COSMIC HERETICS:
by Alfred de Grazia
FOREWORD
I did not obtain Alfred de Grazia's materials for this book without remonstrance and persiflage. I had thought that he would be pleased to have someone writing about his activities, especially someone like myself who could be counted upon for sympathy, and indeed intended to do so, in several volumes, no less. Strange, for Immanuel Velikovsky had responded to me in the same way!
When I muttered something about reminiscence and the consolations of old age, he was primed for the retort, and I learned that Leonard Woolf had written his autobiography in his eighties, in five volumes, and Woolf was then old enough to be his father, and Bertrand Russell at the same age in three volumes. And I had better read them.
Furthermore, said he, I have a lot to recount, think of it, a boyhood spent sniffing the stench of the Chicago stockyards, shivering in the icy blasts off the prairies, a small critter's glance up the skirts of the Roaring Twenties. Then the University of Chicago in the heyday of Robert Maynard Hutchins. And more, seven campaigns of World War II, and still more, an island of the Aegean Sea, an experimental college in the Swiss Alps, intelligent women, singular, even beautiful, women, even beautiful men, for that matter. No, I can't let you take it away, there's too much to say.
Let me try, I said, there'll be no conflict of interest. I'll hew to the line of the Cosmic Heretics as they tried to break into the halls of science. It's got to be dull. It'll save you doing the chore. I can't take in your enfants terribles or your politicking, your love affairs or your friends who escaped your involvement in cosmic heresies. Or your poetry or attempts at educational revolution. No Naxos, not the beautiful ideas by half. No grueling trips, failures, pains, unless they're cosmical. No Vietnam, no University life.
Then Deg began to reproach me for taking a person's life out of its context, arguing that you have to talk about everything to say the truth about anything, whereupon I argued that no field of science could exist if most of everything weren't left out of the investigation of single thing.
Well certainly, he granted, you'll have a better chance of excising the insignificant details of life. Yes, exactly, I said, but I thought there's the problem and the genius of biography, fixing upon the details which may be the fulcrum of a change of life, precisely the sort of thing that is often lost in sociology and history.
Where will it start, where will it end, he wondered. I'll start, I said, at the time when you met Immanuel Velikovsky, the beginning of 1963, and carry it down to the publication of your Quantavolution Series, that is, the beginning of 1984. Not in chronological order of course. The story will lurch from side to side and pitch and roll.
Using your iconoclastic word "quantavolution" will help to define the dramatis personae. If a person's been observed by you amidst the melee provoked by the claim that nature and mankind have been fashioned by disaster, then that person belongs to the cast of characters.
Deg told me that the cosmic heretics were many, and their number would grow with the acceptance of the heresy. But, he warned me, if the heresy were to fail, I would be guilty of slandering decent citizens by inclusion. In either event, he said, history will be rewritten; it always is.
To whom will you dedicate your book, he asked, which was tantamount to giving his blessing to the project. To the Cosmic Heretics, naturally, I answered Anyhow, I have already taken care of Velikovsky with the dedication of my first book in the field. V. died four years ago, seventeen years after we met, and before we met had done almost all of his writing. For my own part, previously I had done a lot in political behavior and methodology, but nothing that might be called quantavolution. It was a sociological problem that brought us together in the first instance -- the reception system of science I called it afterwards. Although I might have known better, I almost immediately entered into the substantive theory of catastrophe; I couldn't resist the challenge. And I am just about finished now. (I grinned, and so did he.) I'm beginning to repeat myself, too, so it's not a bad time to end with your book. By the way, have you read everything that I've ever written? Yes, of course. Just wondering, he mused, because V. tried never to talk to a person about his works who hadn't read the pertinent volumes. It makes sense and saved his time.
I don't feel strongly about it: my books are children who have gone off somewhere, on their own responsibility. I don't possess them, though I ask that they not be mistreated -- the same as I would for other people's children. Who is entirely read, anyhow, he asked of me almost angrily, as if I had raised the subject.
I said I didn't know. Once I had met a psychologist who had read
the 24 volumes of Freud's collected works. Still, commented Deg,
some of his pieces escaped the Hogarth Press. William Yeats
dedicated his autobiography "to those few people mainly personal
friends who had read all that I have written," but probably no one
qualified. It's good that nobody has read everything of anybody. It
might abet the idea that where the pen stops the person vanishes.
Rather, although the powers of expression tower above life, life
rampages uncontrollably below.