succeeded, as she makes the monologues in Beckett’s The Unnamable and Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses look like models of linear, expositionary clarity.

This may all sound rather forbidding.

I won’t pretend that it’s more reader-friendly than it is.

There are few concessions to conventional understanding:

We get flashes, but they are not comforting.

This is a mind unravelling, and through the gaps we see a horrified fascination with the body, a kind of carnal awareness of existential futility.

Above: Hilda Hilst

There’s an epigraph from Georges Bataille that helps make sense of this:

“I grasp while sinking that the sole truth of man, glimpsed at last, is to be a supplication without response.”

Above: French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897 – 1962)

So here you go:

This is the heavy stuff, literature as an assault course, not for the impatient or faint-hearted, or those who suspect they’re having their legs pulled.

Look on it as not so much a novel as an extended prose poem, written from the edge.

With My Dog-Eyes is an account of an unraveling — of sanity, of language.

After experiencing a vision of what he calls “a clear-cut unhoped-for”, college professor Amós Keres struggles to reconcile himself with his life as a father, a husband, and a member of the university with its “meetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, megalomanias.”

With My Dog-Eyes follows mathematician Amós Keres as he slowly descends into madness and maybe, just maybe, transforms into a canine.

Amós teaches at the Whorehouse Church Government University, but has grown very tired of academia.

He is also struggling to come to terms with and fully understand his role as a father and is frustrated with his marriage.

 (“It’s bedtime.

The boy keeps crying.

What a sham all this of kids and marriage.”)

The mixture of all those elements quickly pushes him to insanity.

Above: Hilda Hilst and dogs

The beauty of With My Dog-Eyes stems from it multiplicity.

The narrative seamlessly weaves together conversations from different points of views, prose, poetry, and strange visions/memories/dreams.

It goes from what could pass for reality to surrealism in the span of a paragraph and seems to be a celebration of language as much as a story about a professor spiraling into dementia:

“The green fruit was plucked?

Is that what he said?

The wall on the other side of the street.

There are certain walls that should never be seen before we grow old.”

Amós’ madness comes quickly, but the depths Hilst explores give the narrative a feel of something longer.

The writing is dense, but not impenetrable, and that makes each transition into philosophical, surreal, or metaphysical terrain a diverging road:

The reader can choose to deconstruct it and try to interpret it or simply take in the imagery and keep reading.

Above: Hilda Hilst in the garden of Casa do Sol, with her dogs

In the 1980s, due to increasing financial pressure from a lack of book sales, Hilst participated in the Programa do Artista Residente (Artist-in-Residence program), at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, being the first artist to do so.

The program was conceived as a way for students to meet established authors.

She later held other teaching positions at the university.

Hilst published Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook (O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby) in 1990, the first book of a pornographic tetralogy.

Controversial, subversive and relentless from the first to the last page, this book began the obscene phase of the author of Júbilo, memória, novitiate of passion.

At 60 years of age, four decades after debuting as a poet and unhappy with the timid reception of her work, Hilda Hilst took a radical stance.

In 1990, with Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook, she decided to say goodbye to “serious literature” and dedicate herself to writing “adorable jokes”.

The narrator, Lori, is an 8-year-old girl who decides to become a prostitute, with her parents’ consent, and record everything — really everything — in her diary.

With acid humor and brutal self-awareness, she recounts the consequences of seduction and the pleasure that money brings her.

Not surprisingly, the scandalous premise yielded the most diverse and emphatic interpretations from critics and continues to arouse the avid curiosity of readers.

In the afterword to this edition, psychoanalyst Vera Iaconelli highlights how Hilda Hilst, by questioning our certainties and going beyond the limits of reason, wrote a work that impresses with its boldness and relevance.

She announced her “goodbye to serious literature” in the 1990s because she was “irritated by the meager reaching of her writing“.

“My books don’t sell.

They don’t get reprinted.

People find me difficult.

I’m tired of this stigma.

I became desperate with the forgetfulness surrounding my name.

I always wanted to be read, I didn’t want to stay in the drawers.“

(Hilda Hilst)

For Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst, writing was a continuous process of transcendence without ever reaching the transcendent.

A radical subjugation of all traditional or seemingly “correct” modes of thought.

For this reason, even the process of moderating a discussion on her work poses a considerable challenge, since the moderator must always question even the foundations of her questions.

Subjects considered socially controversial were themes addressed by the author in her works.

However, as the writer herself confessed in her interview with Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira, her work has always sought, essentially, to portray the difficult relationship between God and man.

I confess I cannot see the connection between child prostitution and the relationship between God and man.

I am not a prude but I don’t feel comfortable with the notion of a mother compelling her 8-year-old daughter into prostitution.

Nor can I comprehend the kind of man attracted to a little girl who has not yet reached puberty.

Where the line between literature and life should be blurred is not only determined by the artist but as well by its audience.

I choose to not read this particular Hilst work, despite the actuality of child prostitution remaining an issue in the world.

(Child prostitution is prostitution involving a child.

It is a form of commercial sexual exploitation of children.

The term normally refers to prostitution of a minor, or person under the legal age of consent.

In most jurisdictions, child prostitution is illegal as part of general prohibition on prostitution.

Child prostitution usually manifests in the form of sex trafficking, in which a child is kidnapped or tricked into becoming involved in the sex trade, or survival sex, in which the child engages in sexual activities to procure basic essentials such as food and shelter.

Prostitution of children is commonly associated with child pornography, and they often overlap.

Some people travel to foreign countries to engage in child sex tourism.

Research suggests that there may be as many as 10 million children involved in prostitution worldwide. 

The practice is most widespread in South America and Asia, but prostitution of children exists globally, in undeveloped countries as well as developed. 

Most of the children involved with prostitution are girls, despite an increase in the number of young boys in the trade.

All member countries of the United Nations have committed to prohibiting child prostitution, either under the Convention on the Rights of the Child or the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography.

Various campaigns and organizations have been created to try to stop the practice.)

Above: Flag of the United Nations

In Letters from a Seducer (1991) Hilst describes the everyday life of Karl, a wealthy, erudite, and amoral man who seeks an answer to his incomprehension of life through sex.

Karl writes and sends twenty provocative letters to Cordelia, his chaste sister.

The letters’ text becomes intertwined with the life of the poet Stamatius, who finds Karl’s letters in the trash.

It quickly dawns upon the reader that both men are in fact the same person albeit at different points of time and circumstance.

This mirror play is the guiding trope for a uniquely grand work.

At her death in 2004, Brazilian author Hilda Hilst had received a number of her country’s important literary prizes and published more than two dozen books of poetry, drama and fiction.

What many Brazilians immediately thought of in conjunction with her name, however, was the notoriety generated by what critics labelled Hilst’s ‘pornographic’ tetralogy of the years 1990 – 1992, with the novel LETTERS FROM A SEDUCER generally considered the masterpiece of the four.

Yet the charge of pornography, which Hilst did not disavow, hardly approaches her deep skill and artistry in drawing from and upon a mode that might appear inimical to art.

In LETTERS FROM A SEDUCER, Hilst employs multiple discourses, styles, forms, and registers, including those of the libertine epistolary tradition, to create a postmodern polyphonic text that surpasses the limits of the conventional realist novel.

Unfolding in three parts, beginning with letters from a wealthy, depraved socialite, named Karl, to his cloistered sister, Cordélia, then shifting to a series of stories by a near-homeless graphomane named Stamatius (‘Tiu’), and concluding with even briefer fragments extracted, like atomic particles, from the ‘hollows’ of the imagination, the novel suggests that perhaps the greatest seducer of all is language and its manifold (im)possibilities.

What becomes ever clearer as we proceed through this novel is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous dictum that ‘ethics and aesthetics’ are one.

Above: Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)

“How to think about pleasure wrapped up in this crap?

In mine.

This discomfort of knowing myself raggedy and covered with sores, your hair growing long in the c****h, if you dare think about it, and then around the h*** a stew of wounds.

I do dare think about it, I tell myself.

My mouth toothless because of all the stress and strains and addiction.

I dare think about it and they don’t forgive that.

Then I take hold of your p***s and your p***y, pound them.

Your cry is high, hard, a whip, a bone.

There’s debris all over the room, shards of that church over there in Caturré.

The guy blew up everything in five minutes (Was it me?), screamed, darkly:

God?

Here, oh, I only know about God when I enter the h***y mouth of the wild sugar apple.

And soon after we heard the bang, the Church exploding like jackfruit falling from the sky.

I take hold of my mistress’ p******a.

After I spit on the papers, those ones from six months ago and which every day I smooth out, fumble with, tear, soil.

Don’t you want to f***, Tiu?

Aren’t you a little tired of writing?

I look at Eulália.

She’s tiny and plump.

For a year now she has been accompanying me in the street.

We ask for everything that you are going to throw in the trash, everything that isn’t worth a dime anymore, and if there is any leftover food we still want it.

The burlap sacks fill up, bric-a-brac, books, stones, then some people put rats and s*** in the bag.

What faces those rats had, my God!

What injured little eyes those rats had, my God!

We separated everything out right there:

Rats and s*** here.

Books, stones and bric-a-brac there.

Never any food.

We were busy all day long.

Afterwards, I washed off the books and began to read them.

Eulália would do what she could to get some food.

What readings!

What people of the first order!

What Tolstoy and philosophy they threw out is unbelievable.

I have my half-dozen copies of that masterpiece THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH and the complete works of Kierkegaard.

Above: Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

Above: Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855)

And among the bric-a-brac I got some special ones too:

• A 12th-century foot of Christ

Above: The Christ Pantocrator of St. Catherine’s Monastery at Sinai

• Half the face of an 18th-century Teresa Cepeda y Ahumada

Above: Santa Teresa de Jesús (Museo del Prado)

• A piece of St. Sebastian’s thigh (with arrow and blood) from the 13th century

Above: Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (255 – 288)

• A stick of pink plastic, from this century, all twisted up as if it had been burned (I kept it in order not to forget. Not to stick mine in one of those spontaneously combustible pieces.)

• Two parrot feathers

Above: Blue-and-yellow Macaw

• The belly of a Buddha

Above: Seated Buddha (563 – 483 BC)

• Three pieces of angel wings

Above: Archangel Michael

• Six Bibles

Above: The Gutenberg Bible, published in the mid-15th century by Johannes Gutenberg, is the first published Bible.

• 210 copies of DAS KAPITAL. 

(They threw a lot of this last one out, it seems to be out of fashion, I guess.)

We’re going to f***, yes we are, Eulália, very soon.

She laughs.

She has excellent teeth and doesn’t care about my empty mouth.

She knows that I lost them (the teeth) when I was trying to pay my mortgage.

The mortgage for my house.

Stress.

It is quite clear that I was unable to do it.

I found myself without house, without teeth, without furniture and without my woman.

But the catfish here is whole, firm as you’ll find, the tongue also, and I go on l*****g Eulália’s little dove, her sweet coil.

She cries out a high cry, hard, a whip, a bone.

Afterwards, I insert the p**e.

When I c*** I take a peek at the bounty.

My bounty here inside.

What I did not have.

The one I lost.

I lost so many words!

They were beautiful, blonde.

I lost ‘Monogatari’, all her mountainousness, her monkey-cat-gnome-like acts.

I lost Lutécia, a pathetic woman but mine.

She died soon after saying to me:

“I’ll go get some pasteles for you only.”

She was run over.

My Lutécia.

The crushed pasteles still in her hand.

My Lutécia.

Never again.

She was on the plump side and tall.

And what softness in the cleft of her bosom, her chasm, in her b**h, in her a**.

What a b***!

I laid my face there and sometimes half tearful, half silly, said if I had had a little pillow like yours, Lutécia, when I was a filthy, shabby kid, I would have been a poet.

Then she turned:

Cry here in my p***y, big boy, smear the rose, go on.

I wept and smeared it.

She moaned sad and long.

Eternal Lutécia.

What are you thinking about?

About our lives, Eulália.

And it isn’t good, Tiu?

If I could at least manage to write.

Write about me, about my life before I happened to find you, about the beating Zeca gave me, about the disease he gave me, about my mother who died of pity for my father when he utterly destroyed his liver, about the baby I lost, Brazil, ay!

Yes, I’ll write, Eulália.

I will write about your tobacco leaves, about my bat.

Don’t talk like that, baby.

I just want to help.

She lies face down, cries a little, afterwards whimpers.

That’s when I pluck the parrot’s feather, one of those with yellow-green plumes, and whistling the national anthem I’ll trill her little a**, sliding the shaft in the h***, slowly stroking the slope of her b*** cheeks.

Eulália rises and draws hers back loose, so I’m heading into the woods, and leave the pulp for the nib, beautifully stuck right in there.

I c*** thick thinking:

I am a Brazilian writer, something of a macho, baby.

Let’s go.“

Above: Flag of Brazil

When this novel was first published in 1991, Brazil had emerged from a military dictatorship (1964 – 1985).

Writers no longer had to contend with brutal government censorship.

As a result, writer Hilda Hirst played with the readers’ expectations.

This is a tale of pleasure, not a lot of seduction, pleasure, gratification, pleasure, and then some more. 

Twenty stories contain numerous references to incestuous relationships between the writer’s father, his daughter and son.

Our work then transforms into Karl writing some short stories (as part of his letters):

“He used to say strange things when he ran into someone on the street.

For example he said:

Not everything can be fixed.

The others looked at him and sometimes responded:

True, not everything.

Or they did not say anything and kept walking and looking back, fearful or simply surprised.

They did not know his name.

They said that at a certain point he appeared in town.

He was well dressed.

A sheaf of papers in his hand.

Many papers.

In addition to the “not everything can be fixed”, he spoke mainly about the difficulty of being understood.

The others:

You don’t speak of anything else besides that.

Do you live far away?

Are you lost?

Did you have an accident?

He repeated:

Not everything can be fixed.

And what was on those papers?

They looked.

Nothing, nothing, just blank sheets.

The people of the village became accustomed to him.

An old widow boarded him in her back room.

The man slept between broken chairs, tarnished mirrors, peeling chests.

They asked the widow:

Did he say something else today?

Only that same thing:

“Not everything can be fixed.”

After the short stories, a section called “Of other hollows”, apparently written by Tiu or Stamatius, a writer who has lost his fortune, his house, his wife, his teeth and now lives in a shack, collecting shellfish, writing and abusing his partner Eulalia:

Apparently a published author after physically abusing his publisher, he if frantically writing, pouring the words onto the page, in-between fornication with Eulalia:

You materialized your howl about life and it’s so poignant it was born a woman.

And it was born as you wanted to be:

Poor in spirit.

And as you see yourself:

A crystalline sensuality.

And a touch of pity, a touch of debauchery, and delicacy in sex because deep down you fear that everything degenerates into death.

Above: Hilda Hilst

The final section is a mixture of voices, with eight short pieces, cutting across all that has come before:

“WE HAD ENDLESS DISCUSSIONS.

I showed him my texts and he said:

You have no breathing room, buddy.

Everything ends too quickly.

You do not develop the character.

The character wanders around, has no density, is not real.

But that’s all I mean.

I do not want contours.

I do not want destiny.

I want the guy lightly-drawn, concise, rushed for its own sake, free of personal data, the guy floating, yes, but he is alive, more alive than if he were trapped by words, by acts.

He floats free, you understand?

No.“

Above: Hilda Hilst

Yes, we have our writer critiquing the work we are reading.

If you are after character development or density then skip this work.

If you are after a challenge and characters celebrating Life, in all its filth and splendour, then this is probably up your alley.

The word “seducer” in the title is slightly distracting as there isn’t a whole lot of seduction going on in between these pages.

We have gratification.

We have desire, lust, as many sexual acts as you could possibly imagine.

However, the “seduction” is a little sparse.

We glide through a difficult structure with lyrical poetry, angry personal letters and euphemisms for body parts all flowing on almost every page.

Not a work you can simply explain, something of a cross between Clarice Lispector and Henry Miller (or maybe Anaïs Nin), this is not your ordinary read, possibly not one to read on a train or plane unless you are willing to put up with the strange looks from your fellow passengers.

Above: Ukrainian-born, Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977)

Above: American writer Henry Miller (1891 – 1980)

Above: French-born American writer Anaïs Nin (1903 – 1977)

Pornographic, poetic, desirous, and often dark, Letters from a Seducer explores themes of sexuality, gender, incest, pleasure-seeking, and literary creation.

Titillating to some and undoubtedly vulgar and offensive to others, Hilst’s novel reverberates with passion and vigour.

With a singular style as cerebral as it is visceral, Letters from a Seducer teases the edge of lust and longing (with frequent sojourns well beyond the borderlands), perhaps arousing in its reader equal parts desire and disgust.

The night is cold and there are stars out.

It is acts like this, you see, that make this life what it is:

Sordid and immutable.

Above: Hilda Hilst

Rútil Nada is a 1993 poetic prose fiction narrative. 

Lucius Kod is a 35-year-old political journalist who ends up falling in love with his daughter’s boyfriend, Lucas, a boy much younger than him.

Because of this “late amour fou“, he forgets about taboos and family obligations.

However, when Lucius Kod is seen alongside Lucas on the streets and in bars by friends of his father, a banker who is homophobic, right-wing and, according to Lucius himself, an “indescribable executioner” who has his life glued to him, he orders his henchmen to rape and beat his granddaughter’s boyfriend and son’s lover, and then go check out the job, kiss the boy and, according to the old man himself, have with him everything he had with Lucius.  

The narrative begins with a stream-of-consciousness interior monologue by Lucius Kod himself about Lucas’s coffin and the whirlwind of voices around him, which breaks the traditional, linear literary mode of narrative, as well as his effort to remember everything that happened up to that point.

The final pages are Luke’s poems about walls until his final message to Lucius:

“Until one day.

In the night or in the light.

I must not survive myself.

Do you know why?

Parodying that other:

Everything human was strange to me.

Luke” )

A number of Hilst’s books were originally published by smaller Brazilian publishers, but beginning in 2001, Editora Globo, the publishing branch of the Brazilian media organization Globo, began reissuing nearly all her works, as part of its Coleção Reunidas de Hilda Hilst. 

She stopped writing in the same year, telling an interviewer that she had said everything she wanted to say.

Above: Hilda Hilst

Hilst died on 4 February 2004, in Campinas at the age of 73.

She had been hospitalized at the Hospital das Clínicas da Unicamp since 2 January, following surgery for a fractured femur.

Her health sharply declined after contracting an infection, aggravated by a chronic heart and pulmonary condition, before she eventually passed away due to multiple organ failure. 

Above: Hospital das Clínicas da Unicamp

Following her death, Hilst’s friend Mora Fuentes created the Hilda Hilst Institute in her honour, an organization whose mission is to uphold the House of the Sun as a space for artistic creation and serves as a library and cultural center. 

Above: Casa do Sol

Author Yuri Vieira, who lived in the House of the Sun for two years, wrote a book about his experiences there.

Above: Brazilian writer Yuri Vieira

After her death, Hilst garnered more fame among English language readership as several of her novels were translated to the language, such as With My Dog Eyes, The Obscene Madame D., and Letters from a Seducer.

Relatively obscure in her lifetime, her work has since been extensively studied and analyzed after her death.

She has been highly referenced in books, magazines, academic journals, and others.

In several of her writings Hilst tackled politically and socially controversial issues, such as obscenity, queer sexuality, and incest.

The tetralogy that comprises Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook (O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby) and Tales of Derision: Grotesque Texts (Contos d’escárnio. Textos grotescos) (1990), Cartas de um Sedutor (1991) and Bufólicas (1992), includes overtly pornographic material, if not pornography per se. 

Her pornographic work started as a response to the minimal popularity her previous works had with the general audience.

She explored theological issues in her work as well, particularly regarding God and the “search of the divine“.

Other common themes in her writings include madness, old age, love and death.

Above: Hilda Hilst

Hilst was an odd character indeed:

Trained as a lawyer, obsessed with Marlon Brando, a lover of dogs and devourer of libraries, hermitic and alcoholic.

She also had a sticky memory.

Everything she read and observed, it seems, found a way into her writing, though often with absurdist shadings.

Memorable and very strange.

Above: Hilda Hilst

I find myself wondering whether Hilst might have been a happier person had she not isolated herself, not abandoned herself to alcohol and sex, but instead had immersed herself in a community of writers.

I see myself in Hilda and in her characters, especially the math professor.

I see a banal world that insists that happiness is only achievable by accepting its banality.

I wonder if only artists can see colour, musicians rhythm and writers meaning.

Is there beauty in the chaos?

Is there music of the spheres, a ghost in the machine, a light at the end of the world’s tunnel vision?

I have tried to capture the earthiness of Hilst without becoming the obscene Canada Slim.

With my dog eyes I have typed these letters from a seducer, compelling you to forego the minimal odes of death but instead I encourage you to embrace life found in a community of like thinkers.

We are born individuals but we remain part of humanity.

Embrace that contradiction.

(Verse 1)

I’m sittin’ here in the boring room
It’s just another rainy Sunday afternoon
I’m wastin’ my time, I got nothin’ to do
I’m hangin’ around, I’m waitin’ for you
But nothing ever happens
And I wonder

[Verse 2]
I’m drivin’ around in my car
I’m drivin’ too fast, I’m drivin’ too far
I’d like to change my point of view
I feel so lonely, I’m waitin’ for you
But nothing ever happens
And I wonder

[Chorus]
I wonder how, I wonder why
Yesterday, you told me ’bout the blue, blue sky
And all that I can see is just a yellow lemon tree
I’m turnin’ my head up and down
I’m turnin’, turnin’, turnin’, turnin’, turnin’ around
And all that I can see is just another lemon tree

[Post-Chorus]
Sing
Dap, da-da-da-dam, di-dap-da
Da-da-da-dam, di-dap-da
Dap, di-di-li-da

(Verse 3)
I’m sittin’ here, I missed the power
I’d like to go out, takin’ a shower
But there’s a heavy cloud inside my head
I feel so tired, put myself into bed
Well, nothing ever happens
And I wonder

[Bridge]
Isolation is not good for me
Isolation, I don’t want to sit on the lemon tree

[Verse 4]
I’m steppin’ around in the desert of joy
Maybe, anyhow, I’ll get another toy
And everything will happen
And you wonder

[Chorus]
I wonder how, I wonder why
Yesterday, you told me ’bout the blue, blue sky
And all that I can see is just another lemon tree
I’m turnin’ my head up and down
I’m turnin’, turnin’, turnin’, turnin’, turnin’ around
And all that I can see is just a yellow lemon tree
And I wonder, wonder, I wonder how, I wonder why
Yesterday, you told me ’bout the blue, blue sky
And all that I can see (Ah, dip-dip-dip-dip)
And all that I can see (Ah, dip-dip-dip-dip)
And all that I can see
Is just a yellow lemon tree

Sources

• Wikipedia
• The Animals, “The House of the Rising Sun“
• Trevor Berrett, “With My Dog Eyes“, 1 May 2014, https://mookseandgripes.com
• “With My Dog Eyes“, Summer 2013, https://bombmagazine.org
• Marcus Creghan, “With My Dog Eyes“, 8 February 2018, https://makemag.com
• Grant Faulkner, Pep Talks for Writers
• Stewart Ferris, How to Be a Writer
• Josey Foo, “Review: With My Dog Eyes“, www.yourimpossiblevoice.com
• Fool’s Garden, “Lemon Tree“
• Sarah Gerrard, “Body of the Text“, Los Angeles Review of Books, 21 April 2013, https://lareviewofbooks.org
• Gabino Iglesias, “Beauty in Multiplicity“, 11 April 2014, https://atticusreview.org
• John Keene, “Letters from a Seducer“, January 2024, https://thewhitereview.org
• “With My Dog Eyes“, 29 April 2014, https://kirkusreviews.com
• Nicholas Lezard, “With My Dog Eyes“, The Guardian, 29 April 2014, https://theguardian.com
• Stephen May, Get Started in Creative Writing
• Tony Messenger, “Letters from a Seducer“, 2 June 2015, https://messybooker.wordpress.com
• “O Caderno Rosa de Lori Lamby“, https://naturbrazil.com
• Chuck Wendig, Gentle Writing Advice
• Jurgen Wolff, Your Writing Coach