Reading Poems of Fernando Pessoa and it’s lovely how it varies. They are letters to self. He’s visibly working things out. He hasn’t decided what the reader is to feel and delegates an emotional runnel to funnel the reader down.
There are (so far) 26 pages that would be a pleasure to reread at retyping speed. Pessoa, writing almost a century ago (although the translations are from 25 years ago) feels more current than current. And seems to fill the gap between the type of poems that try terribly hard to make a person feel something, and the poems that refuse to engage in subjects, subjectivity or anything narrative. If someone would call them journal entries rather than poems, it’d be fine too. What matter is the level that he has thought thru what he says.
Here’s an excerpt from “I heard it told once when Persia”, a story of pillaging and so on, as the city falls around two chess players, absorbed in their game. It’s by him writing as Ricardo Reis.
What’s serious matters so little,
What’s grave concerns us no less.
Let the natural drive of instincts
Give way to the worthless pleasure
(Under the peaceful shady trees)
Of playing a good game.
Whatever we make of this useless life
Is all the same, whether it’s glory,
Reputation, love, knowledge or life itself —
[…]
Glory weighs like a precious burden,
Reputation like a fever,
Love wearies, being so searching and serious,
Knowledge never finds anything,
And life achingly passes, knowing all this . . .
The game of chess
Captures the heart completely, but losing
Matters little, since it’s nothing at all.
I love the double-mindedness, the pragmatism, the acknowledgement of the fretful with a sort of amused detachment at the foolishness of life.
He’s got a funny twist, dismissive and yet trying to understand. “If they want me to be a mystic, fine, I’m a mystic./but only of the body./My soul is simple and doesn’t think.”
And from XXVII
Today I read nearly two pages
In a book by a mystic poet,
And I laughed like someone who’d been weeping and weeping.
That observation alone is a stopper. When emotions run high, they flip one to another. Humour-threshhold is easier to cross when you’re down. The body naturally seeks equilibrium. He continues.
Mystic poets are sick philosophers.
And philosophers are madmen.
Because mystic poems say that flowers feel
And say that stones have souls
And rivers have ecstacies in moonlight.
But flowers wouldn’t be flowers if they felt anything —
They’d be people;
And if stones had souls they’d be living things, not stones;
And if rivers had ecstasies in moonlight,
They’d be sick people.
Only if you don’t know what flowers, stones and rivers are
Can you talk about their feelings.
To talk about the soul of flowers, stones, and rivers,
Is to talk about yourself, about your delusions.
Thank God stones are just stones,
And rivers nothing but rivers,
And flowers just flowers.
At some point the romantic devices get tiring. The personification, the comparisons that forget they are ways of thinking rather than something real. He calls people on that. And himself, I suspect. A call to bring it back from the fanciful and built and what emotional baggage and importance we load onto thing, as if children playing make believe and then forget that it’s a game and start believing in monsters for real.
Then he goes on, doubling-back to clarify (or justify) in XXXI,
If at times I say that flowers smile
And if I should say that rivers sing,
It’s not because I think there are smiles in flowers
And songs in rivers’ running . . .
It’s because that way I make deluded me better sense
The truly real existence of flowers and rivers.
Because I write for them to read me I sacrifice myself at times
To their stupidity of feelings . . .
I don’t agree with myself yet I forgive myself
There’s a certain sneer there of his being apart from the rest of humanity, but the frustration seems to be with himself and his own mind as much as people out there. How to come to terms with way of speaking of and remembering? It is a reflection game, not the actual. We throw words at things but words are built too. What is, is.
Writing as Alberto Caeiro (in poem XIV) he says, “Rhymes mean nothing to me. Only rarely/Are two trees identical, standing side by side.” Which is as elegant of explanation for the logic behind free verse as I’ve seen.
In “VIII, Once at mid-day in late spring” he gives his legend of Child Jesus that is lucidly reconceived and surreal, sacrilegious and tenderly attached both. And why should his not be as probable as those of institutions he asks.
There’s more “I” in the text than anything I’ve seen in ages yet more sense of considered perspective than those who adopt a 3rd person point of view, dress up the syntax in appliques, and put a layers of myth for distance and yet the poem is still utterly transparently fresh scalded anger hurt threat.
There’s a brain working in the text, with itself, with ideas, not playing keep away among the letters.
Maybe I’m on rebound from the Warhol-Koons pop exhibit and want meaning more than usual due to that vacuousness. What’s more boring than tinsel for sale that claims absence of meaning other than personality-jostling and suckering commerce?
Yet Pessoa has some of the same bottom life, believing there is no depth beyond surface, life has no meaning except ascribed and any meaning is a fool’s construction.
And the pop exhibit was largely male (the usual females as footnotes, when they reference males) and Pessoa is male, and invokes (according to the habit of his era) the generic other is male. The only female given a name by Pessoa gets no voice and that is Mother Mary who he calls a suitcase for conveying the deity for a while.
Perhaps what’s appealing is his own insistence that he isn’t getting it right. Even if the pop people were taking care, doing things meticulously, there’s was such a bluster and blather and blare whereas Pessoa doesn’t front that sort of extra layer to cut thru. Maybe it’s a matter purely of sensation. Pessoa has a good feel in the mouth, makes lovely sounds, has an intensity that matches mine. The pop things were attempting in some cases to be hypercolored, extra loud, reflective in the glitter sense so viscerally were irritating with a force level that was unpleasant. Or it may be a matter of angle. Pop was trying to be outrageous in sexual things that made me blink and go ho-hum while Pessoa when angling for controversy aimed at the church which I’m reactive on. Or it could be that the pop has become so integrated with culture that they don’t stand out from the background as radical anymore. Self-promotion as horror? While Pessoa’s ideas are out of step with the times enough to be visible again?
I don’t know why the work should appeal and resonate as well as it does. Many reasons but no clear sense that one is right. Perhaps it will become clear at some point.
