Notes on “The Startling Reality of Things”

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The Startling Reality of Things

by Fernando Pessoa as Albert Caeiro
from Poems for the Millennium: vol. one

The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it’s hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me
And suffices me.

To be whole, it is enough simply to exist.

I’ve written a good many poems.
I shall write many more naturally.
Each of my poems speaks of this,
And yet all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is one way of saying this.

Sometimes I start looking at a stone.
I don’t start thinking, Does it have feeling?
I don’t fuss about calling it my sister.
But I get pleasure out of its being a stone,
Enjoying it because it feels nothing,
Enjoying it because it’s not at all related to me.

Occasionally I hear the wind blow,
And I find that just hearing the wind blow makes it worthy having been born.
I don’t know what others reading this will think;
But I find it must be good since it’s what I think without effort,
With no idea that other people are listening to me think;
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

I was called a materialist poet,
And I was surprised, because I didn’t imagine
I could be called anything at all.
I’m not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any merit, it’s not in me;
The merit is there, in my verses.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.

Notes

I am going to use this poem to introduce the second term I have been contemplating: hyper-realism.  First off, I suppose, is how hyper-realism is connected to immediacy and also how it differs from immediacy.  I see immediacy as being an adjective that can be used to describe any poem, similar to emotional intensity, etc.  Hyper-realism, rather, is a method or style or perhaps even school, if I could be so bold.  How they interact I see as such: a hyper-realist poem seeks to manipulate the immediacy of a poem in a specific manner.  Of course that sentence makes little to no sense, just being packed full of buzzwords that have not quite been defined yet.

I have come across the term in a few different places, though not necessarily being used in the same way that I hope to.  I believe some articles/blogs have used the term.  And I want to say that there is a Dada manifesto that uses it—was it one of Tristan Tzara’s?  Anyone know this offhand?

Let me just define in general the two terms that I am combining here to create hyper-realism.  Hyper in my mind has two primary referents.  The first is to quickness, alacrity, and speed.  Hyperdrive.  Hyperactive.  A state above the normal, particularly with respect to excitement of some kind.  In the last few decades the term has taken on a second referent, that of the internet.  Hypertext.  This derives from the first referent, though when someone uses the term ‘hypertext’, the idea of ‘state above the normal’ seems somewhat lost and merely the idea of the internet, the world wide web, instantaneous communication, etc. remains.  Thus with this, hyper has become something of a keyword or marker of the contemporary world.

Now, let’s go to the above Pessoa poem, which existed many decades before hypertext, computers, et al.  content-wise the poem might very well be the most extreme manifesto for at least overturning poetic conventions.  Pessoa very calmly and very confidently makes a claim against simile, metaphor, and other such comparative and figurative tropes as laughable.  The next to last stanza I see as something of a statement for myself for what I am trying to nail down with this whole hyper-realist/immediacy discussion.  “Because I think it without thoughts” is the ultimate level of immediacy.  Beyond simile, beyond metaphor, and beyond language.  Beyond even whatever one might call the neuron pathways inside the brain.  It is what is pre-existent and can be called up so readily, so forcefully, and, for the narrator at least, so easily.

Of course without language there is no poem.  And even the word itself is a space of figurative, comparative, distance.  So what I see in this is a goal, a call for heightened immediacy.  Calling a stone one’s sister does not bring the stone closer to the speaker or reader—it takes it farther away from the stone that it is.  Each statement is dealing with objects as they are.  In the beginning the lines “The startling reality of things / Is my discovery every single day” sets the stage for his (and this) argument.  Things are what they are, and tropes of low immediacy are just adding veils between that reality and the reader.  By necessity, language of course is going to be a veil, but let’s make it a productive veil, a focus perhaps which focuses and concentrates the intensity on a specific object/thought/etc., like how the narrator of Pessoa’s poem thinks on the stone and the wind with such simplicity and immediacy.

Reality is more than reality for this poem.  It is ‘startling.’  And it is this startling quality, or the ability of poetry to make reality startling, that I think I am shooting for when I use the term hyper-realism.  A fine distinction I think needs to be made at this point.  This Pessoa poem could be read as a support of a highly naturalist poetry or documentary poetry.  I don’t believe that that is necessarily the case.  Look again at the poem.  Where is the narrator?  What is the narrator looking at?  What is the narrator doing during the poem?  There is no actual reality in the poem.  Everything is thoughts, imagined experiences, remembered experiences, weaved together to create a single poem.

I don’t really see the above poem as necessarily an example of hyper-realism (though I think it has elements).  More as an argument for hyper-realism and the rise of immediacy.  A call to create poems that can be read as ‘thinking without thoughts’.