The Syntax of Things

I was lucky enough to be raised by literature loving parents – that is to say, to grow up in a house populated by numerous bookcases full of books, and to be guided towards them by mentors who wanted me to value the worlds they contained. For bedtime stories my parents would serialize books like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Great Expectations, with my mom often putting on southern or British accents to voice the different characters. I loved story time, and learned quickly that books and novels with daunting titles or famous authors didn’t have to be inaccessible. After all, some of the scariest sounding great novels were actually adventure stories, or had narrators who were kids just like me!

But because I was sure I could tackle any literary challenge – and was, incidentally, a sad kid, sometimes misguidedly/desperately looking for answers – I ended up accessing certain authors before my time. For instance, I remember reading The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway at the age of twelve and wondering why Jake and Brett couldn’t just be together. If they love each other so much, I thought, then why so much angst? It wasn’t until I reread the book for a class in high school that I realized I had completely missed the implication that Jake’s war injury had left him impotent. As I grew up I struggled similarly through heavy tomes on artistic photography, Sam Shepard plays and Ken Kesey novels, only more doggedly determined to finish the works that most befuddled me. Although I had the resolve to understand the vocabulary, the metaphors and some of the references, sometimes I was simply hindered in understanding by a lack of real life experience.

I was fourteen when I began to read some of the works of E.E. Cummings, and I remember liking them in a simple, confused kind of way. His funny grammar and odd line breaks were pleasant, if perplexing, and I liked how he would sometimes arrange the words on the page in weird patterns. That was pretty much the extent of my appreciation for his work, and anyways at that age I was more interested in probing the delightfully dark, squelching lusts of Charles Bukowski than following Cumming’s grasshoppers around a page. I hadn’t revisited Cummings in ages, and had pretty much written him off (except for a brief incident at Interlochen arts camp, when an emphatically free spirited cabin mate read me a bizarre poem she had written about having some kind of graphic but metaphoric sex with the famous poet).

But the other day someone quoted part of a line from one of my favorite e.e. Cummings poems – ‘for life’s not a paragraph, (and death I think is no parenthesis).’ I couldn’t remember the rest of the poem, so I looked it up to reread it.

I had specifically remembered liking this poem for its self-conscious syntax and punctuation, and I mostly remembered that the word paragraph ended a paragraph, and that there was a funny and clever use of an actual parenthesis in the last line.

Well, it turns out the poem isn’t about syntax at all. It’s about love.

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you.

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady I swear by all flowers. Don’t cry

–the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids’ flutter which says

 

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life’s not a paragraph

 

and death I think is no parenthesis

There’s no parenthesis encasing the last line – “and death I think is no parenthesis.” That would be silly. Whoever would put that parenthesis there would never wholly kiss you.

The website where I found this poem had two more untitled love poems by Cummings. The last one characterized the intimacy between lovers as motion, the give and take of understanding and tenderness as movements of opening and closing. I didn’t remember this poem as potently as the other, but something in the last stanza was familiar:

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

I suddenly remembered reading this poem as a ninth grader, because I remembered how I unsettled I had been by that last line: nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. The imagery that preceded this line had been the straightforward metaphor of the blooming flower, of spring and in contrast snow snow, of opening and then again closing. But the last line, this collusion of parts, had been so unsettlingly enigmatic.

Now, having been in love and having been touched in some way by the ‘most frail gesture’ of some very small hands, I understand.

Growing older has mostly been a relief for me. I’m realizing that potency of feeling may dwindle with age, but I’m mostly reassured that much of the pain and power of simple emotions can be tempered by something so natural as the complexity that comes with experience and age.

I don’t think that I wasted my time on the poems, books and movies that I didn’t understand.  After all, I understood important parts of things. Maybe I didn’t grasp the love story in Jack London’s Martin Eden, but I could understand Martin’s love of reading, and his depression. Maybe I didn’t quite get Franny’s nervous breakdown in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, but I understood the deep love between siblings. And I’ll revisit these books, now after I’ve been in love, someday after I’ve truly lost, with different eyes and different experiences. Maybe I’ll find an entirely different story. Even if the syntax of things remains the same.