Stein-1c – the pelagic school

Gertrude stein in space and time

1c: portraits

In her lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein articulates the development of her experiments in portraiture: experiments in trying to capture “what made each one that one” in language without resorting to description or explanation; a technique of “looking and speaking at the same time.”

Portraiture for Stein was a constant practice. By her own account, she wrote them practically daily. It’s fair to think of portraiture as a experiential writing practice, a kind of daily training, as much as a compositional technique. This practice underlies her later movement into what she called “landscapes” — her plays and operas.

A large portion of Stein’s writing falls into two project categories: portraits and landscapes.

The portraits correlate to her work from early experiments, through her early opus The Making of Americans, Tender Buttons, and innumerable short prose-poetry works and her earlier plays. The grammars compromise her poems, perhaps those same earlier plays, and her somewhat essayistic investigations into syntax. The landscapes correlate to her later plays, collected in Last Operas and Plays, and emblematized by Four Saints in Three Acts. (She was utterly prolific, so there’s still plenty of writing that falls outside these categories, including her only truly popular hit, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, in which she actually told what happened, which is probably why it was so popular.)

“Now I am quite certain that there is if anything is alive no difference between clarity and confusion.”

“I was however almost certain then when I began writing portraits that if anything is alive there is no such thing as repetition. I do not know that I have ever changed my mind about that.”

In Portraits and Repetition, given as a lecture on her American tour in 1934, Stein is looking back on her work. The early Making of Americans-era experiments in finding what she called the repeating in each person formed the opening foray into a technique she called looking and speaking at the same time. This is the grounding practice of her portraiture. (Note: repeating and repetition signal two different ideas to Stein. Repeating is the way a person is always that person that they are, and always linked to other people. Repetition is a charge of exact reproduction, which, because we exist in time, she says can never truly happen.)

“it was necessary for me nevertheless not to realize these things as remembering but to realize the one thing as existing and there they were and I was noticing…”

What exactly does that practice of portraiture look like? I think what’s useful about thinking through these experiments is how profoundly non-prescriptive they are. Language is a medium she uses to catch an experiential form of being present-to the world — to people, to objects, to landscapes. Her answer, which she tries anew each day, is a single experimental answer to the task she proposes, and so there’s no reason that running the same experiment need produce anything stylistically halo’d by Stein’s dominating signature.

“…this confusion, a real confusion, that in writing a story one had to be remembering, and novels are soothing because so many people one may say everybody can remember almost anything.”

“…that thing that I was gradually finding our listening and talking at the same time that is realizing the existence of living being actually existing did not have in it any element of remembering and so the time of existing was not the same as in the novels that were soothing.”

Stein’s somewhat riddling encapsulation of how to do portraiture is that she is “looking and talking at the same time.” She is letting the words suggest themselves. She avoids the class of descriptive words that treat looking as a controlling, encompassing form of understanding. For Stein, looking is something more like trying to experience being present to something without the intrusion of “remembering.”

This interest in the possibility of inhabiting the present tense, freed from the overdetermination of the consensus of the past and the trajectory of the known conclusion is alive in Stein’s work always, and forms the critical value for how time works in her plays.

“Did one see sound, and what was the relationship between color and sound, did it make itself by description by a word that meant it or did it make itself by a word in itself.”

“I lived my life with emotion and things happening but I was creating in my writing by simply looking.”

How can she do this in language without using language in an instrumental, descriptive way? That has something to do with feeling the language come out of her. This alternate, non-descriptive, non-remembering approach to the written portrait takes a sensual, rhythmic, felt approach that recall a more deliberate version of the automatic writing she experimented with as an undergraduate. It’s not that looking and talking at the same time is automatic in the surrealist sense — which proposes a kind of tap that can be opened whereby the subconscious spills itself without intervention from the conscious. Rather, it’s a practice of a certain kind of consciousness, lightly hitched to the words that come to her mind — the talking that forms part of her looking.

She tries this with people and then she tries this with objects and rooms, and creates one of her most beautiful works, Tender Buttons.

from tender buttons

Link to the full text on Project Gutenberg. No need to read all or read in order, but you can get a fuller sense of the work’s domestic range here.

another portrait

Link to “If I Told Him” on the Poetry Foundation website.

writing exercises

reflective freewrite

The poet Lyn Hejinian says that for Stein, “vitality—liveness—is a supreme good; the first and highest value of anyone (or anything) list in there “being completely living.” Think about how Stein’s embrace of simultaneity (of looking and talking at the same time) seeks a kind of liveness by warding off any intrusion of past or present in the form, among other things, of organized thoughts. (That’s not exactly true — obviously improvisational apprehended pattern is exactly a recognition of organized form.) But in cutting out the space to reflect in the act of composition explicitly targeted on a liveness, Stein keeps her wordflow in a live, decontrolled current.

Freewrite or journal for a while about this value. Do her methods produce something live for you? Are there other ways you can move your mind and writing hand at the same time? What other ways of constraining your writing process might approach some similar value, of writing unencumbered in some way by deadness?

portrait writing exercise

One of Stein’s clearest writing procedures comes out of her talk on her portraits: looking and talking at the same time. By hitching these two things to the same moment, she hopes to bypass “remembering,” which is her name for all the customary and time-honored accumulations of understanding that pertain to a person or an object.

For this exercise, try playing with this simultaneity, by writing your looking without using remembering. What Stein found, after long practice, is a sense that words suggested themselves to her. Instead of attending to what she saw with the arsenal of names and descriptive, explanatory language, she somehow experienced looking in a way that was unmediated by foreknowledge.

Admittedly, this does seem like an impossible thing to bypass, so perhaps part of the route into this kind of looking is about looking differently so that different nouns are perceived. For example, my dog is next to me on the couch as I write this, and though I could look at him and say “Woody” or “large black dog,” I also notice that my immediate impression of him has to do with a shine that is breathing or a shine that is sleeping. I’m not exactly capable of escaping nouns altogether —“a shine” is a noun — but I’m experiencing his presence outside the large, conventional category of “dog.”

Set yourself a simple parameter: a paragraph, a page, ten lines, etc.
Set yourself in front of something you can experience as being present to you.
Write your looking.
The loop of attention is to return to the experience of being present to this scene, this being. It is a kind of seeing lodged in the feeling of being there. Can you feel your looking? And write it at the same time?

You could also translate this to another medium, singing your looking, drawing your looking, or perhaps transpose looking to another sensory form of attention, writing your listening, and so on.

[Download PDF of this exercise to work offline]

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?