When he was in his early twenties and living in lower Manhattan in 1974, Richard Hell founded the band Television with Tom Verlaine, a friend from high school. He eventually split up with Verlaine and created the Heartbreakers, along with Johnny Thunders, the well-known guitarist who had played with the New York Dolls. Later, he formed Richard Hell and the Voidoids, whose 1977 album, “Blank Generation,” is considered one of the essential punk rock albums. I remember when I first heard “Blank Generation.” It was in my parent’s basement where the stereo was located, and my older brother had the record. I was 19 years old. This wasn’t “God save the Queen” or “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.” Hell’s lyrics were literary and dealt with intense personal emotions, so I can see how Lucy Sante said everybody knew he was a poet back then in the late 70s. Hell can bring in many subjects, from science, art, poetry, and fiction in his essays and poems and in doing so exhibit the individuality of his thought. He is poet who cares about the whole Art, not just poetry. And throughout What Just Happened, Richard Hell grapples with growing old, the nature of consciousness, memory, sleep and the nature of poetry. The book also includes several of Christopher Wool’s drawings; they are scribbles that remind me in a sense of Cy Twombly’s work, on which we see numbers and letters, including one where the personal pronoun “I” is in the center; in this drawing I imagine the scribble as the chaos of the world and the centered “I” suggests man’s attempt to order himself amidst confusion. Perhaps, too, this “I” was born of chaos.
I remember going out to the clubs in NYC in the late 80s and 90s, dancing all night, drinking way too much, and then wandering the New York city streets at dawn with my friends on my way home to New Jersey. I remember buying records at Tower in New York and other record shops in Jersey and the excitement of coming home and playing them. I remember pickups in bars, talking all night on the phone; I remember waking up in a friend’s apartment many times with a splitting headache after a night out; all the sex, all the relationships: you’re a teenager and then suddenly you turn 50, what just happened? Where did all the time go? You realize you’re getting older and other things take priority over going out all night.
The suffering of being human in a world where there is no guarantee of Paradise, or no observable order in the immense cosmos, is only made more difficult by remembering our past. In “Advanced Age,” Hell writes “Sure, much worthwhile can still be done / but there’s a natural tendency to focus / on organizing and tying / up old loose ends, and to /re-assess one’s past behavior / in light of knowing there’s scarce, if any / chance left that it’ll improve. /I never before tended much / to dwell on my past. It’s awful / to realize that one can no longer assume /the bad behavior was aberrant. / I’m not the person I thought I was.” Remembering the past exposes us to the realization that we are vulnerable in our human skin before the vast indifferent world. And what is the part of free will in all this? Hell quotes Nerval, whom he also translated, “I do not ask of God that he should change anything in events themselves, but that he should change me in regard to things, so that I might have the power to create my own universe about me, to govern my own dreams instead of enduring them.” But Hell will also realize that control is not possible. He quotes Einstein: “My own career was undoubtedly determined, not by my own will but by various factors over which I have no control.”
Richard Hell, who has seen many things and experienced love and loss, the pain of being, has felt the overwhelming silence that greets one at night. At times he is at war with himself, but it is a war he cannot win. Time is against him. Memories flood his mind, as if he is unable to control the feelings of regret and of loss:
I have pity (and sorrow) for the person I’ve been, and dread and regret and fear and pain for how I’ve behaved towards others. But it’s like having been assigned a role, a story, because that’s the mind’s nature. I had and did a lot and I didn’t have or do a lot. But the striving does seem poignant now that it’s over, because none of it had any meaning and I usually thought it did, no matter how I might assume otherwise at times. It was all uncontrollable drives that have shifted and altered over time till there’s not much left, and that’s all.
He is occasionally subject to self-loathing when he remembers some his past actions; in the 28th fragment Hell writes: “I felt the process of going crazy when I was standing at the sink this morning. I was hating myself so much, hating what I’ve done to people, abandoning them, that I suddenly felt this wave of fear that people were trying to kill me—roots paranoia. I could feel how paranoia, at least in some cases, is rooted in self-loathing and guilt. I could feel it tip into insanity.” Such extreme psychological states and emotional honesty is one aspect of Hell’s poetry.
In these poems, Hell goes rounds with the ghosts of the past. There’s no winner and no loser in this game, just the night and the silence to greet the poet alone with his memories:
What if all that’s left is a form of nostalgia: a longing for a greater degree of innocence? It feels something like that sometimes now, that the only material I have is the past—not the past itself actually, but me in a previous state—when I still believed there was something realistically to aspire to. When I assumed I was pure enough to achieve something.
Desire often leads to a sense of failure, loss. Can we ever get what we really want? What does it mean to have risked everything? We come back to ourselves, to our masks, and are grounded again, put in our place. And perhaps, as Hell writes in “It’s Easy to Forget,” “It’s easy to forget that one has ever done anything, which in a sense is true, one hasn’t, and just as well, but it gets frustrating to start from square one over and over. I guess that’s the sense in which life is eternal though.” Did our choices effect anything? At times it really seems like it did, or we tell ourselves this. Our memories are not reliable though we want them to be.
Ultimately, we are faced with the unknown, things we can’t explain, or even after many years we find it’s hard to come terms with our past as we remember an ex-lover we might have wronged or a friend we abandoned for no good reason. Hell observes about himself: “I’m not innocent enough to find clouds and trees beautiful anymore. Maybe the ocean, but that’s not just “beauty,” it’s impenetrability.” Maybe we cared too much about what other people thought in the past. Too wrapped up in selves to see what the other person meant to us or was feeling. We are no longer teenagers; our innocence is lost. And what of beauty? Just the ocean before in all its vastness, signifying nothing.
And, about the nature of poetry, Hell writes: “Another insight in trying to figure out how to write a good poem was that it’s the poet’s duty not to understand, because we don’t and can’t, and to pretend otherwise is to eliminate poetry. The part of the mind that understands excludes it. We don’t know anything.” Even the rate at which the body completely changes is faster than the eye can see or remember. Change appears slow as we look at ourselves in the mirror each day, but rapid at the molecular level. Change is deceptive like old photographs. The film image we see on a screen is the result of light passing through a projector: a construction. And our sense of time is subjective, despite the movement of the clock hands. Hell writes: “The older I get the less there seems to be a world. Things arrive and depart from the apparent.”
Life is not composed of a discrete series of events in time. But, rather, according to Henri Bergson, we experience a discontinuous succession of heterogeneous psychical states, all leading to a provisional unity, which discloses further multiplicities and is not static. Hell writes: “it all simply modulates incomprehensibly.” According to Parmenides, everything that is coming into being is provisional and returns to non-being. For Hell, “One just has to hope one’s been born into a culture that might permit networks of thought (minds) that are interesting and have some capacity to endure.” Faced with change and the mutation of the culture, Hell, like a philosopher-poet, hopes that something remains, something of the interesting ideas produced in the culture one is a part of. Hell is also interested in consciousness and being. Animals are not self-conscious about themselves. They act on instinct unlike man, who is often plagued by doubt when he attempts to make sense of his world. In “A Being” Hell observes about a wild turkey that it was in a way like him, “but better / for not being / able to need to know it.” When man saw himself in the mirror, says Lacan, all the trouble started. We become consciousness of our separation from things and people in the world. In “Psychal Anecdotes or Cycle Annie (‘I heard her call my name’),” Hell asks:
How much does the world
have in common with the rest
of the universe? Is it its expression
or its affliction? I guess what I want
to know is whether a paradise where
dualities cease to be
is possible or does
consciousness eliminate the possibility?
Explaining consciousness has vexed scientists and philosophers for a long time, and with the introduction of neuroscience, the problem has become even more complex. The American quantum physicist, John Archibald Wheeler, questioned whether life and the mind are irrelevant to the structure of the universe, or central to it. He originated the idea of a “participatory,” conscious universe, a universe in which we are co-creators; this replaced the accepted idea of an “out there” which is distinct from us. Wheeler derived this idea from an unusual aspect of quantum physics: before an observation is made, a subatomic particle exists in several states, simultaneously, but once the particle is observed, it instantaneously collapses into a single position.
But Physicists have not solved the essential problem of Gravity, and so no Unified Law of Physics exists. Randomness is a better guess to explain the world than any regularity of patterns. So as hard as we look, we can’t clearly see the entire picture. Some things can exist and be seen; others cannot and any attempt to represent them will lead to failure. Call what cannot be seen heaven, the invisible or the infinite or finally, God but language falls short of any satisfactory word. We literally can’t know: “Oh, dear God /thank you for being /something other/ than what you are is /all I can say, and I don’t /mean maybe.” God is like an eternal blind spot on the mind; God exists or not. As Hell suggests, God manifests as something else.
Dreams are also an integral part of life. It is said that if we don’t dream, we die. In his seminal essay “Falling Asleep” Richard Hell evokes dreams as the state of consciousness or rather unconsciousness, that is a more accurate portrait of what it means to live: “One’s inner being is a dream. All is a dream. Life is a dream. This is not to trivialize it: there is pain and “injustice” and matters of great human importance in dreams too; it’s just that we regard dreams as unreal: no, dreams are where we’re exposed most directly to reality, the bending of things through us, the junction of us and what is.” Furthermore, “Death is as real as life and therefore everything is being. A screwy thing about the whole discussion of the juncture of life and death, is that in another sense it’s the material cosmos which is immortal, while we, supposedly alive, die.” But also:
The erosion that comes with age of certain mental faculties is like entering a more dreamlike state, as if you’re gradually increasing your resemblance to the inanimate, where chance and physics, rather than any illusory will, are clearly the only actors. One can catch one’s mind behaving the way dreams develop: when one has just been thinking of something and then momentarily gotten distracted and then can remember what had been on one’s mind but it’s a mistaken memory that can have been triggered by any quality of the thing or word(s) for the thing one had in mind; for instance, say one had been thinking of a briefcase, the misremembered item could be a briar case or a saddle or a court date or etc.
Dreams are a valid form of expression, undercutting the need for linear narrative to determine every aspect of our lives; the poetic language of dreams is unstable, subject to fluctuation, change and our identities are also subject to disorientation, from which state emerges the freedom to not have to assume the daily role that society demands. Finally, Hell writes: “I’m surprised to find that when I’m feeling fear, worthlessness, self-disgust, which has always happened and is possibly worse now that I am almost seventy, remembering that I’m dreaming and a dream, the reconciliation of consciousness and the inanimate, of human birth and death relieves me of despair. A good epitaph would be “Out of Control.” Mmmm. The drowsy feeling the warm milk brings.” Hell finally comes to provisional terms with growing older but the final word of the book in the 88th fragment is “foreshadowing.” What is the future event being suggested? Is it death? In any case, it is open-ended. We can literally not know the future. And that’s why life remains mysterious and open to a mosaic of possibilities.
Throughout What Just Happened Richard Hell is as adept at speaking about Einstein as he is Chekhov or de Kooning. This review would have been twice as long if I had spoken about all the references in the poems which are there not as padding, or pretension, but as disparate elements that Hell forges in the furnace of his thought which produces a poem or essay. In fragment 61 Hell writes: “In a way, some of the strength of my writing about art/movies/books comes from my not having an education, because I have to find out for myself what’s interesting and why—for instance my piece on Bresson and my piece on Picabia, which are about the experience of being educated by the art itself … (I remember how exciting it was to suddenly notice when looking at a Cézanne in the Met that this is where Cubism came from. I’d had no idea before that … It wouldn’t have been the same if I learned it from another party.)” For this reason, Hell is an independent thinker in poetry. This is why his poetry is like no other you’ll encounter any time soon. Pick up a copy of What Just Happened. It’s the real thing.
What Just Happened, by Richard Hell. Brooklyn, New York: Winter Editions, June 2023. 156 pages. $20.00, paper.
Peter Valente is a writer, translator, and filmmaker. He is the author of twelve full length books. His most recent books are a collection of essays on Werner Schroeter, A Credible Utopia (Punctum, 2022), and his translation of Nerval, The Illuminated (Wakefield, 2022). Forthcoming is his translation of Antonin Artaud, The True Story of Jesus-Christ (Infinity Land Press, 2022), a collection of essays on Artaud, Obliteration of the World: A Guide to the Occult Belief System of Antonin Artaud (Infinity Land Press, 2022), and his translation of Nicolas pages by Guillaume Dustan (Semiotext(e), 2023).
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