Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Glazed Glitter

Tender Buttons continued..."Glazed Glitter" Part One:
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Glazed Glitter: This is so oblique it seems, at first, to be nonsensical. It starts with a one-sentence paragraph about nickel—the metal? The coin? There does seem to be some sort of effort to define, as the first sentence reads, “Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.” The question mark, of course, is omitted, and the sentence finished by sort of answering its own question, if “it is originally rid of a cover” can be said to define nickel. These entries make me think of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary or Francis Ponge’s Things. Except, of course, while Bierce’s definitions were jaded parodies of definitions, Stein’s are not ostensibly funny; they are simply oblique and difficult to apprehend. What is glazed glitter, anyway? How would one glaze glitter?
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The second paragraph ends with “Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.” Is glitter just a stand-in for hollow décor? For symbol without substance? If this is a motif, then it could help explain the definitions that don’t really define, as they could be taken as in some sense equal to the decorations that don’t become anything, but this seems like a cheap parlor game, a whining or musing that doesn’t stand well as a poem to offer the reader. The second sentence reads, “The change in that is that red weakens an hour.” The first “that” seems to be a pronoun referring to an antecedent in the first sentence, I suppose, but I’m not sure what. The change in the nickel? The change in nickel getting rid of its cover? The change in the glazed glitter? The glazing of the glitter? And once we place that, if we ever do, why does this change weaken an hour? How can an hour be weakened? I suppose if an hour can be extended to mean time, and time can be said to be an enemy to a mortal, ephemeral creature such as ourselves, then witnessing glazed glitter or any beautiful metamorphosis could weaken time’s advantage over us by creating the sort of stillness art provides, by deepening the life of the viewer and thereby making the product we buy with our time more worth the price. I guess.
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The paragraph continues, “The change has come. There is no search.” Well, the change of the nickel ridding itself of a cover, or the change of glitter becoming glazed makes sense, although it seems like a grandiose statement to not extend beyond that literal. The search for what? Meaning? What lies on the other side of the symbol/metaphor equation? Perhaps this exercise I’m performing right now is the search in question, and perhaps this line is begging me not to treat the poem like this. If that’s the case, I apologize to Stein, but I don’t much care for her game, anyway. The paragraph corrects itself in the next sentence, “But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation.” The hope that language represents something? That there is a Meaning with a capital M? “and sometime, surely any is unwelcome.” There’s something here about an analytical dissection of the poem as being unwelcome, I think. “sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure.” A sinecure is a position that requires little or no work while providing an income, or, archaically, an ecclesiastical benefice without cure of souls. It comes from the Latin for “without cure.”
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The sentence continues, “and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing.” I’m not sure what to make of this idea of clean—clean of interpretations, as if they somehow soil the art? Charming, as in a patronizing way to refer to the hope and the interpretation? Maybe a sweeter intention, yet still condescending?
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The second paragraph begins, “There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine.” There are several spots like this where a small word, an article, a preposition, in this case the conjunction “and” seems out of place. I expect to see “in mercy or in medicine” just as I expect “a system of pointing” when Stein gives us “a system to pointing.” What to make of this? Simply a confounding of readerly expectation to reinforce the instability of trying to search for an expected set of symbols and representations and meaning? This first sentence seems, at first, untrue. I feel like I’m pretty grateful for medicine. Perhaps mercy can often go unthanked, but I think it often is repaid with gratitude. Could this connect to an idea of the speaker anticipating the reader’s frustrations with the request that he or she not try to interpret the poem? Meaning, the speaker sets up a poem that confounds the readerly impulse to interpret for the purpose of edifying the reader, offering him or her the mercy and medicine of not interpreting, but the speaker already expects ingratitude for the gesture? Well, it’s a providential expectation, because I don’t care for the game still, and therefore this reader doesn’t have much gratitude.
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“There can be breakages in Japanese.” Does this refer to Japanese forms, like haiku, etc.? I don’t actually remember any, other than haiku. Breakages? In that haiku are less about interpreting a meaning than simply pairing an image from nature with, what, an aphorism? I don’t think I know enough about Japanese forms to take this anywhere. Or maybe it’s not about poetic forms at all. Maybe it’s simply about the Japanese language? I don’t know much about that either.
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“That is no programme. That is no color chosen.” Hmmm. What is the act of creating a programme or choosing a color? Choose a color as in choose a color, say, to paint a room? To paint one’s perspective or reading of a poem by interpreting a meaning and thereby reducing the poem to details that support said meaning? Again, if this is what’s going on, I don’t care for the game. If it’s not too lame to call upon Frost’s “a poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom,” I’m not feeling the delight, and the knowledge doesn’t feel like wisdom; it feels more like more conspiracy theory (hey, man…what if language doesn’t mean anything? What if we’re just a big, foolish experiment for aliens?).