Zen and Modernity: Gertrude Stein and the Parameters of the Collective Experience
I remember my first Gertrude Stein. The class was a Modern and Contemporary Poetry Seminar, the book was Tender Buttons — I was left eye-swirled. It was hard for me to understand that her poems are far from nonsensical and haphazard. I have grown to see them as explorations in linguistics and pragmatics, flirtations with the Theory of Forms, and exercises in memory recollection and personal narrative building. They’re meditative and they’re beautiful.
Her art is a celebration of its communal nature coupled with a deep reverence of the common vernacular. However, it becomes obvious upon discussing her work with another that we simply can never experience her pieces similarly. The conversation becomes a bit chaotic and you’re left with the desire to not explain or share your interpretations; you understand they’re uniquely yours. This is both painfully alienating and liberatingly beautiful.
She demonstrates how, on the surface, a shared language, culture, and symbol-value system all seem innate. This is partially true: alone, words can have a shared visual representation (ex: BED), however, syntax and the timespace in which words are received all ignite highly individualized interpretations, regardless of the degree to which we share understandings of words and symbols.
Approaching Stein from this mindful and meditative angle makes her poetry hallucinogenic and constructed as a deeply shared, but separate, experience. These attributes are reminiscent of an ensō, ambiguous, dualistic, contradictory — and its meaning is understood to be a singular pursuit in discovering meaning. Sound familiar?
I use her words to paint an experience in my mind and as I turn the page, my mind is wiped clean and I’m left with a contemplative meaning that is unique to me in some ways, collective in others.
My relationship to art is movingly transforming, in part because of my evolving understanding of Stein. A perspective altogether different from from that lonely English Lit Girl’s from the past. My mind, enhanced through experience and exposure to expanding thought-pieces, has allowed me to adopt the spirit of the Salon, a modern space Stein and her partner developed with and for fellow artists — helping ignite and spread the Spirit of Modernity. Stunning.
Each time I revisit her pieces, I’m greeted with new understandings, new experiences.
“a rose is a rose is a rose”
— Sacred Emily (1913)
