Authors: Percival Everett
Glyph (6 page)
Steimmel snatched the pad from my wittle hands and threw it across the room as hard as she could. I watched her and, though, I didn’t show it, I was more than a tiny bit frightened by her hysterics. She went to the mirror and screamed at her reflection. Then she went to the door and screamed for my parents.
Pothen to kakon
bene ha-elohim
mal’ak Yahweh
onomata
angeloi
Nergal
My parents and Steimmel and the people who had been hidden behind the mirror huddled like plotters in a corner across the room, each one in turn raised his or her head to check on my whereabouts. They were all so frightened, though the quality of my mother’s fear was discernibly different. I wanted her to break away from the group, lift me, and take me home.
“It’s not possible,” Steimmel said in a voice not a whisper.
A short, balding man with thick glasses worked away on a calculator, then grabbed his head, shaking it at the same time. “Four seventy-five,” he said.
A husky woman wearing a brown suit said, “I get the same thing.”
“Not possible,” Steimmel said.
Mo and Inflato looked over at me with their mouths agape. “Four seventy-five?” Inflato asked. “Good lord.”
Steimmel took over and said, “If all of you would excuse me, I would like to talk to Ralph alone. Just everybody, just step outside.” She ushered them toward the door and closed them out, then turned to face me, fear showing in her eyes, but her movements suggesting that she had remembered that she was much larger and stronger than me. “Okay, young man, let’s get down to some real business here.” She went to the cabinet and came back with a thick folder. She sat in one of the tiny chairs near me. “I want you to look at some pictures for me. Here, now, tell what you see in this one.”
I wrote:
It reminds me of Motherwell’s
Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 70.
22
I could see that my answer distressed her and so I wrote:
I think I see a bear. Is that a bear dere. Ouch, bear bite me.
Steimmel snatched back the blot. “You’re a smart ass.” Then she sat and just stared at me. “I don’t know what to do,” she said to herself. “I don’t understand any of this.”
Mo burst into the room and marched over to me. “Come on, Ralph, we’re going home.”
I slept little, but when I did, my dreams were vivid and of a kind. I was hardly ever present in them in a capacity other than spectator. They were like the novels my mother fed me constantly. Some were like tone poems, but with images, not lacking narrative impetus, but straining the convention. Indeed, I wondered as I read more and more about dreams, in fiction and in psychoanalytic literature, about the convention of dream narrative, as it seemed that all descriptions of dreams fit a rather narrowly defined picture. Interpretation, of necessity, is of interest to anyone who hears the story of a dream, but my interest became the structure of, not any specific dream, but of the category. “That’s sounds like a dream.” “It was like a dream.” “It must have been a dream.”
So, imagining that I had exposed the tricks of dream convention, I sought, consciously at least, to subvert the whole thing and dream in as straight a narrative fashion as possible. My dreams frequently became movies, without bizarre logical twists, every action and word making sense even upon my waking. My dreams became so transparent that they became devoid of meaning. Jung would have been proud of me. Freud would have gone to sleep during our sessions. My dreams became an exercise in boredom, though I was actually impressed with my imagination and its ability to create so many characters, even if they were stock and repetitive. I thought I knew how it felt to be Louis L’Amour or James Michener or even Dickens.
Ironically, the actuality of my having subverted my dreaming practice made the fact of my dreaming of great interest. I wondered what indeed it meant about me that I was so set against the notion of convention that I should attack it. So, I replaced the
dream
with the
novel
, stripping the stories of my dreams of any real meaning, but causing the form of them to mean everything.
23
1
. The cows, of course, remaining forever in the pasture, their bags fat with the milk Zeno awaits, are no more than the arrows, by extension. And finally, the infinite of the imagination, standing in necessary relation, because of its contrast to the infinite of self-relation, must be part of the signification of that thing from which it is separated by infinity.
2
. For it was certainly not the case that, when they pointed to themselves and made their vain and insipid pleas for utterances of
Ma-ma
and
Da-da
, they were trying to get me to recognize other parents in the world. So, why didn’t they point and say, “Our breakfast table,” or “the table that Uncle Toby gave us?”
3
. Aside from the fact that they would throw me into the air and catch me like a ball, they, for all their stock in the words they babbled, often made meaningless sounds, which were not even good music.
4
. And I do mean speech here and not language. Language was no more the villain than she and no less she than herself, as with me, as with you, but she spoke it with her lips and so, built a fence, a gap, which like the Stygian can be crossed but once.
5
. Or not, as I find no shame in wanting
Inflato
, as I called him, if not completely out of the picture, at least shoved to one side or the other.
6
. To different infinities, if you will allow, one infinity being no different from the next and so the same, but being necessarily different by simple reference.
7
. You, no doubt, recognize the text and of course, as the author would later point out himself, it was complete nonsense. But what nonsense. He loved the words, the pregnancy of them, how they swelled with meaning and at once fell stillborn from the page. I mention this to underscore that the reading was in no way speaking. Reading, amplified, is no crime, though it is unnecessary, not a luxury, just something that is not bad.
8
. Ideas, words, concepts, puppies—all the same things. The world, things, signifiers, signified, pigs, planets, philosophers.
9
. I do not say “made love.” They no more made love than they made sex or made me. If I drop a hammer, it falls to the floor. I may drop it to the floor, but I do not make it drop to the floor.
10
. Because, what is the confusion in boredom? It is simply what it is and can be nothing else, is safe for this fact. This is why people listen to rock ‘n’ roll and rap. It is the same. It is boring. It is finally an affirmation of everything, but an admission of nothing.
11
. I traced his source on this matter. “Poetry, novels, short stories are remarkable antiquities which no longer fool anyone, or hardly anyone. Poems, narratives—what’s the use of them? There is nothing but writing left.” J. Le Clézio, Foreword to
La Fièvre
, Paris, Gallimard, 1965. But I do not know how novels were meant to fool anyone. What are novelists and poets trying to do?
12
. Or perhaps I should use the word
construct
, though it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so to speak.
13
. Nothing could be better or more attractive than a darkness of spirit. For I do not mean
evil.
And I do not mean dim light. It was as if she were born in some far-off land, lost from the world around her, it failing to accept her more than she failing to grasp it. Consequently, she craved some kind of attention, perhaps affection, not on a broad scale, but in a rather specific way that it was all too clear my father neither recognized nor understood. She was trying to save her own soul through her art and, bless her heart, she was trying to take me with her. She cried while she painted, wailed. But she could not, for all of her talent, take care of herself. A sad truth that it was clear to me she appreciated and so, sadly, was her reason for being with my father.
14
. See “New Data on the Problem of Y-Linkage of Hairy Pinnae,” Stern, Centerwall, and Starker,
American Journal of Human Genetics
, 16: 455–71, 1964.
15
. My lack of familiarity at the time with Balzac’s novella perhaps hindered my ability to be fair in reading
S/Z
, but just because one doesn’t see the shit in the toilet doesn’t mean one does not smell it. I perceived a claim in the text to point out the remarkable fertility of language, but, in the text, the very practice of language seemed to work like radiation on testes. The threat of epiphany was large and used to hold me hostage, the man telling me that if I stopped reading it was because I was inflexible and a slave to common thinking and forcing me to feel like a simple-minded disciple with each word deeper into the text, until the end when I threw the book out of my crib, and laid a load in my big-boy underwear.
16
. The idea snapped me awake and I was shocked to find myself not only understanding a word or two but in agreement. It however served only to give me a trail of thought to pursue. My mind turned to the ancient Mesopotamians and how, for them, the cosmos was always shattering without warning, only to be rebuilt and suffer another cataclysm. I wondered if dying was like the cosmos shattering or coming finally together.
17
. Please forgive the mention of the two in the same breath, but understand that even then I understood their missions to be different (though not so different as one might imagine) and both to be equally successful. Of course, I lacked the wit and cynicism (the two being functions of experience) of Twain and the charming naiveté of Grey (for this lack I cannot account).
18
. A term and use I discovered reading Ishmael Reed.
19
. I, of course, have left to tacit implication the required assumption that existence is better than nonexistence; an unintelligible claim, but I’m willing to allow it in spite of my failure to understand it. In fact, I have no opinion concerning the existence of god. I am not an atheist, since I do not express a belief that there is no god. I am not a theist, as I do not hold the belief there is one. I am not an agnostic because I do not profess ignorance and so an inability to answer the question. I simply do not care, and so I might incorrectly (however justifiably) be identified as a twentieth-century fundamentalist Protestant or a nineteenth-century Mountain Meadows Massacre Mormon or a Catholic from any century.
20
. If for no other reason than my having claimed it.
21
. This is was a lucky stroke, as I had just read about the theorems of Pappus. I would have been unable to provide a proof for the first theorem and I would not have recognized the second.
22
. I, in fact, was slightly pained that I could not come up with a painting, the title of which might have had significant import for the situation. The fact of the matter was that the blot looked just like that painting, moving me as much, meaning as little. Not a knock on Motherwell at all, however. I love his
Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive
, the colors, the shapes, the composition, the vacuity.
23
. And so, I assume, nothing, as no thing can actually mean everything.
BARTHES
B
What troubled my parents and Dr. Steimmel wasn’t so much that I understood language, but that I basically understood it as they did. It was clear, at least to me, that they suffered from a kind of jealousy, the nature of which remains unclear, but it concerned my having skipped what Steimmel would have wanted to call a symbolic or imaginary stage in my development, a prelinguistic rite of passage, a necessary inconvenience during which they expected to have enormous influence. But my thinking was
organized;
the time during which I was to roughly come to understand the delimiting of my body I used to form a personality, changing, as we always are changing, but knowing more than the parts of my body and their relations. Indeed, the claim might be made that because I lacked the prelinguistic clutter, the subtextual litter, I actually understood language better than any adult. Talk of time never threw me for a loop. Pronouns never confused me. I used
me
when I was supposed to and never once wondered when my mother used
I
whether she was speaking of me.
You, me, they, them, it, she, he
all did their work without baffling me for a second. What is more, the gap between the
subject of enunciation
and the
subject of enunciating
1
not only failed to appear to me as a place of entry, but also failed to register as something I might elide. For me, there was no gap, as there is no gap for anyone.