The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (25 page)

While Pessoa is best known for his directly literary output, he also wrote voluminously on politics, sociology, and religion—disciplines that to his “neopagan” way of thinking were not readily separable. Pessoa’s politics, as far as they can be reduced to specific views on government policy, look rather conservative, but his political theories were too idealistic to be of much practical value. As a self-styled “mystical nationalist,” he dreamed of a post-Catholic Portugal whose society would be modeled after ancient Greece, where religion, politics, and culture were still intimately linked. The logical first step for arriving at that Utopia was—in his view—to clear away not only the Catholicism that was stultifying Portugal but also the nation’s ineffectual political and economic systems, which the birth of the Republic in
1910
did little to invigorate, and so Pessoa was inclined to support the military coups of and
1926,
and he was initially sympathetic to the capable finance minister named Salazar, who began to consolidate his grip on the government in the late
1920s.
Seeing dictatorship as a perhaps useful, or necessary, stopgap measure to lift the country out of the doldrums and to prepare it for a new kind of national consciousness, Pessoa wrote and published, in
1928,
a pamphlet titled
Interregnum: Defense and Justification of Military Dictatorship in Portugal.
But by the time Salazar became firmly entrenched, in
1932,
Pessoa was disenchanted, and in an autobiographical sketch drawn up in
1935
he renounced his
Interregnum,
stating that it should be considered “nonexistent.” Pessoa had apparently become convinced that idealism does not usually make for good politics, for in the same brief sketch of his life and works, in a paragraph labeled “Political Ideology,” he wrote: “Believes that a monarchy would
be the most appropriate system for an organically imperial nation such as Portugal. Believes, at the same time, that monarchy is not at all feasible in Portugal, so that if there were a referendum to choose between regimes, he would reluctantly vote for the Republic. English-style conservative, meaning that within his conservatism he is a liberal, and utterly antireactionary.” And he summed up his brand of patriotism in the words “Everything for Humanity; nothing against the Nation”—an obvious gibe at Salazar’s famous “Nothing against the Nation; everything for the Nation.”

Pessoa’s ambitious hope for the future of his country was nothing less than its intellectual and cultural primacy among nations, and the basis for that hope was the preeminence achieved by the Portuguese some centuries earlier as the world’s leading navigators of unknown seas and discoverers of new lands. If tiny Portugal, against all odds, had forged the world’s greatest maritime empire, then why couldn’t it—against similar odds—forge the world’s greatest literature? Pessoa was betting it could, and he enlisted not only history but Portuguese mythology to support his thesis
.

Portuguese mythology was born when its history derailed, in 1578, the year that set off one of the most precipitous national downfalls in modern European history. After its armed forces were killed and captured almost to a man in a harebrained expedition to Morocco, once-proud Portugal teetered this way and that until, two years later, it fell under Spanish rule as into a mother’s lap. The name of Sebastião, the ingenuous king who had led the Portuguese troops to their certain slaughter, perhaps deserved to be forgotten, but quite the opposite happened. Among the thousands of Portuguese corpses that littered the battlefield, his was not found, and it was said that the king had taken refuge on a desert isle and would return one foggy morning as the
Encoberto,
the Hidden One, to free Portugal from the Spanish yoke
.

Portugal regained its independence from Spain in 1640, but national fortunes continued to flounder, and the wealth that poured in from Brazil in the eighteenth century had scant impact on the widespread poverty, and so the Sebastianist myth lived on, in transfigured forms sustained by new explanations. As late as the mid-twentieth century it was possible
,
on a foggy morning, to find men and women along the Portuguese coastline, looking out across the waves for the
Desejado,
the Desired One, their mythical king and savior. But most Sebastianists, such as Pessoa, invested the myth with symbolic meaning, availing themselves of the endlessly interpretable verses penned by Gonqalo Anes Bandana, a Portuguese cobbler, poet, and prophet from the sixteenth century whose work was publicized by the Jesuit preacher and missionary Antonio Vieira (1608-67), one of Portugal’s greatest writers of the Baroque period. Through numerical puzzles and obscure imagery, Bandana’s versified dreams allegedly predicted not only the return of King Sebastiao but also the establishment, in Portugal, of the Fifth Empire, which represented a new twist on a millenary dream—that of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, recorded in the second chapter of the Book of Daniel. The third text in this section presents a traditional understanding of Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, followed by Pessoa’s own “spiritual” scheme, in which cultural rather than military might reigns supreme. Elsewhere in his writings, Pessoa left a different version of this scheme, with the British Empire instead of Europe occupying the fourth slot, but in either case the Fifth Empire was reserved for Portugal and would coincide with the final return of King Sebastião
.

In presaging Portugal’s ascendancy merely through its language and literature (where its cultural strength lay, according to Pessoa), the Fifth Empire doctrine presupposed a new era in human consciousness and civilization, in which such a purely “spiritual,” immaterial domination would be possible. That era would even be marked by a new kind of love, whose nature Pessoa planned to exemplify in a long poem titled “Anteros,”* after the younger brother of Eros (Cupid for the Romans). The poem never got written, but from prose passages in his archives we know that Pessoa understood Anteros not as the avenger of unrequited love (which is how his mythological function is more commonly perceived) but as an anti-Cupid. Eros, for Pessoa, represented instinctive, sensually motivated love, and Anteros dispassionate, intellectual love—the transcendence of carnal love. This gloss swells with significance when viewed in the light of Pessoa’s lifelong inexperience and avowed disinterest in sensual love, coupled with his ultrapersonalized understanding of just when King Sebastiao would
return to usher in the Fifth Empire. Taking one of Bandarra’s whimsical prophecies—that “the King will return after thirty scissors have gone by”—Pessoa multiplied
31
by 2, added it to
1578,
the year King Sebastidã went down in battle, and came up with 1640, which is when Sebastidã supposedly made his symbolic first return to liberate Portugal from Spanish rule; then, multiplying
31
by 10 and adding it to
1578,
Pessoa arrived at what he proposed as the year of the king’s Second Coming, 1888, the year of his very own birth. This would seem to indicate that Pessoa’s megalomania took the form of a Christ complex, with literature as the latter-day saving grace. Or perhaps he was just pulling the leg of posterity
.

Any Empire not founded on the Spiritual Empire is a walking Death, a ruling Corpse.

The Spiritual Empire can only be achieved, to any useful purpose, in a small nation, where growth of the national ideal won’t lead to ambitions of territorial domination, which would undermine what had begun as a psychical imperialism, diverting it from its spiritual destiny. That’s what happened to the German nation; it was too large to be able to achieve its supreme destiny as a spiritual imperialist. The contrary happened to us, the Portuguese, when the discoveries led us to attempt a material imperialism, which we didn’t have enough people to impose.

By creating our own spiritual civilization, we will subjugate all cultures, for it’s impossible to resist the arts and forces of the human spirit, particularly when these are well organized and have souls of the Spirit for their generals.

The goal of every true Empire is to dominate, for the sheer pleasure of dominating. Though it seems absurd, that is the fundamental yearning of every true life, the essence of every vital aspiration.

Let us create an androgynous Imperialism, one that unites the masculine and feminine qualities: an imperialism replete with all the subtleties of female domination and all the forces and constructive urge of male domination. Let us achieve Apollo spiritually.

Not a fusion of Christianity and paganism, as Teixeira de Pascoaes and Guerra Junqueiro* propose, but a casting off of Christianity, a simple and direct, transcendentalized paganism, a transcendental reconstruction of the pagan spirit.

Question: What do you envision for the future of the Portuguese people?

Pessoa’s Answer:
The Fifth Empire. The future of Portugal—which I don’t envision, but
know—
has already been written, for those who can read it, in the verses of Bandarra and the quatrains of Nostradamus. That future is for us to be everything. Who, if they’re Portuguese, can live within the narrow bounds of just one personality, just one nation, just one religion? What true Portuguese can live within the sterile limits of Catholicism when beyond it there are all the Protestant creeds, all the Eastern religions, and all the dead and living paganisms for us to experience, Portuguesely fusing them into Superior Paganism? Let’s not leave out a single god! Let’s incorporate them all! We conquered the Oceans; now we must conquer the Heavens, leaving Earth for the Others, the Others who are eternally Others from birth, the Europeans who aren’t Europeans because they aren’t Portuguese. Let’s be everything, in every way possible, for there can be no truth where something’s lacking! Let’s create Superior Paganism, Supreme Polytheism! In the eternal lie of all the gods, the only truth is in all the gods together.

The promise of the Fifth Empire, as we dream and conceive of it in Portugal, does not conform to the traditional understanding of Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.

In the traditional view, the First Empire is that of Babylon, the Second Empire that of Media-Persia, the Third Empire is the Greek
one, and the Fourth Empire Roman. The Fifth remains forever in doubt, though in this scheme of material empires it could plausibly be understood as the British Empire. That is how the English interpret it, and within this scheme I think their interpretation is valid.

The Portuguese scheme is different. Since it is a spiritual scheme, it begins not with the material empire of Babylon but with the cradle of the civilization in which we live: the spiritual empire of Greece, the origin of what we spiritually are. That being the First Empire, the Second one is the Roman Empire, the Third one the Christian Empire, and the Fourth one Europe—i.e., secular Europe after the Renaissance. In this scheme the Fifth Empire cannot be the British one, for it will be of a different, nonmaterial order. We hope and believe it will be Portuguese.

Question: Do you agree or disagree that an intensive propaganda campaign in newspapers, magazines, and books can raise the Nation’s morale by creating a collective mentality that will incline politicians toward a politics of national greatness?

Pessoa’s Answer:
Only one kind of propaganda can raise the morale of a nation—the creation or renewal of a great national myth, to be disseminated by all possible means. Humanity instinctively hates the truth, for it knows, by that same instinct, that the truth doesn’t exist, or isn’t attainable. The world is run by lies; whoever wants to arouse or run the world must lie to it deliriously, and the more he’s able to lie to himself and to convince himself of the truth of his lie, the more successful he’ll be. Fortunately we already have the Sebastianist myth, deeply rooted in the past and in the Portuguese soul. This makes our job easier; instead of creating a myth, we need only renew one. Let’s begin by getting drunk on that dream, absorbing it and embodying it completely. Once each of us has done that, acting alone and independently, then the dream will flow spontaneously in all we say and write, and an atmosphere will be created in which everyone else breathes the
same dream. Then that extraordinary event will take place in the Nation’s soul, giving rise to New Discoveries, the Creation of the New World, the Fifth Empire. King Sebastiao will have returned.

What, basically, is Sebastianism? It’s a religious movement, built around a legendary national figure.

In symbolic terms King Sebastião is Portugal, which lost its greatness when he disappeared and will recover it only when he returns, and although that return is symbolic, even as Sebastião’s life was by some divine and wondrous mystery symbolic, it is not absurd to believe in it.

King Sebastião will return, says the legend, one foggy morning on his white horse, having come from the distant island where he was waiting until the decisive hour. The foggy morning presumably indicates a rebirth clouded by elements of decadence, by remnants of the Night in which the Nation had been living. The white horse is harder to interpret. It could represent Sagittarius, in which case we must discover what that sign of the zodiac refers to—whether it refers, for example, to Spain (whose ruling sign is Sagittarius, according to astrologers), or to the transit of some planet in the house of Sagittarius. The Book of Revelation,* on the other hand, offers another possible interpretation.

The Island is likewise hard to interpret.

To justify its present-day ambition to become a cultural empire, Portugal can point not only to its broken tradition of such an empire (which, though it miscarried, still foreshadowed its future destiny), but also to the fortunate fact that it has never yet had a great literature, just a small and insignificant one, so that everything in this field still needs to be done, which makes it possible to do everything, and to do it right.