Memories: Journey into an Immigrant’S Mind

By Emanuel Paparella

As its title powerfully suggests, this bookwhile being a personal memoir, a narration of ones life journey from sunrise to sunsettranscends the personal. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that these memories are the memories of an immigrant who has lived in the country as a US citizen (with an American-born father) for some sixty years. It is much more than a list of events and anecdotes of an immigrant experience. It is written in a Dantesque and Vichian spirit, and as such, it goes beyond the listing of historical events and people.

More than a physical journey, it is an intellectual journey into the mind of an immigrant in search of ones self and ones ethnic identity. As such, it is a universal journey with which nonimmigrants, even native-born, can easily emphatize. Our common humanity makes it universal. As Dante well put it when he began the narration of his lifes journey, In the middle of the journey of our lives, I found myself in a dark wood. As Dante begins the journey guided by Virgil and Breatrice, he finds out that indeed the journey is universal beyond the purely personal. As Michelangelo said, Ancor imparo [I am still learning]. He uttered such a statement at the venerable age of eighty-nine, a few days before he died. He was still sculpting and learning. Likewise, if we dare to begin the journey, at whatever age we may find ourselves, we may soon find out that we too are still learning, and the journey may well have a common purpose and destination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984539830

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 by Emanuel Paparella.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2018908023

ISBN:                  Hardcover                              978-1-9845-3985-4

                           Softcover                                978-1-9845-3984-7

                           eBook                                       978-1-9845-3983-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 08/08/2018

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

771662

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1: Infancy: To see as Children see

Chapter 2: Early Morning (1946-1956) Growing up in Italy’s Humanistic Culture: Father’s Passion for Philately

Chapter 3: Morning (1957-1967) Coming to America, Growing up in NYC, Lowell, Mass. Catskill and Troy, N.Y.: A Franciscan-Spiritual Formation

Chapter 4: Noon (1967-1977) Philosophy at SFC, Marrying an Irish-American, Middlebury College, NYU, Teaching Career at UPR, Admission to Yale

Chapter 5: Afternoon: Midlife (1977-1988) Continuing a Professional Career: Yale, UPR, Cardinal Gibbons’ Catholic H.S., St. Andrew’s Episcopal School

Chapter 6: Late Afternoon: Prime of Life (1988-1998) Teaching in the Florida Public School System and Slowly Burning out, Returning to College Teaching

Chapter 7: Sunset (1998-2008) University of Central Florida, Adjunct Professorship in Italian and Philosophy: Broward College, Barry University

Chapter 8: Evening: 2008-2018: Mother’s Passing. Ancor Imparo: Teaching via Books, Traveling, Writing, and Lecturing

Chapter 9: Open Memento Letters to Grandchildren and other Relatives

Chapter 10: Excepts from the Curriculum Vitae’s (For an idea of the Span of my life-long Intellectual Interests)

Prologue (2018—) A Still Tentative Hermeneutical Vichian Interpretation of the Journey of My Life, via Pasternak and Sgorlon

PREFACE

"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

Mi ritrovai in una selva oscura…"

[In the middle of the journey of our life

I found myself in a dark wood…"]

—Dante

Ancor imparo [I am still learning]

—Michelangelo (a few days before dying)

T hey say that every writer, sooner or later, willingly or reluctantly, writes his own autobiography. It’s almost a necessity of the search for the Self. Innumerable examples of this truism can be gathered from world literature. One thinks of the first poet of Western Civilization, Homer, and his Odyssey, Dante and his Divine Comedy, and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It also brings to mind Vico’s Autobiography recreating through the narration of his life the cyclical corsi and ricorsi (or cycles) of history. A purposeful life’s memoir, held and shared with one’s loved ones, with friends and even with the public at large can indeed have a profound resonating echo, which has the power to shape and re-direct lives, beliefs, values, attitudes, even ideas.

And so, at the ripe old age of 75, it’s my turn. Time to take out the family albums and journey down memory lane, for the journey besides being a memory, is also an interpretation of that memory. A reflection on its meaning. One may say that each of us takes her/his unique journey all alone and eventually dies all alone, but that would be misguided. The journey is never taken wholly alone, individualistically. More properly speaking, it is the journey of humankind. Dante tried that individualistic feat but it proved unsuccessful. He needed guides like Virgil and Beatrice to even begin and proceed safely.

So I have chosen as my artistic scholarly guides Dante, Michelangelo, and Vico.

But old age and approaching death is not the only factor or motivator, there are other compelling reasons. I now get questions from my grandchildren in regard to my life on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. They seem to be intrigued by the past of their Italian-American immigrant nonno. Did you come to America on a gondola? one asked the other day. So, before it all gets lost, with the potential arrival of total memory loss, I have determined that it may be high time for me to document my life’s journey. Indeed, gradual memory loss is a form of slow death, the death of the interior life which becomes practically impossible devoid of memory and, most importantly the ability to examine and interpret the meaning of one’s life events. At the end of it all, that is all we are left with: precious memories.

Italian literature and philosophy happens to be my particular field of academic specialization, and the metaphor for life conceived as a journey from cradle to tomb, was of course particularly inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy as well as by Vico’s Autobiography, not to mention his The New Science. The Divine Comedy begins with Dante on a journey lost in a dark forest. We all end up on the wrong way, lost in a forest. That forest could be the woods of Danali Park in Alaska teaming with menacing grizzly bears but it can also be a more ethereal kind of forest, an intellectual or spiritual way that has been lost sight of and needs to be recovered.

Please notice that Dante does not write in the middle of the journey of my life but in the middle of the journey of our life. That’s important. It means that the journey is a universal journey while being at the same time an individual particular journey of a particular individual. Yes, it is Dante that takes the journey and narrates it, but it is also the collective journey of humankind, and it transcends the physical and the material. It is not only Dante’s existential journey in time and space, which at the conscious level literally begins in the middle of one’s life, the age of maturity, as a sort of deterministic mid-life crisis, but it is also our journey, our collective journey from cradle to tomb. But the question persists: is there purpose and destiny in it?

If we now look at the figure of Michelangelo’s fourth Pietà on which he was still working a few days before his death you will see an autobiography of sorts there too. We do not behold the Madonna holding his son as in his first Pietà done at the age of 23, but the face of Michelangelo now in his 80s. That face reveals a spiritual journey that has lasted 65 years. That journey too, like Dante’s, is also the journey of humankind. To be persuaded that such is the case all that one has to do is look at the more grandiose Sistine Chapel: the journey there is not a chronological one from the creation of light by God (the first panel as one enters the chapel) as some misguidedly believe, but, as Michelangelo himself tells us, it begins with the last panel on the other side of the chapel, with the Drunkenness of Noah, that is to say the degradation of the human body. The journey properly speaking is a spiritual one, from the degradation of the body and darkness represented by Noah’s drunkenness back to the pristine creation of light, back to the garden and the glorification of the body from which humankind was originally banished. Here we have Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of Man four hundred years ahead of its time.

Worth mentioning here the famous biographical movie on Michelangelo The Agony and the Ecstasy played by Charles Heston, that title is apt. In that exquisite Florentine Pietà we contemplate the agony and ecstasy of old age. Agony when one looks back with regret at all the foolish or disastrous choices of one’s life which could have been avoided, the waste of time and talent, the disregard for others, the sheer squandering of gifts that should have been developed for the common good. Ecstasy because one might also look back and also begin to trace the hand of a special guiding Providence that has directed and protected us despite our worst leanings and disasters. Indeed, humankind has been on the brink more than once and somehow it has managed to survive. A similar ecstasy may arise in old age when one also looks forward to the end of the battle, the final release and one’s embarkation on the eternal adventure. That is what Michelangelo seems to have been waiting for when he wrote his poem on old age which declares that painting and sculpturing and human vanities in general no longer satisfy him.

Michelangelo’s Poem on Old Age

The course of my long life hath reached at last,

In fragile bark o’er a tempestuous sea,

The common harbor, where must rendered be

Account of all the actions of the past.

The impassioned phantasy, that, vague and vast,

Made art an idol and a king to me,

Was an illusion, and but vanity

Were the desires that lured me and harassed.

The dreams of love, that were so sweet of yore,

What are they now, when two deaths may be mine, –

One sure, and one forecasting its alarms?

Painting and sculpture satisfy no more

The soul now turning to the Love Divine,

That hoped, to embrace us, on the cross its arms.

There is a sense in this poignant poem of having made to port as a shipwreck of sorts but glad that the journey and the struggle is finally over. More on this meaningful metaphorical image of the shipwreck in the Prologue.

For Vico, on the other hand, the study of language is the starting point of his historicism, his humanity’s primordial historicization. In fact, Vico’s professed academic discipline was neither history nor philosophy but rhetoric, i.e., the study of language in its creative aspects and as a literary phenomenon. The reason Vico rejects the Cartesian paradigm for the apprehension of reality is that, in its stress on rationalism, if fails to criticize itself in order to return to the springs of reason. Thus rationalism is unable to acknowledge that fantasia, which is to say, imagination, intuition and other non-rational factors play an important role in the creation of the human world. For Vico it is language, rather than Cartesian clear and distinct ideas, that provides the most important documentation for the epistemological relationship between man and his world. This relationship of the mind with the external world is imaginative, sensuous and even emotional. It is there, within language that one may hope to discover the genesis (dubbed by Vico nascimento) of institutions and human development. Vico in his Autobiography informs us that most of his literary career has been devoted to pondering and researching how primitive man thought and spoke. From these reflections Vico derived his poetic logic defined as the master key of his New Science. That key is this: …the fact that the early gentile people, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters (SN, 34). That is to say, language at its origins, more than thought, is poetry, symbol and imagination. Language in its totality is a symbolical structure needing constant interpretation and not a mere objective reflection of the world external to the human being.

Vico is able to recreate this primordial poetic phase of language by focusing on its dynamic, rather than its mere functional communicative aspects where the connection between signifier (form) and signified (content) remains an arbitrary one. For Vico verum factum convertuntur, i.e., content and form are convertible. As Edward Said explains it: "Vico…associates intelligence with a kind of escape-and-rescue operation, by which the mind gathers and holds on to something that does not fall under the senses, even though that ‘something’ could not come into being without the body and sense experience.

For us modern men, recapturing this mode of thinking lies in the fact that for us a mediating reason necessarily alters it. Lucretius in his De Rerum Natura, intimates a pre-logical phase of language; a language originating naturally, within feelings. Vico however goes further and postulates three eras: the era of the gods, the era of the heroes, and the era of men. To these three eras (which may be phenomenological and epistemological as well as chronological) he assigns three specific phases of language: (1) a mute phase characterized by body or sign language, (2) a spoken phase characterized by heroic emblems, similes, comparisons, images, metaphors, (3) a human language characterized by words agreed upon by the people. In the first two eras the language is expressive and poetic; here acts and objects have a natural relation to the ideas they are meant to signify.

The primitive men who made these poetic signs were poets (in Greek the word to create is poein). Behind the linguistic sign there is a real image. In fact, at its very origins the sign and the image are one. This is not easy for us to imagine because our linguistic signs do not, as a rule, evoke an image. We abstract things and their qualities out of existence and create notions to which the linguistic sign then attributes existence. But at the origins of language, the image signifies and is assumed to signify universally what it is: the poetic universal objectifies a section of experience into permanent significance. This still obtains for us in art where the singularity of the object signifies, i.e., it has autonomous value by itself but it is also universal. But even here we need to return to cave painting to better understand how the bull is not a mere representation, or for that matter, and aesthetic thing of beauty, or an abstract essence, rather it is a sign, a gestalt, a presence of the life force incarnated in the bull. Here, much better than in our modern art, one can perceive the dynamic power and vitality of life in act, something that is not accessible to reflection and analysis.

We should however keep in mind that Vico is not excluding rational induction from the creation of language. The three phases of language are three aspects of human nature which converge in producing language as activity and form. Here the unity of human nature establishes the universality of language. As Vico puts it: From these three languages is formed the mental dictionary by which to interpret properly all the various articulate languages (SN, 35). This is similar to Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar, almost a genetic endowment of Man. Being human means to have the potential to speak.

Indeed, the very possibility of Vico’s science is related to the existence of universals of human nature reflected in linguistic universals formed by the human mind. There is a diachronic and a synchronic unity in language which is based on the unity of human nature. The failure to correlate spoken and written language produces in turn the failure to understand the origins of language. Regarding this matter Vico says that "the difficulty as to the manner of their origins was created by the scholars themselves, all of whom regarded the origin of letters as a separate question from that of the origin of languages, whereas the two were by nature conjoined…scholars failed to understand how the first nations thought in poetic characters, spoke in fables, and wrote in hieroglyphs (SN 428). In other words, Vico is saying that spoken and written languages are two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Vico is searching within the linguistic sign for clues to that kind of creativity reflecting, almost unconsciously, the lived experience of things. The three moments in which this happens are: (1) the silent, (2) the sacerdotal heroic, (3) the conventional. In the first phase man, still without a spoken language, confronts the world which he experiences and within which he is submerged almost as integral part of nature. Here there is no dualism, no awareness of the mind that knows as distinct from the surrounding world. The particular event, lived or experienced, is expressed through gestures subsequently rendered graphically as a hieroglyph. In contemporary linguistics this is called topical recognition of an experience for the purpose of representation.

In the second phase, i.e., the heroic, a particular content of consciousness relates to sense data by becoming their symbol and signifying them. Here there is still a necessary natural connection between signifier and signified which becomes arbitrary with the sign of the third stage where the necessity is merely historical. Within the Vichian linguistic scheme, this is the most genuinely creative stage: the sacerdotal-heroic. Here language is poetry. The theological poets see the sky and the earth as majestic animated realities and personify every natural phenomenon. Every cosmic reality is captured in images. In Vico’s own words: This is the way in which the theological poets apprehended Jove, Cybele or Berecynthia, and Neptune, for example, and, at first mutely pointing, explained them as substances of the sky, the earth, and the sea which they imagined to be animated divinities and were therefore true to their senses in believing them to be gods (SN, 402).

An inverse process obtains in the more properly heroic language. Here the particular individuation of a figure (for example, Achilles) precedes the signified (the strength of heroes). The signifier is the myth or the allegory, as for instance the legend of the hero (Achilles); the signified is the logos or the meaning; the idea of valor or strength proper to heroes. This idea Vico calls an imaginative universal, or the expression of a truth. The two, the myth and the logos can be distinguished but cannot be separated. Like form and content, they are inseparable. The two phases preceding conventional language are mental processes through which intuitive knowledge finds its form. A form of knowledge this which has been contemptuously neglected within Western Cartesian rationalism.

By the time we get to the third stage, that of conventional language, we find reflected there, in a shortened form, the universal processes of the divine and heroic phases of language. To say it in Vico’s own words: In this way the nations formed the poetic language, composed of divine and heroic characters, later expressed in vulgar speech, and finally written in vulgar characters. It was born entirely of poverty of language and need of expression. This is proven by the first lights of poetic style, which are vivid representations, images, similes, comparisons, metaphors, circumlocutions, phrases explaining things by their natural properties, descriptions gathered from their minuter or their more sensible effects, and, finally, emphatic and even superfluous adjuncts. Many of the elements of the conventional language (the third stage) can be traced back to that poetical or creative moment when the nexus between the sign and the thing is still necessary.

Finally, we must emphasize here that in his attempt to discover through language the documents of primordial human history, Vico’s conception of rhetoric is not one of rhetoric as a purely literary instrument, but rather one of rhetoric as a poetics informing the different forms of the linguistic act and consequently the different forms of human participation to things in time. These forms are primary creations, not artifacts of oratory. In fact, Vico associates his three stages of language with three major rhetorical figures of speech: the silent divine stage is associated with metonymy; the heroic with synecdoche; the conventional with metaphor. Irony emerges last as the product of pure reasoning and cannot therefore be a pure from of that imaginative creativity from which issued the other three tropes. The most important of these is metaphor. It is the most important tool for the development of poetic language. It is, in fact, the tool with which the first poets attributed to bodies the being of inanimate substances, with capacities measured by their own, namely sense and passion, and in this way made fables of them. Thus every metaphor so formed is a fable in brief.

This is consonant with the Vichian principle that the original creativity of man is based primarily on the senses, passions and imagination rather than on reason. Ernesto Grassi (in his Rhetoric and Philosophy, The Pennsylvania University Press, 1980) says that "No theory, no abstract philosophy is the origin of the human world, and every time that man loses contact with the original needs and the questions that arise of them, he falls into the barbarism of ratio." Indeed that describes our technocratic Cartesian civilization. The origins of human history are to be found