the inmate’s journal : the assembly xiii

after i had been worshipping at the assembly for 18 praise-ridden months, one salty sunday when the gods and the demons were trying on each other’s clothes and not finding them unfashionable, sister gooch approached me during the after-service while the people gulped jesus’ ambrosia.  come with me, brother judas, it is time.

 

it was the sort of request one obeyed without much mental fuss.  we took a streetcar to a neighborhood of crackheads, rat-houses, and no-news murders.  the lord is here, brother judas, the lord is here, and i was led down some unruly stairs off an alley that smelled of urine and vomit.  the bar we entered contained a few broken men; the least broken was behind the bar.

 

sister, it’s been a time.

 

a time it’s been, brother fick.

 

the usual?

 

lord bless you, brother fick.

 

two pitchers of beer, a bowl of pretzels, and some used cigars were brought to the table.  the men mumbled their private languages, and sister gooch got down to business.

 

we spoke of your soul some months ago.  by the desolation of the water.  you were found wanting.

 

yes.

 

the senior elders and i wish to inquire as to what you might have done about this state of sin.

 

i thought of my good deeds.  my impeccable church attendance, the patience and restrain i had exhibited in putting up with the freemans all these months, the fact that i had not groped the organist, my brief and unsuccessful yet nevertheless well-intentioned foray into glossolalia, my participation in the jericho marches.  i had raised my hands at least 14 times, not something i was inclined to do given my suburban heritage.  i had begun conversations with many whom i would never have normally spoken to outside the assembly.  i had once been sure of my salvation.  i had tried to think of jesus while masturbating.  i sang.  less than perhaps i should have.

 

brother judas.  the devil and jesus are in a battle and have been since the creation of the world.  each one of us, in knowledge or not, participates in this battle and so either delays or advances the descent of heaven upon earth.  it remains unclear whether you are among those who delay or those who advance.

 

i sort of think i might be one of those guys who does both.

 

both, brother judas?  one does not do both.  one does one or the other and if one does both one does the one.

 

you mean …

 

yes, brother judas, that is what i mean.

 

we sat a while in the destitution of this thought.

 

you see.  i have known i have belonged to the lord and none but the lord from before my very conception, from before the prostitution of the whore of babylon on the thrones of dominion and power, from before satan in the fullness of his evil took the form of a snake and brought the woman and so all women low, from before the breath of jesus touched the darkness and the first stars sang i have been the lord’s and so i shall always be the lord’s.  this is the lord’s will and i have sought nothing but to be the house of his will.

 

i think i might be not as much part of the lord’s will.

 

then you need to change the habitation and habits of your soul.  for some, brother judas, they are born into the lord.  for others, they are born outside the lord or not wholly in him and they must find their way.  you are one who must find their way.  it is an oppression not to be taken lightly that those who must find their way delay this finding at the very cost of never finding. 

 

what about my vigor?

 

your vigor, brother judas?

 

when we were by the desolation of the waters, sister gooch, you said i had a lot of vigor.

 

so i did indeed.  and what else did i say?  i also said that your vigor was buried beneath the excrement of gross and squawking fowl.  and that you are the fowl and producer of excrement and the excrement itself and that you had better get down to the lord’s business and start cleaning.

 

the pretzels were done and we smoked and ordered more beer and drank and listened to the men snore or curse, each according to his kind.  no one entered or left and the place was like some eternally sealed and neglected purgatory in which the inhabitants had forgotten the world they came from and the world they once aspired to.  when the beer was done, sister gooch displayed her significant paws and showed me why she was the chief of cats and i a pup in a lilliputian pound.  she extended her claws and ran hard lines across my jeans, increasing the pressure until there were rips, more rips, then blood.  there wasn’t much i could do; sister gooch was, after all, a candidate for messiah … and what was i a candidate for?  i saw her unmitigated intent.  heard her purring, smelled jesus on her breath.  i compared her to the organist and wondered whom i loved more:  if god had only placed sister gooch’s soul in the organist’s body … but … the nicotine, the alcohol, the pretzels, the rough impossibility of this place; the principalities of her claws, the supremacy of blood.

 

brother judas, this is the hour.

 

and she led me to a nearby room which was overcome by garbage and a feral television.  cats roamed, ascendant and eternal.  the couch would do for jesus.  jesus is a democrat of furniture and things.  i was laid down, bled and didn’t count the hours.  my soul, whatever it was, made itself nothing and took the very nature of a slave and all i heard and saw and felt was the pummelling of god.

 

the next morning i woke alone in sister gooch’s bed, blood and rest and strange salvation.  some baptism non-existent in the middle classes.  i stumbled back to my roots and never returned to the assembly and no one contacted me.  i sat behind the organist in geography class and we never spoke.

next:  spring fragrance

the inmate’s journal : the assembly xii

 

the service is not over.  the service curls around itself until time loses count and the women’s buttocks bulge with forgiveness.  all that has happened is the longest choral foreplay since the world was sung into existence.  all that has happened is that rev. weal has preached everyone into a white trance.  as he winds down, as this channel of the higher powers gets clogged with mortal limitations, his tongue dries, his french fry legs give way, the people rise to the occasion and assume the responsibility of the show’s climax.  group jesus takes over.  someone - maybe it’s sister hoom with her knees and elbows, maybe brother blitt with his throat - moves, subtly, gently, as if challenging a lesser by-law of the lower heavens, from seat to aisle, one, perhaps boldly two, hands raised, hips in rhythmic dialogue with the organ, an expectant jesus jesus roused from the collective lips in harmonic grace.  it has begun, the final bliss and march to glory.

 

an hour or two, it doesn’t matter; the people need the floor. 

 

sister hoom steps out.  lifts a leg, her skirt sliding to reveal a pallid bony knee.  hallelujah, someone shouts, but not too loudly.  the lord has arrived in his collectivity.  brothers blitt and szerpo close behind.  dimpled arms reaching toward the father of all things that die; dimples dimpling, the worries of used metal dim and fading fast.

 

what’s the magnet that draws the people from their comfortable padded seats into the surging sweaty mob growing in the aisle?  sure, it’s the herd instinct - would you be the lone bovine in the thistle field while the other happy cows frolic away to munch on daisies?  yes, it’s the depravity of sweat - of juicy limbs oozing, squishing, singing - armpits in their manifold concavity and moisture, the rubbing joy of a wet hip through a damp translucent skirt, the face of a man so given to god he’s oblivious to the dripping eyebrows, the riparian competitions on his cheeks, lips a breath away, lost and fervid and ribald as a bonobo.  it’s the altar too, the name given to the stage which holds the pulpit and rev. weal, presently recovering his tumescence, a stage significant in area but not in elevation, rising only six or seven inches above the floor of the common penitents, and the large open surface before and to the sides of the stage, which draws the people now with its promise of freedom and the ancient power of its name.

 

oh, it’s the herd and the sweat and the altar, yes, it’s the mass and the negation, the fast forgetting of the self, the privilege of being present at the mating of nature and spirit, even being a necessary conduit, the genes and tongues of that mating; all of us, here, many but one, loosened like long hair, taut as lust.  but it's also the orgy, this fathomless orgy of god.  the people together in their blood, their pulsed confusion, the thickness of their flesh; they are a single phallus and jesus a quivering cunt, the sky split and raining joy.  this is spiritual copulation at its finest - if you haven’t done it, you haven’t lived.

 

penetration, though, has not yet been attempted.  all at the beginning is slurps and licking, hints to heaven that today is the lord’s day and on the lord’s day the people go all the way.  jesus, like a renewable virgin, needs time to spread himself; the divine precipitation requires considerable effort … but god … it’s worth it.  you, my mortgage-laden reader … you know it’s worth it:  the sweat, all those words and lunches, that strange negating.

 

and so the people form lines of deluge, and march around the sanctuary’s perimeter, like joshua’s motley gang around the mighty jericho.  what walls tumble now though, in this virtual century?  the walls of the soul, my friend, the walls of the soul.  as they march, seven times circling, always seven times, brick by brick their souls collapse; their bodies follow, laying exposed and rapt and vulnerable and desolate and beautiful.  here, god lies in his thoughts of incarnation.  here god lies in terrible unity.

 

as the post-sermon marching and singing morph into the after-service, the tempo picks up, decibels leap.  rev. weal is revived from his word ennui and calls out for the gross and the sinful to give their hearts to jesus and be saved.  and who is not gross and sinful?  who does not have a heart that might be given to the grand poobah of love?  to jesus, jesus, fallen children, to ride the crescendos piling in the silos of heaven.  a feast for you, special you, in god’s fat granaries.

 

the noise and laughter give the spirit freedom to roam more boldly, seeking faithful and faithless alike to slay, like some mephistophelean samurai.   people shout and jump on chairs.  they bound onto others’ backs and race in circles of abandon.  flesh follows spirit’s lead.  shoulder straps slip and aren’t replaced.  zippers mysteriously relax.  a heap of socks and shoes and bras grows at the altar’s right, offerings of emptiness.  washroom visits become plentiful and even sister gooch forgets to count.  a nipple here, a buttock there, all is god’s.

 

and half a foot above the others, rev. weal rides jesus like some cosmic cowboy who hasn’t heard the news that the world’s been paved over and the horses slaughtered.  and as the end draws nigh, my organist’s dress clinging to her with sweat’s embrace, i would trade my soul to be that clinging cloth.  a blur of spiritual abduction, whirling, perfect, purple, wholly aloof and pure … my sweet and holy musician has 98 fingers, 19 feet, 42 eyes, and 10,000 cunts.  the organ is the galaxy and she uses every digit and hole to play the stars.  oh, she is music, my carnal portal, i the contaminated air.

 

at the end, when climax hops over climax in some transcendent game of leapfrog, her dress cast aside and she stands naked, dripping with god on the bench of righteousness, her 105 toes dancing out the scales of heaven on the organ of truth, her head tilted back out-laughing hell, eyes leaping like lunatic jack-in-the-boxes, breasts clapping heaven’s exultant rhythms, buttocks round and brazen trumpeting the code of god.  the people move, panting, coils of some simian consciousness, clefs of joy and forgetting, effigies of wanton pain.  the cars parked outside jake’s weep and cleanse the streets of chocolate bar wrappers and condoms, the parking meters dance and shout praise.  god’s thick girls braiding their lechery, forlorn boys of eternal nothingness hoping to climb those braids of truth in the name of whatever name is required.  the assembly is one and perfection and i am a goose being fattened for love.

 

let the skyscrapers rejoice, all things are holy.

let the sewers leap, the world is the lord’s.

the bars and beer belong to the heavens,

let every creature dance and praise the unknown name.

 

as the spent bacchants and their men leave in post-coital exhaustion, a few spirit-stricken devotees remain, comatose on the mid-afternoon floor.  they wait like zombies on mushrooms for the evening service, hard on time’s horizon, to prick their souls, resurrect their flesh, and remind them why this sojourn in this cruel and foreign world.

the inmate’s journal : the assembly xi

certain wise ones have informed the rest of us swarming fools that it is the least spiritual act to conflate the finite and infinite.  i don’t believe them.  it's the most.  to confuse eternity and time, god and humanity, the totality of evil and your parents … these are spiritual disciplines that require rare and significant souls.  every act, every thought, every rebellion that has helped our species scratch its way beyond mosquito-throned nature has been born from the hubris of this conflation.  i offer a liturgy of damnation for those who wish to exorcise themselves of this turd of the so-called wise—

 

clarity be damned.

humility be damned.

god the wholly other be damned.

i am god and, if i am not, the illusion that i might be or become him is the fuel and song of my existence.

god is my means and end, envy and fire, my dream and gurgle.

i am impossibility or i am nothing.

amen.

 

in my youth, though, i was too insecure to admit such vanity for myself, but not so inclined to the teachings of the holy that i refrained from projecting it onto others.  being given to the wisdom of confusion, the seduction of hope, the gargantuan belief in a humanity larger than itself, i looked for the one—the one who would lead our fallen race from its gross partiality to the fullness of our clambering.  a mutant, naturally, they would have to be.  as long as nature kept producing the same old middling crop that longed for nothing other than a mortgage, some sound investments, a spouse or two, a lover or three, tv at 1900, tepid beer, and a regular dose of schadenfreude, i didn’t think we stood much of a chance.  but nature was renowned for its mutations.  those mutations we might call god.

 

when the mutations affect humanity in such a way as to produce an individual specimen so sarcous and visionary, so horny and holy, equally rank with transcendent flesh and immanent spirit, a messiah is born.  they may be born into starvation and not get past their third month.  they may get trampled by the club feet of their family and shrivel into powdered oregano.  they may even get seduced by love and throw a shroud over their genius in the name of virtue and comfort.  but there is a chance—uncertain, infinitesimal, soft, patient—that the holy germ will survive the onslaught of flesh, society, and love, and grow to speak or sing a line or two from another world.  a seed then leaks onto earth’s thorny soil and may grow a plant that’s indestructible.  these plants collectively form a garden of the spirit that's beyond the touch of tyrants, beyond death, beyond the stock market’s forgettable buzz.  this garden is what i live for - everything else is the measure of the clock.

 

i couldn’t figure out, though, whether the chosen one of the third millennium, the one who knew the codes of grace and would lead us through and higher, this new messiah, was rev. weal or sister gooch.  each had their merits and failings.  each a legitimate and formidable candidate.

 

rev. weal had his pulpit, that cloudy stage of words.  he had his distance and his tongue.  sister gooch had her backseat chair, that black perch of observation.  she had her proximity and eyes.  it was a classic choice, offered others in past life and literature:  the transcendent male official sultan or the immanent female unofficial sultana.  the voice from the front or the voice from the back.  apollo or athena.  the one chosen by the tennessee school of god to speak the code in multitude, or the one chosen by jack daniels to speak in private.  the one who groped in words, the one who groped the other way.

 

i lay, hope’s candidate, in night’s vicissitude, stoking my adolescent prick with visions of piping the organist’s treble clef, stoking my adolescent mind with visions of the new one who would save me from myself.

 

jesus has come and gone and stabbed his gospel of forgiveness into the human text and what has changed?  we give and forgive with the same stinginess as when we were apes.  socrates has come and gone and left in our soul’s incinerator the burnt message that the wisest one is one who doesn’t know, yet we proclaim in juvenescent rebellion that this is the age of knowledge and we the age’s priests.  the sermon on the mount is the grandest comedy, the symposium a profound fart of a mind od’d on the garlic of itself.  what have these messiahs been but passing gas on which we’ve built fortresses and guns?  whose words we’ve used to justify our corruption and incompetence?  they’ve been pills and bandaids, progenitors of disappointment, avatars of air.  what i long for is not some bird from heaven who comes and dies on the cross of resentment or the poison of truth and whose words stain the earth with the blood of a strange and irrelevant text.  what i long for is a messiah who inducts our unholy race into a state of perpetual anointing, where all is air and oil and fire and we walk - no, fly! - the thin line of grace, noble emanations of some sacrament creamed with god, always smoking with the fat fat of joy.

 

yeah, the wise among you will tell me that such induction is not only impossible but even if it were achievable and achieved life would no longer be life and a hideous stasis would reign.  what i long for, you sages say in your scratchy profundity, is death.  a non-existence that objects to imperfect, mortal, limited, embodied, real human life.

 

shut up wise ones.  close this book:  burn it and yourselves along with it.  to be human is to not accept the conditions given us until the fatal hour.  it is to be a dream trapped in flesh’s carburetor.  if william taught us anything, it’s that to be a human is to be a fool.  and the most inept fools are those who think they’re wise.  if i am inescapably and eternally a fool, i would learn to be a good one.  thus i shall dream.  thus i shall walk the impossible path until death yawns its maw, snaps, swallows, and teaches me the lesson i will not learn in life.

the inmate’s journal : the assembly x

 

rev. weal milked the poor with aplomb.  a possessed and mellifluous voice is a huge asset if your vocation is exploitation.  it opens doors and legs, slays the goliaths of the academy and press in their clunking monotones.  businesspeople everywhere become copper wraiths, brought low by god's unmitigated substance.  god is the great cloak that covers the body of darkness.  wear him, and be glad.

 

the assembly’s adherents were drawn from the sectors of society you avoid.  tinkerers and travelling knife sharpeners, part-time condom factory janitors, charlatans of lamb, failed rollercoaster mechanics, roasted chestnut salesmen, basement hairstylists and illegal seamstresses, purveyors of used metal, underground traders in exotic amphibians, maladroits of every description, those innumerably expelled, warty inebriated sluts, men of single syllables and grease, middle-aged hamburger flippers, merchants of herbs who can’t spell broccoli, worm gatherers, substitute fish gutters, laborers in the artificial id industry.  the ones upon whom you build your privileges.

 

decline your next dinner party invitation and instead invite these outcasts to your home for lipton’s tea and beer and singing.

 

a night to remember.  love to write about.

 

being from the middle classes and schooled roughly in the classics, i often didn’t have a lot to say.

 

praise jesus.

 

praise.

 

not a bad day.

 

praise jesus.

 

but it was something, and when you’re young it doesn’t take much to feel connected.

 

i ate their otherness like those given to exotic dishes feed on pigs’ feet and bull balls.  couldn’t make them in my kitchen … but, damn, what a restaurant.  call me a vendor of mystery or call me a vulture of crass.  i don’t care.  it’s what i do.  i’m a journalist of institutions and this is my tale.

 

society erects its glassy hierarchies of dignity on the basement of brute power and the rape of mines.  respectability’s a charm that’s purchased in the market of praise for a pound of soul.  don’t misunderstand me.  i don’t wish to denigrate the presidents and ennoble the outcasts.  i wish simply to denigrate us all.  the outcasts are slimy roaches who’d pinch your mother for a fuck.  the presidents are garbage rats, who’d pinch your family for a mansion in grand cayman.

 

jesus was the ingredient that allowed my singing siblings to steal power from those who stole theirs.  dignity was a trade, and you used whatever names you could to survive.  you could do worse than jesus.  you could do peter drucker.  you could do taylor swift.  you could do daffy duck.  jesus at least was unreal and freakish.  bottomless as the pacific and just as cool.

 

they could have fought directly, of course.  gone in combat face-to-face with the directors of wall street.  but they were too smart for this.  the only way to fight the powerful is to negate their power with an equal or superior foundation.  jesus is the only worthy match for mammon in the world’s vicious ring.  they’ve been boxing for two millennia now; maybe mammon’s winning, but the assembly shows it’s not yet a knockout.

 

and if you say the doctrine of prosperity, rev. weal’s $800 shoes, crack the foundations of jesus, you’re right.  every foundation has its cracks.  it needs them, because every structure needs to fall.  so mammon has cracks in its foundations; you see it in the ennui in the skyscraper elevator eyes, the desperation when the phones are silent.  ah, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.  i was there too, at the center of mammon … the bank … it’s just around the corner.

 

i know what you’re thinking about all this assembly business.  a cult … all the trappings of a cult.  charismatic and unquestioned leader, the absence of respectable citizens such as yourself, a clear distinction between members and non-members, psychological and financial exploitation, a culture that’s manipulative, communal, totalistic, and authoritarian.  behavioral, informational, intellectual, and emotional control.  the scholars have defined cult - established its boxed parameters - in their authoritative and critical taxonomies.  what else do you need?

 

oh.  i need life.

 

you haven’t been listening, my enculturated siblings.  the point of my journal, its sting and laughter, is that life’s a cult and all its subdivisions esoteric branches.  one person’s cult is another’s family.  my group’s orthodox, yours insane.  you claim the assembly of the true disciples of christ is a cult and your bank is not.  wait, friends.  i told you - the bank’s the next chapter.  you claim it’s a cult and your family’s not.  your family is my next book.  call rev. weal an uneducated buffoon.  call sister gooch a manipulative dominatrix.  and go to sleep on the pillow of your definitions.  dream thick stories of your virtue.  i have lived too many truths.  i have seen the world’s definitions dance and blur and collapse in the stupor of their variegated and doomed romance.  i have loved the ascetic, the slut, the faithful, the ceo and the bum.  falstaff, lear, cleopatra, cordelia, caliban, prospero, desdemona - each is wholly right and wholly flawed.  i have loved the beauty of weal’s wily words, of sister gooch’s omnipotent fat.  i have known that each contains the truth and each truth is solitary and irreconcilable.  that the only truth is all these truths thrown into a cauldron so large the world would be but a tiny pea bobbing somewhere in its immensity, your beliefs and life a mite among a billion billion mites living in that pea.  this the loneliness below our avalanche of words.  this the darkness at the heart of our structures.  this the truth below your life of lies.  but this my creed, this my tears.

the inmate’s journal : the assembly ix

weal received his ordination papers from the tennessee school of god, a respected mail-order firm specializing in diverse theological degrees, home abortion kits, firearms, evangelistic tracts, including the best-selling go to hell or don’t, witness aids, with everything from 666 forehead tattoos to scratch’n’sniff gospel of johns for the kids, and the ever-popular ordination papers.  his credentials were prominently displayed on a mock-oak plaque in his wood-paneled study, duly impressing the people and, one suspected, himself.

  

his grandfather was a gambler, his father was a gambler, and weal was a gambler.  grew up on the racetracks, buying properties when he won, losing them when he lost, trading deeds he didn’t have for credit, credit for the blood of the bet.  but he found jesus when he was 31, and jesus, as pascal and kierkegaard teach us, is the biggest bet of all.  life wagered on a dream, the dream on a text, the text on a hope, the hope on a death.  absurdity incarnate.  faith made flesh.

 

if you collected all the vain futures of those of us who dream, the spiritual revolutions that have been told but never materialized, the rubble of the soul at the end of a life, wouldn’t the sum of these be jesus?  that bastard jujube.  who hinted of bliss and happy colors, but begot generations of cancer.  who stretched our flesh on the rack of desire to the pitch and warp of suffering.  who spawned centuries of wretchedness, a necessary compensation for his impossible ideals.  this holy desecration and seduction.  that parabolic fool.  that dark marrow in the bones of the world, wearing masks of white.

 

but rev. weal was just being spiritually logical - evolving from physical to metaphysical gambling - a man of faith and reason, taking faith and reason to their end.  for this i feared and loved him.  when he sang his cloned prophecies behind the pulpit, levitating, fluorescent halos confirming his blessedness, in a voice of borrowed power, archaic cadences, the people melting into their praise, sister gooch hovering in the back like some wanton puppeteer, jesus was, for a minute or an hour, wholly right, and history was the dream.

 

praise the stars and dust.

praise the dancers in the firmament.

praise toilets and bears and armpit hair and sorbet and the night that claims all things.

praise kitties that bite just because they feel like it and praise watermelon that doesn't taste like meat.

praise seeds. praise friday.

and praise words of kindness. and praise acts of kindness.

praise inner strength.

praise perpetual hope. and praise the mattress on my floor.

praise the bites that caress and caresses that bite.

praise the kittens in their indifference.

praise chicken little.

praise mortality and stone.

praise bach and cumin.

praise love and leaving.

praise cows and cooing.

praise gomorrah.

praise ana in her raw virginity.

praise tea light candles in the pitch.

praise books forgotten and stupid.

praise amethyst.

praise orpheus in his despair and silence.

praise judas in all his heys.

praise the meat of meats and watermelon.

let all the world praise itself and praise.

 

there’s something about education that drives god from the voice.  while some said rev. weal was a graduate of heaven’s grade school, others, more earthbound, said it was rumored he had dropped out of grade nine and gone straight to the horses.  one could hear him, rev. loudspeaker, exhorting the equines of the assembly to compete in the great race toward the afterlife.  his voice modulated, paused, groped the seraphim in their laughing distant bars, descended into hell to coat its guttural morphologies with love and make them presentable to mortals.  and we peasants of hapless virtue swooned before the sounds.  they weren’t tv.  they held no threat to the world’s chief councils.  the spirit’s bassi profondi and castrati.  he, conducting tongue; we, orchestra, instruments before the grateful audience of god.  there were no critics; this was more beautiful than you imagine.

the inmate’s journal : the assembly viii

despite my desire to be pious - a desire i have since discovered was doomed - i was also curious about the way things worked; i had yet to learn that curiosity and piety are bitter enemies.  naturally, then, a question that arose in my mind soon after my arrival in the assembly was the nature of the relationship between sister gooch and rev. weal.  the latter was married, as a good protestant minister should be, the institution of marriage providing both a façade of respectability and an antagonist on whom to inflict one’s daily venom - functions critical for christian society to maintain its dogmas intact.  sister gooch reputedly had a husband, but it was deemed improper to speak of him.  nevertheless, christians being people too, improprieties occurred.  from the pleasurable furtive guilty leaks i was granted, not always consistent, from sources sometimes foul, i pieced together a boggy patch of knowledge.

 

peggy gooch had been born to a drunken womanizer and a saint sometime before anybody else, in either shelby montana under the amtrak station, wuxi china to migrant and failed missionaries, or in a godly abode not fully of the earth.  not one given to formal education, she didn’t.  not particularly pretty, she refused fashion’s tinctures.  not invested with wit, she followed god.  without siblings, with neither beauty nor intellect, she drew, as only the dispossessed can, power from god’s deep well and became holy.  taking after her mother, she married a nogood churchhating motherfucking godcursing couchbeering bastard, a polemic to her holiness, a mirror to define herself.  in and out of everything but her, mr. gooch was a man of prepositions. above the gods, below decency and order, alongside the devil, with and by and for himself.  if the gooches had had any children, he had eaten them.  if he had had parents, he had roasted, carved, and frozen them.  if he believed in anything, there was no indication.  intimations of grand felonies and deep incarceration abounded.  it all added enormously to mrs. gooch’s reputation.

 

rev. weal and sister gooch were like yahweh and lilith orbiting around planet assembly, vaguely symbiotic, feeding on each other across the conduits of darkness, sources and reflections of light and heat … but never in direct contact.  and if they would be, the planet would surely implode.  they were the northern and southern poles, hamlet and rosalind, midnight and noon:  it was imperative for efficient operations - for the very continuation of life - that they remain apart, at the unspoiled pinnacles of their respective domains.

 

i imagined of course, as everyone must have, trysts in the makeshift baptismal tank - a secondhand whirlpool left the assembly by a deceased member who once lived the good life in california - febrile trysts late, late on the lord’s day, the copulating celebrants consummating the day’s ecstasy, an outlandish union of opposites.  indeed, there were rumours that wanda naught, the pudgy dimpled 6-year-old whose singing was thrust into the spotlight far too often, was a product of such a union.  but who could say?  who among us truly knows their origins?  who dares inquire?

 

in the absence of certitude, conspiracy theories obsessed me.  rev. weal was an agent for the cia, sister gooch a double agent for whatever axis of evil dominated the day, trading secrets through codewords:  thank you jesus meant 400 tanks next tuesday, praise the lord, bomb melbourne.  i invented archaeologies of dark deals made, betrayed, remade, below the white sand of sunday’s choruses.  nobody was safe.

 

but the only collaboration these two hollywood superpowers revealed was indirect dialogue, some conversation mediated by rules beyond routine comprehension.  in the services, sister gooch was the lead respondent, shouting with more gusto and authority than anyone else, the chief violinist, interpreter, and amplifier of rev. weal’s conducting.  for such effort and affirmation, she was acknowledged, praised, and apotheosized from the pulpit.  yes, sister gooch, say it sing it, sing the lord, oh yes yes, sister gooch can sing …  for her part, gooch would refer obliquely to her testosteroned rival.  he who is most frequently behind the pulpit, she would say, pausing dramatically, is not believed to think the lord is behind brother budd’s enterprise.  or - god’s servant who blesses us with words was revealed not to enter into that fellowship in times past.  if questioned for clarity - a mistake only made by novitiates - she would close her thick lids, bow her reptilian head, and remain motionless and silent until everyone, from fear or boredom, had left.

 

there was something between them, but it didn’t follow any protocol i’d been exposed to.

 

no one spoke with rev. weal, one was spoken to.  one was not spoken to one-on-one but from god’s stage in unholy audience.  when the moon is a waxing sliver, showing a crack of light in the dark bowl of the sky, and its round black outline visible against that bowl, it looks as if the world were encased in darkness and behind it a vast warm desirable world of light.  as if a sewer cover has been slipped slightly aside from the bowl, to give us mortals an intimation of the light we’ll never see.  rev. weal was the sewer cover operator who lived on the heaven side of the bowl, slipping it aside to show us distant glimpses of the eternal vat of god.

the inmate’s journal : the assembly vii

nine months after my first visit, not long after my first and last intrepid venture into other languages lacking grammar and name, when i had stumbled through the labyrinth of spiritual legislation and not been found wholly unworthy, sister gooch waited for me outside the men’s room.

 

brother judas, it is time we met and talked of your soul.

 

fine by me.  what was one to say to the fat serpent of purity?  we went down to jake’s and got two cigars and a pint of jack daniels and she led me to a rocky stretch by the lake where geese droppings strangled all living things but themselves and grey clouds spat curses at the earth.

 

you see this, brother judas?  you see this desolation?

 

yes, sister.

 

brother judas, it is yours.  it is the desolation of your soul.

 

how’s that?

 

you, brother judas, are a young man who contains the vigor of jesus.  i knew this the moment you entered the fellowship.  it was in your eyes.  it was in your lips.  it was in your flesh.

 

i gulped judiciously.

 

it has not left you, but rather it has been cast upon the water and increased tenfold, nay, even more.  i and the people and rev. weal and the organist and i have all noticed it.

 

the organist has noticed me?

 

yes brother judas, but not in the way you desire.  she notices your soul and this you know in your heart of hearts to be the greater noticing.  the organist does not notice many souls, you should feel blessed.

 

yes, sister gooch.  i felt thoroughly devigorated.

 

the senior elders met recently to discuss your soul.  we met and prayed and spoke in the languages of the lord and sang and slept little a recent tuesday night on your soul’s behalf.

 

thank you.

 

we do not ask for thanks.  we do it only from the deep joy and love of the lord, which rests outside the praise of men.  i have been charged by the discernment of that night and the spirit of jesus to meet with you and share with you the discernment of that night.

 

it began to rain.

 

the vigor placed in you by the spirit is good, but you are like these geese, spreading their foul excrement without care or discrimination across the holy landscape.  the excrement covers and grows and chokes all life and only those trained in hidden things can see the life that is buried below years of excrement and so desperately yearns to be free.  the spirit is good to you; his vigor increases despite your carelessness.  but with each increase so too your excrement increases.  you are fighting, brother judas—a gram of excrement for each gram of spirit.  you must let go.  your withholding is of the devil, your release is of the lord.  you must be a warrior united, hand-in-hand, with jesus.  mighty things can then be accomplished and your life shall unfold according to his plan, the plan that was yours before the creation of the world.

 

the rain became torrential, turning the goose droppings into a viscous mulch.  we drank and sucked on our soggy cigars and sister gooch stared into the impenetrable weather and saw visions peculiar to herself.  her voluminous pink-patterned dress clung to her vastness; fat nipples stared at me like cerberus’ eyes across the styx’ fog, flesh cascaded, taming time.

 

she laid her many-ringed hand high up my thigh, kneading my young male flesh with weighty familiarity.  the words of benediction were spoken while she delved and clawed me like some feline loosed from the menageries of hell and my organ pulsed with the music of whiskey and tobacco and the fire that created even god.

 

brother judas.  there are many questions even the wise are unsure of, for the truth entire is only in jesus.  but this i know.  you are his and the promise of jesus is within you.  but others who do not have half the jesus you do have progressed farther in his kingdom because they are diligent.  diligent, brother judas.  do you know what diligent means?

 

yes.

 

i mean spiritual diligence.

 

i think so.

 

you have cleaning to do.  and she lifted her significant poundage and was gone.

the inmate’s journal : the assembly vi

enough, enough, spirits of the past.  shut that servant up.  seal him in logorrhea’s mass grave, where the blabby dead babble to their bones through the death of galaxies.  for rev. weal could preach through candy floss and holocausts; his tongue had no circumference and his words were the bridge for the people to walk from night to night.  god, he could talk.  talk through jumbled labyrinths of history and text, some bricolage of perverse and radical redemption.  from moses to tongues to goats to country fairs to sodomy to the healing benefits of bacon to the morality of anklets to the sevenfold division of the ages to moses to mannequins … a vaudeville of rousing united by the stage of himself and the people’s emptiness.

 

if judaism is the religion of angst, hinduism of chaos, buddhism of negation, and islam of jihad, christianity is the religion of talk.  the word made flesh, the flesh made words, and the words begat words and the words words and the words mated with words and word-clouds formed and rained word-seeds and they were fertile and grew and word-trees grew and lo there were tasty word-fruit that grew on the soil of words and we ate, oh yes we did, for we are a hungry people, and we ate and digested and scatted words and we looked and our word-turds were sweet and perfect in our sight.

 

see.  it’s catching.  shut me up.

 

now i’ve always thought that it would be one of the loveliest things to speak in the tongues of angels.  in the tongue of anything but english, that most whorish and aggrandizing of languages, given me in my babedom, now at its political zenith but in spiritual decline since that cursed bard, william, ran the earth.  how lovely to escape one’s natural tongue and soar in the loosened phonemes of unbound space.

 

in my moments of longing for linguistic emancipation, for acceptance by the assembly’s sultans, for a higher plane of spirituality, for the organs of the organist who seemed only interested in her organ, i tried to clamber to the esoteric crags of glossolalia.  as i wasn’t courageous enough to try when squished between the mighty flailing freemans, i tried alone, at night in my bedroom, with the door and windows sealed.  i muttered words of encouragement to myself, words i had heard during recent services.

 

just sing out.  whatever’s in your heart, just sing it out, sing it out.  step on out into that spiritual realm.  don’t be afraid of what it’s going to sound like.  step on out, sing it out.  let it flow from you.  just forget about all that.  just sing to the lord.

 

i sang.

 

ba.

 

i leapt a little more into god’s sweet cadences.

 

ba.  hoo.

 

ba.  hoo.  alababa.  i paused, waiting for the lord’s channels to open more fully.  hoo-ba, i ended dramatically.

 

over the ensuing weeks, i borrowed records from the library containing samples from the masters of unknown tongues, great archaeologists in the syllables of god.  masters of babel, scholars in the winged textbooks of communication.

 

i slowly progressed in the tongued arts, adding a banaboona here, a garooshadalamalaganaga-sherowsheemeeooee there.  after a few months of intense study, heaps of nights seeking the lord’s saliva, i felt emboldened to transfer my nascent oracular talents into the assembly’s weekly competition of lips.  i decided to wait until after rev. weal’s sermon, when the people had drunk generously from jesus’ rapturous cup.

 

the sermon ended.  the people, bathed in words and admonition and glory, began to hum soft lullabies of grace.  brother woodbridge spoke intimations of mandarin.  sister morrison responded with simian joy.  the freemans, pressed into me like lunch, questioned my existence with their formidable mass.  the mob surged and bellowed, riding god’s free rollercoaster, where everything was up.  it was the divinely appointed hour; i let go of my mind, gave myself over to the buried tongue of god, broke free from the surrounding bulk and leapt into the sea of praise, shouting—

 

obahoobaorgawannaorgakufagoofoofuk

 

now it never happened that there was silence in god’s house; that house was a habitation of noise.  but the poets tell us the gods have their humor and the poets are the only ones who never lie.  this is why we ignore them.  so it was that on my first syllable, that syllable bold and strident and possessed and boundless, the house went silent and the people listened to me as if i might have something to say. 

the inmate’s journal : the assembly v

rev. lecher, i know you, like i, have laboured long in the strange unfathomed brine of souls and have not once flinched from the booty of your destiny.  rev. lecher grimaced with pleasure and disease, fondling the folds of his robe as if they were holy.  rev. lecher, we both, each in his peculiar agonies of flesh, have drunk the salty waters that flow unceasing from the wounds of the divine and they have tasted to us as blood.  rev. lecher felt his groin begin the ancient dance; such beginnings were common and so cheap, yet always new, so always precious.  his mind wandered to blood, the blood of christ, the blood of women, the blood that filled and hardened.  rev. lecher, are you listening?  yes, of course, rev. lecher was listening, rev. lecher always listened.  rev. chaste, your words seem to me, as is their wont, not untrue, not unreflective of our diverse paths, paths drawn, as you so eloquently expressed, from a source at once dark and one, a source we jointly name our god.  i recall, in evidence and not combatively, mrs. harper, for whom you spilled much blood in prayer, for whom i spilled much seed in that other meditation, in whom we were united across that holy chasm for a year and a month and a day.  but what, praytell, rev. chaste, is the needle you’re hiding in your haystack of words?

 

a younger man of god, a middle-aged one specifically, one devoted neither to lechery nor chastity but to the ecstasy of his own voice calling the people to forgetfulness, rev. winchester winston weal iii was a man of words, the word, wordy merde and merdy word and, yea, his tongue was olympian and he was rev. weal and his sermon followed and preceded song, a logos so low and long neither jerusalem nor athens would recognize it as their own.  a sandwich of text luncheon meat on white fluffy wonder slices of singing.  his preaching typically ranged between 45 and 90 minutes; the rare occasions he was briefer, he would apologize, presumably to god for being short of the word limit imposed by the pedagogical demands of paradise.  though exceeding the word limit invoked no apology:  jehovah after all was a blabby member of the pantheon and his servants who sought his favor must surely follow suit.

 

jehovah was also a god of many cattle and camels and oxen and asses and sons and daughters and women and years.  but as any socially mediazed infant knows, cars have replaced cattle, aspirin camels, mp3s oxen, thongs asses, master bathrooms and bidets sons and daughters, porn sites women, and fitness years.  so rev. weal drove a cadillac and wore armani suits and a rolex.  he was also addicted to big macs … but sometimes it’s too much to expect both health and wealth.

 

he preached, like all ministers of poor congregations, a gospel of prosperity, a gospel of anti-intellectualism, a gospel of hellfire and gemstones, let’s listen to him.  we’ll join him mid-stream, though i don’t think that really matters—

rev	… when moses filled with the holy ghost and the spirit of jesus descended into the desert and saw the greed and desolation of god’s people, yea … yea … yes, yea friends …
the people	yea yes
rev	… and he saw the sweat and the swaying, the sweat and the swaying, and he heard the clank of the gold, the gold heavy and against the precepts of the most high, an abomination unto the lord, and he smelled the woman’s breasts like the whore of babylon high and lifted up and an affront to the modesty of heaven, and he tasted the evil in the smoke rising from the boiling cauldrons of hell, and yea yea he touched, yes friends, he touched the desolation of the calf …
tp	oh, the calf! the calf!
rev	yes, the calf, baal and beelzebub and holy jesus, … and he felt the devil’s cold heart with the very hands, yes, the very hands that had just in moments past touched god’s law, the very hands that had been scorched and silenced by that one and perfect light, the very hands that we too, members of the body of jesus, can have if we place ourselves in the higher hands of the one who never fails
tp	never fails
rev	never sleeps
tp	never sleeps
rev	never deceives
tp	never deceives
rev	never stumbles
tp	never stumbles
rev	thank you jesus
tp	thank you jesus
rev	… and trust him with our minds and our hearts and our flesh and our souls … not partially, no …
tp	no no
rev	… but whole and entire, the law that is ours if we only claim it, if we only claim what is ours and was ours and will be ours from times past and times present and times to come forevermore amen and amen and glory and praise and joy and hallelujah, oh hallelujah jesus, let’s just thank him …
tp	… thank you jesus, thank you jesus, hallelujah, jesus, oh jesus, hallelujah, thank you lord …
sister gooch	{very loudly, using every fiber of her meat} thank you jesus
rev	oh yes, sister gooch {laughing, everybody laughing} sister gooch knows how to say it, thank you jesus
	{general mayhem while the people praise and envy sister gooch by means of thanking jesus}
rev	khola mala moraba silabu sa   ooh ki ooh kirah ee sambra-ato mati eror oooh rwo sambrwato mato kwanto ta simbato bratamayo  ooooh kiratamasamagabatamrasuhoma  oooooh gaheenraheyn
tp	kalamey  kalamey rwahen  bahoonarey  mala-mahengagashooba-malahooahooreynabananamahoorwakalasen
rev	just last week, lovers of jesus … just last week when the temple was lifted high and his people spread before the lord {laughter, din and orgy} … a brother in the lord from georgia, where was he from sister gooch? … macon, macon georgia, a seller of electronics from the warehouses of god … you remember, how he exposed his heart and told of his years of sin, sin so deep and wide some of the more innocent among you, bless your souls, had to bow your heads in prayer … years of sin of the flesh:  not just bringing his dear dear wife into acts no woman of god should be asked to do, but descents into whoredom … friends, he committed the most abominable acts, acts without forgiveness, acts with men and … and once … once with a goat …
tp	oh dear jesus, a goat, a goat
rev	yes, with a goat, and sins of embezzlement and fraud and perjury and gluttony and pride and lust upon lust upon lust and wrath and murder and incest and …
s gooch	{with gusto} and the mannequin brother winston, don’t forget the mannequin
rev	dear jesus
tp	dear jesus, oh dear jesus
rev	never in all the words from the pit have we heard such words, never such acts so in need of the grace.  and it was just last week here in the lord’s holy temple you remember the brother from georgia wept in shame, in shame for the acts and the goats and the mannequin and the acts with his wife and the goat, his wife and the mannequin, the mannequin and the goats, the storefront of mannequins entire with wife and goat, in shame for the disgrace he tried to vomit - yes vomit, my friends - upon jesus, who will not be vomited upon, for his name is above every name and at the name of jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess … oh thank you lord …
tp	thank you, lord, oh jesus, lord
rev	… and just last week brother angelo stood … brother angelo who neither stands nor speaks in tongues stood and spoke a language he had never heard and there was silence afterwards for god commands us not to prophecy unless it be understood by the people and we all wondered if brother angelo spoke in transgression and we would have to pray the prayer of forgiveness … when sister polanus stood, sister polanus who was born in poland and knows polish and said the word from the lord was polish and this is what the lord was saying through brother angelo to the brother from georgia in polish, how he must repent and give up the acts and the goats and be faithful to the wife he took in the name of the lord and neither enter into unnatural congress with her nor with any animal nor with anything made in the image of woman or animal nor with things plastic …