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Blank verso page following title page in Fernando Pessoa: English Poems, 1921 (Biblioteca Nacional Digital, Lisbon)
The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was relentlessly driven to create multiple variant literary identities for himself in his bewilderingly prolific writings.
With Pessoa the "true identity" question so often asked about writers by those who are not writers -- "Who is the real ____ ? In which of his/her works may the real ____ finally be found?" -- makes very little sense.
With a writer who appears to possess dozens of selves, which one is the true self?
It may help, in attempting to sort out this question insofar as it may relate to Pessoa (or shall we say, the many Pessoas), to consider the blank verso page following the title page of his English Poems, 1921.
The minute grains and blemishes in the paper, the fading and discolouration, the faint stains and subtle craterlike smudges, the marks of folding and corrugation, all these small changes effected by the work of time lend the blank ochre-coloured page an uncanny resemblance to the vast, all-but-featureless landscape of a desert viewed in a satellite photo.
Meditating upon the relation of this not-quite-blank page to the larger work of the mercurial author Pessoa, one imagines the expanded view from that enigmatic gulf we call "space", the non-place where words and identities assume their true eternal insignificance.
Looking "down" from this privileged vantage upon that Great Identity-Free Void known as the universe of language, it becomes possible to sense a dimension in which a writer is permitted to have as many selves as there are grains of sand in the desert, or as he/she has works, just so long as they all fit into that one big trunk.
With Pessoa the "true identity" question so often asked about writers by those who are not writers -- "Who is the real ____ ? In which of his/her works may the real ____ finally be found?" -- makes very little sense.
With a writer who appears to possess dozens of selves, which one is the true self?
It may help, in attempting to sort out this question insofar as it may relate to Pessoa (or shall we say, the many Pessoas), to consider the blank verso page following the title page of his English Poems, 1921.
The minute grains and blemishes in the paper, the fading and discolouration, the faint stains and subtle craterlike smudges, the marks of folding and corrugation, all these small changes effected by the work of time lend the blank ochre-coloured page an uncanny resemblance to the vast, all-but-featureless landscape of a desert viewed in a satellite photo.
Meditating upon the relation of this not-quite-blank page to the larger work of the mercurial author Pessoa, one imagines the expanded view from that enigmatic gulf we call "space", the non-place where words and identities assume their true eternal insignificance.
Looking "down" from this privileged vantage upon that Great Identity-Free Void known as the universe of language, it becomes possible to sense a dimension in which a writer is permitted to have as many selves as there are grains of sand in the desert, or as he/she has works, just so long as they all fit into that one big trunk.
