Zenith had for years extensively translated Fernando Pessoa before deciding to undertake this 1000 page tome, a biography of Portugal’s greatest poet and, perhaps, its greatest philosopher, as well. Pessoa was an extremely odd man. His poetry was often written by heteronyms, not to be confused with pseudonyms. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt the need to enlarge the world with fictitious personalities—dreams of mine that were carefully crafted, envisaged with photographic clarity, and fathomed to the depths of their souls.” These were not mere imaginary friends, but embodied lives that lived within Pessoa. “Today I have no personality: I have divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. Today I am the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me…. I can remember envisioning the shape, motions, character, and life story of various unreal figures who were as visible and as close to me as the manifestations of what we call, perhaps too hastily, real life.” Pessoa had a humor about it all. “Given the dearth of people he can get along with, what can a man of sensibility do but invent his own friends, or at least his intellectual companions?” Zenith adds, “Pessoa accepted that there was no essential self he would ever know. But he hoped to discover the place and significance of the relative self—the ever-changing person or ensemble of persons called Fernando Pessoa—in the grand scheme of things.”
The heteronyms living inside his head were something that Pessoa actively thought about and cultivated. He digs down into his method, “Let’s suppose that a supremely depersonalized writer, such as Shakespeare, instead of creating the character Hamlet as part of a play, had created him simply as a character, without any play. He would have created, so to speak, a play of just one character—a prolonged analytical monologue.” Zenith compares two of Pessoa’s most prodigious heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro and Bernardo Soares, “Caeiro had celebrated the outer world, all that is knowable through vision, hearing, and the other senses. He prided himself, on being “superficial,” asserting that reality has no inner “depth” except in our confused thinking. Soares, while seeing everything with no less clarity, internalized the world and then—in an instantaneous turnaround—externalized his sensations of it. His world included dreams and imagined things as well as things seen.” Caeiro insisted, “Behold the world!” Soares, “I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write, I unroll myself in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate myself…. I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads.” We will give Pessoa the last word,
In this world where we forget,
We are shadows of who we are,
And the real actions we perform
In the other world, where we live as souls,
Are here wry grins and appearances.
Pessoa’s aesthetic and artistic styles were as varied as his stable of heteronyms. Even writing as himself, he often contradicted himself, fibbed, and embellished. He once declaimed, “Superior artistic production is, by its nature, a product of decadence and degeneration.” He was a supreme degenerate, but only in the philosophical sense. He later claimed, “I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth.” As Alberto Caeiro,
If I die very young, take note:
I was never more than a child who played.
I was heathen like the sun and the water,
With a universal religion that only humans lack.
Pessoa’s politics, like everything in his life, were complicated. He was, above all, an individualist and a lover of personal liberty and freedom, both in art and in life. He also loved his homeland, in an abstract sense, though he also did love Lisbon, particularly (and in reality). Pessoa claimed, “My nation is the Portuguese language.” Words were his truths. Zenith expands, “Pessoa rejected fascism and other radical nationalisms for the same reason he rejected ideologies of class struggle such as communism: they reduced the individual to an interchangeable unit at the service of some higher, collective reality such as the nation, or the proletariat…. The only social reality, [Pessoa] insisted, is the individual.” As Alberto Caeiro,
They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.
But I’ve never seen people, or humanity.
I’ve seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,
Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space.
Being Fernando Pessoa was no easy task. “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?” As Alvaro de Campos, he admits, “In each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god.” As Bernardo Soares, “What I am would be unbearable if I couldn’t remember what I’ve been.” For his entire life, Pessoa also struggled to understand others. It was not for want of trying. As Bernardo Soares, “How other people can exist, how there can be souls that aren’t mine, consciousnesses that have nothing to do with my own, which—because it’s a consciousness—seems to me like the only one.” Pessoa had enough trouble with the stable of consciousnesses just contained within his own head. “All of us, in our human and realized life, are but the caricature of our soul. We are always less than what we are. We are always a grotesque translation of what we wished to be, of what we inwardly and truly are.”
Pessoa’s reading interests were varied, but he always had a special place in his heart for all things mystical, occult, and esoteric. He often cast horoscopes for himself, his friends, and his heteronyms. He took it all deadly seriously and lived his life by what the horoscopes revealed. He also created and populated various secret societies and orders, complete with their own complex series of rituals, all in his own mind. “My brother, everything in this world is symbol and dream—symbols whatever we have, dreams whatever we desire. The whole universe, to which we belong through error and as punishment, is an allegory whose meaning you understand today since your eyes, being closed, are open, and your ears, being covered, are finally able to hear.” In one of his few book-length works published during his lifetime, “The Message”, Pessoa writes, as Portugal’s mythical long-lost King Sebastian returned,
Without madness what is man
But a healthy beast,
A postponed corpse that breeds?
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