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+---
+title: How to read this
+genre: prose
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    css: elegies
+    order: 2
+    next:
+      title: And
+      link: and
+    prev:
+      title: epigraph
+      link: epigraph
+...
+
+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.][pessoa-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.
+
+[pessoa-exist]: philosophy.html
+[same river]: mountain.html
+[elegy]: words-meaning.html
+[kernel]: arspoetica.html