"I am nothing"

[Sally Brown]

Hi all,

I am nothing.
I shall always be nothing.
I can only want to be nothing.
Apart from this, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

This is not mine, obviously, but Fernando Pessoa's*.
I thought it should be a good introduction of myself.

Bye,
Sally

* The poetry is "the Tobacconist".

[Koa]

good lines, interesting and imaginative way to introduce yourself i'd say...

many happy postings!

[mono]

What a beautiful and modest introduction, Sally.
Good choice of poetry, and welcome to the forum.

[Sally Brown]

Thank you both!
I'm italian, 27 years old and I love poetry and literature.
Apart from Pessoa: Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Saul Bellow, Agota Kristof, Daniel Pennac, Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Franzen, Raymond Queneau, our fantastic Eugenio Montale, Italo Calvino, Stefano Benni, etc... Stop!
Tell me about you, please...

Bye,
Sally

[Koa]

The Italian family is thus enlarged...
Benvenuta, anch'io sono italiana

[Sally Brown]

Ciao Koa!

[Koa]

Ciao!
(I guess we're going to communicate in English anyway, so that what we say is public... though it will feel a bit strange! Another Italian has recently appeared, but in my opinion he (I imagine him as male but I dont know) hasn't been really sociable...

I would have never imagined you to be another Italian... by the way do you live in Italy or have you managed to escape this ungrateful country?

[Sally Brown]

I live in Italy and I am happy to stay here!
I love this ungrateful - but wonderful - country...

Bye,
Sally

[Miss Darcy]

Hello Sally! Welcome to the Forum. Nice poem! Very philosophical.

Benvenuta, anch'io sono italiana

Um, is that "welcome, I am Italian"? I forget, what's the "anch'io" for? *Goes and gets a dictionary*

I love Italy too, been there many times, though I don't know how it's ungrateful...

Anyway, looking forward to seeing you here often!

Darcy

[Sitaram]

I am nothing.
I shall always be nothing.
I can only want to be nothing.
Apart from this, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

- Fernando Pessoa's
"The Tobacconist".

I am thinking about this interesting poem.

I will agree that Sally Brown seems to be a very modest and unassuming, genuine, sincere, thoughtful person.

I am not certain that the poem is as straightforward in it's modesty.

The last line hints at pride, which makes the first line sound more bitter than modest.

There is a form of rhetoric in which we mention something or bring it up by the very device of claiming that we shall not bring it up.

"Nothing" has a peculiar, innate rhetoric, in the sense that when we speak of it, it becomes a "Something" and calls attention to itself.

Silence is a greater modesty.

Like a secret, which, once told, even if whispered in only one ear, is no longer a secret.

Perhaps the third line is even dishonest: "I CAN ONLY want to be nothing."
Is this line claiming that the speaker is incapable of wanting to be more? The last line certainly calls attention to the fact that the speaker is aware that all the world is within. And, if dreams are wishes or desires, then all the ambition of the world is within this speaker.

Now that I think of it, there is something most peculiar in the grammar and logic of the phrase "want to be nothing". Wouldn't it make more sense to say "I do not want anything." And why throw "be" into the mix?

Let's see what Lord Google has to say about all this:

http://shortblack.blogspot.com/2005/...ind-speak.html

Seriously man, you should read Fernando Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet". Basically a book of frgaments a Portugese poet wrote over a twenty year period. In fact, kinda like a perfect blog, when one blogged on paper instead of PC. I'd love to know what you thought. Actually, if you could just read his poem "The Tobbaconist" or "The Tobacco Shop" I think you would be greatly impressed.

http://www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/pessoa.html

, a poet who lived most of his life in a furnished room in Lisbon, Portugal and who died in obscurity there. Pessoa is the extreme example of what may be the essentially modern kind of poet: the objective introvert. He accepted the dividedness of a human self so completely that he did something unique: he wrote poetry under four names - his own and three 'heteronyms'. Pessoa was four poets in one: Alberto Caeiro (the pastoral seer), Álvaro de Campos (the Futurist), Ricardo Reis (the elegant classicist) and himself, Fernando Pessoa (the Symbolist). Pessoa has gained international recognition as one of the most original poets of European modernism.

The plot thickens!

And, what have we here?

http://www.bombsite.com/saramago/saramago3.html

In Fernando Pessoa's "Tobacco Shop," the narrator reflects that one day both he and the shop's owner will die. The poet will leave his verses and the tobacconist his signboards, but both will perish–it's only a matter of time–and so will the street with the shop, the language of the verses, and eventually the planet.
js Let me add to that perspective: it doesn't imply that there's any orderly progression to the end of things. I don't believe that God exists, but let's suppose for the sake of argument that He does. How can we reasonably think that He devised a universe like this one, one that makes no sense? If He created all those distances, those billions of light-years, why are we confined to this tiny spot? There must have been a time when we populated the whole universe, but because we behaved so badly God cleared us out and put us here; the rest of His creation surpassed us. Pessoa asserts that time will end everything, but I think we ourselves will help time along. I suspect that if there is a God, He is waiting for us to put a final end to our existence. We certainly keep trying to do just that.

The above link and excerpt resemble what I try to say at

http://toosmallforsupernova.org

We appear on this planet, we try to give our actions meaning, but when the sun finally disappears there won't be anyone left to talk about it. The Divine Comedy and The Brothers Karamazov will be over. Don Quixote will be over, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony will be over, as well as the Seventh and the Sixth and all the others, and therefore we will vanish. Humanity will become an insignificant episode in the universe.

One thing always leads to another.


http://www.unesco.org/courier/1999_11/uk/dires/txt1.htm

This is a typical situation in the 56-year-old writer’s life. Tabucchi waits for things to happen and keeps all his options open. He knows that an encounter with a book, a picture or a person can give a new twist to a person’s life. His own changed after he read on a train journey a poem called Tabacaria (“The Tobacconist’s”), by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). He went to study in Lisbon and developed a passion for the country which, he says, is now part of his “genetic baggage”.

http://fernandopessoa.blogspot.com/

It would seem that all the world is concealed in the "nothing" of Sally's post!

http://www.geocities.com/arlindo_correia/021200.html

It is one of the great enigmatic artefacts of the Twentieth Century: following Fernando Pessoa's death in 1935 (from hepatitis - he literally dissolved his identity in alcohol), researchers discovered a vast trunk overflowing with old envelopes, office stationery, handbills, stray scraps of paper and hundreds of notebooks. A merzbau of language: in a meticulous hand or a childish scrawl, with a faulty typewriter or a fancy fountain pen, Pessoa had thoroughly dispersed his self through writing. Never entirely classified until the 1960s, when it is discovered to constitute 27,543 documents, it is a remarkable legacy. In Don Paterson's phrase, it amounts to "His shredded evidence".

http://www.meetingbrook.org/blogger/...9_archive.html

The Tobacconist's
I am nothing.
I shall always be nothing.
I can only want to be nothing.
Apart from this, I have in me all the dreams in the world.
(-- the first four lines of "The Tobacconist's", Ãlvaro de Campos, Lisbon, 15-1-1928, heteronym of Fernando Pessoa, 1888-1935)

Sometimes, nothing -- is all we can realize.

Between you and me. The immediate next. Interim. Betwixt. Thin Place. Itself "I AM."

Siding immediate -- our engaged interrelation with all that is -- a light unto itself.

Siding ourselves in siding itself -- the absolute nearside -- where truth is.

Shall we meet there?

Lamp unto itself all the world.

http://theatre-du-grand-guignol.blog...interlude.html

"An object tossed into a corner, a rag that fell on to the road, my contemptible being feigns to the world."

~~ Fernando Pessoa, Book of Disquiet, Fragment 37

[Sally Brown]

Sitaram, I agree with you.
This poem isn't modest (neither am I, but don't worry about this ).
Pessoa compares two worlds in "Tobacconist's": the one he can see, represented by tobacconist's, and his dream's world.
Finally they become only one, becoming nothing.
That's nihilism, I suppose.
Infinitely bitter, but very interesting...

Bye,
Sally

[Sally Brown]

And, of course, nothing is something: we make it something by thinking of it...

[Sitaram]

I am going to look right now for the words to Wallace Stevens' poem "Snowman"

http://www.papersnowflakes.com/preview15.htm

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

For the first time, it occurs to me that "Snowman" suggests "It's no man"

I remember the false name which Odysseus gave to the Cyclops, Polyphemus,
of "No-man".

"Thar's GOLD in them thar hills (links)!"


http://www.online-literature.com/for...ead.php?t=4124

Perhaps the snowman beheld nothing only because he was "nothing
himself," since, to cite a later poem, whoever "puts a pineapple
together" always sees it "in the tangent of himself."

[Sally Brown]

Sitaram, Pessoa and Snowman (that's no man!) recalled to my memory a Hoelderlin's sentence:

Ein Gott ist der Mensch, wenn er träumt, ein Bettler, wenn er nachdenkt
(Man is a god, when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks)

Thoughtful and beggarly,
Sally

[Koa]

I live in Italy and I am happy to stay here!
I love this ungrateful - but wonderful - country...

Bye,
Sally

Lucky you then, I'm very close to hate for it instead.