In our last class, my group tackled “Logic” by Percival Everett. As we struggled to comprehend what could tie all of these stanza together, one seemingly all-encompassing idea appeared to us. We found the idea of the interplay of parts and wholes, and were able to take that in so many different directions. Now, I’ve been desperately trying to find a way to talk about music once again. Luckily, today’s class and the subsequent ideas proposed by the group have given me the perfect foundation to launch into a discussion of parts within music.
After a fairly long discussion, our group discovered one common thread between the stanzas within Everett’s poem “Logic”. It seems that Everett is constantly dealing with the idea of pieces coming together to create something whole, but then also breaking the wholes he creates back down again. It got to the point where Molly created a chart so we could actually visualize the idea we came up with, because honestly, it was somewhat confusing. However, the more we considered it, the more sense it made. For instance, Everett writes “[r]ecall the picture of that thing. Tell me which way it points. Tell me its color. And whether it can be broken into pieces. A queer conception, sublime logic” (65). This takes the “thing”, a whole, and asks the reader if it can be broken down into pieces. Additionally, a later stanza reads “[d]oes my memory of you consist in parts? Simple, component parts…Are you a composite, or are you a whole…in spite of your long fingers, your olive skin…”(67). Whoever this line refers to, Everett contemplates whether they are seen as one whole of a human being in his memory, or pieces that add up to their overall person. To top it off, the title of the poem emphases this point as well. The study of logic is all about breaking things down to the minimum terms of expression. To focus on formal logic (as opposed to informal), deductive reasoning is one example of such a breakdown. One is meant to condense entire arguments into simple symbols of x and y, subjects and predicates, conjuncts and disjuncts. Those same symbols are then used to add up and represent the whole cumulative argument; a paragraph can become merely 3 lines, and vice versa. There’s a wide variety of evidence in “Logic” to show this importance of parts and wholes.
Many questions asked in our group discussion lead me to look for a bit more information on Percival Everett’s life, and although I could not find much, I discovered he played jazz. Immediately I found the connection I was looking for. Essentially, jazz employs this same idea of parts and wholes. There is often a predetermined structure or chord that the ensemble plays to, to create a unity within the sound. However, as the song continues, often each player will break off into a solo, but eventually rejoin the collective. For instance, the technique of “trading fours”. Each musician in the group has a solo for a predetermined length, before eventually returning to the collective. In this example, the pieces would be the individual artists and musicians, while the whole would be the entire ensemble’s sound. I’m quite glad to have (accidentally) discovered this way to connect music to Everett’s poetry: with a something from his own life, even.
Our group explored many different routes within the “Logic” poem, but it’s interesting where ideas can lead you. Once we established the base idea of parts and wholes, we were each able to go in so many different directions. For example, Connor brought up the concept of monads, which most of us had never heard of. I personally enjoy discussing the connections of music to literature, and I never imagined that it would present itself through a brief look into Everett’s life. But there it was; within a brief poem lay such an expansive idea that allowed our group the freedom to go any which way with it.