Word Rain or a discursive Introduction to the Intimate philosophical investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, it Says

by Madeline Gins

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

Described by Richard Kostelanetz as a "touchstone of innovative prose," and so predictably BURIED.

[Sam]

“The more possibilities are suggested, the more possibilities exist, the more possibilities are taken in by the imagination, the more the imagination's possibilities are defined, the more the possibility of more possibilities can be recognized. The possibilities of more possibilities lead to the imagination itself, immediately and to me.”
—
“Every letter that I see has been sounded at least two times. So too every word has been lived, although I must sadly admit that I do not know any living word besides myself which is a secret.

One joke is that I must do everything at least twice in order to communicate. I must think and say and then hear and think. I lisp around my secret, my thinking is sinking. In order to isolate myself as the process of think-ing, I must think of thinking or more conveniently read my reading. This is an extensive joke in the manner of the irony of names, the belly laugh of birth or the Chaplinesque persistence of consciousness.”
—
“Let me clear your throat. I symbolize your existence for you as I read your life. I have taught her that the poet should be the first to extend herself. And for the dumber (those who have had less practice in talking to themselves) it is now being said that living is almost reading.”
—
“Ropy gas tibers, ropy gas shavings, these are always present inside and outside. You can make wood shavings or shavings from a fruit. If a gas could have its outer edges gradually shaved off, if it were temporarily given the necessary solidity to allow this to be done while still remaining a gas, you could, as you have just done, in this way produce gas shavings. These would be of a ropy substance composed of stringy runners.
These runners speed through a vapor as the agents of an intention. Once they have angled through it, they are brought into a new existence as the springy, pulpy substance of which their own growth has heralded the possibility. In this state, they carry messages, record actions, allow actions and when there is an intention provide runners. Similarly, when there are runners there are intentions. There will be more later.”
—
“The changes of the waft are not at all without a defining axis, a relative center. The axis, assured, might even be coordinated with a vital internal homologue, the spindle, that shaft about which my thought is spun and spinning. And this is the axis about which whirling fields (platforms) rotate past billions of fibers in the body of the imagination.”
—
“Words are moving over me. They fall through me and I hear that I am as tall as a tree. A straight line turns sharply into the corner of a rectangle. I watch lines of words fill in the diagonals. I am a precise cloud.

I am sure. Everything that is, is pulled toward me.
Words selected at various degrees of discrimination must always discuss me even when I am semi-absent.
The more words, the more combinations, the more por-traits, the more negatives to be pushed away, the more positives on which to superimpose. I am so sure, aware, that there is not one word, aware, which can portray me. Instead every word, a confusion of words, may be used to surround me, to isolate me one toot above the page.

Every book fell through me. The way bubbles are held in soapy water, conversation is held in me, and when I blow, it is vocalized. I travel in words.”
—
“I love visitors, accidental mechanical ones, ghosts, microphytic agents, myself. I need this miraculous help as much as possible. In this book, I am the third I, near the beginning of a perhaps infinite series of them, and in the middle of this book.”
—
“The people in the story relaxed into the greased sequence which the author had thoughtfully provided for them. Every mouth had been filled. They were all passible on paper. The word chair had no legs and yet they were able to sit on it.”
—
“I have not been able to rid (read this word with an accent) myself of words. But the words, the rain of words, the weather being what it was, with not one day, one hour willing to stand up alone without its weather, the low warm puddles, the reflective mist; these combined to achieve the final opalescence of my presence. I, no i, (me, mine, she, her, us) am B(b)eing occluded.

The occurrence of words.”
—
“The mist licked the edges of the colloidal fog. The book closed and contracted. Two coordinated hands clasped. There was a breathless pause. Any book which ends, should have its end appended to this one.

(ATTEMPT IMPOSSIBILITIES; SQUARE THE CIRCLE;
SECRET OF PERPETUAL MOTION; SKIN A FLINT;
MAKE A SILK PURSE OUT OF A SOW'S EAR; BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW; HAVE NOTHING TO GO UPON;
WEAVE A ROPE OF SAND; PRENDRE LA LUNE AVEC LES DENTS; EXTRACT SUNBEAMS FROM CUCUM-BERS; SET THE THAMES ON FIRE; MILK A HE-GOAT INTO A SIEVE; ROMPRE L'ANGOUILLE AU GENOU;
BE IN TWO PLACES AT ONCE)”

[Anthony]

somewhere between an experimental typewriter novel and an artist's book, Word Rain is intermittently great. Gins likes to give commands to her readers. Sometimes she wants me to do things I wish I could do ("EXTRACT SUNBEAMS FROM CUCUMBERS") and other times it's stuff I don't wanna do ("Cut off your head.")

[Evan Pincus]

Interesting piece, isn't it? I'm a person who believes that passionate engagement with good art is a necessary thing for a healthy life, but Gins is an person who, later in life, set out explicitly to create work that would indefinitely delay death. I think that goes a long way towards explaining the strangeness and occasional self-importance of the tone here - it's playful, funny and deeply strange, yes, but it's also as serious as your life: YOUR life, addressed directly, with the book demanding to be taken seriously as an physical object that will alter you, the reader, through the power of the author... or maybe it's the narrator. Or maybe it's yet another reader - it's never quite clear who the "I" is, despite an explicit definition or two being offered. It's a hell of a thing, vacillating wildly between being hugely striking and unbelievably silly, except for the fleeting moments where it's both at once (like the literary microorganisms or the footnote addressing an apparent typographic "miracle" that ultimately looks indistinguishable from any number of deliberately introduced, commented-upon formal tricks) - no doubt it will stick with me, but will it stave off my death? I'm less sure. I suppose I've got at least a few more decades to figure that out!

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

vix. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays, p28