Saint Cards 21

The last third of this series draws from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet — a very different kind of source text than the first two. I’m going to introduce the book and my rationale for the next ten prompts that follow. If you just want the prompt, scroll down. 

Rationale

The last two source texts made argument arguments and propositions about what any “I” is, which I translated into writing prompts. Book of Disquiet is a book of writing, and although I didn’t put this together when I decided use this text toward the 30-part non-cumulative sequence of short prompts, it is actually a book full of short, non-cumulative pieces of writing. So the way I see its resonance here is on the one hand to take a permission or consider a possibility from the Pessoa’s way of being an author—who am I who is writing?—and on the other hand, to gather specificities from different entries in the book (for example, storms, cafes, walks to work) as offerings of possible topics or starting points.

The Book of Disquiet is usually attributed now as by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) a modernist Portuguese poet who lived his adult life in Lisbon. Pessoa wrote under his own name and also what he called heteronyms — he had dozens but there are four main ones that he’s most known for—Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Bernardo Soares, to whom the BoD is mainly attributed. These heteronyms were other writers—this is not a case of fracturing of identity in the dissociative personality disorder sense. These heteronyms had histories, contexts, and opinions that were very different from Pessoa’s, and wrote in different poetic styles. He called Bernardo Soares his semiheteronym, the closest match to Pessoa himself—he lives in the same street, also works as an assistant bookkeeper, has the same boss, etc. Soares is Pessoa’s only heteronym who writes in prose, and what he writes his this giant collection of diary entries. 

Pessoa published under his own name and those of his heteronyms in journals during his lifetime, but the bulk of his work was found after his death in several trunks full of loose paper. Much of what was in those trunks became The Book of Disquiet (the book is explicitly named by him; it is not an editorial imposition). The entries of BoD are startingly lovely, sad, intimate accounts of daily life in Lisbon. Because Soares is a semiheteronym, the details of that life — objects, locations, events, map onto Pessoa’s, but the mood and thinking belongs (?) to the heteronym Soares. Or that’s one possible way to read it. What exactly belonged in the BoD and what order it was to be arranged in are questions left unanswered. Most editions are selections, including the one I’m working from (translated by Alfred Mac Adam and published by Exact Change in 1998). Many of BoD’s readers never read the whole thing and don’t go in order. There will never be a definitive edition. There is a comprehensive, chronologically ordered edition from New Directions that came out recently. (And if you’re curious about it, there’s a 2018 season of the Two Month Review podcast devoted to reading through that edition and it starts with textual history). 

Ok that much for some context. 

Without trying to wade into questions of psychology with respect to Pessoa himself, the permission I want to derive from him is this: 

Can I, who is writing, give myself a name that allows me to be something other than I am, to feel and think and notice differently than I do? How many other authors can I host in the orbit of my writing mind?

Prompt

This prompt has two stages: a process writing element in first person, and a condensation that pivots it out toward second or third person. 

1. Write a journal of your daily experience, with an emphasis on the environment you are in and your emotional response to it. Allow the first-person voice to come from an I who is not exactly you, who maybe even contradicts you. Be sure to learn the name of this “I.” 

2. Condense that writing and feed it into a short second- or third-person narration that makes a snapshot of or container for that journal-writer’s moods. Combine the text with an image. It may be a portrait or, because this journal-writer has a name but not necessarily a face, you might want a non-figurative image. An abstract collage or perhaps a sketch of an object in the journal-writer’s field of vision. As always, you might create an actual image, or you might simply describe it. 

Resources, hints

Maybe start with today’s weather

Open variables:

Presence: the thought experiment passes through a kind of story form (“imagine a scene”), but the endpoint of the prompt is toward a record not of what happened or didn’t happen, but of the presence of that figure; the thought experiment is a instrument for getting near in order to register the figure, their effects on others. What’s registered as presence? Think of this open variable as a continuum between radiance (as overwhelming outflow from one to another), reciprocity (as feedback loop between two or more), and withdrawal (of one from another). 

Short: invitation to treat this as a tiny daily exercise—limit it by minutes spent, word count, or page space. This workshop is not cumulative, so you can take up the scale and limit differently each time you choose to write.

Piece: you might write a microstory, a caption, a song, a dialogue, a commemoration, a tiny play, a choreographic score, a meditation or prayer of some kind, a list of images, notes for a character study, or any other form useful to you as a container for this presence.

Figure: is the figure real or invented; gone and remembered or still living; is the figure mapped onto the fullness of a person or does the figure appear as something different than “full” in this sense (a slip, a ghost, an allegory, a disembodied voice, a half-memory, a dream composite…)

Portrait: The portrait might be a description drawn in words, separate or integrated into the rest. It might be a drawing or a collage, or a performed photograph you take of yourself, in the style of Cindy Sherman.

Grammatical person: are you writing “I” or “we” in first-person, writing “you” in second-person, writing “she/he/they+” in third? Addressed to the past or addressed to the future?

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?