Pessoa's Whit of Sense

If I had to summarize Fernando Pessoa’s writing philosophy in one word, it would be “description.” With two words, it changes to “description fails.” In a sentence, it’s “Every attempt at written communication is a failure and we’re all fucked.” Pessoa’s work, inspired by the sense-based poems of Walt Whitman, raises the contradiction between written descriptions and real ones: a conflict addressed in Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Pessoa’s “Salute to Walt Whitman.”

The role of poetry, according to Whitman and Pessoa, is sense-based: putting images in readers’ minds without outside interpretation. Unlike prose, where the narrator’s point-of-view changes how we look at information, poetry allows us to see images alone--to “possess the good of the earth and the sun” (as Whitman says in Canto 1) without an overarching narrative. The goal of this description, then, is absorption. As Pessoa describes, “I go through your [Whitman’s] poems like a multitude of self-encounters… / In your poems, at a certain point, I don’t know if I’m reading or living.” The poetic vision of reality--built upon images like Whitman’s “spear of summer grass” and Pessoa’s (oddly amusing) “universal pimp”--puts sense experiences into readers’ minds. To Whitman and Pessoa, the role of a poem is simple: describing an image evokes the image. In this theory, poems are basically the Horcrux of sensation, since they prolong sensations’ lives and allow for analysis from someone who has never seen, lived, or experienced them. Through these descriptions, Whitman and Pessoa describe the role of poetry as an exchange of sense experience.

However, even though Pessoa accepts sensory writing, “Salute to Walt Whitman” also proves how it fails: namely, that describing a sense doesn’t lead to the sense. The ineffable, experiential moment of reading poetry--an experience that contemporary poet Muriel Rukeyser describes as “allowing people to feel the meeting of their consciousness and the world”--is defeated by its own subjectivity. As Pessoa states,

My line sings trains, sings cars, sings steam,

But my line, icy as it is, is only rhythm and ideas,

There’s no iron, no steel, no wood, no wheels, no ropes,

Not even the reality of the tiniest stone in the street…

What I want isn’t singing iron, it’s iron.

In the action of “singing iron”--an implied reference to “Song of Myself”--Pessoa demonstrates the flaw of description: it can say, but never be. Describing a hunk of iron doesn’t give you a hunk of iron. And in a phrase as simple as Whitman’s “the beating of my heart,” no one has the same image of a beating heart. Because there’s no actual heartbeat gained from this description, there’s no objective standard to measure readers’ interpretations--no way to ensure that Whitman’s image, the sensation his words were written to portray, is actually given to readers. Poetry can’t act as a preserver of senses because poetry cannot act. Instead, according to Pessoa, the only way to know sensory experience is the experience itself: “The true modern poem is life without poems, / It’s the real train, not the verses that sing it / It’s the iron in the rails, the hot rails, it’s the iron in the wheels, their real spinning.”

Although vastly different, Whitman and Pessoa’s sensory theories aren’t incompatible. Instead, like the many interpretations they represent, the two theories stand for a variety of cases: Whitman’s sense-based theory, applicable when an author is reading their own work, and Pessoa’s realistic view, used when a reader sees the work of another person. Whitman’s philosophy, describing sensory descriptions as keepers of longevity, works only when the reader of these descriptions has experienced this sense in reality. In other words, for Whitman’s theory to succeed, the reader must be Whitman. The transfer of description to reader only works when the author is both transfer and the transferee--a quality suggested in the title of Whitman’s piece, “Song of Myself.” Pessoa, as an outside reader of Whitman’s work, does not have access to any of the original sensory memories or thoughts that created it. Without knowledge of the original sense objects, without an objective standard, without the “natural divinity of being there,” Pessoa has no agency over the realness of the mental images he creates. For outside readers like Pessoa, there is no way to access description in Whitman’s works: only intimations of thought, building to something that may not exist.

The purpose of poetry is to sense. The purpose of sense is to experience. Faced with two opposite theories on sensory interpretations, Whitman and Pessoa grapple on the nature of poetics itself. The result, ultimately, leads to nothing: two contradictions, in two time periods, with two authors who died before they could meet. But that in no way indicates their value. “Salute to Walt Whitman” was never an act of answers. It was a letter to a man Pessoa never would reach, a poem he would never fully visualize, a plea he could never accurately put to words. Written, in longing imitation, to “Song of Myself”: a title none of us can ever fully understand.