Stupid Stuplimity [Lusk]

Response to Stuplimity (Ngai)
[[[Sorry this is so late. My eyes didn't let me read the article. Stupid eyes.]]]

I consider myself a writer. A decent one. That may not seem like an extravagant claim, but it took me a long time to fully consider myself a writer. Just as one, I imagine, takes thought and time to declare oneself an artist. I am slowly considering myself an artist. But I feel that’s such a huge claim that one does not take lightly. And it’s interesting. I constantly have moments in my life where I am writing. I am doing the physical act of writing, but I do not consider myself a writer. Fascinating.

I have always had a love/hate relationship with Gertrude Stein. Someone who, I imagine, has no problem calling herself a writer. She has a different relationship with words than I do. I feel under words. I feel that words hold ethereal powers that are beyond my comprehension, and so I must approach words as one would an old friend. With care, compassion, and enthusiasm. Words are people to me, in that aspect. Everyone different with a different responsibility. Stein does not seem to have this careful relationship with words as I do. She seems to view words as a child views Legos (I do not mean to associate Stein with a child in the intellectual sense, but more from the perspective of a child and their sense of reality). She uses her words to form and build and structuralize the English language. She tries and turns it into something of a science. And tries to turn that science into an experience. And that experience is Stuplimity.

Stuplimity, to me, seems to be that moment when you’re reading or hearing words and understanding the sequence or intelligible message in  them is not only difficult, but perhaps impossible.  Ngai puts it more elegantly than I, “The mind struggles to establish a connection – a sequence of cause and effect- and, being unable to do so, suffers a species of temporary paralysis” (254).

I still have questions thought with this article. First off, I found it very dense and difficult to understand. I experienced a type of stuplimity while reading it… I think… Well, that’s where I get lost. I don’t understand the point of this stuplimity. And that’s an issue I’ve always had with Gertrude Stein. Her sentences that seem to purposively confuse and annoy me (“A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”)… other than sounding interesting… I don’t get it. I really don’t. I don’t see the purpose. I don’t see why the effort to make these sequence of words.

And perhaps this is all to do with my relationship with language versus Stein’s relationship. Perhaps we use different sides of our brains. I constantly investigate my reactions when I read words. I want to experience something. I want to be pulled and pushed in a certain way. I’m not saying that I don’t want to think. But it seems that Stein views language as mathematical. And she wants to use words to incorporate our whole being. She wants us to read sentences with not only our heart (as I’m prone to do), but with that part of our brain that comprehends numbers and scientific laws.

Also can you have different experiences of stuplimity? In Jess’s blog post she talks about how she experienced stuplimity while reading some articles for this class. So there’s that stuplimity, and then there is the stuplimity from reading Stein. Both different things, but with the same reaction. Must something have the purpose to ‘stupefy’ you in order for you to have stuplimity? What happens when I’m reading an article that is above my comprehension? It wasn’t meant to stupefy me, that wasn’t its purpose (like Stein’s work)… so is it the same? (This is really hard to articulate. Ha.) So again, to conclude, I THINK I understand what stuplimity is. But I don’t understand why.