The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (13 page)

Strange as it may seem, it’s possible to hear with the eyes, to see with the ears, to see and hear and taste smells, to taste colors and sounds, to hear tastes, and so on, indefinitely. It just takes practice.

Acting is disbelieving. Thinking is error. Only feeling is believing and is truth. Nothing exists outside our sensations. That’s why acting is a betrayal of our thought—ours precisely for not having betrayed itself as thought.

Politics is the art of governing societies when no one knows how they’re governed. Having political ideas is the easiest way to have no ideas. Politics is a misconceived vanity of men who were born to be coachmen. The only way to rule society is to disdain everyone else. Brotherhood is born out of mutual contempt.

Progress is the least noble of unnecessary lies. Even without the concept of progress, we would stop progressing.

Sensation writes straight on the crooked lines of matter.

Sensation is the bottomless vessel whereby “criticism” fulfills its Danaidean role.* Individuality is inexhaustible, since every individual who is born adds to it. Logic is a fence around nothing at all.

It is our aristocratic duty to loathe all who work and struggle, to abhor all who hope and trust, and to despise all self-sacrificers.

Trying to revive tradition is like raising a ladder to climb up a wall that fell down. It’s interesting, because absurd, but only worth the bother because it’s not worth the bother.

The only basis for truth is self-contradiction. The universe contradicts itself, for it passes on. Life contradicts itself, for it dies. Paradox is Nature’s norm. That’s why all truth has a paradoxical form.

All of these principles are true, but the contrary principles are just as true. (To affirm is to go through the wrong door.)

To think is to limit. To reason is to exclude. There are lots of things it’s good to think about, since there are lots of things it’s good to limit or exclude.

Political, social, and religious apostles....... Don’t preach good or evil, virtue or vice, truth or error, kindness or cruelty. Don’t preach virtue, since that’s what all preachers preach, and don’t preach vice, since that’s what they all practice. Don’t preach truth, since no one knows what it is, and don’t preach error, since by doing so you’d be preaching a truth.

Preach your own self, shouting it out loud to the whole world. That is the only truth and the only error, the only morality and the only immorality, ...... which you can preach, should preach, and must preach.

Preach yourself in earnest, with scandals and pomp. The only thing you are is you. Be it like a peacock, be it at large, heads and heels over Everyone Else.

Make your soul into a metaphysics, an ethics, and an aesthetics. Shamelessly replace God with yourself. That is the only truly religious attitude. (God is everywhere except in himself.)

Make your being into an atheistic religion, your sensations into a rite and a ritual. Live perfectly [...] on the sweeping verandah of the convent of yourself.

Replace yourself continuously. You’re not enough for yourself. Be always unpredictable, even to yourself. Let yourself happen before your very eyes. Let your sensations be like chance events, adventures you stumbled into. The only way to be superior is by being a lawless universe.

Existing isn’t necessary; what’s necessary is to feel. Note that this last sentence is completely absurd. Dedicate yourself to not understanding it with your whole heart.

These are the fundamental principles of Sensationism. The opposite principles are also the fundamental principles of Sensationism.

Though Pessoa’s ambitious plans to translate his own works into English and French never got very far (he put several poems of Campos’s into English and a few pages of
The Mariner
into French), he was a prolific writer of translators’ prefaces. The one he left for a projected English translation
of Ultimatum
was unsigned, but we may venture to attribute it to Thomas Crosse, who was supposed to translate the poetry of Campos as well as of Caeiro
.

Álvaro de Campos’s
Ultimatum
was published in the first and (at least up to now) only number of
Portugal Futurista
,* a literary publication the nature of which is sufficiently expressed by its title, which needs no translation.

Having, through some inexplicable stroke of luck, passed the press censors, the luck ceased when someone called the attention of the authorities to it, after the review was in the booksellers’ windows.
Portugal Futurista
was immediately seized by the police, and proceedings instituted against all the authors collaborating. This (it is well to explain) was under the Democratic ministry which was thrown out of power by Sidonio Pais, with the Revolution of the 5th of December, 1917.* Yet it is difficult to imagine how any ministry at all, when the country was at
war, could allow the publication of the
Ultimatum
, which, original and magnificent as it is, and though not pro-German (being anti-everything, Allied and German), contains scathing insults to the Allies, as also to Portugal and Brazil, the very countries where
Portugal Futurista
was destined to be read.

My reason for translating the
Ultimatum
is that it is quite the cleverest piece of literature called into being by the Great War. We may stare at its theories as unspeakably eccentric, we may disagree with the excessive violence of the introductory invective, but no one, I believe, can but confess that the satiric part is magnificent in its studied preciseness of application, and that the theoretical part, whatever we think of the value of the theories, has at least the rare merits of originality and freshness.

These are good reasons why the
Ultimatum
should be translated, and if I only translate it now, though it has been in print since November 1917, it is due* to the fact, which the perusal of the work will render evident, that no such publication could be printed while the War lasted.

It remains to say something to the English reader concerning the nature both of the work and of the author. The tendency of the work is quite clear—dissatisfaction with the constructive incapacity which characterizes our age, where no great poet, no great statesman, and (all things well considered)* no great general even, has made his appearance. Alvaro de Campos, speaking about the
Ultimatum
, once said to me, “This War is the war of the lesser pygmies against the greater pygmies. Time will show
(this was said in January
1918) which are the greater, and which are the lesser, but they are pygmies one way or another. It matters little who wins the War, for a fool is sure to win it. It matters little what comes out of it all, for folly is sure to come. The age of physical engineering has already arrived
(he characteristically added)
, but the age of mental engineering is yet far off. It shows how much we have receded from Greek and Roman civilization and what a crime Christism* has been against the substance of culture and progress.”

“That low sophist, President Wilson,” he once again said to me, “is the type and symbol of our age. He has never said a concrete thing in his life. He could not say a concrete thing to save what I suppose he considers his soul. And he speaks to the world in a time of war ......”

These are almost his exact words, which, as they were spoken in English, I am less likely to forget.

Álvaro de Campos was born in Lisbon on the 13th of October, 1890,* and traveled extensively in the East and through Europe, staying chiefly in Scotland.

At the time the preceding translator’s preface was written, probably in 1919 or 1920, the events of World War I and of Europe in the chaotic prewar period were still common knowledge. Readers today, unless they are history buffs, are not likely to understand all the swipes that the
Ultimatum
takes at politicians, and even readers versed in history will not immediately grasp the sarcastic thrusts at certain writers and thinkers whose names are slipping into oblivion. The many possibly troublesome references are explained in the notes at the back of this volume. The endnoted items, because they are so numerous, have not been asterisked; readers should refer to the page number indications in the notes
.

Once we get over the hurdle of our historical distance, the first half of
Ultimatum
proves to be a deft, sometimes hilarious diatribe that democratically damns everyone. The very different second part is a tour de force in quasi-Aristotelian logic applied to sociology, as well as an outrageous proposal for the future of human society. Some critics have taken the diagnoses and prescriptions at face value, as if the author were being dead serious, and if “author” means Álvaro de Campos, then fair enough, but Pessoa surely saw it as a satire of Nietzscheanism, of social engineering, and of his own pretension to be fifteen or twenty writers in one. Whatever else it is, the
Ultimatum
is also a prophecy, perhaps unintentional but nonetheless unsettling, since at least in a few particulars (the predicted transformations in philosophy, for example), it seems to be coming true
.

The
Ultimatum
was not conceived as a Futurist manifesto. Pessoa wrote the second half first, which he planned to publish under his own name as an Intersectionist manifesto in
Europa
(an aborted magazine project—see S
ENSATIONISM AND
O
THER
I
SMS
). After adding the first half, he planned to publish it (in
1916
or later) as a Sensationist manifesto in
Orpheu,*
where it would have been signed by Alvaro de Campos. The earliest draft of the manifesto’s second half, dating from 1914, contains the same theories and much of the same wording as the final version, but with a scaffolding of Intersectionist-Sensationist theory that Pessoa subsequently removed. He also excised these words: “The Futurist interpretation is a vision of people who are nearsighted in their sensibility. They look toward the Truth but can’t make it out.”*

Eviction notice to the mandarins of Europe! Get out!

Get out, Anatole France, you Epicurus of homeopathic remedies, Jaurès-colored tapeworm of the Ancien Régime, wilted Renan tossed with Flaubert and served in a phony seventeenth-century salad bowl!

Get out, Maurice Barrès, you feminist of Action, a Chateaubriand whose walls are bare, a thespian go-between for countries made of cardboard, mildew of Lorraine, seller of dead people’s clothes who wears what he sells!

Get out, Bourget, you meddler in souls, lighter of lamps no one asked you to light, pseudo-aristocratic shrink, abject plebeian snob who underlines with a chipped ruler the commandments of the Church!

Get out, merchantman Kipling, you poetry pragmatist and junk heap imperialist, England’s epic to answer Majuba and Colenso, Empire Day of soldierly slang, tramp steamer of second-rate immortality!

Get out! Get out!

Get out, George Bernard Shaw, vegetarian of paradox, charlatan of sincerity, ice-cold tumor of Ibsenism, hustler of makeshift intellec-tualism, Kilkenny cat of yourself, Calvinist
Irish Melody
with the
Origin of Species
as the lyrics!

Get out, H. G. Wells, tin man of ideas, a cardboard corkscrew for the bottle of Complexity!

Get out, G. K. Chesterton, with your sleight-of-hand Christianity, your keg of beer by the altar, and your adipose cockney dialectic whose horror of soap has been clouding clear minds!

Get out, Yeats of the Celtic brume wafting around a sign pointing nowhere, sackful of flotsam that washed up on the shore of shipwrecked English symbolism!

Get out! Get out!

Get out, Rapagnetta-D’Annunzio, banality in Greek letters, “Don Juan in Patmos” (trombone solo)!

And you, Maeterlinck, fire of Mystery that died out!

And you, Loti, a cold bowl of salty soup!

And you too, Rostand-tand-tand-tand-tand-tand-tand-tand!

Out! Out! Out!

And drag everybody I’ve forgotten from out of the woodwork!

Clear all this crap from out of my sight!

Out with all of you! Out!

What’s your claim to fame, Wilhelm the Second, left-handed German king with no left arm, Bismarck with no lid to hold down the fire?

And who are you, David Lloyd George, with your socialist mane of hair, dunce with a liberty cap stitched out of Union Jacks?

And you, Venizelos, a buttered slice of Pericles that fell on the floor, buttered side down?

And all the rest of you, whoever you are in the Briand-Dato-Boselli mush of political incompetence, a bunch of war-slop statesmen who were slop long before the war began! Each and every last one of you! Trash, refuse, provincial riffraff, intellectual scurrility!

And all you national leaders, bare-assed incompetents, overturned garbage cans at the door of Contemporary Inadequacy!

Clear all this crap from out of my sight!

Set up some straw-stuffed suits in their stead!

Clear them out! Out once and for all!

Ultimatum to all of them, and to all the rest who are just like them!

And if they don’t want to leave, then make them take a shower!

All are to blame for the general failure of everything!

The general failure of everything is to blame for all them!

Failure of peoples and destinies—complete and total failure!

Parade of nations, I spit on you!

You, Italian ambition, a mere lap dog called Caesar!

You, the so-called
effort français
, a deplumed chicken with painted feathers on your skin! (Don’t wind it up too much or it’ll break!)

You, British “organization,” with Kitchener at the bottom of the sea ever since the war began!

(It’s a long, long way to Tipperary, and a jolly sight longer way to Berlin!)