The Life of Will

By H. W. Randall

The autobiography here of William Foralisworth is an example of human life proceeding from one interest to another. William's first day at school tipped him off that life is perhaps not a bowl of cherries. Ambivalently relocating to different states of the US with his parents required social adaptations his genes never could have anticipated. Interest in understanding what was going on motivated him eventually to seek higher education, which led to expatriate travel and living in different cultures. A chance meeting with an orange-picking Danish woman in Israel led to domestic life in Denmark. His anecdotal ventures are related with amusement and illustrate an interplay of choice and circumstance as he moved about Japan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Israel, and Europe. The introduction and afterword are reflections offered by H.W. Randall and draw on studies in biology, physics, and psychology to suggest that the biological impulse of life, which like an oceanic undercurrent is present at every progressive level of development, may be recognised in the guise of 'will' as it sustains resonance between every passing window of non-material consciousness, which will not stop until the train does.

• Language: English
• Publisher: H. W. Randall
• Release date: Jun 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201512361

H. W. Randall

The author, H.W. Randall (BA, BS, MSc) lives in Denmark, still seeks self-awareness, and regards the metaphorical foot that humanity has in its mouth to be that of never-reconcilable ideological assumptions and self-resurrecting artificial ego constructs. His publications include ‘The Life of Will’ (First edition, 2020; Second edition, 2021; Third edition, 2022). Saxo Publish; ‘The Behemoth’ – a story of pre-civil mankind (2020). Saxo Publish; ‘Behemoth’ (2020). Saxo Publish (Danish version); ‘Five Voices’ (2010). Author House.

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Introduction

The Life of Will

THE US WORLD POPULATION Clock in 2022 proclaimed that the number of humans who walk around on this planet has grown to over 7.9 billion. From a more localised perspective, each of us accordingly comprises a mere 1/7.9 billionth part of all those endowed with life of like nature: i.e., endowed with a consciousness embedded with a facility for language that can represent subjective experience, which in turn has access to a pair of dextrous hands. In contrast to being physically limited in space and time, the consciousness of a human grows prenatally and continues its expansion thereafter through participatory experience. The interval between the moment a human’s eyes first open and the moment those eyes finally close is a characteristic capsule of time for every individual – intervals that are inscribed on stones and evident at every burial ground.

While 7.9 billion anything may be difficult to grasp, humanity is collectively estimated to represent a mere 0.01% of the planet’s biomass. An important but harder-to-grasp bit of math is that we have an interdependent relationship not only with each other but with about 8.7 million animal species (0.4% biomass), 390,000 species of plants (82% biomass), 10 quintillion insects (3.3 billion die monthly), and microorganisms, both the friendly and potentially lethal, which represent the remainder. Life is yet impossible to fully define scientifically and remains a phenomenon of wonderment.

Unlike plants, animals are born to move freely about from one spot to another. Given the freedom of mobility, survival initially owes innate DNA programming and collaboration with a loving parent. Charles Darwin’s evolutionist theory gained support from 20th century molecular genetics, but the idea that adaptational traits can be acquired and passed on gained substantiation as well. New findings correlate well with the propositions of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, a forerunner of Darwin. Genes that come to bear acquired information through adaptational experience, e.g., immune systems, can moreover be transferred not only within but also across species (Lipton, p.15).

Accordingly, an animal’s every move is not pre-programmed. Contexts will be new, unique, and variable; when and why to move or act would depend not only on perceptual perspicacity but also an ability to learn, store information, and recall, which is where humans seem to enjoy an advantage. Despite our common residency in superordinate space and time, each human born will come to experience themselves as unique and will entertain a need to define that uniqueness psychosocially.

At birth, external information streams into one’s mind on light beams augmented by sounds, smells, tactile impressions, gravity, palpitations – a full body alarm! Upon each of us is thrust the proposition of becoming more conscious – a proposition one can neither be in favour of nor against. Perceptions broaden and deepen with every download from the external world. As sensory information, local social guidelines, expectations, and morays are introjected, personal values, beliefs, and preferences will develop and provide the basis by which one cursorily can be identified. When contexts change, one’s hitherto accumulated sensory and cultural information can become nuanced if not structurally modified. One’s consciousness will expand over the following years and eventually fade in that final moment when the value of life underscores its elusive, hallowed message.

Autobiography, a narrative account of a human life, can offer little more than an epidermal perusal of one’s personal history. While it may disclose or elaborate on an individual’s identifiable interests, decisions, consequences, and cultivated traits, full representation and transposition of the subject’s experiences for/to a reader/listener is surely impossible. The biographical subject would remain an object to the degree that the observer cannot see inside the subject’s mind.

Communication of an experience would depend on more than the choice of a few words, as linguistic representation is first and last only a representation. Any psychic crossover not only would depend on empathic sensitivity, which may be predisposed by common background experiences, but also on the electromagnetic and quantum (subatomic) nature of consciousness.

Consider as an example the biographical subject Poochan: a curly little poodle without a humanly decipherable language to express subjective experience. Objectively, she had been fostered in a Japanese shelter, was white and furry, was always happy, licked her owner upon her return home, licked anyone who petted her, seemed unintimidated by larger dogs when out for a stroll, preferred bones and whole grain rice to cookies, had been protective in chasing cats from the yard, and had become the cuddly companion of one’s child. Such a description tends to attribute the dog an identity, which could enable us to identify Poochan upon meeting her, but it says nothing of why... Poochan preferred bones, chased cats, and so on. In that she was quick to learn, apparently selfless, loving and brave to the end, a small figurine moulded by the quivering fingers of her young companion crowns the grave of this exemplary being, who could communicate only by behaviour.

If you have never taken care of a dog whom you came to love, it may be difficult to empathise with the motive for the figurine. Humans mourn loved ones whose end of life means separation, and the child’s expression of her robustly abiding subjective feelings imply a relational experience between two specific beings – human and animal - that was reciprocal and valued. The inner dimension of the experience would derive from the deep, natural need inherent the animal condition, which would be both personal and transpersonal, i.e., beyond ego or a socially conditioned self-image.

When the subject of the biography has a voice, however, as does a human, description becomes more complicated. In addition to ‘what happened’, ‘what did you experience?’ would be a question intended to unveil the subjective experience of the human. However, again, externalizing the mind as a linguistic representation would not reproduce the mind – at best, only a version of the mind. Standing on a precipice, overlooking the space between dimensions, looking for a bridge, could be the predicament alluded to in Bob Dylan’s expression: 

"To put down on paper, what was in (her) mind."

In the case of an autobiography, the narrative will have more meaning for the subject than it ever will a reader, even as communication is its objective. The subject would be him- or herself the object of observation. Expansion of an awareness of self would begin with reflective recall - a subjective phenomenon enabled by virtue of human consciousness. The autobiographer would pause, turn around to remember personal history, and attempt to objectify by assuming a detached perspective. It would be a mock act of depersonalisation.

Each human essentially has only one perspective inherent their existence. Everything else revolves around them. Can a subject step outside subjectivity and view oneself objectively? Subjective interests, fears, desires, and how such are entangled and interact with external stimuli are part of everyone’s life story. In viewing aspects of inner experience, one may stumble upon one’s Jungian shadow: persona-alienated characteristics, or internal experience one assumes to be socially unacceptable and thus unacceptable to oneself. In considering a narrative representation, both the autobiographer and reader may need to fill-in in gestaltist fashion the gaps in coherency and implicit experience.

Every recalled experience would be a view of oneself already past. Accounting for what one just now experienced would no longer represent the Now. One may be aware of and recall how one’s life progression involved formulating context relative, ad hoc constructs, which became the assumptions of further behaviour or exploration. In biographical recall one can circle round and round on one mandala (a symbolic picture of self) without end, like in a shaman’s dance. But truthful recall alone can illuminate the paths taken and complete the mandala, which would include shadowy qualities. Authentic representation on the biographical page would presume not only on subjective openness and objective recall but also on the nuances of the language used.

Objective contexts need to be represented to the degree they are entangled with subjective experience. One or more experiences may predispose a later experience, much like arithmetic would precede algebra. Experiences can interact outside their temporal sequences and thereby predispose an insight, an intuition, a non-local perception, or expose an archetypal projection. Owing a lapse of time, memory is always fallible. Like other narratives, an autobiography can hardly avoid elements that are fictive.

Anecdotes are often available for recall by the subject when lodged in memory due their coherence and emotional value. An anecdote would be topically coherent, and a collection of them when viewed from the clouds may resemble an archipelago of small islands, like steppingstones across a pond. The deeper waters between them would hide their implicit common relationship while the curious reader would hop, sail, or fly from one to another. But, again, language can never fully capture actual subjective experience.

Sketchy biographies are ubiquitous in real life. When an individual presents oneself to a potential employer or applies for membership to an organisation, a curriculum vitae (CV) may be required. In submitting oneself to the discriminatory judgement of another person – a stranger - the subject would not only tend to represent oneself in positive terms but in the process may contribute to the construction of a falsehood. The applicant, like a supplicant, is encouraged to ‘sell’ oneself, like an object. He or she may seek to emulate a feature sought by the potential employer, e.g., an image or tone in auditioning for a theatrical play.

Carl Jung defined persona thusly:

"...an ideal image (or preferred ego image) into which one tries to mould oneself...; ...a mask that feigns individuality..."; a persona, and despite the exclusive identity of the ego-consciousness with the persona, the unconscious self, one’s real individuality, is always present and makes itself felt indirectly if not directly.

One’s ego-construction would be reflected in one’s persona (face one presents socially) and may be an inauthentic representation of the self. In the process of individuation (Carl Jung’s term for the lifetime development of consciousness and personal awareness) each event has value in the progression of the subject’s life:

"...a process of differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual; its aim is to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and the suggestive power of primordial images on the other."

The process of individuation would be progressive and may stretch out over many milestones down the road as subliminal content manages to surface in cognitive awareness. ‘How’ and ‘where’ could be rendered objectively but specifying ‘why’ one went that-a-way or an-other may be more difficult.

It is interesting to note that embryo development also involves differentiation. The embryo has morphological goals that result in differentiated parts of the body. But an embryo is itself authentic and not yet coloured by attempts at self-conception and navigation in a social matrix.

The pronoun ‘I’ may appear prominently in an autobiography. ‘I’ can be understood not only to refer to one’s egoic aspects but more broadly to one’s quantum (sub-atomic) nature. Organic being is not fixed but is in progression. Genes can never precognitively anticipate the unique contexts through which one may pass. One can move and change, bearing the ‘I’ perspective through one role after another, being both the observer and participant. It would seem that at the moment an ‘I’ formulates a statement in consciousness, its spatio-temporal nature would leave an imprint reminiscent of a quantum particle that had shifted from being a wave to being a particle of matter or energy. Mind would pause and illusion would abide.

In that the whole self, or quantum self, can be referred to by the pronoun ‘I’, the ‘I’ may be regarded as both the origin and the goal of individuation.

_________________ 

The following narrative comprising Part I is the autobiography of a man called William Foralisworth. It is a reconstruction of the life of an individual who like many others was born in a specific place and time, but for him it was when the broader world was facing fears of multiple instances of the totalitarian mindset:  WWII.

The subject (William) was fortunate enough to be born to parents who wanted and loved the children they brought into the world. When life following WWII had settled down, he, like his parents and brother, were among the beneficiaries of the existential relief and economic welfare that largely prevailed throughout the USA - and West in general - thanks to F.D. Roosevelt’s regime of wisdom and the current of Keynesian economics.

Given William’s particular family, their lives post-war were materially comfortable. Even as there were numerous upheavals when young - when his parents relocated in search of better occupational circumstances - it was natural to trust in authority and believe unquestioningly in the future. Given such disposition, his natural naivety became challenged only gradually as he gained experience and eventually faced the world on his own. His imagination could put him in the sky to evade and play around with cloud formations as the pilot of a high-powered jet. Becoming a pilot became the personal dream for his future, but by the time he had completed one year in the military, he had come to perceive the world differently, more realistically.

Believing in the right and ability to be responsible for one’s development through an exercise of choice and determination - or will (a premium of sport participation), his life came to manifest an amalgam of two ostensibly contradictory approaches to life: traditional Christianity and secular existentialism. His inner experience was inspired and fed by a non-dogmatic, psychological understanding of the Christian gospels, which admitted the claims and aims of other religions. Feeling free to learn and responsible for autonomous choices, he was open to apprehend the interdependent relevance of the noumenal (ideal, faith-based) and phenomenal (knowable).

His vagabond-like life reflects his earlier years of having relocated in different parts of the multicultural USA. His travels as an adult are an example of how one can travel around the world relatively independently, making plans as one goes, without the direction or backing of an enterprise at home. His life came to resemble a tumbleweed that ascetically rolled along without fear of where it was being blown, guided by deeper values which he intuitively sought to clarify. His life could likewise be compared to that of a bumblebee that bumbled from flower to flower, very much satisfied with where new information and intuition took him.

Part II is an afterword that appends the present introduction, both of which are written by HWR (H.W. Randall). It is largely philosophical in drawing on biology, physics, psychology, and religious texts that tend to illuminate the nature of human life, particularly subjective consciousness in its interaction with environments.

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Part I

I. Will: Meeting the World

I AM CALLED WILL. MY birth was not chosen by me either. I received the miraculous gift of consciousness as a state of profound unknowingness and was blissfully open to new experience. By the time I was five, I had faced many new situations, some of which are unforgettable: I had grappled with a grandfather’s indifference, lost my tonsils to a mystical surgeon, witnessed my mother cry as she wrote letters to my father, and fallen out of my grandmother’s moving car. I had little control over my life.

Yet, I was not alone. When I was born, many adults across the world were in a struggle for control as well. The prospect of a war that could top all wars in its potential destructiveness had already begun. By August 1941, my birth month, the Japanese had invaded China, and the Germans had invaded Poland. By August 15, my birthday, President Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had announced the Atlantic Charter and were preparing to offer aid to Josef Stalin. Following the torpedoing of many USA ships by German submarines and the attack at Pearl Harbour by Japan in December, the USA officially entered the war, making it truly another world-wide conflict, WWII.

Evidently, WWI had failed to wake enough of humanity to its innate ignorance - particularly, the contradictions of archetypes in its collective unconscious. The media, industry, and economists once again stoked fear and bred incomprehensibility about a distant turmoil, which made love at home more precious. My fledgling cognitive powers at the time spared me from such worldliness, and I was free to enjoy my mother’s doting attention. Even so, circumstances lined me up with a few disquieting concerns in this period – which left indelible imprints in memory.

One concern is associated with the image of a hospital flashing by while riding in a car. I had been alerted to the idea that someone there would go in and snip something out of my mouth. I was to surrender my ‘tonsils’, and the idea was mysterious enough to keep my imagination at bay. My mother, of course, assured me that it would be completed before I could blink, so it was nothing to worry about. I recall nothing else, not the blink either.  

Another concern I experienced is suggested by the images of my grandfather’s knee and an expression of indifference. After grabbing onto his pant leg, I had pulled myself up to a standing position. At that height I found myself staring at his kneecap, and then I shifted my eyes upward to find his face. Despite such a magnificent feat, he seemed unimpressed. Engrossed in a serious-sounding conversation, he would not pick me up, as others had done in response to an extended arm and a friendly smile. His indifference perplexed me – it was not what I wanted nor expected. He was not normal. After a few seconds of recovery, I flopped down and after noting his yet turned cheek, I crawled away. It was one of many pre-verbal experiences, but this one stuck somewhere in my mind. It had emotional value, while it contributed to a waking process.

Seeking attention from someone was typically enough a daily quest. I had been in contact with someone during the entire time I was perinatal, particularly my mother’s physiological processes and voice. The dyadic relationship formed postnatally with her was, so far as I can imagine, a pleasurable and existentially affirmational sequel. In retrospect, it must have been spiritual fodder for my soul. What, then, was the value of the indifference I met, unexpectedly, in a man who acted like he was family? What I met in my grandfather was a vague negation of what I naturally sought, so I looked elsewhere.

______________ 

There were more compelling experiences awaiting me. One is indicated by the image of my mother, seated at a desk, holding her head in her left hand, alternately wiping her tears in writing a letter with her right. It was unusual to see her so distraught, and what I initially felt in response was also unfamiliar. I became captivated in a sympathetic embrace, like sitting next to her in a boat being rocked by undulating waves. My sense of security depended on hers, and hers was vacillating. I sympathetically touched her arm, and with a responsive hug she explained that the letter was to my father who was on a merchant ship in the Pacific. Not to worry, I was assured. She just felt tired – something to which I could relate. I hastened to embrace her reassurances.

Mother’s tearful anguish was as powerful as another experience, if not more so, which literally turned me upside down: falling from a moving car. Mother had a spiritual channel to my heart, while the bumps from the hard, impervious ground were physical and fathomable. I felt no threat as they were not delivered by another human or animal, and the physical discomfort had no deeper meaning. Inwardly, I felt impressed.

Falling out of a moving car was spellbinding - an engulfment of body, mind, and soul, the whole, forward-inclined, naive self. My mother’s mother had just purchased a new, four-door Dodge. We were driving along a pebbled road headed for her old, three-story farmhouse in Kansas, encompassed by immense, horizon-deep wheat fields and small shrubbery along the roadside. My mother rode in the front passenger seat, chatting with my grandmother, and my brother and I were in the back. Being no taller than I was, I was practically standing when I took hold of the handle and lifted it upwards. In our own, older car, that act would have locked the door. But the new Dodge featured an innovation, namely diagonally situated handles with a novel mode of operation. As soon as I lifted upward, the rear wind caught the cracked door and forced it open, while my hand clenched more tightly to the handle.

The following few seconds and blink of an eye left me in the dust next to the shrubbery. Lifting my head from the pebbly surface, a huge, dark dog quickly emerged and approached me, sniffing intently with a long nose. Fortunately, by that time, I had heard no story about wolves and the typical descriptions that can inspire anxiety. I had a dog that I loved, and so I saw nothing sinister about the creature. Then out of the other eye, I caught sight of my grandmother’s car, headed nose-down into the ditch on the opposite side of the road. In that same moment I saw my mother jump out of the car, alighting on the rocky road in high heels, then running toward me with a never-seen-before expression on her face. For some reason, she shouted and scared the dog away. It was only then that I began to grasp that the situation could be more serious than I felt.

I was aware of no debilitating pain. A new sheep-skin leather jacket and a leather cap pulled down over my ears had spared me from being totally skinned. Wireless phones were not available to the public in the 40s, so when local friends happened to come by in their truck within minutes, it was a manifestation of benign fortune – the sign of synchronicity, or the paranormal. In the front seat of a farm truck, held under the arm of the farmer-friend, who was more friendly than ever before, I was told not to worry about the large red, slightly bloody scratches on my left rib. We were headed to a hospital. But it was at a hospital I had lost my tonsils, and I didn’t want to go. That was beyond discussion, and our compassionate friend’s smile relaxed me. We were headed toward the Winfield hospital, and the view of my red ribs is where the recollection ends.

______________

The incident is remembered with no clear association of pain or existential threat - my mother had promptly taken control of the circumstances. It did not leave me with an aversion to cars, dogs, wheat fields, or whatever. For that matter, there is another recollection from that period, that is quite positive.

Our bathroom in Wichita had two doors opposite each other, which enabled access from both adjacent bedrooms. One day, upon my return from the playground, my mother smiled and suggested I go and look in the bathroom. What is it? Just go look. Passing through the bedroom, I opened the door, and walked in. Immediately there appeared the image of a strange, bearded man covered in soap, splashing in the bathtub, shaving. Without recognition of who he was or understanding of why I should walk in like that, I felt a bit intrusive and decided to keep walking, eyes front, straight ahead through the other door. As I headed out the door the man said, something like, Will! It’s me! I turned and saw a big smile. Son, it’s me, your dad! I’m back! I began to recall some early images and some of the things my mother had said about him. I didn’t know how to act or what to feel, but I sensed that the times had changed, and my mother and I would no longer need to write another tearful letter. I’m back for good! It must have been the latter part of 1945, after the war had ended, and I was four or five years of age.

Meeting contemporaries en masse

WHEN I WAS FIVE, I was led by my mother hand-in-hand into a large, red brick building. I asked why we were there but received no reply, which was the first signal that something was afoot. At the end of the hall, we turned left and pushed through two large swinging doors. There we met a smiling, friendly lady, who seemed to have been expecting us. My left hand still in my mother’s right, I looked to the right. There sat over 25 strange children about my age, whose 50 plus eyes were staring at us. I looked back at my mother and suggested we leave. I was disappointed to see that she was not as alarmed as I, and my new state of perplexity signalled something ominous. I expected the usual reassurances, but mother continued to chat smilingly with the woman, who then with a motioning finger prompted me to take the available chair on the outside of the sixth row of children. But, but... checking with my higher authority, mum, I was urged to do as asked. While she continued chatting, I sat down where I didn’t want to sit and looked round at an ocean of unknowns. They all presented half-smiles and seemed resigned to sit where they did not choose, just as I then did. Lost in all the faces that passed across my vision, I was brought back to the present when I looked up front again. There I gazed as my mum turned and headed out the door. She hadn’t told me where I was, and she hadn’t said goodbye. She left me in a place she surely knew I wouldn’t want to be and would protest if she brought it up for discussion. Under the circumstances, the broadly smiling woman could have been from another world - and yet seemed a part of the familiar world. She shouted a few things to the others, then reassured me that my mother would return. We all came to address the new, quite busy woman in my life as ‘teacher’.

I faced space, a vacuum wanting to be filled in. I was captivated yet unsure of how to grasp what was going on. I was trying to deal with the alertness in my head, when the teacher began describing the room, as if it were new to every one of us. She told us that we could do whatever we chose to do... within the room. Great! But then she pointed to the back alcove and explained that there were dolls, cradles, and old clothes. Not so great. A theatre-like stage was on our right. Then, pointing to the door up front, there we could find piles of wood and wood tools. Things brightened up, as just the previous day I had seen my father saw and hammer wood out in the garage.  

In a sense, the association with my father activated something positive in me. Feeling I knew what to do with wood and a saw, I waited and anxiously wondered why we had to remain seated. When the teacher flamboyantly invited us to get up and choose our ways, I headed directly toward the door up front. Like a parting of the waters, the girls headed for the dolls and clothes in the back, and the boys, every one of them, headed for that narrow door up front, while weaving through the stream of girls. Soon the boys were all trying to squeeze through the door simultaneously, which of course remained immoveable. We were up against a social reality that we each would learn to deal with idiosyncratically. Being among the last to arrive at the door’s threshold, the push-for-all seemed pointless.

At home, grabbing or pushing to gain my way would have incurred mother’s injunctions. Her rules resonated in me and following them was the easiest and most direct way to gain what I wanted. The other boys didn’t seem to share the strategy. There were apparently other rules, if they had any, to achieve the same goal somewhere in the mystery room – a scintillating image planted in our imaginations by the teacher.

Inside, I found the wood pile no longer a pile. All order had already been obliterated and pieces were scattered about. Four or five boys, wood in hand, stood already by the singular... bench-vice. The one who first had managed to gain control of the vice was making a cut with a saw. The piece was not securely fastened, and it began to tilt. He took the time to loosen it and start again. The second time that happened, another boy intervened by yelling Let me! and then proceeded to remove the first boy’s partially cut piece. Now in control of the vice, the second boy began sawing, but the saw would bend and be caught in a bind. The second time that happened, the others followed his lead and wanted him to give them a chance too.

On the periphery of the crowd at the bench, four or five others and I could watch the fruitless competition. Whatever idea I had for making something for my father had vanished like water colours in a rain. Only traces of colour remained. It was pointless to push into the fray and start making something when others wanted to do the same. The impulse was to control others for one’s own purpose. The one vice was the crux of our contention, and fledgling egos clashed and dominated the workspace. For the onlookers, the creative frame of mind was fragile. Free-reeling imagination and conflict are antithetical, and we were just getting an insight to the impasse.  

The boys at the vice one-by-one seemed to lose interest, and at one point I held the saw in my hand. But it was not mine - there were still others waiting and it seemed my time would be limited as well. After a few cuts, I could see I needed another piece of wood, but leaving the bench-vice to find another piece meant forfeiting the position. One of the others who had also waited began to press for a chance, so I put my piece of wood back on what remained of the pile and left the room. I then sat on the edge of the stage feeling despondent and purposeless. It seemed there was nothing there for me.

The teacher, on her way back to the girls, stopped and sympathetically asked how I was doing. The prospect of telling my story to our common proxy mother, the captain of the premises, was like a breath of helium. Mothers and fathers brought order and justice to conflicts. That was my experience. They were sustenance, police, and the courts. I liked the arrangement. So now our proxy was to be the judge and executor of order – to establish an atmosphere of mutuality.

I discovered, however, that proxies can fall far from the parental role I had experienced. After two sentences the teacher had lost her sympathetic smile. At the same moment, in the space between the teacher’s openness and my preparation to voice my conundrum, a shrill scream erupted from a girl in the back of the room. The teacher sprang up and ran to her. I was sure she would return to hear my story, my plea for sense and muscle, but she did not. I sat there and gradually realised that her interest was more with the dolls. I felt alone - on my own for the first time. Extroversion may have ruled in the wood room, but I had reasons for not jumping in. Reticence seemed reasonable. I don’t remember any other day in Kindergarten.

The feminine mystique  

NEARLY A YEAR LATER, at age 6 in the first grade, two lines of tables were arranged such that half the class faced the other half. We were assigned seats, and I was seated between two girls. After a day or two I became a bit fascinated with them both. The girl on my right could put her pencil to paper and draw in one movement the profile of a man. In checking the art of the girl on my left, I could see she couldn’t do as well, but there was something other than skill that intrigued me. My efforts at emulating the skilful one lay somewhere in between them both, where I literally was positioned as well. The artist to my right usually wore trousers; the girl on my left wore dresses, had wrists and hands that were more delicate, and shyly smiled more – she was different.

I liked them both, both were lovely, and each had her own charm. I enjoyed being caught between them, and what I felt for them was positive and inclined to expression. I didn’t know about jealousy or disloyalty, but in speaking to the one, the other would turn back to her own activity. It was perhaps for this reason, I thought that showing interest in the one would suggest I was less interested in the other. I could try to emulate the admirable skill of the one on the right, but not the intriguing nature of the girl on the left, who perhaps shared a characteristic with my mother or female cousins. Why like them and keep my feelings to myself? I felt inclined to connect, to manifest the invisible impulse that was nature itself.

So, one day I decided to choose one, express myself and see what would happen. At what seemed to be a propitious moment, when the girl on my left was leaning in my direction, still looking toward her other neighbour, I kissed her cheek. She sat up erect with her back half-turned toward me and remained motionless. Seeing this, I pretended that all was natural and resumed working on my drawing. In the corner of my eye, after all of 20 seconds, I saw her neighbour look questioningly at her. The intriguing girl then stood up, still facing her friend. She then turned to the right toward the teacher and raised her hand for attention. With a disconcerted look on her face, she announced, Teacher, he kissed me!

Now, the first-grade teacher apparently still had a foot in the eighteenth century. Fine, long black dress, black jacket, white lace visible around each wrist, hair tightly propped up on top, and a stern demeanour that forewarned of a lack of humour. After a few seconds of trying to fit the situation into her world-view schema, she issued my due: Will! There is a chair in the corner over there (up front)! Turn it around and sit there for one hour! Do you understand?

I had heard of no unwritten commandment against kissing a girl someone liked. There evidently was, however, an invisible line between liking and kissing, which only the teacher seemed aware of – and perhaps the girl I kissed. Now I and every student in the class became very aware of it.

Obtrusive behaviour of yelling and screaming was tolerated and even condoned, but what I had done once was not. I saw no understandable reason for either the girl or the teacher to react as each did. Their respective viewpoints regarding my behaviour centred more on the boy-girl divide. What did that mean? The boy-girl divide was the reason for my attraction, which I expressed in a positive manner. It didn’t make sense to me, and I felt no remorse.

I had experienced being scolded at home, but the first-grade teacher seemed different from my mom. Sitting there in the corner, the only concern I had was how the girl and other children would treat me thereafter. An hour passed before I resumed my assigned seat, and the one I was intrigued by sat with her back to me, chatting with her other neighbour. The girl on my right minded her drawings and turned away also. Everyone seemed busy. A couple of others half-smiled