“If you are ‘in Exile’ this book as small as it is—is to say to everyone, without exception, that you are loved and can indeed RETURN,” Joseph Jarman opens his 1977 collection of poems, Black Case Volume I & II: Return from Exile, like the outcome of a jury’ s deliberation on an epic transgenerational trial and trail of trauma. He seems to understand that he’s accusing Black people of an escapism rooted in the theft and ownership of our bodies, that our fugitive proclivities are survival instincts, but he also knows the kind of self-sabotage we engender by neglecting our souls in the name of psychic or semantic or economic survival. Jarman puts our concepts of triumph over tyranny and well-being on trial in the work, insinuating that there’s no escaping our identification with the many selves we’d rather relinquish than face—“we talk / dead language / should chant secret songs to / bring blood to ourselves a whole.” He senses that our efforts at escapism are a nefarious form of self-loathing that festers—“we pray / as instructed-to die within,” bursts forth as shadow-wounds across the heart of the spirit, and must be overridden by a pride without hubris or what he once called as chant “humility in the light of the creator.”
While the concept of uncontested return to a benevolent source sounds nice or copacetic theoretically, in practice, when you have to free yourself from chattel slavery and resist that naive but seductive hope of reunion with the continent or circumstance that sold you into it, the fast-twitch muscles of escape and perpetual fluency in points of departure are so toned they turn into our muse, our music, and longing for return is overcome by the perpertual absconce that we make of daily life through the music. Jarman’s book proceeds to enact a crime of its own; it murders its own ego and slays the forms it would have used to escape itself: “there is no tomorrow / no now no yes…the other jumped from a window / at cook county jail / i / play music / remembering.” We either become zombies or change form(s), the poems instruct. Jarman plays the trickster god here and fools us into loving what we are by placing all skulls on the altar, he leaves the choice of being joyless and futureless vessels of despair or using music to access blood memory and a semblace of reprieve as he testifies he is doing actively, as method. A carnival of runners come back for their flowering eyes and find their cryptic prayers in Jarman’s poems, which light the subtle roads he names home to the tone science of endless becoming he insinuates. “music / moving through me like ‘Sweet Movie,’” he dances.
But what about the author’s exilic proclivities? Jarman is a Shinshu Buddhist priest, ordained and everything; he is a jazz musician, multi-instrumentalist—drums, flute, bells, woodwinds, saxophone, clarinet, voice; he is a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago (AEC), a member of the souls loved by nature. He reinvents his face in white and blue war paint for shows and rehearsals and lets his reddest blood flood the stage as song and psalm during rituals of live performance. When he encourages reconciliation in his poetry, he is speaking to himselves, his nexus or crossroads, his angels and devils joined in the hinterland where all of his identities find one common mirror and make an ego and a subconscious that wants them to run, one by one, like madmen into the abyss of his gifts and master that fearless dissolution—“we pray / as instructed-to die within.” He refuses.
Jarman is a soul guide of mine in these ways. The first song I remember hearing of his is called “Black Paladins,” which begins with his searing, ruthless recitation of the Henry Dumas poem of the same name (“Saba: Black Paladins”): “We shall be riding dragons in those days / black unicorns challenging the eagle…in those days / we shall be terrible.” We all love threats disguised as promises, all of us exiles sidling our return like wannabe gangsters of the dream. The poem made me aware of a fantasy I didn’t know I had, I didn’t know I needed. I didn’t know I longed to be terrible, meaning to turn the earth over, to make things tremble in the fire of my recovered eyes. Jarman’s intent, unwavering voice, the way it roiled in its role as announcer of the odd Black future, reminded me that I was in exile from my terribleness, that I had to return even in the risk of parting with all polite poetics. The fact that he could recite a poem with that much nearly fascist beauty and then accompany it himself on saxophone and triangle in a mask, after meditation, after and during an endless shadowboxing session with the demented, unrelenting, sublime—this undaunted ability of his, to contain so many frequencies at once, places him among a handful of Black spirits who compelled me to reexamine the capacity of the human being, and to abolish preconceived and false notions of genre in the arts. What each spirit that inspires this in me has in common is a secret love for poetry, backed by a poetry practice hidden beneath other forms as fulcrum and haunt. These spirits are not trying to be poets for the obscure prestige of those gleaming margins of unhinged song. Rather, spirits like Jarman compose poems in a fury beyond scripture, as true griots. Poems as self-made countermyths are the blueprint for their enduring the West intact, not dead within. And though it could appear to be out of some diffuse shame that the poetry by these heroic griot spirits is hidden or unannounced, it’s the opposite—the clandestineness is to protect the sacred nature the form carries for them, or what Sun Ra deemed when describing poetry “the ultimate in things.” Jarman’s instructions for how to return from exile come as poems because he rightfully expects that only those ready for the epic terrors and triumphs of that return will encounter his map—its aura is safe and intentional that way. His liberated verbal grammar then enters the music and gives it the atmosphere of infinite redemption, like moods themselves had been exiled from the sound mirror and are now invited back in vessels such as him.
While a graduate student at Columbia and always looking for new adventures, I visited trombonist and composer George Lewis’ s office on campus. Actually, I slipped a copy of my first book of poems under the door with a note and my email address. We met to discuss jazz and poetics and then he sent me Black Case Volume I & II: Return from Exile. This was after I had heard the recording of the Henry Dumas piece on Jarman’s album. I asked George where I might find Jarman for an interview, to discuss helping him reissue his poems, and maybe a new volume if he had one. George smiled with the surprise he would divulge, informing me that Jarman was running a Buddhist association in Brooklyn and could be reached there without a doubt. He was also an ordained aikido instructor. The sublime juxtaposition sat in my solar plexus grinning and I didn’t want to pierce the legend with any hunting. Serendipity had already done its work and given me the threat of dragons and triumphant terribleness as permission, as earth angel that Jarman is and was at a moment when I was in the early stages of grappling with the almost mischievous integrity of closet poets in the jazz world. The improvisers I had longed for all throughout my indoctrination in Western poetic forms had been limited to pamphlets slipped into out-of-print records inked in the language of return from exile. If you didn’ t align with that wavelength somehow, you might never know about this alternate dimension of the endless Black renaissance. I was almost upset, that’ s how inspired I was to learn about Jarman and his unknown instructions for our eternal return. I needed him, and there he was like the ghost his poetry promises, like the jubilant terror he borrows from Dumas. It was terrible, beautiful, to be leapt at by the panther of formlessness and pure content after years of the worming iambic trick’ s parasitic approach.
The fact that Jarman semi-retired from jazz to life as a devout Buddhist in Brooklyn of all places just gives his idyllic contradictions the soft edge of playfulness. He had to know this was crazy and a dreamscape, a forced exile of his own. He surely understood that all songs are crazy if they are to enter truth’s tyranny. He understood that to be lucid he had to speak in the tongues of songs and master several forms of meditation, of generative silence and renewed sense of interval. He also understood that New York City is no place for peace and vows of asceticism. In a way he was there as an exile, inspiring his own return to placelessness, which is different from displacement. As in his art so in his life, the image and the title didn’t matter; he was practicing, he was rehearsing for something larger than technique, or nation-state, or regional aesthetic hegemony; he sought the level of wholeness and reconciliation with self that departs to witness itself, that needs to switch perspectives fluidly in order to remain charged enough to embody an evolved, electric spirit.
A few years after these incipient encounters with Jarman, years of close listening to his work, I printed the PDF of Black Case that George Lewis had sent to bring to a meeting for a series of events I would be curating at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The series deals with exilic forms rooted in collective improvisation and so-called jazz, and that radicalism of the exile/return binary when deployed to reappropriate lost or stolen forms. It isn’t only that we are invited to return eternally, it’s that we come back riding these dragons resolute, ravished, terrible. I intended to spearhead the series with Jarman and a look at his poetry and music, as well as that of Henry Dumas, to render a collaboration between them in mythic ensemble time, an extension of the return always owed to Dumas, a poet killed by the NYPD at the height of his powers, and Jarman, who was then still living as a devoted Shinshu Buddhist in Brooklyn as far as I knew. When I got home from that meeting, it was to the news that Joseph Jarman had died that day. That is the kind of rhythm one’s aura possesses when it’s as in tune as his. The message is always galvanized, on time and in touch with those who are ready for it, who will walk through the fire of his complex of ego deaths to reach the everlasting word, the trembling terror of true self-actualization for we who the world has attempted to blind to our own sense of self and of what being and creating mean—not what they represent but what creative energy is meant to accomplish in our bodies, minds, souls, spirits. “we were speaking of the revolution,” Jarman promised. “we must fix ourselves / for the event.”
I needed to learn of Jarman’s versatility to be reminded that the over-merchandising of creative work is the first negation and narrowing of what’s possible in the work. I needed to be reminded of why AEC and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians function as collectives, rebel chords refusing to forfeit control of their music, performance, rehearsal, and composition styles. That level of experimentation demanded its own territory to protect the individual improvisers and their legacy as a movement. Sun Ra did this, Amiri Baraka did this, anyone Black who wanted to create on her own terms formed a collective and the blueprint for a depth of practice too invigorating to be infiltrated by commercialization. The success of these collectives was in effect their return from exile, their demand that we, whether admirers, spectators, or detractors, meet them in their language, on their terms, or not at all. You can leave, was always the subtext of their statements. They reversed the exile, now you can go somewhere else. Joseph Jarman never sold out, never left his spirit-home. In fact, he delved deeper and deeper into the Buddhist principle of right livelihood. He strived to unite mind, body, and spirit, and to make the music as natural as breathing itself, an organic extension of his lifestyle rather than fodder for an anointed role as Black entertainer. Jarman’s whole life was a ritual, a perfect spell, down to the final day on this plane when he sent us his instructions as inaudible whispers on the wind of the collective we must now form to protect our music from the hacks of commercialism and the deliberate exiles and alienations of genre-ism. Bending the rules can only take you so far before you finally have to break and nearly slaughter them with your own inventions and the help of universal law, universal consciousness.
Joseph Jarman’s life succeeded in the tender slaughter of anything that might taint his sincerity, and now we are in those days he and Dumas foreshadowed, we are riding dragons, we are ready in our terribleness to return from exile in masks en masse, and to do whatever feels right when we get back with ourselves, when we get together, whatever “lay[s] the high white dome to seige,” as the chant continues, and what ensures, as a poem of Jarman’s invites, “that the vampire of the hinder / worlds and those who / seek to become them / suffer not the faith of / existence but merge / into the strength of OM.” Jarman’s proposed return was in no way unscientific or maudlin; he endorsed utter resonance with a force beyond the ego, one that the blind sound treaty could not help but birth. Joseph Jarman shows us man as ritual, as demigod, as proof that improvisation is rescue from the exilic mode that Western art practice would like to enforce, the noble path toward our terribleness, which through him we amplify, applaud, unburden. He promises the end of dread: because of him I no longer dread the dragon, I no longer hesitate to ride. And I no longer limit tenderness to empathy—vengeance can be tender too. We can avenge him with poems “with hooves that kick clouds / fire eaters from the sun” and that can be right effort, right concentration, honor, love. When we allow ourselves to be led by our own sense of grammar, our own concepts of where things belong in relation to one another, we can get back to everything ecstatic and noble, our return is inevitable. “can our hearts stand so much love, so much longing?”