Chiaroscuro: Mislaid by Some God

Here's the "Previously, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer" rundown: Pessoa was a poet "who wrote poets" and not just poetry: he created what he called "heteronyms"--personalities whose philosophies and writing styles were distinct, and ostensibly distinct from his. The book is Pessoa's only major work in prose: the novel is written as the journal of Bernardo Soares, a clerk in a small company. The text was written over a quarter of a century--published post-humously possibly never meant to become public. Pessoa scholars apparently think that Soares as a character is very close to being Pessoa himself. How do I bring this to the stage? This is the question that has haunted me over the past weeks, a hum of worry like a crease on the skin at the back of my mind. Come mid-July, I've committed to performing a monologue, along with five other performers, at The Substation. Each of us has our own book to dramatize, in whatever way works.

"Nothing, nothing, just part of the night and the silence of whatever emptiness... the space that exists between me and me, a thing mislaid by some god." That is how 'The Book of Disquiet' by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa ends.

Throughout the book, my mind's eye saw Pessoa/Soares quite clearly. Demystified. Or I thought I did. Pessoa (I think of him as Pessoa more than the character Soares) was socially maladjusted, intelligent but intellectually arrogant, sexually repressed and alone. Lonely and loveless. Sometimes his angst was palpable to me--even close to my own inner Munch-ish scream. Other times, I felt appalled by his misanthropic tendencies.

Although the book was never properly edited by Pessoa into a novel before he died, several threads ran through the work: isolation, love, hate, nothingness, tedium, the meaning of his life and of life in general, his writing and the meaning of writing, and--most importantly--sublimation. Sublimation is the process of separating two or more mixed substances; what Pessoa tries to do is sublimation in the literary and ideational sense of distilling the pure from the unpure. With words, he tries to render the base, transitory and meaningless material world into the purity of its substance in ideas, dreams and writing. Sleep is to life, as life is to death. "This thing we think of as life is only the sleep of real life, the death of what we truly are. The dead are born, they do not die... When we think we are alive, we are dead, we live even while we lie dying."

Pessoa reveled in the objectification of emotion (writing that he should die, "feelings first"), in his self-imposed distance from humanity and in his belief that this distance made one superior to others. He extolled indifference as an aim: "(t)o know, immediately and instinctively, how to abstract from every object and event only what is suitable dream material and to leave for dead in the External World any reality it contains... harboring no ambitions, passions, desires, hopes, impulses or feelings of restlessness.

"We must find for every feeling the most serene mode of expression; reduce love to a mere shadow of a dream of love..."

The consequence is best exemplified in a passage about pain: "The pain of not understanding the mystery of life, the pain of being unloved, the pain of others' injustice to us, the pain of life crushing us, suffocating and imprisoning us, the pain of toothache, of pinching shoes--who can say which pain (is) worse?... Everything is nothing, and our pain is no exception."

But was he just hypocritically trying to assuage his own loneliness? Was this intellectual and psychological onanism simply a defense? He admits on page 159 that he was once truly loved, once. Pessoa scholars speculate that Pessoa died a virgin. Apart from passages about being (or striving to be) above sensuality and the sappy sentiment of love ("If the heart could think it would stop beating"), here was one entry that I think betrays his struggle for equanimity with all his futile passions roiling in him:

"A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with eyes half-closed...

I want no more from life than my dreams and this... It doesn't seem much? I don't know. What do I know about what is a little and what is a lot?

... I open the window... And one last thing pierces me, tears at me, leaves my soul in tatters. It's that I, at this moment, at this window, looking out at these sad, gentle things, ought to present an aesthetic figure, like someone in a picture--

and I don't,

I don't even do that."

What I also found interesting was Pessoa's many references to himself as the book itself (or as the product of his art)--Pessoa the "written voice" and "intellectual image", indistinguished from Pessoa the person, mind and existence. Writing four years before he died, he despairs: "I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me." Also: "I am... the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself... I've become a character in a book, a life already read." And, with irony and uncharacteristic humor: "With all this rewriting, I have destroyed myself."

More likely, it is Soares (the character) speaking in direct address to the audience acknowledging that he is only the product of Pessoa's pen.



"Everything in me is a tendency to be about something else; an impatience of the soul within itself as if with an importunate child, a disquiet that is always growing, always the same."