❝ Olha que não há mais metafísica no mundo senão chocolates. ❞
— Álvaro de Campos, TABACARIA
look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates.
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i couldn't really decide what to call this book. maybe everything: Mayflies, because i love the idea of life and the mind and literally everything that is and how transience ties reality together; Tides or Cerulean Rustles (maybe a little less dramatic?) or just something about the ocean because it goes swoosh like a roller coaster, eternally shifting while altering the composition of shores that are supposed to contain it; The Art of not Being because well occasionally when we write we tap into that strange space between here and here but not really, delving into the self to escape it. something somewhere along those lines. naming things is somehow the hardest part about creating them.
i don't know what my next poem will end up being about, and i guess that's exactly why i never wrote introductions for any of my books. i never felt i could say it all; no matter which door i open in my mind's corridors, there will be thousands more that remain shut. can't have all the lights shine in at once. and i guess to have all the lights shining at once is a sort of paramount desire we could never satisfy, as fernando pessoa (whom i've decidedly fallen in love with; and yes, álvaro de campos is one of the like 70 names he wrote under) chucks out:
i always want to be the thing i feel kinship with... // to feel everything in every way, // to hold all opinions, // to be sincere contradicting oneself every minute...
each of us holds infinity, yet in any moment we can only exist as one.
like a wheel turning, the infinities are always present. all the little things we notice, lines etched by drunks on subway windows, the irregularities of bone or skin that carve out our human shape, transmission errors opening the eye to some stray, arbitrary and ephemeral fleck of wonder that exists for just a heartbeat by chance. here then gone, yet somehow always been. the paths we never took — someone will walk them in our trails. the words i never spoke or wrote — in whose mind will they resound? no heartbeat is repeated; every thought once thought will never be thought again... yet every thought after it will bear its mark, knowingly or not. and the thought itself, it is not a culmination of all previous thoughts? i'm not a determinist, but...
amusingly enough, i could say i'm some kind of occasional shallow astrophysics nerd, so there's that. the static we see on tv screens when experiencing transmission errors are pixelated projections of electromagnetic noise, and a major portion of that stuff is cosmic microwave background radiation: when the universe went boom (i'd like to think that's how creation happened), it had its first and possibly last concert, particles flew wild and spewed electromagnetic radiation, and some of it still dances on today, interfering with our televisions.
now, who can judge the universe? who can judge us? there is the electromagnetic noise, existence without comprehensible purpose nor the need therefor, and there are the notions each human word aspires to express. why does the universe run its course? why do we vomit our thoughts out on a page and into the air? i could name a dozen reasons for myself, but the reason behind the reasons never changes: to see what ties all memories together, to invent order where order was never ordered for, to make sense of. to declare that i am. to be human, even when being carries no significance itself. nothing, in the end, has to, but all things well could — the universe doesn't matter, after all, for we cannot escape from ourselves. reality is only your reality, and your reality is the only reality; it is all you will ever know. to decide, to declare, and subsequently to pursue, then, is to confirm.
from null, desire is born, and from desire blooms the world in our eyes, a kaleidoscope of all the possibilities we deem worthy of pursuit. and in this pursuit, significance is confirmed — by faith, faith is confirmed. and who can judge us? here we're all just the same.
there are never ends nor new beginnings. there is the road only, because we walk, and because footprints build roads.
