hoto by  Kenji Tanimura on Scopio

Fernando Pessoa wasn’t playing around. I love that.

Pessoa put his life where his mouth was, or more correctly, where his pen was - or perhaps the other way around - the life and the illegibly-scrawled prose dovetailed closely, if not perfectly or neatly: I don’t think he claimed to have perfected his chosen way of life, but then again, it was a way of life that needed no perfecting. All it needed was his commitment, which he certainly gave in his actions, or more specifically his commitment to the absence of any action, in both his personal life and in the corpus of the text.

The sheer nakedness of this undertaking is arresting. There is nothing clothing the bareness of Pessoa’s prose or the bareness of the life he lived. Well perhaps not quite nothing, there is a single contradiction here: almost nothing clothed the bareness of his existence except, of course, the proliferation of heteronyms that were undoubtedly masks and clothing of a kind.

Pessoa is my gateway. Long sought, lovingly received.

It’s a curious thing.

Over the course of my fifty years of life (so far), I have always been a reader - I still remember the first book I read myself, an adorable illustrated tale about a bear and his little furry friend (A rabbit? A squirrel?) in a snowy wood. I recall the illustrations. I must have been four or five, at least I think so.

Since childhood I have been been a constant reader and at various moments I have been captured by different writers who spoke to me at the different stages of my life. There has been Baroness Karen Blixen who also wrote as Isak Dinesen, Italo Calvino, Josep Luis Borges, Stanislaw Lem - earlier there were the science fiction giants such as Aasimov and the now-condemned Arthur C. Clarke, as well as some English writers such as George Orwell, Robert Graves and the more recent (but still late) John Mortimer.

My reading habits of a lifetime are peppered by a big mix of greats and not-so-greats, many remarkable and many other not particularly remarkable writers mixed together over five decades of reading. I have been ecumenical: Not Only Geniuses need apply. This is because I primarily have read for entertainment and engagement rather than literary edification, and my habit of reading constantly has been supported by a parallel habit of never forcing myself to finish anything that wasn’t engaging my interest. Many books remain unfinished and neglected in the litter of my personal library.

However, things had slowed down over time. Even while my impulse to write had only grown I had been increasingly finding that nothing I read was speaking directly to me. This went on on for quite some time, a period of more than ten years, in lockstep with the intensification of my writing habits.

I had continued to read and to write during this time, often daily, but little engaged my attention or fired my imagination for very long. Nothing much captured me the way books had in my earlier reading career. I found myself returning to old favourites having become frustrated with new discoveries that did little for me. I was stale, in both reading and writing: I had no model to inspire me, nothing to aspire to in my own writing and no master or pattern to emulate.

However, there were some notable exceptions. Pandaemonium was one, a book by notable British post-war social realist (and socialist) documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings. This astonishing volume is a collection of writings of many different kinds that contemporaneously observed and documented the dawning of the machine in Britain, from a variety of different perspectives. The texts are drawn from a period from 1660 to 1886. Personal letters and correspondence, poetry, articles, journal entries, essays, newspaper snippets and literary fragments taken from many different kinds of manuscript have been assembled to form the book, arranged and presented chronologically. The result is astonishing.

I discovered that book in 1996. Also about that time I discovered Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, but more on that and other Calvino gems, such as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, later.

And so to my recent discovery of the Book of Disquiet - a mid-pandemic discovery of 2021.

The parallels between Pandaemonium and the Book of Disquiet are several and distinct. Both books are assemblages of fragments of text (Pandaemonium of different actual authors - the Book of Disquiet of different _heteronymic_ authors). Both books were finalised and assembled, and only published, posthumously, by a good many decades. Both books were also almost Sisyphean labours: the not-quite-lifelong projects of their two progenitors.

Both books are remarkable and both books defy easy categorisation. In fact they make a joyous mockery of categorisation; the effort becomes entirely redundant, a futile and pointless labour - far too reductive in the face of such abundant riches to serve any meaningful purpose.

So that is where I have arrived. The next challenge is the next logical step: the departure.

Photo by Liga Kalnina on Scopio

In a very simplistic sense, structure can be considered as an organising principle (among many other things, of course). In the case of the Book of Disquiet, the organising principle is linked to the activities of assembly and curation (verbs) - in that specific case tasks that occurred decades after the author’s death, and that can never resolve into a definitive outcome, they can never be completed, and they can never be undertaken with anything like objectivity. The substance of the raw material - 25,000 loose fragments, a number of which are practically illegible and only a portion of which are dated - denies these three conditions and much besides.

There is something deeply comforting in this, in the contemplation of both the task and the ‘finished’ product of the task. Contemplating assembling the constituent parts of a similar work from scratch - writing the very fragments that could lead to such a challenge, over a lifetime or shorter period - feels liberating, inspiring and stimulating to the imagination.

What is an artistic work? Is it ever complete? Well, certainly it can be finished; however, I suspect it is never complete, even when ‘completed’ by the artist. Marguerite Duras said:

“I don’t know what a book is. No one knows. But we know when there is one”.

I have that on a sign pinned up in my bedroom. I note that she said, simply, ‘book’, rather than ‘written work’. The point is to make a book, not something as ill-defined or ephemeral as a ‘written work’, which could be argued as having existence independent of its form, assembly, binding, commitment to paper. No, this fight is about books. It is called the ‘Book of Disquiet’, after all - not ‘Ideas of Disquiet’, ‘Thoughts on Disquiet’, or even ‘Meditations on Disquiet’, as the consolidation of the fragments into a book is a precondition of its transformation into existence in the absence of any other relevant organising principle.

I have been published more than a hundred and fifty times, in Australian and foreign publications. Articles, reviews and essays ranging from 500 words to several thousand, nothing longer than that. Nevertheless, the publication itch is satisfied, it is thoroughly scratched.

My personal project, the nascent topic of this blog, is the writing of a book. Publication is not a condition of its existence or its success: it is nothing so fragile or contingent. It is tough, stubborn and resilient, impervious to both my frequent attentions and my equally frequent neglect. The work will exist as a book, or not exist, regardless of whether it is published, in or after my lifetime. As Duras has said - I, too, don’t know what the book is, but I will know when there is one.

There is not one yet.

The streets of Lisbon

Reading the Book of Disquiet was a quiet revelation, one which appeared before me at the age of fifty for the first time. In reading this text I suddenly realised that I had been searching for many years, hunting endlessly without being aware that I was hunting at all, for a mode of writing, a stratagem of prose, diary entry, utterance or confessional, that had some relevance to the clarity of the impulse to write daily that I carried within me. I discovered in Pessoa a prose form and set of topics expansive enough to encompass and extend my own messy, rambling vision in all its particulars.

Up until that point I had been confused. I had no idea why writing conventional stories on writerly topics, in a writerly way, held no fire or purpose for me. Quite simply, without Pessoa’s enigmatic example before me I had discovered no alternative model to “conventional” writing, whatever that is - and I was languishing. One day, several years ago, I expressed it thus: I found that I had many resources - a surfeit of tools, adequate time to work, and sufficient technique to write what I wished, and yet I had nothing to write.

Yes indeed, I believe that after twenty years of being paid to write and being published regularly I am adequately equipped in technique, discipline and vocabulary to accomplish a readable narrative. This alone is valuable, but otherwise of little assistance.

The commissioned essays, reviews and articles flow from my fingertips, quickly and without prevarication. The task is clear, and the technique has been honed to efficiency. However, this does not translate. I never got very far in my non-commissioned writing as the impetus to work petered out long before the work was finished. Sometimes this occurred even before the work was embarked upon; an ennui that accompanied the impulse, but stronger - an inertia that prevented all but the most cursory of writing.

Then I found the _Book of Disquiet_. I found that instead of the repeated frustration of moving forward into these endless dead ends, my mid-life reading of the _Book of Disquiet_ suggested to me that I could evoke Pessoa’s fragments as an absolute permission to write what I wished, on any topic that occurred to me - not as someone I wasn’t, which is ironic given Pessoa’s reliance on heteronyms - but as the person I was, doing the mundane things that I do. The designer who writes, and spends his days in an office, finally found a voice.

Pessoa showed the potential of the writer’s art for me, more so than any other writer I had read in about three decades. His master work, in all its incompleteness and fragmentary discontinuity, revealed to me the substance of topics and utterances that were directly relevant to the framing of my own experience, particularly in terms of their form and meaning. This was an example of a use of language that I could relate to, that sounded like me, equal parts transcendent and mundane - it was a language I could employ. More to the point, he spoke of topics, couched in terms of the frames of his ever-changing mind, that I could relate to.

To be more specific, here I misquote Dave Hickey writing on Gerhard Richter in _Tarkett_ art journal in 1993 (where I have boldly substituted the “painterly arts” with the “literary arts” for my own selfish purposes):

"In the literary arts, those antique categories of expression…were resuscitated…under conditions of absolute doubt - with the understanding that, as long as doubt remained an agency, and the written text it entailed affirmed that doubt, it could neither disintegrate into despair nor transcend into monadic assurance, but would remain, instead, always an absolute permission."

And so I write now, renewed and energised - embarking on an enthusiastic resuscitation of the raw potential revealed to me by Pessoa’s master work, invoked under the joyous conditions of absolute doubt. In an endlessly saturated visual and literary culture, where originality has long been a chimaera, how else can we work? If this was true for Pessoa in the first half of the 20th Century, how can it be less true now?

Having embraced that doubt, having found and invoked a model in language and a predisposition to topics that can frame my own authentic voice, I find that I am finally moving forward.

Now, like Pessoa, I am free to dream.