SEEDING THE BUTTONS BOX
THE BOOK
..........................-
TENDER
BUTTONS
THE SUBBOOK
...................-
OBJECTS
THE SUBPOEM
...................-
WATER RAINING: NUMBER 31
WORD
COUNT......................-
11
THE SUBPOEM
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COLD CLIMATE: NUMBER 32
WORD
COUNT......................-
10
STANZAS..............................-
1 each
THE
LEADER........................-
THE STEINY ROAD POET
CO-LLABORATORS..............-
MODPO
STUDENTS/THE BUTTONS
GENRE..................................-
VIRTUAL OPERA
LOCATION............................-USA,
UK, Australia, Philippines, S. Africa, Canada.
TIME......................................-
ALL HOURS OF EARTH’S CLOCK
TONE.....................................-
EFFUSIVE
“Rain
can make a meadow or it can make a flood. The meadow is passive. The stroke is
violent.” Randy Parker
WATER RAINING.
Water astonishing and difficult
altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.
COLD CLIMATE.
A season in yellow sold extra strings
makes lying places.
The Steiny Road Poet saw the
key words for this study session as water,
raining, meadow, stroke, yellow, strings, lying. A great
deal of the comments focused on objects in the natural world but veered
languorously into painting, writing, the Stein love relationships, saffron, the
yellow fever epidemic of 1793, string theory, and kabbalah.
WADING IN
Here are some samples:
From Randy Parker:
“Making
a meadow is life-giving.
“Making a
stroke--well that could be the painting reference that we talked about in ModPo—standing
water in the meadow like a stroke of white or grey paint. But a stroke is a
kind of statement. A striking, perhaps. Like lightning. A stroke of
genius. A stroke of bad luck. A debilitating physical stroke. Stroke can also
refer to swimming.”
THE FLUIDITY
OF LOVE
From Peter
Treanor:
“I wonder if water raining
could be tears, is she or Alice crying? Raining seems like a very active description
of what is happening to the water. Its astonishing and difficult, maybe
they have argued. And the flow of tears makes you wipe/stoke them away.
“And
stretching it too far probably, could meadow be "me adieu", me ( GS)
saying goodbye. Maybe that’s why there are tears, one of them is leaving?
I
like Randy's reading of this too and like the idea of the meadow as a meadow,
and a meadow is such a good place to make hay..
And "altogether" seems so "all to get
her" every time I see it now that I wonder if the meadow is Alice and the
stroke is GS stroking her, her meadow, and if the water is GS raining/ reigning
down her love and (wet) passion, making hay and making the meadow's wild
flowers grow.
“I was
[also] thinking of the ways that water is seemingly like love. How it flows,
how we get swept away in it, flooded by it, lost in a sea of it, have
oceans of it, float in it, swim in it, drown in it, set sail away on an
ocean of it. Are buoyed up by it. Love and water go together like a cup
and saucer.
from Claudia
Schumann:
“Water
raining is like water passing by (or may mean people passing by). Maybe GS is
thinking of May Bookstaver [Stein’s college lover] and trying to forget.”
BRUSH
STROKES
From Allan
Keeton:
“This
makes me think of the strokes of paint in daoist watercolor paintings.
“I am struck
by the graceful (astonishing & difficult to achieve)
harmony
between humans & nature.”
STRING &
PARTICLE THEORY
from Mary
Armour:
“This
[“Water Raining.”] brought back a memory of walking in a wet spring through
water meadows near Richmond, London, grasses undulating and surfing my calves,
and later watching some androgynous swimmer doing breast stroke in an
Olympic-sized pool, the swift parting of waters and cleaving, not as
dramatic as swimming the butterfly
stroke and heaving up shoulders but scooping water
horizontally, parting of ways like the Red Sea, like tall grasses in
Africa.
“The crawl
stroke was what we were taught at school, the swift clean slicing forward
motion taught after we graduated from doggy paddle. We had to practise it at
the side of the pool before we got into the water, moving our arms through
the air as if air was lighter helium-filled water.
“Then I thought about something else—a rain spider nest disintegrating into shreds of silk on the ivy hedge outside my study window, the way silk reflects light in ripples like and unlike water—and I went off to find an article by Joan Retallack I read last year during ModPo. How light is both a wave and a particle and how that understanding changes conventional ways of seeing a meadow, grass rising and falling like waves of water, rain falling in pencil strokes against glass. How quantum physics has upturned all my older Cartesian/Newtonian notions about what I am seeing.”
Retallack from
“What Is Experimental Poetry and Why Do
We Need It?”:
In the early
twentieth century, Niels Bohr was concerned about pressures that new theories
in physics (the successful ones that were being hailed as discoveries) were
exerting on conventional visualizations of causality. Max Planck’s discovery of
the quantum of action had produced the then startling, now familiar,
contradictory conceptions of the propagation of light. The particle/wave
contradiction illuminated a more complex, counterintuitive substrate of what
had been thought of as the logical limits of the intelligible real. It could
not be accounted for by descriptive conventions embedded in the language of
theory to date.
Allan connected “Water Raining.” and “Cold Climate.” With the words stroke and strings.
“Wow astonishing & difficult stuff here.
“Strokes of lightning are far more
astonishing in their complexity than previously thought.”
Allan
provided a tutorial on Transient Luminous
Events, electrical phenomena that include red sprites, blue jets, and elves. Some of these electrical
flashes resemble jellyfish, carrots, or columns. He also found the following
image of yellow lightning with multiple electrical strings, saying it was
“water raining with extra yellow
strings of lightning” and that the image “recalls the extra dimensions needed
for the vibrational patterns of the strings in string theory.”
THE TRUTH OF
LYING PLACES
In pouring
over “Cold Climate.”, the Buttons had these kind of exchanges.
Randy: “In
Cold Climate, I like the phrase lying
places. Places for animals or livestock to bed down? Or places where the
truth is not told? Places that aren't what they seem?
Peter:
“Cold
Climate, makes me think of winter or spring, and a season in yellow well that
makes me think sun or summer. But the cold and the climate and
the yellow and the lying places (beds) make me think of daffodils. And Daffodils come up in the cold season and need frost
to germinate, are planted in beds. And I somehow think that GS wouldn’t have
missed the allusion to Narcissus if she was thinking of daffodils, so what to make of
that?
“String is interesting too, the twine that could hold a
bunch of flowers, or the lines that the flowers are planted in. The dictionary
definitions include, thread (a series of small objects) on a string: (string
something together) add items to one another to form a series or
coherent whole—a sequence of similar items or events (Just like she
is doing in TB). Or stringing
someone along maybe or twine or entwined or twinned.
“But with the
feeling of cold and winter and Narcissus and strings (maybe playing your own
strings), is she talking of a cold frosty place in their relationship? Is she
talking about times when she or Alice lie in their lying place, (bed) and fall
out of connection with each other and love and pleasure themselves, stroke
their own pens (in the meadows of pleasure)? Does she feel cold and left out,
sold down the river, and that it (their closeness) is a lie (a lying
place) and that she is being strung along or doing the stringing along?
“Or does she
feel that these extra strings (to their bow) attach them further, bind and tie
them together (to get her)? Strings
as ST RINGS Stein/Toklas rings of betrothal/
marriage/ connection maybe?
I think its interesting that cold and sold rhyme too
but don’t know what to see in it, apart from old, that is.”
Randy:
“Intriguing
that mate is right there in
"Cold Climate.".
Here Steiny injected her two
cents:
“How
about climate==>lic(k) mate?”
Peter: “Karren
[a.k.a. Steiny], clit is there too
(in climate) but you made me say it.”
SPICES OF
CULINARY LOVE
The spice of
love also conjured such seasonings as curry and saffron.
Peter: “A season in yellow or maybe yellow seasoning, and came up with saffron one of the most valuable spices sold at the highest
of prices, turns everything yellow. And it looks so very stringy red threads
and yellow styles.
“And Saffron's
aroma is often described by connoisseurs as reminiscent of metallic honey with
grassy or hay-like notes, while its taste has also been noted as hay-like
and sweet.” [referring to meadow
in “Water Raining.”]
LOVESICK: YELLOW FEVER & FLU
Then Peter looked at how these two subpoems together:
“I
saw lying places as possibly graves. And a season in yellow that made graves
what could this be? I thought maybe Yellow fever, which seemed at first to be related to warm climates
not cold, until I saw there had been epidemics as far north as New York, but
that could be in the summer, when hot.”
The yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia, which was then
the capital of the United States, resulted in the deaths of several thousand
people, more than nine percent of the population. The national government fled
the city, including president George
Washington.[41] Additional yellow fever epidemics in
North America struck Philadelphia, as well as Baltimore and New
York in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and
traveled along steamboat routes of interior rivers from New Orleans. They
caused some 100,000–150,000 deaths in total.[42]
“So I thought
about influenza and saw there had been an outbreak of Asian or Russian
Flu in 1889 that started in Russia but spread through out Europe quickly
due to the improved transport networks. It spread to Paris and London and
across to the USA with outbreaks in New York, the following year it spread
worldwide. In Europe, the 1889–1890 influenza was the greatest single
killer epidemic of the nineteenth century, claiming 270,000 to 360,000 lives.
The Russians claimed that the epidemic had been started by the flooding of the
yellow river in China.
“But what of
sold extra strings? Well a dip into the folk remedies of the time (and now)
reveals a belief that Flu can be warded off or absorbed by putting onions around the room, sliced or whole. And with no cultural
stereotyping involved we all know that a Frenchman likes a nice string of
onions. I can imagine that the sale of onions went up during these times of
epidemics as people believed they would ward off the deadly Flu.”
OF GOSSIP
AND HEAVENLY MALE SEEDED WATERS
Here Steiny,
pulling on extra raingear, will emerge from the low-lying places of this
summary to say that Gertrude Stein steeped herself in the lives of her friends.
While she did not keep a personal journal, she loved hearing everyone’s daily stories
and often details from the day went into Stein’s creative writing. Maybe if
these subpoems refer to love spats that they might belong not to Gertrude and
Alice but to Pablo Picasso and Fernande Olivier or to Guillaume Apollinaire and
Marie Laurencin. Also Fernande left Pablo in 1912 when he began seeing Marcelle
Humbert (a.k.a. Eva Gouel). Eva, as Pablo called her, died in 1915 possibly of
tuberculosis so it’s possible Gertrude knew of Eva’s illness when she was
writing the “Objects” section.
In introducing
this study session to the Buttons, Steiny suggested that there might be
touchstones to such subpoems as “Careless Water.”, “A Substance in a Cushion.”,
and “A Piece of Coffee.” Here’s what a newcomer to the discussion had to say
about “Water Raining.” and the connection to “Careless Water.”:
“According
to what I know of the water-heaven relationship, water is created in Genesis as
"here, water." Mayim is created on Sunday (assuming that's the first
day of creation, and Saturday—Shabbat—being the day of rest. Monday, God
created shem-mayim, literally there waters. Hebrew distinguishes
between here (po) and there (shem). Note that water in
Hebrew is waterS, plural, because composed of many drops. Anyhow, when
the there waters were separated from
mayim (face of the earth) it was exceedingly painful, much as birth of
infant; such immense bodies of water being pulled out of the waters is
painful. Therefore on Monday, there is no and it was good. But on Tuesday (third day of
creation), it is said twice to make up
for day before. Check out text of Genesis in tanakh, or the Hebrew
bible.
“Now here's
where it gets interesting in terms of our Gertie. She says careless water. There's an ancient
tradition in Judaism in the Talmud to argue whether God is cause of
suffering, or is aware of it, and thinks it's beneficial to our soul's growth,
or whether he is impartial observer, literally, above it all, i.e., could
"care less." I'm attaching a link that goes into that a little bit.”
Then Steiny
got Xcited and found this:
Steiny had said
during the study session that water imagery is considered female while fire
imagery is considered male. Feeling perplexed, Steiny thought this put Gertrude
in a strange place because her writing imagery seems to be mostly water and not fire. However, now with
this Kabbalistic interpretation of there
waters being male (and containing seeds), the contradiction resolves
itself. But even so as Claudia Schumann pointed out—“GS is an Aquarius which is
a masculine sign—not a surprise. But, that sign is also the water bearer
which would indicate that [someone under this sign] takes up residence with
water.”
FILLED WITH
SUDDEN THUNDER
While “A
Substance in a Cushion.” had words like season
and string in common with “Cold Climate.”, Steiny’s attention went straight to “A
Piece of Coffee.” as a touchstone for “Water Raining.” with the word astonish.
In COFFEE,
we see this sentence:
“Supposing
that there was no reason for a distress and more likely for a number, supposing
that there was no astonishment, is
it not necessary to mingle astonishment.”
In RAINING,
we see this:
“Water astonishing and difficult altogether
makes a meadow and a stroke.”
The verb astonish means to fill
with sudden wonder or amazement. More interesting is that the root points to
thunder:
[Alteration
of Middle English astonen, from Old
French estoner, from
Vulgar Latin *extonāre : Latin ex-, ex-
+ Latin tonāre, to thunder; see (s)tenə- in
Indo-European roots.]
In
“Water Raining.”, we have a meadow and a stroke. As previously
discussed, stroke might point to stroke of lightning and where there is
lightning…thunder, no?
In “A Piece of Coffee.”, if there is no astonishment
such as thunder, Stein wonders about mixing or connecting or mingling astonishment – perhaps putting the fireworks of lightning
together with the wonder of thunder. So what Steiny sees in “Water Raining.” is
if it rains and the rain is astonishing because of thunder and lightning then a
low lying place like a meadow can be
seen. Perhaps this is Stein talking about how to kindle the flame of love,
which, golly gee, brings us back to fire.
Here is where
Steiny praises her rubber boots and yellow slicker with hood. Then fades into
the fog.
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