"words as landscape . . ."

The self-imposed project:
to read Jack Kimball's paper, "Gertrude Stein and the Natural World" from time-sense an electronic quarterly on the art of Gertrude Stein from a site devoted to scholarly writing.

Reason for reading:
sheer curiosity; can't imagine GS hiking through wild places leaving behind the comforts of 27 Rue de Fleurus where she can write day and night OR botanizing (where? in the Jardin du Luxembourg? watching "pigeons on the grass alas"?)or writing about the natural wonders of Montparnasse and other boulevards?

Kimball's essay sends me off in all directions. One of them to a paper (again online) by Jean Mills in The Philological Quarterly 22 March 04 where the phrase jumps out about Gertrude's use of "words as landscapes as opposed to words creating portraits of landscapes."

Now what? So far I'm absorbing that for GS the "natural world" is one of perceiving natural being that can be captured in the process of writing fully in the present, the work of writing being "natural, inclusive", not a matter of naming or lyricism.

Kimball writes: "We have anecdotes . . .about Stein's frequent outdoor writing sessions, how picnics and country drives provided placid backdrops for composition ostensibly addressed to a bewildering jumble of topics, but in fact transcribed in nature's company, unnamed cows, trees, birds and such. Stein writes in The Autobiography, 'I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.'"

Jane Palatini Bowers devotes a chapter in Gertrude Stein to Stein's plays, which she called "landscapes" and which Bowers neologizes (121) as "lang-scapes" since the plays do not "represent, evoke or in some manner correspond to a specific place . . . .Rather, the are about language and its relationship to the performance event . . . "

Other non-Gertrude books intervene, as they tend to in any ordinary day, if our customary forest (not unlike the Vashta Nerada) is a library.

Opened to Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places and chanced on this -- "Cultures that grow up in close correspondence with a particular terrain often develop idiosyncratic methods of representing that terrain."

The "cultural terrain" of GS: American cities. Her excursions: occasionally in her childhood to the outdoors in the Napa Valley but mostly books and more books. (Assuming that concepts of "culture" don't create "representations" but that people who grow up in those cultures do albeit not necessarily in a predictable or uniform manner.)

Then I also read some of the writings in Conjunctions: 49 "A Writers' Aviary" viz. Catherine Imbriglio's "Intimacy Poems" -- birds and humans, "interspecies meanings", daughter, mother, metempsychosis, gulls, cormorants, "real wings". Back to Bowers recounting an interview with GS about pigeons in the grass alas . . . and so it all comes back to the words again. Where no birds sing.