Above is a wild AI generated video collage by my old friend Lanny Quarles.
Meanwhile, based on this wonderful reading of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons from 1914. Then I looked at the original 1914 publication.
I was inspired to do a new project. I am working on a new version of this text. I am reconstructing the whole work as a series of Cubist collage poems using the elements in her work as collage material. Here is a sample of what I am doing…
CUBIST COLLAGE #2
a harmony in hesitation.
Then came the time for discrimination
not indicated by any motion,
there is no suggestion
nothing is hidden
There never is.
all this is sudden.
more nonsense is sullen.
A letter which can wither,
a learning which can suffer
and largely, very largely.
a certainty a shade.
An eye glass,
Like a very strange
rhubarb and a tomato
Mud and water
Silk and stockings
All this makes cherries
A fact is that when the place was replaced
all was left that was stored
The time came when there was a birthday
It happened in a way that the time was perfect
there was no mistake
it did not make anything bigger littler,
Part of the work will be a series called The Tender Teachings. These are little snippets used as if they are Modernist aphorisms Below if one of these.
Silk Button — On Silence, Motion, and Spaciousness
A silence is less is indicated by a motion,
more is not indicated it is enthralled.
and so much place for a lower and an upper,
so much and yet more silence.
Aphoristic Rendering
Small silences gesture toward themselves.
Great silences do not gesture at all —
they absorb.
Lower and upper spaces both expand into them,
and the more silence there is,
the more room the world contains.
Commentary
This is one of Stein’s more delicate contemplations — a teaching on degrees of silence, the signals they give, and the spaciousness they produce.
Let’s open it phrase by phrase.
“A silence is less is indicated by a motion,”
A small silence is easily broken.
It reveals itself through twitch, shift, glance —
a visible hesitation.
This is the silence of:
awkwardness
uncertainty
interruption
momentary pause
It points to itself by the very motions it provokes.
Less silence = more signaling.
“more is not indicated it is enthralled.”
A deeper silence requires no gesture.
It is enthralled — absorbed, full, complete.
This is:
meditative silence
profound stillness
the silence of attention fully given
the silence where gesture no longer breaks the moment
Deep silence does not point to itself.
It holds itself.
More silence = less signaling.
Depth quiets motion rather than provoking it.
“and so much place for a lower and an upper,”
Silence creates space.
Lower and upper contain a subtle symbolic charge:
lower = the humble, the grounded, the bodily
upper = the elevated, the mind, the intangible
Silence expands both realms equally.
It gives place for:
low thoughts and high thoughts
body and mind
earth and sky
the mundane and the sublime
Silence is the architecture that makes room for both.
“so much and yet more silence,”
Silence, unlike sound, does not fill space —
it multiplies it.
The more silence there is,
the more space silence creates.
It is the paradox of contemplative life:
Silence is not absence.
Silence is spaciousness.
Silence is abundance.
The fragment also suggests that deeper silence contains layers —
one silence opening into another,
like nested rooms,
each quieter than the last.
The Tender Teaching
Small silences fidget;
great silences enthrall.
Silence gives space to everything —
the low and the high,
the humble and the exalted.
And as silence deepens,
the world grows larger.