Walt Whitman: “I Exist As I Am”

Photographer Unknown, I Exist As I Am

“I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself,

And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,

I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,

I laugh at what you call dissolution,

And I know the amplitude of time.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Part 20, Leaves of Grass

“Song of Myself”, one of the most famous of Walt Whitman’s works and a poem that represents the core of his poetic vision, was one of the original twelve pieces in the 1855 first edition of “Leaves of Grass”, published at Whitman’s own expense. Originally published without sections, the final edition consists of thirteen hundred lines arranged in fifty-two separate but connected works.

Like most of the other poems in “Leaves of Grass”, this poem was revised extensively, reaching its final form in 1881. “Song of Myself” is a sprawling combination of biography and poetic meditation, with Whitman using symbols and sly commentary to get at important issues. Composed in a series of vignettes with small, precisely drawn scenes, the poem is written in Whitman’s signature free verse style.

This poem did not take on the title “Song of Myself” until the 1881 edition. Previous to that it had been titled “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” and, in the 1860, 1867, and 1871 editions, simply “Walt Whitman.” The poem’s shifting title is suggestive of the theme Whitman examined in this piece. As Walt Whitman, the specific individual, melts away into the abstract “Myself”, the poem explores the possibilities for communion between individuals.

Following its 1855 publication, “Song of Myself” was immediately singled out by critics and readers for particular attention, and the work remains among the most acclaimed and influential in American poetry. Public acceptance, however, was slow in coming. Social conservatives denounced the poem as disregarding norms of morality due to its obvious depictions of human sexuality.

Note: An interesting read from The Walt Whitman Archive is James E Miller’s “Sex and Sexuality” which deals with the themes of sex and sexuality in Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. The commentary can be found at: https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_49.html

Caio Fernando Abreu: “At the Edge of the Open Sea”

Photographer Unknown, At the Edge of the Open Sea

“Then you come and come to me and invade me and take me and ask me and lose me and spill over me with your eyes always on the run and open your mouth to release new stories and again I complete like this, without urgency, and concentrate whole in the things you tell me, and so silent, and so submissive, I chew you inside me while you stab me with slow delicacy making it clear in each promise that it will never be fulfilled, that I must expect nothing but this colorful mask, that you want me because that’s how you are—

At the edge of the open sea ”

— Caio Fernando Abreu, Dragons Don’t Know Paradise

Born in September of 1948 in Santiago, Brazil, Caio Fernando Loureiro de Abreu, as a young man, moved to Porto Alegre where he published his first short stories. In 1967, he joined the Letters and Performing Arts studies at the Federal University of Rio Grande de Sul, and later its dramatic arts program. Abandoning both lines of study, Caio Fernando Abreu decided to do journalistic work in the central and southern areas of Brazil.

In 1968, Calo Fernando Abreu moved to São Paulo and joined the newsroom of Veja Magazine, a country-wide weekly news magazine. A frequent visitor of trendy bars, he became friends with singer and songwriter Agenor de Miranda Araújo Neto, better known as Cazuza, an openly bisexual man who helped change public attitudes about AIDS in Brazil. Abreu became a prolific journalist and literary writer, producing short stories, novels, chronicles and drama works.

During the middle of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1968, Calo Fernando Abreu was pursued by the Department of Political and Social Order, a repressive branch of the government, but found refuge in the São Paulo country estate of poet and novelist Hilda Hilst. In 1971, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, working as a researcher and editor for the magazines “Leia Livros”, “Manchete”, and “Paus e Filhos”.

Fleeing the military regime in 1973, Calo Fernando Abreu entered self-exile in Europe, living and subsisting on odd jobs in London and Stockholm, France, the Netherlands, and Spain. In 1974, he returned to Porto Alegre and resumed his literary career. Besides his own literary works, Abreu continued writing for the theater and for the press medium, with relocations to Rio de Janeiro in 1983 and São Paulo in 1985.

In 1995, while visiting in France, Calo Fernando Abreu found out that he was HIV positive. In a series of three letters called “Letters to the Beyond the Wall”, published in the newspaper “O Estado de São Paulo”, he revealed that he had contracted the AIDS virus. Caio Fernando Abreu returned home to Porto Alegre permanently to live with his parents. He enjoyed the last two years of his life gardening, before dying in Porto Alegre on February 25, 1996.

Caio Fernando Abreu’s narratives come from the subjectivity of a bisexual man in his mid-forties who has AIDS. The characters in his books live and function in the periphery of society; they are in many ways equivalent to queer characters in North American literary traditions. In his most famous, short-story book “Os Dragōes Não Conhecem o Paraíso (Dragons Don’t Known Paradise)”, the majority of characters are either gay or seem to be. A camp writer, Abreu’s works are full of examples of queer sensibility, and of multiple appropriations of mainstream heterosexual society into queer narratives.

The discourse of AIDS was already present in Abreu’s writing from the beginning of the epidemic in the 1980s. He is, along with his friend Cazuza and Brazilian singer and songwriter Renato Russo, one of the most recognize Brazilian artists to have died of AIDS.

James Baldwin: “…Bright as a Razor”

Photographer Unknown, ….Bright as a Razor

“Being in trouble can have a funny effect on the mind. I don’t know if I can explain this. You go through some days and you seem to be hearing people and you seem to be talking to them and you seem to be doing your work, or, at least, your work gets done; but you haven’t seen or heard a soul and if someone asked you what you have done that day you’d have to think awhile before you could answer. But at the same time, and even on the self-same day–and this is what is hard to explain–you see people like you never saw them before. They shine as bright as a razor. Maybe it’s because you see people differently than you saw them before your trouble started. Maybe you wonder about them more, but in a different way, and this makes them very strange to you.”

—James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

Ken Kesey: “Dragging Men Up by Their Hands”

Photographers Unknown, Dragging Men Up By Their Hands

“It’s like… that big red hand of McMurphy’s is reaching into the fog and dropping down and dragging the men up by their hands, dragging them blinking into the open. First one, then another, then the next. Right on down the line of Acutes, dragging them out of the fog till there they stand, all twenty of them, raising not just for watching TV, but against the Big Nurse, against her trying to send McMurphy to Disturbed, against the way she’s talked and acted and beat them down for years.”

—-Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Born in September of 1935, Kenneth Elton Kesey was an American novelist, essayist, and countercultural figure of the 1960s. Graduated from the University of Oregon in 1957, he began writing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1960, following the completion of a graduate fellowship at Stanford University in creative writing.

While at Stanford University, Ken Kesey participated in an Army-funded experiment at the Veterans Administration Hospital, which involved hallucinogenic drugs. The discovery of the effects of the drugs prompted Kesey to study alternative methods of perception. To further his study, he later made the decision to work as an orderly at the Menlo Park mental hospital in California, where he encountered questionable treatments for patients.

From these observations, Ken Kesey concluded that society makes ordinary people crazy and that society, itself, prevents people from functioning in it once again. This conclusion inspired Kesey to write “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, a book he considered to be a rail against the unspoken repressive rules of society.

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is one of America’s most challenged and banned novels. In 1974, residents in Ohio, considering the book pornographic and glorifying criminal activity, sued the local Board of Education to remove the novel from classrooms. Between 1975 and 1978, several school districts in New York, Oklahoma, Maine and Idaho removed the novel from the schools, with the Freemont High School in St Anthony, Idaho, firing the teacher who assigned it. Challenges against the novel being in school curriculums periodically occurred until 2000.

Note: The film adaption of the 1962 published novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, starred Jack Nicholson and was directed by Miloš Forman. It was released in 1975 by United Artists. The film went on to win five Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

David Abram: “They Spill Rain Upon the Land”

Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Thirteen

“Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attention; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons…”

—David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

David Abram is an American ecologist and philosopher best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology,the study of the structural experiences of the ‘self’, with ecological and environmental issues.

David Abram introduced the term “the more-than-human-world” in his 1994 book “The Spell of the Sensuous”, which received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. This term was gradually adopted by other scholars and theorists, and became a key phrase in the broad ecological movement. Abram has also referred to this concept more recently as “the commonwealth of breath”.

Abram advocated a reappraisal of “animism”, the belief system that all objects, places, plants, and creatures possess a distinct spiritual essence, as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview. He held that this view, a belief system of many indigenous people, is one which roots human cognition in the sentient human body, while affirming the ongoing entanglement of our bodily experience with the remarkable sentience of other animals, each of which perceives the same world that we perceive yet from a different perspective.

David Abram, a student of traditional, indigenous systems of ecological knowledge, gave voice to the entwinement of human subjectivity not only with other animals but also with the varied sensitivities of many plants upon which humans depend and the bioregions that surround and sustain our communities.

In 2010 Abram published “Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology” which was a finalist for the 2011 Orion Book Award and the runner-up for the PEN America Edward O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing. Using his knowledge of indigenous cultures, Abram explores our human entanglement with nature and shows that awareness, or the mind, is not an exclusive possession of the human species but a clear aspect of the biosphere itself, one in which we, along with other living things, steadily participate. This book has since become a classic of environmental literature.

Baker’s Dozen

Photographers Unknown, Baker’s Dozen

“Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishment severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month’s hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra- the famous baker’s dozen.”

—Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Man and Flower

Photographers Unknown, Man and Flower

“The moon is beautiful partly because we cannot reach it, (the sea is impressive because one can never be sure of crossing it safely). Even the pleasure one takes in a flower — and, this is true even of a botanist who knows all there is to be known about the flower, is dependent partly on the sense of mystery.”

—George Orwell, Pleasure Spots, The London Tribune, January 11, 1946

Fernando Pessoa: “Life that Wants Nothing Can Have No Weight”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Twelve

“Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life that wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.”

—Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic

Born in June of 1888 in Lisbon, Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent, intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. Each of these heteronyms possessed distinct biographies, temperaments, philosophies, appearances, writing styles, and even signatures.

In 1905, Pessoa attended university in Lisbon, however, after two years he left, educating himself by sequestering in the National Library to read literature, history, philosophy and religion. He began writing short stories, some of them under the name “David Merrick”, as well as poems and essays, most often in English or French and occasionally in Portuguese.

A life-long outsider, Pessoa lived with relatives or in rented rooms, chain-smoking, writing, reading, and working as a translator for firms with overseas connections. Throughout his life, Pessoa grappled with the possibility of insanity, spurred on by his grandmother’s mental illness, but he was never able to draw conclusions about himself either way.

“I’ve divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.” —Fernando Pessoa, talking about his heteronyms

For a thorough and fascinating article entitled “Fernando Pessoa and His Heteronyms” by Carmela Ciuraru, please visit the Poetry Society of America located at: https://poetrysociety.org/features/tributes/fernando-pessoa-his-heteronyms

Tove Jansson: “Moominland Midwinter”

Photographers Unknown, Snapshots

“There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear.”

—Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter

Born in August of 1914, Tove Marika Jansson was a Swedish-speaking Finnish author, novelist, painter, illustrator, and comic strip author. She studied art at University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm in 1930-1933, the Graphic School of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1933-1937, and finally at L’ École d’ Adrein Holy and École des Beau-Arts in Paris in 1938. She exhibited in a number of shows during the 1930s and early 1940s, and had her first solo exhibition in 1943.

Besides producing artwork, Tove Jansson was also writing short stories and articles for publication, as well as creating the graphics for book covers. Starting in 1945, she wrote the “Moomin” book series for children, publishing books in 1945, 1946, and 1948 which were highly successful. For her work as a children’s writer, Jansson received the Hans Christian Anderson Medal in 1968. She later wrote six novels and five books of short stories for adults.

Tove Jansson worked as a cartoonist and illustrator for the Swedish satirical magazine “Garm” from the 1930s to 1953. She produced many political cartoons during that period which achieved international fame. In one of Jansson’s early cartoons, Hitler is seen crying in diapers while European leaders try to calm him down. During the 1930s, Jansson produced illustrations for Christmas magazines and several comic strip series.

Tove Jansson had several male lovers, including political philosopher Atos Wirtanen, a Finnish socialist intellectual and a member of the Finnish Parliament. However, she later met and developed a secret love affair with the married theater director Vivica Bandler, daughter of Helsinki’s mayor Erik von Frenckell.

In 1956, Jansson met her lifelong partner Tuulikki Pietilä, the American-born Finnish graphic artist and professor, who became one of the most influential graphic artists in Finland. In Helsinki, the two women lived separately in neighboring blocks, visiting each other privately through an attic passageway. In the 1960s, they built a house on an island in the Gulf of Finland, where they lived together for the summer months until Jansson’s passing.

Tove Marika Jansson died from cancer in June of 2001 at the age of eighty-six. Tuulikki Pietilä died at her home in February of 2009 at the age of ninety-two.

James Baldwin: “Giovanni’s Room”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Ten

“Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other’s faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon.”

—James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Born in New York City in August of 1924, James Arthur Baldwin was an essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, in the United States and through western Europe.

Disillusioned by the racial prejudice in the United States, James Baldwin emigrated in November of 1948, at the age of twenty-four, to Paris where he became involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank, an area of artists, writers, and philosophers. In 1949, he met and fell in love with the young Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger, becoming life-long partners.

While staying at the Happersberger family chalet in Switzerland with Lucien during the winter of 1951-1952, James Baldwin completed his first novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain”, which was published in early 1953. Over the next two years, while living mostly in France, he worked on his second novel “Giovanni’s Room”. In 1956 after Knopf Publishers decided not to publish this second book, Baldwin allowed Dial Press to publish the novel, dedicated to Happersberger, in the United States, and publisher Michael Joseph in the United Kingdom.

James Baldwin made his home primarily in the southern section of France, but often returned to the United States to lecture or teach. In 1957, he began to spend half of each year in New York City. Baldwin and Happersberger lived together in their house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Provence, France, for many years until Baldwin’s death, with Happersberger by his side, from cancer in November of 1987. James Baldwin was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.

“Giovanni’s Room”, with its complex narrative of love and desire, became James Baldwin’s most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. Due to its explicit homoerotic content, it caused great controversy when it was first published in 1956. The book is noteworthy for bringing complex representations of homosexuality and bisexuality to the reading public with artistry and empathy, lacking in most of the contemporary literary treatments, and thus broadening the public discussion regarding same-sex desire.

“Giovanni’s Room” focuses on events in the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings, and his frustrations, in the relationships he has with other men in his life, particularly Giovanni, a bar keep at a Parisian gay bar. In this novel, Baldwin explores themes of social alienation, self-identity, masculinity, and manhood, expressed through relationships and learned public behavior. Though it is considered a gay novel, Baldwin has stated on occasion that the novel is not so much about homosexuality, but about what happens if you are so afraid that you finally can not love anybody..

For additional information from the National Museum of African American History and Culture:

https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/baldwin-switzerland

https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog/series/stories-chez-baldwin

Haruki Murakami: “Warped in the Folds of Time”

Photographer Unknown, Warped in the Folds of Time

“Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn’t tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn’t fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.”

—-Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

Haruki Murakami: “In the Midst of the Everyday”

Photographers Unknown, In the Midst of the Everyday

“Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievably bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments. While they are unfolding, it’s hard to see anything weird about them, no matter how closely you pay attention to your surroundings. In the midst of the everyday, these things may strike you as simply ordinary things, a matter of course. They might not be logical, but time has to pass before you can see if something is logical.”

—-Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

Born in January of 1949 in Kyoto to parents both of whom were teachers, Haruki Murakami grew up in Kobe as an only child. Since childhood he was heavily influenced by Western culture, reading a wide range of European and American literature, such as Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Jack Kerouac. He moved to Tokyo, where he attended Waseda University, studying drama and graduating in 1973. After college, Murakami married and opened a small jazz bar, “Peter Cat”, in Tokyo, which he and his wife ran for seven years.

Hanuki Murakami’s first novel “Hear the Wind Sing” initially appeared in the June 1979 issue of literary magazine Gunzo, and was published in book form the following month. This first book of the “Trilogy of the Rat” won the Gunzou Literature Prize for new writers in 1979 and was adapted by director Kazuki Ōmori for the 1981 film “Hear the Wind Sing”. Murakami followed this success with two sequels “Pinball, 1973”, published in 1960, and “A Wild Sheep Chase”, published in 1962.

Murakami achieved national recognition in 1987 with the publication of “Norwegian Wood”, a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality, which sold millions of copies among the young Japanese. He is also the author of the novels “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”; “Dance Dance Dance”; “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle””, and “Sputnik Sweetheart”, among others. He has also written three short story collections: “The Elephant Vanishes”; “After the Quake”; and “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”.

Most of Murakami’s works use first-person narrative in the tradition of the Japanese “I-novel”, a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author’s life. With the family being a significant role in traditional Japanese literature, a central character who is independent becomes one who values freedom and solitude over close connections.

After Japan’s Hanshin earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, Murakami interviewed survivors, as well as the Aum religious cult responsible for the subway attack. From these interviews, he published two non-fiction books, forming the series entitled “Underground” in 1997 and 2000. While the book consisted mainly of narratives from individuals, it contained common themes revealing aspects of the psyche and values of the Japanese society as a whole.

Hanuki Murakami’s work has received numerous awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize, a biennial literary award given to writers whose work deals with themes of human freedom, society and government. In 2011, Murakami donated his eighty-thousand Pound winnings from the International Catalunya Prize to the victims of the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, and to those affected by the fukushima nuclear disaster.

Victor E. Frankl: “Man’s Search for Meaning”

Photographers Unknown, Reflections on Life

“The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?

No, thank you,’ he will think. ‘Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.”

—-Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Thanks to https://isthistoomuchblack.tumblr.com for the selfie image with sombrero.

Zane Grey: “Every Second the Scene Changed”

Photographers Unknown, Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Twenty

“I sat there for a long time and knew that every second the scene changed, yet I could not tell how. I knew I sat high over a hole of broken, splintered, barren mountains; I knew I could see a hundred miles of the length of it, and eighteen miles of the width of it, and a mile of the depth of it, and the shafts and rays of rose light on a million glancing, many-hued surfaces at once; but that knowledge was no help to me. I repeated a lot of meaningless superlatives to myself, and I found words inadequate and superfluous. The spectacle was too elusive and too great. It was life and death, heaven and hell.”

—-Zane Grey, The Last of the Plainsmen

E. E. Cummings, “Miracles Are to Come”

Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Twelve

“Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being; somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush ‘tie it into my hand’-

nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening, innocent spontaneous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted; brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to fear;shadow, mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence; never to rest and never to have:only to grow.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.”

—-E E Cummings, Introduction, Collected Poems