Nomad Codes

Beat sensibility both hip and human. Berman was a disseminator. In a brief cameo appearance in his friend Dennis Hopper’s film Easy Rider , he plays a sower of seeds.
    Berman grew up a secular Jew in the Boyle Heights and Fairfax districts of Los Angeles. Hebrew letters were scattered throughout his environment, on newspapers and in butcher shop windows. Later this alphabet became his signature sign, especially the letter aleph, which he painted on his motorcycle helmet. In the 1950s, Berman created faux-Dead Sea Scrolls parchments using the alphabet, and placed the letters in assemblages; later he would paint them on rocks. But these letters never formed actual words; they remained conventionally meaningless, at once surface decorations and hieroglyphs too deep for common sense. If you want to, you can go Kabbalistic on all this, though Berman himself was typically uncommunicative about his intent. During one early show of his parchment paintings, Berman told the actor Dean Stockwell about the work’s Kabbalistic dimensions; to the poet Philip Lamantia, who, unlike Stockwell, actually knew something about Jewish mysticism, he denied any connection.
    In Kabbalah, language is not seen as a human filter that we overlay onto some more primordial reality; instead it is that reality. There are many visions of this original Torah, and a few of them anticipate Berman’s linguistic assemblages. One eighteenth-century rabbi from Syria claims that, before creation, the original Torah was “a heap of unarranged primal letters.” In response to Adam’s actions, this original alphabet formed the particular words that made the world the way it is today. But it does not have to be this way; some Kabbalists suggest that the messianic world will come about through a renaming. Berman’s “meaningless” combinations are in a sense a kind of sacred “cut-up.” Though he ignored the divinatory and synchronistic potential of the cut-up that so compelled Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, Berman does gesture towards the redemptive potential of hermetic nonsense. His letters are playful but profound mysteries—an attempt to invoke the creative plenitude of language as if it were the jazz scat singing that Berman imbibed as a zoot suit-wearing hepcat in LA’s 1940s jazz scene.
    David Meltzer, the West Coast Beat poet and sometime Kabbalist, approaches Berman’s mysticism in a less literalistic way. Meltzer explains that his friend was acutely “aware of an unarticulated imperative to sacralize and somehow repair the broken post-war world.” He compares the operation to tikkun , the notion, drawn from Isaac Luria’s messianic Kabbalism, that humans must put back the fragmented pieces of creation. For many twentieth-century mystics, this sort of labor is placed under the goals of unity and wholeness—noble goals that don’t often make great art. More subtly, Meltzer compares the work of tikkun to the hipster trick of “digging” something, which he characterizes as “appropriating the most mundane object, the most vilified or rejected artifact, and restoring it to a primary glory.” Meltzer describes in loving detail the marvelous bric-a-brac found at Berman’s home; many of us have experienced “bohemian” spaces whose poverty is redeemed by strange and gentle shrines constructed from marvelous ground scores or thrift-store finds. Once these objects have reached the end of their life cycle as commodities, another kind of life is possible, the life of sacred appropriation. Explains Meltzer: “It was a hybrid kind of anti-materialism or counter-materialism, privileging the continuously-new beauty of a particular stone or a time-deformed mass-produced object found in the gutter in the same way it embraced Cocteau’s Orphée or Vivaldi.”
    Berman actually made only a few assemblages during the 1950s, and many of those are sculptures or installations. However you pigeonhole them, his most important mixed media show took place at the Ferus Gallery in 1957. His religious concerns were palpable. Temple resembled a large wooden sentry box or confessional. Inside, a robed figure stood with a key hung from its neck, its head turned away from the audience. The floor beneath the figure was strewn with pages of Semina , a collage-like “magazine” of images and poems by friends and heroes that Berman sent for free to his circle of compatriots through the early 1970s. Though it came in different forms, Semina was essentially