mark leidner

Charles Wright

I read somewhere that post-truth happened as soon as language was invented.

It makes a lot of sense to me; I’m wanting to get away in a big way.

Maybe become a tide, allow my embarrassing consciousness to take on a less spherical shape.

I assume language, used in that context, means signs of any kind. The movement of the human hand, the shift of a human eye’s gaze from near to far, a wiggle of lips, human scratching, inconsistent human breathing, furrowing, gestural signs.

I think of how human babies look before their wiggling appears to be the slightest bit intentional. They’re rolling and squeezing and flipping through time and space.

That baby in my mind’s eye is really feeling it. I sniff.

How cool, I think: when we’re at our coolest we’re organized around the gentlest thing in the room.

My observations come with swallows, they feel like dead weight. I crack, I think, ok, there’s that humming in my body again, I think: occassionally people with political power will perform the organization of their interests around the gentlest thing in the room.

I haven’t prepared myself for humor. I want miracles to be funny but my desire seems stuck in the present. I chatter my crooked teeth.

Ok, I’m thinking, it doesn’t have to be a baby—no—it can be some easily forgotten thing. I fidget, I wonder if it can be language. I picture a circular room, high ceilings, with hundreds of humans bowing toward, say, a beetle, its head down, poking at the microscopic plane. I twist the spine. Language needs references.

So no longer a baby myself, I’m thinking. I’m thinking that when I feel calm or aroused, positively or negatively, I use language. Self-talk, self-adjustment. I depend on time for this.

I stop moving and post-truth.

I struggle with its origins, baked by my own psychology.

Just think of that baby, feeling it, I’m telling myself. The buzz and the ache are more like company now, neither arousal nor calm. Organization can be a painful word. Performance looms. I look toward the end of the day, what words exist there, and how they must sleep. Language can be the gentlest thing, I’m telling myself. Then I open it up:

The world doesn’t work

the world is habited

it is Sunday

and a friend speaks up

Agnes, she has never been encouraged

not enough

its infuriating

and it takes daybreak

a walk to the bus alone

not every thought added

but a single one held close

to remind the world

that it isn’t some broken thing

like angels in america

the pageant reminding us

that if we hallucinate together

we may forgive each other but not ourselves

when the other eventually disappears

and its a strike to changes of season

our sleepy love

cooling the house

settling into the closest thing to touch

so we can stay with the farthest

when it arrives

a silly beetle

a silliness that becomes habit

as its amongst us

our cheeks heated

our eyes a close up

open for long enough

they begin to drip a bit

for the sake of seeing together

a focal point that provides us

no protection

no power

no performance

no voice

no sense

for the sake of seeing together

a silly sacred wandering

that allows our organization

its time to rest

a circular room

high ceilings

but it doesn’t take hundreds

just two in need

I read somewhere that post-truth happened as soon as language was invented.

It makes a lot of sense to me; I’m wanting to get away in a big way.

Maybe become a tide, allow my embarrassing consciousness to take on a less spherical shape.

I assume language, used in that context, means you don’t feel comfortable lying anymore. It’s not February anymore. She arrives late, so its late. She arrives with an army of lovers, so its an army of lovers. She tells you to dive on the ankles of strangers. Squeeze at them with your little muscles. Baby muscles. And close your eyes. Agnes gardens Agnes. She does it through wiggles, daybreak, rolling and squeezing, light. To let a warmth in. To feel Agnes nearby now relax let it go and feel the warmth begin to move into your hips, buttocks, back, and into your abdomen, up your chest, and through your throat, to your hands with their palms and each finger, wrists and forearms, to your shoulders, into your neck, jaw, nose and ears.

Agnes is finding language so she can guide you away from all the power.

Clumsy bodies going first, Agnes needing less.  

Well right, naturally you should hate spirituality. That word almost always refers to someone using the spiritual as spackle to fill a defect in him or herself. A beached fiftysomething with a face like a worn coin, suddenly terrified of death and enrolled in a community college goddess course. Spirituality doesn’t flow in that direction. It doesn’t give a shit about you. We are in its stream and even if we dream of waterwheels to harness the flow, there’s no anchorpoint to take a foundation. Most of the time we just ignore the fact that we’re going where it wants. This makes our situation invisible.  Infrequently, it announces itself. We are helpless then, and irresistibly magnetized. The Apollo Program is a good example.    Everybody thought Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon were spending four-and-a-half percent of the federal budget each year to prove that America owned Science. This was all a fiction. The Apollo Program was an elaborate demonstration of how even the blandest among us are under the heel of the spirit.  NASA needed astronauts to go plant a flag on the moon. For obvious reasons, the astronauts ended up being the most reliable type of man America makes: white, straight, full-starch protestant, center-right, and spawned by the union of science and the military. Every last one of them was the heart of the heart of the tv dinner demographic. But then they get shot into space, tossed from the gravity of this planet, across a quartermillion miles of nothing, to be snagged by the moon after three days. Eighteen guys did this and twelve descended further to find out that moon dust smells like gunsmoke. Every single one of them came back irrevocably changed. America had sent the squarest motherfuckers it could find to the moon and the moon sent back humans. Armstrong became a teacher, then a farmer. Alan Bean became a painter. Edgar Mitchell started believing in UFOs. And also managed to crystallize the experience of seeing your entire planet at once: