The Portuguese poet and author Fernando Pessoa composed his works under approximately 75 fictional names which he called heteronyms, differing from the prosaic mask of the pseudonym in so far as his heteronyms were conceived as fully-fledged characters with corporeality as well as their own biographies and distinct writing styles.
These voices – which shared milieus or the same fictional universe, engaged in dialogue with one another and sometimes stood in stark contrast to Pessoa – included the naif villager Alberto Caeiro who became the spiritual leader of a group of neopagan poets and was the purported author of the collection The Keeper of Sheep, the struggling engineer Ćlvaro de Campos who was more overtly influenced by Walt Whitman then later the futurism of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Ricardo Reis, a Jesuit by education, who wrote neoclassical odes and went into exile from his native Porto, moving to Brazil upon the defeat of a monarchist rebellion in 1919.
One of the most famous and enduring of the heteronyms – often described as a semi-heteronym as he shared many characteristics and autobiographical details with Pessoa – is that of the accountant and flaneur Bernardo Soares, who according to the contemporary account of his creator:
always appears when I’m sleepy or drowsy, so that my qualities of inhibition and rational thought are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. He’s a semi-heteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it. He’s me without my rationalism and emotions. His prose is the same as mine, except for certain formal restraint that reason imposes on my own writing, and his Portuguese is exactly the same – whereas Caeiro writes bad Portuguese, Campos writes it reasonably well but with mistakes such as ‘me myself’ instead of ‘I myself, etc.., and Reis writes better than I, but with a purism I find excessive…
Soares is billed as the author of The Book of Disquiet, a fragmentary and sometimes aphoristic collection which Pessoa introduced as a ‘factless autobiography’ but was not published until 1982, some 47 years after the poet’s own death in 1935. The Book of Disquiet has been compared to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notebooks, to Giacomo Leopardi’s posthumous Zibaldone and to other journals and diaries, essay collections and even modern-day blogs, while for the sake of a musical association it also echoes Franz Kafka’s now famous Blue Octavo Notebooks, readings from which served as the basis for Max Richter’s acclaimed then ubiquitous 2004 breakthrough.
The experimental composer Luke Martin, whose durational pieces tend to emphasise moments of indeterminacy and silence, turns to Fernando Pessoa and The Book of Disquiet for his debut release on the Brooklyn small-run publisher Editions Verde.
Collaborating once more with the Ordinary Affects ensemble, the two long sides of To Be Worthy of Pessoa incorporate readings from The Book of Disquiet which deal with sleep and dreams and drifting states of consciousness, shifting weather systems and at times a kind of dazed and resigned but not dissatisfied abnegation of the self, even as its sensations remain the core subject matter.
The two pieces ‘The Air is a Concealed Yellow’ and ‘The Door to the Old Garden Left Ajar’ were recorded separately, in Vermont in July of 2021 and in Maine a year later in August, but the sound palette is largely the same, by turns a deft fabric or tensile mesh of droning strings and Farfisa organ, with the inherent sawtooth character of the violins carrying atop the deeper tones of the cello, ringing and occasionally chiming vibes plus the odd plunk from Martin’s own acoustic guitar.
The instrumentation never feels hurried and the readings from the text arrive sparely yet there is a sense of constriction and preoccupation which stretches across both sides of To Be Worthy of Pessoa, as Martin’s compositions echo the poet’s fragmentary text by appearing to have lots on their mind with respite no more than a mirage on the horizon. The strings and vibraphone of ‘The Air is a Concealed Yellow’ play out over an indiscriminate rustling or whirring sound, with the occasional bump or scratch for good measure as Martin by way of Pessoa and Soares relates lying in bed and drifting off into dreams:
unaware, apart from the sense of comfort, of the existence of my own body. I feel ebbing away from me the happy lack of consciousness with which I enjoy my consciousness, the lazy animal way I watch in between half-closed eyes like a cat in the sun, the logical movements of my untrained imagination. I feel slipping away from me the privileges, the penumbra, the slow rivers that flow beneath the trees of my half-glimpsed eyelashes, and the whisper of waterfalls lost among the sound, the slow blood pounding in my ears.
The Book of Disquiet can be explicitly musical, as when Soares describes his soul as a ‘hidden orchestra. I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony’. Yet the excerpts coopted for To Be Worthy of Pessoa are typically less florid and bombastic while stemming from more mature parts of the text, as Soares becomes keenly attuned to his own inner rhythms through subtle changes in the light and an encompassing sense of quiet:
The sound of the rain dwindled, as if adopting a gentler tone of voice. The noise in the streets grew worryingly quiet. A new swift yellow light veiled the darkness. But there was just time to catch one’s breath before the fists of sound suddenly echoed out from somewhere else, as if bidding an angry farewell. The thunderstorm was beginning not to be here.
and:
The colours on the stuccoed houses out of sight of the sun gradually take on their stone-grey tones. There’s something cold about that diversity of greys. A mild unease slumbers in the false valleys of the streets. It slumbers and grows quiet
At an hour and fifteen minutes, To Be Worthy of Pessoa lulls you into its own rhythms and logics without ever turning into a passive listening experience. More than accents or accompaniments, each instrument serves a specific role with the chimes of the vibraphone ringing out like little question marks or ellipses while the drones of the string section and Farfisa organ in other works might sound portentous, building up a sense of anxiety or dread, yet here with nowhere to go they function more to mark the passing of time, even a kind of stolen time as they stretch out like an interconnected series of warps and portals.
Where the first piece ‘The Air is a Concealed Yellow’ is more dewy and misty, sometimes even with a pastoral nature, on ‘The Door to the Old Garden Left Ajar’ the drones last longer and possess a more shrill and piercing quality. The staticky patter which serves as a constant backdrop shifts from vague rustling and whirring to land somewhere between raindrops on a windowpane, the dripping of a tap, the incessant chirruping of crickets or sheets of paper being turned through a typewriter. The organ is more pronounced especially in the first half of the track, more noise is emitted through the microphone, and some of the passages chosen from The Book of Disquiet are less observant and more descriptive:
Love requires us to be both identical and different, which isn’t possible in logic, still less in life
or:
drowsing and living are one and the same, except that I can feel something pressing on my eyelids. I can hear my own breathing, when i sleep or am awake. Leaden-footed and leaden-sensed I walk home. The caress of all-extinguishing sleep, the flower of sheer futility, my never spoken name, my disquiet lapped between two shores, the pleasure of relinquished duties.
Each reading washes through the composition, fading in and out of legibility like a radio transmission on a bad frequency or a palimpsest, at once here and not here, as though the text and its narrator are wafting in the breeze as they sit at an old desk in front of a cracked window. The violinist Morgan Evans-Weller provides the liner notes for the physical edition of To Be Worthy of Pessoa, and writes that:
Martin’s music, in its stillness and consistency, is a place for concepts to incubate and for simple sounds to pass by. Pessoa/Soares and Martin are all philosophers as artists; their works form questions through doubt but seek hope for new forms and a potential but fleeting cohesion of an Idea. The floating impermanence of Martin’s work and Pessoa’s Disquiet is an active search; a space where moments coincide, thoughts mature, doubts multiply – a place where truth and the new are sought but also a place where it’s ok if we just have and embrace an experience.
