According to historical legends of the Inultaru, the Sunissan-Pessoa was the cultural analog of a Greek phoenix, or maybe a Russian firebird, or perhaps a Persian simurgh, except that it was not actually a bird. It was a triadic entity, and in the 11th and 12th centuries, among Jackalopian communities in southern France, northern Spain and parts of Portugal, there arose a tradition of employing the Sunissan-Pessoa as a symbol of the Catholic Trinity. Jackalopes had a romantic fling with the Catholic church for a few hundred years, but their affections cooled when Catholic doctrine remained calcified in its patriarchal misogyny.
In Portuguese, the word pessoa means “person”. Coincidently, it is also the last name of the writer Fernando Pessoa.
From The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa:
116. “To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat — some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn’t the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”
117. “Most people are afflicted by an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it’s necessary to use the unliterary hand, twirling it in a steadily upwards direction, so that human eyes will perceive the abstract figure immanent in a wire spring and a certain type of staircase. But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral: it’s a circle that rises without ever closing. I realize that most people would never dare define it this way, for they suppose that defining is to say what others want us to say rather than what’s required for the definition. I’ll say it more accurately: a spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I’ll resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing.
All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don’t act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel and not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying,’ which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather, ‘I feel like tears.’ And this phrase — so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it — decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. “I feel like tears’! That small child aptly defined his spiral.
To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted–under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.”
118. “Why should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life, and I publish because that’s one of the rules of the game. If tomorrow all my writings were lost, I’d be sorry, but I doubt I’d be violently and frantically sorry, as one might expect, given that with my writings would go my entire life. I would probably be like the mother who loses her son but is back to normal in a few months’ time. The great earth that cares for the hills would also, in a less motherly fashion, take care of the pages I’ve written. Nothing matters, and I’m sure there have been people who, looking at life, didn’t have much patience with this child that was still awake, when all they wanted was the peace that would come once the child went to bed.”
Vraicking 