(no subject)

[proximoception]

Our lives - not the world, not life, but ours - are too large for us, for me to have hold of. My thoughts? I think too many things. My past? What there was to it, what pasts and futures of its own it accompanied, what a morning seemed to mean - not a tithe of a grit of all this looms near enough to memory to traceably alter the lighting of what's remembered. Most of what I own is strange to me. No pound of my flesh, no matter how artfully carved, would fail to repel me if met on the bus window. It's not that things fade and fall away till we're next to nothing. It's worse. In the sublime we encounter inside us the slag from seam-burstings without. With this other, though, before our foot can touch ground it must dig and slide through a hundred crumbling, dissimilar models. It's not a second sort of sublime but it makes the first possible, since once our view's cleared the ground always proves too close to dodge, too far to not crash when we land. We take the credit for what isn't ours - ourselves. We aren't the snowglobe. Most days we're not even its smallest tinsel fragment, but rather we're water in waters too wet to know just where we end.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

That bus window. Wow.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

"indistinct / As water is in water."

Also this reminds me of the very end of Proust.

It's great. Luckily not all one's moods are like this. Though maybe that doesn't matter.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

We are insects in giants in time.

[vexed-vitality.livejournal.com]

This, sir, is why I still go on LiveJournal now and then.

Have you read Pessoa by chance?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

On purpose, even.

[vexed-vitality.livejournal.com]

I found him by chance in early 2007 when I found the Richard Zenith translation of The Book of Disquiet at a bookstore. It became my bedside book the rest of the year. The rest was on purpose. I quickly got the poetry collection by the same translator, A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe. Since then I've read almost every major translated volume by him (I think Mensagem, excerpted in other volumes, is the exception). I also bought a few book-length secondary works, along with some recently published juvenilia and miscellany, sadly little of which I've gotten around to reading yet.

Anyway, the line "We take the credit for what isn't ours - ourselves." had a distinctly Pessoan ring to me. He seems to be popping up more and more these days in book blurbs and reviewers' and essayists' asides, doesn't he? I feel like he should be more of a household name but I kind of get why he isn't. Even though he's not what I'd call a "difficult" writer like some other modernists, he's tough to explain to the average intellectually curious reader. I wrote a paper on him in a class long ago (I got to choose pretty much any topic) but it focused mostly on The Book of Disquiet and relied heavily on Zenith's scholarship, serving as little more than a cursory introduction. So I end up saying "Just read him!"

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

He's got a good "hook" with the heteronyms and few surface difficulties so I wouldn't be surprised if he reaches Rilke-Lorca-Neruda level. It's curious that he didn't make much of a splash before the '90s. Relative scarcity of translators from Portuguese, maybe.

I guess it makes sense that he'd be an uneven writer, what with having found a way to forgive himself for writing anything, but boy is he. A lot in Disquiet makes me want to smack him. I can never tell if he's great because of or in spite of his affectations.

[vexed-vitality.livejournal.com]

True, my 23 year-old self in 2007 was mesmerized with him in a way I never could be now. About Disquiet, it has its detractors. The Scottish poet Don Paterson, in one of his excellent books of aphorisms (either The Blind Eye or The Book of Shadows) said he didn't see what the big deal was, and dismissed him as a pretentious whiner. I wouldn't go that far, but uneven is a fair assessment. I'm a big fan of much of the poetry (especially Alvaro de Campos) and some of the prose in Selected Prose and A Centenary Pessoa, though. The Dadaist manifesto-ish "Ultimatum" from Selected Prose is a hoot, with its colorful denunciations of writers and politicians around the time of WWI, and the immortal exclamation "You grand finale of fools!"