Yosefa Raz Interviews David Brazil

For the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, Yosefa Raz interviews David Brazil, author of Holy Ghost (City Lights, 2017). "We decided to frame our conversation (now going back and forth between Oakland and Tel-Aviv, where I now live)," writes Raz, "by the somewhat arbitrary temporality of the omer counting. Omer in Hebrew is a measure for counting wheat, and the omer signifies the 49 days counted between Passover and Shavuot (or roughly, Easter and Pentecost), the time between the barley harvest and the wheat harvest — and in ritual-memory-time, the time between the Exodus from Egypt and the reception of the Torah at Sinai." An excerpt:

I’m really in love with the line from Frank O’Hara poem: “such little things have to be established in the morning / after the big things of the night.” There is a lot of establishment of little things in the morning in your book, getting up again after all the spiritual or political upheavals. I think I’ll do a bit of divination to get me started by opening your book at random. Okay, so, “My Wife, Her Phone:”

My wife she slept
as in a frieze

and dreamt a dream
she could not seize 

and there beneath 
her cover lay

in still and peace 
for just this day

and in that room 
we called our own

came slight sonatas
from the phone

I like that you’ve managed to situate the phone within myth, within spiritual life…there is something humble about this ceaseless work (you write earlier) “Any bit of tune will do/ to work this opening of the heart.”

It reminds me of how right outside my house in Oakland, the summer before Occupy, you spotted some words etched into cement: New Egypt.  Then my house became the “New Egypt” campus for our study: German for Kafka, Minor Prophets. Office-hours: Now-Time.

It’s very gratifying to me that you approach Holy Ghost with bibliomancy, since the book was designed to be used in that way. What is there to say about the phone? A kabbalist of my acquaintance, with a young son named after the angel of healing, spoke almost despairingly about the future available for his child and said, “I mean … the phones.” He could have spoken about nuclear war, environmental devastation, proto-fascism — but it was the phones.

In your quotation from “Holy Ghost Tune,” you dropped part of the line: “Any bit of tune will do / to work this work of opening the heart” — a syntax whose internal accusative strikes me as pretty Semitic and therefore a residue of our study together.  Is there really no fixed grammatical description for the phenomenon of the emphatic infinitive followed by finite verb?  I guess I always call it the “dying he shall die” construction.

I guess “New Egypt” is still there in the concrete, unless they’ve repaved the driveway.  There’s something connected with recognizing what’s already there as our prophetic basis — we had to see, say, and share what had already been put in place for the campus to become true, for a moment anyway.

I always have to pray in the morning, these days, as my basis for anything else. As soon as I open my eyes I say the shema, like it says in Berakot.

Read the full conversation here.