Let Us Describe
The Relational Engagement of Art
Gertrude Stein
Let Us Describe
Let us describe how they went. It was a very windy night and the road although in excellent condition and extremely well graded has many turnings and although the curves are not sharp the rise is considerable. It was a very windy night and some of the larger vehicles found it more prudent not to venture. In consequence some of those who had planned to go were unable to do so. Many others did go and there was a sacrifice, of what shall we, a sheep, a hen, a cock, a village, a ruin, and all that and then that having been blessed let us bless it.
This prose poem by Gertrude Stein is a tough one, but finding it was a pivotal point for me in understanding some of what is possible within poetry and language and what that means for meaning making and truth.
Even after all the years that I have had engaging with this poem, each time I come back it is a shock. What exactly is going on? There seem to be several vantage points or considerations at play in the recounting of what we can suppose is a tragic car accident brought on by inclement weather. Some decided to go, though disaster was portended, some did not. Of those that went it seems Stein’s relationship with them was close enough to categorize the recounted grief as a sacrifice. At the end things jump to a seeming list of unfortunate collisions which breaks into eulogy?
Of all that is not, at least one thing is for sure, Stein is utilizing disruption as a tool to provide a continuity between the language and the disruption felt within the experience of the seeming circumstances described in the poem. In other words, what an injustice, what an incongruous act it would be to write a beautifully formulated, rhythmic and lineated poem about a tragedy, about grief, about memory. What an incongruity to write a poem that “makes sense” for an event that makes no sense, like tragedy. For grief, for tragedy, for confusing times, only a confusing poem will do.
What does this mean for truth? Every time I’ve been a group talking about this poem, people see entirely different things about the exact same poem, even the exact same lines within the poem, even with the exact same words within the poem. Is the truth of the poem relative? Well no. The term relative truth only applies when truth is being conflated with fact. The poem has entirely different parameters than the news or rational, even scientific, understanding and the kind of language we find there.
So what is happening? The poem holds experience, it holds relational engagement as the priority. It means you have to bring your full self to it. If you don’t it will feel like nonsense. If you do there is a reciprocal engagement opportunity. The disruption within the poem can map onto the disruption that we’ve all felt when tragedy befalls us.
Not liking something and dismissing something are not the same thing. You don’t even have to like a poem or a work of art, but relational engagement can still teach you something. If you don’t like a poem, asking yourself why will actually help you to understand yourself better. It will at the very least help you to see what your expectations from poetry—heck! what your expectations of language are.
Art’s possibility is one where truth becomes relational engagement. It allows the complexity of truth to bear its weight upon us. The mystics have been telling us for a very long time that truth isn’t a dislodged inanimate thing, it’s alive, it has a will, it can be wooed and does woo. In fact, if you take a close look at what’s going on in the world you will see that as we study consciousness, and neurology, they are finding what the mystics and artists have been telling us all along, that relational engagement is the primary mode of being.
This poem along with so many others prioritize relational engagement by bypassing the assumption that language need only follow the guidelines of rational communication and rational intelligence. It enforces the idea that language can be an experience.
So what are some of the other modes of meaning that language has to offer us?
Well, one might be sound. We allow instrumental music the freedom to have meaning despite it’s lack rational communication, but we don’t allow language that same affordance. One of the layers poetry reveals is that how language’s sounds is also involved in meaning making.
Take this poem by Ted Hughes:
How Water Began to Play
Water wanted to live
It went to the sun it came weeping back
Water wanted to live
It went to the trees they burned it came weeping back
They rotted it came weeping back
Water wanted to live
It went to the flowers they crumpled it came weeping back
It wanted to live
It went to the womb it met blood
It came weeping back
It went to the womb it met knife
It came weeping back
It went to the womb it met maggot and rottenness
It came weeping back it wanted to die
It went to time it went through the stone door
It came weeping back
It went searching through all space for nothingness
It came weeping back it wanted to die
Till it had no weeping left
It lay at the bottom of all things
Utterly worn out utterly clearThis poem seems to entirely resist our modern conception of how language should behave, other than, perhaps, as lyrics in a song. There are hints and suggestions toward narrative but its as if we are catching bits and pieces here and there, unsure of how one line lines up with the next except on the suggestive level.
There is a fantastic reading by Hughes that I can only find in this clip of poet Alice Oswald giving a talk. The entirety of this video is good but if you want to hear Hughes read it, it is at 27:29 in the video.
In Hughes reading especially, the poem does the rhythmic work of precisely the poem’s subject. Don’t you get the sensation of water lap-lap-lapping on the shore with each water wanted and each it came weeping back?
The sound of language is an offering of meaning, just as much as what the syntax, word pairing, rational coherence and etymological roots offer.
In a close reading of both the Hughes and the Stein poem in a recent discussion group, someone said that both reminded them more of memories than anything else. We tend to forget that the ubiquity of the written word is brand spanking new when it comes to human history. It used to be that we collected memory and significant happenings within our lives and communities through the telling of stories.
This was such an important cultural engagement often tribes would entrust their stories to other tribes in case an unforeseen tragedy wiped them out; their stories, their collective memory, would survive.
Where we do seem to have writings that more closely resemble lists and annotated facts with more advanced ancient cultures, this was hardly the norm and certainly not available to the masses. The stories that were repositories of a culture’s transmitted sense of being, held the atmosphere and phenomenological heft that maintained, not just the informative facts of happenings but—like in the poetry above—had an openness that allowed the hearer to enter them in a relational engagement. There was room for them, for their families within the story. The story bumped around in their psyche, enriching the idiosyncrasy of their world with an imbued meaning. That kind of openness comes at a cost: the facts will not likely remain in tact, but the multivariate hum through its experienced layers will subsist.
This type of story telling’s importance is lost on us. Though not obliterated, often it is pushed to the margin for the sake of more modern types of understanding. Our humanity feels the weight of this. The humus of us resonates. The symptoms of the problem are scattered throughout theater, plays, movies and t.v. shows. Everyone knows the troupe of the father or mother that works so much, or is so engaged in the cause and effect of the modern world they have no time for play or rest or story or deep engagement.
Where it may show up as a troupe because we intuitively recognize a problem, the enacting of it on our screens and our consumption of it as entertainment is hardly a solution.
My full time job is as an Exhibitions Manager in a visual arts center. Part of my job is to pay attention to how people engage with the works of art. One thing I’ve noticed—not just in others but do this myself—is, when a person approaches a painting on a wall, as they get closer and closer their eyes gravitate toward the artwork label.
The artwork label will tell you the who, what, when, sometimes where, how much. It offers you the news. Rational, factual information, and in our Information Age, we land comfortably here. I would contend that all of the artwork label information is important but it is secondary to a relational engagement with the work.
I was lucky enough to have teachers in art school who taught us and emphasized that you should go into a gallery or museum and first, emote. What is it that springs to the surface? If its confusion, if its frustration, if its misunderstanding, so be it! But stay with it, hold on to the feeling being evoked and simply ask why?
All that the artwork tag has to offer you may very well be important information but it doesn’t actually tell you who, doesn’t actually tell you how and certainly doesn’t tell you why. There is a deeper understanding of these (who, how, why) available. Ready and waiting to be engaged and its all happening IN the work.
If part of your body is injured, and the repair requires movement you go to a physical therapist. And the therapist demands something of you: relinquish control of your strength in order to exercise what is weak.
As a culture the musculature of our emotional and intuitive intelligence is weak. Our ability to tell and receive story as a culture, is weak. Our ability to enter the open work of the poetic—in whatever form—is weak. We are glutted on the comfort of fact. We need the deep, revivifying, enlivened work of truth.
There is a world of hospitality within the poetic. And when I say poetic, I mean that across disciplines. The poetic is waiting to accommodate your showing up. It will give to you, it will receive from you, if you’ll come with your whole self.