The Moon’s Dream: The Philosophical Skepticism of Lionel Ziprin
The history of postwar American poetry is riddled with ghosts—subterranean spirits who rarely breached the mainstream, yet whose specter haunts the edges of our contemporary literary conscience. Among them stands Lionel Ziprin (1924–2009), a poet, mystic, and archivist whose commitment to anonymity was both a critique of fame and a ritual of sacred union. Born in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Ziprin was the son of a Jewish cantor and married into the family of the kabbalist Reb Nakhman Mendl of Ludmir. He carries the rare distinction of being equally at home in the world of beatnik lounges and rabbinic scrolls. Despite engaging with countercultural luminaries like Allen Ginsberg and Thelonious Monk, Ziprin never published a full collection of poetry in his lifetime.
This silence was not due to lack of material. On the contrary, Ziprin composed verses obsessively, often in spiral-bound notebooks that were stored alongside his ephemera-filled apartment—a sanctum so dense with manuscripts and marginalia that it earned him the title of “the Wizard of the Lower East Side.” His writings reside somewhere between poem, prayer, and commentary; they refute categorization. What Ziprin left behind was not a bibliography but an atmosphere—a peculiar fog ripe with metaphysical murmur. The material he did publish scattered across little magazines, such as _Kulchur_ and _Judson Review_, and in reprinted form decades later in hand-bound chapbooks produced by friends or cabalistic admirers.
Much of Ziprin’s aesthetic maturity crystallized during the 1940s and ’50s, yet it conveys an ancientness that defies the historical marker. His lyric “Songs for Schizoid Siblings,” written during a spurt of mystical ecstasy, opens with: “I saw the Torah written in lightning on my mother’s apron.”¹ It’s a line that immediately distorts the familiar dyad of the mystical and the domestic. Just as Kabbalah yokes the divine with the profane, Ziprin makes of ordinary space a sacred palimpsest. And yet there is never proselytizing in his tone. The divine, in his verse, seems haunted and bewildered, lost alongside its human avatars.
To understand Ziprin’s aesthetic is to understand his version of Judaism—an idiosyncratic sprawl of Kabbalistic speculation, folk genealogy, and midrashic improvisation. But more than faith, it is curiosity that pervades his work. As one of his lines observes: “We seek what no text records / for in the margins live the angels / too shamed to speak God’s name.”² Here, Ziprin articulates the flaw inherent in all scripture: its silencing of those angelic voices that refuse the fixity of doctrine. He was not interested in exegesis but in exo-exegesis, the commentary outside the commentary, a term he never used but would certainly recognize.
In 1966, Ziprin published a mysterious poem titled “9 9,” appearing in _Angel Hair_, the experimental poetry revue. It is not easy to quote from this poem because it reads like a tessellation of oracles. Yet a line that emerges from the storm reads: “What is sacred if not mistaken? And what is mistaken if not remembered twice?”³ These cryptic inquiries challenge the metaphysics of memory and error. Ziprin posits that sacredness is not a matter of ritual exactitude, but of repeated failure—misremembered, and, thus, given new life through rupture.
This dialectic between mistake and sanctity leads us into deeper philosophical waters. The line recalls Walter Benjamin’s notion in _Theses on the Philosophy of History_ that “only for the sake of the hopeless are we given hope.” Ziprin’s inversion of recollection grants spiritual authority to human forgetfulness, a theme that recurs across his unpublished manuscripts in the form of riddles and gnomic utterances. In one marginalia, scrawled in green ink beside a poem on Hezekiah, he writes: “I write not to remember but to remind God not to forget.”⁴ The assumption here is radical—writing is not for people, but for God; not to preserve knowledge, but to provoke divinity into action. Or perhaps, more disturbingly, into awareness.
This brings us to what may be the core of Ziprin’s philosophical standpoint: a deeply paradoxical theology, or perhaps more accurately, a theognosia—a suspicion that God may still be in the process of discovering Himself. “The aleph was once a comma who forgot how small it was,” reads another sliver of verse, conjectured to be from his 1971 “Inexperiences.” The statement collapses the sacred alphabet into typographical mischief, desacralizing the onset of word while simultaneously investing punctuation with mystical significance.
The speculative consequences are not trifling: if transcendence is error, then poetry becomes a divine blasphemy—a necessary sacrament in the evolution of God’s own understanding. Ziprin thus functions not merely as a scribe, but as a collaborator in cosmic authorship. His oeuvre implies that the imagination is not the faculty through which man approaches God, but the apparatus through which God, too, must dream.
I encountered Ziprin not in a library, but via a xeroxed copy of one of his letters, passed hand-to-hand like contraband. Dated 1987, it speaks of “shoals of forgotten sounds” and a desire to compile “an encyclopedia of unprovable angelologies.” That moment, hunched in a bar beside a dying lamp, caught in the flash of Ziprin’s unspoken cosmology, tilted my thinking irreversibly. Had poetry always meant to be a safeguard for the untranslatable and the deliberately misheard?
I want now to return to the aforementioned line from “Songs for Schizoid Siblings”: _“I saw the Torah written in lightning on my mother’s apron.”_ At first encounter, it dazzled me merely as a surrealist flourish. But later, on reflection, trembling as I conducted my own laundry under a flickering ceiling light, I realized the line wasn’t metaphor but sacred architecture. Ziprin’s world demands that we see apocalypse in the banal, that Midrash might erupt from grease stains, that the infinite might—without warning—fold itself into Aunt Miriam’s sideboard. His soiled and sacred semiosis implies that true enlightenment must arrive unannounced and wear a child’s shoe.
So where does that leave us, seekers of the unread? Reading Ziprin, one is burdened and liberated by the realization that comprehension is not the goal. Like the wandering sparks of Lurianic cosmology, Ziprin’s lines dart in and out of readability, always just beyond what scholarship might resolve. In this way Ziprin’s legacy is not poetic but esoteric—a map for wanderers iliterate in map-reading. His work is not so much a corpus, but a whisper that breathes itself back into disappearance.
Ziprin died in 2009, almost anonymously, though his influence lingers like the residue of a yeshiva chalkboard: erased, but not invisible. He remains cherished by a growing cult of poetic cryptographers who see in his vanished syntax an invitation—perhaps the last one, before the archive burns.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, Judaism, esoterica
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¹ Ziprin, Lionel. “Songs for Schizoid Siblings.” _Judson Review_, Vol. 3, 1962.
² Ziprin, Lionel. _Unpublished notebooks_, Box 14, Ziprin Archives, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
³ Ziprin, Lionel. “9 9.” _Angel Hair_, Issue 5, 1966.
⁴ Ziprin marginalia, “Hezekiah Psalm Fragment,” Ziprin Papers, Box 9, New York Public Library Special Collections.