Auroras (For the voice of María Zambrano) — Daniela Cascella
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We speak:
Aurora raw.
Aurora aura.
Aurora, roar us.
Before she speaks, I say: For some time now aurora. Aurora roars. Roars the inner hum of writing with you as it becomes written, exceeds words; the hum of my conversations with three friends, which give me life and the need to continue to speak, those far away friendships which have brought me here to speak with you, to you, of you. Of your aurora o roar us. These conversations in transit are the secret of my persistence. They are here, delicate and present like a cobweb, weighed with the liquid load of morning dew. The force of our writing is not solely in what is written but in its auroral state: the anticipation, the restless yearning for it, and its aftertaste, its slow fade-out leading always inevitably in. And in there, all the voices heard and studied for a lifetime and farther, those books that are not temporary objects of an ephemeral reading but sites that host infinite conversations and times, sites that contain people and they ask me, in the voice of the writer of a thousand thoughts in flight, ‘Tell me, do you want to retrace the eternal cycle with us?’
For some time now we (myself, you, you again, and another, María Zambrano, who wrote a book of aurora, which we carry in our hearts) have been speaking to each other emerging cyclically from the nights, lingering before the full light, chasing each other and never meeting other than in our words and in what moves them and moves us, in a haze which can never forget or detach from itself the darkness of exile, of pain, but oriented toward the emerging for some time now aurora.
Raw I say: I say aurora. We need it. We are in need of vivifying paradigms, my friend of numinous seditions wrote to me. For some time now I tell you think write aurora before I know what it is. But I know how it touches me and I know it is here, I know it prompts responsive gestures, radiant smiles every time I name it. In naming it, in the haze that is the luminosity of what is not yet fully known but announces its light when all around is still dark, I begin to write it. To write it to you, with you, for you. Because I must find a shape and a voice, because writing now must give shape and voice to deep symbols, ignite imaginal stirrings. We do not need days, we need time. We have been yearning for aurora, sensing that the dew and the gleam in every stubborn and dark rebeginning, the early light in a state of dark helplessness, might hold or indicate a stance to take despite the loss, despite the bleak. Aurora arises from the philosophies of light—it does not find a fixed position, it does not prescribe anything, but suggests a way of being, profound and primitive, necessary, like my friend of the searchlights did when she inscribed signs on an old piece of wood: a necessary simple act which carries inside millenniums of layered gestures.
I tell you aurora, for its cadenced cyclical presence just below time, holding time which is ecstasy, stasis, bliss, is enchantment. I tell you aurora for its resonance with many residues of texts blown over here for years now, their beats inside. There cannot be aurora, its vaporous light, without something impressed in the depths. No beauty, no poetry without viscerae, you once told me. I have your book here, your book of aurora. I cannot single out quotations from it, I cannot translate it, it burns in my hands and it can only exist in the voices which it transports and carries inside, so near it is to the heart, so what is it that I am passing over?
You reply, you say: Residues that burn. The cinders which keep our conversations ablaze. Remember how you heard another impossible writer, the one of the breath of life, through her manifold translators, and yet the voice was always hers, a fundamental humming in her prose beyond words, a radiance that shines through and darkens them? These words are conducting materials of voices: hers, those of the translators, yours, mine, with us, and the beauty of all this is that it is here, is happening now, it is still aurora in this questioning of impossible dark and radiant writings, in this turning over and restless never concluded but alive. Remember, you once wrote: Transcelation is a way of keeping these small fires ablaze, these conversations alive.
It is our aurora. Can you hear the hum, how our aurora roars.
I note, and the note is not-e-ntirely in tune: At the beginning of Of Aurora the of in the title provokes me, I think how odd it is to quote your title, or better, how it disrupts the usual citational formulas, for example, ‘as Zambrano’s statements of Of Aurora’, of of sounds so strange, so let’s make quotations strange and stranger, merge them with our voices, into the living fabric of our readings because with them we think and are, part of the immaterial material with which we feel, hear, and perhaps even if necessary write, and talk to each other when we read each other and read others, read another—so you wrote and again I am not quoting you here, not translating either, I am singing the notes that I heard reading you, I am dissolving and coagulating your words to transform them alchemically into mine, to dissolve the solidity of text because what is written is not evidence but heartbeat, to allow its pulsations to emanate through these auroaring words they roar, see their brightness is here and not here yet, is still enwrapped by the night thus enwraps even more, its buzz even stronger, roar aurora—so I was saying, pulverising your words yet conducting them into our ethereal conversation, in a text aptly called Before Beginning—which is where we are, where aurora is, before the beginning, and wondering, if only words could be born without the urgency of saying everything, what happens if something without an argument ends up becoming a book, it slips through the fingers, words have no belonging. They, we, emerge from the dark, are preludes, faint appearances, almost nothing, but how do these pauses resound, these arrests, in the interval between sun and sun, emerging out of a remote sacrifice in the opacity of an inaccessible fire.
We need this, these pauses and crossings, of the interval between dark and halo and halone we are not, breathing together between unknowing and thinking, how we need that halo not halone. Skimming through the titles in the book of aurora, aurora is heard, sensed, before beginning, sighs, noise, the apparition of the border, aurora guide, of the night, when the day begins like a flame, dawn coagulated and disseminated, the celestial, before the occultation, the line of aurora, the impenetrable limit, the scales of aurora, the void, the shadows, the silent germination of aurora, the lost word, the dew, a progression: fire, word, flame, the germination of aurora, the unsayable word, the word that gets lost, the stammering, the line of writing, nonhuman languages, the flame (for Cristina Campo), yes, her, you were friends, this is how I got here, at last, aurora, of the realm of the sun, the occultation: naming, the realm of aurora, beings of aurora, pure lit up aurora.
I write: Aurora before I even get there, knowing that it is there on the edge of but not yet, and the space of this tension is where all the writing and the thinking around writing lies for us, group of kindred spirits, repeating the same things again and again in the ardent wish that someone will hear, eventually; to the point when we read to be surprised, to be found out and to find us, cyclically annihilated and brightened by someone who said, before us, more piercingly than us, what we always knew but could not grasp until we heard it in the words of another—feeling that the auroral state is here already, with its light and darkness, feel the dew on the skin, and to even reach the point of saying I want to write something around the auroral state has already opened horizons and promised imaginal shifts, imagine this auroral state, cannot we, in its staying with the darkness holding the glimmers of light inside it, not enlightening but auroring, attending to return and rebeginning from the viscerae.
So you continued to write aurora throughout the decades, even when you did not know it, even when you did not talk about it directly but it was there and it diffused its glow over your words and your way of inhabiting them, and you continued to write viscerae throughout the decades, and the pull between the two is enormous, and it is of enormous comfort to note how you continued to return, like aurora, to aurora, and continued to deepen, like viscerae, into viscerae. Viscerae, another site of transformations and transitions, which resists theory while embracing experience. A visceral state does not reach the word, because it cannot interrupt its work. And its domain is rhythm. Viscerae, you have always said, are not reducible to a system: they are alive as they cannot be separated from the tissues which host them, creative forces that do not investigate but transform, and present a type of knowledge circulated in experience and connectedness. They do not speak by absolutes and their form is the form of a life. So here I can only tell you of aurora by telling you of viscerae and serpents, fear. Alive and more obscure than ever, they coil in the vastness that accompanies them toward aurora ora, aurora rosa, aurora rose.
I once sang: Rose I become, or mist in a field, at that threshold hour of the nightday, mysterious morphing passage when all sounds fold and stillness quietly admonishes, and I can only hear a humming from the outer edge of a buried age, never entirely remembered forever felt. Its song would be sung in that morphing passage, in presence and forgetfulness, in broken verses, it is a wave breaking in a song of no name, voice with no face, in disjointed vocalisations shifting so now I want to choke, want to laugh, want to smash this microphone want to crash, I did all my best to smile but I’m in pain and sing, bleeding from my mouth I sing and the song is not there or at least, not entirely. It is sung raw by aurora and aurora roars me. Not sure what I am tuning and turning into, now it is the depth of night, mouth sore. Soon again it will be time to sing and I will not sing, those words will sing me, sing to me let me enfold you, let’s sing to dream to live. Lips curled, voice astray, rise into another song where the edge of my voice bleeds: touch-me-not, let me enfold you. I cannot change much. I can transmit transform this faint tortuous hum. It is cold here, it is night and I can sense some brightening, I yearn for it. Song, you escape me. You say no, you are tired, you quieten. Let me enfold you and you faint, fall, and as you fall I hear, my tortuous tortoise voice taking you away.
I write: You always wrote towards a knowledge of the soul, which does not mean knowing the soul, but a type of knowing that pertains to soul, that is in life through the soul. You always wrote that there is in writing a holding: not a releasing, as in speaking, but a holding, somehow a secret, a truth that shows itself but does not explain itself. Consider such unspoken core, driven and contained—of the soul, that fragment of cosmos in a person. In which forms has the soul written such cores, that are not forms of the intellect? You always wrote to defend your solitude so that you may open to others. You told me that to take something out of one’s depths, one’s viscerae, does not mean to exhibit oneself. On the contrary. It needs a lot of outer space. It needs a horizon. It roars aurora.
You told me. I feel something and it is like homecoming. In this veiled silence, rhythm arises: absorbing everything that each word, in its logic form, appears to have left behind. Because only if it is altogether thought, image, rhythm and silence, can a word reach into that secret, that core, and radiate light from there.
We yearn for writing that holds something not reducible to system, challenging the assumptions that such irreducible quality might be a defect, asking whether such chimeric form, sometimes ambiguous, might not conceal and translate, at once, a thought which did not want to reduce itself to a systematic formula, in fear that such formula robbed it of its most intimate virtue. A radiance, aurora: the transmissions beyond words which only certain arrangements of words can carry. Such forms respond to a different disorder of needs. Here I am, driven to channelling how your words move; how they move me; their core, the beating heart; how they move me to write, and to write to you; how they circulate, breathe, and cannot be encapsulated because they can only exist in change, exchange. I have been saying this for some time now. The task is not in augmentation or progression, the task is in staying close to the singular piercing pronouncements that we can tell because they tell us, and amplify them in the most dedicated ways, convey their auroral promise.
You wrote: The great philosophical systems have aimed for too much, and too much have they left aside. To attach thought solely to usefulness generates void and detachment. If we really want to renew ourselves, these triumphant forms will have to resort to more humble ones, less ambitious, which bear a specific and necessary action. Because knowledge of the mind must be transformed into knowledge of the soul: from life, nourishing life, visceral, from the viscerae. These forms do not discover, they do not investigate: they transform what has been investigated and discovered. You do not have to know them: welcome them. A knowledge of experience does not reach universality, but it is un-renounceable. It responds to thought with grave and sometimes mocking tone, showing instead something humbler, at times even sordid, but indissoluble. It reclaims humans’ essential nakedness. It is the voice of Thomas a Kempis responding to Aquinas. It conceals a secret forgotten by metaphysical, universal knowledge; something not exhausted by science, because science does not know what to do with it: certain states of life, certain situations in which the enunciative force has no strength, no value. It does not use absolute expressions: it insinuates, because each listener must find their own truth in themselves in the nascent state, auroral.
These revelations, auroral glimmers, appear to us exiled. A theory of the knowledge of revelation becomes more necessary every day. In the tenebrae which must promise to open. For us the aesthetic—the state of being attentive to details and characters in these encounters—is an act of justice, ethical, toward that which would not otherwise emerge in the field of the visible, sayable, audible. A light is seen, it looms, it wounds, in full it may burn but we keep chasing it. Its question conceals something which moves it, with originates it, which opens and transforms. Viscerae cannot live by showing themselves. They are buried deep into the body and connected to everything, cannot be torn apart. Viscerae are unthinkable if thinking is only in the measure of availability. But visceral truths shine through auroras. Their heart burns, profound, ample, immense, obscure, luminous.
If I could really sing, at this point I would go down an octave.
This I am in what I see and suffer, not in what I reason and think. What wounds me what touches me. Self beyond, annihilate, circle. There is a core of calm, of quietude, that root of our soul on which we elevate ourselves without remembering it.
Because life is also abandon. That invisible happiness which allows us to bear the weight of our disgrace and to find grace in a ground of quietude, where words offer no guarantees but a submerged logos, a type of knowledge impossible to detach from the condition of those who participate in it. We sing to dream to live.
There are words, few only, of which it is not known for sure whether they have ever gone past the barrier that separates silence from sound. Those auroral words can make themselves alive transforming logic concatenation into cadence; opening spaces of unfillable silences, revelatory.
Suspended, doers of plenitude, if only in a sigh.
Then they gain another type of substance from the viscerae, unviolated in the delirium of someone who, while owning it, abandons herself to a delirium.
But most of all, these words are recognised because they yearn.
Auroras, o roar us. Aurora is in these impossible words, in impossible books, those shimmering texts of all and nothing, with no about, all flame.
Aurora does not announce itself, it does not enunciate, stays invisible by means of its light. It is not a concept but allows to conceive. It places itself before what is called thinking. It is an orientation, a circling around which by being specific does not renounce the absolute. Its clarity lies in its shining and in the shadows it casts.
How do these words breathe into the days and into life, peel off the pages and affect and form us? In a great circle of shadow, breaking into aurora, how they gaze toward the sky and feel the sky. To whom are they directed, dew, even if they have no key and solve no riddle? If this corner of sky devours no wound, if intimacy did not get lost in extension, if words did not have to extend. In the corner of this garden outscaled by this giant butterfly and its red, inappropriately leathery wings, fluttering, serpentine like Arabic characters they rise, red, the fire of a lit-up flame emulating the rose, out of which the day rises, arose. A rose to keep the tremor in thinking auroral, a rose, arrive, something is about to arrive, aurora roars, we hold it, it alerts senses, like the sources of a river that are never to be found, what matters is the stream, its splendour does not need a source. Aurora roars.
Again, the whispered passing of words. To you, and you only.
For you I write this
For you, not for pain, which cyclically disperses in passing,
but for you, who are centre,
who are centre focus fire.
Aurora with no name but ways of being reading
Reading is a whisper born before my lips
Aurora and this song, born like a lighthearted tune, one of those who stab you as they are sung, burned,
This rhythm
Not in an essay or memorable sentences
There is no poetry until something stays impressed in the viscerae
Knowledge sustained by attention and few words, always fewer, less.
I cannot translate, cannot quote, cannot sing. What is left?
Echo held in the body of this rope which coils and holds.
At the edge of light, repose, and margin. That moment when you understand you have read enough, now reverberate, diffuse, deeper, cycle. There aurora holds dark, dark centre of a flame which is not clarity, light is not absolute not clarity. It emerges from penumbra and insinuates like a serpent.
Sensing so much aurora so unmeasured aurora that no creature could ever understand it even in fact it seems to me that it cannot be understood not a least bit if not by those who savour it, and seeing so much aurora myself I had to write aurora, aurora with so much impetus and vehemence that still with mouth open I say aurora and aurora I call you call you aurora.
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This text contains reverberations, translations, chimerisations and distortions of Aurore: Per la voce di María Zambrano, which I wrote to be read aloud, in Italian, at the Le Alleanze dei Corpi festival in Milan, Italy, 26 September 2025. It reverberates, translates, chimerises and distorts, in turn, the book Dell’Aurora by Zambrano (1986), which I read translated from the Spanish into Italian by Elena Laurenzi (Bologna: Marietti, 2000). Auroras is also haunted by other books by Zambrano, which I read in Italian translation as they are not available in English: Verso un sapere dell’anima (trans. by Eliana Nobili, Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 1996), Chiari del Bosco (trans. by Carlo Ferrucci, Milano: SE, 2016), Filosofia e Poesia (trans. by Lucio Sessa, Milano: Pendragon, 2018), I beati (trans. by Carlo Ferrucci, Milano: SE, 20109, La confessione come genere letterario (trans. by Eliana Nobili, Milano: Abscondita, 2018).
‘The writer of a thousand thoughts in flight’ is Maria Gabriela Llansol, A Thousand Thoughts in Flights, trans. by Audrey Young, Dallas: Deep Vellum, 2024
‘My friend of numinous seditions’ is Tim Lilburn, Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change, Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2023
‘My friend of the searchlights’ is Vivian Darroch-Lozowski, Searchlights in People’s Hands, Charlottetown: Penumbra Press, 2023.
‘The impossible writer of the breath of life’ is Clarice Lispector.
‘Roses I become...’ is a rewriting from my book Beauty, Burning: The Condition of Music, forthcoming on Sublunary Editions in 2026. Residues of this book appear throughout.
‘A whisper born before my lips’ is a verse by Osip Mandel’stam, quoted at various moments in time by Marlene van Niekerk, Tim Lilburn, Ermanna Montanari and myself, unaware of one another but buzzing in synchronous mood through many voices, languages, translations.
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Daniela Cascella is a writer and editor. Writing in English as a second language, writing as a stranger in a language, she is drawn toward unstable and uncomfortable forms of writing-as-sounding, and toward the transmissions and interferences of knowledge across cultures.
She is the author of five books in English that articulate an approach to writing she calls chimeric: monstrous, composite, many-voiced, driven by yearning: Chimeras: A Deranged Essay, An Imaginary Conversation, A Transcelation (Sublunary Editions, 2022), Nothing As We Need It (Punctum Books / Risking Education, 2022), Singed. Muted Voice-Transmissions, After The Fire (Equus Press, 2017), F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound (Zer0 Books, 2015) and En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing. An Archival Fiction (Zer0 Books, 2012). Her next book, Beauty, Burning: The Condition of Music, is forthcoming on Sublunary Editions.