A cherished touchstone for my detachment from everything, including me

Pessoa’s sexual abstinence (it is probable, though not provable, that he died a virgin) was by his own account a conscious choice, which he apparently sought to justify in The Book of Disquiet, with passages insisting on the impossibility of possessing another body, on the superiority of love in two dimensions (enjoyed by couples that inhabit paintings, stained-glass windows and Chinese teacups), and on the virtues of renunciation and asceticism. The Book, indeed, is rife with religious vocabulary, although the mysticism preached by Pessoa hallowed no god, except perhaps himself (‘God is me,’ he concludes in ‘The Art of Effective Dreaming for Metaphysical Minds’). Richard Zenith
**
Sovereign King of Detachment and Renunciation, Emperor of Death and Shipwreck, living dream that grandly wanders among the world’s ruins and wastes!
*
I don’t feel my soul, just peace. External things, all of them distinct and now perfectly still, even if they’re moving, are to me as the world must have been to Christ when, looking down at everything, Satan tempted him. They are nothing, and I can understand why Christ wasn’t tempted. They are nothing, and I can’t understand why clever old Satan thought they would be tempting.
*
The nocturnal glory of being great without being anything! … And I suddenly experience the sublime feeling of a monk in the wilderness or of a hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and in the caves of withdrawal from the world.

[I understand people who have a vocation for the cloistered life. I would now be capable of shutting myself off in a retreat for months at a time. To sink into the silence, melt into the monotony of a monk’s gray existence. To stroll along the overgrown pathways, touched by autumn gold, of a neglected garden and read Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine . . . To sit on a stone bench, write, and flick away the little spiders, stubborn little ants, and green garden fleas landing on my paper. Then to gaze through the bars of a Gothic window at the huge, red sun crossed by a few streaks of bluish clouds. Someone would bring me a meal and a candle. And at midnight I would rise to say my prayers . . . Bobkowski]

*

Slavery is the law of life, and it is the only law, for it must be observed: there is no revolt possible, no way to escape it. Some are born slaves, others become slaves, and still others are forced to accept slavery. Our faint-hearted love of freedom – which, if we had it, we would all reject, unable to get used to it – is proof of how ingrained our slavery is. I myself, having just said that I’d like a cabin or a cave where I could be free from the monotony of everything, which is the monotony of me – would I dare set out for this cabin or cave, knowing  from experience that the monotony, since it stems from me, will always be with me? I myself, suffocating from where I am and because I am – where would I breathe easier, if the sickness is in my lungs rather than in the things that surround me?
*
Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can’t live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you’re a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you’re not free. And you can’t hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you’re forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others. This tragedy, yes, is your own, and it follows you.

To be born free is the greatest splendour of man, making the humble hermit superior to kings and even to the gods, who are self-sufficient by their power but not by their contempt of it.
Death is a liberation because to die is to need no one. In death the wretched slave is forcibly set free from his pleasures, from his sufferings, from his coveted and ongoing life. The king is freed of the domains  he didn’t want to give up. Women who spread love are freed of the triumphs they cherish. Men who conquered are freed of the victories for which their lives were predestined.
Death ennobles, dressing our poor ridiculous bodies in finery they have never known. In death a man is free, even if he didn’t want freedom. In death he’s no longer a slave, even if he wept on giving up his slavery. Like a king whose greatest glory is his kingly title, and who as a man may be laughable but as a king is superior, so the dead man may be horribly deformed but is still superior, because death has freed him.

*
To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we’ve understood it.
Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts...
*
My life: a tragedy booed off stage by the gods, never getting beyond the first act.
Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

The logical reward of my detachment from life is the incapacity I’ve created in others to feel anything for me. There’s an aureole of indifference, an icy halo, that surrounds me and repels others. I still haven’t succeeded in not suffering from my solitude. It’s hard to achieve that distinction of spirit whereby isolation becomes a repose without anguish.

I put no faith in the friendship I was shown, and I wouldn’t have put any in love had I been shown love, which wouldn’t even have been possible. Although I never harboured illusions about those who  claimed to be my friends, I inevitably managed to feel disillusioned with them – such is my complex and subtle destiny of suffering.
*
The active life has always struck me as the least comfortable of suicides. To act, in my view, is a cruel and harsh sentence passed on the unjustly condemned dream. To exert influence on the outside world, to change things, to overcome obstacles, to influence people – all of this seems more nebulous to me than the substance of my daydreams. Ever since  I was a child, the intrinsic futility of all forms of action has been a cherished touchstone for my detachment from everything, including me.

From The Book of Disquiet

Saramago On Fernando Pessoa

 

He was a man who knew languages and wrote poetry. He earned his bread and wine replacing words with words. He wrote poetry as one must write poetry, as if for the first time. To begin with he called himself Fernando, a person like anyone else. One day he remembered to announce the imminent appearance of a super-Camões, a Camões much greater than the old one, but since he was a man who was known to be discreet, who used to walk through Douradores in a light-colored gabardine, a bow tie, and featherless hat, he did not say that the super-Camões was in fact himself. After all, this super-Camões could not become a still greater Camões; he was merely waiting to become Fernando Pessoa, a phenomenon the like of which Portugal had never known. Naturally, his life was made up of days, and we know that days may be alike but each never happens more than once, which is why it is not surprising that on one of those days when Fernando passed in front of a mirror he spied in it, at a glance, another person.1 He thought this was just another optical illusion, those ones that happen when you’re not paying attention, or that the last glass of eau de vie had not agreed with his liver and his head, but he cautiously took a step back just to make sure that—as is usually assumed—when mirrors show something they do not make mistakes. This one, however, had indeed made a mistake: there was a man looking out at him from inside the mirror, and that man was not Fernando Pessoa.

He was a little shorter, and his face was somewhat dark-skinned and completely clean-shaven. Unconsciously Fernando brought his hand to his upper lip, then breathed deeply in childlike relief: his moustache was still there. One can expect many things from an image that appears in a mirror, but not that it will speak. And because these two, Fernando and the image that wasn’t an image of him, were not going to stay watching one another forever, Fernando Pessoa said, “My name is Ricardo Reis.” The other man smiled, nodded, and disappeared. For a moment the mirror was empty, bare, then right away another image appeared, of a thin, pale man who looked as if he were not long for this world. It seemed to Fernando that this must have been the first one; however, he made no comment, merely saying, “My name is Alberto Caeiro.” The other did not smile; he merely nodded slightly, agreeing, and left. Fernando Pessoa waited, having always been told that whenever there are two a third will always follow. The third figure took a few seconds to arrive, and he was one of those men who look as if they have more health than they know what to do with, and he had the unmistakable air of an engineer trained in England. Fernando said, “My name is Álvaro de Campos,” but this time he did not wait for the image to disappear from the mirror, but moved away from it himself, probably tired from having been so many people in such a short space of time. That night, in the small hours of the morning, Fernando Pessoa awoke wondering whether Álvaro de Campos had stayed in the mirror. He got up, and what he found there was his own face. So he said, “My name is Bernardo Soares,” and went back to bed. It was after assuming these names and a few others that Fernando thought it was time for him, too, to be ridiculous, and he wrote the most ridiculous love letters in the world. He made great progress in his work of translation and poetry, and then he died. His friends had told him he had a great future ahead of him, but he can’t have believed them—believed them so little, in fact, that he unfairly decided to die in the prime of life, aged forty-seven, if you can believe such a thing. A moment before the end he asked to be handed his glasses: “Give me my glasses,” were his last, formal words. To this day nobody has sought to learn what he wanted them for, such is the way the final wishes of the dying are ignored or despised, but it seems quite likely that what he wanted was to look in a mirror to see who was there in the end. But he was not allowed enough time. Actually, there wasn’t even a mirror in the room. Fernando Pessoa never did find out for sure who he was, but thanks to his doubts we can manage to learn a little more about who it is we are.

Jose Saramago 

The Notebook 

A Book That Never Was

When it was decided to call the proposed book of essays on Fernando Pessoa The Man Who Never Was (1982), I certainly did not foresee that the title would cause anyone any difficulty. Nor did I anticipate that it would mislead anyone. After all, I had merely taken over the title from someone who, in turn, had taken it over from someone else. The practice is common enough. There had recently been on Broadway a play called The Real Thing and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the famous short story by Henry James bearing the same title. To take a second example, John Philip Sousa, the American March King, and the well-known writer Shirley Hazard both entitled novels Transit of Venus, books that were published sixty years apart. Examples are legion.

Now I had not seen anything wrong with it when Jorge de Sena had decided to call his major address at the First International Symposium on Fernando Pessoa in 1977 “The Man Who Never Was.” It was clear, as it must have been to some of those in attendance, that Sena was consciously playing, in this title, with the notion that the several poetic selves created by the Portuguese poet (Fernando Pessoa himself called them his “heteronyms,” of course) were fully characterized personae created to live the several lives that the poet himself could not in fact live out, and that Sena would, in this essay, seek to define the self of the man who had, in a real and (even) poignant sense, never lived. It was also clear that Sena had deliberately borrowed his title from a book first published in Great Britain in 1954. That English book deals with a real-life episode of wartime espionage and counter-espionage in which there is created an elaborate identity and rather complicated past and projected future (as a courier carrying highly revealing letters) for a cadaver destined to be “planted” in the sea off the coast of Spain. The book detailing all this (and revealing it publicly for the first time) was written by the officer in British Intelligence, one Ewen Montagu, who concocted the plot in the first place. I happened to have read (and enjoyed) the book when it was first published in the United States the year I graduated from college. In fact, I thought it clever of Jorge de Sena to have appropriated for his own essay about the man who had made central to his life and art the creation of such “identities” the title of a book which, had it appeared during Pessoa’s lifetime, would certainly have caught the poet’s attention and engaged his interest. And I thought further, when the time came, that it would be a clever stroke to assign the title Sena shared with Montagu to the book of essays on Pessoa (including Sena’s own) that would subsequently appear under my editorship.

That book of essays on Pessoa appeared late in 1982. A year later there appeared a brief notice of the existence of the book in a journal devoted to serious scholarship on matters Portuguese. The notice was the work of the journal’s editor (a full review by another hand appeared elsewhere in the same issue of the journal), who limited himself to complaining that the editor of The Man Who Never Was: Essays on Fernando Pessoa was guilty, at best, of an error in taste in deciding to take over a title from a real-life spy thriller published years earlier. He suggested as well that my having duplicated such a title might well confuse and annoy students of Pessoa’s work.

Now there are several things that could have been said in my defense. First, I seriously doubted that any perceptive student of Pessoa’s life and work would find such a title inappropriate, alluding as it does to a classic instance of deception on that grand scale the Portuguese poet could only dream of. Secondly, the first writer to apply the title to Pessoa was, of course, Jorge de Sena himself, one of the most profoundly committed students of everything having to do with Pessoa. Could anyone doubt that Sena knew full well what he was doing in choosing to appropriate Montagu’s title (thereby revitalizing it) or that he was, in so levying on it, guilty of a lapse in taste? The questions, one ventures, are rhetorical.

Yet, after is said and done, I must admit that my judgmental friend, a historian, had a point. He was right about one thing. At least in one case the title The Man Who Never Was has caused confusion. A few months ago, at the publisher’s office, there appeared a purchase order for one copy of the book—paperbound. The envelope carried a Commonwealth of Virginia postmark, and the order it contained came from the headquarters of the C.I.A., an outfit that is purported to know a thing or two about espionage and counter-espionage. The book was shipped out, and in due course a check for the amount due arrived in the mail. Case closed. Except, that is, that neither the book’s publisher nor its editor had any way of knowing why the C.I.A. should evince an interest in a book of essays on Fernando Pessoa. But we have our suspicions. What we suspect, of course, is that some eagle-eyed spy at the C.I.A. made a mistake. Thinking that our 1982 book might have something to do with “Operation Mincemeat” (as the British called their escapade against the Axis Powers), they dutifully put through an order. On the other hand, it might well be that, like many other individuals who, to their sorrow, have learned differently, the C.I.A.—knowing exactly what they are up to—have now turned their attention to the legacy of modern Portugal’s great trickster poet.

Postscript. Subsequently, copies of Gávea-Brown Publications’ The Man Who Never Was were purchased by direct order for the United States Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, the United States Army in South Korea, and a third military outfit—I cannot recall, at the moment, which one—located in Maryland or Virginia. None of these copies has been returned.

Second postscript. On July 31, 1985, there arrived at Gávea-Brown Publications a letter from one Laurent Weichberger asking to buy a copy of The Man Who Never Was. He had read about Ewen Montagu’s life and times in the Sunday New York Times for July 21st and had, as a result, tried to buy a copy of Montagu’s book in New York City but had not been successful. Upon checking the Times for that date, I discovered that the article was actually an obituary entitled “Ewen Montagu, 84; Briton Led a Mission That Deceived Nazis” (p. 28). It described the events of that mission and mentioned the book—The Man Who Never Was (1953)—that narrated them. Mr. Weichberger was dutifully informed that Gávea-Brown’s book has nothing whatsoever to do with the late Ewen Montagu’s wonderful account of his World War II exploits.

Third postscript. And orders for The Man Who Never Was that was not published by Gávea-Brown continue to come in. In the summer of 1988 the Military Bookstore of Leavenworth, Kansas, tried to place an order for twenty copies (we telephoned them to suggest that it was not our book that they really wanted) and Aztec Shops at San Diego State University ordered fifteen copies to be used, as a phone call uncovered, as a text in History 410A—United States History for Teachers. The same week there was a call from a woman who identified herself only as a secretary at Citibank, New York City, who had been directed by her boss (also a woman) to get her a copy of The Man Who Never Was—“that book about the C.I.A.” The beat goes on.

George Monteiro

From Lisbon to the World 

Dreams inside Dreams

Metaphysical dependencies between things crop up all the time, and are of different kinds. A shadow is metaphysically dependent on the object which casts it, a reflection on what is reflected, a quality on a substance, a whole on its parts. Although it seems to make no sense to say that a shadow can itself cast a shadow, it is not generally the case that entities which are metaphysicaly dependent on other entities cannot themselves serve in the role of ground. We find no difficulty in thinking of a picture of a picture, and a whole is made of parts, each of which may itself be a whole made of parts.

Such nestable grounding relations form chains of dependence, which may or may not be transitive, meaning that if A grounds B and B grounds C, then A grounds C, and may or may not be well­-founded, meaning that the chain begins somewhere.

Is heteronymic simulation, too, nestable? Pessoa assumes the heteronym Caeiro, writing poetry in the style of Caeiro. To my knowledge, Pessoa never, though, considers this scenario: Caeiro himself assumes a hetero­nym, who then speaks and writes as this embedded heteronym. Pessoa treats his heteronyms more like shadows than like pictures, foreclosing the possibility that a heteronym can cast its own heteronymic shadow. In all Pessoa’s writings there is not a single case involving a heteronym of a heteronym.¹ That is not to say that Pessoa is unfamiliar with the idea of nesting per se.

He says, for instance, that ‘this makes me fantasize about whether every­ thing in the sum total of the world might not be an interconnected series of dreams and novels, like little boxes inside larger boxes that are inside yet larger ones.’² Dreams inside dreams, and their implications for the distinc­tion between dream and reality, is also a strong thematic element in his play The Mariner, where the second watcher reports dreaming of a stranded mariner who dreams up a fictitious homeland.³ In this dreamed­-up home­ land, Pessoa emphasizes, the mariner lives as a person among others, with friends, acquaintances, and a remembered past. When Pessoa writes, ‘Then he travelled, with his memory, through the country he’d created’⁴, the pro­noun ‘he’ appears twice, once to refer to the mariner who is the dreaming subject, and again to refer to the subject­-within­-the­-dream. The dream acquires such vivacity that in the end it seems to be his actual life and he is unable to remember his true homeland: ‘Whereas in the life he thought he’d merely dreamed, everything was real and had existed . . . he couldn’t even dream, couldn’t even conceive, of having had any other past.’⁵ The second watcher says that all is explained by another detail in the story: when a boat arrives at the island on which he had been stranded, the mariner is not there. As embedded within the context of a dream, it is the subject­-within­-the­-dream who is real, the dreaming subject less so. Embedding, the lesson seems to be, inverts metaphysical priority.

These are, evidently, Borgesian topics, and the character of dreams inside dreams is the implied theme of Borges’s story The Circular Ruins. Borges introduces the idea that the relation between dreaming subject and simulac­rum is nested when he has the ‘foreigner’ who dreams a youth into being discover, in the dramatic final sentences of the story, that he is himself a simulacrum in another dreamer’s dream. What the foreigner learns in this moment is that the Cartesian dream hypothesis is true: all this is a dream, a dream within which there is a dream in which the youth is dreamt into being.

Nested dreams, together with their implications for the reality of sub­jects, are more explicitly the theme of a remarkable passage in the third­ century BCE Daoist classic, the Zhuangzi. Here is how the passage reads in Brook Ziporyn’s translation:

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about joyfully just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and there he was, the startled Zhuang Zhou in the flesh. He did not know if Zhou had been dreaming he was a butterfly, or if a butterfly was now dreaming it was Zhou. Surely, Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities! Such is what we call the transformation of one thing into another.⁶

A similar double scenario features in Julio Cortázar’s story ‘The night face up’ . A man in a hospital ward falls asleep and dreams he is a Moteca, fleeing from the Aztecs. He awakens, but on falling asleep again has the same dream, and repeatedly so. At long last it occurs to him that he really is a Moteca, dreaming of being a contemporary man in a hospital bed.⁷ The Zhuangzi version has an intriguingly complex structure. There is a framing dream exhibiting self­-alienation, Zhou’s dream being such that, within the dream, the one at the centre of the landscape of presence is a butterfly. There is then an ‘emergence’ from the dream, a ‘waking’ with Zhou now present in the flesh. Immediately, however, two alternative explanations of this ‘emer­gence’ are countenanced. One is the commonplace idea that Zhou, having fallen asleep, now awakens and recalls the dream he just had. The other, more complicated, suggestion, is that the butterfly falls asleep and has its own self­-alienated dream, within which the one at the centre of the land­scape of presence is Zhou. Some interpreters prefer to read the second alter­ native as simply that it was a butterfly all along, dreaming it was Zhou. Yet in this reading there is still nesting, because the butterfly dreams it is Zhou who dreams he is a butterfly. Either way, then, the story is about a nested dream.

With the apparatus of Pessoa’s philosophy of self to hand, we can under­stand this complicated story in a fresh light. The framing dream represents a by­-now familiar case. It is just the same as Valberg’s example of dreaming that he is X. This is not a case of Zhou dreaming that he, Zhou the human being, inhabits the body of a butterfly; rather, in Zhou’s dream, it is the butterfly which is the one at the centre of a butterflyish field of conscious­ness. We might retell this stage of the parable thus: ‘Once Pessoa imagined he was a fly, fluttering about joyfully just as a fly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Pessoa.’ That is almost exactly the same as Pessoa’s actual remark: ‘I really felt like a fly when I imagined I felt like one. And I felt I had a flyish soul, slept flyishly and was flyishly withdrawn.’⁸ The personal pronoun is, therefore, used positionally.

Classical Chinese indeed has two words for ‘I’ , wu and wo. In an earlier pas­sage of the Zhuangzi Ziqi says, ‘Now I (wu) have lost myself (wo).’9 Commentators generally associate wu with ‘an idea of naked subjectivity of experience’ or a ‘thin subject of experience’¹⁰, and wo with the fleshed­-out human being. Yet, exactly as with Pessoa’s statement, ‘I am no longer I’ , what we should say is that the first person is used in two distinct ways: the first use of ‘I’ is a positional use and the second use is a simple indexical use.

Classical Chinese, unlike English, marks the positional use of the first per­son lexically. It is no longer the human being Ziqi who figures as the one at the centre of the field of consciousness: the fugitive self has lost track of the human being with whom it has long, but still only contingently, been one. Likewise here: Zhou has ‘lost himself’ in the sense that, within the dream, he is a butterfly and no longer a human being.

Two distinct scenarios are now envisaged, each of which might constitute what it is to ‘emerge’ from the dream. One is that Zhou awakens and recalls that, in the dream, he was the butterfly. Valberg and Johnston have both provided accounts of what it is to emerge from a dream in this mundane sense.

For Johnston, it is a repopulating of the phenomenal field now with veridical perceptions. He writes, ‘When I awake and recall that I was dream­ing that I was flying, an apparently common frame grounds these “I”­uses. That apparent common frame is an arena that with my awaking has appar­ently come to include a host of veridical perceptions.’¹¹ Valberg, in the grip of the idea that the field is unique and alone, instead represents emergence from a dream as consisting in a widening of the horizon, a larger horizon that now includes the contents of the dream.¹² The alternative scenario is harder to understand. What is now envisaged is that, still in the dream, the butterfly falls asleep and dreams that it is Zhuang Zhou. This second, embedded dream is also self­-alienated, but now it is the butterfly who is the dreaming subject, and it is Zhou who is, in the nested dream, the subject­ within­-the­-dream, the one at the centre of the landscape of dreamt sensations.

Were all this to be put in terms of heteronymic simulation, Pessoan ‘dreaming’ rather than actual dreaming, it would be an illustration of nested heteronyms and of a rather particular sort. It would be as if Pessoa assumes the heteronym Caeiro, who then assumes a heteronym. The heteronym Caeiro assumes, however, is Fernando Pessoa himself! In his actual writings Pessoa does not consider the possibility of heteronymic nesting, and even less does he consider the possibility the Zhuangzi explores, that of circular heteronymic nesting. The nearest he comes is in recounting how he com­posed an ‘early Campos’ poem:

I suggested to Sá­ Carneiro that I write an ‘old’ poem of Álvaro de Campos’s—a poem such as Álvaro de Campos would have written before meeting Caeiro and falling under his influence. That’s how I came to write Opiary, in which I tried to incorporate all the latent tendencies of Álvaro de Campos that would eventually be revealed but that still showed no hint of contact with his master Caeiro. Of all the poems I’ve written, this was the one that gave me the most trouble, because of the twofold depersonal­ization it required.¹³

Heteronymic nesting, were it even to be possible, would involve a similar sort of twofold simulation. It would require Pessoa, as Campos, to assume another heteronym, Caeiro say. The case we are now considering would complicate matters still further, for the heteronym Campos would assume would be Pessoa.

When this hypothetical ‘Pessoa’ writes poetry, it is Pessoa­-as­-Campos­as­ Pessoa who is writing, and the puzzle is to know how this poet stands in relation to Pessoa. ‘Surely,’ the Zhuangzi says, ‘Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities! Such is what we call the transformation of one thing into another.’ A ‘transformation’ of one thing into another, in the context of self­-alienated dreaming, is a switch in the occupancy of the subject position.

Valberg ‘transforms’ himself into X, in this sense, when he dreams he is X. When the butterfly ‘transforms’ itself into Zhou, because it has a dream in which Zhou is the one at the centre, are we to suppose that this embed­ded ‘Zhou’ , a subject within an embedded dream, is the same as the framing dream’s dreaming subject? That is the question about identity and equiva­lence the story is seeking to explore.

I suggest that we answer this question by making use of a concept I have already introduced, that of an orthonym. The correct thing to say is that the embedded ‘Zhou’ is an orthonym of the dreaming Zhou. This embedded Zhou is the double of the dreaming Zhou and is his shadow self. Each, it is affirmed, is as real as the other, but they are not identical. Recall Giorgio Agamben’s description of the orthonymic mechanism: ‘ A new poetic con­sciousness, something like a genuine ēthos of poetry, begins once Fernando Pessoa, having survived his own depersonalization, returns to a self who both is and is no longer the first subject.’ Zhou, surviving a transformation first into a butterfly and then back into himself, returns as a self who ‘both is and is no longer’ the original, dreaming, Zhou.

What the parable teaches us, then, is that simulating subjects are no more real than simulated subjects, and no less so. Or, as Pessoa himself puts the matter, ‘The author of these books cannot affirm that all these different and well­-defined personalities who have incorporeally passed through his soul don’t exist, for he does not know what it means to exist, nor whether Hamlet or Shakespeare is more real, or truly real.’¹⁴ In extending Pessoa’s discussion with the introduction of a double and circular application of dream embed­ding, the brilliance of the parable of the butterfly in the Zhuangzi is that it constructs a device to answer that question: Hamlet (qua heteronym of Shakespeare, not merely a character in one of his plays) and Shakespeare are equivalently real.

1 John Frow is the only author I know of to have observed this fact. He takes it to show that heteronymy is not a nestable relation, writing that ‘one of the ways in which the heteronyms and the orthonym are distinguished from “Fernando Pessoa himself” is that the heteronyms cannot themselves have heteronyms: there is no inf i nite spiral of multiplying and named selves.’ Frow, John. Character and Person. Oxford, 2014, p. 221. Frow does not, however, offer any reason to deny that heteronymy is nestable other than that Pessoa does not consider the possibility. He also, here, conflates nesting with well­-foundedness.

2 The Book of Disquiet,
3 The Mariner. In Selected Prose, pp. 20–34.
4 The Mariner. In Selected Prose, p. 28.
5 The Mariner. In Selected Prose, p. 29.
6 Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, translated by Brook Ziporyn. Hackett, 2009, p. 21.
7 Cortázar, Julio. La noche boca arriba. In The End of the Game, and Other Stories, translated by Paul Blackburn. Pantheon,1963.
8 The Book of Disquiet,
9 Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, p. 12.
10 Hung, Jenny. ‘The theory of the self in the Zhuangzi: A Strawsonian interpretation’ .
Philosophy East and West 69 (2019), pp. 376–94.
11 Johnston, Surviving Death, p. 188.
12 Valberg, Dream, Death, and the Self, p. 121.
13 Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, 13 January 1935, Selected Prose, p. 257.
14 [Aspects], in Selected Prose, p. 2.

Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves Fernando Pessoa and his Philosophy
Jonardon Ganeri

Pessoa on his generation + watch without watchmaker

 1I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgements based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it. That’s why I didn’t give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.

And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what’s left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny? Not knowing nor able to know what religious life is, since faith isn’t acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we’re left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul. Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless  sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves.

Retaining from science only its fundamental precept – that everything is subject to fatal laws, which we cannot freely react to since the laws themselves determine all reactions – and seeing how this precept concurs with the more ancient one of the divine fatality of things, we abdicate from every effort like the weak-bodied from athletic endeavours, and we hunch over the book of sensations like scrupulous scholars of feeling.

Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries. And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it’s because the poetry or prose we write – devoid of any desire to move anyone else’s will or to mould anyone’s understanding – is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.

We’re well aware that every creative work is imperfect and that our most dubious aesthetic contemplation will be the one whose object is what we write. But everything is imperfect. There’s no sunset so lovely it couldn’t be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn’t bring a yet sounder sleep. And so, contemplators of statues and mountains alike, enjoying both books and the passing days, and dreaming all things so as to transform them into our own substance, we will also write down descriptions and analyses which, when they’re finished, will become extraneous things that we can enjoy as if they happened along one day.

This isn’t the viewpoint of pessimists like Vigny,* for whom life was a prison in which he wove straw to keep busy and forget. To be a pessimist is to see everything tragically, an attitude that’s both excessive and uncomfortable. While it’s true that we ascribe no value to the work we produce and that we produce it to keep busy, we’re not like the prisoner who busily weaves straw to forget about his fate; we’re like the girl who embroiders pillows for no other reason than to keep busy.

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t  know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it’s here that I meet others. But I’m neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I’m sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing – for myself alone – wispy songs I compose while waiting.

Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I’m given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don’t read it, or are not entertained, that’s fine too.

***

175The generation I belong to was born into a world where those with a brain as well as a heart couldn’t find any support. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no tranquillity in the political sphere. We were born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquiet. Inebriated with objective formulas, with the mere methods of reason and science, the generations that preceded us did away with the foundations of the Christian faith, for their biblical criticism – progressing from textual to mythological criticism – reduced the gospels and the earlier scriptures of the Jews to a doubtful heap of myths, legends and mere literature, while their scientific criticism gradually revealed the mistakes and ingenuous notions of the gospels’ primitive ‘science’. At the same time, the spirit of free inquiry brought all metaphysical problems out into the open, and with them all the religious problems that had to do with metaphysics. Drunk with a hazy notion they called ‘positivism’, these generations criticized all morality and scrutinized all rules of life, and all that remained from the clash of doctrines was the certainty of none of them and the grief over there being no certainty. A society so undisciplined in its cultural foundations could obviously not help but be a victim, politically, of its own chaos, and so we woke up to a world eager for social innovations, a world that gleefully pursued a freedom it didn’t grasp and a progress it had never defined.

But while the sloppy criticism of our fathers bequeathed us the impossibility of being Christians, it didn’t bequeath us an acceptance of the impossibility; while it bequeathed us a disbelief in established moral codes, it didn’t bequeath us an indifference to morality and the rules for peaceful human coexistence; while it left the thorny problem of politics in doubt, it didn’t leave our minds unconcerned about how to solve it. Our fathers blithely wreaked destruction, for they lived in a time that was still informed by the solidity of the past. The very thing they destroyed was what gave strength to society and enabled them to destroy without noticing that the building was cracking. We inherited the destruction and its aftermath.

Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability.

 ***

I’ve never understood how anyone who has stopped to consider the tremendous fact of this universal watch mechanism can deny the watchmaker, in whom not even Voltaire disbelieved. I understand why, in light of certain events that have apparently deviated from a plan (and only by knowing the plan could one know if they have deviated from it), someone might attribute an element of imperfection to this supreme intelligence. I understand this, although I don’t accept it. And I understand why, in view of the evil that’s in the world, one might not acknowledge that the creating intelligence is infinitely good. I understand this, although again I don’t accept it. But to deny the existence of this intelligence, namely God, strikes me as one of those idiocies that sometimes afflict, in one area of their intelligence, men who in all other areas may be superior – those, for example, who systematically make mistakes in adding and subtracting, or who (considering now the intelligence that rules aesthetic sensibility) cannot feel music, or painting, or poetry.

I’ve said that I don’t accept the notion of the watchmaker who is imperfect or who isn’t benevolent. I reject the notion of the imperfect watchmaker, because those aspects of the world’s government and organization that seem flawed or nonsensical might prove otherwise, if we only knew the plan. While clearly seeing a plan in everything, we also see certain things that apparently make no sense, but if there’s a reason behind everything, then won’t these things be guided by that same reason? Seeing the reason but not the actual plan, how can we say that certain things are outside the plan, when we don’t know what it is? Just as a poet of subtle rhythms can insert an arrhythmic verse for rhythmic purposes, i.e. for the very purpose he seems to be going against (and a critic who’s more linear than rhythmic will say that the verse is mistaken), so the Creator can insert things that our narrow logic considers arrhythmic into the majestic flow of his metaphysical rhythm.

I admit that the notion of an unbenevolent watchmaker is harder to refute, but only on the surface. One could say that since we don’t really know what evil is, we cannot rightfully affirm that something is bad or good, but it’s true that a pain, even if it’s for our ultimate good, is obviously bad in itself, and this is enough to prove that evil exists in the world. A toothache is enough to make one disbelieve in the goodness of the Creator. The basic error in this argument seems to lie in our complete ignorance of God’s plan, and our equal ignorance of what kind of an intelligent person the Intellectual Infinite might be. The existence of evil is one thing; the reason for its existence is another. The distinction may be subtle to the point of seeming sophistic, but it is nevertheless valid. The existence of evil cannot be denied, but one can deny that the existence of evil is evil. I admit that the problem persists, but only because our imperfection persists.

***

The Book of Disquiet

 

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

Young Pessoa

Since both parents were literary in their different ways, they did not find it strange that Fernando chose words as his favorite playthings. As the small boy rode on the streetcar with his mother, it tickled him to call out each letter of the signs they passed. This caused a fellow passenger to remark on his unusual ability to recite from memory what he had previously heard his mother spell out. No, she corrected, he already recognized all the letters of the alphabet.28 By age four he was reading whole sentences.

*

While Pessoa the adult would retain certain childlike traits, the young boy named Fernando already possessed a grown-up sense of his own dignity. Shy but not easily intimidated, he despised being treated with condescension, no matter how innocent or good-humored. When a family friend from the Azores finally laid eyes on the bright five-year-old he had heard so much about, he hoisted the boy up in his arms, saying, “Pleased to meet you! I’ve been very curious to make your acquaintance.” Fernando, with his feet back on the ground, smoothed the ruffles out of his suit and commented with a dash of pique in his voice, “So now your curiosity has been satisfied.”30 Proud and independent, occasionally even insolent, Fernando was at the same time mild-mannered, timorous, preferring indoor games to rough outdoor play. He could be violent in his words, never in actions. He was also, already, a very private individual.

 *

But nothing better illustrates the boy’s intellectual precocity than his astonishing performance at school. A foreigner who arrived at Durban with practically no English, he was soon at the top of his class—and not because of his skill in mathematics. In fact, “top of his class” states only half the case, since he left his class behind and jumped ahead. Although he had had a year and a half of (probably at-home) schooling in Lisbon, his lack of English meant he had to start all over in Durban, where he completed the five-year primary school program in just three years. At a graduation ceremony on December 20, 1898, the school would award Fernando the Examination Prize for all-around academic excellence, the First Prize in Latin, and, most remarkably, the First Prize in English.20In addition to Latin, English, and arithmetic, Fernando’s class schedule during his last year of primary school included geometry, history, science, and French. Some subjects were taught on alternate days; Latin was taught every day, Monday through Friday. So was English, but the Tuesday and Thursday classes were devoted specifically to poetry. Two hours of weekly poetry instruction seems to have been a peculiarity of the convent school rather than a standard feature of the fifth-grade curriculum in South Africa. Black-robed and white-bibbed Catholic nuns, while they may not have served as inspiring muses, were the ones who instilled an early love of poetry in Fernando. It was in the form of a poem that he scrawled a warning to would-be thieves in the front of Principia Latina, his Latin primer, opposite the flyleaf where his class schedule was affixed:

Don’t steal this book

For fear of shame

For in it is

The owner’s name.

And if I catch

Him by the tail

He’ll run off

To Durban gaol.†

At the back of the textbook he wrote a bilingual message, in English and French, instructing whoever might find the book to return it to him at his home address. In February 1898 Fernando, four months away from his tenth birthday, was flaunting his still rudimentary skills as a linguist and poet.

From: PESSOA

A Biography

Richard Zenith

Pessoa - not self

 

Caesar aptly defined what ambition is all about when he said: ‘Better to be first in the village than the second in Rome!’ I’m nothing in the village and nothing in any Rome. The corner grocer is at least respected from the Rua da Assunção to the Rua da Vitória; he’s the Caesar of a square city block. Me superior to him? In what, if nothingness admits neither superiority nor inferiority, nor even comparison?
*
To understand, I destroyed myself.

*
...not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist...
*
I don’t have any idea of myself, not even the kind that consists in the lack of an idea of myself. I’m a nomad in my self-awareness. The herds of my inner riches scattered during the first watch.
*
All of a sudden, as if a surgical hand of destiny had operated on a long-standing blindness with immediate and sensational results, I lift my gaze from my anonymous life to the clear recognition of how I live. And I see that everything I’ve done, thought or been is a species of delusion or madness. I’m amazed by what I managed not to see. I marvel at all that I was and that I now see I’m not.

I look at my past life as at a field lit up by the sun when it breaks through the clouds, and I note with metaphysical astonishment how my most deliberate acts, my clearest ideas and my most logical intentions were after all no more than congenital drunkenness, inherent madness and huge ignorance. I didn’t even act anything out. I was the role that got acted. At most, I was the actor’s motions.

All that I’ve done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself  through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I’d always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn’t I.

I’m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being. I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought. I feel, in this moment, like a man who wakes up after a slumber full of real dreams, or like a man freed by an earthquake from the dim light of the prison he’d grown used to.

This sudden awareness of my true being, of this being that has always sleepily wandered between what it feels and what it sees, weighs on me like an untold sentence to serve.

It’s so hard to describe what I feel when I feel I really exist and my soul is a real entity that I don’t know what human words could define it. I don’t know if I have a fever, as I feel I do, or if I’ve stopped having the fever of sleeping through life. Yes, I repeat, I’m like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, without knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time are not themselves but someone else. I was someone else for a long time – since birth and consciousness – and suddenly I’ve woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up till now. But the city is unknown to me, the streets are new, and the trouble has no cure. And so, leaning over the bridge, I wait for the truth to go away and let me return to being fictitious and non-existent, intelligent and natural.
*
For a long time now I haven’t been I.
*
I overflowed from myself to end up I don’t know where, and that’s where I’ve uselessly stagnated. I’m something that I used to be. I’m never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don’t know who’s seeking me.
*
I stepped out of my own existence and found myself.... It was as if I were using some magical technique to find myself nearer the monad that I perhaps am. Certain aspects and characteristics of my daily existence – represented in my normal self by desires, aversions, worries – vanished from me like fugitives from the law, fading into the shadows beyond recognition, and I attained a state of inward distance in which it was hard to remember yesterday or to believe that the self who lives in me day after day really belongs to me. My usual emotions, my regularly irregular habits, my conversations with others, my adaptations to the world’s social order – all of this seemed like things I’d read somewhere, like inert pages of a published biography, or details from some novel, in one of the middle chapters we read while thinking about something else, and the story-line slackens until it finally slithers away on the ground.
*
What did I make of myself? Nothing.
To be spiritualized in Night.....
Inner Statue without contours, Outer Dream without a dream-essence.
*
Today I was struck by an absurd but valid sensation. I realized, in an inner flash, that I’m no one. Absolutely no one. In that flash, what I’d supposed was a city proved to be a barren plain, and the sinister light that showed me myself revealed no sky above. Before the world existed, I was deprived of the power to be. If I was reincarnated, it was without myself, without my I.

I’m the suburbs of a non-existent town, the long-winded commentary on a book never written. I’m no one, no one at all. I don’t know how to feel, how to think, how to want. I’m the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn’t know how to complete me.

I always think, I always feel, but there’s no logic in my thought, no emotions in my emotion. I’m falling from the trapdoor on high through  all of infinite space in an aimless, infinitudinous,* empty descent. My soul is a black whirlpool, a vast vertigo circling a void, the racing of an infinite ocean around a hole in nothing. And in these waters which are more a churning than actual waters float the images of all I’ve seen and heard in the world – houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and syllables of voices all moving in a sinister and bottomless swirl.

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.
*
I’ve lived certain moments of respite in the presence of Nature, moments sculpted out of tender isolation, that will always be like medals for me. In these moments I forgot all of my life’s goals, all of the paths I wanted to follow. An immense spiritual tranquillity fell into the blue lap of my aspirations and allowed me to enjoy being nothing.
*
I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

Pessoa - Detachment

...I was free from having to feel. It was in a certain sense home – the place, that is, where one doesn’t feel.
*
Sovereign King of Detachment and Renunciation, Emperor of Death and Shipwreck, living dream that grandly wanders among the world’s ruins and wastes!
*
The only aristocracy is never to touch. Avoid getting close – that’s true nobility.
*
May your acts be the statue of renunciation, your gestures the pedestal of indifference, and your words the stained-glass windows of denial.
*
The nocturnal glory of being great without being anything! The sombre majesty of splendours no one knows… And I suddenly experience the sublime feeling of a monk in the wilderness or of a hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and in the caves of withdrawal from the world.
And at this table in my absurd room, I, a pathetic and anonymous office clerk, write words as if they were the soul’s salvation, and I gild myself with the impossible sunset of high and vast hills in the distance, with the statue I received in exchange for life’s pleasures, and with the ring of renunciation on my evangelical finger, the stagnant jewel of my ecstatic disdain.
*
I don’t feel my soul, just peace. External things, all of them distinct and now perfectly still, even if they’re moving, are to me as the world must have been to Christ when, looking down at everything, Satan tempted him. They are nothing, and I can understand why Christ wasn’t tempted. They are nothing, and I can’t understand why clever old Satan thought they would be tempting.
*
Peace at last. All that was dross and residue vanishes from my soul as if it had never been. I’m alone and calm. It’s like the moment when I could theoretically convert to a religion. But although I’m no longer attracted to anything down here, I’m also not attracted to anything up above. I feel free, as if I’d ceased to exist and were conscious of that fact.
*
Once we’re able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life’s setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we’ve stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won’t be more than this nothingness. In this world we sleep on our left side, hearing even in our dreams the heart’s oppressed existence.
*
‘To have occasion to…’ In this space the statue of renunciation will be raised.
*
To be something, anything, that doesn’t feel the weight of the rain outside, nor the anguish of inner emptiness… To wander without thought or soul – sensation without sensation – along mountain roads and through valleys hidden between steep slopes, into the far distance, irrevocably immersed…
*
To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing – a life so slow it constantly verges on tedium, but pondered enough never to find itself there. To live this life far from emotions and thought, living it only in the thought of emotions and in the emotion of thoughts. To goldenly stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by flowers. To possess, in the shade, that nobility of spirit that makes no demands on life. To be in the whirl of the worlds like dust of flowers, sailing through the afternoon air on an unknown wind and falling, in the torpor of dusk, wherever it falls, lost among larger things. To be this with a sure understanding, neither happy nor sad, grateful to the sun for its brilliance and to the stars for their remoteness. To be no more, have no more, want no more… The music of the hungry beggar, the song of the blind man, the relic of the unknown wayfarer, the tracks in the desert of the camel without burden or destination…
*
My happiest moments are those when I think nothing, want nothing and dream nothing, being lost in a torpor like some accidental plant, like mere moss growing on life’s surface. I savour without bitterness this absurd awareness of being nothing, this foretaste of death and extinction.
*
If I contemplate, I don’t think. ...Happy the man who doesn’t think...
*
Thinking is still a form of acting. Only in sheer reverie, where nothing active intervenes and even our self-awareness gets stuck in the mud – only there, in this warm and damp state of non-being, can total renunciation of action be achieved.
To stop trying to understand, to stop analysing… To see ourselves as we see nature, to view our impressions as we view a field – that is true wisdom.
*
... the absence of words, the unbroken silence of the soul that knows it is incapable of acting.
*
Even the desire to sleep, remembered by the mind, has withered because mere yawning seems like too much of an effort. Even to stop seeing hurts the eyes. And in the soul’s complete and colourless renunciation, only external, distant sounds constitute what’s left of the impossible world.
*
And it’s extraordinary to think that, if I were asked right now what I want for this short life, I could think of nothing better than these long, slow minutes, this absence of thought and emotion, of action and almost of sensation itself, this inner sunset of dissipated desire.
*
I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing. I have no hopes and no nostalgia. Knowing what my life has been up till now – so often and so completely the opposite of what I wanted –, what can I assume about my life tomorrow, except that it will be what I don’t assume, what I don’t want, what happens to me from the outside, reaching me even via my  will? There’s nothing from my past that I recall with the futile wish to repeat it. I was never more than my own vestige or simulacrum. My past is everything I failed to be. I don’t even miss the feelings I had back then, because what is felt requires the present moment – once this has passed, there’s a turning of the page and the story continues, but with a different text.
*
Today the only course left for the man of superior intelligence is abdication.
*
I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to a minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to perfect the art of abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights.
*
The best and most regal course is to abdicate. The supreme empire belongs to the emperor who abdicates from all normal life and from other men, for the preservation of his supremacy won’t weigh on him like a load of jewels.
*
Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power.
*
For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what’s left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny?
*
...of those who didn’t have strength enough to conquer nor renunciation enough to conquer by not competing.
*
[Road of ]total renunciation, formal and complete abstention, whereby it transfers to the sensible sphere whatever cannot be wholly possessed in the sphere of activity and energy; better to supremely not act than to act spottily, inadequately and in vain, like the superfluous, inane, vast majority of men.
*

We were born into a world that has suffered from a century and a half of renunciation and violence – the renunciation of superior men and the violence of inferior men, which is their victory.
*
If I could really convince myself that renunciation is beautiful, how dolefully happy I would always be!
*
Splendour of nothing, name from the abyss, peace from the Beyond…
*

This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing – just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world’s diversity. I don’t know if I’m happy this way. Nor do I care.
*
Let’s not even touch life with the tips of our fingers.
Let’s not even love in our minds.
May we never know the feel of a woman’s kiss, not even in our dreams.
*
The higher a man rises, the more things he must do without.
*
The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way. To do this, he covers himself with an armour of realities closer to him than the world’s facts and through which the facts, modified accordingly, reach him.
*
To oppose the brutal indifference that constitutes the manifest essence of things, the mystics discovered it was best to renounce. To deny the world, to turn our backs on it as on a swamp at whose edge we suddenly find ourselves standing. To deny, like the Buddha, its absolute reality; to deny, like Christ, its relative reality; to deny .....
*
The total snuffing out of life and the soul, the complete banishment of all beings and people, the night without memory or illusion, the absence of past and future .....
*
Horace said that the just man will remain undaunted, even if the world crumbles all around him. Although the image is absurd, the point is valid. Even if what we pretend to be (because we coexist with others) crumbles around us, we should remain undaunted – not because we’re just, but because we’re ourselves, and to be ourselves means having nothing to do with external things that crumble, even if they crumble right on top of what for them we are.
*
For superior men, life should be a dream that spurns confrontations.
*
We have what we renounce.
*
Enthusiasm is a vulgarity.
*
... not being more nor wanting to be more than a spectator of myself ...
*
Happy the man who doesn’t ask for more than what life spontaneously gives him, being guided by the instinct of cats, which seek sunlight when there’s sun, and when there’s no sun then heat, wherever they find it. Happy the man who renounces his personality ...
*
To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent....
Reduce your necessities to a minimum, so as not to depend on anyone for anything.
*
My abstention from collaborating in the existence of the outside world results in, among other things, a curious psychic phenomenon.
Abstaining entirely from action and taking no interest in Things, I’m able to see the outside world with perfect objectivity. Since nothing interests me or makes me think it should be changed, I don’t change it.
*
I reduced my contact with others to a minimum. I did my best to lose all attachment to life ..... In time I even shed my desire for glory, like a sleepy man who takes off his clothes to go to bed.
*
Not pleasure, not glory, not power… Freedom, only freedom.
*
Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can’t live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you’re a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you’re not free. And you can’t hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you’re forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others. This tragedy, yes, is your own, and it follows you.
*
And since we wish to be sterile, let us also be chaste, for there is nothing more shameful and ignoble than to forswear what in Nature is fertile while holding on to the part we like in what we’ve forsworn. There are no halfway noble attitudes.
*
Remain pure, not in order to be noble or strong but to be yourself. To give your love is to lose love.
Abdicate from life so as not to abdicate from yourself.
Women are a good source of dreams. Don’t ever touch them.
*
‘Creator of indifferences’ is the motto I want for my spirit today. I’d like my life’s activity to consist, above all, in educating others to feel more and more for themselves, and less and less according to the dynamic law of collectiveness. To educate people in that spiritual antisepsis which precludes contamination by commonness and vulgarity is the loftiest destiny I can imagine for the pedagogue of inner discipline that I aspire to be. If all who read me would learn – slowly, of course, as the subject matter requires – to be completely insensitive to other people’s opinions and even their glances, that would be enough of a garland to make up for my life’s scholastic stagnation.
*
Do I dream of being famous? Then I feel all the public exposure that comes with glory, the total loss of privacy and anonymity that makes glory painful.
*
Living isn’t worth our while. Only seeing is. To be able to see without living would bring happiness, but this is impossible, like virtually everything we dream. How great would be the ecstasy that didn’t include life!
[Observing life is to interesting to waste time on living it. NGD]
*
It’s hard to achieve that distinction of spirit whereby isolation becomes a repose without anguish.
*
To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It’s exceedingly important that we love nobody.)
*
When I participate, although it seems that I’m expanding, I’m limiting myself. To associate is to die. Only my consciousness of myself is real for me; other people are hazy phenomena in this consciousness, and it would be morbid to attribute very much reality to them.
*
So why do I keep writing? Because I still haven’t learned to practise completely the renunciation that I preach. I haven’t been able to give up my inclination to poetry and prose.
*
A life of aesthetic quietism, to prevent the insults and humiliations of life and the living from getting any closer than a loathsome periphery of our sensibility, outside the walls of our conscious soul.
*
To see life passing by under a blue sky makes up for a lot. I forget myself indefinitely, forgetting more than I could ever remember. The sufficiency of things fills my weightless, translucent heart, and just to look is a sweet satisfaction. I’ve never been more than a bodiless gaze, whose only soul was a slight breeze that passed by and saw.
*
The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it.
*
The intensity of my sensations has always been less than the intensity of my awareness of them. I’ve always suffered more from my consciousness that I was suffering than from the suffering of which I was conscious.
The life of my emotions moved early on to the chambers of thought, and that’s where I’ve most fully lived my emotional experience of life.

The masturbator - the perfect logical expression of the lover

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept – our own selves – that we love.

This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he’s the perfect logical expression of the lover. He’s the only one who doesn’t feign and doesn’t fool himself.

Pessoa

All the absurdity, all the nothingness, all the verbalized ignorance of their lives

From birth to death, man is the slave of the same external dimension that rules animals. Throughout his life he doesn’t live, he vegetatively thrives, with greater intensity and complexity than an animal. He’s guided by norms without knowing that they guide him or even that they exist, and all his ideas, feelings and acts are unconscious – not because there’s no consciousness in them but because there aren’t two consciousnesses.

Flashes of awareness that we live an illusion – that, and no more, is what distinguishes the greatest of men.

With a wandering mind I consider the common history of common men. I see how in everything they are slaves of a subconscious temperament, of extraneous circumstances, and of the social and anti-social impulses in which, with which and over which they clash like petty objects.

How often I’ve heard people say the same old phrase that symbolizes all the absurdity, all the nothingness, all the verbalized ignorance of their lives. It’s the phrase they use in reference to any material pleasure: ‘This is what we take away from life…’ Take where? take how? take why? It would be sad to wake them out of their darkness with questions like that… Only a materialist can utter such a phrase, because everyone who utters such a phrase is, whether he knows it or not, a materialist. What does he plan to take from life, and how? Where will he take his pork chops and red wine and lady friend? To what heaven that he doesn’t believe in?

To what earth, where he’ll take only the rottenness that was the latent essence of his whole life? I can think of no phrase that’s more tragic, or that reveals more about human humanity. That’s what plants would say if they could know that they enjoy the sun. That’s what animals would say about their somnambulant pleasures, were their power of self-expression not inferior to man’s. And perhaps even I, while writing these words with a vague impression that they might endure, imagine that my memory of having written them is what I ‘take away from life’. And just as a common corpse is lowered into the common ground, so the equally useless corpse of the prose I wrote while waiting will be lowered into common oblivion. A man’s pork chops, his wine, his lady friend – who am I to make fun of them?

Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet
Translation Richard Zenith