I started posting my autobiography from the beginning of my twenty third year hitchhiking down the west coast from Toronto and leaving my academic career forever. I suppose I started there because that period was filled with colorful adventures. But to do it justice I'll turn back now to page one, my early life and schooling. With that the portrait will be complete.
My life and times
I have thrown off the shackles of caring how I appear, whether a reader might be bored or amused by it, or whether I have any readers at all. I have thrown off the world, Prometheus unchained, free to compose and record my own life, the portrait of a mind, not a face, through decades of radically changing situations. And that’s what I intend to do at great length, in detail. I have the time for it, the words, the prose and a full battalion of quotes and illustrations from all of Western literature to help me illustrate myself in precise detail. It’s a portrait worth painting because I know it’s unique and very rich.
I have only one history to think about and organize and compose, the only one I can perform with some degree of certitude, using my journals and memories. I know my memories might be corrupt in details, but not in general. If that were the case, I’d be nothing, and like Descartes in his worst, philosophical nightmare, unable to write his ‘Meditations’. So I compose what I’ve lived, what events and books shaped me, what friends, male and female, what loves wandered into my heart, happy or sad, or of too short a duration to be either, being just a ‘night flight’, a ‘Vol de Nuit’. But some of those were the most memorable ones, etched in my memory forever.
This journal shall be a colorful transcript of all those riches, in characters that ranged from the most criminal lowlife’s to the brightest intellects on the streets of Berkeley, all at the same periods, and many of whom I introduced to each other in my long habit of combining misfits. The good and bad, the high and low, shall color these pages in my constantly changing settings and fortunes, all over the States, the Caribbean and Canada, presenting a refreshing picture of a life unphotoshopped.
It’s not often that a privileged youth gets to absorb western culture to an intense degree, studying English, Latin, and much of Greek and French literature at a famous University, world renowned, reading it in the original languages for the full experience, delving deep into the Classics. This education took years of intense study, reading hard four continuous years with no social life or distractions, ten to fourteen hours a day, and yet with pure pleasure, such is the wealth of the literature, a pure delight to all who experience it. My library sits beside me and it has been with me for the last forty years, reduced in size a bit in all the many moves I made from California to Seattle to Puerto Rico to Canada, and through a host of disasters. Yet it still stands on my shelves intact. It’s the absorbing and defining force of my very being.
Then, with this wealth of knowledge, I did what a few others have done before me. I strayed from all normal paths and recorded it. I make no claim to originality. I’d read of their lives and followed their example. They were called bohemians two hundred years ago and beatniks in the fifties, radicals in my youth.
I left my gilded world and hitch-hiked into the sandbox of the ‘everyman’, the common people, the salt of the Earth, to see how my knowledge might steer me, what it was worth, to see if the best wisdom that constantly resonated within me from what I’d read and kept reading had any meaning to others, made any sense to the people I befriended and joined, strays, street artists, bums, society’s rejects, and later on, poorly educated construction workers. I made myself one of them, joining a trade as an electrician in my thirties for the rest of my life. But before that I made myself a bohemian on the French model of the 1830’s, then, by an unexpected fluke of fate, the criminal world, making much money, and an ever-stranger group of friends, inviting trouble but avoiding it through my wits and honesty, then leaving that life forever, right before the axe fell on my drug addicted companions.
But my knowledge and morals served me well to an amazing degree. These are the records, the history of that experiment, a crazy journal full of turns and twists. I had a propensity to befriend people I met by random chance down insane paths to near self-destruction at times and saved at the last hour by my inner sense of self-worth and self-esteem. This included both men and women, one of whom I married, possibly the most opposite human being in my life. But the journey was colorful, all along enlightening, even up to the standards of the great books of literature which I reference frequently with my story, like a gloss, as they were with me every step of the way in my adventures, often in my pockets in the strangest scenes.
This book deserves a perusal by any thinking being, inspired by the line at the beginning of the play by Terence where a farmer steps out to his stone wall and sees the neighbor in his field in distress and weeping. He asks what’s the matter, and the other replies morosely “It’s none of your business, you don’t know me”. That’s when he says: “I’m a human being and everything human concerns me”. The line is so profound that when it was said at the first performance of the play, in Rome around 160 B.C. everyone in the audience stood up, stopping the play to applaud. ‘Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.’ It’s still one of the best lines ever delivered. I’ll keep my quotes in foreign languages to a minimum. But I will teach you a few valuable, obscure but poignant words in English. This narrative is my life’s true account, vivid, hard to believe and half-crazy in its many detours. And that’s why I took such an expense of labor to compose it, in my leisure age. Besides, it’s my life, all I own. This is the record of it, a full, succinct, description my life, a real history in all its glorious and inglorious episodes.
The human mind is a jewel. I’ve dossed mine with acid in college, always with enlightening results, and other drugs later, mostly speed, which I used to increase my reading hours after I left academia, pursuing the same studies with even more intensity when degrees were no longer of relevance, but the knowledge was, and still is my only concern. As time went on I developed the habit of keeping a journal of books read and my thoughts upon them. I read voraciously and filled my mind for many years with wide reading, stuffed it with such strange texts as mankind, except for a few academic recluses, haven’t read in a century. Nobody reads Seneca anymore and becomes an electrician. I’m the only one and I know it.
But I also know I care to tell my story for its worth, for its strange scenes and abundant humor, which any smart person will see. The humor is in the irony of the freak, unexpected flukes of fate which changed my destinations, my careers and company, always leading to new adventures which turned out survivable and which I can only account to my ability to adapt to any situation, which I attribute to my lore of lessons learned from the Classics, so rich in examples of life, they comprise the whole universe of human possibilities, human interactions, which all these later ages have repeated over and over but never surpassed in novelty. In other words, it’s all been lived and done before, every love story, every sad story. And it was all described two thousand years ago with mirror-like accuracy to our lives today. We are just repeating the past. I suppose even my life has many close parallels to others from long ago. But mine’s contemporary and in English, so read on, and enjoy.
One other thought motivated this work, far higher and more noble than ‘entertainment’. We all die and are forgotten, sooner or later completely in the sands of time. The common man or woman, who tread their part happy, part miserable life into old age and death, will be remembered by their children vividly, by their grandchildren through a smoked lens, from some youthful, indistinct recollections and stories in pieces and in the fog of ‘long ago’. To their great-grandchildren they’ll only be names, stories and myths so blurred as not worth repeating to their children. So they’ll then be forgotten completely, permanently, forever.
I calculate this span to be forty to sixty years after one dies. I’m not quite happy with this term in our digitized age. So I’ve written down the salient features of my existence, as complete a picture of my life as I can, to be preserved on some computer cloud far into the future. Most likely it will be buried like a single straw in a huge haystack. But there is always the chance someone will notice it and read it a hundred years hence, perhaps share it with others, and in that act, the sliver of me that I preserve in these pages will have beaten time and mocked the common grave.
In one of my few poems, ‘The Mantel’ I mention an artist who carves a wooden horse, with infinite care to details. The reason for it is the same as mine for composing this book:
“The dusty vessel where some spirit spilled
That would not happily be sunk in clay.”
