In my haste the other day to type up the passage from Pessoa, I left off the best part. He has just had a moment of pure enlightenment and relates it to Leibniz’s idea of the dominant monad. “It strips us naked even of our selves.”
And then he adds: (it was on the next page on my Kindle)
“It was only a moment but I saw myself. Now I cannot even say what I was. And, after it all, I just feel sleepy because, though I don’t really know why, I suspect that the meaning of it all is simply to sleep.”
We also need a word for the sort of reading coincidence that just happened to me. Earlier today I read some more of Deleuze’s The Fold and caught an interesting passage that I did not quite understand. Just now, a few hours later, I picked up Pessoa’s Disquiet and within two pages he talks exactly about the notion Deleuze had been talking about.
Passage A from Deleuze:
I possess a clear and distinguished zone of expression because I have primitive singularities, ideal virtual events to which I am destined. From this moment deduction unwinds: I have a body because I have a clear and distinguished zone of expression. In fact, that which I express clearly, the moment having come, will concern my body, and will act most directly on my body, surroundings, circumstances, and environment. Caesar is the spiritual monad who clearly expresses the crossing of the Rubicon. He thus has a body that the flowing waters, a given flow of water, will eventually be soaking. But up to this point, when perception has become the perception of an object, everything can be easily inverted. I can recover ordinary language, or the habitual and empirical order of resemblance: I have a clear or privileged zone of expression because I have a body. What I clearly express is what happens to my body.
Passage B from Pessoa
It is so difficult to describe the feeling one has when one feels that one really does exist and that the soul is a real entity, that I do not know what human words I can use to define it. I don’t know if I’m really as feverish as I feel or if instead I have finally recovered from the fever of slumbering through life. Yes, I am like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, with no idea of how he got there and I’m reminded of cases of amnesiacs who, losing all memory of their past lives, for a long time live as other people. For many years–from the time I was born and became a conscious being–I too was someone else and now I wake up suddenly to find myself standing in the middle of the bridge, looking out over the river, knowing more positively now than at any moment before that I exist. But I do not know the city, the streets are new to me and the sickness incurable. So, leaning on the bridge, I wait for the truth to pass so that I can regain my null and fictitious, intelligent and natural self.
It lasted only a moment and has passed now. I notice the furniture around me, the design on the old wallpaper, the sun through the dusty panes. For a moment I saw the truth. For a moment I was, consciously, what great men are throughout their lives. I recall their actions and their words and I wonder if they too were tempted by and succumbed to the Demon Reality. To know nothing about oneself is to live. To know a little about oneself is to think. To know oneself precipitately, as I did in that moment of pure enlightenment, is suddenly to grasp Leibniz’s notion of the dominant monad, the magic password to the soul. A sudden light scorches and consumes everything. It strips us naked even of our selves.
Passage C ?
The mention by Deleuze of the word zone reminds me that yesterday I read Killian Fox’s review in the Observer of Geoff Dyer’s new book called Zona. It is a Dyer-esque meditation on the classic film by Andrei Tarkovsky called Stalker. I guess I will have to read Dyer’s book after all to see if he mentions Pessoa or Deleuze or Leibniz.
Weds night
Finally got the car in for an oil change in Gilford today. Turns out the service manager, David, whom I’ve known for ten years now, is a big reader. He retains his courtly Tennessee accent too, a bit more mild every year. He loves McCarthy’s The Road. I told him to find a copy of Blood Meridien.
best passage from today’s reading from Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet
93 [174] 29.3.1933
How good to be all alone! To be able to talk out loud to ourselves, to walk about with nobody’s eyes on us, to lean back and daydream with no interruptions! Every house becomes a meadow, every room takes on the amplitude of a country villa.
All the sounds one hears seem to come from somewhere else, as if they belonged to a nearby but independent universe. We are, at last, kings. That’s what we all aspire to and, who knows, perhaps the more plebian among us aspire to it more eagerly than those with false gold in their pockets. For a moment we are the pensioners of the universe, existing on our regular incomes with no needs or worries.
AND AS WITH journeys so with books, and as with books so with everything else. . . . I dream of an erudite life in the silent company of ancients and moderns, renewing my emotions through other people’s, filling myself with contradictory thoughts that spring from the contradictions of real thinkers and those who have only half-thought, in other words, the majority of those who write. But the minute I pick up a book from the table even my interest in reading vanishes; the physical fact of having to read it negates the desire to read . . In the same way the idea of travelling atrophies if I happen to go anywhere near a place whence I could in fact embark. And, being myself a nonentity, I return to the two negatives of which I am certain — my daily life as an anonymous passer-by and the waking insomnia of my dreams.
77 [401] Pessoa The Book of Disquiet trans Boyd, page 78
How is it I’ve never gotten around to reading Pessoa until now? I had a book of his poems in new translation (British publisher) ten years ago while we were in Barcelona. I remember trying to read them when I was in that park around the big terra cotta arc of triumph there. But I just didn’t get into the poems then.
I started looking at the Book of Disquiet earlier this week because it gets mentioned so notably in the German novel I’m reading now, Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon.
Pessoa: ”I read am am liberated. I acquire objectivity. I stop being myself and disperse.” And in the next passage, ” I detest reading. I have an anticipatory tedium about unknown pages.”
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