Glossolalia

It's been noticed more than once that I seem to owe something to the preacher in my style: but there are no other masters of oratory remaining. One my first memories is of standing in church, staring at the back of an old upholstered pew - that vibrant late 70s orange - listening with a curator's ear to the bombast, the glorious excess, the controlled fury of a pentecostal preacher as he stirred his small but willing congregation into the mood for tongues. Baptism, transformation, renewal, ecstatic knowledge: I can't deny that I've been driven by these ceremonies, that in testing their authenticity I've been enacting them, that I am a prodigal son of the backwater shamanism of rural Americana. By the age of 4, I had learned to discern the quality of every glossolalia: I knew that those most eager were desperate, lonely, hysterical. I knew that the rest faked it, mumbling along. I knew that the preacher sought his own ends, that his pathos was practiced, that there was a greed lurking there, but that he could not achieve his magic without temporarily overcoming his limitations - that his art depended on finding a spark of sincerity amidst his lies. I knew also that in the hysteria there sometimes appeared something else: sometimes a genuine emotional valence slithered into view, sometimes the ritual actually worked, sometimes I almost felt that I could speak. The quest for the mother tongue: the language which says everything would also be nonsense... Every poet must decide between the prostration before profligate immediacy and the pride of articulation. Between babble and silence: the real power of evocation lies in the breaths between words, what feels is what is dumbstruck.