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 meta-narrative in which I do not possess an incredulity. Mine would not therefore be among those that Whitehead might find interesting in that context.

1. 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. I also had
no trouble agreeing with Herbert Marcuse(1898-1979), a twentieth century
sociologist and philosopher, when he wrote that: “people recognize themselves in
their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level
home, kitchen equipment.1
One’s appearance, clothes, hair-style and deportment
became entwined with identity in the nineteenth century so argues one analyst.
Clothing, the body, its allurements and images have become, for millions, a
significant part of their identity. The “idea of the Self as a Work of Art,” also
came to be seen as a false self. This falseness as expressed by Simone de Beauvoir
in her book The Second Sex:
“The least sophisticated of women, once she is “dressed,” does not present herself
to observation; she is, like the picture or statue, or the actor on the stage, an agent
through which is suggested someone not there, that is, the character she represents,
but is not. It is this identification with something unreal, fixed and perfect that
gratifies her.”2
1
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society, 1964.
2
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Vintage, NY, 1952, p. 125.

2. In my case I have a different set of commodities which play a role in the formation
of my identity: books and essays, ideas and concepts as well as, and especially as I
got into my sixties, the metaphorical nature of the flora, fauna and material
phenomena of existence, the close connections between physical and spiritual
reality. My wife takes a serious and active role in the beautification of our home
and garden and I am a beneficiary of her domestic enthusiasm. I am sure my
identity is also formed in ways that are subtle and complex by my domestic
surroundings. This is a complex subject which is difficult to deal with here
although John Hatcher deals with it well in his book Close Connections3
and I
have dealt with it in my autobiography in a chapter entitled ‘memorabilia.’
In the last ten years, 2000 to 2010, my life as a writer and poet, an editor and
publisher has shaped my life and my identity in different forms and directions than
it had been shaped in the previous half-century, say 1949 to 1999. 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 extensive writing--and as I entered
my 60s--I think I have seen the end of those cracking-open experiences. This new-
found tranquillity is not in the main because I am free at last to write, although that
is an important factor; it is due to the new medications for my bipolar disorder.
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
3
John Hatcher, Close Connections: The Bridge Between Physical and Spiritual
Reality, Bahá'í Publishing, Wilmette, 2009.

3. 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.4
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."5
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.6
This work is no mere imparting of information. Alfred North
4
Emma Heggarty, “Native Peoples of Canada: Rewriting the Imaginary,” 14th
April 2003, Internet, 2004.
5
Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels, MacMillan, Toronto, 1981, p.33.
6
For this concept I want to thank Winifred M. Mellor’s Review "THE SIMPLE
CONTAINER OF OUR EXISTENCE": NARRATIVE AMBIGUITY IN CAROL
SHIELDS'S THE STONE DIARIES,” in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol.

4. Whitehead once wrote: “no university has had any justification for existence since
the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.”7
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.”8
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.9
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.10
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
20 No.2, 1995.
7
Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, MacMillan
Company, 1929; reprinted in Education in the Age of Science, edited by Brand
Blanshard, New York, Basic Books, 1959.
8
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Polity Press, 1991.
9
An interview by Christine Hamelin, “JOHN MOSS: CONSCIOUSNESS AS
CONTEXT,” in Studies in Canadian Literature, Volume 20, No. 1, 1995.
10
Rollo May, The Courage To Create, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1975, p. 11.

5. difficult to allow for individual decisions or varieties of opinion. When the
maintenance of group solidarity is a prime consideration, originality may be
stifled.”11
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. Fulfilment, 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."12
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.13
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
11
Anthony Storr, Solitude, Ballantine Books, 1989.
12
Virginia Woolf, “Letter to Hugh Walpole (1932),” The Letters of Virginia
Woolf, Vol. V: 1932-1935, ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann, Harcourt
Brace, NY, 1979, p. 142.
13
Quoted in Price's Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead

6. 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:14
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
14
Joan Didion, “Excerpts From Why I Write,” The New York Times Magazine,
December 5, 1976.

7. 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