THIRD WATCHER IS it absolutely necessary, even within your dream, that this mariner and this island existed?
SECOND WATCHER No, sister. Nothing is absolutely necessary.
FIRST WATCHER Tell us, at least, how the dream ended.
SECOND WATCHER It didn’t end ... I don’t know... No dream ends... How can I be sure that I’m not still dreaming it, that I’m not dreaming it without knowing it, and that my dreaming isn’t this hazy thing I call my life? ... Say no more ... I’m beginning to be sure of I don’t know what... The footsteps of some unknown horror are approaching me in a night that’s not this night... Whom might I have awakened with the dream I told you? ... I’m deathly afraid that God has forbidden my dream, which is undoubtedly more real than He allows ... Say something, sisters. Tell me at least that the night is ending, even though I know it... Look, it’s beginning to be day ... Look: the real day is almost here ... Let’s stop. Let’s think no more ... Let’s quit pursuing this inward adventure ... Who knows where it might lead us? ... All of this, sisters, happened during the night... Let’s say no more about it, even to ourselves... It’s human and fitting that we each adopt our own air of sadness.
THIRD WATCHER Listening to you was so beautiful. Don’t say it wasn’t... I know it wasn’t worth the bother. That’s why I found it beautiful... That’s not why, but let me say it was... What’s more, the music of your voice, which I listened to even more than your words, leaves me dissatisfied, perhaps because it’s music ...
SECOND WATCHER Everything leaves us dissatisfied, sister ... For people who think, everything wearies, because everything changes. People who come and go prove it, for they change with everything... Only dreams last forever and are beautiful. Why are we still talking? ...
FIRST WATCHER I don’t know ... (in a low voice, looking at the coffin) Why do people die?
SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they don’t dream enough ...
FIRST WATCHER It’s possible ... Then wouldn’t we be better off shutting ourselves up in our dream and forgetting life, so that death would in turn forget us? ...
SECOND WATCHER No, sister, we’re not better off doing anything ...
THIRD WATCHER Sisters, it’s already day... Look at the astonished line of the hills ... Why don’t we weep? ... That woman who pretends to be lying there was young like us, and beautiful, and she also dreamed ... I’m sure her dream was the most beautiful of all... What do you suppose she dreamed of? ...
FIRST WATCHER Lower your voice. Perhaps she’s listening, and already knows what dreams are for ...
(pause)
SECOND WATCHER Perhaps none of this is true ... This silence, this dead woman and this rising day are perhaps nothing but a dream ... Look closely at all this ... Does it seem to you that it belongs to life? ...
FIRST WATCHER I don’t know. I don’t know how something belongs to life ... Ah, how still you are! And your eyes look so uselessly sad ...
SECOND WATCHER It’s not worth being sad in any other way ... Don’t you think we should stop talking? It’s so strange to be living ... Everything that happens is unbelievable, whether on the mariner’s island or in this world ... Look, the sky is already green. The horizon goldenly smiles ... I feel my eyes burning from my having thought about crying ...
FIRST WATCHER You did cry, sister.
SECOND WATCHER Perhaps... It doesn’t matter... What’s this chill? ... Ah, it’s time, yes... the time has come! ... Tell me this... Tell me this one thing ... Why can’t the mariner be the only thing in all of this that’s real, and we and everything else just one of his dreams? ...
FIRST WATCHER Stop talking, stop talking ... This is so strange that it must be true. Say no more ... I don’t know what you were going to say, but it must be too much for the soul to bear ... I’m afraid of what you didn’t say ... Look, look, it’s already day. Look at the day ... Do everything you can to see only the day, the real day, there, outside ... Look at it, look at it ... It comforts ... Don’t think, don’t look at what you’re thinking ... Look at the day that’s breaking ... It shines like gold over a silver land. The wispy clouds are filling out and gaining color ... Imagine if nothing existed, sisters ... Imagine if everything were, in a way, absolutely nothing ... Why did you look at me like that? ...
(They don’t answer her. And no one had looked at anything.)
FIRST WATCHER What did you say that so frightened me? ... I felt it so strongly I hardly noticed what it was ... Tell me again so that, hearing it for the second time, I won’t be as frightened as the first... No, no ... Don’t say anything ... I didn’t ask that question because I wanted an answer but just to say something, to keep myself from thinking ... I’m afraid I might remember what it was ... It was something huge and frightful like the existence of God ... We should have already quit talking ... Our conversation stopped making sense a long time ago ... Whatever it is between us that makes us talk has gone on for too long ... There are other presences here besides our souls ... The day should have broken, and they should have woken up by now ... Something’s late ... Everything’s late ... What’s happening in things to make us feel this horror? ... Ah, don’t desert me ... Talk to me, talk to me ... Talk at the same time as me so that my voice won’t be alone ... My voice scares me less than the idea of my voice, should I happen to notice that I’m speaking ...
THIRD WATCHER What voice are you speaking with? ... It’s someone else’s ... It comes from some sort of distance ...
FIRST WATCHER I don’t know ... Don’t remind me of that... I should be speaking with the shrill and tremulous voice of fear ... But I no longer know how to speak. A chasm has opened between me and my voice ... All our talking and this night and this fear—all this should have ended, abruptly ended, after the horror of your words ... I think I’ve finally started forgetting the story that you told and that made me feel like I should scream in a new way to express such a horror ...
THIRD WATCHER (to the SECOND WATCHER) You shouldn’t have told us that story, sister. Now I marvel at being alive with even greater horror. Your story so engrossed me that I heard the meaning of your words and their sound separately. And it seemed to me that you, your voice and the meaning of what you said were three different beings, like three creatures that walk and talk.
SECOND WATCHER They really are three different beings, each with its own life. Perhaps God knows why ... Ah, but why are we talking? Who makes us keep talking? Why do I talk when I don’t want to? Why don’t we notice that it’s day? ...
FIRST WATCHER If only someone could scream to wake us up! I hear myself screaming on the inside, but I no longer know the path from my will to my throat. I feel a burning need to be afraid that someone will knock at that door. Why doesn’t someone knock at the door? It would be impossible, and I need to be afraid of that, I need to know what it is I’m afraid of... How strange I feel! ... It seems I’ve stopped speaking with my voice ... Part of me fell asleep and just watches... My dread has grown, but I’m no longer able to feel it... I no longer know where in my soul things are felt... A leaden shroud has been placed over my awareness of my body ... Why did you tell us your story?
SECOND WATCHER I don’t remember ... I hardly even remember that I told it... It already seems so long ago! ... What a deep sleepiness has fallen over my way of looking at things! ... What is it we want to do? What were we thinking of doing? I can’t remember if it was to talk or not to talk ...
FIRST WATCHER Let’s stop talking. The effort you make to talk tires me out... The gap between what you think and what you say grieves me ... I can feel in my skin my consciousness floating on the surface of my sensations’ terrified stupor. I don’t know what that means, but it’s what I feel ... I need to say longish, confusing sentences that are hard to say ... Doesn’t all of this feel to you like a huge spider that between us is weaving, from soul to soul, a black web we can’t escape?
SECOND WATCHER I feel nothing ... My sensations feel like a tangible thing ... Who am I being in this moment? Who is speaking with my voic
e? ... Ah, listen ...
FIRST and THIRD WATCHERS Who was it?
SECOND WATCHER Nothing. I heard nothing ... I tried to pretend to hear something so that you might think you’d heard it and I could believe there was something to hear ... Oh, what horror, what secret horror separates voice from soul, sensations from thoughts, and makes us talk and feel and think, when everything in us begs for silence and the new day and the unconsciousness of life ... Who is the fifth person in this room who extends a forbidding hand to stop us every time we’re about to feel?
FIRST WATCHER Why try to frighten me? I’m already bursting with more fear than I can hold. I already weigh too much in the lap of my self-awareness. I’m completely immersed in the warm mud of what I think I feel. Something that seizes and watches us has entered through all my senses. My eyelids droop over all my sensations. My tongue is stuck to all my feelings. A deep sleep glues all my ideas of gestures together. Why did you look at me like that? ...
THIRD WATCHER (in a very slow and faint voice) Ah, it’s time, the time has come ... Yes, someone has woken up ... There are people waking up ... As soon as someone enters, all this will end ... Until then let’s imagine that all this horror was a long sleep we’ve been having... It’s already day . .. Everything’s going to end . .. And the conclusion of all this, sister, is that only you are happy, because you believe in the dream ...
SECOND WATCHER Why ask me about it? Because I told it? No, I don’t believe ...
A rooster crows. The light brightens, as if suddenly. The three watchers, without looking at each other, remain silent.
On a road not far off an indefinite wagon creaks and groans.
11–12 October, 1913
To Fernando Pessoa
AFTER READING YOUR STATIC DRAMA The Mariner
After twelve minutes
Of your play The Mariner,
Whose utter lack of meaning
Makes the sharpest of minds
Go dull and grow weary,
One of the watching women
Says with languid magic:
Only dreams last forever and are beautiful. Why are we still talking?
Exactly what I wanted
To ask those women ...
ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS
THE MASTER AND HIS DISCIPLES
“The creation ofCaeiro and of the discipleship of Reis and Campos seems at first sight, an elaborate joke of the imagination. But it is not. It [is] a great act of intellectual magic, a magnum opus of the impersonal creative power.” So claimed Fernando Pessoa in a note datable to January 1930, by which time the poet seems to have lost all his modesty. Or could it be that he was just stating a fact? Even if we may doubt that the creation ofCaeiro and his poetic disciples wasn’t, at some level, a hearty as well as elaborate joke, it would be hard to deny the magical quality of Pessoa’s intellectual trick. Having divided himself among invented others, whom he claimed were no longer him, Pessoa could promote them without—theoretically—any personal stake in the matter. And he spared no pains to do just that. Besides all the commentary and praise that he instructed the minor heteronyms to heap on the major ones, and Campos and Reis on Alberto Caeiro (the two “disciples” were rather more critical of each other), Pessoa drew up quite specific plans for publicizing Caeiro’s work in magazines and newspapers, both at home and abroad, and he even drafted some promotional articles. One of these, written in English and headed by a list of the British publications where it was to be sent (including T. P.’s Weekly, Academy, and Athenaeum), explains to its potential readers:
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in relation to its time is, if anything, less original than Alberto Caeiro’s astonishing volume—The Keeper of Sheep (O Guardador de Rebanhos)—which has just appeared in Lisbon.
No one in Portugal’s literary milieu had ever heard of him. He appeared suddenly. And his contribution to Portuguese and European literature breaks away (...) from all traditions and currents that were valid in the past or are active today.
Was Pessoa really planning to blitz the papers with promotional pieces like this one? Probably so, but planning very far ahead, for he would first have had to publish the book ofCaeiro that they promoted, and he seemed in no hurry to publish anything in the way of books. He seems to have realized that time was on his side, such that none of his efforts would be wasted. And in his literary afterlife, on which he bet everything he had or was, Pessoa’s publicity schemes are indeed having their impact.
As a marketing strategist for himself, Pessoa was (begging Caeiro’s pardon) a veritable master, but the real “intellectual magic” of his enterprise resides in the logic of his psychological alchemies. We are all under the spell of Pessoa’s own explanations of who he was, or wasn’t. He left us not just inspired lines and not just inspired characters that recite inspired lines but a vast inspired system of logically interconnected ideas materialized in a literature of interconnected “Pessoa’s” (pessoa means “person” in Portuguese)—a cosmography not just of his multiplied self but of Western thought and philosophy as embodied by those various selves. Such, at least, was Pessoa’s ideal for his system, whose mechanics were perhaps his greatest poetic achievement.
Pessoa had a definite plan for the book ofCaeiro he never published. In fact he had various plans, but the final and most elaborate one called for a substantial introduction by Ricardo Reis, to be followed by Caeiro’s complete poems (The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love, and Uncollected Poems) with accompanying notes by Reis, a horoscope for the time of Caeiro’s birth (cast by Fernando Pessoa), and—finishing off the volume—Alvaro de Campos’s Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro. Most of Reis’s piecemeal but seemingly endless introduction probably dates from the late igios, though passages for it continued to be produced in the twenties. Had it ever been assembled, it would have amounted to a treatise concerned less with presenting Caeiro’s poetry than with explaining and defending paganism (as shown by excerpts from it found further on in this volume). Campos’s twenty-five or so Notes, left in a similar state of expanding disorder, were mostly if not all written in the 1930s, by which time Fernando Pessoa had taken the final step on his path of ironic self-effacement, declaring that he too was one of Caeiro’s “disciples”
Thomas Crosse, a translator and essayist who was responsible for taking Portuguese culture to the Anglo-American world, had the special mission of promoting the work of Alberto Caeiro. He was supposed to produce an English version of Caeiro’s poetry but never got beyond his “Translator’s Preface.”
Pessoa spent considerably less ink on prefatory and critical texts to promote Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos, though the latter was rather good at promoting himself, through his polemical articles and letters that appeared in the Portuguese press. I. I. Crosse, whose piece on Campos’s rhythmical skills is published here, was presumably the brother of Thomas. I. I. also wrote an essay titled “Caeiro and the Pagan Revolution.” Both brothers wrote exclusively in English. (Yet a third brother, A. A. Crosse, competed for cash prizes in the puzzle and word games featured in various English newspapers.) Pessoa, whose only full brother died in infancy, was fond of providing brothers for his heteronyms, and it is Frederico Reis who offers us a sympathetic account of brother Ricardo’s “sad Epicureanism.” Frederico also authored a pamphlet (as of this writing still unpublished) about the so-called Lisbon School of poetry, explaining that it was Portugal’s only truly cosmopolitan movement. The protagonists of the school were—not surprisingly—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos.
Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro
Álvaro de Campos
I met my master Caeiro under exceptional circumstances, as are all of life’s circumstances, especially those which in themselves are insignificant but which have outstanding consequences.
After completing, in Scotland, almost three quarters of my course in naval engineering, I went on a voyage to the Orient. On my return, I disembarked at Marseilles, unable to bear the tho
ught of more sailing, and came by land to Lisbon. One day a cousin of mine took me on a trip to the Ribatejo,* where he knew one of Caeiro’s cousins, with whom he had some business dealings. It was in the house of that cousin that I met my future master. That’s all there is to tell; it was small like the seeds of all conceptions.
I can still see, with a clarity of soul that memory’s tears don’t cloud, because this seeing isn’t external. ... I see him before me as I saw him that first time and as I will perhaps always see him: first of all those blue eyes of a child who has no fear, then the already somewhat prominent cheekbones, his pale complexion, and his strange Greek air, which was a calmness from within, not something in his outward expression or features. His almost luxuriant hair was blond, but in a dim light it looked brownish. He was medium to tall in height but with low, hunched shoulders. His visage was white, his smile was true to itself, and so too his voice, whose tone didn’t try to express anything beyond the words being said—a voice neither loud nor soft, just clear, without designs or hesitations or inhibitions. Those blue eyes couldn’t stop gazing. If our observation noticed anything strange, it was his forehead—not high, but imposingly white. I repeat: it was the whiteness of his forehead, even whiter than his pale face, that endowed him with majesty. His hands were a bit slender, but not too, and he had a wide palm. The expression of his mouth, which was the last thing one noticed, as if speaking were less than existing for this man, consisted of the kind of smile we ascribe in poetry to beautiful inanimate things, merely because they please us—flowers, sprawling fields, sunlit waters. A smile for existing, not for talking to us.
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Page 6