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| Being plural like the Universe. |
| Fernando Pessoa – An approach |
| Pessoa: a ghost. He invents a multiple self, alienates himself, dissolves in the multiplicity of different persons, and fulfils the most diverse biographies. About his life, he is unable to tell a coherent story - and further: his life remains empty, “We are two abysses, “ he writes “a well gazing into the sky”(2). He simultaneously is everyone and nobody. A non-someone, an oneiric wanderer absolutely discreet... Like a puppet, he believes himself suspended by strings, manipulated by an alien hand... Body and gestures become autonomous and the words, the phrases emerge involuntarily and automatically. His life composed by a chorus of invisible spirits, as it reveals and articulates itself they speak their own language and intentions. Imprisoned in alien fates, he lives the life of others; a meclium for feelings and thoughts that do not belong to him. He daily finds himself again on a stage without knowing who is directing the show. Pessoa follows an unknown script, unable to intervene in the flow of things, or in events. He is alone, on the margin, in front of the backstage, the stage and he sees himself as a dispassionate voyeur of careers and funereal prayers, of dramas and small mishaps, of dying and the daily visit to the office. An actor in an endless film... The dream of life is /eft without an exit. Despite all the escape attempts, life holds him hostage, drags him through time, wears out his body, and tires his senses. Even the most insignificant, banal, usual things, attack him, ruin his nerves. Above all.- any feeling is too much. He knows: a lethal dose of even the simplest happiness will be deadly. One intensity too many and he will be paralysed, he slips into the easiest automatisms, Only when life rewards him with a lack, supports him with mourning, with denial, he holds on. Pessoa, therefore visits empty rooms, the “antechambers of emotions, “ where nothing is guaranteed and everything is still in the air is still just a promise... Only in confusion, in ignorance, can one understand oneself and be able to see things to one’s satisfaction. Pessoa does not find chains of meaning to guide and direct his actions. Nothing in his life wishes to emerge into significance - all meaning burns up under the great sun of perdition. The lucidity of his analyses, the sharpness of his thinking dissects, dismembers the large round meatball of “illusion. “ But how does one live without illusions? And since illusion demands a minimum of effort without which denial, producing appearance is not possible, all that is left is a lucid gaze devoid of hope. And Pessoa always sees more than he wants to see. He avoids the commonplace of our constructions indentured to life and collective promises and attractions horrify him. And even the vastness of the universe is a trap for him because it goes nowhere. His disappointments push him to extremes: to the backstage and scenery, to the decorations of a world deviated from life... a world of darkness, of permanent twilight, of colours without strength, of pale and transparent clouds that go by indolently... Lack, absence, void: the identity of a non-person, Pessoa exists by ceasing to be, by ceasing to maintain characteristics and desires. He spreads out (dilates) to his satisfaction, he can defend all positions, integrate, accept, incarnate all opinions, be convincing in any role assigned to him. His inner landscapes are replete with strange remote places where he stops for a brief representation before continuing the journey. A traveller without purpose: permanently on his way, on a journey that never takes him beyond himself and yet reaches the ends of his world. He surrenders to the spell of the furtive. He holds onto nothing, not even his own memories. How can he be sure of living if he lacks even the memory of what he was? (He fills the gaps in his consciousness with the recollections of others). He does not appropriate the outside world, he does not cling to anything, he lives without support. A passer-by, a wanderer a traveller ... on his way, with no rush, no stimulus, no aim. A hermit in the midst of the urban buzz, the masses, the crowd, the racket. One of those faces among many, neither recognised nor remembered by anyone. He finds the human being in furtive glances and acquaintances. In the flow of the passers-by: the bodies separated by light years... an accidental greeting ... insignificant words shared by strangers. For Pessoa, the faces on the street are elements in a landscape that are alive like characters in a novel, just as he might have been requisitioned into the tale of an unknown author Alienated from mankind, he casts his own gaze over what is. And, ‘what there is’is what he sees. Pessoa is revealed as someone who loves pure contemplation, as a voyeur he remains anonymous, with his desires at a great distance from the object, enchanted by appearances. He does not project into things or people more than the visible, than that which is offered to the eye; they are already what they intend to be: a surface full of signs, a text that is read without being understood ... And, he argues, when we love it is this surface that we love since we have no organ with which we can probe depths. On the other hand, the physical presence of others, casual conversations overwhelm Pessoa, they block his thinking and exhaust him. The dramas of love, in particular, demand an effort his neurasthenia cannot bear Love overburdens an existence that is already difficult, rendering it even heavier so that it eventually drowns. For the romantics among us he has the following advice: ‘A woman is a good source for dreams. Never touch her!” All he would have asked was that love should not cease to be “a far away dream”(3). The nudity of the other would be impertinent for Pessoa, a corpse of time, only to be masked by illusions. The object of his love would be exhausted, would weaken and age, as soon as approached. Love has to deceive because it does not fulfil its promise of duration. However love, as imagination remains fresh. In face-to-face love he does not find an intimate relationship. The other is overturned, becomes inaccessible, a projection. Dramatics or drama: for Pessoa, love is an absurd play enacted by alternating actors, a production in the midst of backstage scenery that can be removed, darkened, lit up, changed. He was always an actor and a sincere one. Every time he loved, he pretended, he pretended to love and even pretended to himself And, thus, Pessoa, the actor once wrote to his sole lifetime temptation: “ But / only ask that you fake those caresses, that you simulate some interest in me. “ This poet, we are led to presume, fears love more than any other demon. Attacked by the indolence of the heart, of this general indisposition and this darkness that start when the space, the distance to the “gods” (with whom he is more intimate than with Christian saviour), seems unbearably far Pessoa bears the monotony of the days dreaming. Pessoa’s boredom is not just about what is or what was, it also indicates what might be possible, not only in our world but in all other thinkable ones. Pessoa is tired. Everything tires him: feeling, thinking, acting. His weariness even latches onto to despair and mouming and extinguishes them. It would be necessary to revoke his life even before he was bom. Not just ceasing to exist - but never having been bom! However he neither wishes to nor is able to choose between life and death, because this act would find no resonance in his lethargic being. His actions sink into monotony even before they shine in the light of singularity, of significance. In monotony, however, in the twilight hours, in the semi-consciousness of his dreams, Pessoa finds relief, he is hidden from himself and from others. He finds relief with the first light of the lamps, with nightfall and its abstract order of celestial bodies - disseminated like incomprehensible numbers, abstract and remote like the passers-by on the street... His suffering is silent, exclusively delicate. There is an almost unthinkable hovering in his steps. He seems anaemic, pale, transparent - a ghost on the streets of Lisbon. (A man who attract few glances thanks to his modesty; frail body, near sighted with thick glasses on his face, often on his way with a hat and a wrinkled trench coat). Pessoa is permeable to everything he finds, vulnerable to the affects of others, to late light, to superfluous sunrises, to the noise of the alleys, to the smell of ripe fruit, to the acute metallic squealing of the tram, everything penetrates him, fills him up and disappears. They say he suffers from depersonalization, this however presupposes some decisiveness: being someone. Behind Pessoa’s masks however, no one is hiding. The excesses of his multiplication, the parade of his multiple personas transform him into a mystery without secret. He escapes from himself, escapes into the impersonal; he is the centre of an inexistent world, the empty centre, around which things and his imagination circulate. Pessoa complains of being a man without a will, without desire, without emotion - “nothing” personified in a void that resembles a colourless sky. Pessoa sees himself as a masculine hysteric (a cerebral typelguy, inward facing), who produces his heteronyms like a hysterical woman produces her syndromes. Even his childhood was populated by “unreal figures”, amongst whom he moves naturally.... in a place “beyond the real”, livelier, more alive than the real could ever have been for him. (is it possible to construct a more real world from an unreal one, by pretending?) He escapes his outer life with his inner life. In his imaginary friends he seeks an other he can bear one he can reflect upon and communicate with. By inventing the stories of the others, his heteronytns, these become visible, consistent. Pessoa can hear them, see them, and feel them. The ghosts have faces, figures, dresses, gestures, language, and in their biographies they stand out with a greater profile and definition than Pessoa. (As an example: one of his heteronyms, Mora the philosopher is institutionalised in a psychiatric ward on the outskirts of Lisbon due to paranoia; another one, Alvaro de Campos, seems to be bisexual and driven by Sado-masochistic tendencies). They are not mere extensions of his own metabolism as a writer,- they constitute a separate organism, the follow their own ideas. Pessoa describes on several occasions that the Alberto Caeiro heteronym appears to him in a “type of ecstasy”(5), immediately, the “master appears, followed later by his disciples, Ricardo Reis and Alvaro Campos. They get excited, wear themselves out, and are enlivened by dialogues and discussions. His entities are neither modest nor reserved,- at times they get serious - into polemics and disputes, spirited shoving around. They unmistakably confront each other with their works and naturally demand their copyright. But also: his creatures overtake him, interfere, and even meddle in the private realm. Campos, for example, meets, as Pessoa with the latter’s permanent relationship, Ophelia Queiroz, and argues against him. He demounces his creator mocks him, and writes defamatory letters. Some of these figures become less defined over the years, others clearly stand out. They are part of a dream that is too real to be just a dream. The oneiric and the real are not separable in his blend. In his factories of dream he acts like an autistic god; addicted to fun, he plays with his dreams, stratifies them, creates new ones, and changes perspective. in the dream he takes ownership of everything in life that keeps him away. Pessoa believes that only dreams belong to us, only in dreams do we belong to ourselves. We are instigators, entrepreneurs, and agents, only in dreams. In his dreams he dreams of the triumph of the Caesars, he guides armadas and sleeps in palaces, in the beds of monarchs. He dreams with his eyes open, he dreams through the alleys of Lisbon, the cafes, the public parks, through the narrow hallways of the office of his daily life. Writing exorcises, expels his sensations, expels them from the body; instead of feeling, he produces words for his excitements and passions, he empties them and calms the senses. He replaces life with a text: but one that is much richer tender clear timeless, and perfect than the common things under the sun. A sentence that is felt is stronger than the passion for an object! When he writes, Pessoa can forget who he is or believes himself to be. By forgetting himself, he becomes animated. In language no hope or meaning are needed. He predicts the sentences like future dreams... Pessoa follows his inspirations beyond poetic programs and strategies, he writes without knowing why, without effort, without purpose, without direction... He dreams writing... a creator suffering from chronic fatigue and some fever who creates without wanting to create, and yet bound to his creations by sympathy and longing, An exhausted demiurge, that has no power over his work, over the creations that issue from him and immediately acquire a life and a history. Pessoa displaces his sensations and antagonisms, everything that is irreconcilable, distributing them to several people... (Even his tombstone will one day display the names of three other men). Human beings are not singular,- they accommodate many faces and demands. Pessoa composes himself, fragments himself, is unable to combine the diverging forces of his character into a sole image. He does not save any continuity from one day to the next: he must daily reinvent himself anew. The “I” remains a hypothesis, supposition, construction - a fragmentary work with gaps, faults, leftovers, defects... It’s not that his “/” becomes lost, rather that there is no “/” he can possess or appropriate. And, whoever is one their way without an “/”, is everywhere and nowhere. “The poet is a fakerl He fakes so completely / That he even fakes he is feeling it is painque finge com uma tal perfeiqjo,. que / The pain that he really feels. “(6) Pessoa, the poet does not seek meaning or metaphysics,- neither a mystic nor a philosopher he does not refer to any mythology, does not yearn neither for death nor life, The duration of the average value of our certainties is too brief for him to construct ideologies. The thoughts become dark again and confused once we have just found some clarity. He knows there is no solution, There is no secret that light must be shed upon or understood. No purpose or ultimate end. Pessoa is indifferent since compassion does not emerge in the futility of his actions, neither for himself nor for others. And the others are objects we presume have a soul... They are our peers and neighbours, a piece of flesh, similar to those hanging in the butchers’ windows. We will die without knowing being mutually acquainted; we shall cease to breathe without knowing who we are. We will dream like a flock of sleepers that have forgotten they exist... Text: Thomas Knoefel 1 Angel Crespo, La Vida Plural de Fern a ndo Pessoa, Barcelona, Editorial Seix Barral, 1988, |