A Miscellany (Revised)

by e. e. cummings

  “Father,” said one day a little human being to the Vicar of Microscopy, “how long would it take everybody on earth to count the number of molecules in one (1) drop of water, if every inhabitant of our planet was counting three molecules every second?” “My child,” the benevolently smiling man of God responded, “it would take only ten thousand years.” Miraculous? Yes; but let me invite you to a seance with Oswald the Rabbit! —The heroine has been tied to a railroad track; tied, not with any ordinary substance such as rope, but with her miraculously mobile self: first she has been stretched beyond recognition and then she has been copiously knotted. Alas she is helpless! The villain now boards his train and attempts to run over her—but the locomotive, making all sorts of faces and noises and vigorously changing its shape, refuses. Is she saved? No! The villain (being a villain) has an idea: he backs the train full speed into a sumptuously twodimensional distance conveniently composed of Alps, preparatory to gathering an unholy impetus and thoroughly annihilating his helpless prey. Enter the hero. Nimbly he unknots the heroine and lightly he casts her aside. Gently he seizes in each hand a rail and bends the rails away from each other, spreading them several parasangs apart without the least difficulty. Enter, from afar, the train—whereupon he calmly drops the widespread rails and awaits developments. The train makes for him like Hell. In less than a second it has reached the point at which the rails have been miracled. Presto!—the train splits neatly and exactly in two: one half of the locomotive, one half of the villain, one half of the rest of the train, faithfully follow one rail—the other half of the locomotive and villain and rest of the train faithfully follow the other rail. Between these impotently onrushing halves stands the hero: unscathed, triumphant.

  But enough of crass materialism—let us visit the realm of the psyche; taking for our guide and mentor, no mere layman, but that illustrious extra- or infrascientist, Sigmund Joy. All aboard for Slumberville! We are now asleep, without (of course) having ceased to be awake. Given this purely miraculous condition, such trifles as impossibility don’t trouble us at all; everything (even a banana) being “really” something else. Let contradictions contradict—to the pure all things are impure, but we, by heaven, understand our dream symbols . . . and speaking of dream symbols, will you kindly look at that mouse, I mean cat—that is, dog! Anyway, whatever it is, it wears pants, and he’s got a tough break: his best beloved has just been abducted to the top storey of a skyscraper which is even now shimmying with her screams. In vain does her would-be rescuer thunder at the portcullis, the shimmying skyscraper will not let him in. Something must be done—something scientific, miraculous! But is the potential avenger of outraged virtue a scientist, a miracle man? He is—and Lady Chatterley’s Lover to boot. For, with one hand pulling his pants free from his stomach, he seizes with the other hand his long black flowing tail (which fortunately becomes at this moment a rigid crank) and winds it vigorously: causing a ladder (sic) of strictly miraculous or scientific proportions to mount from his humble pants up, up, up, even unto the tiptopmost storey of the skyscraper! —And the day of days is saved . . .

  Such feats of arms, such deeds of do, are merest quid pro quos and bagatelles to the omnipotent protagonist of the animated cartoons. The language of this organ (if I may mix a metaphor) being the language of miracle, I mean science—that is, dream!—there results, not truth or falsehood, but wish: not what is, but what would like to is. And we of the Like To Is era, we of the “standardization,” we of the “interchangeable parts,” who have been summoned to conceive such subliminal sublimities as “the planetary electron” successfully avoiding itself like an eternal flea in a temporary nightshirt, are not uneasy when (before our very eyes) a head and its body successfully maintain separate existences, or elephants and other tiny objects successfully defy gravitation, or a cop successfully transforms himself into a six piece orchestra to escape successfully from the very crook whom he is at the moment successfully pursuing, or (believe it or not) perfect emptiness successfully generates absolute what-have-you. —No indeed; we are not uneasy. And if, by any accident, we were to become uneasy, we should only have to remember that “nothing succeeds like success” for “in dreams, it is often the rabbit which shoots the hunter.”

  Meantime, the show of shows continues and Industria, via the animated cartoons, encourages us to laugh. Full well she knows that a strictly Super Santa Claus epoch requires enormous quantities of laughter for the greasing of all those miraculous wheels! Hence Mickey the Mouse, Oswald the Rabbit, Krazy Kat, Aesop’s Fables, Silly Symphonies, I know not what. And if you—this means you—are an abnormal individual so healthy, so fearless, so rhythmic, so human, as to be capable of the miracle called “laughter,” patronize your neighborhood wake-up-and-dreamery!

  From Cinema, June 1930.

  A BOOK WITHOUT A TITLE

  An Imaginary Dialogue between ALMOST Any Publisher And A certain Author A.D. 1930

  PUBLISHER:By all that’s holy,THIS IS NOT A BOOK!

  AUTHOR:This is a book,by all that’s not full of holes.

  PUBLISHER:It will RUIN YOUR REPUTATION as an author!

  AUTHOR:Shall we be a trifle more definite?

  PUBLISHER:All right—can you imagine my SALESmen trying to persuade reputable BOOKstores to handle THIS?

  AUTHOR:To “handle” it, how?

  PUBLISHER:As a BOOK?

  AUTHOR:Why not?

  PUBLISHER:But the dam thing has NO TITLE—the frontispiece is A BLANK—the illustrations DON’T MAKE SENSE—the text is MEANINGLESS—the type suggests a CHILD’S FIRST READER—it’s all ABSOLUTELY CRAZY!

  AUTHOR:I should call it hyperscientific.

  PUBLISHER:“HYPERscienTIFic”?

  AUTHOR:Why not? The title is inframicroscopic—the frontispiece is extratelescopic—the pictures are superstereoscopic—the meaning is postultraviolet—the format is preautoerogenous.

  PUBLISHER:SAY . . . NObody’s going to FALL for THAT drivel!

  AUTHOR:All the better;everybody’ll laugh—

  PUBLISHER:“LAUGH”?

  AUTHOR:—Heartily.

  PUBLISHER:But you don’t seem to realize that this stuff is NOT FUNNY;it’s JUST MAD!

  AUTHOR:Could you speak a little less ambiguously?

  PUBLISHER:Listen—I CAN’T UNDERSTAND this RUBBISH which YOU’VE got the INFERNAL NERVE to ask ME to PALM OFF on the UNSUSPECTING PUBLIC as A BOOK;and I’M SUPPOSED TO BE an INTELLIGENT PERSON!

  AUTHOR:Is that any reason why you should be afraid to laugh heartily?

  PUBLISHER:WHO’S afraid to laugh heartily?

  AUTHOR:Certainly not an intelligent person.

  PUBLISHER:Oh,so I’M NOT INTELLIGENT—HUH?

  AUTHOR:If this book makes you laugh heartily,you are intelligent—

  PUBLISHER:And if this BABYISH NONSENSE BORES ME STIFF?

  AUTHOR:If this babyish nonsense bores you stiff,you have “civilization”—

  PUBLISHER:“CIVILIZATION”?!

  AUTHOR:And a very serious disease it is, too—

  PUBLISHER:“DISEASE”?

  AUTHOR:Invariably characterized by purely infantile delusions—

  PUBLISHER:“DELUSIONS’’—such as WHICH?

  AUTHOR:Such as the negatively fantastic delusion that something with a title on the outside and a great many closely printed pages on the inside is a book—and the positively monstrous delusion that a book is what anybody can write and nobody can’t publish and somebody won’t go to jail for and everybody will understand.

  PUBLISHER:Well, if THAT’S not A BOOK,what IS?

  AUTHOR:A new way of being alive.

  PUBLISHER(swallowing his chequebook and dropping dead): No thanks . . .

  1. THE GARDEN OF EDEN . . . before the dawn of history . . .

  CHAPTER I

  The king took off his hat and looked at it. Instantly an immense crowd gathered. The news spread like wildfire. From a dozen leading dailies,reporters and cameramen came rushing to the scene pellmell in highpowered monop
lanes. Hundreds of reserves,responding without hesitation to a riotcall,displayed with amazing promptness quite unparalleled inability to control the everincreasing multitude,but not before any number of unavoidable accidents had informally occurred. A G.A.R. veteran with aluminum legs,for example,was trampled and the nonartificial portions of his heroic anatomy reduced to pulp. Twin anarchists(one of whom was watering chrysanthemums five miles away and the other of whom was fast asleep in a delicatessen)were immediately arrested,devitalized,and jailed,on the charge of habeas corpus with premeditated arson. A dog,stepped on,bit in the neck a beautiful highstrung woman who had for some time suffered from insomnia and who—far too enraged to realize,except in a very general way,the source of the pain—instantly struck a child of four,knocking its front teeth out. Another woman,profiting by the general excitement,fainted and with a hideous shriek fell through a plateglass window. On the outskirts of the throng,several octogenarians succumbed to heart-trouble with grave external complications. A motorcycle ran over an idiot. A stonedeaf nightwatchman’s left eye was exterminated by the point of a missing spectator’s parasol. Sinking seven storeys from a nearby officebuilding,James Anderson(coloured)landed in the midst of the crowd absolutely unhurt,killing eleven persons including the ambassador to Uruguay. At this truly unfortunate occurrence,one of the most prominent businessmen of the city,William K. Vanderdecker,a member of the Harvard,Yale,and Racquet Clubs,swallowed a cigar and died instantly;leaving to fifty plainclothesmen the somewhat difficult task of transporting his universally lamented remains three and one-third miles to a waiting ambulance where they were given first aid,creating an almost unmentionable disturbance during which everybody lost caste and the Rev. Donald X. Wilkins received internal injuries resulting in his becoming mentally deficient and attempting to undress on the spot. Needless to say,the holy man was prevented by wrathful bystanders from carrying out his ignominious plan,and fell insensible to the sidewalk. Calm had scarcely been restored,when a petty officer from the battleship Idaho was seized with delirium tremens. In still another part of the mob,a hydrant exploded without warning, causing no casualties. Olaf Yansen,a plumber,and a floorwalker,Isidor Goldstein,becoming mutually infuriated owing to some probably imaginary difference of opinion,resorted to a spontaneous display of physical culture,in the course of which the former(who,according to several witnesses,was getting the worst of it,in spite of his indubitably superior size)hit the latter with a brick and vanished. Mr. Goldstein is doing well. While playing with a box of peppermints which his parents,Mr. and Mrs. Aloysius Fitzroy of 96 Hoover Ave. Flatbush,had given their little son Frank Jr. to keep him quiet,the infant(in some unaccountable manner)set fire to forty-one persons,of whom thirty-nine were burned to ashes. A Chinese,Mi Wong,who exercises the profession of laundryman at 686 868th Street and Signor Alhambra, a millionaire Brazilian coffeeplanter who refused to be interviewed and is stopping at the Ritz,are the survivors. Havoc resulted when one of the betterliked members of the young married set,whose identity the authorities refused to divulge,kissed Tony Crack,iceman,on the spur of the moment,receiving concussion of the brain with black eyes. In the front rank of onlookers,a daughter of the people became so excited by His Majesty’s spectacular act that before you could say Jack Robinson she emitted triplets.

  But such trivial catastrophes were rapidly eclipsed by a disaster of really portentous significance. No sooner had the stock­exchange learned what the king had done,than an unprecedented panic started;and the usually stable Lithuanian kopec zoomed in seventeen minutes from nine hundred decimal point three to decimal point six zeros eight seven four five,wiping out at one fell swoop the solidlyfounded fortunes of no less than two thousand two hundred and two pillars of society,and exerting an overpowering influence for evil on wheat and sugar,not to mention the national industry(kerosene)—all three of which tumbled about in a frightful manner. The president of the India Rubber Trust Co.,bareheaded and with his false hair streaming in the wind,tore out of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Savings Bank,carrying in one hand a pet raccoon belonging to the president of the latter institution,Philip B. Sears,and in the other a telephone which the former had(in the frenzy of the moment)forgotten to replace on his distinguished confrère’s desk. A hookandladder,driven by Abraham Abrahams at a speed of(a + b)a+b miles an hour,passed over the magnate longitudinally as he crossed Dollar Row and left a rapidly expiring corpse automatically haranguing an imaginary board of directors;and whose last words—spoken into the(oddly enough)unbroken mouthpiece of the instrument only to be overheard by Archibald Hammond,a swillman—were:“Let us then if you please.” So unnerved was the Jehu of the Clipton St. firestation by this totally unexpected demise that,without pausing to consider the possible damage to life and limb involved in a purely arbitrary deviation from the none-too-ample throughfare,he declined the very next corner in favour of driving straight through the city’s largest skyscraper;whose one hundred and thirteen storeys—after tottering horribly for a minute and a half—reeled and thundered earthward with the velocity of light,exterminating every vestige of humanity and architecture within a radius of eighteen miles. This paralysing cataclysm was immediately followed by a colossal conflagration of stupendous proportions whose prodigiously enormous flames,greedily winding themselves around the few remaining outhouses,roasted by myriads the inhabitants thereof;while generating a heat so terrific as to evaporate the largest river of the kingdom—which,completely disappearing in less than eleven seconds,revealed a giltedged submarine of the UR type, containing(among other things)the entire royal family(including the king,who still held his hat in his hand)in the act of escaping,disguised as cheeses.

  2. THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN . . . even prominent people . . .

  CHAPTER II

  Thomas Feeney,master ploughman,leaned upon his plough. It was nineteen minutes past twenty o’clock by the good man’s fifteen peseta watch. A vague radiance brimmed the vast cup of the east,exactly overflowing into the indefinite saucer of the west. Night had risen. A voice,interwoven with the chirping of amorous armadillos,wigwagged him to supper. It was his devoted wife,Gaga,who had just completed a pie wellliked by her spouse,and called(in the vernacular of the country)choopfg. The g is silent,thousands of raindrops had fallen,but the land to the left and right was still parched with drought,as:“I am coming,”he whispered at the top of a musical baritone voice. Gaga smiled,clenching a sixyearold baby to her bosom:Tom had heard her. Life,for this poor woman,held no sweeter solace than to provide indigestible nutriment for the gnarled visage which she had forced herself imperfectly to love. Suddenly,out of the lilac bushes,arose Henry Holt,the village drunkard. On tiptoe he approached the akimbo bride of Thomas Feeney. Sheep,one by one,crossed the horizon,each with his tail in the trunk of the animal just behind him. A linnet twittered wickedly. “No Hen,not now,” she managed to enunciate as he kissed her innumerable times,digging his spiked jimshoes into the slippery clay which constitutes a geographical peculiarity of that glacial morain to which a good five-fourths of the topographical eccentricities of the immediate vicinity owe their(to put it mildly)renown,and bracing his soi-disant back against a-far-from-inconvenient eucalyptus tree,ilex methodicus. But the words had scarcely become nonexistent,when a nighthawk mewed dolefully. The ploughman had by this time,with an easily overestimated dexterity not uncommon to the elder aborigines,escorted his two coalblack horses safely across a rickety footbridge which hung,like a merest cobweb,above the foaming waters of the Tihs,that unbeautiful estuary to which tradition has(whether rightly or no)ascribed miraculous healing properties,and was whistling to himself a curious mixture of The Anvil Chorus and Donna E Mobile,when an arrow transfixed his negligible brain and he sank to one vast knee,dormant. Ominous owls began a ghostly dirge. “There,” the cynical youth said with sinister composure,coolly pocketing his collapsible weapon(on the redhot hilt of which the ten commandments were inscribed in Caslon Old Face,after the manner of the peasants)and inserting a new fuse which almost instantly blew out,lea
ving the environs in total darkness;but Gaga could not and would not credit her tearstained eyes.“He is not,he cannot be dead,”she wailed silently,and in another minute had broken loose and was galloping across the desert with a sprig of parsley in her mouth. This surprised even Holt. A shooting star occurred. Ostriches,nursing their incredible young,promulgated here and there an obstreperous resemblance to madonnas,and,in the middle distance,morning was already beginning to sweep out the barroom of heaven. Ungently he collapsed upon his face,the bottle of cyanide escaped his left hand while the right yet clutched a paper rose. Eight seven nine the referee counted pitilessly,and with a bleeding nose he was on his feet in a second,bringing down the gallery in unmitigated applause,which died as Sid Gimlet crossed an uppercut with two haymakers,producing victory for our side;whereupon somebody threw a bullfrog at the promoter,which missed his abdomen by millimetres and smote a perfect lady in the muzzle. An excavated horse,trampling his own transparent intestines,trotted almost to the gate and sank;while cloakmen upon cloakmen surrounded at a safe distance the inebriated bull and the espadas dropped their cigarettes and stepped into the chapel to pray,thereby causing the sacred edifice to consubstantiate without injuring the caretaker,José Fernandez(who was,as it happened,not present by the merest accident)while the Jefe,overcome,adjusted his cufflinks and took a swanboat to Malaga with his favourite concubine,an English girl named Alice Peters. Rapidly crackers and chocolate were passed from hand to mouth,but you and I didn’t take any,did we? How hot it is,one of them hazarded. No ventilation in these compartments,the Swede said to the Negro. None what­ever,Sambo replied crisply. Why should the soup not be served in skyrockets if they have no weddingrings?I asked,as the train swept onward at a snail’s pace,emasculating pigs and lesser quadrupeds who were far too sleepy to protest,let alone get off the track,where they had taken shelter from the torrential blizzard in spite of a large sign(in Arabic) “Rauschen Verboten.” You got me,Lord Q.responded;spitting out of the half­open window through a cavity in his dexter eyetooth,attributed by some to the Great War,and wiping his monocle on the seat of his trousers,at which a station collided with our train,upsetting the locomotive and two baggagecars,and so we all got out and ate griddlecakes in the cheerfulest manner and just as if nothing had happened you know. He was hermaphroditic,I think,the Count Cazazza murmured,obscurely referring to the engineer who had left two children,one a girl and the other a girl. Was he,Congressman Oswald Coles’third wife said coldly. A silence fell. Nobody could think of where we were anyway. A little boy tried to sell me a bachelor’s button for five cents on the ground that he was hungry,instead of which I gave him my very last Flaubert. But what what was this? Certainly not the whistle! But yes. Crocodiles could be seen in the background,cleverly harnessed to a gigantic waterwheel which made condums at each revolution,and the guard gave me a sample specimen. Is this gratis,I asked him in Polish. That depends,he replied enigmatically,employing a quite untranslatable Sioux idiom. Yes,we were off and how glad we were,too,and we were positively stiff with cold also. It was a pretty sight to see his valet whisking off old Herr Hengist,the perspiring Danish prime­minister,with a broom made of selected peacockfeathers,and the celebrity was certainly grateful,slipping his servitor two monogrammed straw-tipped Thracian firecrackers. All aboard! Rex made such a noise,said Pamela,that nobody heard what I said. What wrecks? I ventured. Yours,she replied,glancing. As I was wearing rubber tights underneath it didn’t matter,and we were off. The air was so restful. Wheelchairs everywhere. It’s good for pimples even. Board! See that funnylooking duchess wearing a cork-jacket and a washable necktie. Dingaling. Keep your Sans and Luiss inside the Rey. Next station Nova Foundland. Aling. Who’s got the button? Down in front! The angelus sounded.