ON THE LOVE OF COMMENTARY
DREAMING DEATH: THE ONANISTIC AND SELFANNIHILATIVE PRINCIPLES OF LOVE IN
FERNANDO PESSOA’S BOOK OF DISQUIET
Gary J. Shipley
Love […] opposes itself to identification (to knowledge) of
the object, which is to say that its object is necessarily
charged with a heterogeneous character (analogous to the
character of the blinding sun, excrements, gold, sacred
things).
1
Georges Bataille
INTRODUCTION: A BAPTISMAL SLEW
Fernando Pessoa had many heads, seventy or more, but was
essentially just an empty space behind a diverse drama of literary
men: poets, essayists, prose writers, translators, philosophers, critics,
etc. Pessoa’s orthonymic head – itself shredded into various
personalities and roles – together with the predominant heteronymic
Ghidorah of Alberto Caeiro (philosopher shepherd), Ricardo Reis
(doctor and classicist) and Álvaro de Campos (naval engineer and
excursionist) formed the drama’s core poetic Svetovid. The fictional
actors working Pessoa’s unique literary universe ranged from mere
characters and pseudonyms through to a nucleus of fully-fledged
heteronyms, a status derived from the expansion of pseudonyms into
autonomous human perspectives, each with its own distinctive
literary style and personal history. It is for this reason that Bernando
Soares, so clearly confluent with Pessoa-himself, did not have a head
2
of his own, and why Pessoa (“person” in Portuguese, a fact which
acted like a goad to the endlessly partible referent, who continually
1
Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. 2, (Ed. Denis Hollier) 141.
Even his vocation and place of residence is appropriated from the vacated
heteronym Vicente Guedes.
2
107
GLOSSATOR 5
failed to reveal the unity that such a term implies) had no choice but
to label him a semi-heteronym, for the two were not merely anent but
overlapping. It was possible, and proved no real wrench, for Pessoa
to have a hand in the deaths of Caeiro and the Baron of Teive, to see
their deaths from a safe distance – the first from TB, the second from
suicide. But this was not the case with Soares, for he, unlike the
Baron, was made for the inherent incompleteness and openendedness of The Book of Disquiet, and so would be there till the end,
slowly accumulating himself in a trunk. In order to kill Soares, Pessoa
would have had to commit a partial suicide. Partial, for there were
differences and lacunas, or “mutilations” as Pessoa liked to call them
– mutilations that make Pessoa’s fragmentary and displaced
autobiography a portrait of the troubled emergence of the author who
was to eventually write it. Soares, by far the more sombre of the two,
has a personality that, while constructed in part from Pessoa’s life
(and those convoluted mechanisms for contextualizing the various
subtleties and inscrutabilities of his literary existence), is far more
prone to indulge in the far reaches of societal disengagement, and it is
this increased detachment that allows Soares to restyle Pessoa’s
heteronymic territories into the elaborate displacements of some root
futility. The book’s slow conception was itself entropic: a rag-bag
personage becoming increasingly disorganized the more inclusive it
became, for Soares, like Pessoa, is not a single voice but many, a
proto-person essentially erased by his own diversity, a stand-in for the
undermined multitude, the many-headed void, the entity both made
and unmade by its own (un)self-induced polycephaly. It could be
argued, then, that rather than being a mutilation of Pessoa, Soares is
in many ways a true reflection of the distortion Pessoa had
undergone, more a reflected distortion than a distorted reflection, a
reflection of what Pessoa had done to himself in order to exist at all,
to exist in Soares. Soares is the mirror-image of the reality of the book
he’s to author – another false face for the many, a mangled
perpetrator of a mangled creation, a mutilation of collectivity, a
rimose fabrication. The book is the whole of two disunities: a struggle
for concord where none exists, a whole where there can be only
parts. Pessoa teaches by example, and his lesson is that every person
is many, and the psychological adhesives we employ to hold the
various together under one name, one I, all dishonesties and
limitations; and being that all alterations are also deaths, he chose to
honour those nonreducible roles with names and identities – tagging
the involute fragments as he fell apart.
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SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
With this in mind, and before proceeding any further with this
lovesick commentary, the following abjuration is most likely
requisite: Pessoa’s central undertaking in the book he eventually
entrusted to Soares was no less than that of detailing the veracities (in
all their slipperiness, and such as he could locate them), the
intellectual and emotional substance, that reside in incompleteness,
multiplicity, contradiction, disorder and penumbra; and so to falsely
pin him/it/them down beyond this, to territorialize the drifting and
merging waters of his/its/their thought, would amount to an assault, a
betrothal not of adoration but of violence. The distortion and the
conflict found in and between the four core Pessoan themes, of
identity, dreams, death, and impossibility, gathered and ventured into
here, will not be served by a process that unsnarls and harmonizes,
for such a process would exemplify no kind of love. And so we arrive
at the following exhortation: “Every effort is a crime, because every
3
gesture is a dead dream.” The cogency of this sentence is difficult to
ignore and, as Soares himself realized, equally difficult to follow
through on. The following efforts are, then, criminal in inception, and
can be redeemed only by their preservative (loving) properties. The
hope (that accursed and futile accompaniment to all non-accidental
creation – our disillusion waiting in the wings) is that Soares’s dead
dream can here be resurrected – its hawking, bug-eyed corpse no
doubt every bit as disconsolate as Schopenhauer’s grave-dwellers
stirred spitting from their slumber – and then once again dispatched
with no grimace added to its twice-dead lineaments.
SELF: LOVE AS AUTOPHAGY
To love is to leave untouched: untouched as both expression of
intangibility and withdrawal from alteration. Love cannot change its
object without destroying it. But one cannot change what cannot first
be captured, and love’s true object always eludes our every grasping
facility, for it is impervious, and its seeming destruction (over various
instantiations) only ever love’s own implosion. Love’s true object is a
4
“placid abyss,” the uncertain variant colouration of a moon’s
insolvable light. Love and love’s objects are unseen and unknown: we
see/know only the manifestations of our inability to see/know, and it
is not worthwhile to construct complaint or remorse from this, for we
3
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (Penguin
Books, 2002), 263.
4
Pessoa (2002), 136.
109
GLOSSATOR 5
5
may see and know its “outskirts,” and just as virgins who stifle their
inclinations to put love into action may see love clearer than love’s
most rampant purveyor, we too might find love’s essence residing in
the very condition of its veiled disincarnation. The subtractions are
not exhausted outside the person; they are as virulent internally as
they are externally, a curtailment of self being considered a
prerequisite to any hope of preserving love’s purity. A comparable
devouring of prurient selfhood can be found in M. K. Gandhi.
Explaining the divestment of the person required by ahimsa, he
expresses these requirements without equivocation: “to rise above the
opposing currents of love and hatred, attachment and repulsion. […] I
6
must reduce myself to zero.” In order to avoid doing violence to
love’s objects, one must do violence to oneself instead.
To be removed from love, to pretend it truthfully at a safe
distance, is not to dream of love – and such is Soares’s predilection
for caution that he issues an emphatic warning: “Let’s not even love
7
in our minds” – but to dream a mind dreaming of love, and to
dream that mind static, chaste, lamenting and unreal, to dream a
mind imprisoned eternally in the inanimate imaginings of love. By
avoiding the inherent precariousness of love in this way we might
8
expect such a lover, preserved by his rationale of timidity, to be
capable of successfully maintaining a self that would otherwise have
been surrendered. After all, it is “running real risks… [that] disturbs
9
and depersonalises,” not dreaming the dreamt risks of fictions. But
love, it seems, cannot so easily be extricated from its terminal
appointment, for love in its purest state is death, and these layers of
distance and conjecture are themselves tools of purification. The
impossibility and falsity of love’s objects are perfectly suited to the
unrealisable desire which love names, that of desiring to possess the
sensation of possession, and while this desire, such as it is, may be
free of the perils of humiliation associated with more worldly
manifestations, it is nevertheless itself an acquiescence, a relinquishing
5
Pessoa (2002), 235.
M. K. Gandhi, ‘Truth and Ahimsa’, in Peter Singer (ed.), Ethics (Oxford
University Press, 1994), 220.
7
Pessoa (2002), 244.
8
Preserved in something resembling a Cioranian state of “enthusiasm”. See
E. M. Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair (University of Chicago Press 1996),
77-78.
9
Pessoa (2002), 73.
6
110
SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
of self to non-existence. To renounce the self in this way – as votive
offering to the abstract other of love as dreamt dreaming – is to
ordain one’s own death, is to sacrifice the self to a state of possession
(a possession that possesses in turn its possessor) in which there is
nothing possessed and no possessor, and by so doing cease to be.
What, then, of this love that risks nothing? We might be
tempted to conceive of Soares’s layered firmaments of dreaming as
little more than the high-minded pusillanimous mewling of one who
is all too aware that anyone who takes his pursuit of love into the
10
world “will, in so far as he conceives it to be missing, feel pain.” A
love in which there is never anything to go missing can never make
threat of absence. But this is not to be thought of as a situation
structured in degrees: his retreat is not, for instance, the one we find
in the soma-saturated society of Brave New World, where “the greatest
11
care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much.” It is not
a timorous recoil from the harrowing consequences of love’s
physicality, but simply a rejection of the inherent contradiction in
love having any kind of genuine physicality. There are times when
Soares is hard to distinguish from Rimbaud’s “very young man” from
the beginning of ‘Deserts of Love’, a young man of terminal reticence
who had not “loved women – although passionate! – [for] his soul
and his heart and all his strength were trained in strange, sad
12
errors.”
Similarly, Soares’s own explorations of love are
symptomatic of a wider epistemological affliction: how in finding the
truth of things as they are accessible to him he finds only himself (as
an accessed means of distortion), while those things that are always
sought after, the concrete abstractions which by their very nature
defy life, inevitably presage a state of death, a state in which the
forfeiture of the self is enacted to preserve the sincerity of the
incommunicable, and the sad sanctity of the perpetually erroneous.
Thus evidencing how a commentary on love is just one of several
ongoing and unresolved (qua unresolvable) epistemological and
ontological commentaries, which (regardless of their object) always
lead Soares to (and sometimes even progress from) some form of selfannihilation.
10
Benedict de Spinoza, Works of Spinoza: Volume II (Dover Publications, 1955),
154-5.
11
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Grafton Books, 1977), 190.
12
Rimbaud, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie
(The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 287.
111
GLOSSATOR 5
To understand love is to at once realize that nothing is, or can
ever be, worthy of it. For love’s true object is itself a nothing. It is as
crass and misguided to love a cup as it is a person, so if one is to love
at all, one would be advised to love what is at hand, what can be
relied upon, what serves the purposes of one’s dreams. Mutuality is
13
not necessary; in fact it’s a scourge, as is life itself. Love’s purity (as
objectless and impredicative) demands that one first dispose of life
and other. Such maximal essentialism is not, of course, the preserve
of Soares alone. The tradition is rich, the mythology its own
keepsake. In his essay on The Lady of the Camellias, Roland Barthes
pinpoints this “bourgeois” isolationism in Armand, whose concept of
love “is segregative…, that of the owner who carries off his prey; an
internalized love, which acknowledges the existence of the world only
intermittently and always with a feeling of frustration, as if the world
14
were never anything but the threat of some theft.” But here the
feared theft is not a removal, an extraction, but an addition, a
poisoning, or a branding as one might steal cattle. The world can
only steal what’s inside if what’s inside is nothing and what’s there to
be stolen is that very emptiness: the world, then, steals by occupying,
a squatter in a house left deliberately and vitally empty. Armand’s
love, like Soares’, without flesh to perish, is immutable and without
end; both vampires draining the invisible blood of essence, their
desire, with the world’s objects as mere oblation, will always be “by
15
definition a murder of the other.”
You can love only the pictures of love, its imagery, its phrases,
the bloodless trinkets of its mythology. To know love is to sanctify it
with impossibility and absurdity, to know that even that veiled
contact is foreign and begets a foreign self: “We do not possess our
16
sensations, and through them we cannot possess ourselves.”
Although love is possession, such possession is impossible. The
approximations of possession are ludicrous and abject, eating without
13
‘Friendship’ is the term that we might most readily associate with love
soured by life and mutuality: “of the love of lifeless objects we do not use the
word ‘friendship’; for it is not mutual love” in Aristotle, ‘Nicomachean
Ethics’ in The Complete Works of Aristotle, (ed.) Jonathan Barnes, Volume 2
(Princeton University Press, 1984), 1826.
14
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Vintage Books, 1993),
103.
15
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Vintage Books, 1993),
104.
16
Pessoa (2002), 301.
112
SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
digesting, digesting without first eating: the awkward nestling of
magnets, the chronic bulimia of the soul, the autophagic compromise
of love’s ideal.
Only love allows us to see (or plant, our fingers caked in our
own mud) the self that resides within others.
Love is torment, its devices cast in oblivion. Love is a craving
for something that even the imagination cannot deliver. It is the
purity of longing, the perfect chastity of the eternally unconsummated
(The words ‘chaste’ and ‘chastity’ both deriving from the Latin
adjective castus meaning ‘pure’) – the dream of some unencounterable
17
other. From the mouth of Diotima via Socrates via Aristodemus, we
are told how Love (as spirit not god) truly is: “as the son of Resource
and Need, it has been his fate to be always needy; nor is he delicate
and lovely as most of us believe, but harsh and arid, barefoot and
18
homeless”
The impersonality that Soares envisages for his refinement of
love is, in certain respects, not so far removed from love’s carnal
origins, the perpetuation of which he so thoroughly admonishes. A
reminder, in case we needed one, of his impeccable Realism, for
Soares’s dreams are not the dreams of a blinkered romantic, but the
dreams of a Realist who at once recognizes his bloodless
reconstructions as being both insignificant and unsatisfactory, while
also realizing that the alternative demands that we sleep so that the
world may live. Soares knows that freedom, beauty, and the
impossible are not in the world, but in how one escapes it. He claims
that “love is a sexual instinct,” but is quick to qualify this by pointing
out that “it’s not with sexual instinct that we love but with the
conjecture of some other feeling. And that conjecture is already some
19
other feeling.” Love’s genesis is in impersonality, for instincts are
always impersonal, and it is in impersonality that it culminates. The
transitory state is, however, speculative, and so no longer entirely
17
“Unlike love in possession of that which was / To be possessed and is. But
this cannot / Possess. It is desire, set deep in the eye, / Behind all actual
seeing, in the actual scene, / In the street, in a room, on a carpet or a wall, /
Always in emptiness that would be filled, / In denial that cannot contain its
blood / A porcelain, as yet in the bats thereof.” Wallace Stevens, ‘An
Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 467.
18
Plato, ‘Symposium’, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton
and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1989), 555.
19
Pessoa (2002), 66.
113
GLOSSATOR 5
impersonal, the emotional import of love being a creative
extrapolation. But once created Soares no longer finds himself there.
The construction excludes self. He experiences love most intensely as
an awareness of a feeling of love, rather than as one who merely feels
it, thereby dissolving any clear notion of the personal entity that
loves. In order to feel, feelings must be disowned; only this way can
20
they remain honest – an honesty precluding all moral encumbrance.
He loses himself “not like the river flowing into the sea for which it
was secretly born, but like the puddle left on the beach by the high
tide,” a locus of impassive awareness extruded from the flow through
21
an imagined analysis of sensations from which it has successfully
disembarked, “its stranded water never returning to the ocean but
22
merely sinking into the sand.”
The perfect objects of love are, like those staples of Soares’s
trance-like animatism, those stain-glass figures or Oriental men and
women painted on porcelain, made not born, and made, ordinarily,
as receptacles of intimacy, exemplars of a purist and devotional spirit.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Soares should make the following
23
disclosure: “Like Shelley,
I loved Antigone before time was;
temporal loves were flat to my taste, all reminding me of what I’d
24
lost.” But this feat, this dismissal of flesh, is not enough. To love a
fiction made to be loved is not to stretch for the impossible. Soares,
like some poet lover of the Middle Ages for whom, as Bertrand
Russell points out, “it had become impossible to feel any poetic
20
The dangers of which Kant extolled at length: “For love out of inclination
cannot be commanded; but kindness done from duty – although no
inclination impels us, and even although natural and unconquerable
disinclination stands in our way – is practical, and not pathological, love,
residing in the will and not in the propensions of feeling, in principles of
action and not of melting compassion; and it is this practical love alone which
can be an object of command.” in Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the
Metaphysic of Morals, in The Moral Law, trans. H. J. Paton (Routledge, 1991),
65.
21
“Only the eyes we use for dreaming truly see.” Pessoa (2002), 111.
22
Pessoa (2002), 137.
23
Referencing a letter to John Gisborne, in which Shelley writes: “Some of us
have in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone, and that makes us
find no full content in any mortal tie.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, Essays, Letters
from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (London: Edward Moxon, 1845), 335.
24
Pessoa (2002), 141.
114
SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
25
sentiment towards a lady unless she was regarded as unattainable,”
is all too comfortable with this aseptic connection, finding its rewards
all too possible. His solution lies in establishing love for the most
despicable of fictional female characters: “No greater romantic
adventure exists than to have loved Lady Macbeth with true and
directly felt love. After a love like that, what can one do but take a
26
rest, not loving anyone in the real world?” A more venal and
murderous repository for love could not easily be found, so to love
such a fiction, a fiction created to incite loathing, is an emotional
exploit undoubtedly worthy of his talents as dreamer and purveyor of
disembodied eroticism. But as Soares makes clear, there is no love
that is not love for self and is not also pity for that same self – a
sandwiching of self that epitomizes wisdom, whether our focus is the
external world or the world of oneiric objects – and so Soares’s
passionate entanglement with Lady Macbeth is, to delineate in more
detail, ardour attached to his successful conceptualization of
27
impossible love and the self-sympathy requisite to it. In perfect
accordance with the template laid down by Plato, she becomes “a
25
Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals (Routledge, 1991), 49. Russell goes
on to explain how “nobler spirits of the Middle Ages thought ill of this
terrestrial life; … [and of how] pure joy was to them only possible in ecstatic
contemplation of a kind that seemed to them free from all sexual alloy.”
(Russell 1991, 50).
26
Pessoa (2002), 290-1.
27
The self-serving core to this anfractuous and insulated artifice can be seen
here as a way in which to dissolve the boundaries of selves and the divisive
conditions in which they’re realized, a detail brought to the fore in the
following passage by Deleuze and Guattari: “it would be an error to interpret
courtly love in terms of a law of lack or an ideal of transcendence. The
renunciation of external pleasure, or its delay, its infinite regress, testifies on
the contrary to an achieved state in which desire no longer lacks anything but
fills itself and constructs its own field of immanence. Pleasure is an affection
of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to "find themselves" in
the process of desire that exceeds them; pleasures, even the most artificial, are
reterritorializations. […] The field of immanence is not internal to the self, but
neither does it come from an external self or a nonself. Rather, it is like the
absolute Outside that knows no Selves because interior and exterior are
equally a part of the immanence in which they have fused.” Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (University
of Minnesota Press, 1987), 156.
115
GLOSSATOR 5
28
mirror in which he beholds himself,” his condition, his failure, and
the ascendancy he forges from that failure.
Because the dreamer is invisible to others, despite them taking
his skin to be their own, he will often, in return, see them as
internally barren, clockwork aggregations of flesh alive to the world
and all its clumsy impositions while dead to their own – now
atrophied – selves. The true (long-subjugated) self of the dreamer,
although rarely encountered even by the most skilled practitioner of
dreams, is instantly recognized as both genuine and unsustainable. It
is a void. The dreamer encounters reality within himself, feeling in a
29
state of revelation that his “soul is a real entity.” Waking from life
into the reality and the lacuna of his soul, the world is made
instantaneously remote, an alien land inhospitable to real persons.
This is the self that can be everything because it is nothing,
simultaneously everything and nothing, the non-relational entity
indifferent to the world and the dreamer’s lesser selves: the dreamer’s
true being, the empty variable, the placeholder, the transcendental
self, the self spark. Soares tells of his revelation: “To know nothing
about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To
know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting
30
notion of the intimate monad, the soul’s magic word.” After the
flash has abated, the dreamer returns to being (embodying) the
dreams of that real self, that nothing that can be all things, and that
dreamt self in turn, once the flash is over, finds anchor in the
fictitious non-existence of a worldly sleeping self, the self that knows
31
no other home but the unconsciousness of the world. The deepest
self comes to us like a vacant apparition, like another person’s
emptiness, derailing thought, intelligence, speech, inducing inertia and
sleep: “And now I’m sleepy, because I think – I don’t know why –
32
that the meaning of it all is to sleep.” The meaning of it all is the
return. The meaning becomes the failure to understand it or to
sustain it. All its subsequent sense is encapsulated by this impotence,
and one sleeps in one’s enthrallment of it. If indeed great men exist in
28
Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and
Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1989), 501.
29
Pessoa (2002), 40.
30
Pessoa (2002), 40.
31
Heidegger’s Being and Time must then qualify as the world’s longest treatise
on slumber.
32
Pessoa (2002), 41.
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SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
this state their whole lives, as Soares tells us, then there can be no real
mystery surrounding why he neglects to give their names.
Soares’s fleeting ekstasis haunts him, and experiencing the ghost
of himself – his true self – leaves him with an irresistible desire for a
time when “our deepest selves will somehow cease participating in
33
being and non-being.” According to Sartre’s phenomenological
systemizations surrounding the void at the centre of our being, “[w]e
find ourselves … in the presence of two human ekstases: the ekstasis
which throws us into being-in-itself and the ekstasis which engages us
34
in non-being.” But Soares, in the face of being and non-being wants
for neither: rather, he concocts a third path, the self existing outside
of both. In short, he has the self that eludes him reflect the absurd
35
incomprehensibility of the experience. Once again he is thinking
36
with his feelings, and whereas for thinkers such as Schopenhauer,
for whom heart and head make the person but it is always the latter
33
Pessoa (2002), 45.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology,
trans. Hazel Barnes (Methuen, 1984), 44.
35
Here we have not so much a Humean honest bewilderment (as we see
expressed in the appendix to A Treatise of Human Nature) but rather a
bewilderment of honesty, the paradoxes and impenetrable perplexities of
conscious experience. Soares writes in earnest: “I’m never where I feel I am,
and if I seek myself, I don’t know who’s seeking me.” (Pessoa, 2002: 161)
This is none other than the metaphysical subject revealing its nothingness,
the Wittgensteinian eye that does not see itself (see Wittgenstein, 1974: 57),
and is to be distinguished from the self that eats into his outwardly-directed
consciousness, the scourge of any (sublimely futile) attempt to aestheticise the
world: “I see the way I saw, but from behind my eyes I see myself seeing,
and that is enough to darken the sun, to make the green of the trees old, and
to wilt the flowers before they open.” (Pessoa, 2002: 329)
36
It is important to note that this homogeneity of thought and feeling is
among the most prominent points of contact between Soares and Pessoa-ashimself, expressed most clearly by the latter in the lines: “In me what feels is
always / Thinking.” (Pessoa, 2006: 284) This proximity led Pessoa to the
realization that Soares was not truly autarchic, and so only a “semiheteronym”, a maimed and depleted version of that most adhesive of selves.
Pessoa’s inability to cleave Soares from his derivation is connected to this
inability to separate thought and feeling: what Soares “thinks depends on
what he feels” (Pessoa, 2002: 475), and what he feels depends on Pessoa, and
whatever Pessoa feels is, he confesses, felt solely in order that he may write
(in a style he shares with Soares) that he felt it, making any separation one
that would have Pessoa existing as his own amputee.
34
117
GLOSSATOR 5
that is “secondary” or “derived,” with Soares (especially in the work
that is closest to Pessoa himself) they invariably merge. Comparisons
with Sartre will help codify Soares’s poetic musings, the eloquence of
Soares’s lyrical philosophy coming alive in the contrarieties. It is
possible to attribute a tripartite theory of the self to Soares,
comprising the unconscious worldly self of life, meditating on its
detail, the self that is dreamt and itself dreams a world for itself, and
the self that is missing, absent from the world and impervious to it.
These demarcations fit more or less neatly with Sartre’s three ekstases
(three stances on the for-itself, as the inevitable dispersion of human
being-in-itself): the first ekstasis involves the realization of existence,
the “leaping out” of grounded (worldly) consciousness, the realization
of nothingness as the reason for the found disparity between worldly
consciousness (living), and awareness of existence as brute human
37
fact (knowing); the second involves the failure of justification: a
further fracturing, as that which seeks to know and actualize the
initial awareness encounters its own difference; while the third has
the other emerging as subject, but one that cannot be known as
subject, as a subject would know itself. But Soares, with no interest in
uniting these perspectives (subjects), turns away from synthesis, from
the one transcendent ego, and instead accepts (welcomes) the
proliferation of such egos that arrive in their wake. For Soares, modes
of awareness invariably spawn selves, or levels of dreaming each with
38
a dreamer. Like Sartre, he does not posit the reality of selves, but
instead sees selves as imaginary devices, through which we can
transcend Reality, the reality in which the self is a nothing.
Our adjectives mostly fail to touch the world as it is; they do not
chart the skin, but dress it. But this is not a mistake, an error to be
corrected; it’s a freedom, a playground replete with bountiful
spawning materials. It is for this reason that the deepest self must be
an impredicative, unanalysable gap – the something of nothing – “no
more than the ray of sunlight that shines and isolates from the soil the
39
pile of dung that’s the body.”
Instead of a reductionist or
eliminativist reading of the self, we get an exploitative one, a rigorous
celebration of the diverse possibilities of consciousness. Soares
37
Soares tells of how his “normal, everyday self-awareness had intermingled
with the abyss.” Pessoa (2002), 95.
38
In Sartre’s 1936 essay, The Transcendence of the Ego, we see him set upon
Husserl’s positing of the transcendental reality of the ego.
39
Pessoa (2002), 58.
118
SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
nurtures the internal remoteness achieved when consciousness turns
in on itself; he nourishes the phenomenological state of being
somehow host to your own self, as opposed to embodying it, and
from this groundwork he starts to build.
At times Soares feels himself becoming that abyssal eye staring
out from nowhere and acknowledging the knotted materials of the
self, as one might acknowledge the presence of a tumour, or some
foreign growth squirming in the rat-infested back alleys of a tale once
told about your life and your role inside it. He sees the human soul’s
unconscious filth, sees it “is a madhouse of the grotesque. […] a well,
but a sinister well full of murky echoes and inhabited by abhorrent
40
creatures, slimy non-beings, lifeless slugs, the snot of subjectivity.”
So what does he do with these grotesqueries of the soul once they’ve
been disinterred? He takes them on holiday: they are transformed
into “huge heads of non-existent monsters,” “Oriental dragons from
41
the abyss,” and finally the hollow stratagems of the city, resignation,
and Destiny.
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein claims that “What brings the self
into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’. / The
philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the
human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the
42
metaphysical subject, the limit of the world – not a part of it.”
Soares captures the exact same revelation, saying “We possess
nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing
43
because we are nothing. […] The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.” And
44
then even more succinctly: “I’m lost if I find myself.” This
constitutes the birth of Soares as dreamer, for this unity of self and
world is a convening of two nothings: the self that cannot be mine
(cannot be anything for me) and the world itself abyssal in
constituting the everything of the absentee self. The challenge is laid
out thus: “Everything is us, and we are everything, but what good is
45
this, if everything is nothing.”
40
Pessoa (2002), 208.
Pessoa (2002), 209-10.
42
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B.
F. McGuiness (Routledge, 1974), 58.
43
Pessoa (2002), 112.
44
Pessoa (2002), 209.
45
Pessoa (2002), 149.
41
119
GLOSSATOR 5
46
That “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” is
something that Soares accepts – he is, after all, the “selfsame prose”
he writes – but when he accepts this, it is not merely as some
rationally punitive stricture, but as a provocation, an ontological
ultimatum.
And the other (psychological) self is a fiction: “It’s only the self
who no longer believes and is now an adult, with a soul that
remembers and weeps – only this self is fiction and confusion,
47
48
anguish and the grave.” This self (this objectified person ) is the
fiction that the world configures, the self lived into obscurity by the
blind processes of its own brute reflexivity. And to realize that there is
no destination, that where we’ve been is as unknown and distant as
where we’re going, arrives as partial remedy to this state of lost
transparency. The dreamer’s prescription is to have as much
expectation for, and make as much demand on, the past as on the
future, to be deliberately aimless – time’s own magniloquent vagrant
– not to simply become one of the world’s clumsy fictions, devoid of
49
identity and “so scattered,” but to found one’s being in the very
impossibility of being anything other than yourself, i.e. to found your
being in what you cannot be, forging an escape from materials that
confine (and define) you. Evidence that this experiment is even in
operation is scant and fragile and pervaded with logical perversity, as
when Soares happens on the “absurd remembrance of [his] future
50
death.”
The real world demands artifice of its sleepwalkers,
revealing itself most fruitfully when bent out of shape. Bending to fit
the world we mimic how the world sees us, not how the world is.
If we consider the exposition of Zeus’ bisection of man found in
Plato’s ‘Symposium’, of how those eight-limbed, two-headed men,
women and hermaphrodites of myth were cleaved like pieces of fruit,
we can begin to see how it is that love came to be seen as some
corrective for lost unity, naming the condition which leaves “each half
with a desperate yearning for the other, … [wanting] for nothing
46
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B.
F. McGuiness (Routledge, 1974), 56.
47
Pessoa (2002), 129.
48
This is the person of the psychological theorist, the indeterminate aggregate
of psychological properties to which the self is reduced by John Locke, David
Hume, Derek Parfit, Sidney Shoemaker, et al.
49
Pessoa (2002), 55.
50
Pessoa (2002), 68.
120
SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
51
better than to be rolled into one.” Soares internalizes this myth,
describing a state which seeks to rectify division within the self, to
close the distance not between human beings but between two
estranged segments of the same self, “Siamese twins that aren’t
52
attached.”
UNREALITY: LOVE AS DREAMING
The world is a dead reality, a weightless husk, its dreamable
resources sucked out like the guts of some pillaged insect.
Consciousness forces a state of being: act one’s dreams and
dream one’s acts. But therein lies a danger: to dream the life that
others merely live is to invest yourself in your surroundings, both the
animate and the inanimate, having them exist only partially on your
terms, leaving the way clear that they may walk away at any time
and take parts of you with them. (What’s more, the inevitable
disclosures of falsity become a source of disgust, for only pure dreams
can enchant, “those which have no relation to reality nor even any
53
point of contact with it.”) The consequence of dreaming life is that
“Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything
54
that ceases in what we see ceases in us.” Every loss, however
insignificant to our state of active dreaming, or to our intellect in
which it might barely register, becomes a mortification, a partial
amputation of the soul. For else why would Soares cry “My God, my
55
God, the office boy left today”?
You can no more own the objects of love than you can own
your dreams. To be skilled at dreaming is to realize a state in which
your dreams can own you. And to be owned by a dream is to submit
to the plot-less presence of the dead man. Similarly, to submit to the
ownership of love is to avoid all of its narrative manifestations, in
which its objects possess nothing but love’s ephemera (sensations of
the perpetually thwarted possession of its objects), relinquishing all
love’s worldly accoutrements, so that there may be something left to
act as possessor: love is the unpossessable possessor of its own
potentiality. By transcending the boundaries of the internal self, love
51
Plato, ‘Symposium’, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton
and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1989), 543.
52
Pessoa (2002), 20.
53
Pessoa (2002), 460.
54
Pessoa (2002), 241.
55
Pessoa (2002), 241.
121
GLOSSATOR 5
realises its own dilution, for as it is lived (exteriorised) into something
else it becomes estranged from the pretence on which its existence
depends, an imagining both estranged and depleted – a lesser dream,
56
tangible and lost. If sex is the “accident”
of love, then the
57
masturbator expresses, in his very abjectness, the unfortunate truth
(as disclosure of essential pretence) of this aleatoric conjunction. “Let
us remain eternally like a male figure in one stained-glass window
58
opposite a female figure in another stained-glass window,” for there
is no other way for us to non-destructively realise (from réaliser to
“make real”) love’s immanent potential as self-sustained dream.
These selfsame conditions for love’s realization, as being necessarily
static and outside of time, are revealed to Jorge Luis Borges’ Javier
Otárola at the close of ‘Ulrikke’: “Like sand, time sifted away.
Ancient in the dimness flowed love, and for the first and last time, I
59
possessed the image of Ulrikke.”
Understanding is inimical to love and to self. In something
resembling an extreme take on Stendhal’s aphorism on happiness, in
which description becomes diminishment, we see that to understand
one must first butcher oneself and then that which one seeks to
understand. Love, in contradistinction, leaves no fingerprint, its
aristocratic non-touch a hovering hand doubly displaced in dream.
To suffer in love is to want it to be more than it is, to be all at
once flesh and idea. Worldly (undreamed) love is a template for
suffering. Love is so important to us, enjoys such exalted
preeminence in human life, because we imagine it to be all that we
want from it. This is how it is able to transcend and enslave us.
Having reconstructed our meaningfulness as human beings from an
impossible desire, we set about trying to find its objects, and that all
objects fall short is no detriment to the love that attaches itself to
them, quite the opposite – their loss is love’s gain. “Perfection never
materializes. The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent. That is
56
Fernando Pessoa, A Little Less Than the Entire Universe: selected poems, trans.
Richard Zenith (Penguin Books, 2006), 351.
57
The plight of those nine grinding bachelors (“malic molds”) in Marcel
Duchamp’s The Large Glass, all sharing “the same useless expression” Pessoa
(2002), 289.
58
Pessoa (2002), 289.
59
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Penguin Press,
1999) 422.
122
SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
60
why we can love the saint but cannot love God” – although, we can
safely love the idea of God.
Love demands distance and intangibility from its objects, so a
wise deployment reserves attention for one’s dreams of love or, more
precisely, one’s dreaming of the dreamt love of fictional lovers. Only
this way can we hope to dissect the emotion of the idea, without
mistaking the idea for flesh. Goethe’s Eduard was a precise enough
lover to make this distinction when it came to Ottilie: “Sometimes she
does something that offends the pure idea I have of her, and it is only
then I know how much I love her, because I am then distressed
61
beyond all power of description.” Love cannot survive our knowing
it or its objects, the latter of which do not really exist: it is the dream
of a dream, the dream of a dream that can’t be dreamt. As Soares
62
would put it, “‘I want you only to dream of you.’” But even the
imagination destroys (possibilities) as it builds, so the formula of the
dream requires the perpetual immanence of the impossible; if “there’s
always at least one dimension missing in the inward space that
63
harbours these hapless realities,” then it’s for good reason. The
desire for this dimensional deficiency to be healed is to want for love
64
to be nursed to death, to be fortified to the point of extirpation. The
reality we seek for those creatures of our dreams is, then, an empty
65
and self-defeating vanity. To want the substance of your dreams to
mimic that of the world is to will the creation of essentially
antithetical beings, a need grounded in the knowledge that “[t]he
more a man differs from me, the more real he seems, for he depends
66
that much less on my subjectivity.” Here resides the dilemma of
60
Pessoa (2002), 65.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Penguin Books, 1971), 146.
62
Pessoa (2002), 101.
63
Pessoa (2002), 90.
64
Not unlike the sad accounts concerning those released from Nazi
concentration camps who, on liberation, ate themselves to death. Love is a
form of starvation, and so requires a thin gruel, the almost figmental
substance of Bengal famine mix.
65
A reality captured in exquisite detail by Wallace Stevens: “This image, this
love, I compose myself / Of these. In these, I come forth outwardly. / In these, I wear a
vital cleanliness, / Not as in air, bright-blue-resembling air, / But as in the powerful mirror
of my wish and will.” in Wallace Stevens, ‘Poem with Rhythms’, in The Collected
Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 245-6.
66
Pessoa (2002), 70.
61
123
GLOSSATOR 5
love: the desire to possess when possession is inimical to the desire.
That which I love must be mine and not mine: mine so that love is
not torture, and not mine so that we can share in the discursive
pleasures of propriety, pleasures known to Samuel Beckett’s Mr
Hackett who, of certain seats, “knew they were not his, … [though]
he thought of them as his. He knew they were not his, because they
67
pleased him.” We want for the absent dimensions of our dreams to
be merely hidden, just as the machinations of self-awareness
instinctively lead us to suppose that what seems like our own absence
is really a mere instance of the search obscuring what it seeks to find.
We want what we cannot see and what cannot be seen to be implied
by what we can and do see, and yet this implication, should it come,
would transform illusion into reality, when the goal for the dreamer is
to realize that reality and illusion are codependents and that it is this
very codependence that makes not only an internalization of the
universe possible, but an internalization of every universe, including
the infinite and incomplete, universes whose internal contradictions
imply something beyond reality, something transcendent rather than
transcendental. But the toll on the self imposed by these Aleph-like
internalizations can be considerable: “How much I die if I feel for
68
everything!”
Like the retired librarian in Borges’ ‘The Book of Sand’, a man
slowly consumed by the infinite book that has come into his
possession, Soares is acutely aware that those that live life do so
unconsciously, that life is best lived unconscious of itself and
reinforced with spurious limitations. Consciousness exists in defiance
of life; to live consciously is to regard life as one would an alien
costume tailored to the shape of men, but lacking any safe points of
entry. To be conscious is to know feeling (or feel knowing) at a
distance, to always maintain a scholarly reserve and perplexity even
towards that which would appear most intimate.
When the dreaming of our waking life (that life discernible from
lived dreaming because it is peopled with tangible occupants) is
disrupted by non-routine elements, it becomes critically
compromised. For when dreaming this life, we live the hypotheses
and imaginings of these real people – we regret their absence while
they are still present, mourn their deaths while they still breathe,
witness mutations of character while they remain unchanged – so that
67
68
Samuel Beckett, Watt (Grove Press, 1953), 7.
Pessoa (2002), 93.
124
SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
if such things should really happen, our pre-emptive dreams of them
appear disfigured by comparative association. The futures we have
constructed for the people around us, futures in which those people
are placed, insulated by the dreamer’s despotic enchantment, have a
reality that has claim to a certain level of solidity, as too do their
present-day selves as visited from the dreamer’s future reminiscences,
a solidity which is impaired (desecrated even) by the crude and
unexpected vacillations of reality. The dreamer demands that life
obey a certain formulaic continuity, that those people that have been
transmogrified into symbols remain unaltered, that one’s future
recollections of them are not falsified by reality. To live this way is to
no longer be one self but two, (“two abysses”): the self that dreams,
lost in its attentiveness to the world and the banality of its detail, and
the dreamt self reporting back from the vantages of imagination.
They are the remote exhibits of a bisected unity, an omphaloskepsis
continually swallowed and disgorged by its umbilici.
To act in one’s dreams is to maintain an internal state of flux, to
move on before having found a place to settle – in short, to play out
the futile insanity of real life to much greater effect. Played out
because the anchor of the real is never truly lost, even if its
impressions elude all recollection, and to greater effect because the
range is inexhaustible, the self which lives it infinite (bearing the
marks of its extrication), and the pattern of its weave all “intervals,”
all “nothing,” the purest possibilities of the absurd (of its divinity), the
confused – a finely delineated oblivion. To attempt (even on a
minimal scale) to mimic these conditions externally is to suffocate the
infinite self, its lungs ill-formed to breathe the oppressive air of
finitude: “The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree
69
with ourselves.”
The internal contradictions that starve the dreamer (of
satisfaction) are the same contradictions that have him grow fat (on
the nobility of disappointment). The dreamer cannot believe in
success; the boundless possibilities consume all sense of it.
Everywhere is nowhere. But therein lies an approximation of success,
for to know your defeat intimately is to be victorious. He moves
70
amongst “the flagless army fighting a hopeless war,” and while he
and this unaffiliated martial horde share the same vanquishment, he
has other wars to continue losing, and losing gloriously and with the
69
70
Pessoa (2002), 27.
Pessoa (2002), 59.
125
GLOSSATOR 5
necessity of his defeat providing fanfare. To be aware that you’re
what’s left of something that’s never been anything more, is to be
spared the vision of the pernicious and phantom-like augmentations
of desire. The dreamer doesn’t try to reach the end (the completion,
or use) of anything, his own self least of all. Here lies meaning, sense,
dignity: “Since we can’t extract beauty from life, let’s at least try to
71
extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life.” The
only perfection open to us lies in our failure to attain it.
The proficient dreamer never loses sight of the phenomenon of
dreaming, or through how many conduits his reverie is being filtered.
72
He dreams “without illusions,” for he is aware that his entire
consciousness bears the mark of the dream, be it the internal dream
of others’ internal dreams, or the dream of the world, soured by its
proximity to claims of truth. It is for this reason that “[e]very dream is
73
the same dream, for they’re all dreams”
(just as every
unconsciousness is the same unconsciousness “diversified among
74
different faces and bodies”).
Soares has no desire to socialize the self (such as we see in late
Sartre, for example), to meld ego with man. Man is a fetid potion, “a
monstrous and vile animal created in the chaos of dreams, out of
75
desires’ soggy crusts, out of sensations’ chewed-up leftovers.” The
paganistic “cult of humanity” is grounded in the misguided premise
that man is a legitimate replacement for God. Though makers of
reality, we do not, as individuals, choose the manner in which it is
made. If our dreams were to be made real – by which we mean
encounterable in the way the world is encounterable, to be inside it as
much as it is inside us – they would be made fact, and the facts would
then overwhelm both dream and dreamer. If realities were to become
Realities, then the dreamer would be altered as a result, altered into a
god. This extra dimension, if added, would render the dream
external (for the supplementary dimension must come from outside
these realities), see them subsumed into the world; the dreamer
would start to dream realities as he dreams the world, unconsciously.
You would live (worldly) in your dream and thereby destroy the
dreaming self. For these realities to gain this extra dimension the
71
Pessoa (2002), 261.
Pessoa (2002), 61.
73
Pessoa (2002), 60.
74
Pessoa (2002), 70.
75
Pessoa (2002), 63.
72
126
SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
dreamer would have to disappear, all distance (that distance that
creates nearness) lost. The reality would be yours, in a way that the
world never is, its independence (for there must be independence.
How else could you meet the friends you’ve dreamed of as distinct
from dreaming such a meeting?) additional rather than inherent, but
it would amount to a fundamental limitation of possibilities, namely
one’s presence as absentee. As when the dreamer returns to the
world, the focus would inevitably shift from acting one’s dreams to
dreaming one’s acts.
Love is not for living but observing, as a form of self-awareness:
the self that dies daily to the world and the dreaming self each watch
the other fail, the former in disillusionment and the latter in
artificiality. But the latter, at least, need never lose the object of his
love, for he realizes that he has created it, and should it become
threadbare can make it again.
To reform reality in the intellect, to tell of the images of one’s
dreams in a voice nobody will hear: this is how to survive the world
and its dismal ministry. Life does not permit its flock to dream, for
once the world has colonized all internal space, there’s nothing else
left to dream and no one left to dream it.
The dreamer does not sacrifice his intelligence, his reason, for
the sake of the dream. He unites them; he makes dreaming a
response to truth and not its replacement. He accepts, like
Wittgenstein, that there are no genuine problems of existence –
“When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question
be put into words. / The riddle does not exist. / If a question can be
76
framed at all, it is also possible to answer it” – that a logical approach
to the world rids us of the necessity of answers, for the world itself
poses no questions, but yet he remains speculative, choosing to detail
this non-existent riddle and set up home in its absence.
The dreamer’s riddle (the riddle that sustains him, for “How
77
everything wearies when it is defined!”) is the very lacuna left by
the riddle of existence which does not exist. His task is not the
framing of answers to impossible questions, or even, for the most
part, framing impossible questions, but rather framing the very
impossibility of certain questions, maddening in their ghostliness,
their vague specificity, their uncertain certainty. He senses the
76
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B.
F. McGuiness (Routledge, 1974), 73.
77
Pessoa (2002), 138.
127
GLOSSATOR 5
questions, senses their non-existence as one would sense the missing.
His words construct the impossibility of construction; they are the
blueprints not for impossible buildings, but the impossibility of
building, thereby constructing a template for impossibility itself, for
the necessity of nothingness.
And once again Soares’s comments on the comingling of
thought and feeling are provided illustration, for it is as a
consequence of their fusion that one can be aware of the strictures of
logic while at the same time breaking them.
The first task is to overcome what is instead of what can be. This
is the initial flight of the dreamer, in which he anatomizes “the
metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of
78
disillusion.” The second, more fundamental, flight turns its attention
on the necessary limitations of that first flight i.e. the substance of the
nothing of undreamability.
Even loves manufactured in dreams must pass. How else could
we dream their allotted nostalgia? Love is an exercise; why else
would we willfully replace its objects? “I can change my sweetheart
79
and she’ll always be the same.” To love this way is to love
indifferently, to experience a paradox of feeling that is the apex of
thought-feeling.
In real life man trails behind himself, all the while imagining that
he is the one with his head over his shoulder. In the life of dreams the
straggler and the vanguard are indistinguishable, united by the
dream. Each must surrender to the other in order for the dreamer to
be formed. Division implies navigation, and the true dreamer does
not navigate his dream, he becomes his dream and each performs the
other. Pace Paul Valéry, knowing oneself is not foreseeing oneself and
so playing the part of oneself, but foreseeing nothing and thereby
locating oneself in the pathless landscape of the dream.
Love provides but one service to the dreamer: the increased
fondness for what is absent. This fondness drives imagination,
animating the dreamer, and when succumbed to without reservation
can absent reality itself.
78
79
Pessoa (2002), 133.
Pessoa (2002), 403.
128
SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
MELTING: LOVE AS DEATH
The deceased man of action was always “what Death would
80
make of him.” The deceased man of dreams was always what he
would make of Death.
The idea of love, like the idea of death, is frozen, eternal and
unoccupied, sensation without the ephemeral trappings of its cause,
or its even needing a cause.
There is nothing you can construct in the exterior world which
does not first involve you destroying an element of yourself, and the
exterior world contains nothing – no cause, no love, no discovery –
worthy of a man’s internal annihilation – not that there is especial
calamity in the latter. To exteriorize is to submit to cowardice, to
submit to the reassuring untruth of reality’s concrete independence.
Soares gives us a way out, a way of protecting the internal from the
external:
The truly wise man is the one who can keep external
events from changing him in any way. To do this, he
covers himself with an armour of realities closer to him
than the world’s facts and through which the facts,
81
modified accordingly, reach him.
This carapace is the actualization of a consciousness, a protective filter
maintaining verisimilitude to nothing but awareness itself, and
thereby constituting a retreat from the numerous “metaphysical
82
mistake[s] of matter,” internalizing them. This is Soares tiring of
truth, as weary from conflict with the world’s persistence he
eradicates all factful concerns, reducing them to an absent-minded
83
dereliction of self. And yet he claims to “remember only external
84
things” and to furnish his dreams, thus upping their intensity, with
80
Pessoa (2002), 407.
Pessoa (2002), 94.
82
Pessoa (2002), 96.
83
Soares’s burden is that of the philosopher, for as Nietzsche observes, the
“philosopher recuperates differently and with different means: he recuperates,
e.g., with nihilism. Belief that there is no truth at all, the nihilistic belief, is a
great relaxation for one who, as a warrior of knowledge, is ceaselessly
fighting ugly truths. For truth is ugly.” in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann
(Vintage Books, 1967), 325.
84
Pessoa (2002), 183.
81
129
GLOSSATOR 5
the rewards of a scrutiny turned outward, with things prose-filtered
and yet inescapably visual and spatially ordered. Externalizing
impressions is a way to locate them, to have them exist, to establish
them as encounterable and so too ourselves as that which encounters,
and much rather that than a false name fixed to the collected
fragments of an unowned dream.
Love makes but one demand for incarnation, that its promise
remain a threat. Seeking love’s fulfilment among the objects of the
world, seeking therein its vertex and conclusion, is a betrayal of the
inherent chastity of loving-as-possession. There is no possession but
the dream, a dream itself devoid of possessing. The loving dream, the
idea of that loved, is the limit of the lover’s claim to ownership, and
one does not even own one’s dreams. Meticulous attention on the
outside should always be a prerequisite for a subsequent act of
internalisation: the sexual impulse is a reversal of this. The
sexualisation of love is a relinquishment of possibility, and a
debasement of the dreamer’s singularity, an immolation that
Schopenhauer tells us “is the life of the species, asserting its
85
precedence over that of individuals.” When Soares declares that
86
“[l]ife should be a dream that spurns confrontations,” it is this kind
of banal skirmish to which he is referring, the anguished dueling that
occurs when the narrator (of dreams) is narrated (by life). To place
love in the world importunes an adjectival prefix, such as we see in
the phrases, sexual love, and motherly love, and also in Hegel’s
somewhat pleonastic clarification: “Active love – for love does that
87
does not act has no existence.” Soares would say that active love, by
existing, is not love, but rather what is fashioned from love’s residual
scraps once it’s been obliterated by activity. Action is never other
than a destructive force, “a disease of thought, a cancer of the
imagination. […And just as] God, becoming man, cannot help but
88
end in martyrdom,” love’s descent into the meat of unclaimed
89
bodies cannot help but end in surrender and eventual death,
85
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J.
Payne, Volume 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 602.
86
Pessoa (2002), 145.
87
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford
University Press, 1977), 255; my emphasis.
88
Pessoa (2002), 272.
89
The fate of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, whose post-coital subjugation and
suicide provides perfect illustration of the annihilative vigour of corporeal
passion.
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SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
consciousness abandoned to the inert flesh of the other. And yet there
is no escape in essentialism either, for love’s fastigium is not free of
death but riddled with a brand of abstract necrosis, a state in which
we are “chaste like dead lips, pure like dreamed bodies, and resigned
90
to being this way, like mad nuns.” And it does not end with love,
for all interaction with others is a corruption of possibilities, a
91
truncation of internal infinitudes: “To associate is to die.” Social
existence involves crediting others with a level of reality that
immediately confines and marginalizes the self, and that part of us
92
that extends into this realm becomes necrotized tissue.
If love is to be suffered, then it should be suffered only as a
possibility for sensation – a sensation of possibility. It is this
nympholeptic sterility that conveys permanence, a sterility that while
frequently associated with the moral implications of chastity, is
93
concerned with neither the virtue of oneself or others: “Women are
94
a good source of dreams. Don’t ever touch them.” Not even with
the prosthetic hands used to touch life. In summation, Soares’s
dictum can be seen as a reversal of one half of the Schopenhauerian
distinction that couples life with permanence: where for
Schopenhauer “it is his immortal part [the will to life] that longs for
95
96
her;” for Soares it is his immortal (or permanent/infinite) part as
90
Pessoa (2002), 289.
Pessoa (2002), 184.
92
Mark Seltzer details the potential destructiveness of socialization in his
study on serial killers, in which he painstakingly explores “the manner in
which serial violence is bound up with what might be described as the
quickening of an experience of generality within: a psychasthenic yielding to
generality, to affections with something stereotypical about them, to
something statistical in our loves. Serial violence, in short, cannot be
separated from experiences of a radical failure in self-difference.” (Mark
Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (Routledge,
1998), 144.)
93
Like Pausanias’ divine lover (as relayed by Aristodemus), Soares advocates
a state in which we may “become one with what will never fade.” (Plato
1989, 537), but unlike Pausanias he has no interest in this lover’s moral
status, or the viciousness or otherwise of his counterpart, the earthly lover,
who lusts only after gratifications of the flesh.
94
Pessoa (2002), 351.
95
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J.
Payne, Volume 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 559.
91
131
GLOSSATOR 5
the rejection of life (the will to anti-life) that longs (or ideally provides
witness to such longing) for her (as a representation). This sense of
there being an underlying aim is also present in Alfred North
Whitehead, who saw love for one’s child or one’s spouse as the
exemplification of a feeling concerned with a desired consonance
somehow made manifest in loved objects. This love, he claimed,
“involves deep feeling of an aim in the Universe, winning such
97
triumph as is possible to it.” Soares would be unable to see any
triumphs worth winning. This is the vulgarity of purpose infiltrating
the sublime uselessness of love, as if the search and the silence were
wanting, weren’t themselves everything. Where Whitehead finds an
implication of discord and division, Soares finds the opportunity for
98
synthesis. The conflict lies with “the principles of the generality of
harmony, and of the importance of the individual. The first means
‘order’, and the second means ‘love’. Between the two there is a
suggestion of opposition. For ‘order’ is impersonal; and ‘love’, above
99
all things, is personal.” The trick is to experience the personal from
a distance, and thereby establish order. There is an inescapable
universality to the personal, and it is this that can be observed
dispassionately. It is that aspect of the personal that we consider
peculiar to ourselves that allows us to relish the structures of love on
a level considered intimate. In this way love and harmony become
inseparable. It is only by surrendering love to particular objects that
100
the ideal is forfeited. This proposed experience of love is objectless,
and so fraught with none of the deleterious consequences so often
associated with love’s worldly actualization. But although free of the
96
Although Soares is clear that nothing about human life is infinite, the
dream, though it may be only momentarily embodied, is not itself
asphyxiated by limitations of time.
97
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge University Press,
1939), 373.
98
Something we also find in Cioran: “Irrationality resides over the birth of
love. The sensation of melting is also present, for love is a form of intimate
communion and nothing expresses it better than the subjective impression of
melting, the falling away of all barriers of individuation. Isn’t love specificity
and universality all at once?” in E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
(University of Chicago Press, 1996), 84.
99
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge University Press,
1939), 376.
100
Like Platonic forms the objects of love must remain “free from all alloy”
(Plato 1989, 497).
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SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
raw anxieties of love’s frontline, the death of the self remains
inevitable. For by turning love into an anti-prosopopoeial
conglomerate of abstractions, ideally experienced as a uniquely
concerted sensation, Soares makes a simulacrum of the self at every
level. There is no room for the self when sensation has been purified
to this degree. It’s the Cartesian corrective applied to sensation: there is
sensation. Georges Bataille, recognising the deep connection between
the physical entrapment of love and the abdication of self, writes: “I
said that I regarded eroticism as the disequilibrium in which the being
consciously calls his own existence in question. In one sense, the
being loses himself deliberately, but then the subject is identified with
101
the object losing his identity.” In Soares’s idealized picture of love,
free of the disequilibrium of eroticism, the subject makes a quandary
of its existence not through identification with the body, but through
having no available repository for identification whatsoever.
If Soares ever managed to encapsulate his – and so Pessoa’s –
entire project in a single sentence, then he does so here: “I’ve
102
externalized myself on the inside.”
What we see with
Schopenhauer’s and Whitehead’s picture of love, which is to name
but two for those with like-minded approaches are legion, is the exact
opposite, for they understand the lover as someone who internalizes
himself on the outside.
The spiritualized transfiguration of two bodies into one brought
on by an individual’s craven rapport with another, in Soares’s hands
becomes a mechanism of intimate self-viewing, the sensation of love
facilitating a (Cioranian) “melting” of self-watched and self-watching.
But to fuse is to annihilate by contamination. To love is to seek
destruction and impurity. To desire the effects of love is to desire a
103
distinctly Empedoclean integration. Identity, or at the least one’s
sense of being a something that dreams, a something in dreams, a
something that some disclosure of scientific truth could possibly make
101
Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Colin MacCabe (Penguin Books, 2001),
31.
102
Pessoa (2002), 254.
According to Empedocles, Love was the amalgam of the cosmic cycle –
the agency that brought about the coalescence of the four roots (earth, air,
fire and water) into a uniform sphere – and Strife the agency that sowed
discord through that love-formed sphere, once again estranging its elements.
But Love cannot retain the integrity of each root, as running “through one
another, they become different in aspect.” The natural world is formed in this
way, via the integrative betrayal of each of its constituent parts.
103
133
GLOSSATOR 5
nothing, always comes at the expense of others. To relate to others
on any level is to have them partake in the composition of your
existence, to have their remote paws help put you together. All action
assumes company, (a necroid promiscuity of the soul) making the one
who acts porous. To act is to recoil from the self, diluting it with
alterity, entombing the freedom of nothingness inside the dirt of the
world.
Physical love is a contagion (for Bataille “an impersonal
growth”) and sterility a partial containment. Soares asks us to pray
that his hypothetical wife be sterile and never more than hypothetical.
Sexual reproduction is the forging (knocking up) of violent materials,
the manufacture of weaponry for a war that your children will fight
for you, a war you can longer see a point in winning, a war that exists
only so that there may be soldiers to fight it, war as a reason for
parturition. The self-annihilations of love do not mimic suicide, they
mimic life; present even in the midst of sterility, they involve the
destruction of what cannot be found, the mutilation of uninhabitable
104
bodies: “Only to kill what never was is lofty, perverse and absurd.”
If, as Bataille tells us, the human corpse is a “tormenting object,” the
object a prophecy of the viewer’s own violent destiny, then human
offspring, delivered into the world or preempted by infertility,
represents the death of a dream, the snuffing out of possibility, of all
opportunity for perfect surrender or love as death – a corpse-less
death. A love in which both parties surrender completely to the other
is not possible, but if it were each would lay their personality out on
105
the mortuary slab: “The greatest love is therefore death.”
All
attempts to act out this surrender are failures that work toward
106
death only to document its impossibility, so that if, as Bataille also
realized, “the urge towards love, pushed to its limit, is an urge toward
107
death,” then it is the urge toward a dream of death, a death made
our own now fading, a death found impossible, leaving us staring
104
Pessoa (2002), 288.
Pessoa (2002), 449.
106
“I FAINT, I perish with my love! I grow / Frail as a cloud whose
[splendours] pale / Under the evening’s ever-changing glow: / I die like mist
upon the gale, / And like a wave under the calm I fail.” Percy Bysshe Shelley,
‘Fragment XXXIII’, in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London:
Edward Moxon, 1870), 577.
107
Bataille (2001), 42.
105
134
SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
down at the vacated corpse of ourselves as it ridicules our dreams for
it.
VOID: LOVE AS IMPOSSIBILITY
If all man’s words are marginalia on blank sheets of paper, then
108
man can only make or unmake the suppositions of his existence.
There can be no true path for that which exists only by hypothesis.
The only way for such a contrivance to live according to its
(unnatural) nature is through an escalation of such pathways,
ignoring the constraints of possibility forged – through misadventures
in identification – along the way. Only recognition of the necessity of
failure can go towards redeeming the efforts made, wherein failure
once again makes its mark. The success of mystery comes at the
expense of a solid footing from which to dream, so expediting the
collapse of abstraction as possible recourse. From what do we
abstract? The universality of Soares’s self-professed ignorance is
rewarded with the wisdom of his awareness of it; with the dejection
of one who’d temporarily submitted to a hope he knew to be false, he
writes, “I’ll never write a page that sheds light on me or that sheds
109
light on anything.” If we can speak of Soares having a moment of
triumph, this is it. For what better way to nurture absurdity than by
constructing the most elaborate strategies of illumination for that
which no darkness could ever hide? (This is what it means to be
110
“spiritualized in Night.”) It is within these strategies, this endless
and sightless lucubration, that he discovers the possibility for
integrity: “I’ve always felt that virtue lay in obtaining what was out of
one’s reach […] in achieving something impossible, something
absurd, in overcoming – like an obstacle – the world’s very
111
reality.” (His Realist credentials are once again in evidence: to
consider such a project of overcoming to be impossible and absurd
one must first have accepted the concrete independence of that which
one seeks to overcome, thereby accepting the limitations – only to
108
One way of approaching this partitioning of man’s control is to see it in
terms of Wilfred Sellars’ distinction between man’s manifest self-image and
man’s scientific self-image: only the former can be made or unmade, the latter
if it is not to unmake the former must remain (to the persons it threatens) a
blank page. See Wilfred Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Harvard
University Press, 1997).
109
Pessoa (2002), 134.
110
Pessoa (2002), 192.
111
Pessoa (2002), 130.
135
GLOSSATOR 5
then discard them in the service of the impossible – that such an
112
acceptance implies.)
Clarity, that impossibility of all impossibilities, and one dreamt
possible so that we may have a reason to fail.
Whitehead states that “In the extreme of love […] all personal
desire is transferred to the thing loved, as a desire for its
113
perfection.” The thing loved, that whose perfection is desired, is,
for Soares, none other than the incarnate love’s impossible telos –
which is itself transformed by the abstract telos found in that very
impossibility.
Soares, despite his deep-rooted abhorrence of persons of this
type, is often almost indistinguishable from the ascetics and mystics of
Christianity and Buddhism, those that “long for what they don’t
114
know.” The blank page is the unyielding human nothing of the
scientifically-present world. The mystics “have emptied themselves of
115
the world’s nothingness,” and so too does Soares. How could he
fail to admire those who shun the world in favour of mystery and
meditative voyage? However, what he cannot embrace about this
mystic life is its prescribed loss of whim. He cannot couch his project
in quagmires of belief, nor can he regiment his feelings with
theoretical manacles. Instead he chooses to create a monasticism of
faithless dreams.
The text must not simply remain open, something some slim
aperture of inexplicitness would realize, but must be splayed to the
point where it cannot even contain itself. This is what it means to be
112
A stance comparable to that which Nick Land finds in the relation
between fiction and theory in Bataille: “One might say that at the level of
writing theory is a constricted species of fiction, in the same way that the
actual constricts possibility (but what matters is the impossible).” Nick Land,
The Thirst for Annihilation (Routledge, 1992), 131. There’s also a striking
resemblance to the nameless man (the ‘somebody’ the ‘you’) in Borges’ ‘A
Weary Man’s Utopia’, who sounds as if he was schooled by Soares himself:
“No one cares about facts anymore. They are mere points of departure for
speculation and exercises in creativity. In school we are taught Doubt, and
the Art of Forgetting— especially forgetting all that is personal and local.”
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Penguin Press,
1999). 462
113
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge University Press,
1939), 372.
114
Pessoa (2002), 147.
115
Pessoa (2002), 147.
136
SHIPLEY – DREAMING DEATH
alert to one’s willed self-ignorance, mindful of our turning as we turn
away, as we strive “[t]o consciously not know ourselves – that’s the
116
way!” To rewrite what was never written, to give presence to
absence and absence to presence, to cultivate the ludic solemnity of a
child, to pummel solid rock into the very form of indeterminacy,
these are the things required of the fertile dreamer of selves. “We
117
weary of thinking to arrive at a conclusion,” and we weary of our
emptiness to arrive at ourselves.
Close and sustained scrutiny always reveals an illusion, and in
the end even the possibility of illusion reveals itself as illusory.
Soares returns to himself after months spent happy and erased
in the dead sleep of life, and embarks upon a bout of nervephilosophy in which he synthesizes with a blowfly. The experiment is
almost Cronenbergian in conception, and the full horror of his altered
embodiment felt with an excruciatingly carnal detail. In a revelation
worthy of Gregor Samsa, he finds himself present to the hideous
fusion: “I was a fly when I compared myself to one. And I felt I had a
flyish soul, slept flyishly and was flyishly withdrawn. And what’s
118
more horrifying is that I felt, at the same time, like myself.” All of a
sudden becoming reacquainted with the futility of his former absence
in life, he transmogrifies his recaptured presence into an imagined
119
presence known, but not felt, to be impossible.
The nothing (a vacuum) with one view: one’s own self spread
like tar across the possibility of seeing. Nothing remains for me to see,
because I’ve seen the way I see and the way I will see. Anything I
could see has been seen by my seeing that transparency of seeing.
When the sensation of love is at its purest it is possible for one
to love excrement, but to translate this love into an impetus, to
absorb and be absorbed by excrement, is to forget that the service of
love is to create the distance from which such things can be loved.
Only a madman can love the shit he’s drowning in.
116
Pessoa (2002), 133.
Pessoa (2002), 206.
118
Pessoa (2002), 281.
119
An impossibility that Thomas Nagel would later detail in his seminal
paper, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Philosophical Review, LXXXIII (October,
1974).
117
137
GLOSSATOR 5
end)
Love is (and should remain) a prayer at the altar (the arseof the impossible.
120
Gary J. Shipley is the author of Theoretical Animals (BlazeVOX) and
co-author of Necrology (Paraphilia). He has published papers in various
philosophy journals. He also has work that has appeared recently or
is forthcoming in The Black Herald, Gargoyle, New Dead Families, le
Zaporogue, elimae, > kill author, and others. He is on the editorial board
of the arts journal SCRIPT.
120
Of which, as Dolmancé informs us, there is none more divine. See The
Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom.
138