Gertrude Stein and Sisyphus

Strange how a phrase with quite profound meanings can arise from a fairly common experience  when it is expressed in high compression as a kind of poetic line. Such a case is of Gertrude Stein’s saying: “There is no there there.” Stein was revisiting Oakland, CA where she had lived as a child. The farmhouse when she had grown up had been razed and built over. In her mind “there” meant “where I grew up”; but that place was no longer “there,” meaning the physical arrangements at that spot.  The poetic touch—to be pedantic about it—is the contrast between two meanings of “there.”

The phrase came to mind this morning when I was contemplating the evanescent nature of reality as we experience it here, which, by a small mental step, produced the notion that the values we create or manifest rapidly vanish with the rush of Time. Or do they? Is it with values as it is with people? The body soon ages and then, transformed into dust or ashes, disappears for practical purposes. But the soul moves on. This line of thought then brought to mind that, as long back as I can remember, work has always been the center of my life—going right back to my humblest tasks in my early teens working as a bus boy at Plaza Royal restaurant in Kansas City. Work produces value—at minimum a certain order. Which vanishes sooner or later—so we never run out of work. But the value of that labor, it seems to me, must be preserved somewhere. Over there, perhaps. Which then suggested to me that Sisyphus’ labors are not fully appreciated. Yes, condemned for his hubris he was set the task of rolling a huge boulder up a steep hill—but just before he reached the top, the rock got away from him and rolled down, down, down again.

Aside from being a great pre-scientific discovery of the laws of entropy by the Greeks, the story also symbolizes the work of our lives here—which, while never-ending—never produce a genuinely lasting achievement either. And since we can’t really see the other side of reality from here—from here we cannot see what is really there—we think there is no there there. But faith tells us that values are there, piled high, not least the value of Sisyphus’ labors. Bits and pieces of his pride kept rolling down the hill—but his efforts to overcome them are there, on the other side.

Action and Faction

The word faction originally stood for party (the political kind). The term was used in that sense in Roman times and also early in American history. Factions, parties, formed as soon as a democratic style of government came to be established. Factions formalized into parties around about 1787 and thereafter as the Constitution was ratified. The word rapidly took on negative connotations, obvious from the way George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and others used the word. These fathers of the country discovered the pleasures of political opposition—and didn’t like it. Washington thought that governance should rise above faction. Perhaps the negative connotations that stuck to the word eventually led to the use of another, party, a word that in the eighteenth century still attached to smaller groups like hunting or dinner parties.

In our time party has itself become encrusted with negatives. “Just party politics” means, although in a milder sense, much the same thing that our founders meant when speaking of “factional disputes”; they meant the contention of limited interests rather than action for the common good. Today—certainly in the media—a positive connotation attaches to activism. Yes. On the Right that word has strongly negative connotations instead, but in the ordinary discourse of the media an activist is someone good, a reactionary someone bad.

Amusingly, both faction and action come from roots meaning “to do,” the first from the Latin facere, the last from the Latin agere. This “doing,” however, in our context, seems always to include a qualifier: against or in opposition to. The activist acts against the System. The faction opposes another faction. The Founding Fathers believed in limiting power by institutional, legal, and procedural methods. Activists and factionalists are ultimately seeking power—but outside established institutional, legal, and procedural boundaries.

Agitation also derives from agere in its sense of moving, driving, and impelling. Factionalists and activists seek to rouse passive masses who, in turn, will either force changes in the System by those who control it or give the faction power so that, in turn, it can rule.

We need not seek far to find the root of party. Removing the tailing y will do. The parts contending to rule the whole. Were Washington and Hamilton ultimately naïve in thinking that an idealized projection of the whole actually existed, that there really was something out there that could act as a party of one? as the American People or the Athenian Demos? Or did they, perhaps, express a kind of nostalgia for a time when more people actually shared a common belief that transcended personal interest?

There is that tongue in cheek saying: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” People reject that because, echoing that sage of modernity, Gertrude Stein, they think that “there is no there there.”