My photograph of page 12-13 Jean E. Mills (2024) ‘Gertrude Stein’ in Richard Scneider Jr. (ed.) ‘Outer Appearances: More Faces from the Annals of the G&LR’ (a retrospective on the art of Charles Hefling), Illustrated by Charles Hefling. Pages 32f.,
Like most people who do it, I communicate too much online. Some who do it pretend to a ‘grand reserve’ of self that exists behind their online personae, but I don’t think that will wash. Hence my problematic verboseness and over seriousness. In contrast, Twitter/X is stuffed with people who take positions, in line with some temporal issue that has either faded or transmogrified into a whole set of other issues by now, too complex to be able to be articulated in one position statement.
Those people need a strategy and in many cases it involves hanging on to frail identities (JaneLeaver or JakeRemainer for instance – though these names are fictitious, you will find their type everywhere) to advertise belonging to a nebulous social group that feels it has the ‘answer’ to why things are ‘so s…t’ (that’s usually how they phrase it) nowadays. Most of the time those semi-anonymous identities survive on the basis of never realising the’ friendships’, that they boast of as the cement of their groupings, at any depth that might challenge them to open up their identity. That lack of depth can still fit in with controlled meeting.
I don’t see these people as bad people but they are needy ones, more so than they will ever admit. If we unpack the names they give themselves, what we see underneath it is:
- A desperate need to belong to a group held together by a simple answer to the way life fails to satisfy as it is.
- An illusion that their group of ‘like answerers’ are mirrored by another group with an answer that is the polar opposite of theirs.
- A gnawing insistence that all views, however wrapped in multiplicity and nuance must be the opposite of theirs unless precisely identical.
This is an extreme case but common enough on social media, not because people are like that but because it is easier to bond on the basis of reductive answers to complicated questions and because the information one gives away is consciously and unconsciously limited by the need to remain close to one’s group common self-image. The base issue is that social media is about bonding around the easily communicable – and only reductive views are easily communicable.
When I ‘communicate’, the communication is too much, excessively so, and often too embarrassingly open. That is not because I see those long answers as ‘the answer’ to my, or any group’s, needs and difficulties in the world but because I have to write as if in search of answers, that, after all, don’t exist in a simple way, and perhaps NOT IN ANY WAY.
Jane E, Mills of the Gay and Lesbian Review (GLR) paints a picture of Gertrude Stein who forced communication of self not into verbosity but into a structure and form (in language) that is neither a structure nor a form but an insistence that language is not ENOUGH for communion, without restoring meaning to basic words that have lost their meaning, like ‘a rose’. For Stein when you say ‘ a rose is a rose is a rose’, you do not define the meaning of a word but instantiate the multiplicity in which the word has meaning without verboseness.
For some that phrase is not enough because it does not define or reduce it to one meaning. For others it is too long because they think they already know what a rose is. For both sets of critics, Stein would have no answer. Jane E. Mills says that this had everything to do with Stein’s relationship to sex/ gender and sexuality in a world where definitions are basically those of binary negations. Stein saw self in terms of being a man, who must marry a woman. In fact that locked Stein into reductive meanings of what a ‘man’ is that trouble cis men too. If ‘a man is a man is a man’ could mean anything, it is that a man is anything a self-identifying man thinks a man is for them but that is not necessarily so for other men or women.
The concept of the non-binary did not exist for Stein except in her play with words and images but Stein tried to make that matter. Write an autobiography, then do it as one of your female life-partner and live in the false assumptions and over-simple answers, Alice B. Toklas.
And Stein may have got it right. Don’t over-write about oneself but suggest that the form and structure of writing opportunities lack what is available to encompass you. That way you write simply but refuse to brown down to simple answers to questions, whose options are not described by you but by overweening structures in traditions that pretend to have all the possible answers already.
Now this won’t work for me because I don’t have Stein’s gifts. But I think her best poem might be that below, if you want an answer:
‘The Answer’ By Gertrude Stein
There ain’t no answer.
Available at : https://allpoetry.com/poem/13522951-The-Answer-by-Gertrude-Stein
There ain’t going to be an answer.
There never has been an answer.
That’s the answer.
All my love as ever
Steven xxxxx
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