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.