Thanks. What do I owe you?
I’ll tell you at the truck.
I can’t believe somebody shot him, I said.
Hey, would you like to have dinner sometime? she asked.
I laughed. Yes, I think so.
Natural Kinds
You look at me. Why the ranch life?
Why the ranch world, Dad?
And to me he says, Why not?
The ranches are not mine, he says, the ranches are not mine.
But they would be, I tell him. In a different world and time. Imagine the horses. Imagine the landscape. Imagine Murphy. Be Murphy. For one extended breath, be Murphy. Or let me.
Why the ranch world, Dad? For now, you say, for now.
But first:
There are no realities that are more real than others, only more privileged. Often the presence of my own body comes back to me like a sort of electric thrill. I would say that my spine is tingled, though that is a feeling I have always sought after, never achieved, but sought after. Who knows, perhaps I have felt the tingling spine and was just too distracted, oddly self-absorbed (how self-absorbed must one be to forget one’s self?), or simply too stupid to recognize it. I had a friend once who so immersed himself in the study of quantum field and string theories that he might as well have hanged himself. He would talk endlessly about particles absorbing this or that and things spinning this way or that way, of polarizations and 31 symmetries, of photons and fermions and space-time and curvatures, that he failed to realize that his wife was fucking everybody in town and taking what money he had. I think her final words to 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 argument, if I had a side in the argument, if it was an argument. But it was all, if nothing else, immaterial.
Then there was yet another fellow that I knew. He had this theory that there was no such thing as race, refused to acknowledge the subject even. Some low-level academic took him to task about his so-called theory. Like most theories, about most anything, it was all beyond me, leaving me feeling like I was looking at a clock with three hands. The whole idea of coming up with a theory about something that didn’t exist was, however, of great interest to me. But this guy I mentioned, the hack academic, his name was Housetown Pastrychef or Dallas Roaster, something like that, wrote that my friend was essentially full of excrement and that, furthermore, race was not only a valid category but a necessary one. This may or may not have been true. Like I said, I didn’t understand any of the discussion, but my friend dismissed the academic, his name might have been Austin Cooker, by saying that of course he believed such a thing, since he made his living and career out of being the ethnic, you know, cooning it up. They nearly came to blows when they encountered each other in a bar in DC. My friend said, This nigger believes in race as a valid category. The insult made little, if any, sense, but language’s function is not to inform but to provoke.
You had quite a few friends.
I did. More or less. In fact, I knew yet another man, still. Well, he was more of an acquaintance than a friend. I encountered him on my walk to campus. He was a nice-enough-looking fellow but had large blue cubes where his arms should have been. I stopped and stared, as you can well imagine. I looked at him and nodded to his blue cubes. He said, Oh, these. Yes, I said. You see, I found this old pewter lamp. When I rubbed it a genie appeared. He was large, muscular, much taller than us. He told me I could have three wishes. Well, I wished first for a beautiful and comfortable home. You can see it behind me here. He gestured with a cube. And indeed behind him, on a short hill, was a beautiful Victorian house, large and clean, colorfully painted. I told him it was a nice house. He nodded. It is, he said. And then I wished for a beautiful wife. There she is on the porch back there. He gestured again with a blue cube. The woman on the porch was in fact quite striking, gorgeous, long dark hair, dark eyes that I could appreciate at even such a distance. And then, I asked. And then, he said, something went horribly wrong when I wished for blue cubes as arms.