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The following is a metaphrase of Gertrude Stein's lecture 'Composition as Explanation'. Stravinsky once said 'words are the instruments of thought'. For Gertrude Stein, words corresponded more closely to the excrement of thought. Like many American writers of her generation, she was fascinated by the process and enjoyed and used the act of writing as a means of inquiry into the mind's digestion. The result is personal, messy, intimate and occasionally revelatory. A metaphrase is not what Gertrude Stein said but a reading of her remains to discover what she may have intended. The original lecture is lightened by occasional flashes of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It can also be read as a convincing manifesto of American minimalism in music.
There is no particular distinction in the order of words making a narrative other than what the reader intends in reading. To compose is to put together. How words are put together is how they are read as well as how they stand on the page, and the only difference there can be between how they are read and what is on the page is how the reader reads them and that changes from generation to generation. If it were not so then every reading would be the same and everybody would know.
If a reader is inclined to continue reading it is likely that what is being read is of interest or that the act of reading is giving pleasure: something they know or something they enjoy doing. Neither of which changes what is on the page. The only difference is in who is doing the reading, and how a person reads depends on how the world is accustomed to read at a particular time. This makes it very difficult to understand the author's intention in putting words together in a certain way to make a composition, not knowing which words lose definition and can only be known as words in an order.
From generation to generation the words remain the same and what changes is how they are read, and reading is an act of composition, of putting words together so that their order has meaning. Lord Grey warned the generals of 1914-1918 of the folly of planning to fight a nineteenthcentury war with...