Reading “Logic” in Percival Everett’s book re: f (gesture), I did more than what was asked of me – meaning, I was trying to critically analyze what each poem meant when Everett was simply asking the reader to use basic logic to understand his writing. After our group discussion, I read through “Logic” a couple more times to see if anything would jump out at me. I wanted to see if a certain word or the structure of a certain poem alluded to something else. There are only six poems in this section of the book and interestingly enough, they seemed to be more complex for me to figure out than other parts of this novel. Given that I didn’t have that much to work with, I came up some theories as to what this all means.
Before I explain my thought process of the meanings behind each poem, it was brought to my attention that the poems might not be separated entities. As a matter of fact, each piece could simply be a stanza that alludes to one single poem. It took me a while to register the possibility of the writings being connected somehow, but I never considered them to be a part of the same storyline. Subconsciously, I probably thought to myself that it would’ve been too easy for Everett to just make each page be connected. Personally, I thought that he was trying to allude each poem to logic, but on their own separate terms. In reality, I just decided what he was trying to do to make the reading easier for myself and decided to keep my explanation of the poems separate.
When I read the first poem, I thought that Everett was trying to allude to the idea of life and people’s existence through their conscious. What made me come up with this conclusion were the lines “ask about relations, about the thing named” and “a queer conception, sublime logic” (Everett, 65). To me, reading that made it seem like Everett was hinting at how someone’s subconscious is sublime in the sense that it’s somewhat of a divine power that dictates how we communicate and exist in society. In other words, Everett is in awe of how we communicate as human beings, especially at a conscious level.
The fact that the second and third poems were located back to back from each other in the book made me think that Everett intentionally positioned them this way to tell the reader that there’s a connection to be made. Personally, I came up with the interdisciplinary idea of the line “let us assume X… some language X” was a way to hint back to the title of the book, which is a basic math function all of within itself (Everett, 66). Then, looking at the third poem about memory, I thought that Everett was playing a fun literary joke to get the reader to remember the purpose of the poems and the type of book they’re reading. This then leads to another connection I made earlier of Everett making the reader subconsciously aware of what’s being presented.
I will have to say that my ideas for the fourth and fifth poems fell short of the ‘conscious theories’ I am trying to present, but I still managed to make a ‘both/and connection’ nonetheless. The fourth poem simply discusses an object in a certain place at a given time. More specifically, “the thing [that] must be!” is “preserved in Paris maybe” is Everett’s way of saying that there’s a museum in Paris, dedicated to exactly what he’s talking about (68). Moving onto the fifth poem in “Logic,” Everett writes about abandonment and how “rags and dust” accumulate in a cellar overtime (69). A light bulb went off after I read about the hidden museum in Paris because that’s exactly what Everett was describing in this poem. He was simply making a conscious connection to the location of the poem he has written, and I applaud him for that.
Finally, the last poem about “seven men lost, but not seven” really confused me, until we discussed it in groups (Everett, 70). At first, I found it to be gruesome of Everett to write about the ways people die and not give any other context into who they are as people. Then, Molly brought up the interesting point of how the news typically gives a death toll of the number of people injured or killed in a catastrophic situation. This helped me make sense of the final poem. Everett wasn’t trying to kill off random people, so to speak, but he could’ve possibly been alluding at how the media presents a quantitative fact and that’s the only take away society generally remembers from a tragic situation.
P.S. Another thing I wanted to point out about the theories I came up with are simply that, theories!! Who’s to say if I’m right about Everett’s writings? I’m just trying to make sense of it all, just like many of the readers who encounter this similar academic dilemma.