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