After reading re: f (gesture) by Percival Everett, we began to break down the ideas and meaning behind Everett’s work. The three sections within this poem are titled, “Zulus, Body, and Logic”. The section that caught my attention, was the section titled, “Logic”. As a group we went through each aspect of this section and interpreted it with our own thoughts. An idea that caught my attention appeared more than once within the section “Logic”.
A member in my group sparked this idea that was formed from a couple of lines, “Are you a composite? Or are you whole, your name, all of you at once, a simple element?”. (page 67). As a group we began to break this down and form ideas. When you hear someone’s name do you see them all at once just as an image, are you picturing only specific thing about them like appearance, voice, or personality, or are you applying all of those at once. Everette asks whether you are composite, meaning made of various parts, or are you as a whole, your imagine not your traits. It is creating a picture in your head of what you see and how you see it. After creating this idea, I began to flip through the other poems. On page 69, the poem titled 5, “from rags and dust a rat is formed in the cellar. It was not there before. Only rags and dust”. You may interpret this section in various ways, but try thinking about this. Everette is saying he is only giving you the two words rags and dust and from that you are creating a picture in your mind based of what you think of when you hear those two words. When you hear rags and dust does your mind places a rat and or a cellar in the picture too, even though the only two words you were given were rags and dust. No where did that phrase include rat or cellar yet you are picturing both.
One definition of logic is, a way of viewing something as accurate. Everette is trying to show that your mind creates imagines from the words you hear that may or may not be correct. Everyone’s logic is different depending on how you interpret it or visualize it.
As a whole, everyone’s mind forms a picture when hearing specific words or phrases, when they may or may not be there. When hearing someone’s name you bring about this idea of them whether they are there or not, or when hearing phrases like rags and dust your mind picturing a basement with a rat even if that is not shown or given to you. We see this situation in various parts of our everyday life.