Percival Everett by Virgil Russell Read Online Free PDF Page B

him were, Polarize this well-defined spin, you stupid fuck. Anyway, as much as I felt bad for him, I could muster little sympathy, a bit of pity, but little sympathy. What did you expect to learn from your gauge bosons and circular polarizations and your vector particles? I asked him. If you had paid a bit more attention to her dilation and your angular momentum and your transverse polarization, she might still be lying under your worldsheet. Then I added, because it’s too late for renormalization now, You stupid fuck, for punctuation and my enjoyment. So it goes with those of us who think there is something to know of the so-called real world. Not to be anti-intellectual, but my knowing that a photon might look like a long strand that stretches with time direction with an angle toward some other direction will not help me avoid the oncoming bus, especially if that bus happens to have agency, like my friend’s wife, who by the way I was told was terrific in bed.
    I had another friend who was so certain that the only way he could identify himself was through language and further by losing himself as object within language that he lost his mind, possibly within language as well, but I never knew what the hell he was talking about. I asked him once why he needed to identify himself. I also asked him, quite sincerely, well, as sincerely as possible, what he meant by identify anyway. Our conversation made for bad music. It sounded like this:
    ME : What does it mean for you to identify yourself ?
    DAVE ( staring earnestly at my eyes. ): It means to establish myself as separate from others.
    ME : Really. ( Mild, benign, rectorial, I rise up from my coffin. ) Wiping your own ass doesn’t accomplish that for you?
    DAVE ( quickly ): What do you mean?
    ME ( gazing on him, impassive. ): You tell me. What do you mean by identify ? (I pull myself out completely and take the minutes he is lost in thought to make myself a soft-shelled crab sandwich.)
    DAVE : What is manifested in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming. (He cries.)
    ME : So, you don’t wipe your own ass? What’s wrong with you? You know, language is very simple. I say something and you either understand it or you don’t. If you don’t, you stare blankly at me and say, What? ( I decide that I have lost my appetite and push my sandwich away. )
    DAVE ( almost angrily ): The function of language is not to inform but to evoke.
    ME : Well, it’s working. You talk about language like it’s actually something. ( I realize that I don’t know what I mean by something.)
    DAVE : Language is not immaterial. (Nods, smiling and laughing.) It is a subtle body, but it is body. Words are bound up in body images that hold the subject. They may impregnate the hysteric, be identified with the penis envier, represent the urinary flow of urethral ambition, or represent the feces retained in greedy jouissance.
    ME : Your mother doesn’t like you, does she?
    DAVE : You can’t turn a response into a reaction. It’s all about desire, isn’t it? (Still smiling.) If I press a button and the light goes on, there is a response only to my desire. If to turn on the light I must go through a whole system of turns and circuits that I don’t know, then there is a question only in relation to my expectation. And that question will be gone once I know how to make the thing work. (Hands up as if to say, Voilà.)
    ME : You’re just a big bag of words. Immaterial words.
    DAVE ( smugly ): I’ve upset you, it seems.
    ME ( quite sincerely ): Do you know where your wife is?
    What I didn’t tell him was that my wife was crashing in an airplane somewhere in western Canada with a pilot whose penis she would later fondle. I chose not to mention it, not only because it was embarrassing, but because it didn’t serve my side of the