My apologies to the muses hovering impatient and opalpresent [1] in the fleeting now, and also to my muse-slaying mind nurses waxing a legion in the shrunken and bitter past.
-6. Causes of WWI, a small blue book issued by A.P. History Teacher Art Richardson in 1978, as preparation for a class debate, which I declined to get involved in. I did read the book a few times and confided in this man, who found me a cipher of insanity who oddly knew facts about obscure ancient battles, such as casualty reports, that I did not think it was rational that any one of these nations carried the sole blame for this stumblebum inferno, that would go on to light a greater torch, that the causes were complex. He grinned, said, “Be careful, it’s about the argument.” I simply watched, dooming my team to failure. This book has nagged at me, rising navy blue in the mind’s eye as I marvel in later years that the only thing that historical or public discourse is concerned with is assignment of human blame or a singular cause. What inquiry is left to us is mere, preposterous, singular assignment of blame or sole cause.
-7. Alexander of Macedon by Harold Lamb, in the form of a cloth bound hard back book of red, was issued to me as my book report subject by Art, who looked at my copy of Conan the Barbarian and grinned with his arrogant lantern jaw, “This book is not the best treatment of the subject. But you will relate to it.” A backhand serve that was! The thing that stuck in my mind was how creative actors, such a Phillip, Alexander’s father, who had been a prisoner in Thebes and there, in his mind, developed the first and finest purpose built combined military machine, and his precocious son, defied the world and redefined mankind’s trajectory in it. Eventually, the machine they create to break boundaries, will mechanistically entrance their inheritors, who become reduced by their dependence upon it. This lead to me reading 14 books on Alexander over 20 years.
The following 3 books I found in the high school library after I was ejected form all classes with library passes for the crime of reading books not assigned by the teacher.
-8. Charles Oman’s History of Warfare, reinforced the above realizations and defined for me, in my teenage mind, mankind’s struggle against overrule by the mostly evil Gods, and the subterfuge and underule of women and eunuchs, as a battle between the creative masculine and the seduction of the feminine garden.
-9. J.B. Bury The Barbarians informed me, through his objected narrative, that the fall of Rome, was not a tragedy upon mankind, but a bastardized delivery from the evils of civilization. Reading Bury while completing all 12 Conan paperbacks and Worms of the Earth by Howard, had in me, an intensifying effect of antipathy towards the world order. Bury wrote an excellent annotated History of Greece, which is still the best single volume general treatment of the subject some 120 years later. This finding, in the 90s, would reinforce what Marshal Cavendish had taught me, that post 1930s history, to include that imperfectly compiled patriotic record, are exercises in a mass mind control lie.
-10. Three books, one written by a 19th century naturalist, on the history of Native American tribes of the Eastern woodlands, found in that high school library in the 1970s, made the case for ancient mariners, to include some lost tribes of Isrаel, settling among these folk in antiquity and their extant traditions, still in evidence in the 1800s, contributed to the long, 8 generation, period of coexistence between European invaders and Natives, a state that was in stark contrast to the simple single generation extermination and capture of Western tribes. Technology alone did not explain this. Art had explained to me that Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had better guns than Custer at Little Big Horn.
-11. Our Oriental Heritage, Volume One in Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization, drew me back into the academic fold I had so nearly escaped, to be hopelessly lost beyond its reading processes. As a special ed retard I did not want to also be a crackpot! I wanted to be accepted, with words, by the two smart non drug using friends I had made in Trinity, Randy and Dale. Reading the first volumes: 2 The Life of Greece, 3 Caesar and Christ, 4 The Age of Faith, 5 The Renaissance, 6 The Reformation, at the school library and at home, drove me to complete reading the series out of my Uncle Herb’s library in Baltimore, and to later buy the series for my sons and for reference. In the long run, thru my 50s, reading Durant made me a student of the liberal view of graduated emancipation from Eternity thru the hallowed civics of Goddess Civilization. This kept me from tilting too quickly into crackpot conspiracies, enabling me to act as a curator rather than a theorist.
-12. Worlds in Collision & Earth in Upheaval, by Emanual Velikovsky were two books my father had on his shelf in his basement office on Moger Drive next to my bedroom. I read these affirmations of ancient historical records [derided as myth today] in the face of omniscient SCIENCE and saw a fight against the old God and the new earthly God rising. My trusted and learned friends assured me that Velikovsky was interesting and meant well but did not have his sources annotated correctly, and should thus be ignored. For the next 50 years of my life I would be told by friends, family, history books, science fiction novels and stories, magazines and TV media, that current science IS GOD: omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent… and the silent, ink lettered voice of the old Russian psychologist who had predicted many things, including the temperatures of unvisited planets, has echoed in my mind ever since…
To be concluded in #3.
Notes
-1. Not a typo, rather a new and badly needed word. English words are so many that they suffer the lonely ennui of the crowd and need a new friend.
