Jake Berry and Wayne Sides, Silence and the Hammer

(26 Duotone black and white art print photographs with poetry, 8" x 8" Perfect Bound, 9th Street Laboratories, 2001)

Jack Foley

The great French critic André Bazin skillfully argued for the ineluctable “reality” of the photographic image. “A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model,” Bazin asserts in What is Cinema?,

but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith...The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it...[P]hotography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time...The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities.

The photograph, Bazin insists, is “an hallucination that is also a fact.”

Bazin’s sense of the “reality” of the photographic image-- “The photographic image is the object itself”--is an important aspect of our response to photographs: This is how my father looked on this day in 1922. Yet, at the same time, from its very beginnings, photography has also struggled against this “realism,” attempting to create “an hallucination” that is not a fact but a dream.

Reading through Silence and the Hammer, the extraordinary collaboration between photographer Wayne Sides and poet Jake Berry, I found myself thinking of André Bazin--with his remarks about “realism”--and of the third-century Neoplatonic philosopher, Plotinus. “The life of true happiness is not a thing of mixture,” Plotinus writes in his First Ennead:

Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and to possess happiness draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by That.
         He can care for no other Term than That: all else he will attend to only as he might change his residence, not in expectation of any increase to his settled felicity, but simply in a reasonable attention to the differing conditions surrounding him as he lives here or there.
         He will give to the body all that he sees to be useful and possible, but he himself remains a member of another order....

I wanted to make the idle relics speak, but when they spoke, they spoke only words and words only distance us from what they speak. And in that distance lies everything holy. Its landscape is barren and sunless and completely invisible, yet it persists, pressing beyond its limitations, pushing the tongue forward. When at last the tongue fails silence and speaks that entire landscape is banished and disappears. Poetry is the only language that doesn’t kill. Only poetry defies the word’s power and destroys words at their point of origin.

Berry’s prose poem suggests the elegiac power of words, which “distance us from what they speak.” Projecting us towards the object, they simultaneously remove us from it--creating a sense of both presence and absence, as in William Carlos Williams’ famous “Red Wheelbarrow” poem. This elegiac power of words is also the elegiac power of the photograph, which creates precisely the same effect.

Yet Berry’s text--which specifies “relics” rather than “images”--goes beyond the assertion of presence and absence and insists that “in that distance lies everything holy.” It is precisely in the space between us and the object that “holiness”--one might suggest “mythic consciousness” as well--exists. When the poet’s “tongue” “fails silence”--a remarkable way of referring to “speech”--the barren landscape of the real is suddenly transformed. “Poetry,” Berry asserts, “is the only language that doesn’t kill. Only poetry defies the word’s power and destroys words at their point of origin.”

Words annihilate objects, yet the poetic word creates a construct which transforms the nature of language--allowing things to live rather than die. The poetic word frees us from the necessity to name and in so doing is able to take on the autonomy and power of the icon, which in turn frees objects from their connection to the mundane. The photograph accompanying this text shows, in soft focus, what appears to be a sleeping child. To the left of the child is a sharply-defined, elaborate crucifix and a star. The text longs to give these objects the power of the sacred. In the photograph the crucifix and the star are only “things” someone has placed on a wall--yet their sharpness of definition separates them from the sleeping child: the “things” seem realer than the child. Both text and photograph struggle to turn the objects we see--mere “images”--into “symbol,” to move us outside the human world and arrive at the realm of the sacred. Both the crucifix and the star are nothing but objects until poetic language restores them to their status as pure emblem. The child’s sleep perhaps suggests that the objects near him are the product of a dream he is experiencing. In any case, “things” found in this world become the shimmering gateway to “another order.” In their collaboration Berry and Sides cause us to experience the simultaneous confusion and clarity of the intersection point between worlds--which is, indeed, also the significance of the crucifix: Christ’s body is present but dead; his living spirit is elsewhere yet radiating out to us. The crucifix, like the texts and images of Silence and the Hammer, embodies the moment of the intersection between worlds.

These remarks about a single page of Silence and the Hammer can only suggest the richness of this collaboration. Sides’ photographs, whether “realistic” or “imaginative,” are haunting throughout; Berry’s language is always evocative rather than descriptive yet maintains enough descriptive elements to allow us to read the text with ease. Though never “mimetic,” this poet’s language is never “difficult.” This is his opening passage:

In those days the old men used to speak in circles. They measured their lives in acres of dust. Abandoned by renegade children and coal-eyed wives, they continued the story alone. So the moon held its rain and rats kept to the thickets and the branches of Eden grew heavier still.

This combination of the evocative with the familiar is a remarkable balancing act, and it comes at a time when one of the issues of the avant-garde is whether one can read the book at all. Jim Leftwich’s Doubt begins,

Constructs him against long views among differences to say that aside from the poetry of nature a ritual poem relies on voice to divulge every aspect of admitted proof. Because the lyrical gamut is smaller than the beyond, the ammunition of rejection is protracted in the grace of expressive ardor, but it’s no less tentative than itself. When within itself as a broth of thesis through statements thus historical, a shortage of ambiguous speech belies a sense of statement as a testament of heresy or high impermanence for the individual process of equivalence everted. However strong a case might be made for the empathy of form, a pathetic silence turns the familiar melody into a series of vowels insistent upon the demands of a confessional noun. A ventriloquistic and narcissistic strangeness, inclusive of transcendent banality, considered as covert form herself, tombs the said salvific then weather into a joke,

and goes on in that way for nearly 600 pages. Doubt is both fascinating and maddening—one “doubts” in all directions—but it can hardly be said to be easy to read. Indeed, Leftwich’s book is a kind of attack on the reader, a little like Baudelaire’s “hypocrite reader, my semblance, my brother.” Leftwich is saying, “You like books? Try this!” No one who has read Leftwich is likely to have any problems with John Ashbery. Berry’s text remains in touch with the deep multiplicities of a book like Leftwich’s but simultaneously maintains itself in a relatively reader-friendly stance. Leftwich’s text is almost entirely made up of problematical assertions; Berry is careful to balance assertions with stories.

The opening image of Silence and the Hammer is of skyscrapers, flattened out by the two-dimensional photograph so that they appear to be piling up against one another. There are no human figures anywhere, and the skyscrapers’ windows appear to be black holes leading nowhere. Puffs of smoke are visible and, above everything, what appears to be a storm sky. The image is at once eerie and terrifying--especially after the events of 9/11. One thinks of Ginsberg’s “Moloch.” As we move through the book, we see much rubble--a number of “waste lands.” Berry comments,

The world is a rough silence on the brink of collapse. It smells of lassitude and pity. There is no one left alive to quench its persistence so we maim its frail keepers until they lash out and vanish. Its record in film lies in great wheels disintegrating at the bottom of a sea of acid. Strange creatures arrive to feed on its ruin and drink the incandescence of fear. At midnight the sea explodes and the world almost remembers its voice.

It is in this fallen, fearful world that everything takes place. Yet, as Berry comments later, “Even in darkness there is a movement of shadows.” In the midst of the darkness a mysterious anima figure appears, a woman with “rich and vacant eyes that spellbind cities with the intimate noise of a neural psalm.” This muse figure offers the speaker a momentary respite from his suffering: “She is rising into the sun and taking the darkness away.” The next page has no text but features an image of the Virgin Mary.

Yet the world and suffering return. Indeed, suffering becomes a kind of music: “At that very moment he understood what he must do. He’d heard a message he felt compelled to deliver--something like music that stormed through his head every time he was alone, something like a chorus of moans.” Or, even more strikingly,

Behind the door he shoves the glass a little further into his leg and releases a scream that’s half laughter? He knows what metal can do.

The world is fallen, darkened--often in Sides’ images it is a cluttered, vacant lot--yet in the midst of the world something of “another order” appears. (In one of Sides’ images, this “something” is an elephant!) There is “no wind, no voice,” writes Berry, but there is “a thin crescent hovering, calling us out of ourselves.” It is a moment of grace, a moment suffused with the holy: “In that space one becomes a membrane stretched across the abyss.”

The book ends with an image of the darkened tide. Berry’s text is,

At last the sea again, resolute and dark. The exiles are placed into small boats garlanded with white flowers. The tide takes them out, invisible, silent and faithless, lost with the stars at dawn.

Silence and the Hammer is an enormously haunting evocation of the world as a veil of tears and of the momentary flashes that take us out of the world. Berry and Sides have worked together for many years and have a deep understanding of each other’s creative processes. The energy that bursts from every page is an indication of how intimate and mutually revelatory word and image can be.

This book will, I suspect, not be easy to find, so I want to indicate how it can be bought. It makes a wonderful Solstice gift. (In a way the book is primarily an evocation of the moment of Solstice--a moment when the year is at its darkest time and when light must be coaxed to return.) You can buy a signed edition of Silence and the Hammer by sending $20, check or money order, to

Ninth Street Laboratories  
P.O. Box 3395
Florence, Al 35630.

And there is more. For $30 you can get, in addition to the signed edition, a wonderful CD produced by Berry and Sides as “The Ascension Brothers.” These two men have made a number of fascinating, experimental CDs; the one accompanying Silence and the Hammer is no exception. Berry is a wonderful reader of his work and, together, he and Sides create a perfect sonic web of accompaniment to his voice. If your understanding of “Spoken Word” is limited to the “Slam” phenomenon, this CD will be a revelation. Indeed, it will be a revelation in any case. Berry’s recitation is followed by a purely instrumental meditation on the material. Silence and the Hammer is a extraordinary book--an affordable “artists’ book.” The entire project is, in Berry’s phrase, a “rendering of the impossible.”

Jack Foley