On Disquiet This is what I know: Pessoa’s family name means both ‘person’ and ‘persona’. Many people speculate that his disquietude was a result of his amorphous last name. * Octavio Paz writes, ‘Anglomaniac, myopic, courteous, elusive, dressed in black, reticent and familiar, the cosmopolitan who preaches nationalism, the solemn researcher of useless things, the humourist who never smiles and makes our blood run cold, the inventor of other poets and self-destroyer, the author of paradoxes clear as water, dizzying: to pretend is to know oneself, the mysterious one who does not cultivate the mystery of the Portuguese midday – who is Pessoa?’ * Pessoa wrote prose in fragments. When he died he left behind 27,543 pieces of prose and poetry in an infamous steamer trunk. * Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet is an autobiography made up of factless fragments of the life of Portugal’s greatest poet. Officially The Book of Disquiet was written by Bernardo Soares, a make-believe acquaintance, a semi-heteronym, a brother, a twin. * I first borrowed this book from the library and then I renewed it twice. Then I tried to take it out again, but it was already taken out. Finally, I ordered the Serpent’s Tail edition online, the one with the outline of a male head, filled with the title and squiggles and swirls. Butterflies. There is a thought bubble with the author’s name: Fernando Pessoa. I own this book, but why did I want to? No one had recommended it to me because no one I know has read much Pessoa. His name just kept coming up as I looked for a definition of saudade. He embodies it. Saudade paints his writing, and his writing paints saudade, colouring in whoever reads it. * Pick up The Book of Disquiet, I dare you, and read the first lines of prose, “Sometimes I think I will never leave Rua dos Douradores. Once written down, that seems to me like eternity.” Do you feel the malaise? Are you thinking about packing your bags? * When I read it, I change. My voice changes, becomes heavy with melancholy and melodrama. It is a book for reading at night, alone, by myself. It needs loneliness as its stage, dreaminess and failure as a supporting cast. This is not a book for happy people. * I sometimes think that reading it does not help my plight. I am already miserable enough with my own baggage; I don’t need to be infected by the prose of a man who feels nostalgia for everyone he encounters: bosses, barbers, the office boy. He’s a philosopher obsessed with the monotony and meaninglessness of life. Still, I can’t put the book down. His misery is greater than mine. This relieves me in some way. * Fernando Pessoa lived alone, never married, and it is said he died a virgin. His true love was the city of Lisbon. A frail, thin man with a slightly curved back, Pessoa worked as a translator. He spoke and wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. * Does the fragmented nature of the man come from his displacement? Pessoa was born in Lisbon, but when he was five years old, his father died and his mother remarried. He moved to Durban, South Africa at seven. He returned to Lisbon at seventeen. * Pessoa is best known for his heteronyms, seventy-two and counting, including the author of The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares. He gave all of them, except Soares, physical traits, professions, biographies, personalities and horoscopes. He created relationships and discourse between some of them. He killed them off. * Bernardo Soares was a semi-heteronym who lasted longer than any of the others. He was a ‘mutilation’ of Pessoa’s personality. * Alberto Caeiro, Pessoa’s mentor, was born in Lisbon on 16 April, 1888 at 1:45pm. He is the poet that Pessoa longed to be. A shepherd who lived in the country and had no education, Caeiro wrote in free verse about Nature. He wrote thirty poems in succession in a collection of forty-nine poems called The Keeper of Sheep. According to his disciple, Ricardo Reis, “The life of Caeiro cannot be told for there is nothing to tell.” Caiero himself writes:
* Caeiro died at twenty-six from tuberculosis. Ricardo Reis was born in Oporto on 19 September, 1887 at 4:05pm. An epicurean doctor with a classical education, Reis wrote metered odes about the vanity of life and fate. In 1919, Reis emigrated to Brazil. * Alvaro de Campos was born on 15 October, 1890, in Tavira in the Algarve, at 1:30pm. He studied naval engineering in Glasgow, travelled extensively and was bi-sexual. His poetry celebrates the modern age. Abrasive and opinionated, Campos would often contradict Pessoa’s opinions and would turn up in lieu of him at interviews. * I think Pessoa would have loved Facebook. He would have one page for every heteronym. They would post videos on each other’s walls. * I have never finished The Book of Disquiet, and yet it is my favourite book. I read it in the bath, in bed, in the backyard, and on the toilet. Because of its fragmented nature, I can open the book to any page and start reading. There is no linearity to the narrative. Some pieces are as short as a single line. Others are long. Some pieces are fully developed while others read like the adages of a grumpy, broken man. * In one fragment, he writes that Bernardo Soares was an assistant bookkeeper for a fabric warehouse, someone he used to run into when “economic necessity” forced him to eat at one of the cheap Lisbon “restaurants or eating places, which have the stolid, homely look of those restaurants you see in towns that lack even a train station.” But, more pressing: what did they eat? * I’ve read that he was more of a drinker. I can see him, with his American moustache and his slightly hunched back, stooping over a plate and picking at cold chouriço, tangy hard-rind goat’s cheese and crusty cornmeal bread. I see him drinking red wine from a bladder. * Pessoa hated being photographed.
http://www.lpm-blog.com.br/?tag=fernando-pessoa * He was born on 13 June, 1888. It is the Day of Santo Antonio, Lisbon’s patron saint, known as the keeper of lost things, the defender of animals, the guardian of good marriages (!) and the protector of the souls stuck in purgatory. Pessoa was a Gemini. * Gemini is the third sign of the Zodiac. It is represented by a symbol of twins, based on a myth of two mortals who shared godhood in death. Geminis, ruled by the planet Mercury, are mercurial. Dual-natured, elusive, complex and contradictory, they take up new activities eagerly but lack follow-through. They are often skilled manipulators of language. They make great writers. They make greater poets. * On his death bed he wrote in English. “I know not what tomorrow will bring.” He died the next day on 30 November, 1935. * The Book of Disquiet was published forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death at the age of forty-seven. He died from cirrhosis of the liver. The liver is the organ of melancholy. * What do I know about disquiet? According to the dictionary, it is an easy uneasiness, an anxious worry, a concerning distress, an un-restful perturbation, an alarming consternation, a fearful fright and a dreadful panic. * In escaping himself through his heteronyms, Pessoa was trying to escape his own disquiet. * The Book of Disquiet is not just a book, it’s a cookbook. Richard Zenith, the translator of Pessoa’s (or Soare’s) best known work, sees it as “the ingredients for a book whose recipe is to keep shifting.” * Pessoa describes his own disquiet as
The desire to go to sleep clothed in a different personality, to forget, dulled by an increase in salary. You feel nothing except the mechanical rise and fall of your legs as they walk involuntarily forwards on feet conscious of the shoes they’re wearing. Perhaps you don’t even feel that much. Something tightens inside your head, blinding you and stopping up your ears. It’s like having a cold in the soul. * He absented himself through his heteronyms. I absent myself through food. *
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