When at a Loss, Pessoa: "A broken gateway to the Impossible"

***

But at least, from my bitterness over what I'll never be,
There remains the hasty writing of these verses,
A broken gateway to the Impossible.
But at least I confer on myself a contempt without tears,
Noble at least in the sweeping gesture by which I fling
The dirty laundry that's me -- with no list -- into the stream of things,
And I stay at home, shirtless.

Fernando Pessoa, from Poems of Fernando Pessoa 

***image from Art and My Life

A bit about Pessoa

Why call water my sister if water isn't my sister? PESSOA v ST. FRANCIS

Don't get carried away, St. Francis. Pessoa has some words for you.

Today someone read me St. Francis of Assisi.
I listened and couldn’t believe my ears.
How could a man who was so fond of things
Never have looked at them or understood what they were?

Why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister?
To feel it better?
I feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something –
Sister, or mother, or daughter.
Water is beautiful because it’s water.
If I call it my sister,
I can see, even as I call it that, that it’s not my sister
And that it’s best to call it water, since that’s what it is,
Or, better yet, not to call it anything
But to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it,
Without any names.
 

Translation: 2006, Richard Zenith
From: A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected PoemsPublisher: Penguin, New York, 2006, 0-14-303955-5

Photo from: Rivanna Writer Blogspot

Great Souls Creating Their Own Proximity: Etta James & Johnny Otis. America's Great Black Musical Triumph. A Poem by Pessoa.

 












A great soul creates its own proximity.  I don't need to have seen or touched Etta James or Johnny Otis to have been touched by them and in some way seen, my raging heart witnessed and deafened, especially by Etta. My life was as, hey, more, enriched by their presence on the planet as by any number of people I've shook hands with, taken classes with, received paychecks from.

As you know they were astonishing soul musicians. Neither had to make the choice to be other than messengers, though for Johnny Otis, a Greek American, there was a transition and it was a bit more conscious than Etta's.  She was black.  He wasn't, but Johnny Otis understood himself to be a musician in the tradition and community of America's great black musical triumph.  He decided to move in that community very early in his career.  Otis was a different kind of beautiful.

Miss James was all kinds of beautiful.

So to honor them I wanted to post a poem about joy and about humility, the true victory. The True Victory. Which is, at least as of 6:30 p.m., 1/20, to have lived and understood the meaning of all this, which is to say the humiliations and sufferings, the rapture of being alive. I don't presume to say they did or didn't understanding what I naively refer to as "the meaning."  Like I do?

I bow to them. 

Courtesy of Fernando Pessoa:

XVIII

If only I were the dust on the road
And the feet of the poor were tromping on me...

If only I were the flowing rivers
And there were washerwomen on my bank...

If only I were the poplars next to the river
And only had the sky above me and the water below me...

If only I were a miller’s donkey
And he beat me and valued me...

Better those than someone going through life
Looking back and feeling sorry about it...
____
Pessoa, 1914 (Portugal), from http://alberto-caeiro.blogspot.com/

Pessoa, Bossa Nova, "I'm in no hurry." A Pessoa poem.

Beatriz Milhazes (Brazilian, 1960)

Fernando Pessoa / Alberto Caeiro does seem to presage bossa nova with its languorous love of the now of beauty. My comparison of Pessoa to bossa nova is based on the shared language--Portuguese, rather than geography, which wasn't shared.  Pessoa lived in Portugal, as we all know, and as we all know, bossa nova, Antonio Carlos Jobim & co., are Brazilian.

But this thought, which, really (or as you might suspect), just occurred to me, does incline me to transmigrate my soul into a Portuguese-speaking body, and, while we are at it, in Brazil rather than Portugal. I'm always eager to escape European shadows though Pessoa's is a shadow providing sun.

Hey, ignore me and read this poem which I found on http://alberto-caeiro.blogspot.com/.  A better blogger than myself would rethink her freewheeling associations and present interpretation. I am not the better blogger.  Heart heart Pessoa.  This poem is not titled.

I’m in no hurry. What for?
The sun and moon aren’t in a hurry: they’re right.
Hurrying is believing people can get past their legs,
Or that, jumping, they can land past their shadow.
No; I don’t know how to hurry.
If I stretch out my arm, I get exactly where my arm gets---
Not even a centimeter farther.
I only touch where I touch, not where I think.
I can only sit down where I am.
And that’s funny like all really true truths,
But what’s really funny is that we’re always thinking something else,
And we live truant from our reality.
And we’re always outside it because we’re here.
__________________
Fernando Pessoa / Alberto Caeiro (6/20/1919)