Stepping Up Tender Buttons Objects: “A carafe, that is a blind glass.”

THE BOOK ..........................-           TENDER BUTTONS

THE SUBBOOK ...................-           OBJECTS

THE SUBPOEM ...................-          A carafe, that is a blind glass: NUMBER 1

WORD COUNT......................-           45

STANZA(S)............................-           1

Other Study Links                               Link 1, Link 2

THE LEADER........................-           THE STEINY ROAD POET

CO-LLABORATORS..............-           MODPO STUDENTS/THE BUTTONS

“Let's just take a compass rose as a place for looking at a system of pointing.” Mary Armour

“…maybe we are blinded by our own prejudices when it comes to concerns we find taboo or out of our comfort zones—the carafe is full, so to speak. Too full, that it becomes a blind glass.” T. De Los Reyes

“I am thinking about / looking forward ahead to cloth as a woven web...” Nathan Walker

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

REOPENING THE TENDER BUTTONS LIVING ROOM

The Steiny Road Poet decided to lead a new ModPo study group on Tender Buttons Objects (section 1) as a way to ease into a forthcoming and brand new ModPo study group on Tender Buttons Food (section 2). Because Stein’s work is so multi-dimensional, new things have been seen, which may aid in close reading “Food.”

One change to note is, forthwith. Steiny will spell the titles of Tender Buttons subpoems as Stein intended, but which was not noted until recently in the Corrected Centennial Tender Buttons edited by Seth Perlow. This means that the initial word will be capitalized but not the rest of the title except for a couple of anomalies: “A little called Pauline.” and “Colored Hats.”.

In these blogposts, Steiny will attempt to showcase selected comments and summarize without embellishment others concerning what hasn’t been noticed in previous study sessions.

To be inclusive, here are some points noticed by Steiny in her October 6, 2013 post:

—Gertrude Stein’s existence weighed heavy on her since she knew she and her brother Leo were replacements for children who came before them and who did not survive their infancy.

Therefore Steiny read “A carafe, that is a blind glass.” as a story of Stein’s birth. Key words: kind (KindèGerman for child), cousin, spectacle, hurt color, resembling.

—Arrangement in a system to pointing might indicate an arranged marriage, which also weighs heavily on producing children. But it could also be how to read Torah with an implement called a yad or it could be the way vowels are inserted (after the fact) in Hebrew text or an indication for how to chant a psalm.

—Stein as consummate scientist concerns herself with elemental balance. Ergo her double negative bookended with simple negatives: All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. More importantly, she is emphasizing existence in the opening subpoem and that existence which is different is proliferating.

TZDAKAH OF THE CARAFE

Robert Dougherty offered this close reading that built upon the word kind as giving:

If I can build upon my definition of "kind as giving" as the carafe "gives wine to the glass," I can see a metaphor that Stein may have built.  

The carafe is not a real carafe but a person with knowledge.  The carafe gives intangible "knowledge" to a glass that is an empty vessel, not a real glass but another person who receives "knowledge."  The carafe is made of "blind glass" because when a person like a poet, for example gives a poem to the future, the poet does not know who will read the poem.  

The carafe and the glass are cousins, as are the one who writes and the one who reads the poem.  Hurt glass refers to the transfer of emotion over time without actual touch. It is an "Arrangement." It points in time always from writer to reader, it is a system of passing knowledge from one generation to the next, from the carafe to the glass, always blind, in birth it hurts as with passing knowledge. Thus the "difference" the carafe "spreads" is its content (knowledge) to the future.

DECONSTRUCTIONS:

Gertrude Stein: A kind in glass and a cousin

Anthony Watkins: A kinding lass and a cousin

Peter Treanor:  A kindèakinèkin

Peter Treanor:  a cousinèaccusing

Peter Treanor:  A kin ding lass sand a cousin

Peter Treanor:  an object that could be part of a group or family, made of glass but "blind" glass, part of a pointing/orientated system. A compass? a watch? a clock? 

Peter Treanor:  A watch, cousin to a compass.

Mary Armour: Compass: 'an arrangement in a system to pointing' but not always true North.

Peter Treanor:  an arrangement in a system to pointingè a derangement in a system to painting. (Is Stein explaining, orienting the reader before she him/her on the voyage through TB. And referring to Cubism, all this—this poem, sentence, word—not ordinary, ordered, not resembling. Like a Cubist painting.)

Karren Alenier: Using a backward reach from "A Chair.", a subpoem that seems to deal with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, cousin and spectacle might suggest Our American Cousin, the play Lincoln was watching when John Wilkes Booth shot him, thereby causing the hurt color and causing the need for an arrangement in a system (the justice system) to (finger) pointing (the accused assassin).

Peter Treanor: a carafeèa craft

GETTING ORIENTED

From the word play came Mary Armour’s thoughts on what a system to pointing might indicate:

Let's just take a compass rose as a place for looking at a system of pointing. Gertrude Stein begins to write about OBJECTS and begins by giving the reader directions for a new way of looking and journeying. She begins therefore with an arrangement in a system of pointing, and for her purposes, the spectacle of a glass and carafe on a table is a compass, nothing strange. But not ordinary, not unordered, not resembling, a different kind of arrangement for pointing.

On the compass there are four cardinal directions: North, South, East , West. There are eight inter-cardinal (or ordinal) directions northeast (NE), southeast (SE), southwest (SW), and northwest (NW). Intermediate points are added to give the sixteen points of a wind compass. 32 points for a mariner's compass. This is how we navigate, taking our bearings traditionally from True North (rather than magnetic North). But if you can 'see' a multiplicity of directions and possibilities simultaneously, you don't need True North. Here or there depends on a different kind of perspective. As GS said of Oakland, "There is no there there."

The compass or arrangement for pointing Gertrude Stein chooses is not pointing out there to a representational reality or topology or climate outside of language. It is a linguistic signifying pointer to language itself, language as reality, language as seeing. It is a compass pointing to blindness and insight.

FINDING THE PHILOSPHIC UNDERPINNING

Among the philosophers and philosophy brought into this study session were:

Wittgenstein—on language games,

Alfred North Whitehead—on process and reality

Empiricism—relative to the role of experience and evidence

Edmund Husserl—relative to phenomenology of embodiment

Mary Armour: As we launch into Objects, I'd like to just give a little quotation from Wittgenstein on 'language games' to remind us all about the many teasing games played in language-making and how many ways we can 'hear' or  'read' a communication. All of them, some of them and  more than one of them are to be found in Stein:

'Review the multiplicity of language games in the following examples, and in others: 

--Giving orders, and obeying them-- 

--Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements

--Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)-- 

--Reporting an event-- 

--Speculating about an event-- 

--Forming or teasing a hypothesis-- 

--Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams-- 

--Making up a story; and reading it-- 

--Singing catches-- 

--Guessing riddles-- 

--Making riddles-- 

--Making a joke; telling it-- 

--Solving a problem in practical arithmetic-- 

--Translating from one language into another-- 

--Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.'

Karren Alenier excited about the language game list (Sprachspiel) offered these Wikipedia quotes about Wittgenstein and about the relationship Stein had with Alfred North Whitehead:

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.[4] From 1929–1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge.[5] During his lifetime he published just one slim book, the 75-page Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (1921), one article, one book review and a children's dictionary.[6] His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously.

Alenier: “So what this bio intro says, Stein probably didn't know anything about Wittgenstein's work unless her good friend Alfred North Whitehead knew him. Stein & Toklas got stuck at his house in July 1914 as WWI was erupting (that was after publication in May 1914 of Tender Buttons—I’m not sure when she first met this philosopher). Here’s a profile on Whtehead:”

Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality was fundamentally constructed by events rather than substances, and that these events cannot be defined apart from their relations to other events, thus rejecting the theory of independently existing substances.[28] Today Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality– are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.

Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us."[28]

Alenier: “Anyway, Mary that language game list is a good roadmap for reading Stein!!!”

Nathan Walker: “I think there is a definite and ongoing connection to Whitehead's Process and Reality to be made, even outside of friendship and association. (Stein knew Whitehead and spent several weeks at his house when she and Toklas got stuck in England at the start of WWI.) To look at Whitehead in concert with Cezanne's influence on Stein gives one pretty much a compositional technique of a field made from the networked connections between distributed elements, each of which is weighted equally in the composition, and points at every other element with multiple, over-determined threads. This produces a web, or tapestry.”

Peter Treanor: “The description of TBs as a web of interconnected parts seems to me to be a description of the human brain also—a web of interconnected parts that have a conversation with each other. Though some pathways may be more established than others, it still has the potential to make interconnections and have “conversations" with itself and its constituent  parts.