The BOOK of DISQUIET
Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. He grew up in Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was Portuguese consul. He returned to Lisbon in 1905 and worked as a clerk in an import-export company until his death in 1935. Most of Pessoa’s writing was not published during his lifetime; The Book of Disquiet first came out in Portugal in 1982. Since its first publication, it has been hailed as a classic.
The Complete Edition
First published in this edition in
Great Britain in 2017 by Serpent’s Tail,
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First published in this arrangement in Portuguese by Tinta-da-china in 2013
Parts of this translation first appeared in Serpent’s Tail’s 1991 edition, which followed María José de Lancastre’s selection for the Italian edition published by Feltrinelli
Arrangement © 2013 by Jerónimo Pizarro
Editor’s Note © 2017 by Jerónimo Pizarro
Translation and introduction copyright © 2017 by Margaret Jull Costa
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78283 356 7
Facsimiles of original manuscripts and typescripts reproduced by kind permission of Tinta-da-China.
Introduction by Margaret Jull Costa
Editor’s note by Jerónimo Pizarro
THE BOOK OF DISQUIET First Phase
Manuscript facsimiles
THE BOOK OF DISQUIET Second Phase
Manuscript and typescript facsimiles
Appendices to The Book of Disquiet
Index of first lines
Fernando Pessoa’s life divides neatly into three periods. In a letter to the British Journal of Astrology dated 8 February 1918, he wrote that there were only two dates he remembered with absolute precision: 13 July 1893, the date of his father’s death from TB when Pessoa was only five; and 30 December 1895, the day his mother remarried, which meant that, shortly afterwards, the family moved to Durban, where his new stepfather had been appointed Portuguese Consul. In that same letter, he mentions a third date too: 20 August 1905, the day he left South Africa and returned to Lisbon for good.
That first brief period was marked by two losses: the deaths of his father and of a younger brother. And perhaps a third loss too, that of his beloved Lisbon. During the second period, despite knowing only Portuguese when he arrived in Durban, Pessoa rapidly became fluent in English and in French.
He was clearly not the average student. When asked years later, a fellow pupil described Pessoa as: ‘A little fellow with a big head. He was brilliantly clever but quite mad.’ In 1902, just six years after arriving in Durban, he won first prize for an essay on the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. Indeed, he appeared to spend all his spare time reading or writing, and had already begun creating the fictional alter egos, or as he later described them, heteronyms, for which he is now so famous, writing stories and poems under such names as Chevalier de Pas, David Merrick, Charles Robert Anon, Horace James Faber, Alexander Search, and more. In their recent book Eu sou uma antologia (I am an anthology), Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari list 136 heteronyms, giving biographies and examples of each heteronym’s work. In 1928, Pessoa wrote of the heteronyms: ‘They are beings with a sort-of-life-of-their-own, with feelings I do not have, and opinions I do not accept. While their writings are not mine, they do also happen to be mine.’
The third period of Pessoa’s life began when, at the age of seventeen, he returned alone to Lisbon and never went back to South Africa. He returned ostensibly to go to university. For various reasons, though – among them, ill health and a student strike – he abandoned his studies in 1907 and became a regular visitor to the National Library, where he resumed his regime of voracious reading – philosophy, sociology, history and, in particular, Portuguese literature. He lived initially with his aunts and, later, from 1909 onwards, in rented rooms. In 1907, his grandmother left him a small inheritance and in 1909 he used that money to buy a printing press for the publishing house, Empreza Íbis, which he set up a few months later. Empreza Íbis closed in 1910, having published not a single book. From 1912 onwards, Pessoa began contributing essays to various journals; from 1915, with the creation of the literary magazine Orpheu, which he co-founded with a group of artists and poets including Almada Negreiros and Mário de Sá-Carneiro, he became part of Lisbon’s literary avant-garde and was involved in various ephemeral literary movements such as Intersectionism and Sensationism. Alongside his day job as freelance commercial translator between English and French, he also wrote for numerous journals and newspapers, translated Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, short stories by O. Henry and poems by Edgar Allan Poe, as well as continuing to write voluminously in all genres. Very little of his own poetry or prose was published in his lifetime: just one slender volume of poems in Portuguese, Mensagem (Message), and four chapbooks of English poetry. When he died in 1935, at the age of forty-seven, he left behind the famous trunks (there are at least two) stuffed with writings – nearly 30,000 pieces of paper – and only then, thanks to his friends and to the many scholars who have since spent years excavating that archive, did he come to be recognised as the prolific genius he was.
Pessoa lived to write, typing or scribbling on anything that came to hand – scraps of paper, envelopes, leaflets, advertising flyers, the backs of business letters, etc. He also wrote in almost every genre – poetry, prose, drama, philosophy, criticism, political theory – as well as developing a deep interest in occultism, theosophy, and astrology. He drew up horoscopes not only for himself and his friends, but also for many dead writers and historical figures, among them Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and Robes-pierre, as well as for his heteronyms, a term he chose over ‘pseudonym’ because it more accurately described their stylistic and intellectual independence from him, their creator, and from each other – for he gave them all complex biographies and they all had their own distinctive styles and philosophies. They sometimes interacted, even criticizing or translating each other’s work. Some of Pessoa’s fictitious writers were mere sketches, some wrote in English and French, but his three main poetic heteronyms – Alberto Caeiro*, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos – wrote only in Portuguese and each produced a very solid body of work.
Yet even this ‘book’ had more than one author and was never completed, never put into any order, remaining always fragmentary. Its first ‘author’ was Vicente Guedes, who wrote semi-symbolist prose pieces for inclusion in something that, as early as 1913, Pessoa was already calling The Book of Disquiet. These texts often described particular states of mind or imaginary landscapes or offered advice to would-be dreamers or even unhappily married women (a subject about which the apparently celibate Pessoa knew nothing at all at first hand) or those who, like him, had lost their religious faith. Around 1920, however, the book seemed to lose its way, and Pessoa forgot about Guedes and the Book of Disquiet. Then, in 1929, the book took a different direction with a different ‘author’, Bernardo Soares, a humble accounts clerk working in an office in downtown Lisbon and spending his leisure hours writing this ‘autobiography of someone who never existed’. Soares was described by Pessoa as only a ‘semi-heteronym’, because, ‘although his personality is not mine, it is not different from, but rather a simple mutilation of my personality. It’s me minus reason and affectivity.’
Pessoa clearly felt that Soares was a more suitable author and even drew up a plan of what to do with all those fragments:
The organisation of the book should be based on as rigorous a selection as possible of the various existing texts, adapting any older ones that are untrue to the psychology of Bernardo Soares… Apart from that, there needs to be a general revision of style, without it losing the personal tone or the drifting, disconnected logic that characterises it.
* Alberto Caeiro is Pessoa’s main poetic heteronym, considered by his other two major heteronyms, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, and by Pessoa himself, to be their Master.
Pessoa never undertook this rigorous process of selection and adaptation. The ‘book’ thus remained forever a work in progress. Indeed, although some fragments were published in magazines during Pessoa’s lifetime, it did not appear in book form in Portuguese until 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. This was thanks to Maria Aliete Galhoz, Teresa Sobral Cunha and Jacinto do Prado Coelho, who deciphered Pessoa’s near-illegible writing and put the texts (some dated, most not) into some coherent order. Every subsequent Portuguese edition and every translation has, inevitably, been different, including many of the same texts, but nearly always in a different order. This edition – meticulously put together by Pessoa scholar Jerónimo Pizarro – proposes that we read The Book of Disquiet as it evolved, without mixing up texts from the Guedes phase with texts from the Soares phase. The Book of Disquiet, says Pizarro, is two very different books separated by about ten years, and it is only in the second book that Pessoa ‘discovered’ Lisbon. The author of the first book inhabits a vague, almost spectral universe, whereas the second book embraces and celebrates Lisbon: ‘Oh Lisbon, my home!’ [252]
What makes this such a rich and rewarding book? It is, after all, the ‘notebook’ of a writer or writers filled with feelings of angst and alienation; the title Livro do desassossego can be translated variously as Book of Unease/Disquiet/Unrest/Turmoil/Anxiety, and yet most readers find these disparate texts a source of comfort, even exhilaration. This is, I think, in large part, because it is somehow consoling to find such moments, such states of mind, described so sympathetically and in the most extraordinary prose. What I love in this apparently cerebral book is the physical detail, like this street scene:
The trams growl and clang around the edges of the square, like large, yellow, mobile matchboxes, into which a child has stuck a spent match at an angle to act as a mast; as they set off they emit a loud, iron-hard whistle. The pigeons wandering about around the central statue are like dark, ever-shifting crumbs at the mercy of a scattering wind. [240]
Or this meditation on waking up:
With the coming of the dark light that fills with grey doubts the chinks of the shutters (so very far from being hermetic!), I begin to feel that I will be unable to remain much longer in my refuge, lying on my bed, not asleep but with a sense of the continuing possibility of sleep, of drifting off into dreams, not knowing if truth or reality exist, lying between the cool warmth of clean sheets unaware, apart from the sense of comfort, of the existence of my own body. I feel ebbing away from me the happy lack of consciousness with which I enjoy my consciousness, the lazy, animal way I watch, from between half-closed eyes, like a cat in the sun, the logical movements of my unchained imagination. I feel slipping away from me the privileges of the penumbra, the slow rivers that flow beneath the trees of my half-glimpsed eyelashes, and the whisper of waterfalls lost among the sound of the slow blood pounding in my ears and the faint persistent rain. I slowly lose myself into life. I don’t know if I’m asleep or if I just feel as if I were. [205]
The ‘second book’ is very much a hymn to the Lisbon Pessoa loved and rarely left after his return from South Africa:
…I love the Tejo because of the great city on its banks. I enjoy the sky because I see it from a fourth-floor window in a street in the Baixa. Nothing in the countryside or in nature can give me anything to equal the ragged majesty of the calm moonlit city seen from Graça or São Pedro de Alcântara. For me no flowers can match the endlessly varied colours of Lisbon in the sunlight. [358]
It is that sheer pleasure in language and pleasure in thinking and, indeed, pleasure in seeing, that makes The Book of Disquiet such a book of comfort, as it seems it was to the author(s):
I often write without even wanting to think, in an externalized daydream, letting the words caress me as if I were a little girl sitting on their lap. They’re just meaningless sentences, flowing languidly with the fluidity of water that forgets itself as a stream does in the waves that mingle and fade, constantly reborn, following endlessly one on the other. That’s how ideas and images, tremulous with expression, pass through me like a rustling procession of faded silks amongst which a sliver of an idea flickers, mottled and indistinct in the moonlight. [326]
When, in 1990, Pete Ayrton of Serpent’s Tail asked me if I would (could?) translate Pessoa’s Livro de Desassossego, it was precisely that pleasure in language and thinking and seeing that made me say Yes. The Serpent’s Tail version followed the selection made by Maria José Lancastre and translated into Italian by Antonio Tabucchi. When, a year or so ago, I was asked if I would translate a more complete version following Jerónimo Pizarro’s edition, I jumped at the chance.
Jeronimo Pizarro’s edition contains many texts that were omitted from Maria José Lancastre’s edition, and faced with those new texts, I was reminded of just how difficult it is for the translator to find meaning in those ‘meaningless’ sentences – which can often be oblique or enigmatic – and, at the same time, reproduce that same languid fluidity in English, that seductive voice. Earlier in text 326, Pessoa writes: ‘I enjoy using words… For me, words are tangible bodies, visible sirens, sensualities made flesh.’ And capturing that tangible sensuality is the third challenge for the translator. Here is the second sentence from text 264:
As casas desigualam-se num aglomerado retido, e o luar, com manchas de incerteza, estagna de madrepérola os solavancos mortos da confusão.
The houses, all different, stand together in a tightly-packed crowd, and the equally uncertain moonlight puddles with mother-of-pearl this dumb, jostling confusion.
At a first reading, the sentence in Portuguese could be one of those ‘meaningless’ sentences, and yet it is full of meaning. The difficulty for the translator lies (a) in understanding what the author means, (b) picturing the image he creates, and (c) transporting that meaning and that image into meaningful, tangible, sensuous English. Keeping close to the original simply won’t work. Paradoxically, the translation has to take quite a bold step away from the original if meaning and imagery are to be preserved. The first verb ‘desigualam-se’ – literally ‘become different or differentiated’ – works far better, I felt, if turned into an adjective, ‘different’. Needing another verb in that sentence, I chose ‘stand together’ because, in my mind, those houses, seen at night from a distance, are like a packed, silent crowd, reluctantly rubbing shoulders. Their humanity is further emphasized by my use of ‘dumb’ and ‘jostling’ to describe that ‘confusão’; ‘dumb’ is quite a long way from the usual sense of ‘morto’, which is, of course, ‘dead’, but which also has the sense of ‘dull’, ‘lifeless’, ‘weary’, ‘extinguished’, ‘muted’. And ‘jostling’ is quite a long way from ‘solavancos’, which means ‘jolts’ or ‘bumps’. Then again, the words he uses in Portuguese are not necessarily words one would associate with houses. The addition of ‘equally’ to ‘uncertain’ is there because the word ‘uncertain’ appears in the first paragraph too, and my addition is a way of explaining that repetition. And then there’s ‘estagna de madrepérola’ – ‘stagnates with mother-of-pearl’ – which makes no sense at all in English. Again, I had to picture what he was describing, the moonlight dappling – my interpretation of ‘manchas’, ‘stains’ – the houses with mother-of-pearl, but I wanted a verb that, like ‘estagna’, had watery associations, and ‘puddles’ – which is far from being a common verb in English – seemed to me to provide the necessary wateriness as well as furnishing that dappled effect. I am aware that I could be accused of straying too far from the original, but when faced by a sentence so complex as regards syntax and meaning, I felt I had no alternative but to reinvent the whole thing, while simultaneously – again that paradox – keeping as close as possible to connotation, nuance, rhythm, and, yes, oddity of phrasing or vocabulary. Pessoa’s/Guedes’s/Soares’s prose, like all the best prose, forces the translator to stretch his or her own language to its limits and to mine his or her imaginative unconscious in order to find new ways to express meaning.
The Book of Disquiet has been translated into many languages, and each of those translated editions is different, with often different texts in a different order. In early 2017,Tim Hopkins of the London-based Half Pint Press produced yet another version, consisting of various fragments typeset by hand and printed by hand on a selection of ephemera – for example, a black-and-white photo, a book of raffle tickets, a napkin from a café, a visiting card, a matchbook – and housed unbound in a hand-printed box. It gives one a sense, in miniature, of what it must have been like to discover that trunk of papers after Pessoa’s death, and to begin piecing together whole books of poetry and prose. In a way, though, its very incompleteness is enticing, encouraging the reader to make his or her own book out of those fragments. What awaits every reader of The Book of Disquiet is the sheer serendipitous pleasure of opening the book at random and reading whichever fragment you happen to alight on. And whenever I come across a photograph of Pessoa and his famously blank, not-wanting-to-be-seen face, I imagine his mind as being like that trunk, stuffed with all those other writers and endless never-completed projects, and, like The Book of Disquiet, stuffed with ideas and images and feelings.
The Book of Disquiet, a portrait of Lisbon and of its portraitist, is now considered to be Fernando Pessoa’s prose masterpiece and one of the twentieth-century’s greatest works of literature. This seems somewhat ironic when we think that Pessoa never completed The Book of Disquiet. What he did was accumulate hundreds of fragments in his trunks; he believed that completing it would be a form of cowardice, of impotence or a ‘March of Defeat’ (a title he initially gave to the poem ‘The Tobacconist’s Shop’). But this book, which successive editors have been striving to put together and finish, this happy cowardice, this fecund impotence, this triumphal defeat, is now a must-read book for anyone who wants to ‘begin’ Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet started off as a kind of post-symbolist diary influenced by conventional nineteenth-century diaries and confessions, but it ended up as the diary of a fictitious person: first, Vicente Guedes and later, Bernardo Soares, who worked in the downtown area of Lisbon. But more than this fictitious alter ego’s diary, it was the portrait of an assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon, a portrait that is impossible to separate from the description of the city in which this latter-day Bartleby lives.
In a passage in which the fictitious author is trying to escape romantic influences, we find the following observation:
Amiel said that a landscape is a state of mind, but the phrase is the feebly felicitous one of a feeble dreamer. A landscape is a landscape and therefore cannot be a state of mind. To objectify is to create and no one says of a finished poem that it is a state of thinking about writing a poem. To see is perhaps to dream but if we use the word ‘see’ rather than the word ‘dream’, it’s because we distinguish between seeing and dreaming. […] It would be more accurate to say that a state of mind is a landscape; that would have the advantage of containing not the lie of a theory but the truth of a metaphor. [386]
As I see it, the landscape of The Book of Disquiet is not exactly the city of Lisbon, which so disquiets the protagonist; rather, it is Pessoa’s own malaise or tedium that becomes the book’s landscape. The Book of Disquiet both is and isn’t an intimate diary like Amiel’s Journal Intime. It is the diary of a writer and of someone who writes to while away the hours after dinner, but these modern-day Confessions – if we are thinking of St Augustine and Rousseau – are only intimate or personal in the sense that all great fiction is universally personal. The portraits of Lisbon and of its portraitist, an office worker employed in various firms in downtown Lisbon (just like Pessoa), are the same. Pessoa’s disquiet falls on the city like rain.
This edition proposes that The Book of Disquiet should be read as it emerged, rather than alternating the texts of the first phase with those from the second. There was a first and a second book – and several years passed between the two – and there is no need to make a thematic montage to unify what required no unification. There is an unnecessary violence about bringing together texts written many years apart, or creating longer texts out of smaller ones or minimising the importance of Vicente Guedes as co-author, imposing an authorial unity, which it already has under the name of Fernando Pessoa, a name that always was and always will be both singular and plural.
In this edition, the texts mostly appear in the order in which they were arranged in my 2010 critical edition, LIvro do Desassossego, published by Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, and republished, without the same critical apparatus, by Tinta-da-china in 2013. In this last edition, I only changed the placement of certain texts intended as preliminaries and a few others that bore the initial indication ‘L. do D.’ followed by a question mark. I also, of course, consulted all the other editions of The Book of Disquiet available before June 2012 and made some further adjustments to my reading of some of the originals.
This book is, to use Pessoa’s words, a ‘great symphonic certainty’, which Margaret Jull Costa has succeeded in translating into English with – to quote one of Pessoa’s aphorism – ‘that re-inspiration without which translating is merely paraphrasing in another language’. I would like to thank her for her excellent work and Nick Sheerin of Serpent’s Tail for his unconditional support for this project.
The BOOK of DISQUIET
(First Phase)
Installed on the upper floors of certain respectable taverns in Lisbon can be found a small number of restaurants or eating places, which have the stolid, homely look of those restaurants you see in towns that lack even a train station. Among the clientele of such places, which are rarely busy except on Sundays, one is as likely to encounter the eccentric as the nondescript, to find people who are but a series of marginal notes in the book of life.
There was a period in my life when a combination of economic necessity and a desire for peace and quiet led me to frequent just such a restaurant. I would dine at around seven each night and, as chance would have it, I was almost always there at the same time as one particular man. At first, I took little notice of him, but as time passed he came to interest me.
He was a man in his thirties, thin, fairly tall, very hunched when sitting though less so when standing, and dressed with a not entirely unselfconscious negligence. Not even the suffering apparent in his pale, unremarkable features lent them any interest, nor was it easy to pinpoint the origin of that suffering. It could have been any number of things: hardship, grief or simply the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having suffered too much.
He always ate sparingly and, afterwards, he would smoke a cigarette rolled from cheap tobacco. He would watch the other customers, not suspiciously, but as if genuinely interested in them. He did not scrutinize them as though wanting to fix in his memory their faces or any outward evidence of their personalities; rather he was simply intrigued by them. And it was this odd trait of his that first aroused my curiosity.
I began to observe him more closely. I noticed that his features were illuminated by a certain hesitant intelligence, but his face was so often clouded by exhaustion, by the inertia of cold fear, that it was usually hard to see beyond this.
I learned from a waiter at the restaurant that he worked as a clerk in a company that had its office near by.
One day, there was a scuffle in the street immediately outside the restaurant – a fight between two men. The customers all rushed to the windows, as did I and the man I’ve been describing. I made some banal comment to him, and he replied in kind. His voice was dull and tremulous, the voice of one who hopes for nothing, because all hope is vain. But perhaps it was foolish of me to attribute so much to my evening companion at the restaurant.
I don’t quite know why but, after that, we always used to greet each other. And then, one day, prompted perhaps by the foolish coincidence of us both turning up for supper later than usual, at half past nine, we struck up a casual conversation. At one point, he asked whether I was a writer. I said I was. I mentioned the magazine Orpheu*, which had recently come out. To my surprise, he praised it, indeed praised it highly. When I voiced my surprise, saying that the art of those who wrote for Orpheu tended to appeal only to a small minority, he replied that he was one of that minority. Besides, he added, he was not entirely unfamiliar with that art, for, he remarked timidly, since he had nowhere to go and nothing to do, no friends to visit and no interest in reading books, he usually returned to his rented room after supper and spent the night writing.
So I met Vicente Guedes purely by chance. We often went to the same quiet, cheap restaurant. We knew each other by sight and would, of course, always nod a silent greeting. Once, though, finding ourselves seated at the same table, what started as a brief exchange became a conversation. We began meeting there every day, at lunch and supper. Sometimes, once we had finished our supper, we would leave the restaurant together and go for a stroll, chatting as we went.
Vicente Guedes endured his empty life with masterly indifference, the foundations of his mental attitude being built on the stoicism of the weak.
He was constitutionally condemned to suffer all kinds of anxieties, but fated to abandon them all. I never met a more extraordinary man. He had abdicated everything to which he was by nature destined, but not out of any kind of asceticism. Though naturally ambitious, he savoured the pleasure of having no ambitions at all.
The thin man gave me an awkward smile and eyed me distrustfully, but there was no malice in that look. Then he smiled again, sadly this time, before looking down at his plate and continuing his supper in silent absorption.
He furnished his two rooms – doubtless at the expense of a few basic necessities – with something akin to luxury. He took particular pains over the chairs – deep, soft armchairs – door curtains and carpets. He told me that this was his way of creating an interior that would ‘maintain the dignity of his tedium’. In a modern-style room, tedium becomes a discomfort, a physical pain.
He had never been obliged to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He had never belonged to any group. He had never been to university. He had never been part of a crowd. As happens with many people or, possibly, who knows, with everyone, the chance circumstances of his life and the direction it had taken were dictated by his instincts, in his case inertia and detachment.
He had never had to deal with the demands of state or society. He even avoided the demands of his own instincts. He had never acquired friends or lovers. I was the only person who, in some way, became close to him. Along with the knowledge that I knew only that false personality of his – and the suspicion that he never really thought of me as a friend – came an awareness that he needed someone to whom he could bequeath his book. Even though, initially, I found this rather wounding, it now pleases me to think that, when I finally saw everything from the one point of view worthy of a psychologist, I did remain his friend, a friend devoted to the reason he had drawn me to him in the first place, that is, the publication of this his book.
It’s odd, but even in this respect, he was fortunate, in that circumstances presented him with someone like me, who could be of service to him.
…this gentle book.
This is all that remains and will remain of one of the most subtly inert, the most dreamily debauched, of beings the world has seen. I doubt there has ever been an outwardly human creature who so completely embodied his image of his own self. A dandy in spirit, he paraded the art of dreaming through the pure happenstance of existence.
This book is the autobiography of someone who never existed.
No one knows who Vicente Guedes was or what he did, nor…
This book is not by him, it is him. However, we should always remember that behind everything written here lies a shadow, a mystery…
For Vicente Guedes, being self-aware was an art and a morality; dreaming was a religion.
He created an inner aristocracy, an attitude of soul that most closely resembles the attitude of body of the consummate aristocrat.
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony.
All effort is a crime because every gesture is but a dead dream.
Your hands are like caged doves. Your lips are silent turtle doves (which my eyes can see cooing).
All your gestures are birds. You are a swallow when you stoop down, a condor when you look at me, an eagle in your ecstasies as a proud, indifferent woman. You are merely a fluttering of wings, like those of the […], you are the lake of my seeing.
You are all winged, winged […]
It’s raining, raining, raining…
It’s raining constantly, plaintively…
My body sets my soul shivering with cold, not the cold that exists in space, but the cold of me being that space…
All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.
I do not dream of possessing you. What would be the point? It would be tantamount to translating my dream for the benefit of a plebeian. To possess a body is to be banal in the extreme. To dream of possessing a body is perhaps, were such a thing possible, even worse; it would mean dreaming oneself banal – the supreme horror.
And since we choose to be sterile, let us also be chaste, because there can be nothing baser and more ignoble than to renounce in Nature all things fertile, and yet vilely keep back anything that takes our fancy among those things renounced. There are no partial nobilities.
Let us be as chaste as dead lips, as pure as dreamed bodies, as resigned to being both these things as mad little nuns…
Let our love be a prayer… Anoint me with seeing you, and out of the moments when I dream you I will make a rosary on which all my tediums will be Our Fathers and all my anxieties Hail Marys…
Thus we will remain forever like the figure of a man in a stained-glass window opposite the figure of a woman in another stained-glass window… Between us, shadows whose footsteps echo coldly – humanity passing by… Between us will pass murmured prayers, secrets… Occasionally, the air will fill with incense. At other times, to left or right, a figure like a statue will sprinkle us with prayers… And there we will stay, always in the same windows, all colour when the sun shines through and all dark lines when night falls… The centuries will not touch our glassy silence. Outside, civilizations will come and go, revolutions will break out, parties will whirl past, meek, everyday people will rush by… And we, my unreal love, will be frozen in the same pointless pose, the same false existence, and the same […], until one day, after centuries of empires, the Church will, at last, crumble and everything will end…
But we, knowing nothing of this, will still be here, quite how or where or when I don’t know, like eternal stained-glass windows, hours of innocent art painted by some artist who has long been sleeping in a Gothic tomb where two angels, hands clasped in prayer, have set the idea of death in cold marble.
If, one day, I were to choose a wife from among the women of this Earth, may your prayer for me be this – let her be barren. But ask too, if you pray for me, that I never win that imagined wife.
Only barrenness and sterility are noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is rare, sublime, absurd.
Sometimes, when, feeling exhausted and humble, even the effort of dreaming unleaves and withers me, and the only dream I’m capable of having is thinking about my dreams, then I leaf through them, like a book that one leafs through once, then leafs through again, finding only the inevitable words. Then I wonder who you are, you, this figure strolling through all my lingering visions of slow landscapes, ancient interiors and lavish ceremonies of silence. In all my dreams you either appear as a dream or else accompany me like a false reality. With you I visit regions that are perhaps dreams of yours, lands that are perhaps embodiments of absence and cruelty, your essential body fashioned into a quiet plain or a mountain with a chilling profile in the garden of some hidden palace. Perhaps my only dream is you, perhaps when I press my face to yours I will read in your eyes those impossible landscapes, those false tediums, those feelings that inhabit the gloom of my wearinesses and the grottoes of my disquiets. Who knows, perhaps the landscapes of my dreams are simply my way of not dreaming you? I don’t know who you are, but do I know precisely who I am? Do I know what it means to dream in a way that merits calling you my dream? How do I know that you are not a part, possibly a real, essential part, of me? And how do I know that I am not the dream and you the reality, or that I am your dream rather than you being a dream I am dreaming?
What kind of life do you have? What way of seeing is this way I have of seeing you? Your profile? It is never the same and yet never changes. And I say this because I know it, even though I do not know that I know it. Your body? Seeing it naked is the same to me as seeing it clothed, seeing it seated is the same as seeing it lying down or standing. What does this mean, simply that it means nothing?
You belong to the sex of dream shapes, the non-sex of figures […]
A mere profile sometimes, a mere pose at others, at still others barely a slow gesture – you are moments and poses made spirit in mine.
There is no implied sexual attraction in my dreaming of you, beneath your vague Madonna robe of inner silences. Your breasts are not the sort one would think of kissing. Your body is entirely flesh-and-soul, but never body-and-soul. Your flesh is not spirit, but spiritual. You are the woman from before the Fall, formed out of the first mud of paradise.
My horror of real women, sexual women, I mean, is the path I took to find you. Those earthly women, who in order to be […] must bear the agitated weight of a man – who can love them? who does not feel love dissolving at the mere thought of sexual pleasure? Who can respect his Wife and not think of her simply as a woman in another sexual position? Who does not feel disgusted to have had a mother, to have been so vulval in his origins, so vilely expelled into the world? Who is not revolted by the idea of our soul’s carnal origin, of the corporeal turbulence out of which our flesh is born, and which, however beautiful, is soiled by its origin, its birth?
The false idealists of Real Life gild the Wife with poetry, kneel before the idea of the Mother… Their way of dreaming is a garment that conceals, not a dream that creates.
Only you are pure, Lady of Dreams, whom I can imagine as an immaculate lover because you don’t exist. I can imagine you a mother and adore you because you were never soiled by the horrors of being impregnated or of having given birth. How could I not adore you, when you alone are worthy of adoration? How could I not love you, when you alone are worthy of love?
Perhaps by dreaming you, I am creating a real you, but in another reality; perhaps you will be mine there, in that other purer world, where we will love each other but never touch, with a different kind of embrace and other more essential ways of possessing one another? Perhaps you existed already, and I did not create you, but merely saw you with a different way of seeing, interior and pure, in another, more perfect world? Perhaps my dreaming you was simply finding you, perhaps my loving you was simply seeing you, perhaps my scorn for the flesh and my feelings of revulsion were only the obscure desire with which, before I knew you, I was waiting for you, and the vague hope that, even without knowing you, I loved you?
I really don’t know if I loved you already, in a vacuum for which perhaps my perennial tedium is a kind of nostalgia. Perhaps you are another sort of nostalgia, a physical absence, a distant presence, female perhaps for reasons other than your being female.
I can imagine you both a virgin and a mother because you are not of this world. The child you hold in your arms was always a tiny infant and so you never had to soil it by carrying it in your womb. Since you were never other than you are now, how could you be anything but a virgin? I can love you and adore you because my love does not possess you and my adoration does not drive you away.
Be the Eternal Day and let my sunsets be the rays from your sun, possessing itself in you!
Be the Invisible Twilight and let my desires and disquiets take on the colours of your indecision and the shadows of your uncertainty.
Be Total Night, become the Only Night, and let my whole self be lost and forgotten in you, and may my dreams shine like stars in your body full of distance and denial…
Let me be the folds of your cloak, the jewels in your crown and the starry gold of the rings on your fingers.
I could be ashes in your hearth, what does it matter if I am mere dust? Or a window in your room, what does it matter if I am mere empty space? Or an hour in your hourglass, what does it matter if I pass, if, because I am yours, I will endure; what does it matter if I die if, because I am yours, I will not die, or if I lose you, if losing you means finding you?
Creator of absurdities, disciple of sexless sentences. Let your silence rock me to sleep, let your merely-being caress and soothe and comfort me, O Herald from the Beyond, O Empress of Absence, Virgin Mother of all Silences, Hearth and Home of shivering souls, Guardian Angel of the abandoned, Human landscape – unbelievably sad – eternal Perfection.
My life is so sad, and yet I do not even consider weeping over it; my hours are so false, and I do not even dream the gesture that might end them.
How could I not dream you? How could I not?
Our Lady of the Hours that Pass, Madonna of stagnant waters and dead algae, Tutelary Goddess of vast deserts and dark landscapes of barren rocks, free me from my youth.
Consoler of the inconsolable, Tears of those who never cry, Hour that never sounds – free me from joy and happiness.
Opium of all silences, Lyre never to be plucked, Stained-glass Window of distance and abandon – may I be hated by men and scorned by women.
Dulcimer of Extreme Unction, touchless Caress, Dove lying dead in the shadows, Balm of hours spent sleeping – free me from religion because it is gentle and from unbelief because it is strong.
Lyre fading at evening, Coffer of withered roses, Silence between prayer and prayer – fill me with loathing for life, hatred for health, scorn for youth.
Make me useless and sterile, O Reaper of all empty dreams; make me pure for no reason and deceitful with no lover to deceive, O Rushing Stream of Sadnesses Endured; let my mouth be a landscape of ice, my eyes two dead lakes, my gestures a slow unleaving of old trees – O Litany of Disquiets, O Purple-Mass of Weariness, O Corolla, O Fluid, O Ascension!
How it grieves me to have to pray to you as if to a woman and not love you as I would a man, and not to be able to hold you up to the eyes of my dream like the Topsy-turvy-Dawn of the unreal sex of those angels who never got into heaven!
You are not a woman. You do not even evoke within me something I might experience as feminine. It is only when I speak of you that the words I use name you as female, and my expressions give you female shape. And because I must speak to you as if in a tender, loving dream, the words only find a voice for this by addressing you in the feminine.
But you, in your vague essence, are nothing. You have no reality, not even your own. I do not, properly speaking, see or even feel you. It is like a feeling that is its own object and belongs entirely to its innermost self. You are always the landscape I was just about to glimpse, the hem of a dress I did not quite see, lost in an eternal Now that lies just around the corner. Your profile relies on you not being anything and the shape of your unreal body unstrings and scatters the pearls of the very idea that you even have a shape. You have already passed, you have already been, I have already loved you – that is how I feel your presence.
You occupy the intervals of my thoughts and the interstices of my feelings. That is why I neither think you nor feel you, or, rather, when I feel your presence, my thoughts are ogival and when I evoke you, my feelings are gothic.
Moon of lost memories shining down on the dark landscape, bright in the stillness of my imperfect understanding. My being feels you vaguely, as if it were an invisible belt encircling you. I bend over your white face reflected in the nocturnal waters of my disquiet, but I will never know if you hang in my sky in order to cause that disquiet or are instead a strange submarine moon merely feigning disquiet.
If only I could create a New Way of Looking with which to see you, as well as New Thoughts and New Feelings with which to think and feel you!
When I attempt to touch your mantle, my words drain of all energy the very effort of reaching out, and a stiff, painful weariness turns my words to ice. Like the flight of a bird that seems to be approaching but never arrives, that same weariness hovers above what I would like to say about you, but the matter of my sentences is incapable of imitating the substance or the sound of your footsteps or the trace left behind by your glances, or the sad, empty colour of the gestures you never made.
I am speaking seriously and sadly; this matter is not a joyful one, because dream joys are sad and contradictory and, for that reason, pleasurable in a particularly mysterious way.
Sometimes inside me, I cast an impartial eye over those absurd, delicious things that I cannot see because they are apparently illogical – bridges that begin nowhere and go nowhere, streets with no beginning and no end, upside-down landscapes – the absurd, the illogical, the contradictory, everything that detaches and distances us from the real and from its misshapen retinue of practical thoughts and human feelings and desires for useful, effective action. The absurd saves us, despite the tedium, from that state of soul that begins with the sweet fury of dreaming.
And somehow I find a strange, mysterious way of envisioning those absurdities – I don’t know how else to explain it, but I see things of which visibility cannot even conceive.
Let us absurdify life from east to west.
Out of my abstention from collaborating in the existence of the outside world comes, among other things, a curious psychic phenomenon.
By abstaining internally from action, taking no interest in Things, I can see the outside world, when I look at it, with perfect objectivity. Since there is no point, no reason to change it, I do not.
[And thus I…]
My dreams: since I create friends in my dreams, I walk with them. Their alien imperfection…
Be pure, not in order to be noble or strong, but to be yourself. To give love is to lose love.
Abdicate from life in order not to abdicate from yourself.
Woman is a good source of dreams. Never touch her.
Learn to separate out ideas of voluptuousness and pleasure. Learn to enjoy everything, not for what those things are, but for the ideas and dreams they provoke. Because nothing is what it is, and yet dreams are always dreams. That is why you must not touch anything. If you do, your dream will die, and the touched object will take over your feelings.
Seeing and hearing are the only noble things that life contains. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy lies in not touching. Do not get too close – that is true nobility.
It is noble to be timid, illustrious not to know what to do, great to have no talent for living.
Only Tedium, which is a form of aloofness, and Art, which is a form of scorn, gild our [life] with a semblance of contentment.
The will-o’-the-wisps given off by our own putrefying selves do at least provide light in our darkness.
Only unhappiness raises us up – and the tedium we draw from that unhappiness is as heraldic as being the descendant of distant heroes.
I am a well of gestures never made, of words never thought or spoken, of dreams I forgot to dream until the end.
I am the ruins of buildings that were never more than ruins that someone, in the midst of building them, grew tired of even wanting to build.
Let us not forget to hate those who take pleasure in things because they take pleasure in them, to despise those who are happy because we ourselves do not know how to be happy. That false scorn, that feeble hatred, are merely the rough, grubby pedestal on which we raise up, haughty and unique, the statue to our Tedium, a dark shape on whose face glows an impenetrable, darkly secret smile.
Blessed are those who do not entrust their lives to anyone.
This dreadful hour that either shrinks into possibility or grows into mortality.
May the dawn never break, and may I and this whole room and the atmosphere to which I belong be distilled into Night, into absolute Darkness, and let nothing remain of me, not even a shadow that defiles with my memory whatever is left behind.
Anything that involves action, be it war or reasoning, is false; and anything that involves abdication is false too. If only I knew how not to act and how not to abdicate from action either! That would be the dream crown of my glory, the silent sceptre of my greatness.
I do not even suffer. My scorn for everything is so great that I despise myself; for since I despise other people’s suffering, I also despise my own, and thus I crush my own suffering beneath the weight of my disdain. Ah, but then I only suffer more, because giving value to one’s own suffering gilds it with the golden sun of pride. Great suffering can give us the illusion of being Pain’s Chosen One.
Money is beautiful, because it is a liberation...
Wanting to go and die in Peking and not being able to is something that weighs on me like the idea of some imminent cataclysm.
The buyers of useless things are always wiser than they think: they are buying small dreams. They are children when it comes to buying. They are drawn to small, useless objects, which beckon to them when they realise there is money to be spent, and the buyers take possession of them as gleefully as a child picking up shells from the beach! For a child, no two shells are ever alike. He falls asleep with the two prettiest ones clasped in his hand, and when they are lost or thrown away – a near-crime, as if bits of his soul had been stolen or fragments torn from his dreams! – he weeps like a God who has been robbed of his newly created universe.