Text by Heidi Stalla
Sound Design by Diana Chester
Special Contributions by Cora Ceipek
I am standing here, behind a makeshift podium, imagining Gertrude Stein in the summer of 1926, standing behind a podium at the Cambridge Literary Club, half obscured by a jug of roses, and reading from her lecture, “Composition as Explanation” to a small following of undergraduates. The lecture is nonlinear, it disrupts conventional notions of time, and compares the evolution of World War I warfare to the role of Modernism in the evolution of the Arts. “There is singularly nothing that makes a difference,” she begins,
a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.
Perhaps it is Stein’s attention to words, nouns, pronouns, even verbs, as entities so powerful that they can almost exactly summon to mind everything and anything we see and hear and touch regardless of the year or century that led her to write in the continuous present. Her language, full of time-sense, creates a spirit of the age that refuses to be dismembered from its historical body. I believe in representations, and I find myself composing a word portrait of Stein for my students, thinking that what she looked and sounded like could help flesh out her words, her mind, her meaning. For one, Stein’s biographer tells us matter-of-factly that as a young medical student at the turn of the century she went uncorseted: “big and floppy and sandaled and not caring a damn.” To her lover, Alice B. Toklas, Stein “was a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair,” and her voice was “unlike anyone else's voice—deep, full, velvety, like a great contralto's, like two voices.” Like two voices! Contraltos, the lowest female voice part, are rare, falling between tenor and mezzo-soprano; so rare, I read, that some people today deny that contraltos actually exist. Sometimes, men, counter tenors, are hired in place of contraltos, and I wonder whether to Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s two voices meant that she heard in her lover perfect oscillation, sweet sound between interchangeable male and female tones, two essences vibrating like a cat’s purr: pure, and without equivocation.
As I read Stein’s voice out loud, I am thinking about how to explain the lecture to my own literature students almost 100 years later, who are eager writers themselves. When Stein talks about composition she means a few things: she means art, specifically modernist art; she means her own avant-garde writing and the way she arranges words spatially and sonically to make meaning, and she means the composition of war—specifically the design of battle: war strategies that had to evolve in real time to match modern warfare and technologies. Lord Grey, she says, “remarked that when the generals before the war talked about the war they talked about it as a nineteenth century war although to be fought with twentieth century weapons. That is because war is a thing that decides how it is to be when it is done—just as the modernist impulse is a thing determined to see and describe the world exactly as it is, fragmented, in flux. War accelerates change, and this is the same from generation to generation. Whether the Great War closing 1918, or the MeToo movement opening 2018, it is crisis, as Stein notes, that creates rupture compelling artists and politicians and public intellectuals to make a choice to either embrace things that are new and different and odd in their generation, or else to widen the trenches between fact and perception: in simple today speak to court alternative fact.
To see truly—it is this quality that I find myself thinking about in my own time as I imagine Stein and as I mull over her lecture. She went uncorseted in spirit as well as body, never prevaricating in any aspect of life or love or art. Perhaps Stein didn’t mean to be explaining the nature of truth to the Cambridge Literary Club when she was talking to them about beginnings, middles, and endings, but from my vantage point, facing a generation born around the time that Bill Clinton didn’t inhale, and coming to age just in time to cast their ballots for or against a president who lies about voter fraud, boasts about the size of his inaugural audience, and claims to have seen thousands of people cavorting on rooftops to celebrate 9/11, this is the angle from which I am looking. At first it seems counterintuitive to read Stein as a beacon of clarity, however, the seeming slipperiness of Stein’s language is essential to the candor of a vision that seeks to enlarge the truth: for all of her experiments disrupting sound and sight on the page, Stein is a proponent of straight talk. Her witticisms and word play open up possibilities precisely because they invite the widening of the senses from beginning to middle to end. Stein pairs clarity of sight with direct and pared-down speech when she writes, “There is no blindness where the talk is cheap, a version of her more famous line, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” from her poem, “Sacred Emily”. In the age of Homer, Stein explained, a poet could use the name of a thing and the thing itself was really there. Well, time and politics have intervened so that the inverse now is true.
In the age of Trump, our debates about language have very little to do with composition, or craftsmanship, or a part’s meticulous relationship to the whole, but we do return again and again to conversation about impending wars, fake news, and alternative facts. Language is not birdsong to be interpreted from the ether, but instead we chase shrill and broken tweets that race around a threatening virtual reality. Perhaps we are traversing a fault line that first began with the invention of this virtual reality; the internet, in its garnering of a space more concerned with semblance than true essence, represents the sort of change in modern composition we would do well to really see and understand. For now its simulated environment performs the antithesis of Stein’s continuous present, where a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. In virtual reality, “thinginess” is merely symbolic, and it becomes easy to insist that the truth, any truth at all, doesn’t actually exist. For now, we are living in contingency; any form of the past not caught verbatim on tape or in video footage evades, dodges, prevaricates, or as Donald Trump might have it relative to MbS—pussyfoots around.
“There is no direct reporting connecting the crown prince to the order to murder Jamal Khashoggi,” announces the American Secretary of State to the world. Well, I can just about hear Stein’s response to the secretary; it would take the shape of a verbal portrait of the true likeness behind the secretary’s statement—which is not really about MbS at all, it’s entirely about President Trump. But Stein’s portrait would use the president to represent something much more interesting, much more telling than Trump the man; she would answer with a verbal portrait of the figures at the heart of the debate. What I have in mind here, is something in the style of her second portrait of Picasso, which other than the title, “If I told him: A completed portrait of Picasso” has little discernible physical resemblance to Picasso at all—much as Picasso’s painting of Stein was hardly representative of her. In fact, in her poem, she never even mentions Picasso—she opens with repeated references to Napoleon, asking, “if I told him would he like it, would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.” It doesn’t take much to see the connection between Picasso and Napoleon: they were both short men with big egos—Picasso emperor of modern art, and Napoleon, the soldier emperor of France. By representing Picasso as Napoleon, Stein captures something of Picasso’s surround sound, so to speak; a reverberation that we could playfully extend to our self-styled emperors of today. Let’s let Stein slip into the composition of this moment in time that Trump inhabits and influences and is both part and parcel of:
If I told him: A Completed Portrait of #45
If I told him would he like it . Would he like it if I told him.
Would he like it would he trump him would he trump him would would he like it.
If MbS if I BS if I told him if MbS. Would he like it if I trump him if I told him if MbS. Would he like it if I BS if MbS if I told him. If I told him if I BS if I BS if I told him. If I trump him would he like it would he like it if I BS.
Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.
Exactly as as kings.
Feeling full for it.
Exactitude as kings.
So to impeach you as full as for it.
Exactly or as kings.
Shutters shut and open so do screens . Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.
Exact resemblance to Jamal Khashoggi, the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly dismembering, exactly in resemblance exactly a dismemberance, exactly and rememberance. For this is so. Because.
Now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all.
Have hold and hear, actively repeat at all.
I judge judge .
As a dismembering him.
Who comes first. Trump the first.
Who comes too coming coming too, who goes there, as they go they share, who shares all, all is as all as as yet or as yet.
Now to date now to hate. Now and now and date and the date.
Who came first Khashoggi at first. Who came first MbS the first. Who came first, America first.
The thing is, in the age of Trump, a dismembered body is not a body is not a body is not a body. An audio tape is not a tape is not a tape is not a tape. A murder is not a murder is not a murder is not a murder. A king is not a king is not a king is not a king. A smoking gun is not in flagrante delicto.
It is the way you are looking, Stein says across her podium, that affects the way life is conducted, and this way of looking at any one moment is what makes up a composition. Using the language of the creative process, Stein is asking each generation to bear witness to their present moment in real time, to realize what that other modernist Virginia Woolf said, that while words are useless they are the only thing that matter. We must not allow advances in today’s technology to outpace our means of using them, but instead figure out how to maintain the richness of composition, of the natural arcs of beginnings, middles, and endings, of words that tell human stories that lead to meaning. Aristotle told us generations ago that if words have no meaning then our reasoning with one another, and indeed with ourselves, has been annihilated.
Play fairly.
Play fairly well.
A well.
As well.
As or as presently.
Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.
Text and Audio Sources:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69481/composition-as-explanation
Smith, Samuel Francis, and Unidentified Band. America. [Edison, 1914] Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/ihas.100010370/>.
Novello, Ivor, and Frederick Wheeler. Keep the Home Fires Burning. Edison, Orange, N.J, monographic, 1916. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/00694067/>.
Vanderlip, Frank A., Spk, Nation'S Forum Collection, and A.F.R. Lawrence Collection. One Hundred Million Soldiers. [New York: Nation's Forum, 1918] Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2004650678/>.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKlub5vB9z8&gl=SG&hl=en-GB
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Stein/If-I-Told-Him.php
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-28231055/rare-recording-of-virginia-woolf
“Let Me Recite What History Teaches” is about speculation in all its forms: it thinks about what Gertrude Stein meant about history and time in her essay, “Composition as Explanation”; it plays with, in both form and content, the nature of collaboration and the invisible sounds and influences that underscore any published work; and finally, it uses Stein’s sense of a continuous present to highlight how history and characters repeat through time, in this case right up to the moment of last year’s questions and prevarications about the brutal facts surrounding the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
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Heidi Stalla (text) is a literature scholar and nonfiction writer interested in the play between modernist texts and contemporary issues. She has a BA from Stanford and a DPhil from Oxford, and teaches literature and creative writing at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.
Diana Chester (sonic composition) is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist and Digital Media Scholar. Her work draws from sound studies, archival studies, and the ethnographic study of expressive culture in religious festivals and traditions. Chester is fascinated by patterns in sound and the relationship in the formal qualities of different mediums. This gives organization to her work and informs her compositional approach. Diana is a visiting scholar at TISCH School of the Arts at New York University, and holds a Lectureship in Media and Communications at the University of Sydney.