Tosh's Journal: July 24, 2023

As I go through my library and boxes to clean out my space, I run into memories and, at times, someone else’s memories. The above picture is of my late mom Shirley Berman when she was an illustrator’s model for various department stores in Los Angeles during the early 1950s. Before I was born, and around the time she married my father, Wallace Berman.

The newsprint is fragile, and if I sneezed on it, I felt it would disintegrate in front of me. For the past few days, this has been the most treasured item I found in my office space at home and buried deep in a box full of books and papers from my years as a publisher for TamTam Books. My mom died in January 2022, and I still can’t shake off the feeling of missing her or never absent from my consciousness. I have no regrets, but I dislike death and people falling into bad health. There is something wrong with this system where one dies and leaves a space that can’t be filled up. On the other hand, after seeing my mom’s death, I have no fear of dying. That doesn’t bother me at all. What bothers me is living poorly and being unable to do what you want. Luckily, I’m not in a bad place.

Still, it’s an everyday struggle, and no shortcuts exist to avoid emotional pain or dread. Everything magnifies your feelings, and you become an Expressionist painting of anger and disappointment. Through an idea from my wife Lun*na and my past readings of the works by Claude Levi-Strauss, I will look at my life as a subject matter to investigate. I want to “uncover the underlying structures and patterns that shape human culture across time and space.” But since I know little about human culture, I’ll focus my studies on my behavior and practices. Even by instinct, by reading Marcel Proust, I could see I would come to this point in my life. Here’s to my adventure, and may it lead to new avenues of exploration.