Pioneering Over Four Epochs:
An Autobiographical Study and A Study In Autobiography: Part 3

by Ron Price

published in Pioneering Over Four Epochs

PREAMBLE:

What follows is Part 3 of Pioneering Over Four Epochs(7th edition) found here at Bahai Library Online (BLO). In time, hopefully, I will add a Part 4 and an 8th edition. This document tries to provide, with Parts 1 and 2, an overview of my 2600 page(font 14 and 400 words/page) autobiography or memoir. Those wanting to read the third edition of this same work with the same title Pioneering Over Four Epochs can go to eBookMall to access that earlier edition. Readers can also find my writing in book form at Lulu.com and spread over literally thousands of internet sites of special interest, topics, subjects and themes, all related in one way or another to this epic work 'Pioneering Over Four Epochs.'

I should reiterate at the outset that readers will in all likelihood only be interested in this document if they are interested in the interplay, the interconnectedness, the interlock, between a Bahai life, the wider Bahai community and the general society in which a Bahai has lived in the last four epochs of Bahai history, that is the years 1943 to 2013. This work also provides a retrospective glance taking in the years that are the meeting of my parents, the Bahai teaching Plan beginning in 1937 and more generally the years back to the very start of Bahai history with the birth of Shaykh Ahmad in 1753/1743. I have been enmeshed all my life, as we all are, in history and society's complexity, its irreducible multiplicity, the endlessness of its overt and subtle processes. This work only covers an infinitessimal part of that entire multidimensional world and it only covers a small part of my life's ceaseless and necessary process of self-renewal in which I have been and am engaged, a process that occurs to some extent in the act of writing as I scrutinize and recapture my inner and outer life.

As I pointed out when introducing Part 1 of this work at the Bahai Academics Resource Library (BARL) since renamed to Bahai Library Online(BLO), only some references are included in the body of this work at BLO and there are, as yet, no footnotes. I have tried to make up for this deficiency in a number of ways--by using, for example, a wide-anged lens to see each passage or section that I am writing at any moment in its relation to the plan of the whole book and by going off on tangents, tangents discussed in many of the books I draw on in this work. Still, some readers may find my remarks from time to time far too tangential and the lens far too wide-angled, thus detracting from any sense of unity and coherence to the overall text. As I say this will be the case at least for some readers. I can only add, not really in defence but just as a matter of fact, that the intelligible field of study in this work is as much autobiography as a genre and as it is my life, as much my religion and society as it is my life. I see this triangle of forces, of subjects, as a series of interlocked features of my existence. This wide-angled lens takes in a very wide ambit, virtually all of Time and Space or at least as much of it as I can relate to in the short course of my life.

I see this project as both a priviledge to write and an impossibility to accomplish to any full extent due to the many uncertainties, indecisions, gestures toward publicity before an impersonal public and finally, gestures before the many windows of death. The self-conscious scholar, historian, anthropologist and autobiographer uses life-writing to voice complaints, make observations, write analysis and theorize about what defines them and what makes their society the way it is. This book is undoubtedly for the more academically inclined, the more introspective, reader. It is a work that is, for me, a social practice which creates meaning as well as hoping to communicate it. The writing transforms the person, the writer, from silent witness and participant into engaged survivor, victor and failure. For we all win some and lose some as they say. For this autobiographer, autobiography is not so much generic category as it is a literary strategy for, as Jean Paul Sartre once wrote "to write is to act."

I trust that what may appear initially to readers as extraneous or irrelevant, inappropriate or unnecessary--events, ideas and commentary--may come in time as the reading continues to be seen--as I see this entire opus or epic and each of its parts--as all of one piece, all on the same page as they say these days. Strangely and in ways that surprise me, this work seems to be a product of a different self than the one I display in my habits, in society and in the context of my virtues and vices, my everyday self. I have mentioned this before and so it is that this memoir is less a record of what actually happened to me, my society and my religion than a discovery-creation which grows out of a loosely defined and complex set of aesthetic, biological, psychological and socio-historical factors. There is a sentence in Shakespeare which should be stuck in the preface of all autobiographies: “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not: and our vices would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues.” And I would add this sentence from Aleister Crowley that English occultist and mystic. He once wrote: "I can imagine myself on my death-bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world, like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman.

This memoir is also more the record of multiple versions of the self in the guise of a single self that has the appearance of being the same over time. This memoiristic work is a complex interplay of now-blackish content, of now-iridescent fact with my now-mercurial and my now-intransigent mind. It contains trace elements of the poetic, of riddles, of quizzicality, of quirkishness; instances of spiritual aspiration and performances of a sportive mind. Hopefully readers will find here Narcissus touched by Mercury. This is a modernist or, perhaps, a postmodernist text which contains what Roland Barthes calls "a galaxy of signifiers to which readers gain access by several entrances none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one. The number of these signifiers is never closed."(Roland Barthes, An Essay, Trans by Richard Miller,Hill and Wang, NY, 1974, pp.5-6.)

The past is, it sems to me, inherently indeterminate. That is there is no single determinate truth about the past. This claim follows, I believe, from the fact that actions are never context free, but are, rather, always actions under a particular description. Since descriptions of action can change over time as new descriptions become available and old descriptions fade away, the past is not determinate. In brief, 'retrospective re-descriptions' can actually change the past. Any "truth" about the human past will, then, be completely relative to the contextual framework of our descriptions.

The indeterminacy of the past is in some ways quite a radical thing to say. There are good reasons to be skeptical about such a statement at least some of its bolder aspects, perhaps particularly due to the fact that re-descriptions of the past can actually change the truth of the past. Such a view of the past can leave one open to charges of historical revisionism. I stand guilty as charged.

In his Experiment in Autobiography, the famous writer H.G. Wells gave(1935) his readers a report on his ideas, his views on one world and indeed, the inevitability of a globally integrated world system. He described his life as the growth and development of an average brain. He never tired of repeating these words or some variation of them. This concept of intellectual development sounded the keynote not only to his life but to his ideas. It has earned for his autobiography the title of "Honest". I am not sure what the title my work will earn me, but the rather lengthy title I have given it will suffice for now.

Philosophy and autobiography are, in some basic ways, the representation of ideas. Such is my view. Poetics, and poetics plays a large role in my autobiography, is a means by which I necessarily understand or try to understand identity and belonging, or not belonging. I draw on many cultural forms, and on representation via genre, myth, poem, anecdote, story, sayings, metaphors as well as essays. The autobiographical 'I' is never itself found in any pure sense because it always represents itself through culture; the autobiographical eye can never perceive directly much less remember directly. Further, there are continuous inner journeys that beckon deep within oneself to scattered islands and mirages of life. I think of myself now at least partly as a pathological hermit, yet I make long voyages in my mind, prompted and pursued by desires entwinedly utopian and dystopian.

At any point in my life, I can think of myself as relating to a number of identities in terms of: gender, age, residence, job, family status/income level and ethnicity, to name only a few. The conceptual and emotional difficulties that a migrant, a traveller-pioneer like myself experiences in coming to a singular understanding of the term identity is akin to standing in the middle of a chamber of mirrors that are in constant, slow rotation. One catches glimpses of transient reflections without ever settling on a fixed image. Those of us who have reluctantly experienced displacement, or willingly shifted our cultural base, find our own private ways of locating and perceiving ourselves beyond the obvious coordinates of a street, a suburb, a town or a passport. I am no exception in this quiet search, and my vehicle of travel is writing non-fiction.

But undeniably, as a social being, I am part of a larger scene, and I have to say that looking at the bigger picture makes me uneasy about contemporary communal attitudes regarding identity. The cultural fragmentation with which I must cope merely complicates the issue, but it also alerts me to the pitfalls of excessive and sometimes blind patriotism that is often evident, for example, in such comparatively trivial matters like sports or in such comparatively serious matters like politics. My communal identity as a Bahai helps to centre me on this planet as a global citizen. I talk about this more at other places in the five volumes of this autobiography.

I do not believe that it is possible for me to wear the permanent tag of a cultural stereotype. Indeed, a Bahai is part of an international commmunity with a thousand-or-more cultures. I have no unqualified identification with a single, mainstream tradition; this would be a denial of the composite that I am. It would be futile and, indeed, undesirable to attempt to purge the cultural diversity that has shaped me. My splintered life is not entirely the result of migration. It was a natural consequence of an upbringing that was strongly influenced by history. In the 1940s, 1950s and '60s in Canada was still strongly affected by the cultural and institutional legacy I--and Canadians in general--had inherited from the British. For my parents it was inconceivable that I would not attend a school where English was not the language of instruction. I was sent to a public school run by people educated in the Canadian educational system. Cultural fragmentation began to take place early in my life, as I see it now in retrospect, in the 1950s as post-modernism began to become part of the wider culture of Canada. This is a complex phenomenon and I deal with this aspect of my life in these 2600 pages.

My writing life, also beginning seriously in the 1950s, but continuing with varying degrees of intensity sensibly and insensibly in the next half century(1960 to 2010) has increased my curiosity about identity. Writing non-fiction was purely a result of my education and its focus for the most part on the social sciences and later, in my 40s, 50s and 60s, on the humanities. I have writtena great deal about why I write what I write and I will not discuss that subject in more detail here. There was a growing dissatisfaction with my professional life as a teacher by my mid-50s. Boredom has never been a problem for me exscept perhaps with the predictability of my middle-class existence in a small Canadian country town in my mid-teens. I reached a point about the age of 18 in which the lethargic blandness of life was so intense that I yearned for something to fill the vaccuum---anything as long as it got filled. Slowly, an intellectual fulfilment came into my life from my late teens to my late 20s. The blunting by an increasing indifference about the wider world, by personal tests and difficulties was slowly overcome.

Underneath all of this was a kind of urgency, insurgency, a revolution from within that insisted I pay attention to myself. Well I made an effort to meet the real me by recording my reflections in fragmented bits of writing. But this did not occur until my 40s and it has continued into my 50s and 60s. Essays emerged when I was a high school and college teacher in my 30s and then in newspapers in my 40s. By my 50s poetry was flowing out-of-me like Niagara Falls. A pioneer's voice told me what it was like to feel like a stranger and yet be at home, to live both inside and outside of my immediate situation, to be permanently on the move, to think of a one way return journey and also to realise at the same time the impossibility of doing so, since the past was not only another country but also another time, beyond the grasp of the present.

My writing began to tell me about long-distance journeys and relocations, about losses, changes, conflicts, powerlessness and visions of what might have been. And with this writing came an awareness of the severity of the tests I had had and an emotional resolve to utilize the strengths that had resulted from these tests. There was another voice, different in tone and articulating entirely different perspectives of another emotional and intellectual landscape. This other voice spoke about new experiences, about ideas that extended my intellectual and emotional frontiers and recharged my desire to explore unknown territories. This voice encouraged me to celebrate the richness of cultural diversity. In a sense, writing has become a residence, a place I can call home. The question arises in this house of writing where I have lived in a very serious way for more than a decade now: to where will I travel with all these words? I would like to spend the whole of my life traveling, as that fine essayist William Hazlitt once wrote, "if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend at home." For as I head for 70 my heart is in my home here in Tasmania.

The alarming but also exciting acceleration in technological evolution and its impact on social and cultural changes have significantly influenced the ways in which communities are insisting on defining themselves. It would seem that there is a desperate need to find historical and contemporary markers to construct a framework within which people can feel secure about their perceived values and lifestyles. I find many of these historical and contemporary markers in my Bahai cosmology, my Bahai ontology, my Bahai view of history and society. Across the 200++ nations on this Earth there are multi-paradigmatic shifts in the ways people characterise their identity. The identity of the individual is now found in so many contexts. Sometimes these contexts are subservient to a community's ideology of what a person should be if he or she is to have a meaningful place in mainstream society. The context for my identity is not so much subservient to my community's set of convictions as a logical outgrowth of the teachings and history of my community, the Bahai Faith and, I must add, the society I live in.

This work is somewhat like a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age kind of novel which arose during the German Enlightenment. In it, an author presents the psychological, moral and social shaping of the personality of a character, usually the protagonist. The bildungsroman generally takes the following course:
* The protagonist grows from child to adult.
* The protagonist has a reason to embark upon his or her journey. A loss or some discontent must, at an early stage, jar him or her away from the home or family setting.
* The process of maturation is long, arduous and gradual, involving repeated clashes between the hero's (protagonist's) needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order. This conflict bears some similarity to Sigmund Freud's concept of the pleasure principle versus the reality principle. Of course, this work is no novel but is, rather, a work rooted in fact, in my life's realities and pleasures, in my long maturation and many clashes with life, with society and my own self.

It is not likely that this autobiography will be made into a movie blockbuster. It is difficult to sum-up my storyline in single sentences that easily translate across cultures and borders which is an essential feature of the modern blockbuster. My story could not be made to offer someone in this third millennium ample opportunities to fantasize about my experiences and imagine them to be their own. My message and this memoir could not be reaffirmed in product placements, commercial tie-ins, cross-promotions, and the general culture of global consumerism that is shepherded around a successful blockbuster these days. To make of this narrative a blockbuster, like any and all high-concept commodities, would require some tweaking, some shift in emphasis, an attachment to a different conceptual star in order to refashion my life into some novel and visual vehicle. The mix of narrative style, thematic elements, spectacle aesthetics and concentrated effort has only recently been conceived in the movie-blockbuster industry of our time. Perhaps this life-narrative of mine will be a twenty-third century blockbuster drawing on any one of a slate of international stars who would drive audiences to enthuse over a life, my life, far-back in the late 20th century. Such a celebrity headliner would most assuredly factor into the bottom line of such a visual cinema success for a global audience of billions!

The five key marketing characteristics responsible for the success of that 23rd century blockbuster that would try to capture my memoirs might be as follows: First, blockbuster film would utilize the soundtrack as well as the text to make money. Second, the momentum surrounding blockbuster would be created long before opening weekend, by which time the buzz would already be strong and the distribution environment would already be saturated with related products, in addition to the text. Third, in an effort to maximize both vertical integration and content-sharing among the many brands, the New Hollywood of the 23rd century would use all branches of its conglomerate structure to repurpose my autobiographical product up and down the corporate food chain. Fourth, the high-concept formula that sold the text to the producer and that easily conveyed the narrative to its viewers would again be used to sell the film on a secondary level, through its print advertising and television and radio spots, and in trailers attached to both formal theatrical releases and already released DVD movies. Finally, the filmic text would be tied to the global commercial complex via retail tie-ins and cross-promotions that would saturate the infrastructure that surrounds the movie theater and the film. Fully entrenched, global franchises would stand perfectly poised with easily translatable themes and texts, international stars, and spectacular images to convey "the good life," my life, in a setting of global consumerism.(Ashley Elaine York,"Chick Flicks to Millennial Blockbusters: Spinning Female-Driven Narratives into Franchises," Journal of Popular Culture,Vol. 43, No.1, Jan 2010)

According to Kem Luther in his book The Next Generation: The Rise of the Digitals and the Ruin of Postmodernism.(iUniverse Inc., NY, 2009)each generation is defined by "emergence in a repressive context, rebellion and failure, exile and ascendant ideas, economic malaise, utopias and social action, war and reprogramming, and finally conservative synthesis and decline," before finally giving way to a new generation. Drawing on Luther's model: the reformer generation was that of my grandparents. It was marked by the literary revolution of the 1880s to the lost generation of the 1920s; the moderns were my parents, those who came of age during the 1920s to the 1940s or 1950s, and the postmoderns are my generation more or less the current generation with its emphasis on diversity and cultural change. I could easily fit my life into this model beginning with the repressive forties and fifties in contrast with the rebellion and failure of the sixties. For now, though, I will leave this model as a sketch and let readers fit my life, my society and my religion into this historical paradigm.

The story, the history, of the Bahai community, both the lives within it and all the accompanying ideals, values and beliefs do not occur either naturally or by accident. They are framed by design when a writer like myself goes to put its story on paper with description and analysis. An international organization like the Bahai Faith requires some sense of congruence between its international system and the social and cultural structures which are part of it if the account of its internal life and external relationships is to hang together. If an international movement is to exist an internationalist sentiment is required. Such a sentiment exists when a feeling of anger is aroused by the violation of internationalist principles, or when a feeling of satisfaction is aroused by their fulfillment. To put it in the social critic Raymond William's terms, an international organization requires certain hegemonic figures. In western history the knight and the cowboy were such figures. In the international Bahai community the pioneer is such a hegemonic cultural figure. The pioneer provides the Bahai community with an organizational force, a person who connects otherwise separated and even disparate meanings, values and practices. The knight, the cowboy and the pioneer are archetypes. The pioneer evokes an image of what the international Bahai community should be. The term appeals to disparate parts of the community, parts that are required if the Bahai community is to extend itself to every section of the globe in the decades ahead, parts that are required if the Bahai community is to become a cynosure, a magnet which attracts others. This is true because in a broad sense all Bahais need to be pioneers in some way or other.

The stories of the knights were essential to defining England as a nation in the late middle ages. Painted as romantic purveyors of right, upholding chivalric ideals, and commencing on exciting, colorful quests, the knights appealed to all, aristocrat, merchant, and peasant alike. The timing of the overwhelming popularity of the knights' tales strongly suggests that these tales, and more specifically, the knights depicted in them, provided England with a central icon around which to establish identity as a nation. The pioneer in the last eight decades and even more so in the next several decades has been, is and will be essential in propelling the Bahai community into the international arena so that every cluster on earth is inhabited by Bahais and by strong Bahai communities.

North Americans, the recipients of the Tablets of the Divine Plan, have, it seems to me, a continuing urge to chart new paths and explore the unknown. That instinct drove Lewis and Clark and a host of other explorers to press across the uncharted continent and into the extremities of its Arctic wastes and "sustained twelve Americans as they walked on the moon."(James Beggs, NASA Administrator, 23 June 1982) From the voyages of Columbus, to the Oregon Trail,to the multitude of explorers all across the North American continent, to the journey to the Moon itself and, for the Bahai community, more than a century of pioneering, history proves that Americans have never lost by pressing the limits of their frontiers.(See: George Bush, 20 July 1989, in Catherine Gouge, "The Great Storefront of American Nationalism: Narratives of Mars and the Outerspatial Frontier," Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2002, Volume 1, Issue 2

A deep-space mission to Mars is a focus for the new century. It's like westward expansion. The effort and journey will spark creativity and imagination. So wrote Dr. Jon Bowersox, consultant for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, 14 February 2000. For the Bahai community, both in North America and throughout the more than 200 countries and independent territories throughout the world, a focus for the 21st century is to build Bahai communities in all the 16,000 clusters on the planet. The task is immense and "throughout the coming centuries and cycles many harvests will be gathered.(TDP, 1977, p.6)

"The frontier that was opened by the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492, over 500 years ago, is now closed," astronautical engineer Robert Zubrin has argued. "If the era of Western humanist society," Zubrin went on to write, "is not to be seen by future historians as some kind of transitory golden age, a brief shining moment in an otherwise endless chronicle of human misery, then a new frontier must be opened. Humanity needs Mars. An open frontier on Mars will allow for the preservation of cultural diversity and will create a strong driver for technological progress(Robert Zubrin, Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York, 1999. p.123).

For the Bahai community in this new paradigm of the extension of our frontiers into the immensity of th euniverse, the equivalent of this frontier of Mars, indeed the many frontiers in our universe in the sciences: biological, physical and social, is the new culture of learning and growth and its accompanying pioneering and travel-teaching venture in the decades and perhaps centuries to come. Learning is its own exceeding great reward and in this new Bahai paradigm there are many places in which to apply ones learnings.

Of course, Mars is not, in fact, like the American frontier; nor is the American frontier like the Bahai pioneering experience. Mars is 150 million miles away; it's atmosphere is 7 milli-bars of CO2 so that once you arrive there you would die instantly on the surface. It doesn't have any of the qualities that the American frontier had, that is, of individuals deciding, say, in the Old World of Europe or the eastern states: "I'm fed up here. I'm going to sell everything that I own. I'm going to jump on a boat. I'm going to be a poor person in America because this will be better than what I had before." This is the quality of the frontier that does not exist on Mars. The Bahai pioneer is also not your frontierman or cowboy. Each Bahai pioneer has his or her own story. This narrative is but one of these stories.

It is impossibile to fit Mars into paradigms imported from Earth. It is equally impossible to use the wild west analogy. There are no really useful historical analogies and parallels for the Bahai diaspora. Such historical or futuristic comparisons may have some value in helping pioneers take moral responsibility for the complex changes—social as well as biospheric—initiated by terraformation and community building. Pioneers must be more humble about their place in history, must accept responsibility for their actions and yet resist the impulse to stake too large a claim for themselves in history books.

One recent article "Can We Go to Mars without Going Crazy?" in the May 2001 issue of Discover magazine argues that "designing and building a sophisticated spacecraft capable of getting to Mars is just the beginning. This is also true of the Bahai pioneer. The society, the community, he is involved in building is just at its beginning. The ultimate challenge NASA faces may be building a tiny computer that can psychoanalyze astronauts and keep them from going nuts.(Weed, 38). The ultimate challenge the Bahai faces is the building of a community that is part of the new Bahai paradigm of learning and growth. The whole question of getting all that we want in life, part of the pioneer-frontier drive is simply unrealizable. The desire to realize one's hopes in the frontier as a pioneer can be both deconstructive and self-destructive. It is not a place of guarantees. There is often a lean provision for the devotion the Bahai brings to the challenge. Like the experience of Noah, there are often weeks and months of never-ending dark. The challenge is not for the timid, the vainly pious, the pusillanimous of spirit, the overwrought. The voyage is a long one with unseasonable rains and a long wait for the salient dove to bering the living twig.(White, Pebbles, p.71).

The understandings of the Bahai in the promise of the pioneering journey on the frontier are often far from adequate. Education and the cultural attainments of the mind are crucial if he or she is to become a whole and powerful citizen. Often the Bahai feels split and inadequate, frail and in difficulty. It's a basic condition of the pioneer of Bahai life to have ones identity and sense of self challenged to the hilt. When a Bahai buys into an a-historical fantasy, a view of Bahai life that is not imbued with true understanding of the nature of pioneering-frontier life, he or she may become somewhat apathetic. Often one comes across Bahais in ones travels who have hoped to undergo a transforming experience in themselves or in their community but, due to some defect of personality, of understanding, they have become discouraged. The task, the journey, is far from easy. Everyone is called but few are chosen. Forgetting and forgiving the harsh words that are part and parcel of community experience is not something everyone can do. Being selfless is a goal not a reality of our lives.

I have always seen the Bahai community as a pioneering society. It is a community in which the producer and director and a vast array of skilled people are available to make a wonderful film. The parts have been assigned to each member of thew cast by the Central Figures of this Cause and the legitimate institutional successors. But it's also an improvisational theater where people must write their parts. They can all play a useful role, whether conceived by someone else or by themselves. So, it's a very liberating thing, but it's also very challenging and not everyone arises to the challenge. I think that the Bahai community will create in the decades ahead in cluster after cluster a fascinating array of films. Thsi Cause is a very progressive branch of international, global, human culture. The Bahai community will produce social conventions that will be very useful as the international community struggles with the challenges ahead. These conventions and the inventions of groups and individuals due to creativity and ingenuity will be useful in community after community across the planet. The Bahai community in this new paradigm will be an example of a society that places a high value on each and every person because each and every person is precious.

From the perspective of those pioneering to populate the variously-sized clusters on the planet, prospective frontier places are often spaces of unfulfilled hopes and dreams, like the frontiers in the wild west portrayed in the movies. They are often fantasy spaces of unlimited potential but a potential not to be realized in the first years of pioneering or even the years after much effort has been expended. It is this potential which those who encourage the pioneers, the Bahai institutional marketers of Bahai pioneering-frontier experience, the proponents of frontier community development must exploit to secure the participation of the community.

There are many ways of pioneering in this new paradigm. I came across an article in The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture by Michael J. Gilmour, Assistant Professor of New Testament at Providence College which suggested to me a type of literary pioneering. Gilmour pointed out that to understand Beethoven it was best, at least for some students, to listen to his music rather than reading biographies. There is only one true way to understand the genius that was Beethoven and that is to listen to his music wrote Gilmour. This music is an unvarnished, uncensored record of Ludwig van Beethoven's passions, fears, violent anger, humanity and, finally, victory over unimaginable adversity. It is a direct link to his state of mind. The strength and depth of emotion that Beethoven unleashes on the listener is astonishing (Bernard Rose, in liner notes to the soundtrack for Immortal Beloved, Sony Music, 1994). The same principle, it seems to me, applies to Bahaullah and His writings. The use of the Bahai writings and religious motifs often serve literary and moral, aesthetic and spiritual purposes, not mere autobiographical and historical objectives and outcomes.

In a study of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Catherine Brown Tkacz reminds us that Bronte's use of the Bible can have everything to do with art and the spiritual and little or nothing to do with autobiography and self-disclosure: "An author who has thoroughly assimilated the ideas and images of Christianity, who has gained easy familiarity with the Bible, and who then thinks readily and freely with these materials, animating and embodying them in new ways, may be said to have a Christianized imagination." The same is true of someone who has gained easy familiarity with the Bahai writings and embodies them in new and imaginative ways.(Catherine Brown Tkacz, "The Bible in Jane Eyre," in Christianity and Literature, Volume 44, pp. 3-27, 1994.) Such is one of the aims and purposes of the new Bahai paradigm for those who have advanced beyond the basic core of the Ruhi sequence of books and resources. Deepening in the Bahai Revelation is an endless activity, a lifetime journey, and the Ruhi sequence is providing an important start now for hundreds of thousands of Bahais in some 6000 clusters.

Of course, insofar as my autobiography is concerned, of which this is Part 3, it seems to me that the use of my poetry and prose by readers here could be a helpful basis for further autobiographical construction should readers want to go in that direction. The study of the broad religious, poetic and literary aspects of my work found across my other writings will frequently provide readers with answers to questions about my life. My writing is an inevitable and necessarily window to my soul so to speak. In a recent treatment of a contemporary rock group U2 by Steve Stockman, we find a spiritual companion to the career of this group. It is an attempt at telling the story of the band members' journeys of faith and at exposing the underlying spiritual themes in U2's music. The correspondence of any artist's personal life and their words or lyrics--and mainly poems in my case--is, of course, not always straightforward. For example, early in his career Bob Dylan frequently referred to Jesus and themes in the Christian New Testament. This did not tell us anything about his Jewish faith or his interest in Christianity at that stage of his life. It simply told us that he was at least familiar with the Bible and felt free to draw imagery from a wide range of sources.

It should not be assumed that Dylan's writings are always deliberately constructed expressions of his worldview. In my case my worldview is much clearer than Dylan's. While there are certainly autobiographical elements in several of Dylan's songs, including some explicitly religious statements, these can provide only fleeting glimpses into that songwriter's private world, captured at a moment in time. In my case I think my private world is much more of an open book.

Julia Kristeva, philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist and feminist, once referred to the banal aspect of the study of a writer's sources (Kristeva 1984, 59-60). Of course the mere identification of sources behind a literary work is not synonymous with interpretation, nor are authors like myself influenced only by the written word. It is also relevant that readers themselves bring a bundle of contexts to the objects of their study. And so it is that when readers examine this work, this autobiography, they bring their own contexts into play and these are crucial to their understanding of my life. As a result, it is not only difficult to distinguish between what an author has created from what he has borrowed. It is also true that what is 'heard' or 'read' by different listeners or readers will not always be the same. This hardly needs saying.

The Review Office of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahais of the United States has given me permission to post this work at internet sites like BLO. This work is a multi-genred opus and includes: letters, narrative, poetry, prose-poetry and conceptual material from the social sciences and humanities. The three Parts of this work, of which this is the last here at BLO, are just a start to a many-volumed work, a work that can only be found on the internet and only in part. One day this vast memoir may appear in a hard or soft cover set of volumes, but I am not holding my breath waiting. Indeed, if this work ever does appear on book shelves I shall be long gone into a world where man speaks no more, at least not in the same way he speaks here.

For this writer, nothing has been passed down to me except memories of my life. Some of the aspects of this life and this writing are relaxed and comfortable and some are not. Writers of autobiography have to possess a certain sense of their prodigality. I don't think one can be a writer without it: some expansive wastage which also stems from vast prodigiousness. As a writer, one is always two, then three, then more beyond the mere sea of this life. I am often fastened to a noise, sometimes to music, or to literatures and languages beyond the idea of home. I try to survive within this imaginary.

Readers will come to understand the meaning of this broad play of my mind, this reminiscent fieldwork on myself, this way of pointing to who I am, to this self-creation, the more they read the material in this cornucopia. My memory browses and grazes at will stringing apparently dispersed and disordered parts into what is hopefully a fine thread of many colours. It is not the coat of many colours of the long lost Joseph but rather a rough-tough coat with a fine and tender lining. The processes of age have worn down that lining exposing my inner being to all sorts of unanticipated developments that will in the end bring about my demise.

The storms of these epochs have reqired of me a good strong coat to weather the tempest of the times. As I contemplate the past, my past, and write I lose myself under the whole pressure of the spring of my memory proceeding from my most recent revisitings and their associated recognitions. If all goes well I make of the revisiting a veritable hymn of the wonder of it all as the past floods in with its particles of history, with its scrapings of gold dust, of lead and base metals, with its wayward fragments and their meditative extrapolations. I feel a little like the American essayist Joseph Epstein who wrote that "if one wants to be a writer, he must first make himself incompetent in everything else." I strive not to be that bungling in the majority of my pursuits but, as I progress through these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood, the years 60 to 80 as some human development psychologists call these years in the lifespan, I have tried to limit my various pursuits however competent or bungling I may be in their execution in order to focus on my writing. I find in writing autobiography, poetry or essays, the three major genres of my work, that material for my writing can come from all over the place. For this reason readers may find this memoir not the smooth running course they expected at the start.

While I have been writing and revising recent editions of this work since 2003, the literary world has witnessed what could be aptly labelled a memory boom. The number of publications is overwhelming. The ISI Web of Knowledge, which combines citation indexes in the social sciences and in the arts and humanities, yields over 11,800 references to collective/cultural/social/ public/popular memory, of which some 9,500 appeared during the last decade (1998-2008). It is reasonable to assume that these tentative figures fall short of the actual number of relevant publications, which span many disciplines and often do not use distinctive adjectives. Google Books lists 936 books published in the past decade alone with "social memory," "collective memory," "cultural memory," "public memory," or "popular memory" in the title. Google Scholar lists over 41,000 items with titles that include one or more of these terms. There are two journals exclusively dedicated to this topic: History and Memory and Memory Studies, and numerous periodicals have devoted special issues to this theme. H-Memory, an online discussion network launched in 2007, features constant debate on what is now recognized as an interdisciplinary academic field in its own right: "…how humans remember and represent that memory, be it through literature, monuments, historical works, or in their own private lives". All in all, the literature is extensive. How does one separate the wheat from the chaff?

Memory is a slippery term. Despite all that has been written, its meaning is not self-explanatory. Unreflective and uncritical references to memory inevitably induce banal conclusions. "Collective memory", conceptualized by Maurice Halbwachs (1925,1950) in the interwar period, remains, in the words of James Wertsch, a "term in search of a meaning" (2002, 30-66), and contemporary research displays discomfort with the vacuous ways in which it has been applied. In particular, scholars have deemed the connotations of homogeneity implied by the term "collective" to be problematic. In the early 1980s, a group based in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham developed a neo-Marxist model of "popular memory," which stemmed from two sets of dialectics: between popular and dominant memories and between private and public memories (Popular Memory Group 1982). A complementary study preferred the term "public memory" in order to signify the battleground between dominant and subordinate social frameworks (Bommes and Wright 1982). John Bodnar, whose study of American commemorations focused on the "intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions", also employed this term effectively (1992, 13).

This autobiography, then, has a good deal of company. But my autobiography is not a work of history in the sense that Edward Gibbon wrote history. "The theologian," wrote Gibbon, "may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings."(The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) I have not thusfar, and do not intend to, become involved in that melancholy duty as Gibbon described the process of his writing history. I make the occasional comment on degeneracy as I see it in myself and in others but, for the most part, I leave out so much of that sorry tale. Perhaps I should have told more of the foibles of both myself and others and that inevitable mixture of error and corruption. But I will quote Gibbon again since what he writes echoes the words of the central figures of this Faith, my Faith, the Bahai Faith: "To the philosophical eye the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtue." So often, Shoghi Effendi once wrote, it is the very enthusiasm of the believers which is what gets in the way of the progress of this new world religion. It was true in the 1840s and it is true today.(See The Dawnbreakers, p.652)

It will take a certain intellectual posture on the part of readers to wade through this memoir, to read its excessive pile of "I"s and "Me"s. The French writer Stendhal made this same comment about his writing but he also went on to say that he found his writing "stinking." The Russian novelist Dostoevsky once wrote that a person had to be "disgustingly in love with themself to write about themself without shame." In the end, it was his view, that it was impossible to write about oneself without lieing. Thankfully, I do not find that my work possesses a four odour, although a sense of shame is not entirely absent from this work or from my life. I take some comfort from Bahaullahs words that the sense of shame is "confined to a few" although, on reflection, I'm not sure I should take any comfort. I actually enjoy reading this work as I go about what has been and I'm sure will continue to be an endless editing exercise. This memoir is a work in which I develop, express and define as the French sociologist Michel Foucault put it somewhere in his labyrinth of essays and books, my legitimate strangeness, my idiosyncratic self. As far as lies are concerned, I trust I have kept them to an absolute minimum and when they are present in this work, I am not conscious of them. For me the issue is not honesty but, as Bahaullah puts it when he elucidates the nature of tact, diplomacy and interpersonal relationships in one of His thousands of passages on these important subjects: "not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed and not everything that can be disclosed is timely or suited to the ears of the hearers," and I paraphrase here.

"Those who feel compelled at some time in their life to embark on autobiographical writing, wrote Susan Suleiman in her book Risking Who One Is, "do so because they have no choice; they must do it whatever the consequences." Autobiography is not a form that one would at first suppose comes naturally to the Australian temperament. This is due to the covert suspicion, says Aussie comedian and icon Barry Humphries, that life in Australia may be too boring to merit a literary record. Even if a person'slife is interesting and packed with activity, the necessary skills and/or interest in writing their story down are lacking. But I am not an Australian; at best I am a hybrid having migrated here at the age of 27 in 1971 from Canada. I am still living here nearly forty years later in Australia's most southerly appendage, Tasmania. I am also not a self-absorbed self-promoter who is happy to talk endlessly about my favorite subject, myself, inspite of appearances to the contrary; nor am I a natty narcissist who is preoccupied with the friendly fellow who confronts himself every morning in the shaving mirror. Hopefully a reading of this work should establish these truths beyond the shadow of a doubt. Again, like that Australian-commedian Barry Humphries, I write this reminiscence to amuse myself and hopefully others.

While I have been writing this autobiography writers, critics, and academics in Australia have turned to autobiographical writing as a means of self-expression and cultural and social reflection in increasing numbers. Germaine Greer, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Robert Dessaix, Ruby Langford and Bernard Smith are each located very differently as Australian intellectuals, and yet each has a major role to play in Rosamund Dalziell's discussion of contemporary autobiography. Dalziell's approach is thematic. She argues that shame, although seldom discussed, is a recurring element in Australian social history. This relates most obviously to racism as is evident in the debates about shame and guilt as a response to the dispossession of indigenous peoples as a result of settler colonialism. Dalziell also connects distinctively Australian manifestations of shame to the cultural cringe produced by colonial status, to the shame of illegitimate birth, and shame in the immigrant experience. For me, shame has a minor role to play in this work but, then, I am only an Australian hybrid.

Dalziell draws on Erikson's theory of the "eight ages of man", which identifies shame as a formative emotion in early childhood, associated with self awareness, and prior to the development of guilt: "Shame supposes that one is completely exposed and conscious of being looked at, in one word, self-conscious. One is visible and not ready to be visible." For Dalziell, the autobiographical act is an opportunity for the mature self to confront shame, and re-evaluate self-worth. Shame is, then, fundamental to the autobiographical process, and the association between shame and autobiography goes back to its origins in the religious confession. The writing and the reading of autobiography, are seen as therapeutic, as a process whereby the autobiographer and the implied reader are brought to a confrontation with shame and its legacies in the individual life, this "can lead to a deeper self-knowledge and a greater recognition of shared humanity. Reading autobiographies is one way this can be achieved." In this sense shame has more than a minor key in this now lengthy work.

Autobiographical writing has been for me a means of healing through cathartic expression, not so much of shame but of a wider expression of emotion, an expression which has produced what Dalziell calls psychic release. If life has wounded me, if history has wounded me, then writing has been a balm to these wounds. As a "linguistic expression of therapeutic renewal for the narrating self", writing and reading autobiography is associated with individual and social regeneration. Dalziell's work has struck a very positive chord in my psyche,a very positive response. Her stress on a a deeply personal and humanistic response to autobiographical texts, a response which is decidedly out of kilter with current debates in autobiographical theory and criticism in their emphasis on self-knowledge and shared humanity. The grounding of Dalziell's work on autobiography is in psychoanalysis rather than literary theory, and it is no coincidence that most of her references to postmodernism are in passing, and dismissive. The capacity of the autobiographical text to be a reliable vehicle for the expression of emotion and truth by a narrating subject is not in question here. Nor are they in question for me in my autobiogrpahical writing.

Lest readers see in this word amuse a less than serious intent on my part, allow me to insert many of the synonyms from my handy internet Thesaurus which has been available on the WWW for common useage for some years now. The bag of choices, of words, that a happy traveller through his sentences and paragraphs, can use include: break one up, charm, cheer, crack up, delight, divert, fracture, gladden, grab, gratify, interest, knock dead, make to roll in the aisles, occupy, please, put away, regale, slay and tickle. Another set of meanings of amuse include: to divert the attention of in order to mislead, to delude, to deceive and to entertain, make smile or laugh. Then there is yet another list of synonyms for bemuse: to confuse, bewilder or puzzle. A set of antonyms for amuse throw light on the word from an opposite direction. These antonyms include: anger, annoy, bore, dull, tire, upset. These latter things I try not to do in my writing, in this book. Finally, there are all the synonyms for amuse's second major entry as a verb: to beguile, charm, attract, cheer, delight, distract, divert, engross, entertain, entice, knock dead, knock out, lure, occupy, seduce, send, slay, solace, sweep off one's feet, tickle, tickle pink, tickle to death, turn on, vamp. So it is that readers should not see in my efforts to amuse, either myself or them or both, an exercise of little import.

If this work has an educative function that will be a bonus and let me add dear reader, if you have come this far, in Part 3 of this memoir, you have already begun to receive your bonus or you would have stopped reading long ago. I am not as hooked on applause, I should point out, as that Australian commedian I have already mentioned Barry Humphries apparently was and is. I had lots of applause for years as a teacher and, now retired, I do not have that felt need--at least that need or desire is not as strong as it once was. Whatever felt need I still have for popularity, if indeed there is any of that felt need left in the inner workings of my mental and emotional life, any that still exists in the curious and subtle make-up of my personal wants and wishes, it is satisfied on the internet in little ways, here and there, in nanoseconds and spread over 1000s of sites in cyberspace, a place that tends to dilute popularity's edge among more than, I am told, 280 million places, sites, venues, documents, web pages, World Wide Web documents and home pages as they are commonly and variously called.

I have always had a certain felt need, though, for a heroic dimension to life which Roger Solomon says was the basis for the madness of Don Quixote in Cervantes' famous novel(1605) and which my mother always said was one of the reasons I had found the Bahai Faith attractice back in the 1950s and 1960s.(See Desperate Storytelling, Roger Solomon, U of Georgia Press, London, 1981, p.16). There are not as many stories here as one might expect from an autobiography, but I hope I convey some of the heroism, not so much of my own but the heroism that is found in bucket-loads in this new world Faith. There is a drama in this Cause which is, I have been told since the 1950s, since perhaps 1953 when I sat in a small lounge-room at the age of 9, that is found in a multitude of forms. My first memory of this drama was hearing that the very birds flying over Akka in the 1860s and 1870s dropped dead. I had trouble believing that anecdote then and I have trouble believing it now that I have added to the list of incredible anecdotes that, taken together, make up the greatest drama I am also told in the world's spiritual history. Such is the view I hold, too, of the Bahai drama as it has been played out in the last two centuries and which will be played out in the centuries to come. About that I have little doubt--although a little doubt regarding just about everything, I should add, is not a bad thing especially in our secular age with its cynicism, skepticism, agnosticism, atheism and many more isms and wasms.

Thanks largely to what might be called the 1960s Zeitgeist and the commercial success of films with countercultural ideology, the conventional "Hollywood" hero is not necessarily the paragon of pride, masculinity, and aggressiveness that he had been in the days of John Wayne and the years before WW2 generally. The good-over-evil protagonist is being challenged by dissenting-voice personae who expose and transcend, often through a painful transformation, obstacles of sexism, racism, nationalism, and speciesism. Hundreds of characters¾from Gandhi to ET, Billy Eliot to Patch Adams, and Pocahontas to Erin Brockovich have been searching for tolerance, human potential, and environmental harmony. More apt to cry and meditate than kill and conquer, the emerging hero seeks a victory over the ego rather than an "evil" other and, in the process, invokes characteristics that mirror a larger cultural vision, one based in civil rights, feminism, deep ecology, Eastern philosophy, ecopsychology, creation spirituality, Green politics, and other movements that seek to define human identity beyond the constructs of our capitalist culture, militaristic mentality, and strictly patriarchal notions of the divine. There has slowly emerged in the last several epochs of the Formative Age of Bahai history(1921 to 2010) a "thousand faces" for the cultural journey that reflect the turmoil and potentials of our current cultural moment. I mention various examples from the cinema because of its pervasive influence, but Bahai history also has its heros and heroines, its saints and martyrs, indeed, mearly two centuries of tradition filled with inspirational narratives.

The warrior whose journey is outward and involves self-assertion, competition, and conquest is giving way to the magical inward journey that involves a transformation of ego-dominated goals to ones of service, healing, and compassion. According to Pearson, "The movement from Warrior to Magician archetype hinges on the ability to stop regarding the enemy out there as 'not me' and to begin seeing the shadow in oneself." Lawrence and Jewett maintain that the "supersaviors in pop culture function as replacements for the Christ figure, whose credibility was eroded by scientific rationalism." For the Bahai, this Christ figure has been given an updating, so to speak, in an image of contemporary relevance in a series of Central Figures in the Bahai Faithand a pantheon of others who enrich Bahai history and give the believer, the adherent, a galaxy of models.

Along with Luke Skywalker, whose journey George Lucas pulled wittingly from Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces, Neo in Matrix (1999) typifies both the classical hero's journey and the monomythic saviour. The Call begins when Anderson (Neo's "unreal" name) reads the words "wake up" on his computer. The Departure from the "ordinary world" starts when he follows the "white rabbit" and chooses the red pill. Refusing to accept that "He is the one," Neo (the "new" Christ) begins the Initiation with help from his guides, Morpheus and Trinity. Born again, physically and spiritually, complete with amniotic fluids and multiple umbilical chords, he transcends the mechanistic world controlled by artificial intelligence. The real world laid waste by nuclear weapons¾is part of the subtext relayed distinctly by Agent Smith to Morpheus: humans, whom he likens to a virus, are incapable of living in harmony with the environment. Neo accepts his plight and eats the goo and lives in a dungeon-like spacecraft but enters the matrix to find out, with the help of allies, who he is. His descent into hell, prompted by the "Judas" Cypher, is symbolized in his return to save Morpheus (the amorphous "Father"). After Neo dies and is reborn via a kiss from Trinity (the fairy princess/holy spirit), he fulfills the Oracle's prophecy by learning to control the matrix and reaches the final stage, the Return. His message,the revelation gleaned from the unconscious and carrying overtones of Eastern philosophy,is explicit. In the final scene, while setting the stage for the sequels, he talks to the audience from a payphone, claims that the new world order is irrepressible, and ascends to the heavens. This is but one of the increasing number of visual myth-making films. The Bahai is given in Bahai history and in the Bahai writings a metaphorical interpretation of physical reality, indeed, a world of relevance. But he or she must do some digging, the meaning of the Cause is not handed to the Bahai on a platter. There are tests in many areas of Bahai life, not the least of which is the relevance of his community life and his intellectual framework to the needs of the time.

The conventionally macho Hollywood hero does fit an archetypal pattern. He is the extroverted warrior whose adventures end with the conquest of evil and the capture of the treasure,either a prized female and/or riches. However, in concert with most of Western culture's myths and legends, Hollywood has made that archetype a stereotype from the rough and ready cowboy to Rambos, Top Guns, and Die Hards. As John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett show, the "superhero of the American monomyth" serves as "the zealous crusader who destroys evil" and not only saves his endangered paradisiacal community but also serves as the selfless source of communal "redemption." Unlike the Jungian warrior of "the classical monomyth" archetype, popularized by Joseph Campbell that focuses on rites of initiation, the American superhero conquers the evil other but does not need any rites of initiation because he "requires no personal fulfillment." He already holds all the answers, and, as fate would have it, is always able to carry out his will. Careful to honour the cultural experience and heroic traits that created and bolster the monomyth, Lawrence and Jewett recognize that "the monomyth's failures lie in the stereotypical identification of who is evil, its melodramatic exaggeration of evil traits, its facile belief in selective punishment, and the assignment of a retributive role to nature and to superheroes."

When we think archetypally we can recognize the deep structure behind ideas in different fields that predominate in any historical period. When the Warrior archetype was dominant in Western culture, theology focused on the struggle between good and evil, biology emphasized the survival of the fittest, meetings were run along authoritarian lines by majority rule, and organizations took on hierarchical structures, like the military. As the Magician archetype emerges into consciousness, we see theologies emphasizing oneness, biology stressing ecological interdependence, meetings run according to rules of consensual decision making, and organizations becoming flatter and more egalitarian in structure. When archetypes are strong in the culture around us, we must be open to them or risk becoming irrelevant. In many ways, the Bahai Faith, its organizatyional structure and teachings have a balance between new and old archtypes.

The Magician archetype contains, according to some writers, the power to transform, to reinvent personhood in light of our changing world,a process that Erich Neumann called "centroversion." Unlike the West's extraverted hero archetype whose victory occurs over the dark forces that impede ego-consciousness, the centroverted hero has as his or her goal the transformation of the psyche, wherein the feminine unconscious is reintegrated with the masculine ego. Calling it the latest stage in the evolution of human consciousness, Neumann regards centroversion as the process whereby the ego recognizes the whole self and willingly submits part of its domain to the powers of the unconscious,a phenomenon that could and should determine the fate of both the individual and humankind.

The civilization that is about to be born will be human civilization in a far higher sense than any has ever been before, as it will have overcome important social, national, and racial limitations. These are not fantastic pipe dreams, but hard facts. The turning of the mind from the conscious to the unconscious, the responsible rapprochement of the human consciousness with the powers of the collective psyche, that is the task of the future. There are many ways that this revolution, this transformation, this break with the past, is taking place and, from a Bahai perspective, this new Faith is at the front, the vanguard, of this epochal shift.

The androgyne is a predominant archetype used to convey the transformation that transcends the classical hero's journey. Various writers affirm the masculine bearing of the classical journey and detail ways in which the new hero is integrating the long-established, but forgotten, androgynous archetype, wherein the archetypal masculine and feminine are reunited. The reunion represents the recovery of the "balanced psyche," of wholeness, health, and a newfound connection to an innate sense of a primordial cosmic unity or "oneness" which existed "before any separation was made." That oneness refers to a balance of qualities with which any man or woman can reunite without losing masculine or feminine traits. In most cases, the androgynous male discovers his anima by confronting his ego-limitations and seeking peace, inner and outer, while the emerging female hero not only demands equality but also finds the freedom to express a re-mystified feminine impulse, replete with intuition, empathy, and a sacred sense of connection. This theme is far too extensive to pursue here but it is part of the backdrop to this memoir. As in so many areas of life now there is increasing consciousness of and a pointing toward a common goal, a goal which is expressed in many different ways one of which is: a centroverted hero whose victory is presented through the death and rebirth of ego consciousness in a journey intended to supplant aggression, revenge, and material gain with self-discovery, equanimity, and planetary identity.

In my essays, poetry and autobiography I am trying to make a point. In the stories I write in this memoir, stories about things and events which actually took place, I am often not quite sure what the point is. If I tell a story or several stories about my ten months in the frozen tundra on Baffin Island or the eighty-seven months I spent in the hot savanna and semi-desert country of Australia what point or points will I give to them? T.S. Eliot once said of Henry James: 'He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it,' which, I think, is the ultimate compliment for an author, a story-teller, a novelist--at least in some senses. Stories are, in some basic ways, above ideas. Of course, the concept I am alluding to here--the concept of story and idea--is complex and can not be covered in a small paragraph like this. There are books on the subject if readers want to pursue the subject or google it as they now can.

In the years ahead readers will be able to google whatever subject interests them with even greater ease than they can now in this new world of cyberpsace that has emerged in the last decade and a half for billions of people around the world. The internet is accummulating libraries of resources available at a few clicks if readers know what they are looking for. This googling process, I should add here, has been of immense value in compiling this memoir. Understanding is, for me, a product of experience, reading and writing. I don't really get things very intuitively, but intuition, too, seems to come along in the act of writing and reading. Understanding is often an "aha!" experience and there is some of this encounter with "aha" in the act of writing. The "aha" experience is, indeed, one of the great generating stations in the writing process. Hopefully some readers will share with me these moments, these experiences, of insight and understanding.

SELF-RESPECT and COMMUNITY, CELEBRITY-FAME AND RECOGNITION

Celebrity with its connotations of popularity, fame and recognition has become an important part of our society and I would like to make a few comments here about this much used and abused subject in this final part of my memoir at BLO. Someone like myself who writes a 2600 page memoir or autobiography can't separate his life and his work from these connotations and so some analysis, some statements, some observations on this now vast subject are in order. The recognition that interests me is the one associated with the purification of my heart, with the attraction to my Lord and Mentor and with my search for and finding rational and authoritative arguments in relation to the to the many issues faving the human condition.(See:Bahai World Faith, p. 383) In another context of the Bahai writings we find the following: "One whose thought is pure, whose education is superior, whose scientific attainments are greater is entitled to full rights and recognition.(The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 166) Purity has never been a quality of my life that I could lay much claim to and my scientific achievements are not of a high order even if I placed all my writings in that category as "scientific" because they drew on my rational faculty, a faculty which is the major basis for scientific endeavour. And so, even using this base-line as the kind of recognition that interests me, that I would like to achieve, I am not in the running or so it would seem to me after the slow evolution of more than 65 years of my life.

"Self-respect," as the American essayist Joan Didion(1934- )once wrote,"has nothing to do with the approval of others." Who we are has nothing to do with reputation. Didion is right here but only in some senses. Our personal response patterns necessarily involve many imbalances, immaturities and imperfections and we are often unaware of these patterns. We are often acutely unaware of our internet psychic mechanisms in these response patterns. Taking stock of our strengths and weaknesses and making deliberate efforts to bring our behaviour patterns into harmony, balance and full development is a lifelong journey. Some encounters in life demand what we are equal to, what our nerves can handle. But over the course of a life-time we experience many encounters which we are far from equal-to, which are simply beyond our capacity to handle. We can call this experience tests and some of these tests we lose; some relationships fail, some verbal exchanges are far, far from adequate to the situation. Our will often seems to be drained and we feel we must start again or give up. Is there any point of fighting a battle you are going to lose? Accepting what one cannot change, changing the things one can and having the wisdom to know the difference keeps us busy in life. Sometimes one becomes a burnt-out case and yearns for release from this earhtly life. This has happened to me many, many times and I tell of this story in my 50,000 word, 140 page chaos narrative, the life-story of my experience of bipolar disorder. the story is, on the whole, a clinical one and it is a story found here at BLO. It is also a story I use at over 100 internet sites which are concerned with mental health.

We learn, slowly but surely, our limitations and our capacities. But we do not learn it all. We only make a beginning in this life. We learn, sometimes not so slowly and not so surely, but out of necessity, if we want to continue our labour for the Cause. We also learn to forgive and forget--insofar as we are able--for we are not always able. We must learn not to get too upset over the unfortunate things which occur in community life. This, too, is not always easy or indeed even possible. Hopefully, the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter or a telephone call unanswered does not, in time--perhaps it might take decades--arouse a disproportionate guilt. We are in charge of our life but in the context of community this taking charge is often a highly complex entity. To assign unanswered letters or telephone calls or anything else that others demand of us their proper weight, writes Didion, is to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves. Freedom in this sense is something most of us only experience in part. "There lies," she emphasizes, "the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself and finds no one at home." Of course, there is much more to say on this subject of self-respect and community life than this short paragraph, but I thank this fine essayist, Joan Didion, for her useful thoughts on the subject. I will come back to the many layers of meaning contained in this theme of self-respect. Had I not learned, indeed, acquired, some of this self-respect that Didion writes about here I would not have been able to pursue my writing, reading, research, editing and publishing role to the depth I have done in recent years. That is why Didion's words struck home with such force and why I quote her here. But her words are not the last words on the subject.

The British anthropolgist Mary Douglas' model of the various types of responses people make in life is useful here in analysing how I have gone about living my life. To the individualist, Douglas writes, life's decisions present opportunities. Those that threaten freedom of choice or make that free choice difficult to make, of course, do not present opportunities. The institutions of this Cause do not use logic, argument and rhetoric to make every member of the community think and feel in some preconceived way. This Cause, like life itself, presents tests and challenges along life's path. Many of the decisions in my life have been opportunities in work clothes, as one writer describes the tests of life. Many of my tests and challenges have been difficult to make and have tested me to the limit and beyond. The Bahai system sets standards and, in the process, provides an element of control and this has provided a helpful mechanism in helping me with a self-control of my behaviour. Self-control has been of the utmost importance in negotiating life's path, its journey. Self-control has been crucial in helping me to be a faithful husband, in helping me limit the expression of anger and make efforts to acquire virtues among a host of other aids in living my life.

To individuals who are esentially hierarchists, and I have been one such individual in some respects, they make decisions on the basis of technological and environmental factors. Their decisions about participation are generally left to experts. I have often left decisons in life to such experts: dentists, doctors and people of scientific and technological expertise. The list here is too long but I may comment on this aspect of my decision-making at a later date. The fatalist in me says there is very little control over many decisions that affect me. As a fatalist I tend to accept whatever decisions are made on my behalf, if it is obvious that I can not change the situation. To the egalitarian there is a fear of risks to the environment, to the collective good and to future generations. This egalitarian aspect of my personality has also had an important role in my life. As an egalitarian I believe that power and influence should be spread more evenly within society and in the groups with which I have been associated.

There are other models of personality, of adaptive repsonses to life which psychologists, sociologists and social scientists from various disciplines have outlined and I may add to Douglas' model here at some future date. There is much in contemporary social sciences that provides useful frameworks for explaining and analysing one's life.

I thank the essayist Clive James for some of his comments on the distinction between celebrity and recognition--qualities which have links with self-respect. Celebrities, he says, are recognized on the street, but usually because of who they are, or who they are supposed to be as they have been portrayed-imaged in the media. To achieve recognition, however, is to be recognized in quite a different way. It is to be known for what you have done, and quite often the person who knows what you have done has no idea of what you look like. When I say that I've had enough of celebrity status, I don't mean that I am sick of the very idea, although I have come to feel a strong distaste for it now in my late adulthood. I think that the mass-psychotic passion for celebrity is one of the luxurious diseases that Western liberal democracy will have to find a cure for in the long run, but the cure will have to be self-willed. I don't think that it can be imposed, and certainly not from the outside.

I found on the few occasions when I was a semi-quasi-celebrity that it distorted my life. My celebrity status was in a small measure and it mainly came about because my face was in the newspaper in a small town and I had a high profile due to the nature of my job in adult education which brought me into contact with a great many of the town's inhabitants. Your face doesn't have to be in the media for long, and in any capacity, before you become recognizable. The reason that one's face comes to be so easily recognized has to do with a primeval characteristic of our sensory apparatus. Once the human brain has the outline of another human face sufficiently implanted, that other human face can be picked out of a crowd decades in the future, whatever has happened to it, if not by everybody at least by many. Once you have appeared on that scale in the public domain, nothing is harder than to disappear. On the day you realise that you can vanish only through never emerging from your home or motel room, and that even then the pizza delivery man has recognized you through your floor-length facial hair, you will realise that celebrity really amounts to a kind of universal mug-shot. While the photo, celebrity itself, bears little relationship with what you do or have done, with the real you, it is an indelible picture of who you are in the eyes of others.

And what has all this to do with my memoirs? When I say that I have had enough of celebrity, I only mean that I have had my share and can't complain. I know what the experience is like and I have no desire for any more of it before I pass away. Some of the distortions that I felt while being a celebrity were always welcome. I came to have a high profile in many schools where I taught. When one is a teacher being popular beats being hated; being liked beats being the source of student complaints. That was one of the things that made both popularity and notoriety seem like distortions. They were movements away from the norm of anonymity that most of us face in the urban agglomerations in which we live and move and have our being. When I moved from a low-paying job at a tin-mine in the small town of Zeehan Tasmania in 1981 to a higher paying job as an adult educator in 1982 in another small town in the Northern Territory of Australia I went from being a relative nobody who was recognized by a few miners to a person of some significance in a little town of 3000 within twelve months.

The same thing happened or variations on this theme on many other occasions in my long career in education. Some of these distortions were, as I say, only too welcome, initially, especially when one is making more money than one did before in the last job and the people, staff and students, are holding you in high regard. You can very rapidly get used to the idea, the experience, of being thought of as some kind of saint or super-hero, by your colleagues and your students. When you are one of the more successful among the teachers in a school jealousy can arise and i tell of this in my memoirs, but not here. There are enough who came to be impressed with the quality of my work usually to counter any growing jealousy. Many of the town's people, if the town is small enough, are pleased to include you in their personal honour-rolls of party guests.

One's own peculiarity, eccentricity or distinctiveness is sometimes, to reiterate, felt as a distortion and it is quite uncomfortable especially when one wants the anonymity that is one's usual state when one walks down a street. If that anonymity can not be found even when one goes to the corner store for milk one is in trouble unless, of course, one revels in that sort of public profile and visibility. The way toward celebrity has often been one of the common routs toward madness and madness would probably have arrived for me if I had ever been a famous young rock star. But I was never a famous young rock star. When Elvis Presley hit bottom, he exploded in the bathroom. His bottom hit the ceiling as Clive James put it suggestively in one of his columns. My own nadir, several of my nadirs, were far less spectacular and the world did not take note, because the world did not care--except for a small circle of my friends and family. Some of my bottomings-out were in psychiatric facilities and some were in my kitchen or bedroom at 2 a.m. with my wife in tears and/or my death-wish on all-ahead full.

In Bahaullahs Tablet of the Holy Mariner reference is made to the cry of Abdul-Baha and His falling upon the dust. In Jamsheed Samandari's commentary(p.61) on that tablet Samandari sees this cry as occurring in the last years of Abdul-Bahas life, after the unveiling of the Tablets of the Divine Plan in 1919, due to His disappointment at the lack of faithfulness of people, especiallt the Bahais, and at His own inability, despite heroic efforts, to achieve as great a victory as His own Father had prayed for to be achieved in the life of Abdul-Baha. If one looks at the life of Abdul-Baha as a metaphor for our own lives, then, despite our own heroic or not so heroic efforts, disappointment may accompany our lives in the end. Indeed, it may be Abdul-Bahas disappointment at my own life and my failure to overcome the many pitfalls of the self within. All is not victory and joy. Sadness and despondency are part of our experience as it was for Abdul-Baha.

As I entered my middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80) in the lifespan I felt like a burnt-out case. All was not burn-out but the life-narrative of Abdul-Baha is, for me, an important part of the understanding of the last phases of my own life on Earth. I tell some of my story here in Part 3. All is not doom and gloom but all is not winning and joy. As Shoghi Effendi points out in his foreword to God Passes By, there are phases or stages in the life of the Cause and this is true in our own lives. These stages involve great calamity and crises on the one hand and grace and victory on the other. The lives of the Central Figures provide, together, a matrix for a metaphorical interpretation of the physical reality that is our lives. This is, it seems to me, a crucial baseline for understanding our life-narrative, our lifestory, our memoir, our autobiography. I utilize this metaphor in trying to come to grips with the context for my life. There is also--and this is so very obvious--an ironic futility to achieving greatness. What happens to those who do? All but some fragmentary evidence remains of their accomplishments: empire builders, conquerors as well as thinkers and poets.

Life has many contexts. This is but one, but it may be the key; certainly it is a useful interpretive matrix which can help us turn the key to an understanding of our very lives. And the key will keep turning until the hour of my soul's ascension when my very life will still hang in some mysterious balance. In the meantime, though, in these years of my life a means for the composure of my mind and heart have been provided and I can utilize these means to write in ways that I have conveyed and will convey in this memoir. I do laugh at my "coursings through east and west" but I have in this work not ceased to analyse, interpret and circulate some "complex dubieties," as Abdul-Baha calls much of human introspection. I have not "put aside all thoughts of self" nor have I hidden my sufferings.(Selections, p. 236). The Bahai writings give literally thousands of ethical, moral and life-enhancing exhortations. Some we are able to follow and some we are not--for we are not Abdul-Baha--and this memoir is a story of my life and not His. I am no exemplar nor mentor and as I have often said to my son I have provided him with some useful guidance: one of which is the power of negative example! In writing about my own sufferings, it is my hope that my story will help others find the courage to cope with their own. For suffering is the common lot of all and, in the West, as Shoghi Effendi has pointed out on many occasions, one of the most common of tests are mental ones. Martyrdom in the West is not at all like that experienced by Bahais in Iran for the last two centuries. Mental tests and pioneering combine to produce one of the possible examples of the term "spiritual descendants of the Dawnbreakers" another oft' used terms in the Guardian's writings. Whether, of course, one can call oneself such a Dawnbreaker; whether one can call oneself one of the "few are chosen" from "the many are called" these are also terms one can aspire toward but never know for sure. It seems to me they are stations one earns, perhaps through the grace of God and, therefore, unearned. Like so many things in life: time will tell.

MEMOIRS and AUTOBIOGRAPHY: CULTURAL STUDIES and POSTMODERNISM

Cultural Studies as an academic discipline came into being at the start of my pioneering life in the 1960s. Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory, a theory I came across in my sociology studies. This theory combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history/criticism in its study of cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, and/or gender.

It is not my intention here to go into the history and development of this discipline in the last fifty years. Cultural studies has substituted an elitist concept of culture for an anthropological one and, consequently, focuses upon all the possible cultural spheres whether they deal with the dominating culture or a subculture. Cultural studies is concerned with high or low culture, popular and minority culture, border culture and diasporic culture, homosexual and lesbian culture--the list cannot be exhausted. My autobiography, dealing as it does not only with my life-narraitve but also with my society and my religion, has a very wide context and many aspects of cultural studies come into my autobiography time and time again. To put this another way, I make use of much that is in the field of cultural studies as I go about trying to map the life I have lived in the last seven decades. One theorist in cultural studies, to chose but one example, points out that cultural studies has conceived of memory as a "product of social processes whereby the past is represented through cultural forms."(Timothy Robins, "Remembering the Future: The Cultural Study of Memory," in Theorizing Culture: An Interdisciplinary Critique After Post-Modernism, Barbara Adam and Stuart Allan, eds.,New York University Press, NY, 1995, p. 201). The light of memory, so writes another theorist, can be identified only when memory is imbued with "a symbolic aura" which in turn serves to play a defining role in the ritual of memory. This ritual, as explicated by Walter Benjamin, is derived from the notion that for the collector of objects or ideas, imaginative concepts and memories, "ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to these entities. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them."(Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting," in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans.,Schocken Books, NY,1988),p.60). Benjamin is emphasizing objects in this article. He stresses that in traversing the domain of time and its endless flux, objects as sites and agents of memory can also be understood as purveyors of identity. According to yet another theorist, "In a world of objects, different people will take different things into their hearts and minds." What is important for some will not be for others. This hardly needs to be said but I insert this brief discussion of memory here as one of the multitude of cultural studies subjects on which I draw in this memoir.

Postmodernism, a second field of importance in this memoir, literally means after the modernist movement. While the term modern itself refers to something related to the present, the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives, a set of perspectives that are complex and have given rise to many definitions and hairsplittings. There is no real consensus as to what it means but among its many possible meanings is: a continuous inquiry into self-definition all over the world in this age of diasporas. Postmodernism appears again and again in theories in the social sciences and humanities, especially a socio-political field known as critical theory. Postmodernism refers to a point of departure for works of literature and drama, architecture and cinema, journalism and design, marketing and business as well as to an interpretation of history, law, culture and religion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Postmodernism is an aesthetic, literary, political or social philosophy which has been the basis of an attempt to describe conditions and states of being as well as changes to institutions and society in postmodernity, a period roughly from the 1920s onwards, although the term was used as fart back as the late 19th century. To put this another way, postmodernism is a cultural and intellectual phenomenon especially since the 1920s to refer to, to label, a series of new movements in the arts. Postmodernity focuses on social and political activity and innovations globally especially since the 1960s in the West. All certainties, absolutes and claims to objective truth, so argue the postmodernists, are far too complex and interconnected to support any metanarrative, totalizing theory or partisan political agenda.

Although my life has been lived within the context of a Bahai metanarrative, a grand theory, an anchor point, a dominating centre, a hegemonic paradigm or frame of reference. I find the postmodernist perspectives useful in the articulation of my understandings of the world I live in with its incredible complexity and interconnectedness. Social realities are complex, shifting, slippery, multi-dimensional, polycentric, fractal, grainy,wispy, wrinkled and capable of being known or captured only to an extent. Knowledge is, in many basic ways, a dynamic cluster of interacting perceptions being constructed and transformed by real people. Everything is a relation and part of a multiplicity of forces and elements. And so it is that I live with both a metanarrative and an endless questioning of my metanarrative. I take ther words of the German philosopher Fichte with me as I travel: "I cannot think of the present state of humanity as that in which it is destined to remain; I am absolutely unable to conceive of this as its complete and final vocation. Only in so far as I can regard this state as the means towards a better, as a transition-point to a higher and more perfect state, has it any value in my eyes.(Johann Fichte, The Vocation of Man)

I am conscious that postmodernism has initiated an entire re-evaluation of the Western value system: love, marriage, popular culture, industrial values to service economy values in a shift that took place beginning in the 1950's and 1960s, among a host of other aspects of culture. The writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche are important precursors to postmodernism. With their emphasis on skepticism, especially concerning objective reality, social morals and societal norms these three philosophers, for the postmodernists, represent a reaction to modernism in the writings of many philosophers ending with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Art and literature in the early part of the 20th century played a significant part in shaping the character of postmodern culture. Dadaism, in art, attacked notions of high art in an attempt to break down the distinctions between high and low culture; surrealism, another artisitic movement, further developed concepts of Dadaism to celebrate the flow of the subconscious with influential techniques such as automatism and nonsensical juxtapositions. All of this plays about on the edges of my memoires and I incorporate the many implications of this value shift in this lengthy work.

In addition to postmodernism in art, other significant contributions to postmodern culture come from literary figures. They include the following: Jorge Luis Borges who experimented in metafiction and magical realism; William S. Burroughs who wrote the prototypical postmodern novel Naked Lunch and developed the cut up method to create other novels such as Nova Express; Samuel Beckett attempted to escape the shadow of James Joyce by focusing on the failure of language and humanity's inability to overcome its condition, themes later to be explored in such works as Waiting for Godot. I mention these aspects of postmodernism in art and literature not because this autobiography deals with postmodernism in any detail but, rather, because this movement has affected what I write in many ways and I draw on ideas, concepts and perspectives from postmodernism in what and how I write about myself, my religion and my society. In modern society, writes the major postmodernist writer Fredrik Jameson one is lost in a "placeless dissociation," an "alarming disjunction between the body and the built environment." Jameson compares the experience of urban life to the increasing incapacity of our minds to cognitively map another hyperspace, "the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects."

Along with cultural studies, postmodernism needs to be acknowledged as a critical backdrop, mise en scene, an interpretive category, a hermeneutic tool, if you will, to and for my memoirs. By the time I came to write my memoirs in the 1980s both postmodernism and cultural studies had crystallized as tools for writers and poets like myself. For crystallization to occur in nature/chemistry from a solution it must be supersaturated. Both cultural studies and postmodernity were, by the 1980s, supersaturated with ideas.

THE METAPHORICAL NATURE OF PHYSICAL REALITY

The result of many of the developments in the humanities and social sciences, of which cultural studies and postmodernism are but two, as well as the developments in the physical and biological sciences, is that the intellectual foundations of the modern world have been and are shaking. Indeed, these foundations have been shaking since the appearance of two Manifestations of God in mid-19th century. This shaking process has gone through several stages. The centre not only hasnot held in the century, say, 1750-1850; but it has not held in the century 1850 to 1950 and in this present century, 1950 to 2050 another intellectual revolution is underway. Our world has become the fragmented and decentred world of postmodernity that we live in--and there is a renewed search for a centre in the midst of the pluralism, subjectivity and relativism. This memoir is the story of one person's life experience in the midst of this fragmentation.

This memoir deals with aspects of my physical life, of my effort to achieve growth and development, of my effort to put into place the process of my becoming, to exemplify divine virtues more completely as outlined, documented and described in massive detail in Bahai texts, to find rational explanations for how divine intervention occurs in society, in history and in the context of my religion, a religion which has provided my centre, my central centering system. I have aimed for several decades now to develop a more expansive, comprehensive and advanced learning experience and I will continue to do so for the rest of my life. This has been, is and will be the centre of my elan vital. It is centred in my mental faculties, my conscious thought, my knowledge, my volition and action. Carl Sagan once wrote that: "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed.' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.'(Pale Blue Dot: A Vision Of The Human Future In Space) The Bahai Faith is a religion that says: "Yes, yes, yes! Here is a god that is utterly mysterious and unknowable and beyond the wisdom of the wise and the learnign of the learned.

This autobiography is written on the assumption that there is a reality beyond the physical self and the physical universe and that there is a periodic intervention by an Unknown Reality into this existential world in the form of Manifestations of God like: Moses, Jesus and Muhammad and, more recently, Bahaullah. This story of what might be called progressive revelation is a long and complex one and I suggest readers follow-up on this idea in any one of amultitude of books. In due course, I will gradually be released from this physical self and I will continue beyond this physical experience. I do not engage in the numerous proofs and evidences for this and advise readers who are interested in this theme to read the extensive literature now available. A good start is John Hatcher's book Close Connections(Bahai Pub. Wilmette, 2005).

All suppositions about reality do have a subjective and self-constructed aspect and this work assumes that there is a metaphysical reality beyond the physical. I believe I have control over how I will respond to life's circumstances and the bridge between the physical and the metaphysical can be bridged through my faith and conviction. The Bahai texts can tell me how I am doing but they can only do so to an extent. I will achieve the object of my quest little by little and day by day as I gradually become increasingly adept at discerning the metaphorical,symbolic and/or dramatic exercises that constitute my experience as a physical being. I believe I will also achieve this object in life by expressing this understanding in action, action that derives from my imagination and invention. The entire process is itself a gradual awakening to the verities governing the total integration of physical and metaphysical reality by means of metaphor.

Before closing this section on physical reality I will make a comment about "reality television" since it will help to provide a contrast with what I am trying to say and do in writing about my life, my society and my religion in this memoir. Robin Nabi defines the genre of reality television as "any program that incorporates the following elements:

(a) people portraying themselves, (b) people filmed at least in part in their working environment rather than on a set, (c)people acting without a script, (d) people having the events of their lives placed in a narrative context, and(e) people behaving for the primary purpose of viewer entertainment. Current reality television programming appears to heighten desires for communal identification. It also encourages participation and vicarious membership in the wealthy class through consumption. Reality TV allows viewers the most secret of viewing experiences: watching ordinary people sleeping, taking baths, making love."(Robin Nabi,"Determining Dimensions of Reality: A Concept Mapping of the Reality TV Landscape," Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Volume 51, No. 2, 2007, pp. 371-390)

Some of these criteria could be applied to this autobiography except that, instead of film, I use the written word. There is also little of the everyday, the quotidian, in this book. Readers will look in vain for the kind of things people put in their diaries and the kinds of things they see in reality TV. I leave it to my diary, and not this narrative autobiography, for the collection of my flotsam and jetsam, as Virginia Woolf calls her diary entries that she has put on record. This diary material has been born from a vaster collection of my life's flotsam and jetsam, some of which is meaningful to me in the moment or at least hopefully so but, ultimately and possibly, about as useful and valuable to others as the eye of a dead ant. My diary or journal is much more confessional than my autobiography or memoir. Perhaps it is my diary that would best be compared to reality TV. My diary or journal tended to be the place, as I say, of my most confessional writing and, for that reason alone if for no other, it deserves to exist on its own. It was and is a genre of particular use to me as a writer for its several purposes which I have outlined elsewhere.

My pioneering story needed to be written, or such was my own felt need in the last 25 years after I reached the age of forty. It has now been written; it is now complete, at least as far as the 6th edition, and a truncated version of it is here at Bahá'í Library Online. Readers who want some of the reality TV that is my life can go, then, to my journal--after I have passed away and after my executors have decided to make it public, if they do. But don't hold your breath waiting!

BOTTOMING-OUT TESTS AND BIPOLAR DISORDER

Let me say a few things about bottoming-out, being a burnt-out case and my life-experience of bipolar disorder(BPD) before I continue my discussion about celebrity, fame and recognition. I have written about the nadirs in my life in Parts 1 and 2 and discussed BPD before, but this downsideofmy life is relevant here lest readers get the view that I am some sort of celebrity in the wide-wide-world. I want to place these nadirs in the context of my BPD and what I sometimes have come to call my chaos narrative. That narrative is now some 45,000 words in length and over 120 A-4 pages. I will cut and paste some of that particular aspect of my life-narrative here before continuing with the discussion of celebrity, fame and recognition.

1.2 The account of my BPD is a longitudinal, retrospective account going back to my conception in October 1943. Neurobiological, neuropsychiatric and affective disorders like BPD have diverse manifestations and symptomatology as well as a broad range of age of onset and specific symptoms. Little is still known about its pathogenesis, that is, the origin and development of the disease of BPD. What follows is one person's story, one person's life experience of BPD. It is my personal life-narrative with the diverse manifestations, the symptomology, of BPD.

1.3 I make reference to a strong genetic contribution to the aetiology of BPD, a genetic predisposition, a genetic susceptibility as a factor in the pathogenesis of BPD. A family history, what is sometimes referred to as a family pedigree, of affective disorder in a first-degree relative, in my case my mother(1904-1978) is relevant to this narrative. My mother had a mild case of what may very well have been BPD, at least I have come to think of her mood swings as falling into a significantly high place in what is sometimes called the BPD spectrum during her 75 year life. Her mood-swing disability or affective disorder, though, was never given the formal medical diagnosis manic-depressive(MD), a term which was replaced in 1980 by BPD.

1.3.1 All manifestations of BPD share uncertain etiologies, with opaque relationships between genes and environment. Some medical experts and theorists in the field of such studies posit latent changes in expression of specific genes initially primed at the developmental stage of life. Some studies and some experts emphasize that certain environmental agents disturb gene regulation in a long-term manner, beginning at early developmental stages in the lifespan. But these disturbances, these perturbations as they are sometimes called, might not have pathological results until significantly later in life. In retrospect, as I look back from these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood, the years 60 to 80 as some developmental psychologists call these years of the lifespan, these perturbations and pathological results were clearly manifested at the age of 18. I could easily theorize an earlier onset on the basis of behavioural perturbations manifested in early childhood and into adolescence and I will do so later in this account.

1.4 The new diagnostic term, BPD, is now found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-III). DSM-III had 300 disorders twice as many as DSM-II. DSM-II--and now DSM-IV--is considered a "bible" by specialists and others in the professions and is considered by many as a scientific instrument of enormous power. It did away with the term maniac and with a one-size-fits-all classification system. About half of all patients with BPD have one parent who also has some form of mood disorder. There is then, or so it seems to me, a clinical significance in my mother's mood disorder in the explanation of the origins and diagnosis of my own BPD.

1.5 The high heritability of BPD has been well-documented through familial incidence, twin and adoption studies. There is an unquestionable justification for the inclusion of my family in the understanding of my BPD. No specific gene has yet been identified as the one bipolar gene. It appears likely that BPD is caused by the presence of multiple genes conferring susceptibility to BPD when combined with psychosocial stressors. I make this point as an opening remark and pass on to my story.

1.6 This account also provides a statement of my most recent experiences in the last two years, 2007-2009, with manic-depression(MD) or BPD as it has come to be called since 1980.(not included in this part 3 at BLO) Some prospective analysis of my illness is also included with the view to assessing: potential short term, medium term and long-term strategies, appropriate lifestyle choices and activities in which to engage in the years ahead in my middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++), if I last that long. For the most part, though, this account, this statement I have written here in some 40,000 words, is an outline, a description, of this partially genetically predisposing family-based illness and of my experience with it throughout my life.(to 2001 here at BLO) I would, though, discourage others from blaming their parents for their genetic contribution to the disorders. I would also discourage them from blaming other family members for their contributions in the form of stress and conflict and failure to understand. Rather than wasting time and energy in finger-pointing or bemoaning the fact that they have BPD, I would encourage them to learn how to best use available treatment modalities to minimize their symptoms and to find success and satisfaction in their lives despite their disorder.

1.7 Some of the personal context for this illness over the lifespan in my private and public life, in the relationships with my consanguineal family(family of birth) and in my two affinal families(families by marriage), in my employment life(1961-2005) and now in my retirement(1999-2009) are discussed in this document. I include some of what seems to me my major and relevant: (a) personal circumstances as they relate to my values, beliefs and attitudes--what some might call my religion as defined in the broad of senses; (b) family circumstances; for example, my parents' life, my wife's illnesses, the life experiences of my three children as well as significant others in my lifespan like my father and mother and my first wife; (c) employment circumstances involving as they did: (i) stress, (ii) movement from place to place and (iii) my sense of identity and meaning; (d) aspects of day-to-day life and their wider socio-historical setting and (e) details on other aspects of my medical condition to help provide a wider context for this BPD in the last two years.

1.8 This lengthy account will hopefully provide mental health sufferers, clients or consumers, as they are now variously called these days, with: (i) a more adequate information base to make some comparisons and contrasts with their own situation, their own predicament, whatever it may be, (ii) some helpful general knowledge and understanding, (iii) some useful techniques in assisting them to cope with and sort out problems associated with their particular form of mental health problem or some other traumatized disorder that affects their body, their spirit, their soul and their everyday life and (iv) some detailed instructions on how to manage their lives more successfully despite the negative consequences of their BPD or whatever trauma or illness affects their lives.

1.9 I like to think that what has become over the last few years this small book of over 100 pages has advice that could be used by many people with BPD as well as others without BPD. Keeping detailed records, for example, written or mnemonic, ingrained in memory and/or with signs for immediate recall when required--of one's feelings and relationships and, in the process, taking responsibility for maintaining and improving them, might help BPD sufferers and others deal with their problems and have more successful lives. As for the meaning of successful, I prefer Thoreau's evocative lines: "If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs; if life is more elastic, more starry and more immortal in the process--that is your success." Even ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's ‘oft repeated phrase: "Be Happy!" is a simple enough aphorism and yardstick for measuring your daily life, your sense of well-being and the extent to which you are well-oriented and well-positioned to assume the responsibilities that are the result of your interests and commitments. Of course, in using such definitions of ‘success' like this one must recognize that millions of people without mental health issues don't have success defined in these terms.

1.10 There are what you could call risk-factors that increase the chances of BPD sufferers becoming ill and/or having their symptoms dominate their daily life and produce ill-effects for themselves and others in their environment. Such socio-environmental factors as: family distress, drinking alcohol or using drugs, sleep deprivation or missing medication are in this category. Another list of what could be called protective factors that help protect people with BPD from becoming ill might include: keeping charts of one's moods, going to bed and getting up at the same time every day, staying on one's programs/regimes of medication and psychotherapy and avoiding social stressors that one knows will precipitate negative symptoms of BPD.

1.11 I like to think that this account is crammed full of useful information for patients with BPD and other illnesses, for their family members, for therapists, for friends, lovers, employers and anyone else interested in this disorder. The insights I share were acquired from both experience and reading the voluminous literature on BPD. I have taken a more serious intellectual interest in the subject in the last decade since I retired from FT employment in 1999. My insights come, in the main, from reflecting on 66 years of life since the anticipated genetic origins of this BPD in my life at the point of my conception in October 1943. There are other psychiatric disorders often confused with BPD and patients need to be aware of these others in the diagnostic dialogue with their doctor. Differential diagnoses to be considered include: ADHD, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder; cyclothymia; recurrent major depressive disorder and substance induced mood disorder. In one study of 60 patients with BPD, 23 (38%) fulfilled the diagnostic criteria for at least one personality disorder. Those personality disorders most commonly were: narcissistic, borderline, antisocial, obsessive-compulsive or avoidance disorder. The presence of these disorders may make BPD symptoms more intense and more difficult to treat and they appear to increase the risk of suicide. This account is about BPD and by a person with BPD and this account only ventures into these several other personality disorders to a limited extent and only from time to time in this lengthy account when it seems relevant. I have included in appendix 5(none of the appendices are included here in part 3 at BLO) an article from an online newspaper to place mental health in a wider, populist and, hopefully, helpful context for readers.

1.12 This document was originally written in 2001 to assist others in assessing my suitability for: (a) employment, (b) for a disability pension of some kind and/or (c) public or private office in a casual work and/or volunteer capacity. This document is no longer needed for these reasons since I am fully retired from FT, PT and casual/volunteer work and am on two old age pensions. Although this document no longer serves the purpose of helping others to make the evaluations it did eight years ago in 2001 and make their decisions and their personal and organizational assessments of me informed ones; although there is no need for others to assess my capacity or incapacity to take on some task or responsibility, I have kept this original general statement, what was a first edition in 2001 and have extended it to what is now an 8th edition eight years later for other purposes. I tend to update the most recent edition on an annual basis as: (i) new knowledge comes to hand, (ii) new experience is added to my BPD history and (iii) as I reflect on 66 years of my experience of BPD.

1.13 Many do not feel comfortable going to doctors, to psychologists, to clinical psychologists and, more especially, to psychiatrists. Perhaps this is part of a general distrust of certain professional fields in our world today. Perhaps it is part of a general public being more critical, wanting to be more informed and wanting to play more of a role in their own treatments. People seek help in so many different ways; some try to work things out themselves and there are, of course, various combinations of those who try, those who have given-up and those who go back and forth between the two poles of trying and not trying to sort out their disorder, their psychological problems or whatever. Many often find the journey through the corridors of mental health problems so complex, such a labyrinth, that they give up in despair. Suicide is common among the group I refer to here—the sufferers from BPD and I could include depression(D) as well as a range of other illnesses and life battles of a traumatic nature.

1.14 This account may help the people I refer to above obtain appropriate treatment and, as a result, dramatically improve their quality of life. I think, too, that this essay of more than 40,000 words and more than one hundred A-4 pages(font 14) is part of: (a) my own small part in reducing the damaging stigma associated with BPD, (b) what might be termed "my coming out" and (c) the small part I am able to play in helping others accept some diagnosis they are given by a professional in the field of mental health and particularly of BPD. Once a person has a firmly established diagnosis, they may find this statement useful. Rather than trying to manage their feelings and rejecting the diagnosis or under-identifying with it, acceptance can be of great help. Acceptance is often very difficult for BPD sufferers. BPD sufferers who do not accept their illnes, for that reason, do not really deal with the issues that are part and parcel of their life as a person with BPD.

1.15 The wider framework of my experience which I outline here is intended to place my BPD in context and should provide others with what I hope is a helpful perspective, as I say above, in relation to their own condition, their own problems and situations. Perhaps my statement may help some BPD sufferers describe and understand their personal histories. My BPD exists on an affective spectrum which is a grouping of related psychiatric and medical symptoms which accompany bipolar, unipolar and schizoaffective disorders at statistically higher rates than normally exist in the general population. These disorders are identified by a common positive response to the same types of pharmacologic treatments. They also aggregate strongly in families and may therefore share common heritable underlying physiologic anomalies.

1.15 This essay, as I say, of more than 100 A-4 pages(font-14) is written: (a) for doctors and various medical professionals who have dealt with or will come to deal with my disorder and especially for those who are now, at this present time, involved with my treatment should: (i) I decide that they would find such a statement useful or (ii) they request such a statement; (b) for the registered users and guests at internet sites dealing with health in general and mental health in particular: BPD, D and schizo-affective disorder(SAD) among other special mental health illnesses; (c) for some of my relatives, friends and associations over the years with whom I still have contact in these middle years(65-75) of my late adulthood as the years from 60 to 80 are called by some developmental psychologists and to whom it has seemed relevant to give such a statement; (d) for government departments, voluntary organizations, interest groups and Bahá'í institutions who require such statements for reasons associated with our relationships and interactions; and (e) for myself as a reflection, for my own satisfaction, to put into words the story, the results, of an illness, a sickness, a disorder that has influenced my life for seven decades.

1.17 This document, this statement, originally written in 2001 for the Australian government's now department of Human Services,its Centrelink section which deals with Disability Support Pensions, has been revised many times after further reflection. Now in its eighth edition after feedback from various doctors, friends and internet respondents, as well as after an increase in my own knowledge of the illness as a result of further study, this document is an ongoing and changing entity as my experience of the disorder continues into the evening of my life. I am on two old age pensions, one from Australia and one from Canada with this BPD still a part of my life.

1.18 I do not claim to possess a specialized and/or professional expertise in the field of the study and treatment of BPD. I do not work with people who have such problems, nor do I have a desire to do so, except as a participant at a number of internet sites concerned with relevant mental health topics and with people who cross my path serendipitously with various related problems. This long piece of writing, too long for some and perhaps for most, not as sharply focussed on my actual day to day experience as some respondents on the internet have already indicated and not particularly relevant to the experience of others, others with BPD among other disorders, in an illness that has a very wide range of behavioural typicalities---this long piece of writing is but one of the many pieces of my writing these days. The vast majority of my writing and my interests both in and off the internet has nothing to do with this disorder.

1.19 Without going into detail regarding the many typicalities associated with those who suffer from BPD that I have referred to above and without outlining a detailed history of the treatment of BPD in the medical and psychiatric fields, all of which can be easily googled on the world wide web, allow me to briefly describe one creative person who suffered from BPD, the famous composer Tchaikovsky. It doesn't take much listening to his music to appreciate that Tchaikovsky was a very emotional man, a man whose passions often got the best of him as they often have got the best of me. He suffered from BPD with its highs and lows following upon one another with bewildering rapidity. He had many episodes of depression and many panic attacks which often resulted in flight, in tearful reactions to events, in impulses to overwhelming generosity and kindness and outbursts of angry temper. The result of all this emotional stress and struggle was that in 1890, when Tchaikovsky was in America, some commentators took him to be in his sixties, ten years older than his actual age and this had the effect of depressing him even further.

1.20 After some 65 years of dealing with this medical problem in my private and public life, I would be only too happy to put it to bed, to put it into some final corner and forget it. Sadly, or perhaps fortuitously, I can not do so because I still suffer, even after more than 65 years, with problems that are part of this disorder's long history and its current manifestation in my life. I have also become more conscious, as I have come out as it is said colloquially, of how this lengthy personal statement has come to be of great help to many, especially at the more than 100 mental health sites on the internet where I place all or parts of this document. Major affective disorders continue to be the leading causes of psychiatric disability and the need to develop safe, effective, and efficient long-term treatments for these disorders is of extreme importance not only to professionals but to the millions of sufferers. People like myself with life experience of BPD have stories that can be of use to other sufferers. That is at the core of my motivation for all the internet posting I do at mental health sites related to BPD.

1.21 Readers who are busy and not inclined to read a long statement like this are advised to skip, to scroll-down to section 10.3.8 below and some of the sections following after 10.3.8 to avoid reading much of the history and much of this statement that is not relevant to their needs. They can then: (a) make some practical assessment of this account, an assessment relevant to their present and personal needs; (b) obtain a shorthand account of whatever information in this document is relevant to their particular situation; (c) assess my suitability to undertake: (1) some form of employment: FT, PT, casual or volunteer; (2) some task that they think I could take on or some social or leisure activity in which I could engage with profit to others; (d) assess whether they themselves can/should go onto a pension of some kind and, finally, (e) understand my background of BPD more fully and so contextualize my life in order that they might understand me better.

1.22 Data from the United States on the lifetime prevalence of BPD--and mine has been a lifetime of BPD--indicate a rate of 1 percent for Bipolar I, 0.5 to 1 percent for Bipolar II or cyclothymia and between 2 and 5 percent for sub-threshold cases meeting some but not all criteria for BPD.

1.23 I would like to close this introductory section with a general comment about the increasingly close relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and about a sub-field of philosophy and sociology known as hermeneutic phenomenology.

1.23.1 Since at least 1980 when my illness was given the label BPD, there has been a growing tendency among the mental health professions to interpret everyday emotional suffering and behaviour as a medical condition that can be treated with a particular drug. For this reason, among others, mental health issues are coming to be seen by some in epidemic proportions. There is little doubt that the medical community is more capable of recognizing and diagnosing BPD and other mental disorders in the last twenty years 1990-2010. But often simple aberrant and abnormal behaviours are blamed on a mental illness of some kind when no real mental illness is present. On the other hand it is often the case that people who have a diagnosed mental health problem are often seen as those out-of-control individuals who can't act normally and need to: (i) pull themselves together, (ii) exercise more self-control, (iii) rein themselves in and/or (iv) avoid their excesses, to use a few of the many colloquial phrases that capture the negative--and sometimes justified-- reactions of others. And in all of these assessments by others it is important for BPD patients to assume control of their lives rather than turning them over to medication prescribers, psychotherapists, family members and/or other caretakers.

1.23.2 Hermeneutic phenomenology, a field within both philosophy and sociology, is uniquely suited to challenge the core assumptions of the above particular forms of the medicalization of BPD, among other psychiatric disorders. Hermeneutical phenomenology can function within psychiatry: (a) to expand psychiatry's narrow conception of the self as an enclosed, biological individual and (b) to assist psychiatry to recognize the ways in which a person's experience of things--including mental illness--is shaped by the socio-historical situation in which we grow. Informed by hermeneutic phenomenology, psychiatry's first priority, so it could be argued, is to suspend the prejudices that come with being a medical doctor in order to hear what the patient is saying. To this end, psychiatry can begin to understand the patient not as a static, material body with a clearly defined brain dysfunction but as a person with an unfolding, situated existence already involved in an irreducibly complex social world, an involvement in which the patient is trying to experience, feel, and make sense of their emotional suffering.

1.23.3 This increasingly close relationship between: (a) the pharmaceutical industry and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and (b) this sub-field of philosophy and sociology known as hermeneutic phenomenology---offers the sufferers of BPD two potentially useful lines of inquiry and explanatory frameworks in the future, but they are not lines of inquiry that I investigate in this statement. For my story, my account and my analysis, I see these two directions of inquiry as tangential to the central thrust of both my story and its treatment both in the past and in the future. As I have said, and as I repeat on occasion in this lengthy statement, now that I have worked out a satisfactory medication regime after all these years—and with a great deal of effort and experimentation—I don't want to play around with the package, a package which is working for me to my satisfaction as of the writing of this latest edition of this narrative-account.

2. My Experience of Manic-Depression:

Phase One--The First 37 Years 1943 To 1980

2.1 In the first 37 years of my life I had many episodes of various kinds of emotional imbalance or disorientation, themselves of varying lengths and intensities, ranging from a euphoric, impetuous, expansive or high mood to a depressed, grey, low energy or despondent mood. Indeed the range of mood in these 37 years was extreme, but the complete/extreme range was rarely experienced. In these years I learned various self-monitoring skills as well as some self-reinforcing tactics. Sometimes these symptoms affected my day-to-day life severely and negatively, sometimes positively and sometimes the affect was non-existent, insignificant and hardly noticeable.

2.2 After many experiences on the fringe of a normality that was my usual modus operandi or modus vivendi, as it is said in Latin , on the fringe of what I saw as my general everyday experience of life, an experience that is sometimes called the quotidian by writers, poets and novelists, I was diagnosed as MD in May 1980. I was treated by a psychiatrist in Launceston Tasmania while in the psychiatric wing of a general hospital. I had often been on the fringe of BPD, as I say above, a borderline zone, a limen as some historians call it, a border territory, a zone between normality and various behavioural extremes and eccentricities from my birth in 1944 to 1980. But in 1980 the symptoms were extreme and required hospitalization. The treatment regime in 1980 was lithium carbonate, an antimanic medication for the treatment and prophylaxis of BPD. Lithium had not been approved by the FDA in the USA until 1970 and only in 1974 as a preventive treatment for manic-depressive illness(MD).

2.3 Lithium was the first really successful mood stabilizer used by doctors to treat MD, an illness that in the 1980s and 1990s came to be called BPD. This medication cushioned the effects of extreme depression and hypomania and prevented their effects from striking at my life. The perils of BPD lie in what I did in the midst of: (a) hypomanic episodes to deal with: decreased need for sleep, decreased self-control, increased sexual desires, irritability, risk-taking behaviours-1964,1966 and 1967; (b) schizo-affective or psychotic states, the 1968 and 1979-80 episodes; and (c) depression periods with their moroseness, extreme melancholia and suicidal wishes-1963, 1968 and 1978.

2.4 My history to that point, to 1980, had been far from smooth and linear as my remarks above indicate. Those thirty-six years had often been bisected, polarised and traumatised. As I indicated above I have written a more detailed account of these years elsewhere but this outline, this brief sketch here, of particular episodes and the periods between episodes will suffice. My experience of these highly diverse emotional and psychological swings of mood in everyday experience away form the norm, from my norm, is only part of my story. But it is a crucial part. Everyone has their story for everyone experiences all sorts of abnormal eccentricities and health problems in life, some people of course more than others and some more traumatic and intense than others.

2.5 My account of the years from 1943 to 1980 follows. I try, in writing about and in summarizing these first 37 years of my life, not to overstate my case, nor to understate it, but give an account of those first 37 years which I refer to here in this general statement as phase one of my bi-polar life. In some ways the inclusion of the names of those doctors who treated me over the years in this first phase and in later phases would personalise this account, but names are not that important and to include them here in this narrative causes confidentiality problems and raises privacy issues for some readers and for people in my own past who might not want to be mentioned. This question of confidentiality and privacy is especially true at some internet sites where posts are rejected if names are included in any posting at the site concerned---and so I leave names out. Those whose names I could mention would not be troubled by their inclusion here, not now, not in 2009 after an extensive destigmatization of the disorder in recent years and after so much of my experience and so many of the people concerned are now, what you might call, ancient history.

2.6 I certainly appreciate the medical and clinical work of: (a) several of the doctors I went to in my childhood, adolescence and adulthood, (b) the psychiatrists who have treated me since June of 1968, more than four decades ago and (c) many family members, friends, colleagues and associations, some known well and others hardly at all, who have helped me ride the waves when the disorder raised its head yet again along the way, the road of life.

2.7 Comments on My Ante-Natal, Neo-Natal, Childhood and Adolescence Life: My BPD: Phase One-Part One: 1943-1963

2.7.1 As I refer to above, I had some experience of what may well have been BPD in childhood as far back as infancy and at the toddler stage, all of the pre-school years, 0-5, of early childhood development. My mother nearly died in the first month after my birth, the implications of which it is not my intention to go into here. If there are any significant implications of this birth process and/or events in my ante-natal and neo- natal phases of my life, I do not examine here, however important they may be in the aetiology of this illness. Before the age of five there is evidence that my behaviour had some of the features of what is now called: (a) Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or (b) Oppositional Defiant Disorder, but it is difficult to disentangle those features from those of BPD.

2.7.2 For the most part, though, I did not manifest BPD symptoms like: elated mood, grandiose behaviours, decreased need for sleep, racing thoughts or hyper-sexuality. Children are developmentally incapable of many manifestations of BPD described in adults; for example, children do not "max" out credit cards or have four marriages, pre-puberal and early adolescent age equivalents of adult mania behaviours. Still, as David Healy emphasizes in his book Mania: A Short History of BPD, some doctors are now associating BPD as beginning in utero. Scientists are also making progress in finding the biological markers for behaviour assoicated with depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive neurosis. Markers are essential to understanding the anatomical basis of mental disorders, diagnosing them objectively, and following their response to treatment, as well as perhaps preventing psychosis in those at high risk. To determine the neurobiological bases of the behavioral differences is complex. If one reads the studies in this area, as in so many areas of the science of mental health, the language used by specialists is often difficult. The human brain is not just an enlarged monkey brain, and it is often difficult to know how to correlate the two; the cerebral cortex is especially difficult because of the large size of the human cortex. Readers need to be warned in relation to the paragraphs which follow and in the footnotes. I site but one example in the footnote below.

Perhaps in a later edition of this essay I will attempt a more detailed outline of what I recall from these years of early childhood, but my recollections are minimal and it is difficult, if not impossible, to excavate my memories from those years at this late stage of my life. It is not my intention to comment further on these early years except for the occasional passing reference when it seems appropriate.

2.7.3 I would like to make a few remarks here on the biological, physiological, bases of BPD drawing on recent studies. The language I am drawing on here is, as I say above in section 2.7.2 and in the footnote #14, difficult and I advise readers to pass over this section if they find it too complex in terms of the medical terminology I am using. The neurobiological abnormalities associated with BPD, the abnormalities characterizing episodes of mood disturbance in BPD, help elucidate the pathogenesis, that is, the cause and development of BPD. There are immunological, neuroendocrinological, molecular biological and neuroimaging abnormalities characteristic of BPD. I will summarize these abnormalities in the following section, 2.7.4.1 and 2.7.4.2.

2.7.4.1 Trait neurobiological abnormalities of BPD include heightened pro-inflammatory function and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis dysfunction. Dysfunction in the intracellular signal transduction pathway is indicated by elevated protein kinase A activity and altered intracellular calcium signalling. Consistent neuroimaging abnormalities include the presence of ventricular enlargement and white matter abnormalities in patients with BPD. This may represent intermediate phenotypes of BPD. In addition, spectroscopy studies indicate reduced prefrontal cerebral N-acetylaspartate and phosphomonoester concentrations.

2.7.4.2 Functional neuroimaging studies of euthymic patients implicate inherently impaired neural networks subserving emotional regulation, including anterior limbic, ventral and dorsal prefrontal regions. Despite heterogeneous samples and conflicting findings pervading the literature, there is accumulating evidence for the existence of neurobiological trait abnormalities in BPD at various scales of investigation. The pathogenesis of BPD will be better elucidated by future clinical research studies which will investigate larger and more homogenous samples. These studies will also employ a longitudinal design to dissect neurobiological abnormalities that are the underlying traits of BPD from those abnormalities related to episodes of mood exacerbation or pharmacological treatment.

2.7.5 I try to avoid the complex language found in the above two sections not only because readers rarely understand them but also this complex terminology as really over my head as well. We all have limits in trying to understand things. This is true in the complex mental health field and it is also true in many other domains of modern life—no matter how hard we try. It is important for BPD sufferers to recognize the limits of their own rational faculty, the endowments conferred by birth in their intellectual domain. Drugs used to treat affective disorders exert their effects largely through their actions on various neurotransmitter systems. Neurotransmitters are important regulators of neural development. Beyond this, beyond these last two sentences, readers do not need to know the complex physiological and neurobiological systems that underpin BPD.

2.7.6 Through middle and late childhood, say, the age of 6 to 12(1950-1956) into the puberty cusp of 12/13 in 1956/7, I did exhibit personality features, behaviours or symptoms that had features of BPD, at least to a limited degree, or so it could be argued if not proved: (a) a lack of control of my emotions, impetuosity, lack of emotional restraint, hyper-sexuality and (b) a far too intense activity threshold what is now called hyperactivity, mild mania or hypomania. It should be emphasized in this context, though, that hypomania is now considered by many in popular culture as a pleasantly grandiose, somewhat overactive feeling and behaviour orientation, but is not considered as evidence of a disorder, a maniacal posture or mania in psychiatric terms.

2.7.7 I recall at the age of 12/13, at the onset of puberty, exhibiting inappropriate or precocious sexual behaviour, although the particular manifestations only involved one episode which constituted groping and an attempt to kiss a girl who did not want to be kissed. In addition, in my years of late childhood(8 to 12) I was involved in: (a) stealing items from shops and selling them; (b) one breaking and entering experience in which the charge was dropped and (c) an excessive intensity expressed in sport and other activities. Adolescent BPD and adolescence generally presented me with an accentuation of puberty and teen-turbulence caused by hormonal shifts. Society value shifts in the 1960s accentuated these tensions and behavioural problems even more, or so it seems to me, as I look back from the perspective of half a century. My mother's understanding, commitment, perseverance and patience, even though she did not know that I had BPD, is now in my memory bank and in the greater appreciation that I now have for my mother than ever before.

2.7.8 Although the symptoms of BPD that I exhibited in childhood and adolescence are largely not described here, I could go back to my birth and, indeed, to conception itself and my in utero, ante-natal, life as I intimated above, for possible origins and manifestations of BPD. The relationship with my mother, my sexual proclivities, my OCD tendencies could all be described, could be gone into, in more detail and I do mention my OCD tendencies again in this statement. I have also written about this subject briefly in my memoirs. I do not attempt in this now quite lengthy account to describe this period of my life in more detail, nor do I discuss my death wish or my suicidal tendencies during the many years of BPD beginning in the last months of my adolescent years, in October of 1963, during which I experienced the death wish for the first time due to the intensity of my first depression. Before the official diagnosis of manic-depression in 1980 my death wish was only associated with a few periods of intense D. I do not allude to this death wish except en passant and, then, only in the most cursory fashion.

2.7.9 I don't think I will ever know enough about the early years in my life before the age of 18, anyway, to assess whether my short periods of behavioural disorientation were examples of: (a) a mild-mania, hypomania, (b) BPD, (c) an affective disorder of some kind like schizo-affective disorder or (d) just a mild form of OCD. The very validity of the diagnosis of BPD in paediatrics and in adolescent studies is now in question. It is becoming, some say, a simple catchall applied to explosive and aggressive children and other kinds of idiosyncratic behaviour. Others say that many behavioural abnormalities are finally being recognized as part of a single disorder or existing on a single continuum. There is more generally a growing debate over the accuracy of many diagnostic classifications. This might seem to be purely academic except for the effect it has on treatment protocols. Estimates are that on average it takes 7 1/2 years before a BPD diagnosis is made. Improperly diagnosed BPD and delayed diagnosis are facts that BPD sufferers and those with D should be aware of especially if they are in their teens and twenties.

2.7.10 Keeping sexual stimuli under control has always been a struggle for me to regulate so that thoughts of a sexual nature did not claim too great a share of my attention. With the years, the more than half a century since my puberty in 1956/7, the opportunities to go over the top and to let physical/sexual temptations assume too great an importance have increased. My mother took a liberal attitude to my sexual frustrations and this liberal attitude became part of my own attitude to the battles I had to face in this domain of life's tests. It took me many years to take a more moderate attitude to sex in my marriage, thus reducing the tension between my wife and I. "The total amount of undesired sex endured by women," Bertrand Russell once wrote, "is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution." That I did not own my wife, that I could not trespass or invade, that sex was a gift and not a right--were insights that I acquired slowly as I only slowly learned how to deal with my BPD.

2.7.11 It was not until much later in life, though, that I began to see my aberrant childhood behaviours and my sexual and other aberrations (stealing, breaking and entering, excessive emotional and behavioural intensities) at puberty and then in adolescence as possibly having a link with the BPD which was eventually diagnosed when I was 35 years old. It was not until I was 19 in 1963 that any characteristics of BPD, in retrospect, became quite clearly apparent, pathological and, as I say in retrospect, could be called part of BPD and given that medical diagnosis. At the time, though, in 1963 no doctor would have given, or at least gave me, that diagnosis. Looking back to the age of 19 in October of 1963, I recall feeling a depression so deep it was like ‘a sickness unto death,' a term used by the founder of Christian existentialism Soren Kierkegaard. He called this a despair at willing to be oneself. I felt despair but not in the sense that Kierkegaard used the term. I had never experienced such an intensely low mood. The word despair is a more appropriate one. It was a sadness so pathological that it made me feel suicidal, like death not warmed over, as one could say colloquially. It does not surprise me that the third leading cause of death among people aged 15-24 is, in fact, BPD. I could very easily have been one of those dead souls especially back in the early 1960s when there was such little understanding of this illness.

2.7.12 One can read about this intensity of depression in many fields of literature and of mental health, although the word ‘depression' does not seem to have entered the lexicon in the West until about 1900. The desire to die at that time in 1963 was overwhelming. But I did not talk about it to anyone except perhaps my mother, although I honestly can not now recall the extent of my openness with her. She knew I was depressed but neither she nor I really understood the dynamics or the intensity of the depression. I think it was assumed that I would grow out of it. And I did. By December 1963 the depression began to lift. I wrote my December exams at university and I continued with my first year studies in liberal arts.

2.7.13 These behaviours, this depression, at the age of 19 or any of my behaviour before that last year of my teenage life(1963-1964), did not result in my receiving any medical attention. The first formal diagnosis of my illness was labelled a schizo-affective disorder(SAD) in 1968. SAD is a sort of hybrid condition that exists in between BPD and schizophrenia, although this distinction may be somewhat artificial. It may be inappropriate to have a discrete cut between the two disorders when both may represent part of a spectrum and symptoms of both disorders were part of my experience during the last half of 1968. This situation involved the possibility of a serious risk of harm to myself or others and required in July 1968 what is termed involuntary commitment to hospital. This case involved a severe BPD episode with dangerous-violent and aggressive behaviour as well as depressive episodes in August with suicidal ideation.

In retrospect, I now see the autumn of 1968 as the first formal diagnosis of my BPD, although I was not to personally receive/read that diagnosis until 1970 when I visited a psychiatrist in Kingston Ontario some two years after I was released from a large psychiatric hospital outside Toronto in the town of Whitby. At the age of 19, though, I was given lots of advice from religious to common-sensical: diet, exercise, prayer, vitamins, interesting leisure distractions/interests like horse-riding, watching TV, music, et cetera. After several months to several years, 1963 to 1968, the emotional aberrations disappeared or could be said to be sub-threshold at least for a time. My episodes over those years and in the years December 1977 to June 1980 seemed to exhibit quite separate and distinct tendencies and patterns from those I had experiences in the 1960s.

2.7.14 In BD, episodes of depression occur alternately with manic or hypomanic episodes during which the mood becomes euphoric and labile, the capacity for deriving pleasure increases, behaviors aimed at deriving pleasure increase, energy and psychomotor activity, libido and self esteem become elevated. Thus, the same domains are implicated in depression and mania, although the characteristic disturbance in emotional behavior within these syndromes appears opposite with respect to emotional valence. Thus the clinical manifestations of mood disorders would appear to implicate the cognitive, emotional and visceral functions. Mania, mild mania or hypomania is a real symptom of BPD and has its origins in extra neuro-transmitter brain cells which, due to neurochemical over-stimulation, begin to fire (synapsis) at once for a sustained duration of time. It is a very disquieting symptom involving rapid and profuse synaptic activity that is quite tiring and can interfere with concentration, focus and cause rapid, erratic thought patterns and ideas. People with mania often remain awake for days without normal sleeping intervals. The longest period of time I was awake was two or, perhaps, three days in May 1968. The experience became progressively more painful after 24 hours of no sleep. I had no mood-stabilizing medication at the time to slow the synaptic activity down. I do not recall any symptoms of mania in my late childhood or adolescent life. There were some periods of mania in the years 1963 to 1966 but not as intense as what I experienced in May 1968. If I had any mania in early childhood, I have no memory of such experience.

2.7.15 The boundaries between normality and abnormality, health and pathology are often blurred and indistinct. In addition these boundaries shift from person to person, doctor to doctor and decade to decade making one's understanding of the problem more complex and more difficult to deal with on the one hand and, paradoxically, more simple and easy to deal with on the other. Within those five years, 1963 to 1967 though, the permutations and combinations of emotional variation were enough to being tears to the eyes of a brass monkey, as my mother used to say. Looking back in retrospect at those last years of my formal education, I see it as a miracle that I ever got my BA degree and my teaching qualifications labouring under such emotional chaos from time to time and often, week after continuous week in a variegated pattern. There were periods, though, in those several years of my post-secondary school education in which I could function normally and my moods seemed to level out so to speak.

2.7.16 Although the pharmaceuticalization of the post WW2 modern world had began in earnest by the 1960s, it had not taken off that earnestly as medical and psychiatric applications to the behaviours and symptoms that I exhibited back then. The most successful treatment I received, though, was pharmaco-therapy and this continued to be the case for the next forty years.

2.7.17 Sometimes I returned to incapacitating symptoms; sometimes I simply exhibited impetuosity or lack of emotional restraint; at other times my moods were expansive, quasi-manic. Perhaps, as some of the BPD literature suggests, I was affected sporadically by the extremes of a psychomotor retardation and agitation which is characteristic of this illness. Combinatory, lateral, uneven, unusually sensitized thinking, particular sensitivity to energy levels and a state of increased awareness were all part of my experience in these five years. It is difficult to describe these five years in retrospect given the bizarre and chaotic nature of the experience. Given, too, a coextensive and coexisting general context of normality and the inevitable routine and quotidian nature of life that went on inspite of everything, inspite of the emotional problems--makes the description of the details of these experiences, after forty years, difficult.

2.7.18 In the years 1969 to December 1977 the symptoms of my BPD were sub-threshold, non-existent or not as extreme. I coped and my behaviour did not require or even suggest medical intervention. In the 1977 to 1980 episode, the next major episode, H and its various symptoms like elation and good feelings, were rare and varying intensities of D were common. The episode lasted from December 1977 to June 1980, some two-and-one-half years. The first episode had lasted off-and-on from October 1963 to December 1968, a little more than five years. This second major episodic-period only lasted half the length of time that the first had lasted, but this was only due to the lithium treatment that put an end to my symptoms quick-smart. Without the lithium which I began to take in the first week of May 1980—who knows what the BPD symptoms would have been? The sixth leading cause of disability and lost years of healthy life for people aged 15-44 years in the developed world is BPD. I had lost only fifteen months of employment due to hospitalization(6/68-12/68 and 5/80-12/80), although much more time of varying degrees of decreased functioning. In addition, taking an early retirement at the age of 55 and going on a disability support pension at 57 until I was 65 could add another ten years onto this one year of unemployment due to BPD, if I wanted to make a fully comprehensive statement of the affects of BPD on the total years of my unemployment.

2.7.18 In early December 1968 I had left the mental hospital in Whitby Ontario on a mild sedative. I think it was called valergan; but I'm not sure; I have forgotten its name after nearly 40 years. In the nine years from 1968 to 1977 I tried: exercise, diet, giving up smoking, sex, radiesthetics and hair analysis, jogging and play therapy, among a range of treatments to prevent or alleviate any incipient symptoms reoccurring.

2.7.19 In the episodes from 1977 through 1980 the constellation of: fear, paranoia(P) and the extremes of D were often as low as I had experienced in the sixties, in those chaotic years of that episode from 1963 to 1968. I experienced in those years 1977-1980 a range of emotional swings, but they were largely, at least as I recall looking back a quarter century later, at the D and P end of things. A psychiatrist in Ballarat prescribed stelazine or trifluoperazine, an antipsychotic drug. It was at first administered in early 1978 and it seemed to make things worse. In December 1978 I moved to Launceston with my wife and three children and, after a series of two or three quite severe emotional swings at both the H and the D end from January to May 1979, a psychiatrist at the Launceston General Hospital prescribed lithium. After just two or three days my symptoms were relieved never to return in the same form.

2.7.20 I include the above observations and comments on this second major episode because they throw some light on the first episode and place my childhood and adolescent experience of BPD, if indeed I had that disorder at all in those years, in a helpful perspective at least for me, if not for others who read this statement. Depressive episodes for those with BPD tend to have a median length about 6 months with manic episodes usually beginning abruptly and lasting for between 2 weeks and four to five months. My episodes of depression and mania were certainly within this range.

It is helpful to me to express my disorder this way, that is in longitudinal, retrospective, terms as far back as my childhood and this I hope will be helpful to other BPD sufferers and some readers of this document for other reasons. My account here may appear somewhat complex and labyrinthine for general readers and I would advise such readers not to try and follow all the permutations and combinations of my description of this disorder. My description is quite difficult for some to follow and for me to outline in detail and to understand in general. As I go about relating this story, I go about trying to place this narrative into some coherent form. It has taken these seven editions over eight years to get some sense of coherence, some sense of continuity, into what some biographers and autobiographers sometimes call a ‘chaos narrative.'

2.8 From My First Episode of MD in 1963
To My First Institutionalized Care in 1968:

2.8.1 The episode in 1963 continued in a complex series of forms up to and including 1968, as I have outlined above. This episode was not diagnosed as either MD or BPD in those years. This episode, part of my first phase of BPD as I see it in retrospect, did not receive any professional psychiatric diagnosis until June of 1968. From June 1968 to November of that year I received institutional care in: the Frobisher Bay, now Iqaluit, General Hospital; the Verdun Psychiatric Hospital in Montreal; the Scarborough General Hospital in a Toronto suburb and the Whitby Psychiatric Hospital about a 30 minute drive from Toronto. The story of those years from 1963 to 1968 and those four psychiatric units and hospitals were my years of university study and the first year of full employment. The story of these years is long, stony and tortuous and I will not write the account of these five years in any more detail since no medical diagnosis was given to me in writing or verbally. I did receive a great deal of advice and types of treatment: (a) more exercise and prayer, (b) a better diet and sex, (c) drug therapy, 8 ECTs and other types of therapy from talk to art and manual activities. I do write of these six months in these several facilities in my memoirs in much more detail than I do here. To write of it here would result in prolixity.

2.8.2 In June or July of 1968, though, one member of a battery of doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists and other care givers who were then providing my treatment program in Montreal Canada at the Verdun Psychiatric Hospital took a personal interest in my case. He was the first attending psychiatrist in my life about whom I remember anything at all. He was a Bahá'í, a religion that had its origins in Iran in 1844; he was one of perhaps 4000 Bahá'ís in Canada at the time and perhaps its only psychiatrist. He was himself at the outset of his own career in psychiatry. I had been serendipitously institutionalized here after the onset in late May of 1968 of an episode of BPD which was given no name at the time, although colloquially I recall it being said I had become "bushed" or, as they say in Australia, "gone tropo."

2.8.3 I had been working with the Inuit at the time in Canada's high Arctic as a grade three classroom teacher. Looking back it seems highly fortuitous that this first institutionalized care that I received was, in part, from a psychiatrist who shared the same belief system as I did, the Bahá'í Faith. I remember him taking me out into the community to meet some of the Montreal Bahá'ís and their friends. Such an exercise, I assume, he felt was a normalizing experience.

2.8.4 I appreciate, as I say above, the interest, care and assistance shown by a long series of individuals, particularly the relatives and friends in my life, who over the years and as far back as 1963. In that year what I now see as the first clear episode of MD or BPD began to manifest itself. The professional work of those doctors and the personal assistance of those family members and friends has been invaluable and I want readers to appreciate the primacy I give to the work of these special people for their help and support, their saving me from what in any previous age and time period would have been a horrific, virtually end-of-normal-life experience. I want, too, to particularly emphasise the personal care-givers in my consanguineal and affinal families, that is my family of birth and marriage, especially my mother, my first wife and my second wife. These three people were there to help inspite of the difficulties they experienced as a result of their care-giving attitudes and supporting activities. They were absolutely critical and significant others in that wider social context of family, friends and doctors over the years.

2.8.5 I sojourned in these first five years, in that first episode from 1963 to 1968, in a public and private world that was new to me. From time to time and beginning arguably on 29 May 1968 I sojourned in a place no less strange to me than if I had been among an exotic jungle tribe in Africa. It is the duty of some cultural anthropologists to report on their exotic travels and field trips, whether among the indigenous peoples of this earth's Antipodes or to equally remote recesses of human experience among other culturally diverse groups. The account I write here, though, is not so much anthropological; it does not give an emphasis to the eccentricities, the absurd and the bizarre which SAD, P, D, MD and BPD accounts often do; it does not attempt to make a comprehensive statement of my experience. I leave this for my autobiography/memoirs and readers can find the story buried there in occasional references among the 2600 pages much of which is now on the internet in different forms, short and long, paragraphs here and pages there.

2.8.6 I came as I say above, insensibly over several decades--and then only at some distant and abstract level--to associate the extremes of my BPD somewhat with the role of shamans among tribal, third world and animistic communities, people who relate their myths and their meanings by means of emotionally laden quasi-ecstatic visions. On the personal level, I discovered in myself unexpected patience, humility and hope. I learned to treat life as the most precious of gifts, infinitely vulnerable and precarious, to be infinitely prized and cherished. I had not become a shaman or a saint, though; I still suffered; I was still impatient; I did not always appreciate life; I still got depressed. I had journeyed with my body, although I don't think with my soul, into an underworld and come back, more times than I care to tell and certainly more times than I tell of here. But I have survived and lived to tell the story. This is not always the case for people with SAD, D, MD or BPD.

2.8.7 Mine was a spiritual drama of sorts—on a psycho-neurological, a psycho-pharmacological, a schizo-affective level and in 1968 the first psychiatric diagnosis, some five years after the beginning of my first episode, resulted in my suffering, my illness, having at last a label, a medical diagnosis, a name attached to it: a mild-schizo-affective disorder, for which I use the acronym SAD in what has become a somewhat long account. This mild SAD I could, as I say, narrate as a drama in religious terms and describe it as a purgatorial dark night. But, briefly, it was both a pain in the neck and a gift of the gods, I can now say in retrospect. Whatever it was and however I interpret its meaning in my life, it has unquestionably been a key part of my life. But it was not all my life. I do not define all my life in terms of this disorder. This account is of that part, that small but important part. It is the centre of my chaos narrative as some students of autobiography call such accounts.

2.8.8 It is unfortunately very trendy to attribute mood disorders like BPD to personality and spiritual illnesses. From my point of view such attribution is done by people who don't research into what is the real cause of BPD and their understanding of the disorder is limited. Sometimes the negative stigma and the inaccurate attribution hurts more than the actual disorder. It can be very disheartening to see a negative stigma continuing in a community and in individuals. Given the complexity of BPD such an attribution is not surprising. Like so many things in life BPD is just one of the many very complex phenomena and people can't be expected to understand all of life's complex medical disorders and social problems.

2.8.9 Stories in life, all peoples' stories, are chaotic and confusing at a certain level of analysis, a problematique as some social scientists call the story of one's life, especially in the absence of some kind of narrative order, an order imposed or simply narrated in a simple fashion. Even with some order, imposed or not imposed on one's experience, one's life is still a problematique. I tell my own story here as briefly as possible to help establish, for me, some of that sense of order. I tell of these events, as a storyteller might, of my experience of life, but it is a story not packaged for the media. It has been packaged, though, in several written forms for the internet at some 100 sites from 2004 to 2008. I try as I get older to use soft words and hard arguments both in my writing and in my speech. This is a good goal for people with BPD. Softness, tact, kindness and gentleness are often absent from the behaviour and speech of sufferers from BPD. This has certainly been true of me in the half century trajectory of my experience of BPD. These qualities are still absent at crucial times, but so is this true of billions of others who do not have BPD.

At some of the postings of my story, my experience, on the internet there is only a brief statement and at other sites the statement is as long as this one. As in life, so on the internet: not everything a man knows can be disclosed; not everything that can be disclosed is timely and not every timely utterance is suited to the ears of the hearer. This definition of tact from the writings of Bahá'u'lláh is most apt here. I have used this 40,000 word statement or parts of it for other purposes. Without sequence, without narrative form, without analysis of some kind and some attempt to frame a discernible causality, one's story remains a bit of a jumble to say the least.

2.8.10 Of course, not everyone looks at their life experience this way. We are a highly diverse species and not everyone is inclined to write an account like mine, if they write their account at all. In my experience over all these decades with this illness, I am inclined to the view that very few ever write their story in even an abbreviated form. We are a highly diverse species, as I say above, and we see, experience and understand things in so many different ways. Life has an element of mystery, of jumble, no matter how much knowledge and understanding we bring to our problems and whether we write an account of our life or whether we don't. There is so much, too, of the practical that one needs to learn to implement if one has BPD. The old English proverbs are pertinent here: "A full cup must be carried steadily;" and "A Smooth sea never made a skilled mariner."

2.8.11 And so, as I say, this story is what could be called my chaos narrative. Certainly studies in autobiography and biography, as I say above, are now classifying this very popular genre into many sub-types. Autobiography and its several forms of life narrative, memoirs and diary, inter alia, is arguably the most popular genre of the last several hundred years. One sub-category of the genre of life-writing is the chaos narrative. It is written after the excesses of the chaos have gone; the experience of the extremes of the chaos are incompatible with the writing or the telling. To put this another way, it is difficult to write the story while in the midst of some of the more extreme parts of the experience. People like the famous dancer Nijinski, among others, have placed their experience in a written context during their suffering. But I could no more have written anything when in the summer of 1968 I was placed in a locked and padded room to protect myself from myself; or in the winter of 1978 living in Ballarat, an old gold-mining town in Australia, when I hid under the sheets of my bed on getting home from work feeling, as I did, a sense of acute paranoia every day. The paranoia was not experienced all the time but certainly enough of the day to make the day one that was difficult to cope with in my ordinary employment and family situation. As I say, some write in the midst of their chaos, but this is not the case with me in this account.

2.8.12 Those who are living in the midst of bipolar episodes are now telling of their experiences more and more in recent years as they come-out and as BPD becomes more a part of public knowledge. Their stories are often bizarre, but in this crazy world sometimes their stories are only one of many kinds of traumatic, bizarre and extreme forms of suffering that the world is drowning in at present. The chaos that I describe in the distant past is told here in the relative and retrospective tranquillity of the present. Living in the midst of chaos, to emphasize this point for a final time, makes reflection, and consequently any attempt at narrative for oneself or others, difficult if not impossible.

2.8.13 Telling and, even more so, writing is a way of taking control and creating order, thus giving an account of what was once experienced as chaos, but now has a framework of meaning. To some extent, as a famous psychiatrist Dr. Victor Frankel once put it, suffering ceases to be suffering, the moment it finds a meaning. That is partly true and even if it is entirely true it is not always seen that way by the sufferers. But Frankel's words apply to me in a significant way and this is partly why I write this account here. Without one of the main strands of medicine, though, namely orthodox psychiatry behind me and its chemotherapy strand I don't feel I would even be here to tell my story.

2.8.14 The longest intense D(depression) I had was in 1963 and 1964 with perhaps two six month periods from June to November and July to December, respectively. The longest episode of some combination package that came to be labelled a mild schizo-affective state, a combination or alternation of hypomania and depression, among other symptoms was a part of my life from June to November 1968. This episode also resulted in the medical characterization of my illness, as I say, a SAD with the adjective mild placed at the front of the term. The episodes of H in 1977 to 1980 and 1990 were treated more quickly with medication, although the 1977/8 episode, beginning in December/January, seemed to last for at least three or four months and had a mostly depressive component. It was treated with trifluoperazine, under its brand name stelazine, another anti-psychotic and the side effects were horrific. Only the 1980 episode required hospitalization in this case for one month in May of 1980.

3. Enter Lithium in 1980 and Then Fluvoxamine in 2001:

3.1 Lithium was and is, arguably, the central pivot in this whole story, at least to this point in my life at the age of 63 as I live through these early years, 60 to 65, of late adulthood, a period some developmental psychologists characterize as the years from the age of 60 to 80. I was on lithium for twenty-seven years: from May 1980 to April 2007 a little more than 40% of my total lifespan to this point, to 2008. I have experienced the symptoms of this disorder, this partially genetic disorder, with the label MD and then BPD for 27 years. I would now add at least an additional 17 years during which I was not diagnosed with BPD, but had a range of symptoms and experiences I have described above and which were diagnosed in 1968 as a mild SAD.

3.2 By 1969 I had been treated and I was ready to re-enter society which I did as a security guard on what was then Canada's tallest building in Toronto. And so, this made 70% of my life, 44 out of 64 years during which I manifested some obvious features of a disorder of some kind: SAD, D, MD or BPD—not every month or every year but at various times in these 44 years.

3.3 My mood swings came to have an entirely different typically in 2001. And again in 2007, after eight months on this new package of medication, on yet another medication, sodium valproate, my emotions, my feelings, are of quite a different order. The death wish, for example, which I have lived with periodically and in various degrees of intensity since at least 1963 has diminished even more and is now only a faint trace of its past. It has not blown away entirely, but its heat has gone. If it exists at all, it is as a trace element, so to speak. My mood swings have moved into new territory yet again. The luvox in 2001 took my nighttime blackness away and the colouration of my emotions late at night became grey; luvox(fluvoxamine) was added to my medication package that year.

3.4 There is very little high-quality evidence to guide prescribing for older people, particularly those with multiple medical conditions for which multiple medications may be indicated for those with various disabilities. Current best practice in prescribing drugs for late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++), the geriatric patients of the world, relies on regular evaluation of the safety and efficacy of each medication and of the combination of medications for each patient. Functional and cognitive impairment are strong independent predictors and factors of importance.

3.5 Inappropriate treatment is a common concern and includes the use of medicines at too high a dose or for too long a period or the addition of a new drug that induces harmful adverse effects through drug–drug or drug–disease interactions. Another inappropriate way of prescribing occurs when a patient is denied the beneficial effect of a known drug on the grounds of advanced age. In such a complex milieux and after many years of dealing with this disorder, I prefer to just leave the treatment regime to my doctor after brief consultations. The inappropriateness of a drug and the inappropriateness of a treatment, the inappropriate quality of a drug are not concerns I take on board. I leave these concerns to my psychiatrist. Substantial progress has been made in the past several decades, while I have had to deal with the symptoms of BPD, toward the application of evidence-based medicine. Practice guidelines, which assist providers in clinical decision making, have played a valuable role in this initiative and my psychiatrist is a man in his late 60s with over 40 years of specialist interest in clients with BPD. The attributes of good practice guidelines, their role in the skill repertoire of my psychiatrist in his role as a health-care provider and the limitations of practice guidelines for psychiatrists in general are concerns I do not have. I am confident in my psychiatrist and the treatment he is providing.

3.6 The symptoms that affected my daily working capacity, even now, are fatigue and psychological weariness especially after (i) a night of light sleeping, tossing and turning or what some call agitation insomnia and/or (ii) after many hours of intellectual activity. One can hardly complain, though, given that this fatigue, these experiences, psychological and/or physical weariness, are the lot of Everyman to some degree and in a myriad of different patterns. My story, my experience with sodium valproate, my lithium substitute, began nearly two years ago in April of 2007 and effexor was introduced into the medication package in May 2007 to replace the luvox. Sodium valproate is an anti-psychotic or mood stabilizer & effexor an anti-depressant medication, but more on these drugs later in section 4 below.

3.7 Since 1980 and more so since 1990 I have had little difficulty knowing where I was in the process of mood swing, psychological orientation and general understanding. The chemistry and the relationship with brain functioning which is involved with BPD is very complex and I make no attempt to describe the chemistry, the anatomy and the physiology here in this document. Over the years I had grown used to the various plays on my emotions, my sleep patterns and my mental activity during the pre-medication phases and the post-medication periods of the medications prescribed. During this mood transition, though, the swing to a mild elation or euphoria was new, refreshing and quite pleasurable, after an initial period of a few weeks of instability and highly variable sleeping patterns and problems. During this transition there were a variety of symptoms, but I feel no need to outline them here.

3.8 The transition to the medication package in 2007 was very different than the one in 1980 or the second major shift in 2001—with the addition of luvox. The great intensities of swing had virtually gone by 1980, although the blacknesses late at night remained. After the introduction of luvox, though, as I said above, these blacknesses disappeared. Total acceptance of the necessity of taking lithium was a critical variable in this process and it took the decade of 1980 to 1990 to achieve. At the hypomanic end of the continuum over the years there were experiences like the following: violent emotional instability and oscillation; abrupt behavioural changes and a sudden change in a large number of intellectual assumptions; elation, high energy and various forms of excess. Mental balance, a psychological coherence between intellect and emotion and a rational reaction to the outside world all seemed to blow away, over a few hours to a few days, as I was plunged in a sea of what could be variously characterized as: emotional heat, intense awareness, sensitivity, sleeplessness, voluble talking, racing mental activity.

3.9 What I have described briefly in 3.6 above was my hypomanic personality at one end, the extreme end of the spectrum. At the other end of this same spectrum: fear, excessive paranoia, incoherence, intense depression or melancholia, despair and a desire to commit suicide were the major symptoms. This BPD spectrum includes a large number of mood disorders. The reason there now are so many different categories of BPD is partly due to this spectrum approach. With more reflection in the months and years ahead I may come to define my BPD experiences over the last half century along this spectrum more precisely. In the years from 1963 to 1965, in 1968, in the years from 1977 to 1980 and finally when I went off lithium in 2001 and began a new series of medications from 2001 to 2007/8 I could utilize several labels in the psychiatric literature. For now I shall not go down this road at this point in this statement.

3.10 Memory Loss:

3.10.1 I was a classroom teacher and educator for over thirty years(1967 to 2003) and I have seen a good deal of short term memory loss in both myself and my fellow man and the myriad reasons we all give for forgetting, some justified and some not-so. The experience of memory loss in my own private domain, though, may be the result of: (a) the several medications I have had since 1968 and (b) the eight ECT treatments in the summer and autumn of 1968. But, again, everyone has memory problems; a recent test in 2005 administered by a doctor specialising in treating memory loss in geriatric patients, did not indicate any particular memory difficulty or the onset of any illness associated with memory loss, like altzeimer's disease, a disease with its own trajectory of memory problems and functioning.

3.10.2 My current psychiatrist, who specialises in treating people with BPD and who has been providing his professional advice to me for the last seven years, after a series of psychiatrists I have had going back to that period in 1968,3 does not think my memory problem is a central or even a peripheral part of my bipolar symptoms. If anything, my problem of memory has its origins in causes other than bipolarism. This was the same conclusion of that specialist in geriatric care, as well, whom I saw in 2005. After more than half a century of evidences of bipolarism in my life, I am inclined to think that my memory loss is, again, not something that should concern me unduly in this account of my bipolarism--even though it has been a practical concern in my daily life and I would like to say a few words about that problem in the following section.

3.10.3 My memory problem does contribute, as readers may appreciate, to many practical problems in day-to-day life. My wife is very aware of these problems which we have come to associate with: (a) selective memory, (b) inattention, (c) poor listening skills, inter alia. I mention these things because, although my bipolar disorder is largely treated and whatever memory-loss I exhibit I do not regard as attributable to my BPD or the ECTs I had back in the 1960s, there is still a constellation of physical and psychological difficulties remaining, in addition to the residue of bipolar symptoms that are still present in my life. I do not want to emphasize these problems, this constellation of difficulties, these more peripheral problems though, because such descriptions detract from the central theme of this account. Their relevance is indirect though, I must emphasize, they are not irrelevant to the way I experience my life.

3.11 More General Comments:

3.11.1 It seemed appropriate to outline this detailed statement of my experience with BPD for several purposes since the issue of the nature of my problem and what was once called MD, at least until the 1990s, is a complex one. The story varies from person to person and has been of concern to me over the sixty-five years that I have had to deal with its symptoms in my personal and professional life. Others close to me, some of whom are now called care-givers, have also had their concerns.4 It is difficult to characterise my condition and it is for this reason that I have written what some may find to be an overly long statement. As I say above, I write this for both my satisfaction and the use by others, especially those who suffer from BPD.

3.11.2 I hope this account, in both long and short term contexts, will explain adequately my reasons for not wanting to work in any employment position or participate in any demanding social context. It was for this reason that I drafted the first edition of this essay, this account, five years ago now in 2003. This account, now in its seventh edition may provide those interested, as I also say above, with some useful information for dealing with their own particular problems, perhaps even problems not associated with bi-polarism. I have a file of detailed notes on doctors' visits, various treatments for specific problems and background information. It is a file I opened in 1999 on my retirement from FT work to assist me in treating myself for particular medical problems that arose and to compensate for the memory problems I experienced in relation to the several medical difficulties which arose from my mid-fifties onwards. Visits to GPs and my psychiatrist required several treatment regimes and I needed some system to record items I could not remember. But I have not commented on these problems and medical details here. The focus in this account is on my BPD and not any separate or ancillary difficulties.

3.12 The Process:

3.12.1 There seems to be a process, one of immense variability, that I have experienced on a daily basis for arguably, 65 years. The details, the symptoms, the behaviour, varies from year to year, with the decades, with the days and especially since my first D in October 1963 and since the medications I have been placed on since June of 1968. I cross from some normal behavioural constellation to an abnormal, intense one. The abnormal extreme position varies, as I say, from day to day, month to month and year to year in content, texture, tone and intensity. In 1946 it was characterized by uncontrollable early childhood behaviour and eccentricities. My mother had to deal with these aberrations.

3.12.2 Looking back to my childhood I did have some behavioural abnormalities, but their association with bipolarism is also, I tend of think, unlikely in retrospect. Behavioural abnormalities in children and adolescents are also as common as air and it seems to me, at this stage of the understanding of my disorder, that to impute bi-polarism may be premature at best and simply incorrect at worst. The diagnosis of bipolarism at that early stage of my life in 1947 at the age of three is only a remote possibility given that only 1% of people with BPD are considered to have exhibited BPD behaviour during their childhood or adolescence before their late teens. More knowledge of this disorder may yield a different conclusion at a future time especially since children and adolescents have been increasingly given the label, the diagnosis, BPD in order to explain their medical/behavioural problems. The lack of reliable screening instruments in my childhood and adolescence that could have assessed my several mood, anxiety and behavioural conditions within the spectrum of a possible BPD was one of the problems in identifying conditions at these earliest possible points in time for effective intervention. If you are one of the many individuals who struggle with mood and anxiety symptoms, identifying your particular problem and beginning effective treatment can help you get back on track. For now, though, I leave this issue without further comment.

3.12.3 At the moment, at the age of 65, the negative aspects of my BPD are several, but I will go into these details, these more recent manifestations of this disorder, at least since 2001, in the next section of this essay, section 4. Due to the above "process" over more than sixty years, due to the part of the process which occurs in varying degrees in various accentuated forms, it has often been difficult to define just where I was at any one time along the 'normal-abnormal' continuum—and it still is. This was true at both the depressive end and the hypomanic end of the BPD spectrum.

3.12.4 It is difficult, therefore, to actually name the number of times when I have had major manic-depressive episodes.5 Perhaps the number is as many as eight. Certainly it is at least four in my whole life from what may have been the first episode in 1946 to the last brief episode in 1990 when I went off my lithium for between one and two months. Defining an episode is not easy for me to do; indeed, the concept of episode is only useful in some respects. In other ways it over-simplifies a complex set of behaviours; it has value, though, when trying to describe the experience in writing. The term episode serves as a sort of shorthand, a paradigmatic sign and symbol to cover a broad range of behaviour and over a wide set of time spans under one rubric. BPD has a complexity that has required, at least for me, medications, time, the wisdom of experience and, in some ways most importantly, a high quality carer to provide relevant feedback and understanding. These have all been keys, among others, to help me find the stability I so desperately craved from time to time.

3.13 Some Things I Have Left Out:

3.13.1 The account above has none of the fine detail that I could include like: (a) details about my mental and auditory hallucinations during my psychotic episodes, (b) a long list of specific low-range fears and high range paranoias, (c) the electroconvulsive therapy, E.C.T.s I had back in 1968, (d) details of the developmental aspects of the various treatment regimes I have been given over the years, (e) the various psychiatric analyses and diagnoses, (f) the many years of dealing with suicidal thoughts and what some call a death wish, (g) experiences in and out of half a dozen hospitals, visits to unnumbered doctors' clinics and listening to advice from well-meaning but usually misinformed or uninformed people than I care to recall, (h) adjusting to medications that varied from those which heavily sedated me and simply put me to sleep, to those which made me high, increased my sensitivities and sense of awareness of my environment—and still others that resulted in a state of paranoia, nausea and a sense of utter terror among other side-effects; (i) the effects of these many swings and mood changes on my employment, my relationships, my two marriages and my attitude to life; and (j) the manifestations of this disorder during the period from my birth to the age of 18.

3.13.2 Many of the situations, looking back, were humorous and the contexts absurd. And there was much else but, as I indicate, I hesitate to go into more detail. My aim here is to make a short(not short enough I hear some readers say!) clinical statement, to put some basic facts on paper, to outline some impressions, to make some analysis and draw some tentative conclusions. Perhaps later, in a further essay or posting on the internet--for this is the place my writing on BPD as a non-professional gets the most exposure--I will go into the kind of detail some readers have already requested. And so--I want to make this statement as short as possible, but as detailed as I can, to give a longitudinal perspective. At 40,000 words this account has become far from short, but it serves my purposes even if it is onerous for some readers to digest. I find, after several years of internet posting, that readers who find my account too long simply don't read it. There is plenty of material on the World Wide Web for sufferers of BPD who require short posts, simple advice sketches and quick back-and-forth chat settings.

3.14 Different BP Profiles and Typicalities:

3.14.1 There are a variety of BPD profiles, what you could call different behavioural typicalities from person to person of those diagnosed as having BPD. It is bipolar because both ends of the spectrum, the moods, were and still are experienced over the period 1943 to 2008, 65 years. Thanks to lithium, fluvoxamine and, now, sodium valproate and venlafaxine(effexor), most of the extremes are now being treated. Beginning (i) at the age of 19 in 1963, then (ii) at the age of 34 in 1978, (iii) again at the age of 57 in 2001 and, finally--at least I hope this was the final major shift—(iv) over the two year period 4/2007 to 1/2009 in these early years of late adulthood, that twenty year period in the human lifespan from 60 to 80, different medication regimes have resulted in an experiencing of life in very different ways. They brought me back to a centre, a normality, but I was somehow, somewhat mysteriously, inexplicably in some ways, never the same again. Different medications and different people in certain ways, ways that this statement refers to briefly. This of course is true of all of us, each in our own ways, with our own stories of change, of crisis and our own expressions of a difficult to define normality and abnormality.

3.14.2 It took ten years, from 1980 to 1990 as I say above, for me to fully accept the lithium treatment. From time to time in the 1980s I tried to live without the lithium, to go it alone, to go off it on a cold turkey, as they say colloquially. Such, in as brief a way as possible, is the summary of my experience over the years and, in the main, up to 1991. I have written more extensively of these years, and especially the issue of acceptance of one's BPD and compliance with medication in my autobiography which is readily available on the internet for anyone who is interested.

3.14.3 Individuals with BPD have several characteristics that make them more vulnerable to substance abuse, addiction and compulsive behaviours. There is, therefore, a higher prevalence of people with BPD who have: (a) addictions, (b) OCD and (c) a higher vulnerability to substance abuse. As I have emphasized in this account, the experience of individuals with BPD, while having symptoms in common, is also highly diverse in its characterization. Over more than half a century now I have experienced, at various times: agitation and anxiety, aggressiveness and belligerence, confusion and fatigue, impulsiveness and insomnia, irritability and morbid thought patterns, suicidal ideation and panic, paranoia and persecutory delusions, pressured speech and racing thoughts, restlessness and rage—not all at once, it must be emphasized, but at various times and, as I say, over many decades. One could find all of these behaviours in people without BPD but, for the most part, not in the same person.

3.14.4 The behaviour patterns of people with BPD are often characterized by: impulsiveness and sensation-seeking, risk-taking and thrill-seeking, novelty seeking and high exploratory drive, excitability and low levels of inhibition as well as more sexual partners and artistic activity. The term schizotypal personality is sometimes used for people with BPD who have a quirky or socially awkward approach to life. These patterns, it is argued by some neuroscientists, have neural correlates and are driven by individual differences in dopamine system sensitivity. The dopamine reward pathways of the brain are different in people with BPD. Dopamine is a chemical in the brain that feels good when it is released and it acts as part of an internal reward system. Dopamine rewards are critical for survival since they provide the pleasurable feelings associated with things like eating and reproduction among other experiences in the lifespan. When a person has BPD their brain does not reward them with a rush of dopamine easily, so they have to go to more extreme measures just to get that experience of well-being. That desperate desire for stimulation is also why many people with BPD self-destruct. Finding a creative pursuit that is truly engaging has been, for me, a great remedy for my addictive and OCD tendencies as well as my apparently above normal desire for stimulation. But the remedy is only partial. Unexpressed creative impulses, so many argue, are the driving force behind some of the negative behaviours associated with BPD.

3.14.6 The two decades 1991-2009 had several major turning points. The first in 1991 was the beginning of what is often called total drug-compliance. In my case it was with lithium. I had had, I reiterate, in the first decade of lithium treatment, 1980 to 1990, a problem with compliance. The majority of BPD patients are non-compliant and tend to stop their medication after one year often with disastrous results. I had, therefore, lots of company in that first decade for I had stopped my meds twice in that first decade: 1980 to 1990. BPD sufferers also lose years of productivity, normal health and life-expectancy. The first two factors certainly applied to me, although time will tell the extent to which that last factor will be true in my life.

3.14.7 Failing to educate oneself and/or one's family inadvertently contributes to medication non-compliance and, in my case, this led to a serious relapse in 1990, but not to re-hospitalization. Knowledge is empowering and can improve one's capacity to react constructively to periodic crises in one's disability. This was the case in 1990. The relapse occurred in my summer holiday and by the time this holiday ended I was back on my meds and ready to go back to work due to the uncharacteristic emotional instability—the tears—that I experienced ‘off-my-meds.'

3.14.8 From 1991 to 2001 I experienced a decade of euthymia, a term used for normality. This decade was much like an earlier decade of euthymia in my life, the years from 1969 to 1978. There is a tendency, and this was the case with me throughout most of the 1970s and again in the 1990s, to view my disorder as having a somewhat benign course. This tendency, this view, had been present right from 1963 to 1968 when the first significant evidences of the presence of BPD raised their ugly, their depressive and their hypomanic head. Effective prophylactic lithium medication controlled and attenuated my acute mood swings, minimized my sense of continuing distress and, I might add parenthetically, assisted mental health professionals' in simplifying the treatment of my disorder and in prescribing advice which I sought during the 27 years I was being treated(1980-2007). Psychiatrists were able to fit me into a category without my having to go through some long analysis and that was all I wanted—"to get my pills and go home." This may not have been the best attitude to take, but it represented the core of my attitude for most of this time. After seeing the wonderful effects of drug-therapy I was disinclined to engage in much talk-therapy, at least talk-therapy unrelated to my monitoring and adjustment to the several medication regimes I had been prescribed.

3.14.9 The malignant quality of BPD is insufficiently appreciated. It has been insufficiently appreciated by me—and still is--and by millions of other sufferers. The functional impairment found among BPD patients; the havoc and disruption reported to their occupational, family and social lives, suggests that, in spite of adequate drug treatment, disturbing problems persist impeding the optimal emotional growth and development of patients/clients as well as that of their immediate family members. Despite their significant effect on symptoms, lithium and drug therapies by themselves often have little impact on interpersonal problems and various psychosocial stressors that may develop in the course of the illness, an illness that often, although not always, plagues an individual over the person's entire lifespan.

3.14.10 It is difficult to lock into, to describe, in this account this aspect of the interpersonal problems and psycho-social stressors I experienced. My account of the impact of BPD on the various facets of my life is really quite complex and I am still trying to work it out, to put into words quite complex patterns of thought and behaviour. In my efforts to do so readers may find that I jump from time frame to time frame in my lifespan and that I compare and contrast different episodes while juxtaposing them within one particular period of time. Readers may find my account confusing in this regard. I may be able to sort out this problem of outlining a logical and clear delineation of my experience in some future edition of this story as I gradually come to refine this life-writing. But, for now, this current outline of my experience is the best I can do given the complexity of the disorder and how it has been experienced over more than six decades. I also want to be succinct and if I examine in any detail the affects on my work, family and relationships the result would be prolixity.

4. My BPD In The Short-Term: 1991-2009

4.1 1991-2001: "Luvox Arrives in 2001"

4.1.1 In the decade 1991 to 2001 I finished my life of full-time employment; I began to seriously reduce my extensive and intensive activities and responsibilities in the social and administrative aspects of the Bahá'í community and its life, as well as other volunteer activities and social involvements. I also began my obsession with writing during this period. Rather than ponder the value of non-compliance with this medication as I had done in the 1980s, I came to a state of full-compliance; I came to appreciate, to fully accept, my lithium treatment. Anti-psychiatry has had many forms since psychology and psychiatry emerged in the last decades of the 19th century and the early twentieth and since chemotherapy began to have more and more success in the last half century, say, in the years 1959 to 2009, my years of late adolescence to late adulthood. Like many of the mental illness conservatives, they take a far too extreme position in relation to psychiatry from my point of view.

Readers wanting more of this story can either google it using the phrase: "RonPrice BPD" or go to another part of this autobiography. The story of the last decade, 2001-2010, I will leave for now and return to the subject of celebrity which I began to discuss above and which will provide some balance to the above doom and gloom which I'm sure some readers found far too analytical, technical and detailed for their liking.

MORE ON THE CULTURE OF CELEBRITY

I was a very well-known baseball player in my teens, in the 1950s in the small town of Burlington Ontario, at the time a place of about 5000 people. I was the home-run king in the pee-wee league(1954/6) and the most-valuable-player in the midget league(1957/8) before I ran out of status at the age of 18 among the juvenile all-stars(8/62) and moved to another town where I played no more baseball. Later I was a young(in the 1960s and 1970s) and then middle-aged (1980s and 1990s)teacher, sometimes well-regarded even a celebrity of sorts. I never became addicted to anything more destructive than one cigar on Friday after a busy week with 200 students or a feeling that I was really someone special and deserving of recognition with my chest puffed-out imaginatively. I smoked the cigar slowly in the town of Gawler. I lived in this town which was 30 minutes by car from the school where I taught in Para Hills South Australia. I tried to keep a lid on my ego knowing, as I did, that popularity could make inroads into that subtle, often tenuous and obstructive veil of self, a self that builds walls that can shut me from my portion of eternal grace.(Selections, p.182). That cigar-smoking time was back in 1973 outside Adelaide in the Barossa Valley where I lived for just on one year. That ego-smoking time is one I describe in more detail in these memoirs and there is no need here to give an account of this mise en scene at this point. "There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart," wrote Samuel Johnson who compiled the first English dictionary, "a desire for distinction, which inclines every man to hope, and then to believe, that nature has given him something peculiar to himself." I think Johnson was onto something here but this idea, like alot of ideas and quotations, needs unpacking and I do not want to do so here.

I would like now to quote and paraphrase from an excellent essay on the subject of "The Culture of Celebrity" by Joseph Epstein in a journal entitled The Weekly Standard.(10/17/2005, Volume 011, Issue 05)Epstein, like Clive James, is another fine essayist that has been thrown up by journalism during the last two epochs. Both these men possess a fine mind, an erudition, and a wonderful sense of humour. As I say, I paraphrase Epstein here and intersperse some of my own comments as I go along.

The concept of and emphasis on celebrity at this moment in the West has reached epidemic proportions by sensible and insensible degrees since I was a child in the 1950s--and it's spreading fast--wrote Epstein only four years ago about a dozen years after I first read his writing and his book Plausible Prejudices. Sometimes it seems as if nearly everyone is into celebrity. Television provides celebrity dance contests; celebrities take part in reality shows; perfumes carry the names not merely of designers but of actors and singers. Without celebrities, whole sections of newspapers would have to close down. So pervasive has celebrity become in contemporary cultural life that one now begins to hear a good deal about a phenomenon known as the Culture of Celebrity. As the author of this five volume memoir, I can not ignore this subject either, if only because in this work, if nowhere else in the world, I am the chief celebrity and readers need to know some of my thoughts on the subject.

The word "culture" no longer--if it ever did--stands in most people's minds for that whole congeries of institutions, relations, kinship patterns, linguistic forms, and much else for which the early anthropologists meant it to stand. As I mention above, though, in relation to cultural studies, this memoir keeps its eye on culture in this anthropological sense. Only a coterie now studies or ever studied anthropology. Words, unlike disciplined soldiers, refuse to remain in place and take orders. Even when one is a student of anthropology and knows the meanings given to the word culture in that social science discipline, these students will still find that word an unruly entity in our media-saturated age. Words like 'culture' slither and slide around, picking up all sorts of slippery and even goofy meanings. An icon, another slippery term/word, has not stayed, has not remained, with its original meaning as: a small picture of a religious personage. The word icon has been transformed, transmogrified, into all sorts of uses. Just check out your Thesaurus for the multi-layered meaning that word now possesses in popular culture. "Language," the French writer Flaubert once protested in his attempt to tell his mistress Louise Colet how much he loved her, "is inept." It is useful for readers to keep this in mind as they trowl through the million words in this memoir or the several million if they include the several genres in which I have attempted to tell my story.

Today, when people glibly refer to: "the corporate culture," "the culture of poverty," "the culture of journalism," "the culture of the intelligence community," and even "the homeless community"--what I think is meant by "culture" is the general emotional atmosphere and institutional character surrounding the word to which "culture" is attached. Thus, corporate culture is thought to breed the selfishness practiced at the Machiavellian level; the culture of poverty breeds hopelessness and despair; the culture of journalism, a taste for the sensational combined with a short attention span; the culture of the intelligence community involves covering-one's-own-behind and a certain viperishness; and so on. The word "community" has similar problems. It has become another of those hopelessly baggy-pants words with uses up and down the culture's lexicon to mean everything from a man to his dog and much, much else.

Culture is now used to explain unpleasant or at least dreary behavior. "The culture of NASA has to be changed," is a sample of its current usage. The comedian Flip Wilson, after saying something outrageous, would revert to the refrain line, "The debbil made me do it." So, today, when admitting to unethical or otherwise wretched behavior, people often say, "The culture made me do it." Good old socialization, an endemic part of culture, has become a useful explanatory concept brought into the conversation, like reincarnation, to explain, at least partly, nearly and and every behaviour imaginable.

As for "celebrity," its standard definition is no longer the dictionary one but is found closer to that in use by the American historian and writer Daniel Boorstin which he gave in his book The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream. "The celebrity," Boorstin wrote, "is a person who is well-known for his well-knownness," which is now simply misquoted as "a celebrity is someone famous for being famous." The other standard quotation on this subject is Andy Warhol's "In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes," which also frequently turns up in an improved misquotation as "everyone will have his fifteen minutes of fame." But to say that a celebrity is someone well-known for being well-known, though clever enough, doesn't quite cover it. Not that there is a shortage of such people who seem to be known only for their well-knownness.

The distinction between celebrity and fame is one most dictionaries tend to fudge. I suspect everyone has, or prefers to make, their own definition and differentiation. The one I like derives not from Aristotle, who didn't have to trouble with celebrities in the centuries before Christ, but from the career of the baseball great, Ted Williams. A sportswriter once said that Williams wished to be famous but had no interest in being a celebrity. What Ted Williams wanted to be famous for was his hitting. He wanted everyone who cared about baseball to know that he was--as he believed and may well have been--the greatest pure hitter who ever lived. What he didn't want to do was to take-on any of the effort off the baseball field involved in making this known.

As an active player, Williams gave no interviews, signed no baseballs or photographs, chose not to be obliging in any way to journalists or fans. A rebarbative character, not to mention often a slightly menacing s.o.b., Williams, if you had asked him, would have said that it was enough that he was the last man to hit .400; he did it on the field, and therefore didn't have to sell himself off the field. As for his duty to his fans, he didn't see that he had any. Whether Ted Williams was right or wrong to feel as he did is of less interest than the distinction his example provides. That distinction is one which suggests that fame is something one earns--through talent or achievement of one kind or another--while celebrity is something one cultivates or, possibly, has thrust upon one. The two are not, of course, entirely exclusive. One can be immensely talented and full of achievement and yet wish to broadcast one's fame further through the careful cultivation of celebrity; and one can have the thinnest of achievements and be talentless and yet be made to seem otherwise through the mechanics and dynamics of celebrity-creation, in our day a whole mini or not-so-mini, industry of its own.

Another possibility which we find in the realms of celebrity is that one can become a celebrity with scarcely any pretensions to talent or achievement whatsoever. Much modern celebrity seems the result of careful promotion or great good luck, things besides talent and achievement. Epstein sites the following examples: Mr. Donald Trump, Ms. Paris Hilton, Mr. Regis Philbin. The ultimate celebrity of our time, Epstein suggests, may have been John F. Kennedy Jr., notable only for being his parents' very handsome son--both his birth and good looks factors beyond his control--and, alas, known for nothing else whatsoever now, except for the sad, dying-young-Adonis, end to his life. I'm sure many will disagree with Epstein for we all have lots of opinions in this popular world of the celebrity.

Fame, then, at least as I prefer to think of it, is based on true achievement; celebrity on the broadcasting of that achievement or the inventing of something that, if not scrutinized too closely, might pass for achievement. Celebrity suggests ephemerality, while fame has a chance of lasting, a shot at reaching the happy shores of posterity. Oliver Goldsmith, in his poem "The Deserted Village," refers to "good fame," which implies that there is also a bad or false fame. Bad fame is sometimes thought to be fame in the present, or fame on earth, while good fame is that bestowed by posterity--those happy shores again. This doesn't eliminate the desire of most of us, at least nowadays, to have our fame here and hereafter, too.

Fame that is not false but wretched is covered by the word "infamy." "Infamy, infamy, infamy," remarked the English wit Frank Muir, "they all have it in for me." The lower or pejorative order of celebrity is covered by the word "notoriety," also frequently misused to mean noteworthiness. If you can find the time to read Leo Braudy's magnificent book on the history of fame, The Frenzy of Renown you will find his wonderful history of fame in civilization. Braudy illustrates how the means of broadcasting fame have changed over the centuries: from having one's head engraved on coins, to purchasing statuary of oneself and, for the really high rollers--Alexander the Great, the Caesar boys--naming cities or even months after oneself. Then there is the commissioning of painted portraits, to writing books or having books written about one, and so on into our day of the publicity or press agent, the media blitz, the public relations expert, and the egomaniacal blogger. One of the most successful of public-relations experts, Ben Sonnenberg Sr., used to say that he saw it as his job to construct very high pedestals for very small men.

And so, a reader may ask: "what has all of this to do with your autobiography, Mr. Price?" A simple answer is that the issue of fame, distinction, celebrity, identity and introspection all surround the statement attributed to Socrates that: "the unexamined life is not worth living." The American philosopher Daniel Dennett(1942-) once wrote that: "The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is nothing to write home about either."(Elbow Room)If, indeed, I have overexamined my life, my society and my religion--as I'm sure many readers will conclude and stop reading this work early in the piece--so be it.

Although this work obviously has a personal, an introspective, focus, I would argue that I provide an access to non-partisan politics,a global political agenda of the first order. This memoir is no slide into a lifestyle, navel-gazing introspection; it is rather a life-changing analysis and interrogation of my life.

I have acquired a very proper suspicion of celebrity. What George Orwell said about saints, seems only sensible to say about celebrities: They should all be judged guilty until proven innocent. Guilty of what, precisely? I'd say of the fraudulence, however minor, of inflating their brilliance, accomplishments, worth, of passing themselves off as something they aren't, or at least are not quite. If fraudulence is the crime, publicity is the means by which the caper is brought off. This work is not intended to be a caper, even a minor fraudulence, a personal inflation of decades of achievements, an attempt to prove innocence, an outline of my guilt. That is not my intent, but in 2600 pages it is difficult not to have some of these aspersions stick to me for what I write, what I reveal of my life.

Is the current heightened interest in the celebrated sufficient to form a culture--a culture of a kind worthy of study? The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber defined culture, in part, as embodying values which may be formulated, overtly as mores, or felt, implicitly as in folkways, by the society carrying the culture. It is part of the business of the anthropologist to characterize and define these terms. What are the values of celebrity culture? They are the values, almost exclusively, of publicity. Did they spell one's name right? What was the size and composition of the audience? Did you check the receipts? Was the timing right? Publicity is concerned solely with effects and does not investigate causes or intrinsic value too closely. Epstein writes about a review of his book Snobbery: The American Version. It received what he thought was a too greatly mixed review in the New York Times Book Review. He remarked on his disappointment to the publicity man at his publisher's who promptly told him not to worry. The publicity man emphasized that the coverage was a full-page review on page 11 on the right-hand side. That, he said, "is very good real estate," which was quite as important as, perhaps more important than, the reviewer's actual words and final judgment. Better to be tepidly considered on page 11 than extravagantly praised on page 27, left-hand side. Real estate, man, it's the name of the game.

This work of mine is found hidden away on the internet, in a place that will bring me neither fame, nor rank, nor name, nor notoriety except among a coterie so small as to barely have any significance at all. In addition, I am my own publicity-man. My main interest is in the publicity of the religion that has been part of my life since the double helix that Watson and Crick discovered made it clear that DNA explained heredity. That discovery led to such practical applications as DNA forensics in law enforcement, testing for genetic diseases and the development of an entire biotechnology industry. With the recent completion of the Human Genome Project, it could radically change the way medicine is practiced over the next few decades. In 1953, the Bahai Faith celebrated the 100th anniversary of the first intimations of Bahaullahs revelation in the Siyah Chal, a revelation that initiated a drama that this autobiography is but a line, a word, in a play of many acts that has been, is and will be the basis for the transformation, the planetization, of this Earth. My contact with this new Faith began in that same year.

We must have new names, Marcel Proust presciently noted--in fashion, in medicine, in art--there must always be new names. It's a very smart remark and the fields Proust chose seem smart, too, at least for his time. Now there must also be new names, at a minimum, among movie stars and athletes and politicians. Implicit in Proust's remark is the notion that if the names don't really exist, if the quality isn't there to sustain them, it doesn't matter; new names we shall have in any case. And every sophisticated society somehow, more or less implicitly, contrives to supply them. The Bahai Faith has been playing its part in the creation and establishment of new names and the process has only begun during these four epochs that are at the base of this memoir--and the four epochs of the Heroic Age of this Faith from 1844 to 1921.

I happen to think that we haven't had a major poet writing in English since perhaps the death of W.H. Auden or, to lower the bar a little, Philip Larkin. But new names are put forth nevertheless--high among them in recent years has been that of Seamus Heaney--because, after all, what kind of a time could we be living in if we didn't have a major poet? And besides there are all those prizes that, year after year, must be given out, even if so many of the recipients don't seem quite worthy of them. Considered as a culture, celebrity does have its institutions. We now have an elaborate celebrity-creating machinery well in place--all those short-attention-span television shows, all those magazines. We have high-priced celebrity-mongers--Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Oprah--who not only live off others' celebrity but also, through their publicity-making power, confer it. They have also become very considerable celebrities each in his or her own right.

Without the taste for celebrity, they would have to close down the whole Style section of every newspaper in the country. Then there is the celebrity profile in magazines like Vanity Fair, Esquire and Gentlemen's Quarterly. These are nowadays usually orchestrated by a press agent with all touchy questions declared out-of-bounds. The television talk-show interview is central to the celebrity business. The show has its star and stars who are beyond parody. Well, almost beyond: Martin Short in his parody of a talk-show host remarked to the actor Kiefer Sutherland, "You're Canadian, aren't you? What's that all about?" But all is not a sorry tale of doom and gloom in that world of glitter and gloss. While all this celebrity trivia has been piling-high there has emerged in the last half century a literature in the humanities and social sciences that has transformed the academic world. It has not percolated down to the millions who consume and who are amusing themselves to death in the electronic media, but it is now found in thousands of good libraries around the world and, increasingly, on the internet. It is in the context of this new and quite exciting literature that I attempt to place this memoiristic work and ensconse it in what I hope is a context that illumines both this work and the braoder issues in relation to the media. This work has little or nothing to do with all this celebrity and fame nonsense that I am discussing here, discussing in order to completely eliminate it from the agenda of readers.

Many of our current day celebrities float upon "hype," which is really a publicist's gas used to pump up and set aloft something that doesn't really quite exist. Hype has also given us a new breakdown, or hierarchical categorization, of celebrities. Until twenty-five or so years ago, about the time I starting writing this memoir, great celebrities were called "stars," a term first used in the movies and entertainment and then taken up by sports, politics, and other fields. Stars proving a bit drab, "super-stars" were called in to play, this term beginning in sports but fairly quickly branching outward. Apparently too many superstars were about, so the trope was switched from astronomy to religion, and we now have "icons." All this takes Proust's original observation a step further: the need for new names to call the new names. Let me be clear. This work is no "hype" and I make every effort to place it far from the whole notion of stardom and celebrity as I have discussed it briefly above.

This new ranking--stars, superstars, icons--helps us believe that we live in interesting times. One of the things celebrities do for us is suggest that in their lives they are fulfilling our fantasies. Modern celebrities, along with their fame, tend to be wealthy or, if not themselves beautiful, able to acquire beautiful lovers. Their celebrity makes them, in the view of many, worthy of worship. "So long as man remains free," Dostoyevsky writes in the Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov, "he strives for nothing so incessantly and painfully as to find someone to worship." If contemporary celebrities are the best thing on offer as living gods for us to worship, this is not good news. I think Epstein is overstating things somewhat here but, I think for millions he is telling it as it is, as it is experienced. The interesting times that we live in, for me, have little to no association with all this media blitzing that has come to occupy the airwaves especially in my pioneering life, decade after decade.

The worshipping of celebrities by the public tends to be thin and, not uncommonly, it is nicely mixed with loathing. People, after all, at least partially, like to see their celebrities as frail, ready at all times to crash and burn. The famous actor, between the wars and after WW2, Cary Grant once warned the then-young director Peter Bogdanovich, who was at the time living with Cybill Sheppard, to stop telling people he was in love. "And above all," Grant warned, "stop telling them you're happy." When Bogdanovich asked why, Cary Grant answered, "Because they're not in love and they're not happy. Just remember, Peter, people do not like beautiful people." Well, Cary, that's partly true but some of those soap-operas have wall-to-wall beautiful people and they are 'liked' by millions, at least they are often watched by millions for many years on end, day after day.

Still, Cary Grant's assertion is borne out by what Epstein calls the grocery press: the National Enquirer, the Star, the Globe, and other variants of the English gutter press. All these tabloids could as easily travel under the generic title of the National Schadenfreude(i.e. taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others), for more than half the stories they contain come under the category of "See How the Mighty Have Fallen." One reads endless accounts of: Oh, my, I see where that bright young television sitcom star, on a drug binge again, had to be taken to a hospital in an ambulance! To think that the handsome movie star has been cheating on his wife all these years--snakes loose in the Garden of Eden, evidently! Did you note that the powerful senator's drinking has caused him to embarrass himself yet again in public? I see where that immensely successful Hollywood couple turn out to have had a child who died of anorexia! Who'd've thought? I discuss this theme in this autobiography in several contexts one of which is the tall-poppy syndrome in Australia where I have lived for nearly forty years.

Along with trying to avoid falling victim to schadenfreude, celebrities, if they are clever, do well to regulate the amount of publicity they allow to cluster around them. And not celebrities alone. Edith Wharton, having published too many stories and essays in a great single rush in various magazines during a concentrated period, feared, as she put it, the danger of becoming "a magazine bore." Celebrities, in the same way, are in danger of becoming publicity bores, though few among them seem to sense it. Because of improperly rationed publicity, along with a substantial helping of self-importance, the comedian Bill Cosby will never again be funny. The actress Elizabeth McGovern said of Sean Penn that he "is brilliant, brilliant at being the kind of reluctant celebrity." At the level of high culture, the novelist Saul Bellow used to work this bit quite well on the literary front, making every interview--and there have been hundreds of them--feel as if given only with the greatest reluctance, if not under actual duress. Others are brilliant at regulating their publicity. Johnny Carson was very intelligent about carefully husbanding his celebrity, choosing not to come out of retirement, except at exactly the right time or when the perfect occasion presented itself. Apparently it never did. Given the universally generous obituary tributes he received, dying now looks, for him, to have been an excellent career move. I don't want to ignore the possibility that I am regulating my publicity and the machine may really get going long after I leave this world, if it ever gets going. If I can play a part in the long-range drama that I have referred to above, I will rejoice, or such is my belief, in worlds wholly and spiritually joyous that will assuredly be mine--or so Bahaullah promises with several riders on His promise.

One has the impression that being a celebrity was easier at any earlier time than it is now, when celebrity-creating institutions, from paparazzi to gutter-press exposés and to television talk-shows, weren't as intense, as full-court press, as they are today. In the Times Literary Supplement, a reviewer of a biography of Margot Fonteyn noted that Miss Fonteyn "was a star from a more respectful age of celebrity when keeping one's distance was still possible." My own candidate for the perfect celebrity in the twentieth century would be Noël Coward, a man in whom talent combined with elegance to give off the glow of glamour--and also a man who would have known how to fend off anyone wishing to investigate his private life. Today, instead of elegant celebrities, we have celebrity criminal trials: Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Martha Stewart, Robert Blake, Winona Ryder, and O.J. Simpson. Schadenfreude is in the saddle again.

Received opinion, at least as I perceive it, has it that in American society and much of society in the West in the twenty-first century, there are only two things highly valued: money and celebrity. Whether or not this is true, vast quantities of money, we know, will buy celebrity. The very rich--John D. Rockefeller and powerful people of his era--used to pay press agents to keep their names out of the papers. But today one of the things money buys is a place at the table beside the celebrated, with the celebrities generally delighted to accommodate, there to share some of the glaring light. An example is Mort Zuckerman, who made an early fortune in real estate, has bought magazines and newspapers, and is now himself among the punditi, offering his largely unexceptional political views on television chat shows. This is merely another way of saying that, whether or not celebrity in and of itself constitutes a culture, it has certainly penetrated and permeated much of American culture generally.

Such has been the reach of celebrity culture in our time that it has long ago entered into academic life. The celebrity professor has been on the scene for more than three decades sinceabout the time that I entered univeristy as a lecturer and tutor. As long ago as 1962, in fact, Epstein says he recalls hearing that Oscar Cargill, in those days a name of some note in the English Department of NYU, had tried to lure the then-young Robert Brustein, a professor of theater and the drama critic for the New Republic, away from Columbia. Cargill had said to Brustein, "I'm not going to bulls--t you, Bob, we're looking for a star, and you're it." Brustein apparently wasn't looking to be placed in a new constellation, and remained at Columbia, at least for a while longer, before moving on to Yale and thence to Harvard.

Genuine scholarship, power of ratiocination glowing brightly in the classroom, is distinctly not what makes an academic celebrity or, if you prefer, superstar. What makes an academic celebrity, for the most part, is exposure, which is ultimately publicity. Exposure can mean appearing in the right extra-academic magazines or journals: the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly; Harper's and the New Republic possibly qualify, as do occasional cameo performances on the op-ed pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post. Having one's face pop up on the right television and radio programs--PBS and NPR certainly, and enough of the right kinds of appearances on C-SPAN--does not hurt. A commercially successful, much-discussed book helps hugely.

One might have assumed that the culture of celebrity was chiefly about show business and the outer edges of the arts, occasionally touching on the academy (there cannot be more than twenty or so academic superstars). But it has also much altered intellectual life generally. The past ten years or so have seen the advent of the "public intellectual." There are good reasons to feel uncomfortable with that adjective "public," which drains away much of the traditional meaning of intellectual. An intellectual is someone who is excited by and lives off and in ideas. An intellectual has traditionally been a person unaffiliated, which is to say someone unbeholden to anything but the power of his or her ideas. Intellectuals used to be freelance, until fifty or so years ago, when jobs in the universities and in journalism began to open up to some among them.

Far from being devoted to ideas for their own sake, the intellectual equivalent of art for art's sake, the so-called public intellectual of our day is usually someone who comments on what is in the news, in the hope of affecting policy, or events, or opinion in line with his own political position, or orientation. He isn't necessarily an intellectual at all, but merely someone who has read a few books, mastered a style, a jargon, and a maven's authoritative tone, and has a clearly demarcated political line.

But even when the public intellectual isn't purely tied to the news, or isn't thoroughly political, what he or she really is, or ought to be called, is a "publicity intellectual." In Richard A. Posner's interesting book Public Intellectuals, intellectuals are in one place ranked by the number of media mentions they or their work have garnered which, if I am correct about publicity being at the heart of the enterprise of the public intellectual, may be crude but is not foolish. Not knowledge, it turns out, but publicity is power.

The most celebrated intellectuals of our day have been those most skillful at gaining publicity for their writing and their pronouncements. Take, as a case very much in point, Susan Sontag. When Susan Sontag died in 2004, her obituary was front-page news in the New York Times, and on the inside of the paper it ran to a full page with five photographs, most of them carefully posed--a variety, it does not seem unfair to call it, of intellectual cheesecake. Will the current prime ministers of England and France when they peg out receive equal space or pictorial coverage? Unlikely, I think. Why did Ms. Sontag, who was, let it be said, in many ways the pure type of the old intellectual--unattached to any institution, earning her living entirely from her ideas as she put them in writing--why did she attract the attention she did?

I don't believe Susan Sontag's celebrity finally had much to do with the power or cogency of her ideas. Her most noteworthy idea was not so much an idea at all but a description of a style, a kind of reverse or anti-style, that went by the name of Camp and that was gay in its impulse. Might it have been her politics? Yes, politics had a lot to do with it, even though when she expressed herself on political subjects, she frequently got things mightily askew: During the Vietnam war she said that "the white race is the cancer of human history." As late as the 1980s, much too late for anyone in the know, she called communism "fascism with a friendly face" (what do you suppose she found so friendly about it?). To cheer up the besieged people of Sarajevo, she brought them a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. She announced in the New Yorker that the killing of 3,000 innocent people on 9/11 was an act that America had brought on itself. As for the writing that originally brought her celebrity, she later came to apologize for Against Interpretation, her most influential single book. I do not know any people who claim to have derived keen pleasure from her fiction. If all this is roughly so, why, then, do you suppose that Susan Sontag was easily the single most celebrated--the greatest celebrity--intellectual of our time?

With the ordinary female professor's face and body, I don't think Ms. Sontag would quite have achieved the same celebrity. Her attractiveness as a young woman had a great deal to do with the extent of her celebrity; and she and her publisher took that (early) physical attractiveness all the way out. From reading Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock's biography Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, one gets a sense of how carefully and relentlessly she was promoted by her publisher, Roger Straus. I do not mean to say that Sontag was unintelligent, or talentless, but Straus, through having her always dramatically photographed, by sending angry letters to the editors of journals where she was ill-reviewed, by bringing out her books with the most careful accompanying orchestration, promoted this often difficult and unrewarding writer into something close to a household name with a face that was ready, so to say, to be Warholed. That Sontag spent her last years with Annie Leibowitz, herself the most successful magazine photographer of our day, seems somehow the most natural thing in the world. Even in the realm of the intellect, celebrities are not born but made, usually very carefully made--as was, indubitably, the celebrity of Susan Sontag.

One of the major themes in Leo Braudy's The Frenzy of Renown is the fame and celebrity of artists, and above all writers. To sketch in a few bare strokes the richly complex story Braudy tells, writers went from serving power (in Rome) to serving God (in early Christendom) to serving patrons (in the eighteenth century) to serving themselves, with a careful eye cocked toward both the contemporary public and posterity (under Romanticism), to serving mammon, to a state of interesting confusion, which is where we are today, with celebrity affecting literature in more and more significant ways.

Writers are supposed to be aristocrats of the spirit, not promoters, hustlers, salesmen for their own work. Securing a larger audience for their work was not thought to be their problem. "Fit audience, though few," in John Milton's phrase, was all right, so long as the few were the most artistically alert, or aesthetically fittest. Picture Lord Byron, Count Tolstoy, or Charles Baudelaire at a lectern at Barnes & Noble, C-SPAN camera turned on, flogging (wonderful word!) his own most recent books. Not possible!

Some superior writers have been very careful caretakers of their careers. In a letter to one of his philosophy professors at Harvard, T.S. Eliot wrote that there were two ways to achieve literary celebrity in London: one was to appear often in a variety of publications; the other to appear seldom but always to make certain to dazzle when one did. Eliot, of course, chose the latter, and it worked smashingly. But he was still counting on gaining his reputation through his actual writing. Now good work alone doesn't quite seem to make it; the publicity catapults need to be hauled into place, the walls of indifference stormed. Some writers have decided to steer shy from publicity altogether: Thomas Pynchon for one, J.D. Salinger for another. But actively seeking publicity was thought for a writer, somehow, vulgar--at least it was until the last few decades.

Edmund Wilson, the famous American literary critic, used to answer requests with a postcard that read:

Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to: Read manuscripts, Write articles or books to order, Make statements for publicity purposes, Do any kind of editorial work, Judge literary contests, Give interviews, Conduct educational courses, Deliver lectures, Give talks or make speeches, Take part in writers congresses, Answer questionnaires, Contribute or take part in symposiums or "panels" of any kind, Contribute manuscripts for sale, Donate copies of his books to Libraries, Autograph books for strangers, Allow his name to be used on letterheads, Supply personal information about himself, Supply photographs of himself, Supply opinions on literary or other subjects.

A fairly impressive list, I'd say. When I was young, Edmund Wilson supplied for me the model of how a literary man ought to carry himself. One of the things I personally found most impressive about his list is that everything Edmund Wilson clearly states he will not do, Joseph Epstein has now done, and more than once, and, like the young woman in the Häagen-Dazs commercial sitting on her couch with an empty carton of ice cream, is likely to do again and again.

I tell myself that I do these various things in the effort to acquire more readers. After all, one of the reasons I write, apart from pleasure in working out the aesthetic problems and moral questions presented by my subjects and in my stories, is to find the best readers. I also want to sell books, to make a few shekels, to please my publisher, to continue to be published in the future in a proper way. Having a high threshold for praise, I also don't in the least mind meeting strangers who tell me that they take some delight in my writing. But, more than all this, I have now come to think that writing away quietly, producing what I hope is good work, isn't any longer quite sufficient in a culture dominated by the boisterous spirit of celebrity. In an increasingly noisy cultural scene, with many voices and media competing for attention, one feels--perhaps incorrectly but nonetheless insistently--the need to make one's own small stir, however pathetic. So, on occasion, I have gone about tooting my own little paper horn, doing book tours, submitting to the comically pompous self-importance of interviews, and doing so many of the other things that Edmund Wilson didn't think twice about refusing to do.

"You're slightly famous, aren't you, Grandpa?" my then eight-year-old granddaughter once said to me. "I am slightly famous, Annabelle," I replied, "except no one quite knows who I am." This hasn't changed much over the years. But of course seeking celebrity in our culture is a mug's game, one you cannot finally hope to win. The only large, lumpy kind of big-time celebrity available, outside movie celebrity, is to be had through appearing fairly regularly on television. I had the merest inkling of this fame when I was walking along one sunny morning in downtown Baltimore, and a red Mazda convertible screeched to a halt, the driver lowered his window, pointed a long index finger at me, hesitated, and finally, the shock of recognition lighting up his face, yelled, "C-SPAN!"

I was recently asked, through email, to write a short piece for a high price for a volume about the city of Chicago. When I agreed to do it, the editor of the volume, who was, I think, young, told me how very pleased she was to have someone as distinguished as I among the volume's contributors. But she did have just one request. Before making things final, she wondered if she might see a sample of my writing. More than forty years in the business, I thought, echoing the character played by Zero Mostel in The Producers, and I'm still wearing the celebrity equivalent of a cardboard belt.

"Every time I think I'm famous," Virgil Thomson said, "I have only to go out into the world." So it is, and so ought it probably to remain for writers, musicians, and visual artists who prefer to consider themselves serious. The comedian Richard Pryor once said that he would deem himself famous when people recognized him, as they recognized Bob Hope and Muhammad Ali, by his captionless caricature. That is certainly one clear criterion for celebrity. But the best criterion I've yet come across holds that you are celebrated, indeed famous, only when a crazy person imagines he is you. It's especially pleasing that the penetrating and prolific author of this remark happens to go by the name of Anonymous.

Joseph Epstein who, as I say, is the source of much of the above, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. An earlier version of this essay was published in "Celebrity Culture," the Spring 2005 issue of The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia (www.virginia.edu/iasc/).

The use of the Bible and religious motifs often serves literary, not mere autobiographical, purposes. Better is an approach to some writer's works that focuses on artistic merit and aesthetic qualities - how are the biblical texts used? In a study of Charlotte BrontŠ's Jane Eyre, Catherine Brown Tkacz reminds us that use of the Bible can have everything to do with art and nothing to do with self-disclosure: An author who has thoroughly assimilated the ideas and images of Christianity, who has gained easy familiarity with the Bible, and who then thinks readily and freely with these materials, animating and embodying them in new ways, may be said to have a Christianized imagination.

THIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY THE REVOLUTION AND MY POETRY

I trust the above remarks by Epstein place this massive autobiography in some context. I'm not sure what context. But let me say that I am at least sensitive to the issues he raises as I write all this stuff about my life, my religion and my society. Perhaps in the months and years ahead I will make some more personal comments on where I come into this great mud-puddle of celebrity and fame if, indeed, I have a place there at all. Since the gradual emergence of civilizations in the several millennia after the neolithic/agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago, the world has been the private preserve of a small leisured class. Almost overnight, in the wake of the universal Revelation of God promised in all the sacred scriptures of the past, people everywhere are awakening to the possiblities in human life. Something that can be truly called humanity is being born. The revolution of our time is one toward a global, unified civilization fit for people to live in and, however long and bloody the process humankind is struggling toward the creation of a world community. This is the widest context for my life and the life of all this focus on fame and celebrity which I have discussed above and which readers can continue to explore in their lives in the decades ahead.

For decades I have faced life in this emerging global society. I was forced by the circumstances of my bipolar disorder to face it or gas myself in the garage. Never having the courage or the stupidity or both to end my life I always lived to see another day--at least thusfar. Ironically, my desire for death lit my life up when I was neither manic nor depressed: and this was most of the time. I write of this polarity in my life in other places and will not dwell on that theme here in these introductory words.

I am not one of those who are lavishly talented, who are endowed by genetics, socialization or cirumstances with immense gifts from the gods. I would never have been a major poet whatever the circumstances. Even if I lived as long as my admired philosopher Goethe or any other long-lived man or woman of fame, I would never have been in their league. In baseball terms I was not even double-A material, just a local boy who did well in the pee-wee league. I have tried to put two things together in my life: whatever talent with which I was endowed and whatever tragedy I had to face. Sometimes I was successful at this and sometimes I wasn't. Goethe and many a person of great talent die of old age which is another way of saying their's was a natural death. What such people often want is more of what they'd spent many years enjoying in life and sometimes describing in their literary works. They just don't want to leave this old world. It is or was just too good a place to leave. That's understandable. Because of their successes they could scarcely complain that life had dealt them a raw-deal or that they had never really arrived on terra firma and experienced its delights, the good things life had to offer. Nor could I complain and I rarely do these days except after midnight when the affects of my medications begin to wear off. I have no problem with the prospect of leaving these terrestrial habitations. Although I have, in overview, in summary, enjoyed my life I would not want to live it again or come back. Reincarnation has never interested me. I would take oblivion over reincarnation any day if that was my basic choice. I would not want to return as a rich man, a wise man, as a tree, a flower or any other living thing: thank you very much.

Most poets lose out when they abandon some overt poetic form in their work. But I was one of the lucky few who gained. At least that was the way I felt after I found the non-poetic form that suited me after more than 30 years of trying to write poetry. By this happy timeI was in my fifties. I don't think this poetic pleasure was due to my ear; my poetry never felt so sound that I could develop a seductively articulated texture of echo over any group of unrhymed lines. I wrote no villanelles and other systematically repetitive forms. Flatness in my poetry and a sense of my repetitiveness are things that many a reader will experience in my work. I have little doubt of this. Anything in my poetic that sounds willed or manufactured to a template probably is. But it is my template and it is written, in the main, to please my ears. One of the main marks of my poetry is its autobiographical aspect, its mild confessionalism. I am asking readers for their interpretation of my experience: I am doing everything I can to bring such an interpretation on. I am trying to say that real life, this part of my life in this particular poem, was like this or that or the other. It was like this and it took place at the same time as that event in history, in society or in my life. This autobiographical emphasis will be a significant part of my immediate poetic appeal, among other possible appeals, if my poetry ever does receive any appeal in the wide wide world.

Perhaps this wide societal appeal will lead to annotated editions of my work for future use in high schools and colleges across the English-speaking world should some publisher feels there is a market for my scribblings. Such a publisher may or may not include footnotes to explain what was once an Australian short-hand for some cultural artefact. The global culture in the generation after next might need to be told what 'a ute' or 'a tip' was, when there were dirt roads or trips to the garbage dump in one of my poems. My poetry might say what the dirt roads or the tips were, and how they sounded through the floor of my vehicle or how they smelled through my ute's open windows. And my poem may not. I have tried to make my poetry easily understood but I am not always successful.

COURAGE

Courage in oneself, saying one has courage, is difficult to do. It is difficult to measure or even identify in oneself. At least I find such an admission to be the case. All I can do is comfort myself that it has become only one of the factors, if indeed it is there in my life at all, in the self-understanding that has come to me before my death in these years of the evening of my life. If valour, whether moral or physical, were the sole criterion for recognition, most of us would have to give up on the idea, and stick with what celebrity we can get. I hasten to add that I haven't quite given up on celebrity or recognition. These things can help with getting one's writing read. Perhaps I would have had a lot more success getting my poems published if I had been able to get my face on television. It always seemed to me that such exposure has helped many a writer. But I sometimes think that being published is like being in love. Rejection in both these cases is often more memorable than acceptance and it often nourished the waters that run underneath one's life in the acquifers of the soul.

MORE ON CELEBRITY AND RECOGNTION

Had I been a television performer I would have become accustomed to being told by confident pundits that I am engaged with a mass audience as the more or less willing victim. In fact, though, the mass audience in TV Land is confined to the studio and usually consists of four cameramen plus two floor-managers and a group of scene-shifters reading magazines. The television audience sits at home and consists of a lot of individuals sometimes referred to as couch-potatoes. The literature that now analyses TV audiences is burgeoning and it is not my intention here to get into these endless and reasoned inquiries about individuals and the mass. A mass I would argue, though, is the last thing a TV audience is. At Nuremberg, when Hitler was on the rampage in the 1930s, his audience was all there in the city square together in one lump: a mass was the first thing that audience was. That mass did not feel inclined to address its operatic-political-phantom. Indeed, it could not. Paraphrasing Goethe's remarks about the lay-out of a Roman amphitheatre Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect, said that an assembly building for the Nazis must be so constructed that a whole people could become ‘impressed with itself'. The audience for this work is also no mass entity. It is a largely unknown set of individuals all over cyberspace. They are individuals who rarely communicate with me but we have many things in common because, in the main, these individuals are Bahais. After nearly sixty years of association with this international Bahai community,a community with a global ethic, it must be said that this autobiography is totally unconnected with a mass audience. Cyberspace brings to me endless fragments, individuals I will never meet and, for the most part, do not want to meet. As I said above, I'm not into the celebrity business. If I have any aim it is a quiet recognition because I know that some people out there on the planet are enjoying reading some of what I write and that what I write is a source of some social good. The revolution that I am engaged in is a quiet one: it is universal, spiritual and significantly out of man's control. My role is but a small part in a big picture and that big picture has a very specific outline and description. It is a Bahai cosmology, a Bahai metaphor, a Bahai view of history and a Bahai sociology and psychology of our times.

Many of the more off-putting aspects of our abundant West arise from its freedoms. The first thing we can be sure of about and in a free society is that it will be teeming and throbbing with things we don't like. We live in a sort of immense Luna Park or Fun Park with thousands of think tanks, universities and other organizations taking care of the serious end of town. We do not inhabit Plato's Republic or a Bahai golden age. Artists, Everyday man and we Bahais should be grateful that we have been given such variety to be creative about. There have been, and there may always be, plenty of despots ready to give us a lot less. One could very well say: " Welcome to the crazy house." One could also say: "Take deep satisfaction from the advances of society in our age." It is only too apparent that we are going to have to reinforce the foundations of our society as the edifice of society shakes with the urgent vigour of its productivity and with the tempests that sometimes feel like they are tearing the world apart. This reinforcing process, though, might be difficult to do. The process of reinforcing society could be seen much like the process of getting new reinforcing rods into concrete while that concrete is being squeezed from within by the expansive oxidation of the old ones.

Recognition is just such a reinforcing rod. Unequivocally, recognition is a proper aim in life. Although recognition is obviously a worthy personal goal it often catches its votaries unawares. To be recognized means to be reassured that you were right to pursue a course that often had no immediate rewards. That same course may also have got in the road of activities that do have such rewards. Poetry is something I have given at least part of my life to: a fact on which I once upon a time preened myself, at least in private. It's rewards were inner ones and not social/external ones. When a Roman general returning from his conquests abroad was awarded what the Romans called 'a triumph', a special herald rode in the chariot with him through the cheering city to whisper in his ear and remind him that he was made of dust and shadows. The occasional general no doubt said to that herald beside him: "Bugger off, I've had this coming for years." In my case, though, I have had no triumph; I do not expect one and, if it came my way, it would only interest me if that triumph was able to exalt this Cause in the process and magnify its international community at the same time. I feel little to no need of any formal and public recogntion in these middle years of my late adulthood with enough recognition under my belt for a lifetime. And the inner rewards are sufficient unto themselves.

THIS EPIC WORK

The document above, below and elsewhere is a necessary abridgement of a narrative work of 2600 pages; it has been truncated here to fit into the small space for this document at Bahai Library Online. This document is both an outline and a curtailment of an epic-opus, an abbreviated, a compressed, a boiled down, a potted, a shorn, a mown, a more compact version of my larger epic-work. This abridgement of the 7th edition of my autobiography will include changes in the months ahead. When a significant number of changes are made an 8th edition will be brought out. It is my hope, although I cannot guarantee, that this brief exposure here will give readers a taste, a desire, for more. The inclusion of quotation marks, apostrophes and accents has often proved difficult as have the addition of footnotes. Hopefully this will be remedied at a later date. I should add before opening with volume five of this work that it is in need of an editing pen--one that it does notlook like getting while I am alive and while this work remains only on the internet and not in a hard or softcover.

Like the first and the second Parts of this memoir, of what may eventually be a several-book set of this burgeoning multi-genred autobiography, this Part 3 will seem to many readers as a text that looks and handles like a doorstop from Valhalla, as Clive James described the 2nd volume of George Bernard Shaw's correspondence(CliveJames.com). Nearly a thousand pages is found here in Part 3, most of them I like to think unskippable: the reader must forge on in the spirit(I also like to think) of a kind of despairing delight, overwhelmed by the abundance and vitality of what is on offer and secretly grateful that he knows only as a statistic what I know for a fact; namely, that the complete set of this work with all the genres included will contain perhaps 40 or 50 volumes of writings and communications which I actually wrote. Perhaps that reader can be grateful that the complete set of volumes of my writing may never see the light of day saving, to the delight of conservationists, an immense number of trees; to that reader's delight he may save a good deal of money that he might have spent without an intellectual payoff, so to speak and saving as well the mental effort he would have had to exercise to read the works in the first place. Inshalla

I continually pose many questions in this memoir. One such question is where my creative identity is located, where it was born, its quality and purpose. The answer can be found by both readers and by myself when we look far enough back. The multiple activities of my life, its career, its interests, its wins and losses, are all anchored, or so it seems to me in retrospect, in my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood my growing up years and the first years when "I growed up." I must voice a certain cautionary note, though, insofar as creativity is concerned. The poet and polymath Paul Valéry once said that the word 'creation' has been so overused that even God must be embarrassed to have it attributed to him.

VOLUME FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
(Part 1)

The relative success of my poetry and essays may also have something to do with the diminishing national attention span and the pervasive spread of mediums which keep people's eyes busier than their minds--or so we are so often told. These days one sees a novel of four hundred pages, sighs, and says, "There goes a week of my reading life." In my case how could this five volume autobiography ever really make it? Still, as I approach the end of this somewhat rambling autobiography, the inclusion of the following essay seemed perfectly appropriate. So much of my life has been a 'life-in-community' that I thought I would give some of the last words on the subject to that brilliant tactician of the personal and interpersonal, 'Abdul-Baha, who survived a most difficult community and advised us on how to live in community in our time. As our own communties have been, are and will be challenges for us to live in this analysis of some of 'Abdu'l-Bahás final words before He passed away several years later will be timely. This section of my autobiography, then, will deal with biography, ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's treatment of the subject and, then, a few brief notes of mine.

"A Study in Community," Pioneering Over Four Epochs," 2003.

"With penetrating detail, crisp style and emphasis on the compression of facts; with vivid images, usually not more than three or four pages, with a concision of explanation or commentary, with a specific point of view, a style of biography has continued from classical times into the twentieth century. This is biography in miniature. It has a certain bias toward the person over the event, toward art as smallness of scale, toward structuring the confusions of daily life into patterns of continuity and process. There is a broad intent to sustain an interpretation or characterisation with facts teased, coloured, given life by a certain presentation and appraisal. Facts about the past are no more history than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are an omelette. They must be whipped up and played with in a certain fashion." -Ron Price with appreciation to Ira Bruce Nadel, "Biography as Institution," Biography, Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984, pp.13-66.

Nadel, whom I quote in the opening passage of this essay, goes on to say that the "recreation of a life in words is one of the most beautiful and difficult tasks a literary artist can perform."       Freud said the recreation of a life, the getting at the truth of a life, can not be done; and if someone does do it, as inevitably biographers try, the result is not useful to us. People have been trying to write about the lives of others for millennia and, even if Freud is right, they will probably go on doing it anyway. ‘Abdu'l-Bahá gives the exercise a parting shot, to put it colloquially, in the evening of his life, when He was in His early seventies. His work, Memorials of the Faithful, is squarely in the tradition Nadel describes above: commemorative, didactic, ethical, psychological. His is a work of art as well as information, a work of pleasure as well as truth. His is a work of selection, as biography must be if the reader is not to be snowed in a mountain of useless detail. He unravels the complexities of seventy-seven lives and in doing so he answers Virginia Woolf's questions: ‘My God, how does one write a biography?' and ‘What is a life?' If one can not answer these questions, Woolf wrote, then one can hardly write a biography.

The act of reading Memorials of the Faithful is an opportunity to see how ‘Abdu'l-Bahá answers Virginia Woolf's seminal questions about life, how He answers them again and again in the more than six-dozen of His biographies in miniature. Biographers and autobiographers arguably have one freedom, a freedom that overrides the genetic and social forces that determine so much of human life. It is the freedom to tell the story, the narrative, the freedom to explain a life, any life, even one's own life to themselves and others the way they desire. This freedom is part of that active force of will that ‘Abdu'l-Bahá wrote, in his pithy summation of the historico-philosophical issue of ‘freewill and determinism,' is at the centre of all our lives.

Of course, it is incontrovertible that what has happened in a life has happened. There is no going back to change any one of the events, decisions or results. Life bears the stigmata of finality in a certain sense. There has been a relentless succession of facts, at once inflexible and in some ways arbitrary. All story-tellers are slaves to these facts, if their story is to enjoy the imprimatur of truth.

Charles Baudelair once wrote that a biography "must be written from an exclusive point of view, but from the point of view which opens up the greatest number of horizons." There are many ways in which one could define the point of view in this subtle and deceptively simple book. The point of view is that of a lover of Bahá'u'lláh, one who wants to be near Bahá'u'lláh, one who wants to serve Bahá'u'lláh. The point of view is really quite exclusive. All the men and women in this biographical pot-pourri were lovers of the Manifestation of God, the most precious Being ever to walk on this earth, or so they believed, and they all had some relationship with Him during the forty year period of His ministry: 1852-1892.

Restlessness is a dominant theme, a strong characteristic, in the lives of many people 'Abdu'l-Bahá describes. They 'could not stay quiet', 'had no rest', were amazingly energetic', 'awakened to restless life', 'plagued by yearning love'. Nabil of Qa'in was 'restless, had no caution, patience or reserve'. Shah Muhammad-Amin "had no peace" because of the love that smouldered in his heart and because he "was continually in flight'. This restlessness 'Abdu'l-Bahá sets down among a galaxy of other qualities and a multitude of other people. Some of the most outstanding believers had this restlessness. Tahirih was 'restless and could not be still'.

Quietness is also valued highly. One does not have to be a great talker to attract the attention of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Quietness also has its place in Bahá'í community life. There are people who are 'inclined to solitude' and keep 'silent at all times'. They possess an 'inner calm'. They are souls 'at rest'.

The gregarious types and the type who keeps to himself are part of this quintessential dichotomy, a dichotomy that was as much a part of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's world as it is our own, although there seem to be a slight preponderence, a dominance, of the gregarious person. Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad both kept to themselves and "away from friend and stranger alike". Mirza Muham- mad-Quli "mostly...kept silent". He kept company with no one and stayed by himself most of the time, alone in his small refuge". The more sociable type, like Haji 'Abdu'llah Najaf-Abadi "spent his days in friendly association with the other believers." Ismu'llahu'l-Asdaq "taught cheer- fully and with gaiety". "How wonderful was the talk,"says 'Abdu'l-Bahá of Nabil of Qa'in, "how attractive his society".

There are all of the archtypes that the various personality theorists have given us in this century. In addition to Jung's introvert and extrovert, there is the artist, the suffering artist-soul within us all, Mishkin-Qalam. He survives in all his seriousness, as we might, with humour. There are the types who William James describes in his Varieties of Religious Experience: the personality constitutionally weighted on the side of cheer and its opposite, the somber, more reflective even melancholic type. The two carpenters, Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad were examples of the former. The examples we find of the latter were often the result of the many difficulties these lovers of Bahaullah were subjected to and it wore them "to the bone."

‘Abdu'l-Bahá addresses all of us, all of us on our journeys while He describes many of those He came to know in His life. For He is describing not only the lives of these men and women in the nineteenth century, He is describing us in our time. He is addressing us on our own travels. He addresses the restlessness in us all. He speaks to us in our victory and our loss. He speaks about what Michael Polanyi calls the tacit dimension, the silent root of human life, which is difficult to tap in biographies, the inner person. This private, this inner person, is the one whom He writes about for the most part. He sets this inner life in a rich contextualization, a socio-historical matrix. He describes many pilgrimages and you and I are left to construct our own. We all must shape and define our own life. Is it aesthetically pleasing? Intellectually provocative? Spiritually challenging? ‘Abdu'l-Bahá shapes and defines these lives given the raw-data of their everydayness added up, added up over their lives as He saw them. How would He shape my life? Yours? How would we look in a contemporary anthology of existences with ‘Abdu'l-Bahá as the choreographer and the history of our days as the mise en scene?

Some of the lives of the obscure, the ordinary and representative members of the Bahai community are recovered for history and for much more. Their private aspirations and their world achivements, their public images and their private romances, their eventual successes and their thwarted attempts are lifted onto the pages of a type of Bahá'í scripture. 'Abdu'l-Bahá is setting the stage, the theatre, the home, in these pages, for all of humanity. The extrovert is here, the introvert, those that seem predisposed to cheerfulness and those who seem more melancholy by nature. All the human dichotomies are here, at least all that I have come across in my own journey. They are the characters which are part and parcel of life in all ages and centuries, all nations and states, past, present and, more importantly, future. Here is, as one writer put it, the rag-and-bone-shop, the lineaments of universal human life, the text and texture of community as we all experience it in the crucible of interaction. It is somewhat ironic that the host of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's contemporaries that we find here were resurrected and for us, found, at a time when the lost generation between 1914 and 1918—were getting lost in the trenches of Europe.

Memorials of the Faithful is what might well be this age's Canterbury Tales, that compendium of personalities who exemplify, as William Blake once put it, "the eternal principles that exist in all ages." We get a Writer Who delights in other people but Who has an active and incisive mind, a practicality that He brings to bear on what are often difficult personalities. He dwells only on the essentials; His purpose is inveterate; His feelings sincere and intense; they never relax or grow vapid during His cursory analyses. He is exquisitely tender, but clearly wily and tough to survive in the burly-burly life of exile, prison and the unbelievable difficulties He had to bear along life's tortuous path.

Interest in biographies of Bahá'ís in the 19th century Iranian Bahá'í community is not exactly a booming business these days. But that time will come sensibly and insensibly in the decades ahead as this new world Faith comes to play a critical part in the unification of the planet. ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's work is more than a little prescient.

The heroic age was coming to a close when ‘Abdu'l-Bahá put His pen to paper; and it was over by the time the Haifa Spiritual Assembly published this His final book. A remanant remained, Bahá'u'lláh's sister, the Greatest Holy Leaf who died in 1932. ‘Abdu'l-Bahá had played a prominent role in the epic that was the heroic age. He played a dominant role in writing that epic's story. Memorials of the Faithful is an important part of that epic. This epic tradition was not essentially oral but quintessentially written: a written tradition par excellence. Since The Growth of Literature by the Chadwicks(1924-1926) the heroic epic has been seen in literature's epic studies "as a cultural rather than a literary phenomenon." The Bahá'í epic has grown out of a complex and fascinating set of cultural conditions. Indeed ‘Abdu'l Baha's work has contributed to the resolution of problems involving the relationship, the transition, between oral narrative and written text. But this relationship is a question to occupy epic enthusiasts and is not our principle concern here.

Within three to four months of completing this last of His books, ‘Abdu'l-Bahá had begun His Tablets of the Divine Plan , the action station within which the community He was addressing could put into practice all the good advice He had given it in His Memorials of the Faithful. Like The Will and Testament, though, it may take a century or more to grasp the implications of this surprisingly subtle and, deceptively simple, book.

In the next two decades we shall see the end of the first century of the Formative Age. Perhaps the time has come to begin to seriously grasp the implications of these shining pages from ‘Abdu-l-Baha and His interpretive genius.

We do not know much about the circumstances of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's writing, at least I don't. Some writers we know, like Beethoven, are intensely physical people who seem to fight their thoughts onto the page, splattering the ink, breaking nibs, even ripping the paper in the process. Beethoven had none of the serene penmanship of a Bach or the hasty perfection of Mozart or the quasi-mathematical constructs of Webern. But we do know some things. We know, for example, that ‘Abdu'l-Bahá often worked all night with a large part of the night devoted to prayer and meditation. It was then He did His writing; He was too busy to scribble down things in the daytime as some writers do. He had a short sleep after lunch. After writing one of the biographies he would often read or tell the story at one of the meetings in the next few days. Now, we can read them in a book or access them on the internet, in very readable English, in authorized translations. Gone is the Persian and Arabic in which He wrote; gone is ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's innimitable script or that of one of His secretaries. Having flashed onto the screen with the speed of light or into the book in some electronic form with every character proportional, every paragraph in alignment, these words, written six years before His passing, are now free to penetrate our own lives as the lives He wrote about penetrated His.

FOOTNOTES AND CHAUCER

The material on Chaucer that follows was obtained from Derek Pearsall's The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, pp. chapter 6. The following is not a quotation.-Ron Price, Tasmania

The whole organization of Chaucer's narrative is in the historical lattice-work of a world of ecclesiastical routines and needs. 'Abdu'l-Bahás narrative, played as it is in the lives of seventy-seven souls, exists in the interstices of lives transformed by a manifestation of God. Instead of the ubiquity of the Christian Faith and its practices we have a new religion emerging in the soil of people's lives. Both books give us a narrative of faith. Women are dominant in Chaucer and men in Memorials of the Faithful. Both books provide us with a spiritual journey. There is a gusto and carnivalesque spirit, a contempt for marriage and sexual urges, in Chaucer while none of this is to be found in 'Abdu'l-Bahás work. There is no sense of social and moral commitment in Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's London is a turbulent and dangerous place; so too in 'Abdu'l-Bahás world. He writes of the domestic world rather than the politics of power. Both men possess a remarkable acuteness of observation; there is little of the sense of outrage. Chaucer makes a magpie-like raid on scholarly texts, perhaps more from conversations. The pilgrims are infinitely various. The sense of dramatic vitality is so strong the temptation to read the tales as principally an expression of the characters of their tellers is strong.

Chaucer is a self-concealing and evasive character. This father of English poetry is a figure who eludes the biographer's grasp even more fully than Shakespeare. There are no private letters or journals, no anecdotal reminiscences of friends, and precious few autobiographical clues in the poems themselves. The tools for understanding Chaucer are literary history, philology and the history of patronage and court politics in the 14th century. These disciplines need to be part of a biographer's strong suit if he or she is to excel in their recreation of Chaucer's life. In dealing with the life of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá none of these problems exist for the biographer.

Chaucer's audience in the imagination is "a miscellaneous company, of lettered London men, to be appropriately scandalized and delighted by the Wife of Bath and the fabliaux, flattered by the invitation to share in a gentleman scholar's easily carried burden of learning and intrigued by the novel expose of London low life in the Cook's Tale. The audience is, probably exclusively an audience of men. ‘‘Abdu'l-Bahá has no audience until 1928 more than a decade after He has finished writing the book.

A mission to Genoa and Florence on the king's service in the early 1370s was especially important for Chaucer's poetic development because it gave him the opportunity to discover the riches of Italian literature. Fifteen years later he began writing The Canterbury Tales his maturer reflections upon the life of men and women in society and in the Christian faith. They were written in the last dozen years of his life, 1387-1400. He was almost entirely occupied with writing 'The Canterbury Tales' in these last years.

For Chaucer poetry was an accomplishment and a vehicle for self-display, a means for his advancement at court rather than an activity of his profession. His poetry benefited his career and vice-versa: his earlier works, coinciding with his French connections, were influenced by French poetry, notably the great allegorical love vision of the Roman de la Rose, while his middle period, inspired by the Italian journey, was dominated by his version of the Troilus and Cressida story, written in imitation of Boccaccio's treatment of the same subject.

He refrained from direct allusion to public events and it is difficult, unsafe, to make any deductions about specific connections between his life, his works and the events of the time. Some scholars prefer to see his work as chaotic and inexplicable.

The comparisons and contrasts with the work of 'Abdu'l-Bahá make a fascinating study to those interested in both Chaucer and the Bahai Faith. But even those who hold no particular interest in Chaucer can find the contrasts and comparisons valuable in helping them understand the work of this Central Figure of the Bahai Faith writing as He was at the very beginning of the Lesser Peace and the new Age the world was entering in all its tragic swiftness, amazing perplexity and fascinating juxtapositions.

In my more than fifty years of pioneering and nearly sixty involved as I have been in the Bahai community, I find this seminal work of 'Abdu'l-Bahás absolutely crucial in my attempt to understand and deal with the complexities and problems that arise in Bahai community life. It is as if 'Abdu'l-Bahá has given me the Bahai community in microcosm. Although He wrote the book nearly a century ago, it speaks to me about my life and so I pass the dialogue I have had with this book to you, dear reader.....and a final word on Chaucer….

NO STRUGGLE TO INVENT

Chaucer had a simplicity and directness of style. He was able to step into a child's mind and an adult's; indeed, he could take on the life, the mood and the personality of anyone or anything he knew or could know. That is the basis of the vividness, the individuality of his characters. He pleads authenticity, faithfulness to actual life and speech. -Ron Price with thanks to Collier's Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.

Oh Father of English poetry-
the King's English-when English
was finding its East Midland dialect
and first being used in Parliament,
some six hundred years ago1, whose
poetry was in the language of the man-
in-the-street, with simplicity, naturalness,
freshness and vitality—which we have
recently rediscovered in our time and
which I strive for in my poems and in
what I write of history and character in
my pioneering tale, pilgrimage-like across the
world, painting some realistic portraiture, with
no struggle to invent, only to suit my purpose.

1George H. McKnight, The Evolution of the English Language: From Chaucer to the Twentieth Century Dover Publications Inc., NY, 1968(1928), p. 18.—25/5/97.

VOLUME 5
CHAPTER 6
(Part 2)
INTRODUCTION TO SECTION IV OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

"BIOGRAPHIES"

It is fitting that the following short descriptions of my efforts at biography should be preceded by an analysis of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's biographies. Twenty-eight years ago now, in 1981, I took my first excursions into writing biography. I had, of course, written little pieces for my students since the beginning of my teaching career in 1967. Those excursions beginning in 1981, though, became part of, first, The History of the Bahá'í Faith in Tasmania: 1924-80 and; second, The History of the Bahai Faith in the Northern Territory: 1947-1997. The short biographies I wrote in the 1980s and 1990s are, for the most part, now in the archives of the Bahai Councils for Tasmania and the NT. Some of these short sketches of human personality are in a file I keep in my study, a file which has increased in size since it was first created in the early 1990s, but this increase is due to the resource, the source, material I have added to the file not more biographies themselves.

Some of the sketches I wrote in those two decades are on the internet at the site bahai-library.org. They have all become part of a larger work Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Section IV. But they will not be included here in this edition of my autobiography which I am posting on the internet since the people I have written about are, for the most part, still living.

In addition, the notes in this file on the subject of biography, which I began to collect sixteen years ago in 1993, have begun to assume a far greater extent, a wider ambit than was initially planned due to the plentiful resources on the subject of biography available on the Internet. Perhaps, in time, I may write more biographical material, hopefully material in greater depth of expression than I have done thusfar and hopefully from a more fertile base than I have been able to discover in my first attempts in the 1980s and the 1990s.

Whatever biographies I write, they will in time be part of Section IV of my larger work, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. This biography file has, as I say, developed into a more substantial resource in recent years and a brief examination of its table of contents will show the range of relevant sub-topics. This biographical interest provides some balance, although I must confess very little so far, to all the autobiographical material I have collected in other files; perhaps, too, readers will also find in them some balance and help avoid any impression of my narcissistic tendencies which critics may be inclined to dwell upon. As I say, hopefully, this material may prove useful in my efforts to write biographies in the years ahead as part of Section IV of my autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs. --3/3/06.

Beginning in 1993, after living in Perth for five years and after more than 30 years in the pioneering field, I began making notes on people I knew. For various reasons I found the experience unsatisfactory and, by 1997, I had discontinued the process. It was my second effort at writing biography, the first being a similar period of four years in Katherine. These latter notes are found in the several volumes of writing on 'The History of the Bahai Faith in the N.T. and the Northwest of WA.:Vol.2 Part 1.' I also wrote a few short biographies in 2000 to 2002 when finalizing that same history.

After some 20 years of occasional efforts at writing biography, I had the experience Anthony Trollope and Henry James had with their efforts.1 They became disenchanted with the process. Limited to historical narrative they became bored even dismayed by the exercise. My essential problem was that I hardly knew any of the individuals well enough to chart their biographies. The exercise of delving into historical documents involving those who were dead or having extended conversations with individuals who were still living, I realized was beyond my interest, my enthusiasm and, perhaps, my ability. After the initial sketches I had drawn in the years 1981 to 2001 I simply ran out of details to extend my accounts. -Ron Price with thanks to Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984, pp. 137-8, 8/7/03.

BIOGRAPHY: A BRIEF ANALYSIS

In writing biography and autobiography one is confronted with a number of questions: what is its place in history? Is it simply a sort of sophisticated entertainment, a bedside companion better handed over to novelists? Is it a scholarly pursuit in itself? Is it a generator of cases to help us explain, in this case, aspects of the psychology, sociology or philosophy of religion? Is it a window through which we can learn to tackle existential questions in life, through which we can identify ourselves with others, come to understand ourselves emotionally and intellectually and help change and create ourselves?

The approach I take to both autobiography and biography is that these genres can help us reorient ourselves, our familiar ways of looking at things in unfamiliar terms, by the power of a certain strangeness. The exercise may also help us to become the new human beings we would like to be. There is, as Michael Polanyi emphasizes, a private, tacit passion at the root of much in life. It is a passion that is difficult to explore in an individual's life, is tinged with the personal, keeps the world at a distance and can often be seen chiefly only in the written works of the person. The ‘real individual', the unique self, the argument goes, can only be seen in what he or she writes.

James Wood writes in the Guardian about English writer Martin Amis's book Experience: "it is an escape from memoir; indeed, an escape into privacy." Although the book seems at first glance to be exhibitionistic in reality, Wood emphasizes, it is a retreat into the provinces of himself." And so is this true of my work, or so it seems to me. My work does not vibrate with an atmosphere of wounded privacy as much autobiography does.

Some analysts of the written word argue that it is of no help to the reader to understand the state of mind, the personal life, of the writer concerned. Still others see the individual only in a socio-historical context, as the product of their times, as part of a sociological discourse or matrix, a rich contextualization, a historical situatedness. The historian, Wilhelm Dilthey saw it the other way around: individuals construct their own society and, therefore, each person, each writer, lives in a different society even if, ostensibly, in reality, they occupy the same territorial space.

The implications of the post-structuralist thinking and the deconstructionists is that the subject matter, the person, is a product of language, a language construct, a product of the text and its incarnated vocabularies. Any attempt at a unitary identity, at any definition of a self, is a simple error since the self is constantly shaped by forces of ideology, changing its representation with each situation it faces. This view of the self makes the view of the coherence of the person---a myth. In reality the self is a discontinuity, beyond documentation, essentially unknowable in its many variations, unrecoverable. The best thing to do is to avoid trying to construct a narrative line, a central focus. Given the slipperiness of language, language's need to create non-referential figures to construct the self, no real, individual 'face' is possible.

Of course, this was not the view of Virginia Woolf who argued in her Collected Essays, Vol.4 that the age of biography had just begun. Woolf wrote this at the start of the Formative Age in Bahá'í history in the 1920s aware as she was of the writings of famous historians and biographers like Plutarch and Thucydides in previous ages. Woolf would have agreed with Nadel that "the recreation of a life in words is one of the most beautiful and difficult tasks a literary artist can perform."1 Part of this beauty and part of this difficulty is the fact that these qualities are rooted in individual difference and idiosyncrasy, as A.L. Rowse emphasizes in his study of Matthew Arnold.2

Such are some of my thoughts on biography in these first years of my retirement. I have for the most part lost my interest in writing biography after 3 periods, 3 attempts in the last 20 years. –Ron Price with thanks to 1 Ira Nadel, op.cit., p.152 and 2A.L. Rowse, Matthew Arnold: Poet and Prophet, Thames and Hudson, London, 1976, p.160. –2002.

BAHA'I BIOGRAPHY: AFTER 15 YEARS OF THINKING ABOUT IT:1981-1996

Autobiography is the unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people. -Oscar Wilde in The Oxford Book of Quotations, John Gross, OUP, 1983.

As he worked at the Decline and Fall, Gibbon became convinced that the true character of men was so complex and elusive that it could be only tentatively described....If even a contemporary could not unravel the complexities of character, what could a historian hope for?.....Gibbon became increasingly reticent about judging character and motivation. Gibbon presents history as preeminently a construction, a literary work with aesthetic rather than systematic order and coherence. -David P. Jordan, Gibbon and His Roman Empire, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1971, p.5.

Whoever turns biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to embellishments…..for biographical truth is not to be had and, even if one had it, one could not use it."-Sigmund Freud in Freud: A Life For Our Time, Peter Gay, WW Norton & Co., NY, 1988, pp. xv-xvi.

This is an anthology of existences. Readers will find here lives of a few lines, of a few pages, more than a few pages on occasion. Readers will find adventures gathered together in a handful or several handfuls of words. There is such a contraction of things in the process of writing about these lives that one does not know whether the intensity which traverses them is due more to the vividness of the words or to the violence of the facts which jostle about in them. There is a series of singular lives here, created through I know not what accidents of life what strange poems. This is what I wanted to gather together and this is what I got in a sort of literary herbarium. -Werner Sollors, editor, Book's Name Is Unknown, Oxford University Press, 1989, p.155.

Some time in 1981, as accurately as I can estimate after the evolution of fifteen years, I began to write the history of the Tasmanian Bahá'í community. It was the first such exercise in Tasmania and in my own life, as far I know. I also started to write poetry about that time. The first poem I have in my collection was written in August 1980. On 23 July 1982 I left Tasmania and arrived in Katherine. I immediately set about collecting materials for a history of the Bahá'í Faith in the Northern Territory. I also continued writing a few poems from year to year. I collected great quantities of information and made brief biographies as part of a narrative history. I have since sent all the material, all of my writing, to the Bahai Council of the NT or the, then, RTC of Tasmania.

As I point out in the introductory biographical sketches, pieces written over the last two years(1994-1996), I have not had much success in writing Bahá'í biography. I did write many short pieces and had each person's agreement to the piece I wrote about them. It is a sensitive exercise this biography business. I take some comfort in reading about Edward Gibbon's reticence about judging character and motivation. To him, people, like history, were constructions, significantly his constructions. What he did was attempt to unravel the complexities of character, however elusive they might be. He did this en passant, as he composed his history of the Decline and Fall. I do my writing about individuals en passant, as I compose my Pioneering Over Four Epochs.

In a book whose name is now lost to me, Werner Sollors refers to pieces of biography as "an anthology of existences...a few lines or a few pages...gathered together in a handful of words..." That is certainly the simplest characterization of a process I have scarcely begun in these fifteen years. The annotation to my collection of twenty-five years of letters collected while in Australia(1971-1996), has yielded little fertility, as far as biography is concerned. I hope in the coming years, the last half of the second decade of my effort to write biographical material, that I will have more success than the meagre twenty pages I have thusfar accumulated and whatever additional pages are currently housed in the archives of an LSA and a RTC. -1997

NOTE ON AUTO/BIOGRAPHY

Montaigne says, in discussing human changeability, "He that would judge of a man in detail and distinctly, bit by bit, would oftener be able to speak the truth."(Second Book of Essays, p.1) It is difficult, he goes on, to find men who have "formed their lives to one certain and constant course, which is the principle design of wisdom." Vice, he argues, is essentially irregularity, lack of constancy. My mood swings give to my life a lack of constancy that is with me even now from morning to night. Since the age of eighteen, I have been a teacher of the Bahai cause to the best of my ability. This is one of the constants in my life, although aspects of my work for this Cause have been sporadic. Service on LSAs, for example, I have found to be an exercise that changes from year to year. My role on the LSAs of Windsor, Whyalla and Belmont in 1967, 1972 and 1988, respectively portrayed very different Ron Prices at the age of 23, 28 and 44 respectively. One would need a profile over a whole life to get an accurate picture of this soul's service on local spiritual assemblies--or anyone else's for that matter. Unable to do this I have, for now, discontinued writing biography. Leslie Stephen says that "reading a biography often leaves one pretty much in the dark as to the person biographised."(1) I can understand why. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)Leslie Stephen, Biography.–June 1996(ca

YET ANOTHER INTRODUCTION TO BIOGRAPHIES:

When I first came to Perth in 1987-8 I began a series of biographical sketches. By 1992 I had ceased making these sketches. I took up the pen again in 1993 writing sketches of Bahá'ís in Perth, but I ceased this exercise in 1996/7. On May 17th 1991 I sent three volumes of notes to the Darwin LSA and ceased any work on the "History of the Bahá'í Faith in the NT and Northwest Australia". That effort had contained a good deal of biographical material I had written from 1982 to 1987. About one decade, then, of biographical work came to an end in that Holy year.

There were several reasons for this: (i) the response to what I had written seemed so far from enthusiastic as to be possibly detrimental to the Cause, in spite of the best of British intentions; (ii) my new interest in autobiography, essays and poetry, emerging clearly by 1992 and (iii) the difficulty of getting material from the people I did get to know in Perth. There seemed to be a positive disinclination on the part of most people I met to have anything about them written at all. Over the first five years in Perth I wrote approximately ten pages of material on several people I had got to know.

I began collecting notes and photocopies of information about biographies and, by early 1996, I had collected some sixty pages of interesting resource material. Biographies began appearing, about the time I began writing extensively in the early 1980s: in the Bahá'í community. I was not interested in taking on any serious book-length exercise, but I was interested in writing short character sketches. Most of what I was reading about biography applied to major studies.

Like Andre Maurois, perhaps the world's greatest biographer thusfar, I was searching for the formula for the short character sketch. Perhaps I should read collections of essays. I have and I will. In the meantime some of the literature on biography is useful to me in defining my perspectives. J.A. Symonds, for example, says there is an "undefinable flavour of personality...which repels or attracts, and is at the very root of love or dislike.(Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol.2, The Hogarth Press, London, 1967, p.273) Virginia Woolf says we get glimpses of that personality, but never really find it. The vast majority of lives remain nameless and traceless to history, she goes on.(p.221)

She traces a brief history of biography, but it is not my intention to review that history here. I think I have, to some extent, achieved in some of the sketches I have written, the intensity of poetry and something of the excitement of drama in the context of fact. Perhaps I will rediscover this process in future efforts. I am only at the beginning of my efforts, as biography itself, as Woolf points out, is only at the beginning of its journey. I shall strive, in the years ahead, to make some good mini-biography, if that is an appropriate term for my end products, my outlines, sketches, my fertile facts, my creative facts. Perhaps something can live on in the depths of the mind, some bright scene, some startling recognition. Perhaps something useful, significant, can be found; perhaps, like Boswell, I can invest the ordinary facts with "a kind of hyperactuality and heightened import." (Wimsatt, Images of Samuel Johnson, p.359)

Perhaps a man should not live longer than what he can meaningfully record; like a farmer, he should plant only what he can gather in. Writing biographies can give me another feather in my bow, so to speak. Thusfar, the initial enthusiasm has become a laborious drudgery and so I have discontinued the exercise of writing biography. I am so disinclined to participate in much social intercourse that it is not surprising that writing biographies does not take place. I felt a strong affinity to Nathaniel Hawthorne and particularly the description of his life in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vol. XV(p.61). Here George B. Loring discusses Hawthorne's anti-social proclivities which may be a useful basis for novel writing but not necessarily for biography writing.

A third period of biographical writing followed in the early years of the new millennium, 2000-2001, as I put the finishing touches on The History of the Bahá'í Faith in the NT: 1947-1997. When this task was complete my interest in writing biography ceased again, although I still studied the subject and kept notes on the genre. Biography was a challenge to both my reason and imagination. It called for attack. I really had to pounce on it, fasten my teeth in its gristle, worry it and drag it around in circles if I wanted to come out on top. This I had no desire to do. The sense of attack never entered my being after some early wrestling in the 1980s and 1990s. I had pounced on it for three short periods, grabbed it with my reason and imagination and dragged it around. Perhaps one day I'll get it between my teeth again when the need or the desire arises. Perhaps next time I'll really get on top of it; at the moment, though, I'm not holding my breath. Indeed, one of the many lessons that writing biography, poetry and narrative has taught me over the last two decades is that no literary or poetic expression, be it epic, lyric, narrative or something that falls in between them, can exist in any meaningful way without a receptive community. And I do not have the skills or the interest to write biography that will have a significant appeal.--10/1/97—5/3/06.

VOLUME 5
CHAPTER 6

One of the most famous of poets during these four epochs, and especially in the last two, beginning, say, in the 1980s, was John Ashbery. In 1995 he was referred to as an "essentially ruminative poet." He turned a few subjects over and over in the wider perspective of a mythology of self. This could very easily describe my own work but I aim to have my work yield meanings; whereas, Ashbery's poetry seems to militate against the very possibility of articulating them. Although Ashbery turns a few subjects over and over readers have difficulty finding any unifying principles, any particular tactics, figures or concerns in his poetic output. As poetry critic Helen Vendler has remarked, "it is popularly believed, with some reason, that Ashbery's style itself is impenetrable, that it is impossible to say what an Ashbery poem is about."

As one critic argues: "What is at stake in the criticism of Ashbery is the meaning and status of what it is to be 'American.' One could very well frame the meaning and status of my work around my Bahá'í identity. The central concern of both mine and Ashbery's poetic career could very well be defined as the self-world relationship. With this in mind, I present to readers some 6600 prose-poems by 2009. Here are some.

THE BIOGRAPHY OF A GENERATION

Price's autobiographical poem can be read, in some ways, as the biography of a generation, the generation that came of age in the sixties, grew into middle age in the eighties, into what some human development theorists call late adulthood, the years 60 to 80, in the first decades of the twenty-first century and into old age in the years beyond 2525. William Wordsworth's poem The Prelude could be read as the biography of the romantics of the 1790s who grew into old age, if they lived that long, in the years after 1850--although a man was old much sooner in 1850 than he is today. More importantly, though, as far as my autobiography is concerned, Wordsworth's Prelude is the most sustained self-examination in English poetry and its real importance lies in not what it tells of the past but what is promises of the future. Such is the view of Stephen Gill in William Wordsworth: A Life(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989,) and, as Gill goes on to say, Wordsworth's "rewriting stems from a determination to treat his poems as living presences and to change or discard what no longer seemed adequate(ibid., p81).

The case is obviously an arguable one and, at best, only partly true as a comparison. In the case of Wordsworth or Price, the mind, the imagination, is a binding, sympathetic medium and the poems which come out of their poetic matrix speak with or against the historical grain. Their lives and those of their contemporaries or coreligionists are at the heart of their inner life which is given a primary place in the ideology of both men, in the creation of their personal identities and it is the place where the important changes of life take place, albeit slowly and unobtrusively. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 6 April 2009.

Yes, perhaps, in some ways,
to each man his own story.
Mine is quite precise in places,
but there's a matrix here for
everyone to tell of their own.

Mine, growing out of the first epochs
of this Formative Age has a certain:
tone, mode, manner, content, style,
relevance, timeliness and scope--
bound together in this sympathetic
medium, this inner space for and
about the seekers my contemporaries--
and me and what it all means for, if it
means nothing to me, it is nothing.

Ron Price
6 April 2009
(updated from 3/2001)

MORE ON COURAGE

When the hardback or softback edition of this multi-volumned work is published, if it ever is, readers will be able to see only some of the courage of my convictions. Courage is difficult to measure in our Westernizing world, as I have mentioned before, with wall-to-wall comforts and more entertainment than ever before in history pumped into ourlunge rooms decade after decade. Putting out 2600 pages in three Parts on the internet could be seen by critical observers, of which the world is not lacking, as an expression of narcissism, of a sense of the writer's self-importance and of his enormous egotism. If this man(myself) had any courage it was in a context of such self-obsession as to neutralize any claim to courage.

If life was and is a fleeting phenomenon, how much more fleeting must, indeed, should be the reviewing of it in a memoir? In this work I have had enough nerve to say that life, my pioneering life, even though it was fleeting, its ephemera might be of lasting interest. I thought the business of reviewing my life in all its detail might have its own importance. Often as I wrote this ballooning work I didn't entirely think so. Even now I have me doubts. But here it stands in cyberspace to be scrolled down page after page. Martin Luther once said: "Here I stand! as the Protestant reformation was about to take off. And I say the same thing as the Bahai Faith is just coming out of an obscurity that has coated its life for more than a century and a half.

It is said of the essayist Thomaws de Quincey(1785-1859) that "The brilliance of his articles was marred by an incurable tendency to digress, which, though harmless and even enjoyable in his famous Confessions of an Opium Eater, is a constant irritation in an essay on an abstract subject. His vast and curious erudition, too, got in his way and he did not know when to stop." I trust readers here will find, what may appear initially as digressions, are found to be at worst harmless and at best enjoyable. The following prose-poems are intended to be in this vein.

WANDERING

We each map a unique landscape of thought, frailty, drama, bewilderment and belief. The biographies of our life, if any are ever written, are other people's stories and descriptions of our map. Norman Sherry, in the second volume of his biography of the famous novelist Graham Greene, writes that Greene "seemed homeless just wandering the streets" in a state of "acute solitariness." This was a period in the 1950s when Greene was in a condition of "great unhappiness and great torment. Manic-depression reached its height in that period." Sherry continues: "Greene wheeled obsessively around the world." With alcohol and women he sought to kill the despair and the formidable desire for self-annihilation that rose up within him. He was "compelled to wander the earth until death; an unending traveller, an unending writer, he laboured like Sisyphus."1 It seemed in his nature to go beyond permitted limits.2 -Ron Price with thanks to Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene: Vol.2: 1939-1955, Jonathan Cape, London, 1994, 1pp.507-508 and 2p.258.

I, too, have wandered my streets
in a state of acute solitariness during
many of these my pioneering days.
I've had my torment and unhappiness,
but have now, in the evening of my life,
left behind me that very debilitating chaos,
darkness and fear;1 obsessively I have drunk
the air and killed despair with His sweet-scented
streams, tasted even in my hair with its fragrance
in my prayer and with my medications oh so fair—
without which God knows what I would have dared!

I, too, will wander until death, an unending traveller,
an unending writer and labour like Sisyphus at the door,
but the stone, the weight, will one day be no more.
Many, too, wander with their morbid predilection
for the darker sides of life—not surprising in a time
after two wars, millions of dead in the fields and
millions more to come—trying to put it together,
each finding the cosmic drama in their own way,
creating their forms, their styles in this slough of
despond with the phantoms, so very often, of their
wrongly, so very wrongly, informed imaginations.

1 my manic depression was successfully treated first in 1968, then in 1980, again in 2001 and, finally, I trust, in 2007: four medication regimes to remove most of the fear, the darkness and the despair.—15/12/01 updated 18/6/'09.

A FRESH IMPULSE

The five years which followed my drive to Yerrinbool from Ballarat in December 1977; and the five years which followed my first days at university in September 1963 were without doubt the years of my life in which I experienced the most intense and extensive depression, confusion and disorientation. These years of internal and external crises, of varying severity were devastating in their immediate effects. Each of these five year periods resulted in the complete breakdown in my capacity to earn a living and function in day-to-day society. But by December 1982 and September 1969, it could be argued, these crises were beginning to release a corresponding measure of divine power. My life could and did continue unfolding my potential, my capacity. A fresh impulse had been lent to this process of unfoldment by these same crises, at least that is a dominant view I now take looking back from these years of my late adulthood. Readers should examine the foreword to God Passes By for Shoghi Effendi's ouline of the stages in the evolution of the Cause and, arguably, our own lives.

It took me some years to understand what could be called a 'life process;' some years to begin to regulate my life to its rhythm. It became my view, my understanding, slowly with the years, that my very happiness as a Bahai depended, in part at least, on the extent to which I understood this life process. -Ron Price with thanks to the NSA of the Bahais of Canada, "Letter to All Pioneers," Pulse of the Pioneer, January 1979, p.2.

I was stimulated to write the above paragraph by reading a paragraph in a biography of the English novelist Thackeray(1811-1863), the first novelist to "hold a mirror up to real life," or so one literary critic put it. It was a paragraph written by this same critic which began "......The five years which followed his night flight to Paris were bitter and restless ones for Thackeray." (Ann Monsarrat, The Uneasy Victorian: Thackeray the Man, Cassell, London, 1980, p.121) For some reason my own mind immediately switched, on reading this line about Thackeray, from his bitter five years to some of my own.

I believe my journey, intellectual and otherwise, becomes more complete through the study of biography. Our personal troubles are, partly, public problems. Such was the view of sociologist C.Wright Mills in his Sociological Imagination(1959) written the year I became a Bahai.

It's about linking happiness
to understanding, keenness
of our tests, the test to be
happy and confident both
within and without the Bahai
community, a whole of life process.

But...no forcing, you're not responsible
for the present condition in the community,
only a small part. Trust to the life processes
set in motion within our life in this Cause and
in your own dear life which seems to take the
whole of life to decode, process, interpret.

Ron Price
22 January 2002
updated 18/6/09

A POET AT LAST

Stephen Coote writes in his biography of John Keats that Keats "was battling to preserve the integrity of his vision, and what he described as the pride and egotism of the writer's solitary life formed as a protection against the intrusion of merely practical matters."1 Keats saw his development as an inward process, a long and patient observation of the rhythms of his consciousness. True poetry, he believed, came from this, not from manufacturing verse for the marketplace.

Price had battled for years, at least until the early years of the new millennium, to acquire that solitary life which was protected from the intrusion of the endless and inevitable practical matters of life. As 1999 evolved insensibly to 2006, he was able to move beyond those endless volunteer activities and responsibilities which occupied so much of his time in his middle adulthood. By 2006 he had been able to focus on the inward processes of development that accompanied writing for at least eight hours a day keeping practical intrusions to a limit. He felt he had written about that process as much as he had written poetry itself. Poetry, he had concluded, was impossible to define. At best, it served for him as a form in which he could deal with that first attribute of perfection which 'Abdu'l-Bahá describes, and which it was his task to acquire, in The Secret of Divine Civilization: learning and the cultural attainments of the mind.2 -Ron Price with thanks to Stephen Coote, John Keats: A Life, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1995, p.268; and 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.35.

By the time I had arrived here
in this town by a river by the sea,
at the bottom of the Antipodes,
I had defined and refined that
inward process and the rhythms
of my consciousness and mind.

I had found the form in which
I could deal with the vast tracts
of learning and those cultural
attainments of mind's lifeline.

I occasionally toyed with essays,
with novels but, in the end, turned,
always returned to this form and
these processes which enabled me,
at last, to declare myself a poet.
I did not so much collapse into
late adulthood, although there was
some of that tedium vitae, as die
to my former self as much as I was
able, but so much still remained like
honey and poison making me seek
from a cup a pure and limpid water.

Ron Price
January 2002 to March 2006
(updated 6/3/09 and 18/6/09)

A STRONG CONSITUTION?

This afternoon, in mid-summer here in Tasmania, I sat under a tree near the beach at Low Head on Bass Strait and read Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography by Peter Alexander.(1982). This South African poet(1901-1957) had, according to Alexander, a magnificent constitution. According to the famous psychiatrist, Laurens van der Post, Campbell was a man "born on fire." He could only live by burning himself out: drinking much and eating and sleeping little. It is difficult, it seems to me, to determine what, in fact, is a 'magnificent constitution.'

Have my history of manic-depression, the slow development of a mild emphysema, a certain psychological fatigue as I came into my sixties and, perhaps, several other illnesses like pneumonia and some polio-like disease contracted in my childhood, had the effect of weakening my constitution? Is writing millions of words a sign of a strong constitution? I don't know, but I do know I have experienced varying degrees of burn-out several times in my life. It would appear that, like Campbell, burning myself out was part of my central life experience, although the causes of the burn-out(mine and Campbell's) were quite different. It would appear that, in this the early evening of my life, I have learned to live without burn-out and without its tragic consequences thanks to psychiatry's medications. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 22 January 2002(updated 6/3/09).

A million impressions,
impressed themselves
over these several epochs
in the last half-century,1
pressed themselves upon me
and annihilated me2 as Keats
said;3 I surrendered, lost myself
to these poetic acts of creation,
acts of love4 in which I imagined
myself intensely, merging with a
great sea of life beyond the me and
becoming one: mystic, seer, poet...
integrated circuits with the past
containing the seeks of its future.

1 1952-2002
2 Looking back it would appear that at least 3 reconstructions of personality were required: 1968, 1979/80 and 1999; inevitably there were some continuities, one of which was poetry in 1999.
3 Keats, Letters, 27 October 1818
4 The World of Poetry, p. 92.
Ron Price 22 January 2002

AM I WORTH SAVING?
"A biographer can be a most uncomfortable visitor for a living author and his family. Skeletons clatter in all our closets; everyone's life has black patches, shames and sorrows: no one, you would think, would willingly submit to Judgement Day come early." So writes Peter F. Alexander at the start of his book Les Murray: A Life in Progress(Oxford UP, 2000). But when such an author, like myself for example, is a virtual unknown; when he has never published a book; when virtually no one in the literary world has ever heard of him, then such a discomfort would not be experienced by that author. Indeed, such an unknown author would probably think to himself that no one in his lifetime would ever venture to seriously consider writing a biography about him at all. Skeletons in his closet and the darker side of his life would, therefore, concern him not a twit, for he would know that no writer would ever be likely to probe into his private life while he was alive. Such is the way I feel as I approach the age of sixty-five.

When I eventually pass from this mortal coil, though, I would be more than happy to grant any aspiring biographer complete access to everything: manuscripts, letters, diaries, various documents private and public, even accounts now found on the internet and memorabilia of all sorts. I would be equally happy for such a biographer--should he or she ever exist--to interview whomever they want and as frequently as they want, ever mindful of the courtesies required of such potential intrusions into other people's lives. I would like to think that such biographers should feel free to prod, probe and uncover whatever they could find, for we are seen by others in such varied ways. Such is the attitude, I currently hypothesize, that I shall possess after my demise as I gaze at this world from the domain of light. -Ron Price with thanks to Peter Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Oxford UP, 2000, p.9.

Should I give full and exclusive
access to my voluminous papers?
How easy should I make detective
work for the possibly impertinent,
not especially skilled, wanting to save
a life for future generations? Am I the
sort of man you might want to see live
again and dance in the pages of a book?

If you know of my battle on the road,
will it help you with yours? Whatever
will help future generations. Do you
need all my sordid details, my hind parts
and their contemplation and an exploration
of mountains of trivia?...whatever will help
and only if it helps.....

Ron Price
16 March 2002

PS I have come to feel the way the Russian writer Boris Pasternak did when he wrote on January 15th 1960 three months after I became a Bahá'í: "the artist starts to get to love his new design and it seems to him that the slowly developing work is larger and more important than he." For me this ‘work' is both my life and my writing.-Evgeny Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years: 1930-1960, Collins Harvill, London, 1990, p.244.

CONNECTIONS

The sociologist C.Wright Mills tried to make his readers aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of our own lives and the course of world history, as ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world.1 The Bahai Faith, in contrast, gives to its votaries an historical consciousness that is both providential and humanistic, that stimulates the process of making connections and finding patterns between individual lives and the course of history.-Ron Price with thanks to 1C.W. Mills, the Sociological Imagination, 1959, p.4.

A lot of things relate
to a lot of things, big-
and-little-pictures in
this tenth stage of history
and a lot of isms and wasms
have collapsed as explanations
of the world and ourselves.1

Meanwhile, there has been
an influence not dwelling
elsewhere in literature or
philosophy that shatters the
cup of speech that we cannot
contain-we cannot dam the sea.2

This influence asks us to stretch
ourselves beyond the here-and-now
and present awareness, subtlely
reminding us of what we already
know in the big world that has made
us what we are, as sub-creators in our
own understanding of our own life.

1 Immanuel Wallerstein, "Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian," Theory and Society, Vol.15, 1986, pp.465-474.
2 Horace Holley quoted in the Ocean of His Words, J. Hatcher, Wilmette, 1997,p.3.

Ron Price
8 November 2002

CAPTURING CONTEMPORARY REALITY

"Before you are through with any piece of work," wrote C. Wright Mills at the end of his Sociological Imagination, no matter how indirectly on occasion, orient it to the central and continuing task of understanding the structure and the drift, the shaping and the meanings, of your own period, the terrible and magnificent world of human society in the second half of the twentieth century. -Ron Price with thanks to C.W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford UP,1959.

Or, as the House wrote eight years later,
to strive to obtain a more adequate
understanding of the significance of
Bahá'u'lláh's stupendous Revelation
is ourfirst obligation and the object
of our constant endeavour.(1)

And so has this been the case
in what you might call
'The Bahai Imagination'
which we approach
with a sense of high mission,
with an ethic,
with an articulation of ideas,
with definitions of personal,
social and passing realities.

For we knew, too,
that liberalism and socialism
had collapsed
as frameworks for democracy.
We knew, too,
personal troubles were public ones,
as we tried to capture contemporary reality,
its fleeting fragments and the big picture
as the years passed through this dark transition
and we grew unobtrusively into old age.

(1) The Universal House of Justice, Wellspring of Guidance, p.113.

Ron Price
25 November 2000

THE NEW METANARRATIVE

When the Guardian died in 1957, C.W. Mills was working on his The Sociological Imagination, published two years later. Mills referred to our being "at the ending of what is called The Modern Age." He saw the hallmark of the postmodern period as one of "skepticism towards metanarrative." The major metanarrative he referred to in his book was "the collapse of an acceptance that liberalism and socialism are adequate explanations of our world."

By 1959 I had not rejected what the left-wing idealists of my generation saw as the answer and which Mills saw as having already collapsed. In 1959 I was into sport, schoolwork at the grade ten level and girls. I was successful in the first two categories of my interests but not in the third. That was probably a good thing looking back half a century later with the wisdom of age. It was not until 1965 that I even discovered Mills and intellectually understood, at least to some extent, the issues involved. As I studied sociology again and again from the 1970s to the 2000s I came face to face with the bankruptcy of liberalism and socialism. Still I had to face the idealists and the non-idealists who hoped that their party, some political saviour would rescue them and their society. The continued acceptance of the liberal and/or socialist(and by the 1980s and 1990s the conservative) metanarrative was everywhere to be seen. By the 1990s the acceptance of these several metanarratives was becoming more difficult in the face of the problems of late twentieth century western society, problems discussed under the umbella of postmodernity and postmodernism among other umbrellas.

The new metanarrative that I had accepted as early as 1959, while all other metanarratives were dieing, slowly became the centre of my own philosophy, my own view of postmodernity and my own cosmology. I defined it with increasing sophistication and detail as the last decades of the twentieth century closed and the new millennium opened. This metanarrative was far from fixed; indeed it celebrated rather than lamented the incoherence and fragmentation in society. There are many ways of looking at the modernist-postmodernist division of the modern age. The metahistorian, Arnold Toynbee, saw the post-modern age beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century after four hundred years of the "modern." But sociologists generally have seen postmodernism beginning sensibly and insensibly in the 1950s, 1960s and/or 1970s.

Personally, I find there are many ways of looking at this dichotomy. One way I favor is a "modernity" synchronizing with the period 1754-1963, two centuries of preparation for, and the ministries of, the Central Figures of the Bahá'í Faith; and a "post-modernity" synchronizing with the fully institutionalized charisma in the Bahá'í Faith beginning in 1963.-Ron Price with thanks to Stephen Crook, et al., Postmodernization: Change in Advanced Society, Sage Publications, London, 1992, pp.41-42.

His death divided the Age(1)
and postmodernity could
be the tenth stage of history,(2)
the final part of the meta-
narrative which would be
the rest of my life and my
children and my children's
children and their children.

Ron Price
12 January 2000

(1) Shoghi Effendi
(2) 1963, the last stage of history in the paradigm of history outlined by Shoghi Effendi.

CONSTRUCTED

"The world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as reality by the ordinary members of society in the subjectively meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these members."1 The French sociologist, Emile Durkheim did not see it this way. The world of everyday life, for Durkheim, could never be said to originate in the thoughts and actions of "members" because everyday life is irreducibly external to any individual or plurality. It is always already there when one enters it, as a child, or as an adult when one, for example, joins the Bahai Faith or moves to a new Bahai community as a pioneer. The implication is that the social world is made of historically constituted positions or situations through which people move and differently exist.2 In my poetry I have tried to both describe the world I've lived in and the one I have created in, assuming as I do that both have some reality, especially a metaphorical one. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality, 1967, pp. 19-20; and 2Herve Varenne, "The Social Facting of Education: Durkheim's Legacy," Journal of Curriculum Studies, Vol.27, 1995, pp.373-389.

There's an intersection here
of self and other, biography
and history requiring some
virtuosity to get at it, at the
story, subtle and mysterious.
Much of the data is slippery,
elusive, tentative, something
that has seized my life,
startling and bewildered,
sometimes wrenching:
is there an essential whole?
Are there patterns and nodes?
Is the truth of my story deeper
than my life itself? Have I
provoked and illuminated it?1

1 R. Bullough and S. Pinnegar, "Guidelines…of Self-Study," Educational Researcher, Vol.30, No.3, pp.13-21.
Ron Price 12/11/'02.

THE HEALING ROAD

I first came across the ideas of sociologist Emile Durkheim while studying sociology at university from 1963 to 1967. Many of his ideas I have always thought were relevant to a Bahai perspective. One thing he wrote certainly reflects my experience of intellectual, artistic and literary pursuits, what 'Abdu'l-Bahá called "learning and the cultural attainments of the mind." Just as Bahai administration was taking its first form under the guidance of Shoghi Effendi in the 1920s, Durkheim wrote that "the love of art, the predilection for artistic joys, is accompanied by a certain aptitude for getting outside ourselves, a certain detachment or disinterestedness….We lose sight of our surroundings, our ordinary cares, our immediate interests. Indeed, this is the essence of the healing power of art. Art consoles us because it turns us away from ourselves."

After forty years of pioneering
I find here my peace and supper
as if after a long day's work. Yes,
Emile, this is its own reward, yes!

Just a simple artistry in these poems,
part of my search for the right idiom
and the best ways of meet life's lot.
I do not feel like Frost, stricken,
intensely conscious, suspicious of
my struggle. A healing came, to me,
at last, and all that gloom, obsession,
temper, rage, depression softened
with the years and easy sleep
without the pain dulled, at last,
life's sharp and ragged edges.

And my style could lighten, take an easier road
without that heat and the tortuous heavy load.

Ron Price
22 September 2002

RESACRALIZATION

Many writers and thinkers, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, have felt that society has been undergoing a stage of transition and moral mediocrity in which the old gods were dead or dying and the new ones had not yet been born. It is a process that has been repeated throughout history; like individualism it has been a feature of the historical process in one form or another within the different forms of community at least since the neolithic revolution. -Ron Price, An attempt to summarize a core idea in: Durkheim and Postmodern Culture, S. Mestrovic, Aldine de Gruyter, NY, 1992.

The Bahá'í community and the individuals within it will play a crucial role in defining a unifying vision of the nature of man and society and laying the foundations for a global society to which the mass of humankind can commit themselves. -Ron Price, a paraphrase of some of the opening paragraph of "Bahá'u'lláh", A Statement of the Bahá'í International Community, Office of Public Information, 1991, p.1.

As we internationalize our world
and seek to bond ourselves together
emotionally with Disney World, Mc
Donald's and olympic games, souvenir
spoons, greeting cards, nostalgia channels,
synthetic flowers and other faint-and-not-so
faint-embodiments of human sentiment, a new
version of community is emerging, a new
collective morality, beyond left and right
infighting, emerging from a common
experience in one world culture, humanity,
social unity and congruence and we are
just at the beginning of the process, the
enormous task of resacralizing our world.

Ron Price
26 December 1997

MODELS

Unfortunately we can learn little or nothing for our contemporary social problems from ancient history. -Max Weber, "The Social Causes of the Decay of Ancient Civilization," 1896 in Max Weber: The Interpretation of Social Reality, J.E.T. eldridge, NY, Scribner, 1971, p.256.

All that societies require to be held together is that their members fix their eyes on the same end and come together in a single faith. -Emile Durkheim in Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, A Historical and Critical Study, S. Lukes, 1973, Penguin Press, London, p.341.

The classics are just about ancient history
around here. They've been dropping like
flies in this tempest of modernity,
and unpredictable post-modernity
which would have blown old Caesar's mind.
We'll have to do our modelling elsewhere—
hardly anyone's reading Aristophanies, et al, anyway.

We seem to have moved to pop-psych,
organization science, Skinner and Carnegie,
filling in the gap until we come of age
and penetrate the most complex, subtle
and comprehensive aspects of existence,
as we establish a practical basis for order
and our common humanity, beyond
the vague sentiments of good will.

Ron Price
18 January 1998

LIFE-ENHANCEMENT

In the prelude to his biography of Henry Moore, Roger Berthoud tells of Moore's life-enhancing quality. Both Moore's personality and his work, Berthoud writes, had this quality. "One felt the better," he continues, "for having talked to him or for having contemplated his creations."(1) There is no doubt that in my life I possessed this life-enhancing quality. I possessed it in many of my years as a teacher. But I did not possess it all the time. You just have to ask either of the women I married. I did not possess it with all my students; I'm sure there would have been dozens of students over those thirty-five years who were not impressed with my qualities as a person or as a teacher. For, as a pioneer, I was in many ways just an average bloke, certainly no saint and, if distinguished, only from time to time and not as a consistent feature of my life from the word go to woe. -Ron Price with thanks to Roger Berthoud, The Life of Henry Moore, Faber and Faber, London, 1987, p.15.

I, too, Roger, am more complicated
than I seem and am also addicted
to this poetic work, as my restless
mind wanders over the world's mystery
settling for the partial and incomplete
portion that is our lot due to life's
contingencies, mysteries and paradoxes.

For whatever truths I find there's so much
that is provisional, with an emphasis here
but not there.1 And whatever confidence
I have found there is worry still about the
apparently trivial, this complex and difficult
product that I have created to market2
in the interstices of these my latter days.

1 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Hogarth Press, 1991(1940), London, p.xi.
2 Roger Berthoud, op.cit., p.13.
Ron Price 14 December 2002

MACRO-MICRO

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. Yet men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. The first fruit of this imagination and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within this period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. -Ron Price with thanks to C.W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp.3-10.

There's a massive complexity here.
But, at the core, there's been a fine
compression, an intensification of
global consciousness, making of this
world a single place, coexistence in a
single spot, humankind's oneness, yes,
taking off, by stages, since 1475, 1875,
1975 with more and more world images
in this single place.….since I was playing
baseball and we went to outer space and I
joined the Bahai Faith by stages beginning
with that most wonderful and thrilling motion
which appeared from that point of light the spirit
of teaching…..1 Half a century, since then, since
that inception of the Kingdom of God on earth2
when I was nine and John and Hattie Dixon
served us rose-hip tea in that little town by that
great lake in southern Ontario's golden triangle.

1'Abdu'l-Bahá in God Passes By, p.351.
2 idem. The completion of the temple in Chicago inaugurated this inception.
Ron Price 8 November 2000

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. 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, unconnectedness, loneliness or the end of engagement in society. 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. They are, in effect, experimenting with the project of the self, with strategies for self. -Ron Price with thanks to Judith Schroeter, "The Importance of Role Models in Identity Formation: The Ally McBeal In Us," Internet, 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 own
autobiography--for years and getting
very little sense of who I am from the
media and their endless role models.

I've been in a community with two
hundred years & fifty years of models
historical models and hundreds, over
the years, of people I have known who
have shown me qualities worth emulating,
helping to make me some enigmatic and
composite creature on this God's earth.

Ron Price
11 October 2002

SOCIAL SEDIMENTATION

Experiences become sedimented in that they congeal when they are recollected as recognizable and memorable entities. For me, they become part of my autobiographical poetry and narrative. Intersubjective sedimentation occurs when several individuals share a common biography, the experiences of which become incorporated in a common stock of knowledge. This social sedimentation can become recognizably objective and shared by others in a sign system. Language becomes the basis and the instrument of a collective stock of knowledge. It becomes the depository of a large aggregate of collective sedimentations. The objective meanings of institutional activity are conceived of as knowledge and transmitted as such. With the full institutionalization of charisma in 1963 in the Bahai community, the institutional transmission of knowledge has been mostly in the form of letters. It is difficult to achieve consistency between institutions and the forms of transmission of knowledge pertaining to them. But, for the most part, this transmission in the Bahai community has possessed a consistency and a logical coherence. The problem of logical coherence in the transmission of this knowledge arises first on the level of legitimation and secondly on the level of socialization. In the Bahai Faith the former is not a serious problem. -Ron Price with thanks to "Sociology Notes from Reading in the 1990s," 15 November 2002.

We've been sedimented,
this community and I,
for several decades, but
noone is kidding no one
that the sharing of His Signs
is a totally consistent, smooth,
run from year to year. Yes,
there is grace and favour to
joyously press on in battle;
then, too, there is whimpering,
fright, trembling and shaking.
There are veils which shut me out.1

There is a life congealed in recollection,
a thousand memorable entities and an
aggregate of sediment with seeds sown
in a forest of wild trees, pebbles with
some fruit and rare precious stones.2

1 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Selections, p.181.
2 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Tablets of the Divine Plan, 1977, p.87.
Ron Price 16/11/02.

SYNCHRONICITY

To students of twentieth-century modernism, 1971 was the year when Valerie Eliot published a facsimile edition of The Waste Land's pre-publication manuscripts. 1971 was a significant year in my own life for it was the year I left Canada and moved to Australia. Thirty-six years later it looked like I would lay my bones in that vast dry dog-biscuit of a continent. The publication of the pre-publication manuscripts of The Wasteland was an event which invited new accounts of the poem's genetics and fresh assessments of how those might bear on our understanding of the poem. My move to Australia invited a different set of life studies and interpretations of my life-narrative and as the decades advanced fresh assessments of their meaning. -Ron Price with thanks to Valerie Eliot, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, Harcourt Brace, NY, 1971.

One year later, in 1972, I started teaching high school in South Australia. That same year Hugh Kenner and Grover Smith published two essays which, while differing sharply in premises and procedures, reached a consensus that Part III, "The Fire Sermon," was the earliest portion of the poem to have been written, probably around midsummer 1921, followed first by Parts I and II, then by IV and V, the latter completed in December 1921. I was always impressed, at least since I first studied Eliot in 1963 and then taught his poetry in 1988, 25 years later, at the remarkable synchronicity between the writing of The Wasteland and a crucial stage in the institutionalization of charisma in the Bahá'í Faith associated with the passing of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. -Ron Price with thanks to Hugh Kenner, "The Urban Apocalypse," in Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the The Wasteland, ed. A. Walton Litz, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1973, pp. 23–49.

By 1988 when I studied this poem
to teach it at matriculation level,
a quarter century after studying it
in English Literature so I could get
into university in Ontario at age 18,
pre-publication dates for the poem's
writing were defined as far as possible.

This central poem, this determinant
of our modern consciousness, which
told us something of who we are was
finished in those same transition months
after 'Abdu'l-Bahá's death to the start of
the laying of the foundations for the
erection of the Administrative Order of
this Faith as set forth in His final Will.1

1 Lawrence Rainey, "Eliot Among the Typists: Writing The Waste Land," Modernism/modernity, Volume 12, Number 1, January 2005.

Ron Price
12 January 2007

SOME CONTINUOUS COMPOSITE WHOLE

The spiritual, mental and emotional autobiographies of the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived have never been recorded. For many thousands of people in the last two centuries, though, a detailed, a scanty, a fascinating or a tedious record has been left. In recent decades writing biography and autobiography has become somewhat of a popular sport or discipline. In the case of a very few, people like the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, the preservation of documents about the self has been carried to the point of mania. With Flaubert, the student of the individual creative process has a microscopic view for perhaps the first time in history of the development of the creative process in one individual. My own particular poetic narrative presents what I am to myself, how I see myself and how I have lived with this self for sixty-five years. I go about this exercise with a certain style. Style to me was what it was to Flaubert "the rendering of content in a form in which both style and content would be one."1 Style is the filter, the means, of rendering externality. -Ron Price with thanks to Benjamin F. Bart, Flaubert, Syracuse UP, 1967, Preface and 1p.340.

Style is, ultimately, a matter of the precise
words used and their arrangement in some
structure, some form, some continuous,
composite whole, a physiological-anatomy,
in the cultural repository of history.1

Content, the work, came to me insensibly
over several years so that, now, it is the work
of my whole life. It is always on my mind.
I am always preparing for it. Even my rest
are rests for the work ahead down the road
1 Some of Flaubert's view of 'style'

Ron Price
13 April 2002

I trust the above prose-poems were a source of social good.

POETRY AS A SOURCE OF SOCIAL GOOD

If these booklets of poetry, some sixty-three now, help to establish nothing else it will be my search for a context in which relevant fundamental questions about the undoubted right of the individual to self-expression, the societal need for legitimate and just authority and our need as individuals for solid thinking about the organic change in the very structure of society that the world has been preparing for but has not yet experienced—can be examined. In some six thousand six-hundred poems and four million words, a massive corpus, this search for a context for the examination of fundamental questions may not be so obvious. For I try to do a great deal in this poetry of which this particular search is but one of the facets of my journey.

The fluid and elastic qualities that underpin the expression of freedom assume a different latitude from one mind to another. Indeed in this Faith there are "unique methods and channels" for the exercise and maintenance of freedom. The very meaning of freedom has been deepened, its scope extended. The very fact that my writing poetry, an expression of art, is elevated to an act of worship augers well for the "enormous prospects for a new birth of expression in the civilization anticipated by His World Order."

Much, if not virtually all, of my poetry is about personal experience, a personal view of some sociological or historical process or fact. I see this poetry as essentially lyrical, as capable of expressing a sense of commonality and, for me, unparalleled intimacy. Some of what I write could be termed confessional. The first person "I" is vulnerable, dealing as it does with varying degrees of self-revelation. But even in the second and third persons there is the poet's view, less direct and self-revelation is less obvious. The poetry is self-serving; the reader is invited to share in my experience, in my thoughts. Whether he or she experiences the intimacy that I do in the act of writing is another question. The poetry also serves the community, however self-focussed my poems are, and they all are to some extent. They deal with the universal and with the growth and development of that universal Force and Cause behind these poems. They deal with community. And the quest for community, it would seem, has always involved some conflict, some anxiety.

I strive, of course, for moderation, refinement, tact and wisdom in any of my poetic expressions of human utterance. But for everything there is a season. Thusfar, the season of my poetic writing in public has been minimal except on the internet where there ar enow millions of my words. I have been quite happy that the public utterance of my poetry, at poetry readings, has been minimal. I have written about this before in the 26 interviews recorded in my booklets of poetry and in other places. Bahá'u'lláh, Himself, reinforces this idea in the maxim that: "Not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed...nor can every timely utterance be considered as suited to the ears of the hearer." As the Universal House of Justice says in its expatiation on the theme of speech and freedom "an acute exercise of judgement" is called for. Perhaps when, and if, I become "public property" I will have acquired more of that quality of acute judgement.

The freedom of the poet to declare his conscience and set forth his views is at the root of the foundation of this Order, but I try to avoid poetry with a various types of negative quality; indeed, I impose on myself a strictness, attempt to give to my writing a certain etiquette of expression in my efforts to prevent confusion and discord reigning in community life. I try to remedy the divisive tendencies at play in the world. The process of criticism is baneful in its effect and, therefore, the nature of my poetry is intended to counteract dissidence which I see as "a moral and intellectual contradiction of the main objective animating" my words. What I write is simply ordinary speech, sometimes emotionally loaded, raised to a high level, the highest level I can, of expressiveness. I strive for what the Greeks called kairos: tact, discretion, prudent restraint, maturity, for the quality that poet Pindar expressed. I also strive for some of that wisdom shown by the Greek philosopher Epictetus who wrote that: "If you hear that someone is speaking ill of you, instead of trying to defend yourself you should say: 'He obviously does not know me very well, since there are so many other faults he could have mentioned'.(Enchiridion)

In declaring my conscience I think of the words of Jerome K. Jerome(1859-1927), the English writer and humorist, best known for his humorous travelogue Three Men in a Boat. He makes a useful point about the immensely complex, subtle and highly emphasized term 'conscience' in our culture. "How good we feel when we are full after a good meal," writes Jerome, "how satisfied with ourselves and with the world!" Jerome goes on to say that: "a clear conscience also makes a person very happy and contented. But a full stomach does the business quite as well. In addition, it is cheaper and more easily obtained. A person feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well-digested meal: so noble-minded, so kind-hearted." My own conscience has played an important part in this pioneering journey as I go about setting forth my views in this literary work and as I go about living my daily life. It is a stubborn and complex entity, a little creature this conscience, and I allude to it often. Its implications can not be avoided in any complete autobiography.

Humanity today needs that communitas communitatum and this Faith, the Bahá'í Faith, has an important role to play in this unifying process. This poetry is part of that wider process, that wider phenomenon. I seek a judicious exercise in my writing as a contribution to this communitas communitatum. I try to be sensitive to content, style, sound, tact, wisdom, timeliness in order to "give birth to an etiquette of expression" worthy of that term 'maturity', which Pindar possessed, and which this age must strive to attain. There must be a discipline here in this poetry if it is to attain the status of being a "dynamic power in the arteries of life." If my words are to attain "the influence of spring" and cause "hearts to become fresh and verdant", they shall have to be seen as "acceptable to fair-minded souls." I can not make such a claim of my poetry, yet.

I am sensitive to my poetry's tenderness, as I am to the tenderness of the Cause which motivates so much that underpins my poetry. The rigorous discipline that must be exerted when putting print before the public eye, I have not exerted, not entirely. For I have assumed that, for the most part, the public will not see most of my poetry, at least for some time to come. But I strive to speak the words of both myself and my fellow human beings as part of a whole; this autobiography tries to serve the whole. It resonates in the immediate and the concrete, in the inner and the outer values of our lives, or in some socio-historical framework. However idiosyncratic and autobiographical a particular poem may appear it is related to the totality, the cosmic, the grand-scale, the great system of time and place. For mine is the poetry of a metanarrative. Hopefully different readers will be cheered or saddened in different ways as my poems drift through diverse human situations. The humanistic psychologist Erich Fromm has written that: "There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as "moral indignation," which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue."(Man For Himself) Moral indignation is just one of the many thorny interpersonal issues we face as humans in community and I only have part of this complex problem sorted out. We all only get part way along the road of life with all the tests that life provides us in its crucible with its often burning chemical contents and mixes.

Spontaneity, initiative and diversity must be encouraged, but everything in its time, the right time under heaven, so to speak. The individual in this Cause is "the focus of primary development"(8), but within the context of the group; for the individual is essentially subordinated to the group. The individual should be seen as a source of social good. This is his most supreme delight. This is the essential context for poetry. When, and if, this occurs my poetry will find its right and proper place in community life. Dealing as my poetry does with the fragile, confused and ever to be rediscovered and redefined self, the place of the inner life and private character, the delight to which I refer will, hopefully, be associated with understanding, with intellect and wisdom, the two most luminous lights in the world of creation.

Ron Price
28/11/97 to 16/12/09

SOME ESSENTIAL THOUGHTS ON MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The autobiographies of others, as I have indicated in several previous essays, illuminate one's own attempt to understand one's life through writing it down. St. Augustine's(354-430 AD) Confessions has a distinctly ‘before' and ‘after' flavour, before his conversion and after. Mine begins, essentially, with my conversion, although in my poetry the decade before my contact with the Bahá'í cause receives some attention. Like Augustine I certainly possess a sense of participating in an eternal plan. This is also true of Dante's(1265-1321) La vita nuova. For these writers and for me, the account is no final story, but a preparation for even more on the horizon.

Four hundred years later John Bunyan(1628-1688) wrote in his Grace Abounding(1666) about his life. Truth became known through his experience. For me, as well, it was truth becoming understood through my experience. I had had a massive influx of truth at fifteen and before. Indeed, my life was one of continual access to truth. Conversion was a beginning point for me and life provided one long, unending process of coming to understand its myriad ramifications. Dante accessed truth in dreams, some five in his autobiography; Bunyan had some ten mystical experiences, or visions. Not for me a series of ecstatic moments in my curve of learning, much more a process which the Guardian has described as a series of seven stages that we go through in our life, from crisis to victory. Bahá'u'lláh's Seven Valleys provides another delineation of the process. It is complex, much more complex than anything autobiography had revealed by 1666.

For Bunyan all experiences partook equally in his ultimate deliverance. For me, certain events in my life stood out: getting to know several personalities well and dozens, if not hundreds to a significant extent; my psychiatric illnesses; my moving to Australia; my two marriages; my parents; my career; my attempt to live a life consistent with the teachings of the Faith; my role as a pioneer. The presence, the sense, of the divine has been critical to my life as it was for Bunyan, albeit in different ways. By the time Bunyan wrote, the structure of belief upon which all previous historical autobiography was built, was beginning to fall into disrepair. With Benjamin Franklin(1706-1790) the edifice of autobiography came to be built entirely on human recollections alone. Deep in the national mythos of the cultures I have lived in: North America and Australia is the glorified figure of the loner: the farmer, backwoodsman, cowboy, gold miner, or other adventurer who lives by wit and grit a step from the frontier, needing no organized religion or government to show him the way. In some ways the pioneer which I have now been for nearly fifty years partakes of this mythos. At the same time, though, the pioneer struggles as the decades of his or her experience lengthen to define themselves geographically, culturally and in a non-partisan political sense and, in so doing, to assert some communal identity. The Bahai ethos, its history and teachings are crucial in this regard.

Augustine whose life and writings have had an immense impact on the western intellectual tradition, at least until modern times, had a contact outside of time through Christ; mine is and has been through Bahá'u'lláh. He is the ground of my being and the basis for any human consanguinity. My position is not unlike that of all autobiographers up to Franklin. Augustine addresses his narrative to God; what he writes is like a devotional colloquy. My entire corpus is addressed to my readers, in my minds eye, generations not yet born and holy souls who have passed on and who assist me in ways I do not know; as well as, and especially, to a body of men which represents an institutionalization of the charisma at the heart of my belief system. Unlike Franklin, I do not offer up my autobiography on the authority of personal conviction, I offer it as a contribution to understanding how one person lived his life within the framework of an emerging world religion, at an early stage in its development, its second century. I am not seeking, as Franklin apparently was, to get men to imitate me; far from it. But it is my hope that they would gain greater understanding of their religion and its history, its history as it was embodied in the life of one of its ordinary practitioners, one of its votaries during the second to the fourth epochs of its Formative Age.

Augustine, Dante and Bunyan used the form of autobiography to dramatize their belief that an eternal truth guided their lives. For Franklin it was reason which centred and dramatized his life; in writing his autobiography he was essentially reliving a successful life. It was his hope that the lessons of his own individual experience and self-reliance, would replace the role taken by revealed truth. The truths of the Bab and Bahá'u'lláh and their legitimate successors(1844-1995) are a critical anchorage for my own story; understanding and experience are the fruit of my life; they do not replace revelation but are important buttresses of everything that has come to constitute me, my identity, my self, indeed, my soul.

Rousseau(1712-1778) tries through his autobiography, his Confessions, to secure an honoured place in history. For him truth lies in his feelings and in the continuity of his soul. I have written about this theme of fame or renown in my poetry and in my journal. If I secure some place in history through the efforts contained in all that is represented by Pioneering Over Three Epochs it will be because there is something worthwhile in what I have written, there is some meaning and historical significance of some kind that illuminates a future age. I find this an inspiring goal: to contribute to an ever-advancing civilization. This would make my contribution ongoing, beyond my life in a very concrete sense. If this does not occur, it will be because people do not find it of use, of interest. I will have gained, I trust, through my examination of my inner life and my outer life as I am asked to do in the Writings of my Faith.

Rousseau, like Franklin, secularizes historical autobiography. He describes how he came to be the way he was. I do the same. Rousseau tries to remake society in his image.. Franklin tries to get people to imitate him. I try to do neither. Experience for Rousseau, as it was for Augustine, is the enemy of truth and happiness. For me the relation of the two is far more complex than this; indeed, it would require a separate essay to begin to explore this relationship. I, like Rousseau, enjoy my visits into the past to write autobiography. There is a nostalgia, a warm richness that coats the past. Unlike Rousseau I do not see the past as a sad concatenation of events that has led to my wretchedness. Rather, I see a series of events coated with many colours from dark blacks and browns to warm reds and spiritual blues, if one can give colours physical and psychological equivalents. There is sadness and there is joy; it depends where I look.

Augustine found true being outside of time; I do too, but I also find it in time. Rousseau found the thread, the link, the life of his soul in the undercurrent of feeling that ran through his entire life. Here he found a coherent, continuous whole and it was here that he re-experienced in imagination his enthusiasms, his hopes, his ambitions and pleasures. To tap into these feelings the narrator must relive his life. I find this particular aspect of Rousseau's approach to autobiography very helpful. He has put into words what I have tried to do. When I have been successful I have achieved a kind of root-tapping. Rousseau saw this retrospective activity more a form of self-realizaton. To him it was divine. It caused the world to vanish; it caused the writer to enter an ecstatic plane of self-possession, a necessary stage perhaps en route to self-forgetfulness. Rousseau came to see all his past wanderings as pointless and destructive. Viewed sub specie aeternitatis, I have found my pioneer wanderings as part of a meaningful whole, especially the suffering.

The action that is my past has been characterized by a certain degree of faithfulness and a certain degree of passion. Augustine emphasized the former and Rousseau the latter. Experience has been both my enemy and my friend; passion both the life of my soul and its death. This is true of just about everything one does. Everything changes with each movement. Remembered feeling becomes the criteria for the truest autobiographical statement. Autobiography, for Rousseau, becomes not so much the life he lived as the life he lived in the act of composing his life. I find this to be true of my own writing in whatever genre the autobiography is found. I find myself in autobiography, like some flickering light of an ineffable bliss.

It helps in making the road to the grave profitable, enlightened by the two most luminous lights of intellect and wisdom. To claim any wisdom makes me a little uncomfortable in Australia, a land of an unpretentiousness and cynicism that lives luxuriously slightly beneath the surface of everyday events.

I am more than a little conscious of the transition from a relatively unreflective young adult to what could be seen as an excessively reflective man of middle years. But, like Bunyan, I ‘fetch invigorating thoughts from former years' and recreate an energy that has been lost or, better, transferred from brawn to brain. Like Wordsworth I ‘rescue from decay the old/ By timely interference' and so ripen ‘dawn into steady morning', or perhaps late afternoon.(for surely the last half of middle adulthood-50 to 60-can be equated with late afternoon). My purpose here is not so much to tell the story of my life, although I do achieve this in my narrative, but to look within, self-examine, gain self-knowledge, achieve some union between the knower(me) and the known. I find there is a certain stasis, quietness in my movement, reposeful condition, as a result of this writing process. The knowing and acting self has finally been brought together. The slow process of looking within and finding God, of acquiring virtues and contributing to the development of civilization, or of experiencing generativity and integration is all partially understood in the act of autobiography.

And so, like Wordsworth in his Prelude, I became a traveller in my own life. My primary vehicle has been poetry, although I have provided other genres largely for future readers should there be any. For poetry reveals, in Wordsworth's words, ‘our being's heart and home'; it allows discordant elements of our life to harmonize; it renovates the spirit in a priestly robe; it precedes from some creative and enduring source and becomes a source of knowledge, power and joy. Poetry is like a regulating device. It comes to see the parts of life in terms of the whole; indeed the recollected hours, again in the words of Wordsworth, ‘have the charm of visionary things.' Again, in Wordsworth's idiom, poetry diffuses:

Through meagre lines and colours, and the press
Of self-destroying, transitory things,
Composure and ennobling Harmony.(VII, 769-71)

Wordsworth was not able to find his centre in an urban landscape. He always returned to nature for his centre. My centre has only been threatened in a deep and serious, a conscious and obvious way on rare occasions in the course of my life: during university for about a year in 1964-65; in 1968 during a stay in a mental hospital in Whitby Ontario; in 1974 in the losing of my voting rights and the events that led up to them and, arguably, in 1995 when my experience of Bahá'í community life dried up. Much else could be said on this theme but now is not the time. One thing should be said; namely, that if my Centre did disappear from my life the very raison d'etre for my life-and hence my autobiography-would go with it. In contrast to Wordsworth, who turned to nature when his centre was lost, I turned to prayer, to a process of waiting and withdrawal, as well as a gradual reorientation to Bahá'í community life. Slowly the pattern of Bahá'í life, so eloquently and extensively described in the Bahá'í literature, would begin to emerge again in a form that I was comfortable with, which gave me joy and meaning and which was clearly an expression of finding my centre, safe and secure.

Wordsworth stated that life was like a river of remembrances which we try to shape into some pattern. But for him the view was dark and the movement of the soul was hidden from the reach of words, like forgotten experience which is hidden from our search on this intricate and difficult path. There are though, he stated, spots of time that nourish and invisibly repair our minds. They have a special virtue. This concept has some place in a Bahá'í perspective: our declaration of belief, our hearing of the Faith, the Fast, moments of prayer, etcetera. In some future and fuller autobiographical account I might pursue this theme further. In the end, Wordsworth was left with thought and faith and his own words, his life: this was his truth, the true being that he sought. At the end of my work, this autobiography, the reader will find something quite beyond a writer, a personality, in however much detail his life is displayed. He will find a human experience that is touched by the white radiance of eternity, by the spirit and teachings of several souls who are continuing to energize the whole world to a degree unapproached during their earthly lives.

Thomas de Quincey's Confessions place opium at the centre of a life, not a man or a divinity. De Quincey, like Franklin, had to rely on his own experience and the shared convictions of his culture to find any truth there was to find. De Quincey said that time breaks the self into impermanent, unrecapturable feelings, but that suffering brings it all together. Sometimes. There is a type of permanence, a type of capturing that autobiography creates. The fierce condition of eternal hurry which concerned De Quincey I have been conscious of at least since the beginning of my pioneer life in 1962. I refer to it as the sense of urgency. I feel as if I have been running for three decades, although in the last several years the running has been more frequently in my head. In other ways, the road has been too slow and tortuous to suit me. One seems to have only some degree of influence on the process, a degree which can not be measured.

De Quincey said he never heard the eternal, celestial music of life, although he believed in it. If I examine the entire period of my life beginning in 1962, several years after I joined the Cause, I find an increasing intensification of the music of the spheres, punctuated by no sounds at all and such stygian gloom that the soul wondered if it would ever recover.

My poetry, though, allows my words to enter or become the reader's reality in unique ways, if the reader possesses the necessary susceptibilities. He becomes infected with a mode of utterance; his mind whirls around in mine. It is not the historical events that make the life; that life is essentially ungraspable. I can not find my life in the narrative or, indeed, in some of the philosophically intertwined material there. I find only a handle of some kind which is graspable; I find a work about itself, about a ghost that is me. I find something that tries to tie me together, my past to my present. How does one express what it is that ties it all together. Poetry provides better linkages: fuller, deeper, more intimate; these linkages are linkages to my past, my society, my self and the future. The poetry seems to provide the oneness I seek. It connects me with the infinite through Bahá'u'lláh and provides a vehicle for expressing this connection. For how does one know what one thinks about a connection until one has put it in words, however briefly. The poetry brings together an outer man and an inner man, two men who are so very distinct. They each provide two distinct sets of feedback about who I am. My poetry throws a light which both unites and separates my selves in paradoxical and ironic juxtapositions.

The surface externalities: where I worked, what I did, those I knew, etcetera in some basic ways hide the man rather than displaying him; they veil the inner person. The inner person can be found much more clearly in my poetry: both the darknesses and the lights are there, the mystery and the simplicity, the ambiguity and those paradoxes. The inner passages of my being, all its chambers, its treasures and its rubbish heaps are found here. The emblematical gold, the priceless gem, that writers like Hawthorne looked for in vain, was handed to me on a platter at the age of fifteen. "Thou without the least effort did attain thy goal." Yet, as Bahá'u'lláh says, I remained "wrapt in the veil of self." To put it another way my life has been a testing of the gold with periodic fires. It is quite a different battle than it was for writers like Hawthorne fight. But my autobiography has many parallels with his. It is, as Spengemann puts it in describing the fictive autobiography of Hawthorne, a series of actions performed in the act of composition, a historical record and an interpretation of them. The process and the result tells me who I am, at least in part. I find some of my immortal self, a lifelong task. The search yields only some result; the definition of success, the measuring rod so to speak, is found in the framework of a body of ethical and moral insights of the Bahá'í writings.

Hawthorne and most of his contemporaries never possessed this framework and their search did not yield "the beauty of His countenance."(HW, Persian, 22) All they found was a self, one created in the autobiography. A great deal of the who that I am, the what that I am, the garment of words can never tell. I am God's mystery. But every atom in existence is ordained for my training. And so, on and on the quotations from the Writings pile high providing the perspective, the framework, that the contemporary secular autobiographer lacks. Every Bahá'í that follows the autobiographical road has this same framework, this same centre, within which he can sift the experience of his life.

It may just be that modern man in search of his soul requires a particular Centre; that the Augustinian assumptions regarding the soul and the self are not adequate for these days; that the reshaping of the self, the soul, can not be accomplished by autobiographical efforts in the context of experience itself without getting lost in an inherent subjectivity. As Keats put it for many: "I have no Nature." As Eliot put it: the self is "everywhere present, and everywhere absent" in the act of writing. The autobiographical experience is so enigmatic in this kind of framework as to discourage, frustrate and, in the end, seem just about meaningless. For the Bahá'í who has been exhorted to understand his inner life, his private character; to take account each day before the final reckoning; to see with his own eyes and know of his own knowledge; to find the inner light and get its radiance, be content with it and seek naught else; for such a Bahá'í who has turned his sight unto himself he may, through autobiography, find his Lord standing within him "mighty, powerful and self-subsistent."(HW, Arabic, 13)

One thing I am very conscious of finding as I tell and retell, examine and reexamine my life, is a series of progressive and regressive periods repeating over time. Repose and adventure seem to be unstable states. Much of what could be called the romance of my story can be found in the oscillation between the saint, the hero, the courageous adventurer and the little fat man who preserves his comfort, his security, the chrysalis of everyday life To put the contrast another way: it is the contrast between the ordinary self and the heroic self, between ourselves as anti-heroes and heroes, that makes the real adventure, the colouration, the heart of the journey. The struggle with the ordinary self always involves courage and it is here that the road to high adventure is found.

Roger Bannister describes the moments when he neared completion of the four-minute mile this way: "I had a moment of mixed joy and anguish, when my mind took over. It raced well ahead of my body and drew my body compellingly forward. I felt that the moment of a lifetime had come. There was no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim. The world...did not exist....I felt at that moment that it was my chance to do one thing supremely well."(J.A. Michener, Sports in America, Random House, NY, 1976,p.77.) My experience in the last three to four years has been much like this ‘moment' of Bannister's. The world did not exist for Bannister as he headed for victory. The world provides a fertile base of material for writing poetry as the world provided Bannister with the misc-en-scene for his achievement. In this sense I find the world is like a window into the future, richly laden with meaning. It drives the engine of my writing, endlessly it would seem. One day, inevitably, I will run out of gas. After what seems like an endless sequence of adventures and security blankets finally an integration has occurred. It is like winning the race, the game, the prize, the lottery. The drudgery, tedium and gracelessness of so much that is ordinary life is gone. This is the most apt thing I can say that brings this autobiography up-to-date. Time will tell what sort of longevity this experience possesses. Each writer, each poet, has his own story.

Ron Price
31 December 1995

MORE PROSE-POEMS: HARMLESS AND PLEASUREABLE

MY 'BIG BOOK'

A symbol of poet Les Murray's vastly eclectic interests "The Great Book' was a large, hard-covered ledger-book which he had adapted as a scrapbook.1 Into it went postcards, newsclippings, poems he liked, cartoons, inter alia. My mother kept a similar book which was sent to me from Canada when she died in 1978. Not as large as Murray's, it contained the literary memorabilia she had collected from about 1930 to 1955.

The symbol of my own eclectic interests can be found today in my study here in Tasmania. Of postcards and cards there are few; of cartoons and assorted newsclippings there are more. The absences, the empty spaces, in my Big Book are voluminous, for one cannot record it all. Quotations abound in some 300 arch lever files, two-ring binders, A-3 loose-leaf and other sized files on a host of subjects: history, philosophy, religion, literature, poetry, fiction, drama, psychology, media studies, anthropology, Greek and Roman history, various religious themes, graduate study programs, journals, novel writing attempts, biography, autobiography and much else. inter alia. -Ron Price with thanks to Peter Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Oxford UP, London, 2006, p.255.

So this is my 'great book.'
I've divided it into a library
of files over the years.
Part of my soul is there
on the shelves of my study,
extremely agreeable friends
from everywhere in the world,
past and present,
always at my service;
they come and go
as I am pleased.

Sometimes they are difficult
to understand and require
special effort on my part.
My cares are often driven away
by their vivacity. They teach me
a certain fortitude. I keep each of them
in a small chamber in a humble corner
of my room where they and I
are delighted by the happy symbiosis
of my retirement and their presence.1

1 Plutarch, On Books.

Ron Price
16 March 2002
That's all folks!

THE LIGHTHOUSE

In discussing the character of a man, there is no course of error so fertile as the drawing of a hard and fast line. We are attracted by the salient points, what seems to stand out in his life, and seeing them clearly and repeatedly we jump to conclusions. That is natural. These conclusions may even have some validity. These qualities that stand out may be likened to a lighthouse guiding our way in the night or, in the day, serving as a landmark in our travels. But they are only a guide. They tell us little of the surrounding landscape, none of the geology, the history, the botany, the geography of the nearby terrain. This is even more true of a man's life, so far removed from the general sketch, the highlights, which at best are all that is usually passed down to succeeding generations.

The man of letters on the other hand is, in truth, ever writing his own biography or autobiography. What is in his mind he declares to the world, to whoever reads his works. If he finds a readership, if his work is well written, this memoir, this biography, this autobiography will be all that is necessary. It will take us far beyond that lighthouse into geology, history, botany, geography--a total view. -Ron Price with thanks to Anthony Trollope, The Life of Cicero, quoted in Trollope, Victoria Glendinning, Pimlico, London, 1993, p.v.

There are some lighthouses here.
I've set them out along the coast
to guide your way through the night
of my life and there has been much
night, black clouds and darknesses.

I've also provided rich and varied
collections of flora and fauna
to tell you something
of the living tissue of my days,
some of its green shoots,
its flowers, its bright colours
and some of its exotic texture.

I've even left you a map
to help you connect
with nearby towns and villages;
for I have belonged to a community
where people knew me
and would tell you something of me.

But, again, do not jump to conclusions
about the nature of my person and self.
What I have left behind can only,
like the lighthouse, guide your travels.

I have tried to be faithful
to the Covenant of God,
to fulfil in my life His trust
and in the realm of spirit
obtain the gem of divine virtue.1
But how successful I have been
that is a mystery to me, as much as thee.

1 Bahaullah, Hidden Words, Introductory passage.

Ron Price
17 January 2002

THE AGE WE LIVE IN

It is not so much authorial ego or that I am a compulsive self-historiographer which compels me to document my life more fully than most. All this poetry is my workshop where my awareness of life expresses itself quintessentially. I also see myself as part of a global pattern, a representative figure, part of a mytho-historical process which may be of use to future generations. I was born into a new age with the Kingdom of God just beginning when I was nine years old. In my lifetime the Bahai administrative process, the nucleus and pattern for a new Order, went through a radical growth period. I have been committed to the promises and possibilities of this new way of Life.1 As F. Scott Fitzgerald was committed to and had a belief in American life in the 1920s, as American was going through new beginnings so, too, do I feel strongly, passionately, a new commitment, a new belief and new beginnings.

George Bull points out in his introduction to his massive biography of the life of Michelangelo that people are often best understood "in the crowded context of the significant changes and continuities of the age."2 The age I have lived in and through has also faced "significant changes and continuities." My life, I have little doubt, can be understood, too, as Michelangelo's and so many others have been understood, in this same general context of their age. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 Matthew Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945, p.vii; and 2George Bull, Michelangelo: A Biography, Viking Press, 1995, p.xviii.

I, too, saw myself as coming
at the end of a complex
historical process
that had its beginnings
in the district of Ahsa,
those birds flying over Akka
and those Men with beards
and I identified with it.

I was born near the start
of yet another Formative Age:
would it last as long as the Greeks?1
I understood profoundly well
the claims of this new belief
as you did the claims of your craft.2
I was, like you, fortune's darling
in this new age and I was, too,
the shell-shocked casualty
of a war that was more complex
than any of us could understand.

1 Their Formative Age lasted from 1100 to 500 BC; this one began 23 years before I was born.
2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the major American writer between the wars: 1919-1939.

SOME COMMENTS ON MY LETTERS

INTRODUCTION

As the final months and days of Volume 11 of Division 1 of my personal correspondence(26/11/'06-26/11/'07) came to an end on 26 November 2007, I began to keep the bulk of my correspondence in electronic form and not in hard copy in files. Inevitably, some incoming items did not lend themselves to electronic form, but did lend themselves to keeping. In addition, some items like introductions to various files, some emails and letters and a wide range of archival resources that: (a) did not fit in anywhere else in my system of files and (b) did not lend themselves to being kept in electronic form, but which I wanted to keep in some type of archive, I began keeping in Volume 11. I continued that practice in this volume 12 of varied resources and collected items.

It has become obvious, though, with this new development of an electronic letter archive, that much material that I used to keep is no longer kept. This has been true of the very short pieces especially short emails, various items of memorabilia and other odds-and-ends whose content seemed irrelevant to keep for any future use by me or others.

This file, Personal Correspondence: Volume 12, did seem to be a relevant place to keep: (a) first and further editions of introductions, (b) first and further editions of other short pieces of writing and (c) some early editions of tables of content, inter alia. The result of these additions to the "letters/emails" files, was a sort of hotch-potch of stuff. At a future time, I may evaluate where to go with this new development of non-epistolary material which, strictly speaking, does not belong in such a "letter" file.

After one year in this volume 12(26/11/'07-26/11/'08), there appears to be room in this arch-lever file for at least another year of letters, emails and more of this pot-pourri of resources that seem to possess some archival relevance.

30/10/'08
INTRODUCTION # 1 TO FILE 2.2

I find my experience of writing letters has a number of similarities to the experience of Petrarch. He describes this experience in his Preface to his First Collection of Letters:

"…..amid the tempests of life I have never for long cast anchor in any one port, I have naturally made innumerable acquaintances. How many true friends I know not, for friends are not only exceedingly few, but difficult to distinguish. It has fallen to my lot, in consequence, to write to a great many who differed so widely from one another in mind and condition that on re-reading my letters it sometimes seemed to me as if I had said in one precisely the opposite from what I had in another. Yet anyone who has been in a similar position will readily admit that I was almost forced into such contradictions. The first care indeed in writing is to consider to whom the letter is to be sent; then we may judge what to say and how to say it. We address a strong man in one way and a weak one in another. The inexperienced youth and the old man who has fulfilled the duties of life, he who is puffed up with prosperity and he who is stricken with adversity, the scholar distinguished in literature and the man incapable of grasping anything beyond commonplace, ---each must be treated according to his character or position. There are infinite varieties among men; minds are no more alike than faces. And as the same stomach does not always relish the same kind of food, the same mind is not always to be fed upon the same kind of writing. So the task becomes a double one, for not only have we to consider the person to whom we propose to write, but how those things we are planning to say are likely to affect him when he reads them. Owing to these difficulties I have often been forced into apparent contradictions. And in order that unfavourable critics may not turn this against me, I have relied in a measure upon the kind aid of the flames for safety, and for the rest, upon your keeping the letters secret and suppressing my name."

Petrarch continues in that same preface: "Now that letters sent off years ago to the most distant regions are brought together at once in a single place, it is easy to perceive deformities in the whole body which were not apparent in the separate parts. Phrases which pleased when they occurred but once in a letter, begin to annoy one when frequently repeated in the same collection; accordingly they must be retained in one and expunged from the others. Many things, too, which related to every-day cares and which deserved mention when I wrote, would now weary even the most eager reader, and were therefore omitted." Such are some of Petrarch's explanations of the changes to the text in his collection of letters. Generally, it seems to me that the same could be said of my letters and I have quoted Petrarch for this reason.

Petrarch analyses the letters of Cicero whose oeuvre comes to nearly 1000. He says that Cicero treats philosophical subjects in his books, but fills his letters with miscellaneous news and the gossip of the day. For this reason, Petrarch goes on, he finds Cicero's letters very agreeable reading. They relax the tension produced by the weighty matters in Cicero's books which if read for long strain the mind. If occasionally interrupted the weighty subjects become a source of pleasure. Certainly my own letters follow the example of Cicero as opposed to that of Seneca who kept the tone and content of his letters serious to the end.

Petrarch entitles one of his volumes Letters of Familiar Intercourse, letters he writes "which there is little anxious regard to style, but where homely matters are treated in a homely manner." I am sure some quite natural division or categorization of letters could be made in relation to the several volumes of my letters. I leave this, of course, to future editors.

In the end it may be best to simply keep these letters of mine secret, unpublished or in the fire. In these ways these crude productions that I have carelessly thrown off--called letters--will be shielded from impudence, criticism and the lack of etiquette of expression. I think I may be making too much about various small matters in relation to these letters of mine. But I may be justified because I am more than a little conscious of my fear of censorious critics who, instead of producing work of their own to be judged, set themselves up as the judges of others' talents.

"I am ashamed of a life which has lapsed into weakness," Petrarch says in a surprising statement. He says that an examination of the order of his letters reveals a language in his earlier years that was sober and strong, betokening a valiant heart. He "not only stood firm," he says, "but often consoled others." The succeeding letters of his later years become day by day weaker and more dispirited and filled with lamentations of many kinds. Certainly as the years have gone on, and especially after the age of fifty, bodily weakness, a lack of fire in the will, an increased consciousness of my failings and of my sins of omission and commission became more and more part of my experience. I often felt more like a child than someone who had reached maturity. The aging process and its attendant correspondence is slow and mysterious and something I have just begun.

Ron Price
July 29th 2005

SOME COMMENTS ON MY POETRY

Were my poetry to become significant enough in the public domain I would certainly like to direct the attention of scholars to adaptations of and responses to its contents in music, drama, dance, and the visual arts. I'm confident that studies of my poetry in music, for example, could take the form of, say, something like Aaron Copland's song cycle of 12 of Emily Dickinson's poetry. Copland completed this creative work in 1950. While the poems of Dickinson that Copeland chose centered about no single theme, they treated of subject matter particularly close to Miss Dickinson: nature, death, life, eternity. It was Copeland's hope, nearly a century after Dickinson's poems were conceived, to create a musical counterpart to Emily Dickinson's unique personality. However desirable such an exercise might be to my spirit, I leave that activity to a posterity that I can scarcely imagine. Whatever aspects of my work that a future age might seek to highlight through song or indeed any other form of the creative and performing arts is, for me, a tantalizing consideration that can scarcely occupy any of my time at present, indeed, it seems somewhat pretentious to do so. I can not help but offer one thought in this direction; namely, that the poems which a future composer, for example, might select would, of necessity, be filled with the dissonant noises of the life of these four epochs. A counterpoint was developing, of course, but they were still early days, early days of the Kingdom of God on earth.

I have never understood music and my experience of it in a vacuum, as a pure structure of sounds as if fallen from the stars onto my faculty of musical perception. Music seems rather inextricably embedded in my several forms of life, forms that are, as it happens, essentially linguistic. Music is necessarily apprehended, at least in part, in terms of the language and linguistic practices that define me and my world. These words, this memoir, has for me a musical context and texture.

Music is manifested, as the philosopher Wittgenstein once wrote, by a complex of behaviours, such as illustrative gestures, apt comparisons, suitable hummings, and appropriate movings, incarnations, of thought. Gesture, in music, can be defined as "a movement that may be interpreted as significant." So is this true in words, in writing. Indeed all the musical terms seem to me to have literary analogues. Some analysts of music see gesture as affecting performance and experience more directly than the thematic and harmonic categories of conventional analysis. Gesture is seen as central to the performer's conception of the musical work--and mine.

Performers, like writers, attend primarily to the ‘shape' of a piece. Shape is analogous to structure but it tends to be more dynamic through its sensitivity to momentum, climax, and ebb and flow, comprising an outline, a general plan, a set of gestures unfolding in time. I say this because these considerations lie at the background and in the texture of my work.

To say one final thing about gesture, its definition in musical terms has some application to my writing and so I include it here in full: "a holistic concept, synthesizing what theorists would analyze separably as melody, harmony, rhythm and meter, tempo and rubato, articulation, dynamics, and phrasing into an indivisible whole. For performance, these overlapping strands must be further melded into a smooth, and at some level undivided, continuity. That melding is achieved most efficiently by means of an apparently natural, human gesture. Performers strive to create a shaping and shading of each phrase that is more than the sum of the motivic and harmonic units of which they are composed."

Gestural analysis in music, like analysis of this memoir, should focus on short events---motifs, figures or short phrases. The sense of unity in a composition and in this work is forged through a recognition of the gesture's internal continuity and coherence, and of the interconnections between gestures. This enables performers like myself to recognise and project seemingly disparate and distinct "motifs" as manifestations of the same "gesture". This work is like one single gesture.

Language, like music, is manifested in a complex of behaviours. Both music and language are forms of thought. Understanding music should therefore be analogous to understanding language. Both are a matter of use, that is, of knowing how to operate with the medium in question in particular contexts of communication. This 'knowing' is not about propositional knowledge but, rather, about behavioral and experiential abilities and dispositions. Hence, if music is thought, we should naturally come to understand it as we come to understand thought in words. This is done not by learning how to decode or decipher it, but by learning how to respond to it appropriately and how to connect it to and ground it in our lives. How I respond to language and how readers respond to my language is at the core of this memoir.

Intelligible music stands to literal thinking in precisely the same relation as does intelligible verbal discourse. If that relation is one that takes its form in expression, then music and language are, at any rate, in the same, and quite comfortable, boat. The performer and certainly this writer allows the articulation, accentuation, even the tempo to be different from page to page or on every few notes if that seems to be the natural shape of the lines. Everything is dynamic, fluid, in flux. That is certainly how I felt as I wrote this memoir.

Musical performers who over-emphasize their gestures through exaggerated emotional expression are similar to an actor who accompanies every movement with exaggerated facial and bodily expressions. I am conscious of having over-emphasized some gestures in this work as I have also over-emphasized some gestures in my life. This is not surprising given the bi-polar nature of my experience, my various enthusiasms and their gestural performances which undoubtedly have disrupted the overall architecture of my life and both enhanced and disrupted its continuity.

Musical sounds and these words flow in the same world and, although these comments comparing music and writing say nothing about my life, they are an appropriate inclusion as this memoir winds its way to its conclusion.

VOLUME FIVE
CHAPTER SEVEN

ABOUT MY POETRY

I find writing poetry is somewhat like the way a stream flows down from the mountain to the sea, its course changed by every boulder it comes across, which never goes straight for a minute unless the terrain dictates otherwise. It follows one law, is always loyal to that law which, curiously, is no law. There is nothing for it to do but make the trip to the sea.-Ron Price with thanks to Alfred Kazin in Mark Twain, Harold Bloom, editor, Chelsea House, 1986, pp.132-33.

I have tried in my poetry to overcome the problem that Milton refers to in Paradise Lost. I spoke, I wrote poetry and other genres and, in the process, defined the who, the where, the cause. I trust that very little of my poetry verges on the incoherent,1 although I have had enough people in the last 15 years(1990-2005) either express the fact they did not understand what I wrote or they simply did not enjoy my poetry enough to bother commenting; perhaps they did not want to hurt my feelings by being honest.-Ron Price with thanks to John Redmond, "Review of Les Murray's Subhuman Redneck Poems, Jacket, Vol.1, 1997.

My self I then perused, and limb by limb
Surveyed, and sometimes went, and sometimes ran
With supple joints, and lively vigour led:
But who I was, or where, or from what cause,
Knew not; to speak I tried, and forthwith spake,
My tongue obeyed and readily could name
What e'er I saw.
- Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII, pp. 253-73

Before including the first part of my only attempt at a single epic poem, I would like to include a personal reflection on my own character that arose from reading a reflection by Thornton Hunt who went on to become an accomplished man of letters in his own right. Hunt's reflection was on the life and character of William Hazlitt, a famous English essayist(1778-1830). Hunt wrote that "William Hazlitt was sensitive, captious, anxious to please, ready to fear that he had displeased, prompt to take offence; quick of insight into definite character and bookish qualities; half genius in art, but only half; trained in a narrow dissenting school, conscious of deficiencies in the very alphabet of literature, at a loss in the world, perplexed by fanciful mistrusts that others are ridiculing him; jealous, bitter, eloquent, generous, confessing a weakness for rackets and tea, at war with himself against foibles he despises, but confident in honest purpose, and the permanent rule of intellect and beauty."(See Appendex 2, Blunden, Leigh Hunt and his Circle (London: Harper Brs., 1930), at p. 3362)

I have always been anxious to please and, often, far too quick to take offense. One of life's challenges has been to feel at home in the world and not at a loss although, at times when I was in the grip of my bipolar disorder, I was far from at home in the wide-wide world. I was not troubled by bitterness or jealousy but had a degree of inner-warfare. The rule of intellect became stronger with the years. Biography provides, I find, a useful bridge to understanding self and for this reason I include the above reflection.

PART ONE OF MY SPECIAL EPIC POEM

At the centre of this wondrous epochal shift
is a cultural story of saints, martyrs and
messengers and endless connective tissue
with past and present. Heroic exemplars,
deep in history back to the enlightenment,
say, in Bahrain, the core of the vision
with the force to slowly actualise a reality,
new political and social harmonies
and disharmonies. My own ordering of history
here in its legitimate and beauteous form
with law and design, touchstones of order,
writ large across chaotic and energised
multiplicity, the endless disasters of time,
extinctions and near-extinctions,
the human slaughters and the pain
as I connect, in situ, my subjectivity
and history with meaning—yes, yes,
a place of refuge, partly in desire,
in mind or imagination and in the Beauty
of the Unseen shining forth above the horizon
of creation1 and in creating myself through
commitment to a complex personal synthesis,
through a relationship with myself
in a fascinating and difficult elaboration2,
inventing, producing myself with this poetic art.

And all these endless particulars cohere,
far beyond a personal order,
an autobiographical imposition
from this finite brain
in a dramaturgical translation,
a richly allusive, highly imagistic in-gathering,
not simply for some love of nature,
but to unlock a beauty and a truth,
to taste a choice Wine
with the fingers of might and power
and slowly establish a spiritual kingdom
in a physical form-order and beauty linked,
power and love united yonder, world's away,
around history's bend. Hesitation and doubt
I have heard and seen by gallon measure,
things that throw consternation into the hearts of all men—
and so the showers of tests come to pass
to free us from the prison-cage of self and desire,
to help us attain the meads of heavenly delight,
with gifts from the Unknowable Friend,
those shudders of awe that are mostly a quiet shimme
and shake, a tightness, dynamic tension;
all my days surrounded by this growth,
this organism, two generations now, incipient,
beginnings of a System, potentialities
and interrelationships of component parts
only partially understood, often like sinking
in a miasmal ooze, but a good terror, this one,
as we have inched our consequential and necessary way
toward a humbling summit only seen,
with the secret of conquering a greater world than ourselves
only little known, and so we prayed. I seem to have prayed
for years, over three epochs, and then ran into the door
of meditation and it opened into another world.
I have seen devotion, beyond human strength,
exhausting, making heroes of many men.
I watched my moods like a cat as I pursued this path,
convinced of the significance of my days sub specie aeternitatis
at the core of my art, my poetic, the oneness of my experience.
I trust its connection with the Royal Falcon on the arm of the Almighty.

I have thrown my life away in this great cause
but, as my arm has arched and flung, there was
down in my heart something sung, some voice
that met my joy and tears in great fatigue with all the years.
Truth here was what one long endured with persistence,
feet and passion sure, some burning vitality of mind
and heart, an intensity that once threatened to tear me apart.
I had my time with sexual heat, a blazing contact,
direct and real. It nearly sucked my life away with lust
the core of search. It tried to kill my loneliness and isolation.
Beyond, beyond the horrors and fears, to make some meanings
of our years we turn to sex, to self, to God
so as not to wither on this sod. And me no less.

And if, by some mysterious dispensation of Providence,
we feel we can play a part in changing the world,
not just get a grip on it and so endure it with a taste of joy,
with a taste of destiny minimising that everlasting self-concern,
the fierce inner pressure of problems with no solution
or with just transient existence, we can live with our guilt,
with sin, with our evil doings having our heart
melting all our life. This is the feeling of redemption.

And so there is a grimness here, and redeeming belief,
supernatural sanction. There has been a speed, a power,
a talent, a fertility-one matchless time-after forty years of
wandering between two holy years-a single human self
struggling to become what he is capable of becoming,
to know who he is, a lot of pennies dropping without
an endless recitation of the quotidian, unremarkable fact.
Some rich burgeoning, some rich hermeneutic tradition
opening up for all to see, read and understand,
like some elaborate systems theory which defines social reality
in terms of relations: right back to his birth, the birth of the universe
and endless other births and deaths and relationships
among relationships, networks of information that only I can bring
into some integration, dynamic analytic distinctions
of complexity, instability, quantity and quality...for this
universal human community, the end and object
of the highest moral endeavour, has at its root needs
and interests universally similar. We must free ourselves
from history's conceptual jails in this remade world
and keep remaking it.

And so an intensified global interconnectedness,
a post-international, post-industrial transformation
is taking place under our eyes and, what, three
hundred million will have starved from 1969 to 1999,
since Paul Ehrlich wrote his Population Bomb?
Global historical civilization, being born amidst
chaos and middle class complacency, is reconstituting
the world as one place. Do we not need, therefore,
some universal truths, perennial but not archaic?
Do we not need some philosophical stance with
which to view modernity and post-modernity?
Some sense of the ultimate becoming, some teleological
evolutionary scheme? Some utopian vision
within which to frame the struggle? Yes, yes, yes:
some magnetising value core, firey furnace,
magnetising our convergent efforts,
as Durkheim might have said.3

And while I have answered "yes' to all of this
since at least the days when we sent the first
men into space and since the Zeal of the Lord
passed on, I have enjoyed and feared a constant
swing between ecstasy and exhaustion, the heavy-
weight and lightning speed, galactic, radiance in the
smallest of patches and dull emptiness: overwhelmed,
dazzled and awed, a rush of images, a flow of phrases,
needing this epic form to express the burgeoning,
the out-pouring, the excess, the prison of the longue duree,
the patterned, the inchoate, the world beyond
the commonplace and the self-evidentnesses of view;
needing synthesis, mediation, unification of ideas
among the children of men.

But my sense of the beauty everywhere has been
so long clouded by so many things, emotions,
intensities, the pulse of a greater dynamism beats
with a heavier heart. The Bridge, the basis of that
new dynamism, is that new unity, innocence and
freedom which we first saw in Shaykh Ahmad
when he left his home in northeast Arabia in 1794;
when Robespierre was in power and Pitt was the
Prime Minister of England. Trying to create a tradition
where none existed, the Committee of Public Safety,
guillotined 10,000 seen as some kind of moral revolution
in the making, after Rousseau. But the moral revolution
that would last for centuries was proceeding to Najaf and
Karbila to begin its long road, becoming the leading mujtahid:
the Bridge was an idea, a terror struck in the hearts of the Sufis,
while that other terror issued dechristianization decrees and
relentlessly uprooted public order. And so this poem begins
in the early dawn of this modern age, over two hundred years,
with appropriate quantities of analysis and introspection,
bewildered and bedazzled as I am by it all, pushing through
all the ramifications of thought, burning myself up, candle-like,
drop-by-drop the wick will come in time to only a pool of wax
on this table and I shall be gone, across the Bridge, home.

History's weakness and my own is found here
amidst the blaze of visionary sense
and an infinitude of correspondences:
a mystic on the loose, synthesizing, mediating,
watching the slow realization of vision in action,
seeing this Bridge and these White Buildings4
across a span from ancient Greece and Rome
to our own age, this one on a hill. This bridge
takes you up and down to ideals as remote
as Arctic winds but as close as your life's vein.
But I do not try to speak to a whole culture, here,
Hart, and its infinite fragmentation, only to a coterie
on its way to the fulfilment of His vision
set in a world of diamond words, sweet-scented streams
of His eternity, an orderly matrix of values.
This is no diversionary flight, scheme, temporary assuaging
of a longing, magical society of dreams, life's flickering grace,
but some battle for the conquest of men's souls
but oh so gently, as the teacher distils eternity
from the transitory with a spark of heroism amidst decadence,
a filtering of the harsh refuse of modernity,
conscious of a new savagery in the midst of civilization,
the endlessly arbitrary and fortuitous, the hasty grasp
and exploitation of ephemera, of the momentary.
And so the teacher learns not to take the fleeting moment
too seriously, to be detached, while at the same time pouring
forth all his concentration into the thing in front of his nose.
If the pioneer can do this he has the world by the tail—
and boredom, distraction and an over-excited worldliness
are problems far beyond him. For he has new nourishing food—
the food of knowledge—duration with a purpose
as deep as the ocean and as wide as the sea,
realising the ideal lines will be completed
beyond this momentary reality. And so I capture it all
in this written portraiture, capture the fleeting,
the transient and the eternal, the inevitably fragmentary
phenomenal world in a metaphysical unity,
gradually letting it ripen-or it captures me,
and I warm it over, gestate it for some future public.

In this forest of symbols, voluptuous labyrinth,
sometimes ghostly landscape of damnable
and not-so-damnable pleasures and professions
we must close our eyes to luxury and attachments
to the material world and long, as I have long longed,
for eternal life. The real department store,
the primal landscape of consumption,
the secret labyrinth of dreams
is the jewelled wisdom of this lucid Faith.5

End of Part One

COMMENTARY AND CONTEXT ON AMERICAN AND BAHA'I HISTORY AND MY POETRY: AS EPIC

These, and other similar incidents connected with the epic story of the Zanjan upheaval, characterized by Lord Curzon as a "terrific siege and slaughter," combine to invest it with a sombre glory unsurpassed by any episode of a like nature in the records of the Heroic Age of the Faith of Bahaullah -Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p. 46.

Epic: narrative poem of heroic type or scale; poem of any form embodying the conception of the past history of a nation or group of people.-Dictionary

The number of long epic poems written the world over is increasing. World history and the history of its many nation states is characterized by epochal statements and epics of various kinds as far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address were both epochal if not epic statements, to choose but two from American history and one could choose many others from the history of other nations. Then there are epic movies like Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind and epic figures from cinema, like John Wayne. John Wayne himself directed a film on an epic event, the Alamo. He also wrote a book on the making of this film. He called it "The Making of the Epic Film." Epic, it seems, comes up everywhere when one thinks about America and increasingly in relation to all sorts of historical and contemporary events in today's world. It also comes up in relation to my poetry and the Bahá'í Faith and that is my reason for writing. I have brought it up.

This continent and this world has epic voyages, battles, wars, figures, poems, prose. Calling up all the titles of books from recent decades that contain the word "epic" in the catalogue of a good library will reveal scores of books. The same is true on the internet. The word is now applied indiscriminately to appropriate and inappropriate subjects. Does the story of United Methodist preaching or the study of the genitals of boll-weevil properly warrant the label "epic"? Yes and no. The question has become complex. We speak of "epic" not only in the strict sense of a long poem on certain topics, with certain characteristics more or less based on the founding epics of our Western epic tradition, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. We speak of epic in a broader sense, as a story recounting great deeds, typically in wars or battles or on dangerous voyages or as an application, an example of the definition that begins this essay. The use of the term "epic" has spread out in a burgeoning fashion from these points, these definitions, these senses.

One is not surprised, therefore, that Robert Hughes' huge current book on American art, American Visions, is subtitled The Epic History of Art in America. Hughes tells us, in a TV interview, that the subtitle is the publisher's. Is then the association of "epic" with things American all just a matter of merchandising, American hype, the spirit of P.T. Barnum? Are we dealing only with the epic of American salesmanship, which almost all foreign visitors to America have commented on, or is there something about America that properly summons up the idea of "epic"? One would not expect a book on British art, for example, to be subtitled "the epic of British art," though there are of course wonderful buildings, paintings, and sculptures in Britain. Is that only a matter of characteristic British understatement? Perhaps. And yet, when one rolls the phrases around on one's tongue, the strong impression cannot be denied: Whatever the crass motives of the publisher of American Visions or of filmmakers who dub many a film "epic," epic seems to suit America and American topics better than it suits many other countries. Epic becomes America–in the sense in which Eugene O'Neill used the term, in his great play, Mourning Becomes Electra. Was his play an epic?

The artist Willem de Kooning who was born, raised, and educated in Holland has an interesting comment on what happens when one sees oneself as American, rather than, say, Dutch. It's a certain burden, this American-ness. If you come from a small nation, you don't have that burden. "When I went to the Academy and I was drawing from the nude," says de Kooning, "I was making the drawing, not Holland. I feel sometimes an American artist must feel like a baseball player or something–a member of a team writing American history." Certainly Hughes would agree. America's size, its newness, its wonders engaged many American artists in the nineteenth century. They took up the American landscape not only as a subject but as a duty. In the early twenty-first century, it is still some particular idea of America–today, however, generally evoked satirically, ironically, critically, indignantly–that seems to motivate much of the oversized work of contemporary American artists. And then there is the "great American novel," an obsession with some novelists, and the fact that America's greatest poet writes in a grand, elevated style about America. Indeed, his work is labeled by some an epic, as in James Edwin Miller's Leaves of Grass: America's Lyric Epic of Self and Democracy."

I did not take up writing about the Bahá'í Faith as a subject, as a duty but, rather, as something which engaged my mind and perhaps to an extent as an obsession, as a member of that team which is writing about the Bahá'í Faith. As someone who grew up in the northern half of America, of North America, in what we used to call the Dominion of Canada when I was a kid, I have little trouble identifying myself with the epic experience, the epic history of the Bahá'í Faith. With six thousand poems and several million words under my epic belt, so to speak, I feel tied to, part and parcel of, this epic experience which for me goes back to 1753 and the birth of Shaykh Ahmad--a quarter of a millennium ago. My life, since 1967, has been part of "The historic mission beyond the confines of the Dominion," and part of the "push to the outposts of the Faith to the northernmost territories in the Western Hemisphere." The greatest drama in the world's spiritual history, the Bahá'í story, is an epic of mamouth proportions. My writing is simply one of the infinite number of expressions of this story.

America as "epic" raises the question, what is unique, what is central, about the American experience that deserves the epithet "epic"? The same question can be raised in relation to the Bahá'í experience as an international community, in the form of its more than 200 national communities and in the lives of its some six million adherents. It reminds me of another, soberer effort to get to what is unique about America, the discussion of "American exceptionalism," conducted principally by sociologists. Seymour Martin Lipset has recently collected and updated a considerable body of his writings on this subject, one that has engaged him for many years: American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. Daniel Bell has also pondered American exceptionalism in The End of Ideology and elsewhere. The issue, as they discuss it, arises because of the interesting question of why there has been no major socialist movement in the United States and what makes the USA unique among advanced industrial societies.

The question was perhaps first raised in 1906 by the German sociologist and economist Werner Sombart. There is little that we would consider distinctive about America that has not been raised to explain the failure of socialism to develop here. Thus Bell writes that Sombart "pointed to the open frontiers, the many opportunities for social ascent through individual effort and the rising standard of living," and goes on to give many other reasons why socialism didn't take in America. "In the end," Bell writes, "all such explanations have fallen back on the natural resources and material vastness of America." And Lipset writes, "Political exceptionalism, the failure of socialist parties in the United States, has been explained by numerous factors–so many that the outcome seems overdetermined." He then goes on to list no less than 12 significant features of the United States, societal and political, that could explain the absence of a major socialist movement and its unique role and function in the world.

The theme of American exceptionalism is related to the topic of America as epic because as a concept this notion of exceptionalism provides, in part at least, an explanation for what is unique about America, what makes it so successful economically and so dynamic socially. American exceptionalism directs us to look at basic values, institutions and social forces which since the 1940s have made the USA the strongest, the most prominent nation on earth. Exceptionalism is part, then, of the subject of epic in America. One could build similar arguments about the uniqueness of other nation states or, indeed, the Bahá'í Faith.

The epic proper recounts great and terrible deeds, founding ages. One sometimes reads that with Milton or Wordsworth, or Whitman, the intellectual or spiritual development of the poet–Blake's "mental fight"–replaced the struggles of warriors as the proper subject of epic scope in narrative poetry. The sequence of Achilles, Rinaldo, Wordsworth or Whitman brings to mind Carlyle's unintentionally funny list of "heroes," which begins with the Norse God Odin and ends with Samuel "Dictionary" Johnson. Often moral courage and physical courage go hand in hand when one is examining the epic in history, although not everyone would agree with this line of thought.

Deeds, inner explorations of feelings, discoveries to improve the lot of man, the world of the epic has broadened. The proper subject of epic can now be found just about anywhere. Some are troubled by this democratization of something that historically had an elitist image in literature. Some literary critics, who after all are often the first people to discuss what makes an epic, who set up its canons of legitimacy, assert that the purely personal is no subject for epic. Perhaps they are right. I am happy to include my poetry in the category ‘epic' because it is inspired by and about the history of the Bahá'í Faith. Although much of my poetry is personal, it is not only personal. It is also about what is unique, what is special, significant, original about Bahá'í history and Bahá'í experience. Both this experience and my poetry, I would argue, participate in the concept epic. Were my life and thought not tied to the Bahá'í Faith it is doubtful that I would have associated it with the notion of epic. Indeed, it is doubtful that I would have written any of it at all.

Walt Whitman, despite his insistence on the purely personal nature of his achievement, incorporated within his poetry the entire American experience of his time. He wrote: "Leaves of Grass ... has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and other personal nature–an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America) freely, fully, and truly on record. Note Whitman's determined reference to time and place. And Whitman wrote elsewhere, "I contain multitudes within myself and these were the multitudes of America. As Samuel Beer has argued in an interesting essay, Whitman reaches out much further into a political community than the typical poet. In my poetry I do the same, but I reach out into the Bahá'í community not the American people at Whitman did.

Wordsworth or any one of a host of poets in the last 200 years, contemporary Americans and others, record their personal responses and personal development. They are not celebrating a nation, its democracy, its multifariousness, and, as American art does, its variety and newness. They are not celebrating or commemorating the events of the history of a nation or a group as I am doing in my poetry in relation to Bahá'í history. They are quintessentially individualists. I suppose one could argue that that is the other epic theme in recent centuries: the theme of the individual. Wordsworth's Prelude is certainly an epic venture and it's all about him and his critique of the age--not unlike my own work here.

This is not to say, of course, that poets of the last 200 years have not had any political, religious or group affiliation: no group identity. Everyone belongs to a group in some way or another. The theme of "America as epic" directs us to think, initially, not about the multiplicity of America and Americans but of a single dominant story, carried by heroes. The epic of America, dominant until at least the 1930s and 1940s, has been in recent decades eclipsed by another and quite different "epic of America." It is a multicultural America with a host of epics.

For Bahá'ís who are also poets the epic that arises in their poetry is the history and the culture of their Faith and in the 1930s and 1940s that epic started to take form as the American Bahai community expanded to include all of its states, to be "a national unit of a world society."

The first American epic, dominant until at least the first teaching Plan(1937-1944) emphasizes the newness, the vastness, the openness of America–the freedom thereby granted Americans. It is the old, or at least the older story, about America. Connected with it are such terms as the American idea, or the American creed, or the American dream, or Manifest Destiny. It is true that the frontier as a continuous line of settlement to the West no longer existed by 1890. It was in the first few years of the 1890s that the first Bahá'í pioneers arrived on American shores, precursors of the pioneers who would later leave America's shores. That first American epic and the epic in Bahá'í history associated with the heroic age, one could argue, lasted into the 1930s when Bahá'í administration advanced to assume a form which allowed it to focus on a national, an international teaching Plan. It was here, in this international teaching Plan, that the second stage of the Bahá'í epic emerged.

There was still much of the West to be settled even after 1890; there was to come an overseas expansion expressing very much the same values; and then there was the brief "American Century," carrying forward similar and related values. The second epic, which I place in opposition to the first, is a somewhat more problematic epic. It emphasizes racial and ethnic diversity, whether in an optimistic or pessimistic mood. The first epic was connected with an ever available frontier denoting free land, free institutions, free men. The second epic is city-centred and finds its frontiers, if any, within a physically completed society. The first is the epic of the forests, the prairies, the plains. It is the epic of discoverers, explorers, pioneers, of Columbus, Daniel Boone, and Lewis and Clark, of the Oregon trail, the Mormon trek, the transcontinental railway. The second celebrates quite different voyages: the middle passage, the Trail of Tears, the immigrant ship, the underground railway, the tenement trail from slum to suburb. The first is the epic of the Anglo-Saxon, the Scotch-Irish, in lesser degree the German and the Scandinavian. The second is the epic of the Native Americans, the Africans, the "new immigrants" from southern and eastern Europe, the new immigrants of the last three decades, cast generally as the victims of the protagonists of the first epic.

The first epic has not fully lost its power to evoke response in American consciousness, and the second is not entirely new but has been with us from the beginning, even if hardly noted. From a Bahá'í perspective that first epic is, as I said above, synonymous with the Heroic Age(1844-1932). Whitman is a bridging figure from the first to the second and maintains an optimistic stance embracing both. ‘Abdu'l-Bahá or the Guardian or even the Greatest Holy Leaf serves as the bridging figure from this first to the second stage of epic in Bahá'í history.

One sees, in the last few decades, a transition in which the first epic, once dominant, becomes recessive, while the second asserts its problematic claims as the epic of America ever more sharply. Here, too, in these same decades the Bahá'ís, just one group in a host of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith groups, find expression for the epic in which my own life has been involved. It is here that my poetry finds its place as part of that faith-epic. The second Bahá'í epic or at least its second stage also asserts its problematic claims in the epochs of the Formative Age, thusfar.

One can select many symbolic events to mark the change from phase one to phase two of the epic experience both in American and in Bahá'í history. In American history consider the contrast between the writings of two presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Roosevelt wrote of the frontier, the "winning of the West." He celebrated the expansion of American power and settlement westwards, and the projection of America's power beyond our continental boundaries, much of which he engineered as president. During his presidency, the greatest stream of immigrants in American history was entering the country. He saw immigrants as adding to the strength of America, filling its factories and mines and armies. But he did not celebrate diversity. He insisted on a full Americanization. "We freely extend the hand of welcome and of good fellowship to every man and woman, no matter their creed or birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on becoming a good citizen, but we have the right and it is our duty to demand they shall indeed become so." David Brooks, quoting this passage in an article in the Weekly Standard, comments: "That meant, in Roosevelt's eyes, the immigrant had to leave Old World quarrels behind. It meant he had to learn English–We believe that English and no other language is that in which all school exercises should be conducted.... We have no room in a healthy American community for a German-American vote or an Irish-American vote and it is contemptible demagoguery to put into any party platform [rhetoric] with the purpose of catching such a vote."

The tone changes with John F. Kennedy, another friend of American power and of immigration. He wrote A Nation of Immigrants, lauding the immigrant contribution to the United States, and he and his brother sought to open the doors of America wider to immigrants. The first Roosevelt, when he thought of immigrants, thought of a growing and ever stronger America that needed manpower. His successor president thought rather of appealing to a new electorate or of displaying compassion for the victims of a troubled world. One will detect a marked change as one moves from the first to the second. Kennedy did not use the term "Americanization": It would not have rung right even in 1958, and, today, it is quite banned from politics. Every president since Kennedy, Democrat or Republican, has lauded immigrants and immigration. President Reagan presided over the rededication of the Statue of Liberty, a great national festival. Long before, the meaning of the Statue had been quite transformed from that originally intended. It was no longer "Liberty Enlightening the World," but "Liberty welcoming the immigrant."

The Bahá'í epic associated with its heroic age is not the same as the epic associated with its Formative Age. The potentialities that the creative force of that first 77 years-that heroic age-had planted in human consciousness, in the consciousness of Bahá'ís, would gradually unfold. My life and the life of my parents would see the first century of that unfolding. The poetry I have written, while inspired by that heroic age, is written in the main about the epochs, the four epochs, of my life in the Formative Age.

In a recent book by Nathan Glazer We Are All Multiculturalists Now, Glazer tries to understand and to analyze the change in how we envisage America in our schools and what it teaches about our past. In explaining the book to various audiences he has sought to find an emblematic expression of the very different time when there was no great argument as to what we meant by "the epic of America"–when no hint of the great change of the last few decades was yet evident. He explained that the title of Theodore Roosevelt's first great success as a writer and historian, The Winning of the West, characterized this earlier period. It is a title that without restraint or second thoughts or apology celebrates the American epic of expansion. Today, the title The Winning of the West would lead us to think immediately of whom we won it from–the Indians, the Mexicans, the environment. Its celebratory note would grate on us. But it does tell us what the epic of America once was.

Perhaps its equivalent in Bahá'í literature is The Dawnbreakers, with its thrilling passages and the splendour of its central theme which gives the chronicle its great historic value and its high moral power. Beginning with nine years marking the "most spectacular, most tragic, most eventful period of the first Bahá'í century," this heroic, this apostolic, age ended with the passing of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá in 1921. In the 1920s and 1930s Bahá'í administration and Bahá'í teaching Plans came to take on a central focus in this second stage of the Bahá'í epic.

To place The Winning of the West in its time: The first volumes were published in 1889 when Roosevelt was only 31. He had already served as a New York state legislator, had written a well-received book on the War of 1812 and a biography of the frontier statesman Thomas Hart Benton, had turned himself into a ceaseless advocate of the strenuous life, had ridden with cowboys on cattle ranches in the Dakota Territory on the western frontier when Indian wars were still a reality, and had written a book of his experiences there. That experience led him back to earlier frontiers in American history. As Harvey Wish tells us: The task of writing four volumes of The Winning of the West ... had to share his time and energy while he served as an active member of the United States Civil Service Commission and then as President of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners. He investigated slums, sweatshops, and graft.... In 1895-6, he managed to issue his final two volumes while campaigning for McKinley ... for which he was rewarded by receiving the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

He went on to become governor of New York, vice-president, and, upon the assassination of McKinley, president in 1901. Despite his auspicious beginnings as a historian, he was never to complete The Winning of the West as he had originally intended. The completed volumes end with the acquisition of Louisiana and Lewis and Clark's exploration of the vast new territories that had been added to the United States. The Winning of the West was republished again and again, in many editions, even before Roosevelt became president, but I note that the last full printing was in 1927. Harvey Wish's little volume of selections from the four volumes, from which I have quoted, was published in 1962, and the book was, surprisingly, reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 1995, perhaps another signal of a modest Theodore Roosevelt revival. We should be aware that the book was greatly respected in its time and for decades after, and not only by popular and literary critics but by the leading academics of the day.

Roosevelt did do a remarkable amount of research in archives and wrote the book from primary sources, not secondary materials. Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard admired it. Frederick Jackson Turner, the propounder of the enormously influential thesis on the role of the frontier in the shaping of American society, also praised it. He wrote three reviews of it as successive volumes appeared. Turner's own seminal paper, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," was presented in Chicago in 1893 (after Roosevelt's first few volumes had been published) during the great Chicago fair celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, as it was once described. Indeed, the contrast between the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage and our embarrassed effort to deal with the 500th anniversary is symbolic of the change I am trying to characterize. It was clear then that the opening of the West was the great theme of American history to almost everyone who thought seriously about it at the time and that its closing, as noted by the Superintendent of the Census on the basis of the findings of the census of 1890, had to portend some significant changes.

Of course, the opening of the towns, localities, states and all the countries of the world to the Bahá'í Faith by its pioneers was also a great theme of Bahá'í history. And that theme can be found expressed again and again in my poetic-epic, an age of pioneering from the 1920s and 1930s onward. My poetry is a work of unabashed religious enthusiasm and I know it will not attract many because of this. The Winning of the West is a work of unabashed nationalism. It is a nationalism that exalts the role of one element of the American population and takes bare notice of the others. There is no political correctness in The Winning of the West, of course. The first volume is labeled, "The Spread of the English-Speaking Peoples," and will remind us of one of the books by a later great nationalist leader, Winston Churchill, who wrote a multi-volumed history of the "English-speaking peoples." Roosevelt begins: "During the past three centuries, the spread of the English-speaking peoples across the world's waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world's history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance."

Today, we would sit up and notice that the lands over which the English-speaking peoples spread are called "waste spaces." We would think of all the people who already lived there when the English-speaking peoples arrived. The Indians to Roosevelt are "savages." They are cruel and treacherous, by our standards of course, but Roosevelt does not take much account of the standards of "the other": "Not only were they very terrible in battle, but they were cruel beyond all belief in victory.... The hideous, unnameable, unthinkable tortures practised by the red men on their captured foes, and on their foes" tender women and helpless children, were such as we read of in no other struggle, hardly even the revolting pages that tell the deeds of the Holy Inquisition." (In these latter days, Roosevelt might also be condemned for male chauvinism because of the way he refers to women.) Roosevelt respects the Indians for their warrior prowess, but has no regret over the outcome.

The history of the border wars ... makes a long tale of injuries inflicted, suffered, and mercilessly revenged. It could not be otherwise when brutal, reckless, lawless borderers, despising all men not of their own color, were thrown into contact with savages who esteemed cruelty and treachery as the highest virtue, and rapine and murder as the worthiest of pursuits. Looking back, it is easy to say that much of the wrong-doing could have been prevented; but if we examine the facts to find out the truth, not to establish a theory, we are bound to admit that the struggle could not possibly have been avoided. Unless we were willing that the whole continent west of the Alleghenies should remain an unpeopled waste, the hunting ground of savages, war was inevitable. And after examining briefly Indian claims that they were the first present and the possessors of the soil, Roosevelt writes:

"The truth is the Indian never had any real title to the soil; they had not half so good a claim to it, for instance, as the cattlemen now have to all eastern Montana, yet no one would assert that the cattlemen have a right to keep immigrants off their vast unfenced ranges. The settler and the pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages."

I hope it is not necessary to emphasize that my point is not to expose the prejudices or blind spots of an earlier time, but to present as clearly as possible how a representative great American, an historian as well as a national leader (Roosevelt was, in time, to serve as president of the American Historical Association), thought of what was noteworthy, great, and of epic character in American history. And here we must say something more of Roosevelt's view of the protagonists of this epic, the pioneers.

The pioneers are, of course, representative of the English-speaking peoples, but they are also a new people shaped by the experience of colonization and settlement in a new and dangerous place. "At the day when we began our career as a nation we already differed from our kinsmen of Britain in blood as well as in name." The original English stock, which Roosevelt points out was already the result of a mixture of peoples, mingled with and absorbed into itself immigrants from many European lands, and this process has gone on since. It is to be noted that, of the new blood thus acquired, the greatest proportion has come from Dutch and German sources, and the next greatest from Irish, while the Scandinavian element comes third, and the only other of much importance is the French Huguenot.

But then he adds, remarkably for 1889, when the sources of American immigration had recently undergone a great change, from northern and western Europe, to eastern and southern: "Additions have been made to the elemental race-strains in much the same proportion as those originally combined." He defines the guiding, leading, pioneering element more sharply:

"The backwoodsmen were American by birth and parentage; but the dominant strain in their blood was that of the Presbyterian Irish–the Scotch-Irish as they were often called.... It is doubtful if we have wholly realized the importance of the part played by that stern and virile people.... They form the kernel of the distinctively and intensely American stock who were the pioneers of our people in their march westward, the vanguard of the army of fighting settlers, who with axe and rifle won their way from the Alleghenies to the Rio Grande and the Pacific."

They are the heroes of the epic. They were not to be displaced for another 50 years. But, of course, new elements were being added to the American population, in great number, and they were not pioneers, except metaphorically. Willa Cather titled her novel, O Pioneers!, but they were not pioneers in the same sense as the Scotch-Irish who crossed the Alleghenies, fought Indian wars in the Old Northwest and Southwest, conquered Texas from Mexico, made the way clear for German and Scandinavian farmers who followed after. Perhaps Cather's Norwegian settlers in Nebraska could, to some extent, be incorporated into this American epic. But then, what of the newcomers crowding the cities in the 1890s and 1900s and 1910s?

Turner had propounded the most influential thesis in American history in 1893. By 1914, he had to take notice of a great change in America: "If we look about the periphery of the nation, everywhere we see the indications that our world is changing. On the streets of ...New York and Boston, the faces we meet are to a surprising extent those of Southeastern Europe.... It is the little Jewish boy, the Greek or Sicilian, who takes the traveller through historic streets, now the home of these newer people ... and tells you in his strange patois the story of revolution against oppression."

In this same address, a commencement speech at the University of Washington, Turner creates a striking image of these two worlds in contact. It seems Turner had to pass through the Harvard museum of social ethics–an early expression of sociology at Harvard which no longer exists–in order to get to the room in which he lectured on the history of the westward movement: The hall is covered with an exhibit of the work of the Pittsburgh steel mills, and of the congested tenements. Its charts and diagrams tell of the long hours, the death rate, the relation of typhoid to the slums, the gathering of all Southeastern Europe to make a civilization at that centre of American industrial energy and vast capital that is a social tragedy. As I enter my lecture room through that hall, I speak of the young Washington leading his Virginia frontiersmen to the magnificent forest at the forks of the Ohio. Where Braddock and his men ... were struck by the painted savages in the primeval woods, huge furnaces belch forth perpetual fires and Huns and Bulgars, Poles and Sicilians, struggle for a chance to earn their daily bread, and live a brutal and degraded life. He writes "Huns" but presumably means Hungarians.

We will note little reference to African Americans or slavery in Theodore Roosevelt or Frederick Jackson Turner: The epic of the westward movement had little to say of them. Roosevelt did write that the early settlers, "to their own lasting harm, committed a crime whose short-sighted folly was worse than its guilt, for they brought hordes of African slaves, whose descendants now form immense populations in certain portions of the land." But slavery plays no great role in his story: He makes little distinction between the frontiersmen pushing out from Pennsylvania, or from Virginia and the Carolinas, and indeed asserts that they made little distinction. They were all mountain men, and the issue of whether slave or free was of no great moment then. It was before the great conflicts over whether the new western states were to be slave or free. Turner depreciates the significance of slavery as against the significance of the frontier in American history: "Even the slavery struggle ... occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to Westward expansion."

This perspective astonishes us today: It is as if once the conflict over whether new states were to be slave or free was settled by the Civil War, race was no longer of great consequence in American history. Indeed, during the first half of the 20th century, the question of race, urgent as it was for black Americans, was little noted by others. If there was an alternative epic to the epic of westward movement, it was then (as in measure it still is) the Civil War and the destruction of southern plantation society, seen entirely from the point of view of the slaveholder. And so, the first great American movie epic is The Birth of a Nation, and the greatest is Gone With the Wind.

In 1931, a popular historian of the day, James Truslow Adams, published a one-volume history of America and boldly titled it, The Epic of America. Published by a leading Boston publisher, it was a Book-of-the-Month club selection; it still makes interesting reading today. The attitudes of more significant figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Jackson Turner are still dominant, if somewhat cruder, in the year before the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is still the epic of westward expansion and manifest destiny, now generalized into the American dream, that is "the epic of America." When Adams writes of "three racial frontiers in the West" around 1800, he does not have in mind white interaction with Indians and Africans. He has in mind the French and the Spanish and the English. His three racial frontiers remind me of the "historical convergence of European, African, and Native American people" which stands at the beginning of American history, according to the recently proposed National Standards for History. The historically important "races" have undergone a radical change.

Adams, a New England writer and the author of such previous books as The Founding of New England, Revolutionary New England, New England in the Republic, and The Adams Family, finds no problem in celebrating the culture of the antebellum South. "The type of life which now evolved in the South was in many ways the most delightful America has known, and that section has become in retrospect the land of romance."

William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist weekly, The Liberator, is to Adams "fanatical," as is John Brown. The Civil War was not merely a question of slavery. It was a question of interpretation of the fundamental compact between the states ... whether property guaranteed by the Constitution was safe or not...; whether an agrarian civilization could preserve its character...; whether a section of the country should be allowed to maintain its own peculiar set of cultural values or be coerced to conform to those of an alien and disliked section...; a question of what would become of liberty if union were to mean an enforced conformity.

Yet the epigraph at the beginning of the book is from Whitman: "Sail–sail thy best, ship of democracy." One does detect a muddle here, but no more of a muddle than characterized American democracy as a whole at the time. We will also have to tut-tut over Adams's treatment of the new immigrants, as they still were in 1931: "These Slavs, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, Italians, Russians, Lithuanians, Jews ... were of a very different type from the Irish, British, Germans and Scandinavians." More were illiterate. They were also "much more 'foreign' in their background and outlook than those who had come previously, and less assimilable to our social life and institutions." Though they were peasants, "they did not seek to become farmers and to establish homes in this country, but congregated in huge racial groups in the larger cities, or became operatives in factories and mines." They preferred to accept day wages, maintain their old low standard of living, and even go below that, to save as much money as possible.... The earlier immigrants had come to make homes, raise their standard of living, and become citizens; these new ones came as birds of passage.... This also kept them from the desire to assimilate themselves to American social life, to learn English, and to adapt themselves to American ways.

And yet, there is the quotation from Whitman, and he writes of the prophets of American democracy, that only Emerson "glimpsed the real essence of Americanism and its dream of democracy.... Whittier was too concerned with the problem of the slave, and, like Lowell, who would have sacrificed the union because of his dislike of the South, saw America too much in terms of sectional evil. And the muddle only increases. After his criticism, typical of the time, of the new immigrants–and progressives as well as conservatives indulged in it–Adams ends his book with a vision of the American dream and one of these new immigrants dreaming it on the steps of the Boston Public Library:

"That dream ... has evolved from the hearts and burdened souls of many millions, who have come to us from all nations. If some of them have too great faith, we know not yet to what faith may attain, and may hearken to the voice of one of them, Mary Antin, a young immigrant girl who comes to us from Russia.... Sitting on the steps of the Boston Public Library, where the treasures of the whole of human thought had been opened to her, she wrote: "This is my latest home, and it invited me to a glad new life.... The past ... cannot hold me, because I have grown too big; just as the little house in Polotzk, once my home, has now become a toy of memory, as I move about at will in the wide spaces of this splendid palace.... America is the youngest of nations, and inherits all that went before it in history. And I am the youngest of America's children, and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage.... Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future."

So we see new epics being born even while the old one is being celebrated. And by the time the Bahá'ís began to use the term pioneer, just as their first teaching Plan(1937-1944) was about to be set in motion, "the whole majestic past and the shining future" awaited them. In 1951, Oscar Handlin, who was to become the major historian of American immigration, and the leading figure in a generation of historians studying the old and the new immigration, summed up his vision of immigration in a book titled The Uprooted. (The second edition of 1973 bears on its cover the subtitle, The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that made the American People. The first sentence of the book reads: "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were America."

The eclipse of the first "epic of America" seemed complete. Theodore Roosevelt would not have used the term "immigrant" to refer to his Dutch ancestors or to the frontiersmen he celebrated. They were colonists, settlers, pioneers–immigrants were something else. The notion that we were all immigrants was still somewhat surprising in 1951, though Franklin Delano Roosevelt, speaking to the Daughters of the American Revolution, who had refused to allow Marian Anderson to sing in their hall in 1939, did say, "We are all immigrants, and the descendants of revolutionists." However, this was then still a surprising and provocative thought. Twenty years after Handlin published The Uprooted, it was only common wisdom, or commonplace. A half-dozen presidents and a hundred judges inducting new immigrants pronounced we were all a nation of immigrants. And desperate efforts were being made to induct the non-immigrants–Native Americans, as the Indians had become, and the African-American descendants of slaves–into American epics that had ignored or disdained them.

It was not long before Handlin was alarmed at the terms of inclusion. Supplementing The Uprooted, 20 years after its original publication, in the Spring of 1971, Handlin wrote: "a committee of the United States Senate held hearings on an amendment to the higher education act. In the parade of witnesses, there were no dissenters. From many different parts of the country, representing many different organizations, they reiterated an identical woeful refrain: ‘We have been made victims!'"

The tone was varied, from undiluted bitterness to a plaintive awareness of offsetting gains. But unfailingly the complaints expressed a tone of deprivation which was also a sense of emptiness, the ache of which required stilling. America had created the void by the theft of their ancestors; now the victims needed the healing pride of ethnicity.

Handlin was speaking of the hearings on legislation that would assist ethnic groups in developing curricula on their culture and history which could be used in schools. No Mary Antins appeared to celebrate the openness of America, the pleasures and rewards of integration–which inevitably does mean the loss of the past. No Theodore Roosevelt was present to insist that that is what America expected of immigrants. The single story was becoming many stories. Black studies at the time were spreading rapidly and were soon to become a fixture in the academy, along with Latino, Asian-American, and Native-American studies. The women's movement had exploded in the universities. No one in 1971 realized what a sturdy trunk of academia it would shortly become, nor that it would be joined by gay and lesbian studies. Perhaps other forms of diversity that we are not yet conscious of will become equally sturdy growths. The one grand epic has been succeeded by many fragmentary little epics. One great theme of epic is the founding of a nation, as in The Aeneid. The new fragments of nations create epics that celebrate the destruction of a domineering and false oneness by a manyness; and we wonder whether that means also the fragmenting of a nation.

This brings us up to date in considering America as epic. The epic of the frontier closed a long time ago. Many have worried about what succeeds it. Let us project America overseas, some said, in imperialist conquest, or in fighting tyranny, or in improving the lives of other peoples. We have now withdrawn from the empire, though a few pieces remain. We face no great tyranny, and our will in facing even small tyrannies is not strong. We are now doubtful about our capacity to improve the lives of other peoples. The new frontier, we are told, must be education, or space, or good group relations. How often have we heard it said: How come we can reach the moon and not improve our cities or race relations? Clearly, it must be easier to reach the moon, and that does require heroes and is a subject of epic stature. I doubt whether the improving of group relations can replace the conquest of a continent as the subject of epic. Of course, we can live without an American epic. But that does diminish us, and it is easy to understand why some of our poets, artists, writers, and historians keep on trying.

And for the Bahá'í community the heroic-age stage of its epic has long passed. ‘Abdu'l Baha provides the linkage between the two stages in His Memorials of the Faithful and, perhaps, the Greatest Holy Leaf who died in 1932. ‘Abdu'l-Bahá addresses all of us, all of us on our journeys while He describes many of those He came to know in His life in that heroic age. For He is describing not only the lives of these men and women in the nineteenth century, He is describing us in our time. He is addressing us on our own travels. He addresses the restlessness in us all. He speaks to us in our victory and our loss. He speaks about what Michael Polanyi calls the tacit dimension, the silent root of human life, which is difficult to tap in biographies, the inner person. This private, this inner person, is the one whom He writes about for the most part. He sets this inner life in a rich contextualization, a socio-historical matrix. He describes many pilgrimages and you and I are left to construct our own. We all must shape and define our own life. Is it aesthetically pleasing? Intellectually provocative? Spiritually challenging? ‘Abdu'l-Bahá shapes and defines these lives given the raw-data of their everydayness added up, added up over their lives as He saw them. How would He shape my life? Yours? How would we look in a contemporary anthology of existences with ‘Abdu'l-Bahá as the choreographer and the history of our days as the mise en scene?

Some of the lives of the obscure, the ordinary and representative members of the Bahai community are recovered for history and for much more. Their private aspirations and their world achievments, their public images and their private romances, their eventual successes and their thwarted attempts are lifted onto the pages of a type of Bahai scripture. 'Abdu'l-Bahá is setting the stage, the theatre, the home, in these pages, for all of humanity. The extrovert is here, the introvert, those that seem predisposed to cheerfulness and those who seem more melancholy by nature. All the human dichotomies are here, at least all that I have come across in my own journey. They are the characters which are part and parcel of life in all ages and centuries, all nations and states, past, present and, more importantly, future. Here is, as one writer put it, the rag-and-bone-shop, the lineaments of universal human life, the text and texture of community as we all experience it in the crucible of interaction.

And here, in this autobiography and this poetry is some more of the text and texture of the Bahá'í community and an ordinary life set into the rag-and-bone shop of life, however epically I might want to envisage it. Language becomes here the means of reconstituting the past state of an element of Bahá'í culture and its context. At the same time my language is a way of detaching, of distancing the past from a person who is most committed to reconstituting it.

It is difficult in an autobiography not to make oneself the central figure of the text. Seen as a whole, this text describes an ascent from childhood, through adolescence to adulthood and old age. In some ways this ascent only touches all the peaks and periods of my life and then begins the long and slow decline with its attendant troughs, a decline that has just begun at this stage of writing, a decline into an inevitable physical enervation and death, shadowed and enlightened by the memory of the Bahá'í community's experience over several epochs. The global Bahá'í community was created in my lifetime, spreading from a small group of countries and a relative handful of centres, to well over 200 countries and territories and 1000s of centres.

The millennial hope, the dream of the destiny of the Bahá'í community, began to take a more definite shape in my lifetime. The Bahá'í story is much fuller than it was in its first century, 1844-1944. The Central Figures of this Faith occupy more space; their somewhat austere figures never stray from their importantly narrow roles as charismatic founders, lawgivers and interpreters. Bahá'u'lláh comes to us in the Bahá'í literature as a quietly brilliant youth, divine revelator and a man in full, a matchless hero equal to every occasion. And yet although, or perhaps because, we see him in that narrow role, we somehow never get a complete picture of him. His story, in the Bahá'í historical narrative, is often fragmentary and elliptical. He remains slightly, perhaps necessarily, elusive. Marked by accounts, terse notations, motives sometimes left unstated, gestures and phrases whose meanings we've lost, He can not be grasped even in the first century after His passing. Trying to grasp him, we embrace a vapour.

Like every true dancer, I have been a figure of constant change: vivid, elusive, unforgettable. Perhaps it takes a poet to do justice to such mutability, but not this poet. An author of many volumes of poetry might be an apt choice for an autobiography: "The Life of Ron Price." I have read the autobiographies of many others in my lifetime and I do not feel confident as I engage in such an attempt.

Unable to write biographies of any of the Central Figures or even of one of the saints, heroes, martyrs or significant Bahais in the first two centuries of its history, I use Bahai history, its narrative account for other purposes. I use it to illumine my own life and its experience. I supplement that history in places with secular history and, in the process, I try to bring alive the only person I know at all well—myself. In episode after episode, I braid a narrative together with literary interpretation and psychological conjecture, drawing out patterns of correspondence, filling gaps in a record which would have got lost had I not taken pen to paper and taken advanage of the computer and its word processing technology. I like to think my work is characterized by acutely engaged speculation. Perhaps it would not have mattered if this account had got lost or if it had never been told at all, for I have only been one of the multitude of the warp and weft of a community of Bahais, a community which sees itself as the core of an emerging world religion.

Mostly bypassing but occasionally touching the accretions of, perhaps, 40 centuries of religious piety and veneration, peering behind what is often a spare record of action and speech and at other times a burgeoning historical record bordering on anarchic confusion, I seek to discern the feelings and intentions of the living person that I have been and am now, this thing which I call myself. If the world and myself were good for nothing else, they are both fine subjects for speculation.

It's a risky business, fleshing out remote historical figures into what often seem essentially novelistic characters. I have long recognized this as a student of biography. This is no less true of figures close to us and, perhaps, even most true of our own dear selves. My kindness, a trait ‘Abdu'l-Bahá says is a Canadian characteristic and exhibited on many an occasion in the first sixty years of my life, may be rooted in guilt or show, policy or love, all of these or none. Behind the facts of life and the human qualities of its actors, lie a swarming mass of causes. Part of the role of the historian, the psychologist or the autobiographer is to turn the microscope sensitively to the minute causality in life and its often subtle and obscure effects.

I hope that readers find my characterological insights interesting and my literary arguments astute. Corners of the Bahai myth, the historical metaphor, light up with the glow of my imagination and I hope they light up those of readers. My life, it seems to me anyway, grows increasingly strong as it moves from my early years to the years of middle and late adulthood, but weakness runs along beside it never to be entirely extirpated and trampled beyond my sight. My individual perspective on the quite revolutionary transformation of the Bahai community from a small, western, post-Christian culture of individuals to the early stages of a visible, enumerated, global and inclusive civilization, is, I like to think, a tour de force of historical imagining and the experience of any Bahai who has been a part of this Cause for several decades.

Most importantly, I like to think, in writing this book I achieved my stated goal of making the Bahá'í Faith more accessible without making it cease to be refreshing, exotic in a sense and or a delight to the mind. Any history, any figure, about so remote a culture as 19th century Iran, must always remain somewhat remote to the votaries of future generations. Some might argue that a work of this kind ought not be attempted in the first place, that to embroider Bahá'í history and its text is slightly false and, if not false, at least presumptuous to a degree. But what I do here is squarely within the historical tradition of narrative elaboration, even if my methods and sensibility are unmistakably modern. Whatever may be said of my life and my community, my family background and Bahá'í history, what I write it is a kind of creative engagement that makes this history live and endure. At least that is my hope.

And, finally, some poems:

ASPIRATION AND OCCUPATION

"Poet" names an aspiration not an occupation...Once a poem is resolved, I lose the sense of having written it. I can remember circumstances, but not sensations, not what it felt like to be writing. This amnesia is almost immediate and most complete when poems are written quickly, but in all cases it occurs. Between poems I am not a poet, only someone with a yearning to achieve. What is it that I want to achieve? It is that same concentration again. -Louise Gluck, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Ecco Press, NY, 1994, p.125.

I lose the sense of
even having written it.
It's like someone else's.
It surprises me;
I may remember some trace element,
some vague origin, circumstance.
Yes, being a poet, like being a Bahá'í,
is an aspiration.
It often feels like an occupation
because of the intensity, energy,
time, thought, devoted to the process,
especially when the flow comes
as fast as it has in recent years.
I must stop now:
it makes me tired
even thinking of it.

Ron Price
15 October 1995

It is difficult to live to the age of sixty and not have death touch you in different ways. In addition to several family members who have passed on, I pray for more than fifty Hands of the Cause and seventy-five friends and people who have been important to me over the years. Due to my belief system the emotional disarray that often touches people when loved ones die has been rare and short-lived. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, the founder of modern language theory, I have since about 1980 had a certain preoccupation with death. There have been times when the word obession seemed an appropriate one in relation to my feelings about death, but since my treatment with fluvoxamine in 2002, the experience of death as impending only occurs at night for short periods of time. When I wrote the following poem nearly ten years ago now I had what was, in some ways, an obsession with the subject of death.

AT LAST

From Sappho to Dickinson, Rossetti, and the nightingales, death has been an imaginative obsession for many women poets-an obsession resumed in the twentieth century by poets like Millay, Mina Loy and Laura Riding, Smith and Plath,1 male poets like John Berryman and Jack Kerouac and other writers like James Agee, Poe and Magritte. Knowing this pleased me because, since 1980, death has both haunted and attracted me. Somehow it did not seem right and yet, in another sense, it seemed the most natural of obsessions. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p.291.

These words, these prayers, so many deeds,
so many years have helped dissolve those walls
which thankfully separate us from them:
you wouldn't want to go around hallucinating,
would you? Enmeshed as we are
in each other's lives and will be,
through these words, this unpopular art
which can't be hung for all to see
or moulded like that stone statue,
or turned into fine sound over time,
but will remain on paper
after the dilapidation of dilapidations,
after the night wind wimpers,
the leaves are all gone
and we come forth and on
with fragrances just beyond
and we slowly emerge,
exposed to our essential life,
this real world, at last.br />
Having grappled so long,
so long with bits of paper
and what they all were saying,
a clearness fell over the river,
so smooth with a thousand diamond
sun-studding: you could see them
as you drove along the river,
even in the night, a thousand eyes
but one mind, at last, at last,
even if the heart aches
for one has been there
so many times before.

Somewhere in the stale familiarity,
half-dead, weary-sings
something tastes of home,
just around the corner,
beyond that cloud
where the sun is breaking,
strong and clear:
at last.

Ron Price
2 July 1995

It is timely that I refer to Wiggenstein as this autobiography comes near to its end. This major twentieth century philosopher saw the object of philosophy as "the clarification of thoughts." Surely, if nothing else, this autobiography is intended to do the same thing. It tries to make what is opaque and blurred the centre of clarity and sanity, of health and understanding to the mind. Like Wittgenstein, too, I see no division between my life and this work. It is all of a piece. I may not be able to remedy all the deep emotional difficulties in my life by untangling them philosophically, as Wittgenstein thought he could do. Lucidity, joy, wonder, the mystical, are all important to me as they were to Wittgenstein, too much to go into detail here.

But as I pass sixty and go into the first months of my sixty-first year, with the great bulk of my bi-polar illness behind me I do not anticipate suffering the way many do after the age of sixty. I have a strange premonition that the worst is behind me. Unlike Mark Twain, whose life from age 60 on was blasted by calamity and sorrow; unlike the cinema director Alfred Hitchcock who was plagued by alcohol and depression from sixty-five until his death at the age of eighty, unlike many others in their declining years of late adulthood, I see my life as just beginning, albeit a different life than the one I have known, but one I am looking forward to with relish. This is not to say that fatigue, exhaustion and anxiety will not afflict me and forces at large in the world will not assail me. I may require the perserverence I have seen in my wife for the last twenty years.

KIN AND KITH

"The generation born in the mid-forties...were the most indulged, cared for and ‘liberated' children in history...the narcissistic trend began in the 1920s...These between-wars folk were the parents of the post-World-War-II generation....who formed the ‘hippie generation'... still relentlessly ego-absorbed generation."1 These two generations have been the main pioneers of the second, third and fourth epochs.-Ron Price with appreciation to Ronald Conway, The Rage for Utopia, Allen and Unwin, 1992, pp. 146-148.

There's nothing like a parting
to make you feel a piece.
Nothing like a starting
to make you ill-at-ease.

Partings are a sorrow;
I think I'll keep them few,
as I head down the home stretch
to the newest of the new.

‘Cause one day we'll part forever
on this terrestrial coil;
we'll make this the last one
on this our earthly soil.

I may not talk with you so deeply
that you feel connected with,
but I'll learn that one some day,
as we become both kin and kith.

I think Conway has touched the core
of a certain ego-absorption
at the heart of all these plans
that make difficult their adoption.

It also makes it difficult, dear,
to grow close as you would like to.
It may just be this narcissism
which I must overcome too.

Ron Price
10 July 1995

I would like to make one or two parenthetical remarks here before continuing and concluding with more of my poetry. Part of the way I view language and thus the way I view the writing of this autobiography is reflected in the way the philosopher Wittgenstein views language. He sees it as a game consisting of varied and various relationships among different strategies, approaches, multiple interacting conditions, ways and means not simply a configuration or tradition based upon "empirical stability." As I have pointed out earlier in this lengthy work, there is a basic facticity, empirical stability, in my life, my society and my religion that one can not get away from this. But they are no more history than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are an omelette, as that student of biography Ira Nadel noted with his humorous edge. One needs Wittgenstein's culinary talent in the autobiographical kitchen. This poetry provides readers with some of the basic constituents of the language game and the multiple conditions as I see them.


EX NIHILO

There's a mystery in poetic writing, some kind of creation ex nihilo, from within, but within bounds, the bounds of your way of living, of who you are. It's like magic, a varying splendour, a stirring of atoms to find connections to release compulsions and find other selves. Scratch the itch of disconnection, the soup of this and that sometimes feeble, pathetic self, sometimes rich, fertile self in the core and an architectural correctness, balance, density, emerges: as if from the journey of one's life-long, tortuous, sometimes lost. In the end you've preserved something of yourself and you wonder why. It's quite mysterious. -Ron Price with thanks to Sue Woolfe and Kate Grenville, Making Stories, Allen and Unwin, St. Leonards, NSW, 1993.

UNINTERRUPTED POETRY

The writer, unable to chose his language, can no more choose his style, this necessity of his mood, this rage within him, this tumult or this tension, slowness or speed, which comes to him from a deep intimacy with himself, about which he knows almost nothing, and which give his language as distinctive an accent as his own recognizable demeanour gives his face....a language inseparable from his secret depths, that which, therefore, should be closest to him, is also what is least accessible to him...to encounter and then to silence the empty depths of ceaseless speech...of uninterrupted poetry. -Maurice Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, editor: Michael Holland, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995, pp.146-149.

The revolution has come: the break!
It twists and turns
in metaphorical equivalent
at special times, at any time
it seems appropriate;
for the whole history has,
what shall we call it,
mythological significance?
This is the new myth!

The end of history has arrived!
Yes, this is the eternal Return
and world shaking, world reverberating
institutions have come, born, growing
in a majestic process launched in 1953
within a rhythmic life pattern
of fundamental happiness
which itself contains anxiety and grief
and a time for healing in those secret depths
of ceaseless speech and what seems to be
uninterrupted poetry.

Ron Price
7 December 1997

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, while I was writing this autobiography, science was turning away from regular and smooth systems in order to investigate more fragmented, more chaotic phenomena. So, too, in the study of the writing of autobiography there was an increasing consciousness of its complexity, ambiguity, indeed, its chaotic content. There is certainly an element of the fragmented, of the chaotic in my own life. Sometimes the feeling of fragmentation is pervasive and sometimes it is short-lived, momentary. Rather than seeing form, literary or physical, as something divided into the classical binaries of order and entropy, form now is often regarded as a continuum expressing varying degrees of pattern and repetition, elements that are at the core of structure, any structure. At one end of the continmuum we find extreme order, pattern and traditional forms and at the other end we find gibberish, chaos and disorder. Fragmentation is something we all experience and it is found between life's extremes. Fractal autobiography works in the ground between these extremes of life. Digression, interruption, fragmentation and lack of continuity, then, are part of the normal world of autobiography. Fractal comes form the Latin for fragmented or broken: hence the term fractal autobiography.

As architect Nigel Reading writes, "Pure Newtonian causality is an incorrect, a finite view, but then again, so is the aspect of complete uncertainty and infinite chance." The nature of reality now is somewhere in between. One writer called this interplay between chance and causality, a dynamical symmetry. It occurs to me that this shift in focus from a simple, a polarized view of life to a more dynamic, more complex, more chaotic view is something that is expressed in, can be found in, literature as postmodernism. In any case, the poetry, the autobiography, I am calling fractal shares many defining traits with that contested term: postmodern. Some contemporary poetries and genres of autobiography show an allegiance to romantic, confessional or formalist traditions. Fractal poetry, fractal aesthetics, fractal autobiography describe one feature of my literary topography. When poets and autobiographers address aesthetics, their own work inevitably shades their views.

But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them. In postmodernism one read, watched, listened, as one had done for decades before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. There is a generation gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 1980.

Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality' into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as the self, myself, now, ‘interacting' with its texts. Thus pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is reality and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form.

Postmodernists saw the eclipse of grand narratives and pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity. This new world is monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining, all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or sold.

This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved', engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author'; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded. I outline briefly the shift from postmodernism to pseudomodernism which has occurred in the time I have been writing this memoir because my writing is, to some extent, a reflection of this change. But I do not want to go beyond these few, these brief remarks.

Conversion and a religious conversation prevails in my poetry. It is part of an archtypal pattern because it represents part of a maturing process and a move toward self-discovery. It is part and parcel of this autobiography, unavoidably, I find. It is part of a personal life, which Anais Nin says, if it is lived deeply moves beyond the personal.1-Ron Price with thanks to Suzanne Nalbantian, Aesthetic Autobiography, MacMillan, 1994, p.6; and 1Anais Nin in ibid.,p.171.

CICERO(106-43 BC)

A poet must be clinical, dispassionate about life. The poet feels much less strongly about these things than do other men...one finds realized (in Auden's work) a verbal and intellectual pleasure so pure that one feels as if the lowly human faculty of mere enjoyment had been somehow ennobled. -Frederick Buell, W.H. Auden As a Social Poet, Cornell UP, London, 1973, p.41.

Cicero came long ago,
at a critical juncture,
he urged his combative peers
to end their recriminative posture,
political moralist who saw the
value of philosphy in politics,
an idealist in an age of extremes,
complex personality
who saw kindness as a means to
justice, the goal of society.
The main branches of society must
work together, love each other
for this is the foundation of law
which holds society together.

Popular Assemblies, like today,
no longer expressed the will of the people,
no longer aspired to higher culture,
honesty, propriety: for real politics
was a way of life.

Ron Price
10 June 1995

Source S.E. Smethurst, "Politics and Morality in Cicero", The Phoenix, Vol. 10/11, 1955-57, pp.111-121.

RULING CONCEPTIONS

If poetry is an intellectual/intuitive act it is not a random indeterminate process, but is governed by a previsional end....there must be a ruling conception by which it knows its quarry: some foresight of the work to be done, some seminal idea. -James McAuley in Meanjin, Summer 1953, vol.xii, p.433.

The conception here's been getting more detailed,
massive, as the decades have come on since 1953.
The conception was extraordinary, then,
with the ten stages of history and the ten year crusade
just having begun the Kingdom of God with a bang,
a quiet one, not much of a bone crusher,
pretty unobtrusive then, even now,
with that conception described in a thousand books,
too much for most.

And the LSA Handbook getting so big
you needed a degree in law
or big biceps just to carry it to the meeting.
By God, the quarry! Nothing less than
the spiritual conquest of the planet,
the conquest of self and the attainment
of a tranqill heart:
and a thousand other mysteries
waiting to find form.

Ron Price
16 December 1995

CONTEMPORARY MODERN

Of the many currents of contemporary modern poetry in Australia I have selected Bruce Dawe's poetry and particularly his book of poems No Fixed Address, published in 1962, as the starting point. This title is taken from one of his first poems, written back in 1954, by the same title. It is a suitable starting point for 1962 was the year when this pioneering venture got its start. By the time I began writing poetry seriously there were, arguably, 40 to 50 years of a tradition of the colloquial to build on, to help me on my way.-Ron Price from information in A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry, Geoff Page, University of Queensland Press, 1995, p.2.

They started to say it differently,
to use the colloquial, the vernacular.
the everyday stuff as early as 1962,
if not before, when I had started my
pioneer life, quite early.
Had many fixed addresses.
I counted them once:
37 in twenty-five towns.

You had been writing for some time
with that ‘No Fixed Address'
the first that I knew about:
that one who in solemn state
lies garlanded in gin
part of a poetic legacy
that takes us back to the beginning
of the Kingdom of God on earth.

The whole world started to change its spots
in that ninth stage of history when, coincidentally,
I entered the field. And now I'm trying to say it
using the new form, wave, style, humour, normality
of the ordinary, unpretentiousness, highest spirituality.
A late starter, building on thirty or forty years
of other writers of contemporary modern.

Ron Price
9 December 1995

ELOQUENCE

Indifference to response of the immediate audience is a necessary trait of all artists that have something new to say. They say what they have to say...Communicability has nothing to do with popularity...no man is eloquent save when someone is moved as he listens....Those who are moved feel, as Tolstoi says, that what the work expresses is as if it were something one had oneself been longing to express...the artist works to create an audience to which he does communicate.-John Dewey, Art as Experience, Capricorn Books, NY, 1958(1934), p.105.

Complete and unhindered communication,
in a world of gulfs and walls
that limit our experience of community,
can be found in some works of art.br /> Was that why I cried in looking
at your paintings on the wall
when normally art galleries
make me sleepy?
Was that why I wrote so many essays
about Roger White's poetry,
though noone would publish them?
Is that why I write all this poetry,
to serve the unifying forces of life
breaking out all over this planet?

Ron Price
23 December 1995

CRYSTAL COOL WATER

The poet is a hunter consciously and aggressively active in the hunting process of composition. The poetry is what's hunted down and transformed by that process in a wilderness of language...The poet is an intermediary hunting form beyond form, truth beyond theme through woods of words tangled and tremendous....through a forest of mystic meaning. -John Taggart, Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, University of Alabama Press, London, 1994, p.174.

Myriads of mystic tongues find utterance
in one speech and myriads of hidden mysteries
are revealed in a single melody*
and the poet hunts in forests of mystic meaning,
searching for the tongues of utterance,
pursued by hounds,
clawed by talons,
with pitiless ravens lieing in wait on the mountain side.
And while he hunts other hunters stalk
and assault him in the bright meadows of his search.
His head falls to the earth, even brims with blood,
but Peace comes at last and the dark night of tangled
trees is no more, only the tall independent pines,
so straight and tall and spacious, with the sun
falling though their intersticies on the book
of his own self, dead at last in a summit of glory
left behind on the earth beside the crystal cool water
that the Cup-Bearer bringeth! In the journey unto
the Crimson Pillar on the snow-white path.

Ron Price
11 October 1995

*Bahá'u'lláh, Hidden Words, Arabic, 16.
** Bahá'u'lláh, Seven Valleys, pp.55-59.

RECREATING COMPLEXITY: SIMPLY, DEEPLY

The poetic idea unites aspects of existence that ordinarily remain unconnected, and in this lies its value. The secret of genius is perhaps nothing else than this greater availability of all experience coupled with larger stores of experience to draw on. -I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism, 1929.

Experience is never limited...it is an intense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb, of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. -Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction', Partial Portraits, 1888.

I think of experience as acting, not upon, but in and with the poet-I conceive the poet, not as having, but as being, his experience. -H.W. Garrod, Poetry and the Criticism of Life, 1931.

Guessing the unseen from the seen,
tracing the implications of things,
judging wholes from patterns,
feeling the whole and sensing corners,
travelling underground to get at the mountain,
imagination supersaturated,
dropping stuff all over the place:
vivid concentrations, realer than real,
intensified in the memory,
truth not yet achieved.

Precision instrument for storing impressions,
instant and complete,
trusting imagination and memory,
showing the world reflected in broken glass
to sharpen it for the reader, if he can;
recreating a complex world:
simply, deeply.

Ron Price
18 September 1995

Pioneering across two continents, from south to north, over more than forty years has imbued me with a certain creative spirit. It was a spirit that was expressed within the context of a disintegrating civilization with a sophisticated individualism at its core and a more sophisticated sense of unity at the core of a new, emerging, global civilization whose nucleus and pattern were to be found in the Bahá'í community. The differences between the two were increasingly accentuated by proximity. During all these years I lived with what could be called "a frontier feeling." The "frontier feeling" is evident in this autobiography, in my poetry and several other genres. It is not defiant, not bellicose toward my neighbours, but manifests the spirit of friendliness and goodwill. In my eagerness to experiment, to push the boundaries of consciousness, and to restlessly, ceaselessly innovate over those four decades I became intimately familiar with as much of the intellectual culture that my academic proclivities allowed. This border spirit, this frontier feeling, this pioneer orientation intensified my antipathy for and estrangement from much that was in my culture. This antipathy for or, perhaps more accurately as the years went on, exhaustion with so much that was part of this disintegrating civilization became an important component of the creative agon and the raison d'être of my lifelong campaign within the Bahá'í community and its teaching and consolidation programs operating at a global level. The other component of the cultural limen of this growing Bahá'í civilization could be "aptly described as the hospitable threshold of an ever open door." This threshold was a humble one, but it was secure.

This creativity, this expression of psychic energy, as Toynbee goes on to describe it, is at its maximum when the society that is the transmitting agent is a civilization in the process of disintegration and decomposition. I have often wondered just where the accretion of energy came from beginning right at the start of this pioneering process in 1962. Is Toynbee providing a theoretical underpinning for what might be called a psychological explanation of my creativity, in part related to my bi-polarism? I do not know; I simply offer the theory here as this autobiography comes to its close. There were so many cross-currents that operated between the individual and society, between my own life and the wider life of society and that flowed into the life of the pioneer, this pioneer.

One such current was put in a clever way by Paul Tillich. Arguably the twentieth century's greatest Protestant theologian, once said that when citizens believe they have no effect on the life of society, the result is favorable to religion but bad for democracy. In Canada and Australia I think it was bad for both. The lives of these citizens became locked in job, family and play and the bigger social picture is one that was just talked, viewed on TV and in the media about but never or rarely acted upon. The big picture, of course, was complex and filled with so many issues. I have written on this theme elsewhere and so will leave its complex tentacles here.

But now to some prose-poetry beginning with that poet-activist James Dickey:

JAMES DICKEY: SOMETHING THAT MATTERS

Dickey wants to change the reader; he wants to use the poem as a medium through which the reader is raised or torn out of himself into a larger, more energized state of being...This is a poetry that forces the reader to know he is in the presence of a kind of truth at which (he) could not have arrived at by himself. -Bruce Weigl and T.R. Hummer,"Introduction", The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1984, p.2.

...a curious tension exists between poetry and belief, idea, principle, or reason. That is, while we hear a good deal about poetry's need to be based upon an explicit view of the meaning of existence, we are often very bored and exasperated by the poetry which testifies to such a view.-Howard Nemerov, William Blake in Poetry and Fiction: Essays, Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, 1963, p.vii.

You want to get the reader in,
move him about emotionally,
intuitively, physically even,
out of complacency, drift,
help them find their real lives,
combating the malaise, do some purging,
undistorting, unblunting: your poem
is something that matters--
a two hundred year old romantic dream--
and we've been moved.

Some transforming, healing,
life-affirming impulse:
pretty ambitious stuff, eh?
From an initial repulsion
Through acceptance to a full embrace--
sounds like something I'd like
to pull off, too!
Can we call you a poet
of the second and third epochs?
A foundation poet for the Kingdom
of God on earth? I don't know, James,
but I like what you're into, so much of it:
the dramatic confrontation of self and guilt,
the presence of such joy as to remove self-pity--
good gear, James, good gear!

The search for the energizing Truth:
now there's a goal worth pursuing.
How are you coming now, James
in your redeeming search of the depths?
That divine intermediary?
Is it more than the poem?
More than imagination?
Is there something beyond
these sacred and resplenent tokens
from the planes of glory?
Is there something beyond
the green garden of these blossoms
in the lands of knowledge, beside
the orient lights of the Essence in the
mirrors of names and attributes?*

2 October 1996
*Bahá'u'lláh, Seven Valleys, pp.3-4.

DOMESTICATION

Since I went pioneering in 1962 there has been what Robert Bly calls "a domestication of poetry". "That's one metaphor" says Bly "to explain the amazing tameness of the sixty to eighty volumes of poetry published each year, compared with the compacted energy" of the poetry that came from the "wild knots of energy" of the poetry going back at least to the 1920s. --Robert Bly, "Knots of Wild Energy: An Interview With Wayne Dodd", American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, Harper and Row, NY, 1990, p.300.

We have never before faced what it's like in the culture when hundreds of people want to write poetry and want to be instructed in it...We know how to instruct a hundred engineers, or computer technicians...We don't know how to instruct in the area of poetry.-Robert Bly, ibid., p.318.

Such a burgeoning, multiplicity,
everything happening at once.
But, you know Robert,
I've met a lot of engineers
who aren't too happy with their instruction.
We've got much to work out in this
incredible planetary fertilization,
bifurcated merging, cross-fertilization,
exploding tempest, increased intensity,
desperately troubling times.
Wondrous leaps and thrusts cross-firing:
leaving people bewildered,
agonized and helpless.

Those knots of wild energy, we had them too,
as the great Order began to form back then
in the first two epochs of this Formative Age:

Our earliest pioneers1 had what you might call
a conflagrant holy urgency.
I came in on the firey end
of that ninth stage of history
and caught the comet's burning ice
and after thirty years I try to translate it
into a poetry of dazzling prospects,
a poetry of two more epochs.
Is it wild, Robert? Is it wild?
I was wild; I was. And I, too,
have been domesticated.

1 1921 to 1961: 40 years

Ron Price
16 October 1995


ACCEPTING UNKNOWINGNESS

I suspect that the greatest poetry is, as a rule...a concise and simple way of saying great things...this does not necessarily mean ‘un-complex' or ‘easy to understand'. Not everything or everyone is always concise and simple; even the simplest souls have complex moments. -With appreciation to John Livingston Lowes and C.Day Lewis in The World of Poetry, Phoenix House, London, 1959, pp.133-134.

You're not looking for some top-40 tune here
or a delightful ditty like:
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
Some easy style, light reading,
a little amusement, to be taken over breakfast
with your morning paper, come on mate!
What do you take me for? I'm not a comedian
with a quick fix, instant laugh, insight guaranteed.

I bring you a certain darkness in which I labour
to enshroud you, certain fluctuations and associations
which I melt down for your purpose and make distant
for you to reach for: buy those spectacles,
for this is no dead vacuum, floundering place, dimness.
You must cultivate your poetic receptivity,
accept unknowingness when it comes, as you would
in those mysterious places, the faces of friends,
those you love and associates you hardly know.

Ron Price
20 September 1996

THE ABODE OF DUST TO THE HEAVENLY HOMELAND

Dickey's sense of personality (is)....a series of imagined dramas, sometimes no more than flashes of rapport, kinships with....the apocalyptic...in which personality is gained only when reason is rejected...The process of increasing self-consciousness...as every existential role in the universe must...be abandoned...reverence for life...his own personal history as an analogue to...an exploration of twentieth-century....a fundamental helplessness of man....the poet a shaman, a specialist in ecstacy, a participant in the divine... -Joyce Carol Oates, "The Imagination of James Dickey", The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1984, p.68, p.72

The main thing in poetry is the discovery of an idiom and the exploitation of it over an area of thought for a long time.-James Dickey in Jane Bowers-Martin's, "Jericho and God's Images", The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, Bruce Weigl and T. Hummer, editors, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1984, p.150.

Poetry is a happening in depth...at that level of the personality where things really matter...it is a divine intermediary between the poet and the world in which poetry functions bringing with it an enormous increase in perceptiveness, an increased ability to understand and interpret the order of one's experience. The pleasure, the gift, is one of being able to get as far as one can into a great good place. That place is the poem itself. -James Dickey, "The Energized Man", ibid., pp.164-165.

The terror that many feel
in the silence of infinite spaces
when the wind blows whistling
through the edges of the doors
and windows on a cold rainy night
at the edge of a great sandy desert
in a new suburban house
with the garden not-yet-planted,
or in a thousand other infinite spaces
on this whirling ball,
I have not often felt.

I have for many a long year,
since somewhere in my teens,
seen the universe as a benign place
and a meaningful one, purposeful,
a direction to an evolutionary process
and poetry, imagination, aliveness
fill the space, give me a feeling
I have lived and defined that order,
meaning, purpose, reality.
I have sensed I am nothing.
Out of this nothingness I attempt to become.

In this attempt I begin to live, to write
and to use my imagination to enrich
all that I live for and believe,
all that I see in this dizzying universe
of suns, moons, space--
this abode of dust on my way to
the heavenly homeland.

Ron Price
2 October 1995

*Bahaullah, Seven Valleys, (US, 1952), p.4.

LUSCIOUS FIELDS OF GRAIN

I had already reached the conclusion that we are in no wise free in the presence of a work of art; that we do not create it as we please but that it preexists in us and we are compelled, as though it were by a law of nature, to discover it because it is at once hidden from us and necessary.-Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Passed, trans. by C.K. Scott Moncrieff.

Several of Roger White's poems I have taken and reworked the themes. I felt a little like Proust. I felt I was somehow finishing off the sculpting process, tidying up the edges, expanding on White's pithy language. I was discovering something else in the form which was hidden and waiting to come out. Here is one that came out. -Ron Price, 9:00 am, 29/12/95, Rivervale, Western Australia. See Roger White, "It is an Easy Thing to Love the Dead", The Witness of Pebbles, p.58.

I have loved the dead for years,
have talked to them in prayer
with occasional answering tears.
It is not difficult to love these souls
who can not wound or tell a lie.
They seem to satisfy some need
as we are told they can perform a deed,
a deed of miraculous force from their
special place right near the Source.
They are like some fruit beyond the seed
which small and dry would never yield-
we thought-such a full and luscious field
of grain to help us here, to help us gain.
Now who would argue with a rose?
Who'd expect a tree to turn up its nose?
Both were grown, so long, so free,
with quiet charm for all to see.
Do not tell of pain and dung
of tortured sap and spirit wrung.

Ron Price
29 December 1995

I define my poetry, my autobiography, my individuality in the context of a community of individuals. Ben Franklin did as much as America was laying its foundations and I do the same as the Bahai Faith lays its foundations in country after country, especially during these four epochs and especially in Canada and Australia where I have lived my life. I think, too, that my autobiography and my autobiographical poetry is as much a literary strategy as it is a generic category; it is like some reminiscent fieldwork on myself where I take a leap. It is not so much a leap into the past as it is an introduction of invention into my existence in a complex layering of vastly disparate elements. If there was ever resentment in my life and for years there was, healing and reconciliation has come, partly through autobiography's protean forms, partly through prayer and partly through those mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence.


VOLUME FIVE
CHAPTER EIGHT

SOCIAL TOPICS OF RELEVANCE

You will find below a series of poems on topics of individual and social concern involving history and issues of contemporary relevance. Although this autobiography attempts to explore the history and issues of the four epochs, I don't think it does so quite as comprehensively as I wanted when I set out on my writing journey seventeen years ago. And so I include in this chapter some poems to compensate for this inadequacy. It is impossible for any soul to possess that "qualification of comprehensive knowledge" that 'Abdu'l-Bahá speaks of, although some in the Baai community seem to have acquired an amazing breadth of knowledge. I have always found economics beyond me, beginning with the two weeks in September 1963 when I enrolled in an introductory economics course before withdrawing and taking Spanish in its stead. The physical sciences, especially physics, have always eluded me and the biological sciences seemed to possess an enormous and intricate specialized vocabulary. Foreign languages after my eighteen birthday became quite uninteresting and that Spanish course was dropped after a month of trying to memorize a long and tiresome vocabulary. Mechanical subjects, trades areas, engineering, mathematics and other disciplines from what became in this half century a burgeoning list all moved to the periphery of my life and danced around in a region of nearly total obscurity. And so it is that whatever contribution they might make to an understanding of social problems has been lost to me.

I draw on a wide but limited field of knowledge, limited to the social sciences and humanities for the most part, for the following poems. I lower myself into what I like to think is my "divinely ordained solitude," not like a swimmer into freezing water as Rilke did, but into some river where poems arrive as they did to Rilke: suddenly, in urgent bursts, like visitations. A crystalline voice does not ring through the gale, as it did with Rilke but, rather, like a baby arriving down the birth canal and a release of a weight, a strain, a train, of thought falls onto the paper. These poems seem part of a great granary; each poem has its own afterlife, an afterlife that I discover serendipitously as the days and the years go by. Some of this afterlife is blissful, joyful and some has a plainness, an everyday simplicity that is as ordinary as the ordinary life I once lived. The afterlife is my own; the meaning is my own and, if readers find something helpful or pleasureable here, that is a bonus.

1. ENVY AND LUST:

LOTS OF WORK STILL TO DO

You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attendance upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young:
What else have I to spur me into song?
-W.B. Yeats in On Poetry and Poets, T.S. Eliot, Faber and Faber, London, 1947, p.257.

Can it be that I do not envy any more?
No desire to be young or handsome?
No desire to receive some recognition
by being elected or appointed?
Perhaps a wishing that I might have
become something more: purer?
more independent? more courageous?
Horace said those who envy grow thin.
That's why I'm getting chubby.
Found: a sign for the absence of
the least trace of envy--chubby
old men and women. No, that can't be.
I've been envying all my life.
There was always someone better
at something than me. Now, well,
I just don't care. Is this the root
of my spiritual gainer: insouciance?
The contextual nuances for envy
are multitudinous and I must confess
that occasionally, even now,
admiration finds envy's trace element
like a cold wind from the Arctic blowing
faintly, so faintly across my face.
I nearly miss it; it goes so fast,
but it stick's for an instant in my liver,
or is it my kidney, unbeknownst.

Envy's microscopic trace, extracted,
purple? black? colourless? only the
psychoanalytic-geologist would know for sure.

There's been a thinning going on
underneath my nose leaving my
wanting faculty highly pruned, sorted.
What, pray, has slaked my envy?
Has that primary envy of my mother's
breast just run out of gas?
This theological problem, abating,
perhaps is taking a new form: pride.
Good God, no! Desire's quiet new receptacle.
Erudition, those who can amuse,
who have money to travel,
those who have radiant acquiescence,
courage--the list seems endless,
quieter but endless.
Lots of work still to do.

Ron Price
28 November 1995

My wife has helped me in achieving whatever 'spiritual tranquillity' I have achieved in a marriage relationship, but this was achieved only when I learned to enjoy her soul and not lust after her body, a process too long to describe here. The Russian writer Pushkin also put his experience with sex this way. The plethora of women's and men's magazines now on the market, life-style magazines like Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, Women's Weekly, inter alia which deal with relationships, marriage, sex and love have not been of much value to me for I have never been much of a reader of this dense forest of reading material. Nor have some of the other dense forests of magazines and literature: cars, fishing, food, domestic, fashion and on-and-on contributed much to my life, spiritual or material. This is not to say, of course, that I have not been affected by this plethora of an often engrossing trivia, a quotidian reality which bathes the senses of many an everyday man with its enticing attractions.

The car, for example, which Roland Barthes sees as the equivalent in our time of the Gothic cathedrals, with their magical spirit and utility, has given me much pleasure and practical value for more than 60 years ago, especially after I first got my license at the beginning of my pioneering life in 1962.(Barthes, Mythologies, 1967, p.99) According to Jeremy Iggers the advent in 1963 of Julia Child's television show The French Chef began a revolution in the middle class's approach to cooking and to food in itself(Jeremy Iggers, The Garden of Eating: Food, Sex, and the Hunger for Meaning, Basic Books, 1996, p.29). Television was the perfect medium for the dissemination of bourgeois culture, and the Baby Boomers, raised on TV, were right there absorbing Julia's dictates about food. MacClancy claims: "In the ways in which the Boomers' parents strove to acquire knowledge of painting or classical music, the Boomers have made cooking the art, the social currency." Cooking shows and cars still have centre stage in the advertising world. And I must acknowledge the delight of both these categories of consumer culture in my life even if I take little interest in cooking or in cars.(Jeremy MacClancy,Consuming Culture, Holt, NY,1992, p.210)

The consumption of a food culture by the middle-aged and now old age middle classes seems to have displaced sex and the consumption of sexuality. As my generation avidly went for sex and discussed its sexual exploits and liberation during the sixties, so we now avidly discuss the meals we've cooked and the restaurants we've eaten in. Among educated Boomers, cookery books have attained the status of art object or sex manual or both. Of course, there have been cookery books since ancient times, but they were specialized for an elite audience of master cooks. The advent of cookery books for the common man or woman in the nineteenth century, however, marks the beginning of the commodification of such objects. I don't want to go into this topic to any greater extent. Readers are advised to take a look at: Cher Holt-Fortin, "A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine,and Thou Beside Me in the Kitchen," Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2002, Volume 1, Issue 2 for an excellent contextualization of food for my generation even if my experience of much of it is atypical.

Perhaps this would be a good place in this memoir to off the following summary.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. ADialogue on Love. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

2. SUICIDE AND DEPRESSION EXPANSE

‘Tis a dangerous moment for anyone when the meaning goes out of things and Life stands straight-and...yet no content comes. Yet such moments are. If we survive them they expand us. -Emily Dickinson, Prose Fragment 49.

I clutched at sounds
and groped at shapes
and still my heart did groan
in some endless wilderness
it wailed, lamented bone.
I could not find the golden lines,
silver or hyacinth--only a base metal
from which I made a nail
for my sackcloth shirt and tail.

I felt it in the afternoons
when the light angled low;
it left a scar; it left a hurt
deep down, a feeling, woe.
‘Twas a sense of full despair
and it hung like weighted rocks.
When it went I felt expanse,
Immortality, like darkness
leaving from the grass and
all creation in a dance.

Ron Price
25 June 1995

Stephen Gill writes, in his analysis of the poetry and life of William Wordsworth, that the poet doesn't deal with fact but with the poetry of the imagination. The brain, he says, generates its own cues for recalling memories. And so it is that the recreation of the self hinges on infusing mental states into the environment and on the ability to change the self-image in beneficial directions so that one can undertake the arduous task of a poetic vocation. Gill, of course, is writing about Wordsworth, but I have found over the years that much that applies to Wordsworth and his writing applies to me and my writing. The self, writes Gill, is a biproduct of a reality monitoring process; it is perceptually driven and reflectively generated. Autobiography became for Wordsworth what it has become for me, a way of watching over my conduct, of giving it shape, of inventorying and stylizing daily behaviour and of constructing identity. As I attempt to comment on the several issues that I do in this chapter the commentary of Stephen Gill is highly relevant.

3. REGRET AND REMORSE

VICTORY THROUGH FAILURE

Nothing is more fruitful for man than the knowledge of his own shortcomings.-'Abdu'l-Bahá, Promulgation, p.244.

...you cannot lay remorse upon the innocent nor lift it from the heart of the guilty. Unbidden shall it call in the night, that men may wake and gaze upon themselves.-Kahlil Gibran, Prophet, p.43.

Unbidden it called this morning, early,
heavy it laid upon my pillow and climbed
around my ears like a sleepy mosquito
who was only into dull roars. It headed
for my eyes and my shutting them had no
effect as it climbed right on into my brain,
slowly eating its way to my heart, stopping
on its way to burn my liver if it could-and it did.

I looked upon myself like some prisoner
whose regret was like some jail-cell barring
me from joy and colouring my morning with
the nethermost fire of remorse. I would be here
again, I thought, for I was so far from the
immortal Wine. And yet, and yet, I would
not be estranged from this Cause and these
vicissitudes of fortune would not draw me away
from my Goal: I hoped! I hoped! I hoped!

For I found meaning here, right here, in
these tribulations. I was not radiant, not happy;
I had not learned this yet, but I had learned
to search for meaning and this would have to do
and I did. The radiance came later, years later.

Weary, I stood at the window at dawn and watched
the rising sun. Slowly my eyes gladdened, invaded
and sustained with the fresh meaning of gold
and the subtle tempter, for the moment, slipped away.
My sense of fitness returned. Perhaps this fire
would be removed; perhaps it would go on for years.
For great forces churned inside me and tore me apart
and had all my days. Tremendous energies were
often released. I trust this will happen again perhaps
through my failures, yet again, yet again.

Ron Price
16 December 1995

One of the twentieth century's famous feminists, Simon de Beauvoir, wrote that in writing her autobiography she wanted to create an identity of her own and win for herself an ethical centre. She knew that in this struggle she was not successful in all respects. So is this true of me as I go about commenting on these issues and struggling with my struggles in this poetry and in my life.

Identity in many ways has come to mean for me what it is for the post-structuralist, namely, a site of contesting selves: past self, present self, public self, private self. I as a writer must choose and/or invent a speaking self.

4. COMMUNITY

A NECESSARY INSTABILITY

The community should not be like a chain which is only as strong as its weakest link, but like a garment whose fibers, the warp and weft, may be ever so slender, numerous and intimately connected.-Ron Price with appreciation to Charles S. Pierce, Collected Papers 5.264.

Some see the meaning of life
As making a contribution to the community,
for here the creative personality
is born and matured;
it is the gift of evolution,
the ordering of inequality,
the integration of the individual,
where restraint and self-control
are part of self-esteem.
One day community feeling
will triumph over everything
that opposes it, as natural
to man as breathing,
the scientific inevitability
of social harmony
slowly overcoming the force
of antisocial dispositions
now so preponderant in the world,
at least in certain places.

Perhaps a Ciceronian stoicism
to start with and a widening
secular spirituality, as the blank page
whirls about in the winds of the spirit
and we come to understand cognition,
the social restraints
which limit our options,
define our choices
and generate what seems to us
as a restriction of potential.
Ron Price
26 June 1995

"Our years come to an end like a sigh," so it says in the Psalms(90). "They are soon gone and we fly away." Much of the landscape of my life, however much it has involved a search for solitude and peace, it has also involved a great deal of the landscape of community. One of the first epic's based on community and individualism in the western intellectual tradition was Homer's Odyssey. Amidst what were once a thousand entertaining and instructive episodes for western readers, the hero, Odysseus, is hardly ever absent from the story. His lonely voyage, part and parcel of the emerging Greek city state that he and it was, in strangely mixed scenes of human existence, I have over the years felt a strong identity with. For I too have travelled, part and parcel of an emerging global Order in our time, an Order that was, like Odysseus', hundreds of years in the future before it would reach its apotheosis. There was a strangeness to it, an excitement, a sense of the bizarre. It was written, too, in the Formative, the Iron, Age of Greek culture. Perhaps, as history specialist Anthony Andrewes writes, "the very instability and incoherence of Greek political institutions" led to "a political evolution which was denied to other cultures."

One often sensed this instability in these early years of the evolution of the Bahai administrative Order, especially working as I have so frequently over the last forty years with the new institutions which Bahaullah has created with an inventiveness and brilliance that only a Manifestation of God could possess. There was a fragility not unlike the flowers of the garden. But, then, it was difficult to get a right and proper sense of historical perspective, for it took hundreds of years before the golden age of Greek culture finally arrived. And we, the Bahais, in this first century of the Formative Age, are really right at the beginning--about the time that Odysseus was on his voyage. At least one could argue the case. And so I do, as I comment from a historical perspective on this poetry, dealing as it does with some of the issues of our day.

5. SOCIAL PROBLEMS


THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY

Because of American poet Wallace Stevens's emphasis on the importance of the imagination, he is sometimes criticized for being little in touch with social issues and political realities.1 Some who read Price's poetry extensively may find, may conclude, a similar out-of-touchness in its content. Certainly there are relatively few poems about particular and explicit social problems like: war, poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, and refugees among so many others. At the same time, I write about the agitations of private life and the torments of public questions. It seems to me that there also exists in my poetry what John Brenkman calls a utopian power.2 This power derives from, or lies in, my poetry's many concrete connections and its language of of everyday practice and living with its relevant social contexts. As I see it, my poetry does not aim to separate itself from those contexts or to set itself above them. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Alan Shucard, Modern American Poetry: 1865-1950, Alan Shucard, et al., Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1989, p.149; and 2John Brenkman, Culture and Domination, 1987, p.108.

I write about social and political issues,
in context, finding a context, searching
for a context, concerned as I am with
expressing my experience within this
new Order, with defining its reality, its
ambience, its future, its past, its present
construct, with giving language to all
that I am and all that is this System
represented in this poetry of heightened
visual, imaginative, intellectual sensibility,
giving words to things others never notice
in the everyday, paying attention to colours,
shapes, textures, objects, time's relationships
that are right in front of me, hard, clear, real:
incorporating and integrating into the what
the what that is me and the when, where, why.

What can we call it:
the social construction of reality?

Ron Price
24 June 1995
Updated: 4/12/07

The sociologist Alvin Gouldner says that in life, in society, the norm of anonymity is "a necessary adjunct" to what he calls "the short-take society wherein one goes from one short-take role to another." Between these short-takes one must "be accorded civil inattention and encouraged quickly to change roles" not to sustain relationships. There is no doubt that throughout a large part of one's life this is true, but there are situations where most of us have to deal with relationships that are not short takes. These are found, for me, in marriage, in some jobs and in some experiences of the Bahai community.

Edward Sampson writes that "what is meant is continuously being reframed by what is...said." One could put the same idea this way: "how do I know what I think until I see what I've said?" The self is a product of the social arrangements which support it. The nature of those supports themselves are increasingly, although not always, multiple and fragmentary, temporary and without depth. Viewed from this perspective even the mind becomes a form of social myth and the self-concept is removed from the head and placed within the sphere of social discourse. Max Weber observes that both for sociology and for history the object of cognition is subjective meaning. This subjective meaning is both the basis for and the complex of action. The point here is not that "anything goes," but rather that "everything is contingent"; not that there are no rules, but that the rules that do exist are decidedly "historically and culturally situated." At the same time, from a Bahá'í perspective, I am inclined to the view that there are essential metaphysical verities and these verities are eminently prone to potentially endless revisions. These revisions ensure that "the self is not an organic thing that has a specific location but is, rather, a dramatic effect arising diffusely from the scene that is presented..." This autobiography and the way I see my life has been significantly affected by this 'social constructionist' line of thinking.

PERSONAL REMINISCENCES

All attempts to write about persons or events, however important, to which the poet is not intimately related in a personal way are now doomed to failure....Auden's elegies are linguistic homes in which the dead continue to adide, their words and ideas held fast among the words and ideas of the living poet. -Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, pp.201-203.

I often wondered why writing about, say,
Julius Caesar or Churchill, was so difficult;
or even the old starving China boys
that my mother used to talk about
when trying to get me to eat my vegetables,
or the disaster in Dneipropetrovsk
or Novosibirsk, or the Chukchi people
and their rain dance: one needs some
kind of intimacy really.

We each have different worlds.

Now, Mr. Auden, I find writing begins
both from the sense of separateness in time
and the sense of continuity
of the dead, the living and the still-to-be-born.

It all goes on and on, virtually, forever,
Although my short span will soon end
and, as you say, these words are like
carving my initials on my desk,
maybe someone will read them one day:
‘tis a type of rising from the dead,
or as some say...an ever-advancing civilization.

If this is too pretentious then
just some personal reminiscences,
just reminiscences, Mr. Auden.

Ron Price
30 June 1995

THE GREYING OF THE RED AND YELLOW PERIL

We grew up at a time
when Karkhov, Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk
were black foot-prints in the snow-Bruce Dawe, "What Lies on Us", Sometimes Gladness, 3rd edition, Longman, 1988, p.142.

Most of us grew up at a time
when Krushev, Kiev and Kennedy
were part of the language of the big world
that we only ever partly understood at best.
The yellow beast and her red friend
gradually became greyer and greyer
and then the whole thing fell apart
in a brave new world
for which most of us
had lost whatever bravery we had.

By then, I'd lived in so many houses,
in so many towns, known too many
women and thousands of people
that I was never shocked by headlines
or news from the lighted chirping box
and its anonymous deaths,
or private griefs
immortalized yet again
for the zillionth time on film.

I clean my teeth and wind the clock
for I am still living.
I have just returned from another evening
where I watch merchandised desire
and rented embraces exhaust the night air,
where frightened cries rise occasionally
and pierce the quiet suburban landscape.

What is happening now
that the land has become grey
and the red and yellow hues
do not threaten us still?
What does all this mean
for us who have seen a century
bathed in blood and tears
on television and in movies?

Ron Price
17 December 1995

This would be a good juncture to make some comments on television and the movies, mediums that have become very infuential in the half century that this autobiography is concerned with. I have collected three arch-lever files of notes on the media from the recent times that I taught media studies and I could wax eloquent. Instead I will include another poem here. It was inspired by a documentary.

SAINTSHIP

After ten years you go beyond feeling.-C. Chessman, BBC, 1993, ABC TV, 30 November 1995: Great Crimes and Trials of the Twentieth Century. Chessman was a man waiting on death row in California from 1950 to 1962, in the years I was preparing, little did I know it, for a lifetime of pioneering.

After thirty-three years in the field
your feelings learn to protect themselves
with humorous asides and saying ‘no,'
dwelling in some inner landscape
where the Master rides, lightly rides:
in the mountains you reach for Him.
You cloak yourself in a privacy
which sometimes tastes of dignity
and a hint of spiritual charm
like a herbal remedy, ever so distant,
ever so subtle, dry even.

Sometimes you feel like a delectable,
mysterious sauce, piquant,
puzzlingly attractive,
lingers on the tongue,
surprising their taste buds
with unexpected combinations
of colourful, scented, ingredients.
You meet the human need
for delighted astonishment,
but sadly(thankfully?) only sometimes.1

So much of it is dry paperland
with no more juice
than some of those useless lemons,
that is why you admit people to friendship slowly.
You had to after winning
all those popularity contests
which you didn't even want to enter:
So you perfected evasion into an art form;
kept away the bore, the pedant, the obtuse,
the fake, the chatterbox, the loud,
just about everyone: gave them the slip
when they blundered uninvited
with their chit-chat into your personal space,
with their well-intentioned catechism of things
that would be good for you.

For the cosmic patriotism of this Cause
and its enthusiastic temper of espousal
can get a little thin,
unless one is constitutionally sanguine
and possesses a congenital amnesia,
an incapacity for even transient sadness,
a temperament organically weighted
on the side of cheer,
fatally forbidden to linger,
even momentarily, on the dark side.

But you, and many of them,
have a different susceptibility
to emotional excitement,
to the impulses and inhibitions
that they bring in their train.
This rank-and-file believer,
part of the warp and weft,
an ordinary chap,
seems to have softened with the years,
has unobtrusively acquired
an incapacity for those sacrificial moods
that once inspired his being;
perhaps he has just learned
to inhibit his instinctive repugnances
and has acquired a firece contempt
for his own person
which he is learning to moderate
in both his private and public domains.

Is this how one discovers and measures saintship?

1 When I look at some celebrities especially comedians, like Robyn Williams, I wonder how what seems like their infinite capacity to delight others must have a wear and tear factor on their lives.

Ron Price
30 November 1995


6. CRISES

PERSISTENCE

The way that we perceive and react to an event or crisis is largely responsible for the ultimate effect of that event upon us. If we can understand and make sense out of an event...the impact of that event will be less dreadful. -A. Ghadirian, ‘Human Responses to Life Stress and Suffering', Bahá'í Studies Notebook, 3, 1-2, 1983, p.50.

One constant in a world of variables
--they'd be there come rain or shine.
Not many, mind, but someone was always there.

My mother always said they were the only people
who'd have a picnic in the rain:
they'd bargain with the sun.

It must be all those birds collapsing over Akka
which you hear about in their history:
all that blood, sweat and tears.

Yes, you find persistence here,
fed by the blood of those martyrs
and enough joy to take you the distance.

Ron Price
17 December 1995

7. DEATH

WOULDN'T HE?

These apocalyptic elegies are indeed not conventional expressions of consolation but triumphant outbursts directed...to the dead and Emily Dickinson's own anguish...an anguish distilled...into triumph.1 Here, in this poem below, is my own triumphant outburst with my usual cautionary note derived from Bahai theology regarding our final moments. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Benjamin Lease, Emily Dickinson's Readings of Men and Books: Sacred Soundings, MacMillan, London, 1990, p.xvii.

All across the world they lie
behind grey stone
and obscurest graveyards
in places noone's heard
on the edge of town.
Yes, heaven's humble handful
and not-so-humble,
among simple stones
and not-so-simple.
Hardly heroes, hardly known:
servants, gentlemen, ladies,
every conceiveable type,
they're all here behind stone.

Words carved by unknown hands:
Pioneer Canada Nine Year Plan.
He'd planned his. Knew who he was.
Identity grew into stone
that would last a thousand years.
He was going to end this one befittingly;
I mean it was his life, himself,
his mirror of some eternal hyacinth
growing forever in a garden
of eternal splendour, forged,
cut diamond-edged, glittering whiteness
on that snow-white path so close,
touching that Crimson Pillar
and trustworthiness's pillar of light.
He would, at least, feel it.
Wouldn't he?

Ron Price
28 October 1995

Perhaps the inclusion at this point of some lines from one of Emily Dickinson's apocalyptic elegies, an elegy that is not so much a triumphant outburst as it is "anguish distilled" into a quiet triumph. In poem number 1142 she opens with the lines:

The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House supports itself.

It is logical to assume that 'the House' here is the human soul. The Bahai might add that "The House supports itself" with the help of God and prayer. Dickinson concludes this pithy piece as follows:

A past of Plank and Nail
And slowness--then the Scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul.

Dickinson provides here a succinct phrase to capture, to express, for me and for her a discernible shape to this poetic work. Seemingly diffuse and sprawling, there is an intellectual depth in her literary eccentricity--and in mine. At least there is depth for me---and hopefully for readers who chance by the rivers of thought this work contains. In the last two decades of Dickinson's life, 1863-1883, the idea of finishing a poem became repugant to Dickinson. For me, the idea of finishing this autobiography is, not so much repugnant, as unrealistic. There are always things to add, to take away and to alter and I'm sure this will be the case as long as I live and can function.

8. SEX

THE SMILE

The chronic cleavage between love and sexual desire is a disease of western man. Here in Australia was a Canadian who got lots of practice of learning to love women whom he desired sexually but did not give that desire sexual expression. Here was a Canadian with a face like the back side of a spoon, etched with a smile, with a cautious reserve and the flavour of irony every time he tasted his world and his words. -With thanks to Robertson Davies and his comments on writing on The ABC program Writers and Writing, 25 June 1995, 8:00-8:20 pm.


I'd learned to smile and say cheese
as good as anyone else in that country
of bland faces like the back of a spoon;
and when I finally learned that skill,
after getting rid of my depressions,
well, not quite, they lingered long,
I left for Australia where in that dry land
people's faces and mouths tell stories,
some of which you wished you didn't know.

Scratch that smiling exterior
of a Canadian face and underneath
you get a gem of fascinating complexity.
I've been discovering one all my life
with the help of Australians
who are much more frank, funny
and facially expressive:
bodies are alive here.
They've been jumping out at me
in classrooms where I teach,
on the street when I walk
or drive around, even on TV
and in my own house where
she's been jumping out at me
for nearly thirty years.

The whole place is alive
with body language.
The women have been turning me on
so much I'm like a spinning top.
But I always have my Canadian face
to smile at the world:
the cheerful Canadian, the good-guy,
the nice guy.

It's too much work for most people
to get to know what's behind the smile,
but I don't mind. I'm busy enough
getting to know me. That'll keep me busy
the rest of my life and, with age,
the temptations have not been hitting me
in the face as much

Ron Price
25 June 1995

9. APOCALYPSE

WRITING BEFORE THE DAWN: SUSAN SONTAG

These are the darkest hours before the break of day. Peace, as promised, will come at night's end. Press on to meet the dawn.-Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, 1993.

The present age lives by a scenario in which apocalypse looms and it doesn't occur...And still it looms. -Susan Sontag in Susan Sontag: the Elegiac Modernist, Sohnya Sayre, Routledge, NY, 1990, p.147.

But how does one tell the tale of an apocalypse that was so long in coming and promises to be as long in going? Where to begin and, more importantly, where to end as we live in and live out of it? It would seem, at first, a slow apocalypse but, in the end, it may appear fast. Time perspectives are often mysterious. Given its impalpability, its lubricity, can this protracted apocalypse be grasped, or only sensed faintly as we slip listlessly through it? Oh, and by the way, is this apocalypse real, or merely a rhetorical device to be activated by millenarians, debunked by critics, and ignored by everyone else? Is "Apocalypse" but a way to connect a vast constellation of other metaphors, whose referents are themselves finally just the vague grumblings and grim presentiments of a culture perennially fixated on the chances of its own demise? - Andrew McMurry, "The Slow Apocalypse: A Gradualistic Theory of The World's Demise," Postmodern Culture, V6 N3, May, 1996.

In these early years of
the last stage of history
you have written, written,
like so many, pouring
a flood of knowledge
onto a world drowning,
drowning apocalyptically.

I always admired your work,
your endless, obsessive work
and your insights: tragedy is
the way we acknowledge
the world's implacability.*
The House referred to it as
a ‘discouragingly meagre' response.
Then, there was your succinct statement
on comedy as a precarious ascendancy.*
You wrote so much.
Most people I've ever met
just stay out of the ball park
or way out in left field;
you become the lone figure
in the lonely landscape,
you who have been writing
since the beginning of this
Kingdom of God on earth.**

You knew, then, that thought was
in ruins and your eschatological mentality
and concern for religious redemption
never found its way near
the Nightengale of Paradise
Who sang upon the Tree of Eternity.
Your melancholy, your seriousness,
your death of history, of self, of culture,
your homelessness, your autobiographical
thinking***, heroic amidst the ruins,
seeking to simplify, not trusting----
all in an apocalyptic mood
which looms while we wait,
a stealth apocalypse plodding
camouflaged among us hiding
among us in plain site, looming
in these last dark minutes and hours
before the break of dawn.

* Susan Sontag, ibid., p.90.
** Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By(US, 1957), p.351; the beginning was 1953.
***Sohnya Sayre, ibid., p.128; all thinking has an autobiographical aspect says Sohnya.


10. RETIREMENT

SOME UNHEARD VOICE

"Called in my late fifties to this high office/for a record term..."1 I, too, felt called by my late fifties after the feeling had grown for perhaps a decade. By that time I did not have to spend time with the responsibilities of job and endless meetings.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Bruce Dawe, "The Vision Splendid", Sometimes Gladness, 3rd edition, Longmans, 1988, p.183.

Called in my fifties to this high office
for what is coming to look like a record term,
I receive no honours for my grey hairs
or my endless combination of words;
perhaps this is because I seek no honours,
only this late afternoon sunlight glittering
like sparks of stubble over all of creation,
a vitalizing fragrance, too,
like some dawning-place, some day-spring,
some transmutation of grief into blissful joy.

Replenished from deep springs,
perhaps the Ancient of Days,
or some unheard voice
from a burning bush, some bounty
beyond the ken of mortal mind or heart*,
I sing in the company of the most exalted angels,
but still I hesitate and halt, still I shake
to my very foundation, still my sorrow
and tears accompany by blissful joy.

Ron Price
19 December 1995

* Bahá'u'lláh, The Tablet of Carmel

11. MARRIAGE AND SOCIABILITY

A FORTRESS FOR WELL-BEING

Many people visit others out of a desire to have company, be sociable, pass the time, etcetera. Many others, at the other end of the social spectrum, are lonely and in need of company. Another group of people don't want any company and are happy with their own. Working out your own ‘sociability index' is important to your peace of mind, sense of social tranquillity and personal integrity. -Ron Price with thanks to George Simmel in The Sociological Tradition, Robert Nisbet, Heinemann, 1966, p.308.

I think if I had a free and healthy and lasting organization of heart and lungs as strong as an ox's so as to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation without weariness, I could pass my life very nearly alone, though it should last eighty years.-John Keats, In a Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 24 August 1819.

Give me a call sometime; didn't I tell you
the greatest journey in life is to relieve
the sorrow-laden heart.1
If you're ever feeling a little low,
drop in, no need to give me a call,
unless you want.

I find when I say this not many drop in,
so don't get the idea that you are imposing
on my time. I'm not the most popular fellow
with everyone and their dog dropping in.
My wife keeps my spirits pretty good,
quite an understanding lady really
and I find I can talk to my son
like a friend, when sadness visits me.

So we've got a, what ‘Abdu'l-Bahá called,
a fortress for well-being2 here,
a safe haven, a quiet place,
a silent garden where only birds
and blowing branches can he heard.
Can I say a wave of tenderness is here?
Mostly. There are barriers here
which we do not pass:
each in separate solitudes
in separate rooms much of the time,
You will find greater and lesser pearls
in the corners of our rooms,
in our garden and hidden away
in shallow seas and rivulettes
that run through our lives.
Set free in a diamond studded array,
kept secret mostly, modestly arranged,
for God hath set all things free
from one another
that they may be sustained
by Him alone,
and nothing in the heavens
or in the earth, but God,sustains them.3

1 ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, source not known
2 other quotations from marriage prayers
3 The Bab, from His Tablet El Kadir(The Mighty)

Ron Price
29 December 1995

12. WAR

In recent years, at least since the late 1980s and 1990s, the subject of warfare has become more popular, partly because war and terror are back in the social picture, partly because the whole of the last century has seen one war after another, partly an end of history climate of apocalypticism, partly because we increasingly see a relationship between our own daily activity and war, partly rhetorical inflation, partly endless media hype and partly because of an increasingly loaded language with warfare terminology: military-industrial complex, consciousness industry, territories, borders, logistics, defences, inter alia.

DAYTON'S TEMPORARY BOND AND TV'S SCATTER GUN

The first peace talks in my life, the first end-of-war talks were in 1945 at Yalta. There were then a series of peace talks in Korea, in Viet Nam, in relation to the Cold War, in the Balkans, in the Arab-Israeli War, the list seems endless. As I write this poem there are peace talks going on nearly sixty years after the first ones in my life. "Why were there peace talks in Dayton Ohio?"-Ron Price with thanks to Alister Cook, "Message from America," ABC Radio, Sunday, 26 November 1995, 7:15 pm and 21 February 2003.

The Wright Bros would not have believed it;
we did not believe it:
peace in the Balkans-at last!
Is it a sign of things to come?
If we can sort out this knot
anything is possible.
Who would have thought you could fly?
Who would have thought we'd get peace
in our time?

They're turning in their graves now;
they're turning; things are turning.
There's a turning of the wheel,
some kind of vital axle's here,
some kind of vital oil
as a peaceful Order emerges.

It's an oil ignited in the Siyah-Chal;
gone now around the world,
a light that's far beyond those fairies,
far beyond Dayton's temporary bond.
far from TV's endless scatter gun.

Ron Price
26 November 1995
<
13. CIVILIZATION

In Kenneth Clark's discussion of civilization he says there are three "essential ingredients:" leisure, movement and independence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,a German philosopher, wrote that: "The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it."(The Sorrows of Young Werther) While I would not go all the way with him on this note, I do agree the leisure has presented the society I have lived in with great problems. Abdul-Baha puts the focus on "purity, independence and freedom." This prose-poem explores some of the core problems of civilization at a quite personal level, more personal and deeper for me than is usually examined in the media.

This poetry is
an emotional response
to the truths of revealed religion
in an hour when
my contemporaries
are looking for different truths.

While I tried to understand
these great truths
I moved thirty-six times,
possessed a restless
insatiate curiosity and,
by the time I was sixty,
all I wanted was tranquillity,
the experience of fine discrimination
and the capacity to discover truth
through the delicate balance of words.

Purity seemed to elude me
as the years went on
and I became increasingly
encrusted with the
soil and soot of a body
of staggering incapacity.

Ron Price
29/5/03.

VOLUME FIVE

CHAPTER NINE

PRAISE AND GRATITUDE

I'd like to close this autobiographical work with some poetry, poetry that is an expression of praise and gratitude for the developments that have taken place on Mt. Carmel. In many ways these developments express, symbolically, the achievements in the half century that this autobiography describes: in my life, in my religion, in the Bahai community and as a hope for humankind. Autobiographies written by Bahais during these years, and there have not been many, extend what you might call a hypothetical hermeneutics1 to correlate the events of Bahai history with episodes in their own lives. And this is what I do in both narrative and poetry. -Ron Price with thanks to Linda Peterson, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation, Yale UP, London, 1986, p.61.


APPLAUSE

They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
and dances...
-William Wordsworth, "I wandered lonely as a cloud".

Walking through these gardens green,
red-pebbled paths and cypress sheen,
He saw those marble columns tall,
a Parthenon reborn; he raises a call
back to the Greeks!
whom for many a year he seeks.

Such a brilliance to the eye,
continuous with the stars who die,
but only after many years
and then their light goes out, my dears.
All of history here he saw,
the future too in one draw
of breath, one cast of eye.
The whole world around it danced so high
He nearly missed the wealth this view had brought
because he had not really thought.

Often when he sits or lies
there comes upon his inward eyes
this flash of beauty like a dream
mountain fresh, torrent, stream.
Then his heart fills up at last;
his rivers run, his mind moves fast.
After years of working for a Cause
his eyes taste sweetness, hands applause.

Ron Price
19 June 1995

GESTATION

When artists speak about the gestation period for their work I like to think of a long, medium and short term period. In my own case the long term gestation involved my grandfather, my mother and my father. These were the primary influences on my life in the first half of the twentieth century. Of course, one must also add the socio-historical influences from this period: the two wars, the decline of tradition, the new media, et cetera. The medium term influences involved my career as a teacher, my pioneering and experience in the Bahá'í community, say, from about 1953 to 1978; and short term gestation and influences, especially Roger White and the writing of poetry from 1978 to 1992, my years in the north and west of Australia: 1982 to 1999 and, finally, the Arc Project on Mt. Carmel from 1987 to 2000.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 18 July 2000.

Gradually, an emotional engagement,
an imaginative reconstruction,
a crystallizing of attention,
of life's waiting,
a linguistic enactment,
a private and colloquial voice
an expression of the paradisical
substratum of experience
in a dark and complex age
of the isolation of the individual
of the individual in community
of an emptying out of an articulate self
to clarify and define the Other,
of a lifelong pursuit of a speech
fitting to one's life,
of an insistent and intense personal presence
in touch with a spiritual world
and with human society,
of inner brightness and darkness,
the precious and the painful,
from place to placelessness,
from now to then,
from here to there
in the power and depth of my solitude.

Ron Price
18 July 2000

Anyone who has got to this final chapter in my story would probably agree that "a man's true life is not the sum of the events of his life." As authority moved from revelation to reason and experience in the last two to three centuries, a paradigmatic shift took place in the writing of autobiography. From a sense of some objective story, out there, writers became aware that their lives became more private even as they brought them into the public eye, the public domain, by the act of writing. The story oscillated between the presence and absense of the self. That has certainly been my experience in writing this work. I feel as if I have artistically arranged the phenomena of my life for aesthetic, intellectual and moral purposes, for education and reality testing. But I have been honest. I have not hidden behind the lives of uncles, aunts, fathers, mothers, a host of significant individuals who have come into my life or my interests.

The Bahai Faith, some may feel, has occupied too much of a central place. But I put it there and did so intentionally. I have enjoyed writing this account; it has not been distasteful to put myself at the centre of the stage, although I have been incapable of the "striptease of autobiography" that it has become for so many and which has also become the taste of a vast readership. For me, there has been what William James called "a rage for privacy" and this has balanced whatever confessionalism has been part of my work. Autobiographers tend to leave out what makes them uncomfortable. The famous Helen Keller, in her autobiography of 1903, omits the sadness and rage she suffered due to her blindness and deafness.

SMALL DIFFERENCES MAKE THE DIFERENCE

The completion of the Human Genome Project, the great achievement that it is, is coinciding with the completion of the Arc Project. Both events change and will change the way we think about ourselves. Just as small differences between our genome and those of other animals and plants reveal what make us uniquely human and profoundly different from animals and plants, so do small differences between the Bahá'í Faith and other Faiths make it the unique and profoundly different phenomen- on that it is. Both Projects have resulted in great gifts, powerful tools, for humanity's use. Both Projects will help human beings find their place in the complex systems that make up the great adventure of life in this universe. Both Projects were launched by inspired visions, visions that were based on the belief that the pursuit of large-scale fundamental problems in the life-sciences or in religion was and is in the interest of humanity. Both Projects are not endings but beginnings of a new approach to biology on the one hand and global cooperation, peace and a new future on the other. Both Projects are identified with extraordinary new power and with the treatment of dis- ease, one a physical disease and the other spiritual. Both are associated with a true internationalism which has developed significantly during these my pioneering days. -Ron Price with thanks to Barbara R. Jasny and Donald Kennedy, "The Human Genome," Science, Vol. 291, No. 5507, 16 February 2001, p.1153.

We get another perspective
on all the life on earth
and on this small and insignificant religion
we have played a part in all these years.

Small differences make
all the difference:
a written Revelation,
a clear statement of succession.
My God, these two factors alone
make it unique and pure.
The unity of life, of religion,
is so obvious, so clear, so true:
I see it on that Hill of God,
still the cynosure of a very few.


Ron Price
24 February 2001

A NEW POETIC INFLUENCE

The Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi, which the West comes closest to in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, places the accent in artistic expression, in its aesthetic philosophy, on the rustic, the raw, the rough, on the imperfect, the impermanent, the incomplete, on nothingness, emptiness, detachment. Since much of my poetry contains accents similar to the tone and texture, meaning and feeling, conveyed by these words; since I have long felt a certain identity with the writings of Henry David Thoreau, that pioneer of yesteryear who also wrote extensively about his everyday experience in the bush, in the rustic places where he lived by himself; since the Writings of the Bahai Faith, and of Bahaullah in particular, also dwell on that same mystical quality of nothingness and emptiness, of detachment and the wilderness of remoteness: this particular Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi has a peculiar relevance to my own writings.-Ron Price with thanks to "The Comfort Zone," ABC Radio National, 3 March 2001, 9:00-10:00 am.

Only recently has it been confirmed
that this galaxy has a billion planets,1
only just the other day while
the Arc Project was being completed,
filling out our world with light,
with fragrances of mercy wafted
as they are over all created things,
over that myriad of planets.
And here, in these words,
I shed a unique light on the lives
of men and women of four epochs,
these protean beings who strike
a thousand postures in their lives
and change their spots swifter
than the twinkling of an eye.2

1 Interview with an astronomer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science(AAAS) on "The Science Show," ABC Radio National, 12:10-1:00 pm, 3 March 2001.
2 Robert Louis Stevenson, "Modern History Sourcebook: Samuel Pepys," 1886. He discusses the chameleon nature of human beings in his introduction.

Ron Price
3 March 2001

GROWTH 1

Yesterday I wrote a poem, Growth, on my life and the development of that fragrance until 1962. This morning I felt like continuing that theme with a focus on the development of my beliefs, that fragrance. The task seems too difficult to get the required depth. In the poem below I have set an overall outline but the depth, the detail, the kind of achievement that Wordsworth attains in his The Prelude I do not seem able to produce, as yet. I have a model in Wordsworth but my personal achievement in that direction must, for now, remain elusive. Perhaps one day I will come back to this theme, this poetic package.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 28 March 2001.

The only one on campus: '63-'66,
nearly lost the plot
in a mix of depression, sex,
career questions, confusion,
lectures, note taking and exams.

Was saved, in the end,
by Martin and Bond,
put on track,
got a direction,
centred my passion,
still fought fear
and depression,
broke the umbilical cord.

Survived those four years
in one piece,
launched to the north,
a real pioneer this time
with a marriage under my belt
to help me make it through.

Lasted, what, nine months?
A mild schizo-affective state!
Patched up and sent out after six
for a final two-and-a-half year
stint by Lake Ontario.

Restored my batteries,
kept my marriage,
continued my career,
pioneered again,
a few hours from Toronto,
taught the Cause, thanks
to the Eastern Proc Team,
put Picton on the map.

Fifty years after His passing1
I was in Australia
and praying again
to light up Whyalla
and my life,
both exploded
into more success
than I could imagine.

Divorce and two years
in South Australia
led to Tasmania, Victoria,
the NT, WA and back to
Tasmania and a thousand
upon thousand events
taking me to 57,
the opening of the Arc Project
and the Terraces.

Always the fragrance
has been there,
but to follow its journey
as Wordsworth followed his
must wait until another day.

1 'Abdu'l-Bahá: 1921-1971

Ron Price
28 March 2001

The longer I lived with the details of my life, and I lived with them in some written form for two decades(1984-2004), the more I realized that these isolated observations and experiences needed to be pulled together to gain any profundity, any solidity, any cohesion, any perspective, any overall pattern and meaning. And they needed to be pulled together quite differently than they had been the first time or the second. For on both these occasions I felt that something was missing, something important that I could not quite put my finger on but something that, if I did not find it, the whole structure of the narrative would simply lack a soul. Up to that point, I felt as if all I had really done was transfer dry bones from one graveyard to another, albeit with some order, some system and some reverence. Autobiography has been an evolving literary genre: historically, philosophically and in recent times, poetically. And it has evolved in my own approach over two decades. Now it seems, as Suzanne Nalbatian describes it in her analysis of autobiography, that this "book is a product of different selves" than the one which I manifested in my habits, in society and in my vices.

This is really not surprising given that the uniqueness of a place, a locality, a person, an idea, a life, a love, is constructed out of many particular interactions, articulations, social relations, social processes, experiences and understandings. A large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are actually constructed on a far larger scale than what we can define or describe at any given moment. The place, the idea or the relationship is built out of such a complex construction, such a large scale and so many dimensions, which change so frequently with the years, that the entire concatenation of people, events and places often seems like a dream, a vapour, an illusion. This autobiography and this poetry tries to capture some of this vapour, this mirage in the desert, and turn it into water.

MELANCHOLY'S ANTIDOTE

In 1601, four hundred years before the opening of the Arc Project, the Terraces on Mt. Carmel, William Shakespeare completed his composition, his most famous play, Hamlet. The phenomenon of the character of Hamlet is, as leading Shakespearian analyst Harold Bloom writes, "unsurpassed in the West's imaginative literature."1 Given the preeminent importance of the process of teaching to the growth and development of the Bahai community, in the following poem I have given my proto-typical teacher in the Bahai Faith during that teaching Plans beginning in 1937 the persona of Hamlet. I have drawn on Harold Bloom's study of Hamlet for much of the text of my poem. I have also made one crucial alteration or inclusion to this persona, the experience of "the most exquisite celebratory joy."2       -Ron Price with thanks to 1Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Penguin, NY, 1998, p.384; and 2The Universal House of Justice, Letter 3 April 1991.

Hamlet is so endlessly suggestive,
his ever-growing inner self
and his infinite consciousness,
often sees himself as a failure,
a failed, tragic protagonist,
an earlier self had died
and a new one born,
in a sea of constant change,
a graciousness in mourning,
the centre of a solemn consciousness
everywhere and tentativeness
the peculiar mark
of an endlessly burgeoning world,
so continuously alive,
a breaking wave of sensibility
pulsating onward.

His bewildering range of freedoms
we can see in ourselves
providing as they do
a will-to-identity
and his sinuous enchantment,
his global self-consciousness,
of two hundred years now.

He needs humanity
to give honour and meaning
to his life for we are not alone.
He lets everything be
and trusts in God
to balance, siphon,
the anxiety,
as he makes us see
the world in other ways.

He makes successful gestures
and so do we with our inwardness
in the theatre of the mind
in the inmost self,
our necessary disinterestedness
where the only enemy is self.
But for us there is joy,
melancholy's antidote.

Ron Price
14 May 2002

DYNAMIC SYNCHRONIZATION

By the early 1990s the Arc Project was making large holes in the side of Mt. Carmel. Evoking images of paradise, of the land of milk and honey, of the blessed isles, of the promised land, of the Elysian fields, among other pastoral surroundings associated with this holy place, in the minds of believers around the world, it was assuming a place of immense proportions in the mind's eye of the faithful. During this same period of time, in 1993, the Hubble Spacecraft was fixed in the heavens. As the Arc Project headed to completion in 2000 and 2001, Hubble sent back data that allowed astrophysicists to determine with some accuracy the age of the universe at 12 billion years. Some 40,000 galaxies could be observed in the sky behind a curvature the size of a grain of sand and there was a vast increase in the knowledge of the origins of stars. The Sun and the Moon were also studied during the construction of the Arc Project telling us much more about these heavenly bodies. The Sun's polar regions were investigated during this period. Asteroids and comets were also examined in more detail than ever before. Mars and Saturn also came under the astronomers' microscopes. -Ron Price with thanks to The Internet: Planetary Science Spacecraft, 24 June 2002.

They1 said we stood on the threshold
of the last decade
of the radiant twentieth century.
The prospects were dazzling:
little did we know
we'd be able to go back
and see our origins
12 billion years ago.

Yes, there was an acceleration
of spiritual forces then
as May 1992 approached.
The suddenness, the speeding-up,
the transformational impact
on my poetic output,
the new feelings of delight
on the dry soil of my heart
and a certain bewilderment
which I have been trying
to understand since those
winter months when
it really began,2
made me slowly realize
that, at last, I could
not do everything
on this long, slippery
and tortuous path
as that dynamic synchronization
at last approached.

1 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message 1990.
2 In the winter months of June to August 1992 I wrote 35 poems, the precursors to an immense poetic unfolding of about 600 poems each year for the next ten years: 1992-2002.
-Ron Price 27 June 2002

MEDITATION ON BAHA'I WORLD CENTRE

It could be argued and I often do that the first visual evidences of this new democratic theocracy that is the Bahai Faith are situated in the buildings, terraces and gardens on Mt. Carmel. Of course structures of various kinds go back to the turn of the twentieth century, indeed, the years after the passing of Bahaullahn 1892. Just as the early seventeenth century in Holland and the works of painters like Rembrandt witnessed "the first visual evidence of bourgeois democracy" and "a group of individuals (came) together and (took) corporate responsibility," so too is this the case with the Bahai community around the world.

...............my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
...............to the external World
Is fitted.
      -William Wordsworth, "The Recluse", William Wordsworth: Selected Poems, Walford Davies, editor, Dent, 1975, p.132.

Here I behold a mind that
feeds upon infinity, a mind
sustained by direct transcendent
power and holds converse with
a spiritual world of past, present
and to come: epoch to epoch,
past recorded time.

Here I see days gone by
returning from those first
glimmerings at the dawn of this Age,
enshrined now: the spirit of the Past
for our future's restoration.
The characters are, now, fresh and visible
in this spot of time with its distinct pre-eminence
and its renovating virtue whereby
our minds are nourished and
invisibly repaired.

Here are those efficacious spirits
who have profoundest knowledge
of leavening of being and
of the workings of One Mind,
the character of this Great Apocalypse
and the types and symbols of eternity,
gathered, as they are, among solitudes sublime.

Here we find our better selves,
from whom we have been long departed,
and assume a character of quiet
more profound than so many of
the pathless wastes where we have
long walked, too long, its roads.

Here, too, I hear at last my song which
with its star-like virtue shines to
shed benignant influence,
make a better time,
more wise desires and
simpler and humbler manners.
Perhaps some trace of purity may
come with me and guide and cheer me
with Thy unfailing love
which I forget.

Ron Price
19 June 1995

And so I refer frequently to my poetry to explain my personal life and I refer to my personal life to explain my poetry. This is a common technique among poets. Somehow when a writer writes, and this is no less true when writing autobiography, he must lift up to his imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. This is what gives his writing, his craft, his life, the kind of breath which is not artificial, not dry, but savoured with an intensity, a spontaneity, a creativity that in some strange way purifies, improves and filters thought. It takes autobiography from where it has been for so many years, in what Allen Shapiro calls "the dark continent of literature," and gives it new light, if not for many of the readers, at least for some of the writers.

DISTINCTIVE VOICE

Distinctive voice is inseparable from distinctive substance...we will feel, as we read, a sense that the poet was not wed to any one outcome....the reader is freely invited to recreate in his own mind....the true has about it an air of mystery or inexplicability ........the subject of a serious poet must be a life with a leaning, life with a tendency to shape itself... -Louise Gluck, "Against Sincerity", Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Ecco Press, Hopewell, N.J., 1994.

Every atom in existence is distinctive
especially these Hanging Gardens:
we've got distinctive substance here
and some of us have been waiting
a long time-try forty years-for this
apotheosis of the Ancient of Days
in a holy seat, at last a genuinely
holy seat in a world of seats, seemingly
endless seats: the light of the countenance
of God, the Ruler of the Kingdom of Names
and Fashioner of the heavens hath been
lifted upon thee.*

Here is a world where affliction is married
to ecstasy, suffering defined with virtuosity,
colour mounts on colour, temperatures mix
and pure gold comes from the alchemist,
pure fire, pure spiritual energy so that:
my pages stain with apple-green;
my letters are written in chrysolite;
words find marble, gates and shrines
embedded in diamonds and amethyst.
What is this molton gold, ink burnt
grey, revelation writing? ....cheering
thine eyes and those of all creation,
and filling with delight all things
visible and invisible.* Yes and no,
always, it seems, yes and no.
Conflagrant worlds interacting:
the myth is tragic here. A grandeur
that is magnetic, but even here,
the meaning must be found.

Can you see the scars, the evidence:
there's been emotion here to the
essence of our hearts. I try to name,
localize, master, define that scar,
but it is beyond my pen, beyond the
poignant inadequacy of my strategems.
No response of mine goes deep enough.
This poetry of functional simplicity
will never reach Zion, the City of God,
but I will try: May my life be a sacrifice
to Thee, inasmuch as Thou hast
fixed Thy gaze upon me,
hast bestowed upon me Thy bounty,
and hast directed toward me Thy steps.*
14/10/95.
* Tablet of Carmel

EMBALMED

Here are the early stages of a civilization that will create and experience beauty, that will rise above the cacophony in which the world now seems to be drowning. As T. S. Eliot looks back to the Greeks, the Renaissance, the creative peaks of the past, R.F. Price looks ahead with a vision implicit in the architectural configurations on Mt Carmel. Ron Price in appreciation to Alan Shucard, Fred Moramarco and William Sullivan, Modern American Poetry, G.K. Hall and Co., Boston, 1989, p.101.

Perhaps ‘the modern' could go back
to Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase(1912),
the symbol of the international exhibit of art
in New York, the root of the manifestation
of ‘the modern' in America(1913)
and ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's 239 days in the West.

The big guns had come and changed the world:
Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein and
the broidered Robe of Light
hearing the wondrous accent of the Voice
that cometh from the Inaccessible
to our urban, industrial, democratic,
fragmented, scientific jungle
of motion, speed, urbanity, machinery
and billions of human beings.

Here was the nest of the modern in poetry,
where intellectual and emotional complexes
were presented in an instant in time:
containers for ideas and feelings,
poetic sensuousness, hard and clear,
a firey intensity, prose poems,
awakening, invigorating, confusing,
some Hellenic turning,
some nature turning,
some turning, twisting, revolving,
evolving trying to describe our world:
bewildered, agonized, helpless,
invading by some wind
into the remotest and fairest places
and wasting as it germinated.

Poetry created aesthetic objects
out of words, reassembling language,
detached and leading anywhere, everywhere:
hymns to possibility, not just gibberish,
idiosyncratic flux, slangy informality,
surprising peculiarity of things.

Eliot advised writers to develop
an historical sense, back into the entire
western intellectual tradition,
my relation to the dead and the unborn:
to escape from the subjective into system, order.

And so I did TS, so I did, a system just being born
back then: 1912, 1919, 1922--goodness, you were
right there, then, at the start with J. Alfred Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go..(*).

That meaninglessness was being replaced,
paralysis, confusion, social falsity, anxiety
and we see the mermaids singing each to each.
...I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us and we drown.(*)

And we drown, dreaming figures, as in a dance.
Silently adoring, embalmed in awe
and pentilekon marble, released to marvel
the magic Dust that noone ever sees.

Ron Price
23 June 1995

(*) TS Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", in TS Eliot: Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, London, 1954, pp.11-16.

There will be, I am inclined to think, many who will read this work and find it not to their taste. And I am reminded of what one writer said of T.S. Eliot and his poem The Wasteland, perhaps the most famous poem of the twentieth century. That poem, The Wasteland, he wrote "was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life." What a reader gets from a work is quite an idiosyncratic reality. It is something I have little control over once I have let loose this work. In the end a writer must please himself. Gibbon became an autobiographer for the same reason he became an historian: to see a pattern, a plan in what might appear from a distance to be a welter of haphazard, chaotic or contradictory experience. I have done the same. I do not expect my readers to see the same pattern.

DISTANT GARDENS

The second century(1944-2044) is destined to witness...the first stirrings of that World Order, of which the present Administrative System is at once the precursor, the nuc- leus and pattern-an Order which, as it slowly crystallizes and radiates its benign influ- ence...will proclaim the coming of age of the whole human race.-Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, pp.72-73.

The Parthenon, or whatever, is universal because it can continuously inspire new personal realizations in experience. It is simply as impossibility that any one today should experience the Parthenon as the devout Athenian contemporary citizen exper- ienced it...The enduring art-product...was called forth by something occasional, something having its own date and place. But what was evoked is a substance so formed that it can enter into the experience of others and enable them to have more intense and more fully rounded out experiences of their own. -John Dewey, Art as Experience, Capricorn Books, NY, 1958(1934), p. 109.

And so it is universal
and will go on being so
down the halls of time,
enriching and intensifying
the experience of those
who are willing to share in its beauty,
to experience it as something new,
something mine,
to which I give the meaning,
reordering colour and shape
in relation to myself,
to experience delight and overcome
the inchoate, restricted, apathetic, tepid,
fearful, conventional, routine
through some expansion, intensification,
fullness: ordering matter through form,
on this journey to these far places,
these distant gardens.

Ron Price
23 December 1995

GUITAR + SHOCKS = POETRY

"Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing now, he must dig down deeper. One would say that the shock of suffering and vision breaks down, one after another, the living sensitive partitions behind which his identity is hiding. He is harassed, he is tracked down, he is destroyed...He dies and is reborn in and with poetry.....He discovers an essentially free, objectless, creativity in poetry. With each poem, the poet creates a world and savours it." Such are Maritain's words and they have a certain resonance with my own thoughts, except I still can sing and do, although not often. -Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, New American Library, NY, 1953, pp.130-177.

I was soaked in music in the ‘60s
and like a wandering minstrel
for twenty-five years
I took that ubiquitous guitar,
moved to sing, to song,
the pioneer singer.

But the shocks kept coming;
the fires died.
There was nothing left to sing,
except dry bones deep down
on the edges of my tongue,
somewhere in my heart.

In my brain a new music did I find,
a certain verbal sound
filled with thought and meaning
deep in the womb,
of some poetic intuition
with tact, subtlety,
to express the inexpressible
in common speech, human voice:
close to my heart,
defining what my thoughts are like,
conferring nobility on words.

Still did I sing old songs
for old folks,
last notes dredged-up
for occasions
to try to bring a little joy
to withered faces,
last breaths before death
carried them away.1

1 So it was that once a month I joined a small choir of 4 to 8 people who sang at Ainsley House for senior citizens here in George Town.

Ron Price
22 December 1995/
25 April 2003.

SINGALONGS AND MY TWO-2 RING BINDERS: 1949 TO 2009

This 2000 word essay explores the story of the gradual evolution of the singalong booklets in my life: 1949 to 2009. The first booklets of music in my life, at least those I remember, go back to 1949 when I was five years old. The first booklet of music, though, that I put together myself in order to run singalongs was in the late 1960s, in 1968 when I was twenty-four. From about 1949 to about 1969, then, I ran along on the singalong booklets of others: my parents', my friends' and, of course by the decade 1959 to 1969, TV's many-idiomed and formatted aural-texts. During the period of some 60 years, then, from 1949 to 2009 I have been involved in singalongs in one form or another.

In the last ten years though, 1999 to 2009, singalongs using booklets of songs I created took place for the most part at an aged care facility, an Australian government-funded aged care home, called the Ainslie House. This collection of buildings is located beside the Tamar River, an estuary, that runs beside George Town and Low Head in Tasmania. The residents of this home in this the oldest town in Australia, live in a modern and attractive facility about one kilometre from the Bass Strait, an extension of the Great Southern Ocean at the other end of the world from were I was born and grew to maturity in Canada.

I have been in at least two dozen aged care buildings in my life. These places where home means living with many new people under one roof, getting used to other people doing some of the everyday things you might have previously done for yourself and by yourself as well as working out new balances between one's need for privacy and the inevitable community nature of such a life are now an increasingly burgeoning presence across our civilization as war-babies like myself and baby-boomers all come into their late adolescence(60 to 80) incrementally year after year. Any child born in the first year of WW2 in 1939 will be seventy in 2009.

As a lecturer in aged care studies, programs in which I finished my teaching career in an Australian technical and further education college dealing with students studying aged care and other specialist training programs in various human services certificate and diploma courses, I became as I had so often before become "an instant expert." I am now an expert in more and more subjects and know less and less, or so it seems, as the years go on. A range of different levels of care as well as specialist services are available here in these buildings by the sea under one management and organizational structure: high and low level care, short and long term care, independent unit and shared accommodation, transition as well as particular and multi-service care are all available under one roof. Care and services such as: respite care, care for particular cultural needs and health conditions, care for end-of-life clients, for war veterans, for the socially and financially disadvantaged, for the mentally ill and for people living in rural or remote areas.

To a lesser extent I also led singalongs in the decade 1999 to 2009 in the Bahá'í community I had, by then, been associated with for six decades. My final singalongs in classrooms took place as my teaching in FT, PT and volunteer teaching wound down in that same decade. These singalongs became rare events in my last years in Perth Western Australia in large Bahá'í communities and the smaller ones in northern Tasmania where I lived after 1999 and in the several classrooms where I taught. In the decade that I lived in Tasmania, 1999 to 2009, guitar-playing and singalongs slipped to the periphery of my life with one main bastion of activity—with the old and dieing.

In some ways it was fitting that the last few years of the singalongs in my life, 2002-2009, involved mostly senior citizens, the aged, old people, those in the last decade of late adulthood(70 to 80) and old age(80++)--here in George Town, Australia's oldest town. I used large-print songbooks published in the UK with a small singing group, choir was not quite the right word, until 2005. I say "fitting" because the content of these booklets was mainly for the two generations born before WW2--in the first four decades of the twentieth century—the earliest years in Canada and Australia of the activity of the Bahá'í community, the religious community I have been associated with for more than 50 years.

In 2009, though, the material in my two volumes, my two 2-ring binders, that I used for singalongs was for all age groups. There are very few songs that originated in the period, the two generations that were born in the years from 1970 to 2010, circa. The group born in the years after about 1970 will find few songs that were popular from their years of listening experience in these two binders. I did not listen to the music of those two generations. For the music of some two generations(1970 to 1990 and 1990 to 2010), of a great mass of popular music; for example, the songs of groups like Abba, among a host of others, I never bought the sheet music nor did I learn how to play the songs in some personally inventive way by figuring out the chords. So it was that by 2009 I did not know the songs of those under forty well enough to sing them in groups informally in the Bahá'í community or in any other communities of which I was a part as a teacher in primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions, as an adult educator, as a quasi-entertainer or one of a number of other roles I have had during those years.

These resources here in these booklets, these files, this collection, are here for singalongs in the groups I am involved with as I head into the last six months of the early years(60 to 65) of late adulthood(60 to 80) the middle years(65 to 75) of late adulthood and the last years of that stage(75 to 80) and finally, old age(80++), if I last that long. I have multiple copies of what I have come to call the music of other interest groups--for those not familiar with the Bahá'í musical experience, booklets of songs I put together for students in classrooms where I used to teach as well as other groups. I have many editions of song books in multiple copy form that I made for Bahá'í groups, as I say, as far back as the late 1980s. Songbooks from the previous two decades, the years 1969 to 1989, and the two decades before that, 1949 to 1969, have all been lost, thrown away or disappeared into the sands of time, the time that has been my life, as it has slipped irretrievably from my grasp.

These musical experiences called singalongs have returned to my life now here in George Town in the last six months. In July 2008 I put together a package/booklet of 75 songs as requested by the local aged care centre. Who knows when and who knows where and how these singalongs will develop in these years of late adulthood. My wife and son became a little tired of hearing the same old stuff back in the 1980s and 1990s for I am not a particularly talented guitarist and it is understandable that they have got tired of hearing all these old songs, this repertoire of mine. Singing in groups seemed to become passe, perhaps even to become seen as declasse or lower in social status/standing in the wider society or at least many sectors of the wider society that I came to live and have my being in by the 1990s and 2000s.

This form of self-entertainment and group entertainment that does not rely on the electronic media, though, is far from dead, though, and I feel it will be part of my life in these years before my demise, my passing from this mortal coil. In some ways it has been fitting that most of the singalongs I have been part of in the last ten years, 1999 to 2009, have involved residents of a home for those in aged care, for people on their last legs. I often thought that American writer William Faulkner's spirit may have been present in those sing alongs. I often thought, too, as I led these old folks in song that the spirit Faulkner had when he wrote his now famous book "As I Lay Dieing" may just be at the back of the leisure-social-room where we had our singalongs; perhaps this great writer, this winner of a Nobel prize in literature, hangs around the ceiling or occupied another place in these rooms and outside which the poet-historian Arnold Toynbee says peopled our lives, these unseen, unknown, unobserved souls, millions upon billions of souls at just one remove, one step, beyond our senses in a land of lights never to return to this earth, its beauties and its uglinesses, its bitter-sweetnesses and its joys.

These people who now singalong once each month all lay, sat up or palely loitered about, dieing slowly. Each month that I went back to this old folks home during these latter years of these singalongs someone else had died, sometimes two or three had died or had moved to the very edge of their final hour. Some sat in some state of increased decrepitude to that state I had observed in my previous visit and some looked brighter and more alert. Sometimes I was brighter and more alert. The term ‘old folks home' was what we used to call these places for the old and dieing when I was a kid. And of course it was just that, a home, their last. It was their home, their last home on this earthly plane.

Slowly I got to know many of the names of these souls, got to know their life stories, their particular ailments in great detail—as old people are want to tell you to the nth degree of finitude. I also got to know a little of their philosophies and their religious proclivities.

The resources in my personally prepared, tenderly fostered, oft-used-and-repeated booklets of singing material that are here in my files, my collections are getting a new lease on life. They had often been kept, in this last decade, tightly sealed with a big rubber-band around them, in keeping for a future time when singalongs would once again return to my life and to the groups I was involved with in these years of my late adulthood and what would become, finally, old age. Now the rubber bands are off the its action-stations for singalongs once again.

Old age begins, say some human development psychologists, at the age of 80. I've come to like that model since the 1990s when I was a teacher of a course on human development. This model gives me now as it has given me in the last decade many more years before the onset of old age. As things stand now in 2009, I have another 15 years before I'm actually, officially, or shall I say psychologically, in theory at least, de facto, old. And I have plenty of years left for singalongs. Perhaps they may still be in my life in the 2040s, the decade when I become a centenarian. We shall see what those mysterious dispensations of a Watchful Providence provide in this the evening of my life as nightfall gradually approaches and "I go into a hole for those who speak no more," as the Báb once wrote it graphically and literally in His voluminous writings back in the 1840s.

Ron Price
23 July 2009
2000 Words

UNSURPASSED HOLINESS

Ours is the duty.....to play our part, however small, in this greatest drama of the world's spiritual history. -Shoghi Effendi, 21 March 1930, in The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, USA, 1974, p.26.

Even when all these marble edifaces
with their inaccessible mysteries,
their attendant gardens are complete
we are still faced with ordinary dust.
The domestic orange trees
will still be as unendearing as ever,
contented perhaps in their green universe,
having been taught submission
(you can tell by their roundness).
The geraniums will still be
as pedestrian and obtuse as ever.

The only thing you've got here, mate,
is what you have lavishly invested
with your aspiration and belief.
You can grow weary of nightingales
and peacocks, the uselessness of words,
the fruitlessness of speculation.
You'll find here among the frail petals
no formula for perfection.
The disinterested cypresses,
even though they point heavenward,
will offer no certain answer to your questions.

The jasmine may captivate your senses
and paralyse your will,
but the sense of urgency will not leave you
nor this place for some time;
for the hour is perilous and dark
and the rush of history is moving
toward the climax of a spiritual drama
of staggering magnitude
which so few are yet aware: be warned!

Just resume your ordinary life
with its deadlines and schedules.
The taxi will soon speed you
to your destination.
The airport can sell you a postcard
of the place which will soon be the stage
for the enactment of several critical acts
in a play of unsurpassed holiness.
Have a safe trip home.

Ron Price
28 December 1995

I CAN SEE YOU NOW

I have found it difficult in the last several years to get my mind off the Arc that is being built on Mt Carmel. It fills me with profound pleasure and ardent expectations.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 23 December 1995.

For if we look back at one hundred years of an unexampled history of unremitting progress, we also look forward to many centuries of unfolding fulfillment of divine purpose...incrementally realized.... -Universal House of Justice, Ridvan, 1992, p.1.

I can see you now: close and distant,
near and far, with pregnant and tragic import,
loosening and tightening,
expanding and contracting,
separating and compacting,
soaring and drooping,
rising and falling,
dispersive and scattering,
hovering and brooding,
unsubstantial lightness,
massive blow--
such is the stuff you are made of,
up on that hill, over there,
infinitely diversified,
but I can express you here:
the significant, the relevant,
compressed and intensified
in some exalted rising, surging
and retreating, the sudden thrust,
the gradual insinuation
until I am obsessed with your wonder
and can hardly take my mind off of you:
the enduring, the voluminous, the solid,
room, filling, power, energy of position
and motion, rightness in placing.

And so I am in poised readiness
to meet your surrounding forces,
to persist, to endure with some energy
and some opportunity for action
with my unique experience,
gradually letting you yield to me
in the changing light and moods,
your enduring sacredness
and charm and your monumental
register of cherished expectations.

Ron Price
23 December 1995

A SWEET NEW LIFE

"People entering Gothic cathedrals left behind their life of material cares and seemed to pass into a different world," writes Kenneth Clark as he makes his feelings of the arts contagious in his book Civilization. In other ages buildings were constructed simply to give pleasure. Twentieth century wars have destroyed many of these buildings in a fit of modern barbarism. As this was taking place, as this barbarism was hacking into the evidences of civilization humans had erected over many centuries, a small and embryonic community that followed the teachings of its prophet-founders, the Bab and Bahaullah began to erect new symbols of a new civilization.-Ron Price with thanks to Kenneth Clark, Civilization, Pelican Books, 1969, p. 167.

It was an age of minarettes
that staggered the imagination,
built high into the sky,
immense heaps of stone
and glass and aluminium.

It was also the end
of the Heroic Age
and the start
of the Formative Age
and they used this social art,
architecture,
to help us lead fuller lives,
to touch life at many points,
to give us that douceur de vivre,
that sweetness of life
at places all over the world.

Ron Price
29 May 2003

If Evelyn Waugh is right when he says that "nobody wants to read other people's reflections on life and religion, but the routines of their day, properly recorded are always interesting," then this book has little hope to ever see the light of day. Perhaps, following Waugh or a writer like Thomas Mann, I should really make that diary with all its confessionalism the focus of this and future writing. As this work has come to see the light of day at sites like the Bahai Academics Resource Library, bahai-library.org website in August 2003 and the website: bahaindex.com in November 2003 and the Bahá'í World Centre Library, among several other sites like lulu.com and eBookMall where hard cover and electronic copies can be purchased, I tend to think that there is little hope that it will find a wide appeal, a high degree of popularity. Such is life! At the very least writing this work has offered, like knitting, a therapeutic relaxation for me, but for others well....who knows?

Shaping one's life, Virginia Woolf writes, involves shaping something that in many ways has no shape at all. I seem to have a need to recall things that have gone too far, gone too deep, sunk into this life or someone else's and become part of mine. I seem to have a need to recall dreams, things surrounding me, half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and by night, shadows of people one might have been, unborn selves. That would be an interesting autobiography, interesting at least to me: the story of someone I might have been. Sadly, joyfully, inevitably, I must settle for this story of the person I have been.

This narrative is partly an experiment with a means, a way, of defining my experience of a religious and cultural heritage, a heritage which has been bound up with the Bahá'í Faith for over fifty years. Through this writing, this autobiography, this literary production, I attempt to turn my small part in what may very well become one of the world's most significant but, as yet, quite obscure diasporas—in which several hundred thousand people in the last 160 years have moved their home, their place of residence voluntarily or through some unavoidable force of circumstance, for a religious motive, for a religion, a new world Faith--into an act of personal memory, part of an institution of cultural memory. This narrative records my confrontation with both a native and a host culture, a Bahá'í and a non-Bahá'í culture, a confrontation that has been part of a total, a life, experience since 1953.

We all resist conformity on principle, in varying degrees; but we indulge in it in practice. One can call this practice socialization, conformity or, indeed, one of many other terms. Despite expressions of horror about "mass man" during the Red Scare 1950s when I was in my late childhood and teens, for instance, North Americans were already growing increasingly homogenous in behavior and taste. Max Lerner in his 1957 book America as a Civilization caricatured North Americans as robots "performing routinized operations at regular intervals." He went on to say that: "They take time out for standardized coffee breaks and later a quick standardized lunch, come home at night to eat processed or canned food. They read syndicated columns and comic strips; they dress in standardized clothes and attend standardized club meetings. They are drafted into standardized armies and, if they escape the death of mechanized warfare, they die of highly uniform diseases and are buried in standardized graves.(p. 261)

What I have tried to do here is to understand this pioneer condition inspite of the inevitable standardizations of life; I accept its many dimensions and try to explain it to others who have enough interest to read this work. I resort in these pages to an act of narration as an expression of the hybrid nature of this global phenomenon, a phenomenon of voluntary or not-so-voluntary migration, migration that has taken place both in my Canadian homeland and overseas, internationally. It is also a phenomenon which in its individual details is usually documented in a very a cursory manner or is often never written about at all and is simply forgotten by history and public memory.

The monument of this new, this as yet obscure, pioneer history is not the fair farm land and the human habitation and settlement as it was in previous centuries. The new archives are not the words and lines on mouldering stone head-boards above a humble grave. These new archives do not belong to an emigrant and the partner of his exile sustained through their lowly but heroic struggle with the wintry or hot and sultry wilderness by mutual affection. The new archives are not old barns now fallen apart from disuse or long fences now seemingly as ancient as the hills. I would like to say a few words here about the new archives I have become associated with as a pioneer of an embryonic institutional environment.

Over the last three-quarters of a century, since the time my parents first met at the Otis Elevator Company in the late 1930s, an explosion of archival material has erupted in this Bahá'í world for the would-be historian of the future. With each passing year the eruption, the explosion, becomes increasingly difficult to deal with, overflowing as it does the bounds of our capacity or our interest in these early decades of the institutonal environment with which it is associated to cope with its effusions. When this great mountain of material is classified and the student begins to focus on the archival body relevant to his own interests and needs, some proportion and framework will emerge from the chaos and prolixity of it all. The historian and social analyst must tease both sense and nonsense from all the loose ends, fragments, contradictions and observations, eruptions and explosions that are found in these archives. Indeed, the present generation is hardly able to deal with this eruption, nor have any of the generations which have created this mountain of paper-archive-even begun to examine it with any seriousness, occupied as they are with creating and developing the institutional matrix that this great archival body clothes with its often hidden meaning.

The student of the emerging world Order of Bahá'u'lláh has seen or will see, if he desires to make a serious study of this world-embracing mountain of paper, in the thousands of archives emerging in local Bahá'í communities around the world especially in the last half century, since the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth in 1953, the beginning of that ninth stage of history as the Guardian called the Ten Year Crusade, the still early stages in the evolution of what the future will come to see as the nucleus and pattern of the new World Order.

"Archives offer our knowledge an extra bonus", says Arlette Farge in her book Fragile Lives. They are not so much the truth as the beginnings of the truth and, she goes on, "they are an eruption of meanings with the greatest possible number of connections with reality." For most of the Bahá'í community at the local level in these epochs, archives are just so much paper in old boxes. Sometimes there exists an obsessive tendency to admit too much meaning to these archives when much of their contents is irrelevant circularized correspondence that could easily be discarded without any loss. But there are innumerable rare gems to be often found amidst the detritus and the irrelevant material. The historian must and will learn to see the forrest amidst the mass of trees.

History and its documents are made up of so many different lives: impoverished and tragic, rich and joyful, mean and lackluster personalities, saints and heros. There is also a certain grandeur, humour, absurdity and irony to the parade and its varying semblances reflected in these documents gathering dust in rooms and garages, attics and now computer directories all across the planet. Archives are both seductress and deceptive mirror of reality. They can falsify and distort the object being studied. They can also be too facile or too ambiguous a means of entering into a discourse with history. They can tell very little of the real events of Bahá'í community life. They can often be just a pile of dry bones transferred from one graveyard to another. But like the increasingly scientific tools of the archeologist, the skills of the archival historian can reveal much light. In the future--or so I believe—they will reveal much light.

History has long been enamoured with ‘the great man'. More recently it has taken up the cudgels of ‘the average man', ‘women', ‘the disabled', ‘the migrant', ‘the pioneer', and on and on goes the list, the litany, of the ordinarily ordinary and the humanly human personages of history. All of these prototypes can be found in the archives of local Bahá'í communities around the world. For anyone taking part in Bahá'í community life in the epochs that are the backdrop for this memoir, and especially as the millennium turned its corner just the other day so to speak, the typical reaction to archives, as I say, is a perception of them as just boxes of stuff kept in someone's house in that back room, attic or shed, among other places. There is a certain ennui, a certain world-weariness that is experienced by the very contemplation to these mini-mountains of correspondence. The weariness comes in part from the great mass of apparently irrelevant detail in those boxes and partly from a simple inability to get any meaningful perspective on the great historical adventure being engaged in by means of the contemplation of this great weight of paper and memorabilia.

"It is unfortunately true" says Moojan Momen in summarizing the history of memoir writing and archive collecting in the Bahá'í community, "that the Bahá'ís are lamentably neglectful." Perhaps in the last five decades, Moojan, they have turned a corner. Time and history will see, Moojan. Throughout history, it should be kept in mind, there has been a long and ambiguous relationship with archives. There have been successive tensions down the ages between boxes of documents known as archives and the actual writing of history. The earliest period in the history of western civilization for which we have a great deal of documentation, of archives, is the first century BC in Rome. For the great mass of humanity this archive is of no interest whatsoever. But for the professional ants who deal in Roman history this archive is crucial; it has helped to generate an explosion of archival enthusiasm amongst a coterie of students of Roman history in the last several decades. Side by side with this professional enthusiasm there prevails an atmosphere of anarchic confusion in the attitude of western man to his past.

We are talking, then, about an old problem: the meaning and relevance of archives. Just as the writing of the Roman poets in that first century BC represents an important part of that rich and ancient archive, so does this poetry of mine represent part(time will tell how important a part) of a modern archive of increasing relevance to both historian and social analyst. I see this poetry as an embellishment to a local archive, several archives where I have lived in Australia and Canada; a contribution to an international archive on pioneers, an archive still in the first century of creation, collection and development; and a small part of a burgeoning base of material the world over which is so extensive now as to virtually swallow the individual in a sea of printed matter were he or she to take a serious interest in the material.

"It is impossible to avoid the realm of aesthetics and emotion" in dealing with archives, says Arlette Farge in her introductory statement on the subject. In a broad sense the architectural remains of the fifth century BC or the Egyptian pyramids, are a repository of information, an archive. The realm of aesthetics and emotion is at the heart of these ancient architectural archives. Archives are also an eruption, Farge states; they can be an expression, she says simply, of whim, caprice and tragedy. And, like this poetry and the stuff in those boxes, they can and are so much more.

It is impossible to assess the relevance of what will one day be the architectural archive of the Bahai Faith, say, in two and a half thousand years. What will be the story told of these generations of the half-light in this first century of a Formative Age when a heterodox and seemingly negligible offshoot of an insignificant sect of Shi'i Islam finished its transformation into a world religion? What will they say of the architectural achievement that helped to give form and beauty to the institutionalized charismatic Force that was about to play a crucial role in the establishment of a global and peaceful civilization?

This autobiography takes half a century of personal accounts of events in the realm of memory and locates connecting points between ancestral, family, societal and religious history along linking lines in an attempt to create a unified whole, a synthesis in time and space. And so it is, that in the context of reproducing my history and my family's history, this autobiography is critically rewriting a new version, a variant, of the story of my community, my Bahá'í community. At the same time a dialogue is created both within and without the Bahá'í community, a dialogue about its memory, its contents and discontents. I have seen the dialogue begin and its future looks so very rich, part of the greatest drama in the world's religious history I have no doubt.

This writing could be said to exist as a text, as "literature engagée," which contributes in its own way to new didactic readings of Bahá'í history, its politics and sociology, its psychology and the poetry of its community, indeed, what it means to be a Bahá'í in the first century of the Formative Age. There are many layers of circumstantial memories in the Bahá'í community, a multiplicity of narratives, multiple voices, multiple interpretations of the same story. The ones that are written down—and there are myriad now in a host of books, journals and magazines—are for the most part short and sweet or not-so-sweet as the case may be; some are of medium length, a few pages, and they can be found in all sort of publications and a very few, like this one, are long-and hopefully sweet.

Partly, too, I have aimed to create but one expression, one means for the construction of history and culture, not an offical one, just a personal one, but one that is a shared process based on a collective effort, a shared process that excludes no one and involves anyone who has the interest and the desire to take part. It must be kept in mind in all of this, and as I have intimated before, that there is an impossibility of autobiography as the narrative of a unified self unless it be a unity in multiplicity. The narrator and the subject of narration are only the same person in a certain sense; the narrator's memory is only partly a reliable guide to the past. The person who writes about their past is at bottom only partly the person of the past.       This autobiographical exercise has created an essential, original, coherent autobiographical self which, in many ways, simply did not exist before the moment, the years, of self-narrating. However coherent this autobiographical self is, it possesses fragmentary, subjective, unstable, constructed and mobile aspects as well. These aspects are less an intrusion than they are a constant. Whatever continuity we grasp, there is much in our life that is beyond grasping and even the continuities can be described in multiple versions with multiple perspectives making an "official" version virtually impossible.

Ernest Renan explains that what bonds peoples of a nation together is their shared ability to forget. I find that a comforting notion, even if paradoxical, especially as I head into my latter years, years characterized so much by forgetting. Perhaps this forgetting is a sign of things to come in that Undiscovered Country we all go to in the end, a place with both mysterious rememberings and forgettings.


PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME THREE

Anyone who has actually read the first two volumes(1800 pages) deserves a prize for having come this far. If it is any comfort, you persistent few have got through more than half of the conceptual space where identity and meaning meet around three themes: my life, my society and my religion. If you have read this far, I'm confident that you have gained some pleasure in the read and I am happy for you. Indeed, my very raison d'etre for this autobiography can be found in the pleasure and the understandings you have found thusfar. De te fabula narratur -this is your story--at least in part and an important part, or so I like to think.

I like to think that those entering into the world of their memoirs or autobiography can see here some images of that literary future. The images I have offered, though, were not planned in a sequence, a tidy narrative line from cradle to grave, so to speak; but on the best of anarchist principles—that is with no planning, somewhat like the way Michael Ondaatje writes his novels-with no sense of what is going to happen next. It just growed!

For most artists both the struggle and the fulfillment of creative work consist in the transfiguration of matter and thought into art. As Joyce put it, the sluggish matter of earth must somehow be transformed within the "virgin womb of the imagination." After 66 years of life, I'm not so sure my imagination has a virgin womb. The flesh, to corrupt the phrase slightly, must be made word. The flesh of my life has been made into words, all too many of them I'm sure for most readers. For writers, this transfiguration of thought into word has always been especially difficult to effect. Even when the writing process does not seem difficult and the words flow swiftly onto the page, as is the case often with me, I would not want to sugguest that to get at the underlying realities of life in the form of words is easy. I would like to think, as the Australian essayist Clive James wrote in 1980, that "it is usually true that the bigger the talent, the slower it ripens into wisdom." My talent has slowly ripened giving me no special sense of it until I was in my fifties. But after the slow percolation of more than 15 years I will leave it to readers to assess if it is big, prodigious, average or dull.

Some writers like James and Auden have prodigiously creative minds which play at their writing desk. I come across writers who churn out a dozen, two dozen, three dozens books. I have yet to publish one in a hard or soft cover and so I hesitate to make any claims at all.

Words, after all, are symbols divorced in a very direct way from the sources of their meaning and power. While music has an undeniable emotive force, and painting a potency contingent on mimetic qualities or the tangible interplay of visual rhythms and tones, words seem somehow distant and vague, mute, flat, comparatively colourless. After 50 years in classrooms and 65 hearing words I am more than a little aware of the bludgeon of words and in a dominantly oral-visual culture words often take second or third place to other mediums of communication. While the dramatic arts, including dance, appeal to both the aural and visual faculties and have, besides, an emphatic, public immediacy because they are performed in the flesh, words speak softly, sometimes inaudibly, and are notoriously bad dancers.

I'm not sure how much of a psychological necessity it was for me to seek relief by setting down my story in words. This work was no opiate, as the Russian Alexander Herzon's autobiography was to him, "against the appalling loneliness of a life lived among uninterested strangers." I was far from lonely and was surrounded by students and Bahá'ís who were far from "uninterested strangers." Like this greatest of Russian autobiographers, though, much time was needed for the events in my life to settle into "a perspicuous thought," a thought I could convey in both a meaningful and written form—and especially meaningful to me. Like Herzen, too, some of my thoughts were uncomfortable and melancholy but, in writing, I was able to reconcile them, after several unsatisfactory attempts, with my rational faculty. Art--and for me the art of writing--is an outward interation inspired by a degree of inner disintegration.

It is more than a little coincidental that my first published articles in the press and my first collected poems in my own files and occasionally in magazines came in the first years after lithium had stabilized by bipolar life; and an even greater literary enthusiasm and success came when luvox, sodium valproate and venlafaxine were in my bloodstream.

It was said of the writer James Joyce that he attempted in Ulysses to render as exhaustively, as precisely and as directly as it was possible in words to do, what his participation in life was like or, rather, what it seemed to him to be like from moment to moment as he lived. This was Joyce's way of narrowing the gap, as he saw it, between life and literature. This narrative of mine does not attempt a moment by moment, blow by blow account, although there is some of this immediacy, this narrowing of the gap as it were in my poetry and my journal.

The contrast between my autobiographical work and Joyce's Ulysses, though, is heuristic. Ulysses is the account of one day in Dublin — June 16, 1904, Joyce's private tribute to his wife Nora, since that was the date on which they first went out together. His book then follows the movements of not only he and his wife, but also hundreds of other Dubliners as they walk the streets, meet and talk, then talk some more in restaurants and pubs. All this activity seems random, a record of urban happenstance.

After years of trying to find the language to write and talk about the serious, about my life and my religion, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the ability came with increasing degrees of effectiveness and with more and more pleasure. But I did not go down the same literary avenue as Joyce. My style and method was very different. The handle I found for my work came in late middle age not early adulthood as was the case with Joyce. Joyce's modus operandi he himself expressed as follows: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of ensuring one's immortality." For Joyce his Ulysses was a modern retelling of Homer's Odyssey with its own wandering hero. T.S. Eliot, who recognized the classical underpinnings of Joyce's work, wrote that Joyce's use of classical myth as a method of ordering modern experience had "the importance of a scientific discovery."

My work, too, was an Odyssey, a journey not with classical underpinnings, but with the metaphorical nature of spiritual reality underpinning my work and a modern, a Bahá'í mythology to guide my way through life's labyrinth. In the same way that Ulysses expanded the domain of permissible subjects in fiction, I like to think that my memoir may function to expand the domain of autobiography and memoir written by Bahá'ís. The multiple narrative voices and extravagant wordplay made Ulysses a virtual thesaurus of styles for writers wrestling with the problem of rendering contemporary life. Aspects of Joyce's accomplishment in Ulysses can be seen in the works of William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison, all of whom, unlike Joyce, won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I am not interested in the mimicking of my work by others but, rather, more attempts at the process of autobiography by more Bahá'ís. Some people seem to have an artistic or literary ability virtually at birth; with me it was a slowly acquired art and, partly for that reason, a much appreciated one.

There were times when I felt this ability would never come and after some early evidences of its existence I felt at times that it had dried up and deserted me. This was especially the case in the nearly twenty years when this autobiography was in its first edition(1984-2003); when in some of the courses I took by external studies my capacity to write what a supervisor wanted simply seemed beyond my ability(1978 to 1988); when yet another magazine declined to accept a poem or an article I had spent what seemed a lifetime composing(1979 to 1999); when I tried to write a novel, a sci-fi fantasy or a long quasi-historical-philosophical piece(1983-2005).

But by the time I had completely left the world of full-time, part-time and volunteer/casual work—by degrees in the years 1999 to 2005—I knew where my abilities could be found and tapped and there I would stay, as far as the eye could see. At the age of sixty, in the earliest year of my late adulthood(60-61), I had finally found and was able to distinguish between the places of literary fertility and the places where only dry dog-biscuits existed. For many years when I was a teacher I compiled reading material for my students around an eclectic mix of book chapters, journal articles, historical documents, extracts from literary texts, journalism, inter alia. Now, in this autobiographical work, I have followed a similar pattern but put a pot pourri of material into one work. I give to readers a single-authored, multidisciplinary sourcebook in the field of autobiography, an autobiography with several formal principles underpinning it, one principle of which is the necessity for digressions, parentheses, with wanderings from the point. To this multidisciplinary work I have added a medley of variegated products from a poetic inclination, an inclination that has led to a certain prolixity. Some may see this work as just another word for creative disorder.
In his book Realism in Our Time George Lukacs states that in realism, the characters' "individual existence, their 'ontological being,' as a more fashionable terminology has it, cannot be distinguished from their social and historical environment. Their human significance, their specific individuality, cannot be separated from the context in which they are created. In this framework of ontological realism, individual characters are isolated, but they are part of a social context as individuals. Beside and beyond whatever solitariness they exist within, there is a common life; the strife and togetherness of other human beings goes on and they are part and parcel of this wider world. For me, this historical, this social environment, is at once global, regional, local and deal with the sciences of man—and all of this only to the extent that I am able to embrace these worlds with my wisdom and the power of my thought.

But there is also another ontological view governing the image of man which is the exact opposite of this view. It is found in the work of many leading modern writers. Man, for these writers, is by nature solitary, asocial, unable to enter into relationships with other human beings. In a word, man's solitariness is his specific social fate. I see no reason why I as a writer, an autobiographer, can not espouse both ontological positions. This latter position which stresses an individual's solitariness, their asocial life and solitude which, Gibbon said, "is the school of genius," is a logical view of one's life when so much of that life is spent alone.

Readers will find in the following part of this work an epilogue and some thoughts on letter writing, on history, poetry and essays--some of the genres I have used in this work. What I want to find here, and what I pray for daily, are evidences of "spirits possessed of such power" that they can act as a leavening force on the arts and sciences as expressed in my life and specifically my writing. "All the worlds which the Almighty hath created can benefit through them," Bahá'u'lláh says. Herzen said that he could hear spirits knocking beneath his lines, not literally of course, but metaphorically.

These spirits inspired Herzen's autobiography and so too did his view that, as he put it, "every life is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, the life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter into another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another's heart, and to listen to its beating ... he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks for himself confirmation, sympathy, justification ..."

This leavening spirit that Bahá'u'lláh refers to, then, I like to think has helped me replace the endless flow of people through my life, people and employment tasks, community engagements and family responsibilities with literary opportunities. Formerly the motivating, leavening forces turned my life toward other activities demanding most of my time.       In the process them fiery tests which, in retrospect, I now see as phases in a life process, a life process that I am now, it seems, only beginning to understand. My life I now see as resolving itself into a series of crises of varying intensity and severity. Although devastating at the time, they released a divine power quite mysteriously; further calamities were engendered along the way with liberal effusions of grace enabling me to win even greater victories in the service of this Cause. I have been carried in this age of transition through my own transition further and further on a path of service and that service is now found primarily in my writing.

The decades succeeding each other gradually and insensibly wore me down: work, ill health, disappointments and discouragements in love, in failed or unrealistic aspirations and expectations in my relationships with the Bahá'í community, in my professional occupation, in striving to be happy and confident in the midst of difficulties and anxieties, in recognizing time and again my own limitations; in the various forms of dissension, conflict and disputes that led to bitter loss along the way---this world of honey and poison and its severe trials and hardships made my spirit, my nature, recoil and I often desired that life should end. But gradually, sometimes like an irruption from within, and not infrequently, a new and luminous light and life stirred in my frame. I could never have any certitude of its source.

Perhaps it was simply getting older and wiser; perhaps it was new medications and medical treatments; perhaps it was new jobs, new places of residence, new relationships, new successes in the material world. But whatever the source, new, pulsating and wonderful configurations, a fresh vitality, deriving perhaps from the power of thought, perhaps from the armies of the Company on high, perhaps from Will or from the world within this world, perhaps from the emanations of the spirit in a process that was, if not completely mysterious to me, it was one that I have come to believe--if I cannot prove--will have its fruitage in the world beyond.

Who knows what achievements and struggles lie in store for me in this the evening of my life that is ahead of me as I continue trying to transmit the precious heritage with which I have been entrusted to those among my contemporaries? I will say no more in this introduction to the epilogue other than to leave you with a prose-poem I wrote at the age of 56, a year after I arrived in Tasmania to begin my retirement and a daily-life devoted to writing. I had spent years as a talker, after a youthful and quiet beginning. The excessive speech, however spontaneous and irrepressible it may have been, had been a factor in wearing out my edges and driving me into a solitude from which I did not often want to escape. It was in this new found solitude that I developed a predilection for a recurring rhythm, the repetition of a motif, a motif that allowed me to write, to serve this Cause at another stage in its gradual evolution and to serve it in the teaching work more than I ever had before. Retirement in 1999 set me on a new course in life and a tremendously productive one.

A MIND LIVELY AND AT EASE

It is said that an artist's work is the sum total of his experience. The artist does not create from a tabula rasa, but from a rich menu of specific and unspecific experience, grey and vague but also highly and variously coloured. From all of this he maps his experience; this map-making could be said to be exactly the main topic of his life as an artist. The artist drafts his own destiny as he drafts his music, his art, his sculpture or his poetry, at least in part. And he is never sure, as Stephen Spender puts it, however confident he may be, whether he has misdirected his energy, or whether his poetry is insignificant and irrelevant or great and important. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 8 August 2000.

A mind lively and at ease
is a gift of fortune
and gives meaning and value
to perceived experience,1
to the deep and rich satisfaction
of my own writing and to the slow
charting of the progress toward our
destiny, our meaning and our fate.

The unperturbed mind is quickest
and can deal with the vanity of vanities:
life, which we must both accept and reject,
which pierces us with its nonsense and its
strange relations, its unending moments
until that last syllable of our recorded time.

1 Jane Austen, Emma.

Ron Price
8 August 2000
ADDENDUM OR EPILOGUE

Having completed my autobiography or, at least, completed a seventh edition in a form that is satisfactory to me in the first two volumes and keeping in mind that I will in all likelihood make additions to it in the years ahead, I want to write a sort of addendum or epilogue in the pages which follow. I write this epilogue in part because I need a network of intersecting tributaries of memory and speculation before returning to my main theme. I need to return to my main theme again and again as well. It is not so much that my record and my insights are unique or especially articulate. The world is overflowing with words from perceptive and very clever people. But my mind seems easily stirred and with the new medications of the last seven years(2001-2008) for my bipolar disorder I experience a certain tranquillity never before enjoyed.

This tranquillity is, I think, like that recollection in tranquillity that Wordsworth said allowed him to withdraw his thought and his life while witnessing its spectacle with the dominion of words, the incarnation of his thoughts. The essential passions of Wordsworth's heart—and mine---speak, hopefully, a plainer and more emphatic language. There is, too, a language which arises out of one's repeated experience and regular feelings which is, for me at least, a more permanent and philosophical language. My feelings seem at last to be more regular and easy and I can reflect on past feelings and absent things often as if they were present. This is not a special talent; indeed it is quite common, but it is very useful, essential, when writing one's memoirs.

I want to contribute this memoir to the world and I want audiences to read my work hoping, among other things, that readers will find a new or at least an altered perspective on their own lives. This is probably a somewhat pretentious aim, trying to stake out a fresh territory for readers, a territory that requires my voice, a voice that has similarities to others but is, in the end, uniquely mine. I feel I have done this to some extent in the first two volumes and I hope some readers find some of this uniqueness and enjoy it.

The spiritual ideal underpinning my experience as conveyed in this memoir has captivated, converted and inspired my soul. It is one which I believe will capture many millions and billions of others in the decades and centuries ahead, irrespective of background and temperament. It was the experience of many, indeed nearly all with whom I came in contact during these epochs, to find themselves doubting whether this enterprize of the Bahá'ís could ever be brought to a successful issue. If they did not doubt, they took little interest; perhaps this was due to the fact that the Bahá'í communities and the individual lives of its members had acquired, had exemplified, only the first streaks of that promised Dawn. The impact of this new Faith and its several instruments were not yet even dimly imagined by the wider world.

The seductiveness of other systems of ideas and fallacious philosophies which tried to explain the whole machina mundi, which had captivated the intellect and the emotions of many a previous generation still lingered into the twentieth century and the epochs that were the time frame of my life like desiccated carcasses. These systems formed a part of the backdrop of my life from the 1940s to the first years of the new millennium: the pseudo-scientific system of Marxism which was in its last years as I was beginning to write this memoir in the 1980s; the purely pragmatic systems of capitalism and humanistic liberal democracy were rapidly losing their hold on the minds and consciences of those who once worshipped, often unknowingly, at their alters; the quite pathological systems of Nazism and Fascism were coming to an end in the first two years of my life and the several traditional religions of history had spawned a host of strange bedfellows wholly inadequate to the slough of despond that was descending on humanity in my time, in the lifetime of my parents and, arguably, my grandparents.

Some poets were aware of this rupture, this massive and intense discontinuity. T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden seemed to have been the only poets who pondered and lamented this significance, this tempest that was ripping the world to shreds; other poets sought substitutes, things that might suffice.
My approach to this work has many similarities to that taken by the historian and early biographer, Plutarch, who saw the events of his age in personal terms and the individual life in moral terms of progress or regress. Plutarch's boundless interest in the individual, his sense of the drama of men in great situations is mine. I hope I also possess Plutarch's wide tolerance, ripe experience and his ability for making greatness stand out in small actions. Alas it is difficult to assess oneself in terms of these qualities. However difficult it is and was to assess the quality of my work, especially from a reader's perspective, for me the present was gradually flooded with a light from the past and the past was flooded with a light from the present. It took some twenty years of writing(1984-2004) these memoirs, though, before this delightful experience began to occur in my mental and sensory emporium.

Autobiographical writing has been redefining the meaning of narrative in recent decades, as the explosion of memoirs by writers such as Frank McCourt, Mary Karr, Dave Eggers and Kathryn Harrison, among others, suggests. In the last 25 years, coincidentally since the time I began this narrative, many people with and without some degree of fame tried to write their memoirs. More than in previous quarter centuries, or so it has seemed to me after a cursory study of the literature. Fewer, of course, tried to publish their memoir. With the critical and commercial success in the United States of these memoirs more and more people have been encouraged to try their hand at this genre. Mine is but one.

The best specimen of an autobiography in Russian literature is often considered to be Alexander Herzen's My Past And Thoughts. Herzen, the father of Russian socialism, referred to his memoirs as ‘reminiscences.' He said in the preface to his work(1855), that anyone could write their story if (a) they had something to say and (b) the capacity to say it. The worst punishment for any author, he went on, was that their work should not be read.       It may be that, inspite of my best intentions, inspite of my own perception of the quality of my work and the pleasure I take in reading it, my work may not engage the readers in the Bahá'í community as much as I'd like to see happen. I think engagement entails defining a common enterprise that newcomers and community veterans can pursue as they try to develop their interpersonal relationships, their teaching opportunities and their own lives. I think I do this quite well, at least I have tried; such is my personal perception of how successful I have been.

But as readers continue in their interacting trajectories in their communities and as they continue to shape their identities in relation to one another, they may not find this book that useful. Not all the roads in our life, paved as they are with good intentions, with sincerity, lead to the places we would like. And these are dark days in an age of transition, perhaps the darkest days in the history of civilizations. It is difficult for people, facing an immense challenge in trying to resolve the confusion regarding even the most fundamental issues of life, to even locate a context in which to discuss relevant and critical questions. These are times of tempest and I do not expect any spontaneous response of acclaim to this work.

The provincial motto of Quebec, the province next door to Ontario where I spent the first quarter-century of my life, is Je me souviens. This is a significant reminder of the importance of memory in securing the survival of cultural and individual identity. Without the memories of the past that make up cultural and intellectual continuity, there can be no fully comprehended present either for a collectivity or for an individual, and with no remembered past to define and direct the present there can be no planned or idealized future. Much of contemporary living is what you might call a present-participle existence: drinking, eating, sailing, having fun, et cetera, in a perpetual present that, even as it happens, is obsolete by design, becomes history. These memoirs are about integrating those present participle experiences with the past and future. These memoirs are also about integrating the past participle events of history and especially that part of history that is the history of this new Faith. And so I might put it poetically:

Many a bright remembrance o'er the fancy plays;
New classic dream, new star of my epochal days.
Not al in memory's store is shiny clear and new.
Slough of despond is always part, parcel of this view.

While engagement with this book may be positive in some ways, a lack of a certain literary and psychological mutuality in the course of the engagement of readers with these pages and these ideas may create relations of marginality and keep what I say as distant as some thesis that never reaches deeply into peoples' identities. In the end and at this early stage in the publishing trajectory that this work takes, I'm really not sure how successful I have been. The enterprise of assessing how truly engaging this work has been will have to wait for the judgement of time and circumstance. I must admit to my suspicions which may be mainly a function of age and the assumptions that time's occasionally cynical presence laces with skepticism.

Autobiography, unlike novels, does not keep its readers at a distance from the facts of its author's life. The sufferings and tribulations, the successes and wins of the autobiographer's life are much more immediately part of the reader's awareness than they are from a novel by the same person. The relationship between a memoir/autobiography and the reader is less mediated and more like a patient/doctor relationship. The writer is on the couch talking: the reader becomes the doctor, reading hopefully with passion and interest, listening as good doctors must, and at the same time putting the story through the mill, as any good doctor would, of his own consciousness, memory and experience. I have often wondered while I have been writing this book whether it will get any readers/doctors at all. The worst that can happen to a narrative, it is often said and as Herzen pointed out in his preface, is that it remains ‘responseless'.

I have taken a course that another skeptic, David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, took at a much younger age than I. Hume writes in his autobiography that at the age of 23 he "laid that plan of life" which he "steadily and successfully pursued." He goes on to say that he aimed "to maintain unimpaired" his independency and "to regard every object as contemptible," except the improvements of his talents in literature." His first literary efforts, he informs us, fell dead from the press. But, as he says, due to his naturally cheerful and sanguine temper, he very soon recovered from the blows of intellectual and social indifference which his work received. In spite of receiving no recognition he continued to prosecute "with great ardour" his studies.

I, too, would have liked at the age of 23 to pursue a literary life but, as I pointed out in earlier volumes, this did not eventuate for many reasons and I had to wait for more than three decades before I could find that fertility and give that concentration which Hume gave to intellectual and literary activity in the early years of his maturity. I, too, like Hume enjoyed a cheerful and sanguine temperament, at least between bouts of bipolar disorder and after the problems of a bi-polar disorder were assuaged if not eliminated from my life; and between the tests that inevitably come our way in life. By the age of 60 the fire of the tests seemed to become cooler, the heat was less intense, and, although problems still came my way as they seem to come our way in one form or another until our last days, I was ready to launch that literary career that I would have liked to do forty years before and that Hume did in the flower of his early life. Whether I would have the success that Hume enjoyed only time would tell. My continued skepticism was not encouraging, but as the early years of late adulthood insensibly progressed from year to year the energy I expended toward this goal did not desert me linked as it was to the advancement of that Cause I had been associated with now for well over half a century.

Hume took the view that there is no permanent "self" that continues over time. He dismissed standard accounts of causality and argued that our conceptions of cause/effect and relationships are grounded in habits of thinking, rather than in the perception of causal forces in the external world itself. I find this issue of such complexity that to dwell on it further here would lead to prolixity, but Hume's notion of self is one that writing this memoir has confirmed. I should add, in closing this inclusion and reference to Hume, that at the age of 23 I "laid that plan of life" which I "steadily and successfully pursued." I, too, aimed "to maintain unimpaired" my independency and my habit of seeing things with my own eyes. But I was aware of how difficult this examination of one's own life and ideas with a spirit of understanding based on one's own views and not the views of others was---even in my early adulthood. Unlike Hume, I did not "regard every object as contemptible" except when depressed.<

Seeing things through our own eyes and not the eyes of others is very difficult when we are to a considerable extent influenced so strongly and often unconsciously by the forces of socialization, consumerism and fate that surround us and enter the very core of our beings. Many of our ideas and memories are not in any meaningful way our own. Millions wander soporifically around the cities, towns and rural areas in a state of amnesia, forgetful of the events of their own life, an evident consequence of their absorption by the voices of consumer culture and the confused voices of socialization which struggle with fate's iron grip.

As I write this memoir I feel on the one hand that I am a chronicler and celebrator of the changes and chances in my life; and on the other I feel, as I make my disillusioned descent into the cherished and yet ironically chaotic landscape of my past, I am choosing to remember it in my mind's current eye. This current eye muses and recalls those far off years. And as I recall, I remember rather than see closely that these facts of my life are more like vapours in the desert, mirages, illusions that I call life, that I see as a sort of stability and facticity. But these so-called facts contain only the patina of reality.

My interest in memory makes me as sensitive as Marcel Proust to the particular power of the senses of smell and taste in the calling-up of remembrances: "Oh…the nose," Proust has a character exclaim in A Sister to Evangeline (1898), "how subtle and indestructible are its memories! They know the swiftest way to the sources of joy and tears." My interest in memory also makes me sensitive to how memory of hardships and difficulties encountered in one's past is often experienced with a nostalgic joy, as the Canadian poet Oliver Goldsmith writes in the following couplet:

What lively joy each honest bosom feels,
As o'er…past events his memory steals...

I like to see imagination as a process of expanding the self by transcending time and space and creating new images of the world and the self. Imagination, at least for me, has been something which involves locating one's sense of engagement in a broad, a universal, system and defining one's personal trajectory of meaning in terms of something that connects what one is doing far beyond oneself. I'd like to think this autobiography extends the meaning of artefacts, people and actions within the personal spheres of people's lives, at least the people who read this book. That is what I'd like to achieve but, as I pointed out above, I'm not so sure that I have succeeded in this respect. The sheer proliferation of the objects, diversions, and possibilities for life in modern society has made modern society, as Walter Lippmann pointed out after WW1 in his book The Phantom Public, "not visible to anybody, nor intelligible continuously and as a whole." Abundance has in some ways both blunted and accentuated the meaning of experience and the pleasure to be found in abundance itself. Society, the world, has become one great brontosaurissmus, some voracious shark, that people who are not used to the sea are trying to dissect and understand. There are elements within this whole that are unprecedented and therefore profoundly shocking and the effects, like those of the shark, are often paralysing and prostrating. Of course, there is much that is pleasurable: not all is shark-like.

Still, in spite of the abundance, the burgeoning multiplicities and singularities, of life and its fragmenting, confusing and blunting affects, there have been clear turning points in my life and they represent ways in which I have freed myself in my self-consciousness from my history, its banal qualities and its conventionality. These turning points have been steps toward what Jerome Bruner, one of the great students of autobiography in the late 20th century, calls "narratorial consciousness." My autobiography involves a description of these turning points not only in my construction of self but also my interpretation of the nature of my society and its culture.

In spite of these complexities and enigmas, the past, my past, has occurred. It has gone and can only be brought back again in thought by this autobiographer or by historians and social scientists working in very different media: in books, articles, documentaries, inter alia. The actual events, of course, can not be brought back. The past has gone, history is what historians make of it and autobiographers, too, when they go about their work. In Re-thinking History, Keith Jenkins describes history as "a discourse that is about, but categorically different from, the past." And so it is that my autobiography is categorically different from my past. And so it is that my autobiography is not simply a telling of a series of critical incidents. As the present becomes the past, it too slips into my autobiography little by little day by day.

I interpret my past experiences, then, by means of a composition process involving my life in the present. It is a life that has adapted to, resisted and sometimes reached beyond the master narratives of the many dominant cultural and social institutions that have affected my life. And these institutions possess many master narratives which are inevitably woven into my personal story and my lived experience with and within these institutions. Motherhood, social class, industrialism, capitalism, socialism, democracy, religion, socialization, social control and authority are but a few of these institutions. Each of these institutions and many others have their own story and to write that story in a comprehensive and systematic way would lead to prolixity and such stories are beyond the compass of this narrative. This concept of "institution" associated with the above terms is part of the language of the field of sociology, a language, a discipline, I first came in contact with in 1963 and which has been part of my study and teaching program for over 40 years.

I could take each of these master narratives and focus or skew my autobiography as Jean Piaget did his series of autobiographies.       In his study of Jean Piaget's life, Vonïche deals with the particularly interesting case of Piaget's multiple autobiographical identities. Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist, wrote several autobiographies aimed at different audiences, thus presenting himself in different ways and on different scenes. In all of his autobiographies, Piaget is both the same and different. The facts are the same. The anecdotes are similar. But the outcome is entirely different. People use their autobiographies as a form of self-presentation that varies according to the target audience. They organize and re-organize the plots of their lives. According to the target audience, Piaget can be a post-Bergsonian metaphysician, a scientific psychologist, or a disillusioned philosopher turned scientist. And so is this target-oriented approach to autobiography an approach I use as well and perhaps at a future time I may develop it more fully. For now these 2500 pages in four volumes will have to suffice in all their heterogeneity and what many readers may find to be a blooming and buzzing confusion.

I have tried to avoid the telling of such a series of incidents, like vignettes, that concentrate upon episodes and especially those which identify specific life activities and practices. A real danger in this critical incident approach is that, if uncritically used, critical incidents and their respective literary accounts come to have a great and compelling explanatory power. This explanatory power exerts a conservative force on the overall narrative which cannot be underestimated. I like to think I have used critical incidents critically, conscious of their explanatory power, their affect on the overall narrative and, thus, placed them in this narrative in a balanced and judicious way.

I like to think I have done what Goodson advises autobiographers to do; namely, "to move from life stories to life histories, from narratives to genealogies of context, towards a modality that embraces stories of action within theories of context." "In so doing," Goodson suggests, "stories can be ‘located', seen as the social constructions they are, fully impregnated by their location within power structures and social milieux." For life is not all stories, not all a narrative.

As the distinguished historian E.H. Carr put it: "facts of the past exist independently of the mind of the historian, but historical facts are only those data selected from the past that a historian finds relevant to his or her argument. The historian can never know the past "as it really was," but only how it might have been, since our information about the past is partial and inevitably mediated." It seems to me this is true, a fortiori, of the autobiographer and the memoirist. Neither I nor the historian enjoys the scientist's luxury of being able to conduct and replicate experiments about the past, my past, under controlled conditions. I can test one theory about my life against another theory, as can the historian about some aspect of history. This allows me as autobiographer, and historians as story-tellers, to develop theories that are more viable. But we can never establish the truthfulness, the validity, of that theory. History and autobiography are both attempts to explain our experience of the present by constructing a viable account of the past such that if it had taken place then the present we live in would be the case. History is not only an attempt to account for the way things were, but also to account for the way things are. George Landow writes: "at that point in human history when choices become so abundant, autobiography, the justification of one's choices, becomes increasingly important as a literary mode." There is certainly much of this justification of my choices here.

Artists and writers, critics and thinkers, indeed, the entire intellectual apparatus of society of which this work is but an infinitessimal part is based on, finds its raison d'etre in, a vision of social agency and of creative process. If the term intellectual is a little too pretentious I am happy to use the term thinker. After living in Australia for 35 years I am not happy with the term 'intellectual'. As broadcaster Robert Dessaix discovered when he conducted interviews for a book and radio program on the topic, Australian intellectuals are wary of being called intellectuals. Unlike their French counterparts, "Any Australian whose name was included in a Dictionary of Australian Intellectuals would very likely sue for libel." For me, too, a more modest term is preferred if, indeed, a term is required for the process of what I am trying to do.

Whatever the terminology, my focus is a mixture of author-as-creative-individual, writer-as-literary-intellectual and historian-as-autobiographer. For an artist-writer to be an intellectual it is less important to have a theory of writing than to possess a vision of how their literary work might operate in society and to assume responsibility for it. For me this vision is expressed in a number of ways one of which is what might be called a new "sociological poetics" that "connects literary work to the outside world." This vision is also expressed as an individual, personal, rendition of a Bahá'í interpretation of history and society.

In general terms what I do in this memoir is described succinctly by Jerome Bruner, who has written extensively on life-writing. "We constantly construct and reconstruct a self," writes Bruner, "to meet the needs of the situations we encounter, and we do so with the guidance of our memories of the past and our hopes and fears of the future."

I like to see these memoirs as part of a great body of work by Bahá'ís in the last two centuries. Mine is a body of work that exemplifies both of the two human types that Sir Isaiah Berlin described in an essay he wrote in 1953. Berlin drew a distinction between two human types: those, like the fox, who pursue many ends, often unrelated, even contradictory, and those, like the hedgehog, who relate everything to a single universal organizing principle. He saw Tolstoy as a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog. He considered Aristotle, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce and Turgenev foxes. Plato, Dante, Pascal, Proust and Dostoyevsky were counted among the hedgehogs.

There are some occasions in autobiography when writers abandon any claim or pretense to literal truth and an accurate account of their experience. They strip off the content of their consciousness's excessive valorization and the specificity of their life and--perhaps again excessively--dismiss their life's "very littleness." Whatever facts occupy their conscious awareness they deem but accidental happenings. They discard their autobiographical self as an ultimately trivial and illusory phenomenon and create a novel self. This novel self is constructed out of memory and desire. This attempt, this somewhat novelistic approach to autobiography, continues to punctuate the narrative and becomes a new actuality to the autobiography. This is far from my aim and is not a part of my philosophical approach in any way, but I think it is difficult for autobiographers generally and me in particular to entirely dismiss this autobiographical orientation. Memory is cultural and personal, muscular and cerebral--simultaneously--and its products, contents, can be dealt with in so many ways.

Through a close reading of Wordsworth's first autobiographical sketches made in his late twenties and dating from October 1798 through April 1799, one can demonstrate how Wordsworth creatively remembered his childhood. The context of this memory was in terms of the development of the powers of his imagination. In this six month period at the end of the 18th century we find Wordsworth's earliest autobiographical attempt to trace the ontogeny of his imagination back to the dream state, to play, and to perceptual and conceptual blending. I did not engage in such a serious tracing of my childhood until my early sixties. But I profited from one of the first attempts at poetic autobiography in Wordsworth's The Prelude. It is interesting that Wordsworth's poetic and autobiographical efforts coincided with the earliest years of Shaykh Ahmad's sense of his "unerring vision", his "fixed purpose" and his "crushing responsibilities" associated as they were with a new and coming Revelation.

I could add the results of cognitive neuroscience, drawing on memory research, sleep research, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, to add an evolutionary history of fictional cognition to my own autobiography as Wordsworth did to the origin and development of his work. An accurate, honest and successful unfolding of the imagination, one could argue, is only possible when accompanied by adequate monitoring systems. An author must possess the capacity to distinguish between what originates in his perception and what is the response of his memory. The resulting tapestry must be sufficiently complex to permit the formulation of a hypothesis about the self which may not be scientifically tested but at least possess some sweet reasonableness.

In a commentary on this first period of composition Wordsworth wrote that his autobiographical self-as-being arose as a virus within his source monitoring system. This investigation by Wordsworth of his early years is a complex one and I don't want to go into any more detail here. I find the same is true of the origins of my own imaginative function: its unfolding is complex. And the monitoring systems that existed at the time of its earliest unfolding are difficult to trace. I hope that readers find here at least some of that sweet reasonableness even if I do not elaborate on the theme I have introduced here dealing with imagination and memory.

When I say that my life has been full of joy and sorrow I do not see this as an apparent contradiction but simply as a reality of my life, like all of our lives. If I analyse my life I can divide it into joyous parts and sorrowful parts. This I have done by discussing these aspects, but I have not precisely quantified these two emotions. My life has been joyous in some respects and sorrowful in others. The whole of life, when analysed in respect to these emotions, could be seen as contradictory and paradoxical. The nature of the reality of our lives is to deal with these endless polarities. Like an oyster we must do what we can to heal the ugly wounds of life by turning life's grains of sand into beautiful pearls. Much has been written about these polarities of life and I do not want to add to the philosophical library here.

Biologists estimate that there are about 5 to 100 million species of organisms living on Earth today. Evidence from morphological, biochemical, and gene sequence data suggests that all organisms on Earth are genetically related, and the genealogical relationships of living things can be represented by a vast evolutionary tree, the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life then represents the phylogeny of organisms, that is, the history of organismal lineages as they change through time. It implies that different species arise from previous forms via descent, and that all organisms, from the smallest microbe to the largest plants and vertebrates, are connected by the passage of genes along the branches of the phylogenic tree that links all of Life. In the broadest of senses, then, my autobiography would be one encompassing all of life. I must, of necessity here, limit my analysis and discussion. I do some assimilation: the personal to the historical, the individual to the societal, the psychological to the sociological. I tell what certain events have meant to my mind and my heart, events in the Bahá'í community and the wider society, but I do not tell what I think should have been done. I do, though, point the way, attempt to engage serious minds whereever I can to the unity, the universality and the new ethos, the new system of values inherent in Bahá'u'lláh's vision that are relevant to the challenges of the next stage in human and social development on the planet.

While imagination can lead to a positive mode of belonging, it can also result in disconnectedness and greater ineffectiveness; it can be so removed from any lived form of life and activity, membership and meaning, that it detaches the identities of readers and leaves them in a state of uprootedness. Readers can lose touch with their sense of social efficacy; their view of reality can be distorted. Imagination is a great power and a difficult one to rule. While that is not my desire, my autobiography may in the end be just a slippery slope in the direction of idle fancies, vain imagination, discontent and disorientation. Good intentions, as they say and as I have said before, are often the road to greater problems. As a teacher of literature, of English and the social sciences, I know only too well that many students turn some of the best writers and the greatest wisdoms right off their radar. I, too, am not immune from this experience. In the end, of course, one writes and sends one's efforts out into the universe and takes what comes.

Alignment is a term applied to writing and to autobiography. It entails negotiating perspectives, finding common ground, defining broad visions and aspirations, walking boundaries and reconciling diverging fields of interest. Alignment requires shareable frameworks and paradigms, boundary items and concepts that help to create fixed points around which to coordinate activities, an oeuvre, a life. It can also require the creation and adoption of broader discourses that help give a literary enterprise some life, some vitality and meaning and by which the microcosm of local actions can be interpreted as fitting within a broader framework. However, alignment can be a violation of a people's sense of self, something that crushes their identity. In some ways, at least for me, alignment is "the pen's obedience to a line already traced in the mind, if not on the page."

It seems to me that, in some respects, I am completely unable to write anything about much that is quintessential in life, nor will I ever be able. For, as Bahá'u'lláh writes, "myriads of mystic tongues find utterances in one speech and how many are the mysteries concealed in a single melody but, alas, there is no ear to hear nor heart to understand." The garment of words can only contain so much. There is much knowledge that can not be put into words like the content of many of the arts and sciences. Mysticism itself finds its origins in this notion. No sensible man will venture to express some of his deepest thoughts in words, especially in a form which is unchangeable. So much that is said and thought here is as potentially changeable as the wind which blows and the clouds which change their patterns in the sky from minute to minute and hour to hour. A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living, as Virginia Woolf once said.

However changeable, new and wonderful configurations, an ever-varying splendour intimately connected with the power of thought and associated with a mysterious core of self or personality, has come into my life over the decades and it's story is here, however obscurely narrated and however set in a context of change and mystery. The circumstances of life are always changing and truths seem to constantly need restating to maintain their grip, their purchase of truth. Perhaps that is why re-reading is as important as reading. Perhaps that is why, too, that, as Nietzsche said: "every great philosophy so far has been . . . the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir." What Nietzsche says here is but part of the recognition that anything a person says or writes tells us something essential about the speaker or writer. One should keep in mind of course that, although Plato does have Socrates state somewhere that, ' all men are philosophers', one hears distinctly, in the cavernous silence that follows this disclaimer, the inevitable rejoinder: some people are better at it than others. The same democratic dictum , with analogous rejoinder, can be applied equally well to poets, judges , consultants and cooks.

All of this is obviously a commonplace notion. Not only literature but philosophy and science can also be seen as forms of self-expression, types of autobiography. Self-portraiture is very difficult to avoid when you write, indeed when you live and breath and have your being. As soon as readers accept that a literary text expresses, or makes exterior, something within its author, then it becomes inevitable that they will use that text as a key to that interior, that biography, that autobiography. As a man is, so he sees and so he writes.

The activism that has been part of my life over these four epochs has many facets. It is not like a journey to the corner store, not the occasional donation to some organization like amnesty or a save the whale or the tree campaign, or a periodic march in the name of some cause or an endless series of criticisms of government, institutions and prominent people in public, it is a plunge into the dark with a commitment, a commitment for life and with many strings attached. The history of the activism I have been associated with since the 1950s is more like the weather than like checkers or chess or something that ends after an afternoon of protest or a vote in an election after weeks of advertising's sloganizing and simplifying. Games, elections and protests all end, but the weather you always have with you. At the end of a game, you add up the scores, sort out the winners and losers, close up the board and go on to something else.

But with the social activism in this Cause, one can pause, take a break, pack up your bags and move to another town or even another marriage, but you can never add up the score. It's part of your mental set until you resign, stop believing in its truth, get converted to some secular or other cause like pessimism, skepticism, nihilism, cynicism, one of the many wasms and isms that occupy people's minds and hearts and that also can change with the seasons. You can't tote up the score, close up the board, and go home unless, as I say, you lose your sense of commitment, your sense of belief.

We must acknowledge the darkness of our moment and our world, but we also must realize that the score isn't in, that it can't be known. Not ever, not really. We play a part in a process and we must define that process and examine in what way we want to be part of that process. We have to make a wager, to take a leap into the dark, and bet on faith in our cause, hope and commitment to its future and, in the short term, we simply can't know the consequences of our acts, a point I can not make with enough force. Sure and quick victories, always delightful and always giving you the feeling the fight was worth it, worth living for, are a different genre to defeats.

Defeats are not final and, as Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal eight months into WW1, "The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think." Dark, she seems to say, she seems to define, as something inscrutable, not as something terrible. We often lose the meaning of darkness as Woolf defines it. People imagine the end of the world is nigh because the future is unimaginable. Who twenty years ago would have pictured a world without the USSR and with the Internet?

We talk about "what we hope for" in terms of what we hope will come to pass, but we could think of it another way, as why we hope. We hope on principle, we hope tactically and strategically, we hope because the future is dark, we hope because it's a more powerful and a more joyful way to live. Despair presumes it knows what will happen next. But who, two decades ago, would have imagined that the Canadian government would give a huge swathe of the north back to its indigenous people, or that the imprisoned Nelson Mandela would become president of a free South Africa? But hope must be linked to something more, something akin to certitude, something akin to whole-hearted enthusiasm, something that invites a totality of response unchecked by any maybe, one of the characteristics of great art.

The famous film actor, Sean Connery, once said about writing his memoirs that the process was "time-absorbing and very wearing. It's the sort of thing that wakes you up in the middle of the night." I, too, found the exercise wearing for many years especially after the first edition was completed in 1993. For nearly a decade, 1993 to 2003, I could not get a sense of meaning, of perspective, that accumulation of novelty, of freshness and of vitality with respect for my work that would make it live, if not for others at least for me. It felt like dry dust, the transfer of dry bones from one graveyard to another. When I finally did find a fresh approach in the years 2003 to 2006 the exercise became time-absorbing, time-consuming, indeed, an obsession and an enriching one personally. I felt a sense of literary virtuosity I had never had before, an interpretive extravagance which may turn some readers off even as it turned me on. My private scaffolding, though, was not so much one of self-assurance, but rather one of striving to cross the spaces between life's fragments and its many points of separation and experience some sense of synthesis, union and wholeness.

Whatever I achieved in this vein, with this aim and direction in my work was a gift. I was not involved so much in amassing facts and relating endless details of my life, although I could not entirely avoid this activity, as I was experiencing a precarious literary existence suspended between the past and the present hoping to touch some ice-tipped azure of my highest excellence with both moderation and balance, flexibility and elasticity. It was like my soul trying to glimpse certitude, trying to touch my life with wonder, trying to tell something of my soul's flight if not my mind's ease, something that reflected the motions of my heart in this twilight generation, this generation of the half-light. But whether I was responding to the capacities of some potential readership, I really had no idea. In the several years that this work had been sprinkled in varying quantities onto the internet, I slowly learned, yet again and again, to respond to criticism and misunderstanding with either silence or a in a language that is "temperate, moderate and infinitely courteous," grounded in an awareness of my own shortcomings and my own frail vulnerability and weakness, tempering my voice and training my vison. This process, this tempering, this training is slow, repeated many times on the road of life and seems to need a whole lifetime to make it part of your very nerves and sinews.

Sean Connery also admitted that his autobiography proved to be "much, much more difficult" than he anticipated. When I started writing my narrative in 1984/5 I had no idea what the process would be like. I could not and did not anticipate that I'd still be writing it nearly twenty-five years later. Connery doesn't have any glib explanations about the way his career of fame and wealth developed. My explanations about how my life developed are also far from glib, although after nearly 2500 pages, some of my readers may wish they were glib.

After long continued intercourse between my many teachers, as we have been in joint pursuit of our several, our many, subjects—over these decades--suddenly, insensibly, like the light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, there has been born, created, it seems in my soul, some dazzling rays of a strange, heavenly power, which nourishes and is nourished. It seems just about impossible to convey in writing and a fortiori in dialogue with others without sounding presumptuous, pretentious, self-righteous, even arrogant in some sense. This flashing forth, this kindling and dazzling is and has been a process not an event. The process has been so incremental, often so insensible and certainly so mysterious that to discuss it here would require a separate book.

I would, though, like to say a few things about Clive James' new book Cultural Amnesia. James and his book illustrate some of what I'd like to say about this process that I have referred to in the above paragraph. James's book is prompted by the suspicion that a new age of barbarism is indeed descending. He has lots of company in this view. My recent memoir is also prompted by a similar intuition. But like the barbarism of the late Roman Empire in the West in the second and third century A.D., I take the view that a new religion is growing in our midst. Like Christianity which crept, half-hidden, along the foundations and against the background of an Augustan empire, the Bahá'í Faith seems, thusfar, too insignificant to be noticed by history for it, too, is growing slowly, obscurely, insensibly in our modern and postmodern world.

In his book James also offers a steady stream of advice on how to go about the business of self-education. I offer advice, for the most part indirectly, or such is my hope, for I am all too conscious of the limitations of direct advice-giving; I do not advise any must-reads or how-tos. There are, as in James's work, many anecdotes, but I do not see myself as exemplar. Like James in his Cultural Amnesia I launch a symphony of voices; I hope it is not a cacophony.

My life, like James's, has been richly social, but not in the world of celebrities and media. I have read a great deal, but nothing like the quantity that James has consumed. James says that most of his listening was to the authors behind the books he read; in my case, until I retired in 1999, most of my listening was to people in the raw: individuals, groups, communities. For a host of reasons--the expansion of universities, of suburbs and of telecommunications, to name three--the kind of face-to-face intellectual-artistic life that was exemplified in coteries in the past, and that flourished in other twentieth-century cities before WW1, simply no longer exists or so James sees it. I agree, but not all the way. I feel as if I've done an awful lot of face-to-face stuff in my life.

James's answer to this intellectual-artistic bereavement is the book itself as is my own memoir—partly. Here is the café, the former place of the intellectual-artist; he has created it in his mind; it is a convocation of voices that respond to one another across the barriers of language, outlook, expressive form and, most of all, time.       Over the decades and beginning while at university in the 1960s, I was driven away from academic institutions of higher learning and toward a more journalistic approach, to a plain speech and a style of writing that was not as esoteric as an MA thesis or a PhD dissertation. Direct observation and the necessity to entertain was absolutely crucial for James—and for me. I would never have survived in classrooms had these qualities not surfaced insensibly over the first half-a-dozen years of my teaching experience from 1967 to 1973.

Not in the mass media eye, as James was and with his immense success, I settled for a more modest achievement in the world of "the school" and "the college." Like James, I wrote essays, reviews, sketches and squibs for students; I also wrote in longer and more conventionally prestigious forms, but always in styles that had been honed by the whetstone of conversation, but without the accruing prestige that James accumulated.

Writing for the student and for the popular press, even at a much less successful and prestigious level of everyday journalism than James, demands both simplicity and compression, and compression, if it is of good quality, makes language glow. I felt, as the years went on, that some light was finally being emitted from the marks on the page that I was putting down. The stylistic models that James and I emulated were much different. However different, they each could "pour a whole view of life, a few cupfuls at a time, into the briefest of paragraphs." James highest hero, "the voice behind the book's voices" and one of several exceptions to his rule of writing only about twentieth-century figures, was Tacitus.

It was Tacitus who wrote the sentence, says James, out of which the entire volume Cultural Amnesia grew: "They make a desert and they call it peace." James heard the line quoted as a young man and "saw straight away that a written sentence could sound like a spoken one, but have much more in it."

My Tacitus, was Gibbon and Gibbon saw his history as a continuation of Tacitus' work. I felt James and I were on a similar track. I would like to think that my memoirs are what James' book Cultural Amnesia was to the reviewer in The Nation; namely, "less a collection of great figures than of great sentences." But alas and alack, this is not the case. That same reviewer, William Deresiewicz, went on to say, "reading Cultural Amnesia feels like having a conversation with the most interesting person in the world: You're not saying much, but you just want to keep listening anyway." Well, I'm not sure I have had such a conversation in years—as a talker or a listener—expect in books. But James is, for me, one of my many, one of my crucial, mentors.

The reason James is such a good talker is that he's such a good listener. He means it literally when he says that the book took forty years to write, because its quotations are the harvest of the notebooks he has kept for all that time, and the notebooks are the harvest of his insatiable reading. Forty years of talking tired me out as did forty years of listening. Forty years of my note-taking has resulted, for me, in a small study filled with files that annoy my wife who has a penchant for the tidy and the clean, the orderly and the useful. It is a penchant I share with her but in a different modus operandi, modus vivendi. Forty years of reading and note-taking gave me an even greater appetite for print after I retired from full-time, part-time and casual-work in the years 1999 to 2005.

Ever since running into Tacitus, says James, he has been a connoisseur of aphorisms and aphorists--of writing that is both conversational and compressed and of the kinds of minds that produce it. It's no coincidence that he is also a connoisseur of music. "Echoes of a predecessor's rhythm, pace and melody are rarely accidental": That sentence contains four terms that sound like they refer to music, but it's about writing. Rhythm is central to James's understanding of style, and so are "echoes"--that is, memory. He is himself an incandescent and virtually habitual aphorist.

I, too, went down this road but not quite as passionately as James, for I was not in the media spotlight that he was, a spotlight where the aphorism is one of the kings of the sound-bite and the clever turn of phrase. I did collect quotations in my many notebooks, but clever turns of phrase and jokes always slightly eluded me. As I approach my sixtieth year, I found there was just too much to copy into notebooks; there was too much that was useful. By then my computer directory began to come in handy. I did not have had to transcribe an entire book, entire articles, paragraphs or sentences. the internet and the computer saved an immense pile of paper and pleased my wife, a person who had become, also by the age of sixty, the crucial person in my life.

The love of the beautifully turned phrase goes far deeper than mere appreciation. The identifiable tone of voice, a tone which is a synthesis of all the voices one has ever heard, is at the core of the term "voice." The most individual style in the world is the product of a collective effort. In gathering the voices that inhabit our own, the echoes we hear in our head, are indeed produced by the growth of our mind; it is the song of ourself. I have discussed this in connection with Wordsworth's poem The Prelude and my own poetry.

To fully participate in community life in the sense that is at the heart of this autobiography each Bahá'í must find ways to engage in the work, the community enterprize in their own individual way. They will do some things that others do, that other community members do, but they must be able to imagine their own work as being an important part of a larger enterprise. And they must be comfortable that the larger enterprise and its smaller components as well as the many conventions of that community are compatible with the identities they envision for themselves. Being a part of the community, then, is not simply a matter of learning new skills, new attitudes and new values, but also of fielding new calls for identity construction. This understanding of identity suggests that people enact and negotiate identities in the world over time. For identity is dynamic and it is something that is presented and re-presented, constructed and reconstructed in interaction. And like the tension in violin strings which are the basis of musical harmony, life in community also possess a tension with which we must play in harmony. Of course, this is not always so. Often only noise is produced. this is true when one writes, when one talks and when one lives and works in community.

The individual experience of power derives from belonging, but it also derives from exercising control over what we belong to, what we participate in, what we read, indeed, an entire panoply and pageantry of activity. Each individual is heterogeneously made up of various competing discourses, often conflicted and virtually always possessed of contradictory scripts. Our consciousness is anything but unified. In many ways wholeness or integration is not so much a goal as a battle, at least some kind of perpetual balancing act of dealing with unstable forces, forces which we must try to reconcile or they will tear at our psyches. These unstable forces may also cause us to withdraw and, like a planet slipping from orbit and following the dictates of its own centrifugal momentum, become ultimately so remote from the magnetic attraction of the sun that it flies irretrievably into remoteness. This can happen to both individuals and societies. Inner conflict is not so much a disorder as it is the first law of human psychic life and is part of that principle of polarity at the centre of life.

The Australian critic and raconteur Clive James made a pertinent point in this connection when he compered an ABC FM Radio program about Australian orchestras in concert. He said that large countries like Australia and the USA don't have identities. They are too diverse. I think the same is true about individuals. They are also diverse over a lifetime to have a single identity.

There is now a great wealth of literature available to the Bahá'í community, both in-house literature and the burgeoning material now available in the marketplace. My book occupies a small place, possesses no particular authority and competes for a place, for space, with a print and electronic media industry of massive proportions. In order to survive and do well in most of the print and electronic media a writer must develop the ability to put things simply and effectively, in a manner that everyone can understand. Such a writer has maybe a minute and a half to two minutes if he is talking on the TV to explain a complex subject or a series of short verbal expositions if he is involved in an interview; even a book, if it is to find a large readership in the mass circulation market, must be as simple as possible.

Many academics and intellectuals are so steeped in academic jargon that they are unable to simplify their material. I hope this book is not an example of this academic problem, the problem of someone who could not pull off the simplification process. I'm afraid simplicity and brevity are not marks of my literary style. So, perhaps, I will fail here. Time will tell.

I knew of a senior academic who was asked to appear on a local TV station. She showed up with six or seven books and they had little pieces of paper stuck in the books for purposes of quotation. The whole interview was over in less than two minutes; she never read any of her quotations and she was frustrated that she just couldn't make her points. She didn't understand that if you're going to play in the media ballpark, you have to play by their rules, not your own. I like to think that this book, this autobiography, has allowed me to have my six books and their quotations and that the role of this book does not include a two minute TV summary or an interview of ten minutes on an arts program. On the other hand, I could probably write a ten second autobiographical-ad grab, summarize what I'm all about in one or two minutes and be interviewed for any appropriate length of time. Maybe it will never happen before I die.

There are many different kinds of self-referential writing. I have incorporated some of them in what is for me a surprisingly large work invoking Whitman's "I am large, I contain multitudes," as an appropriate presiding spirit for the genre. Whatever largeness I claim to possess, it is the same largeness we all possess in relation to ourselves. We all must live in our own skins for all our days and the sense of our largeness--or our smallness for that matter--is a result of our bodily manifestation, our physical proximity to self. In the multitude of methods and genres of studies of Bahá'í history and experience, teachings and organization, autobiography is either tentatively acknowledged, invoked by negation or simply passed over in silence. It is one genre that is, for the most part, conspicuous by its absence from any bibliography. This has begun to change in the last decade or two. This piece of writing is part of that change.

So often we commiserate over the lack of history writing or, as Momen puts it, how "lamentably neglectful in gathering materials" for the history of the Bahá'í Faith we have been. History writing and the transmission of the narrative of a group has often been a problem. "It wasn't until the 1850's," writes Russell Shorto in his review of Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower that "William Bradford's narrative of the founding of Plymouth in 1620 was finally published." Only then, after 230 years, did the story of the first years of the history of the USA enter the historical record. While Momen may be right, there are many ways to look at the gathering of historical documents. Just how this autobiography will appear in the grand scheme of things only time, only history, will tell. This autobiography comes from the historical experience within four epochs in the first century of the Formative Age.

While my work makes no attempt, no pretense, to being a history of the period, it does attempt to express the experience of one man. How relevant this will be for future generations I leave to those mysterious dispensations of Providence which I often refer to in this now lengthy book. The details of my experience in this new Faith and the details associated with its origins and development in the various Bahá'í communities I lived in or was associated with in a broad sense could be said, if one wanted to be critical, to represent 'intentional history.' This type of history is a form of social memory which establishes the image of the past that the community wishes to transmit and a resulting type of corporate identity. I suppose it is difficult to avoid this problem, this tendency, entirely. No matter how frustrating my experience has been—and there is no question that I have suffered as so many have done because of the Bahá'í community---I love this community and my positive bias toward it is unavoidable. I have gone a long way toward my goal of presenting this community as honestly and accurately as I can, or so it seems to me. However much I have shaped my life and times into a discernible and personal storyline, it is with an eye to the future and the uncertainties of the present that preoccupies me and shapes much that is written here.

The mechanics of constructing the past, my past, my real historical memories and contemporary, homoeostatic dynamics of the Bahá'í community are closely intertwined in the formation and ongoing formation of the metanarrative that is Bahá'í history. This is inevitable. For history's first historian, Herodotus, there were no official versions. What mattered to this Greek historian was the local nature of his information, in all its complexity. Some local, some idea of the past of a polis was a shared possession, rooted in cult and a complex ongoing tradition. For me, on the other hand, there is an official, a written history and it is this history which matters. What also matters, although in quite a different sense, is the local, complex, ongoing, nature of my information, the personal, the complex, the individual, the local, story. Much of my poetry in this autobiography has a similar emphasis to Homer's and the poetry of many another poet in the sense that it is about: "the poetry of the past." I use poetry to help me navigate the labyrinth of personal connections, -isms, and the historical nexuses which often seem too complicated for me to find my way through. I hope readers find here a lucidity that helps them cope with the complexity they find in both their community and their personal life.

To make one more comparison between the experience of the Bahá'ís and the founding fathers of America in 1620, I'd like to quote what Philbrick says about these founders, namely, that they "began to see that they were traversing a mythic land, where a sense of community extended far into the distant past." It took time for them to appreciate the significance of the Indian religious tradition. Relations with the Indians were the axis, says Philbrick, for a history of the Pilgrims. In time the Pilgrim colony became caught up in massacre and sadness; one could reasonably conclude that this underscores the danger of believing that God guides one's hand.

I used to think the relationship with indigenous peoples was the critical axis of the Bahá'í community in our time. That was one of the main ideological reasons for my going to live, first among the Inuit and then among the Aboriginals. But as time, as my life, has moved on, I am more of the view that a more critical axis is the power of understanding. There are other axes, too, but this subject is too long for an exposition of all the relevant axes and themes here. For the Bahá'ís, during the four epochs that was the temporal framework for my experience and that of my community, they too faced crises, as great or greater than those faced by the American Pilgrims. They were crises that threatened to arrest the community's unfoldment from time to time and, as Shoghi Effendi once said threatened to "blast all the hopes which its progress had engendered."

"There's something terribly feminine about novel writing," John Fowles once wrote. "When you create characters," he went on, "all processes are analogous to childbirth, including postnatal depression. When a book is reviewed, it is like the weaning of children. You're kicked about or even praised--and the book is separated from you. At a conscious level, this may be painful. But at an unconscious level, this leaves one free--to write another novel." What Fowles says here about novels has been partly true of my experience of writing this autobiography. The main difference is that this book is still connected to me by a literary umbilical chord. I will go on working on it for some time to come: until I'm tired of it or I die.

Fowles goes on to say something which I think is also true of writing autobiography, at least--partly--for me. He says: "The novel is an impossible voyage. It's a mystery why you keep doing it." He asked, "Why is an unhappy ending considered more artistic than a happy ending?" and then he answered this question himself: "In some ways the unhappy ending pleases the novelist. He has set out on a voyage and announced, I have failed and must set out again. If you create a happy ending, there is a somewhat false sense of having solved life's problems." For me, the question of endings has not come in to this autobiography. Obviously, I am still alive and could be here for another 30 or 40 years. My story, my autobiography could be only half or two-thirds over. And happiness, for me, has only a tangential relationship with the glitter and tinsel of an affluent society or the superficial adjustments to the modern world envisioned by humanitarian movements or publicly proclaimed as the policy of enlightened statesmanship. Happiness is much more of a paradoxical thing, a conundrum, a galimaufery-to hose a name from a Bahá'í folk group--a mixture of unlike thing.

I have set out many times on this autobiographical journey. It is a mysterious journey, an impossible one in some ways. This journey could be divided into three aspects: the spatial, the temporal and the intellectual. I divide and mix the three, partly for convenience, partly due to serendipity and partly due to quite unknown processes. The three are textually interconnected. The temporal journey meshes with the experience of space to shape the protagonist's-that's me-intellectual development. In a certain philosophical sense, there is no world other than that the one I create, the one of which I am the maker, the one I have outlined here in a general sense.

Henri LeFebvre sees space as active, "not a passive surface" and has three components: perceived, conceived and lived space. Trying to keep the three points of the triad straight is not as important, at least for my argument, as is maintaining a sense of their interlocked relation. Lived, perceived, and conceived space folds into and spins across its several forms, working together to accomplish the production of spaces: place, space, landscape, and location as in--streets, homes, rooms, fields, buildings, people, inter alia. These spaces become embodied with stories, memories, and all sorts of meanings. Although the world is indeed increasingly well connected, we must hold this connectedness in balance with the observation that most people live intensely local lives." This has been true for me throughout these epochs, although in the realm of thought I have been travelling all my pioneering life in wider vistas.

Jean-Paul Sartre's pronouncement that prose is an attitude of mind applies equally well to poetry. I move from one attitude to another throughout this work. There is an inconclusive quality to prose, poetry and art for me. The symbolic and the suggestive are both a strong part of my writing. To be a writer, Joseph Conrad wrote in a letter in 1895, "you must treat events as the outward signs of inward feelings," and to accomplish this "you must cultivate your poetic faculty." Conrad wrote in another letter: "A work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character. All the great creations of literature have been symbolic, and in that way have gained in complexity, in power, in depth and in beauty."

Cultural geography is concerned with those aspects of land and space, in both the micro and the macro sense, that shape people's ideas about themselves, and give to their identities a characteristic expression. Landscape is really an all-embracing concept. It includes virtually everything around us and has manifest significance for everyone. This sub-section of geography, the cultural sphere, formulates the complex strategies of identification that function in the name of a people and a nation. It is here that the recollection, the sense, of home and belonging are constructed and create an imagined and/or a real community. There results from this study of land and space a collectiveness that is addressed in different ways by different peoples, that is part of their identity and that structures belonging. I have mentioned this from time to time in this autobiography, but it has not occupied much of my attention. This is probably due to the many places I have lived rather than one which has helped to form my identity.

This whole question of the sense of identity has been part and parcel of the western literary tradition going right back to Homer and the Old Testament writers. Early poetry of the eighth century BCE, Hesiod, Homer and the tradition they belonged to, has as a major theme of the identity of the Greek people, whether united in a military expedition as in the Iliad or as a geographical system in the Catalogue of Ships. My poetry and my autobiography is concerned, too, with the notion of identity, the identity of the Bahá'í community and my own identity both within that community and without. It is this aspect of my identity that I give more of my attention to in this work.

The decision to pioneer internationally in 1971, to go abroad as we used to say, a decision I made with my first wife or, more honestly, because of my first wife, after graduating from college in 1967 and teaching for three years, represented an embrace of the challenges and pleasures of the unfamiliar. This reorientation was also a form of disorientation due to the new that flooded in from all sides and pulled old assumptions off their moorings. Just as a compelling theory may force students to fall back on what they know, only to find that the theory has changed the way in which they considered this knowledge, so the experience of living on a foreign continent makes one look homeward and realize that home will never be the same.

The lesson I have learned during my 35 years as an expatriate is perhaps best described as a semantic one: home, Canada, and North America ceased forever to be synonyms in my mind. Even if home still lies "over there," certain signs of it greet the eyes of Canadians abroad no matter where we go. Unlike the USA which, more than any other country, extends beyond its borders with its extensive global permutations and permeations reshaping foreign economic, political, and social, not to mention imaginative landscapes—all in the image of America, Canada remains snowlocked in a bleak and lonely landscape and, even in our more media-saturated world, the country still lies somewhat remote and isolated, clean and distant.

The more I have travelled, the more I have learned, the more I have come to realize that, should I return after having departed home, home and homeland, the objects of my patriotic projections, cares little for me or my loyalty. The idea, then, that I belong to a place, and that that place in turn belongs to me, merely exposes me to disappointment, and conditions me to contest for and die over a fiction, which, by its very nature, denies and defies belonging.

The Canadian or the American abroad--and certainly me in Australia--sees that the foreign landscapes where he dwells are not just mirror images of home. Some landscapes are, of course, familiar in some ways, and some are not. In a globalizing world our experience of contemporary reality is fused with the dreams, fantasies, and satellite image-fed visions of everyone and everything from the original European colonizers in our homeland, to a set of explorers like Lewis and Clark or Cartier and Cabot, to Somali refugees, to the likes of al-Qaeda. These ideas that traditionally existed behind quite clear borders have been in this era of mass communication, mixed into one big pot. To put this a little differently: the world has become one country.

Canada became, particularly in this global age, something that was neither simply a place, nor as a permanent set of values, beliefs, attitudes, or philosophies. It was, it became, an idea, one that was fluid and open to constant change and not defined by traditional constraints like geography, politics, and nationality. My personal experience, however, showed me that thinking of Canada in these terms as I did, was neither simple nor easy. It was easier said than done and, if done as I had done now for over 30 years, it was not easy to put into words. This was true not only of my Canadianness but of my pioneeringness and much else.

"The art of autobiography has many facets. One of the critical facets is omission. One's own forgetfulness is very important. Indeed, as I have pointed out elsewhere, most of my life is simply not here. It has been omitted in the interest of interest. As in the daily round one can only bring to memory a certain portion of one's experience, otherwise one would literally drown in data, in memories, in a chaos of facticity. As the world passed through the golden age of astronomy during these epochs, as it advanced through a range of new technologies from the computer to satellite, from radio to TV, video to DVD, inter alia, as it doubled its population from 3 to 6 billion, so much was invented and developed, so much impacted on man and society-but I have omitted the discussion of these and so many other facets of the industrial and commercial developments of our time. I belonged to the first generation born into a world in which television had been invented, but not yet popularized.

Claude Simon, in the lecture he gave when given the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985, said, "I find that what one writes or describes is never something which has happened prior to the work of writing. On the contrary the writing produces something in every sense of the term in the course of working." The writing, Simon argues, produces something within its own present. I find this to be my own experience as well. This work has returned unremittingly to decisive and not so decisive events in my life. I have created a seam of light, of gold, of joy, that has had its source, its origins in the Bahá'í Faith. With fire my gold has been tested and life's gold in its many forms has tested this servant again and again. Many of life's tests I did not pass. But like a close cricket series, I won't know the score or, indeed, if I won, until the last ball is played and the series has ended. Indeed, I'm not so sure the cricket metaphor about winning even applies here because so often in life the first shall be last and the last first. The act of writing for me is more of an effort of understanding. My aim is to be clear and evocative for in this way I feel more in touch with my subject.

Many of the ideas in Richard Sennett's The Culture of The New Capitalism reflect the new metaphors of meaning that I see inhabiting my life. The transience, risk and fragility that frame the world of market speculation have come to infect the way people work and live? I have found this to be true since the years I entered university, the work force and community life in the sixties. Old hierarchies and institutions have been, are being and will be overthrown; work and life have been and are more flexible than ever; new communications have opened up the world – but none of this has necessarily made us free. Sennet claims that older ways of life were underwritten by a far greater commitment to stability, to authority, to the way things were, than new ways of life by those enamoured by unfettered markets, by a questioning of authority and by a desire for change. Older-style capitalism, social mores and an orientation to tradition created a grounding context where workers could derive some meaning and satisfaction from what they did. Social capitalism in the very recent past, say, up to the post-WW2 period and into the 1960s, granted what Sennett calls the 'gift of organised time.' You could plan your future life within the organization. In other words, the relative stability of 'social capitalism' created an experience of time suited to building the self as a narrative project. This has not entirely disappeared, but its presence as a rock of social stability has long gone.

Sennett's narrativised self is part of the rise of social capitalism. It coincided with the rise of linear narrative forms such as the 19th century novel and the autobiography. Both constructed a self that unfolded through time, where experiences and events shaped identity. The autobiography especially, displayed a particularly mercantile logic, as the author shaped a messy life into a narrative where experiences accumulated like investments to reveal the final payoff, the published writer, the autobiographer and the biographer. For Sennett, the working-self for centuries, perhaps millennia, gains meaning in this kind of linear projection; identity defines itself in the space between where one has come from and where one might end up.

By contrast, the new capitalism, the vast changes in society in the last half century, have ushered in a very different culture. Traditional corporations aimed at gradual profit. Corporations today, dominated by fickle shareholders, are governed by short-term speculation, risk and a mindset where destabilising the organization sends a positive, rather than negative message to investors. Sennett argues that this instability is devastating for workers. The company that downsizes, gets taken over, or reinvents itself is no longer a place where one can plan for the future. As I look back over my employment life, I seem to have downsized myself. An instability factor always seemed to be present as I reinvented my wheel of life time and time again, not from stratch mind you, but there were so many restarts.

The new capitalism, the new society, that has emerged in this last half century since I went looking for part time work, for summer jobs, in the 1950s is in many ways blind to past experience. The accomplishments of an employee mean little in a world of continual retraining and rapid obsolescence. Indeed, employees who takes pride in their work, subscribing to the ideal of work as craft, is regarded in many cases with suspicion as mired in the past, probably unsuitable for re-skilling. I felt this change in the 1980s and 1990s, insensibly in the work places I was associated with in Australia. Nowadays, in the words of one employee, "each time you start a new job you need to fake it. The boss expects you to know how things should be done and what he wants. But of course you don't. It's a challenge'."

For Sennet only a particular kind of person is able to succeed in this culture, a person who in a sense has no self, who doesn't need a sustaining life narrative or, someone who sees the world as his home, who has become a global citizen. This person is likely to be either naïve, or a member of the new breed of so-called 'office psychopaths' able to divorce themselves from responsibility, in a different context the kind of person who might fake an autobiography, or indeed, someone whose loyalty is as a cosmopolitan and not a local. Any wonder then that the new capitalism spawns different cultural representations, where those whose lives that stress randomness and chance begin to supplant those with linear narratives. As philosopher Slavoj Zizek notes, our own era is haunted by the idea of contingency, the sense that we live in a radically open situation.

Think of the rising genre of 'what-if?' histories that speculate how a single event, a delayed letter, a chance meeting, might have radically altered the world. Or consider the films of Kryztstof Kieslowski (Chance, or the Double Life of Veronique), or other narratives in recent literature and film that present parallel lives for the same person. The privileging of contingency in the workplace but also in the wider culture superficially equates with openness and freedom, but behind this lie deeper anxieties over a loss of control of our situation. I could quote many a chapter and verse with "what if," scenarios in my life. But this would lead to prolixity.

Sennett claims the destabilizing forces found in the new workplace also manifest themselves in consumer society. Much of what we consume is based on potential rather than use: MP3 players store more songs that we can hear, SUVs are designed to go places we'll never go, Wallmart complexes are overstacked with items we don't need. For Sennett this unusable potential ushers in a strange kind of passivity where possibility is more important than actual realization. One might find a parallel of sorts here, in the critical backlash against so-called 'hysterical realism.'

The sprawling novels of David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie and the like are books which remain inextricably tied to the information society they depict. So while they contain massive quantities of obscure scientific knowledge, geographical and biographical trivia, lists and details, they fail the test of art: namely, to realize something different from this information.

If such critics are at all persuasive in their claim that neither the subjects nor the reader can usefully do anything with all this information, then these novels are indeed symptomatic of the culture Sennett describes, a culture where ceaseless consumption of either goods or information mitigates against possession. Sennett's suggestions as to how we might alter this situation through the provision of basic incomes, job sharing, counter-institutions to provide stable work---are designed to reconnect the thread of experience together, to enable a self to become more grounded in time, but they are perhaps too modest in the face of the spiritual, economic and environmental situation that stems from the new capitalism.

Still, Richard Sennett's latest book eloquently depicts the devastating irony that results when the iron cage of modern capitalism opens, only to imprison us within more intangible forms of unfreedom. And might the transience, risk and fragility that frame the world of market speculation come to infect the way the rest of us work and live? Richard Sennett thinks so. His new book argues that we need to rethink Marx's dictum 'all that is solid melts into air'. The once praised 'creative destruction' of capitalism now merely destroys. For Sennett, this 'new capitalism' requires us to rethink our assumptions about openness and freedom.

Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy among other 19th century novelists were also aware of the play of chance, accident, circumstance or contingency on our lives. In his last 30 years, 1840 to 1870, Dickens never had any more money troubles; he never had any lack of popularity; he was a “glutton for work” and could choose his time, place and manner of doing it after a fashion which deprives work of all, or nearly all, of its worrying effect. He found, in addition to his original and independent work as novelist, two occupations, that of editor and that of public reader, both of which were very profitable, while the former of them gave exercise to his busy and rather autocratic temper, and the latter furnished an outlet to the histrionic faculty which was almost as strong in him as the literary. He died at the age of 58; but after a full, glorious and, apparently, on the whole, happy life, not, indeed, without some preliminary illness, but without suffering from that terrible lingering failure of faculties which had beset Scott and Southey and Moore in the generation immediately before him. Fame and fortune after the very earliest step, and far earlier than in most cases, had, in almost all respects, been equally kind to him.

I mention Dickens here since, after my retirement from the world of being a student and then an employee, a world than had occupied me for half a century(1949 to 1999), I could also satisfy my lifelong gluttony for work without its worrying effect, without the ambiguity and conflicting pushes and pulls on my life from job, community responsibilities as a Bahai and family activity. Like Dickens, I came to enjoy two additional occupations after retirement: editing and publishing my own work on the internet as well as work as a journalist and a promoter of causes---especially the Cause. The outlet to the histrionic faculty which was almost as strong in Dickens as the literary, had been strong in me and a 35 year teaching career had given full vent to this theatrical tendency. By the time I was 55 I had little desire for social life and its inevitable theatrical aspects. I have already had a decade more of life than Dickens; I will never enjoy his fame or wealth---and time will tell what will happen to my faculties in old age. Reading about Dickens recently forced this comparison on me. I also wrote the following prose-poem which I insert here:

THANKS CHARLES

Although I was a student then teacher of English literature and composition at all levels of the educational process, from primary to post-secondary school from the 1950s through the 1990s, I never really got ‘into’ the works of Charles Dickens(1812-1870). None of his books were ever on any of the curricula that I had to teach. The opening sentence to one of my all time favorite books in the world The Catcher In the Rye by J.D. Salinger placed my attitude as a young and middle-aged man to Charles Dickens and his books. That sentence read: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know about my life is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap..."

As I got into late adulthood, though, the years after 60, according to one model of human development in the lifespan, I began to take an interest in Dickens, his life and his writings. Tonight I watched the first of a new mini-series Little Dorrit. It was screened in the U.K. in 2008, in the USA in 2009 and now it was here in Australia in 2010.1 Little Dorrit was published between 1855 and 1857. It was, among other things, an indictment of the British system of justice. Virginia Woolf maintained, in a helpful turn of phrase, that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens," as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks."

All authors might be said to incorporate autobiographical elements in their fiction or, in my case, in their poetry. With both Dickens and I, though, this autobiographical aspect to their writing is very noticeable. Dickens took pains to mask what he considered his shameful, lowly past. I do not take pains to mask my life, my relationships, my religion or my mental-illness, although I certainly do not reveal-all. Dickens's own father was sent to prison for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books. The detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit resulted from Dickens's own experiences of that institution. The delightful Claire Foy, as Amy Dorrit, is an idealised character; this idealising of character serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. An important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers. Since Dickens did not write the chapters very far ahead of their publication, he was allowed to witness the public reaction and alter the story depending on those public reactions. I, too, found, this aspect of public reaction important in my writing on the internet since I retired from FT, PT and casual work in the years 1999 to 2005.-Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC TV, 27 June 2010, 8:35 p.m.

Well, Charles, I can understand
your despair about society and
those seemingly unbridgeable
gaps..Yes, people do so stick
to their beliefs---assumptions
about life with their emotions
wrapped around them—their
faith, Charles, that’s their faith.
We all have our faith; for each
of us our faith decides what our
mountains are from day to day...

Yes, Charles, we all go on our
pilgrimage in search of eternity
as restless travellers in search of
our true selves often imprisoned
as they are in the greatest prison
of all---the prison of self.1 Thank
you, Charles, for so many things:
helping me with my writing......my
autobiographical self and listening
to my readers as best I can before
writing more in my serialized and
seemingly endless prose----poetry.

1 Takao Saijo, “Charles Dickens: His Novels and Society,” Internet Site, 27 June 2010. This term ‘the prison of self’ is also one found in the Baha’i writings which have been important to me for nearly 60 years.

27 June 2010

One of the ways, the contexts, I have had to rethink my assumptions, especially for a person like myself who has lived in 40 houses in his autobiographical life and had more jobs than he could shake a stick at, has been in the management of short and long term relationships while migrating from job to job and place to place. If institutions no longer provided a long term framework, I have had to improvise my life narrative. I also had to do without a sustained sense of self from time to time, at crisis periods; I had to find some basis, a new basis, for such a self. We all need a sustained sense of self, a sustaining life narrative, to value our experiences, to be good at something specific. The major continuity through these four epochs has been the religion I came to be associated with through my mother some fifty-four years ago at the age of nine. It has been the primary glue, so to speak. I can not prove this. It is a hypothetical like so much of life. Truths which are perennial but not archaic have been at the core of my life and sustained it—or so it seems to me as I gaze back to my first memory in 1947/8, sixty years ago.

In some ways this ideological contunity is like the continuity of place as I have experienced it since WW2. My understanding and appreciation of both the intellectual underpinnings of my religion and the sense of meaning I derive from place is much like my experience as I walk down many a city street. On many city blocks and village streets in Canada and Australia where I have spent all my life, it is possible to find groups of buildings that may span one or two hundred years of construction methods and styles. Yet they visually support and enhance each other, and in addition they provide examples of a regional culture and development. These human habitations and centres may often be as young as thirty or forty years, or even less, as they were in most of George Town, Zeehan, Katherine, South Hedland and Frobisher Bay among other towns where I lived. But they had a certain fit; they seemed to be good structures that people too care of with their endless gardens. If they had any possible contemporary use, they were also parts of the past that people tried to maintain.

For me these buildings and streets were and are not unlike the continuities, the threads, the warp and weft, of my ideological commitment, my religious communitas communitatum, that has structured my life, fitting it--however unscripted, however flawed and however ordinary my life may be—even in its darkest incoherence--with this inadequate piercing shorthand of prose and poetry which helps me negotiate the latter years of the ardent voyage that has been my life, a voyage with its unreasonable and unseasonable rains and the many long waits for that salient dove to bring the living twig.

After my years of early childhood(1944-1948), I enjoyed life as a student for nearly twenty years; for many years I enjoyed teaching, perhaps as many as thirty to thirty five, full and part-time. I don't think I was a natural teacher, but I grew into it. After several years I became successful; I became a person enjoyed by my students and enjoying them. I loved to explain things and rarely made a questioner feel stupid for asking. Although I had broad intellectual interests, my pursuit of career, familycommitments, simple lack of money and my involvement in the Bahá'í Faith left little time for other activities: I did not play golf or follow sports after the age of 21; I did not take up painting or cooking or photography or anything one could call a hobby, although I did collect stamps in my teens; I watched little TV, had no TV from 1956 to 1976, although after I retired I watched over two hours a day; I rarely went to movies, to various forms of entertainment or ate out. For 40 years I played the guitar and led sing-alongs. I joined the Bahá'í Faith with its world of meetings and outings, lounge-rooms, conferences and clusters. I went for a daily walk of about half an hour among a host of other domestic, familial and social activities that are part of the lives of fathers and husbands in the west.

I think it highly unlikely that aspects of my life will become legendary as did the lives of many a celebrity in my time. No series of iconographic images evoked from fact and fiction will ever produce a celluloid dream as has been produced for many a culture hero of these four epochs. There will be no fantastical caricature of my life with its inevitable exaggerations, bright colours and haunting themes and images created for the world of cinema and a mass audience. Mementos and mis-remembering, forms of pride and various prejudices, will never be mixed together and served up as legend to hungry fans in this or ensuing centuries. Every year hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visitors will never flock to some of the locales where I have lived. No one will ever have to locate or re-locate my legend in some tangled interweaving of history, myth and memories. The millions and billions of people in this and future centuries whose names, whose lives and memories are and will be excluded from history, will not be pulled into some vortex, some timeless world of myth and dream, legend and narrative associated with the places I have lived, my places of memory and my life's experiences. "Cinema is most akin to music, writes R.D. Crano, "insofar as it utilizes time as an elemental raw material in its sculpting of space." I could say the same about autobiography but the comparison and contrast is too complex to pursue here. Crano also makes another interesting observation about music and cinema which I will quote here for its implications for this autobiography: "they have the potential to operate in a purely anarchic mode, as a temporal phenomena comprised of heterogeneous movements and recurring motifs."

That perceptive philosopher of film Gilles Deleuze wrote that film analysis should concern itself not with criticism or judgment but with an attunement to the ‘properly rhythmic values' produced by a given body of work. I would like to apply this same idea to any analysis of this work. But what would the rhythmic values of this memoir be?

As Shakespeare has Juliet say in the play Romeo and Juliet: "What's in a name?/That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet," a name is an artificial and meaningless convention however linked it may be to genealogy, some rite de passage such as: baptism, marriage, an affiliation in religion, politics or area of human interest. If anything about an individual life endures, if anything in that life is worth enduring, if anything goes beyond the strutting and fretting of one's hour upon life's stage, if one is to avoid the fate of being heard no more and leaving no trace even until the last syllable of one's recorded time; if life is to be more than a bad play, an illusion, a mere shadow cast by a brief candle, a vapour in the desert; if one's native hue of resolution is not to be "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," and as Shakespeare goes on to add: "And enterprises of great pitch and moment/ With this regard their currents turn awry/And lose the name of action" then, as Shoghi Effendi writes time and time again, we must urge on the steed of action. This steed takes so many forms both within the psyche and externally in the open field of everyday activity. One such form I described briefly in an email I sent to my son, Dan. It went like this:

I came across the following passage in a letter from Shoghi Effendi dated 19/9/48 to an individual believer. It goes like this:

"We must never dwell too much on the attitudes and feelings of our fellow- believers towards us." Feelings of isolation are often found in these thoughts we have of others, eh, Dan, among other sources? The Guardian goes on to say that: "in this way the weaknesses of human nature and the peculiarity or attitude of any particular person is not magnified, but pales into insignificance...." Easy to say but hard to put into action inside, in one's psyche, eh? I could also say the same about people's reactions to this work: does it resonate as an object of spectatorial affection? How important is it that it does?

I leave this quote and this idea with you Dan and, if I had that book I once loaned you entitled Solitude by Anthony Storr, I would loan it to you again. Always a source of lots of advice which I trust will never function as a weight on your brow.

Retail sales are down, the Ftse is up, the Hang Seng is steady and the price of gold is up.....
Dad

More generally, will a myth of our time be created, as is so often the case with any and every age, a myth with its myriad of elements, with its enormous disparity between conception and reality? Will that myth spawn an immense literature as is happening to all the ages of the past? The concern of a future time will not be with the reality of our time, the time of these four epochs, but with what people have thought and felt about that reality. This thinking, feeling and remembering will undoubtedly contribute to the myth. Myth is the stuff of the history of sensibility. One critic of contemporary Hollywood myth expressed the view that "If you can find the myth, it hasn't been hidden properly, and if it's been hidden properly, you can't find it for sure." My life has been so much wrapped up with the Bahai myth and I think I have hidden it in this long work. I have hidden it so well that the average reader will have little idea of what it is. There is some truth in this cryptic comment by this Hollywood critic. If cinematographic meaning is to be found in the shifting relations between bodies, as some analysts of cinema argue, perhaps autobiographical meaning here is to be found in the shifting relations I have created in these several 1000 pages.

There is, of course, myth and myth. Some students of autobiography, as I have mentioned earlier, regard self-authorship as a type of myth arising out of modern individualism and the increasingly narcissistic nature of modern Western society. It is the view of some of these analysts of autobiography that individuals are only the narrators, not the authors, of their life story. Martin Heidegger, in a book published at the very start of my pioneering journey, Being and Time, said we have two possibilities as we go through our lives. We can be the author of our own story or we can traverse life according to a script composed by others. It seems to be that like we do both.

In Habits of the Heart, Bellah and others contend that, despite contemporary popular thought on the subject, the idea of a life course must be set in a larger generational, historical and probably religious--as opposed to individualistic--context if it is to provide any richness of meaning. The authors further believe that despite the radical individualism that has achieved hegemony in universities, in middle class life and which is based on and supported by studies in the social sciences, impoverished philosophy and vacuous theology, all of our activities go on in relationships, groups, associations, and communities ordered by institutional structures and interpreted by cultural patterns of meaning. Christopher Lasch argues that our present society has carried "the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all and the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self."

My own take on this issue of self and community is that if one looks within oneself one should aim to find the God within and this God within helps one to see with one's own eyes and not the eyes of others. But there is a whole structure of individual and community values that is involved in cementing the individual and the community and this structure must find its basis in an individual psychology, a philosophy and a sociology of community and history. It is the task of the writer to articulate these frameworks. Scholarship by Bahá'ís on autobiography from within their community is in its infancy. Indeed, it has hardly got off the ground. When this work is subjected to students of this genre, I will be interested to see the results. By then, I am inclined to think, I will have left this mortal coil.

After countless debates and exhaustive deconstructions about my time and my age which are sure to take place in the future, it will be hard to tell what is left. A lot of talking tends to produce the experience of intellectual exhaustion. Certain images will endure for some people and define the age, the time. That imagery may be contested, may be transcendent, may be bewildering, unbending, and even beguiling. For others it will be text, print, that defines an age, a time, a person, a problem—not images. For still others it will be a combination and still others no images and no text will define the item of concern because the subject at issue will not concern them in the slightest. We can't all be concerned about the same stuff. The peculiar and compelling image, the subtle and complex text, will prod a future age to re-examine the fascinating crossroads of myth and memory. They will beckon a revisiting, yet again, of another day.

My second wife often complained, although grew to accept, that I devoted insufficient time to my marriage and to shared activity together. In my retirement this changed a little—for the positive—as we came to spend three or four hours together every day. It is perhaps a matter of personal taste whether one attributes my drive first as a student, then as a teacher and finally as a writer and as a Bahá'í to personal ego or a genuine commitment to my various roles, roles to learn, to educate and inspire people about learning and to serve the Cause and my writing. Undoubtedly there were elements of all these motivations present at different stages of my life-span. Retirement also brought a greater element of control over my life. Parents, teachers, employers and students had a great deal to say about my life until about the age of sixty. Then the only person I had to please to any significant extent was my wife and, by the age of sixty, I had that worked out, if not entirely to her satisfaction, at least enough to provide the basis for a household harmony and tranquillity so that I could get on with what had become the passion of my life—writing and reading. As the poet Seneca wrote: Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultra: ~ Leisure without literature is death, or rather the burial of a living man.

I once thought that autobiography meant being able to write without artifice, but I'd like to think any thoughtful observer of this writer will see a certain cunning, game, play, everywhere. That is what I'd like to think. The geography of my book circles and doubles with long footnotes to take the spread of thought. Why footnotes? As Martin Amis writes in his autobiography that footnotes "preserve the collateral thought." In fact, the whole thing is a lattice of collateral." Like Amis, too, I must confess to having compiled this work with one eye on a remote and exacting audience: posterity. And if not the whole eye, then part of the eye, perhaps the retina or the aqueous humour or the eye brows. But at least the job got done before the body gave way, as the philosopher Paul Feyerband's did. He became paralyzed and had to finish his autobiography from an unfortunate bed-ridden state. Other writers become paralysed with the thought of using the first person: a serious dilemma for an autobiographer. I, too, was reticent to use the first person for the first two decades as I toyed initially with this autobiography. But eventually I found a voice, a voice I was comfortable with. I also found a format that attempted to create what I think is a happy balance between the routine and the banal on the one hand and aphoristic nuggets and sustained analysis on the other. I leave it to readers to assess whether I achieved this balance.

The profession of writer has recently acquired something of the roles of travelling salesman and repertory actor. As I gaze back over the half a century(1949-1999) before I took up writing full time I feel as if I acquired or took part in these roles through the mediums of several spheres of major activity: student, teacher, Bahá'í pioneer and a multitude of geographic, status, career, employment, community and marital situations. Full time writers are often engaged in an endless succession of book festivals and literary conferences which take them round the globe, all of which adds to an air of unreality and stimulus, with books alone being the hub around which their existence revolves. I, too, went around the globe, or at least from one end in the north to the other end in the south, with books being a critical hub of my life. Book festivals were for me programs on the radio.

If I experienced any unreality it was due to a range of factors but attending literary conferences and book festivals was not among those factors. From time to time and partly due to my bi-polar disability I experienced that unspeakable penalty or affliction in which I felt that my whole being had been exerted toward accomplishing nothing. But, insensibly and as the decades wore on, I knew that this feeling, when and if it arose, was transient and that in a few hours at most it would disappear.

As my early sixties advanced from year to year I withdrew increasingly, almost entirely, from the society of those about me and gave myself up to a wondrous study of writing and reading. In many ways, my reading in the first six decades of my life was far from as deep as I would have liked it to be but there was so much else going on in my life that I was unable to achieve the depth that I wanted. With the early years of late adulthood I have been able to both read and write more, much more, at last to my satisfaction. I am conscious of William Hazlitt's cautionary note that often, if one reads more, one thinks less. Perhaps that notion just provided me with an easy way to excuse myself. I find that concentrated and extensive reading seems to come second to writing and the innumerable odds-and-ends of life. It is true for me, as it was for Hazlitt, that I try most earnestly to cultivate the habit of thinking. I detest nothing so much as servile imitation, affectation and their loathsome odour. I can feel that creep when it comes into my writing and, wishing to think and feel for myself, I try to stamp it out. If I have not drunk deep, hopefully I have at least been an expert taster who makes serendipitous connections.

This reading and writing does not take place in a vacuum. I continue my role of activist, but I play the role differently than I did in the first forty years of my adult life. As someone who surmounted the educational hurdles that kept previous generations in my family solidly working class, I became a credentialed worker, a professional who experienced considerable autonomy and intrinsic worker satisfaction from the 1960s to the 1990s. And now that paid-labour of the day does not occupy me as it did for decades, nor does raising a family, nor going to meetings and engaging so frequently in social and community activities, I can write and place the products of my efforts at thousands of internet sites with literally millions of my words. Although a critical observer might see and say that I was simply blowing my own horn, I was blowing the Bahá'í horn, so to speak. This occupied me virtually all my waking hours.

There were many who blew the horn that I blew, albeit differently shaped, different sizes and styles, but many ordinary people and many thinkers and intellectuals, writers and social scientists blew many of the tunes I was trying to blow both in my autobiography and in other works. Fernand Braudel, for example, of the French annales school, recognised the justice of the sociologist Raymond Aron's observation that 'the phase of civilisations is coming to an end, and for good or ill humanity is embarking on a new phase.' That phase is one of a single civilisation which could become universal. I don't want to list and comment, quote and analyse, all those who share this global, one world perspective. Suffice it to say, it was a horn which as the epochs advanced was blown by more and more serious students of history's longue duree. Some of these students had a grand interpretation of history, a meganarrative, along the lines pursued by Oswald Spengler, H. G. Wells or Arnold Toynbee. And some did not. Much of the discussion remains nebulous and unsatisfactory. The story, the blowing, is far from over.

My years of worrying about the success of my three children and whether they too would enjoy the benefits of education in their professional lives that I enjoyed; whether they were happy in their single or married lives and whether my step-grandchildren were winning their races or successful at school, were for the most part over by the time I entered my early sixties. My wife tended to take care of the worry department in these areas and she did a better job of providing care, therapy and advice when needed to these importn at people in my affinal family. The messages of conformity and obedience, of working hard to achieve occupational achievement and self-satisfaction, were important patterns in my children's lives and the lives of my grandchildren as they were in mine in my youth and adulthood in the last several decades. Although all was not smooth in their lives, they did not give me much to worry about as they went on with their lives as busy as beavers with their: careers, domestic lives, leisure interests and, of course, the inevitable slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This subject could occupy many more pages and perhaps it will in some future revised edition of this autobiography; the members of my immediate affinal family each have their own story and, when looked at in detail, is as long as your proverbial arm--to say nothing of the consangineal family I left behind me in Canada some forty years ago.

I should add here, parenthetically, that I, too, worked hard. Perhaps such a remark goes without saying given the general Bahai ehtos; perhaps my inner drive was due partly to my insecurities and my knowing that my achievements never came easily. Perhaps my relentless pursuit of the high goals I set myself was part of my bi-polar disorder. Perhaps the origins of my ambitious tendency were to be found in my early childhood and my relationships with hard working parents and a conscientious family in general. Perhaps a detailed explanation of the Price and Cornfield family fortunes over time, over previous generations might uncover some explanation for the ardour and effort that characterized my life.

The foundation of the two family-trees in my consangineal family, Price and Cornfield, going back centuries is virtually unknown to me before the late 19th century. In the last quarter of the 19th century each family occupied the upper regions of the lower class or the lower regions of the middle class. The recounting of the ups and downs of the generations in these two families, generations I have known something about, is beyond the scope of my knowledge or the purposes of this autobiography as I have come to conceive it. The canvas I paint is broad but it is, for the most part, rooted in subjects I know a good deal about. Readers will find some discussion of my family tree in this autobiography but, on the whole, very little outside those members I actually met and got to know well--and, even then, I devote relatively little to the array of people in this final category of those I have known well.

"History," wrote the historian R.G. Collingwood, "is the science of res gestae" and res gestae are the actions of human beings, actions that have been done in the past. The first time in the western tradition that we come across this term res gentae is with the emperor Augustus in 14 AD. It is inscribed on his mausoleum. It is a memorial of his achievements. It is a type of official, abbreviated autobiography. This autobiography is no memorial to my achievements; it is more general commentary on a life,a religion and a society.

Autobiography, then, to follow the historian Collingwood's lead, is my own actions in the past. "History," Collingwood went on, "is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is." "All history is the history of thought," Collingwood continues, "in so far as human actions are mere events, the historian cannot understand them; strictly, he cannot even ascertain that they have happened. They are only knowable to him as the outward expression of inward thoughts." All this is certainly true, a fortiori, of autobiography, of this autobiography.

The history of my thought and action is the re-enactment of that past thought and action in my own mind. My autobiography is a continuous process of interaction between myself and the facts of my life, an unending dialogue between my present and my past. I am, in the words of another historian E.H. Carr, just another dim figure trudging along, but the point at which I find myself in this trudging procession determines my angle of vision and just how dim or how sharp that vision is over the past. In addition, as autobiographer, I am not dredging up everything only what I see as relevant. A good many people simply want to know about the past, my past and my view of things for the emotional or intellectual satisfaction I might provide. The line between comment and opinion is increasingly becoming blurred in newspapers and in the electronic media. Often, the fewer the facts the stronger the opinions. About my life, I have all too many facts and, as I get older, the diversity of opinion I bring to my life, my society and my religion, I find requires the use of outside authorities and experts to provide balance, some fact-checking, some external perspective.

The extent to which an autobiographer fulfils the useful social function of helping people know something better, to that extent does he contribute to the complex of non-practical activities which make up the culture of a society. When and if I stimulate and satisfy the imagination of my readers, I do not differ essentially from the poet or artist. There is an emotional satisfaction of a high order to be gained from extending the comprehending intelligence of people to include elements of the past. Like all rational activities, the study, the reading, of a well written autobiography, an autonomous enterprise and activity in itself, can contribute to the improvement of man. It does so by seeking the truth within the confines of its particular province and that province is the rational reconstruction of the past.

I do not want to dwell excessively on the middle class psychology, either in its individual or collective expression, that played in the centre and at the fringes of my life as an adult since the mid-sixties. Nor do I want to place here a political analysis, an analysis that took society from a politics of the left in the sixties and seventies and then to the right in the following twenty years. Even though my adult life was lived with this psychological and political background, I feel I have alluded to these themes enough in the previous mountain of words. I have drawn here on one of the better analyses of my culture and my class, my status group and its values and beliefs, an analysis that was first published in 1989, just as I was about to complete my last decade of professional employment as a teacher.

Like Gustave Flaubert, the originator of the modern novel who spent much of his life in one house and a great deal of that time in one room I, too, spend much of my time now in a room in a house in the oldest town in Australia at the end of the Tamar River in northern Tasmania. Only the occasional Bahá'í activity, family interchange, conversation with a friend, daily interaction with my wife and the inevitable trips to town to shop, to put up posters and to go the library and attend to the several domestic activities that are part of life for everyman took me into the social domain. I had come to see life more as an affair of solitude diversified by company than an affair of company diversified by solitude. For fifty years(1954-2004) it had been the other way around.

With early retirement the tables and the millennium had slowly been turning. As they turned I slowly approached the heartland of my story across the familiar slopes of my earthly life, its actions and thoughts. I tell my story in a way which gives me an invigorating sense of briskness and phrase-relishing. As the epochs advanced I had an increasing and an insatiable spirit of activity. By the fifth epoch the spirit was channelled virtually in its entirety into a sedentary and literary life. In the process I defined my world. I hope readers enjoy my definition and the way I go about putting it together. Like Johnson's dictionary 250 years ago, it is an ambitious work. But whether it will influence generations as Johnson's work did, I can only hope. He wrote to escape the pain of life; I wrote to escape society's endless chat with which I had grown fatigued and to write which was my pleasure.

I write, too, because of life's very familiarity which one writer called life's ‘soul fat.' Familiarity insulates and cushions, dockets the uncanny, translates every tomorrow into a rerun of yesterday. It is an anodyne not be scorned, but to be appreciated because it helps us negotiate our world through the hostile and the unexpected. Familiarity populates our world with hints of habituation, reassures us with bulletins about the déjà vu and the deja vecu, resists novelty with patterns and conventions that both predate and outlive us. This autobiography is an extended raid on the familiar in order to make it unfamiliar, renewed, fresh. In this I only partly succeed. For being cushioned and insulated from reality by familiarity's layering of fat has its comforts and gives life a certain ease amidst the reruns. I try not to promise more than I deliver as I survey this territory of the familair and in promising little perhaps, hopefully, I will deliver more.

An autobiography, like a novel, stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. "There is no other medium," said William Golding when he received his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, "in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character." That is the service both an autobiography and a novel renders. Golding went on to say: "It performs no less an act than the rescue and the preservation of the individuality and dignity of the single being, be it man, woman or child. No other art, I claim, can so thread in and out of a single mind and body--and so live another life. It does ensure that at the very least a human being shall be seen to be more than just one billionth of one billion.."

If the potential reader is not interested in what I have preserved here he need not read my work, need not pick it up. He is free to stop at any juncture. I hope that this work is not just a humdrum inventory of personal recollections that attempt to encourage the disinclined reader. I hope, too, that it is not just a series of casually scanned or, like Flaubert's novels, savagely chosen details in a frozen gel of chosenness." Pioneering Over Four Epochs is a portmanteau of personal history, the Bahá'í Faith and endless opinionizing; it is a pinata of literary references and a galimaufery of stuff that I try to beat into shape with the stick in/of my brain--sometimes successfully, sometimes not. This work is an entire province, a country rich in ideas, a structure built of my pioneering life, my predicaments, my joys, my solitudes and my despairs but, most importantly for me, this memoir is more monument than personal memorial, monument to the unity and civility, the universal and sensitive, the ethos and the ethical orientation, the morally preoccupied, embryonic community I have been a part of for over half a century.

Many are concerned at the pulverizing of society into a sandheap of individual atomizing particles each claiming their natural and sovereign rights. We could call this group conservatives with their concern for the inevitable arrival of collectivist nationalism. For the conservative, individual freedom lies in the interstices of social and moral authority. Think of the great cultural efflorescences of the 5th century B.C. in Athens, of 1st century, Augustan Rome, of the 13th century in Europe, of the Age of Louis XIV, and Elizabethan England. One and all these were ages of social and moral order, powerfully supported by moral codes and political statutes.

The Aeschyluses, Senecas, Roger Bacons, Molieres, and Shakespeares flourished in ages of social and moral order, powerfully supported by moral codes and political statutes. Far from feeling oppressed by the hierarchical authority all around him, Shakespeare, about whose copious individuality there surely cannot be the slightest question, is the author of the memorable passage that begins with "Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark! what discord follows; each thing meets in mere oppugnancy."

It might be noted finally that the greatest literary presences thus far to appear in the twentieth century Western culture have nearly all been votaries of tradition and cultural authority. Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Yeats, and others all gave testimony to authority in poem, essay and novel, and all, without exception, saw the eventual death of Western culture proceeding from annihilation of this authority in the names of individualism and of freedom. Writers and artists, creative types of all kinds, in the late twentieth century do their work in the freest air the imagination and the rational faculty have ever breathed, while composing their literary works. But it is apparent from the wretched mess of narcissism, self-abuse, self-titillation, and juvenile, regressive craving for the scatological and obscene that the atmosphere has become so rarefied as to have lost its oxygen.

It is not liberty but chaos and license which, conservatives would and do say, comes to dominate when moral and social authorities: those of family, neighborhood, local community, job, and religion, have lost their appeal to human beings.

It was strong social and moral authority these creative minds were living under not the oppressive, political-bureaucratic, limitless, invasive, totalitarian governments of the twentieth century. Another group, call them libertarians if you like, in which the coercions of family, church, local community and school seem almost as inimical to freedom as those of the political government. The gulf between libertarians and conservatives seems to be widening.

The Cause is going to need pioneers for many generations to come. As I have been writing this lengthy statement of my pioneering experience I have often felt that my story is but one of the first to make it onto paper from the generations beginning in 1937. Some narratives, some genres, like westerns and gangster stories, are dead or are dieing out. The political agenda changes with the seasons, although some problems seem to be perennial. My father used to say "there is always trouble in the Middle East." When the news came on and he was in his latter years, he would leave the room muttering about the endless warfare in Israel. That was in 1960. Nearly fifty years later the story is the same. And the historian AJP Taylor said it was wisest never to have an opinion about the Middle East. The pioneer, in its many forms, has a long life ahead of it and a long life behind it. Opinions about the pioneer, in some ways, have just begun.

Since literature takes as its subject all human experience, and particularly the ordering, interpreting, and articulating of experience, it is no accident that the most varied literary projects find instruction in the great mass of literature and its history and that the results of these projects are relevant to thinking about literature. What is true for literature, is also true for the other arts, such as painting and film and—autobiography. Within this great mass of literature, metaphor always plays a crucial role in autobiographical self-recognition and self-creation since it provides a ready means of perceiving order in an otherwise inchoate experience. The voyage paradigm or metaphor is used time and again in the history of western autobiography. At the close of the only Latin novel to survive, the poet Apuleius writes: "You have endured and performed many labours and withstood the buffetings of all the winds of ill luck. Now at last you have put into the harbour of peace.... Neither your noble blood and rank nor your education sufficed to keep you from falling a slave to pleasure.... But blind fortune, after tossing you maliciously about from peril to peril has somehow . . . landed you here in religious felicity."

This work of nearly 2000 years ago could very well apply to me and my life, at least in some major dimensions before I, too, landed in a region of religious felicity. The metaphor of journey as travelled by others has its applications to my trip as well.

The reader should also keep in mind as he reads this work that there is what autobiographers calls the interstitial self—the self that emerges in life's multitude of interstices, some in discourse, others in private. Sometimes this interstitial self emerges only for a moment to deal with and negotiate a conflict, a particular point in a relationship, indeed, many of life's especial situations. Sometimes the person is unaware of some of his interstitial selves. He is drawn back into familiar territory where there is a more stable position, a more familiar self and his interstitial self disappears as fast as it came into being. At other times, this interstitial self is grasped as a way to escape the restrictive discourses that so often arise in social life. In addition to this interstitial self there is another conventional autobiographical term, the hybrid self. This is a self that can be seen as shifting among positions and discourses, sometimes combining them into a true hybrid. At other times I am very aware of the contradictions and contradictory situations in life and that I must maintain quite separate and independent discourses, languages, so to speak, of the self. Then there is the unfound self, a self that seems unfindable. It took me 19 years(1984-2003) to finally find a voice that spoke to me of me so that I could write this autobiography in a satisfactory way. Beginnings are often difficult for novelists and autobiographers. People think of writing their story or some story for years but may, in the end, never pick up their pen. I shall say no more on what can be a complex subject, the subject of selves. But it is an important aspect for readers to consider as they delve into this autobiography.

Readers need to keep in mind G.K. Chesterton's turn of phrase in his discussion of the future of Charles Dickens' writings. Chesterton notes that there are a number of important factors which ensure the immortality of a man. "The chief of them," he adds, "is the unquestionable fact that if they write an enormous amount of bad work they are well on the way to immortality." This may lead a man to being put below his place in his own time, but it does not affect his permanent place, to all appearance, at all. Shakespeare, for instance, and Wordsworth wrote not only an enormous amount of bad work, but an enormous amount of enormously bad work." Some of the feedback I have received in the three years since I finished the 3rd edition of this work would indicate that what I have written is just that, an enormously bad work. So, perhaps, my immortality is assured, at least if Chesterton is onto something here.

Chesterton goes on to say in his discussion of the future of Dickens' writings that it is the very exaggeration of his characters that will immortalize him. The realistic narrators of their time are all forgotten, but the exaggerators live on. Chesterton sites the example of Homer and his characters in the Iliad and Odyssey. I might add the example of the Bab and Bahaullahh's writings which to a western ear and the moderate tones of the stiff upper-lip of the English literary tradition, often seem exaggerated. My own work, sadly, aiming as it does for realism, factual detail and accuracy of circumstance, will probably pass through the wings of time and be no more substance than the eye of a dead ant as the Bab wrote. I have not sufficiently exaggerated my story.

Chesterton has left me with some hope for a place in posterity's literary home. Chesterton also felt that those writers with a poetic inclination had a greater future than those without. So, perhaps, in the end, my poetry will save a place for me in the rooms of the future amidst their lush or not-so-lush furnishings. Among these furnishings, perhaps on the walls, will be the carefully arranged portraits of my emotional credentials, my intellectual and psychological interests, indeed, a whole gallery of stuff. It is difficult to see what value all these gallery pieces will have but their association with a new Faith which claims to be the emerging religion on this planet will give them a significance I can scarcely appreciate at this early hour.

A person is not simply determined and dominated by the pressures of any overarching discourse or ideology such as the secular pluralism in which we as citizens of western democracies are immersed. We are all, I believe, the agents of our own personal discernment capable of identifying and interpreting society's dominant discourse in order to insert ourselves into it or confront and resist it. The dominant cultural forces within our world do not take away our free will--entirely. But just as Darwinism and the Civil War shattered the psyches of Americans living in the last 40 years of the nineteenth century(1863-1903) and two great wars and the holocaust(1914-1945) shattered the psyches of those living in the twentieth century. We in the last half of the 20th century and the early 21st have all of this shattering of the social and psychological ethos of our times behind us and an entirely new crop of traumas to add their bewildering and deranging affects.

There cannot be any doubt at all that my own literary corpus can not be appreciated apart from the influences of my age. In an attempt to sketch the course of my literary endeavours it would be futile to detach their succession from the experiences of my personal life, largely determined, as they were, by the revolutionary changes of my time, by other changes in the condition of both Canada and Australia where I have lived, developments in the religion I have been associated with and in the various intellectual shifts and alterations in the multitude of centres around the world.

The probing of 'Canadianness' or ‘Australianness' turns out to be a puzzling and somewhat brain-racking exercise in my pioneer situation. But all is not puzzle and probe for the brain. Much of the contemplation is enriching and interesting for the psyche. In the end, too, there is a balance between this national identification and a local as well as an international level of experience and analysis.

The world I have grown up in, at least since Norman Vincent Peale wrote what was arguably the first modern self-help book in 1937, has grown accustomed to the standard victim-recovery cycle of modern self-help books. Part of pop-psychology, one of the many substitutes for religion in my time, the self-help genre can not be found in the text of this book. Like Proust's masterpiece, I like to think my work is edifying precisely because my struggle goes on and on and just changes its form as the years go on. Unlike Proust, I do get better from the illnesses that dot my life. I may not get totally cured; the battle of life may change its form and content; I often blame or am tempted to blame others for my problems; I do not welcome suffering, as Proust seems to do, as an opportunity for thinking up fresh ideas and for entering into a richer relationship with experience. But once it has come and gone I welcome the insights that come in its train.

An interesting question that Erich Fromm raises in his book The Art of Listening(1994) has to do with what we regard as the maximum of suffering which is in each of us; or as William James put it in his Varieties of Religion Experience(1900) what are the limits of our sacrificial propensities. At the age of 62 I do not know, but I am aware that my capacity has been approached in recent years. I know to a significant extent what I can and can not do; I can see the edge approaching but, unless I have some advance warning, I still fall off. Having reached my limit, I still plunge into the abyss if I take too much on. Too much now is quite easily defined as too much social interaction

I like to think too that if any of this memoir is some form of self-help, I am offering it in the form of a quasi-manual, a semi-philosophical guide for the intelligent person. If self-help there be here, I hope it is a welcome departure from the usual bellyaching, angsting and endless expressions of concern. ''Our best chance of contentment,'' Proust writes ''lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes and emotional betrayals. If we can also avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time and the weather, then some degree of contentment may be ours.'' Following the inevitable nine, seven or five steps of those self-help books may also help, I say with tongue in cheek.

For some, especially writers, language itself is the primary arena within which the shattering experiences of life are coped with and the individual assertivenss and agency becomes manifest from behind the angst. For writers talk is more important than action, indeed talk itself is action because words determine thoughts and actions. "Language... is the parent, and not the child, of thought.... Men are the slaves of words." This may have been true of the philosopher Kant whom posterity caricatured as a man "who was all thought and no life" or "a man who neither had a life nor a history." I've come to the view that thought and action, two of the major facets of our lives, can not be separated. The practical and the mystic have become one in our day.

My journey is not only the core and central thread of my life story; it is also the recurrent and most enduring principle of my life. Nowhere, throughout the narrative, will one encounter a complacently ensconced pioneer. I have been a migratory and volatile spirit which has sprung out of the most established and rooted position in a conservative Canadian consciousness. I have often been beaten down by circumstances, depressed by body chemistry and situations, called by that curious combination of sorrow and a strange desolation of hope into a quietness, but complacency has not been a quality I have battled with—although I must say that complacency sounds restful and not unattractive after some of life's other battles I have had to contend with.

My resistance to the dominant mores of my time has been articulated, made public, and critiqued in several textual identities of which this autobiography is one. My discernment, my autonomy, my sense of personal agency is manifest, it seems to me, in this very writing. This writing is both the site and symbol of my resistance to the dominant ideology of my time and its major cultural manifestations. This resistance takes place with the aid of the great power of retrospect and hindsight and gives to much of life's messiness an order and shape. In the end, though, much is messiness, for not all of thought is ordered, tidy and logically sequential.

If I give to my life artistic form, spiritual vision and design in retrospect; if I discover a more profound truth in the context of this vision than an unfertilized collection of facts could deliver, I understand that is part of a design-imposed, meaning-making, process that I give to my life. Perhaps a great deal of what has happened to me is fate, destiny, a certain predestination. Such was the view Henry James took of his life when he wrote his autobiography in the evening of his life. There is little doubt of the importance of fate from a Bahá'í perspective. I wish I could say in this context that my sentences had a quality of stunning exactitude, lyricism and comedy, an aphoristic concision but, alas, style is not a quality bestowed on me as it was on Flaubert. Perhaps this is because I have not been willing to work at it as obsessively as he over many decades. But I have made a start.

I wish I could also say, too, that I possessed the kind of grand and exuberant personality that the great twentieth century literary critic William Empson is reputed to have possessed. Such a personality would have been handy in so many of the social situations in life. So much of life has been social. That refined, sophisticated, and erudite scholar with his great reckless energy for life, with his willingness to throw his entire self into the interpretation and criticism of literature, William Empson had an energy and passion that informed his critical work and served to renew in the common reader a sense that there is some literature that can matter deeply to all and any of us. Alas, although I shared Empson's energy it did not result in any literary erudition in my case; although, like Empson, I threw myself into my academic life in varying degrees with some success over half a century, I never made it to the major leagues. My destiny was to be a minor poet in the minor leagues. But I enjoyed playing poetic-ball in a small town in the minors. If you love playing ball part of you does not care where.

I was certainly not in the same league as Empson, arguably one of the three greatest literary critics in the last several hundred years; although we both had sexual proclivities and desires which, in the case of Empson, seemed to result in great notoriety. I had certainly experienced shame, fear and guilt in relation to my sexual urges and activities, among other sources of shame. Fear of exposure was very real and, after my young adulthood, I was not able to share my concerns with anyone except my wife. These were battles I fought, for the most part, on my own. Being honest about my failures in the sexual domain was virtually an impossible thing to do outside my immediate marital relationship. There simply was not the context, the relationship for such a degree of intimacy or confessionalism. And my religious values did not encourage such confessionalism.

People like myself write always, as Virginia Woolf puts it, "of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilized the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosophers' turret. Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the onset of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth." I think in this two thousand five hundred page series of volumes I have shown some of the courage of a lion tamer; I have shown some of the robustness in my philosophy and some of reason's bowels. I leave it to readers to judge how much.

These doings of the mind in the catalogue of my diverse writings, in a steadily accumulating and interacting body of enthusiasms with their ever-intensifying interplay of nuance is, I think, my real autobiography. The battles of my emotions in the lion tamers' cage is yet another autobiography and one did not keep me away from God as many such battles do to others. My sense of unworthiness seemed instrumental in drawing me closer to God, to appreciating His forgiveness, something I was assured of over and over again by Bahá'u'lláh. I had right desire, but possessed wayward appetites, a sort of contagion of the lower self, part of an inward war made of thin but tough veils, battles which I often lost, susceptibilities of conscience which were simply not strong enough. I was not willing, or so it seemed, to burn the bridges across which certain sins continually came. In a world like this, in the darkest hours before the dawn, I was confident I had much company, company that ran into the millions—if not billions—in my sins of omission or commission.

Alcohol was never a problem for me as it was for Empson. Comparisons with others, of course, are sometimes useful but, as the cliché goes, comparisons are often odious. Autobiography's ultimate purpose, Henry James felt, was to fix the self for all time, to put forth the idea that the autobiographer matters and that his life is significant in the supposed order of things.       I certainly like to think my life matters, that it has meaning in the ultimate scheme of things, that in writing this autobiography I am not merely imposing form on chaos, that all that I think is not merely an exercise in subjectivity, that my life is not so deeply private as to be beyond scientific scrutiny, that it derives its importance from factors beyond that which is unsystematic, even chaotic, uncommunicable and emotional in life.

The scientific domain contains an important element of subjectivity and total objectivity is always impossible. One of the key elements of science is that it exists in, indeed generates, a community, a framework, of interpretation. Indeed, the scientist can only function within such a community. That is also true, at least in some ways, for this autobiographer. The community in question for me is the Bahá'í community and, more generally, the human community.

What makes my work scientific is that I am engaged in a "conscious, explicit organization of knowledge and experience." I am not just engaged in making true statements. One can do this in any quiz or game like trivial pursuit. Proof, in scientific terms and in autobiography, "means nothing more than the total process by which we render a statement more acceptable than its negation." An important caveat here is that the convictions I bring to this exercise, my feelings of certitude, indeed much that I might call tentative hypotheses for example, are part of a psychological state not part of my knowledge. Certitude can often be had with no knowledge at all and hypotheses are things anyone can make. Our emotions organize themselves around our convictions and become part of our way of life. This is one's faith, one's religion. And we all have a religion in this sense; there exists around this religion or faith a theoretical uncertainty and it exists for all of us. Such is some of the intellectual orientation, some of my foundation view, that I take to this autobiography.

Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal, to assert this autonomy, however permanent it may be, than the creative process itself, the process of composition. The creative self, the source of this process, is a society of perishing occasions or selves and the context is an aesthetic one. The writer's task is to develop a coherent system of ideas by which every item of his experience can be interpreted. The fundamental building blocks of nature are not bits of passive, inert, dead matter, but momentary unities of experience, actual entities which are involved in a creative advance into novelty. Such was Whitehead's way of looking at the process. Although I have never been a serious student of Whitehead's I have been broadly aware of his views for forty years.

Verse really does, in Akhmatova's words, grow from rubbish among other things. To express this same idea more elegantly, one could say that verse grows out of slime the same way as a lotus flower. The roots of prose are no more honorable. But there in the roots can also be found faith and thought--the lotus flower's embryo. Without faith and thought no society can long endure and without a common humanity and a practical basis for world order appalling catastrophe threatens to engulf humanity.

As this autobiography has come to take form increasingly since I began writing it over twenty years ago, I have felt a measure of literary and psychological power and humility. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that self-narrative is a tool used to gain self-determinacy.       This work is also partly an illness narrative, partly a salvation narrative, partly a travel narrative, as autobiographers often call these sub-genres, and partly an act of becoming and re-becoming. Through self-narration I partly re-make myself, re-fashion and re-invent a new understanding of myself. With this story I try to resist the several disabling definitions that could label my life and so to write myself into/with a rhetorical normalcy. Narrative is used as a tool, a technology, that is intended to be a vehicle to freedom, self-definition, and self-expression. Unlike some writers, I have no obsession with being taken seriously. What consumes many words of many writers in an attempt to be taken seriously, consumes little of mine. I have not set this work before the public with the confidence, still less the complacency, of an established master. This book belongs to my middle and late adulthood. I had no reputation to defend, indeed, I was hardly known anywhere except by coteries so small and insignificant that it might be wondered why I bothered to write this work at all.

In some ways this book is a valediction to my international overseas pioneering experience as a formative event in my life and the lives of the many international pioneers. When an event ends, its history begins. The end of my venture is not yet, but it certainly feels like the beginning of the end or, as Churchill once said, the end of the beginning. As a project, this writing is understandably tinged with nostalgia, but that is a price I don't mind paying for what happens with greater intensity when I write. Most works of history are generated by some personal experience and intellectual debate would be more fruitful if historians admitted from the beginning that they were writing, at least in part, about themselves. As autobiographer I have no problem with such an admission. By placing my own experience within my work there is an honesty in my attempt to understand myself and the world with which I deal. There is also a kind of parallel between the traveller, the pioneer, writing retrospectively to give shape and meaning to his experience, and the historian giving shape and meaning not only to his own intellectual travels but to the part of the story of history that he writes.

Autobiographies, and certainly the one I am writing here, are not playbacks of life events. They require a point of view from which past events are tied together and are made relevant for a here and now, with an eye on the autobiographer's future orientations. I am quite conscious, as Jerome Bruner points out too, that my memories often become victims of my self-making stories.

And so it is that the self, myself, becomes a product of my telling and not some essence to be delved for in the recesses of my subjectivity. My narrative, my memoir, grants to this written context of storytelling, this social setting on paper, what might be called certain literary privileges that are unique to this setting, that are different than the context, the setting that would exist, and does exist, when I tell the story orally, in a short essay form or in a poem.

Salman Rushdie said at a conference recently that he found it interesting that the organizers would invite him, a writer, to speak at a conference about communication. "Writers don't speak, writers write," he said. By the time I came to write full-time in my mid-fifties, I had had 50 years of talking and listening in great quantities and I did not mind not speaking; indeed, I preferred quiet. I was ready for the writing art. My corridor of flesh, of skin, bones and fluid, a corridor that allows language an access to the direct experience of writing as well as what one is writing about, enjoyed what Helene Cixous called in her equating of body and text, the pleasure of writing and the pleasure of sexuality/sensuality. In writing, the self folds around absences and my writing functions as a substitute for the social, the sexual, the verbal. My whole body is poised in between and resonates with, movements, spilling toward words that mark out the journey along the markings on the page. Running between the blue lines, the movement out of nothing takes my senses beyond the limit of skin, beyond the optic nerve, beyond the taste buds, beyond the beat of the ear drum, deep inside my throat, beyond the vocal chords. In writing this autobiography, I go beyond, below, within.

The imaginative powers with which one writes possess a flexibility and elasticity born of the very tension they seek to resolve. At least that is the way that Bahiyyih Nakhjavani puts it in an article published in 1982, the year I arrived north of Capricorn in an important part of this pioneer journey. After twenty years on the pioneer trail I had certainly experienced much tension. Perhaps, as Nakhjavani expresses the concept here, my imaginative powers had begun to give birth to both a flexibility and elasticity that would manifest themselves in my writing in the next several decades. I liked her theory. These imaginative powers exercised themselves as I stepped outside of society in order to gain a more critical perspective on it not so much for the purpose of defining myself as for understanding what I was not.

An important part of this tool of autobiography is repetition which Arthur Frank says is a medium of becoming. And all this becoming, all this repetition, took place in a world of memorabilia with all its metaphysical significance. Sometimes this metaphysical significance got lost in the daily round of habit. There is often nothing as old and tired as today's newspaper. Repetition is not always ennobling, refreshing. It provides a context but only one part of life's context and that part is usually neither new nor bright.

Perhaps at a later date I will expand on this notion of the metaphorical significance, metaphorical nature, of physical reality in general and this memorabilia in particular. From the newspaper to the knife, fork and spoon the memorabilia of our lives have much to speak to us. But this is a separate topic. Perhaps, though, I'm not to be trusted with either metaphor or facticity. The members of the Fourth Estate, the working men and women of the print and electronic media, whom intellectuals have been inveighing against for more than a century are, like novelists, all professional contorters, twisters of stories, of memorabilia, in one way or another. Much of the contorting, though, in media can be viewed as an authorless form of literature. Autobiographers do their share of contorting as well, but they are far from anonymous. Autobiographers are active participants. They are, in a sense, behind the scenes, but readers know who they are. If there is any contorting and twisting done, at least readers know who is doing it even if they don't know when and if it is done. Memorabilia offers a rich mise en scene for contorting and for playing with the metaphorical nature of reality.

The result of this playing with memorabilia is that some writers plumb the depths of experience while others remain fixed, gloriously or not-so-gloriously, on the surface. What some writers lack in profundity they make up for in verbal dexterity. In life's exacting ledger of posterity each writer plays with life's memorabilia in a myriad of ways. Some drive their pens on the tumbling ocean's surface and its endlessly repeated waves while others go to its depths discovering new and mysterious life forms. Different watery memorabilia cross each person's life and the significance of this memorabilia, the appreciation the writer offers his readers of what he experiences, the pleasures of the everyday objects, the commonplaces enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos, are all so varied.

Given all the television shows, commercials, and infinite number of images that people are confronted with every day, their creators usually go by unnoticed, working behind the scenes. Their identities are known to a knowledgeable few, but for the most part, they remain anonymous. In place of sentences and paragraphs, aesthetic devices are used to portray mood and appeal to the senses of sight and sound. At its lowest point, mediums within media such as television, film, music, and computers can appeal to people's lack of attention. A lack of the ability to read will not hinder their enjoyment for any given sitcom or video game. Readers of new work through the use of appropriation, if the work is successful, will be able to disregard the original author's influence on the creation. The author will have become an inactive participant, whose roll will no longer extend itself into the piece's interpretation. The death of the author is the only thing that will yield a pure, untainted view of the piece. Some may say that this authorless creation lacks soul. Perhaps. On the other hand, when one views the credits at the end of some program, some film, it is clear that the creation is the collective work of many and could be said to possess a collective soul. Perhaps this notion of the collective soul has been present right back to the beginning of narrative in the western tradition. In place of speculations and fabrications about the narrator of Hesiod, for example, modern analysts are returning us to the way Hesiod the narrator, the Sender of the Way,5 would surely want to be understood--through his words. If we don't know who wrote the words, does it matter.

Often, though, if not to a significant extent, we come to be known through our body language. A study of body language reveals how much of our entire communication process relies on body language. I was often seen as a laid-back person. One of my students once said that he thought I was so laid back that I might as well have been parallel to the ground. I never felt I was super cool like, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, Jim Morrison in the Doors or Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. They were all cool and I was not in their league.

Any writer, and especially those like myself who have spent a good part of their lives in Australia, cannot but see that the power of religion, especially belief in revelation, is weaker today than it was in any other epoch in human history. More and more children grow up without faith in God, without belief in a reward and punishment associated with the divine, without belief in the immortality of the soul and even in the validity, the importance, of a common ethical system. The genuine writer cannot ignore the fact that the family is losing or has lost its spiritual foundation. Such were the views of Isaac Bashevis Singer, expressed in his 1978 Nobel Lecture given about ten days before I left Ballarat for Tasmania. When Singer wrote these words in 1978 I was struggling with another episode of manic-depression; I was out of work and with three kids and a wife; I was more concerned about my own spiritual foundations than society's. Many would agree with Singer. Like so many issues, I think the ones raised by Singer are more complex and require much more than two or three core sentences. I think the ideas Singer expresses here are substantially true, the issues surrounding them are not simple, though, and so I will leave this issue for another volume.

I have often felt that a writer is only doing his ethical and political duty if he or she becomes morally independent of their formative society. But this can only be achieved partly. I was especially conscious of this as a student, as a teacher and, indeed, as an employee in many an organization. One could disobey the rules, one could have a different set of moral standards, one could have different interests than the great majority, one could flaunt the organizational standards but only to an extent. Moral independence from the group is one of the grandest themes of all literature, because, as some argue, it is the only means of moral progress, the establishment of some higher ethical concept. Consciousness of this honourable calling may induce the poet to present himself as at once dignified and eccentric – epithets which catch some aspects of myself as a social presence.

Of course, in the Bahá'í society I have no desire to be morally independent of its mores and folkways, its customs and beliefs. But, given the fact that the moral and ethical preachments and encouragements in the Bahá'í writings are so extensive, Bertrand Russell's words which he once told a meeting may be pertinent: "the Ten Commandments are like an examination paper and should bear the rubric: ‘Only six need be attempted.'" One can do in life only so much. If, as one noted Bahá'í writer once pointed out, there are some 1400 virtues that one can find in the Bahá'í writings, one may do well in life if one only manifested, say, eight or nine hundred. Perhaps the general point here is that the subject is not simple.

In life we do not have direct access to the thoughts of other people. We have to infer the working of other minds from surface phenomena such as speech, body language, behavior, and action. R. D. Laing put the point vividly: "your experience of me is invisible to me and my experience of you is invisible to you. I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience is man's invisibility to man." This autobiography and whatever memorabilia remains of my life has taken away some of the invisibility. But still, however much I have put together clues to my life and described its unfolding patterns, however much I have developed various theses about why I and others reacted to the possibilities and circumstances the way they did, I could easily have wasted my time and never touched the truth. This is a theoretical possibility that the autobiographer must acknowledge. Unlike Samuel Beckett, though, in his discussion of Proust, I am not a writer suffering mysterious agonies whose origins are unclear to him. Most of the agonies I have suffered in life have been all too clear to me. Like Beckett's work on Proust, though, my autobiography is also intended as an academic study.

In that half century before the Declaration of the Bab in 1844, when His two precursors were alerting people to the coming fulfillment, Goethe made the following comment about his own great oeuvre. He called his work and especially his autobiography--one big confession. Looking at his work and the work of other great writers in the broadest sense, you could say the same of them all: Shakespeare, Balzac, Wordsworth, etc. We find, so runs the argument, total self-examination and self-accusation, a total confession in the work of any author. They are naked, I think, when we look into their words. "Maybe it's the same with any writing," said the British poet laureate, Ted Hughes, "writing that has real poetic life."

Hughes went on to say in that same interview that "maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn't actually want to say, but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it's the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic — makes it poetry." The poet is actually saying something he desperately needs to share. The real mystery is this strange need. Why can't he just hide it and shut up? Why does he have to blab? Why do human beings need to tell their stories and confess? These questions possess an ambiguity for me and for others. One way I deal with this ambiguity is to see myself as a poet in the realm of prose. Another way is to recognize and admit I've had a secret nearly all my life. I've had things that I could rarely if ever say and some things I could say but rarely to any depth and intimacy.

If most poetry doesn't seem to be in any sense confessional, it's because the strategy of concealment, of obliquity, can be so compulsive that it's almost entirely successful. The smuggling analogy may help us here. The smuggler is loaded with interesting cargo that seems to be there for its own sake but, in reality, it's there for another purpose. I do a little smuggling here in my autobiography, but I feel as if I've declared most of my baggage, most of the items in my larder, so to speak. If my larder collects something of the food of other writers, I usually declare it. I draw on other writers because I find in reading their works and biographies I am so often reading about myself. Reading the words of famous writers often seems tantamount to reading about oneself, writing about them becomes pleasurably self-revelatory?

In that half century before the Declaration of the Bab, characterized as it was by those two chief precursors of the Babi Revelation, there emerged what was the defining quality of autobiography: the author's historicisation of his/her own unique development. Goethe, it is often argued, was the first truly modern exponent of autobiography. "It was he who first wrote his own life as the history of an individuality. He saw his personal formation as the effective interplay of his self and his world." I have taken Weintraub's thesis about modernity, the self and autobiography and put it into the context of Bahá'í history. The history of autobiography by Bahá'ís recapitulates Bahá'í history. That is, the encounter with the great mass of humankind on the planet has elicited among Bahá'ís many cultural responses. There has been a growing tendency to think of the self in the same way that the fully evolved Western autobiographer does: as an individual being shaped by the contingencies of his or her experience. Bahá'ís, at least some and at this stage still relatively few, are stimulated, by their various experiences of pioneering, community building, extending the Bahá'í teachings to their contemporaries, study and many other activities to produce an historicized sense of a highly individualised self, just as in modern western autobiography. Autobiography is not merely a handy evidentiary supplement to other sources, it is one of the premium sites for the articulation, the expression, of the development, the process, of spiritual development. In many ways spiritual development and spiritual realities are intangible abstractions. But autobiography can help the individual give concrete expression to the subtleties of this gradual and complex process.

A study of autobiography by Bahá'ís in the next century must and will have something to say about the prodigious evidence of autobiography's many dimensions and expressions in the first two centuries of Bahá'í history at least since Shaykh Ahmad arrived in Iran in 1805/6. This study, though, is not my purpose here. My work is but one more example in the long line.

Edward Said, Professor at Columbia, said in 1999 that the main cause he is fighting for is "not something about political parties or positions or organizations, but rather an individual commitment which I don't regret at all." For me, my cause is both individual commitment and organizational, Bahá'í Administration, the nucleus and pattern for a future World Order.

Writers, autobiographers, indeed, all human beings, throw off some of their luggage, their baggage, when they talk or write. But to tell it all is just not appropriate. They and we deliberately strip off the veiling analogies occasionally and go to the root confessing some item of one's deeper life. The luggage, the baggage, is open to all for inspection. Perhaps Sylvia Plath in our time, in the months before the Universal House of Justice was elected, in early 1962, went further than most. "Her secret," Ted Hughes said, "was most dangerous to her. She desperately needed to reveal it. You can't overestimate her compulsion to write as she did. She had to write those things — even against her most vital interests. She died before she knew what The Bell Jar and the Ariel poems were going to do to her life, but she had to get them out.

She had to tell everybody, like those Native American Indians who periodically tell everything that was wrong and painful in their lives in the presence of the whole tribe. It was no good doing it in secret; it had to be done in front of everybody else. Maybe that's why poets go to such lengths to get their poems published. It's no good just whispering them to a priest or a confessional. And it's not for fame, because they go on doing it after they've learned what fame amounts to. No, until the revelation's actually published, the poet feels no release. In all that, Sylvia was an extreme case, I think."

I suppose I got this sense of release on the internet in the early years of this new millennium. I certainly was not interested in fame, as I pointed out elsewhere in this autobiography. Like Plath I felt compelled to write but, unlike Plath or those native American peoples, I did not feel the need to tell all. With more than 2000 pages, though, there is enough to keep most readers busy for a time. I've had a need to write about the Bahá'í Faith for, perhaps, forty years. My autobiography gave me this opportunity. It also gave me the opportunity in which I could say 'me voici', 'it's me here.'

Peter Read, in his article Private Papers and a Sense of Place in an online seminar Private Lives Revealed: Letters, Diaries, History,1 analyses the nineteenth century English poet John Clare's verse. He sees Clare's verse as an interesting example of private papers. Clare's poetry was so eclectic, his language so personal, his personal involvement so touching, that Read argues Clare's poetry was much more akin to a collection of private papers that we might find in a library than to the poetry of a poet who could have become, but didn't, one of the best-known poets of the nineteenth century. Instead, wrote the cultural historian John Barrell in discussing Clare, "insofar as Clare was successful in expressing his own sense of place, he was writing himself out of the main stream of European literature."

Accomplished poets and novelists are fully aware of the need for their readers to be able to generalise from the emotions which the writer presents about a particular place to their own world view and life experiences as readers. Private papers often reveal such private emotions, and private emotions often reveal intense, ungeneralised concerns for particularities which hardly ever surface amongst the published works of professional writers. I mention this article and the poet John Clare because I sometimes think that all of my writing could be seen as a simple, if lengthy, collection of private papers.

During the last two decades, while I was writing this autobiography, some of the scientific work from the physical and biological sciences and the philosophy of science was turning away from regular and smooth systems in order to investigate more fragmented, more chaotic phenomena. So, too, in the study of the writing of autobiography there was an increasing consciousness, an increasing interest, in autobiography's complexity, ambiguity, indeed, its chaotic content. In the last two decades there has been much interest in chaos theory, but I don't want to go into this labyrinthine subject. There is certainly an element of the fragmented, of the chaotic, in my own life, in all our lives. Sometimes the feeling of life's fragmentation, its lack of cohesion, partakes of a certain absurdity, a certain vanity and emptiness. Sometimes these feelings are pervasive and sometimes they are short-lived, momentary feelings. This new direction in autobiography can be seen emerging all the way back to the 1950s. But it is not my purpose here to write a history of autobiography. I do present short capsules of that history from time to time because it throws light on my work.

Speaking of direction, as I have from time to time in what has become a four book set, the process in writing autobiography is as invisible as is the role of director in a theatrical production. I create something, as does a theatre director, that can never be touched. Both art forms, both roles, are measured, to a significant extent by the number of people in the audience or in the readership. Just as it is the role of the director to make the production as meaningful and illuminating as possible, so is this true of the writer of an autobiography. The director's work is finished when the play is staged and the autobiographer's is finished when the book is sent to press or, now, posted on the internet. Both are responsible for the artistic vision and the coherence of the product. Both are managers of a project. In the case of autobiographers, though, they have the multiple role of lighting, designer, composer, costume and set designer, writer, publicist, among others. They must create the space where all of these roles collaborate to present the final multi-dimensional product. They must engage a certain sensibility, possess a certain desire, a striving and sometimes even a passionate ecstasy or enthusiasm for their task. If this sensibility and passion does not result in an attractive package no one will get turned on, no one will read the book.

After more than three decades of living in Australia and nearly three living in Canada I have come to accept what one writer called the "Toquevillian paradox." Simply stated it is the view that the highest excellences in life are nearly always achieved through moderate, not extreme, zeal. There is usually something blinding about zealousness, something that overshoots the mark. Eagerness attracts but overeagerness repels. Sincerity, yes, but an emotional intensity turned up too high, no. A general social climate of pervasive, vast cynicism, skepticism, even indifference toward personal commitment, toward the epic and the tragic in life requires of the writer, the poet, like myself a moderate expression. My unashamedly introverted voice I have learned to express with humour, with a light touch and with an extended autobiography, at least I like to think so.

I am also conscious of a basic rhetorical problem that I have as autobiographer; namely, creating an appearance of honesty. All autobiographers have this problem. Howard Helsinger puts the problem this way: "Testifying to his own character, the autobiographer is a suspect witness whom the least skeptical auditors might doubt..….The more personal his testimony, the less liable to corroboration by public knowledge, and hence the paradox: the greater the autobiographer's effort at introspective honesty, the more his subject he grows to doubt."

The poet Elizabeth Browning, expressing another problem faced by the autobiographer, once wrote: "To be one's own chronicler is a task generally dictated by extreme vanity and often by that instinctive feeling which prompts the soul of man to snatch the records of his life from the dim and misty ocean of oblivion." Even at the early age of fourteen, she recognized the "extreme vanity" inherent in an autobiography. Vanity has enigmatic qualities; it possesses some of that obscuring dust of acquired knowledge and some of those illusions of satanic fancy. I am warned.

I think this is the great gain that Australian culture has taught me, that I have learned through some osmotic process. I have learned to keep my zeal well-contained, my excitements and intensities appropriately moderated. I have become more comfortable this way. Much must be concealed when one enters the social domain. General ideas and sustained and subtle thought are, for the most part, kept for very special occasions, occasions which are inner and private rather than public and social. And any naturally occurring ecstasy I have learned to express in the inner recesses of my being, but not something for public consumption.

I have learned as well to express and experience a genuine and expansive kindness—around a core which already existed as part of my Canadian heritage—and I have learned to love pleasure in a way that my more restrained Canadian conservatism never allowed me, even in my youth. There is even a certain boisterousness, an honesty, an energy, in the Aussi psyche which has insensibly crossed the borders of my personality and penetrated my emotional nodes. When occasion allows and when it seems right I have found recesses of my personality that in my youth and young adulthood were quite unknown to me. In this experience there was catharsis, relief and a feeling that I was tapping into something that was there but never before experienced. But there was also exhaustion. The social domain was a game I could only play for limited amounts of time by my fifties and by my sixties I kept it as limited as possible.

Just as casting is important in the role of the director so too is this the case for writers as they choose just what they will include in their work from the thousands of people who have been on the stage of their life. The right cast helps the dramaturgical process on the stage as well as between the covers of a book. A good play, a successful production, says Sue Rider, "is one which is electrifying, spiritually, emotionally, visually and intellectually stimulating for the people who see it, the audience." This is, I think, equally true of the final product of a piece of writing. As the writer of this work, I have to be like a creative director and create an artistic environment where my own creativity can blossom. Flexibility, openness to change, listening to others, indeed, a wide range of qualities needed for creativity to find a home are necessary if the work is to live and engage others. Even then, in the end, only some will come to see the production, read the article or read the book. Few of the total population will become stimulated. The exercise is not fundamentally about popularity, at least not to me, however important a variable popularity may be.

Rather than seeing form, literary or physical, as something divided into the classical binaries of order and entropy, form now is often regarded as a continuum expressing varying degrees of pattern and repetition, elements that are at the core of structure, any structure. Insofar as the structure of this book is concerned, it seems to me it is more cumulative than sequential. What readers get here is more a group of semi-independent analyses occurring in unevenly distributed clusters, rather than linear arguments leading to a clear conclusion. The individual analyses I put on page after page are themselves often partial and the conclusions are stated somewhat obliquely. Some of the book's best moments are suggestive in ways that elude easy articulation. I want readers to realize that I am grappling with some of the central theoretical issues of autobiography, particularly in a Bahá'í context, in a way that few Bahá'ís, if any, have done before.

Not everyone will enjoy thinking about such matters, such analysis and introspection, as I have raised in this book, and those who don't will probably dislike this book or, more importantly, they will probably not even pick the book up or come to know of its existence. What I try to do is make a case, one that is undeniably personal and quite idiosyncratic, but ultimately I hope persuasive--a case that this book is less interesting for its connections to existing scholarship than for the fresh and, I like to think, provocative things that I have to say. Each reader, especially each Bahá'í reader, has been weaned since the late 1970s and early 1980s--a generation now--on a diversity of print that no previous generation has enjoyed and I trust this diversity has set a heterogeneous perspective, thus overcoming whatever homogeneity had existed before. This experience of the last generation makes, I like to think, a receptive climate for my work. But, of course, those looking for a narrative, an interesting story, are likely to be disappointed when they come to read this work.

I have felt, more and more as this memoir developed in the last two decades, that the very appropriate role of both my memoirs and my poetry should be what Mary Shelley called "the intrusion of self in a work of art," and "the habit of self-analysis and display." For this approach results in a work in which "the human heart" is as some "undiscovered country." Mary Shelley says such works may become the favorites among men because of their "imagination and sensibility," but they are favorites only to some readers. Such works, she continues, belonging as they do to the imagination, are often not appreciated or enjoyed by many.

Doris Lessing once wrote that the great bourgeois monster, the bourgeois nightmare is repetition. It is, of course, both nightmare and salvation. At one end of the continuum we find extreme order, pattern and traditional forms and at the other end we find gibberish, chaos and disorder. Fragmentation is something we all experience and it is found between life's extremes and at the extremes as well. Fractal autobiography works in the ground between the extremes of life. Digression, interruption, fragmentation and lack of continuity, then, are part of the normal world of autobiography. Fractal comes from the Latin for fragmented or broken: hence the term fractal autobiography. Autobiography, as a literary form, possesses a certain malleability, a certain pluralism of forms. In my work, my narrative and analysis, there is no single triumphant highway; rather, there is a maze of paths, a network of disparate forms. I have experienced much of my life this way. If there is any single, any major, creative achievement, it lies in the synthesis of divergent forms such as prose and poetry and content and ideas from several of the social sciences and humanities mixed with the quotidian narrative of an everyman.

However much of a synthesis I achieve, my work is riddled with heterogeneity, a strange composite of belief and scepticism, action, yarn and analytical or metaphysical abstruseness. Some of my narrative seems fashioned out of an adventure story and some seems derived from what I have read, heard and seen in several dozen places: amid the sounds of students moving down corridors and in classrooms, amid the screech of traffic in a taxi and many cities and towns, the deafening clatter of machines in a tin mine, the whisper of voices in offices and the variously pitched voices of people in lounge-rooms across two continents. Into such robust and not-so-robust stuff, however, I infiltrate fine-spun strands of philosophical and psychological speculation. My story and my analysis characteristically oscillates between contraries. Whatever unity I feel I achieve in the midst of these contraries and this heterogeneity; I'm sure there will be readers for whom this unity is equally elusive, usually unattained and, in attained, not of interest to them.

William Empson in his now classic work on ambiguity suggests, the "essential key to the poetic use of language is that it is the reader who invents reasons and weighs judgements as to why a poet has chosen to convey the facts he has." Ambiguity is a major device for the poet to engage us imaginatively, by forcing us to evaluate the balance of a particular phrase. There is much poetry in this autobiography and there is some ambiguity. Ambiguity is unavoidable in both daily life and in poetry. I must say, though, that I try to avoid the ambiguous as much as possible to make the readers' job easier and because, for the most part, I like to call things straight. Much of the humour everywhere, but especially here in Australia where I have laid my hat for decades, is based on ambiguity among other factors. I find it both enriches life and lightens it as well as causes problems between people because of that very ambiguity which so often can result in taking a comment the wrong way, causing offence.

As architect Nigel Reading writes, "Pure Newtonian causality is an incorrect, a finite view, of life's processes, but then again so is the aspect of complete uncertainty and infinite chance." The nature of reality is now seen as somewhere in between. One writer called this interplay between chance and causality, a dynamical symmetry. It occurs to me that this shift in focus from a simple, a polarized view of life to a more dynamic, more complex, more chaotic view is something that is expressed in, found in, my autobiography. Of course the whole idea of freedom, of free will, is an illusion "in a world where every effect must have a necessary and sufficient physical cause." It's an old conundrum, free-will and determinism.. I like to think that we overcome this encompassing determinism by what Whitehead calls a "creative advance into novelty." This is an expression I first came across nearly forty years ago. I liked it then and, after 40 years, I find it expresses much that has been my experience.

The poetry, the autobiography I am calling fractal shares many traits with that contested term--postmodern. Often the postmodern writer dismisses the very idea that a historical, coherent, composite person ever existed. The biographer does not have to dig for true persons with existential truths surrounding their lives. For such people and such truths do not exist. Some historical figures, like Dickens and Shakespeare, are so large, so amorphous, that they can take whatever shape biographers want to give them. Many a postmodernist would argue that voice "is a patchwork of other people's voices" as well as their own. I would argue, with the postmodernist, that this work of mine is, among other things, but an echo of hundreds of different books that I read in preparing to write this autobiography. To many a postmodernist I simply don't really exist as a character. I'm just a little patchwork figure. In someways this is an exaggeration, but it contains some of the spirit of the approach of the postmodernist to autobiography. These remarks contain, too, some of the spirit of my own approach, my own understanding, of this literary creation of mine.

Some contemporary poetries and genres of autobiography show an allegiance to romantic, confessional or formalist traditions. And so does some of my work. Fractal poetry, fractal aesthetics and fractal autobiography describe another feature of my literary topography. When poets and autobiographers address aesthetics, their own work, their writing, inevitably shades their views. I write from perceptions of where my poems, my autobiography, have been lately and where they are both likely to be headed. I write in a middle, a fractal, ground between the elitist and populist polarities or views of autobiography. As the curtain begins to fall in these early years of the evening of my life, on what has been an adventurous sixty years, I scramble about with cultural theorists and artists to attempt to sum up the last half century or so of both my personal life and society's cultural production and historical experience. It's a self-interested activity, of course, with one eye on an hypothesized readers in the future. I stand with social critics and philosophers as the millennium turns and I gaze both backwards and forwards. I would like to exclaim, "aha! I've got it." I'd like to win a gold star and enjoy endless invitations to dinners and panels for the next 10 years—well theoretically. In reality, though, I have come to experience a strong distaste for much in the social domain.

The art critic, John Ruskin, organized his past life chiefly in terms of moments of vision because he conceived himself essentially as a spectator, as one, that is, who lived chiefly by seeing. He said he felt fully alive only when engaged in the act of vision. For Ruskin, the core of his life experience was the thirst for visible fact and a standing apart from the flow of life so that he could look on. For me, as it is for all of us, the eye is the chief tool of the rational faculty, but I have often felt somewhat illiterate visually. I am not able to encompass my life so centrally around vision as Ruskin did and, although I too have been a spectator--aren't we all—I have been much more than this. I am storyteller, recaller of events, analyst, historian, psychologist and sociologist writing so that those of the generations to come will not forget the four epochs of the first century of this Formative Age or, to put it more accurately, will have more insights into the period in question.

In conventional fiction and autobiography a narrative continuity is usually and clearly discernible. But it is impossible to create an absorbing narrative, it seems to me, without at the same time enriching it with images, asides, themes and variations—impulses from within. Just as the first historian in the West, Herodotus, placed great stress on personal identity and motive over institutional factors and often halted his narrative "for tangential observations," so is this my approach.

This emphasis on and use of the tangential is evident in much fiction: Joyce, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner are obvious examples. The narrative line has tended to weaken, merge with, and be dominated by, the sum of variations. This is also true in much autobiography. Each narrative step in a great deal of modern writing is likely to provoke many sidewinding pages before the next narrative step is taken. A lot of the power of many writers is to be found in these sidewindings. In addition, a writer's side-glances or, as Emily Dickinson called the process, 'looking aslant on the world', are equally important. What happens in jazz when the melody merges with the improvisations and the improvisations dominate has been happening in fiction and autobiography for some time now.

This is certainly true in both my autobiography and my poetry. There is some narrative in my autobiography and there is a sense of continuity which is clear, but there are also variations, improvisations, sidewindings, side-glances and impulses from within. These variations, I know from experience, are too much for many readers. But as in daily life, one can not connect with everyone.

There is another element of this memoir that some readers may have trouble connecting with. That is its epic quality. I see this work as an epic in its own right and as a small part in a much bigger epic involving the origin and development of the Bahá'í Faith and its community.

"All historical epics," as Benjamin Friedlander notes in his analysis of Bahá'í poet Robert Hayden's epic, "are first of all affirmations of community." While there is affirmation here, my rendition of epic is more a simple preoccupation with a continuing historical tradition which I played a part of during four epochs. Like Hayden's America and his failed attempt at an epic of the Negro comunity, my epic rendering of community--the Bahá'í community--is, partly, a problem with many algebraic variables but no one solution. I do not see my work as either failure or success but, rather, work in progress or process. This work and my life has been captive by the fascination of those things, mixed of light and darkness, that are the passing phenomena of this spacially and temporally conditioned universe of names and forms that I have absorbed in my life. The shaping force of civilization is lived experience and at the heart of this epic is just that: inner experience--mine, peculiar and private, at a particular juncture in history. Community is problematic, enigmatic and the sine qua non of this memoir. But I can't help but agree with the sentiments of Joseph Campbell when he says: "each individual is the centre of a mythology of his own." As Bahá'u'lláh says, we each must find for ourselves the indwelling God, the Thou at the centre of our world--and the crossover, for the Bahá'í, the cornerstone of community, is symbolized by Bahaullah.

Many historians make of their work, the content of their work, an epic. Herodotus, to continue drawing on his history, makes of the Persian wars a great epic. These wars are for him a "struggle between barbarism and civilization projecting this back into events long after they occurred." The Bahá'í epic is ideally suited to be the screenplay for a Cecil B. DeMille epic film, but it will be some time before the Bahá'í narrative is seen in this context of epic. My own view is that the entire history of this Faith, beginning with the lives of its two precursors reads uncannily like a dramatic presentation of history on celluloid. But I leave that for future directors, producers and cinematographers.

The earlier senses of 'form' in previous centuries in both autobiography and poetry are not important to me. I have rejected them as irrelevant or, at best, mildly influential to what I am aiming to achieve. Perhaps, to put the issue more accurately and more simply, I have introduced my own autobiographical mix and my own prose-poem form because it serves my purposes more usefully. I find that the literal activity of writing itself is very often my focus. This may prove difficult for some readers as it has often proved difficult for me. The fragmentary, labyrinthine storyline that I present here, like that of Bahá'í history itself, might also present formidable obstacles to readers or, indeed, to any commercial screenplay or epic that might come out of this work down the road of time. But I shall be long gone before such this epic is ever translated onto the big sreeen or the stage, or so I am inclined to think. If the barren beauty and the forbidding nature of many of the landscapes I have lived in is ever to be combined with this memoir's literary and psychological complexities would it ever appeal to escapist movie audiences?

There is a second historian who provides somewhat of a model for my writing; indeed, I like to think I combine or at least aim to combine the best of Herodotus and the best of Thucydides. Perhaps the reason I even refer to these first historians of the western intellectual tradition is that they were part of a course on Greek history which I taught in the late 1980s and early 1990s and so I became more than a little familiar with their works. I like to see this work the way Thucydides did his: as a possession for all time, as a piece of investigation, interpretation and analytical writing, as an account of the moral and social breakdown of society, as part of a mythic paradigm underlying this work, as one attempt to give expression to the will of God and motivation as the two factors which shape the course of history, as an attempt to give expression to the continuity and development of my time and an analysis of the fundamental illness of the age—disunity. Thucydides sought a stable centre for society and I see that stable centre as one that will evolve, in time, from the nucleus and pattern of the Bahá'í Order. Thucydides thought an absence of romance from his work would, over time, detract from its interest and lose him the applause of the moment. There is much which will detract from my work: lack of romance, absence of a simple and provocative story line, a lack of simplicity in the style of my writing. Thucydides' culture was shaken to its roots and he feared for its survival; such is the case with my age and my society. It was shaken to its roots before I was born and the shaking has just gone on and on. Perhaps one day I will draw some further parallels with other historians. Fifteen years ago, at the same time that I began to write poetry extensively, I began a file on the major historians of history and there is much more I could add here from their several philosophies of history. But, for the moment, this will suffice.

My poetry has its beginnings in many places and times. One of the crucial beginnings is in modern times right at the start of the Kingdom of God on earth, from a Bahá'í perspective, in the early 1950s. Specifically, the American poet Allen Ginsberg had a list of slogans that he kept over his desk back in 1954 in San Francisco. The slogans came from Ginsberg's friend Jack Kerouac. Kerouac called them: "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose." They went like this:

"Blow as deep as you want -- write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then readers cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by the same laws operating in his own human mind.... Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to the laws of time---the Shakespearean stress of a dramatic need to speak now in my own unalterable way or forever hold my tongue. Make no revisions….write outwards swimming in a sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion ... tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow! -- now! -- your way is your only way...." Although it would be nearly forty years before I was able to put these words into poetic practice, they say much about the way I go about writing and why?
The objects which occur to me at any given moment of composition, what we might call objects of recognition, can be, must be, treated exactly as they occur to my mind and my senses. Ideas, imaginations, abstractions, conceptions, preconceptions from outside this sensory apparatus, world, paradigm are, for me, introduced to enrich the sensory, the intellectual, picture. They are handled as a series of additions to a field in such a way that a series of tensions are created. These tensions are made to hold and to hold exactly inside the content and the context of my autobiography and its prose and poetry. This content and context has forced itself into being through me, through my writing as autobiographer and poet. This is a central aspect of anything I might say about the memorabilia which will remain after I am gone and which will remain forever irretrievable by me.

The self-chosen place of the autobiographical mode, the point of real reference, is the act and the situation of writing, which provides a sense of coherence. Coherence can be obtained in many ways in life. But, for me, the autobiographical mode, the situation of writing and its products are an important aid. They provide an overarching internal coherence. The recent increase of writings in the autobiographical mode, as far back as the early 1950s and sixties, seems to represent both a reaction to the so-called crisis of the novel and a possible artistic solution to the fragmentary nature of human experience. Yet at the same time the autobiographical turn reveals the paradox inherent in this form. My autobiography reflects a nostalgia for stability, continuity, past experiences and their memories as well as a desire to understand the paradoxes and complexities of life and deal as best I can with life's vacuous, empty, semblances of reality, absurdities and vanities. I'm sure for readers that my narrative will seem disjointed, even plotless; if that is so, it may be due to the fact that life often seems this way. Defining and detecting omissions, the reasons for what I do select, the discontinuities and the irregularities in my autobiography may be as problematic for my readers to assess as it is for readers of many a historical text. Perhaps I am in good company.

Disproving what I say will require readers to tell different stories and to do this will reveal different assumptions, explanations and interpretations of my life and times. To change the narrative is to change the explanation. At the same time, I should not want all those who would analyse this work, to be apologists for me and/or what I say. I think there are many problems with my account: the frequent shifts of locale make narration difficult; the extensive use of analysis often gets in the way of a good story; chopped-up narrative, analysis of questions that can't be answered by narrative and, for readers, a situation of being faced with the reality of the limits of narratological analysis. No matter how much readers study this text there are problems they simply cannot solve: problems with the text, problems with my life, problems with my analysis. If readers are stimulated in their thinking I will be more than satisfied.

Conventional autobiographies could be regarded as the proper medium for the realistic representation of a self and for the narrative recovery of past events from the perspective of the present. Many contemporary autobiographical texts of the last half century stress the illusory nature of what could be called mythopoetic endeavours. Due to the breakdown of a clear demarcation between reality and fiction or reality and imagination, the traditional conception of the autobiographical genre has lost its degree of certainty and truth. Any sense of perfection, of completeness, of comprehensiveness cannot be achieved in written works and most certainly not in these kinds of writings composed of thousands and thousands of potential scraps of recollection--so runs the argument. Memory follows exactly the course of events and chronology, but that which emerges from this chronology is totally different from the actual happening. This is partly due to memory's role in transfiguring the past by bathing things in a sentimental glow, making the good old days appear more beautiful than they actually were. Also, I have come to regard my life as a matter of events of the soul, events which, to quote Levinas again, "resemble mystery rather than spectacle, and whose meaning remains hidden to whoever refuses to enter into the dance."

A few years ago I heard an interview with Australian historian Inga Clendinnen. She said the following about memory: "Memory is profoundly unreliable and profoundly coercive. Memories can seem absolutely real, realer than reality, as you know quite well when you get a sudden whiff of a scent and you're transported back into some situation you'd thought you'd forgotten and you remember everything about it. You know, the sound of the magpies, the smell of the grass, it's there, held in that whiff of scent." And she continued: "I think we construct our memories. I think we have vivid sense impressions and out of them we construct a narrative and the narrative is about the sense we make of what's happening to us and our dominant mood and what we think matters about the scenes we're involved with. And we classically do this very slightly, of necessity, after the event. And then those memories which are personal and private and vivid can become consolidated into a kind of group narrative as with family memories."

I think Clendinnen is right here. At least my experience reflects her views on memory. I often tell stories about something in my life and, after many years of telling a particular story, I begin to wonder if any of what I am saying is true. But I remember the story and I have come to treat it as gospel truth for so long that I feel it to be gospel truth. And it is truth because it matters to me. There's a whole lot of social meaning being invested in our stories and tales. There is also a whole lot of complex interplay between personal and community forces, and between ideology and philosophy on the one hand and practical considerations and activities on the other. This interplay is revealed in my decisions, behaviour and the patterns in my life.

Cherished memories are often all a person has as they head into old age, but these memories are often false in terms of many of their basic substantive details. That's the problem with human memory. It's both fallible and creative. It's also part of our most private, personal and cherished possession. If you attack someone's memories, you're attacking the seams of their being. Nonetheless it's the historian's and the autobiographer's jobs to tackle their own and other people's memories. As an autobiographer it is important that I really understand just how perverse and creative memory is and that it must be kept under close scrutiny.

More generally, though, I leave to posterity the debates that will inevitably occur and recur across the public sphere, debates that will act as if constantly taking the temperature of the habitations of autobiography within the cultural industry. One must acknowledge the impossibility of explaining how all the differentiations across the world of popular non-fiction work in both the contemporary world and, a fortiori, in some future time and place. Publishing houses, both on and off the internet, quite deliberately position themselves with their many-sided strategies in adopting and legitimating their own territories of transaction. These territories of transaction form a valuable framework for the public promotion of authors and genres.

Editors working on both high literary and popular mass market manuscripts are very aware of the different demands posed on and by these widely differentiated genres. This speaking up on behalf of popular non-fiction in general and autobiography in particular, as I have done here, I think raises new questions and interpretations of the nature of the game. Despite all the doomsday rhetoric of the past thirty years, and there has been much, there is something about the role of the genre of autobiography in the cultural industry that keeps rising up with renewed vitality from the overcrowded marketplace, the smouldering pit and the fiery furnace of the world of publishing.

Listed below is a brief outline are some potential scraps of recollection and memory that have not made it into this autobiography thusfar. I have placed these scraps in a series of appendices to bring this epilogue to a conclusion.

List of 15 Appendices Which Follow:

1. Material, resources, information not found in this autobiography.
2. Horowitz and package: A Model-Some Comparisons and Contrasts.
3. Ron Price, "Omissions Are Not Accidents: Erasures & Cancellations
in Ron Price's Manuscripts: A Hypothetical," Unpublished Manuscript, 2006.
4 Punctuation and editing drawing on an article by Emma L. Roth-Schwartz, "Colon and Semi-Colon in Donne's Prose Letters: Practice and Principle," in Early Modern Literary Studies, Vol.3, No.1, 1997
5. A record of books read or partly read: 1962-2007.
6. A Study in Time Management: My Retirement Years: April 1999 to April 2007
7. A note on Choosing One's Literary Executive
8. This essay draws on the "Preface To The Electronic Edition, Writings of Washington, John C. Fitzpatrick, 2002; and 2 Writings: Washington to James Craik, 25 March 1784.
9. Origon and Purpose of My Epic Poem.
10. Outline of my collection of 6000 poems, 60 booklets of poetry
11. Letter-Poems: A Blended Genre
12. My own funeral: some thoughts at my 50th birthday
13. My bi-polar disorder: a 60 year study in context:1947-2007
14. Some poetry and comments: on my poetry collection.
15. Bahá'í literature:1907-2007

APPENDIX 1:

MATERIAL/RESOURCES/INFORMATION
NOT FOUND IN THIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The material below is found in my home in its study and, although not included in this autobiography, it could be useful for future autobiographical, biographical and historical work.

SECTION III Characters/Biographies: 24(ca) short sketches

SECTION V Published Work
Essays-Volumes 1 to 4-200 essays(ca):
See(a) Resume Vol.5 Ch 1 above
Section V: Volumes 1 to 3
of private collection.

SECTION VI Unpublished Work: Essays-Volumes 1 to 6-200 essays(ca)
........................1979-2007
Novels-Volumes 1 to 3---12 attempts
........................1983-2006

SECTION VII Letters
Volumes 1 to 35: 4000 letters(ca).
……………… 1960-2007

SECTION VIII Poetry Booklets 1 to 60: 6000 poems(ca)

SECTION IX A.Notebooks :300(ca)......................................1966-2007
B.Notebooks :300(ca) no-longer-extant…….1949-1999
SECTION X.1 Photographs : 12 files/booklets/folios........…1908-2007
SECTION X.2 Journals : Volumes 1 to 5......................1844-2007

SECTION XI Memorabilia. :.............................................….1908-2007

It has been my view, in writing this work, that a piece of autobiographical literature is most effectively religious, psychological, sociological, historical and, indeed, any one or many terms I might apply, not by propounding abstract dogma, theory or general propositions, but by representing human experience concretely and honestly-whatever the professed beliefs of the author. My thesis, if I could call it that, is that the work of unbelievers like writers Yeats and Faulkner, or of Eliot before his conversion, can present a vision of reality of profound significance to Bahá'ís insofar as it is faithful to the truth of human experience. For, whatever the beliefs of writers, they all must take some of the elements that shine in the eye of their memory and try to accord to each of them whatever splendour and sadness, melancholy and delight the different apparitions play in the mystery that is their lives.

Though Beethoven's final religious views are somewhat obscure and Mozart was associated with the Masons, their musical creations often furnish far greater spiritual enhancements to our lives than many of those being contributed by devout believers in our time. By the same token, the first thing a Bahá'í should ask about a work of literature of this type I have written is whether it is honestly and skillfully crafted. Of course, I have studiously avoided the works of covenant breakers in composing this autobiography. While this may be strange to those who are not Bahá'ís, it is only consistent with the teachings of my Faith, teachings at the basis of this work.

This epilogue has expanded to some 60,000 words of further reflections on the overall autobiographical process, a process that has interested me, off and on, for some twenty-three years. As I head through the early years of my late adulthood, incrementally and insensibly, I feel similar to the sociologist Norbert Elias who said in an interview: "I have an unusual talent and I feel I have a duty to do something with it. A duty towards other people. I work even harder than ever." Of course, I see whatever talent I possess as a gift from God. Elias worked passionately for years at his intellectual tasks. I don't work as hard as he and my talent is not as striking as his. But I devote as much of my time as humanly possible to the many intellectual tasks that have been unfolding as the evening of my life entered its early hours. One never knows when one's own end will come, when the early evening will become late evening and when night may fall and "by a sleep to say we end." Like Marcel Proust I am an exacting advocate of the belief that life is unfathomably complex, too complex in fact for even a 1000 page masterpiece like this to do it justice. I know my work is never done but, inevitably, my life will end and whatever work I have chosen to do will also be terminated.

The historical trends of at least the last several decades or more, trends which account for the dramatic reduction in respect and veneration for elderly individuals in Western societies have, as yet, only a limited negative affect on me and my life style. This negative causal perspective of the elderly is only partially true and I do not want to go into detail on this subject until, perhaps, I myself enter into old age at the age of 80 and beyond. Some theorists say we have in the last hundred years invented the very concept of the elderly, just as we invented the concept of childhood in a previous period. These same theorists suggest we now deny death and avoid thinking about dieing. With the creation of the concept of the elderly in my own lifetime has come their isolation from society into special homes. People tend to avoid encountering these homes and thus are not reminded of life's carnal mortality.

An image of the elderly, so goes this view, as ineffectual and incompetent is promoted. They are seen as unable to contribute to society's work force. This view of the elderly is a natural extension of the view of people as "human resources" to be used and exploited in accordance with technological demand. When their usefulness as resources comes to an end, then they come to an end. In the context of such a vision, elderly individuals cease to exist in any meaningful way at all. In their capacity as a standing reserve, they are unable to stand on their own. They can no longer contribute to the world of linear vision and they are directed to the infinite beyond, a world devoid of generational rhythms and traditions. As I say, I shall return to this theme as I advance into this final stage of the lifespan.

Perhaps my experience with this book may be somewhat like the experience of Authur Schopenhauer with his famous work, The World as Will and Representation. Alfred Estermann's study Schopenhauers Kampf um sein Werk examines the relationship between Arthur Schopenhauer and his publishers, focussing in particular on the three editions of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), published by Brockhaus in 1818/9, 1844, and 1859. Shopenhauer had grand expectations for his book but the reality of the book's reception, at least for the first 40 years, was far apart from these expectations. Acceptance and recognition of this now-classic work came slowly. Like many authors, Schopenhauer was certain of the brilliance and significance of his work when he first offered it to his publisher. I'm not sure I would characterize my book as either brilliant or significant, although I would certainly like to. I enjoyed writing it but I'm not as confident about its reception in either the short or the long term. I leave the assessment of this work to others and to those mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence, dispensations that I have often refered to in these pages. Not craving recognition as some writers do, perhaps younger ones, I'm happy to leave this work on the internet in small doses and to time's winged chariot.


APPENDIX 2:

HOROWITZ AND PACKARD:
SOME USEFUL COMPARISONS & CONTRASTS

In the preface of Daniel Horowitz's book "Vance Packard & American Social Criticism"(University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1994) which I read in 2006 after I had finished the bulk of this memoir I came across an approach to how I would like to deal with any person who is interested in writing, and possesses the skills to write, my biography. I include parts of Horowitz's preface below for future reference should it ever be useful and should anyone ever seriously contemplate writing my biography before or after I pass from this mortal coil. I draw on this preface and my several comments below and make it into the second appendix of my memoir, adding as it does a few pages to this autobiography.

"In the spring of 1985," Daniel Horowitz writes, "I began to research a chapter on Vance Packard for a book on the response of American writers to affluence in the years after World War II. I interviewed Packard in the spring of 1986 and in that summer went to Pennsylvania State University to examine the material he had deposited there, covering the period since 1957. A year later, when the chapter had grown to ninety pages, I told him I might write a book on him alone, rather than just a chapter on him in a work that included chapters on others as well. When I arrived at his home in New Canaan for a second interview and entered his living room, he pointed to more than forty boxes of material, mostly for the period before 1957, and a tabletop copier. He informed me that he would act as my research assistant, helping to reproduce anything I wanted. Not long after that visit, I decided to write this book."

Horowitz goes on to explain in his preface why he decided to write the book on Packard. "I wrote the book," he said, "for several reasons in addition to the availability of the material in his living room and his willingness to cooperate. Ever since I began teaching in the mid-1960s, I have taught widely-read works by writers trained as journalists, such as William H. Whyte, Jr., Betty Friedan, Alvin Toffler, Anthony Lukas--and Packard. As I thought about doing this book, I realized how long and how seriously I had considered the questions raised by the careers of journalists: the complicated relationship between reader and writer, the distance that separated authors who were professors from those who were not, the challenges that faced a free-lance writer in America, and the impact of best-sellers on popular consciousness and, in turn, on social movements."

My Note:

If any person expressed interest in writing my biography, some outline and analysis of my life, I would like to be able to introduce such a person to the corpus of my published and unpublished work: my 300 notebooks, 35 volumes of letters amounting to some 4000, some 60 booklets of poetry numbering over 6000 poems, my several volumes of published and unpublished essays, attempts at novels, inter alia. The writings of others in my many notebooks might be useful to such a biographer and, if used, they would keep such a person as busy as a beaver for some time. If Providence dictated that I had met my demise by the time such a person arose, I would like to think that this future biographer would be introduced by some future executor of my estate to boxes of what are now on shelves in my study and in an adjoining room.


"In the years since 1986," Horowitz continues in his preface, "Packard has cooperated with me eagerly and fully. He sent me material he had discovered. He suggested people I could talk to and then called in advance of my arrival, encouraging them to speak freely. He answered my questions and responded to my requests for more documentation and for verification of facts. Again and again, he displayed the fundamental personal decency that his friends had mentioned to me. His assistance has made my task both easier and more difficult. Easier, because he placed in front of me none of those stumbling blocks that living subjects often put in the way of inquiring scholars. More difficult, because of the abundance of the material he uncovered and because of the sense of gratitude that I felt toward him."

My Note:

Packard died in 1996 and the exercise that Horowitz initiated took ten years while Packard was alive. It is my hope that I might reach the age of 100, thus providing a period of some 40 years for such a biographer to arise. But, as I intimate above, I am not holding my breath, simply outlining a perspective, a direction, for possible future excavation of a life. Often, when writers are gone from this terrestrial domain, they are left alone. As W.B. Yeats once said in the Irish Senate in 1925, "I would hate to leave the dead alone." With Yeats, then, I live in hope that in the long range I shall not be left alone and what I have written may yet have its place of relevance. But this is the case only if such a biographical effort would enhance the progress, the experience, the meaning, of the Cause to future generations. I have been identified with this Cause for more than the critical half century of its history at the very start of the Kingdom of God on Earth, 1953-2003 and what very well may be many more years in the second half.


"Despite his generosity, this is not an authorized or official biography, as I understand those adjectives," Horowitz emphasized. "For this to have been such a book: (a)Packard would have had to initiate the request that I write about his life; (b) he would have to grant me exclusive access to material, and (c) he would have to reserve to himself the right to read and comment on what I had written before it appeared in print. None of these conditions have obtained. In April 1988 we signed a simple agreement that gave me nonexclusive rights to draw on his papers. Except in the case of my use of one short document, Packard never asked to see what I was writing, nor did I offer him the opportunity to do so."

My Note:

The above paragraph summarizes the three preconditions of what makes a biography "official." None of these three conditions are ever likely to exist insofar as my life is concerned, or so it seems to me in these early years of my late adulthood. An official biography or even an unofficial one is simply not a likely occurrence in my lifetime. I would leave the selection of an official biographer, should such a situation ever arise after my death, to my executor or executors and those mysterious dispensations of Providence. I am merely suggesting the broadest of frameworks here and doing some initial mental excavation and anticipation for what might eventuate in the future.
_______________________
"As I proceeded," Horowitz went on, "I came to understand one of the reasons Packard respected my autonomy as an author. As a magazine writer from 1942 to 1956, Packard faced editors who carefully monitored what he wrote, often making sure that he changed the words that would appear under his name in order to suit the needs of his employer. When he emerged as a self-employed writer in 1957, he cherished his freedom to write as he pleased. Throughout his life he has remained a committed civil libertarian. I am sure there are other writers who, though they prize their own freedom of expression and fight to preserve it for others, would abandon these abstract principles when confronted by someone who is writing about them."

My Note:

Packard worked as a journalist from 1937 to 1957 and then as a full-time writer of books until he published his last book in 1989. I worked as a student from 1949 to 1988 and as a teacher from 1967 to 2005 writing various genres of material from the fifties to the early years of the new millennium. Over the years 1983 to 2007 I increasingly devoted my time to writing, first essays and articles in newspapers, in-house tasks for employers and poetry for my own taste and after 1999 virtually full-time work as I writer. There was always a high degree of professional sensitivity on the part of supervisors, employers, newspaper editors and academics regarding my writing. When I became a full-time writer in the early years of the 21st century I only had to please myself and, inevitably, internet moderators and posters where I placed much of my work. One could not just write willy-nilly whatever came into your head: one was always one's own editor with an eye on the audience and my emotions on what I might call "a wide range of sensitivities.".

Of course, given the present and temporary system of Bahá'í review, a system which I welcome and one which engages the trust and the affection I possess for my fellow Bahá'ís who must implement it, a system which casts a shadow on the good name of the Faith in the eyes of certain non-Bahá'ís,1 I too have no difficulty in abandoning such abstract principles of freedom of expression, the right to write what I please, confronted as I am by this system of review. Such an attitude on my part requires me to view the Administrative Order as the context for a moderate freedom, for the very "structure of freedom for our Age."2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1 "Extracts from Letters of the Universal House of Justice On Issues Related to the Study of the Baha'I Faith," Bahá'í Canada, May 1998; and 2 "Letter to the Followers of Bahá'u'lláh in the United States of America," The Universal House of Justice, May 29th 1988."
_________________________
"Though many of our conversations focused on his public life, Horowitz went on, "and our talk never became personal, he shared with me his thoughts, experiences, and memories. He still has a reporter's commitment to accuracy and an ample capacity to recall details and events. What developed over time was a somewhat formal and, I think, mutually respectful relationship. Sometimes as I returned home, I wondered what Packard thought of this historian who had entered his life and persisted in asking questions that were sometimes obvious and other times unexpected. He was, after all, a skilled interviewer himself, more sophisticated than his colloquial talk and unassuming manner suggested. In addition, in the past few years he has been writing a book in which he reflected on his life and work.

"At moments he would jokingly talk about how he was trying to get me to show his life in a favorable light. For example, at the end of a letter in which he mentioned the considerable prescience with which he had written for forty years, he remarked, "The self-cheering goes on." 1 At other times he sent me signals that I interpreted as encouragement to offer a frank appraisal of his life. He once forwarded a marked-up copy of a review of Sally Bedell Smith's biography of William S. Paley. Packard underlined a number of passages, including some with quite negative statements about Paley's life. For example, he highlighted a passage where the reviewer noted that Paley emerged in the book as a "toweringly small man: insecure, petty, jealous, ungrateful, snobbish, . . . a philanderer" and also "a tyrannical father. . . a pathological liar; abusive, resentful, cruel, neurotic, hypochondriac, self-absorbed, tightfisted and greedy.'' 2 In the accompanying letter, Packard remarked, "Here is a good example of why well-researched biographies have a much better reputation as good reads than autobiographies, which, unless they are confessional, are usually suspected, with good reason, of being efforts at image protection and enhancement."

My Note:

As much as I would want to avoid the problem of image protection and enhancement in my autobiography—and I think I have gone a long way toward doing so by means of: (a) my moderate confessionalism, (b) the Australian habit of playing the self down and exhibiting a certain honestly felt tiredness with life and (c) my difficulty, also an Australian trait, of going in for consistent self-delusion—some of these natural, if somewhat odious, qualities slip in. I should also add that, if any person takes the slightest interest in writing my biography, my relationship with that person would inevitably be different than that between Horowitz and Packard. There are also a range of people in my life who would offer some quite different views of myself. Some of these people are close and intimate: my wife, step-daughters and son. Several work colleages and some of those of whom I write, Bahá'ís and others would also offer differing perspectives. But I leave this to and for biographers. There is little doubt that the views of others would provide some useful perspectives. If a biographer does not arise, say, in three generations, there will be no one on Earth who will have even known or met me by then.


"Vance Packard and American Social Criticism" was published in the early years(1994) of my own serious writing ‘career' which one could say developed by insensible degrees over as many as forty years(1952-1992) but really got going in the Holy Year(1992-1993). It differs markedly from what Packard might have written of his own life. Horowitz writes, still in that preface, "I well understood that my task was to present my interpretation of his life and work, not his view. Though in correspondence and interviews he offered me his own views, I incorporated them into the text only when I believed they illuminated the past I was trying to recover. I suspect that he will want to correct some statements that I make, but I hope that most of those will concern issues of interpretation and few of them, questions of fact. Grateful as I am to him, in the end my commitment is to offer a book that both acknowledges and evaluates his contribution at the same time that it sets his life and writing in their historical contexts."

My Note:

Clearly, too, whatever some future biographer might write on my life will differ from my own autobiography, memoirs. By that time, I trust, I will have gone to those retreats of my compassionate Lord and be the recipient of His mercy and forgiveness forever and ever. I will have forsaken this swiftly passing world and soared away to unseen realms.--July 10th 2006

I have added below an additional number of appendices taking the total to fifteen. Some autobiographers outline detailed statements on their sleeping patterns, eating and drinking habits, interest/hobby activities, job/duty statements, detailed descriptions of their relationships with individuals. Some of these they place in appendices. My additional appendices are as follows:

Appendix 3:

This appendix consists of the following essay:

Ron Price, "Omissions and Changes Are Not Accidents: Erasures, Cancellations, Additions, Deletions and Alterations in Ron Price's Manuscripts: A Hypothetical," Unpublished Manuscript, 2006.

Most of the omissions in my work are not intentional, nor are they accidents. Indeed, very little that I have written is accidental. Although it must be said, that serendipity does come into my writing more frequently than I am myself aware want to admit or understand. Some skeptical observers may call this serendipity an accident.-Ron Price, June 1st 2006.

Sitting in some library at some future and hypothetical time at least 100 years after my passing, lets say about 2140, an imagined person is poring over erasures, scissorings, cancellations of various kinds in my letters, essays, poems, notes and diaries, cuttings, photocopies, pastings-in, notes at the side and in the text added for emphasis and comment. This imagined person comes across a few tamperings. They were tamperings that occurred both before and after Bill Washington applied his experienced editorial pen to this vast corpus of memoir-words in the years 2004 to 2007. Tampering with text has taken many forms and I can not possibly cover them all here and I make no attempt to be systematic. I just want to offer a general commentary on the subject.

In the more than 100 years since my passing in 2040 at the age of 96, I anticipate that only the occasional person might see fit to make some alteration to the original text. I must remark upon what I hope is the powerful effect of reading my manuscripts. Harold Boom, a late 20th century literary critic, declared after spending several weeks with my work that "there's something about the way Price's words go racing across the page, with the spaces between them, that change your idea of everything you've read before about the Bahá'í Faith in its first several epochs of the Formative Age, well, at least, the Formative Age from 1944 to 2044." I like to think that Boom was one of those I prayed for from the next life. I certainly like what Boom has said here.

My handwriting, where it exists, is relatively rare. Most of my material is in typed script of different kinds and styles. Likewise, the mutilations that might come to exist in the century after my demise, as I say, 2040-2140, are also likely to be rare. Readers cannot help but wonder what might provoke an earlier reader or readers to initiate responses creating the gaps in my documents or changes to the text.

If omissions are not accidents, as part of the title of this brief essay indicates, and as the opening quotation points out, then many inclusions are more than just happenings or accidents, as well. Erasures are rare because there is little in the text that is done in pencil. Cancellations of my words by hands other than my own are, as I have said, are also likely to be rare. Some editing will inevitably be done by others, perhaps half a dozen editors and friends to the many years of my collected writings. Who knows really; this is just a hypothetical to satisfy my own curiosity and sense of play. My own editing is only occasionally obvious. The erasures and cancellations are of various types, and I want to be clear that I have no desire to focus on each and every kind made by other hands or by myself.

To anyone familiar with my work they will know that since writing my first pieces in the 1960s and since keeping the works of others in that same decade, except for the inclusion of my mother's work back to the 1930s, my oeuvre is massive. I have written these words to provide a perspective on a possible future of my writings. It is a future which, as I say, is essentially hypothetical. Time will tell if it has any truth, any validity. It is just a play with the future, so to speak.


Appendix 4:

This short paragraph comes from a prose-poem I wrote on the subject of punctuation and editing and it draws on my reading of an article by Emma L. Roth-Schwartz, "Colon and Semi-Colon in Donne's Prose Letters: Practice and Principle," in Early Modern Literary Studies, Vol.3, No.1, 1997. After teaching punctuation and reading about the subject, off and on, for half a century, I concluded, as I wrote this autobiography, that I have little interest in making statements about my use of punctuation for future literary scholars. There are dangers, of course, in inattention given to punctuation both by myself and future students. There is damage done to sense and style by repunctuation, mine and others, for punctuation must be seen as an act of interpretation. I find that I sometimes punctuate different copies of the same text differently.

I certainly don't feel tied to the punctuation and phraseology that editors and scholars find in my work. Bill Washington, through his initial editing, set the stage for a punctuation style, a style that was mine but was made more consistent through his professional efforts. Some writers do not want editors to change anything. I am not of that ilk. My hope is that future editors may yet come close to that happy state of affairs in punctuating and editing my work, a state described by Francis Clement in 1587 in which he says that with punctuation "the breath is relieved, the meaning conceived, the eye directed, the ear delighted, and all the senses satisfied."1 This is also true of good editing.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Anthony Graham-White, Punctuation and Its Dramatic Value in Shakespearean Drama, University of Delaware Press, Newark, 1995, p.46.


Appendix 5:

A RECORD OF BOOKS READ OR PARTLY READ
IN A 45 YEAR PIONEERING LIFE: FROM 1962 TO 2007

It is impossible for me to make an accurate record or even a reasonable guesstimation of what might be called my reading record since 1962, my matriculation year, the start of my pioneering experience, to the present time, some 45 years later. I have made a start at such a record, such a rough guesstimation, though. And here it is:

A. Books Read(i.e. scan): 10,000
B. Books Partly Read(i.e. skim) : 20,000
_____________________________Total:25,000

: 4,00
D. Poems Partly Read 6,000
E. Articles Read: : 10,000
F. Articles Partly Read(1/4 or more) 50,000
____________________________Total : 70,000

Ron Price Feb. 8th 2007

Appendix 6:

A Study in Time Management: April 1999 to April 2007---Retirement

A.1 FIVE CATEGORY TIME DELINEATION/ALLOCATION
FOR STUDYING AND WRITING EACH DAY

The statistical information below attempts to outline the time I spend on a daily, monthly and yearly basis at the tasks I have set myself to accomplish, in the form of goals or as a result of serendipitous activity, during the first eight years of retirement. The data below is a guesstimation only for I did not keep precise daily statistics. Since I must attend to various domestic tasks, community activities, family, Bahai and 'other' matters it would appear that the 8 to 9 hours per day is about the most realistic average time allocation spent at reading and writing.

CATEGORY NO OF HOURS % OF MONTH AT EACH LEVEL
1. Super-efficient : 10-12 hours 12%

2. Very Efficient : 8-10 hours 32%

3. Efficient38%

4. Good 10%

5. Poor 8%

A.2 STATISTICAL TOTALS:
HOURS/DAY AND HOURS/MONTH

Number of days at the above five levels in a thirty day(month) period is a guesstimation only:

1. 3.6 days @ 11 hours= 40 hours
2. 10.0 days @ 9 hours 90 hours
3. 14.0 days @ 7 hours= 98 hours
4. 1.4 days @ 6 hours= 12 hours
5.       2 days & @ 5 hours= 10 hours
Total: 30/31 days = 240/250 hours

Total: 240/50 hours/month; or 240/50= 8 hours per day.=56 hours/week
This is about 1/3 of the 720 hours(of total time) available in each month
Another 240 hours(1/3 of total time) is devoted to sleep
Another 240 hours is devoted to 'other.'

B. LIST OF MAJOR ACTIVITIES & TIME ALLOCATION:
1999-2007

1. Reading and Writing(as above 33%
2. Domestic & Family Activities : 30%
3. Outside: Social, Walking, etc. : 4%
4. Sleeping/Being in Bed, Ablutions : 33%……..Total: 100%

C. DETAILS REGARDING READING AND WRITING ACTIVITIES 1999 TO 2007 IN B.1 ABOVE:

From August 1999 to August 2007, exactly eight years, I wrote:

1. Three books: (i) Roger White's Poetry: 350 pages, (ii) Autobiography/memoirs: 2500 pages, 3 volumes and (iii) My Website: 650 pages, an estimation. Total: 3500 Pages.

2. 22 booklets and of poetry, some 1000 poems(approx.)

3. When not working on a book or writing in some other genre I:
(a) read, (b) make notes, (c) reorganize my files & systems, (d) post internet items and develop these WWW resources and (e) engage in one of ‘B: items 1,2 & 3' above.

D. BREAKDOWN OF ACTIVITIES ON DAILY BASIS
IN SECTION B.1 ABOVE

1. READING AND WRITING:

1.1 Writing letters and emails-1
1.2 Reading-2
1.3 Writing-Autobiography-1
1.4 Updating Notebooks-2
1.5 Posting/Responding on the Internet-1
1.6 Writing Prose/Poetry-1

The time allocations above over an 8 hour day are very broad guesstimations only.

E. CONCLUDING STATEMENT

The above provides an overview of the new arrangements, the new time allocations in my life in the years 1999 to 2007 since retiring from the teaching profession and what had been in the decades before living a life within the great work/home, school/home divide with its extensive involvement in: Bahá'í community activities, formal employment, raising children and studying in formal education programs, inter alia. All statistics/data above are guesstimations only and how long this new picture will last into the years of my lateadulthood and oldage is difficult, impossible, to estimate.--Ron Price April 21st 2007

Appendix 7:

A NOTE ON CHOOSING ONE'S LITERARY EXECUTOR

Edward Gibbon is best known for his enormous book on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For a man who wrote so much on this one subject he showed admirable restraint in his memoirs. His memoirs can be found in one volume that almost disappears beside the large tomes that make up his History. Gibbon himself never put together the autobiographical pieces he wrote upon finishing his life's work. These autobiographical parcels were first collected in a decorously edited volume by Lord Sheffield, Gibbon's literary executor. Unfortunately Lord Sheffield showed far too much restraint in his editing. He excised practically anything that anyone might find offensive. This is yet another example, of the many, why some writers regard editors as a useless sort of breed who should not be allowed much more activity in their lives than to correct spelling mistakes and grammar and why authors must take the utmost care in choosing their literary executors. I do not share that concern for editors that others do. Mine is a more modest concern.

This sentiment, this concern, may be true in relation to Gibbon's autobiographical work. It was also a concern of my mother's brother insofar as the editing my mother did of her father's autobiography. But it is not an accurate overall view of what editors generally do and what their roles entail. In the hands of a good editor the work of any author can find a good home. Such is my hope. Lord Sheffield's cutting diminishment of Gibbon's text was only discovered long after the fact. Sheffield covered his tracks well. Only in 1894, a century after Gibbon died, when Gibbon's papers were made public, was the magnitude of the editorial interference revealed.

Since that time the work has been refashioned by a number of editors. Almost all contemporary editions include all that is good in Gibbon's autobiography. Lord Sheffield's version was a great success. The later and complete versions are even better. -Ron Price with thanks to ‘The Review of "Memoirs of My own Life,"' by Edward Gibbon in The Complete Review, 2000.

There are many other articles on ‘literary executors' which I have kept in my journal and, should future executors be interested in some of my views in more detail they are free to read them, but are under no obligation to do so. Taken together they provide a more comprehensive view of just how I see the ideal editor. For now, though, I am happy to proceed with the editing work of Bill Washington with no caveats aside.

Appendix 8:

This brief essay draws on the "Preface To The Electronic Edition, Writings of Washington, John C. Fitzpatrick, 2002; and 2 Writings: Washington to James Craik, 25 March 1784.

The preservation of Washington's papers was a subject never far from his mind. Washington was born in 1732 and died in 1799. His deathbed instructions to his secretary Tobias Lear in December 1799, to "arrange and record all my late military letters and papers . . . and other letters,"1 were only the continuation of a practice that Washington had begun as a young man when he began saving his incoming letters as well as copies of most of his outgoing correspondence.

It was not until the years of my middle age that I began, at first insensibly, to take an increasing interest in the preservation of my papers. In the last decade of that middle age, from 50 to 60, 1994-2004, that interest took a more serious, a more organized form. In the 25 years preceding that middle age, my years from 15 to 40, 1959 to 1984, the year I joined this new Faith until my second year north of Capricorn, the collecting of letters gradually assumed a proportion from no interest to a significant one.

Washington, at the age of 52, immediately after the American Revolutionary War(1775-1783), declared that no history of his life, "could be written with the least degree of accuracy, unless recourse was had" to his papers for information.2 The American Revolution was a period of momentous events and Washington did, indeed, play a significant part. This is equally true of these days, of my life in the 8th, 9th and 10th stages of history from a Bah&aacut perspective. They are momentous days. But given the nature of the global theatre in which the Bahá'í revolutionary program is being implemented and the thousands of people whose lives are as significant, if not more so, than my own, it could be seen as presumptuous to compare myself to the famous American George Washington. My intention is to contrast a significant and famous individual in history with the ordinarily ordinary person who is also a member of the Bahá'í community.

It is in this contrast, with some elements of useful comparison, that the following prose-poem finds its place. I have been simply one of the links in the chain, one of the soldiers in the field, one of the threads, part of the very warp and weft of the Bahá'í community in the first half century of the Kingdom of God on earth(1953-2003), one of the many participants in the first stages of the transatlantic field of service of the North American Bahá'í community, a testing period of apocalyptic proportions marking the lowest ebb in humankind's fast-declining fortunes during the weightiest spiritual enterprise in recorded history.

Washington spent much of his time organizing and copying his papers. He even went so far as to plan a separate building near his mansion house for their safekeeping, although that plan remained unrealized at his sudden death in December 1799. After my retirement in 1999, two hundred years after Washington's death, I spent some time, on and off over five years, organizing my own papers into some framework. By the time I was 60 that framework required little attention, little further organization, only the occasional reorganization, the occasional refinement and adjustment.

Comprised of more than 17,400 letters and documents in thirty-seven volumes, plus a two-volume index, John Fitzpatrick's work on Washington's papers was a monumental achievement by any standard. Fitzpatrick's experience in the Library of Congress, which owns the single largest collection of Washington manuscripts, more than 60,000 documents, had ably prepared Fitzpatrick for the herculean effort necessary to bring out an edition of that scale over such a short span of time.

Whether my own letters and documents, my papers and poems, ever find a home in some voluminous collection is not my worry or concern. I have spent a little time placing them all into some ordered arrangement and I leave it to my executor, the Bahá'í community and those mysterious dispensations of Providence which I mention from time to time in this now lengthy work to do with them what they will. -Ron Price with thanks to the 1Preface To The Electronic Edition, Writings of Washington, John C. Fitzpatrick, 2002; and 2 Writings: Washington to James Craik, 25 March 1784.

The greatest of all arts—
the management of the mind
and the art of living1
can be acquired in part
from letters and papers,
poems and essays in the
great archives of history.

The playful spirit, the light,
humorous touch, the portrait
of a mind, the spontaneous
and unique expressions of
personality, of indiscretion
and virtue scrawled across
the pages of these papers—
but what inducement to any
preservation? To possess
a part of me? Surely not!

To enjoy fine examples
of writing? Surely not
in a world drowning in
the written/spoken word.

To have the pleasure of a
vivid picture of a character
and person with glimpses
into his life? What value?

So much of life contains only
the insubstantial correspondence
that we might call telephone talk.
And what value is this, pray tell?

To paint one of the threads
of the warp and weft
of the Bahá'í community
as the Kingdom of God on earth
was being born and developed
in its first half century—now that
art work, dear friends, is of value!

1G. Birkbell Hill, editor, Letters of Samuel Johnson, Clarendon Press, 1892.

Ron Price November 19th 2005

I have always liked the way Arnold Toynbee describes the spread of a divine, a fundamental, impulse in society. It is like a light caught from a leaping flame, an inspiration caught in peoples' souls, a spark which gives light unto all who are in the house, a light whose influence is felt "even at points that are astonishingly remote from the centre of radiation." I first came across this Toynbeean paradigm in the mid-1960s at the outset of my pioneering life and it fits the Bahá'í paradigm and at the same time paints my own work in an eloquent perspective.

Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes in her fine essay on the artist and the seeker that "our greatness rests not in ourselves as much as in our ability and desire to circle around the great." It seems to me in life we all select the ones we want to circle around.

Any writer who aspires to a wider audience, even an autobiographer like myself, has a number of role models to chose from. So let me say a little here about the selection from my role models from outside cognitive neuro, though I have tried to select something from what they have said that sketches meaning over the terra incognita of life. This allows me to create in comfort, as part of a promising, operating, model, part of an infinite series of experiments in an effort to realize the vision of the oneness of humankind and as part of a force with an important role to play in the future of humankind.

The Central Figures of the Bahá'í Faith, my role models, indicate that there is a map for my journey, humankind's journey; there is a goal in the journey and vague sentiments of good will, however genuine, are not enough. The map and the goal has been elaborated in the first century and a half of the existence of these Figures and their authorized interpreters, in a massive body of print. My role models circumambulate, skirt around this body of print. I could, and I do, select scientists and writers in the arts for my models and many do serve as such models for the exercise I am involved with. Some of those that have made a sustained effort at popularizing science and literature and commented on a larger scene, a large sphere, and created a significant niche have played an important part in the evolution and elaboration of my own ideas, values and beliefs. But these people from the sciences and arts are not my models for fundamental philosophy and value systems that I share with others in community, that are my reasons for community. For agreement on principles in writing what I write comes from community and, even when there is agreement on principles, coordinated action is not easy

Finally, before I close this appendix #8, let me say something about the general situation that the average person is now in with respect to information. He or she is awash with data of many kinds. I am often told about some amazing new fact or invention and when I ask the source of that bit of knowledge, am told by the person: "I read it" or "I saw it on TV". Usually the person recounting the story cannot inform me whether the information came from an academic journal, a science program on TV, the Oprah Winfred Show or perhaps an ad on TV. In some ways the source matters and in some ways it doesn't. Information becomes validated simply because it exists. The information climate has become complex, absurd, burgeoning and wonderful all at once. Educators, entrepreneurs and politicians sing the praises of the potential benefits of the information revolution—and I do too. This autobiography has been significantly aided by this revolution as has my life in general. But what I also see, and I see it every day and have for decades, is a shattering of the world we once knew through fragmentation and an explosion of information into bits and pieces.

People are much more aware of the globalization of the world but, at the same time, they no longer understand the significance of this interdependence and interrelationship and how their lives and the things they consume are linked to everything else in the world. We are no longer aware, for example, of the sources or producers of food, clothing, material goods. The links are vague and often completely unknown. Much of the world's goods are simply objects to be purchased without knowledge or care for the condition of the workers who laboured to make them available, the ecological costs of their harvest, manufacture and transportation. I have tried in this autobiography to draw together some of the links, some of the connections, tried to overcome some of the fragmentation of life, my own life, into some coherent whole. By bedtime so often my brain like many another brain-billions perhaps--in my complex world had become a mush of factoids. Some anchorage to a central, a spiritual source, some context that informed me why it mattered at all, was critical, at least critical for me. And I have written of this theme over and over again in this autobiography.

The one thing television—this queen of the consumer durables--cannot tolerate is dead air because the viewer is armed with a channel changer and the attention span of a hummingbird. It is not unlike the real life of any person and it is a central problem when one goes to write autobiography—a lot of the time in life is "dead time." There is little going on and little if anything that can be said about this time. TV producers , directors, owners and advertisers all end up competing for viewers by being more raucous, outrageous, shocking, unexpected, entertaining, etc to capture and hold a fragmenting audience. The victim of all this is reality.

Conscious as I have been for many a year of the fragmentation of the audience that might read this book and conscious, too, that I am not ever likely to attain celebrity status, acquire a mass market or get up-front in the print and electronic media--I needed an established way to reach whatever audience I could. Attention is a precious commodity, and people tend to rely on trusted gatekeepers, such as magazines, newspapers, television. This is breaking down somewhat, with the web's ability to bypass them and this is what I have done, simply bypassed the mass for the fragments since I first got this book into some marketable shape in 2003. I have also developed a certain skepticism about, a lack of appetite for, celebrity after more than fifty years of being exposed to its many forms.

I have been on guard, too, as an autobiographer that I don't slip into the same slot as mass media people of trying to get readers. I must confess that I am not completely innocent. As information channels have opened up and computers access information anywhere on the planet, programs have become increasingly short, strident, loud, kinky, sensational or violent in order to keep an audience. And there is much that is good. I hope, in this autobiography, that I exemplify more of the latter, more that is good, than the former.

The "op-ed" pages of local newspapers provided me with a place for well-written articles of about 700-1000 words. This is an entry-level niche that didn't exist several decades ago. I could not have broken into such a market in the 1960s or 1970s. I was at that time too busy, too sick, too married, too jobbed and not sufficiently matured as a writer. But by the 1980s I was able to sort a few things out in my personal and professional life and in the 1980s I was able to break into that market with some 150 essays in newspapers. This market expanded in the 1990s and in this new millennium with the extension of web portals having editor-selected commentary. In the last three years, 2003-2006, I have found many an essay, article, comment niche for getting my pieces out there and it is here that I have placed much of this autobiography.

In many ways what I am doing in this autobiography is simply extending what I did as a baby, what all babies do. The first sign that babies are going to be human beings and not noisy pets comes when they begin naming their world and demanding the stories that connect its parts. Once they know the first of these they will instruct their teddy bears, enforce their world views on victims in the sandlot, tell themselves stories of what they are doing as they play and forecast stories of what they will do when they grow up. They will keep track of the actions of others and relate deviations to the person in charge. They will want a story at bedtime. Nothing passes but the mind grabs it and looks for a way to fit it into a story, or into a variety of possible scripts.

I try to represent and present the world, my world, both truthfully and beautifully. The task is not easy. It is not easy to be truthful or present the picture as a place of beauty. When I read Balzac or Dickens I get a strong sense that they do not believe the world to be a beautiful place. They wish to console their readers with an encouraging picture of how the world ought to be. Dickens stops short of describing in full detail the depths of despair to which poverty drives the people of London, because he does not want to cause his readers pain, or show them something repulsive. Balzac is both entertaining and truthful, but he does not remain true to his personal vision. The comedy in their works is overcome by the suffering world.

Dostoevsky takes some of their techniques and themes, but his personal vision is different and this vision guides his stories. He adds the strange, tragic beauty of St. Petersburg to the bittersweet comedy of the realists. In the process he introduces a new world of people redeemed within a Christian cosmology and their suffering world. They are not defeated by it. As a Christian writer, he saw the world from "the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for". There is some of this in the Bahá'í mystery. I deal with some of this mystery in this autobiography and I leave some to readers.

The world I present in this autobiography is the one I experience and the cosmology I believe in. My world view is a Bahá'í one, not the Bahá'í one but a Bahá'í one. It has much of a view of life as pure mental activity somewhat like that of H.G. Wells; the activity of the intellect and the senses, creative will and imagination has much to do with the world I see and live in. This is partly the romantic temperament speaking. The evil I see in the world is not so much due to stupidity, as Tolstoi saw it, but man's lower nature which manifests itself in many ways of which stupidity is but one. Health, energy and joy is certainly at the core of my Weltanschauung, for I know what life is like when one of these three key ingregients is missing. For years, like D.H. Lawrence, Maupassant and Blake, I saw sexual love and the fuel of sexual activity as a sort of nirvana.

We need the sciences and the arts, more and better sciences and more and better arts, not for the technology, not for our leisure time, not even for our health and longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival. This book, I trust, is but one very small part in that process of acquiring wisdom.

An account from the days of earliest passenger railway in 1830 enthuses that: You can't imagine how strange it seemed to be journeying on thus; without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical, unvarying pace, between these rocky walls, which are already clothed with moss and ferns and grasses; and when I reflected that these great masses of stone had been cut asunder to allow our passage thus far below the surface of the earth, I felt as if no fairy tale was ever half so wonderful as what I saw.(Quoted in Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium: 1660‐1886, The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers (New York: Free Press, 1985)

This sense of the fairy-tale has continued into these four epochs with even more intensity but the fairy-tale has been moderated by the sense of holocaust and tempest--leaving humanity bewildered and often agonized and helpless.

Appendix 9:

ORIGIN AND PURPOSE OF THIS EPIC POEM

I remember reading how both Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon acquired the initial inspiration and conceptualisation for the magnum opus of their lives: A Study of History in the case of Toynbee and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the case of Gibbon. Three years ago I began to think of writing my own epic poem and fashioned some ten pages as a beginning. The poetic work of my own life, my epic, I have come to see in terms of all the poetry I have written, the poetry I have sent to the Bahá'í World Centre Library and what I have entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs. T.S. Eliot observed toward the end of his life that he could not be called a great poet because he had not written an epic. Of course, if indeed I be a great poet, it will not be because I have written an epic but in spite of it. Whatever greatness accrues to my writing, prose or poetry, it will be due to my association with the Bahá'í Faith and the relevance of my writing to the development of the Bahá'í Faith over four epochs.

Classical scholar, J.B. Hainsworth says that "the defining feature of an epic is that it combines expansiveness of form with greatness of soul and a clear focus on a central theme of universal appeal." Hainsworth goes on to say that this combination was first achieved in the Iliad where a concise and focussed narrative centered on the idea of heroism. While I would not want to make any claims to greatness of soul, being only too aware of my limitations and weaknesses, my association with the great epic of our time embodied in the history of the Bahá'í Faith, gives to this work some of the reflected light of that great epic.

I have begun to see all of this poetry somewhat like Pound's Cantos which draws on a massive body of print, or the Confucian Analects, a word which means literary gleanings. The Cantos, the longest poem in modern history, over eight hundred pages and written over more than fifty years(1916 to 1968), are a great mass of literary gleanings. So is this true of my poetry. The conceptualization of my work as epic has come long after its beginnings. My poetry slowly defined itself as an epic after half a dozen years of intense and extensive writing and many more years, perhaps as many as thirty, of occasional writing. I began to see my poetic opus as one immense poem. I like to think this poetry creates one voice, a voice for future times, to the Bahá'í culture I've inhabited all these years.

Pound was twenty-nine when he began to write his epic. I was fifty three when I began to see all my poetry, poetry I began writing at the age of thirty-six or, perhaps, as far back as eighteen, as part of one immense epic. Pound was acutely conscious that the cultural, the historical tradition had broken down and he was searching for a new basis, "new laws of divine justice." His task was to reassemble this tradition or,at least, search in history where not only the fall from innocence was located but also the locus for the process of redemption could be found. I, too, was aware of this breakdown. I, too, felt the need to reassemble history, not as Pound did, but rather to find truths which were perennial but not archaic within the broad framework of a new Revelation from God, a Revelation which defined and described the continuities and was Itself a basis for redemption in this new and complex age.

Written now, for the most part, over a little more than eight years(1992-2000), the epic I am writing covers a pioneering life of 39 years. It also covers much more. I have now sent 39 booklets to the Bahá'í World Centre Library: one for each year of this pioneering venture. But the epic journey that is at the base of this poetic opus is not only a personal one of over forty years back to the time I became a Bahá'í, it is also the journey of this new System, the World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, which has its origins as far back as the 1840s and, if one includes the two precursors to this System, as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century when many of the revolutions and forces that are at the beginning of modern history have their origin: the American and French revolutions, the industrial and agricultural revolutions and the revolution in the arts and sciences.

Generally, the way my narrative imagination conceives of this epic is itself an attempt to connect this long and complex history to my own life, as far as possible, to that of the religion to which I belong. I have sought and found, in recent years, a narrative voice that contains uncertainty, ambiguity and incompleteness among shifting fields of reference and of a certainty mixed with and defining itself by the presence of its polar opposite, doubt.

Since this poetry is inspired by so much that is, and has been, part of the human condition, this epic it could be said has at its centre Life Itself and the most natural and universal of human activities, the act of creating narratives. When we die all that remains is our story. From a Bahá'í perspective much is taken on into the eternal realm and whatever part we have played in the advancement of civilization is also left. But that part is often obscure, especially in the case of the ordinarily ordinary person which I have been on this mortal coil.

I have called this poetic work an epic because it deals with events, as all epics do, that are or will be significant to the entire society. It contains what Charles Handy, philosopher, business man and writer, calls the golden seed: a belief that what I am doing is important, probably unique, to the history and development of this System. This poetry, this epic, has to do with heroism and deeds of battle in their contemporary and historical manifestations. It involves a great journey, not only my own across two continents, but that of this Cause as it has expanded across the planet. The epic convention of the active intervention of God and holy souls from another world; and the convention of an epic tale, told in verse, a verse that is not a frill or an ornament, but is essential to the story, are found here. I think there is an amplitude in this poetry that simple information-giving lacks; there is also an engine of action that is found in my inner life more than in its external story. In some ways, this is the most significant aspect of my work, at least from my point of view. Of course, in the end, it is really quite impossible to impute any significance to one's work. Such imputing must be left to the future and to others.

Such an imputation was made of the writing of Henry James the author of substantive autobiographical works in the last several years of his life. Le Roy Phillips wrote, eight years before the death of Henry James, that James was able to convey what people concealed within their inmost selves, what they really thought. This mystery of what might be called ‘an inner sight' is, I think, possessed by many in my world. Some possess it in a remarkable degree; indeed, it is manifest in so many different ways. Perhaps there is some of it here in this work.

In the Greek tradition the Goddess of Epic Poetry was Calliope, one of the nine sisters of the Muses. The Muses were the inspiration of artists. Calliope was the mother of Orpheus who was known to have a keen understanding of both music and poetry. We know little about Calliope, as we know little about the inspiration of the Muses, at least in the Greek tradition. In the young and developing poetic and artistic tradition of the Bahá'í Faith, on the other hand, although gods and goddesses play no role, holy souls "who have remained faithful unto the covenant of God" can be a leaven that leavens "the world of being" and furnishes "the power through which the arts and wonders of the world are made manifest."(Bahaullah, Gleanings, 1956, p.161.) In addition, among a host of other inspirational sources, the simple expression ‘Ya'Baha'ul'Abha' brings "the Supreme Concourse to the door of life" and "opens the heavens of mysteries, colours and riddles of life." Much could be said about inspiration but I shall leave the topic with the above brief analysis and comment.

Mary Gibson says in Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians(Cornell U, 1995, p.96) that one question was at the centre of Pound's Cantos. It was the "question of how beauty and power, passion and order can cohere." This question was one of many that concerned Pound in the same years that Bahá'í Administration, the precursor of a future World Order, was coming to assume its embryonic form in the last years of the second decade of this century, a form that would in time manifest those qualities Pound strove in vain to find in a modern politico-philosophy.

At the heart of my own epic is a sense of visionary certitude, derived from a belief in an embryonic World Order, that a cultural and political coherence will increase in the coming decades and centuries around the sinews of this efflorescing Order. Wallace Stevens' sense of the epic "as a poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice"(Jay Parini, editor, the Columbia History of American Poetry, Columbia UP, NY, 1993, p.543) is also at the centre of my conceptual approach. This epic is an experimental vehicle containing open-ended autobiographical sequences. It is a didactic intellectual exploration with lines developing with apparent spontaneity and going in many directions. The overall shape is in no way predetermined. In many respects, this long poem is purely speculative philosophy, attempting to affirm a romantic wholeness on a fragmented world, something Walter Crane tried to do in the 1920s. This long poem, or seemingly endless series of poems, is an immense accumulation of fragments, like the world itself, but they are held together by a unifying vision. So,too, was Pound's epic.

Pound was intent on developing an "ideal polity of the mind". This polity flooded his consciousness and suggested a menacing fluidity, an indiscriminate massiveness of the crowd. The polity that is imbedded in my own epic does not suggest the crowd, probably because the polity I have been working with over my lifetime has been one that has grown so slowly; the groups I have worked in and with have been small. My style, my poetic design, though, is like Pound's insofar as I use juxtaposition as a way to locate and enhance meanings. Like Pound, I stress continuity in history, the cultural and the personal. At the heart of epic poetry for Pound was "the historical." Also, for Pound, was a new world order based on the poet's own visionary experience. It was part of the reclaiming job that Modernist poets saw as their task, to regain old ground from the novelists. But, unlike Pound, I see new and revolutionary change in both the historical process, in my own world and in the future. The visionary experience that will guide world order is not mine, but that derived from the Central Figures of my Faith.
                                         
Those who are quite familiar with the poem Leaves of Grass may recall that Walt Whitman often merges himself with the reader. His poem expresses his theory of democracy. His poem is the embodiment of the idea that a single unique protagonist can represent a whole epoch. He can be looked at in two ways: there is his civic, public, side and his private, intimate side. While it would be presumptuous of me to claim, or even to attempt, to represent an entire epoch, this private/public dichotomy is an important underlying feature of this epic poem (Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, Harcourt, Brace and Co., NY, 1994, pp.447-78). I also like to think that, while this poetry has a focus on my own experience, this experience is part and parcel of the experience of my coreligionists around the world.

In my poetic opus, my poetic epic, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, the reader should sense a merging of reader and writer, a political philosophy, a sociology, a psychology, a global citizen--something we have all become. There is in my poetry a public and a private man reacting to the burgeoning planetization of humankind, the knowledge explosion and the tempest that has been history's experience, at least as far back as the 1840s, if not the days of Shaykh Ahmad after he left his homeland in those halcyon and terrifying years of the French Revolution.

There is much more than verse-making here, though. Here is the ruling passion of my life: the Bahai Faith, its history and teachings. It seemed to wrap and fill my being during my pioneering life, the process beginning as far back as 1953 when my mother first heard of the Faith. Indeed, I came to see myself as part of what ‘Abdu'l-Bahá called that "heavenly illumination" which flowed to all the peoples of the world from the North American Bahai community and would "adorn the pages of history" (Citadel of Faith, p.121). My story inevitably became part of that larger story of the Bahai Faith and, again, that larger story which is history itself. Stephen Sicari suggests that the structural principle in Pound is "the search for unity." If I had to define the structural principle behind my own sharply fragmented, multifarious material with its vivid multiplicity and diversity, it would be my attempt to express the unity I found and that I believe lies behind and in the world of creation.

For it is the narrative imagination that is at the base of this epic poetry. As far as possible I have tried to make it honest, true, accurate, realistic, informed, knowledgeable. As I develop my story through the grid of narrative, I tell my story the way I see it, through my own eyes and my own knowledge, as Bahá'u'lláh exhorted me in Hidden Words. I leave behind me traces, things in the present which stand for absent things in the past. The phenomenon of the trace, Paul Racour writes, is similar to the relationship between lived time and astronomical time, a relationship at the basis of calendar time. For history is "knowledge by traces", as F. Simiand puts it (Paul Ricoeur, "Narrative Time", Philosophy Today, Winter 1985). And so, I bequeath my traces.

The traces I bequeath are also, to continue an important theme of the epic tradition, those of the wandering hero. It is a hero, a wanderer, with many dimensions described in many contexts. It is a journey of redemption to union with God, as it was for Dante. It is a journey of adventure and finding my home, as it was for Odysseus. It is a journey that attempts to embody my vision of the Bahá'í world order, as the poet Virgil tried to articulate his vision of Augustus' order during the crucial years of the establishment of the Roman Empire(29-19 BC). It is a personal epic, a personal journey, an inner journey, within the tradition of William Wordsworth and his Prelude. There are elements of the Miltonian epic here with the foregrounding of the author, his weaknesses and his strengths, in what is par excellence, a theological-religious journey. And there is the monumental journey of Bahaullah over forty years which acts as a metaphorical base for my own journey. The wanderer I draw on is, in other words, a flexible, elastic, figure who allows me to include in my epic poem virtually anything that I want to include in the text.

And so the wanderer that I describe in my epic is a composite. But this wanderer is not in search of the Path; rather, he has found the Path and the wandering takes place on the Path. The wandering through the sea of historical, sociological, literary and other texts, books and articles, etc. is all part of the experience, the context, the definition, of the Path, for this particular journeyman. For the reader will come across many references, many texts, many quotations here. They are laid on a Bahai-paradigm-map; I am not alone, as Pound was, relying on his own wit and courage with no framework of guidance and meaning within which to sift history's and experience's immense chaos into some order. I find that the actual writing of the poem assumes characteristics of the epic journey itself. This was true for Pound, for Dante and, in all likelihood, the mythical Homer.

It may be that my journey on this Path is only half over and that this epic found its initial conceptualization at the mid-point of my Bahá'í life. If I live to be ninety-five, my journey within this framework of belief passed the half way mark (age 15 to 95, a period of eighty years)at the age of 55. So I like to think that what I have now, after only eight years of intense writing of poetry, is what Pound had: "a dazzling array of finely wrought fragments straining in their own unique way to achieve order and unity" through the deployment and development of this image of the wanderer in its many forms. That is what I like to think. Time will tell, though, if I can sustain and define in precise and dazzling terms the structural, the organizational, principle enunciated above. This structural principle is based on a view of my poetry as: the expression of my experience, my sense, my understanding, in the context of my wandering, my journey and of the concept of the Oneness of Mankind. Can I continue to develop this epic, beyond the start I have given it, to a satisfying conclusion in the years ahead?

In the earliest stages of my own epic I think these words of Sicari aptly describe my own position, my view of my own epic. The nature, even the existence, of affinities between my own epic and the artistic forms called epics that have come into existence in the last three millennia did interest and concern me, though this may not concern students of my work should they one day arise. I should add, parenthetically, that Pound's pre-Cantos poetry(before 1917) is a meditation on and an investigation of his own identity. This is equally true of my own poetry in the years before I conceived my writing as epic, that is, the years before the autumn of 1997.

I would like to add, in conclusion, that this journey, this epic, is experienced as a weight or, perhaps, to use the words of the Universal House of Justice, as a "solemn consciousness." Whatever joy, pleasure and meaning I have experienced has grown out of this wellspring. But all is not "beer and skittles" as my mother used to say. There is a dull pain at the heart of life, the heart of our existence and to deny this pain is to deny life, indeed, it is an offense against life and it encourages a certain asphyxia of soul. I often tend to think that the denial of life's inner tension is a significant part of our ordinariness and cowardice, our sleeping selves, our consciously anti-hero stance. The vanities and cupidities of our life must be faced and, in some ways, we face them all too easily. The transcending of our ordinary self is also at the heart of this epic. And I'm never quite sure how much transcending I've done.


Appendix 10:

OUTLINE OF RON PRICE'S COLLECTION OF POETRY

What follows is an outline of the titles of the booklets of my poetry and the dates when the poetry in these booklets was written. I have also included a brief description of where I have sent these poetry booklets. There are some six thousand three hundred and fifty poems in this collection and some two million words. Five thousand of these poems are in the Bahá'í World Centre Library. In these fifty-nine booklets there are 27 years of poetry, 1980-2007, written after nine years on the homefront(1962-1971), nine years internationally(1971-1980) as a pioneer. During those 18 years of writing the occasional poem none were ever kept.

A. Booklets:

This poetry is divided into several sections named after the several stages associated with the construction of the Shrine of the Bab and the beautification of the surrounding properties. These several sections of poetry are entitled: The Tomb's Chambers, The Arcade, The Golden Dome, The Terraces and The Mountain of God.

BOOKLET NUMBER / NAME OF BOOKLET/ PERIOD WHEN WRITTEN

1. THE TOMB'S CHAMBERS:

---August 1980 to 2 March 1987

The above booklet of poetry was not sent to anyone or any group. It was kept as part of my personal juvenilia. But, after twenty-five years in the pioneer field, the following booklets of poetry were sent to the Bahá'í World Centre Library or some Bahá'í institution or community.

2. THE ARCADE

1June 1987 to 22 August 1992

3 THE GOLDEN DOME

2                         Pioneering Over Three Epochs             2 January 1992 to 22 December 1992
3                         Swiftly Changing Tides                               4 January 1993 to 22 April 1993
4                         The Priceless Treasury                               22 April 1993 to 5 July 1993
5                         A Yet Greater Impetus                               11 July 1993 to 29 August 1993
6       The Darkest Hours Before the Dawn 4 Sept 1993 to 11 November 1993
7             Instruments of Redemption 12 November 1993 to 30 December 1993
8             In Ever-Greater Measure                               1 January 1994 to 20 April 1994
9             Time Capsules                               27 April 1994 to 11 September 1994
10       The Emergence of a Bahá'í 18 September 1994 to 28 November 1994
                  Consciousness in World Literature
11             Intensest Rendezvous                   4 December 1994 to 14 December 1994
12             Soldiering On                               16 December 1994 to 5 January 1995
13.1       Vista of Splendour                         23 March 1995 to 4 May 1995
13.2       The Prelude                                           4 May 1995 to 30 May 1996(?)

4 THE TERRACES:

14                         Mysterious Forces                                           1 June 1995 to 29 June 1995
15                         Apple Green                                                       2 July 1995 to 10 September 1995
16                         The Hunt for Ground Cover                   13 September 1995 to 3 December 1995
17                         Emerald Green                                                 7 December 1995 to 23 January 1996
18                         The Strong Room                                           26 January 1996 to 8 April 1996
19                         Tapestry of Beauty                                           9 April 1996 to 30 April 1996
20                         In Loving Memory                                           3 May 1996 2 June 1996
21                         Ivy Needlepoint                                                 6 July 1996 26 August 1996
22                         Tender Packages                                           30 August 1996 to 3 November 1996
23                         The Art of Glorification                               6 November to 8 January 1997
24                         Canada's Glorious Mission Overseas 10 January to 14 Feb 97
                              (sent to IPC of the NSA of the Bahá'ís of Canada)
25                         A Small Contribution...Befitting Crescendo 19 Feb to 25 May 97
                              (sent to the NSA of the Bahá'ís of Australia)
26                         An Imperishable Record of Int'n Service 26 May to 31Aug 97
                              (sent to several LSAs in southern Ontario)
27                         At the Crest                         3 September 1997 to 28 November 1997      
28                         Elegance                                     29 November 1997 to 4 January 1998
29                         A View from the Roof Garden       6 January 1998 to 2 Feb 98
30                         Lines, Curves and Concentric Circles 3 Feb 1998 to 13/4/98                   31                         Silver Green and Grey...and Flame Orange 14 April 98 to 7/8/98      
32                         As Elegant As                               8 August 1998 to 9 November 1998
33                         Panorama Road's Monumental Gates 7 Nov 1998 to 10 Jan 99
34                         Impression of a Deeper Curve 12 January 1999 to 18 March 99
35                         Cascading Down                                     20 March 1999 to 16 May 1999                                                                        
36                         Who Is Writing the Past?                   18 May 1999 to 6 July 1999
37                         The Field Is Indeed So Immense 29 August 1999 to 9 July 99
38                         This Dawn and That Dawn       31 October 1999 to 31 August 99
39                         Epic                                           1 November 1999 to 25 December 1999
40                         A Celebration of Forty Years       27 Dec 1999 to 15 March 00
41                         A Bahá'í Poet of the 4th Epoch 22 March 2000 to 18 May 2000            
42                         39                                                             19 May 2000 to 12 September 2000
43                         Finished At last             14 September 2000 to 31 December 2000

5.       THE MOUNTAIN OF GOD:

44                   Fifty Years from F.O.G.       30 December 2000 to 13 April 2001
                                    (sent to the IPC of the NSA of the Bahá'ís of Canada)
45                   Thirty Years of International Pioneering 14 April 01 to 12 July 01
                        (sent to the IPC of the NSA of the Bahá'ís of Canada and the NSA
                                                of the Bahá'ís of Australia)
46                         Forty Years of Pioneering: 62-02 13 July 2001 to 15 Nov 02
47                         Some Poetry from the Fifth Epoch 20 Nov 2001 to 30 Jan 2002
                              (sent to the Bahá'í Institute of Learning for Western Australia)
48                         Out From Under the Bushel       31 January 2002 to May 14 2002
                                    (sent to the Bahá'í Centre for South Australia)
49                         The Fiftieth Anniversary Plus One 2 June 2002 to 30 Aug 2002
                                    (sent to the Bahá'í Centre for Canberra in the Australian
                                                      Capital Territory)
50                         Twenty Years On             7 September 2002 to 5 November 2002
                                    (sent to the Bahá'í Council of the NT)
51                         Forty Years On                   6 November 2002 to 21 March 2003
                                    (sent to the Bahá'í Council of Victoria)
52                         Half Way Point in the Five Year Plan:
                              A Poetic Note Struck             22 March 2003 to 21 October 2003
                                    (sent to the Bahá'í Council of Queensland)
53                         This Rising Vitality                   19 December 2003 to 27 July 2004
                                    (sent to the Local Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of Burlington Ontario)            
54                         Pioneer's Report:In Memory of Lulu Barr 11 Aug 04 to 16/3/05
                                    (sent to the Bahá'í Community of Hamilton Ontario)
55 Pioneer's Report: In Memory of Nancy Campbell, Fred & Lillian                                     Price March 21st 2005 to July 26th 2005.
                                    (sent to the Bahá'í Community of Hamilton Ontario)
56 Pioneer's Report: In Memory of Jameson & Gale Bond & Dorothy Weaver                   27 July 2005 to August 31st 2005
                                    (sent to the Iqaluit/Frobisher Bay Bahá'í Community)
57 In Loving Memory of George Spendlove
                                    September 2nd 2005 to December 9th 2005
                                    (sent to the Toronto Bahá'í Community)
58                         The Inner Life and The Environment: A Gateway not a Carpark
                                          December 20th 2005 to April 9th 2006
                                    (sent to the Bahá'í Council for Tasmania)
59                         Steeled Through Experience April 12th 2006 to Nov 30 2006
                                          (sent to the NSA of the Bahá'ís of Canada)
60 Untitled As Yet
                                          December 6th 2006 to April 12th 2007
                                          (recipient undecided as yet)

B. Some Background Information on the Booklets:

The booklet entitled Warm-Up: The Tomb's Chambers was not sent to the Baha'I World Centre Library(BWCL). It contained some 35 poems. I kept this booklet in my study. But after 25 years in the pioneering field, this poetic inclination increased and, unable to publish my poetry in the secular press, I sent it out to Bahá'í institutions in Canada and Australia. The following paragraphs describe how and who and when and where.

The next several booklets of my poetry were not given titles originally, as far as I recall; and, although they were placed in covers, they were not initially given what has become the standard format for each of my booklets of poetry, the plastic folder/cover. I eventually gave titles to all the booklets and each one is in a plastic cover in my personal collection. I hope, too, that one day the pages can be numbered, a table of contents for each booklet can be arranged and an index can be provided to cover all the poetry. This is a somewhat daunting task given the sheer quantity of material. Since there are still relatively few readers of my poetry in these years of the first century of the Formative Age, there is little need to complete such an exercise for publishing and marketing purposes. And, of course, there may never be such a need.

Booklets 1 to 23 were all sent to the BWCL. Booklet 24 was sent to the International Pioneer Committee of the NSA of the Bahá'ís of Canada in celebration of eighty years of the revelation of the Tablets of the Divine Plan and Canada's glorious mission overseas. Booklet 25 was sent to the NSA of the Bahá'ís of Australia in celebration of the contribution of overseas pioneers from other countries to the Australian Baha'I experience, the fortieth anniversary of the spiritual axis and the Guardian's last letter to Australia. Booklet 26 was sent to the LSA of the Bahá'ís of Burlington, to be shared with several LSAs in Southern Ontario, where I became a Bahá'í in the 1950s and enjoyed some of my initial Bahá'í experience in the early 1960s. I sent Booklets 27 to 43 to the BWCL.

Booklet 46 celebrated forty years of my pioneering life: 1962-2002 and was presented to the Regional Bahá'í Council for Tasmania to celebrate its first year in office. Booklet 45 I sent to the International Pioneer Committee(IPC) of the NSA of the Bahá'ís of Canada and the NSA of the Bahá'ís of Australia in celebration of my thirty years of international pioneering, Booklet 44, entitled Fifty Years From F.O.G.,(an expression used in Canada for ‘Feet-on-the-Ground.') sent in April 2001 to the IPC of the NSA of the Bahá'ís of Canada celebrated the current fifty years of international pioneering, the current situation of international pioneers in-the-field beginning with Alan Pringle in Costa Rica who arrived there in 1951.

Booklet 47 was sent to the LSA of the Bahá'ís of Melville to celebrate the first anniversary of the opening of Western Australia's new Bahá'í Centre of Learning which opened in May of 2001. Booklet 48, celebrates the first anniversary of the opening of the new Bahá'í Centre on Brighton Road in South Australia and Booklet 49 the opening of the Bahá'í Centre in Canberra and the beginning of the second half century of Bahá'í experience in Australia's national capital. Booklet 50 was sent to the Bahá'í Council of the Northern Territory thanking them for including my History of the Bahá'í Faith in the NT: 1947 to 1997 in their newsletter ‘Northern Lights.' Booklet 51 was sent to the Bahá'í Council of Victoria in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the election in 1963 of the Universal House of Justice. Booklet 52 was sent to the Bahá'í Council of Queensland to mark the half-way point in the Five Year Plan, October 2003. Booklet 53 was sent to the Bahá'í community of Burlington Ontario, my Bahá'í community of origin, in celebration of more than forty years of pioneering experience initiated within that community. Booklet 54 was sent to the Bahá'í Community of Hamilton as a ‘Report from a Pioneer' and in memory of the first Bahá'í in Hamilton in 1939, Lulu Barr. Booklet 55 was sent to the Bahá'í Community of Hamilton as a ‘Report from a Pioneer' and in memory of Nancy Campbell and my parents who served on the first LSA of Dundas in 1962. Booklet 56 was sent to the Bahá'í community of Iqaluit in Memory of Jameson and Gale Bond and Dorothy Weaver and a celebration of a decision forty years ago to pioneer among the Eskimo/Inuit. Booklet 57 was sent to the Toronto Bahá'í community 37 years after I left to pioneer. Booklet 58 was sent to the Bahá'í Council for Tasmania in celebration of the opening of the new Bahá'í Centre in Hobart in 2007. Booklet 59/60 was sent to the NSA of the Bahais of Canada. Booklet 61, recipient undecided as this point.

C. Concluding Comment:

The above outlines twenty-six years of poetic activity, poetic writing, that has taken place for the most part in my second twenty-five years in the pioneering field. As I bring this up-ro-date, we are at the start of another Plan, a Five Year Plan(2006-2011). I look forward to more years of writing as we head toward the completion of the first century of the Formative Age in the next fifteen years(2006-2021). I, too, will complete my own half century of pioneering in the next six years, in 2012. I hope that whoever comes across this poetry gets some pleasure and insight from the experience.

Ron Price August 2006

Appendix 11:

LETTER-POEMS: A BLENDED GENRE

"Letter-Poem, a Dickinson Genre" does not contend that Emily Dickinson was the only or the first poet to use letters to transmit poetry, to formulate letters as poetry, to exploit the poetic and epistolary so that they inflect, enrich, even become one another. Keats and others of Dickinson's forebears, as well as a host of her descendants, have come to blend the genres in various ways and for a wide range of purposes resulting in an even wider range of effects. I have come to see some/many of my own letters in a collection now spanning some 40 years as a blend of genres.

In his 1958 introduction to The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson remarked that it was difficult to tel where the letter leaves off and the poem begins" A decade later, when my own collection of letters was taking its first form, Dickinson's eminent biographer Richard B. Sewall identified producing "letter-poems" as a familial as well as an artistic practice: "Dickinson's father's (Edward) sister, Elizabeth, was not only the chronicler but the bard of her generation in the family. She once sent her young nephew Austin a rhymed letter of fifty stanzas on his toothache" (Life 32). Sometimes Dickinson enclosed poems on a separate sheet with a letter; sometimes poems, especially to Susan Dickinson, constitute the entire text of a letter; sometimes a few lines of a poem recorded in the fascicles or in another letter or on a sheet not bound to any manuscript book, either literally with string or figuratively by being sent to a particular addressee, are woven into the prose of a letter.

The following questions could easily be asked of both Dickinson's poems and letters and mine: "What counts as a "poem" and what counts as a "letter?" and "How useful is the appellation "letter-poem" which foregrounds the genre traditionally devalued as "lesser" and "private" when compared to "poems"? And, a final three questions"

1. "What criteria should be used for distinguishing between "poems," "letters," and "letter-poems" and how useful are those for analyzing Emily Dickinson's artistic project and mine?

2. What sorts of insights result from the twentieth and twenty-first-century conventions of marking some manuscripts as "private" and some print documents as "public"? How are critical understandings and interpretations constrained by these conventions equating the "public sphere" and the origins of print culture?

3. What sorts of insights are enabled by conventional genre distinctions between the epistolary and the poetic and what critical understandings and interpretations are constrained by these conventions of genre reinforced by print bookmaking?


I leave readers of this autobiography with these questions, questions I have not answered myself, but questions that have serious implications for this autobiography which draws on poetry, letters and narrative in extensive measure. I leave readers, too, with the following two items: a statement on Bahá'í literature in general and a short essay introducing my correspondence with Roger White. And with this my autobiography is nearly concluded, although I may add an epilogue to this epilogue. We shall see.

APPENDIX 12:

I began giving thoughts in some organized way to my own funeral at the end of the Bahá'í Holy Year, in fact, quite specifically on April 19th 1993. I was 14 months short of my fiftieth birthday. At the time I had been attending more funerals than I had ever done in my life to that point, in those six years since arriving in Perth.

Forty days before the last day of the Holy Year(May 29th 1992-May 29th 1993), on April 19th 1993 then, I decided it was timely to write my own eulogy and to put on paper some kind of statement of 'final words,' to be used in the event of my death. In January 1993 I had drawn up a formal Will. I was nearly 48 at the time. Previous Wills, going back to my late teens, had become out-of-date. Now, thirteen years later in 2006 it seemed timely to revise that initial statement and type it into my computer for ease of access and future use, perhaps in my memoirs.

I have divided this statement into three parts: (A) my material estate, (B) actions to take on my death and (C) my eulogy. These statements now follow:

A. MY MATERIAL ESTATE:

A.1 Clothes, Books and Other Personal Effects

I leave these things to my wife and son to dispose of in any way they desire.(see formal and official Will witnessed in July 2002)

A.2 Personal Writings

I like to think that this great mass of material would be of some use to the Bahai community. It could be sent to the nearest LSA archive, the Tasmanian Centre for Learning archive or the National Bahá'í archive in Sydney. Again, I leave this to my wife and son to work out. I may, at some future time, discuss this question with the various Bahá'í institutions concerned and have this issue determined/clarified before my passing. But I have not yet done this. (See formal and detailed statement in the file with my offical Will and in the bottom drawer of my desk for further guidelines on this subject).

B. Actions to Take on My Death:

1. Send an email to my relatives in Canada care of my cousin Joan Cornfield. Joan is my mother's brother's daughter, age 73 in 2006, living in Georgetown Ontario. Her email address is: joanc@aztec-net.com In addition, send an email to my cousin David Hunter at: bdhunter@sympatico.ca. He lives in Ottawa Ontario.

2. Send an email to The Universal House of Justice:
secretariat@bwc.org

The words could be as follows:
"Ron Price, Canadian pioneer on the homefront from 1962 and international pioneer to Australia from 1971, passed away on__________ from_______."

3. Send an email to the NSA of the Bahais of Australia, Inc:
secretariat@bnc.bahai.org.au

4. Send an email to the NSA of the Bahais of Canada
5. Send an email to Judith Noack, my first wife.
Judith.noack@sympatico.ca

6. Buy a tombstone and have it marked as follows:

Ron Price 1944-20

Bahai Pioneer:1962-20

7. Pray for my soul from time to time.

8. Organize a funeral service to your taste following (a) the guidelines in the funeral director's kit and (b) the supervising LSA's specifications.

C. My Eulogy:

My wife or son are free to read the following personally composed statement in full, in part or not at all as they so desire. "It is conventional for a eulogy, if one is read or spoken at all, to be composed by a person other than the deceased. And if any person or persons would like to say something about me and my life they should feel free to do so at this funeral service. But after listening to several eulogys at several funerals and going to funerals as far back as 1956, both within and without the Bahá'í community, I decided for a time to write my own last words. The first draft of such a statement was written at the end of the Bahá'í Holy Year of 1992-1993; I had been a pioneer for some thirty years at the time. I made the occasional alteration over the next thirteen years and on 27 December 2006 I wrote what I hoped would be the final words on the subject, the final words to a statement that might go into the first hard cover copy of my memoir. These sorts of statements are very subjective and one's thoughts and feelings change with the seasons, with the years. Who knows what might eventuate insofar as a final statement by me in the years and possibly decades that remain.

"The first statement I wrote in 1993 was three pages long of double-spaced typing. The second and what I thought at the time would be my final statement was just a simple poem. It was called 'reincarnation.' I don't believe in reincarnation. I have no desire to return to this earth in any form, but I liked the poem. It suited my taste at the time. In the end, in October 2004, I decided against the idea of a eulogy or the use of that poem. That is how things stand at present as I organize this series of appendices to my memoir.

My motivation to write a eulogy, a motivation that existed for over a decade, was due to the overstatements I had listened to at funerals. My mother felt the same way back in 1965 about the eulogies she listened to at my father's funeral. I was 21 at the time and did not understand her sentiments but, now that I am the same age as my mother was then--in my early sixties, I can appreciate her complaint and desire for a more honest but kind set of final words.

"If things went according to the death notices," wrote novelist Erich Remarque, "man would be absolutely perfect. There you find only first-class fathers, immaculate husbands, model children, unselfish, self-sacrificing mothers, grandparents mourned by all, businessmen in contrast with whom Francis of Assisi would seem an infinite egoist, generals dripping with kindness, humane prosecuting attorneys, almost holy munitions makers - in short, the earth seems to have been populated by a horde of wingless angels without one's having been aware of it."

I leave the funeral exercise in the hands of those who loved me and the LSA that assumes the responsibility for its execution. The following prose-poems, while not serving as a eulogy, will serve as some concluding words to this appendix.

APPENDIX 13

IDENTITY

The purpose of autobiography as the recreation, as the nostalgic closure or as the simple delineation of a life is without doubt. But it is also a search for some clearer understanding of the autobiographer's identity. Such a literary exercise thus involves a significant psychological dimension, further reflected in its concern with the interface between the active, public self of a life and its more contemplative private equivalent side by side. Since autobiography constitutes a process of investigation rather than a finished product, it is, inevitably, open-ended. Until my early retirement at the age of 55 in 1999, my identity was tied-up with my career, my family and community life and far, far back in fourth place was my writing life fitting itself into corners that saw the light of day when necessity or some selected sense of duty and pleasure called.

In the last ten years, 1999 to 2009 though, my life as a writer and poet, an editor and publisher has shaped my life and my identity. As the poet e.e. cummings once wrote, if the artist does not shape his or her identity to their work their life will crack open. My life had already cracked open several times before my early retirement and with the medication I acquired for my bipolar disorder during this last decade and as I entered my 60s, I think I have seen the end of my life cracking open—but it is not in the main because I am free at last to write.

My religious identity as a Bahá'í acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of my particular subjectivity, my particular sense of who I am. I also acknowledge that all discourse, all writing, is placed, positioned and situated and all of my knowledge is contextual. I find it helpful, fertile, useful if this way of looking at my Bahá'í identity is contested, subjected to a dialectic, if it arises from an assertion of a difference, a clash, of opinions. In this way my identity develops from, is clarified by and is based on a process of engaging and asserting difference rather than suppressing it. This identity acknowledges the reality of decentralised, diffuse and sometimes systematized knowledge; it acknowledges a sense of power which also has a diffuse set of sources and at the same time accepts the useful concepts of periphery and centre, margins and depths, surfaces and heights in the expression of that power. Once we clarify the notion of identity, once it is redefined in a universal and non-derogatory way, once it engages difference without implying superiority and hierarchy, it is hoped that this will help the Bahá'í community express its group consciousness, help it to develop in a manner which is unfettered by the accrued and often inaccurate associations of history and culture, tradition and ignorance.

My identity and my autobiography is wrapped up in, is part and parcel of, my search for and experience in a collective solution to the problems of our age. This collective solution is presented to me as both a moral imperative and the logical consequence of reason applied to my intelligible, and I trust intelligent, rendering of history and the nature of my society. The measures needed to cure the ills of civilization are identical with those needed to cure the individual but these measures must be practiced in a social milieux. Indeed the social milieux, the social interaction within the social order revealed in the Bahá'í scriptures, is the workshop for both my individual fulfilment and for the collective solution that I am a functioning part of by my free choice. Individual identity and a more inclusive identity as part of a social structure, as a world citizen are inextricably conjoined.

There are so many ways of looking at identity. One popular view is expressed as follows: What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of us ever have the courage to face: and that is the child you once were, long before formal education ever got its claws into you--that impatient, all-demanding child who wants love and power and can't get enough of either ...It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old."

My autobiography which in many ways is a series of depictions of my identity is presented as a pastiche of many types of writing: first, second and third-person point of view narration, the use of the past as well as the present tense, letters, newspaper articles, speeches, lists, historical accounts, scientific jargon, definitions, photographs, recipes, conversations, obituaries, wedding announcements, telephone conversations and assorted memorabilia. The inclusion of all these kinds of writing, all these genres of writing both loosens and strengthens genre boundaries and points to blurring and cross-pollinating between genres as being more useful.

In writing my memoirs, my autobiography, I am defining myself because I am putting consciousness into text. In some ways I'm exploring personality, trying to understand myself better and at the same time I'm opening up personality. I'm writing out of personality and it's my canvas in a sense. I could never have written my memoirs and get a handle on my identity without postmodernism, without the licence to collapse generic conventions and see myself as many selves. I like the idea of calling my work a novel and then to define it further as creative non-fiction. But, again, I must emphasize, the overview of all of this life-narrative, the general context, the total orientation, the moulding and remoulding of my world, is in the form of a conscious participation, often on a very small scale, in the forming of a new society. The context is one of commitment, of solitude and solidarity.

My identity is also bound up with an appreciation of the past, with history, with tradition. All of these things are necessary to a full life, a life which develops organically rather than one which is radically cut off from its roots. The roots of my society are Judaeo-Christian and Greco-Roman and the new Faith that has inspired my life and which is at the centre of my identity has a rich appreciation of these two roots.

But however I express my identity I leave the final word here with Virginia Woolf who once wrote: "I sometimes think only autobiography is literature--novels are what we peel off, and come at last to the core, which is only you or me."

APPENDIX 14: SOME POETRY AND SOME COMMENTS ON:
THE RON PRICE COLLECTION

GLAD TIDINGS

It is the freshness of the child's approach to experience that you need to cultivate as a writer. -Carmel Bush, Dear Writer: Revised and Expanded, 2nd edition, 1996(1988), p.58.

This poem was written after attending a wedding of a former student of mine, Alister Wilson, at a Church of Christ on Beaufort Street in north Perth.-Ron Price, 4:50 pm, Saturday, 5 July, 1997.

One comes to churches from time to time
when a wedding or a funeral takes place
and one sits in a pew with light streaming
in from overhead, after centuries of dealing
with light, sitting beside strangers, the myriad
strangers, the special sub-set found at weddings
and funerals, people just like me, all so different,
yet hardly distinguishable, as we go down life's
road to the end, to a new beginning where the light
of the Great Beyond will define more precisely who
we are and who we have become. Here we must always
remain forever a mystery to each other and to God,
some flotsam and jetsam thrown together in curious
combinations, given a temporary immortality
in this fixed place of the Evangel.

1 Evangel means glad tidings, an appropriate term for a wedding.

CONCLUDED DAYS

Another Emily Dickinson poem, number 735, lies behind this composition. She examines in her poem what she calls her(and our) "concluded days". She was in her early thirties when she wrote her poem. I examine below my(and our) "concluded days" from the vantage point of my mid-fifties. I have been impressed, at the many funerals I have attended in the last decade, by the sense of joyfulness, cheer, happy spirits evidenced, almost like a good-bye party. This was also the case as far back as the first funeral I attended in the Bahá'í community, my father's in 1965. In other funerals I have attended, the balance went toward sadness and somberness, an atmosphere of gloom. Getting the balance right is difficult. So, too, in life there should be the right balance, in the contemplations of one's days, between the sweet and the sour memories. The ‘quiet centre' contains, it seems to me, a balance of this light and shade, gain and loss, victory and defeat, honey and poison. For everyone the mix is different.

As our days grow to their ends,
flavours and temperature
emerge from our contemplations:
some tastes are sweet and warm
and some are cool and sour,
some weigh heavy on our hearts,
a burden carried,
a lacerated throat;
some make for garlands-
a coronal-
and, then, at the funeral,
on that dying side
we are saluted:1
hail and farewell!

Ron Price
24 March 1999

1 And so we should be saluted for having survived these difficult days with all their piercing ambiguities and, perhaps, in this case anyway, told of the tale. I wrote this poem in the last two weeks of my tenure as a permanent full-time teacher.

A DELICATE CONCOCTION

A poet ultimately constructs a world, a quite autonomous universe, in his work. I have done this in my body of poetry. This world is at once: personal, historical, futuristic, intimately connected with a body of religious beliefs, philoosophy, literature and poetry as true to reality as I can make it. The construction is not unlike the coming of spring. Something fresh and new is seen, heard, tasted or felt. There is a ferment, a heat, an awakening; and the urge to write, a creative fever, is felt. I can't make it come. It is not orderly or coherent but, in the writing, in going into the mind's deep well, coherence and order is established, at least to some extent. For life's truths are multilayered, many-sided and complex and have an elusive aspect. The Apollonian aspect of poetry can only be partly attained; for there is a certain Dionysian element present when one writes poetry.
-Ron Price

There is an energy, longing, generated
by striving after an ideal. My poetry is
a giving of form to this energy, this striving,
an expression of an entire way of life,
an interpretation of the universe, a
perception, as penetrating as possible,
of some of the issues in existence.
The poet needs
serenity and gloom,
joy and melancholy,
quiet happiness and a smouldering anger
in a delicate concoction. Like the Greeks
we have an image of a world order
shared by all people in our community.

Ron Price
14 April 1999

A STRANGER

Bruce Dawe wrote an endearing little poem about getting to be known by the undertaker, the funeral director, the personnel at the place where funerals were conducted, probably in Toowoomba Queensland where he lived for many years. He had attended so many funerals there that he got to be well known by those who worked at the funeral parlour and the place of burial. Since I have moved around so much in life, thusfar, there has been no chance that I could have got to be well known or even recognized by any funeral director and his assistants in their "immortal grey suits." -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1999.

I've attended funerals in so many places,
I've never got to be really known by undertakers,
or any of those polished dude
who drive the cars or
walk around in their grey suits.

I think it's fated that my face
will be a stranger
at such a final resting place,
where, one day,
I'll be out of life's danger.

Perhaps underneath the shade of trees
I'll watch some friends give out their pleas
that my soul may enjoy some pure water's fount,
be cleansed of all that was part of my earthly haunt
and behold God's splendour on a lofty mount.

Yes, I'll gaze down on such a scene,
I hope, and thank God, for what has been,
that the game is over and the fun
that all has been said and all has been done
and all has been heard and all has been seen.

And that now for me will be perpetuity,
perhaps a rose-garden
at the end of a sea of light
in a world of mysteries
and delight. ...Ron Price 15 October 1999

THE WORDS ‘HERE AM I! HERE AM I!'

Emily Dickinson writes "There is a finished feeling/Experienced at Graves-"(Number 856). Her short poem inspired my own which draws on a short passage from the Long Obligatory Prayer. -Ron Price

Death is tidy, in a box,
at funerals I see.
It has a finished feeling,
quite precise, eternal: be.

There is a leisure, too, that enters
in this wilderness of size.
This is where His footsteps start
and the words ‘Here am I! Here am I!'

Ron Price
4 January 1999

I'm sure it will go unnoticed anywhere in the world should a university, an academic institute, some centre for learning, indeed, one of any number of institutions, buy for a disclosed or undisclosed sum, the entire collection of my papers – all 1 to 3 tons of manuscripts, notebooks and letters. The 1001 boxes containing the definitive archive of this writer, poet, teacher, Bahá'í pioneer, Canadian-Australian, father of one and step-father of two, husband, among other roles acquired in his lifetime, are expected to take two years to catalogue, as a Curator of Literary Collections told Price once upon a time. Processing began shortly after acquisition, or perhaps purchase, and transporting from Price's study in Tasmania to the institution in Canada. Some portions of the collection will be made available to scholars within months of purchase.

The news of this acquisition has not been made widely public, mainly because it is not expected that there be significant interest in the collection. Anyone who is keen to examine the archive can drive down to its new location to get a sense of what this archive contains. The institution, I trust, will very kindly offer to display a sample of the material for anyone to see.

In the said Library at said institution handling a scrapbook in which I gathered my first documents from over 40 years ago in 1962, my first publications twenty years ago, a note of congratulations from several of my internet correspondents, a receipt of payment for my first royalty for my first book, the covers of magazines in which my work appeared. There is also sad evidence of my manic-depressive behaviour from time to time. There are few handwritten drafts of poems, although there are hundreds of pages of notes in his handwriting. Typewritten manuscripts can be found for all the six drafts of my book on the poetry of Roger White as well as my own autobiography in its five editions. There are over 6000 poems in 57 booklets.

The range of unseen material in this collection will keep scholars busy for years to come. Some of the personal correspondence will be closed for 25 years and the letters between myself and, say, John Bailey "might be viewed 100 years from now like the correspondence between Wordsworth and Coleridge". Professor of X says "it will help us hire new lecturers in the field who will have at their fingertips material that will launch their scholarly careers"on archives of this nature. My papers join those of X,Y and Z and a small collection from A, although A has not yet made my complete collection of papers available.

So why might my collection go to Canada and not to Australia at, say, universities in Sydney or Melbourne? The answer is quite simply that in 2134 McMaster Uni might be given $105 million in Coca-Cola stock which has been used to build a collection of manuscripts from contemporary poets. I can not be be quoted in a newspaper as saying that my papers "could not be at a better place nor in more congenial company". But there may have been two further reasons why I might be happy to have my papers in Canada. In Canada I have, as the American Price scholar Joe Jones might put it, "been skewered by the Canadian feminists as being the person who killed Cock Robin, and that is in no way accurate". Consequently, there has been little interest in my work there. Now it is clear that the future compilation of the Complete Poems and the Collected Letters will require much time spent in Canada. Everything is in place for a revival of interest in Canadian academia. McMaster is planning to offer scholarships to fund the study of my collection as an extension of the two currently available for work on their material written by Bahá'ís..

Secondly, my reputation in Canada deprived him of the pot of gold that Canadian universities have delivered to some others. This sale might have gone some way towards compensation for that. But the loss to Australia is sad. The fact is that Australian universities have been too aloof to seek the kind of private and corporate endowments that gave McMaster its purchasing power. In a recent TLS article Joey Towsim indicated that money is available to purchase papers for the nation, but that either university libraries or authors are unaware of it. "In the case of my papers, for example," Mount writes, "the dealer involved had already been rebuffed by the Heritage Lottery Fund in his efforts to secure Alan Sillitoe's papers for Nottingham." Mount suggests, however, that the sums available would not even have approached McMaster offer.

In 1996 my contemporary at Cambridge deposited my papers at Sheffield University where Harry Smith teaches. Smith was the first person to write a monograph on my work. This option was always open to me, although he'd have taken a lot less money. But were any Australian universities seriously interested in raising the money to keep this major twentieth-century archive in Australia? More recently McMaster has added to their archive my my work my letters to John Bailey from 1996 to 2011, and 400 manuscript drafts of poems from the late 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. All this later material was in private hands and thus not previously available for study. The result is that future scholars of my work will be going to McMaster and swallowing the power of Coca Cola. Certainly there could be no better place for their conservation, and future collections of my material will now join the original 1 to 3 tons from Devon. It may be an advantage to scholars to have all the material in one place for the work that is to come. -Ron Price with thanks to Terry Gifford, "The Fate of Ted Hughes's Papers," poetrymagazines.org.uk, No 14, Autumn 1999. 1100 boxes is, of course, a guesstimation.

APPENDIX 15: BAHA'I LITERATURE: 1907-2007

I'd like to make a short summary statement, a sort of postscript to some 6000 prose-poems I have written since 1980. It is a post-script not merely to this body of poetry but also to the incredible output of prose and poetry that has emerged from the Bahá'í community in the century since the heart of the troubled times of ‘Abdul-Baha's ministry1 to today: 1906-2006. I have sometimes heard it said that the twentieth century, in the matter of purely Bahá'í literature in English, has been dull and uninteresting; that it is even an uninviting domain. As a teacher of literature I have often heard this also said of Shakespeare and the Bible, especially the King James version. Another criticism I have heard is that most of the Revelation is, as yet, untranslated and unavailable and that we are still working with a small portion of the sacred text. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that, given the small percentage of translated writings from the original Persian and Arabic, it is really idle and unprofitable to spend one's time with what is available. It would appear to me, though, that the opposite is the case.

The 20th century saw an immense literature on the Faith become available to the Bahai community, too much for it to cope with. The staggering Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh and the body of sacred literature from the other Central Figures of the Bahá'í community, to say nothing from the literature produced by the trustees of that Revelation, the Universal House of Justice, as well as the commentaries from the body of believers became just about beyond the capacity of the individual to take it all in. Indeed individuals cannot; they must now pick and choose.

The 20th century to which may be credited translations of the major works of Bahá'u'lláh, innumerable writings of the Central Figures and the trustees of the sacred texts, the many secular commentaries, poetry, music in many forms and styles, plays and several other genres and forms of literature and the arts has laid a solid foundation for the future. In their present form Bahá'í literature and the several forms of expression in the creative and performing arts more than holds its own in the history of Bahá'í literature as against the centuries that have preceded it or will follow it as we traverse the years to the golden age centuries hence. Bahá'í literature is not deficient either in variety of utterance or in many-sidedness of interest. It is not merely full of the promise that all periods of transition possess, but it's actual accomplishment is, from my point of view, beyond criticism and its products are possessed of both beauty and relevance. -Ron Price with appreciation to Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, Wilmette, 1957, p.267 and thanks to "Political and Religious Verse to the Close of the Fifteenth Century," The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes: 1907–21, Volume II: The End of the Middle Ages at Bartleby.com, Great Books Online, 2006.

And finally a word about my correspondence with Roger White, unofficial poet laureate of the Bahá'í community in the 1980s, with whom I corresponded from 1981 to 1993.

I'd like to introduce one of my volumes of correspondence with Roger White by a short piece on the literary archives of a father who died at 55. The piece is written by the son, a Sebastian Matthews. By the age of 55 I had ‘died' to the world of employment, indeed much of the social world and I began to take seriously what I had never been able to do in the previous 40 years, 1959 to 1999: a serious commitment to writing. By my mid-to-late teens, 1959-1963, I could feel the intimations of academic, literary interests developing. The embryo had formed, but the experience had to wait before it could be given full reign. Health problems, sexual proclivities, marital and family responsibilities, spiritual and religious responsibilities, moving from place to place—the list of things that got in the road of my giving my energies fully to literary and academic interests, so to speak—was long. By my mid-to-late teens, too, I also began to organize my life in narrative terms. The first sketches of this life, this narrative, were vague and tenuous but the process clearly began in late adolescence and young adulthood.

The field of narrative psychology which began to develop seriously about the same time that I began to put pen to paper in the mid-1980s to write this memoir. This field emphasizes how human activity and experience are rooted in the feeling of meaning and that stories, rather than logical arguments or lawful formulations, are the vehicle by which that meaning is communicated. I won't outline the main theorists in psychology who have developed this theme but meaning, I recall as clear as if it was yesterday, was a critical variable to me as an adolescent.

Since my second marriage in 1975, four years after I arrived in Australia, the concept of narrative has successfully travelled from literature into several new disciplines such as social sciences, law, psychology, theology and health studies. Narrative form is not a dress which covers something else but the structure inherent in human experience and action. But no elements enter our experience, we maintain, unstoried or unnarrativized.

I believe that the ways of telling and the ways of conceptualizing that go with them become so habitual that they finally become recipes for structuring experience itself, for laying down routes into memory; for not only guiding the life narrative up to the present but directing it into the future. I have argued that a life as led is inseparable from a life as told – or more bluntly, a life is not "how it was" but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold. Narrative is everywhere in these our storied lives. I thank Bruner and others for their insightful analysis of narratives in our lives. I also thank David Malouf for expressing an aspect of my narrative life, namely, that in an important sense there is no beginning, middle and end to one's story and one's stories, and that much of narrative is accidental, unconscious, quite mysterious, written in a context of a writer's ‘puzzled attentiveness' and deriving quintessentially from emotional connections both in the writing, the telling and the living.

By the time my correspondence with Roger White was completed in early 1993, I could see the light at the end of my employment tunnel. Tired of much in the job and social domains I began to look forward to a period I could devote to writing, to the academic, to the solitary. In that year 1992-3 my poetry indeed did take off and for many years, until my retirement in 1999, I wrote over 500 poems a year. I thank Roger White for providing a literary inspiration, a sort of kick-start. "Letters mingle souls," wrote the poet John Donne. "More than kisses, letters mingle souls," Donne said. I like to think some of this mingling went on in my correspondence with White.

By definition death leaves unfinished business, wrote one Stanley Plumly. I am not sure what exactly is unfinished with Roger but I look forward to whatever eventuates in the world beyond in the language of there.


I have left this short piece of writing on 'archives' to the end of this autobiography because it may be particularly useful to my son Daniel or, perhaps, others involved as executors/friends in disposing of my literary estate. The article is from that piece I referred to above, that source: Sebastian Matthews, "My Father's Garden: Tending a Literary Legacy," Poets & Writers Magazine, 2003.

Sebastian Matthews writes that: "It would be an exaggeration to say my father, William Matthews, "arranged" his papers. On his death in 1997 manuscripts were found bound together with rubber bands; individual poems often had the name of the journal in which they first appeared handwritten in the lower-right corner; old essays were stored either in a filing cabinet or in one of the computer files on his ancient Macintosh. That was the extent of the order he kept. One box was full of student manuscripts covering piles of old tax receipts; another brimmed over with official correspondence—years of random letters from conference directors, editors, festival organizers, and department heads. Early drafts of a manuscript overflowed one box, while later versions hid in another. Random postcards popped up between manuscript pages. My father kept contradictory lists of poems he'd published in journals, which meant they all needed double-checking.

"After a full day of work, I still couldn't get a clear sense of the archive's contents. Entire decades of early correspondence were missing from this man who died at 55. I had been told by old friends that my father had engaged in ongoing correspondence with such poets as: W.S. Merwin, James Wright, Robert Bly, and Richard Hugo. But it seemed that only a few letters from each had survived his many moves. I couldn't shake the feeling that important aspects of his estate were either tucked away in a storage shed somewhere or gone for good.

"A literary executor was required. I had a vague idea of what is required of a literary executor. Negotiating contracts, editing, trafficking manuscripts, collecting royalties, and registering and renewing copyrights seemed like the typical duties that would be asked of me. But as the daunting task of placing his letters and manuscripts in a university archive loomed, I could see there was more to the role of a literary executor than just legal and administrative details. I was hesitant to take steps forward, because I wasn't sure what to do first; my father's will, unsigned, was vague and offered little instruction.

"As my father's son who had gathered together all his papers into boxes, I eventually tried to sort out all the papers in those boxes. But, after I had spread them out on the living-room carpet in an attempt to do the sorting, I found that I kept walking away from the boxes, overcome with a sharp sense of despair bordering on panic. It felt like I had lost my way, was trapped in a dense forest with no discernible path out. The archive had to be catalogued, I understood, for legal and administrative purposes, but why did I have to do it? What about my own work? I had chats with a few others, family and friends, in an effort to sort it all out. My mother put on Bob Dylan or some other record my father and I used to listen to together, and eventually I'd return to the living room and dip my hands back into the boxes. When it was all done, instead of feeling a sense of completion—of a job well done—I was depleted, overwhelmed by the task of going through my father's literary papers and their constant reminder of my father's absence. I felt invisible in the work, lost again in my father's long shadow.

"How does one go about managing a writer's legacy? And if that writer happens to be your father, how do you avoid resenting him for dumping all this work on you? In order to move forward, I needed to know what my father would have wished. I kept asking myself those questions. And I could only guess at the answers. As a young writer with little experience in the field, with only a few publications to my name, I felt unable to achieve a balance between doing what I thought I should do to keep the memory and wishes of my father intact and doing what it seemed I was supposed to do. As an executor, as a son, I had been left with only fragments of a map.

The article from which I obtained the above passages can be found in my Journal Volume 4(section B.1.1.(1)) Whoever deals with my literary estate could read that full article by Sebastian Matthews. But I don't anticipate these problems of Senastian Matthews arising for my son or the executor(s) of my literary estate will be necessary. Those who deal with my literary estate, my papers, my writings, may have different problems, if they have any problems at all. My papers have an order, a system, which should make any dealings and post mortem organization quite straight-forward. My will is also in order as well and all the relevant documents concerning all this paper in my study is set out in order. I have written the following general statement to cover my Will and my papers:

GUIDELINES FOR MY EXECUTORS AND OTHERS
IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH

Preamble:

1. In the event of my death it is my wish that my body NOT be cremated, that no embalming process be employed, that it be buried within one hour's journey of the place of death, and that my burial and any service held in connection with that burial be conducted according to the custom of the Bahá'í Faith and under the direction of the Local Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'í community where I reside or nearest to the place where I reside in the event of my death. I request also that the Local Spiritual Assembly of the Bahai community in which I reside(or nearest to where I reside) at the time of my death and the National Spiritual Assemblies of the Bahais of Australia Inc. and Canada be immediately notified of my death.

2. Next of Kin:____Christine Price_____________________________

3. Address: 6 Reece St., George_Town Tasmania 7253____________

4. Persons to be notified in the event of death or serious illness are:

_Daniel Price(son)___________________________________________

_VivienneWells(oldest step-daughter)_____________________________

_Angela Armstrong(youngest step-daughter)________________________

_DavidHunter(mother's sister's son in Ottawa Canada)________________

-_Judith Noack(first wife in Trenton Ontario__________________________

_Recipients of Annual Email/Letter( POFE Section VII Letters, Division XI.1-Annual Letters)______________________

5. Institutions/Groups:

5.1 Bahai Institutions: LSA of the Bahais of Launceston(see also letter from
NSA of the Bahais of Australia Inc
NSA of the Bahais of Canada

6. My Will is located at:

6 Reece St George Town Tasmania in the bottom drawer of my desk in my study in an A-3 file inside a metallic-edged file with a plastic-clip label. The label reads: "What To Do With My Writings At Death."

7. Other Documents/Items Relevant to My Will

These can be found in the bottom drawer of the desk in my study in a file marked 'What To do With My Writings At Death." A series of relevant items are found therein, as follows:
(a) a blank will form
(b) a copy of my will and an addendum to that will
(c) an instrument appointing my enduring guardian
(d) a National Mutual(NM) Trustee letter of 27/1/98 in relation to my Will/and a file from NM
(e) an email on "Bahá'í Funerals and Burial Practices"
(f) information and documents on organ and brain donation
(g) my ringstone in a small plastic box; (behind computer monitor beside photo of my mother)
(h) The Tasmanian PublicTrustee
(i) Bahá'í Wills and Burials: Chapter 13 of LSA Handbook
(j) other(no further items as of: 26/11/07).
___________________________________________________
8. My Executor is:

Christine Price and, if she has passed away, Daniel Price.
______________________________________________
c.c. See copy of this form in my computer under:
'My Documents>Diary>Everyday>Bipolar>Medical>My Will
__________
Dated:26/11/ '07 Signed:___________________________
________________
WHAT TO DO WITH MY PRINTED MATTER FILES & WRITINGS
WHEN I DIE
(June 2002 revised November 2007)

This 2nd edition of this statement on: WHAT TO DO WITH MY PRINTED MATTERFILES & WRITINGS WHEN I DIE was made more than five years after the initial edition in June 2002 is a more succinct edition. No attempt is made to provide a detailed outline of my writings as was the case in edition #1. To access this statement go to my computer directory and follow this series of steps below:
....My documents>Diary>Everyday>Bipolar>Medical>My Will-Writings.....

General Categories of My Writings A To D as Follows:

A.SEND TO:I leave it to my executors to decide if, and to whom, any of the hardcopy of the body of my writings and files are to be forwarded to anyone or any institution.

B.KEEP FOR YOUR OWN USE:

1. Grandfather's Autobiography
2. Mother's Poetry and Art File
3. Other: Executors' Decision.

C. ARCHIVE FOR SOMEONE or SOME INSTITUTION(s):

This section is to be kept by my executor(s) in a safe and secure place for some future time when (a) individual(s) and/or (b) institution(s) seek out any of my writings.

D. ALL OTHER FILES:

Executors' decision

Ron Price
26 November 2007
The executors will be one or more of my family members and/or a Bahá'í administrative body. For now, I leave what eventuates to Providence's mysterious Realm and what I trust and hope will come to me enshalla, as I am being refreshed "with the crystalline wine cup tempered at the camphor fountain."

At the heart of any artistic endeavor, writes Welsh novelist, poet and dramatist Emyr Humphreys, there is an empty space eager to be filled. This is not the same phenomenon as the vacuum that nature is reported to abhor. It seems to be a space in consciousness that our species longs to have filled and fill. And it goes beyond the primitive sociological truism that human kind is obliged to create rites and rituals in order to make its brief existence more tolerable and meaningful. The continuing desire to create within a given form, be it a building or a novel, a symphony or a play, a film or a sailing ship or, indeed, an autobiography, is a reliable indicator of the health of a given civilization. There has to be more to life's raison d'etre than the desire of a multi-national corporation, or a tourist board, to keep its work force happy with ten-pin bowling alleys or operatic spectaculars.

The health, the advancement, of a civilization, Emyr, now that's a good note to strike as I approach the end of this memoir. I also want to strike a note drawing on an ambiguous epigraph, mnemographia Bahensis, a term whose ambiguity lies in the difficulty of obtaining a precise and agreed on translation of this epigraph. I have utilized this epigraph for the final stage of this analysis aiming in these final words to make some concluding remarks on this one aspect, this one example, this one literary exercise from the total corpus of the literary and material manifestations of what has variously been called "collective," "cultural," "social," and "public" memory in the Bahá'í community.

I have provided here one manifestation, one presentation, that focuses on a commemorative, a personalized memorialization, an example, of autobiographical practice in the Bahá'í community over the four epochs of the second century of the Formative Age in the Bahá'í community with particular emphasis on the relationship between literary and material manifestations of memory as expressed in autobiography.

There are serious difficulties surrounding even the term "memory" in a collective context. Some see an inherent impossibility of dealing with any matter that is even a small part of a purportedly collective memory in the Bahá'í community without also considering issues of community or society and environment or landscape. I could divide this mnemographia Bahensis into two parts entitled: (a) Muse and Recall and (b) Remember and See reflecting two hypothetical components or aspects of this memoir. I could give this work, this autobiography, the sub-title: A Commentary on Memory, Community and Environment in the Bahá'í Community with Particular Reference to the Experience of a Pioneer in the Four Epochs: 1944 to 2021.

Such a title would reflect the breadth, complexity, and specificity of the many subjects I address in the context of the life of this pioneer. Mnemographia Bahensis in the context here is somewhat unusual in being both the product of a single author and a collection of a vast miscellany of over 2500 references. If a literary model for this combination of singularity and miscellany were to be sought in Bahá'í literature or literature about the Bahá'í Faith, it would be difficult to locate. Other literary works in what is now a vast corpus of literature on the Bahá'í Faith do not possess either the formal characteristics of this work that readers find here or the mode, manner and style within which I discuss and analyse the ideological implications of this content. To the extent that this memoir is the product of a single author, its origins lie in a list of places and settings, people and books, inspirations and visions too long to list here, but already alluded to at previous places in this text.

To the extent that this work is a miscellaneous compilation by a myriad of various hands, these volumes are a collection of memories that is a partial embodiment of a pluralistic approach to collective memory. This pluralistic approach seems not only necessary but also desirable when the subject is the Bahá'í Faith, a community of communities, if there ever was one, in which communal and individual interests are, or at least try to be, mutually reinforcing. People in this global community characteristically exhibit a tangle of local, regional, national and ethnic allegiances and I am but one example of this tangle, a tangle which is harmonized, untangled, in this work over several volumes.

Perhaps it is not too much to hope that in form as well as content this Mnemographia Bahensis reflects a Bahá'í internationalism through the eyes of one of its members, an internationalism that is simultaneously aware of the achievements and shortcomings of the history of the Bahá'í community down the road of its past and the attempts of individuals and communities to face the challenges and possibilities of creating a multi-ethnic, a multi-cultural vision of the future and a more pluralistic vision of the past.

Readers must recognize that a selectivity exists not only in what passes as tradition in the history of a community, but also what one places in a memoir like this, the narrative of an individual life. Readers also need to be conscious of the prognostications of George Orwell from his Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949). Orwell knew only too well that we all need to be aware of many things and especially the manipulation of history to serve the needs of the present and, just as important, to serve as a critical contribution to communal solidarity. The emerging architecture and the dozens of commemorative places around the globe are evidence of both the Bahá'í community's coming-of-age and an expression, a mould for popular and community consciousness.

If there is one theory of the nature and function of individual and collective memory underlying all of this memoir, it is the constructionist tradition both in sociology and psychology. The British psychologist F.C. Bartlett wrote in his Remembering: a Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932), that "when a subject is being asked to remember," very often the first thing that emerges is something of the nature of an attitude. The recall is then a construction, made largely on the basis of this attitude, and its general effect is that of a justification of the attitude." One must approach with some scepticism the notion of collective memory at the same time as one is convinced of the constructive nature of individual remembering. One must also concede that social organization gives a persistent framework into which all detailed recall must fit, and it very powerfully influences both the matter and the manner of recall.

In other words only individuals have the capacity to remember but, preliminary or prior to the process of individual recall, there exists a mental predisposition that has been at least partly shaped by a social or communal environment: to speak of the memory of a group is to reify and transcendentalize; to speak of memory in a group is to acknowledge both the singularity of individual recollection and its relation to a surrounding society or community—in this case the international Bahá'í community and especially, in the case of this memoir, its variants in Canada and Australia during four epochs as expressed through the eyes of one man who lived and breathed at the time.

Of the numerous other assumptions and characteristics that these several volumes have in common, one more is worth mentioning here. It is simply the hope that, in its small way, Mnemographia Bahensis may help to awaken an attitude of recall and create a framework of remembrance that will assist Bahais to maintain a conciousness of what at this stage of their history are often unique and fragile communities and environments. "Forgetfulness…is driven by an unshakable belief in progress," wrote Russell Jacoby in 1975. There exists a social and economic dynamic in which "oblivion and novelty feed off each other and flourish" in the same shopping mall as "planned obsolescence," "rampant subjectivism," "blind materialism, and superficial humanism." Memory, it could be said in 2007, is crucial to the reclamation of men and women's full humanity—their sense of a continuity, even a comradeship, between present, past, and future generations—without which the human race and its sustaining environments are doomed to become the victims of the pernicious cultural and personal values.

Many Bahá'í communities are especially prone to "social amnesia," to the "refusal or inability to think back" that undermines people's abilities to think critically, to use language accurately, to understand and exercise their democratic rights and responsibilities of participation in this global communitas communitatum. The Bahá'í community in nearly every locality in the world is a new community already old in acquiescence, in submission and obedience to the teachings of the Prophet-Founder of their Faith. This Faith is a society rich in history and values as well as hopes and resources, a vast and privileged community on the globe in which memory and understanding may yet so nourish right thinking and right action that they become, in the words of Margaret Avison's "Snow" (1960), the "rhizomes" that "quake" the "astonished cinders."

In autobiography, if anywhere in literature, we are expected to sense that these are texts inhabited by a living person, that an author who was particularly present to himself while he was writing is now present to us as we read. In autobiography, the self or subject is written as text. "Auto-bio-graphizing is the writing of the self as text".

I hope, dear reader, you enjoyed the visit, the text.

Ron Price
5 December 2007
End of Appendices.

AN EPILOGUE TO MY EPILOGUE

The process by which a memoir or a poem emerges is partly the way Robert Frost puts it succinctly and which I quote approvingly here: "Sight, excite, insight." Like all good aphorisms this is only partly true. There is so much more to the process. I write about this process here, indeed, at many places in this book. "By the time you start to compose, more than half the work has been done," wrote Irish Poet Seamus Heaney. "The crucial part of the business is what happens before you face the empty page," he continued, "before the moment of first connection, when an image or a memory comes suddenly to mind and you feel the lure of the poem-life in it."       Most of the writing in this memoir took place in my late fifties and early sixties to mid-sixties. Much of the work, the living, had indeed been done: half, three-quarters, nine-tenths? Time would tell how long I would remain on this mortal coil.

The living, the thinking, two to five decades of preliminary writing, imagining, sometimes dry, sometimes fertile, literary experience--all of this set the stage. As Bakhtin argues, "In the world of memory, a phenomenon exists in its own peculiar context, with its own special rules, subject to conditions quite different from those we meet in the world we see with our own eyes." This perceptual filtering of memory results in a tendency to focus in on pleasant events and/or emotions while repressing painful or disturbing ones. The result is invariably a rose-tinted personal or social history, a heavily edited reconstruction of our past that often leads us down Housman's "happy highways" to those cosy halcyon days of childhood as depicted in yjr YB program The Waltons. Like Derrida's notion of language as a process of constant deferral, memory can only ever make distant reference to a past experience. I am aware of this universal tendency and I trust I have countered it in this multi-volumed work, at least to some extent.

Steven Rose points out that, "A thirty-year-old man does not remember his ten-year-old self in the same way as a fifty-year-old remembers his thirty-year-old self although the time-lapse is the same in each case. Only a few individuals seem to retain in adulthood the eidetic memory, the extraordinarily detailed and vivid recall of visual images, of their childhood." I am aware of these variations in memory quality but I find it difficult to comment on just how this phenomenon operates in my life and particularly in this memoir.

I was impressed with how James approached his autobiography in his Unreliable Memoirs published at about the time I began to collect my own writings for a possible posterity. "Most first novels are disguised autobiographies," he wrote. "This autobiography is a disguised novel. On the periphery, names and attributes of real people have been changed and shuffled so as to render identification impossible. Nearer the centre, important characters have been run through the scrambler or else left out completely. So really the whole affair is a figment got up to sound like truth. All you can be sure of is one thing: careful as I have been to spare other people's feelings, I have been even more careful not to spare my own. Up, that is, of course, to a point."

James says that he felt he had for too long been a prisoner of his childhood and wanted to put it behind him and that was the reason he wanted to "dredge it all up again without sounding too pompous." He did not want to "wait until reminiscence was justified by achievement." All attempts, James wrote with a strong vein of Australian humour and cynicism that runs through his entire work—indeed all his writing—"all attempts to put oneself in a bad light are doomed to be frustrated."

Proust argued that, while nostalgic memories may not be accurate, the experience of reworking memory traces can sometimes be even more powerful than the original experience. Memory can give the past a definition and shape by creating a personally meaningful narrative out of disparate and often irrationally recalled fragments. But one must be careful or the comment that the philosopher Santayana made about the Confessions of the famous Jean-Jacques Rousseau may apply to one's own efforts; namely, that candour and ignorance of self were obvious in reading them—and in equal measure.


Perhaps the historian Jane Welsh Carlyle was right when she said about autobiographies that: "Looking back was not intended by nature….from the fact that our eyes are in our faces and not behind our heads." One critic calls the personal memoir which many people write "a strange hybridization of the autobiographical genre" which is "seeking an intimacy with history that will give public meaning to personal identity." Looking backwards or forewards, I have certainly sought intimacy in my writing, intimacy whereever I could get it: with people, with history, with my own dear self-perhaps understanding is a better word. I see this piece of literature, this autobiography, as released from "literature" with its capital "L." I give it the broadest possible construction and set of genres and media/mediums in which to find expression. I utilize texts fashioned from letters and essays, diaries and journals, memoirs and stories, oral narratives and songs, photographs and assorted memorabilia. Texts, for me, are everywhere and the limits to the sources for study are only the limits of my imagination. This now multi-volumed autobiography is left in the hands of my executors and that new executor in cyberspace to decide what to do with what must be a many-millioned word ediface of verbiage.

Some autobiographers have little interest in the world outside themselves. One autobiographer, Frederick Grove, once said to the French writer Andre Gide: "I feel the same need for lying and the same satisfaction in lying that others feel in telling the truth."       I am less disturbed by this egotistical propensity for lying that Grove admits to because recent theories of autobiography ask us to look at such writing from the same viewpoints as fiction. Grove had an obsession with failure. This may have been due to his effort to write his autobiography. He experienced the difficulty which all autobiographers face in trying to shape their experience. His sense of failure is, in part at least, due to the limitations of the genre he had chosen to write within. In the end, though, Grove passes the test for a memorable autobiography. The test, writes Collins in her discussion of Grove's autobiography, lies in a writer's ability to deal with painful experience and to balance such moments of intense living with the mundane, unexceptional progress of daily events. Another test, although not one Collins refers to, but one I am consciously aware of as I write, is that the longer I have been away from places like the ones where I grew up and the many towns I lived in as well as many of the people I once knew—the more I bring them with me into the present when memory or circumstance presses the right button. What I bring into the present is some mysterious amalgam of tranquillity and tension, honesty and imagination, fact and fancy, show and vapour, illusion and reality.

As a result of this amalgam, this enlargement, this diminution, this very wide-angled-lens, this macro-photograph of a life what is considered worthy as social history or of literary examination for the examination of this life, my life, materials once thought valuable for only some narrow or not-so-narrow purpose can now be examined by scholars from a multitude of perspectives if, of course, they so desire. I have created a multilayered documentary to serve the expectations of multiple-user-audiences. I do not seek personal popularity but future utility by future readers by institutions and individuals associated with an emerging world order, an order which may very well be the last refuge of the tottering civilization I was born into and in which I lived my life over several epochs.

By reifying my own sense of vocation and avocation and my impressions of pioneering over four epochs, I can participate in both the short term and the long term, in the twentieth-and-twenty-first century efforts by the international Bahá'í community to spred this new Faith to every corner of the planet and contribute, in the process, to the planteization, the globalization, of humankind and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. This participation has been taking place on the internet for well-nigh a decade and by the time this work is published in hard-cover, if it ever is, I shall be long gone from these syllables of recored time.

If experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes, I'd had plenty of that. My hope is that not too many readers will find these volumes of memoirs unapproachable due to their length, their vocabulary, their overly analytical nature, the absence of a simple and interesting storyline, the relative absence of the traumatic conveyed in narrative form--society's violence and sex and mine--the short supply of romance and the kind of adventure that readers have come to expect in a good novel or TV program. If I possessed the humour and masterly narrative style of, say, a Garrison Keilor or a Clive James this work could be more enchanting, hypnotic and funny. Sad to say, I do not. Readers will get what they see here. "What they see is what they get," to use a phrase come into common parlance in recent years Downunder. I am what I am and my style is what it is. My ruminations are rarely profound, never unique and at best, an original hotch-potch of stuff to satisfy me as I go along. Hopes and wishes are never quite enough to determine a polished and complete outcome, although they have helped me travel along the road of life and of writing with a multitude of tasks completed, many a conversation engaged in and sat through and a host of other stuff on a list too long to outline in even the briefest of fashions here.

If one is to stay creative and remain tuned-in to the richness of being, of living, of reflecting and anticipating, as one must if one is writing one's autobiographical story in the seventh decade of their life; and if one is not to yield to depressing tones of déjà vu, one has to admit it is often the fragment that offers an opening onto potential meaning. The fragment is imagination's stimulus to the opening of windows. For things in their meaningfulness, address us in a certain way. This is part of what we could call the realm of responsiveness, a realm that is an encounter, an encounter that is essentially a linguistic relationship.

To put this business of the importance of the fragment another way: the anecdote is a way of saying things that keeps the process fresh for the writer. But, in the end, this writer needs vision, needs a big picture what is now called by some a metanarrative. But all is not words; poetry and thinking belong together in speech and in their devotion to the relation which is silent in all our speech. Wallace Stevens expressed the wonder of the world and its shining by means of the poetic word in the following lines of his poem "The Idea of Order at Key West:"

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the sole artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang,
The sea, Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.

Stevens knew that there is no world other than the one we create, the one of which we are the makers. And I have made a world here in this memoir. It is I who did inhabit it and must inhabit it as I write and, as in the daily routine of life, it seems to me that if there is no joy, no happiness, it is hardly worth the exercise. The fragment, in this case the sea in Stevens' poem, does not deal with wholeness, although it may contribute to the completed account. Only through the fragment can one have access to a way of being that is dynamic, pluralistic and self-regenerating. To say this a little differently: lived experience is a critical shaping force in our lives. In some ways, this is only saying the obvious. Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer writes in her introduction to the autobiography of Naguib Mahfouz that for him "life was a search in which one must find one's own sign-posts." This we all must do; the statement hardly needs saying it is so obvious. Here I have put the stress on the fragment but vision creates reality and without vision the people perish. This writer would never have written without vision even if that vision was one he acquired in his youth and has come to understand and fill in more fully with the years. The words of Bertrand Russell in one of his letters are apt here: "I simply can't stand a view limited to this earth; I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds. I like mathematics largely because it is not human." In my case, I found windows into other worlds through many channels: religion, philosophy, other social sciences and the humanities, the physical and biological sciences--imagination and memory.

As the decades went on, I found, I came to understand, a mythogenic zone, some interior metanarrative through which I could sift my experience, learn who I was and came to achieve some degree of unity with my environment and with others. This unity is found in the context of a constant conversation between unity and disunity, a conversation in which juxtaposition plays with omission and collision. At least that is the way I see and experience writing and its conversation with life. For literary artists both the struggle and the fulfillment of creative work consist in the transfiguration of matter and thought into art. As James Joyce put it, the sluggish matter of earth must somehow be transformed within the "virgin womb of the imagination." The flesh, to corrupt the biblical phrase slightly, must be made word.

For writers, this transfiguration has always been especially difficult to effect. Each tries in their own way with very different results. Words, after all, are symbols divorced in a very direct way from the sources of their meaning and power. While music has an undeniable emotive force, and painting a potency contingent on mimetic qualities or the tangible interplay of visual rhythms and tones, words seem somehow distant and vague, mute, flat, comparatively colourless, especially to the minds and hearts of millions. After 50 years spent in classrooms where for success students must engage with the written word I am only too well aware of the difficulties masses of people have with printed matter. While the dramatic arts, including dance, appeal to both the aural and visual faculties and have, besides, an emphatic, public immediacy because they are performed in the flesh, words speak softly, sometimes inaudibly, and are notoriously bad dancers.

In his autobiography entitled Words Jean-Paul Sartre describes how as a child he discovered that words gave him a sense of power and a control of a world from which he felt divorced. The English poet Philip Larkin says much the same and he credits his immersion in books to his short-sightedness. In my case I found books and their contents a slowly maturing entity in my life. I read what I had to read to pass exams and get through to the next grade. But life's realities were not to be found in books except by sensible and insensible degrees into my teens and twenties. By my late twenties I had struck the gold-mine that was the world of books. The last 35 years has seen print take off like a jet-aircraft through my private and public life. I was too busy teaching and dealing with people until I was 55 to really get into writing in any significant way. But I have made up for this in the last decade(55-65), 1999 to 2009. Writing became a psychological necessity for a complex set of reasons that I explain elsewhere in this memoir. I did not sacrifice other things; other things lost their previous charm or demand, their role and responsibility. I was able to express my emotions and at the same time give them form and control as a poet like Larkin did; I was able to find relief from fears and anxieties as Sartre did in his literary work. Unlike Larkin, though, I do not have a fear of death nor his melancholy gloom; unlike Sartre I do not have his philosophy of atheism, his massive literary output nor his tendency to construct a series of personae to hide my real self and deal with a variety of correspondents.

No matter how much we understand the dynamics of our situation, we still get hurt and feel exasperated. No matter how strong our beliefs they must face the tribunal of our experience as a whole and this process is a daily one. In that tribunal analysis gives us the grammar for our concepts. But analysis is faced with the conundrum that at each moment of life's becoming that moment escapes our attempts to comprehend it. Autobiography is an attempt for me to deal with these hurts, these exasperations, this tribunal and gain some comprehension of my experience. In this last century of all the ones thusfar in the great human journey we are allowed to grow up and grow old in peace if we can learn to deal with those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and our own weaknesses and failings and I am growing old with my solitude and with enough companionship to take whatever negatives arise in this solitude. And so:

Quietly I close the door of my study
and tap away on these keys making
the world, its past and mine, one in
many parts. Perhaps the rain ushers
in the evening or the news and I fall
asleep before my hours of solitude
return and I can cautiously unfold,
emerge with every atom in existence
and the essence of all created things,
with a thousand deep and meaningful
conversations behind me, ten thousand
books and more jobs and towns than I
want to count or try to remember as the
dish washer and pentium-4 hum in unison.

Ours is a culture of the fragment, like life itself, and the Bahá'í Faith is a culture of the unity of fragments. Like the baroque, the postmodern--our world--shares above all a taste for mixing, palimpsesting, hybridization and discontinuity. Some of the distinct features of both the baroque and the postmodern are: self-irony, self- parody, saying one thing and meaning another, a rejection of static definition, ambiguities of definition, a constant or at least a periodic, crisis of identity which people seem to have to go through, a sense of incompleteness in which the culture and the individual are never fully capable of explaining themselves. As much as I make an effort to frame this memoir in the context of a grandnarrative, a metanarrative, I feel that I am far from achieving such an accomplishment; indeed, the claim is in itself somewhat pretentious. I do not achieve any wholeness even though occasionally I am moved to make such a statement. I do not grasp the ultimate nature of things even though I might have such an ambition; one needs a certain degree of shamelessness to be able to claim, seriously, that one can capture the whole truth about the world in one's oeuvre.

Some of the distinct features of the Bahá'í Faith are its spiritual history, everywhere unfolded in the manner of a new and a single symphony, in a grand fortissimo now, in our time, with new harmonies and dissonances, irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax out of which another great movement will, in time, emerge. I have always enjoyed a quality that I think it is useful for writers to have, namely, a sense of history. This sense of history emerged insensibly and sensibly in my late teens in reading Bahá'í history and studying history at high school and university: at least this was part of the start, part of the emergence and now, at the age of 65, this sense of history has a half a century of development in my life. Some writers have this sense of history and some don't. The American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote between the two wars had this sense. Some writers, like Clive James, are perhaps most brilliant on the subject they know best: themselves. I came across that clever turn of phrase in a reviewof Clive James three volume memoirs published between 1980 and 1990. I've enjoyed James on many other subjects beside himself for he is a man of remarkable erudition in the arts: at least some of the social sciences and humanities. He is certainly more well-read than I am, more humorous and witty. he is a useful mentor for this memoiristic exercise.

I lived my life in the shadow of the shattering legacy of Nazism and Communism, the two totalitarian movements that had a profound affect on and overshadowed the 20th century. Both these movements illustrate the dangers posed by ideologies that try to reduce the world's dazzling complexity to simplistic formulas. I sometimes come across superficial analyses of the Bahá'í Faith that impute this failing to this new world religion. My experience of more than half a century in this new world religion would suggest that, while there is a simplicity to this new Cause, part of the difficulty of working within it is, in fact, its dazzling complexity. Getting a handle on it is no mean achievement. The preciousness and fragility of humanism, indeed, of life itself, as a cultural, an existential reality is, it seems to me, mirrored in this Faith.

By my late fifties and early sixties I had become what Robert Scanlan in his review of Susan Sontag's play Alice in Bed called a graphimaniacal phenomena. I turned all of my minutest experiences into words-about-experience. My experience had become much like that of Marcel Proust who transmuted his life, during the years he spent in his cork-lined bedroom, into an all-but-endless narrative discourse that could and would be cut off only by his death. Some consider Proust's death a mercy. Perhaps mine will be as well. I would not want to last too long.

In quite another sense the now fashionable metaphor "the death of the author" has come to characterize the modern condition of fiction. The French literary critic Roland Barthes argues that writing and creator are unrelated. The method of reading a text that tries to connect the two may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy, flawed and results in a tyranny of interpretive. A text's unity lies not in its origins, its creator, but in its destination, its audience. Without the meditative background that is the criticism of certain members of that audience, works become isolated gestures, ahistorical accidents and soon forgotten.

The historical Alice James, Henry James' sister, on whom the play Alice James is based, left no doubt that she welcomed the literal death that would bring her acute physical and emotional torments to a close. I, too, will welcome my literal death for different reasons than Alice James and I leave to readers whatever meaning they derive from this now far too long memoir.

This work I like to think, although I may be somewhat presumptuous in doing so, has some similarities to Virgil's Aeneid, Rome's national epic written in the years 29 to 19 BC. Just as Virgil's work envisaged a golden age so does this work; just as his work was permeated with the lack of reconciliation in the new Roman Empire just formed, so is this work permeated with the tragedy of the slowness of response of humanity to the Revelation of Bahaullah the slough of despond and the social commotion at play on the planet, the troubled forecasts of doom, the phantoms of a wrongly informed imagination at this crucial turning point in history, a turning point represented by these four epochs. As Virgil's Ecologue opened up new perspectives, I like to think this work will do the same. Some read the Aeneid with an optimistic view and others have gloomy readings. Inspite of my own forecasts of gloom and doom, I see my work as essentially positive, optimistic and with a view that sees a bright future for humanity. When Virgil wrote Rome was at the start of an empire, a system, a new order, and Virgil was preoccupied with the notion of unity as were the Romans after a century of wars and violence.

I see myself as writing in the context of "the first stirrings of that World Order of which the present Administrative System is at once the precursor, the nucleus and pattern." As the Romans needed insight into their predicament not cleverness, so is this our need. As I live and write in Australia I sometimes think that the essentially comic spirit of the Romans has been passed on by history's circuitous forces to the Australians. As I watch decade after decade of entertainment dispensed by the print and electronic media, I can't help but agree with that delightful American critic Gore Vidal that laughing gas is pumped into the lounge room of Australians, indeed all western countries, on a nightly basis. I suppose if you are going to go down, you might as well do so laughing.

In my early adulthood I was critical of this endless private pleasure but with the years, and certainly with the onset of late adulthood, I came to appreciate what Thomas Hardy called the "instinct toward self-delight." Some have this quality with an exuberance that bubbles up. I have more delight now that I do not have to deal with the pains and pangs associated with bi-polar disorder, with full-time work, with the idiosyncrasies of people in groups and with my incapacities for dealing with a wife and children.

As you, dear reader, move through the words, the fragments, the volumes of this work, you will think, dream and analyse with me. You will contour yourself to the disjunctures, inconsistencies, ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the language of my therapeutic and non-therapeutic forum. Know that here in these words-of-suffering, words-of-compassion, words of simple and complex thought, my psyche is attempting to draw you through a labyrinth such that you begin to reflect on your own frustrations, doubts, duplicities and suspicions in regard to the inexhaustibility of interpretation on the many fronts of your own lives. It is my hope that you will begin to recapitulate with a more finely tuned exactitude, the play of subtleties and pluralities found in the texts of your own lives--texts and lives which have all too often been dismissed as societally and therapeutically irrelevant or simply not thought about by you and by others. I would like to think that, as a result of reading some of the things here, the meaningfulness of readers' lives and their phenomenal existence will take on a heightened significance. One can but hope.

Perhaps these same readers will relate and behave in a different way than they have in the past after they have read this work. If understanding does not increase, perhaps my words, as Wordsworth says, will "uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe." So many of the world's words serve, he says, as "a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve." Many of the world's words are simply lost in history's vast abyss due to disinterest, the burgeoning of print and the tempest that is the time we live in. I'm confident that this will be the case for this work among the great multitudes of humanity. A coterie of influence is the best one can home for.

Perhaps, to put it another way, this work will serve as a catalyst of and for intellectual complexity. My work is essentially what the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright's was: "a creative and cathartic exercise in selective memory that reveals as it conceals." Unlike Wright's work, mine is not a composite of truth and lies. Both my memoirs and Wright's were published in our mid-sixties; they are not psychobiographies although they provide tantalizing clues to our psychological development for anyone who is interested. Some of the complexity I refer to derives from this developmental process and some derives from my tendency to explore and define myself in the context of my society and my religion. To put this another way, these memoirs are but a version of my society's narrative and the narrative that is my religion--the Bahá'í Faith. These memoirs fashion, discover, recreate both my society and my religion through the collyrium of my own life. This collyrium allows me to steep a wide variety of subject matter in the hues of my own individuality without using that individuality as a means of self-display. At least that is the way I see it, although I'm sure there will be others with different views.

For the most part, indeed virtually throughout my entire work, I avoided recording my unfavourable opinions of many of my contemporaries both within the Cause and without. If I did voice a critical view the reader would have little idea if that view was held by someone they knew personally. This, it seemed to me, was one of the many aspects of dispassionate discussion. I would like to think and, indeed, I tried, to ground my criticisms of others and their views in facts that they would be unable to deny. Some I'm sure may have found this orientation of mine to facts had an exasperating facility, but given the complexity of what constituted a fact and the immense quantity of the availability of facts in the marketplace of ideas and values, beliefs and opinions the whole process often simply got lost in the grey wash of life.

In literary criticism the crucial New Critical precept of the intentional fallacy declares that a poem or, indeed, any piece of writing, does not belong to its author. Rather the work is detached from its author at birth and goes out into the world beyond the author's power to interpret or control it. The prose or poem belongs to the public. The oldest profession, some say, is the poet or storyteller and the second oldest is the critic or interpreter.

Both my society and my religion are but a soft wax and I must shape them as if I am installing a window into my own life. Perhaps it is the other way around and I am the soft wax which must be shaped or; again, perhaps the entire phenomenal reality is necessarily and unavoidably soft wax. These memoirs, whether wax or not, are a focalizing literature which takes a distinctive culture, a set of beliefs and ideas and writes them in individual characters, providing a privileged access to my own life, a moment in both my society's lifeline and the four epochs in the life of my religion. Over a lifetime my identity has certainly been like soft wax and this memoir is unquestionably concerned with identity. Complexity is but another name for identity and it is both problem and solution.

I do not want to indulge in overenthusiastic gestures and promises to readers in these pages. I recognise a certain untidy preference on my part for proliferation over prudence in my setting out of argument and concept here. The territory is difficult even if it is only my elaboration of a life, a society and a religion which has been part of the air I have breathed for over 50 years. There has come to exist in recent decades a bewildering range of disciplines in which models of memory are constructed and criticized and I do not want to discuss this massive milieux of literature and ideas. I do not cavalierly sweep exceptions and qualifications under the rug as I go about recalling all that I recall and analysing all that I analyse. The Bahá'í community and the secular society I describe both cover millions of individuals with the most diverse sensibilities. Their experience is a protean one and what individuals choose to marginalize and centre from their direct and vicarious experience, from their beliefs and values and attitudes and meanings is incredibly diverse. My intent here is to present what I like to think is a balance between the memory of my society and the Bahá'í community on the one hand and to draw on my own idiosyncratic view of history, mine and others. This whole exercise interests me only insofar as it serves living. There is a degree of doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates, as Nietzsche said in the opening paragraph of his On the Use and Abuse of History For Life. It is my hope that this is not the case with me and this work.

Writers inevitably have hopes for their work. And my hope is that my words will serve as a conduit. Once readers get into my book, interest in the world I detail, along with its troubled times, themes and personalities, will I trust be whetted sufficiently to read -- or at the very least skim -- on and on. This epilogue to my epilogue is one final reflection on my life, my work and my religion. I hope this reflection is not too complex for readers. As diverse and as apparently fractured as it all is, it is umbilically connected in one body and from it, in time, I trust a living and breathing entity will emerge for the reading public. The sifting and winnowing of my life's experience, swimming as it has in many and different amniotic fluids, has taken place over many years.

One aspect of what seems to me to be a major shift that millions could outline but which I as a Bahá'í place in the context of my Bahá'í experience begins with the historian Jacob Burckhardt. He writes that in the Middle Ages "man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family—only through some general category." He goes onto say that this consciousness melted in the Renaissance. It seems to me this consciousness has been for many, and certainly for many Bahá'ís, has been recreated and added to it is the consciousness of the individual ego that is not subsumed by the group. Sometimes this consciousness is called individualism.

There is at least 100 more pages in this part 3 of my memoir/autobiography and anyone wanting the remaining pages--which I could not fit into this BLO space--can write to me at ronprice9@gmail.com and i will happily email the remaining pages.