Barbara Guest

Attic Mirror, collaboration by Mary Abbott & Barbara Guest [Painters & Poets]

from Barbara Guest's The Collected Poems:

The Nude

Studios are stations of reminiscence
in the nimble wind they are shadows

The artist attaches himself to the shadow
he attempts to revive it after the wind ceases,

This mixture of dark and light
is mysterious and adds depth

To the position of his model
who rephrases the shadow.

She reminds him of attitudes
beyond the mere appraisal of subject,

A peace without clothes
with its bestowal of light and volume

Where nudism is born.



The behavior of the landscape of nudism
varies as mirrors reflect

Curves, syllables of grace,
drops of water or trees elastic,

A native body beneath its plumes.

Is a weight become effervescent
when attacked by knowledge

Of shells and other remainders
of sexual consciousness tossed from sand,

They live in a contradiction of time.



The narcissism of the artist escapes into a body
that defines his emotions,

An interior where his own contour is less misty.

The figure is a nominal reminder that existence
is not pantomime as relieved by the artist,

The body of the model, the lift of her torso
the extension of limbs, fold of skin



Express reality beyond tenure of the brush,
shell or escapist sail,

A severe distance is established between her realism
and his anxious attempt to define it.

The painter desires the image he has selected
to be clothed in the absolute silk of his touch,

Lonely himself he has admired the glance
of kimonos, mirrors, fans and bestowed them on her

Who for many minutes of this day
borrows from art to cover her nudity.

The artist chose these objects to enrich space
around his model's hair or even her breathing

Which you notice as it shifts the atmosphere
in which you keep watch with a calm become necessary,

You are the viewer and without you
the picture cannot exist, the model shall cease to breathe.

The artist will sorrow even as darkness
replaces his brilliance of color.

The viewer inherits this nude
as a reminder of his own weightlessness

In a natural world
made winsome, or tense or aggravated

By the requests of an unclad body
with its announcement of dimension and clarity.

The need of the artist to draw the body
is like the love for three oranges,

He searches the world to find those spheres
that will confine the fluid nude,

There is with him a desire elemental
in its urgency to savor the skin of the body

The hues of geranium before the exit
his allotment of reality.

As the swan entered Leda
so the actual timing of an artist's abrupt gesture

Is supernatural despite interferences
of local ornamental mundaneity,

The supernatural contacts ecstasy hidden
in a guise of nudism.



The artist borrows mannerisms and technique,
he is free to copy, the other world is ambitionless.

An aura once restless now subsists
through residual favors on reverence,

Eve stands by her cypress,
a quiet nude studied by Cranach,

The solid body is led through crocuses.



You are an artist who notices everything
which concerns color and shape.

In the restaurant the artist says a blouse
you are wearing goes with the decor.

The blouse is a watery blue like somewhere
off the coast of Greece, like these walls

The colors you wear tumble into mild earth tones
again like a country, nothing literary

Where the rough body reaches out
a wave rushes over the sand denuding it

You share the classical nude landscape of sand.



At times a silence overcomes the artist,
a fog at the base of columns,

He explains he is thinking of the body.

Its behavior is strange, hiding behind leaves
he can never trap or bribe it.

So deep is the body's memory of self.

Each day there is a different voice,
today while wearing no clothes

It spoke of the essentials of life which were evident,
but the body took an invisible position,

It is arguable whether he shall ever see the face,
her back was turned from him like a goddess

She was either admiring herself or bathing.



Morning traverses her breasts
where she sits under the window of white curtains,

Trees are outside, their branches fix the sky,
she is thinking of nudism,

He draws an odalisque,
it is love they are asking for.



She looks at a canvas,
nature covets it,

Where a fever blots the muslin
clouds start to rise.

There is no figure.

This is landscape,
portrait of nude melancholy

Or its glow which is austere,
she asks, where am I?

He has not drawn her,
the sheen of her body only survives.

She turns herself into a star
above the unattended foliage,

He views her as she glistens,
silver enters the picture.



He confides,
"Each day I define myself."

He notices a coarseness of flesh,
he thickens his paint,

"It is a glimpse into the future,
fields light up," she sighs.

To replenish the sallow on her throat
he adds sunset tint

She reaches for ombre, noir
"It is the narrowness of time."

Respectful moonlight inhabits them.

Hugh Kenner

Hugh Kenner [Big Other]

from Hugh Kenner's The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett:

The Stoic is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed. Whether because of the invariable habits of the gods, the invariable properties of matter, or the invariable limits within which logic and mathematics deploy their forms, he can hope for nothing that adequate method could not foresee. He need not despair, but the most fortunate resolution of any predicament will draw its elements still from a known set, and so will ideally occasion him no surprise. The analogies that underlie his thinking are physical, not biological: things are chosen, shuffled, combined; all motion rearranges a limited supply of energy. He has been typically, at typical points in history, an ethical theorist weighing duty against preference without extravagant expectations, a hero aware that in defying the gods he yet fulfills their will, a gambler calculating odds, a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and in our time a novelist filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters.

It has taken us several centuries to realize how the Gutenberg Revolution transformed literary composition into a potentially Stoical act. So long as writing was the graph of speech, its highly stylized limitations, its nuances synthesized from discrete particles, were tacitly allowed for. Tones, gestures, live inflections, meeting eyes, these catalysts for the continuum of dialogue the reader learns unconsciously to supply. Not only was reading for many centuries an operation always performed with the voice, not merely the eye, but writing, even writing for the press, was controlled by the presupposition that these words here chosen would ideally be animated by speech. "Verie devout asses they were. . . ." — five words of Nashe's, and we know that we hear a voice. But by 1926, I. A. Richards found it necessary to labor the point that tone ("the attitude of the speaker to the audience") was one of the components of meaning, for the meaning of printed words had by that time come apart into components which the skilled reader has learned to put back together; and by mid-century a chief occupation of the college classroom had become the effort to persuade eighteen-year-olds, skilled consumers of print for two-thirds of their lives, that there were any kinds of meaning latent in language except the ones a grammar and dictionary will lock together.

I wonder, by my troth, what thou, and I

Did, will we lov'd? were we not wean'd till then?

A student who finds whose lines clotted has no difficulty with the following:

On newstands, the new Sunday paper had a clean, uncluttered look (six columns to the page instead of the customary eight), and it was certainly easy to carry home (8 oz. v. the 4 lb. 2 oz. of The New York Times).

Yet the latter passage is virtually impossible to read aloud. It has moved from research  through typewriter to printing press without the intervention of the human voice. I copied it, of course, from the issue of Time that happened to be lying nearest me: the entire issue, ninety-two pages of it, a dense mosaic of factuality behind each atom of which is alleged to stand a researcher's guarantee that justification can be produced on demand. Time, the exhalation of the linotype machine, does not talk, it compresses. Its very neologisms (cinemactor, Americandidly) carry their wit to the eye alone. In its immense success we behold several million readers a week absorbing information from the printed page by solely visual means, deciphering with ease and speed a mode of language over which, for the first time on so vast a scale, speech has no control at all.

This means that we have grown accustomed at last not only to silent reading, but to reading matter that itself implies nothing but silence. We are skilled in a wholly typographic culture, and this is perhaps the distinguishing skill of twentieth-century man.

Anne Carson

from Anne Carson's Plainwater:

I: Do you dream . . .

M: No I dream of headlights soaking through the fog on a cold spring night

I: Now it is you who is angry

M: I’m not angry I am a liar only now I begin to understand what my dishonesty is what abhorrence is the closer I get there is no hope for a person of my sort I can’t give you facts I can’t distill my history into this or that home truth and go plunging ahead composing miniature versions of the cosmos to fill the slots in your question and answer period it’s not that I don’t pity you it’s not that I don’t understand your human face is smiling at me for some reason it’s not that I don’t know there is an act of interpretation demanded now by which we could all move to the limits of the logic inherent in this activity and peer over the edge but everytime I start in everytime I everytime you see I would have to tell the whole story all over again or else lie so I just lie who are they who are the storytellers who can put an end to stories

fell of dark, not day

When Robin Williams killed himself, I felt kinship & deep sadness because I’ve wanted to kill myself — depression causes that. When I learned he’d been diagnosed with Parkinsons, I felt sad in a different way. Parkinsons is an awful, body- & mind-disabling disease. I wouldn’t want to endure it either. I too would do my best to kill myself in the early stages, before the disease progressed to the point where I would not be able.

Of course, I didn’t know Robin Williams, so I don’t know whether he killed himself because he chose not to live a diminished life or because he was depressed to the point where he could no longer ask for help. I hope it was the former. I hope I can kill myself before some awful disease diminishes me.

Mark Wunderlich

Mark Wunderlich [twitter]

from Mark Wunderlich's The Earth Avails:

Coyote with Mange

Oh, Unreadable One, why

have you done this to your dumb creature?

Why have you chosen to punish the coyote

rummaging for chicken bones in the dung heap,

shucked the fur from his tail

and fashioned it into a scabby cane?

Why have you denuded his face,

tufted it, so that when he turns he looks

like a slow child unhinging his face in a smile?

The coyote shambles, crow-hops, keeps his head low,

and without fur, his now visible pizzle

is a sad red protuberance,

his hind legs the backward image

of a bandy-legged grandfather, stripped.

Why have you unhoused this wretch

from his one aesthetic virtue,

taken from him that which kept him

from burning in the sun like a man?

Why have you pushed him from his world into mine,

stopped him there and turned his ear

toward my warning shout?

fox with mange in Argentina

Guy Davenport

Guy Davenport [New Directions]

from "E. E. Cummings?" in Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays:

That the poet speaks for people who cannot speak, that he makes sentences for people to say, is as outmoded a concept in pedagogy as whacking the behind for laziness and insolence. The poet, poor fellow, has become a Personality, and the only authority for his raving is that he stands in his shoes. That pair of shoes over there: in them stands a man who for lack of Personality might be famous as the poet.

One can think of statements that seem to explain so wry a misunderstanding of the poet as an issuer of personal pronunciamentos. Behavioral psychology, squirted into the ears of students from Head Start through the Ph.D., can account for no action not grounded in self-advancement; it follows that the poet as a voice for other people is suspect. He must be expressing himself, don't you see? Poor Whitman. He wrote a corpus of poems for an entire nation, to give them a tongue to unstop their inarticulateness. He wrote in their dialect, incorporating the nerve of their rhetoric and the rhythms of the Bible from which their literacy came. He wrote two elegies for Lincoln, one for grownups ("When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd") and one for school children ("O Captain! My Captain!"). He tried to understand the voiceless American and to speak for him, and as much as any poet has ever succeeded, he did. Yet he has been idiotically deposed from the fulcrum he so carefully selected. He wrote not a single personal poem and yet every word is taught to students as the self-expression of an elate disc jockey who made his scene with a poetry book, Way Back Yonder (but still pertinent, as he used symbols and sometimes undercut with irony).

Thus the editors of Time have no trouble doing an article on the most significant American poet. Marianne Moore? Louis Zukofsky? Ezra Pound? Robert Kelly? Ronald Johnson? Robert Duncan? Naw. Robert Lowell. Mr. Lowell has, indeed, worked hard at being a poet. He has been severe in his output, and knows, with Brahms, that writing is all too easy. What's hard is to throw most of what you've written in the trash-basket. He has been smart and modern in metric and diction. And he has been bleak, agonized, and serious, terribly serious. He seems to have always had a headache. He is respected at Bennington. Mr. Pound (as Time does not seem to know) has read from his poems at Spoleto. And Time has singled him out as the significant poet.

And he is, if we define poetry as essentially self-expression. And if Mr. Lowell's response to the world were as eloquent as, say, Stan Laurel's or François Villon's or Mahalia Jackson's — that is, if there were some juice or even some mud between the toes — the report from his inwards might instruct us in grief and support us when we're doleful. One need not diminish Mr. Lowell's excellence to say what's out of joint in Time's report on current American poetry; but since they set him up as representative, it is necessary to say with some firmness that he is not. He is a thoughtful, serious, melancholy academic poet; if he is representative of anything beyond himself, it is of a broody school of professor-poets whose quiet, meticulous verse is perhaps the lineal and long-winded descendant of the cross-stitch sampler.

Poets, Time says, are moony-minded, seeing camels and bunny rabbits in clouds. (Shiver and snuggle up, dear reader, Time is going to walk right up to a poet, give him an Ed Sullivan hug, and get him to express himself about his self-expression.) Shelly, by golly, saw a cloud as a cloud, but never mind. "Poets," Mr. Lowell says, "are a more accepted part of society." Mr. Lowell is a Harvard professor, and would no doubt, if he taught physiology, explain to his students that the tongue is an admirable and useful organ, and that society is almost reconciled to its being part of the body. When Ezra Pound ("the father of modern poetry," says Time) became a more accepted part of society, after thirteen years in the pokey where society put him in a moment of rejection, he was detained momentarily by reporters asking the usual silly questions. "Ovid had it a lot worse," he said, and while they were looking at each other's notepads to see how to spell Ovid, he clapped his hat on his head, and walked off to take a ship to Italy.

John McPhee

John McPhee [Ned Stuckey-French]

from John McPhee's "Cooling the Lava" in The Control of Nature:

Hearing a sound like a chain saw's, I looked down to see a motorcycle climbing the new volcano. The rider wiped out as he approached the crater rim. The motorcycle, pinwheeling, spun downhill in a sputtering swirl of tephra. Ash over teakettle, the rider tumbled, too. At last arresting his fall, he got up, ran after his loose machine, trapped it, then resumed the steep climb. Reaching the top, he zipped around the narrow rim. He stopped for a moment, contemplating. Then he plunged hundreds of feet down the dark-red slope inside the crater all they way to the bottom, under control. Motorcycles seem to have more prestige in Iceland than in, say, Greenwich, Connecticut, or Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. All over the new volcano, white-painted automobile tires mark the established tracks and competitive routes of what were described to me as "the largest, most powerful, most beautiful motorcycles in Iceland."

Where the lava went eastward into the sea, some of the new cliffs are a hundred feet high. Waves occasionally break over them. After a Belgian trawler crashed there in 1981, waves threw pieces of the trawler up on top of the cliffs. Rocks weighing half a ton have been tossed up there, too. It was at the base of one such cliff that Gudlaugur Fridthorsson first landed on the night of his long swim. In two places, bays with rocks beaches have indented this new coastline. One is called Baetur the Beach of the Insurance Claim. The other is Vidlagafjara the Beach of the Catastrophe Fund. The rocks, whether they are the size of potatoes, grapefruit, watermelons, water beds, or motor buses, are all rounded. Most are so cavitated by former gas bubbles that they suggest black coral, or models of the human brain. It was discovered on Surtsey and confirmed on Heimaey that such boulders do not require thousands of years to assume their shape but can be rounded by a single storm. During the eruption, a lighthouse on the eastern shore went below the lava. A new lighthouse stands above the Beach of the Insurance Claim.

Carla Harryman

Carla Harryman [The Volta]

from Carla Harryman's Adorno's Noise:

It Is Difficult to Write Satire

Lesson

The president was on top of me it's not what you think he was trying to hurt me he didn't know that I had a vest on too that he would have to try harder to get through he was pounding I was scared but unreasonably and so my giggling mingled with fear incredulity and true amusement the president wow was trying to pow me this made him madder he was plowing in with a low ball cut across the chest I'm teaching you a lesson his jaw was relaxing that bewildered set in stone look of determination he used for cameras relaxing a new expression was eeking through showing another self more free less fake by a long shot glowing but bitter "you'll never win you'll never beat me I'm stronger than you" this was obvious whenever he let go his grip on my shoulder even slightly I'd try to slide away from him he wanted to see me cry he pinned me, whispered this in my ear, not knock me out "the smug smile I'm gonna wipe it off your face" that's what he was going for and for me to declare with sincerity I give up you are going to be on top forever I've learned my lesson just move off and I promise you'll never need your fists again when you have completed your term I'll work in your library file your papers escort researchers to the drawers where your secret documents will be kept several decades hence and in the meantime we can keep your wife's favorite poetry books in them along with all the kind notes full of gratitude people have sent you and the personal notes from leaders thanking you for your hospitality and supporting your views on everything from — well you know — staying the course we'll keep the notes in those files until the keepers of state secrets let your truths slip out of their vaults into your drawers full of dignity and proper views and victory I'll call you whenever you like on a special line and report on the most recent display of fan letters one floor down in the presidential museum grand gallery — those tomes you had missed out on reading when you were busy doing your duty being obedient to the higher powers who had bestowed upon you the protective armor we now both share.

Cherry Pickman

Cherry Pickman [Marina Kaganova]

Cherry Pickman from Jai-Alai Magazine:

Bathymetry

I

If this were a movie and it is
the day would be       protracted but the season
short       after so many miles one tends to forget
tomorrow was never       promised I jumped
              from a boat and stopped       breathing
mostly there is no one else there     there is
              blue of prohibitive depth
there is a hull like home    that is
              rocking        not shaking
there is      a light the camera can't catch

II

If this were a story       I would be held
              accountable        I would string sense
from distinct beginnings        we do nothing
but grow old      watching a horse sleep
is like watching the ocean      the world
              exists more below you than above       waves
are anchored      to a set if you are not
              fettered by fear you are not home

III

If I were a poet I wouldn't be
              so beautiful I could stand outside
myself       for only a short time
           like holding one's breath
the more fear       the more love
the deep wood in the trees reaches
           simultaneously in opposite
directions        I am by no means the first person
condemned        to freedom the wave's
              velocity is predetermined it dragged its blue
from the middle of somewhere

Paul Blackburn

Paul Blackburn [jacket 12]

from Paul Blackburn's Selected Poems:

Hot Afternoons Have Been in West 15th Street

Here, in late spring, the summer is on us already
                                                Clouds and sun,
                a haze over the city.        Outside my
window the ailanthus nods sleepily under
                                                a hot wind, under
                wetness in the air, the brightness
of day even with overcast.        The chair on the next roof
                sits by itself and waits
for someone to come stretch his length in it.        Suddenly

thunder cracks to the south over the ocean, one can
                                                shuteye see
the waves' grey wife, the storm, implacably stride
rain nipplings on the surface of the sea, the waves
                powerfully starting to rise, raise their
                                                powers before the hot wind
The endless stretchout to Europe disappears, the
rainsweep moving toward the city rising caught in the haze-hot
                                                island atmosphere
                Hate anger powers whip toward the towers rising
from the hum of slugbedded traffic clogging avenues, the trees
                of heaven gracing their backyards crazily
                waving under the strengthening wind

                                                sun brighter
                                                more thunder
                                                birdsong
                                                rises shrilly announcing
the storm in advance in encroach in abstruse syllables of pure
                SOUND    .    SONG    .    SOMEONE
comes to the porched roof to cover the chair from the thunderfilled
                wet atmosphere,        there is
nothing clearly defined wrong I can see except
I must go uptown and see what other storms there
                                be, there

And paint the inside of my wife's white filing cabinet red
that all things may be resolved        correct        and dead    .

Iceland

Lupinus nootkatensis, Alaskan lupine

the ornamental word

the figure, the accessory form

or colour or reference

is rarely content to die to thought

precisely at the right moment

but will inevitably linger

stirring a long brain-wave behind it

of quite alien associations

                                          — Walter Pater

I spun the mildewed pillow to the least gruesome corner, slept there

the meditative poet, sheltering self

from the agitations of the outward world

is in reality only clearing the scene

for the great exhibitions of emotion

                                                       — Ibid.

miles of lupine in lava

of dandelion

damp rock draped with pale brown moss

green moss

runners of cream flower

tufts of easter pink

rock sculpture

more cairns than a traveler needs

an Arctic Kona

Taraxacum offinale, dandelion

The more you see the country

the more you do not wonder why they shut the door.

                                                                               — Gertrude Stein

windows by Mondrian

quadrangled glass in thick, extruded frames

houses white with bright roofs

or houses bright

sheathed in corrugated iron

or concrete mixed with gray sand

I have often noticed how easy it is to have cement around because everywhere there are rocks & so everywhere if you have the necessary building & equipment you have cement. And in the country, it looks strange, it makes it look like dryness or like snow, like Russia or like sand, like a ruin or like a fog, oh dear some people like to live & look at it & some must, or dear, stop when they see it, oh dear.

                               — Ibid.

life is brutish

& short

improvement is illusory

though grand

love is unforeseen

& unattainable

                      & real

fishes engraved on coins

Reykjavik

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams [New World Encyclopedia]

from William Carlos Williams's Spring and All:

Thus, weary of life, in view of the great consummation which awaits us — tomorrow we rush among our friends congratulating ourselves upon the joy soon to be. Thoughtless of evil we crush out the marrow of those about us with our heavy cars as we go happily from place to place. It seems that there is not time enough in which to speak the full of our exaltation. Only a day is left, one miserable day, before the world comes into its own. Let us hurry! Why bother for this man or that? In the offices of the great newspapers a mad joy reigns as they prepare the final extras. Rushing about, men bump each other into the whirring presses. How funny it seems. All thought of misery has left us. Why should we care? Children laughingly fling themselves under the wheels of the street cars, airplanes crash gaily to the earth. Someone has written a poem.

Oh life, bizarre fowl, what color are your wings? Green, blue, red, yellow, purple, white, brown orange, black grey? In the imagination, flying above the wreck of ten thousand million souls, I see you departing sadly for the land of plants and insects, already far out to sea. (Thank you, I know well what I am plagiarizing) Your great wings flap as you disappear in the distance over the pre-Columbian acres of floating weed.

The new cathedral overlooking the park, looked down from its towers today, with great eyes, and saw by the decorative lake a group of people staring curiously at the corpse of a suicide: Peaceful, dead young man, the money they have put into the stones has been spent to teach men of life's austerity. You died and teach us the same lesson. You seem a cathedral, celebrant of the spring which shivers for me among the long black trees.

Joan Retallack

Joan Retallack [cacophony]

from Joan Retallack's The Poethical Wager:

Fractal models (with their scalar self-similarities and unpredictable variations) bring into the foreground of our attention the large patterns and erratic details, the dynamic equilibrium of order and disorder in complex life systems like weather and coastlines. This is a geometry of nature that has helped us attend more productively to the chaotic processes of complex turbulent phenomena that static and idealized Euclidean models cannot begin to accommodate. I have begun to think of certain forms of art (for example, the post-1940s music of John Cage) as having a fractal relation to the rest of life. They are complex constructions that, among other things, present their material presence as a dynamically indeterminate "coastline" for audiences to explore via their own complex cultural and psychological dispositions. If one acknowledges language itself as a complex life system, the linguistic tensions and instabilities, semantic ruptures, and self-similar variations in a work like [Gertrude Stein's] Blood [On The Dining Room Floor] invite comparison to fractal forms. Can one in fact view Blood as fractal model of small-town and family turbulence rather than confused detective novel?

The closer you look at fractal models, or the natural phenomena they describe, the more (self-similar) details you see, the more complex things become. (In Euclidean figures the closer you look, the simpler things get.) I wonder whether the kind of "positive feedback loop" that generates fractal self-similarities and variations — data reentering the system again and again, each time undergoing slight modifications — might be an illuminating way to think about Stein's writing process. Might in fact give some intuitions about how the mind (that is, the fractal neural networks of the brain) produces complex linguistic forms based on repetition and variation. We know that in the case of Blood, as with most of her other writing, the product and the process are almost identical. Stein wrote as words came to her and hardly ever made substantial revisions.

And then there's the particular way the form of any coastline structures an exploration of it. The reader can tramp up and down the shifting coastline of Stein's words looking for the lost object (the victim, the culprit) in vain, day after day not finding it, finding instead a strange constancy in the scene of the absent object, the coastline itself as a pattern-bounded indeterminacy in flux. Even if something as reassuring as a body were to turn up with an explanation tagged to its toe, it could hardly become the focal point of this tidal windblown beach or page. Ocean beach and Steinian page are equally contingent and dynamic zones whose life principle is change. The beach changes in its conversation with the vagaries and variabilities of meteorological elements; the page changes in its conversation with variable epistemologies, grammars, and genres, as well as with the associative elements of a reader's mind as that mind lives within multiple intersecting forms whose rules are neither simple nor readily apparent. All this occurs of course within another strange constancy — the changing cultural climate of the developing contemporary. Luckily, coincidentally, both beach and page are locations of aesthetic wonder. Aesthetic wonder is a source of energy even as one hesitates in the face of unforeseen difficulties.

But, you may be quite legitimately asking, this beach stuff — isn't this (metaphorically speaking) building sand castles on an extended conceit? Surely one knows that language is not really a coastline. Well I'm not so sure it's not. Or rather I sense that languages and coastlines operate with similar kinds of principles. If one thinks of a coastline as just one site of mutually transformative exchange between different kinds of complex dynamical systems, then language as it exists in the active mediation between neural network and world ecosystems is surely such a site. There are specific things one gains in thinking of language in this way, particularly when confronted by literature that won't resolve into simple mimesis or tidy containments and conclusions.

It saves a certain amount of frustration to remember that you will never solve a coastline. You can explore, analyze, describe it, visit it as often as you like for the pleasure of it, picnic on it, swim along it, embark from it. It is of course gloriously noncompressible. Its best description can only be conterminous with itself, with its horizons and skies and weather, with the complex, infinite series of possible encounters anyone might have with it. You cannot sum up or paraphrase a coastline, although you can experience topographical limits. Geographers call the point on a landscape where certainty about one's bearings begins to rapidly fall off an "edge." The fractal edges of Stein's art make up part of the active coastline — zone of shifting stabilities and instabilities — between culture and the rest of life — the zone of silence that will never be absorbed in culture but can be wondered at from the vantage points of its edges. Some dimensions of the scalar repetitions and variations within a work of art can be internally formulated, but others have to do with the relation of that work to the history of the language-culture, the history of the art itself (in this case to the novel), to other cultural forms, to forms of everyday life and the natural world.

As location of conventional murder mystery, where all must resolve into a single gory punctum — vanishing point of "the body" — Stein's coastal prose is entirely revelatory in its surprising variations. The more you can't find the object you're looking for, the more you're learning about the language coastline itself.