Who is this guy ‘ARIFLIP?

 

It’s a Google map. I found it buried in his 70,000+ image files, but I can’t find where he used it. I know I’ve seen him quote the nostrum, “If you would be universal, first be local.” This map shows where he’s from in southern New Jersey and implies a broader reach than that. Northwest of the outline profile is the City of Philadelphia, a kind of headquarters of his fiction. The face suggested by the profile is indeed pointed westward toward the rest of the country. Strangely enough, this is the image file I had to keep returning to get the “bug picture” of his youth and upbringing. There’s a problem with ARIFLIP you don’t have with most writers.

The thing about those 70,000 image files is that although there’s a ton of stuff in them that relates directly to his experience of life, what’s most notable is what’s missing. Missing from his writing as well as his inventory of image artifacts. Unlike the American notables of his time and before, there is no autobiographical early novel we can use to chart the beginning of his journey. There is no equivalent of Fitzgerald’s famous This Side of Paradise, Salinger’s infamous Catcher in the Rye, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Nathanael West’s “Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin,” Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus or Portnoy’s Complaint, Mailer’s From Here to Eternity, O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, Kerouac’s On the Road, Updike’s Rabbit Run, or Faulkner’s disastrous Soldier’s Pay.

While these books are very different from one another, what they share is a portrait of the shaping influences associated with coming of age or finding a direction or perspective that will recur throughout later works. A source file if you will that shows readers the themes to be explored from this point onward. In this respect, they are personal and intimate to the degree the author is comfortable with opening the coat on the insides of his hopes and fears.

There is no such coming of age novel on ARIFLIP’s résumé. No prep school novel. No college novel. No first life-changing romance novel. No first bruisings in the real world novel. No coded witfest novel of youthful disillusionment. 

What is there? His first published book is a Bible. In every sense of the term. Interestingly, the author has always referred to it as a work of fiction, which stands in implied opposition to the general inference that it is a work of satire, that being a form commonly if not exclusively categorized as nonfiction. But in what he has written about the book, ARIFLIP has explicitly identified the novel form as one of the book’s multiple organizational bases, specifically deeming it a ‘Novel of Harry.’

Which, when you look for it, turns out to be valid. Differently constructed to be sure but a novel nonetheless. In fact the simplest way to approach and understand The Boomer Bible (TBB) is as the Autobiography of Harry. From this perspective, it is all Harry, his words, his recital of his own education, philosophical roots and conflicts, and his creation of a persona capable of dealing with the experience of living in the time to which he was born.

This is the point where I have to come clean about the name I have given this site and the man I’m trying to document here. ‘ARIFLIP’ is not his name for himself. It’s mine. Late in his blogsite Instapunk Returns, he has a provocative post called “The World According to Instapunk.” In it he identifies three different personas, voices if you will, that account for the enormous volume of writings and graphic artwork he has produced. These are R. F. Laird, Instapunk, and an ‘AI’ component he describes as a constant impassive observer and keeper of memory. In the course of the post, he alternates principally between the voices of Instapunk and the observer entity. Reading it, I became convinced it was not simply a pose but an accurate rendering of the core of the man himself. A writer, a warrior, and a coldly objective observer in some fluid combination through time. So I played my own word game, similar to the one he played over the years with the alias Sigma Zerone (which is its own story, told elsewhere), and I came up with ARIFLIP. How?

RFL + IP + AI > [f/Anagram] = ARIFLIP. 

Why the anagram function? He loves anagrams. In another post, I’ll be citing this graphic from his portfolio.

I got this far when I had my own little epiphany. My ordering of the letters was designed to make them pronounceable and easy to remember. But the new name gave me that tip of the tongue feeling you get sometimes. Saw something missing that would, if found, make perfect sense of the new name. Then I remembered his many references to studying classical Greek. Seek and ye shall,find. I found an Attic Greek diacritical used commonly with the character alpha. It restores a missing ‘h’ sound. I added it up front and arrived at ‘ARIFLIP, pronounced HARIFLIP. 

So simple.The root identity of the mystery man hiding underneath this monumental pile of stuff was Harry flipped. A dark version and a lighted version. Which made me remember a pair of image files that are used on multiple occasions over the years in various permutations. A quick sampling:

It all works in a typically ironic way. It is the TBB’s Harry who insists on himself as a figure in white. Depicting the author of Harry as his obverse results in shades of black, which may speak to some level of the depressive side of a creative spirit. The use of the figure does not end with the two competing negative images, however. There is also the figure of power we can imagine as ‘ARIFLIP’s view of his functional role in this life, as a remote solitary keeping a close eye on all that happens in his purview.

This third image is revealing not just because it adds color. Like all ARIFLIP graphics, it has an originating context that is whimsical but also wickedly serious and opaque.

There are a great many graphics portraying various aspects of the Harry character in various episodes of his story. These will no doubt appear in other posts. What matters here, though, is what TBB tells us about the flip side of Harry. If the whole book is an autobiography written by Harry, then the Past Testament is what he learned in school about history and ideas and culture. Which means that it’s not really the punk view we’re reading here. Both Harry and his flip side were expressly taught the content of these 39:books. In the Present Testament we have a narrative summarizing the traumatic transformation of American culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Which means we know more about them as characters than we ever learn about by reading the supposedly intimate revelations of the novelists mentioned above. 

If the gospels of Harry are the epitome of a cynical response to the changes underway in that great turning point of the nation, then the flip side must be the opposition to, the rebuttal of the gospel of Harry. And if we realize that the real author behind the fiction of Harry is R. F. Laird, we can begin to see that the gospels are meant to be understood as a monumental exercise in reverse psychology. Harry is jeering at his own philosophers, daring them to wake up and do the exact opposite of what Harry is telling them to do. The Present Testament ends on a note of family, the final musings of a loving but disappointed father of the monster called Harry.

The Punk Testament is where the good stuff is buried in doggerel. This is the Coming of Age. The starting over part. The realization that what has been taught so systematically about the important things is wrong.

There is hope where it is least likely to exist, and it is fueled by a passion for life that doesn’t even know enough to be intimidated into acceptance of the long odds against them.

Yet… yet if we accept the novel premise, that THB is the autobiography of Harry, told we are to believe in his own words, then how do we account for the Punk Testament? Harry must have written that as well. It must have been the point of writing the rest of it. Harry is not Satan. He is the Man in White, working in his own way for a hopeful outcome. But if this is the case, who is the flip side, the author of the novel of the autobiography of Harry. They are interleaved with one another as all creators are with their creations. Harry and R. F. Laird are a superposition of states, both the dark and the light interacting.

Now we return to an early point of discussion, if you would be universal, first be local. The story we’ve just been looking at is very local, most of the real action from the prefaces to the Present and Punk Testament occurring in the neighborhoods of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as they really were in those days. Why the Google map up top is important. This is the origin of the mind that made the Coming of Age work known as TBB, and much of what occurred there in ‘ARIFLIP’s life is also documented in all the personal idiosyncratic detail traditional writers would recognize as traditional writing. But the sum total of the work is not confined to that. It ventures very far from that in virtually every conceivable direction and it’s very far from being finished, even now.

Keep browsing. You’ll catch up eventually.