‘kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness', Pessoa, Poe, Baudelaire, Borges, Voltaire (preserved citrons and pistachio nuts)

parte de um excelente artigo por André Darlington.

"Baudelaire could have been talking about Pessoa when he calls such a man a ‘kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.” One thinks of Edgar Allen Poe’s Man of the Crowd, and in fact, Pessoa translated Poe– as well as O. Henry and Walt Whitman– into Portuguese.

In Poe’s short story, the narrator becomes obsessed with an old man he sees while sitting at a café, and proceeds to follow him through the streets of London, doggedly, overnight until the next day. It is a story of pursuing uniqueness within a teeming and anonymous modern city. But it is also the start of a Chinese box, or a Russian doll: the narrator of Poe’s story is, in effect, pursuing another story.

In The Thousand and One Nights, the Persian sultan Shahyrar is so disillusioned with the infidelity of women that he marries a virgin every day and then executes her in the morning. But when he marries Scheherazade, the Grand Vizier’s daughter, she begins to tell a story every night so suspenseful that the Sultan desires to hear its completion. Each night she begins a new story after telling the old one, such that every story always leads to yet more stories, with stories emerging from within one another, ad infinitum.

The collection that became The Thousand and One Nights was drawn together over centuries from multiple Asian and Middle Eastern sources. The book’s impact on European letters after it was first published in France in 1704 has been enormous. It was particularly pivotal for Marcel Proust, for instance, who mentions it as inspiration for the multiple intersecting stories found in his sprawling work, A Remembrance of Things Past.

But the book was also foundational for the Argentinian writer of accumulating and intertwining stories, Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is a master of multiplication, of stories in which unreality threatens reality through a sheer blizzard of narratives–so many interlocking that the reader experiences vertigo.

With a Portuguese great-grandfather on his paternal side, Borges played the part of a flaneur as a youth on the streets of the Italian-Portuguese neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. Characters often speak Portuguese in his stories, and he has been honored with a monolith by Federico Brook in the Arco do Cego garden in Lisbon.

In 1977 the blind author, who committed entire passages of the world’s literature to memory, discussed The Thousand and One Nights in a lecture he delivered at the Teatro Coliseo. In it, he recalls a note by the Orientalist Baron von Hammer-Purstall describing the confabulatores nocturne, men paid to tell stories during the night. He relates that as late as 1850, such storytellers were still common in Cairo. It was professional storytellers such as these that gathered the folktales and fables found in The Thousand and One Nights, and embellished them over the ages.

Curiously, it was in the district of Alfama in Lisbon where Fado first appeared as a full-fledged art form sometime in the 1820 and 30s. Although its origins are a mystery, Fado is thought to have begun in this port area as a night dance among the laborers and sailors. It has Moorish roots, and Alfama was once the Moorish quarter. The name Alfama comes from the Arabic Al-hamma, meaning fountains, or baths.
Fado singers are Lisbon’s confabulatores nocturne, singing songs of fate, of longing, of what the Portuguese call saudade—the emotional result of irrecoverable loss.

Pessoa and Borges never met, although they were both in Lisbon at the same time twice during their lives. Once, in 1914 when Borges’s family was passing through on their way to Geneva. Borges was fourteen and Pessoa would have been twenty-six.

It is difficult to accept that they did not meet the second time, in 1923, when Borges spent forty-five days in Lisbon and both men were by then authors and Anglophiles with many similarities. There is even reason to believe that Borges drank coffee at Pessoa’s café, A Brasileira, which still exists.

But they did not meet, nor did they ever write.

After Lisbon, Voltaire’s picaresque tale continues on to the New World, to Borges’ home of Buenos Aires, and then returns from across the Atlantic to England, to come to rest finally on the Ottoman coast. There, Candide receives the words of wisdom from an old Turk that free him from Leibniz’s optimism. He has the epiphany that rather than philosophize, ‘we must cultivate our garden.”

With that pronouncement, Voltaire’s little book marked the end of a world of transcendental good and evil, and the birth of a far more earthly and practical one. The disillusionment found in Candide signaled a profound shift in ethics and epistemology, making way for the storming of the Bastille thirty years later.
And that is how, for we moderns, the story of the earthquake in Lisbon, the city of stories, is, like a tale told by Scheherazade, the beginning of our own.

- -