tender gluttons
I came across a postulation that the title itself of Gertrude Stein's literary work of Cubist Confusion Tender Buttons is a metaphor for the female erogenous zones. While I am not at a time in my life where I can (or desire to) spend hours (again) devoted to decoding this wonderful, confounding work, today I was internet link-lead down the path of reading some of it again, for the first time in years.
Merely reading that its title was a metaphor for nipples and clitorises re-framed the way I viewed the pacing of each paragraph. The whole thing feels like foreplay; there is teasing, there is repetition, and just when you think you're going to get some kind of narrative, some kind of climax or - dare I say it - {erect} POINT - the composition devolves again, fragmenting into staccato shards. Like this, for instance:
"The time came when there was a birthday. Every day was no excitement and a birthday was added, it was added on Monday, this made the memory clear, this which was a speech showed the chair in the middle where there was copper."
Like, damn, we finally thought at last we would be getting to a birthday party scene (if not Mrs. Dalloway going to buy the flowers herself, then someone DOING someTHING), and then...this. Gertie didn't know Covid19 was coming, but the above paragraph sums it up pretty perfectly: every day stretching on towards sameness, an abundant lack of excitement, and then finally a birthday comes and it's... on a Monday, so it can't really be celebrated at all.
Tender Buttons reads like a lecture that you fall asleep on and then come to, hear a fragment, and then fall asleep again, drifting in and out of a verbal symphony. I mean that as a compliment, it's incredibly soothing and I remember being one of the very few in my class who cheered for this work, who felt something of it, felt so much for it. Even more so when I found a clip of Gertrude Stein reading her own work, which can't help but make you feel like you're on drugs, and then late one night with my friend Mark, recorded myself as Gertrude Stein reading it.
Tender Buttons has what I love and loathe most about modernist literature: infinite possibility and a marked absence of a cast-iron hook upon which to hang my hat. There is no comforting or mollycoddling, reading it is like being subject to a literary centrifuge, like reading when you're so tired that you're eyes cross and so you overcorrect by widening your eyes so big that your contacts aren't held in place anymore and they panic-shift of their own accord to adjust, and then everything comes back together into focus for a moment before losing it again.
Gertrude wrote it while having her portrait painted by Picasso, and so every day they sat and talked words, and form, and shape, and how the pieces are just as crucial as the whole, if not more so.
March to March has been an onerous, monotonous lecture. We have looked at nothing but ourselves, we waited, we yearned for a dialectic. It was a full calendar year of stream-of-consciousness. I think of this mid-Covid tweet almost daily:
How alone, we all were and are, how desperately we clung to pixelated crumbs of humanity.
2020 was modernism, mid-2021 will (hopefully) be an outrageous unfurling, a veritable phallus of metamodernist energy -- decidedly un-Gertrude-like. I have a stack of books by my bedside and I can think of no other appropriate word than I feel desperate for it, the sudden need to absolutely inhale and learn and know, before we all get back out there, milling around each other, like we used to. I've got to know more now than I did then, I just have to. Like this private alone-time with the words and worlds of others is a sacred space to protect, and I feel it dwindling away. I suppose that's how my anxiety about the world coming back is unfurling to me - it's not presenting as social anxiety, but as a private sort of nightly ravenous rapture. I'm a tender glutton?
We all hang here, now, in the balance, between the I and the you and the resultant we.
As Gertie said best: Miracles play. Play fairly. Play fairly well. A well. As well. As or as presently. Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.
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