Stein-1d – the pelagic school

Gertrude Stein in space and time

1d: composition as explanation

In 1926, Stein gave a talk called “Composition as Explanation.”

Her basic argument in this talk is about time: that the critical act of a contemporary artist is to compose in the time they are living. Put the time of the composition into the time in the composition. Trying to get free of all the ways one is pulled into other time senses, whether retrograde, behind the curve ways of understanding the world, or narrative time, which is concerned with what happened and in what sequence, Stein theorizes that a composition can take place in a state of continuous presence. The basic action of Stein’s writing is looking — visual art’s projects and types (portraits, landscapes) offer Stein a way around or beyond the time sense that usually belongs to narrative.

“Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition.”

What does Stein mean by “composition”? She means three things: there is a composition everyone is living, which is the scatter, organization, and understanding of how we inhabit the world. There is the composition of looking at or understanding the world as one is living it. And there is the composition of an artist describing it in the moment they are living it — basically a task of realism. (Elsewhere, in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Stein writes that she thought writing should be an exact reproduction of either outer or inner reality. See Lyn Hejinian’s “Language and Realism” in the readings section for an excellent discussion of this if you want to think further about what realism might be.)

What is a composition? “It confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen.” It is a natural phenomena.

“The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition…”

One thread of the talk is a complaint about the lag time of ideas or understandings of the world with the contemporariness of the world one is actually living. Her own genius, self-described, is her capacity to live and write her contemporariness. She claims that aesthetic acceptance is usually several generations behind what is actually contemporary. She uses WW1 as an example of an experience that shocked everyone into the contemporary, even though, going into the war, military thinkers were still thinking in nineteenth-century terms.

Think of her interest in contemporariness like an outer ring around the inner task of writing a continuous present. Although she is speaking broadly here — of generational change and a shift in the world we are living in and the way we live in it — her attention in writing is always to things local, ordinary, domestic, present to the body: things you can look at and write at the same time.

In a way, she trades the living in one’s contemporariness, and the capacity to see, speak, understand in the true present tense of the age, for the timescales (beginning, middle, end, chains of causality) that are usually present in stories. When she says that things are different, she means that however similar they might be, they are existing in a different moment. She is tuned into difference as a measure of historical time, but a measure that can only be taken in the present moment.

She takes this very large sense of where she is in the now of history and applies it to the present moment, attempting to compose her contemporary perception now and now and now and now: the continuous present. Historical time is present in her writing in the way her composition makes itself and understands itself. But narrative time is excluded.

read the full talk

Link to the full text of “Composition as Explanation” on the Poetry Foundation website.

further exercises

reflective freewrite

Use a freewrite to reflect on the question of how what Stein calls “the time of the composition” (meaning, the present circumstances, the environment of writing, the movement of thought in real time as you write) might be interact with the time in the composition (story world time, historical time as it bears on existing understanding and language used in the writing, future time as it bears on predictions — a reader’s sense of where the writing is going). Stein plays the binary to exclusion: she is interested in making the time of the composition coequal with the time in the composition. What do you think? What would be interesting experiments that might let you play with a permeable membrane between these two things? Can you think of works you’ve read, other than by Stein, that so aggressively eschew time in in favor of time of, or otherwise play with the traffic between those times in an interesting way?

writing exercise

Write exactly one page, trying to let the time of your composition exactly match the time in your composition. Approach this page observationally, as a kind of receiving medium for your perceptions in time and space for the duration that it takes you to fill a page.

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?