The Way of Q

The Way of Q is a one-volume voyage through the ten volumes of the Quantavolution Series of Alfred de Grazia, published between 1981 and 1984, explaining his theory of recent, sudden, holistic and violently rapid changes to the solar system, to Earth and to hominids and humans through events of a catastrophic nature and of cosmic origin, whose ancient memory is denied or misunderstood. It takes five prolonged stops: at Homo Schizo One, and Two, to examine how the very humanity of hominids and early humans has been precipitated and shaped forever by the experience of catastrophes; at The Divine Succession, to discover how these experiences have created religion and its later derivatives, politics, science and the arts; at Solaria Binaria, a speculative attempt, in cooperation with astronomer Earl Milton, to re-frame the history of the solar system in the light of the testimony of myths and legends; at The Lately Tortured Earth, to examine evidence of catastrophes on the planet’s surface. All from the perspective of a mind that is both enlightened and troubled, and split by its very nature and origins, our own.

by Anne-Marie de Grazia

The last guests are gone. Tony has taken off at dawn for Milan airport, to fly back to Los Alamos and to his NASA lab. After lunch, and a heated discussion over whether space plasma is of any relevance to rock art all over the world, Vladimir has driven Rens in our car to the local airport, whence he is to fly back on Ryanair to London. Alfred and I then drive Vladimir to the train station - in a few hours he will take off for Sofia, Bulgaria, and his office at the Academy of Science. Kisses, fond farewells. Thus ends the first Colloquium on Quantavolution, held at the University of Bergamo, Italy. Some twenty-five quantavolutionists have sat together around glass tables for several warm spring days in a beautiful Gothic room, squeezed between two medieval cloisters in the newly restored Convent of San Agostino, which stands like a prow at the end of the Upper town of Bergamo, the Città Alta - the Lombard plain in front, the Alps in back.       

These have been heady and exciting days. Germans questioning the validity of measuring early geological and historical time by radiochronometry. Victor Clube from Oxford examining the historic or prehistoric records of catastrophic cometary approaches of Earth. The demise of the dinosaurs, of course, one extinction among many. Greek professors introducing their new field of “geomythology:” the traces left on Earth’s surface by violent events reported as ancient myths. How repeated planetary convulsions may have made us human. Quantavolution is the science of such changes.
Quantavolution has been my life with this extraordinary man, Alfred de Grazia. The word was born in the first year of our life together, in Washington, DC, where we dwelled for a while, while Alfred was consulting for Government agencies. He was writing The Lately Tortured Earth, the first of the ten books of what was to become the “Quantavolution Series.” “Quanta,” in physics, standing for a discrete (i.e., distinct, non-continuous) natural unit, or packet, of energy, charge, angular momentum, or other physical property. “Volution,” a turn, down or up, a jump, an event as opposed to a regular, continuous process.

Quantavolution posits that the major changes in nature occur in rapid, intense bursts of energy rather than accruing at steady, incremental slow rates. A Quantavolution is a disruption of the processes of steady change, accelerating or transforming them. Many people had trouble with the word, arising often from a deeply ingrained reluctance to admit the existence of an unsettled universe. It was tough to get it accepted. It was met with blank stares, it was derided, it was criticized, in the end - one quarter of a century later - it was proving itself unmatchable. It was born, as I said, in Washington, D.C. in a small brick house in Georgetown and, in what can only be termed an instance of poetic coincidence, the house was located on ‘Q’ Street... At the time, Liz Taylor and Senator Warner lived in back of us, on P...

It is hard to imagine today how foreign to the way of thinking that prevailed then in the sciences were the notions of Quantavolution. The only establishment scientist endowed with a sizeable audience who was then pushing at the edge of the all-powerful paradigm of uniformitarian change was the Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, at Harvard. He called his concept of rapid change intervening between long periods of constancy “punctuated equilibrium”. His views raised controversy and he got his share of flak from the scientific establishment, but he had adroitly managed to bring his opponents to fight him on the battlefield of the media, where he enjoyed considerable advantage, through his extraordinarily engaging, mild-mannered personality and a regular column in the magazine of the New York Museum of Natural History. He was able to score significant successes and to break a first breach in the wall, from within. A few broke out after him. Quantavolution broke in. Although he never espoused Alfred’s paradigm, Gould agreed with isolated elements of it and there was a friendly exchange between them.

One might bring back the revolution in established scientific thinking some fifteen years earlier, to the emergence of chaos theory in mathematics in the early sixties. Incrementalism, slow change, uniformitarianism were in essence linear thinking, whether applied to cosmology, geology, evolution, or the social sciences. With the major turn into non-linear studies in mathematics, which itself had been made necessary by the even earlier breakthroughs of quantum mechanics in fundamental physics, another big stride was made, although this revolution had taken place without bloodshed, as there were no overriding ideological interests tied in with linear mathematics, and the dominant ideology, which held the natural sciences in such a tight grip, paid little attention to mathematics and fundamental physics, and saw no danger coming from those quarters. Still, minds shift, and when they do, they are not wont to turn back... Changes of paradigm are necessarily preceded by such shifts - changes in the frame of mind, what one might call, in the fashion in thinking...

Quantavolutions happen all the time, at all levels, through the universe. With tremendous, disturbing bursts of energy wandering loose through the cosmos, even to the interior of our cells. Galaxies crash into each other, stars explode - it is happening right now... At the scale of the universe, a large meteorite crashing into a planet is a crude, insignificant event. Far less significant than a mutation in a mouse’s litter might turn out to be for the species of mice, or for the order of mammals.

It is interesting to note that, despite the fact that slow change, at least in the form of the cyclical and seasonal, was available to man for observation all through history, and was indeed given intense attention, man explained the world in terms of fast change, sudden catastrophes, violent events, and mostly lived in dread of them, and organized in anticipation of them. The idea of evolution, of uniformitarian change, occurring unthreateningly, and over a long time, emerged in England at the very beginning of the Nineteenth Century, after the French Revolution, and in reaction to it. It spread out from there and may well be termed an ideology - replacing the faltering religious faiths of the Western world - which helps to explain the fierceness with which its tenets were defended whenever challenged. Political revolution, as it were, was thus outlawed, on grounds of non-conformity with the laws of nature. The rash of political revolutions which continued to agitate Europe during the rest of the century only contributed to tighten the hold of the new ideology. The natural sciences were increasingly pushed into the descriptive, the pedantic, and the myopically specialized. Overarching explanations, reaching into different fields of the increasingly atomized sciences, became taboo. Theoretical thinking wasted away. 

Evidences of large scale, sudden catastrophic changes were explained away, or suppressed and, after a while, became simply non-existent to the eye trained not to see them, and their study was postponed for over a century and a half.
Alfred de Grazia eschewed the term “catastrophism” in favor of “quantavolution.” But that was because there was something wrong with the word. For, however “catastrophic,” the violent, sudden changes visited upon ourselves, our Earth, and our Solar system have actually been of limited destructiveness, as they have permitted us to exist and to survive to this day. 

The balance, until now, between the creative and the destructive aspects of quantavolutions on Earth, is mightily positive from our point of view, and from the point of view of life itself, as we have maintained ourselves splendidly up to this point - from man to microbe - and are indeed thriving. If life exists on these galaxies now in the process of crashing into each other - and we are fast approaching a consensus in the scientific world according to which life exists virtually everywhere - the processes of destruction are probably far more radical and, for those forms of life that would be equivalent to the mammalian or the reptile, probably thoroughly fatal. (At least one third of the stars are now thought to be able to support systems where life could develop. We can logically imagine that every day, somewhere, a world of intelligent beings might be annihilated.)

The more measured quantavolutions which Earth has undergone have created us humans and we would not exist as we are, were it not for their occurrence. The catastrophic extinction of the dinosaurs was a boon to the mammals and in the end, to you and me (if you and me consider it a boon to have been born, a simple event which is equivalent, for each of us, to winning odds which are far greater than winning the biggest jackpot ever, at the biggest lottery ever, with the smallest possible stake.)  Quantavolutions occur rapidly, wreak their transformations within a short time and their effects are profound and usually irreversible. They occur in a universe of tremendous plasticity and complexity, endowed with practically infinite capacities of response, which it has “learned” precisely at the school of these mega-changes.
 
Alfred de Grazia’s reflections on rapid change had started a long time before he moved to ‘Q’ Street and settled on the term “Quantavolution.” In fact, it happened a decade and a half before, when he became a close friend and supporter of Immanuel Velikovsky, who lived down the street from his house in Princeton. He was then a professor of political science of impeccable credentials, one of the top political scientists of his generation, with a round dozen of books published, very much an establishment scientist himself, founder of a magazine, The American Behavioral Scientist, which is still going strong in the stable of Sage Publications, along with the many journals it has sired. He held teaching appointments at University of Chicago, University of Minnesota, Brown University, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford University, New York University.

The first meeting of the two scholars was regularized into frequent tête-à-tête and phone calls over the years whenever Alfred was in Princeton. He had taken little notice of the controversy surrounding Velikovsky when it had happened, in the early fifties, and by the time he met Velikovsky, this controversy had considerably subsided. Except for a few diehard supporters, it was pretty much history.

What aroused his indignation before all, and moved him to action, was the scandalous way in which Velikovsky had been treated by several leaders of the scientific establishment, who had threatened his first publisher, Macmillan, with boycott if it did not give up the publication of his book, Worlds in Collision. This outrageous threat had had its intended effect: the book was dropped from the list of Macmillan, and owed it only to its success as a best-seller to be picked up smoothly by another publisher, Doubleday.

Alfred de Grazia stunned his readership by devoting an entire issue of The American Behavioral Scientist to “The Velikovsky Affair,” forcefully raising the central question, the one of utmost importance indeed to political and social science - what he called “the Reception System of Science,”  for which the treatment dealt to Velikovsky by the scientific establishment represented indeed an ideal case.

The controversy was restarted, stronger than before, both regarding the behavior of establishment science towards new ideas, and, inevitably, as regards the substance of Velikovsky’s ideas and theories. Alfred later told the whole story, as well as that of the revived movement around Velikovsky, in his book The Cosmic Heretics. When Alfred convened a college at Valais, Switzerland, Immanuel came along in due course, bringing with him his extended family. Alfred established a special studio on civilizations and catastrophes for him there.

Many things happened between them before I arrived on the scene. They had their quarrels, always quickly subdued by their rare bond of two men who could and did respect each other. Velikovsky was still living in Princeton when I met Alfred and we visited him often in his house on Hartley Avenue, close to Lake Carnegie. We had lunch there in summer, on the new wooden deck which he had added to the side of his house, drinking Israeli wine. He maintained a strong connection to Israel, of which his father, emigrating from Lvov after the Communist Revolution, had been one of the earliest settlers. The house on Hartley Avenue struck me as “Central-European,” it resembled the home of old people I visited as a child in Alsace, with heavy furniture and rooms kept dark to protect the upholstery. There was an atmosphere of heavy coziness and I was old enough to feel a nostalgia for it, although I myself liked to live in airy, sunny places.

Sixteen months after I first met him, eighteen years into their friendship, Velikovsky died, at his home, unexpectedly. That day, when Velikovsky’s widow, Elisheva, tried to call Alfred to announce him the great man’s passing, we had been working together at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, doing research on Alfred’s book on Moses and the Exodus: God’s Fire. Particularly, in the Egyptology section, on the drawing of an extraordinary device, boat shaped, with two winged creatures facing each other on top of a box, in which Alfred saw the Egyptian prototype of the Ark of the Covenant - an electrical capacitor, an accumulator of static electricity, an early and more sophisticated form of what would be rediscovered in the XVIII century as the Leyden jar. It produced sparks, and transmitted charge which could shock, and even kill, as was clear from several passages in the Bible relevant to the Ark of the Covenant. It would have been particularly effective - beyond anything a Leyden jar could produce in our times - in the highly electrified environment of the time of the Exodus, which was created by electromagnetic conditions caused by close passages of a wandering, comet-like planet Venus - the linchpin of Velikovsky’s theories.

The early seventies witnessed the publication of three books by Alfred in political science. From then on, it was all ‘go’ for Quantavolution. Alfred had retired early from New York University in order to write the books which would become the Quantavolution Series, of which God’s Fire was the second. The ten books took approximately another seven years to write and to produce - the first seven years of my life together with Alfred. Needless to say, this task required his full time and the full engagement of his tremendous work capacity - from five o’clock in the morning, day after day, year after year, until late at night - and a good deal of mine, as well. Our main source of income was Alfred’s early retirement pension and we led a frugal, yet highly satisfying life - thanks, in great part, to our unusual living circumstances: Alfred had acquired, years before, a large piece of land facing the Aegean sea and the sunset on a promontory on the Greek Island of Naxos, then still undiscovered by mass tourism, a setting of Eden-like simplicity, where he had built a cabin of rough stones - without running water, without electricity, without telephone. No taxes. Wonderful fresh food. Restaurants where a hearty meal with wine cost less than a dollar.

We didn’t have a car - there was no road to speak of, either, on our promontory, called Stelida. Alfred used to drive to town on a motorcycle until the day, early on - the very day he finished the first draft of an article on Moses which he was already thinking of expanding into a book (it would be God’s Fire) - when he broke his leg trying to get his motorcycle unstuck from a muddy spot. The road was so poor that we did not ride it on the motorcycle together - I had taken a short cut on foot and was waiting for him farther down the road. After I found him, I ran to the closest farm and, with scant knowledge of Greek and passionate gesticulation, got the farmer to pick him up on his tractor and drive him into the main town of the island, where there were no medical facilities besides a competent and overworked young generalist. After this, I forbade him the motorcycle and I walked to town twice a week - three miles around the mountain and along deserted beaches, with my knapsack on my back, to buy food. Having no electricity, we had no refrigerator, either. It was probably the happiest time in our lives.

For six months of the year, we went back to live in America, picking up with the same work schedule, in a different environment. The cabin in Naxos was not winterized, and of course Alfred needed to work in good academic libraries. Among his New York University post-retirement privileges, he had been allowed to keep an apartment on the 25th floor of the Silver Towers, in the heart of Greenwich Village, with what was then probably the most beautiful view of New York: the perfect unobstructed Midtown skyline - one could see a sliver of both the Hudson and the East River - and a bit of New Jersey and a bit of Brooklyn. It would have been the perfect place to live if, due to restricted financial circumstances made necessary for him to be free to write the books, Alfred had not been forced to sublet it part-time, the first year, to an only too-eager close relative who, living quite comfortably in New Jersey himself, decided to use it as a luxurious Manhattan pied-à-terre. The part-time arrangement became quickly, and unilaterally, full-time and, preferring to keep the family peace, we ended up eking out the right to a few short days of residence every fortnight from this reluctant relative.

We were married at the Church of Saint Luke’s in the Fields, actually then a basement because it had burned to the ground, but where the Rev. Chia Ballantine, Alfred’s niece-in-law, officiated, and then jumped in our wedding clothes on the PATH train to return to New Jersey, on to Trenton, where we had bought a small old brick row-house with a back-yard to plant tomatoes in a mixed neighborhood. I am reminded of Truman Capote - who derived a feeling of basic security from knowing that, whatever happened to him financially, he would be able to live creatively in a marginal urban neighborhood. The house on Centre Street, Trenton, was narrow, had two floors, a basement where Al’s archive was kept, an attic where some quantavolutionist or other sometimes slept. It was not close to any usable academic library, but we made do with frequent drives to nearby Princeton, where Alfred’s mother still lived, and our bi-monthly trips to Manhattan, where we would work in the nearby Bobst Library and at New York Public Library - what joy that was, too...

These were therefore the places where the ten books of the Quantavolution Series were mostly written, ‘Q’ Street in Georgetown, DC, the Greek stone cabin, the greatest-view-in-Manhattan, the Trenton slum - over seven years... If books, and ideas, are a product of places as well as of minds, Quantavolution is a product of these places and of that mind, Al de Grazia’s.

India’s leading environmentalist, Dr. Rashmi Mayur, reviewed Chaos and Creation for the million readers of The Hindu, dated May 31, 1981, and asked Alfred whether the planet was in peril from a new quantavolution. “More dangerous is the threat of man’s self-destruction. Nuclear explosions can reduce India’s huge people to Manu and his crew once more, but there is no guarantee that they would be wise. Only a responsible world-government can insure us against this disaster.” Ever interested in world conflicts, Alfred was in India pushing the cause of the kind of world union he had devised in his basic book on the subject: Kalos: What is to be Done with Our World?

Earl Milton I met in Washington in 1978 - he came for a month from Lethbridge, Alberta, to talk about Alfred’s theory of ‘Solaria Binaria,’ among other things. Lethbridge University had made Velikovsky a doctor honoris causa.  The model of Solaria Binaria had been first expounded in a chapter of Volume One of the Quantavolution Series, Chaos and Creation, which had not yet been published. Earl, a professor of astronomy and a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, was enthusiastic with the proposed new paradigm of the solar system and before long the pair decided to do a separate, co-authored volume with Ralph Juergen, already committed. This brought for Alfred the benefit of Earl’s expert knowledge and his original mind, which was intent on pushing as far as it could go - even to the breaking point - the electromagnetic dynamics included in the theory - in fact, doing away with the gravity model altogether. So went gravity, to which, in Chaos and Creation, Alfred had still been holding onto - so to speak - with the help of electro-magnetic forces. The result was a highly original mind-blower which Prof. Vladimir Damgov, a top-ranking physicist and member of the Bulgarian Academy of Science wondered, in a lecture twenty years later, why it had not been widely discussed in scientific journals. 

Earl and Alfred met again in Princeton, later that year. But the book needed a long stretch of intimate discussions and collaboration for which the stone cabin on the Aegean Sea was to offer the perfect haven. Earl Milton took several months off from his teaching and brought along his wife Joan and his little son Davin, who was then two and half years old.
We met up with them in London - it was the first time that Earl Milton and his family were travelling outside North America. They had gone straight to Westminster Abbey, “the oldest place we have ever been to.” Both Alfred and Earl took part in a meeting of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, founded by British supporters of Velikovsky’s work. We then flew together to Athens and took the eight hour ferry-boat ride to Naxos. 

We settled Earl and Joan and Davin in one of the small, vine and flower-covered bungalows built among the rocks by our friend Juergen Hecht, a German geologist, which he rented out to foreigners who had found their way to the remote spot. The bungalows had no electricity, either, the water came from a cistern which collected the winter rain, the nearest telephone was a crank-up model at the taverna down by the beach of Agios Prokopios. The beach was then vast, white and empty, used mostly by straggles of beautiful, penniless students from Germany and Scandinavia, a few members of the tailing-off hippie-movement of America, occasional Australians, all nudists by conviction. Some of them lived right on the beach, in bamboo huts. Juergen Hecht’s bungalow had a large, vine-shaded terrasse, with a view to the sea and the mountains, a kitchen where Joan cooked meals, a small bathroom, it cost five US dollars a day. Earl and Joan and Davin stayed for two months - May and June 1980.

From the bungalows, if you walked West, the nearest house was Alfred’s cabin, almost a mile away and after that, only the hill and sea. Every morning, in the cool  hours, Earl walked over to our place. Al would be waiting for him with their coffee. And work would start with the first word of greeting - for this was a blissful time - life was work, all interaction between them was work, almost inadvertently, as well as it was life at its happiest and most exciting. It seems to me that I have never been in proximity of a human being so evenly elated over such a long stretch of time as Earl Milton was, working with Alfred at Stelida. They would go at it all morning, then the three of us would have lunch on the patio, then we would have a nap, Al with me, Earl on a couch in the “study” where they worked, which was a longish, oddly shaped house that Al had built next to the cabin and which we still call “the annex.” Then they would work again, until evening, ouzo and whisky time - when Joan and Davin would come over for dinner, or we would all together walk a mile or two to one of the tavernas, coming home in the dark of night, along unlit paths, groping in the dark with weak flashlights (the quality of the batteries was poor), unless the moon was up, bright as day. Or Joan would invite us for dinner at the bungalow.

The weather was perfect all that time, the air was dry, the sub-desert Mediterranean vegetation produced no pollens or irritants, a fact which Earl, who much suffered from asthma, appreciated immensely. He had just turned forty, he was tall and athletic, he enjoyed the sun and the simple life - his mind was working at full speed. With balls and spheres, and strings and rulers, he and Alfred would play around in the annex, demonstrating the developing planetary configurations of Solaria Binaria. I would hear them speak loudly, enthusiastically, and laugh a lot of the time. The available library resources were scant, but included the full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, for which Alfred professed contempt, kept in its own little oak chest. The nights were mild and dark - no street-lights, no clouds. Often Earl told us he had spent hours after dinner, watching the sky.

Sometime in May, we took a trip to the island of Thira-Santorini, three hours away by slow boat from Naxos, an awesome site, an island the largest part of which was blown off in a volcanic explosion dated to around 1450 BC, an event of such proportions that it has been suspected variously to be at the origins of the Atlantis legend, of the Plagues of Exodus and of the destruction, through concomitant earthquakes, tsunamis, gas-clouds and ash fall-outs, of the Minoan civilization of Crete. In its present shape, it is semi-circular, the sea having invaded the caldera, with two small islets in the middle of it which emerged only three centuries ago and constitute some of the youngest land to be trodden on Earth. It is one of the great sites on the planet, a place of shattering beauty. We took a late afternoon ferry boat leaving from Naxos, planning to enter the caldera of Thira at sunset, when it appears in full glory. We did not make it...

A bad wind blew up. The ferry made a routine call at the neighboring island of Ios, and decided it would stay over for the night in the protected little harbor there. There was not much going on in Ios at the time, except for some notorious hippie-beaches on the opposite side of the island. On Ios, a tenacious legend insists, Homer died and lay buried. Our party’s enthusiasm was only heightened by this forced halt in the Homeric site: Alfred had already almost finished The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, which was to be part of the ten books on Quantavolution, and which is a catastrophic, astronomic interpretation of the Homeric Song of Demodocus, such as it appears in the Odyssey, one of the most ancient song pieces taken up in the epic. To Alfred, it recorded the planetary instabilities of the age immediately preceding the Trojan War, and the interactions of a catastrophically unstable, des-orbited Mars with Venus, Earth and the Moon. We left the boat and went for a long walk in the hills, then returned on the ferry to spend an uncomfortable night: as the trip had been supposed to last only three hours, we had not taken cabins... The boat left sometime in the middle of the night and reached Thira at dawn, on a rough sea, passing, as it entered the caldera, the stately ‘Achille Lauro,’ an Italian cruise-boat, which would be a few years later the target of a notorious Palestinian terrorist attack (remembered in an opera: The Death of Klinghoffer).

Earl Milton was deeply moved by the experience of this trip to Thira - it was the only time he went there in his life - by the awesome sight of the caldera, the excursion to the excavations of the Late Bronze Age city of Akrotiri, which had been buried by volcanic ashes, and particularly by a boat trip to the “new lands,” barely emerged, of the volcanic islands, where the soil was hot and sulfur bubbled up under his hands as he dug into it. When he died, nineteen years later, in 1999, we learned from his devoted second wife, Ann, that he had asked for his ashes to be spread on this island, in the middle of the caldera.

This, then, was where and how Solaria Binaria, the co-authored book by Alfred and Earl, was spun out from a chapter in Chaos and Creation. A year later, Rosemary Burnard started typesetting the manuscript in her house in East London. It was slow work. Every week, batches of type-set pages arrived. Earl proved a slow and demanding editor. Alfred and I brought the book to a printer in Manhattan. It was the seventh of the ten books to be put into print. Almost simultaneously with The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars and The Burning of Troy.  Trips to printers had become routine. The arrival of cartons of books too, which we stored in the basement of the little Trenton house.

After that, there were left to finish, and publish, The Divine Succession, which rounded off the theoretical model of Quantavolution by moving it to its ultimate and inevitable conclusion, into the theological sphere, through what Alfred called theotropy, the dynamics working in opposition to entropy - creation, as against destruction. The last, autobiographical volume, The Cosmic Heretics, told the story of his unique friendship with Velikovsky and his involvement with the catastrophist movement. The Cosmic Heretics came out in the Spring of 1984. The last of the Ten Volumes, the achievement of the Herculean task, the Labors Accomplished.

All ten books were published by our Metron Publications - a company created and owned by Alfred since the 1950's, and which had published products as distinguished as The American Behavioral Scientist, and the “Universal Reference System,” the first computerized index in the social sciences in America - or in the world, for that matter - created in 1964, another achievement of Alfred which had been ahead of its time.

The books were difficult to handle, to market, to send off. During the years when they had been coming out one by one, we had advertised them, sold them, filled orders, out of the Trenton house. During the months we spent and worked in Naxos, Sigmund Kardas used to take over. Sigmund Kardas, who lived in a fine house in a Trenton neighborhood which bordered on the terrifying, taught science in one the state’s most difficult schools and owed to his heroic life-style a financial independence allowing him to pursue his multiple and offbeat intellectual interests. He had lived in Spain, he still owned a house on Teneriffe, but did not care much for travelling. When the Quantavolution Series was complete and published, we took off for Naxos and Sigmund took over, for the following years, the business of selling and expediting the books.

Later that year, after the chemical catastrophe which caused thousands of deaths in Bhopal, India, we went there, together with Rashmi Mayur. Alfred  wrote his next book, A Cloud Over Bhopal, about the catastrophe, on behalf of the victims and the survivors. With the Ten Books behind him, he could move on, hardly giving them the personal promotion they deserved and required. But this direction was not new to him, rather a return to the sources for he had been, after all, a political scientist with a major reputation. After Bhopal, he went on to write his autobiography, three large books, The Babe, about his childhood as a bandmaster’s son on Chicago’s Near North Side, in the age of Jazz, The Student, about his studies at University of Chicago, where he had entered on a half-tuition scholarship at the age of not-yet fifteen (and worked-off the other half of his tuition working as a busboy), The Taste of War, about his experience in five campaigns of WWI in Africa and Europe.  

It was followed by a large history of the United States, from 1492, or rather, from geological times to the millennium, and by a book of poems, Twentieth Century Fire Sale, his second.

In 1997, Alfred created his Grazian-Archive website with the help of our friends from Princeton, Syamala and Krishna Jonnalagadda, on which his enormous output in all fields was progressively published and which within a few years developed to a million and a half visitors a year. The Daily Average of Data Transferred from Alfred de Grazia’s archive to visitors to the archive, in the month of April 2005, was 310,544 kilobytes. The total number of successful requests of the same month came to 185,353.. The Ten Books were published as a Quantavolution CD during that same year.

With all this, it has been clear to me for over a decade that reading ten thick, tightly printed books (654,198 words!) which, moreover, challenged so many notions commonly held by an educated American, was an almost impossible demand to make of readers.

There was a need, I felt, for a book that would bring together the main ideas of the Quantavolution Series, leaving out much, perforce, but keeping the essential. There are few major problems of contemporary science that are not addressed directly or by inference in the Grazian Corpus. The extent of the coverage cannot be explored even in the many pages to follow. I have drawn nearly nothing, even by mention, of the special, highly differentiated articles of The Burning of Troy, little from The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, certainly a myth/reality epic in extremis explicatus. Or of the Cosmic Heretics (with its intriguing technique of the double-ego author). Lately Tortured Earth is easily the most holistic and adventurous of the geography and geology of the latter twentieth century. The Divine Succession is a stunning compendium and logical analysis of the totality of religion, with a catechism worthy of recital at college chapel meetings periodically. The Cosmic Heretics tells of all these books, going far beyond what I can divulge here, and to it ought be appended the famous Velikovsky Affair, a work which Alfred, once he was convinced of Velikovsky’s cause and scientific achievement, produced with the cordial and dedicated support of Livio Stecchini and Ralph Juergens, a classic of the history of science, forever being cited, although narrowly treated, as if only the historical pages were read and not the records of the history of science inscribed by Dr. Stecchini, nor his own contribution to the social psychology and behavior of the scientific establishment. It could truly be said of the book, as befitted Alfred’s temperament and past performances, that it forced the issue to the doors of the enemy.

I tried constantly  to preserve the deep, organic unity of the whole, which was produced in one enormous and practically uninterrupted drive, a tour de force, a true Herculean cycle, all integrated, all at the avant-garde of scientific investigation and still comfortably far-out, reacting immediately to new advances which conventional science, due to its own obligations, could only afford to consider and absorb slowly, striking out boldly yet always stopping in time to reflect upon the advance and making the necessary adjustment to the whole in order to receive it. Thus ending up in a new paradigm of many parts from cosmology to geology to psychology to history to theology. I followed the process daily, and in endless conversations. Never once did I catch Al trying to sweep under the rug a contradiction or an embarrassing fact - a sin sometimes exposed in Velikovsky’s own work - never did he fudge a citation, or take from it only what was useful to his purpose and silence the part of the message which did not support him. Nor did he have an agenda beyond the scientific - like proving, for instance, that Moses’ monotheism owed nothing to Akhenaton’s religious revolution - the religious and nationalistic aspects of such questions (for which he had a famously keen nose, going back to his early studies in the sociology of knowledge) were mightily indifferent to him...

He followed doggedly his line of thinking and any contradiction and new input had to be addressed, and any new explanation satisfactorily fitted into the whole, because the coherence of the whole was more important than the immediate usefulness or relative importance of its parts. There would be no peace until contradictions were fitted according to the rules of pragmatic logic, and to this the ‘Q’ series, whether right or dead wrong in many of its parts, owes its terrific conceptual unity. He wanted to prove nothing, promote nothing, except for his own case of trying to get recognition of a scientific truth which was being ignored and neglected - precisely for reasons of ideology and history and motives the non-scientificity of which had come to be forgotten. First of all, as only a social scientist could do - he revealed systematically the disabilities of what was then conventional science, and announced peremptorily: “The King is blind!”

Denouncing the opacity of the science establishment over the years would have been a useful activity. But, having glimpsed the substance of the truths which science was depriving itself of, he set out after them and would not pause until he had pursued them and cornered them at their logical end in a new complex of paradigms. He created a model, reaching from the constitution of the solar system as an evolving catastrophic binary, all the way to the dawn of hu­man awareness in a minuscule delay in instinct, which made us suddenly incapable of acting with the innocence and security of the beasts, and instead made us create all else in an attempt to recapture the wholeness and simplicity of our minds, to reclaim and endlessly transcend the wholeness and health of our lost animal selves, and set us on the path of discovery of which the ‘Q’ paradigm should be, like all science, one of the crude, early stepping-stones.

Anne-Marie de Grazia
Naxos, 2005