Notes on How to Live Forever is a poetry anthology made up of the words we throw away. It is an exercise in curation, a balancing act between shaping a narrative from the words, and stepping back to let the words tell their own story. With more than 50 contributors and 300 scans of notebook pages, scraps of paper, doodles & mindless scribbles, this project seeks to prove the magic in the mundane, the extraordinary nestled within the ordinary. Simply, the profundity of people. But above that, and perhaps most important of all, it explores the life we give our words and its relevance to our lives, long after we let it leave our minds through our fingers.
From the contributions, themes were extracted, narratives synthesised and condensed. What came out of it was 16 fully-formed pieces of poetry and prose, packaged in a square, children’s book-inspired publication, chosen for its nostalgic, sentimental quality. I adopted an anecdotal and diaristic style and tone for this project and by the end, what came out of it was something unreasoning and visceral, intuitive and vulnerable – an outcome that couldn’t have been better.
There is a particular urgency and earnestness to the things we choose to write down
that can make writing so intimate, even vulnerable. It is because writing reveals the
things we want to remember, even if we don’t realise it ourselves. Our handwriting is
the physical manifestation of our state of mind, and when you know where to look,
you’d see that it’s not just what we write that matters, but how we write it. Whether it’s
a scribble in a margin, mindless doodles on worksheets, subconscious prayers lightly
penciled, even bold confessions written in ink, what we write is bound to leave clues of
exactly how we were feeling at the time of writing.
Clumsy beings that we are, we leave crumbs of our consciousness, traces of
our thoughts, silhouettes of our psyche everywhere – I could alliterate all day but you
get the point. We are brimming with so much poetry and purpose, it’s no surprise at
all that it gets left behind on paper, even when we’re not thinking. While expressing
ourselves through script has always been unconscious, there’s another layer of self and
intimacy present, one that isn’t merely cognitive. It is unreasoning and visceral, some
might even say magical.
When you start viewing words beyond just the ideas they represent, you’ll
notice the beauty of the written word. How your hand falls to the page, the weight of
your lines, your words. They are frozen sounds, a snapshot of your mind. It’s you, on a
page. Living in a world constantly hurtling us from uncertainty to ambiguity, this is the
only way we know to make sense of things. To pluck from the intangible world to make
tangible. It’s more than magic, you see. It’s alchemy.
When we write, we immortalise ourselves. That piece of us lives on forever,
preserved in pristine condition, long after we are gone. Writing, etch-making – whatever
you call it – is the most primitive form of human documentation. It’s how humans
leave a mark, fiercely proving our existence despite it all. With over 50 contributors and
300 scans of notes, doodles and scribbles, Notes on How to Live Forever mines poetry
out of the words we throw away, proving the magic in the mundane. But above that,
perhaps most important of all, it explores the life we give our words and its relevance to
our lives, long after we let it leave our minds through our fingers.
So, how does one live forever? Well, I’d say they need only write.
