PEPC Digital
Edition 2007
Surrealism Meets Kabbalah: The Place of Semina in
Mid-Century California Poetry and Art
Stephen Fredman
University of Notre Dame
Image Gallery
This
essay investigates the aesthetics of the poets and artists who
congregated around Semina, a journal produced by Wallace
Berman in California from 1955-1964.[i] [See
Fig. 1] Berman (1926-1976) was a pioneering California artist
of the post-World War II era. Born in New York, he grew up in
Fairfax, the Jewish district of Los Angeles, where as a zoot-suited
high school student he was expelled for gambling and became a
fixture in the dynamic L.A. jazz scene. Although his first
precocious pencil drawings graced the covers of jazz albums,
he gravitated toward collage and assemblage, becoming one of
the primary artists in the California assemblage movement. His
first public exhibition, mounted at the legendary Ferus Gallery
(1957), was deemed obscene and closed down by the police. [See
Fig. 2] Severely
shaken by this incident, Berman moved to Northern California
and helped launch the counter-cultural revolution in the arts
that fostered communal living, anarchist politics, occult research,
drug exploration, and sexual display. One of the expressions
of this communal artistic practice was Semina, which Berman
printed on loose-leaf cards, stuffed into decorated envelopes,
and mailed off to friends. Semina ran for nine issues
as a contemporary “museum without walls,” combining
Berman’s photos and collages with reproductions of work
by other California artists and filmmakers and with an equal
representation of poetry, mostly by California writers. Beginning
with Semina 7 (1961), the only issue devoted entirely
to his own work, Berman’s art progressively became dominated
by Hebrew lettering. His most well-known works, for instance,
are the Radio/Aether series of kabbalistically flavored
collage-facsimiles, made up of multiple iterations of a hand
holding a transistor radio, with each version housing a different
occult, mundane, or erotic image. [See
Fig. 3] One of the indispensable
artistic instigators of the Hippie movement, Berman himself became
an icon, appearing both in the collage on the cover of the Beatles’ album Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band and as a communal
farmer in his friend Dennis Hopper’s film Easy Rider.
Semina occupies
a legendary place within the California art world as the club
for those in the know. [See
Fig. 4] An experiment in private, improvised
art distributed among friends, Semina can be compared
to the fascicles and letters of Emily Dickinson a century earlier;
both Dickinson and Berman sought through their hand-made, private
creations—often sent out as “mail art”—to
coalesce a community that was at odds with the official world. Within
the charmed circle of the Semina coterie, distinctions
between literature and art collapsed: poets drew and made collages;
artists and filmmakers wrote poems. Speaking for Berman,
his wife Shirley asserts that he published Semina “because
he loved poetry so much” (Starr, 81). “We spent
a lot of time reading poetry,” she recalls, insisting that
poetry was a more fecund source of inspiration for Berman than
two other art forms he adored, music and film: “His
working process was to read poetry, all the new young poets” (70). By
reading seriously California poets such as Robert Alexander,
David Meltzer, Michael McClure, Robert Duncan, John Wieners,
Philip Lamantia, Jack Hirschman, Bob Kaufman, Ray Bremser, and
Kirby Doyle, Berman gained entrée into a vast range of
modern and occult literary ideas and forms. In fact, his
poetic explorations opened up fields of experience and experiment
that took Berman beyond what he was learning from the visual
artists who congregated around him. In particular, the
poets joined him in a lifelong fascination with surrealist writers
and intermedia figures such as Jean Cocteau and Antonin Artaud. The
surrealist literary tradition, Shirley attests, provided Berman
more instruction than did surrealist painting: “He was
really more involved with [surrealist] poetry than he was with
the artists—Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Cocteau” (70).
Like two of the poets
central to the San Francisco Renaissance, Robert Duncan and Jack
Spicer, Berman admired Cocteau “as a Renaissance man, because
he did so many different things” (70). This model
of the artist whose work extends into different media and ultimately
into an aesthetic approach to life had another exemplar in Artaud,
who was renowned as both writer and psychic pioneer; Artaud provoked
an unquenchable fascination in Berman and many of the other poets
and artists around him. Shirley affirms emphatically that Wallace “did
love Artaud.” Like the California poets for whom
Surrealism was a major preoccupation, Berman also undertook a
variety of occult investigations, which ultimately flowered in
the kabbalistic conjuring with Hebrew letters that became the
signature of his visual art. [See
Fig. 5] In concert with Berman, the
poets Duncan, Meltzer, and Hirschman all made Kabbalah a central
feature of their artistic/spiritual practice. Taking Surrealism
and Kabbalah as central features of Semina aesthetics,
the essay that follows examines those features by considering
in four sections the work of Berman and the poets he gathered
around himself. The first section looks at the larger poetics
involved in Berman’s creation of an artistic context within
the California arts scene. The second focuses upon the
influence of Artaud, who led the Semina poets and artists
into Mexico in search of peyote. The third explores Robert Duncan’s
crucial advocacy of Kabbalah and his incorporation of it in his
own poetry, especially in the volume entitled Letters. The
final section considers the ways in which Berman, Hirschman,
and Meltzer adopted Kabbalah as an improvisatory compositional
practice. Combining Surrealism and the occult with the
political anarchism rampant in California after World War II,
Berman and the poets and artists associated with Semina fostered
a richly creative milieu that played an important part in generating
much of what is distinctive about California art and culture.
- The Poetics of Context
“From the first, the intent of Semina was
not a choice of poems and art works to exercise the editor’s
discrimination and aesthetic judgment, but the fashioning of
a context.”—Robert Duncan
In
a time when the idea of performance art has become so ingrained
in how we conceive of culture that an entire popular genre, “Reality
TV,” has emerged based on the premise that life and art
are indistinguishable, it is not surprising that artistic figures
hitherto confined to the margins of Beat culture like Wallace
Berman or Harry Smith—figures who consistently blurred
the boundaries between life and art—have come to exert
an irresistible fascination. Smith, an avant-garde filmmaker,
painter, anthropologist, notorious scrounger, and editor of the
groundbreaking 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music,
regarded the practice of everyday life as an occult art of foregrounding
and rearranging contexts. In a sense, Berman and Smith
were early practitioners of postmodernism, staking a claim to
aesthetic innovation by a stunning appropriation and arrangement
of existing artifacts rather than by creating original masterworks. The
essence of their influence, though, derives not so much from
new appropriationist techniques as from the magnetism of their
personalities—from what they thought, what they did, their
attitudes toward art and life, their uncanny ability to shine
a new light on events happening around them. Resolutely
anti-commercial, unconcerned with producing enduring artifacts
for collection, Berman and Smith acquired the aura of living
works of art; their presence and example likewise inspired creativity
in others. Latter-day shamanic figures, they share a number
of features in common: they refused to live their lives conforming
to institutional norms or expectations; they made the conduct
of life itself an ongoing artistic composition; they so conflated
art and a hermetic spirituality that it’s impossible to
say which was the dominant factor in their work; they engaged
in an all-consuming artistic/spiritual quest; and their personalities
exerted an uncanny magnetism upon other people.
In direct opposition
to the mind-numbing voyeurism of Reality TV, which reduces the
unpredictable personal forays of performance art to a media-manufactured
spectacle, there was a productive secretiveness to the performance
art of Berman and Smith. They shunned publicity and promoted
the formation of self-contained, counter-cultural communities. This
creative ability to draw “a new circle” (as Emerson
put it in his essay “Circles,” [401]), to see new
possibilities and thus invoke a new context for a group of people,
a group of ideas, or a group of objects, constitutes what I would
call a “poetics of context.” Smith drew a new
circle around the scattered remains of the “Race” and “Hillbilly” music
recorded by major record labels between 1927 and 1932, creating
in his Anthology of American Folk Music not a folkloristic
compendium but an endlessly mysterious collage of songs that
comment directly upon one another and cry out for participatory
interpretation by listeners and later performers. Berman
made Semina a unique artistic context in which words and
visual artifacts have equal priority, so that instead of the
visual illustrating the literary, or vice versa, all of the artworks
in each issue are drawn into an aesthetic, spiritual, and often
political context.
Through
his mastery of the poetics of context, Berman became a major
innovator in what must be seen as a broad cultural shift, one
that has foundations in the phenomenological orientation of nineteenth-century
Romanticism. In the ensuing two centuries, changing modes
of perception and cognition have given rise to an aesthetic approach
to life, such that life can now be lived and understood as if
it were an artistic composition. In the largest sense,
this new practice of taking art as a model for the conduct of
life is a symptom of the breakdown of traditional values in Western
culture, especially those sanctioned by organized religion. The
substitution of artistic for religious frames around lived experience
took on a particular cast at mid-century on the West Coast, amid
the abiding aesthetic combination of avant-garde provocations
with esoteric philosophies and anarchist politics. This
aesthetic stance has been quite potent in West Coast culture
over the past half-century, inspiring in various ways large social
movements as diverse as the Beats, the Hippies, Punk, and New
Age spirituality. Native Californian John Cage brought
this mix of the avant-garde, the occult, and the anarchist to
New York, combining the “perennial philosophy” cooked
up by Aldous Huxley in California with the Zen sensibility of
D.T. Suzuki and the anti-art aesthetic pioneered by Marcel Duchamp. Insisting
that art and life should be ever more closely intertwined, Cage
has made what was originally a California perspective into a
gigantic force within the world of art, both nationally and internationally. Although
it is true that Cage and Smith gained renown after moving to
New York City, it is important not to forget that both grew up
in a West Coast intellectual milieu saturated in mystical philosophies
such as theosophy, spiritualism, and Vedanta, where political
movements such as anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism played a
signal role.
Wallace
Berman occupies a place at the center of the mid-century California
aesthetic because of the vital context he created for the flourishing
of that aesthetic, a context he named “Semina.” Semina
is best imagined as an open-ended, traveling exhibition that
manifested in a variety of forms: as nine sets of printed cards
sent out to friends over a period of nine years; as installations
of visual art and poetry organized by Berman in a number of physical
spaces; as a nexus of mail-art produced by many hands; and, more
broadly, as a principle of association among people, objects,
artworks, photographs, texts, experiences, and ideas. [See
Fig. 6] In
other words, Semina is the name of an aesthetic context that
generated a way of life. “From the first,” notes
Robert Duncan, “the intent of Semina was not a choice
of poems and art works to exercise the editor’s discrimination
and aesthetic judgment, but the fashioning of a context” (Duncan, Prose,
198). Taking cues from the earlier movements of Dada and
Surrealism, Berman assembled a context that was at once aesthetic
and existential, an outlaw context that sought escape from prevailing
social and political norms. Declaring himself part of that
context, Duncan, the most accomplished and influential California
poet, claims that, “in our conscious alliance with the
critical breakthrough of Dada and Surrealism . . ., we began
to see ourselves as fashioning unnamed contexts, contexts of
a new life way in the making, a secret mission” (198).
If
Semina is the name of a context that encompasses “a new
life way” and “a secret mission,” then it must
be regarded as much more than the name of an artistic/literary
magazine. To enter the Semina context involves dedicating
oneself to an emerging way of life—in which aesthetic values
become the basis for life decisions—and to the secret mission
of overthrowing the mundane reality of the fifties and early
sixties, substituting a transgressive, ecstatic mode of life.[ii] The
secret mission of Semina can be seen as a Beat project, and so
Semina has been placed alongside other Beat activities in venues
such as the Whitney Museum’s exhibition “Beat Culture
and the New America: 1950-1965.” While participating
in the larger currents of Beat culture, Semina’s distinctive
union of art and life took its own path through those currents,
drawn less toward the quietism associated with Buddhism and more
toward the provocation associated with Surrealism. Semina
was inspired especially by three aspects of Surrealism: by works
that depict a life lived according to aesthetic principles (such
as André Breton’s novel Nadja), by the interwoven
artworks and lifestyles of less-doctrinaire surrealist figures
such as Artaud and Cocteau, and by the long French avant-garde
tradition of aesthetic rebellion as a way of life. [iii] Growing
out of surrealist experiments with drugs, dreams, madness, and
sexual transgression, Semina ultimately became the first Hippie
context, in which expanded perception and sexual display were
celebrated as aesthetic achievements in their own right.
Although drugs and
sex were stimulants for the Semina breakthrough, the major artistic
vehicle for expanded perception and bodily display was collage. The
most crucial stylistic innovation in the arts of the twentieth
century, collage provided Semina with a principle for both aesthetic
and existential innovation. In this sense, too, Semina
harks back to Dada and Surrealism, for just as collage had been
used by those movements to generate iconoclastic, anti-real actions
that would, at the same time, coalesce into an artistic movement,
so it was used by Semina as the basis for a new, transgressive
social/artistic context (Duncan, Prose, 198).[iv] Collage
was practiced by Semina artists in their mail-art, in works of
assemblage, and in the meta-collage of Semina itself. An
important exhibition, “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and
His Circle,” curated by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna,
reveals for the first time how everyone in the Semina circle—including
the poets—made collages and saw it as the art form most
conducive to their thinking and interacting. David Meltzer,
another poet central to Semina, puts his finger on the contribution
the collage aesthetic made to the new modes of awareness the
group cultivated: “The Bermans attached themselves to the
mysterious quality intrinsic in many things. Any object
could be transformed into something of great interest; it was
a matter of placing it in the right context. Wallace would
say something was ‘strange’ or ‘weird,’ in
that re-ordered perception, and by looking at it with greater
intensity or assumption it would take on a new meaning” (Meltzer, “Door,” 100).
By finding objects
in daily life and placing them in “the right context,” where
they would take on a new, “mysterious” resonance,
Berman extended the compositional method of collage out from
the realm of art-making, per se, and into the realm of lived
experience. At the heart of collage as it has been practiced
in the arts during the past century are two activities: 1) the
selection of objects from the real world for incorporation into
the artwork; and 2) a compositional process that involves creating
new contexts by juxtaposing objects in unexpected (non-linear,
irrational, or anti-hierarchical) ways. Berman and others
in the Semina cohort—including artists who worked in collage
and assemblage (such as George Herms, Jess, Bruce Conner, Edward
Kienholz, and Dennis Hopper) and poets with a surreal bent (such
as Robert Duncan, Philip Lamantia, David Meltzer, Michael McClure,
Jack Hirschman, John Wieners, Bob Kaufman, and Allen Ginsberg)—used
collage principles to bring “new meaning” to a mundane
reality lived amid the detritus of California urban existence. In
their adoption of an essentially surrealist form of collage,
the Semina group, both poets and visual artists, entered what
Kenneth Rexroth calls “the international avant-garde,” transposing
the French inflections of surrealist collage to the California
environment.[v]
2. With
Artaud in Mexico
“I cannot conceive of a work of art
as distinct from life.”—Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud, poet,
actor, theater revolutionary, and madman, was one of the renegade
Surrealists whose concepts and practices proved instrumental
to Berman and the Semina poets. [See
Fig. 7] In particular, Artaud’s
texts “To Have Done with the Judgment of God” and “Concerning
a Journey to the Land of the Tarahumaras” gained early
translation and became touchstones for the Semina group (Duncan, Prose,
199). As a young man, Artaud had proclaimed, “Where
others want to produce works of art, I aspire to no more than
display my own spirit. . . . I cannot conceive of a work of art
as distinct from life” (Esslin, 5). Since his death
in 1948, Artaud has been an international icon of the aspiration
to live life as a continual experimental performance; his influence
upon theater and performance art has been incalculable. One
of Artaud’s experiments that greatly impressed the Semina
group was a trek to Northern Mexico for the purpose of ingesting
peyote with the Tarahumara Indians. Artaud’s 1936
report of his “Journey to the Land of the Tarahumaras”—like
Aldous Huxley’s 1954 chronicle of mescalin experiments, The
Doors of Perception—is one of the first modern depictions
of psychedelic experiences.[vi] Over
and above the extensive influence of his “theater of cruelty,” which
emphasizes spectacle, bodily danger, and personal and social
transformation, Artaud directly inspired the Semina group to
imitation by describing the effects of peyote and by invoking
Mexico as a magical and forbidden realm.
In an essay entitled “Artaud:
Peace Chief,” Michael McClure hails Artaud as “more
than a man of literature,” adding, “He has turned
his body into an instrument of science and become a being of
history” (McClure, 77). McClure found occasion to
turn his own body into such an instrument early in 1958, when
Berman left off five peyote buttons at his apartment (Cándida
Smith, 247; Solnit, 69). The morning after, McClure wrote “Peyote
Poem,” which Berman then printed as a single long sheet
and made the sole contents of Semina 3—graced on
its cover by a photo of two peyote buttons.[See
Fig. 8] The poem depicts
the ecstasy of expanded consciousness, in which an “I” witnesses
itself intersecting with an external world in ways both fantastic
and fleshly:
I am separate. I
close my eyes in divinity and pain.
I
blink in solemnity and unsolemn joy.
I smile
at myself in my movements. Walking
I
step higher in my carefulness. I fill
space with
myself. I see the secret and distinct
patterns
of smoke from my mouth
I
am without care part of all. Distinct.
I am separate
from gloom and beauty. I see all.
In certain ways, this report of McClure’s
echoes the famous visionary experience of becoming a “transparent
eye-ball” that Ralph Waldo Emerson reports in his essay Nature: “I
am nothing; I see all; the currents of Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or particle of God” (10). Despite
the similarity of language used in describing them, though, the
two visions result in different outcomes, for Emerson embraces
his as confirming a Platonic tendency to see transcendent forms
as most real, while McClure is moved by his experience to see
the fleshly as inherently spiritual, an insight that sets him
off on the path of biological mysticism he has followed since
that time.
The
Semina equation of Artaud with Mexico and drugs reaches a climax
in Semina 5, an entire issue dedicated to an Artaudian
view of Mexico. The complementary cover images of a huge
Pre-Columbian stone phallus and a portrait of the classic poet/nun
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz articulate a complex union of
opposites that runs throughout the issue: both the images and
the poems seek to blend antinomies such as male and female, voluptuous
and ascetic, fleshly and spiritual. In this issue of Semina,
sex, drugs, and an earthy spirituality that both Artaud and the
Semina group associate with Mexico operate as catalysts to bring
about a kind of alchemical conjunction of opposites. Artaud’s
invocation of this alchemical operation can be seen on one of
the cards that contains an excerpt from his “Le Mexique
et la Civilization:” [See
Fig. 9]
and
to Mercury corresponds the movement,
to
Sulphur corresponds the energy,
to
Salt corresponds the stable mass
even
as the activity of fundamental sources
manifests
the Mexican thing, an image, its
powers
perpetually renewing itself.
By bringing elements
fundamental to the conduct of alchemy, such as mercury, sulfur,
and salt, into the Mexican landscape, Artaud portrays it as dynamic,
transformative, and perpetually self-regenerating. Possessed
of remarkable alchemical abilities, Mexico seems to represent
for Artaud both an image in its own right and the power to create
images. He acquired this sense of the assertive, transformative
quality of the landscape during peyote sessions, when the mountains
and stones took on a series of biomorphic shapes: “I
seemed to read everywhere a tale of childbirth amid war, a tale
of genesis and chaos, with all these bodies of gods which were
carved like men, and these truncated human statues” (Artaud,
71). In another card from this issue of Semina, “I
Mexico After Artaud,” poet Kirby Doyle imitates Artaud’s
initiation into the dynamic powers of the Mexican landscape by
throwing himself into the same crucible of madness that Artaud
courted by ingesting peyote: “Stricken by my unconscious
impotence, / Dizzy from intelligent spells of madness / Revealing
the same thoughts, / I fall into Nature already prepared.” [See
Fig. 10]
Other
cards evince a similar sense of being “prepared” by
Artaud. In particular, many depict states of derangement
and insight achieved through the use of drugs. “Memoria” is
Lamantia’s paean to marijuana as a Mexican seeress, who “spoke
sibyl sentences silver and cut the throats of time!”[See
Fig. 11] A
photo by Berman of Lamantia injecting heroin on one card [See
Fig. 12] is matched
on another by a poem of Bob Kaufman’s that ends with the
lines, “O Mexico, give me your Easter Faced Virgin / And
your Junk.”[vii] [See
Fig. 13] Likewise,
in his “Peyote Poem,” John Wieners finds himself “inhabited
by strange gods” and wonders, “who / are they, they
walk in white trenchcoats / with pkgs. of paradise in their pockets.” [See
Fig. 14] The
filmmaker Larry Jordan contributes a poem, “Rockets,” that
seems to chronicle a peyote-enhanced trip to Mexico [See
Fig. 15]:
Motor
oxydizing
Space-raped
Breugel sand oxydizing
Blue
sky oxydizing
Peyoton
cloud oxydizing
Pepsi-cola
oxydizing
The
undeceived rearview mirror
blasting
back an oxydized grey stripe.
Burnt,
skin & spirit, we returned
More
purified than we knew.
Through a drug-inspired vision of the world
rusting away, Jordan partakes of the Mexican alchemy outlined
by Artaud, in which breakdown and burnout are the first stages
of an eventual purification and regeneration.
Just
as there is a union of the opposing qualities of rust and purity
in Jordan’s poem, other cards in this issue of Semina portray
Mexico as either dangerous or seductive or both. John Reed
invokes the ancient Mexican sense of the macabre with a drawing
of a ferocious, partially skeletalized torso alongside a horrific
poem presided over by vultures. [See
Fig. 16] Christopher MacLaine speaks
in “Callejon García Villa Lorca” of the archetypal
experience of Mexico as “a stone / flung into the otherness
of time.” [See
Fig. 17] Notwithstanding his invocation of the
Spaniard García Lorca in his title, MacLaine sounds more
like the Mexican poet Octavio Paz when he portrays Mexico as
a stone following an aberrant trajectory through history. John
Chance imagines his own death, impaled on “Mexican green
bull horns / Growing out of the Aztec Earth,” in his poem “How
I Died,” while
John Hoffman offers a more peaceful image of the ocean “clos[ing]
the break of land / Into its time-deep crystal.” David
Meltzer envisions the dead Pancho Villa, whose ear “hangs
like a rotted flower, / its blood nourishing the flies & /
a disfigured unknown cactus.” In contrast, Michael
McClure’s reverie about Mexico has a gentle quality, invoking “pastel
/ adobe houses. Pink, Salmon, and Blue / piñatas
and crinoline hems.” Seemingly addressed to a lover,
McClure’s poem opens up to the feminine side of the packet,
in which Sor Juana, Mexico’s first poet (translated by
Lamantia), asks whether it is worse to be the seducer or the
seduced, the prostitute or her client. Poet and filmmaker
Ruth Weiss contrasts the “calendar-poster of saints” with “the
open-legged girl [who] IS the / mother of your children,” in
order to illustrate what she calls “the two-sided coin” of
Mexico. [See
Fig. 18] The feminine side of Mexico is rounded out
by William Margolis in a sentimental depiction of “pious-shawled
women / mourning poverty in the sun / impassively with their
eyes.” For
the Semina cohort, Artaud’s Mexico is a place of exploration
and escape, of breakdown and transformation, where the strait-laced
reality of fifties America can be undone in a seductive embrace
with otherness.
3. Kabbalah and Robert Duncan’s Letters
“[I]n mystical traditions of Judaism,
religion was passing into imagination.”—Robert Duncan
Artaud was one of
a number of Surrealists, including René Daumal and Kurt
Seligmann, who commandeered esoteric religious imagery for an
assault upon the reign of rationality. Author of an extensive History
of Magic, Seligmann, like Artaud, made a profound impression
upon Lamantia. As a teenager in Los Angeles and New York,
Lamantia had direct access to what he calls “the surrealist
diaspora” of writers and artists who had fled Europe during
World War II: “Surrealism was what brought me to what you
call hermeticism. . . . The key for me was my weekly lunch with
the painter-engraver Kurt Seligmann, who graciously allowed me
to look at his many volumes of very early, amazing alchemical
texts. This was an unforgettable experience” (Meltzer, Beat,
137). Alongside alchemy, another major strand in the Western
hermetic tradition, Kabbalah (literally, “tradition” or “transmission”),
the mystical wing of Judaism, also held an enormous fascination
for the Surrealists. When trying to understand how patterns
repeated in the Mexican landscape have a mathematical regularity,
a regularity imitated in the patterns of the Tarahumara rituals
and dances, Artaud turns to Kabbalah for an explanation: “There
is in the Kabbala a music of Numbers, and this music which reduces
material chaos to its prime elements explains by a kind of grandiose
mathematics how Nature orders and directs the birth of forms
she brings forth out of chaos. And all I beheld seemed
to be governed by a Number” (Artaud, 71). Kabbalah
has become important to modern poets not only for its numerological
magic but also because of the powerful, even cosmic, significance
it accords to words. As David Meltzer explains, “The
Kabbalah, as much as poetry, is the study of and submission to
the mysteries of the word. The language used by Kabbalists
is so intricately dimensional that it is almost impossible to
fully convey the simultaneous levels of meaning revealed in the
simplest of words. It is said that one word is the seed
of a particular universe, a system of interactions and realities
as complex as the birth and death of a sun” (Meltzer, Garden,
xiii). [See
Fig. 19] The kabbalistic conception of a word as a
cosmic seed is implicit in the term “Semina”—which
explains in turn why poetry, with its insistence on the generative
force of language, plays such a prominent part in Semina.
Of all the forms
of magic outlined in Kurt Seligmann’s History of Magic (such
as astrology, numerology, divination, casting of spells, mortuary
magic, alchemy, Kabbalah, Tarot, witchcraft, and black magic),
Kabbalah appeals most directly to poets because it is a kind
of alchemy that engages with the basic materials of writing:
the word, the letter, and the book. In Kabbalah all of
the levels of occult “work”—magical practice,
meditation and contemplation techniques, visionary excursions,
and spiritual and psychological self-transformation—can
be found, as they would be in any esoteric system, but all derive
from investigations of language and writing. Kabbalah made
its way into the Semina circle primarily through the advocacy
of Robert Duncan, who heard it whispered of by his parents at
theosophical meetings during his childhood (Kamenetz, 9-10). The
most important kabbalistic text, the Zohar, was read by
Duncan’s parents as one of the keys to the mysteries of
the universe; from his own perspective, the Zohar ought
to be read instead as “the greatest mystical novel ever
written” (Garden, x). Duncan’s enthusiasm
for Kabbalah had a profound effect upon the Semina poets and
artists, especially upon Berman, Meltzer, Jack Hirschman, and,
to a lesser extent, Lamantia. It is ironic that Duncan,
raised as a Christian hermeticist, became the instigator of lifelong
research by such Jewish figures as Berman, Meltzer, Hirschman,
and Jerome Rothenberg into a Jewish form of mysticism. Meltzer,
for instance, who edited a journal devoted to Kabbalah, Tree,
and an anthology of kabbalistic texts, The Secret Garden,
calls Duncan “my exemplar” in Kabbalah studies (x)
and credits Duncan with introducing him to the works of Gershom
Scholem, the modern scholar responsible for reviving interest
in Kabbalah (xv).[viii]
Duncan began drawing
extensively upon Kabbalah for his own poetry during the writing
of the book Letters (1958), composed between 1953 and
1956, which was also the time period when Semina was born. [See
Fig. 20 ] The
actual meeting between Duncan and his partner Jess and Wallace
and Shirley Berman took place in 1954 (Duncan, Prose,
197), during a moment when the triumvirate of Duncan, Jack Spicer,
and Kenneth Rexroth dominated the San Francisco poetry scene. Nearly
everyone in the Semina group—whether poet, artist, or filmmaker—was
mentored by at least one of these poets. Although Letters has
received relatively little critical attention, Duncan’s
recently reissued book is a remarkable achievement, both for
the impact it had upon the Semina group and others on the scene
at the time and for discoveries he made within it that set the
course for much of his subsequent poetry. In an interview
devoted to his explorations of Kabbalah, Duncan acknowledges
how its study was instrumental to the writing of Letters: “Even
the name Letters comes from the Zohar which I was
reading in that period” (Kamenetz, 13). In Kabbalah,
as expounded both in the Zohar and in the earlier Sefer
Yetzirah, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are conceived
of as the basic building blocks of the universe. David
Meltzer summarizes this notion: “The Yetzirah expresses
the concept of God creating the universe through letters which
hold the possibility of creation’s entire vocabulary. The
world is entered and invented through language rooted in alphabet
systems. God translates Himself, condenses into alphabet. To
know alphabet is to approach creation’s workings. Within
and without are the letters” (Meltzer, “Door,” 93).
For Duncan, this
creative activity of the letters is not literal but imaginative;
in his conception, the poet participates through letters in the
unending creative work of the cosmos. Although he states
in the preface to Letters that “the lore of Moses
of Leon in the Zohar, has been food for the letters of
this alphabet” (xii), Duncan sees himself not as a believer
in Kabbalah, but as a poet greatly stimulated by it as a theory
of the power of the imagination: “It seemed to me,” he
says in the interview, “that in mystical traditions of
Judaism, religion was passing into imagination.” While
maintaining an abiding fascination with Kabbalah, Duncan refused
it his belief because his concern was not with certainty but
with imaginative possibility; from his perspective, “imagination
is the final ground of reality” (Kamenetz, 13). Drawing
upon the examples of the letter meditations in kabbalist gematria and
the alphabetic puns in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Duncan
conceived of Letters as an exploration of the creative
matrix that letters form in the imagination and the cosmos: “Letters is
influenced toward a creative veil or world-cloth which would
be identical with the maya in which it’s woven all the
way through. The warp and woof are connected and the figures
emerge and disappear” (12). For Duncan, to work in
art is not to strive for uniqueness or originality but to participate
in this “Maya,” this world-weaving, and he passed
along this sense of creative participation in every moment of
life to the poets and artists around him. As Diane di Prima
testifies, “Robert was probably one of the closest, most
intimate lovers I ever had, even though we never had a physical
relationship. I learned a lot of different kinds of things
from him. One of the things I learned—in a way no
teacher of Buddhism ever showed me—was how precious my
life was. How precious the whole ambience of the time. A
real sense of appreciating every minute” (Meltzer, Beat,
17).
In the preface to Letters,
Duncan describes this exquisite awareness as a balance between
creativity and self-consciousness (ix-x). Ultimately this
creative awareness translates into the ability to uphold a balance
between art and life, in which each penetrates but does not overwhelm
the other. Duncan wanted to stand for the view that art
and life are like warp and woof: both participate in and help
create the design the artist makes. In his preface, Duncan
singles out Artaud as an attractive but finally destructive example
of someone whose life overcomes his art: “Artaud is torn
apart by actual excitations which are intolerable to his imagination
and to his material” (x). Duncan sounds this cautionary
note in Letters and continues to sound it throughout his
career. In his 1978 appreciation of Berman (who had died
two years earlier), Duncan acknowledges the Semina group’s
romance with drugs and speaks parenthetically of his and Jess’s “avoidance
of the drug culture scene so that we did not cultivate [Berman’s]
Larkspur house.” He recognizes, though, that there
was also a creative side to that dangerously self-destructive
scene: “The word ‘junk’ that in the 1950s would
have meant the trashing of the drug heroin, in the 1960s came
to mean the redemption of trash in the recognition of devotional
objects, emblems and signs rescued from the bottom in the art
of a new context” (Prose, 202). California
Junk Art represented for Duncan an art of survival, in which
the artist, threatened by (self-) destruction, manages to reclaim
an imaginative sway over a brutal reality. In a prose poem
dedicated to the Bermans from his 1964 Roots and Branches (a
title that again alludes to Kabbalah by invoking its image of
the Tree of Life), Duncan speaks of “the artists of the
survival” and asks, “How to shape survival! In
what art to survive!” (169).
When the “artists
of the survival” engage in “a descent into the underground
of the city and [a] programmatic use of forbidden drugs” (Prose,
200), Duncan views this Semina descent as part of “an alchemical
process in which the nigredo or melanosis, ‘the
horrible darkness of our mind,’ is the initial stage of
a promised individuation.” Through offering themselves,
as Artaud did, to a psychic/artistic crucible, in which they
would burn away within themselves the values of an unlivable
society, the Semina group might hope to offer a new, creative
vision for transforming that society. There was, in fact,
an astonishing potency to this art of survival, whose discoveries
continue to radiate far afield. “Semina is
to be seen,” Duncan proposes, “and the later work
of Berman as themselves ‘seminal,’ as the seeding
of ‘that black, magically fecund earth,’ as Jung
describes the alchemical antinomy” (200-1). In their
transformation of darkness and destruction into the potential
for new creativity and community, the Semina group participated
in the larger cultural phenomenon of the Beats. As Lisa
Phillips notes, “The search for alternative consciousness,
the mystical side of the Beats, goes hand in hand with their
gritty realism and rebellion. These two sides—the
ecstatic and the horrific, the beatific and the beaten, define
the poles of Beat experience” (33). Even more directly
than many of the other Beats, the Semina group combined mysticism,
communalism, drug use, sexual frankness, and political protest
into a survival art that became a prototype for the Hippie movement.
4. From Seeds to Tree
“Above the triteness and everydayness
of this image continuum was Aleph—the first letter of the
Hebrew alphabet.”—David Meltzer
In the Kabbalah of
Isaac Luria, which the Semina group read about in Gershom Scholem’s Major
Trends in Jewish Mysticism, the transformative art of survival
is known as tikkun olam, the restoration of the broken
world (265-86). The sense of wholeness implied by tikkun is
essential to the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria and is consonant with
a number of other mythical kabbalistic symbols, such as the Tree
of Life and the figure of Adam Kadmon, the Cosmic Human Being. Berman
adopted another symbol of wholeness, the first letter of the
Hebrew alphabet, aleph, as his personal signet. Scholem
points out that aleph is a silent consonant that “represents
nothing more than the position taken by the larynx when a word
begins with a vowel” (Kabbalah, 30). Aleph is
the silent source of all articulation, the seed of the entire
alphabet, “and indeed the Kabbalists always regarded it
as the spiritual root of all other letters.” The Zohar recounts
the most famous story concerning the letter aleph as the
silent source: “When the blessed Holy One wished to fashion
the world, all the letters were hidden away. For two thousand
years before creating the world, the blessed Holy One contemplated
them and played with them. As he verged on creating the
world, all the letters presented themselves before Him, from
last to first” (11). Each letter stepped forward
in turn and asked the “Master of the world” to “create
the world by me” (12). The Holy One praised the virtues
of each letter based upon a particular word that it begins, but
refused to create the world with it, until the letter bet entered
and said, “Master of the world, may it please You to create
the world by me, for by me You are blessed above and below” [berakhah,
blessing, begins with bet]. The Holy One agreed. The
letter aleph had remained outside this scene in humility,
at first not wanting to assert itself where other letters had
failed and then not wanting to usurp the favor that had been
granted already to bet. “The blessed Holy
One said, ‘aleph, aleph! Although I will create
the world with the letter bet [using be-reshit,
the first word of the Torah], you will be the first of all letters. Only
through you do I become one [aleph is the number one]. With
you all counting begins and every deed in the world” (16).
Aleph is the
source of creation, although it remains inactive, incipient. Berman
stamped this originary letter everywhere, from his motorcycle
helmet to Semina 7, entitled “ALEPH,” which
is an entire issue of photography, drawing, and writing by Berman
dominated by the letter aleph. Speaking of Berman’s
collages and assemblages, Meltzer notes how aleph functions
in relation to mundane imagery drawn from print sources: “Above
the triteness and everydayness of this image continuum was Aleph—the
first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which put everything into
a strange tension, because on the one hand you’d see the
normative images that newspapers and magazines use to increase
circulation held at bay by this letter” (Meltzer, Beat,
200). In this way, aleph took on a transformative,
sacralizing function, as though it were capable of conferring
a blessing upon a degraded, commodified reality. In Semina
7, a huge aleph is stamped alongside or on top of
a variety of photographs: on the cover, a woman strapped into
an electric chair awaiting execution; Berman’s young son,
Tosh, holding a rifle and wearing a Davy Crockett leather jacket;
a vigorous stand of marijuana plants; a memorial collage for
Charlie Parker; the bust of his wife, Shirley, with a large medallion
between her exposed breasts; photographer Patricia Jordan nude,
wearing a mask and beads; a saxophone being played; and a figure
seen through a window in two poses. The obsessions of Berman’s
life—his family, his friends, his devotion to jazz, his
love of sexual display, his outrage at society as death-affirming—are
all stamped with the sacralizing signet of aleph.
Berman’s employment
of aleph not only introduces an “intuitive Kabbalah” that
confers blessings upon the most vital facets of his life (Meltzer, “Door,” 100),
it also has an elegiac quality by virtue of its use as an iconic
element so soon after World War II. Berman grew up in the
Fairfax District of Los Angeles, where the Hebrew lettering of
the Yiddish language was prominent in the windows of shops and
in newspapers; invoking that world in the aftermath of the Holocaust
draws attention to the death of the Hebrew letter, not only because
the Yiddish-speakers of L.A. were dying out but also because
the extermination of Jewish culture in Europe had incinerated
the letters, both written and spoken, and rendered them ghostly. Like
many gestures within his life and art, Berman’s depiction
of Hebrew letters on photographs, in assemblages, on parchment,
and upon massive stones is fraught with opposing motives: the
letters invoke suffering and disappearance while at the same
time promising redemption.
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