Tartlet

When I was much younger and much more naive than I am now, my mother told me that words were exhaustible. She said that if I said any given word too many times I would not be able to say that word any longer. Being the smart-ass that I was, I tested this theory. "Cat, cat, cat," I proclaimed loudly for two days straight. When I awoke on the third, I couldn't say it any longer. The word, which had meant so much to me before, now was meaningless. After saying the word so many times, it had worn out and my mind had developed a mental block to saying it. I walked around for day, sunken in a depression of realizing how useless words are as a form of communication. They don't stand alone as a generalization; they mean something unique to everyone else. This is precisely the idea explored by Gertrude Stein's quote. She said : “In Tender Buttons and then on and on I struggled with the ridding myself of nouns, I knew nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything was to go on meaning something. And so I went on with this exceeding struggle of knowing really knowing what a thing was really knowing it knowing anything I was seeing anything I was feeling so that its name could be something, by its name coming to be a thing in itself as it was but would not be anything just and only as a name”(242). What this simply means to her is that words do not translate with the same meaning. She, like the younger version of me, used certain words repeatedly in the text to purposefully demonstrate their irrelevance. Each time she used the word was meant to felt different but, in reality, merely highlighted the incongruences of language. In the first three sections of "Objects" for example, the word "color" is used three times specifically, once a section. She brings out the word to show how color demonstrates several different things in our language, English, but can mean something totally different in, say, Italian.

Stein's work reads much like a drunk man's writing. That being said, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, notorious drunkards, write more clearly than Stein. Her language is twisted, in some cases more clearly read backwards than left to right. Upon first reading the poetry of hers, one imagines this is a joke assignment, written perhaps by a stoned guy, as was demonstrated in F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Unfortunately, we are left without our Sugar O's to keep us from drowning. Stein's writing is full of meanings unexplained and meant to stun the reader. As was mentioned in a previous post, I am a huge LOST fan and I love puzzles. This piece of writing, however, is not a puzzle. It is a maze, designed to entrap the reader in a universe of confusion.

It took several days to undo my mental block of the word "cat." I have a nagging feeling that not even a lifetime of study could un-fog the writing of Tender Buttons.