So
anyhow the last time I get into town it is an uptown thing - the
induction of Gertrude Stein into the Poets Corner at the Cathedral
of Saint John the Divine - up around Columbia, all the more literary
NYC poets living in their 1950s coldwater flats know where I mean,
and even the general public does these days, there was a fire there
just before Christmas and in this world of 9-11 Manhattan jumpiness
a fire in a public place gets everybody's attention, though the
press says nothing about Poets Corner just goes on and on about
the cathedral until the last spark's well doused and some other
news item has them rushing off after the moment's latest alarm.
Anyhow never mind that
it's the last time I was in Manhattan and to tell you the truth
the only time I go to the cathedral is for these inductions, Christmas
and New Years you'll find me steering way clear of the Big Apple,
but when it comes to inducting poets I'm there, like just last year
when it was Edna St Vincent Millay they were inducting into their
little self-appointed American Poet nirvana - not that I'm complaining,
mind you, it's not a bad idea at all, despite the solemn robewearing
and titles like "electors" and other bureaucratic niceties,
where else can you walk by cathedral light to stones immortalizing
the likes of Walt Whitman Mark Twain Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson
and now it's the turn of the 20th century types, anyhow now it's
a year later Edna's safely immortalized in uptown Manhattan and
this year they're inducting Gertrude - a pretty cool thing in my
mind since just last year when Dana Gioia was in the middle of the
process there was a big scuffle over who should get in that year,
Gertie or Edna, and Edna the neo-formalist won not my favorite but
neo-formalists should have their day in the limelight, and now it's
the turn of language poet Gertrude Stein.
In fact I haven't been
uptown like this since the night before the day they auctioned off
Jack's On The Road scroll, a magnificent night in its own way in
a scruffy college bar he and Hunke and Allen and Burroughs and the
rest hung in back in the 1940s, strange place for a two and a half
million dollar artifact to be displayed, but fitting I guess the
bar itself is a kind of artifact of the original beat days when
Jack typed hell out of the world two fists flying and slung life
around in a backpack; as for the scroll a dog chewed off one end
of it and who knows what other indignities it suffered but fifty
years later it is a literary relic that they keep under luminous
glass and only film stars and sports celebrities have a shot at
buying it; which in fact happens, some football team owner who plays
guitar and has stars in his eyes for bohemians buys the thing and
for a hefty price; and all together I figure Jack's "Inner
Catholic" would be pleased with the way the thing's handled,
not his "Inner Buddhist," way too temporal for that, there
in the bar near Columbia his beat up old scroll is being watched
like a piece of some saint's skull or other relic by burly security
guards who are trying to look inconspicuous; whether or not he wished
for sainthood they are beginning to sanctify Jack's things and encrypt
them in the literary holy places and churches for the benediction
of all who approach and I for one have no doubt one day we'll see
Jack's name among the other literary saints encrypted at St Johns;
not just yet, however, they've only gotten so far and so radical
and so enlightened and so twentieth century as Gertrude Stein.
It's about time for
her, anyhow. Overdue maybe.
You could argue that
but I won't, anyhow I get there early for a change and instead of
sitting up in the pews where the papparazzi and their bored boyfriends
sit I find a fold-up seat down among the dignitaries and reserved
seats, how I slip past the Cathedral security guys I have no idea,
but it is a ringside seat and I am within sizzle distance when they
light the candles at the lectern. nice effect, but not particularly
effective for reading, I think. And sure enough a moment or two
later I notice off in a corner, just at the last moment before the
thing is supposed to start, this maintenance guy shows up and flicks
a tiny switch behind a curtain, and the reading lamp comes on.
Shades of Wizard of
Oz, you say, but hang on. Immediately this crowd of Electors emerges,
behind a procession of candlebearers and a choir, wearing their
holy garb, and the show begins. There's a lot of nice singing, and
some woman gets up and says what a cool lesbian Gertrude was. Some
language poet gets up and says what a cool language poet she was.
A woman with big earrings gets up and says they are Gertrude Stein
earrings, and on the way over here tonight a guy in the subway noticed
them and complimented them and asked if Stein wrote the Wizard of
Oz, and how funny that was.
It's all pretty good
but I get distracted a little because while all the official stuff
is going on, meanwhile a small serious boy and his taciturn father
are in front of me wrestling over a pencil. The boy is persistent,
with an urgent whisper, trying to mark some spot on the program.
The father, wearing a mostly plain gray suit under his big Elector
Robes, whispers in his ear and pushes his hand away from the program.
It is an odd little
scene, let me tell you, the father keeps slapping his son's hand
away below the line of vision while he's smiling for the crowd,
some secret silent struggle going on below the line of vision while
everything appears normal and excellent on the outside, the boy
squinting at the pencil and twisting at it, the father twisting
at it too, trying not to squint, at first I think it is some sad
lost unseen game going on, hangman or snap, but it's not that, I
lean forward to catch the whispering struggle going on between them,
the boy is saying the word over and over, I begin to make it out:
"cue," he says, "the cue," what is the meaning
of all this, I wonder; but put it aside, now the man has gotten
up, it is his turn to speak.
Turns out it is not
just a man - it is Charlie Bernstein. Distinguished Professor at
Buffalo and all that, he's the keynote speaker or something for
the event, and he starts to speak, and he's clever and intelligent
and comprehends Gertrude Stein in a way that I'm pleased as punch
to hear about; and after awhile I figure out what all the fuss was
about over the pencil. It turns out Charlie has staged a nice little
stageplay in the middle of his speech, the boy is supposed to come
up and say something in the middle of his dad's speech, Bernstein
has made the boy part of the academic trickery of the moment, something
to raise the eyebrows of all the sleepy gray heads in the cathedral,
and the kid is anxious because he doesn't know the cue he keeps
saying to his dad "what's the cue!"
Anyhow they must have
figured it out because the cue comes and the boy stands up and says
"if I may interject," and he rushes up to the lectern
to interrupt his dad, it is a little stale and lame but okay, it
gets a rise out of the crowd, I don't mind. A rise is a rise is
a rise.
So what's a rose? Something
a little more radical than "what lips these lips have kissed,"
which is Edna's big line, but Gertrude has lots of big lines if
you look closely at her stuff, which not a lot of people do - I
mean some of it is pretty heavy going, and there's too much of it,
and besides Gertude, well she was a person who deliberately went
about smashing the architecture of language so that she could make
it new again and quite often the effect was that of so much rubble
to pick through. But for all that I always thought that Stein's
wordplay moves past destruction to an oddly satisfying reconstruction
and was satisfied with that and moved on. From the looks of things
at the cathedral it is obvious that she continues to inspire iconoclasts
and experimentalists to this day in their iconoclastic experimentalist
white towers. Cool - at its best such wordplay transcends its own
contrariness to achieve a state of aphoristic bliss.
Like one of the speakers
says after Gertrude said "a rose is a rose is a rose"
the rose was red for the first time in 100 years, Stein had to learn
English as a second language, for her she was acutely aware of how
old and tired the language was and felt it desperately important
to figure out how to write with originality and importance in a
tongue which was in its "late age," this smash and grab
thing was her way, writing in the excitedness of pure being, syntactic
equality which creates a continuous present, go ahead Just Do It,
push the small shifting of punctuation and grammar and repetition,
shake off the old connotations edge toward the new.
Yes, a beautiful thing
and Gertrude Stein could do it and did. "Let Me Repeat What
History Teaches," she wrote, "History Teaches." I
like that. That's what it says on her stone now at the Cathedral
of St John the Divine, and if it is a little ironic to see an artist
so bent on breaking apart history for the kernels of linguistic
truth being enshrined in history, it is also one which we might
imagine old Gertie smiling about in her secret musings. At least
that's how I choose to think of her.
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