May 26, 2013

  •         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? [Eimi]
            Right.
            And pronounced?
            "A" as in a, "me" as in me; accent on the "me".
            Signifying?
            Am.
            How does Am compare with The Enormous Room?
            Favorably.
            They’re not at all similar, are they?
            When The Enormous Room was published, some people wanted a war book; they were disappointed. 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.
            Well! And what about Am?
            Some people had decided that The Enormous Room wasn’t a just-war book and was a class-war book, when along came Eimi—aha! said some people; here’s another dirty dig at capitalism.
            And they were disappointed.
            Sic.
            Do you think these disappointed people really hated capitalism?
            I feel these disappointed people unreally hated themselves—
            And you really hated Russia.
            Russia, I felt, was more deadly than war; when nationalists hate, they hate by merely killing and maiming human beings; when Internationalists hate, they hate by categorying and pigeonholing human beings.
            So both your novels were what people didn’t expect.
            Eimi is the individual again; a more complex individual, a more enormous room.
            By a —what do you call yourself? painter? poet? playwright? satirist? essayist? novelist?
            Artist.
            But not a successful artist, in the popular sense?
            Don’t be silly.
            Yet you probably consider your art of vital consequence—
            Improbably.
            —To the world? 
            To myself.
            What about the world, Mr. Cummings?
            I live in so many: which one do you mean?
            I mean the everyday humdrum world, which includes me and you and millions upon millions of men and women.
            So?
            Did it ever occur to you that people in this socalled world of ours are not interested in art?
            Da da.
            Isn’t that too bad!
            How?
            If people were interested in art, you as an artist would receive wider recognition— Wider?
            Of course.
            Not deeper.
            Deeper?
            Love, for example, is deeper than flattery.
            Ah—but (now that you mention it) isn’t love just a trifle oldfashioned?
            I dare say.
            And aren’t you supposed to be ultramodernistic?
            I dare say.
            But I dare say you don’t dare say precisely why you consider your art of vital consequence—
            Thanks to I dare say my art I am able to become myself.
            Well well! Doesn’t that sound as if people who weren't artists couldn’t become themselves?
            Does it?
            What do you think happens to people who aren’t artists? What do you think people who aren’t artists become?
            I feel they don’t become: I feel nothing happens to them; I feel negation becomes of them.
            Negation?
            You paraphrased it a few moments ago.
            How?
            "This socalled world of ours."
            Labouring under the childish delusion that economic forces don’t exist, eh?
            I am labouring.
            Answer one question: do economic forces exist or do they not?
            Do you believe in ghosts?
            I said economic forces.
            So what?
            Well well well! ‘Where ignorance is bliss. .. Listen, Mr. Lowercase Highbrow—
            Shoot.
            —I’m afraid you’ve never been hungry.
            Don’t be afraid.
    –e.e. cummings