Pessoa = Person

The weather was so warm today that I overheard strangers talking about spring. It’s not yet March and the winter seems to have foreclosed the chance for cold. I don’t believe it. I expect to turn the corner any day now on a wall of snow. Still, today was warm. Warm enough for all kinds of activity outside: dogs barked, children played in empty side streets, parents dawdled on sidewalks, cars battled each other to get home first. Coming up the street, I walked with traffic, not yet 4:30.

There is a man who I occasionally see in the neighborhood. He is maybe middle-aged and rides a bicycle. I only see him riding in warm weather and wouldn’t recognize him but for the fact that he sings. Loudly and really really well. Pop tunes. Standards. Motown. His dial is set to a station of a certain era. He rides his bicycle and he sings, belts out these songs at the top of his lungs. It’s such a joyous sound that you turn to smile at singer, to share in the good feeling you think he’s gifting to the strangers in the road – only to get a hard look. The man actually hates you! Meeting your gaze, he’ll yell at you, telling you to mind your business, castigating you in always surprising, always brutal manner.

I saw the singing cyclist today. As I was walking with traffic. I heard him first, that rich baritone at full blast, from unseen distance. His voice vibrated in the street, rich and warm and happy. And then he came into view. I saw he was riding his bicycle towards me, against traffic. A car passed me, a white SUV riding high on its tall wheels, towards the man. I watched the cyclist pedal steadily on, towards the car, singing so freely and loudly, facing down the car with his bicycle. Facing down the car, singing as he was, I was struck by his total joy and his total anger. Both emotions sprang from his slow and steady cycling towards the car, in his swinging, booming voice. He was free, singing; he was not free in the road, not at all. He waited until the last minute to rear up on the sidewalk and pedal away, not one breath missed, not one wrong note in his song.

I am reading the Book of Disquiet right now. I included a review of it before – Pessoa’s diary written by one of his “heteronyms”; a fictional bookkeeper Pessoa created to write his autobiography. The book is so stunning, it’s painful to read, makes my cheeks redden with how beautiful it is. Jealousy. Recognition. Enthusiasm. All the things that great writing evokes in the sitting reader. But one passage made me think of the singing cyclist, signing joy and anger simultaneously, existing totally in the grip of such distinct, seemingly exclusive emotions. Pessoa describes the multiplicity of his selves, how the one who walks down one road today in the rain will be someone else tomorrow, a sunny afternoon. How some individuals, especially those in history or created in fiction, live in by the single rubric of an external, objective world. And how “…someone like me, who is not who he is, not only lives in the external, objective world but in successive, diverse, internal worlds that are subjective.” Pessoa in Portuguese means person, in singular; his legacy, the collective work of many selves. The singing cyclist is a stranger but even in that one moment, showed two selves at least, charging toward the car, singing like a star.

The next entry will be about the Book of Disquiet or it will be about Angela Carter, a writer I’ve just discovered – why didn’t I know of her earlier?? – and maybe the great windfall of discovering perhaps two of my favorite writers ever within a single week.