What's obsolete can't hurt you.



Detail.  The interior walls of the passenger elevators at the L.A. Central Library are covered with typewritten file cards from the library's original card catalogue system, mounted under tempered glass panels.

I discovered the poetry of e.e. cummings about the same time I discovered the typewriter (my dad's Royal).  The novelty of both eventually wore off as I became more sophisticated, proficient and yes, possibly jaded.  A Cap Lock Key is only interesting, or so I told myself, when it's new; I became a better typist and decided my feelings were evolving too, growing more complex, more refined than, say: 

                     anyone lived in a pretty how town
                     (with up so floating many bells down)

and very possibly my emotional nature was maturing; after all, I was leaving home, I'd gotten my own electric Olivetti portable, I was on the move.  I was 'on the road.' 

At the Library the other day, how far I'd really gotten -- how it had really all worked out, as they say, so far at least  -- seemed less significant, less profound -- less certain I guess you would say -- from the radical convictions of youth.  Perspective rarely remains unchanged; it all shifts ("constant in the darkness, where's that at?" as Joni Mitchell observed).  Good thing too, Change.  "Same as it ever was" isn't always a compliment.

What had I gone to the Library to look up, anyway.  Oh, Love.  Well, you can blame callow youth, but I didn't remember ever thinking of e.e. cummings as a Poet of Love. 

The question now is similar to the question I tried asking when I looked at the wall of card catalogue entries the other day: am I feeling a longing for what used to be, or for who I used to be and what I used to feel, when card catalogues were new?   Does anyone else remember those long wooden drawers, with the metal rod that ran through a hole at the bottom of every card, keeping them in place?  I used to wonder how they got all the cards in and how they could never make a mistake because they'd never be able to get them out again once they'd built the drawer around them.

Of course you can't really be nostalgic for a system we've so clearly improved upon, can you.  We've come so far.  And as I like to say, I am traveling light -- no heart.  So can the man who never capitalized say anything to me about what I feel now, I wondered.  

                  somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
                  any experience, your eyes have their silence:
                  in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
                  or which I cannot touch because they are too near

                  your slightest look easily will unclose me
                  though I have closed myself as fingers,
                  you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
                  (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

                  or if your wish be to close me, i and 
                  my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
                  as when the heart of this flower imagines
                  the snow carefully everywhere descending;

                  nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
                  the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
                  compels me with the colour of its countries,
                  rendering death and forever with each breathing

                  (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


There was a time, back when I used a card catalogue and a manual typewriter, when I thought enough of this poem to copy it down.  Then I moved on to other poets and, presumably, other ways of perceiving and understanding the world.  And that is why perhaps, standing in the elevator at the Central Library, I was reminded, looking at those typed entries on old file cards, of feelings I'd forgotten, and of all the things I have moved on from since then.  It seems like a long time ago.