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.