Gertrude Stein On My Mind (Part 2)
I read the book. Gertrude's style didn't seem all that radical to me, but perhaps because it's been so widely emulated in the century after it first appeared in print. Much of the same happened with the publication of Hemingway's short stories and the Sun Also Rises but no one there right mind would emulate his style when writing about the homeless. It would seem farcically too detached.
Nevertheless, Three Lives was the beginning of Stein's smashing conventional literary wisdom.
She swung for the fences with a style and connected and didn't even play baseball.
I am definitely not swinging for the fences with a writing style to convey my experiences with the homeless. More like spraying singles around, advancing runners with steals and sacrifices to score runs, to continue the baseball metaphor.
Maybe that's getting me nowhere.
Stein's idea of writing like painting a canvas appealed to me. If it's a painting, it doesn't change. It can't. It's finished. And whoever views that canvas sees only that scene, nothing that came before or after, although in their mind they might have associations. I certainly do when I see a painting of a lush Pacific Northwest forest that I know has been destroyed by an obscene clearcut.
What about paintings of scenes from homeless life. Surely there are American artists doing that right now although I have certainly haven't seen one setting up an easel across the street from a homeless encampment as if it was an estuary teeming with herons and egrets.
It sometimes feels like the homeless people I observe and interact with are exactly the same as a painting. Fixed. Unchanging. They move about the world but move nowhere that I can fathom. Do they even fathom their movements? Perhaps there is nothing for them to fathom, but only for the person observing and talking to them.
I decided it worthwhile to experiment with Stein's style as I understood it and paint a recent hour-long viewing of homeless men and women in one room that defied narrative into a larger painting that the viewer (reader) would take from there as if they were a visitor at an art gallery and staring at a painting hanging on a white wall.
Coffee and breakfast is being served on rolling carts. A tremor of the hands begins for a toothless man with a goiter about the neck and he leaves to ride out the shakes in a parking lot as hard rain falls. A woman with purple hair begins crying about needing to get off the streets. Her current face still shines some light and kindness even thought it is crying. It's all in the face, if there is anything left, and there is quite a lot left in hers. Discussion between various men on the history of the Spanish American War and the International Monetary Fund and an ongoing monologue from an elderly man on matters related to the sinking of the Arizona during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A man wearing glasses plays Galaga on his phone. Another plays solitaire. An old woman knits. A young man with two black eyes drinks milk. A volunteer serves a man with a gray beard and gray hair a bowl of Lucky Charms and the man breaks into the Irish accent of the crafty leprechaun who was always hoarding the cereal with its marshmallow stars in a pot near a rainbow on commercials interrupting Saturday morning cartoons. The man says, “They're magically delicious,” just like the leprechaun always said. The man also says, without accent “”Lucky Charms at 8 and 48 aren't' quite the same.” He ate them for dinner as a kid and now he's eating them for breakfast in a street ministry. “They're magically delicious!” A bearded man in a stocking cap announces he has the opportunity to get off the streets and into housing, but the housing doesn't have TV or WI-Fi so he's not going! A woman with red hair has a fern, a real fern, growing out of the back pocket of her backpack. She's wearing it around. What is the fern? Not bracken? Not sword? Licorice, that's it! She is wearing a licorice fern! Another woman, young, falls asleep at a table while still holding a cup of coffee. She has a face, a smooth placid lake of a face, before a stone hits the surface of the lake and ripples it forever, which is an impossibility with ripples on a lake, but not ripples on a face.