Discovering David Meltzer
Academics are secretly drawn to topics that interweave with our own personal histories. This week I sat in the reading room of the Bancroft Library’s archives in Berkeley, looking down through the windows at students walking past in big groups. I came there to browse David Meltzer’s papers. He was the editor of Tree, a kabbalistic poetry magazine published by beatniks in Berkeley from 1970 to 1978.
Rabbi Hollander first told me about Tree. He wrote about it for the newsletter also. I was sitting in Der Nister during Friday afternoon open study hours, and he had brought out the two copies he owned. Browsing for a moment, I quickly realized this was major, that the works of poetry included here represented a different history of Jewish mysticism than I had been taught and were themselves a treasure trove, perhaps unfound by academics. Wanting to share this with the world, knowing there are others who would value it if they only knew it existed, felt like I was discovering something--a transformative realization.
Two days ago, walking over hills in San Francisco, I was on the phone with Henry and poked him to tell me stories about the writers whose correspondence I had been reading in the archive. While walking down Castro Street, I heard Henry talk about the Mission District, where he ran his bookstore between the BART station and the college where Meltzer taught. Meltzer and his best friend, Jack Hirschman, would stop by.
When I was a few years old, I remember visiting the UC Berkeley campus with my father, who was a postdoc there, to see a movie screened at a theatre on campus; I remember visiting the dinosaur skeletons in the Valley Life Sciences Building and running around them in circles. I remember going through dark days outside that same building when I was a 19 year-old undergraduate. Then I remember feeling so sure of myself, later that same school year, when I enrolled in critical theory and literature classes, and stepped onto the path of study I’ve continued to this day.
And where was I when David Meltzer wrote the emails I read this week on printed sheets, the later moments of his personal archive? I remember being in the diner on Haight Street that my mom took me to, where the servers were punks — although I didn’t know the word yet for that style, and the fish tank I would sit and look at there, and the vinyl flooring. I remember so many signs of old San Francisco. When I was six years old, Meltzer and Hirschman were still doing poetry readings at City Lights, just a few hills and miles away from my family’s home in the Castro. I didn’t know, I couldn’t have known then, that a generation was dying out whose work I now love and whose world I deeply long to be a part of. I was born just a little too late.
Tree feels like a part of my story because my own life maps onto it. Like the editor David Meltzer, I first studied Kabbalah in translation (although Meltzer only ever studied it in English translation, at least until the mid-1970s, when he attests to it in a typewritten page I found last week.) Like him, I see mystical poetry as being related to political values, against violence and militarism; also like him, I travel constantly, and found my first young adult home in the Los Angeles counterculture, though there has been a long arc from beatnik poets and rock-and-roll bands in his day in the 50s until the 2020s LA rave scene I became a part of.
I could write about the documents I found this week and the reactions that I had to them, like the eulogies for Allen Ginsberg and Bookseller Moe of Moe’s Books, or the 9 pages of testimony about first meeting Wallace Berman in LA in the 50s, and how LA was the same fantastical mystic hell it is now, but even hotter; I could write about the poem he wrote during the second intifada, in which he reflects recognizably, without naming it, on a quote from Gershom Scholem which I wrote an entire dissertation chapter about. Two days later, I found the handwritten paper notes where he copied that same quote; I had recognized it even in Meltzer’s unattributed poetic rendering.
Before any of this becomes scholarship, before I dissolve away the personal pronoun from all of it and let these writers’ stories speak for themselves--and the story of their intellectual project, which transformed kabbalah from esoteric tradition into a communal tiqqun--I have to write about myself for some reason, I have to let the “I” remain.
