Curving Space with cummings

I seldom write about poets, preferring to leave this genre to others better suited. But the talk yesterday about the shuttles and Hubble and Chandra, and of stars and black holes and other aspects of astrophysics, brought to mind one of my favorite poems, Space being(don’t forget to remember)Curved, by e.e. Cummings:

Space being (don’t forget to remember) Curved
(and that reminds me who said o yes Frost
Something there is which isn’t fond of walls)

an electromagnetic (now Ive lost
the) Einstein expanded Newton’s law preserved
conTinuum (but we read that beFore)

of Course life being just a Reflex you
know since Everything is Relative or

to sum it All Up god being Dead (not to

mention inTerred
LONG LIVE that Upwardlooking
Serene Illustrious and Beatific
Lord of Creation, MAN:
at a least crooking
of Whose compassionate digit, earth’s most terrific

quadruped swoons into billiardBalls!

There was a time when the world was in love with Einstein and space travel and physics and the atom and all that was science. For the first time in our history, a scientist rated over a businessman or a politician at the dinner table, though not necessarily a football player or a writer. Into this comes cummings and his irreverant look at curved space, a poem that he himself called a parody of the times in The Explicator 9.5.

Dear Sir–
please let your readers know that the author of “Space being(don’t forget to remember)Curved” considers it a parody-portrait of one scienceworshipping supersubmoron in the very act of reading(with difficulties)aloud,to another sw ssm,some wouldbe explication of A.Stone&Co’s unpoem
–thank you

E. E. Cummings
December 11 1950

The satire of cummings is most apparant in the last stanza of the poem, when he writes about God being dead, killed by man who sets himself up as “god” — the same god who “at a least crooking of Whose compassionate digit, earth’s most terrific … quadruped swoons into billiardBalls”; who, with the curve of the trigger finger, kills the mighty elephant in order to turn its ivory into billiard balls. The same billiard balls that are used to demonstrate the curvature of space.

I’m not sure why I like cummings so much. Perhaps its because he was a true Renaissance man, a painter who painted such uncompromising portraits of himself, in addition to art ranging from the prosaic to the erotic. Perhaps it’s because he wrote faerie tales as well as poetry, and immortal phrases such as “There is some shit I will not eat.”

I admired his willingness to throw out form if it suited his needs, and this, indirectly, helped me overcome my fear of writing publicly when I knew that, inevitably, there would be times when I would miss ‘form’ unintentionally.

And then , there is of course Cummings’ poetry, sometimes silly, sometimes satirical or lovely, but often biting and blunt, and always timely:

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shops and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

I think, though, my fondness for Cummings is because he understood the ultimate struggle:

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night
and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest
battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.