by VajrasattvaOne

Created on: January 27, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

I've been dipping my toes into the vast mannish ocean of Gertrude again. She's a deep one, she is. Hard to read. No light sandy beach material here. Brown mahogany studies and gas lamps. Famous paintings crowding the walls. Pince-nez or perhaps a monocle. Something to make you concentrate because Gertrude is nothing if not concentrated.

Distilled. What is the process of distilling? You keep running the same ingredients through the pipes, boiling and condensing, purer and purer, until what's left is the essence that intoxicates you.

That's what Gertrude did.

Not always. Her most famous work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, is a straightforward, fact-filled, gossipy kind of recounting of the early days of the Parisian artistic explosion at the turn of the 20th century. In other words, the kind of life that Alice and Gertrude and her brother Leo were certainly living. Like reading one of those British books about the royal family written by a former valet.

Other works are dense. Dense with repetition. But not exactly repetition. This is why you must concentrate because she repeats but not exactly. There may be a word missing. And when Gertrude removes a word, there must be a reason for it.

Gertrude is famous for writing, "Rose is a rose is a rose" which I have no idea what that means, even though I wrote about it once too. But there is the distilled essence of her endless repetition, and her injunction, repeated repeatedly in The Making of Americans to "begin again." I believe it was also Gertrude who said about that town in California, Burbank I think, "There's no there there." Exactly.

No distilled essence to tell you what it is. Which is what Gertrude repeatedly seeks.

You must be careful when reading Gertrude because she explores multiple meanings of words. This is part of her repetition as well. Take, for example, her portrait of Picasso. (After all, Picasso painted her portrait...with much difficulty, it is told. He never could get her face right. He worked for months. For months he worked. He worked and worked but the face would not work. Until he finally blotted out the whole thing and painted the mask you see in the portrait. And that became Gertrude's face, no other. She grew into that face.)

I want to quote the first two paragraphs of Gertrude's portrait of Picasso because they admirably set up the rhythm of repetition and lay the foundation of a completely accurate depiction of who that old Picasso was and what he was about. They also demonstrate Gertrude's

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