The old impressions return: that you are floating in the jelly of a clock, that you are inside a bird’s backbone, that your head has gone an octave up and your body an octave down. That you are physically compelled to stand and kneel with the rest of the people, that you are required to answer with everyone else. Religion trains you like roses—it installs automation in the arms and legs, even in the mouth. Or as Jason once asserted, with his trademark mix of authority and malapropism, “They’re priming you like Chekhov’s dogs. To hear the gunshot and drool.”
