Stein 1a – the pelagic school

Gertrude Stein in space and time

1a: becoming an experimenter

Before Stein committed herself to writing, she studied science. She was present at the early stages of two different disciplines: the laboratory-based approach to psychology practiced by William James (as his student when an undergrad at Radcliffe), and the nascent field of neuroanatomy (as a medical student at Johns Hopkins). Both of these disciplines had a hand in dismantling the dualism and essentialism separating the understanding of mind and body — a dismantling that we now take for granted.

You could say that she ported this experimental, process-based approach to working over to a creative field. But you could also say that writing constituted one more field of science for her, a venue in which to think about thinking, about what consciousness and aliveness are.

Stein is of course not at all alone in this bridge, or in her interest in the traffic between these disciplines — I don’t present her here as exceptional so much as point it out because this experimental process is at work both in Stein getting writing written and in anyone reading Stein’s writing. Writing and reading both take place inside the experiment. That is, to paraphrase Mac Wellman from his essay “Speculations,” the writing is completed by the mindfulness of the reader.

And completed differently in the mind of every subsequent reader.

With James, Stein was introduced to what James called “radical empiricism.” Empiricism alone is the knowledge derived from sense experience (historically, the debate is between worldly experience and some kind of mystical Platonic nonmaterial mind stuff). What is added by the “radical” is the commitment to attend to all experience, including the transitions between experiences, the vaguer and more relational fields of experience.

From James too, following from radical empiricism, is an emphasis on the experiential as the place from which meaning, understanding, truth value, and decision about how to act spring forth — an emphasis that grounds both philosophical pragmatism and political pluralism.

Key ideas from James about different kinds of knowledge will remain in Stein’s vocabulary and provide support for her own commitment to non-descriptive, non-“narrative”-writing. (A breakdown of these ideas will come in a later section.)

Here’s Lyn Hejinian’s encapsulation of Stein’s time studying with James, from “Two Stein Talks:

At Radcliffe College, or what was then called Harvard Annex, Gertrude Stein studied with William James, who was not yet the philosopher William James but still a psychologist.

For James, psychology meant the study of consciousness—the contents and forms of consciousness. His methods were experimental, involving laboratory work and hence using laboratory methods. His principal work was the study of perception, our consciousness of perception, and the consciousness of the consciousness of perception—a trajectory from which one can hear the rumble of an approaching philosophy of language. James thoroughly understood, and Stein animated in practice, the vital, even vivacious, relationship of language forms and structures to perception and consciousness. James’s psychology assumed people’s natural inclination to seek truth, however multiple and variable it might turn out to be. (Obviously a truth based on and derived from perception will be as multiple and variable as the things perceived and the persons perceiving.) But for Stein, it was not truth but understanding that was of value—a shift of emphasis, from perceived to perceiving, and thus to writing, in which act of observation, as context perception, take place. James’s emphasis on the important of (primarily perceptual) experience and its relationship to the structures and development of meaning had already extended to a study of language as a function of experience. Stein took the concept further. Language, as she thought and felt it, does far more than simply offer names for our experiences; indeed, a dependency on names (nouns) tends to obscure experience, by replacing what we experience with a pre-established concept, a ‘simulacrum,’ of it. It was on this discovery that Stein based her radical challenge to the primacy and centrality of the noun. States of consciousness exist as full sentences; the topography of consciousness consists of a rich verbal landscape. In imagining it, we have to bear in mind its porosity and observe the dance of activity on its surface. We must acknowledge our sensation of of, if, the, and some as well as tree, smoke, shed, and road.

Hejinian is referring here to a famous passage from James’s Principles of Psychology in which he claims as much weight in the transitions of experience as in the perches or resting points that are named things:

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.

From her studies at Johns Hopkins, Stein carried forward the emergent understanding of the neural apparatus of the brain as a thing made not by essential pieces of anatomy with core functions and a defined network, but by the cooperative, flexible, plastic ways anatomically discontinuous neurons process information — a process dependent on contact and contiguity of neurons, but not any kind organic union that fixes function in place.

Stephen Meyer writes of this background in Stein’s thinking:

“The crucial thing to note here is that in taking neurons…as paradigmatic of organic life…it becomes necessary to reconceive organicism as a function of contact or contiguity, rather than of organic connection. It was this perspective that Stein brought to her experimental writing…when she began writing her ‘studies in description.’ Here is ‘A Long Dress’ from the ‘Objects’ section of Tender Buttons:

What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long and necessary waist. What is this current.

What is the wind, what is it.

Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it.

Writing like this might be characterized, in properly radical empiricist fashion, as studies of exchanges at word junctions and across word membrane, designed to show the ways in which words join together in functional multi-word units.”

Because Stein’s words are experimentally joined in these ways her work requires experimental reading, alert to the temporary lit-up structures activated by these odd combinations. Meyer again:

“Such experimental reading, as it were, is not a matter of reductively decoding Stein’s writing word for word or phrase for phrase but of neuraesthetically reproducing her ‘studies of the relation of words in meaning sound and volume’ in ways specified by the compositions themselves.”

I find that by reading Stein aloud, I am easily introduced into the experiment, the way the composition specifies the relation of its words. Reading on the page, my eyes eventually glaze over and my reading hydroplanes.

The rhythms and sonority of the words are the spatial matrix for the temporary information processing formed by contact and contiguity, their local units easily distinguishable in sound in a way that they’re not on the page — thanks to Stein’s general abandonment of commas and other marks beyond the period. Forced off the page and into the mouth and ear, the writing makes a sense that eludes it when silent.

This is a flexible, neuroplastic appreciation of how language might arise into a descriptive form, well outside the well-worn paths and approved syntaxes usually named by “description.” Language is a felt and actively feeling (feeling for, feeling out, feeling up) medium of thought in a vibratory field of matter.

in James

This chapter taken from Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892), James’s edited version of his tome, Principles of Psychology (1890).

on stein as a student

Excerpt from Stephen Meyer’s study of the convergence of science and writing in Stein’s experimentalism, Irrisistible Dictation. This section discusses the emergent biological paradigms during the time that Stein was in medical school at Johns Hopkins.

reflective exercise

current and emergent paradigms

Take ten minutes to freewrite about the newest scientific paradigms that strike you as offering a useful model for understanding how the world works more generally or, perhaps, how we might be in the world differently. A strong example for me is the increasing interest in the interrelation of trees and fungus. Not only is the science itself emergent and moving more and more into accepted consensus, but I see the scientific knowledge called upon to offer ways of tuning our thinking about human social structures too: it enters the popular imagination. The point of this reflective exercise is to think of Stein’s example as one we can port forward into our own time. What are the resources of scientific thinking that might feed your own experimentalism? If you want to look for a different area of study, beyond science, that works too.

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?