6 - Landscapes

Summary

Before we really delve into Whitehead's thinking about nature I want to take a close look at how Stein presents her new take on movement in her lectures. As we may expect, her new views led to several, seemingly contradictory, projects. In “Portraits and Repetition” she boasts about having isolated a fundamental movement: a type of movement that has nothing to do with seeing, speaking, hearing or feeling, and that does not find itself in relation to anything else. “[A]ll that was necessary,” she writes with respect to the 1928 portrait of George Hugnet with which she felt pleased, “was that there was something completely contained within itself and being contained within itself was moving, not moving in relation to anything not moving in relation to itself but just moving.” Her writing seems severed from her daily life:

But now to make you understand, that although I was as usual looking listening and talking perhaps more than ever at that time and leading a very complicated and perhaps too exciting every day living, never the less it really did not matter what I say or said or heard, or if you like felt, because now there was at last something that was more vibrant than any of all that and somehow some way I had isolated it and in a way had gotten it written. It was about that time that I wrote Four Saints.

When we turn to the lecture “Plays,” in which she writes more about the opera Four Saints in Three Acts, we find Stein taking a different course. Here, she emphasizes relations over movement. She is happy with the opera, she tells us, because “it did almost what I wanted, it made a landscape […].” Essential to landscapes, as Stein sees them, is the fact that they are made up of relations; they are “not moving but being always in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky and then any detail to any other detail.” It was because she was living in the landscape around Belley, furthermore, that she “slowly came to feel that […] the landscape was the thing.”