Thinking Is a Sickness of the Eyes

I. A Wraith’s Biography

In a poem dated November 8, 1915, the Portuguese poet Alberto Caeiro wrote

If, after I die, someone should choose to write my biography,
Nothing could be simpler.
There are only two dates—that of my birth and that of my death.
Between one and the other all the days were mine.

The task before me is to tell the story of a man whose days were his yet not his—a man who was born twice and who died twice but who never really lived, whose life exists only in words hung on lines and huddled in stanzas.

One version of this wraith’s biography goes like this: Caeiro was born in Lisbon on April 16, 1889. Orphaned at a young age, he lived most of his brief life in a country house in the Ribatejo, a province in central Portugal, with his great aunt. He had no profession and little education, but he declared himself a “Discoverer of Nature” and the “Argonaut of genuine sensations.” A pastoral poet shorn of the warming wool of contemplation, he appears naked in his words, filial only to the functions of his five senses. The sense that dominates his poetics—especially in his earliest and best-known work, The Keeper of Sheep (1925)—is sight: “our only wealth is seeing.” He saw the world through the gaze of a disembodied eye, without the metastasis of metaphysics. His verses seem simple and feel spontaneous, as of a consciousness devoid of consciousness, “newborn with every moment / To the complete newness of the world.” He wrote, “to think is to not understand,” and in his poetry, he strived to be as free of mental contrivance as possible. His poems exist as a kind of petrichor, the remainder of some primal feeling. He claimed he never altered what he wrote and mocked fellow poets who labored over their lines: “And there are poets who are artists / And work on their verses / As a carpenter does on a piece of wood!” Instead, he wanted readers to see him as he saw the world, as “some natural thing.” He moved, like all natural things, toward a natural end, dying of tuberculosis in 1915, at the tender age of 26.

But there’s another biography: Caeiro was born March 8, 1914, springing from the mind of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, seemingly fully formed, in the shape of a shepherd-poet. He began life as a gag: “I thought I would play a trick on [friend and fellow poet Mário de] Sá-Carneiro and invent a bucolic poet of a rather complicated kind,” Pessoa admitted. (The name Caeiro may be a play on his friend’s name: Carneiro → Ca(rn)eiro → Caeiro.) Not quite a pseudonym, Caeiro is what Pessoa called a “heteronym,” a term that for him implied a greater independence. According to Pessoa, Caeiro and fellow heteronyms are not facets of his own personality; each personality is “complete unto itself.” Though some of the heteronyms are figures drawn with a quick pen, others seem rendered in flesh and blood. Most have extensive biographies: birth and death dates, horoscopes, personalities, ideologies, families, friends, loves, losses, the detritus of daily life. They also sometimes interact: reading, translating, and analyzing one another’s work. Pessoa claimed, “They are beings with a sort-of-life-of-their-own, with feelings I do not have, and opinions I do not accept. While their writings are not mine, they do also happen to be mine.”

Which necessitates a third biography: Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon on June 13, 1888. When he was five, his father died of tuberculosis. Soon after, his younger brother died too. Pessoa created his first heteronym (Chevalier de Pas) around the age of six, and heteronyms multiplied with each passing year. At seven, upon his mother's second marriage, the family moved to South Africa, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He returned to Portugal 10 years later, ostensibly to attend university though he abandoned his studies. He worked as a commercial translator but spent much of his time writing prose and poetry under his own name and under his seemingly infinite heteronyms, contributing to both avant-garde literary magazines such as Orpheu (which he cofounded) and broadsheet newspapers such as Diário de Lisboa. He published a few chapbooks in English and one volume of poetry in Portuguese. When he died in relative obscurity in 1935, at age 47, most of his work remained unpublished, piled like pirate booty in large trunks for literary treasure seekers of the future to discover. Another 47 years passed—a whole second Pessoa lifetime—before his most celebrated work, The Book of Disquiet, appeared in 1982. The posthumous publication of Pessoa’s writings established him as one of the major figures of literary modernism.

This month, New Directions published The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari, which collects all the writing attributed to Pessoa’s heteronym as well as commentary by Pessoa (in his own voice and in the voices of several other heteronyms). It is the first English edition to combine Caeiro’s poetry with Pessoa’s other heteronymic responses to the work. Because of this presentation, readers are invited to see the sources of Caeiro’s verses as three beings, who, like the Christian triune Godhead, are distinct yet consubstantial. Here we finally see these poems as they ought to be seen: as the creations of Caeiro, as the creations of Pessoa, and as the creations of Pessoa-as-Caeiro.

II. The Sad Slime of Being Conscious

In The Keeper of Sheep, Caeiro writes

I am a keeper of sheep.
The sheep are my thoughts
And my thoughts are all sensations.
I think with my eyes and my ears
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.

This primacy of feeling is the foundational aspect of Caeiro’s poetry. Notice he “keeps” these sheep—this flock of sensations—but he makes no mention of shepherding them. To control or guide them in the way a shepherd would his flock would be to impose philosophy and ideology on them. Caeiro claims, “I have no philosophy: I have senses.”

If poets are the great appraisers, adorners, and augmenters of the world, then perhaps Caeiro is no poet at all. (He admits that “Being a poet is not my ambition. / It’s my way of being alone.”) He does not wish to interrogate the natural world or analyze it or obfuscate it with unnecessary theory or furbelow nature with poetic language. He wishes merely to relay the sensation of seeing things as they are: “Because everything is as it is and that’s how it is.”

This acknowledgment of the materiality of the world—seeing things as they are, in the glory of their thingness—suffuses Caeiro’s every line. “I am the very first poet to have realized that Nature exists,” he declares. His predecessors, he claims, “have sung of Nature, but always subordinated her to themselves, as if they were God.” Caeiro subordinates himself to Nature. According to him and his heteronymic disciples, this is what makes him new and revolutionary; ironically, it is also what most ties him to a poetic lineage.

In the margins of a book from his personal library, Pessoa marked the following description of John Keats: “Acute as was his own emotional life was, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the order of poets whose work is inspired, not merely by their own personality, but by the world of things and men outside them.” Caeiro belongs to this order of poets, yet he understood, as Keats did, that the world outside can be experienced only through the senses. “I know that the stone is real and that the plant exists,” Caeiro writes. “I know this because they exist. / I know this because my senses show me.”

To manifest this poetics of sense, to become a “Discoverer of Nature,” Caeiro must eschew, as best he can, the infirmity of intelligence—its frailty, its contamination, its insubstantiality. He explains that “the essential thing is knowing how to see,” by which he means “knowing how to see without thinking.” For him, “Thinking is a sickness of the eyes.”

This poetics of non-philosophy, of pure sense, feels like the end of the cul-de-sac that Keats wandered down a century earlier. In a letter to his brothers dated December 21, 1817, Keats describes his concept of “negative capability”—a sort of philosophical anti-philosophy—as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats explains that in the work of a great poet, “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

This obliteration meets its apotheosis in Caeiro, who rejects even the final sacred cows Keats can’t quite give up: mystery and beauty. In one poem, Caeiro writes, “The mystery of things? What do I know about mystery! / The only mystery is that there are people who think about mystery.” Elsewhere: “The mystery of things, where is it? / If it exists, why doesn’t it at least appear / To show us that it is a mystery?” And: “Beauty is the name given to something that doesn’t exist.” If Caeiro clings to anything in what might be deemed his negative negative capability, it is this meager certainty: there is no mystery, no metaphysics, no beauty even, for things are what they are: “Things are the only hidden meaning of things.”

March 8, 1914—the day of Caeiro’s creation—represented a breakthrough in Pessoa’s poetry. Pessoa had invented other personas before, but this was different:

I wrote some thirty poems, one after another, in a kind of ecstasy, the nature of which I am unable to define. It was the triumphant day of my life, and never will I have another like it. I began with the title, The Keeper of Sheep. What followed was the appearance of someone in me whom I named, from then on, Alberto Caeiro. Forgive me the absurdity of the sentence: In me there appeared my master.

It is telling that Caeiro, at least in Pessoa’s own self-mythology, merely “appeared.” He wasn’t sought or searched for; there was no irritable reaching. One of Pessoa’s dominant pre-Caeiro heteronyms was named Alexander Search—and the break from the search and Search, through Caeiro, is the invention of a new Pessoa. After writing those 30 Caeiro poems in a torrent of desubjectivized inspiration, Pessoa claimed he then immediately “wrote, again without stopping, the six poems constituting ‘Oblique Rain,’ by Fernando Pessoa.” He called this “the return of Fernando Pessoa / Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa himself” and “the reaction of Fernando Pessoa against his nonexistence as Alberto Caeiro.”

In the earlier Search persona, Pessoa appears as a poet of metaphysical neuroticism and constant strain. Search searched for—and was undone by—“the mystery of all,” forever troubled by the “crime of having thought,” forever stuck between “thought and feeling’s endless schism.” Though Pessoa remained haunted by the “crime of having thought” in his Caeiro persona and the heteronyms that followed, the neurosis of this “sickness of the eyes” no longer overwhelms the poetry.

A reader of Caeiro might reasonably ask whether this doctrine of non-thought is intrinsically non-human. Or, put another way, if things simply are what they are—Caeiro’s foundational claim—shouldn’t Caeiro be what he is and, as a human, give in more readily to thought and to consciousness? The more you read Caeiro, the easier it is to see that he does. The Caeiro pose, which privileges feeling over thought, is not a way to disassociate entirely from thinking but a way to bypass the paralyzing nature of consciousness. Yet his poems betray his intellect; he could no sooner get rid of it than he could exist as stone.

His thought is cumbersome baggage, but he knows that baggage is precisely what he is: “Weighed down by the heavy suit humankind made it wear.” The critic Eduardo Lourenço—not a Pessoa heteronym, though at times it feels as though all the figures of Portuguese literature may secretly be so—describes Caeiro as dragging behind him “like a snail, the sad slime of ‘being conscious.’” Caeiro can’t escape this muck of the mind; the poems are that mollusk excreta.

III. De-Containing the Multitudes

Pessoa’s appreciation for Keats is clear. In his own voice, he admitted, “I cannot think badly of the man who wrote the ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ nor of him who, in that ‘to the Grecian Urn,’ expresses so human an idea as the heart-rending untimeness of beauty. We all have felt that tearful sensation.” But Keats did not realign Pessoa’s universe. Walt Whitman was the new planet swimming into Pessoa’s ken.

According to Lourenço, Pessoa’s two main heteronyms, “Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos, were for Pessoa the manner by which he integrated the glaring impact of Whitman without disintegrating from the contact.” Lourenço argues that the encounter with Whitman, unlike Pessoa’s encounters with other poets, was not “an occasion for a mere formal or exterior influence” but constituted an “absolute disturbance of his creative mechanism and of his vision.”

Whitman catalyzed almost every facet of Pessoa’s poetic development. In the microcosm of Caeiro, Whitman became the model for this “Argonaut of genuine sensations.” The scholar Susan Margaret Brown points out that the first line of Whitman’s poem “There Was a Child Went Forth” “becomes the basis for the persona of the innocent shepherd poet.” That first line—“And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became”—does unmistakably embody the interest in thingness that pervades the Caeiro poems.

As researcher Richard Zenith notes, “In the two books of Whitman’s poetry owned by Pessoa, a number of underlined verses reappear in the pseudoshepherd’s poetry.” That said, he admits much of the “sensual and sensorial relationship to the world we find in Leaves of Grass (1855) disappeared in Caiero.” Lourenço calls Caeiro “a disembodied Whitman.”

“He resembles Whitman most,” writes fellow Pessoa heteronym Álvaro de Campos of Caeiro. “But he transcends Whitman with the sanity & clarity of his inspiration & the directness with which he works out his feelings in a coherent & astonishing new metaphysics.”

Though one might feel awed that Pessoa had the audacity to praise his own writing (from one heteronym to another) as better than Whitman’s, it is important to note that reviewing one’s own poetry is itself Whitmanian. Whitman famously wrote three unsigned raves of the various editions of Leaves of Grass. The editors of this new Caeiro collection, Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, note in their introduction that not only did Pessoa borrow some of Whitman’s lines of poetry for Caeiro’s verses, but even some of Pessoa’s intra-heteronymic praise of Caeiro appropriates the language of Whitman’s own anonymous self-acclaim.

Moreover, Whitman’s influence on the heteronym Álvaro de Campos is as central as his influence on Caeiro and more directly acknowledged by Pessoa. A disciple of both Caeiro and Whitman, Campos writes in his “Salutation to Walt Whitman,” “At a given moment, reading your poems, I can’t tell if I’m reading or living them, / I don’t know if my actual place is in the world or in your poems.” This hints at Whitman’s macrocosmic influence on Pessoa. More than just in the individual heteronyms of Caeiro and Campos, Pessoa’s whole heteronymic gambit is the actualization of Campos’s (and thereby Pessoa’s) dislocation in the face of Whitman. Pessoa pushes the conceit of Whitman’s poetics into the real world on a large scale.

Whereas Whitman’s container is the self (“I am large, I contain multitudes”), Pessoa’s container is the world. If Whitman brimmed with other selves, Pessoa made no attempt to “contain” his multitudes. Whitman expressed his multitudes in songs of himself, but Pessoa did not see himself as a major presence in his dramatis personae: “I created, therefore, an inexistent coterie,” he wrote. “I gauged influences, discovered friendships, and heard, within myself,  discussions and disagreements over criteria. In all this the creator of every thing and every one mattered the least. It seemed as if everything had taken place independently of me. And this is still the way things seem to go.”

Whether or not we believe in the independence of these heteronyms, there is one aspect of the Pessoan mythos that did happen independently of him. The critic Fredric Jameson calls Pessoa the greatest ironist of modernist lyric poetry, but perhaps the greatest irony surrounding this ironist is that his very name, Pessoa, means person in Portuguese. In both the work published during his life and in the manuscripts discovered after his death, there are many pessoas and many Pessoas: one man yet a whole heteronymative society.

IV. Shakespearean Masks in the Wild(e)

Besides Keats and Whitman, two other influences are worth noting. In their introduction, Pizarro and Ferrari explain that among the books Pessoa was reading around the time of that “triumphal day” of Caeiro’s creation were books on the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays as well as books by and about Oscar Wilde. Pizarro and Ferrari contend “Wilde’s ideas on the value of certain poses, attitudes, and unrealities clearly left their mark ... both Wilde and Shakespeare were instrumental in the genesis of Caeiro & Co.—in the constructing of these authors and shaping their identities.”

In Wilde’s essay on costumes in Shakespeare’s plays, “The Truth of Masks,” he famously proclaims, “A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.” These Wildean paradoxes are everywhere in Caeiro. “I don’t agree with myself but I absolve myself,” Caeiro writes. “Because I don’t take myself seriously.”

Caeiro is both the shepherd-poet and the man who “never kept sheep” and has no ambition to be a poet. He is the keeper of a flock of sensations, yet he also carries the sad slime of being conscious. He is simultaneously the writer and the writer’s mask.

In a 1914 letter to the author Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, Pessoa claims, “If there is a part of my work that bears the ‘stamp of sincerity,’ that part is the work of Caeiro.” Heteronym Campos agreed with his creator: “My master Caeiro was the world’s only entirely sincere poet.” Yet Caeiro, as a contrivance, is obviously not sincere. To explore the “natural” poetry of “simple sensations,” Pessoa needed to invent an artificial poet, to wear a mask. “The truths of masks,” as Wilde knew, are “the truths of metaphysics.” This is precisely because of their contradictory dual purpose of revelation and concealment.

Pessoa understood that sensations themselves are full of contradiction. The invention of Caeiro allowed Pessoa to embody that inherent contradiction and to mine it for all its interesting conflicts while writing poetry that allowed him, through the simple pose of a shepherd-poet, to act unaware or unconscious of it. In perfect illustration of this, Pessoa wrote of Caeiro, “In fact, he never contradicts himself, and when it seems that he does, there appears, in some other corner of his verse, the appropriate contrary argument.” In other words, Caeiro never contradicts himself, and when it looks as though he does, don't worry: there’s another contradiction somewhere else contradicting this contradiction.

Pizarro and Ferrari suggest that “Caeiro occupied a central place in the Pessoan universe, because, while being the very image of the most natural of poets, he was, at the same time, the embodiment of the most artificial.” They point out that he is a “posthumous editorial construction.” Though Caeiro “died” in 1915, we know that Pessoa kept working on and rearranging Caeiro’s poems for years after, like the poet-carpenters who sawed and sanded their lines and who earned Caeiro’s pitying laughter as a result.

The most important paradox in Caeiro is that he exists as both a poet in his own right and as a character in Pessoa’s fictional universe—specifically, in his proposed collection Fictions of the Interlude. That was the title of an early sequence of poems Pessoa published in 1917 under his own name. By the end of his life, though, that phrase had been repurposed as the working title for an unrealized collection of the entirety of his heteronymic writings. This would-be masterwork, the one that could conceivably have surpassed even The Book of Disquiet, remains incomplete and unpublished. Maybe it’s better that way, for these Pessoas cannot all be contained between the covers of a single book.

Shakespeare, that “Man of Genius” whom Keats was describing when he coined the term “negative capability,” features prominently in Pessoa’s incomplete preface fragments for Fictions of the Interlude:

Let’s suppose that a supreme depersonalizer like Shakespeare, instead of creating the character Hamlet as part of a play, created him simply as a character with no play. He would have written a drama, so to speak, for a single character, an extended, analytical monologue. It would not be legitimate to go looking for a definition of the feelings and thoughts of Shakespeare in such a character unless the character was a failure, because only bad playwrights reveal themselves.

In the end, does it matter whether Pessoa’s dramatis personae are real or imagined? Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy isn’t diminished by Hamlet’s nonexistence nor would it be diminished if we knew Shakespeare was as fictional as his havering Prince of Denmark, as some scholars believe he was. 

In another scrap of the incomplete preface, Pessoa writes of his heteronyms, “You would be quite wrong to believe my explanation. You should assume, once you had read my explanation, that I lied.”

“Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art,” Wilde once wrote. Pizarro and Ferrari admit “it is hard not to think that this perfectly describes Caeiro.” The absolutes in Caeiro—“objectivity, spontaneity, naturalness”—are all lies, yet isn’t the lie what makes the poetry essential, what makes it, as Wilde would say, “Art”?

Though Pizarro and Ferrari claim that their edition “could perhaps serve as an invitation to reread Caeiro with or without a willing suspension of disbelief,” I think it invites us to read him with and without a willing suspension of disbelief—to see the stone as the stone is, which isn’t, as Caeiro claims, solely as a stone without our thoughts of its stoneness. After all, the stone, once perceived, becomes covered in the moss of thought, and even if Caeiro attempted to deny this in his lines, his poetry undermines that proclamation.

This constant subversion and contradiction makes futile any attempts to find meaning in the messy world of Pessoa and his heteronyms, or to chart the topography of his fictive universe. Maybe it’s because, as Caeiro writes, “the only hidden meaning of things / Is that they have no hidden meaning at all” or maybe it’s because the “inborn tendency to mystification, to artistic lying” that Alexander Search finds in himself is in all the other Pessoa heteronyms too. Either way, the heteronymative society Pessoa created, like our own universe, is what it is—and also isn’t.

I could attempt to reach for a grand conclusion, some ultimate connection or hidden meaning, but not everything comes together in the end. Perhaps Caeiro is correct when he writes “a real and true unity / Is a disease of our ideas.” Elsewhere he says, “Nature is parts without a whole.” Though his poetry enacts an admiration for nature, he can never quite explain what it is that he loves about it or how his poetic universe truly comes together around the natural one. He admits

If I talk about Nature, that isn’t because I know what it is,
But because I love it, and that’s why I love it,
Because whoever loves never knows what he loves
Nor why he loves, nor what it means to love ...

As Caeiro speaks of nature, I speak of his creator. When I read Pessoa (in his own voice and in the voices of his heteronyms), what I am left with, rather than answers, or even questions, is a feeling, the embarrassment of a genuine sensation, one I might sheepishly call love.