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![[words on FERNANDO PESSOA & CO. by FERNANDO PESSOA]
*
Fernando Pessoa is possibly my favorite writer
or at least one of them
I bought his book The Book of Disquiet a few years ago
I read half of it then accidentally left it on a bench in Berkeley, California
it was gone the next day
I bought it again & read abt half of it
then I left it in a friend’s car in Carrollton, Georgia
I got it back finally in May 2012
& finished it ~ early August 2012
it’s one of those books I didn’t wanna finish
it’s one of those books that’s better read in parts
he calls it a ‘Factless Autobiography’
his paradoxes, especially w/ identity, interest me to ‘no end’
he has ~ 78 ‘heteronyms’ (his term for ‘pseudonym’ or ‘persona’)
apparently the ‘French’ love him because his name is so close to ‘persona’
apparently Lisbon, where he lived most of his life, deifies him now
he published in literary journals during his life
translated texts in multiple languages
but was mostly ‘self-taught’
he left an enormous chest of manuscripts when he died
a lot of them have been published ‘posthumously’
including Book of Disquiet & Pessoa & Co.
I read his poetry collection called A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe
that includes ‘poems’ from the same 3 heteronyms (his 3 most famous)
Alberto Caeiro
Ricardo Reis
Alvaro De Campos
I am not a ‘huge fan’ of Ricardo Reis & have decided to, for the most part, leave him out of this ‘re-view’
*
Alberto Caeiro is one of my favorite poets
I speak of him as if he weren’t Pessoa (although Pessoa ‘created’ him)
because that’s how Pessoa viewed him & that’s how I feel when I read him
he, as well as Pessoa’s other heteronyms, is an entity of his own
Pessoa created particular birthdays, worldviews, professions, nicknames for his heteronyms
‘Pesso was sincere in his insincerity; heteronymy was not a game he acquired or involved along the way, it was woven into his DNA’ (translation Richard Zenith)
in 1914 Pessoa had a bizarre & powerful ‘boom’ of ‘inspiration’
that’s when he created all 3 of these heteronyms & said when writing in Caeiro’s mode the poems came out of him automatically like he was a ‘medium’
in a cultural / literary climate now that emphasizes a ‘postmodern’ playfulness of identity
a flexible, unfixed identity
(& alt-lit w/ its pseudonyms)
I can’t help but to think (& I’m not the only one) that Pessoa was a major precursor to ‘our’ sensibilities
‘Caiero, according to his script, was interested in things themselves, in their direct apperception. Pessoa was not’
this fascinates me
when one reads any of ‘Pessoa”s works, one usually has the impression that he was hyper introspective
hyper analytical
as if he ‘thought things to death’
but Caeiro emphasizes the opposite
his poems repeatedly deliver a notion that ‘things in themselves’ are what matter & not the thoughts we have abt those things
his mode is extremely Zen // Taoist (to me)
his language is stripped down (& this plainspokenness also precurses our present climate)
‘Pessoa’ had so many ‘selves’ inside him, so much range of perception & aesthetic
apparently he was very much influenced & inspired by Walt Whitman
which makes sense, because Whitman’s poet-self often spoke as if ‘larger than life’
‘A Little Larger than The Entire Universe’
Whitman’s poet-self wanted to encompass all corners, all identities, all ‘sides’
& that seems to have catalyzed Pessoa’s universe of identities
here is Caeiro reminded me a bit of Walt Whitman:
‘I salute all who may read me. / Tipping my wide-brimmed hat / As soon as the coach tops the hill / And they see me at my door. / I salute them and wish them sunshine, / Or rain, if rain is needed, / And a favorite chair where they sit / At home, reading my poems / Next to an open window. // And as they read my poems, I hope / They think I’m something natural— / That old tree, for instance, / In whose shade when they were children / They sat down with a thud, tired of playing, / And wiped the sweat from their hot foreheads / With the sleeve of their striped smocks.’
Caeiro has a ‘nihilistic’ touch to him, (as many of Pessoa’s heteronyms do)
but of a very ‘Eastern’ persuasion, in that the lack of meaning in things is not a source of anxiety or depression
‘To think about the inner meaning of things / Is superfluous, like thinking about health / Or carrying a glass to a spring. / The only inner meaning of things / Is that they have no inner meaning at all’
‘Because everything is what it is, which is how it should be, / And I accept it, and don’t even give thanks, / Since that might suggest I think about it’
here are my other favorite moments from Caeiro:
‘Today I wish I could think of Spring as a person / So that I could imagine her crying for me / When she sees that she’s lost her only friend. / But Spring isn’t even a thing: / It’s a manner of speaking’
‘I cut the orange in two, and the two parts couldn’t be equal. / To which part was I unjust—I, who am going to eat both?’
‘Yes, sometimes I weep for the perfect body that doesn’t exist. / But the perfect body is the body that’s the most body of all’
‘The exact and entire coincidence of a thing with itself’
‘This may be the last day of my life. / I lifted my right hand to wave at the sun, / But I did not wave at it in farewell. / I was glad I could see it—that’s all’
*
I want to say a bit abt the third heteronym in this book (like I said, I’m skipping the second; he wasn’t nearly as exciting to me—more classical & ‘archaic’)
Alvaro De Campos
‘The Jaded Sensationist’
is pretty awesome
while Caeiro ‘sees’ things as they are, Campos is more interested in ‘feeling’
‘I’ve been the pimp of every emotion’
‘To be able to laugh, laugh, laugh uproariously, / To laugh like an overturned glass, / Completely crazy just from feeling, / Completely disfigured from scraping against things, / My mouth cut up from biting on things, / My fingernails bloody from clawing at things, / And then give me whatever cell you like that I may look back on life’
he references alcohol & hashish
he references childhood & leaves the impression as the most ‘nostalgic’ of the lot (I’m a sucker for ‘nostalgia)
he is the most ‘modern’ too
his poems take place often in more urban’ spaces than Caeiro
Caeiro’s usually take place in ‘nature’
Pessoa apparently used Campos as a heteronym when sending letters to ppl as well
‘Alberto de Campos was Pessoa—same basic attitudes, desires, and anxieties—but with more pizzazz and chutzpah, living out much of what his progenitor only dreamed of’
perhaps Campos was Pessoa’s way of ‘letting loose’ a little
despite his Campos’ up-with-the-times attitude, he explores a fragmentation of the ‘I’
‘Is the I I feel the I that’s real? / Even with feelings I’m a bit of an atheist. / I don’t even know if it’s I who feels’
& he has a bit of Caeiro in him sometimes:
‘Pluck a blade of grass, bite into it, and you will understand’
apparently one of ‘Pessoa”s most famous poems is ‘The Tobacco Shop’
Campos wrote this poem
it’s one of my favorites in the book
‘there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates, / And all the religions put together teach no more than the candy shop’
‘When I went to take off the mask, / It was stuck to my face’
the poem speaks of unrequited desires & a lust for life that falls short of coherence
but the end says, ‘He waves hello, I shout back “Hello, Esteves!” and the universe / Falls back into place without ideals or hopes, and the Owner of the / Tobacco Shop smiles’
*
The book closes with a sheaf of poems from ‘Pessoa himself’
I feel like this ‘re-view’ is already too long
but I’ll speak on one poem, which I think, in some ways, encapsulates Pessoa’s approach
the poem’s called ‘The Soul with Boundaries’
I wrote ‘manifesto’ next to the title in the book:
‘If all things are but slivers / Of the universal intelligence, / Then let me be my parts, / Scattered and divergent. // If from myself I’m absent / And whatever I feel is distant, / How did my soul come to have / An individual existence’
*
find the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/Fernando-Pessoa-Co-Selected-Poems/dp/0802136273/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349078512&sr=8-1&keywords=pessoa+%26+co](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mb7fz9dUAj1r1vr5po1_500.jpg)
[words on FERNANDO PESSOA & CO. by FERNANDO PESSOA]
*
Fernando Pessoa is possibly my favorite writer
or at least one of them
I bought his book The Book of Disquiet a few years ago
I read half of it then accidentally left it on a bench in Berkeley, California
it was gone the next day
I bought it again & read abt half of it
then I left it in a friend’s car in Carrollton, Georgia
I got it back finally in May 2012
& finished it ~ early August 2012
it’s one of those books I didn’t wanna finish
it’s one of those books that’s better read in parts
he calls it a ‘Factless Autobiography’
his paradoxes, especially w/ identity, interest me to ‘no end’
he has ~ 78 ‘heteronyms’ (his term for ‘pseudonym’ or ‘persona’)
apparently the ‘French’ love him because his name is so close to ‘persona’
apparently Lisbon, where he lived most of his life, deifies him now
he published in literary journals during his life
translated texts in multiple languages
but was mostly ‘self-taught’
he left an enormous chest of manuscripts when he died
a lot of them have been published ‘posthumously’
including Book of Disquiet & Pessoa & Co.
I read his poetry collection called A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe
that includes ‘poems’ from the same 3 heteronyms (his 3 most famous)
Alberto Caeiro
Ricardo Reis
Alvaro De Campos
I am not a ‘huge fan’ of Ricardo Reis & have decided to, for the most part, leave him out of this ‘re-view’
*
Alberto Caeiro is one of my favorite poets
I speak of him as if he weren’t Pessoa (although Pessoa ‘created’ him)
because that’s how Pessoa viewed him & that’s how I feel when I read him
he, as well as Pessoa’s other heteronyms, is an entity of his own
Pessoa created particular birthdays, worldviews, professions, nicknames for his heteronyms
‘Pesso was sincere in his insincerity; heteronymy was not a game he acquired or involved along the way, it was woven into his DNA’ (translation Richard Zenith)
in 1914 Pessoa had a bizarre & powerful ‘boom’ of ‘inspiration’
that’s when he created all 3 of these heteronyms & said when writing in Caeiro’s mode the poems came out of him automatically like he was a ‘medium’
in a cultural / literary climate now that emphasizes a ‘postmodern’ playfulness of identity
a flexible, unfixed identity
(& alt-lit w/ its pseudonyms)
I can’t help but to think (& I’m not the only one) that Pessoa was a major precursor to ‘our’ sensibilities
‘Caiero, according to his script, was interested in things themselves, in their direct apperception. Pessoa was not’
this fascinates me
when one reads any of ‘Pessoa”s works, one usually has the impression that he was hyper introspective
hyper analytical
as if he ‘thought things to death’
but Caeiro emphasizes the opposite
his poems repeatedly deliver a notion that ‘things in themselves’ are what matter & not the thoughts we have abt those things
his mode is extremely Zen // Taoist (to me)
his language is stripped down (& this plainspokenness also precurses our present climate)
‘Pessoa’ had so many ‘selves’ inside him, so much range of perception & aesthetic
apparently he was very much influenced & inspired by Walt Whitman
which makes sense, because Whitman’s poet-self often spoke as if ‘larger than life’
‘A Little Larger than The Entire Universe’
Whitman’s poet-self wanted to encompass all corners, all identities, all ‘sides’
& that seems to have catalyzed Pessoa’s universe of identities
here is Caeiro reminded me a bit of Walt Whitman:
‘I salute all who may read me. / Tipping my wide-brimmed hat / As soon as the coach tops the hill / And they see me at my door. / I salute them and wish them sunshine, / Or rain, if rain is needed, / And a favorite chair where they sit / At home, reading my poems / Next to an open window. // And as they read my poems, I hope / They think I’m something natural— / That old tree, for instance, / In whose shade when they were children / They sat down with a thud, tired of playing, / And wiped the sweat from their hot foreheads / With the sleeve of their striped smocks.’
Caeiro has a ‘nihilistic’ touch to him, (as many of Pessoa’s heteronyms do)
but of a very ‘Eastern’ persuasion, in that the lack of meaning in things is not a source of anxiety or depression
‘To think about the inner meaning of things / Is superfluous, like thinking about health / Or carrying a glass to a spring. / The only inner meaning of things / Is that they have no inner meaning at all’
‘Because everything is what it is, which is how it should be, / And I accept it, and don’t even give thanks, / Since that might suggest I think about it’
here are my other favorite moments from Caeiro:
‘Today I wish I could think of Spring as a person / So that I could imagine her crying for me / When she sees that she’s lost her only friend. / But Spring isn’t even a thing: / It’s a manner of speaking’
‘I cut the orange in two, and the two parts couldn’t be equal. / To which part was I unjust—I, who am going to eat both?’
‘Yes, sometimes I weep for the perfect body that doesn’t exist. / But the perfect body is the body that’s the most body of all’
‘The exact and entire coincidence of a thing with itself’
‘This may be the last day of my life. / I lifted my right hand to wave at the sun, / But I did not wave at it in farewell. / I was glad I could see it—that’s all’
*
I want to say a bit abt the third heteronym in this book (like I said, I’m skipping the second; he wasn’t nearly as exciting to me—more classical & ‘archaic’)
Alvaro De Campos
‘The Jaded Sensationist’
is pretty awesome
while Caeiro ‘sees’ things as they are, Campos is more interested in ‘feeling’
‘I’ve been the pimp of every emotion’
‘To be able to laugh, laugh, laugh uproariously, / To laugh like an overturned glass, / Completely crazy just from feeling, / Completely disfigured from scraping against things, / My mouth cut up from biting on things, / My fingernails bloody from clawing at things, / And then give me whatever cell you like that I may look back on life’
he references alcohol & hashish
he references childhood & leaves the impression as the most ‘nostalgic’ of the lot (I’m a sucker for ‘nostalgia)
he is the most ‘modern’ too
his poems take place often in more urban’ spaces than Caeiro
Caeiro’s usually take place in ‘nature’
Pessoa apparently used Campos as a heteronym when sending letters to ppl as well
‘Alberto de Campos was Pessoa—same basic attitudes, desires, and anxieties—but with more pizzazz and chutzpah, living out much of what his progenitor only dreamed of’
perhaps Campos was Pessoa’s way of ‘letting loose’ a little
despite his Campos’ up-with-the-times attitude, he explores a fragmentation of the ‘I’
‘Is the I I feel the I that’s real? / Even with feelings I’m a bit of an atheist. / I don’t even know if it’s I who feels’
& he has a bit of Caeiro in him sometimes:
‘Pluck a blade of grass, bite into it, and you will understand’
apparently one of ‘Pessoa”s most famous poems is ‘The Tobacco Shop’
Campos wrote this poem
it’s one of my favorites in the book
‘there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates, / And all the religions put together teach no more than the candy shop’
‘When I went to take off the mask, / It was stuck to my face’
the poem speaks of unrequited desires & a lust for life that falls short of coherence
but the end says, ‘He waves hello, I shout back “Hello, Esteves!” and the universe / Falls back into place without ideals or hopes, and the Owner of the / Tobacco Shop smiles’
*
The book closes with a sheaf of poems from ‘Pessoa himself’
I feel like this ‘re-view’ is already too long
but I’ll speak on one poem, which I think, in some ways, encapsulates Pessoa’s approach
the poem’s called ‘The Soul with Boundaries’
I wrote ‘manifesto’ next to the title in the book:
‘If all things are but slivers / Of the universal intelligence, / Then let me be my parts, / Scattered and divergent. // If from myself I’m absent / And whatever I feel is distant, / How did my soul come to have / An individual existence’
*
find the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/Fernando-Pessoa-Co-Selected-Poems/dp/0802136273/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349078512&sr=8-1&keywords=pessoa+%26+co
