Stein-1e – the pelagic school

gertrude Stein in space + time

1e: pleasure and understanding

Ok, so Stein wants to let the words for things suggest themselves, wants to write without being impinged upon by remembering (i.e. clearly describing or explaining things in accepted vocabularies), wants to make compositions so fully of their time that there is no other timescale in them. What hope have we for understanding what she’s saying without the benefit of all that consensus and explanation?

Stein’s answer is: we have pleasure, enjoyment.

“If you enjoyed it then you understood it.”

Stein’s most concise articulation of her pleasure principal comes in a radio interview during one of her American lecture tours:

INTERVIEWER: Your coming to the United State to lecture, Miss Stein, seems to me to imply that there are many people who will be able to comprehend your ideas… Although it may seem absurd in them, many American people doubt your ability to speak intelligibly. Just where…does Four Saints in Three Acts fut untie. Your scheme of lecturing, which, if it is to be successful, must be at least understandable… which is more than most of us can say for your opera.

STEIN: Look here, being intelligible is not what it seems, after all all these things are a matter of habit… You mean by understanding that you can talk about it in the way that you have the habit of talking… putting it in other words… but I mean by understanding enjoyment. If you go to a football game you don’t have to understand it in any way except the football way and all you have to do with Four Saints is enjoy it in the Four Saints way… Don’t you see what I mean? If you enjoy it you understand it, and lots of people have enjoyed it so lots of people have understood it. You see that is what my lectures are to be. They are to be a simple way of telling everybody this thing, that if you enjoy it you understand it.

Joan Retallack, following up on this exchange in her introductory essay to her Stein reader, pursues the relationship of understanding to knowledge. After all, Stein is not saying swap understanding for enjoyment. She’s saying that enjoyment is a fruit of understanding — an understanding that we’re habitually dismissive of but that is there nonetheless.

“Her work at its best has the evocative intelligence of language that is not explaining what it is doing but, as Thornton Wilder writes in his introduction to her Chicago lectures, ‘make[s] yourself know yourself knowing it.’ On meeting Stein in Chicago, Wilder immediately recognized her invention of a new kind of literature, embodying a new epistemology, a new theory of time, and new pleasures.”

A new epistemology — or a more radically inclusive one. Cast back to her mentor William James, who sought to widen the parameters of empiricism to include all experience. As we will see in the next section when we look at her essay “Plays,” Stein preserved and activated James’ vocabulary of types of knowledge throughout her life. These were:

knowledge about

Knowledge about — knowledge that comes to us by description, explanation. This is the kind of knowledge that we swim in in an informational ecosystem that demands we engage with much that we have never been in contact with.

knowledge of acquaintance

In a more contemporary mood we’d call this embodied knowledge. “Acquaintance” might ring casual to our ears, but James meant by this, lived and experiential, rather than relayed to us from a distant or explanatory source. Here he describes knowledge of acquaintance in Principals of Psychology:

“I am acquainted with many people and things, which I know very little about, except their presence in the places where I have met them. I know the color blue when I see it, and the flavour of a pear when I taste it; I know an inch when I move my finger through it; a second of time, when I feel it pass; an effort of attention when I make it; a difference between two things when I notice it; but about the inner nature of these facts or what makes them what they are, I can say nothing at all. I cannot impart acquaintance with them to any one who has not already made it himself I cannot describe them, make a blind man guess what blue is like, define to a child a syllogism, or tell a philosopher in just what respect distance is just what it is, and differs from other forms of relation. At most, I can say to my friends, Go to certain places and act in certain ways, and these objects will probably come.”

When Stein links enjoyment to understanding, she is using enjoyment — pleasure — as proof of this kind of experiential knowledge. That instead of rebuffing the audience, her words have worked on the body, on the humor, on something tapped into a very different reservoir than the accumulated cultural knowledge about.

Pleasure is the measure.

further exercise

reflective freewrite

Use a freewriting session to cast your memory to pleasurable experiences you’ve had in contexts where you’ve been at a disadvantage of knowledge-about. What kinds of experiences do these create? What traces of bodily enjoyment-understanding remain for you, coloring these memories?

Units Two & Three of this course are forthcoming. Stay Tuned.

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?