F.P. 101 (cont.)

II. Anatomy of Fascination

I'm so full of feeling
I can easily believe
I must be sentimental
But when I mull this over,
I see it's all in thought,
I felt nothing whatever

All of us alive spend
One life in living it,
Another, thinking it.
And the only life we have
Is split between
The true one and the false.

But which is true
And which is false
No one can explain.
And as we go on living,
The life we spend's the one
That's doomed to thinking.
- Fernando Pessoa
I'm So Full Of Feeling


I was a kid when I heard this story about Bobby Fisher, arguably the greatest chess player in history. Fisher, according to the story, trained himself for important matches by playing against himself. Himself. Bobby Fisher playing white against Bobby Fisher playing black. The rationale was that he wanted to train against somebody equal, if not better, than him to be able to reach greater heights, and to him that other person was nobody but himself.

To many people, Bobby Fisher was just full of himself. To me, he was like Fernando Pessoa, so full of feelings. But of course Pessoa was not the Fisher of literature (the latter came to the world much later). I mean he could be, plus more.

And that more is this: Pessoa was a four-in-one poet, a multiplex artist of labyrinthine structures spewing labyrinthine expressions. When great writers had pseudonymns, Pessoa had heteronyms - dramatis personaes who existed outside of himself, alter egos with their own egos - each one gaining a following. His heteronyms were poets in themselves, everyone bestowed not only with a name but personality, physical attributes, religion, birthdate, writing syle, and school of thought.

There was Alvaro de Campos, a Jewish world traveller born on Oct. 15, 1890 at 1:30 p.m., naval engineer, dynamic, and free-spirited. His words, his thoughts...

Yes, yes, yes...nail me to your sea ventures
And my shoulders will love the weight of the cross!

Do what you want with me,
so long as it's done at sea,
On deck, to the sound of the waves.
Wound me, kill me, tear me apart!
What I'd like is to bring to Death
A soul spilling over with the Sea.

And then there was Ricardo Reis, born in 1887, a doctor who lived in exile in Brazil, Whitman-inspired, neoclassical, isolated, a constant searcher. Let us give audience to his loneliness...

I'm beginning to know myself. I don't exist.
In the space between what I'd like to be and
what others made of me.
Or half that space, because there's life there too...
So that's what I finally am...
Turn off the light, close the door, stop shuffling
your slippers out there in the hall.
Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.
It's a cheap world.

And still there was Alberto Caeiro, born in 1889, died in 1915, he had no profession nor education, he was a pastoralist, an almost innocent man living in the country. He, too had some melancholic things to say...

I have no philosophy: I have senses...
If I speak of nature, it's not because I know what Nature is,
But because I love it, and that's why I love it,
For a lover never knows what he loves,
Why he loves or what love is...
Love is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not to think.

And finally, there's Bernardo Soares, a great writer of prose, not really a heteronym but more of Pessoa himself, to whom The Book of Disquiet was attributed, and who Richard Zenith described as "a mutilated Pessoa, with missing parts." Hear, then...

All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don't act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary.

What words, I am fascinated! And my fascination becomes a retort to how Pessoa described The Book of Disquiet: as his cowardice. Hear me now, sir, with all my literary pleasure...

You are my bravery.