The King of Gaps

 

In glaring affinity with the Chinese and, most of all, with the Daoist experience of the world, the sense of the vague, undefined and indeterminate is central in Pessoa. This is not so much in regard to nature, as in Pascoaes, but more in the realm of the internal psychic experience. The sense of the vague is at the root of the heteronymous experience of the Self as a non-Self or meontological emptiness that may at each instant become other (outrar-se) and become everything, in limitless self-creating possibilities. Bernardo Soares writes this very polished sentence in The Book of Disquiet: ‘Because I am nothing, I can imagine being everything. If I were something, I wouldn’t be able to imagine’ (Pessoa 2015, 156; Borges 2017, 29–44). However, it is an English poem by the young Pessoa that foresees and configures the more explicit experience of that undetermined vagueness as an insubstantial and interstitial emptiness. The poem is The King of Gaps, which summons, in a fairy-tale atmosphere, an ‘unknown king / Whose kingdom was the strange Kingdom of Gaps’ (Pessoa 2006, 420). This is a sovereign of the gaps and spaces of indetermination between determined and distinct things and entities, that is, no-man’s land that Pessoa calls ‘interbeings’. Its territory is the non-delimited space of the in between, the non-distinction connecting that which is distinct in inner and outer experience: one ‘thing’ and another ‘thing’, the ‘waking’ and the ‘sleep’, the ‘silence’ and the ‘speech’, ‘us and the consciousness of us’. The in between one thing and another is neither one nor the other, distinguished only by its indistinctness. Only seemingly delimited by that which has limits, it is, in truth, the limitless and undetermined that at once transcends, envelops and contains everything that limits and determines itself in it. This is suggested by the characterisation of the ‘strange mute kingdom’ of that ‘weird king’ as an otherness, which is alien to the human categories of ‘time and scene’ (time and space).

The space without dimensions of this king-kingdom is that of the open and inconclusive, ‘between’ the ‘supreme purposes’ and the ‘deed undone’, as well as that of the ‘mystery’ opening ‘between eyes and sight’ or between subject and object, which evades determination as perception or non-perception (‘nor blind nor seeing’).

As ‘void presence’ which is nothing but a ‘chasm’, the strange ‘King of Gaps’ is the formless and the abyssal, similar to what is named in Sanskrit as kha, in Greek kháos and in Latin chaos. Without location and not being an entity, it is uncreated and imperishable (‘never ended nor begun’). It is a figure of emptiness and insubstantiality suggesting an openness without contours which is nothing and has nothing (‘The lidless box holding not-being’s no-pelf’) (Pessoa 2006, 420).

The ‘King of Gaps’ is a figure of the infinite, strange to all circumscription and condition, a positive negativity. His identification with God is therefore natural except for himself (‘All think that he is God, except himself’), since in this logic to be God is still to be something, a determination and a limit which the infinite does not bear. In the words of Hegel regarding a letter by Spinoza: ‘Omnis determinatio est negatio’ (Melamed, Yitzhak Y. 2012, 176). This theme, the theme of the God which is not God to himself, or even the theme of the ‘beyond-God’, is derived from the mystic apophatic Greek and Christian Neoplatonism (Plotinus, Damascius, Pseudo-Dionysus, Scotus Eriugena, Eckhart, Silesius) and is recurring in Pessoa’s thought and work (Borges 2017, 133–161), as well as in other Portuguese poets and thinkers such as Antero de Quental, José Marinho, Agostinho da Silva, and Teixeira de Pascoaes – who writes that God is the ‘only perfect atheist’ (Pascoaes 1945, 276) because He is not God to himself. The ‘King of Gaps’ is a figure of the Zero or Emptiness (Jünger 1995, 15–40), as the bottomless bottom of the metaphysics of the One and of Being. Sometimes intuited as Nothing (ouden) (by excess and not by defect) (Pareyson 2000; Givone 2009), this elusive ‘King of Gaps’ also manifests itself in those literary figures of ‘insignificance’ and ‘impersonality’ that are Nemo, Niemand, Nobody, Personne (with a fruitful ambivalence) and Ninguém (Breton 1987, 5–26), encountered in Homer and the Anglo-German literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and in Portuguese culture in Gil Vicente’s Fool, in Almeida Garrett’s Pilgrim, in the sonnet ‘Homo’ by Antero de Quental and in many passages by Teixeira de Pascoaes and Fernando Pessoa. As one can see, the ‘King of Gaps’ is a figure of the undetermined emptiness and is, for that reason, fertile and superabundant, around whom the affinities between the Daoist and the Pessoan experience constellate, alongside a certain kind of Western philosophical-literary tradition (Poulet 1985–1990; Breton 1992).
Since the Middle Ages, the word gap has, etymologically speaking, the sense of a rift in a wall or hedge, afterward acquiring the meaning of an opening between mountains and, in a wider sense, of an unfilled space, an interval, hiatus or interruption. Archaically, it refers to the image of an abyss, an empty space or a wide-open mouth. Its proto-Indo-European root, *ghieh-, points to that meaning and is akin, as I mentioned, to the Sanskrit kha, to the Greek kháos and to the Latin chaos.

In Sanskrit, kha means empty space and zero (Rendich 2014, 136–137). In the Rig-Veda, it names the empty centre of the wheel where its axle is inserted (Coomaraswamy 2001, 255), later being identified with Brahman, the infinite unconditioned primordial space (Zaehner 1992, 95), the bottomless bottom of everything. If the good movement of the car is dependent on the good insertion of the axle uniting the wheels in their empty centre, the wheel being the universal symbol for the movement of life (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1990, 826–830) experienced as way or journey, then it is understandable that, in the same Indian, Hindu and Buddhist traditions, sukha, that is, the good insertion of the axle in the empty centre of the wheel, means happiness and dukkha, the bad insertion, means suffering (Droit 2010, 19). What remains implicit is that a life well-adjusted to, or well centred in, the infinite primordial empty space is a life that goes well, whereas an ill-adjusted or badly centred life in that same space is a life that goes bad.

In Sanskrit, kha also means zero, whose invention occurred in India with the ensuing revolution of calculus. Other Sanskrit words that also mean zero are śūnya, pūrna, ākāśa and ananta, that is, emptiness, plenitude, space and infinity. As the zero contains every possible number, so the emptiness entails the plenitude of possibilities. The space without centre or periphery is the infinite, complete emptiness (Coomaraswamy 2001, 255–262; Bäumer, Bettina and Dupuche, John R. (ed.), 2005; Borges 2018, 12–14). According to the Chāndogya Upanishad, all beings find their origin in and return to that ākāśa, the primordial space. For this text, that is the reason such infinite space is ‘the objective of this world’ (Zaehner 1992, 105). This infinite space, the matrix of all the cosmos, is not, however, exterior; it is rather the ‘space within the heart’ where ‘everything is concentrated’, the whole macrocosm (Zaehner 1992, 155). (...)

The experience of emptiness and indetermination dissolves the subject of experience, paradoxically leading him to proclaim himself as deprived of himself: ‘I realized, in an inner flash, that I’m no one. Absolutely no one’ (Pessoa 2015, 231). The experience of emptiness is the experience of the infinite whose centre resides in its absence, as stated by Aristotle: ‘the infinite has no centre’ (Aristotle 2014, 275b). 

The experience of a coincidence with the core of the unlimited leads Pessoa to express it in a paradoxical way, violating conventional logic and the common meaning of the words:

And amid all this confusion I, what’s truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I’m the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what’s truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls’ viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it. (Pessoa 2015, 232) Contrasting with the predominant perception and representation of the self as a determinate identity and an autonomous centre of perception, called I / subject and considered as distinct and separate from the world / object it perceives, Pessoa’s experience of the true ‘I’ is one of a paradoxical centre that conventional logic presupposes and demands, but that truly one does not find, since it is without form or shape. Instead, the experience of the self shows an abyssal depth, without contours – a ‘well without walls’, a ‘nothing’ around which everything spins, but an ‘everything’ that, on its turn, becomes ‘nothing’, since it has nothing delimiting and constituting it. This vertiginous ‘geometry of the abyss’, which annuls itself in the absence of dimensions, is clearly alike to the abyssal experience of the self expressed in this short poem in two verses:

The abyss is the wall I have
Being myself has no size

(Pessoa 1986a, 264) The ‘well without walls’ from The Book of Disquiet now corresponds to an ‘abyss’ as the only delimiting ‘wall’, which is tantamount to saying that there is no delimitation and that the experience of the self is the experience of the limitless. The latter may be understood either as the experience of a limitless self/I or as the absence of self/I (in fact, a limitless self/I is a non-self/non-I, since it has no otherness delimiting it and in reference to which it constitutes itself). Therefore, it is an ‘I’ without ‘size’ that, because it has no non-I differentiating it, is equivalent to a non-I or to the ‘nothing’ from The Book of Disquiet.

Like Zhuangzi, Pessoa presumes the original nature of the world and beings to be a chaotic indistinctness somewhat forfeited through the emergence of differentiation (Tseu 2007, 79), which he sometimes expresses in ways that are similar to the cosmogonic mythology of Neo-Orphism: ‘grandchildren of Destiny and stepchildren of God, who married Eternal Night when she was widowed by the Chaos that fathered us’ (Pessoa 2015, 44). From this perspective, humans come from Chaos and Night, potencies of undifferentiation and obscurity that have before them only ‘Destiny’, from which they may be a manifestation. The affinity with the cosmogony narrated by Aristophanes should be noted. It begins thus: ‘In the beginning there were Chaos and Night’ (Aristophanes in Ramnoux 1986, 177; Orpheus 1993, 31).

Álvaro de Campos goes in the same direction in his invocation to the ‘ancient and unchanging Night’ [Noite antiquíssima e idêntica] (Pessoa 2006, 161), in a longing aspiration that seems to come from the irreducible rooting of the ‘the most ancient part of us’ [Do antiquíssimo de nós] (Pessoa 2006, 162) in its primordial undifferentiation (Pessoa 1986a, 886–887), showing us as prior to time (Pessoa 2000, 70). This selfsame undifferentiation is also suggested by the ‘Indefinite’ whose contemplation at the beginning of ‘Maritime Ode’ (Pessoa 2006, 166) triggers the whole process of profound ecstatic change of consciousness that the poem so thoroughly narrates (Borges 2017, 83–116; Borges 2019). The same eagerness for the ‘Indefinite’ opens Campo’s poem ‘Lisbon Revisited’ (1926) and remains in the poet’s ‘yearning’ for experiences of self-effacement and trans-intellectual understanding of the emptiness of existence: ‘Those moments where I had no importance / Those where I understood all the emptiness of existence without intelligence to understand it’ (Pessoa 1986a, 1017). In Campos, there is explicitly ‘a desire for the indefinite / A lucid desire for the indefinite’  (Pessoa 1986a, 1046).

The primordial formlessness or emptiness remains latent, both in Daoism and in Pessoa, as the bottomless bottom of everything, the omni-embracing of which nobody can ‘deviate’ (Watts 1975, 37). As in Daoist wisdom, it is from this emptiness that emerge the ‘ten thousand beings’ (Tseu 2005, 63) or the infinity of possibilities and the possibility of an authentic life lacking self-centeredness (Tseu 2005, 71). In Pessoa, the overabundance of becoming other (outração) and of the experience of heteronymy emerges from that insubstantial emptiness of self and of everything – the ‘mystery’ and the ‘abyss’ of the ‘ultra-being’, greater than ‘gods and God and Fate’ (Pessoa 1986a, 1018–1019). It is the ‘great shadow’ that ‘merges in Night and Mystery’, the ‘Universe’ of ‘Matter and Spirit’ (Pessoa 1986a, 1025), as well as the power to be and ‘to feel everything in every way’ [Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras] (Pessoa 2003, 146) – following the sensationism of Campos. It is the possibility of a full life in the acknowledgement of the absence of substantial existence and in the affirmation of an ‘abyss’ (Pessoa 1986a, 1036) or gap, such that Campos writes: ‘I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist / I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made me’ (Pessoa 2003, 200). This is the ‘abyss’ of one who is in the divine, the ‘abyss’ of being prior to oneself, or prior to defining oneself by naming oneself, that emerges as the ‘gap’ that is ‘between’ the self and itself (Pessoa 1986a, 1117). The most authentic and full life takes place in the evasion from the oppressive hegemony of the egological principle:

To be one is prison, To be me is not being.
I will live in evasion But truly alive I will be.
(Pessoa 1986a, 316)

As in the Daoist universe, ‘the great Way’ does not intend to be the ‘master of the beings of which it is the matrix, the nurturing bottomless bottom’ (Tseu 2005, 197), as an anarchic and acratic arché that leaves them to process themselves instead of defining and governing them, as occurred in the political drift of the Greek metaphysics of the arché as hegemonic principle (as has been the case since Anaxagoras) (Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1994, 383).

Thus, in the immanence of the Pessoan heteronymic experience, the subject is less a definite ‘being’ (Pessoa 1986a, 283) than an unsubstantial erring in constant metamorphosis. The subject is a rootless soul that, not even belonging to itself, lives ‘being other constantly’ on an indefinite endless journey. As Pessoa writes in a poem in 1933:

To travel! To change countries!
To be forever someone else,
With a soul that has no roots,
Living only off what it sees!
To belong not even to me!
To go forward, to follow after
The absence of any goal
And any desire to achieve it!

(Pessoa 2003, 264) By carrying out a return to the odologic (from the Greek odós, way, path) and pre-ontological origins of Western thought, prior to the sedentarisation of categorical reason, the Pessoan experience suggests a nomadic erring in the intimacy of a [non-]self open to unpredictable metamorphoses that evokes the poetic and libertarian spirit of the fengliu Daoism, which may be translated as a ‘going with the wind’ (Marcel 2010, 12) and recalls the allusion to the elusive Daoist character Lie-Tseu: ‘Lie-Tseu moved riding the wind’. Writing not long after that ‘the perfect man is without I, the inspired man is without work; the holy man leaves no name’ (Tseu 2007, 31), Zhuangzi invites us to think of Pessoa as the man whose multifaceted work sprang precisely from acknowledging himself as not being an I and as having no other name. If we think in French, then the paradoxical or enigmatic suggestion of its absence becomes present: Pessoa / Personne / / Nobody.

Paulo Borges
Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy