j.a. van wagner :: wordobject :: imagetime

In order to get at the truth we have to go through the nail. If the nail has fallen, so be it — it’s easier to treat with contempt. This same mocked nail, with some considerable effort, was meant to be driven into the church door; yet there it is, futile nail, now bent perhaps from its encounter with the church and its door, hewn from god knows what dense interlocking grain of what tree they, the committee, thought best represented the heavenly fortress lightly sketched out in the books, a matter of a few words per passage; words intended to invoke, and then to chasten, and then to forbid — what is a nail to that? (here the text commends laughter) — so it happens a man in the best least moldy trousers he can muster out of the closet, or tempt out of the recesses of a bottom drawer, comes to stand before the committee, or no, an unaffiliated group of individuals gathered together in hope of a cure — in this report it’s an Easter at Lourdes or the ancient Santuario at Chimayó — a man we now think may have been hiding a nail, or nails, on his person, in the folds of this jacket, with frayed sleeves, drawn from retirement; he was not searched before entering the place, they did not apply their electromagnetic wands to his person, they let him in because he might conceivably amuse them with his tractates, drawn from sources other than the Heavenly, not even figuring in any book; he is to stand before them, literally clothed but effectively naked, juggling clandestine nails with the fingertips of his left hand while sweating through his tongue like an overheated dog, tongue lolling lopsidedly (added opportunity for derision); they would even pay to see that, if only he would not speak. The man, while gesturing toward the unaffiliated and speaking perhaps some words anyway, is really aware only of the church and its door, the door and the church and the nail, or nails, of which two are supplementary in case of failure of the first, and in another pocket, just now a freshly invented pocket, a roll of weatherproof parchment on which is inscribed in black lettering an extensive document; many individual letters compose it, thousands, of diverse shapes resembling nothing so much as black bent spikes; one can hear, almost, the clatter of letters failing against the ears of the congregation, striking and rebounding against the ears of the tribunal to fall in reformed shapes onto the unheated stone floors, bent outlines crawling as though in defeat toward the solace of a crack, or yet a page will do, a thousand nails in service of any available tractate; the atmosphere is diffuse, light stained somber blue, or purple, scattered in all directions, the perspiring man in the shapeless, threadbare jacket utters at last a few amusing words; sparse laughter among the skeptics.