Over Four Epochs

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

VOLUME 4: INTERNATIONAL PIONEERING

Chapter 1 International Pioneering 1: 1971-1973

Chapter 5 International Pioneering 5: 1982-1988 Chapter 6 International Pioneering 6: 1988-1996

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SECTION VI Unpublished Work: Essays-Volumes 1 & 2---125 essays ...... 1979-2004 Novels-Volumes 1 to 3---12 attempts ...... 1983-2001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 Photographs: 12 files/booklets/folios...... 1908-2004 SECTION X.2 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 self- creation 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 of my thought and writing I was able to make more and more and more of my life; 5 it 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, 8:00- 8:30 am. 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. 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'l- Baha 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, should find that....he has become the cause of peace and well-being, of happiness and advantage to his fellow men."11

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. 11 idem 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

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

12 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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 self-

15 Henry David Thoreau in Annette M. Woodlief, “The Influence of Theories of Rhetoric on Thoreau,” Thoreau Journal Quarterly, Vol. VII, January 1975, pp.13- 22.

16 Published in Action, Knowledge, and Reality: Critical Studies in Honour of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Hector-Neri Castañeda, Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., Indianapolis, 1975. expression 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 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

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. 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. 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 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

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. 23 James Olney, Metaphors of the Self: The Meaning of Autobiography, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1972, pp.31-32. 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. 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 24 Proust quoted in 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature Acceptance Speech, Saul Bellow, Internet. 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.

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 25 Emily Dickinson refers to "conviction's granite base" in her poem number 789. 26 See: http://www.sheckley.com/frames.html 27 Joseph Epstein, "Writing on the Brain," Commentary, 2003. 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: 1962- 1971 and volume 4: international pioneering: 1971 to 2004; finally, volume 5 contains essays on pioneering, some special poetry and a detailed resume and bio- data. 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 not sure I ever would have written it in the first place, however personally meaningful or useful my life has been.

28 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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.” 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-through- catastrophic 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 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 pscyho- geographical characteristics and my pioneering life will be elaborated on, unfolded, in

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 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 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.

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. 46 Graham Hassall, "Self and Society: Biography and Autobiography in Baha'i Literature," Baha'i Library Online, 2004, p.4. 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 razor- thin-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 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 47 Adriana Cavarero, op.cit., p.84. 48 ibid., p.92. 49 Lewis Mumford, op.cit., p.256. 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 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

50 William Gass reports Valery as taking pleasure from his work in writing more than in the product. 51 Nicholas F. Pici, "Trading Meanings: The Breath of Music in Toni Morrison's Jazz,"Connotations, 1997/8, pp.372-398. 52 Wallace Stevens in "They Have the Numbers; We the Heights," Harold Bloom, Boston Review, 1993-1998. 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 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 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. 56 Thomas Mann at: www.littlebluelight.com 57 Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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. 65 Charlie Bertsche, "Autobiography in Music Criticism," Bad Subjects: Political Education in Everyday Life, June 1999. 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, self- narrative 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 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 66 Mark Van Doren, “On Donald Colross Peattie,” in David Mazel, Op.cit., p.276. 67 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Selections, Haifa, 1978, p.111. 68 The social, the cultural, construction, of human beings is increasingly emphasized in the literature of the social and behavioural sciences. 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 non- academic 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.

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, 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. 71 W.H. Auden in W.H. Auden: Forewords and Afterwords, 1979, p. 366. 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.

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 72 Phillip Webb, "What are You Studying History?" Access: History, Vol.3.1. 73 Roger White, "A Toast to the Hero," A Witness of Pebbles, George Ronald, Oxford, 1981, p.106. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

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.

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 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 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 84 George Townshend, "Introduction," God Passes by, Wilmette, 1957, p. iii. 85 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. 88 idem 89 David Womersley, The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1988, p.184. 90 ibid., p.181. 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 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 mid- sixties, 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.

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. 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. 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 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. 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 100 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.” 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 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 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. 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 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 107 Northrop Frye, A Literary History of Canada, Spring/Summer, 1982. 108 Leo Bersani, op.cit., p.86. 109 idem 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. 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 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 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. 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 self- reflexivity 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. 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, 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 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. 120 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, Wilmette, 1977, p.6. 121 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. 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 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." 124 Doug Martin, "The Spiritual Revolution," World Order, Winter 1973-4, p.14. 125 Todd F. David and Kenneth Womack, "PERSPECTIVES: Criticisms of the Motion Picture 'The Titanic,'" Journal of Popular Film and Television, Spring, 2001. 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 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, computer- generated 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

126 Geoffrey Durant, William Wordsworth, Cambridge UP, 1969, p.115. 127 '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. 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.

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 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. 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. 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 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 133 Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain, Vintage Books, NY, 1989. 134 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. 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 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

138 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. 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, 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

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. 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. 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, 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. 145 This will remain the situation unless and until my life becomes the object of study by others. 146 'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, pp.35-6. 147 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. 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 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 149 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. 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 comfortable 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-so-

153 Paul Theroux describes his experience of writing travel books this way in Fresh Air Fiend, Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 154 155 Oscar Wilde in David Richter(ed.), op.cit. p.459. trivial 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.

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 pre- ordained 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. 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. "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.'

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 transition 164 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 160 John Macmurray,, Persons in Relation Being: The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Glasgow in 1954, London: Faber, 1961, pp. 60-61. 161 Marzieh Gail, Summon Up Remembrance, George Ronald, Oxford, 1987. 162 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 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 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 between the many theories of the individual and society. And I draw on much of this material in this autobiography. 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. 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 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. 170 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. 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 quasi- historical 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.

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 179 William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, Penguin, 1970, p.127. 180 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.325-6. 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 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

183 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 157. 184 Raymond Tallis, In Defence of Realism, Edward Arnold, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1985. 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 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-of- bounds 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 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. 189 See also: R. Shields, “Social Spatialization and the Built Environment: The West Edmonton Mall,” Society and Space, Vol. 7, pp. 147-164. 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 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.

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. 193 Tom Brokaw, An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from The Greatest Generation, Random House, 2001. “ 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 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!

194 Lenin, What Was Is To Be Done? quoted in Kelsh, op.cit. 195 Jose Sarmago, CLCWeb:Comparative Literature and Culture: AWWWeb Journal, CLCWeb Library of Research and Information, CLCWeb Contents 2.3, September 2000. 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 bitter- sweet 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

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 self-

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. 199 Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self, Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1991, p.4. 200 idem dramatization.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 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; 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. 204 Frank T. Vertosick, Why We Hurt: The Natural History of Pain, Harcourt, 2000. 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, 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’l- Baha, 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 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. 209 'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.35. 210 ibid., p.59. 211 This issue is discussed in "A Review of T.J. Binyon's Pushkin: A Biography," The Wilson Quarterly, 2004. 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 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 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. 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. 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 sun- warmed 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.

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

215 Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys, USA, Wilmette, 1952, p.13. 216 George Townshend, The Mission of Baha'u'llah, George Ronald, Oxford, 1973(1952), p.91. 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 sequence- Or 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 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.

217 Richard Sennett, "The New Political Economy and its Culture," Hedgehog, Spring, 2000. 218 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, editor, T.H. Johnson, 1970, p.531. 219 Horace Walpole(1717-1797) in a Letter to Anne, 16 August 1776. 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.

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. 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 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 222 Donald Horne, "Life lines," The Australian Review of Books, May 1998. 223 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. 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.

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 army 228 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.

225 David Hume in A Study of History, Vol.2, Galaxy Book, 1962(1934), p.73. 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. 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 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

229 Judith M. Melton, The Face of Exile: Autobiographical Journeys, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1998. 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 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 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 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. 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 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

236 Emerson, "The Poet." 237 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. "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 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.

240 Frances Quarles(1592-1644), Emblems. 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. 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 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 empty- handed. A loss of that innocence and exaltation was also mine as was a sense of the

243 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. 244 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. knowingness of my knowledge.248 Prayer often provided what Shakespeare said it 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 248 Thanks to Roger White, "A Sudden Music," A Witness of Pebbles, George Ronald, 1981, p.81. 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. 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 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 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. customs and sanctions of civilization "constitute a thin veneer over our baser 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 memory- bank: 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. 259 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. 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, otherness, nature and nurture I could describe these forces in great detail. But not here. 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. 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 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

268 Paul Theroux, Fresh Air Fiend, Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 269 Bertrand Russell, Autobiogrpahy, Volume 3, Preface. 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.

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 270 Robert Penn Warren, Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, 1988, #7231. 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 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 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. 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. 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.

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 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. 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 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 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. 280 ibid.,p.15. 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.

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 281 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. 284 Fannie Eckstorm, “On Thoreau’s The Main Woods,” A Century of Early Ecocriticism, editor, David Mazel, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 2001, p.172. 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.

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. 2 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.

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 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 285 William Empson expressed this view of poetry. See: Frank Kermode, "William Empson: A Most Noteworthy Poet," The London Review of Books, June 2000. 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.

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 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 2Richard Sennett, Authority, A.A. Knopf, NY, 1980, pp. 193-195.

This writing of poetry is performance: 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. 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.

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 post- American, 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.

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 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

289 Toynbee, op.cit. p.36. 290 Horace, “Carmina,” Book IV, Ode 9, lines 25-28.(65 BC to 8 AD) 291 Toynbee, op.cit., p.39. 292 Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress.” 293 Mary O’Neil, “ The Fortunes of Avant-Garde Poetry,” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 25, No.1, 2001, pp.142-154. “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, 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(1959- 1969) 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. Dieing, like being born, I was tired with is a long process. what you might call Who can say when it really a bone-weariness. when it really begins? -ibid., p.169. 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, 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 T.S. Matthews, op.cit., p. 170. 2 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. 294 Toynbee, op.cit., p.42. 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 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 295 It is now nearly five years since I have been freed from employment and what I came to find excessive community tasks: 1999-2003. 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. 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 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 297 Polybius in the Preface to Oecumenical History since the One Hundred and Fortieth Olympiad, Book 1, Chapter 1. 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. 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 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

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. 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.

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 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. 305 John Hatcher has written extensively on this theme as far back as the late 1970s in several books and journal articles. 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 non- specific 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 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 306 Anton Zidjervelt, The Abstract Society, Penguin, 1970. 307 Urpo Kovala, "Cultural Text Analysis and Liksom's Short Story 'We Got Married," Comparative Literature and Culture: AWWWeb Journal. 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 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. 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. 311 Joseph Conrad in S.E. Gontarski, op.cit. Astute’s the pilgrim on the land Who never heeds the sea And resolutely walks away- It 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(1727- 1781). 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 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.317 312 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). 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, 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 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: 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. 321 Callum Brown in "The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe: 1750-2000, Cambridge UP, 2003," Reviewed in:Canadian Journal of Sociology Online, March- April 2004.gh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds. 322 Louise Gluck, USAToday.com, 29 August 2003. 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. 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.

1 my mother was born in 1904 after her parents arrived from England in 1900. 2 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 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:

1872 to 1901-early 1901 to 1931-middle 323 I received his autobiography in 1982. 324 A book of this length, written by an unlettered, largely uneducated, man is unquestionably impressive. Since the late 18th century, since Rousseau's classic 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. and 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, 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. 326 See Alfred Cornfield, A.J. Cornfield’s Story, 1980 for his autobiography: 1872- 1901. 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 327 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Internet Quotes. 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.

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

328 William Shakespeare, Sonnets, Number 3. 329 'Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'i Prayers, NSA of USA, 1985, p.106. 330 ibid., sonnet 15. 331 ibid., sonnet 18. 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.

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 CONTEXT 334

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 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. 334 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. 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.

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 335 William Schultz, op.cit. 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 cross- section 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.

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 336 Bruce Petty, "Wisdom Interviews," ABC Radio National, February 8, 2004. 337 Shakespeare, op.cit., sonnet 141. 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, 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. 338 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. 339 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. 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 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

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. 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.) 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 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 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.1 346 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/ 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 350 Paul Valery in William Gass, op.cit., p.159. 351 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 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 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

355 "An Interview With Louis Auchincloss," Atlantic Unbound, October 15, 1997. 356 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. 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 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

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. 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.

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 ground- breaking, 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: 1993- 1793," 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

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 364 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History: Vol.2, Oxford UP, 1962(1954), p.84. 365 ibid., p.86. 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 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, 366 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to Canada, p.37. 367 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(1993-2003) 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. 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.

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 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. 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 self- generation 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 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, 378 idem 379 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. 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 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 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. 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. 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!!

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 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. 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 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, 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. 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 post- 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 392 Emily Dickinson, "Poem Number 632," Complete Works. 393 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. 394 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 407 Geoffrey Hartman, "The Dream of Communication," in I.A. Richards: Essays in His Honour, editor, Reuben Brower, et al., NY, 1973, p. 173. 408 George Simmel writes extensively on this theme. See also: W.B. Gudykunst and Y.Y. Kim, Communication With Strangers: An Approach to Intercultural 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 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 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 412 Kurt Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, The Free Press, NY, 1950, pp.402- 408. 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 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, 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. 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.

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.

416 Roger White, "New Song," Another Song Another Season, George Ronald, Oxford, 1979, pp.116-118. 417 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. 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.

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 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 anti- victimization. -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: 419 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions: Book 1, 1782, p.1. 420 Will Rogers in "Writing Changes Everything: A Review of '627 Best things Anyone Ever Said About Writing,'" Deborah Brodie in BookPage, 1997. 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, 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. 421 Lord Acton in A Study of History, Vol.1, 1934, p.47. 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.

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

422 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. 424 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. 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, 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 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. 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. 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.

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.

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. 436 Doug Martin, “The Spiritual Revolution,” World Order, Winter 1973-4, p.14. 437 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. 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 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?

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.

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.

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. 438 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, editor, T.H. Johnson, 1970, p.536. 439 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. "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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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. 447 “Simplify, simplify, simplify,” was one of H.D. Thoreau’s famous aphorisms. 448 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. 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 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.

450 David Williamson, "Wisdom Interviews," ABC Radio National, February 22, 2004. 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. 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.

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 life- pursuits 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 453 Andre Maurois, “Quotations on Biography,” EntWagon.com 454 Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, p.161. 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.

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.

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.

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,

455 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. 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 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

458 ibid.,p.108. 459 Hans Georg Gadamer 460 Ricoeur, 1984, p.25. 461 John Barth, "All Trees Are Oak Trees.…," Poets and Writers Magazine, 2003. 462 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. 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 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 465 Harold Rosenberg, "Parable of American Painting," The Tradition of the New, New York: Horizon Press, 1959. 466 Rufus M. Jones, Preface, George Fox: An Autobiography.(1694) 467 Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960, 1961. 468 Louis Menand, "Masters of the Matrix," The New Yorker, December 29, 2003. 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

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 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. 471 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 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 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 477 Roger Bromley, Lost Narratives: Popular Fictions, Politics and Recent History, Routledge, London, 1988, Introduction. 478 Anne Kane, “Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as Cultural Structure and Practice,” History and Theory, Vol.39, October 2000, pp.311- 330. 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. 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 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 self- conscious 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.

482 Robert Gittings, The Older Hardy, Heinemann, London, 1978, p.192. 483 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. 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 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 486 ibid., p.8. 487 idem 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 note- gatherer and writer. I certainly lacked any mechanical ability or interest, at least none 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 488 Alice Walker, The Same River Twice: Honouring the Difficult, Scribner, 2004. 489 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. partly why a gender theorist like Judith Butler492 has come to see identity as free- 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 self- teaching 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.97- 99.

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. 492 Judith Butler(b. 1956) became famous for her book Gender Trouble(1990). She teaches comparative literature and rhetoric at the University of California. 493 Alfred Kazin, op.cit. p. 132. 494 ibid., p. 134. And you thought you could 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.

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 is my view that the paradigms of Baha’i culture are shared through the telling of our 495 I would, of course, cross the Bass Strait many times in the years ahead to go to some event on mainland Australia. 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.496 496 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. 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 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.

* 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!

1 "The ability to change topics easily and quickly is part of the nature of social conversation." Georg Simmel, op.cit., 1964. 2Shoghi 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. 3pass-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 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 497 Georg Simmel in "Simmel's Ambivalent View of Modern Culture," Glenn Goodwin, Internet, 2002. 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. 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 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

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. 501 S. Mestrovik, Durkheim and Postmodern Culture, 1992, p. 37. 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 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

502 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. 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 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 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. 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.

511 Vivian A Wagner, “A Review of Andrew Carroll’s War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence From American Wars, Scribner, 2001 in Book Page, 2001.