another wun

so i have been having my head stuck up in or around this cute little book of poetry and lectures by a really interesting and sometimes hard to understand guy, he's been dead for a while, shit, i don't know when he actually died. i will have to look that up in a few.

his name is e e cummings. somebody actually told me that he changed his legal name to e e cummings, all lower case letters.

his writings almost always have punctuation placed in spots that some, well most, people find to be weird, like he will put a ( at the beginning of a sentence, with no other ) afterwards. it's like he is trying to write something else than just words, well of course, but his poems speak so rightly, just as i would say whatever he is talking about, he put it in a way that my head actually thinks to itself about the subject, idea, whatever... hard to explain. there are a lot of things about him that are absolutely hard to understand and explain. my head likes him though. a lot.
(there i go again, talking about my head as if it were a seperate entity.) space, the final fronteir.
my frontal lobe. the final frontal lobe. heh heh hehe

okay, so back to this book of e e cumings. he gave some lectures at Harvard in 1952-53, six in all. they were about him, how he found himself as a person, how he came to be an artist and a writer, how an artist=writer. the amazingness of humanity, the greatness of imagination and love and life and alive. in each lecture, the first 45 minutes were about him and his life, but the last part of the lecture, he would read poems from other artists that had an impact on himself or other people he loved. for example, at the end of his first lecture, he read a poem his mother kept copied down in a littel spiral bound notebook she kept with her at all times.

there was one piece he read though, at the end of the sixth lecture that was just absolutely amazing, i had to read over it more than a few times. such a beautiful selection. it is the last three stanzas of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Act IV. chk it out...

This is the day, which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism.
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep:
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.

Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

yes yes yes. man, powerful lines, and i like the flows of it all on top of that.

and he said/wrote something else in his fourth lecture that really caught my eyes, this he actually wrote himself...

"you and i are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are
human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the
mystery of growing:the mystery which happens only and whenever
we are faithful to ourselves . . . Life,for eternal us,is now . . ."