“I suffered in me, with me, the aspirations of all eras, and every disquietude of every age walked with me to the whispering shore of the sea.” (Text #95)

"SENSATIONAL … Another exemplary tale of suffering from one of the
best writers of our time." The Times.

This is a review of J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man, quoted on the front cover
of the Vintage Books edition of 2006. "Oh," I thought, looking at it.
"So suffering can be done well or badly. It can even be judged. I
wonder which one of them has suffered better, Pessoa or Coetzee.
Coetzee at least has the advantage of being alive to see that his
suffering is exemplary."

Could this be a comfort? In his autobiographical fiction, Youth,
Coetzee tells us that he thinks he is good at misery, better at misery
than at anything else. If you truly believed that misery was your
forte would you feel a tug of pleasure, seeing that The Times was
giving you top marks in the thing you did best? The central character
of Youth claims that he is "so dull and ordinary that you would not
spare him a second glance." One page after that he lies on a park
bench in the sunshine and feels unexpectedly joyful. "It lasts no more
than a few seconds of clock time, this signal event … If he has not
been transfigured then at least he has been blessed with a hint that
he belongs on this earth."

Think of Pessoa in text #450 when a storm passes over the office and
everyone is happy. It rains "like a nightmare" whereupon "enormous
joy, full of deliverance and peace of mind, disconcerted us all." It
rains and he is joyful; the sun shines and Coetzee is joyful. The
lesson: suffering can end with a change in the weather.

“A life!” (Text 334)

So says Soares. And I think it’s in the blowfly of text 334 (the fifth text I’ve read) that I’ve first seen, in this book, any living creature other than Soares. (I believe it’ll be a couple more texts before I see him in the company of other people.) (And, incidentally, text 214, if you’re keeping score at home, was the first time I saw Soares explicitly interact with a physical object, namely, some old pages he’d written.)

The way this text brings Soares back to himself, to being or feeling like he’s himself alone again, plays well against the self-separation he experienced back in the existentialist halcyon days of text 214. In fact, at the beginning of 334, he’s coming off a "mental slumber": "I haven’t existed. I’ve been someone else. I’ve lived without thinking."

Actually, the connection is a little creepy, now that I think about it.

Anyways. Contradictions aside, he’s himself again, small and insignificant as the blowfly. He’s come back to thought, too. Well, "thought," anyways. Thinking about his life, of course, leads him to believe his life is pointless. Seems captured by his mental image of "the side of the old farm that opened on to the fields, and in the middle of the scene appeared the threshing-floor, empty." (That image, its referential nature: Signifier? Signified? Both? Neither? Is there a center to that center? I don’t know: It’s been a while since I looked at that one paragraph of Derrida.)

Also, 334 is the first time I’ve seen Soares really place himself in some real context. A scene: surrounded by physical sounds from the office and the street outside, sitting at a desk, looking at a blowfly. Appropriate enough, in that he claims he’s not thinking, but feeling, "carnally, directly, with profound and dark horror," when he wonders "what supreme forces" might whack him with a ruler for the insignificant piece of life he is.

All of which gives way to one of my favorite lines so far, when the blowfly wanders off, taking Soares’s mental wanderings away with it: "The involuntary office was again without philosophy." I mean, heck if I know what the word "involuntary" is doing there, other than describing the office as if it were some reflex, something not of its own will. Whatever, though, anyway. It works. It’s art.

Reading in the park (Text 67)

Often enough the surface and illusion catch me, their prey, and I feel like a man.  Then I’m happy to be in the world…….  On these days I’m particularly fond of gardens.

Trees grow, but there are benches beneath the shade.  On the broad walkways facing the four sides of the city, the benches are larger and are almost always occupied.

When I forget, I become a normal man, reserved for some purpose, and I brush down another suit and read the newspaper from front to back. 

But the illusion never lasts long, partly because it doesn’t last and partly because night arrives.  And the colours of the flowers, the shade of the trees, the geometry of the streets and flower beds– it all fades and shrinks………..

“A silent anatomy of melancholy”

Lee Rourke, writing at The Guardian:

He has been called – amongst other splendid things – "the man that never was." It is a stamp that makes perfect sense: Fernando Pessoa never revealed himself, just his work. He lived solely through his work. He has also been misconstrued many times over the years, readers often seem to label him as a pessimist, his writing the blathering of a depressed man – I see it more as a silent anatomy of melancholy.

Maybe this is why his work is not as popular as it should be? Maybe we can’t stomach his – and more tellingly our own – emptiness as it is so beautifully laid bare in The Book of Disquiet? It is so often the case, as Nietzsche pointed out, when we look into the abyss the abyss also looks into us. It’s a shame that the majority of us – unlike Fernando Pessoa – don’t have the nerve to look into it more than once.

“The darkness of the forever overcast day” (text 461)

"Knowing how easily the littlest things can torture me, I deliberately avoid contact with the littlest things. If I suffer when a cloud passes in front of the sun, how will I not suffer from the darkness of the forever overcast day that’s my life?" (Text #461)

Nonadaptation

I was not made to live anywhere except in Paradise.

Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.

Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.

whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.

I pretended to work like others from morning to evening,

but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries. 

For solace I escaped to city parks, there to observe

and faithfully describe flowers and trees, but they changed,

under my hand, into the gardens of Paradise.

I have not loved a woman with my five senses.

I only wanted from her my sister, from before the banishment.

And I respected religion, for on this earth of pain

it was a funereal and a propitiatory song.

Czesław Miłosz, Polish poet, Nobel Prize winner.

Name of translator unknown by me. Potentially a combination of Miłosz himself and the American Robert Hass. Robert Hass lives in California and his wife’s name is Brenda Hillman. Brenda Hillman, like her husband, is a poet. She once said in an interview: "It is impossible to put boundaries on your words, even if you make a poem. Each word is a maze. So you are full of desire to make a memorable thing and have the form be very dictated by some way that it has to be. But the poem itself is going to undo that intention. It’s almost like you’re knitting a sweater and something is unraveling it on the other end."

I’ve left that word, "unraveling," with only one l because she is American, she was quoted in an American magazine (Rain Taxi), and requoted on an American website (where I found the quote), and so it seems somehow better to leave her with the American spelling. Writing one l, I feel as if I am being fair to her nationality, which pleases me. Perhaps she is very proud of being American and would be insulted to see herself quoted with two ls. She might panic. She might feel that her own quote was lying about her origins. "I am not a two-l person. I am a one-l person," she might think angrily. "I’ll admit I have never thought about this one-l two-l business before and yet suddenly, as I see myself quoted with two ls, the importance of a single l feels central to my being. How is it that I can be represented as a two-l person? How is this violation possible? Where do I stand? What are my legal rights? May I sue?" Or she might not care.

But I am not American, and so I think I see her ‘unraveling’ with two ls when I read it. It’s only if I go back and stare at the word as it is printed here that I realise it only has one.

Whether she ever reads this or thinks those things or not, I am still pleased by my idea of her being pleased. And it seems to me that this is the central thing.

Her quote reminds me of text #169: "Everything we do . is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing."

“Did you buy those jeans at the Gap? Because baby, I can see myself on the other side of them.” (Text 214)

This blog is fun. I think so, at least. Hopefully you do, too. I’m enjoying it. Contributing to it and reading it. I’m especially looking forward to seeing how our readings overlap and contradict when we start touching the same texts from different angles, at different times, through our own unique paths through the book. That’ll be fun. Also fun is taking things people write about one text and seeing how they look when held up against some other text. (Yes, in fact, I do have an awesome definition of fun. Envy my girlfriend and the dates I take her on.) Like, here’s Brian Stephenson on (or at least near) text 70:

While Bernardo Soares continually reevaluates his relationship with his writing through his writing, and in turn his relation with life, what’s important is not any final conclusion but the suggestion of it being an ongoing process where the continual evolution of the writing is what contains the benefit.

Which is great until you jump forward to text 214, in which Soares stumbles across some old writing of his, "this time in French, written some fifteen years ago," that he finds is written about a thousand times better and more fluently than he could achieve today, and is made to wonder who he’s become and whether he ever was the person who wrote those French pages in the first place: "Who did I replace inside myself?"

Text 214 is a wonderful little meditation on identity and our inability to maintain it across time and the gaps we place within our own histories, and it’s all I can do not to quote the entire thing at you right here, because it sort of kicks ass. It’s about one of those situations you can relate to if you write and if you find some old piece of writing of yours and you can’t help but wonder who you were when you wrote it, because sure as hell it wasn’t the you you know now who wrote that piece of merde. (Okay, admittedly a different situation from Soares’s, but the parallel is there.) (Not that this has ever happened to me.) (Only every time I see something I wrote more than ten minutes previously.) (Five.) (On a good day.)

What’s really great here and relevant to Brian’s statement is the way this text seems to explode the notion that the process is automatically its own benefit. When you look at yourself on a long enough time timeline, who you are and used to be becomes something frightening and practically unrecognizable; surely, no process can come out of that mess of selves, each separate and distinct from the next? It’d be like baking a cake after you wipe step eighteen* off the face of the planet. How can you conceive of conclusions when who you’ve been has already been concluded and what you’re left with is the vision of who you used to be, shockingly unknowable, somewhere down there "in the depths"?

Of course, Soares puts it better than I could:

It’s as if I’d found an old picture that I know is of me, with a different height and with features I don’t recognize, but undoubtedly me, terrifyingly I.

How am I not myself? How am I not myself? How am I not myself?

* – I’ve never baked a cake, but I assume step eighteen is the one that reads "Insert deliciousness now."

“Spools of thread and chess pawns” (Text 92)

"I am still obsessed with creating false worlds, and will be until I die. Today I don’t line up spools of thread and chess pawns (with an occasional bishop or pawn sticking out) in the drawers of my chest, but I regret I don’t ." (Text #92)

When I was little I had an ice cream container of plastic toy animals and with these I made a small society in the back garden. I miss my animal society’s inhabitants more than I miss any person I met at school during the same period of time. I have a better idea of the animals’ personalities than I do of the peoples’, and I trust my memory of those animal personalities more since all of the personalities were really mine alone; the inhabitants I miss were all me. As I think back I know I have no way of returning to that society, to that twig forest where the baby kangaroo got lost (almost eaten by the scratched lion and the glossy orange wolf), those rivers loved by the brown crocodile whose tail had been chewed until it looked feathered, the cold, muddy burrow, voluptuous with black loam, where the plastic hyaena lived, the triangular cave in the rocks, the florid jungle of giant leaves …

“A deep and weary disdain,” or, Dude needs some Gas-X for the soul (Text 35)

Soares is a dreamer, true. But he doesn’t just prefer dreams to reality. He thinks his dreams and his soul are literally more real than reality. He’d rather not visit reality, not even to spit on it. Reality, for him, is an "unaesthetic nightmare, like the result, in dreams, of a mental indigestion." Reality, like gas, isn’t something you want to deal with.

Not only that, but he actually thinks you’re sort of a jerk for doing stuff. Don’t you get it, you moron, he seems to say, getting his Holden Caulfield on; this is all total crap. It’s not worth it. He scorns all things "useful" that require "effort," but reserves his worst "disdain" and "writhing horror" for "all forms of violent effort." But in his mind, violence encompasses both things good and bad: "all those who work for mankind," "all those who fight for their country and give their lives so that civilization may continue," "[w]ar, energetic and productive labor, helping others." There’s nothing outside his head he much cares for. And it’s fascinating (at least to me) that he can so easily equate action and violence. As if nothing stands ‘twixt the two but perception.

It would be easy to argue that Soares is sort of a nutcase. You can see him now, can’t you, sitting in the corner of your local coffee shop, scowling at everyone who walks by? But as a reader of literature and litblogs, living in the early 21st century? You can’t say you can’t relate. Wouldn’t it be better to dream to live than live the dream? But then, too, as someone who cares about your family, your friends, about living a good and real life? You also can’t romanticize him much, can you?

Unless you purposely do stuff in order to be a jerk. Then, well: let me introduce you to your hero.

“We shouldn’t read newspapers” (Text 314)

"We shouldn’t read newspapers, for example, or should read them only to find out what anecdotal and unimportant things are happening. You can’t imagine the delight I get from the provincial news round-up." (Text #314)

Excerpts from The Geelong Advertiser, October 6^th, 2007.

"Mr Plumridge said he was initially thinking the football should be about 10 metres tall but many people had told him that would be far too small." 

"Farquharson’s ex-wife and the boys’ mother, Cindy Gambino, cried out at the first verdict and was helped from court wailing as her mother, Beverly, fainted and had to be carried from court."

"Rod Aires said the meals take about 10 minutes to heat once water is added to an adjoining unit containing iron oxide and magnesium … "They are quite nice," he said." 

"Shanahan has been forced to sit out the game because of knee soreness while the 17-year-old Colbourne, who spent the week in Brisbane at a bowling camp at Cricket Australia’s Centre of Excellence, has a heel problem."

"This week’s New Moon takes place just as Mercury becomes stationary."

The Aesthetics of Discouragement (Text 307)

I’ve read about ten texts so far. Here’s how I read: I’m on my way to
bed, I’m on my way to the bathroom, I’m sitting at the computer, I’m
on my way to work in the morning, I stop and pick up the book and read
a text. Part of a text. Several texts. A line. The text I last read
the last time I picked the book up. A new text. Multiple new texts.
Sometimes I start from the beginning and read all the texts I’ve read
to date. Like I’m trying to memorize it, or something. Like I’m
looking for something. Not sure what.

Like any good bibliophile, I panic when I think about all the books
I’ll fail to read before I die. Which means I tend to read a lot of
books and I read them fast and that for as much as I do get out of all
the books I read I don’t get as much from each book as I might like or
as I might get were I to stare at each page for extended periods of
time. Which means that reading this way is weird. Which means I’m
wondering how my experience with this book differs from my experience
with any other book. Which means I’m wondering how much of what I do
find in this book is actually stuff of myself I’m putting there myself
in order for me to find it. Dreaming a dream of a dreamer holding a
mirror to someone else’s face who sees right through it to see
himself, wide-eyed and wondering, on the other side.

In any case, I’ve been in a terrible creative rut lately. Trying to
write creatively and instead writing nothing but crap. Wondering why
everything I write is crap. Wondering if everything I’ve ever done
that I once thought was good is actually crap. Wondering if I’ll ever
write anything that isn’t crap ever. It’s kind of a bummer.

Enter the second text on my list, subtitled "Aesthetics of
Discouragement." I’m not sure how many times I read it before I
realized that it’s sort of about me. Or the me I’d like to be, right
now, in my state of being discouraged. Sort of. Sort of not. On the
one hand, wouldn’t it be great to make my "failure into a
victory…endowed with columns, majesty and our mind’s consent"?
Wouldn’t it be swell to decorate the "prison cell" of this life, this
rut, with "the shadows of our dreams, their colorful patterns
engraving our oblivion on the static surfaces of the walls"?

But then of course there’s that pesky "on the other hand" clause.
Soares reveals his inability to do anything but dream:

Like every dreamer, I’ve always felt that my calling was
to create. Since I’ve never been able to make an effort or carry out
an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or
desiring, and action has meant dreaming of the acts I wish I could
perform.

"He
valorizes inaction, elevates dreaming to an art," indeed. Now if
only I could get a dream recorder plug-in for OpenOffice.org Writer,
I’d be all set.