Alfred de Grazia, born at Chicago in 1919, became a teacher, soldier, educator, poet, philosopher, and a reformer and innovator in politics and the sciences. He has been a participant and close observer in various significant scenarios of three generations, as he moved in a complex variegated congeries of social and family circles in America and abroad. He developed a type of pragmatism and phenomenology that he conveyed into many aspects of social and natural science, and into history and the humanities. He used the sociology of knowledge to dissect the forms of political representation. He introduced innovations into psychological warfare.
He initiated a paradigm of holistic quantavolution, whereby the world in its every sphere changes largely via sudden, intense, large-scale, correlative events. A quantavolution is inherently both catastrophic and anastropic (benefactive), the weighing and judgment of which calls upon a moral science with a definite complete catechism. The paradigm is descriptive and judgmental of all time past, predictive of the future because of human nature and nature itself, and prescriptive when applied to plans and designs for the future.
He composed a number of plays in ironic vein on serious themes, reminiscent of late ancient Greek comedies, and two volumes of poetry and two novels in the same style. He set forth numerous schemes for social reform, including a plan for world governance and a Constitution for a Federated Israel- Palestine. He published basic texts on American government, welfare, history, and politics.
Background
and SchoolingHistorian John Gillis called De Grazia's autobiography of childhood, The Babe, "a wholly new kind of work, as vivid and fascinating in detail as it is systematic in its method." He was born on December 29, 1919 and raised on the Near North Side of Chicago during the "Roaring Twenties." All four of his grandparents were Italian, from Sicily, of independent artisan class. Grandfather and blacksmith Sebastiano di Grazia won high fame in his ancient Greek-settled town of Eubea and the Medal of Honor for having helped save Emperor Victor Immanuel from capture by the Austrians in the Wars of Independence.
Named for his father, a musician and conductor, Alfred studied at Franklin Grammar School, and at Waller and Lake View High Schools, all of them heterogeneous ethnically. He was taught the violin at seven, which he disliked, and switched to the cornet at twelve. Baptized a Catholic, afterwards his religious indoctrination was nil. He was caused to pray as a Protestant at schools and camps, yet maintained a certain sympathy for the Roman Church. He became a Catholic in heart, a Protestant in behavior, and a Jew in mind. At fifteen he entered the University of Chicago, studied there from 1935 to 1940, and 1947 (A.B., 1939, Ph.D., 1948), and at Columbia University's Law School in 1940
The Indelible Stamp of the University of ChicagoAt college, he was enveloped by the controversies over the "Chicago Plan's" universal curriculum, by philosophical debates between pragmatism and Thomism, and between the sciences and the humanities; it was the great age of the University, also the period of the Great Depression around the world. Teachers of the highest standing raged over what ideas and books were to be foisted upon their students, who were caught up, enthusiastically so, in the continual imbroglio. His book, The Student, gives a first hand account of the University of Chicago in the hey day of Robert Maynard Hutchins. His teachers included Hutchins and Mortimer Adler on the one hand and T.V. Smith, Charles E. Merriam, Nathan Leites, and Louis Wirth on the other hand. Harold D. Lasswell was a friend and model for over 40 years.
Music and Athletics He was economically self sufficient at sixteen, earning his educational expenses and livelihood at a variety of jobs. He was a busboy at Billings Hospital cafeteria. He played solo trumpet and was Manager of the University Band. He worked as well with the Orchestra. He starred on the University championship water polo team, which won national honors. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa honorary scholastic society. He had long nurtured an interest in jazz as well, and in 1938 and 1939 his jazz combo played during the summer aboard British and Dutch Atlantic Ocean steamships.
Military Experiences In World War II he served in the ranks from Private to Captain, in artillery, intelligence, and psychological warfare, and was decorated several times during the six campaigns in which he participated, venturing from North Africa to Germany. He worked with a small group of men who were innovating tactics and techniques of war front and occupation propaganda; he was involved in fateful decisions regarding the Abbey of Monte Cassino, in the liberation of Rome and its new government, in the introduction of Italian troops into the Allied line, in the development of the First French Army, in the liberation of Southern France and Alsace, and in the conquest and control of Germany. At war's end he commanded psychological warfare operations of the American Seventh Army in Southern Germany. He had previously served in the British Eighth and American Fifth Armies. He recounts these four war years in The Taste of War. His heavy war experience was brought into play later on in the Korean and Viet Nam Wars and on occasion as a consultant to the State Department and Department of Defense. In Vietnam he tried without success to convert a war of devastation into a "welfare war."
Political Behavior and the American Behavioral Scientist After the Second World War, he did a brief stint in publishing, and finished his work for the doctorate, which later, under the title of Public and Republic: A History of American Ideas of Representation, was one of the few books in political science to be selected for the initial White House Library collection. A graduate of the "Chicago School" of Political Science, he pioneered, following Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, Nathan Leites, and H.F. Gosnell, in the "Political Behavior" movement that ultimately captured political science, providing to it especially a general theory of representation and apportionment, and redefining the scope of political science with the founding and editing, for ten years, of the American Behavioral Scientist, a journal which, when acquired by Sage Publications, became the centerpiece for the largest set of social sciences journal publications in the world. The Universal Reference System, the first computerized social science bibliographic service was his invention, and he designed other systems for use in welfare tracking and inventorying governmental functions.
Political Affairs He supplied much of the theory for the Federalism Task Force of the Hoover Commission on the Organization of the Federal Government in 1947-48. He helped in salient stages of their careers candidates of the Independent Voters of Illinois, the repeatedly press voted "Best U.S. Senator", Paul Douglas, the candidates of the Democratic Clubs and Senator Alan Cranston of California, Robert E. Merriam of Illinois, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and others. Some of his students became leaders later on ranging from a Mayor of San Francisco to a Connecticut Congressman and Rhode Island Governor, from a foreign minister of Algeria to a famous Indian environmentalist.
Teaching and Founding an Experimental College He taught for the first time at the University of Chicago, briefly, at the age of twenty, a graduate course in comparative political parties and elections; he spent the latter part of his teaching career (1959-1977) at New York University as Professor of Social Theory. In between he taught at Minnesota, Brown, and Stanford Universities, and lectured at various other schools in America and abroad, including Gothenburg, Istanbul and Lethbridge.(In one year, 1951-2, he held appointment to the faculties of three universities, Brown, Harvard and Columbia.).His usual courses were entitled Social Invention, Political Behavior and Leadership, Methodology, Psychological Factors in International Politics, and Propaganda, Communications, and Public Opinion.
He helped conceive reorganization plans at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (with Frank Keppel) and Stanford University (in connection with a Ford Foundation program).He directed a Center for Applied Social Research at New York University in 1959-61.He designed a fully innovative college and led an experiment in higher education 1970 - 1972 at Valais, Switzerland, called the University of the New World. Its several radical innovations included personal study plans and evaluations for every student, rule by an assembly chosen by lot from the school community, and the "Studio" as a continuous all levels club like substitute for conventional departments.
To found it, he formed a team composed almost entirely of students, teachers, and adventurers from different places, notably Kevin Cleary, Richard Kramer, Peter Tobia, Philip and Elizabeth Jacob, Robert Cheasty, St. Clair Drake and Elizabeth Johns. Also involved was Nina Mavridis, who later became his second wife, and who, after their divorce, set up a foundation on Naxos, and moved with her husband, Peter Bockelmann, a prominent musicologist, to Berlin. The Swiss experiment ended in failure, for lack of funding and from an internecine struggle for survival among the leaders. De Grazia " won the battle but lost the war." In retrospect, nevertheless, through the minds of its hundreds of participants, it appeared as a short lived success, a benchmark of their lives. Other attempts at founding radical colleges also failed: at St.Kitts and Nevis (where his beloved partner, Jean-Yves Beigbeder, was eaten by sharks); at Tunis (in the name of the great medieval Arab, Ibn Khaldun); at Apt in Southern France (stalled in local incomprehension).
Books in Political and Social Science Alfred de Grazia's first book, Public and Republic, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1950. His total published production runs to some two score volumes. His unpublished and unformatted works bring the number to over one hundred volumes. At first he wrote largely in political theory and method. Several major earlier works in the field are Elements of Political Science (1952), The Western Public (1954), The American Way of Government (1957), Science and Values in Administration (1961), Political Behavior and Organization, 2 vol. (1962), Apportionment and Representative Government (1963), and Republic in Crisis: Congress Against the Executive Force (1965). Besides, he edited Grass Roots Welfare (1958), and wrote American Welfare (1960, co authored by Ted Gurr ).
Voluntarism and the New Conservatism Period As indicated earlier, he undertook responsible roles in Chicago, New York, and California local politics and in national politics, in the Republican, Democratic and Independent movements. He directed a group of experts in a sweeping study of the functions and reform of the United States Congress, under the auspices of the American Enterprise Institute. Some of the many proposals of the report, entitled Congress: First Branch of Government (1966-7), ultimately achieved adoption. He referred to himself as a "radical-reactionary," and as such came under attack both by liberals and conservatives. He supplied much salient doctrine to the "New Conservatism" before the term was used and abused, including voluntary welfare theory, anti bureaucratic systems designs, and the strengthening of the independence and competence of the legislative branch of government. Much of this work was done with the aid of the William Volker Fund, the American Enterprise Institute, the Relm and Earhart Foundations, and New York University.
Designing the New World Order: Kalos and New Cities He then moved toward a more radical merger of right and left ideas, especially represented in the book called Kalos: What is to be Done with Our World? (1968 ff.) This was a treatise on human needs and the means of satisfying them through, and only through, a constitutional world government. He wrote two special documents: 40 Stases and Theses for World Reconstruction, published with 40 symbolic paintings by the Genovese artist and psychotherapist, Licia Filingeri, in 1995; in pamphlet format in English and Italian, there also appeared "The Kalotic Catechism of the Divine Succession." (2003). Other polemical texts included Politics for Better or Worse (1973), Eight Bads, Eight Goods: The American Contradictions (1975), and Art and Culture: 1001 Questions on Policy (1979, prepared for the National Endowment for the Arts).
He prepared and advanced proposals for new cities (The New City), and structures for Everyman (The Hacienda), beginning in 1969 with a plan for the rational transition of a traditional rural area of the island of Naxos, Greece, into urbanism and tourism (all of which failed to materialize; their story is contained in www.grazian-archive.com).He built a house by the sea at Naxos in 1968 and continued developmental work along with much of his writing there.
Adviser to Governments and Corporations He was an advisor to various national foundations, government agencies, and corporations, and was a senior consultant to the State Department, acting once as a delegate to the UNESCO General Conference, and organized and investigated psychological operations for the Defense Department in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. His reports on psychological operations, now largely declassified, include an early technical manual of the American Fifth Army published in the field (Cassino, 1944),Target Analysis and Media in Propaganda to Audiences Abroad (1952), Elites Analysis (1955), and Psychological Operations in Vietnam (1968). He was a consultant to General Motors Corporation, General Electric Corporation, Hawaiian Pineapple Company, the American Jewish committee, and other groups.
Proposing the Paradigm of Quantavolution Beginning in the 1960's his interests turned increasingly toward the problems of neo catastrophism, following the publication by him of a widely praised but controversial book upon scientific censorship, The Velikovsky Affair: Scientism against Science. In this work, he applied the behavior of scientists as observed to the concept of the Reception System of Science. He termed the theory of catastrophism as he re-conceived it by a new paradigm "quantavolution." Putting class work aside, from 1977 onward he devoted full time to research and writing, culminating in the publication by 1985 of ten volumes of the Quantavolution Series; they deal with subjects as diverse as the Odyssey of Homer (The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars) and the history of the Solar System seen as a binary electro magnetic transaction (Solaria Binaria, with Prof. Earl R. Milton as collaborator). The noted Bulgarian astro-physicist Academician and statesman, Vladimir Damgov, called for a thorough appraisal of the latter model by new age scientists. Two volumes deal with the evolution of mankind (Homo Schizo I) and human nature today (Homo Schizo II.); in these he proposes a short time instinct-delay theory of humanization, and linguistic and cultural hologenesis. His hologenesis depended heavily upon psychiatric theory and archaeology. Understandably he clashed with both conventional and religious chronology and historical reconstructions.
Also in this Q-series were The Lately Tortured Earth, which is a proposed revision of the conventional earth sciences; God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus, which interprets the Exodus in the light of modern science and psychiatry, which offers a new theology and new considerations on the existence of gods; The Burning of Troy, a collection of special studies and memoranda and Chaos and Creation, which presents the general theory of quantavolution.
He coined the term "quantavolution" to denote his holistic theory of sudden, leaping, large scale changes as the major factor in natural history, evolution, and human development. Quantavolution Theory is the most general expression of the movement away from newtonism, darwinism and lyallism in physics, biology and geology, and includes a thoroughly integrated electromagnetic short time history of the solar system as a binary system; other novel elements of the Q theory affect drastically the issues surrounding the development of human nature, language, biological evolution, geomorphology, and theology. Thus, his Homo Sapiens Schizotypus theory conveys a hologenetic physical cultural quantavolution from hominid to homo sapiens, brought on by sharp environmental crisis, as with a marked electro magnetic atmospheric shift, bringing on a micro delay in instinctual response, hence, multiple personality, hence fear of self and drive for self control.
The Struggle to Publish a Plethora of Books His Solaria Binaria Theory originates the solar system from a nova of the Sun and a stretched, lessening electric arc to a binary, now practically disappeared, around which the planets evolved. The original binary he called Uranus Major, identified with the ancient Greek Ouranos and Hindu Varuna. Successive novas created Saturn and Jupiter. The theory was submitted to expert seminars at the University of Bergamo, and in Sofia at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, with mixed receptions from the astrophysicists and astronomers present. Proceeding with his integrated theory, by a “lunagenesis,” he derived the Moon from the Earth in recent times in an explosive response to a passing binary fragment("Uranus Minor"), and explains continental drifting, not by tectonic plate theory, but as a rafting of the remaining Pangea toward the great vacated basin, along the fracture lines of the globe occasioned at the moment of passage. He essayed a new theory of mythology and linguistics as well, and offered two novel proofs for the existence of gods. In all of this work, controversy was taken for granted. The pages of classical journals in the sciences and humanities were closed to quantavolutionary writings, with rare exceptions. If only because his output was so heavy, he could not expect to publish his work except over many years, and therefore used his early publishing and editing experience to design and supervise the production of his own works on numerous occasions.
Campaigning for Global Federalism All the while he worked in these areas, he continued to afford time and energy to his proposed movement for world government, begun in 1969 with the book mentioned above, Kalos, What is to be done with our World? and pursued the plan as a guiding theme of the Swiss college. He published Kalotics I and Kalotics II, containing manifestoes and extensions of the theory of world government. A number of his former students, Dr. Stephanie Neuman, Dr. Rashmi Mayur, Dr. Nina Mavridis, and Dr. Ibne Hassan, to name four, were for a time actively engaged. In 1985 he set up a World Headquarters for the Kalos movement at Bombay, with Arun Gandhi, Rashmi Mayur, and others, which collapsed upon his departure. Too, his present wife and novelist, Anne Marie Hueber de Grazia (inter alia, Pigeon d'argile, Sur ce promontoire, Les dents de scie, Amazon's Choice) has worked in the movement. In his study of the Bhopal poison chemical-insecticide, Union Carbide disaster, A Cloud over Bhopal (1985), which she helped prepare, he urged that multi national corporations be brought into a world order of responsibility.
Autobiography, Poetry, Novels, Theater The story of his experiences in the Quantavolution Movement from 1962 to 1982 is related in his book, The Cosmic Heretics, which became the first of several planned autobiographical volumes to appear in print. Published in early 1992 were the first three volumes, those dealing with the child (The Babe: Child of Boom and Bust in Old Chicago, Umbilicus Mundi); education: (The Student: At Chicago in Hutchins' Hey day) and soldiering in World War II: (The Taste of War). To follow, he planned volumes on philosophy, academia and politics, on the Swiss university experiment, on the island and culture of Naxos, and on the family. A first volume of his poetry was published in 1967 as Passage of the Year and the second in 1997, Twentieth Century Fire Sale. In manuscript for some years and now published on the web are two novels, Blackout and Ronald's Norm, both of them set in the Washington Square neighborhood of Manhattan.
Seventeen plays of recent years are appearing on the web and in fugitive formats for rehearsals and performances, in English and in Italian translation (2004). A theatrical troupe, the Bergamaskers, was organized in the hope of performing them. The Rogue State and The Holocaust of Mein Kampf received public readings in Bergamo. In 2005 6, he produced two of the plays, The Rock of Sisyphus and The Gene of Hope as movies. A personal account of a Swiss espionage case, involving an acquaintance, Chris Marx, which also forms part of the autobiographical series, is titled The Fall of Spydom, or The Venus Spytrap; it was written at his home in the Vaucluse, France, during the period 1988 9, and was published in 1992.
The De Grazia Family Experience Numerous De Grazia's have been extensively involved in American intellectual circles and public affairs. Two of his brothers were professors of law and philosophy, and authors of important works (Sebastian (dec.) was awarded in 1990 the Pulitzer Prize in History for Machiavelli in Hell). Edward was a founding member of the faculty of the Benjamin Cardozo Law School, and has written extensively on freedom of the press. A third brother, Victor (dec.), a political campaign manager and onetime Deputy to the Governor of the State of Illinois, headed a consulting firm that specialized in the jury process.
Alfred and his first wife, Jill Oppenheim (deceased), had seven children. (Their correspondence of a million words during World War II may be the world's largest of this genre, and, with regard to Jill’s letters, the best. In 1999 it became available as Home Front and War Front on CD-ROM.)Two of his daughters are professors, Catherine in archaeology ( Director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and Princeton) and Victoria in social history (Columbia University): author of How Fascism Ruled Women, and of Irresistible Empire, Editor of A Dictionary of Fascism; Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences);a third, Jessica, first assistant and chief of administration of the office of the District Attorney of Manhattan, for the past decade a consultant on security matters for international concerns and lately a consultant to the British Government on the management of criminal prosecutions, has written on the international drug traffic and efforts to combat it. Two sons are craftsmen and musicians, working in Seattle. Carl died at 48 from cancer. John, variously skilled, has wandered widely. Alfred’s wife, Anne Marie Hueber, joined with him since 1977, is French, a prize-winning novelist (see, e.g. La Promontoire) and translator in three languages, and has been his collaborator on several projects, in publishing and in quantavolution research. Her latest book is a translation from the Gothic German of Johann Gottlieb Radlof's The Shattering of the Great Planets Hesperus and Phaethon, an obscure treatise on the catastrophic planetesimal Phaethon. Numerous other relatives by lineage and marriage are also professors and writers, constituting, in all, one of the larger literary and artistic families of America.
Size of Corpus and Its Distribution In sum, he authored 4500+ published pages on numerous aspects of American government and history (published by Alfred A. Knopf, John Wiley, Scott Foresman, Doubleday, Sidgwick and Taylor, American Enterprise Institute, Metron Publications, et al), 3000+ pages on general political theory and world affairs, many pieces appearing in his role as founder and editor of The American Behavioral Scientist for a decade, 3000+ pages on quantavolution and ancient catastrophes,1500+ pages of autobiography,2 volumes of poetry, 1 volume of theatrical plays, 2 novels, 2 theatre films, and several thousand pages that are being prepared for publication on cd rom and in book format. His work of the years 1990 to 2006 drew substantial support from the Mainwaring Archives Foundation.
Bergamo and the Italian Quantavolution Circle Alfred and Ami sold their house in Princeton, New Jersey, and gave up a part time residence in Angouleme, France in order to move in 2002 to Bergamo, maintaining at the same time the old Naxos home. At the University of Bergamo he was appointed Professor of Methodology and the History of Science. Among his new associates were the brilliant mathematician and revisionist of ancient history, Prof. Emilio Spedicato, Prof. Vladimir Damgov, chief physicist and plasma research director of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Admiral Flavio Barbiero of the Italian Navy and an explorer, Felice Vinci who wrote “Homer in the Baltic,” and Rector Federico di Trocchio, biologist and historian of scientific controversies. He set up a modest Center for Quantavolution Studies with the help of the Mainwaring Archives Foundation. Just as he had discontinued or failed at some projects in the past, he invented, but then quit developing, a computerized electronic book, for he was repelled by the confused and elaborate nature of the patenting process. But in 2000 he started up and developed an on line CD DVD disk and print bind plus electronic books on demand publication system to ensure and speed up communications in his chosen fields.
He stepped up his writing and editing of plays. He wrote and published in CD rom (1999) and placed on line and at www.grazian archive.com the book, Reconstructing American History from 1400 2000A.D. Soon afterwards, the total unexpurgated World War II correspondence with his wife Jill, Home Front and War Front, appeared in CD rom. It is reputed to be one of the largest and best of the genre of personal war letters. He headed in 2003-4 two research projects on the coincidence of natural disasters and legends in ancient times, and promoted quantavolution teaching and archiving at the Center for Studies in Quantavolution. He kept up the preparation of a special Encyclopedia of Quantavolution and Natural Catastrophe, and began writing a memoir to update developments pertinent to the sciences of quantavolution between 1980 and 2005.
Exposition of a Federation of Israel-Palestine with a ConstitutionHe continued to prepare and circulate proposals for world union, and agitated especially against the rogue state tactics of the Israel and USA governments that fueled Islamic and indeed general resistance to American policies around the world. He urged a unified federation of Israel-Palestine. And he wrote for it a Constitution, which with associated documents was published on the Web. In 2002 all of his writings, old and new, on World Governance, were published on CD rom. It included the Constitution, which he considered to be a utopian antidote to the absolute pessimism and evasion everywhere prevailing in regard to the region. It was carried in Hebrew, Arabic and English on the Web.
The Iron Age of MarsIn 2005, Ami de Grazia's single volume abridgement of most of his work in quantavolution was published in book form as The Way of Q. He then completed and published in 2006, The Iron Age of Mars, which contained his most speculative work on quantavolution up to the present. In this two volume book, he reduced the onset of the Iron Age by centuries, claimed the origin of most iron from the skies, specifically from Planet Mars, argued for the origins of the earliest Hebrews and the Bible in Western Arabia, and depicted an enormous destruction and formation of new cultures and sciences everywhere in the greater Mediterranean region, starting as the Bronze Age moved into the Iron Age.
The Grazian Archive on the WebHis Web site will ultimately carry the estimated two billion bytes of his writings, photographs, and films. Welcoming over two million file visits per year, it is working toward containing the full body of his works. The production of some 100 CD’s of his individual works continued, and Eumetron on Naxos began turning out the complete works as bound books, produced and supplied as needed.
Friends and AssociatesDe Grazia's numerous changes of life settings, forty-eight of them, brought each its new human relationships. There may be a point to systematic naming. Why name by title one's books or songs in a biography, while leaving out the named people who were the books and songs of his life? As one moved from circle to circle (and via 48 different locales) his friends might change completely. And these associates determined some part of his character and his life activity. Among the friends would be named those of each of his three generations. Inasmuch as his written work is extensive, and broad in scope, each work involved new acquaintances. Which, of a hundred kind librarians, should be promoted to friendship? He also has parents, dearest of friends,(Alfred Joseph, Catherine Lupo) his wives (Jill Oppenheim and her children, Nina Mavridis, Anne-Marie Hueber), the brothers ( Sebastian, Edward and Victor) and their wives (particularly Anna Maria D'Annunzio de Grazia, Miriam Carlson de Grazia, and Lucia Heffelfinger de Grazia), and some of their children, and thereafter, in no special order here, Bill Steinbrecher, Bob Merriam, Johnnie Dearham, Hank Danenberg, Tom Crowell, Livio Stecchini, Ed Dunton, Dick Cornuelle, Stephanie Neuman, Savvas Camvissis, Martin Herz, Bill Colman, Paul H. Douglas, Hans Wallenberg, Harold Lasswell, Bill Evers, Carl Stover, Norm Pearson, Bob King, Allen Greenman, Elberton Smith, Emma Forer, Tony Aparo, Lorraine Anderson, Bruce Mainwaring, Johnny Anspacher, Clara Unghy, J.F.Brown, Gert Roesler, Ken Olson, Mike Nalbandian, Jay Gordon Hall, George de Huszar, Tom Stevenson, Paul Oppenheim, Ann Whittington Oppenheim, Earl S. Johnson, Donald Sproat, Derwin Elliott, Joe Farina, Howard Blencoe, Clara Zeutschel, Eugene Vanderpool, Simone Thomas, Ian Greenlees, Suzanne Farkas, Ian Robertson, Mike Fraser, Margery Goldman, Tom Frelinghuysen, Rosalyn Frelinghuysen, Susan Weyerheuser, Livio Stecchini, Christine Cahill Ressa, Herb Cornuelle, Ken Templeton, Kevan Cleary, Mark Blasius, Savvas Camvissis, Laura Bergquist, Donna Wilensky, Herbert Simon, Dick Kramer, Rod Rockefeller, Jean Yves Biegbeder, Earl Milton, F.W. Meyer Rudolphi, Chris Meyer Rudolphi, Bill Mullen, Ian Tresman, Chris Marx, George English, Emilio Spedicato, Itheil de Sola Pool, Rolf Classon, Maria Lancing, Peter Gillgren, Richard Stern, Pilar Latini, Immanuel Velikovsky, Ibne Hassan, Chia Ballantine, Herbert Neuman, John Scott, Peter James, Vladimir Damgov, Catherine Earhart, Troy Earhart, and many others whom one would wish to include and will find their way into a final accounting based on his diaries and archives. J'en passe et des meilleurs?
It would be of little use to label them, except impermissibly to distinguish the famed from the obscure; moreover, each person would constitute matter for a poetic and sociological volume. They do appear by name and function in the many autobiographical works and letters. For his first fifteen years, an attempt has been made in The Babe to evaluate the influences that a number of named persons had upon the child's life. Actually affection and friendship varied with duration and intensity, in a kind of scatter diagram. A rough calculation over the years would accord him about four thousand acquaintances, and a rather larger number of "nodding acquaintances." Of these 1500 or so would have been his students; he would have had about 500 close acquaintances, and 250 close friends, five in grammar school, eight in high school, twenty five in college and university, thirty at war, fifteen in politics, fifteen in business, ten in neighborhoods, twenty as colleagues, eleven in immediate family members (except children and wives), and the rest variously occupied and purely social. Intellectual and social activity often contended with public functions, jobs, and political agitation during his lifetime.
Life SettingsLife Style and HealthHis eighty-sixth birthday was celebrated in solitude with Anne-Marie at the Hotel Victoria in Pisa, where, with the Kinokitchen Company and the Bergamaskers, he was producing a movie of his play, The Gene of Hope. The film was released in July, 2006.
His lifelong strong libido had its generous components of eat (omnivorously), drink (water, juices, single malt scotch, martinis, and red wine), sexuality (with fidelity running far ahead of libertinism, and one partner for the last third of life), making merry (its temptations pacified easily and suborned to solitary research and writing), and a boundless ambition to advise everyone and also the world on how to achieve perfection. Illness brought only three scares, once at 8 years upon an appendectomy, once at 80 with warning signs of an electrical insufficiency, which was appeased by a cardiac pace-maker, and again twice with diverticuli hemorrhages from, he believed, and who was to say not so, a vagus nerve that began annoying his innards and eyes slightly from one year to the next since he had overworked ambitiously in his youth, and was activated during episodes of anxiety thereafter. His blood pressure when he was over 75 ranged satisfactorily between 125/138 and 75/88, with a slow regular pulse at around 66. Cataracts had been removed from his eyes in the early nineties and he saw and read well without glasses, except against the sun and driving at night. Dentition was getting ragged as he aged; he emplaced a partial dental bridge, discarded it, got another one years later, used it half-time. A once tri-fractured left foot (from a side-slipping motorcycle) occasioned mild edema; once it seemed that a deep thrombosis was working its way out; the local lymphatic system was not evacuating water sufficiently. In general, then, he reached the late eighties in enviable health.
He was never fearless, however he appeared, and was often challenged to resist the edges of fear in peace and war. He became moderately depressed after the age of 82: out of anxiety, at orgasmic impotency, for having no longer a chance to be great, for the despicable governments (especially the USA and Israel) whose conduct he had helplessly to observe, at the ruthless dispatching from the world of nearly all those who had been part of him, at the fondness of his wife for a good friend of both and her profound mourning at his unexpected demise from cancer in Spring of 2006, and at the pain his own death might cause to someone. He was considering the surprising possibility of a rejuvenating injection of embryonic stem cells -- the beginnings of a revolution that would ultimately see educated citizens creating new species and varieties of life in their gardens and workshops. Given his well-being, he could bet on a final three-year stint of work, a 7-day week with 4 to 10 hours per day. Funds from the Mainwaring Archives Foundation helped him process his archive and get help for his research in Italy and Greece. So he might hope that his future biography could contain a fully ordered DVD archive, an additional spate of autobiographical detail, and several new colleagues in politics, quantavolution, and the theatre.
There was scant chance that he could organize his planned International Society for Quantavolution Studies, with its accompanying Q Bulletin and distance learning courses. He intended to write a grand play to be called Mashugena. He would probably be living in a new home. somewhere, too. His rare beautiful retreat on the Stylida promontory had become almost encircled by villas. New fast and powerful ferry boats sent waves three times a day from a mile at sea to roil his three little beaches. France? Italy? Britain? The States?