Notes on Gertrude Stein’s “Veal”

Very well very well, washing is old, washing is washing.

Cold soup, cold soup clear and particular and a principal a principal question to put into.

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D— washing is old,

Veal is the meat of the young, more expensive and tender. Washing could be that key and ancient practice of cleaning your meat before cooking. Something that could be taken for granted very easily. It could be a psychic or spiritual (even ritual) cleansing, as this is a sacrifice of calf or lamb for the sake of taste. Not necessity.

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D— I remember a discussion on kosher in one of the Stein threads. Veal must be something of a controversy in that regard.

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D—Yes, technically veal is kosher so long as it’s from official animals and cut in the proper method. Hence the controversy. Some rabbis would like us to look at the principles, and from that there’s a lot going into the conditions in which the animals are kept and raised, how it’s translated from farm to table:

The idea of linking kosher food with other ethical issues is not new. In the 1970s, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein of New York urged Jews not to eat veal. In the late 1980s, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a leader of the Jewish Renewal movement, wrote that Jews should examine all the resources they consume, not just food, to determine if they were “kosher” in the broadest sense of the word.

There’s more, but I don’t know, maybe this is a very small minority:

Clearly Rabbi Levy was implying that some, I emphasize some and not all, Reform Jews might wish to refrain from eating the foods that are cited as forbidden in our Torah portion. He also seemed to suggest that some Reform Jews might wish to express their social consciousness by not eating veal that comes from calves that were raised in a cruel manner or crops that are cultivated and harvested with the use of pesticides, which are dangerous to farm workers. Rabbi Levy was seeking to explore a range of possibilities for Reform observance, some hearkening back to ancient tradition and some quite modern in spirit.

Still, it’s worth noting that scriptural ethics is at odds with other moral systems and this leads to an internal crisis:

If these unethical violations seem too anomalous an occurrence to judge the entirety of kashrut on, though, consider the fact that within the system itself there abound examples of unethical practices. For example, veal is a common  kosher dish served on Jewish dinner tables across the country, but its production is anything but humane. According to the American Humane Society, hundreds of thousands of calves raised for veal are confined in cages so compact that they cannot move their bodies for their entire sixteen-week lives. While this is the case for both kosher and non-kosher veal production, if there is no distinction between the ways in which kosher and non-kosher factory farms raise veal, what other factors distinguish kosher veal from non-kosher veal? In what sense is it more moral to eat kosher veal?

Very well very well, washing is old, washing is washing.

It’s been justified from the very beginning. And this old white-washing, it’s still at it.

Cold soup, cold soup clear and particular and a principal a principal question to put into.

Could that coldness be a judgment? That these producers (and consumers?) of veal are cold-blooded. They follow a divine code and yet there’s this "clear" outrageous practice that the code condones. And the existence of such "little" issues puts into question the universality and goodness of the rules.

For me, it’s not about moral qualms on the part of Stein. Just because someone drinks coke doesn’t mean this guy’s not mindful of how the multinational corporation runs down local economies and ruins teeth the world over. I think that Stein’s sensing hypocrisy and would like to enter that into what veal is supposed to mean. As in celery, she tries to restore the history of the food as part of the food, as something we consume without knowing we consume it, that we are continuing and absorbing ages-old ideas (slavery, elitism, all manners of prejudice) just by cooking and eating something.

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D— Very well very well, washing is old, washing is washing.

I’d look into the youngest of the crew, Pip. He jumps out of the boat twice, washed, so to speak. “Very well very well” seems to lead to a revision (or greater specification) of plans once new factors are identified. It might also lead to compromise. A whale is loosed to save Pip, and no one’s too happy about it.

Cold soup, cold soup clear and particular and a principal a principal question to put into.

No one, that is, except maybe for Captain Ahab. The next time Pip jumps in the water he is stranded there or a long time, in that “awful lonesomeness” (cold soup, cold soup). Captain Ahab looks at Pip as if he is some compass into fate, or to the real (clear) nature of things. I vaguely remember a chapter where Ahab takes Pip aside and confers with him beyond earshot of other sailors but within view. I think he took Pip out on a small boat? Anyway, if so, this is where that principal question was entered.

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D— There are tales and practices where important structures like bridges and large bells would be cursed, would prove dangerous if the builders neglect to pour baby or virgin blood.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is littered with the remains of the young and the innocent. Abel, the son of Abraham (almost, and it was a close call), the firstborn children behind the unmarked Egyptian doors, and Herod’s infanticide. It’s usually done to curtail power (as in those offered to the Minotaur in Greek mythology), keep it on one side or the other, the adults refusing to pass it on to successors or soon-to-be-upstarts. Now if Jesus is God’s lamb, then it might be Pilate doing the washing:

Very well very well, washing is old, washing is washing.

It’s that “very well very well” that puzzles me, though your “well” as noun is fascinating. Tears welling up? It does sound as if the word “veal” was butterflied and unfolded.

clear and particular and a principal a principal question to put into.

In Moby-Dick, what comes closest to all this is Pip. Ahab’s that principal (they belong in the cabin, thanks, K—, I misplaced them earlier) and his quest and question in the heart of the hunt as well as the book. I remember encountering “principal” in Stein’s office once before. It seems to come into this too... and some schoolgirl or schoolboy is about to get it.

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Notes on Gertrude Stein’s “Celery”

Celery tastes tastes where in curled lashes and little bits and mostly in remains.

A green acre is so selfish and so pure and so enlivened.

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[ bartleby ]

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D— Celery tastes tastes where in curled lashes and little bits and mostly in remains.

Those lashes could be curling as in the act of whipping. Perhaps this acre is not as pure as it feels in the mouth. So “lashes” are soft “on the eyes,” but those s-sounds from kind of seethe, for example: ending as they do in those fertile “remains”.

A green acre is so selfish and so pure and so enlivened.

What a redundancy of life in this one, and selfish of course stands out. This green comes at the cost of those remains, conceivably buried in the soil beneath.

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D— Something sounds quite technical now that you’ve highlighted it. If legal, perhaps pointing to an institutionalized injustice? As for “tastes tastes,” one of them could be a verb, and if grammatical, it should be the first. The celery is the one doing the tasting, eating of those lost, nameless bits, those buried remains. If these nameless had “tastes,” these would not now be distinct from the vegetable’s taste. And now the agency, the spirit, the subjectivity belongs to the celery.

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D— Odysseus also found herbs. And following Heracles and his (pre)Spartan boys, I came upon a wreath of celery. So pure! So enlivened! And maybe something that might account for the remains:

While she showed to the heroes the way to the nearest well, she left the child behind lying in a meadow, which during her absence was killed by a dragon. When the Seven on their return saw the accident, they slew the dragon and instituted funeral games to be held every third year. 

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D— Never thought of linking them that way, T—, one leading to the other. I’ve always somehow seen these subpoems as independent, linked in terms of theme and image. But yes, if they are courses in a meal...

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D— And lashes... Pip was to be led (then tied) by Ahab with “man-rope”

Or, Berrigan and the Whale

3 Pages
by Ted Berrigan
for Jack Collom

DE— Let me just say that my heart skipped a beat when Berrigan's list mentioned the Hunt for the Whale. I read Melville in my youth when no teacher required it of me, and it was one of my greatest reading experiences. In fact, when the line struck me, the whole poem was suddenly flooded by the novel's immense waters. Even the title reminded me of Ahab's own 3 "pages," Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, petty officers and middlemen on this the grandest and most foolish of ventures.

AN— the first part of the novel is encyclopedic, a sort of melville's a dummies guide to whales, whaling, and the color white (that last part is my fave). formally, they're essays. if i remember right, there should be a good handful of lists in the pequod: what to do with blubber, what to do with whale parts (look up cassock!) and others, a lot of how-tos here and there. starbuck was the most practical of them, the least metaphysical, and he must be partial to these lists. of course ahab would dash them all and have it his way! he has his own list. and his methods of staking the ship to his own TO-DO, his theatrics, his mythic references, that sinister, inert doubloon!

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AN— schopenhauer sounds right in this case. perhaps not only in our reading of the poem but also in berrigan's writing of it.

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[A post was deleted]

DE— Ahab's mission, and this list of ten things to do. They're a whole universe apart in terms of grandeur and scope and yes time (and diction, as I think you're pointing out too). Though they're both America, that much is true. And maybe I'm forgetting (and you've reminded me) that the creation of this poem is itself the hunt for the whale.

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AN— it could be a key to this, i agree. one among many, i'm sure bec of the nature of the poem, but still, a welcome entrance!

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DE— The last lines after NO HELP WANTED doesn't seem like things you do every day. There's the heart attack, the medal of honor, the house in the country: these are things to aspire to, such that every day builds up to them. I guess in the back of the psyche there's something that gnaws, a less obvious, less acceptable desire, something more Quixotic (forgive the mixed references though I'm fairly certain Melville the sailor was likewise referencing Cervantes the sailor), therefore more grand than any desire. Still, there's that other thing. Ahab was all about revenge. Could this be the hidden motive (motif) of the poem? Berrigan's revenge on US conservatism (prosaic, sorry!), it's pretensions, how if it has any greatness in it, you'll find it solely in the shortcomings? For some deep yearning here is unanswered (WCW on the poem: for lack of which people die miserably every day). Which brings us back to the port of poem as whale as poem.

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AN— and maybe beyond the revenge of the poem is the vindictive life. like Berrigan was saying something like: I won't get with your program folks! my poker, my lunch poems these fly in the face of your congressional medal of honor!

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DE— Forgive the re-post here; I'd like the Mates in my ship as well. I tried to read Berrigan by using the 3 MATES of Ahab (as you suggested). There's something there, though not so clear-cut, but perhaps the others can make more of it.

Here it goes. Melville's Pequod is a ship of symbols (although it can be read as a driven narrative even without any eye for allegory, we thus have movies of it here and there) and as such is a very symmetrical construct. The 3 MATES can be read as the stages of the human brain: 1st mate STARBUCK is the voice of reason, the schooled one, a pragmatist at heart. 2nd mate STUBB is much less refined, but in moments of clarity he embodies a folk sort of wisdom. Nevertheless, he's more Gung-Ho and is thus more open to the seductions of Ahab. But 3rd mate Flask has practically sold his soul to Ahab even without him asking for it, and since it's clear we're moving down the brain here, Flask is more bile and vengeance; he really takes the whales personally.

Beer? Jack off? Curse? Probably Flask. hunker down, quite merrily, life goes by: We could probably get a whiff of Stubb's pipe here (though he seems to be smoking with Flask in the earlier parts too). Which means that the last, where happiness is not happiness but something negotiated with weather (sails?), that could be Starbuck there, the only dissenting voice when the ship went mad with Ahab's bloodlust. He's the one with his eye still on Mary, his wife, their "house in the country," their nameless son.

But all of their tempers and powers taken singly or together: NOT ENOUGH

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DE— Others in the forum say that it's part of the incompleteness, the "NOT ENOUGH"

Poem says that it's a list of 10, but it doesn't always add up (though it depends on who's counting), almost always amounting to but nine items. In the anthology, it physically takes 2 pages, though it says three. So 3 pages follows that logic. (An aside, Calvino's "Six Memos" contains only five, suggesting we write the last one, perhaps that's the case here too? Add your page. Or add your thing-to-do?)

The others cut the poem into three, following the sectioning suggested by those phrases with purely capitalized letters. What do you think? Perhaps there's an important 3-page document somewhere in American history we should know about?

Anyway, I'm glad to have to think on it/ of it. Hope this helps.

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DE— Hi! It's an idea I got from your 3 ages thread. I hope I didn't misquote you. But yes, put like that I see that it somehow not only "clusters" but "furthers" all the cutting that's already been done in/by the poem.

AN— a very good idea. the more you read it that way, the more the 3 "sets" or "pages" distinguish themselves from each other

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DE— True and tragic, how the persona "can't even find that wholeness in the lifestyle of other Americans." He lists everything that everyone else is about but comes out empty-handed. Even with fame and security thrown in at the last breath.

AN— perhaps because fame and security was offered in the list? maybe that made it worse somehow?

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DE— It's hard (for me) to put the whiteness of the whale out of the picture when inside North Am Lit, but because Berrigan does it in cuts he could evade full reference (as an epigram wouldn't, or a direct quote) and that sometimes makes for more richness, a more textured reading. Perhaps the "paging" I did with the mates was a stretch as well. But it was such fun doing it.

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AN— the openness of a cropped line is interesting. that's probably why I loved not only following Tzara's instructions but reading the works of people who did. and now that Berrigan gives us a project like this, it's wonderful to welcome all associations in the tapestry of meaning

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DE— Ishmael as the sailor behind (or grafted into) Berrigan's persona, that's promising. What a bummer to miss this, so: thanks! Ishmael's more laissez faire, a down and out man, going where the wind would take him. Melville must have been trying his damnedest to draw a blank of a character, someone who'd soak in the whole Pequod, all its men and methods then live to tell the tale. Ishmael is a survivor (the survivor) of the mad quest, and his presence could change the motif from revenge to just pure survival, openness, going at it one day at a time.

AN— she is on to something. Pip also is mad(dened) enough to deserve a second look as an intertext of this poem

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AN— hegemonic parameters of quality? are you saying they are the gold standard of poets of the time? and that they are oppressive somehow as influence goes? if i hear from you, thanks

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DE— I do love Berrigan too. He and Corman and Armantout, they're great "finds" for me, and only made possible by "This".

AN— perelman too now, and bernstein and hejinian

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DE— I saw this a bit late, here's the summary of some hypotheses offered earlier:

1) NOT ENOUGH. 3 Pages makes you look for a page that isn't there (the poem takes up only two in a book), the texts and contexts from which these lines have been cut. It highlights the insufficiency of the list, perhaps also of listing, maybe of poetry.

2) 3 SECTIONS. Some believe that lines such as "BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN" cut the poem physically into three.

3) That the title refers to 3 PAGES known only to Berrigan (and other such "hidden" readings).

AN— or there are (at least) 3 ways of looking at everything here. maybe read/ lunch/ poems are three pages more than enough!

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DE— Thanks!