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“Heteronyms” & Multiple Personalities & Connections

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.” ~ Fernando Pessoa

Poet Fernando António Nogueira Pêssoa was born in Lisbon, Portugal, June 13, 1888. It is also in Lisbon where there is a Pessoa library, and it is most famously the Biblioteca Particular Fernando Pessoa (Fernando Pessoa’s Private Library), housed at the Casa Fernando Pessoa.

That is why I intended on visiting Lisbon when I was in Portugal. However. And that is a big however; there is a great deal of traffic there. And there are also many tourists there. Many. After visiting Porto, (a much smaller city by comparison) there was no desire to go to Lisbon. So I didn’t go. *Sigh*

Pessoa is one of my great loves and I have many of his books. Here are a few of my favorites.

Interesting how The Book of Disquiet came out with the light mixed into the cover photo. Certainly it is the Spirit of it. Here is the actual cover below.

But, why here? Why now do I speak of Pessoa? Because internally we make connections. These connections go from a single conversation to other conversations, and finally to thoughts on the page. So now we are going speak of those conversations, of what led me to consider Pessoa.

The other day at the Coffee Shop someone brought up the subject of movies. (Normally we just play chess there but sometimes we have time left over because one game lasts as long as two.) From there we moved to specific types of movies. Then came reflections on the movie Sybil. Yes, the Sybil of the many personalities, something like 16 of them. (We all concluded that was a great many indeed.) The conversation then evolved into the theory of split personalities, multiple personalities, and finally the evolving psychological theories and integration of the multiples into one.

But that led me alone to other places that I didn’t share. It wasn’t the time to speak of poetry and poets. Not even that of cabbages and kings.

It led me to thoughts of the marvelous mister Pessoa. There is so much to tell about Fernando that it would take a full and long biography to do it. But I am not going to do that. If we don’t want to do that, we would have to pick and choose. So I am going to pick. I am choosing to tell of the thing that brought the whole connection together in the first place, at least in my case. Multiple personalities.

Our poet would sneeze at the idea of only 16 different personalities. He was known for his creation of over 70 “heteronyms”—distinct literary personas. He explored identity, existentialism, and the multiplicity of the self.

In 1914, the year his first poem was published, Pessoa found the three main literary personas, or the heteronyms, as he called them, which he would return to throughout his career: Alberto Caeiro, a rural, uneducated poet of great ideas who wrote in free verse; Ricardo Reis, a physician who composed formal odes influenced by Horace; and Álvaro de Campos, an adventurous London-based naval engineer influenced by poet Walt Whitman and the Italian Futurists.

Pessoa published under his own name as well, but considered those works the product of an “orthonym,” yet another literary persona. While other notable writers of his generation used literary personas, such as Pound’s Mauberley and Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, Pessoa alone gave his heteronyms a full life separate from his own, assigning and adopting in turn each persona’s psychology, aesthetics, and politics. Imagine. The shear number alone makes Sybil look like an amature. Pessoa insisted on identity as a flexible, dynamic construction. He consistently rejected traditional notions of authorship and individuality.

Had Pessoa encountered a psychologist who sought to integrate all of the various personalities there might have been at least two possible results. Had he succumbed he likely would have gone mad. If not, he might have converted the therapist to an elaborated conviction of identity as a flexible, dynamic construction. Even in multiples of self.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was regarded as one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century. He died in Lisbon on November 30, 1935. He died young from cirrhosis of the liver which has led some of us on the pavement to speculate that he drank beyond the modicum of the socially acceptable. We speculate but do not know. In any case, perhaps it was the penchent of one of his many personalities that did him in.

The Biblioteca Particular Fernando Pessoa is the personal library of Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s most celebrated poet. It contains about 1,300 titles (1,419 volumes) that Pessoa bought, received, edited, or annotated over his lifetime. The collection spans all branches of knowledge, with some rare or unique items such as Secret Shakespearean Seals and The Encyclopaedia of Wit.

Certainly any fan worth their salt would visit that library when in Portugal.

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Tributes

About that…

It needs to be said that the most painful of all losses are those we suffer outside of public view. Those are the losses that are rarely written about, the losses that leave us with part of our souls gone and the days that will forever be missing the breath of another.

We have had a year of treasured public icons gone from our lives. One of the most significant of the adored is Dolly Parton, dead, gone from the human domain. On the night of Tuesday, August 25, 2026, the Empire State Building’s tower lights sparkled in pink from 9:25 p.m. to 10:25 p.m. as a tribute to Parton, who died the same day. Her songs were sung and played throughout the nation. Other countries, the world mourned her loss and named her accomplishments, generosity, and compassion.

Every death, every new reminder, serves to push at what had been a momentary pause in our own stone storehouse of loss. Stunning or surprising, we add another to our of mansion of memories, integral pieces of the lives that once were.

Grief is just a word. Yet the pain that it resurfaces unites all parts of us. Our mind, our body, our soul become one in pain. The worst of it is when we dream and the dream conjures the dead one—the child’s hand, the words, the soft brown eyes of the dog barking at the door, the young man walking toward me. And then we awaken. And then learn all over again it wasn’t a mistake at all. We are empty.

To say some of the things we hear said are puzzling only speak to our loneliness. “As long as someone lives in another’s memories, they are not dead.” How can that possibly make any sense? Yes they are. They are not here. “Well at least she’s at peace now.” She maybe, but I’m not. Not yet. We know that the loss happens to us, not to the dead.

Things fall apart.

After the first pains of mourning we play memory tributes. Those words of “remember when.” With the wonderful famous people who die, we can make public honors. We can acknowledge them and their good works. Most important, they can represent the stages in our lives. They sing not only of when we were, but who we were becoming and would become. Perhaps even who we still will become.

These are the ones I’ll forever be grateful to. These are the ones for whom I feel honored to have had them in my life.

GLORIA STEINEM

The Truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off

DOLLY PARTON

JESSE JACKSON

TIM CURRY

BOB WEIR

CATHERINE O”HARA

CHUCK NORRIS

WENDELL BARRY

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Oops and Dreams

Because I do not learn from past mistakes, even the most recent ones, I have a recent one to oops on. The admonition to trust but verify is valid. Something I have known and mostly applied. The times I don’t apply I pay the price. So do you in this instance. The last post contained ranting about The Odyssey. The ranting maintained that the essentials were omitted from the film. They were not.

Odysseus does indeed spend time on an island. Eight years in fact which does extend the trip a bit. With a real babe. And the Cyclops monster does appear. He does have a single eye which is indeed poked out by our hero. (This is to remind us never to run with sharp pokey objects.) The only rant that was correct is the part where the monster is told that Odysseus’ name is No-man.

Maybe this is enough about Greeks and Myths and Time for now.

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As for the Precious

Last night as I lay sleeping, I was awakened by a soft, light, unusual pressure in my stretched-out hand. It was that it was unusual which awakened me I’m sure. Coming out of the depths I realized it was the precious paw of my sleeping partner, the littlest cat, Lizzy Fig. One sweet paw placed ever so gently in my palm. Next the other front paw. I wrapped my hand lightly over hers. We lay like that then, until we each fell asleep in our time, safely. And that is the name of Joy. Beyond all words.

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Mumblings

Much ado has been made of The Odyssey and I fully intended to see it. Then I read some of the reviews. This is not something I normally do. In fact my intention is to never read them but as I seldom pay attention to my intentions, I did. So. The most interesting to me was that two essential parts of the Odyssey were left out. (My essentials as I’m only speaking for myself here.) The essentials were the Siren Song and the time spent on the island with the lotus eaters and singers of love and lust and pleasures consumed and consummated. But to me the very most important part that I dearly loved was the escape from the cave and the monster because Odysseus told him his name was “no man.” Therefore the allies of the blinded one-eyed giant monster could not help him against Odysseus because when they called out to him asking who he needed help with, the horror responded with “no man.” Ha!

How clever. How enjoyable were both of those sections in their entirety. I don’t know or care who the editor(s) or screenwriters were, but they should be gone with the wind. And whoever else went along with the script as it is, (e.g. the whole production crew including director). I no longer have any desire to see the movie.

This is a photograph published by globalperspectives.info. It is showing when Odysseus blinds the Cyclops making him into a no-eye instead of a one-eye. You will not see this in the movie so I thought I would show you here.

How’s that for a movie review of a film I haven’t seen? I’m sure I could make a living at this.

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I am quite tired of the word “literally” being used, even when it is used correctly.

I am also quite tired of the text on facebook being a block long and mostly because the author is using the gimmick of one paragraph per sentence or word. Please. The emphasis is lost due to its very repetition. The same with exclamation points. Only one at the end of sentences, please. And certainly do not pepper every other word or sentence with them. *sigh* Of course it loses its power that way.

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Wired has published an article about the sun being blocked due to the effects of el nino. That is to say, the powers that be are considering the blocking. Because the sun has such a powerful impact on el nino and makes it exponentially worse than it would be on its own. This is not news. This proposal has been offered up for a few years now. Perhaps it is currently becoming more serious. That would not surprise me. What surprises me is how we do not learn from our past mistakes. Let me go on record here as saying What the Hell are you Thinking! There are always, always consequences unforeseen when we mess with nature. Just because we cannot see the repercussions does not mean there aren’t any. The Earth always wins. Mother nature is not cuddly.

Remember the culling of the herd of elephants? Culling is a nice word for destroying, killing, murdering. We killed these bull elephants in front of their babies, the baby bulls. They watched as their fathers were killed and lay dying in front of them. Okay, so there were fewer elephants to overrun the surrounding small villages. There were in turn fewer new babies to overrun the villages.

What they got instead was a herd of new bulls that overran the villages and destroyed everything in their path. They acted out in outrages patterns of destruction and terrorised anyone whom they encountered. Afterall, they had no elders to raise and teach them their role within the herd. They saw their parents killed, shot by humans. They learned fury. They learned rage. Some say they even learned revenge. Well, at least there were fewer of them.

And right now the Earth seems pretty pissed off at us. Let’s please not add to the chaos. Leave the sun alone.

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For The Expats

“Oh, people have made a lot of my falling in love with Italy, and though I don’t deny it, I sometimes chafe at the idea—there’s an inkling of sexism to it, as if I’ve lost my head and left my real responsibilities behind to run off with the gardener. … When I was learning Italian, I wasn’t just trying to learn a new language—I was searching for something latent in myself, some greater personal and creative freedom, and I ended up finding it there, in a language in which I will always remain an outsider. It’s freed me from the trap of origins and prescribed identity, from the tyranny of authenticity and the myth of the so-called mother tongue. That, to me, is true liberation.”
jhumpa lahiri
–JHUMPA LAHIRI—Born this week in 1927

Lahiri authored many books, most noted are The Interpreter of Maladies, and The Namesake.

I’ve posted this here as I think our dear Jhumpa has captured perfectly the feelings of those who, in the end, move from visitor to citizen of another country. The expatriates of their home country. Or, as we say here in the U.S., the immigrants.

Funny isn’t it, how the change in a word used to describe something can so dramatically change the attitude towards the object. Or person.