EE Cummings

The voice of the first person singular always has validity, no matter the quality of the voice. Even if the light that's given off is dark light it's worth listening to.

Susan Cheever, in her charming little book on EE Cummings, notes the three tenants of modernism: 1) the "exploration of using sounds instead of meanings to connect words to the reader's feelings" 2) the stripping away of "all unnecessary things to bring attention to form and structure, making the formerly hidden skeleton a work exuberantly visible" and 3) an "embrace of adversity."

When I can't sleep I read late at night, and sometimes well into the morning. Everything seems Modern then, even Cervantes. My eyes can't just sit there though like they used to, I jump around from book to book, taking in the words, sometimes very great words as in the stories of the Bible, Charles Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Samuel Beckett quickly, to see if they still have meaning for my life. Five or six minutes is all I can read now at one time, then I take a break, then I read for five or six more minutes etc. etc.

After a while of reading like this I enter a post modern phase where I'm able to read without any book at all; that is, I read a book that has no words, seeing a book in the wall, on the ceiling, through the window.

Reading Susan Cheever's bio last night I'd forgotten what a charming little bigot EE Cummings had been, anti-semitic, avid supporter of Joseph McCarthy, and that he died of a heart attack while chopping wood at the family farm in New Hampshire. Almost everything about Cummings' private life contradicted the public life he constructed out of modernism, his absolute, mostly unfathomable commitment to individualism.

There are very few opportunities to enter a world that no longer exists, a world that's come to an end but will still let you in, in fact wants you to come in, but modernism still provides one of them, if not the only one.