[Fernando Pessoa wasn’t Bernardo Soares. As the text itself declares, The Book of Disquiet is the autobiography of a man that never existed; or rather, that imaginary man was the real book. If this is the case, then perhaps these writings are late addendums and revisions. For why couldn’t the spirit of Bernardo Soares, which is ever alive—fecund and morose—have authored these words, too?]
*
We perceive by means of telluric currents, hydrostatic pressures, heat waves, magnetic fields, convections, far-reverberating echoes of thunder, pyrography. We are absorbed into the changeable, misshapen atmospheres we breathe.
It is a grayish day of gentle rain.
*
To rip up all my jottings, to toss the little scraps in the air, to have them catch on curlicues of wind before a storm—this is my ambition: to produce a heyday’s tickertape, like useless coins that do no more than glitter. The soul is nothing, merely a river’s coruscating light. Trash burnt up before it’s even real.
*
I am as profligate with my dreams as I am abstemious in my person, which, in point of fact, is null. I am like a shadow that dreams its body so that this dreamt-of body may block the sun.
*
I have transformed what was merely congenital—depression—into an entire philosophy: pessimism, a pessimism of not only the future but of the past. To love the loss of things, and in their vanishment to keep that love alive. I, too, am the empty and ethereal blueness of this hollow afternoon. The sea keeps lapping in my heart, keeps leaving its scum on the wharves at low tide. Whole epochs and empires mean nothing to me: I haven’t forgotten them because there was never anything for them to be remembered by. Yet I’m capable of regretting even this. Out the window by my desk, the clouds pass like mausoleums though my eyes. The matinee lets out and now the little theater goes dark. The crowds perambulate the tree-lined boulevard. Estrangement, saudade, and nothingness. Everyone voyaging alone in their interior space. There is no such thing as intimacy, for the image you have of another is really your own, an accretion of gestures and perhaps some wishful thinking. The people promenade, and I note the colors of their hats. I sit in my apartment and let these phantoms walk through my mind—the grocer, the gossiping mothers with their squawking infants on their hips, the newsboy, the rich doctor, that pretty girl down there, and who knows who?
*
Dream objects have only one side; they’re pure appearances. Yet characters in dreams seem as full-blooded as actual people. They talk to me—that is, my dream self—and I have no idea what they might say. Their speech doesn’t seem scripted, least of all by my own consciousness. And, as with words heard while awake, I also have no clear idea, in most cases, what dreamt words mean when I hear them, either. Perhaps then, objects, people, words: all are signs without signification? Or, by contrast, everything proliferates with innumerable messages, making each indistinguishable from noise. (Interpretations are always subject to interpretation.) Thus, the apparitions found in dreams are as meaningful as those discovered upon waking. —Unlike the doyens of logic and philosophy, I freely acknowledge there’s an inexactitude without which nothing could exist, could pretend to exist.
*
Newspapers, those metaphysical sponges: each day the same columns are filled, no matter how much has happened. On Sundays very little happens; they clump on my doorstep larger than ever.
*
I am an aristocrat of fatalism, a curator of strange sorrows. I watch the clouds unravel like arguments; the daylight fades like every feeling. And I go on, morosely dissecting my food.
—
Will Cordeiro has recent work appearing or forthcoming in The Boiler Journal, DIAGRAM, Painted Bride Quarterly, Territory, Threadcount, Two Hawks Quarterly, Whiskey Island, and elsewhere. He lives in Flagstaff, where he is a faculty member in the Honors Program at Northern Arizona University.
Photo by: Ana Prundaru