29/06/2014
FERNANDO PESSOA AND EDVARD MUNCH: COUSINS, BUT NOT BROTHERS
Pessoa is one of the main icons, if not the main icon, of Portuguese culture. Norway's most internationally famous icon is probably the artist Edvard Munch, especially his painting The Scream. Pessoa (1888–1935) and Munch (1863–1944) lived roughly at the same time, and most probably shared some artistic influences. Look at the man walking separated from the crowd, in the opposite direction, at the third painting below. That could have been Pessoa. Or the man the second painting (called 'Melancholy'): Pessoa? However, the utter despair which is the quintessence of The Scream is in my opinion not completely in sync with the mind of Pessoa, who once wrote in a poem:
What matters is to be natural and calm
In happiness and in unhappiness,
To feel as if feeling were seeing,
To think as if thinking were walking,
And to remember, when death comes, that each day dies,
And the sunset is beautiful, and so is the night that
remains . . .
That’s how it is and how I want it to be . . .
Munch too was a writer, at least of diaries, which btw are currently being edited and soon published in Norway. In one of these diaries he writes:
My whole life can be compared with walking along the edge of a vulcano ...
Munch, the expressionist: an inner vulcano exploding, using the whole canvas, filling it to the brim in order to express himself. Pessoa: an equally intense inner pressure, but a more controlled and cool temper which does not allows itself to burst, but is distilled into the purest passages of lyrical prose.
Munch's sky is blood red.
Pessoa's sky is transparent:
I know, I alone
How much it hurts, this heart
With no faith nor law
Nor melody nor thought.
Only I, only I
And none of this can I say
Because feeling is like the sky -
Seen, nothing in it to see.
