Beyond-God and beyond-being: Uncreated and Yearning in Fernando Pessoa
Paulo Borges
(University of Lisbon)
Our working supposition is that one of the main sources in Pessoa’s work is to be
found in the experience that there is something in the subject, which is former both to the
constitution of the world and his presence in it, as well to what traditionally is presented as
its absolute principle, God. The feeling and the memory of this anteriority unfold in the
experience of non coincidence between himself, or the common identity that the subject
ascribes to himself and the world ascribes to him, and a deeper dimension which can’t be
objectified or characterized, that he fore-feels as an hidden nature not lost at all, as it is
present in the sense of its own absence and is reachable at different levels of consciousness,
and that throws the subject into the restlessness of a fundamental dissatisfaction and
inadequacy with what life, the world and its own subjectivity offer him. Among other
compositions of the young Pessoa, we believe this is displayed in the important 35 Sonnets,
written in English between 1910 and 1912, and corrected until their publication in 1918.
The confirmation of our supposition would show the remarkable rooting of Pessoa’s work
in that literature of a yearning exile1, that strongly characterizes the Portuguese tradition
and that raises to a theoretical consciousness of itself in the work of Teixeira de Pascoaes
and other members of the movement Renascença Portuguesa, whose magazine, “A Águia”,
introduced Pessoa to his first appearance before the public with an essay about the
“pantheist transcendentalism” of the “new Portuguese poetry”, from Antero de Quental
until Pascoaes and his followers2. A substantial part of Pessoa’s modernism and
sensationism would then precede and depend from what, apparently, it refuses the most, the
mystical-metaphysical experience implied in the traditional yearning lyrics, that in the poet
raise to the simultaneously sweet and sour experience of the union-scission in the
uncreated3.
Some of the 35 Sonnets allow a clear exemplification of this. Firstly, the sonnet
XXIV, here transcribed:
“Something in me was born before the stars
And saw the sun begin from far away.
Our yellow, local day on its wont jars,
For it hath communed with an absolute day.
Through my Thought’s night, as a worn robe’s heard trail
That I have never seen, I drag this past
That saw the Possible like a dawn grow pale
On the lost night before it, mute and vast.
It dates remoter than God’s birth can reach,
That had no birth but the world’s coming after.
So the world’s to me as, after whispered speech,
The cause-ignored sudden echoing of laughter.
That’t has a meaning my conjecture knows,
But that’t has meaning’s all its meaning shows”4
If we take the first four verses, the statement that “something” in himself was “born
before” the appearing of the symbols of what is more remote, visible and glowing in the
world, watching it “from far away”, can be read as the expression of inherency in the
uncreated and the absolute vision of the origins that unfolds in it, all the more since in the
presence of this communion “with an absolute day” the perception of every day’s life is
emphasized as something repetitious and aged5. It isn’t just about stating a birth and a
presence former to a particular set of inner-world beings, in this particular case the stars,
but to confess the experience that, when something comes into being, he is already there.
There is “something” in the subject which precedes the appearance of everything, being at
the same time presence and absolute vision. Thus, it can’t be accidental that what
distinguishes itself as the object of this vision happens to be precisely the sunrise, that
prestigious image of the appearing and unveiling of things, so relevant in the human
experience and the metaphysical and ontological western and planetary imaginary, as
demonstrated both by the word origin (from the Latin orior, meaning the appearing of the
stars, but employed specially in reference to the sun; where the notion of orient comes
from) and by the link between eôs (dawn) and eón (being, presence)6, indicating the being
as an appearing, a manifestation, not to forget the platonic affinity between the “Sun” and
the “Good”7, in line with the mythical-metaphysical Indo-European representation8. What
stands out in this Pessoa’s poem is the undetermined, pre-original and pre-manifested
instance, which is immanent in the subject as transcendence and vision of everything that is
and appears. One could say that it is the unconditioned of this transcendence, through
which it is nothing of what is and appears, that turns round in the totality of the vision that
contemplates the own rising of the condition of possibility of all life and visibility9.
In the following four verses it is particularized in what consists this anteriority and
transcendence, whose experience, though considered to be past, keeps being present in a
hidden way, as a light that can’t be objectified and is dragged by the poet “through the
night” of his “Thought”, such as the “trail”, only “heard” but never seen of a “worn robe”.
In this splendid image, what the poet brings with himself at any moment and becomes
present, along and beyond the obscurity of the thought directed to the worldly things, is that
1 Cf. Patrice Cambronne, Chants d’Exil. Mythe & Théologia Mystique, foreword by Alain Michel, Bordeaux, William Blake and Co. / Ar & Arts, 1997; Maria José de Queiroz, Os Males da Ausência ou a Literatura do Exílio, Rio de Janeiro, Topbooks, 1998; Cláudio Guillén, O Sol dos Desterrados. Literatura e Exílio, translated into Portuguese by Maria Fernanda de Abreu, foreword by Almeida Faria, Lisboa, Editorial Teorema, 2005.2 Cf. Fernando Pessoa, A Nova Poesia Portuguesa, in Obras, II, edited with forewords and notes by António Quadros, Porto, Lello & Irmão – Editores, 1986, pp. 1145-1203.3 About the yearning (saudade) in Pessoa, cf. the yet always rich work of Alfredo Antunes: Saudade e Profetismo em Fernando Pessoa. Elementos para uma Antropologia Filosófica, Braga, Publicações da Faculdade de Filosofia, 1983.4 Fernando Pessoa, “35 Sonnets”, XXIV, in Poesia Inglesa, I, edition and translation by Luísa Freire, Lisboa, Assírio & Alvim, 200, p. 56.5 Cf. the paradigmatic experience, already present in Antero de Quental, in the sonnet “Torment of the Ideal”: “I knew Beauty that doesn’t die / And I got sad. […]” – Sonetos, edition, introduction and notes by Nuno Júdice, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1994, p. 45.6 Cf. Carlos Silva, “Dos Signos Primitivos”, Análise, vol. 2, n.º 1 (Lisbon, 1985), published by Publicações GEC, pp. 189-275, p. 205 and note 119, p. 251. Cf. P. Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque. Histoire des mots, Paris, Klincksieck, 1968; Ch. H. Khan, “The Verb “Be” in Ancient Greek”, in AAVV, The Verb “Be” and its Synonyms. Philosophical and Grammatical Studies, ed. by J. W. M. Verhaar, Dordrecht-Boston, Reidel Publications, 1973.7 C. Plato, A República, 508 b-c.8 Cf. Mircea Eliade, Tratado de História das Religiões, Lisboa, Cosmos, 1977, pp. 161-163.9 In the sonnet VII, as a complement of this pre-existing in relation with the stars, the subject states that he comprises them, developing with this a questioning argument of his immortality: “Shall that of me that now contains the stars / Be by the very contained stars survived ?” – Fernando Pessoa, “35 Sonnets”, XXIV, in Poesia Inglesa, I, p. 22.
same vision of its original appearing. Described, nevertheless, as the “Possible” or the dawn
of the manifestation that, instead of triumphing and accomplishing in firm and obvious
realization and being, looses glow and clearness and becomes undefined, moving back to
the darkness, silence and vastness of the unmanifest, such as “a dawn grown pale / on the
lost night” that precedes it. It isn’t after all absolutely “lost”, then, as the image suggests,
gradually as the subject gets forward having the horizon as an object enlightened by his
own looking, always the dragged tail of his robe, invisible but audible, ties him to that
unmanifest and makes it present in a sensitive, though trans-objective, way. It is in the
latent presence of the “Night” of the unmanifest or uncreated, everlasting former and wider
than the day of the manifestation, that the other “night”, the one of the “Thought”, is
accused of not being able to catch a glimpse of that in the heart from where it rises and
constitutes, neither the vision of universal potentiality, nor the unlimited that precedes it
and to where after all it returns.
It is this double instance, felt but ignored both in conceptual and intellectual terms,
since it is transcendent to thought, that the subject carries any moment within himself. And
it is this, the uncreated and the full vision of universal potentiality, in other words, what in
the subject is transcendence and absolute anteriority, that we can understand in the next
triplet as “remoter” than “God’s birth”, that consisted in no more than the “world’s coming
after”. The uncreated and the full vision of the possible, inherent to the subject, are
transcendental and former to a God that only appears as such through the constitution of the
world, even if the creative or manifestation principle belongs to him. Without the appearing
of the world, as a created or manifested effect, that would neither be nor appear as principle
and God, remaining in that primordial indeterminacy, which can’t be something else than
one and unique, that for this reason can’t be anything but the “something” which is
irreducibly transcendent and former to all. Thus, what in this case is stated is “something”
that in the subject transcend all that is possible and all the real, including what traditionally
is pointed out and represented as its transcendent source, God himself, that in this context,
while presupposing an otherness at an ideal and real level, is just a determined, manifested
and created form of that “Possible” and of that absolute uncreated that the subject brings
within himself. Indeed, if what one thinks to be God is after all the absolute itself, it
coincides with that “something” that there is in the subject and that transcends everything.
However, to apprehend it and nominate it as “God” implies that the experience one makes
of him is made in the duality between a subject and an object or a cause and an effect,
conferring him a determination that refers him to the domain of what has a beginning, a
concept and predicates. Thus, the latent uncreated in the subject is irreducible to any
divinization, as well as to any theology and metaphysics. To divinize him and think him
both as God to the human conscience and as God to himself is to diminish and degrade him
from the absolute to the domain of the relation.
Pessoa seems to move here, in what concerns the western tradition, on the line of
Plotinus, where the transcendence of the ineffable one excludes the thinking and the being
for himself, distancing from Aristotle’s vision10 that is prolonged, secularized, in Hegel’s
one. He shows as well a remarkable affinity with the Master Eckhart ‘s vision-experience
of a primordial state of absolute immanency, where what will be determined as subject is
“free from God and everything”; it is just as far as it willingly exiles from there and
constitutes itself as a “created being”, that, together with the appearing of the “creatures”,
this ineffable depth is determined as God for himself and for them11. That’s why, in this
eternal uncreated condition, “unborn” and fore-subjective, former to the determination of
the self, the world and God, the future subject “is above God” while “principle of the
creatures”12, whereas, in reality, it is his not less eternal “birth” or passage to the subjective
and transient determination that originates the determination of “everything” and of “God”
himself as such13.
This affiliation in the western tradition extends to the eastern one as well, and
between one and the other to the handling of the matter in the portuguese tradition, where at
least since Antero the vital and impersonal absolute, present at the deepest bottom of the
subject and the universe, transcends all the personification, divinization and cult,
understood as the “Idolatry” that shrouds him when he is nominated as “God”14. It is an
important matter of the contemporaneous portuguese thought, present in the vision of
10 Cf. Aristotle, Metafísica, A 7, 1972 b 19. Cf. Plotin, Enéadas, VI2, 7, 37, pp. 111-112; 7, 41, p. 117; 8, 9, p. 145; 8, 12-13, pp. 148-150. Cf. Paulo Borges, “O desejo e a experiência do Uno em Plotino”, Philosophica,, n.º 26 (Lisbon, November, 2005), pp. 175-214.11 Cf. Meister Eckhart, Pr. 32, in Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, edited and translated by Josef Quint, Zurich, Diogenes, 1979, pp. 304-305 and 308.12 Cf. Ibid., p. 308.13 Cf. Ibid., p. 308. Cf., on these issues, Paulo A. E. Borges, “Ser ateu graças a Deus ou de como ser pobre é não haver menos que o Infinito. A-teísmo, a-teologia e an-arquia mística no sermão “Beauti pauperes spiritu...”, de Mestre Eckhart”, in Philosophica, 15 (lisboa, 2000), pp. 61-77.
“God” in Pascoaes as “the only perfect atheist”, among whose diverse meanings stands out
the one that “God”, while absolute, is not God for himself15, being instead an infinite source
of possibilities, out of which totality the manifested God as such is but one: “In the Infinite
all is possible, even God himself !”16. A converging perspective can be found both in José
Marinho and Agostinho da Silva, among others, and the most significant is that it always
precedes and converges to one experience-summit of transcending what traditionally is
presented as the transcendent itself.
If in Pessoa, sometimes, the surpassing of God is presented as a desire as intense as
the prayer of Master Eckhart in order that God liberates him from him17, however without
an addressee, as when he speaks of the “overflowing, absurd desire of a satanic kind that
preceded Satan, that one day – a day without time or substance – one will find a escape
outward from God and the deepest in us will give up, I don’t know how, being a part of
being or of not being”18, in another text, perhaps from the same period of rewriting of the
35 Sonnets, with a clear gnostic and oriental influence and in a heterodox dialogue with
theosophy, it is stated, nevertheless, that “God, the God Creator of Things” is “just a
manifestation” of the “Unique”, that, while a emanating “center of the creative” and
affirmative “powers”, is itself “an Illusion”. “God is the Supreme Lie”, not as a simple false
belief of the human mind, but as a process of self-illusion of a being and conscience
equivocated as to their own reality: “God exists, in fact, to himself; but God is wrong”;
“God thinks he exists, but he doesn’t”. The divine conscience suffers from the illusory
belief in its intrinsic existence that affects all beings, which are not absolutely, since “the
being itself is but the Not-Being of the Not-Being, the deadly statement of Life”. In an
easier way, the being of all beings, including the one from God, is just a determination –
and, therefore, one denial – of the unthinkable that transcends the “Unique” itself and that,
stranger to the “Intelligence”, through it and for it is thought as “Not-Being”19.
This denunciation of the equivoque of the divine being for himself, besides the
contusive metaphysical blasphemy that strikes straightly against the “I am who I am” of the
revelation in Exodus (3, 14), ground of the Christian onto-theology, raises the question of 14 “Que vivi sei-o bem...mas foi um dia,/ Um dia só – no outro, a Idolatria / Deu-me um altar e um culto... ai ! adoraram-me, // Como se eu fosse alguém ! como se a Vida / Pudesse ser alguém ! – logo em seguida / Disseram que era um Deus... e amortalharam-me!” – Antero de Quental, Sonetos, p. 107.15 Cf. Teixeira de Pascoaes, Santo Agostinho (comentários), Porto, Livraria Civilização, 1945, pp. 275-276.16 Id., Duplo Passeio, in A Beira (num relâmpago) / Duplo Passeio, Obras Completas, X, introduction and critical notes by Jacinto do Prado Coelho, Lisboa, Livraria Bertrand, 1975, p. 187.
who is the one that is able to state the divine mistake of existing for himself. Going back to
the commented sonnet, we believe that it only can be the uncreated “something” that there
is in the subject, the transcendent “spectator” – an expression of Pascoaes to name the
same20 - which, former to everything, witnesses the total spectacle of the birth and
constitution of the world, including God’s one, that just through the becoming of things will
be determined as such. Former to the world and to God, seeing that God is subsequent to
the world, we understand that in the presence of this uncreated and contemplative instance
the world can be as a “sudden echoing of laughter” without a known cause. If its
traditionally supposed cause, that is, God, is after all its effect, the becoming of the world
appears expressed by an image of a pure and spontaneous irruption. As it is said in the last
lines, one conjectures that it has a sense, but this sense doesn’t display more than its
conjectural existence and not what it really is. The experience narrated in the poem is of a
radical and absolute pre-existence in the subject, former to the world and God, that allows
him the vision of universal becoming with a spontaneity whose sense is undetermined and
irreducible to any reason, entity or specific finality.
A second sonnet, XXXI, seems to confirm the most relevant features of this
experience, introducing some new elements.
“I am older than Nature and her Time
By all the timeless age of Consciousness,
And my adult oblivion of the clime
Where I was born makes me not countryless.
An exile’s yearnings through my thoughts escape
For daylight of that land where once I dreamed,
Which I cannot recall in colour or shape
17 “Darum bitten wir “Gottes”, da wir “Gottes” ledig werden...”, “Darum bitte ich Gott, da er mich Gottes quitt mache” – Mestre Eckhart, Pr. 32, in Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, pp. 305 e 308.18 Bernardo Soares, Livro do Desassossego, in Fernando Pessoa, Obras, II, edition, introduction and notes by António quadros, Porto, Lello & Irmão – Editores, 1986, p. 601.19 Cf. Rafael Baldaia, Tratado da Negação, in Fernando Pessoa, Textos Filosóficos, organization, introduction and notes by António de Pina Coelho, I, Lisboa, Ática, 1993, pp. 42-44.20 Cf. the references of Pascoaes to the “spectator” that “isn’t no angel, neither demon”, to the “contemplative and eternal spectrum” or, more radically, to the “souls [that are] only soul”, that not only don’t participate in the drama and fall of the divine demiurge - being not as the “poets, accomplices of God in the crime of the Creation” -, as well as they “don’t even pretend to be spectators” – Teixeira de Pascoaes, O Bailado, introduction by Alfredo Margarido, Lisbon, Assírio & Alvim, 1987, 11-13, 78, 86, 88-89, 99.
But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed
And yet is not as light remembered,
Nor to the left or to the right conceived;
And all round me tastes as if life were dead
And the world made but to be disbelieved.
Thus I my hope on unknown truth lay; yet
How but by hope do I the unknown truth get ?”21
Here, the subject asserts as well to be former to “Nature” and “its Time”, claiming
perhaps for a timeless “Consciousness”, that precedes metaphysically the level where the
temporal nature of things and beings is developed. Yet, as a new element in this experience,
appears the yearning as that disturbing, desiring tie between what the subject is at the level
of the temporality and the “clime” or “land” where “once” it was born and dreamed. This
burning desire that rises from an experience of “exile”, this yearning, as a tie to what is
really desired, is intimately articulated with the knowledge of being former to everything
that is developed at the level of the temporality. Though there is an “adult oblivion” of that
primordial dimension of oneself, which is perhaps the one of a childhood simultaneously
metaphysical and of age, this oblivion inherent to the being that develops temporally
doesn’t bereave absolutely the subject of that metaphysical country or nation, of that place
of timeless consciousness, where he appeared and somehow always lasts previous to the
temporal nature. The own conscience of the “exile” and the “oblivion” show the belonging
to something that transcends them, assured by the yearning as a desire of returning to the
daylight of that instance where once was lived the experience of dreaming, that is, of the
non-limitation of what is possible. As in the precedent sonnet, in a very similar vision and
expression, it is through the night of thinking and of the thoughts, that is, of the conceptual
level of the mind, connoted with the darkness22, that the yearning escapes demanding the
daylight that has been previously experienced. Here is sketched a movement of vertical and
metaphysical returning, which is complementary to that former dragging of the non-
objective primordial vision of the possible and the uncreated in the midst of existence.
21 Fernando Pessoa, “35 Sonnets”, XXXI, Poesia Inglesa, I, p. 70.22 Cf. also another expression very alike: “closed sea and black night of Thought” – Ibid., XX, p. 48.
However, by determining the yearning vision of that metaphysical space of an
original belonging, Pessoa recognizes in it the same non-representable trans-objectivity.
Being impossible to “remember in colour or figure” or to conceive as one of the terms of an
antinomy, it isn’t after all “as light remembered”, though it shades its present experience as
something that “hath gleamed”. The yearning is an impulse and movement towards the
reintegration of what transcends any representation, image and concept at all.
Finally, as in the precedent sonnet, this feeling of a yearning belonging, in union and
scission, to something former and transcendent to everything, but that can’t be enjoyed
fully, turns into a lack of potentiation of the experience in the world. It is larger here than
behind, because all that is around the subject has the flavour of “dead” life and the world
appears to him as deprived of reality23. Accompanying this disbelief in the world, the
sonnet ends with the statement that just through “hope” one will reach the “unknown truth”
where it is entrusted. This “hope”, as an alternative way of a knowledge that transcends the
limits and the fallibility of thinking and of the conceptual and imagistic representations,
seems to come close to what we understand here by yearning, that is, the burning desire of
the metaphysical instance that the subject states as his own place. Hope is, in fact, one of
the elements in the definition of “saudade” (yearning) in Teixeira de Pascoaes: “If
remembrance is its soul, the desire, the hope is the flesh and the living blood of its body”24.
In another English sonnet of Pessoa is confirmed the presence of yearning as the
painful tie and burning desire of the subject to what it feels and remember as its primordial
place, before being born, living and dying, when is stated the “old sadness for the immortal
home” that accompanies it in the “widening circle of rebirth”, each time that the “soul”, in
its journey, arrives at a “new flesh” and “try again the unremembered earth”25. Should be
remarked here that what is remembered yearningly is essentially the metaphysical
23 The proximity is even bigger with “Tormento do Ideal” , Antero’s sonnet mentioned before: “Thus I saw the world and what it encloses / To loose the colour, […] – Antero de Quental, Sonetos, p. 45. The feeling about the false reality of the world, associated with the incapacity of thought to know truly, are also well emphasized in sonnet XXVI: “The world is woven all of dream and error / And but one sureness in our truth may lie - / That when we hold to aught our thinking’s mirror / We know it not by knowing it thereby”; “We know the world is false, not what is true. / Yet we think on, knowing we ne’er shall know” – Fernando Pessoa, “35 Sonnets”, XXXI, Poesia Inglesa, I, p. 60. 24 Cf. Teixeira de Pascoaes, “Os meus comentários às duas cartas de António Sérgio”, A Águia, n.º 22, II Série (Porto, 1913), in AAVV, Filosofia da Saudade, selection and edition by Afonso Botelho and António Braz Teixeira, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1986, p. 72; O espírito lusitano ou o saudosismo, in Ibid, p. 25.25 Cf. Fernando Pessoa, “35 Sonnets”, XX, Poesia Inglesa, I, p. 48.
fatherland and what is forgotten is the “earth” of the incarnated existence, where
supposedly one has to relearn mournfully to live every time that prenatal home is
abandoned.
In the remaining poetry in English language, Pessoa often expresses this experience
which is converted into one mystical-metaphysical impulse towards the liberation of the
being conditioned by life and existence. Abreast of the yearning as the inmost breath of that
impulse, we find immediate and effective experiences of the transfiguration of the
perception of reality that could be framed in the “peak experiences” of Maslow26, in the
“savage mystic” of Michel Hulin27 and, generally, in the so-called “altered states of
consciousness”28. In “Anamnesis”, from 1915, a landscape is evoked, painful for its
extreme beauty, where “great antenatal flowers” recall to the subject his “lost life, before
God”, also referred as his lost “childhood before Night and Day”29. The double meaning of
“before” opens two possibilities of interpretation, although both are confirmed in other
Pessoa’s compositions. If in both cases it goes back to a pre-existence, the reminiscence
could be from a “lost life” in the presence of God or former to his appearing, following
what we found in the first commented sonnet. But this alternative can be transcended,
allowing a more unitary reading of many poems, if we remember that in Pessoa, as in
Pascoaes and in other portuguese thinkers, what conventionally is named as “God” can
point out to something that is not “God” for himself, like that furtive “King of Gaps”, the
“unknown king” that reigns over the space between things and beings, a stranger to the
categories of time and space, without a beginning or an end, “void presence” that is nothing
but a “chasm” and from which it is said: “All think that he is God, except himself” 30. This
abyssal and empty instance, to which Pessoa’s subject so often seems to be more intimate
than to himself, indicates in this vision what escapes from the God’s mistake that “thinks he
exists, but he doesn’t” 31. Anyway, this or that antenatal childhood is not absolutely or
irremissibly lost, as in the poem that expresses the experience of a communion with “the
lost thing that gleams”. In it, the poet feels himself “God’s moon’s node, / A child again,
outside life’s road”, remembering him, though inversely, the same sense of separation that
he had when he awoke “from God” and felt the “world” around him32. It is this sentiment of
a pre-existence in the infinite and unconditioned, be it God or what precedes the appearing
of the experience and the idea of God, it is this sentiment of having had “a self and life /
Before this life and self”33, associated with the experience of returning to him, due to the
strength of yearning that changes time into something vertically reversible, that is
expressed in the vehement desire of going beyond oneself, of being another, of having a
perception not conditioned by the self and of dissolving after all in God as the true “self”
and “home”, mixing in “His peace” like “a scent with the breeze”34. On the other hand,
abreast and as a complement of that mystical reencounter and desire of a union that frees
from time, place and word35, there is the feeling that in it become possible new and
transfigured forms of experience of oneself and the world. That “Foreself” is one “unknown
being”, where the conventional self vanishes and “mazes of I” will open into another
experience “where to see is to know”, free from the “vain vision” of the dualistic perception
of the conglobating36. Those are the “happy hours” of life, when the subject feels that it is
not living, not centered in himself37. Or, in another approach, when the liberation of the
conventional self and the return to the unutterable bottom without bottom of everything
flourishes in one vision-communion in which all the things are intimately connected and
“outward” and “inward” become “one”, so as “disparity” and “unity”, revealing a “New
God” inseparable from the experience of oneself as “center” of “nothing”-“all”38. The
vision of “how God everything is” transfigures the subject, who proclaims to be “another”,
feeling that the “senses” belong not to him, deepening so the divine totality in such a way
that leads him to feel “like a child-king crowned”, “robed with sky and ground”39. The
possibility of this somewhat pantheistic ecstasy appears, however, accompanied by another
possibility, more radical in our opinion, which is the effective dissolution of all referents of
meaning, as it happens in the composition expressively called “The Abyss”, where the poet
paradoxically speaks of an inner “impossible stream” that drags to a “sea” always
unattainable “all the things” from which his “thought is made of – Thought / Itself”, “the
ideas of God, of World, / Of Myself and of Mystery”40. In this experience, truly without a
bottom, all the common referents are dissolved – God, I/man, world – that structure and
condition both the traditional metaphysics and their deconstructions.
Thus, we believe that in the original experiences from where proceed these
mystical-metaphysical orientations of the English poetry can be found the grounds of many
of the most well-known motives of Pessoa’s production, namely the constitutive emptiness
and insubstantiality of the subject, that changes him into the stage of the psychodrama of
the autodemiurgic heteronimy – “I can imagine anything of myself, because I’m nothing. If
I were something, I couldn’t imagine”41 - , and the “being” / “feeling everything in all
manners”42, a Dionysian and simultaneous assumption of all possibilities in and from their
matrix’s abyss.
(translation by Jorge Telles de Menezes)
26 A. H. Maslow, Religions, values and peak-experiences, Columbia, Ohio State University Press, 1974.27 Cf. Michel Hulin, La Mystique Sauvage, Paris, PUF, 1993.28 Cf. Georges Lapassade, Les états modifiés de conscience, Paris, PUF, 1987.29 Cf. Fernando Pessoa, “Anamnesis”, Poesia Inglesa, I, pp. 256 and 258.30 Cf. Id., “The King of Gaps”, Ibid., p. 280.31 Cf. Rafael Baldaia, Tratado da Negação, in Fernando Pessoa, Textos Filosóficos, p. 44. 32 “I feel me God’s moon’s node,/ A child again, outside life’s road,/ Remembering how I found me/ When I awoke from God/ And felt the world around me” – Id., “Chalice”, Ibid., pp. 258 and 260. This last experience should be compared with the sentiment of a sudden fall from a remote “aerial” and glowing world into the “circus” of beasts of existence, in Antero de Quental – “No Circo”, Sonetos, p. 132. 33 Cf. Fernando Pessoa, “The Foreself”, Poesia Inglesa, I, p. 274. 34 Cf. Id., “To One Singing”, Ibid., pp. 272 and 274.35 “One day, Time having ceased, / Our lives shall meet again, From Place and Name released./ Only that shall remain/ Of each of us that may/ Seem natural to that Day” – Id., “Summerland”, Ibid., p. 302. 36 “There are mazes of I./ I am my unknown being,/ I have, I know not why,/ Another kind of seeing/ (Other than this vain vision/ That is my soul’s division/ From what girds sight about)/ Where to see is to know,/ […]” – Id., “The Foreself”, Ibid., p. 276.37 “My life has happy hours:/ ‘Tis when I feel not living” – Ibid., p. 276.38 Cf. Id., “Fiat Lux”, Ibid., pp. 288, 290 and 292.39 Cf. Id., “A Summer Ecstasy”, Ibid., p. 292 and 296.40 Cf. Id., “The Abyss”, Ibid., p. 286.41 Cf. Bernardo Soares, Livro do Desassossego,edited by Richard Senith, Lisbon, Assírio & Alvim, 1998, p. 185. Cf. Paulo A. E. Borges “”Posso imaginar-me tudo, porque não sou nada”. Vacuidade e auto-criação do sujeito em Fernando Pessoa” in Pensamento Atlântico, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2002, pp. 319-332; “Posso immaginarmi tutto perché non sono niente. Se fossi qualcosa non potrei immaginare”. Vacuità e autocreazione del soggetto in Fernando Pessoa”, Simplegadi – Rivista di Filosofia Interculturale, Anno 9, n.º 25 (Padova, Ottobre 2004), pp. 65-80 (translation by Antonio Cardiello).42 Cf. among many other places, Fernando Pesoa, answer to “Portugal, vasto Império”, survey by Augusto da Costa, in Obras, III, introductions, organization, bibliography and notes by António Quadros, Porto, Lello & Irmão – Editores, 1986, pp. 703-704; Álvaro de Campos, “Passagem das Horas”, in Obras, I, introductions, organization, bibliography and notes by António Quadros and Dalila Pereira da Costa, Porto, Lello & Irmão – Editores, 1986, p. 933.
