Pioneering Over Four Epochs:
Section VIII: Poetry

by Ron Price

published in Pioneering Over Four Epochs: An Autobiographical Study and A Study in Autobiography
2007

John Keats and Emily Dickinson among others used letters to transmit poetry, to formulate letters as poetry, to exploit the poetic and epistolary so that they inflect, enrich, even become one another. The blending of genres in various ways and for a wide range of purposes resulting in an even wider range of effects has become a popular sport in recent decades. I have come to see some of my own letters in a collection now spanning 50 years as a blend of genres. Indeed poetry and prose have become somewhat indecipherable in my mind's eye.

My poetry is a blending of autobiographical elements, echoes of the literature of the social sciences and humanities & a steady stream of references to & influences from Baha’i writings, history and teachings. This evening I was reading about the English poet George Byron(1788-1824). I was particularly struck by the fact that Byron's poetry is a blending of autobiographical elements and echoes of the literature he had absorbed over the years. And so I felt a certain affinity to Byron for this reason.

His poem Don Juan is considered the most autobiographical of Byron’s works. Almost all of Don Juan is real life either Byron’s or the lives of those whom he knew. Byron started writing Don Juan on July 3rd 1818, eight months after the birth of Baha’u’llah. He continued working on the poem in Italy and on his death in 1824 the poem remained unfinished. Don Juan was a, perhaps the, poem that the working class took to heart in the mid-19th century, so Friedrich Engles informed us in 1844. This poem reached the urban and rural poor and, for many, it was all they read besides the Bible. It is very likely that most of these readers did not read any of Byron's other works. As early as 1819 the work was regarded by the bourgeoisie as filthy and impious, although it was not fully published until 1901. He was regarded by Eliot as having contributed nothing and by Goethe as the greatest genius of his century. -Ron Price with thanks to Galit Avitan, “Publication Histories: Byron’s Don Juan,” Ashes, Sparks and Hypertext, 2000.

I came across an online seminar organized by the National Library of Australia entitled ‘Private Lives Revealed: Letters, Diaries, History’1 and was particularly struck with an article by a Peter Read: Private Papers and a Sense of Place. The article was an analysis of the verse of the nineteenth century English poet John Clare. Read saw Clare’s verse as an interesting example of what he called ‘private papers.’ Clare's poetry was so eclectic, his language so personal, his personal involvement so touching, that Read thought 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. However akin to private papers Clare’s poetry was, Read still thought Clare could have become one of the best-known poets of the nineteenth century. In discussing why Clare did not become such a poet, Read quotes the cultural historian John Barrell’s views on 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 they as writers present about a particular place, event or person. The world view and life experiences of writers needs to find resonance with readers, if their writing is to be successful. Private papers often reveal such private emotions, and private emotions often reveal intense, ungeneralised concerns for particularities which hardly ever surface amongst the published, fictionalized and/or poetic works of professional writers. -Ron Price with thanks to 1“Internet Site,” National Library of Australia, 2006.

Note: one day I may arrange the poetry here in the standard poetic form, but time and the inclination does not permit such an exercise at this time.

A CRITICAL ATTITUDE

I like to see my poetry in all its myriad expressions, among other things, as a form which substitutes a critical attitude for criticism. This critical attitude is both a part of my art and it exists as a tendency that grows out of my art. The primary facts, the conceptual framework, of what I write, are the poems, the essays, the journal, the books, indeed, virtually all that I write in all its genres. My writing, what constitutes my personal literature, is not some piled aggregate of words and works but, rather, it is and it creates an order. This order constitutes my conceptual framework, my organizing principle. This order, this skeleton, allows readers to respond imaginatively by seeing any one part of what I write in the larger perspective provided by the literary and social contexts of my work.

This critical attitude, then, is not an exercise of evaluation, not an exercise in rejecting or accepting some literary works and ideas, some concepts or thoughts but, rather, it is an exercise whose goal is knowledge, understanding and making things more intelligible. I'm on about making more sense out of both literature and life.--Ron Price with thanks to "Northrop Frye," Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, 5 January 2007.

Imagination and feeling, well,
it all starts there in the context
of my primary facts, of my art,
of my story, my narrative,
my experience, this Story,
transformed and expanded
with myths and metaphors
to live by, proceding from
this rest stop on pilgrimage.

…with a new Holy Book,
a cosmos, a body of stories,
a new mythological axis,
a metaphorical framework
that we all can live within.1

1 Northrop Frye's major work in literary criticism was published the year Shoghi Effendi passed away, 1957.
           
Ron Price
6 January 2007

A GREAT AND MIGHTY WIND

On November 12, 1912 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá arrived in New York, the last city of His eight months tour of America.. That same day an Antarctic search party discovered the tent of Captain Robert Scott and his two companions. The body of Captain Scott was wedged between those of his fellow explorers, the flaps of his sleeping bag thrown back, his coat open. His companions, Lieut. Henry Bowers and Dr. Edward Wilson, lay covered in their sleeping bags as if dozing. They had been dead for eight months. They were the last members of a five-man team returning to their home base from the Pole.

The team had set out on its final push to the Pole the previous January. They knew they were in a race to be the first to reach their destination. Their competition was a Norwegian expedition lead by Roald Amundsen. The two expeditions employed entirely different strategies. Amundsen relied on dogs to haul his men and supplies over the frozen Antarctic wasteland. Scott's British team distrusted the use of dogs preferring horses; once these died from the extreme conditions the sleds were man-hauled to the Pole and back. In fact, Scott deprecated the Norwegian's reliance on dogs. Their use was somehow a less manly approach to the adventure and certainly not representative of the English tradition of "toughing it out" under extreme circumstances. Man could manage Nature. A similar spirit guided the building of the "unsinkable" Titanic and then supplied the ship with far too few lifeboats to hold its passengers if disaster did strike. Just as the passengers of the Titanic paid a price for this arrogance on April 14th 1912, so too did Captain Scott and his four companions. On April 14th, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was in the last two months of His European tour.-Ron Price with thanks to "Eye Witness To History.com" and H.M. Balyuzi, '‘Abdu’l-Bahá, George Ronald, Oxford, 1971, pp.329-393.

Yes, there's a message there.
They believed, then, as they
believe now, in some illusory
hope, some frail foundation of
confidence in the future, through
some fortuitous conjunction of
circumstances, it is possible to
bend the conditions of human life
into conformity with prevailing
human desires: alas the catalogue
of horror, the magnitude of ruin,
gripped as we are in the clutches
of a devastating power, in the end,
bewildered, agonized and helpless
we watch this great, mysterious and
mighty wind invading the remotest
and fairest regions of the Earth.

Ron Price
13 January 2007

A SWEET PERFUME

This is a poetry which memorializes a particular tradition as well as my society and my life. It is a poetry which grows out of the events of these three categories of my experience. I like to think that this poetry reaches into the truth of this experience and responds to the appeal of its presence in my memory and imagination. I know from more than twenty-five years of writing this prose-poetry that it holds itself open to the very stuff of my living, the dwelling of my inner and outer self and the happenings of my religion and society. I have come to see my prose and poetry as equally poetic; indeed, in some ways they are interchangeable. I like to think, too, that there is in my writing a purity, a thickness and a solidity that is itself a human activity like singing, thinking, cooking, painting or reading among so many other forms of doing. My writing, my poetry, is an expression of my own way of living, my modus operandi, modus vivendi, my style and content of thinking, how things occur to me, how I see things happen, how they move and have their being, their presentness, their being and existing. -Ron Price with thanks to Martin Heidegger, "Introduction," Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper and Rowe, NY, 1971, pp. ix-xxii.

When these ideas became accessible
in the introduction to that small book,
I was on my way from Canada to South
Australia. I had already been put off
what you had to say by the massive size
of your books and your association with
one of the great evils of our age 40 years
before my present horizon. There was a
sweet perfume of victory in the air back
then and I tasted it again in that dry dog-
biscuit of a town in the malee of South
Australia. A new horizon, bright with
intimations of thrilling developments,
charged with meaning, half-sensed,
half-seen through my young eyes,
laying bare special challenges as I
tried to seize opportunities unique
in human history to radiate the message
of my burgeoning brain to the many
seekers among my contemporaries.
I had little luck it seems now but,
with seeds one never knows for sure.

Ron Price
22 January 2007

CALMING LIFE'S WHIRLPOOL

I came across Doris Lessing in an interview on “Books and Writing,” an ABC Radio National program, on 16 January 2000, then again on SBS TV on 18 September 2000. On that latter date she referred to my generation as self-indulgent and unself-critical. With the years, Lessing went on to say, this self-indulgent generation of mine had many casualties as former personal certainties that it had held died and systems, empires and parties lost their credibility, their meaning and even their existence.

Lessing also informed her listeners that she thought most writers were mildly depressed. When asked what her most joyous moments were she said they were “at the beginning of each book.” I agree that a certain melancholia, a certain pensiveness, a certain level of emotion recollected in tranquillity, are present during the writing process. In November 2000 I came across a statement by Lessing in an article entitled: “Writing the Self: Selected Works of Doris Lessing,” Deep South, Vol.2, No.2, Winter 1996, p.12. She had just completed, but not yet published, the second volume of her autobiography Walking in the Shade. Of autobiography, she said: "it helps calm life’s whirlpool." In the next several years I found Lessing's words accurate. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 February 2007.

You were just finishing your story,
your two volumes in '94 and '97
while I was just starting to put my
story down. Of course, you'd done
those semi-autobiographical novels,
indeed, you've been writing since I
was a child and recording my first
memories back in '47 and '48 & '49.

Producing our lives we were, Doris,
by an infinite chain of signifiers and
constructs. Some therapeutic self-
discovery as we were spinning our
yarn, as it were, in the current of life.1

You ended your story in '62, just as
I was beginning mine, my pioneering
over four epochs. Finishing your story
at 43 you were and me--starting mine
at 43 and taking it back to the age of 18.

1 Lynda Scott, "Similarities Between Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing," Deep South, Vol.3 No.2, Winter 1997.

Ron Price
4 February 2007

COINING UNDER A MICROSCOPE

I've never been comfortable with coining, that is, referring to my writings, my poetry or prose, as: Pricesque, Pricean, Pricese or the unbelievable and barely pronounceable--Pricic. Is there some implication in using such terms that my writing does not stand on its own, that it must instead be buttressed with the objectionable or attractive presence, as judgement would want, of my personality. Pointing out these authorial adjectives, these literary options, as I do here, suggests a certain susceptibility of my work to stylistic parody or opprobrium. It seems to me that the use of such a term degrades my literary coinage. Only a reader who has expertise with the alleged term, a reader who has read my work or a significant part of it, can discern what characteristics, qualities, or mannerisms the use of such an adjective signifies in a given context. For others, of course, the use of such authorial adjectives as a thumb nail imprint, a succinct word sketch, lends to my work a status, an encomium, it would not otherwise enjoy.

The authorial adjective of an author’s name is a means of universalizing a continuous, ontological restatement of the author's style and function. The adjective--Pricesque--or --Pricese--the two coinages I like the best of the four options suggested above, promise to condense and digest my entire work in a way that can either pull me right out of history and invite the past to scrutinize the present or give me a place in history, perhaps a set of epochs, that identifies me and my work and invites the past to interpret the present in ways that I could never imagine or predict.

Although coining authorial adjectives is notoriously easy and applicable in theory to any author, only a limited number of instances have attracted such notice, such terminology in The Oxford English Dictionary. For me, of course, I will have to leave it to history, the judgement of the future and those mysterious dispensations of literary development to see if my work is ever to benefit or be buttressed, to be coined and scrutinized in this way by the application of such literary nomenclature. Authorial adjectives like these are nothing if not critically functional, whether employed for purposes of devaluation or praise, encomium or opprobrium. They work via implied comparisons, comparisons which, at least potentially, draw upon the entire oeuvre that exists under an author’s name. They yield an inventory of slippery, semi-distinct notions about author and text. Authorial adjectives tend to give authors a type of handle and they function as if they were critical balances and counterbalances overlooking an entire literary opus. -Ron Price with thanks to Aaron Jaffe, "Adjectives and the Work of Modernism in an Age of Celebrity," The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2003.

I came across this idea tonight,
to me quite fresh and new---
I thought I'd give it thought,
put it under the microscope
and see what I could see.

I've given the concept a tangle
here and massaged the terms
around. I'm not sure what the result
was and I think I'll let the future tell.

Ron Price
10 January 2007

HARDLY ANYONE KNOWS

Yesterday I attended the Bahá’í Unit Convention for northern Tasmania. I drove home with my Tasmanian wife and with the oldest Bahá’í who had attended the Unit Convention, a Mr. Simon van der Molen age 78. As we drove through the hills, valleys, flat stretches of road and the occasional little town: Westbury, Exeter, Birralee, I reflected on all those Unit Conventions I had attended since the early sixties. This Unit Convention system was devised by the Universal House of Justice and is described briefly in the book Principles of Bahá’í Administration(1976,1963).-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 11 February 2007.

Well, that makes 40 meetings of this
electoral unit system, as far back as
'64, yes, at the Brant Inn, getting a bit
vague now. I have to take off the year
we lived on Baffin Island and recently
when I was just too tired and did not
want to get elected so stayed home
and one of those years in Perth WA
when I had run out of gas-a happening
from time to time over those 40 years.
Two words--forty years--which are easy
to write down but deceptively complex
and require volumes to put in the details.

There's a blur of towns, places, rooms, food,
discussions, people, drink, entertainment, voting,
reports, decisions, ballots, documents, letters,
photos, worries, sadnesses and joys, heat, cold,
across two continents, just about dries-out the
psyche, fills the memory to overflowing, thinking
about it. You can't put it all down in a prose-poem;
it's just too much, too late, too long---the first forty
years of this new electoral system and me from 21
to these years of early late adulthood, about the same
time frame as Moses going to the Promised Land
so long ago just about every one has forgotten--Now
hardly anyone knows about these little events that
dot the landscape of the world, the first tier in a
global electoral system that is taking the world
by storm from Spitzbergen to the ends of Tasmania:
but so slowly no one would ever guess and with a
grace so contained as to pose no threat, not this,
not these few in their ragged semi-circle far from
the decisions distantly drawing them forward.

The resolutions, often fragile, as they inch their
consequential necessary way in a process that
has just begun in this final stage of history.

Ron Price
11 February 2007

ILLUMINATED AND CONCEALED

One of Canada's great intellectuals, thinkers and writers, Northrop Frye, was seven weeks old when 'Abdu'l-Bahá arrived in Montreal, the only city in Canada 'Abdu'l-Bahá visited in 1912. Frye was born in Sherbrooke Quebec, a 90 minute drive from Montreal. When 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Divine Plan began in 1937 Frye was at Oxford and had formed, in his own words, "his permanent form of character or identity." To put this another way: his childhood became "the father of the man." The streets, the people, the impressions, the landscape and the mythological framework of his hometown, Moncton New Brunswick, where he lived from the age of seven, function to recapture, to frame, to construct, his past and present reality. They are the content of his dreams and they condition his reactions in the present.

When Frye was nine in 1921 he devised a scheme for a writing project that repeated itself hundreds of times in different forms and patterns in his notebooks during his life. At eleven he said he had a passion for private study and he cultivated his orientation to introversion in later life in order to protect himself from intrusions. This was a critical factor in his becoming, arguably, the most important literary and cultural critic of the 20th century. -Ron Price with thanks to Robert Denham, "Moncton Did You Know?" Antigonish Review, #138.

My Moncton was Burlington
and I wander its streets,
the house, the places, I lived
my life in my brain
reconstructing it often--
historical, not-fiction,
but dream-like, semi-fiction,
some liminal territory that
illuminates and conceals
is not constrained to site
sources or provide footnotes.

I argue and don't argue
all at once to make the past
live, to relive it, ponder it,
savour it, get hold of something
fresh, give a convincing portrait,
of a visual scene, an animation,
a drama, to me and anyone else
interested, objectivity, texture,
intimately caught, a metaphor
between past, present and future,
making the past familiar-strange
and the present strange-familiar.1

1 With thanks to Sue Peabody, "Reading and Writing Historical Fiction," The Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, 1989, pp.29-39.

Ron Price
7 January 2007

INFANTS

But in our lives we have often ignored those small creatures, who do not seem to hold out much scholarly promise as we have defined the ethnographic imagination. At a theoretical level babies constitute for most of us a non-subject, occupying negative space that is virtually impervious to the anthropological gaze. Moreover, those studies that do privilege infants have been sidelined from mainstream conversations in cultural anthropology. Infants still occupy a marginal place in academic literature and in autobiographies early childhood usually gets only a passing nod while middle and late childhood get a more deserving place. The ethnography, the study of infants is still in its infancy.

Discussion of the social matrix of children’s lives appears to be developing rapidly in several fields of the social and bheavioural sciences. From the early work of Philip Ari`es in 1962 history and sociology are especially fertile grounds and signal encouraging paths for emerging discussions of children as culturally situated.

Developmental psychologists routinely define ‘‘infancy’’ rather strictly as the period encompassing birth to the onset of ‘‘toddlerhood,’’ which in their definitions normatively begins at the age of two years. The transition from the end of the second year to the beginning of the third is taken by psychologists as a benchmark of the latest date at which the young child begins to understand and respond to linguistic communication and can walk effectively without constantly falling.

KIPLING

English poet and novelist, Rudyard Kipling died on January 18th 1936. A "new hour had struck in the history"1 of the Bahá’í Faith. A new stage was set synchronizing with the deepening gloom in the world. That stage was the devising, the inauguration, of a plan for the systematic spread of the Faith in the United States beginning in May 1936. The prosecution of that Plan began in April/May 1937. In March 1937 Kipling's autobiography Something Of Myself was published. The extent to which Kipling’s description of his life failed to match what actually happened is extraordinary.

In the first sentence of his autobiography Kipling said he had to play the cards in his life "as they came." I could very well have opened my own autobiography published sixty-six years later with that same line. In the last chapter of his book he said that writing to him had always been "a physical pleasure."2 Writing became that to me by degrees, sensibly and insensibly. A preamble stage existed in the years of my childhood and adolescence. From 1962/3 to 1972/3 I now see as stage 1; 1972/3-1982/3 as stage 2; 1982/3-1992/3 as stage 3 and 1992/3-2002/3 as stage 4 and 2002/3 to the present as stage 5. That sense of physical pleasure did not enter my sensory emporium until stage 2.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Shoghi Effendi, "Cablegram October 26, 1935," Messages To America, Wilmeete, 1947, p.5. and 2Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, Macmillan, London, 1937.

I came to the ink,
by degrees and with
pleasure 36 years
after you had left
this mortal coil, but
it served to keep me
inside myself as it did
you those many years--
you with your daemon
and me the leaven of
that Divine Educator.

We both enjoyed our trade
tools--books--Petrarch's
friendly society found in
a convenient chamber in
a humble corner of our
habitation and taking delight
in retirement's tranquillity and me
by this river not far from this sea.

I was just getting going when
you were slowing the pace,1
but for both of us writing was
inseparable from our social,
political and religious views.

1 Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, to the age of 65/6

LESSING

I came across Doris Lessing in an interview on “Books and Writing,” an ABC Radio National program, on 16 January 2000, then again on SBS TV on 18 September 2000. On that latter date she referred to my generation as indulgent and unself-critical. With the years, Lessing went on to say, this self-indulgent generation had many casualties as former personal certainties died and systems, empires and parties lost their credibility, their meaning and their existence. On another note Lessing informed her listeners that she thought most writers were mildly depressed.

When asked what her most joyous moments were she said they were “at the beginning of each book.” I agree that a certain melancholia, a certain pensiveness, a certain level of emotion recollected in tranquillity, are present during the writing process. In November 2000 I came across a statement by Lessing in an article entitled: “Writing the Self: Selected Works of Doris Lessing,” Deep South, Vol.2, No.2, Winter 1996, p.12. She had just completed, but not yet published, the second volume of her autobiography Walking in the Shade. Of autobiography, she said: "it helps calm life’s whirlpool." -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 February 2007.

You were just finishing your story,
your two volumes in '94 and '97
while I was just starting to put my
story down. Of course, you'd done
those semi-autobiographical novels,
indeed, you've been writing since I
was a child and recording my first
memories back in '47 and '48 & '49.


MISSED HIM BY A HAIR

In the 1850s the American writer John Steinbeck's grandfather, Johann Steinbeck, left Germany to live in Palestine. He married a woman of American descent Almira Dickson in 1854. In 1858 he and his wife returned to the United States. They had gone to Palestine as part of the Protestant millennial enthusiasms regarding the Second Coming. Johann Steinbeck and his wife, Almira, chose to live in Florida where their third son, John Ernst, the father of John Steinbeck was born. Johann enlisted in the Civil War and afterward the family moved to Massachusetts to be near Almira’s family. Ten years later they tried their luck in the West and settled in California. There John Ernst married and in 1902 a son was born to him. He was the now famous writer, John Steinbeck. -Ron Price with thanks to Yaron Perry, "John Steinbeck's Roots in Nineteenth Century Palestine," Steinbeck Studies, Vol.15, No.1, 2004.

They missed Him by a hair, John.
They really had no idea how to look
at the true meaning of prophecy.
Well, they had some idea, nearly
died trying amidst the violence,
the heat, the pain and suffering.

They believed He would come
like a thief in the night and so
He did at the same time they
were nestling in Palestine--
the first intimations of that
Revelation when He was like
a man asleep and He was taught
all that was and all that would be.
This was not from Him but from
Someone Who was Almighty and
All-knowing and He bid Him lift
up His voice--and He did while
they were hoping and believing--
He would come!

Ron Price 5 January 2007

MOON

The far side of the Moon is the lunar hemisphere that is permanently turned away from the Earth. The opposite side is known as the near side of the Moon. This hemisphere was first photographed by the Soviet Luna 3 probe in 1959. But it was not directly observed by human eyes until the Apollo 8 mission orbited the Moon in 1968. The rugged terrain on the moon's near side is distinguished by a multitude of crater impacts as well as a relative paucity of lunar mares. It includes the largest impact feature in the solar system: the South Pole-Aitken basin. On October 7, 1959 this Soviet probe Luna 3 took the first photographs of the lunar far side, seventeen of them being resolvable ones covering one-third of that surface which is invisible from the Earth. The images were analysed and the first atlas of the far side of the Moon was published by the USSR Academy of Sciences on November 6, 1960. It included a catalog of 500 distinguished features of the landscape.1

That same week of October 7, 1959, I joined the Bahá’í Faith. I had just started grade 10 at Burlington Central High School. I had just finished my first season in the midget baseball league and was about to start my first year of midget hockey. I dearly loved Susan Gregory who lived three doors down the street but, sadly, she did not love me. My father had just retired at the age of 65.       My mother was in her last four years before retiring as a secretary from McMaster University in the Foreign Students Department.
-Ron Price with thanks to "The Other Side of the Moon," Wikipedia, 14 February 2007.

I had no idea, as I walked
along New Street--or did I
ride my bike--in the evening
of a fine autumn season nearly
fifty years ago--that they were
photographing the other side
of the moon, the side I'd never
seen, that no one had ever seen
until that very week. It was there
and then I uttered three tiny
syllables, two simple words
of obscure derivation, without
the slightest trace of alarm,
without private hesitations,
with unqualified conviction
and force, not imagining that
as I spoke the angels were all
ears and not knowing that when
I said "I believe" I would not be
Let alone and not be put to proof.

Ron Price
14 February 2007

THAT MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES

Charles Darwin refers, in the first paragraph of the preface to his book On The Origin Of Species(1859), to the origin of species being "that mystery of mysteries." It is a term, he says in that same first paragraph, which was used "by one of our greatest philosophers." Darwin goes on to say that after "patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on" the subject of specie origin, he allowed himself "to speculate on the subject and draw up some short notes." He enlarged these notes "in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions which then seemed" probable to him. From 1844 to 1859 Darwin "steadily pursued the same object."

"My work is now nearly finished," he says in the second paragraph of that same preface, "but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract. I have more especially been induced to do this as Mr. Wallace…..has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species. Last year he sent to me a memoir on this subject, with a request that I would forward it to Sir Charles Lyell, who sent it to the Linnean Society, and it is published in the third volume of the Journal of that Society. Sir C. Lyell and Dr. Hooker, who both knew of my work--the latter having read my sketch of 1844--honoured me by thinking it advisable to publish, with Mr. Wallace's excellent memoir, some brief extracts from my manuscripts." -Ron Price with appreciation to Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859.

It was a very big year back in 1844!
Marx's first writings that hot summer;
The first electric telegram with the words
"What hath God wrought?" The YMCA
began and Joseph Smith was martyred.
The Millerites experienced what came
To be called The Great Disappointment.
The first international cricket match and
between Canada and the USA, the first safe
was invented and so goes the litany on 1844…..

The time appointed for the judgement,
the judgement of those things which were
written in the books, each according to
their works1 at the time of the end,
the end times; the close of the 2300 days,
the work of investigation and blotting out
of sins--both of the living and of the dead.
The date 1844 marks the end of the longest
time prophecy in the Bible, a prophecy that
is at the very heart of the book of Daniel.
1844 marks the beginning of the first phase
of the judgement and the beginning of the
final work of Jesus in the heavenly sanctuary
prior to His return to this Earth. While Daniel
focuses our attention on the heavenly scenes,
the book of Revelation focuses on a mighty
movement that arises on earth,2 a special
movement that comes at the end of those
2300 days of no-man's-land prophecy.

1Rev. 20:12
2 Rev. 10.

Ron Price
16 January 2006

SOMETHING OF MYSELF

English poet and novelist, Rudyard Kipling died on January 18th 1936. A "new hour had struck in the history"1 of the Bahá’í Faith. A new stage was set, a stage synchronizing with the deepening gloom in the world. That stage was the devising, the inauguration, of a plan for the systematic spread of the Faith in the United States beginning in May 1936. The prosecution of that Plan began in April/May 1937. In March 1937 Kipling's autobiography Something Of Myself was published. The extent to which Kipling’s description of his life failed to match what actually happened is extraordinary.

In the first sentence of his autobiography Kipling said he was dealt a set of cards and he had to play these cards during his life "as they came." I could very well have opened my own autobiography published sixty-six years later with that same line. In the last chapter of his book he said that writing to him had always been "a physical pleasure."2 Writing became that to me by degrees, sensibly and insensibly. A preamble stage existed in the years of my childhood and adolescence: 1944-1962. From 1962/3 to 1972/3 I now see as stage 1 of my literary life; 1972/3-1982/3 was stage 2; 1982/3-1992/3 was stage 3 and 1992/3-2002/3 was stage 4. I have just begun stage 5: 2002/3 to the present. That sense of physical pleasure Kipling described did not enter my sensory emporium until stage 2.
-Ron Price with thanks to 1Shoghi Effendi, "Cablegram October 26, 1935," Messages To America, Wilmeete, 1947, p.5. and 2Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, Macmillan, London, 1937.

I came to the pleasure of ink,
by degrees 36 years after you
had left this mortal coil and
that Plan had made an epochal
shift. That pleasure served to
keep me inside myself as it did
you those many years--you with
your daemon and me the leaven
of that Ideal King and Educator.

We both enjoyed our trade tools--
books--Petrarch's friendly society
found in a convenient chamber in
a humble corner of our habitations
and me taking delight in retirement's
tranquillity by this river near the sea.

I was just getting going at last
when you were slowing the pace,1
but for both of us writing was
inseparable from our social,
political and religious views
reaching out to human beings.

1 Kipling(1865-1936) kept writing until the early 1930s, to the age of 65/6. In the previous ten years, from say 55 to 65, his pace began to slow. I was only starting to pick up my pace at the age of 55 after I retired from full-time work.

Ron Price
17 February 2007

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

SOLUTIONS TO THE RIDDLE

In the summer that my pioneering life began as a Baha’i, in 1962, C. S. Lewis wrote a preface to what became his last book, The Discarded Image. I had just turned 18 and was about to start my last year of high school. Lewis’ book was an introduction to medieval and renaissance literature. The book was published in 1967 by which time I was living among the Inuit on Baffin Island. Lewis died the year after he wrote that preface. He died on the same day as the assassination of President Kennedy, November 22nd 1963 and the same day I re-enrolled in first year university in Canada and took one of the only two courses I ever took in medieval and renaissance history.

C.S.Lewis is best known for his children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia(published 1950-56); he was a close friend of J.R.R. Tolkien another writer of children’s works and especially the famous series The Lord of the Rings(published 1954/5). More than 50 years later both Lewis’ and Tolkien’s works are still making it big and even bigger in adaptations to film and TV. This year I am 63 and I just read this evening that Lewis’ books have sold several hundred million copies and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has grossed US$750 million worldwide.–Ron Price,Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 29 March 2007.

I was playing baseball and not into
reading when your famous Chronicles
were published so long ago. It was too
late when your study of the middle ages
came out in ‘67: the Inuit were occupying
my attention, a first marriage and an
illness that kept me away from books.

Your Christian convictions puzzled me
for there were so few of academic ilk
who took that path to sorting the puzzle.
But then, there were even fewer who took
my path as the solution to the riddle of life.
Numbers are never a good guide to truth.

I kept running into your life over the years:
The Screwtape Letters at Teachers’ College,
the film about you in 1993---Shadowlands,
Surprised by Joy in ’74, part of the declining
Christian tradition—one of the few parts I
liked and I wish you well, now, in your
journey to the infinite and its sea of lights.
Ron Price
29 March 2007

SOLITARY SHAPING

There was an uncertainty and tentativeness in the early attempts at literary expression in Australia Leonie Kramer, noted Australian public figure and academic, informs us.1 That sense of historical moment and newness which one finds in many other countries was not found downunder. The first poet, Charles Harper(1817-1868), was what Kane calls a “solitary shaper,” but he did not have any central point of reference as he lay the foundation for an Australian poetry. His interests were broad and complex, his search was for philosophic and religious truth.–Ron Price with thanks to Paul Kane, Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity, Cambridge UP, 1996, p.17.

With Walter Brennan, who began to write poetry seriously in the months before Baha’u’llah passed away, we have a poet who should be evaluated as the architect of a single poem not a series of poems. He saw all poetry as “a history of mankind’s dream of the Absolute.”1 Poetry, to Brennan, was an expression of an aspiration for a pitch of experience denied in ordinary life. –Ron Price with thanks to G.A.Wilkes, “Christopher Brennan,” The Literature of Australia, G. Dutton, editor, Ringwood, p. 307.

Well, you could say these were
thoughts about Australian poetry
before the Baha’i Formative Age.
Much more could be said, but I
find here my spirit-home feeling.

It took me thirty years1 not so much
of tentativeness or uncertainty but
of the solitary shaping of myself,
the finding of a voice suited to
some inner prompting and urge
to match the historical moments
and pervasive newnesses around
me that dizzying whirl, booming
and buzzing in confusion of it all.

1 1962 to 1992: thirty years of some mysterious solitary shaping, of finding a voice that seemed mine. “Thus began that bent of mind from which I could not deviate….that of turning into an image, into a poem, everything that delighted or troubled me.” Ernst Cassirir, Symbol, Myth and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirir: 1935-1945, ed. D. P. Verene, Yale UP, 1979, pp. 209-210.
Ron Price
4 March 2007

SMALL DOSES

Being able to decisively attach one’s prose to the created rhythm of one’s time and age, to the psycho-historical mood and affective state in its many dispositions and tempers; or being able to detach one’s prose from one’s age in a clean and straightforward way is difficult. In my case, the result is uneven, a little simplistic at times, some might say supercilious and pretentious and, even if it does bear the weight of my preoccupations, the weight is too heavy for many readers. Perhaps my oeuvre in all its genres is too ambitious in its range and depth; perhaps it tries to diagnose too much over too extensive a field of content. My diagnostic intelligence, if I can call it that, probes. For some people who read my work the affect, I’m sure, is deadening. For others there is a vitality and for still others there is no affect at all.

My writing is remorselessly and, I like to think, glitteringly intent on diagnosis. The glitter of invention is, for me, everywhere and it is linked with and provides a distinctive literary identity, a creative abundance. For some readers I’m sure this is the case, but not for most. For most who chance upon my writing, the affect on them is enervating as it is for me after a long day of writing or even periodically in the course of any single day. I like to think my literary venture is gallant and ambitious, even if it is not really successful in the marketplace. My unremitting concern for detail, for analysis and for comment is not everybody’s and my advice to many would-be readers is to take my writing in small doses.-Ron Price with thanks to Vincent Buckley, “The Novels of Patrick White,” The Literature of Australia, editor, G. Dutton, Penguin, 1972(1964).

I create a world, too, Patrick;
I want to show extraordinary
things behind the ordinary,
the mystery and the poetry,
to transcend the tensions and
explore my world by words.

No mere surface impressionism
but passages, words, vibrant with
significance growing out of profound
numbness and pervasive inarticulateness.
Ron Price
3 March 2007

SLOUGH OF DESPOND

As I was retiring from full-time teaching and settling into George Town Tasmania in 1999, Boris Yeltsin(1931-2007) sent Russian troops into Kosovo and the then breakaway region of Chechnya in Russia. Teltsin had been instrumental in engineering the final collapse of the Soviet Union and state communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In August 1991 he rallied his country against an attempt at a coup. This coup had been aimed at reestablishing state communism. His was one of the key political pushes in Russia to establish democracy in that country. He had made a stunning debut as the Russian President. He possessed a confessional edge no previous President had possessed. This was reflected in his memoir which appeared in 1994 and it was entitled The Struggle For Russia. I had just begun to work on the second edition of my own memoir in 1994 which was becoming increasingly confessional as the editions appeared in my computer.

In my last years as a teacher, 1991 to 1999, and in Yelstin’s years as President in those same years of 1991 to 1999, he presided over a chaotic Russia, over his own chaotic behaviour, his own depressions, his alcohol problem and the 75th anniversary of Lenin’s death(1924-1999). In 1991 Yeltsin declared the Soviet Union extinct; in 1993 he banned the Russian parliament and the Communist Party. During all of this time the Arc Project of the Baha’i community proceeded apace in Haifa Israel on Mt. Carmel. -Ron Price with thanks to “FoxNews.Com Home>World and Associated Press,” 23 April 2007.

That 4 year plan1 was ending when
you resigned back in ’99, Boris and
we were developing our resources
after 80 years of the unveiling of
those Tablets during the Great War.2

The unfolding magnificence of the
Terraces was capturing attention as
a galvanic coherence was beginning
at last in expansion, consolidation,
in vision and activity, unbeknownst.

It was a festive moment in those years
with their chronology of expectations
ending with the completion of that Arc.
I’m sorry you missed it all, dear Boris,
as tangled fears seized helpless millions
and your time was ending in that slough
of despond, phantoms of a wrongly
informed imagination and those troubled
forecasts of doom which seem to have
been around all my life and yours, Boris.
1 1996-2000
2 Tablets of the Divine Plan unveiled in New York in 1919.
Ron Price
28 April 2007
...in celebration of the 9th Day of Ridván BE 164.

IDENTITY

The purpose of autobiography is: the recreation, the nostalgic or not-so-nostalgic closure, or the simple delineation, of a life. This is without doubt, at least for me. But it is also much else and many writers describe the purpose of autobiography and of its several country-cousins: memoirs, diary or journal writing and even essays and poetry. A search for some clearer understanding of the autobiographer’s identity is a commonly found aim in the now massive literature on the subject of why autobiographers write. For some autobiographers of a scientific bent their work is animated by the purpose of proving that their lives are ultimately purposeless. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead states, with his tongue in his cheek in his book The Function of Reason, that the examination of such autobiographies would constitute an interesting subject for study. My autobiography, in contrast, is animated by a significant sense of purpose and by a metanarrative in which I do not possess an incredulity. Mine would not therefore be among those that Whitehead might find interesting in that context.

My literary, my autobiographical, exercise involves a significant psychological dimension with its interface between my active, public self and my more contemplative private underside--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 only when necessity or some selected sense of literary duty and, sometimes, pleasure called.

In the last ten years, 1999 to 2010, 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. With the medication package I acquired for my bipolar disorder during this last decade, this decade of writing--and as I entered my 60s--I think I have seen the end of my cracking open experiences. This new-found tranquillity is not in the main because I am free at last to write; it is due to the new medications.

My religious identity as a Baha’i 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. All of my knowledge, all of my writing, to put this another way, is contextual. I find it helpful and fertile, useful and engaging, if the way of looking at my Baha’i identity is contested by others, subjected to a dialectic and praxis, dialogue and discussion, apologetics and rhetoric. The assertion of differences, a clash of opinions, is a helpful way of establishing identity. 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 and the need for decentralised and centralized, diffuse and specific, as well as systematized and fractured knowledge. This sense of identity acknowledges a sense of power which also has a diffuse set of sources. At the same time this inner and outer sense of identity accepts the useful concepts of periphery and centre, margins and depths, surfaces and heights in the expression of that power. Once I 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, I hope that this expression, this set of views, will help those who read this, those who are both part of the Baha’i community and those in other interest groups, express their own 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 see myself as part of a functioning unit by my free choice. Individual identity and a more inclusive identity as part of a social structure and as a world citizen are inextricably conjoined for me—and they are examined in this memoir.

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 both loosens and strengthens the genre boundaries within which I work and points to blurring and cross-pollinating between genres as being more useful. This work is no mere imparting of information. Alfred North Whitehead once wrote: “no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.” I would not go that far with Whitehead but the point he makes about information certainly applies to my autobiography. It is not essentially an information base, a data base, for my life.

The sociologist, Anthony Giddens, has much to say of relevance to the autobiographer and the literary expression of his identity. “Each of us not only 'has', but lives a biography,” writes Giddens, “it is reflexively organised in terms of flows of social and psychological information about possible ways of life. Modernity is a post-traditional order, in which the question, 'How shall I live?' has to be answered in day-to-day decisions about how to behave, what to wear and what to eat - and many other things - as well as interpreted within the temporal unfolding of self-identity.”

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 or got 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.

The Bahá'í community which I have been a part of for nearly 60 years gives to me a happy mix of creative expression and group solidarity. “Originality,” writes the psychologist Anthony Storr, “implies being bold enough to go beyond accepted norms. Sometimes it involves being misunderstood or rejected by one's peers.” In these last six decades I have often been misunderstood by my fellow Baha’is. Such an experience is an inevitable part of virtually any intense group experience. “Those who are not too dependent upon, or too closely involved with, others,” continues Storr, “find it easier to ignore convention. Primitive societies find it difficult to allow for individual decisions or varieties of opinion. When the maintenance of group solidarity is a prime consideration, originality may be stifled.”

I have not found a stifling of my creativity to be the case in this new faith, this new international community. This is not to say that I have not experienced tension in the many Bahá'í groups of which I have been a part. As Alfred Adler writes: we make our own choices on how we are to belong. I have done this all my Bahá'í life. Decisions on how best to make my contribution to the whole, to the local and to the national and international Bahá'í community have not always been easy. I have done this by means of my efforts in my career, my intimate relationships, my friendships and, as I say, the larger Bahá'í community. But in these areas of my existence there has been frustration and tragedy. Fulfillment, the release of psychic energy, has been an emergence, at least as I look back over my life, from the tragedy among other sources. Perhaps this is, in part, due to my view of religion as world loyalty, of unity as the first and last word and of tolerance as the requisite of high civilization.

The ultimate ends of my lifelong education process are a living religion, a living aesthetic enjoyment and a living courage which has urged me toward a creative adventure. I play my part in the maintenance of the language, the history, the symbolic code, of my Bahá'í society and in the relevant application of its teachings to the society I live in. My identity is, therefore, bound up with an appreciation of the past, with history and 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 must acknowledge my appreciation to these words of Virginia Woolf: "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."

Since moving to Australia in my late twenties, in 1971, humour has become an important part of my identity. The nearly total absence of humour from the Bible, the Bahá'í writings and, indeed, from most of religious and philosophical literature, a literature in which I have immersed myself for several decades, has made of me a highly serious person. Living in Australia has brought-out in me an appreciation of the funny side of life. I became conscious of this slow development when, in 1980, I got a job as a probation and parole officer in Tasmania and it was largely due to my sense of humour, or so I was told by the interviewing panel. Thirty years later, now in 2010, humour is part of my soul’s salvation, my modus operandi, Downunder, one of the main gainers from living in the Antipodes for nearly 40 years.

The American essayist Joan Didion has also contributed to my sense of identity, the identity which writes, and I conclude this brief essay with a paraphrase of her words, words which she acknowledged from George Orwell:

In many ways writing is the act of saying “I” and of imposing oneself upon other people. It’s a way of saying: “listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.” It is also an aggressive, even a hostile, act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the readers most private space.

Didion says that she stole the title “Why I Write?” not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all that she has to tell us as readers. Like many writers, she says, she has only this one "subject," this one "area": the act of writing. She can bring readers no reports from any other front. She acknowledges other interests, as I do, but—like Didion—in these my latter years—writing is my game.

Like Didion, too, I needed a degree by the end of one summer, for me it was the summer of 1966, so that I could enter teachers’ college. Like Didion, my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch. But, unlike Didion, it was also on ideas, hundreds of them. Like Didion, though, I knew only too well what I couldn’t do. I knew what I wasn’t and it took me some years to discover what I was. By the age of 55 and even more by 60, and even more by 65, I knew I was a writer.

Didion goes on to say that when she said that she knew she was a writer--she meant not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer. To her this meant a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are/were spent arranging words on pieces of paper. In Didion’s case she emphasizes that had her credentials been in order she would never have become a writer. Had she been blessed with even limited access to her own mind there would have been no reason to write. She wrote entirely to find out what she was thinking, what she was looking at and what it meant as well as what she wanted and what she feared. I had a different set of reasons, a different raison d’etre. I explore this raison d’etre in these essays on autobiography, on identity, as well as many other subjects.

Ron Price
29 December 2009

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 Baha’i 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. Baha’u’llah’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 two, perhaps, three personalities; 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. For all these men the presence of the divine was critical to their lives, 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.

Augustine had a contact outside of time through Christ; mine is and has been through Baha’u’llah. 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 Baha’u’llah 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 Baha’i 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 Baha’i community life. Slowly the pattern of Baha’i life, so eloquently and extensively described in the Baha’i 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 Baha’i 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 Baha’u’llah 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 Baha’u’llah 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 Baha’i 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 Baha’i 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 Baha’i 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 Baha’i 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.