We, humans, are people who by and large live and behave conforming to our social identities. A waiter who looks and behaves truly as a waiter; a priest, truly as a priest; a manager, truly as a manager; and so on. You can often see a Brahmin, whose appearances, behaviour, habits and the symbols he is wearing gives an unmistakable look of a Brahmin. So does a Muslim, and so does many others. Barring the social identities, which we conform to, what are we? Merely humans? I don't know if I can say that. But I always feel I have to assume an identity externally to fit into situations, social expectations and my profession, although internally I feel differently. Yet, how others look at me, the identity they assume in me, which may be expressed in their occasional, unsolicited feedbacks, suggestions or remarks, is still something entirely different. This difference between what I internally feel what I am, what I have to assume and show externally, and what others assume about me, this suffocating rift between different identities of mine, is, what I think, Fernando Pessoa's writings try to express. Maybe, Pessoa is much more complex than this; maybe he is much more different. But I am talking about what I could capture from his writings.
What I feel internally is not very coherent. It always drifts freely. I feel differently at different times. I have altogether different and often conflicting thoughts at different times. For that matter, none of my identities are the same. None of them are coherent. I have no integral identity. This lack of integrity is confusing and the root of a lot of existential anxieties. Normally, people may not take it seriously. Many may not even be aware of this. Some might be aware feebly, but would not have thought about it. What if I take it very seriously? What if I try to analyze myself and my identities so seriously? Then I will become Pessoa! Can I say that?
Pessoa identified his different kinds of thoughts and he realized they were even different types of thought processes. He was crazy, he gave different identities to them, inventing different names and biographies for each of them. He allowed each of them to write poetry, creating varieties of poems. Each expressed different philosophies, different themes. He called his different identities 'hetronyms'.
'The Book of Disquiet' was written by Bernando Soares, one of Pessoa's many hetronyms, and this book is perhaps the only prose Pessoa has written. Written as a series of daily journals, the book expresses the core of Pessoa's inability to conform to an identity, or his lack of identities. If no identity is assumed, I feel myself only as a consciousness through which thoughts, dreams, imaginations are flowing incessantly, incoherently, discontinuously. What can I make of them? What do I perceive as the center of my thoughts? The thoughts and dreams are not part of any identity. So, I may feel they lie outside me. Everything I see, sense, perceive is me. I am in the clouds, in the horizon, in the wind. My life just pass through and my experience of it is quite detached from me. This detachedness can be sensed in every line in the book. Moreover, when I write it assuming an identity – Bernando Soares – what do Soares feel? He does not have a body for himself nor any sensory organs. What he sees, hears, experiences, are all through Pessoa's body. This makes Soares feel more detached from the experience than he should be. And that makes the writing more abstract and beautiful. For example, Soares feel he is imprisoned inside an infinitely large prison, which, because is infinite and hence is as large as the world, cannot be escaped. His inexpressible desire, which is repeated throughout the book, is not to have been existed. He does not desire to exist nor cease to exist, for both for him are meaningless. He desire not to have existed, to have been saved from the emptiness that he is experiencing. He is very keen in observing everything, living and non-living, around him. Perhaps, he is helpless in that he can't help observing all that happens, even the minute and insignificant experiences and sensations. A sight of the sunset, clouds, rain or the blue sky creates uncontrollable flow of thoughts in him. Thus he feels connected to the world around him. He is so alone yet connected to everything around. That makes his loneliness more suffering. “Whether I like it or not, in the confused depths of my fatal sensibility, I am all these things,” he writes somewhere. He also writes, “I look for myself, but finds no one.” And he is disturbingly aware that he doesn't really exist but his whole experience comes through some one else's body. Thus he writes, “I do not know if I exist, it seems possible to me that I might be someone else's dream.”
All the dreams, imaginations, thoughts, all uncontrollable, makes Soare's mind always noisy. This disquiet is what the name of the book implies. The Book of Disquiet. I am only half-way through the book. It is abstract, disturbing yet addictive.
Sandeep
Bangalore
17-Sep-2015
