Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein Book

If you listen to youself talking you will notice that you don't know the words except as you hear them, you can't anticipate your ideas for you can know them only when you find them. The thread on which they are strung is not experience. In fact there may be no such thread....


"My formula is that we find things, our emotions[,] will[,] attitudes and all the rest, and that the simplest way of stating the matter is to say things happen." That consciousness was singular and unified was largely a fiction. If we think that our thoughts are in our heads, he observed, that's because our eyes are in our heads. Looking sharply and thinking deeply were intimately, integrally related. And of course ideas exist in space, he continued. The world is spatial, our relation to it is spatial, even conciousness is the sum of spatial relations, not a thing alone or apart. What we think is basically a function of what we see when we stand where we stand.

Profoundly influenced by William James, Leo was struggling toward an antimetaphysical, pragmatic definition of consciousness, one that would ultimately explain aesthetic perception without divorcing perceiver from objects perceived -- which is what he believed cubism had done. He rejected the notion of an isolated consciousness, omnipotent and willful, and was trying to topple the artist from what he viewed as an unwarranted elevation. Bu his timing couldn't have been worse. He was formulating his ideas -- indeed, had to formulate them -- precisely at the moment Gertrude insisted -- indeed, needed to insist -- that the artist was just that inspired being answerable to no one.