Christmas, a poem by Fernando Pessoa

Christmas

One God is born. Others die. Truth
Did not come or go. Error changed.
Eternity is different now.
What happened was better always.

Blind Science plows the useless sod.
Fool Faith lives the dream of its observance.
A new God is but a word.
Search not, nor believe. All is hidden.

From a Notebook that Never Was

From a Notebook that Never Was, by Fernando Pessoa [via 3:AM Magazine]:

"Believing in nothing firmly and therefore accepting as equally valid, in principle (which is as far as they go), all opinions, and considering that a theory is worth only as much as the theorist, an emotion as much as the emotion’s expresser, I could never take seriously the literary dogma that consists in the use of a personality. Personality is a form of belief and, like all belief, impossible for the reasoner.

"It’s a short step from believing in outer truth to believing in inner truth, from accepting a concept of the world as true to accepting a concept of our self as true. I don’t affirm that everything is fluid, since that would be an affirmation, but to our understanding everything is indeed fluid, and the truth, unfolding for us into various truths, disappears, since it cannot be multiple.

* * *

"Thank God for that ironic element in human destinies that makes dreams the mode of thought for the poor in life, even as it makes life the mode of thought—or thought the mode of life—for the poor in dreams.

"But even dreaming channeled through thinking ends up making me weary. At which point I open my eyes from dreaming, go to the window, and transfer my dream to the streets and rooftops. And it’s in my distracted and profound contemplation of so very many roof tiles divided into rooftops, covering the astral contagion of people organized into streets, that my soul becomes truly detached from me, and I don’t think, I don’t dream, I don’t see, I don’t need to. Then I truly contemplate the abstraction of Nature—of Nature, the difference between man and God."

This series of quotes, particularly the line about personality being a belief impossible to the reasoner, seemed an interesting response to a recent and frustrated rant from Black Sun Gazette on the struggle between rationalists and believers. As I keep pointing out, faith is about telling a story to contextualize our experiences, and what kind of story do rational atheists tell to cover the horror and randomness of being movements of particles? Are they even logically allowed to tell such stories?

Library of Unique Experiences

As a writer and avid reader it often worries me that in this hyper-modern world literature is becoming a rather insular art form: those who read read, and the rest, the majority, don't. This is one reason why I am fascinated by book lists such as these lists of the 50 best cult books or banned and challenged books. Hell, I even geek out over lists on Amazon, because sometimes these kinds of arbitrary collections can point me to books I ought to read, and even more importantly, suggest the extreme influence literature has had, and still has, on individuals.

For me however it is often not enough to read, or list, books that are inspiring, deviant, and fantastic for their own sake. Who hasn't tripped through the imaginations of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, or Poe? The more I read the more I become aware that one thing literature can do is describe, and allow us to experience, ever finer shades of being- much the way good classical music can create subtle emotional tensions through the contrast of chords, a masterful narrative can create as equally refined tensions through the tools of plot, language, identification. Of course, this has also meant for me a quest to discover ever more complex psychological narratives and descriptions of irreality, somewhat along the lines of Italo Calvino's idea of a library created out of books that only belong on the periphery of the established canon, the shamans and madmen of the book world, that by their tentative inclusion change our perceptions on the rest of our literally conjured experiences. On that note I want to present my own list of authors and texts that by haunting and redefining the canonical texts have been rather indispensable in my understanding of what is possible to experience.

Samuel Beckett- "Stories and Texts for Nothing," "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable," etc. While most people are familiar with "Waiting for Godot," the play that made him famous, few have braved Beckett's prose writing. Dense and dreamlike only scratch the surface, having been influenced heavily by Joyce and Proust, Beckett sets out to destroy every convention and form of thought available to language, so that we are left with plotless, settingless, and even characterless stories that nonetheless explore the despair and consciousness of what it means to be alive. Not for the casual reader, or even most experienced ones.

Nick Blinko- "Primal Screamer." The singer and artist of seminal anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, Blinko followed in the footsteps of many great artists by going insane. From the asylum he produced an album dedicated entirely to H.P. Lovecraft, and this novel. "Primal Screamer" charts his descent into madness and childhood regression from the perspective of his psychiatrist, who may also be going mad.

Jorge Luis Borges- "Labyrinths," etc. I won't say much because he's more well known these days. Storytelling as the philosophy of infinite regression. A must read.

Julio Cortázar- "Hopscotch," "All Fires the Fire," etc. Though Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa are perhaps the more widely known Latin American authors, Cortázar was also highly responsible for the Boom of Latin American Fiction in the 60s-70s. More urbane than Márquez's colonial-themed magical realism, Cortázar's work often deals with the loose boundaries of history and desire. Furthermore, his work "Hopscotch" has been hailed as the first hypertext novel or literary choose-your-own-adventure, featuring several chapters that can be inserted into the main text while remaining an immanently lyrical read.

Mark Z. Danielewski- "House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions." Also becoming more popular as his latest novel was nominated for several awards, Danielewski's "House of Leaves" was for years a cult classic circling around the internets. Personally I was not too impressed by his powers of storytelling, but was fascinated by the innovative, non-linear, and self-referential form of his texts, which are like reading trembling, labyrinthian, academic papers. And the idea of a house that continues to get larger inside itself gave me exquisite nightmares for about a week.

Mircea Eliade- "The Forbidden Forest," "Two Occult Tales," etc. Most famous as a scholar and founder of comparative religions, the Romanian Eliade always considered himself more of a storyteller. While the vast erudition of his academic work has a way of looping in on itself, his fiction does nothing but benefit from an intricate understanding of world mythological themes, put at the service of describing the psychological effects of time and the World Wars. He also writes some rather fantastic short stories based on his wide occult knowledge. A personal favorite.

Richard Hell- "Godlike," "Go Now." Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.

John Clellon Holmes- "Go." The novel that made the Beats a household word, and yet now falls outside the Beat canon. In the same vein as many other good author-wandering-around-aimlessly stories (cf. Henry Miller), "Go" gives an accurate portrait of the drunken striving and frightened insignificance of the best minds of his generation.

J.K. Huysmans- "Au Rebours (Against the Grain)," "Lá-Bas (Down There)." In the widely read "Portrait of Dorian Grey," Oscar Wilde has his character read a peculiar text that changes his life. That book happens to be "Au Rebours," which depicts the kind of decadent French lifestyle that Wilde only dreamed of living. Starting from this decadence, Huysmans manages to span the gamut of extreme experience in his works, from attending satanic masses to eventually joining a monastery.

Comte de Lautréamont- "Les Chants de Maldoror." Entirely unknown in its time, this work was eventually rediscovered by the surrealists who hailed it as one of the two masterpieces that informed their movement, especially the line: "The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." "The Songs of Maldoror" is a long imagistic prose poem about a relentless and possibly demonic anti-hero who has renounced God, mankind, and ultimately himself. Camus was also fascinated about this work and there are shadows of Maldoror in "The Stranger."

Stéphane Mallarmé- "Divigations," var. prose poems. While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.

Gérard de Nerval- "Aurélia," etc. The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.

Kenneth Patchen- "The Journal of Albion Moonlight." A major influence on the Beats and collaborator with jazz musicians, Patchen somehow taps into the collective horror of World War II, penning a disjointed and surreal journal of a group of people fleeing and raging against a ubiquitous army of wolves. Phenomenal and chilling, this is the 40s, an emotional intensity never reached in the work of Pynchon, including the ballsy move of making both Jesus and Hitler misunderstood minor characters to his plot. A must read.

Milorad Pavić- "Dictionary of the Khazars," etc. More experiments with non-linear narratives. This text weaves a mythic story over several centuries through tentatively connected encyclopedia articles that can be read in any order and sound like masterful fairy-tales. Pavić's other works take the form of crossword puzzles and tarot readings.

Victor Pelevin- "The Yellow Arrow." I haven't read any of Pelevin's other work, but the Yellow Arrow is a personal favorite. A dark allegory about life and the Russian State, in which a man who is riding on a train that never stops, houses countries of people, and the dead are thrown out the windows, begins to wonder what would happen if he were able to get off. Beautiful and simple.

Fernando Pessoa- "The Book of Disquiet." Pessoa distinguished himself by creating several distinct literary heteronyms, who are the authors of their own works. In "The Book of Disquiet," one of these invented authors muses about the uncertainty and tedium of his life, and desire to imagine something different. For some reason I couldn't get through the book (mostly due to my own disquiet), though lines and images from it come back to me from time to time.

Rainer Maria Rilke- "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Many are familiar with his "Duino Elegies," and some colleges even require his "Letters to a Young Poet" in freshmen classes, but Rilke's only novel remains somewhat of a mystery. Much like other existential, man-about-town texts, in which not much happens but a character's obsession becomes fully lived (cf. Sartre and nausea, Lautréamont and evil, Miller and sex), Rilke's Malte is troubled by the question of death and transcendence, and that place where the veil of reality is torn to reveal poetic meaning. Though as a whole the "Notebooks" wanders off without a proper finish, many of the scenes display a linguistic and imagistic virtuosity that I don't think is rivaled in any other piece of literature. A personal favorite, try to find Stephen Mitchell's masterful translation.

Bruno Schulz- "The Street of Crocodiles." An obscure Polish art teacher, Schulz wrote down his childhood memories as letters to a fellow teacher and later published them as short stories. While drawing on the clarity and warmth of early Proust, as well as the ability to let incidental objects trigger emotional memories, Schulz sets himself apart by being able to see the extreme magic and dark possibilities that are peculiar to childhood. A personal favorite. The title piece also later served as inspiration for a short film by the Brothers Quay.

Of course, like all lists, this one is far from comprehensive. Other authors I am just discovering now deserve to be on here, such as Felisberto Hernandez, José Donoso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, each of whom refines this library of unique experiences further. Hopefully others may read this and discover an author worth checking into, and if there are any texts that you have found inspirational or experientially exquisite, please post a comment.

borderlines of the imagination

I spent most of last night getting into Thomas Pynchon's "Mason and Dixon," figuring if I wanted to enjoy a tome right now I'd pick one with less current cultural prickliness than the latest Harry Potter. Once again I found myself overwhelmed, unable to stop turning pages, cast into a full world in the same way as when reading Pynchon's latest, "Against the Day." What strikes me the most about his writing is that Pynchon is an intelligent man. He has done extraordinary amounts of research in regards to the subject matter he's presenting, and in regards to just about everything else, and he knows how to weave it all into a compelling story which doesn't read like someone's narrated science manual. Furthermore he's also enough of a writer to not only understand his subjects, but to ignore all the truth of his knoweldge and make up his own sidereal histories to established persons and times, as if there were infinite number of histories, worlds to be historicized, waiting directly below this one, a Borgesian nest of worlds within worlds, each with its own sure dialects and idiosynchronicities, that can't quite be distinguished from but are certainly other than the world we live in. And there's a plot.

I had to put down Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude" because, despite how fascination his idea of assuming mulitple heteronyms to write under is, this is essentially a plotless notebook of moments of feeling rather glum and out of sorts with humanity, claiming to have fascinating dreams but not even telling us what they are, perhaps better titled a book of bemoaning. He is not even a Rilke with a prescience of vision and beauty beneath his Everyday which leaves one wondering just what the journalist really sees. Despite what I feel is a necessity to divulge the depths of the human mind and experience, one wants to at least wonder if something will change, some slightest event actually happen to break the author from their ennui into a sense of real life. Sartre looked at a tree and felt a profound nausea in that he was one with it, a spiritual enough experience in what is presented as an otherwise humdrum life, and because of that decides to look up an ex-lover. Not a terribly profound plot, but moving, because at the very least it goes somewhere. Even Pavic's recent "Dictionary of the Khazars," told in sprawling asymptotic encyclopedic entries that span space and time and religion and myth without ever quite being straightforward, has the ability to suggest that something happens to the characters, even if that happening is in the reader's own process of trying to assemble the disparate trains of thought. At least, entertaining, as it pushes the imagination, and the very act of reading.

Having felt creatively dry for days now, Pynchon's tome was like a refreshing drink, I was suddenly filled between his pages with ideas, scenes, a sense of something happening in the dark of my own internal narratives. He has created a world, which like all good worlds begs that it is quite possible to create others. The genius behind Tolkien's Middlearth is that it is self-contained, fleshed out, populated and mythologized to the utmost. Every line Tolkien wrote added to the fullness of his simulacraic reality, all the short stories and rejected fragments, so that we might have his grand trilogy, which is in itself not specifically a story but another chapter in the history of its world. The beauty, and curse, of dreams is that they are always set in their own realities, everyone's quite different, and more complicating it is a world with no set boundaries, that changes night by night so that a certain bridge you walked under five years ago no longer exists, and a strange tower now stands in its place which in itself never seems to quite stand still enough to tell how many floors it has, or who lives there, or if it is really there at all. Vague suggestions of denizens, deities, deep mythologies of the psyche, ever alluded to but never clearly explicated, forests and swamps and deserts that may indeed be nothing other than the dreamer's own body and somnolent processes.

Harry Potter may have his wizards' schools and loves and nemeses, but these elements can only belong, when all is written, to the world, to an externality of events driven more by economic fetishizing and the populaces that support it, than they can belong to himself. In the end Harry Potter's world can no longer sustain itself as a world, as it is not spun out of his own imagination with him as only a minor miracle worker in it, and he succumbs to the dustbins of all worn out marketing gimmicks. Arguably so does any element of history or the imagination, once the Author is done with them and moves on. Mason and Dixon, Bilbo Baggins, Bernando Soares, Harry Potter, the race of the Khazars, Borges himself, all these have passed on, returned to some post-formative, subterranean cavern underneath the ice shelves of cultural consciousness to be recycled back into the collective dreaming, to return next time with different faces, altered agendas, stripped of any original historicity and design, the only articulable world the one in which they somehow exist together, devoid of memories and the stories which birthed and bound them, lost names in the fabric of being nothing but someone else's character and never their own to invent, as we sometimes, barely, have the glimmering of possibility towards.

uncertain joys of the mind

"I too was happy, because I exist. I left the house with a great goal, which was, finally, to get to the office on time. But on this day the very compulsion of life participated in that other good compulsion which makes the sun shine in the hours stipulated by the almanac, according to the longitude and latitude of the places on the earth. I felt happy for not being able to feel unhappy. I walked down the street in a leisurely fashion, full of certainty, because, after all, the office was a known factor, the people in it known factors, all certainties. It shouldn't be surprising that I felt free, without knowing what I might be free of. In baskets set on the sidewalk along the Rua da Prata, the bananas for sale under the sun were of a grand yellow.

It takes very little to make me happy: that the rain had stopped, that the sun is shining brightly in this happy South, bananas that are more yellow for having black spots on them, the people selling them because they talk, the sidewalks of the Rua da Prata, the Tagus in the background, blue streaked with green turning to gold, this entire domestic corner of the Universal system.

The day will come when I will not see this any more, when the bananas on the side of the street will outlive me, the wisecracking women who sell them, and the day's newspapers, which the little man has spread out from one side of the corner to the other. I know very well that they will be different bananas, that the women will be different, and the newspapers will have, for anyone who bends over to look, a date different from today's. But they, because they do not live, last, even if they are different, while I, because I am alive, pass away even if I am the same.

I could make this moment more solemn by buying bananas, since it seems to me that all of the day's sun is projected into them as if it were a spotlight without a lamp. But I'm ashamed of rituals, symbols, of buying things on the street. The women might not wrap them properly or sell them as they should be sold because I don't know how to buy them as they should be bought. They might find my voice bizarre when I ask the price. It's better to write than to dare to live, even if living is nothing more than buying bananas in the sunlight, as long as the sun lasts and there are bananas for sale.

Later on perhaps... Yes, later on... Another man, perhaps... I don't know..."

from Fernando Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet"