PIONEERING
OVER FOUR EPOCHS
The Fifth Edition
An autobiographical study
and a study in autobiography
By RonPrice
TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS
VOLUME 1:
INTRODUCTIONS AND GENRES
Chapter 1
Introduction 1
Chapter 2
Introduction 2
Chapter 3
Letters
Chapter 4
Diary/Journal/Notebooks
Chapter 5
Interviews
Chapter 6
A Life in Photographs
VOLUME 2:
PRE-PIONEERING
Chapter 1
Ten Year Crusade Years: 1953-1963
Chapter 2
Pre-Youth Days: 1956-1959
Chapter 3
Pre-Pioneering Days: 1959-1962
VOLUME 3:
HOMEFRONT PIONEERING
Chapter 1
Pioneering: Homefront 1: 1962-1964
Chapter 2
Pioneering Homefront 2: 1965-1967
Chapter 3
Pioneering Homefront 3: 1967-1968
Chapter 4
Pioneering Homefront 4: 1968-1971
VOLUME 4:
INTERNATIONAL PIONEERING
Chapter 1
International Pioneering 1: 1971-1973
Chapter 2
International Pioneering 2: 1973-1974
Chapter 3
International Pioneering 3: 1974-1978
Chapter 4
International Pioneering 4: 1978-1982
Chapter 5
International Pioneering 5: 1982-1988
Chapter 6
International Pioneering 6: 1988-1996
Chapter 7
International Pioneering 7: 1996-2003
Chapter 8
Epilogue
VOLUME 5:
COMMENTARIES, ESSAYS AND POEMS
Chapter 1
Credo and Resumes
Chapter 2
Pioneering An Overview
Chapter 3
Anecdote and Autobiography
Chapter 4
Autobiography as Symbolic Representation
Chapter 5
Essays on Autobiography
Chapter 6
A Study of Community
Chapter 7
About Poetry
Chapter 8
Social Problems
Chapter 9
Praise and Gratitude
sections below: (found in these volumes)
SECTION I
Pre-Pioneering
SECTION II
Homefront Pioneering
SECTION III
International Pioneering
sections below: (not found in these volumes)
The material below is found in other locations and, although not included in this
autobiography, it could be useful for future autobiographical, biographical work and
historical work.
SECTION IV
Characters/Biographies: 24(ca) short sketches
SECTION V
Published Work : Essays-150:
See(a) Resume Vol.5 Ch 1 above and
(b) Section V: Volumes 1&2
of private collection.
SECTION VI
Unpublished Work: Essays-Volumes 1 & 2---125 essays
....................1979-2004
Novels-Volumes 1 to 3---12 attempts
.......................1983-2001
SECTION VII
Letters: Volumes 1 to 35: 3000 letters(ca)... 1967-2004
SECTION VIII
Poetry: Booklets 1-52: 6000 poems(ca)........ 1980-2004
SECTION IX
Notebooks: 150(ca)........................................1966-2004
SECTION X.1
SECTION X.2
Photographs: 12 files/booklets/folios.............1908-2004
Journals: Volumes 1 to 4.................................1844-2004
SECTION XI
Memorabilia...................................................1962-2004
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to the Universal House of Justice in celebration of the fortieth
anniversary of its first election in April 1963 and to Alfred J. Cornfield, my
grandfather, whose autobiography was an inspiration to the one found here.
PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION
In early April 2004, six months after creating a fourth edition of this work, a hard
copy, the first in the public domain as far as I know, was made by Bonnie J. Ellis, the
Acquisitions Librarian, for the Baha’i World Centre Library. The work was 803 pages
at that point. Anyone wanting to read this fixed edition, this hard copy, of the fourth
edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs will find it, then, in the Baha’i World
Centre Library. That fourth edition of April 2004 is now the base from which
additions, deletions and corrections have been, are being and will be made in the
months and years ahead. Anyone coming across the Internet edition with these
changes will come across what is for me the fifth edition of my work, an edition which
I trust will be the final edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs.
May 25 2004
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
After completing the third edition of this work on July 9th 2003, in commemoration
of the 153rd anniversary of the martyrdom of the Bab, I continued to polish, to edit, to
add and to alter its basic structure and format. By the celebration of the anniversary of
the birth of Baha'u'llah on November 12th 2003, due to the many changes I had made,
it seemed timely to bring out this fourth edition. The second edition had been
essentially the same as the first edition which I had completed ten years before in
1993, although I added in the intervening period, in the years 1993 to 2003, a series of
appendices and notebooks containing a substantial body of resources that I could draw
on from the vast literature that had become available on the autobiographical process
and on life-writing as well as from the social sciences and humanities on the various
themes I wanted to pursue in my work. And I did just that in writing the third edition.
In 2003 I wrote what was essentially a new autobiography of over seven hundred
pages with over thirteen hundred footnotes. In this fourth edition of some three
hundred and fifty thousand words I have divided the text into five volumes and it is
now found on the internet at several sites and especially at www.bahaindex.com which
highlighted this autobiography at its news site on November 4th 2003 and the Baha'i
Academics Resource Library, located on the internet at bahai-library.com. It has
taken me nearly twenty years to satisfy my autobiographical and literary self; perhaps
now this self has the maturity to exercise its skills judiciously and so enlighten the
public. I hope so. To attempt to enlighten anyone these days, though, rings of a
certain pretentiousness and so I make this last comment with some caution.
I plan to continue working on this fourth edition in the months ahead and, when a
substantial, a sufficient, number of changes, additions and deletions have been made
and/or when some unforseen development occurs I'll bring out a fifth edition. This
exercise will depend, of course, on being granted sufficient years before "the fixed
hour" is upon me and it is my "turn to soar away into the invisible realm." 1 Readers
will find below, then, the fourth edition of my autobiography Pioneering Over Four
Epochs with whatever changes, additions and deletions I have made after November
12th 2003. For the most part, readers will find here augmentations of the third edition
rather than revisions or corrections, very much what the first essayist Michel
Montaigne said he did with the editions of his Essays.2
This edition represents a reconciliation of a certain zestful readiness of my
imaginative life with the practical concerns and the challenging demands of the world
of teaching, parenting, marriage, Baha'i community activity and various social
responsibilities. It is a reconciliation that could not have occurred, though, had the
demands of job, community and family not been significantly cut back to a minimum.
The swings in my bi-polar cycle and the practical demands of life for a long time
ennervated and depleted whatever energies I could have poured into writing this
autobiography. But after my retirement from the teaching profession nearly five years
ago and after the final stage of the treatment of my bi-polar disorder during these
same years, a whole new energy system unfolded, productive tensions between selfcreation and communal participation, enabling me to put together these seven hundred
pages in the course of one year. I hope I have not just built an autobiographical
skyscraper to adorn the literary skyline. I hope that at least a few readers will take an
elevator up to my many floors and check out some of the multitude of offices hidden
away. After travelling up and up at the press of a button, readers I hope will find
some useful resources for their everyday lives. As one of the 'writingest pioneers' I
hope I provide some pleasureable moments to anyone brave enough to take on the 800
pages here.
My imagination, my creativity, for many years had been unable to convey my life's
experience and thought in writing in a personally satisfying way. But as the new
millennium opened its first doors, with energies that yearned to express themselves
through the art of writing, I was able at last to satisfy the autobiographical impulse.
And the impulse led me on many paths but only one direction--deeper.3 This book
became, in a way, the crystallization of a way I wanted to write. 4 Out of the privacy
1
'Abdu'l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, NSA of the Baha'is of the United States,
Wilmette, 1971, p.166.
2
Colin Burrow, "A Review of Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher by
Anne Hartle," Guardian Unlimited Books, Nov. 2003. Montaigne wrote his essays
between 1571 and 1592.
3
Bonnie Goldberg, Room to Write: Daily Invitations to a Writer's Life, Putnam
Books, 2004.
4
Alister Cooke expressed his radio braodcasts, beginning as they did early in the first
Seven Year Plan, this same way. See: ABC Radio National, April 4th, 2004, 8:008:30 am.
of my thought and writing I was able to make more and more and more of my life;5 it
was a 'more' that was not based quintessentially on the social dimension of life as my
life had been hitherto for virtually all of my pioneering experience. It was, though, a
'coaxing of a context'6 out of my experience and the history of my times and of my
religion. The result is the edition you read here completed several months before my
sixtieth birthday. I offer this edition of my work in celebration of the birth of that
Holy Tree7 near day-break 186 years ago this morning.
I do not try to fix this autobiography into a single frame; I do not try to write my own
story with a sense of closure and definitiveness. Nor do I write with a great emphasis
on disclosure and confession; I do not try to 'jazz-it-up', make it more than it is. I'm
not tempted to give it a glamour it does not possess but I do strive to find its meaning,
the meaning in what is already there. My story is based on remembrance, memory,
yes, unavoidably, first-person reportage, necessarily. There are an unlimited number
of possible narratives that could be constructed as reporter on my life. What readers
have here could be called an interpretation, an adaptation, an abridgement, a retelling,
a basic story among many possible basic stories.8
There is some ordering of the incidences and intimacies of this specific, individual life
into a narrative coherence giving readers some idea of what it was like to be me, some
idea of what my inner, private, mental life was like. This private life is for the most
part illegible; we live it and fight it alone. I have tried to make this inner life, as much
as possible, as legible as possible. The sense of self which has emerged in the process
of writing this work is two-fold. One is that private, mysterious, difficult to define
self about whom it seems impossible to boast about. This self is an enigma, a
mysterious who that I am, a transient entity, ceaselessly re-created for each and every
object with which the brain interacts. Along with this transient entity, though, there is
what seems like a second self, what one writer called an autobiographical self. 9 It is
this self which gives this autobiography some narrative flow; it is the self of everyday
life, the surface existence. It is not trivial but is really quite important in a different
way than that more enigmatic self.
If, in opening both my narrative self and my inner self to others, readers may see ways
to describe and give expression to their lives and in so doing be open further to the
immense richness of life's experience, that would give me pleasure. For, as 'Abdu'lBaha wrote in the opening pages of The Secret of Divine Civilization, "there is no
greater bliss, no more complete delight"10 than "an individual, looking within himself,
5
Cleanth Brooks, "W.B. Yates as a Literary Critic," The Discipline of Criticism:
Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation and History, editor, P. Demetz, et al.,
pp.17-41.
6
A description by a journalist of the accomplishment of Alister Cooke over nearly
60 years. See: idem
7
Baha'u'llah refers to His birth using the words "this Holy Tree." See David S. Ruhe,
Robe of Light, George Ronald, Oxford, 1994, p.21.
8
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories," Critical
Inquiry, Autumn 1980.
9
Antonio Damasio quoted in: "The Autobiography of Consciousness
and the New Cognitive Existentialism," Janus Head, Vol. ? No.?.
10
'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970(1928), p.3.
should find that....he has become the cause of peace and well-being, of happiness and
advantage to his fellow men."11
I make no claim, though, to my life being some apotheosis of the Baha'i character as,
say, Benjamin Franklin's autobiographical persona was of the prevailing conception
of the American character back in the eighteenth century. Baha'i character and
personality, it is my view, is simply too varied to be said to receive an apotheosis or
typification in someone's life. Franklin, and many autobiographers since, have been
interested in self-promotion and in being an exemplar for the edification and moral
improvement of their community, exempla as they are known in the western religious
traditions. I have taken little interest in the former or the latter as I proceded to write
this work. The Baha'i community has acquired many exempla in the last two hundred
years12 and only one true Exemplar. If this work plays some role, however limited, in
developing an "aristocracy of distinction," as Franklin's did, and in contributing to
"the power of understanding,"13 as this great Cause goes on from strength to stength in
the years ahead, I would welcome such a development. To think that this work could
play a part, however small, in the advancement of civilization, may be yet another
somewhat pretentious thought, but it is a hope, an aspiration, consistent with the
system of Baha'i ideals and aims which has been part of my ethos, my philosophy of
life, for at least some forty-five years now.
And finally, like Franklin, I leave a great deal out of this autobiography, a great deal
about my times, my religion and myself. I make no apologies for this any more than I
make any apologies for living, although my sins of omission and commission are
legion and sufficiently extensive to warrant a few apologies to particular individuals I
have known along the way. Conscious of the problem in autobiographical literature
of the "aggrandisement of the self," I stress the very ordinariness of my life, my part
of a larger, collective, community memory and the coherence of my life around a host
of themes. Most of life's experience has been left out, as Mark Twain informed us.
This is an inevitability, part of the nature of any autobiography. Perceptual gaps,
cognitive omissions, lacuna of many kinds prevent an accurate or complete account of
reality. But, because we are seldom aware of the lacuna, we believe our cognitions
accurate. Clocking in at a burgeoning eight hundred pages, as I write these additional
words to this autobiography's fourth edition, this work is, I'm sure, too much for most
readers. In fact, it may be that I have tried to say, to take on, too much. If that is the
case some future editor can cut it back to a manageable portion and readers may be
advised to read part rather than all of this text.
Ron Price
November 12th 2003
11
idem
If one defines Shaykh Ahmad's leaving his home in eastern Arabia in 1793 as a
starting point for the story of this new religion and the completion of the first edition
of this autobiography as 1993, then there are two centuries of religious experience to
draw on for various kinds of exemplars, heroes, saints and wondrous personages. I'm
not so sure I deserve to be included in this list of exemplars.
13
Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah, Wilmette, 1974, p.17.
12
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
Forty years ago this week the Baha'i community elected, for the first time, its
international body, the Universal House of Justice. The timing for the completion of
this third edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs14 has been fortuitous since I have
dedicated this book to these Men of Baha, as the Baha'is sometimes call this body at
the apex of their administrative Order. The completion of the third edition of this
work, this autobiography, in the last few days, coinciding as this completion does with
the election of that international governing body for the ninth time, has been
encouraging. Over these last two decades I have often been inclined to discontinue
this whole exercise. With the writing of this third edition a renewed hope has entered
the picture.
After nearly twenty years of working on this autobiography or narrative non-fiction as
it might be called, I feel, at last, that it has a form worthy of publication and so I have
entered it here on my website: bahaipioneering.bahaisite.com/ It has been nearly
twenty years, too, since I first read my grandfather's autobiography, a book written in
the first two years of the Formative Age, 1921-1923, by a man who had just turned
fifty years of age. The book was the account of the first twenty-nine years of his life,
1872-1901. Written, as I say, at the beginning of the Formative Age of the Baha'i
Faith, this work, of more than one hundred thousand words, by a formally uneducated,
self-educated man, was an inspiration to me and my writing. And so I have also
dedicated this book to my grandfather, Alfred J. Cornfield.
I have now written perhaps more than two hundred thousand words about the first
fifty-eight years of my life, twice as many years and twice as many words as those in
my grandfather's autobiography. I see this edition as a working base for an ongoing
exercise in autobiography and autobiographical analysis and an exercise, too, in
applying the multitude of insights from a lifetime of reading in the social sciences and
humanities. When enough changes to this third edition have been made, a fourth
edition will take its place some time in the years, or perhaps just months, ahead.
Perhaps, too, like Edward Gibbon I'll complete six editions before this earthly life is
out. Gibbon's autobiography, of course, became significant because of its association
with his famous work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The significance of this work, if indeed it comes to possess any significance at all,
will be due to my association with a Movement that claims to be the emerging world
religion on the planet. I completed a first edition of this work ten years ago in May
1993. I dedicated it to the Universal House of Justice on that occasion, as I do here in
this edition. A second edition contained additional sentences and paragraphs,
alterations and a wealth of quotations and essays on the subject of autobiography as
well as a dozen or so updates to take the story into this my fifty-ninth year of life and
my forty-first as a pioneer. I was trying in this second edition, although I don’t feel I
was in any way successful at that stage, to write the kind of sentences Henry David
Thoreau advocated: “Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an
atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new
14
The four epochs are the years 1944 to 2021 of the Formative Age, not to be
confused with the two epochs of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Divine Plan: 1937-1963 and 1963 to
an as yet unspecified year.
impression; sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as Roman
aqueducts; to frame these, that is the art of writing . . . [a style] kinked and knotted up
into something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond,
without digesting.”15 Well, it’s good to have a lofty aim. In the third edition I began,
at least so it is my impression, to achieve this goal.
As I worked on the second edition I was often inclined to leave the account there and
break-off the writing. But something kept pulling me toward a more extended, a
deeper, treatment of my life and times in the context of my religion. This third edition
was written in the first four months of 2003. Drawing on much of the resource
material I had gathered on the subject of autobiography in the previous ten years, I
was finally able to tell my story in a way that was satisfying, if far from perfect. I
look forward to further developments to this autobiographical work in the months, the
years and the decades ahead. Should I be granted a long life in which to recount the
'tokens that tell of His glorious handiwork,' it will be interesting to see what changes
there will be, what will be added and what will be taken away, in future editions. The
significance of my efforts, what they ultimately will reveal and have revealed, what
those mysterious dispensations of Providence will uncover from behind the veil of
silence that seems to ultimately cover the lives of most people on this mortal coil, is a
mystery. Providence has ordained for my training every atom in existence. Some of
the evidences of that training experience are here in this book.
In writing this third edition, I seem to have found at last a successful strategy for
writing something longer than a few pages, longer than an essay or a poem, literary
forms that somehow got fixed by my many years as a student and lecturer in academic
institutions and by my own inclination and need to write short pieces for personal
pleasure and/or practical necessity. And if, in the beginning at least, in this work, the
result is a slightly complex and involved style, perhaps it is because I have found life
to be complex and involved. I have learned, at last, that revising can be a pleasure and
that even the clumsiest initial draft can take on a life of its own in subsequent drafts.
A revision, for me, seems to function in a multitude of ways: simplification, the
achievement of greater depth and complexity due to a penetration, a digging beneath
appearances to something I see as a greater reality or truth; indeed, something quite
new as well as a refining of the old.
I have discovered too that spinning out ideas and experiences is not only idiosyncratic
but also something usefully connected with what others have said. Each spinning
seems to require its own web and the search for fixed points of reference is part of the
struggle for coherence, completeness and the autobiographer’s attempt to penetrate, to
dig, beneath those appearances to something closer to reality. As a result, I like to
think that each sentence of Pioneering Over Four Epochs is a "flower in a crannied
Henry David Thoreau in Annette M. Woodlief, “The Influence of Theories of
Rhetoric on Thoreau,” Thoreau Journal Quarterly, Vol. VII, January 1975, pp.1322.
15
wall," as a poet once wrote.16 The crannied wall of autobiography has been a popular
one in the last several centuries, since the Reformation in the sixteenth century, but
especially in the last four decades, in the years of this pioneering venture. Many
thousands of people in my lifetime have turned to this genre as a means of selfexpression and cultural and social reflection.17 I would not be the first person to see
in my own life a mirror of the times. The famous work The Education of Henry
Adams, a text that appears and reappears periodically in the literature of our age,
makes much the same claim for its subject.
Autobiography is a genre of literature that is arguably the most popular of all genres
in the Western tradition, at least since the Enlightenment.
But books, like civilizations and life itself, are fragile things and, however splendid,
often come to mean little in the hearts and minds of a people. Like that flower in a
crannied wall, however beautiful and however strongly it may cling to the crevice in
the wall, in time it comes to flower no more with no evidence at all of its existence. It
is possible that the abyss of history, so deep as it is, may bury this whole exercise.
Writers must face this possible reality, no matter how much hope they may entertain
for their works.
I came to see, as I wrote, that a dialectical use of experiential, historical, religious and
philosophical themes and positions is the most reliable way of anchoring one's
experience, one's thoughts and arguments and making them more stable and complete.
Of great benefit, too, in this the longest of my pieces of writing, has been the many
disciplines of the social sciences and humanities and a continued dialogue and even
controversial exchange with contemporaries, a controversy that must be characterized
by an etiquette of expression and a judicious exercise of the written and spoken word.
On paper, as in life, the phenomenon of freedom of thought "calls for an acute
exercise of judgement."18 One must not say too much nor too little. One must find
one's own checks and balances, one's own insights into the dynamics of expression.
This edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs is part of that search for these
dynamics, these checks and balances and as acute an exercise in judgement as is
possible given the blooming and buzzing confusion that so much of life represents to
us as we travel this often stony, tortuous and narrow road to what we believe or hope
is, ultimately, a glorious destiny. It is understandable how writers like Conrad and
Naipaul can see human destiny in terms of darkness, weeping and the gnashing of
teeth. If it were not for the political-religious idea at the centre of the Baha'i Faith
with which I have sketched a framework of meaning over the terra incognita of life
16
Published in Action, Knowledge, and Reality: Critical Studies in Honour of
Wilfrid Sellars,
ed. Hector-Neri Castañeda, Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.,
Indianapolis, 1975.
17
Gillian Whitlock, "A Review of 'Shameful Autobiographies: Shame in
Contemporary Australian Autobiographies and Culture,'" Rosamund Dalziell,
Australian Humanities Review, 1998.
18
The Universal House of Justice, Letter to the Baha'is of the United States of
American, December 29th, 1988.
for virtually all the years of this story, I would not be able to create in comfort. I
might very well see life, as so many writers do, as little more than a groteque farce. 19
The shape within which these dynamics operate, the genre of autobiography, is like
water. It is a fluid form, with varied, blurred, multiple and contested boundaries, with
characteristics some analysts say that are more like drama than fiction, containing
constructed more than objective truth. So it is that other analysts of autobiography see
it as "the creation of a fiction."20 This is an understandable conclusion if a writer
tends to stress the perspective Baha'u'llah alludes to when He writes that life bears
"the mere semblance of reality," that it is like "a vapour in the desert." Whatever
universality exists in this text it comes from my association with the writings of this
prophet-founder of a new religion rather than any of my specific pretensions to
findings and conclusions that I like to think bear relevance to everyone. What I offer
here is an interpretation, a voice, seemingly multivocal, that struggles to obtain the
attention of others. In some ways what readers will find here is a series of
interpretations, identifications, differentiations, in tandem, in tension, in overlap, to
one another, each registering their own significances. There is some of Thoreau’s
famous statement in my work: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he
hears, however measured or far away.”21 And there is much effort here to please, to
walk with people where they are.
I hope readers will find they do not have to penetrate elaborate sentences, wade
through arcane terminology and deal with excessive jargon. I hope they will not find
here a heaving mass of autobiographical lava as so often at the centre of
autobiographies. But with nearly 800 pages this document may prove more useful as
a piece of archival history rather than something for contemporaries to actually read.
I certainly aim to please and, as in life, I'm sure I will do that only some of the time. I
try to please through this piece of analytical and poetic narrative which I have created
not so much on paper as in my innards, out of the living tissue of my life. 22 And it is
the autobiographical theorist James Olney who defines this process of creation best:
"Autobiography is a metaphor through which we stamp our own image on the face of
nature. It allows us to connect the known of ourselves to the unknown of the world.
Making available new relational patterns it simultaneously organizes the self into a
19
For these views of Naipaul and Conrad see "Guardian Unlimited Books," Internet,
March 22, 2004. See also Colin Wilson, The Strength to Dream, Abacus Books,
London, 1976, p.xxiv.
20
Shari Benstock, "Authoring the Autobiographical," in The Private Self: Theory
and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, University of North Carolina
Press, Chapel Hill, 1988, pp. 10-33, p.11.
21
Henry David Thoreau, Walden. This book contains the lessons Thoreau learned
living beside this pond from July 1845 to September 1847.
22
Gloria Anzaldua, "Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,"
This Bridge Called My Back: Writing By Radical Women of Colour, 2nd edition,
Kitchen Table Women of Colour, NY, 1983, p.172.
new and richer entity so that the old known self is joined to and transformed into the
new and heretofore unknown self."23
This new and richer entity is the result of a carefully edited version of personal
experience and my particular version of reality that I place before my readers so as to
indicate the persepctive from which this narrative is being written. This narrative
depends on the deferred action of my memory and is based on the view that the
writing is worth the risk however complex the task.
May 1st 2003
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
It has been nearly ten years since I finished the first edition of Pioneering Over Four
Epochs. Since that time I have added a large body of my poetry among other
additions, deletions and alterations. The size of the original work has been increased
many fold. Time has moved on and my life is being lived in another epoch, the fifth,
necessitating a new name for this work: Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Here is the
story, then, of more than forty years of pioneering experience: 1962-2002 and fifty
years of association, 1953-2003, with a Movement which claims to be--and I believe
it is--the emerging world religion on the planet. I like to think, with the historian
Leopold von Ranke, that “self-imposed discipline,” and there has been some in
producing this work, “alone brings excellence to all art.” If that is the case, then there
is some excellence here. There is here, too, some of what Proust called "true
impressions",24 hints from life's realities, persistent intuitions which require some art
form, some form like writing, so that we are not left with only the practical ends of
life which, although necessary, are never really sufficient to living.
The choice of subject is a deeply emotional affair. Poetry and history are, in this
work, allies, inseparable twins. But there are other brothers and sisters that anchor and
define this autobiography: philosophy, sociology, the everyday, religion, inter alia.
Style, too, is, as the historian Peter Gay emphasizes, the bridge to substance, to all
these family members. I hope readers enjoy the walk across this bridge as I have
enjoyed this organized, disciplined and certainly emotional encounter with some of
the substance of my life and times and the many family members, friends, students
and myriad associations I have had in life.
It is the belief of some writers, some thinkers, some human beings, that there is
nothing new under the sun or perhaps, to put their view more accurately, there is
nothing new to say about the human condition. The greats of history, the
Shakespeares and the Sophocleses have already said it inimitably, brilliantly. At best,
it seems to me, this is only a partial truth. The historian, the critic, the autobiographer,
among others, interprets and reinterprets the human condition and, although, the
human condition has elements that stay the same(plus ca change, plus ca la meme
chose)much changes. For, as it is said, you can not step into the same river twice.
23
James Olney, Metaphors of the Self: The Meaning of Autobiography, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1972, pp.31-32.
24
Proust quoted in 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature Acceptance Speech, Saul
Bellow, Internet.
There is, then, much more to say, much more that is new. At least that, in summary, is
my view.
I think that some may find this book peculiar. Such was the view of the autobiography
of the nineteenth century novelist, Anthony Trollope. Late Victorians found his book
cantankerous and they had trouble absorbing its contents. For many reasons, not
associated with cantankerousness in my case, I don't think many will find this book of
mine absorbing. Although, like Trollope, I chronicle some of life's daily lacerations
upon the spirit. I also move in channels filled with much that comes from flirtations
with the social sciences: history, psychology, sociology, anthropology and several
literary studies. My book has come to assume what many, I'm sure, will experience as
unmanageable proportions. Five hundred pages and more is a big read for just about
everyone these days. Readers need to be especially keen to wade through that much
print. Perhaps at a future time I will divide the text into parts, into a series of
volumes. But even then, in the short term, this world is a busy place and lives are
confronted with so much to read, to watch, to do and to try to understand. This work
will, I think, slip into a quiet niche and remain, for the most part, unread. I hope I am
proved wrong.
I like to think, though, that should readers take on this work they may find here the
reassurance that their battles are my battles, that we are not alone and that the Cause is
never lost. Most readers coming to this book, I'm inclined to think, already believe
these things. But what I offer here could be seen as a handrail, if that is desired, a
handrail of the interpretive imagination. Here, too, is a handrail informed by my
experience, my life's basic business of shunting about and being shunted about,
carelessly and not-so-carelessly, for more than half a century in the great portal that is
this Cause. Finally, I like to think this handrail is coated with an essential compassion
and what writer Trollope wife Joanna says is the monument of a writer, a hefty dose
of humility. That's what I'd like to think and, with Plato, I’d like to think that I am "a
good writer(who) is a good man writing.” But of course one never knows this sort of
thing for sure.
Ron Price
22 January 2003
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
What began in 1984 as an episodic diary and in 1986 as a narrative of pioneering
experience covering twenty-five years has become an account covering thirty-one:
1962-1993. Coincidentally, I have finished this third and what I hope is the final draft
of this first edition in time to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the first election of
the Universal House of Justice. This short account of some seventy-five pages has
been dedicated to this institution which I have tried to serve, successfully and
unsuccessfully, as one noted analyst once put it, like a precisioned instrument, since
April 1963. Often the instrument has been dulled by life, by incapacities, by the tests
that are part of our existence. Sometimes, one is conscious that the instrument has
developed a sharpness, a sensation that at best is part of an unmerited grace.
Readers will find here what could be called a descriptive and analytical narrative, a
narrative that intensifies in its personal meaning my life here on earth and has,
thereby, a restorative function. By the time I came to finish this work I felt a strong
need for a restoration of my psyche. This was in 1992-93. There is no doubt that my
writing, my art, has shaped my experience, lending it style and direction. Life in turn
informs this art giving it variety, giving it a granite base. 25 I have also used other
genres to tell my story: diary, letters, essays, poems, fiction, photographs, notebooks
and memorabilia. They can be found in other places, none of which are yet available
in published, in some available, form. Together, all the genres, all the writing, several
million words in all, paint the story of a life, a life that is far from over, far-light
years-from perfection, but in many ways typical of the thousands of lives, of people
who have pioneered in the three epochs that are the backdrop for this account. And
the act of writing is, as one writer put it, "a high, this writing thing, a kind of drug, and
once you experience it nothing else is ever the same." "Ordinary life," that writer
went on, "seems like a prison sentence in comparison to the freedom of writing"26
That puts it a little strongly but I agree with the general sentiment. But however one
characterizes writing it is difficult to grasp its origins. As Freud once wrote, "Before
the problem of the artist analysis must alas lay down its arms."27
My story is unique. The story of the experience of each pioneer is unique. Under the
guidance of the trustee of that global undertaking set in motion nearly a century and a
half ago, men, women, children and adolescents have scattered across the planet to its
most remote corners. Few write their accounts, their experiences, their journey and try
to tell of its pulse, its rhythm, its crises and victories. Whether from humility and a
feeling that writing autobiography is somehow an inappropriate exercise, perhaps too
self-centred; whether from a lack of interest in writing or the simple inability to
convey experience in a written form; whether from the tedium of the everyday and its
routines and responsibilities which come to occupy so much of their time; whether
from the responsibilities and demands of life or simply the battles which pioneers
inevitably face in their path of service: most of the stories never get told. This is one
that I hope will make it.
25
Emily Dickinson refers to "conviction's granite base" in her poem number 789.
See: http://www.sheckley.com/frames.html
27
Joseph Epstein, "Writing on the Brain," Commentary, 2003.
26
For many years I thought it would be better to keep this story under wraps, keep it
from seeing the light of day. Perhaps, I thought, it would be better published
posthumously, if it was to be published at all. Alternatively, it could be kept in some
local spiritual assembly or national spiritual assembly archive and retrieved by some
scholar or archivist as a curiosity, a sample of a work written in the darkest heart of an
age of transition. This may be, in fact, what eventuates. At this stage, as I complete
the first edition, it is difficult to know what will become of this document.
At this stage of the autobiographical process, too, I am not concerned about
publishing this piece of writing. This writing provides some helpful perspectives on
the pioneering process and on teaching and consolidation in the first decades of what
Shoghi Effendi called the tenth stage of history. I hope whoever has the opportunity
to read this account will find themselves entertained and stimulated by a man who
paused, as Henry David Thoreau28 did at the dawn of this new era, to give as full an
account, a report if you like, of his experience. I think it is a good read. It was
certainly a pleasure to write. It is a start, at least, to a story which I hope to continue
in the years ahead in future editions.
Memories are things, nouns if you like, which we all have. Remembering is an
activity, a verb if you like or more accurately a gerund. It is more like a book in the
process of being written, something that seems, in part at least, made up.
Remembering is not analogous to a book that I read or create from a printed script.
Remembering is a problem-solving activity, where the problem is to give a coherent
account of past events. Memory itself is both the problem and the solution to the
problem, if indeed the problem can be solved at all. Memories are also, as John
Kihlstrom suggests, "a special class of beliefs about the past." Belief, Kihlstrom
argues, is the phenomenal basis of remembering.29
April 12th 1993
SUMMARY AND OVERVIEW OF VOLUMES ONE TO FIVE OF THIS WORK
Anyone wanting to get a bird's-eye view of the 800 pages in this book need only go to
the chapter titles. The 30 headings at the outset of the chapters give anyone with little
time a quick picture of the contents of this autobiographical work. Volume 1 is
essentially a life-overview; volume 2 a discussion of my pre-pioneering days during
the Ten Year Crusade: 1953-1963; volume 3 examines homefront pioneering: 19621971 and volume 4: international pioneering: 1971 to 2004; finally, volume 5
contains essays on pioneering, some special poetry and a detailed resume and biodata. Three hundred and fifty thousand words is a big-read. Those who come to this
site can dip in at any place. There is no need to begin at the beginning. The author
wishes whose who do come upon this lengthy piece of writing much pleasure, much
insight and a feeling that time spent reading this is time well-spent. This work can not
be adequately understood as merely the story of my life. Were this just my story, I'm
Lewis Mumford, “Thoreau, Nature and Society,” A Century of Ecocriticism, The
University of Georgia press, Athens, 2001, p.250.
29
John F. Kihlstrom, "Memory, Autobiography, History," Proteus: A Journal of
Ideas, Vol.19, No.2, Fall 2002.
28
not sure I ever would have written it in the first place, however personally meaningful
or useful my life has been.
This work is, like William Wordsworth's great poem, The Prelude, the account of the
growth of a poetic personality and an imagination. It is also an account, a personal, an
intimate, account, of another prelude, my experience of part of that prelude which
preceded the inevitable and mass entry into the Baha'i Faith of literally millions of
new believers.30 And finally, after several thousand years of the recording of memory
in the western intellectual tradition, a balance between the recording of private and
personal memory on the one hand and public and collective memory on the other--the
two major nodes of memorialization since, say, the Homeric Period in the middle of
another Formative Age31--is being achieved, in recent centuries, in autobiography.
This is yet one more effort in the contribution to the achievement of such a balance.
VOLUME 1: CHAPTER ONE
Some Introductions and Genres
"Not beginning at the Beginning...."
Dispositions are plausible responses1 to the circumstances individual Baha'is found
themselves in and they led, in toto and inter alia, to the gradual emergence from
obscurity of their religion over these four epochs. The story here is partly of this
emergence and partly it is myself telling my own life-story, as Nietzsche writes in his
life story, in his famous autobiographical pages of Ecce Homo.2 For I have gone on
writing for years, perhaps as much as two decades now, in relative obscurity doing
what I think is right. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Joseph Kling, "Narratives of
Possibility: Social Movements, Collective Stories and Dilemmas of Practice," 1995,
Internet; and F. Nietzsche in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood,
Adriana Cavarero, Routledge, NY, 2000, p.85.32
_____________________________________________________________________
I am intentionally not going to begin at the beginning. Most autobiographies that I
have examined thus far seem to be sequential exercises beginning with the author's
first memories and proceeding logically until the last syllable of their recorded time,
their allotment on earth,33 at least up to the time of the writing of their said
30
Entry-by-troops is seen as a prelude to mass conversion.(Citadel of Faith, p.117).
My pioneering life began with the first evidences of entry-by-troops in the early 1960s
in Canada. Wordsworth's The Prelude has three editions: 1798/9, 1805 and 1850.
This autobiography, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, has now gone through four
editions.
31
One model of Greek history has the Formative Age at 1100-500 BC and the
Homeric period at 750-600 BC. There are several time models and labels for this
period used by specialists in Greek history.
32
idem
33
Of course there are also autobiographies that do not begin at the beginning and
some that tell little about their authors at all. Kafka's and Dostoevski's are examples of
the latter.
autobiography. This is not my intention here. Anyway, when does one really begin a
journey, a friendship, a love affair? Beginnings are fascinating, misunderstood,
enigmatic. I’ve written many poems about various beginnings and the more I write
the more elusive they become. But there comes a moment, a point, when we realize
that we are already well on the way; we know the journey has definitely started.34
And as we travel along we mark historical moments which we weave into our
narrative. They often change, our view of them that is, as we grow older: these rites de
passage, these coming of age moments, these transition periods, these passages, these
crises, calamities and victories. Unlike the Roman historians of the republican days
who wrote their histories annalistically, that is year by year in sequence, this work is
much more varied and informal with a slight tendency to write by plans and epochs.
It is important, too, that life, my life, not be seen as simply journey and not life. The
two are not mutually exclusive.
I strive for my account to possess narrative lines that move forward, like lines in
music, lines that keep their listeners waiting for and wanting resolutions. At the same
time I think it's vital for many lines to develop at once, as in a fugue, so that when one
narrative line resolves itself, another is already developing.35 I frankly do not know
how I am going to approach this story, though I have no trouble finding historical
moments and various lines of development. There is always in the background to my
life ever-present plans, new beginnings, fresh initiatives, systematic advances, "leaps
and thrusts,"36 triumphs and losses, vistas of new horizons and dark clouds. Thinking
seriously about autobiography or, indeed, any intellectual discipline, requires us to
acknowledge our ignorance of the subject. This is a prerequisite. Our past, any past,
is another country, a place that exists in our imaginations and in those uncertain and
often unreliable echoes of our lives that we trace in words, in places and in things.
There is, then, an inscrutability which paradoxically lies at the heart of this work. I
return again and again, taking the reader with me, to absences, spaces in my
knowledge, my memory, my construction. I recognize that the act of making this my
life, into a whole, from the pieces I have left from my past is necessarily a creative
one, an act of imagination, what one writer calls "the dialectic between discovery and
invention." In the process I transform my history and the history of my times, from
something static into something lived. I am not imprisoned in some imagined
objectivity; rather, I reenter the moment, the hour, the days and the years and imagine
it as something experienced from multiple perspectives, simultaneously
acknowledging its erasures and silences.37 This book compels me to think again about
my life and readers to think about theirs. I explore my views about contemporary life
and values and in the process of exploration I define my thinking.
I don’t see my life or make any claim to my life being necessarily representative of
that of an ideal Baha’i or a Baha’i pioneer. This is not an exemplum. Claims to
34
Gillian Boddy in Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer, Penguin,
Ringwood, Victoria, 1988, p.161.
35
Naslund expresses her writing in these terms in: Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab’s Wife
or The Star Gazer, William Morrow, 1999.
36
Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 1992, p.1. An excellent overview of the
sequence, the pattern, of plans, phases, epochs, etc.
37
I have drawn here on James Bradley, "Dancing With Strangers: A Review of Inga
Clendinnin's Book," in smh:f2network, October 11, 2003.
representativeness, it seems to me, are at best partial. I find there is something
basically unstable or slippery about experience or, to put it in even stronger terms, in
the words of Baha’u’llah, there is something about experience that bears only “the
mere semblance of reality.” There is something about it that is elusive, even vain and
empty, like “a vapour in the desert.” There are so many exegetical and interpretive
problems that accompany efforts to tie down the meaning of a life, of an experience,
of a relationship. There is something divided, duplicitous, something that has
happened but has yet to be defined and described or, as is usually the case, never
described, at least not in writing, depending of course on the experience of the person
and their literary skills. There are innumerable and indispensable points of reference
in a life and yet so many of them take on the feeling of a mirage, as if they are not
really there, like a dream, particularly as the years lengthen into later adulthood and
old age. Meaning is not something one can wrap up and walk away with. Often the
mind's sensitivity to meaning is actually impaired by fixed notions or perspectives. It
seems that often we must see things for ourselves, again and again, sometimes in
community with its endless heterogeneity, sometimes in our solitude. For community
is not always pastoral dream of innocence and togetherness and solitude is not always
enriching. Here, as in music, there is an alternation between fast and slow and joyful
and sorrowful; there's an ebb and flow to the emotional structure.
At the same time, I agree with what is called the essentialist view of group identity in
community; namely, that there is a common identity for the members of a social
group. This view emphasizes commonness of identity and the possession of a certain
stability that is more or less unchanging since it is based on the experiences the
members share. But I can only go so far in this essentialist tradition. I am also
inclined to see group identities as fabricated, constructed, misleading, ignoring
internal differences and tending not to recognize the unreliability of experience. 38 Of
course individuals can fabricate much of their own history. Charlie Chaplin and John
Wayne, for example, were notorious fabricators of their story.39 And to chose one
final example, the man who was Mark Twain, Samuel Leghorne Clemens, lived
behind a "layering of invented selves," and performing, of course, was simply another
way of inventing or disguising himself. Or so Andrew Hoffman describes Twain.40
I take the view too that, however much I work out my life in solitude, my experience
is what some sociologists call ‘socially constructed. This social and emotional self is
mediated by the environment in which it lives and works. In this context the self is
not exalted to the centre of the universe. The nature of one's inner thoughts and
38
For a helpful contrast between the postmodernist and the essentialist views of
group identity see: Satya Mohanty, "The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On
Beloved and the Postcolonial Condition," Cultural Logic, Volume 3, Number 2,
Spring, 2000.
39
Edward Morris, "A Review of Charlie Chaplin and His Times," Kenneth S. Lynn,
Simon & Schuster in Book Page, 1997. Lynn interprets Chaplin's life in terms of
reactions to his mother. For me, the psychological field of interpretation is much
wider. See also Edward Morris, "A Review of John Wayne's America: The Politics of
Celebrity," Garry Wills, Simon and Schuster, 2004, Book Page, 1997.
40
Roger Miller, "A Review of Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel
Leghorne Clemens," Andrew Hoffman, 2004, Book Page, 1997.
feelings are not purely personal or individual.41 The community in which we interact,
the system of thoughts that serve as our beliefs, is a crucial determinant of who we
are. Our fundamental forms of experience are created by our own mental activity.
This mental activity usually begins in the outside world and is imposed, at least to
some extent, on the mind.
Canadians, for example, approach the survival of ordeals, not as the theoretical
American would by finding and revealing a reservoir of inner strength and wisdom in
some heroic fashion, but by banding together, by becoming a “company”--literally, as
Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman suggests by using the rituals of everyday life as
a mediating device, to create community. Literary critic Northrop Frye suggests that
Canadians possess a garrison mentality with an image of a fort in the wilderness as a
symbol of their psychic centre or domain. Margaret Atwood, Canada's major writer
as the millennium turned, sees the Canadian character as one with a gloomy-throughcatastrophic strain. This interpretation of the character is reflected in Canada's
literature and especially in the writing of Margaret Atwood.
Atwood also sees the Canadian character as one that is incurably paranoid. There are
various strategies suggested by artists, writers and critics to cope with this paranoia.
Art, religion, relationships, a strong sense of fate or destiny, an avoidance of the
heroic and a taking refuge in the ordinary, in a reticence, in trepidation, in the soft
escape and boxing experience into frames, into limits. These are some of the coping
mechanisms seen by these analysts. If one understands Canadian history, one can
understand the sense of the overwhelming, the impenetrable, the claustrophobic, the
sense of a world which denies entry to the human. It is these attitudes to self and life
that are evinced by Canadians and Australian artists towards their existential
condition. But perhaps the central attitude is a radical, deep-seated ambivalence.
Both Canadians and Australians are ambivalent about the heroic, the posture taken by
the American. I mention the Canadian and the Australian because it is in these two
countries where I have spent all my life. I have realized, though, that the range of
effects I could achieve writing as if I was an Australian or a Canadian were too
narrow. It would be like playing one instrument, say, the drums or a cello. So I turned
to writing in as broad a perspective as I could. I may have bit off more than I can
chew. But even if I have, I find that there's a certain synchronicity in writing
autobiography and also living my day to day life which makes the big-chew relevant
to the daily nibbles that constitute the routine, the trivial, the predictable and the
wonder that fills the interstices of life.
Pioneers in Canada for several hundred years were swallowed up by the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, the great Canadian wilderness, the frozen Arctic tracts and the USA. In
Australia there was a similar swallowing up process by means of: the hot desert
centre, the vast interior spaces, the surrounding oceans and seas. The most
significant other in both these countries, countries where my life has been, in a certain
sense, swallowed up, is the landscape. Visual representations not language seems to
be the most common window into the consciousness of these two national groups. All
of this is, of course, pure speculation. There are so many parallels I can make in
41
There are too many feminists and sociologists to mention here in a field of
sociological or feminist theory that could be titled “the social construction of reality.”
relation to both countries. The whites in both countries tend to congregate in a very
few, relatively sizable centres. Boundaries and frontiers in the USA serve as
limitations to be transcended or denied. In Canada and Australia they are seen as
dangerous places to be negotiated.42 The relationship between these general pscyhogeographical characteristics and my pioneering life will be elaborated on, unfolded, in
the nearly 800 pages which follow. What will also unfold, at least it is my hope, is
what American novelist Normal Mailer said is the purpose of art, an intensification,
even, if necessary an exacerbation of "the moral consciousness of people."43
I intend to take a line, an approach, from the Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, who
said, in an interview with Gary Kamiya, that when he writes he has no sense of what
is going to happen next. Plot, story and theme unfold. Ondaatje says that writing is a
discovery of a story when he writes a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and
discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing. This is the
way it is for me even when I have some broad outlines, outlines that are my life. For
Ondaatje writing novels doubles his perception, he says, because he is so often writing
from the point of view of someone else. To write about oneself, he says, would be
very limiting. To each his own, I suppose. If the unexamined life was not worth
living, if teaching our own self was not so significant, if ultimately all the battles in
life were not within, if it were not important to understand our imperfections and be
patient with our own dear selves, if the source of most of our troubles are to be found
in feelings of egotism and selfishness, if the God within was not “mighty, powerful
and self-subsistent,” then this autobiographical pursuit may be in vain.
I also want to do what that popular English writer Kingsley Amis said he wanted to do
when he wrote: give shape to the randomness of life, to make sense of things, to
create and resolve some of life's enigmas, to give meaning to the endless repetition in
life, to the things we experience again and again, a thousand and a thousand thousand
times or in merely unusual combinations of what is around us. Personal habit is an
expression of this repetition, laws of nature predict it, genes direct it, the edicts of
organization and state encourage it and universals, as William Gass puts it so nicely,
"sum it up."44 The exercise is somewhat like the work of Michelangelo with marble.
Always there is an unfinished struggle to emerge 'whole' from life's block of matter.45
This autobiography is based, then, on what is often called the narrative construction of
reality. There is in life, in adulthood, a rich domain for development and learning, a
domain which recognizes the utility of narrative. This work, this story of a life, is an
experiment with autobiographical form. It seems to me that in this work I forge a
unique non-fiction work which is many things at once: memoir, prose poetry, perhaps
even song or rhapsody. I don't know, but I hope it both sings and informs. One of my
aims in writing this extended piece of narrative and analysis is to find the most
42
Gaile McGregor, "A Case Study in the Construction of Place: Boundary
Management as Theme and Strategy in Canadian Art and Life," 2003.
www3.sympatico.ca/terracon/gaile_mcgregor/index.html
43
Norman Mailer in "A Review of 'The Time of Our Time', Roger Bishop, Book
Page, 1998.
44
William H. Gass, The World Within the Word: Essays by William H. Gass,
A.A. Knopf, NY, 1976, p.112.
45
Malachi Martin quoted in Saul Bellow, op.cit.
effective way to give this narrative theoretical and practical interest for readers.
Autobiographies are not, it seems to me, inherently problematic, but they become so
when tension results, as Graham Hassall notes, "from differences between a writer's
intentions and readers' expectations."46 Over a twenty year period now I have written
four editions of this work. Each edition explores the field of human development and
the uses of narrative. I would like this work to be as private, intimate and casual as my
poetry, not structured, not having an agenda. That's why I have not planned this work.
I sew readers into the seam between two lives: on two continents, in two marriages, in
two cosmological worlds, in two stages of development. They are lives which are
tangled and in tension rather than in some form of tightrope-walking or some razorthin-sharp dichotomy. Some of my life is untidy; some of my life results in dead ends;
some follows paths to unimaginable or imaginable new worlds. Some of what I write
captures, conveys, a clearly discernible script, some of which may have been
predestined, the script of fate. The narrative is, inevitably, incomplete, a half-life.
There is much that has yet to be written, like a half-finished portrait. It holds a
promise and a potential which is always a mystery, at best only partly known.
Hopefully this exercise will prompt readers to study autobiography and see how it
contributes toward the realization of a multi-disciplinary form of learning. It may be,
though, that readers will see, as Adriana Cavarero writes, that "to tell one's story is to
distance oneself from oneself, to make of oneself someone other."47 Some readers
may also find the process of writing autobiography pretentious or a somewhat
artificial, a little unreal, externalization of inner and intimate, essentially private,
reflection. They may see biography as the appropriate, natural, act but not
autobiography.48 Seeing that denial, avoidance and selectivity are inevitable in
autobiography, readers often approach autobiography with a skeptical eye and mind.
Anticipating hagiography, the disembodiment of the authentic person, readers feel
deceit at every turn or only the partial uncovering of truth. I write as I read, as deeply
as I am capable, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to share in that one
nature that it human, universal and, like me, writes and reads.
While I must confess to harbouring elevated notions that I am conveying, at least for
the most part, the truth of my life, it seems to me that I am bringing me into the world,
calling it to my attention, as much as I am bringing the world to me. Impressed by the
depth and complexity of the writing of some authors and the superficiality of others, I
increasingly took pleasure in exploring the richness of life and the mysteries of human
character. Perhaps I had an overactive hypothalmus or limbic system. I have
absolutely no idea. Perhaps it was pure desire, an intensity that led to this work. In
the end, the activity is its own reward.
An autobiography is not the story of a life. More accurately, it is the recreation, the
discovery, of a life, in this case the life of a pioneer, a pioneer who brought a better
order of society, an inner life, something private, something that moved him
46
Graham Hassall, "Self and Society: Biography and Autobiography in Baha'i
Literature," Baha'i Library Online, 2004, p.4.
47
Adriana Cavarero, op.cit., p.84.
48
ibid., p.92.
confidently “in the direction of his dreams.”49 It was a type of pioneer that had a
noble lineage in both Baha’i society and in the secular society he was a part of. What
this pioneer does, here, is arrange and rearrange things from this blooming and
buzzing confusion called life to give point and meaning, direction, flow, ambience,
simplicity and a certain coherence to complexity.
He doesn't have to create these things ex nihilo and he doesn't create for the pure
pleasure he gets in creating, in telling the story, although the pleasure he gets in
writing takes him, with the poet Paul Valery, 50 a long way. Reading this
autobiographical work is somewhat like the experience many people have when
listening to a jazz performance. Whatever the musicians are playing, you hear the
melody and then it goes away or seems to. The musicians play the overall work
against the background of the melody or around the melody or they take the melody
off into another zone.51 Then the melody comes back; listeners recognize it yet again
amidst a world of other sounds. This, it seems to me, is one way to see this long--and
for me at least--stimulating work. A central narrative thrust is reflected and recreated
with ideas and emotional content that take readers away again and again. Like the
aural idiosyncrasies of jazz and its spaces and places, my narrative has its own
idiosyncratic dimension and I provide the spaces and places for readers to participate.
There is a type of intimacy created, but not everyone appreciates that intimacy; not
everyone likes jazz and not everyone will like my work.
Most jazz music is created in bands: trios, quartets, quintets, etc. This narrative work
establishes some of this sense of a band or group by the frequent references there are
in the text. As I write these words I see that there are about two references per page,
sixteen hundred in an 800 page text. The vehicle for this work is thus enhanced,
enriched, by the solo work of others, rhythm sections that draw on several writers,
thinkers and philosophers, etc. as accompaniment. They add complexity, tension,
different pulses, staggered patterns, superimpositions, repetitions on a theme, similar
statements with an ever changing expression.
Pleasure, I find, tends to help me take the ride of life and the ride of writing. But, of
course, there is more, for pleasure itself is never enough, never the whole story. It
occupies only part of life's experience. "Experiences," writes that articulate
psychohistorian Peter Gay, "testify to the uninterrupted traffic between what the world
imposes and the mind demands, receives and reshapes." We construct our experience,
says Gay, and that construction is "an uneasy collaboration between misperceptions
generated by anxiety and corrections provided by reasoning and experimentation."
There is more to our ideas and actions than meets the eye. Our life, our experience, is
at one level simply what it seems to be. It is rooted in external reality. And it is also,
paradoxically, not what it seems to be. Much of our life is silent; it seems to take place
underground or in some inner ground. "We live in the mind," as the poet Wallace
49
Lewis Mumford, op.cit., p.256.
William Gass reports Valery as taking pleasure from his work in writing more than
in the product.
50
51
Nicholas F. Pici, "Trading Meanings: The Breath of Music in Toni Morrison's
Jazz,"Connotations, 1997/8, pp.372-398.
Stevens put the human experience.52 This autobiography tries to deal with both the
obvious and the paradoxical. In some ways, the word 'narrative' could be replaced or
added to other words like: view, claim, position, interpretation, world-view or even
life. To give the word 'narrative' some kind of pristine prominence at the centre of our
authenticity, is too strong an autobiographical direction to suit my tastes. To do so
may be impoverishing, pernicious, even damaging psychotherapeutically. Even if, or
as, I do centre this autobiography on narrative I am conscious of changes I make to
my past, alterations, smoothings, enhancements, shiftings from the raw propositional
facts and contexts, all processes that may be neurophysiological inevitabilities. Some
analysts of autobiography would advise writers "that the less you do the better."53
Most pioneers, in both the secular world and the Baha’i community, have exhausted
themselves in external activity or filled their lives with events, comings and goings,
that seemed to leave, so often, just about always, no record for future generations.
This is not necessarily a bad thing; for we can not all be good gardeners, cooks, car
mechanics or, in this case, writers. Over the years I have known many talented
pioneers. But as a writer, my task is different. I want to place my readers on a stage,
swarming with detail, dense with meaning; I want to give readers some of that
constant sense of things and ideas that exist outside themselves and outside myself in
my time, in these epochs, as Walt Whitman did when the Baha’i revelation was first
bursting on the world a century and a half ago.54 But these words are not the reality of
my experience. The text is not the true and only protagonist of this my finite
existence. In the end, at the end of this story, silence speaks; narration is suspended.
My role as poet, historian and storyteller comes to an end. In the book of history, a
book of single and unique stories interwoven on the landscape of earth, I have made
myself into a narrator of a story. I am a protagonist, a pioneer, who has narrated his
own story and, in the process, rescued himself from oblivion. I have configured my
story in community. I do not swallow or erase the scene I tell of, rather, I describe it,
paint it, represent it. I make no claims to being an omniscient narrator who is also
inside the minds of my characters, although I am certainly in the mind of one. I try to
see the world as I see some of the main players in this story and, as I do, I reproduce
their separate streams of consciousness.
My story does not take place on an imagerary landscape like Thomas Hardy's Wessex,
but it does reflect a fifty year experience as Hardy's did in a different time and with a
different pessimism and sense of tragedy than Hardy's. It is an experience moderated
by a phenomenon that has captured my imagination for nearly fifty years and
generated the spiritual nerves and sinews to work as I have all my life for the
unification of the peoples of the world.55 Hardy and I share, too, a sense of human
destiny or fate which can not be deflected once a human being has taken the step
which decides it. To put it another way, if you are possessed by an idea, you find it
52
Wallace Stevens in "They Have the Numbers; We the Heights," Harold Bloom,
Boston Review, 1993-1998.
53
Galen Strawson, "Tales of the Unexpected," Guardian Unlimited Books, January
10, 2004.
54
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855. He worked on this book until he died in
1892.
55
I have drawn here on a publication by the Baha'i International Community Office
of Public Information in New York entitled Baha'u'llah, 1991, p.1.
expressed everywhere. Those were the words of Thomas Mann. You could even
smell the idea he said.56
Autobiographers bring specific words to their narratives, words with great explanatory
power and emancipatory potential due to the traditions they live and write within.
"The tradition of all the dead generations," wrote Marx, "weighs like a nightmare on
the brain of the living."57 I'm not sure how accurate this view is but, should this be the
case, then the emancipatory potential I speak of in relation to this autobiography may
derive from this reality. The Christian, the Moslem, the Marxist, the Baha’i, the
secular humanist, among a great many other traditions, reify special words that take
on very important meaning for them. Christ, Muhammed, class, freedom, justice,
Baha’u’llah, oneness: these are words which can not be divorced from the narrative
voice of their respective autobiographers. And so it is that I have my special words,
my special vocabulary which will unfold in the pages ahead.
Poets who take their readers on spiritual journeys each have their own special
languages. Unlike the great medieval poet Dante Alighieri I do not paint the hell I
have experienced in colourful and lively imagery but, like him, I do have my
metaphorical dark wood with its sinful aspects. Dante has his virtuous non-Christians
placed in Limbo. I have my virtuous non-Baha’is whom I am not confident of placing
in any particular theological abode. Perhaps I should be confined to Dante’s second
circle where “the lustful were punished by having their spirits blown about by an
unceasing wind.” For I too have had my lust’s to battle with, lusts that one can find
expressed in Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh in the first and second millennium
BC.58 I always thought Dante was a little hard on flatterers who were “mired in a
stew of human excrement.”59 Dante is so often ridiculed now and so might this work
of mine be in the years ahead even if my vocabulary is so very different than Dante’s.
I have written several editions of this work in the midst of a "series of soul-stirring
events" that celebrated the construction and completion of the Terraces on Mount
Carmel and in the first two decades of the "auspicious beginning" of the occupation
by the International Teaching Centre of its "permanent seat on the Mountain of the
Lord." I see my work, too, as a spin-off, part of that generation of spiritual nerves and
sinews that is the result of "the revolutionary vision, the creative drive and systematic
effort" that has come to characterize more and more the work of all the senior
institutions of the Cause." This lengthy narrative is also my own humble attempt to
"comprehend the magnitude of what has been so amazingly accomplished" in my
lifetime and in this century just past. What I write is part of "a change of time," "a
new state of mind," a "coherence of understanding," a "divinely driven enterprise."60
The story and the meaning I give it are crucial to my life for, without them--story and
56
Thomas Mann at: www.littlebluelight.com
Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
58
"Pre-Classical Epic," HyperEpos: Epic on the Internet, February 28, 2004.
59
“Short Summary of Classic Notes,” Gradesaver, On-line Internet Site, January 20,
2004.
60
The references here are to Universal House of Justice Letters: 16 January 2001, 14
January 2001, Ridvan 2001. It is not my intention to review the major strands of the
many letters of this elected body of the Baha'i community; rather I intend a periodic
reference to what is now a mass of messages, letters and documents of various kinds.
57
meaning--the days of my life would remain, would be, an intolerable sequence of
events that make no sense. They would be, at best, a dabbling into things, a sort of
entertainment, a search for fun in the midst of love and work with their inevitable
pleasures and frustrations. They would express a kind of absurdity which many can
and do live with; or like the writer Herman Hess the dominant taste of life would be of
"nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams" which he said is the content of "the
lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves."61 I would find this a sad and
inadequate philosophy, one I could scarcely bear and one I would find difficult to
journey through to the end.62 Telling a story of my life is like a natural echo, an
automatic repetition, a rhetorical sequence in the effort to define and link my identity
to who I am and to unfold the meaning of it all. Even with an overarching meaning
that is a source of joy, of enchantment, there is still sadness, chaos and absurdity.
Self-interrogation joins the self and produces the story of its life by capturing what is
basic about the whole thing, what is indispensable and what is marginal and even
superficial. The story of Jon Krakauer's climb to the summit of Mt. Everest illustrates
some of the irrationality, the absurdity, the puritanical aspects of anything that is the
passion of a life. He writes about his "belief in the nobility of suffering and work.....It
defies logic."63 I find this particular theme of profound significance which I may
return to at another time. Krakauer also writes, "I can't think of a single good thing
that came out of this climb." Even in my lowest moments, gazing retrospectively at
my life, I don't feel I can make this tragic claim for the climb that is my life.
In the process of writing this autobiography I have come to see myself somewhat like
a jazz musician, as I have intimated above. Toni Morrison, a modern novelist, said
she saw herself like a jazz musician, as “someone who practices and practices and
practices in order to be able to invent and make her art look effortless and graceful.”64
Another musical analogy to this autobiographical process which I like is the music
critic who has an autobiographical orientation to his critical writing about music.
Music, like my life, is something I play again and again in my head on my mental CD
or LP in decades gone by. Music is particularly conducive to inspiring passion. The
reason for this is simple. Music lends itself to repetitive consumption. It is unlikely
that most people will read the same book, or watch the same episode of a TV show, or
see the same film more than five times. But one's life especially different sections of
it, is played virtually continuously, repetitively, just like music, only more so. Each
time one plays one's life, like music, one finds similar points of attraction and
differences. I like this analogy of music to life; it is capable of endless permutations
and combinations of comparison and contrast. Only readers will tell of whatever
61
Hesse, Herman. Siddartha, Demian, and other Writings, editor: Egon Schwarz,
Continuum, NY, 1992, p.105.
62
Many modern thinkers, especially of the existentialist school, see the world as
essentially absurd, a shipwreck, impossible to comprehend, a confrontation with
nothingness and with ultimate meaning at best elusive.
63
Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster,
Villard Books, 1997.
64
Larry Schwartz, “Toni Morrison and William Faulkner: The Necessity of a Great
American Novelist,” Cultural Logic, 2002.
effortlessness and grace I have achieved in producing my music, whether it charms
and pleases them.65
Before leaving this musical analogy, though, I would like to draw on the work of
culture theorist Judith Butler who places a great emphasis on the role that repetition
plays in the stabilizing of identity. The basic premise, Butler states amidst her
complex language, is that identities are prone to disintegrate unless they are reinforced
regularly. The autobiographical experience, like music, in its repetitive nature has this
reinforcing nature, reinforcing our sense of self through language, through sound.
Repetition is at the very centre of identity formation, at the centre of an endless
construction project. Just as songs "call" listeners to a particular identity, to
explorations of their identity, this autobiography "calls" me--or perhaps I call it! And
the therapeutic dimension of autobiography arises when readers feel the same or even
a different "call."
I do not possess that encyclopedic interest that some seem to have in absolutely
everything. This encyclopedic interest was described by Mark Van Doren in 1937
when the first Baha’i teaching Plan was being launched in North America.66 Given the
pervasiveness, the multiplicity, the vast complexity, the multitude of academic and
non-academic disciplines, the great ocean of humanity and its immensity, it is only
too obvious that I must confine my wandering mind, and I do, in this autobiography.
My interests are wide but don't extend to everything in the encyclopedia. I find I must
focus my thinking on single points if I want my thought to “become an effective
force,” as ‘Abdu’l-Baha emphasized.67 I mention this theme, this concept, several
times throughout this work. I mention, too, the private disorder and the public
bewilderment of our times, a subject which the generations I have lived and worked
with tire of as this bewilderment knocks them around and around, bit by bit over the
decades of their lives. I approach these concerns in a variety of ways and try not to
dwell on them. For this narrative is not a piece of sociology, politics or economics.
There is more of the personal, the literary, the humanly human, here. Readers, though,
especially those with a peculiarly forensic mind, may still find this work far too
rambling, with an under-belly that is just too complex and detailed for their liking, too
much work and not enough payoff, not enough of the right kind of focused
stimulation, the kind they get on TV for example, to suit their tastes. The forensic
mind is useful in the who-dun-it detective stories and it is useful here, but it must
persist in this long work if it is to come up with useful clues for its existential angst, if
it is to derive the pleasure I know is there, the pleasure I find.
Narrative or story construction is an increasingly influential and integrating paradigm
in psychology and the social sciences generally. The conceptual foundations of a
narrative perspective can be traced thematically and contrasted with more traditional
models of human psychological functioning. Autobiographical memory, selfnarrative and identity development as well as narrative interpretations of
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are all part of a relatively new field. Contributions
from the cultural and social constructionist traditions to narrative psychology are
65
Charlie Bertsche, "Autobiography in Music Criticism," Bad Subjects: Political
Education in Everyday Life, June 1999.
66
Mark Van Doren, “On Donald Colross Peattie,” in David Mazel, Op.cit., p.276.
67
‘Abdu’l-Baha, Selections, Haifa, 1978, p.111.
relevant to my writing and the full weight of their implications are dealt with in this
narrative construction of the person that I am.68
Recent advances in narrative research methodologies, particularly those qualitative
approaches which focus upon interview and other autobiographical sources of data
can be helpful. This autobiography does not deal with all of these aspects of narrative
or autobiographical psychology. It draws to some extent on the academic, hopefully
not too much, not too esoterically. I am only too conscious of the jargon of academic
discourse and of how unfamiliar terminology switches readers off swifter than the
twinkling of an eye. For I was a teacher for thirty years and, by the time I retired in
1999, I could just about feel the switch-off process in its first few seconds of mental
down-turning with a class of students. The language of the last two paragraphs, I am
only too aware, is pretty 'heavy.' I shall endeavour to lighten up and keep the style
and tone much less freighted with this specialized language from the social sciences.
Much that is part and parcel of academic discourse is seen by the great mass of
humanity as unreality, just a lot of words. And I am sure that no matter how I write
this book many readers will find what I write as unreal, over their head, too many
words, too long, too heavy. To each his own. As T.S. Eliot once wrote, the world can
not bear either too much reality or too little. But the pursuit of truth need not have the
additional burden of the use of complex language. I avoid it as much as I can. I am
aware, too, that the world finds much academic language quite incomprehensibly. It
has become weary of a certain stock-in-trade of ideas, myths, scenarios and
problem/issue topics that have been discussed ad nauseam in academic and nonacademic literature.
I assume that readers are more versatile, more limber, more educated and want
something fresh, some fresh language, something simple but meaningful. But that is
difficult to deliver. I think it can only be delivered to a point. For much of life in the
end, no matter how much we want to simplify, is complex. "Whom the gods would
destroy, they first make simple-simpler and simpler," as Charles Fair once wrote.69
The world abounds in Terrible Simplifiers.
So much of our understanding of periods of history is limited "by the body of texts
which accidently survive."70 In the half century that this autobiography is concerned
with, 1953/4-2003/4, these limitations have been largely lifted and humanity is now
drowning in texts that are representative of the times. Throughout history the voice of
only a select group, usually white adult males, can be found. Social and editorial
conventions within which most public speaking and published writing have taken
place tended to mute everyone but this adult male. These conventions have been
crumbling during these epochs, though, and this autobiography is, partly, a testimony
to this crumbling process.
68
The social, the cultural, construction, of human beings is increasingly emphasized
in the literature of the social and behavioural sciences.
69
Charles Fair, the New Nonsense: The End of the Rational Consensus, Simon
and Schuster, NY,1974, p.259.
70
A. M. Keith, "Review of John Winkler's Constraints of Desire: the Anthropology
of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece," in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, January 18,
2002.
Given the plethora of books, journals, magazines and programs in the electronic
media, everyone finds and enjoys what they prefer. Although I do not see myself as
an elitist, I am inclined to think that what I write here will probably appeal to no more
than ten per cent of the population and, it is my considered view, that during my
lifetime, it will be read by a coterie so small as to be statistically irrelevant. This
would have been true a hundred years ago, in 1903 as well. This is not a book for
mass consumption. I wish it were. But I know of few people who read the Bible,
Shakespeare or any of the great poets for that matter. So if few people read me, I
know I am in good company. Everything written these days is for a coterie except the
literary products of celebrities.
It seems to me that, as W.H. Auden once wrote, the pleasure of readers and any
ensuing literary success gives but small satisfaction, a momentary pleasure or a series
of moments, to an author and his vanity or his idealism. What is worth winning,
Auden went on, was to be of use to future generations in the inner sanctum of their
thoughts, to be a hallowed mentor.71 Although the society I describe here and my role
in it will, in time, be gone forever, something may indeed be left from accounts like
the one I provide. I like the emphasis Auden puts on the issues but, of course, it is
unlikely that I will ever know if I have been successful in the sense he describes,
certainly while I am alive. And not having tasted literary success significantly,
publicly, in this life thusfar, I do not know what the level of satisfaction is that might
accrue to my ego, my vanity and my idealism should public success come my way.
I like to think, indeed I believe, that it is possible to reach the whirling mind of the
modern reader, to cut through the noise and reach that quiet zone. The fact that the
great majority of humankind will never read this book does not concern me. If I can
find a few in that quiet zone that will be a bonus. For my real reward has been the
pleasure I have found in writing this book in the first place. I don't find any pleasure
in gardening, in cooking, in fishing, indeed, in a long list of things. Each person must
find their own pleasures in life. Sometimes pleasures can be shared and sometimes
they can't. We all contribute, it must also be added, each in their own small way, to
the big picture that is history. This book is part of my contribution.72
For many the threat of death multiplies stories of life; for others it is the simple
opportunity to tell an interesting story and tell it well, with or without a moral. For
still others it is love for some other: friend, loved one, community. This is a difficult
question for me to answer: why do I write this story? There are probably many
answers I could give but the one that comes most readily to mind is: to play my part in
contributing to an ever-advancing civilization. This sounds somewhat pretentious but,
however over-the-top it sounds, it honestly expresses the big-picture, the motivational
matrix of my narrative, my metanarrative. I've liked this somewhat elusive phrase
since I first came upon it in the late 1950s or early 1960s. I sense in what I write a
destiny that proceeds through the events and occurrences of my days. It is a unique
destiny; it is partly unmasterable; it is unrepeatable; it is the course my life traces.
Some have called this destiny, their daimon. There is clearly in all our lives something
we cannot refuse. Perhaps it is the price we pay for our life.
71
72
W.H. Auden in W.H. Auden: Forewords and Afterwords, 1979, p. 366.
Phillip Webb, "What are You Studying History?" Access: History, Vol.3.1.
I can interpret my life and try to explain it; I can search out its unity in the events of
my life or the hidden substance, the soul, that dwells with this body in some
mysterious, indefineable way. I can look inside it and excavate its appearances,
discover its interiority and, in the process, hopefully bring my readers closer so that
they see me as more like them, more of a friend. But no matter how I examine it in all
its complexity and simplicity, I only partly control it, plan it, decide it and make it.
There is much that is simply uncontrollable, that has no author, that is solely in the
hands of God or what might be called those mysterious dispensations of Providence.
As Producer and Director Who defines the mise-en-scene, Who sets the stage and the
choreography, He provides the context in which many lives intersect and mine is but
one. My life does not result from a story; but this story results from my life.
Unscripted, flawed and plausible, this life can not be lived like a novel or a movie.
There is no "choiceless invulnerability"73 in our lives as there is in the edited and
celluloid safety of lives on film in what Roger White calls the tedium of their
impeccable heroes. But still there is, for the Baha'i, some plan, some form, some idea,
some centre, to focus the dazzling and frenetic blooming and buzzing confusion of
existence. There is a panorama, a megavision, which for the Baha'i adds an
incomparable power of intellection. It provides a bird’s-eye view which Baha'is can
assume in an instant, in a lifetime, for their own. It gives them the world to read and
not just to perceive. But, as Emerson once observed, even for the hero, for those
animated by a passion and a plan, life has its boredom, its tedium, its banalities.74
Even with all the plans and programs, there are barricades in the way of the Baha’i
who is also an autobiographer, barricades that prevent his understanding. His
passionate convictions and the historical experience that forms these convictions, are,
as Eric Hobsbawm puts it, part of these very barricades. 75 The road to understanding
is not always smooth and untroubled.
In my copy of God Passes By, the 1957 edition which I purchased in the first year of
my pioneering experience, 1962, I have written many quotations from Gibbon and
commentaries on Gibbon. I wrote the quotations on the blank pages at the beginning
and the end of the hard-cover volume I own. There is one quotation, I think it is from
J.W. Swain, which goes: "history is an endless succession of engagements with a past
in which the dramatis personae were never able to fathom, control and command
events."76 This could equally be said of autobiography. Roy Porter also writes that
"diligence and accuracy are the only merits of an historian of importance."77 While
these qualities are certainly of benefit to the autobiographer, the ability to write well
and in an interesting way is paramount or no one will ever read his work.
73
Roger White, "A Toast to the Hero," A Witness of Pebbles, George Ronald,
Oxford, 1981, p.106.
74
Ralph Waldo Emerson in Howard Mumford Jones, Atlantic Brief Lives: A
Biographical Companion to the Arts, ed. Louis Kronenberger, Boston: Little,
Brown, 1971.
75
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991,
London, Michael Joseph, 1995, p.5.
76
J.W. Swain, Edward Gibbon the Historian, 1966, p.70.
77
Roy Porter, Edward Gibbon: Making History, Weidenfeld and Nicholson,
London, 1988, p.12.
There are other quotations which I have written on the blank pages of this great book
by Shoghi Effendi, quotations which apply as much to this narrative as to Gibbon's
Decline and Fall. Gibbon's work, writes Keith Windshuttle, is a demonstration that
much of history is driven by the influence of unintended consequences, chance and a
human passion which "usually presides over human reason."78 My own work, while
finding no conflict with Gibbon's words, demonstrates in addition, I like to think, a
Baha'i philosophy of history "which has as its cornerstone a belief in progress
through providential control of the historical process."79 But neither is man "a thrall
to an impersonal historical process."80 He must deal with the forces of fate, perhaps
battle with his fate, as Nietzsche once put it, with his socialization and the free will
with which he has been endowed. Perhaps, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he will
come to have a great influence on his age.81 Perhaps, like Solzhenitsyn or, perhaps,
like Xavier Herbert, he could write for sixteen hours a day to tell his story.
He must battle, too, with a prophetic view of the modern age which can only be
"proved" in part and which can be so variously interpreted that agreement is difficult
and often impossible to forge among the children of men. The story of personal
development, like that of artistic change, is not one of progress, like the development
of tools, alphabets, or air conditioners; rather, this development embodies the unique
expressions of individual souls situated in their own ages, responding to and emerging
from the mesh of experiences and cultural habits unique to them.82 That unique
emotional expression, which consistutes the expressive genius of the individual,
speaking out from his own place in the world and in history, is what constitutes art-not a checklist of mimetic requirements--and is at the heart of the story of my personal
experience.
With David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, and with Edward Gibbon, I have
come to regard my life and, indeed, all of history, "as a drama of human passion." For
human passion is many things, some associated with sexual love and others with
strong emotion and belief. The former perpetuates the species, is a source of immense
pleasure and, for me, for most of us, many problematics; the latter is the motivational
matrix behind so much of action. Passions are timeless and the circumstances in
which they occur are never the same. Beliefs, on the other hand, especially a belief, a
commitment, to a new religion, are seen by most, most of those who were part of my
lie in some way, as a strange exoticism. And me, as an outsider.83 My task became to
win friends and influence people, to get on some inside, so to speak.
78
Keith Windshuttle, "Edward Gibbon and the Enlightenment," The New Criterion,
Vol.15, No.10, 1997.
79
Geoffrey Nash, Phoenix and the Ashes, George Ronald, Oxford, 1984, p.89.
80
Nash, op.cit. p.94.
81
D.M. Thomas, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, Alfred A. Knopf.
82
Susannah Rutherglen, "The Philosopher in the Storm: Cultural Historian E.H.
Gombrich's Troubled Achievement," The Yale Review of Books, 2003.
83
Udo Schaefer makes this point in the opening sentence of his Imperishable
Dominion, George Ronald, Oxford, 1983, p.1
There have been two ruling passions in my life: the Baha'i Faith and learning and the
cultural achievements of the mind. I find Abraham Maslow's theory of the hierarchy
of needs, which he elaborated during the Ten Year Crusade, goes a long way, at least
for me, toward integrating into a helpful perspective my various human needs and
passions, desires and wants, which we all have in varying degrees. I won't outline this
theory here because any reader can learn about Maslow's theory with a little effort.
The erotic, for example, which has been a strong need/passion in my life and requires
a separate story all its own to go into the detail this need warrants, fits nicely into
Maslow's first level of needs: what he calls physiological needs. I have a health
problem, relating to my the physiological needs of my neurological system. The
several manifestations of manic-depression relate to the failure to satisfy this need.
Maslow's theory is, I find, explanatory, and I leave it to readers to relate Maslow, his
theory and his ideas to their own lives: their needs and passions, wants and desires. I
could go into an elaborate explanation of my own experience drawing on Maslow.
But that is not my purpose here. There are, in addition, other theorists of personality,
of human development wo are helpful for autobiographers and I mention them from
time to time in the course of this text. With more than seven hundred pages left to
read, only readers who perist with this narrative will be exposed to the various
theorists I draw upon to give text and texture to this my life.
I build a narrative out of individual agency, the agency of my own actions, the
surprises, the events, "the shadows on the high road of an inevitable destiny,"84 and
my own sometimes peaceful and secure world, but like Edward Gibbon, "the sheer
accumulation and repetition of events"85 and the unprecedented tempest of my times,
in the end, leaves the reader, I am inclined to believe, with patterns and processes,
ideas and ideals, philosophy and analysis in a much bigger picture than an isolated, an
individual life. And I, along the way, experience an element of surprise. I don't look
for it or even anticipate it. It seems to come along like a bonus, the way flowers grow
in a garden and one enthuses over them with friends.86 But the book, this book, as
Proust argued, is "the product of a very different self" than the one I manifest in my
daily habits, in my social life, in my vices and virtues.87 The self that writes is a
mysterious entity that no amount of documentation can take the reader into. In the end
this autobiography must remain incomplete, not because it does not tell all the facts-which is impossible anyway-- but because it deals with a mystery, a human being.
Those things we call interviews, conversations recorded for the public and found in
the print and electronic media by the multitude, while not entirely superficial and
valuable in their own right for information and entertainment, for the quirks and
friendships laid out for us, do not deal with the innermost self which can only be
recovered or uncovered by putting aside the world and the social self that inhabits
that world. "The secretions of one's innermost self," says Naipaul quoting Proust,
"written in solitude and for oneself alone" are the result of trusting to intuition and a
84
George Townshend, "Introduction," God Passes by, Wilmette, 1957, p. iii.
J.A.S. Evans, "The Legacy of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall: Lecture,"
American School of Classical Studies, Athens, 1998/9
86
The great Indian writer and lifetime devotee to English prose, V.S. Naipaul,
talked about this element of surprise in his Novel Lecture in 2001.
87
Proust quoted in Naipaul's 2001 Nobel Lecture.
85
process of waiting.88 In time, with the advance of years, I will come to understand
what I have written, although even then not fully.
If the autobiographer is sensitive to the processes of minute causality, he will slowly
and inevitably come to see that behind each fact there is a "swarming mass of causes
on which he could turn the historical microscope."89 The fragmentary, ambiguous and
opaque material of our days makes it difficult to wield the pen with any kind of
authority over our lives. What started off with a sense of my authorial imperium, as
was the case at the start of writing this autobiography in the early 1980s, is often the
case with writers and was the case with Edward Gibbon. Such a feeling of literary
authority often results, though, over the long stretch of writing in an increasing
vulnerability.90 There is, too, some degree of frustration in trying to put words behind
the elusive complexities of life and the multitude of unfocused and divergent aspects
of one's days. Giving life a unity of form, a unity of literary expression, can beat the
best of them. One toils with a performance that struggles endlessly with ideal. I may
generate a powerful impression of sequence and it certainly does exist behind the
pages of this narrative. But readers may also find that there is just too much to be
contained by their intellect in a narrative that contains such frequently competing
claims of evidence and experience and such a variety of standpoints. My imagination
is always active to enlarge the narrow circle in which nature and circumstance confine
it. And enlarge it I do, perhaps by "the revelation of the inner mysteries of God,"91
mixed with that “obscuring dust”92 of acquired knowledge. It is often difficult to
know what is revelation and what is dust, although intuition’s unreliable guide often
gives us a feeling of certainty. And there is much, too, that eludes the net of language
no matter how active the imagination.
Millions of human beings in the years at the background of this autobiography came
to find in cinema insights into their personal life-stories by observing directors'
insights into themselves or their society. Perhaps this is partly because in the last
century the fusion of the arts, the sciences and technology has been so seamlessly
institutionalised by the cinema. Competing world views are fused and inscribed on
human consciousness by skilled film directors. Some film directors like Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, to choose one of many, offered film goers a cinematic persona
that reflected their own personality. Fassbinder’s films are autobiographical in the
sense that they attempt to confer shape and meaning on a chaotic life and a scandalous
society, on a catastrophic social and political environment. As Fassbinder said in an
interview his films "always place himself at the centre."93 This literary work
Pioneering Over Four Epochs, like Fassbinder's work in cinema, tells of my
experience. Other people, other Baha'is, inevitably have a different setting for their
88
idem
David Womersley, The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1988, p.184.
90
ibid., p.181.
91
Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, 1956(1939), p. 264.
92
idem
93
Rainer Fassbinder in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays,
Notes, editors, Michael Toteberg and Leo Lensing, The Johns Hopkins UP,
Baltimore, 1992, p.41. Fassbinder was a director of films in Germany after WW2.
89
lives but, ultimately, there is a sameness, a strong similarity. Like Fassbinder, I tell
my story very personally but I give it, as best I can, a universal context.
Film directors all have their signature; no matter how they like the work of other
directors, they try to tell their own story in their own way. The generation of
important American directors who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s:
Scorsese, Spielberg and Coppola, among others,94 just after I came of age in the midsixties, have told their story citing the influences on their work. So, too, have I told
mine in a work that has burgeoned to over 750 pages. The autobiographical
documentary film, in TV and on radio, with its themes of self and identity, like
autobiography in print, has been a fascination to western film-makers, to journalists,
producers and directors since those late sixties.95 Like Jim Lane's book, which shows
the significant role of autobiography in the history and culture of our time, at least in
the last three decades,96 I like to think that my book will play a useful role in
understanding how autobiography can assist in illuminating the collective experience
of a generation within the Baha'i community, the history and culture of that
community and the experience of one individual within it over the last four epochs.
This autobiography has my signature and no matter how much I borrow and blend,
copy and plagiarize,97 I draw the lives and experiences, the ideas and concepts of
others making them into my own unique recipe. In the details I can not and do not
imitate even if I use some of the same ingredients and even if I sometimes borrow
with appreciation. I adapt to fit my particular constellation, my interpretation, of
reality. No matter how much I draw on the views of others and I do extensively, in
the end, as Yale professor Harold Bloom argues, "there is no method except
yourself."98 I react differently, from time to time, from year to year, sometimes with
more spontaneity or more reserve, more adventurousness or more caution. I create
my own personal world, tell of my own emotional and intellectual cells and their
depths. I hope they resonate with readers; I hope they sensitize readers--at least a few.
For what is involved here, in addition to the articulation of some of the core
parameters of community, is that "introspective consciousness, free to contemplate
itself"99 or a seeing things with one's own eyes and hearing things with one's own
94
Robert C. Sickels, "A Politically Correct Ethan Edwards: Clint Eastwood's The
Outlaw Josey Wales, (Retrospectives)," Journal of Popular Film and Television,
Winter, 2003.
95
Jim Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America, Wisconson Studies
in Autobiography, 2004.
96
Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk:Genres of Crisis in Contemporary
Autobiography.
97
I've always appreciated the words of T.S. Eliot on plagiarism, namely, that "great
poets plagiarize" and call what they borrow their own out of a sense of gratitude.
Great poets Eliot said "make men see or hear more" and, finally, "the claim to be a
man of letters is a modest pretension." There is certainly in this work what I would
call "a modest plagiarism" See T.S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic, Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, NY, 1965, p.134. Perhaps, though, with nearly 1500 references my
plagiarizing is not so modest. I try to strike a fair and moderate 'middle ground.'
98
Harold Bloom in "Colossus Among Critics," Adam Begley, New York Times On
the Web, 25 September 1994.
99
idem
ears, that Baha'u'llah links with justice and which I refer to several times throughout
this text.
Just a final note from one of the interviews with Fassbinder. I include it because I
think film, philosophy and autobiography have, or at least can have, one thing in
common and that is the world.100 Their mutual interrelations are complex and, as
Andrew Murphie puts it, hectic and in need of mutual nurturing. He was asked if film
making was "a sort of love substitute." His response was that his first take "was more
fantastic that the most fantastic orgasm....a feeling indescribable."101 The finished
product, the film we see, is indeed a collage. Sometimes, if not frequently, the visual
immediacey of film prevents reflection. All the takes are the materials that have to be
reduced and assembled to form the coherent whole of the film. It is this that
eventually comes to be the final art-product ready to come to life in the perceptions of
viewers.102 The other finished product, this autobiography, also involves reduction
and an assembling of material to form a coherent whole, but there are no problems of
visual immediacey. There are no problems either of the collaborative nature of film
making. For the most part, autobiography is a solo event.103 Although, like film, the
credits could go on for many minutes--even hours in the case of autobiography. Of
course, who would stick around to read such a list of credits, a list, for the most part,
totally meaningless to most readers.
I would not put writing in quite the same context as making love. Orgasms are shortly
lived experiences; love relationships are complex in different ways to writing, even if
one forgets about orgasms and focuses on touching and hugging, gentleness and
kindness. Writing and love, it seems to me, have many similarities. Writing goes on
for years, for a lifetime like a permanent, long-term loving relationship in marriage.
Writing often has a short duration, is episodic, like most of the relationships we have
in life. The passion of writing obviously lasts far longer than any single erotic act or
collection of them, at least for those writers who keep at it over their lifetime. Both
writing and love-making chart the intersection of multiple and often contradictory
points of view, different concepts of community and interpersonal understandings and
levels of social integration. At one level it all seems so easy, so natural, so organic,
love-making and writing that is. At another level both processes are complex, a source
of both angst and pleasure and both can, in the end, come to nothing.
I should add, too, in this connection, that memory is filled with images of the nonself,
with all sorts of things from the physical, human and religious worlds and a multitude
of disciplines that attempt to assimilate this information and these images and these
memories enrich and frustrate, deepen and accompany both love and writing. To put
some of this another way: in The Ethics of Ambiguity Simone de Beauvoir argues
that we are born in the midst of others without whom the world would never begin to
Andrew Murphie, “Is Philosophy Ever Enough?” Film-Philoosphy, Vol. 5 No.
38, November 2001. Murphie makes this same point.
101
Rainer Fassbinder, op.cit., p.71.
102
Alexander Sesonske, “The World Viewed,” The Georgia Review, 1974, p. 564.
103
Although, when an autobiographer has nearly 1400 references and fills his
narrative with many a person, it is difficult to call the exercise “a solo event.”
100
take on meaning.104 For me, writing helps me make of the world much more. For
writing helps me to fertilze the solitude that, as Beauvoir adds, is as essential as
interrelationship.
Poets, writers and many others, often turn away from the world of objects in their
jouissance and they rediscover the non-self within the self; or to put this idea more
concretely, self and world are rediscovered in a richer symbiosis. "It is in
themselves," as Leo Bersani writes, "that their insatiable appetite for otherness is
satisfied."105 This idea is a complex one; perhaps it is just another way of saying the
cultural attainments of the mind, that first attribute of perfection as 'Abdu'l-Baha calls
it,106 have more lasting power than anything associated with the physical.
I should say at the outset that this book will contain an autobiography, several essays
about autobiography and generous helpings of poetry. Poetry is at its grandest when it
serves some lofty purpose. For me there are several lofty purposes here. The general
principles of the subject of autobiography are, as yet, hardly agreed on by either
practitioners or theorists of this embryonic discipline. Perhaps these principles never
will be. I'm not sure it matters. Like other kinds of history, autobiography has its own
styles and themes as they involve in their diverse ways, both settled life and
movement, living and teaching, learning and consolidation, development and stasis, a
broad range of dichotomies. Then there is the relation of these themes and topics to
the social imagination. Imagination is involved with all these dichotomies.
Imagination has its own rhythms of growth as well as its own modes of expression. I
feel strongly that autobiography, whatever its inherent merits and demerits, is, for
some people anyway, an indispensable aid to our knowledge of the history of Baha'i
experience.107 The hundreds, indeed thousands, of life's anecdotes have varying
degrees of dramatic immediacy. This autobiography absorbs these anecdotes, all these
deeds of commission and omission, into a ceremony of recitation, recreation and
renewal. They are seen both as life and as material for art, as part of a material
transformed into self-expressive speech, as the utterance of an individual voice and as
an aesthetic performance, as the deployment of a perspective and as a form that
reverberates with the interpretations of my own consciousness.108 Perhaps, too, what I
write is also a "relational move" by which I try to complete myself "by connecting to
the eternal"109 or some ideal within myself. And if, as James Thurber once wrote, you
can fool too many of the people too much of the time, only the few who are very
difficult to fool will even bother to read this work. Perhaps there is hope for my
work.
Identity is unquestionably central to any autobiography. The theme of identity will
appear again and again in this narrative. There are lived identities and identities that
104
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman
(Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1975), p. 18. This book was first published
as _Pour une morale de l'ambiguote, Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
105
Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, Harvard UP, London, 1990, p.74.
106
'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p. 35.
107
Northrop Frye, A Literary History of Canada, Spring/Summer, 1982.
108
Leo Bersani, op.cit., p.86.
109
idem
one talks about.110 I like to think there is a balance between these two types of
identity in this autobiography. This subjective experience of identity could be said to
be a type of unity, a unity produced by the realization of that identity. This unity is a
constantly evolving product of my personal decisions and activities or what Nucci
calls "the labile self."111 There is also in this work of my mind a relief of tensions
created by my own needs. My mind is given its grammar by the world; my wishes
give it a vocabulary and my anxieties its object or so one writer put it.
The
experience of each of us is different from that of others, sometimes just slightly,
sometimes significantly, some might say--totally. To hazard generalizations on a
whole group is a risky business, although these generalizations are often a highly
instructive witness to one's several worlds.
My experience is only a part, a small part, of the vast intricate mosaic of Baha'i
community life, of Canadian life, of Australian life, of the life of a teacher, a parent, a
husband, a man of the middle class in the closing decades of the twentieth century and
the opening years of the twenty-first. But it is experience which I have, at least in
part, recovered, reconstructed and recounted. This experience is also written in the
early evening of my life and does not convey that quality of excitement it might have
conveyed had I written it forty years ago when my youthful enthusiasms influenced
my thinking more significantly. I like to think, though, that my learning is lighter and
my humour easier, that I am more the observer and the analyst and my seriousness
less heady and intense than it might have been had I written this in early adulthood or
the early years of middle adulthood. My historical sensibility has been sharpened by
years in-the-field, a pioneering field going back to 1962. But whatever intensity,
fierce inner tension and concentrated fighting with the problems of existence there
had been in my early and middle adulthood, they moderated with the years, at least in
their social expression. In my private world they continued on in residual form, some
pithy core which possessed an intensity that was part of my motivational matrix and
kept me going at my intellectual tasks for six to eight hours a day.112
Paul Ricoeur's Spiral of Mimesis accounts for how people complete texts by asking,
"Does this narrated world share a horizon with my world?" Only when the answer is
"yes" does the text seem authentic. "The opaque depths of living, acting and
suffering," which is how Ricoeur describes our quotidian world, can be configured
narratively to make that world livable, but only when the text is authentic. And
authenticity he sees as the result when the world of the text shares a horizon with the
world of readers. Time will tell just to what extent readers find this work of mine
'authentic,'113 find it helps make sense of the big stew of life, the deck of cards and the
hand we all get dealt with and which changes every time we play. Jerry Seinfeld was
110
Vernon E. Cronin and William Barnett Pearce, Research on Language and Social
Interaction, Vol. 23, pp.1-40.
111
L.P. Nucci, "Morality and the Personal Sphere of Actions," Values and
Knowledge, E.S. Reed, et al., editors, 1996, p.55.
112
It is interesting here to contrast the intensity of Wittgenstein which was much
more fierce and uncompromising in his style of working. See: N. Malcolm, Ludwig
Wittgenstein: A Memoir. London: Oxford University Press, 1959, pp.26-7.
113
Kathryn Smoot Egan, "Applying Paul Ricoeur's Spiral of Mimesis for
Authenticity as a Moral Standard," Journal of Popular Film and Television,Winter,
2004.
able to put the everyday events of life centre-stage: "life's minutiae, people's foibles,
and mankind's quotidian moments of angst,"114 but this autobiography needs more
than the minutiae, for I am no comedian. My range of material must go far beyond
foibles, angst and the acute observations of small moments in life in this very Jewish
of sit-coms. The qualities of the main actors in Seinfeld: their shared immaturity,
amorality, narcissism, unrelatedness, and general ill-will toward others, I trust are not
found here, beyond the modicum of these negative qualities most of us share. In order
to climb into the depths," Wittgenstein once said, "one does not need to travel very
far; no, for that you do not need to abandon your immediate and accustomed
environment."115 In writing this work and in the years on the horizon my intention is
not to travel at all. I have done enough of that in the first half century of my life.
Ricoeur describes what I write, it seems to me, as follows: "a concordant discordance
of ambiguities and perplexities" which I try to resolve hypothetically, narratively. The
"followability" of the story is the test of its authenticity, says Egan. 116 I go along with
this, but not all the way. Many can't follow Shakespeare or the the writers of the Old
Testament or a host of other authors, but that does not make what they write
inauthentic. Authenticity has other features.
J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, once wrote that “God gave us memory so we
could have roses in winter.”117 Here, then, are some of my roses and, inevitably,
some weeds from what is sometimes called episodic memory.118 I hope that, as Oscar
Wilde once wrote, I do not rob this story of its reality by making "it too true." Also, if
Wilde is correct when he says that "the interesting thing about people in good
society....is the mask that each one of them wears," then I hope that I at least describe
accurately that mask and, however partially, reveal the world that is underneath. For,
as Wilde says again, "we are all of us made of the same stuff"119 and differ only in
accidentals. But oh, what accidentals!
The wilderness of western society in which I have lived and had my being over forty
years as a pioneer was much more demanding and wild, requiring a persistence and
understanding that I had not anticipated at the dawn of my manhood in the early
1960s. This wilderness has been intricate and complex, subtle and, for the most part,
114
Joanne Morreale, "Sitcoms Say Goodbye: THE CULTURAL SPECTACLE OF
SEINFELD'S LAST EPISODE," Journal of Popular Film and Television, Fall,
2000. The Seinfeld series went from January 1990 to May 1998 and on the last
program advertisers paid 2 million dollars for a 30 second ad. Were the selfreflexivity in this book as clever as Seinfeld's!
115
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
116
idem
117
J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan, quoted in: “Memory, Autobiography, History,” Proteus:
A Journal of Ideas, Vol.19, No.2, Fall 2002.
118
Psychology has been studying episodic memory for most of its history beginning
with H. Ebbinghaus, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, NY,
Dover, 1964(1885).
119
Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying, quoted in The Critical Tradition: Classic
Texts and Contemporary Trends, 2nd edition, David Richter, ed., Bedford Books,
Boston, 1998, p.455.
seemingly impenetrable in any direct sense to the teachings of the Cause I espoused.
This is not to say that many, a multitude, of seeds were not sown, “like the infinitude
of immensity with the stars of the most great guidance,” as ‘Abdu’l-Baha puts it so
beautifully in the opening paragraph of the Tablets of the Divine Plan. I did indeed
find, as ‘Abdu’l-Baha went on to write in His opening tablet, that “heavenly
outpourings” descended and “radiant effulgences”120 did appear in my life and in my
society. This autobiography is, in many ways, a tribute to those effulgences and those
outpourings. The evidences are all around the world in beautiful Baha'i edifaces and
in thousands of communities that simply did not exist in 1953 when this story begins.
But there was also a dark heart to the age and to my life; there were millions of “gray,
silent rocks,”121 a dreary and desolate scene, a vast, titanic, catastrophic tempest that
“remorselessly gained in range and momentum”122 throughout all the years that this
narrative is concerned with. During these years "the queen of consumer durables," the
term Martin Pawley gives to the television, became the principle assassin of public
life and community politics. Between catastrophe and the consumer, Pawley puts it in
colourful language, stands the goalkeeper, the person who bring you the news. "He
will tell you when a shot is coming your way."123 While that may have been true in
the broad arena of global conflict or even community crime, this goalkeeper did not
protect me from the shots in a battle that was essentially spiritual and only partly
within my control.
The difficulty is that this public realm became less and less experienced and more and
more reported on. The public realm became more and more complex in this half
century. Or so it seemed. Affluence concealed the atomization and fragmentation of
society. People's choices favoured privacy and anonymity over the very idea of
community. Private goals triumphed over public ones. I liked Pawley's analysis when
I came across it in 1975 while I lived in Melbourne and so I refer to it here.
The origin of the vast upheaval which I have only briefly alluded to here has been the
subject of unending academic and public discussion. It is a phenomenon that goes
beyond demands for reform. Indeed, new vocabularies have been formulated to
depict the crisis. The revolution is said to be "cultural." The challenge is said to be to
the "quality" of life. The search is often said to be for "relevancy" or "authenticity."
The picture is "postmodern" and requires "deconstruction." And on and on goes an
endless analysis drowning the subject in a sea that few can swim in and even fewer
want to swim in. However suggestive such terminology, such distinctions, may be
they remain "tragically inadequate to grasp the reality of experience124 in these several
epochs. The crises and tragedies I faced as a youth, in my marriages, in my jobs and
my health were all part of the only real war in my life, the war within the individual
‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, Wilmette, 1977, p.6.
H.D. Thoreau in “Thoreau, The Maine Woods and the Problem of Ktaadn,” in
David Mazel, op.cit., p.333. Thoreau’s enthusiasms for nature were tempered during
his three main trips from 1846 to 1857 as mine were tempered during forty years of
travelling and teaching in the northernmost reaches of Canada and of Australia.
122
Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day Is Come, Baha’i Publishing Trust, New
Delhi, 1976, p.1
123
Martin Pawley, The Private Future, Thomas and Hudson, London, 1973.
124
Doug Martin, "The Spiritual Revolution," World Order, Winter 1973-4, p.14.
120
121
and the news was like some kind of secondary reality with its tertiary battles and
sound bites.
How shall we excuse the supine inattention of the vast majority of humankind to those
evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence in the personages of two
prophets or God-men for the modern age? Is it due to humanity's lack of reason or
the simple failure of its several senses? During the century of the Bab, Baha'u'llah
and His eldest Son, and the many incredible personalities who could be designated as
apostles or as Their first disciples, the doctrines which They preached were confirmed
by innumerable prodigies. The lame did indeed walk, the blind did see, the sick were
healed, the dead were raised, daemons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were
often suspended for the benefit of this embryonic community. But the sages and
indeed the ordinary masses of West and East, North and South have, for the most part,
turned aside from this aweful spectacle, and, pursuing their ordinary occupations of
life, of work and of study, have, for over a century and a half, appeared unconscious
of the wondrous miracles associated with the lives and works of the Central Figures of
this new Faith. There were and are innumerable reasons and this narrative deals with
some of them in a serendipitous fashion.
The form and style of this work are not incidental features. A view of life is told. The
telling itself, the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary, of the
whole manner of addressing the reader's sense of life--all of this expresses a sense of
life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not, of what learning and
communicating are, of life's relations and connections. "Life is never simply presented
by a text," writes Martha C. Nussbaum, "it is always represented as something."125 In
the case of this autobiography, the Baha'i Faith is presented en passant in the context
of my life and the society I experienced in the half century 1953/4-2003/4. The Baha'i
Faith gives to my mind and imagination as they body forth, or so Theseus tells us in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream: "The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns
them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” The
mystery of existence, its paradoxical and complex form, is given "a local habitation
and a name."
This modern age has seen a host of miracles partly due to the inventions of
technology, partly due to the explosion in knowledge, partly due to the sheer
expansion in population from about one billion when these two manifestations of God
were born to the present six billion. Whatever the case, whatever the reasons,
however slow may appear the growth of this Movement during the half-century I have
been associated with its expansion and consolidation, this Cause seemed to me to
develop to a degree that, in many ways, far exceeded my expectations.
From time to time in this five volume work I refer to The Prelude by William
Wordsworth, the first and the major long autobiographical poem in the history of
modern English literature. I refer to it because it contains a number of useful
comparisons and contrasts with this work. The theme of Wordsworth's long poem is
"the loss of the paradise of childhood" and the regaining of that paradise through the
125
Todd F. David and Kenneth Womack, "PERSPECTIVES: Criticisms of the
Motion Picture 'The Titanic,'" Journal of Popular Film and Television, Spring,
2001.
power of the developing imagination.126 I certainly deal with the loss of my
childhood; I deal with the power, the experience, of a developing intellect and
imagination. I also deal with the regaining of that paradise in the years of a different
prelude, the years in which there was an entry-by-troops into the Bahai Cause. The
fifty year period from 1953 to 2003 witnessed a growth of the Baha'i community from
two-hundred thousand to nearly six million. And it appeared as I wrote these several
editions of this narrative work that this period of prelude before a mass conversion
would continue in the years ahead, as far as I could prognosticate anyway, until at
least the end of the first century of the Formative Age in 2021 and probably well
beyond. To Wordsworth the transformation of the world was through the mind of the
writer, the poet. This is unquestionably true and this autobiography is, in some ways,
a testimony to the "new and wonderful configurations" that derive from the luminous
lights of the mind.127
There is little description of the pastoral, of place, of setting, of locale, in my poetry or
my prose.128 I do not record in minute detail the landscapes, what I saw and heard, on
Baffin Island in northern Canada, along the Tamar River in Tasmania or in any of the
several dozen cities, towns and hamlets where I have lived, visited, moved and had
my being. I do not measure these earthly days, as Wordsworth and the nature poets
often have done, by the mountains, the stars and the river valleys I have gazed upon,
however inspiring, lofty and pleasant the verdure and grandeur. The minutiae of
nature, the myriad sense impressions, the sunshine and shadow where gaiety and
pensiveness so often met, the solitude and silence, the noise and the tumult that
occupied my hours and days, the industrial, the technological, the machine: there is so
much that I have not described, that I have not even attempted to enter a word about.
Natural history in its many spectacular forms, wildlife, geological and archeological
history were presented in didactic, anthromomorphic and, more recently, computergenerated forms and, although I did not take a serious study of natural history and the
relevant sciences involved, I certainly enjoyed decade after decade of inspiring, truely
beautiful and informative productions on television.129
Landscape, or place, always includes the human presence, of course, and, in fact, is
centred around it. Place is where our embodied selves experience the world, receive
its nurturance and energy. Place is where, as David Abram wrote, "the sensing body
is....continually improvising its relation to things and to the world."130 Place is also an
agent, a locus of action and significance. The purpose of nature, of landscape, of
scenery, at least for me, is not visual so much as mental. It evokes memory, fuses
present emotions to remembered occasions.
126
Geoffrey Durant, William Wordsworth, Cambridge UP, 1969, p.115.
'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.1.
128
The obsolesence of the pastoral dream, the pastoral vision, for many has become
a dream cultivated in more personal and domestic terms of local space. This, I think,
underpins my autobiographical narrative, although the emphasis is slight.
129
For a summary of these forms see: Karen D. Scott, "Poputarizing Science and
Nature Programming: The Role of "Spectacle" in Contemporary Wildlife
Documentary," Journal of Popular Film and Television, Spring, 2003.
130
David Abram in "The Locus of Compossibility: Virginia Woolf, Modernism and
Place," in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment,
Summer 1998.
127
By the 1940s and 1950s both Australians and Canadians "accepted as conventional
wisdom that the local territory in which they lived was a defining force in their lives
and their nationality."131 In my lifetime such a view was expressed over and over
again ad nauseam. But in the last forty years, during my pioneering journey,
uncertainty has crept into any simplistic identity associated with land, with region.
Other bases of identity have come to occupy the attention: the arts, the media,
ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, wealth, social and political issues, inter alia.
Region was not as important as it had been two, four or six generations before, in the
first centuries of the history of these enormous countries. But place could not be
ignored even if the bases of identity were more diverse, more complex, more
confused. "Identity is a conceptual structure," writes Berzonsky, "composed of
postulates, assumptions, and constructs relevant to the self interacting in the world."132
Identity functions as an attempt to explain oneself, to enhance self-understanding, to
provide an account of my core beliefs and purposes.
My schooling is yet another of the many aspects of life I hardly mention. The
curriculum in both Canadian and Australian schools was inherited from Great Britain,
and consequently it was utterly untouched by progressive notions in education at least
until the early 1960s when I graduated from high school. We, that is Canadians, took
English grammar, complete with parsing and analysis; we were drilled in spelling and
punctuation; we read English poetry and were tested in scansion; we read English
fiction, novels, and short stories and analyzed the style. Each year we studied a
Shakespearean play committing several passages to memory. If I had been a student
in Australia, the story would have been the same.
I might have been living in Sussex or Wessex or Essex or Norwich for all the
attention we paid to Canadian poetry and prose. It did not count. We, for our part,
dutifully learned Shakespeare's imagery drawn from the English landscape and from
English horticulture. We memorized Keats's "Ode to Autumn" or Shelley on the
skylark without ever having seen the progression of seasons and the natural world
they referred to. This gave us the impression that great poetry and fiction were written
by and about people and places far distant from Canada. We got a tincture of
Canadian prose and poetry, of course. We knew we had some place. We were so big;
we had to have some psychological existence. The educational process gave us some
appreciation for the Canadian landscape and its culture. It was not as tidy or green as
England's. It deviated totally from the landscape of the Cotswolds and the Lake
Country or the romantic hills and valleys of Constable. If I had been given an
Australian education I would have had even less of an appreciation of my native land
back in those years before and just after WW2.
In Canada in the 1950s textbooks were often written by Canadians. This was not true
in Australia. In mathematics, for example, Australian kids studied arithmetic and
simple geometry, five times a week. The textbooks were English and the problems to
be solved assumed another natural environment. It was possible to do them all as a
131
Gerald Friesen, "The Evolving Character of Canadian Regions," 19th
International Congress of Historical Sciences, Oslo, Norway, 2000,
132
M.D. Berzonsky, "A Constructivist View of Identity Development," Discussions
of Ego Identity, 1993, p.169.
form of drill without realizing that the mathematical imagination helped one explore
and analyze the continuities and discontinuities of the order which lay within and
beneath natural phenomena.133 I could say so much more about those eighteen years
of institutionalized education in Canada, as I could about so many other aspects of
life, but I must of necessity limit the details, the story, to a confined space and
quantity. And, whatever inadequacies these years in school may have had, I look back
at them fondly, as a broad expanse of time that preceded and initiated my life as a
Baha'i pioneer.
In 1967, like Dustin Hoffman in the 1967 film The Graduate,134 I graduated from
university, suffered through the party given for me by my mother, dealt with my fears
of the plastic society I was entering and continued my search for an identity outside
the bland, material, suburban existence of my parents and friends. Unlike Dustin
Hoffman, Benjamin Braddock in the film, I was able to define myself outside that
suburban environment. My Baha'i pioneering identity was reinforced a hundred-fold
by a move, three months after graduating, in August 1967, to Frobisher Bay in
Canada's Northwest Territories, about as far removed from plastic North American
suburbia as possible, without leaving the continent and its island tributaries.
The fluid and impermanent nature of relationships with the minimum of formality that
Tocqueville135 said characterized democracies were certainly part of these years in
both school and in all the other aspects of life. Tocqueville's analysis said much about
my time. The individual, he wrote, shuts himself tightly within a narrow circle of
domestic interests and excitements and from there "claims the right to judge the
world."136 As social, community, ties loosened, they became more impersonal,
Tocqueville said, and "domesticity was reinforced."137 I could expatiate at length on
the insights this French scholar made in the decade before the Bab's declaration in
1844, but it is not my intention to offer a long, detailed, sociological analysis of my
time. The search for the secret, the basis, for a just social order for human beings was
part of Tocquville's search as it has been for political philosophers and theorists as far
back as the pre-Socratics and the prophets of the Old Testament. The search for a
just social order in the years of this prelude would continue though, it seemed, on
some predestined path, a path in which a tempest was blowing with great force and a
path in which a new social order was given an articulate expression in the writings of
a new world Faith. My task was to help give this Order physical expression in the
communities where I lived. And this I did in embryonic form in town after town
across two continents.
The tempest that was blowing through the global society that this narrative takes place
in was so severe that its very origins, its significance and its outcome were, for the
most part, impenetrable. Most of the people I came to know, to have any association
133
Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain, Vintage Books, NY, 1989.
Robert Beuka, "Just One World...'PLASTICS'": Suburban Malaise and Oedipal
Drive in The Graduate," Journal of Popular Film and Television, Spring 2000.
135
Gianfranco Poggi, Images of Society: The Sociological Thought of Tocqueville,
Marx, and Durkheim, Stanford U.P., 1972, p.41. Tocqueville wrote this in 1831.
136
ibid., p.43.
137
Marvin Zetterbaum, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy, Stanford UP,
Stanford, 1967, p. 69.
134
with, outside the Baha'i community, in Canada and Australia, in these years of the
prelude, were caught up, in a host of ways, by this great onrushing wind. Whatever
was available at the banquet table of the Lord of Hosts would simply have to wait as
the great masses of humanity continued to be swept along by this tempest, this
onrushing gale-force-wind which was altering the very basis of society, its content
and structure. The tempest was simply so immense; the upheavals so extreme, that
the average person or the greatly endowed, the intelligent and the ignorant were swept
along by its devastating and complex forces.
I muse, with American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote 65 days after the
Bab declared His message to Mulla Husayn: “When we see how little we can express,
it is a wonder that any man even takes up a pen a second time.” 138 But I have tried as
many have tried. And I have tired. I do not dwell on the various tensions in
relationships: in classrooms where I taught, in homes where I lived and in offices,
mines, mills and factories where I was employed. I mention the tensions and pass on.
The element of dramatic tension, then, which is essential to any drama and which
could be defined as "the gap between a character and the fulfillment of his
purpose,"139 is present but it is highly diffuse, diverse. It has been present in the
constraints I have faced in life and in the pursuit of the resolution of my several
purposes. As one analyst of drama put it: "drama is the art of constraint."140 But the
drama here does not transport the reader into a fictional world, either metaphorically
or literally.
The drama here is mostly the common, everyday stuff. I can not claim that my drama
is particularly unique or is capable of holding the interest of the reader due to its
unusual qualities or fascinations. This is no pretend world of fictional characters in
which readers have to suspend disbelief, as Coleridge once put it.141 The reader's
relationship with me and what I have written is infinitely negotiable and the meanings
that emerge are dynamic and shifting. Perhaps I can contribute here, a little to some
future prudence, a prudence which Plutarch once described as: "the memory of the
past, the understanding of the present and the anticipation of the future."142
There is a bewilderingly luxuriant and immensely complex aspect to the human
condition. It offers many illegible, contradictory and paradoxical clues. There is often
only a superficial unanimity in the attitudes and values, the behaviour and thoughts of
the members of any of the groups I have been associated with in life. If what I write
earns "the judgement of gratitude and sympathy," as Matthew Arnold described the
reaction of readers to writers who help them and give them what they want, I will also
have won the day. But I'm not sure if I will achieve this. There is a gentle and,
Nathaniel Hawthorne in Leo Marx, “The Pastoral in American Literature,” in A
Century of Early Ecocriticism, The University of Georgia Press, Athens, 2001,
p.344.
139
John O'Toole, The Process of Drama: Negotiating Art and Meaning,
Routledge, NY, 1992, p.27.
140
idem
141
S.T. Coleridge, Bibliographia Literaria, Chapter 13.
142
Plutarch, Rerum Memorandarium Libri, ed. G. Billanovich, Florence, 1943,
p.43: quoted in "The Plot of History from Antiquity to the Renaissance," Eric
MacPhail, Journal of the History of Ideas, 2001.
138
perhaps, not-so-gentle advocacy here as I attempt to transform circumstances into
consciousness. There is much digression, some disproportionate, which is one of the
prime luxuries and blemishes of this work.143 It is difficult, if not impossible, to
consider every particle and fragment of this work in relation to some overall design.
There is metanarrative here, there is micronarrative, but not everything can be
connected to its design. Vicarious experience, the stock-in-trade of television
narrative, can be found here but its presentation is not as effective as the visual
medium. The cultural fantasies that mediate reality for TV viewers in dramas, sitcoms, comedies, inter alia are not found here with the same effect. The cultural
landscape upon which viewers map their desires and aspirations day after day in front
of the lighted chirping box may be added to here in this Rocky Mountain of print.
In movies such as Oliver Stone's JFK, Edward Zwick's Glory and Spike Lee's
Malcolm X the director has an audience far greater than any documentary or
autobiographical work. An autobiographical work, this work, can, if desired, clearly
present all of the facts from both sides of the spectrum. The content of films such as
those mentioned above usually presents one version of the story, the only one that
many will see, read or know about. The directors of such films, knowing that they
have a captive audience, can therefore choose which facts that they place in their film
to create the myth or message that they wish to create and leave out the facts and
events that, although important and relevant, go against their beliefs and destroy the
myth they wish to create. Those directors who somehow manage to entertain the
masses and make an argument are very special. They can stimulate the study of
history but, more often, they simply entertain. Oliver Stone, Edward Zwick and Spike
Lee are three directors who possess the talent to entertain and present an argument
successfully, making it difficult for others, concerned with the truth but with less
money and no talent for directing or writing a film, to argue against their views.
Such "historical" film directors cleverly create myths to promote their own beliefs or
sometimes mischievous speculation and the average movie goer, faced with no other
opinion than the one on the screen, generally believe that myth as reality. 144 As film
director of my own life in this autobiography I try to avoid clever myth creation,
mischievous speculation and manipulation of a captured audience. Given that readers
will have no other opinions on my life than the ones presented here, although they
will certainly have other opinions on the Baha'i Faith and society, I am certainly
aware how much I am in control of the story and of the truth, of my own history. 145 I
am aware, too, that, although history and my life can be studied scientifically, the
field is immensely complex--both history and my life--and immensely subtle.
However vast, self-evident and urgent the field is, and surely one's life is all of these
things, generating a certain anxiety as one proceeds in its examination; however
esoteric and divisive it also seems, thus precluding any unified approach to its
examination and perhaps even any general and organized, any systematic and intense,
143
De Quincey did not see his many digressions this way. See De Quincey As Critic,
John E. Jordan, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1973, p.2.
144
Matthew Dixon, "Historical Films: Myth and Reality, The Journal of American
Popular Culture, 2000.
145
This will remain the situation unless and until my life becomes the object of study
by others.
interest: if there is to be any concerted action towards the goal, a map for the journey
must be found and applied. Vague sentiments of good will, however genuine, will not
suffice. Some basic understanding of principles and processes, of ethics, philosophy,
ontology and history, indeed a host of fields of knowledge are required if the seeker,
the writer, is to even approach the first "attribute of perfection" and its "qualification
of comprehensive knowledge" that 'Abdu'l-Baha exhorts us to attain.146 If any
coordinated progress is to be achieved there is much to be done.147 I make a start as
we all must this side of the grave.
The literary architecture here requires some foresight; if it is to be rich and expressive
it must subsume the irregularities and afterthoughts of day to day life into some kind
of harmonious whole. It must acknowledge the uncertainties and the ambiguities
which I and others have lived with, at least since the appearance of the two-God men
of our age. This task is as difficult to do in real life as it is in writing about real life.
If my work is to be at all useful to people of our time it must define and describe the
nature of our "frantic need for guides through the jungle of modernity." 148 The
experience of modern times is swathed in paradox, ambivalence, anxiety, shifting
perspectives, and nostalgia. People everywhere are getting run over. Can this work
offer a stimulating analysis, a framework of understanding?
Can it be useful,
paradoxically, to people who seem to have no need for guides at all. Sadly, in our
time, there is so much said about everything that there is little assurance about
anything, except perhaps the great material and technological apparatus of society
which brings to those who can afford it comforts never known in all of history. And
so I hold no high hope for the results, the affects, of what I write here for it is not part
of that immense scientific apparatus.
Composing an autobiography is somewhat like constructing the interior architecture
of the houses I’ve lived in, the landscapes of the towns and providing small character
sketches of the people I’ve got to know well. Various people, my readers in this case,
will pass through the houses, landscapes and sketches I construct and say, 'Oh, that’s a
nice house, a pleasant room, but what a hideous window over the kitchen table, what a
dull suburb.' Only writers really live in their autobiographies. So much of what works
best about them are things that people who come to dinner, who pass through, never
know about or see." The comments of readers have, at best, only a partial relevance.
I think this is a fitting, an apt, analogy.
The distinctions of personal merit and influence are tempered but still conspicuous in
any Baha'i community. The oneness of humankind does not imply that the
distinctions between people are feeble or obscure. Neither does the concept of
oneness imply that the abilities and talents of everyone who cross our paths be
ignored. The severe subordination of rank and office, which often pertains in
societies that raise egalitarianism to unrealistic heights of value, which do not see
equality as the chimera it is, was and is not characteristic of the Baha’i community.
The Baha'i community recognizes a wide range of statuses and roles resulting from
146
'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, pp.35-6.
I have borrowed here from Douglas Martin, "Baha'u'llah's Model for World
Fellowship," World Order, Fall 1976, p.13.
148
Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud: Vol. 1 Education of
the Senses, Oxford UP, NY, 1984, p.59.
147
talent and appointment, election and pure ability, and it sees oneness as more of an
integrated multiplicity than any conception of sameness.
I hope there is here little of that 'twotwaddle' that William Gass said Freud wrote and
little of those strange illusions which seem to cloud the clear skies of literary
relevance. Marx thought religion encouraged the illusions and the self-delusion of the
working class. With Naipaul, I believe this role of providing illusions and stagnation
has been passed to politics.149 Hopefully, then, this work will be free of this
contamination. Relevance is essential in works like this to the creative and productive
lives that read it. Inspite of the fact that I have the feeling that we all have from time
to time; namely, that life possesses a hopelessly insignificant aspect, an impossible to
comprehend reality, in the grand scheme of things, I want to venture on the sea of
autobiography avoiding as far as I can the many familiar formulae used by
autobiographers. Readers will respond to this work the way audiences do to film: in
patterns of meaning and symbols, not as simple stimuli or messages. 150 I trust, too,
that in stepping back and reading this, readers will see themselves by distancing
themselves from their own lives and by being implicated in what they read. 151 For I
think there is more here than “the clothes and buttons” of a man, as Mark Twain
described biography. And much more than some gray transit “between domestic
spasm and oblivion.”152 I present the picture of a grand scheme, what the sociologists
call a grand narrative, but I do not suggest in the process any easy answers, simplistic
formulae for sorting out the problems of the world in all their staggering complexity.
I feel a little like a tourist guide taking a bus-load of people through the historic
places, the interest sights and the beautiful spots in some part of the country in order
to make a package-tour of several days. The aim is to both entertain and inform the
travellers and send them on their way with their time having been pleasantly
occupied. Like the guide and the tour, I do not take my readers everywhere. In fact
most of the places in the urban-rural complex that this bus travels through and around
are never seen by the tourists for fear of boring them to death with repetition and the
tedium of endless streets in the city and field-after-field in the country. But in the
midst of these repetitious scenes and the dullest of exteriors which are about as
interesting as the eye of a dead ant, there is drama, comedy and tragedy. It’s just a
matter of digging it out, ferreting it out, going down and in, behind the windows and
doors of a dozing world which often is just watching TV, doing some house-cleaning,
some gardening or, perhaps, having a meal at the time.
I also feel somewhat like a combination of tourist and traveler, a distinction Paul
Theroux makes in his new book Fresh Air Fiend. Tourism---sightseeing---is
expected to be fun. You do it in large groups; it's very companionable; it's comfort149
Timothy Bradley, " At Home Abroad: Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul's essays
describe a world of invisible tragedies," The Yale Review of Books, 2003.
150
Janet Staiger and Martin Barker, "Traces of Interpretation," Framework: The
Journal of Cinema and Culture, 2001.
151
Jean Douchet, "Constructing the Gaze," Framework: The Journal of Cinema
and Media, 2001. Douchet writes that viewers of film became 'implicated in the
story' beginning in 1953 with Ingmar Bergman's Sommarin med Monika. So is this
true of good autobiography.
152
These quotations come from a website, EntWagon.com.
able and it's very pleasant. Travel has to do with discovery, difficulty, and
inconvenience. It doesn't always pay off. There's a strong element of risk in travel.
This distinction is a useful one but I won’t expand on it here but rather leave it to the
reader to make his or her individual interpretation of the differences from their
experience. I have also discovered that in writing this autobiography, although I deal
very much with the past, I am also describing the future. There's something prophetic
about the process of delaing honestly with life. When you see your life, your society
and your religious philosophy and you describe it as far as possible without
stereotypes and preconceptions, but with subtlety, what you write can seem like
prophecy.153
One day 154in the not-too-distant future I hope I will be content to lie beneath a quiet
mound of grass and a small monument of stone. But in the meantime, I am not
content just to go into the hereafter, however joyful or regretful I may be on that
journey into eternity; I do not seem content with the role of a thoroughly
commonplace, nameless and traceless existence which, to some extent, is the lot of all
of us or nearly all. I seem to be drawn to autobiography as a bee to a honey-pot.
Perhaps I should regret, as some readers may be in the end, that I did not apply my
abilities to more useful fields.
Why should anyone care what the merits of an obscure Baha'i are, one who came to
live at the ends of the earth, the last stop before Antarctica? Can it really matter that
he lived in 25 towns and 40 houses, is now on a disability pension and all of this over
a period of several epochs during the growth of a new world religion which has been
emerging from obscurity during his lifetime? Does it contribute any benefit to
humankind to have a printed version of his particular form and intensity of navel
gazing?
We all walk through our lives partly blindfolded. This is partly due, as Oscar Wilde
once noted, to a certain "extraordinary monotony,"155 itself a product of an
underactive imagination and inner life. There is simply too much to take in. You
could call it a cultivated blindness, as Wilde does, or a cultivated inattention, as some
media analysts refer to the way we watch television. The principle of selectivity was
crucial, universal and inevitable. The news, extensively canvassed in the popular
press, in specialist journals and at the turn of this century and millennium on the
internet; meticulously documented in the electronic media, however unsatisfactorily
to the proclivities and prejudices of many, was just one of the multitude of things that
occupied people's minds in various degrees. Endless happenings, trivial and not-sotrivial events, a great sea of minutiae occupied people's minds in various degrees, with
various degrees of meaning and significance. The events of family life, of jobs and
the multitude of human interests, quite understandably, filled the space available, both
for me and those who were in my company. The relationships were often intense and
nurturing opportunities to grow and often, on reflection, fragile and tenuous.
Paul Theroux describes his experience of writing travel books this way in Fresh
Air Fiend, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
153
155
Oscar Wilde in David Richter(ed.), op.cit. p.459.
As I pondered this reality of life, I mused about the impossibility of the thoughts and
events of one life, in one autobiography, in my autobiography, ever finding a place in
the minds of just about everyone or indeed anyone on the planet. These thoughts
might reach a coterie, a small coterie as I have already said above, and that’s about all.
Half the art of storytelling, of course, no matter who the story reaches, is to keep the
story free from too much of that deluge of information and too great a quantity of the
plethora of explanation one acquires as one walks down life’s path. If this art is
practiced well, readers will be left free to interpret things the way they understand
them. I'm not sure how well I do this. I try to please readers. Writing is somewhat
like talking; hopefully someone is listening and wants to listen. I leave the reader free
to interpret the way he or she wants but, along the way, I provide great dollops of
explanation and plentiful helpings of information and analysis. I try to do this with
the same art that good cinema possesses: "the art of the little detail that does not call
attention to itself."156
I provide an episodic structure, careful selectivity and analysis. The reader can enter,
can gain access to the text by any one of many entrances, none of which is the main
one. Readers could begin at the beginning or in the last chapter. there is no preordained sequence to follow. I like readers to feel they have gained something on
their own and to feel that all I have done is help them along the way. But, like George
Bernard Shaw, I can no more write what people want than I can play the fiddle to a
happy company of folk dancers."157 The balance between pleasing people and
pleasing myself, between honesty and tact is as difficult in writing as it is in life.
While I portray some of my own secrets and desires, understandings and analyses in
this text, readers, it is my hope, will find themselves. I can but hope.
As a stenographer of reality, as a mirror of the world I lived in, this autobiography
does less distorting than a novel, which often manipulates, modifies and exaggerates
truths about the past in deference to cultural , literary and highly personal pressures.
There is more caution required, at least it can be so argued, of a reader vis-a-vis a
novel than an autobiography, at least this one, if the reader is trying to get a picture of
the past. Often great novels are not realistic; they distort and, as Peter Gay argues,
they have done history a disservice.158 I do not claim that my experience, my view,
my vision, is necessarily shared with other Baha’is, except in the broadest of outlines
and except insofar as all Baha’is share the Book and its Interpreter and the Universal
House of Justice in a pattern of centres and relationships in their lives.159 But
certainly my desire to share my experience is, in principle, part of what it means to be
human. For human life, even in its most individualistic elements, is a common life.
"Human behaviour always carries," as John Macmurray wrote, "in its inherent
structure, a reference to the personal Other.160 And you, dear reader, are that 'Other.'
156
Francois Truffaut in a letter to Eric Rohmer in 1954, quoted in Framework: The
Journal of Cinema and Media, 2000.
157
G.B. Shaw in "Price's Piece," Barkly Regional, March 6th, 1985.
158
Peter Gay, Savage Reprisals, W.W. Norton and Co., NY, 2002.
159
This pattern of centres and their relationships is discussed briefly in Messages of
the Universal House of Justice: 1968-1973, pp. 37-44.
160
John Macmurray,, Persons in Relation Being: The Gifford Lectures Delivered
in the University of Glasgow in 1954, London: Faber, 1961, pp. 60-61.
I trust the reader will not find here any gnashing of teeth, any strutting and stridence,
any fretting and fulminating as, like Marzieh Gail,161 I summon up remembrance of
things past, my early life, the Baha'i communities and the general society I have lived
in over the last half a century. In the process I hope to sketch something of what T.S.
Eliot said was the great need of modern man: a larger polity. But my sketch is not an
in-depth socio-historical study, a politico-economic treatise; it is autobiography by
traces, history by traces, as F. Simiand defines history. 162 I give the reader vestiges
left behind by the passage of a human being through four epochs in a Baha'i timetable,
a Baha'i framework of the passage of history. Details crystallize, images are isolated,
moments are seen that fascinate, as I gaze back in time. There is a certain fetishizing
of otherwise ordinary, fleeting, evanescent, subjective, variable moments. What is
seen and discussed here is in some ways "in excess of what was lived." It is a little
like what film critic Paul Willemen claims of the cinephiliac moment: "what is seen is
in excess of what is being shown." It is not choreographed for you to see; it is a kind
of addition, a synergetic-add-on that is the result of thought, the "new and wonderful
configurations"163 of these epochs.
The starting point here is something like Carlyle’s analogy between the history of the
world and the life of the individual. In my case a history of modern civilization and
of my religion which has grown up in the light of modern history occupies the central
place alongside my own life. The Victorians saw their age as an age of transition164
and so, too, is our time one of transition, we who have inherited the interpretations of
our time by the Central Figures of the Baha'i Faith and Their trustees, the international
governing body of the Baha'i community. I impose a pattern on this age of transition,
a pattern which is partly unidirectional and partly cyclical. It possesses the halo of
inevitability but not the patina of triumphalism. It has grown out of the Baha'i
conception of history and it gives direction and meaning to the immense dislocation of
these times. It possesses, too, a sense that history is coherent, rational and
progressive. I am conscious that this view can be disputed but I am confident that my
views flow logically from the texts and its authoritative interpreters who inspire what
I write. I don't think my contribution to the study of history is important in any way
but I think the mix of the humanities and the social sciences I bring to the study of the
individual in society is, if not unique, at least possessed of a certain originality, an
original mix of Baha'i ideology and large dollops of historical and social theory found
among the wide range of theories and theorists.165 While not possessing the cognitive
originality of any of the great writers and poets, I believe there is something here that
is intrinsically useful in sensibility, perception and conception. I hope, too, that some
161
Marzieh Gail, Summon Up Remembrance, George Ronald, Oxford, 1987.
F. Simiand in "Narrative Time," Philosophy Today, Winter 1985.
163
'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.1.
164
Marion Thain, "An Awful Moment of Transition: Victorian Ideas of History and
the Individual Life Narrative of Michael Field," Source Unknown, Internet, May
2003.
165
The parallels between my own particular take on a Baha'i view of history and the
liberal worldview of, say, a 'father of liberalism' like John Stuart Mill which you
might call a non-theistic religion are many. Indeed, in my study of sociological and
psychological theory over the last forty years I have come to see many parallels
between the many theories of the individual and society. And I draw on much of this
material in this autobiography.
162
Baha'is will find inspiration here as they seek to understand the Baha'i model of social
and political engagement rooted as it is in a distinctly Baha'i socio-theological
framework.
For the New Historicist school of history, this work will be seen as an agent of
ideology, conforming as it does to a particular vision of history. For this school sees
ideology as prior to history, sees this autobiography as a representation of the culture,
the Baha'i culture, from which it emerged.166 The lives of the obscure, the ordinary
and the unknown members of society at any given historical period some have argued
can never be satisfactorily recovered. I possess a different take on this theme. It is my
view that their inner world can be penetrated, can be recaptured. Michelle Johansen
takes a similar view in her analysis of an obscure London librarian.167 This
autobiography, like Johansen's, examines the life of an essentially obscure person, in
my case someone who has held many jobs in and out of teaching, lived in many
places and been involved for more than half a century with a religious group that
claims to be the nucleus and pattern of an emerging world religion, a religion in the
first century of its Formative Age.
The use of the first-person voice is always a conscious narrative choice. In the writing
of history its official use is restricted. The "I" of the historian is usually absent. It is
simply not invoked. Subjectivity is the great unmentionable in historical narratives.
Historians are not encouraged to relate their personal reactions, motivations,
emotions, dreams or other imaginative connections between their reading, research,
and writing or envisioning. But this work is only partially a history.168 The use of the
first-person seems natural here.
Traces are left, a trace remains. Thus we can speak of remnants of the past in the same
way or a different way, from the way we speak of relics or monuments. And so I
hand over to the contingencies of preservation or of destruction this autobiography.
Like all traces, it now stands for a past, mine and society's, mine and my religion's, an
absent past. The past may be absent but this trace, this writing, is and will be(I hope)
present, thus, in a certain way, preserving the past even though that past is gone, even
though it no longer exists. I feel drawn to the mystery of both the past and the future.
Somehow, the very mystery of being, of the present, is tied up there.
We all see different aspects of life as expressions of an ultimate journey, especially
for those of us who see life in terms of eternity. But the whole question of ultimate
journey has so many many meanings to people. In some definable and indefinable
way these expressions are symptomatic of what life is all about to each person. Some
see the quintessence of life’s journey best through the medium, the mediating role, of
film; some hear it in music or in one of the other creative and performing arts; some
see in nature the supreme moving impulse in creation; some find it in love and
166
D.G. Myers, "The New Historicism in Literary Studies," Academic Questions,
Vol. 2, 1988-1989, pp.27-36.
167 Michelle Johansen, "Prioritising the Nebulous: The Imagined Imaginary World of
Charles Goss(1864-1946): London Librarian," Source Unknown, Internet, May 2003.
168
Jennifer M. Lloyd, "Collective Memory, Commemoration, Memory and History,
or William O'Bryan, The Bible Christians and Me," Biography, Honolulu, Winter
2002; Jennifer M Lloyd.
relationships; some in learning and the cultural achievements of the mind. The list,
were I to try and make a comprehensive one, could be continued on and on. For we
are creatures of heterogeneity and, more than knowing ourselves directly, we seem to
know about ourselves by knowing about other things. At the same time knowing who
one is is at a basic level not a cause of trouble, unless one has psychological or
neurophysiological illnesses.169
I was one of those, like many others, for whom the ultimate journey was observed,
defined, expressed through many forms. My experience of some of these forms is
described in the following narrative now approaching eight hundred pages. This
narrative has become larger than I had originally anticipated. However long it has
become, it seems suited to my particular literary and psychological needs. Whether
readers find this length suitable to their tastes is another matter. In the history of
western literature there have been two dominant motifs or themes: the quest or
journey and the stranger.170 This autobiography fits comfortably into this long
tradition.
I sometimes think this autobiography is a little like the poetry of the metaphysical
poets. T.S. Eliot says that in this poetry "a degree of heterogeneity of material is
compelled into a unity by the operation of the poet's mind."171 Such poets are
constantly amalgamating disparate experience, literally devouring that experience and
in doing so they modify their sensibility and form new wholes. In the process an
originality and a clarity results which you might call my autobiographical point of
view or, in the case of the metaphysical poets, the poet's point of view. Eliot writes
that "our standards vary with every poet" and this is also the case with every
autobiographer. Refering to the poet John Dryden, Eliot writes that his "unique merit
consists in his ability to make the small into the great, the prosaic into the poetic, the
trivial into the magnificent."172 While I would like to be able to do this in this
autobiography and, while I feel I do achieve it on occasion, I do not think I achieve
this transformation on a regular basis. I create the objects I am contemplating,
namely myself, my society and my religion, through the employment of memory,
reason and will, thrusting each of them into whatever nourishes me and finding, as
best I can, the aptest expression for my feelings and thoughts.
Perhaps I could say I am 'rendering' the past as a painter renders. I have rendered my
life, given it a certain transparency, refigured my world, re-described it, appropriated
it, re-enacted it, reeffectuated the past in the present.173 I have brought things out into
the open, the way we all do when we tell stories about ourselves. I have transformed
my life in the sense that an examined life is a changed life, a different life. So many
Baha'is have achieved great things for their Faith. Many have achieved little. The
169
Ingar Brinck, "Self-Identification and Self-Reference," EJAP, 1998.
Many writers have expressed western literature in these terms. Just today, while
listening to ABC Radio National I heard the author of Possum Magic, a famous
children's book, I heard this concept reiterated.
171
T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1932, p.283.
172
ibid., p.310.
173
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1946.
170
portion of some and the portion of others varies as to their respective receptacles.
Comparisons may be partly odious, but they are inevitable.174
In the kingdom of fiction, novels, stories and science fiction, the constraints of
historical knowledge have been suspended or considerably loosened and played with.
There is a great freedom to explore imaginative variations of history, of the past in
these literary forms. In autobiography I do not enjoy this luxury but, still,
reconstructing the past needs the help of imagination. Just as fiction has a quasihistorical component, so too does autobiography have a quasi-fictional component.
History and fiction intersect in autobiography in the refiguration of time, in that
fragile mix where the facts of the past and human imagination join in an effort to
produce the deepest observations and the liveliest images, to enlarge the narrow circle
of experience and to penetrate the complexities of life. As Canadian writer Margaret
Atwood once wrote "the mind is a place where a great deal happens."175 I hope
readers find a lot happens here.
The British sociologist, Anthony Giddens, wrote that a person's identity is "not to be
found in behaviour, nor in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a
particular narrative going."176 That person must continually integrate events and sort
them into an ongoing story about the self. He must, and in this case the self is a 'he',
"have a notion of how he has become who he is and where he is going." There is a
process of selecting and of discarding memories, a partly robust and partly fragile set
of feelings and self-identity.177 As I keep my story going, as I posit some degree of
unity and continuity over time, some degree of autonomy and responsibility, I
describe the somebody I have become, the doer-deciding, not being decided for, the
person who thinks, wills and acts.178
Perhaps Sir Francis Drake put it more strikingly and eloquently in his prayer:
O Lord God!
When Thou givest to Thy servants
to endeavour any great matter,
Grant us to know that it is
not the beginning
But the continuing of the same
to the end,
Until it be thoroughly finished,
Which yieldeth the true glory…..
174
While I write I am thinking of an email I got recently from a Baha'i named
Dempsey Morgan who chaired nine LSAs, 5 NTCs and was on four NSAs in Africa
among a host of accomplishments too many to list here and a Baha'i who lived in
Gravenhurst Ontario for fifty years as an isolated believer from about 1915. (See
Baha'i Canada, 2001(ca).
175
D.G. Jones, "A Review of Sherill Grace's, Violent Duality: a Study of Margaret
Atwood," in Canadian Poetry, No.9, Fall/Winter 1981.
176
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late
Modern Age, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 1991, pp.54-5.
177
idem
178
Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford UP, Oxford, 1969, p.131.
Autobiography is interpretive self-history and an interpretive self-history that goes on
until one’s last breaths. It is a dialogue with time and I have spent various periods of
the last twenty years(1984-2004) trying to give my experience a cast, a shape, and
make a coherent intervention into my past not just write a chronicle of elapsed events.
As I do this I find I nourish the past, anticipate the future and face unavoidable
existential realities like death, my own limitations and failures. While my account is
ostensibly about myself, I like to think that it becomes, in the end, about the reader.
For there is a complex symbiosis here between me and you and the many readers not
yet born. "I'll live in this poor rime," as Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 107. Every
writer worth his salt likes to think, hopes, as the Bard wrote in the last couplet of this
sonnet, that
………thou in this shalt find thy monument
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.179
It is difficult to present an orderly account of one's story, one's "monument." Frankly,
though, I don’t think orderliness is crucial. As the American novelist Henry James
once wrote, back in 1888, the crucial thing is to be saturated with life and in the case
of this autobiography: my life, my times and my religion. Time has a corrosive
quality and produces a certain vacancy of memory. Space and time are, as de
Quincey once wrote, a mystery. They grow on man as man grows and they are “a
function of the godlike which is in man.”180 What I tell here is some of this mystery.
Conjoined to this vacancy of memory, paradoxically, is its function as a medium
through which time passes, as part of the very basis of one's creative energy and part
of a "perpetual benediction."181
I am conscious of what the writer and philosopher H.L. Mencken wrote about
autobiography, namely, that no man can “bring himself to reveal his true character,
and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and as a believer, his true meannesses,
his true imbecilities, to his friends or even to his wife.”182 She, like servants of old,
though, are most likely to see the true colours of a man or a woman. Honest
autobiography, Mencken wrote, is a contradiction in terms. All writers try to guild and
fresco themselves. There may be some guilding here, but I think I make an
improvement on most biographies which A.J. P. Taylor said were mostly guesswork.
There is a tone of tentative enquiry in this work; there is inevitably some guesswork;
there is a recognition that truth is often elusive and subtle. I have chosen the title and
the theme 'pioneering over four epochs' advisedly. There is some fundamental
connection with my life's journey, my soul, that is contained in these words which
now roll off my tongue with deceptive but now familiar ease.
179
William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, Penguin, 1970, p.127.
Thomas de Quincey, The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, editor,
David Masson, p.27.
181
Christopher Solvesen, The Landscape of Memory: A Study of Wordsworth's
Poetry, Edward Arnold, 1965.
182
H. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy, A.A. Knopf, NY, 1974(1916), pp.3256.
180
I have taken, too, Taylor's advice on politics. Taylor wrote that "the only sane course
is never, never, to have any opinions about the Middle East." If anything, I point
toward a way; I urge and encourage, but I do not offer answers to complex political
questions by taking sides, criticizing governments or taking positions on various
crises and issues. If anything, my book is a timely, timely for me if not for many
others, anecdotal and impressionistic examination of the historical origins of the
Baha'i alternative in my time, an alternative embedded in my life and my four epochs.
Life's sense and nonsense have pierced me with a feeling, a view, that much of
existence is strange and absurd; that there is much which is vain and empty in those
impressions which passs through our sensory emporiums; and that there is much that
is wonderfully awesome and staggeringly mysterious. History for millions is more
nightmare and panorama of futility and anarchy. So many millions of human beings
seem ill-equipped to deal with the forces of modernity. The resulting social
commotion, the resulting disarray is evident all around us.
As my own days pass swifter than the twinkling of an eye, I offer here in this
autobiography something of my experience with the relentless acceleration of
forces183 in the dynamic span of epochs that have been the background of my life. I
offer, too, layers of memories that have coalesced, that have condensed, into a single
substance, a single rock, the rock of my life. But this rock of my life possesses
streaks of colour which point to differences in origin, in age and in the formation of
this rock. It helps to be a geologist to interpret their meaning and I, like most people,
have no advanced training or study in geology. So it is that my memories have fused
together and they are not fully understood. Perhaps by my latter, my later, years;
perhaps in an afterlife, in that Undiscovered Country when I enter the land of lights,
then, I will understand.
I could begin, for example, with my first memory in 1948. I remember making a
mud-pie in the spring; perhaps the snow was still on the ground or the April rains had
come after a Canadian winter. Perhaps it was March or perhaps it was April of 1948
as the Canadian Baha'i community was just completing the first fifty years of its
history. Perhaps it was on that weekend of the 24th and 25th of April 1948 when the
first National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Canada was elected by 112 Baha'is
in Montreal. That's when I'd like to think my first memory occurred in real time. But,
alas, I do not have a unified, factually accurate, version of that first event in my
mind's eye. I am saddled, as we all are, with a host of variations of what happens to
us, what is around us and what it all means.
We can only connect with a portion of our own lives and of the great mass of facts
and details that makes up the history of our time.184 Even if one assumes that we can
explain human personality totally in terms of culture, there is only so much culture
one can analyse and synthesize, find personally meaningful, interesting enough to
consider at all. The writer, the historian, the autobiographer, all analysts of the
modern condition and of the human beings in it, must face limitation. They must face
minutiae and avalanches of information. I could take refuge in a more distant past as
many do these days and tell of my mother's and father's life going back to the turn of
183
The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 157.
Raymond Tallis, In Defence of Realism, Edward Arnold, Hodder and Stoughton,
London, 1985.
184
the century, or of my grandparents on my mother's side in England or on my father's
side in Wales in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Or I could write an account
of my great-grandparents' lives taking readers back to the beginning of this New Era
in the 1840s. Few people exhaust the surface, much less the contemplation, of their
own experience, how much less that of their forefathers. The years before my birth I
shall mention from time to time if and when I feel they illuminate the theme I am
pursuing.
The days of my life are gone, at least as far as late middle age or middle adulthood as
some human development theorists call the years from 40 to 60. Some of these days
return as if from the dawn of my life and, as Wordsworth expressed it so beautifully,
"the hiding places of man's power/Open: I would approach them, but they close."185 I
scarcely see them at all, Wordsworth continues, but he says he tries to "give substance
and life to what he feels," thus "enshrining…the spirit of the past/For future
restoration."186 And so, writing this autobiography is, in some ways, a job of
restoration, restoration over four epochs. I leave the previous epochs of the Formative
and Heroic Ages to the pens of others, the thousands of others whose lives were lived
in the years after the beginning of this New Era in 1844. These earlier years will, as I
say, get only the occasional mention when they function to illuminate the present or
the future. For this autobiography focuses on a history that has been part of my bones:
the first six decades of the second Baha'i century.
In a recent edition of the journal Cultural Logic I came across the following
quotation which expresses, in some ways, what I am attempting to accomplish here.
The author wrote: “I am speaking my small piece of truth, as best as I can. We each
have only a piece of the truth. So here it is: I'm putting it down for you to see if our
fragments match anywhere, if our pieces, together, make another larger piece of the
truth that can be part of the map we are making together to show us the way to get to
the longed-for world.187
So many changes have taken place both in public space and private thought that the
world I set out in in 1962 as my pioneering life began has been transformed. One
mundane and in some ways trivial example in public space is described by R. Shields:
“Hyper-realities are found in malls, restaurants, hotels, theme parks; in self-contained
fictional cities such as Disneyland, in California, Tokyo and Paris, and Disney World,
in Florida; and in real cities such as Los Angeles and Miami. All are facades woven
out of collective fantasy. The original for these, of course, is Disneyland, built in the
mid-1960s. It is tempting to laugh off all of this as an amusing curiosity, but shopping
malls are the most frequented urban social spaces in North America now.” They play
a pivotal position in the lives of billions of consumers and are a new focus of
communities.”188 And as one writer put it: shopping is the most creative act western
185
William Wordsworth in T.S. Eliot: The Longer Poems, Derek Traversi, Harcourt,
NY, p.196.
186
idem
187
Minnie Bruce Pratt, "Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart" in Cultural Logic, Volume 3,
Number 2, Spring, 2000.
188
Richard Marsden and Barbara Townley, “Power and Postmodernity: Reflections
on the Pleasure Dome,” Electronic Journal of Radical Organization Theory, 2003.
man performs.189 In my forty years of putting up posters, 1964-2004, I could always
rely on the shopping mall to say no to my request to put up a poster. It was an out-ofbounds zone to any kind of political or religious activity. I have no intention or
interest in describing my shopping activities in malls or, indeed, in any other
commerical establishments over the years, although I must have put up several
thousand posters in smaller shops: newsagents, florists, hardare stores, delis,
retaurants, inter alia, and had light-hearted and easy-going relationships with many a
shop-keeper. I’m sure I could write a small book on my experiences putting up all
these posters. And in a society which is nothing if not a consumer society, much could
be said about my shopping experiences, even if they were minimal and occupied an
essentially periferal part of my life.
In the macro-political domain there were a core of events which took place in the
more than four decades of pioneering experience that affected the climate of western
thought. One of the more recent was in 1989, two centuries after the French
Revolution, which did more than merely terminate the bipolar balance of terror that
had kept the peace for nearly half a century; the fall of the Berlin Wall brought to an
end the older ideological equilibrium and the habit-encrusted formulation of issues
which went with it. The concepts my generation used to describe the world after
WW2 urgently needed to be reformulated after 1989.190 And they have been
reformulated in the last fifteen years, 1989-2004, in a much more complex global
community. This is not to say, of course, that everything changed in 1989. Many
aspects of the world in the years 1945 to 1989 have remained the same, but the
tendencies were exacerbated. “The wealthiest and poorest people,” according to a
U.N. Human Development Report of 1996, “are living in increasingly separate
worlds.”191 The three billion in 1945 has become six billion and the hostile camps of
WW2 have changed their complexions, their names, their features. But it is not my
aim to discuss the socio-political world in great detail in this work. The reasons for
war now are different from those seventy or ninety years ago in the last two major
world wars and I am confident they will change their spots yet again in this new
millennia.
The generation born in and after WW2 have watched that war on television and at the
cinema for half a century. It is not my aim here to document the kalaedoscope of
opinions and attitudes to the great wars of the first half century, suffice it to say that
there seem to be as many changes, shifts in view, as there have been decades since
1945. One notable cultural theme that emerged in American society as it entered the
twenty-first century, for example, was the glorification of the generation that had
endured the Great Depression and heroically sacrificed to win World War II. A
virtual sanctification occurred in best-selling books, in TV programs and at the
movies.192 As I have watched this latest vintage of 'war-movies,' I wondered at just
how my generation would be analysed and discussed half a century from now both
See also: R. Shields, “Social Spatialization and the Built Environment: The West
Edmonton Mall,” Society and Space, Vol. 7, pp. 147-164.
190
Ernest Gellner, cited in G. Burrell, M. Reed, M. Calás and L. Smirchich, “Why
Organization? Why Now?” Organization, 1994, pp.5-17.
191
See Deb Kelsh, “Desire and Class,” Cultural Logic, Vol.1, No.2, Spring 1998.
192
Albert Auster, "Saving Private Ryan and American Triumphalism," Summer,
2002.
189
inside and outside the Baha'i community. The generation that came of age and fought
in WW2 was been called, by one recent author, “the greatest generation any society
has ever produced.”193 For me and my generation that came of age in the 1960s, the
story remains to be written. Perhaps this autobiography is part of that writing.
“Without a revolutionary theory, “wrote Lenin, “there can be no revolutionary
movement.”194 I have been convinced the Baha’i teachings provides both; but the
revolution is spiritual, evolutionary and, like Christianity 2000 years before, slow to
work itself out in the context of society. There is a repetitive aspect to both life and
history that gives rise to the cyclical aspect of religion. Comments like the following
of British novelist E.M. Forster(1879-1970) reveal the repetitive aspect of life: “Most
of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that
would describe it, one is obliged to exaggerate in the hope of justifying one’s own
existence.” While I find this statement a little over the top, to say the least, there is
undoubtedly some truth to it, a truth based on the repetitious nature of life, the routine,
the weariness, some of what the Romans called life's tedium vitae. It is one reason,
among many, that most people would never think of writing an account of their lives
and, if they did, they would find it difficult to get any readers or, more importantly,
publishers to put their book on the marketplace. Of course, this may be equally true of
my book. I'm sure some would have no trouble seeing my book among the more
tedious reads.
The tendency to exaggeration in writing, as in life, is part of what for me is a complex
reaction to the Baha'i community, my experience of it and my life in society over this
last half century. Part of my instinct over the years has been to run from it, physically
and imaginatively. This tendency to run simply reflects the difficulty of the
experience of one Baha'i in the years 1953-2003, of my relation to people, to
institutions and to events which taken together are so much greater than myself. the
whole of life often seems like some brontisaurismus, some shapeless, structureless
colossus with its flood of detailed information and candy-floss entertainment which
seems to simultaneously instruct and stultify.
My life as a moral being has its roots in a complex and very abstract world of seen
and unseen connections, categories and ideas which, as I say, are greater than myself.
The same imagination that perceives these categories and generalizations which
describe my life also fashions ideas of local, regional, national, international and
humanitarian obligation. My sympathies and moral obligations, my antipathies and
withdrawals are born in this mix. They make up, along with other factors, my
conscience, albeit intangible, my reality.
"Ultimately, we always tell our own story, not the story of our life, our so called
biography, but the other one, which we find difficult to tell using our own names," so
writes Jose Saramago, "not because it brings us excessive shame or excessive pride,
but because what is great in human beings is too great to be told with words, even if
there are thousands of them, as is the case of tis work. What usually makes us petty
and mediocre is so ordinary and commonplace that we would not be able to find
Tom Brokaw, An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from The Greatest
Generation, Random House, 2001.
194
Lenin, What Was Is To Be Done? quoted in Kelsh, op.cit.
193
anything new that would touch a chord in that noble or petty human being that the
reader is."195 And, if indeed it did strike a chord, to string it out into a musical
symphony to bring pleasure to others--now that's a trick!
However one cuts the cake, so to speak, telling one’s story is not easy. The Danish
philosopher Kierkegaard put his finger on part of the problem when he wrote that: “it
is perfectly true that life must be understood backwards. But philosophers tend to
forget that it must be lived forward, and if one thinks over that proposition it becomes
clear that at no particular moment can one find the necessary resting place from which
to understand it backwards.”196 Belief to Kierkegaard was based on the view that it
was absurd. He was, of course, referring to the then typical view of Christianity: credo
quia absurdum.
It is perhaps for these and other subtle, complex and difficult to define reasons that in
their stories certain authors, among whom I believe I could include myself, favour a
complex mix in the narrative they live and have lived, the story of their memory with
its exactnesses, its weaknesses, its truths, its half-truths, even its fictions some of
which they are blinded to and some they are quite conscious of, although they would
not want to call them lies. Neuro-imaging is revealing much about how we remember
and why we forget. One recent author ranks suggestibility as the sin with the greatest
potential to wreak havoc on the accuracy of memory.197 Then, too, there are many
ways I could tell this story and still tell it honestly; the one that has made it to the
surface of the paper here is just one from among the many options, some of which I
am conscious of and others beyond both my memory and my imagination. I try to
touch a chord in what I write, the one in my own heart and mind and the many chords
in those of readers in the best way they know how. In some cases that chord is
actually touched.
Mark Twain says to describe everything that happens each day would require a
mountain of print. However much a life is enjoyed, to write about it in an engaging
way is another question, another topic, another world. Although many enjoy their
lives, few could write an account that would give any pleasure to readers. There are
many skills in living and another set in writing about them. I'm not sure this book falls
into the category of entertaining reading. It is written to satisfy my own sense and
sensibility, my proclivity for analysis and my personal desire to give shape to my life,
a shape that at least will exist on paper when I am finished. My tale is neither a bittersweet tale of a charmed and lamplit past; nor is it a narrative of loss and its lumps, its
fragmentation and loneliness. It is closer to a poem, a hypothesis, a construct.198
195
Jose Sarmago, CLCWeb:Comparative Literature and Culture: AWWWeb Journal,
CLCWeb Library of Research and Information, CLCWeb Contents 2.3, September
2000.
196
Phil Cohen, Autobiography and the Hidden Curriculum Vitae, Internet, 2003.
197
Daniel Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and
Remembers, Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
198
Luc Sante, The Factory of Facts, Granta Books, 1997.
A narrative, like the one I present here, provides a “unifying action to temporal
sequences,” 199 and it is “fundamental to the emergence and reality” of the subject,
namely myself,200 however variable my behaviour across a myriad social contexts.
Self-understanding and self-identity are dependent on this narrative. The process is
not a simple mirroring but, rather, an updating, a refiguring, a process of being
perched, as Proust says, on the pyramid of my past life as I launch into the future to
create, to refine, to define, the self yet again. And while this exercise takes place one
must be on one’s watch for self-aggrandizement, self-indulgence and selfdramatization.201 For self-love is kneaded into the very clay of man, as 'Abdu'l-Baha,
once wrote back in 1875.202 It is as natural as air.
While religious or political commitment, as expressed in terms of some religious or
political affiliation, is not a rare or unique phenomenon among writers, most writers
today do not incline to commitments in these areas. Most of the people I have known
in my life outside the Baha'i community are similarly inclined. They possess broad
commitments to family, to job, to their writing or any one of a range of personal
interests, activities and artistic pursuits. Gardening, hobbies of different kinds, sports
and the many pleasures and enjoyments of their leisure time seem to lead the way.
There is, it seems in the decades of my life's experience, an adversarial relationship
between writers and thinkers of various ilks, with aspects of government policy,
indeed, with all institutions of political and religious orthodoxy. This adversarial
relationship gets expressed throughout their writings and their life. The lack of any
affiliation, any commitment, to some organizational form with its attendant authority,
has been virtually anathema to the generations I have been associated with in this
half-century.
So many get aroused over what they don't want. And millions don't get aroused at all,
except in their private domains by the magical products of consumption and their
micro worlds of job, family and personal interests. The world of information and
entertainment got increasingly mixed in these several decades and in the pluralistic
society that imbibed it all, and in which I had my own life and being. The result
seemed to be a mixed bag around which most people spun the web of their lives.
Television tended to privatize rather than publicize; it was not so much a window as a
periscope by means of which the submerged suburban viewer perceived and
understood. At least that was the way Martin Pawley put it.203 I think TV did both,
served as both window and periscope. Half unconscious after the evening news, the
viewer sleeps, watches more TV, plays golf, washes the dishes but rarely engages
with society in any 'political' way, a way that attempts to engage with society through
some organizational form except perhaps: tennis, sport or any one of a host of leisure
pursuits. As society goes through one of its most revolutionary, its most painful
periods of change, the average person is, as one critic put it, amusing themselves to
death. This is not to say that millions don’t experience pain. "Pain as God's
199
Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self, Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1991,
p.4.
200
idem
201
Peter Kemp, editor, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, Oxford UP,
1997.
202
'Abdu'l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.96.
203
Martin Pawley, The Private Future, Thames and Hudson, London, 1973.
Megaphone," C. S. Lewis wrote, "is a terrible instrument." Frank T. Vertosick quotes
this line as epigraph to his new book, Why We Hurt.204 Lewis's comparison points
out why pain is essential: It gets our attention, alerting us that something is terribly
wrong and, if possible, must be dealt with. This autobiography is, partly at least, a
story of these moments.
This half century was filled with many of this sort of savage dichotomy: the
traditional demands of a sexual morality utterly at variance with the massive
propaganda of eroticism; a glossy magazine and media world with its affuence and
orientation to private pleasure and a world of barbarism, poverty, violence and death;
the constant message to do your own thing and the immense need for people to work
in groups on the vast array of social problems--and on and on. Needless to say, these
polarities often pulled people completely apart. At the end of their journey in which a
perpetually unstable reconciliation of forces had become the first law of their inner
psychic life, in which the search for some Real Me had gone on for years, in which
messages to feel rather than think, in which some rockbottom realism had become
pretty much everyone's position, one wondered when and if society would lapse into
some anarchic animalism. Perhaps I overstate the case, but the flavour of my case
remains and the tensions of this half century were indeed enormous, if often subtle
and unnoticed.
Proust once said that "in reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his
own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to
the reader to enable him to discern what, without the book, he would never, perhaps,
have preconceived in himself."205 There is some truth in Harold Bloom's assertion
that we read because we can not know enough people and friendships possess a
vulnerability.206 And so, as I survey the interstices of my life, I hope I can make of
the exercise that optical instrument for the reader that Proust refers to here. Language
offers, as Janet Gunn put it so well, a peculiar fitness for the expression and creation
of the self.207 It is a common tool, a tool we all possess, perhaps the best there is if we
want to be the novelist, the psychologist, the psychiatrist, of ourselves. 208 It is also a
tool with which I would like to mildly disturb the rebellious and lively minds of
readers but not to cut their throats; or, as some writer whom I have now forgotten,
once said: I’d like to be seen as a surgeon who gives his patients a whole new set of
internal organs but leave them thinking they did it all by themselves.
But while possessing this disturbing, this therapeutic, function, with J.B. Priestly, I
like to think this autobiography has some of that sin-covering eye, that eye of
kindness, where I take in the washing of others and they take in mine. We need to be
kind to ourselves as well as others. For many this is a hard lesson to learn. While we
are being kind, though, we must be careful that we are not being indolent and aimless,
Frank T. Vertosick, Why We Hurt: The Natural History of Pain, Harcourt,
2000.
205
Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured.
206
Harold Bloom in "Lit Crit Giant in Full Bloom," The Australian, January 10,
2001.
207
Janet Gunn, Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience, 1982, p.6.
208
Ortega y Gasset wrote that "man is the novelist of himself," in History as a
System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History, 1961, p.203.
204
that we attend to that "first attribute of perfection:" learning and the cultural
attainments of the mind209 and, in a series of fundamental exhortations of ‘Abdu’lBaha, that we oppose our passions.210 Otherwise, like the great Russian writer
Alexsandr Pushkin(1799-1837), we concern ourselves with the perfection of our art
and not the perfection of our life and readers, in their turn, become enamoured of the
confessional aspects of a life, its baseness and its loathsome aspects.211
I have already, in a first edition of this autobiography, written a version, a story, of my
life. It was about 40,000 words. I completed it more than ten years ago now, in May
1993. On reading it, though, I felt some of that tedium vitae mentioned above. I
thought to myself "surely there is more to my life than this?" So, I collected the best
literature I could find about the process of writing autobiography. It was a literature
that began to accumulate in libraries to a significant extent starting in the 1960s. I read
everything I could find about this literary activity which arguably goes back to St.
Augustine in 426 AD when he wrote his Confessions.212 I also read many
autobiographies but I found them, for the most part, uninspiring, predictable accounts
along predictable lifelines. Some autobiographies seemed of excellent quality and I
learned a great deal about a person's life that I did not feel I needed or necessarily
wanted to know. So, I only read a few chapters and stopped in most cases. So often a
student of autobiography, biography and history is faced with cliche, imitation,
pietism, affectation, useless fact and much that is trivial and simply irrelevant to their
lives. I try to overcome these problems here, probably only partly successfully.
At best one seems to get entertained, mildly informed and occasionaly stimulated with
yet another story. As I near the age of sixty I feel as if I have read and seen, lived and
heard, a million stories. I don't feel the need to imbibe yet another story of how
someone made it from cradle to grave. Inevitably dozens and dozens of stories will
come my way as life takes its course. People's inclination to tell stories seems
endemic, pervasive, part of the very air they breath. In the end, anyway, it may be
"style alone that makes a great memoir"213 or autobiography, with story taking a
distant second place. There is, yes, story here but this is no psychoautobiography or
psychobiography in the tradition begun by Freud in 1910 with his study of Leonardo
da Vinci. There is no formal reliance on a case study. Rather the reader will find here
a much looser, informal, construction.
No private citizen, Lippman and Schumpeter have reasoned, can be expected any
more to have access to all the information and arguments required to make an
209
'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.35.
ibid., p.59.
211
This issue is discussed in "A Review of T.J. Binyon's Pushkin: A Biography," The
Wilson Quarterly, 2004.
212
Graeco-Roman civilization, of course, had its autobiographers and autobiographies
like that of Flavius Josephus, among others. See Georg Misch, A History of
Autobiography in Antiquity, Parts 1 and 2, International Library of Sociology,
Routledge, NY, 1950.
213
W.S. Di Piero, "Remembrance past," The Australian's Review of Books, May
1998, p.12.
210
informed decision about affairs of state.214 And so it is, folowing their reasoning, that
I make little attempt to discuss complex social issues in this narrative. Given the
insurmountable nature of the private citizen's public role the question in our day has
become, what is the role of the private citizen in the community?
Wanting and needing coral, pearls and rare salts the student of autobiography so often
gets shells and sea-weed and cloudy water in the ocean where autobiographies are
published. I hope this account furnishes more than sea-weed, more than shells. I
hope those that walk along the beach of this autobiography find rare ocean delights of
imperishable value. That is what I hope readers will find here. That is what I looked
for in the autobiographies of the famous, the rich and the daring. But, they could not
satisfy nor appease my hunger and, in the end, I got a small collection of beach
detritus, smooth rocks, pieces of fish bone and coloured glass. Needing to be
oceanographers, needing degrees in aquatic zoology or botany, needing a highly
refined aesthetic sense, we so often have to settle for building sand castles in the sand
and strolling casually along the beach with our brains addled by life’s minutiae, trying
to find in the fresh salty air some new life for our souls. Needing more than the sunwarmed sand we seem to stand in our separate solitudes, strangers in so many ways to
ourselves and to life itself. There is, it seems to me anyway, an irreconcilable gap
between expectations and outcomes, at least in some areas of life. Sometimes, too,
outcomes exceed the expectations; the ocean deeps contain specimens beyond my
wildest dreams. At the turn of the millennium this was actually the case. My hope
was that this work would add to this special collection of specimens which
oceanographers were truely finding in the dark depths of the ocean.
Sometimes, though, both in life and in reading(surely that is a false dichotomy) I
found that I had simply no expectations at all. When young, for example, I simply
had no idea what to expect from the trip that was in store for me. I took what came my
way. Often it is best not to have expectations. But much of the time they are
unavoidable. I hope the tree of your expectations, your longing, dear reader, does not
yield the fruit of disappointment. I hope, too, that the fire of your hope does not
become ashes215 as you search this autobiographical account for some helpful
perspectives on your life and times. I hope there is life here, perspectives of
relevance.
May there be little of the kind of life that begins in romance and high hopes, like that
of Deborah-Kerr’s and Burt Lancaster’s tryst on the sand in the 1953 film From Here
to Eternity,and ends, as so much of romance does end, in sadness and the dashing of
hopes. 1953 was a big year for me, too, and for the narrative at the centre of this
autobiography. But my romance, at least back then, had nothing to do with the erotic
and everything to do with an idea. I hope readers are enticed after a short read of this
autobiography. May they put the book down to cook their evening meal, work in the
garden, watch that movie or attend to their many responsibilities and pick it up again
with enthusiasm. That would indeed give me pleasure. I can but hope.
214
Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public, Transaction Publishers, New
Brunswick, 1997(1927), pp.11-63; Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism and Socialism,
1944. Such was the situation, or at least such was my view, at least, for the years in
the first century of the Formative Age.
215
Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys, USA, Wilmette, 1952, p.13.
The wonder of this age is that it has become so varied, so rich, so full of change and
movement and of novelty that it seems to stand in little need of what I have written
here. The great books of history, too, for the most part stand unread by the hapless
millions as they read another 'how-to' book, the latest 'therapy manual,' or some
magazine of their choice before browsing through the local paper or, perhaps, some
advertising leaflets placed in their mailbox. Ironically, at the same time, more history
gets read than ever before. There is more print passing over the eyes of the human
community than ever before in history. Whether that will include this work of mine,
time will tell.
Our age provides a cornucopia of stuff, intense, engrossing, distracting, mundane,
secular and spiritual, material to refine and elaborate our pleasures. In many ways it is
easier now to be happy. Pleasantness is scattered everywhere.216 But so, too, is there
horror, anxieties and uncertainties.217 And there are autobiographies. After ten more
years of writing and note-gathering, building on the first edition of this autobiography,
I felt I had a second edition. I had altered my basic narrative only slightly, but I had
built up a supporting structure of material that analysed autobiography as a genre. I
had a helpful resource of literally hundreds of thousands of words. I was ready for
another assault on this enigmatic, subtle and, I find, elusive act of writing one’s story.
The elusiveness lies in finding some quintessence of story, some essential meaning
that one can give to one’s experience or, as T.S. Eliot puts the idea in his poem The
Dry Savages:
It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern,
and ceases to be a mere sequenceOr even development.(lines 85-87)
And again:
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.(lines 93-96)
Some of this elusiveness, this curious creature, that is a person's life is described by
Emily Dickinson in the following poem:
The Past is such a curious Creature
To look her in the Face
A transport may receipt us
Or a Disgrace-Unarmed if any meet her
I charge him fly
216
George Townshend, The Mission of Baha'u'llah, George Ronald, Oxford,
1973(1952), p.91.
217
Richard Sennett, "The New Political Economy and its Culture," Hedgehog,
Spring, 2000.
Her faded Ammunition
Might yet reply.218
I look on this curious creature, the past, with much more humour and
dispassionateness than once I did and I seek the ‘reply’ of that ‘Ammunition.’ The
nostalgia I have often come across for 'the good old days' distorts the real harshness of
the past. There is, too, a fascination for the incredible story of the evolution of man
and his communities. Perhaps what I have written here in this fourth edition is the
start of the release of that 'Ammunition' that Dickinson refers to. "The world is," as
Horace Walpole wrote back in 1776 at the outset of the American Revolutionary War,
"a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel."219 It can also be a
rich tapestry to those without an historical sense and don't tend to think about history,
but that tapestry must be composed of threads from other domains of human
experience.
As I approach the age of sixty I see much more of the comedy, the subtlety and the
complexity of the human narrative than I once did; the serious tragedy that I once saw
in life has been softened, ameliorated, but not entirely eliminated, with the years.
Humanity's collective adolesence and the momentous transition of our time have
brought and are bringing crises and turmoil on an unprecedented scale amidst a torrent
of conflicting interests. I look, too, at this curious creature the past, and in particular
the forty years of pioneering that is at the heart of this story, as Hosein Danesh put it
in an essay he once wrote on the subject, as part of the outstanding contribution to the
history of the unity of the world that is the Baha'i pioneering activity. 220 But it is an
outstanding contribution that I have only just begun to understand.
In some ways the truths associated with pioneering give substance to a concept of
truth expressed in a history text, Making Sense of Modern Times: "Truth happens to
an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its truth is an event or process. Truth
is provisional and changing."221 I'm sure this is part of truth's relativity. And, of
course, there is much more. Emerson wrote in his essay "The Poet" that half of what
makes human beings is their expression. For me that expression is, significantly, the
written word. Writing and artistic expression in general, Emerson concludes, is an
ability confined to a few. I think that is true of writing, although people express their
creative bents in a wide variety of ways.
Donald Horne, Australian social critic, suggests that we reserve autobiography "for
books that are primarily concerned with the changes, surprises and shifting around of
the self."222 Perhaps he will add my book to his list. For there has been much shifting
and many changes and surprises insofar as the self, myself, is concerned and much
else during these four epochs. I hope he would not consider my work an
'autoglorification.' There have been continuities in the midst of the ups-and-downs,
the crises and the victories. Like A.B. Facey in his autobiographical work, A
Fortunate Life, there has been a continuous core to my experience that has remained
unchanged despite the changes and challenges from life. No matter how continuous
218
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, editor, T.H. Johnson, 1970, p.531.
Horace Walpole(1717-1797) in a Letter to Anne, 16 August 1776.
220
H. Danesh in Baha'i Scholarship: A Compilation and Essays, 1992, p.66.
221
J.D. Hunter, editor, Making Sense of Modern Times, p.209.
219
and how shifting, I'm sure there will be some who will wish I had devoted this work
to, say, an animal autobiography. Tess Cosslett, of Lancaster University, in his article
Subjectivity and Ethics in Animal Autobiography: Black Beauty223 and Others,
discusses the use made of the autobiographical genre by humans about their animals.
Given the enthusiasm in our culture for pets many, after they have sampled this
narrative, may wish that my account was about one or several of the cats in my life,
the many dogs or horses that crossed my path, or the birds, the fish or any one of the
host of animals that became part of my life since I was a child and which David
Attenborough and others have colourfully presented to my eyes and mind over the
years. For many, especially those who seem to love animals more than humans, I’m
sure would prefer my own story was left right out, although it is unlikely that such a
person would ever pick up this narrative and try it on for size anyway.
There is little reference to animals at all in this story, although I did have a cat around
the house off and on from about the age of ten until the age of fifty. And,
interestingly, I became quite fond of cats, spent much time in their company,
particularly because I was often up at night when everyone was in bed but the cat.
Details about my experiences with cats and with dogs, other peoples' who provided an
unpleasant musical background on many of my evening walks in many towns I lived
in, the occasional bird, animal menageries, visits to zoos, aqua-marines, inter alia, I
virtually ignore because, if nothing else, their significance in my life has been
negligible. If, though, as 'Abdu'l-Baha says, stories repeated about others are seldom
good, a silent tongue is safest,"224 perhaps it would have been better to write more
about the animals in my life and less about myself, at least for those animal lovers.
The same argument could be made about plants and minerals, insects and vegetation,
although that is a more complex argument and I will leave that for later.
Indeed, as I try to place this Baha’i, this pioneering, experience, 1953/4-2003/4, into
some context, I'd like to draw on the writings of Arnold Toynbee in his A Study of
History, Vol.2 which was first published in 1934 as Baha'i Administration was taking
its initial form in several countries around the world. Toynbee quotes the eighteenth
century philosopher David Hume, who concluded his essay Of the Rise and Progress
of the Arts and Sciences with the observation that "the arts and sciences, like some
plants, require a fresh soil; and, however rich the land may be, and however you may
recruit it by art or care, it will never, when once exhausted, produce anything that is
perfect or finished in the kind.225 For some reason, for many reasons, in August 1962,
on the eve of my pioneering venture I felt quite exhausted or should I say I felt a sense
of the tedious, the tedium of the environment, the environment in which I had lived
for the previous dozen years in my childhood and adolescence. It was the
environment where I was in the porch-swing of my first bones, where I had first
settled into myself and my life and where I stared out at the world with a complex mix
of awe, boredom, confusion and psychological hunger.
222
Donald Horne, "Life lines," The Australian Review of Books, May 1998.
Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, Internet, May 2003.
224
'Abdu'l-Baha, 'Abdu'l-Baha in London, p.131: quoted in The Pattern of Baha'i
Life, Baha'i Pub. Trust, London, 1970(1948), p. 31.
225
David Hume in A Study of History, Vol.2, Galaxy Book, 1962(1934), p.73.
223
But by 1962 my bones hankered for a fresh soil. I needed to move on, to travel, to see
the world, what young people have been doing extensively since the late eighteenth
century.226 Each generation in the twentieth century seemed to travel more; the
generation that came of age in the 1960s made a quantum leap out into the world.
While we leaped, or at least after I leaped, I tried to convey something of the nature of
the leap and of the conventional life that occupied the ground-tone of my days. For no
matter how much the music varies, there is always a gound-tone of conventionality,
like some sort of glue that helps keep us from being unstuck. And having been
unstuck several times, I am more than a little conscious of the importance of
stuckness, of conventionality.
Toynbee also draws on the mythology of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition to
discuss the stimulus of new ground. I want to draw on this same mythology as I try to
place this pioneering venture into a fitting context. Toynbee writes that in their
removal out of the magic garden into the workaday world, Adam and Eve transcend
the food-gathering, the hunting and gathering, economy of "Primitive Mankind and
give birth to the fathers of an agricultural and a pastoral civilization. In their exodus
from Egypt, the Children of Israel….give birth to a generation which helps to lay the
foundations of the Syriac Civilization in taking possession of the Promised Land."227
Such is part of the symbolic significance of, arguably, the first pioneers.
I argue here, and it has insensibly become my conviction with the years, that Baha'i
pioneers around the world are helping to erect, in ways they are quite unable to
conceive or understand, the nucleus and pattern of a future world Order. It is not an
agricultural and pastoral civilization they are building but, rather, a global civilization.
The Promised Land they are taking possession of for the Lord of Hosts, the blessed
Person of the Promised One, they do so as part of a heavenly army228 and the land is
the entire planet. Just as the highest expression of the civilization that the Israelites
represented was to be found on new ground--in the land of Israel--so, too, does the
international pioneer in this embryonic global civilization find the highest, the finest
expression, the fruit of his own life, in the place he has taken up root, the new soil.
This autobiography is not born out of the pain of exile, alienation or some
metaphysical homelessness, as is so often the case with autobiographies.229 Rather, it
is born out of what you might call the restorative power of narration, out of a writing
process that transforms through a general autobiographical impulse, an impulse that
creates a certain reportage, that documents a life, a self-story and a time, that serves as
a symptomatic or transfigurative symbolization of an experience, an experience that
226
C. Aitchison, N.MacLeod and S. Shaw, Leisure and Tourism Landscapes:
Social and Cultural Georgraphies, Routledge, London, 2000, p.89. For most of
history travel beyond one's home and environs was a rare occurrence.
227
Toynbee, op.cit., p.73. I do not take this story literally but more of a metaphor for
the period after the Neolithic revolution(1200-8000 BC) to the period of the late
second and early first millennium BC(1300-800 BC).
228
'Abdu'l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, Wilmette, 1977, p.47.
229
Judith M. Melton, The Face of Exile: Autobiographical Journeys, Iowa City,
University of Iowa Press, 1998.
looks like it is going to last the rest of my life. 230 It is born, too, out of a series of
certain kinds of symbolic markers and consummations that have defined where I have
been in relation to others in my life, both living and dead, that have served as
signposts helping me to make sense of my life in terms of place and time and to help
give it a coherent narrative shape in spite of the many disorienting, fragmenting,
effects of experience. For the project of one's survival and growth, the contribution to
self and society and one's meaning and purpose all have a place in time and space.
And place, unlike a consumer product, has an organic component, a history, an
ecosystem, and a social body, that inevitably shapes its form and social character and
the person in that place. This project must be understood in its temporal and spacial
dimensions, in addition to whatever metaphysical and ideological abstractions
underpin the whole exercise.
Some may find this context in which I attempt to place this international pioneering
story a little too lofty or pretentious, a little too over-the-top as it is said these days.
And that is an understandable reaction, especially for those who interpret life in terms
of some local landscape, some local region with family, job and garden occupying
centre stage. In the bewildering range of autobiographical writing now on show some
tell their stories in terms of geography and the nation-state, their homeland, some in
terms of their family and career, others in terms of their private interests and hobbies,
and still others as an expression of their religious, political or social commitments.
I have always seen my life in terms of some big picture, some metanarrative, some
global story. I feel this international pull and have felt it since my teens. I see what I
write as part of a mosaic of a time when the world seemed to be shifting on its axis,
when there was much impoverishment of life and much enrichment. What I write is
shaped by narrative paradigms which I select, by a certain literary plotting, by
ideological investments, by the caprices of memory and forgetfulness and by my own
psychic needs. In the process of writing this autobiography I examine various forces
at work in the pioneering process, the interplay of history and autobiography and the
complex relationship between the autobiographer who lives in history and the
narrative I construct regarding that history. There is, too, some of that nectar, that
celestial life, that divine animal that allows the mind to flow, as Emerson said in one
of his essays, "into and through things hardest and highest" and the intellect to be
ravished "by coming nearer to the fact."231 By the time I was writing the fourth edition
of this autobiography my "habit of living was," as Emerson called it, "set on a key so
low that the common influences" delighted me.232 I hope the result for readers will be
some evidence of a satisfying interplay of observation, wit, and insight. One can but
hope.
As a child, like virtually everyone else I knew or did not know in the 1950s, local
activity filled my daily life. My imagination played all over this world and at its
fringes. There were then, as there are now, many whose life occupied some central
pivot around things beside the private, the personal and the familial. Over these last
five decades the vast majority of people whom I have come to know, outside the
230
Cynthia Merrill, "A Review of The Face of Exile: Autobiographical Journeys," in
a/b: Auto/Biography, Purdue University Press, Winter, 2002.
231
Emerson, "The Poet."
232
idem
Baha'i community that has been at the centre of my own life, have an individual ethos,
a milieux, a reason d'etre, you might even call it a religion, that is a composite of: job,
family, home and garden and a set of interests, hobbies and activities to occupy them
as pleasantly as possible in life's space and give it meaning. I have mentioned this
before and I will mention it again because it was such a pervasive part of what you
might call the social and philosophical part of the environment of my life, of what was
the quintessentially conventional core of existence at the mundane level.
I often recreate images of those halcyon days but, by 1962, a new set of continuities
were forming around beliefs and a new community. My identity was reforming
around a whole new set of relations between home, culture, intellectual tradition and
nationality, marriage and landscape, career and the profound changes associated with
movement to new places, what Baha'is had called 'pioneering' for some twenty-five
years by 1962.233 In the wider society, a nomadic, voluntary and concentrated
movement had developed in my late childhood and adolescence, the 1950s. It
expressed a form of intellectual wandering—the Beat Generation—which widened to
involve youth throughout the Western world. It is not by chance that the sacred text
of this nomadism, a nomadism of refusal, was Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It was a
book that celebrated the epic of the hobos and the diversity of their roaming.
"I walked along the tracks in the long sad October light of the valley, hoping for an SP
freight to come along so I could join the grape-eating hobos and read the funnies with
them,"234 wrote Kerouac. The book is about the pleasure of movement, the aesthetics
of rouler, hanging around as a style of life, in trains, buses, trucks, bus stations. Why
we do things is , of course, a complex question but my decision to pioneer in the
1960s had its roots in a number of sources of which this Beat Generation, it seems
logical to conclude, was one.
Over the years I felt a Babel of my multiple selves being created and writing this
autobiography is, in part, an attempt to harmonize these voices, to thread the maze of
the past into some tapestry of colour and shape,235 some guiding ideal of a singularly
construed self, some coherent autobiography.
The self as a unified, stable, entity existing through time, is a traditional
autobiographical perspective that, while I have been pioneering since the 1960s, has
been unravelled, critiqued and debunked by many theorists of autobiography. Like
the land I walk on, my self is an even more changing, a more unstable and
indefineable entity, because it is ultimately associated with the soul. The self, of
course, appears to the senses as a fixed form. Writing this autobiography is as much a
cognitive self-reconstruction as it is a performative act. But it is not a fiction, not a
giving face; it is, rather, a document of self-exploration and self-defence, a document
of catharsis and elaboration. It is also what Emerson said was a characteristic of the
233
The term 'pioneer' became an increasing part of Baha'i vocabulary beginning in
the mid-1930s according to Will C. van den Hoonaard, Professor of Sociology at the
University of New Brunswick. See his The Origins of the Baha’i Community of
Canada: 1898-1948.
234
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Andre Deutsch, London, 1958, p.101.
235
Cynthia Merrill, op.cit.
poet: being inflamed and carried away by thought and heeding my dream which holds
me "like an insanity."236
The Baha'i Faith, in the course of my pioneering venture, became what America was
to Emerson, a poem. It gave me a departure from routine, from a life path with the
normalities and predictabilities of a kid in southern Ontario from the lower middle
class. It gave to me an emotion that touched my intellect and sapped my conventional
entusiasms. An upheaval occurred in my sensibility, an upheaval that resulted in a
new, a fresh perspective, on life, on living. Its ample vision dazzled my imagination.
My art, my writing, became the path by which I defined "the work." With Emerson,
too, I doubt not "but persist." The impressions of the actual world do seem to fall, as
Emerson put it in the final paragraph of his essay on "The Poet," like summer rain
washing the lines of this narrative account.
The wider society in which I live gives little recognition to the world view which I
feel and think about, although the global nature of society, the ethic of one world that
is part and parcel of the Baha'i teachings is quickly and confusedly making its
appearance as the decades spin by insensibly and sensibly. The wider society, for the
most part, has virtually no conception of the contribution that I and my coreligionists
are making. What I do, I do virtually entirely in an obscurity that is, thusfar, virtually
impenetrable, although the rise from this obscurity has been taking place slowly over
these epochs. I find it interesting, somewhat surprising, but partly predictable, given
the pattern that has repeated itself in the story of western civilization going back to the
Israelites, that religious pioneers have "transformed themselves" but "continued to live
in obscurity." In the case of these same Israelites this obscurity lasted for, perhaps,
seven or eight centuries.237 I see myself as one of a second generation, during the
years 1962 to 1987, of international pioneers. The first generation of pioneers
occupied the years from just before my parents met in the late 1930s and continued
until I was in my matriculation year at high school.
If the work I do has taken place largely in obscurity it is hardly surprising, as I have
just said, given that the Israelites lived in an equal if not greater obscurity for over 700
years in the land they moved to as pioneers.238 Actually and ironically, I see my life
and its significance largely as one that has seen a gradual coming out of obscurity or,
as the Universal House of Justice put it in 2002, a "continuing rise from obscurity."239
It is difficult to judge either my own life or that of the Baha'i Faith in the long term
"before the play is done," as Frances Quarles once wrote.240 Although I take account
of my life every day, and have for years, it is impossible to judge one's ultimate
achievement or lack thereof. The ultimate achievement of this Faith I have been
associated with for fifty years, though, is rich with promise. There has certainly been,
for these several decades, these epochs, a process of coming out of obscurity both for
236
Emerson, "The Poet."
Toynbee, op.cit., p.54.
238
The roots, too, of Greece civilization began at the turn of the first millennium BC
with a mingling of influences from Africa, Asia and the Middle East with those
"rising from Greek soil." Ted Hughes," Myth and Education," The Symbolic Order,
editor, Peter Abbs, The Falmer Press, NY, 1989, p.162.
239
The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, 2002.
240
Frances Quarles(1592-1644), Emblems.
237
me and for the Baha'i Faith, but so much of the inner experience one has as a Baha’i,
at least in so many of the pioneer places I have lived since 1962, is one of the relative
obscurity of the Movement I am associated with.
Perhaps the years I taught in high schools and post-secondary schools in Australia,
1972 to 1999, saw a personal rise from obscurity take place in my life. 241 More than
half my life now has been lived as an overseas pioneer, from the age of twenty-seven
to fifty-nine. More recently the rise out of obscurity is taking a different form through
my writing; perhaps my late adulthood and old age will see in this creative field what
the House of Justice called this "continuing rise from obscurity" The expression
"continuing rise from obscurity" is an apt one for both my own life and the life of this
Cause. In so many ways, I have come to see my life and the life of the Cause as
obverse, like opposite sides of the same coin, as 'Abdu'l-Baha once described the
relationship between this life and the next.
The character of individuals rises and falls with the roles, activities, practices and
customs that make them social animals. And so it is that this book, this story, will
inevitably dwell on the web of relations that have cultivated and educated me. It will
dwell on the circumstances of my time and my religion, my family and my profession,
and how they bear on my social identity, on the psychological glue that holds me and
especially my religious community together.242 It is not my purpose here to dwell on
the many theories of identity, it is rather to provide a sense of myself as a person, a
story I believe in and am committed to. But however important all of these ideas are,
this autobiography is not essentially a work in psychology; nor is it a work in
sociology, history or literature. It is a compendium and as such may not satisfy those
who want a depth of perspective deriving from one or more of these social sciences.
The distinctions of personal merit and influence are tempered but still conspicuous in
any Baha'i community. We are not, of course, aware of all these distinctions. Many
of them are feeble and obscure. Others are brighter than the noonday sun. Most of
humanity is not conscious of the abilities and talents of others who cross their paths.
Indeed, we all wear differently constituted blinders for various reasons of time and
circumstance. So it was that there were many, if not most, whom I scarcely
appreciated, to whose true virtues and talents I was insensible. The severe
subordination of rank and office, which often pertains in societies that raise
egalitarianism to unrealistic and undesireable heights of value, which do not see
equality for what it is, a chimera, was not characteristic of this community which
recognized a wide range of statuses and roles resulting from talent and appointment,
election and loyalty, mature experience and selfless devotion.
So it was, therefore, that I came to be more than a little conscious of the very real
abilities of people I came to know as a result of seeing them week after week in their
homes, their lounge-rooms, seeing them serve tea and chat with the wide variety of
humanity that were present in any community of even a few souls. So, too, did
familiarity often dull or prevent my appreciation of the true worth of many of the
241
A twenty-eight year period, less three years to recuperate from bi-polar episodes,
to do part-time jobs and to work in a tin mine(1979-1981).
242
Todd Gitlin argues that identity comes from the features of new social movements.
The term 'identity' came from the studies of psychologist Erik Erikson.
friends and associations who were part of my life in this incredibly diverse
community in the last half century. Wittgenstein put this experience of familiarity
this way: "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of
their simplicity and familiarity."243
The psychological synchronicity required for relationships to achieve any harmony, I
had mastered perhaps as early as my twenties and this attitude helped me all my life.
But there was so much else required for the battles of life than the application of this
somewhat simple concept to relationships. And there was always, to some extent, an
inevitable degree of tension in inter-relationships
Baha'u'llah says in a prayer for assistance, assistance for both the individual and the
Cause: "Guide me then in all that pertaineth to the exaltation of Thy Cause and the
magnification of the station of Thy loved ones."244 Life brings out in our experience,
it would appear, events which 'magnify our stations' and events which 'draw away and
hinder' us from 'approaching Thy court.'245 The battle, it also appears, does not end in
this earthly life. For, ultimately, all the battles in life are within and so they have been
all my life, no matter what the external war: WW2, Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq and the
Middle East, the war on poverty, aids and starvation, an aggressive secularism246 and
the multitude of others that have dotted the landscape of my life since 1944. Much of
our inner battle, of course, we never see. That, it seems to me, is only natural. This
autobiography tells as much the inner story of self as it does the documentation of
actual experience,247 and little of those external wars I have just referred to above.
So many events, or appearances, or accidents, which seemed to deviate from the
ordinary course of nature were often rashly ascribed to the immediate action of the
Deity or the will of God, as I found it so often expressed by my coreligionists or other
believers on other religious paths. The credulous fancy of the multitude often gives
some theistic contour to the shape and colour, language and motion, to the fleeting,
common and sometimes uncommon events of daily life. I found myself disinclined to
attribute such events to the direct intervention to the Central Orb of the universe.
Conscious as I was, very early in my Baha'i experience, certainly by 1962 at the age
of eighteen, of the several protocols of Baha'i piety; stranded as I so often was on
uncertainty both before and after trying to enter that rare Presence--as I attempted to
do in prayer; giving expression to a skepticism which was part of the very spirit of my
age, I was a humble petitioner, or so I tried to be, who was often joyless and emptyhanded. A loss of that innocence and exaltation was also mine as was a sense of the
knowingness of my knowledge.248 Prayer often provided what Shakespeare said it
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
The 'provisional translation' of a prayer sent to me by Roger White 1990(ca).
245
Baha'u'llah in Baha'i Prayers, Wilmette, 1985(1954), p.193.
246
S. Lukes, Emile Durkheim His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical
Study, Penguin Press, London, 1978, p.358.
247
This was also very true of the poet Laura Riding. See: Barbara Adams, "Laura
Riding's Poems: A Double Ripeness," Modern Poetry Studies, Vol. 11, 1982,
pp.189-195.
248
Thanks to Roger White, "A Sudden Music," A Witness of Pebbles, George
Ronald, 1981, p.81.
243
244
could, in words he put in the mouth of Prospero in the last lines of the Epilogue of his
last play, The Tempest:
My ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As far as my life is concerned, I feel a little like Mark Twain who wrote: "I have
thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed
of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to get on paper yet….I believe that if I
should put in all or any of those incidents I have felt in my life I should be sure to
strike them out when I revise the book."249 Twain's hyperbole is delightful here and,
although I can only think of several incidents that caused me to feel a sense of intense and prolonged shame, incidents that one could argue are worthy of recording in
an intimate autobiography, I, like Twain, would strike them out here, if indeed I had
included them at all in my first edition ten years ago. Most of the incidents that
caused me to experience a sense of shame, were brief, short verbal exchanges,
remembered for perhaps a few days, a few months or even a few years, but are now
lost to my memory, and thankfully so, in the sands of time.
"The tongue," as Baha'u'llah said in a richly textured and profound passage, "is a
smouldering flame." "Excess of speech," He went on, "is a deadly poison," and I have
had more than my several drops over what is now six decades of life.250 Some of these
shame-causing incidents involved the erotic inclination, or the concupiscible appetite
as Baha’u’llah called it, and readers have these incidents to look forward in the
chapters ahead. This autobiography is not intended as an unburdening or baring of
my soul. There is some psychotherapy here; there is also some history which is
awakened, as Toynbee notes in the opening sentence of his final volume of A Study
of History, "by the mere experience of being alive."251 I engage in some
confessionalism but, it seems to me, it is a moderate amount relative to the great
quantity that could be given the light of day. Some readers, I anticipate, will regard
the confessionalism they read in the pages ahead as far from moderate; others will say
'he has not gone far enough!'
But I write what I do about my personal battle, its failings and its successes, because,
as Elizabeth Rochester once wrote in her personal letter to Canadian pioneers
overseas in 1981, "I believe we Baha'is need to know that we all experience the
effects of the world around us and we all are vulnerable to stress when things are
different from what we are used to. Baha'u'llah knows it is hard work. We don't
overlook what isn't there! We are not called upon to deny the existence of faults or to
pretend that we don't know they are there." Elizabeth shares some of her thoughts
about acknowledging our sinfulness. "How will we learn from one another," she goes
on, "if we are not open enough to acknowledge the process between the discomfort
and the joy?" If I do not let others know that I struggle and have struggled in the
249
Mark Twain, "Chapters from Mark Twain's Autobiography," North American
Review, September 1906-December 1907, September 2001.
250
Baha'u'llah in a fascinating tablet known as "The True Seeker."
251
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol.10, 1963(1954), p. 3.
same way that they must struggle, Elizabeth concludes, will they have the courage to
try, to endure, to be steadfast until the victories come?252 Such is the spirit within
which much of what I have written in the struggle department is included. Failures,
like successes, are part of the very clay of life. Guilt, shame, loss and feelings of
incompetence and inadequacy are built into the fabric of my life, all our lives and
readers will hear some of my cry, my admissions, my confessionalism in the pages
ahead.
If, as 'Abdu'l-Baha writes, "stories repeated about others are seldom good, a silent
tongue is safest," and "even good may be harmful if spoken at the wrong time and to
the wrong person,"253 then I am sure to cause offence to some in the course of this
book. So......I will get the apologies out of the way right now. Autobiography is an art
that can open the passage from feeling to meaning. It can be a detonator of intellect
and will in its attempt to translate the intensity of the life of human beings through a
play with the familiar, deal with both the ordinary and the deeply felt. I'd like to think
I give to readers a great narrative achieving what great narratives are supposed to
achieve: provide a background readers can understand, present a character readers can
believe in and care about, provide an adventure and tell a story in which something
surprising and yet partly inevitable occurs, which moves readers, makes them
question things they believe in and fills their emotional selves.254 That's what I'd like
to think. I don't think I achieve all these things. Few stories, narratives, novels, books,
autobiographies, do. I please myself here and, in the process, I hope to please a few
readers. I try to provide what Canadian poet Ken Norris says contemporary poets do
not yet achieve: a unifying vision.255 I try to do, too, what T.S. Eliot confessed that
writers should do. “Meaning,” he wrote, “is the bone you throw a reader while you do
your real work upon him.”256 I suppose this raises the question ‘what is my real
work?’ I will leave that to the reader to assess as he or she plows through the next
seven hundred pages.
I'd like to return to a few more comments from Arnold Toynbee on the strength of the
impression, the affect on the receptivity, the vividness, of historical circumstances. I
have been reading Toynbee from time to time now for forty years and what he writes
is so often pertinent to this autobiography. Toynbee says that the affects, the strength,
of the impact of historical circumstances is "apt to be proportionate to their violence
and their painfulness." When the process of civilization is "in full swing," he goes on,
then "a thousand familiar experiences" constantly make us aware of our "goodly
heritage."257 At the same time, one can not help feel, from time to time, that the
customs and sanctions of civilization "constitute a thin veneer over our baser
252
Elizabeth Rochester, Pulse of the Pioneer, January 1981, National Pioneer
Committee of Canada, pp.5-7.
253
'Abdu'l-Baha in The Pattern of Baha'i Life: A Compilation, London
1970(1948), p.31.
254
Mary Schendlinger, "Judges' Essay: The Adventure of Narrative," Prism
International, 2002.
255
Ken Norris, "Interview," Quarry, 1988.
256
T.S. Eliot in “The Meaning of Meaning,” Marion Stocking, Books in Brief,
Vol.53, No.3, Spring 2003.
257
'Abdu'l-Baha, Pattern of Baha'i Life, p.31. Also this "goodly heritage" is a
phrase from Psalms, xvi, 6.
instrincts."258 Whether our civility derives from guilt, shame or religious proclivity
in this age, these early epochs of the Formative Age, it is a civility that slips to the
edge and barbarism so often takes its place.
The Universal House of Justice put it a little differently, but in the same vein, by
saying that we should "take deep satisfaction from the advances in society." 259 As
these epochs moved insensibly through the decades of my pioneering experience more
and more people seemed to sink into a slough of despond and were "troubled by
forecasts of doom."260 I, too, and the Baha'i community were deeply aware of the
dark heart we were travelling through, but there were always those deep satisfactions
in the progress we had made as a society. The Baha'i Faith also leads ultimately to an
optimism regarding the future of humanity but the process of getting to that distant
'golden age' is fraught with problems with which we must struggle. And so the
optimism is liberally coated with realism. With the years, then, I have become more
than a little sensitive to those "professional optimists" whom Thomas Hardy spoke of
with skepticism and who "wear too much the strained look of the smile on the
skull."261 Perhaps it was the smile of shyness, embarrassment, of not knowing quite
what to say in the heterogeneous social situations increasingly demanded of people in
groups. Perhaps it was the smile that fills the gap between real love and interest and
that which has to be generated in social contexts in order to survive. Perhaps it was
more of a temperamentally asocial tendency, a preference for privacy over interaction
with people. The passion for privacy which increased as middle adulthood became
late adulthood was an important part of the society that nourished me. In fact, if you
could hear the sound of that passion, it would be deafening.262
By the time my first memories were taking form in this earthly life, in 1947 and 1948,
radio was in the first years of its second quarter century and TV was just starting out
on its journey for the masses after twenty years of technological development.263 My
parents were in their teens and twenties when they listened to their first radio
programs in the 1920s; my grandfather was in his fifties back in that roaring decade.
These two mediums brought an immense quantity of historical impressions into my
life and the lives of millions in the fifty-six years that constitute my present memorybank: 1948-2004.264 In fact, I was a member of that first generation that enjoyed
television, radio, newspapers and magazines, computers and satellite communication
all together, as the basis of a continual swill from a print and electronic media that
258
Robert M. Young, "Guilt and the Veneer of Civilization," Internet Site, 2001.
The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, Haifa, 2000, p.144.
260
The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 156.
261
Thomas Hardy in Thomas Hardy: Selected Letters, editor, Michael Millgate,
Oxford UP, 1990.
262
Robin Leach, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” The Secret Parts of Fortune:
Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms, Ron Rosenbaum,
Random House, 2000. This enthusiasm for privacy was not just a characteristic of the
rich.
263
This is not the place for a detailed history of the new electronic media but,
generally, the 1920s saw the introduction of radio and the 1940s the introduction of
TV, with the technologies of each being developed significantly in the 10 to 20 years
before their introduction.
264
I have no memories before the forth year of my life, July 1947 to July 1948.
259
was our lot. And we came to enjoy much more: jet travel, flights in space, a
cornucopia of gadgets and devices, a host of technological conveniences that resulted
from advances in the physical and biological sciences. They all seem to have come
trundling into our lives at different points in the first century of this Formative Age, as
Baha'i administration was spreading out over the planet, especially after 1953 when
this Kingdom of God, this "most wonderful and thrilling motion"265 appeared.
There is, as Toynbee noted in that same eleven volumes of history, "an automatic
stimulus from the social milieux in which a human being grows up and in which he
continues to live and work as an adult."266 But in 1952 for a full three quarters of the
human race, on the eve of my first contact with that revolutionary force that was and
is the Baha'i Faith, history signified nothing. It was "full of sound and fury," but it
had little to no meaning outside the family and the local community. This picture
changed rapidly in the next half century. It is difficult to summarize the affect here
but, suffice it to say, that the quantity of information that poured into the eyes, the ears
and the minds of increasing numbers of human beings left the educated portion of the
human race--and the uneducated--swimming in a sea of ideas, events and information.
Of course, even as the new millennium came upon us, half the world was still illiterate
and had a minimal access to electronic media. But the global scene was changing
fast. As we strove to be more precise, even fastidious and scientific in our language,
the world got more complex; people used language casually and so inexactly. We
became much more conscious of ambiguity even as we tried to strip language of its
poetic allusions, its vagueness. I say this because, however precise I try to be about
my life and times, I can not avoid the consequences of the ambiguous, the complex
and the inexactitude of language and life. If we want to be precise perhaps Arabic
should be the lingua franca.
It required a creative stirring of curiosity, a voyage of intellectual exploration, a
response to the challenge of the great complexity of history, society and life to make
the writing of this autobiography an experience similar to that of the excavator of the
treasures buried in the Second City of Troy, Heinrich Schliemann. "It is not from any
feeling of vanity," Schliemann wrote in trying to explain the origins of his personal
story, "but from a desire to show how the work of my later life has been the natural
consequence of the impressions I received in my earliest childhood."267 This
intellectual exploration into my early days is, like Schliemann's, part of my effort to
show the interconnections of my life and its wholeness. Although I appreciate the
importance of the contribution of these early childhood years to my life, I do not
dwell on them unduly. They are but one of my chief exhibits or foci, as I try to lay a
foundation of understanding for myself and, if all goes well, for some readers. I
might add, though, that it is not only my early life but my early adult life and middle
adult life that has laid and is now laying the foundation for what lies ahead. It is all, in
the end, an integrated circuit of time and space. This is not to say that there were not
forces which profoundly influenced my educational and professional pedigree, the
constellation of my interests and abilities. Entrenched in discourses of difference,
265
'Abdu'l-Baha in God Passes by, p.351. The opening of the temple in Chicago in
1953.
266
ibid.,p.5.
267
Heinrich Schliemann, Ilios, John Murray, London, 1880, p.1.
otherness, nature and nurture I could describe these forces in great detail. But not
here.
Like the poet Coleridge I see myself as a solitary but gregarious person in the
presence of a fascinating, an enigmatic, a reticent stranger who is striving to be
understood. That stranger is myself. Although I can write about other people and other
things, I write here about myself, the cri de coeur of the modern author. I find a
strong existential need for solitary experience. Unlike the need of the famous travel
writer Paul Theroux for what he calls “solitary exercise” and therefore bicycles, sails,
canoes and spends weeks in remote places by himself,268 I find life now, during the
years of putting the meat on the bones of this autobiography, gives me a relatively
solitary existence compared to my wall-to-wall “people years” up to 1999.
What made some of the first and significant impressions on my receptive mind, quite
unbeknownst to me at the time and still difficult to explain and understand in a
satisfying way, even after the passing of five decades, was the daily exposure to a
grandfather who was seventy-two when I was born. This grandfather, who had come
to Canada from England at the age of twenty-eight, had raised three children and seen
four grandchildren arrive in and around Hamilton in southern Ontario, before I was
born. He read insatiably as he had since his own childhood to kill the various pains of
life and to satisfy his own endless curiosity. The influence of a very attractive, a
deeply introspective and religious woman, my mother; and a strong, an energetic and
emotional Welshman, my father, provided a triumvirate of forces that combined to
exercise an influence, to this day, which is mysterious, explanatory and filled with
endless hypotheses--and absolutely no memories. For these were the years 1944 to,
perhaps, 1948 when I was four years old. Crucial to my development were these years
but containing nothing but some faint whispers, grey and subtle plays with space and
time, which I can remember.
1944 was also the scene of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the religion that
my mother enquired into in 1953, the Baha'i Faith. Of course, I have no memory of
that date, 1944, either nor of the earlier date in April 1937 when the first teaching
Plan, 1937-1944, put 'Abdu'l-Baha's Tablets of the Divine Plan finally into action.
At that earlier date, in 1937, my parents had yet to meet. They met during that first
Plan and my grandfather enjoyed the first years of his retirement after going from job
to job and place to place for so many years of his adult life as he had done during his
childhood. His life, it would appear, was as gregarious as mine has been. My
grandmother, this man's wife, died of cancer two years into the Plan, in 1939; my
mother reached forty and my father forty-nine when the Plan ended in April 1944.
Two months later I was born, in the two year period between Plans, 1944-1946. This
pattern of relating my life to the several Plans for the extension and consolidation of
the Baha'i community I follow occasionally but not religiously in this autobiography.
"During the year 1944," says British philosopher Bertrand Russell in his own
autobiography, "it became gradually clear that the war was ending."269 This was
certainly the major event of that year of my birth although, to my mother, the major
268
269
Paul Theroux, Fresh Air Fiend, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Bertrand Russell, Autobiogrpahy, Volume 3, Preface.
event was giving birth to me and it nearly killed her. The following prose-poem places
this event in a wider context. The famous American poet, Robert Penn Warren, says
that a poem is “the deepest part of autobiography.”270 Here, then, is the first portion of
this deepest part.
A GIFT
In the first weeks of my life, in August 1944, Shoghi Effendi was able to celebrate the
completion of the first Seven Year Plan. He marked the moment with a gift to the
Baha’is of the world. It was the publication of God Passes By. The book provided “a
window on the spiritual process by which Baha’u’llah’s purpose for humankind is
being realized.”1 At the time of this celebration in August 1944 my mother nearly
died from the birth process that brought me into this world. She was a forty year old
Canadian in Hamilton Ontario Canada who, in August 1944, prayed to be made well
with a promise to her God to give her son to the Lord. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over
Four Epochs, January 17th 2004.
A perspective on the past,
a light on the future,
awakener of capacities,
maker of sense of the world,
and my experience of it,
enriches life, a gift, a shaper
of civilization’s long course,
a great work of the mind,
history taken to a new level,
vehicle for understanding
the Purpose of God,
converging as it did
with Revealed Texts,
summoning up the full
mystery and meaning
of one hundred years
of ceaseless sacrifice.1
And my mother’s prayers
in that same month, August,
must have been answered
as all prayers are
with a resounding “yes!”
“I will make you well,
if you give the boy to Me!”
And so He did and so you did.
It was a gift for a gift
in a season of gift-giving.
1
The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, pp.69-70.
270
Robert Penn Warren, Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, 1988, #7231.
Ron Price
17 January 2004
To the world Jewish community, the first year of my life was the last year of the
holocaust, an event many regard as the nadir of history, an event after which there
could be no more history. For my father, I can only hypothesize that, since he had
just lost two sons in that same war, sons who were from his first marriage, I was,
perhaps, a last glow of light on his mountain-top as was the marriage relationship he
had just entered. I shall never know, though, for I never asked him in all those years
I spent under his roof before he died at the age of seventy when I was twenty-one.
Although we talked briefly on occasion about his own personal myth or meaning
system, as Carl Jung described the effort to explain one's life in his book Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, my father was much more of a doer than a talker. He worked
hard at his job, gardened endlessly at home and gradually fell asleep reading the
newspaper in the evenings, but he did not tend to analyse in much detail his life and
its meaning, at least not verbally and not in conversation with me.
Indeed, we had few conversations in all those years I spent in his company, 1944 to
1965. I was 'tin-ribs' who 'tinkered in the trees.' I was the light of his life but such a
strong accolade was never uttered, as he battled on in his final years, glad to leave this
mortal coil when he did in the mid-1960s as I was about to enter maturity.
I was born, then, during WW2 during what I have come to see as the second phase of
that modern tempest that Shoghi Effendi had described in his book, The Promised
Day Is Come, published in 1941. My mother and father had been in their teens in the
first phase of that tempest, the first world war, 1914 to 1918. My grandfather had just
entered middle age. The remaining years of my life, the years after 1945, occupy the
third phase of that tempest, a phase quite different from the first two phases, a phase
which Henry Miller described as "far more terrible than the destruction" of the first
two wars, the first two phases, with fires that "will rage until the very foundations of
this present world crumble."271 It is not my intention to document any of these three
phases of the destructive calamity that visited humankind in the century I have just
left, for this documentation has been done in intimate detail elsewhere, both visually,
orally and in print. I do not document but I frequently refer to these three phases. I
have different purposes here than historical documentation.
This destruction of the third phase, it could be argued, began symbolically, if not
literally, on August 6th 1945, when I was just one year and two weeks old, with the
dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki in Japan. As I have just indicated, it is not
my intention to document the fine details of this destruction, this destructive process,
this third phase has been documented more than any period in history in volumes that
fill libraries all over the planet in books too voluminous for any human being to read,
except for some infinitesimal portion for whom modern history is their special
interest. Most people now get their history via television. It's not necessarily a bad
271
Henry Miller in The Phoenix and the Ashes, Geoffrey Nash, George Ronald,
Oxford, 1984, p.55. Miller was also one of the few major writers in the 20th century
to praise the Baha'i Faith.
thing for there is so much to know and understand in this new age we are just
entering. 272
There are dozens of history books that describe the process in fine, in minute, detail.
My intention is to draw together my own life, the history of my times and the religion
I began my association with when my mother started to investigate the ideas of one of
its small groups in Burlington Ontario. It was indeed a small group of a dozen or more
people in a religion that was also a small community then of, perhaps, 200,000 strong
globally. Back then in 1953 nine out of ten of the Baha'is lived in Iran. I had no idea
of this at the time, more than fifty years ago. At the age of nine I had other things on
my inarticulate but quite definite agenda with its eternal-seeming things in grade four
and five, with baseball and hockey and beautiful Susan Gregory a few houses away at
the corner of Seneca and New Streets. In the early 1950s, my family also had a
television set and those years saw the launching of a "space opera" fad in pop culture.
With programs such as Space Patrol (ABC, 1950-55), Buck Rogers (1950-51),
Johnny Jupiter (DuMont and ABC, 1953-54), Rocky Jones, Space Ranger
(syndicated, 1954-55), and Captain Video273 television had entered science fiction and
fantasy, as well as a global and intergalactic space-time continuum. It was all very
fitting, as I look back, since those years were the years that, from a Baha'i point of
view, the Kingdom of God on earth had also been launched.
For the next nine years, 1953 to 1962, a creative stirring of curiosity, the beginnings
of an arduous journey of intellectual exploration, from about the age of nine until I
was eighteen, served as the personal backdrop of my life. I lived with my mother and
father in a two-bedroom house. It is one of the smallest houses I've ever been in. If art
critic Kenneth Clark is right that "nothing significant has ever been created for
civilization in a big room,"274 then there was hope for me, for this house and my
bedroom was the smallest of spaces. At the front of my life, unbeknownst to me at
the time, was the Ten Year Crusade(1953-1963) which took the Baha’i Faith to the
furthest reaches of the world and played a significant part in making this new Faith
the second most widespread religion on earth by the 1990s. I was no more aware of
this Crusade, then, than I was aware of the second world war which was waging
fiercely when I was born. This lack of awareness is often the case with human beings
who travel life's paths for, as I have just said above, there is so much to understand
and to know, and so many different voices claiming the attention of the masses of
citizens as they try to make their way.275 And when one is a child this is especially
true. However periferal the wide world of politics, the nearby cities like Hamilton and
Toronto, indeed just about everything on planet earth, except the few blocks I played
on near our home and where I went to school, the small Baha'i community in
Burlington insensibly penetrated into the interstices of my family's life from the age
of nine to eighteen, the nine years before I went pioneering.
272
In an on-going debate among media analysts, some argue history is better taught
by TV than by books; others take an opposite slant.
273
David Weinstein, "Captain Video: Television's First Fantastic Voyage," Journal
of Popular Film and Television, Fall, 2002.
274
Kenneth Clark, Civilization, Penguin, NY, 1969; see the television series by the
same name.
275
Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition, MacMillan Press, 1997.
For the most part back in what many saw as the quiet fifties, my attention, my
spiritual resources, my curiosity, was channelled into sport, school and an emerging
interest in the opposite sex. The energies of this young child and adolescent, who had
just begun the long race of life, were, indeed, stretched to the full during these
halcyon days by activities having little to no connection with any organized religion.
The following poem tells a little about one of the sports, baseball, its context in my
life, in modern history and this new Faith whose connection with my life was a
largely peripheral one during these years. I wrote this poem six weeks before leaving
the classroom and retiring from employment as a teacher at the age of 55 in 1999. So
often in life I felt strongly that I just could not stay any longer; I had to go. Sometimes
the reason was obvious; sometimes it was inexplicable.
I draw on many of my poems in this work for I find the empirical distinction between
prose and poetry is largely an illusory one. In some ways my poetry is just another
pattern I introduce from time to time to illustrate my story. 276 My poetry is as much
about things as it is about ideas.277
Before including some dozen poems, of which two about baseball begin the series, I'd
like to say a few things about poetry. Some readers will find the effect of my
introducing poetry will be to create a multiple, interwoven, narrative thread, a sort of
flexi-narrative, to draw on a term used by Robin Nelson in his study of television
drama. Nelson also points out that television drama by the 1990s had come to
emphasize short-term aesthetic pleasure over reflective intellectual stimulus. Perhaps
my use of poetry will have some of this kind of short-term aesthetic effect as well. If
nothing else my poetry and prose is a response to the Baha’i Faith in a critical half
century of its growth and to the tempest that has been blowing through society as long
as I and my parents have been alive.278
And so I commence and interpret a story which the reader alone must complete. I
construct what readers must take in actively if they are to read much of this text. The
details I provide make for a type of perfection but, in the end, perfection is no mere
series of details, as Michaelangelo once put it.279 I enter, as I do in the following
poems about baseball, with a certain glow of enthusiasm. The melody of a life
escapes; I catch up with it; I retrace my steps; my life flies again; it disappears; it
plunges into a chaos of emotion and thought; I catch it again; I seize the moment; I
embrace it with delight; I multiply the modulations, the repetitions and a whole series
of symphonies are produced. There is much trial and error as I am driven relentlessly
on day after day year after year to write this music which I have played over so many
276
Many poets and writers make this same point about the artificial distinction
between the two literary forms.
277
Unlike the famous American poet who said that poetry should be not about “ideas
but in things.”
278
Nejgebauer points how how American poets “failed to respond to WW2 with
anything approaching the greatness of its impact on the destiny of mankind.” See M.
Cunliffe, editor, American Literature Since 1900, Sphere Books Ltd., London,
1975, p.144. Put another way, one could say that this autobiography is a response to
the Lesser Peace and the associated wars that began when my father was 19 and my
mother 10.
279
Daniel Mason, The Quartets of Beethoven, Oxford UP, NY, 1947, p.9.
years. Just as Beethoven’s first movement of his Quartet in F Major consists of “a
long F, a turn around it, and a jump down to C” and “repetitions of it-well over a
hundred of them,”280 so does this autobiography consist of a long life, many turns
around some basic notes, occasionally a jump up or down from the basic pattern and
endless repetition.
To continue this musical analogy I'd like to quote the words of several conductors
because what they say about music and the process of conducting has many parallels
with the writing of this autobiography and of poetry. Herbert Blomstedt, speaking of
composers, says, "everyone has a different pace and develops in different ways." 281 In
some ways this seems as obvious for conductors as it does for autobiographers but,
however obvious it may be, it is a crucial point. I was really not ready to write about
my life in any meaningful way until I was nearly sixty. Blomstedt also said that some
artists need to work out a way of having a break or they will work themselves into the
grave. At fifty-five I gave up my paid employment as a teacher out of emotional
exhaustion or, as I felt at the time, I would have worked myself into my own grave.
Only after determining how I would fill in my own day, rather than having it filled in
by the demands of job, of community, of family and the various human associations
that had come to fill my life, was I able to continue writing with any real fertility. In
the first four years of retirement I was able to develop my vision of how I wanted to
work, what I wanted to say, in what way I was going to be able to contribute to the
growth and consolidation of the Baha'i community now that the major pattern of the
last forty years had been broken or ended by the inevitabilities of the retirement
process.
My writing is simply the realization of the vision, an evolving construct which is itself
fertilized by my work, my life and the developments in the wider Baha'i community,
society and the micro-society in which I live, move and have my being. Like the
conducting and the music Blomstedt talks about in his interview, my writing is "very
personal."282 Like Blomstedt, I strive to be exactly myself. Catherine Comet, says the
conductor must "be able to reconstruct from scratch what the composer originally did
and then put it back together again." That is not a bad way of expressing what the
autobiographer must do. In both cases it takes hundreds of hours. 283 One per cent of
the work of conducting is done at concerts. In writing, the same is the case. Time and
experience function to expand the repertoire so that interesting programs can be put
together. This is true in both music and in writing autobiography. The conductor
Margaret Hillis says she has no more energy left after conducting. She says music
bosses her around, tells her what to do, but it is so beautiful she is prepared to pay the
price. Writing is like this for me.
280
ibid.,p.15.
Herbert Blomstedt in Conductors in Conversation: Fifteen Contemporary
Conductors Discuss Their Lives and Profession, Interviews with Jeannine Wagar,
G.K. Hall and Co., Bonston, 1991, p.7.
282
ibid., p.13.
283
Catherine Comet says she needs to put in maybe 200 hours on a score. I do the
same with a chapter or chapters of this work. There are innumerable parallels between
conducting and writing.
281
So, here is the first of many poems which will appear in this autobiography. A critical
observer might say the same things about my poetry as were said by Fannie Eckstorm
about the poems of Henry David Thoreau. Nearly one hundred years ago now she
said his poems were “not resolved into rhythm. It is poetry but not verse...Judged by
ordinary standards he was a poet who failed. He had no grace at metres....his sense
always overruled the sound of his stanzas. The fragments of verse.....remind one of
chips of flint....the maker’s hand was unequal to the shaping of it.”284 I know, too,
that poetry does not enjoy in my contemorary society the legendary significance it has
in the former communist block countries or in South America. Some have even
announced the end of poetry. I leave it to readers who must cope with my poetry, a
poetry which may not be verse, these chips of flint which follow. These prose-poems
may be part of a dieing genre, but they are useful to my purposes here and so I include
them.
BASEBALL AND THE BAHA’I FAITH
When a series of programs about baseball, a series called The Big Picture, began to
unfold on television, I quickly came to realize the remarkable similarity between the
story of baseball and the story of the Baha’i Faith, both of which grew up in the
modern age. The game of baseball was born in America in the 1840s as a new activity
for sporting fraternities and a new way for communities to develop a more defined
identity.1 Indeed, there are many organizations, activities, interests which were born
and developed in this modern age, say, since the French and the American
revolutions. The points of comparison and contrast between the great charismatic
Force which gave birth to the Baha’i Faith and its progressive institutionalization on
the one hand, and the origin and development of other movements and organizations
on the other, is interesting to observe. -Ron Price with thanks to Ken Burns, “The Big
Picture: Part Two,” ABC TV, 18 February 1999; and 1John Nagy, “The Survival of
Professional Baseball in Lynchburg Virginia: 1950s-1990s,” Rethinking History,
Vol.37.
They both grew slowly
through forces and processes,
events and realities
in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries:
baseball and the Baha’i Faith
along their stony and tortuous paths,
the latter out of the Shaykhi School
of the Ithna’Ashariyyih Sect
of Shi’ah Islam.
And it would be many years
before the Baha’i Faith would climb
to the heights of popularity
that baseball had achieved
quite early in its history.
Fannie Eckstorm, “On Thoreau’s The Main Woods,” A Century of Early
Ecocriticism, editor, David Mazel, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 2001, p.172.
284
Baseball was a game
whose time had come,
a hybrid invention,
a growth out of diverse roots,
the fields and sandlots of America,
as American as apple pie.
And the Baha’i Faith was an idea
whose time had come, would come,
slowly, it would seem, quite slowly
in the fields, the lounge rooms,
the minds and hearts
of a burgeoning humanity
caught, as it was, as we all were,
in the tentacles of a tempest
that threatened to blow it-and us--apart.
Ron Price
17 February 1999
A second poem, written about a year after retiring, also conveys something of the
flavour of those ‘warm-up days’ when my curiosity about this new religion was
exceeded by curiosity about other things.
A BASEBALL-CRAZY KID
In October 1956 Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitched the only perfect game
in post-season baseball. Yogi Berra was the catcher.1 That same month and year R.
Rabbani advised Mariette Bolton of Orange Australia, in the extended PS of her letter,
that it was “much better for the friends to give up saying “Amen.”2 The following
year Shoghi Effendi died and Jackie Robinson, the first negro to play professional
baseball, retired. I was completing grades 7 and 8 when all of this took place and,
even at this early age, was in love with at least three girls in my class: Carol Ingham,
Judy Simpson, Karen Jackson and Susan Gregory. I found them all so very beautiful.
Karen was the first girl I kissed.3 -Ron Price with appreciation to: 1"The Opening of
the World Series: 2000," ABC TV; 2Messages to the Antipodes, Shoghi Effendi,
editor, Graham Hassall, Baha’i Publications Australia, 1997, p.419; and 3Ron Price,
Journal: Canada: To 1971: 1.1, Photograph Number 102.
I was just starting grade seven
and still saying amen
occasionally when I went
to that Anglican Church
on the Guelph Line
in Burlington Ontario
with my mother and father
and saying grace
just as occasionally.
I watched the World Series,
a highlight of autumn
for a twelve year old
baseball-crazy kid, back then.
And I passed the half-way point
of my pre-youth days1
when I was the only kid
with any connection
with this new world Faith
in these, the very early days
of the growth of the Cause
in the Dominion of Canada.2
1
1953 to 1959: my pre-youth days.
In 1956 there were only about 600 Baha’is in Canada. The 400 Baha’is that started
the Ten Year Crusade in Canada became 800 by the time I became a Baha’i in 1959.
In southern Ontario, from, say, Oakville to Niagara Falls and Windsor, to several
points north of Lakes Ontario and Erie in 1956 I was the only pre-youth whom I then
knew, or later came to know. There may have been other pre-youth but at this early
stage of the growth of the Cause in Canada, year fifty-eight of its history, I was not
aware of them.* *--Canada’s Six Year Plan: 1986-1992, NSA of the Baha’is of
Canada, 1987, p.46.
2
Ron Price
23 October 2000
The interest of a poem arises, at least for some poetry critics, from its representation
of what passed in the mind of the poet. The piling up of information about what the
poem means is in the end, these same critics argue, an investigation of the mind that
produced it. I'm not sure this is entirely the case but it is certainly a useful view in
relation to the role of poetry in this autobiography. 285 There seems to be a sense of
estrangement or outsidedness of poets and poetry in the society I've been a part of.
With my poetry here, I play a small part in overcoming this alienation.
Before I continue on with my story, wandering as it does via a circuitous route, I shall
include here a poem about my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who died five years
before I was born, just as the first Seven Year Plan was completing its first phase, in
1939. My grandfather was 67 at the time and he was left alone in life with his three
grown-up children, one of whom was my mother. She married five years later at the
age of forty, at the end of that Seven Year Plan. But first this poem about my
grandmother:
YOU LOVED KISSING
My grandfather, Alfred Cornfield, to whom I dedicated this narrative, wrote a four
hundred page autobiography covering the period from his birth in 1872 to 1901, his
285
William Empson expressed this view of poetry. See: Frank Kermode, "William
Empson: A Most Noteworthy Poet," The London Review of Books, June 2000.
arrival in Canada. In it he briefly describes his wife, my grandmother, Sarah
Cornfield. He said that before they were married she loved kissing more than anything
else. My mother, my grandfather's daughter, spoke of her mother many times over the
years. The following poem is about this woman, my grandmother, whom I never
met.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 17 October 1998
She told me you were kind,
a woman who was all heart.
He told me you were no woman
of the world, but you loved kissing.
I never knew you at all,
taken as you were by cancer
in '39 after you had raised
your family and earned a love
that was a legend in its time,
at least in that small family circle.
Now that photograph
looks down from the shelf,
speaking volumes of articulate silence
and a loving-kindness
which joins our hearts in mystery
from your kingdom of immortality,
your glorious paradise,
your retreats of nearness.
Ron Price
17 October 1998
The craving to write this autobiography has been damned back, only allowed to
trickle in the last two decades, but has accumulated a powerful pressure of urgency;
I'm not sure exactly why, but a major difficulty has been to find a form, a process, a
context, to say what I wanted to say. After a decade of a narrative effort, 1984-1993
and another of poetry (1992-2002) and resource-gathering, this third edition gushed
out like a fountain in a period of four months.286 Now I pray to be carried on “by the
divine wind of curiosity’s unflagging inspiration”287 in the years ahead in further
editions. Perhaps it is a curiosity which, as Toynbee argues, has finally generated
higher activities, a mind that has blossomed in a higher flight; a life-long communion
with my Creator, a communion that goes back at least to 1953 at the age of nine, “like
a light caught from a leaping flame,”288 which has resulted in this extended piece of
prose I call my autobiography.
No matter how infinitesimal are the quanta that I examine, no matter the infinite
magnitude and immensity, they all demonstrate infinitely complex forms. I’ll say a
286
Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 3rd Edition. I worked for four
months, an average of four to five hours a day, from January to April 2003.
287
Toynbee, op.cit., p.24.
288
Plato,Letters, No.7, 341 B-E.
few things here about form, performance and the shape of this narrative I am creating
here:
PERFORMANCE
What excites some writers most in their work is themselves as performers.
Performance is an exercise of power, a very curious one.1 Power, of course, is a
complex, subtle and difficult term to define, unlike authority which is associated with
a role or an institution, and it can bind people together due to its association with
miracle and mystery and its capacity to hold the consciences of human beings.2 -Ron
Price with thanks to 1Richard Poirier, “The Performing Self”, Twentieth Century
Literature in Retrospect, Reuben Brower, ed., Harvard UP, 1971, p.88; and
2
Richard Sennett, Authority, A.A. Knopf, NY, 1980, pp. 193-195.
This writing of poetry is performance:
like dancing, singing, sport,
part of being fully alive,
like film-making or playing golf,
aspires to some popularity,
some shaping of my self,
is a type of work, discipline,
not easy, but enjoyable
or I would not do it.
Some would say this writing
is an exercise in power,
yes a type of power, a type of love,
of endurance, of pleasure,
way of spending one’s leisure-time,
of becoming immortal, now.
Ron Price
7 May 1996
MISTY FORMS AND A FROSTY GLAZE
A good third of one’s life is lost to the observer in sleep and dreams, "soft embalmer
of the still midnight," as Keats wrote in 1820. The nearest one can get to the other
two-thirds is the autobiographical notes of a Montaigne, a Samuel Butler, an
Emerson: conscious intellectual portrayals of introspection and reflection. In the end,
only a fragment of the totality of our living is graspable, engraveable in words. Most
of the pages of our days are lost or only barely graspable, only partly intuited, grasped
intellectually or emotionally. A purely external selection of materials dominated by
chance, by arbitrary choice and distortions of various kinds is counter-balanced by the
value of personal witness, of small impressions, of a fine sense for the infinitessimal,
of a perception of the significant in the insignificant, of the trivial incident and of
vivid anecdotes, however fleeting and partial they may be.
If to these largely external realities the writer adds the dimension of the inner life and
private character one can unmask a life, reach into its roles, the parts played on the
stage of life, approach the life as closely as can be and give the reader a concentrated
symbol, a genuine picture as well as an inner portrait of a life, an ordinary life, one
that approximates the life of the reader more closely than the famous, the brilliant, the
distinguished achiever and the genius whose auto/biography so often focuses on the
externals. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, April 4th, 1999.
Anyone looking at these poems
sees an essential discontinuity,
a discontinuous story,
a narrative arrangement of reality,
purely fragmentary, purely incomplete,
partly verifiable, buried in cultural history,
lost in this writing, a symbol of endurance,
beyond misty forms, only partly concrete,
spiritual intimations, spiritual pretensions,
across a golden bridge to shoreless eternities,
to the inner life through windows
that are unclear and covered
with the frosty glaze of language.
On one of those cold
Canadian winter mornings
those windows reveal a world
that is half beauty, half mystery,
always cold and wet to the touch.
You can only see the real world,
partially and, then, only in special places.
Writers are getting closer
to our inner worlds
as science is unfolding
another set of inner worlds,
for that is where the action is
below the surface, unseen, invisible.
Ron Price
4 April 1999
INFORMING PRINCIPLE OF POETRY
When you write is it for a particular audience or just yourself? Initially, the thrust of
the poem, any poem, seems to be for self, from self, about self. But as the poem
develops the audience widens to include my contemporaries, those dead and those
yet-to-be-born. Sometimes the focus of the poem is futuristic, utopian; sometimes I go
back in time to an individual or a group. This is part of the wonder of poetry, the
ability to write about, include, virtually anything in existence or in the imagination.
Michael Palmer says the informing principle of poetry is that the poem intends as it
comes into being; it moves toward a particular meaning. That is unquestionably the
way I experience the writing of a poem. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs,
31 October 1998.
There are always people writing.
I call them my students;
one day they will be gone.
I have grown tired
of the endless talk, talk, talk
and their piles of writing
which has virtually no interest to me
anymore: is so excessively banal,
repetitious, try fifty million pages
over thirty years to dumb the brain.
My wife gives me her critical view now
and I think this is enough, enough to view
this cleaner and tighter form.
Read what I want now--no obligation.
Of course, I like people to read my poetry
but, in this world of confused alarms,
this is not the most important thing to me:
a world where anyone can write a poem
on anything they want and only a few
want to write anything at all.1
1
The irony, the paradox, is that there is now more being written by more people than
ever before in history.
Ron Price
31 October 1998
THE ONENESS OF FORM AND CONTENT
We must write for our own time, as the great writers did. But this does not imply that
we must shut ourselves up in our words. To write for our time does not mean to
reflect it passively. It means that we must will to maintain it or change it; therefore,
go beyond it toward the future; and it is this effort to change the world which
establishes us most deeply in it, for our world can never be reduced to a dead mass of
tools and customs. What the poet writes should not always correspond to anything
outside the mind of the poet. His words should bring together apparently unrelated
phenomena in a unique world that is the writer’s own, freed, as far as possible, from
the rusty hegemony of angst. What results is a written expression which is both form
and content. They are one and the same. The general context is an “independent
search for knowledge” and a continual renewal of “one’s conception or one’s vision
of the world.1 -William V. Spanos, “A Discussion of Eugene Ionesco,” A Casebook
on Existentialism, Thomas Crowell Co., NY, 1966, pp.151-157.
Yes, Eugene........
I write for my time
and a future time.
This is no dead mass of letters,
but things from inside my head,
from all over the place,
a unique concatenation
of form and content,
as I renew my vision of the world
and help lay that foundation,
for that apotheosis which I saw
several weeks ago on a warm day
up on a hill in a city in Israel.
The inner essence thereof
I knew was for my time.
I knew this, partly,
from something He wrote,
something eternal, yes, Eugene:
and I was only eighteen, then.
And, now, I'm getting old
and closer, it seems, to the eternal.
Ron Price
24 July 2000
GIVING THE POEM FORM
Much of the writing in western civilization since I became a Baha’i in 1959 and went
pioneering in 1962, is what one could call post-Canadian, post-Australian or postAmerican, post everything except the world itself. A global culture, which had been
emerging slowly, perhaps as far back as the period 1475-1500,1 with a global
technology which brought the various centres of culture around the world so much
closer than they had ever been. The literary sensibility is no longer dependent on a
national environment, although writers continue to be influenced, consciously or not,
by their predecessors and the cultural climate in which they are socialized. To give a
poet’s sensitivity and expression a form suited to his personal proclivities he could
study the classical and contemporary literary monuments,2 indeed the entire
intellectual tradition of the planet. After twenty-five years in the pioneering
field(1962-1987) I did just that, at least as far as I was able.
I also drew on literary monuments that had impressed me during those pioneering
years: Toynbee, Gibbon, John Hatcher, Roger White, Robert Nisbet, among so many
others. But I think what gave my poetry, my writing, its vitality was the struggle of
my mind over decades to come to terms with the cynicism and skepticism of modern
society vis-a-vis religion and provide intellectually relevant responses to the questions
of the seekers among my contemporaries.-Ron Price with thanks to: 1 Arnold
Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. 8, p.115; and 2Northrop Frye, The Stubborn
Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society, Methuen and Co. Ltd., London, 1970,
p.311.
A striking fact about that society
I grew up in back then
and for most of its history
was the domination of narrative form,
a narrative poetic and its impersonal,
bald, dry, statement to portray action.1
A deep moral silence also filled the land,
amidst massive indifference, solitude
and a social ideal that still inhabits our soul.
And now, as the imaginative centre
of Canadian life moved to the metropolis,
and faster in Australia
and for the international Baha’i pioneer
a feeling of nomadic movement
over great distances filled his consciousness,
standards for a world culture of the arts
were insensibly established.
They arose out of an almost continuous probing
into the distance and the fixing of one’s eyes
on an ever-changing skyline.
1
my own narrative poetic is, unlike this Canadian tradition of the impersonal in poetic
narrative, highly personal.
Ron Price
22 July 2000
I like to think, as I begin this narrative with its poetic inclusions, that prophets, poets
and scholars are chosen vessels “who have been called by their Creator to take human
action of an ethereal kind.”289 But it is my considered view that, however much I feel
I am being called, my spiritual armament resembles an archer’s who is aiming at a
target which is too far distant to be visible. As the years go on, and especially now
after forty years on a journey as a pioneer to the seekers among my contemporaries, I
have come to feel the truth of the words of that Roman poet Horace who wrote at the
time of the appearance of another manifestation of God: “Cast thy bread upon the
waters, for thou shalt find it after many days.”290 And if this piece of literature,
autobiographical literature, is ground-breaking in any way; if it has any particular kind
of originality and is in any way equal to the challenge of the new internationalism and
the new institutions that this Faith I am associated with, only those mysterious
dispensations of time as it hurries by on its winged chariot will reveal.
I have also come to feel, as Toynbee expressed it so well writing when he was on the
eve of the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth in 1952, that “It is Man’s task to
execute, within the time that God alots to him on Earth, a human mission to do God’s
will by working for the coming of God’s Kingdom on Earth.”291 The Baha’i Faith
289
Toynbee, op.cit. p.36.
Horace, “Carmina,” Book IV, Ode 9, lines 25-28.(65 BC to 8 AD)
291
Toynbee, op.cit., p.39.
290
provided, through its Founder, His Successors and now its administrative institutions
a strong sense of divine appointment, of a specific, a guided, direction, in establishing
that very Kingdom. Working now with some psychic chronometer, with intellect and
spiritual creativity defining the working tempo of my days, I work, as the poet
Andrew Marvell expressed it perhaps somewhat archaically, while “at my back I
always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”292 At the same time, I was slowly
learning over several decades one of writing’s secrets, namely, what to put in and
what to leave out. I was learning, too, other things about writing prose and poetry, as I
have expressed them in the following prose-poems. One thing seemed to come easily
and that was prose-poetry which, as Mary O’Neil notes, goes back to the
Renaissance.293
THE BRILLIANCE AND THE WONDER
“In the fact that the subject is a process lies the possibility of transformation,” writes
Catherine Belsey.1 And there is transformation, several over a lifetime, perhaps
innumerable ones, before the final bodily separation, before the cage is burst asunder
and soars into “the firmament of holiness.”2 The cage is often drawn back to the earth
again and again, the transformation never complete, and then the cage is gone and the
soul, that acme of mature contemplation, continues the journey. While on earth
hounds, claws, ravens and envy stalk the "thrush of the eternal garden" that is your
life.3 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Catherine Belsey in Writing Selves: Contemporary
Feminist Autobiography, Jeanne Perreault, University of Minnesota Press,
London,1995, p.1; 2Baha’u’llah, Hidden Words; and 3 Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys,
p.41.
While thoughts press on
and feelings overflow
and quick words ‘round me
fall like flakes of snow,
the years go on,
each year adding one
and I grow old,
hardly known and quietly:
drifts of snow the wind has blown
against a wall or house
one day will melt
while new spring sun brings
green grass, flowers bloom
the final transformation of June,
repeated so often, so regularly,
so predictably, that somehow
the transformation becomes
a part of the air we breath
and we only notice,
for such short times,
Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress.”
Mary O’Neil, “ The Fortunes of Avant-Garde Poetry,” Philosophy and
Literature, Vol. 25, No.1, 2001, pp.142-154.
292
293
the brilliance and the wonder
amidst the dogs of the claws of earth.
Ron Price
7 September 2000
TRANSFORMED
There is a definite relief in simply writing a poem, in completing it, in having one's
imagination aroused to give life and significance to the world. In some ways that is
enough. In other ways, the poet wants others, as many others as possible, to speak to
other minds, to see and share his expressed feeling and, hopefully, have them enthuse
over what he has written. I would have liked a wider audience. I may one day get
such an audience. But I think it unlikely. Even the likelihood of obtaining an
audience beyond the grave is, I think, small. I have said a great deal about poetry,
about my poetry, in the more than five thousand poems I have sent to the Baha’i
World Centre Library. Like a spider, I spin my poems out of my own vitals, out of
some inner necessity, so as to catch life. Like a spider, too, I don’t mass-produce the
same poem, at least not yet. I write another poem and another as circumstances and
some combination of inner desire and necessity require.
There is seriousness present; there is lightness. What it means for me, I can not
expect it will mean to others. Thus, I have a sense of my poetry’s worth, but I am not
obsessed by its importance or my own. Life drove me, as it drove T.S. Eliot, into a
wasteland of suffering when I was young, in the first ten years I was a Baha'i(19591969) and, along with other precipitating influences, it formed, or better, transformed
me slowly, insensibly and eventually, perhaps inevitably, into a person who felt
compelled to write poems. -Ron Price with thanks to T.S. Matthews, Great Tom:
Notes Towards the Definition of T.S. Eliot, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London,
1974, pp.95-96.
I think I felt old at fifty.
I was tired with
what you might call
a bone-weariness.
But, as Eliot advised,
I still felt like an explorer.
I venture out to encounter
life’s last adversary:
the slow decline of old age,
a senescence which explores
the old man, me,
as my friends go through
alarming and not-so-alarming
changes and chances.1
My poetic opus,
my celebratory note,
Dieing, like being born,
is a long process.
Who can say when it really
when it really begins?
-ibid., p.169.
has been struck to its full.2
And all that’s left one day
will be one final exploration,
one final note
on the keyboard of life.
1
2
T.S. Matthews, op.cit., p. 170.
Over 5000 poems sent to the BWCL
Ron Price
30 December 2000
The necessary and passive receptivity of so much of life becomes, as it must, an active
curiosity if one is to know anything about one’s life, one’s times, one’s religion,
indeed, if one is to know virtually anything at all. The mind’s mill must be set and
kept in motion by a perpetual flow of curiosity and this curiosity must be “harnessed
to the service of something more purposeful and creative”294 than pure curiosity itself.
There is always opportunity for rest, for ease, for contemplation, unless one
completely stuffs one's life with activity. But that is not my story now in these early
years of the evening of my life, these golden years, free from so many of the
responsibilities that kept my nose down and my emotions engaged: job, family, sex
and love and people in community, for so long.295
Toynbee says our search, our quest, is “for a vision of God at work in history.”
Slowly, unobtrusively, by an endless and sometimes exhausting seriousness, the
teachings of the Baha’i Faith filled in this vision. By the beginning of my pioneer
venture on or about August 20th 1962, at the age of eighteen, this vision had taken root
in the soil of my life. In the last forty years the painting, the sculpture, the poem that
this vision has taken its form in, has added light and shadow, colours, tones, texture
and literally millions of words. They could probably be reduced to several bottles of
ink. As I listened and watched a thousand musicians, heard more comedians than I
could count, attended talks, seminars, deepenings and meetings of many kinds, got my
hair cut by old men and young, by beautiful women across two continents, watched
more who-dun-its and documentaries than the mind can hold, that vision drifted
through my mind, again and again and again, caught the accents of voices too many to
remember and touched my heart like trapped starlight, like fleeting green tints from
passing lights that struggled in the eyes of someone I loved, like the colour of rain.
And the vision kept passing and returning.
This is no settler narrative, the kind that filled many an autobiography in British and
other nations' colonies around the world and in nations as they expanded west and
east, north and south in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I do refer to my work
as a pioneering narrative, though, one of many which I am confident will be produced
in these epochs and in the many epochs that will succeed them in the decades and,
perhaps, centuries ahead. Like many of the settler narratives, this narrative should be
seen as a volatile subject not as something fixed in black and white. The apparent
294
Toynbee, op.cit., p.42.
It is now nearly five years since I have been freed from employment and what I
came to find excessive community tasks: 1999-2003.
295
marginalia that I bring into the framework of my story, should not be seen as a
distraction but as part of the main game. I manoeuvre myself into many corners. The
prescriptions and formulations of a pioneer narrative which authorize my text, so to
speak, are many and ill-defined, making manoeuvring inevitable. This is no archtypal
pioneering history for, thusfar, I have yet to read a thorough and systematic or
anecdotal and serendipitous account of a pioneer. If any exist, they have yet to be
published.296 But whatever is published by Baha'i pioneers in the years to come, I am
confident that the one common denominator, uniting all those who try to tell their
story, will be their devotion to the possibilities and the inevitabilities, the certainties
and the complexities, associated with the Faith they have taken to the corners of the
earth and the thousands and thousands of places in between. Their writing will be seen
in many ways but certainly as a bi-product, a detailed, circumstantial, portrayal of
their pioneering experience.
In the fifty years since I first came in contact with this new Faith, the years 1953/4 to
2003/4, it has spread around the world and multiplied its numbers thirty times. I feel
a little like the historian Polybius(206 BC to 128 BC) must have felt when he
observed the unification of the Hellenic world within his own lifetime, between 219
BC and 168 BC, when “almost the whole world fell under the undisputed ascendancy
of Rome.”297 I had observed the Westernization of the entire planet and the sense of
that planet's global reality. I knew I was at the beginning of what would be a long
process. The transformation of the entire world within the dominion of a single
system was, without doubt, part of the long-term Plan of the Baha’i community. It
would be an exercise that would take place without arms, swords and uniforms, at
least not as far down the road as I could see. It would be an exercise that had taken
place for the most part quite unobtrusively with increasing speed perhaps as far back
as the years of the industrial revolution, the agricultural revolution and the American
revolution in the years 1760 to 1780, approximately. Alvin Tofler called it the second
and third wave. From my perspective it has been one long wave since the 1750s, since
Shaykh Ahmad was born or, to choose a personage of greater popularity and renoun
in the West, since J.S. Bach died in 1750.
This immense wave has swept over humanity in a context of such complexity and
over so many decades and now nearly three centuries, that the average person came,
in my time, to have little to no idea what the overall process was, no idea of the
296
I comment on this theme from time to time in this autobiography. For, as I point
out in other places, there have been autobiographies written by Baha'is in the
Formative Age. But, thusfar, they are short accounts or the accounts of people whose
lives are quite out of the ordinary in some way, like Andre Brugiroux who hitch-hiked
more than anyone on the planet, like famous entertainers or Baha'is of prominence on
the elective or appointive arms of Baha'i administration. As far as I know, this is the
first autobiography by an ordinary Baha'i without any particular claims to fame,
renoun, wealth, prestige or prominence. Just one of the millions who make up the
warp and weft(or woof) of the Baha'i community. It is ordinariness, the
commonplace, that weighs us down, or so Goethe once put it.
297
Polybius in the Preface to Oecumenical History since the One Hundred and
Fortieth Olympiad, Book 1, Chapter 1.
meaning of the events, except in some microcosmic sense.298 Indeed, this was hardly
surprising. In some ways the decades and, indeed, the next several centuries were
coming at humankind like the sound of a distant train: the vast majority just could not
hear its faint, its light echo in the distance. The noise of civilization and the jumble of
an endless subjectivity produced a cacophony that completely muffled the sound of
distant trains. So few heard the distant whistle or the quiet drum-beat of civilization's
inherent pattern. It was the drum-beat of a new revelation, little did the multitudes of
humankind know, at least as the years of new millennium began.
It was also an exercise, a phenomenon, that was taking place under my very eyes in
the two dozen towns and cities in which I had lived. No one had any idea that this was
the Plan; even I and the Baha’is who lived and had their being in the context of that
Plan had a great deal of trouble keeping their eyes on this particular aspect of the Plan,
so awesome and so obscure was it at the mundane level of their own lives. Seeing the
unification of the planet, the planetization of the globe, the increasing oneness of the
world of humanity, take place with more and more evidences in my lifetime: this is at
the heart of my story. Ironically, it took place in the context of intense conflict and
millions, hundreds of millions, of deaths. The context did not change, either, in the
generation before me, the generation of my parents, in which two wars decimated the
value and belief system of a whole civilization; or the generation of my grandparents
before that, say, back to the 1870s. A great wind of change seemed to be blowing and
blowing, generation after generation. Perhaps, as Robert Nisbet pointed out, that wind
had been blowing at least since the fifth century BC; or, perhaps, since the Tree of
Divine Revelation was planted in the soil of the Divine Will with the prophetic figure
of Adam.299 This historical question is far too complex to pursue here in this short
space.
Indeed, my pioneering venture, it seems to me in retrospect, has been part and parcel
of the very reconstruction of a civilization that, arguably, began to occur in the
lifetimes of the twin-manifestations of our time and their precursors.300 That
reconstruction, one could argue and I do so here, has taken place to a significant
extent in the context of a Plan, a Plan that was put into action just seven years before I
was born.301 But, as the culture critic Lionel Trilling once wrote, speaking of the form,
the existence, of a culture: "the form of its existence is struggle." That is certainly the
case with the Baha'i culture. Some artists, Trilling went on, contain in their personal
life the very essence of this struggle and its contradictions and paradoxes. I am not
inclined to think my life, my autobiography, contains this essence, nor do I think it is
the most suggestive testimony to what the Baha'i Faith is and was in this half century
298
Students came to know, for example, the five causes of WW1 or the three major
causes of the drought. But, insofar, as the flow of civilization, is was either a mystery;
it was approached with complete indifference or educated people swam in a sea of so
many ideas that it prevented any agreement.
299
Shoghi Effendi uses this metaphorical language in his talk delivered by Ruhiyyih
Khanum in Chicago in 1953.
300
If one goes back to the birth of Shaykh Ahmad in 1753 one could argue that
modern civilization had its roots in these days. To pursue this historical theme is not
the purpose of this autobiography.
301
The Seven Year Plan: 1937-1944, the start of the first epoch of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s
Plan.
under review. But I do like to think that this autobiography does eviscerate, that is,
draws out what is vital or essential in my life, elicits the pith, the essence of my days,
my journey. Life, at least as I have experienced it, involves maintaining myself
between contradictions that so often can't be solved by analysis. They can only be
presented with due regard for their virtually insoluble complexity and I do so in this
work.
What I write here is one of virtually millions of tangents to a set of concentric circles
that are at the core of this new and emerging society. To scale the moral and aesthetic
heights of what constitutes this new society I use the ladders of social observation and
analysis. And so this autobiography should not be seen like a novel. Readers should
not expect an interesting story with tension, plot, dialogue and a what's next
atmosphere. Those that want to read a story of escape or adventure, of mystery or
science fiction, of romance or one of innumerable forms of entertainment, are advised
to watch TV, go to the movies or read one of a multitude of books in any book store
or now on the Internet. There is both mystery and romance here, as there is in the
history of the Baha'i community of which this autobiography is a part, part of that
greatest of mysteries going back to Abraham, but I'm not sure I convey it with the
language it requires.302 The theme certainly requires more analysis than can be given
in an autobiography like this which has already blown-up to over 750 pages.
I am in some ways like Ralph Waldo Emerson who hardly ever read novels and
hardly ever liked those that came his way.303 In the last two decades, 1983 to 2003, I
even tried, some ten times, to write one. Perhaps the future will find a place for the
novel in my life. The story here is of a different ilk and for many I'm sure not their
cup of tea. But then, I'm not writing this to give people what they want, create a
reading public and in the process, perhaps, acquire some fame and glory along the
way. If these elusive acquisitions come my way, fine. I've got nothing against these
attributes of conventional success.
I often draw on a myth which narrates a complex interaction between individual and
community and a promise of a world at peace, in unity and imbued with an ongoing
progress that is both inspiring and a source of long-range hope. The essential quality
of the Baha'i experience in the first century and a half of its history came to reside in
its expansion and consolidation and the opportunities that such expansion and
consolidation offered to individuals and communities as the medum in which they
could and did inscribe their destiny. This struggle, for it was nothing if not a struggle,
became central to the myth. It was a myth, though, that would never be transmuted
into an avowedly hopeless quest, although from time to time a sense of crisis seemed
to threaten "to arrest its unfoldment and blast all the hopes which its progress had
engendered."304 It was a myth, too, that I use as my starting point in many basic
ways, for my own story.
302
Human imagination has difficulty plumbing the depths of the mystery of
individuals like Abraham, Christ, Baha'u'llah and others, their suffering, their exile,
their secret. See: Dorota Glowacka, "Sacrificing the Text: The Philosopher/Poet at
Mount Moriah," Animus, 1997.
303
Marcus Cunliffe, "Literature and Society," American Literature Since 1900,
editor, M. cunliffe, Sphere Books Ltd., London, 1975, p.367.
304
Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, Wilmette, 1957, p.111.
I am contributing in my own small way to the fathering and mothering of a tradition
of becoming, a tradition which finds in my own experience the seeds and the sinews,
the warp and woof, of what I am confident will one day be a compelling and
instructive literature. And the myth at the centre of this account is what John Hatcher
once called the metaphorical nature of both physical reality and Baha'i history.305
To become a reader of this work one enters a force-field of anxieties and delights
where cultural ideologies intersect and dissect one another, in contradiction, in
consonance and in adjacency. As Firuz Kazemzadeh once said, we are one per cent
Baha'i and ninety-nine per cent the culture we live in. In this work the 99 per cent and
the 1 per cent blend and flow in a myriad eddies and tides. Then there are the readers
and they will bring to this work their passions and unreliabilities, their talents and
interests, their desires to escape from the pull of my argument or swim in its
persuasiveness, their pleasure in the use of my language or their preference for slim
books or fictional narrative. There are a tangle of problems which are fundamental to
thinking about and writing autobiography. As this book procedes there are shifting
sands, moving constructions of agency, subjectivity and truth as I change with time,
place and intent, untethered by everything except the memory and the imagination
that is my life and how I put it into words. There are, too, highly volatile components
and serious blind-spots to my life story that make the story capable of being played
out in different and quite unpredictable ways to the ones I have chosen.
It is also difficult to invoke various verbal and conceptual totalities embodied in such
words as: marriage, childhood, Baha'i Administration, Baha'i theology, Baha'i history
or even pioneering, oneness and 'the Writings'. These are all terms which proliferate
in my account and make understandings sometimes more difficult, clumsy and nonspecific due to their very complexity, a complexity that is difficult to negotiate and
describe. Sometimes such terminolgy hides the ambiguities and the inconsistencies,
the complexities and wealth of detail that exist in much of life's experiences and they
raise in their stead certain obscurities, flatnesses and grey-coveralls. As Anton
Zidjervelt once wrote in his stimulating book, The Abstract Society, which I read
when I was teaching at a College of Advanced Education in the late 1970s, so much
of our world and virtually all of the conceptual material is abstract making the
majority of people whose minds work best with practical realities lost in a sea of quite
excessive complexity. Still, these abstract terms come in the end to be second nature,
part of the air they breath,306 even if not ever fully understood: democracy,
Christianity, Islam, community, politics, inter alia.
There are several reasons why an autobiography like this is useful. One: it is itself a
form of social action and an important one; two: it is a useful source of evidence for
the future, evidence for grounding intellectual claims about social structures, relations
and processes. Three: texts of this nature are sensitive barometers of social processes,
movement and indicators of social change. And, four: texts of this nature are integral
parts of a text-context, theory-practice nexus. I have drawn here on a paper by Urpo
305
John Hatcher has written extensively on this theme as far back as the late 1970s in
several books and journal articles.
306
Anton Zidjervelt, The Abstract Society, Penguin, 1970.
Kovala, a teacher at the university of Jyvaskyla in Finland.307 I think, though, that
autobiographies, much like conversation and people's oral accounts of their lives, can
feature difficult and sometimes ambiguous engagements with an accepted, orthodox
or mainstream Baha'i story and its history of persecution and idealism in various
modes and mixes. Since there is, as yet, a distinctive but small literature of
autobiography in the autobiographical tradition in the Baha'i community, a tradition
that creates, invents or imagines some international self for an international
community; since there is no pioneering self that floats free of social, national,
psychological, sociological, ethnic, sexual differences; since that self is only
constituted by and through difference and in history, I am forced to script that self in
its relation to others, through adjacencies and through intimacies, through associations
and disassociations. This makes for complexity and it has produced this ongoing
narrative. Those who want a simple story of what I did and when and how--the
normal parameters of an autobiography--will probably by now have stopped reading
this work. I try to portray the vast invisible inscapes of my life, my society and my
religion, but whether they make interesting reading, I can not tell.
I think it unlikely that there will ever be one compact, professional and efficient Price
Industry, as such an Industry might come to be called some decades hence. It may
loom into existence, if it ever does, with many points of origin, numerous individual
starting points, evolving so unobtrusivley, so obscurely, so slowly as to be unnoticed
by the vast majority of readers bent on absorbing the burgeoning lines of thought that
will be increasingly available to the public. If there is an escalating, a future,
absorption in autobiographical and biographical studies in the Baha'i community, due
partly to a slowly engendered and multiform enthusiasm of readers, due to the
priviledging of print over performance and the apparent stability or consistency of the
literary script over its theatrical realization or completion and due also to an emerging
world religion moving completly out of an obscurity it has been in for a century and a
half and more, then this work may yet find a significant reading public.
“I can call it back,” writes Mark Twain in his autobiography, “and make it as real as it
ever was and as blessed.” But what is real the philosopher Merleau Ponty argues are
“the interlocked perspectives” which we must “take apart step-by-step”308 and relive
them in their temporal setting. And just as "the crossing, the process of departures
and distancing from Europe are germinal in nineteenth century emigrant
autobiographies," as Gillian Whitlock notes, so are these same features germinal in
the stories of international pioneers. The crossing, like the journey of the pioneer,
initiates a new consciousness of the self through emigration;"309 or, as Samuel Beckett
wrote in 1931: "We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are also no
longer even what we were before the calamity of yesterday."310 There is, too, some of
what novelist Joseph Conrad calls the detritus of life. There is a detritus that
307
Urpo Kovala, "Cultural Text Analysis and Liksom's Short Story 'We Got Married,"
Comparative Literature and Culture: AWWWeb Journal.
308
Merleau Ponty in Narrative and the Self, A. P. Kerby, Indiana UP, Bloomington,
1991, p. 22.
309
Gillian Whitlock, The Intimate Empire: Reading Women's Autobiography,
Cassell, London, 2000, p. 44.
310
Samuel Beckett in " Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett's
Theatre," S.E. Gontarski, Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 22, Number 1.
surrounds the "minute wreckage that washes out of" my life into its "continental
receptacles"311 on both of the great landscapes where I have lived: Canada and
Australia. The flotsam of a difficult first marriage, now partly forgotten but an
important, a formative part, of my life and the recontained shipwreck of its bourgeois
domesticity in a second marriage, may well be minute in my memory now nearly
thirty years later, but that upheaval, like all upheavels, leaves its mark in quite
complex and difficult to describe ways, as do other traumatic events and personal
tests. The marks of life, major and minor, are difficult to paint with words on the
emotional equipment of one's psyche.
I will say no more about this 'sea-change' which has been written about in great detail
by many writers. The words of Roger White, though, are timely ones here:
CALLED
A word is inundation, when it comes from the sea.-Emily Dickinson
The shore is safer than the sea,
It does not seethe nor call
Nor buffet and betray who’d quest
Nor heinously appal.
Astute’s the pilgrim on the land
Who never heeds the sea
And resolutely walks awayIt is not so with me.
I gaze upon the bitter wrecks
Mercilessly broken
And guage my craft and weigh my words
The scheming waves have spoken.312
The confrontation of sharply diverse cultures caught the imagination of the historian
Herodotus(485-425 BC) and the modern philosopher civil-servant Turgot(17271781). It was this diversity and this confrontation that helped to provide the
motivational matrix for the writing of their histories. They both saw in this diversity
“a key to the understanding of history.”313 The confrontation of sharply different
cultures has been a phenomenon that goes back probably hundreds of thousands of
years if one draws on the science of paleo-anthropology314. More recently, at least
since Columbus and the beginnings of modern history, if one defines ‘modern’ as that
period going back to the end of the Middle Ages, that clash of cultures has been
311
Joseph Conrad in S.E. Gontarski, op.cit.
Roger White, One Bird One Cage One Flight, Happy Camp, 1983, p.124.
313
Toynbee, op.cit.p.82.
314
Ortega y Gasset, Man and People, 1957, p.159. Gasset points out, among other
things in this chapter, the essentially dangerous nature of all people outside one's clan
everywhere on earth in the thousands of years up to the emergence of agricultural
civilization in 10,000 BP(ca).
312
increasing in extent and intensity.
And this clash affects modern writing. Walter
Benjamin once said that the most modern of texts would be made entirely of other
texts.315 While this is not true of this text, it is difficult to ignore the partial truth of
Benjamin's remarks as they apply to this autobiography. For as I write these words
there are nearly fifteen hundred references that I draw on to elaborate my story.
The confrontation of elements within this immense social and psychological diversity
seemed to be coming to another head, to a climacteric, in the half century that has
been both the years of my life and the first five decades of this Kingdom of God on
earth.316 Two of the greatest, the most bloodthirsty, wars in history had been fought
in the thirty-one years, 1914 to 1945, ending just as I had come into the world. It was
a period which coincided with the adulthood of my parents and grandparents. And in
the eight years preceding the inception of that Kingdom, 1945 to 1953, the atomic
bomb had lent a special element to the range and momentum of the catastrophic
aspects of the twentieth century. In a strange and nearly unbelievable way, it was all
part of what the Baha'is came to call the process of the Lesser Peace.317
Toynbee points to the Peloponnesian War(431 to 404 BC) as the beginning of the
decline of Hellenic and Roman civilization. Perhaps 1914 marks the beginning of the
end of the civilization into which I was born, Western civilization, and the beginning,
three years later, of the Lesser Peace and the new civilization that would emerge from
the destructive fires of this age.318 Certainly the organizational aspects of the Cause,
teaching plans, the embryo of Baha’i Administration could be said to go back to these
years in the last half of the second decade of the twentieth century. 319 While the old
world began its decline, a new one was taking form. In 1919, at the heart of these
embryonic years, when this new world was taking form and the Lesser Peace could be
said to have just begun, my father was 24, my mother 15 and that other major
influence on my early life, my mother’s father, was 47.320 This question of decline is
a complex one with a host of views surrounding it. One recent author has argued that
the 1960s marked the beginning of “real” secularization, the “permanent decline” of
315
Walter Benjamn in Teresa Leo, "Finding Poetry: An Interview with Rick Moody,"
CrossConnect, Internet, 2003.
f i n d i n g p o e t r y: a n i n t e r v i e w w i t h r i c k m o o d y
316
‘Abdu’l-Baha uses this term quite explicitly on page 351 of God Passes by,USA,
1957(1944).
317
It could be argued that 1917 and Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points were the beginning
of the Lesser Peace. See The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light,2000,
p.33.
318
Of course, one could just as easily select 1789 as that beginning point or even
1517, or one of several other possibilities in the complex history of Western society in
the modern age.
319
Peter Smith, “The American Baha’i Community: 1894-1917, A Preliminary
Survey,” Studies in Babi & Baha’I History, Vol.1, M. Momen, editor, Kalimat
Press, 1984, p. 157.
320
I could include here my mother’s mother who was 45(ca) and other members of
my family but, it seems to me, that their influence on my life was too periferal to
mention here.
religion in the form of the churches and “pervasive Christian culture."321 Certainly
the dialogue about religion has been a very complex one since the 1960s, since I
began this pioneering venture, that it is not surprising that "teaching the Faith" has
become the complex phenomenon that it has, at least in Australia and Canada, the
fields where I have worked.
I’ll include two poems here to convey some perspective on these three souls. What I
write here is a far cry, a distant cousin, apparently, to the wide vistas of history and
social analysis I have been writing about above. Readers will have to bear with me as
I dance and dart from the macrocosm to the microcasm. Apologies to those readers
who find my 'darting-and-farting', as they say in the vernacular here in Australia,
frustrating. I think those who are comfortable with my style thusfar should have little
difficulty wading through the six hundred and fifty pages to come. For those who find
my style, my approach, too weighty, too cumbersome and difficult to take in, I can
only say that, hopefully, there will be a reward for effort. Perhaps, too, this text
would be improved by following the advice of American poet laureate Louis Gluck
who wrote in 1994 that: "Writing is not decanting of personality." At the start of a
volume of essays called Proofs and Theories she wrote: "The truth, on the page, need
not have been lived. It is, instead, all that can be envisioned."322 In my case, for the
most part, these words are lived. Gluck's words which follow, written in 2001, could
very well describe many of my desires at the outset of this autobiography, especially
the solitude I need to work:
Immunity to time, to change. Sensation
Of perfect safety, the sense of being
Protected from what we loved
And our intense need was absorbed by the night
And returned as sustenance.
MY MOTHER
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.
-Wallace Stevens
She was born just after they arrived
from the old country1on a cold winter day
while hope still filled the air of our spirit,
before two wars sucked us a little dry
to put it absolutely mildly.
We really had no idea how sucked
we had been and still don't, not really.
321
Callum Brown in "The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe: 1750-2000,
Cambridge UP, 2003," Reviewed in:Canadian Journal of Sociology Online, MarchApril 2004.gh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds.
322
Louise Gluck, USAToday.com, 29 August 2003.
We were left to face a continuing tempest
even in these fin de siecle years.
She came into that northern land
by a lake, below an escarpment,2
and stayed for seventy-four years.
She had one child
in twenty-three years of marriage,
played the piano, was very beautiful
and chanced upon a new Faith
as the ninth stage of history
and the Kingdom of God on earth
were just breaking in
and a new beginning for humankind
was on the way: little did we know.
Ron Price
6 December 1996
1
2
my mother was born in 1904 after her parents arrived from England in 1900.
my mother lived in and around Hamilton Ontario all her life.
THINGS GOT AWEFULLY COMPLEX
This poem tries to take an overview of my mother's life. She was 16 in 1920 and
living in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The Baha'i Faith had just begun its story in
Ontario, in Toronto, 40 miles away, seven years before. Gertrude Stein said my
mother was part of a lost generation. Stein also felt and wrote about the ethic of the
pioneer.1 My mother, it has always seemed to me in retrospect, was one of those
pioneers Stein wrote about. Fitzgerald said that generation was bright and with infinite
belief. Sometimes my mother lost the patina of brightness during life's inevitable
struggle, as did many of that generation. Ernest Hemmingway dramatized the
disappearance of that brightness and that belief in The Sun Also Rises in 1926.
-Ron Price with thanks to Henry Idema III, Freud, Religion and the Roaring
Twenties, Rowman and Littlefield Pub., 1990, p.135; and 1William H. Gass, William
H. Gass: Essays By William H. Gass, A.A. Knopf, NY, 1976, p.122.
You were part of what they called
the lost generation, after that first war,
when the spiritual dynamic
seemed to fall out of the bottom,
some spiritual debacle
where the roots of faith
were finally severed
and some kind of secular tree
grew out of depression and more war
and the necessity for something to fill
the all-pervasive spaces and holes of existence.
Things got awfully complex too, for you,
as the years went on and a hundred options
on a hundred trees tried to interpret
what was really happening
and the tempest blew and blew
across the face of the earth
through your towns and days.
But not many figured it out,
not many back in the fifties
even tried.
Maybe the war,
and the one before
had shattered their world,
but they didn't really know it
while they watched 'I Love Lucy,'
Westerns and Dragnet
and ate hot dogs.
You had some of that
'what's it all about?' sense,
that search, that endless search,
that pioneer mentality,
otherwise you would not have
been there when the Kingdom of God
got its kick-start back in '53.
I wrote the following piece as an introductory statement to my grandfather’s
autobiography. His autobiography, writtenh in the early 1920s, covered the first
twenty-nine years of his life, up to 1901. I place this statement here because it puts
my grandfather’s life in a context that I think is useful and covers the years 1901 to
1958. It provides, too, a helpful backdrop, background, mise-en-scene, for my own
life and, given the fact that it was my grandfather's autobiography, an autobiography
of his years from 1872 to 1901, that inspired mine, some general statement on his life
is pertinent at the outset of this life-story of mine.
ALFRED CORNFIELD: THE MIDDLE AND LATE YEARS
It has been some twenty years since my grandfather's autobiographical work The
Adventures of Arthur Collins was finally typed and distributed to each living
member of the family.323 Arthur Collins was, of course, Alfred J. Cornfield, and the
adventures were his own from 1872 to 1901, from his birth to his marriage in early
1901. He writes his story in some four hundred pages, an impressive work for a man
who had but two or three years of formal education in the newly established Board
Schools in London in the first decade after primary education had become compulsory
in England by the Education Act of 1870.324
It is my intention in this brief
323
I received his autobiography in 1982.
A book of this length, written by an unlettered, largely uneducated, man is
unquestionably impressive. Since the late 18th century, since Rousseau's classic
324
biographical piece to complete the account which my grandfather began, which he
wrote in the years 1921-1923 during his forty-ninth to his fifty-first year when his
daughter, my mother, was in her late teens. It is my intention to take his story from
his early adulthood, his marriage at the age of twenty-nine, to his death in 1958 at the
age of eighty-six when I was thirteen.
A common pattern with autobiographies and biographies is to divide a life into early,
middle and late. Often, too, when an autobiography ends without completing a life or
leaving a large part of a lifestory untold, some other literary genre is used to provide
for those years unaccounted for in the original story.325 Applying this early, middle
and late division to Alfred Cornfield's life it could look something like this:
and
1872 to 1901-early
1901 to 1931-middle
1931 to 1958-late
The early part of his life is covered by the account he himself wrote up to his marriage
in 1901. The second and middle part covers the period up to the birth of his first
grandchild and the third and final part covers the period from that child’s birth in 1931
to Alfred Cornfield's death in 1958. My intention here is to convey something of the
life-story of my grandfather, a man whom I know so little about after he reached the
age of 29 in 1901. Like so many of us, we come to know someone in our family or an
acquaintance, but we never really know them in any meaningful, any detailed, sense.
What follows here is a short statement, a brief description, of my grandfather’s life
from 1901 to 1958, a man I hardly knew.326
THE MIDDLE YEARS: 1901-1931
During these three decades, 1901 to 1931, western civilization went through the worst
war, the most traumatic and horrific experience since, arguably, the Black Death in
1348 when one in every three people from Iceland to India perished. History books
have documented this period and its Great War of 1914 to 1918 in great detail. It is
not the purpose of this biography to dwell on these events of history, however briefly,
except insofar as they impinge on the life of Alfred Cornfield. It is my purpose,
autobiography Confessions, autobiography had become a more common literary
form. The French novelist Stendhal, for example, in his early fifties wrote an account
of his first seventeen years in some five hundred pages. The work is dull, repetitive,
often dishonest and boastful. The twenty-first century reader used to the faster pace
and self-exposing nature of modern novels and autobiographies may find this work of
my grandfather, Alfred Cornfield somewhat dull and repetitive in places, it seems to
me to possess the ring of a self-effacing honesty, humility and is highly readable.
325
The American writer Henry James divided his life, his autobiography, into early,
middle and late. He wrote it from 1913 to 1917, beginning to write it at the age of
sixty-eight. See Autobiography: Henry James, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey, 1983, p.ix; and The Autobiography of John Cowper Powys
published in 1934 up to the age of sixty. After 1934, until his death in 1963, Powys'
letters provided the base for the account of the rest of his life.
326
See Alfred Cornfield, A.J. Cornfield’s Story, 1980 for his autobiography: 18721901.
though, to outline in as much detail as possible my grandfather's life from the age of
twenty-nine to fifty nine, the middle years of his life until the birth of his first
grandchild, Murray, the first son of his eldest daughter, Florence, who was then thirty.
Six months after Alfred's marriage, in late August of 1901, a severe storm lashed the
city of Hamilton. The green leaves of late summer's trees were blown from their
branches and the Works Department were kept busy cleaning up the streets. It had
been a hot August and now, after this storm, people sat outside in the evenings
looking at the trees "gaunt and leafless as midwinter" as Alfred describes it in the
closing pages of the autobiography of his early years, the first three decades of his
life. Perhaps this storm was a sign of things to come. For the next fifty-seven years a
tempest blew through the institutions and society of western civilization and it has
continued blowing into the lives of Alfred's grandchildren and great-grandchildren in
the closing decades of the century into the opening years of the new millennium.
In late 1901 Alfred and Sara had their first child, Florence. Florence was followed in
1904 by Lillian and in 1908 by Harold. Alfred was thirty-six when he had his last
child and his first son. He was forty-two when the first WW began and fifty-seven
when the depression hit in 1929. I know very little about his activities during these
years except that he worked as a shirt-cutter while he was writing his autobiography
and that he and Sara and their children moved frequently during the first three decades
of the twentieth century living as they did in Hamilton. Searching for a cheaper and
better accommodation, searching for a better job, another job, a more secure job
seemed to be the general story of these years.
I remember my mother, Lillian, telling me about how her father used to stop off at a
butcher on the way home and pick up a steak for the evening meal. But I do not
remember any other anecdotes from these middle years of Alfred's life: 1901-1931.
These brief notes will, for now, have to suffice until more information comes my way
or some inspiration arrives to provide a base for more details for these Middle Years.
The Great War and its aftermath, 1914 to 1931 decimated the value system of western
man. Whatever beliefs my grandfather had in 1914 at age 42 got completely
catapulted into oblivion by the age of 59 when this stage of his story ends. With his
wife Sara the story of belief seemed to dominate over skepticism.
I was able to write more on my grandfather's 'later years’ before handing the story to
my cousins Joan Cornfield and David Hunter in 2002 to add what they could.
THE LATER YEARS: 1931-1958
The years from 1931 to 1945 saw the end of the Depression and a second great war
from 1939 to 1945. If belief were annihilated in WW1, optimism in the future had
trouble surviving WW2. Alfred Cornfield was a struggling young immigrant from
England at the turn of the century and by the early 1920s, when he wrote the
autobiography of the first twenty-nine years of his life, his life's struggle had
continued for another twenty years. It was becoming difficult for him to maintain a
sense of a bright future, but he did acquire, insensibly over the decades a
philosophical attitude that resulted in an apparently calm demeanor by the time he was
in his seventies. The storm clouds of war and poverty that kept blowing through
western society from 1929 to 1945 would temper any philosophy of progress and
belief in God even more; at least that was the case for millions. Anything associated
with theistic belief that might have stirred in Alfred's soul had difficulty breaking in
by the late forties when I have my first memories of grandfather.
"There exists in human nature," wrote Gibbon with his long view of the times, "a
strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present
times."327 Alfred's skepticism was rooted in the historical experience of the first half
of the twentieth century whose evils were justifiably magnified. Whatever optimism
had existed in the West in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and it would
appear from the writings of many analysts in these years that a good deal of optimism
did prevail, it was bashed out of western man in the first half of the twentieth century.
These cruel events of history did not seem to affect the beliefs of Alfred's wife Sara,
as my mother was to inform me in the late 1950s, some fifteen to twenty years after
Sara's death in 1939. Even Alfred's two daughters, Florence and Lillian, at least as I
remember them in the 1950s, continued to enjoy the seeds of belief perhaps taking
more after their mother than their father who remained until his death an agnostic.
The last years of my grandfather's life, then, after 1945, from the age of seventy-two
to eighty-six were years of his retirement. He had retired from the world of
employment by the age of sixty-five in 1937, if not before. His employment history
was a chequered one and the thirty-six years from the age of twenty-nine to sixty-five
involved many positions, living in many houses, always trying to make ends meet, as
it were. But my memory yields little on this period of Alfred's life and my sources of
information have, as yet, provided little supplementary detail.
Alfred lived to see the beginning of the space age, the first man to encircle the earth in
a space vehicle, Yuri Gagarin in the Sputnick in 1957. Alfred Cornfield died at age
eighty-six in 1958. This period is easier to document since all of Alfred's
grandchildren lived during this period and came into their teens and twenties. His
oldest grandchild, Murray Hunter, was twenty-seven when Alfred died.
My first memories of Alfred Cornfield were in about 1948 when I was four. My
memories are from the years 1948 to 1958, a brief time, when Alfred lived with my
mother's sister's family, by then, in Burlington. The memories are few, but quite
graphic: babysitting me on cold Canadian evenings when my parents went out to choir
practice; sitting in his chair in his bedroom/study on Hurd Avenue in Burlington
reading a book; walking over to our home on Seneca Street from his home on Hurd
Avenue; speaking quietly and gently to my mother or father in our home on Seneca
Street in Burlington. I was thirteen when Alfred died and had just entered secondary
school.
My mother used to tell me things about her father whom she loved deeply and
respected highly. She saw him as one of the best read people she knew in her life.
She saw him as highly virtuous: kind, patient, self-controlled, thoughtful, wise,
courteous, considerate. My memories, again, are sadly, few and far between. I shall
leave this very brief account, having made an initial effort to put something down on
paper. Perhaps when time and circumstance permit more can be added to this life of
Alfred Cornfield.
327
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Internet Quotes.
I place these few words, this brief summary of parts of my grandfather's life, at this
point because I have a strong appreciation for his own autobiography. Immediately
after reading it in 1984 and 1985 I began to write my own. My mother's poetry, too,
seemed to finally bear fruit in my own poetry within two years of her death, hence my
inclusion here of this brief account of my mother's poetry and art. These lines from
Shakespeare's sonnets seem particularly apt here in relation to any understanding I
have of the significant people in my childhood:
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shall see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.328
My view of these my earliest years, my "youth's proud livery, so gazed on now," as
Shakespeare writes in his second sonnet, is nowhere near as bleak as he goes on to
write in that same sonnet. I do not see those years as "a tottered weed of small worth
held" but, rather, as part of a "pure and goodly issue on the shore of life."329 Often,
though, I feel the truth of Shakespeare's words about life's stage that it "presenteth
nought but shows."330 And, to conclude these quotations from Shakespeare's sonnets,
I like to think that:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.331
This, of course, is my poetry and my prose. It is timely to include this brief digression
into the life of my grandfather because his own autobiographical work was read
during my third and forth years in Katherine, 1985-6, and it served as a crucial
inspiration to the beginnings of my own work. Alfred Cornfield’s work was
prototypical, provided a principle of coherence and generativity, a kind of helpful
simplicity of aim and purpose to my own work. His work has served as an anchor
point for what Todd Schultz, an instructor in methods of autobiography, calls
“personalogical inquiry.”332 Having seen how my grandfather creatively crafted some
clarifying coherence in his own uneven and complex life, I was encouraged to try to
anchor my life in a similar fashion. Of course, there were other anchoring events and
this autobiography describes a number of them.333 These anchoring events, some in
one's micro, one's interpersonal world; some in the macro world of socio-politics, give
one a focus from which to deal with life's labyrinth, its puzzle and from there to find
the golden thread.
328
William Shakespeare, Sonnets, Number 3.
'Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'i Prayers, NSA of USA, 1985, p.106.
330
ibid., sonnet 15.
331
ibid., sonnet 18.
332
William Schultz, “The Prototypical Scene: A Method of Generating
Psychobiological Hypotheses,” Up Close and Personal: Teaching and Learning
Narrative Methods, D. McAdams, APA Press, Washington, D.C.
333
Renato Barilli, "William Blake at the Origins of Postmodernity," coolmedia,
internet site. Barilli refers to anchoring events in Blake's life like the French
Revolution.
329
At this stage of my life I have written little about my grandfather’s days after 1901
and little about my parents. I will close this opening chapter with an introduction I
wrote to a collection of my mother’s art and poetry that I put together after her
passing. This piece will also help to provide some autobiographical background, a
setting, a context, for what follows in the chapters ahead. The notes here on my
mother's life are few, entirely out of proportion to the significance of her role in my
life.
LILIAN PRICE'S 'POETRY AND ART' IN CONTEXT334
One of Canada's major writers in the last half of the 20th century, Mordecai Richler,
left Canada in 1950 at the age of 20 for the UK. Among the reasons he left was his
opinion that he could not publish his writings in Canada. Canadian literature was still
in its infancy, then, as a literary genre. It was about this time that my mother started to
write. Except for only occasionally published pieces, most of my mother's work was
unpublished. After some twenty years of gathering quotations from varied
sources(1930-1950) and more than thirty years of extensive reading, mostly in
literature, philosophy and religion, she began writing poetry. She was about forty-six.
The view of Canadians then, and now, was that they were "nice but solemn." At least
that was how Richler expressed it in an interview fifty years later on Books and
Writing, ABC Radio National(1:00-2:00 pm,18 July 2001) By the last decade of the
twentieth century Canada had found a rich vein of literature in the form of several
major writers on the international stage. By that time my mother had passed away.
But during those years when Canada was moving from its infancy in literature to the
more mature work that was beginning to be found in bookshops around the world in
the years 1950-1980, my mother produced this body of poetry. It was not the work of
a major poet or even, perhaps, a minor one. But it was the poetry of someone who
loved words and who tried to put life's meaning into words. It was the poetry of
someone I loved very much and to whom I owe much more than I can measure for my
own interest in writing poetry as well as a wole attitude to life.
In the same way that autobiography provided an event of super-saliency in the life of
my grandfather, the writing of poetry served as a similarly salient event in the life of
my mother in terms of their influences on my own experience. It is difficult to know
just how this process works but I would accord these events a central status. They
help to counter the looseness of method in autobiography and they help me deal with
the puzzling multiplicity of interpretations that attempt to explain a life. Some
interpretations seem better, more pronounced, even if not definitive. One strives for a
degree of interpretability, continuity and cogent coherence, for self-defining memories
and prototypical scenes. Perhaps, too, as Schultz argues, it is a manifestation of “the
principle of parsimony in action.”335 It draws webs of meaning together in one concise
package, providing a handy touch point to remind myself who I am.
This introduction is found at a website called ‘A Celebration of Women Writers.”
Go to: http://users.intas.net.au/pricerc/24Family&Self.htm#lillian.
335
William Schultz, op.cit.
334
Canada's history was not as bloody and angst-ridden as that of the United States,
England or even Australia. Canada's novelists and poets simply 'mapped the territory'
as Richler put it. In 1950, until her death in 1978, my mother, Lilian Price, was
mapping her territory through poetry and, I should add, through art and music.
Building on the work of her father, Alfred J. Cornfield, whose autobiography was
written when she was only sixteen or seventeen but was not published until 1980, less
than two years after my Mother's passing and twenty-two years after Alfred Cornfield
had passed away, Lilian was, indeed, 'mapping her territory,' as her father had mapped
his more than thirty years before. Whereas he did his mapping in the form of
autobiography and a life of extensive reading, Lilian used poetry for her main artistic
medium.
By the time I began to write poetry in 1980, my mother had been gone for two years.
Interestingly, my grandfather's work had only been published perhaps three months
before I started writing poetry. By the time I began to write poetry and autobiography
my grandfather had been gone for nearly a quarter of a century. I write these words to
give perspective and context to my mother's work, work that I keep in my study here
in George Town Tasmania. I keep it in a file and in a small booklet I have entitled
Poetry: Mother. Around it, on the walls, are three of her pastel drawings which, with
two photographs of her, keep her memory alive and well twenty-five years after her
passing. After I left home, first in 1964 and then, when my father died in May 1965,
my mother began to take up art. I do not know the exact date of the pieces in the
collection here, but my guess is that they come from the years 1965 to 1978. To her
musical talents and her poetic inclinations were now added the artistic in her latter
years, after the age of sixty.
Then, as the 1970s, neared their end, my mother passed away. The many battles
between heart and head, which were the pleasure and pain of her life and which were
at the root of much of her artistic work, were at last over.
Ron Price 18 July 2001
And so, in a rambling sort of fashion I introduce my life and something of my family
in the twentieth century. I'm always by degrees and alternating: amazed, slightly
surprised, impressed, perplexed, bemused, alienated and fascinated by the crosssection of skills, abilities, successes, failures, indeed, the life-stories of the many
members who constitute my family of origin and family by two marriages. The group
is now a burgeoning one of some fifty people, approximately. I can't even keep track
of them all and, for most of my life, I have not tried, too occupied was I with my own.
Now that I am retired I take a distant and dispassionate view. Australian cartoonist
when asked to describe "the domestic trail" of his life said it was "utterly incoherent"
and "a huge mystery."336 I laughed when I read those words. I liked Petty's honesty
here. I think these phrases apply, in part, to my domstic life. But I would also use
other phrases to characterize the overall picture. Perhaps I'll let them unfold in the six
hundred and fifty pages ahead.
336
Bruce Petty, "Wisdom Interviews," ABC Radio National, February 8, 2004.
This chapter provides a start to what has become a long story and an equally long
analysis. I hope readers will find the chapters which follow both entertaining and
instructive. If at times they seem a little boring and mechanical, as so many
autobiographies are, I hope that readers will also find that they are usefully
informative from time to time and intellectually simulating on occasion. I may not lift
ticks from the clock and freeze them as Proust once did and as Vermeer once did in
his paintings, but I try to save some of this swiftly passing life and invest it with a
verbal value that time never permitted me to give it when it was happening. The
discipline of psychoautobiography confines itself to salient episodes, special
fragments, illuminating gestalts, persistent modes of behaviour, formal symmetries
and constellating metaphors in a life. I cover more ground than just the salient
features. I solve enigmas but leave many unsolved and so can not apply
psychoautobiography to what has become a seven hundred page narrative. But there
is an informed use of the psychological in this narrative and I hope it makes for a
more well-rounded, a more satisfying life history. There is also an informed use of the
writings and ideas of some of the "greats" of the western intellectual tradition. The
wealth of this tradition provides a burgeoning base of quotable material. Here is one,
again from Shakespeare, one of the many precepts and axioms which seem to drop
casually from his pen, which I found to be a crucial way of putting my own
experience, my own feelings, especially about those I loved:
In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.337
Baha'u'llah's says much the same ting in different ways, especailly when He refers to
the sin-covering eye. Much in relationships depends on this one quality.
The information I have sought and the experience I have had has been used and lived
over these many decades in the service of a commitment I grew into, insensibly, in the
late 1950s and early 1960s. This information and this experience I now frame as I did
while I travelled along the path within the context of goals I have had, goals which
have determined what I needed to do on the journey. This information and this
activity has been part of a life of committed action, what Kierkegaard called life in the
ethical sphere.338 Now, in these early years of retirement, the information I am
obtaining in abundance is supporting an engaged intellectual activity, furthering the
coordination of my action in the Baha'i’ world and the life I live in relation to that
world. My everyday commitments have always had a context within an overall
framework of what ultimately makes sense to me. And that is still the case providing,
as this framework does, the terms of reference in which I obtain the information I do.
There is a passion and energy in my work and now a harmony; this is no mere
dabbling. Kierkegaard says that “will is the real core of man. It is tireless,
337
Shakespeare, op.cit., sonnet 141.
I first came across the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard in 1964 or 1965 at the
University of Waterloo when Elizabeth Rochester gave a talk on the relevance of
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, among other topics. He is a difficult philosopher to
unravel(1815-1855) but his ideas I have found useful in a general Baha’i perspective.
338
spontaneous, automatic and reveals itself in many ways.”339 Seven or eight hours a
day in the service of ideas and print is all my will can muster. There is spontaneity
and the automatic in this exercise of writing and reading. For the remaining seven or
eight hours a day during which I am awake I must turn my will to other things to
refresh my spirit and survive in the world of the practical, the world of people and
places. Like Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau more than a century before
me, I travel widely within the confines of my small town with and in my mind.340 I
confront life in and with my own spirit which is the most trying battleground life
gives us. Only time will tell the extent of my mastery.
An insidious bi-polar illness, a long list of sicknesses beginning in early childhood,
sadness and melancholy, fatigue resulting from fifty to seventy hours a week talking
and listening, reading and writing, marking and planning as a teacher; guilt from
crimes, follies and sins of a major and minor nature, baseness, impatience, lack of
self-control, lust, indulgences of several kinds, the litany could go on and on; periodic
failure in employment, in marriage, in relationships of various kinds, incapacities on a
host of fronts--and still with this sense of burden, perhaps because of it, there arose
this call to write. Perhaps this writing was simply--or not-so-simply--part of my
"heart melting within me" as it says in the Long Obligatory Prayer. Of course, the
heart did not melt all the time; the burden was not felt like some great weight over my
head every minute of my existence.
Some of my sins I did not want the answer to "so keenly as to burn the bridges across
which the sin continually" came. My entreaty to God to save me from my sin was
mixed with a sense of repentance that was, often, "a very searching and disturbing
affair." The effort to come to grips with many of my sins has often seemed too
demanding. I have prayed long and hard over several decades but, it seems, that I so
often simply(or not so simply) lack the constitutional fortitude. I can find the right
"inward craving,"341 but the promptings of my passions, their contagion, seems so
much stronger than the control I need to deal with them. And so the battle rages.
I remember back in the mid-1990s, as I was beginning to plan my exit from the world
of endless talk, people and listening as a teacher and Baha'i in community; I
remember that tastes, touches, sights and smells began to take on a new meaning. I
seemed to recapture the past and live in the present with a greater intensity than I had
been able to do in previous years. As the new millennium opened and I was at last
free from meetings and people coming to me and at me at a mile a minute, the present
and especially the past began to come at me noticeably free of those disappointments
and anxieties that had for so many years accompanied my life. There was the sense of
Kresten Nordentoft, Kierkegaard’s Psychology, trans from Danish by Bruce
Kirmmse, Duquesne University Press, 1978, p.130. In my 3 arch-lever files on
philosophy Kierkgaard only occupies 14 pages of notes, hardly a just amount given
the significance and relevance I have found his ideas in the last four decades.
340
John Pickard, Emily Dickinson: An Introduction and Interpretation, Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1967, p.31.
341
All the quotations in this paragraph come from the book on prayer which I have
found most helpful since I bought it at the start of the 4th epoch in 1986. It is by
William and Madeline Hellaby, Prayer: A Baha'i Approach, George Ronald,
Oxford, 1985, pp. 81-85.
339
blossom, of freshness, of new colour, of bright intensity and there was also the sense
of calm and a solemn consciousness.
This consciousness seemed productive of a quiet joy that had not been there before,
perhaps this was partly due to fluvoximine and lithium's soothing presence in my
brain and body chemistry, especially at the synaptic connections. They were certainly
essential but, as I listened to Chopin's Ballade No.1 in G Minor, Opus 23 and gazed
occasionally out of the window of my study at the lemon tree and the flowers my wife
had recently planted in our front garden here in northern Tasmania, I felt a quiet joy.
It was a joy which resembled that equable temperament that Wordsworth is said to
have had and which allowed me to experience the emotions and events of earlier days,
only this time they were recollected in tranquillity, in that "bliss of solitude."342
I do not so much want to recover the past; this work is not so much an autobiography
of remembrance, although there is inevitably some of that. It is an autobiography of
analysis and reflection. I want to write, also, about what I have not experienced and
about what gives this life of mine meaning and worth.343 I am not living in this work
the way some writers have done who failed to live in their life. I am certainly
appraising my life, my times, my religion and the myriad relationships involved in
such an appraisal, for appraisal has been for me somewhat of an obsession as these
four epochs evolved and as the content of the appraisal shifted. For some writers, the
great ones, it is style that endures. Lies, subterfuge and dissimulation become part and
parcel of the text. This was true of Proust. For me, my aim is the essential truth of my
life and times, however difficult it may be to find and describe it. Style is something
of which I am hardly conscious.
I am conscious, though, of the epistemological upheaval taking place in the historical
profession and in the field of autobiography. This upheaval has several major forms.
One of these forms is based on the view that there are only possible narrative
representations of the past and none can claim to know the past as it actually was. Of
course, some historians maintain that conventional historical practice can be
continued. Others say that the writing of history must be radically reconceived. 344
The historian and literary analyst, Raymond Williams, says that the word “narrative”
“is one of the most difficult words in the English language.”345
My work may be out of step with the modern consciousness; my sexual revelations
may be tame; my social preoccupations of interest to only a few; my politics
irrelevant to the vast majority; but I like to think there is a rich and analytical base that
is quiet and possessed of what many I’m sure will find to be a dull but hopefully
pleasing silence, a silence which will, in time, attract some readers from among the
342
William Wordsworth, "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud," William Wordsworth:
Selected Poems, Dent, London, 1986(1975), p.123.
343
Remy de Gourmont says "one only writes well about things one hasn't
experienced." I'm not sure if this is true. But I will be writing about both.(See William
Gass, op.cit., p.154.)
344
Roberta Pearson, “Conflagration and Contagion: Eventilization and Narrative
Structure,” Internet, April 16, 1999. See Alan Munslow, Deconstructing History,
Routledge, London, 1997.
345
Pearson, op.cit., p.1
loud impatient honks and belches that occupy so much of the public space these days.
For there is, amidst the noise and tumult, a serious and sophisticated reading audience
that has developed in the last several decades and now includes millions. This work
may find a home among some of these millions. But whether it does or whether it
doesn't for a citizen who acts or a writer who spends periods of time cloistered from
society, the dilemma is the same. It is the dilemma of the witness. As witness, one
asks: "Who am I to say?" Or: "Who am I, if I don’t say." The more deeply you
examine your own life, the more deeply you enter your times, and from there,
history.346
Were we endowed with a longer measure of existence and lived perhaps two or three
centuries, we might cast down a smile of pity and contempt on the crimes and follies
of human ambition. But given the narrow span in which we live, that we are given,
we seem eager to grasp at the precarious and short-lived enjoyments with which we
are blessed. It is thus that the experience of history exalts and enlarges or depresses
and confuses, the horizon of our intellectual view. In this autobiographical
composition that has taken me some months or years, in this perusal that has occupied
me for some several dozen days of total time, perhaps hundreds of hours, two
centuries have rolled through these pages, with more attention paid to recent decades
and less as the years go back. These are the two centuries since Shaykh Ahmad began
his years as the Bab's precursor in Iran, circa 1804-6.
The duration of a life or an epoch, my life, is contracted to a fleeting moment. At the
same time, this physical world, which gradually burst with wonder as the years rolled
by, rapidly grew smaller as a result of radio, TV, the computer and a cornucopia of
technological inventions. The grave, I sensed by my thrities, was ever beside life's
achievement, however unconscious I was of its presence or should I say its absense
most of the time. The success of life's ambition was instantly, or virtually so,
followed by the loss of the prize. Our immortal reason survived as it reflected on the
complex series of calamities and victories which passed before my eyes in history's
larger and multi-coloured garment. The entire panoply and pageantry of it all faintly
dwelt in my remembrance as I went about my daily duties. So is this true in varying
degrees of all of us. And it is this remembrance that I write about in this
autobiography, these fleeting years in which the Baha'i Faith and the world have been
transformed; in which the proceses of integration and disintegration were gathering
momentum, accelerating unobtrusively and yet, ironically, quite conspicuously; in
which the world's landscape daily grew more desolate, threatening and unpredictable
and yet more comfortable physically due to a range of consumer durables that were
not enjoyed by the world's peoples at any time in history and were still not enjoyed by
half the population, perhaps three billion or more.
Liberal relativism and capitalism represent a single, a dominating and comprehensive
world-view, as they have in "Western civilization" during all these epochs and
especially since the fall of communism in the late 1980s. Against this background,
during these several epochs of my life, great conceptual, political and social changes
have taken place in the midst of terrible suffering. The Faith itself has undergone a
346
Anne Michaels, "Unseen Formations" 99 in "Re-Membering the (W)holes:
Counter-memory, Collective Memory, and Bergsonian Time in Anne Michaels’
Miner’s Pond," Kimberly Verwaayen, www.arts.uwo.ca/canpoetry/
succession of triumphs which are documented elsewhere.347 It would appear an even
greater toll of grief and travail, unimaginably appalling, is in the offing in the
remaining years of this epoch and the epoch to come which will take us to 2144, in all
probability. But there is too, somewhere down the track, a vision of great glory and
beauty for man and society--from a Baha'i perspective.
I think that I have some advantages over the film-maker who tries to reduce a life to
24 frames per second. Something happens on the way to the screen that does not
happen on the way to the page. Despite the evocations of the past through powerful
images, colourful characters and moving words, film so often does not fulfill the basic
demands for truth and verifiability used by writers of history. Film compresses the
past into a closed world by telling a single, linear story with essentially a single
interpretation at least such is the general pattern in the first century of film history. I
try to avoid this trap. I do not deny historical, autobiographical alternatives. I do not
do away with complexities of motivation and causation. I do not banish subtlety. I
explore it in all its paradoxes and nuances. But in a world where most people get most
of their information about history from visual media, I am conscious that history and
one of its sub-disciplines, autobiography, have become somewhat esoteric pursuits,
that a large part of the population not only does not know much history but does not
care that they don’t know. It would seem that it is becoming difficult for many writers
about the past to tell stories that engage people. At the same time there is a plethora of
books that tell wonderful stories. Film tells stories so very well.348 We are certainly
not short on stories.
To render the fullness of the complex, multi-dimensional world in which we live we
need to juxtapose images and sounds; we need quick cuts to new sequences, dissolves,
fades, speed-ups, slow motion, the whole panoply and pageantry of film to even
approximate daily life and daily experience. Only film can recover all the past’s
liveliness. So goes one view. On the other hand, some critics of film say that film
images carry a poor information load. They say that history is not primarily about
descriptive narrative. It is about debate over what happened, why it happened and
what significance it had. It’s about personal knowledge. What I try to do in this book
is get six each way. In the absence of film’s captivating charm I try to do what film
can’t do or certainly won’t be doing with my life while I am alive. This book contains
much that is the stuff of film, a surface realism, the truth of direct observation, but I
try to reach out to people through the inner life, through character, through
psychology and what is private and not visible or catchable on camera. In the process
I am confident I will catch or contact some and with others no contact will be made.
tis is inevitable.349
I do with my life what history tries to do with people’s lives. I write and in the process
feel less peculiar and less isolated, less alienated, less lonely. The wrap-around feeling
347
I have drawn in this paragraph from ideas found in Century of Light, Universal
House of Justice, Baha'i World Centre, 2001, especially chapters XI and XII.
348
Robert A. Rosenstone, “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the
Possibility of Putting History Onto Film,” American Historical Review, Vol.93,
No.5, December 1988, pp.1173-1185.
349
I draw here on some of the ideas of Russian film makers as expressed in Donato
Totaro, “Art for All Time,” Film-Philosophy, Vol.4 No.4, February 2000.
one gets at the movies, the swamping of the senses, the feeling of being there, I get in
the writing of this autobiography. I also get elements of reflection, evaluation,
argument, weighing of evidence, dealing with inaccuracies and simplifications.
Whether the reader can get both is another question. The intellectual density of the
written word can be conveyed in film and the senses can be stimulated as much by
print as by the cinema. One can try to do both but to really pull it off is no mean feat.
My work possesses, for me, an escape from the world and its complex of incidents,
demands, compulsions and solicitations of every kind and a degree of urgency. These
external and never-ending minutiae of life, these incidents, “overtake the mind," as
Paul Valery once wrote, "without offering it any inner illumination."350 Now and in
this work the world blows through me like the wind, as it has blown through my life
and my times. Writing this account is a world of wait and watch, ponder and ponder.
Its chief reward is a stimulating affect on my mind. Sometimes there is exhaustion.
But there is and has been a daily renewal which was something I did not get in my last
years of teaching.
By the time I was nearly 55 and ready to retire from teaching I had begun to taste a
"pervasive spiritual strangulation," a disappointment, a fatigue of the heart, a tedium
vitae, an "existential exhaustion." This was my experience in the 1990s beginning in
my late forties and early fifties. It was part of Shakespeare's experience as conveyed
in his sonnets.351 What every human being does in their inmost thoughts and
responses, the play of feeling on things seen and felt, this is what we find in his
sonnets.352 This is what I try to portray, too, in this narrative. It was not all gloom and
doom, though. There was, as well, as John Updike observed, a new fun in life, "an
over-50 flavour."353 This will become evident to readers as they progress through this
book. Perhaps all I had was what Jed Diamond called, in his two books on the
subject, the male menopause,354 which he regarded as the major male change of life in
his whole life. There clearly was an angst, but there also was an inner peace, a
dichotomy, a contradiction in terms, perhaps consistent with my bi-polar disorder. In
1998 I began a series of testosterone injections, not for my libido but for a fatigue
which was making me go to sleep every afternoon. By late 1999, and my early
retirement these injections were discontinued. The fatigue and angst gradually
dissipated as the new milennium opened.
What I write here is closer to history than most dramatic film or documentary
television. Things have to be invented to make stories, the content of dramatic film, a
smooth documentary hour, coherent, intense, fittable into a two hour time-slot. The
most difficult thing for many to accept about film is that this most litteral of media is
not at all literal. What we see on the screen is less a description than an invention of
the past. But what is here in this autobiography deals with ‘just the facts, mam.’ It
350
Paul Valery in William Gass, op.cit., p.159.
Author Unknown, Quotations from Books about Shakespeare's Sonnets,
December 5th, 1998.
352
Madeline Clark, "The Eternal Self in Shakespeare's Sonnets," Sunrise
Magazine, June/July 1982.
353
Are You Old Enough to Read this Book? Reflections on Mid-Life, editor,
Deborah H. Deford, Readers Digest Books.
354
Jed Diamond, Male Menopause, 1st and 2nd editions, 1993 and 1997
351
deals with them in a certain fashion to deal with coherence and incoherence, intensity
and boredom, time’s regularities and irregularities. It deals with history in a way that
is new in the history of literature. For literature until the last century or so has dealt
with the upper classes, the well-to-do, and only since the coming of these two modern
Revelations have ordinary, everyday, men and women, even begun to tell their stories
or have them told by others.355
The awful mysteries and the true nature of the institutions of this Faith I have come to
believe in and give a context to in this narrative as well as the devotional side of my
life's experience I have both concealed from the eyes of the multitudes of humankind.
Indeed, it seemed necessary to exercise the utmost caution, even to affect a certain
secrecy, in these early epochs of this Formative Age when the tenets of this Faith are,
as yet, "improperly defined and imperfectly understood."356 It was a secrecy, a
caution, that for me derived from the implications of the claim of Baha'u'llah, a claim
which over time would involve both opposition and struggle, authority and victory. I
often felt a little like a secret-agent man possessed of knowledge no one around me
had. Sadly, it appeared that those around me, for the most part, did not want that
knowledge. So it was that I possessed only some of the equation, the analogy, the
picture of the secret-agent man. I often felt the romance and the excitement of the
role, however subdued it was by reality.
I am more than a little conscious that I am, like Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College,
"swallowed up in a corporate body"357 which will outlast me. I possess, then, a kind
of derivative immortality. My own life is only an element in that body's more
permanent life. My work, like that of all my fellow Baha'is, will be carried on by our
successors, the generations yet to come. Our story and the story of our successors will
be found in many places. This is only one small part of that story. For humanity will
"again become united around a transcending moral issue." At the moment the
transcending pathfinders among us can not be spotted; society does not appear ready
to risk a new path. But these pathfinders will not be going away; they will be waiting
to help a confused society find its way back to a clarity of purpose.358 This
autobiography is part of that effort to breathe a new life in this "spiritual springtime"
and "array those trees which are the lives of men with the fresh leaves, the blossoms
and fruits of consecrated joy."359
In my dress, my food, my homes, my furnishings, my gardens, my transport, my
employments and enjoyments, I was clearly one of those favourites of fortune among
the global billions who united every refinement of convenience and of comfort, if not
elegance and splendour. So many of these emoluments soothed my pride or gratified
my sensuality, insensible, largely unappreciative of their comforts due to familiarity
and their continuous presence like the very air I breathed. One could not give the
name of luxury to these refinements of mine. Nor could I be severely arraigned by the
moralists of the age for possessing these basics. But I often thought that it would be
more conducive to the virtue, as well as happiness of mankind, if all possessed the
355
"An Interview With Louis Auchincloss," Atlantic Unbound, October 15, 1997.
Shoghi Effendi, Baha'i Administration, Wilmette, 1968(1928), p.140.
357
Leslie Stephen, Studies of a Biographer, Vol.2, Burt Franklin, NY, 1973, p.158.
358
Gail Sheehy, Pathfinders,Bantam Books, NY, 1982, p.532.
359
'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.116.
356
necessities and none of the superfluities of life. And one day, it was my view, that
would be the case.
Many autobiographies purport to deal with one thing while, in reality, dealing with
something else. Hillary Clinton's recent autobiography was intended to be about the
many controversies and scandals in Bill Clinton's campaigns and presidency,
presumably to get these issues behind her before she contemplated running for the
White House herself. Yet the book skates over the problems the Clinton
administration faced in its rocky debut and in the impeachment crisis and skims over
details of matters like Whitewater and "travelgate." It expends a startling amount of
space on Mrs. Clinton's trips abroad, on her personal appearance and on what is
simply trivia. This is where her frankness is found; for example, her frank dislike of
golf.
I hope this book of mine avoids this unfortunate trap of the populist autobiographer. I
hope I achieve what I set out to do.360 There is certainly little frankness in this work
about the trivia in life. Perhaps it would be better if there had been. Hilary Hammell,
in her review of Hilary Clinton's book in the Yale Review of Books, concludes that
Mrs. Clinton may just have convinced 600,000 people to vote for her in 2008.361 It
may have been that she did not waste her words on trivia. And it may be that this
work should have included much more of this everyday bone and chouder.
Michiko Kakutani writes that Katherine Hepburn was decidedly unaccustomed to the
art of introspection. Revelations in Scott Berg's biography of Hepburn, published two
weeks after her death, are few and scattered. "Hepburn, I learned," Mr. Berg writes,
"always lived in the moment; and once an event had been completed, she was on to
the next. There was no looking back."362 This work, Pioneering Over Four Epochs,
is strongly, decidedly introspective. It is just about entirely a book that looks back,
but with one eye firmly fixed on the future. My role as witness to, as a contemporary
of, the developments in the Baha'i community in the half-century 1953-2003 is a
major feature of this narrative.363 It is a witness that has an eye on the future, that
feels like it has the very future in its bones.
360
Michiko Kakutani, "Living History: Books of the Times," NY Times.com: A
Review of Zone of Privacy, Hillary Clinton, 562 pages, 27 August 2003.
361
Hilary Hammell, "Review of Living History," Yale Review of Books, 2003.
362
Michiko Kakutani, "Hepburn: The Authorized(It Says Here) Version," NY
Times.com, 27 August 2003, a review of A. Scott Berg's biography of Katherine
Hepburn entitled Kate Remembered.
363
Writers and poets often see themselves in general, in thematic terms. The Russian
poet, Anna Akhmatova, for example, saw her role as witness to the horrors of the
twentieth century. This is a major theme in her verse which she wrote in a groundbreaking, concise modern style. Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet, St. Martin's
Press, NY, 1994; and Anna Akhmatova: Biographical/Historical Overview, Jill T.
Dybka, Internet Site, 2003.
VOLUME 1: CHAPTER TWO
"Breaking New Ground"
When people collectively explore, in various ways, the real commitments that define
their lives as human beings, they can create a vision of self-actualization in their
social environment, a new way of expressing what their world is, who they are and
what they ought to be. And when that vision is already defined in specific terms so
that their analysis and discussion is about the elaboration of that vision, the results can
be staggering. It is like a second coming into being of the self. -Ron Price with thanks
to James Herrick, "Empowerment Practice and Social Change: The Place for New
Social Movement Theory," 1995, Internet, 12 January 2003.
_____________________________________________________________________
The Baha'i experience has generated a massive quantity of print in the first two
centuries of its experience, if we go back as far as the arrival of Shaykh Ahmad in
Najaf and Karbila in about 1793 and his becoming a mujtahid in the following years
as the beginning point for that history. This generation, the generation that came of
age in the 1960s, has seen a burgeoning quantity of print become available, more than
any generation in history. The Writings of the Central Figures of this Faith and its
two chief precursors produced a mountain of print. What is now a monumental
quantity of official documents, primary source materials like letters and reports from
both within and without the Baha’i community and its efflorescing institutions around
the world, and detailed analyses in book form and on the internet is bringing to the
generations after the 1960s more print than they can deal with and absorb. -Ron Price,
"A Contemporary Baha'i Autobiography to the Beginnings of Baha'i History: 19931793," Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Internet Document.
_____________________________________________________________________
But there have been many aspects of the Baha'i experience, its history, the individual
stories of what are now millions of adherents, which have been resistant to literary
and historical representation whether as narrative, novel, play, poem, letter, diary,
biography or autobiography, among the many genres in which humans convey their
experience. Moojan Momen points out that "Baha'is have been lamentably neglectful
in gathering materials for the history of their religion."1 But as the new millennium
approached this has begun to change.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Moojan Momen, The
Babi and Baha'i Religions 1844-1944, George Ronald, Oxford, 1981, p.xvii.
_____________________________________________________________________
In volume two of Toynbee’s A Study of History, he discusses the concept or doctrine
that “the ordeal of breaking new ground has an intrinsic stimulating effect,” and “the
stimulating effect of breaking new ground is greatest of all when the new ground can
only be reached by crossing the sea.”364 Toynbee cites many examples and focuses
especially on the Etruscans who “stayed at home and never did anything worth recording"”and the “astonishing contrast between the nonentity of the Etruscans at
home and their eminence overseas.” This eminence, he argues, was due to the
“stimulus which they must have received in the process of transmarine
colonization.”365
364
365
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History: Vol.2, Oxford UP, 1962(1954), p.84.
ibid., p.86.
My pioneering experience took me across the sea, first in 1967 across the Davis and
Hudson Straits, extensions of the North Atlantic Ocean; second in 1971 across the
Pacific Ocean and third, in 1974, 1978 and 1999 across the Bass Strait, an extension
of the Great Southern Ocean, to live on Baffin Island, the continental island of
Australia and Tasmania, respectively. These pioneer moves could have had the
soporific effect that the migration of the Philistines had on them about the same time
as the Israelites were transforming themselves from nomadic stock-breeders into
sedentary tillers on stony, barren and landlocked highlands and pasture-lands east of
Jordan and south of Hebron.
But I found these moves, like the Volkerwanderungs that is, the wanderings, of the
past, those of the Ionians, the Angles, the Scots and the Scandinavians, possessed an
intrinsic stimulus. For these moves were part of a modern Volkerwanderung, an
national and international pioneering exodus. My own role in this story was as a part
of that national exodus, the opening chapters of the push of the Baha’i Faith to “the
Northernmost Territories of the Western Hemisphere”366 and Canada’s “glorious mission overseas.”367 And to put this venture in its largest, its longest perspective and
time frame: my work is at the outset of the second 'period' of a 'cycle' of hundreds of
thousands of years, in a second 'age', over four 'epochs';368 or to use yet another
paradigm, my life is at the beginning of the federated state, after successive units of
political and social organization on the planet: tribe, chiefdom, clan, city state and
nation after homo sapiens sapiens emerged some 35,000 years ago from a homo
sapiens line beginning 3mya.(ca)369
If such are the most general perspectives on time in relation to where I am in history,
the spiritual axis, mentioned by Shoghi Effendi in his 1957 letter,370 and a series of
concentric circles define the spacial parameters of my life, in several interlocked and
not unimportant ways. The southern pole of this axis is "endowed with exceptional
spiritual potency."371 Many years of my life have been lived at several points along
the southern extremity of this pole: in Perth, in Gawler and Whyalla, in Ballarat and
Melbourne and in several towns of Tasmania. All of these points lie at the outer
perimeter of the ninth concentric circle whose centre is the "Bab's holy dust."372
In anatomy the second cervical vertebra is the axis on which the head turns. Axis also
refers to any of the central structure of the body’s anatomy, the spinal column. The
term is also used as a positional referent in both anatomy and in botany. Such is a
366
Shoghi Effendi, Messages to Canada, p.37.
ibid.,p.69.
368
Juan Ricardo Cole, "The Concept of the Manifestation in the Baha'i Writings,"
Baha'i Studies, Vol.9, p.36. The terms cycle, period, age and epoch place one's life in
what one might call 'an anthropological, an evolutionary, perspective.
369
In the early 1990s I taught anthropology at Thornlie Tafe College in Perth
Western Australia. In the ten years since I finished teaching anthropology(19932003) I have tried to follow the increasing knowledge of this field in
paleoanthropology. (mya=million years ago)
370
Shoghi Effendi, Letters from the Guardian to Australia and New Zealand,
NSA of the Baha'is of Australia, 1970, p.138.
371
idem
372
Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, Baha'i Publishing Trust, 1965, p.96.
367
brief exposition of the analogical importance of where I have spent my life as an
overseas pioneer.373 Living, as I have at the end of the planet’s axis, endowed with an
exceptional spiritual potency, an axis on which the Baha’i world, it could be argued,
turns and serves, the line between Japan and Australia, as the central structure or
positional referent, of the global community, gives me a crucial spacial orientation the
significance of which only the future will reveal.
My several moves, part of the laying of the foundation for this federated, this future
super-state, resulted in a periodic change of outlook and this change of outlook gave
birth to new conceptions. The process was an insensible one at first but, over more
four decades, the process resulted in a change which one could analyse at many
levels. It took place in such small incremental steps, especially in the first ten years of
the adventure, 1962-1972. But in the second decade, 1973 to 1983 “new and
wonderful configurations” developed, again, not overnight, but measurably and
accompanied by difficulties as well as victories. Indeed, the temple of my existence
was “embellished with a fresh grace, and distinguished with an ever-varying
splendour, deriving from wisdom and the power of thought.”374 Perhaps this puts it
too strongly, makes too extensive a claim. It may not have been wisdom, nor “the
dazzling rays” of “a strange and heavenly power”375 but, rather, a progressive healing
of my bi-polar disorder.
After six months in several mental hospitals in 1968 and an emotionally unstable first
decade on the pioneer front, “a new horizon, bright with intimations of thrilling
developments in the unfolding life of the Cause of God” was clearly discernible.376
Such was the general hope for my own life, 'intimations of thrilling developments,' as
I flew, with my first wife, Judy, across the North American continent and the Pacific
Ocean: Toronto to Sydney, in early July of 1972. Within two years of these bright
intimations Judy and I were divorced. But the first evidences of any kind of writing
ability surfaced in these years. Such are the paradoxes and contradictions of life which
I have lived with, as we all live with as we try to apply the teachings of this Cause to
our daily lives.
Many theories of self have become useful, as I examine the past retrospectively, if I
am to possess “an adequate definition of self-conception.”377 The capacity to evaluate
the qualitative worth of my desires and my actions, to express whatever is
contradictory, paradoxical, ironic, complex and difficult if not impossible to
understand, are part of creating accounts, reconciliations and explanations of my life
or just small parts of it. The process is facilitated by the narrative self-conception of
autobiography, a self-conception that surfaces from the interplay between events and
the perception of them re-constructed in narrative form.
373
Perhaps, too, this provides some of the basis for Peter Kahn's hypothesis that
Australia and Japan may one day lead the world spiritually. See Peter Kahn,
American Baha'i News, date unknown. See also Ron Price, "A Dot and a Circle: An
Essay on the Spiritual Axis," File B: Unpublished Essays, 23 November 1991.
374
‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.1.
375
idem
376
The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 1971.
377
Michel Ferrari, “Narrative Dimensions of Ethnic Identity,” Journal of the Piaget
Society, Vol. 29, No.1.
There is a multiplicity of narrative frames in this autobiography: gender, religion,
family, nation, history, politics, sociology, psychology, that exist, all of which govern
the narrative I endorse and the associated actions that take place in these pages. There
are, too, the narratives of hope and accomplishment, those of dissillusionment and
failure, as well as those of faith and belief as opposed to skepticism and doubt. In each
of these, or some mix of all of them(which it seems is the case with mine),
individuals act to create or fulfill their identities. The narrative serves to frame or
orient action and action transforms the narrative by enriching and validating it. If the
public narrative is consistent with our actions, we can say that self and identity are
authentic.378 If there are opposing narratives, contradictions or even falsities, you
might say that this is simply part of the dynamic nature of identity, an identity which
operates in the context and texture of daily life with the same contradictions and
falsities. For identity is not static, pure and unadulterated: context and audience are
critical variables in what is inevitably, and certainly for me, a hybrid reality. The
writing of this autobiography is a process of gathering information and testing
hypotheses about myself, my roles and my relationships.
Judy and I flew to Australia to work for the South Australian government as primary
school teachers in Whyalla. By April 1971 when the international Baha’i body sent
its Ridvan message379 we had been hired and began planning for our overseas move.
The Formative Age of this new Faith was rapidly approaching the mid-point of its
first century. Those "bright intimations" certainly filled our world as we got ready to
move to Australia in the southern hemisphere. We were hardly conscious of just how
far from home this move entailed. Just how far it was I came to discover in the next
several decades. I only saw my mother once again and my cousins not for more than
thirty years.
However unstable that first decade of pioneering was, the memories I have of that
period constitute what social scientist Peter Braustein calls “possessive memory.”
These memories now exist with me “in a lover’s embrace.” I feel as if no one else can
touch these memories, even if I share them with others in this autobiography. These
memories, in a way, possess me. I do not possess that "sense memory" that, say,
British actor Michael Caine enjoys in which he can go back to a point in time in his
life and relive the emotional event in the same way. A tearful event will bring tears to
Caine again by the simple but intense contemplation of the memory. 380 The memory,
for me, is very real but the experience is more like Wordsworth's: "emotions
recollected in tranquillity."
Braustein says of the activists of the sixties that they “experienced a sense of selfgeneration so powerful that it became a constituent part of their identity.”381 My
activism was not based on rejection or opposition but, rather, on the part I played in
the development of Baha'i communities in the ten towns I lived in during the sixties. I
378
idem
In the writing of an autobiography it is often difficult to get the facts precise and
accurate after the passing of many years.
380
Michael Caine, "Parkinson," ABC TV, 9:30-10:30 pm, April 19th, 2003.
381
Peter Braustein in “Who Owns the Sixties?” Rick Perlstein, Lingua Franca,
Vol.6, No.4, 1996.
379
was fifteen when the sixties started and twenty-five when they ended. My pioneering
life began during those years and that “sense of self-generation” is still part of my
identity. Identity is, of course, a complex question and one's identity, my identity, has
many sources. Indeed, the success of identity formation depends on various
personality factors like flexibility, self-esteem, tendency to monitor one's behaviour,
an openness to experience, cognitive competence, social context, family
communication patterns, among other things. It is difficult to write autobiography
based on the view that writing is not an expression of personality. If writing should
be a question of the continual expelling of oneself from the matter at hand, then a
genre other than autobiography should be engaged in.
I felt in the sixties, as I do now, that sense of urgency, as if I was an agent in history.
Hippies and student activists made the counter-culture between 1964 and 1968, “by
their explicit attack on technology, work, pollution, boundaries, authority, the
unauthentic, rationality and the family,”382 wrote Ortega y Gasset as he attempted to
define the essence of that generation and its particular type of sensibility.
As I look back over what is now half a century, I perceive the panorama, the chaos,
the picture of discrete events as they roll by my mental window indiscriminately.
Humans and perhaps their several progenitors have had this ability for, perhaps,
several million years. With the arrival of the train early in the nineteenth century,
human beings were able to triple the distance that had been covered in a given period
of time throughout all of recorded history by horse and cart. They could "perceive the
discrete as it rolled past the window indiscriminately" three times faster than in a
horse-drawn coach. Wolfgang Schivelbusch says this is the defining characteristic of
the panoramic. In fact he says the really crucial feature of the panoramic is "the
inclination to fix on irrelevant details in the landscape or in the images that pass
before the viewer's eye."383 As I scan, in my mind's eye, the multitude of events in the
panorama of my life, I fix first on this event and then on that, as Schivelbusch
describes. Of course, there is some pattern in this autobiography, but there is also
much that is serendipitous, spontaneous, highly discontinuous. Readers may find this
latter quality somewhat disconcerting, especially those readers who are more
comfortable with a sequential, a simple and somewhat predictable and absorbing
narrative sequence.
The electronic media in the same half century that this autobiography is concerned
with(1953-2003) have also brought to the individuals--at least this individual--a
profusion, a diaspora, of public spheres and so very much more of those discrete
events rolling past my window indiscriminately. The imaginative resources of lived
and local experiences have become globalized. Shoghi Effendi wrote in 1936 that the
process of nation-building had come to an end and, in my early years as a Baha'i, I
often wondered at his meaning. The issue is, of course, complex, too complex to
pursue here, but the window on my world, the imagined community, in the half
century of this narrative, has become the entire planet. "The creation of selves and
382
Ortega y Gasset in Ecstasy and Holiness: Counterculture and the Open
Society, Methuen and Co. Ltd., London, 1974, p.19 and p.65.
383
Christian Keathley, "The Cinephiliac Moment," Framework: The Journal of
Cinema and Media, 2000.
identities," as Imre Szeman384 wrote recently, takes place in a volatile and unstable
mixture. The imagination now can play everywhere and instability, volatility, is part
of the result. The autobiography of anyone living in this period must take cognizance
of this colonization of the imagination by the media and what many call commodity
capitalism.385
However serendipitous this account may be, however much I improvise as I tell my
story, as I move the events around in what seems like a loose, easy-going and
fortuitous fashion, my aim is not that of those two famous American novelists of this
period: Kurt Vonnegut Jr and John Updike. The former's novel Timequake is written
with irony, humor and sarcasm to wake people from their stupor and apathy and to
warn them of what awaits if they do not try to radically transform their society.
Likewise, John Updike's Toward the End of Time presents readers with a future that
is so grim and characters that are so repulsive that the very hideous images force them
to either embrace his work masochistically or reject it outright and work towards
preventing the dystopia. Both writers try to jolt their readers, shock them.386
There is little irony in this narrative, not anywhere near as much humour as I would
like and only a moderate amount of sarcasm or shock tactics. If there is anything grim,
it is my portrayal of aspects of the society I have lived in since the mid-twentieth
century. My work is, rather, an attempt to hint at the utopia that I see at the heart of
the Baha'i System, my experience of it at this embryonic stage of its development and
the effort I see that is required to achieve its reality. I am aware as I write that for the
Baha'i the future has never looked so bright and the Baha'i community has itself been
gathering strength all my life.387 And so my aim is far removed from that of these two
famous novelists. I would, though, very much like to write like James Herriot who,
his son observes in his heartfelt, affectionate memoir, wrote with "such warmth,
humour, and sincerity that he was regarded as a friend by all who read him."388 Sadly,
I do not have that talent or a topic that, for me, does not lend itself to such an
endearing style and approach. We all have our limitations and the qualities that make
others great do not make us who we are. Herriot has sold 60 million copies of his
books in 21 languages. The book selling league I will never enter. People will not be
rolling with laughter in the aisles from an hour spent with me in this book. Alas and
alack!!
384
Imre Szeman, "Review of Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization," Arjun Appadurai, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. The
autobiographical implications of the ideas Szeman deals with here are too extensive to
consider in any detail.
385
The literature on commodity capitalism or commodity fetishism is vast and I make
no attempt in these pages to deal with the major systems of world politics like:
capitalism, socialism, communism, liberalism, conservatism, et cetera.
386
Greg Dawes, "Somewhere Beyond Vertigo and Amnesia: Updike's Toward the
End of Time and Vonnegut's Timequake," Cultural Logic, Volume 1, Number 2,
Spring 1998.
387
The Universal House of Justice, Letter, May 24, 2001.
388
Jim Wright, The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father, Ballantine
Books, 2000.
I used to work at a College of Advanced Education in the late 1970s where one of my
fellow lecturers in the social sciences aimed to dismantle the world views of his
students, to shake them up, so to speak. I, too, want to do this, but my method is to be
much gentler, to go around to the back door and, like a surgeon, give someone a new
set of lungs without them feeling the experience with too much of a jolt. Various
fiction writers, famous and otherwise, assume the roles of performers in their books.
At the centre of brilliantly imagined worlds these writers become actors who put on
dazzling performances. The narrative personas in these works assume roles which
lead readers to question the reliability of their authors. If drama is the sister-art to
life-writing, as some claim it is, then we must consider that the life-writer can use
dramatic technique to shape what and how the reader imagines. By using stagecraft
life-writers have the power to distort or to enhance the truth about what they are
illustrating in their lives.389
As an autobiographer I am conscious of creating a certain narrative persona and of
establishing a context of dramatic art but, the critical variable for me, is style. Style is
a distinctive selection of words and phrases to express thought or feeling; it is a
certain mental attitude peculiar to myself; it is the opposite of affectation which is an
assumed habit or manner of expression; it is part and parcel of my very character.
"The most perfect development of style," writes Archibald Lampman, "must be
sought in those whose experience of the world has been full and at the same time in
the main joyous and exhilarating." There has been, he goes on, a certain exquisite
indulgence and graciousness of disposition, a capacity to delight others, to put others
at ease, a happy attitude of mind, impulsive yet controlled.390
It would be a rare soul who could do all these things all the time. And I am only too
conscious of my many inabilities in these several domains especially the absense of
joy from time to time due to a life-time of manic-depressive illness. But I am also
conscious of the exhilarating aspects of my life and of the pleasure, the stimulus, that I
brought to many, especially in my role as a teacher and lecturer. Lampman continues
in many directions one of which is to associate "true style" with genius, to emphasize
the unconsciousness of its acquisition and the writer being "haunted persistently by
certain peculiar ideas." There is much in Lampman's analysis which resonates with
my experience. In the end only the reader, at least some readers, will discover this
style. But, whatever the case, it is here in this elusive world of style that my dramatic
art lies. Whatever excitement there is in the creation of this narrative persona it lies
not in some conscious dramatic invention for the stage of life, however brilliantly
devised and dazzlingly performed. For years I have been reaching out for a subject to
give coherent form to my "voice." Poetic and non-poetic narrative has helped me find
this "voice" in the last decade and lifted, refined and lifted it again. Form and voice
has brought content into being, as Joyce Carol Oates describes the process. 391 And
now this autobiography spins in orbit about that kernel of myself, my society and my
religion. In a very general--and yet quite specific sense--the kingdom of God is both
within and without. To put this idea a little differently: there is no dichotomy. Every
atom in existence is testimony to the names of God. And every atom of this
389
Conran, Brandon, Morley Callaghan: Critical Views on Canadian Writers,
editor: Conran, McGraw-Hill, Ryerson, Toronto, 1975, Introduction.
390
Archibald Lampman, "Style," Canadian Poetry, Fall/Winter 1980.
391
Joyce Carol Oates, "Soul at the White Heat," Critical Inquiry, Summer 1987.
autobiography springs from my fascination with the movement of thought, of inner
experience. There is here a braiding together of disparate fragments jotted down and
refined and refined again.
Sometimes the experience of writing this account, like the experience of life, is
euphoric; sometimes it is homely and domestic; sometimes there is the sense of the
ceaseless surge of the sea, of a fierceness of energy; sometimes I feel as if I am in
possession of the heart's foul rag and bone shop, as the elder Yeats poignantly
described his inner life. Sometimes I feel as if I am obsessively preoccupied with
refining perceptions, with analysing. I feel no need to continue the external journey,
occupied as it was with living in some two dozen towns over the last forty years. But
continue it I will, as we all must to the end of our days. As Emily Dickinson puts it:
The Brain--is wider than the Sky-For--put them side by side-The one the other will contain
With ease--and You--beside-The Brain is deeper than the sea-For--hold them--Blue to Blue-the one the other will absorb-As Sponges--Buckets--do-The Brain is just the weight of God-For--Heft them--Pound for Pound-And they will differ--if they do-As Syllable from Sound--392
Many autobiographers and analysts of autobiography examine their lives and the field
of autobiography in the context of postmodern theory. Postmodernism is a
movement, a theory, an approach, to life which encapsulates the arts, the sciences,
society and culture, indeed every aspect of day to day life. I also find this theory
useful. It suggests an external world of ceaseless flux, of fleeting, fragmentary and
contradictory moments that become incorporated into our inner life. The modern hero
is the ordinary person and the world is filled with abstract terms. This postmodern
society could indeed be called 'the abstract society.' It is a society filled with a
commercial, private, pleasure-oriented, superficial, fun-loving individual. This type of
society and this type of individual began to appear, or at least the beginnings of postmodernism, can be traced back to the 1950s.393 The post-modern in autobiography
tends to doubt everything about both self and society. After examining more than fifty
biographies of Marilyn Monroe the post-modernist is left with plausibilities and
inscrutibilities but not unreserved truth. We are also left with multiplicity rather than
authenticity. If we ultimately can’t be sure of why we did what we did in life, we can
exercise great control of the process of explaining it retrospectively. The post392
Emily Dickinson, "Poem Number 632," Complete Works.
A case can be made, of course, for a pleasure-seeking, fun-loving, philosophy at
the heart of life in the 'roaring twenties' and as far back as periods of classical culture.
Cases for the beginning of post-modernism as far back as 1917, the first time the term
was used.
393
modernists raise many questions about the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of doing
genuine, real, authentic biography and autobiography. I find their approach mildly
chastening.394
There is so much information in this information-loaded society and so many
interpretations that shift and slide that an atmosphere of meaninglessness or unreality
prevails, of absurdity or the comic, of an essentially problematic and unresolvable set
of human dilemmas. Novelty, indifference to political concerns, no ideological
commitments or beliefs in any metanarratives, but rather a commitment to hobbies, to
entertainment, and a host of pleasureable pursuits and pastimes fill the private space.
Commitment and continuity become less important, except of course a commitment to
a world of the private, the personal and the relationships contained therein, in their
many forms. The analysis of postmodernism in social science literature is extensive
and too vast to deal with here. As a philosophy, a sociology, a psychology,
postmodernism helps furnish an understanding of society and the individual in the
years since the mid-twentieth century, the years of this autobiography.395
Postmodernism is a state that inclines people to self-reflection, self-apprehension,
self-definition. Autobiography is a natural bi-product of postmodernism and deals
with the definition of both self and world. Given both the complexity and the lack of
consensus, though, about what constitutes postmodernism, I am hesitant to deal with
the term in any depth here.
This autobiography also needs to be seen in the context of a wider and emerging
autobiographical experience of many groups and peoples. Autobiography has
undergone great changes during the years with which this particular story is
concerned, the last fifty years of the twentieth century. It is seen now, much more
among women writers, ethnic writers, gay and lesbian writers, indeed the writings of a
host of indigenous and minority groups on the planet. Since the autobiographical
tradition prior to this time belonged mostly to men and men in the upper classes,
women's voices, particularly "ordinary" women's voices, and men's, ordinary men's
voices, were relatively unheard. In addition, earlier autobiography was typically
motivated by the desire of famous or "special" individuals to record and preserve
significant thoughts and historically important experiences. Recent autobiographies of
the 'ordinary' person, however, appear to grow most often from the need of people to
make sense of their lives, to define themselves by intellectually mastering their
experiences, and to locate their place in a broader concept of history. 396 There is an
A Review of Arnold Ludwig’s “How Do We Know Who We Are? A Biography
of the Self,” Oxford University Press, NY, 1997, in Biography, Vol. 22, No.3,
Summer 1999.
395
Other philosophies, sociological, literary, economic, historical and psychological
theories are also pertinent to understanding this autobiography, this life and the lives
of people in western society during these four epochs. But I have chosen not to dwell
on these burgeoning theories in this third edition. Postmodernism, as a word, was first
used in the decade after WW1. But it did not become an intellectual 'movement' until
a period from the late 1950s to the 1970s. There also seem to be several major
interpretations of its origins and development making it too complex a movement to
deal with properly here.
396
These 'ordinary' people write what might be called 'the new literature of obscurity.'
They bring an immensely varied personal context to their narratives. Their memoirs
394
attempt in autobiography to heighten the ordinary events of life, to translate them into
a series of extraordinary visitations. To do this a certain ardor, energy, is needed.397
But autobiography, for all its potential depth and insight into life, its witness and
contribution to history, is far from commanding a canon. Like journalism, for
different reasons, a canon is difficult to locate in such a burgeoning and complex
field. Any attempt to do so must inevitably be challenged and reevaluated.398 This is
not my task here, although I refer frequently to the autobiographies of the famous and
not-so-famous in history for their relevance to this work.
I write of this theme in other contexts in this work, for this broad theme of the 'coming
out' of ordinary people who otherwise would have been nameless and traceless, is a
part of what is involved in this narrative. Autobiography, according to Nellie McKay,
has been "the preeminent form of writing in the U.S.A."399 since the seventeenth
century. And it has had an important place in the literary history of other nations, too
many to describe in even the briefest of outlines here. What I do, and one of the
things that distinguishes this autobiographical work, is "borrow", "adapt", and
"modify" different theories, sources and ideas and use them to organize my own
observations and experiences.
José Saramago, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, argues that for all
of us the words we utter between the moment we get out of bed in the morning and
the moment we go back there at night, as well as the words of dreams and thought,
memory and imagination, all constitute a story that is concurrently rational and crazy,
coherent or fragmentary. A story, an autobiographical narrative, can at any moment
be structured and articulated in a written or an oral form or simply thought out or
thought through. And the story is always only partial; it can never be complete. Even
when we do not write, he continues, we live as characters. We live as characters in
nevertheless share the common belief that the act of remembering and reexamining
experiences through writing has both individual value and larger social significance.
In constructing, rather than simply accepting, their life histories, they shape or
reinvent themselves as they shape their texts. Each confronts inevitable change-usual
or unusual, expected or unexpected-but manages through writing not just to endure,
but to understand and grow. Their memoirs illustrate the power of personal quests to
illuminate experience beyond themselves. There are dozens and dozens of examples.
Here are six from the last half century of American women writers: Kate Simons,
Brox Primitive(1982), Annie Dillard, An American Childhood(1992), Anne
Moodie, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), Natalie Kusz, Road Song (1990),
Mary Clearman Blew's, All But the Waltz, Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention:
The Story of a Marriage. See The Wyoming Council for the Humanities, Internet,
2003.
397
Louis Untermeyer describes Blake's capacity to "heighten the ordinary." See:
Lives of the Poets: The Story of 100 Years of English and American Poetry,
Simon & Schuster, NY, 1959, p.310.
398
Mitchell Stevens, "Now and Forever: Who Should Enter the Journalistic Pantheon?
July/August, 2003, Columbia Journalism Review.
399
Nellie McKay, "Autobiography," Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's
History, Houghton Mifflin Company, Internet, 2003.
the story that is our life. For we are all on the stage now.400 And if great literature is,
as Ezra Pound once defined it, "language charged with meaning to the utmost possible
degree,"401 this work is, for me at least, great literature. For it is a work super-charged
with meaning. For the reader, of course, whether this constitutes great literature is
another question. Pound thought the two qualities a writer, a poet, needed were
curiosity and a persistent energy. I certainly bring these two qualities to this work, to
my writing. Time will tell if what I write is deemed great.
The life-long project that living has been in the past, in history's endless caves, due to
a career in business, the military, the bureaucracy, a profession, et cetera, or a belief
system or an embeddedness in a family structure in a place of local habitation is, so
often, at least in recent decades-in this tenth stage of history---not as possible, as
likely, now. These careers, these systems, were often 'for keeps' in what Weber called
'an iron cage,' an institutional context. This is still common, but not so much the case
as it has been. Career, family and a collection of interests still has centre-stage in the
autobiographical accounts that make it into the public eye. The artistic products that
result contain designs that vibrate in resonance with people's lives, their interests and
the collective centres around which they orient their lives.
Of the half a dozen major theories of learning to develop in the last century
constructivism has, arguably, the most application to this autobiography.
Constructivism is based on the view that we construct our world from our experience
and science is, then, for the autobiographer, “the enterprise of coordinating and
arranging this experience.”402 Knowledge, here, is the reconstruction of our
experience and is relative to each person. Scinece is simply the systematic use of our
rational faculty in its application to whatever we aim it towards. We make, we define,
we construct, our worlds and that is what I have done here in this autobiography.
Family, career and interests is what makes up the core of the experience of most of us.
Autobiographies, then, inevitably deal with these three foci in some shape or form-and mine as well.403 To some extent, as the philosopher Bradley notes, "no experience
can lie open to inspection from outside." Sharing is possible to only a limited extent.
We are all alone, imprisoned in our sphere.404 What we construct, however much it
takes place in a social context, has an important component of seeing things with
one's own eyes and one's own ears. That is why, as I approached the age of sixty and
with William Hazlitt, "I was never less alone than when alone." I came to like
400
Again, there is an interesting, a fascinating, literature on how the media has
altered our perceptions of self and our sense of the dramaturgical, the theatrical.
401
Ezra Pound in "Ezra Pound: A One-man Literary Revolution," Michael Dirda,
The Guardian, January 16, 1989, p.9.
402
Alexander Riegler, “Towards a Radical Constructivist Understanding of
Science,” Foundations of Science, vol.6, No.1-3, pp.1-30.
403
The major theories of learning can and are divided into a host of sub-theories
each with their varied emphases on a type of learning, but my purpose here is not to
explore this now extensive field of psychology.
404
J. Hillis Miller, On "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in Poets of Reality:
Six Twentieth Century Writers, Cambridge MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP,
1965.
solitude when I gave myself up to it for the sake of solitude.405 The fantastic, the
deeply appreciated, was often just the prosaic viewed in a fresh light. The everyday
world I lived in, the world of strip malls and highways and back yards, sidewalks and
walls the world of the quotidian, I occasionally saw anew.
In my own life my profession had not been tied to a locality. I was a cosmopolitan
rather than a local. Coherence and security came from the exercise of my skill more
than from doing the job in a place which, as Sennett writes, was often an "empty
arena," a place of intermittance, of lesser loyalty. The career-long project was not, for
me anyway, associated with a location, a place. A new economic map emerged in the
half century I was involved in the workforce and many older workers felt obsolete as
their working lives came to a close. I wanted out of the workforce by my fifties and
experienced a sense of relief rather than failure when I retired at 55.406 My
consanguinial family(birth) became, by stages from the age of 21 to 33 when my
parents passed away, my affinal family(marriage) as the sociology of the family
demarkates the two major types of family. My interests changed and developed as
well and this autobiography provides more detail in each of these three areas of
autobiographical investigation in the more than six hundred pages remaining.
As the century was ending, I wanted to attend to the inwardness of my mental life.
This inwardness, this inner world of thought, feeling and wish had undergone a
transformation in the forty years I had been a Baha'i, 1959-1999. This inner world was
not some permanent, inescapable, lifelong and unchanging reality. By my fifty-fifth
year this inner world had gone through a host of changes; something new had been
gradually acquired; it had accummulated, widened, grown, developed. It was, too, a
product of cultural history, of my religious experience, my reading and study. My
poetry, my writing and especially earlier drafts of this autobiography made me aware
that I could give myself over and up to this inner world and put it into words. But I
was also aware that much of this inner world could not be articulated by language. I
simply had to admit defeat in the face of the inability of my ear, as Baha'u'llah wrote,
"to hear" or for my "heart to understand." Perhaps, Geoffrey Hartman put the idea
aptly when he wrote that "Art represents a self which is either insufficiently present or
feels itself as not presentable."407 Looked at from a certain angle, there are simply
few words for what happens inside us. Looked at from another angle the inner life is
an endless spinning tumbler of verbiage. And so in the midst of this autobiographical
memoir intersecting the discourses of my identity, my social and historical analysis
and my religion, I try to give form to both the verbiage and to what can not be
contained in words.
Locality was important to me especially as a node in a global network. Place had
power through this exercise of talent, but it was not isolated power. Self had power,
but was not a burdensome possession, rather, it was tangentially connected and yet an
integral part of a durable institution with an important role to play as an emerging
405
These expressions on the experience of solitude come from The Letters of
William Hazlitt, Internet Site, 2004.
406
This concept of a sense of place I come back to in this autobiography because it
is a very central, a very important, part of the whole of life experience, certainly mine.
407
Geoffrey Hartman, "The Dream of Communication," in I.A. Richards: Essays in
His Honour, editor, Reuben Brower, et al., NY, 1973, p. 173.
organization on the planet. Yes there was the fleeting, the disjointed and the
fragmented; one could not avoid or ignore these realities of contemporary life. But
some of these fortuitous fragments of reality lodged and embedded themselves in a
place, my human spirit, where they could grow and endure. An attitude of blase
indifference was a necessary defence against emotional overload, but spontaneous
enthusiasm could and was cultivated and expressed in an individual way. As a
pioneer, I was often a stranger and, as such, I possessed, it seemed, an inherent
mobility, freedom and a type of objectivity. People often felt they could confide in
me. At the same time, I was sometimes a little like the European Jew, the "internal
other." At other times I was one of the gang. Strangeness, of course, can enter even
the most intimate of relationships and it has certainly entered mine, all my life. I have
grown to think it is part of life.
'Abdul-Baha seems to be an example of how to overcome this strangeness and I
learned much from His example. I could write more on this process for strangeness is
"one of the most powerful sociological tools for analysing social processes of
individuals and groups."408 For I have been for so many years, at least forty, a
potential wanderer who comes today and is gone tomorrow, with the possibility of
remaining permanently.
Australian psychologist and social analyst Ronald Conway once wrote, "The soul of
the Australian is a starving captive in a dungeon created by generations of either not
caring, or dreading to show care". Conway is harsh and I'm sure many would
disagree with his comment. Yet it is the view of many of our writers, poets and film
makers. D.H. Lawrence, a rather famous visitor to Australia right at the start of the
Formative Age, observed "the disintegration of social mankind back to the elements".
He saw, too, in Australia "a generous but shallow personality" groping vainly for
integration in a society that was "chronically skeptical."409 There are now a volume of
analyses of the Australian psyche which as a pioneer I have had to learn to deal with.
This brief analysis goes some way to explaining the difficulty in teaching the Faith
here. And there is much more to say.
In Canada one could find equally damning quotations like the following:410
Canadians “are a nation of contradictions floating helplessly in a sea of confusion
with no framework for living, with no proper definition of justice and without a single
philosophical clue as to how a nation of civilized men interacts and sustains itself."411
In the Guardian's letters to Canada and Australia one can find more honorific
quotations to balance these pejorative characterizations. Between the two poles of
opinion and some complex reality, this pioneer worked his way, plied his trade.
As an international pioneer, I have had to learn how to overcome strangeness, to make
a home of whatever place I inhabited, dwelled in, occupied, however temporarily and
408
George Simmel writes extensively on this theme. See also: W.B. Gudykunst and
Y.Y. Kim, Communication With Strangers: An Approach to Intercultural
Communicaiton, McGraw Hill, NY, 1997.
409
Ronald Conway, The Great Australian Stupor, Sun Books, 1971, p.256.
410
Scott Carpenter, "The Great Canadian Identity Crisis," Liberty Free Press, No.
53, January 2000.
411
idem
however skeptical and shallow it may have been. My life-long project was associated
with a value system that was part of my religion and, in retrospect, it appears that has
been the case for at least those forty years. I have been "no owner of soil,"412 not
radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the places I
have lived in but, rather, possessing a particular structure of nearness and distance,
indifference and involvement. I have been close but yet far from the locals. This
year, in 2004, I will have been in this town in northern Tasmania for five years; I will
be sixty and strangeness still exists on this suburban street, in this small town even as
I own my home; even as I exhibit a friendly demeanor; even married as I am to a
local. I think strangeness is part and parcel of the very pervasiveness of existence.
All the world is unquestionably a stage and as I write about my experience on this
stage I have a double intention in mind. Some of this intention is clear and
transparent. Indeed, it is highly desireable that the story the person tells is recognised
as clear and transparent at every stage by the reader. The intention of the storyteller is
also in some ways that of a conjuror, an unapologetic and unrepentant conjuror, who
has no other excuse but his or her genius. And this genius is only, is simply, some
extraordinary luck, some gift of unmerited grace if you prefer, a gift at some exact
moment that cosmic grace was distributed among the several billion human
inhabitants of the globe or a gift diffused insensibly over a whole lifetime.413
In retrospect, to return to my own story and its thread of events, I now see my move to
the Canadian Artic in 1967 at the age of 23 as, among other things, part of my
rejection of the middle class culture I had grown up in during the 1950s and which I
became more critical of during my further education in the early to mid-1960s. Of
course, this move was part of the Baha'i community's pioneering thrust as well. It was
a thrust I first became conscious of in the late fifties. The fifties may have given the
world silly putty, Mr. Potato Head, barbie dolls, rock 'n' roll, paint by number and the
first TV shows, but the affluent fifties were alienated years which worried about
communism, the atomic bomb and possessed "a convulsive craving to be busy."414
This desire to be busy was an important quality because it was one which contributed
to the massive extension of the Baha'i community to the uttermost corners of the
earth. The craving to be busy, in a meaningful way, has been with me all my life.
But for the most part my identity did not derive from rejection, from alientation. I was
not trying to forget the first or the second Great War, for they were history to me in
the fifties, a history I knew little of as I played on the street, in the woods, in parks
and in my back yard. When in 1960 that mask of Faith and belief was drawn aside
again, as it was in the 1920s after the first war, "to reveal a changing face, regretful,
doubting, yet also looking for a road to a rebirth,"415 I had begun searching for my
412
Kurt Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, The Free Press, NY, 1950, pp.402408.
413
Jose Saramago, “Comparative Literature and Culture,” A WWWeb Journal
CLCWeb, Purdue University Press, September 2000.
414
There are now many analyses of the fifties in novels and social science literature.
This quotation comes from D.T. Miller and M. Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We
Really Were, Doubleday and Co. Ltd., NY, 1977. The quotation goes on to outline a
long list of features of the fifties, formative years for me from the age of 5 to 15.
415
ibid., p.18.
own form of authenticity. By my mid-teens the Baha'i Faith seemed to represent that
form. In 1980 when I read Roger White's poem, New Song I realized quickly that he
had said much about the identity I acquired in those critical years of the late 1950s
and sixties. So, I will quote some of that poem here:
And he hath put a new song in my mouth......
-Psalms 40:3
It was comfortable in the small town smugness
of your childhood.
You were born securely into salvation's complacent trinity:
A Catholic, Protestant or Jew.
So begins this delightful poem by Roger White. He seems to describe the tone and
texture of my childhood and adolescence. He continues:
The world was small and safe and familiar.
And very white.
No red or black offended
our prim steepled vaults of self-congratulation.
Indians were the bad guys who got licked in movies,
Dying copiously amid candy wrappers
And the popcorn smell of matinees.
.........
Yes, it was comfortable then.
.........
When you heard that God had died, you wondered
Whether it was from sheer boredom-...........
The tempest came in your twelfth or fifteenth year,
a clean cold wind
and you were left like a stripped young tree in autumn
with a cynical winter setting in
and nothing large enough to house your impulse to believe.
The need lay as quiet, unhurried and insidious as a seed
Snowlocked in a bleak and lonely landscape.
So White describes my personal condition from about the age of ten or twelve to
fifteen, the years 1954 to 1959. "The need' was there to believe. It "lay as quiet" as a
seed and grew, germinated. The tempest blew into my life at eighteen, a little later
than it did in White's poem, his life. But, in the years 1959 to 1962, fifteen to
eighteen, I caught a glimpse of the Bab “in the clearing smoke of the rifles in the
barrack-square of Tabriz." I heard His "new song./Up from the Siyah-Chal it rose."416
I could draw many parallels between my own life and the one described by White
here. Perhaps at a future juncture, in a future edition of this work.
416
Roger White, "New Song," Another Song Another Season, George Ronald,
Oxford, 1979, pp.116-118.
Manic-depression, or what is now called a bi-polar disorder, afflicts 1.5 to 2 per cent
of the population. It also afflicts its sufferers in quite different ways. During the years
1962 to 1980 I had half a dozen major episodes as they are called. Only two of them
required hospitalization and the worst were in the 1960s. Robert Lowell, the famous
American poet, was hospitalized for most of his episodes which occurred each year
from 1949 to 1974. In a book about his life, a bi-polar disorder is described as
follows: “that terrible condition in which the mind is bombarded by more sensation
than it can accommodate, when associations succeed one another so quickly that the
mind feels stretched to the breaking point, painfully drawn out as though forced
through the tiny aperture of a needle’s eye.”417 But, thanks to lithium treatment in
1980, I was finally sorted out, well just about. Fluvoxamine, twenty-two years later,
put the finishing touches on this treatment by medication418 leaving only a mangeable
residue of emotional/mental difficulties by the time I came to write this fourth edition.
Due to my most extreme episode I had to leave the Canadian Arctic and return to
Ontario in June of 1968. Here is a poem, a reflection on the process of pioneering,
written over thirty years later. It is a poem that puts this Arctic part of my venture,
August 1967 to June 1968, in perspective. I wrote about:
THE PULL OF PIONEERING
I would not want anyone to be under any illusions regarding the pioneering
experience, at least the experience that was mine and many others in the last half of
the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I would not want to see future men and
women looking anxiously in towns, villages and cities, farms and rural aspects, large
and small organizations for non-existent excitements and the thrill of adventure due to
some mythic pioneering identity, some imaginary creation, some literary and artistic
representation of pioneering that had a particular potency in the collective imagination
but was false. Some internal and external view of pioneering created by pioneers and
travel teachers whose poetry and fiction, whose prose and story created an idealised
and Romantic myth, I want to counter and clarify. I would want the pull of
pioneering, the quest for the heart of its potential experience to be a realization that,
although one detaches oneself completely from one's normal social environment,
much of life can and often does remain the same. -Ron Price with thanks to C.
Aitchison, N. MacLeod and S. Shaw, Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and
Cultural Geographies, Routledge, London, 2000, p.89.
It's been an adventure, mate;
you could even make it
into one of those movies
for the evening escape.
Katheirne Wallingford, Robert Lowell’s Language of the Self, University of
North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1988, p.35.
418
The story associated with my several medications and my response to them I do
not go into, for the most part, in this narrative. Like so many aspects of life, if I dwelt
on the fine detail of my response to these medications, this autobiography would
results in many volumes of prose.
417
This story is unscripted,
flawed and plausible,
only the predictable wonder
of an ordinary life,
none of the tedium of
the choiceless invulnerability
of the movie-evening-hero,
none of the glitter and gloss.
You can't edit your life
to emerge in celluloid safety
with that toothpaste-ad-smile finish,
sliding smoothly from scene to scene
with that sense of story-writ-large
across the two hour coloured show.
This one you have to make
which, like nature, is slow
and uneventful, quietly enduring.
The big story is on the inside;
the technicolour manipulation
is largely unbeknownst to all,
silent, rich, self-created
or not there at all.
Ron Price
2 November 2000
The next poem focuses more sharply on that Arctic adventure twenty-eight years after
it ended. The word 'transformation' has much meaning for me when I view life over
many decades. A different person emerges, perhaps several times in life but, in the
short term, in the day-to-day grind, I would use the term epiphany to describe some
intense experience but not transformation. We each describe our life in different ways
for we are, as that 18th century autobiographer Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote,
"sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous and sublime."419
GONE FOREVER
Genuine self-revelation is a rare gift, almost a creative gift. How alien, how remote,
seem most people's memoirs, autobiographies and confessions from the real current of
their actual days. Some autobiographies use self-revelation as a form of social
protest, a form of victim narrative. Sylvia Plath's poem The Bell Jar(1950's) is one of
the earliest examples. More recent victim narratives are about self-promotion;
sensationalism and self-disclosure, oppressors and victims all tends to blurr. Perhaps
many who read my work will find it alien and remote, just not enough juices, not
enough heat, not enough to turn you on, a little too analytical thank you very much.
American humorist Will Rogers says, partly in jest and parlty seriously, "When you
419
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions: Book 1, 1782, p.1.
put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did
do, that's memoirs."420
I have tried to connect my work as far as possible to the real current of my times, my
days and my religion. But I don't go anywhere near, say, the in/famous Howard Stern,
the radio 'shock-jock' who introduced a new radar of naughtiness into media society.
Most of his public revelations are, for me, private things. I'm not into exploiting
myself to make a buck, to introduce self-tabloidization, pseudo-victimization or antivictimization. -Ron Price with thanks to Freya Johnson and Annalee Newitz, "The
Personal is Capital: Autobiographical Work and Self-Promotion," Bad Subjects,
Issue # 32, April 1997.
Autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in an intricate process of
self-discovery and self-creation.1 The self at the centre of all autobiographical
narrative is in some basic, subtle and quite mysterious ways a fictive structure. But
whether fictive or non-fictive, there was at the centre of this narrative an explicit
avowal, an acceptance, of the embodiment of moral authority in the Central Figures of
the Baha'i Faith and Their elected successors, the trustees of a global undertaking, the
Universal House of Justice. There was, too, a facticity at the centre of this work. This
is not a work of self-creation as readers come across so frequently in the
entertainment business.2 -Ron Price with thanks to: 1Fictions in Autobiography:
Studies in the Art of Self-Invention, Author Unknown, Princeton UP, 1985, p.3;
and Joe Lockard, "Britney Spears, Victorian Chastity and Brand-name Virginity,"
Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, October 2001.
Price often wrote poems about his past. This one, written some twenty-eight years
after the event that it is concerned with, attempts to summarize my year among the
Eskimo and some of its meaning in retrospect. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four
Epochs, 27 April 1996.
Like some shot out of the night,
a blast from the past,
from a frozen land
where big pioneering began,
where I was worn to a frazzle,
burnt to a crisp and at forty below!
Taken away on a jet and put in a net,
like a bird in a cage,
frightened on every page,
my brain burning with rage;
slowly it soothed
and the cold Artic air
became a thing of the past,
some moment in time,
like a memory sublime
with adventure writ high
and many a long sigh,
Will Rogers in "Writing Changes Everything: A Review of '627 Best things
Anyone Ever Said About Writing,'" Deborah Brodie in BookPage, 1997.
420
long before I was to die.
Some passing few months,
over in the blink of an eye,
there, for a time, I nearly died.
Ron Price
27 April 1996
This poem, one of the few rhymng poems that I have written, for I don't seem to enjoy
rhyming poetry, still says something about that experience I had at the age of 23 on
Baffin Island. However intimate my autobiography, I see my life as part of a
universal history, a history that Lord Acton, one of the great modern Western
historians described in a letter he wrote to the contributors to The Cambridge
Modern History, dated March 12th 1898. His vision of universal history contains
some of the perspective within which I write about my own mundane and ordinary
life. Acton wrote: "By universal history I understand that which is distinct from the
combined history of all countries….a continuous development…not a burden on the
memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to which the nations
are subsidiary.”421 In the twentieth century a succession of universal histories
followed: Spengler's in 1918, H.G. Wells' in 1919; Toynbee, who began his
monumental work, in 1921;422 and Eric Hobsbawn’s four volume work completed in
1996, among others.
In a strange and certain way pioneering, and especially international pioneering which
was three years away, lifts one into this universal history. Perhaps that is why I have
found reading Toynbee so stimulating over these four decades of pioneering. There is
another historical paradigm that I have found useful for interpreting my times, my life,
my religion, all that I have seen in history and anticipated in the future. It is what
could be called “the decline and fall” paradigm. Saint Jerome, while writing his
'Commentary on Ezekiel', in 410 AD said that he was “so confounded by the havoc
wrought in the West and above all by the sack of Rome" that long did he remain
silent, "knowing it was a time to weep.”423 So, too, is our time a time to weep. With
Rumi, the Persian poet, we are justified in saying: "do not mock the wine, it is bitter
only because it is my life." The generations of the twentieth century have seen, heard
or read about billions dieing. Is this a taste of things to come? Whatever wine of
pleasure and comfort we in the West have enjoyed in these decades, and there have
been many pleasures and comforts, there is a tincture of bitterness, of sadness, of
sorrow, of melancholy, in the cup from the immense and tragic sufferings which have
afflicted the human condition in our time, the generations born in the twentieth
century.
421
Lord Acton in A Study of History, Vol.1, 1934, p.47.
Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West; H.G. Wells, Outline of History and
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History.
423
St. Jerome quoted in The Two Cities: the Decline and Fall of Rome as
Historical Paradigm, Jaroslav Pelikan.
422
Toynbee sees the period of what historians call the ‘fall of the Roman Empire in the
West’ as “vultures feeding on the carrion or the maggots crawling in the carcass”424 of
that society. Roman society, argues Toynbee, especially in the days of the
Empire(that is after 31 BC), was moribund. So, too, I would argue is our own society.
The society we live in in terms of its traditional political and religious institutions is
moribund. There are vultures feeding on the carcass of all its traditional institutions all
over the planet. In such a climate autobiographers like myself must be on guard that,
as William Maxwell says, "in talking about the past" it is possible that we may "lie
with every breath we draw."425 The story, the history, is complex and one can easily
get one's interpretations of the reality of our circumstances wrong. Our views are, so
often, not so much lies as Maxwell saw it, but simply or not-so-simply errors.
We also need to develop, as Dr. Johnson did centuries ago, an acute sensitivity to
artificiality in our writing and to the very nature of our analysis. In a resonant phrase
by language theorist and social philosopher Roland Barthes, ours is a ‘Civilization of
the Image.’426 To get behind the image, away from the pervasive penetration of the
image, requires the penetration of imagination, creativity, understanding and insight.
I hope I provide some of these items in the recipe, the mixture, here.
Doomsdaying, present to a greater or lesser extent in all ages, has become a chief
mode or form of social activity in modern culture. The ancient Romans are often
compared to the Americans in what Patrick Brantlinger calls a “negative
classicism.”427 We have developed, many argue, some of the negative features of
classical civilization. The serious literature of most Western countries, at least since
1914 writes W. Warren Wager, has been “drenched with apocalyptic imagery.”428 It is
not my purpose here to outline the optimistic and utopian or the pessimistic and
dystopian scenarios that have filled the print and electronic media in my time, though
Brantlinger does one of the best jobs of doing so. The analyses of our social,
economic, political and psychological cultures now available is burgeoning and often
enlightening. Indeed, I could devote a special chapter to what I see as relevant
commentary and from time to time I will refer to some theory, some theorist, some
commentary, some analysis. But I do not want to burden readers or myself with
analysis. Readers will probably find I have provided more than enough analysis in my
own individual way.
But, like Leon Edel, the chief biographer of American writer Henry James, I feel as if
"my life has been the quintessence of what I have written......The way I am and the
way I write are a unity."429 So, analysis is, for me, just part of the story, part of me,
Toynbee, op.cit.(vol.1) p.62. The period of Roman history known as ‘The Empire’
began in 31 BC and ended, it is often argued, in 476 AD.
425
William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow, Knopf, NY, 1980, p.27.
426
Marty Fairairn, “Reawakening Imagination,” Film-Philosophy, Vol. 4 No. 17,
July 2000.
427
Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social
Decay, Cornell UP, Ithaca, p.17.
428
Wager in Brantlinger, op.cit., p.39.
429
Leon Edel, Henry James' Letters: Volume IV: 1895-1916, Belkham Press,
London, 1984, p.15.
424
my thought, who I am. For the self is not a thing, but the meaning embodied in a
man, in a life.430
Just as our Western world emerged out of the chaos of the break-up of the Roman
Empire and “the deep sleep" of the interregnum(circa AD 375-675)”431 which
followed, so is a global civilization emerging out of the break-up of the traditional
societies all around the world including our own western society. We, too, have a
deep sleep432 in our own time in the midst of the break-up of the old world. The roots
of faith, without which no society can long endure, have been severed. Perhaps they
were severed in that blood bath of WW1;433 perhaps the severing was completed in
WW2 just as I was born, but certainly in the half century that it has been my privilege
to serve in this embryonic chrysalis church, the institutional matrix, the embryo, of a
new world Order, the chord of Faith has been cut. In many ways, this chord has been
recreated, rebuilt, reshaped around a thousand alternative faiths, sects, cults, isms and
wasms creating a sense of confusion and noise that is part of the new set of problems
of these epochs.
The policy of the many governing bodies, as far as they concerned religion, was
happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the
supersticious, part of the citizenry. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in
this emerging global society, like the Roman world two thousand years before, were
all considered by the people, with equal indifference or on some basis or principle of
exclusivity or preference. Most philosophers, intellectuals and academics saw the
multitude of religions as equally false. There were many, though, among the great
masses of humanity, who saw these religions, or at least one, as true, useful,
pernicious, absurd or simply the leftovers of a previous age.434 The blight of an
aggressive secularism often replaced inherited orthodoxies. Such was part of the
climate that was the backdrop for these epochs.
But, however one analyses the process of social disintegration, the death of an old
Order and the birth of a new one that is characterizing this age, for me the great
historian and sociologist, Reinhardt Bendix puts my life and this pioneering
experience in its primary and, what you might call, its existential setting. He quotes
Jacob Burkhardt's emphasis on "man suffering, striving, doing, as he is and was and
ever shall be"435 at the centre of the process. In autobiography this centre is inevitable
whether one acknowledges a transcendental Centre or no centre at all.
430
Josiah Royce in Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing,
Aaron Fleishman, 1983, p.9.
431
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol.1, 1962(1934), p. 39.
432
This is quite a complex sociological and psychological question, the state of
individual paralysis or deep sleep that afflicts so many millions. Perhaps I will pursue
it in another edition.
433
For a succinct summary of the effects of WW1 see Edward R. Kantowicz, The
Rage of Nations, Cambridge, 1999, p.138.
434
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Internet
Quotations.
435
Jacob Burkhardt in Reinhardt Bendix, Kings and People: Power and the
Mandate to Rule, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978, p.265. Burkhardt
was a 19th century historian.
The revolution of our time, as historian Doug Martin put it in a clever turn of phrase,
“is in essence spiritual.”436 It is also universal and out of our control, he went on in
what I always found a style of writing that has had a significant impact on my
thought. Martin was one of the many influences on my life437 that led, by the 1990s,
to produce the following poems, poems that played with concepts of civilization,
society and the future.
THE GENUINE ARTICLE
The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset writing about the Roman Empire said that
"the heads of the most powerful state that existed....did not find any legitimate legal
titles with which to designate their right to the exercise of power...they did not know
the basis on which they ruled....at the end of the whole thousand-year process which is
Rome’s history, its chief of state went back to being just anybody. Hence the Empire
never had any genuine juridical form, authentic legality, or legitimacy. The Empire
was essentially a shapeless form of government...without authentic institutions....but
the famous Roman conservatism resided in the fact that a Roman knew what law
is....it is that which cannot be reformed, which cannot be varied. -Jose Ortega y
Gasset, An Interpretation of Universal History, WW Norton, NY, 1973, p.120, 197
and 293.
We may eventually learn that
nothing in life is meaningless;
that it has all happened
with one grand purpose,
one unifying scheme;
that the tragedy of history all fits,
is not purely fortuitous,
not a set of chance-couplings,
on-and-on forever.
And that a genuine legitimacy
is a slowly evolving entity
like man himself, or homo erectus,
or the events of the Carboniferous:
you need several thousand years.
Developing out of a prophetic
an exemplary charisma,
the legitimacy of its institutions
found in a routinization
Doug Martin, “The Spiritual Revolution,” World Order, Winter 1973-4, p.14.
As early as 1960 I listened to the talks of this high school teacher. I heard him in
various venues: in Toronto, Hamilton and Chattam, in summer camps and institutes
until 1967. From the 1970s to the 1990s I read his several journal articles and, by the
turn of the millennium, I was reading his talks on the Internet. There is no question in
my mind that he has been one of the formative intellectual influences on my life.
436
437
that has successfully negotiated
the first century and a half of its life:
Is this the genuine article, the key
to the puzzle of history?
Ron Price
10 January 1996
CIVILIZATION SLIPPING
During the 1980s, the concept of globalization began to permeate a diverse body of
literature within the social sciences. An intellectual fascination with globalization, in
which daily processes were becoming increasingly enmeshed in global processes,
contributed in subtle ways to that rampant force that seemed to be part of the dark
heart of this transitional age. During these dark years, too, perhaps as far back as the
1960s, it became obvious that the controlling strain of my character was clearly
emotional. It would have been impossible for me to work as a teacher and serve in
the Baha'i community as a pioneer if my character had not been dominantly
emotional.1 For both these 'jobs' came to diminate most of my life. The other parts of
my nature merged into or were contained in an earnest expression of devotion to God
and man in a framework defined by this new Faith. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over
Four Epochs, 29 October 1997 and 1Alfred Marshall, "On Arnold Toynbee: Marshall
Studies," Bulletin,Vol.6, editor, John Whitaker, pp.45-48, 1996. The mystical and the
emotional seem to be strongly linked.
While I was watching the crim discovers on his release that he is not the only one to
perceive his lagging in terms of suspended animation. His old friends do also. They
act as though he has returned from a brief trip to the toilet or out of town for a few
hours, even though he may have been in the nick for a decade, greeting him casually
and then going about their business.
the slippage of civilization
into its heart of darkness,
like some kind of secondary
or should I say primary reality,
out there, on the box, periscopes up,
bringing it in through the tube,
some intensity was sucked out,
down, in, away from my heart,
day-after-day, hour-by-hour,
year-by-year, until now
a strange quietness invades my soul,
an easy peace, as I watch
the endless succession of signs
in an endless conversation with life,
where an uneasiness, cold and dark,
whispers through the spaces,
the rooms and high into the trees,
harrowing up the souls of the inhabitants
like some mysterious, rampant force.
Ron Price
29 October 1997
GLOBAL CIVILIZATION AND ITS SPIRITUAL AXIS
Civilization lies in an awareness shared by a whole people. And we, all six billion of
us, are slowly acquiring a common awareness.1 Increasingly, the cities of the world in
which I had been born and lived during these epochs, began to fill like Rome, the
capital of that ancient empire or some great monarchy of old, with travellers, citizens
and strangers from every part of the world. Some introduced and enjoyed the
favourite customs and superstitions of their native country. Some abandoned them.
The sound and the clamour, the diversity of appeal, the richness and the confusion of
cultures was incessant. In the midst of all this cultural diversity, the decline and the
diversification of authority, an authority which once had been transmitted with blind
deference from one generation to another, now provided opportunities for human
beings everywhere to exercise their powers and enlarge the limits of their minds.
The name of Poet was in most places forgotten, although their number increased with
every passing decade. Many of the orators were like the sophists of old. A cloud of
critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning. At the same
time learning was advancing by leaps and bounds the world over. If a man were
called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the
human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, not name
that time which elapsed during the epochs of this Divine Plan serving as the
background for this autobiography. Although the benefits of this period to many
millions of people have been obvious and impressive, a sense of optimism has not
resulted. A slough of despond has resulted from the troubled forecasts of doom and
the light of the twentieth century is hardly appreciated. The vast array of changes and
the complexity and the relativistic ethos of the times makes humanity, for the most
part, ill-equipped to even interpret the problems of society.2 1-Thomas Mallon, A
Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries, Ticknor and Fields, NY, 1984,
p.143 and 2 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 156, p.4 and Edward Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Internet Quotations.
It kept moving west,
civilization on the move,
centre of gravity:
Fertile Crescent, Greece, Rome,
north and west Europe,
then North America.
And He kept sending Them:
One by One,
every thousand years or so.
And where now is the centre
as we go global?
Everywhere?
Yes, He's popped Them
all over the place,
but did not tell us
until just recently.
Can we prevent extinction
so we don’t go the same way
as the Easter Islanders,
or the Anastazi Indians?
Where will our children be
after the disappearance
of the tropical rainforest in 2030?
Or all the primary products in 2050,
in a global population
of twelve billion in 2040 or 2060
when they are sixty or eighty
and we are long gone?
Perhaps civilization will continue
its drift west into the middle of the ocean!
Perhaps that spiritual axis
he told us about before he died,
just after the first satellite
showed us ourselves as round ball,
this federated ship, beginning to sail
behind its powerful lights of unity,
for there is a manifest destiny
beyond this tempest blowing,
which will take us, crying, pleading,
bleeding humanity to the blessed mansions
of a global father and motherland.
Ron Price
19 January 1997
So much that we do in life we know we could have done better. Our sins of omission
and commission are legion. It is not my intention to commiserate on the long list of
my failings; the world will not benefit from such a litany. This autobiography is not
quintessentially confessional. From time to time, though, I mention some failing,
some sin; an autobiography would hardly be an autobiography without one or two or
three of such confidences. It may just be that history is the essence of innumerable
autobiographies, however confessional they may be; however private, silent, obscure
and ordinary; however glamorous and in touch with the seats of authority and
influence.
But I would like, here, to quote a poem by Emily Dickinson which puts so much that
we do in life, whatever our role and place in society, in perspective. Her poem is
philosophical, theological, psychological and speaks to both our hearts and minds:
A Deed knocks first at Thought
And then--it knocks at Will-That is the manufacturing spot
And will at Home and well
It then goes out to Act
Or is entombed so still
That only to the ear of God
Its Doom is audible.438
It is not my intention to get my readers to see things the way I see them. I like to think
that this life story is open to interpretation in ways other than those which I intend or
don't intend. As philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, points out in discussing autobiography “a
Work does not only mirror its time, but it can open up a world which it bears within
itself.” It opens up possibilities, he goes on, for others to recompose their lives and
their own life stories.”439 Readers should also be aware in their reading of
autobiography of what Irving Alexander calls "identifiers of salience.” These are
psychologically important features of autobiography that can help readers understand
autobiographical texts more fully. These salient features include: primacy,
uniqueness, frequency, negation, omission, errors, incompleteness and isolation.440 I
deal with all of these factors of salience, but not in a systematic, ordered, way; rather,
readers will find these features dealt with in a spontaneous fashion each in its own
way in the chapters which follow.
"Wars and the administration of public affairs," wrote Gibbon, "are the principal
subjects of history." During these epochs this view has been challenged by historians
with other views of history and this autobiography sees history quite differently as
well.441 However the autobiographer views history, though, this old and established
discipline is one of autobiography’s major boundaries; several other social sciences
occupy, let us say, the south side of the boundary. Tedium and anxiety, suffering and
tribulations of various kinds can be found on the east rising like the sun to bring new
challenges to humankind and obituary waits patiently on the west.442
I would like to comment briefly on 'primacy' and 'uniqueness' before continuing on
my way in this narrative. My life, this autobiographical statement, takes place in a
world that is "shatteringly and bewilderingly new," that is part of the "break-up" of
438
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, editor, T.H. Johnson, 1970, p.536.
A. Nelson in Paul Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revaluation,”
Essays on Biblical Interpretation, London, SPCK.
440
Author Unknown, "Saliency Cues," Internet, 30 March 2003. The literature that
attempts to explain and interpret autobiography has become, in the last 20 years
especially, massive.
441
it is not my intention to survey the many approaches to the study of history but
there are several which focus on aspects of the story that do not involve war. The
annales school and the work of F. Braudel is but one example.
442
I thank Philip Guedaila, British Writer 1889-1944, for this idea which he
expressed quite differently in relation to biography.
439
civilization in a divide greater than any, arguably, since the neolithic revolution.443
Like the neolithic revolution which was spread over several thousand years, so too is
the one we are experiencing. It is not confined to these four epochs but is, rather, one
whose time frame is difficult to define with any precision.
Some put the break-up of the old civilization in the early twentieth or late nineteenth
centuries; others in the middle of the nineteenth century.444 We are, it seems to me,
unquestionably in a new and radically different world and this autobiography is part
of this modernist, postmodernist, unprecedented, catastrophic and unpredictable
world, a world which eludes precise characterization. Surrounded as I am with
imperfect fragments of my life, sometimes concise, often obscure, sometimes
contradictory and often clear elements of fact in space and time, I am reduced to a
vast exercise of collecting, comparing, and conjecturing. Such is the nature of
autobiography, the nature of much of life in our time. And it must be asked: is this
particular autobiography symptomatic of the general, the typical, story of the pioneer,
international or otherwise? Or is each story so idiosyncratic and particular, so unique
and individual, that one person's story is not of much value in conveying the general
narrative for a community moving unobtrusively onto the global stage? There is for
each Baha'i writer of autobiography a dialectic between the banal, the vacuous, the
ordinary and what holds intense significance, what are vital and delightful moments of
being as Virginia Woolf calls them. Another dialectic of equal importance is that
between the culturally common, the shared values and beliefs, the unific and the
whole and the culturally idiosyncratic, heterogeneous, divergent and partial. Readers
of this work will, inevitably, get some of both sides of both dialectics.
I have tried in my day-to-day experience to implement a way of life that has a very
wide embrace. Containing the diversity of human types that this way of life
incorporates, it also contains a philosophical system, far from systematized yet. This
philosophy is not a dead piece of furniture. It is something that, as Johann Gottleib
Fichte said, “we accept or reject as we wish; it is a thing animated by the soul of the
person who holds it.”445 Any of the difficulties I have experienced in implementing
this philosophy in my relations with others are a reflection, as William James once put
it, “of a certain clash of human temperaments.” Temperament is often the source and
cause of an individual’s biases more than any of his more strictly objective premises.
Temperament “loads the evidence" for us "one way or the other.” It is this
temperament that individuals come to trust in themselves and they are often
suspicious of the temperaments of others.446 The psychological sources of this
443
This great divide, this catastrophic shift, took place in the decades after the
passing of Baha'u'llah. So argue Malcohm Bradbury and James McFarlane,
Modernism: A Guide to European Literature: 1890-1930, Penguin, 1991, p.20.
444
Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, London, 1967, p.9.
445
Johann Gottleib Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, trans. Heath and Lachs,
Appleton-Century, Crofts, 1970(1794), p.16.
446
William James, Pragmatism, World Publishing Co., 1970(1907), P.19. Of course
temperament is not the only reason why I fail to live up to the many ideals of my
philosophy. The reasons are many and beyond the scope of this narrative. However
fascinating these reasons may be and however often I allude to them during the course
of this study, they remain far too complex and varied to pursue here.
temperamental orientation are important and complex. They are also beyond the
scope of this narrative to deal with in any depth.
Some writers refer to this temperament as ‘inner biography’ or ‘psychic constitution.’
I don’t want to dwell on this theme of relationships too extensively here for the issues
are subtle and require much attention to grasp and, even then, they are often elusive.
A poem or two is appropriate, though, to expand on this complex subject. I deal with
the sometimes elusive, sometimes quite specific and obvious factors involved in
understanding self and its failings in my poetry. What started out as a simple
handshake with my life twenty years ago has become something of an arm-wrestle.
Simplicity may derive from knowing little and thinking less, from a certain
philosophical view as was the case of Thoreau,447 or from a sharp focus on one thing.
Emerson once wrote, “great geniuses have the shortest biographies.”448 After a
century and a half since Emerson wrote these words and many massive biographies
and autobiographies, he may have revised his words.
When one talks about philosophies of life one can't help imbibing something of the
overall cultural philosophy of the country one lives in. Australian playright, David
Williamson, commenting on the contrast between the Australian and the American
philosophical ethos said the following about the American story structure: "I think
that they(Americans) do very much have that story structure firmly in their heads, that
the hero must start out, must go through a series of challenges, each of which he or
she overcomes, and becomes a better and stronger person at every turning point, and
finally ends up the film a true hero."449 Going on to comment on how Australian
writers told their stories he said: "Now I think Australia and Australian writers tend to
believe that this is a falsified picture of life, that life proceeds more often according to
the neuroses theory where people keep making the same mistakes over and over again
which is more conducive to a comedic approach than a heroic, dramatic approach."450
After a lifetime in both countries I think my approach is a bit of both.
PROJECT OF THE SELF
According to Ulrich Beck, the most dominant and widespread desire in Western
societies today is the desire to live a 'life of one's own'. More and more people aspire
to actively create an individual identity, to be the author of their own life. This
involves an active process of interpreting my own experiences and generating new
“Simplify, simplify, simplify,” was one of H.D. Thoreau’s famous aphorisms.
R.W. Emerson, “Quotations on Biography,” Famous Quotations on Biography,
Internet Site.
449
A modern and, perhaps, definitive, description of the hero's journey told by
Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 3rd printing, Bollingen
Series, Princeton University Press, 1973. I could very easily align my life with his
many stages and phases. However simple this exercise is, I feel it is all a bit 'iffy,'
pretentious and more suited to individuals with more claims to fame.
450
David Williamson, "Wisdom Interviews," ABC Radio National, February 22,
2004.
447
448
ones.451 The ethic of individual self-fulfilment and achievement can be seen as the
"most powerful current in modern societies." The concept of individualisation does
not mean isolation, though, nor unconnectedness, loneliness, nor the end of
engagement in society. Individuals do not live in society as isolated individuals with
dear cut boundaries. If they ever did, now they exist as individuals interconnected in a
net work by relations of power and domination. This is how Edmund Leach put it.452
Individuals are now trying to 'produce' their own biographies. This is partly done by
consulting 'role models' in the media. Through these role models individuals explore
personal possibilities for themselves and imagine alternatives of how they can go
about creating their own lives. This is also done partly by reading history, for it is in
history that some theoretical framework can be found. It is also done partly by reading
biography, for here the autobiographer can find himself at every turn. In effect, it is
one grand experiment or project of the self, with strategies for self and reinventing
self, as it is often said in contemporary parlance. -Ron Price with thanks to Judith
Schroeter, "The Importance of Role Models in Identity Formation: The Ally McBeal
In Us," Internet:www.theory.org.uk, 11 October 2002.
I define myself in community
which is not the same as being
surrounded by people ad nauseam,
nor does it mean doing what I want
as much of the time as I can
or being free of difficulties,
stresses and strains-which seem unavoidable.
I've been creating my own biography-my autobiography--for years
and getting very little sense
of who I am from the media
and their endless role models.
I've been in a community
with two hundred years
of historical models
and literally hundreds,
of people I have known
who have shown me
qualities worth emulating,
helping to make me
some enigmatic,
some composite creature.
451
The literature on this process is now extensive. See M.D. Berzonsky, "A
Constructivist View of Identity Development," Discussions on Ego Identity, J.
Kroger, editor,Hillsdale, NJ, 1993, pp.169-203.
452
Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication, Cambridge UP, Cambridge,
1976, p.62.
Ron Price
11 October 2002
The lives of others then, biographies in short, shelter autobiographical features within
them. We collect these features or, at least we can, into bunches of flowers, ones that
brought sweetness into our life and present them, as Andre Maurois suggested, as an
offering. He suggested the offering be made to “an accomplished destiny.”453 I might
put it a little differently and suggest the offering be made to “the souls who have
remained faithful unto the covenant of God and fulfilled in their lives His trust.”454
MORE THAN A TRACE
Zygmunt Bauman, one of the leading sociologists at the turn of the millennium, wrote
in his book In Search of Politics(Polity Press 1999, 1988, p.54) that "sufferings
which we tend to experience most of the time do not unite their victims. Our
sufferings divide and isolate: our miseries set us apart, tearing up the delicate tissue of
human solidarities." In the Baha'i community, as a pioneer in isolated localities, small
Groups and larger Assembly areas, in my family and in the wider community, I have
found this to be only partly true during these forty years 'on the road,' so to speak.
"Belief in the collective destiny and purpose of the social whole," Bauman continues,
gives meaning to our "life-pursuits." Being part of a global collectivity with highly
specific goals, purposes and a sense of destiny has not only given meaning to my lifepursuits but it has tended to unite me with my fellows even when isolated from them.
It also gives me a special sense of consecrated joy; the consecration comes from the
difficulties endured. Although these difficulties seem to tear that "delicate tissue" that
Bauman refers to, they also provide some of that chord which binds. -Ron Price,
Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 29 July 2002.
Often it was largely in my head,
that tissue of solidarity,
especially in Frobisher Bay,
Whyalla or Zeehan,
on the edge of a universe.
But always, they visited me
when I was sick, somehow
they were always there,
even when they left me alone.
For this is a polity which
gives you lots of space
when you need it and,
you can always go and get it
because there's so much out there:
solitude and sociability
in these vast and spacious lands.
453
454
Andre Maurois, “Quotations on Biography,” EntWagon.com
Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, p.161.
Life is no mere sequence
of instantaneous experiences
without a trace left behind.
Here is a trace with my inscription
of lived time on astronomical time.
This is no singular, self-same identify,
shared or common ancestral, historical,
self. Fractured and fragmented it is,
spread across two continents,
two countries and four epochs,
cutting events out of flow
turning grief into lamentation
and lamentation into praise,
little by little and piece by piece.
See ibid., p.165.
Ron Price
29 July 2002
TOKENS
Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Keats felt 'the burden of the mystery' that was
part of 'this unintelligible world.'1 This orientation of these romantic poets fits into
what Horace Holley calls "the principle of struggle" which is our reality, which is
deeply rooted in the very being of man. "The first sign," writes Holley "of the
purification of the human spirit is anguish."2 There is, too, a great mystery in all of
life: no man can sing that which he understandeth not, nor recount that unto which he
cannot attain.3 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Stephen Coote, John Keats: A Life,
Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1995, p. 151; 2Horace Holley, Religion for
Mankind, GR, London, 1956, p.217; and 3Baha'u'llah, Baha'i Prayers, USA, 1985,
p.121.
I can, I can, recount His tokens,
tokens that tell of His handiwork.
I see them in the community,
in the proximity and otherness
which stirs me: a beautiful face,
an exquisite mouth, such kindness,
a gentle voice, a garden of beauty
and, yet, it wore me out to the bone.
Pleasures they know nothing of,
worlds I can not enter: community
we are just beginning to learn to build.
Emblems of a mind that feeds on infinity,
sustained by transcendence,
attempting converse with a spiritual world
and the generations of humankind
spread over past, present and to come.1
1
Wordsworth, "The Prelude," Book Fourteenth.
Ron Price
23 January 2002
The question about what constitutes genuine understanding or a valid interpretation of
an ongoing life story is a crucial one. Obviously, not all interpretations are valid.
Valid interpretation relies on good guesses, partly because all our actions are what one
could call plurivocal. They are open to several readings, views, opinions on their
meaning or purpose. Guesses only enable the process of interpretation to begin; it is a
necessary step in judging what is important in life, in one’s own life, in gaining any
understanding. Certitude in so much of the interpretations of our actions, if not all of
them, cannot be demonstrated. The best we can get most of the time are strong
probabilities. “We can not possibly evaluate what befalls us or anyone else in terms of
whether it ultimately results in justice or injustice,” writes John Hatcher, “or whether
it is harmful or beneficial.”455 The fruition of our life and its actions is destined for
another plane of existence. Is it difficult to evaluate this pruning process.
There is, then, an ongoing recomposition, involving imagination and critical
reflection, in the writing of autobiography. The story is never ended until we die and
the meaning changes all the time. There are, though, what you might call valid
understandings which possess an internal coherence; they do not violate the whole of
the story; they seem to be authentic, genuine. In the end, though, as Paul Ricoeur
notes, “it is still possible to make an appeal.”456 The appeal process, Ricoeur argues,
belongs in the realm of the poetic, the metaphorical. “Truth,” he says, “no longer
means verification but manifestation.” Here language is a vehicle of revelation,
intuition.457 Ricoeur emphasizes the importance of this “poetic understanding” to
project a new world, to break through, to open. It involves opening or exposing
“oneself to receive a larger self.” Readers will, then, find many a poem that I use to
try and “break through” “open,” to intuit and manifest some larger, deeper,
perspective, 458 to obtain “a radical personal engagement with the truth claims”459 of
my life, my religion and my views of my world. Ricoeur adds that in
autobiographical writing: "The task of hermeneutics is to charter the unexplored
resources of the to-be-said on the basis of the already said. Imagination never resides
in the unsaid.”460 To put this idea in a slightly different way: every image of the past
that is not recognized and expressed in the present as one of the present's own
concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably from our grasp. This autobiography is in
John Hatcher, The Purpose of Physical Reality, Baha’i Pub. Trust, Wilmette,
1987, p.109.
456
Paul Ricoeur, 1971, p.555.
457
Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” Essays On Biblical
Interpretation, London, SPCK, 1980, p.102.
458
ibid.,p.108.
459
Hans Georg Gadamer
460
Ricoeur, 1984, p.25.
455
some ways my simple attempt to tie down what tends to be somewhat slippery,
somewhat evanescent. I must admit that I write somewhat in the same vein of Kurt
Vonnegut's smiling, shrug-shouldered, but not unserious admission that all writers
write "in the secret utopian hope of changing the world."461 And, if this I can not do,
I'm happy just to get my story told.
In the pages ahead, then, readers will find imagination and critical reflection working
together. We all take up things differently. We play with the materials of our world
differently. Imagination brings home unreliable and often shady friends such as
dreams, questions, flashes of insight; critical reflection’s friends are eminently
respectable, though often difficult for imagination to bear. Sometimes they work
together well and it is impossible to tell what is going to come of their intimate
collaboration. But the work of the imagination is in the context of reportage and
form. If falsehood is detected, says Richard Coe, autobiography fails.462 And this is a
serious statement for who can be absolutely honest every minute or every day and
every minute when one writes! Noone: not in everyday life nor in the writing of
autobiography. But, if I am successful here, through poetry, interviews and
anecdotes, I will so personalize this narrative as to actively engage readers. As the
actor Kevin Klein said in relation to ideas and words he has “stolen,”463 I graft the
words and ideas of others if they resonate with my own experience and, as far as
possible, I acknowledge the source. The result, I trust, is a person who is complex,
contradictory and flawed, with subtle and gross features and qualities that are liked
and not liked. The result, too, is a constant enlarging of my "stock of fresh and true
ideas,"464 ideas which nourish my creative activity.
In some ways the question of honesty in life is more accurately a question of what is
appropriate and timely for the occasion, what is disclosed is, hopefully, suited to
people’s ears. In some ways, too, this whole question of honesty is encompassed by
the words of Harold Rosenberg, the famous art critic, who wrote in 1959--the year I
joined the Baha'i Faith--that American art is a tradition of non-tradition. It is a
tradition of solitary and isolated effort. For many international pioneers, and certainly
for this one, I find much of my work, both as a Baha'i and as a person, is indeed a
solitary and isolated effort. This makes it easy for me to see myself in idiosyncratic
terms with a unique tone.465 There is, as far as I know, no autobiography on anywhere
near the scale of this effort by an ordinary Baha'i who is part of the basic warp and
weft of the community. And so I have nothing with which to compare or contrast my
work.
There are, of course, great religious autobiographies I could have drawn on like those
of: George Fox, the "Confessions" of St. Augustine, Saint Teresa's "Life," Bunyan's
"Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners," the "Life of Madam Guyon, Written by
John Barth, "All Trees Are Oak Trees.…," Poets and Writers Magazine, 2003.
Richard N. Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the
Experience of Childhood, Yale UP, 1984, pp.74-5.
463
Kevin Klein on The Jim Lehrer Hour, 8 January 2004, 5:00-6:00 pm.
464
Matthew Arnold, Matthew Arnold, editor, M. Allott and R. Super, Oxford UP,
1986.
465
Harold Rosenberg, "Parable of American Painting," The Tradition of the New,
New York: Horizon Press, 1959.
461
462
Herself," and Joh Wesley's "Journal." They all lay bare the inward states and
processes of the seeking or the triumphant soul. I do as well, but I would not claim for
this autobiography the same status or ranking as these great works. William James,
one of the founding fathers of psychology, states that religion must be studied in those
individuals in whom it is manifested to an extra-normal degree. I'm not so sure. It is
certainly one way to study religion. I'm not so sure I would want my life to be an
exemplum for others to emulate. Studying the lives of those individuals who have a
particular genius for religion, for whom religion has constituted well nigh the whole
of life, like the founders of the great religions and many of the exemplary figures in
these great religious traditions would, I think, be useful. But such a life is not found
here. George Fox, St. Augustine and Saint Teresa, perhaps, are the eminently worthy
characters of this sort. Not Ron Price.
"The world-events which moved rapidly across the stage during the crowded years of
his activity," writes Rufus M. Jones in the preface to George Fox: An
Autobiography, "receive but scant description from his pen. They are never told for
themselves. They come in as by-products of a narrative, whose main purpose is the
story of personal inward experience."466 And so is this true, for the most part, of my
own work, although I give more social analysis than Fox does in his work. Fox
provides a minute study of the hamlets of his microworld and the sects and cults of
the Christian relgion that existed at the time. Readers will look in vain for such a
study in this autobiography. Fox, according to Rufus, saw everything he wrote of
equal importance. I find it difficult to assess the relative significances of the many
sections of this work and leave it to readers to find the mantle of meaning that is
relevant to them and their world.
One problem in assessing and analysing the events of contemporary society has been
in evidence since, arguably, November 12th 1960 when Kennedy defeated Nixon
owing largely to the TV debates.467 Many writers have been talking about the triumph
of the image over the content since the massive spread of TV in the 1950s. Daniel
Boorstein's The Image(1961) introduced the concept of pseudo-events and before
him Kenneth Boulding in a book by the same name(1956) wrote about pictures
becoming a substitute for reality. Louis Menand thinks the reason for this developing
feature of western life is the pleasure people take in "artificially enhanced reality."
People have difficulty facing "ordinary life, in which the excellent and the
extraordinary are rare and most things are difficult, imperfect, disappointing or
boring."468 Needing life to be sweetened, we have the media industry which has
grown up and presented us all with many realities, distractions, allurements and
trivialities, knowledge and insight.469 But, as St. Augustine warns, we must guard
against enjoying the distractions of the voyage lest we become stranded in mid-ocean
and never really find the far shore.470
466
Rufus M. Jones, Preface, George Fox: An Autobiography.(1694)
Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960, 1961.
468
Louis Menand, "Masters of the Matrix," The New Yorker, December 29, 2003.
469
The literature now available that analyses the print and electronic media is
burgeoning and this is not the place to delve into the myriad issues relating to them.
470
St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. NY, 1958.
467
At the same time we need to be aware that in our words, too, there is, as Erica Jong
points out, “fiction in autobiography and autobiography in fiction.” Gustave Flaubert
wrote of his character Madame Bovary: “Madame Bovery c’est moi.”471 Philip
Roth’s book My Life as a Man is part novel, part autobiography, mirroring as it does
the chaos of life. I could site other examples. Like Louis Armstrong's aim in jazz in
the 1920s, I try to tell a story, to convey an intimate experience of life.472 Perhaps if I
introduced more fiction into my narrative it would grab the reader more effectively.
But, to a significant extent, I am imprisoned in the facticity of my life. “History,”
wrote Brent Robbins “is the resolute taking up of one’s heritage as a destiny.”473 This
heritage, though, is both facticity and destiny. At the same time, in the academic
writing of history or autobiography, the tendency to produce an untiring positivity, a
series of assertions as to what actually happened, must be countered if the result is not
to be some lock-step, dry tinder-box of events that never get lighted with the fire of
life, of imagination, of soul, of inner life.
My own autobiography tends less toward the novel and more toward interpretive
history, sociology, psychology and philosophy. This book is also somewhat like the
description that the French poet Paul Valery gave of his books. He said that they were
merely a selection from his "inner monologue.”474 These inner monologues are
intended to enhance, to enrich, the inner life of readers. I try to establish a beachhead
in the brain of my readers by my reactions, my comments, my words that try to etch
into the sensory and the ineffable in life. In the process I supply, furnish, outline a
structure for the amorphousness of life itself. The task is impossible to achieve. I
make a start. This amorphousness is strongly coloured by the past which is never
really dead. It is not even past. "Its reverberations inside the human mind," as the
American novelist William Faulkner wrote, "are continuous."475 The realization, the
understanding, of human experience seems to be possible only after we have lived it.
“I can only write about myself,” wrote Enid Bagnold at the start of her autobiography,
“But oneself is so unknown. Myself has no outline.”476This is arguably the cri de
coeur of the modern author. The autobiographical unravelling is a created thing: part
artifice, part work of art, part slippery and unpredictable discourse. The essential glue
in the process of constructing autobiography is memory which is “a complex cultural
and historical phenomenon constantly subject to revision, amplification and
forgetting.”477 There are other glues, though, that are involved in the writing of an
historical account like an autobiography. One such glue is the explanatory power of
culture itself. Meaning construction is at the very nexus of culture, of social structure
and social action. It is this meaning construction that must be the explicit target of
Quoted on February 10th 1985, “Book Review of Erica Jong’s Parachutes and
Kisses,” The New York Times, p.26.
472
"Jazz," ABC TV, 19 November 2003, 11:00-12:00 pm.
473
Brent Robbins, “ Phenomenology, Psychology, Science and History,” Internet:
Existential-Phenomenology Page.
474
From The New York Times, 1997: The Internet.
475
William Faulkner in Bright Book of Life, Alfred Kazin, Little, Brown and Co.,
Boston, 1971, p. 28.
476
idem
477
Roger Bromley, Lost Narratives: Popular Fictions, Politics and Recent
History, Routledge, London, 1988, Introduction.
471
investigation when writing autobiography, for it is not so much the events of life but
their meaning that is the crucial variable. When one is involved, as I am in the cultural
dimension of historical explanation,478 the culture of my time, my religion and the
very landscape of where I have moved and had my being, are all part of my
autobiography.
There is a strenuous and ceaseless exertion of the intellect here which has gone on for
years, decades, epochs. It is largely a pleasurable exercise and it occupies the
interstices of life for the most part quite pleasantly, although that is not always the
case. This exercise of the intellect is partly a compensation for the blindness of the
heart, its passionate and seemingly insatiable lifeforce where man often explodes in
the service of his passions. As John Ruskin once wrote, the great writer or poet must
combine "two faculties, acuteness of feeling and command of it."479 I have certainly
had my destructive, irrevocable explosions and, like a chronicler, I go back into the
past to put it together again. "Desire,", 'Abdu'l-Baha wrote back in 1875, "is a flame
that has reduced to ashes uncounted lifetime harvests of the learned." Accumulated
knowledge can not quench this flame. Only the holy spirit or, as Jack McLean puts it,
waging a mental jihad can control and guide this desire.480 And waging jihad, mental
or otherwise, has never been one of my gifts. The government of the passions seems
to be a life-long task which one only partly achieves.
This book has become part of an ongoing project in life, a project that Edward Said
described in his first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of
Autobiography(1966). It was not a career, Said wrote, that a writer should aim for
but rather a project that a writer pours himself into. A series of such works in turn
define who the writer is. And such is this particular work: part of a project, part of a
definition of self. However strenuous and ceaseless the exercise of the intellect, it is
not a mental jihad but, rather, a milder exercise of the faculties. There is, though, a
type of portraiture which we usually find in literary autobiographies and biographies.
These portraitures usually focus on their subjects exclusively, reducing to shadows
friends, relatives, and influential contemporaries, and barely sketching in the social
milieu which they inhabited.481 The portrait here in this autobiogrpahy is certainly
guilty, to some extent, of this shadow effect but it does sketch the social milieux more
fully. The landscape of my work is broad; it is filled with figures, many of them
usefully if not minutely articulated and set in motion. I have written what amounts to
a general social history of my times from a western perspective in the last half of the
twentieth century and the early twenty-first, and in its midst, one can trace the
frequently detailed and sometimes obscure narrative of my life, its dark places made
Anne Kane, “Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as
Cultural Structure and Practice,” History and Theory, Vol.39, October 2000, pp.311330.
479
John Ruskin,"The Symbolical Grotesque Theories of Allegory, Artist and
Imagination," Ruskin's Poetic Argument, Cornell UP, 1985.
480
Jack McLean, Dimensions of Spirituality, George roanld, Oxford, 1994, p.189.
481
Graver, Bruce E. "Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover,
Rebel, Spy," Romanticism On the Net 13 (February 1999). A Review of: Kenneth
R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy, New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1998.
478
sufficiently visible, part of a broad canvas, a many-toned-and-textured picture. I have
made a strenuous effort to integrate my life, my society and my religion.
I often speculate, argue from probability and by analogy, and relentlessly mine
passages from poems I have written, notebooks I have gathered, letters I once wrote
and memories that sit vaguely or precisely in my brain for what they can yield that is
relevant to the text. Robert Gittings wrote, in his The Older Hardy published in
1978, that "the creative vitality of Hardy's life was due in large measure to his lifelong
self-discipline in reading and note taking."482 In my own case, as I write these words,
I have little doubt that in the last fifty years I have averaged some four hours per day
devoted to reading, writing and notetaking and whatever creative vitality I possess
derives in significant measure from this long and, on the whole, pleasureable if
disciplined activity.483
One can argue about my conclusions and disagree about the nature of my evidence,
for they are all just one man's view. But I think this work is arguably one of the
important studies in autobiography from a Baha'i perspective and, if taken seriously,
will have a role in shaping the course of autobiographical and biographical studies in
the years to come.
I flesh out my portrait by investigating my family, perhaps too briefly; my sexuality
again perhaps too briefly; my finances hardly at all and my religious proclivities and
involvements more thoroughly than some may like. I try not to paint, as William
Wordsworth did, a poet of calm tranquillity amidst the storms of his times, a selfconscious creation of a man whose early life was anything but tranquil. I try not to
paint an account of myself, again as Wordsworth did in that first and great
autobiographical poem The Prelude, which must be handled with care because it
leaves far too much out. Johnson remarks that Wordsworth's portrait is "like one of
those Renaissance paintings with the artist himself represented down in a lower
corner, gesturing toward his subject. Except that, in this case, the subject turns out to
be the poet himself."484 To break through all this self-fashioning, Johnston adopts a
simple rule of thumb for the biographer: "when there's a choice of possibilities,
investigate the riskier one."485 Such a procedure is bound to create controversy. This
rule of thumb should not be necessary here although, as many writers have found,
man is an infinitely mysterious quotient with endless depths to pursue.
Wordsworth, Johnston maintains, possessed "remarkably low powers of invention."486
He almost never made anything up. Consequently, there exists in his poetry a rich
reciprocal relationship between historical and biographical data, on the one hand, and
the details of his verse, on the other. This, of course, is not news to Wordsworth
482
Robert Gittings, The Older Hardy, Heinemann, London, 1978, p.192.
This average is a guesstimation. There were, of course, periods in these fifty
years, 1954-2004 when little(0-2 hours/day) was done and periods when much(8 to 10
hours/day) was done. The years 1974-2004 was a marked increase over the previous
twenty years, 1954-1974. The years from birth to age 10 saw little reading and little
interest in doing so.
484
Johnston, op.cit. p.13.
485
ibid., p.9.
486
ibid., p.8.
483
scholars. But Johnston's use of facts and source material to illumine the verse, and
then his use of the verse to provide further facts about Wordsworth's life, is
astonishingly new, and more often than not, convincing. Johnston uses factual data to
explain peculiarities in the poem and shows how, in later revisions, Wordsworth
progressively disguised factual details, usually by substituting vague generalizations
for what was originally quite specific, and he points out clear differences between the
poem and its literary source. These differences, according to Johnston, provide further
clues about Wordsworth's life: where Wordsworth departed from a literary source, he
drew directly from his own experience. And Johnston then presents further evidence
to corroborate this hypothesis. History, biography, and literary art are inextricably
bound together, and must be so, for anything like coherent meaning to emerge.
Johnston repeats this procedure time after time, with passage after passage of
Wordsworth's poetry. Evidence from a wide variety of sources is laid out for us
clearly, with the dispassionate detachment of a legal brief, a number of possible
interpretations are set forth, and while always offering his own preference, Johnston
gives his reader space to disagree and dispute, and take up the argument in another
forum. Even where his specific conclusions are not wholly convincing, he has defined
the procedures by which future Romantic criticism must be carried out.487
I quote from this article by Bruce Graver at length because it places my own work and
whatever future it may have in a relevant context. There are a number of
inconsistencies and inaccuracies, as one would expect in the first printing of a 780
page book with scholarly pretentions. One would think, for instance, that an
autobiographer who quotes so liberally from so many sources would have these
sources more firmly in hand, but I often have to leave a source incomplete with a page
number not even cited. Some of the so-called facts are clearly errors of fact. This is
often due to my not having access to a published volume or my having found it too
difficult to obtain such access. My references are sometimes several pages off due to
my utilizing of internet sources rather than the books themselves. These are errors, of
course, that can be easily corrected and, as this autobiography will hopefully go into
further editions, one hopes that such errors will be corrected. Generally, though, I
take as great an interest in the autobiographical process of writing, am as interested in
writerly procedure, as in autobiographical outcome.
Autobiographer and poet, poem and autobiography, are so deeply implicated in each
other, and it will be essential, for many years to come, to read the one beside the
other. My portrait, I often feel, is of the something that is not there. To reveal that
something requires a fuller text: letters, poems, essays, interviews, notebooks. And if
Freud is right, that biographical truth can not be had, this autobiographical statement
in all its genres, is an absolutley critical, fundamental, foundation for any architecture
that is to be built. Should anyone ever want to do so.
I have been a competent teacher, a kind and, I think, judicious, father and a
compassionate if not especially practical husband. I have come to master the ability to
speak to a group, to keep a good set of minutes and wash dishes with a regularity I
have rarely seen exceeded in other company. I came to see myself, by the age of
sixty, as a talented poet, a disinterested gardener, a poor cook and a capable notegatherer and writer. I certainly lacked any mechanical ability or interest, at least none
487
idem
has surfaced in the course of my life thusfar. In the mundane necessities of life I also
seemed to show little interest: shopping, the car, the garden, cooking, the finer points
of cleaning, clothes, inter alia. To this core of domestic disinterest I could add many
academic disciplines that have never caught my fancy, for there are so many and they
can not all be investigated with vigour and depth. Generally the biological and
physical sciences, engineering and mathematics and foreign languages have always
had an existence lower on the totem-pole of my interest--to chose some subjects from
a broad field that would and does fill libraries in the world. But here in this narrative I
reveal several worlds to readers and I trust, in the process, that it will help move
people into being more compassionate. Virginia Woolf once said that "writing
improves society and makes the writer a better person."488 I hope that is the case.
As my wife put it, perhaps eloquently, I lived, at least after my retirement, largely in a
world inside my head, although I came out from time to time to interact when
necessity or pleasure dictated, when the world's getting and spending required my
presence and when people, in some shape and form, nibbled at what was left of a
lifetime of affability and sociability. What I tried to do in my writing and in this
autobiography was, as the literary critic Alfred Kazin put it, "tell over and over the
story" of my life and its fatal deeds until I found "the obstinate human touch that
summed up every story."489 Kazin goes on to say that he sees himself, and writers in
general, becoming as old as thought itself as they examine their younger selves
rushing through the past. Some, like Faulkner, try to put it all in one sentence; others
need great and long stories. It seems that I am closer to the latter than the former.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the first 'moderns' to write his autobiography, wrote in the
eighteenth century and, in the process, constructed a particular model for what a self
should be and do. He constructed a self that served as an idealized identity: static,
unchanging and only altered by the varied interpretations of his readers.490 This
process was repeated over and over again in autobiographical writing, perhaps until
just the other day, during these four epochs. Now, on the Internet, Franklin’s work is
interlinked with literally thousands of other texts and his work has ceased to be a
discrete document. It has become a fluid text, more fluid than it ever could have been
when it occupied a small space on a library shelf, as it did for perhaps two centuries.
Of course, Franklin is still there in the library, but he is also on the Internet. There he
changes with each reader and each time that reader accesses his documents. There is
now so much more cross-fertilization, interdisciplinary commentary. The author, the
autobiographer, is far less able to manipulate the reader; for readers have at their
disposal more than ever before the tools for critical analysis. They can construct the
author in new and different ways, explore through quite subtle and sometimes
revolutionary processes, if they have the interest, the motivation. At the same time, of
course, one can argue that the reader is more easily manipulated than ever.491 That is
partly why a gender theorist like Judith Butler492 has come to see identity as free488
Alice Walker, The Same River Twice: Honouring the Difficult, Scribner, 2004.
Alfred Kazin, Bright Book of Life, Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 1971, p.31.
490
John Palmer, “Brave New Self: Autobiographies in Cyberspace,” Internet, 2002.
491
This issue of manipulation is a complex one dealt with by media and culture
theorists and not possible for me to go into it in any detail here.
492
Judith Butler(b. 1956) became famous for her book Gender Trouble(1990). She
teaches comparative literature and rhetoric at the University of California.
489
floating, as the dramatic effect of our social performance or, for that matter, our
performance while alone. This performance, this identity, Butler sees as shifting and
changing with the contexts of our lives.
And so the memories I live with and by, my spiritual self, which is at bottom simply
the effort of my memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, into effort, into
vision, into patience, into a host of qualities, into a survival pattern for the future, I
cast down in this story, this narrative, which I write down for readers, piece by piece,
paragraph by paragraph. The ownership, the boundaries of this text, have become
fragile in the expanding circle of information that has become instantly or at least
easily accessible in cyberspace and in life's burgeoning reality of this new age. I can
and I do, place my story firmly in the context of my culture. This is not the story of an
isolated individual but rather a person within an intricate societal network where selfteaching occupies centre stage. Like Saul Bellow I'm sure I influence myself far more
than I am influenced by others,493 although collectively and over the decades there is
an immense, an immeasureable influence from others, writers and non-writers, friends
and associations.
Perhaps these influences are due to the fact that thinking is "the most accessible form
of virtue."494 There is an urgency to my thoughts and my recent writings, including
this autobiography, and I have found several narrative and analytical, poetic and prose
forms for their expression. I will conclude this chapter now with some prose-poems
to illustrate some of what I am saying here:
UNITY OF CULTURE
W.B. Yeats' last poetry was "the fulfilment of his whole life; it made him write about
our times as no other poet has."1 He had seen the world he wanted and the woman he
wanted move further and further away; he saw, too, that his work and his misery had
been useless. R.F. Price's poetry, especially after 1992, was especially fulfilling. He,
too, had had his misery, his sense of uselessness, his sense of the world moving away,
even his desire for the world to move away and disappear entirely. This, among other
things, was what brought poetry near and, by 2004, in six thousand poems. -Ron Price
with thanks to Randall Jarrell, "The Development of Yeats's Sense of Reality",
Kipling, Auden and Co: Essays and Reviews: 1935-1964, Carcanet, 1981, pp.9799.
You had wanted that unity of culture
and only got that bitterness
and a fanatic for a lover.
The world had been split in pieces
in a bundle of fragments
with specialized abstractions.
And you thought you could
493
494
Alfred Kazin, op.cit. p. 132.
ibid., p. 134.
bring it together through your poetry,
your sense of life and vigour.
And all you got was one long struggle
with reality—which is all some get
if the cause is worth fighting for,
for others a consecrated joy.
Unity is this dark age,
this formative age,
this age of transition
is a slow working out,
a tortuous, stony road.
Accepting this, then,
everything is easier.
This is really the only fight
to accept, to quit life
and then reenter it,
becoming one with all creation
and tasting some of that joy.
Ron Price
21 June 1998(begun)
21 January 2004(finished)
SOCIALITY AND SOLITUDE
We must be others if we are to be ourselves. For the imaginations which people have
of one another are the solid facts of society. To observe and interpret these
imaginations must be one of our chief aims. The definition of our inner life and
private character must, in the end, be partly a product of how we see and interact with
others. At the same time we can't put everyone else in our books. There is only so
much of life and of others that can be assimilated, absorbed, made a part of our life.
What I write about here is the spillage, the leftovers, the excess, the largeness and
passion of temperament. -Ron Price with thanks to George Herbert Mead, Charles
Horton Cooley and Shoghi Effendi Rabbani in Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western
Reason: Logological Investigations Volume 1, Routledge, NY, 1996, p. 267; and
Guidance for Today and Tomorrow, George Ronald, Oxford.
So much of who we are
is socially constructed,
through detours
into the referential perspectives,
the attitudes of others
we come back to ourselves.
It is as if we are enveloped in others,
in their encompassing signs and voices
and we are literally made from words
and speech which interweave themselves
into our being and we rise,
differentiate and evolve.
We respond to our own responses,
making our experience and the self
which emerges in this process.
Networks of social interaction
produce highly complex
individual self-understandings,
enhanced creative existence.
We are socially constructed realities,
needing large helpings of solitude
for our highly divergent minds.
Ron Price
6 December 1997
THE SOCIAL FABRIC
Whatever kind of life a writer lives, what he writes is infinitely more important than
the way he lived. This remark was made of the great Russian poet Pushkin1 and it has
been said of others. I’d like to think it is true of me for, as I approach the last years of
middle age, I am only too aware of my many accumulating sins of omission and
commission. I would like to take refuge in this writing; I would like to think of it as a
wondrous legacy, as part of the important traces left behind from my age. That’s what
I’d like to think. But I can not afford this luxury.
The vulnerability of the soul is only too apparent. How often, Baha’u’llah declares, at
the hour of the soul’s ascension ‘the true believer’ can descend, speaking
metaphorically, to ‘the nethermost fire.’ How we live, the composite of inner and
outer activity, is unquestionably important. But this poetry will remain, whatever I
have done or not done in life, as a series of pictures of what I trust is meticulously
observed spiritual experience.2 At the heart of both my poetry and my life, is mystery,
loss and victory, sadness and joy. -Ron Price with thanks to Robin Edmonds,
1Pushkin:The Man and His Age, Macmillan, London, 1994, p. 240; and 2H.
Summers in The Autobiographical Passion: Studies in the Self on Show, Peter
Steele, Melbourne UP, 1987, p.79.
Is there some authoritative sway
of imaginative perspicacity here,
which cannot let go of what it finds
uniquely precious,
nor leave isolated
what it finds congenial, collegial,
but which must stitch together
across the wounds
of a psychic and a social fabric
the fibres of private and public meaning?1
I write to overcome death,
in a state, as I am,
of intense expectation of it,
in these lingering moments
of a life that will be over
in less than the twinkling of an eye.
1
Gerald Manley Hopkins in Peter Steele, op.cit., p.113.
Ron Price
3 May 1999
NEW STRUCTURE
After reading and indexing my poetry from 1980 to 1995 I feel as if the entire body of
work is "Warm-Up." The period September 1992 to June 1995 inclusive I shall now
call "The Golden Dome." It is phase three of my 'warm-up.' The period July 1995 to
May 2001, nearly six years, I shall now call "The Terraces." Reading my poetry
from phase three, perhaps the first time I have read it as a whole body of work,
allowed me to make the first overall assessment of my poetry from this phase of its
development. It still seems to be, for the most part, 'juvenilia,' immature and, except
for the occasional poem, singularly unimpressive. I have, though, established a new
general structure, sequence, order, for my poetry during the years 1980 to 2001, a
twenty-one year time span. It is a structure in which I have utilized the names of the
general phases of architectural development for the Shrine of the Bab and the gardens
and terraces which embellish it. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 17
April 2001.
I am that modern hero
who preserves and maintains
a face of my own--no epic,
no universal epic,
but an epic of sorts;
no romantic hero--just
a personal self now formed
around more than twenty years
of poetry symbolically developed
as the Shrine of the Bab was developed
over more than one hundred years.
And here I have access to such power
as can generate the attitudes and names
of God1 as citizen and philosopher,
as public and private poet and person
in this the beginning of the fifth epoch.
1
Thomas Lysaght, "The Artist as Citizen," The Creative Circle: Art, Literature
and Music in Baha'i Perspective, editor Michael Fitzgerald, Kalimat Press, 1980,
pp. 121-157.
Ron Price
18 April 2001.
And so, to go back to my story and its sinuous line, water was crossed, perhaps for the
last time in my life in August 1999.495 As the fifth epoch went through its third month
in April 2001 when I wrote this poem, I had been in Tasmania for nearly four years. I
had no plans to cross any more water and find some new stimulus by breaking more
new ground as Toynbee had referred to in his Study of History as a key to creating
astonishing contrasts in our life. But, as the gerontologists were informing us at the
start of this new millennium, many of my generation could last well into their second
century. So, who knows what would transpire in my life in the years of late adulthood
and old age. Perhaps a future edition of this autobiography will be able to provide
some brilliant inventiveness and help tidy-up and synthesize some of the loose ends
that have resulted from jumping off at so many and so various places in my life story,
from such a wide variety of social analysis and from what I'm sure for some readers
will see as the unfortunate results of this writer's divergent brain.
Famous anthropologist Clifford Geertz sees human beings as animals suspended in
webs of significance they themselves have spun. Those webs are essentially the
cultures human beings live in and they are composed of strands, strands that are their
personal histories. These histories, these stories, these autobiographies, help us
understand and explore these cultural webs and their many and myriad connections
that ultimately make up their communities. Personal stories themselves, when shared
with audiences, are often signatures of cultures in capsule form. They contain
archetypes and standards for acceptable cultural behavior. The great anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss once maintained that through the stories of a culture, the stories
we ourselves tell, the entire culture is accessed and interpreted in a meaningful way.
The storyteller gives her or his listeners such interpretation in subtle and entertaining
ways, and in ways far more important than the mere ethnography or ethnology of a
social group.
One of the tacit aims of the personal history performer is to disseminate such
information and interpretation through channels that are more spiritual and more
subconscious than the anthropologist's cold ethnographic narrative. When people
engage in the telling of their personal histories, a spirit of communitas pervades the
entire attending group, regardless of the various backgrounds each individual member
of the group possesses. Communitas is a feeling of equality, a profundity of shared,
vital and spiritual involvement that a group experiences in the process of ritual or
quasi-ritual activities. It is this spirit that is part of the goal of the autobiographer, the
teller of the story.
It is my hope that readers encounter here feelings of communitas. This writing, this
activity has the goal of reasserting shared paradigms and celebrating the known and
common social structures that exist around us in the Baha’i community. Communitas
is an important step in bringing people together, and in a world in which diversity and
variety are not only becoming more prevalent, but are also becoming increasingly
sought after, it is vital in creating individuals who value others and other cultures. It
495
I would, of course, cross the Bass Strait many times in the years ahead to go to
some event on mainland Australia.
is my view that the paradigms of Baha’i culture are shared through the telling of our
personal histories. My personal and individual interpretations of life and the moral
and ethical codes that accompany these interpretations are also shared in this story.
Society and the individual are brought together in a synergy of experience for both the
teller and the audience, for me and readers. This is part of the magic of personal
history performances. The telling of personal histories has an advantage over many
other arts in creating a culturally sharing atmosphere since it is so ephemeral and so
personal an art. But it is in this atmosphere created between my words and my
readers, that answers to so many of life's questions will be found, if any indeed are to
be found, not so much in the overall text.
Through storytelling, other cultures and differing personalities can actually be
accessed and shared in real and entertaining ways, with narrative that sparks interest
in and personal involvement with characters from diverse and varying backgrounds.
The art of autobiography demands interpretation and the recasting of the naked
experiences of life; interpretive theory and a sense of design bring loose and
meaningless facts into some order, some framework. And there is always the
ineffable, as I reiterate from time to time in this narrative.
By telling my story, as I do here, others can participate in the process of reaffirming
qualities of the human, the personal, in a society that sorely needs it as it becomes
further technological and impersonal. In fact, if such story telling, such
autobiographical statement, ceased to exist, meaningful and artistic communication
would also cease to exist and the very foundations of vital sharing would collapse and
society with it. Tellers of personal histories are givers. They give their stories to
others, hoping that in some way, other individuals' lives will be improved. They are
intended to be service-oriented, unselfish exercises that seek to make others happy. I
gladly make this story available to others. When the imagination is stirred and
feelings and attitudes are explored and reaffirmed, the most fulfilling type of
entertainment occurs. The personal history performer brings images and visions of
people and places to life for her or his listeners. Such engagement does not numb the
mind, although one can never write iron-clad guarantees. Movies or television often
stimulate and often numb the faculties. Storytelling demands that the audience share
with the teller in creating the pictures, scenes, actions and emotions of the story. This
is not always attainable. The mind may be stimulated and exercised; the listener and
teller may leave the experience invigorated and energized or bored to death.
The ways I have responded to public figures both inside and out of the Baha'i
community, the feelings these many people have evoked, the interpretations of life
they invite or inflict, the meanings they embody in the few or many interactions that
take place, these are not shadows cast upon a wall but the very stuff of my experience.
It may all be like a vapour in the desert; it may be in reality a dream and not the water
of life at all; indeed, it may be mere illusion, as Baha'u'llah says, but it is the
metaphorical vehicle within which I am intended to grow and acquire virtues for
mysterious purposes beyond the grave. And so, to decry the human inadequacies and
the faults and failings of my fellow beings or the lack of response of my
contemporaries, however natural this voice of complaint may be, simply betrays an
unwillingness to reckon with, to understand, the realities of this postmodern world.496
I would like to say some things about community, both the Baha'i community and the
various collections of individuals I have had association with over the last half a
century. I will begin with three poems, some ideas from Georg Simmel one of the
finest analysts, I have found, of sociability and some of my own experience as a way
of introducing some general comments about the social dimension of this
autobiography:
TRIUMPH
It is the nature of sociability to free concrete interactions...and to erect its airy
realm...the deep spring which feeds this realm and its play does not lie in...forms, but
exclusively in the vitality of concrete individuals, with all their feelings and
attractions, convictions and impulses....Yet it is precisely the serious person who
derives from sociability a feeling of liberaiton and relief. -Geoege Simmel, The
Sociology of George Simmel, Kurt Wolff(ed.), Collier-Macmillan, NY, 1964.
This is unquestionably the community,
an instrument of mega-proportions
with a community feeling that will
triumph over everything and become
as natural as breathing, necessity itself....
So: what is crucial is
our subjective orientation
toward the community
in all its manifold aspects.
This is our elan vital;
this is our therapy, our centre,
our norm, our basis of judgement,
our overcoming of antisocial dispositions,
our indestructible destiny.
Here is creative tension:
the individual and community,
much talked about dichotomy
that stifles our capacity for joy;
where we are learning new bases,
new instrumentalities for happiness
after centuries of darkness;
where guilt and innocence play
in a drama whose roots are largely unseen;
where the alone and the lonely are found
in a complex web of social interstices;
where the greatest theatre of all
496
I have borrowed here from Drake Bennett, "The Nixon Enigma," The American
Prospect, Vol.14, No.9, January 10, 2003. this is a review of David Greenberg's
Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image, WW Norton, 2002.
plays life on the stage
and we play with a required courtesy,
hopefully genuine, a certain reservedness,
but not as stiff and ceremonial as the past.
It seems purely fortuitous: the harmony,
contact and dissonance, the easy replaceability
of everyone we meet, the democracy we play at.
And we must play on the stage as players
with our parts-not indifferent-interesting,
fascinating, important, even serious,
with results: after the action,
the play of several acts with many scenes
and exchangeability. Ourselves, our self,
our personality may just vanish
or become coated with the many colours
of ‘otherness’.
Enter thou among My servants,
And enter thou My paradise.*
For here you must lose your self
to find community
and we have much to learn
about loss of self.
It is here we shall find
the community feeling that will triumph
over everything, as naturally as breathing.
Ron Price
1 December 1995
* Seven Vallies, (US, 1952), p.47.
These are perspectives on conversation, on the social, written after more than thirty
years on the pioneering road. In the first years, the first decade, 1962 to 1972, I found
the conversational milieux, a source of great, perhaps, chronic, frustration. There was
pleasure, too, but frustration made up many of its threads. The intensity and
frequency of this seemingly chronic frustration waned with the years and became a
much less periodic and less intense experience after my retirement in 1999.
LIQUID CRYSTAL PING PONG
When life touches us
poems appear like bruises
-Roger White, “Bruises”, Occasions of Grace, 1994, p.164.
“Surely, this game evening
was not bruising.”
-Participant in a game evening organized by a friend for a group of nine.
The candle splutters in the cool evening air;
it has been a hot day, one of the first of the summer.
The air is so refreshing, it matters not if
the games this evening,
the basis for tonight’s sociability,
are somewhat tedious.
This is another of those
‘make the best of it’ settings;
you get better at it with the years,
even become a bit of the entertainer,
synthesizer, unifier, charmer, raconteur
(for that has been your ostensible goal)
in one of these planned or thrown together,
four hour, eight hour stage performances,
leg-on-leg, the finest and subtlest dynamics
of broad, rich, oft-repeated, social existence.
The girl beside me, Kate,
catches the warm light
on her brown legs and hair.
Her eyes are the colour of rain.
I’m sure the frangapani frequent her boudoir.
We talk, so briefly;
we could have talked long, dined,
perhaps had an evening swim and made love,
but not in this world and probably not the next.
The art in art, he said, consists in:
having the courage to begin,
the discretion to select
and the wisdom to know when to stop.
I have gone too far, for some,
not far enough for others.
But what of me?
What of my many selves
that I’ve been trying to bring together
into some wholeness, an integration,
in a perpetual balancing act,
an unstable reconciliation of forces
in my psychic life, a battle that
once tore at my edges, but now
provocative stimulation,
challenge and response,
assertion and withdrawal,
no erotic push or poetic madness.
And so we chat; we play the evening’s games.
The air cools, the balmy breeze blows Kate’s hair
across a thousand stars. Like liquid crystal
our words dance in unpredictable patterns,
as if blown by the wind
in serendipidous, if unremembered,
weavings, gropings and groupings,
never too turbulent.
I think of a way to make a quick exit
for I have tired of conversational ping-pong
in a group of nine. It is an old game for me,
at least since 1962. I’ve never played it well,
although I’m better at it now,
just about comfortable.
I play it better in groups of two.
It requires a brilliant inventiveness,
after 255 minutes of backs-and-forths
I exit as courteously as possible.
8 January 1996
And, finally, a third poem:
LET’S GO ALL THE WAY
Described below is an evening spent in the home of an Australian couple. It was a
typical evening. The conversation flowed smoothly and quickly. On other occasions,
with other couples, the conversation is often not as flowing. This couple is one
which my wife and I have known for about five years. I have tried to describe, as
graphically as possible, the nature of the evening and the difficulty of talking about
the Cause in any meaningful sense. The evening represents one venue, one situation,
one typical teaching activity in a person’s home. It must be repeated ad nauseam
across Australia and has been for many decades. -Ron Price, 11:00 am., 1 January
1996, Rivervale WA.
Well, there’s a five hour
whiz-around-everything-under-the-sun
evening, occasionally coming up for gas
conversations, all very stimulating
as long as you can keep feeding
the machine with verbal fodder
just to maintain the pace at all times
with lots of food and drink thrown in
for good measure and sociability.
How many evenings I’ve had
like this in twenty-five years
on the international pioneer stage
in the Antipodes: Australia.
By God, I can talk
with the best of them now,
shift conversational gears1
with razor-sharp speed,
touch down on the serious
or the inner life just to measure
the waters, mention the Cause
once or several times en passant
just to see if someone
would like to pick up on it,
play mental gymnastics,
a pot pourri, keeping it light,
humorous, dexterous,
from here to eternity.
I question the mileage gained,
the meaning, the purpose, the value
of endless discussions about trivia.
Make friends, you say,
get to know people, lay the foundation,
make a start, lay before these contacts
your inner life and private character
which mirror forth in their manifold aspects
the supreme claim of the Abha revelation.2
You become the entertainer, the raconteur,
the man-for-all-seasons, everybody’s somebody,
bouncing the verbal ball for five hours;
maybe there’s an infinitessimal glimmer,
the smallest of look-sees
into the inner chambers
of each other’s hearts, minds and souls.
Perhaps to the extent that
the outer is a reflection of the inner,
we make a start, build a bridge.
How many only saw the outer life of ‘Abdu’l-Baha?
Only a few seemed to see what Howard Ives saw.
So, too, do we dance around each other’s outer shells.
After twenty-five years of playing
pass-the-parcel in lounge rooms
and gardens all across Australia
I’ve become quite adept.
I’ve heard that faith is patience to wait;
I wonder if my inner life
will ever be good enough
and I ponder at the nature of a society
which rarely gets beyond the outer layers
of the parcel.3 I’m tempted to yell:
take it off! take it off! Let’s go all the way!
Ron Price
1 January 1996
1
"The ability to change topics easily and quickly is part of the nature of social
conversation." Georg Simmel, op.cit., 1964.
2
Shoghi Effendi, Guidance for Today and Tomorrow. This quotation is part of one
of the more famous of the Guardian’s statements. It begins: “Not by the force of
numbers...” Shoghi Effendi says that our success in teaching ultimately rests on our
inner life and how that inner life mirrors, in its manifold aspects, the teachings of
Baha’u’llah.
3
pass-the-parcel is a children’s game that can also be played by adults and consists of
passing a small article, wrapped up in many layers of paper, from one person to the
next. The person who has the parcel when the music stops takes off one layer of paper
and then must leave the game. The person who is never caught with the parcel when
the music stops wins. The game usually generates lots of laughs and excitement and
the pace is quite fast. I have a theory, developed from twenty-five years of playing
this game-as a pioneer-that social evenings like the one described above are just that,
social. We take layers of ourselves off. The Baha’i should not attempt to get into
anything serious insofar as the Cause is concerned, or indeed any other serious topic
for that matter in the course of the first few evenings. People seem to find it difficult
to take off too many layers to pursue the serious, the inner person.(See the writings of
sociologist George Simmel on sociability for a theoretical/analytical discussion of
what I am saying here). Serious stuff comes outside this context on a one-to-one basis
or a special meeting convened for seriousness because the person has indicated their
interest or you have spontaneously invited them. These are just a few reflections on a
‘fireside’ situation I have been in so many times and which this poem attempts to
describe.
I often think, as I look back on the multitude, the seemingly millions, of fleeting,
fragmentary, ephemeral dissolves, moments into which life can be seen and described
in retrospect, that it is process that one should emphasize again and again, not product,
the fortuitous and not-so-fortuitous fragments of reality with the aid of psychological
microscopy and sociological detachment even aloofness and a fine mix of an
alternating and modulated intense concern and blase indifference. And just as the
metropolitan consumer has come to feel at home, even stimulated, amidst a
fragmented multiplicity of objects and styles, goods and services, which overlap and
fill a world, so too does the individual, so too has this individual, come to feel at home
in this world of variegation. And, if not at home, in this work I at least demonstrate
that I am capable of capturing how I have experienced contemporary reality and the
meaning that radiates from the multitude of points in time and space along the many
continuums of his existence. During these several decades of pioneering adventure I
have developed a passionate feeling, an intense collection of thoughts, for the human
condition and this narrative allows me to give expression to this collection, to
construct a totality from the great number of fragments. This account is, though, not
so much the story of a unique individual but "an individual in a community," in an
intersecting set of social circles, in a world where I am perpetually confronted by a
multiplicity of cultural objects: ideas from religion to a pervasive secularism, from
science to custom, internalized yet alien, in fixed yet coagulated form, subjective and
intimate, restless and distant, meaningful yet incapable of being fully assimilated.497
497
Georg Simmel in "Simmel's Ambivalent View of Modern Culture," Glenn
Goodwin, Internet, 2002.
And so is this the experience of my contemporaries throughout the world I have
inhabited these many years. The six variables of social analysis used by Simmel could
very well be mine: size, distance, position, valence, self-involvement, symmetry.498
But his cage of the future and its impending doom, his prediction of the atrophy of the
soul, partly fulfilled by the hundreds of millions of deaths that were to occur in the
century after he wrote and the cancerous materialism that gripped western civilization,
I have replaced by the vision, the dream, the reality of the flourishing of a new
religion and its succession of triumphs499 in the last century and a half but, more
importantly, in the half century that is at the basis of this narrative.
Some of this personal story, some of my experience, may be of help to readers by
means of a type of healing process which, if I gave it a name, would be
'understanding.' "My name is Ron and I'm a Baha’i who has battled along this road,"
could be the beginning to my story. Hopefully, some readers will experience healing
through a sense of understanding, as they read my story and reflect on the frustration,
the damage and the hurt they have had in their lives. For the Baha’i community is
engaged in a very serious business: the establishment of the Kingdom of God on
earth. It is no tea-party, although sometimes it may feel like that and there is certainly
a lot of tea consumed in the process. It is impossible to be involved in an exercise of
such importance, such seriousness, such global dimensions and such intensity without
people being hurt from time to time. It’s really part of the process no matter how hard
we try; in fact the harder we try, often the more hurt comes our way. Again, that too is
part of a bigger process.
There is something about telling others about our disappointments that heals. A
broken relationship, a sad heart, personal trials and tests demand that we tell the story
to our closest confidant. There is some of that in this work, although I would not call
what I write, as I mentioned before, a confessional. I do put my heart on my arm
occasionally, but I don’t stick it out with all its warts and bruises. Some of us need to
sing the blues to help us get over them. Some stories from our lives we carry around
and they feed us with damaging, confusing and inaccurate information. These stories
need to be told, and then replaced with healing, accurate, positive stories that are
based on understanding and insight, stories that maintain the factual basis of our life
but facts that are rooted in ‘wisdom and the power of thought, that are embellished
with a fresh grace, distinguished with an ever-varying splendour and the new and
wonderful configurations of existence.’
Perhaps, to some extent, Theodore Adorno, the critical theorist of the Frankfurt
School was right: thinking and writing domesticate our explosive impulses; they
sublimate anger.500 They channell painful emotion in the direction of socially critical
thought. They purge the tensions of life, which might otherwise be purged by sport,
an active sex life, soap opera or any one of a multitude of socially functional
498
The insights of Georg Simmel are highly relevant to this work, but I do not want
to dwell on them too much, thus skewing this autobiography in a particular analytical
direction.
499
The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, Baha'i World Centre, 2001,
p. 141.
500
Matt Connell, "Childhood Experience and the Image of Utopia," Radical
Phlosophy, Issue 99, January/February 2000.
gratifications. You pays your money and you takes your choice, as my philosophy
professor used to say. But whatever we do to deal with life's tensions it is often the
case that "to reach our goals we are forced to precede along increasingly long and
difficult paths with the connection between ends and means often elusive, veiled,
obscured and entirely lost.501
While parents or others may have told us "you can't," others will help us replace this
negative story with the "I can" story. The dichotomy, of course, is not simple for, as
the Alcoholics Anonymous motto emphasizes, there are things we cannot change and
we need to have the wisdom to accept the things we can’t change. Our lives will
reflect this new story of success, these new understandings. Telling stories that are
dark and painful and that embody new understandings give us a chance to realize that
we are in the middle of our great Life Story, and that the future contains the hope of
possibility. Personal stories are for sharing and for hearing and for seeing and for
feeling. As the storyteller, as I paint with words and the gestures of meaning the
varying sensory images in my personal history, readers' imaginations will I hope take
them to often faraway places, let them meet people they have never met or remember
those whose voices have become faint in their memories, and give them an
understanding of experiences they may or may not have experienced. This is all
accomplished by a portrayal of both the familiar and the unfamiliar-made-familiar as
the teller identifies, internalizes, and then portrays the images and events in the
story.502
There has developed in the last half century or so what some have called a "culture of
celebrity." Its roots can be traced back to the 1830s, Charles L. Ponce de Leon has
suggested. Leo Braudy in The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History traces the
roots of this Western preoccupation with fame and the public person back to Roman
times. It is not my intention in writing this autobiographical work to join this frenzy,
this cult of celebrity, this preoccupation with fame. I would lament any celebrity I
might attain because it would cost me the anonymity that I have come to enjoy, to
prize, especially since my retirement in 1999.
But given the dominance of celebrity, its presence, on the public landscape over such
a long period of time, over two thousand years and more, I can’t help but reflect to
what extent these very preoccupations occupy my attention, even unconsciously,
without even wanting to admit to their presence. They creep in whether I want them
there or not. Perhaps there is an inevitability to the existence to these kinds of
tendencies in any autobiography.503 They certainly play a part in the long history of
autobiography and readers may find some of these inevitable tendencies slipping in
here. With more than six hundred pages to go in this account, perhaps readers would
501
S. Mestrovik, Durkheim and Postmodern Culture, 1992, p. 37.
James P. Carse, Getting Through the Day: Strategies for Adults Hurt as
Children; Nancy J. Napier, Sacred Stories; Charles and Anne Simpkinson, editors,
Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1993; Sam and Fox Keen, Your Mythic Journey,
Anne Valley Fox, 1996 and David Sidwell, Dept of Theatre Arts, The Utah State
University Oral History Program.
503
The literature on celebrity, fame, popularity, renoun has burgeoned in the last
several decades; indeed, Greek civilization has its concerns with these themes as well,
especially in the fifth century BC.
502
be advised to wait, to read a good deal more before they try to answer this question. I
felt a certain ambivalence about my celebrity status while I was a teacher for many
years and would probably do so should it come my way again.
Abraham Maslow points out that "our organisms are just too weak for any large doses
of greatness." He continues: "The person who says to himself, 'Yes, I will be a great
philosopher and I will rewrite Plato and do it better,' must sooner or later be struck
dumb by his grandiosity, his arrogance."504 Man's true greatness and distinction,
Baha'u'llah informs us, "lieth not in ornaments or wealth, but rather in virtuous
behaviour and true understanding."505 "Man's highest distinction," Baha'u'llah goes
on, "is to be lowly before and obedient to his God; that his greatest glory, his most
exalted rank and honor, depend on his close observance of the Divine commands and
prohibitions.506 If there is any general context for whatever work I accomplish on this
earth, these quotations provide a starting point.
The famous War Poet of WW1, Robert Owen, expressed the view that: "I want no
limelight and celebrity is the last infirmity I desire."507 With this view I completely
concur, although I would add that, if such celebrity accrued, in the process, to the
glory of this Cause of God, I would welcome such an 'infirmity.' I think it unlikely,
though, that I will ever face this issue.
I'd like to turn now in the third chapter to a discussion of the collection of letters that
has gradually been accumulated during my pioneering experience for the last forty
years. Perhaps they will reveal part of some unconscious preoccupation with fame,
although my conscious mind thinks this unlikely. I'm confident the discussion of my
letters will reveal, what is also the intention of this long narrative to reveal, namely,
that full understanding of social phenomena and of our own dear lives is impossible
"save in terms of a recognition of the unalterable, irreducible role of the religious
impulse,"508 as expressed through the one Power that can fulfill the ultimate human
longing of the minds and hearts of the people of the world.509
This brief overview of some three thousand letters suggests a context. These letters
represent the expression, among other things, of my religious values, embedded in
social relations, in one of the multitude of social forms with its infinitely manifold
contents. Readers will find in both this general overview of my letters and the letters
themselves, should they ever be published, a strange mixture, a melange, of my
attempts at selfless devotion and the multitude of my human desires that are far from
selfless; my pretensions, my efforts, to acquire, to develop humility's necessary spirit
and the many forms of enthusiasm and elation, joy and pleasure, of sensual
immediacy and spiritual abstractions. Some might call these emotional elements 'the
religious frame of mind.' At least Georg Simmel expressed it this way. 510 He equated
504
William Todd Schultz, "The Riddle That Doesn't Exist: Ludwig Wittgenstein's
Transmogrification of Death," Internet Article: Source Unknown.
505
Baha'u'llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah, Page: 57.
506
`Abdu'l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, Page: 71.
507
Robert Owen, Memoir, 1931, p.33.
508
Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition, Heinemann, 1966, p. 261.
509
The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, Haifa, 2001, p.144.
510
R. Nisbet, op.cit., p.262.
this frame of mind with piety. Without this pietas, it was Simmel’s view, society
would be impossible. It was and is the essential bond by which society is held
together. It was certainly one of the bonds that held my life together. There were
many others.
Virtually all these letters, and since about 1995 emails, have been elicited, socially
necessitated in some way or part of some promotional exercise for the Cause or my
poetry. Occasionally and more frequently with the years, though, a letter is entirely
proffered, an exercise in spontaneous giving, an exercise for the fun of going surfing
on the waters of language or the waters of life, to meet a soul as best as one could
with words.
In a review of some 50,000 war letters from the 1860s to the 1990s, Vivian Wagner
wrote recently in Book Page that: “One of the few positive things that can be said
about war is that it inspires good correspondence.”511 Much is hidden, she goes on,
between the lines. Much, too, is revealed that tells of what it means to be human and
to endure. I am sure this is eqully true of the literally hundreds of thousands of letters
written during the great spiritual drama the Baha’i community has been engaged in
during the several Plans over these four epochs. Most of these letters, of course, will
never see the light of day. I’m sure, though, there will be more than a few which will
surive: here are some.
Vivian A Wagner, “A Review of Andrew Carroll’s War Letters: Extraordinary
Correspondence From American Wars, Scribner, 2001 in Book Page, 2001.
511