The story of Violet

So synchrenistically, does it begin to be obvious that things are coming together for her, so that she can in the confusion to make sense of things, relating to her story?

but rest awhile dear , and take up your load later.

So discouraged for everything , for this messy sketch, but I’ve got the spine not to dissolve into a jellyfish, and I have to, even if it take years, to come to any characterization, that may bring her alive.

You cannot quit for the problem, her problem has to transpire. Whatever, may I be damned or banned.

Justinian no just. Just.
She discovered Phylo

Look into it and the many faces of satyr. So little time.

Last night at mass the priest talked of seeder and holocaust in Christ IN terms.

2day go get records of the medical history behind my prostate. See what’s with that.

Must continue to search …

Dont really no much, must talk with Violet and how she goes on about her.business as usuAl without making a mess of it.

And I showed her this, and when she glanced at it, she became exuberant. Here it is: but like a chess game coming to only an an-passant move, she snatched it away as an absurd thing to do.

No one cases about crap like this, course it means a life to me, she quipped

Here I reproduce this seemingly haphazard and time consuming waste nobody will café about.

And she says, " worry and boredom are stranger bedfellows yet. Its really absurd that You should entertain the thought.

"Indeed, in a way the best argument that Quine at least implicitly raises against the analytic and its kin is precisely that they perform no serious scientific explanatory work, and this he attempts to show by providing what he takes to be a satisfactory explanation of human language without them. In his (1960, 1973) he sketches a behavioristic theory of language that doesn’t rely on the postulation of determinate meaning or reference. He argues that translation (i.e., the identification of two expressions from different languages as having the same meaning) is “indeterminate”; there is “no fact of the matter” about whether two expressions do or do not have the same meaning (see Indeterminacy of Translation). This would appear to imply that there are pretty much no facts of the matter about people’s mental lives at all! For, if there is no fact of the matter about whether two people mean the same thing by their words, then there is no fact of the matter about whether they ever have mental states with the same content; and consequently no fact of the matter about the content of anyone’s thoughts. Quine himself took this consequence in stride—he was, after all, a behaviorist– regarding it as “of a piece” with Brentano’s thesis of the irreducibility of the intentional; it’s just that for him, unlike for Brentano, it simply showed the “baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention” (1960, p.221


.and, this remarked the brazen limits of her reliance on the cutoff method, as somewhat more indiginous then say, fee association.

( Knowing well enough that this ’ method ’ PR state of mind was prophetically foreshadowed way earlier, bu decades perhaps…

youtu.be/hIXeb2Cb1XI

youtu.be/ITaQTEnEiJQ

AUTISM

Were the Timekeepers of the Ancient World Autistic?
Archaeologists ask where ancients got the math for complex calendars.

When we read of ancient civilizations, there are many mysteries. One perennial question is how societies with (supposedly) no technology, no system of writing, and no known system of calculation managed to develop the mathematical ability to calculate movements of stars and planets. There is overwhelming evidence that many early civilizations did this with great precision; we did not surpass them until quite recently.

One question I’ve never seen asked in that context is this: Is there reason to think those early mathematicians and engineers were autistic?

During the past few years I have been studying the role of autistic people in history; particularly in the church. There’s a good body of evidence to suggest that churches have been home to autistics for thousands of years, and indeed we neurodivergents may have had a hidden hand in shaping many of the world’s religions.

For example, Isaac Newton is widely believed to have been autistic, based on accounts of his behavior and his own written words. Today we know Newton for setting down a description of calculus. Some say he invented calculus, but there are many autistics (me included) who can manipulate waveforms in our heads, and the written calculus may just be a way to share that ability with others. If that’s true in Newton’s case as well, then what he did was lay out for others an ability he was born with. In that sense, he didn’t invent anything. Instead, he described his different way of thinking.

But that’s “Newton now.” In his time, Newton wrote considerably more on theology and religion than he did on science. In his day he was more known as a theologian than a mathematician. When we go back in time, we find most scientists and deep thinkers were supported by churches. Prior to 1800, churches were the world’s centers of logic, reason, and abstract and scientific thought.

With that in mind, we can find many descriptions of autistic behaviors alongside the achievements of early churchmen. We even find evidence of accommodation. For that, look no farther than the silent orders of monks, or the reflective orders that spent their days in cool shade. Today we’d call that sensory-friendly. What did that call it then? It’s reasonable to ask how far back that connection may reach. York University archaeologist Penny Spikins posits that sustainable autistic traits made their appearance in the human genome some 100,000 years ago.

When we reach back a few thousand years, the written record gets mighty thin. There are few descriptions detailed enough to retrospectively consider whether any particular person of that day was on what we now call the autism spectrum. Yet there is a very strong sign that autism was there in the background. We see it in the calendar. And remember – the calendars were traditionally kept by the priests.

Ancient civilizations had very sophisticated calendars that were tied to long and short term celestial events. They forecast the years and the seasons with extraordinary accuracy. They also noted much slower changes in the sky – the cycles of precession that unfold over thousands of years.

It’s interesting to consider how calendars have changed over the ages. Today we use calendars to plan our days and weeks. We schedule what we will do at 10, and where we will go at 3. We note the day of a birthday or an anniversary. The events we record seem trivial, except to ourselves.

The ancient calendars recorded dates of more moment. Calendars counted the days since the beginning of the world, or they counted the hours till the end. They forecast the changing of constellations and the arrival of comets. Calendars told our ancestors when to plant, and even how to navigate. If you’ve never done so I encourage you to explore Mayan, Egyptian, or Indian calendars – you’ll find them incredibly fascinating.

Early calendars tended to be far more complex than the calendars we use today. They were also harder to maintain and calibrate, in the absence of electronics and standards such as we rely on in the modern era. At the most basic level, ancient calendars were tied to the sky, and built upon knowledge that must have been gathered and passed down for many generations.

AUTISM ESSENTIAL READS

Flexible Brains and Adjusting to a Changing World
Archaeologists ask why early societies needed such complex and far-reaching calendar systems. While that is a good question, a more interesting question (to me at least) might be, what kind of person could build and run such a calendar?

To find that answer, we need only turn to the autism community. Psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald has studied calendar calculating abilities and other savant skills. He’s found that calendar skills are almost exclusively the province of certain autistic people. In his experience the people with the greatest calendar skills were often quite disabled in present society, but they could tell you the moon phase or day of the week for any date 500 years in the past or present with complete accuracy.

Archaeologists and historians have puzzled about where ancient people got the mathematical skills to construct and run their calendars. After all, they were not even known to have written language. So how could they have higher math? The answer is simple. The math was in the autistics. It was inborn, in their minds. Practice makes better, but formal teaching was not needed. That’s evident in today’s calendar calculators.

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Need evidence of that? Ask an autistic with calendar calculating abilities to show his work. He (she) can’t. It’s like asking me to show my work when I added musical waves in my head. It’s a thing we can do, but we can’t necessarily set down a written path for someone else to do it. Newton did for calculus, and changed the world. I’ve yet to see something similar for calendar calculation.

In the absence of that, it’s reasonable to turn the traditional archaeologist’s question around and ask: Who but an autistic person could have run the calendars of ancient times in his (her) head? The historians say, “there was no evidence they had math” and they may well be right. They didn’t need math. They had autistics.

And yes … science does suggest that. We may not have found evidence of computers in prehistory, but for some of us, the autism is in our genes, and for genetic evolution, prehistory was just the blink of an eye away.

So look where it’s brought us …

Dr. Fitzgerald noted that most of the autistic calendar calculators he found were living in group homes or institutions. They were said to be totally disabled, with average IQs below 70. Yet a Mayan or Egyptian calendar would be play for them. Indeed, play is probably a very apt term.

2,000 years ago, would that person be disabled or venerated, for the same ability?

It’s an interesting cultural commentary. We talk about all our challenges. Seizures, depression, language. But if you could keep a calendar in the time of the Pharaoh, there might well be some honor and accommodation beyond what we see today.

Not that it makes life easy – the lives of early shamans and priests are often described as tortured and painful. Honored didn’t necessarily mean comfortable. But it means we had a place in the world; something many of us feel we’ve largely lost today.

What do you think?

John Elder Robison

John Elder Robison is an autistic adult and advocate for people with neurological differences. He’s the author of Look Me in the Eye, Be Different, Raising Cubby, and the forthcoming Switched On. He serves on the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee of the US Dept of Health and Human Services and many other autism-related boards. He’s co-founder of the TCS Auto Program (A school for teens with developmental challenges) and he’s the Neurodiversity Scholar in Residence at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

John Elder Robison is the author of Look Me In The Eye: My Life With Asperger’s, and Be Different.

Do Environmental Changes Explain the Rise in Autism Diagnoses?

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Psychology Today © 2021 Sussex Publishers, LLC

She took my gun away. Was trying to do well …now I am … but im reluctant this story.

Not making it up. This is no fiction. But gotta get it off my chest. Carleas knows about it.

I needed a gun. For self protection. And i hope this guy, my ex son in law who has got my grandson deals. He took my daughter’s life because she dumped him , found someone she lived, and could support her.

He moved in after her ex moved out.

Then on one Sunday night he took the little kid the apple of my eye, on Sunday night.

There was a flurry of communication between my Isabella my daughter and alwx, my son in law for the delivery.

It was supposed to be the unicorn

We didnt know a thing, not a thing, until it became too late.

The gun thing set it off. Originally I bought it for he is a rough crowd and it is a family business.

But she found me cleaning it, and says afterbdecades of marriage " It’s either the gun that goes or You will.

So i gotta get at least a quater of the price back fof I gotta fix her car’s door handle, someone tried to break into it. So I go sure, for i can’t afford to be thrown out at this stage.

Plus I love her cause I promised not to make the same mistake like my old man made walking out on mom.

But back to the story, just get to sidetrack at times?
Now I don’t feel that bad, cause I am not afraid to be shot, and now I’m clean in their eyes.

And Natalia says, that’s my wife, that if I get mad I’d shot her.

She can hardly wait for him to get arrested, but I kind of feel half heartedly sad for the kid for one time, were talking, and he says to his dad " are You also going to die daddy( for they told him, being 5 years old

Violet was here other name. She went to live in Asia, she was beautiful
She was in centerfolds. She lived her 15 minutes of fame, when with her girlfriend dressed only in lettuce, paraded near the basilica to protest cruelty to animals.

Then I got an urgent call for help. She worked six months in Manila in a TV show, and her agent, an older woman raped her and stole her wages, leaving her penilless. The maid who took care of her, wrote me that all she dies is view a movie called ’ into the wild’ , over and iver, and her flat was haunted and she was afraid to go into the sunlit street for barrages of autograph seekers tormented her constantly.

So I went, brought her back after two years of the suicide of her brother , my youngest son, fir they were so close.

She and her high school swearheart tied the knot soon after, and we were all concerned and hoped that he may help her forgett her brother.

He had issues, wrote a book , that I published under his name post humorously.

But Violet was really a gentle soul,l a sort of underlying sadness betook her, she tattooed her back in Thailand with the same pattern that Angelina Jolie did on her back.

So she goes and marries than, whom she was supposed to know, and everything unraveled for her. He was a dealer, drove i3 new infinities for which she paid, and proceeded to total one after an other.

She became an interior decorator, did well did some exteriors later on, in upscale places like along PCH, and her portfolio spoke of volumes.

Her last night . Seeking the unicorn, he was supposed to bring oxy, but brought fentanyl, and she and her current boyfriend couldn’t tell the difference for they wete both of purple color. She never woke up, and i found her as i did her brother a few years hence. Now the noose is tightening around her ex, who has costudy of the kud, and that brings it to this bitter closing.

All hoping for clisure, and I regret the Missus found me cleaning the gun, I promised to take it back and get at least a few hundred back so that I can fix the broken handle of her gun.

Why I bought it last year was a general fear if a possible social uprising where people will run out of food, and they may break into the house for food. Did not anticipate further use, but now, maybe it’s a good thing, fof now my only remaining worry, that if they get me, what will happen to my dear wife of many decades, to whom I have sort of become an emotional anchor.

I had a lot if legal hurdles to overcome, before I succeeded to gain 1 hour of visitation rights per month with the kid, my dears wonderful grandson, with whom I was supposed to attend child psychiatric sessions, but that promise became as empty and broken as his dad is.

I knew him since high school days and he passed for ok. but who would have thought he would eventually bring Violet down to drug dependency.

As it turned out, that was the only hold of control he had in her, and niw that she is gone along with her financial support, he is back with his son, my grandson living with his parents whom he detests.

The only comfort I have here that soon Violet , as portrayed in this narrative will here be soon firgot, her life, her sweet face, because this is only one little story within the thousands of forums buried here, and really who will unearth the volumous archives ?

I am kind of paranoid of the search my writings, but really it is my paranoia kicking in.
I know her soul is around fof we’ve had some occasional paranormal events like a strange owl staying with us, perched on the fence a few says, …

I have never seen that bird befire or since that event. Maybe she is with him now fir like i said they were cliss, very close.

The gun: I mentioned to someone here about it, but it became an obsession of retribution or protection for us, and I have to let that pass, as well, along with Buddha’s promise of redemption, if one can just let everything go, including deaf for one’s spoucd, progeny and most important : one’ self.

The story of the diamond, not flawless really. But it does have a story.

The story is simple. The diamond is not really much on terms of value. In a mall maybe 3M but maybe a third of that to sell. Ill go by the mall prize, thr gun was a glittering jewel to reflect the difference between my Christian love for him, and his otherworldly yhought, based on an ancient ethical code. That preceded the Talmud.

The story of violet and the story of the diamond can be similarly discounted" the diamond is really both shine. ,…i cannot go on tonight , the diamond has been sleeping underground, pressed against the inner layers of deeply buried diff, while violet the pure hearted kid, my grandsons mother has still can be heard as the sweet child waking to the early white glow of the sun, and the little kid on her bosom resting on the dew of promises those eternal rays.

The angels that know cant stand the burst of powder the gun emits , as christiam soldiers took back the holy land in the ages before the afterglows of civilized man.

The diamond Sutra.:

youtu.be/AbfR4qrr4N8

The Jesus/Joshua contraversy:

."The Platonistic philosopher Celsus, writing circa 150 to 200 CE, wrote a narrative describing a Jew who discounts the story of the Virgin Birth of Jesus.[117] Scholars have remarked on the parallels (adultery, father’s name “Panthera”, return from Egypt, magical powers) between Celsus’ account and the Talmudic narratives.[111] In Celsus’ account, the Jew says:

“… [Jesus] came from a Jewish village and from a poor country woman who earned her living by spinning. He says that she was driven out by her husband, who was a carpenter by trade, as she was convicted of adultery. Then he says that after she had been driven out by her husband and while she was wandering about in a disgraceful way she secretly gave birth to Jesus. He states that because he [Jesus] was poor he hired himself out as a workman in Egypt, and there tried his hand at certain magical powers on which the Egyptians pride themselves; he returned full of conceit, because of these powers, and on account of them gave himself the title of God … the mother of Jesus is described as having been turned out by the carpenter who was betrothed to her, as she had been convicted of adultery and had a child by a certain soldier named Panthera.”[118][119]

At this point, there is no point to reassert a common theme, for the cut off method and free association produce a sketch, merely a sketch of that impression that only a partially differentiated life can be inferred, where an alpha/omega structure will do away with such inference. By that, is meant the rigorous way that the beginning and the end has been instilled into every narrative. whereas cyclicality or eternal repetition is more likely.

Gertrude Stein comes ti mind.

"Making Sense: Decoding Gertrude Stein
Carly Sitrin
Read the instructor’s introduction
Read the writer’s comments and bio
Download this essay

On Saturday evenings in number 27 rue de Fleurus on the Left Bank of Paris, Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas played host to a gathering of noteworthy artists and writers. It was here in the early decades of the century that people flocked to view the women’s unrivaled display of modern art and share in their conversations as the expatriates waxed poetic about art, science, and philosophy. By surrounding herself with such avant-garde culture and innovative perspectives, Stein created a laboratory of conceptual and intellectual thought which heavily influenced her own writing. Although her opinions were coveted by the great thinkers of her time, Stein’s abstract poetic style has had a polarizing effect on those who encounter her work. In his critique entitled “Art by Subtraction: A Dissenting Opinion of Gertrude Stein,” B. L. Reid finds most of Stein’s writing to be “unreadable” and of no intellectual value (93). He claims that her poetry is “not for the normal mind” and asserts that it is not worth the time it takes to read it (93). Similarly, Michael Gold in his article “Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot” echoes Reid’s claims, and argues that “her works read like the literature of the students of padded cells in Matteawan” further stressing the insanity of Stein’s prose.

Reid’s and Gold’s analyses, however, are far too reductive. I agree that at first glance, and without any background knowledge, Stein’s poetry is challenging and seemingly senseless; however, I argue that Stein’s writing demands context to be fully appreciated. Since she was a highly educated woman who spent her days with some of the greatest artistic minds of the century, it is not surprising that her technique requires that the reader have a foundation of artistic and scientific comprehension. To dismiss her work as unintelligible is to refuse to put in the effort to understand it. Her poems and novels demonstrate that her educational background studying psychology under William James, her time spent around artists such as Pablo Picasso, and her years studying the language centers of the brain all played a significant role in how she constructed her writing.

Jamesian Psychology

As a student at Radcliffe College, Gertrude Stein studied under the influential psychologist William James and, in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, stated:

The important person in Gertrude Stein’s Radcliffe life was William James. She enjoyed her life and herself. She was secretary of the Philosophical club and amused herself with all sorts of people. She liked making sport of question asking and she liked equally answering them. She liked it all. But the really lasting impression of her Radcliffe life came through William James. (73)

Her years spent at Radcliffe saw Stein working closely with James, taking part in several experiments, and publishing her own articles in scientific publications. These experiments focused on “normal and induced motor automatism,” or actions located on the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness (Weinstein 16). The experiments made use of automatic reading and writing phenomena for the most part, but it was James’ Psychology (1892) that contained a chapter that would most heavily influence Stein’s later poetic career. This chapter entitled “The Stream of Consciousness” combined his fascination with the psychology of consciousness with the psychology of language and use of words. The questions that plagued James—What is consciousness? How does consciousness relate to the whole personality? Is consciousness continuous or discontinuous?—are directly explored in the works of Gertrude Stein.

The concept of stream of consciousness starts with the idea that “consciousness of some kind goes on. ‘States of mind’ succeed each other.” He argues that as “ideas recur, although the ideas may be the same, we see them in different relationships” (Miller 13). More simply stated, the repetition of words and concepts can change their implications, just as the physical act of repeating a word aloud can alter its meaning. In Gertrude Stein’s writing, she utilizes this strategy of repetition to inject a deeper and more expansive significance to her words. For example, her poem “Sacred Emily” recounts in minute detail the everyday actions of a woman in her home. The piece consists of exactly 367 staccato lines repeating phrases such as “push sea” eight times in one line (33). While this statement may at first seem to be nonsense, according to Jamesian psychology, the more often it appears, the more the meaning expands. In this way, the phrase “push sea” transforms from the literal vision of a breaking wave to the kneading motion of the poem’s subject as she prepares dinner and, later, the motion of her knitting needles.

Following the Jamesian theory of transformational meaning, the famous line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” appears for the first time in “Sacred Emily” and is later found in several of her other works as well. This line can be interpreted as epitomizing the infinite forms of a word. The capitalization of the first “Rose” is in reference to a name while the following three refer to the past tense of the verb “to rise,” the color rose, and the flower (Ramazani 34). As a result, the constant repetition of the word causes it to alter its significance in the mind of the reader, thus imbuing what appears to be nonsense with more symbolic meaning.

The notion of repetition is further expanded upon in Stein’s use of Jamesian characterology. Along with his concept of “stream of consciousness,” James pioneered the assumption of a pluralistic universe, saying the “world is teaming with possibilities that can be actualized by man,” basically signifying that the personality is the product of what a person most emphasizes in his field of consciousness (Weinstein 17). He purports that habit plays a large role in defining a person. When utilized as a lens to analyze Gertrude Stein’s poetry, the seemingly tedious repeating phrases become the defining forces in a character’s existence. The most glaring example of this use of habit to define a person comes in Stein’s piece Melanctha, a portion of her larger work Three Lives. Taken at face value, not much is actually accomplished throughout the plot. Melanctha, an African American servant girl, tends to her ill mother, pursues three men, and falls in love with one of them. She then falls out of love, contracts tuberculosis, and dies. The story itself is simple; however, the art lies in Stein’s unique form of characterization. Rather than revealing the character’s personalities in their actions, Stein chooses to place the focus on the characters’ stream of consciousness and an omniscient narrator to divulge their traits rather than a sudden epiphany or willful action.

Paramount in Stein’s longer writing is her belief in the stability of a character. She accepts the Jamesian notion of characterology and expands upon it by asserting her conviction that, once a character is set in his archetype, the possibility of any major changes is unlikely. This again is evidenced by her use of repetition and habit in “Sacred Emily” and Melanctha. “Melanctha Herbert was a graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive,” Stein writes continually throughout the piece (Three Lives). Despite the environment, Melanctha is always described exactly the same way. While this constant affirmation may at first appear to be monotonous nonsense, Stein utilizes this structure to convey her beliefs about humanity. Namely, because a person is permanently stuck in their character type, defining him or her consists of a constant cycle of assertion and realization of the same simple thing. The character’s thoughts may drift from subject to subject, but their core personality is always constant. Melanctha may fall in and out of love, she may live or die, but she will always be “graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive” (Three Lives).

More specifically, Stein uses her verb tenses and word choice in Melanctha to dictate the characters’ personalities. Melanctha’s lover, Jeff, believes in “loving” and “being good to everybody” and “trying to understand” (Three Lives). His consciousness is filled with participles, qualifying adjectives and clauses as he struggles to achieve his emotions, rather than simply feeling them. In contrast, Melanctha says, “I certainly do understand,” thus asserting her definitive and logical nature through her verbs rather than through her actions (Three Lives). As a result of the importance placed on word choice, the events of the story can come in any sequence. Melanctha is the same person throughout the story, unchanged by her environment, which Stein proves by removing the logical progression of time.

A final tenet of Jamesian psychology used to portray characters in Stein’s writing is his notion of a “continuous present” (Miller 19). At its core, “continuous present” is the visualization of time as fluid and all encompassing. Rather than a traditional linear structure of “first, next, then, last,” James promotes the concept of every event occurring simultaneously in the mind. Stein utilizes this ideology in Melanctha by creating discontinuities in narrative time. The piece begins:

Rose Johnson made it very hard to bring her baby to its birth. Melanctha Herbert who was Rose Johnson’s friend, did everything any woman could . . . the child though it was healthy after it was born, did not live long. (1–3)

Nearly a hundred pages later, this information is relayed again almost identically. Although Melanctha and Rose’s friendship does not flourish until late in Melanctha’s life, the piece opens with their relationship and the eventual death of Rose’s child. This purposeful removal of chronological continuity, while seemingly nonsensical, is integral to Stein’s style. By presenting the reader with all of the important character information at once, the reader is forced to consider all of the facts equally. This closely follows James’ concept that what is emphasized in the consciousness, regardless of time or event, is the best measure of characterization. In this way through his notions of “stream of consciousness,” “characterology,” and “continuous present,” Jamesian psychology serves as a key to decode Stein’s seemingly erratic writing style.

Cubism

Of secondary importance in Gertrude Stein’s life and poetic style was the cubist work of artists such as Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. The artists were close friends with Stein and her partner Alice Toklas and frequently displayed their work in the couple’s apartment. As W.G. Rogers asserted in his book When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person, “Tender Buttons is to writing…exactly what cubism is to art,” stressing the connection that the artists forged. A basic description of cubism is the destruction, dissection, and reassembling of an object with the intention of capturing its essence. The idea falls in line with Stein’s belief of the “continuous present.” As Picasso wrote in his 1923 Statement to Marius De Zayas, “to me there is no past or future in art. If a work cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all,” thus stressing his belief in the timelessness of any artistic style (“Picasso Speaks”). At its core, cubism operates on the notion that an object is not the sum of its parts, but rather every atom of an object contains within it the essence of the whole, and therefore can be rearranged at will while still maintaining the overall sense of the thing.

This concept of the strategic reassembling an object is explored at length in Stein’s book of poetry Tender Buttons. Take, for example, Stein’s description of “A Handkerchief”: “A winning of all the blessings, a sample not a sample because there is no worry” (24). What the piece lacks is cohesion. The words themselves are not challenging, just as a piece of cubist art is nothing more than a simple color or shape; the art comes from the organization as a whole. Stein’s work is not meant to be analyzed word by word, connecting the concepts of “blessings” to the common phrase “bless you” following a sneeze. Rather, she intends her poetry to be digested all at once, in the “continuous present” with every word carrying the same weight because every word contains within it the essence of the whole.

Another crucial principle of cubism is the concept that the subject is “veiled by the medium of description” (Lewis). For Picasso, the “veils” were the planes into which the painter broke up the canvas, while Stein’s “veils,” according to Marjorie Perloff in her book The Poetics of Indeterminacy, are the abstract patterns of her words. Perloff asserts that Stein’s objects “not only are fragmented and decomposed as they are in cubist still-life; they also serve as false leads forcing the reader to consider the very nature of naming.” In this way, Stein’s manipulation of her syntax, while seemingly random and senseless, is actually a calculated strategy enacted to shake up the reader’s preconceived notions of the subject. Eyeglasses become “A color in shaving, a saloon is well placed in the centre of an alley,” rather than two clear glass lenses in metal frames (Tender Buttons 21). This conscious action of portraying glasses without the expected combination of words forces the reader to see the subject in a new light. The initial confusion caused by the apparent lack of cohesion acts as a fog or veil through which the reader must actively try to see through. Stein is attempting to make her audience sit up and pay attention, to read critically and engage their minds just as Picasso wanted to engage his viewers in his art.

Linguistic Relativity

A final influence that gives context to Gertrude Stein’s writing is the psychological theory of Linguistic Relativity pioneered by Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir, sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Throughout her studies at Johns Hopkins medical school and her interactions with William James, Stein focused much of her education on uncovering the mysteries of the brain, with a specific concentration on the neural connections between consciousness and language (Weinstein 52). Among the theories gaining popularity during her time in school was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, which, summarized, states that language influences thought. In this way, people speaking different languages would therefore have different perceptions of the world around them. With this in mind, what Stein seeks to accomplish in her writing is a completely novel view of reality. She intends to explore the limits of language in the hope that it will lead to an entirely new understanding of the world in which we live.

Among Whorf and Sapir’s more controversial assertions is the notion that, if a word for an object does not exist in a given language, then the individuals who speak that language must not think about that object. This concept is not proven or refuted by Stein’s writing, but rather explored. In her poetry in Tender Buttons, Stein purposefully avoids using common nouns when defining her objects and instead chooses to talk around the subject while still alluding to its existence. For example, in her poem “A Red Stamp,” the omission of words is just as important as the words she chooses to include. Consider a stamp. The words most commonly associated with it would likely include envelope, letter, send, mail, corner, etc. Stein, however, seems to be playing a form of the game Taboo in which she avoids these words of association at all costs. In doing so, she asserts that the sense of an object can be gleaned without typical or expected explanation. And, while Whorf and Sapir would argue that a culture with no word for telephone must not think about telephones, Stein would answer by stating that it is possible to indicate an object without stating it outright.

This strategy of talking around a subject to capture its essence adds to her desire to depict an object in its entirety. As expressed by her cubist influences, Stein’s writing revolves around the concept of the subject as a whole, completed, entity. Her pieces in Tender Buttons represent the reality of a specific item as reflected by her consciousness. This concept is most thoroughly explored in her poem “A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass.” Structured as a definition, she first gives the object (a Carafe) followed by its description. However, her description is not the general depiction commonly found in a dictionary. The key to Stein’s poetry is understanding that she is not defining a carafe. She is defining her carafe. The glass that she sees at a certain time, in a certain light, through her eyes, is different from any old glass on a table. With this in mind, the description becomes purely experiential and personal. Phrases such as “an arrangement in a system to pointing” may mean nothing to a reader sitting in a library because they were crafted to capture a certain subject in its full essence at one moment in time (Tender Buttons 9). Her poetry therefore is not meant to be understood and accessible to all, but rather a way of transmitting across time and space the experience of life itself.

With the consideration that Stein’s poetry is meant to capture an experience, what follows is the notion that traditional grammar rules do not and should not apply. Critics of Stein will point to her omission of traditional punctuation and abundant usage of verbs as crass or meaningless; however, this could not be further from the truth. Her refusal to abide by the laws of coherent language frees her to create new meaning with her poetry and stand as a maverick forming new methods of thought. Just as notes can be combined to form melodies and symphonies, words too can create music. However, the desire to form a “logical” sentence restricts the writer to using melodies that have already been written. When these restrictions are removed, the writer is free to conduct symphonies that have never before been heard. The cadence of her poem “Vegetable” is a perfect example. She writes, “it was a cress a crescent a cross and an unequal scream,” which, at first glance is complete nonsense (Tender Buttons 53). But, read aloud, read as music, the sentence is melodic and unfamiliar. It is a combination of simple words that has never before been written simply because of the fear inherent in not being understood. Therefore, Gertrude Stein uses her language to shatter the preconceived notions of reality and create a new perception of the world through her word choices.

By taking into consideration the influences of psychology and art on Gertrude Stein’s poetry, her words are transformed from puzzling gibberish to works of deep intellectual merit. In many ways, however, Stein’s stream of consciousness writing can even be taken as a form of Taoist meditation, as her exploration of the inner consciousness leads to her perceptual formation of her own personality. Perhaps Stein’s writing cannot possibly be understood by anyone other than herself. Therefore, the harder we struggle to understand her words, the more meaning we inject in our desperate attempts to stave off the emptiness that encroaches in the absence of complete understanding. Like Jeff Cambell in “Melanctha,” we are “trying to understand” and are constantly fighting our natural state of emptiness, when maybe what we should be doing is turning inward to embrace our inner chasms as Stein did with her poetry. After all, it was Robert Frost who said,

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars—on stars where no human race it.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places. (13–16)"

The deepest emotion I have is my malice against the well-constituted as compared with the ill-constituted…Dwarfs, morons, idiots, imbeciles, hunchbacks, degenerates, perverts, paranoiacs, neurasthenics, every type of individual upon whom the world looked down, I loved…admired…and imitated.” – John Cowper Powys