Consciência e autoconhecimento

LOOKING AT THE TAGUS

She led her flocks beyond the hills,
Her voice backs to me in the wind,
And a thirst for her sorrow fills
All that in me is undefined.

Spiritual lakes walled round with crags
Sleep in the hollows of her song.
There her unbathing nudeness lags
And looks on its pooled shadow long.

But what is real in all this is
Only my soul, the eve, the quay
And, shadow of my dream of this,
An ache for a new ache in me.

MANIA OF DOUBT

All things unto me are queries
That from normalness depart,
And their ceaseless asking wearies
My heart.
Things are and seem, and nothing bears
The secret of the life it wears.
All thing’s presence e’er is asking
Questions of disturbing pain
With dreadful hesitation tasking
My brain
How false is truth? How much doth seem
Since dreams are all and all’s a dream.
Before mystery my will faileth
Torn with war within the mind,
.............

Alexander Search

The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss
Upon the wetted sand. I look, yet dream.
Surely reality cannot be this!
Somehow, somewhere this surely doth but seem!
The sky, the sea, this great extent disclosed
Of outward joy, this bulk of life we feel,
Is not something, but something interposed.
Only what in this is not this is real.
If this be to have sense, if to be awake
Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things,
For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take
And for truth commune with imaginings,
Holding a dream too bitter, a too fair curse,
This common sleep of men, the universe.

In the cool pillared portico
That gives white entrance to her moods
Start-lovely stand in a mule row
The statues of her pulchritudes.

Twelve are they and the mind doth gather
Their separate seen lives to one sense;
The thirteenth, which is all together,
Means her soul and its confluence.

Five statues mean the senses five,
Seven are her mysteries of Thought.
The thirteenth seems somehow to live
Beside her life and know it not.

The summer lies outside her shades,
The breezes creep into her halls,
And from her windowed loss the glades
Are something that the soul recalls.

She built her house with heavenly types
Of building in her inner seeing.
The sun makes the long pillars stripes
On the cold hard floors of her being.

Yet she is absent and despairing,
Her statues await her New Hour,
And from the shadows of her hearing
The whisper of the drones doth flower.

This was not anyhow nor when.
All was as cool as dreams are cool
When breezes creep up to our pain
And we are laid beside a pool,

And a far larger pool arises
In our restored imagining,
And all our body's sense despises
Our innate lack of fin and wing.

Still by her portico I stopped.
The shadows there were clear and fast.
Slightly, as with a kiss, I hoped,
And Having, like a swallow passed.

I am older than Nature and her Time
By all the timeless age of Consciousness,
And my adult oblivion of the clime
Where I was born makes me not countryless.
Ay, and dim through my daylight thoughts escape
Yearnings for that land where my childhood dreamed,
Which I cannot recall in colour or shape
But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed
And yet is not as light remembered,
Nor to the left or to the right conceived;
And all round me tastes as if life were dead
And the world made but to be disbelieved.
Thus I my hope on unknown truth lay; yet
How but by hope do I the unknown truth get?

We never joy enjoy to that full point
Regret doth wish joy had enjoyed been,
Nor have the strength regret to disappoint
Recalling not past joy's thought, but its mien.
Yet joy was joy when it enjoyed was
And after-enjoyed when as joy recalled,
It must have been joy ere its joy did pass
And, recalled, joy still, since its being-past galled.
Alas! All this is useless, for joy's in
Enjoying, not in thinking of enjoying.
Its mere thougth-mirroring gainst itself doth sin.
By mere reflecting solid life destroying.
Yet the more thought we take to thought to prove
It must not think, doth further from joy move.

Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing.
Its careful touch, deciphering forms from shapes,
Still suggests form as aught whose proper being
Mere finding touch with erring darkness drapes.
Yet whence, except from guessed sight, does touch teach
That touch is but a close and empty sense?
How does more touch, self-uncontented, reach
For some truer sense's whole intelligence?
The thing once touched, if touch be now omitted,
Stands yet in memory real and outward known,
So the untouching memory of touch is fitted
With sense of a sense whereby far things are shown
So, by touch of untouching, wrongly aright,
Touch' thought of seeing sees not things but Sight.

As a bad orator, badly o'er-book-skilled,
Doth overflow his purpose with made heat,
And, like a clock, winds with withoutness willed
What should have been an inner instinct's feat;
Or as a prose-wit, harshly poet turned,
Lacking the subtler music in his measure,
With useless are labours but to be spurned,
Courting in alien speech the Muse's pleasure;
I study how to love or how to hate,
Estranged by consciousness from sentiment,
With a thought feeling forced to be sedate
Even when the feeling's nature is violent;
As who would learn to swim without the river,
When nearest to the trick, as far as ever.

The world is woven all of dream and error
And but one sureness in our truth may lie –
That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror
We know it not by knowing it thereby.
For but one side of things the mirror knows,
And knows it colded from its solidness.
A double lie its truth is; what it shows
By true show's false and nowhere by true place.
Thought clouds our life's day-sense with strangeness, yet
Never from strangeness more than that it's strange
Doth buy our perplexed thinking, for we get
But the words sense from words – knowledge, truth, change.
We know the world is false, not what is true.
Yet we think on, knowing we ne'er shall know.

Something in me was born before the stars
And saw the sun begin from far away.
Our yellow, local day on its wont jars,
For it hath communed with an absolute day.
Through my Thought's night, as a worn robe's heard trail
That I have never seen, I drag this past
That saw the Possible like a dawn grow pale
On the lost night before it, mute and vast.
It dates remoter than God's birth can reach,
That had no birth but the world's coming after.
So the world's to me as, after whispered speech,
The cause-ignored sudden echoing of laughter.
That 't has a meaning my conjecture knows,
But that 't has meaning's all its meaning shows.

Life lived us, not we life. We, as bees sip,
Looked, talked and had. Trees grow as we did last.
We loved the gods but as we see a ship.
Never aware of being aware, we passed.

As to a child, I talked my heart asleep
With empty promise of the coming day,
And it slept rather for my words made sleep
Than from a thought of what their sense did say.
For did it care for sense, would it not wake
And question closer to the morrow's pleasure?
Would it not edge nearer my words, to take
The promise in the meting of its measure?
So, if it slept, 'twas that it cared but for
The present sleepy use of promised joy,
Thanking the fruit but for the forecome flower
Which the less active senses best enjoy.
Thus with deceit do I detain the heart
Of which deceit's self knows itself a part.

Oh to be idle loving idleness!
But I am idle all in hate of me;
Ever in action's dream, in the false stress
Of purposed action never act to be.
Like a fierce beast self-penned in a bait-lair,
My will to act binds with excess my action,
Not-acting coils the thought with raged despair,
And acting rage doth paint despair distraction.
Like someone sinking in a treacherous sand,
Each gesture to deliver sinks the more;
The struggle avails not, and to raise no hand,
Though but more slowly useless, we've no power.
Hence live I the dead life each day doth bring,
Repurposed for next day's repurposing.

How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?
The true mask feels no inside to the mask
But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.
Whatever consciousness begins the task
The task's accepted use to sleepness ties.
Like a child frighted by its mirrored faces,
Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing,
Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces
And get a whole world on their forgot causing:
And, when a thought would unmask our soul's masking,
Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking.

We are in Fate and Fate's and do but lack
Outness from soul to know ourselves its dwelling,
And do but compel Fate aside or back
By Fate's own immanence in the compelling.
We are too far in us from outward truth
To know how much we are not what we are,
And live but in the heat of error's youth,
Yet young enough its acting youth to ignore.
The doubleness of mind fails us, to glance
At our exterior presence amid things,
Sizing from otherness our countenance
And seeing our puppet will's act-acting strings.
An unknown language speaks in us, which we
Are at the words of, fronted from reality.

Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night,
In one black mystery two void mysteries blends;
The stray stars, whose innumerable light
Repeats one mystery till conjecture ends;
The stream of time, known by birth-bursting bubbles;
The gulf of silence, empty even of nought;
Thought's high-walled maze, which the outed owner troubles
Because the string's lost and the plan forgot:
When I think on this and that here I stand,
The thinker of these thoughts, emptily wise,
Holding up to my thinking my thing-hand
And looking at it with thought-alien eyes,
The prayer of my wonder looketh past
The universal darkness lone and vast.

When I should be asleep to mine own voice
In telling thee how much thy love's my dream,
I find me listening to myself, the noise
Of my words othered in my hearing them.
Yet wonder not: this is the poet's soul.
I could not tell thee well of how I love,
Loved I not less by knowing it, were all
My self my love and no thought love to prove.
What consciousness makes more by consciousness,
It makes less, for it makes it less itself.
My sense of love could not my love rich-dress
Did it not for it spend love's own love-pelf.
Poet's love's this (as in these words I prove thee):
I love my love for thee more than I love thee.

35 SONETS

I

Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.

My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man,
Of some Egyptian art than Egypt older,
Found in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan,
Where all things else to coloured dust did moulder.
Whate'er its sense may mean, its age is twin
To that of priesthoods whose feet stood near God,
When knowledge was so great that 'twas a sin
And man's mere soul too man for its abode.
But when I ask what means that pageant I
And would look at it suddenly, I lose
The sense I had of seeing it, nor can try
Again to look, nor hath my memory a use
That seems recalling, save that it recalls
An emptiness of having seen those walls.

If that apparent part of life's delight
Our tingled flesh-sense circumscribes were seen
By aught save reflex and co-carnal sight,
Joy, flesh and life might prove but a gross screen.
Haply Truth's body is no eyable being,
Appearance even as appearance lies,
Haply our close, dark, vague, warm sense of seeing
Is the choked vision of blindfolded eyes.
Where from what comes to thought's sense of life? Nought.
All is either the irrational world we see
Or some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rot
Its use for our thought's use. Whence taketh me
A qualm-like ache of life, a body-deep
Soul-hate of what we seek and what we, weep.

My love, and not I, is the egoist.
My love for thee loves itself more than thee;
Ay, more than me, in whom it doth exist,
And makes me live that it may feed on me.
In the country of bridges the bridge is
More real than the shores it doth unsever;
So in our world, all of Relation, this
Is true – that truer is Love than either lover.
This thought therefore comes lightly to Doubt's door –
If we, seeing substance of this world, are not
Mere Intervals, God's Absence and no more,
Hollow, in real Consciousness and Thought.
And if 'tis possible to Thought to bear this fruit,
Why should it not be possible to Truth?

I put by pleasure like an alien bowl.
Stern, separate, mine, I looked towards where gods seem.
From behind me the common shadow stole.
Dreaming that I slept not, I slept my dream.

Desce a névoa da montanha,
Desce ou nasce ou não sei quê...
Minha alma é a tudo estranha,
Quando vê, vê que não vê.
Mais vale a névoa que a vida...
Desce, ou sobe: enfim, existe.
E eu não sei em que consiste
Ter a emoção por vivida,
E, sem querer, estou triste.


02/09/1935

Bem sei que estou endoidecendo.
Bem sei que falha em mim quem sou.
Sim, mas, enquanto me não rendo,
Quero saber por onde vou.

Inda que vá para render-me
Ao que o Destino me faz ser,
Quero, um momento, aqui deter-me
E descansar a conhecer.

Há grandes lapsos de memória
Grandes paralelas perdidas,
E muita lenda e muita história
E muitas vidas, muitas vidas.

Tudo isso; agora me perco
De mim e vou a transviar,
Quero chamar a mim, e cerco
Meu ser de tudo relembrar.

Porque, se vou ser louco, quero
Ser louco com moral e siso.
Vou tanger lira como Nero.
Mas o incêndio não é preciso.


15/09/1934