Performances for the End of Time

Performances for the End of Time

Harold Jaffe

ISBN 978-1-9996964-8-1. Paperback, 176 pp. Publication date: October 2022

Equus Press: London & Prague

A series of dirges for the living-yet-already-departed, Performances for the End of Time “perform” not a foreboding of what may be, but a scathing indictment of what now already is. This collection is not meant as an alarm, but as a meditation, less Cassandra warning of certain doom and more Tiresias musing on the immutability of a doomed fate.

The title, Performances for the End of Time, was borrowed from French composer Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, which he composed in 1940 while a prisoner in a Nazi labor camp. Harold Jaffe’s volume is comprised of brief performative texts and concludes with a short play called Faust & Mephisto. The brief texts are caustic, eerie, and ironically comical. Each text is usually repeated once or more with the same title but different content, yet each text is ultimately about endings—small, large, and colossal.