My soul is simple and doesn’t think - untranscendent Caeiro

The Keeper of Sheep, treated like a book, contains 49 poems, most quite short, a stanza or two, the longest, a trivial fantasy of Christ’s return, as long as six pages.  The importance of the collection is disproportionate to its size, and can hardly be indicated by any particular poem.  Almost every poem, though, has a blunt argumentative power.   Alberto Caeiro is kin to Thoreau, a prick for our thick hides.  Yelling “Knock it off!” is, to Caeiro, better than doing nothing.  Caeiro, like Thoreau, is kind of a jerk, or plays one in his writing.

I find it so natural not to think
That I start laughing sometimes when alone
At what, I really don’t know, but something
Having to do with people who think. . . .  (XXXIV, ellipses in original)

Hey, he’s laughing at me!  “Nothing thinks anything” he writes later in the same poem.  I don’t like where he puts me.   Poets get the same treatment in poem XXXVI:

And there are poets who are artists
And work on their poems
Like a carpenter on his planks! . . .

And Caeiro is almost cruel to this crusader for humanity:

And, looking at me, he saw tears in my eyes
And smiled with satisfaction, thinking I felt
The hatred he did, and the compassion
He said he felt.
(But I was scarcely listening…)  (XXXII, ellipses mine)

If I make Caeiro sound like too much of a Transcendentalist, it is my fault more than his.  What is bracing about Caeiro is his continual rejection of the transcendent, often just at the moment I expect the leap into the unknown:

If they want me to be a mystic, fine.  I’m a mystic.
I’m a mystic, but only of the body.
My soul is simple and doesn’t think.  (XXX)

And then the poet retreats to his “solitary whitewashed cabin.”  If he writes, if he uses language, it is for the sake of “deluded men” and “their stupidity of feeling” (XXXI).  In four poems in a row, Caeiro explicitly embraces transcendence of himself – “I’d give anything if only my life were an oxcart” (XVI) or “I’d give anything just to be the roadside dust” (XVIII), but these poems are preceded by another, in which Caeiro insists that “I wrote them when I was ill…They agree with what they disagree” (XV) which is either completely ridiculous or a fine joke.  That ungrammatical, nearly nonsensical last sentence is what one would expect from an untutored shepherd poet, yes?

Caeiro’s poems are packed with bad ideas, plainly stated, and better ideas, concealed, perhaps.  Ricardo Reis, for example, always seems to indulge in what I take as the shallowest side of Caeiro, the pointless search for authenticity, the rejection of subjectivity, like Caeiro’s example gives him an excuse for his pessimism.  Words like “subjectivity” belong to Reis.  Caeiro does not write like that. Reis is Caeiro gone sour.

This will take more reading and, although Caeiro forbids it, thought to sort out.  Maybe I should try to learn some Portuguese, too.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll look at his single best poem, make the case that Caeiro was a poet, not just a bundle of crude philosophical positions.

How hard it is to be oneself and see only what is there! - radical Caeiro

Sometimes, on days of pure and perfect light,
When things are as real as real can be,
I quietly ask myself
Just what makes me suppose
That there is beauty in things.

The beginning of poem XXVI of The Keeper of Sheep is what we have here, this time in the translation of Peter Rickard (University of Texas Press, 1971).  Readers who follow me more closely than is wise may detect a hint of my interest in Alberto Caeiro, although I merely asked if there was beauty in literature, conceding the beauty of things from the start.  The naïve Caeiro is, unlike me, a real radical.

Is there beauty in a flower, then?
Is there beauty in a fruit?
No: they have colour and shape
And they exist, that’s all.
Beauty is non-existent, the name
I give to things in return for the pleasure they give me.
It has no meaning.
Why then do I say that things are beautiful?

Holy cow, Caeiro pushes this idea a lot farther than I dare – “they exist, that’s all”!  But that’s a lot, I think to myself, and why do we want to stop there?  Most of us, most of the time, stop all too soon, reflexively.  Caeiro makes an ideology of reduction.  He has a response for me, in poem XXII: “But who ordered me to want to understand? \ Who told me I had to understand?”

The simple pastoral poet seems to have been (not) reading Plato or Kant or who knows who – someone with genuine knowledge can help me out.  Or he is a throwback to the sorts of philosophers who talk about properties of matter, “extension,” that sort of thing.  Each brand of breakfast cereal is a specific combination of traits – sweetness, crunchiness, mouthfeel, and so on, all measured on a five point scale.  Everything is like breakfast cereal.  Color, shape, existence.  Why are these components not themselves understandable, or beautiful?  Perhaps Caeiro has an answer to his difficult question.

Yes, even to me, who live just by living,
Come all unseen the lies men tell
When faced with things,
When faced with things which simply exist.

How hard it is to be oneself and see only what is there!

Kinda strong, huh, “lies”?  The corruptions of men, received ideas, I guess, must be resisted.  At least the poet acknowledges the difficulty of his stance.  If Caeiro, who lives just by living, has so much trouble, what can I, who live not only by living, but also by thinking, possibly do?

Ricardo Reis, a contemporary of Caiero, wrote that “my knowledge of The Keeper of Sheep opened my eyes to seeing,” a paradox more interesting than anything I have seen in his own poems.  Did Reis’ knowledge just happen somehow, or did it require something more active, some kind of knowing?  My eyes were already open, and already saw, or so I claim.

I just read – I think I just read, but cannot find – a line by Annie Dillard, in Living by Fiction (1982) to the effect that good criticism has no obligation to be right but rather to be fruitful.  The same is true of poetry.  Is there beauty in the abundant fruitfulness of Caiero?