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In the 20th January of 1913,
Fernando Pessoa wrote this poem and
scribbled vertically on its side,
in capital letters and old writing,
for the first time,
the word "DESASSOCEGO"
(DISQUIET).
I grabbed my heart
And held it in my hand.
I stared at it as if staring
At a leaf or at grains of sand.
I stared as if pale and spent,
As if I knew I were dead,
My soul stirred only by dreaming
And scarcely touched by life.
THE FILM OF DISQUIE
It was in the silence of my disquiet,
at the hour of day
when the landscape is a halo of Life
and dreaming is mere dreaming,
my love,
that I raised up this strange book like the
open doors of an abandoned house.
From
THE BOOK OF DISQUIE
Composed by Bernardo Soares,
bookkeeper apprentice in the city
of Lisbon, by Fernando Pessoa.
I offer you this book because
I know it is beautiful and useless.
It teaches nothing, inspires no faith,
and stirs no feeling.
And because this book is absurd,
I love it;
because it is useless,
I want to give it away;
and because it serves no purpose to
want to give it to you,
I give it to you...
I don't know what time is.
I don't know what its real measure is,
presuming it has one.
I know that the clock's measure is false,
as it divides time spatially,
from the outside.
I know that our emotions' way of
measuring is just as false,
dividing not time but our sensation of it.
The way our dreams measure
it is erroneous,
for in dreams we only
brush against time,
now leisurely, now hurriedly, and what
we live in them is fast or slow,
depending on something
in their flowing that I can't grasp.
Fairly tall and thin, he must have been
about thirty years old.
He hunched over terribly when sitting
down but less so standing up,
and he dressed with a carelessness
that wasn't entirely careless.
In his pale, uninteresting face
there was a look of suffering
that didn't add any interest,
and it was difficult to say just what kind
of suffering this look suggested.
It seemed to suggest various kinds:
Hardships, anxieties, and the suffering
born of the indifference
that comes from having already
suffered a lot.
Later on I came to know
his name was Bernardo Soares.
What a remarkable den!
I want to dance!
This bar has no music.
It didn't, until you ladies arrived.
What can I offer you?
What we want maybe you don't have...
I have a lot of things.
Aznavour, I love it!
If you have this song we will even
drink your shitty champagne!
You may sit down,
I'll serve you in a minute.
First, the music.
Always!
Let me laugh and let me sing
Let me inebriate my soul
So that I can forget the past
That I carry on my shoulders.
Come and pour me the strongest wine
Because the wine sings
Bring and pour more and more
I want to get drunk.
Two guitars on my chest,
a great emotion
revealing the validity
of our existence.
So why do we live, why do we live?
What is the reason for existing?
I'm alive today,
You're dead tomorrow,
and even more dead the day after.
Thank you.
Saturday nights!
One could write a beautiful text
on what just took place.
True. A beautiful text.
Do you write?
Do you know Orpheu?
Yes, I used to enjoy that magazine
very much. The texts were remarkable.
That's strange,
because the art of those
who write in Orpheu is meant for few...
Maybe I am one of the few.
I also write,
but I can't write poems.
Only fragments,
fragments, fragments...
What do you work on?
I have a modest job,
but I don't want to leave it.
I have nowhere to go,
nothing to do.
I have no friends to call on me.
I have no interest in books.
I spend the nights,
in my rented room, writing.
Literature, which is art
married to thought,
and realization untainted by reality,
seems to me the end towards which
all human effort would have to strive.
There is no difference between me
and these streets,
save they being streets and I a soul.
Did you thought it was going to rain?
No. As you may have already noticed,
I have some difficulty walking.
I always bring an umbrella with me.
The dignity of tedium.
In rooms decorated in the modern style,
tedium becomes a discomfort,
a physical distress.
Nothing had ever obliged me
to do anything.
I have spent my childhood alone.
I never joined any group.
I never pursued a course of study.
I never belonged to a crowd.
One could say that
the circumstances of my life
were tailored to the image
and likeness of my instincts,
which tended towards
inertia and withdrawal...
I never had to face the demands
of society or of the state.
I even evaded the demands
of my own instincts.
Nothing ever prompted me
to have friends or lovers.
You are the first who is in some
way my intimate.
Thank you so much.
Maybe you can publish them,
who knows?
I will read them with great curiosity.
Blessed are those who entrust
their lives to no one.
I 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.
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.
I belong to a generation that inherited
disbelief in the Christian faith
and created in itself a disbelief
in all other faiths.
Our fathers still had the
believing impulse,
which they transferred from Christianity
to other forms of illusion.
Some were champions
of social equality,
others were wholly enamoured
of beauty,
still others had faith in science
and its achievements,
and there were some who became
even more Christian,
resorting to various Easts and Wests
in search of new religious forms
to entertain their otherwise hollow
consciousness of merely living.
And so we were left,
each man to himself,
in the desolation of feeling
ourselves live.
Thus we reproduced a painful version
of the argonauts' adventurous precept:
Living doesn't matter,
only sailing does.
Without illusions,
we live by dreaming,
which is the illusion of those
who can't have illusions.
Living was painful because
we knew we were alive;
dying didn't scare us,
for we had lost the normal notion
of what death is.
But those who formed
the Terminal Race,
the spiritual limit
of the Deadly Hour,
didn't have courage enough
for true denial and asylum.
What we lived
was in denial,
discontent and disconsolation,
but we lived it within,
without moving,
forever closed,
at least in the way we lived,
inside the four painted walls
of our room
and the four stone walls
of our inability to act.
Touch me, soft eyes.
Soft, soft hand.
I feel so lonely in here.
Oh touch me soon, now.
What is this word
that everyone knows?
I am here alone and still
and also sad.
Touch me,
touch me just as I am.
Just as I am.
Everything or nothing.
Everything or nothing.
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.
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.
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?
What is the weight
when you say "weight"?
The law of the fall of the body.
Everyone falls on the ground.
On earth.
The force of earth's
gravity is the weight.
A cup of coffee, a cigarette and my
dreams can substitute quite well
for the universe and its stars, for work,
love, and even beauty and glory.
All that we know is our own impression,
and all that we are is an exterior
impression.
I need virtually no stimulants.
I have opium enough in my soul.
I have to choose what I detest,
either dreaming,
which my intelligence hates,
or action, which my sensibility loathes,:
Detesting both, I chose neither,:
But since I must on occasion either
dream or act,
I mix the two things together.
I have no theories about life.
I don't know or wonder
whether it's good or bad.
In my eyes it's harsh and sad,
with delightful dreams
interspersed here and there.
Why should I care
what it is for others?
Other people's lives are of use
to me only in my dreams,
where I live the life
that seems to suit each one.
I start to wonder how I'm able to go on,
how I dare have the faint-heartedness
to be here among these people.
Like flashes from a distant lighthouse,
I see all the solutions offered by the
imagination's female side:
Flight, suicide, renunciation...
They weren't even sufficiently dirty.
Those who truly suffer don't form
a group or go around as a mob.
Those who suffer, suffer alone.
What a pathetic group!
What a lack of humanity and true pain!
They were real and therefore
unbelievable.
No one could ever use them
for the scene of a novel
or a descriptive blackdrop.
They went by like rubbish in a river,
in the river of life,
and to see them go by made me sick
to my stomach and profoundly sleepy.
Absurdity is divine.
Let's develop theories, patiently and
honestly thinking them out,
in order to promptly act against them.
Let's buy books so as not to read them;
let's go to concerts without caring to
hear the music or to see who's there;
let's take long walks because
we're sick of walking;
and let's spend whole days in the
country because it bores us.
To find our personality by losing it,
faith itself endorses this destiny.
I seek and don't find.
I want and can't have.
Without me the sun rises and expires;
without me the rain falls
and the wind howls.
It's not because of me
that there are seasons,
the twelve months,
time's passage.
Lord of the world in me which, like
earthly lands, I can't take with me...
What Hells and Purgatories
and Heavens I have inside me!
But who sees me do
anything that disagrees with life,
me, so calm and peaceful?
I yank from my neck a hand
that was choking me...
A cold hand squeezes my throat
and prevents me from breathing life.
Everything is dying in me, even
the knowledge that I can dream!
Where is God, even if he doesn't exist?
I envy all people, because I'm not them.
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 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.
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.
After I've slept many dreams, I go out
to the street with eyes wide open
but still with the aura and assurance
of my dreams.
And I'm astonished by my automatism,
which prevents others
from really knowing me.
And I walk in the right direction,:
I don't stagger,:
I react well,: I exist.
But that sudden light scorches
everything, consumes everything.
It strips us naked of even ourselves.
Everyone has his alcohol.
To exist is alcohol enough for me.
Drunk from feeling, I wander as
I walk straight ahead.
When it's time, I show up at the office
like everyone else.
When it's not time, I go to the river to
gaze at the river, like everyone else.
I'm no different.
And behind all this,
O sky my sky,
I secretly constellate
and have my infinity.
What if I threw myself in there?
They are not that stupid!
Excuse me Sir,
I'm lost and I don't have anything...
I don't get indignant,
because indignation is for the strong;
I'm not resigned,
Because resignation is for the noble;
I don't hold my peace,
Because silence is for the great.
And I'm neither strong,
Nor noble,
Nor great.
I suffer and I dream.
I complain because I'm weak.
And since I'm an artist,
I amuse myself
by making my complaints musical
and by arranging my dreams
according to my idea
of what makes them beautiful.
I only regret
Not being a child,
Since then I could believe
In my dreams...
And a deep and weary disdain for all
those who work for mankind,
for all those who fight for their country
and give their lives so that
civilization may continue...
Everything useful and external
tastes frivolous and trivial
in the light of my soul's
supreme reality
and next to the
pure sovereign splendour
of my more original
and frequent dreams.
Sometimes I feel, I'm not sure why,
a touch of foretold death...
And then I wonder what this thing is
that we call death.
I don't mean the mystery of death,
which I can't begin to fathom,
but the physical sensation
of ceasing to live.
Whenever I see a dead body,
death seems to me a departure.
The corpse looks to me like
a suit that was left behind.
Someone went away and didn't need to
take the one and only outfit he'd worn.
The coffin is so small!
On what side the head lays?
Usually it's on the side where the
cross is, but the cross is in the middle.
Neither priest nor acolyte.
Poor creature.
A nature's mistake.
If he took after his mother he would be
healthy,
he took after his father
a drunkard.
Better luck next time.
Stillbirth, without a baptism,
he was refused a Christian funeral.
He never awoke.
He won't bother anyone.
What is serious is when a grown man
ends his own life.
That is the worst of all.
To be born lifeless,
what can one do about that?
I'm sick of walking.
The death, there isn't room
for all of them...
This one is small, it occupies little
room...
if all the adults were buried
standing up...
Sitting or kneeling isn't proper.
Standing.
In that position the blood would seep
down to the earth, fertilizing it.
I am so tired! My heart isn't
what it used to be.
Afterall the heart is a pump,
constantly pumping litres of blood.
Some nice day the pump clogs
and then!
When the hell will this be over?
Lungs, heart, liver, old oxidated pumps.
To hell with the rest of it.
Maybe on the last day you will rise,
on judgement day.
Sadly, or perhaps not, I recognize
that I have an arid heart.
An adjective matters more to me than
the real weeping of a human soul.
But sometimes I'm different.
Sometimes I have the warm tears
of those who don't have and never
had a mother;
I don't remember my mother.
She died when I was one year old.
And everything bad about my sensibility
comes from the warmth I didn't have.
They told me later on
that my mother was pretty,
and they say that, when they
told me, I made no comment.
My father, who lived far away,
killed himself when I was three,
and so I never met him.
I still don't know why he lived far away.
I remember his death as a grave
silence
during the first meals we ate after
learning about it.
I remember that the others
would occasionally look at me.
And I would look back,
dumbly comprehending.
Then I'd eat with more concentration,
since they might, when I
wasn't looking, still be looking at me.
That is me!
I wrote that!
Where might the living be?
Nature is the difference between
the soul and God.
Where's the salad?
You don't get paid for chatting.
To need to dominate others
is to need others.
The commander is dependent.
I have a very simple morality:
Not to do good or evil to anyone.
I refrain. I've never loved anyone.
To submit to nothing. Free from
ourselves as well as from others,
contemplatives without ecstasy,
thinkers without conclusions and
liberated from God,
we will live the few moments of bliss
allowed us in the prison yard
by the distraction of our executioners.
A man of true wisdom, with nothing but
his senses and a soul that's never sad,
can enjoy the entire spectacle of the
world from a chair,
without knowing how to read
and without talking to anyone.
Something that would make me
almost feel,
something that would
make me not think.
Every pleasure is a vice,
because to seek pleasure is what
everyone does in life,
and the only black vice is to do
what everyone else does.
Human life is tedious.
An opinion is a vulgarity, even when
it's not sincere.
Every instance of sincerity
is an intolerance.
There are no sincere liberal minds.
There are, for that matter,
no liberal minds.
Enthusiasm is a vulgarity.
To have opinions is to sell out
to yourself.
To have no opinion is to exist.
To have every opinion is to be a poet.
Collective thought is stupid
because it's collective.
We all love each other, and the lie is
the kiss we exchange.
And when lying begins to bring us
pleasure,
let's give it the lie by telling the truth.
Might not God be an enormous child?
Doesn't the whole universe seem
like a game,
like the prank of a mischievous child?
The downfall of classical ideals made
all men potential artists,
and therefore bad artists.
When art depended on solid
construction
and the careful observance of rules,
few could attempt to be artists,
and a fair number of these
were quite good.
But when art, instead of being
understood as creation,
became merely
an expression of feelings,
then anyone could be an artist,
because everyone has feelings.
One tin fell, like the Fate of us all.
There's a thin sheet of glass between
me and life.
However cleary I see and
understand life, I can't touch it.
What they could say while they wait...
they would stop thinking
about their stomach.
What I really needed was a miracle.
Miracles are God's laziness,
or rather, the laziness we ascribe
to God when we invent miracles.
I'm suffering from a headache
and the universe.
What I feel like doing is dying,
at least temporarily,
but this, as I've indicated,
is only because my head aches.
Covering my eyes won't blind me,
but it will keep me from seeing...
My head aches because
my head aches.
The universe hurts me because
my head hurts.
But the universe that actually
hurts me is not the true one,
which exists only to me and which,
should I pass my hands through my hair,
makes me feel that each strand
suffers for no other reason
than to make me suffer.
God is good but the devil isn't so bad.
It's as if my life amounted
to being trashed by it.
What do I have to do with life?
The most contemptible thing about
dreams is that everyone has them.
My sweat isn't cold,
but my awareness of it is.
I'm not physically ill, but my
soul's anxiety is so intense
that it passes through my pores
and chills my body.
So great is this tedium,
so sovereign my horror of being alive...
My God, my god, who am I watching?
How many am I?
Who is I?
What is this gap
between me and myself?
I'm liberated and lost.
I feel.
I shiver with fever.
I'm I.
A cat wallows in the sun
and goes to sleep.
Man wallows in life,
and goes to sleep.
I will always belong
to the Rua dos Douradores,
like all of humanity.
I will always be,
in verse or prose,
an office employee.
I will always be local
and submissive,
a servant of my feelings
and of the moments when they occur.
This posthumous coat,
these old sleepers,
play out in my useless reverie a dream
no different from anybody else's.
The mistery of life distresses
and frightens us in many ways.
Sometimes it comes upon us like
formless phantom,
and the soul trembles with the worst
of fears,
that of the monstrous incarnation
of non being.
At other times it's behind us,
visible only as long as we don't turn
around to look at it,
and it's the truth in its profound horror
of our never being able to know it.
But the horror that's destroying me today
is less noble and more corrosive.
It's a longing to be free of wanting
to have thoughts,
a desire to never have been anything,
a conscious despair in every
cell of my body and soul.
What do we possess?
What do we possess?
What makes us love?
Beauty?
And do we possess it when we love?
If we vehemently, totally possess
a body,
what do we really possess?
Not the body, not the soul,
and not even beauty.
When we grasp an attractive body,
it's not the beauty but fatty and cellular
flesh that we embrace,:
Our kiss doesn't touch the mouth's
beauty
but the wet flesh of decaying,
membranous lips,:
And even sexual intercourse, though
admittedly a close and ardent contact,
is not a true penetration, not even
of one body into another.
What do we possess?
What do we really possess?
Our own sensations, at least?
Listen to me.
Listen to me carefully.
Absurdity, confusion, oblivion,
everything that isn't life...
In my own way I sleep,
without slumber or repose,
this vegetative life of imagining,
and the distant reflection
of the silent street lamps,
like the quiet foam of a dirty sea,
hovers behind my restless eyebrows.
I sleep and unsleep.
It's in classical writers,
in the calm-spirited
in those who if they suffer don't
mention it,
that I feel like a holy transient,
an anointed pilgrim,
a contemplator for no reason
of a world with no purpose
prince of the Great Exile,
who as he was leaving gave
the last beggar
the ultimate alms of his desolation.
I don't know why, but I'm troubled by
this objective network
of wide and narrow streets,
this sucession of street lamps, trees,
lighted and dark windows,
opened and closed gates,
heterogeneously nocturnal shapes
which my near-sightedness
makes even hazier,
until they become subjectively
monstrous, unintelligible and unreal.
I feel a certain duty to dream
continuously
since not being more nor wanting
to be more than a spectator of myself,
I have to put on the best show I can.
And so I fashion myself out of gold
and silks, in imaginary rooms,
on a false stage, with ancient scenery:
A dream created to invisible music
and the play of soft lights.
I will always be, under the large blue
canopy of the silent sky,
a pageboy in an unintelligible rite,
dressed in life for the occasion,
executing steps, gestures,
stances and expressions
without knowing why,
until the feast,
or my role in it, ends
and I can treat myself to tidbits
in the large tents
I've been told
are down below,
at the back of the garden.
If happiness and the new day
would never come!
If I opened my eyes from my pretended
slumber I could see,
on the darkly visible walls of my room,
floating snatches of dreams
to be dreamed,
dim lights, black lines,
hazy shapes climbing up and down.
The various pieces of furniture,
larger than in the daytime,
indistinctly blotted
the dark's absurdity.
The door was distinguishable as
something no whiter or blacker
than night, just different.
My soul's solitude grew and spread,
invading what I felt, what I wanted,
and what I was going to dream.
Clouds... Today I'm conscious
of the sky.
Clouds... Such disquiet when I feel,
such discomfort when I think,
such futility when I desire.
Clouds... I question myself
and don't know me.
Nothing I've done has been useful,
and nothing I do will be any different.
I've wasted part of my life in
confusedly interpreting nothing at all,
and the rest of it in writing these verses
in prose
for my incommunicable sensations,
which is how I make the unknown
universe mine.
I'm objectively and subjectively
sick of myself.
I'm sick of everything, and of
the everythingness of everything.
Clouds... They are everything:
Disintegrated fragments of atmosphere,
the only real things today
between the worthless earth
and the non-existent sky,
indescribable tatters of the tedium
I ascribe to them,
mist condensed into colourless threats,
dirty wads of cotton from a hospital
without walls.
Clouds...
They're like me,
a ravaged passage
between sky and earth, at the mercy of
an invisible impulse, thundering,
whitely giving joy or blackly spreading
gloom, stray fictions in the gap,
far from the earth's noise
but without the sky's peace.
Clouds...
Whoever lives like me doesn't die:
He terminates, wilts, devegetates.
The place where he was remains
without him being there,:
The street where he walked
remains without him beeing seen on it,:
The house where he lived is inhabited
by not-him.
That's all,
and we call it nothing,:
These vegetable manifestation
of both truth and life,
dust on both the outside
and the inside of the panes,
grandchildren of Destiny
and stepchildren of God,
who married Eternal Night
when she was widowed by the Chaos
that fathered us.
To depart from the rua dos Douradores
for the Impossible...
You look very good.
I've never had a flattering notion of my
physical appearance,
but I never felt it to be more
insignificant than there,
next to the familiar faces.
My gaunt and inexpressive face
has no intelligence or intensity
or anything else to raise it out of
that lifeless tide of faces.
Lifeless, no.
There are some truly
expressive psysiognomies there.
Senhor Vasques looks just like himself,
broad, cheerful face with hard features
and a steady gaze.
The two travelling salesmen look sharp.
And the local Sales representative
turned out well,
though he's half hidden
by Moreira's shoulder.
And Moreiral Moreira, my supervisor,
the epitome of monotonous constancy,
looks much more alive than II
What does this mean?
What is this truth
that film doesn't mistake?
What is this certainty
that a cold lens documents?
Who am I,
that I should look like that?
A cold silence.
The sounds from the
street seemed to be cut by a knife.
Then there was a long,
cosmically held breath,
a kind of generalized dread.
The entire universe had stopped dead.
Moments, moments, moments...
Silence blackened the darkeness.
All of a sudden, live steel...
Again, without warning,
magnetic light gushes forth, flickering.
My heart beats with a gulp.
A glass dome shatters on high
into large bits.
Senhor Vasques, his wan face
is an unnatural and befuddled green.
I watch him take his laboured breaths
with the kinship of knowing
I'll be no different.
Oh Lisbon, my home!
I remember, as clearly as what's before
my eyes,
the night when as a child I read
for the first time, in an anthology,
Vieira's famous passage
on King Solomon:
"Solomon built a palace... "
And I read all the way to the end,
trembling and confused.
Then I broke into joyful tears,
tears such as any of life's sorrows
ever make me shed.
That hieratic movement of our clear
majestic language,
that expression of
ideas in inevitable words,
like water that flows because
there's a slope,
that vocalic marvel in which the sounds
are ideal colours,
all of this instinctively seized me like
an overwhelming political emotion.
And I cried.
Remembering it today,
I still cry.
Not out of nostalgia for my childhood,
which I don't miss,
but because of nostalgia for the emotion
of that moment,
because of a heartfelt regret
that I can no longer read for the first
time that great symphonic certitude.
I have no social or political sentiments,
and yet there is a way in which
I'm highly nationalistic.
My nation is the Portuguese language.
It wouldn't trouble me at all if Portugal
were invaded or occupied,
as long as I was left in peace.
But I hate with genuine hatred,
with the only hatred I feel,
not those who write bad Portuguese,
not those whose syntax is faulty,
but the badly written page
itself, as if it were a person,
incorrect syntax, as someone
who ought to be flogged,
the substitution of i for y, as the spit
that directly disgusts me,
independent of who spat it.
Yes, because spelling is also a person.
The Word is complete
when seen and heard.
And the pageantry of Graeco-Roman
translitearion dresses it for me
in its authentic royal robe,
making it a lady and a queen.
But I don't write in Portuguese.
I write my own self.
So long, Mr. Soares,
and I hope you feel better.
The trumpet blast of this simple phrase
relieved my soul like a sudden wind
clearing the sky of clouds.
Camaraderie has its subtleties.
Some govern the world,
others are the world.
Between an american milionaire,
a Caesar or Napoleon, or Lenin,
and the Socialist leader of a small town,
there's a difference in quantity
but not of quality.
Bellow them there's us,
the unnoticed:
The reckless playwright
William Shakespeare,
John Milton the schoolteacher,
Dante Alighieri, the tramp,
and the waiter who just now
demonstrated his camaraderie
by wishing me well, after noticing
I'd drunk only half the wine.
I can assure you that I sometimes feel
what I say and even,
despite being a woman,
what I say through my gaze...
Aren't you being harsh on yourself?
Do we really feel what we think
we're feeling?
Does this conversation, for example,
have any semblance of reality?
Surely not. It would be
unacceptable in a novel.
I realize it gives the impression of an
overwrought, somewhat forced reality...
To be an illustration seems to me
the only ideal worthy
of a contemporary woman.
As a child
I wanted to be the queen
of one of the suits in a deck
of old cards we had at home...
For a child, of course, such moral
aspirations are common...
Only later, when all our aspirations are
immoral, do we really think about this.
You know, even now as I'm talking
I'm trying to fathom the true meaning of
the things you've been telling me.
Do you forgive me?
Not entirely...
We should never plumb the feelings
that other people pretend to have.
They're always too intimate...
don't think it doesn't hurt me
to share these intimate secrets,
all of which are false
but which represent
true tatters of my pathetic soul...
You've hurt me.
Why ruin the constant
unreality of our conversation?
Now it's my turn to ask
forgiveness...
But I was distracted
and really didn't
notice that I'd said something
that makes sense...
How late it always is!
Don't get upset again, the sentence
I just said, after all,
is complete nonsense...
Don't apologize, and don't pay any
attention to what we're talking about...
Every good conversation should
be a two-way monologue...
The best and profoundest
conversations,
and the least morally instructive ones,
are those that novelists have between
two characters
from one of their books.
For example...
For heaven's sake! Don't tell me
you were going to cite an example!
That's only done in grammars;
perhaps you've forgotten
that we don't even read them.
Did you ever read a grammar?
Never.
I've always despised knowing
the correct way to say something...
All I ever liked in grammar books
were the exceptions and pleonasms...
To dodge the rules
and say useless things
sums up the essentially
modern attitude.
Isn't that how they say it?
What's especially irritating in grammars
is the chapter on verbs,
since these are what give meaning
to sentences...
An honest sentence should always
have any number of possible meanings.
Verbs!
A friend of mine who committed suicide
was going to dedicate his life
to destroying verbs...
Why did he commit suicide?
He wanted to discover and develop
a method
for surreptitiously
not completing sentences.
He commited suicide, yes,
of course,
because one day he realized
what a tremendous responsability
he'd assumed...
The enormity of the problem
made him go nuts...
A revolver and...
No...
Don't you see that it could never
be a revolver?
A man like that never
shoots himself in the head...
You understand very little about the
friends you've never had...
The two figures sitting at the table
surely didn't have this conversation.
But they were so well groomed and
dressed that it seemed a pity
for them not to talk this way...
That's why I wrote this conversation
for them to have had...
Sometimes, when I lift my dazed head
from the books
where I record other
people's accounts
and the absence of a life
I can call my own,
I feel a pshysical nausea,
which might be from hunching over,
but which transcends the
numbers and my disillusion.
I find life distasteful,
like a useless medicine.
We live by action, by acting on desire.
Those of us who don't know how to
want, whether geniuses or beggars,
are related by impotence.
What's the point of calling myself
a genius,
if I'm after all an assistant
bookkeeper?
I looked at it from the depths
of the abyss, anonymous and attentive.
It was coloured by green shades
of black-blue,
and its shiny repulsiveness wasn't ugly.
A life!
I didn't think:
I felt.
It was carnally, directly,
with profound and dark horror
that I made this ludicrous comparison.
I was a fly when I compared
myself to one.
I really felt like a fly when I imagined
I felt like one.
And I felt I had a flyish, slept flyish
and was flyish withdrawn.
And what's more horrifying is that I felt,
at the same time, like myself.
I automatically raised my eyes
towards the ceiling,
lest a lofty wooden ruler
should swoop down to swat me,
as I might swat that fly.
When I lowered my eyes,
the fly had fortunately
disappeared without a sound,
at least not any I could hear.
The involuntary office
was again without philosophy.
In my kingdom
love doesn't weary,
for it doesn't long to possess;
nor does it suffer from the frustration
of never having posessed.
My hand lightly rests
on the hair of those who think,
and they forget;
those who have waited in vain
lean against my breast,
and finally come to trust.
My lips
utter no song like the sirens'
nor any melody
like that of the trees
and fountains,
but my silence welcomes
like a faint music,
and my stillness soothes
like the torpor of a breeze.
In my domain,
where only the night reins,
you will be consoled,
for your hopes will have ceased;
you'll be able to forget,
for your desire will have died;
you will finally rest,
for you'll have no life.
Drink from my inexhaustible chalice
the supreme nectar
which doesn't jade or taste bitter,
which doesn't nauseate or inebriate.
Look out the window of my castle
and contemplate not the moonlight
and the sea,
which are beautiful
and thus imperfect things,
but the vast, maternal night,
the undivided splendour
of the bottomless abyss!
I will be your maternal wife,
the twin sister you've at long last
recovered.
And with all your anxieties
married to me,
you yourself will become lost
in my mystic substance,
in my forsworn existence,
in my breast where things smother,
in my breast where souls drown,
in my breast where the gods vanish.
Sovereign King of Detachment
and Renunciation,
Emperor of Death and Shipwreck
living dream that grandly wanders
among the world's ruins and wastes!
Sovereign King of Despair amid
splendours,
grieving lord of palaces
that don't satisfy,
master of processions
and pageants
that never succeed
in blotting out life!
Sovereign King
Shepherd of the Watches,
knight errant of Anxieties
travelling on moonlit roads
without glory and without even
a lady to serve,
lord in the forests and on the slopes,
a silent silhouette with visor
drawn shut,
Sovereing King consecrated
by Death to be her own,
consecrated by Death
to be her own.
Bring the goblets,
platters
and garlands,
all you pages
and damsels
and servants!
Bring them for the feast!
Bring them and come dressed in black,
With your heads crowned by myrtle.
Death is Life's triumph!
Death is Life's triumph!
Death is Life's triumph!
It is by death that we live
when we dream,
since to dream is to deny life.
Death guides us,
death seeks us,
death accompanies us.
Your love for things dreamed
Was your contempt for things lived.
Virgin King who disdained love,
Shadow King who despised light,
Dream King who denied life!
Amid the muffled racket
of cymbals and drums,
Darkness acclaims you Emperor!
Yes, it's the sunset.
Slowly and distractedly I reach the
end of the Rua da Alfndega and see,
beyond the Terreiro do Pao, a clear
view of the sunless western sky.
An immense peace that I don't have
is coldly present in the abstract fall air.
Not having it, I experience the feeble
pleasure of imagining it exists.
But in reality there is no peace
nor lack of peace,
just sky, fuzzy hues of distant clouds
that aren't clouds.
And all of this is a vision
that vanishes as soon as it occurs,
a winged interlude between
nothing and nothing
that takes place on high,
in shades of sky and grief,
diffuse and indefinite.
Ah, who will save me from existing?
It's neither death nor life that I want:
It's that other thing shining
in the depths of longing,
like a possible Diamond
in a pit one can't descend.
It all amounts to the absence
of a true God, an absence
that is the empty cadaver
of the lofty heavens and the closed soul.
Infinite prison, since you're infinite,
there's no escaping youl
Your ships, Lord,
didn't make a greater voyage
than the one made by my thought,
in the disaster of this book.
They rounded no cape
and sighted no far-flung beach,
beyond what daring men had dared
and what minds had dreamed,
to equal the capes I rounded
with my imagination.
I too have finally arrived
at the port-in-no-place
of the World's abstract chasm,
at the vacant end of things.
I have entered,
Lord, that Port.
I have wandered, Lord,
over that sea.
I have gazed, Lord,
at that invisible chasm.
I dedicate this work
of supreme Discovery
to the memory of your
Portuguese name,
of your Portuguese name,
creator of argonauts.
I'm so cold,
so weary in my abandonment.
Go and find my Mother,
O Wind.
Give me back my nursemaid,
O vast Silence,
and my crib and the lullaby
that used to put me to sleep.
SENTIMENTAL
EDUCATION
For those who choose
to make dreams their life,
and to make a religion and
politics out of cultivating sensations
like plants in a hothouse,
the sign that they've successfully taken
the first step
is when they feel the tiniest things in
an extraordinary and extravagant way.
That's all there is to the first step.
To know how to sip a cup of tea
with the extreme voluptuousness
that the normal man experiences only
when overcome by joy
at seeing his ambition
suddenly fulfilled
or himself suddenly
cured of a terrible nostalgia,
or when he's in the final,
carnal acts of love,:
To be able to achieve in the vison
of a sunset or in the contemplation
of a decorative detail
that intensity of feeling
which generally can't occur
through sight or hearing
but only by way of the carnal senses,
touch, taste and smell,
when they sculpt the object
of sensation on our consciousness,:
The creation of an automatically
heightened and complex awareness
of the simplest and commonest
sensations
leads not only to a vast increase in the
enjoyment we get from feeling
but also to a tremendous upsurge
in the amount of pain we experience.
The second step for the dreamer
should therefore be to avoid pain.
He shouldn't avoid it like the
stoics or the early Epicureans,
by abandoning the nest,
for that will harden him against pleasure
as well as against pain.
He should, instead,
seek pleasure in pain,
and then learn how to feel pain falsely,
to feel some kind of pleasure, that is,
whenever he feels pain.
There are various paths
for reaching this goal.
One is to hyperanalyse our pain
but only after we've first trainded
ourselves to react to pleausure
by exclusively feeling it,
with no analysis.
This is an easier technique than it
seems, at least for superior souls.
To analyse pain and to get in the habit
of submitting all pains to analysis,
until we do it automatically,
by instinct,
will endow every pain imaginable
with the pleasure of analysing it.
Once our ability and instinct
to analyse grow large enough,
our practice of it will absorb
everything,
and there will be nothing left of pain
but an indefinite substance for analysis.
Another method, more subtle
and more difficult,
is to develop the habit of
incarnating the pain in an ideal figure.
First we must create another I,
charged with suffering, in and for us,
everything we suffer.
Next we need to create an inner sadism,
completely masochistic,
that enjoys its suffering
as if it were someone else's.
This method, which on first reading
seems impossible, isn't easy,
but it is eminently attainable,
presenting no special difficulties
for those who are well versed
in lying to themsleves.
Once this is achieved, pain and suffering
acquire an absolutely tantalizing
flavour of blood and disease,
an incredibly exotic pungency
of decadent gratification!
The feeling of pain
resembles the anguished,
troubled height of convulsions,
and suffering, the long and slow kind,
has the intimate yellow which colours
the vague bliss
of a profoundly felt convalescence.
And an exquisite exhaustion
tinged with disquiet
and melancholy evokes the
complex sensation of anguish
that our pleasures arouse in the thought
that they will vanish,
as well as the melancholy
pre-weariness
we feel in our sensual delights, when
we think of the weariness they'll bring.
There is a third method for subtilizing
pains into pleasures and
for making doubts and worries
into a soft bed.
It consists in intensely concentrating
on our anxieties and sufferings,
making them so fiercely felt
that by their very excess
they bring the pleausure
of excess,
while by their violence
they suggest the pleasure
that hurts for being so pleasurable and
the gratification that smacks of blood
for having wounded us.
This can only hapen, of course,
in souls dedicated to pleausure
by habit and by education.
And when, as in me, all three methods
are employed simultaneously,
when every felt pain,
felt so quickly there's no time
for the soul to plan any defence,
is automatically analysed to the core,
ruthlessly foisted on an extraneous I,
and buried in me to the utmost
height of pain,
then I truly feel like a victor
and a hero.
Then life stops for me,
and art grovels at my feet.
Everything I've been describing
is just the second step that the dreamer
must take to reach his dream.
Who besides me has been able
to take the third step,
which leads to the
sumptuous threshold of the Temple?
This is the step which is indeed
hard to take,
for it requires an inward effort vastly
greater than any effort we make in life,
but it also rewards us to the heights
and depths of our soul
in a way that life never could.
This step is, once everything else
has been completely
and simultaneously carried out,
the three subtle methods having been
applied to the exhaustion,
to immediatly pass the
sensation through pure intelligence,
filtering it through a higher analysis
that shapes it into a literary form
with its own substance and character.
Then I have completely
fixed the sensation.
Then I have made the unreal real
and have given the unattainable
an eternal pedestal.
Then, within myself,
I have been crowned Emperor.
Don't imagine that I write to publish,
or merely to write, or to produce art.
I write because this is the final goal,
the supreme refinement,
the organically illogical refinement,
of my cultivation of the states of soul.
If I take one of my sensations
and unravel it
so as to use it to weave
the inner reality,
you can be sure I don't do it for the sake
of a lucid and shimmering prose,
nor even for the sake of the pleasure I
get from that prose
but to give complete
exteriority to what is interior,
thereby enabling me
to realize the unrealizable,
to conjoin the contradictory and,
having exteriorized my dream,
to give it its most powerful expression
as pure dream.
Yes, this is my role as a
stagnator of life,
chiseller of inaccuracies, sick pageboy
of my soul and queen,
reading to her at twilight
not the poems from the book
of my Life
that lies open on my knees, but the
poems that I invent and pretend to read,
and that she pretends to hear,
while somewhere and somehow the
Evening is softening,
over this metaphor raised up in me into
Absolute Reality,
the last hazy light of a
mysterious spiritual day.
The caress never comes,
the stone in your ring
bleeds in the growing darkness...
The dark, far-away night of the
argonauts,
and my forehead burning with
their primitive ships...
Everything belongs to others except
my grief for not having any of it.
I suffered in me, with me,
the aspirations of all eras,
and every disquietude of every age
walked with me to the whispering
shore of the sea.
We are who we're not,
and life is quick and sad.
The sound of the waves at night
is a sound of the night,
and how many have heard it
in their own soul,
like the perpetual hope that dissolves
in the darkness
with a faint splash of distant foam!
What tears were shed
by those who achieved,
what tears lost by those
who succeeded!
And all this,
in my walk to the seashore,
was a secret told to me by
the night and the abyss.
How many we are!
How many of us fool ourselves!
What seas crash in us,
in the night when we exist,
along the beaches that we feel
ourselves to be, inundated by emotion!
Who even knows what he thinks
or wants?
Who knows what he is to himself?
How many things music suggests,
and we're glad they can never be!
How much I die if I feel for everything!
How much I feel if I meander this way,
bodiless and human,
with my heart as still as a beach.
The idea of travelling nauseates me.
I've already seen what I've never seen.
I've already seen what I have yet
to see.
Ah, let those who don't exist travell
The train slows down,
we're at Cais do Sodr.
I've arrived at Lisbon,
but not at a conclusion.
O night in which stars feign light,
O night that alone is the size
of the Universe,
make me, body and soul,
part of your body, so that,
being mere darkness, I'll lose myself
and become night as well,
without any dreams as stars within me,
nor a hoped-for sun shining
with the future.
A few vestiges of consciousness persist.
I feel the weight of slumber
but not of unconsciousness.
I don't exist.
The wind...
I wake up and go back to sleep
without yet having slept.
There's a landscape of loud
and indistinct sound
beyond which I'm a stranger to myself.
Dreamed madness
in that estranging silencel
Our life was all our life...
And what a fresh and happy horror
that there was nobody therel
Not even we, who walked there,
were there.
Faint and dispersed but definite sounds
dawn in my awareness,
filling my consciousness of our room
with the fact that the day is broken...
Our room? Mine and who else's,
if I'm here alone?
I don't know.
Everything blends and all that remains
is a fleeting mist of reality
in which my uncertainty founders and
my self-awareness
is lulled to sleep by opiums...
Let us give up the illusion of hope,
which betrays,:
Of love, which wearies,:
Of life, which surfeits
but never satisfies,:
And even of death, which brings
more than we want
and less than we hope for.
Let us not weep, nor hate, nor desire...
Let us cover with a sheet of fine linen,
O Silent Soulmate, the dead,
stiff profile of our Imperfection...
Peace at last.
All that was dross and residue vanishes
from my soul as if it had never been.
I'm alone and calm.
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.
Peace, yes, peace.
A Great calm, gentle like
something superfluous,
descends on me
to the depths of my being.
The pages I read, the tasks I complete,
the motions and vicissitudes of life,
all has become for me a faint penumbra,
a scarcely visible halo circling
something tranquil that I can't identify.
Go swiftly by, life that's not felt,
a stream flowing silently
under forgotten trees!
Go gently by, soul that's not known,
an unseen rustle beyond
large fallen trees!
Go uselessly by, pointlessly by,
consciousness conscious of nothing,
a hazy flash in the distance
amid clearing in the leaves,
coming from and going to
we don't know where!
Go, go, and let me forget!
Faint breath of what never dared live,
dull sigh of what failed to feel,
useless murmur of what refused
to think,
go slowly, go slackly,
go in the eddies you have to have
and in the dips you're given,
go to the shadow or to the light,
brother of the world,
go to glory or to the abyss,
son of Chaos and of the Night,
but remembering
some obscure part of you
that the Gods came late
and that they will also pass.
The man in the corner of the dance-hall
dances with all the dancers.
He sees everything, and because
he sees everything,
he lives everything.
Since everything is ultimately
our own sensation,
to have actual contact with a body
counts for no more than seeing it
or just remembering it.
I dance, therefore,
when I see someone dance.
How is your colleague doing?
He passed away yesterday.
Flatly answered the barber's voice
behind me and the linen cloth.
The whole of my irrational good mood
abruptly died,
like the eternally missing barber
from the adjacent chair.
A chill swept over all my thoughts.
I said nothing.
Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua
da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores,
the Rua dos Fanqueiros.
Tomorrow I too,
I this soul that feels and thinks,
this universe I am for myself, yes,
tomorrow I too will be the one that no
longer walks these streets,
whom others will vaguely evoke
with a "what's become of him?".
The highest stage of dreaming is when,
having created a picture
with various figures
whose lives
we live all at the same time,
we are jointly and
interactivelly all of those souls.
This leads to an incredible degree of
depersonalization and the reduction
of our spirit to ashes.
And it is hard, I admit,
not to feel a general weariness
throughout one's entire being.
But what triumph!
This is the only final asceticism.
It's an asceticism without
faith and without any God.
God am I.
Let's go gentlemen,
I want to close in five minutes.
Can you please stop playing
with that shit?
I can't look at the blade
it reminds me the history of Rome!
Thank you Mr. Pessoa.
I'll see you tomorrow.
Good night.
Take care. I'll be right back.
Mr. Pessoa, Mr. Pessoa!
Distracted, as always!
That isn't mine!
It was left on a chair at your table.
It isn't mine.
I have no idea what this is.
Who else has been sitting in that
table today?
You sir, nobody else.
Keep it. It may interest you somehow,
who knows?
If someone claims it,
I'll warn you Mr. Pessoa.
Okay.
Have a goodnight sleep Mr. Pessoa!
Ah, to sleep...
Excerpts from "The Book of Disquiet"
according to Richard Zenith's translation
bSubtitle Rip; TheHeLL/b