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author | Case Duckworth | 2015-01-31 13:10:17 -0700 |
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committer | Case Duckworth | 2015-01-31 13:10:17 -0700 |
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Finish linking Elegy, Hezekiah; Rename files
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1 | --- | ||
2 | title: How to read this | ||
3 | genre: prose | ||
4 | |||
5 | project: | ||
6 | title: Elegies for alternate selves | ||
7 | css: elegies | ||
8 | order: 2 | ||
9 | next: | ||
10 | title: And | ||
11 | link: and | ||
12 | prev: | ||
13 | title: epigraph | ||
14 | link: epigraph | ||
15 | ... | ||
16 | |||
17 | This book is an exploration of life, of all possible lives that could be | ||
18 | lived. Each of the poems contained herein have been written by a different | ||
19 | person, with his own history, culture, and emotions. True, they are all | ||
20 | related, but no more than any of us is related through our genetics, our | ||
21 | shared planet, or our yearnings. | ||
22 | |||
23 | Fernando Pessoa wrote poems under four different identities---he called | ||
24 | them *heteronyms*---that were known during his lifetime, though after his | ||
25 | death over sixty have been found and catalogued. He called them heteronyms as | ||
26 | opposed to pseudonyms because they were much more than names he wrote under. | ||
27 | They were truly different writing selves, concerned with different ideas and | ||
28 | writing with different styles: Alberto Caeiro wrote pastorals; Ricardo Reis | ||
29 | wrote more formal odes; Álvaro de Campos wrote these long, Whitman-esque | ||
30 | pieces (one to Whitman himself); and Pessoa's own name was used for poems that | ||
31 | are kind of similar to all the others. It seems as though Pessoa found it | ||
32 | inefficient to try and write everything he wanted only in his own self; rather | ||
33 | he parceled out the different pieces and developed them into full identities, | ||
34 | at the cost of his own: "I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I'm less | ||
35 | real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced | ||
36 | by them all." de Campos said of him at one point, "[Fernando Pessoa, strictly | ||
37 | speaking, doesn't exist.][pessoa-exist]" | ||
38 | |||
39 | It's not just Pessoa---I, strictly speaking, don't exist, both as the | ||
40 | specific me that writes this now and as the concept of selfhood, the ego. | ||
41 | Heraclitus famously said that we can't step into the [same river][] twice, and | ||
42 | the fact of the matter is that we can't occupy the same self twice. It's | ||
43 | constantly changing and adapting to new stimuli from the environment, from | ||
44 | other selves, from inside itself, and each time it forms anew into something | ||
45 | that's never existed before. The person I am beginning a poem is a separate | ||
46 | being than the one I am finishing a poem, and part of it is the poem I've | ||
47 | written has brought forth some other dish onto the great table that is myself. | ||
48 | |||
49 | In the same way, with each poem you read of this, you too could become a | ||
50 | different person. Depending on which order you read them in, you could be any | ||
51 | number of possible people. If you follow the threads I've laid out for you, | ||
52 | there are so many possible selves; if you disregard those and go a different | ||
53 | way there are quite a few more. However, at the end of the journey there is | ||
54 | only one self that you will occupy, the others disappearing from this universe | ||
55 | and going maybe somewhere else, maybe nowhere at all. | ||
56 | |||
57 | There is a scene in *The Neverending Story* where Bastian is trying to find | ||
58 | his way out of the desert. He opens a door and finds himself in the Temple of | ||
59 | a Thousand Doors, which is never seen from the outside but only once someone | ||
60 | enters it. It is a series of rooms with six sides each and three doors: one | ||
61 | from the room before and two choices. In life, each of these rooms is a | ||
62 | moment, but where Bastian can choose which of only two doors to enter each | ||
63 | time, in life there can be any number of doors and we don't always choose | ||
64 | which to go through---in fact, I would argue that most of the time we aren't | ||
65 | allowed the luxury. | ||
66 | |||
67 | What happens to those other doors, those other possibilities? Is there some | ||
68 | other version of the self that for whatever complexities of circumstance and | ||
69 | will chose a different door at an earlier moment? The answer to this, of | ||
70 | course, is that we can never know for sure, though this doesn't keep us from | ||
71 | trying through the process of regret. We go back and try that other door in | ||
72 | our mind, extrapolating a possible present from our own past. This is | ||
73 | ultimately unsatisfying, not only because whatever world is imagined is not | ||
74 | the one currently lived, but because it becomes obvious that the alternate | ||
75 | model of reality is not complete: we can only extrapolate from the original | ||
76 | room, absolutely without knowledge of any subsequent possible choices. This | ||
77 | causes a deep disappointment, a frustration with the inability to know all | ||
78 | possible timelines (coupled with the insecurity that this may not be the best | ||
79 | of all possible worlds) that we feel as regret. | ||
80 | |||
81 | In this way, every moment we live is an [elegy][] to every possible future | ||
82 | that might have stemmed from it. Annie Dillard states this in a biological | ||
83 | manner when she says in *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*, "Every glistening egg is a | ||
84 | memento mori." Nature is inefficient---it spends a hundred lifetimes to get | ||
85 | one that barely works. The fossil record is littered with the failed | ||
86 | experiments of evolution, many of which failed due only to blind chance: an | ||
87 | asteroid, a shift in weather patterns, an inefficient copulation method. Each | ||
88 | living person today has twenty dead standing behind him, and that only counts | ||
89 | the people that actually lived. How many missed opportunities stand behind | ||
90 | any of us? | ||
91 | |||
92 | The real problem with all of this is that time is only additive. There's no | ||
93 | way to dial it back and start over, with new choices or new environments. Even | ||
94 | when given the chance to do something again, we do it *again*, with the | ||
95 | reality given by our previous action. Thus we are constantly creating and | ||
96 | being created by the world. The self is never the same from one moment to the | ||
97 | next. | ||
98 | |||
99 | A poem is like a snapshot of a self. If it's any good, it captures the | ||
100 | emotional core of the self at the time of writing for communication with | ||
101 | future selves, either within the same person or outside of it. Thus revision | ||
102 | is possible, and the new poem created will be yet another snapshot of the | ||
103 | future self as changed by the original poem. The page becomes a window into | ||
104 | the past, a particular past as experienced by one self. The poem is a | ||
105 | remembering of a self that no longer exists, in other words, an elegy. | ||
106 | |||
107 | A snapshot doesn't capture the entire subject, however. It leaves out the | ||
108 | background as it's obscured by foreground objects; it fails to include | ||
109 | anything that isn't contained in its finite frame. In order to build a | ||
110 | working definition of identity, we must include all possible selves over all | ||
111 | possible timelines, combined into one person: identity is the combined effect | ||
112 | of all possible selves over time. A poem leaves much of this out: it is the | ||
113 | one person standing in front of twenty ghosts. | ||
114 | |||
115 | A poem is the place where the selves of the reader and the speaker meet, in | ||
116 | their respective times and places. In this way a poem is outside of time or | ||
117 | place, because it changes its location each time it's read. Each time it's | ||
118 | two different people meeting. The problem with a poem is that it's such a | ||
119 | small window---if we met in real life the way we met in poems, we would see | ||
120 | nothing of anyone else but a square the size of a postage stamp. It has been | ||
121 | argued this is the way we see time and ourselves in it, as well: Vonnegut uses | ||
122 | the metaphor of a subject strapped to a railroad car moving at a set pace, | ||
123 | with a six-foot-long metal tube placed in front of the subject's eye; the | ||
124 | landscape in the distance is time, and what we see is the only way in which we | ||
125 | interact with it. It's the same with a poem and the self: we can only see and | ||
126 | interact with a small kernel. This is why it's possible to write more than | ||
127 | one poem. | ||
128 | |||
129 | Due to this kernel nature of poetry, a good poem should focus itself to | ||
130 | extract as much meaning as possible from that one kernel of identity to which | ||
131 | it has access. It should be an atom of selfhood, irreducible and resistant to | ||
132 | paraphrase, because it tries to somehow echo the large unsayable part of | ||
133 | identity outside the frame of the self. It is the [kernel][] that contains a | ||
134 | universe, or that speaks around one that's hidden; if it's a successful poem | ||
135 | then it makes the smallest circuit possible. This is why the commentary on | ||
136 | poems is so voluminous: a poem is tightly packed meaning that commentators try | ||
137 | to unpack to get at that universality inside it. A fortress of dialectic is | ||
138 | constructed that ultimately obstructs the meaning behind the poem; it becomes | ||
139 | the foreground in the photograph that disallows us to view the horizon beyond | ||
140 | it. | ||
141 | |||
142 | With this in mind, I collect these poems that were written over a period of | ||
143 | four years into this book. Where I can, I insert cross-references (like the | ||
144 | one above, in the margin) to other pieces in the text where I think the two | ||
145 | resonate in some way. You can read this book in any way you'd like: you can | ||
146 | go front-to-back, or back-to-front, or you can follow the arrows around, or | ||
147 | you can work out a complex mathematical formula with Merseinne primes and | ||
148 | logarithms and the 2000 Census information, or you can go completely randomly | ||
149 | through like a magazine, or at least the way I flip through magazines. I | ||
150 | think writing is a communication of the self, and I think this is the best way | ||
151 | to communicate mine in all its multiversity. | ||
152 | |||
153 | [pessoa-exist]: philosophy.html | ||
154 | [same river]: mountain.html | ||
155 | [elegy]: words-meaning.html | ||
156 | [kernel]: arspoetica.html | ||