I have not come to mean
I mean I mean
Or if not I do not know
If not I know or know
This which If they did go
Not only now but as much so
As if when they did which
If not when they did which they know
Which if they go this as they go
They will go which if they did know
Not which if they which if they do go
As much as if they go
I do not think a change.
-Gertrude Stein
What meaning I have is questionable; I have not come to mean anything, rather I have become someone who makes meaning out of what is at hand, a bricoluer, if you will, rather than someone who knows what anything means. Someone who takes what is there and makes what she wills of it. My father, after he retired, opened a furniture repair shop in the garage at home. He had three children from 8 to 17 and he could not afford to retire even on social security, so he took what he had in his repertoire and made money. People would bring him their broken furniture, or their “antiques,” furniture they wanted to keep for some reason. Dad would fix it. He would find pieces of wood reproduce the original and fix it. I remember him staring at a piece of copper sheeting for an hour, getting up walking around the yard, cursing, sitting down and staring at the copper again, cursing some more, before finally cutting out a pattern for something he was trying to make in less than a minute. He was my Axe Handle.
Much of what I write now, as far as essays go, are rambles, I start, then follow where the trail leads. Of course that does not mean a direction as much as a trail, impling a wake like a boat across a lake; I arrive somewhere, so in retrospect it appears as if I have followed a path, rather than cut my way through the tangle of my thinking. The turns of the trail are determined as much by what I do not talk about as much as what I do. I think of Mark Strand’s poem where he says, “I move to keep things whole.” He keeps the air apart in his bodily presence, so he moves allowing the reunification of air. I write to make things whole; I move through the bits of words I have been reading trying to get out of the way. I am not being coy. I look over the “texts” I have been reading, write down a few quotes, out of the slew of underlining I made while reading the books, then start to write. I would imagine that if I could pick different quotes from the same authors, I would come up with a different essay. Of course the quotes I pick are determined by what I am thinking at the time of the choosing, which is influenced as well by the quotes I pick as I am picking them thereby changing what I am thinking. Finally I create a story line that attempts to shape it all into a sense of meaning, or at least a sense of what I think I mean at the time.
I wonder if I am shaped more by the writing than I shape what I write when I write.
subtext 