[display_podcast]

(Dick Higgins, pp. 11–17 in Legends & Fishnets; this piece written Autumn 1959, first published in 1960 by Bern Porter as a pamphlet. Back cover copy:

Must a story consist only of what is told? Or can it also lie in the language? Or in the interplay among the ideas and images embodied in the words?

In Legends & Fishnets Dick Higgins sets out to use a whole bevy of unorthodox means of narrative. The legending idea is simply that the image of a person or thing can be reverberated in the mind to ad to its statue – the man or woman may be small, but the shadow can be huge. These stories are told in terms of the shadows and afterimages of the subject. Higgins’s interest in this process is not a recent one – some of the stories were begun as early at 1957, and they were written off and on until 1970. The use of assemblages of participles (and its implicit avoidance of the verb to be) produces a strongly visual effect, heightened by very concrete language. The principle at work is William Carlos Williams’s formula “No idea but in things!” more than some development out of Gertrude Stein’s concept of the continuous present, which these pieces superficially resemble in some ways, and to which Higgins feels sympathetic but unrelated. This the reader will discover when he comes up against Higgins’s emphasis on moral principle (in the lineage of Emerson) and interest in all stages of the time process, not just the present as with Stein.

These stories cover a full range of expression – from the farcical (“Sandals and Stars”) to the comic (“The Temptation of Saint Anthony”) to the nostalgic (“Ivor a Legend”) to the lyrical (“Women, like horses”) and more. If the expression is heightened by the form, then the form is justified. And it is here, on this assumption, that Higgins has hung his hat.

Legends & Fishnets was published by Unpublished Editions in 1976; one notes that Higgins was republishing Gertrude Stein’s work from 1966 to 1973.)

“Well, said Paul, if they didnt want what we got would there be any progress. Perhaps there aint any progress, said Donald Paul, perhaps not. There cant not be progress, said Sam, if there isnt any progress how could we sell goods and we gotta sell goods to get a job. Yes, said Donald Paul, that’s it. And perhaps said Sam, all these over here they’re so poor they live with their chickens and all they’re just so poor. Yes all right, said Jimmie, but they do have chickens to live with. Yes, said Sam, but that aint progress. Well I dunno, said Jimmie, I like chickens, I kind of guess there always will be chickens. And if not, said Willie. Well then there might be progress, said Donald Paul . . . .”

(Gertrude Stein, Brewsie and Willie, p. 97.)

“At any rate she was wonderful with horses and he loved automobiles only he would never take a job where he would have to lie down under an automobile with his legs sticking out. This was distasteful to him.”

(Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, pp. 4–5.)

“I caught sight of a splendid Misses. She had handkerchiefs and kisses. She had eyes and yellow shoes she had everything to choose and she chose me. In passing through France she wore a Chinese hat and so did I. In looking at the sun she read a map and so did I. . . . In loving the blue sea she had a pain. And so did I. In loving me she of necessity thought first. And so did I. How prettily we swim. Not in water. Not on land. But in love. How often do we need trees and hills. Not often. And how often do we need mountains. Not very often.”

(Gertrude Stein, from “A Sonatina Followed by Another”, quoted in the preface to Davenport’s Sappho.)

“The fourth was one who in a way was one dancing. He was in a way being one doing that thing. He was one in a way completely meaning that thing completely meaning being one being dancing. He was in a way then dancing. He was one being one asking and answering in dancing being asking. He was one asking in dancing being existing. He was one answering in dancing being existing. He was one in a way dancing that is he was one coming to be one asking and answering. He was one asking. Dancing was existing. He was one answering. Dancing was existing. He was one asking and answering. He was one meaning that thing meaning that dancing had come to be existing. He was one not dancing. He certainly was not dancing. Any one could be one dancing. He was not then dancing. He was then meaning the thing meaning that something is existing and that something is one thing. In a way he was doing nothing that was not something that was meaning something had been existing, that dancing had been existing. He could be one dancing. Dancing was existing.”

(Gertrude Stein, from “Orta or One Dancing”, pp. 290–1 in the Library of America Writings 1903–1936.)

“In the manuscript of Identity A Poem [Gertrude Stein] made a personal comment about her frustration in a sentence that she rightly eliminated. ‘I know now when one is [xd creating] writing and nothing has been printed and therefore there is no audience every single word every scrap of writing is important because there being no audience.’ In the deleted sentence she had already revised ‘creating’ to ‘writing.’ ”

(Ulla E. Dydo, p. 5 in the introduction to A Stein Reader.)

“To believe in progress and in science you had to know what science was and what progress might be. Having been born in the nineteenth century it was natural enough to know what science was. Darwin was still alive and Huxley and Agassiz and after all they all made the difference of before and after. And now in 1943 none of it means more than it did. Not so much more as not more. Not more at all.

And I began with evolution. Most pleasant and exciting and decisive. It justified peace and justified war. It also justified life and it also justified death and it also justified life. Evolution did all that. And now. Evolution is no longer interesting. It is historical now and no longer actual. Not even pleasant or exciting, not at all. To those of us who were interested in science then it had to do tremendously with the history of the world, the history of all animals, the history of death and life, and all that had to do with the round world. Evolution was as exciting as the discovery of America, by Columbus quite as exciting, and quite as much an opening up and a limiting, quite as much. By that I mean that discovering America, by reasoning and then finding, opened up a new world and at the same time closed the circle, there was no longer any beyond. Evolution did the same thing, it opened up the history of all animals vegetables and minerals, and man, and at the same time it made them all confined, confined within a circle, no excitement of creation any more. It is funny all this and this was my childhood and youth and beginning of existence. War oh yes was but logical and incessant war, and peace of yes, peace because if war is completely understood then peace was the ideal. It was just like that.”

(Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, p. 61.)

“But one does get so tired of seeing everybody planting and growing vegetables you think how nice it will be to have those happy days come back when vegetables grew not in the ground but in tins. A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing but vegetables.”

(Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, p. 39.)

“Of course there are a good many times when there is no war just as there are a good many times when there is a war. To be sure when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war. And when there is no war, well just now I cannot remember just how it is when there is no war.”

(Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, p. 5.)