Redtree Times

Pondering Blue– At West End Gallery

If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

–Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I came across this passage in The Book of Disquiet from Fernando Pessoa. I have written about Pessoa in the past here and this book sits on a stonewall in my studio where I can pick it up at any time to browse its always compelling contents.

This particular passage immediately struck a chord with me, from the standpoint of writing as well as from that of my painting.

Both often come about because of a need to release and express those welled-up emotions that come from an existence based mainly on feeling. A need to have my say, even though in both cases I understand that my feelings and my expressions of them are of little consequence.

I sometimes wonder if I feel too much, experience too much of an emotional response to too many things. But trying to repress my feeling only creates a dam where every feeling is deposited. The feeling is not reduced, just unreleased.

And the fever builds.

And the only way to reduce this fever of feeling, as Pessoa states, is to write. Or paint, in my other case. Maybe I am fortunate to have two ways to break this fever. Or maybe I simply need both in order to fully do so.

But I know, as Pessoa also points out, that my expressions mean little in the long run. Ultimately, I am just a little person filled with many– maybe too many– feelings.

And that begs the question: Can you have too many feelings?

I don’t know. I can only recognize what exists inside myself. That is all I know so it is a normal state of being for me. It’s like experiences in your childhood that seemed perfectly normal because that was all you knew but when you see that others had vastly different experiences, you begin to wonder.

And this morning I find myself wondering.

For the moment, the fever has come down a bit…