Selected Poems - Fernando Pessoa

“One of my mental complications - horrible beyond words - is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity.” 

Pessoa - October 30, 1908

I’m about to embark on what I hope will be a long and profitable love affair with Portuguese poetry. The thing that I love about this canon project is that it always broadens my horizons beyond the known and expected. There are moments (this past month) when I began to wonder if eight years of this was enough…how will I know when to stop? Is there ever a good stopping point? I very obviously will never finish this project unless somehow A. I learn to read faster or the Matrix becomes real and I can just download books into my brain or B. The great minds of science figure out a way one could read while being cryogenically frozen…but since neither option seems imminent or very likely…

I almost stopped this month. I called my sister and told her maybe it was time to be done. I’ve learned a lot…maybe it’s time to throw in the towel. She wasn’t an explicit “yes”…and so almost reluctantly I picked up a book of poetry by Pessoa, and then as usually happens, was transported down the rabbit hole into a world beyond my ken or imagination. And so, Pessoa has become the perfect gateway drug into Portuguese literature and poetry and for the time being the project will continue with reignited passion with no foreseeable end in sight. I have too many questions and rabbit trails to follow at this point.          

This post will be more an introduction into Pessoa and the questions I will begin to follow than a traditional essay.

Perhaps there is no greater modernist than the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). With the modernist obsession with fracturing and dislocation, Pessoa embodies this fractured sensibility with a whole new fervor, taking on the identities of three other poets and a coterie of seventy-two different personalities. For Pessoa, identity is fluid and complex, and his heteronyms allow him to submerge himself into this complexity rather than continuously wrestle with it. 

According to Jonathon Griffin (1) “Pessoa was a poet who wrote poets as well as poems.” Each of his different poets have markedly different styles and voices. Pessoa created histories for his personalities beyond the page and frequently found himself an observer to their dramatic arguments rather than a possessor of them.

According to George Steiner: 

“Pseudonymous writing is not rare in literature or philosophy (Kierkegaard provides a celebrated instance.) ‘Heteronyms’ as Pessoa called and defined them, are something different and exceedingly strange. For each of his ‘voices’, Pessoa conceived a highly distinct poetic idiom and technique, a complex biography, a context of literary influence and polemics, and most arrestingly of all, subtle interrelations and reciprocities of awareness. Octavio Paz defines Caeiro as ‘everything that Pessoa is not and more.’ He is a man magnificently at home in nature, a virtuouso of pre-Christian innocence, almost a Portuguese teacher of Zen. Reis is a stoic Horatian, a pagan believer in fate, a player with classical myths less original than Caeiro, but more representative of modern symbolism. De Campos emerges as a Whitmanesque futurist, a dreamer in drunkenness, the Dionysian singer of what is oceanic and windswept in Lisbon. None of this triad resembles the metaphysical solitude, the sense of being an occultist medium which characterizes Pessoa’s ‘own’ intimate verse.” (2)

First, as an example of Pessoa’s poetic style we’ll take a look at “Suddenly a Hand” (14.3.1917) translated by Jonathon Griffin (3):

Suddenly a hand, part of some occult haunting,

Between the folds of the night and of my sleep

Shakes me, and I awake, and in the deep

Neglect of night discern no face or movement. 

Yet an old terror I have, immanent

And unburied, as though from a king’s siege

Descends, and affirms itself my liege

Without command, without threat, without taunting. 

And I can feel my life - how on a string 

Of Unconscious abruptly tightening

I am, by some nocturnal hand, controlled. 

I feel that I am no one, only shade, 

Of a face I don’t see, being in its shade,

And in nothing exist as the dark’s cold. 

The enjambment leaves the reader with a sense of unpredictability and tension. The repetition of ‘without’ creates an echoing effect of isolation, alone with oneself in a chasm of impenetrability. The mood is haunting and somber, precariously held together by a ‘string’… The poem opens with a disembodied hand, and ends with the narrator realizing he is but a disembodied face, or rather a “shade of a face I don’t see, being in its shade.” His life is controlled by a disembodied puppeteer, and the narrator stands at its mercy; identity and “selfhood” being ambiguous, mercurial and always beyond grasp.   As mentioned above, Pessoa takes the modern movement’s preference for flux over stasis and internalizes it, he’s flotsam along his own stream of consciousness. 

Alberto Caeiro, the bucolic, “uneducated” poet, writes almost exclusively in free verse and is described by Octavio Paz as: “..the sun in whose orbit, Reis, Campos, and Pessoa himself rotate. In each are particles of negation or unreality. Reis believes in form, Campos in sensation, Pessoa in symbols. Caeiro doesn’t believe in anything. He exists.” (4) Perhaps I will circle back and do an entire essay on “The Keeper of Sheep” but for now here are a few excerpts I found intriguing: 

To think is uncomfortable like walking in the rain

When the wind is rising and it looks like raining more. 

I have no ambitions or wants. 

To be a poet is no ambition of mine. 

It is my way of staying alone. 

[…]

When I sit down to write verses, 

Or, as I walk along the roads or short cuts, 

Write verses on the paper that is in my thought,

I feel a shepherd’s crook in my hands

And see and outline of myself

There on the hill-crest,

Listening for my flock and seeing my ideas, 

Or listening for my ideas and seeing my flock,

And smiling vaguely like a man who does not 

understand what is being said

And tries to pretend he understands. 

Very Zen. I’d like to spend a lot of time on Caeiro, it’s easy to see why he’s described as the ‘master.’ His writing is stripped down and bare and yet so incredibly evocative. I love the chiastic: listening for my flock and seeing my ideas, or listening for my ideas and seeing my flock,” there’s almost a similar disembodied hand leading both the ideas and flocks on a imperceptible string. Again beneath the surface is the problem of communication, but here Caeiro is comfortable with the fact that knowledge is illusory and unattainable. 

Ricardo Reis, a physician, writes in mostly metrical but unrhymed poetry influenced in part by Horace and Catullus. The poem I picked for Reis, “Legion Live in Us” (13.11.1935) is less Horatian and more to the point of dissociation: 

Legion live in us; 

I think or feel and don’t know 

Who it is thinking, feeling. 

I am merely the place

Where the thinking or feeling is.

I have more souls than one. 

There are more ‘I’s than myself. 

And still I exist

Indifferent to all. 

I silence them: I speak. 

The crisscross thrusts

Of what I feel or don’t feel

Dispute in the I I am.

Unknown. They dictate nothing

To the I I know. I write. 

By 1914 Pessoa was aware that he was no longer “himself.” In a letter to Armando Cortes-Rodrigues he writes: “I am no longer myself. I am a fragment of myself kept in an abandoned museum”  and  “I am like a room filled with fantastic mirrors that falsely reflect a single previous reality that isn’t in any of them and is in all of them.” (5) In answer to how he knows which heteronym is doing the writing, Pessoa says that Reis is the better writer but with a “purism I find excessive.” (6) 

And lastly Alvaro de Campos, the naval engineer/ adventurist, influenced by the Italian futurists and in constant dialogue with Walt Whitman. De Campos is the blackguard of the group, writing scathing manifestos and publicly critiquing the works and opinions of Pessoa, and occasionally writing/publishing poetry while drunk and broken hearted, such as “Ah Margarida” in which this postscript says: “Dictated by the naval engineer, Sr. Alvaro de Campos, in a state of alcoholic unconsciousness.”

Here’s an excerpt from “Triumphal Ode”: 

Ah, to be able to express myself whole as a motor expresses itself! 

To be complete like a machine! 

To be able to go through life triumphal like an automobile, the very latest model!

Be able at least to permeate myself physically with all that, 

Rip myself right open, lay myself bare completely, 

render myself passive

To all the oil and heat and carbon perfumes

Of that stupendous, black, artificial and insatiable 

flora!

I’m looking forward to the day when I can chuckle and say things like “That’s so typical of De Campos and his mechanical modernism…” (I should probably be holding a glass of bourbon while I say this.) It’s easy to see why De Campos and Pessoa were frequently at odds, occasionally rebutting Pessoa’s views in literary publications. De Campos seems to have a thing for a good simile…my quick take away from this excerpt is thus: 

Beneath the exclamations and presented awe at the mechanical age, lurks in the background the horrors of mechanical warfare and mass slaughter of the first World War. And like Pessoa, but from a different angle is the problem of identity and communication. The narrative voice is envious of being truly known in a way impossible for mere mortals of the modernist age. And while the ‘latest model’ is proud and triumphant, for a lonely ineffectual poet, there’s the hovering anxiety of being remembered and triumphant only in death. 

Notes: 

1.  Griffin, Jonathan. Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems. 2nd ed, Penguin Books, 2000. pg. 9

2.  Steiner, George. “A Man of Many Parts,” The Observer, Sunday 3 June 2001. 

3.  All Pessoa poems from: Griffin, Jonathan. Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems. 2nd ed, Penguin Books, 2000

4.  Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Harcourt Brace & Co, 1994

5.  Jackson, David. Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man is a complicated book to describe. The structure of the novel is frequently compared to a jazz composition, with themes and their riffs weaving through complicated patterns and distortions. I think that is a helpful comparison. If the title of the piece is “Invisibility” the riffs would be about the problems of vision in all its many permutations. 

The opening line: “I am an invisible man,” contrasts with the opening of Moby Dick "Call me Ishmael." In Moby Dick the quest is seemingly straightforward, i.e. Captain Ahab’s vendetta against the white whale and the hopeless quest to find him. For the invisible man the quest is amorphous, his white whale is his own namelessness. His identity is constantly in flux as he tries to make sense of belonging to a nonsensical world.  

A leitmotif running throughout the novel is the problems of mistaken identity. The protagonist “sees” himself as the next potential Booker T. Washington, an illusion that slowly dissolves. Mr. Norton, the white college trustee, has had his illusions of the peaceful cultivation of the black race shattered when he’s confronted with the brokenness and complexity of the black lives that live beyond the campus boundaries. Out of sight out of mind, he has no frame of reference for life existing outside of his imperialistic vision. 

Perhaps the most significant riff on identity is when the protagonist, after suffering a traumatic accident in the paint factory is cocooned/coffined in a small medical apparatus. The staff hover around him talking about the theoretical success the prefrontal lobotomy machine will have. As the disembodied voices talk above him he hears the voices agree that his psychology is not at risk, because it’s doubtful how much psychology he possesses in the first place…it’s a win win situation: they get to try out their new machine and “society will suffer no traumata on his account.” (366) 

“There was a pause. A pen scratched upon paper. Then, ‘Why not castration, doctor?’”

The scientific cultivation of the black person has been transformed from an idyllic college campus to barbaric medical experimentation. In each instance the black person is matter to be changed and transformed, but without personhood to tether it to humanity. As the protagonist undergoes horrific shock treatments, biting his lips to smother his screams, his body convulses with the pulsating electric. 

“Look, he’s dancing, “ someone called. 

‘No, really?’

An oily face looked in. ‘They really do have rhythm, don’t they? Get hot boy! Get hot!” it said with a laugh.”  (368)

Despite the electric shock therapy and the unequivocal claim that the result will be a “complete change of personality,” the protagonist emerges largely intact. The only thing missing is his name. And now for the first time he must wrestle with his own invisibility. His name has become meaningless, he has been transformed from a man with a dream and the possibility of hope into “blackness and bewilderment and pain.”  (372) As he’s pressed over and over to answer questions, his lack of identity begins to haunt him: 

“I wanted freedom, not destruction. It was exhausting, for no matter what scheme I conceived, there was one constant flaw—myself. There was no getting around it. I could no more escape than I could think of my identity. Perhaps, I thought, the two are involved with each other. When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” (376)

Another significant theme is confusion that leads to violence. The first instance of this thematic cycle is within the first chapter when the protagonist is asked to read his high school graduation speech at a boxing match for the white spectators. His speech argues that “humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress,” and as he makes his way to the ballroom he’s swept up along with the young black boxers getting ready for the fight. I say “swept up” because the majority of the action in this book happens without the volition or consent of the protagonist. He’s merely flotsam in the endlessly meaningless chaos. 

As he’s pushed along with the nine others into the servant elevator, the atmosphere is tense and without solidarity. Our protagonist assesses his compatriots and finds them wanting: 

“…I suspected that fighting a battle royal might detract from the dignity of my speech. In those pre-invisible days I visualized myself as a potential Booker T. Washington…I felt superior to them in my way, and I didn’t like the manner in which we were all crowded together into a servant’s elevator.” (29)

As the doors open they are led through the haze of cigar smoke toward the center of the room and pushed into place. And there standing in front of them is a naked blonde woman, gyrating slowly to the music “the smoke of a hundred cigars clinging to her like the thinnest of veils.” (32)

Only, part of the entertainment is the boxing match, the other part is the humiliation of the black male in all aspects of his personhood. Will the black boys look at the woman? Can they control themselves in the presence of a naked gyrating woman, their control or lack thereof being evident in their thin boxing shorts? The protagonist feels a wave of “irrational guilt and fear.” In Black Like Me, the author John Howard Griffin, who had dyed his skin black to experience racism in the south, was cautioned to never look directly at a white woman under any circumstances. In Mississippi he was told to avoid looking at movie posters if they happen to have a white woman on them, any direct gaze was enough to run the risk of lynching. 

“I wanted at one and the same time to run from the room, to sink through the floor, or go to her and cover her from my eyes and the eyes of the others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed on her belly her thighs formed a capital V. I had a notion that of all in the room she saw only me with her impersonal eyes.” (32)

Their looking creates a layering of objectification. The subjugation of a black man in the south circa 1950 is almost taken for granted…but with the arrival of the blonde, the objects are equally engaged in objectifying the woman standing before them as the white men surrounding them. The protagonist sees the woman before him as a sexual object and as such he dehumanizes her. The description of the woman exposes the irony of the American “dream”. Although the woman has the American flag tattooed across her belly, her “V” is not for victory, but an ironic reminder of subjugation.

In Shelly Eversley’s essay “On Female Invisibility in the Novel” she argues that one of the most under explored aspects of Invisible Man is the concept of vision. 

“More than a literal question of seeing, the protagonist’s life depends on his ability to ‘learn to look beneath the surface’ and discern reality despite ‘mirrors of hard, distorting glass’ (153, 3). Such discernment requires he learn to distinguish salient meaning from stereotype.” 1

The protagonist imagines this blonde woman as a type of mythic siren, “calling to me from the angry surface of some gray and threatening sea.” (32) This image presupposes a level of agency, but as a clarinet begins to softly “moan”, something about the song snaps him out of his reverie and allows him to see the world around him more objectively. Both the black men and the woman are pawns in this horrific game of chess. He notices now specific men in the throng of lascivious white faces. One man, in a particularly disturbing simile is described as “clumsy like that of an intoxicated panda, wound his belly in a slow obscene grind.”(33) 

Gradually, the focus of interest shifts from the physiological predicament of the boys to the dancing blonde and as the circle tightens their “beefy” fingers begin to reach out for her flesh. Mistaken at first for a siren, the protagonist now sees her lack of agency. Her inability to escape and her equal subjugation. She tries to gracefully dance away from their groping fingers but is eventually caught and carried out of the room, hoisted above their heads like a prize. And as she is carried away he sees her for the first time: 

“…above her red, fixed-smiling lips I saw the terror and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror and that which I saw in some of the other boys. As I watched, they tossed her twice and her soft breasts seemed to flatten against the air and her legs flung wildly as she spun. Some of the more sober ones helped her to escape. And I started off the floor, heading for the anteroom with the rest of the boys. Some were still crying and in hysterics.” (34)

This has just been the prologue to the fight. The theme of distorted vision and confusion has been set up and now we circle back for a riff. In the first rendition the boys think they are about to fight each other, but instead are forced to contend with themselves and their own sexuality. In the second rendition the boys again think they are about to fight each other, but being blindfolded individualizes the experience where they are battling blindly against a bloody melee of flesh. And once again they are goaded by the white onlookers: 

“See that boy over there? one of the men said. [before being blindfolded] “I want you to run across at the bell and give it to him right in the belly. If you don’t get him, I’m going to get you. I don’t like how he looks.”(34)

The irony here is the emphasis of vision. The boys won’t be able to see anything blindfolded. This is the black man’s predicament: There is no solidarity in a ‘dog eat dog’ world. He has been fear-mongered into an automaton, mechanically obeying another’s commands based not on rationale but biased opinion; the white man controls everything by his preferences: he doesn’t like how the other boy “looks.”

Within this paradigm there is no sight. The protagonist feels “blind terror” he “wanted to see, to see more desperately than ever before, but the blindfold was as tight as a thick skin-puckering scab and when I raised my gloved hands to push the layers of white aside a voice yelled, “Oh no you don’t you black bastard! Leave that alone!” (36)

Throughout the novel this will be repeated over and over again, the idea of pushing aside the “white” in order to be able to see. And always in response the disembodied voice of a white man unwilling to relinquish control. There is a dichotomy between those who have the power to see and be seen and those who do not.  With vision comes dignity. 

“Blindfolded, I could no longer control my emotions. I had no dignity. I stumbled about like a baby or drunken man…A blow landed hard against the nape of my neck. I felt myself going over, my head hitting the floor. Streaks of blue light filled the black world behind the blindfold.” (37)

Ellison said once that he didn’t set out to write a protest novel, and I think the “black world behind the blindfold” is what is the differentiating factor. This isn’t simplistic racism, it’s not as easy as black vs. white. It’s a broken system that throws all interactions within the body politic into confusion. Throughout the fight everyone fights everyone hysterically in “complete anarchy.” “No group fought together for long.” Embedded within the text is an allusion to the failures of both Marxism and Black Nationalism that the protagonist will contend with throughout the novel. 

For Ellison, the problem of the Invisible Man is complex. He argues that invisibility comes from two basic facts of American life: The first is racial conditioning which leads white people to make judgments about black people as inferior and ultimately subhuman. The second is the “formlessness of Negro life wherein all values are in flux.” 2  

“The boys groped about like blind, cautious crabs crouching to protect their midsections, their heads pulled in short against their shoulders, their arms stretched nervously before them, with their fists testing the smoke-filled air like the knobbed feelers of hypersensitive snails.”  (38) 

The values are in flux, not because they lack solidarity as the Black Nationalist would argue, but because they have lost their dignity as humans. The protagonist realizes slowly the fighters have been pulled off the mat one by one until it’s just him and the largest brute in the group. As they dodge and parry he leans in and whispers “Fake like I knocked you out, you can have the prize.” But in this moment his opponent has come to believe that this fight is worth fighting for, that despite the puppetry, he chooses to fight: one black boy against another. 

Ultimately, the protagonist will find himself again in the same predicament, blindly fighting against another black man for the right to live, only to find himself buried alive in a coal cellar, left alone with his nightmares. 

Written in 1952, this book has a timeless quality about it, which perhaps isn’t a good thing. Ellison challenges the reader to go beyond discussions of racism and begin to ponder what disembodied voices are guiding our societal prejudices for better or for worse. 

It’s a fallacy that racism is on the wane. Racism is a protean entity, always in flux. “A changing ideology with the constant and rational purpose of perpetuating and justifying a social system that is racialized.” 3 Our standards must evolve with the times rather than being permanently entrenched in a Slavery/Jim Crow era paradigm. Three years after Invisible Man was published 14 year old Emmett Till was murdered for having a conversation with a white woman in a grocery store. In 2014 a 12 year old black boy, Tamir Rice was shot repeatedly by a police officer while playing with a toy gun in a park. When black bodies are objectified as predatory it creates a vision problem. Christian Smith And Michael Emerson argue in Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America that our framework for describing racism needs to change. Instead of racism, they argue for a more complex understanding of racialization: 

“It understands the racial practices that reproduce racial division in the contemporary United States are ‘(1) increasingly covert, (2) are embedded in normal operations of institutions, (3) avoid direct racial terminology, and (4) are invisible to most Whites.’ It understands that racism is not mere individual, overt prejudice or the free-floating irrational driver of race problems, but the collective misuse of power that results in diminished life opportunities for some racial groups.” 4

In the prologue, the Invisible Man says that what ultimately leads to his invisibility isn’t something inherent in his biochemical makeup, but rather something intrinsic in the eyes of those he comes in contact with. It’s an “inner eye” problem. A choosing to not see by choosing to not look. In the end, the relevance of this book is a reminder to choose to see. To wrestle with our own identity and the visibility of those around us. No matter what echelon of society you belong to, whether visible or invisible, we humans in our “absurd diversity”  all have a role to play.

Footnotes: 

1. Eversley, Shelly.  "Female Invisibility in the Novel." Bloom's Guides: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, ed. Harold Bloom, Infobase Publishing, New York, 2008, pp 57-58.

2. Ellison, Ralph. "Working Notes for Invisible Man." Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook, ed. John F. Callahan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, pp24

3. Emerson, Michael, and Christian Smith. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. Oxford University Press, 2000.

4. Ibid.