TRANSCRIPT

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

The death of a man as foretold in dreams of trees. A woman with clownlike red hair in a bright red dress passing coded messages to an FBI agent. A young woman whose tears fall in cake batter she makes for her sister’s wedding, then, at the celebration, after taking a bite, everyone begins to cry, simultaneously.

I am a fan of enchantment. The above are examples from popular culture and literature: a novella by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, the TV show “Twin Peaks,” and the movie “Like Water for Chocolate.” When novelist Toni Morrison has her main character describe tulips that grow instantly around his mother as fast as she plants them, I immediately recognized this world. My family’s superstitions and beliefs in charms prepared me to exist in a world where anything-can-happen. 

Some might call it fantastical, but in fact, for many, magic is our orientation, or the place where we began as children and never experienced the rupture that befalls most when they become adults. For me, comics, animation, Greek myths, and martial arts films bred a threshold of imagining that still informs how I process everyday events. The flying that happens in wuxia classic films like the Five Deadly Venoms is the equivalent of poetry that moves from the unconscious to the conscious, from the hidden to the seen.

Today’s marvelous poem reminds me we exist in liminal zones where the extraordinary renders the ordinary visible and uncanny, an assertion of the imagination that makes our world shimmer.

The Running of Several Simulations at Once May Lead to Murky Data
by Heather Christle

How do you say ‘inopportune’
in a small forest of cell phone towers
disguised as bizarrely regular trees?
I am asking in case it happens,
because anything can and even does.
Sometimes I want to shrink
and move into a miniature model village
mostly because the particular green
of the imaginary grass corresponds
with how my body believes joy would feel
if joy were to happen here on Earth,
where my eyes receive light in this 
certain way: limited, but not
without pleasure. As a child
I visited one model village
so extensively constructed I fell 
into a state of complete wonder—
‘They thought of everything!’
even the person running late
for the train, and the window
left slightly open to the storm—
and I should like to request
the arrival of this sensation in response
to the world at its actual scale—
just imagine! Someone
has even gone to the trouble 
of filling the egg cartons
individually with smooth brown
eggs and one—such detail!—
has broken, but not enough
to be noticed before the carton
has been paid for and brought home.
Sometimes artificially I will
induce this feeling in myself
by going silent at a large
restaurant gathering, pretending
—until it is real—that each person
is speaking from a highly naturalistic script,
having carefully rehearsed each 
tiny gesture, the mid-sentence reach
for the salt, and I fall immediately
in love with my companions,
in awe of their remarkable talent
for portraying with such detailed conviction
the humans I know as my friends.

“The Running of Several Simulations at Once May Lead to Murky Data” by Heather Christle from PAPER CROWN © 2025 Heather Christle. Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press.