by Cauble, Don
whoever you are,
and dance your destiny,
dance your life in its wholeness.
Remember who you are."
For you
For those who long for the lights of home.
For the crazed ones who live in the shadows.
For lovers, everywhere.
For you,
whoever you are.
May you carry on with kindness
in your actions
and may you know forgiveness
in your heart.
This Passing World/
Journey from a Greek Prison
If the poems and stories in On the backs of seahorses' eyes have meant anything to you, please check out Don Cauble's first published novel: This Passing World. Available in eBook, paperback and hardcopy versions.
www.thispassingworld.com
§
On his honeymoon in Greece with his lovely bride Angelina, David Pendarus, through his own willful actions, finds himself in prison, along with drug smugglers, murderers, rapists, and thieves. He then begins to take a relentless look into his past and his intense and painful romantic entanglements—a journey, like Odysseus, full of twists and turns—in order to answer one burning question: Who am I? This Passing World tells the story of one man's journey to free himself from the prisons—within and without—of his own making. The characters and setting are vivid and alive. The time emerges from the depths of forgotten memories: everything rings with a universal chord, for we have all been prisoners of something once. How does one transcend? This Passing World suggests a way and leads us gently by relating the characters' experiences.
Thoughts on This Passing World
Cauble spins detail with a precision that suggests real-life familiarity, fleshing out the characters into believable, relatable people. He connects far-flung players—artists, musicians, fellow nomads, Greek villagers, drug smugglers. David Pendarus is a seeker with the flexibility of a willow branch...What begins as the story of his marriage to his beloved Angelina, unfolds into a meandering journey across spiritual and physical worlds...and, ultimately, to a Greek prison.
—Kirkus Review
*****
This Passing World kept me turning pages. The book falls somewhere between a memoir and a novel. It drifted along in a very loose way, but as it went, something intangible began to gel, and characters took on more and more dimension. It's that something intangible that is always the hallmark of a good book.
—John Bennett, Hcolom Press
*****
THIS PASSING WORLD. I read it, and passed through your window into another world. Nice work.
—Jeff Maser, bookseller,
http://www.detritus.com/maser
*****
Don Cauble had the misfortune to be in Greece during the time of the Colonels. For a mere handful of weed, he was sent to prison for two years. This book recounts the years before, during and after that time with fluid prose and poetry that makes it a pleasure to turn the pages.
Cauble's insights into the places he lived and the women and men he encountered, find a place in the reader's mind as if he had accompanied each scene and person with an indelible photograph.
Cauble's generosity of spirit allows him to portray a time of ecstasy and privation with a calmness (sometimes hard to maintain) grounded in his understanding that nothing you do, or that happens to you, can alter your essential self.
Elsewhere he has said: "My writing attempts to show how consciousness reveals itself, by shifting time—sequences, events, perceptions—to suggest that everything is happening at once, simultaneously."
—William Hageman (the Willie),
somewhere in Australia
Author: Living in the O
*****
For poet and sometimes philosopher David Pendarus, the central character in This Passing World, that life-altering experience was a two-year stretch, from 1972-1974, in a Greek prison. The arrest came at an especially inopportune moment, during an extended honeymoon in Greece. Pendarus' relatively carefree life of literature, poetry, travel, adventure, and romantic love ended abruptly in the isolation of jail cell in a foreign land. Deprived of freedom, thrown in with a group of international ruffians, robbers, murderers, and ordinary outlaws, not to mention those poor souls swept up in the dragnet cast by a repressive, despotic military junta, Pendarus is forced to reconsider his life, to examine closely the people, circumstances, and choices that brought him to that Greek slammer. Most importantly, he was forced, or afforded the opportunity, to ask that most important philosophical and spiritual question: "Who am I?"
Beneath and above all the sometimes confused, sometimes desperate, sometimes painful, but always hopeful searching for new ways of connecting with each other, most of the men and women in This Passing World are deeply concerned with finding an authentic, viable form of spirituality, something different, more real, more meaningful, more relevant than the institutional forms of religion they grew up with. Beneath all the drugs, the sex, the music, the radical politics, was an earnest desire to find a transcendent dimension in our human life, something that gives meaning and purpose to an individual life. The characters in this novel are spiritual seekers, especially David Pendarus, the imprisoned Odysseus of this journey of spiritual discovery. Yes, they were mostly unconscious and unaware of that fundamentally human urge, and yes, sometimes, even usually, they looked for love and truth in all the wrong places, but the motives are pure and sometimes so were the results. Sometimes these seekers found, more or less, what they were looking for.
Some readers may dismiss the forms of spirituality in This Passing World as impossibly New Agey, but if they look more deeply, they will see that the searching and the discoveries of the characters in the novel are not all that different from more conventional religions. Is David Pendarus' authentic spiritual experience in that jail cell in Greece essentially different from that of Saul/St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or the Buddha's enlightenment beneath the fig tree 2,500 years ago, or the illumination of Jesus on the cross, or the earth-and-heaven shattering spiritual experiences of hundreds, perhaps thousands of mystics from around the globe and in every century? I don't think so. The language of literature, especially poetry—both present in this novel—is basically the same, pointing to a Light that transcends the cares, concerns, sorrows, suffering, and sadness of this passing world of shadows, this dream within a dream, while at the same time infusing everything in that very world with its Truth. We are, as I've heard it said, not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience. In the end, we are indeed all Beings of Light.
—From a review by Larry Setnosky, artist in wood
§
Full disclosure
To paraphrase the philosopher David Hume, on his publication of A Treatise of Human Nature, Cauble's book, This Passing World, "fell stillborn from its publication, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among learned writers, except for a few poets and friends."
About the author
Don Cauble grew up in the South and received an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from the University of Oregon in 1966. He has lived in San Francisco, Greece, and Denmark, and now lives in Portland, Oregon. He's an avid gardener.
"The details of my personal life matter little. What matters is who I am in relation to the timeless. My writings are an attempt to answer the question: Who am I? To follow this question is take the journey of your life. It is the journey that will lead you to the source of your being (and the Source of all that is)."
—Don Cauble
A list of books Don Cauble has authored appears on page 2 of this book.
This Passing World is his first novel.
How to order this book
Copies of this book can be ordered from Amazon.com.
For printed copies signed by the author,
please visit www.seahorseseyes.com
Click on the "Order" tab
, and follow the instructions.
You can contact the author by writing to him at [email protected]
To read excerpts from his novel
and to order
This Passing World / Journey From a Greek Prison
please visit www.thispassingworld.com