The ephemera of Bernardo Soares

 

I read and am liberated. I acquire objectivity. I cease being myself and so scattered. And what I read, instead of being like a nearly invisible suit that sometimes oppresses me, is the external world’s tremendous and remarkable clarity, the sun that sees everyone, the moon that splotches the still earth with shadows, the wide expanses that end in the sea, the blackly solid trees whose tops greenly wave, the steady peace of ponds on farms, the terraced slopes with their paths overgrown by grape-vines.

I picked up The Book of Disquiet, again, and started from the very beginning. I wasn't able to mark where I left off so I decided to begin this fragmentary novel from the first page, from the introduction by editor and translator Richard Zenith. By fragment #87 – which ended thus, "Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret." – I knew that my first pass already brought me up to a fifth or a fourth of the book. Rereading could be futile. Bernardo Soares himself could not bring himself to reread.

I reread? A lie! I don’t dare reread. I can’t reread. What good would it do me to reread? The person in the writing is someone else. I no longer understand a thing… [Text 63]

Soares was not the one flipping the pages but Fernando Pessoa. The author's identity is fickle. In a book about states of being and consciousness, hyperreal dreams, and intellectualized tedium, we detect the inconsistent protests of a poet suffering from impostor syndrome. His only recourse was random jottings; he could be the forerunner of modern blogging. He devoted his life to art and its contradictions and so embraced the contradictions of a life lived on the fringes of art.

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life. [Text 14]

Blogger without a platform, Soares killed time writing to give his readers some sort of distraction. He believed it served a purpose because otherwise he'd be forced to admit that the time he spent on writing was all a waste.

Zenith's introduction prepped the reader for the chaotic and tedious composition of the book. Soares struggled writing and organizing it for most of his life. "Unfinished and unfinishable", the art consumed the artist. If only the novelist was born in the age of NaNoWriMo, then he could have made progress on his unfinishable enterprise, copy-pasting and tracking changes to his heart's content. Zenith believed though that it would not be the same masterpiece had Soares completed the task. Tightly edited, coherent, smoothly flowing, and possibly streamlined to half its published length, the non-posthumous Book of Disquiet would have been more daring and more passionate but less disquieting.

The editor said that the sequence he followed to shape the fragments was not definitive and was informed by a rough skeleton of dated fragments arranged chronologically. According to him, the reader could open the book at any page, create their own order of the texts, and proceed to any random page. A chaotic species of composition deserved an equally chaotic decryption. An unorthodox reading would not lose the decadent spirit and drift of Disquiet. 

With so many entry points and possibilities of arranging the texts and countless ways of reading and ordering the fragments, backward, forward, skipping every two or three pages at a time, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Disquiet is the definition of an infinite book. A book by Pessoa, the father of pluralism, had a secure place in the invisible library of Borges, a prominent place in the Library of Babel.

If it was up to me, I would appreciate holding a fragmentary version of Disquiet, the way Soares left it for posterity. In a large envelope and in a trunk, the texts written in different formats and all forms of paper. "He wrote," Zenith said, "in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of letters, advertisements and handbills, on stationery from the firms he worked for and from the cafés he frequented, on envelopes, on paper scraps, and in the margins of his own earlier texts." 

These ephemera deserved a better packaging, printed and preserved just as they languished for almost half a century (47 years) before their publication in a bound book. Opening that vessel of texts, the closest feeling I would potentially compare it to was when I, trembling, opened the box containing the stapled chapters of The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson. Plus, I would throw in the lists Pessoa made of non-existent poems, stories, and books. Who is to say they do not exist? The fact that their titles exist made them exist. If only we would look hard enough.

"Each writer," Borges wrote, "creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation, the identity or plurality of men doesn't matter." In his writing, Pessoa created his own precursors: fictional authors writing about fictitious writers and fictive pieces, dreaming dreams inside dreams and daydreams. His "plurality of men" (heteronyms) doesn't matter. 

I am still obsessed with creating a false world, and will be until I die. Today I don’t line up spools of thread and chess pawns (with an occasional bishop or knight sticking out) in the drawers of my chest, but I regret that I don’t, and in my imagination I line up the characters – so alive and dependable! – who occupy my inner life, and this makes me feel cosy, like sitting by a warm fire in winter. I have a world of friends inside me, with their own real, individual, imperfect lives. [Text 92]

The writer fully inhabited the fictions of his beings. The writer inside the writing was somebody else. Soares needed to recover himself from himself: "I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps."