[Image by Rodrigo Ferreira de Ribeiro]
From the first moment I closed Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, I found it hard to distinguish between his dreams and my concurrent musings.
As a writer, Pessoa nonlinear, plot-laziness anticipates many contemporary novelists, some of them literary super-stars. As an individual, however, Pessoa is hard to pin precisely because he overflowed with a multiplicty of selves- he was an ardent nationalist of one country divided by others against the pretension of selfhood.
Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.
The spectating of the self. A man who cultivates the spectacle of the self doesn't mind not being "known" by others. What he loses in intimacy and friendship he gains in time and freedom to reinvent himself as he pleases.
I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.
More than watching himself in shop windows, he watched others watching him in shop windows. The mirror serves as a form of access to other people; it reveals the reactions they hide in face-to-face contact. The revulsion comes from knowing the attention of others is directed at a false version of self, a contrivance that keeps us impure and more faux than the smiles we use to keep others from comforting us.
The ancients hardly saw themselves. Today we see ourselves in all positions. Hence our self-horror and self-disgust.
Like any self-respecting flaneur, Pessoa grew to know the streets of Lisbon inside and out. Wandering through the year of 1925 led Fernando to write a guidebook. The modern man- the one who sleepwalks his way through the daily routes- knows street signs and cafes as if they defined an internal topography.
We stumble through ourselves struggling, somehow, to envision a map. The signifiers and sign-posts come to us from billboards and
There is nothing that is as it should be, for we have no reference or recourse to an ultimate plan that would put all of us- and our mountains of stuff- in the proper place. Nothing to orient us apart from the effervescent commercial promises of progress- the ones that rotate to reveal new colors and machinations.
There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.
There are no universal stories to save us from the exceptional nature of our daily lives.
Julio Pormar's neo-expressionist portrait of Pessoa, 1985
For Pessoa, the flaneur is at his best when approximating the gestures and reveries of romantic love. Because self-love is the only true love.
"We never love anyone," insists Pessoa, "What we love is the idea we have of someone". Only the dazzling costumes of love are worthwhile. And so, the circumstances lead us to situation in which the mantra lies, hatching, snug within the nest of the parentheses.
To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)
It would be easier to label Pessoa a "narcissist" and avoid the perfection of his prophecies.
Every man, to be able to live and love, needs to idealize himself (and, ultimately, those he loves). That’s why we love. But as soon as I see myself and compare what I see to an ideal—not high, even low—of human beauty, I give up on real life and on love.
Fernando Pessoa, like the standard iPhone-carrying citizen of the 21st century, was never alone. His need for love was reduced by the plethora of personal alternatives.
Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.
These alternatives included a virtual reality of countless "Others" inhabiting the unitary notion of the self. Pessoa honored each Other with the acknowledgement of its own name, or heteronym. The first such heteronym was Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa explained Alberto as follows:
He sees things with the eyes only, not with the mind. He does not let any thoughts arise when he looks at a flower... the only thing a stone tells him is that it has nothing at all to tell him... this way of looking at a stone may be described as the totally unpoetic way of looking at it. The stupendous fact about Caeiro is that out of this sentiment, or rather, absence of sentiment, he makes poetry. He is free of metaphysical entanglements.
Alberto was the first in a line of many heteronyms. In a sense, while narrating the inner lives of his characters, Pessoa was always exposing an aspect of himself, a self which he honored with a separate name. Alberto, for example. The fact that Pessoa served as his only muse and only fictional character is suggested in various passages and poems.
For the superior man, others don’t exist. He is his own other. If he wants to imitate someone, it’s himself he tries to imitate. If he wants to contradict someone, it’s himself he endeavors to contradict. He strives to hurt his own self, in its most intimate reaches. He plays tricks on his own opinions. He has long conversations with the sensations he feels, talking down to them and . . . .
Every man that exists is Me. I have all society inside me. I am my best friends and my truest enemies. The rest—what’s on the outside, from the hills and plains to people and . . . . . . —is all just Landscape . . .
The great defect of work and effort is that they can become habits. The same defect pertains to inaction. It also tends to become a habit. The right way for the superior man to be contrary is to refrain from having habits, or opinions, or a definite individuality.
Statue of Pessoa in Lisbon
“I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided,” said Fernando, as if referring to his previous support for monarchism and military dictatorship. Staring at the pristine architecture of his top hat, I find it easier to make sense of his remark in the context of his social relationships. For a jaded lover, nothing beats a few hours reading The Book of Disquiet.
Yet the wounds of all the selves Pessoa avoided- the selves that belonged to other human beings- toughened into scars. So I read with the strange sentiment of massaging a series of scars that tormented a man so much he felt the need to name them. Each section scaffolds a scar- a simple piece of skin tissue developed to maintain the physical divide between interior and exterior. The scars are grostesque; the skin kept supple by the blood coursing beneath.
"The Film of Disquiet" (YouTube)
"A cold in the soul" by Benjamin Kunkel (The Believer)
"Fernando Pessoa and the surrealist self" by Vilma Bader
"On Fernando Pessoa: 'The metaphysical courier'" (Truth Tableaux)
"Pessoa and the multiple faces we show on the net" by Syma Tariq (The Guardian)
"The magical world of Fernando Pessoa" by Gary Lachmann (Southern Cross Review)
"Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms" by Carmela Ciuraru (Poetry Society of America)
"Four ways of seeing: Pessoa's Book of Disquiet" by Jessica Sequeira (The Harvard Advocate)
"The reality of dreams: Antonio Tabucchi and Fernando Pessoa" by Robert Gray (Eclectica)
"In which Fernando Pessoa reports his own death" (This Recording)
"In which we receive the love letters of Fernando Pessoa" (This Recording)
"Disquiet and solitude in Fernando Pessoa" (Ther Hermitary)
"Aleister Crowley and Fernando Pessoa" (50watts)
Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms (deviantArt)
Fernando Pessoa (Aldous Eveleigh)
Pessoa's Trunk (Marc Widenbaum)
