Ana Toader

Like the faces of the Cherub, Fernando Pessoa was four. I dare not judge him, he is not mine. Pessoa belongs to the world. No doubt, the doctors dealing with heads will find him damaged, ill, schizophrenic. I don’t know, I deal with hearts.

The beauty of his act is so simple I can only bend, as if in prayer. He wrote under the names Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Alvaro dos Campos and Fernando Pessoa. Each poet had his own, distinct voice and they have been called heteronyms, instead of pseudonyms.

Caeiro – the master. What you want to be. The ancient, heavy perfection, never to be attained until the red sun of our age sets once and for all.
Pessoa – himself. Lashing against the awakening of the master. This is me, this is what I can be most authentically.
Reis and Campos – two sides of the same coin. The coin is Caeiro. What masters can do, others can mirror and add their own distortion. We like these distortions, even if they are not fundamental like the original. We are enchanted with small variations.

I am clumsy,  let him tell you.

“I wrote thirty-odd poems straight off, in a kind of ecstasy whose nature I cannot define. It was the triumphal day of my life, and I shall never be able to have another like it. I started with a title – ‘The Keeper of Sheep’. And what followed was the apparition of somebody in me, to whom I at once gave the name of Alberto Caeiro. Forgive me that absurdity of the phrase: my master had appeared in me. This was the immediate sensation I had
[...]
I immediately seized another sheet of paper and wrote, also straight off, the six poems that make up Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Chuva Obliqua’. Immediately and completely … It was the return of Fernando Pessoa Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa himself alone. Or better, it was the reaction of Fernando Pessoa against his own non-existence as Alberto Caeiro.
[...]
I jerked the latent Ricardo Reis out of his false paganism, discovered his name, and adjust him to himself, because at this stage I already saw him. And suddenly, in a derivation opposed to that of Ricardo Reis, there arose in me impetuously a new individual. At one go, and on the typewriter, without interruption or correction, there arose the ‘Triumphal Ode’ of Alvaro de Campos – the Ode along with this name and the man along with the name he has
[...]
I fitted it all into moulds of reality. I graded their influences, recognised their friendship, hear, inside me, their discussions and divergencies of criteria, and in all this it seemed to me that I, the creator of it all, was the least thing there. It is if it all happened independently of me. And it is if it still happens like that…”
Fragments of a letter written by Fernando Pessoa in 1935 to Casais Monteiro

“Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.”

“ No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.”
Eugene Ionesco, playwright of Le Theatre de l’Absurde

The characters wear black and white. It is only I who wears grey. Occassionally, if the character is less pure, it might wear a red flower. The characters always say memorable things, even when talking about the weather. They live in the confinement of the stage and look perfectly at home there. They do not wish outside the box.

Unlike them, I have a soul.

The story is essentially about me, it must be. I am in every act, except I can not speak, they didn’t give me any lines. It is I who stays and they who change, obeying a charming little mechanism. This mechanism I ignore. I always pick the wrong things to do and I am shipwrecked in some corner of the stage, watching the characters like the ugly duckling watches some swans. Yet I am here, you can see me.

Their faces are so painted, you can not distinguish the face underneath. I like that. I wish I could go through life like this, with a face out of powder boxes and brushes.

In order to love a character, you must strip it of the black and white and give it grey clothes and smudge its make-up. Only then it will forget its lines and start talking like me and I do not have patience for this lack of aesthetics. Plus, it makes the audience feel restless.

Restore us to convention.

In the end, the characters grow old quickly and die, but that’s alright, they come in endless reserves. What is tragic is that I can not say something to remember even now, with all you lovely people watching me.

Reiteration of a theme, according to my background. I crave that final clarity, seeing the network of living threads in its simplicity. Interdisciplinarity. For this, I thank my teachers.

This applies to most of us. It is only by discipline that we can bring ourselves to think in a logic other than the bivalent one, but always, our first instinct is to use Aristotle instruments. Anything else is too uncertain, it makes us restless. Therefore I either love you or I love you not. We escape in words.

We need the absolute, we do not distinguish between degrees. In our minds, we always converge in norm, in reality, it is a weak convergence. Our hearts can not accept it. I love you in weak convergence. I love you for 40 minutes because light is broken in your eyes just perfectly right now. Then, I should like some coffee.

 In the end, all we can do is be tender to one another. 

“Time for you and time for me
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea
[..]
And indeed, there will be time
To wonder ‘Do I care?’” – TS Eliot – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 

To me, as to Shelley, Epipsychidion is soul within the soul.

This is the way to make the most naked love.

There’s you and there’s the Other, Ferrante.

You thrust fingers in your chest and open. In the dripping creaking ribcage, your soul.

And again. You thrust fingers in your soul and open. Eckhart’s scintilla animae. Flesh drips on, edges swell, the palpitant wait of things never meant to be out.

Ferrante mirrors.

You clench your teeth and enter the embrace like a church. Rub. Invasion. Winepress. Effacement.

You breathe the brass of pain.

“The light clear element which the isle wears
Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers.”