An Open Letter to Gertrude Stein.

An Open Letter to Gertrude Stein

by james bezerra

Oh Gertrude Stein you strange giant beast of a person you Nazi-collaborating tastemaker you who died decades before I managed to get to Paris who once upon reading the poetry of Picasso took him by the shoulders and proclaimed “Pablo go home and paint” you reminded me of something and in doing so made me happy immediately after having made me so unhappy you reminded me as I was sitting at the table where I do my writing you reminded me as I was reading you reminded me that I was reading like I read and that in so reading was failing to really read you. You. Gertrude. You strange giant.

Which is to say that I put the wrong hat on before I read you the other day. I guess I had forgotten what your deal is. It took me a page and a half of banging my face into the rough brick wall of “Composition as Explanation” before I took a step back and wiped the blood away and remembered that you were basically an anti-semitic Jewish lesbian before it was cool. When you wrote, “No one thinks these things when they are making when they are creating what is the composition, naturally no one thinks, that is no one formulates until what is to be formulated has been made” I jotted in the margin, “Can a brother get a comma?” and you (apparently) replied down through time: “No.”

But you reminded me of something Gertie, with your incoherent waterfall babble that at first pissed me off because when I sort the contents of my brain by effect I often place you Modernists at the same campsite as the Post-Structuralists whom I adore as one adores their own child but not other people’s, I blame the Deridian destruction of language as (one of) the philosophical underpinnings of the Neoliberalist resurgence that gave us Reaganite Doublespeak and made it possible for Connecticut-born millionaire and son of a President W to call himself “an outsider” I blame you because Patron Saint Stephen had to make the word “truthiness” just to keep the fuck up with the language of lying that you helped make possible when you turned the page into a swirling vortex of word gravy. Goddammit Gertie.

But you reminded me of something. You reminded me as I started marking the breath pauses in your sentences just so that I could keep up, you reminded me that you were basically writing poetry and I was notating it like music and you reminded me that together we had just invented jazz and you reminded me that Kerouac didn’t write about jazz he wrote in jazz and so why had I put on my reading hat to read you when I was sitting at my writing table and should have been reading you like I was writing you.

You reminded me to snap my fingers and to tap my foot along with your beat. You reminded me that when one seeks to manifesto on the virtue of the incomprehensibility of all things, that one need not do it in sentences that make even any small amount of sense. Basically.

You reminded me of my conflicted relationship with Donald Rumsfeld. You compelled me to watch that whole documentary again where Rummy mugs at the camera as he reads his memos the collected works of the greatest ever language poet of bureaucracy and in the silence on Errol Morris’s side of the camera you can hear him wanting to scream, “You’re a fucking maniac! But I just can’t quit you Donald.” Known knowns and unknown knowns and known unknowns. You did this to us Gertie. Somehow you made this possible from Paris a hundred years ago. Somehow with a bottle of wine and a chat with Hemingway and Woolf you made this possible Gertie and bombs and bombs and bombs from the sky fell. Awe. Shock. When you make things mean nothing you are stealing from the future because when you remove the inherency of meaning other people will always come along and fill the empty place with something else. We are a race of meaning hoarders Gertie it is our addiction and just because you have cleaned our home out and shown us how pretty it can be when it is empty does not mean we want it pretty and empty. We want things Gertie and maybe your thing is pretty but it is too pretty for us. We like carnival barkers and Apple watches and shit that is bad for us. We prefer even lies to the chilling existential dread of the meaninglessness that you are trying to show us. We don’t want to eat our vegetables Gertie. And so we get Donald.

We were fine Gertie with general mediocrity. When you take that away from us by showing us that it is mediocre we like bratty children or teenage daughters will always say to you, “Oh yeah? Well watch this!” and like a rebound relationship we overcorrect into a different kind of vacuousness one that at least is willing to claim to have meaning. Donald Trump is running for President Gertie and not sucking at it and that is okay because we all know that he is actually just a bunch of rats wearing a trenchcoat, but he like you is going to enable the lunatic psychopaths to seem like not craven lunatic wolf psychopaths. When you pull back the curtain and expose the lack of meaning in everything then you put us in a situation where we have to buy meaning from the pimps of fecal ideology (ie: Ted Cruz) because we just can’t stand for everything to be nothing. We are not all equipt to be nihilists Gertie. We don’t like knowing that the universe was started by an accidental explosion and that there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. Can you please just let us have some birthday cake and let us watch The Big Bang Theory in peace Gertie? And of course down through time you reply: “No.”

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