The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (11 page)

Alberto Caeiro is reported to have regretted the name of “Sensa-tionism” which a disciple of his (a rather queer disciple, it is true), Mr. Álvaro de Campos, gave to his attitude, and to the attitude he created. If Caeiro protested against the word as possibly seeming to indicate a “school,” like Futurism, for instance, he was right, and for two reasons. For the very suggestion of schools and literary movements sounds bad when applied to so uncivilized and natural a kind of poetry. And besides, though he has at least two “disciples,” the fact is that he has had on them an influence equal to that which some poet—Cesário Verde,* perhaps—had on him; neither resembles him at all, though indeed, far more clearly than Cesario Verde’s influence on him, his influence may be seen all over their work.

But the fact is—these considerations once put aside—that no name could describe his attitude better. His poetry
is
“Sensationist.” Its
basis is the substitution of sensation for thought, not only as a basis of inspiration—which is comprehensible—but as a means of expression, if we may so speak. And, be it added, those two disciples of his, different as they are from him and from each other—are also indeed Sensationists. For Dr. Ricardo Reis, with his neoclassicism, his actual and real belief in the existence of the pagan deities, is a pure Sensationist, though a different kind of Sensationist. His attitude toward nature is as aggressive to thought as Caeiro’s; he reads no meanings into things. He sees them only, and if he seems to see them differently from Caeiro it is because, though seeing them as unintellectually and unpoetically as Caeiro, he sees them through a definite religious concept of the universe—paganism, pure paganism, and this necessarily alters his very direct way of feeling. But he is a pagan, because paganism is
the
Sensationist religion. Of course, a pure and integral Sensationist like Caeiro has, logically enough, no religion at all, religion not being among the immediate data of pure and direct sensation. But Ricardo Reis has put the logic of his attitude as purely Sensationist very clearly. According to him, we not only should bow down to the pure objectivity of things (hence his Sensationism proper, and his neoclassicism, for the classic poets were those who commented least, at least directly, upon things) but bow down to the equal objectivity, reality, naturalness of the necessities of our nature, of which the religious sentiment is one. Caeiro is the pure and absolute Sensationist who bows down to sensations qua exterior and admits no more. Ricardo Reis is less absolute; he bows down also to the primitive elements of our own nature, our primitive feelings being as real and natural to him as flowers and trees. He is therefore religious. And, seeing that he is a Sensationist, he is a pagan in his religion, which is due not only to the nature of sensation once conceived of as admitting a religion of some kind, but also to the influence of those classical readings to which his Sensationism had inclined him.

Álvaro de Campos—curiously enough—is on the opposite point, entirely opposed to Ricardo Reis. Yet he is not less than the latter a disciple of Caeiro and a Sensationist proper. He has accepted from Caeiro, not the essential and objective, but the deducible and subjective part of his attitude. Sensation is all, Caeiro holds, and thought is a disease.
By sensation Caeiro means the sensation of things as they are, without adding to it any elements from personal thought, convention, sentiment or any other soul-place. For Campos, sensation is indeed all, though* not necessarily sensation of things as they are, but of things as they are felt. So that he takes sensation subjectively and applies all his efforts, once so thinking, not to develop in himself the sensation of things as they are, but all sorts of sensations of things, even of the same thing. To feel is all; it is logical to conclude that the best is to feel all sorts of things in all sorts of ways, or, as Álvaro de Campos says himself, “to feel everything in every way.” So he applies himself to feeling the town as much as he feels the country, the normal as he feels the abnormal, the bad as he feels the good, the morbid as the healthy. He never questions, he feels. He is the undisciplined child of sensation. Caeiro has one discipline: things must be felt as they are. Ricardo Reis has another kind of discipline: things must be felt, not only as they are, but also so as to fall in with a certain ideal of classic measure and rule. In Álvaro de Campos things must simply be felt.

But the common origin of these three widely different aspects of the same theory is patent and manifest.

Caeiro has no ethics except simplicity. Ricardo Reis has a pagan ethics, half Epicurean and half Stoic, but a very definite ethics, which gives his poetry an elevation that Caeiro himself, though the greater genius (mastership apart),* cannot attain. Álvaro de Campos has no shadow of an ethics; he is nonmoral, if not positively immoral, for of course, according to his theory, it is natural that he should love the stronger better than the weak sensations, and the strong sensations are at least all selfish, and [are] occasionally the sensations of cruelty and lust. Thus Álvaro de Campos resembles Whitman most of the three. But he has nothing of Whitman’s camaraderie; he is always apart from the crowd, and when feeling with them it is very clearly and very confessedly to please himself and give himself brutal sensations. The idea that a child of eight is demoralized (Ode II,
ad finem
)* is positively pleasant to him, for it* satisfies two very strong sensations—cruelty and lust. The most Caeiro says that may be called immoral is that he cares nothing for what men suffer, and that the existence of sick people is interesting because
it is a fact. Ricardo Reis has nothing of this. He lives in himself, with his pagan faith and his sad Epicureanism, but one of his attitudes is precisely not to hurt anyone. He cares absolutely nothing for others, not even enough to be interested in their suffering or in their existence. He is moral because he is self-sufficient.

It may be said, comparing these three poets with the three orders of religious spirits, and comparing Sensationism for the moment (perhaps improperly) with a religion, that Ricardo Reis is the normal religious spirit of that faith; Caeiro the pure mystic; Alvaro de Campos the ritualist in excess. For Caeiro loses sight of Nature in nature, loses sight of sensation in sensation, loses sight of things in things. And Campos loses sight of sensation in sensations.

Álvaro de Campos is one of the very greatest rhythmists that there has ever been. Every metric paragraph of his is a finished work of art. He makes definite, perfectly “curved” stanzas of these irregular “meters.”

He is the most violent of all writers. His master Whitman is mild and calm compared to him. Yet the more turbulent of the two poets is the most self-controlled. He is so violent that enough of the energy of his violence remains for him to use it in disciplining his violence.

The violence of the “Naval Ode”* is perfectly insane. Yet it is unparalleled in art, and because its violence is such.

His volcanic emotion, his violence of sensation, his formidable shifting from violence to tenderness, from a passion for great and loud things to a love of humble and quiet ones, his unparalleled transitions, his sudden silences, sudden pauses, his change from unstable to equable states of mind—none has ever approached him in the [expression] of this hysteria of our age.

The classic training of his early years that never deserts him (for he is one of the most unified of poets, and ever a builder and a fitter-together
of parts into an organic whole); his individual stability, his mathematical training and scientific training adding another stabilizing influence (never too much for such a volcanic temperament).

His large-minded contempt of small things, of small people, of all our age, because it is composed of small things and of small people.

This quasi-Futurist who loves the great classic poets because they were great and despises the literary men of his time because they are all small.

His art of conveying sensations by a single stroke:

The pink ribbon left on top of the dresser
...

The broken toy (but still with the dirty string used to pull it)
Of the child who had to die, O mother dressed in black, folding up
his suit
... *

His terrible self-analysis, making suddenly cold all his emotion, as in the “Salutation to Walt Whitman.”*

The philosophy of the work of Ricardo Reis basically amounts to a sad Epicureanism, which we will try to characterize.

Each of us (contends the Poet) should live his own life, isolating himself from others and seeking, in an attitude of sober individualism, only what pleases and delights him. He should not seek violent pleasures nor flee from moderately painful sensations.

Avoiding unnecessary suffering or grief, man should seek peace and tranquillity above all else, abstaining from effort and useful activity.

The poet adheres to this as a temporary doctrine, as the right attitude for pagans as long as the barbarians (the Christians) reign supreme.
If and when the barbarian empire crumbles, then this attitude may change, but for now it’s the only one possible.

We should try to give ourselves the illusion of freedom, happiness, and peace, all of which are unattainable, since freedom is a privilege denied even the gods (who are subject to Fate), since happiness cannot be felt by someone exiled from his own faith and from his soul’s natural habitat, and since we cannot pretend to be peaceful when we live in the midst of today’s commotion and know all too well that we’ll die. The work of Ricardo Reis, profoundly sad, is a lucid and disciplined effort to obtain a measure of calm.

His entire stance is based on an interesting psychological phenomenon: a true and real belief in the gods of ancient Greece, with Christ (sometimes considered inimical, but only insofar as he arouses the Christian spirit, which is indeed the ...... enemy of paganism) being admitted as one more god, but not more than that—an idea in accord with paganism and perhaps partly inspired by Alberto Caeiro’s idea (a purely poetic idea) that the Christ Child was “the god who was missing.”*

Besides generating a diversified trio of heteronymic poets, a team of subheteronymic translators and publicists to promote them, and a “Neo-paganist” ideology (see pp. 147–57) to give philosophical weight to their literary works and psychological weight to their invented personalities, Pessoa also invented literary movements for them to spearhead and promulgate. But far from being limited to Pessoa’s notebooks and papers, these movements infiltrated the Portuguese intellectual milieu of the
1910s,
and one could argue that
they
were the raison d’être of Caeiro, Reis, and Campos, and the reason the heteronyms evolved the way they did. Both points of view may be valid, for in that period of Pessoa’s life there was a startling symbiosis between the written world of his fancy and the literary world at large. IfVertiginism, Abstractionism, Dynamism, and Fusionism weren’t much more than evocative names on one or another statement of artistic principles that perhaps no one but Pessoa ever saw, the movements called
Paulismo,
Sensationism, and Intersectionism were enthusiastically taken up by his writer friends. And even if Pessoa, as we know from his notes and from several letters, sometimes saw these movements as expendable gimmicks, the fact is that they helped transform Portuguese literature. None of them endured long, but they were the instruments by which Pessoa and his compeers brought Modernism to Portugal, whose literature had perhaps been suffering from too much high seriousness. Some playfulness, even in the form of gimmicks, was bound to have a salutary effect
.

The name
Paulismo
comes from the Portuguese word for swamp
, paul,
which was the first word (but in the plural
, pauis)
of one ofPessoa’s first two poems to be published, in February of
1914.
He actually wrote
the poem a year earlier, and like
The Mariner,
also written in 1913, it hangs in suspension, with more three-dot ellipses than there are verses. Both works are rarefied products of post-Symbolism, but Pessoa’s one-act play, for all its somewhat unreal, sometimes illogical dialogue, isn’t hard to follow, whereas the poem can’t possibly be followed, since it leads nowhere; we simply have to enter it and float among the words and images, which are often striking. It was published (with another poem) under the title “Twilight Impressions,” and these include a “distant tolling of Other Bells,” the “thin autumn of a vague bird’s song,” and “opium fanfares of future silences.” In one of his notebooks, Pessoa cited this poem as an example of
Paulismo
by virtue of its “strangeness,” a second poem as an example by virtue of its rhythm, and a third poem by virtue of its “metaphysical uneasiness.” The preceding page in the same notebook characterizes
Paulismo
as the ultrarefinement of sensation, thought, and expression, while a page from another notebook defines it as “the sincere cultivation of artificiality.” Though it owed most of its genetic endowment to post-Symbolism
, Paulismo
can be distinguished from its predecessor by its greater self-consciousness, or artificiality, by the deliberateness of its creative process
.

Paulismo
had no noticeable impact on the poetry of the heteronyms, and in the poetry signed by Pessoa himself it quickly evolved into a less “swampy” style that employed a simpler language. But the orthodox, ultrarefined variety continued to be practiced by Mario de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916), who was in fact its greatest exponent. Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro met in 1912 and immediately realized that they’d found, in each other, their kindred spirit. The existential dichotomy ofl-who-am-I
versus
I-who-am-another was, if possible, even greater in Sá-Carneiro than in Pessoa. Or if not greater, at least more in evidence, and more agonizing, for Sá-Carneiro did not have Pessoa’s uncommon capacity for making emotions submit to reason. Pessoa was intellectually distressed by the gap between what he was and what he wanted to be; Sá-Carneiro, because of the same gap, committed suicide. The theme of all but his earliest work was precisely the torment he felt for not living up—in his flesh, in his writing, and even in his imagination—to an ideal of beauty he could only intuit, not define, though it was obviously informed by a Decadent
,
post-Symbolist aesthetic. In
Paulismo
he found the perfect vehicle to express, through charged images and linguistic “strangeness,” his anguished vision of an unattainable beauty, and in the space of four years he produced one of the most exquisite poetic oeuvres in Portuguese
.