The Problem With Being: Clarice Lispector, Francis Bacon, & Cézanne

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Hello everyone. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here.

[00:00:03]Today we're going to be talking about Clarice Lepe again. But we're not just going to be talking about Clarice today.

[00:00:11]We're going to be talking about Clarice and two other people that I feel share the same motive as Clarice. If you don't know who Clarice Lee is, Clarice Leper was a Jewish Brazilian author and it is notoriously very difficult to describe her work. But I think maybe the best way to describe it would be to say that Clarice was concerned with matters of being, of existing, and what goes beyond existence. A lot of Clarice's books are very, very long internal monologues with herself. All of Clarice's protagonists are a reflection of Clarice herself and her own struggles with existence and living. And the two people that I feel that share in Clarice's goal, which I will tell you what it is in a second, would be the painter, the Irish British painter Francis Bacon and the French impressionist painter Seaison. Francis Bacon is one of my favorite painters.

[00:01:18]And I didn't know about Paul Seaison until I started reading a little bit more uh like analysis about Francis Bacon's work. And I'm not really a fan of Seaison's painting. And I don't think Seaison really liked his own painting either. But I do love the idea that Seaison was trying to paint. I am I'm inspired a lot by what he was trying to achieve and what he very rarely achieved in his art. He died embittered because he could not achieve it. So you might be asking, what is this goal that I'm talking about? What is this motive? And all three of them have a different way of describing this motive or what they're trying to achieve. Clarice describes her motive as trying to get to the thing itself, trying to access the fundamental neutral matter of the universe really. And I believe that Bacon and Saison were both trying to uh record this or paint this I guess you could say where Clarice calls it the thing itself that she's trying to write about. I guess Bacon calls it recording a fact in his paintings. What Seaison was trying to do, how he described it was trying to avoid the cliche. Seaison was most well known, I guess, for his still lives of apples and peaches and jugs and things like that. And so Seaison's goal was to paint the appiness of the apple, what the apple is, not what we think it is, the apple before we attribute anything to it. So to to better describe it, right, for Clarice's thing, it is an attempt to eat at the source, to get to the source of all things. For Bacon's fact, what he was trying to record was the figural over the figurative matter versus its interpretation. And then Seaison was trying to get rid of the cliche. He was trying to get rid of anything representative about an object. He was just trying to paint things as they are.

[00:03:33]And so this thing that all of these artists really were trying to do is an incredibly difficult task. It's nearly impossible. And that's what makes their their work so compelling. I just think it's interesting, you know, to note that whenever you really like things, they all kind of end up having ties to one another. I don't think it's any coincidence that I love Clarice Le Spectre and Francis Bacon is also my favorite painter. You know, I I think that maybe I like them because they have a common goal. I just didn't realize that until recently. And so, what prompted me to do this video was uh I wanted I've I've read quite a bit about Clarice. I have her biography. I've read many of her books and short stories, but I didn't know I I had a very surface level uh idea of Francis Bacon's uh work because really you can just look at Francis Bacon's work and be like this is amazing and not really know anything about it. And so I wasn't satisfied with that. So I uh I acquired his biography which is called Anatomy of an Enigma.

[00:04:35]And I also got the book that Doo wrote, an analysis that he wrote about Francis Bacon's work. It's called The Logic of Sensation. That book is really really difficult for me to read and understand.

[00:04:48]It's not fun to read, but the fruits are wonderful of of reading it. Um, I'm happy to read it. I just am not enjoying myself in in the process. And it is through the logic of sensation by Doo that I learned about Seaison because he compares Francis Bacon and Seaison quite a bit and says that they share a common goal. They just call it something else.

[00:05:13]And then it was after reading all that that I was like, "Oh my god, what Bacon and Seaison are doing is also what Clarice was trying to do." My intention with this video is to delineate how each of these artists, Clarice being a writer, but you can call her an artist too, is how how they are similar and how even though they may the means at which they try to achieve their goal is different, their goal is the same.

[00:05:39]As for Seaison, um I'm basing my knowledge on him and what I'm going to be talking about in this video from an essay called Seaison by DH Lawrence, which I found out about from the logic of sensation by Deloo. And I'm going to have the logic of sensation is a PDF online that you can read for free.

[00:06:02]That'll be below. and so is uh DH Lawrence's essay on Seaison, which is a very pleasurable read. I loved it. So, those will be below. Anything by Clarice, though, you're going to have to go out and buy a book or rent a book from the library or buy her biography, whatever. Before I go on with the rest of this video, I just want to say that this video is sponsored by me and my Substack, House of Heaven. It's free to subscribe if you would like to. Um, I do free memos and a poem that surmises my week. Um, it's called a cipher. I do free essays every now and then. But if you'd like to elevate your patronage, uh, there's also more essays, thought pieces, personal essays. There's exclusive interviews, and I do like videos where I make clothes and just like m miscellaneous things. Um, you're also getting my videos from YouTube in podcast form, so you can listen to them wherever you'd like. So, that's also a perk of um, subscribing to my Substack, but I would truly appreciate your um, contribution to that. Um, if you want to, you don't have to, but um, it is it is a place that allows me to literally do this for a living. It it it funds my ability to continue being creative and researching these really interesting topics and sharing them with you, adding value to my own life and maybe to yours.

[00:07:29]And it's a place that uh you don't have ads. There's no sponsorships and things like that. So, and and my goal is through Substack that I don't have to do sponsorships anymore. So, consider supporting me on there or just subscribing and just looking at some of the free stuff that I do. your attention matters, too. So, um, if I've given you value, then consider giving it back if you'd like. All right, on to the the video. So, again, I'll say I'll say what each of these what each of these artists are trying to do. Clarice is trying to get to the thing itself.

[00:08:02]Bacon is trying to record the fact in his paintings and Saison is trying to either avoid the cliche or paint what DH Lawrence calls appliness.

[00:08:18]So what is Clarice's thing itself? What does that mean? Clarice once said uh it's in her biography. If I had to give a title to my life, it would be in search of the thing itself. Clarice describes it in the passion according to GH um which is going to be a reference point for this video. She describes this thing itself as neutral, inexpressive, tasteless, unsalted. It is not transcendable. It's fundamental. It's the source. It's it's the fundamental matter of the universe. This source also has ties to Judaism um and Judaism's obsession with uh the name of God which is the name through which everything else acquires its meaning. It's fundamental right so from this source all meaning kind of spires out of it and it is the ultimate reference point. So, this is what I would call the source.

[00:09:18]And I think I want to use this term, the source, as as a kind of umbrella term for what all of these artists are trying to do. They're trying to record, paint, describe, get at this source of life itself or or life before we had words to describe it even, you know, life just as it is, things as they are. That is what all three of these artists I believe are trying to do. And so in the passion according to GH, Clarice Lepector's unnamed protagonist, she just goes by GH. This is a book that uh documents a direct apprehension of the thing itself and it pretty much ruptures the protagonist's entire reality. I wrote here, it's a woman who has an intense mystical experience that ruptures her normal way of living. So much so that she logically deduces that she should eat a cockroach to recalibrate her reality. And that's the best way that I can describe it. The book is literally an internal monologue.

[00:10:33]She has a mystical experience. And the whole the whole book is her describing this experience and and trying to figure out how to put herself back together after it. And so eating of this cockroach is derived from logical means.

[00:10:45]By the way, it is logic to the point of absurdity. The cockroach represents the thing itself. Uh not just for the protagonist, but also for Clarice. Um because Clarice in the documentary it's it's described that Clarice is quite literally so terrified of apprehending the thing itself that she equates it to something as disgusting as a cockroach.

[00:11:06]The whole book is her reasoning as to why she should eat this thing and why it'll in a way save her. It makes sense for her to do this because if you have read about mystical experiences, you the mystic goes into this place. This touches the thing itself and then comes back and tries to describe the indescribable.

[00:11:32]And so it makes sense that in in the passion according to GH, GH is trying to describe something indescribable. And the only way that it makes sense is to do something completely absurd because that's the only way that it's translatable into this domain, the earthly domain. Okay? From this mystical experience, she comes back and she says the only way out is to eat this cockroach. It's it's nonsense, but it's the only way that does make sense. It's the only sense she can make out of it.

[00:12:00]And so language kind of has to be used literally in the book in this kind of perverse uh logic has to be used in a kind of perverse deconstructionist way in order to translate what she was feeling and what she experienced on the other side. the main character's attempt and therefore Clarice's attempt to to reconcile being human with also knowing about the thing itself is to merge with it and to to form some kind of alliance with it through eating it. For it to in fact be a part of her again. I think that's the best way to describe it is that to eat the cockroach is to not be this like separate human thing, but it's to be one with the fundamental matter of the universe. That is why she eats the cockroach. And so Clarice's battle through this novel as well as her other novels is this kind of Stephenwolf drama of like the two selves that she's trying to reconcile. And so you have the part, the one part of yourself that's just like that's human and is like sentimental and tries to live in reality with symbolism and concepts and just goes about her day in this this this reality, right? And then there's the part of being that just is that has no words that just exists.

[00:13:20]It's her trying to reconcile those two things. And I see this also in Bacon and in Seaison.

[00:13:34]What is Bacon's fact? What Bacon was trying to do was trying to paint the figural over the figurative. Trying to paint matter versus the interpretation of that matter, the concept of that matter. Just trying to paint a fact.

[00:13:51]There are so many ways that Doo describes this because it's so important and it needs it needs interpretation and it needs to be understood in a way. But he talks about it as um painting a body without organs, removing the organism from the body. The body without organs does not lack organs. It simply lacks the organism. Um he talks about this by painting he Bacon doesn't paint faces.

[00:14:20]He paints heads. He paints the head, not the face. So, it's you're painting the literal like the flesh and the bones and the matter that make up the person, but you're not painting the expression.

[00:14:31]You're not painting the soul, the the spirit behind this face that makes the face. That's that's another way of describing it. Bacon paints a fact by isolating a subject, for example, and and he puts the the the figure in these like round areas that almost look like they're on like display the colors and the patches of color and stuff. They like enclose in on the subject in a way so as to make this seem like the only thing on Earth and single it out to be like it's like Bacon paints by putting the figure and being like here this is it. This is the only thing he was trying to paint the matter the direct experience of something but without you know with a with a clean mind without any any predetermined ideas about it with no figuration behind it without a narrative. That is how Bacon was trying to paint things. He wanted to paint especially Bacon is famous for painting the screaming pope and just screams in general. He wanted to paint he he described this as I want to paint the scream more than the horror.

[00:15:39]So right the horror in Francis Bacon's painting would be a concept a concept behind the scream. Bacon's work is often times like known for it being horrific and scary terrifying you know like the the grotesqueness of being alive. And um Bacon didn't want it to be that way.

[00:16:01]Bacon wanted horror to be left out of it. Horror instead of the scream. Horror is the concept that we associate with a scream, right? So he wanted to just paint the teeth and the and the mouth open and for you to and really if it's just a fact if it's just the fact of a mouth being open or it maybe doesn't even it barely even looks like a mouth and teeth, it's for you to then attribute your own subjectivity to this painting. And there's all kinds of like open orififices and stuff in his work and they are purposefully meant to not have a concept attached to them. and the whole painting kind of warps itself around them because the law is is the fact.

[00:16:53]So what the hell does Seaison's appiness mean? In DH Lawrence's essay, he says that Saison was successful at being able to know the apple and a jug or two. But he also died and bittered because he feel like he just Seaison did not feel like he really accomplished his goal in being able to know the fundamental matter of the universe. He's trying to paint the apple as it is. Just like Clarice is trying to with the cockroach merge with things as they are, the neutral matter of the of the world, right? Seaison instead of trying to eat it and become it, he's trying to paint it. The appiness of the apple is the apple that just exists. It's the apple that uh exists before we attach any kind of concept to it, before we even call it an apple. This is this is the apple before we give it meaning. And he was trying to find the appiness in all things. You could say he was trying to find this in people, in painting, people playing cards at a table. He was trying to paint this in landscapes. He was trying to do this with all things. The app find the appiness in all things. He was trying to paint things as they live instinctually and intuitively.

[00:18:15]Intuitively is the word that DH Lawrence uses in his essay. And I and I really just want to impress on you just how impossible it is to just paint the apple as is. Another way of describing the applininess with Seaison is that he was trying to avoid the cliche. The cliche is the ready-made idea. It is the concept that we just throw at stuff in order to make it more comfortable for us. We when you think about a cliche with an apple, what do you think is the most cliched thing in the world? Adam and Eve, right? What is the most cliched thing? Uh, an apple in a still life. An apple held by a woman by her face. An apple being bitten into an apple in a pig's mouth. Like, these are just ready-made concepts that we apply to the apple, but it diminishes the apple in a way. This is what Clarice described in the passion according to GH and I'll quote it here. I'm the one who must stop myself from giving a name to the thing.

[00:19:13]The name is an accretion and blocks contact with the thing. The name of the thing is an interval for the thing. The desire for the accretion is great because the naked thing is so tedious.

[00:19:27]Seaison's apple as he wished it could be. the applininess of the apple. Uh before before we attach any concepts to it, if the apple just is, that is Clarice's thing. That's what Clarice is talking about. The the concept of the apple is what Clarice is uh uses the word accretion. It's something on top of the apple. It's something that blocks contact with the apple. That's what Clarice means. And this is why I think they're similar. like these make this make sense to me that uh the name for the apple the concept the cliche is the accretion that Clarice is talking about and it blocks contact with the thing we're not able to experience it in the best way in its most fundamental way in the way that the apple just is and I'll read two quotes to you from DH Lawrence's essay on seaison here what seaison was trying to do was he was trying to paint a sensation That's how it's written. Sensation is the opposite of the fasile and the ready-made, the cliche, but also of the sensational, the spontaneous. Sensation has one face turned toward the subject and one face turned toward the object, or rather it has no faces at all. It is both things indisolubably. It is being in the world.

[00:20:49]He kind of like uh he kind of goes into this uh interesting point that like the apple knows itself already. It knows itself inside out all around. And that's what he means by intuitiveness like this instinctual nature of the apple. This thing that Seaison was trying to paint is something so complete and and fundamental that there is no facade for it. there is no word for it that it just it is solid all the way through and DH Lawrence talks about this further uh when he's discussing how Saison paints women and people because that was very difficult for Saison and he did not accomplish painting people as they are as they just exist. He knew as an artist that the only bit of a woman which nowadays escapes being ready-made and a ready-nown cliche is the appley part of her. Oh, be an apple and leave out all your thoughts, all your feelings, all your mind and all your personality.

[00:21:55]Leave it all out and be an apple. It is the appiness of the portrait of Saison's wife that makes it so permanently interesting. The applininess which carries with it also the feeling of the knowing the other side as well. The side you don't see the hidden side of the moon. For the intuitive app perception of the apple is so tangibly aware of the apple that it is aware of it all around not only just of the front. The eyes sees fronts and the mind on the whole is satisfied with fronts. But intuition needs all aroundness and instinct needs insideness.

[00:22:36]The true imagination is forever curving round to the other side to the back of presented experience.

[00:22:45]So the thing that just is and exists and can just be doesn't deal with facades, doesn't deal with concepts, doesn't deal with accretions. It just knows itself inside out. And the way he describes it is almost like this applininess has a kind of volume, a permanence or something.

[00:23:05]There is no, as Clarice would call it, um there is nothing that blocks contact with themselves. So I I hope you're still with me here. So to to reiterate yet again, the accretion, the cliche, the concept, the representational, all of this, that is what blocks contact with the thing. And it's the reason why Seaison was so upset all the time is because he had such a hard time removing his own humanity and all of the the cliches and concepts and readymmaids that exist in oneself as a person as a human being to paint to just paint things as they are. Seaison was trying to literally be like inhuman. He had to be inhuman, live instinctually, live intuitively in order to paint, which is almost impossible.

[00:23:57]So, how do these kind of cross-pollinate uh between the three different uh artists? So there there are many overlapping points but one of them one of the the most crucial ones to understand is that these people are trying to paint something non-intellectual or or write about something non-intellectual.

[00:24:18]This is demonstrated by Clarice's tendency to make her characters amoral people. Um, this is shown in many of her works like Near to the Wild Heart, The Passion According to GH, The Imitation of the Rose, The Besieged City, and The Chandelier. All of her characters have this kind of like a morality that is that is not of of the normal world or something that is natural. It is a natural morality. And when it comes to Seaison, for example, DH Lawrence wrote this about him. If the human being is going to be primarily an apple, as for Seaison it was, then you're going to have a new world of men. A world which has very little to say. Men that can sit still and just be physically there and truly nonmoral.

[00:25:08]Now, as for Bacon, the logic of sensation that Deloo wrote about Bacon, that's like the most intellectual thing I've ever read in my life. I mean it is quite literally like a dialectic of sensation and it's so it's what Doo was doing was quite the opposite of that but what Francis Bacon was doing himself in his painting was trying to by by achieving the fact by trying to paint the fact there is nothing to say about the fact was merely just trying to explain how this happens through painting because you have to describe you have to talk about what the painting looks like and so Deloo was trying to describe what Bacon was doing through his techniques. But the fact has has nothing needs nothing from us. The fact just is we just are. We just exist. That is a fact. That is the most non-intellectual thing ever. This progresses into a this is mostly just Bacon and Clarice, but a shared interest in animals. Animals for Clarice represent perfection because they are the closest to this fundamental matter.

[00:26:16]uh the cockroach. Um she talks about horses and dogs a lot for Clarice because animals don't have the same level of intelligence I guess as human beings do. They're closer to the source.

[00:26:29]And so you also see this in Bacon's paintings um is that uh Bacon's the figures shadows often look like animals or animals are present uh in the or animal like figures are present in the paintings and there is what Doo calls this zone of incernability between man and animal. And he writes it here. The most common fact of man and animal.

[00:26:57]Bacon pushes this to the point where even his most isolated figure is already a coupled figure. Man is coupled with his animal in a latent bullfight. In Clarice's body of work attributed to her character Joanna from near to the wild heart says here from the uh biography just as there is no meaningful separation between man and animal between Joanna and the cat or snake neither man nor animal is separate from God the single infinite and eternal one substance that is synonymous with nature. And so being like an animal or humans being in disccernible from animals means that they are all part of the same substance like Benjamin Moser said here the one substance the source.

[00:27:46]And so for Joanna to be compared to animals or for people to act more like animals in an amoral sense this brings them closer. This removes the accretion.

[00:27:57]This removes the cliche and all this and brings them closer to the source.

[00:28:02]There's actually a point where Clarice says that uh she talks about how she's a Sagittarius and how uh she called herself half beast.

[00:28:12]Just a cool thing to say. Bacon is also known for painting meat and like deformed figures that are mutilated and just kind of shot to pieces. And I see a connection with Clarice here again.

[00:28:24]Benjamin Moser wrote, "The roach from a passion according to GH and the woman share the organic life that is the most essential part of any creature. On the level of blood and guts, they are one and the same. For bacon, animal, human, man, meat, they are all the same because there is no distinction between the two of them. That's the whole point is the fact does not require concepts, does not require distinction. Everything is on the same level. Clarice was trying to get to that level. Bacon was trying to paint it as was Seaison. And the last thing I'm going to be talking about here is mysticism. This is just something I might be reaching here when it comes to Clarice and Bacon. Um, this is my own observation and I drew it from what Doo said about Bacon. So, after reading this chapter, um, it's called the painting before the painting and Deloo's the logic of sensation. Bacon's formula was disclosed to me through that for the first time. Bacon would start with, let's say, a cliched idea. This thing that him, Seaison, and Clarice all hate a lot. He attempts to kind of launder it through like manipulated chance or what he calls utilized accident.

[00:29:41]And this could be putting the figure, the cliche, through like a wood chipper, sending it into like this mystical zone.

[00:29:49]And then he has the painting come back as a fact rather than something representational. And if that sounds complicated, then I feel like there's maybe a metaphor that would better explain that. This process, I think, effectively produces images that have this feeling about them of like this departure and return where the cliche subject or idea through this kind of like spasm um goes into a mystical domain and returns kind of mutilated and incomprehensible and kind of absolved of all of these human traits. The reason why that's so important is because that's exactly precisely what happens to GH and the passion according to GH when she smashes the cockroach. It's a movement into the mystical domain and back again though not fully recovering what one loses in the process and you kind of return unrecognizable and therefore for Bacon and Saison you avoid the cliche. But for Clarice, this is a moment of intense reflection and this is a problem. Whereas Bacon would just leave these things on the canvas and Seaison would try to paint the thing in its in its oneness and wholeness and instinctual nature. Clarice was like, "How do I exist like this though? You guys are just painting it, but I have to live with this and try and figure out how to be a human that is not human."

[00:31:16]You can see this. You can see this more in Bacon's paintings. Like there's a kind of hysteria. That's the word that Doo uses for Bacon's paintings. Like this hysteria, this idea that the body wants to escape itself, that it wants to escape from the organism. It's the same thing like Clarice wants to escape from being human because she feels it's almost disingenuous that it's not honest to live this way that to live the way that we do with our intelligence and our concepts our cliches is too far from the real way to live life. Bacon's also isolation is present in Clarice's work too. All of the characters like I said it's just like you're just listening to them. It's really, it is very claustrophobic or hermetic as as they once described Clarice's work. Clarice is isolated. She was very depressed throughout all of her life. Um, and very anxious as well. So, this this feeling of isolation of putting the fact onto the canvas or Clarice just trying to find a way to live this fact is present in how she writes. I'm literally running out of battery life. I I have had to I've had to re re-record this three or four times. Um but hopefully this made sense. That is my observation with these three is that they all had their own way of trying to trying to get to the source of things, trying to experience, trying to describe, trying to paint matter as it is, being as it is. And it's it really is admirable. It's it's like I've I've said many times throughout this video, it's it's nearly impossible because you have to use the only means you know necessary and those means are wrong already.

[00:33:09]So the only way to do it right is to pervert the means necessary and to mutilate the subjects on the canvas or to give up as Seaison did as it were and to die a sad pissed-off man because he could not figure out how to do it. But he paved the way for others which was important. Yeah. I just think this this this video might be nearly incomprehensible in itself because it's very difficult to describe these as it were and reading Deloo makes me want to like hit my head with a brick reading it but it's interesting nonetheless fascinating really like I'm trying to describe all this to you and like I understand it in my head in here I get it uh instinctively intuitively I understand what these people are trying to do here but I'm trying to explain to you guys why I find this so fascinating and maybe I can't even do it very well.

[00:34:08]So, this is this is an admission of weakness and futility in a way. But let me know what you think in the comments. Please, please tell me.

[00:34:20]Let me know if you found this interesting. If this was difficult to understand, you should see my notes. You should see my notes for this. It's nuts.

[00:34:31]Uh I have like two separate files next to one another. Two different outlines for this because it's Yeah, I I hope I hope you had some fun. I hope maybe some things stuck out to you and maybe we'll you'll carry with you for a while. But yeah, I hope you have a great weekend.

[00:34:48]Please don't forget to like and subscribe. Don't forget to subscribe to my Substack if you want to. Uh, and I will see you guys next week.

[00:34:58]Totaloo.