The Brooklyn Rail

Uncle Neeli. 

 My earliest memories of Uncle Neeli are from around age 3. He, lying flat on the floor or grass, would lift me high, supporting me with one hand as I outstretched my limbs to become a bird or plane gliding over an imaginary landscape, both of us smiling and laughing with pure joy. I have a toddler’s-eye-view image of him lying in the yard at my mother’s house, holding a book overhead in the same way, staring up at it intensely, occasionally licking a thumb to turn a page. 

As a teenager and young artist in search of a medium, I triangulated between the worlds of visual art, music and poetry. During this time Neeli would send me signed and inscribed books of poetry by Ferlinghetti, Corso, Lamantia, Kaufman, Ginsberg and Bukowski, among others—and of course Cherkovski. With each book he sent me, it was as if my uncle plotted an ornate signpost to escape the angst I was experiencing in junior high and high school. 

My most enduring memory of Neeli is of his strong relationship to his friends, in particular those in the poetry communities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Since my childhood, spending time with Neeli often meant spending time with his friends, tagging along to Norms in LA with Bukowski or to Caffe Trieste with the Bay Area cohort when in San Francisco. Talking on the phone with Neeli also meant hearing updates or amusing anecdotes about his friends, many of their names now known to history.

“Hank”, Gregory (Corso), Bob Kaufman, Lisa (Brinker), (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti , Harold (Norse), Kaye McDonough, Michael McClure, (Philip) Lamantia, David Meltzer, Raymond (Foye), (George) Scrivani, Jack (Hirschman), Sally (Larsen), Charley Wehrenberg, (Paul) Vangelisti,  Danny Rosen, Kyle (Harvey), Scott (Bird), Phong (Bui) and so many more … In my head, I will always clearly hear these names in Neeli’s distinctive orator’s voice and volume. 

Like many of Neeli’s family and his closest friends, I received weekly emails of poems in progress and phone calls with full volume readings of his poems or those of others, often poems that he recited from memory. In recent years, many of my uncle’s poems became an integral part of my own work and painting practice, full poems hand-scribed onto the gessoed subsurfaces of my paintings, deposited in graphite into the sacred plane between layers of paint, a personal aspect of my art practice that is not evident publicly. 

Segments of Neeli’s poems also showed up as titles of my artworks or exhibitions: Awaken in the woods and walk between the trees; Light breaks from old restraints; Send sentences as vessels at dawn; Bow to the Stream on its descent to the Lowlands; Take a single letter from the stream.  Sometimes a work in progress Neeli had emailed was quickly integrated into a painting in progress in my studio. Neeli may not have known it but from 2018 I had opened up a direct channel from his writing into my own creative processes. For me, this channel and practice brought me closer to my uncle while also serving as a method of exploring my interests at the intersection between painting and poetry, narrative and abstraction, nature and consciousness—themes that I know were important in my uncle's work.

In our last phone calls, Neeli grappled with the passing of close friends, spoke enthusiastically about collaborations with peers and some of the young poets he was hanging out with, and anticipated the release of various translations of his poems. On most calls he would lament his own eventual passing, briefly touching on some regret of not having achieved certain accolades and financial security but always resolving his feelings with deep gratitude for the loving support of his partner of 37 years, Jessie Cabrera. 

Neeli also felt indebted to the early support and collaboration he received from his parents, my grandparents Sam and Clare Cherry, pre–Beat Generation bohemians who left San Francisco in the 1940’s and opened Cherry’s Bookstore & Art Gallery in San Bernardino, California. Neeli gave his first public readings there in the 1950’s. In the early- to late-1960’s my grandparents and Neeli co-produced poetry magazines such as Black Cat Review and Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns (both with Charles Bukowski).

Last year, while visiting Neeli, my sister Eden and her husband Mark sat with him on his back patio. As their conversation turned toward the passing of some of Neeli’s friends, including poet Jack Hirschman, and the passing of loved ones within my own family, Neeli mused on his own inevitable death and called upon a passage from the Buddhist teachings known as the Pāli Canon as being foundational to his life. Neeli first encountered the teachings in a small blue book my grandfather owned called Some Sayings of the Buddha, published in 1972. 

Eden started recording video on her phone. With her encouragement, and with a preface in which he calls himself a ham, Neeli recited from the Canon for the camera. Here it would be fitting to let Neeli speak for himself, in his well-timed warm tones:

Okay, so this is a—what I’ve lived by. I translate this into less-archaic English, but it’s something like this: 

Through many a round of birth and death I ran
Then found the builder that I sought
Now, house builder, you have seen
Broken are the rafters
Split the beams
No more compounded mind
Has slain craving

So that simply means the very simple complex, the fluid complex of completion, or what they might call nirvana. That’s just a word, but: completion. That I understand that I’m attuned to the entire universe: I am the universe. I am all these things. But that means I’m all the good things and all the negative things. And how do you mix it? I am the light and I am the darkness….

I’m all of that. And that is what I’ve lived by.  So I might say that my latest project is called Autobiographical Hell. Now, that’s based on the Inferno, by Dante. But people have to keep in mind: Dante wrote Purgatorio—that’s the middle ground, purgatory, which he got from Saint Augustine, who invented the idea of purgatory, and Paradiso, and the Inferno. 

So I say Autobiographical Hell because first of all it’s a clever title that’ll get people, and life is a kind of hell, because it does end, because you have to face death. 

But when you can say “I feel a sense of completion,” and all completion is is unity. Unity with what? Well, that’s very simple: unity with everything. With every flower in every garden, with every leaf on every tree, with every essence from every plant, with the sound of every animal. And that’s what it is, you know? And that’s so difficult for us, because we’re always snipping at it, or always truncating it. 

That’s what Buddha was about. And that way you can die at peace. I think. That way you can die at peace.

Dani Tull, August 22, 2024