This episode is about Schubert's awful and awesome bohemian life/music/death; a Victor Hugo sonnet from "Les Contemplations" ("La mort et la beauté sont deux choses profondes"); K.G. Nishitani on Nihility, sin and redemption; Fernando Pessoa's Fragment 363 (love, possession and illusion, the interplay of beauty and horror), with visuals courtesy of a walk around Rickmansworth Lake with Max listening to Sviatoslav Richter play Schubert's Piano Sonata No. 18 in G Major: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o12iQ6n6Rs&ab_channel=SviatoslavRichter-Topic.

A "Father Archetype" soul collage for Pessoa’s Fragment 88: “Who am I, finally, when I’m not playing? A poor orphan left out in the cold among sensations, shivering on the street corners of Reality, forced to sleep on the steps of Sadness and to eat the bread offered by Fantasy. I was told that my father, whom I never knew, is called God, but the name means nothing to me. Sometimes at night, when I’m feeling lonely, I call out to him with tears and form an idea of him I can love. But then it occurs to me that I don’t know him, that perhaps he’s not how I imagine, that perhaps this figure has never been the father of my soul…”

Also on YouTube - for those not able to access the video version of this episode here 🙏🏼🦋

My aspirations for how we might “live” Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet together.

An audio-visual Soul Collage created in response to Fernando Pessoa’s Fragment 307 (from The Book of Disquiet): “AESTHETICS OF DISCOURAGEMENT Since we can’t extract beauty from life, let’s at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life. Let’s make our failure into a victory, into something positive and lofty, endowed with columns, majesty and our mind’s consent. If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let’s at least decorate it as best we can – with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls. Like every dreamer, I’ve always felt that my calling was to create. Since I’ve never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant dreaming of the acts I wish I could perform.” The walk that Max and I did (in reverse, starting from Chesham) can be found here.

“An episode chiefly inspired by 10 seconds of animation by Alyssa on her YouTube channel.

Check out THE FULL TWELVE SECOND video ⁠here⁠.

Also inspired by the following quote from fragment 32 of Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet:

"Underlying everything, the hushed night was the tomb of God (and my soul felt sorry for God).”

OTHER TOPICS THAT CROP UP IN THIS EPISODE: 

-Lucid Dreaming: Rob’s experiences with lucid dreaming and the techniques he used to achieve it (counting backwards, repeating a phrase while falling asleep).

-Finding Beauty in the Mundane: the concept of cultivating a "waking dream" mentality, where one finds wonder and beauty in everyday experiences. Cf. Eckhart Tolle/Nisargadatta.

The Yearning for Connection: Lost loves, and the desire to recapture those feelings of connection and shared experiences. The possibility of finding a similar connection through lucid dreaming.

-Techniques for Lucid Dreaming: dream journaling, sensory deprivation, and meditation.

Life as a Waking Dream: living one’s life as a lucid dream state, rather than feeling trapped in our waking nightmares.

-In The Forest of Estrangement: A text written in 1912 and forming the initial foundations for TBOD according to a letter to João de Lebre e Lima, in which FP talks about his new project. Read both the letter, as well as In The Forest of Estrangement here.

“The clock in the back of the deserted house (everyone’s sleeping) slowly lets the clear quadruple sound of four o’clock in the morning fall. I still haven’t fallen asleep, and I don’t expect to. There’s nothing on my mind to keep me from sleeping and no physical pain to prevent me from relaxing, but the dull silence of my strange body just lies there in the darkness, made even more desolate by the feeble moonlight of the street lamps. I’m so sleepy I can’t even think, so sleepless I can’t feel.”

This episode begins with a restless nights for two literary alter-egos: Fernando Pessoa's Soares and Richard Matheson's (I Am Legend) Neville.

Pessoa grapples with insomnia, intertwined with alcoholism as well as various existential anxieties in Fragment 31 of The Book of Disquiet, a meditation on sleep, death, and the nature of being.

Neville, the protagonist of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, finds himself seemingly the last human on Earth, haunted by the undead. His struggle for sleep mirrors Pessoa's, hinting at a similar psychological issue: the manifestation in his life of the Death Drive as explored by Freud in his 1922 essay "Beyond The Pleasure Principle".

Also, a fascinating historical footnote: Pessoa's role in crafting early advertising copy for Coca-Cola in Portugal, resulting in a government ban on Coca-Cola imports that lasted for over 50 years.

"Sadly, or perhaps not, I recognize that I have an arid heart. An adjective matters more to me than the real weeping of a human soul. But sometimes I’m different."

In today's missive of disquietude (Fragment 29), Fernando talks about waking to a rain-washed dawn that gives way to “triumphant” blue skies—a beautiful morning in which he feels melancholic rather than happy. As he aimlessly paces his room, the various rituals of his day expose his isolation. He feels a longing that weighs on him like a damp rag left staining a window sill.

I respond by sharing my own attempts to wrangle morning chaos—the various routines I follow meant to optimize productivity, as well as the hunt for Pessoa’s words amid perfectly ordered bookshelves. No system or structure can solve our essential needs.

Notes:

-A day in my life | Lex Fridman

-Living Each Day As A Three Act Play

-Music used in this episode

In today's fragment of Disquiet, Fernando describes waking to a rain-cleansed Sunday, unveiling blue skies—a lovely morning that evokes melancholy as well as joy. He wanders aimlessly, the various Sunday rituals accentuating his isolation and longing.

In my response to Rob and Pessoa, I relate how an unexpected encounter with a doppelgänger of a past love, Nadia, during a walk near Amersham evokes deep nostalgia. The shifting weather mirrors these emotions, and this Rilke poem further underscores the transient nature of relationships and time.

Links:

Music: Living The Book of Disquiet Playlist on Spotify

Life Answers: A Complete Audiobook Reading of Sri Nisargadatta Maharajah’s “I Am That”

Lomakayu's reading on YouTube of "I Am That"

Huberman & Conti's How To Understand & Assess Your Mental Health series (treasure trove of ideas and wisdom here, worth at least a year of therapy in each episode!)

Agnes Callard & Robin Hanson's Minds Almost Meeting

Raymond Carver's Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

In this episode I re-interrogate my reasons for creating a Book of Disquet cover-version by exploring some of the nuances between the word "desassossego" (restlessness, uneasiness, anxiety) in Portuguese and the English translation which usually renders the word as "disquiet."

I also reflect a bit more, with the help of Richard Zenith's recent biography of Pessoa, on Pessoa's melancholy brand of existential unrest which acts in so many ways as a stand-in for the absurdity and tedium of modern life, making The Book of Disquiet the modernist masterpiece that it is.

Pessoa self-medicated his deep-seated disquiet through writing, smoking, alcohol and coffee. Alcohol, we might say, acts as a kind of liquid heteronym in this book, medicating away the pain of "tedio" (tedium, boredom, monotony), another crucial word in the Pessoan lexicon (he uses it 131 times in his Livro do Desassossego).

References:

-"Chega de Saudade" (Jobim/Moraes) sung by João Gilberto in 1959

-Pessoa: An Experimental Life (2021) by Richard Zenith

-Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave

-Article about The Real with regard to our daily routines

-"People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts" (article)

-Andrew Bird's "Sisyphus"

Fragment 12: Pessoa sees his random writings as an unimportant autobiography and a way to unwind like solitaire.

Fragment 13: Pessoa feels his writings are as insignificant as his life next to the vast universe.

Fragment 14: Pessoa says creating imperfect art is better than creating nothing, as it may help others.

Fragment 15: Pessoa gradually conquered his innate inner nature through effort.

Fragment 16: Pessoa daydreams during a trip, neither seeing the landscapes nor remembering them.

Fragment 17: Pessoa contemplates examining his life to understand how he arrived where he is.

Fragment 18: Pessoa feels content staying in his mundane job, needing only minimal income and time for dreaming and writing.

Fragment 19: Pessoa expresses in symbolic language his sensations of fleeting passions and repeatedly shattered illusions.

Fragment 20: Whenever Pessoa tries to change his circumstances, new oppressive ones take their place.

Fragment 21: Pessoa says we are all slaves to the gods, whether they exist or not.

Fragment 22: Pessoa sees himself as destined to remain obscure, frail even in his innermost self.

Fragment 23: Pessoa advocates embracing absurdity and contradiction to avoid false self-knowledge.

Fragment 24: Pessoa realizes he shares more camaraderie with waiters and delivery boys than intimate friends.

Fragment 25: Pessoa has an eerie encounter with a lithograph of a woman staring sadly at him.

Fragment 26: Pessoa wishes to feel emotions vividly, as if each had its own heart.

Fragment 27: Pessoa sees literature's imagination as the pinnacle of human effort, giving life permanence.

Fragment 28: Pessoa longs for music or dreams to stir feeling and stop thought.

Good morning FP,

I was lying in bed half an hour ago wondering if I should stop writing to you, stop trying to connect to another human being through the medium of writing. For this is a peculiar game I am playing here am I not? 

A man sees another man standing in a clearing talking to a tree. He gets a bit closer and recognises that the tree is a kind of proxy for the conversations this man maybe wishes to have with another. So he approaches the man and offers him an ear: talk to me and I will respond as another man might, or even as a tree, he says.

Alternately, a man sees another man standing in a clearing talking to a tree. How peculiar, he thinks, and walks on, leaving the man and the tree to whatever understanding they might learn to glean from each other.

Perhaps this is your response to my fable, a poem from 1933?

The master without disciples

had a flawed machine.

Despite its levers and gears

it never did anything.

It served as a barrel organ

when there was no one to hear it.

When silent, it tried to look curious,

but no one came near it.

My soul, rather like that machine,

is flawed, complicated,

erratic,

and serves no purpose at all.

FP, in this missive I write to you about addiction and abstinence, about Bhavesh and me spending an evening without our respective substances, and the idea that therapy, like religion, depends on confronting what one cannot renounce. I describe the Beatles and their articulation of love as life’s central meaning, Freud’s belief that an analyst must face his own cravings to avoid moralising or colluding with a client, and Jung’s influence on Alcoholics Anonymous through the concept of spiritus contra spiritum. I examine psychotherapy as a secular religion with its own rituals, prohibitions, and codes of purity, and discuss the constraints of supervision, the fear of liability and exposure, and the rise of what I call the Church of Outrage. I consider the therapist’s position within capitalism, the tension between care and commerce, and the role of friendship in therapeutic work. I trace Freud’s intellectual inheritance from Judaism and Christianity, his inward turn toward the invisible, his resistance to redemption, and his fatalism made literal through his addiction to cigars. I contrast Freud’s stoic endurance with Father Teofan’s ascetic ideal and Hesse’s depiction of Narcissus and Goldmund as embodiments of transcendence and appetite. Finally, I return to you, Fernando, to the cafés, the wine, the solitude, and the way you refined all that corrosion into syntax, proving that style can outlast flesh.

Hello FP, and thank you for being here.Here’s a new missive I’ve written for you about friendship and soulmates, dogs and gods, addiction, vanity, longing, kingship, numerology, therapy, loneliness, YouTube, tea, and clay. Also: Mário and Max, the breast and the bottle, writing as a drug, Pessoa (you, obviously, but also pessoas in general), writing as a wound, and the small, stupid, stubborn hope that one soul might still recognise another across centuries and timezones. About being a Four with a Five wing, the Green Girlfriend; ageing men with microphones and various Ghosts (Swayze! Krapp!) for company. About the commerce of care, the image-making factory, the melancholy of being too sensitive for one’s own good, and the strange consolation of Anankē.Here are (your) poems that I refer to in this piece: To the Memory of the Poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro (written shortly after Sá-Carneiro’s suicide in 1916)I do not know if this is dream or real,or a blend of both in me,this sense that splits my soulin two equal halves.One half lives in shadow, the other in light,one in mystery, the other in truth,and I, the being that joins and guides them,feel myself dead in life.I was another once. Today I am no one.What I was died with me.Of myself there lingers, for my torment,only the memory of what I too once was.You who were half my soul,you who were the mirror where I saw myself—Mário, you who were my calm,you who were my joy—today I am nothing but longing for you,and my soul is a cold corpsethat the wind carries, like a bare leaf,through a late autumn.---Fruits are given by trees that live,Not by the wishful mind, which adornsItself with ashen flowersFrom the abyss within.How many kingdoms in minds and in thingsYour imagination has carved! That manyYou’ve lost, pre-dethroned,Without ever having them.Against great opposition you cannotCreate more than doomed intentions!Abdicate and beKing of yourself.-Ricardo Reis (6 December, 1926)

You, whose coming is so gentle that it resembles a departure,

Whose ebb and flow of darkness, when the moon exhales,

Contains waves of dead affection, cold as a sea of dreams,

Breezes from landscapes fashioned to calm our excess of anxiety . . .

You, palely, you, feebly, you, liquidly, or in the form of a numbing vapour,

The smell of death among flowers, the whiff of fever on river banks,

You, the queen, you, the chatelaine, you, the pale lady, come . . .

From the closing section of Ode Marítima (1916) Pessoa writing as Álvaro de Campos. Translation: Margaret Jull Costa

Tu, cuja vinda é tão suave que parece um afastamento,

Cujo fluxo e refluxo de treva, quando a lua bafeja,

Tem ondas de carinho morto, frio de mares de sonho,

Brisas de paisagens supostas para a nossa angústia excessiva…

Tu, palidamente, tu, flébil, tu, liquidamente,

Aroma de morte entre flores, hálito de febre sobre margens,T

u, rainha, tu, castelã, tu, dona pálida, vem…

"I have to choose what I detest – either dreaming, which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn’t born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together."

Pessoa, Fragment 2, TBOD

--

Hey FP!

A few days ago, on a walk from Chalfont and Latimer to Chesham, a walk I’ve done a hundred times before, a song came up on my 'Liked Songs' Spotify playlist which I had playing on random at the time: Bill Callahan’s Riding for the Feeling. This song always makes me think of Roz, as it was Roz who introduced me to the song four years ago in a message she sent me on Hinge.“Seems like you’re a Riding For The Feeling kinda guy,” she’d written, including in her message a link to a YouTube video of the Bill Callahan number: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wphQGf2KrXc&list=RDwphQGf2KrXc&index=1

I immediately matched with her. Not least because Roz was beautiful and intelligent, and had better music tastes than I had, but also because nobody on Hinge then or since has ever engaged in a conversation with me on that app the way Roz did. This is a missive to you about Roz and the Enneagram. As a fellow Riding For The Feeling Guy, I send it to you with love.

Steve

xxxx

--

VIDVERSION: https://youtu.be/bpCI8-HdHa0

"Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries. And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it’s because the poetry or prose we write – devoid of any desire to move anyone else’s will or to mould anyone’s understanding – is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.

We’re well aware that every creative work is imperfect and that our most dubious aesthetic contemplation will be the one whose object is what we write. But everything is imperfect. There’s no sunset so lovely it couldn’t be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn’t bring a yet sounder sleep. And so, contemplators of statues and mountains alike, enjoying both books and the passing days, and dreaming all things so as to transform them into our own substance, we will also write down descriptions and analyses which, when they’re finished, will become extraneous things that we can enjoy as if they happened along one day."

-Pessoa, TBOD, Fragment 1

"He had furnished his two rooms with a semblance of luxury, no doubt at the expense of certain basic items. He had taken particular pains with the armchairs, which were soft and well-padded, and with the drapes and rugs. He explained that with this kind of an interior he could ‘maintain the dignity of tedium’. In rooms decorated in the modern style, tedium becomes a discomfort, a physical distress. Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The rooms decorated in the modern style, tedium becomes a discomfort, a physical distress. Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal. He never had to face the demands of society or of the state. He even evaded the demands of his own instincts. Nothing ever prompted him to have friends or lovers. I was the only one who was in some way his intimate. But even if I always felt that I was relating to an assumed personality and that he didn’t really consider me his friend, I realized from the beginning that he needed someone to whom he could leave the book that he left."Pessoa, TBOD (Preface)

This piece explores Simone Weil’s Factory Journal and her idea of Anankē—necessity—as a kind of sacred affliction: the possibility that what undoes us is also what connects us most deeply to reality. I'm including it here, because it is through Weil that I have returned to my initial Pessoan project, which will follow in subsequent fragments.