stein-1b – the pelagic school

Gertrude Stein in space + time

1B: REPEATING

Repeating is Stein’s word for the thing that makes a person that person she is—that thing as it is continuously present and continually reiterating itself as that person lives.

Repeating is also Stein’s word for the thing that appears variously across many different people—ways of being or thinking or moving through which one person echoes another.

To find a person’s repeating is the early task Stein gave herself.

“Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me.”

“I do this for my own sake and for the sake of those who know I know it that they look like other ones, that they are separate and yet always repeated.”

Paying attention to a person’s repeating is the task Stein set out for herself in her early phases of writing — the portraits, and also her early opus, The Making of Americans, which paid attention to her family, who, as she notes, didn’t enjoy the scrutiny. (“No one who knows me can like it.”)

“They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it, I love it and now I will write it.”

“More and more I love it of them, the being in them, the mixing in them, the repeating in them, the deciding the kind of them every one is who has human being.”

There is an interesting tension here between an impulse to classify and the love that animates her looking, which sees and hears each one as a singularity. The classifying impulse in her thinking will give way — even now she sees each one as a unique combination of classifications or types — their repetitions. The agitating desire I see in here is encyclopedic: toward a plural multitude.

“There will be descriptions of every kind of way every one can be a kind of men and women.”

“There must be a whole history of each one of them. There must then now be a description of all repeating.”

Hear Stein reading from The Making of Americans

(one of several excerpts of Stein reading on the excellent PennSound archive)

Joan Richardson has written about the sense of combinatory and recombinatory being that Stein encapsulates as repeating as a kind of written embodiment or compositional deployment of the emergent understanding of Mendelian genetics that was in the forefront of evolutionary science during the period when Stein was in medical school. Richardson’s attention is often on these trans-disciplinary instances of the way new scientific understandings open up compositional, attentional possibilities in literary form. Stein’s attention is still, to a degree, that of an anatomist, trying to make maps of what people are.

“Let me make believe that Stein had seen diagrams mapping the numerical ratios of Mendel’s Law of Segregation: Short/Short crossed with Tall/Tall yield four Tall/Shorts; Short/Short crossed with Tall/Short yield two Tall/Shorts and two Short/Shorts; and on and on. Four elements continuously and variously repeating: ‘I think I won’t/I think I will/I think I will / I think I won’t’ (ATCG repeating in a string of 3-6 billion units long, its combinations the markers revealing genetic inheritance). ‘Out of the two sections printed in sequence’ from ‘On Elucidation,’ as Ulla Dydo notes, ‘she makes a checkerboard of texts and voices alternating.’ Dydo cites another example from the same text: ‘There are four words in all. / There. / Why. / There. / Why. / There. / Able. / Idle.’ There are, too, as Mendel and all nineteenth-century breeders knew, random mutations which later researchers learned result from errors in transcription, shifts of one letter in the code, imperfect replications. Of Stein’s word-play, Dydo has observed: ‘she substitutes the homophone ‘there’ for ‘their’ or even ‘three’ for ‘there,’ or she bends ‘and so forth’ into a new shape, ‘and so fourth’; “It is wonderful the number of mistakes a verb can make.’ And in the endless proliferation of life forms, “Always one Stein piece engenders the next, so that each becomes a context for the next.” Molecular biology inherited the Neo-Mendelian ‘idea that all of an organism’s characteristics were written in a somatic language, generated by a grammar that produced outward sentences distant but derivable from deep structure.” Stein believed no less than Emerson that words are things — “every word I am ever using in writing has for me very existing being’ — their present form containing the history of their permutations through time, her writing an example ‘which has in it all the history of its intellectual recreation…language as a real thing.’ Why not, once the mechanism of generation had been uncovered, experiment in breeding words as well as sweet peas? Since Mendel had observed ‘that characteristics in intricate organisms were preserved in patterns,’ and since language is the unique characteristic of the intricate organism humans are, why not consider words preserved in patterns equally as elements of the phenotype revealing the otherwise hidden permutations of the genotype unfolding its mechanism over time — in Stein’s case, words preserved in patterns of English spoken by ‘every kind of men and women’ in America. She thus ‘conceived…the rhythm of anybody’s personality.’” (From Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism, 234-5)

Rhythm or pattern as a way to recreate the feeling of a person in written compositions. Not representation, not argument, not commentary, but presence.

“Always from the beginning there was to me all living as repeating. This is now a description of loving repeating as a being.”

“Everyone is always repeating the whole of them.”

The active thought image here is to consider the affinity of the mapping of the human genome with the rhythmic mapping of a person’s ‘repeating’ as two ways of thinking person. Not a psychological way of thinking character so much as a vibratory, patterned one.

“Sometimes then there will be a complete history of all repeating to completed understanding. Sometime then there will be a complete history of every one who ever was or is or will be living.”

“Much loving repeating has to be in a being so that one can listen to all the repeating in every one. Almost everyone loves all repeating in some one.”

Stein is often dismissed as “merely” formal in her poetics, as if her writing possesses no real ethics, only belligerently difficult syntax. I like to remember how she asserts that the kind of attention she pays, the attention at the foundation of the experiments that ushered her into her substance as a writer, are grounded in loving.

The portion of The Making of Americans you met on this page is scanned from Stein reader edited by Joan Retallack, a highly recommended collection (although it is not much interested in her plays). See the reading list on the course hub page for full citation.

A portrait of much repeating

Orta, or One Dancing is Stein’s 1912 portrait of Isadora Duncan. As you read, look for the principal of repeating at work in the looping variations of each paragraph. Does it work for you as a kind of insistent ongoing sense of being present (as reader) to the “bottom nature” of her subject? Read at least part of it aloud to get a feel for its rhythm.

further exercises

Portrait exercise

Find a subject whose portrait you’d like to write. You might observe someone in a public space, or ask someone you know to “sit” for you, or write from memory. Set yourself a limitation (a number of pages or minutes, perhaps) and write their portrait borrowing Stein’s early experimental method — that is, write to find what is repeating from moment to moment in your subject. Allow your portrait to stay totally focused on this moment-to-moment present-tense sense of your subject. No conclusion needs to be drawn, no context needs to be offered.

It might help to think of this as a perception exercise rather than a writing exercise.

reflective freewrite

All of Stein’s procedural methods are oriented toward knowing who and what is in front of her. In her writing, she is not so much interested in kinds of knowledge we might describe as comprehensive, explanatory, or totalizing. Her knowledge question is a little bit more like: what is it like to be in the room with this person, this being?

Write freely for five or ten minutes, exploring the question of your own interest in knowing the characters or subjects of your writing. Use Stein’s example as a way to set your own interest into relief. How do you want to know them? How do you want them to be known through the vehicle of your writing?

Consider also, whether this limit-case, explanation-free experiment of hers holds any interest for you in a practical sense, and what kind of prompts or questions you might ask to get at what’s interesting about it. For example, if Stein’s question is, “what repeats or insists in this person that makes her exactly her and no one else,” then how would you frame the question to active your own experiment in knowing?

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks.

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now.

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment.

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”?

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them?

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others.

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it.

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?