Whenever I open my laptop and see an empty Pages document, I feel a mix of fear and excitement. I’m not sure if this is healthy or not, but only when I’m writing do I feel a sense of connection. Otherwise, I feel like I’m floating in the world, barely touching the ground. I sense that something is happening, or I have an emotional pull in a certain direction, but it’s only when I sit down and start writing that these feelings begin to make sense.
The one thing that has stayed constant in my life is the show-and-tell. I was a poor student. However, I recall that in first grade, we had the opportunity to bring something from home and share it with the class. I can’t remember what I brought, but I do recall the feeling of sharing something I was passionate about. As I got older, still in school, I remember I would carry my favorite record around campus, and it was a badge of sorts, showing what mattered to me. My dad, the artist Wallace Berman, was one of the faces behind the Beatles on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Although I was very proud of my dad for being in such company, I would never parade that album around the courtyard. No, it had to be something more personal.
This article appears in Issue 34 issue of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
For me, it was The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. The album cover, which showed the four band members, featured lead singer Ray Davies, on the far right, wearing a yellow zip-up sweater and bassist Pete Quaife, on the far left, in a pullover sweater. The simplicity and elegance of British gentlemen wearing those clothes in 1968, during the height of psychedelic fashion, stood out. To me, the image, especially Davies’s expression, signals sadness or even regret. Hearing Village Green at that time, at the age of 14, I listened to a sadness I hadn’t encountered in songs before. I learned that sadness is part of being human, so carrying that album became my statement on life and aesthetics.
After a while, I couldn’t walk around a campus with a favorite book or album, because I graduated and I never went to a university. The next best thing—and in many ways the best—was writing about why I loved a particular album, film, or book. The first record I wrote about was the modern composer Terry Riley’s Reed Streams. This remarkable 1960s recording is also the music I listen to while editing certain pieces that I feel will become part of my oeuvre. Writing allowed me to keep sharing my passions with others, even outside my immediate circle. I also discovered that I loved shaping words on the page: choosing the right one for the right spot, noticing how the sentences looked as much as how they sounded. The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé cared deeply about how a poem appeared on the page, and that idea stayed with me. When I write, I want not only to create a picture in the reader’s mind but also to be mindful of how the text itself lives on the page.
The most important part of writing is those moments when you sit down at the keyboard and start translating your thoughts into words. I use the term composing, because I hear rhythm in sentences, and often—but not always—music plays in the background, either in my head, through my computer, or by way of my record collection. Each art form has its own rules and boundaries, but all the arts connect. I have written screenplays, poetry, and fiction. Each form has a different voice, but there’s still one thread that makes it mine, and that is me.
For the past 20 years, I have been writing memoirs. It’s hard for me to understand who I am and to place myself within a narrative, so memoir writing explores my thoughts and feelings as a way to find answers, if possible, or at least to understand the landscape I inhabit. It’s very much an adventure to wander through my mind, to discover who my family is and also what role I play in this music-theater called life. I write because without words, I drift, but with them, I can finally place my feet on the ground and share the map with others.•
