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+title: 'How to read this'
+project: 'Elegies for Alternate Selves'
+...
+
+This book is an exploration of life, of all possible lives that could be
+lived. Each of the poems contained herein have been written by a
+different person, with his own history, culture, and emotions. True,
+they are all related, but no more than any of us is related through our
+genetics, our shared planet, or our yearnings.
+
+Fernando Pessoa wrote poems under four different identities---he called
+them *heteronyms*---that were known during his lifetime, though after his
+death over sixty have been found and catalogued. He called them
+heteronyms as opposed to pseudonyms because they were much more than
+names he wrote under. They were truly different writing selves,
+concerned with different ideas and writing with different styles:
+Alberto Caeiro wrote pastorals; Ricardo Reis wrote more formal odes;
+Álvaro de Campos wrote these long, Whitman-esque pieces (one to Whitman
+himself); and Pessoa's own name was used for poems that are kind of
+similar to all the others. It seems as though Pessoa found it
+inefficient to try and write everything he wanted only in his own self;
+rather he parceled out the different pieces and developed them into full
+identities, at the cost of his own: "I subsist as a kind of medium of
+myself, but I'm less real than the others, less substantial, less
+personal, and easily influenced by them all." de Campos said of him at
+one point, "Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn't exist."
+
+It's not just Pessoa---I, strictly speaking, don't exist, both as the
+specific me that writes this now and as the concept of selfhood, the
+ego. Heraclitus famously said that we can't step into the same river
+twice, and the fact of the matter is that we can't occupy the same self
+twice. It's constantly changing and adapting to new stimuli from the
+environment, from other selves, from inside itself, and each time it
+forms anew into something that's never existed before. The person I am
+beginning a poem is a separate being than the one I am finishing a poem,
+and part of it is the poem I've written has brought forth some other
+dish onto the great table that is myself.
+
+In the same way, with each poem you read of this, you too could become a
+different person. Depending on which order you read them in, you could
+be any number of possible people. If you follow the threads I've laid
+out for you, there are so many possible selves; if you disregard those
+and go a different way there are quite a few more. However, at the end
+of the journey there is only one self that you will occupy, the others
+disappearing from this universe and going maybe somewhere else, maybe
+nowhere at all.
+
+There is a scene in *The Neverending Story* where Bastian is trying to
+find his way out of the desert. He opens a door and finds himself in the
+Temple of a Thousand Doors, which is never seen from the outside but
+only once someone enters it. It is a series of rooms with six sides each
+and three doors: one from the room before and two choices. In life, each
+of these rooms is a moment, but where Bastian can choose which of only
+two doors to enter each time, in life there can be any number of doors
+and we don't always choose which to go through---in fact, I would argue
+that most of the time we aren't allowed the luxury.
+
+What happens to those other doors, those other possibilities? Is there
+some other version of the self that for whatever complexities of
+circumstance and will chose a different door at an earlier moment? The
+answer to this, of course, is that we can never know for sure, though
+this doesn't keep us from trying through the process of regret. We go
+back and try that other door in our mind, extrapolating a possible
+present from our own past. This is ultimately unsatisfying, not only
+because whatever world is imagined is not the one currently lived, but
+because it becomes obvious that the alternate model of reality is not
+complete: we can only extrapolate from the original room, absolutely
+without knowledge of any subsequent possible choices. This causes a deep
+disappointment, a frustration with the inability to know all possible
+timelines (coupled with the insecurity that this may not be the best of
+all possible worlds) that we feel as regret.
+
+In this way, every moment we live is an elegy to every possible future
+that might have stemmed from it. Annie Dillard states this in a
+biological manner when she says in *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*, "Every
+glistening egg is a memento mori." Nature is inefficient---it spends a
+hundred lifetimes to get one that barely works. The fossil record is
+littered with the failed experiments of evolution, many of which failed
+due only to blind chance: an asteroid, a shift in weather patterns, an
+inefficient copulation method. Each living person today has twenty dead
+standing behind him, and that only counts the people that actually
+lived. How many missed opportunities stand behind any of us?
+
+The real problem with all of this is that time is only additive. There's
+no way to dial it back and start over, with new choices or new
+environments. Even when given the chance to do something again, we do it
+*again*, with the reality given by our previous action. Thus we are
+constantly creating and being created by the world. The self is never
+the same from one moment to the next.
+
+A poem is like a snapshot of a self. If it's any good, it captures the
+emotional core of the self at the time of writing for communication with
+future selves, either within the same person or outside of it. Thus
+revision is possible, and the new poem created will be yet another
+snapshot of the future self as changed by the original poem. The page
+becomes a window into the past, a particular past as experienced by one
+self. The poem is a remembering of a self that no longer exists, in
+other words, an elegy.
+
+A snapshot doesn't capture the entire subject, however. It leaves out
+the background as it's obscured by foreground objects; it fails to
+include anything that isn't contained in its finite frame. In order to
+build a working definition of identity, we must include all possible
+selves over all possible timelines, combined into one person: identity
+is the combined effect of all possible selves over time. A poem leaves
+much of this out: it is the one person standing in front of twenty
+ghosts.
+
+A poem is the place where the selves of the reader and the speaker meet,
+in their respective times and places. In this way a poem is outside of
+time or place, because it changes its location each time it's read. Each
+time it's two different people meeting. The problem with a poem is that
+it's such a small window---if we met in real life the way we met in poems,
+we would see nothing of anyone else but a square the size of a postage
+stamp. It has been argued this is the way we see time and ourselves in
+it, as well: Vonnegut uses the metaphor of a subject strapped to a
+railroad car moving at a set pace, with a six-foot-long metal tube
+placed in front of the subject's eye; the landscape in the distance is
+time, and what we see is the only way in which we interact with it. It's
+the same with a poem and the self: we can only see and interact with a
+small kernel. This is why it's possible to write more than one poem.
+
+Due to this kernel nature of poetry, a good poem should focus itself to
+extract as much meaning as possible from that one kernel of identity to
+which it has access. It should be an atom of selfhood, irreducible and
+resistant to paraphrase, because it tries to somehow echo the large
+unsayable part of identity outside the frame of the self. It is the
+kernel that contains a universe, or that speaks around one that's
+hidden; if it's a successful poem then it makes the smallest circuit
+possible. This is why the commentary on poems is so voluminous: a poem
+is tightly packed meaning that commentators try to unpack to get at that
+universality inside it. A fortress of dialectic is constructed that
+ultimately obstructs the meaning behind the poem; it becomes the
+foreground in the photograph that disallows us to view the horizon
+beyond it.
+
+With this in mind, I collect these poems that were written over a period
+of four years into this book. Where I can, I insert cross-references
+(like the one above, in the margin) to other pieces in the text where I
+think the two resonate in some way. You can read this book in any way
+you'd like: you can go front-to-back, or back-to-front, or you can
+follow the arrows around, or you can work out a complex mathematical
+formula with Merseinne primes and logarithms and the 2000 Census
+information, or you can go completely randomly through like a magazine,
+or at least the way I flip through magazines. I think writing is a
+communication of the self, and I think this is the best way to
+communicate mine in all its multiversity.