more great Stein quotes

“Poetry and Grammar” (from Lectures in America in Stein writings 1932-46)

One of the things that is a very interesting thing to know is how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside of you.

Do you always have the same kind of feeling in relation to the sounds as the words come out of you or do you not. All this has so much to do with grammar and with poetry and with prose.
Words have to do everything in poetry and prose and some writers write more in articles and prepositions and some say you should write in nouns, and of course one has to think of everything. (313)

When you are at school and learn grammar grammar is very exciting. I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagraming sentences. I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagraming sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. (314)

Sentences and paragraphs. Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are. I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is.
I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog’s drinking will see what I mean. (322)

Prose is the balance the emotional balance that makes the reality of paragraphs and the unemotional balance that makes the reality of sentences and having realized completely realized that sentences are not emotional while paragraphs are, prose can be the essential balance that is made inside something that combines the sentence and the paragraph, examples of this I have been reading to you. (326)

Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.
When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun. (327)

imply.

your silence by which I mean
there is no eye contact

a tattered ball
night giggling
mud scented

intend.

it is unclear by which I mean
I try turning in each direction
and yet

yellow light
a waxing moon
at all hours
or a shared taste sweet
and salty

indiscretion.

by which I mean
every possibility

against smooth
against skin
against thinking for a moment
outside of this

more Stein

“Lecture 1” from Narration (Selections Ed. Joan Retallack)

It is something that any one interested in narrative has to very much think about, because it has never happened before. Always before the language of each nation who had a narrative t make a story to tell a life to express a thing to say did it with a language that had gradually become a language that was made gradually by them to say what they had to say. But here in America because the language was made so late in the day that is at a time when everybody began to read and to write all the time and to read what was written all the time it was impossible that the language would be made as languages used to be made to say what the nation which was coming to e was going to say. All this has never happened before. History repeats itself anything repeats itself but all this had never happened before. (293)

So there they were and the Americans were not at all that way they did not live their life at all no not at all in that way and they had it to say that they lived their own life in their own way and they had it to say it with the words that had been made to tell a nation’s story in an entirely different way as the nation who had made the language had the entirely different story to tell of living their daily life every moment of every day. (295)

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do when they live where they have to live that is where they have come to live which of course they do do. (300)

from "My Debt to Books"

by Gertrude Stein

So many books have been important to me, it is like the man who said about automobiles when some one asked him is that mark a good one, all automobiles are good, some might go better than others but they all go, and that is the way books are to me, any book that I can read at all is important to me and I can read most of them, each one does something to me, you have to read a lot of books if you are going to read all your life and read at least five or six books a week, you can read them over and over again but even so it does take a good many if you begin when you are very young and you live a reasonably long life.

intuitional transfer, a geographical space, topographic concerns relate to an array of condensation (emotionally speaking). these things I offer in response: catalyst or cataclysm. each photo a design specific to internal conflict, blurring scenes interrupted by color, fragments of lines, framed monotony of landscape nonetheless in constant flux.

what I will tell you is this: each implication like a gravel floor, shifts underfoot. specific pebbles stuck between toes or in the crevasses of the soles of my shoes. the dry dusty pattern of comprehension gets muddy in the rain.

this space, filled with the sound of cars and industry, hints toward complete isolation, outside of...then turns away entirely. a continuum of populated reflection.

a wildflower, and endangered plant, a trail closed for restoration. the dog wanders. seconds filled with detail, scent of rotted something in the freezer, a cool humid breeze brushes dry foothills. she sniffs, sticks her head all the way in. i tell you this is not like it ever was. returning to the same but completely changed. this other me. a distant imagined you. the dog, like the path, seems to intuit direction. morning evening birds, this isn't the desert at all. rocks underfoot, I am thinking that there was a moment when I would have wondered otherwise. but in this, exactly, there is no other present. no example of a replaced moment. a dog sleeps under the desk and nothing has happened, not before I thought you existed, nor is there momentum toward a future struggle. it is this. two dogs jump under the showers of a garden hose. one dog watches. one dog sleeps. the image stands still with no purpose. that is the lesson.

1.
Can you dare encounter each detail, a personality, in relation, a situation. We are all in context. She wandered across the room: grey carpet, grey walls, the scent she remembered used to waft through hallways, mingle over letters received from far away. An earlier comfortable moment, that is, in terms of not knowing so little for so long. How to relate each feeling encountered, that is, shredded fingernails, hair tightly curled, blemished skin. That is, an inability to process emotion. Temperament. Holes in the wall. Self flagellation. Verbal abuse from the inside out.

2.
Describe your own specific location:

Concrete. Moving layers of human built not nature. Planned, usable, landscaped. Wild Detroit. Birds, overgrowth, taking over empty lots, spaces, wildlife call it home. Crumbled sidewalks covered in weeds. New gardens using space among impromptu wilderness.

3.
What's your story?

4.
History of economic turmoil. Disturbed dreams of suburbia. Fleeing city grounds. Undone. History of mixed emotion. Stay. Leave. Stranded. Abandoned and crumbling. History of a city full of profit. Lingers in shadows of monuments: an old train station, high ceilings, frescoes. What grows around in through. Write your story. Years of sediment. Emotional rubble. Graffiti consequences. Art in public where once stood capitalism's empire. The auto center of industry. The self(identity) in context. History of emotional abandon. Grey.

revolt is continuous
the space of a body in space
pieces cohere, dissolve, calculate
coins, instruction, an orange hue
wafting
smooth tones linger
wasting precariously
why imagine any
future
refuse
choice

number the sections in order to tell
truth grey mist
every day is otherwise
but need
fake photos fake plants
remember
blue sky decorated streets characters
colored in crayon
outlines
striped
hold distance at length
with or without lyrics
chords vibrate
decades the false progression
looping each nervous intention
scared scarred diverge
neatly censored (sensory) concrete
seeps

mostly inhibit decline rancor aggressive viral or a stairway
of iron tells otherwise, choose a word write it in parts one
section after another list pleasure weighted over a list

cat crawl spiral iron
mint ice in summer
bowling after hours

can you this page cut at the edge missing words display
a new sparkle, or pretend, at least walking one distance

or another
focus each line

an extended visual moment. flame. scattered. a camera shifted microsecond. your wild hair. my manic laugh. there was talk and sound. in that instant. a wish, a beginning with inarticulate syllables. repeat the number 30. count. repeat. a sentence with no predicate stands still. flame scatters suspended. illuminates. repetition with a shift, slight, clear.

from Plot by Claudia Rankine

10:12 pm

Is it allowed? Am I, as a descendant of particulars, unneeded times, permitted the thing and more? This world, its worst is real. What doesn't hurt, ticking past, what doesn't intersect? Our destinations recalled, our points of fracture, of limbs crushed to memory, no more than experience, I am too aware of other ways.


Still Life

A draft enters. A sketchy gust. Blown is the woman standing within her likeness. To her left the sun needs to be drawn but her hands are the shape cradling her breasts, keeping her nipples in place. Each breast is the rest floating within metonymy. Her swollen scape keeps her awake. In its milky silence she feels distaste. She holds still. She waits. The draft draws dust into her eyes. Her eyes tear until her outline dislodges, dilutes, blurs. In the time it takes to fix her face the moon is drawn quartered.

from Branches Without Leaves
an essay on a word

4.
In terms of grief, it’s a matter of time. This is what they say. But it is not what one hears. The words are intangible. The notion of time, of grief, of what has even been lost is not conceivable. There is no time. There is only time. What is time. There is only this.

Grief caused by loss. Death. Displacement. Deconstruction. There are symptoms, treatments, complications. All of these only equal moving through stages in time. Deny. Anger. Be numb. No sense of time passing, not passing, standing still, falling.

So many people show up for the funeral. From all over. Many were here for the wedding. Tell stories, look at pictures. One night we drink beer at Mike’s favorite bar down the street. The next day his dad gets up to speak during the service. We all hold our breaths, don’t hold our tears. He tells us to have faith in what happens next. We have lunch in the same room where we ate ribs and corn on the cob at the rehearsal dinner almost five years ago. You were with me then. I don’t know how things came to this.

from Branches Without Leaves

5.


Cathy Caruth explains that the traumatic neurosis is “not the reaction to any horrible event but, rather, the peculiar, and perplexing experience of survival” and asks the question “what does it mean to survive?”

The pathology or neurosis is not in the original event, but in the haunting repetition of the image or event that takes hold of the traumatized in different manifestations, and for which there may be no understanding. The obviously traumatic event for both family and friends of victims, and the general American public is 9/11, into which there is no real access, nor does it seem possible to represent. Alongside a photo of a pile of stretchers made of wood for transporting rescued victims (or bodies) from the Trade Center wreckage, Rankine writes, “The language of description competes with the dead in the air” (82). What does it mean to survive? Caruth explains, “contemporary trauma” involves “a crisis of truth” that “extends beyond the question of individual cure and asks how we in this era can have access to our own historical experience, to a history that is in its immediacy a crisis to whose truth there is no simple access” (Trauma 6). But the stretchers were, for the most part, unnecessary. There were no bodies. At first, some few survivors of the event itself, and later, family, friends, rescue workers who experienced the event only in its aftermath, and through the loss incurred.

grey

from Branches Without Leaves
an essay on a word

9.

The rain makes her crazy. The smells. Not able to walk around outside. She takes off, runs, leaps, climbs the neighbors’ fence, gone. Only instinct, the desire to keep going. After a squirrel, a smell. She’ll endure the consequences later, now, she doesn’t think, just goes. Later, she’ll reflect on her actions from her time-out place in the basement.

When one thing disappears, something else takes its place. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it, or it isn’t apparent. One day I was missing you, but thanked you, quietly, for giving me the opportunity to do some things: adopt Tash, listen to myself, do more yoga, sleep in the middle of the bed. One day I forgot altogether, and then remembered: Friday happy hour, eating with friends, snow in the woods, breaths instead of thoughts.

Tash is always in trouble. She runs away and climbs fences. She gets into the garbage and pulls out things to lick like wrappers or plastic bags, or things to tear into a million pieces, like empty milk cartons. Still she is all love and energy. Her whole body wiggles when I walk in the door. She sticks her nose right up against mine and stares deeply into my eyes like she knows we are connected, like she is telling me everything will be fine, we have each other. She jumps on the bed and curls up with her body pushed as close to me as possible and we keep each other warm.

Some Buddhists say that emptiness simply means inconceivable, or infinite, potential. In order to have the opportunity to realize this potential, one must surrender to complete emptiness, release attachments, trust in letting go. Pure possibility. Like a tree with no leaves, heading into spring.

from Branches Without Leaves
an essay on a word


6.
scribbled on scrap paper. you want to keep doing this into the future. sign here. date it. write it. say it. live it. the narratives we tell (ourselves). you tell hybrid stories. fact, fiction, sound misplaced, modifiers, dreams repeated as misheard memories. you decide how to narrate my past.

(Rankine: is he dead? is she dead?)

present elided by blurry images. you paint between lines you have drawn by hand.

(no one deserves to be shot 41 times.)

re-create events for some character who has my initials, is not me. I am in a room with no door, no window, a phone that doesn’t call out. when it rings I talk to you but there is no one the other end. I can’t find my stories. filed in another room I try to narrate them for you but there are no verbs, or articles, available. I realize there is no phone. I am talking to the face I imagine is you, projected on the wall. when I wake I am on the floor. suffocating. repeating the same 3 line story wondering if you can hear me. a chant. trying to catch my breath. repeat. what happened to that paper? the one you signed? in a file with my stories. the stories you told before you disintegrated on the breeze. you are in front of me. cannot speak. mumble in nonsense syllables. lips contort. my hand goes through your chest. I wake in the corner. why did you, I repeat. I crawl into the closet. curl on the floor. the dog snores. your face moves out of focus.

(Rankine: what’s the use of forgetting if its followed by dying? this is the most miserable in my life.)

Laura Mullen

"Original Material"

Laura Mullen

so fabulous...

Bride Journal

from Precarious Life

by Judith Butler

I do not think, for instance, that one can invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. One cannot say, “Oh, I’ll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to the task, and I’ll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me.” I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.
Something takes hold of you: where does it come from? What sense does it make? What claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? To what are we tied? And by what are we seized? Freud reminded us that when we lose someone, we do not always know what it is in that person that has been lost. So when one loses, one is also faced with something enigmatic: something is hiding in the loss, something is lost within the recesses of loss. If mourning involves knowing what one has lost (and melancholia originally meant, to a certain extent, not knowing), then mourning would be maintained by its enigmatic dimension, by the experience of not knowing incited by losing what we cannot fully fathom. (21-22)

On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost “in” you , that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related (22).

What grief displays, in contrast, is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. I might try to tell a story here about what I am feeling, but it would have to be a story in which the very “I” who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the telling; the very “I” is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing. I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must.
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other, And if we’re not, we’re missing something. (23)

For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you,” by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know. (49).