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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.