A Journey Through Existence: the Way of Worldly Love

By Norm Prigge

Preface

I explicitly do not affirm the truth of any statement made or implied herein concerning any actual people, including myself; or any actual relationships, including my own; or any concrete situations depicted. Everything I have written is either about or based upon my perceptions, memories, imagining, suppositions, assessments of poetic and dramatic appropriateness, and the like, all such, qua sources of factual truth, being notoriously fallible. The only truth that I do affirm herein is that of the universals that can be abstracted from the particulars of my subjective experience, the universalscall them poetic truthswhereby my audience can better understand and perfect themselves as I, hopefully, have been able to do for myself in the living and subsequent describing of all that follows. If anything I have written happens to occasion any people pain, I express in anticipation my deepest compassion; such people must know, however, that I would not have written as I have if I did not suppose that I would thereby have caused, in potentiality, far greater good than harm. Bear Valley Springs August, 2011

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465385994

Book preview

PROLOGUE

A Prospect, In Retrospect,

Of The Way Of Worldly Love

A Year in Grass Valley

It was late spring when we left the city,

with its jangling commotion, its jostling crowds of strangers

still jittery with the panic of war,

to spend a peaceful sojourn in a little mountain town.

I could not have known when we arrived there

how vast would be the year that was to pass

from then till our return to urban life,

and to the tasks set out for me: to grow up, get a good education,

find a respectable profession and a decent wife—

to lead, in short, or at least to try to lead, an ordinary life.

How grand was the Longwood home we’d left behind,

with a kitchen so large it could accommodate a built-in dinette

where the family would eat informally when there were no guests,

with a bedroom for my folks, one for my brother, and a separate one for me,

even one, on the ground floor, for the colored girl Dorothy!

How different was the small, square wooden house that awaited us that spring,

with a kitchen so tiny the icebox, though not so very large,

had to be exiled to the dusty, screened-in back porch,

a house with only two bedrooms, one of which, along with its single bed,

I had to share with my brother, who was a lot bigger than me,

and who loved to hog the covers by rolling up in them,

leaving me to make do in my chilly solitude.

How grand was the Longwood garden we’d left behind! . . .

My present memories of it are so vivid

as to render what I remember

more present, indeed more real,

than this page in front of me:

From the patio at the rear of the main wing of the house,

I descend the broad concrete staircase

with its matching pairs of oversized terracotta pots,

each filled with a plant clipped to resemble a great fuzzy green ball.

I reach up on tip-toes and pat the top of one of the balls,

so bristly to my touch, and am put at once in mind

of petting Angus, my father’s father’s surly Scottie.

To my left, as I go down, are three lawn-covered terraced hills,

whose plateaued tops, each broad enough

for a couple of boys to play on rambunctiously,

stretch laterally all the way to the property’s edge,

hills gently rolling down to the treacherous rocky slope

pitching to the brook below. To my right,

once past the side-wing of the house,

I come upon a hillside covered with ivy, made impenetrable

by thoughts of slugs and snails and other slimy things.

At the bottom of the staircase I arrive at the sturdy bridge

that crosses over the brook that is itself home to crayfish, watercress,

and other things of mystery. I cross the bridge,

trailing my hand along the smooth top

of the railing of wrought-iron filigree,

and arrive at a flight of stairs that ascends to—I know not where,

for a mist of forgetfulness now clouds my sight.

The moment passes, and, through no effort of my own,

the noon-day sun breaks through upon the landscape of my memory:

I ascend those stairs to a simple rectangular field of grass,

a bird-bath at its farthest reach,

the field surrounded by a close-clipped box-hedge,

with conveniently placed entry-ways neatly sculpted out of it.

I walk along the path surrounding the outside of the hedge,

admiring, on the far side of the path, the flower beds

interspersed with victory gardens

where we warriors on the home-front grow vegetables

which look, well, not all that good, but which,

or so everyone insists, are delicious to eat.

I note, in a far corner, the inevitable incinerator

and nearby the playhouse large enough for grown-ups to stand up in.

I take comfort in the privacy afforded me by the fence

around the whole, indeed around the nearer garden

as well as this one farther back, a fence densely covered

with wild berries, hibiscus, and honeysuckle.

Even at this distance I can smell the honeysuckle still!

Oh how grand all of it is! . . . and yet, as my mother often complained,

it was never quite the same ever since that day

our gardener Mr. Kawafuku came to say good-bye,

with two little American flags, one for my brother and one for me,

and with tears in his eyes.

How different now was the small dirt yard surrounding the Grass Valley house,

with nothing but patches of brown grass and dried hulks of dead daffodils!

My father, though a medical officer in the Army,

could do no better for us in this little town than he had done,

for his redeployment had been sudden

and many soldiers preceding him also wanted to be with family.

Besides, those differences made little difference to me,

now set free to roam the nearby countryside in summertime!

A solitary lad, I roamed alone, for I had no friends

outside my mother and those others, of whom I never spoke,

inhabiting my wondrous world of make-believe.

Still, on the occasion of my turning six,

my mother was able to entice the neighborhood kids

with ice-cream and cake to attend my birthday party.

They came, of course, and with their obligatory gifts,

one of which, a game with loads of pretend money,

so enthralled me I announced to all it was my favorite,

whereupon my mother quietly admonished me

that showing preference for a gift was just not done,

and ever since then that is something I have never done.

With the coming of yellow and orange and red

amidst the perpetual evergreen, my brother and I

began our week-day morning trek down Empire Street,

at our backs some distance away the gold mine, still in operation,

where the family would occasionally visit

for a week-end picnic; in front of us, on either side,

the stately old homes I imagined to be

mansions filled with ghosts of folks from Gold Rush days;

and finally the school which was our destination,

the only school in town, twelve grades plus kindergarten, and still quite small.

The first-grade substitute teacher came substituting, or so it seemed,

at least once a week, tyrannizing all of us but especially me:

Whitey, she shouted one day—that was not my name,

but a reference to my hair, and she called me that

in a tone suggesting its color was what she hated most in me—

"Whitey, go and stand in the corner with your back to the class,

and don’t move till I tell you to"—this, even though I’d done nothing wrong,

but I obeyed, until, in a moment of defiance, I turned in my fury

and stared at her; she was facing me but with her eyes closed,

closed, perhaps, because of the glare of the overhead light;

she was stooped and haggard, her lips pressed tightly together,

her mouth a thin gash of angry red,

her powdered face covered with just perceptible fuzzy hair,

that looked to me like creeping, furry, white mold.

I felt, I did not know quite why, almost sad.

The first snow that year was my first snow ever.

How I loved its silence, its muffling of other sounds,

its brightness when at last the sun came out!

how I loved walking down Empire Street—

my head encased in a leather cap with flannel lining,

the ear-flaps of the cap tied at my chin,

and the rest of me in layers of woolen clothes,

covered with a little lumberman’s jacket,

and over my shoes galoshes whose metal buckles I loved snapping shut—

walking, actually scurrying with fear, albeit a fear mostly feigned,

past the ghostly mansions now eerily shrouded in white,

knocking the fluffy snow off whatever fences and walls

were in reach of my mittened hands! how I loved watching

the older boys one day wage a ferocious snow-ball fight in front of school,

while the girls and younger boys like me built a gigantic snowman!

When I was selected to play a fairy in the Christmas pageant

I got to wear wings and a night-gown made of something like silk,

and use my mother’s lipstick and rouge—

what joy! and though my father sternly disapproved,

I knew there was absolutely nothing he could do.

Returning home from school one sunny afternoon—

the last snow of winter had disappeared,

but its moisture was still nurturing late daffodils—

I found my mother sitting on the front porch stoop

sobbing. I rushed to her, crying in panic,

What’s happened? What’s wrong?

The president is dead, she replied, sounding so lost it frightened me.

Good I exclaimed, but, seeing her look of horror,

I quickly explained, Well, you voted for Dewey didn’t you?

She smiled through her tears, and drew me into her arms,

cheek on wet cheek, and said, "When you’re older,

you will understand."

It was early summer when we returned to our urban life

in that city with its jangling commotion, its jostling crowds of strangers

now jittery with the prospect of peace,

where I subsequently did grow up, got a good education,

found a respectable profession and a decent wife—

where I tried, without much success as it turned out, to lead an ordinary life.

I could not have known how fast the time would pass

from then until the mountains would again become my home,

where I’d live out, in the quiet of another little wooden house,

a quite extraordinary life, indeed, in those first years here,

a life learning, through my sense of being loved

by the man I loved, to love the man I am.

PART 1

On The Low-Lying Plain

Encounters with Existence:

The Dark Side (1)

I have always enjoyed the most splendid health,

and yet, at least ever since I was conscious of being me,

have always suffered from the most abysmal misery.

I’ve tried to escape this pain by means of perpetual busy-ness,

filling my life with present exertions towards future goals,

or with momentary pleasures that everywhere abound,

or with emotions—anger is a favorite—

so ready to be indulged or even contrived,

accompanied, of course, by an abundance of motion and commotion;

or by steeping myself in whatever form my religiosity

is taking at the moment, so that my soul can soar above everyday reality;

or by constructing, via philosophy, an alternative world, abstract, ideal,

prescinded from any kind of fractious facticity,

above all, from all genuine, mature feelings of any sort.

But then, after the shortest while,

the futility of such escapes becomes quite manifest,

and the pain returns, more and more intense.

I think the time has come to stop trying to run,

the time to turn and face the misery, study it analytically,

learn the identity of the culprit who is its cause,

and then either exterminate this enemy,

or cut him loose from me and cast him out,

or, failing that, acquiesce stoically

in his malignant company,

and then, should I be so lucky as to be able to,

sink slowly

into apathy.

And so I resolve herewith

to reflect upon the journey of my life,

and note, just as they occur to me,

my memories of those episodes that reveal

with optimal clarity the culprit whom I seek,

episodes I’ll call, with characteristic hyperbole,

my encounters with existence.

* * *

I go quickly back, back to when the suffering might have begun,

and stop at moments when I first made war against myself,

against the part of me that was most obtrusive, most obdurate—

against, to wit, my corporeal, outer self,

my—body.

I remember all too well how my father ridiculed

the way I walked and talked, the way I stood and sat;

how, as were it yesterday, just as I was to graduate from junior high,

he spoke not a word of praise for the academic prize to be awarded me,

but said instead, "For Christ’s sake, when you walk across that stage,

don’t make your goddamn wrists go all limp."

He gave me a baseball and mitt when I was still quite young.

Of course I found these gifts sorely disappointing,

for he’d chosen them strictly in accord with his picture of me—

and perhaps of himself as he’d like to think he used to be—

without regard to what I might want or need.

He tried to teach me how to catch the ball

by throwing it again and again at me;

and, of course, I dropped it, again and still again.

Once, to be sure, I did manage to catch it,

and felt quite triumphant until I saw his scowl.

It seems I’d caught the ball not in the mitt,

but in the other hand, the bare one,

and that, evidently, is not how it is done.

I recall as well when my little wee-wee

stopped being a curious toy which amused me

during those times alone when boredom required relief,

a toy which, with familiar manipulation, changed size, shape, and tactility,

and produced a vaguely pleasurable sensitivity—

when it stopped being a source of joy

and became a thing with an imperious will all its own,

growing—this, anyway, is how it seemed to me—

huge and hard and monstrously protuberant—all quite spontaneously—

bulging out in front of me despite the stiff, thick fabric of my jeans,

and at the most inopportune of times,

causing the girls to giggle and the boys to mock,

and, on one lamentable occasion,

sending my father’s maiden cousin Florence

into shock.

Then came the pimples,

and learning to comb my hair

while seeing, and not quite seeing,

my corroded, festering face; but

even such deliberate self-deceiving

didn’t help much, for when—

which seemed to be all the time—

there were others present,

if only in my imagination,

I couldn’t help looking at myself

as if through their eyes, thus

recognizing myself indeed—

and yet it seemed hardly me

that I perceived—and then

judging myself as I supposed

they were judging me.

God what a wretch I was!

* * *

How repulsed was I standing naked before the mirror;

had nightmares of myself in a crowd without a stitch;

panicked when facing an occasion that required a bathing suit.

I saw my body, dressed as well as not,

in all its gawkiness and incompetence;

I quickly learned in consequence

to retreat into my mind,

and there to hide.

The trouble was, I couldn’t hide from myself;

I knew what images haunted my fantasy,

that inner world in which I not only got to sleep with my mother—

though I was then of an age when ‘sleeping with’ meant only that—

I got to be just like her, and, not just that,

I got to be her, and my father was never around;

maybe he’d been killed in the war;

how nice, how heroic that would be!

And then, when, thanks to the hands-on instruction of an obliging neighbor friend,

I learned to masturbate, I beheld images not at all like those my brother gasped about;

my images were of naked men, sometimes even of my father,

but more often of the heroes of comics and films—

Tarzan was my favorite, though Buck Rodgers would more than do.

So much in my mind was unspeakable, forbidden,

causing revulsion to spew out of my gut

much as lava, witheringly hot, erupts

from a suddenly convulsing volcano—so much was it so,

that I retreated even further, right into the inner reaches of my intellect,

till my mates at school referred to me almost invariably

as the book-worm and the brain,

but I could pretend I didn’t mind, for brainy was something I could be

that wasn’t ridiculed or condemned by family or adult society,

and yet I did mind, for my peers were the people who mattered most to me,

and what they thought loathsome was also so for me.

God what a wretch I was!

* * *

Shamed by the clumsiness of my body,

I would flee from it and crawl up into my mind;

but guilty of the moral corruption I found there,

I would flee from my mind and crawl up into

the highest dimension of my self, into the ego, that point

of consciousness which is without extension,

without content, and which does little else

but observe. Perched there, a kind of floating

abstraction, I would feel paralyzed into immobility;

not that I couldn’t move or think, only that

I couldn’t do so with any spontaneity.

I monitored myself carefully

as I took Alyce into my arms,

my hand near, but—heaven forbid in those days!—

not quite on, her ample breast,

my lips emitting a gasp to evince a momentary loss of control,

then meeting hers in just the way I’d seen Clark Gable do—

I did it all so perfectly, exactly as I’d imagined it,

except, in the throes of all that cogitation,

I felt—nothing;

well no, that’s not quite true,

I did feel—just a little silly.

On another occasion,

some years later during my beatnik phase,

I sat upon a dirty floor,

eyes to the wall,

back to the world,

awaiting the invited guest.

When I heard his knock upon the door,

I shouted Come in!

but did not rise or even turn

when he entered and greeted me.

He was naturally surprised

to see me there on the floor,

and asked with concern what was troubling me.

Thereupon I spoke the words I’d carefully rehearsed:

"I’m merely living authentically

in my realization that there’s no reason

for anyone to do anything, and thus none for me

to get up and treat you more hospitably."

Evincing now what for me was a delicious pique,

he replied smartly, Then why don’t you just commit suicide?

No, said I more smartly still,

"that would be doing something."

The problem was I not only grossed him out—

that much was decidedly fun—

but I grossed myself out as well,

for I felt through and through

a fraud.

Years later still, having just transcended

my hippie phase, I was at a party

of the Philosophy Club, sharing a joint

and some erudite conversation

with a fellow graduate student

I wanted to impress; I was carefully

articulating a hidden similarity

I’d discerned in Heidegger and Wittgenstein,

when I began listening to myself,

my shrill pompous voice not quite hiding

the fact that what I really was

was what was then indecorously called

full of shit.

Marx teaches that the common laborer is miserable

largely because he is alienated from the product of his labor

as it is ripped from his hands to be sold for the profit

of others; and therewith from the process of creating

that product, the laboring itself; and from his fellows

with whom he must compete for crumbs and,

I hardly need add, from his capitalist oppressors;

and finally from the very essence of his working self. (2)

Yes, I am familiar with such misery, not as a common laborer, to be sure,

but as a common student, as when a philosophy paper

came back marked with red corrections throughout

and, as a fitting finale, a huge C+ on the last page,

a grade which promptly plunked itself down upon

my very being. The grade was bad enough, but how

much worse my being reduced to a grade at all and nothing more,

and not by the professor just, but by credulous, pity-pot me.

But even worse for me, perhaps, than the misery

of these episodes were those in which I was filled

with a sense of uncanniness when visiting

the physical setting from a past life, where so much

was the same, but so much was different:

as when I returned, after sixty years, to the church

from which, as a six year old, I ran in panic thinking

I had cancer of the throat: it was exactly as

I’d remembered it, except now it was surrounded by

a chain-link fence, to keep the vandals out,

and all the lettering, no doubt inviting parishioners

to the next service, was in Korean! In every such case

it was a part of my very soul that was being ripped away,

and not just by another person or situation, but ultimately by me,

leaving me an impotent underground mouse flailing futilely

in my own spew, and then sinking into it, so burdened down

was I with boredom that not even perversity, consisting in my case

of being as weird as I could possibly be, not that that

was so great a task, but not even that could buoy me up. (3)

And so it was: I would plunge again and again

into the roiling sea of life, but always find myself

floating above it all, a diaphanous, delicate bubble—

God, listen to what I’m saying: I’m even more

full of shit now than I was before.

But please, please give me leave

to assume now a calmer mood,

a more dignified idiom, though

the more gloomy for all that:

it was as if, I want to say,

my reflection looked at me

looking at my reflection

looking from the glass,

with neither of us really knowing

which one was truly real

and which one the simulacrum.

Would that I had a self, I’d lament from time to