The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (10 page)

My master Caeiro listened with rapt attention. Once or twice he blinked, as if to shake off ideas the way one shakes off sleep. And, after thinking a bit, he said:

“I don’t have theories. I don’t have philosophy. I see but know nothing. I call a stone a stone to distinguish it from a flower or from a tree—from everything, in other words, that isn’t a stone. But each stone is different from every other stone—not because it isn’t a stone but because it has a different size and different weight and different shape and different color. And also because it’s a different thing. I give the name stone to one stone and to another stone since they both share those characteristics that make us call a stone a stone. But we should really give each stone its own, individual name, as we do for people. If we don’t name stones, it’s because it would be impossible to come up with that many words, not because it would be wrong—”

“Just answer me this,” interrupted Fernando Pessoa, “and your position will become clear. Is there, for you, a ‘stoniness,’ even as there is a size and a weight? I mean, just as you say ‘this stone is larger—has more size, as it were—than that stone’ or ‘this stone has more weight than that stone,’ would you also say ‘this stone is more stone than that one,’ or in other words, ‘this stone has more stoniness than that one’?”

“Certainly,” replied the master immediately. “I’m quite prepared to say ‘this stone is more stone than that one.’ I’m prepared to say this if it’s larger or if it’s heavier than the other, since a stone needs size and weight to be stone, and especially if it surpasses the other in all the attributes (as you call them) that a stone has to have to be a stone.”

“And what do you call a stone that you see in a dream?” asked Fernando, smiling.

“I call it a dream,” answered my master Caeiro. “I call it a dream of a stone.”

“I see,” said Pessoa, nodding. “Speaking philosophically, you don’t distinguish the substance from its attributes. A stone, in your view, is a thing composed of a certain number of attributes—those necessary to make what we call a stone—and with a certain quantity of each attribute, which gives the stone a particular size, hardness, weight, and color, thereby distinguishing it from another stone, though both are stones, because they have the same attributes, even if in different quantities. Well, this amounts to denying the real existence of the stone. The stone becomes merely a summation of real things....”

“But a real summation! It’s the sum of a real weight plus a real size plus a real color, etc. That’s why the stone, besides having weight, size, and so forth, also has reality. ... It doesn’t have reality as stone; it has reality for being a summation of what you call attributes, all of them
real
. Since each attribute has reality, so too the stone.”

“Let’s go back to the dream,” said Fernando. “You call a stone that you see in a dream a dream, or at the very most, a dream of a stone. Why do you say ‘of a stone’? Why do you employ the word ‘stone’?”

“For the same reason that you, when you see my picture, say ‘That’s Caeiro’ and don’t mean that it’s me in the flesh.”

We all broke out laughing. “I see and I give up,” said Fernando, laughing with the rest of us.
Les dieux sont ceux qui ne doutent jamais
. The truth of that phrase by Villiers de I’lsle Adam* was never clearer to me.

This conversation remained imprinted on my soul, and I’ve reproduced it with what I think is near-stenographic precision, albeit without stenography. I have a sharp and vivid memory, which is characteristic of certain types of madness. And this conversation had an important outcome. It was, in itself, inconsequential like all conversations, and it would be easy to prove, by applying strict logic, that only those who held their peace didn’t contradict themselves. In Caeiro’s always stimulating affirmations and replies, a philosophical mind would be able to identify conflicting systems of thoughts. But although I concede this, I don’t believe there’s any conflict. My master Caeiro was surely right, even on those points where he was wrong.

This conversation, as I was saying, had an important outcome. It provided António Mora with the inspiration to write one of the most astonishing chapters of his
Prolegomena
—the chapter on the idea of Reality. António Mora was the only one who said nothing during the whole conversation. He just listened to all the ideas being discussed, with his eyes staring inward the whole while. The ideas of my master Caeiro, expounded in this conversation with the intellectual recklessness of instinct, and hence in a necessarily inexact, contradictory fashion, were converted into a coherent, logical system in the
Prolegomena
.

I don’t wish to detract from the undeniable merit of Antonio Mora, but it should be said that just as the very basis of his philosophical system was born (as he himself reveals with abstract pride) from that simple phrase of Caeiro, “Nature is parts without a whole,” so too an important part of that system—the marvelous concept of Reality as “dimension,” and the derivative concept of “degrees of reality”—was born from this conversation. To everyone his due, and everything to my master Caeiro.

The work of Caeiro is divided, not just in his book but in actual fact, into three parts:
The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love
, and that third part that Ricardo Reis aptly titled*
Uncollected Poems. The Shepherd in Love
is a futile interlude, but the few poems that make it up are among the world’s great love poems, for they are love poems by virtue of being about love and not by virtue of being poems. The poet loved because he loved, and not because love exists, and this was precisely what he said.

The Keeper of Sheep
is the mental life of Caeiro up until the coach tops the hill. The
Uncollected Poems
are its descent. That’s how I distinguish between them. I can imagine having been able to write certain of the
Uncollected Poems
, but not even in my wildest dreams can I imagine having written any of the poems in
The Keeper of Sheep
.

In the
Uncollected Poems
there is weariness, and therefore uneven-ness. Caeiro is Caeiro, but a sick Caeiro. Not always sick, but sometimes
sick. He’s the same but a bit removed. This is particularly true in the middle poems of this third part of his oeuvre.

My master Caeiro was a master for everyone capable of having a master. There was no one who got to know Caeiro, no one who spoke with him or had the physical privilege of keeping company with his spirit, who didn’t come away as a different man, for Caeiro was the only Rome one couldn’t return from as the same person he was when he went there, unless he wasn’t after all a person—unless, like most people, he was incapable of individuality beyond the fact of being, in space, a body separated from other bodies and symbolically blemished by its human form.

Inferior people cannot have a master, since they have nothing for a master to be a master of. That is why strong personalities can be hypnotized very easily, normal people less easily, and idiots, imbeciles, feeble or incoherent people not at all. To be strong is to be capable of feeling.

There were, as the reader will have gleaned from these pages, three main people around my master Caeiro: Ricardo Reis, Antonio Mora, and myself. Without inflating myself or anyone else, I can say that all three of us were and are radically different—at least intellectually speaking—from the common, animal lot of humanity. And all three of us owe whatever is best in our souls to the contact we had with my master Caeiro. All of us became others—became our true selves, that is—after passing through the sieve of that fleshly intervention of the Gods.

Ricardo Reis was a latent pagan, unable to grasp modern life and unable to grasp that ancient life into which he should have been born—unable to grasp modern life because his intelligence was of a different species, and unable to grasp ancient life because he couldn’t feel it, for you cannot feel what isn’t there to feel. Caeiro, the reconstructor of Paganism, and from the eternal point of view its founder, brought Ricardo Reis the tangible substance that he was lacking. And so he found himself as a pagan—the pagan he already was before finding himself. Before meeting Caeiro, Ricardo Reis hadn’t written a single verse, and
he was already twenty-five years old. After meeting Caeiro and hearing him recite
The Keeper of Sheep
, Ricardo Reis began to realize that he was organically a poet. Some physiologists say that it’s possible to change sex. I don’t know if it’s true, because I don’t know if anything is “true,” but I know that Ricardo Reis stopped being a woman and became a man, or stopped being a man and became a woman—as you like—when he met Caeiro.

António Mora was a shadow with philosophical pretensions. He spent his time mulling over Kant and trying to figure out if life had any meaning. Indecisive, like all strong minds, he hadn’t discovered the truth, or what he felt was the truth, which as far as I’m concerned is the same thing. He discovered it when he discovered Caeiro. My master Caeiro gave him the soul he’d never had; inside the outer Mora, which is all there had ever been, he placed a central Mora. This led to the triumphal reduction of Caeiro’s instinctive thoughts into a philosophical system of logical truth, as set forth in Mora’s two treatises, marvels of originality and speculative thought:
The Return of the Gods
and the
Prolegomena to a Reformation of Paganism
.

As for myself, before meeting Caeiro I was a nervous machine that busily did nothing. I met my master Caeiro after Reis and Mora, who met him in 1912 and 1913, respectively. I met him in 1914. I had already written verses—three sonnets and two poems (“Carnival” and “Opiary”).* These sonnets and poems reveal my emotional state when I was helplessly adrift. As soon as I met Caeiro, I found my true self. I went to London and immediately wrote the “Triumphal Ode.”* And from then on, for better or worse, I have been I.

The strangest case is that of Fernando Pessoa, who doesn’t exist, strictly speaking. He met Caeiro a little before I did—on March 8th, 1914, according to what he told me. Caeiro had come to spend a week in Lisbon, and it was then that Pessoa met him. After hearing him recite
The Keeper of Sheep
, he went home in a fever (the one he was born with) and wrote the six poems of “Slanting Rain”* in one go.

“Slanting Rain” doesn’t resemble any of my master Caeiro’s poems, except perhaps in the rectilinear movement of its rhythm. But Fernando Pessoa would never have been able to extract those extraordinary poems
from his inner world without having met Caeiro. They were a direct result of the spiritual shock he experienced mere moments after that meeting occurred. It was instantaneous. Because of his overwrought sensibility, accompanied by an overwrought intelligence, Fernando reacted immediately to the Great Vaccine—the vaccine against the stupidity of the intelligent. And there is nothing more admirable in the work of Fernando Pessoa than this group of six poems, this “Slanting Rain.” Perhaps there are, or will be, greater things produced by his pen, but never anything fresher, never anything more original, and so I rather doubt there will ever be anything greater. Not only that, he will never produce anything that’s more genuinely Fernando Pessoa, more intimately Fernando Pessoa. What could better express his relentlessly in-tellectualized sensibility, his inattentively keen attention, and the ardent subtlety of his cold self-analysis than these poetic intersections in which the narrator’s state of mind is simultaneously two states, in which the subjective and objective join together while remaining separate, and in which the real and the unreal merge in order to remain distinct? In these poems Fernando Pessoa made a veritable photograph of his soul. In that one, unique moment he succeeded in having his own individuality, such as he had never had before and can never have again, because he has no individuality.

Long live my master Caeiro!

In placing before the English-reading public my translation of these poems, I do so with the full confidence that I am making a revelation. I claim, in all confidence, that I am putting before Englishmen the most original poetry that our young century has as yet produced—a poetry so fresh, so
new
, untainted to such a degree by any kind of conventional attitude, that the words a Portuguese friend said to me, when speaking
of these very poems, are more than justified. “Every time I read them,” he said, “I cannot bring myself to believe that they have been written. It is so
impossible
an achievement!” And so much more
impossible
, that it is of the simplest, most natural and most spontaneous kind.

...

Caeiro, like Whitman, leaves us perplexed. We are thrown off our critical attitude by so extraordinary a phenomenon. We have never seen anything like it. Even after Whitman, Caeiro is strange and terribly, appallingly new. Even in our age, when we believe nothing can astonish us or shout novelty at us, Caeiro does astonish and does breathe absolute novelty. To be able to do this in an age like ours is the definite and final proof of his genius.

He is so novel that it is sometimes hard to conceive clearly of all his novelty. He is too new, and his excessive novelty troubles our vision of him, as all excessive things trouble vision, though it is quite a novelty for novelty itself to be the thing that is* excessive and vision-troubling. But that is the remarkable thing. Even novelty and the way of being new are novelties in Caeiro. He is different from all poets in another way than all great poets are different from other great poets. He has his individuality in another way of having it than all poets preceding him. Whitman is quite inferior in this respect. To explain Whitman, even on a basis of admitting him all conceivable originality, we need but think of him as an intense liver of life, and his poems come out of that like flowers from a shrub. But the same method does not hold for Caeiro. Even if we think of him as a man who lives outside civilization (an impossible hypothesis, of course), as a man with an exceptionally clear vision of things, that does not logically produce in our minds a result resembling
The Keeper of Sheep
. The very tenderness for things as mere things which characterizes the type of man we have posited does not characterize Caeiro. He sometimes speaks tenderly of things, but he asks our pardon for doing so, explaining that he only speaks so in consideration of our “stupidity of senses,” to make us feel “the absolutely real existence” of things. Left to himself, he has no tenderness for things, he
has hardly any tenderness even for his sensations. Here we touch his great originality, his almost inconceivable objectivity. He sees things with the eyes only, not with the mind. He does not let any thoughts arise when he looks at a flower. Far from seeing sermons in stones, he never even lets himself conceive of a stone as beginning a sermon. The only sermon a stone contains for him is that it exists. The only thing a stone tells him is that it has nothing at all to tell him. A state of mind may be conceived resembling this.
But it cannot be conceived in a poet
. This way of looking at a stone may be described as the totally unpoetic way of looking at it. The stupendous fact about Caeiro is that out of this sentiment, or rather, absence of sentiment, he makes poetry. He feels positively what hitherto could not be conceived of except as a negative sentiment. Put it to yourselves: What do you think of a stone when you look at it without thinking about it? Or in other words:* What do you think of a stone when you don’t think about it at all? The question is quite absurd, of course. The strange point about it is that all Caeiro’s poetry is based upon that sentiment that you find impossible to represent to yourself as able to exist. Perhaps I have not been unsuccessful in pointing out the extraordinary nature of Caeiro’s inspiration, the phenomenal novelty of his poetry, the astonishing unprecedentedness of his genius, of his whole attitude.