17 June 2020
In Part 1, I examined the metapolitics and philosophy of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. We can also learn much about psychology from his life and writings, wisdom that can be applied for our own daily adversities, and important elements of myth and ritual. Pessoa made it clear that the seventy-five heteronyms he created, were all different facets of his own identity - how he related to himself and various situations - not a superficial escapism to temporarily cope: "These imaginary personae were not a disguise, an attempt to conceal the author, the way a pseudonym would. At any rate, it was known in literary circles right from the beginning that Pessoa was behind them. He called them heteronyms, a word he seems to have coined."(1) Each day he viewed as offering lessons and potential, so that these heteronyms were broadly part of his lifelong journey as he wrote: "What I am one hour, I am not the next hour; what I've been one day, the next day I've forgotten."
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| Illustration by Colombian graphic designer Carolina Zambrano that excellently conveys Pessoa's allusions to psychology and growth |
In Part 1, I examined the metapolitics and philosophy of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. We can also learn much about psychology from his life and writings, wisdom that can be applied for our own daily adversities, and important elements of myth and ritual. Pessoa made it clear that the seventy-five heteronyms he created, were all different facets of his own identity - how he related to himself and various situations - not a superficial escapism to temporarily cope: "These imaginary personae were not a disguise, an attempt to conceal the author, the way a pseudonym would. At any rate, it was known in literary circles right from the beginning that Pessoa was behind them. He called them heteronyms, a word he seems to have coined."(1) Each day he viewed as offering lessons and potential, so that these heteronyms were broadly part of his lifelong journey as he wrote: "What I am one hour, I am not the next hour; what I've been one day, the next day I've forgotten."
Introduction to His Heteronyms. A mirror image of Pessoa was Bernardo Soares, through whom he expressed his most direct and conscious thoughts. He was the Pessoa who moved around various translation and publishing jobs, at times melancholic and always his mind wandering through the reflections of his beloved Lisboa, so that through him Pessoa found ultimate purpose even amidst the mundane. So it was that he wrote on 30 December 1932: "Each of us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self. That's why the same person who scorns his surroundings is different from the person who is gladdened or made to suffer by them. In the vast colony of our being there are many different kinds of people, all thinking and feeling differently."(2)
Beneath this immediate reflective self of Soares, Pessoa constructed three primary heteronyms through whom he was resolving deeper issues within himself and harmonizing the different aspects of himself - a very effective Shadow Work. One of these, Álvaro de Campos, was "born" in Tavira on 15 Oct. 1890 and lived for awhile in Scotland - a reflection of Pessoa's own youth in South Africa. This saudade for Portugal and the outside world simultaneously is a metaphor for reconciling various emotions to arrive at a contentful soul. Like a Lusitanian xamã, Campos occupied liminal places: "I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the abstract, carnal halfway house between things."(3)
Ricardo Reis - the "oldest" of Pessoa's heteronyms, "born" in Porto in 1887 - was heir of the Stoic and Epicurean paganism which overcame both love of life and fear of death; and Alberto Caeiro represented Pessoa's simple nature and direct intuition, "our spirit only as the preceptor of that reality."(4) Caeiro was "born" in Lisboa in 1889, lived most his life in the countryside, and "died" in 1915. In a letter, Pessoa said that Caeiro "appeared" in him on 8 March 1914, "the triumphant day of my life."(5) Calling him his "Master" who personified "wisdom of the senses": "Pessoa said in the letter that the emergence of Alberto Caeiro meant the non-existence of Fernando Pessoa. This makes perfect sense. Caeiro, the sensationist poet, is the antithesis of Pessoa, the Sebastianist with mystical leanings. There is an unbridgeable gap between the doctrine of sensationism and the occult, which seeks meaning beyond the visible."(6) Caeiro defined his intuitive "philosophy of non-philosophy" thusly: "The main thing is knowing how to see / To know how to see without thinking."(7)
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| Scene from the mirador near the Carmo Convent ruins, 30 June 2017. Such a scene would have engendered self-reflection for Pessoa, who lived most of his life in the adjoining streets. |
Everything contains lessons. Through the character of Bernardo Soares, who reveled in the mundane and trivial details of his life(8), Pessoa conveyed the idea that everything contains lessons, no matter how small or insignificant. This he did in his most well-known work, Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquiet), a journal written over two decades. "It is a rule of life that we can and must learn from everyone. There are serious matters in life to be learned from charlatans and bandits, there are philosophies to be gleaned from fools, real lessons of fortitude that come to us by chance and from those who depend on chance. Everything contains everything else."(9)
Through the heteronym of Soares, Pessoa was asserting the human personality through the functions set by society, a duality where Soares was both fulfilling his role but transcending it at the same time through his limitless imagination. Among the themes Pessoa was exploring was the existence of deeper realities that can't be quantified, and the value within escapism - not excessive thinking all the time, but a true balance of the left and right brains. Even seeing the value within the "stupid": "Only one thing surprises me more than the stupidity with which most men live their lives and that is the intelligence inherent in that stupidity."(10) Pessoa saw the development of human cognition in the same way:
"No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. Collective thought is stupid because it's collective. In youth we're twofold. Our innate intelligence, which may be considerable, coexists with the stupidity of our inexperience, which forms a second, lesser intelligence. Only later on do the two unite. That's why youth always blunders - not because of its inexperience, but because of its non-unity."(11)
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| View from above the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, 29 June 2017. The glistening waters of the Tejo reflected Pessoa's imagination, and the expanses of Lisboa mirrored his conscious thoughts. |
Pessoa on Myth and Ritual. Successive thinkers like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell have lamented the loss of myth, ritual and initiation in modern Western societies, and the value in recapturing those elements that were always part of our cultures. As Max Weber observed: "The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world."(12) Through his heteronyms, Pessoa was exploring his own "Hero's Journey" and writing his own "Monomyth" to borrow two of Campbell's terms. He invested even the "mundane" with spiritual meaning, such as his interest in Alchemy - Soares conveying the idea that even something like commerce could be seen in light of transmutation. One symptom of this loss of Myth is the modern tendency to reduce that term to a symptom of something "untrue", whereas Pessoa held to the original definition of Myth in his epic poem Mensagem: "O mito é o nada que é tudo" ("Myth is the nothing that is everything").(13)
If ritual is truly about "the ancient technology of transition between identities" as noted by Jonathan Cook in his business-oriented analysis of Pessoa(14), then the great poet through his heteronyms was like a modern Lusitanian form of "shaman"(15) who traversed and integrated the various aspects of his personality - As Within, So Without - as he wrote on 18 June 1931: "Beneath the great blue canopy of the silent sky, I will always be a page caught up in some incomprehensible ritual, clothed in life in order to take part in it, and blindly going through the different gestures and steps, poses and mannerisms, until the party or my role in it ends and I can go and eat the fancy food."(16) He advised on a different occasion: "We should bathe our destines as we do our bodies, change our lives just as we change our clothes - not to keep ourselves alive, which is why we eat and sleep, but out of the disinterested respect for ourselves which can properly be called cleanliness."(17)
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| My own descent down the nine spiral levels of the Initiation Well, Quinta da Regaleira, Sintra, 30 June 2017. A place laden with esoteric and symbolic meaning that also inspired Pessoa. |
Cultivating a Second Self. Using what Jung later personified as "Archetypes" - certain allegories for psychological, cosmic and natural forces contained within the world's mythologies - many a writer or artist explored their own multifaceted personalities through a parallel self. The Roman Cicero advised cultivating a "second self" after studying the lives of historical heroes one can emulate not to run away from one's own identity but enhance one's own potentials. The Florentine political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli used to do this after a day's work in the fields and now assuming the role of the philosopher: "A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savor of it."(18)
This ties in with ritual, involving an actual transformation into this second self. We have lessons from our own indigenous European mythologies, for example when the Germanic god Wodan transformed himself after his ordeal for nine days and nine nights on the World Tree to obtain not just the Runes but truly the enlightenment within. Pessoa was especially fond of the Greco-Roman hero Odysseus, whose ordeals as immortalized by Homer in The Iliad can be allegories for the tests each one of us will face within our lifetime - it depends on how we learn from the trials, how we deal with the adversities, if we will rise when the occasions call for it or not. To emulate an Archetype is the antithesis of running away from internal problems through illusory behaviors, and so too did Pessoa approach his various heteronyms in such an inspiring way.
Even literary figures can shape us as Archetypes, such as I wrote in relation to what Miguel de Cervantes conveyed through the Castilian Archetype of Don Quixote. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer saw him as allegorical: "Don Quixote is an allegory of the life of every man who, unlike others, pursues an objective, ideal end that has taken possession of his thinking and willing; and then, of course, he stands out as an oddity in this world."(19) The eccentricities of Pessoa were also reflections of this deeper ideal, such as the specific rituals he was known to take when writing (he tended to stand rather than sit), the way he would sit at the cafe with a certain number of books and a specific drink, and a general sense of symbolism. For example, his heteronyms were each inspired by the four astral elements - air, fire, water, and earth - and designed according to their astrologies(20), each involving the "planet of literature" Mercury(21).
Performing embodied actions inspired by these Archetypes can be truly transformative, but only if structured in a way affirming one's own innate qualities. Pessoa foreshadowed the advice of the American psychologist George Kelly, "to realize here and now that our innermost personality is something we create as we go along rather than something we discover lurking in our insides or imposed upon [us] from without."(22) It calls for accepting that which cannot be changed but still being inspired to deal with adversities and overcome challenges. A character sketch of this "second self" can be done, such as the elaborate personalities and horoscopes that Pessoa created for his heteronyms. For these were representations of the multifaceted aspects of ourselves - our higher and lower self, our subconscious and conscious minds, etc. - as much as they convey the multiplicities inherent within Nature. Such a task we will further explore in the third and final part.
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| Parque Eduardo VII, Lisboa, 1 July 2017. Both the cultivated gardens and the spiral meandros on the streets contain personal metaphor as they would have for Pessoa. |
Footnotes and References:
(1) Zbigniew Kotowicz. Fernando Pessoa: Voices of a Nomadic Soul. Exeter, England: Shearsman Book, 2008, p. 41.
(2) Pessoa. Livro do desassossego / The Book of Disquiet. Lisboa: Edições Ática, 1982, p. 20.
(3) Álvaro de Campos, "Começo a conhecer-me. Não existo" / "I'm beginning to know myself. I don't exist."
(4) Pedro Teixiera da Mota, "Fernando Pessoa e os Mestres," 22 December 2017, <https://pedroteixeiradamota.blogspot.com/2017/12/fernando-pessoa-e-os-mestres.html>.
(5) Poems of Fernando Pessoa, eds. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998, pp. 3, 7.
(6) Kotowicz, op. cit., p. 47.
(7) Alberto Caeiro, "The Keeper of Flocks," XXIV.
(8) Ellen Sapega, "Contemporary Responses to the Fragments of a Modernist Self: On the Various Editions of Fernando Pessoa's Livro do Desassossego," in Homenagem a Alexandrino Severino: Essays on the Portuguese Speaking World, eds. Margo Milleret and Marshall C. Eakin. Austin, TX: Host Publications, Inc., 1993, p. 45.
(9) Livro do Desassossego, p. 182.
(10) ibid., p. 344.
(11) ibid., p. 104.
(12) Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," 1917.
(13) Pessoa, Mensagem, 1934, II. The Castles, Verse 1 "Ulysses".
(14) Jonathan Cook, "The 5 Strange Truths Fernando Pessoa Brings To Business," Oct. 10, 2017, <https://medium.com/@JonathanCCook/the-5-strange-truths-fernando-pessoa-brings-to-business-52af6454ae69>.
(15) I use this term generally, as the ancient Lusitanians had their own form of "shaman" that were closely parallel to the Druids of Celtic peoples.
(16) Livro do Desassossego, p. 482.
(17) ibid., p. 146.
(18) Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter VI, p. 1.
(19) Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1818-1819.
(20) Paulo Cardoso. Fernando Pessoa, cartas astrológicas. Lisboa: Bertrand editora, 2011.
(21) Pessoa's own birth coincided with Wednesday, symbolically and linguistically related to the god Wodan in Germanic countries, and to the Greco-Roman god Mercury throughout southern Europe. These two gods, and their equivalent Lugus whose veneration was widespread among the ancient Lusitanians, Celtiberians, and Gauls, all contain qualities related to poetry, inspiration, literature, words as a powerful medium, and arts and crafts generally.
(22) See "Using a Second Self to Promote Self-Transformation," <https://academyofideas.com/2020/03/using-a-second-self-to-promote-self-transformation/>.
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