Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,48

a truck as he drove in his sports car on the winding, narrow road to his birthday party in one of the canyons on the edge of Los Angeles that evening in 1976. After being prosecuted for obscenity for his first art exhibition in 1957, he’d chosen to keep a low profile. My original title for the book was Swinging in the Shadows, taken from a postcard he wrote to the painter Jay DeFeo, in which he told her that he was going to go earn some money and swing back into the shadows again, but my publisher overruled me on that.

For the thesis I had pieced together Berman’s life from what people around him had to say, what the art itself told me, from archives and oral histories, exhibition catalogues and old postcards and letters that people still had on hand. In so doing I realized a number of things, including that there had been a California avant-garde in the 1950s that had been overlooked in official histories, a series of coteries and communities involved in film, poetry, visual art, esoteric and non-Western spiritual traditions and practices, and mind-altering drugs. An avant-garde that helped give rise to the counterculture of the sixties, a realm of experimentation and rebellion and reinvention. This was what I wanted to write a book about, not one artist, but a community of artists.

Back then, cultural history was supposed to be a linear business that had unspooled in Europe and then in New York, and California was a despised hinterland, a place in which nothing much was supposed to have happened. Someone once sneered at a friend of mine doing a thesis on western history at Yale that People in California don’t read books, as though all the poets in the mountains and the scholars in the cities and the indigenous storytellers in the ninety-nine native California languages from the desert southeast to the rain forests of the northwest boiled down to one empty-headed sunbather on a hot beach. In 1941, Edmund Wilson wrote, “All visitors from the East know the strange spell of unreality which seems to make human experience on the Coast as hollow as a troll nest where everything is out in the open instead of being underground.” In 1971, Hilton Kramer wrote in the New York Times that the San Francisco Bay Area was characterized by “the absence of a certain energy and curiosity, a certain indispensable complexity and élan” and dubbed the style of one of the artists “Dude Ranch Dada,” though dude ranches were mostly a phenomenon of the intermountain West, many hundreds of miles away. Things seen small at a distance lack detail, and growing up when I did you saw California through eastern telescopes when you saw it at all. That era of disdain and dismissal had not yet ended when I was a young writer.

In the course of writing that book I worked out for myself why I was grateful that we shared a border with Mexico and faced Asia and were farther from the influence of Europe that was supposed to convey legitimacy, and that I suspected imparted conventionalizing impulses, and I came to understand how many writers, from Mark Twain to Seamus Heaney to Alexander Chee, had come here to get free of something and gone back changed. Many years later a student who’d just moved to the Bay Area from New York (and had before come from Mumbai) relayed her distress to me at no longer being in the center of things, with the implication that centers are what matters. I went home and thought about the value of margins.

I’d written about them in my work on hope and social change, because I’d been following how ideas move from the shadows and the fringes into the center and how much the center likes to forget or ignore those origins—or just how those in the floodlights can’t see what’s in the shadows. The margins are also where authority wanes and orthodoxies weaken. My first education in how all this worked came from Wallace Berman, who had consciously chosen to live on various edges—economically precarious, subcultural, often literally on the edge—homes perched on stilts in the canyons of Los Angeles and the salt marshes of the Bay Area. From those locales he had been influential for people who plunged into the limelight—poets, artists, actors such as Dennis Hopper, Russ Tamblyn, and Dean Stockwell.