Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,49

One sign of Berman’s influence is his inclusion in the collage that is the album cover for the Beatles’ 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; another is his small role as a sower in another iconic artwork of the era, Dennis Hopper’s 1969 film Easy Rider. (The name of Berman’s hand-printed magazine was Semina, from the Latin for seeds and semen, and he was a sower of seeds—that’s literally what he does in his cameo in Easy Rider—but also a cultivator of the seeds others had sown.)

To delve into his life and milieu meant interviewing, first for the thesis, then for the book, people who I still thought of as grown-ups—adults intimidatingly older than me. They were my parents’ generation but they were people who had lived their lives as great adventurers, taking risks, not chasing stability, and not regretting it. My parents were, even after decades in the middle class, so governed by old Depression-era fear of poverty that their lives were cramped and cautious. These extravagant peers of theirs provided a fine alternative model of how to live your life. When I began that book four years after I graduated, I didn’t know that I myself would never really get around to getting a job again. I would have endless work, and write a lot of books, and a lot more essays and articles, and I’d do some activist work and some teaching, but I’d never really go back to being an employee with a salary and a boss.

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The North Star is so far away from earth that it takes its light more than three hundred years to reach us, and even the light from the closest star takes four years. A book is a little like a star, in that what you read is what the author was passionately immersed in long before, sometimes only because of the time it takes a book to be written, edited, printed, and distributed. And because often the time it takes to make a book means that it represents the residue of interests that preceded the writing. By the late 1980s new interests were eclipsing the ones that came before; I was engaged in a new way with ideas about nature and landscape and gender and the American West.

This first book was about revisiting and completing something significant that I had found years before. I focused on six artists—three from Southern California and three from the Bay Area—whose lives and work and ideas had overlapped as they became friends and sometimes collaborators in the 1950s: Jess (who’d abandoned his surname when he left science for art and a life as an openly gay man when that was a superhumanly bold thing to do), Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner, George Herms, Wally Hedrick, and Berman. Each of them had chosen in various ways to lead a low-profile life, to find out what making art could mean and what a life full of it could be and then making it and living it. Conner, Hedrick, and DeFeo had opportunities to go to New York and become stars, but they declined the opportunity.

Their idealism was underwritten by the affluence of the era and their own frugality, by white flight that left cities full of cheap housing, and wages high enough that couples and families often lived tolerably off the income from one part-time job. Even in the 1980s, the kind of freedom to come and go, to stop paying the landlord for months and then find another pleasant place to live, to drop in and out of the economy seemed like the strange customs of an ancient free people. The artists I wrote about had moved on the edge of Beat circles or passed through them, and the story often told about the Beats as a group of male writers from the East morphed into something larger and more interesting that included these visual artists and experimental filmmakers and the poets who were part of other movements, notably what got called the San Francisco Renaissance, including Jess’s life partner, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Michael McClure, who moved through many worlds.

I learned from these characters that before you can make art you have to have a culture in which to make it, a context that gives it meaning, and people from whom to learn and to whom to show your work. Through short-lived galleries, tiny magazines, screenings, poetry readings,