The Book of Disquiet

My past is everything I failed to be.

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me. 

I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate.  I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing. And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there's the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything. If only I could think! If only I could feel!

From  : The Book of Disquiet; translated by Richard Zenith.

The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa) is a work by the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). Published posthumously, The Book of Disquiet is a fragmentary lifetime project, left unedited by the author, who introduced it as a "factless autobiography." The publication was credited to Bernardo Soares, one of the author's alternate writing names which he called a semi-heteronym, and had a preface attributed to Fernando Pessoa, another alternate writing name or orthonym. It was first published in Portuguese in 1982, 47 years after Pessoa's death; the author died also at 47, in 1935. 

Fernando Pessoa was born on this day  June 13, 1888,  130 years ago.

Wikipedia

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson review – a radical approach to genre and gender

I am currently reading the Dutch translation of The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson.

The book starts thus :

“October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark off the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles as a reminder of this pose’s possible fruits. Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer. “

In essence, the book relates how Nelson encounters a lover (the artist Harry Dodge) who is neither man nor woman, they marry as an act of political protest just before the law enabling homosexual marriage is revoked in California, and together they engage in a series of radical bodily experiments. Maggie becomes pregnant with a sperm donor at the same time as Harry takes testosterone and has breast removal surgery, with the simultaneity of these changes rendering pregnancy itself a queer state.

The Guardian

Like her other autobiographical books, The Argonauts is episodic, fragmentary, and pointedly acategorical: it’s not a conventional memoir, but neither is it any of the other genres that it borrows from — not poetry, not scholarly criticism, not theory, not essay. There are no chapters, only paragraphs, which range from one sentence to two pages in length. Sometimes these form a sequence; at other times each stands alone as a self-contained thought. Mostly, the book tells the story of Nelson falling in love with, marrying, and raising children with Harry Dodge. It also tells the story of Nelson becoming a mother to the baby Iggy, a stepparent to Harry’s son, Lenny, and a partner to Harry during a period of transformation: after nearly thirty years of wearing “smashers,” even to bed — “doctored sports bras, strips of dirty fabric” that erase any visible trace of breasts — Harry decides to undergo top surgery and start taking testosterone. Harry’s bodily transformation parallels Nelson’s during her pregnancy, and both transformations hint at the title’s meaning. Like the Argo, the mythological ship that keeps its name even as its parts are replaced, Nelson and Harry remain the same even as their bodies change. “On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine, more and more ‘female,’” Nelson writes. “But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.”

This is one way to narrate the arc of the book. It is accurate, but also misleadingly tidy: if The Argonauts eludes easy plot summary, it may be because the plot is not what anchors the book. What does instead is the character of Nelson’s thought, which is warm, winning, sprawling, inexhaustible, and above all bent on a generous kind of self-improvement — one that doesn’t dwell on personal failure so much as measure old ideas against new experiences, to test if they’re still capacious enough, still flexible enough, to be true. Anecdotes become springboards for intellectual gymnastics, which Nelson performs without pretension; critical theory permeates the book, but she’s not simply showing off her ribbons. (Nelson holds a PhD from CUNY, where she studied with the queer-theory heavyweight Eve Sedgwick; she now teaches at CalArts in Los Angeles.) Her style is vernacular, intimate, and practical: reflections on maternity, queerness, domesticity, and their representations derive from real questions that feel urgent because they are. A fondness for the psychologist D. W. Winnicott, for example, marks the distinction between theory that feels useful and theory that doesn’t:

    In Iggy’s first year of life, Winnicott was the only child psychologist who retained any interest or relevance for me. Klein’s morbid sadism and bad breast, Freud’s block-buster Oedipal saga and freighted fort/da, Lacan’s heavy-handed Imaginary and Symbolic — suddenly none seemed irreverent enough to address the situation of being a baby, of caretaking a baby. Do castration and the Phallus tell us the deep Truths of Western culture or just the truth of how things are and might not always be? It astonishes me to think that I spent years finding such questions not only comprehensible, but compelling.

The italicized line comes from the gender theorist Elizabeth Weed, and it’s one of many quotations Nelson works seamlessly into her text. These quotations are almost always rendered in italics, with the original writer’s name printed in the margin in a pale font. “I’m looking for a thoroughly digested way of thinking with other people,” Nelson once said of this technique, and digested seems like the right word. The effect is that other people’s sentences blend into Nelson’s; they seem to belong there, as residents of her mind she must contend with.

NplusoneMag

"If you read “The Argonauts,” you’ll know that this book—it literally stands on the shoulders of . . . the wild revolutionary work of so many feminist, queer, and anti-racist thinkers, writers, activists, and artists. . . . I called those people in my book “the many-gendered mothers of my heart,” which is a phrase I steal from the poet Dana Ward, but I do have a specific mother, who’s also here tonight—Mom, I love you. . . . And, last but not least, thank you, Harry Dodge . . . who so generously allowed me to write about our conjoined life to make this book, and it is beyond lucky that you stand by me tonight and every day."  

New Yorker

The title of The Argonauts comes from a Roland Barthes passage that compares a person saying “I love you” to one of the Argonauts who repairs and renews his ship during its voyage. Nelson recalls that, feeling vulnerable after having said “I love you” to Dodge at the beginning of their time together, she sent him the quote, which suggests that the “task of love and language” is “to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new”.

Near the beginning of the book, Nelson describes her and Dodge getting married hours before California revoked its legislation on gay marriage and began a (temporary) ban. “Poor marriage!”, she writes. “Off we went to kill it (unforgiveable). Or reinforce it (unforgiveable)” – their marriage is both subversive and the opposite of subversive. She examines different facets of this, and later remarks on the “assimilationist” bent of “the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement” that has rushed to seek entrance into “two historically repressive structures: marriage and the military”.

She tells me that Harry and her talk a lot at home about the hopefulness embedded in much queer theory that “there’s something about non-normative genders and sexualities” that encourages a politically radical tendency. “We don’t yet know how people would behave if we stopped incentivising marriage” financially and culturally, she says. But for the moment, “the tethering of politics to certain genders and sexualities has probably passed … The most shocking thing about Caitlyn Jenner is that she’s a Republican. That’s proof alone that it’s not clear what politics stem from certain gender and sexuality arrangements.”

Before meeting Dodge, Nelson was suspicious of the whole idea of family – “for all the familiar feminist, queer, and collectivity-based” reasons. But Harry, she has said, used the term “so widely and happily. It really amazed me.” When the two got married, it was, we learn in The Argonauts, in a temporary chapel room, with a drag queen at the door who “did triple duty as a greeter, bouncer, and witness”. Officiating was Reverend Lorelei Starbuck, who listed her denomination as “Metaphysical” on the forms. The ceremony was rushed, and in some ways deeply unserious, but the couple didn’t account for love: “as we said our vows, we were undone. We wept, besotted with our luck.” Then they went to pick up Dodge’s son, “came home and ate chocolate pudding all together in sleeping bags on the porch, looking out over the mountain”.

 The Guardian

 

Works by Harry Dodge

Harry Dodge