Pablo Picasso/Gertrude Stein
by richibi
“Untitled“ (1923)
________
Gertrude Stein was a friend of Pablo Picasso,
you can see it in her prose, a disordering of
traditional practices, perspectives and
proportions
in “loving repeating“ she writes
“As I was saying loving repeating being is in a way earthly being. In some it is repeating that gives to them always a solid feeling of being. In some children there is more feeling and in repeating eating and playing, in some in story-telling and their feeling. More and more in living as growing young men and women and grown men and women and men and women in their middle living, more and more there comes to be in them differences in loving repeating in different kinds of men and women, there comes to be in some more and in some less loving repeating. Loving repeating in some is a going on always in them of earthly being, in some it is the way to completed understanding. Loving repeating then in some is their natural way of complete being. This is now some description of one.”
_________________
in my poetry course the Modernists keep on
coming, quite a few I’ve found impenetrable
and obtuse, I can see their points, but find
them pedantic and trivial
similar sentiments greeted the Impressionists
when they came out, so I’m watching myself
it’s easy to digest Picasso‘s painting now,
but even when I was a boy he was
controversial, now everyone admires him
Gertrude Stein not so much, writing is not
painting
they are both, I believe, returning to the
language of innocence, putting together
their world as children do, getting their
information in overlapping concepts,
trying to make their way through the
muddle
a five-year-old would talk like that, a
five-year-old would paint like that,
both are sorting out their new world,
the world that had been so profoundly
disturbed, disjointed
they were returning to the disarray,
and consequent irregular grammar,
of children, making their own kind
of common sense, trying to get their
bearings, after all, even God had
died, see Nietzsche on that
and, for better or worse, finally,
they’ll leave you behind, the children,
whose world, then, is it worth attending
Richard
psst: as a boy I asked my dad, while
interminably, I thought, fishing,
how long it would take the
minnow to grow into the
required fish, how’s that for
not illogical observation
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