e.e. cummings, famous for his poetry, published a book in the 1930’s of his paintings and drawings. In the forward he referred to himself as “An author of pictures, a draughtsman of words.” It sounds very much the way modern comicbook artists like to think of themselves. In fact, Cummings was quite aware of the cartoonist’s medium when it was still in its infancy. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (oddly now mostly forgotten by our same moderns) was a favorite of his as early as 1917. Jack Kirby and Will Eisner entered the world that year, and the U.S. entered the First World War.
Cummings is an interesting case. He spent more time painting and drawing than writing. His early work is appropriately marked with influences of the imagist school such as Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. Imagist poetry had a new way of leading a reader from one thought or feeling to the next. An imparted vision, it was discovered, is very different when preceded or followed by one particular other. The order in which imagery is used to elicit a reaction has a great effect on the meaning that gets perceived. Cummings thought visually, and of his poems as “little pictures,” sound paintings. The work was, in its foundations, emotional narrative imagry.
During most of the First World War Cummings was in college, but by 1917 he was in prison in France for a misunderstanding. Sergei Eisenstein was not in France in1917, but a Russian in St. Petersburg watching the October Revolutionaries throw off the power of the Czar.
As a silent film director, Eisenstein had a very definite understanding about narrative imagery. His Theory of Montage still informs modern thinking. How to best tell stories with images? Eisenstein believed that the most effective way was to do it wthout the image. A picture itself, by itself, was to say almost nothing. The something was in the line between the images, in the cut, in the gutter.
It was in the nature of the human mind, as he understood it, to make connections. The idea being, that if you put one image down, and then another next to it, especially images that said little by theselves, the reader would find the meaning in the only place left to find it, in between them. That way, the thread we follow out of the artist’s maze toward understanding, transpires not so much on the screen, on the stage, on the page, as it does in our own minds. To coin a Yogi Berra-ism, “It ain’t in your head, ‘til it’s in your head.”
Eisenstein never went to prison, he got famous. More famous than Cummings, almost as famous as Yogi Berra. But Eisenstein was doing with images what the poets had been doing with imagery. And cartoonists had learned it from poets, which is maybe why Cummings liked Krazy Kat.
But more than anything he liked, Cummings liked creating. In a forward to a book of poems he published in 1926, he said, “If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little–somebody who is obsessed by making.” He saw his works as part of creation and he struggled that they should measure up with the little miracles of everything. “With you I leave a rememberance 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”– ”
More than whatever it was he was about to make, about to say, about to tell us about the things he saw or found value in, he began first by being someone who had to account for how he felt. Before knowing how to express, before knowing what one has to say for himself to the world at all, the beginning comes from needing to speak. Needing to make a thing and put yourself in the world.
Then comes the hard part: converting from Jones to Smith. Going from being the kind of person who wants things, to the kind of person who makes things to be wanted. And who among us is disinterested in the footprints of miracles?
