The Height of Spiritual Torture and Humiliation

 One of the soul's great tragedies is to execute a work and then realize, once it's finished that it's not any good. The tragedy is especially great when one realizes that the work is the best he could have done. But to write a work, knowing beforehand that it's bound to be flawed and imperfect; to see while writing it that it's flawed and imperfect - this is the height of spiritual torture and humiliation.

Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet, document 231

This probably popped into my head because I've managed to get in no meaningful writing lately. I wrote so much over the summer, and maybe that's why I had that totally unrealistic goal of finishing the epics book before the summer ended - that is, once the school year began I knew that my time would shrink to nothing and my meaningful output would be even less. Of course, what Pessoa is getting out is something even more profound: why do I bother when I know it won't be any good anyway? He answers the question in the next paragraph: "So why do I keep writing? Because I still haven't learned to practice completely the renunciation that I preach." He reflects that the first poems he wrote as a child were perfect, or at least they seemed perfect to him at the time. Pessoa laments that, "I'll never again be able to have the illusory pleasure of producing perfect work." How delicious and necessary is that "illusory pleasure." He reflects, "I weep over those first dreadful poems as over a dead child, a dead son, a last hope that has vanished." I don't think I've even earned that "illusory pleasure," because what have I ever created that amounted to anything? I can't even pretend that it amounted to perfection, because, like Oakland, there's no there, there.

Spontaneous Tendency to Depersonalization

 "What I am essentially - behind the involuntary masks of poet, logical reasoner and so forth - is a dramatist. My spontaneous tendency to depersonalization, which I mentioned in my last letter to explain the existence of my heteronyms, naturally leads to this definition. And so I do not evolve, I simply EVOLVE. (. . .) I continuously change personality, I keep enlarging (and here there is a kind of evolution) my capacity to create new characters, new forms of pretending that I understand the world or, more accurately, that the world can be understood."

(From a letter of Fernando Pessoa, 20 January 1935), A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, p. 273

Since this upcoming semester may actually be my last one (doubtful, but who knows) I decided to keep a promise to myself and focus a class on Fernando Pessoa. I'm adapting my COR 204 Marxism & the Movies class and, while maintaining, largely, a film structure, I'm going to examine issues of self and identity, which I guess will make this a class on Self, Identity, & Film. I'm going to have the students read Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and also the poetry collection, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe. This will allow me to bring in films such as Bergman's Persona and Kurosawa's Ikiru and Kieslowski's Blue and Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7 and Ford's The Searchers. I'll probably bring in some choice selections from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, because, well, why not? I think I'm going to, shadowing Pessoa, have the students write a factless autobiography. Somehow, this will all make sense.

CFL Excellence on Steroids

 The last few months have been, obviously, more than a bit chaotic, which means that certain things ended up being pushed, unintentionally, to the back burner. One of them was a CFL trip. As is well-documented on this blog I've attended a lot of CFL games over the years (and dragged along family and friends, often kicking and screaming). I'm always happy to spend money on the CFL, in a way that I'm no longer interested in spending money on the NFL or even MLB. Usually, in the course of a season I'll attend two or three CFL games, however, I don't normally attend three in one week. I had proposed a Montreal and Ottawa doubleheader (as we've discussed, one of the beauties of the CFL is that although they only play four games a week they are sometimes spread over three or four days, which opens up the potential for bunching games). We couldn't make the schedule work, but happily our excellent friend Andy got into the CFL schedule and figured out a Hamilton and Toronto doubleheader. Happily, our friend Kevin (who clearly likes the CFL more than he will admit) could make it work. They were great travelling companions, and, despite buying the tickets, they took care of all of the other logistics. We found an AirBnb in between Hamilton and Toronto, and off we went, catching a Calgary Stampeders and Hamilton Tiger-Cats game on Friday night, and following it up with an Ottawa REDBLACKS and Toronto Argonauts game last Saturday afternoon. However, why would you stop at two CFL games when you can go to three? I dragooned Gary and his wife Ali, and yesterday we went up to catch a Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Montreal Alouettes game. The two teams met in last year's Grey Cup and are once again the two best teams in the league, which made the game a probable preview of this year's Grey Cup. It was a great game, and all the starters played the entire game, even though neither team had anything to play for (yet another reason why the CFL is better than the NFL, where most of the skill players would have taken the day off). The Blue Bombers won on the last play of the game, after a devil's wind, clearly blowing in from Winnipeg, knocked down an Alouettes punt and gave the visitors one last chance. Now, should I just go ahead and buy tickets for the Alouettes playoff game in two weeks?

It was a chilly night in Hamilton, but a solid win for the Tiger-Cats.

A great lunch in a cool bar about fifteen minutes away from the BMO stadium in Toronto. Yes, that's not the sweatshirt that I wore the night before. It was, like its cousin from the night before, heavily insulated, which was appreciated in Hamilton at night, but I cooked on a lovely sunny afternoon in Toronto (which required more CFL merchandise purchases).

Obviously, the trip required several stops at various and sundry Tim Horton's. Mike Kelly had set the number of TimBits consumed at 108, and we all bet over, which was a solid choice because we easily blew past it.

A wild game in Toronto, with the Argonauts (aka the Boatmen, aka the Double Blues) almost blowing a thirty point lead. Yes, that's a new Argonauts jersey. 

A picture snapped by Ali. The rainbow, correctly, predicted a wonderful day.

And, of course, a stop at the southern most Tim Horton's.

We had great seats, almost right on the 55 yard line. What started out as a beautiful, sunny day, eventually turned into the gusty affair mentioned above - and the requirement that I buy some more CFL merchandise, in this case a nice warm cotton Alouettes sweatshirts.

One of us in cool, and the other one is me. I'm so happy to have this amazing woman as my daughter-in-law.

My Dear Vegetables

 I loathe the happiness of all these people who don't know they're unhappy. Their human life is full of what, in a true sensibility, would produce a surfeit of anxieties. But since their true life is vegetative, their sufferings come and go without touching their soul, and they live a life that can be compared only to that of a man with a toothache who won a fortune - the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, for it is the gift of being like them, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and pain.

That's why, in spite of everything, I love them all. My dear vegetables!

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 313

FP - "the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and  pain."  How long have humans tried to live lives equal to that of the gods? The answer is exactly how long the gods have punished them for wanting exactly that. Yahweh tossed Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden for eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the crime of essentially trying to rival God. However, in the end, at least according to Pessoa, we were trying too hard. the truth is not a studied Stoic or Buddhist transcendence, but instead a witless "living unawares." Of course, are they actually living? Way too many people - apparently around 46% of the adult US population - are apparently living, and voting, vegetatively. 

Shanks and Cutlets of Destiny

 I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I've seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And 'flesh and blood' in fact describes them rather well: they're like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher's, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 317

OK, first off I should just go ahead and admit that one of my fantasy baseball team is going to be retitled Shanks and Cutlets of Destiny of next year. In the Irrational League, which I helped found thirty-five years ago, my team is a bottom dweller season after season, mainly because I just don't pay much attention to baseball any more. I'm hanging around in the league mainly to be supportive of my friends. Consequently, I tend to swap out the names pretty routinely now, mainly to preserve the sanctity of the Atlanta Crackers - my original team name, and one in which I won a lot. My gross incompetence now besmirches the legacy of that proud name, and I rotate in and out of other names And, seriously, who could not root for the Shanks and Cutlets of Destiny.

More importantly, Pessoa is, once again, discussing his love of the world of literature and art, where true reality resides, and his mistrust of the coarse physical world that surrounds us. Yes, he's being more than a bit of over the top, but he's correct in recognizing that what we think is important is often anything but. Not that family and friends aren't important, obviously, and he was loyal to both, but instead that we place so much importance on people who are of absolutely no importance whatsoever. What's more, our society - now more than then - focus our attention, endlessly, on the "famous" and "interesting" at the expense of truly meaningful. Is it any wonder that we live in the age of Donald Trump?

My Constant Helper

 When I moved into the cabin I assumed that Cici (aka Nut Job aka the Vertical Cat) would be my boon companion, but it turned out to be Mollie. It might just be an issue of scheduling in that Cici makes it to Janet's lap first in the morning, and Mollie uses me as a fallback. However, she's usually up here at my desk, lounging on one of my prayer rugs, when she's not trying to knock my laptop to the ground because I have the temerity to try and write when she needs/demands attention.

The work session blew up pretty quickly when Mollie heard a bird outside and just about leapt to her death trying to climb out the window.

An Interconnected Series of Dreams and Novels

 I've often noticed that certain fictional characters assume a prominence never attained by the friends and acquaintances who talk and listen to us in visible, real life. And this make me fantasize about whether everything in the sum total of the world might not be an interconnected series of dreams and novels, like little boxes inside larger boxes that are inside yet larger ones, everything being a story made up of stories, like A Thousand and One Nights, unreally taking place in the never-ending night.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 285

As we've discussed, to understand Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet you really need to grasp his ceaseless and beautiful interiority. I think you also need to understand that, in a lot of ways, Pessoa is not quite certain that the external world exists. By this I don't mean in a surface-level and fairly witless Matrix version, but rather that the external world is so unimportant that it essentially doesn't exist. It's crass and it's ugly, but it's also so pointlessly bereft of meaning that it has no tangibility, intellectually or emotionally or philosophically or spiritually. Hence, when Pessoa identifies The Book of Disquiet as "a factless autobiography" he's not simply being typically weird, he's making a far more profound point. One of the reasons why biographies or autobiographies can be so unsatisfying and unproductive is because a listing of things that you did doesn't really tell me anything about you. I'm hoping to teach a class centered around The Book of Disquiet in the spring, and I'm going to start off by asking the students to write a couple pages autobiography, which I'll, utterly predictably, gently mock in class, following up on the point above that a chronicle of jobs you had or places you visited doesn't actually tell the reader much of anything about the subject. Of course, this also relates to the previous post about my growing sense of fear that I won't end up moving to Portugal, because, after all, the Ganges does run by the Rua dos Douradores. Would a new external existence in Portugal actually change anything, unless, of course, it helped me change myself internally.  With all this in mind, I think you could see why Pessoa proposes "an interconnected series of dreams and novels." If the external world is so gossamer fleeting in its significance, then the characters in a novel probably are more important than most of the people in my "actual" life.