The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (16 page)

This is one of those days
in which I’ve never had a future
. There’s just a static present, surrounded by a wall of anxiety. The other side of the river, as long as it’s the other side, is not this side; that is the root cause of all my suffering. There are many boats destined for many ports, but no boat for life to stop hurting, nor a landing-place where we can forget everything. All of this occurred a long time ago, but my grief is even older.

On days of the soul like today I feel, in my awareness of every bodily pore, like the sad child who was beaten up by life. I was put in a corner, from where I can hear everyone else playing. In my hands I can feel the shoddy, broken toy I was given out of some shoddy irony. Today, the fourteenth of March, at ten after nine in the evening, this seems to be all my life is worth.

In the park that’s visible from the silent windows of my confinement, all the swings have been wrapped high around the branches from where they hang, so that not even my fantasy of an escaped me can forget this moment by swinging in my imagination.

This, but with no literary style, is more or less my present mood. Like the watching woman of
The Mariner
, my eyes sting from having thought about crying. Life pains me little by little, by sips, in the cracks. All of this is printed in tiny letters in a book whose binding is falling apart.

If I weren’t writing to you, I would have to swear that this letter is sincere, that its hysterical associations of ideas have flowed spontaneously from what I feel. But you know all too well that this unstageable tragedy is as real as a teacup or a coat hanger—full of the here and now, and passing through my soul like the green in a tree’s leaves.

That’s why the Prince never ruled. This sentence is totally absurd. But right now I feel that absurd sentences make me want to cry.

If I don’t post this letter today, then perhaps tomorrow, on rereading it, I’ll take the time to make a typed copy, so as to include some of its sentences and grimaces in
The Book of Disquiet
. But that won’t take away from all the sincerity I’ve put into writing it, nor from the painful inevitability of the feeling behind it.

There you have the latest news. There is also the state of war with Germany, but pain caused suffering long before that. On the other side of Life, this must be the caption of some political cartoon.

What I’m feeling isn’t true madness, but madness no doubt results in a similar abandon to the very causes of one’s suffering, a shrewd delight in the soul’s lurches and jolts.

What, I wonder, is the color of feeling?

Thousands of hugs from your very own

Fernando Pessoa

P. S.—I wrote this letter in one go. Rereading it I see that, yes, I’ll definitely make a copy before posting it to you tomorrow. Rarely have I so completely expressed my psychology, with all of its emotional and intellectual attitudes, with all of its fundamentally depressive bent, with all the so characteristic corners and crossroads of its self-awareness ...

Don’t you agree?

I don’t know if the stars rule the world
Or if tarot or playing cards
Can reveal anything.
I don’t know if the rolling of dice
Can lead to any conclusion.
But I also don’t know
If anything is attained
By living the way most people do
.

Álvaro de Campos
(from a poem dated January 5, 1935)

On one of his frequent nights of insomnia the “semiheteronym” Bernardo Soares, repeating a ritual he no doubt learned from his inventor, finally gives up trying to sleep and walks over to the window, from where (as he tells it in
The Book of Disquiet,
Text
465) “I
gaze with my wretched soul and exhausted body at the countless stars—countless stars, nothing, nothingness, but countless stars
....”
We all occasionally think—we think and we forget—about the smallness of our human life next to the vast, indifferent, and inscrutable stars, but Pessoa was haunted, if not possessed, by that consideration. Unable to accept the nothingness that his reason so often announced, he spent many, many hours pondering the truths that might lie hidden in and beyond the stars’ luminous hieroglyphics
.

Pessoa owned several hundred books about spiritual matters ranging from ancient religions and astrology to the Kabbala, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry, and he wrote scores of pages on these same topics. He also cast at least a hundred horoscopes for historical figures (including Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Mussolini), literary figures (Milton, Goethe, Dickens, Baudelaire), his friends, himself, and his heteronyms. Pessoa, when writing on things spiritual and metaphysical, like Pessoa when writing on most things, couldn’t avoid a degree of irony, trying out all positions to show that they’re all correct, or all wrong, or all relative, but there was a definite evolution in his spiritual interests and attitudes. By tracing it we may not arrive at what Pessoa “really” believed, but we will find out which, among the spiritual paths he explored, he at least respected, and which he rejected
.

Pessoa was a highly eclectic reader and by his early twenties had become versed not only in Greek and German philosophy but also in orthodox and heterodox Christian theology, Judaism, and Eastern religions. Though not a believer of a specific creed, he recognized in himself a spiritual tendency, and he cultivated it. He was at the same time, and in seeming contradiction, an inveterate skeptic, having been deeply impressed as a teenager by the writings of Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist whose immensely popular
Riddle of the Universe (1899)
propounded a strictly materialist view of the world. Despite his doubts, Pessoa never abandoned his spiritual quest, presumably for the reason set forth in the Alvaro de Campos poem cited above
.

From 1912 to
1914
Pessoa lived with his Aunt Anica, who was an enthusiast of the occult sciences and the probable catalyst of her great-nephew’s automatic writing, which began in
1916.
In
1915–16
Pessoa translated and published six books by four authors of the Theosophical Society—C. W. Leadbeater, Annie Besant, Helena Blavatsky, and Mabel Collins—whose ideas prompted an “intellectual crisis,” according to the draft of a letter to Mario de Sá-Cameiro. Though impressed by the concept of “higher, superhuman knowledge that pervades Theosophical writings,” Pessoa could not reconcile Theosophy’s “ultra-Christian” character with his own “fundamental paganism.” He was also nonplussed by the new movement’s humanitarian aspirations. These reservations became two of the main reasons for
the unqualified contempt of Theosophy expressed by Raphael Baldaya, Pessoa’s astrologer heteronym, in an unfinished essay titled “Principles of Esoteric Metaphysics.” After defending the hermetic tradition of the Rosicrucians and other secret societies, Baldaya accused Theosophy of being “merely a democratization ofhermeticism or, if you like, its Christianization.”

Pessoa’s own experiences as a medium—described in the letter to his Aunt Anica that follows and documented by several hundred sheets of automatic writing in the archives—were similarly discredited in an essay titled “A Case ofMediumship.” Analyzing his “case” from a clinical point of view, Pessoa attributes its origins to “hysterical neurasthenia” and hypnotic suggestion, and narrates the mediumistic phenomena he experienced—including his “so-called etheric vision” and his “pretended communication with diverse spirits” via automatic writing—like so many symptoms of a disease. His automatically received communications are found to be the product of his excited imagination (the case, we’re told, of the Margaret Mansel story in the group of automatic writings published here) or of mere delusion brought on by mental fatigue. One of the essay’s stern conclusions is that “spiritism should be prohibited by law,” or at least limited to a sect, as in ancient times
.

“A Case of Mediumship,” like the Baldaya essay, was probably written shortly before
1920,
and while it’s true that Pessoa was his own best devil’s advocate, his interest in Theosophy and spiritism had waned if not withered. He continued to produce automatic writings until at least
1930,
but sporadically, and without all the battling of spirits from the netherworld that occurred in 1916–17. It was also in the 1910s that Pessoa became an assiduous practitioner of astrology and a dedicated student—if not an actual adept—of Rosicrucianism, and these interests stayed with him throughout the rest of his life. It was perhaps in 1912 or
1913
that Pessoa first read Hargrave Jennings’s
The Rosicrucians, Their Rites and Mysteries (1870),
the fourth edition of which
(1907)
can be found in his personal library. Pessoa, in the aforementioned letter to Sá-Carneiro, wrote that this book—even before the Theosophists’ writings—had radically challenged his way of thinking. It was, furthermore, one of only three esoteric books approved by Henry More, Pessoa’s main correspondent from the astral world, in an automatic communication received in 1916. “Read
no more theosophical books,” More cautioned in the same astral dispatch
(#7
in the group published below)
.

According to Pessoa’s own writings on Rosicrucianism, virtually nothing is known about the original Fraternity of the Rosae Crocis, or Rosy Cross, though it is reputed to have been founded in the fifteenth century by Christian Rosenkreutz, whose last name, Latinized, gave the society its name. The Rosicrucian Order—not to be confused with the Rosy Cross Fraternity—appeared in the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth century had developed a fairly complex system of initiation, leading, through successive degrees, to knowledge of occult truths and union with God, or, more accurately, the realization in oneself of the divine duality, consisting of Force (action, emanation, the masculine principle) and Matter (inaction, immanence, the feminine principle). Pessoa was especially interested in Rosicrucian symbology and felt that an adept’s spiritual progress could be measured by the extent to which he had firmly grasped and internalized various symbols such as the cross, the tau, the cross within a circle, the triangle, the rose, and the crucified rose
.

This helps to explain Pessoa’s passion for astrology, which as a “physical” science could never have made it past the threshold of his eminently rational mind. Pessoa did not believe that the stars literally influence our lives, as if by virtue of a gravitational or magnetic force. “What operates on us is a destiny,” he wrote, “and that destiny, which exists as a spiritual force on a higher plane, is materially, or cosmologically, represented in the stars.” Astrology, understood in this representational way, was intimately connected to symbol-rich Rosicrucianism, which in its turn was closely related to Freemasonry (its spiritual offspring, according to Pessoa) and Kabbalism. Pessoa felt a certain solidarity with all of these hermetic traditions, and in
1935
he claimed to be initiated, through a master, “in the three lesser degrees of the (apparently extinct) Portuguese Order of the Knights Templar” (the parentheses are Pessoa’s). This claim smells a bit mythy, particularly since Pessoa, just two months earlier, had written in a letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro (see p. 260) that he was not initiated in any secret society and that the Portuguese Order of the Knights Templar “has been extinct, or dormant, since around 1888.” This last statement, of course, also smells funny, since it is not (apparently) known if there even was a precise year when the secret
,
“internal order” of the Portuguese Knights Templar disappeared (the “external order” having been abolished by royal edict in
1319),
and no one but Pessoa has ever proposed that this disappearance might have occurred the same year he was born
.

Leaving aside the Knights Templar, the same paragraph in the same letter to Casais Monteiro contains what is probably Pessoa’s clearest statement of his ultimate religious position: “I believe there are various, increasingly subtle levels of spirituality that lead to a Supreme Being, who presumably created this world. (...) I do not believe that direct communication with God is possible, but we can, according to the degree of our spiritual attunement, communicate with ever higher beings.” Of the “three paths toward the occult” (continues the letter), the most perfect for Pessoa was the path of alchemy, which referred not to the conversion of tin to gold but to “the transmutation of the very personality.” In his last five years of life, stimulated by his correspondence and encounter with the English magus Aleister Crowley,* who visited Lisbon in
1930,
Pessoa’s “spiritual attunement” seems to have taken a quantum leap, being reflected in a number of esoteric poems and unfinished essays on the hermetic traditions. And yet Bernardo Soares, intensely active during the same period, never seemed to believe in more than the vast, inscrutable stars. Although it was written earlier, in the late 1910s, Text 251
of The Book of Disquiet
recounts a variety of religious experience that was perfectly in keeping with late Soares. After telling of “frightful nights hunched over tomes by mystics and Kabbalists” and complaining of how the “rites and mysteries of the Rosicrucians” and the “symbolism of the Kabbala and the Templars ...... oppressed me for a long time,” the narrator finally confesses: “Today I’m an ascetic in my religion of myself. A cup of coffee, a cigarette and my dreams can substitute quite well for the universe and its stars, for work, love, and even beauty and glory. I need virtually no stimulants. I have opium enough in my soul.”

Automatic writing came into vogue in the second half of the nineteenth century as a means for communicating with departed spirits. It was often practiced in groups and with the aid of a planchette—a small, heart-shaped board with casters that supported a pencil and rolled across paper under
the pressure of people’s fingertips. In the twentieth century the principle (without the planchette) was co-opted by the French Surrealists, who promulgated it as a method for producing literature directly out of one’s subconscious. Though some of Pessoa’s longer and presumably less automatic writings—such as
#9
and
#25
of the group published here—were probably written with future readers in mind, most were of the nonliterary, spiritual type and can be seen as the practical complement of the beliefs he professed. Or were they merely a tool for self-analysis and self encouragement? While it is true that Pessoa’s main interlocutor from beyond, Henry More, is identified as his spiritual master, Pessoa the disciple receives virtually no lessons, just pep talks urging him to get rid of his virginity as soon as possible. The astral spirits also promise Pessoa that he will have money and fame, but they remind him that love is more important
.