DON’T AVERT YOUR EYES: A review of Harold Jaffe’s Revolutionary Brain

Tags

docufiction, harold jaffe, revolutionary brain

by R. Sebastian Bennett

 

Harold Jaffe’s latest work, Revolutionary Brain, is a collection of “Essays and Quasi-Essays” which utilizes a variety of rhetorical strategies borrowed from fiction and nonfiction to dissect, analyze, and diagnose the societal and psychological dysfunctions which characterize the current human condition. In its broad, omnidirectional sweep, the book offers detailed findings as well as guidelines for solutions. This beautiful, expansive text is an acute cry for awareness of society’s flaws and, simultaneously, a curative voice of hope.

 

Jaffe foregrounds his theses with the directive that we, as human beings, share a tacit obligation in the midst of our crisis: “Don’t avert your eyes.” This injunction to maintain awareness as the first step in solving societal issues is a prescription to observe civilization and its detriments consciously, even if such observations entail an internalization process which is deeply disturbing.  For the artist, this process may lead to the birth of a particular kind of art, “Crisis Art,” which functions simultaneously as a creative outburst from the artist and–via the manifestation of that creativity–a further opportunity for other citizens to develop greater social awarenesses.

 

Crisis Art entails taking a stand, protesting, documenting, unmasking—literally and figuratively—societal elements which negatively impact our world. Jaffe carefully analyzes the aesthetic dimensions and components of Crisis Art, which is “directed rather than disinterested,” “closely related to art as process,” and “keenly aware of text and context.”  It entails “an energy and focus which more than compensate for its relative lack of refinement.” The crisis artist, like all of us, has the “obligation… to bear witness.” And that obligation functions in opposition to governmental and corporate quests to maintain citizens’ conformity and complacency, under the guise of maintaining order for public interest. Such a guise is mocked by Jaffe in “Iso,” where a narrative voice waxes pseudo-eloquent concerning social control: “Too many creatures dreaming, moving sideways, promote chaos.”

 

Much of Revolutionary Brain comprises, in a variety of rhetorical formats, a pondering and analysis of specific examples of societal dysfunction and their macroscopic implications. Ultimately, the text goes beyond these specified and artfully rendered depictions of maladies/mal-adaptations/mutations to answer the question: What are the veracious and most promising opportunities for transition and amelioration? In Revolutionary Brain, these opportunities carry an echo of the truest American hopes for democracy and humanity in their implicit appeal to a deism in the spirit of Walt Whitman and Thomas Jefferson, a would-be entreaty to “Nature’s God” for moral guidelines and fortitude. This is an appeal for a re-prioritization of natural beauty, justice, reason, equality, and the freedom to live a life unfettered by toxic, institutional pressures of any form.

 

However, while the book supports a broad, naturalized orientation to a spiritual dimension, again in congruence with Jefferson, it fervently rejects the current trends toward religious influence on government, manifest even in countries as supposedly secular as France and the United States. In “Hijab,” Jaffe addresses a French edict that “Islamic females of lycée age are required to remove their head and face coverings while in the lycée,” while nuns are allowed to wear head coverings—as they are “picturesque…[and] have an aesthetic dimension.” Jaffe unmasks this supposed “aesthetic” dimension as “the sacred prepuce of… white male leaders” which serves to support discrimination against religious traditions not directly aligned with that of the reigning governmental regime. Jaffe leaves the reader to ponder the implications of governmental/religious fusion in the United States; however, he is unequivocal about the extent of that synthesis:

                      

Is the US… a theocracy?

Without question

 

Notably, toxic social pressures detailed in Jaffe’s book are not merely commercial or sociological, but rather often scientific manifestations of the institutional goal of profiteering from human illness, weakness, or character flaws. Such dynamics are evident in Jaffe’s text “Freeze-Dry,” where parents ghoulishly attempt to cryogenically restrict the physical growth of their disabled child, a process which calls to mind an exponentiated, sci-fi version of foot-binding.  Along similar lines, in “Anal Acrobats,” the climate change phenomenon is posited as the net result of world leaders’ self-serving quests for power and votes, and their self-imposed blindness to the plight of decimated animals such as “a polar bear cub dying in the Antarctic because of ice melt.”

 

Jaffe’s scope is not focused merely on broad institutional or thematic issues. Revolutionary Brain also details individual psychological aberrations caused by particular societal conditions.  These aberrations often have a sexual component, and several of Jaffe’s texts address the hypothesis that the ever-increasing, main-streamed intake of porn, especially highly-deviational porn, is a response to/escape from an increasingly decimated civilization. The mechanism for this seems to arise from severe external disruptions in the normal bio-social sphere, causing a form of psychological imbalance akin to that seen in an animal which starts to behave in a physically deleterious or anti-social manner due to disruptions or abnormalities in its environment. As Jaffe puts it, “We need extremity beyond extremity to dodge the collective torment we are forbidden to acknowledge.” In some cases, the sexual aberrations and deviations are aided and abetted by a form of the technological fetishism which has become so prevalent today; in “Things to Do,” airline baggage handlers conform to their internalized self-dialogue/self-directives to “collect female hair from brushes, combs, intimate wear. Bag the hair in plastic, label it. Encode… fantasies of the hair-owners’ most intimate gestures on… smart phone.”

 

 

Jaffe points to a loss of moral compassing as characteristic of our era. This loss again functions microscopically and macroscopically, psychologically and politically. In “Pet Girl,” a woman is “led around on a leash by her boyfriend… [She] said she was the pet of her 25-year-old fiancé” and explains to a bus driver:

 

I don’t cook, I don’t clean, I don’t do anything or go anywhere without my master.  To you it’s strange, but it’s my culture and my choice.  It isn’t hurting anyone.

 

Later, the “British bus company” must apologize to the girl for calling her a “freak.”

 

Intriguingly, Jaffe simultaneously posits the “Pet Girl” event as evidence of deviant social trends resulting from aberrant social pressures AND culturally-induced unwillingness to accept alternative lifestyles due to a collectively endorsed closed-mindedness. As such, humans are caught in a quintessential catch-22: naturalistic behaviors have mutated in an unbalanced manner, and militant, conformist institutional pressures mandate criticism—indeed ostracism—of those mutations. This is a prime mechanism for collective unrest, a state gladly induced by commercial and political forces, as it can be harnessed for profit-driven and agenda-driven outcomes.

 

Further depicting the loss of moral compassing, Jaffe points to  the acronym-obsessed arenas of international relations and military strategy.  Again, Revolutionary Brain calls for a humanistic force to balance the be-numbed, crocodilian orientation of ranking administrators, junta-supporters, and analysts who fail to manifest any semblance of sympathy for arbitrarily tortured individuals, and view them as acceptable collateral damage for any undertaking which supports current political strategy. In “Truth Force,” confronted by the actuality of torture, the presiding administrator refuses to acknowledge the event or its implications, and repeatedly states “I’ve read the report,” in a self-imposed, perpetual state of cognitive dissonance regarding the torture itself and its moral justification.

 

An appeal for sympathetic and empathetic responses to human suffering is especially manifest in Jaffe’s text “Death in Texas,” which calls into question the issue of the death penalty, far beyond its obvious susceptibility to criticisms concerning irreversibility of outcome for mistakenly convicted individuals. Jaffe’s text focuses, again, on the humanity of death-row inmates, especially as manifest in their last statements, just prior to their executions. These messages are haunting, both in their finality and, oddly, in their innocence—wherein that innocence relates not to culpability, but to a purity of expression and mentation, a Zen-like state, perhaps achievable only when there is nothing left to lose and all external judgments of one’s expressions are irrelevant. The prose rhythms in “Death in Texas” are especially compelling, as if synchronized with the unforgiving relentlessness of passing time itself. The scope of the “offenders’” final statements chronicles the dimensions of human experience itself.   

 

Some speak of family, nature, and emotional state. Foregrounding spirituality, Marcus Cotton, in the final moment, speaks out to his mother:

                      

Take care yousefs

Tell my kids I love ‘em

God is real.  He is fixin to find out some deep things…

 

Virgil Ravenfeather calls to the forces of nature, with an ironic overlay:

                   

Only the sky and the green grass goes on forever and today is a good day to die…

I can give you just one thing.

I’m a give a life for a life.

I am not saying this to be facetious.

I hope yawl find comfort in my execution…

 

Johnny Saginaw’s last statement focuses on a quest for happiness:

                   

Be happy.

Are you happy?

Are you all happy?

 

Some offenders weigh the social solution of the death penalty against the solution of mercy.  Napoleon Beazley addresses various alternatives:                 

                      

Tonight we tell the world that there are no second chances in the eyes of justice.

Tonight we tell our children that in some instances killing is righteous…

The problem is the system is telling them there is no rehabilitation.

Only unforgiving punishment.

 

Adolf Wölfli focuses on the primacy of mercy:

                      

If among you there is anyone without sin, let him come to me, and I will implore him for compassion and mercy.

 

The positioning of Wölfli in this context is complex and variegated.  The historical Wölfli, himself sexually abused as a child, was imprisoned in a mental hospital following his luring and molestation of young girls on several occasions (www.aldolfwoelfli.ch/index).  Over the course of his confinement, his artistic genius emerged, as he produced a large number of intricate and striking illustrations. His name fictively included in the body of offenders executed in Texas functions as an implication that: 1) Even reprehensible acts may be beyond an individual’s control due to the overwhelming impact of previous life experiences; and 2) The capital punishment of any individual may constitute the death of a genius who was destined to make great contributions to society (this train of argumentation also functions in curious and sardonic counterpoint to similar arguments made by pro-life advocates—many of whom are also in favor of the death penalty…).

 

In “Death in Texas,” other offenders invoke the afterlife, implicitly or explicitly.  Karla Faye Tucker addresses this via her Christianity:

                   

I am going to be face to face with Jesus now.

I will see all yawl when you get up there.

I will be dressed in wat.

 

Of course, this statement involves a Southern dialect; however, the ambiguous rendering of the word “wat” functions simultaneously as a color reference and as an interrogative “What”–with the implication that Karla, like many of us, is still rather uncertain of what the afterlife will entail, and her precise role/deportment within it. This uncertainty seems characteristics of Karla Faye Tucker’s own quixotic physical and mental state; the historical Karla Faye Tucker reportedly experienced intense orgasms as she struck her victim with a pick-axe. (www.clarkprosecuter.org).

 

Jimmy Blackmon’s final statement is silence, accompanied by an institutional parenthetical commentary: “This offender declined to make a final statement.” By default, this prelude to death emphasizes it as the penultimate, alienated end; without hope of transcendence in any form.

 

Many of the texts in Revolutionary Brain address damage to our environment from sources such as climate change and toxic pollutants.  In “Sacrifice,” Jaffe summarizes the degree of damage which humans have inflicted on the planet: “Man and his institutions will not cease to filthy o’er the earth. Profiting all the while.” In “Iso,” he addresses a particularized effect of chemical interference on the animal world: “Tens of thousands of frogs born maimed. They point to the futureless future.” The net effect of this damage is akin to a Frankensteinian-level alteration of our planet. Jaffe emphasizes this comparison in his text “Bride of Frankenstein (Directed by James Whale, 1935)” in which ultimately, Frankenstein realizes the degree of his own aberration and kills both himself and would-be bride, after she has rejected him. Jaffe ends this text with a coda: “Monsters perish, ultimately. Monstrous acts fester.”

 

 

Fully contemplating the depths and dimensions of social dysfunction detailed in Revolutionary Brain certainly leads to a deep sense of alienation, isolation, and sadness; however, while these emotions may be useful for enhancing awareness, the book ultimately points beyond such responses to curative mechanisms.

In this regard, the beauty, power, and mythology of animals and the animalian kingdom are proffered as possible keys to enlightenment. Jaffe’s text “Animals” repositions and redistributes animal and human values, both biological and ethical: “Elephants’ brains are denser than humans’. The temporal lobes associated with memory are more complexly developed than in humans…” With regard to their moral purity, Jaffe writes: “Animals… do not wage war, exile or murder the innocent form money.  They do not extort surplus labor for surplus value.”

 

While Revolutionary Brain disdains a governmental/religious union as described, importantly, it by no means rejects a religious orientation; indeed, such an orientation is posited as perhaps the most powerful promise for amelioration of our world. As proclaimed in Jaffe’s text “Sacrifice,” “the diseased earth can be cleansed solely by God’s grace.” Moreover, on an individual level, an unadulterated connection with a pure form of religion, devoid of sectarian discrimination and prescriptive worship, is championed, as seen in the text “Salvation Mountain,” with its simple yet powerful message “God is Love.”

Harold Jaffe’s book Revolutionary Brain is a brilliant and heartfelt cry for the restoration of humanity, a cry which is accompanied by a message of spiritual guidance from “Nature’s God.” While the book is scrupulous and thoroughgoing in its criticism of societal flaws, it is not subversive or nihilistic.  Rather its plea for new awareness and social amelioration is urgent and poignant, as seen clearly in this passage from “Weep”:

 

Weeping animals, plants and stones…traverse the benighted globe…

Climate change acknowledged and addressed.

Dehumanizing post-capitalism hacked, disempowered.

The invisible colored poor made visible.

The twisted made sound.

Enslaving technology disappeared.

                      

How long will that take?

Advertisement

On Harold Jaffe’s OD

Tags

docufiction, harold jaffe, OD

by Joseph D. Haske

Harold Jaffe refers to much of his recent work as “docufiction.” Texts, such as his latest OD, convey elements of multiple genres and mediums, including history, journalism, fiction and poetry. The very concept of docufiction, although contradictory in its essence, allows Jaffe to demonstrate to the reader how an apparent sense of authenticity and “truth” might be achieved by blurring these genre lines and by manipulating the perceived notion of historical accuracy. In this sense OD calls to mind Roland Barthes’ treatment of popular myth in his 1957 text Mythologies:

 

What I mean is that I cannot countenance the traditional belief which postulates a natural dichotomy between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a ‘freedom’ and the latter with a ‘vocation’ equally suitable for spiriting away or sublimating the actual limitations of their situation. What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth. (12)

 

Taking Barthes’ perspective on the condition of truth to another level, Jaffe’s docufiction operates both inside and outside of the conventionally accepted boundaries of history, genre and fact, calling into question the very notion of veracity while ultimately legitimizing an alternative concept of history.

 

Jaffe’s docufictional style, in its subversion of the traditional notions of genre, reflects this defiance of expectation by utilizing a form that is closer in spirit to a sort of free verse poetry than it is to a standard form of fiction. In fact, Jaffe’s style, structure and literary disposition are evocative of another forward-thinking American non-conformist, Walt Whitman. As with Whitman’s poetry, Jaffe’s work blurs genre boundaries and typically utilizes familiar mainstream vernacular, while still exploring more complex ideas and allusions. Docufiction proves gratifying on several basic levels, easily accessible to the average person, but one needs to dig deeper to encounter the true complexity and literary profundity of Jaffe’s work.  Texts like OD have much to offer both the academic and the lay reader.  Layers upon layers of figurative and philosophical depth are embedded into a minimalist, poetic, narrative aesthetic.

       

The tales in OD feature cultural icons bound to each other by their addictions and drug-related deaths.  Each subject acts as sort of benchmark figure to represent a moment in relatively recent history. Jaffe presents a vast assortment of characters and utilizes diverse strategies and perspectives to create the docufictional narratives for each well-known subject. Again, as Mythologies explores the notion of familiar societal tropes, Jaffe employs figures who are public icons, their lore, for the most part, familiar to the general population. Then, he adds his own unique spin to the stories. Barthes claims that:  

 

“Mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication: it is because all the materials of myth (whether pictorial or written) presuppose a signifying consciousness, that one can reason about them while discounting their substance” (110).

 

Perhaps Jaffe’s overdose mythology emerges from iconic figures at significant moments of our time precisely because the material of their lives has already been worked and reworked into a sort of collective mythology. Jaffe’s fabrications, of course, are not familiar, and the astute reader will marvel at his manipulation of “truth.”

          

OD  begins with “Bela Lugosi,” a treatment of the actor most famous for playing Dracula. The beginning of the text reads as if it were taken from a more traditional biography, stating many commonly putative facts about Lugosi. Then, there is a shift toward embellishment and historical liberties when the narrator states, “The preceding amounts to a commonly accepted summary of Bela Lugosi’s life and times. Another version, much more evocative, has to do with Lon Chaney” (14). The text then launches into a fantastical tale that involves Lon Chaney changing places with Bela Lugosi at the time of Chaney’s supposed death. In a sense, this sort of move is evocative of current internet trends such as Wikipedia, the populist encyclopedia, where essentially anyone can change and add information and almost anyone can dispute the “facts” listed on the site. With texts like “Bella Lugosi,” Jaffe calls into question the accepted notions of knowledge and makes light of the many ways in which authoritative sources are not as conclusive as they seem. The reader is prompted to simultaneously suspend disbelief and question authority.  One might begin to wonder, when reading OD, if the fabricated elements of these narratives might be true or if they are any less credible than the accepted biographical versions.  Jaffe reminds the reader that there is no absolute truth and we should apply a critical eye to all authorities and sources of information.

          

In “Poe,” Jaffe employs a first-person account, reminiscent of Poe’s own style, set in contemporary times. This fictionalized version of Edgar Allen Poe operates as a hybrid character, bringing in elements of the historical poet as well as characteristics of the narrator and, as stated at the end of the text, borrowing a brief portion of a scene from Walter Benjamin. The text employs temporal juxtaposition and a collective voice to show kinship between the subject and narrator while exhibiting the mythology of the tortured writer and misunderstood genius. Through the narrator, we experience Poe’s anguish made universal. The textual reincarnation of Poe, when facing a conflict with a physically intimidating functionary, reminds the reader that great talent is perpetually hindered by the incompetence that surrounds it. When the narrator sees “that the name on the tag pinned to [the aforementioned functionary’s] chest was Griswold,” an obvious allusion to Poe’s most notorious literary detractor, one realizes that all great writers continually face the harassment of inept peers as well as inner demons (54).

          

After working through various iconic singers, artists and writers, Jaffe examines cult mythology via the Jamestown incident before concluding the collection with a narrative on Sigmund Freud and the younger Lucian Freud which explores “the dialectic that vibrates:/Eros-Thanatos for Lucian Freud./Thanatos-Eros for Sigmund Freud” (121).

The cohesive thread binding this diverse collection is the examination of extraordinary people’s motivation to live/die and the correlation of these struggles with acts of creation, sex, talent and drugs. In the end, OD does propose answers regarding the subjects’ respective drug-related deaths, but ultimately leaves the reader with still more questions, as good literature should. Jaffe challenges accepted notions about the mythology of drug lore while simultaneously propagating said notions. Again, in Mythologies, Barthes says that,“[a]ncient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is the type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the ‘nature’ of things.” Jaffe, truly one of the great contemporary masters of the minimalist aesthetic, both proves and disproves this sentiment with OD.

On the Poetics of Maria Garcia Teutsch

Tags

Ilya Kaminsky, lyric poetry, Maria Garcia Teutsch

by Ilya Kaminsky

In her poems, Maria introduces us to the woman “who used to talk so much God-language”:

 

She traveled inside a hole.

She shouted and pointed

her gun of daisies.

 

Look as she becomes

smoke around the rooftiles.

She used to talk to god

at a pew of park benches.

 

The voices in her poems are direct and yet there is a certain mystery to this directness, this clarity of address. Clarity, the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish taught us, is the first mystery. She understands this too. Her poems can be devotional, or political or sexy, but there is always this sense of direct address, of clarity that isn’t all that simple, that contains a kind of tenderness, a kind of playfulness that is clear and mysterious at the same time.

 

Here are a few lines from one of her love poems:

 

“My fingernails are

are tattooed with the ink of hate mail”

 

“my hands touch moonlight on your cheek while you sleep.”

 

And, here is how a speaker in another of her love lyrics defines clarity for us:

 

Clarity

 

is your stomach

against

my spine in the bed of salt.

 

 

What kind of vision comes from a poet who speaks of clarity in a language that is thoroughly metaphorical?  What is her sense of the past? Of the past, she says —

 

“The past is a whore insisting you notice her red silk dress.”

 

Is it a memory, we wonder, or theater? Perhaps it is both, as the language of images does not just list the detail, but invites the reader to enact it:

 

“The past is your sister’s curly hair in summer sunlight, her body an arc, diving.

              (The past is the ripple from the splash you dip your toe in.)”

 

Thus, her poems about memory and events in her life aren’t at all confessional, just as her political poems aren’t at all polemic. Here are some lines from the piece, “An American Poet in a Muslim Country,” which she wrote recently while living abroad:

 

Fisherman finds human finger in belly of a fish—

 

fish finds silver hook

with lemon bait twist

in corner of mouth of a man who’s caught it–

who’s pointing

the tail

at whom?

 

And, here is another lyric from a different sequence on living abroad:

 

French politician wages war on “anti-white racism.”

 

Soldiers confused

over white flag.

With hands outstretched,

they surrender

while whistling untender

untended parts of speech.

 

This, as you can see, is a poetry that is willing to take a closer look at strange things and to make familiar things new and fresh again.  To find clarity in confusion, take playfulness as a given, and to be alive in each days, with full intensity. She does this because she follows the path of Cezanne, who said that painting from nature is not copying the object…it is materializing one’s sensations.

 

Maria Garcia Teutsch is a poet who looks for lyricism and sensual flavor in our daily moments, and makes poems that ride on the human nerve, like Frank O’Hara told us the poet must.