path: root/3-howtoread.txt

---
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.