sounding the impossible

I am trying to write/sound the impossible space I hear in Stein's work. Not one work or one line but her whole project... though I hear it in every passage and grouping of terms. I hear it strident. Lyotard talks of the strident as a "shrill sound. Intense often brief, it pierces our ears...a font of sound so offensive that the frail membrane fails to enter into resonance with it". This is the impossible. At the edge of possibles...

John Ashbery once wrote about Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas In Meditation,
"Stanzas in Meditation is no doubt the most successful of her [Stein's] attempts to do what can’t be done, to create a counterfeit of reality more real than reality. And if, on laying the book aside, we feel that it is still impossible to accomplish the impossible, we are also left with the conviction that it is the only thing worth trying to do."

The extreme pressure is all ventriloquised as a sort of joke, slapstick, a deadly serious odd. The resonance is within itself. Its own parameters, which are... none.