The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is different, of that almost any one is can be certain. The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps every one can be certain. (Stein, Composition as Explanation)
In July 2008, over slick croissants and pats of butter on Lygon Street, Stein 09 was brainstormed. Two thousand and nine will be a year-long festival of Gertrude Stein. All acts, encounters, products of dumb banalities and intimacies; every word written and word effaced; all the grammars of consciousness and imagination; every plump chook roasted and omelette fried and sock darned and poodle groomed … all perceptive, cognitive and creative events of experience will contribute to a prolonged duration of engaged Steinian thinking-and-writing, writing-and-playing, playing-and-thinking.
From this improvised working bee, ideas about what kind of contemporary Australian poetic might emerge from strategic saturation of neo-Steinian activity were imagined. How might Stein intervene the lineages and chronologies of national poetic narratives? In re-imagining Australian experimentalism in terms of a Steinian poetic, could we somehow mobilise ideas about our own local circumstances that were not tied up with discourses of historical and cultural character? The very fact of our coming together over Stein in a fracas of mid-conference, post-booze, croissant-and-jam skill-share was meaningful. Yet Stein has always done well to elude the logics of her own biography, so her presence in wintry Carlton on this morning was no surprise. She is our contemporary in the sense that her ideas about language and experience, writing and thinking, composition, grammar and time are utterly relevant to our own various praxes. More than that, Stein’s oeuvre is, in so many ways, anticipatory of contemporary preoccupations. She seems to gesture towards key moments of late-twentieth century cultural, critical and philosophical thought.
In a literal sense, this paper is a Stein 09 event, a piece of writing with the project in mind. But more importantly, this paper suggests that the very living and thinking of my being-in-time, my sensing time and living with my own time-sense, as well as the living and thinking of my own sense of a poetics, is a Stein 09 event. To say that this paper is a composition, I must also say that there are other compositions at play, that to compose is to take note, to be aware, to keep moving, to find a way — as Stein would say, to make living a thing that I am doing.
There is a certain sense of playfulness, an admission of silliness in framing these conceptual-creative preoccupations, collective or singular, within a year and naming it a festival. Yes, I admit to being silly about this gestural act. But it is not a silliness that recourses to coolish irony or cynicism. It’s a serious silliness; there are serious concerns at play for me here. Whatever claims I make about the processual or durational events of Stein-induced attentiveness to poetics are claims that actively contribute to my sense of being-in-the-world, claims that demand the ongoing interrogation of my intellectual and creative practices. (more…)
