Piping Down the Canyon Wild

The fact that I’ve never woken up in the actual vicinity of Tosh Berman does not prevent me from imagining what it would be like: It’s morning and Tosh has slept in, having attended a Sparks concert or an art opening or a poetry reading the night before. His eyes open. He reaches for his glasses on a bedside table and puts them on. He scans the room. What does he see? I have no idea—maybe the cover of an old vinyl record, a book, a painting. Possibly some object he’d left out, meaning to put it away the night before but having forgotten. No matter, because whatever it is, it fills him with delight.

Tosh is many things: an artist, a writer, a podcaster, a publisher, an impresario, but above all, he is a person whose deepest instinct is to find pleasure in both the small and the great. You could call him a fan, but that would be wrong, because a fan uses the object of adoration to provide an identity. Instead, I would call Tosh an enthusiast, and to compare a fan to an enthusiast is to compare a monotheist to a polytheist. An enthusiast is a person who lives in a world of infinite pleasures and not just a single fat unmoving one. There are rules attached to fandom; enthusiasts make up theirs as they go.

If this sounds like the life of an artist, of course it is. Tosh’s mother, Shirley, was a dancer, and his father, Wallace, was a major figure in the Topanga Canyon renaissance. Thus, Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World is a sort of double history—the annals of Tosh’s parents and their world as seen through the eyes of their growing child, as well as the history of that child.

And so the child becomes our guide. Tosh—age 9, or 12, or 16—is already a flaneur in a world of art and music: the Stones, the Doors, Allen Ginsberg, Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper, Frank Zappa, and others, all seen without judgment and with casual wonder. It’s a world in which Tosh’s own actual first memory—being terrified by the bloody head of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott appearing through his bedroom window—is bathed in a fear that is not separate from the radiance of discovery.

Which brings me to the book’s second mission: to remind us of how we can wake to the full potential of our own lives. Because being childlike does not mean being simple. If Tosh reminds me of anyone, it’s Jean Cocteau, the French poly-artist who, more than being identified with any single genre, represented the process of creation. Likewise, although what emerges from Tosh’s experience can be found at the core of dozens of valid-enough self-help books, Tosh not only embodies these principles but makes them accessible.

Here, for example, are a few of the things I took from Tosh:

1. Pay attention. Don’t be lazy in seeing what’s in front of you. Don’t settle for what you expect to see; see what’s really there.

2. Follow your impulses. Don’t stop yourself before you start by saying, “It will take too much time” or “Nobody will be interested anyway.”

3. Be resilient. When you fail, enjoy that experience, too. (I was especially fond of Tosh’s proud reporting, for example, of how he failed kindergarten.)

4. Recognize people who are creative, who push the limits of what you think you can do. Be their friend.

5. And finally, learn by doing, not by being told what to do.

So that is a sort of list, and lists are pleasant because they make us feel we’ve accomplished something just by making one. The truth, however, is that the wisdom of any list won’t help unless we actually follow it, or, if we don’t know where to start, at least stand next to someone like Tosh and watch him in action. Are results guaranteed? Of course not. Are we all going to be a Wallace Berman? Again, of course not. But the point isn’t to be as brilliant as another person but to be as brilliant as we can be. And so this “piping down the valleys wild,” to quote William Blake, is never a waste of time. Blake wrote elsewhere, “Energy is eternal delight,” and like so many aphorisms, the reverse is true as well: Delight creates energy.

These days, the most important lesson of all may be simply this: With so much at stake in the larger world, so much genuine peril, so much injustice, so much that needs fixing, it’s important not to forget our right to pure Blakean joy. To remember that as we try to make things better for others and for the planet, if we cease to be awake to life’s unexpected parts, we will have lost what’s most important. And in this as well, Tosh can be our guide.•

We regret to inform you that the January 15 event featuring author Tosh Berman, special guest Garrett Caples, and host John Freeman in discussion about Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World has been canceled due to illness. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this memoir of a boyhood among artists in Topanga Canyon, and we’ll see you next month on February 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific for a conversation about Greg Sarris’s Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories.