Filme do Desassossego Page #7

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There is a third method for subtilizing

pains into pleasures and

for making doubts and worries

into a soft bed.

It consists in intensely concentrating

on our anxieties and sufferings,

making them so fiercely felt

that by their very excess

they bring the pleausure

of excess,

while by their violence

they suggest the pleasure

that hurts for being so pleasurable and

the gratification that smacks of blood

for having wounded us.

This can only hapen, of course,

in souls dedicated to pleausure

by habit and by education.

And when, as in me, all three methods

are employed simultaneously,

when every felt pain,

felt so quickly there's no time

for the soul to plan any defence,

is automatically analysed to the core,

ruthlessly foisted on an extraneous I,

and buried in me to the utmost

height of pain,

then I truly feel like a victor

and a hero.

Then life stops for me,

and art grovels at my feet.

Everything I've been describing

is just the second step that the dreamer

must take to reach his dream.

Who besides me has been able

to take the third step,

which leads to the

sumptuous threshold of the Temple?

This is the step which is indeed

hard to take,

for it requires an inward effort vastly

greater than any effort we make in life,

but it also rewards us to the heights

and depths of our soul

in a way that life never could.

This step is, once everything else

has been completely

and simultaneously carried out,

the three subtle methods having been

applied to the exhaustion,

to immediatly pass the

sensation through pure intelligence,

filtering it through a higher analysis

that shapes it into a literary form

with its own substance and character.

Then I have completely

fixed the sensation.

Then I have made the unreal real

and have given the unattainable

an eternal pedestal.

Then, within myself,

I have been crowned Emperor.

Don't imagine that I write to publish,

or merely to write, or to produce art.

I write because this is the final goal,

the supreme refinement,

the organically illogical refinement,

of my cultivation of the states of soul.

If I take one of my sensations

and unravel it

so as to use it to weave

the inner reality,

you can be sure I don't do it for the sake

of a lucid and shimmering prose,

nor even for the sake of the pleasure I

get from that prose

but to give complete

exteriority to what is interior,

thereby enabling me

to realize the unrealizable,

to conjoin the contradictory and,

having exteriorized my dream,

to give it its most powerful expression

as pure dream.

Yes, this is my role as a

stagnator of life,

chiseller of inaccuracies, sick pageboy

of my soul and queen,

reading to her at twilight

not the poems from the book

of my Life

that lies open on my knees, but the

poems that I invent and pretend to read,

and that she pretends to hear,

while somewhere and somehow the

Evening is softening,

over this metaphor raised up in me into

Absolute Reality,

the last hazy light of a

mysterious spiritual day.

The caress never comes,

the stone in your ring

bleeds in the growing darkness...

The dark, far-away night of the

argonauts,

and my forehead burning with

their primitive ships...

Everything belongs to others except

my grief for not having any of it.

I suffered in me, with me,

the aspirations of all eras,

and every disquietude of every age

walked with me to the whispering

shore of the sea.

We are who we're not,

and life is quick and sad.

The sound of the waves at night

is a sound of the night,

and how many have heard it

in their own soul,

like the perpetual hope that dissolves

in the darkness

with a faint splash of distant foam!

What tears were shed

by those who achieved,

what tears lost by those

who succeeded!

And all this,

in my walk to the seashore,

was a secret told to me by

the night and the abyss.

How many we are!

How many of us fool ourselves!

What seas crash in us,

in the night when we exist,

along the beaches that we feel

ourselves to be, inundated by emotion!

Who even knows what he thinks

or wants?

Who knows what he is to himself?

How many things music suggests,

and we're glad they can never be!

How much I die if I feel for everything!

How much I feel if I meander this way,

bodiless and human,

with my heart as still as a beach.

The idea of travelling nauseates me.

I've already seen what I've never seen.

I've already seen what I have yet

to see.

Ah, let those who don't exist travell

The train slows down,

we're at Cais do Sodr.

I've arrived at Lisbon,

but not at a conclusion.

O night in which stars feign light,

O night that alone is the size

of the Universe,

make me, body and soul,

part of your body, so that,

being mere darkness, I'll lose myself

and become night as well,

without any dreams as stars within me,

nor a hoped-for sun shining

with the future.

A few vestiges of consciousness persist.

I feel the weight of slumber

but not of unconsciousness.

I don't exist.

The wind...

I wake up and go back to sleep

without yet having slept.

There's a landscape of loud

and indistinct sound

beyond which I'm a stranger to myself.

Dreamed madness

in that estranging silencel

Our life was all our life...

And what a fresh and happy horror

that there was nobody therel

Not even we, who walked there,

were there.

Faint and dispersed but definite sounds

dawn in my awareness,

filling my consciousness of our room

with the fact that the day is broken...

Our room? Mine and who else's,

if I'm here alone?

I don't know.

Everything blends and all that remains

is a fleeting mist of reality

in which my uncertainty founders and

my self-awareness

is lulled to sleep by opiums...

Let us give up the illusion of hope,

which betrays,:

Of love, which wearies,:

Of life, which surfeits

but never satisfies,:

And even of death, which brings

more than we want

and less than we hope for.

Let us not weep, nor hate, nor desire...

Let us cover with a sheet of fine linen,

O Silent Soulmate, the dead,

stiff profile of our Imperfection...

Peace at last.

All that was dross and residue vanishes

from my soul as if it had never been.

I'm alone and calm.

But although I'm no longer attracted

to anything down here,

I'm also not attracted

to anything up above.

I feel free,

as if I'd ceased to exist

and were conscious of that fact.

Peace, yes, peace.

A Great calm, gentle like

something superfluous,

descends on me

to the depths of my being.

The pages I read, the tasks I complete,

the motions and vicissitudes of life,

all has become for me a faint penumbra,

a scarcely visible halo circling

something tranquil that I can't identify.

Go swiftly by, life that's not felt,

a stream flowing silently

under forgotten trees!

Go gently by, soul that's not known,

an unseen rustle beyond

large fallen trees!

Go uselessly by, pointlessly by,

consciousness conscious of nothing,

a hazy flash in the distance

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