Quote of the Moment

"...She says, 'But in contentment I still feel 

The need of some imperishable bliss'.

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, 

Alone, shall come fulfillment for our dreams

And our desires. Although she strews the leaves

Of sure obliteration on our paths, 

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths,

Where triumph sang its brassy phrase, or love

Whispered a little out of tenderness,

She makes the willow shiver in the sun.

...We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

Of that wide water, inescapable.

...At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink,

Downward to darkness, on extended wings."

Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

Quote of the Moment

 

"It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or we are old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. 

 And why, if this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us-- why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him. 

Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love."

-Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room (1922)

[Note on the picture: This is a photograph taken of the Dreadnought Hoax, of which the Bloomsbury group was responsible. Virginia Woolf is the handsome bearded one on the far left.]

A Little Monkey Goes Like A Donkey

 

Gertrude Stein never ceases to make me laugh. In a prose poem of Stein's entitled, "A Dog"--which is found in the Objects section of Tender Buttons--I found myself particularly seized in a giggle fit. The poem is short: "A little monkey goes like a donkey that means to say that means to say that more sighs last goes. Leave with it. A little monkey goes like a donkey". Take your time. Read it again. Read it again. Again, read it. It read again... uh, confused?  I am. Confused, but amused. Can't you just see Gertrude on rue de Fleurus, lumbering around, knocking the Picassos and Renoirs off the wall, and clucking after her beloved dogs, "Little Monkies! Comment je vous adore!"? Well, I can. 

Here is some semblance of logic that I can find in "A Dog": It is a linguistic portrait of movement. Stein's whole shtick is to create an emotional relation by suggestion. In that, by using word combinations that seem senseless upon first inspection she creates a portrait by suggestion. So, she doesn't literally mean a monkey goes like a donkey thus a dog. She seeks a set of nouns that we have an intuitive emotional reaction to and sets them on their head (or their paws, hooves... whatever) to suggest another picture... i.e. now for something completely different! 

Here's what Stein herself said on the matter in A Transatlantic Interview: " 'A little monkey goes like a donkey...' That was an effort to illustrate the movement of a donkey going up a hill, you can see it plainly." Right. 

What are your thoughts? Commentary on other Stein works?