unless:
1/ christian bale is in the cast
2/ joss whedon is writing/directing
3/ i get to be a cylon or a vampire slayer
see this review of last year's Project Chiaroscuro performances.
it was actually a very fair and correct review.
but man does it hurt.
that's what i get for googling my own name!
Showing posts with label chiaroscuro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chiaroscuro. Show all posts
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Chiaroscuro: Curtain Call
I caught a play by myself last Sunday (the day after the final curtain call was made on Chiaroscuro). Two modern noh plays written by Yukio Mishima; Richard Chua was co-director and Mishima is one of my favorite authors. I was late, and there were only two people outside the theater, handling the ticket sales. The lady asks me if I'm a student and I say, no. The guy looks at me and says, "Oh... Sol!"; he turns to the lady and says, "She's an actress."
Nat and Rahiman will kill me for repeating this story, but it really brought home the message. Am I an actor?
screenshots of the DVD that Junior produced for Project Chiaroscuro 2007
In the first place, how did I negotiate between and among the roles of actor, playwright and director?
First, I suppose, I had to grapple with the role of playwright. Rather than use the book as just a point of departure, I really worked more to adapt a 230-page book into 15-20 minutes on stage. This required an intense reading of the book, taking notes, doing further research on the author (especially since his book was semi-autobiographical). What powered me along was the words. Pessoa writes beautifully, and it was a matter of (1) piecing together what struck me the most in his writing; (2) reading common themes throughout what was effectively a journal, and identifying them; (3) trying to form a character. What I ended with, to cut a long story short, is a character who is a woman, a writer, looking for affirmation as an artist and who writes in the belief that her art necessitates cutting herself off from the “vulgarity” of reality and humanity, but at core she is lonely, unloved and thinks that she is ugly.
Second, starting with a script, I had to be an actor and director simultaneously. I had a vision for how I wanted the performance to look (I knew I wanted to play around with a table, chair, notebooks full of writing, a cup of coffee, cigarettes, and a window) and I wanted to convey that the character was alone in her room, speaking to her unseen readers (the audience), speaking to herself. So when I first wrote some stage directions for the script, they were based on a vague idea of what I imagined the performance should be; but I had no formal training either to act or direct and no concrete idea of what I wanted to do. Without Anjeli's help (she made me try to perform the first draft script a couple of times very early on; just before I left for Timor on 21st June) I wouldn't even have gotten a script together.
In the end, became most instructive was actually performing—especially the preview performance that we did barely a week before the actual event. Here, I got feedback from the audience, which included both friends, other people in the theater scene and the Chiaroscuro director-mentors. What they said was that I had stage presence and could create tension within the audience, but what the performance lacked were: clarity (movement and speech), effective dramatic build-up and breaks in the tension, and a lack of conveyance of the motivations for what I was doing. I had further talks with Michael Corbidge and Richard Chua in particular, that put me on track to re-work the sequences in the script and think further about what tension I really wanted to convey and how I should convey it.
Thus, the result was that I re-sequenced the script. I let the audience in first, to see the character, lonely and alone, before going into this whole diatribe of how life as we know it is not really life, how everything is nothing—the whole existentialist shebang. I reduced the words and cut the script down by a third of the original. There are three movements in the performance.
First, I show with hardly any words, the lonely writer; alone in her room, writing in a frenzy but finding it hard to concentrate. There are distractions she needs to overcome: street noise from outside the window, which she shuts; food and drink on the table—she’s hungry but can barely stop long enough to have a proper meal; she spills her coffee and almost ruins her work... The reward is finally getting a clear thought through; and she lights a cigarette and enjoys her little triumph.
Second, she starts to reveal what she’s been writing about. She feels defensive, as if her little victory is empty. She lashes out that she, alone in her room, knows better than anyone about what the meaning of life is. But she starts to reveal that this knowledge is painful.
Third, there is another battle: she wants to continue to write, but she is distracted by the life outside her window. She goes to the window and tries to see whether the beauty outside is reflected in her. But it’s not, and she reveals her true fears. That she is nothing, that her life and her writing mean nothing, and she tries to reject all her work.
Finally, resolution: she cannot reject her work nor her life. She picks up her writing and leafs through it, seeing the beauty of the characters she has created. And this is the truth of her life: to produce art, she took herself out of the stream of humanity (even if she suffered for it with her loneliness), but by creating art, she has contributed to humanity. She returns to her table, and as a reward, lights a cigarette.
here's a little self-promotion... heh heh
It was my interaction with the directors and the other actors, that was most instructive. I learnt from their advice on how to better bring out the dramatic tension in what I wanted to convey with my performance, and from the excellent talents of the other actors, I learnt how to use more visual cues and other means like my voice; demonstrating how little challenges (distractions) needed to be overcome in order to win small victories (writing, deserving a cigarette), things like that. I would not have been able to do this alone.
At the Q&A with the audience after my last performance of From the Book of Disquiet, I said something that I hadn't verbalized until that moment: "I could no by measure or account have been considered an actor; but now, maybe I can start to define myself as one."
Nat and Rahiman will kill me for repeating this story, but it really brought home the message. Am I an actor?
screenshots of the DVD that Junior produced for Project Chiaroscuro 2007
In the first place, how did I negotiate between and among the roles of actor, playwright and director?
First, I suppose, I had to grapple with the role of playwright. Rather than use the book as just a point of departure, I really worked more to adapt a 230-page book into 15-20 minutes on stage. This required an intense reading of the book, taking notes, doing further research on the author (especially since his book was semi-autobiographical). What powered me along was the words. Pessoa writes beautifully, and it was a matter of (1) piecing together what struck me the most in his writing; (2) reading common themes throughout what was effectively a journal, and identifying them; (3) trying to form a character. What I ended with, to cut a long story short, is a character who is a woman, a writer, looking for affirmation as an artist and who writes in the belief that her art necessitates cutting herself off from the “vulgarity” of reality and humanity, but at core she is lonely, unloved and thinks that she is ugly.
Second, starting with a script, I had to be an actor and director simultaneously. I had a vision for how I wanted the performance to look (I knew I wanted to play around with a table, chair, notebooks full of writing, a cup of coffee, cigarettes, and a window) and I wanted to convey that the character was alone in her room, speaking to her unseen readers (the audience), speaking to herself. So when I first wrote some stage directions for the script, they were based on a vague idea of what I imagined the performance should be; but I had no formal training either to act or direct and no concrete idea of what I wanted to do. Without Anjeli's help (she made me try to perform the first draft script a couple of times very early on; just before I left for Timor on 21st June) I wouldn't even have gotten a script together.
In the end, became most instructive was actually performing—especially the preview performance that we did barely a week before the actual event. Here, I got feedback from the audience, which included both friends, other people in the theater scene and the Chiaroscuro director-mentors. What they said was that I had stage presence and could create tension within the audience, but what the performance lacked were: clarity (movement and speech), effective dramatic build-up and breaks in the tension, and a lack of conveyance of the motivations for what I was doing. I had further talks with Michael Corbidge and Richard Chua in particular, that put me on track to re-work the sequences in the script and think further about what tension I really wanted to convey and how I should convey it.
Thus, the result was that I re-sequenced the script. I let the audience in first, to see the character, lonely and alone, before going into this whole diatribe of how life as we know it is not really life, how everything is nothing—the whole existentialist shebang. I reduced the words and cut the script down by a third of the original. There are three movements in the performance.
Click here for the full script and images from the performance.
First, I show with hardly any words, the lonely writer; alone in her room, writing in a frenzy but finding it hard to concentrate. There are distractions she needs to overcome: street noise from outside the window, which she shuts; food and drink on the table—she’s hungry but can barely stop long enough to have a proper meal; she spills her coffee and almost ruins her work... The reward is finally getting a clear thought through; and she lights a cigarette and enjoys her little triumph.
Second, she starts to reveal what she’s been writing about. She feels defensive, as if her little victory is empty. She lashes out that she, alone in her room, knows better than anyone about what the meaning of life is. But she starts to reveal that this knowledge is painful.
Third, there is another battle: she wants to continue to write, but she is distracted by the life outside her window. She goes to the window and tries to see whether the beauty outside is reflected in her. But it’s not, and she reveals her true fears. That she is nothing, that her life and her writing mean nothing, and she tries to reject all her work.
Finally, resolution: she cannot reject her work nor her life. She picks up her writing and leafs through it, seeing the beauty of the characters she has created. And this is the truth of her life: to produce art, she took herself out of the stream of humanity (even if she suffered for it with her loneliness), but by creating art, she has contributed to humanity. She returns to her table, and as a reward, lights a cigarette.
here's a little self-promotion... heh heh
It was my interaction with the directors and the other actors, that was most instructive. I learnt from their advice on how to better bring out the dramatic tension in what I wanted to convey with my performance, and from the excellent talents of the other actors, I learnt how to use more visual cues and other means like my voice; demonstrating how little challenges (distractions) needed to be overcome in order to win small victories (writing, deserving a cigarette), things like that. I would not have been able to do this alone.
At the Q&A with the audience after my last performance of From the Book of Disquiet, I said something that I hadn't verbalized until that moment: "I could no by measure or account have been considered an actor; but now, maybe I can start to define myself as one."
Friday, June 15, 2007
Chiaroscuro: From the Book of Disquiet (A Script)
Nothing, nothing.
Just the night—
The silence of emptiness—
the space that exists between me and me—
a thing mislaid by some god.
We are 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.
Oh, that I should die--feelings first!
We must learn to sublimate the pure from the contagion of the vulgar.
We must 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.
The very fact of completing or achieving anything, be it an empire or a sentence, contains what is worst about all real things: our knowledge that they will perish.
To belong to something—that’s banal. Creed, ideal, lover or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.
To be, is to be free.
Touch nothing!
Abdicate from life, so as not to abdicate from one’s self.
Do not think with your feelings, feel with your thoughts!
Find for every feeling the most serene mode of expression; reduce love to a mere shadow of a dream of love...
Make of desire something vain and inoffensive, the delicate private smile of a soul to itself...
Lull hatred to sleep like a captive snake and order fear to preserve agony only in its eyes and in the eyes of our soul.
Let pain instruct you. 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.
If my heart could think, I think it would stop beating.
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?
Summer evening out there. How I would love to be someone else.
I open the window... Everything outside is so gentle, yet it pierces me with an indefinable pain, a vague feeling of discontent.
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 a beautiful figure, like someone in a picture--
and I don't, I don't even do that.
I'm nobody, nobody.
I am the outskirts of some non-existent town.
I don't know how to feel or think or love.
My life is a tragedy, booed off the stage by the gods after the first act.
I am the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book, a character in a novel as yet unfinished, 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.
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.
With all this rewriting, I have destroyed myself.
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.
... For light fleeting moments, I manage to forget the taste of life, to leave life and noise behind and die, feelings first, into an empire of anguished ruins, a grand entrance amidst flags and victorious drums, into a vast final city where I weep for nothing, want for nothing and not even ask not to be myself.
My imaginary world has always been the true world for me. I never knew loves so real, so full of passion and life as I did with the characters I myself created.
I am the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself... I am a character in my book, a life read.
words adapted from Fernando Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet"
Just the night—
The silence of emptiness—
the space that exists between me and me—
a thing mislaid by some god.
We are 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.
Oh, that I should die--feelings first!
We must learn to sublimate the pure from the contagion of the vulgar.
We must 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.
The very fact of completing or achieving anything, be it an empire or a sentence, contains what is worst about all real things: our knowledge that they will perish.
To belong to something—that’s banal. Creed, ideal, lover or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.
To be, is to be free.
Touch nothing!
Abdicate from life, so as not to abdicate from one’s self.
Do not think with your feelings, feel with your thoughts!
Find for every feeling the most serene mode of expression; reduce love to a mere shadow of a dream of love...
Make of desire something vain and inoffensive, the delicate private smile of a soul to itself...
Lull hatred to sleep like a captive snake and order fear to preserve agony only in its eyes and in the eyes of our soul.
Let pain instruct you. 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.
If my heart could think, I think it would stop beating.
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?
Summer evening out there. How I would love to be someone else.
I open the window... Everything outside is so gentle, yet it pierces me with an indefinable pain, a vague feeling of discontent.
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 a beautiful figure, like someone in a picture--
and I don't, I don't even do that.
I'm nobody, nobody.
I am the outskirts of some non-existent town.
I don't know how to feel or think or love.
My life is a tragedy, booed off the stage by the gods after the first act.
I am the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book, a character in a novel as yet unfinished, 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.
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.
With all this rewriting, I have destroyed myself.
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.
... For light fleeting moments, I manage to forget the taste of life, to leave life and noise behind and die, feelings first, into an empire of anguished ruins, a grand entrance amidst flags and victorious drums, into a vast final city where I weep for nothing, want for nothing and not even ask not to be myself.
My imaginary world has always been the true world for me. I never knew loves so real, so full of passion and life as I did with the characters I myself created.
I am the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself... I am a character in my book, a life read.
words adapted from Fernando Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet"
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
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."
"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."
Monday, March 26, 2007
Chiaroscuro: Disquiet and the Malconent
Chiaroscuro is a technique for painting and sketches that uses the contrast of light (chiaro) and darkness (oscura), with the falling of light on uneven surfaces or from a particular source. It heightens the drama, signifies depth and dimension, and could denote something sinister. This is my journal on Project Chiaroscuro, a production by Little Red Shop and the Substation, which will culminate in a performance of six original monologues at The Substation on 12-15 July. Each performance will be inspired by one of six selected books.
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pesoa
First, let me admit that I still haven't finished reading it. Not because it's boring but because it's totally absorbing. I think I need to simply take a day off and finish the damn thing. It's been a while since I've had to read a book line by line, and life is full of distractions.
From what I've read so far, the Book of Disquiet isn't plot or character-driven; yet one can't compare it to stream-of-consciousness type works as Virginia Woolf or getting into the mind of the protagonist like Dostoyevski (I'm referencing Crime and Punishment here, at least). What comes to mind is prose by Albert Camus, who used his fiction to explore his ideas about life and existence.
The book is essentially the journal of a book-keeper/accountant named Bernardo Soares, whose life is largely circumscribed by his neighborhood--even his street--in Lisbon. Overtly, he spends his days without change and without incident: he goes to work, eats at the same restaurant, cuts his hair at the same barber's, and so on. He is a non-descript, quiet man, who doesn't make any ripples around him and walks through life as if he is unmindful of what happens around him.
Overtly.
His inner life is full of tumult, richness and expanse. Although he has never been far from home, Soares cogitates over life and existence from his own love of Portuguese and other literature. He pores over the minutiae of his own life and his impressions of his surroundings and the people around him. The people around him have no clue of how much they affect him. He writes about the meaning of existence and life, religion, even sex and love; but from the vantage of a limited scope of experience. And all this happens behind his eyes, behind the veneer of the constant, consistent and unassuming book-keeper, who somehow has the ability to do two things in parallel: enter the credits and debits of his mundane irreducibly material existence while living, in his mind, within a maelstrom of ideas and ontological questions that do not cease.
Here are some quotes to illustrate:
"One must monotonize existence in order to rid it of monotony. One must make the everyday so anodyne that the slightest incident proves entertaining."
"I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love... I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall."
"Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything."
Part of what makes the book remarkable is also its author. Fernando Pessoa is a Portuguese poet and this book is his only major work in prose. Moreover, the book was found (and published) post-humously from papers among his possessions. He started the book in 1912 and wrote, on and off, until his death in 1935.
This presents an occasional idiosycracy in the book, or perhaps it's just that the nature of one's thoughts and attitudes change over time: sometimes he comes across as religious; others, atheist. Sometimes, he is intellectually arrogant; others, he is exceedingly self-deprecating.
As a writer, Pessoa was also noteworthy for the his use of "heteronyms" (as opposed to pseudonyms), where he explored the philosophy and thoughts of other individuals--writing as them--with outlooks and styles different from his. Bernardo Soares in the Book of Disquiet, however, is seen to be a vehicle for Pessoa's own thoughts and life.
In terms of dramatizing the text, I was thinking of developing a character who is translating the text from Portuguese into English, thus grappling with the ideas presented, Pessoa's life himself, and how this relates to the character's life. I'd be interested in reading the translation by Margaret Jull Costa (the one I'm reading is by Maria Jose de Lancastre), who is considered to have written the best translation of the book into English, and fictionalize on her experience. Perhaps the character's life is in disarray, and she takes refuge in Pessoa's world of ideas--by disagreeing with him, but also finding that some of what he writes resonates in her like truth.
thanks go to sunita, for providing perspective.
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pesoa
First, let me admit that I still haven't finished reading it. Not because it's boring but because it's totally absorbing. I think I need to simply take a day off and finish the damn thing. It's been a while since I've had to read a book line by line, and life is full of distractions.
From what I've read so far, the Book of Disquiet isn't plot or character-driven; yet one can't compare it to stream-of-consciousness type works as Virginia Woolf or getting into the mind of the protagonist like Dostoyevski (I'm referencing Crime and Punishment here, at least). What comes to mind is prose by Albert Camus, who used his fiction to explore his ideas about life and existence.
The book is essentially the journal of a book-keeper/accountant named Bernardo Soares, whose life is largely circumscribed by his neighborhood--even his street--in Lisbon. Overtly, he spends his days without change and without incident: he goes to work, eats at the same restaurant, cuts his hair at the same barber's, and so on. He is a non-descript, quiet man, who doesn't make any ripples around him and walks through life as if he is unmindful of what happens around him.
Overtly.
His inner life is full of tumult, richness and expanse. Although he has never been far from home, Soares cogitates over life and existence from his own love of Portuguese and other literature. He pores over the minutiae of his own life and his impressions of his surroundings and the people around him. The people around him have no clue of how much they affect him. He writes about the meaning of existence and life, religion, even sex and love; but from the vantage of a limited scope of experience. And all this happens behind his eyes, behind the veneer of the constant, consistent and unassuming book-keeper, who somehow has the ability to do two things in parallel: enter the credits and debits of his mundane irreducibly material existence while living, in his mind, within a maelstrom of ideas and ontological questions that do not cease.
Here are some quotes to illustrate:
"One must monotonize existence in order to rid it of monotony. One must make the everyday so anodyne that the slightest incident proves entertaining."
"I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love... I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall."
"Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything."
Part of what makes the book remarkable is also its author. Fernando Pessoa is a Portuguese poet and this book is his only major work in prose. Moreover, the book was found (and published) post-humously from papers among his possessions. He started the book in 1912 and wrote, on and off, until his death in 1935.
This presents an occasional idiosycracy in the book, or perhaps it's just that the nature of one's thoughts and attitudes change over time: sometimes he comes across as religious; others, atheist. Sometimes, he is intellectually arrogant; others, he is exceedingly self-deprecating.
As a writer, Pessoa was also noteworthy for the his use of "heteronyms" (as opposed to pseudonyms), where he explored the philosophy and thoughts of other individuals--writing as them--with outlooks and styles different from his. Bernardo Soares in the Book of Disquiet, however, is seen to be a vehicle for Pessoa's own thoughts and life.
In terms of dramatizing the text, I was thinking of developing a character who is translating the text from Portuguese into English, thus grappling with the ideas presented, Pessoa's life himself, and how this relates to the character's life. I'd be interested in reading the translation by Margaret Jull Costa (the one I'm reading is by Maria Jose de Lancastre), who is considered to have written the best translation of the book into English, and fictionalize on her experience. Perhaps the character's life is in disarray, and she takes refuge in Pessoa's world of ideas--by disagreeing with him, but also finding that some of what he writes resonates in her like truth.
thanks go to sunita, for providing perspective.