Madeline Gins, _The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader_, ed. Lucy Ives

 MADELINE GINS (1941-2014) was an artist, architect, and writer. I had not heard of heard before coming across her name and a citation of this book in the endnote to Kate Briggs's The Long Form; just being cited by Briggs made Gins a person of interest for me, but it also made a difference that Lucy Ives, a writer I have long followed, had put the collection together. So, what have we here?

Gins published several books in collaboration with her husband and partner, Shusaku Arakawa, and another four on her own. The Saddest Thing reprints the entirety of her first book, Word Rain (in facsimile, no less), and substantial excerpts from What the President Will Say and Do!! and Helen Keller, or Arakawa, together with some early poems and essays.

Although I am among the world’s leading skippers of introductions, I read Lucy Ives’s introduction to the volume because….well, Lucy Ives. Her account of finding Word Rain in the University of Iowa Library inspired flashbacks of some of my own favorite finds in the less frequented shelves in the “P” stacks (or 800s in the Dewey decimal system). She also makes the useful suggestion that what Gins is up to make overlap with what the Language poets were doing.

That suggestion led to my own guess at what the title Word Rain means. Language is like weather in that it is the ground of almost everything we do, a universal condition in which in which our lives inevitably take place, the always-already-there thing so omnipresent that we may not always notice it. Language creates the context in which our lives occur, as weather does (as, for example, rain or its absence does).

The structure of our language tells us things about the world even prior to anything semantic—prior, that is, to our knowing what a word means. If someone says, “I snarfled today, and I plan to snarfle tomorrow,” we know that “snarfle” is an action one can perform, even if we do not what it is. We could even pose questions like, “Is it okay to snarfle on an empty stomach?” without even knowing what “snarfling” is.

The structure of our language allows us to make perfectly grammatical, coherent statements contrary to fact, such as the Kafka’s famous one about Gregor Samsa waking up and finding himself a bug, and even statements that are literally impossible, like Chomsky’s famous “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Using the possibilities of syntax to generate statements without regard to what is actually existing, to what is even possible, could get us into the realm of the surrealists, such as “Hairy buildings ponder equanimity annually.” 

Even though such statements do not correspond to any actuality, even any possible actuality, they might have a certain meaningfulness, as though they might be true in some sense, or might have some kind of utopian projection in them. We naturally look for meaning in statements, and so we might speculate about the spiritual lives of hairy buildings. And if a writer places such statements in a sequence, we start to assume they are or could be a meaningful sequence, a narrative.

That language cannot actually reliably deliver to us the truth about the world may induce anxiety, even a sense of tragedy, but we have little in the way of alternatives. It’s sad that we have to rely on something so unreliable as words, as Gins notes in the sentence Ives repurposed as the book’s title. It’s certainly healthy to be made to understand this particular deficit in our shared situation, however.

Word Rain gets us thinking about how syntax generates meaning by leaving blank spaces in the middle of sentences, gets us thinking about how two sentences are points that we assume will define a line, gets us thinking about how the relation between language and the real is always up for grabs. It participates in many of the same tricks that a lot of 20th century avant-garde writing was trafficking in, but it’s a great deal more fun that most of the other examples. It takes its games seriously, but doesn’t get too painfully earnest and beetle-browed or götterdammerung about it. The book is a delight, mainly, with some unnerving moments and some startling insights, like a good psychedelic. Props to Lucy Ives for getting it back in circulation.