This typed sheet takes the form of a letter home from “Emil,” who has just arrived in San Francisco and gone to church to please his parents and grandmother. The church turns out to be Glide during the Invisible Circus, and the letter begins to register the event’s strange sacramental theater: the “funny triangular thing” that someone offered Emil as a “blessed sacrament,” elevators, shredded plastic, and other fragments of the happening. As the account proceeds, the words themselves begin to fall apart and drop down the page, echoing the kind of “dropping out” that could follow an LSD experience — not simply leaving school or society, but slipping out of ordinary language, family expectation, and respectable narrative. The page is both a parody of the dutiful letter home and a small performative relic of the Invisible Circus, where the typewriter becomes part of the altered field. |