**2. Meditation and the Late-Nineteenth Century Metaphysical Ferment**

By the nineteenth century's last decade, when the college-age Stein was engaged in her studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts had long been an epicenter of American metaphysical thought. In the decades prior to James's tenure there, Harvard was home to the birth of Transcendentalism, which heralded a new non-doctrinal spirituality. Led, in effect, by Emerson, the Transcendentalists looked for inspiration to German Romanticism; the relatively new field of Biblical criticism, which engendered a newfound religious skepticism; and the theosophy of seventeenth-century Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. If the previous generation "beheld God and nature face to face" and "we through their eyes", Emerson wrote, "why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" (Emerson 2004a, p. 9). True to the democratic spirit of American religion, such individual revelation was available to all, and Emerson, and his friend Henry David Thoreau, sought it through solitary communion with nature.

It was Emerson and the mystical writings of Swedenborg that, in turn, served as foundational ideas in William James's work on religion (E. Taylor 2011) 3 . At Harvard, James's capacious intellect produced an extensive body of work covering psychology, religion, and pragmatism, a school of philosophy he helped found. After initially veering into medicine, James sought his entire life to bring science and spirit into harmony. In the 1880s, inspired by the wellspring of new religious activity flowing around him, James sought scientific evidence for psychic and religious phenomena (ibid, p. 22–23)<sup>4</sup> . His better-known laboratory work on attention, states of consciousness, and the psycho-physical connection—the influence of which on Stein's writing has been explored at length—unfolded alongside his work on witchcraft, trances, mesmerism, mystical encounters, and the newly fashionable practice of meditation<sup>5</sup> .

James's fascination with meditation reflected a wider trend in late-nineteenth century American religious liberalism towards mental healing, mesmerism, and silent, solitary contemplation. As Schmidt describes it: "the burst of interest in meditation involved a peculiarly American conversation among Transcendentalists, liberal Protestants, Reform Jews, Vedantists, Buddhists, and mind-cure

<sup>3</sup> Eugene Taylor, a William James scholar and former professor of psychology at Harvard, considered "Swedenborg and Emerson" to be the "primary philosophical frame of reference for understanding James". For his social and political context, Taylor placed James in the "American utopian socialism of the 1840s, to which James was a direct heir through Henry James, Sr. and Emerson" (E. Taylor 2011, pp. 182–83).

<sup>4</sup> James, primed for belief by his upbringing, never desired to empirically "explain away" such phenomena but rather to redefine the psychological and religious expanses of human experience. In 1885, James built his own temple for the systematic exploration and documentation of spiritual phenomena in co-founding the American Society of Psychical Research. Overseen by Harvard luminaries, committees including Experimental Psychology, Thought-Transference, Apparitions and Hallucinations, Mediumship, and Hypnotism reveal the late-nineteenth century zeal for empiricism and the desire to scientifically investigate what was happening in metaphysical discourse (E. Taylor 2011, pp. 22–23).

<sup>5</sup> His influences from the metaphysical community are too many to name here, but Jamesian scholarship, Eugene Taylor's in particular, show that James readily defended vernacular metaphysics (he testified on behalf of mind-curers to the Massachusetts State House), and was himself well-versed in principles of New Thought and the therapeutic dimensions of positive thinking and meditation.

metaphysicians" (2005, p. 17)<sup>6</sup> . James, for his part, published his 1899 essay "The Gospel of Relaxation", in which he recommended physical activity and mental repose as antidotes to the stresses produced by the excitable American character.

The eclectic spiritual paths that came together to form this turn of the century fascination with meditation tell us that Stein's use of the word was plucked partially from her time experimenting in the psychology lab and partially from the spiritually-charged zeitgeist in which she spent some of her early years. They also remind us that the religious eclecticism we associate with the 1960s and 1970s counterculture—a religious eclecticism we also find in American avant-garde artists influenced by Stein, such as the Living Theatre and Richard Foreman—stretches further back to the strain of metaphysics that permeated Stein's world, thought, and the theatrical work to which we now turn.

## **3. Meditation and Landscape Dramaturgy**

Much has been written about Stein's concept of landscape both as it manifests in her writing and how that has been translated to the stage. In her essay "Plays", Stein described a creeping anxiety that overcame her at the theater as the narrative unfolding before her outpaced her emotional involvement. The story on stage and her inner response were out of step, causing what she termed "syncopation", an uncomfortable feeling she then sought to remedy. She thought if she could remove narrative, remove causality, and therefore remove time from on-stage action, such feelings of syncopation would end. To do this, Stein moved away from a linearly unfolding narrative to juxtaposing images, objects, and words in space, placed as if in a landscape.

Looking at natural landscapes transformed her way of imagining her writing. In an oft-quoted excerpt from *Plays,* Stein captures the sensation of her eyes gliding across a vista, marking one thing in relation to another: "the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky and then any detail to any other detail". "And of that relation", Stein writes, "I wanted to make a play" (Stein 1967, p. 77). Narrative and incident, the time-bound dimensions of more traditional theater, cool into static images or fragment into other "objects" placed in space. "A landscape does not move", Stein wrote, "nothing really moves in a landscape but things are there, and I put into the play the things that were there" (ibid, p. 80).

To observe the "things that were there", Stein engaged in what she called "meditation". Much like the mental concentration or contemplative devotion implicated in the religious sense of the word, Stein used the term meditation to indicate the "process of realizing perception". Ulla Dydo went so far as to call this process of "becoming conscious" a "sacramental act", As Dydo explains: "To meditate, for Stein, meant to concentrate all her attention on what she saw immediately before her" ((Dydo 1988, p. 47). Stein's meditation was inextricably linked to the phenomenology of gazing, often at natural landscapes, and capturing what she saw in language.

<sup>6</sup> When Americans began to encounter Asian traditions, meditation and yoga were seen as paths to mental clarity and concentration, tonics against an increasingly anxious and fast-paced culture. Vedantist Swami Vivekenanda and the Sinhalese Buddhist monk Anagarika Dharmapala, in particular, traveled widely on the American lecture circuit, promoting Hindu and Buddhist spiritual techniques for mental focus and well-being. Schmidt also locates a home-grown strand of meditation practice in the "optimistic gospel of mental healing and positive thinking" known as "New Thought" (Schmidt 2005, p. 17). Horatio Dresser, James's friend and colleague at Harvard, and Ralph Waldo Trine, whose best-seller *In Tune With the Infinite* James read and quoted, were both star players in the New Thought movement, and James observed in the *Varieties* that the current vogue for contemplative practice stemmed not from evangelical Protestant devotional prayer but from "our mind-curers," who had "reintroduce[d] methodical meditation into our religious life" (p. 147). Trine and another fellow New Thought devotee, Henry Wood, both recommended "a daily practice of meditation and concentration, performed in solitude and silence in a seated restful posture" to quiet a wandering mind, sharpen concentration, and draw into life the abundant "divine inflow" (p. 147). Annie Besant, a second-generation leader of the Theosophical Society, wrote extensively on meditation's role in the quest for divine knowledge. Heavily influenced by some Buddhist and Hindu devotional practices, Besant championed mental "one-pointedness" or *samadhi*, a state of intense meditative focus that lead to transcendent consciousness. The difficulties of this practice are made clear in Besant's counsel: "When the mind loses hold of its object, whether devotional or intellectual—as it will do, time after time—it must be brought back, and again directed to the object" (pp. 108–9).

But as Elinor Fuchs observed, it is ultimately unclear when Stein talked about plays as landscapes whether she meant a way of seeing or thing to be seen—the inner world of perception or the outer one of material reality. Fuchs wrote that Stein uses the term landscape to describe "a phenomenological spectatorship of theater, a settled-back scanning or noting" of textual or spatial patterning, "*as if* it were a natural scene" (Fuchs 1995, p. 94). But for Stein, this way of seeing seems to go hand in hand with actual nature imagery. In her first sense of the term landscape, Fuchs interprets Stein's notion of landscape in two ways: it is "spatial and static instead of temporal and progressive", i.e., a way of seeing (95). And second, it also refers to a self-contained theatrical world in which images of nature appear. Fuchs stresses the spectator's shift towards surveying the visual field in its entirety, her attention held not by "structures arranged . . . on lines of conflict and resolution" between characters "but on multivalent spatial relationships" (107). Through this kind of attention, we find ourselves neither "transported to another world" nor do we "banish all other worlds", but rest firmly in a timeless now akin to a shift in consciousness produced during meditation (107). Stein's writing-as-meditation is designed to produce a meditative effect on the spectator—what Stein called the "continuous present".

Metaphysical religion on stage has always been considered the special province of the Symbolists, with Maurice Maeterlinck as the leading light. Fuchs asked if we might consider Maeterlinck's eloquent Symbolist stage and Stein's landscape dramaturgy as "variants of a similar modern tradition, these two static, spatial theaters with their concomitant resort to landscape" (ibid, p. 70)<sup>7</sup> . As variants of a modern tradition, Fuchs saw the immanent, static eternal of Maeterlinck and the repeated beginnings of Stein's continual present as two time signatures "embedded" in each other. Unlike Maeterlinck, Stein never sought to stage the intersection of visible reality and the invisible spiritual world through mystical correspondences, but we might think of Stein's continuous present as a secularized version of the immanent eternal.

Stein's method of writing-as-meditation translated to the stage the constant process of beginning again and again, which mirrors a kind of meditative practice requiring the meditator to continually bring the mind back to its object of concentration when it began to wander. For many of the nineteenth-century mystics advocating for meditation, its ultimate goal was the same as Emerson's—uniting the human mind with the divine mind, accessing divine knowledge, and healing the human being. For Stein, as we shall see, meditation's highest end was to settle into the continuous present of the human mind in order to produce masterpieces.

Stein's revision of Emerson and James brought together metaphysical correspondences, linguistic skepticism, meditation, movements of the mind, and contemplation of nature. In linking the religious content of Stein's landscape plays to William James's concept of "knowledge of acquaintance", Rebecca Kastleman argues that the primary form of knowing presented in landscape dramaturgy "is epitomized by religion, which represents a form of knowledge that is experienced and felt but not fully available to thought" (Kastleman 2019, p. 345). She effectively shows how Stein, like many other Modernist writers, "rehabilitated religious experience as an aspect of the aesthetic" (354). Re-reading Stein through the wider context of late-nineteenth century American religious liberalism, and through Albanese's definition of metaphysical religion in particular, Stein's own preoccupations with the mind and mental phenomena reveal new associations. Stein's explorations of attention, consciousness, self-consciousness, and awareness stem not just from the advent of modern psychology but also from what Eugene Taylor calls psychology's "shadow culture" of folk healing and vernacular magical practices in the lineage that both he and Albanese trace. Stein's most significant theoretical contributions to the theatre—her

<sup>7</sup> Is it any wonder that Maeterlinck considered Emerson his "avowed master and greatest influence", publishing an essay on his mysticism and writing the introduction to a French translation of his essays (Moses 1920, p. 11)? When *The Treasure of the Humble,* which contained Maeterlinck's influential essay on static drama, "The Tragical in Daily Life", was published in 1896, he was summarily hailed as the "Belgian Shakespeare" and the "European Emerson" (Frothingham 1912, p. 251). Perhaps Symbolism's mystical language of correspondences and symbolic landscapes is as much Emersonian as Baudelairean, and American religion had a significant influence on the early European avant-garde as well as its native one.

notion of landscape dramaturgy and the continuous present—all reflect her preoccupation with mind and an idiosyncratic interest in nature that has roots in the metaphysical language she inherited.
