BERNEVAL

It was published in 1951. Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work by Donald Sutherland ends with a chapter on the “meditations” mode of Stein and it is a section delivered in a Q + A dialogue. Both in style and substance, it presents a take on the author and on criticism that is worth quoting at length for two main reasons: the emphasis on forces, tensions, etc. and for the connectedness of something belonging to anything (which is different from everything). Here goes.

Sooner or later criticism will have to get used to thinking in terms of forces, tensions, movements, speeds, attractions, etc., as well as in terms of constructs and animals — not because science says so or philosophy says so at all but because life is conducted more and more in those terms and it is the way life is conducted in a time that is the prime source of steady energy and solid reality in a work that outlasts its time. This kind of composition is getting to be more and more the composition of reality as everyone sees it. It amused Gertrude Stein to find that her early arrangements and abstractions, which had seemed to be highly acrobatic and gratuitous if refined formal exercises, were turning out to be literal transcriptions of the most evident realities, that is the same abstractions and arrangements on which life is more and more consciously conducted by people at large. It is true that we are more comfortable in the composition of 19th century life and literature, in which an actual or a mentioned cup of tea was part of an hour which was part of a day which was part of a week, month, season, or year, which was part of say the annals of Britain, which were part of the the general onward evolution of something that was part of a cosmic order. A sentence was part of a paragraph which was part of a chapter which was part of a book which was part of a shelf of books which was part of England or America or France and so on. Something belonged to everything automatically. But nothing now is really convincingly a part of anything else; anything stands by itself if at all and its connections are chance encounters.

And so a chance encounter with Susan Stewart’s Poetry and the Fate of the Senses and this remarkable sentence from the opening meditation on night, its privations and the drive to create:

The task of aesthetic production and reception in general is to make visible, tangible, and audible the figures of persons, whether such persons are expressing the particulars of sense impressions or the abstractions of reason or the many ways such particulars and abstractions enter into relations with one another.

And that was published in 2002.

And so for day 778
29.01.2009

The copy on the back cover nicely encapsulates the premise of this romance-essay (somewhat like William Morris’s News From Nowhere).

Descendants of the original forty-four emerge to an hospitable Earth nearly four centuries after the Bomb. They are met with the ruined artifacts of a once mighty civilization and find no clue as to why the pre-Bomb people committed global suicide. Only after the works of four pre-Bomb artists (Picasso, Pollock, Moore and Beckett) are unearthed can the descendants begin to grasp what went wrong. […] But when a fringe element of the post-Bomb society gets possession of the works […]

I have one quibble. In this fiction, the Moore sculpture is described as a bronze in an intro to an interview where the discussion is all about stone and carving rather than modelling and casting. Nonetheless, it is a satisfying little book given the range of voices it contains. It invites the reader to stretch imagination and it helps with such descriptions of the annihilation of all traces of culture:

Suffice here to reiterate that the charnelization of the world consumed every device and medium of human expression and memory. Every data bank, archive, gallery, library. No music survives, no painted or sculpted artifact, no written word. Only a melted, congealed detritus that yields, ever more intriguingly, mute witness to all-engulfing catastrophe.

Michael Carin. The Neutron Picasso. 1989.

And so for day 776
27.01.2009

Michael Warner “Thoreau’s Bottom” in Raritan XI:3 (Winter 1992).

On Hegel on love:

In Philosophy of Right, for example, Hegel declared that “love” could be defined as the experience of a problem: “The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a self-subsistent and independent person and that, if I were, then I would feel defective and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I count for something in the other, while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction.”

On Thoreau on the other, object of love:

“Thou hast loved me,” he exclaims in the privacy of his journal, “for what I wast not — but for what I aspired to be.” In these moments of desire, a self/other opposition becomes an unstable antinomy. By dint of his very insistence on the integration and autonomy of “self,” Thoreau divides himself from an ideal self. Self is an object to itself, even another self, rather than an experiential unity. “May I be to myself as one is to me whom I love,” he says, “a dear and cherished object.”

“Je est un autre.”

And so for day 773
24.01.2009