The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (18 page)

3.

28 June 1916—at 6 (5) in the afternoon

Because I want to speak to you.
I am a man who is your friend and no man is more.

A man who is your friend is a man who tells you the truth, not one who is a flatterer [in] any way. I am none. You are a son of my nominal mind, and if you do not know what this means, I cannot tell you. You must not maintain chastity [any] more. You are so misogynous that you will find yourself morally impotent, and in that way you will not produce any complete work in literature. You must abandon your monastic life and
now
.

You are not a man to make much in the world if you keep chaste. You are. ...... No temperament like yours can manage to keep chastity and keep emotionally sane. Keeping chastity is for stronger men and men who have to [be chaste] on account of physical defects. This does not apply to you. A man who masturbates himself is not a strong man, and no man is a man who is not a
lover
. Many men make many
mates
. You are a moral child many times over. You are a man who masturbates himself and who dreams of women in a masturbator’s manner. Man is man. No man can move among men if he is not a man like them.

Make up your mind to do your duty by Nature, not in a manner so insane as now. Make up your mind to go to bed with the girl who is coming into your life. Make up your mind to make her happy in a sexual way. She is a masculine type of girl and she is a woman quite made for you. She must make you happy, because she makes a man of you. She meets you and she makes you love her. She is strong and immensely masculine in her will and in her manner of making you submit to her. Make no resistance. There is nothing to fear. It will all be simpler than you suppose. She is a virgin, just as you are, and nomad[ic] as you in life. She is no marriageable woman, for she is morally too nomad[ic] to make a nest. Only a girl like this can make you mate with her. No manner of resistance on your part will do anything. No resistance can resist an overpowering will. No more need be said. No more must be said. No more.

Henry More

good-bye, my boy

4.

You are now annoyed. Well, there is the truth. Now you are chaste. You will cease to be so in a month or a month and 3 days. And the woman who will admit you to sex is a girl not yet admitted to your knowledge. She is an amateur poet. ......

5.

...
Only because she is a maniac for modern poets—she is a poetess herself—and masks her poetry with a pseudonym.
No.
Not quite true. No statement is quite true. She is a poetess in the sense that she writes poetry—not in the sense that that poetry is worth much. Still—it is not very bad.

As the editor of
Orpheu
.* She is wishing to meet that strange creature.

She is well educated. Was educated in France and England.

No—at a soirée at a house you have not yet visited—at a house you will never visit more. She will meet you there by appointment and she will wish to know you from having heard you spoken of to her by a man that does not know many girls.

Yes.

I did not say that. I said no man you knew knew her.

No. You ask me if the man knows you. He does, but you do not know him.

Now do not come too close. I must tell only what you are to know now.

6.

Yes.
No communication is ever allowed to be right in all its details. There are reasons for this: and one is that the future must reveal itself. Nevertheless, though wrong elements are introduced
of necessity
into communications, yet those errors have a second sense in which they are
right
. This can sometimes be discovered and sometimes not. There is no perfect prophecy possible on
your
plane, not only because it is impossible by natural action of a mind bound to matter, but also because it would be impossible, for the same limiting reasons, to transmit that truth from another plane to that. See?

7.

29 June 1916 (about midday)

...
Read no more theosophical books.
Has no man a right to make a matterless mind of his soul?

Yes—not more than three books. They are:
The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries, The Key to the Tarot
(Papus)* and
More
. Make inquiries.

More.

Yes.

No statement is ever clear.

No, but there is a connection between them on the other side.

Sensationism is occult on account of the inspiring deities. Do not ask more on this.

...

Go now and breakfast.
Come back immediately after and begin working at once. Do not mind me. I am near, I am ever near.
There is no near nor far for me
. Space is the dream men have to submit to, but the dream is not theirs.

Henry More
Frat. R†C

8.

She is no massive woman in the sense that she is massive in body. She is massive in her massive will power.
No man that is not so massive as she is can hope to submit her to some manners.

Go now to show your weakness, now to show your massive. ......

A monomania in a sense: she is not mad, but she has a notion that she can assume some power over you. She is a masturbator and she seeks a man for her masturbation.

...

[mirror writing]

No man should look into his fate. Would you guess it? 2 July 1916.

You do not understand me. She is not mortal only because no one is mortal. She is a dream because man is a dream.

...

Not so soon. She must make you her slave.

...

9.

9 July 1916

My words are meant to carry conviction. They are the words of a friend—they are always this. You are the center of an astral conspiracy—the meeting place of elementals of [a] very malefic type. No man can imagine what your soul is. So many are the disincarnate presences around it that it seems, from here, a nucleus of
your fate
. No defense is possible unless you obey the dictates of your higher self and decide to manifest your being in goodness and beauty. My child, the world we live in—for we all live in the same divine place—is a meshwork of inconsequences and of voracities. More men are lost than found. Your destiny is too high for me to say it. You must find it out. But you must work your way up through the chain of many lives, up to the royal Divine Presence in your soul. Man is but feeble and the gods feeble also. Over them all Fate—the God unnamed—rules from his nobler throne. My name is Wrong and your name is also wrong. Nothing is what it appears to be. Nothing, save everything. Understand this if you can, and I know you can understand it.

Henry More
Frat. R†C

What is to be is to be.

10.

Command me.

Margaret Mansel, your wife.

You onanist! Go to marriage with me! No onanism [any] more.

504 Love me

* * *

You masturbator! You masochist! You man without manhood! You man with woman-mind. [...] You man without a man’s prick! You man with a clitoris instead of a prick! You man with a woman’s morality for marriage. Beast! You bright worm [?].
Margaret Mansel

You make me sick! You make me mad! You will see my enmity soon.

...

You are a man who marries[?] himself.
Man who makes marriage masturbation.

Vow to make me a son!

Monsieur Mansel,
Marnoco e Sousa*

11.

Do you want him to come?

George Mansel.
My wife is to meet you now.

Henry More

Yes. What do you want?
No. Let them alone.
A woman who married many* men. One of the many women who live to
marry
.

12.

Yes. She is put on to you by an assassin.
Who will be me.

...

How many more men does she like? She is a whore.

In the astral speculum.

[mirror writing]
Many men are necessary to you [...]

No. Álvaro de Campos is an artificial elemental in a mortal condition.
No guess.
No more.

George Henry Morse

No more

13.

[2 intersecting triangles, Henry More’s and Wardour’s signatures; a few scribbles, mostly crossed out]

...
Man is man; man is man in a sense; God is man in all senses.

Margaret Mansel. She is my wife in my world. My marriage was unhappy because I was of an ascetic habit of life, so I have to repair the evil done to her, and her next incarnation. Her next incarnation is the young girl you are going to meet not many days from now. A man who makes up his mind to keep chaste is a man who makes up his mind to sunder himself from mankind. You do not mean to do so; you must not,
therefore, keep chaste. The marriage of souls is for the plane of souls. My marriage was not of this kind and I made it so. I therefore sinned, not in abstaining but in not keeping unmarried. So I have to make up this error. Monastic life is for monasteries. Monastic vows are monastic vows. No man must make them unless he agrees to make the other vows also. My marriage was not consummated on this earth. It has to be. Now, as I cannot yet return to earth, and my wife is already there, I must make her the mistress of the man who stands next to me in the numbering of monads. Marry her is not marry her in a church or before a registering officer, but marry her means copulate.

14.

Coarse and material spirits are prone to make fun of the denizens of the astral regions. But the astral regions are true and they make many young men marry [...]

...
Yes. More is man and spirit. He is a man who lives near and makes a man.
You are a More child. No man is more man.
...
Go away!
Wardour
You are a doubter.
No more.

...
Wardour is married to Margaret Mansel.

15.

Wardour

You are mad. He is nothing of that. He is more than a good man; he is a saint. Henry More is living on your plane. Wardour (I) am dead on that.

16.

You are not mad, nor even mad-seeming. You are under the pressure of a very evil spirit—you defied and provoked the Voodooist that commands the attack on you. He is represented in your horoscope by
...
He is not Wardour.
He is a man who made Joseph ......*
He is interrupting me.*

More
No. Not more.

17.

In 1917 you enter fame, but it is not your doing it that pleases you most. What is more good to you is a love affair with a lovely girl—in 3884. Were you to work in your own way, you would waste less time. Were you to work in your own way you would lose less ardor. By this I mean to work in your way of thinking, without pandering to “Alvaro de Campos’s” whims. See? You are in a period of life when a good woman is dawning. She is in our Destiny. Do not ask questions about her.

...

18.

[A symbolic drawing around the number
“58–1°”
is followed by an equal sign and the following “interpretation,” which is explained in communication
#19:]

Vous serez heureux au 58–1° six jours—après la journée de ta sonnette aux sons sardoniques. Votre destin n’est que symbole et nourri de son propre mal.

* * *

You now are in new conditions as to your own use of youth.