What you are about to read is an illustration of a writer's confusion. I chose not to call it that, however, and titled it "A Listening to Gertrude Stein." I called it a listening because I hear her prose when I read it. It is the only way I can read it. The voice is hers; the confusion is mine. I went searching through her texts for something to investigate, something perplexing I could use to wear down my mind. Prepared for confusion, I sought paradox, I greedily dug for knots to unravel.

And I found knots. But they were the least important things. What I found between them were beads, intricately carved or smooth and shiny. From far away, the beads formed patterns, curiously like sentences and ideas in progression. Close up, each bead was a bit of art, an individual selfcontained masterpiece. They formed complex chains of philosophy at times, passing over and back upon each other. Sometimes they made small circles full of color and light. At the end of the chain you started over, or went on to another small circle. I tangled myself all up in these long, long chains and spent hours identifying small patterns, and marveling at how they made up larger ones. Here is where my struggle began.

I looked for stuff to investigate. I tormented myself trying not to tell anyone anything. In this I failed. I discovered I didn't know what it meant to tell, because I didn't know what it meant not to tell. I still don't know. In this I succeeded, if frustration was the goal.

So here is my telling of what it is to listen to Gertrude Stein. If the telling offends you, look through it to the language, to the words. They are most important. Among the telling there are pictures, look at those if you can. I think it was Baudelaire, anyway it was a French poet, who wrote of a tree telling its leaves like rosary beads. My telling is that kind of telling. It is the only way I know how to express a text as both a multitude and a continuum. Read it with joy and scepticism.

There is a comfort in knowing exactly what one (or someone) means, in writing for oneself and strangers. There is no doubt in Stein. There is no dressing up of arguments, no use of prickly words to impress people who read only to look at those words. I relax completely in Stein, because she writes what she means. She explains herself, as she must, being Stein. It is of little interest to her whether her contemporaries can easily amuse themselves with her work. Gertrude Stein is not part of a club. She is not clever; she does not comment on or complement the writers of her time. She is her time, as we all are. There is no Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for Stein. The only assistance one is likely to get is from Alice B. Toklas, who says nothing.

In rereading "The Gradual Making," I found a rich pattern, a progression, in her sentences. Elements are introduced and repeated to create a design. These elements are not ideas, but words. They lead on, one to the next, and the overall pattern is wonderful, and it is clear. This is all my telling. I will stop telling now.

I had always understood a portrait as a snapshot in time. But here are portraits that are "a continuous succession." [1]

Much like a drawing without lines. What would be the way to portray a person as they are, not as one remembers them? What sort of words would replace the lines? Verbs, of course, would be essential. They would be essence. Imagine the scent of an identity. Not a memory, because the memory is a creation of the writer, a little show the synapses put on. The odor of one's being, ongoing, not elusive. Direct, obviously it belongs to the one portrayed. Imagine writing about a scent without using the name of any object that possessed a smell.

Stein's repetition is the overlap of scales.

This is what I find in great abundance in "Tender Buttons:" red, and yellow, and cups. Tables and spoons and water. And no and not. There is generosity in invitations, in the spread of tables.

"...then be reckless be reckless and resolved on returning gratitude." [2] "...reckless reckless rats...." (SW, 419) Recklessness is a generosity.

In "Food" in "Tender Buttons" she likes to use the same word twice, several times. Sometimes she asks and answers a question, sometimes she uses words as different parts of speech: "A transfer, a large transfer, a little transfer, some transfer, clouds and tracks do transfer...." (SW, 426) The second to last transfer is ambiguous.

"This is not a subject." (SW, 426) "This is true." (LA, 209) "This is not a prejudice it is a fact." (SW, 571) Everywhere she is telling. This is a pronouncement. More so because she doesn't trouble to explain. It is as if she uses these as periods, which she loves. A period, a statement is like writing "Now I have finished" or, very possibly, like what comes before "Now I will begin." Of all punctuation she has thrown out, she keeps periods. Not because they are needed, because if she thought they were unnecessary they would be, but because she loves them. The commas she might leave out, but she makes sure you know where they ought to be, so you might read her work aloud with understanding. The understanding lies in giving and receiving. It is generous.

"An eye glass, what is an eye glass, it is water." (SW, 427) Among the obscure are obvious things. Are they all obvious to someone? Were they obvious to Stein? Making puzzles seems an unSteinlike thing to do. One does not make puzzles for oneself, and strangers, are they likely to understand? Were these clear to their creator? I think that they must have been. This is archaeology. Past civilizations, dead writers, are they likely to leave clues and mysteries behind intentionally? I think not. So everything anyone needs to know is available, it is there.

Did she love meals, or did she just always write at the table?

Occasionally there are rhymes: "...all the splinter and the trunk, all the poisonous darkening drunk, all the joy in weak success, all the joyful tenderness, all the section and the tea, all the stouter symmetry” (SW, 423-4) (this last reminds me of Blake's “Tyger”' which is silly). "...a hurt mended, hurt and mended is so necessary that no mistake is intended." (SW, 429) How should I take these?

"Take no remedy lightly, take no urging intently, take no separation leniently, beware of no lake and no larder." (SW, 429) Generally, pieces of her work can be removed without loss of meaning. They can and have become "sayings." She would have liked that word, she liked gerunds very much because they are verbs that replace nouns. There is so much imperative in these portraits.

"...which does make which does not make...." (SW, 429) Paradox? A change of mind? Realization and reinterpretation? She likes to use "do" and "does." She does like to. Is this for insistence?

"...it is necessary...." Over and over. Necessary is perhaps a quality imparted to a thing, that makes part of a situation. Almost as often is "ordinary." They may be the same.

"The teasing is tender and trying and thoughtful." (SW, 430) "Cuddling comes in continuing a change." (SW, 430) This is not the usual kind of alliteration. I cannot imagine that it was not intentional, so what does it do? What makes it necessary?

I think the sound of "cow" must have amused her. I can't say it is gratuitous, but it is everywhere in Tender Buttons. "Cold," too, and "green."

There is so much eating, and it is social. "This is use." (SW, 432) It is necessary, not the food, but the meal.

"Eel us eel us with no no pea no pea cool, no pea cool cooler, no pea cooler with a land a land cost in, with a land cost in stretches." (SW, 437) This is the same as her lectures, isn't it, the same as what adds clarity and weight to "The Gradual Making." Is she playing? Is she practicing scales? Scales overlap in both fish and arpeggios.

"It was an extra leaker with a see spoon, it was an extra licker with a see spoon." (SW, 438) There is humor here, there is a sense of Stein chuckling. Is she having fun with the words or with her readers? I get a feeling that she genuinely loves words, sees them as abstract, individual bits. Also, this is an orange, which both leaks and requires licking.

More fun: Here is a poem (about another orange). "A type oh oh new new not no not knealer knealer of old show beef-steak, neither neither." (SW, 439) It is music. Music repeats itself, it founds itself in rhythmic patterns. Why shouldn't words? Why shouldn't language?

Is there a separation of words and language in Stein? Language harnessing words to convey some ideas, and words used as a medium to create art, to convey other ideas. Ideas that have little or nothing to do with the words themselves. One can paint a woman on canvas in rose and blue, using lines and paint. But the painting is about the woman, not about rose or blue or lines or paint. Either this is a tremendous idea I can't quite see all of, or I am making things up. One begins to feel that way with modern anything.

I find parts of Tender Buttons that are oddly sexual. The oddly is more interesting to me than the sexual. I don't know if the title suggests these or if they weren't meant that way. She writes so lovingly of food, surely sex deserves the same treatment. Here are two of these parts:

"In between a place and candy is a narrow foot-path that shows more mounting than anything, so much really that a calling meaning a bolster measured a whole thing with that. A virgin a whole virgin is judged made and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and mild colds there is no satin wood shining." (SW, 418)

"A plain hill, one is not that which is not white and red and green, a plain hill makes no sunshine, it shows that without a disturber. So the shape is there and the color and the outline and the miserable centre, it is not very likely that there is a centre, a hill is a hill and no hill is contained in a pink tender descender." (SW, 444)

"Sugar any sugar, anger every anger, lover sermon lover, centre no distractor, all order is in a measure." (SW, 448) “Act so that there is no use in a centre.” (SW, 441) There is a lot about centers and measures here. Here is the worst part: this is beautiful and I don't know why. I can't explain, can't reword. Can't dissect or recombine, this is not poetry it is simply living written down. Living doesn't exactly make sense, but it is wonderful full of wonder all the same.

In "Composition as Explanation" she writes that a work of art is not considered beautiful until it is accepted, until it is no longer "irritating annoying stimulating." (SW, 455) I wonder if this is part of or all of the trouble I am having with her work. It is all those things, and it is beautiful. Beautiful generally means one can stop worrying about it now, that that is all it need be. It, beauty, is often used as an ornate box to store art whose time and relevance have passed. Art that is the composition of long generations ago.

So what does it mean, this repeating, this insistence? Words wash against the mind in waves, one at the tail end, washing out meets a new one washing in. It makes no sense to separate them. They are cumulative; they create what they are, a continuum.

I am working over and over her ideas on composition. It only makes sense at a distance. That is to say it makes complete sense. She is talking about traveling in time. "Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here. This is some time ago for us naturally." (SW, 456)

"The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing." (SW, 455-6)

Gerunds all over the place. What is composition? What is the composition each of us is making in and by our living? (That is a structure Stein doesn't use, perhaps because it is complex. She would write "in our living, by our living." Is that more clear? It is more insistent. "By the people, for the people," and so on.) Is the idea of our time, our generation, a composition? Are we developing the way of art, of thought, for this generation? All unknown to us, to be appreciated much later. We each must then see a part of the composition, with no idea of the whole. She treats living as a voluntary thing, which of course it is. It is interesting to think of living as a thing one is doing, like a hobby or a vocation. I can imagine a whole new facet to inane dialogue: "So what do you do?" "I live. I'm in living. I'm working on something I call living. I like to live."

About that word "interesting:" No one uses it in the way Stein can. To most of us it is so colorless and banal it has become insulting. "How was the play?" "Oh, it was ...interesting." The negative has much more force, peculiar for a word that by definition evokes no feeling. Everyone knows what "uninteresting" means (although some have difficulty with "disinterested"). But when Stein finds a thing interesting — she who adored the everyday ordinary commonplace — it becomes exalted (the thing and the word). She was interested in almost everything, enough so to write about it. But an "interesting" thing or idea would require much thought and examination. "Interesting" is more vital in her voice than "fascinating," because Gertrude Stein was fascinated by the most mundane things. Interest goes much deeper than fascination, which is a visceral thing.

There is a "continuous present," (SW, 457) "using everything," (SW, 457) and "beginning again." (SW, 457) And there is "beginning," and there is "groping." I am groping now. The continuous present, does it form the beginnings again? Is knowledge from groping incorporated? I understand the composition is made up of all the living everyone is doing. This living, can it be, is it beginning again? Is it groping? The continuous present is where composition is made. It is when the living is being done. It is the tense of portraits. Using everything, does that mean putting it all in? She writes of "more and more using of everything," (SW, 458) not of "using more and more of everything." The everything is a stumbling place. Beginning again is not productive, unless of course she saved all the everything and all the beginnings again. And then there is beginning. And beginning and beginning and beginning. Will all these beginnings string together like points in a line? Do they become then a continuous present? She writes that they are both things, so they perhaps are separate.

"The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything." (SW, 453) The only things that are different are time and composition. This is a riddle. But of course it isn't it is complete and clear. We make composition by doing what we do in our living. What we do affects what is seen, which separates one time, one generation, from another. Living is making composition and it is creating a time, a generation. Composition and time are the same, but one comes from the other. To make this even more confusing, no one is ever aware of composition until several generations later, after it has passed. At this time, those who see the composition have not made it, and are at that time making their own, all unknown. They see it as a factor of how they are living, making the new composition. So of course they build it into the new composition, which will define this generation, but only much later, to a new one. And so on. Is this using everything? This is time travel.

"...that is the reason why at present the time-sense in the composition is the composition that is making what there is in composition.

"And afterwards.

"Now that is all." (SW, 461)

So what? What is there in all this I can say? There is a struggle, a great groping, a stretching in the dark. I can say that her words are still as soothing as rain and as perfect. I have told them not like facts but like rosary beads. I have found pattern and repetition, these are in nature and they are natural. I have picked up each word and each idea, I have examined. I have wondered strenuously and tried hard not to explain, not to prove. I have dealt most delicately with abstractions and tried not to make them my own, not to propound theories. I have been flooded by her generosity. This is what I have to give in return. This is a piece of the thinking I am doing, part of the living I am doing. It is of necessity something of a telling of the voice I have been listening to. It is the click a bead makes when it falling strikes another bead.

Denise Logsdon is a freelance writer and editor and an M.F.A. candidate at Columbia University.

Copyright Denise Logsdon 1998.

Comments to dithyramb@juno.com

[1] Lectures in America. Ed. Wendy Steiner. Boston: Beacon Press (no date), p. 176. Hereafter cited as LA.

[2] Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Random House, 1946, p. 408. Hereafter cited as SW.