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A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe

Page 12

by Fernando Pessoa


  To the East which is everything we don’t have,

  Which is everything we’re not,

  To the East where—who knows?—perhaps Christ still lives,

  Where perhaps God really exists and rules over all . . .

  Come over the seas,

  Over the widest seas,

  Over the seas without definite horizons,

  Come and pass your hand over the back of that wild, watery

  beast,

  Mysteriously calming it,

  O hypnotic tamer of greatly agitated things!

  Come, ever considerate,

  Come, ever maternal,

  Come on tiptoe, ancient nurse who sat

  At the bedside of the gods of lost religions

  And witnessed the birth of Jehovah and Jupiter

  And smiled because for you all is false and useless.

  Come, silent and ecstatic Night,

  Come wrap your white mantle

  Around my heart,

  Serenely like a breeze on a balmy afternoon,

  Gently like a mother’s soothing gesture,

  With the stars shimmering in your hands

  And the moon a mysterious mask on your face.

  All sounds sound different

  When you come.

  All voices hush when you enter.

  No one sees you enter.

  No one knows when you have entered

  Except of a sudden, when everything starts to withdraw,

  When everything loses its edges and colors,

  And high above, in the still bluish sky,

  As a distinct crescent, a white circle, or just a sliver of

  new light,

  The moon begins to be real.

  II

  Ah the twilight, nightfall, the lights turning on in big cities,

  And the hand of mystery that stills the hubbub,

  And the weariness weighing on everything in us, hindering

  An active and accurate feeling of Life!

  Each street is a canal in a Venice of tediums,

  And how mysterious the unanimous end of the streets

  When the night falls, O my master Cesário Verde,

  Who wrote “Sentiment of a Westerner”!

  What profound restlessness, what longing for other things

  That aren’t countries or moments or lives!

  What longing for perhaps other kinds of moods

  Inwardly moistens this lingering, remote instant!

  A horror that sleepwalks among the city’s first lights,

  A mild and fluid terror that leans against street corners

  Like a beggar waiting for impossible sensations

  Without knowing who might bestow them . . .

  When I die,

  When I go away—ingloriously, like everyone—

  Down that road whose very idea we can’t face directly,

  Through that door we’d never take if we could choose,

  Toward that port that’s unknown to the captain of the Ship,

  Let it be at this hour of day, worthy of all the tedium I’ve

  suffered,

  This ancient and spiritual and mystical hour,

  This hour in which perhaps, much longer ago than it seems,

  Plato, dreaming, saw the idea of God

  Shaping body and existence as something perfectly plausible

  In his thoughts externalized like a field.

  Let it be at this hour that you take me off to be buried,

  At this hour when I don’t know how to live,

  When I don’t know what to feel or pretend I feel,

  At this hour whose mercy is tortured and excessive,

  Whose shadows come from something other than things,

  Whose passing drags no robes over the ground of

  Sensible Life

  Nor leaves any fragrance on the paths of Sight.

  Cross your hands on your knee, O consort I don’t have or

  wish to have,

  Cross your hands on your knee and look at me in silence

  At this hour when I can’t see that you’re looking at me,

  Look at me in silence and in secret, and ask yourself

  —You who know me—who I am . . .

  30 JUNE 1914

  MARITIME ODE

  Alone this summer morning on the deserted wharf,

  I look toward the bar, I look toward the Indefinite,

  I look and am glad to see

  The tiny black figure of an incoming steamer.

  It’s still far away but distinct, classic in its own way.

  It leaves a useless trail of smoke in the air far behind it.

  It’s coming in, and the morning with it, and here and there

  Along the river maritime life begins to stir:

  Sails are hoisted, tugboats advance,

  Small boats jut out from behind the anchored ships.

  There’s a slight breeze.

  But my soul is with what I least see,

  The incoming steamer,

  Because it’s with the Distance, with Morning,

  With the maritime meaning of this Hour,

  With the sweet pain that rises in me like a queasiness,

  Like the onset of seasickness, but in my soul.

  I look at the far-off steamer with great independence

  of mind,

  And in me a flywheel slowly starts spinning.

  The steamers coming in around the bar in the morning

  Bring to my eyes

  The happy and sad mystery of all who arrive and depart.

  They bring memories of distant wharfs and other moments

  Of another sort of the same humanity in other ports.

  Every landing and every sailing of a ship

  Is—I feel it in me like my own blood—

  Unconsciously symbolic, terribly

  Fraught with metaphysical meanings

  That stir up in me the man I once was . . .

  Ah, every wharf is a nostalgia made of stone!

  And when the ship shoves off

  And we suddenly notice a space widening

  Between the wharf and the ship,

  Then I’m hit by a fresh anxiety I can’t explain,

  A mist of sad feelings

  Glistening in the sun of my grassy anxieties

  Like the first dawn-lit window,

  And it wraps me as if it were someone else’s remembrance

  Now mysteriously mine.

  Ah, who knows, who knows

  If I didn’t already set sail from a wharf

  A long time ago, before I ever was—if I, a ship

  In the slanting light of dawn,

  Didn’t already depart from another kind of port?

  Who knows if, long before the outer world as I know it

  Dawned for me,

  I didn’t already depart

  From a large wharf full of a few people,

  From a large, half-awakened city,

  From a huge, commercial, overgrown and apoplectic city,

  As far as this is possible outside of Space and Time?

  Yes, from a wharf, a wharf in some sense material,

  Real, with the form of a wharf, a wharf in fact,

  The Absolute Wharf whose model we’ve unconsciously

  imitated,

  Unwittingly evoked, to build

  Our wharfs that serve our ports,

  Our wharfs of literal stone over actual water,

  And once they’re built they strike us without warning as

  Real Things, Spirit Things, Soul-Stone Beings,

  At certain moments of root feeling

  When a door in the outer world seems to open

  And, without anything changing,

  Everything proves to be different.

  Ah the Great Wharf from where we set sail in Nation-Ships!

  O Great Primordial Wharf, eternal and divine!

  Of what port? Over what waters? And why do I wonder?

 
Great Wharf like other wharfs, but the only One.

  Rustling, like them, with predawn silences

  And blossoming with morning to the noise of cranes

  And arriving freight trains,

  Under an occasional, thin black cloud

  Of smoke from nearby factories

  That shades the black and shiny, coal-sprinkled ground

  Like the shadow of a cloud passing over dusky waters . . .

  Ah, what essence of mystery and senses arrested

  In revelatory divine ecstasy

  At hours colored by silence and anxieties

  Forms the bridge between any wharf and The Wharf!

  Wharf blackly reflected in still waters,

  The bustle on board ships,

  O wandering, restless soul of people who live in ships,

  Of symbolic people who come and go, and for whom

  nothing lasts,

  For when the ship returns to port

  There’s always some change on board!

  O never-ending flights, departures, drunkenness from

  Diversity!

  Eternal soul of navigators and navigations!

  Hulls slowly mirrored in the water

  As the ship pulls out of port!

  To float like life’s soul, to sally forth like a voice,

  To live the moment gently tossing on eternal waters,

  To wake up to days more immediate than Europe’s,

  To see mysterious ports bordering the sea’s solitude,

  To round far-off capes and find sudden vast landscapes

  Of countless startled slopes . . .

  Ah, the distant beaches, the wharfs seen from afar,

  And then the beaches close up, the wharfs in plain view.

  The mystery of every departure and every arrival,

  The sad instability and inscrutability

  Of this impossible universe

  Felt more deeply in the skin with each passing maritime

  hour!

  Our souls’ absurd sobbing

  Over the expanses of diverse seas with isles in the distance,

  Over the distant islands flanking the coasts not visited,

  Over the ports that grow clearer with their houses and people

  As the ship approaches.

  Ah, how fresh the mornings of arrivals are,

  And how pallid the mornings of departures,

  When our insides tighten into a ball

  And a vague sensation akin to fear

  —The ancestral fear of leaving what we know and going away,

  The mysterious ancestral fear of Arrival and the New—

  Makes us shrink in our skin with anxiety.

  And the whole of our anguished body, as if it were our soul,

  Feels an inexplicable desire to feel all this

  In some other way.

  There’s a nostalgia for something,

  A stirring of affection, but for what uncertain country?

  What coast? What ship? What wharf?

  The thought languishes,

  And we’re left with a large inner void,

  A hollow satiety of seaborne minutes,

  And a vague anxiety that would be weariness or sorrow

  If it knew how to be either . . .

  Even so, the summer morning is slightly cool.

  A slight torpor of night still wafts in the shaken air.

  The flywheel in me spins a bit faster.

  And the steamer is coming in, because I know it must be

  coming

  And not because I can see it moving at such a great distance.

  In my imagination it’s already close by and visible

  All up and down its rows of portholes,

  And everything in me trembles, all my muscles and flesh,

  Because of that person who never arrives in any boat

  And whom I’ve come to wait for today, because of an

  oblique command.

  The ships coming in around the bar,

  The ships setting out from ports,

  The ships passing in the offing

  (I imagine myself watching them from a deserted beach),

  All these abstract ships about to depart—

  All these ships move me as if they were more

  Than mere ships, ships coming and going.

  And ships seen from up close, even if we’re not going to

  embark on them,

  Seen from below, from the skiffs, next to the steel

  broadsides,

  Seen from inside, in the cabins, the lounges, the storerooms,

  Seeing up close the masts tapering high overhead,

  Brushing against the ropes, descending the cramped

  stairways,

  Smelling the greasy metallic and maritime mixture of all

  this—

  Ships seen from up close are something else and are the

  same,

  Stirring the same nostalgia and the same yearning in

  another way.

  The seafaring life! All that it embraces and all that it is!

  All of its sweet seduction filters into my blood,

  And I daydream indefinitely of voyages.

  The distant coastlines, flattened by the horizon!

  The capes, islands, and sandy beaches!

  The maritime solitudes, like certain moments in the Pacific

  When by the power of some suggestion learned in school

  Our nerves feel the weight of its being the largest ocean,

  And the world and the taste of things become a desert in us!

  The splashier, more human expanse of the Atlantic!

  The Indian Ocean, the most mysterious of all!

  And the Mediterranean, without mystery, soft and classical,

  a sea that washes

  Esplanades eyed by white statues in nearby gardens!

  How I’d love to hold all seas, all straits, all bays and all gulfs

  Against my chest, feel them close, and die!

  And you, O nautical things, my old dream toys!

  Be my inner life, outside me!

  Keels, masts and sails, helms, rigging,

  Smokestacks, propellers, topsails, pennants,

  Tiller ropes, hatchways, boilers, pipes and valves,

  Fall inside of me in a heap, one big heap,

  Like the jumbled contents of a drawer dumped out on the

  floor!

  Be the treasure of my feverish greed,

  Be the fruit of the tree of my imagination,

  Theme of my songs, blood in the veins of my intellect,

  The aesthetic link between me and the outside!

  Provide me with metaphors, images, literature,

  Because really and truly, seriously, literally,

  My sensations are a boat with its keel in the air,

  My imagination a half-sunken anchor,

  My yearning a broken oar,

  And the web of my nerves a net left to dry on the beach!

  Somewhere on the river a single whistle blows.

  The entire ground of my psyche is now trembling.

  The flywheel in me keeps moving faster.

  Ah, the steamers, the voyages, the not-knowing-the-

  whereabouts

  Of so-and-so, a seaman of our acquaintance!

  Ah, the glory of knowing that a man who palled around

  with us

  Was drowned off an island in the Pacific!

  We who knew him will tell this to everyone

  With all due pride and a quiet conviction

  That all this has a broader and more beautiful meaning

  Than just the loss of the ship on which he sailed

  And his sinking to the bottom with his lungs full of water!

  Ah, the steamers, the coal ships, the sailing ships!

  How rare, alas! sailing ships are becoming on the high seas!

  I who love modern civilization and kiss machines with all

  my soul,


  I the engineer and sophisticate who studied abroad,

  Would love to see once again only wooden ships and sailing

  vessels,

  To know no other seafaring life besides the ancient life of the

  seas!

  For the ancient seas are Absolute Distance,

  The Pure Faraway, free of the weight of Today . . .

  Ah, how everything here reminds me of that better life,

  Of those seas that were larger, since navigation was slower,

  Of those seas that were mysterious, since no one knew much

  about them!

  Every faraway steamer is a nearby sailing ship.

  Every distant ship seen now is a ship from the past

  seen up close.

  All the invisible sailors aboard ships on the horizon

  Are visible sailors from the time of the old vessels,

  From the slow, sail-driven age of perilous voyages,

  From the wood and canvas age of voyages that took months.

  The delirium of maritime things slowly takes hold of me,

  The wharf and its atmosphere physically penetrate me,

  The surging of the Tagus inundates my senses,

  And I begin to dream, to be wrapped by the dream of the

  waters,

  The transmission belts on my soul start turning hard,

  And I’m visibly shaken by the flywheel’s increasing speed.

  The waters call me,

  The oceans call me,

  The faraway calls me with a bodily voice,

  And it’s every seafaring age there ever was, calling.

  It was you, Jim Barnes, English sailor and my friend,

  Who taught me that ancient English cry

  Which so virulently sums up

  For complex souls like mine

  The confused call of the waters,

  The uncanny, implicit voice of all maritime things,

  Of shipwrecks, of long voyages, of dangerous crossings.

 

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