I thought about Michael Morrison a lot as I walked the narrow streets of small Maltese towns and cities, stopping for the occasional beer, and navigating the troubled pages of a book that I have dipped in and out of for more than a year.
On completing Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, a sometimes clunky yet rewarding affair, I felt I had gained something of an understanding of the author and his characters, and maybe a little more about me and mine.
On his death, Pessoa left behind thousands of pages of manuscripts written in short bursts over many years, his ultimate intention unknown. Even to him.
Structured in 438 segments, it doesn’t exactly flow, but then it wouldn’t, and it wasn’t meant to.
In a way Pessoa was way ahead of his time, writing newspaper column style observations of physical and mental life on the streets of Lisbon in the early 20th century and, on his alcohol induced death, unintentionally leaving it all for someone else to compile as a “collected works”.
Pessoa writes like I wanted Michael Morrison to think in The Choreography of Ghosts. His searingly honest exploration of the human psyche and what we can and cannot possibly know about what and how each other thinks provides a jumbled mix of emotion and complete detachment.
I had intended more of the latter for Morrison, but his quest for resolution wouldn’t have worked. He could hardly have greeted each terrible discovery with a casual shrug of the shoulders and an “oh well, at least I know now”.
Pessoa knows that in the end none of it matters, and I think I do too, but I can’t let that philosophy rule my thinking. I’m not sure Morrison did know. Maybe I subconsciously didn’t allow him to.
Characters can’t be perfect because, as Pessoa says, we don’t know perfection, so can’t understand it. They can’t always want what is right, because we, their creators, are not certain as to what is right. They can’t achieve their dreams because dreams aren’t real and can never be fully realised.
In between those big moments in life - the job you think you wanted but didn’t really because to never have to work when told to would surely lead to a more fulfilling life, the ‘Disney wedding’ to the perfect person who doesn’t and can’t exist - we have to negotiate upset, the deaths of some of those we know and love, the tedium of having to do something we have no desire to do.
So a character, a novel, to me have to take their place in the world as something that can’t or doesn’t exist in the life of the writer, yet forms part of that person and their thought process, otherwise they couldn’t be created.
So it is that Michael Morrison became the writer that I am not, experienced the failure I believe I have and the success I have not - but how do we measure that? - and earned enough to spend his days wandering the streets of beautiful and partly real towns while still thinking of how his life could have been so much better.
That imperfection, that disquiet, will stay with him until his death, as it undoubtedly did so with Fernando Pessoa and, whenever the time comes, will do so with me.