i.e.

The last issue of i.e. is little like the preceding six. There is less polemic about it. Convinced against convincing, the editors say, "We have composed our final issue of drawings, stories, and poems, hoping to entertain you." They do, although entertainment didn't seem their first intent.

The editors originally announced, "This review is meant to support a demand for art and especially thought, the products and sources of a vitality which is being unconsciously or accidentally crushed by the universities." They suggested that universities, like museums, now preserve dead things, through the memorization or paraphrasing of past knowledge, as if it had nothing to do with now.

In the second number they criticized the uni-("in the academy, grades, fellowships, appoint-versities for encouraging responsibility to things ments; in the world, wealth, social standing, etc.") which they felt to be external. They said that such responsibility "is in fact the irresponsibility of the individual to himself." They were not denying corporate responsibility, but emphasizing that it "can only exist meaningfully as the organization of each human's responsibility towards his own dignity."

A Point of View?

After trying for three issues, the editors concluded that a point of view is possible as well as desirable. But possible only when and because one sees how hard it is in coming. The next editorial, entitled "The Place of Opposition" more directly criticized this university for its distractions, the activities which exist not for their own sake but to prove something else to somebody else, and which turn into poses. "Standards of measurement," they said," are strong distractions both in the B.A. and the Ph.D. systems." Then i.e. published its Harvard Issue, which has been much talked about.

To criticize that issue for pejorative was to miss its point; and this last issue suggests that brash confidence and imagination needn't be limited to scientific work. "When we can seriously entertain the thought of flying to the moon or any other bit of scientific surrealism, why do we bring up that deus ex machina 'impossible. . .necessity' to limit the possibility of living imaginitively."

No Response

Now i.e. has had its political word to say. Its editors have left the university and can no longer be, as they were, "political in the classical sense," finding "orientation and energy through the discussion of the problems of the University community." Since also the responses that i.e. sought to liberate had found no institutional home, there was little intelligent discussion. The Advocate last year published "our acceptance of Mr. Raditsa's challenge," and this fall published an editorial pleading in vague language, for simple language, less interested in simplicity than a windy theory of simplicity. The CRIMSON published a rather bored analyse de syntax. The administration's response was to advise the editors against publishing the course lectures of faculty members.

Since there was no real discussion, the editors could only, in the present, final issue, make another statement of belief, in the form of pleas that seem so unnecessary and redundant as to be funny: "We are personal, and the first level of experience is almost by definition subjective completely. . .Critics are humans. . .The good life is not a quantitative thing; it does not increase; it is," Does this need to be stated? Who can be convinced of it who doesn't already believe it?

It often seemed that i.e. was trying to say something quite simple, which did not conveniently lend itself to manifestos. Since the failure of their agitation, they seem to have come back to it.

What they may mean is that the verbal juggling of ideas tyrannizes the sensations which might give them relevance, and creates, if anything, a false framework of taught knowledge that obscures knowing. When somebody "knows too much," it is often this: he knows too much that doesn't matter to him, that makes it harder for him to see what does matter.

Except for the editorial, this issue contains no 'ideological' articles. The viewpoint that its editors have reached, or returned to, cannot perhaps be enunciated in proclamations, and few can be convinced by the mere saying of it. Maybe the viewpoint can better be discovered in the stories and poems and pictures of this issue.

Fat and Skinny

There are lots of poems, fat ones and skinny. I like Kenneth Koch's best. His are fat. He writes like a great bull, not afraid of going anywhere or being anything. The nicest poem is The Young Park. "Hands picked/On her blossoms./The young park was sad." In the park things become animals, and animals people, and the young park becomes a person, Young Park. Even the automobile club gets mislocated in the zoo. All because the poet becomes the park, and believes in it. "At night, when everything is yellow and green,/You too can come alive/If you believe in me." Mr. Koch does not describe or persuade, and his poem is not a bunch of well-behaved metaphors gathered around something that was once somebody's idea. He is making a new place where you might want to be; and that, I think, is what poetry ought to be. Another poem of his, The History of Jazz, is nostalgic and wistful for things, but not twisted around them so that it can't talk. His third poem is declamatory and more than most energetic, filled like a great stuffed pie with backward looking happy smiles on the dead and useless bodies (suffocating names, proficiences, and adjectives--states symbolized) revered because they are dead and useless and can't kick. The poet treats these bodies to expressions--Cockadoodle doo!--and then hands them to the strangler who near the end is caught reading The Hudson Review. I overflow on Kenneth Koch because he is alive and seems to exemplify in some ways what the editors have gotten around to saying. He is also clear.

Some of the poems here are not clear. John Ashbury's Chinatown, for instance, is filled with small startling things--"when the firebug grated a lemon"--which only jounce; taken as a whole, the poem is dreamy and shapeless.

Russell Thomas' poem resembles variations rising from the title maxim, First Things Last. The poem does not get to you by images so much as in waves, amplifying the starting statement that "Seeing is better than believing." Once you have seen you can only go to distort the sight.

Phyllis Smith's poems are three brave attempts to make words into sights and songs and children's voice. Her hard, heavy lines and sheer, skimming ones are packed with consonants, alliterative even driving, to suggest the twist of a bronze by Henry Moore or the voice of a counter tenor, or a child's playing. Even more than the others, Reclining Figure is of substantial pauses that might better be heard than read.

The issue's longest story is the funniest and also the best. Ivan C. Karp's A Medicine Called Happiness tells part of the history of Hayyem Soloveichik, who is conspired against by his purposes and his father. The humor of the story comes both from Karp's odd eye for detail and from the picture of Hayyem's father, "the scholar," which Hyyam's oblique remarks create. When in the synagogue he is nudging his father to ask for money, he thinks, "I was faced with an iron will pretending to be religious ecstasy." The story is so readable because of the suspense with which we wait for fate to turn Hayyem's small successes into monstrous failures. His greatest early triumph, losing his virginity ("Without any kind of preliminaries, on top of a flour sack we got completely mixed up together"), produces two months later, a baby, for which he is convinced to pay "two month's salary for silence and one months salary for expenses."

Meyer Liben's two short stories make elaborate and fantastical developments on the petty deceits of big business. I think Solomon's Wisdom is better, if only because it shows more completely how lost a businessman can get in the midst of his own designs and the "apparently sympathetic attention" he gives to his associates. Paul Goodman's Bathers at Westover Pond less successfully describes the frightful misunderstandings of a married couple. The story takes the form of a series of seperate, mistaken images which the two thrust upon each other. Though these psychological forays are real enough by themselves, they don't seem connected. This lacks a continuing life, and isn't really a story.

There is much more to this thick issue; the most notable are eight fine reproductions of drawings by Jackson Pollock. Taken even in sum, this issue's contribution don't seem to lack a viewpoint. The best of them, which might be called fantasies, seem to show how it feels, how funny it sometimes feels, to be human.