Carole Maso - Break Every Rule - Essays on Language, Longing, & Moments of Desire

“Almost everything is yet to be written by women,” Ava Klein says, moments before her death.

Let us bloom then, unreservedly.

There’s still time.

B EGIN in singing.

Chapter One

Rose.

A Longer Chapter

A word whispered. Called through green. In the years she was growing and lilting hills sung in the night and in the day and in every possible way over water rose the first word, the world. Was I loving you I was loving you even then.

One word. Rose

To Be Sung

Urgently, sweetly, with bliss, and sometimes with desperation

Chapter Bliss

Rose.

Chapter Wish

Rose. And Chapter hope…

And this is what bliss is this.

Rose to be sung against the sky and diamonds night.

Red Roses

A cool red rose and pink cut pink, a collapse and a solid hole, a little less hot

In direct sensuous relationship to the world.

Chapter Early and Late Please

I found myself plunged into a vortex of words, burning words, cleansing words, liberating words, and the words were ours and it was enough that we held them in our hands.

Chapter

Sincerely Beverly Nichols Avery Hopwood Allan Michaels and Renee Felicity also how many apricots are there to a pound.

And this is what bliss this is bliss this is bliss.

They found themselves happier than anyone who was alive then.

Chapter Saint

Saint Two and Saint Ten

Saint Tribute

Saint Struggle

Chapter Grace

Chapter Faith

Chapter Example

Saint Admiration

Our Lady of Derision

Saint Deadline — not finished and not finishable. I like thinking of this.

How many saints are there in it? Saints we have seen so far:

Tributes are there in it? A Very Valentine — for Gertrude Stein.

Colors are there in it?

A Novel of Thank You. A Basket.

Saint Example and Saint Admiration

Thank you, how many, audacity religiosity beauty and purity your ease your inability to compromise ever thank you

very much.

Your freedoms Saint Derision, Chapter One

Do prepare to say

Portraits and Prayers, do prepare

to say that you have

prepared portraits and prayers and

that you prepare and that I prepare

Yes you do.

A vortex of words very much.

For your irreverence and desire

extremity courage and good humorous

subversiveness

splendorous

Yes you do.

For Your Beauteous

Language is a rose, a woman, constantly in the process of

opening

thank you

your freedoms. Released at last from the prisons of syntax.

Story.

For your—

Choose wonder.

Choose Wonder

Apples and figs burn.

They burn.

She had wished windows and she had wished.

A novel of thank you and not about it chapter one.

Rose, rose, rose.

Rose whispered, prayed over the child love love. Please please sweet sweet sweet

Chapter

Susie Asado

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea

written for a particularly irresistible flamenco dancer

Please be please be get, please get wet, wet naturally, naturally in weather.

Chapter Alice

To not emerge already constructed, already decided, preordained.

Thank you

The difference is spreading.

very much

The permission.

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do

I like the feeling.

very much

The main intention of the novel was to say thank you.

A novel of thank you. In chapters and saints.

And it is easily understood that they have permission.

Without telling what happened…to make the play the essence of what happened.

A thing you all know is that in the three novels written in this generation that are important things written in this generation, there is, in none of them a story. There is none in Proust in The Making of Americans or in Ulysses .

Once upon a time they came every day and did we miss them we did. And did they once upon a time did they come every day. Once upon a time they did not come every day they never had they never did they did not come every day any day.

A novel of thank you and not about it.

A story of arrangements

When it is repeated or Bernadine’s revenge. When it is repeated is another subject. How it is repeated is another subject. If it is repeated is another subject. If it is repeated or the revenge of Bernadine is another subject.

inner thought, silent fancies

There is one thing that is certain, and nobody realized it in the 1914–19 war, they talked about it but they did not realize it but now everybody knows it everybody that the one thing that everybody wants is to be free, to talk to eat to drink to walk to think, to please, to wish, and to do it now if now is what they want, and everybody knows it they know it anybody knows it…1943

…not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered

multiplicity and freedom unfettered ecstatic

thank you

To begin to allow. To allow it.

I had to recapture the value of the individual word, find out what it meant and act within it.

Imagine a door.

To free oneself from convention again and again and again. Thank you for suggesting once again. And again and again that story is elsewhere, that story must have been, been elsewhere. In every kind of other place. Thank you. Again and again. In every possible way.

Once upon a time they came every day and did we miss them we did. And did they once upon a time did they come every day. Once upon a time they did not come every day…

Chapters in the middle

So then out loud.

Everyone.

And so forth.

All and one and so forth.

By and one and so forth.

Grammar will. Grammar. Obliged.

Grammar is not grown.

Grammar means that it has to be prepared and cooked. Forget about grammar and think about potatoes.

Or gnocchi. We are touring Italy. Tuscany and Umbria a little.

Cypress cypress cypress cypress cypress pine.

Grammar is not grown.

Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson: To restore the original clarity of each word-skeleton both women [Gertrude Stein and Emily Dickinson] lifted the load of European literary custom. Adopting old strategies, they revived and reinvented them…

Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein also conducted a skillful and ironic investigation of patriarchal authority over literary history. Who polices questions of grammar, parts of speech, connection and connotation? Whose order is shut inside the structure of their sentence? What inner articulation releases the coils and complications of Saying’s assertion? In very different ways the counter-movement of these two women’s work penetrates to the indefinite limits of written communication.

No one can know the difference between why I did and why I did not.

Not that kind of novel then.

And in my own very gradual real move toward a more abstract fiction who have been the models? Woolf, Woolf, Beckett, Beckett, Woolf, Woolf, Woolf, then Stein, Stein, now Stein. Stein now for some time very much. I’ve been loving you following you Chapter Gratitude. Yes for some time, time now so what about it say for example John Reed?

John Reed: She (Stein) lives and dies alone, a unique example of a strange art.

And where have you gotten your chronology from for your master narratives? And what has it cost you?

And what have you taken for legibility? And what has it cost finally?

Be nice. Try to be.

Thank you for the strangeness and the beauty. Reality is remote say it.

Imagine a door a room plenty of ice and snow also as often as they came in they went out.