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Books – Experimental

In Praise of Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue:
An Exponential Dyad

As Ron Sukenick so aptly put it in his last book "Mosaic Man," Jews are both proto and posthuman. Adam Shechter and Daniel Y. Harris are possessed of that molten globe of fiery perdition that draws the brighter children of the tribe to the flame. Add poetry and oy! What can I say? Shechter and Harris have made another journey to the hellchamber of Jewish mystery/creation/death and came out in company, a big company that includes a lot of fried geniuses, but most if all they came out, and it’s good to see them.

— Andrei Codrescu, is the author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Princeton University Press) and edits Exquisite Corpseat

I can’t begin to comprehend/surround all that is transpiring here in this Harris/Shechter collaboration/fusion—I'll need other readings toward adequate bearings—but as Seine suicide Paul Celan hovers among these pages of prayerful heresies—"no Shabbos–always Shabbos"—I experience a language that wields "pen as scalpel," and I feel flayed but grateful for this awakening into wild inquiry/attack. By way of thousands of years of Jewish history & of their own lives slashed out in poems & prose pieces of mesmerizing power, even as they wonder if they've gone too far, these two visionaries/revisionists have made something powerful & new here, something of charismatic complication. Oi Vey, & mazel tov.

— William Heyen, author of Shoah Train: Poems, finalist for the National Book Award

Accolades

“Forward Fives: 2010 in Poetry”
Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue: A Exponential Dyad, picked as one of “the five most important Jewish poetry books of 2010” by the staff of The Jewish Daily Forward
December 28, 2010
“The Arty Semite,” the arts blog of The Jewish Daily Forward newspaper

Reviews of Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue: An Exponential Dyad

Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue: An Exponential Dyad
Daniel Y. Harris & Adam Shechter
Cervena Barva Press

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft
The Pedestal Magazine
Issue 62, February 21-April 21 (2011)
The Pedestal Magazine

One of the most challenging collections I have ever reviewed for The Pedestal Magazine was Unio Mystica, Daniel Y. Harris’s wide–eyed exploration of Judaism and the Kabala that closed my featured look at Cross Cultural Communications in April of last year. As I did at the outset of that review, I offer once again this disclaimer and caveat: I am not Jewish, nor have I studied the Kabala in depth. Further, I have only an undergraduate history student’s understanding and insight into such monumental events in Jewish history as the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, Spain’s Reconquista, and countless pogroms, enslavements, and massacres in Europe and Asia that culminated in the Holocaust. Compared to the wealth of historical, religious, cultural, and literary knowledge of Harris (a Master of Arts in Divinity) and Shechter (founder and, along with Harris, editor of The Blue Jew Yorker), I am at several obvious disadvantages. Thus, I beg the more educated (and Jewish!) reader’s patience and pardon for the mistakes I will probably/inevitably make in analyzing Harris’s and Shechter’s dynamic, educated, erudite, and ultimately overwhelming long poem.

I can, however, say with all confidence that Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue is not only a dynamic, educated, erudite, and overwhelming work, but also a major work, one that I think will be (or, at least, should be) counted among the most imaginative and provocative American long poems of the 2010s. In just 60 pages, the two poets take the reader on a whirlwind journey through Jewish history, the Hebrew alphabet, the culture of the Diaspora, the intricacies of familial relationships and poetic inspiration, and the very mind and body of God.

Our Virgils through this drama of eons are three. The first is Paul Celan, a Romanian Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor whose years in Auschwitz informed much of his work, including the notable poem “Todesfugue.” He was also profoundly influenced by the surrealist movement, a fact which can be seen in his hybridized language choices and quickly shifting imagery.

A brief digression now, but one I promise will provide a solid map for the esoteric terrain ahead. In researching for this review I, of course, read Wikipedia’s entry on Celan (while noting with bemusement Harris’s reference to the much–criticized free encyclopedia as the “obese child” of “the google monster”). In doing so I came across a quote from a speech about the state of the German language after the Holocaust that Celan gave when accepting a literature award from the city of Bremen. I reproduce it here, because I think this quote cuts to the heart of the efforts of our two remaining Virgils, Harris and Shechter, in Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue.

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.

While Harris and Shechter do not focus primarily or even predominantly upon the Holocaust, the language in their poem serves much this function. Language preserves Jewish culture, history, and religion from loss through its capacity to cycle through millennia and through its ability to bridge centuries. In one of the most interesting passages, for example, prophet, visionary, and excommunicant Nathan of Gaza speaks to a young (and somewhat bored) messiah named Shabbatai Tzvi, whose name plays upon that of kabbalist and later Islamic convert Shabbatai Zevi, whom Nathan proclaimed to be the messiah. In this excerpt, Nathan and Tzvi converse not only about the Kabala, but also about the collapse of the Shabbatean movement the two men founded. Note the ease with which Harris and Shechter here juggle not only Jewish mysticism, but also details from Zevi’s life (his imprisonment in the Castle at Abydos, for example) and the nature of time itself.

Nathan of Gaza

…

(To Tzvi)

The breastplate of your tract
is purged—acrostic formed by Torah
and backsliding bodies of demons.
The Sea of Reeds is a River of Dragons.

(To himself)

You think you’re a Lurianic
zelem? Try the butcher! The one who choked
on a leg of lamb, after eating nine borek.

(to Tzvi)

Left of the lower
golem, that is the black-purple
boils of tehiru, primordial man
was inflated by a demiurge—veiled
consort in arch and prepuce. You are imprisoned
for our good on aion in the Castle of Abydos.

Shabbatai Tzvi

Nathan, bro, lets not be too hard on ourselves
here. Don’t forget the dream. That was real
my man! I mean I think your mother must
have hidden your Zyprexa that morning,
but schizophrenics are genuine psychics just the same.

…

(Clearing his throat and getting serious)

Nathan, the fact of the matter is that they
used us, bro. Listen, I’m not saying that we
didn’t have good times. But they played us
for a couple of self-important jerks!

Man!!! We were the anti–psychotic medicine
for World Jewry in its completely destroyed
17th Century pogrom-ed out state. Where would
they be with out us? Do you hear me Nathan?

I am the Messiah!

Celan also believed that, following World War II, the German language in which he wrote needed to go through a change. In Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue, Harris and Shechter write in lively and ever–evolving English, to the limits of which they constantly strain. In this passage, for example, the poets attempt to describe the Tetragrammaton—that is, the four Hebrew letters that make up YHWH, or Yahweh, in English. This is an interesting feat, considering that those four letters—Yod, Heh, Vav (or Waw), and Heh—later became the Latinate Jehovah, or IHVH, in perhaps the ultimate transmigration and transformation of language.

In this passage, Celan learns of his mother’s death at the hands of the Nazis. This was a significant event in his life as it was his mother who taught him German, the language in which he would later write. Harris and Shechter symbolize this linguistic gift by the “deposit” of “a mummified Yod” in young Celan’s “tiny cupped hand.”

Here, Celan, as seen by Harris and Shechter, struggles not only with the contradiction between Semitic and Germanic language, but also with the ultimate meaning of language and the existence of God following and in the face of the Holocaust.

Paul Celan

Purified disquiet interned with idiom
at nadir’s retort, hollow
and hectic, my name
manshaped: words signal
expulsion with burnt bronchial

tubes—psaltar, in slots,
liquidates share, the copied
person pillorying since Eden.

Born into a thousand exiles,
dates are cancers—remove the amygdala,
yizkor of barbaric recall and undo birth:

Yahwhc lungs abetted by doxology,
never tissued. No writ. No gist.
No stock. No shoot.

Yod: return uber and sub to the bestiary.
Heh: return homunculus and dolt.
Vav: return Aleph to its rude cosmology.
Heh: return implode to stasis.

Uncreate.

As Celan struggles with the very prefixes that lead to this latest and worst attempt at exterminating the Jews—that is, the “above” and “below” in Nazi concepts such as “übermensch” and “subhuman”—Harris and Shechter struggle through the 21st Century’s own linguistic paradoxes, several of which have been brought about by the advent of the internet. The book is peppered with email exchanges between the two, in which they discuss not only their shared project and its theological and cultural ramifications, but also their family history; Harris’s grandfather Yves Oppert aided the French Resistance before being murdered by a Vichy policeman, while Shechter’s Brooklynite grandfather committed suicide after failing to live up to his ambitions. Inevitably, their communications and poetic ruminations pull them into the whirlwind history of Judaism and the Jewish people and bring them face to face with Celan himself in the poem’s enigmatic final lines.

Like Unio Mystica before it, Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue is not for the casual reader. Unless one is either highly educated in Jewish history or familiar with the Kabala, piecing through this dizzying and dense array of language will prove next to impossible without the aid of a few good research books and/or a good search engine. Nonetheless, it’s a journey that should be undertaken. Not only is this long poem innovative, thoughtful, disturbing, and sometimes hilarious, it’s also exciting. Harris and Shechter know how to play with language, how to break it, reshape it, and how to bring it to heel. Their journey through thousands of years of history and religious thought is nothing short of an epic.

Review by Jake Marmer*
Review entitled “The Messiah Cut–Up”
The Jewish Daily Forward
November 4, 2010
“The Arty Semite,” the arts blog of The Jewish Daily Forward newspaper
*Reprinted in Big Bridge, Volume #15, Spring 2011

Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week Jake Marmer writes about the surrealist dialogues of Adam Schechter and Daniel Y. Harris.

The family of Jewish Surrealists and Dadaists is extensive, ranging from Dada’s founding poet Tristan Tzara, to French filmmaker Nelly Kaplan, to American media artist Man Ray. This family has now experienced a seismic shift with the inclusion of two new members — Adam Shechter and Daniel Y. Harris, whose chapbook “Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue: An Exponential Dyad” was published by Cervena Barva Press earlier this year. The previous collaborative work of these two authors, “Seven Dead Kafkas and a Fork,” has been featured in Exquisite Corpse, the prestigious online journal of Surrealism, but this is their debut appearance in print.

The chapbook is a dialogue that exiles itself from easily identifiable goals and whose subject escapes specific plot lines. Perhaps, this work is an attempt to re–map the history of Jewish esoteric mythology, focusing on Messianic obsessions as well as a kaleidoscope of traumas — national, universal, metaphysical, and the authors’ own.

Here’s a segment, where Harris takes the voice of Paul Celan, the great Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor, who committed suicide by jumping into the Seine river, while Shechter responds as the Messiah:

Paul Celan

Bare signs and ciphers, fisherman’s bait — found
me ten days later. Do you remember
the Bug River, émigré historian
of dead mothers?
Flows the pneuma, the mail
piled up, students pinned to their benches
at the Ecole Normale — no one
to wear
Hölderlin’s head.
You swallowed
me too
late.

The Messiah

It was the red milk that
drained from their breasts, granite
Obliquely reverse—pure nausea
That drew me to the air.
I sensed, as I do
The needed gap
The textual hole
No tongue, no lips — you were always incinerated
and half way there — my most favored residue.
Really Celan, I told my Tzaddikim,
His stolid head will hang with your apples
Eyes empty of suppressed chronology
Feathers and leaves at his ears — in your Orchard.
And they laughed at the sunlight gelatin,
Their own turgid feet dismembered
Ornamenting my diametric mechanism
with the sudden vacuous shaft
that even breaks my concentration.

Paul Celan

Then jocular,
in league with the axis,
ruah’s doyen,
stilled by a grate of vowels — antic
yes-tones of no
with my rucksack of psalms.
Sinai lodestar.

The Messiah

Look for the anxiety calm
at the gouged crest — the Mosaic crust
in your eyelashes.
Sweat dust in your hands.

In this vein, the poets take turns addressing each other as various characters: Paul Celan and the Messiah, Shabbetai Tzvi and Nathan of Gaza, the Lubavitcher Rebbe and a Baal Teshuva. No matter what masks they don, however, or which settings they’re in, their two voices are distinct. Harris takes the tone of an overeducated madman, whose range of reference and highfalutin’ vocabulary is forbidding, yet, in its disorientation and piling–on, there’s a visceral music and, at times, irony. Shechter is basically a trickster, a shaman: one minute he erects edifices to Freud, Hassidic philosophy and poetic melancholy, and the next moment he emerges from behind them and laughingly shatters them into dust. Here’s a particularly memorable sampling of Shechter channeling:

God

If you have sex (even try) with your mother, I will kill you. I apologize for being so blunt, but creation can tire. Please do not overreact. In exchange for your mother’s body, I will mysticalize your hopelessness, and there will be literature. I assure you, the ultimate pleasure derived from this muted desperation will far outweigh the physical attainment of her. And don’t try anything stupid! Contrary to popular belief, I cannot be killed. That is a fallacy of literature’s hopeful byproduct, religion.

Having said all that, please reproduce.

Aside from the Surrealist mode, the dialogue occasionally veers into straightforward bits of autobiographical narrative. It is as if the dybbuks possessing the two authors take off for an impromptu vacation, and the two temporarily relieved writers converse in almost–human language.

Here’s Harris, speaking as himself:

Memory is a hunger artist, Adam, and my memory is the ruined prayer of Mnemosyne. As a boy of ten, freshly usurped from Paris, my entire physical presence was relegated to two eyes and large extended ears attached to a long thin torso. Our Brookline home was filled with books and imitation Louis XIV furniture. My father composed on his mother’s piano – serial chromaticism – I would later understand it to be, and my mother taught French. We lived a quiet, French–Jewish life in Boston’s colonial suburbia, save the physical violence dispensed upon me by my mother. Littered among biographies of Arnold Schoenberg and a vast collection of books from the Biblioteque de la Pleiade, were police reports and psychiatric evaluations. At twelve, the daughter of Yves Oppert, my mother, broke my arm. At thirteen, she broke my father’s collarbone.

Similarly, here are two pieces from Shechter:

I have always been a tower of words crashing down in parental trickery – at thirteen years old they bribed me out of my Bar Mitzvah. Instead we took a trip to Disney World. At Epcot Center, not within the borders of any one specific national recreation but in between the numinous synthetic signifiers, I became a Man – three Jews wandering, loud shameful arguing in the Goy Land of Fun – Fun for the whole Jewish family. That was my parsha.

At eighteen, I am sorry to say I believed I was Jesus and was in fact plagued by other out of control Jewish boy thoughts.

The thrust of trauma, drama, and disorientation is so harsh that catharsis does not exactly arrive, and yet somehow follows behind the imagistic onslaught at all times. Not surprisingly, the book ends with a melt–down, which, however is not devoid of hope, or at least irony: the ghost of Paul Celan appears, addressing Paul Celan himself, as well as Daniel and Adam, and advises all:

Eke’s davar to hunks of swill,
the dry eye, pink, blur–crust
to pilaster strip – sees
Lecha Dodi marry itself.