Those moments when the mind unleashes weeks of creative work in a single burst are indescribable. It is amazing how the ideas shine with clarity and quickly pile up into sentences that become pages, until the point where they cease not because they are exhausted, but so that the eyes can admire, in disbelief, how productive the work session was. Everything is impressive, from the spontaneity to the abundance of manifestation, which takes place without the spirit seeming to exert itself as usual, and consequently takes place and generates no fatigue. Some artists have said that such an experience resembles a state of semi-lucidity, whereas a force beyond one’s control seems to do the work. Perhaps semi-lucidity is not the most appropriate term, since at such moments there is a pulsating sense of epiphany, and the mind seems lucid and clear as it has never been. And then, rare as they are, it is to make the most of them, rejoicing for as long as they last, and knowing that they will not always be available…
Tag: literature
The Representation of Reality
The representation of reality really does seem to be the essential literary exercise; that is, leaving aside aesthetic theories, simply turning experience or observation into literature. In time, the limits that reality itself offers become evident, and then the artist may choose to take a step forward. It is curious to note that the highest works often originate from this motivation: to achieve through art what reality does not allow. There seems to be, in artists taken by this obsession, a point in life when the reality is exhausted, or at the very least becomes insufficient. Hence, all previous training is employed to make mental creation a literary reality as patent as that motivated by direct experience. And to see that, in many cases, the former still manages to stand out.
What Is Most Dear and Worthy
For the artist, just as experiences are useful to him as they influence his work, it is wrong to judge their importance as one would do with an ordinary man. Whether art is seen as the representation of reality or the creation of an alternative reality, the artist will put into it what really matters to him, that which, transformed into art, represents to him what is most dear and worthy of this crystallization. Therefore, it will almost always be absurd to want to see as determinant in the artist something that his own work refuses to tell us.
Pessoa: A Biography, by Richard Zenith
This biography of Fernando Pessoa by Richard Zenith will hardly be surpassed by those that succeed it. In the first place, we have here a profound connoisseur of Pessoa’s work, and not only of his life. It seems obvious to say, although perhaps it is not so obvious that the most complex task in making a biography of an intellectual is to narrate his intellectual trajectory. For an artist like Fernando Pessoa, whose for him his greatest virtue was his own multiplicity, this is a very risky undertaking. But Zenith faces it and presents us with a serene vision of the meanderings of the poet’s intellectual evolution, without falling into the temptation of conforming the biography to his personal interpretation. The chapters are intelligently organized, and the narrative, at first chronological, allows itself to go back and forth in time when the theme demands it. And then we see the details, the beautiful details that only acquire their due importance when contextualized by a competent biographer, such as the honorable and moving tribute to Uncle Cunha and his invaluable contribution in amusingly and creatively instigating the imagination of the little poet. Pessoa: a biography is a work worthy of the most sincere praise, and whose author has proven himself worthy of thanks that will extend for many generations to come.