Candice Wuehle, featured in the new Ocean State Review
The God Machine
Drought logic: human blood more affordable than ink but
more costly than mercury, than venom. Be careful what
you write for. In the rafters of the universe, a disgusted
dramaturge wondering who let the tragedians dress the set,
distress the drawing room with sand and ash. Death the
ultimate anti-flow but every improvised scene seems to end
with a pyre, a red ribbon unrolled artfully from the
starlette’s mouth. Sentient script, trilemma of selfhood: if
the actor is unaware of the role, they are not acting/ if the
role is unaware of the actor, it’s extemporaneous/ if the
audience is unaware of either, it isn’t play. Someday, you’re
going to want to stop gnashing your teeth, to drink. You’re
going to want this scene to end but there isn’t going to be
anybody to write you off the stage. Deus ex machine in
reverse, awkwardly arriving as flubbed line, flipped toga
revealing 21st century elasticized underwear; the
supraliminal scratch on the surface of existence. Step out
of your part long enough to look for the latch, the trap
door concealed within that when lifted drops you in.
—
The occasion for “The God Machine” was a ringing in my office.
The ringing started in January of 2021, but I had been suspecting for a while that the forces dressing the set of the universe were getting sloppy. Like, what if God is a stagehand whose blacks have gotten dingy—are now reducing the suspension of belief for the audience?
Earlier, in the summer of 2020, I’d been walking across a campus in Kansas when I noticed a small dog I saw regularly. Petey. I knew his name was Petey because his owner screamed it from across the green bowl of lawn every time the dachshund chased a squirrel.
Petey was sitting still, as dogs with some setter in them do—setter, trained to set—underneath an enormous oak. He was looking up into the tree intently, his eyes focused on a squirrel seventy-five, one-hundred feet above.
It was so hot the air was wavy, expanded with bent light. Already, nothing felt real.
Then the squirrel fell from the tree and hit the ground with a crack like an egg rolling off the counter, but really loud. It made me think how much I have never heard bone crack. It fell right in front of Petey, whose posture about the whole thing recalled the boy from The Twilight Zone movie who controls everyone with his mind.
So this poem is about that: supraliminal sensation. The feeling of knowing some information about the universe that hasn’t been processed yet. A sort of algorithmic consciousness in which reality is produced by what one pays attention to—the “sentient script.”
(Petey being the one paying attention, specifically to the missteps of squirrels.)
The imagistic and aesthetic world of the poem sort of took off from that idea. I’ve always been fixated on actors, mentalists, stagecraft, trap doors, the world above the stage, and the idea of the dramaturge who is providing the cast and crew with all the wrong information. Did you know there’s a scene in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women—one of the dark scenes, in the attic—where if you look closely you can see Timothée Chalamete’s hydroflask in the background? Or, in The Wizard of Oz, you can notice Judy Garland’s hair grows several inches and then returns to it’s original length by the end of “If I Only Had a Brain.” My favorite continuity error, however, is a chronic one: Scorsese insists on placing real ice cream under lights so that, in, for example, The Aviator, it’s like the actor is eating her sundae in reverse.
Those are examples of what I don’t mean: the set so carefully dressed a mistake never codes as possibility.
I’ve always followed the generative error in my own work, so it follows I like the same thing from the universe. Just as the red ribbon unrolled from the starlette’s mouth contains a utopic double—a rich space of symbol instead of signifier—so did that ringing in my office.
I don’t live in the house in Kansas anymore where the ringing started, but it’s something I carry with me in my own ears. A sort of warning about the far side of creation; of the possibility of making the wrong thing. The danger of being uncareful what you write for.
Candice Wuehle is the author of the novel MONARCH (Soft Skull, 2022) as well as the poetry collections Fidelitoria: Fixed or Fluxed (11:11, 2021); 2020 Believer Magazine Book Award finalist, Death Industrial Complex (Action Books, 2020); and BOUND (Inside the Castle Press, 2018). She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Kansas.
Candice Wuehle’s website: https://www.candicewuehle.com/
Candice Wuehle’s new novel, MONARCH, is out with Penguin/Random House.