E. E. Cummings

For those acquainted with me and with the lecturing content and style, and this will be somewhat lighter hopefully tonight. Last night's lecture on shamanism and yoga sort of tore a hole in a lot of people's conceptions and proved to be a rather stunning situation. It wasn't taped but I'm hoping tonight to flip over the page and go to a different, different view. Same subject but different view.

In the twentieth century American poetry has been one of the great arts of the world. It ranks with Elizabethan drama and Greek tragedy as one of the really great achievements of the human spirit. There have been at least five or six great major American poets and we've seen two so far. We've seen Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and we've seen how they fled to Europe and in Europe the American experience early in this century was one of catastrophic misrecognition because the American character had developed in a totally different way for about two hundred years. And by the time Americans started going back to Europe in the 20s, they came as strangers. They came as intelligent primitives. And it was like the Red man had passed into the White man. And now he went to Europe and found the White civilization was a playground for him because he was not constrained by any of the traditions or the values. And so the Americans that went there grew very affine with the outlaws of European civilization, those individuals who didn't want to be part of the tradition, those individuals who were interested in movements like Surrealism and Dada and so forth. And one of the movements there is known as De Stijl, De Stijl. And it's usually spelled in the Dutch, D-E-S-T-I-J-L, De Stijl. And I'll read you a little description as an indication of the kinds of art movements that were in Europe at this time that the Americans who went there found affinity with. Not with Europe but with this sort of new revision. This is from Herschel Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, published by University of California Press.

“The purest of the abstract movements and the most idealistic in its ideology was the Dutch group, De Stijl (The Style)... founded in Amsterdam in 1917.”

1917, in the midst of the First World War. Now you might recall, some of you, that in the lecture series in the 19th century we showed that the European mind progressively during the 19th century de-materialized its sense of reality. That from the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in the early part of the nineteenth century about 1804 on through the nineteenth century the European intellect dematerialized reality until at the end of that time there were developments like those that led to Einstein's theory of relativity in 1905. That century from 1804 to 1905 proved to be one of abstract backing away from the natural world, the social world. And in backing away all of the values that were traditional seemed to cling to this negativity that was made by the backing away, and the clinging was suffocating people intellectually. And this was the direct cause of the First World War - was the suffocation of the European mind broke out in the First World War and coincided with all of these outlaw movements coming up. And the Americans coming over ran right into this situation, the dematerialization, the outlawing. And in this group artists like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot found themselves squeezed and wrung out and stretched into all kinds of impossible shapes. But the case of E. E. Cummings is different. It's different because E. E. Cummings was agile. He had a spiritual quality which Pound does not have; which Eliot does not have. Agility. And this is not a colloquial term. I forget the Sanskrit term for it but it's a spiritual term. It means that he was able to create his way while he went. He didn't need a path. It's that kind of agility. And so Cummings’ experience is enormously different. And in fact when he was there he had a lot of trouble in the First World War with political authorities. He was an ambulance driver. He had been born in 1894 on the Harvard campus. He had grown up in between William James’ House and Josiah Royce’ House. He'd been a little genius kid running around with all these greats of Harvard.

In the middle class houses at that time were sporting William Morris wallpaper and handcrafted furniture. There was a whole move to bring back the basic crafts of humanity. Bring back the medieval handcrafted life and put it into the home every home every American home. And the intelligent educated upper class and middle class American homes had this kind of handcrafted movement. And Cummings came from that and went from that to the dematerialization of Europe, ran smack into it, as an ambulance driver in the First World War in France. And he had problems, not with the Germans, but with the French. And the problems came up because Cummings refused to stop chumming around with an ambulance driver who had written some critical comments about the French. He'd written the letter home but of course the French censors had read it and so they brought Cummings in to try and question him to see whether or not his friend was a renegade. And Cummings of course was just delighted to have someone to play with. They're interrogating me. So he played with them, and in his playing with them they got angry and finally threw him into a detention camp. They said, “we think you're the alien. We think you're the guy that's guilty.” And so Cummings, agile Cummings, went into the detention camp and had fun. And when he came out he wrote his first novel called The Enormous Room which is about the prison, about the detention camp.

It came out in 1922 and right away marked Cummings as an oddball somebody who enjoyed detention, somebody who loved the fact that they interrogated him, somebody who just danced blithely through one of the most tragic situations in human life and came out not only smiling but giving raspberries to everybody. Well, here's how the introduction starts to The Enormous Room - I'm not making it up.

“Don't be afraid.
– But I've never seen a picture you painted or read a word you wrote –
So what?
So you're thirty-eight?
Correct.
And have only just finished your second novel?
Socalled.
Entitled ee-eye-em-eye?
Right?
And pronounced?
‘A’ as in a, ‘me’ as in me; accent on the ‘me’.
Signifying?
Am.”

And this novel that he's talking about was called EIMI. EIMI. And it's the Greek word for ‘am’. He means rather almost the existential quality. Am-ness. I'm here. Are you there? If you are you better respond to me because I'm real and not a figment of your imagination. I happen to really be here. And if you have anything to do that involves me, have at it. That sort of character. So they say,

“When The Enormous Room was published, some people wanted a war book; they were disappointed. [And] When EIMI was published, some people wanted Another Enormous Room; they were disappointed.
Doesn't The Enormous Room really concern war?
It actually uses war: to explore an inconceivable vastness which is so unbelievably far away that it appears microscopic.
When you wrote this book you were looking through war at something very big and very far away?
When this book wrote itself, I was observing a negligible portion of something incredibly more distant than any sun; something more unimaginably huge than the most prodigious of all universes–
Namely?
The individual.”

Benjamin Franklin is back, but Benjamin Franklin is back in the optimum speed. Have you ever seen Salvador Dali's painting of the Maximum Speed of Raphael's Madonna, where the form of Raphael's Madonna is on the canvas but it's split up into little atoms of color and it's only when you look at it from a distance that you can see the face of Raphael's Madonna but when you look close it's just whirling blobs of color. Well, E. E. Cummings is the ‘Maximum Speed of Benjamin Franklin’.

When the book gets going, this is how it reads. Just give you a little excerpt so you get the flavor.

“ ‘Put your baggage in here,’ quoth an angry voice. ‘No, you will not take anything but one blanket in your cell, understand.’ In French. Evidently the head of the house [was] speaking. I obeyed. A corpulent soldier importantly led me to my cell. My cell was two doors away from the monkey-angel, on the same side. The high boy-voice, centralized in a torrent-like halo of stretchings, followed my back. The head himself unlocked a lock. I marched coldly in. The fat soldier locked and chained my door. Four feet went away. I felt in my pocket, finding four cigarettes. I am sorry I did not give these also to the monkey - to the angel. Lifted my eyes, and saw my own harp.”

The man had just been thrown into prison for an indefinite length of time sitting in a cell. This is his reportage of the event. Part three is called “A Pilgrim's Progress” and it follows like this:

“Through the bars I looked into that little and dirty lane whereby I had entered; in which a sentinel, gun on shoulder, and with a huge revolver strapped at his hip monotonously moved. On my right was an old wall overwhelmed with moss. A few growths stemmed from its crevices. Their leaves are of a refreshing color. I felt singularly happy, and carefully throwing myself on the bare planks sang one after another all the French songs which I had picked up in my stay [in the ambulance corps].”

What can you do with him? He won't complain. He won't cry. He won't break. He won't get angry. He sings in his cell. Agility. He writes,

“At last I knew that I was very thirsty; and leaping up began to clamor at my bars. ‘Quelque chose à boire, s’i! Vous plait.’ After a long debate with the sergeant of guards, who said very angrily: ‘Give it to him,’ a guard took my request and disappeared from view, returning with a more heavily armed guard and a tin cup full of water. One of these gentry watched the water and me, while the other wrestled with the padlock. The door being minutely opened, one guard and the water painfully entered. The other guard remained at the door, gun in readiness. The water was set down, and the enterer assumed a perpendicular position which I thought merited recognition; accordingly I said ‘Merci’ politely, without getting up from the planks. Immediately he began to deliver a sharp lecture on the probability of my using the tin cup to saw my way out; and commanded haste and no doubtful terms. I smiled, asked pardon for my inherent stupidity (which speech seemed to anger him) and guzzled the so-called water without looking at it, having learned something from Noyon. With a long and dangerous look at their prisoner, the gentlemen of the guard withdrew, using inconceivable caution and re-locking the door. I laughed and fell asleep.”

So he spends a very long time in this detention camp. They interrogate him. He doesn't break. He has fun with the interrogator. He gets to know the whole population and the book is about the population seen through the eyes of agility. Seen through the eyes of a man who is playfully at home in reality and for whom all these phony constructs are but games, plastic; they have no sense of reality. He as an individual is free to interpret in any way that he wishes. So that towards the end, here is a description, when the prisoners are slowly being let go. And this is Cummings at some of his best, early writing.

“Morning. Whitish. Inevitable. Deathly cold.
There was a great deal of hurry and bustle in The Enormous Room. People were rushing hither and thither in the [half heavy darkness]. People were saying good-bye to people. Saying good-bye to friends. Saying good-bye to themselves. We lay and sipped the black, evil, dull, certainly not coffee; lay on our beds, dressed, shuddering with cold, waiting. Waiting. Several of les hommes whom we scarcely knew came up to B. and shook hands with him and said good luck and good-bye. The darkness was going rapidly out of the dull, black, evil, stinking air. B. suddenly realized that he had no gift for The Zulu; he asked a fine Norwegian to whom he had given his leather belt if he, The Norwegian, would mind giving it back because there was a very dear friend who had been forgotten. The Norwegian, with a pleasant smile, took off the belt and said ‘Certainly’ …he had been arrested at Bordeaux, where he came ashore from his ship, for stealing three cans of sardines when he was drunk… a very great and dangerous criminal… he said ‘Certainly’ and gave B. a pleasant smile, the pleasantest smile in the world. B. wrote his own address and name in the inside of the belt, explained in French to The Young Pole that any time The Zulu wanted to reach him all he had to do was to consult the belt; The Young Pole translated; The Zulu nodded; the Norwegian smiled appreciatively; The Zulu received the belt with a gesture to which words cannot do the faintest justice.”

Cummings is bringing in a quality of poignancy which is ethically serious. His agility, his humor, his lightness has the most serious ethical purpose. He writes,

“Through the little peephole I caught a glimpse of them, entering the street. I went to my bed and lay down quietly in my great pelisse. The clamor and filth of the room brightened and became distant and faded. I heard the voice of the jolly Alsatian saying:
‘Courage, mon ami, votre camarade n’est pas mort; vous le verre plus tard,’ and after that, nothing. In front of and on and within my eyes lived suddenly a violent and gentle and dark silence.
The Three Wise Men had done their work. But wisdom cannot rest… Probably at that very moment they were holding their court in another [prison] committing to incomparable anguish some few merely perfectly wretched criminals: little and tall, tremulous and brave – all of them white and speechless, all of them with tight bluish lips and large whispering eyes, all of them with fingers weary and mutilated and extraordinarily old… desperate fingers; closing, to feel the final lukewarm fragment of life glide neatly and softly into forgetfulness.”

“To convince the reader that this history is mere fiction (and rather vulgarly violent fiction at that) nothing perhaps is needed save that ancient standby of sob-story writers and thrill artists alike – the Happy Ending. As a matter of fact, it makes not the smallest difference to me whether anyone who has thus far participated in my travels does or does not believe that they and I are (as that mysterious animal ‘the public’ would say) ‘real’. I do however very strenuously object to the assumption, on the part of anyone, that the heading of this my final chapter stands for anything in the nature of happiness.”

And then he goes on and he says that he is not concerned with happiness or with sorrow. He is not concerned with the world that we would recognize as the polarities. He is concerned with the ‘real’, with what penetratively is so far away and so vast that it seems microscopic and inconceivable that the individual happens to be ‘real’ is not the feeling, is not the situation, is not the involvement. Those are epi-phenomena and to subvert the reality of the individual to being concerned with those epiphenomenon makes the individual vanish from our perspective and when that happens nothing is real and the epiphenomenon take over by themselves and run haywire like a junkyard of amplitude having no root. And that the only guarantee of any value whatsoever is for the individual to be real to himself and to others.

This quality of Cummings is evident in some of his early poems. He has a poem which they usually read in schools, ‘Chansons Innocentes’. This has the light lyric touch of disclosing that joy occurs for human beings and that because joy occurs for human beings there is definitely a quality of our reality which responds to joy and therefore is not alien to us. It is necessarily a part of us and if we are integrated then that part is woven into the whole. So that the disclosure that we are capable of experiencing joy is self-revelatory about our nature. This is how the poem writes. You may, you may recognize it:

“in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee”

His agility comes startlingly through and a little later on - that was in Tulips and Chimneys - two years later - which was published in 1923 - and two years later the next collection came out. Notice now the difference in Cummings still agile still delivering that perception of the real as a part of our nature and that joy discloses it. This also then is seen as the essential quality of nature. That Mother Nature and our reality resonate to the real.

“O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest


them only with

spring)”

That the flailing about of machinations doesn't do anything. That if we react to the flailings we're shadow-boxing. And in that shadow-boxing we become extraordinary clever because we never hit anything. And the mind becomes cleverer and cleverer thinking I will trap that so and so if I can't hit him. And all this co-opting mentality comes into play, all this netting, and none of it is effective which raises frustration. You can't get through to somebody with your fantasies.

One of my favorite Cummings poems came out in the collection simply indicated with numerals on it.

“Buffalo Bill ’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus

he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death”

Cummings could not be kept down. In fact Cummings became the bad boy of poetry because his poems not only fractured lines, and phrases, and words, but even letters. Because the abstract movement of the style of the Dada he was playing with it. To him it was not some white knuckled death grip last chance to save ourselves from complete dematerialization. For Cummings he was at home in the ether. Alright, if we don't have anything to lean on let's fly. What's wrong with flying? Can't man do that? And so at the beginning of a collection called, ‘is 5’, he was forced by his publishers. You know the arm behind. You've got to, you've got to cut this out. No. They're selling. I won't cut it out. Yes. You've got to do something. You've got to write an introduction. Alright, I'll write an introduction. And so his introduction is like this. He says of himself and of his technique.

“At least my theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original, nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk viz. “Would you hit a woman with a child? – No, I'd hit her with a brick.” Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.
“If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions, the Making obsession has disadvantages; for instance, my only interest in making money would be to make it. Fortunately, however, I should prefer to make almost anything else, including locomotives and roses. It is with [locomotives and roses] (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing.
“They are also competing with each other, with elephants, and with El Greco.
“Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives a poet one priceless advantage: whereas nonmakers must content themselves with the merely undeniable fact that two times two is four, he rejoices in a purely irresistible truth (to be found, in abbreviated costume, upon the title page of the present volume.)”

And the title is “is 5” - two times two is five. And one says no it can't be. And Cummings says for me it is and has a puckish look and says for me it is. The individual has the right to be unique. He has the right to live his life even if it's illogical for what is real in the logical. The authority that is supposed to have over us. It's an abstract. Authority has nothing to do with my reality as a human being. I am free from that in that I don't have to succumb to it. For me it is fine he says. So he writes poignantly in one of these poems. Notice the playfulness. Notice the ethical seriousness to maintain the agility.

“this young question mark man

question mark
who suffers from
indigestion question
mark is a remarkably
charming person

personally they tell

me as for me
i only knows that
as far as
his picture goes

he's a wet dream

by Cezanne”

Cummings again with his raspberry. With his lightness and his agility. And by this time it was being recognized that Cummings is a very extraordinary combination of poet. His manner is flippant. His breaking up of the poem on the surface of the page is absolutely the last word in dematerialization. But his content is conservative New England American Unitarianism. That the universe actually in reality is unified and needs only a focus in a person really for that to be recognized. That every other mental projection, feeling projection, sensation projection, thought projection, intuition projection, whatever else there is. Eventually in its swirl of its legitimacy and its form and its authority has to come back to that most impossible paradoxical realignment in the fact that the individual is real beyond all polarities. He happens to really be here. He's not a figment of somebody's imagination. Really lives. So he writes a few poems later in ‘is 5’. One of his greatest poems. It's just number eight, Number seven:

“since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady I swear by all flowers. Don't cry
–the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think no parenthesis”

Free. The American spirit is free. Free in the sense that Benjamin Franklin was free at the very beginning. We have at last come to someone who has understood the esoteric alchemical nature of the personality that you don't do alchemy on minerals out there but on this person in here and you don't make something that wasn't there, you disclose what was there. And the only thing that was there was the real. That's the alchemy. And how do you disclose that? By growing; by constantly transforming and growing which when it's raised to fast speed becomes agility. One becomes an acrobat of existence. And with E. E. Cummings, who a lot of people think is a lightweight, American civilization comes to full maturity. Such a person can go anywhere, can be anything given circumstance and time. That individual is free to be. What can you do to him? What can you not do with him?

Later in his life, when Cummings was extraordinarily famous - he had become sort of the chief representative of the bohemian avant-garde that had grown old in Greenwich Village. He wrote a beautiful poem collected in a volume just called 95 poems. And I'll read this and then we'll take a break.

“spirit colossal
(& daunted by always
nothing)you darling
diminutive person

jovial ego (&
mischievous tenderly
phebeing alter)
clown of an angel

everywhere welcome
(but chiefly at home in
snowily nowheres
of winter his silence)

give me a trillionth
part of inquisitive
merrily humble
your livingest courage”

Let's take a break.

Cummings published several volumes of poems in the mid 1920s and increasingly was thought of as a crackpot, an oddball, a weirdo but interesting. And because he was agile all of this public reprobation and approbation was for him fodder. So he decided to write a play to really scotch his reputation as being rational for all time. And he called the play HIM. It was published in 1927 and performed. And not performed too much since then because it's very difficult to ascertain what's going on.

“SCENE I

SCENE: A flat surface on which is painted a DOCTOR anesthetizing a WOMAN. In this picture there are two holes corresponding to the heads of the physician and of the patient, and through these holes protrude the living heads of a man and a woman.
Facing this picture with their backs to the audience, three withered female FIGURES are rocking in rocking chairs and knitting.

FIRST OR MIDDLE FIGURE: ‘We called our hippopotamus It's Toasted.’
‘I wish my husband didn't object to them.’
‘Of course it's a bother to clean the cage every day.’
‘O I wouldn't mind doing that.’
‘Be sure to get one that can sing.’
‘Don't they all sing?’
‘O dear no. Some of them just whistle.’
‘[O] I've heard they're very affectionate.’
‘I find them so.’
‘Did it take long to tame yours?’
‘Only a few days. Now he sits on my hand and doesn't bite me.’
‘How charming.’ “

Oh God. That's how it begins. And 115 pages later - the creak is the book not me. Act three, Scene four:

“SCENE: The three knitting rocking figures facing the pictures with their backs to the audience.” Very consistent. “The DOCTOR’S head has disappeared from the picture, leaving a black hole. The WOMAN’S head is in the picture; [but] her eyes are closed.”

Right now you're all alone. Boy, talk about being isolated and alienated.

“FIRST FIGURE: ‘Terribly. Especially in summer.’
‘How simply frightful! All over them?’
‘Drowsiness rumblings sour risings heartburn waterbrash and the feeling of being stuffed.’
‘That depends: sometimes.’
‘Is it very painful?’
‘Ask the man who owns one.’
‘Not very. Like falling down stairs, and you apply the same remedy – one stick of dynamite in a tumbler of ink before meals.’
‘Ask dad he knows.’
‘I understand the dynamite but what does the ink do?’
‘Comes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush.’
‘Why the ink dissolves the guineapigs and makes them nervous.’
‘And what do they do after that?’
‘Look for the union label on every garment.’
‘They? Who?’
‘The guineapigs.’ ”

A couple of excerpts from him. And of course extremely dangerous man to be walking around. So Cummings decided that he would test himself and test his technique, his agility. So he thought to himself where is the most dour place in the world that I can go to? This was 1932 and he thought, I'll go to the Soviet Union. And so the agile hero of the twentieth century, the American spiritual con man ready to dematerialize at a moment's notice, went to Stalin's Russia in 1932. And that's what the book EIMI is about, EIMI. It's 436 pages of stream of consciousness monologue about a free agile American being real in Stalin's Russia in 1932. I don't know how much of this I can deliver. Cummings here brings his technique into its underside. Instead of having the lightness of bubbling now, the lightness is still there, but it is holding down the horizon and letting the language play in a horizontal continuity. And here's how it turns out.

“Wake alone – he got out at 6 (Warsaw) while I was chez the gentleman from Vienna; but for some unconscious reason there's rather less room than before (perhaps compartments made of elastic nonspace, which contracts automatically when something is put into it and automatically expands when something is taken out)

seek the diner, semiexpecting (thanks to my American-procommunists-living-in-Paris – The Horrors Of Capitalist Poland) to be brutally cheated; if not softly knocked down and simply robbed. Frank E. Campbell turns me round with a word of his own, supposed to be ‘wagon restaurant’: march tipsily back through train, past living corpses hit with Fresh Air and luxuriously outstretched on authentic wood. Promptly and courteously I’m supplied with excellent coffee butter bread and cheese: at nearby table, a plutocrat, insisting that the only waiter (who's obviously Robinson Crusoe) accept one entire American dollar; R. C. obliges with footprint-in-the-sand reflex – my own (less immodest) generosity provokes the more hysterical thanks of 5 languages.

Windmills! Reeling up-&-over-behind villages or standing soishly among sunful skies. An everywhere of fields, spattered with animals, pricked with beings. Big holes of air & crude blocks of land (I can almost smell this world). When the savage beings wear colors, the colors are hard red and tight blue. The gruesome faces of the tiny beings come at me immediately, genuinely, through Shutness. And (look) pinetrees are, whose here Thelike together creates an Aful leaning; and (there) specks (and look) browse all forming one direction. Rhythm: organic Is – neither fillable nor empty; [able] actually (how clumsily) alive.

Pause: Unser Gott still effective; beer at 6opf and Berlin newspapers at 30. Across the way something flutters: a woman? Not a woman; woman: immensely crouched beside gray pond she rubs 1 by 1 black pots. Ducks patrol, geese survey. And the coarse fierce earth sprouts dandelions. This (who's shoving a bottle to someone in 3rd) has dainty legs but her thick face roosts on a tough neck and she grins (unable to smile? Can noone smile in Poland?) Here's a sickly youth; grabbing into himself a soiled child clumsily who waves, waves, as our drowsy train stumbles away – he smiles, an idiot's distant rare smile”

So you get the flavor. One more short section.

“Something? – ah, the ticket, from here to Moscow: I go and I do: but what a ticketless ticket! So, in dream moving, preceded by trifles, through very gate of

inexorably has a magic wand been waved; miraculously did reality disintegrate: where am I?

in a world of Was – everything shoddy; everywhere dirt and cracked fingernails guarded by 1 helplessly handsome implausibly immaculate soldier. Look! A rickety train, centuries BC. Tiny rednosed genial antique wasman, swallowed by outfit of patches, nods almost merrily as I climb cautiously aboard. My suitcase knapsack typewriter gradually are heaved (each by each) into a lofty alcove; leaving this massive barrenness of compartment much more than merely empty (a kissing sickle and hammer sink in heaver’s palm, almost child trickles away). Dizzily myself seeks Fresh Air. Genially (with an ‘I'd be naughty if I took it’ shrug) the antique wasman refuses a cigarette.”

And like so. And EIMI is over four hundred pages like this, nonstop. And in the excursion of it Cummings shows that his agility survives and emerges untouched and unscathed that he has subjected himself to the acid test. He's put himself in the most shut up society of his time. Stalin's Soviet Russia was the gloomiest place on the globe. And he has not only survived but he has survived joyfully as his reality is and has shown that he is true gold. He's been subjected to this aquaregia and did not dissolve. He's not some phony gold. He's real. And from 1933 when that was published, Cummings increasingly in his poetry became spiritually courageous to try and not say the ineffable, but to try to make the ineffable said. And here's a poem from late in his life published I think just all within a few years of his death. Page 714 in The Collected Poems. Notice the way now in which he will let language disclose the ineffable.

“from spiraling ecstatically this

proud nowhere of earth's most prodigious night
blossoms a newborn babe:around him,eyes
–gifted with every keener appetite
than mere unmiracle can quite appease–
humbly in their imagined bodies kneel
(over time space doom dream while floats the whole

perhapsless mystery of paradise)

mind without soul may blast some universe
to might have been,and stop ten thousand stars
but not one heartbeat of this child;nor shall
even prevail a million questionings
against the silence of his mother's smile

–whose only secret all creation sings”

If you think Cummings is a minor poet you might have to look again. American poetry in the 20th century raised to one of the greatest art forms of all time. And in recognition of this growing quality, by 1953 - surprisingly - because Cummings had refused all formal contact with American life he had lived in Greenwich Village. He lived in the same apartment with his wife Marion whom he loved dearly, for 35 years. Number 4 Patchin Place. In fact a description of Cummings life there might be in order from a man who spent some time with him and then wrote the great biography called The Magic Maker - The Magic Maker. And here's what he writes.

“They spend their summers in New Hampshire, on a farm which Cummings inherited from his mother. Every May - the first week if the weather is warm, the second warm or cold - Cummings and his wife journey there, going by plane to Boston, [and] from Boston by train. Their sojourn at the farm is never under four months; often it is closer to five. Until 1957 there was no electricity in the house, and reading was done by kerosene lamps. Despite the wiring, [now] there is no radio, no TV.

“For trips to the nearby village Cummings drives a 1929 Ford sedan, upholstered and roomy as an old-fashioned Pullman. It rides high over the narrow, winding dirt roads; cars of later design, he says, are two low-slung to be of use. Besides, he explains - smiling - should his car get stuck in a rut, only three pairs of hands could lift it out. On his farm, particularly in overalls doing chores, he looks a bit more the Yankee he [really] is.

“There are more than three hundred acres of woodland which, despite the blandishments of regional lumbermen, have been left strictly alone. So have the grass and bushes around the house, with the result that thrushes are more numerous than chickadees or sparrows. Hummingbirds sip from vials of sugared water outside the screen porch where Cummings and his wife take their meals. The stone floor of the porch is strewn with empty shells from peanuts in a cookie jar where chipmunks come three times a day, beginning with the first sound in the kitchen in the morning. There is also water for them in a glass dish.

“Cummings [has] assured me that the hummingbirds ‘bow good-by’ to him when they are ready to take off for their long flight to the Caribbean at summer's end; and I hereby testify that it is so. On the last day of August, 1957, as we were sitting on the porch, which faces the mountains of the Sandwich Range, he called my attention to two hummingbirds outside the screen.

“‘They are bowing good-by,’ he said.

“Like tiniest helicopters the hummingbirds rode straight up to the top of the screen, then descended, five or six times, turned and were gone.”

When man is real all of nature is his home. Wherever he is he is at home. The esoteric saying of Jesus, The Son of Man, has nowhere to lay his head is not a pitiful statement that he's homeless. It's an accurate spiritual statement that he is at home anywhere he is. He does not need a place specifically to lay his head. He is at home wherever he is. This is the agility of the spirit, different from the nets of the psyche, different from the authority and logic of the mind, but quite at home in the world of nature. The world of nature responds to reality, not to the nets, not to the authority.

In recognition of Cummings greatness, the growing perception that he was really a great author, Harvard University beseeched him in 1953 to deliver some lectures at Harvard. And he said, very well I will deliver them, but they are going to be called “Nonlectures.” He gave six. But the title of the book is not Six NonLectures. The title of the book and the title of the series is ‘i’ lowercase ‘i’ six non lectures. There's no colon, there's no comma. It's simply the juxtaposition ‘i’ lowercase ‘i’ six non lectures. And of course in the non lectures at the end of each non lecture he read in the original languages great poetry six or seven different languages. Cummings is quite a man. In the first nonlecture this is how he addressed the Harvard audience, 1953, he was 57 years old.

“Let me cordially warn you, at the opening of these socalled lectures, that I haven't the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer. Lecturing is presumably a form of teaching; and presumably a teacher is somebody who knows. I never did, and still don't, know. What has always fascinated me is not teaching, but learning; and I assure you that if the acceptance of a Charles Eliot Norton professorship hadn't rapidly entangled itself with the expectation of learning a very great deal, I should now be somewhere else. Let me also assure you that I feel extremely glad to be here; and that I heartily hope you won't feel extremely sorry.

“Ever since many of you didn't exist I've been learning and relearning, as a writer and as a painter, the significance of those immemorial maxims ‘one man's meat is another man's poison’ and ‘you can lead the mare to water but you can't make her drink.’ Now - as a nonlecturer - I am luckily confronted by that equally ancient, but far less austere, dictum ‘it's an ill will [that] blows [noone] good. For a while a genuine lecturer must obey the rules of mental decency, and clothe his personal idiosyncrasies in collectively acceptable generalities, an authentic ignoramus remains quite indecently free to speak as he feels.”

And that's how he began.

Cummings’ extraordinary capacity to transmute not simply on the mundane level to transmute the phony seriousness that boggles the mind, but to actually transmute the projections that seem to block out life back into the interior where someone real lives. And that resonance is natural. Cummings towards the end of his life - and he died in 1962, September 4th - he and I incidentally share the same birthday October 14th. We have the same horoscope. On May 13th, 1962 he wrote a letter to a pal of his, a lady. Cummings, who was one of the beautiful men able to have friendships with women. It's a real hallmark of the free, real personality to be pals, to be able to be pals, a very hard thing in this world of stodginess authority projections. Cummings was able to.

Cummings writes, “Just finished revising captions for a book of fifty photographs and they’re by Marion” - his wife - “they're superb which may appear this autumn and now can thank you at least partially for your fine May day letter. One of Marion's portraits is the by the by is of a dark dashingly handsome acquaintance of ours and I call this picture Cougar, meaning North American mountain lion, under which title my caption reads ‘one law for the lion and ox is oppression’.” Quotation from William Blake. “On behalf of her and my selves…” Plural. She has her selves. I have my selves. Together we have an incredible number of selves. “...have turned down the President and Mrs. Kennedy's black tie invitation. It's not transferable to dine at the white House with as it turned out 70 some crooks punks and nobelius…” That's nobelius. “...as well as a more recent conquest by the Minister of the interior that we celebrate Henry David Thoreau's birth or death or both in company with another select bevy including, you'll be astonished to learn two contemporary friends of Thoreau viz Chief Justice Black and Robert Frost. But lest thou shouldst suspect me of snobbism know that corn spouse…” - with spouse “…I appeared not long since at City Hall New York And was copiously snapshotted with and without Mayor Wagner this being the price we paid Germany for not being thrown out of our 35 year old residence at 4 Patchin Place after a lawsuit lasting about a year.”

They tried to renovate the block and they were going to throw all the residents out and it was discovered by the world press that one of the residents was the great E.E. Cummings who would not leave. He said we happen to really live here and have been really here for all this time. This that you have are plans in your minds. They cannot prevail against our reality. Go ahead and try. And Mr. Agility was snapshotted and photographed as the hero of the day but he also was the hero of the age. He showed that spiritual courage always wins when one maintains one's reality. Nothing can change that. What is there that can change that? Nothing. One is rooted like the bedrock of the universe in one's presence.

Continuing the letter he says, “Marion bought a remaindered book that is a financially worthless volume wherein I met those wonderful words translated from the Greek of Plato's Republic.” Then he quotes the translation from Plato. “ ‘It, the ideal state is laid up in heaven as a pattern for him who wills to see it and seeing to found a city in himself whether it exists anywhere or ever will exist is no matter. His conduct will be an expression of the laws of that city alone and have no other.’ ” And then Cumming says, “What can mere use say to the truth underlying these noble words? The truth which you yourself call man's own and true domain. How infinitely more than right you are in feeling that instead of detaching you from life it teaches me to attend only to this domain where the word life is still meaningful, intense has a chance of growth and victory.”

Bravissimo. That's the personality of Cummings. That's his nature. And a society, a culture which misinterprets such a man as being a second rater or a lightweight is only indicting itself. It's like someone saying that they think Rembrandt used too many browns to be a great artist. It's a reflection on them not on Rembrandt. Cummings’ delightfulness, his agility, is a characteristic of the American personality when it is real. There is almost no personality like E. E. Cummings in European history. There are individuals like Laurence Sterne or James Joyce but they are comical in context. Cummings is miraculously free without context. This is different. About the only place that you meet this kind of a personality anywhere else in human history is in China. The old Chan writers, the old Tang poets, like Li Po, display this kind of agility of reality. We happen to be real. And what's wrong with flying? One last poem.

someone i am wandering a town(if its
houses turning into themselves grow

silent upon new perfectly blue)

i am any(while around him streets
taking moment off by moment day
thankfully become each other)one who

feels a world crylaughingly float away

leaving just this strolling ghostly doll
of an almost vanished me(for whom
the departure of everything real is the
arrival of everything true)and i'm

no(if deeply less conceivable than
birth or death or even than breathing shall

blossom a first star)one

Which is the same in lower cases, ‘I’

Next week Wallace Stevens.

Thank you friends.