Dipping into Stein

I have not come to mean
I mean I mean
Or if not I do not know
If not I know or know
This which If they did go
Not only now but as much so
As if when they did which
If not when they did which they know
Which if they go this as they go
They will go which if they did know
Not which if they which if they do go
As much as if they go
I do not think a change.
-Gertrude Stein

What meaning I have is questionable; I have not come to mean anything, rather I have become someone who makes meaning out of what is at hand, a bricoluer, if you will, rather than someone who knows what anything means. Someone who takes what is there and makes what she wills of it. My father, after he retired, opened a furniture repair shop in the garage at home. He had three children from 8 to 17 and he could not afford to retire even on social security, so he took what he had in his repertoire and made money. People would bring him their broken furniture, or their “antiques,” furniture they wanted to keep for some reason. Dad would fix it. He would find pieces of wood reproduce the original and fix it. I remember him staring at a piece of copper sheeting for an hour, getting up walking around the yard, cursing, sitting down and staring at the copper again, cursing some more, before finally cutting out a pattern for something he was trying to make in less than a minute. He was my Axe Handle.
Much of what I write now, as far as essays go, are rambles, I start, then follow where the trail leads. Of course that does not mean a direction as much as a trail, impling a wake like a boat across a lake; I arrive somewhere, so in retrospect it appears as if I have followed a path, rather than cut my way through the tangle of my thinking. The turns of the trail are determined as much by what I do not talk about as much as what I do. I think of Mark Strand’s poem where he says, “I move to keep things whole.” He keeps the air apart in his bodily presence, so he moves allowing the reunification of air. I write to make things whole; I move through the bits of words I have been reading trying to get out of the way. I am not being coy. I look over the “texts” I have been reading, write down a few quotes, out of the slew of underlining I made while reading the books, then start to write. I would imagine that if I could pick different quotes from the same authors, I would come up with a different essay. Of course the quotes I pick are determined by what I am thinking at the time of the choosing, which is influenced as well by the quotes I pick as I am picking them thereby changing what I am thinking. Finally I create a story line that attempts to shape it all into a sense of meaning, or at least a sense of what I think I mean at the time.
I wonder if I am shaped more by the writing than I shape what I write when I write.

Inner Speech, Deep Inner Speech

I read "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominique Bauby today. It is the memoir of a man who had a stroke and was left paralyzed completely. He was able to move his head and his left eye. He suffered from what they called "locked-in syndrome," because he could still think, see, smell, and hear, but could not communicate with the outside. His speech therapist came up with the idea to rearrange the alphabet into the most commonly used letter order. Visitors would say this new alpha order and when they arrived at the letter of the word he was trying to spell, he would blink his left eye. Early in the book he wrote that he would think about what he wanted to write before someone arrived, because he did not want to waste time thinking about what he wanted to say when he was writing. It was a funny, say, moving story. It made me think about how much time we spend in our own heads, and Vygotsky's inner speech. Jim Harrison wrote that most of the talk we do is with ourselves. Yes, community is important: Bauby's amazing effort to communicate is testimony to that, but his book is also testimony to the depth of the world we live inside of our skulls.

transaction

Let me see if I understand?

You have this image
a picture, if you will , in mind
perhaps more of a painting
because of the layers
and textures of nuance
you have thought about
but cannot articulate
in any coherent, logical manner
thus the image
or did we agree on a painting
to help out in the explanation
a visual aid of a sort
but a visual provided by a word
which of course is a sound
which represents something else
which creates an image
or painting to represent
all of what you mean
but cannot say
which is there floating around
in your head
like snow flakes or fog.

Is that it?


(Fall 2007)

small talk

the tendency to provide an entry
to give over some easily handled
metaphorical line of thought to make
the intent palatable for the time
it takes to transform the former idea
into the latter one: you into me - -
long enough to allow the thought to form
long enough for the talk to begin

yet still what is there to say anymore
that has not been said before by others
we are constrained in the range of language
how many ways can we say I love you
not enough apparently, look around
so many die with no kiss on their lips

(December 2007)