My Autobiography: Part 1

PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS: autobiographical study and a study in autobiography
7TH
EDITION
By Ron Price
TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOLUME 1:
PREFACES Six Prefaces to Six Editions
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
Chapter 2 Introduction 2
Chapter 3 Letters
Chapter 4 Diary/Journal/Notebooks
Chapter 5 Interviews
Chapter 6 A Life in Photographs
VOLUME 2:
1

PRE-PIONEERING
Chapter 1 Ten Year Crusade Years: 1953-1963
Chapter 2 Pre-Youth Days: 1956-1959
Chapter 3 Pre-Pioneering Days: 1959-1962
VOLUME 3:
HOMEFRONT PIONEERING
Chapter 1 Pioneering: Homefront 1: 1962-1964
Chapter 2 Pioneering: Homefront 2: 1965-1967
Chapter 3 Pioneering Homefront 3: 1967-1968
Chapter 4 Pioneering Homefront 4: 1968-1971
VOLUME 4:
2

INTERNATIONAL PIONEERING
Chapter 1 International Pioneering 1: 1971-1973
Chapter 8 Epilogue
VOLUME 5:
COMMENTARIES, ESSAYS AND POEMS
3

Chapter 1 Credo, Poems and Resumes
Chapter 2 Pioneering An Overview
Chapter 3 Anecdote and Autobiography
Chapter 4 Autobiography as Symbolic Representation
Chapter 5 Essays on Autobiography
Chapter 6 A Study of Community and Biography
Chapter 7 About Poetry
Chapter 8 Social Topics of Relevance
Chapter 9 Praise and Gratitude
__________________________________________________________
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SECTION I : Pre-Pioneering
SECTION II : Homefront Pioneering
SECTION III : International Pioneering
The material below is found in other locations and, although not included in
this autobiography, it could be useful for future autobiographical,
biographical and historical work.
-------------------------------------------
SECTION IV Characters/Biographies: 24 short sketches
SECTION V Published Work:Essays-300-Volumes 1 to 4—1982-2010
SECTION VI Unpublished Work: Essays-Volumes 1 & 2---170 essays
.......................1979-2010
Novels-Volumes 1 to 3---12 attempts
......................1983-2003
SECTION VII Letters : Volumes 1 to 25 :3000 letters.1960-2010
Volumes 26 to 50:2000 postings..2001-10
SECTION VIII Poetry : Booklets 1-61: 6500 poems....1980-2010
SECTION IX Notebooks: .........300.............1962-2010
SECTION X.1 Photographs : 12 files/booklets/folios....1908-2010
SECTION X.2 Journals : Volumes 1 to 5.....…........1844-2010
5

SECTION XI Memorabilia : 1908-2010
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to the Universal House of Justice in celebration of the
fiftieth anniversary in April 2013 of its first election in April 1963 and to
Alfred J. Cornfield, my grandfather, whose autobiography was an inspiration
to the one found here.
Caveats:
1. The document below is a necessary abridgement of a narrative work of
2600 pages; it has been truncated here to fit into the small space for this
document at Bahai Library Online. This document is both an outline and a
curtailment of an epic-opus, an abbreviated, a compressed, a boiled down, a
potted, a shorn, a mown, a more compact version of my larger epic-work.
This abridgement of the 7th edition of my autobiography will include
changes in the months ahead. When a significant number of changes are
made an 8th edition will be brought out. It is my hope, although I cannot
guarantee, that this brief exposure here will give readers a taste, a desire, for
more.
2. The inclusion of quotation marks, apostrophes and accents has often
proved difficult as have the addition of footnotes. Hopefully this will be
remedied at a later date.
6

_____________________________________________________________
PREFACE TO THIS SEVENTH EDITION:
A 2600 page, five volume narrative, a 300 page study of the poetry of Roger
White, the major Bahai; poet of that half-century; 6600 prose-poems, 120
pages of personal interviews, 400 essays; 5000 letters, emails and interent
posts; 300 notebooks, six volumes of diaries/journals, 12 volumes of
photographs and memorabilia, a dozen attempts at a novel, indeed, an epic-
opus of material has been integrated into an analysis of my religion, my
times and my life. This variety of genres aims at embellishing and deepening
my own experience and that of readers. Only a very small portion of this
epic work is found here, a portion that readers can dip into anywhere.
This is the autobiography of an ordinary Bahai, perhaps the most extensive
one to date. This epic-opus illustrates what hardly needs illustrating these
days, namely, that you dont have to be a celebrity or a person of some fame
or renoun to have a biography or autobiography. This literary genre is now
so popular that men and women of little interest and significance feel
impelled to record their life-stories. In the wide-wide world my life is
clearly is this category. The Bahá'í Faith provides, it seems to me, a nice
balance between the importance of community and the necessity for that
7

community not to stifle the voice of its members. This is not an easy
balance to strike but in the decades ahead the world will find that this Faith
is one of the organizations, perhaps the critical one, which provides the mix
of freedom and authority, unity and diversity, without which planetary
survival will be difficult if not impossible.
The autobiographies and the biographies in the Bahai community that have
come into Bahai bookshops since the Kingdom of God had its inception in
1953 with the completion of the Bahai temple in Chicago are, for the most
part, about individuals of some significance in the Bahai system of social
status or stratification like Hands of the Cause Furutan, George Townshend
and Martha Root. Extant autobiographies and biographies have been written
about or by individuals with some special, publicly recognized, talent or
experience like: Andre Brugiroux who hitch-hiked around the planet; Dizzy
Gillespie or Marvin Holladay both of whom had a special musical talent and
fame; Louis Bourgeois or Roger White, men of great artistic or literary
talent; Angus Cowan or Marion Jack two of the 20th century's great
teachers.
There are now hundreds of short & often moving biographical &
8

autobiographical pieces by or about quite ordinary people with simple
stories of their lives and their often significant contributions to the work of
this Cause. Such accounts can be found in the many volumes of Bahai
World and other books like Claire Vreelands And the Trees Clapped Their
Hands. If, as Shakespeare suggests in his play Hamlet, “bevity is the soul of
wit,”1
there is a potential for much wit in much Baha’i biography. Sadly
there may be little here in this work if one follows the same reasoning. But
if, as Walter Pater emphasizes in his essay on style, the greatness of a work
lies in its content, perhaps there is hope for this work.2
Like the poet-writer
Jorge Luis Borges, I like to think of myself as unusually liberal in my
insistence that every reader must have his own autonomy: "I think the reader
should enrich what he's reading. He should misunderstand the text: he
should change it into something else."3
Somebody else's original gift and I
like to think that whatever quality of writing is found here is a gift, can't be
duplicated, but the study of it can always help to make us a more careful
guardian of our own. Clive James makes this point at his new website. And
1
Shakespeare, Hamle t, Act II, Scene II.
2
Walter Pater in W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, MacMillan,
London, 1971(1961), p.viii.
3
Adam Feinstein, “Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson,” The Guardian,
1 January 2005
9

even if a reader has no plans to be a writer himself, there is always an extra
fascination in watching a craftsman at work. Writing in any form is never
just the style, but it isn't just the subject matter either.
Here is one of the first extensive autobiographies about one of these quite
ordinary Bahais, without fame, rank, celebrity status or an especially
acknowledged talent, who undertook work he often felt unqualified or
incompetent to achieve, with his sins of omission and commission, but with
achievements which, he emphasizes, were all gifts from God in mysterious
& only partly understandable ways, ways alluded to again and again in the
Bahai writings. They were achievements that arose, such is his view, due to
his association with this new Revelation and its light and were not about
name, fame or renoun, although some of these now tarnished terms play
subtely and not-so-subtely on the edges of many a life in our media age.
These achievements and their significance are sometimes termed: success,
victory, service, enterprize, sacrifice, transformation, all words with many
implications for both the individual and society.
This story, this narrative, is unquestionably one of transformation: of a
community, a Cause and a life that has taken place in a time of auspicious
10

beginnings for both humankind and the Bahai community, at one of historys
great climacterics. The concept of this oeuvre, this prose and poetry, as epic,
took shape from 1997 to 2007 after more than 50 years of association with
what may well prove to be the greatest epic in human history, the gradual
realization of the wondrous vision, the brightest emanations of the mind of
the prophet-founder of the Bahai Faith and what Bahais believe will become,
over time, the fairest fruit of the fairest civilization the world has yet seen.
During these last ten years, my final years of full-time teaching in a
technical college in Australia and the first years of early retirement, this
concept of his work as epic has evolved.
By 2010 I had been writing seriously for at least 50 years and writing poetry
for 45. The concept of this written opus as epic gradually crystallized after
more than 40 years of my association with and involvement in the Bahai
Cause between the two Holy Years 1952/3 and 1992/3 of the Formative Age
and at a time when the projects on Mt. Carmel and the garden terraces on
that Hill of God were being completed. With the increasing elaboration,
definition and development of the structure and concept, the notion and
framework, of this entire collected work as epic has come a conceptual home
of reflection, memory, imagination, action and vision which readers will
11

find described, albeit briefly, in this abridged, this truncated, edition and
document at Bahai Library Online.
No intelligent writer knows if he is any good, wrote T.S. Eliot; he must live
with the possibility, the theoretical uncertainty, that his entire work has all
been a waste of time. This provocative idea of Eliot’s, I believe, has some
truth. But whether for good or ill--write I must. One of the results of this
epic work is another provocative idea which I like to think also has some
truth; namely, that my work was a part of the new patterns of thought,
action, integration and the gathering momentum of Bahai scholarly activity
indeed, the change in culture evidenced in the Four Year Plan(1996-2000),
that befitting crescendo to the achievements of the 20th century; that my
epic work was a part, too, of that very beginning of the process of
community building, a new culture of learning and growth,4
and, finally, a
part of those traces which Abdul-Baha said shall last forever.
To approach this epic or even the truncated edition of my 2600 page
narrative in two Parts at Bahai Library Online and read it certainly requires
an effort on the part of a hopeful internet user. I like to think that such an
4
See my 275 page, 130,000 word book entitled: The New Culture of
Learning and Growth in the Bahá'í Community at Bahá'í Library Online.
12

effort will be rewarded, that such an exercise on the part of the reader will be
worthwhile. Of course, as a writer, I know that I can make no such
guarantee.
Some writers are read most widely for their fiction; there is often a closeness
for them of the two worlds, reality and invention. Fiction for these same
writers often represents a mere short step from their essays or their poetry.
A similar sensibility pervades all their work in whatever genre. I do not
write of reality and invention, at least not consciously. Fiction does not
inhabit my several genres, although I like to think there is a common
sensibility across all my writing—but I’m not so sure. I leave such an
analysis, such a statement, to readers.
The American poet William Carlos William’s used the term locality or
ground and expressed his agreement with Edgar Allen Poe that this locality
or ground was to be acquired by the “whole insistence in the act of writing
upon its method in opposition to some nameless rapture over nature. . . with
a gross rural sap; he wanted a lean style, rapid as a hunter and with an aim as
sure — Find the ground, on your feet or on your belly. . . . He counsels
writers to borrow nothing from the scene but to put all the weight of the
13

effort into the WRITING.”5
For me, for my written expression, this locality
or ground in either my verse or my prose was not easily attained. The
evolution of my oeuvre since the 1960s and its present style here in
Pioneering Over Four Epochs reveals my long struggle to capture the
complex interrelationships between self, society and the sacred.
The time is ripe to articulate questions about the complex interdependence
of internationalism, nationalism and locality and the critical need for a basis
for communitas communitatum and to infuse literature and social analysis
with a relevant vocabulary. After several thousand years in which the world
has been the private preserve of a small leisured class, something that can
truly be called humanity is being born and a world society fit for human
beings to live in. The process is both slow and fast.
Like many writers and thinkers, artists and entrepreneurs, in these epochs of
my life, I have found that there is a world towards which I can direct my
loyalty and whatever skills, by some unmerited grace, with which I have
been endowed. Many never find that world, never find some commitment
into which they can throw their heart and soul. They have to settle for: self,
5
William Carlos Williams, “Edgar Allan Poe,” In the American Grain,
New York,1925, p.227.
14

family, some local set of issues, perhaps a political party or a cause like the
environment, whales, seals, a career, sex, indeed, the list is virtually endless.
These commitments around which millions and billions sketch the meaning
of their lives over the terra incognita of existence, around which the creative
imagination with which each of these human beings is endowed, attempts to
produce a reality that is consistent with that commitment, with the facts that
it sees around it. And I do the same. This autobiography is a sketch of that
commitment, that reality, that imagination and its set of facts.
I am not concerned by the degree of exposure that is necessitated by
autobiographical writing; I do not feel the need to provide a thin shield of
anonymity over my life by using pseudonyms rather than real names, by
using fictionalized autobiogrpahy or some form of story to hide behind.
There is a shield here, but it is not the shield of anonymity; rather it is the
shield that results from only a moderate confessionalism in my writing of
these memoirs. I do not tell it all. It should be said, though, that even
though this series of five volumes evolved over 25 years, it is still only a
preliminary work.
15

It is, I like to think, detectably sparing with the main drama of my life which
has had to do with how I reacted to this new Faith with my whole soul and
how my soul became richer because of it. There is more than enough
opinionated reflection and generous regret to make the narrative useful in its
scope to the generations who are and will be new to this Faith as well as
those who have imbibed its teachings for many a year. Still, I have only
just sketched the story in 2600 words and the associated genre accretions.
I’m gradually putting in the full story of my developing response to this
Faith in these closing years of the first century of its Formative Age. But,
however this work is written when all is said and done and I’m gathering
rose-buds as I might in the hereafter, it will not be a stand-alone masterpiece.
it’s far too long for those who come upon it. Frankly, I don’t think many
will even get past these several prefaces. But perhaps I am too modest.
The Bahá'í community has been colonizing the earth, arguably, since 1894,
arguably again since 1919 and without doubt since 1937. Many of the 200
odd countries and territories have long been sufficiently in flower to spread
their spiritual pollen on the pioneering-wind. There were always the loyal
and dutiful, the sacrificial and the escapists, the theatrical types and the
artistic, and then, after World War II in 1946, 1953 and 1963, came a
16

succession of Plans that spiritually conquered the planet, little did anyone
know. Quite apart from the incredible letters of Shoghi Effendi, now
ensconsed in a series, indeed a shelf, of books that it would take a long
paragraph simply to enumerate and quite apart from the architectural
splendour that was popping up in rare sites all over the planet, the Bahá'í
Faith had, by the time my pioneering life began in 1962, discovered “a most
wonderful and thrilling motion,” that in the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was
“permeating all parts of the world.”6
This autobiography is but one part of
that grand motion, one part of that immense permeation.
PREFACE TO THE SIXTH EDITION
On 19 January 1984 in the middle of the oppressive heat of that region’s
summer. I had just received a copy of my maternal grandfather’s
autobiography from a cousin in Canada. This autobiography was not the
record of his entire life, just the part from his birth in England in 1872 to his
marriage in 1901 in Hamilton Canada. I had browsed through but not read
this one-hundred thousand word 400 page double-spaced narrative written
“about 1921-1923,” by an autodidact, a self-educated man, when he was
fifty years of age. As my grandfather indicated in 1953 when he wrote a
6
In God Passes By, Wilmette, 1957, p.351.
17

brief preface to that work while living in Burlington Ontario five years
before his death, it was his hope that his story would “arouse interest.” As I
revise this preface to the sixth edition of my autobiography or, more
properly, this epic literary work, on 1 August 2008, my hope is that this
work will also arouse interest. I began writing this preface on the vernal
equinox here in Australia, 21 September 2007, and, hopefully, that date was
an auspicious beginning to this work for future readers.
I had no idea when I made that first diary entry in January 1984 that this
literary beginning would become by insensible and sensible degrees an epic
work containing: a five volume journal, a body of 6500 prose-poems; a
collection of 5000 letters, emails and posts on the internet; a second
collection of over 300 notebooks; a dozen unsuccessful attempts at a novel
and; finally, in this narrative of 2600 pages, a total oeuvre that seems
appropriate to refer to as an epic.
I remember reading how both Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon, two of
my favourite historians, acquired their initial conceptualization for what
became their life’s magnum opus, their epic: A Study of History in the case
of Toynbee and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the case of
18

Gibbon. Ten years ago in 1997 I began to think of writing an epic poem and
so fashioned some ten pages as a beginning. My total poetic output by
September 2000 I began to envisage in terms of an epic. The sheer size of
my epic work makes a comparison and contrast with the poetic opus of Ezra
Pound a useful one. Unlike the poet Ezra Pound’s epic poem Cantos which
had its embryo as a prospective work as early as 1904, but did not find any
concrete and published form until 1917, my poetry by 2000 I had come to
define as epic, firstly in retrospect as I gradually came to see my individual
poetic pieces as part of one immense epic opus; and secondly in prospect by
the inclusion as the years went by of all future prose-poetic efforts.
Such was the way I came increasingly to see my epic opus, sometimes in
subtle and sometimes in quite specific and overt degrees of understanding
and clarity from 1997 to 2000. This concept of my work as epic began, then,
in 1997, after seventeen years(1980-1997) of writing and recording my
poetic output and five years(1992-1997) of an intense poetic production. At
that point, in 1997, this epic covered a pioneering life of 35 years, a Baha’i
life of 38 years and an additional 5 years when my association with the
Baha’i Faith began while it was seen more as a Movement in the public eye
than a world religion. In December 1999 I forwarded my 38th booklet of
19

poetry to the Baha’i World Centre Library: one for each year of my
pioneering venture, 1962-1999. I entitled that booklet Epic. I continued to
send my poetry to the Baha’i World Centre Library until 30 December 2000.
Part of some desire for a connective tissue pervaded the poetry and prose of
this international pioneer transforming, in the process, the animate and
inanimate features of my distant and changing pioneer posts into a kindred
space whose affective kernel or centre was Mt. Carmel, the Hill of God, the
Terraces and the Arc which had just been completed.
This lengthening work evinces a pride, indeed, a veneration for the historical
and cultural past of this new Faith. Part of my confidence and hope for the
future derives from this past. There is a practical use to the local association
I give expression to in this work. It as a means of putting the youth and the
adults in this new Cause in touch with the great citizens and noble deeds of
the past, inspiring them with a direct personal interest in their heritage.
Along the way, I hope I am helping to create memorials and monuments
with an international ethos, with a resolution that is indispensable in
performing the duties of a type of global citizen of the future. I trust this
work serves, too, as a dedication, a natural piety, by which the present
becomes spiritually linked with the past. This last point is, of course, an
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extension into the sphere of nationhood of Wordsworth’s near proverbial
expression of desire for continuity in his own life— "The Child is father of
the Man; / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural
piety" (1: 226). If this new Cause is to grow and mature in an integrated,
organic, and humanistic manner, it must affirm the continuity between the
present, the past, and the future. Countries that eschew militarism and
imperialism need to venerate their cultural and national achievements if they
are to maintain and foster the identity and independence of their citizens and
with this an international spirit must inevitably sink deep into the recesses of
the human heart and mind—for it is a question of survival.
But it is the future that I love like a mistress, as W.B. Yeats says was the
feeling that the poet William Blake had for times that had not yet come,
which mixed their breath with his breath and shook their hair about him.
The Baha’i Faith inspires a vision of the future that enkindles the
imagination. This imagination German mystic and theologian Jacob
Boehme said was the first emanation of the divinity. Blake cried out for a
mythology and created his own.7
I do not have to do this since I have been
7
W.B. Yeats, op.cit., p.114.
21

provided with one within the metaphorical nature of Baha’i history, although
I must interpret this mythology, this history, and give it a personal context.
As I say I had begun to see all of my poetry somewhat like Pound’s Cantos
which draws on a massive body of print or Analects, a word which means
literary gleanings. The Cantos, the longest poem in modern history, over
eight hundred pages and, in its current and published form, written from
1922 to 1962, is a great mass of literary gleanings. So is this true of the great
mass of my poetry. The conceptualization of my poetry as epic, though,
came long after its beginnings, beginnings as far back as 1980 or possibly
1962 at the very start of my pioneering life. The view, the concept of my
work as epic began, as I say above, as a partly retrospective exercise and
partly a prospective one. The epic journey that was and is at the base of my
poetic opus is not only a personal one of forty-five years in the realms of
belief, it is also the journey of this new System, the World Order of
Baha’u’llah which had its origins as far back as the 1840s and, if one
includes the two precursors to this System, as far back as the middle of the
eighteenth century when many of the revolutions and forces that are at the
beginning of modern history find their origin: the American and French
22

revolutions, the industrial and agricultural revolutions and the revolution in
the arts and sciences.
Generally, the goal or aim of this work and the way my narrative
imagination is engaged in this epic is to attempt to connect this long and
complex history to my own life and the lives of my contemporaries, as far as
possible. I have sought and found a narrative voice that contains uncertainty,
ambiguity and incompleteness among shifting fields of reference mixed with
certainties of heart and spirit. Since this poetry is inspired by so much that is,
and has been, part of the human condition, this epic it could be said has at its
centre Life Itself and the most natural and universal of human activities, the
act of creating narratives. When we die all that remains is our story. I have
called this poetic work an epic because it deals with events, as all epics do,
that are or will be significant to the entire society. It contains what Charles
Handy, philosopher, business man and writer, calls the golden seed: a belief
that what I am doing is important, probably unique, to the history and
development of this System. This poetry, this epic, has to do with heroism
and deeds in battle of contemporary and historical significance &
manifestation. My work and my life, the belief System I have been
associated with for over half a century, involves a great journey, not only my
23

own across two continents, but that of this Cause I have been identified with
as it has expanded across the planet in my lifetime, in the second century of
Baha’i history.
The epic convention of the active intervention of God and holy souls from
another world; and the convention of an epic tale, told in verse, a verse that
is not a frill or an ornament, but is essential to the story, is found here. I
think there is an amplitude in this poetry that simple information lacks; there
is also an engine of action that is found in the inner life as much, if not more,
than in the external story. In some ways, this is the most significant aspect of
my work, at least from my point of view. Indeed, if I am to make my mark at
this crucial point of history, it will be largely in the form of this epic literary
work which tells of forty-six years of pioneering:1962-2008. But more
importantly, the part I play, the mark I leave, is as an individual thread in the
warp and weft that is the fabric and texture of the Baha’i community in its
role as a society-building power. Indeed, the World Order lying enshrined in
the teachings of Baha’u’llah that is “slowly and imperceptibly rising amid
the welter and chaos of present-day civilization,” is becoming an
increasingly familiar participant in the life of society and this epic is but one
of the multitude of manifestations of that participation. My own life, my
24

own epic, within this larger Baha’i epic, had its embryonic phase in the first
stage of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Divine Plan, 1937-1944, the first of three phases
leading to the election of the Universal House of Justice in 1963 as the last
year of my teen age life was about to begin and as, most importantly, the
fulfilment of the prophecy of Daniel regarding “that blissful consummation”
when “the Divine Light shall flood the world from the East to the West.”
In the Greek tradition the Goddess of Epic Poetry was Calliope, one of the
nine sisters of the Muses. Calliope and her sister Muses, not a part of
popular culture and slipping into some degree of obscurity among many of
the multitude of cultural elites in our global world, were seen traditionally, at
least in the west and among its cultural literati, as a source of artistic and
creative inspiration. Calliope was the mother of Orpheus who was known to
have a keen understanding of both music and poetry. We know little about
Calliope, as we know little about the inspiration of the Muses, at least in the
Greek tradition. In the young and developing artistic tradition and its many
sources of creative expression among adherents of the Baha’i Faith, on the
other hand, although gods and goddesses play no role, holy souls “who have
remained faithful unto the covenant of God” can be a leaven that leavens
“the world of being” and furnishes “the power through which the arts and
25

wonders of the world are made manifest.” In addition, among a host of other
inspirational sources, the simple expression ‘Ya’Baha’ul’Abha’ brings “the
Supreme Concourse to the door of life” and “opens the heavens of
mysteries, colours and riddles of life.” Much more could be said about
inspiration from a Baha’i perspective, but this is sufficient for now in this
brief description of the origins and purpose of this my poetic oeuvre.
Mary Gibson emphasizes in her study of Ezra Pound’s epic entitled Epic
Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians that one question was at the
centre of The Cantos. It was the "question of how beauty and power, passion
and order can cohere." This question was one of many that concerned Pound
in the same years that Bahai Administration, the precursor of a future World
Order, was coming to assume its earliest form in the last years of the second
decade of the 20th century and the early years of the third, a form that was
slowly coming to manifest those qualities Pound strove in vain to find in a
modern politico-philosophy. The wider world did not yet see these qualities
in the as yet early phases of the development of this new System. But in my
mind and heart, and certainly in my poetry, I found these qualities and gave
them expression. I do not address an unusually cultivated class as Pound did
leaving most readers feeling they were faced with a terminus of incoherent
26

arrogance; nor is my work a game as Pound’s Cantos appeared to be to
many readers with its absence of direction, but like Pound my work was that
of a voyageur who was not sure where his work would end up. My work has
been, like Pound’s, thrown up on a shore that I certainly had not planned to
visit. Unlike Pound I do not yet have many enthusiasts or detractors of my
work. And I may never have. Unlike Pound, my work, my epic, does not
possess a disordered, indeed, chaotic structure and is not filled with
unfathomable historical allusions; nor do I see my work as dull and verbose,
although others may. If Pound’s was a “plotless epic with flux” mine has
both plot and flux, but the accretion of detail and the piling up of memory on
memory may, in the end, lose most readers. For now, I must live with this
possibility.
There is no Christian myth to guide the reader through Pound’s epic, as there
was through Dante’s Commedia six centuries before. Pound’s Cantos tell the
story of the education of Ezra Pound as my epic tells the story of my
education. In my case there is a guide, the Baha’i metaphorical interpretation
of physical reality or, to put it simply, the Baha’i myth. At the heart, the
centre, of my own epic, then, is a sense of visionary certitude, derived from
my belief in this embryonic World Order of Baha’u’llah, that a cultural and
27

political coherence will increase in the coming decades and centuries around
the sinews of this efflorescing Order. My work is serious but not solemn
and, like Eliot, I am not sure of the permanent value of what I have written.
As Eliot put it: “I may have wasted my time and messed up my life for
nothing.” No man knoweth what his own end shall be, nor what the end of
his writing shall be either, I hasten to add.
The poet Wallace Stevens’ expressed his sense of the epic “as a poem of the
mind in the act of finding what will suffice. ” What Stevens says here
certainly gives expression to what is involved in this process, this sense of
epic, for me. I am involved in the act of creating a prose-poem of the mind
and trying to find out as I go along “what will suffice” to express what is in
my mind and my heart, what is part and parcel of my beliefs and what
occupies the knowledge base of the Baha’i Faith. This process is, without
doubt, at the centre of this conceptual, this epistemological, this ontological,
experiment of mine. This epic is an experimental vehicle containing open-
ended autobiographical sequences. It is a sometimes softly, indirectly
didactic, sometimes not-so-softly and quite directly didactic, intellectual
exploration with lines developing with apparent spontaneity and going in
many directions. The overall shape of this work was in no way
28

predetermined. In many respects, both my long poem, the thousands of
shorter poems and, indeed, all my writing is purely amateur and speculative
philosophy, literary playfulness and autobiographical description that I try to
integrate into Baha’i and secular history in a great many ways.
I feel I can make the claim that this work belongs to Australian history, at
least part of it and I hope that the words of Mark Twain can apply to my
work. “Australian history,” Twain wrote, “is almost always picturesque;
indeed, it is also so curious and strange, that it is itself the chief novelty the
country has to offer and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third
place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of
a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and
adventures, the incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but
they are all true, they all happened.”8
I don’t like to see this work of mine
associated with lies, but if there are any lies here perhaps if they are
beautiful ones I suppose that’s an improvement over all the ugly ones I’ve
heard in my life.
I attempt as I go along to affirm a wholeness within this epic design, a
8
Mark Twain, More Tramps Abroad, London, 1897.
29

design which I like to see and refer to as a noetic integrator: a conceptual
construction which serves to interpret large fields of reality and to transform
experience and knowledge into attitude and belief. I have slowly developed
this construction, this design, this tool and it is a product of decades of
extensive and intensive effort to articulate a conceptual construction to deal
with the long, complex and fragmented world in which I have lived my life
and where a tempest seems to have been blowing across its several
continents and its billions of inhabitants with an incredible force for decades,
for over a century. I would hope that this construction, this epic design, will
be of use to others. I would like to think that it will help others translate their
potentiality into actuality--a process that Alfred North Whitehead called
concrescence. But I have no idea. (See: D. Jordan and D. Streets, "The Anisa
Model," Young Children, vol.28, No.5, June 1973.)
I trust, too, that this epic work is not only a sanctimonious, openly pious,
exploration of literary, practical and life-narrative themes but simultaneously
a self-questioning of these themes and forms, actions and motivations. What
I write should not be seen as fixed and final, but a lifelong attempt to polish
and not pontificate, to guard against blind and idle imitation as well as
against narrowness, rigidity and intolerance--tendencies toward
fundamentalist habits of mind--in my own spiritual path.
30

Pound was intent on developing an “ideal polity of the mind”. This polity
flooded his consciousness and suggested a menacing fluidity, an
indiscriminate massiveness of the crowd. The polity that is imbeded in my
own epic does not suggest the crowd, probably because the polity I have
been working with over my lifetime has been one that has grown so slowly
and the groups I have worked in and with have been small. At the same time
I have become more and more impressed, as my experience of the Bahai
polity has become more seasoned, more mature, with what is for me "an
ideal polity." It has come to "flood my consciousness" over the years and I
could expatiate on its System and how it deals with the essential weaknesses
of politics pointed out so long ago by Plato and Aristotle and which continue
to this day. But that is not the purpose of this memoir.
This vision and this Movement, my role and my contribution, though, has
not been so much to give people answers but, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani
writes, to help pose, to stimulate the asking of, the right questions. People
seem so very skeptical of answers and so playing the devil's advocate, so to
speak, has seemed to me to have more mileage in the process of dialogue.
(The Promoter of the Faith or Devil's Advocate was a position established in
31

the Roman Catholic Church in 1587 to argue against the canonization of a
candidate) I have dealt with my most rooted assumptions and questioned my
most secret and instinctive self and many of the assumptions of my secular
society. In the process, I hope this exercise has led to an openness of mind, a
humility of response that finds resolutions as much or more than solutions
and that it carries the seeds of other questions. There is an interdependence
of diverse points of view rather than some total vision here. There is, too,
what Nakhjavani calls, "a Bahai aesthetic" which is a form of seeing that
enables us to use our creative endeavours to reflect the motions in the heart,
motions of search, striving, desire, devotion and love.
My style, my prose-poetic design, though, is like Pound’s insofar as I use
juxtaposition as a way to locate and enhance meanings. Like Pound, I stress
continuity in history, the cultural and the personal. At the heart of epic
poetry for Pound was “the historical.” It was part of the reclaiming job that
Modernist poets saw as their task, to regain ground from the novelists; my
reclaiming job is to tell of the history of the epochs I have lived through
from a personal perspective, from the perspective of the multitude of traces
both I and my coreligionists have left behind. In some ways these events
don’t need reclaiming for the major and minor events of our time both
32

within and without the Baha’i community are massively documented in
more detail than ever before in history. Perhaps, though, in the same way
that Pound’s work was, as Alan Ginsberg once put it, “the first articulate
record and graph of the mind and emotions over a continuous fifty year
period,” my epic may provide a similar record and graph. But unlike Pound I
see new and revolutionary change in both the historical process, in my own
world and in the future with a distant vision of the oneness of humanity
growing in the womb of this travailing age. I see humankind on a spiritual
journey, the stages of which are marked by the advent of the Manifestations
of God.
Those who are quite familiar with the poem Leaves of Grass may recall that
Walt Whitman’s poetic work often merges both himself and his poetry with
the reader. In the same way that Pound’s work provides a useful comparison
and contrast point for me in describing and analysing my epic, so is this true
of Walt Whitman’s poem. His poem expresses his theory of democracy. His
poem is the embodiment of the idea that a single unique protagonist can
represent a whole epoch. This protagonist can be looked at in two ways.
There is his civic, public, side and his private, intimate side. While I feel it
would be presumptuous of me to claim, or even attempt, to represent an
33

entire epoch or age, this concept of a private/public dichotomy is a useful
one, a handy underlying feature or idea at the base of this epic poem. I also
like to think that, as I have indicated above, this experience, this poetry, this
epic work, is part and parcel of the experience of many of my coreligionists
around the world even though my work has an obvious focus on my own
experience. Paradoxically, it is the personal which makes the common
insofar as it recognizes the existence of the many in the one. In my own joy
or despair, I am brought to that which others have also experienced.
In my poetic opus, my epic, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, I like to think,
that with Whitman, the reader can sense a merging of reader and writer. But
I like to think, too, that readers can also sense in my epic a political
philosophy, a sociology, a psychology, a global citizen--something we have
all become. There is in my poetry a public and a private man reacting to the
burgeoning planetization of humankind, the knowledge explosion and the
tempest that has been history’s experience, at least as far back as the 1840s,
if not the days of Shaykh Ahmad after he left his homeland in the decade
before those halcyon, if bloody, years of the French Revolution.
But there is much more than verse-making here. I have no hesitation in
34

making what Donald Kuspit calls identitarian claims for my poetry. My
writing, my poetry, contains within in, page after page, an expression of, an
identity with, what has been and is the ruling passion of my life: the Baha’i
Faith, its history and teachings. They seem to have wrapped and filled my
being over my pioneering life over these last 45 years. Indeed, I have seen
myself with an increasing consciousness, as a part, one of the multitude of
lights in what ‘Abdu’l-Baha called a “heavenly illumination” which would
flow to all the peoples of the world from the North American Baha’i
community and which would, as Shoghi Effendi expressed it “adorn the
pages of history.” My story is part of that larger story, the first stirrings of a
spiritual revolution, which at the local level has often, has usually, indeed,
just about always, seemed unobtrusive and uneventful, at least where I have
lived and pioneered.
There is a narrative imagination, too, that is at the base of this epic poetry.
As far as possible I have tried to make this narrative honest, true, accurate,
realistic, informed, intelligible, knowledgeable, part of a new collective
story, a new shared reality, part of the axis of the oneness of humanity that is
part of the central ethos of the Baha’i community. As I develop my story
through the grid of narrative and poetry, of letters and essays, of notebooks
35

and photographs, I tell my story the way I see it, through my own eyes and
my own knowledge, as Baha’u’llah exhorted me in Hidden Words, but with
the help of many others. I leave behind me traces, things in your present,
dear reader, which stand for now absent things, things from the past, from a
turning point in history, one of history’s great climacterics. The phenomenon
of the trace is clearly akin to the inscription of lived time, my time and that
of my generation, upon astronomical time from which calendar time comes.
History is “knowledge by traces”, as F. Simiand puts it. And so, I bequeath
traces: mine, those of many others I have known, those of a particular time
in history.
In the years since this sense of my total oeuvre as epic was first formulated,
that is since the period 1997 to 2000, I have been working on the 2nd to 6th
editions of my prose narrative Pioneering Over Four Epochs. In these last
eight years, September 2000 to August 2008, this narrative has come to
assume its own epic proportions. It is now 2600 pages in length and
occupies five volumes. It is one of the many extensions, one of the many
facets, parts and parcels, of the epic that I have described above and which
had its initial formulation form from September 1997 to September 2000.
After a dozen years, then, from 1997 to 2009, my epic has extended my
36

world of prose memoir, of narrative autobiography, of meditation. I also
completed in that same period a 400 page study of the poetry of Roger
White which was placed on the Juxta Publications website in October 2003.
It was entitled: The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World
Literature: The Poetry of Roger White. The first edition of my website in
1997, also entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs, became a second edition
on May 21st 2001 two days before the official opening of The Terraces on
Mt.Carmel on 23 May 2001. My website, then, is now ten years old. This
website contains some 3000 pages and is, for me, an integral part of this
epic.
There are so many passions, thoughts, indeed so much of one’s inner life
that cannot find expression in normal everyday existence. Much of my
poetry and prose, perhaps my entire epic-opus is a result of this reality, at
least in part; my literary output is also a search for words to describe the
experience, my experience, of our age, my age. This is part of what might be
called the psycho-biological basis of my work. My poetry and prose allows
me to release surplus, excess, energy and an abundance of thought and
desire which I am unable to assimilate and give expression to in my
everydayness and its quotidian features. This entire work is an expression of
37

thoughts, desires, passions, beliefs and attitudes which I am unable to find a
place for amidst the ordinary. This literary epic adorns the ordinary; it
enriches my everyday experience, as if from a distance. I have come to see
and feel my literary efforts as if they were a breeze en passant over my
multifaceted religious faith, over my daily life. I do not write to convince or
proselytise, but as a form of affirmation of all that has meaning and
significance in life, my life and, by implication and since all humans share
so much in common, Everyman's. I write of that foul rag and bone shop, as
the poet W.B. Yeats called the heart, and of that golden seam of joy in life,
of frailty and strength and of the abyss of mental anguish and a heart
exulting unaggrieved. These aspects of my writing are all part of that trace I
alluded to above.
An additional part of this epic is an epistolary narrative written over fifty
years, 1957/8 to 2007/8. This epistolary work is driven by this same belief
system acquired, refined and thought about over a lifetime, a belief system
which finds a core of facticity and a periphery of interpretation, imagination,
intuition, sensory activity and an everyday analysis of its history and
teachings in the context of these letters. The inclusion of this collection of
letters and more recently emails and internet posts in its many sub-categories
38

is part of my effort to compensate for the tendency of my fellow Baha’is
throughout the history of this Faith not to leave an account of their lives,
their times, their experiences, as Moojan Momen has made so clear in his
The Babi-Baha’i Religions: 1844-1944.
I did not start out with this motivation, nor did I think of my epistolary work
as I went along as a sort of compensation for the strong tendency of my
fellow believers not to record their experiences in letters but, after half a
century of this form of collected communications, I realized that they
offered an expression of my times and of the Bahai community during these
epochs that may be of use to future historians, biographers and a variety of
other social analysts. This view I have come to gradually in a retrospective
sense. This epistolary narrative is yet one more attempt, along with the other
several genres by this writer, to provide a prose-poetry mix of sensory and
intellectual impressions to try to capture the texture of a life, however
ineffably rich and temporarily fleeting, in one massive opus, one epic form,
with branches leading down such prolix avenues that its total form is most
probably only of use as an archive and not as something to be read by this
generation.
39

At the present time there are some 50 volumes of letters, emails and internet
posts under ten major divisions of my epistolary collection. The third
division of the ten contains my contacts with sites on the internet and there
are some 25 volumes of site contacts at: site homepages, forums, discussion
boards and blogs with their postings and replies, inter alia. This collection of
posts on the internet, posts largely made since 2001 and the official opening
of the Arc Project in May 2001, is now a part of this massive, this
burgeoning epic. I have written an introduction to this collection of letters,
inter alia--and that introduction is found at Baha’i Library Online>
Secondary Source Material> Personal Letters. The other genres of my
writing: the character sketches, the notebooks and the five volume journal,
the dozen attempts at a novel as well as the photographic embellishments
and memorabilia within this epic framework I leave for now without
comment--although readers will find ample comment at later points in this
epic-opus.
After more than a decade since the initial concept of this epic was first
initiated, I feel I have made a start to what may become an even longer epic
account as my life heads into late adulthood and old age and the Faith I have
40

been and am a part of soon heads into the second century of its Formative
Age. This aspect of epic, this perception of my oeuvre as epic, the
incorporation of all my writing into a collected unity in multiplicity, a
memoir in many genres, necessitates the initiation of this sixth edition. After
finalizing the fifth edition a year ago, an edition which went through more
drafts than I care to count, I bring out this third draft of the sixth edition of
this work.
16 August 2008
PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION
Life writing is now one of the most dynamic and rapidly developing fields
of international scholarship. Life writing is a catch-all term developed to
encompass several genres: autobiography, biography, memoir, journal,
diary, letter and other forms of self-construction. During my pioneering
life(1962-2007) and especially since I have been writing this memoir(1984-
2007) or what I sometimes refer to as my autobiography, this dynamism and
intensive development has been particularly prominent. The field also
includes these several genres of life-narrative I mentioned above within
41

various disciplines of the social sciences and humanities: history,
anthropology, sociology, politics, leadership and leisure studies, narrative
and literary studies, among others. I make use of all these genres in my
memoir, but only a small portion of any one of them are found in what has
become quite an extensive work.
Life writing addresses and gives voice to many social constituencies
including: women, men, indigenous groups, postcolonial societies, ethnic
groups and a wide variety of society’s sub-groups like new religious
movements. The sub-group I am concerned with in my work is the Baha’i
community. This community is part of my focus. Life writing, among its
many purposes, gives voice to those who suffer illness, oppression,
misfortune and tragedy. It is also an enabling structure, tool or mechanism
for those who wish to speak in a spirit of affirmation, inquiry, amazement or
celebration among other emotional and intellectual raison d’etres or modi
vivendi. My voice, my spirit, finds its enabling structure, its raison d’etre,
in this lengthy work.
In addition to its high, its increasing, academic profile, life writing generates
great interest among the general public. Works of biography and
42

autobiography sell in vast numbers; millions now work in or are part of large
organisations; millions follow the endless political and economic analyses
that are generated by the media daily. People in these groups are interested
in the literature by or about the leaders and the special people associated
with their group and organizational affiliations.
Many aficionados of entertainment and sport read books by or about the
celebrity figures in these fields. There is also a wide readership for books
that deal with life in various cultures and cultural groups; an increasing
number of people are interested in writing family histories or their own
autobiographies. And on and on goes the litany of enthusiasm and human
interests. Studies in biography and autobiography are burgeoning and
blossoming at universities all over the world. Each institution in their own
way aims to reflect and to facilitate their special component of the interests
referred to above and to make their schools nationally and internationally
recognised centres of excellence for integrated activities in the field. And
so, in writings my memoirs, I feel I have lots of company.
For those with a philosophical bent, studies in biography and autobiography
tap into some of the most profound and interesting intellectual issues of our
43

time and previous times; for example, are we the products of nature, nurture
or a combination of both? When we come to write the story of a life, be it
our own or someone else's, what kinds of plot structures does our culture
provide for telling the truest story we can? When do we need to invent our
own plot structures, and to what extent is this possible? How true can
stories about people be, and how do we know whether they are true or not?
Is it possible to be objective about one's own self, or about another human
being? What are the limits of confidentiality when putting a life on public
record? How, and in what ways, does the experience of having a self, of
being a person, differ from one culture to another? Is there any value in
leaving behind a voluminous anatomy of self, Such questions, and others
like them, reach into central issues of recent literary and cultural theory.
Issues pertaining to subjectivity, the social construction of the self, agency,
identity, the structures of the psyche, and so on, are all part of this vast
territory. The four books, in volumes one to five, that make up this memoir
or autobiography are part of this burgeoning, this dynamic, field.
The first hard copy of the fifth edition of this work was made in April 2004.
This hard copy, the first in the public domain, as far as I know, was made by
44

Bonnie J. Ellis, the Acquisitions Librarian, for the Baha’i World Centre
Library. The work then had 803 pages. The first paperback edition
available from a publisher was at the internet site of lulu.com in June 2006,
although it was not yet available to the public requiring, as it did, the review
by the NSA of the Baha’is of Australia Inc. Anyone wanting to obtain a
paperback copy will, I trust, soon be able to order it from lulu.com. This
fifth edition is the base from which additions, deletions and corrections are
still being made in the flexible world that publishing has become. The latest
changes to that edition were made on September 1st 2007 in my 64th year, a
little more than a quarter of the way into the Baha’i community’s new Five
Year Plan, 2006-2011.
This fifth edition now comes to some 2600 pages at the lulu.com site where
I have organized the material into four paperback volumes. An 1800 page,
abridged version of this fifth edition is available at eBookMall for $2.98. It
is my present intention to make, through my literary executors and after my
passing an additional chapter, a chapter that I prefer to keep ‘under wraps’
during my life on this mortal coil. Such a number of pages with over 2000
references is enough to turn off any but the most zealous readers. Readers of
editions on the internet or in one of several libraries may come across one or
45

part of previous editions. I frequently make changes to the content and I
have been placing editions or parts thereof on the internet and in libraries on
the internet for the last four years. The ease and flexibility of internet access
makes publishing on the world wide web a delight for a person like me
whose writing is not associated with remuneration, gaining the support and
backing of a publisher or paying someone to promote my work, a common
internet practice.
When I first completed this fifth edition in May 2004 I assumed it would be
the last edition; even with additions, deletions and alterations I thought I had
an edition which would see me out to the end of my days. This has proved
not to be the case; this edition will not be the final one of this
autobiographical work, a work which, as I indicate from time to time, may
more aptly be called a memoir in keeping with recent trends in terms and
nomenclature. A memoir is slightly different from an autobiography.
Traditionally, a memoir focuses on the "life and times" of the writer and
often a special part of a life, a special occasion or theme in a life; it is less
structured and less chronologically precise than an autobiography. An
autobiography has a narrower, more intimate focus on the memories,
feelings and emotions of the writer and, as the historical novelist Gore Vidal
46

suggests, is essentially history, with research and facts to back up the
statements. It tends to deal with the whole of life. Perhaps my work is
essentially a hybrid: both autobiography and memoir.
The Baha’i Academic Resources Library, the State Library of Tasmania and
the National Library of Canada among other internet sites, all have
variations of this edition. At this stage in the evolution of these volumes I
could benefit from the assistance of one, Rob Cowley, affectionately known
in publishing circles back in the seventies and early eighties --as “the Boston
slasher.” Guy Murchie regarded his work as “constructive and deeply
sensitive editing.”9
If he could amputate several hundred pages of my work
or even a thousand or more with minimal agony to my emotional equipment
I’m sure readers would be the beneficiaries. But alas, I think Bob is dead
and I have found an editor, a copy and proofreader who does not slash and
burn but leaves one's soul quite intact as he wades through my labyrinthine
chapters and pages, smooths it all out and excises undesirable elements.10
9
Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life, Houghton Mifflin Co.,
Bonston, 1978, p.viii.
10
In 2003 Bill Washington and in 2005, a ‘selene yue’ each did some
editing work on parts of the 3rd
and 5th
editions, respectively. Others, too,
sent me comments and feedback on parts of my manuscript. In November
2006 Bill began again his work on this memoir which had grown in the
meantime from eight hundred to twenty-five hundred pages and his work
was part of the formal system of review under the auspices of the National
47

John Kenneth Galbraith also had some helpful comments for writers like
myself. Galbraith’s first editor Henry Luce, the founder of Time Magazine,
was an ace at helping a writer avoid excess. Galbraith saw this capacity to be
succinct as a basic part of good writing. Galbraith also emphasized the
music of the words and the need to go through many drafts. I've always
admired Galbraith, a man who has only recently passed away. I’ve followed
his advice on the need to go through endless drafts. I’ve lost count, but I’m
not sure if, in the process, I have avoided excess. I can hear readers say:
“are you kidding?” In some ways I have found that the more drafts I do, the
more I had to say. And excess, is one of the qualities of my life, if I may
begin the confessional aspect of this work in a minor key.
And so I have Galbraith watching over my shoulder and his mentor, Henry
Luce, as well. Galbraith spent his last years in a nursing home before he
passed away in 2006 at the age of 98. Perhaps his spirit will live on in my
writing as an expression of my appreciation for his work, if nothing else.
Spontaneity did begin to come into my work at perhaps my sixth or seventh
draft of this fifth edition. Galbraith says that artificiality enters the text
Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Australia, Inc.
48

because of this. I think he is right; part of this artificiality is the same as that
which one senses in life itself. Galbraith also observed with considerable
accuracy, in discussing the role of a columnist, that such a man or woman is
obliged by the nature of their trade to find significance three times a week in
events of absolutely no consequence. I trust that the nature of my work here,
my memoir, will not result in my being obliged to find significance where
there is none. I’m not optimistic. Perhaps I should simply say “no
comment” and avoid the inevitable gassy emissions that are part of the world
of memoirs.
The capacity to entertain and be clever may not occupy such an important
place in the literary landscape in the centuries ahead. But this is hard to say.
There is something wrong it seems to me if millions have what the famous
American critic Gore Vidal says is part of the nightly experience of western
man: the pumping of laughing gas into lounge rooms. While this pumping
takes place millions, nay billions, now and over the recent four epochs about
which this account is written, starve, are malnourished and are traumatized
in a multitude of ways. The backdrop to this memoir is bewilderingly
complex. Still, I like to think readers will find here a song of intellectual
gladness and, if not a song, then at least a few brief melodies. I would also
49

like it if this work possessed an unwearying tribute to the muse of comedy
that instils the life and work of writers like, say, Clive James and many
another writer with the flare for humour. Alas, that talent is not mine to
place before readers, at least I am not conscious of its presence. Readers
will be lucky to get a modicum of laughs, as I’ve said, in the 2600 pages that
are here. I avoid humour, although not consciously, except for the
occasional piece of irony, play with words or gentle sarcasm that some call
the lowest form of wit.
Not making use of the lighter side of life, not laughing at oneself and others
in a country like Australia is perhaps an unwise policy. I do this a great
deal in my daily life but readers won’t find much to laugh at here.11
They
will find irony in mild amounts and even enough of that Benthamite
psychology of the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain to satisfy the
value-systems of readers, at least in Australia.12
I came to write this edition
of my autobiography, or memoirs as I say above, after living for more than
11
J.K. Galbraith in Harry Kreisler, Conversations With History:
Intellectual Journey--Challenging the Conventional Wisdom, University
of California Press, Berkeley, 1996,
12
Ronald Conway in The Great Australian Stupor, Sun Books, 1971,
p.17 points to this as “the highest value” and “the most vital of stratagems.”
This was how Conway saw it and expressed it in his book in 1971, the year I
arrived in Australia.
50

three decades in Australia. Part of this book unavoidably analyses the
things, the culture, around me.
In some ways I don’t mind the relative dearth of humour in this work
because, if Gore Vidal was right in a recent interview when he said with his
tongue planted firmly in his cheek where he often places it to the pleasure
and amusement, the annoyance and frustration of many a listener--and
laughing gas is, indeed, pumped into most homes every night as society
amuses itself to death,13
then, to avoid this paradox, this ambiguity, this
complexity at the heart of our world, my world, could be said to deny the
pain that is at the very heart of our existence in this age. To gainsay such
pain is, for some, a central crime of the bourgeois part of our society. For
me, the issues and offences, the challenges and struggles in relation to this
polarity-paradox, this conundrum, are exceedingly complex and I only deal
with them indirectly in this somewhat personal statement, however long it
may be.
13
Gore Vidal, “Interview with Bob Carr: Foreign Correspondent,” ABC
TV, 9:45-10:05 p.m., February 21st
, 2006 and Neil Postman, Amusing
Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,
Penguin, 1986.
51

If readers miss the lighter, the more humorous, touch here, they may also
miss the succinctness that they find in their local paper, a doco on TV or the
pervasive advertising medium that drenches us all in its brevity and
sometimes clever play on words and images. One thing this book is not is
succinct and I apologize to readers before they get going if, indeed, dear
readers, you get going at all with this work. I like to think, though, that
readers will find here two sorts of good narrative, the kind that moves by its
macroscopic energy and the kind that moves by its microscopic clarity. I
won’t promise this to readers here at the outset in this preface, but such is
my hope—springing eternally as hope does in the font of life.
I have grown fonder of life in late middle age and the early years of late
adulthood after years of having to suffer ‘the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune.’ As far as laughs are concerned, I have made much ‘ha
ha,’ as Voltaire called it, in the public domain in these last six decades,
especially since coming to Australia in 1971, 36 years ago. A goodly
portion of my life has been light and cheery and I’m confident, with Gore
Vidal, that it will stay this way, barring calamity or trauma, until my last
breath. I hope some readers will enjoy this narrative in all its excess, its
voluminosity and its serious note and tone. In one of John Steinbeck’s
52

letters he wrote: “Anyone who says he doesn’t like a pat on the back is either
untruthful or a fool.”14
Perhaps Steinbeck never met many of the Aussies
I’ve known who don’t like pats on their back or anywhere else, are
suspicious of those who give them and are certainly not fools. But I am,
alas, not a full-blood Aussie; I am at best a hybrid and I look forward to
many pats on the back. Australians have taught me not to be too optimistic,
too dependent, too attached to such pats; perhaps, though, it is simply life,
my experience and my own particular brand of skepticism that has taught me
this. Scratching backs—now that is a different question!
Gertrude Stein’s autobiography was published when she was 54 and it led to
the beginning of her popularity after more than 20 years of trying to publish
her writing, unsuccessfully. The reason for her autobiography’s success, she
once said, was that she made it so simple anyone could understand it.
Perhaps I should have done the same and removed anything obscure or
complex. Sadly, for those who like to ‘keep it simple stupid,’ as one of the
more popular lines in business English courses emphasizes, they may find
this work a bit of drudgery, far more that they want to be bothered to bite
off. Stein marketed her book in several important ways, ways to which I do
14
John Steinbeck, “Letter March 14th
1963,” in Steinbeck Studies ,
Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2004.
53

not resort. I have done my marketing of this book, just about entirely on the
Internet. I’ve marketed it as autobiography, as memoir and on the internet in
more ways than it is useful to recount here. Memoir has recently become a
fashionable term, just in the last decade, but I still tend more often to use the
term autobiography. I have used this term increasingly since I started this
writing in 1984.
I have left much out of this autobiography. That energetic President of the
USA, Theodore Roosvelt, said in the opening line of his autobiography,
“there are chapters of my autobiography which cannot now be written.”15
I,
too, have left much out. I would like to think that this book requires more
exposition than criticism, more reflection than editing. To put it more
precisely, I would like to think that as readers go through these pages in five
volumes they may apply their critical faculty as a connoisseur might do.
Readers would be advised to employ that critical faculty to discern what is
distinctive and enduring here. That is what I would like to think but I am
confident that, should this lengthy work attain any degree of popularity, it
will also receive its share of criticism. For many this work will not have
what is an essential of popular writing: that it be written entertainingly,
15
Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography, 1913.
54

breezily, and full of snappy phrases. I trust this work does possess, though,
that happy mix of copiousness and restraint, depth and lightness. When this
narrative breathes out, the world is many; when it breathes in again, the
world is one. When this narrative looks back in time it might be called
retrospective or narratology and when it looks forward futurology. Time
itself is only significant in terms of some relation; severed from relation it
becomes merely a semantic term or construct.
Whatever this work lacks in the way of potential popularity it does aim “to
unite the greatest possible number of people.”16
The oneness of humankind
is, for me, more than a theoretical notion. Albert Camus in his acceptance
speech for the Nobel Prize in 1957 said that uniting people was or should be
the aim of the writer. The Baha’i community has been engaged in this task
for more than a century and a half and as one of its members I have been
similarly engaged for a little more than half a century. I often use books
toward this goal. I see books as stories about human beings and, although
books are not life, it is life they are about. I got a surge of warmth and
delight putting this life together and, if I knew a monk, I would get him to
16
Albert Camus, Acceptance Speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature,
1957.
55

illuminate it.17
As George Bernard Shaw used to say, “my first aim is to
please myself and I can not always please my readers.” How true, how true.
I am confident that the standard of public discussion and literary criticism
will, as the decades and centuries go by, significantly, profoundly improve. I
confidently leave this work in the hands of posterity and the mysterious
dispensations of a watchful Providence. Perchance editors and readers will
be found down the roads of the future. The determining factors of fate and
freedom leave much to be decided on those roads. I like to think that this
autobiographical work may incline readers to re-examine their received
ideas on the autobiographical genre. The inflated reputations that are a
constant part of literary discourse in this field of literature need to be placed
in a more balanced perspective. I hope the approach I have taken to this
work is a step in the direction of that balance. May this work be used as a
sort of scaffolding--a burgeoning product in the public place--for readers to
work on the buildings that are their own lives. For I aspire, as the literary
critic Rebecca West once put it, to artistry not just a simple amiability. I’d
also like to intellectually challenge the reader not just provide a story to
17
Randall Jarrell makes this comment in “Hunger for Excellence,
Awakening Hunger In His Readers,” Helen Vendler, The New York Times,
January 4th
1970.
56

satisfy human curiosity. Our world in the West is drowning in stories and so
I try to provide something beyond a simple tale with its exciting twists and
turns, with its moral-to-the-story, its romance and surprises. I am a tireless
interpreter of themes, resources, books and people and I move from the
micro to the macro world faster than a speeding bullet. This shifting about is
not everybody’s cup-of-tea. Any pleasure this work provides, any influence
it achieves, I like to think derives from my peculiar artistry and my blend of
truth, studies of the humanities and social sciences and the combination of
the colloquial and the academic. There is nothing wrong with having such
lofty aims even if I do not achieve them. At the same time, I do not want to
make extravagant promises that, in the end, disappoint.
Readers will find here a conceptual density that can give both pleasure and
instruction. Those who enjoy philosophical argument may enjoy this book
more than those looking for a good yarn. In fact, I would advise those
looking for a captivating story to look elsewhere. This work may well repel
those who have a low tolerance for compact, complex ideas piled on one
after another, but whether the reader enjoys or dislikes this work, as a study
of the past and the present from a particular perspective, an autobiographical
one, it is my way of understanding my world. I like to see my work partly
57

the way Mark Twain did his. As he wrote in the introductory lines of his
autobiography: “my work has a form and method whereby the past and the
present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which
newly fire up the interest all along, like contact of flint with steel.” His
method, Twain went on, was a ‘systemless system’ that depended solely on
what interested him at the time of writing. Such, too, is my aim and method,
at least in part.18
It is easy I find to please myself when I write; the challenge
and the greatest pleasure lies in writing for the pleasure of others.
There is also a similarity in my writing to the works of various artists in the
last century: Picasso's revolutionary paintings, T.S. Eliot's verse with its
strange juxtapositions and odd perspectives, Igor Stravinsky’s music and its
clashing sounds. Even if one accepts these similarities, readers may find
that their natural reaction to this work is to want to throw it into the dustbin
of autobiographical history. I would anticipate this response given the
conventional, the natural, reaction to literary works of this type on the part
of many a student I have taught and got to know over the years. The desire
for an orderly impulse, a simple, an exciting, narrative sequence may
produce in such readers an initial discomfort due to their perception of what
18
Methodology, defined in its widest sense, is the means by which
knowledge is produced, accumulated and classified.
58

they see as my disorder and complexity and the sheer length of this work. In
this autobiography, as Henry James once put it, “nothing is my last word on
anything.”19
This disorder, this complexity, therefore, could continue for
such readers almost indefinitely, at least theoretically. " These were, as
Charles Dickens once said, "the best of times and the worst of times."20
In
my more than thirty years of teaching I came across hundreds of students
whom I know would take little to no delight in an analysis of these times in a
form like the one found here.
The most recent additions and alterations to this fifth edition were made on
September 1st
2007, the first day of spring in Australia. This was more than
four years and four months after the third edition of this work was sent to
Haifa and since that edition was first made public in eBook form at
eBookMall. It had been more than six years since the second edition of my
website was first made public with extensive autobiographical material on it.
A third edition of my website with a more user-friendly style and content is
planned. The designers refer to it as a new-look, twenty-first century edition,
but it has yet to see the light of day. I have had a website for ten years and
19
Henry James quoted by Susan Sontag, “Exhibit A With Julie Copeland,”
ABC Radio, 8:30-9:00 p.m., January 9th
2006.
20
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
59

what readers will find in my new site is a piece of writing, an autobiography,
in a much more readable format: such is my aim.
As I was making a recent addition to this autobiographical work, I came
across the words of Paul Johnson. "Balanced, well-adjusted, stable and
secure people,” he wrote, “do not, on the whole, make good writers or good
journalists. To illustrate the point, you have only to think of a few of those
who have been both good writers and good journalists: Swift, Samuel
Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens, Marx, Hemingway, Camus, Waugh
and Mark Twain--just to begin with."21
All these men had great personal
struggles, instabilities and battles that, arguably, helped to give their writing
the quality it possessed.
I’m not sure if I deserve to be ranked with this group of famous men,
however much I might like the idea. But neither am I sure if I could
describe myself as balanced, well-adjusted, stable and secure. I leave both
of these evaluations to my readers, most of whom will never know me
personally. Future biographers, too, should there ever be any, may well find
their path in writing a more detached view of my life one of perplexity. But
21
Paul Johnson, The Spectator, vol.24, No.3, 1990.
60

whatever their answers to the biographical enigmas that arise in their work,
it is my hope that they enjoy the process of trying to resolve the questions.
All they will have from me are words on paper, all that any writer leaves
behind. And, as I get older, there is coming to be so much of it, words,
paper and cyberspace that is.
This work is partly an account of my stabilities and instabilities, balances
and imbalances. As poet, writer and autobiographer, I have gone into
myself. The tale here is significantly an inner one. It is not a lonely region,
but a place where I often find fresh vigour and nourish my disposition to
repose. I also have a certain preoccupation with personal relationships,
intensity, bi-polar illness and movement from place to place, living as I have
in over two dozen towns from Baffin Island to Tasmania. It’s all part of my
particular expression of a process which Baha’is call pioneering and which
readers will get much exposure to in this narrative.
If the feedback I have received since the last edition to this work was
completed over three years ago is anything to go on, feedback for the most
part I received in relation to the first few pages of this work that I posted at a
number of internet writing sites, the average reader, as I say above, is
61

looking for a good story and is not prepared to wade through my analysis,
commentary and social scientific and literary-philosophical perspectives
gleaned from a variety of disciplines in the humanities. The feedback I have
received has praised my work to a high degree and it has also been critical of
everything from my style and content to my choice of vocabulary and my
very attitude. C’est la vie. “Such is life,” as Ned Kelly is reported to have
said on his way to the gallows in 1880 after a life of notoriety—and now
posthumous fame in Australia. I may, one day, write a more narrative,
story-oriented, book to entice readers with excitements, romance and
adventure. But, for now, I leave readers with this my life as I want to write
it. This book may be more epitaph than autobiography. If so, I will need a
whole cemetery of tombstones.
Ron Price
1 September 2007
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
After completing the third edition of this work on July 9th 2003, in
commemoration of the 153rd anniversary of the martyrdom of the Bab, I
62

continued to polish and to alter its basic structure and format. By the
celebration of the anniversary of the Birth of Baha'u'llah on November 12th
2003 it seemed timely to bring out this fourth edition, due to the many
changes I had made. The second edition had been essentially the same as
the first which I had completed ten years before in 1993, although I added a
series of appendices and notebooks which contained a substantial body of
resources that I could draw on that had become available on the
autobiographical process and on life-writing as well as the social sciences
and humanities on the various themes I wanted to pursue in my work. And I
did just that in writing the third edition.
In 2003 I wrote what was essentially a new autobiography of over 700 pages
with over 1300 footnotes. In this fourth edition of some 350,000 words I
have divided the text into five volumes that are now found online at several
journal/diary sites and some Baha’i sites.22
The Baha'i Academics Resource
Library located on the Internet at bahai-library.com has the fullest version.
It has taken me nearly twenty years to satisfy my autobiographical and
literary self after years of finding my autobiographical writing somewhat
dreary. I’d like to think I offer some enlightenment in these pages after 20
22
This autobiography is now located at Bahaindex.com highlighted this
autobiography at its news site on November 4th 2003-among other sites.
63

years of practice. But to attempt to enlighten anyone these days rings of a
certain pretentiousness and so I make this last comment with some caution.
I know that the artist Andy Warhol expressed the feelings of many people in
these days of electronic media when he said that ‘words are for nerds.’23
I
am not anticipating a great rush to this text.
Words are a poor resource for capturing complexity, as Leonardo da Vinci
once said, but they are our chief tools for such a capture. Beneath a
meticulous drawing of a dissected heart, on one of the many pages of his
dazzlingly precise anatomical drawings now in the royal collection at
Windsor, Leonardo wrote: "O writer! What words can you find to describe
the whole arrangement of the heart as perfectly as is done in this drawing?
My advice is not to trouble yourself with words unless you are speaking to
the blind."24
Of course a life is at least as complex as a heart and, in many
ways, the artist can not make a drawing of a life. Hence the value of words.
When a substantial, a sufficient, number of changes, additions and deletions
have been made to this edition I'll bring out a fifth edition. This exercise
23
Andy Warhol in a review of Andy Warhol, Wayne Koestenbaum,
Viking/Penguin Lives, NY, 2003.
24
Charles Nicholl, “ Breaking the Da Vinci Code,” The Guardian
Unlimited, November 27, 2004.
64

will depend, of course, on being granted sufficient years before "the fixed
hour" is upon me and it becomes my "turn to soar away into the invisible
realm."25
Readers will find here augmentations of the third edition rather
than revisions or corrections, in a very similar way to those that, Michel
Montaigne, the first essayist in the western intellectual tradition, said he did
with the editions of his Essays.26
Readers will also find in this work an
application of what I call the Reverse Iceberg Principle: 10% cold hard facts
on the surface and 90% analysis, interpretation, imagination.27
This edition represents a reconciliation of a certain zestful readiness of my
imaginative life with the challenging demands of the world of teaching,
parenting, marriage, Baha'i community activity and various social
responsibilities. It is a reconciliation that could not have occurred, though,
had the demands of job, community and family not been significantly cut
back to a minimum. The swings in my bi-polar cycle and the practical
25
'Abdu'l-Baha, Memorials November 27, 2004.of the Faithful, NSA of the
Baha'is of the United States, Wilmette, 1971, p.166.
26
Colin Burrow, "A Review of Michel de Montaigne: Accidental
Philosopher by Anne Hartle," Guardian Unlimited Books, Nov. 2003.
Montaigne wrote his essays between 1571 and 1592.
27
See Barbara Tuchman, “The Guns of August,” in Wikipedia, The Free
Encyclopedia, December 5th 2004, for an explanation of the Iceberg
Principle in which readers have to do the analysing and the author only
presents the facts.
65

demands of life enervated and depleted whatever energies I could have
poured into writing this autobiography for a long time. But after my
retirement from the teaching profession nearly five years ago and after the
final stage of the treatment of my bi-polar disorder during these same years,
a whole new energy system unfolded, productive tensions between self-
creation and communal participation, enabling me to put together these
seven hundred pages in the course of one year. I feel a little like that
towering literary giant of my time Doris Lessing who, in a recent interview,
said: “all kinds of circumstances have kept me pretty tightly circumscribed.
What I've done is write. I used to have a very great deal of energy, which,
alas, seems to have leaked away out of my toes somewhere.”28
I certainly
don’t have the energy I used to have when employed full-time, but God has
granted a good deal to emerge from between my toes.
Lessing also wrote in her 1994 work Under My Skin: Volume One of My
Autobiography--To 1949: “Telling the truth or not telling it, and how much,
is a lesser problem than the one of shifting perspectives, for you see your life
differently at different stages, like climbing a mountain while the landscape
changes with every turn in the path. Had I written this when I was thirty, it
28
Doris Lessing in “An Interview With Doris Lessing,” Bookforum, Spring
2002.
66

would have been a pretty combative document. In my forties, a wail of
despair and guilt: oh my God, how could I have done this or that? Now I
look back at that child, that girl, that young woman, with a much more
detached curiosity. Besides the landscape itself is a tricky thing. As you
start to write at once the question begins to insist: Why do you remember
this and not that? Why do you remember in every detail a whole week,
more, of a long ago year, but then complete dark, a blank? How do you
know that what you remember is more important than what you don't?”29
I hope I have not just built an autobiographical skyscraper to adorn the
literary skyline. I hope that at least a few readers will take an elevator up to
my many floors and check out some of the multitude of offices hidden away.
After travelling up and up at the press of a button, readers will find some
useful resources for their everyday lives, at least for the life of their minds.
As one of the 'writingest pioneers,' I hope I provide some pleasurable
moments to anyone brave enough to take on the 850 pages here. The kind of
pleasure I am talking about is the fine delight that follows the fluid matrix of
thought, as Gerard Manley Hopkins once put it.
29
Doris Lessing, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography: To
1949, Flamingon, London, 1994, p.12.
67

I was able at last to satisfy the autobiographical impulse. And the impulse
led me on many paths but only one direction--deeper.30
This book became,
in a way, the crystallization of a way I wanted to write.31
Out of the privacy
of my thought and writing I was able to make more and more and more of
my life;32
it was a 'more' that was on the social dimension of life as my life
had been hitherto for virtually all of my pioneering experience. My writing
became a 'coaxing of a context'33
out of my experience and the history of my
times and of my religion. An historical sense as a member of civilized
society is what memory is to individual identity and there are so many
catalysts to memory: places, people, ideas and the media among other
catalysts. But even as the quantity of memories accumulates with the years I
still have some of that feeling expressed by that eminent 20th
century
anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, namely, that “I never had, and still do
not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself
30
Bonnie Goldberg, Room to Write: Daily Invitations to a Writer's Life,
Putnam Books, 2004.
31
Alister Cooke expressed his radio braodcasts, beginning as they did early
in the first Seven Year Plan, this same way. See: ABC Radio National, April
4th, 2004, 8:00-8:30 am.
32
Cleanth Brooks, "W.B. Yates as a Literary Critic," The Discipline of
Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation and History, editor, P.
Demetz, et al., pp.17-41.
33
A description by a journalist of the accomplishment of Alister Cooke
over nearly 60 years. See: idem
68

as the place where something is going on, but there is no “I,” no “me.”34
Though I use these terms frequently in this autobiography there is certainly
an enigmatic aspect to the sense of self.
The result of the simple, the complex and the enigmatic is the edition you
read here completed several months before my sixtieth. I offer this edition
of my work in celebration of the birth of that Holy Tree35
near day-break 186
years ago this morning. I do not try to fix this autobiography into a single
frame; I do not try to write my own story with a sense of closure and
definitiveness. Nor do I write with a great emphasis on disclosure and
confession; I do not try to 'jazz-it-up', make it more than it is. I'm not
tempted to give it a glamour it does not possess but I do strive to find its
meaning, the meaning in what is already there. My story is based on
remembrance, memory and unavoidably, first-person reportage. There is so
much that, with the years, calls forth a flood of valuable reminiscences. I
have converted some of that which I have seen, thought, held, tasted and felt
into thought, language, memory. These memories of times past are not
pursued as a nostalgic end in themselves, although they are usually enjoyed,
34
Seth Huebner, “Virginia Woolf: O Thy Splendid Identity!” Janus Head,
Winter 2005.
35
Baha'u'llah refers to His birth using the words "this Holy Tree." See David
S. Ruhe, Robe of Light, George Ronald, Oxford, 1994, p.21.
69

but as an illumination of the present and a guide to the future.36
There is a
seductive power in autobiographical writing that enables writers of this
genre to manipulate, manage and revise their experience and, at the public
level, synthesize and analyse public opinion.37
This power has always
attracted writers. I’m not sure I like this idea but, in some ways, everything
written has a certain spin. “A book is a thing among things, a volume lost
among the volumes that populate the indifferent universe,” writes the
Argentinian poet, Borges, “until it meets its reader, the person destined for
its symbols. What then occurs is that singular emotion called beauty, that
lovely mystery which neither psychology nor criticism can describe.''38
I
would hope that at least some readers experience that thing called beauty
here in this autobiography.
There are an unlimited number of possible narratives that could be
constructed as reporter on my life. What readers have here could be called
36
See William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey (1798) and Matthew Arnold’s
The Terrace at Berne (1852), for similar experiences of other
autobiographical poets.
37
Helga Lénárt-Cheng, “Autobiography As Advertisement: Why Do
Gertrude Stein’s Sentences Get Under Our Skin?” New Literary History,
Vol.34, No.1, Winter 2003.
38
Andrew Roe, “Borges' Epiphanies on Everything From Kafka to Citizen
Kane,” A review of Jorge Luis Borges’, Selected Non-Fictions, editor Eliot
Weinberger in The San Francisco Chronicle, 5 September 1999.
70

an interpretation, adaptation, abridgement, a retelling, a basic story among
many possible basic stories.39
It is neither true nor false, but constructed.40
It
has meaning because, as the poet Czeslaw Milosz writes, “it changes into
memory.”41
The universal currency and assumed naturalness of narrative,
though, may well suppress its problematic dimensions such as: parsimony,
inclusion and suppression as shaping factors in the composition of
narratives.
There is some ordering of the incidences and intimacies of this specific,
individual life into a narrative coherence giving readers some idea of what it
was like to be me, some idea of what my inner, private, mental life was like.
This private life is for the most part illegible; we live it and fight it alone. I
have tried to make this inner life, as much as possible, as legible as possible.
The sense of self which has emerged in the process of writing this work is
two-fold. One is this private, mysterious, difficult to define self about whom
it seems impossible to boast about. This self is an enigma, a mysterious
who that I am, a transient entity, ceaselessly re-created for each and every
39
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,"
Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1980.
40
Steven V. Hunsaker, Autobiography and National Identity in the Americas,
Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1999, p. xvi.
41
Czeslaw Milosz in “The Memory of Czeslaw Milosz: 1911-2004,” Hilton
Kramer, The New Criterion, October 2004.
71

object with which the brain interacts. Along with this transient entity,
though, there is what seems like a second self, what one writer called an
autobiographical self.42
It is this self which gives this autobiography some
narrative flow; it is the self of everyday life, the surface existence. It is not
trivial but is really quite important in a different way than that more
enigmatic self.
The everyday self, the one which wrote this fourth edition, possesses a
memory which is the basis of thought, feeling, tradition, identity, and spirit.
This act, this struggle, to remember and not to forget is also the basis for the
achievement of a sense of continuity. Here in this continuity lies my
individual and cultural identity. George Orwell’s warning that an erasure of
the past is one of the conditions that allows a totalitarian régime to
manipulate the future is a warning that I take quite seriously. I possess the
freedom and the ability to remember; this freedom is intact and as a
custodian of my own, my society’s and my religion’s memory, I have the
ability and the responsibility to exercise one of the most formidable defenses
against the many forces that encourage amnesia and threaten the basis of my
personal and cultural awareness and identity.
42
Antonio Damasio quoted in: "The Autobiography of Consciousness
and the New Cognitive Existentialism," Janus Head, Vol. ? No.?.
72

If, in opening both my narrative self and my inner self to others, readers may
see ways to describe and give expression to their lives and in so doing be
open further to the immense richness of life's experience, that would give me
pleasure. For, as 'Abdu'l-Baha wrote in the opening pages of The Secret of
Divine Civilization, "there is no greater bliss, no more complete delight"43
than "an individual, looking within himself, should find that....he has
become the cause of peace and well-being, of happiness and advantage to his
fellow men."44
Time will tell, of course, how successful I have been in this
regard.
I make no claim, though, to my life being some apotheosis of the Baha'i
character as, say, Benjamin Franklin's autobiographical persona was of the
prevailing conception of the American character back in the eighteenth
century. Baha'i character and personality, it is my view, is simply too varied
to be said to receive an apotheosis or typification in someone's life. Franklin,
and many autobiographers since, have been interested in self-promotion and
in being an exemplar for the edification and moral improvement of their
43
'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970(1928),
p.3.
44
idem
73

community, exempla as they are known in the western religious traditions.
I have taken little interest in the former or the latter as I proceeded to write
this work. The Baha'i community has acquired many exempla in the last two
hundred years45
and only one true Exemplar. If this work plays some role,
however limited, in developing an "aristocracy of distinction," as Franklin's
did, and in contributing to "the power of understanding,"46
as this great
Cause goes on from strength to strength in the years ahead, I would welcome
such a development. To think that this work could play a part, however
small, in the advancement of civilization, may be yet another somewhat
pretentious thought, but it is a hope, an aspiration, consistent with the system
of Baha'i ideals and aims which has been part of my ethos, my philosophy of
life, for nearly half a century now.
And finally, like Franklin, I leave a great deal out of this autobiography, a
great deal about my times, my religion and myself. I make no apologies for
this any more than I make any apologies to particular individuals I have
45
If one defines Shaykh Ahmad's leaving his home in eastern Arabia in
1793 as a starting point for the story of this new religion and the completion
of the first edition of this autobiography as 1993, then there are two
centuries of religious experience to draw on for various kinds of exemplars,
heroes, saints and wondrous personages. I'm not so sure I deserve to be
included in this list of exemplars.
46
Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah, Wilmette, 1974, p.17.
74

known along the way. Conscious of the problem in autobiographical
literature of the "aggrandisement of the self," I stress the very ordinariness of
my life, my part of a larger, collective, community memory and the
coherence of my life around a host of themes which can never be considered
in isolation from the communities that shape and inform their values. It is
an ordinariness, though, that has taken place over so many locations in
towns and cities that the destruction of familiar and historied edifices, a
destruction that amounts to the creation of a memory hole for local people, a
memory hole into which psychic energies and entities are irretrievably
drawn, to the considerable impoverishment of what remains behind, has not
been a critical part of my experience. My life has been in so many ways one
that has had to deal with the shock of the new and the making of this
newness into a familiarity and home.
Literary memories are many in my life: from many of the passages in the
Baha’i writings like Baha’u’llah’s “from the sweet-scented streams” to
Shoghi Effendi’s “a tempest unprecedented in its magnitude” help this work
to chart its course among a host of visionary uses of memory. The Baha’i
vision of the future has been an important inspiration in my day to day life;
indeed, I would go so far as to say that this vision is much more than
75

inspiration. "Vision creates reality," as the once and long-time secretary of
the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States, Horace
Holley, once wrote. To put it in the words of that paleontologist, philosopher
and theologican, Teillard de Chardin, in the end it is the utopians who are
the realists. That idea may grate on the pessimists, cynics and skeptics
among us, a mass of humanity that fills every corner of our world. And who
knows, everyone makes assumptions about life, about history and the future.
Assumptions are like axioms in geometry, they are given, not really
proveable in any ultimate sense. We take these assumptions, wrap our
emotions around them and walk the walk. That has always been, at least
since my thirties, a definition of faith that I have drawn on in my work and
in my teaching. For everyone makes assumptions; everyone has faith in
something, some idea, concept, definition of history and meaning of life.
Most of life's experience has been left out, as Mark Twain informed us is an
inevitability, part of the nature of any autobiography. Perceptual gaps,
cognitive omissions, lacuna of many kinds, prevent an accurate or complete
account of reality. But, because we are seldom aware of the lacuna, because
the neural processes, the neurophysiological data underpinning
autobiographical memory, the cerebral representation of one’s past is
76

difficult to elucidate and difficult to tap, we tend to believe the cognations,
the cognations and the cogitations.
Clocking in at a burgeoning 850 pages, as I place these additional words, is
too much. If that is the case, some future editor can cut it back to a
manageable portion or publish it in several volumes. Readers may be
advised to read part rather than all of this text, if they read it at all.
Ron Price
November 12th 2003
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
Forty years ago this week the Baha'i community elected its first international
body, the Universal House of Justice. The timing for the completion of this
third edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs47
has been fortuitous since I
have dedicated this book to these Men of Aha, as the Baha'is sometimes call
47
The four epochs are the years 1944 to 2021 of the Formative Age, not to be
confused with the two epochs of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Divine Plan: 1937-1963
and 1963 to an as yet unspecified year.
77

this body at the apex of their administrative Order. The completion of the
third edition of this work, this autobiography, in the last few days,
coinciding as this completion does with the election of that international
governing body for the ninth time, has been encouraging. Over these last
two decades I have often been inclined to discontinue this whole exercise.
With the writing of this third edition a renewed hope has entered the picture.
After nearly twenty years of working on this autobiography, or narrative
non-fiction, as it might be called, I feel, at last, that it has a form worthy of
publication and so I have entered it on my website at
http://www.users.on.net/~ronprice/. Since the 1980s there has been a great
interest in autobiography among the many minoritarian constituencies, as
they are often called. The Baha’i community is but one of these many
constituencies. My work it seems is part of this new wave of personalised,
embodied narrative that foregrounds the particularity, as Anne Browser puts
it, of the everyday.48
Readers will also find elements of a grandnarrative
here. For I link the epic and monumentalising narratives of history and
science to the quotidian. There is no hierarchical opposition between the
48
Anne Brewster, “Writing Whiteness: The Personal Turn,” Australian
Humanities Review, Issue 35, June 2005.
78

everyday and the official discourses of public life. I try, as far as I am able,
to integrate the micro and the macro into one whole.
But readers who enjoy human interest stories and history and theoretically
seek to learn about distant and unknown regions in a non-fictional account
of an important period in history with geographical and historical
highlights--when they pick up this narrative what they will get is not history,
but myself telling my story. The everyday, it seems to me, is not reducible
to simply pure or raw data from which the larger discourses of life are
produced. I would argue that this here and now world and all its
mundanities, underlines, shapes and informs the modes of rationality, the
philosophies and ideologies, which are said to transcend it. Formal and
official discourses and institutions, in turn, inform and shape this everyday
life. My work seeks to deconstruct and integrate the conventional playing
out of the relationship between these two domains which, historically, have
been hierarchised, gendered and always in conflict, always contestatory.
Rather than being mutually exclusive, these heterogeneous zones inform
each other. Rather than being seen as redundant, trivial and empty, everyday
life is thought of here as a field in which 'macrostructural categories', such as
79

those of official and pedagogic discourses, 'are ongoingly translated into
manageable structures of sense at human scale.’49
I first read my grandfather's autobiography in 1983. It is a book written in
the first two years of the Formative Age, 1921-1923, by a man who had just
turned fifty years of age. The book was the account of the first twenty-nine
years of his life. This work of more than 100,000 words, by a formally
uneducated man, was an inspiration to me and my writing. And so I have
also dedicated this book to my grandfather, Alfred J. Cornfield.
I have now written perhaps more than 200,000 words about the first fifty-
eight years of my life, twice as many years as those in my grandfather's
autobiography. I see this edition as a working base, a mental precinct, for
an ongoing exercise in autobiography and autobiographical analysis and an
exercise, too, in integrating the multitude of insights from a lifetime of
experience of which reading in the social sciences and humanities has been
an important part. When enough changes to this third edition have been
made, a fourth edition will take its place some time in the years, or perhaps
49
I have drawn here on the ideas of John Frow, '”Never Draw to an Inside
Straight: On Everyday Knowledge”, in New Literary History, Vol. 33: pp.
623-37.
80

just months, ahead. Perhaps, too, like Edward Gibbon I'll complete six
editions before this earthly life is out. Gibbon's autobiography, of course,
became significant because of its association with his famous work The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The significance of this work, if indeed it comes to possess any significance
at all, will be due to my association with a Movement that claims to be the
emerging world religion on this planet. The world-wide development of the
Baha’i Order and the first stirrings of the coming World Order have seen and
will see a tremendous development in my lifetime. Although I see my life in
the context of these wider themes, I do not focus on these themes which are
dealt with in other places, other books, in much more detail. Another central
context for my life has been as a prelude to a prelude, to an eventual mass-
conversion of the peoples of the world to the Baha’i Faith. The process of
entry-by-troops is the prelude to that mass conversion and thus far, in most
of the places I have lived, entry-by-troops has been more like, as one clever-
editor once put it, entry-by-roos.50
And so my life pioneering over four
epochs is a part of that prelude to the prelude that is entry-by-troops.
50
The cover of the Australian Baha’i Bulletin in 1996(circa) had two
kangaroos at the edge of a group of trees with the caption ‘entry-by-roos.’
81

William Blake once said, "Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
That, to me--eternity that is--is a love worth pursuing. I completed a first
edition of this work ten years ago in May 1993. I dedicated it to the
Universal House of Justice on that occasion, as I do here in this edition. A
second edition contained additional sentences and paragraphs, alterations
and a wealth of quotations and essays on the subject of autobiography as
well as a dozen or so updates to take the story into this my fifty-ninth year of
life and my forty-first as a pioneer. I was trying in this second edition,
although I don’t feel I was in any way successful, to write the kind of
sentences Henry David Thoreau advocated: “Sentences which suggest far
more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not
merely report an old, but make a new, impression; sentences which suggest
as many things and are as durable as Roman aqueducts; to frame these, that
is the art of writing . . . .a style kinked and knotted up into something hard
and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without
digesting.”51
Well, it’s good to have a lofty aim. In the third edition I began,
or so it is my impression, to take the first steps toward achieving this goal-so
often impressions are all we have.
51
Henry David Thoreau in Annette M. Woodlief, “The Influence of
Theories of Rhetoric on Thoreau,” Thoreau Journal Quarterly, Vol. VII,
January 1975, pp.13-22.
82

“The formation of a style,” though, as the Canadian poet Archibald
Lampman once wrote, “is a most unconscious process. He who should set
about premeditatedly to form a style would end most certainly in forming
nothing but an affectation. But he who finds himself haunted persistently by
certain peculiar ideas, certain peculiar images, certain tones of sound, colour
and feeling and sets about expressing these simply in the manner most
outright and clear and satisfactory to himself, and continues to do so until his
hand attains ease and certainty will discover, or rather his readers will
discover that he has invented a style.”52
This style is also the result, or so it
seems to me, over several decades indeed my whole life of a certain
peculiarity of thought and of imagination which has been uppermost in my
mind and emotions as adolescence has been succeeded by the stages of
adulthood. This thought and this imagination has given birth to and formed
images that have at times insensibly absorbed my attention and at other
times obsessed me. An intensity of vision, a sustaining power of thought
and understanding and a capacity to feed my emotions, all aspects of this
obsession, on this long road, this long labour that is life, has developed quite
52
Archibald Lampman, "Poetic Interpretation," in Archibald Lampman:
Selected Prose, ed. Barrie Davies, The Tecumseh Press, Ottawa, 1975, p.
88.
83

unobtrusively and periodically quite surprised me with the years. This
complex mix of mysterious entities has given a tone to my literary creations
and worked itself out through the implements of my art. All of this has
resulted, too, in the formation of a style.
Finally, drawing on Lampman again, "The perfect poet, it may be said,
would have no set style. He would have a different one for everything he
should write, a manner exactly suited to the subject.2
Style is the result not
only of a distinctive selection of words and phrases to express thought or
feeling, but even of the manner in which the writer chooses to emphasize his
thoughts through punctuation.53
As I worked on the second edition I was often inclined to leave the account
there and break-off the writing. But something kept pulling me toward a
more extended, a deeper, treatment of my life and times in the context of my
religion. This third edition was written in the first four months of 2003.
Drawing on much of the resource material I had gathered on the subject of
autobiography in the previous ten years, I was finally able to tell my story in
a way that was satisfying, if far from perfect. I look forward to further
53
idem
84

developments to this autobiographical work in the months, the years and
perhaps even the decades ahead. If I live to be one hundred and I am in
possession of my faculties I could be working on further editions for another
four decades. Should I be granted such a long life in which to recount the
'tokens that tell of His glorious handiwork,' it will be interesting to see what
changes there will be, what will be added and what will be taken away, in
future editions. The significance of my efforts, what they ultimately will
reveal and have revealed, what those mysterious and unmerited graces will
uncover from behind the veil of silence, a veil that seems to ultimately cover
the lives of most people on this mortal coil, is an unknown quantity.
Providence has ordained for my training every atom in existence. Some of
the evidences of that training experience are here in this book.
In writing this third edition, I seem to have at last found a successful strategy
for writing something longer than a few pages, longer than an essay or a
poem, literary forms that somehow got fixed by my many years as a student
and lecturer in academic institutions and by my own inclination and need to
write short pieces for personal pleasure and/or practical necessity. If this
work possesses a slightly complex and involved style, perhaps it is because I
have found life to be complex and involved. I have learned, at last, that
85

revising can be a pleasure and that even the clumsiest initial draft can take
on a life of its own in subsequent drafts. A revision, for me, seems to
function in a multitude of ways. It yields simplification; it achieves greater
depth and complexity; it results in a penetration, a digging beneath
appearances to something I see as a greater reality or truth. Something quite
new is produced as well as a refining of the old. One test of whether I have
found that successful strategy, whether I have written a memorable
autobiography, lies in the writer's ability to deal with painful experience, and
to balance such moments of pain in intense living with the mundane,
unexceptional progress of daily events. Only readers will be able to assess if
I have, indeed, achieved this balance.
I have discovered too that spinning out ideas and experiences is not only
idiosyncratic but also something usefully connected with what others have
said. Each spinning seems to require its own web and the search for fixed
points of reference is part of the struggle for coherence, completeness and
the autobiographer’s attempt to penetrate, to dig, beneath those appearances
to something closer to reality. As a result, I like to think that each sentence
of Pioneering Over Four Epochs is a "flower in a crannied wall," as a poet
86

once wrote.54
The crannied wall of autobiography has been a popular one in
the last several centuries, since the Reformation in the sixteenth century, but
especially in the last four decades, in the years of this pioneering venture.
Many thousands of people in my lifetime have turned to this genre as a
means of self-expression and cultural and social reflection.55
I would not be
the first person to see in my own life a mirror of the times. Part of my aim is,
not so much to convince by force of argument, by means of discussion, by
presenting a variety of ideas for the sake of argument, but rather to introduce
a personality, a character, the person, the character, who would have such
thoughts-namely myself. I do this by turning ideas in the social sciences
and humanities to the service of my life. I aim to be, to become, the “poet of
my life.” This could be seen as the animating thought behind this book.
It is said of the famous artist Andy Warhol that he had one idea in his life
and he just recycled it again and again. I’m not sure how true that idea is
because I am not a serious student of this particular artist. But I often feel I
have had one idea all my life, an idea that I must admit to be an obsession
54
Published in Action, Knowledge, and Reality: Critical Studies in Honour
of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Hector-Neri Castañeda, Bobbs-Merrill Company,
Inc., Indianapolis, 1975.
55
Gillian Whitlock, "A Review of 'Shameful Autobiographies: Shame in
Contemporary Australian Autobiographies and Culture,'" Rosamund
Dalziell, Australian Humanities Review, 1998.
87

and that idea is the Baha’i Faith. I cycle and recycle it, twist it around in my
mind, it seems, endlessly. I feel slightly embarrassed to admit this fact of
my life in a culture, an age, a society(at least in the parts where I have lived),
that for the most part does not take religion seriously and when it does it is
in some form of disparagement. But an autobiography must contain some
frankness and I think it important to put some of my cards on the table early
in the piece.
The famous work The Education of Henry Adams, a text that appears and
reappears periodically in the literature of our age, is an autobiographical
work noted for its frankness, its elegance and its view of a man who saw his
own life as the microcosm of his age. My work is far less frank, far less
splenetic, far less elegant and hardly representative of my age. Like
Shakespeare, though, I feel I am holding up a faithful mirror of the manners
and life of my society thus reflecting reality through my writing. I’m
informed that a meaning of the word reflect, obsolete by 1677, was to ‘turn
back.’ I do a good deal of that here, however obsolete that meaning may be.
Holding up a mirror to oneself also has another meaning in our visual
iconography—vanity or pride, Narcissus admiring his own beauty by means
of reflection. The demon of vanity, Nobel prize winner Roger Martin du
88

Gard pointed out, is never completely silenced. It whispers its flattering
presumptions to us all. I am warned.
Adams often used exaggeration to make his case as do many a literary figure
and as most of us do in one way oranother in everyday life. Leo Tolstoi
wrote that Shakespeare’s characters are exaggerated and not realistic.56
Real
people would not have spoken the way they do in Shakespeare’s plays or
sonnets,Tolstoi emphasizes. And this is true of the language in my
narrative. As far as mirrors are concerned, in Shakespeare’s day they did not
faithfully replicate reality. The skill in making mirrors had some distance to
go in 1600. The words of St. Paul are also relevant here: “Now we see
through a glass darkly, but then face to face.” Human knowledge is always
partial and obscured. That is certainly true insofar as much of this
autobiography is concerned. Like the mirrors in Shakespeare’s time, the
mirror I hold up to life, society’s and mine, is far from free of distortion,
however honest and clear I strive to be. In addition, literary histories and
autobiographies have mirrors with a specific pattern of reception and usage
determined by the ideological bias, the epistemological limitations and the
specific concerns of their authors.
56
Carol Banks, “The Purpose of Playing: Further Reflections on the Mirror
Metaphor in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Signatures, Vol.2, Winter 2000.
89

Autobiography is a genre of literature that is arguably the most popular of all
genres in the Western tradition, at least since the Enlightenment. But books,
like civilizations and life itself, are fragile things and, however splendid,
they often come to mean little in the hearts and minds of a people. Like that
flower in a crannied wall, however beautiful and however strongly it may
cling to the crevice in the wall, in time it comes to flower no more with no
evidence at all of its existence. It is possible that the abyss of history, so
deep as it is, may bury this whole exercise, as it buries us. Writers must face
this possible reality, no matter how much hope they may entertain for their
works.
I came to see, as I wrote, that a dialectical use of experiential, historical,
religious and philosophical themes and positions is the most reliable way of
anchoring one's experience, one's thoughts and arguments and making them
more stable and complete. Of great benefit, too, in this the longest of my
pieces of writing, has been the many disciplines of the social sciences and
humanities and a continued dialogue and even controversial exchange with
contemporaries, a controversy that must be characterized by an etiquette of
expression and a judicious exercise of the written and spoken word. On
90

paper, as in life, the phenomenon of freedom of thought "calls for an acute
exercise of judgement."57
One must not say too much nor too little. One
must find one's own checks and balances, one's own insights into the
dynamics of expression. This edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs is
part of that search for these dynamics, these checks and balances and as
acute an exercise in judgement as is possible given the blooming and
buzzing confusion that so much of life represents to us as we travel this
often stony, tortuous and narrow road to what we believe or hope is,
ultimately, a glorious destiny. It is understandable how writers like Conrad
and Naipaul can see human destiny in terms of darkness, weeping and the
gnashing of teeth. If it were not for the political-religious ideas at the centre
of the Baha'i Faith with which I have sketched a framework of meaning over
the terra incognita of life for virtually all the years of this story, my life, I
would not be able to create in comfort. I might very well see life, as so
many writers do, as little more than a grotesque farce,58
as a petty pace that
creeps on from day to day.
57
The Universal House of Justice, Letter to the Baha'is of the United States
of American, December 29th, 1988.
58
For these views of Naipaul and Conrad see "Guardian Unlimited Books,"
Internet, March 22, 2004. See also Colin Wilson, The Strength to Dream,
Abacus Books, London, 1976, p.xxiv.
91

The shape within which these dynamics operate, the genre of autobiography,
is like water. It is a fluid form, with varied, blurred, multiple and contested
boundaries, with characteristics some analysts say that are more like drama
than fiction, containing constructed more than objective truth. So it is that
other analysts of autobiography see it as "the creation of a fiction."59
This is
an understandable conclusion if a writer tends to stress the perspective
Baha'u'llah alludes to when He writes that life bears "the mere semblance of
reality," that it is like "a vapour in the desert." Whatever universality exists
in this text it comes from my association with the writings of this prophet-
founder of a new religion rather than any of my specific pretensions to
findings and conclusions that I like to think bear relevance to everyone.
What I offer here is an interpretation, a voice, seemingly, hopefully,
multivocal, that struggles to obtain the attention of others. In some ways
what readers will find here is a series of interpretations, identifications,
differentiations, in tandem, in tension, in overlap, to one another, each
registering their own significances. There is some of Thoreau’s famous
statement in my work: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
59
Shari Benstock, "Authoring the Autobiographical," in The Private Self:
Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, University of
North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1988, pp. 10-33, p.11.
92

perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music
which he hears, however measured or far away.”60
I hope readers will find they do not have to penetrate elaborate sentences,
wade through arcane terminology and deal with excessive jargon. I hope
they will not find here a heaving mass of autobiographical lava as so often is
at the centre of autobiographies. But with nearly 800 pages this document
may prove more useful as a piece of archival history rather than something
for contemporaries to actually read. I certainly aim to please and, as in life,
I'm sure I will do that only some of the time. I try to please through this
piece of analytical and poetic narrative which I have created not so much on
paper as in my innards, out of the living tissue of my life.61
But, as George
Bernard Shaw, once said with his characteristic humour: “I can do more
write what people want than I can play the fiddle to a happy company of
folk dancers.”
60
Henry David Thoreau, Walden. This book contains the lessons Thoreau
learned living beside this pond from July 1845 to September 1847.
61
Gloria Anzaldua, "Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women
Writers," This Bridge Called My Back: Writing By Radical Women of
Colour, 2nd edition, Kitchen Table Women of Colour, NY, 1983, p.172.
93

It is the autobiographical theorist James Olney who defines the process of
literary creation best for me:
"Autobiography is a metaphor through which we stamp our own image on
the face of nature. It allows us to connect the known of ourselves to the
unknown of the world. Making available new relational patterns it
simultaneously organizes the self into a new and richer entity so that the old
known self is joined to and transformed into the new and heretofore
unknown self."62
Nature, in turn, provides all the means of material life and
a common, human currency for representing ideas about that life as society
and culture.
The new and richer entity that is this autobiography is the result of a
carefully edited version of personal experience and my particular version of
reality. I place this before my readers and in so doing I indicate as clearly as
I can the perspective from which this narrative is being written. This
narrative depends on the deferred action of my memory and is based on the
view that my writing is worth the risk however complex the task. I like to
think of this work as part of a public space, a contributing factor, a small
62
James Olney, Metaphors of the Self: The Meaning of Autobiography,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1972, pp.31-32.
94

part in defining and unifying Baha’i culture and its heterogeneous
population. This is a role all Baha’is have and which they play out in their
lives, each in their own way. For we all try to be unifiers of the children of
men.
This work of autobiography is no historical revision which purposely erases
and omits facts, airbrushing my life of what existed but was unpleasant,
what existed but was embarrassing. I don’t reveal all my warts and sins of
every degree. Memory endures and is at the root of this work. It is an
invisible, underground, a secret religious observance in my mind, a type of
black market; it is stories I might and did tell my son. I make the invisible
visible here. This memory I coat with the visibility of language; language is
my repository of cultural and personal memory. Language is memory’s tool,
a repository of history. I feel as if I am part of a culture that is being built
not one that is being destroyed or is on the way out.
I have taken part for over forty years in the development of an institution
that is growing and changing, that is slowly and unobtrusively becoming
part of the landscape of this earth at the local, regional, national and
international levels. I have been part of a community with multiple
95

narratives and literally millions of voices and experiences. Inevitably, some
voices are more prevalent than others and there exists in this community a
common metanarrative. Inevitably, too, there is a multiplicity of
perspectives and forging unity in this diversity, a harmony in contrariety, is
not always easy. All talkers need listeners and all writers need readers who
want to come along for the ride. At this stage of the book my role is partly to
persuade and partly to seduce the few to stay with me for a time between the
covers of this book. And so I do some wooing, propagandizing, subtle and
not-so-subtle manipulation and mild proselytizing everything short of
aggression and virtual terrorizing, in order to pave the way for the eventual
entry of one mind into another, for some serendipitous dialogue. If there is a
need for what I write here, if readers find some pleasure here, it will get
read. If not, well, it will fall by the wayside.
May 1st 2003
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
It has been nearly ten years since I finished the first edition of Pioneering
Over Four Epochs. Since that time I have added a large body of my poetry
96

among other additions, deletions and alterations. The poetry of history is
rooted in the geography, the landscape, of each poet and the facts of the
period of history in which the poets wrote. This is also true of my work.
The addition of my poetry to this work seemed a natural process. It also
helped to give a new lease on life to the writing of my autobiography which
by 1993 was wilting, its vitality and the energy and enthusiasm I began with
dissipated. As the American poet John Ashbery once said: “the poem is
you.”63
Much of me, as Ashbery might have said, is added to this 2nd
edition.
In some ways this poetry and this entire autobiography is a tableaux vivant,
a living picture, carefully posed for in the context of much thought and
theatrically lit in the theatre of ideas. During the reading, no one moves or
speaks out loud. It is a type of mise en scene, many mise en scenes, a form
of entertainment in sequential narrative. The tableau vivant was originally
an approach to picture-making in photography that began in the 1840s. The
tableau vivant was also a motionless performance in theatre. Archeologists
use the term to describe the site of their dig. I think these concepts have
some application to what I am doing in this literary work: the site of my
63
Jody Norton, 'Whispers Out of Time': The syntax of being in the
poetry of John Ashbery, Twentieth Century Literature, Fall 1995.
97

intellectual dig, a motionless literary performance, a many and varied mise
en scene in the context of a tableaux vivant.
I have always found the words of Goethe apt insofar as poetry is concerned
and I refer to them here in this introduction to the fourth edition of my
autobiography. In his famous conversation with Eckermann on 31 January
1827 Goethe introduced his proclamation of the epoch of world literature
with the following observation: "I see increasingly that poetry is a common
property of mankind and that it emerges in all places and at all times from
many hundreds of people. Some are a little better at it than others and stay
on top a little longer, that is all there is to it….everyone must realize that the
gift of poetry is not so rare a thing, and that nobody has reason to let it go to
his head if he produces a good poem.”64
Readers will find this not so rare
thing--poetry—included in short episodes throughout this work.
Lest I get carried away by a vision of populist poetry, let me add the words
of Joseph Brodsky from his banquet speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature
in December 1987: “I should like to add that through recorded history, the
64
Hendrik Birus, “The Goethean Concept of World Literature and
Comparative Literature,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature, December
2000.
98

audience for poetry seldom amounted to more than 1 % of the entire
population. That's why poets of antiquity or of the Renaissance gravitated to
courts, the seats of power; that's why nowadays they flock to universities,
the seats of knowledge.” “Even a quarter of that 1 %,” Brodsky went on,
“will make a lot of readers, even today.” My own poetic life was just
beginning in December 1987, after another series of exhausting years, this
time in the north of Australia. I did not know of Joseph Brodsky, but I was
certainly aware of poetry’s percentages. For I had been, by 1987, a teacher
for 20 years and had no illusions about the interest in poetry by the mass
public, at least poetry in the form I wrote it.
The size of my original autobiographical work has been increased many fold
since its first edition. Time has moved on and my life is being lived in
another epoch, the fifth, necessitating a new name for this work: Pioneering
Over Four Epochs. Here is the story, then, of more than forty years of
pioneering experience: 1962-2002 and fifty years of association, 1953-2003,
with a Movement which claims to be--and I believe it is--the emerging
world religion on the planet. I like to think, with the historian Leopold von
Ranke, that “self-imposed discipline alone brings excellence to all art.” If
that is the case, then there is some excellence here. There is here, too, some
99

of what Proust called "true impressions:"65
hints from life's realities,
persistent intuitions which require some art form, some autobiography, so
that we are not left with only the practical ends of life which, although
necessary, are never really sufficient to living.
The choice of subject is a deeply emotional affair. Poetry and history are, in
this work, allies, inseparable twins. But there are other brothers and sisters
that anchor and define this autobiography: philosophy, sociology, the
everyday, religion, inter alia. Style, too, is, as the historian Peter Gay
emphasizes, the bridge to substance, to all these family members. I hope
readers enjoy the walk across this bridge as I have enjoyed this organized,
disciplined and certainly emotional encounter with some of the substance of
my life and times and the many family members, friends, students and
myriad associations I have had in life.
It is the belief of some writers, some thinkers, some human beings, that there
is nothing new under the sun or perhaps, to put their view more accurately,
there is nothing new to say about the human condition. The greats of history,
the Shakespeares and the Sophocleses have already said it inimitably,
65
Proust quoted in 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature Acceptance Speech, Saul
Bellow, Internet.
100

brilliantly. At best, it seems to me, this is only a partial truth. The historian,
the critic, the autobiographer, among others, interprets and reinterprets the
human condition and, although, the human condition has elements that stay
the same(plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose)much changes. For, as it
is said, you can not step into the same river twice. There is, then, much more
to say, much more that is new. At least that, in summary, is my view.
I think that some may find this book peculiar. Such was the view of the
autobiography of the nineteenth century novelist, Anthony Trollope. Late
Victorians found his book cantankerous and they had trouble absorbing its
contents. For many reasons, not associated with cantankerousness in my
case, I don't think many will find this book of mine absorbing. Although,
like Trollope, I chronicle some of life's daily lacerations upon the spirit. I
also move in channels filled with much that comes from flirtations with the
social sciences: history, psychology, sociology, anthropology and several
literary studies. My book has come to assume what many, I'm sure, will
experience as unmanageable proportions. Five hundred pages and more is a
big read for just about everyone these days. Readers need to be especially
keen to wade through that much print. Perhaps at a future time I will divide
the text into parts, into a series of volumes. But even then, in the short term,
101

this world is a busy place and lives are confronted with so much to read, to
watch, to do and to try to understand. This work will, I think, slip into a
quiet niche and remain, for the most part, unread. I hope I am proved wrong.
I like to think, though, that should readers take on this work they may find
here the reassurance that their battles are my battles, that we are not alone
and that the Cause is never lost. Most readers coming to this book, I'm
inclined to think, already believe these things. But what I offer here could be
seen as a handrail, if that is desired, a handrail of the interpretive
imagination. Here, too, is a handrail informed by my experience, my life's
basic business of shunting about and being shunted about, carelessly and
not-so-carelessly, for more than half a century in the great portal that is this
Cause. Finally, I like to think this handrail is coated with an essential
compassion and what Anthony Trollope’s wife Joanna says is the monument
of a writer, a hefty dose of humility. That's what I'd like to think and, with
Plato, I’d like to think that I am "a good writer(who) is a good man writing.”
But of course one never knows this sort of thing for sure. And, if one aims to
acquire any genuine humility in life, it is probably better not to know but,
rather, just to keep on aspiring.
102

During the writing of this second edition it was enlightening to read of the
autobiographical propensities of Thomas Woolfe. His passion for
recreating, reliving the past, was like a tonic of inspiration to help me
recreate mine. For years it seemed an impossible task. The epiphanies
which he enjoyed as he reviewed his life, or as memories spontaneously
crowded his mind, I had yet to enjoy, at least not to the same extent, not with
the same intensity. I often thought the lithium I had begun taking in 1980
pulled me back to the middle and did not let me run with such intense
emotions. A biography on Robert Lowell discussed this same phenomenon,
this same effect on artists, that lithium had after it was introduced in 1967 in
North America. However intensely life was lived, I found that when I went
back to dredge it up it did not possess the same colour, the penetration, the
feeling. There was a distance, a dullness, an absence of sensory detail. I
experience little of the ‘torrential recollectiveness’ that Woolfe experienced.
If I was to apply the insights gained from this invaluable reading of
Woolfe’s experience all I could do was simply do as I have been doing: wait
for the moment of inspiration, epiphany, emotional recollection and put
down a few words. Knowing that Woolfe did it with the enthusiasm he did,
that he eventually became disillusioned with the process and that he pointed
103

writers to the future, to hope, to potentials, is a pertinent reminder to me of
the ultimate limitations of retrospectivity and the need to possess a range of
qualities in attempting to write such a work.
My problem for many years was that I did not find the autobiographical
process fertile at all, or hardly at all, except insofar as it helped me write
poetry. Writing a ‘retrospective journal’ and an autobiography for most of
the first 16 years I have been trying has been a dry and uninspiring process.
Perhaps I should stay with poetry and just forget the journal and the
autobiography. With the completion of this second edition I feel the
beginnings of a new lease on autobiographical life.
Ron Price
22 January 2003
104

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
What began in 1984 as an episodic diary and in 1986 as a narrative of
pioneering experience covering twenty-five years has become an account
covering thirty-one: 1962-1993. Coincidentally, I have finished this third
and what I hope is the final draft of this first edition in time to celebrate the
thirtieth anniversary of the first election of the Universal House of Justice.
This short account of some seventy-five pages has been dedicated to this
institution which I have tried to serve, successfully and unsuccessfully since
1963. In the words of a Baha’i writer whose style and tone I have always
found delightful, Mr. Douglas Martin, I have aimed, aspired, to be “a
precisioned instrument.” Often the instrument has been dulled by life, by
incapacities, by the tests that are part of our existence. Sometimes, one is
conscious that the instrument one has developed is a mysterious gift of God,
an unmerited grace. Sometimes one is not too impressed with the instrument
at all.
Readers will find here what could be called a descriptive and analytical
narrative, a narrative that intensifies my life in the process of putting it on
paper. This writing has had what you might call a restorative function on
105

my life. By the time I came to finish this work I felt a strong need for an
even greater restoration of my psyche. This was in 1992-93. There is no
doubt that my writing, my art, has shaped my experience, lending it style
and direction. Life in turn informs this art giving it variety, giving it a
granite base.66
I have also used other genres to tell my story: diary, letters,
essays, poems, fiction, photographs, notebooks and memorabilia. They can
be found in other places, none of which are yet available in published, in
some available, form. Together, all the genres, all the writing, several
million words in all, paint the story of a life, a life that is far from over, far-
light years-from perfection, but in many ways typical of the thousands of
lives, of people who have pioneered in the three epochs that are the
backdrop for this account. “It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to exhibit a
life,” writes Plutarch one of the founding fathers of biography, “which is
blameless and pure.”67
Shortcomings and faults run through all our lives.
This is equally true of autobiography. Biographers, writes George Landow,
when on the trail of others “must put up with finding himself at every turn:
66
Emily Dickinson refers to "conviction's granite base" in her poem number
789.
67
Plutarch quoted in Roger Kimball, Lives of the Mind, Ivan R. Dee,
Chicago, 2002, p.35.
106

any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it. He begins with
somebody else's papers, and ends with his own."68
And the act of writing is, as one writer put it, "a high, this writing thing, a
kind of drug, and once you experience it nothing else is ever the same."
"Ordinary life," that writer went on, "seems like a prison sentence in
comparison to the freedom of writing"69
That puts it a little strongly but I
agree with the general sentiment. But however one characterizes writing it
is difficult to grasp the mystery of its origins. As Freud once wrote, "Before
the problem of the artist, analysis must alas lay down its arms."70
I might
add that there are many other mysteries beside the artist, to list them here
would lead to prolixity.
My story is unique. The story of the experience of each pioneer is unique.
Under the guidance of the trustee of that global undertaking set in motion
nearly a century and a half ago, men, women, children and adolescents have
scattered across the planet to its most remote corners. Few write their
accounts, their experiences, their journey and try to tell of its pulse, its
68
George Landow, “Autobiography, Autobiographicality & Self-
Representation,” Victorian Web Internet Site, 1988.
69
See: http://www.sheckley.com/frames.html
70
Joseph Epstein, "Writing on the Brain," Commentary, 2003.
107

rhythm, its crises and victories. Whether from humility and a feeling that
writing autobiography is somehow an inappropriate exercise, perhaps too
self-centred; whether from a lack of interest in writing or the simple inability
to convey experience in a written form; whether from the tedium, the
repetition, of the everyday and its routines and responsibilities which come
to occupy so much of their time; whether from the responsibilities and
demands of life or simply the battles which pioneers inevitably face in their
path of service: most of the stories never get told. This is one that I hope
will make it. One of the things that attracted me to writing autobiography
and that keeps me interested in it is the diversity of perspectives that exists
within it as a field, as a discipline. Once I realized that the exercise of
writing an autobiography was not just about writing your life from go to
woe, but that the discipline of autobiography had a rich theoretical and
intellectual base, a base that I found increasingly fascinating, I was airborne.
As I complete this first edition, I have just started to fly or, to put it even
more accurately in a metaphorical sense, I feel I have started taking flying
lessons for a future in the sky. I may never get my pilot’s license, but the
experience will be pleasurable.
108

For many years I thought it would be better to keep this story under wraps,
keep it from seeing the light of day. Perhaps, I thought, it would be better
published posthumously, if it was to be published at all. Alternatively, it
could be kept in some local spiritual assembly or national spiritual assembly
archive and retrieved by some scholar or archivist as a curiosity, a sample of
a work written in the darkest heart of an age of transition. This may be, in
fact, what eventuates. As I completed the first edition, it was difficult to
know what would become of this document. But I liked to think, as the
French scholar Jacques Derrida reminded us, that archives are as much about
the future as the past. If what I wrote here was to be about the future, as
Derrida suggested, if it was to be useful to some group of human beings at a
future time, then that future Baha’i archive or internet site would have to be
an active corpus linked to original documents, organically connected with
original stories like mine.
I would like to think that the value of this autobiography in the years ahead
will be to those who want to address, whether overtly or covertly, the issues
of social cohesion, the role of religion and especially the role of the Baha’i
Faith in the emerging global society. It seems to me that this work lends
itself well to such purposes. One day, it is my firm conviction, the Baha’i
109

Faith will be centre-stage in the global political-social landscape-
marketplace and this work may be one useful brick in the construction of
humankind’s future home for the mind. There was a short period as an
adolescence when I wanted to be a bricklayer. This may be as close as I get,
if indeed I get close at all. The resonance of my work in some larger context
remains, of course, to be seen.
After I completed the first edition of my autobiography in early 1993 I was
not concerned about publishing this piece of writing. This writing provided
some helpful perspectives on the pioneering process and on teaching and
consolidation in the first decades of what Shoghi Effendi called the tenth
stage of history. Whoever had the opportunity to read this account would
find themselves, or so I hoped, entertained and stimulated by a man who
paused, as Henry David Thoreau71
did at the dawn of this new era, to give as
full an account, a report if you like, of his experience. I thought my book
was a good read. It was certainly a pleasure to write, at least some of the
time. It was a start, at least, to a story which I hoped to continue in the years
ahead in future editions. As I say, I found writing this edition pleasurable
only part of the time and reading it, I must admit, turned me off. I did not
71
Lewis Mumford, “Thoreau, Nature and Society,” A Century of
Ecocriticism, The University of Georgia press, Athens, 2001, p.250.
110

find it stimulating. The rich reservoir of literature on autobiography I had
only begun to discover as I finished working on the third draft of this edition
in 1992 and 1993.
Memories are things, nouns if you like, which we all have. Remembering is
an activity, a verb if you like or more accurately a gerund. It is more like a
book in the process of being written, something that seems, in part at least,
made up. Remembering is not analogous to a book that I read or create from
a printed script. Remembering is a problem-solving activity, where the
problem is to give a coherent account of past events. Memory itself is both
the problem and the solution to the problem, if indeed the problem can be
solved at all. Memories are also, as John Kihlstrom suggests, "a special class
of beliefs about the past." Belief, Kihlstrom argues, is the phenomenal basis
of remembering.72
I have always taken some comfort in the words of
Charles Darwin about his memory, taken from the last page of his
autobiography: “So poor in one sense is my memory, that I have never been
able to remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry.”
72
John F. Kihlstrom, "Memory, Autobiography, History," Proteus: A Journal
of Ideas, Vol.19, No.2, Fall 2002.
111

This work is no retrospective, backward-looking, desire for stasis, desire to
remain the same and resist the changes coming at us all seemingly at the
speed of light. There are things in my memory set in some iron mist, things I
can never forget that I dwell on especially. But as the Canadian humorist
Stephen Leacock writes: “Leave your memory as it is. No reality will ever
equal it.”73
Sometimes a confrontation with the past modifies or replaces
darling illusions with reality and confirms or establishes the many merits of
new perspectives. As the narrator of C. Dino Minni’s short story
Roots(1985) puts it after returning from Canada to visit his childhood home
in Italy, "Not bad at all, but it is not me."74
I could say the same about this
work of mine and, realizing this, I find this whole exercise of writing these
memoirs is one of describing and defining my new perspectives.
The future of Canada whether from a material or spiritual standpoint, its
national character combining as it so fortuitous does the progressiveness and
initiative of the Americans and the stability and tenacity of the British and
the illuminating promises of ‘Abdu’l-Baha in his Tablets on the one hand;
and the visions of Canada’s mysterious but enormous power and potential as
73
Stephen Leacock, The Boy I Left Behind Me, pp. 31-32.
74
Quoted in: “Emigrant Remembering and Forgetting,” Mnemographia
Canadensis, Volume 1, Muse and Recall, D.M.R. Bentley.
112

expressed by some of her writers and poets, augured well, or so I liked to
think, for the expression in my life of those unmerited treasures of a grace
that was infinite and unseen.75
Perhaps this work was or might become a
manifestation of such treasures. One can but dream.
Authentic religious faith is notoriously difficult to depict accurately on
screen: big screens, little screens, any screens. A literary autobiography has
a much better chance at depicting a life of religious faith without having to
resort to caricature and distortion, negative stereotyping and trivializing. The
standard film conventions for portraying religious faith in our antediluvian
world are a mixture of fanaticism and irrationality, excessive emotion and
piety--understandable I suppose. Of course, we all know that a person can
be religious without being morally reprobate, inflexibly ruthless and
intellectually helpless. If the writer throws in a touch of sincerity for
believability and good measure, the negative stereotype is often enhanced. I
invite you to see if I have been successful in my depiction with just the right
amounts of several virtues sprinkled in to season the mix. Of course, I
suppose you will never know for sure how accurate the mix, the recipe, is.
You have to take it all on trust. Knowing this is not possible, I bequeath to
75
Baha’u’llah, Prayers and Meditations, Wilmette, 1969, p.89.
113

you the following story, the following mise en scene which my words can
not tell nor my tongue describe, except in part.
April 12th 1993
SUMMARY AND OVERVIEW
OF VOLUMES ONE TO FIVE OF THIS WORK
Anyone wanting to get a bird's-eye view of the 2600 pages in this book need
only go to volume 1, which is essentially a life-overview; volume 2 is a
discussion of my pre-pioneering days during the Ten Year Crusade: 1953-
1963; volume 3 examines homefront pioneering: 1962-1971 and volume 4:
international pioneering: 1971 to 2005; finally, volume 5 can be summarized
by simply reading the chapter titles. The 30 headings at the outset of the
chapters give anyone with little time a quick picture of the contents of this
autobiographical work. Volume 1 contains essays on pioneering, some
special poetry and a detailed resume and bio-data. Three hundred and fifty
thousand words is a big-read. Those who come to this book can dip in at any
place. There is no need to begin at the beginning. The author wishes those
who do come upon this lengthy piece of writing much pleasure, much
insight and a feeling that time spent reading this is time well-spent. This
114

work can not be adequately understood as merely the story of my life. Were
this just my story, I'm not sure I ever would have written it in the first place,
however personally meaningful the exercise has been to me. A play in four
acts, innumerable scenes and more lines than I care to count is found here,
from childhood to old age.
This work is, like William Wordsworth's great poem “The Prelude,” the
account of the growth of a poetic personality and an imagination. It is also
an account of another prelude, a prelude within the context of the Baha’i
Faith.76
And finally, after several thousand years of the recording of
memory in the western intellectual tradition, a balance between personal
memory and collective memory on the other is being achieved in modern
history. These two major nodes of memorialization have taken place since
the Homeric Period in the middle of another Formative Age77
This is yet
one more effort in the contribution to the achievement of such a balance.
76
Entry-by-troops is seen as a prelude to mass conversion.(Citadel of Faith,
p.117). My pioneering life began with the first evidences of entry-by-troops
in the early 1960s in Canada. Wordsworth's The Prelude has three editions:
1798/9, 1805 and 1850. This autobiography, Pioneering Over Four Epochs,
has now gone through four editions.
77
One model of Greek history has the Formative Age at 1100-500 BC and
the Homeric period at 750-600 BC. There are several time models and labels
for this period used by specialists in Greek history.
115

LIST OF PLATES
At this stage, the completion of the sixth edition and its partial editing by
Bill Washington in 2007, no plates, no photographs, are planned as
inclusions.
_____________________________________________________________
PROVENANCE OF THE TEXT
Life expectancy has increased markedly in recent years and it may be that
many more years are granted to me. One never knows when one's own end
shall be, of course, but changes, additions, deletions, alterations of various
kinds will inevitably take place in the years to come. The publishing life of
this book on the internet and in hard cover is difficult to predict. If my
literary executors, whoever they may be, wish to embellish this work in
some form, alter its format to include material not in this fifth edition, I will
have no objection. There is certainly plenty to draw on: letters, journals,
notebooks, essays, books, interviews, inter alia.
116

Page breaks, italicization, diacritical marks, spelling and grammar, indeed, a
host of editing routines and formalities, I leave to those same executors and
whoever these future editors may be.
___________________________________________
VOLUME 1: CHAPTER ONE
Some Introductions and Genres
"Not beginning at the Beginning...."
Dispositions are plausible responses78
to the circumstances individual
Baha'is found themselves in and these dispositions led to the gradual
emergence from obscurity of their religion in the last half century. The story
here is partly of this emergence and partly it is my telling of own life-story.
For I have gone on writing for years, perhaps as much as two decades now,
in relative obscurity doing what I think is right.
I am intentionally not going to begin at the beginning. Autobiographies
which I’ve had a look at, skimmed and scanned, occasionally reading one
from cover to cover, seem to be exercises that begin in as many different
places as there are authors. Sometimes first memories are found on page
one and the account proceeds chronologically if not logically until the last
78 1
Joseph Kling, "Narratives of Possibility: Social Movements, Collective
Stories and Dilemmas of Practice," 1995, Internet.
117

syllable of their recorded time, their allotment on earth,79
at least up to the
time of the writing of their said autobiography. This is not my intention
here. Anyway, when does one really begin a journey, a friendship, a love
affair? Beginnings are fascinating, misunderstood, enigmatic. I’ve written
much about beginnings and the more I write the more elusive they become.
There comes a moment, a point, though, when we realize that the journey
has started and we had not realized it.80
As we travel along we mark
historical moments which we weave into our narrative. They often change,
our view of them that is, as we grow older: these rites de passage, these
coming of age moments. Unlike the Roman historians of the republican
days who wrote their histories annalistically, that is year by year in
sequence, this work is much more varied and informal with a slight tendency
to write by plans and epochs. It is important, too, that life, my life, not be
seen as simply journey and not life. The two are not mutually exclusive.
79
Of course there are also autobiographies that do not begin at the beginning
and some that tell little about their authors at all. Kafka's and Dostoevski's
are examples of the latter.
80
Gillian Boddy in Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer,
Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1988, p.161.
118

My ideal doctor for this journey, wrote the late Anatole Broyard, would be
“my Virgil, leading me through my purgatory or inferno, pointing out the
sights as we go. He would enter into the world of sin or sickness and
accompany this pilgrim, this patient through it.”81
Virgil was Dante's
imagined guide in the Divine Comedy. My Virgil, my ideal doctor, in this
autobiography is, without doubt, Baha’u’llah; my Divine Comedy is this
autobiography. The parallel is, of course, not exact, but it has its relevant
points of comparison.
In this context I should add that the three great shapers of my nature were
the twin-prophets: the Bab and Baha’u’llah, as well as ‘Abdu’l-Baha and
Shoghi Effendi. There were others who unquestionably did much shaping,
namely my parents and the two women I married, but from an intellectual
and spiritual standpoint I would have to give the first three places to these
Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith and Their legitimate successors.
I strive for my account to possess narrative lines that move forward, like
lines in music, lines that keep their listeners waiting for and wanting
81
Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, "Oliver Sack's Awakenings: Reshaping Clinical
Discourse," Configurations,Volume 1, Number 2, Spring 1993, pp. 229-
245.
119

resolutions. At the same time I think it's vital for many lines to develop at
once, as in a fugue, so that when one narrative line resolves itself, another is
already developing.82
I frankly do not know how I am going to approach
this story, though I have no trouble finding historical moments and various
lines of development. There are always in the background to my life ever-
present plans, new beginnings, fresh initiatives, systematic advances, "leaps
and thrusts,"83
triumphs and losses, vistas of new horizons and dark clouds.
There is also, as I have moved around two continents over the second half of
the twentieth century, and early 21st
, the tracing of an end of Empire, an end
of an age, an order, a politico-social system and the arrival of a new kind of
order. This new order is rootless, without a centre and constantly shifting on
the one hand; and rooted, centred and global on the other. They allow one
to explore, to write of a place, to explore foreign societies and new ideas at
a crucial time in history--a time of beginnings. The Baha’i order and the
people in it which I had identified with and participated in personally as far
back as 1953 were caught between an old order they had sloughed off, had
ceased to pin their hopes on, and a new one they had yet to mature.
82
Naslund expresses her writing in these terms in: Sena Jeter Naslund,
Ahab’s Wife or The Star Gazer, William Morrow, 1999.
83
Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 1992, p.1. An excellent overview of
the sequence, the pattern, of plans, phases, epochs, etc.
120

At the outset I want to emphasize the inadequacy of language to match and
give sequence to life’s experience. This poem of Emily Dickinson’s
expresses this idea well:
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –
As if my Brain had split –
I tried to match it -- Seam by Seam –
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before –
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls -- upon a Floor.
Thinking seriously about autobiography or, indeed, any intellectual
discipline, requires us to acknowledge our ignorance of the subject. This is
a prerequisite. Our past, any past, is another country, a place that exists in
our imaginations and in those uncertain and often unreliable echoes of our
lives that we trace in words, in places and in things. There is, then, an
inscrutability which paradoxically lies at the heart of this work. I say
121

paradoxical because the more one describes one’s life the more mysterious it
gets. I return again and again, taking the reader with me, to absences, spaces
in my knowledge, my memory, my construction. I recognize that the act of
making this my life, into a whole, from the pieces I have left from my past is
necessarily a creative one, an act of imagination, what one writer calls "the
dialectic between discovery and invention."
In the process I transform my history and the history of my times, from
something static into something lived. I am not imprisoned in some
imagined objectivity; rather, I reenter the moment, the hour, the days and the
years and imagine it as something experienced from multiple perspectives,
simultaneously acknowledging its erasures and silences.84
This book
compels me to think again about my life and, I like to think, readers to
ponder theirs. I know I cannot capture in words all the minute particulars of
my place and time. I know that however I chronicle the linear time of my
life or however I philosophize about its deep time, la duree as Henri
Bergson called it, when viewed sub specie aeternitatus, the whole scheme is
evanescent, like a vapour in the desert. Still, I make more than a little effort
here to explore my views about contemporary life and values and in the
84
I have drawn here on James Bradley, "Dancing With Strangers: A Review
of Inga Clendinnin's Book," in smh:f2network, October 11, 2003.
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process of exploration I define my thinking about the transient and the
eternal, the contingent and the absolute.
I would like to make a few remarks here about growing up and the places of
my childhood. I wrote the following paragraphs in October 2011 and have
cut-and-pasted them here since they seem to be relevant at this juncture in
this chapter 1.
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP
CHILDHOOD THEN
When I was growing up our house backed onto woods, a several-acre
remnant of a once-mighty wilderness. This was in a southern Ontario town,
a town that is now a city and has gone from a little place of 5000 people in
1950, when I was five, to over 100,000 more than half a century later in
2010. If I went back to that house(which is not likely since I now live on a
pension in Australia) I’m sure that woods would be gone. I could check it
out on google-maps, but my eyes get tired quickly when I try to figure-out
places where I lived long ago on that marvellous internet tool.
The existence of what are now called green-belts was not due to enlightened
planners. The first citizens of those little towns in southern Ontario came to
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enjoy such belts of green for many reasons: part forest, part farm, part
undeveloped land. That farm and that green belt is now gone. I did go back
to another place where I had lived much later in my childhood, in my early
adolescence, that third stage of childhood in the lifespan according to some
human development psychologists. Some new planners had done a great job
of tidying-up some of the old places where I once played cowboys and
Indians or field hockey; young families could now walk and take their kids
to play on the swings and wooden-apparatus.
Those woods, to which I referred above, were tame as can be when I walked
through them on the way to school. Yet at night they still filled with
unfathomable shadows. In the winter they lay deep in snow and seemed to
absorb, to swallow whole, all the ordinary noises of your body and your
world. Scary things could still be imagined to take place in those woods. It
was the place into which the bad boys fled after they egged your windows
on Halloween and left your pumpkins pulped in the driveway. There were no
Indians in those woods where once they had been. We learned about those
Indians in school and, at least for me, at summer camps. They had many
names.
Swift, straight-shooting, silent as deer those Indians peopled the periphery of
my life. They were long gone except for their lovely names: Seneca,
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Iroquois, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, Delaware,
Nanticoke, Creek and Cherokee. As I got older I found out dozens of other
Indian names for tribes which lived all over North America. As an adult I
experienced whole new peripheries to my life.
A minor but undeniable aura of romance was attached to the history of
Ontario, my home province. It was a very big place, but no one I knew went
into its far north, into its biggest parts. As far as I was concerned, and
everyone else I knew, Ontario was southern Ontario with Barrie, Owen
Sound and, on the rarest occasions, Tobermory at the end of the Bruce
Peninsula, 300 kms north of Toronto. For me Ontario was all about Lake
Ontario and Lake Erie and the towns and cities along their edge—over to
Windsor in the west where I went to teachers’ college, and to Kingston in
the east where the St. Lawrence River began and where I visited a
psychiatrist once in 1969; or over to Ottawa where I went for my
honeymoon in 1967.
The St. Lawrence River was another great landmark and world on the
periphery of my childhood life-narrative. This large river flowed through the
middle latitudes of North America and connected the Great Lakes with the
Atlantic Ocean. Its drainage area included the Great Lakes, the world's
largest system of fresh water lakes. I knew none of this while growing-up.
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The lakes of which Ontario and Erie were but two, the biggest lakes in my
world and Ontario’s world of smaller lakes, were just great places to swim
on hot summer days.
But the Wilderness of Childhood, as any kid could attest who grew up and
survived to tell their story in later adulthood, had nothing to do with trees or
nature. It was the same for my father who grew up on the streets of Merthyr
Tydfil a city of 30,000 in Wales with its coal mines and pubs, one of which
was owned by his father, more than half a century before. I could lose
myself on vacant lots and playgrounds, when I was five, or in the alleyway
behind the shops in town, in the neighbours’ yards, on the sidewalks.
Anywhere, in short, I could reach on my tricycle and then my bicycle or
simply by walking. By these three means I covered my neighbourhood, my
world, in a regular route first(with my tricycle) for half a mile and then
several miles(with my bike and walking) in every direction.
I knew the locations of all my classmates’ houses, the number of pets and
siblings they had, the state of their bedrooms in particular and houses in
general, the brand of popsicle or type of food they served, if any; the
potential dangerousness of their fathers, how pretty their mothers were.
These locations, in addition to the places of the shops, the ice-skating ring,
the curling club, the homes of the girls I liked, the frozen ponds in winter
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where I played hockey---provided perfectly the mental map of my world. It
is a world I have endlessly revised and refined since I left it back in the
summer of 1962 never to return---except for a 24 hour period when I
dropped in during a visit to Canada some 40 years later on my way to
Europe. Childhood is, or has become, for me a rich and important branch of
cartography.
Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of
Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That’s because every story of
adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between
human beings and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only
with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case
sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper
reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of
an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We
have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of
a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and
danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to
find in life.
This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and
write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is,
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or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation,
courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most
part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with a fragmentary map.
That map is marked: here there be tigers and there mean kid with air rifle.
That child constructs out of a patchwork of personal fortune and misfortune,
bedtime reading and an accumulated local lore, a grey chaos and dream of
stuff, his world. It is this world, as I say above, which is his base for any
historical revisionism.
A striking feature of literature for children is the number of stories, many of
them classics of the genre, that feature the adventures of a child, more often
a group of children, acting in a world where adults, particularly parents, are
completely or effectively out of the picture. Think of The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe, The Railway Children, or Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.
Then there is the very rich vein of children’s literature featuring ordinary
contemporary children navigating and adventuring through a contemporary,
non-fantastical world that is nonetheless beyond the direct influence of
adults, at least some of the time.
As a kid, I was not really into reading, too busy with doing things: playing
until I had not a trace of energy left except to eat my mother’s lunch or
evening meal, playing to avoid some responsibility that might come my way
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if I was too available; finding ways to make money without which I would
have none to buy soda-pop or candy, dinky-toys or go to the movies;
exploring all the places where adventure beckoned in those places on that
above map.
CHILDHOOD NOW
The thing that strikes me when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood in
this third millennium is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave
me to adventure in its world. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea
of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone;
the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid
might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the
neighbour-ring- kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-
opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by neighbours and others, adults and
an endless print and electronic media.
TOURISM
The traveller, arguably a particular kind of seasoned tourist, eventually
learns that the only way for him or her to come to know a city, to form a
mental map of it, however provisional, and begin to find their own way
around it is to visit it alone or with a friend, preferably on foot, and then
become as lost as one possibly can. I have been to many cities and towns in
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the world over 100, and many of them maybe a half-dozen times in my life,
on visits of different kinds, and yet I don’t really know them because every
time I’ve visited, I have been picked up and driven around, and taken to see
the sights by someone far more versed than I in the city’s wonders and
hazards—to me it’s all just a vast jumbled lot of stage sets and backdrops
passing by the window of a car, or homes and places visited by my friends
or by me as I stopped for a hamburger or a pie on my way through.
CHILDREN IN OUR WORLD
What we as adults provide for our children is a kind of door-to-door, all-
encompassing escort service, contrived to enrich the lives of our children.
We schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one
another’s houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands
between. If they are lucky, we send them out to play in the backyard, where
they can be safely fenced in and even, in extreme cases, monitored with
security cameras. The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands
have been abandoned in favour of a system of reservations—MacDonald’s
play-area, the commercial Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment and
or play centres mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside
from doors marked staff only. When children roller-skate or ride their bikes,
they go forth armoured as for battle, and their parents typically stand nearby.
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There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the
corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of
the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in
America and increasingly in the affluent parts of our global society, of safety
and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of the insurance
actuarial and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this
curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased
anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the
wolves in the Wilderness.
This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice
Department, the number of abductions by strangers in the United States was
115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child
is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed
is that the horror is so much better known. At times it seems as if parents are
being deliberately encouraged to fear for their children’s lives, though only a
cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.
The endangerment of children—that persistent theme of our lives, arts, and
literature over the past twenty years—resonates so strongly because, as
parents, as members of preceding generations, we look at the poisoned
legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife and
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radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification,
and feel guilty. As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the
Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children
have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time
they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation.
And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell
it.
What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the
development of children’s imaginations? This is what I worry about the
most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and
almost impossible. After the usual struggle and exhilaration of learning to
ride a bicycle, and the joy of achievement there now rapidly follows a
creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment. It quickly becomes clear
that there is nowhere to ride it—nowhere that I am willing to let this child
go. Should I send my children out to play?
There is a small grocery store around the corner, not over two hundred yards
from our front door. Can I let my children ride there alone to experience the
singular pleasure of buying themselves an ice cream on a hot summer day
and eating it on the sidewalk, alone with their thoughts? Soon after they
learn to ride, they might go out on a lovely summer evening. If I wander
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with my child on the streets of our lovely residential neighbourhood at, say,
after-dinner in what might be seen as a peak moment of togetherness, like
the magic hour of my own childhood, it is quite possible that we will not
encounter a single other child.
Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with? Art is a form
of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those
unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted—not taught—to
be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of
adventure, of stories, of literature itself? Such, then were some of my
general thoughts about my childhood and changes in the experience of
childhood in the last half century.
I don’t see my life or make any claim to my life being necessarily
representative of that of an ideal Baha’i or a Baha’i pioneer. This is not an
exemplum. Claims to representativeness, it seems to me, are at best partial.
I find there is something basically unstable or slippery about experience or,
to put it in even stronger terms, in the words of Baha’u’llah, there is
something about experience that bears only “the mere semblance of reality.”
There is something about it that is elusive, even vain and empty, like “a
vapor in the desert.” There are so many exegetical and interpretive problems
that accompany efforts to tie down the meaning of a life, of an experience,
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of a relationship. There is something divided, duplicitous, something that
has happened but has yet to be defined and described or, as is usually the
case, never described, at least not in writing, depending of course on the
experience of the person and their literary skills. There are innumerable and
indispensable points of reference in a life and yet so many of them take on
the feeling of a mirage, as if they are not really there, like a dream,
particularly as the years lengthen into later adulthood and old age.
In many ways this narrative belongs in the company of the thousands of
individual and communal narratives of the Baha’i community. But there are
several narrative frames that exist and operate in tandem in this
autobiographical work. My family and friends, most of whom are not
Baha’is, my students over the years and the literally thousands of people I
have come to know will find the narrative frames in this autobiography exist
in tandem. In life and in autobiography the same story must often be adapted
for different audiences that value different things and will judge one’s story
by different criteria. Narratives must necessarily be censored for specific
audiences or for ourselves. The censoring that must be done here, must be
done by readers. This narrative that I am endorsing by placing it in the
public domain contains a multitude of stories, perspectives and narrative
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lines suited for some but not for others. The individual, therefore, in
accordance with the demands of each situation, each portion of this
autobiography, must do the validating of opposing narratives about myself.
Two opposing narratives, sets of actions, apparently contradictory
behaviours, demonstrate the dynamic nature of identity. It is not static and
we all do all sorts of things that to the people we meet are upsetting, wrong,
confusing, etcetera. What I am trying to conceptualize here is the pastiche,
the fluid, nature of my multiple self-identities that have emerged in my
lifetime. Some are suppressed at different times, depending on the cultural
demands or constraints of a particular context or audience; some are given
expression at other times. These identities are context driven. Behavioural
repertoires are not always easy to adjust as one moves from social setting to
social setting. Culture shock or acculturative stress often arise and this
narrative which follows is, in part at least, the story of some of these shocks
and stresses.
Meaning is not something one can wrap up and walk away with. Often the
mind's sensitivity to meaning is actually impaired by fixed notions or
perspectives. It seems that often we must see things for ourselves, again and
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again, sometimes in community with its endless heterogeneity, sometimes in
our solitude. For community is not always pastoral dream of innocence and
togetherness and solitude is not always enriching. Here, as in music, there is
an alternation between fast and slow and joyful and sorrowful; there's an ebb
and flow to the emotional structure, although it often seemed, as
Shakespeare once wrote, that “when sorrows come, they come not single
spies, but in battalions".85
At the same time, I agree with what is called the essentialist view of group
identity in community; namely, that there is a common identity for the
members of a social group. This view emphasizes commonness of identity
and the possession of a certain stability that is more or less unchanging since
it is based on the experiences the members share. But I can only go so far in
this essentialist tradition. I am also inclined to see group identities as
fabricated, constructed, misleading, ignoring internal differences and tending
not to recognize the unreliability of experience.86
Of course individuals can
fabricate much of their own history. Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne, for
85
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene V.
86
For a helpful contrast between the postmodernist and the essentialist
views of group identity see: Satya Mohanty, "The Epistemic Status of
Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the Postcolonial Condition," Cultural
Logic, Volume 3, Number 2, Spring, 2000.
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example, were notorious fabricators of their story.87
And to chose one final
example, the man who was Mark Twain, Samuel Leghorne Clemens, lived
behind a "layering of invented selves," and performing, of course, was
simply another way of inventing or disguising himself. Or so it is that
Andrew Hoffman describes Twain.88
I take the view too that, however much I work out my life in solitude, my
experience is what some sociologists call ‘socially constructed.’ This social
and emotional self is mediated by the environment in which it lives and
works. In this context the self is not exalted to the centre of the universe.
The nature of one's inner thoughts and feelings are not purely personal or
individual.89
The community in which we interact, the system of thoughts
that serve as our beliefs, is a crucial determinant of who we are. Our
fundamental forms of experience are created by our own mental activity.
87
Edward Morris, "A Review of Charlie Chaplin and His Times," Kenneth
S. Lynn, Simon & Schuster in Book Page, 1997. Lynn interprets Chaplin's
life in terms of reactions to his mother. For me, the psychological field of
interpretation is much wider. See also Edward Morris, "A Review of John
Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity," Garry Wills, Simon and
Schuster, 2004, Book Page, 1997.
88
Roger Miller, "A Review of Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel
Leghorne Clemens," Andrew Hoffman, 2004, Book Page, 1997.
89
There are too many feminists and sociologists to mention here in a field of
sociological or feminist theory that could be titled “the social construction of
reality.”
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This mental activity usually begins in the outside world and is imposed, at
least to some extent, on the mind.
Canadians, for example, approach the survival of ordeals, not as the
theoretical American would by finding and revealing a reservoir of inner
strength and wisdom in some heroic fashion, but by banding together, by
becoming a “company”--literally, as Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman
suggests by using the rituals of everyday life as a mediating device, to create
community. Literary critic Northrop Frye suggests that Canadians possess a
garrison mentality with an image of a fort in the wilderness as a symbol of
their psychic centre or domain. Margaret Atwood, Canada's major writer as
the millennium turned, sees the Canadian character as one with a gloomy-
through-catastrophic strain. This interpretation of the character is reflected
in Canada's literature and especially in the writing of Margaret Atwood.
Atwood also sees the Canadian character as one that is incurably paranoid.
There are various strategies suggested by artists, writers and critics to cope
with this paranoia. Art, religion, relationships, a strong sense of fate or
destiny, an avoidance of the heroic and a taking refuge in the ordinary, in a
reticence, in trepidation, in the soft escape and boxing experience into
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frames, into limits. These are some of the coping mechanisms seen by these
analysts. If one understands Canadian history, one can understand the sense
of the overwhelming, the impenetrable, the claustrophobic, the sense of a
world which denies entry to the human. It is these attitudes to self and life
that are evinced by Canadians and Australian artists towards their existential
condition. But perhaps the central attitude is a radical, deep-seated
ambivalence. Both Canadians and Australians are ambivalent about the
heroic, the posture taken by the American.90
I mention the Canadian and the
Australian because it is in these two countries where I have spent all my life.
I have realized, though, that the range of effects I could achieve writing as if
I was an Australian or a Canadian were too narrow. It would be like playing
one instrument, say, the drums or a cello. So I turned to writing in as broad
a perspective as I could. I may have bit off more than I can chew. But even
if I have, I find that there's a certain synchronicity in writing autobiography
and also living my day to day life which makes the big-chew relevant to the
daily nibbles that constitute the routine, the trivial, the predictable and the
wonder that fills the interstices of life. I like to see this autobiography
somewhat like the poet George Herbert’s: as the "story of the self reflected
90
Not all Americans take a heroic posture. Harold Bloom in his Words To
Live By, 2004 emphasizes the acceptance of limits as a key to wisdom.
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and improved in the mirror of Scripture," a self who "makes no claims to
uniqueness" but is in fact content "that the truths he finds there are not his
alone.”91
I might add just to get the context right that the Scripture is a new
one and, although I make a claim to uniqueness, it is a uniqueness each of us
possesses. I might add, too, that a myriad details, a multitude of meaning-
neutral objects, arise in the course of this text. They are details which
appear and guarantee a certain plausibility of context, generate a certain
sense of reality, of real life, construct a persona, fashion a self, smooth over
life’s accidents, make it more understandable and coherent. I am aware,
though, that whatever force and persuasiveness I might achieve today may
well become mute due to fashion’s baffling cruelty.
None of us ever quite lives up to their idealized personae, but the more
successful a person’s writing is and the more integral it is to the
achievement of their life, the more closely they can be identified with
their author-ideal, that is, with the self they fashion and present to the
world as the voice behind her texts. There is, for me, in this text, a
strong sense of identification, a close match between text and reality.
91
Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible, U of
California Press, Berkeley, 1985, p.98.
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There are certainly few writers and theorists of autobiography who believe
that it is possible to remove one's commitments and values from the exercise
of writing one’s story. I do not believe that I can separate the facts of my
life from the theories, assumptions and frameworks that underpin them. I do
not see myself as an objective gatherer of facts. I believe that values,
commitments, goals, inter alia, all play their part in the scholarly analysis
and interpretation of a life. They are part of all investigation, all intellectual
activity, and spelling them out is essential if one is to attempt to understand
the great kaleidoscope that is one’s life. My commitment to the Baha’i Faith
supersedes any other identification of genre, nationality, race, culture, age,
inter alia and I approach this commitment, this identity, from a wide range
of perspectives which will unfold in a quite unsystematic way in the next
2500 pages. The practice of autobiography, of course, means different things
to different people. I would not want to limit the discussion of
autobiography to one approach, one theory, one model, even if that model is
my own. There are so many ways to skin a cat, as they say colloquially in
some places.
In the opening lines of the spiritual autobiography of one of the most social
of beings and arguably the greatest boxer of all-time, Muhammad Ali,
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writes: "During my boxing career, you did not see the real Muhammad Ali.
You just saw a little boxing. You saw only a part of me. After I retired from
boxing my true work began. I have embarked on a journey of love.”92
I feel
very strongly that the same is true of me; namely, that those who knew me,
saw a little of some social being, some part of me. I think this is largely true
of most of us. we have a social self. this book tries to get at some of the
other dimensions of the who that I am.
Pioneers in Canada for several hundred years before the word was first used
by the Baha’i community in the 1930s, were swallowed up by the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, the great Canadian wilderness, the frozen Arctic tracts and the
USA. In Australia there was a similar swallowing up process by means of:
the hot desert centre, the vast interior spaces, the surrounding oceans and
seas. The most ‘significant other’ in both these countries where my life has
been swallowed up, in a different sense, is the landscape. Visual
representations not language seems to be the most common window of
understanding in the consciousness of these two national groups.
92
Muhammad Ali, The Soul of a Butterfly: Reflections on Life's Journey
Summary, Hana Yasmeen, Bantam Books, 2004(1975).
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All of this is, of course, pure speculation. There are so many parallels I can
make in relation to both countries. The white populations in both countries
tend to congregate in a very few, relatively sizeable centres. Boundaries and
frontiers in the USA serve as limitations to be transcended or denied. In
Canada and Australia they are seen as dangerous places to be negotiated.93
The relationship between these general psycho-geographical characteristics
and my pioneering life will be elaborated on, unfolded, in the nearly 1000
pages which follow. What will also unfold, at least it is my hope, is what
American novelist Normal Mailer said is the purpose of art, an
intensification, an exacerbation, of "the moral consciousness of people."94
Some writers go so far as to say they are their country. The Irish writer Seán
O'Faoláin made this declaration in commenting on his autobiography.
Ireland was the central metaphor of his self. This may be even more true for
those living on islands; the concept 'island' implies a particular and intense
relationship of land and water. Allegorical and structural associations of
island characters become used for the reconstruction of people’s personal
93
Gaile McGregor, "A Case Study in the Construction of Place: Boundary
Management as Theme and Strategy in Canadian Art and Life," 2003:
www3.sympatico.ca/terracon/gaile_mcgregor/index.html
94
Norman Mailer in "A Review of 'The Time of Our Time', Roger Bishop,
Book Page, 1998.
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history and identity. The Irish professor in Aidan Higgins's novel Lions of
the Grunewald suggests, “the smaller the island the bigger the neurosis.”95
If
this has some truth, I may be protected from such a fate since I have lived on
only two islands, Baffin Island and Tasmania. Others emphasize the highly
ambivalent relationships between people and their island homes. My island
homes are large ones and my stay, thusfar, has been for short periods of my
life, ten years in total, unless of course one counts Australia itself as an
island. Structurally and thematically speaking, the motifs of 'leaving the
island' and/or 'returning to the island' seem to make for key scenes in a wide
range of autobiographies by islanders. There are the emotionally charged
events. This was not true for me given the short periods of residence thusfar
on the island of Tasmania. The emotional charge did take place for me
when I returned to Canada and to Western Australia. But more of that
another time.
I intend to take a line, an approach, from the Canadian writer Michael
Ondaatje, who said, in an interview with Gary Kamiya, that when he writes
he has no sense of what is going to happen next. Plot, story and theme
unfold. Ondaatje says that writing is a discovery of a story when he writes
95
Adrian Higgins, Lions of the Grunewald, Secker & Warburg, London,
1993, p.191.
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a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond
in the darkness, beyond where you're writing. This is the way it is for me
even when I have some broad outlines, outlines that are my life. For
Ondaatje writing novels doubles his perception, he says, because he is so
often writing from the point of view of someone else. To write about
oneself, he says, would be very limiting. To each his own, I suppose. If the
unexamined life was not worth living, if teaching one’s own self was not so
significant, if ultimately all the battles in life were not within, if it were not
important to understand our imperfections and be patient with our own dear
selves, if the source of most of our troubles are to be found in feelings of
egotism and selfishness, if the God within was not “mighty, powerful and
self-subsistent,” then this autobiographical pursuit might be in vain.
I also want to do what that popular English writer Kingsley Amis said he
wanted to do when he wrote: give shape to the randomness of life, to make
sense of things, to create and resolve some of life's enigmas, to give meaning
to the endless repetition in life, to the things we experience again and again,
a thousand and a thousand thousand times or in merely unusual
combinations of what is around us. Personal habit is an expression of this
repetition, laws of nature predict it, genes direct it, the edicts of organization
145

and state encourage it and universals, as William Gass puts it so nicely,
"sum it up."96
The exercise is somewhat like the work of Michelangelo with
marble. Always there is an unfinished struggle to emerge 'whole' from life's
block of matter.97
This autobiography is based, then, on what is often called the narrative
construction of reality. There is in life, in adulthood, a rich domain for
development and learning, a domain which recognizes the utility of
narrative. This work, this story of a life, is an experiment with
autobiographical form. It seems to me that in this work I forge a unique
non-fiction work which is many things at once: memoir, prose-poetry,
perhaps even song or rhapsody. I don't know, but I hope it both sings and
informs. One of my aims in writing this extended piece of narrative and
analysis is to find the most effective way to give this narrative theoretical
and practical interest for readers. Autobiographies are not, it seems to me,
inherently problematic, but they become so when tension results, as Graham
Hassall notes, "from differences between a writer's intentions and readers'
96
William H. Gass, The World Within the Word: Essays by William H.
Gass, A.A. Knopf, NY, 1976, p.112.
97
Malachi Martin quoted in Saul Bellow, op.cit.
146

expectations."98
Over a twenty year period now I have written five editions
of this work. Each edition explores the field of human development and the
uses of narrative. I would like this work to be as private, intimate and casual
as my poetry, not structured, not having an agenda. That's why I have not
planned this work. I hope that my endless analysing of my life, my society
and my religion is not too off-putting. I must admit, though, that analysis
and interpretation, the rehearsing of views and ideas, is part and parcel of my
very way of life and it is impossible for me to separate this tendency from
this autobiography. Like so many pleasures and talents we enjoy in life, it is
not an unalloyed blessing.
The famous American novelist William Faulkner once said in an interview
that when he found his poetry wasn’t very good, he changed his medium.
“At 21 I thought my poetry very good and so I continued to write it when
22, but at 23 I quit it,” Faulkner continued, “and found my best medium to
be fiction. My prose is really poetry.” Readers have been puzzled because
Faulkner makes the seemingly anachronistic comment of "My prose is really
poetry." He made the comment after World War II when all the society was
98
Graham Hassall, "Self and Society: Biography and Autobiography in
Baha'i Literature," Baha'i Library Online, 2004, p.4.
147

totally prosaic.99
Like Faulkner, I regard my prose and poetry somewhat
interchangeably. The work I do is for me really all a form of poetry. It
seems to me to be critically unclassifiable and resistant to being placed
under the care of any specific Muse, any genre.
But if there were to be only one Muse left of all the weary Nine for these
four epochs and the four before my time going back to 1844, I would have to
choose the Muse of Tragedy. This is the Muse who deals with the most
monstrous and appalling that life can offer, when it turns upon us its
Medusa-like countenance of frenzy and despair. This frenzy and despair is
that terror, that tragedy, which Nietzsche said allows us to gaze into its heart
without our being turned to stone by the gaze, the vision, the dark
catastrophes of our century that undermine creativity at its very roots. In an
age when the spirit of affirmation has almost been burned out of us, more
than ever we need what Nietzsche also called tragedy; namely, that ability
which is the highest art and that is the inner strength to say “yes” to life.
99
Watanabe Shinji, “A Poet Saved in The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner
Soaring Against Modernism,” The Faulkner Journal of Japan, Number
Two June 2000.
148

The mother of the Muses, or of the one daughter still surviving, is Memory.
We can not celebrate our existence simply by forgetting the terrors of the
recent past, ignoring those of the present or by turning our eyes away from
the possibilities of a frightening future. We must confront these terrors and
yet celebrate the joys of life in these epochal times. We must search out
causes, found our assumptions on the results of our serious search, energize
our emotions behind these assumptions and act. This memoir is part of that
acting—for me. For it is in these words, this language, that I have tried,
during several of these epochs now, these many years of my life, to write
poems. I do this in order to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I am,
where I was and where I was going, to chart my reality.100
Poetry helped rejuvenate my prose and now I see both as part of an
integrated whole. The comment I have quoted from Faulkner I could very
well apply to this narrative. Faulkner saw himself as a failed poet and kept
on writing poetry. I never experienced any popular success with my poetry,
but I found it useful as a form of literary expression and still do. Readers,
then, will find a good deal of it in this autobiography. Before I leave these
100
And so it was for Paul Celan, "Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the
Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” (1958), Collected
Prose, 1986, p.34.
149

references to Faulkner, though, let me add some of his words about
publishers because the experience I had was very similar—and different.
"One day," Faulkner said, "it suddenly seemed as if a door had clapped shut
silently and forever between me and all publishers' addresses and booklists
and I said to myself, ‘Now I can write.’"101
In the 1990s I had this same
experience and literally thousands of poems poured forth. Early in the new
millennium the internet opened its doors and I sent forth more ‘published
work’ than I could ever have imagined in the fifty years I had by then been
writing.102
I sew readers into the seam between two lives: on two continents, in two
marriages, in two cosmological worlds, in two stages of development. They
are lives which are tangled and in tension rather than in some form of
tightrope-walking or some razor-thin-sharp dichotomy. Some of my life is
untidy; some of my life results in dead ends; some follows paths to
unimaginable or imaginable new worlds. Some of what I write captures,
conveys, a clearly discernible script, some of which may have been
predestined, the script of fate. The narrative is, inevitably, incomplete, a
101
idem
102
The term ‘publishing’ refers to systematic posting of essays and, indeed, a
variety of other material on the internet, material like: emails/letters,
parts/chapters of books, et cetera.
150

half-life. There is much that has yet to be written, like a half-finished
portrait. It holds a promise and a potential which is always a mystery, at
best only partly known. Indeed, it is impossible to say it all and revision is
endless.
Hopefully this exercise will prompt readers to study autobiography and see
how it contributes toward the realization of a multi-disciplinary form of
learning in their own lives. It may be, though, that readers will see, as
Adriana Cavarero writes, that "to tell one's story is to distance oneself from
oneself, to make of oneself someone other."103
Some readers may also find
the process of writing autobiography pretentious or a somewhat artificial, a
little unreal, an externalization of inner and intimate, essentially private,
reflection. They may see biography as the appropriate, natural, act but not
autobiography.104
Seeing that denial, avoidance and selectivity are inevitable
in autobiography, readers often approach autobiography with a skeptical eye
and mind. Anticipating hagiography, the disembodiment of the authentic
person, readers feel deceit at every turn or only the partial uncovering of
truth. I write as I read, as deeply as I am capable, not to believe, not to
103
Adriana Cavarero, op.cit., p.84.
104
ibid., p.92.
151

accept, not to contradict, but to share in that one nature that is human,
universal and, like me, writes and reads.
While I must confess to harbouring elevated notions that I am conveying, at
least for the most part, the truth of my life, it seems to me that I am bringing
me into the world, calling it to my attention, as much as I am bringing the
world to me. Impressed by the depth and complexity of the writing of some
authors and the superficiality of others, I increasingly took pleasure in
exploring the richness of life and the mysteries of human character. Perhaps
I have an overactive hypothalmus or limbic system. I have absolutely no
idea. Perhaps it was pure desire, an intensity, that led to this work. In the
end, the activity is its own reward.
An autobiography is not the story of a life. More accurately, it is the
recreation, the discovery, of a life, in this case the life of a pioneer, a pioneer
who believed he brought a better order of society and an inner life,
something private, something that moved him confidently “in the direction
of his dreams.”105
I felt I was a type of pioneer that had a noble lineage in
both Baha’i society and in the secular society he was a part of. In Baha’i
105
Lewis Mumford, op.cit., p.256.
152

society the lineage of the pioneer extends back more than 70 years(1935-
2007) with a 90 year historical foundation before that(1844-1934). The
secular history of pioneering goes back at least to the renaissance and
reformation, if not long before that.106
What I do here in this work is arrange and rearrange things from this
blooming and buzzing confusion called life to give point and meaning,
direction, flow, ambience, simplicity and a certain coherence to complexity.
What I do is what culture critic and educator Edward Said(1935-2003) said
he was doing in his The World, The Text, and the Critic. "Texts have ways
of existing,” wrote Said, “that even in the most rarefied form are always
enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society; in short, they are in the
world, and hence worldly.”107
This idea is variously articulated as a motif in
my work--and Said’s. "The writer's life, his career, and his text," Said
remarks in his book Beginnings, "form a system of relationships whose
configuration in real human time becomes progressively stronger.” These
relationships become more distinct, more individualized and exacerbated
with time. In fact, one could go so far as to say “these relationships
106
The term ‘pioneer’ and its role in history could be extended back into the
first and second millennium BC.
107
Edward W. Said, The World, The Text and The Critic, p.35, 1983.
153

gradually become the writer's all-encompassing subject.”108
Said's work as
a critic emerges from his life as a dislocated Palestinian. Mine emerges from
my life as an international pioneer whose convictions are centred on a new
movement109
that claims to be the emerging world religion on this planet.
Some writers, some people, see pattern and meaning in history and some
don’t. But whether one sees some plan, some system, in the great gallery of
history or whether one doesn’t the death of 10 million people in some social
tragedy, people you've never met, does not have the impact of the death of
your sister? The newsworthiness of a handful of deaths in your hometown
rates more highly than millions in the next continent. Personal tragedy beats
impersonal holocaust every time. Propinquity is one of life’s core principles
if one is measuring significance and is a principle determining what to
include in an autobiography. This is the theme in Martin Amis’ Koba the
Dread.110
For this and for a host of other reasons this autobiography will
deal more with the personal than the social, more with the immediate
confines of my circle of activity and to a far lesser extent with the larger
108
Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, p.227, 1975.
109
The literature on New Religious Movements(NRMs) and New Social
Movements(NSMs) is now massive and in the years of my pioneer life they
have increased in number and variety.
110
Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Stalin and the Death of a Sister, 2002.
154

picture of world events. Amis’ book gives snatches of autobiography; my
book gives snatches of social and historical analysis.
This analysis exists in a world of what I might call poetic knowing. The
distinction between knowledge and poetic knowing resembles the distinction
between history and memory. Knowledge and history is essentially amoral:
events occurred and are behind us. Poetic Knowing and memory is
inextricably linked with morality. History’s source is event, but memory’s
source is meaning. Often what we consciously remember is what our
conscience remembers. Memory, like love, gains strength through
restatement, reaffirmation; in a culture, through ritual, tradition, stories and
art. Memory courts our better selves; it helps us recognize the importance of
deed; we learn from pleasure just as we learn from pain. And when memory
evokes consideration of what might have been or been prevented, memory
becomes redemptive. As Israeli poet Yehudi Amichai wrote: "to remember
is a kind of hope."111
I don't have to create my story ex nihilo and I don't create for the pure
pleasure I get in creating, in telling the story, although the pleasure I get in
111
Yehudi Amichai, quoted in D.M.R. Bentley, op.cit.
155

writing takes me, with the poet Paul Valery,112
a long way. Reading this
autobiographical work is somewhat like the experience many people have
when listening to a jazz performance. Whatever the musicians are playing,
you hear the melody and then it goes away or seems to. The musicians play
the overall work against the background of the melody or around the melody
or they take the melody off into another zone.113
Then the melody comes
back; listeners recognize it yet again amidst a world of other sounds. This, it
seems to me, is one way to see this long--and for me at least--stimulating
work. A central narrative thrust is reflected and recreated with ideas and
emotional content that take readers away again and again. Like the aural
idiosyncrasies of jazz and its spaces and places, my narrative has its own
idiosyncratic dimension and I provide the spaces and places for readers to
participate. There is a type of intimacy created, but not everyone appreciates
that intimacy; not everyone likes jazz and not everyone will like my work.
Melody is crucial to most music and it is crucial here if the reader is to find
pleasure in reading this work.
112
William Gass reports Valery as taking pleasure from his work in writing
more than in the product.
113
Nicholas F. Pici, "Trading Meanings: The Breath of Music in Toni
Morrison's Jazz,"Connotations, 1997/8, pp.372-398.
156

Most jazz music is created in bands: trios, quartets, quintets, etc. This
narrative work establishes some of this sense of a band or group by the
frequent references to the ideas and works of others that readers will find in
this text. As I write these words I see that there are about two references per
page, over sixteen hundred in an 1110 page text. The vehicle for this work
is thus enhanced, enriched, by the solo work of others, rhythm sections that
draw on several writers and thinkers and philosophers, etc. as
accompaniment. They add complexity, tension, different pulses, staggered
patterns, superimpositions, repetitions on a theme, similar statements with an
ever changing expression.
To continue this jazz metaphor briefly, I’d like to draw on the words of
Mark Isaac, a composer of jazz music.114
Isaac says that his extensive
improvising seems, to some listeners, like a hotch-potch. I’m sure some
readers here will find my work somewhat of a hotch-potch. Isaac says he
plays the music differently each and every time he goes about writing his
work. It keeps coming out differently. Some of the harmonies in jazz and in
my autobiography are obtuse; some are sharp. The melody line leaves
openings for just about anything to come in. There is great discipline and
114
Mark Isaac, “Interview on the Music Show,” ABC Radio National, July
31st, 2004.
157

much ease in the process of writing here and in the process of creating jazz
music, as well, says Isaac. It often takes weeks to get the music right he
argues; this work took twenty years to get it right, to get it into a form I was
pleased with.
I do not write from the margins of empire, from within a national culture or
even from an individualist perspective. I depict the family, the individual
and the state, the media and a host of leisure activities all as nexus points or
places of transfer in the formation of an international polity that is rushing at
us faster than we can comprehend.
Pleasure, I find, tends to help me take the ride of life and the ride of writing.
But, of course, there is more, for pleasure itself is never enough, never the
whole story. It occupies only part of life's experience. "Experiences," writes
that articulate psychohistorian Peter Gay, "testify to the uninterrupted traffic
between what the world imposes and the mind demands, receives and
reshapes." We construct our experience, says Gay, and that construction is
"an uneasy collaboration between misperceptions generated by anxiety and
corrections provided by reasoning and experimentation." There is more to
our ideas and actions than meets the eye. Our life, our experience, is at one
158

level simply what it seems to be. It is rooted in external reality. And it is
also, paradoxically, not what it seems to be. Much of our life is silent; it
seems to take place underground or in some inner ground. "We live in the
mind," as the poet Wallace Stevens put the human experience.115
This
autobiography tries to deal with both the obvious and the paradoxical. In
some ways, the word 'narrative' could be replaced or added to other words
like: view, claim, position, interpretation, world-view or even life.
I’d like to quote briefly from a poem by Wallace Stevens, one of the finest
poets of these four epochs and from one of his more famous poems. These
words from Stevens will illustrate something about what I am trying to
achieve in this memoir. Stevens writes:
. . . And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
115
Wallace Stevens in "They Have the Numbers; We the Heights," Harold
Bloom, Boston Review, 1993-1998.
159

Except the one she sang and, singing, made.116
Without going into an extensive analysis here, I would like to see my
memoir as one long song. It is the world for me; it is the one I sang through
words and I leave it to readers to make a tune of their own that they can
enjoy.
To give the word 'narrative' some kind of pristine prominence at the centre
of my claim to autobiographical authenticity, is too strong a position, a
direction, to suit my tastes. To do so may be impoverishing, pernicious, even
damaging psychotherapeutically. Even if, or as, I do centre this
autobiography on narrative I am conscious of changes I make to my past,
alterations, smoothings, enhancements, shiftings from the raw propositional
facts and contexts, all processes that may be neurophysiological
inevitabilities. Some analysts of autobiography would advise writers "that
the less you do the better."117
There is too in all this writing a strange
assortment of the satisfied and unsatisfied, the appeased and unappeased, the
reconciled and unreconciled. There is also intransigence, difficulty and
116
From “The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens.
117
Galen Strawson, "Tales of the Unexpected," Guardian Unlimited Books,
January 10, 2004.
160

contradiction. From time to time I try to tell what I’m on about, but it is
difficult to write a life.
Most pioneers, in both the secular world and the Baha’i community, have
exhausted themselves in external activity or filled their lives with events and
comings and goings that seem to leave, so often, just about always, no
record for future generations. This is not necessarily a bad thing; for we can
not all be good gardeners, cooks, car mechanics or, in this case, writers.
Over the years I have known many talented pioneers. But as a writer, my
task is different. I want to place my readers on a stage, swarming with detail,
dense with meaning; I want to give readers some of that constant sense of
things and ideas that exist outside themselves and outside myself in my time,
in these epochs, as Walt Whitman did when the Baha’i revelation was first
bursting on the world a century and a half ago.118
But these words are not the reality of my experience. The text is not the true
and only protagonist of this my finite existence. In the end, at the end of this
story, silence speaks; narration is suspended. My role as poet, historian and
storyteller comes to an end. In the book of history, a book of single and
118
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855. He worked on this book until he
died in 1892.
161

unique stories interwoven on the landscape of earth, I have made myself
into a narrator of a story. I am a protagonist, a pioneer, who has narrated his
own story and, in the process, rescued himself from oblivion. I have
configured my story in community. I do not swallow or erase the scene I tell
of, rather, I describe it, paint it, represent it. I make no claims to being an
omniscient narrator who is also inside the minds of my characters, although
I am certainly in the mind of one. I try to see the world as I see some of the
main players in this story and, as I do, I reproduce their separate streams of
consciousness.
My story does not take place on an imaginary landscape like Thomas
Hardy's Wessex, but it does reflect a fifty year experience as Hardy's did in a
different time and with a different pessimism and sense of tragedy than
Hardy's. It is an experience moderated by a phenomenon that has captured
my imagination for nearly fifty years and generated the spiritual nerves and
sinews to work as I have all my life for the unification of the peoples of the
world.119
Hardy and I share, too, a sense of human destiny or fate which can
not be deflected once a human being has taken the step which decides it. To
119
I have drawn here on a publication by the Baha'i International
Community Office of Public Information in New York entitled Baha'u'llah,
1991, p.1.
162

put it another way, if you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed
everywhere. Those were the words of Thomas Mann. You could even
smell that idea he said.120
In the westward expansion of Americans Richard Slotkin describes “the
power of nature to destroy a people's capacity for civilized sentiment and
social forms, in essence the power of the wilderness to kill man's better
nature."121
It was Slotkin’s belief that the frontier contained perils that
could entrap the would-be-hero and lay waste to the regenerative human
qualities that led to frontier advancement. I think a similar pattern exists in
the experience of Baha’i pioneers. I do not try to draw together all the
significant strands of thought and belief about the pioneer in the history of
Baha’i experience. Such an exercise is too large a task for this writer. The
history of the Baha’i pioneer that has developed thusfar in the first 162 years
of the history of this new Faith tends to concentrate those experiences in
what might be called a syndrome, a paradigm, a model, a typification of a
tale of a single hero. Such a syndrome presents that hero's life experience in
such a way that his audience could believe in and identify with him. The
120
Thomas Mann at: www.littlebluelight.com
121
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of
the American Frontier, 1600-1860, Wesleyan University Press,
Middletown, Connecticut, 1973, p.269.
163

paradigm, though, has been expressed in a wide variety of narratives during
this time. This narrative is but another example within the paradigmatic
story of Baha’i origins, origins rooted in pioneering.
Those who were the recipients of the Tablets of the Divine Plan, the North
Americans, have, throughout their history, exemplified a continuing urge to
chart new paths and explore the unknown. Of course, they are not unique in
this characteristic, but by the nineteenth century they represented one of the
most diverse cross-sections of humanity in the world. As I pointed out
above, I think Canadians have a different orientation to the charting, the
exploration, process than the Americans. The instinct that drove Lewis and
Clark to press across an uncharted continent and sustained twelve Americans
as they walked on the moon is reflected in the spirit that has moved Baha’i
pioneers since the Plans were initiated nearly seven decades ago. To put the
idea slightly differently: from the voyages of Columbus to the journeys on
the Oregon Trail and to the journey to the Moon itself, history proves that
humanity has never lost by pressing the limits of its frontiers. In 1958, the
then Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson boldly positioned space as the
primary concern of the Senate agenda. At the time I was just positioning
myself to put the Baha’i Faith on my agenda, perhaps not the primary item
164

at the time. My journey, my voyage, my path into this uncharted sea of
belief--uncharted by me--was just a view from the coastline at this stage and
a distant view at that.
The international Baha’i pioneer lives in a frontier society, rather than a
society in which the script has been written and the parts are assigned. His
is an improvisational theatre where people write their own parts within a
framework of values and beliefs. Anyone who can play a useful part,
whether conceived by someone else or by himself or anyone else, can play.
And it is important for pioneers to work out just what kind of useful part
they are to play. It can be a very liberating thing. Robert Zubin,
astronautical engineer and author of two books promoting the Mars program,
said that this liberating culture is “what we'll create on Mars.”122
The Baha’i is involved in a very progressive, innovative, branch of human
culture. It will produce conventions that will be useful on this planet just as
the inventions of Yankee ingenuity in a previous age were useful in Europe.
It is an example of a society that places a higher value on each and every
122
Robert Zubrin, Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization,
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam: New York, 1999; The Case For Mars, 1996.
165

person because each and every person is precious.123
Such is my view of the
Baha’i program and Robert Zubin’s view of the Mars space program has
some interesting parallels to my view.
But Mars is not, in fact, like the American frontier in any way. It's 150
million miles away and it has an atmosphere that is 7 millibars of CO2 so
that once you arrive on the surface there you would die instantly. It doesn't
have any of the qualities that the American frontier had, of individuals
deciding, say, in the Old World. It’s not the Mars program that is like the
American frontier-exploration paradigm. It’s the Baha’i program. Frontier-
exploration in space is seen by people like Robert Zubin as the foundation of
American exceptionalism in the 21st century. From a Baha’i perspective
this exceptionalism could be seen as being founded on America’s being the
cradle of the administrative order and the recipient of the Tablets of the
Divine Plan, the very foundation of the teaching plans.
Those who have worked, pioneering in the teaching field, in these last
several decades, and remained in-the-field for any length of time are
certainly pushed to their limits in their efforts to spread the Baha’i teachings
123
idem
166

among their contemporaries. The process is more psychological, though,
than physical, more subtle and mental than overtly dangerous and
threatening. A deep-space mission to Mars is a focus in this new century.
Like westward expansion in the USA this effort and journey in space will
spark creativity and imagination. This is also true of the pioneering
paradigm. Creativity and imagination are born in the process. Someday this
great international pioneering story, this diaspore of many decades, will be
told and it will illuminate what I am saying here in more detail. I sometimes
think Captain James Kirk’s familiar and now famous words on Star Trek
"Space: The Final Frontier” should read “The Baha’i Faith: The Final
Frontier.” My experience over the last half century often gives me the
feeling that pioneering this revolutionary Faith is like humanity’s venture
into space. It is going to take a long time and, even as we make a dint on
space’s horizon, there will always be so much more to explore. The world
the Baha’i is concerned with is to a significant extent, an inner one, an
infinite one. Not wanting to be too narrowly focused on the religion of my
choice, though, let me say that it is obvious that there are a host of frontiers
humankind entered just recently and they are going to keep the human race
occupied for some time to come.
167

This diaspora does not carve itself out on some pioneer trek like the Oregon,
the Santa Fe or the Cherokee Trail. It is not a clean-cut westward expansion
or an "over-the-mountain-pass" journey. Mine, like so many others, is a
heterogeneous mix of places from one end of the earth to another. Traces
here and traces there, unobtrusive, obscure, mostly unknown.
The corrupting influence of civilization as it was going through the dark
heart of an age of transition did not overcome the civility of culture in the
same way it did on the frontier in American and Australian society in the
18th and 19th centuries. In the wild West the slide into the depths of
inhumanity was one of its dominant patterns with violence, alcoholism and
different forms of depravity. Some people were strengthened by a process
that was slowly creating a new race of man diametrically opposed to and
different from the people in the European civilization that gave it birth. That
has also been the case in the Baha’i story. It is as difficult to describe that
process in the wild West as it is in Baha’i history and that is not my intention
here. I just wanted to intimate interesting parallels here; a detailed analysis
of this theme is beyond my purpose.
168

Autobiographers bring specific words to their narratives, words with great
explanatory power and emancipatory potential due to the traditions they live
and write within. "The tradition of all the dead generations," wrote Marx,
"weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."124
I'm not sure how
accurate this view is but, should this be the case, then the emancipatory
potential I speak of in relation to this autobiography may derive from this
reality. The Christian, the Moslem, the Marxist, the Baha’i, the secular
humanist, among a great many other traditions, reify special words that take
on very important meaning for them. Christ, Muhammed, class, freedom,
justice, Baha’u’llah, oneness: these are words which can not be divorced
from the narrative voice of their respective autobiographers. And so it is
that I have my special words, my special vocabulary which will unfold in the
pages ahead. The ideas and writings have been whispered in my ear so
many times that they have come to serve as maxims for my conduct and,
indeed, my imaginative life.
Poets who take their readers on spiritual journeys each have their own
special languages. Unlike the great medieval poet Dante Alighieri I do not
paint the hell I have experienced in colourful and lively imagery but, like
124
Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
169

him, I do have my metaphorical dark wood with its sinful aspects. Dante has
his virtuous non-Christians placed in Limbo. I have my virtuous non-Baha’is
whom I am not confident of placing in any particular theological abode.
Perhaps I should be confined to Dante’s second circle where “the lustful
were punished by having their spirits blown about by an unceasing wind.”
For I too have had my lust’s to battle with, lusts that one can find expressed
as far back as in Genesis and in the Epic of Gilgamesh in the first and
second millenniums BC.125
I always thought Dante was a little hard on
flatterers who were “mired in a stew of human excrement.”126
Dante is so
often ridiculed now and so might this work of mine be in the years ahead
even if my vocabulary is so very different than Dante’s.
I have written several editions of this work in the midst of a "series of soul-
stirring events" that celebrated the construction and completion of the
Terraces on Mount Carmel and in the first two decades of the "auspicious
beginning" of the occupation by the International Teaching Centre of its
"permanent seat on the Mountain of the Lord." I see my work, too, as a
spin-off, part of that generation of spiritual nerves and sinews that is the
125
"Pre-Classical Epic," HyperEpos: Epic on the Internet, February 28,
2004.
126
“Short Summary of Classic Notes,” Gradesaver, On-line Internet Site,
January 20, 2004.
170

result of "the revolutionary vision, the creative drive and systematic effort"
that has come to characterize more and more the work of all the senior
institutions of the Cause." This lengthy narrative is also my own humble
attempt to "comprehend the magnitude of what has been so amazingly
accomplished" in my lifetime and in this century just past.
What I write is part of "a change of time," "a new state of mind," a
"coherence of understanding," a "divinely driven enterprise."127
The story
and the meaning I give it are crucial to my life for, without them--story and
meaning--the days of my life would remain, would be, an intolerable
sequence of events that make no sense. They would be, at best, a dabbling
into things, a sort of entertainment, a search for fun in the midst of love and
work with their inevitable pleasures and frustrations. They would express a
kind of absurdity which many can and do live with; or like the writer
Herman Hess the dominant taste of life would be of "nonsense and chaos, of
madness and dreams" which he said is the content of "the lives of all men
127
The references here are to Universal House of Justice Letters: 16 January
2001, 14 January 2001, Ridvan 2001. It is not my intention to review the
major strands of the many letters of this elected body of the Baha'i
community; rather I intend a periodic reference to what is now a mass of
messages, letters and documents of various kinds.
171

who stop deceiving themselves."128
I would find this a sad and inadequate
philosophy, one I could scarcely bear and one I would find difficult to
journey through to the end.129
Telling a story of my life is like a natural
echo, an automatic repetition, a rhetorical sequence in the effort to define
and link my identity to who I am, to unfold the meaning of it all. In some
ways it is both more and less than telling a story. It is a conversation with a
diverse public: family, friends, the past and the future--and inevitably the
present. It is a conversation, an identity, shaped by the events of my time
among other forces.
Even with an overarching meaning that is a source of joy, of enchantment,
there is still sadness, chaos and absurdity in this conversation, this story.
Self-interrogation joins the self and produces the story of its life by
capturing what is basic about the whole thing, what is indispensable, what is
marginal and even superficial. The story of Jon Krakauer's climb to the
summit of Mt. Everest illustrates some of the irrationality, the absurdity, the
puritanical aspects of anything that is the passion of a life. He writes about
128
Hesse, Herman. Siddartha, Demian, and other Writings, editor: Egon
Schwarz, Continuum, NY, 1992, p.105.
129
Many modern thinkers, especially of the existentialist school, see the
world as essentially absurd, a shipwreck, impossible to comprehend, a
confrontation with nothingness and with ultimate meaning at best elusive.
172

his "belief in the nobility of suffering and work.....It defies logic."130
I find
this particular theme of profound significance which I may return to at
another time. Krakauer also writes, "I can't think of a single good thing that
came out of this climb." Even in my lowest moments, gazing retrospectively
at my life, I don't feel I can make this tragic claim for the climb that is my
life.
In the process of writing this autobiography I have come to see myself
somewhat like a jazz musician, as I have intimated above. Toni Morrison, a
modern novelist, said she saw herself like a jazz musician, as “someone who
practices and practices and practices in order to be able to invent and make
her art look effortless and graceful.”131
Another musical analogy to this
autobiographical process which I like is the music critic who has an
autobiographical orientation to his critical writing about music. Music, like
my life, is something I play again and again in my head on my mental CD or
LP in decades gone by. Music is particularly conducive to inspiring passion.
The reason for this is simple. Music lends itself to repetitive consumption. It
130
Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest
Disaster,
Villard Books, 1997.
131
Larry Schwartz, “Toni Morrison and William Faulkner: The Necessity of
a Great American Novelist,” Cultural Logic, 2002.
173

is unlikely that most people will read the same book, or watch the same
episode of a TV show, or see the same film more than five times. But one's
life especially different sections of it, is played virtually continuously,
repetitively, just like music, only more so. Each time one plays one's life,
like music, one finds similar points of attraction and differences. I like this
analogy of music to life; it is capable of endless permutations and
combinations of comparison and contrast. Only readers will tell of whatever
effortlessness and grace I have achieved in producing my music, whether it
charms and pleases them.132
Before leaving this musical analogy, though, I would like to draw on the
work of culture theorist Judith Butler who places a great emphasis on the
role that repetition plays in the stabilizing of identity. The basic premise,
Butler states amidst her complex language, is that identities are prone to
disintegrate unless they are reinforced regularly. The autobiographical
experience, like music, in its repetitive nature has this reinforcing nature,
reinforcing one’s sense of self through language, through sound. Repetition
is at the very centre of identity formation, at the centre of an endless
construction project. Just as songs "call" listeners to a particular identity, to
132
Charlie Bertsche, "Autobiography in Music Criticism," Bad Subjects:
Political Education in Everyday Life, June 1999.
174

explorations of the singers’ identity and its surrounding themes, this
autobiography "calls" me--or perhaps I call it! The therapeutic dimension of
autobiography arises for the writer in the act of writing and for the reader
when he or she feels the same or even a different "call."
I do not possess that encyclopedic interest that some seem to have in
absolutely everything. This encyclopedic interest was described by Mark
Van Doren in 1937 when the first Baha’i teaching Plan was being launched
in North America.133
Given the pervasiveness, the multiplicity, the vast
complexity, the multitude of academic and non-academic disciplines, the
great ocean of humanity and its immensity, it is only too obvious that I must
confine my wandering mind, and I do, in this autobiography. My interests
are wide but don't extend to everything in the encyclopedia. I find I must
focus my thinking on single points if I want my thought to “become an
effective force,” as ‘Abdu’l-Baha emphasized.134
I mention this theme, this
concept of focus, of limitation, several times throughout this work. The
material I write about is broad enough.
133
Mark Van Doren, “On Donald Colross Peattie,” in David Mazel, Op.cit.,
p.276.
134
‘Abdu’l-Baha, Selections, Haifa, 1978, p.111.
175

I mention, too, the private disorder and the public bewilderment of our
times, a subject which the generations I have lived and worked with tire of
as this bewilderment knocks them around and around, bit by bit over the
decades of their lives. I approach these concerns in a variety of ways and try
not to dwell on them. For this narrative is not a piece of sociology, politics
or economics. There is more of the personal, the literary, the humanly
human, here. Readers, though, especially those with a peculiarly forensic
mind, may still find this work far too rambling, with an under-belly that is
just too complex and detailed for their liking, too much work and not enough
payoff, not enough of the right kind of focused stimulation, the kind they get
on TV for example, to suit their tastes. The forensic mind is useful in the
who-dun-it detective stories and it is useful here, but it must persist in this
long work if it is to come up with useful clues for its existential angst, if it is
to derive the pleasure I know is there, the pleasure I find. For there is none
of the five steps to success, the simple aphorisms, the humorous quips that
attempt to plumb the realities of life by indirection, thus assuaging the angst
of the multitude and satisfying and appeasing the existential hunger.
Narrative or story construction is an increasingly influential and integrating
paradigm in psychology and the social sciences generally. The conceptual
176

foundations of a narrative perspective can be traced thematically and
contrasted with more traditional models of human psychological
functioning. Autobiographical memory, self-narrative and identity
development as well as narrative interpretations of psychoanalysis and
psychotherapy are all part of a relatively new field, arguably, since the 1950s
when I was first associated with the Baha’i Faith. Contributions from the
cultural and social constructionist traditions to narrative psychology are
relevant to my writing and the full weight of their implications are dealt with
in this narrative construction of the person that I am.135
Readers who find
the academic jargon a bit much from time to time are advised to simply skip
such parts and go on to areas more intellectually palatable. I often feel my
life is much more than the sum of its parts and should readers miss some
parts, I’m not so sure it will matter.
Recent advances in narrative research methodologies, particularly those
qualitative approaches which focus upon interview and other
autobiographical sources of data can be helpful. This autobiography does
not deal with all of these aspects of narrative or autobiographical
psychology. It draws to some extent on the academic, hopefully not too
135
The social, the cultural, construction of human beings is increasingly
emphasized in the literature of the social and behavioural sciences.
177

much, not too esoterically. I am only too conscious of the jargon of
academic discourse and of how unfamiliar terminology switches readers off
swifter than the twinkling of an eye. For I was a teacher for thirty years and,
by the time I retired from full-time teaching in 1999 and casual teaching in
2004, I could feel the switch-off process in its first few seconds of mental
down-turning with a class of students. The language of the last two
paragraphs here, I am only too aware, is pretty 'heavy.' I shall endeavour to
lighten up and keep the style and tone much less freighted with this
specialized language from the social sciences.
Much that is part and parcel of academic discourse is seen by the great mass
of humanity as unreality, just a lot of words. And I am sure that no matter
how I write this book many readers will find what I write as unreal, over
their head, too many words, too long, too heavy. To each his own. As T.S.
Eliot once wrote, the world can not bear either too much reality or too little.
But the pursuit of truth need not have the additional burden of the use of
complex language. I avoid it as much as I can. I am aware, too, that the
world finds much academic language quite incomprehensible. Millions of
people have become weary of a certain stock-in-trade of ideas, myths,
scenarios and problem/issue topics that have been discussed ad nauseam in
178

academic and non-academic literature, in the media and in private
conversation.
The process by which I work here, it seems, is much like what Gore Vidal
did in his 1995 memoir called Palimpsest: A Memoir. Vidal said he started
with his life, made a text, then wrote a revision--literally, a second seeing, an
afterthought--erasing some but not all of the original while writing
something new over the first layer of text. Vidal added that he found
discrete archeological layers of his life as he continued to excavate. The
process of excavation was like the archaeologist’s finding the different
levels of old Troy. At some point beneath those cities upon cities, it was his
hope to find “Achilles and his beloved Patroclus and all that wrath with
which the world began.”136
Such has been my hope and I have found a great
deal in the cities, the rag-and-bone-shop of my life. A finely tempered sword
was found in the darkness of its sheath; some foul dregs of impurity, too;
some rust on the heart and some fruits containing a divine and consummate
wisdom.
136
Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir, Random House, NY, 1995.
179

I assume that readers are more versatile, more limber, more educated and
want something fresh, some fresh language, something simple but
meaningful. But that is difficult to deliver. I think it can only be delivered
to a point. For much of life in the end, no matter how much we want to
simplify, is complex. "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make
simple-simpler and simpler," as Charles Fair once wrote.137
The world
abounds in Terrible Simplifiers. Fair called such simplicities “the new
nonsense.”
So much of our understanding of periods of history is limited "by the body
of texts which accidently survive."138
In the half century that this
autobiography is concerned with, 1953 to 2005, these limitations have been
largely lifted and humanity is now drowning in texts that are representative
of the times. Throughout history the voice of only a select group, usually
white adult males, can be found telling the story, the story of humankind.
Social and editorial conventions within which most public speaking and
published writing have taken place tended to mute everyone but this adult
137
Charles Fair, the New Nonsense: The End of the Rational Consensus,
Simon and Schuster, NY,1974, p.259.
138
A. M. Keith, "Review of John Winkler's Constraints of Desire: the
Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece," in Bryn Mawr
Classical Review, January 18, 2002.
180

male. These conventions have been crumbling during the epochs that are the
temporal frameworks of this work and this autobiography is, partly, a
testimony to this crumbling process. For Baha’is, like women, the
autobiographical voice is rarely singular, but instead exists in chorus within
a cluster of voices of other Baha’is.139
The whole idea of proper, responsible, academic autobiographies, operating
within acceptable limits and armed with all the usual gate-keeping
paraphernalia: academic standards, publication controls, peer reviews,
benchmarks, responsible and efficient methods in the wings and some latent
ostracizing power-what some call hidden mechanisms of ideological power
and control--seems to have disappeared in this field of autobiographical
writing if, indeed, it ever existed at all. In the massive quantities of
autobiography, at least in the last two centuries, the sustaining power of
some status quo has been fed through an umbilical cord that has
intravenously fed the past, present and future in such a variety of ways that
this status quo has a rich vein of expression. So it was that, by the time I
come along as the millennium was shifting, I felt free to present my
139
See ‘Introduction” to: Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women's
Autobiography, Editors: Lynn C. Miller, Jacqueline Taylor, and M. Heather
Carver, Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography, William L. Andrews, Series
Editor, 2003.
181

eccentric angles of vision, angles that have never been quite settled, never
fully accepted by me or others, never resting entirely comfortably in my
psyche, never quite at home and, as Rilke put it, angles that made me feel
like “a perpetual beginner”140
in my own circumstances.
The so-called rites of passage which come into all our lives in very different
ways are distinguished by formal, and usually very severe ordeals, exercises
of severance, whereby the mind is radically cut away from the attitudes,
attachments, and life patterns of the stage being left behind. This process
occurred in my life on several occasions each of which was followed by an
interval of more or less extended retirement, during which were enacted
rituals designed to introduce me to the forms and proper feelings of my new
estate with its unalterable marks indicative of my new role, my new status,
new patterns of socialization, folkways and mores. When, at last, the time
was ripe for me to return to my normal world, my original home and
landscape, I would have been as good as reborn. But I never returned.141
This
autobiography will deal with these rites de passage as I unfold the stages in
140
R.M. Rilke in “No Perfect Crime: Review of K. Jenkins, Refiguring
History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline,”(NY,2003), Digressus,
Vol.2, 2003, pp.5-10.
141
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Bollingen Series
17, Princeton, NJ, 1973, p. 10.
182

turn. I do not provide detailed pictures of all the shifts for there are too many
to outline in detail without leading to prolixity.
Given the plethora of books, journals, magazines and programs in the
electronic media, everyone turns to, turns on, finds and enjoys what they
prefer. Although I do not see myself as an elitist, I am inclined to think that
what I write here will probably appeal to no more than ten per cent of the
population and, it is my considered view, that during my lifetime, it will be
read by a coterie so small as to be statistically irrelevant. This would have
been true a hundred years ago, in 1905, as well. This is not a book for mass
consumption. I wish it were. I know of few people who read the Bible,
Shakespeare or any of the great poets for that matter. So if few people read
me, I know I am in good company. Everything written these days is for a
coterie except the literary products of celebrities and print and non-print
resources that have caught the eye of the electronic media. I am not
complaining. That is simply a reality of life.
It seems to me that, as W.H. Auden once wrote, the pleasure of readers and
any ensuing literary success gives but small satisfaction, a momentary
pleasure or a series of moments, to an author and his vanity or his idealism.
183

What is worth winning, Auden went on, was to be of use to future
generations in the inner sanctum of their thoughts, to be a hallowed
mentor.142
Although the society I describe here and my role in it will, in
time, be gone forever, something may indeed be left from accounts like the
one I provide. I like the emphasis Auden puts on the issues but, of course, it
is unlikely that I will ever know if I have been successful in the sense he
describes, certainly while I am alive. And not having tasted literary success
significantly, publicly, in this life thusfar, I do not know what the level of
satisfaction is that might accrue to my ego, my vanity and my idealism
should public success come my way.
I like to think, indeed I believe, that it is possible to reach the whirling mind
of the modern reader, to cut through the noise and reach that quiet zone. The
fact that the great majority of humankind will never read this book does not
concern me. If I can find a few in that quiet zone that will be a bonus. For
my real reward has been the pleasure I have found in writing this book in the
first place. I don't find any pleasure in gardening, in cooking, in fishing,
indeed, in a long list of things. Each person must find their own pleasures in
life. Sometimes pleasures can be shared and sometimes they can't. We all
142
W.H. Auden in W.H. Auden: Forewords and Afterwords, 1979, p. 366.
184

contribute, it must also be added, each in their own small way, to the big
picture that is history. This book is part of my contribution.143
For my part,
I fully admit to the vice of many a writer and autobiographer to pick the
things I find most interesting and challenging and write about them.
I think, like the biographer of ancient history, Plutarch, I am engaged in
writing lives--or a life--more than I am history. Sadly, too, like Plutarch, I
am only too conscious that “the most glorious exploits do not always furnish
us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men.”144
Often a matter of
much less significance, an expression or a jest will tell more of a person’s
character and inclinations than one’s great achievements, the major events or
the principle failures in life. And so it is that in this autobiographical work I
give my particular attention to the friction of anecdote, the arresting detail,
the turn of phrase, the inner life and private character, to elicit a certain
moral bearing, to bring a life and a time into a moral theatre and recapitulate
some of the events for the edification of others. Like Plutarch, I do not
eagerly or gratuitously display my defects or whatever misdeeds of
wickedness I displayed in my life. In this regard I show restraint in both the
143
Phillip Webb, "What are You Studying History?" Access: History,
Vol.3.1.
144
Plutarch quoted in Lives of the Mind, Roger Kimball, Chicago, 2002,
p.22.
185

display of virtuous character, which others may not want to emulate or
imitate, and the display of what is not so virtuous.
For many the threat of death multiplies stories of life; for others it is the
simple opportunity to tell an interesting story and tell it well, with or without
a moral. For still others it is love for some other: friend, loved one,
community. This is a difficult question for me to answer: why do I write this
story? There are probably many answers I could give but the one that
comes most readily to mind is: to play my part in contributing to an ever-
advancing civilization. This sounds somewhat pretentious but, however
over-the-top it sounds, it honestly expresses the big-picture, the motivational
matrix of my narrative, my metanarrative. I've liked this somewhat elusive
phrase since I first came upon it in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
I sense in what I write a destiny that proceeds through the events and
occurrences of my days. It is a unique destiny; it is partly unmasterable; it is
unrepeatable; it is the course my life traces. Some have called this their
destiny, their daemon. There is clearly in all our lives something we cannot
refuse. Perhaps it is the price we pay for our life. Of course, my story, like
186

that of all authors is “conjugated within a geography of social
relationships”145
and it possesses a fragile reality. This fragility is implicit in
the words of historian Henri Lefebvre’s characterization of "The Home as
nothing more than a historico-poetical reality.”146
Space, landscape, where
we live our lives, Lefebvre emphasizes, is a product of “the perceived, the
conceived, and the experienced.” That it is best expressed in historico-poetic
terms is, in fact, one of the underpinnings of this work.
The myriad spaces and places where I have lived and had my being,
heterogeneous relational spaces, have played an important role in producing
the self that I am inasmuch as I have experienced them so differently.147
For
the places and their spaces I have lived and worked in have been both haven
and cage, source of solace and anxiety, peace and psychological warfare, my
bedrock, my identity, ambiguity and anguish. I try in this book not to get
too caught up in the many microcosms of my life, their interstices and
accompanying relationships. Such analyses are a dime-a-dozen and can be
read in many other places. I try to follow the advice of ‘Abdu’-Baha here:
145
Philippe Lejuene, in Autobiography and Geography: A
Self-Arranging Question,Frédéric Regard.
146
Henri Lefebvre, “Produire L'espace,” Anthropos,1974, p.143.
147
Edward Soja,Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in
Critical Social Theory, Verso, London and New York,1989, p.23.
187

“laugh at our coursings through east and west...Let us not keep on
forever.....with our analysing and interpreting and circulating of complex
dubieties.....let us not make known of our sufferings nor complain of our
wrongs.”148
In each location there is a more porous, floating exchange
between the self that I was and am and the self that I became. The two
bodies overlap and merge in some ways and they separate in others.
I can interpret my life and try to explain it; I can search out its unity in the
events of my life or the hidden substance, the soul, that dwells with this
body in some mysterious, indefineable way. I can look inside it and excavate
its appearances, discover its interiority and, in the process, hopefully bring
my readers closer so that they see me as more like them, more of a friend.
But no matter how I examine it in all its complexity and simplicity, I only
partly control it, plan it, decide it and make it. There is much that is simply
uncontrollable, that has no author, that is solely in the hands of God or what
might be called those mysterious dispensations of Providence. As Producer
and Director Who defines the mise-en-scene, Who sets the stage and the
choreography, He provides the context in which many lives intersect and
mine is but one.
148
‘Abdu’l-Baha in Selections From the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Baha,
Haifa, 1978, p.236.
188

My life does not result from a story, although some students in this field
believe that it does. This story results from my life. Unscripted, flawed and
plausible, this life can not be lived like a novel or a movie. There is no
"choiceless invulnerability"149
in our lives as there is in the edited and
celluloid safety of lives on film in what Roger White calls that choiceless
tedium of their impeccable heroes. But still there is, for the Baha'i, some
plan, some form, some idea, some centre, to focus the dazzling and frenetic
blooming and buzzing confusion of existence. There is a panorama, a
megavision, which for the Baha'i adds an incomparable power of
intellection. It provides a bird’s-eye view which Baha'is can assume in an
instant, in a lifetime, for their own. It gives them the world to read and not
just to perceive.
As Emerson once observed, even for the hero, for those animated by a
passion and a plan, life has its boredom, its tedium, its banalities.150
Even
with all the plans and programs, there are barricades in the way of the Baha’i
149
Roger White, "A Toast to the Hero," A Witness of Pebbles, George
Ronald, Oxford, 1981, p.106.
150
Ralph Waldo Emerson in Howard Mumford Jones, Atlantic Brief Lives:
A Biographical Companion to the Arts, ed. Louis Kronenberger, Boston:
Little, Brown, 1971.
189

who is also an autobiographer, barricades that prevent his understanding. His
passionate convictions and the historical experience that forms these
convictions, are, as Eric Hobsbawm puts it, part of these very barricades.151
The road to understanding is not always smooth and untroubled.
In my copy of God Passes By, the 1957 edition which I purchased in the first
year of my pioneering experience, 1962, I have written many quotations
from Gibbon and commentaries on Gibbon. I wrote the quotations on the
blank pages at the beginning and the end of the hard-cover volume I own.
There is one quotation, I think it is from J.W. Swain, which goes: "history is
an endless succession of engagements with a past in which the dramatis
personae were never able to fathom, control and command events."152
This
could equally be said of autobiography. Roy Porter also writes that
"diligence and accuracy are the only merits of an historian of importance."153
While these qualities are certainly of benefit to the autobiographer, the
ability to write well and in an interesting way is paramount or no one will
ever read his work. Gibbon became important to me because of his
151
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-
1991, London, Michael Joseph, 1995, p.5.
152
J.W. Swain, Edward Gibbon the Historian, 1966, p.70.
153
Roy Porter, Edward Gibbon: Making History, Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, London, 1988, p.12.
190

importance to the Guardian and his importance to an appreciation of the
great beauty and complexity, subtlety and power, of English.
There are other quotations which I have written on the blank pages of this
great book by Shoghi Effendi, quotations which apply as much to this
narrative as to Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Gibbon's work, writes Keith
Windshuttle, is a demonstration that much of history is driven by the
influence of unintended consequences, chance and a human passion which
"usually presides over human reason."154
My own work, while finding no
conflict with Gibbon's words, demonstrates in addition, I like to think, a
Baha'i philosophy of history "which has as its cornerstone a belief in
progress through providential control of the historical process."155
But
neither is man "a thrall to an impersonal historical process."156
He must deal
with the forces of fate, perhaps battle with his fate, as Nietzsche once put it,
with his socialization and the free will with which he has been endowed.
Perhaps, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he will come to have a great influence
154
Keith Windshuttle, "Edward Gibbon and the Enlightenment," The New
Criterion, Vol.15, No.10, 1997.
155
Geoffrey Nash, Phoenix and the Ashes, George Ronald, Oxford, 1984,
p.89.
156
Nash, op.cit. p.94.
191

on his age.157
Perhaps, like Solzhenitsyn or, perhaps, like Xavier Herbert, he
could write for sixteen hours a day to tell his story.
He must battle, too, with a prophetic view of the modern age which can only
be "proved" in part and which can be so variously interpreted that agreement
is difficult and often impossible to forge among the children of men. The
story of personal development, like that of artistic change, is not one of
progress, like the development of tools, alphabets, or air conditioners; rather,
this development embodies the unique expressions of individual souls
situated in their own ages, responding to and emerging from the mesh of
experiences and cultural habits unique to them.158
That unique emotional
expression, which constitutes the expressive genius of the individual,
speaking out from his own place in the world and in history, is what
constitutes art--not a checklist of mimetic requirements--and is at the heart
of the story of my personal experience. It is not so much my desire to
change the world, an elusive exercise at best, it is rather my desire to make
sense of it that is the aim of my expressive force and purpose.
157
D.M. Thomas, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, Alfred A.
Knopf.
158
Susannah Rutherglen, "The Philosopher in the Storm: Cultural Historian
E.H. Gombrich's Troubled Achievement," The Yale Review of Books, 2003.
192

With David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, and with Edward Gibbon,
I have come to regard my life and, indeed, all of history, "as a drama of
human passion." For human passion is many things, some associated with
sexual love and others with strong emotion and belief. The former
perpetuates the species, is a source of immense pleasure and, for me, for
most of us, many problematics; the latter is the motivational matrix behind
so much of action. Passions are timeless and the circumstances in which
they occur are never the same. Beliefs, on the other hand, especially a belief,
a commitment, to a new religion, are seen by most, most of those who were
part of my life in some way, as a strange exoticism, at best a movement that
impressed them and at worst one that was simply not for them. I have often
been an outsider, but one learns as far as possible to make both yourself and
others feel at home.159
My task became to win friends and influence people,
to get on some inside, so to speak.
There have been two ruling passions in my life: the Baha'i Faith and learning
and the cultural achievements of the mind. I find Abraham Maslow's theory
of the hierarchy of needs, which he elaborated during the Ten Year Crusade,
159
Udo Schaefer makes this point in the opening sentence of his
Imperishable Dominion, George Ronald, Oxford, 1983, p.1
193

goes a long way, at least for me, toward integrating into a helpful
perspective my various human needs and passions, desires and wants, which
we all have in varying degrees. I won't outline this theory here because any
reader can learn about Maslow's theory with a little effort. The erotic, for
example, which has been a strong need/passion in my life and requires a
separate story all its own to go into the detail this need warrants, fits nicely
into Maslow's first level of needs: what he calls physiological needs. I have a
health problem, relating to the physiological needs of my neurological
system. The several manifestations of manic-depression relate to the failure
to satisfy this need. Maslow's theory is, I find, explanatory, and I leave it to
readers to relate Maslow, his theory and his ideas to their own lives: their
needs and passions, wants and desires. I could go into an elaborate
explanation of my own experience drawing on Maslow. But that is not my
purpose here. There are, in addition, other theorists of personality and of
human development who are helpful for autobiographers and I mention them
from time to time in the course of this text. With more than eight hundred
pages left to read, only readers who persist with this narrative will be
exposed to the various theorists I draw upon to give text and texture to this
my life.
194

As self-representation, autobiography is perhaps uniquely suited to validate,
to explain and analyse, the experience I have had with my bi-polar disability
and to counter stereotypical representations which I find arise, in some ways
quite naturally, in the course of my life.160
But this work is not so much an
attempt to justify myself before the court of life, so to speak. If this work is
ever read to any significant extent, I will be gone to the land of those who
speak no more and self-defence will hardly matter then, at least not to me.
This work is, rather, a representing of myself to myself and in doing this,
others may find that the content and process I go through is useful for them
as they go through the process of self-understanding.
Power, inner strength, identity, is in some ways re-achieved in this narrative
of myself after it had been sucked out of me by the demands of life by the
time I came to write it in my late fifties. Self-narrative, say some students of
autobiography, is a tool used to gain self-determinacy. In this "illness
narrative" which Pioneering Over Four Epochs is to some extent, there is an
act, a story, of becoming and re-becoming. Through self-narration I re-make
myself, re-fashion and re-invent a new understanding of myself. With my
story, I try to resist the disabling definition of mental illness or manic-
160
G. Thomas Couser, "Disability and Autobiography: Enabling Discourse,"
Disability Studies Quarterly, 17.4 (1997), p.292.
195

depression. I try to write, reexpress, these pejorative terms into a rhetorical
normalcy which I hope will play a small part in society achieving a real
understanding and acceptance of this illness in everyday social life.
Narrative is used as a tool, a technology, that is intended to be a vehicle to
freedom, self-definition, and self-expression. My character has been
reshaped by the integration of modern medical technology(medications)
with my body.161
Without these medications, this narrative would assume
quite a different trajectory. Living my daily life, again and again, I
establish, I create, through the simple act of repetition the medium of my
becoming. The story is long--and some of it is here.
I build a narrative out of individual agency, the agency of my own actions,
the surprises, the events, "the shadows on the high road of an inevitable
destiny,"162
and my own sometimes peaceful and secure world, but like
Edward Gibbon, "the sheer accumulation and repetition of events"163
and the
unprecedented tempest of my times, in the end, leaves the reader, I am
161
Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics,
Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1995, p.159; Mark Mossman, “Acts of
Becoming: Autobiography, Frankenstein, and the Postmodern Body,”
Journal of Postmodern Culture.
162
George Townshend, "Introduction," God Passes by, Wilmette, 1957, p.
iii.
163
J.A.S. Evans, "The Legacy of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall:
Lecture," American School of Classical Studies, Athens, 1998/9
196

inclined to believe, with patterns and processes, ideas and ideals, philosophy
and analysis and a much bigger picture than an isolated, an individual life.
And I, along the way, experience an element of surprise. I don't look for it or
even anticipate it. It seems to come along like a bonus, the way flowers grow
in a garden and one enthuses over them with friends.164
But the book, this
book, as Proust argued, is "the product of a very different self" than the one I
manifest in my daily habits, in my social life, in my vices and virtues.165
The
self that writes is a mysterious entity that no amount of documentation can
take the reader into. In the end this autobiography must remain incomplete,
not because it does not tell all the facts--which is impossible anyway-- but
because it deals with a mystery, a human being.
Those things we call interviews, conversations recorded for the public and
found in the print and electronic media by the multitude, while not entirely
superficial and valuable in their own right for information and entertainment,
for the quirks and friendships laid out for us, do not deal with the innermost
self which can only be recovered or uncovered by putting aside the world
and the social self that inhabits that world. "The secretions of one's
164
The great Indian writer and lifetime devotee to English prose, V.S.
Naipaul, talked about this element of surprise in his Novel Lecture in 2001.
165
Proust quoted in Naipaul's 2001 Nobel Lecture.
197

innermost self," says Naipaul quoting Proust, "written in solitude and for
oneself alone" are the result of trusting to intuition and a process of
waiting.166
In time, with the advance of years, I will come to understand
what I have written, although even then not fully.
If the autobiographer is sensitive to the processes of minute causality, he
will slowly and inevitably come to see that behind each fact there is a
"swarming mass of causes on which he could turn the historical
microscope."167
The fragmentary, ambiguous and opaque material of our
days makes it difficult to wield the pen with any kind of authority over our
lives. What started off with a sense of my authorial imperium, as was the
case at the start of writing this autobiography in the early 1980s, is often the
case with writers and was also the case with Edward Gibbon. Such a feeling
of literary authority often results, though, over the long stretch of writing in
an increasing vulnerability.168
Egotism, energy and a will to power are all
required to sustain a long piece of writing like this. Such qualities are not all
a writer needs to create a literary presence, but they are essential. I would
use the word power but not authority. As Richard Sennett wrote in his
166
idem
167
David Womersley, The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1988, p.184.
168
ibid., p.181.
198

brilliant analysis of authority: "authority is an act of the imagination, it is a
search for solidity and security in the strength of others.”169
Although this
work is certainly an example of the former, it does not possess any of the
capacity to bind, to bond, people together. Power is quite an ambiguous
word as used in the social science literature. It’s use is so ambiguous I am
happy to coopt it, to use it in association with my writing, as I proselytise for
my vision using my life as a vehicle.
There is some degree of frustration in trying to put words behind the elusive
complexities of life and the multitude of unfocussed and divergent aspects of
one's days. Giving life a unity of form, a unity of literary expression, can
beat the best of them. One toils with a performance that struggles endlessly
with ideal. I may generate a powerful impression of sequence and it
certainly does exist behind the pages of this narrative. But readers may also
find that there is just too much to be contained by their intellect in a
narrative that contains such frequently competing claims of evidence and
experience and such a variety of standpoints. My imagination is always
active to enlarge the narrow circle in which nature and circumstance confine
169
Richard Sennett, Authority, A.A. Knopf, NY, 1980, p.199. The
qualities one brings to writing, to this writing, is a subject unto itself and it is
not my desire to go into the subject too deeply at this point.
199

it. And enlarge it I do, perhaps by "the revelation of the inner mysteries of
God,"170
mixed with that “obscuring dust”171
of acquired knowledge. It is
often difficult to know what is revelation and what is dust, although
intuition’s unreliable guide often gives us a feeling of certainty. And there is
much, too, that eludes the net of language no matter how active the
imagination.
Millions of human beings in the years at the background of this
autobiography came to find in cinema insights into their personal life-stories
by observing directors' insights into themselves or their society. Perhaps this
is partly because in the last century the fusion of the arts, the sciences and
technology has been so seamlessly institutionalised by the cinema.
Competing world views are fused and inscribed on human consciousness by
skilled film directors. Some film directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
to choose one of many, offered film goers a cinematic persona that reflected
their own personality. Fassbinder’s films are autobiographical in the sense
that they attempt to confer shape and meaning on a chaotic life and a
scandalous society, on a catastrophic social and political environment. As
Fassbinder said in an interview his films "always place himself at the
170
Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, 1956(1939), p. 264.
171
idem
200

centre."172
This literary work Pioneering Over Four Epochs, like Fassbinder's
work in cinema, tells of my experience. Other people, other Baha'is,
inevitably have a different setting for their lives but, ultimately, there is a
sameness, a strong similarity. Like Fassbinder, I tell my story very
personally but I give it, as best I can, a universal context.
Film directors all have their signature; no matter how they like the work of
other directors, they try to tell their own story in their own way. The
generation of important American directors who came of age in the late
1960s and early 1970s: Scorsese, Spielberg and Coppola, among others,173
just after I came of age in the mid-sixties, have told their story citing the
influences on their work. So, too, have I told mine in a work that has
burgeoned to over 850 pages. The autobiographical documentary film, in
TV and on radio, with its themes of self and identity, like autobiography in
print, has been a fascination to western film-makers, to journalists,
172
Rainer Fassbinder in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays,
Notes, editors, Michael Toteberg and Leo Lensing, The Johns Hopkins UP,
Baltimore, 1992, p.41. Fassbinder was a director of films in Germany after
WW2.
173
Robert C. Sickels, "A Politically Correct Ethan Edwards: Clint
Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales, (Retrospectives)," Journal of Popular
Film and Television, Winter, 2003.
201

producers and directors since those late sixties.174
Like Jim Lane's book,
which shows the significant role of autobiography in the history and culture
of our time, at least in the last three decades,175
I like to think that my book
will play a useful role in understanding how autobiography can assist in
illuminating the collective experience of a generation within the Baha'i
community, the history and culture of that community and the experience of
one individual within it over the last four epochs. The generation that came
of age in the sixties was the most affluent, well-fed, well clothed in history
but they had, as writer Doris Lessing has frequently pointed out, their own
particular and quite severe anxieties and maladjustments resulting from the
two greatest wars in history.176
There is one particular theory of film making called radical constructivism
which I mention here because it, too, has some interesting similarities to the
way I am going about writing my memoir. To the radical constructivist
knowledge is actively built up by the knowing subject. It serves to organize
experience, to construct knowledge. Such is the way I have constructed my
174
Jim Lane, “The Autobiographical Documentary in America,” Wisconson
Studies in Autobiography, 2004.
175
Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk:Genres of Crisis in Contemporary
Autobiography.
176
Doris Lessing, “An Interview With Doris Lessing,” Bookforum, Spring
2002.
202

autobiography building layer on layer, assimilating, accommodating,
adapting. What I construct is less than the past and possesses an
“epistemological fragility.”177
It is an explanation of the present in terms of
the past. Facts about the past are elements of the observer’s experience.
This autobiography has my signature and no matter how much I borrow and
blend, copy and plagiarize,178
I draw the lives and experiences, the ideas and
concepts of others making them into my own unique recipe. In the details I
can not and do not imitate even if I use some of the same ingredients and
even if I sometimes borrow with appreciation. I adapt to fit my particular
constellation, my interpretation, of reality. No matter how much I draw on
the views of others and I do extensively, in the end, as Yale professor Harold
Bloom argues, "there is no method except yourself."179
I react differently,
from time to time, from year to year, sometimes with more spontaneity or
177
Nick Redfern, “Realism, Radical Constructivism and Film History,”
Essays in Philosophy, Vol.7, No.2, June 2006.
178
I've always appreciated the words of T.S. Eliot on plagiarism, namely,
that "great poets plagiarize" and call what they borrow their own out of a
sense of gratitude. Great poets Eliot said "make men see or hear more" and,
finally, "the claim to be a man of letters is a modest pretension." There is
certainly in this work what I would call "a modest plagiarism." See T.S.
Eliot, To Criticize the Critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1965, p.134.
Perhaps, though, with more than 1600 references my plagiarizing is not so
modest. I try to strike a fair and moderate 'middle ground.'
179
Harold Bloom in "Colossus Among Critics," Adam Begley, New York
Times On the Web, 25 September 1994.
203

more reserve, more adventurousness or more caution. I create my own
personal world, tell of my own emotional and intellectual cells and their
depths. I hope they resonate with readers; I hope they sensitize readers--at
least a few. For what is involved here, in addition to the articulation of some
of the core parameters of community, is that "introspective consciousness,
free to contemplate itself"180
or a seeing things with one's own eyes and
hearing things with one's own ears which Baha'u'llah links with justice and
which I refer to several times throughout this text.
Just a final note from one of the interviews with Fassbinder. I include it
because I think film, philosophy and autobiography have, or at least can
have, one thing in common and that is the world.181
Their mutual
interrelations are complex and, as Andrew Murphie puts it, hectic and in
need of mutual nurturing. He was asked if film making was "a sort of love
substitute." His response was that his first take "was more fantastic that the
most fantastic orgasm....a feeling indescribable."182
The finished product, the
film we see, is indeed a collage. Sometimes, if not frequently, the visual
immediacy of film prevents reflection. All the takes are the materials that
180
idem
181
Andrew Murphie, “Is Philosophy Ever Enough?” Film-Philoosphy, Vol.
5 No. 38, November 2001. Murphie makes this same point.
182
Rainer Fassbinder, op.cit., p.71.
204

have to be reduced and assembled to form the coherent whole of the film. It
is this that eventually comes to be the final art-product ready to come to life
in the perceptions of viewers.183
The other finished product, this
autobiography, also involves reduction and an assembling of material to
form a coherent whole, but there are no problems of visual immediacy.
There are no problems either of the collaborative nature of film making. For
the most part, autobiography is a solo event.184
Although, like film, the
credits could go on for many minutes--even hours in the case of
autobiography. Of course, who would stick around to read such a list of
credits, a list, for the most part, totally meaningless to most readers.
The deciphering, the study, of history, a gratingly slow process of
negotiation and disagreement, a process in which the content often becomes
more complex the more one knows, is replaced in our time for most people
by a media blitz on certain events. All we want to know about massive
cultural memory haemorrhages like the Holocaust, D-Day, various
assassinations, etc. can be squeezed into three-hour media bursts, convincing
183
Alexander Sesonske, “The World Viewed,” The Georgia Review, 1974,
p. 564.
184
Although, when an autobiographer has nearly 1400 references and fills
his narrative with many a person, it is difficult to call the exercise “a solo
event.”
205

because of their technical brilliance, their ability to elicit emotions and to
create in the viewer the conviction that the truth has been determined and
can now be shelved—we are at last done with those crises. With so much
now to reflect upon and so little time to reflect and reconsider, we leap
instead from event to event, frantically memorializing--if not remembering--
what the past means: a world war, the death of a celebrity, the death of a
president or the child of a revered president all carry the same valence.185
Around us is a texture of memories, real and prosthetic, produced for us and
by us. We have turned the potentially enriching memory devices in our the
industrialized world: television, radio, film, video, the internet--into
answering machines that, on demand, spool out rote solutions, examinations
of complex issues, a plethora of information for the ontological,
epistemological and existential issues that produce both life’s dread and
life's pleasure, that are anodynes of cultural forgetfulness and stimulus to
investigation and understanding. Again and again we have sketched before
our eyes and ears, in
185
Tim Blackmore, "High on Technology; Low on Memory: Cultural Crisis
in Dark City and The Matrix," Canadian Review of American Studies,
Volume 34, Number 1, 2004.
206

luminous outlines and close detail, the pressures that act to produce some
element of history or contemporary society, some set of agreed-on
perspectives. And all of this exists as part of a pattern of private withdrawal
which is "as obscure in its psychology as it is apparently transparent in its
external shape"186
and is more reported on than experienced.
One analyst put writing in the same context as making love. Orgasms are
shortly lived experiences and peak experiences are common in writing, at
least for some writers; love relationships are complex in different ways to
writing, even if one forgets about orgasms and focuses on touching and
hugging, gentleness and kindness. Writing and love, it seems to me, have
many similarities. Writing goes on for years, for a lifetime like a permanent,
long-term loving relationship in marriage. Writing often has a short duration,
is episodic, like most of the relationships we have in life. The passion of
writing obviously lasts far longer than any single erotic act or collection of
them, at least for those writers who keep at it over their lifetime. Both
writing and love-making chart the intersection of multiple and often
contradictory points of view, different concepts of community and
interpersonal understandings and levels of social integration. At one level it
186
Martin Pawley, The Private Future, Thomas and Hudson, London,
1973, p.13.
207

all seems so easy, so natural, so organic, love-making and writing that is. At
another level both processes are complex, a source of both angst and
pleasure and both can, in the end, come to nothing.
I should add, too, in this connection, that memory is filled with images of
the nonself, with all sorts of things from the physical, human and religious
worlds and a multitude of disciplines that attempt to assimilate this
information and these images and these memories enrich and frustrate,
deepen and accompany both love and writing. To put some of this another
way: in The Ethics of Ambiguity Simone de Beauvoir argues that we are
born in the midst of others without whom the world would never begin to
take on meaning.187
For me, writing helps me make of the world much more.
For writing helps me to fertilze the solitude that, as Beauvoir adds, is as
essential as interrelationship.
Poets, writers and many others, often turn away from the world of objects in
their jouissance and they rediscover the non-self within the self; or to put
this idea more concretely, self and world are rediscovered in a richer
187
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman
(Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1975), p. 18. This book was first
published as _Pour une morale de l'ambiguote, Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
208

symbiosis. "It is in themselves," as Leo Bersani writes, "that their insatiable
appetite for otherness is satisfied."188
This idea is a complex one; perhaps it
is just another way of saying the cultural attainments of the mind, that first
attribute of perfection as 'Abdu'l-Baha calls it,189
have more lasting power
than anything associated with the physical.
Of all the great fictional heroines in literature Emma Bovary, in the famous
novel of Flaubert Madame Bovary, is probably the one about whose
appearance readers are most likely to disagree. We cannot, as with Dickens,
refer to some foxed engraving in an early edition, since Flaubert hated and
forbade illustrations of his works. In my case I say little about my physical
appearance: in my childhood, my adolescence and in my early, middle and
late adutlhood. Keen biographers, if any should arise, can examine the
many photograph albums I have left behind should my literary executors
find it within their power, interest and talent to preserve them from the
memorabilia that is extant on my eventual demise.
188
Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, Harvard UP, London, 1990,
p.74.
189
'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p. 35.
209

I should say at the outset that this book will contain an autobiography,
several essays about autobiography and generous helpings of poetry. I have
come to see my individual poems as part of one long epic poem and it is my
hope that this epic will come to have something more than just a localised
and purely antiquarian appeal. Great poetry has been and will continue to be
written about private life: such was the view of John Crowe Ransom,
arguably the greatest twentieth century poetry critic.190
But I would add that
poetry is at its grandest when that private domain is linked to some lofty
purpose. For me there are several lofty purposes here. The general
principles of the subject of autobiography are, as yet, hardly agreed on by
either practitioners or theorists of this embryonic discipline. Perhaps these
principles never will be. I'm not sure it matters.
I find the following definition of epic one which I have come to appreciate
and one which applies to some of my work. An epic is "a poetic narrative of
length and complexity that centres around deeds of significance to the
community."191
I do not see epic as Aristotle did in absolute terms of fixity
190
See: Michael Lind, “Comment: Our Country and Our Culture,” The
Hudson Review, Vol. LIV, No. 4, Winter 2002.
191
James V. Morrison, "A Review of margaret Bessinger, Jane Tylus and
Susanne Wolfford's, Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: the
Poetics of Community, U. of California Press, Berkeley, 1999.
210

and rigidity; rather I see it in flexible inclusive terms, as multiform, an all-
embracing container of a vast variety of other genres. Significant deeds,
insofar as this work is concerned, involve the struggles of ordinary, sleeping,
selves in their efforts to achieve security, to respond to the dull pain at the
heart of our existence, to transcend the weight of the ordinary self and its
protective chrysalis of the everyday, to deal with loneliness and isolation.
Often, usually, the saints and the heroes are anonymous. My story makes no
claims to either sainthood or heroism, but I wish to tell my story, some of
my struggle, some of the ingredients in which I partake of the heroic. For
there is an endless dialectic between the ordinary self and the heroic soul;
some of that sweep, some of its significance and the tension involved in
spiritual growth is found here.
Like other kinds of history, autobiography has its own styles and themes as
they involve in their diverse ways, both settled life and movement, living
and teaching, learning and consolidation, development and stasis, a broad
range of dichotomies. Then there is the relation of these themes and topics to
the social imagination. Imagination is involved with all these dichotomies.
Imagination has its own rhythms of growth as well as its own modes of
expression. I feel strongly that autobiography, whatever its inherent merits
211

and demerits, is, for some people anyway, an indispensable aid to their
knowledge of the history of Baha'i experience.192
The hundreds, indeed
thousands, of life's anecdotes have varying degrees of dramatic immediacy.
This autobiography absorbs these anecdotes, all these deeds of commission
and omission, into a ceremony of recitation, recreation and renewal. They
are seen both as life and as material for art, as part of a material transformed
into self-expressive speech, as the utterance of an individual voice and as an
aesthetic performance, as the deployment of a perspective and as a form that
reverberates with the interpretations of my own consciousness.193
Perhaps,
too, what I write is also a "relational move" by which I try to complete
myself "by connecting to the eternal"194
or some ideal within myself. And if,
as James Thurber once wrote, you can fool too many of the people too much
of the time, only the few who are very difficult to fool will even bother to
read this work. Perhaps there is hope for my work.
Identity is unquestionably central to any autobiography. The theme of
identity will appear again and again in this narrative. There are lived
192
Northrop Frye, A Literary History of Canada, Spring/Summer, 1982.
193
Leo Bersani, op.cit., p.86.
194
idem
212

identities and identities that one talks about.195
I like to think there is a
balance between these two types of identity in this autobiography. This
subjective experience of identity could be said to be a type of unity, a unity
produced by the realization of that identity. This unity is a constantly
evolving product of my personal decisions and activities or what Nucci calls
"the labile self."196
There is also in this work of my mind a relief of tensions
created by my own needs. My mind is given its grammar by the world; my
wishes give it a vocabulary and my anxieties its object or so one writer put
it. The experience of each of us is different from that of others, sometimes
just slightly, sometimes significantly, some might say--totally. To hazard
generalizations on a whole group is a risky business, although these
generalizations are often a highly instructive witness to one's several worlds.
My experience is only a part, a small part, of the vast intricate mosaic of
Baha'i community life, of Canadian life, of Australian life, of the life of
teachers, parents, husbands, men of the middle class in the closing decades
of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first. But it is
experience which I have, at least in part, recovered, reconstructed and
195
Vernon E. Cronin and William Barnett Pearce, Research on Language and
Social Interaction, Vol. 23, pp.1-40.
196
L.P. Nucci, "Morality and the Personal Sphere of Actions," Values and
Knowledge, E.S. Reed, et al., editors, 1996, p.55.
213

recounted. This experience is also written in the early evening of my life
and does not convey that quality of excitement it might have conveyed had I
written it forty years ago when my youthful enthusiasms influenced my
thinking more significantly. I like to think, though, that my learning is
lighter and my humour easier, that I am more the observer and the analyst
and my seriousness less heady and intense than it would have been had I
written this in early adulthood or the early years of middle adulthood. My
historical sensibility has been sharpened by years in-the-field, a pioneering
field going back to 1962. But whatever intensity, fierce inner tension and
concentrated fighting with the problems of existence there had been in my
early and middle adulthood, they moderated with the years, at least in their
social expression. In my private world they continued on in residual form,
some pithy core which possessed an intensity that was part of my
motivational matrix and kept me going at my intellectual tasks for six to
eight hours a day.197
After more than thirty years living in Australia
whatever seriousness I brought to the Antipodes in 1971 has been moderated
by good old Aussie skepticism, humour, indifference and cynicism all of
which have down sides but all of which also have the function of taking
197
It is interesting here to contrast the intensity of Wittgenstein which was
much more fierce and uncompromising in his style of working. See: N.
Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. London: Oxford University
Press, 1959, pp.26-7.
214

some of the heat out of intensities of all kinds, moderating convictions and
any incipient fanaticisms.
Paul Ricoeur's Spiral of Mimesis accounts for how people complete texts by
asking, "Does this narrated world share a horizon with my world?" Only
when the answer is "yes" does the text seem authentic. Even then, in a wide
variety of ways, we have become uncomfortable with testimonies of the
genuine, the integral, the interior, the original, the real, the self-sufficient,
the transparent and the transcendent that are all coiled in different ways for
different people inside the word "authentic." Perhaps it is the imbalance of
our daily experience and the images and sensations we get exposed to that
spawns some of our sense of inauthenticity.
"The opaque depths of living, acting and suffering," which is how Ricoeur
describes our quotidian world, can be configured narratively to make our
world livable, but only when the text is authentic. Authenticity results, says
Ricoeur, when the world of the text shares a horizon with the world of
readers. Time will tell just to what extent readers find this work of mine
'authentic.'198
I find this work helps me make sense of the big stew of life,
198
Kathryn Smoot Egan, "Applying Paul Ricoeur's Spiral of Mimesis for
Authenticity as a Moral Standard," Journal of Popular Film and
215

the deck of cards and the hand I have been dealt with which changes every
time I play.
Jerry Seinfeld was able to put the everyday events of life centre-stage with
delightful humour: "life's minutiae, people's foibles, and mankind's quotidian
moments of angst,"199
but this autobiography needs more than the minutiae
and I am not the comedian that Seinfeld was. My range of material must go
far beyond foibles, angst and the acute observations of small moments in life
in this very Jewish of sit-coms. The qualities of the main actors in Seinfeld:
their shared immaturity, amorality, narcissism, unrelatedness, and general
ill-will toward others, I trust are not found here, beyond the modicum of
these negative qualities most of us share. In order to climb into the depths,"
Wittgenstein once said, "one does not need to travel very far; no, for that you
do not need to abandon your immediate and accustomed environment."200
During the years of writing the recent editions of this work and in the years
ahead my intention is not to travel. I have done enough of that in the first six
Television,Winter, 2004.
199
Joanne Morreale, "Sitcoms Say Goodbye: THE CULTURAL
SPECTACLE OF SEINFELD'S LAST EPISODE," Journal of Popular Film
and Television, Fall, 2000. The Seinfeld series went from January 1990 to
May 1998 and on the last program advertisers paid 2 million dollars for a 30
second ad. Were the self-reflexivity in this book as clever as Seinfeld's!
200
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
216

decades of my life. I can climb into the depths of life here on the head of my
pin, so to speak.
Ricoeur describes what I write, it seems to me, as follows: "a concordant
discordance of ambiguities and perplexities" which I try to resolve
hypothetically, narratively. The "followability" of the story is the test of its
authenticity, says Egan.201
I go along with this, but not all the way. Many
can't follow Shakespeare or the writers of the Old Testament or the Koran
or a host of other authors and books, but that does not make what they write
inauthentic. Authenticity has other features as well.
J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, once wrote that “God gave us memory
so we could have roses in winter.”202
Here, then, are some of my roses and,
inevitably, some weeds from what is sometimes called episodic memory.203
I hope that, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, I do not rob this story of its reality
by making "it too true." Also, if Wilde is correct when he says that "the
interesting thing about people in good society....is the mask that each one of
201
idem
202
J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan, quoted in: “Memory, Autobiography, History,”
Proteus: A Journal of Ideas, Vol.19, No.2, Fall 2002.
203
Psychology has been studying episodic memory for most of its history
beginning with H. Ebbinghaus, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental
Psychology, NY, Dover, 1964(1885).
217

them wears," then I hope that I at least describe accurately that mask and,
however partially, reveal the world that is underneath. For, as Wilde says
again, "we are all of us made of the same stuff"204
and differ only in
accidentals. But oh, what accidentals!
The wilderness of western society in which I have lived and had my being
over more than forty years as a pioneer was much more demanding and
wild, requiring a persistence and understanding that I had not anticipated at
the dawn of my manhood in the early 1960s. This wilderness has been
intricate and complex, subtle and, for the most part, seemingly impenetrable
in any direct sense to the teachings of the Cause I espoused. This is not to
say that many, a multitude, of seeds were not sown, “like the infinitude of
immensity with the stars of the most great guidance,” as ‘Abdu’l-Baha puts
it so beautifully in the opening paragraph of the Tablets of the Divine Plan.
I did indeed find, as ‘Abdu’l-Baha went on to write in His opening tablet,
that “heavenly outpourings” descended and “radiant effulgences”205
did
appear in my life and in my society. This autobiography is, in many ways, a
tribute to those effulgences and those outpourings. The evidences are all
204
Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying, quoted in The Critical Tradition:
Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 2nd edition, David Richter, ed.,
Bedford Books, Boston, 1998, p.455.
205
‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, Wilmette, 1977, p.6.
218

around the world in beautiful Baha'i edifices and in thousands of
communities that simply did not exist in 1953 when this story begins.
But there was also a dark heart to the age and to my life; there were millions
of “gray, silent rocks,”206
a dreary and desolate scene, a vast, titanic,
catastrophic tempest that “remorselessly gained in range and momentum”207
throughout all the years that this narrative is concerned with. During these
years "the queen of consumer durables," the term Martin Pawley gives to the
television, became the principle assassin of public life and community
politics. Between catastrophe and the consumer, Pawley puts it in colourful
language, stands the goalkeeper, the person who brings you the news. "He
will tell you when a shot is coming your way."208
While that may have been
true in the broad arena of global conflict or even community crime, this
goalkeeper did not protect me from the shots in a battle that was essentially
spiritual and only partly within my control.
206
H.D. Thoreau in “Thoreau, The Maine Woods and the Problem of
Ktaadn,” in David Mazel, op.cit., p.333. Thoreau’s enthusiasms for nature
were tempered during his three main trips from 1846 to 1857 as mine were
tempered during forty years of travelling and teaching in the northernmost
reaches of Canada and of Australia.
207
Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day Is Come, Baha’i Publishing Trust,
New Delhi, 1976, p.1
208
Martin Pawley, The Private Future, Thomas and Hudson, London, 1973.
219

The difficulty is that this public realm became less and less experienced and
more and more reported on. The public realm became more and more
complex in this half century. Or so it seemed. Affluence concealed the
atomization and fragmentation of society. People's choices favoured privacy
and anonymity over the very idea of community. Private goals triumphed
over public ones. I liked Pawley's analysis when I came across it in 1975
while I lived in Melbourne and taught librarian technician trainees. His
analysis still has relevance and so I refer to it here.
The origin of the vast upheaval which I have only briefly alluded to here has
been the subject of unending academic and public discussion. It is a
phenomenon that goes beyond demands for reform. Indeed, new
vocabularies have been formulated to depict the crisis. The revolution is said
to be "cultural." The challenge is said to be to the "quality" of life. The
search is often said to be for "relevancy" or "authenticity." The picture is
"postmodern" and requires "deconstruction." And on and on goes an endless
analysis drowning the subject in a sea that few can swim in and even fewer
want to swim in. However suggestive such terminology, such distinctions,
may be they remain "tragically inadequate to grasp the reality of
220

experience209
in these several epochs. The crises and tragedies I faced as a
youth, in my marriages, in my jobs and my health were all part of the only
real war in my life, the war within the individual and the news was like some
kind of secondary reality with its tertiary battles and sound bites. These
battles also had the effect, I am inclined to think, of limiting my
accomplishments in life. The characteristics of Thomas Edison, to chose
one man to contrast my own life with in this regard, characteristics
mentioned on the last page of his autobiography and ones which enabled
him to accomplish more than most men were “a strong body, a clear and
active mind, a developed imagination, a capacity of great mental and
physical concentration, an iron-clad nervous system that knew no ennui,
intense optimism, and courageous self-confidence.”210
I had all of these
things but they were not consistent and they were not always intense as they
appeared to be with Edison, at least not from 9 to 60 and I do not anticipate
that consistency will be an acquisition in my latter years. But, as Baha’u’llah
states: some are endowed with a thimble-full and others with a gallon
measure. Edison was without doubt a prodigy of work or industry; compared
209
Doug Martin, "The Spiritual Revolution," World Order, Winter 1973-4,
p.14.
210
Thomas Edison, Autobiography, Internet Site, 2005.
221

to him in the hard-work world I am a far lesser mortal, but so are most of us.
I have lots of company.
How shall we excuse the supine inattention of the vast majority of
humankind to those evidences which were presented by the hand of
Omnipotence in the personages of two prophets or God-men for the modern
age? Is it due to humanity's lack of reason or the simple failure of its
several senses? During the century of the Bab, Baha'u'llah and His eldest
Son, and the many incredible personalities who could be designated as
apostles or as Their first disciples, the doctrines which They preached were
confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame did indeed walk, the blind
did see, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, daemons were expelled,
and the laws of Nature were often suspended for the benefit of this
embryonic community. But the sages and indeed the ordinary masses of
West and East, North and South have, for the most part, turned aside from
this awful spectacle, and, pursuing their ordinary occupations of life, of
work and of study, have, for over a century and a half, appeared unconscious
of the wondrous miracles associated with the lives and works of the Central
222

Figures of this new Faith. There were and are innumerable reasons and this
narrative deals with some of them in a serendipitous fashion.211
The form and style of this work are not incidental features. A view of life is
told. The telling itself, the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences,
vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader's sense of life--all
of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and
what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life's relations
and connections. "Life is never simply presented by a text," writes Martha C.
Nussbaum, "it is always represented as something."212
In the case of this
autobiography, the Baha'i Faith is presented en passant in the context of my
life and the society I experienced in more than half a century, 1953-2007.
The Baha'i Faith gives to my mind and imagination as they body forth, or so
Theseus tells us in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: "The forms of things
unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing /
A local habitation and a name.” The mystery of existence, its paradoxical
and complex form, is given "a local habitation and a name."
211
The subject of the discouragingly meagre response to this Faith in the
West during these epochs has been analysed elsewhere and in some detail
and it is not my purpose to expatiate on this theme here.
212
Todd F. David and Kenneth Womack, "PERSPECTIVES: Criticisms of
the Motion Picture 'The Titanic,'" Journal of Popular Film and Television,
Spring, 2001.
223

This modern age has seen a host of miracles partly due to the inventions of
technology, partly due to the explosion in knowledge, partly due to the sheer
expansion in population from less than one billion when these two
manifestations of God were born to the present six billion. Whatever the
case, whatever the reasons, however slow may appear the growth of this
Movement during the half-century I have been associated with its expansion
and consolidation, this Cause seemed to me to develop to a degree that, in
many ways, far exceeded my expectations. This seems like a contradiction, a
strange irony, but it is true, at least for me.
From time to time in this five volume work I refer to The Prelude by
William Wordsworth, the first and the major long autobiographical poem in
the history of modern English literature. I refer to it because it contains a
number of useful comparisons and contrasts with this work. The theme of
Wordsworth's long poem is "the loss of the paradise of childhood" and the
regaining of that paradise through the power of the developing
imagination.213
I certainly deal with the loss of my childhood; I deal with the
power, the experience, of a developing intellect and imagination. I also deal
213
Geoffrey Durant, William Wordsworth, Cambridge UP, 1969, p.115.
224

with the regaining of that paradise in the years of a different prelude, the
years in which there was an entry-by-troops into the Bahai Cause. The fifty
year period from 1953 to 2003 witnessed a growth of the Baha'i community
from two-hundred thousand to nearly six million. And it appeared as I wrote
these several editions of this narrative work that this period of prelude before
a mass conversion would continue in the years ahead, as far as I could
prognosticate anyway, until at least the end of the first century of the
Formative Age in 2021 and probably well beyond. To Wordsworth the
transformation of the world was through the mind of the writer, the poet.
This is unquestionably true and this autobiography is, in some ways, a
testimony to the "new and wonderful configurations" that derive from the
luminous lights of the mind.214
There is much in this work that is testimony,
but it is a work that has a home in today’s world. If the Greeks and Hebrews
invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and Renaissance the sonnet, our
generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.”215
Witnessing begins “with someone who testifies to an absence, to an event
that has not yet come into existence in spite of the overwhelming and
214
'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.1.
215
Lars Iyer, “Write, Write: Testimony, Judaism and the Infinite in
Blanchot, Kofman and Levinas,” Journal For Culture and Religious
Theory, Vol.5, No.1, 2003.
225

compelling nature of the reality of its occurrence.” Readers enable the
testimony to take place by listening empathetically, unobtrusively and
nondirectively, taking the lead in order to begin to affirm the reality of the
event in question. The story emerges and a true witness is born, who is no
longer condemned to act without understanding or to destructively re-enact.
This witness, in turn, is able to address others. Memory, in this case my
memory, is conjured here essentially in order to address another, to impress
upon a listener, to appeal to a community.216
Witnessing is, on this account,
always a witnessing with others, an appeal that would permit an experience
to be translated into terms that are more general, more a part of community.
And, finally, I like to think that this story, this memory shows that the
senseless breaking of the human race in two: believer and non-believer,
Christian and Jew, etcetera, the many dichotomies, is on the way out.
I find that the attempt to write my story of pioneering is like or it has
become an endless detour, a series of futile attempts to reach into the
experience, to broach it in its uniqueness and its singularity. My aim is to
write a writing like that of a textual celebration and memorial. This
narrative is a way of letting an instant, a decade, half a century, resound not
216
idem
226

in order to restore it to life for future generations, but rather to bring its
singularity to the attention of others now and in the future. I feel a certain
imperative to “write, write” as a response to the demand to situate myself
with respect to the enormity of the task at hand, the weight of its
responsibility. I feel as if a new practice of writing is required, a practice I
am hardly faithful to its demands.
Unlike Winston Churchill's record of his youth and young manhood in the
autobiography of his early life, an autobiography which a literary critic in
The Times Literary Supplement regarded as Churchill’s “finest literary
achievement,”217
this book pays little attention to my youth. Churchill’s
style or styles, its variation and development, are the greatest of its charms
continued this same critic. I’d like to be able to say this is true of my
attempt at autobiography, but I hesitate to make such a claim. One fancies
in Churchill’s book that one hears the small boy, the youth at Sandhurst, the
young soldier, the slightly older politician each telling his story in his own
way. Of course no gentleman cadet, still less a small boy, could write like
that; that Mr. Churchill should contrive to bewitch his readers into the
momentary impression that they can is proof that he has at his command the
217
Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life, First English Edition: Thornton
Butterworth, London, 20 October 1930.
227

art of the autobiographer. Such was the view of this TLS critic. I’m
confident that such a critic would not find such a range of voices here, as
much as I might like to have them appear. Indeed, I do not attempt to sing in
the umpteen voices that I once sang in or that I had to cultivate over the last
sixty years. I have owned many voices, many roles, many emotions, many
moods which, it seems to me, get smoothed out in this rather analytical piece
of writing, for this is not a novel, not a bit of entertainment. Rather, it is one
man writing for ordinary men and women everywhere, at least that’s the way
I see it.
There is little description of the pastoral, of place, of setting, of locale, in my
poetry or my prose.218
I do not record in minute detail the landscapes, what I
saw and heard, on Baffin Island in northern Canada, along the Tamar River
in Tasmania or in any of the several dozen cities, towns and hamlets where I
have lived, visited, moved and had my being. I do not measure these earthly
days, as Wordsworth and the nature poets often have done, by the
mountains, the stars and the river valleys I have gazed upon, however
inspiring, lofty and pleasant the verdure and grandeur. The minutiae of
218
The obsolesence of the pastoral dream, the pastoral vision, for many has
become a dream cultivated in more personal and domestic terms of local
space. This, I think, underpins my autobiographical narrative, although the
emphasis is slight.
228

nature, the myriad sense impressions, the sunshine and shadow where gaiety
and pensiveness so often met, the solitude and silence, the noise and the
tumult that occupied my hours and days, the industrial, the technological, the
machine: there is so much that I have not described, that I have not even
attempted to enter a word about. Natural history in its many spectacular
forms, wildlife, geological and archeological history were presented in
didactic, anthropomorphic and, more recently, computer-generated forms
and, although I did not take a serious study of natural history and the
relevant sciences involved, I certainly enjoyed decade after decade of
inspiring, truly beautiful and informative productions on television219
and
analytical material in print and on the radio.
Landscape, or place, always includes the human presence, of course, and, in
fact, is centred around it. Place is where our embodied selves experience the
world, receive its nurturance and energy. Place is where, as David Abram
wrote, "the sensing body is....continually improvising its relation to things
and to the world."220
Place is also an agent, a locus of action and
219
For a summary of these forms see: Karen D. Scott, "Poputarizing Science
and Nature Programming: The Role of "Spectacle" in Contemporary
Wildlife Documentary," Journal of Popular Film and Television, Spring,
2003.
220
David Abram in "The Locus of Compossibility: Virginia Woolf,
Modernism and Place," in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
229

significance. The purpose of nature, of landscape, of scenery, at least for me,
is not visual so much as mental. It evokes memory, fuses present emotions
to remembered occasions and is a simple rest for the eyes. But so, too, is
television, for me. I like to think the significance of this poetic narrative lies
in its art rather than its historical knowledge. If there is any long-range
significance to what I write here I’m confident it will not be the history, the
facts, the main happenings of my age. For these are written in far more detail
and with far more insight than I will demonstrate here.
By the 1940s and 1950s both Australians and Canadians "accepted as
conventional wisdom that the local territory in which they lived was a
defining force in their lives and their nationality."221
In my lifetime such a
view was expressed over and over again ad nauseam. But in the last forty
years, during my pioneering journey, uncertainty has crept into any
simplistic identity associated with land, with region. Other bases of identity
have come to occupy the attention: the arts, the media, ethnicity, language,
gender, sexuality, wealth, social and political issues, inter alia. Region was
not as important as it had been two, four or six generations before, in the
Environment, Summer 1998.
221
Gerald Friesen, "The Evolving Character of Canadian Regions," 19th
International Congress of Historical Sciences, Oslo, Norway, 2000,
230

first centuries of the history of these enormous countries. But place could
not be ignored even if the bases of identity were more diverse, more
complex, more confused. "Identity is a conceptual structure," writes
Berzonsky, "composed of postulates, assumptions, and constructs relevant to
the self interacting in the world."222
Identity functions as an attempt to
explain oneself, to enhance self-understanding, to provide an account of
one’s core beliefs and purposes.
My schooling is yet another of the many aspects of life I hardly mention.
The curriculum in both Canadian and Australian schools was inherited from
Great Britain, and consequently it was utterly untouched by progressive
notions in education at least until the early 1960s when I graduated from
high school. We, that is Canadians, took English grammar, complete with
parsing and analysis; we were drilled in spelling and punctuation; we read
English poetry and were tested in scansion; we read English fiction, novels,
and short stories and analyzed the style. Each year we studied a
Shakespearean play committing several passages to memory. If I had been a
student in Australia, the story would have been the same.
222
M.D. Berzonsky, "A Constructivist View of Identity Development,"
Discussions of Ego Identity, 1993, p.169.
231

I might have been living in Sussex or Wessex or Essex or Norwich for all
the attention we paid to Canadian poetry and prose. It did not count. We, for
our part, dutifully learned Shakespeare's imagery drawn from the English
landscape and from English horticulture. We memorized Keats's "Ode to
Autumn" or Shelley on the skylark without ever having seen the progression
of seasons and the natural world they referred to. This gave us the
impression that great poetry and fiction were written by and about people
and places far distant from Canada. We got a tincture of Canadian prose
and poetry, of course. We knew we had some place. We were so big; we had
to have some psychological existence. The educational process gave us
some appreciation for the Canadian landscape and its culture. It was not as
tidy or green as England's. It deviated totally from the landscape of the
Cotswolds and the Lake Country or the romantic hills and valleys of
Constable. If I had been given an Australian education I would have had
even less of an appreciation of my native land back in those years before and
just after WW2.
In Canada in the 1950s textbooks were often written by Canadians. This was
not true in Australia. In mathematics, for example, Australian kids studied
arithmetic and simple geometry, five times a week. The textbooks were
232

English and the problems to be solved assumed another natural environment.
It was possible to do them all as a form of drill without realizing that the
mathematical imagination helped one explore and analyze the continuities
and discontinuities of the order which lay within and beneath natural
phenomena.223
I could say so much more about those eighteen years of
institutionalized education in Canada, as I could about so many other aspects
of life, but I must of necessity limit the details, the story, to a confined space
and quantity. And, whatever inadequacies these years in school may have
had, I look back at them fondly, as a broad expanse of time that preceded
and initiated my life as a Baha'i pioneer.
Before I close this all-too-brief summary of some 18,000 hours of in-class,
in-house learning, I’ll just summarize the three central threads of that
learning. Various social sciences and humanities were kept from start to
finish, from early primary through university; the sciences and maths were
dropped when I entered university. The third major strand consisted of an
assortment of studies: manual arts, physical education, music, foreign
languages, art, inter alia. All of these subjects in this third strand never made
it passed high school. As I said above, I could describe a much more
223
Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain, Vintage Books, NY, 1989.
233

detailed picture of those years in school, in six schools and, perhaps, on
another day I will.
In 1967, like Dustin Hoffman in the 1967 film The Graduate,224
I graduated
from university, suffered through the party given for me by my mother, dealt
with my fears of the plastic society I was entering and continued my search
for an identity outside the bland, material, suburban existence of my parents
and friends. Unlike Dustin Hoffman, Benjamin Braddock in the film, I was
able to define myself outside that suburban environment. My Baha'i
pioneering identity was reinforced a hundred-fold by a move, three months
after graduating, in August 1967, to Frobisher Bay in Canada's Northwest
Territories, about as far removed from plastic North American suburbia as
possible, without leaving the continent and its island tributaries.
The fluid and impermanent nature of relationships with the minimum of
formality that Tocqueville225
said characterized democracies were certainly
part of these years in both school and in all the other aspects of life.
224
Robert Beuka, "Just One World...'PLASTICS'": Suburban Malaise and
Oedipal Drive in The Graduate," Journal of Popular Film and Television,
Spring 2000.
225
Gianfranco Poggi, Images of Society: The Sociological Thought of
Tocqueville, Marx, and Durkheim, Stanford U.P., 1972, p.41. Tocqueville
wrote this in 1831.
234

Tocqueville's analysis said much about my time. The individual, he wrote,
shuts himself tightly within a narrow circle of domestic interests and
excitements and from there "claims the right to judge the world."226
As
social, community, ties loosened, they became more impersonal,
Tocqueville said, and "domesticity was reinforced."227
I could expatiate at
length on the insights this French scholar made in the decade before the
Bab's declaration in 1844, but it is not my intention to offer a long, detailed,
sociological analysis of my time. The search for the secret, the basis, for a
just social order for human beings was part of Tocquville's search as it has
been for political philosophers and theorists as far back as the pre-Socratics
and the prophets of the Old Testament. The search for a just social order in
the years of this prelude would continue though, it seemed, on some
predestined path, a path in which a tempest was blowing with great force
and a path in which a new social order was given an articulate expression in
the writings of a new world Faith. My task was to help give this Order
physical expression in the communities where I lived. And this I did in
embryonic form in town after town across two continents for more than fifty
years.
226
ibid., p.43.
227
Marvin Zetterbaum, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy, Stanford
UP, Stanford, 1967, p. 69.
235

The tempest that was blowing through the global society that this narrative
takes place in was so severe that the very origins of this tempest, its
significance and its outcome were, for the most part, impenetrable. Most of
the people I came to know, to have any association with, outside the Baha'i
community, in Canada and Australia, in these years of the prelude, were
caught up, in a host of ways, by this great onrushing wind. Whatever was
available at the banquet table of the Lord of Hosts would simply have to
wait as the great masses of humanity continued to be swept along by this
tempest, this onrushing gale-force-wind which was altering the very basis of
society, its content and structure. The tempest was simply so immense; the
upheavals so extreme, that the average person or the greatly endowed, the
intelligent and the ignorant were swept along by its devastating and complex
forces. Job, family and their general interests kept them fully occupied. The
issues, the questions, here require an extensive analysis and it is an analysis I
approach again and again in this lengthy narrative. The historian Peter Gay
commented that “historical narration without analysis is trivial, historical
analysis without narration is incomplete.”228
This equation is equally true of
228
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative, Discourse and
Historical Representation, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
and London, 1987, p.5.
236

that sub-genre of history—autobiography. And I try to supply both in some
balanced fashion.
I muse, with American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote 65 days
after the Bab declared His message to Mulla Husayn: “When we see how
little we can express, it is a wonder that any man even takes up a pen a
second time.”229
But I have tried as many have tried. And I have tired. I do
not dwell on the various tensions in relationships: in classrooms where I
taught, in homes where I lived and in offices, mines, mills and factories
where I was employed. I mention the tensions and pass on. The element of
dramatic tension, then, which is essential to any drama and which could be
defined as "the gap between a character and the fulfilment of his purpose,"230
is present but it is highly diffuse, diverse. It has been present in the
constraints I have faced in life and in the pursuit of the resolution of my
several purposes. As one analyst of drama put it: "drama is the art of
constraint."231
But the drama here does not transport the reader into a
fictional world, either metaphorically or literally.
229
Nathaniel Hawthorne in Leo Marx, “The Pastoral in American Literature,”
in A Century of Early Ecocriticism, The University of Georgia Press,
Athens, 2001, p.344.
230
John O'Toole, The Process of Drama: Negotiating Art and Meaning,
Routledge, NY, 1992, p.27.
231
idem
237

The drama here is mostly the common, everyday stuff. I can not claim that
my drama is particularly unique or is capable of holding the interest of the
reader due to its unusual qualities or fascinations. This is no pretend world
of fictional characters in which readers have to suspend disbelief, as
Coleridge once put it.232
The reader's relationship with me and what I have
written is infinitely negotiable and the meanings that emerge are dynamic
and shifting. Perhaps I can contribute here, a little to some future prudence,
a prudence which Plutarch once described as: "the memory of the past, the
understanding of the present and the anticipation of the future."233
There is a bewilderingly luxuriant and immensely complex aspect to the
human condition. It offers many illegible, contradictory and paradoxical
clues. There is often only a superficial unanimity in the attitudes and values,
the behaviour and thoughts of the members of any of the groups I have been
associated with in life. If what I write earns "the judgement of gratitude and
sympathy," as Matthew Arnold described the reaction of readers to writers
who help them and give them what they want, I will also have won the day.
232
S.T. Coleridge, Bibliographia Literaria, Chapter 13.
233
Plutarch, Rerum Memorandarium Libri, ed. G. Billanovich, Florence,
1943, p.43: quoted in "The Plot of History from Antiquity to the
Renaissance," Eric MacPhail, Journal of the History of Ideas, 2001.
238

But I'm not sure if I will achieve this. There is a gentle and, perhaps, not-so-
gentle advocacy here as I attempt to transform circumstances into
consciousness. There is much digression, some disproportionate, which is
one of the prime luxuries and blemishes of this work.234
It is difficult, if not
impossible, to consider every particle and fragment of this work in relation
to some overall design. There is metanarrative here, there is micronarrative,
but not everything can be connected to its design. Vicarious experience, the
stock-in-trade of television narrative, can be found here but its presentation
is not as effective as the visual medium. The cultural fantasies that mediate
reality for TV viewers in dramas, sit-coms, comedies, inter alia are not found
here with the same effect. The cultural landscape upon which viewers map
their desires and aspirations day after day in front of the lighted chirping box
may be added to here in this Rocky Mountain of print.
In movies such as Oliver Stone's JFK, Edward Zwick's Glory and Spike
Lee's Malcolm X the director has an audience far greater than any
documentary or autobiographical work. An autobiographical work, this
work, can, if desired, clearly present all of the facts from both sides of the
spectrum. The content of films such as those mentioned above usually
234
De Quincey did not see his many digressions this way. See De Quincey
As Critic, John E. Jordan, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1973, p.2.
239

presents one version of the story, the only one that many will see, read or
know about. The directors of such films, knowing that they have a captive
audience, can therefore choose which facts that they place in their film to
create the myth or message that they wish to create and leave out the facts
and events that, although important and relevant, go against their beliefs and
destroy the myth they wish to create. Those directors who somehow manage
to entertain the masses and make an argument are very special. They can
stimulate the study of history but, more often, they simply entertain. Oliver
Stone, Edward Zwick and Spike Lee are three directors who possess the
talent to entertain and present an argument successfully, making it difficult
for others, concerned with the truth but with less money and no talent for
directing or writing a film, to argue against their views.
Such "historical" film directors cleverly create myths to promote their own
beliefs or sometimes mischievous speculation and the average movie goer,
faced with no other opinion than the one on the screen, generally believe that
myth as reality.235
As film director of my own life in this autobiography I try
to avoid clever myth creation, mischievous speculation and manipulation of
a captured audience. Given that readers will have no other opinions on my
235
Matthew Dixon, "Historical Films: Myth and Reality, The Journal of
American Popular Culture, 2000.
240

life than the ones presented here, although they will certainly have other
opinions on the Baha'i Faith and society, I am certainly aware how much I
am in control of the story and of the truth, of my own history.236
I like the
idea that the eighty year old Sabina Wolanski expressed in summarizing her
autobiography when she said that “I have decided to be absolutely
truthful.”237
But, as I point out in several other contexts in this work, truth is
not the simple entity that it appears. I do try, though, to temper my
obsessions, which this eighty year old survivor of the Jewish holocaust,
suggested was a wise move for autobiographers. I, like Wolanski in the late
evening of her life, share her concern, her fear, for being self-indulgent in
making one’s memoir so centrally concerned about oneself. Angels may
fear to tread in this personal and essentially, ostensibly, ego-centred domain,
but I am certainly no angel so, perhaps, that is why my fear, my concern, in
this respect is of a low order of intensity.
I am aware that, although history and my life can be studied scientifically,
the field is immensely complex--both history and my life--and immensely
subtle. It is supremely unlikely that this work will be studied either
236
This will remain the situation unless and until my life becomes the object
of study by others.
237
All In The Mind, “An Interview with Sabina Wolanski,” ABC Radio
National, 7 June 2008.
241

scientifically or serendipitously by anyone. I have also included in the text
of this autobiography many opinions, opinions which I trust come together
into some kind of coherent whole, but about which the Roman poet Terence
might have added the phrase quot homines, tot sententiae, literally ‘so many
people, so many opinions.’ Some readers may find themselves slightly
overwhelmed with the more than 2000 references in this work. However
vast, self-evident and urgent the field is, and surely one's life is all of these
things, generating a certain anxiety as one proceeds in its examination;
however esoteric and divisive it also seems, thus precluding any unified
approach to its examination and perhaps even any general and organized,
any systematic and intense, interest: if there is to be any concerted action
towards the goal, a map for the journey must be found and applied. Vague
sentiments of good will, however genuine, will not suffice. Some basic
understanding of principles and processes, of ethics, philosophy, ontology
and history, indeed a host of fields of knowledge are required if the seeker,
the writer, is to even approach the first "attribute of perfection" and its
"qualification of comprehensive knowledge" that 'Abdu'l-Baha exhorts us to
attain.238
If any coordinated progress is to be achieved there is much to be
238
'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, pp.35-6.
242

done.239
I make a start as we all must this side of the grave. This opening
chapter is just that: a start.
The literary architecture here requires some foresight; if it is to be rich and
expressive it must subsume the irregularities and afterthoughts of day to day
life into some kind of harmonious whole. It must acknowledge the
uncertainties and the ambiguities which I and others have lived with, at least
since the appearance of the two-God men of our age. This task is as difficult
to do in real life as it is in writing about real life. If my work is to be at all
useful to people of our time it must define and describe the nature of our
"frantic need for guides through the jungle of modernity."240
The experience
of modern times is swathed in paradox, ambivalence, anxiety, shifting
perspectives, and nostalgia. People everywhere are getting run over. Can
this work offer a stimulating analysis, a framework of understanding? Can
it be useful, paradoxically, to people who seem to have no need for guides at
all. Sadly, in our time, there is so much said about everything that there is
little assurance about anything, except perhaps the great material and
technological apparatus of society which brings to those who can afford it
239
I have borrowed here from Douglas Martin, "Baha'u'llah's Model for
World Fellowship," World Order, Fall 1976, p.13.
240
Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud: Vol. 1 Education
of the Senses, Oxford UP, NY, 1984, p.59.
243

comforts never known in all of history. And so I hold no high hope for the
results, the affects, of what I write here for it is not part of that immense
scientific apparatus.
Composing an autobiography is somewhat like constructing the interior
architecture of the houses I’ve lived in, the landscapes of the towns and
providing small character sketches of the people I’ve got to know well.
Various people, my readers in this case, will pass through the houses,
landscapes and sketches I construct and say, 'Oh, that’s a nice house, a
pleasant room, but what a hideous window over the kitchen table, what a
dull suburb.' Only writers really live in their autobiographies. So much of
what works best about them are things that people who come to dinner, who
pass through, never know about or see." The comments of readers have, at
best, only a partial relevance. I think this is a fitting, an apt, analogy. At
the same time I do not give to these interior architectures the same degree of
meaning and intensity, anything like the same amount of dialogue that is
often present in autobiographies involving a mother and daughter. The
space within the house that `housed' a daughter's childhood often possesses
poetic images and maternal features that never seem to come into the interior
244

spaces of the houses of my life and the important relationships that took
place there.241
The distinctions of personal merit and influence are tempered but still
conspicuous in any Baha'i community. The oneness of humankind does not
imply that the distinctions between people are feeble or obscure. Neither
does the concept of oneness imply that the abilities and talents of everyone
who cross our paths be ignored. The severe subordination of rank and
office, which often pertains in societies that raise egalitarianism to
unrealistic heights of value, which do not see equality as the chimera it is,
was and is not characteristic of the Baha’i community. The Baha'i
community recognizes a wide range of statuses and roles; rank does not
confer authority no matter how much it results from talent or appointment,
election or pure ability, and it sees oneness as more of an integrated
multiplicity than any conception of sameness.242
241
Jo Malin, The Voice of the Mother: Embedded Maternal Narratives in
Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiographies, Carbondale, Southern Illinois
UP, 2000. p. xiv.
242
It is not my intention here to provide a sociological, an anthropological
and a psychological analysis of the Baha’i community. Like many subjects I
do not deal with in detail here, this one can be found elsewhere.
245

I hope there is here little of that 'twotwaddle' that William Gass said Freud
wrote and little of those strange illusions which seem to cloud the clear skies
of literary relevance. Marx thought religion encouraged the illusions and the
self-delusion of the working class. With Naipaul, I believe this role of
providing illusions and stagnation has been passed to politics.243
Hopefully,
then, this work will be free of this contamination. Relevance is essential in
works like this to the creative and productive lives that read it. Inspite of the
fact that I have the feeling that we all have from time to time; namely, that
life possesses a hopelessly insignificant aspect, an impossible to comprehend
reality, in the grand scheme of things, I want to venture on the sea of
autobiography avoiding as far as I can the many familiar formulae used by
autobiographers. Readers will respond to this work the way audiences do to
film: in patterns of meaning and symbols, not as simple stimuli or
messages.244
I trust, too, that in stepping back and reading this, readers will
see themselves by distancing themselves from their own lives and by being
implicated in what they read.245
For I think there is more here than “the
243
Timothy Bradley, " At Home Abroad: Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul's
essays describe a world of invisible tragedies," The Yale Review of Books,
2003.
244
Janet Staiger and Martin Barker, "Traces of Interpretation," Framework:
The Journal of Cinema and Culture, 2001.
245
Jean Douchet, "Constructing the Gaze," Framework: The Journal of
Cinema and Media, 2001. Douchet writes that viewers of film became
'implicated in the story' beginning in 1953 with Ingmar Bergman's
246

clothes and buttons” of a man, as Mark Twain described biography. There
is something of the biographer Lytton Strachey’s(1880-1932) approach.
Strachey inaugurated a new era of intimacy and candour in biography
writing in contrast to the reticence and hagiography of the nineteenth
century. Strachey died in the year that saw the end, the last remnant, of the
heroic age.
It was timely that writers about people’s lives in this new age, this Formative
Age should say something a little more personal and below the surface. At
the same time I like to think there is in much of the writing of this new age
some of that “grand shine” that some see on the surface of life, a shine
which Walter Bagehot delighted in and which Shakespeare seemed to bring
to his writing and his life.246
I would like to think readers will find some of
these qualities in my work and that it is not “sicklied o’er with the pale cast
of thought” or any other pale casts. I try, as far as I can, to bridge the gap
between the practical and the intellectual.
Sommarin med Monika. So is this true of good autobiography.
246
Walter Bagehot quoted in Roger Kimball, Lives of the Mind, Ivan R.
Dee, Chicago, 2002, p.57.
247

I like to think that there is much more than some grey transit “between
domestic spasm and oblivion.”247
I present the picture of a grand scheme,
what the sociologists call a grand narrative, but I do not suggest in the
process any easy answers, simplistic formulae for sorting out the problems
of the world in all their staggering complexity. I found that after twenty
years of an autobiographical warm-up the process of writing autobiography
was one that mark Twain once described as an emptying of myself and then
a waiting for a while until I was filled up again.
I feel a little like a tourist guide taking a bus-load of people through the
historic places, the interest sights and the beautiful spots in some part of the
country in order to fill a package-tour of several days. The aim is to both
entertain and inform the travellers and send them on their way with their
time having been pleasantly occupied. Like the guide and the tour, I do not
take my readers everywhere. In fact most of the places in the urban-rural
complex that this bus travels through and around are never seen by the
tourists for fear of boring them to death with repetition and the tedium of
endless streets in the city and field-after-field in the country. But in the midst
of these repetitious scenes and the dullest of exteriors which are about as
247
These quotations come from a website, EntWagon.com.
248

interesting as the eye of a dead ant, there is drama, comedy and tragedy. It’s
just a matter of digging it out, ferreting it out, going down and in, behind the
windows and doors of a dozing world which often is just watching TV,
doing some house-cleaning, some gardening or, perhaps, having a meal at
the time. But I’ve spent my life packaging stuff for students, for those who
have been curious about the Baha’i Faith and, indeed, as we all do for those
we love and with whom we interact. And we all try to make the best of it,
put our best foot forward and occasionally tell more than the little which we
know. Sometimes we say too much and even more we say too little because
it does not seem possible to say any more without tension, without conflict,
of some sort.
I also feel somewhat like a combination of tourist and traveller, a distinction
Paul Theroux makes in his new book Fresh Air Fiend. Tourism---
sightseeing---is expected to be fun. You do it in large groups or with friends;
it's very companionable; it's comfortable and it's very pleasant or so it should
be. Travel throughout history had to do with discovery, difficulty, and
inconvenience. It didn’t always pay off. There was a strong element of risk
in travel. This distinction is a useful one even into our own time, into this
21st
century, but I won’t expand on it here; I will, rather, leave it to the
249

reader to make his or her individual interpretation of the differences between
my comments here and their experience. I have also discovered that in
writing this autobiography, although I deal very much with the past, I am
also describing the future. There's something prophetic about the process of
dealing honestly with life. When you see your life, your society and your
religious philosophy and you describe it as far as possible without
stereotypes and preconceptions, but with subtlety, what you write can seem
like prophecy.248
One day in the not-too-distant future I hope I will be content to lie beneath a
quiet mound of grass and a small monument of stone. But in the meantime,
I am not content just to go into the hereafter, however joyful or regretful I
may be on that journey into eternity; I do not seem content with the role of a
thoroughly commonplace, nameless and traceless existence which, to some
extent, is the lot of all of us or nearly all. I seem to be drawn to
autobiography as a bee to a honey-pot. Perhaps I should regret, as some
readers may be in the end, that I did not apply my abilities to more useful
fields.
248
Paul Theroux describes his experience of writing travel books this way in
Fresh Air Fiend, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
250

Why should anyone care what the merits of an obscure Baha'i are, one who
left North America to live at the ends of the earth, the last stop before
Antarctica? Can it really matter that he lived in 25 towns and 40 houses, is
now on a disability pension and all of this over a period of several epochs
during the growth of a new world religion which has been emerging from
obscurity during his lifetime? Does it contribute any benefit to humankind to
have a printed version of his particular form and intensity of navel gazing?
We all walk through our lives partly blindfolded. This is partly due, as
Oscar Wilde once noted, to a certain "extraordinary monotony,"249
itself a
product of an underactive imagination and inner life. There is simply too
much to take in. You could call it a cultivated blindness, as Wilde does, or a
cultivated inattention, as some media analysts refer to the way we watch
television. The principle of selectivity was crucial, universal and inevitable.
The news, extensively canvassed in the popular press, in specialist journals
and at the turn of this century and millennium on the internet; meticulously
documented in the electronic media, however unsatisfactorily to the
proclivities and prejudices of many, was just one of the multitude of things
that occupied people's minds in various degrees. Endless happenings, trivial
249
Oscar Wilde in David Richter(ed.), op.cit. p.459.
251

and not-so-trivial events, a great sea of minutiae occupied people's minds in
various degrees, with various degrees of meaning and significance. The
events of family life, of jobs and the multitude of human interests, quite
understandably, filled the space available, both for me and those who were
in my company. The relationships were often intense and nurturing
opportunities to grow and often, on reflection, fragile and tenuous.
As I pondered this reality of life, I mused about the impossibility of the
thoughts and events of one life, in one autobiography, in my autobiography,
ever finding a place in the minds of just about everyone or indeed anyone on
the planet. These thoughts might reach a coterie, a small coterie as I have
already said above, and that’s about all. Half the art of storytelling, of
course, no matter who the story reaches, is to keep the story free from too
much of that deluge of information and too great a quantity of the plethora
of explanation one acquires as one walks down life’s path. If this art is
practiced well, readers will be left free to interpret things the way they
understand them. I'm not sure how well I do this. I try to please readers.
Writing is somewhat like talking; hopefully someone is listening and wants
to listen. But writing is not entirely like talking. As Thomas Mann said in
his Nobel Prize speech in 1929, “the convinced writer is instinctively
252

repelled, from a literary standpoint, by the improvised and noncomittal
character of all talk, as well as by that principle of economy which leaves
many and indeed decisive gaps which must be filled by the effects of the
speaker's personality.”
I leave the reader free to interpret the way he or she wants but, along the
way, I provide great dollops of explanation and plentiful helpings of
information and analysis which fill in the gaps in a different way than
speech and a speaker’s personality. I try to make this provision of
information with the same art that good cinema possesses: "the art of the
little detail that does not call attention to itself."250
In this I am only partially
successful.
I provide an episodic structure, careful selectivity and analysis. The reader
can enter, can gain access to the text by any one of many entrances, none of
which is the main one. Readers could begin at the beginning or in the last
chapter. there is no pre-ordained sequence to follow. I like readers to feel
they have gained something on their own and to feel that all I have done is
help them along the way. But, like George Bernard Shaw, I can no more
250
Francois Truffaut in a letter to Eric Rohmer in 1954, quoted in
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 2000.
253

write what people want than I can play the fiddle to a happy company of
folk dancers."251
The balance between pleasing people and pleasing myself,
between honesty and tact is as difficult in writing as it is in life. While I
portray some of my own secrets and desires, understandings and analyses in
this text, readers, it is my hope, will find themselves. I can but hope. I like
to think that there is an honesty in my descriptions that is the backbone of
judgment and that arises from a simple, frank determination to get to the
bottom of places, people and experience and to understand them truly.
As a stenographer of reality, as a mirror of the world I lived in, this
autobiography does less distorting than a novel, which often manipulates,
modifies and exaggerates truths about the past in deference to cultural ,
literary and highly personal pressures. There is more caution required, at
least it can be so argued, of a reader vis-a-vis a novel than an autobiography,
at least this one, if the reader is trying to get a picture of the past. Often
great novels are not realistic; they distort and, as Peter Gay argues, they have
done history a disservice.252
I do not claim that my experience, my view, my
vision, is necessarily shared with other Baha’is, except in the broadest of
outlines and except insofar as all Baha’is share the Book and its Interpreter
251
G.B. Shaw in "Price's Piece," Barkly Regional, March 6th, 1985.
252
Peter Gay, Savage Reprisals, W.W. Norton and Co., NY, 2002.
254

and the Universal House of Justice in a pattern of centres and relationships
in their lives.253
But certainly my desire to share my experience is, in
principle, part of what it means to be human. For human life, even in its
most individualistic elements, is a common life. "Human behaviour always
carries in its inherent structure," as John Macmurray wrote, a reference to
the personal Other.254
And you, dear reader, are that 'Other.'
I trust the reader will not find here any gnashing of teeth, any strutting and
stridence, any fretting and fulminating as, like Marzieh Gail,255
I summon up
remembrance of things past, my early life, the Baha'i communities and the
general society I have lived in over the last half a century. In the process I
hope to sketch something of what T.S. Eliot said was the great need of
modern man: a larger polity. But my sketch is not an in-depth socio-
historical study, a politico-economic treatise; it is autobiography by traces,
history by traces, as F. Simiand defines history.256
I give the reader vestiges
left behind by the passage of a human being through four epochs in a Baha'i
253
This pattern of centres and their relationships is discussed briefly in
Messages of the Universal House of Justice: 1968-1973, pp. 37-44.
254
John Macmurray,, Persons in Relation Being: The Gifford Lectures
Delivered in the University of Glasgow in 1954, London: Faber, 1961, pp.
60-61.
255
Marzieh Gail, Summon Up Remembrance, George Ronald, Oxford, 1987.
256
F. Simiand in "Narrative Time," Philosophy Today, Winter 1985.
255

timetable, a Baha'i framework of the passage of history. Details crystallize,
images are isolated, moments are seen that fascinate, as I gaze back in time.
There is a certain fetishizing of otherwise ordinary, fleeting, evanescent,
subjective, variable moments. What is seen and discussed here is in some
ways "in excess of what was lived." It is a little like what film critic Paul
Willemen claims of the cinephiliac moment: "what is seen is in excess of
what is being shown." It is not choreographed for you to see; it is a kind of
addition, a synergetic-add-on that is the result of thought, the "new and
wonderful configurations"257
of these epochs.
The starting point here is something like Carlyle’s analogy between the
history of the world and the life of the individual. In my case a history of
modern civilization and of my religion, a religion which has grown up in the
light of modern history occupies the central place alongside my own life.
The Victorians saw their age as an age of transition258
and so, too, is our time
one of transition, we who have inherited the interpretations of our time by
the Central Figures of the Baha'i Faith and Their trustees, the international
governing body of the Baha'i community. I impose a pattern on this age of
257
258
Marion Thain, "An Awful Moment of Transition: Victorian Ideas of
History and the Individual Life Narrative of Michael Field," Source
Unknown, Internet, May 2003.
256

transition, a pattern which is partly unidirectional and partly cyclical. It
possesses the halo of inevitability but not the patina of triumphalism. It has
grown out of the Baha'i conception of history and it gives direction and
meaning to the immense dislocation of these times, at least for me. It
possesses, too, a sense that history is coherent, rational and progressive. I
am conscious that this view can be disputed but I am confident that my
views flow logically from the texts and their authoritative interpreters who
inspire what I write. I don't think my contribution to the study of history is
important in any way but I think the mix of the humanities and the social
sciences that I bring to the study of the individual in society is, if not unique,
at least possessed of a certain originality, an original mix of Baha'i ideology
and large dollops of historical and social theory found among the wide range
of theories and theorists.259
While not possessing the cognitive originality of
any of the great writers and poets, I believe there is something here that is
intrinsically useful in sensibility, perception and conception. I hope, too,
that some Baha'is will find inspiration here as they seek to understand the
259
The parallels between my own particular take on a Baha'i view of history
and the liberal worldview of, say, a 'father of liberalism' like John Stuart
Mill which you might call a non-theistic religion are many. Indeed, in my
study of sociological and psychological theory over the last forty years I
have come to see many parallels between the many theories of the individual
and society. And I draw on much of this material in this autobiography.
257

Baha'i model of social and political engagement rooted as it is in a distinctly
Baha'i socio-theological framework.
The rise of the DJ in the first half century of this Formative Age and my
experience of him as early as the mid-1950s for half a century now(1955-
2005) could be seen as a cultural symptom of, a cultural model for, the
centrality of the art of selection that is at the core of this work. "The essence
of the DJ's art is the ability to mix selected elements in rich and sophisticated
ways.....The practice of live electronic music demonstrates that true art lies
in the 'mix.'260
Autobiography is quintessentially an example of the art of the
mix, what to mix. And just as we all proceed through life by selecting from
numerous menus and catalogues of items, the autobiographer selects from
the menus and catalogues that fill his life with a cornucopia of stuff from the
sublime to the ridiculous. The autobiographer, like everyone else, can not
resist--indeed it is a constitutive part of his life--the rhetoric and reality of
endless choice through selection. The unavoidable obligation to choose is a
vehicle which expresses our identity whether we describe that process in
autobiography or whether we give it no thought at all.
260
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT P,
2000, p.135.
258

For the New Historicist school of history, this work will be seen as an agent
of ideology, conforming as it does to a particular vision of history. For this
school sees ideology as prior to history, sees this autobiography as a
representation of the culture, the Baha'i culture, from which it emerged.261
The lives of the obscure, the ordinary and the unknown members of society
at any given historical period some have argued can never be satisfactorily
recovered. I possess a different take on this theme. It is my view that their
inner world can be penetrated, can be recaptured. Michelle Johansen takes a
similar view in her analysis of an obscure London librarian.262
This
autobiography, like Johansen's, examines the life of an essentially obscure
person, in my case someone who has held many jobs in and out of teaching,
lived in many places and been involved for more than half a century with a
religious group that claims to be the nucleus and pattern of an emerging
world religion, a religion in the first century of its Formative Age.
The use of the first-person voice is always a conscious narrative choice. In
the writing of history its official use is restricted. The "I" of the historian is
261
D.G. Myers, "The New Historicism in Literary Studies," Academic
Questions, Vol. 2, 1988-1989, pp.27-36.
262
Michelle Johansen, "Prioritising the Nebulous: The Imagined Imaginary
World of Charles Goss(1864-1946): London Librarian," Source Unknown,
Internet, May 2003.
259

usually absent. It is simply not invoked. Subjectivity is the great
unmentionable in historical narratives. Historians are not encouraged to
relate their personal reactions, motivations, emotions, dreams or other
imaginative connections between their reading, research, and writing or
envisioning. But this work is only partially a history.263
The use of the first-
person seems natural here. I don’t go so far as to see subjectivity-as-truth.
Indeed, individual initiative and creativity require the support and
enrichment of collective experiences and the wisdom of the group to achieve
the tremendous goals that are the aims of my individual striving.
Traces are left, a trace remains. Thus we can speak of remnants of the past in
the same way or a different way, from the way we speak of relics or
monuments. And so I hand over to the contingencies of preservation or of
destruction this autobiography. Like all traces, it now stands for a past, mine
and society's, mine and my religion's, an absent past. The past may be
absent but this trace, this writing, is and will be(I hope) present, thus, in a
certain way, preserving the past even though that past is gone, even though it
263
Jennifer M. Lloyd, "Collective Memory, Commemoration, Memory and
History, or William O'Bryan, The Bible Christians and Me," Biography,
Honolulu, Winter 2002; Jennifer M Lloyd.
260

no longer exists. I feel drawn to the mystery of both the past and the future.
Somehow, the very mystery of being, of the present, is tied up there.
We all see different aspects of life as expressions of an ultimate journey,
especially for those of us who see life in terms of eternity. But the whole
question of ultimate journey has so many meanings to people. In some
definable and indefinable way these expressions are symptomatic of what
life is all about to each person. Some see the quintessence of life’s journey
best through the medium, the mediating role, of film; some hear it in music
or in one of the other creative and performing arts; some see in nature the
supreme moving impulse in creation; some find it in love and relationships;
some in learning and the cultural achievements of the mind. The list, were I
to try and make a comprehensive one, could be continued on and on. For we
are creatures of heterogeneity and, more than knowing ourselves directly, we
seem to know about ourselves by knowing about other things. At the same
time knowing who one is at a basic level is not a cause of trouble, unless one
has psychological or neurophysiological illnesses.264
264
Ingar Brinck, "Self-Identification and Self-Reference," EJAP, 1998.
261

I was one of those, like many others, for whom the ultimate journey was
observed, defined, expressed through many forms. My experience of some
of these forms is described in the following narrative now more than fifteen
hundred and pages. This narrative has become larger than I had originally
anticipated. However long it has become, it seems suited to my particular
literary and psychological needs. Whether readers find this length suitable to
their tastes is another matter. In the history of western literature there have
been two dominant motifs or themes: the quest or journey and the
stranger.265
This autobiography fits comfortably into this long tradition.
I sometimes think this autobiography is a little like the poetry of the
metaphysical poets. T.S. Eliot says that in that poetry "a degree of
heterogeneity of material is compelled into a unity by the operation of the
poet's mind."266
Such poets are constantly amalgamating disparate
experience, literally devouring that experience and in doing so they modify
their sensibility and form new wholes. In the process an originality and a
clarity results which you might call my autobiographical point of view or, in
the case of the metaphysical poets, the poet's point of view. Eliot writes that
265
Many writers have expressed western literature in these terms. Just today,
while listening to ABC Radio National I heard the author of Possum Magic,
a famous children's book, I heard this concept reiterated.
266
T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1932, p.283.
262

"our standards vary with every poet" and this is also the case with every
autobiographer. Refering to the poet John Dryden, Eliot writes that his
"unique merit consists in his ability to make the small into the great, the
prosaic into the poetic, the trivial into the magnificent."267
While I would like
to be able to do this in this autobiography and, while I feel I do achieve it on
occasion, I do not think I achieve this transformation on a regular basis. I
create the objects I am contemplating, namely myself, my society and my
religion, through the employment of memory, reason and will, thrusting
each of them into whatever nourishes me and finding, as best I can, the
aptest expression for my feelings and thoughts.
Perhaps I could say I am 'rendering' the past as a painter renders. I have
rendered my life, given it a certain transparency, refigured my world, re-
described it, appropriated it, re-enacted it, reeffectuated the past in the
present.268
I have brought things out into the open, the way we all do when
we tell stories about ourselves. I have transformed my life in the sense that
an examined life is a changed life, a different life. So many Baha'is have
achieved great things for their Faith. Many have achieved little. The portion
of some and the portion of others varies as do their respective receptacles.
267
ibid., p.310.
268
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1946.
263

Comparisons may be partly odious, but they are inevitable.269
I would like to
compare my work with any one of the great epic poets. I would like to think
my work and the spirit that inspires it is, in the words of Paris to Hector in
the Iliad, “like a tireless axe plied in the hands of a skilled carpenter.”270
But my axe is often tired; my spirit is often worn and I often question just
how skilled the craftsman is who wields the axe.
In the kingdom of fiction, novels, stories and science fiction, the constraints
of historical knowledge have been suspended or considerably loosened and
played with. There is a great freedom to explore imaginative variations of
history, of the past in these literary forms. In autobiography I do not enjoy
this luxury but, still, reconstructing the past needs the help of imagination.
Just as fiction has a quasi-historical component, so too does autobiography
have a quasi-fictional component. History and fiction intersect in
autobiography in the refiguration of time, in that fragile mix where the facts
of the past and human imagination join in an effort to produce the deepest
observations and the liveliest images, to enlarge the narrow circle of
269
While I write I am thinking of an email I got recently from a Baha'i named
Dempsey Morgan who chaired nine LSAs, 5 NTCs and was on four NSAs in
Africa among a host of accomplishments too many to list here and a Baha'i
who lived in Gravenhurst Ontario for fifty years as an isolated believer from
about 1915. (See Baha'i Canada, 2001(ca).
270
Homer, The Iliad, Book 3, lines 60-62.
264

experience and to penetrate the complexities of life. As Canadian writer
Margaret Atwood once wrote "the mind is a place where a great deal
happens."271
I hope readers find a lot happens for them as they read this
reconstruction of a life.
The British sociologist Anthony Giddens wrote that a person's identity is
"not to be found in behaviour, nor in the reactions of others, but in the
capacity to keep a particular narrative going."272
That person must
continually integrate events and sort them into an ongoing story about the
self. He must, and in this case the self is a 'he', "have a notion of how he has
become who he is and where he is going." There is a process of selecting
and of discarding memories, a partly robust and partly fragile set of feelings
and self-identity.273
As I keep my story going, as I posit some degree of
unity and continuity over time, some degree of autonomy and responsibility,
I describe the somebody I have become, the doer-deciding, not being
decided for, the person who thinks, wills and acts.274
271
D.G. Jones, "A Review of Sherill Grace's, Violent Duality: a Study of
Margaret Atwood," in Canadian Poetry, No.9, Fall/Winter 1981.
272
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the
Late Modern Age, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 1991, pp.54-5.
273
idem
274
Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford UP, Oxford, 1969, p.131.
265

Perhaps Sir Francis Drake put it more strikingly and eloquently in his
prayer:
O Lord God!
When Thou givest to Thy servants
to endeavour any great matter,
Grant us to know that it is
not the beginning
But the continuing of the same
to the end,
Until it be thoroughly finished,
Which yieldeth the true glory…..
Autobiography is interpretive self-history and an interpretive self-history
that goes on until one’s last breaths. It is a dialogue with time and I have
spent various periods of more than twenty-one years(1984-2005) trying to
give my experience a cast, a shape, and make a coherent intervention into
my past not just write a chronicle of elapsed events. As I do this I find I
nourish the past, anticipate the future and face unavoidable existential
realities like death, my own limitations and failures. While my account is
266

ostensibly about myself, I like to think that it becomes, in the end, about the
reader. For there is a complex symbiosis here between me and you and the
many readers not yet born. "I'll live in this poor rime," as Shakespeare writes
in Sonnet 107. Every writer worth his salt likes to think, hopes, as the Bard
wrote in the last couplet of this sonnet, that
………thou in this shalt find thy monument
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.275
It is difficult to present an orderly account of one's story, one's "monument."
Frankly, though, I don’t think orderliness is crucial. As the American
novelist Henry James once wrote, back in 1888, the crucial thing is to be
saturated with life and in the case of this autobiography: my life, my times
and my religion. Time has a corrosive quality and produces a certain
vacancy of memory. Space and time are, as de Quincey once wrote, a
mystery. They grow on man as man grows and they are “a function of the
godlike which is in man.”276
What I tell here is some of this mystery.
Conjoined to this vacancy of memory, paradoxically, is its function as a
275
William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, Penguin, 1970, p.127.
276
Thomas de Quincey, The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey,
editor, David Masson, p.27.
267

medium through which time passes, as part of the very basis of my creative
energy and part of a "perpetual benediction."277
So much of my life, the life of my society and the Baha’i community in
particular, is about pioneering, exploration, wandering from place to place
and failure amidst success, stasis and staying in one place. This
autobiography is, in some ways, a celebration of this reality, this apparent
contradiction, this inconsistency, the cracks and crevasses of our community
and individual lives where a lot of interesting stuff is found.
I am conscious of what the writer and philosopher H.L. Mencken wrote
about autobiography, namely, that no man can “bring himself to reveal his
true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and as a
believer, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends or even to
his wife.”278
She, like servants of old, though, are most likely to see the true
colours of a man or a woman. Honest autobiography, Mencken wrote, is a
contradiction in terms. All writers try to guild and fresco themselves. There
may be some guilding here, but I think I make an improvement on most
277
Christopher Solvesen, The Landscape of Memory: A Study of
Wordsworth's Poetry, Edward Arnold, 1965.
278
H. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy, A.A. Knopf, NY, 1974(1916),
pp.325-6.
268

biographies which A.J. P. Taylor said were mostly guesswork. There is a
tone of tentative enquiry in this work; there is inevitably some guesswork;
there is a recognition that truth is often elusive and subtle. I have chosen the
title and the theme 'pioneering over four epochs' advisedly. There is some
fundamental connection with my life's journey, my soul, that is contained in
these words which now roll off my tongue with deceptive but now familiar
ease. "By words the mind is winged.”279
I have taken, too, Taylor's advice on politics. Taylor wrote that "the only
sane course is never, never, to have any opinions about the Middle East." If
anything, I point toward a way; I urge and encourage, but I do not offer
answers to complex political questions by taking sides, criticizing
governments or taking positions on various crises and issues. If anything,
my book is a timely, timely for me if not for many others, anecdotal and
impressionistic examination of the historical origins of the Baha'i alternative
in my time, an alternative embedded in my life and my four epochs. Life's
sense and nonsense have pierced me with a feeling, a view, that much of
existence is strange and absurd; that there is much which is vain and empty
in those impressions which pass through our sensory emporiums; and that
279
Aristophanes, The Birds, line 1447. Some translations use ‘talk’ not
‘words.’
269

there is much that is wonderfully awesome and staggeringly mysterious.
History for millions is more nightmare and panorama of futility and anarchy.
For millions of others, fundamentalist, liberal, inter alia, history takes on all
sorts of colourations and meanings. So many millions of human beings seem
ill-equipped to deal with the forces of modernity whatever their views of
history. The resulting social commotion, the resulting disarray is evident all
around us.
As my own days pass swifter than the twinkling of an eye, I offer here in
this autobiography something of my experience with the relentless
acceleration of forces280
in the dynamic span of epochs that have been the
background of my life. I offer, too, layers of memories that have coalesced,
that have condensed, into a single substance, a single rock, the rock of my
life. But this rock of my life possesses streaks of colour which point to
differences in origin, in age and in the formation of this rock. It helps to be
a geologist to interpret their meaning and I, like most people, have no
advanced training or study in geology. So it is that my memories have fused
together and they are not fully understood. Perhaps by my latter, my later,
years; perhaps in an afterlife, in that Undiscovered Country when I enter the
280
The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 157.
270

land of lights, then, I will understand. In the interim, though, I give the
reader my rendition of the creative, revolutionary, unprecedented character
of a new spiritual and social vision, a complex one that transcends eastern,
western, traditional and modern categories of social analysis, one that has
inspired my life.
I could have begun this autobiography with my first memory back in 1948.
I remember making a mud-pie in the spring; perhaps the snow was still on
the ground or the April rains had come after a Canadian winter. Perhaps it
was March or perhaps it was April of 1948 as the Canadian Baha'i
community was just completing the first fifty years of its history. Perhaps it
was on that weekend of the 24th
and 25th
of April 1948 when the first
National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Canada was elected by 112
Baha'is in Montreal. That's when I'd like to think my first memory occurred
in real time. But, alas, I do not have a unified, factually accurate, version of
that first event in my mind's eye. I am saddled, as we all are, with a host of
variations of what happens to us, what is around us and what it all means.
271

We can only connect with a portion of our own lives and of the great mass
of facts and details that makes up the history of our time.281
Even if one
assumes that we can explain human personality totally in terms of culture,
there is only so much culture one can analyse and synthesize, find personally
meaningful, interesting enough to consider at all. The writer, the historian,
the autobiographer, all analysts of the modern condition and of the human
beings in it, must face limitation. They must face minutiae and avalanches
of information. I could take refuge in a more distant past as many do these
days and tell of my mother's and father's life going back to the turn of the
century, or of my grandparents on my mother's side in England or on my
father's side in Wales. If I go back to my great-grandparents on my mother’s
side whose first years would have been in the 1840s to 1860s I pick up a
branch, a piece of my family tree in France. Such was a story told to me by
my mother more than forty years ago, but I have never followed it up for
more detail. In many ways, the main reason my autobiography hardly deals
with the people on my family tree is that I know so little about them. It is a
complete blank before 1844 and a virtual blank up to 1872, the year my
grandfather was born, the year the first English Baha’i was born-Thomas
Breakwell-and the year the great travel teacher Martha Root was born.
281
Raymond Tallis, In Defence of Realism, Edward Arnold, Hodder and
Stoughton, London, 1985.
272

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Wales remained significantly
rural with its people continuing to cling to old-fashioned ways of life,
methods of agriculture, and legends and superstitions, much like the
peasants in Hardy’s Wessex.282
The Welsh, especially those in rural areas,
were a people deeply in touch with their past and this was true even among
the lower classes and the formally uneducated. Visions of the past were
often strongly imprinted both on the land and the consciousnesses of the
people. It was often said that time stood still in Wales and the people tried to
keep the embers of the past burning. My father, though, was born in 1895 in
the largest town in Wales, Merthyr Tydfil,283
and in his teens and twenties
the town went through a boom-and-bust cycle. Sometime, I know not when,
my father left Wales for North America. Some of his socialist spirit, his
militancy, his desire to be financially successful, his energy came from this
early Welsh experience.
I could also write an account of my great-grandparents' lives taking readers
back to the beginning of this New Era in the 1840s. Few people exhaust the
282
Shannon L. Rogers, “From Wasteland to Wonderland: Wales in the
Imagination of the English Traveler, 1720-1895,” The North American
Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol.2, No.2, 2002.
283
Merthyr Tidfil in Wales had a population of 50,000 by 1860.
273

surface, much less the contemplation, of their own experience, how much
less that of their forefathers. The years before my birth I shall mention from
time to time if and when I feel they illuminate the theme I am pursuing, but
the stories of those on my family tree, whether living or dead are not the
focus of this work. The dead in my family line going back to my great-
great-grandparents and their history, for the most part, hardly get a look in.
Those before the 1840s might as well have not existed. As I have already
indicated, the principle of selectivity is at the core of this work as it must be
in any autobiography. Within three generations of my death there will be
noone on earth who even remembers me—or you dear reader, for that
matter. Unless some autobiographical or biographical manuscript remains,
unless you invent something for future generations or, indeed, contribute
something memorable to the human community.
Of course, with the insights of history, other social sciences, literature and
its critical analysis I could very well recreate the thoughts and lives of my
nineteenth-century grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great
grandparents, taking my family tree back to the 1840s and 1830s, as I have
pointed out elsewhere. But that is not my intention in this memoir. I am
occupied with other matters.
274

The days of my life are gone, at least as far as the early years of late
adulthood; middle age or middle adulthood and early adulthood as some
human development theorists call the years from 40 to 60 and 20 to 40
respectively has slipped irretrievably from my grasp. Some of these days
return as if from the dawn of my life and, as Wordsworth expressed it so
beautifully, "the hiding places of man's power/Open: I would approach
them, but they close."284
I scarcely see them at all, Wordsworth continues,
but he says he tries to "give substance and life to what he feels," thus
"enshrining…the spirit of the past/For future restoration."285
And so, writing
this autobiography is, in some ways, a job of restoration, restoration over
four epochs.
Like the forward-looking nature of Homer’s work this autobiography is
imbued with the forward-looking spirit of the Baha’i community. Like
Shakespeare, I see myself as a Renaissance man. But I don’t see myself as
either a Homer or a Shakespeare. The conditions of my craft as a writer and
a bard demand, or so I feel anyway, that I preserve and transmit something
284
William Wordsworth in T.S. Eliot: The Longer Poems, Derek Traversi,
Harcourt, NY, p.196.
285
idem
275

of the fame of a now vanished heroic age. I provide linking pins. For the
most part, though, I leave the previous epochs of the Formative and Heroic
Ages to the pens of others, the thousands of others whose lives were lived in
the years after the beginning of this New Era in 1844. These earlier years
will get only the occasional mention when they function to illuminate the
present or the future. For this autobiography focuses on a history that has
been part of my bones: the first several decades of the second Baha'i century.
In a wider sense my work is just part of the culminating phase in a long
accumulation of sophisticated and not-so-sophisticated literature of the first
century of the Formative Age. There is no attempt, as Milton put it in his
lordly way, to assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to man.
With the writings of the Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith and Their
successors providing ample words, I do not attempt to deal with such lofty
aims. Theology does not play an oppressive part in this account, although it
is impossible to avoid it from time to time. Human beings hold centre stage
here as they do in Homer, I think more closely, more intimately. Dante and
Milton put God and associated abstractions at the centre of their epics and,
although God is not left out of this narrative, I prefer to deal with the human
figures of Baha’i history occasionally.
276

In a recent edition of the journal Cultural Logic I came across the following
quotation which expresses, in some ways, what I am attempting to
accomplish here. The author wrote: “I am speaking my small piece of truth,
as best as I can. We each have only a piece of the truth. So here it is: I'm
putting it down for you to see if our fragments match anywhere, if our
pieces, together, make another larger piece of the truth that can be part of the
map we are making together to show us the way to get to the longed-for
world.286
So many changes have taken place both in public space and private thought
that the world I stepped out into in 1962 as my pioneering life began has
been transformed. One mundane and in some ways trivial example in public
space is described by R. Shields: “Hyper-realities are found in malls,
restaurants, hotels, theme parks; in self-contained fictional cities such as
Disneyland, in California, Tokyo and Paris, and Disney World, in Florida;
and in real cities such as Los Angeles and Miami. All are facades woven out
of collective fantasy. The original for these, of course, is Disneyland, built in
the mid-1960s. It is tempting to laugh-off all of this as an amusing curiosity,
but shopping malls are the most frequented urban social spaces in North
286
Minnie Bruce Pratt, "Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart" in Cultural Logic,
Volume 3, Number 2, Spring, 2000.
277

America now.” They play a pivotal position in the lives of billions of
consumers and are a new focus of communities.”287
And as one writer put it:
shopping is the most creative act western man performs.288
In my more than
forty years of putting up posters, 1964-2007, I could always rely on the
shopping mall to say no to my request to put up a poster. It was an out-of-
bounds zone to any kind of political or religious activity. I have no intention
or interest in describing my shopping activities in malls or, indeed, in any
other commerical establishments over the years, although I must have put up
several thousand posters in smaller shops: newsagents, florists, hardare
stores, delis, restaurants, inter alia, and had light-hearted and easy-going
relationships with many a shop-keeper. I’m sure I could write a small book
on my experiences putting up all these posters. And in a society which is
nothing if not a consumer society, much could be said about my shopping
experiences, even if they were minimal and occupied an essentially
peripheral part of my life.
287
Richard Marsden and Barbara Townley, “Power and Postmodernity:
Reflections on the Pleasure Dome,” Electronic Journal of Radical
Organization Theory, 2003.
288
See also: R. Shields, “Social Spatialization and the Built Environment:
The West Edmonton Mall,” Society and Space, Vol. 7, pp. 147-164.
278

In the macro-political domain there were a core of events which took place
in the more than four decades of pioneering experience that affected the
climate of western thought. One of the more recent was in 1989, two
centuries after the French Revolution, which did more than merely terminate
the bipolar balance of terror that had kept the peace for nearly half a century;
the fall of the Berlin Wall brought to an end the older ideological
equilibrium and the habit-encrusted formulation of issues which went with
it. The concepts my generation used to describe the world after WW2
urgently needed to be reformulated after 1989.289
And they have been
reformulated in the last fifteen years, 1990-2005, in a much more complex
global community. This is not to say, of course, that everything changed in
1989. Many aspects of the world in the years 1945 to 1989 have remained
the same, but the tendencies were exacerbated. “The wealthiest and poorest
people,” according to a U.N. Human Development Report of 1996, “are
living in increasingly separate worlds.”290
The three billion in 1945 has
become six billion and the hostile camps of WW2 have changed their
complexions, their names, their features. But it is not my aim to discuss the
socio-political world in great detail in this work. The reasons for war now
289
Ernest Gellner, cited in G. Burrell, M. Reed, M. Calás and L. Smirchich,
“Why Organization? Why Now?” Organization, 1994, pp.5-17.
290
See Deb Kelsh, “Desire and Class,” Cultural Logic, Vol.1, No.2, Spring
1998.
279

are different from those seventy or ninety years ago in the last two major
world wars and I am confident they will change their spots yet again in this
new millennia.
The generation born in and after WW2 have watched that war on television
and at the cinema for half a century. It is not my aim here to document the
kaleidoscope of opinions and attitudes to the great wars of the last half
century, suffice it to say that there seem to be as many changes, shifts in
view, as there have been decades since 1945. One notable cultural theme
that emerged in American society as it entered the twenty-first century, for
example, was the glorification of the generation that had endured the Great
Depression and heroically sacrificed to win World War II. A virtual
sanctification occurred in best-selling books, in TV programs and at the
movies.291
As I have watched this latest vintage of 'war-movies,' I wondered
at just how my generation would be analysed and discussed half a century
from now both inside and outside the Baha'i community. The generation
that came of age and fought in WW2 has been called, by one recent author,
“the greatest generation any society has ever produced.”292
For me and my
291
Albert Auster, "Saving Private Ryan and American Triumphalism,"
Summer, 2002.
292
Tom Brokaw, An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from The
Greatest Generation, Random House, 2001.
280

generation that came of age in the 1960s, the story remains to be written.
Perhaps this autobiography is part of that writing. The social science
literature, the novels, the media analysis on this period is burgeoning and I
do not want to add appreciably to the mountain of material that already
exists and so my focus is not on the history of my time. Some reference to
that material is, though, essential to my story.
“Without a revolutionary theory, “wrote Lenin, “there can be no
revolutionary movement.”293
I have been convinced the Baha’i teachings
provides both; but the revolution is spiritual, evolutionary and, like
Christianity 2000 years before, slow to work itself out in the context of
society. There is a repetitive aspect to both life and history that gives rise to
the cyclical aspect of religion and life. Comments like the following of
British novelist E.M. Forster(1879-1970) reveal the repetitive aspect of life:
“Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books
and talk that would describe it, one is obliged to exaggerate in the hope of
justifying one’s own existence.” While I find this statement a little over the
top, to say the least, there is undoubtedly some truth to it, a truth based on
the repetitious nature of life, the routine, the weariness, some of what the
293
Lenin, What Was Is To Be Done? quoted in Kelsh, op.cit.
281

Romans called life's tedium vitae. It is one reason, among many, that most
people would never think of writing an account of their lives and, if they did,
they would find it difficult to get any readers or, more importantly,
publishers to put their book on the marketplace. Of course, this may be
equally true of my book. I'm sure some would have no trouble seeing my
book among the more tedious reads.
If there is a tendency to exaggeration in writing, as in life, this is part of
what for me is a complex and intense reaction to the Baha'i community, to
my experience of it and to my life in society over this last half century. At
the same time I feel George Orwell’s words on the subject of exaggeration
are pertinent to what I write. Orwell, arguably the twentieth century’s most
influential prose writer, once wrote: “I think I can say that I have
exaggerated nothing except in so far as all writers exaggerate by selecting.”
What Orwell also wrote regarding order and sequence in a book also applies
to this work. “I did not feel,” he wrote, “that I had to describe events in the
exact order in which they happened, but everything I have described did take
place at one time or another.”294
294
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933, Introduction,
French Translation.
282

Part of my instinct over the years has been to run from life, physically and
imaginatively. This tendency to run simply reflects the difficulty of the
experience of one Baha'i in the years 1953-2005, the difficulty of his relation
to people, to institutions and to events which taken together are so much
greater than himself. The whole of life often seemed like some
brontisaurismus, some shapeless, structureless colossus with its flood of
detailed information and candy-floss entertainment which seemed to
simultaneously instruct and stultify. There is something about the very
pervasiveness of life’s array, wrote a sociologist whose name I have now
forgotten, that is essentially alienating. He could have added, too, that life is
also something essentially beautiful, fascinating, et cetera, in a long list of
adjectives. Life insurance men talk about the whole of life in discussing a
particular type of life insurance policy. During these four epochs it has
become possible, for the first time in history, to describe one’s whole of life
with the possible exception of the first eight months for which psychologists
tell us virtually all of us have no memories.
My life as a moral being has its roots in a complex and very abstract world
of seen and unseen connections, categories and ideas which, as I say, are
greater than myself. The same imagination that perceives these categories
283

and generalizations which describe my life also fashions ideas of local,
regional, national, international and humanitarian obligation. My
sympathies and moral obligations, my antipathies and withdrawals are born
in this mix. They make up, along with other factors, my conscience, albeit
intangible, my reality.
"Ultimately, we always tell our own story, not the story of our life, our so
called biography, but the other one, which we find difficult to tell using our
own names," so writes Jose Saramago, "not because it brings us excessive
shame or excessive pride, but because what is great in human beings is too
great to be told with words, even if there are thousands of them, as is the
case of this work. What usually makes us petty and mediocre is so ordinary
and commonplace that we would not be able to find anything new that
would touch a chord in that noble or petty human being that the reader is."295
And, if indeed it did strike a chord, to string it out into a musical symphony
to bring pleasure to others--now that would be a trick!
295
Jose Sarmago, CLCWeb:Comparative Literature and Culture: AWWWeb
Journal, CLCWeb Library of Research and Information, CLCWeb Contents
2.3, September 2000.
284

However one cuts the cake, so to speak, telling one’s story is not easy. The
Danish philosopher Kierkegaard put his finger on part of the problem when
he wrote that: “it is perfectly true that life must be understood backwards.
But philosophers tend to forget that it must be lived forward, and if one
thinks over that proposition it becomes clear that at no particular moment
can one find the necessary resting place from which to understand it
backwards.”296
Belief to Kierkegaard was based on the view that it was
absurd. He was, of course, referring to the then typical view of Christianity:
credo quia absurdum.
It is perhaps for these and other subtle, complex and difficult to define
reasons that in their stories certain authors, among whom I believe I could
include myself, favour a complex mix in the narrative they live and have
lived, the story of their memory with its exactnesses, its weaknesses, its
truths, its half-truths, even its fictions some of which they are blinded to and
some they are quite conscious of, although they would not want to call them
lies. Neuro-imaging is revealing much about how we remember and why we
forget. One recent author ranks suggestibility as the sin with the greatest
296
Phil Cohen, Autobiography and the Hidden Curriculum Vitae, Internet,
2003.
285

potential to wreak havoc on the accuracy of memory.297
Then, too, there are
many ways I could tell this story and still tell it honestly; the one that has
made it to the surface of the paper here is just one from among the many
options, some of which I am conscious of and others beyond both my
memory and my imagination. I try to touch a chord in what I write, the one
in my own heart and mind and the many chords in those of readers in the
best way I know how. In some cases, I’m sure, that chord is actually
touched.
Mark Twain says to describe everything that happens each day would
require a mountain of print. However much a life is enjoyed, to write about
it in an engaging way is another question, another topic, another world.
Although many enjoy their lives, few could write an account that would give
any pleasure to readers. There are many skills in living and another set in
writing about them. I'm not sure this book falls into the category of
entertaining reading. It is written to satisfy my own sense and sensibility, my
proclivity for analysis and my personal desire to give shape to my life, a
shape that at least will exist on paper when I am finished. My tale is neither
a bitter-sweet tale of a charmed and lamplit past; nor is it a narrative of loss
297
Daniel Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and
Remembers, Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
286

and its lumps, its fragmentation and loneliness. It is closer to a poem, a
hypothesis, a construct.298
I like to think of this work as part of my being
and the being of readers which is a gift and part that is life’s acquisition, as
something which appeals to the often latent feeling of fellowship with all of
life and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits
together our separate solitudes, all of humanity, past, present and future.
A narrative, like the one I present here, provides a “unifying action to
temporal sequences,” 299
and it is “fundamental to the emergence and reality”
of the subject, namely myself,300
however variable my behaviour across a
myriad social contexts. Self-understanding and self-identity are dependent
on this narrative. The process is not a simple mirroring but, rather, an
updating, a refiguring, a process of being perched, as Proust says, on the
pyramid of my past life as I launch into the future to create, to refine, to
define, the self yet again. And while this exercise takes place one must be
on one’s watch for self-aggrandizement, self-indulgence and self-
298
Luc Sante, The Factory of Facts, Granta Books, 1997.
299
Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self, Indiana UP, Bloomington,
1991, p.4.
300
idem
287

dramatization.301
For self-love is kneaded into the very clay of man, as
'Abdu'l-Baha, once wrote back in 1875.302
It is as natural as air.
While religious or political commitment, as expressed in terms of some
religious or political affiliation, is not a rare or unique phenomenon among
writers, most writers today do not incline to commitments in these areas.
They incline to opinions, plenty of them, but not organizational affiliation,
not an affiliation beyond the local writers’ association, the local drama group
or perhaps a keen interest in tennis or lawn bowling. Most of the people I
have known in my life outside the Baha'i community are similarly inclined.
They possess broad commitments to family, to job, to their gardening or any
one of a range of personal interests, activities and artistic pursuits. Hobbies
of different kinds, sports and the many pleasures and enjoyments of their
leisure time seem to lead the way. In my lifetime there has been a great
swing in popular culture toward sport and away from the elite intellectual
like Toynbee, Spengler, Marx, Weber, inter alter, and, of course, toward
television and away from radio. These issues are complex and I don’t want
to pursue them in any detail here. There are many reasons this book is not
301
Peter Kemp, editor, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, Oxford
UP, 1997.
302
'Abdu'l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.96.
288

likely to be popular even within the Baha’i community, some of these
reasons have to do with the pull of popular culture in its many forms. Much
that is popular, of course, is transient, so in the long term this five volume
work may find a big niche market.
There is, it seems to me anyway, in the decades of my life's experience, an
adversarial relationship between writers and thinkers of various ilks, with
aspects of government policy, indeed, with all institutions of political and
religious orthodoxy, be it old movements or new. This adversarial
relationship gets expressed throughout their writings and their life. The lack
of any affiliation, any commitment, to some organizational form with its
attendant authority, has been virtually anathema to the generations I have
been associated with in this half-century. Even among the affiliated, one
sees this adversarial relationship time and time again between the
institutions, the organizational movers and shifters, and the writers and
intellectuals of that community.
So many get aroused over what they don't want. And millions don't get
aroused at all, except in their private domains by the magical products of
consumption and their micro worlds of job, family, health and those
289

personal interests. The world of information and entertainment got
increasingly mixed in these several decades and in the pluralistic society that
imbibed it all, and in which I had my own life and being. The result seemed
to be a mixed bag around which most people spun the web of their lives.
Television tended to privatize rather than publicize; it was not so much a
window as a periscope by means of which the submerged suburban viewer
perceived and understood. At least that was the way Martin Pawley put it.303
I think TV did both, served as both window and periscope. Half unconscious
after the evening news, the viewer sleeps, watches more TV, plays golf,
washes the dishes but rarely engages with society in any 'political' way, a
way that attempts to engage with society through some organizational form
except perhaps: tennis, sport or any one of a host of leisure pursuits. As
society goes through one of its most revolutionary, its most painful periods
of change, the average person is, as one critic put it, amusing himself to
death. "The Westerner is par excellence a man of leisure,” as David Denby
writes in his The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and
Other Aspects of Popular Culture. This is not to say that millions don’t work
hard or experience pain. "Pain as God's Megaphone," C. S. Lewis wrote, "is
a terrible instrument." Frank T. Vertosick quotes this line as epigraph to his
303
Martin Pawley, The Private Future, Thames and Hudson, London, 1973.
290

new book, Why We Hurt.304
Lewis's comparison points out why pain is
essential: It gets our attention, alerting us that something is terribly wrong
and, if possible, must be dealt with. This autobiography is, partly at least, a
story of these moments. It is also a story of my own blurring of work and
leisure.
This half century was filled with many of contemporary society’s savage
dichotomies: the traditional demands of a sexual morality utterly at variance
with the massive propaganda of eroticism; a glossy magazine and media
world with its affluence and orientation to private pleasure and a world of
barbarism, poverty, violence and death; the constant message to do your
own thing and the immense need for people to work in groups on the vast
array of social problems--and on and on. Needless to say, these polarities
often pulled people completely apart. At the end of their journey in which a
perpetually unstable reconciliation of forces had become the first law of their
inner psychic life, in which the search for some Real Me had gone on for
years, in which messages to feel rather than think, in which some
rockbottom realism had become pretty much everyone's position, one
wondered when and if society would lapse into some anarchic animalism.
304
Frank T. Vertosick, Why We Hurt: The Natural History of Pain,
Harcourt, 2000.
291

Perhaps I overstate the case, but the flavour of my case remains and the
tensions of this half century were indeed enormous, if often subtle and
unnoticed. I should emphasize, too, although it hardly needs saying, that my
perspective in this work is one of a western Baha’i not a: Hottentot, Tutsi,
Mongolian, Eskimo or any one of hundreds of peoples in the third world.
Proust once said that "in reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the
reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical
instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what,
without the book, he would never, perhaps, have preconceived in himself."305
There is some truth in Harold Bloom's assertion that we read because we can
not know enough people and friendships possess a vulnerability.306
And so,
as I survey the interstices of my life, I hope I can make of the exercise that
optical instrument for the reader that Proust refers to here. Language offers,
as Janet Gunn put it so well, a peculiar fitness for the expression and
creation of the self.307
It is a common tool, a tool we all possess, perhaps the
best there is if we want to be the novelist, the psychologist, the psychiatrist,
305
Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured.
306
Harold Bloom in "Lit Crit Giant in Full Bloom," The Australian, January
10, 2001.
307
Janet Gunn, Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience, 1982, p.6.
292

of ourselves.308
It is also a tool with which I would like to mildly disturb the
rebellious and lively minds of readers but not to cut their throats; or, as some
writer whom I have now forgotten, once said: I’d like to be seen as a
surgeon who gives his patients a whole new set of internal organs but leave
them thinking they did it all by themselves.
But while possessing this disturbing, this therapeutic, function, with J.B.
Priestly, I like to think this autobiography has some of that sin-covering eye,
that eye of kindness, where I take in the washing, especially the dirty
washing, of others and they take in mine. We need to be kind to ourselves
as well as others. For many this is a hard lesson to learn. While we are
being kind, though, we must be careful that we are not being indolent and
aimless, that we attend to that "first attribute of perfection:" learning and the
cultural attainments of the mind309
and, in a series of fundamental
exhortations of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, that we oppose our passions.310
Otherwise,
like the great Russian writer Alexsandr Pushkin(1799-1837), we concern
ourselves with the perfection of our art and not the perfection of our life and
readers, in their turn, become enamoured of the confessional aspects of a
308
Ortega y Gasset wrote that "man is the novelist of himself," in History as a
System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History, 1961, p.203.
309
310
ibid., p.59.
293

life, its baseness and its loathsome aspects.311
My efforts to oppose my
passions since at least the years of puberty, about the time when rock-‘n’-
roll got its kick-start in the mid-1950s, some fifty years now, my successes
and failures would fill a set of encyclopedia were I to get into a detailed
micro-analysis.
311
This issue is discussed in "A Review of T.J. Binyon's Pushkin: A
Biography," The Wilson Quarterly, 2004.
294

I have already, in a first edition of this autobiography, written a version, a
story, of my life. It was about 40,000 words. I completed it a dozen years
ago now, in May 1993. On reading it, though, I felt some of that tedium
vitae mentioned above. I thought to myself "surely there is more to my life
than this?" So, I collected the best literature I could find about the process of
writing autobiography. It was a literature that began to accumulate in
libraries to a significant extent starting in the 1960s. I read everything I
could find about this literary activity which arguably goes back to St.
Augustine in 426 AD when he wrote his Confessions.312
I also read many
autobiographies but I found them, for the most part, uninspiring, predictable
accounts along predictable lifelines. Some autobiographies seemed of
excellent quality and I learned a great deal about a person's life that I did not
feel I needed or necessarily wanted to know. So, I only read a few chapters
and stopped in most cases. So often a student of autobiography, biography
and history is faced with cliche, imitation, pietism, affectation, useless fact
and much that is trivial and simply irrelevant to their lives. I try to
overcome these problems here, probably only partly with any success. In
some ways, as Jenny Turner points out in her review of Martin Amis’s
312
Graeco-Roman civilization, of course, had its autobiographers and
autobiographies like that of Flavius Josephus, among others. See Georg
Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, Parts 1 and 2, International
Library of Sociology, Routledge, NY, 1950.
295

writing, “all writing is a campaign against cliche. Not just cliches of the pen,
but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart.”313
The literary genre of autobiography has become so very popular in recent
years that people of little interest and no distinction feel impelled to record
their life-stories. I’m sure some would put me and this work in that
category. Perhaps autobiography is, as Anthony Storr suggests, for those
who are not “embedded in a family nexus.”314
At best one seems to get entertained, mildly informed and occasionally
stimulated with yet another story. As I near the age of sixty I feel as if I
have read and seen, lived and heard, a million stories. I don't feel the need
to imbibe yet another story of how someone made it from cradle to grave.
Inevitably dozens and dozens of stories will come my way as life takes its
course. People's inclination to tell stories seems endemic, pervasive, part of
the very air they breath. In the end, anyway, it may be "style alone that
makes a great memoir"315
or autobiography, with story taking a distant
313
Jenny Turner, “’The War Against Cliché’: The Amos Papers,” The New
York Times, December 23rd
, 2001.
314
Anthony Storr, Solitude, Harper Collins, 1989, p.81.
315
W.S. Di Piero, "Remembrance past," The Australian's Review of Books,
May 1998, p.12.
296

second place. There is, yes, story here but this is no psychoautobiography or
psychobiography in the tradition begun by Freud in 1910 with his study of
Leonardo da Vinci. There is no formal reliance on a case study. Rather the
reader will find here a much looser, informal, construction. I find the
process is much more like the process that Patricia Hampl describes in
Memory and Imagination: "Personal history, logged in memory, is a sort of
slide projector flashing images on the wall of the mind. And there's precious
little order to the slides in a rotating carousel." Out of that confusion, the
snapshots of memory and emotion, the memoirist attempts to "create a
shape.”316
No private citizen, Lippman and Schumpeter have reasoned, can be expected
any more to have access to all the information317
and arguments required to
make an informed decision about affairs of state.318
And so it is, following
the reasoning of this social critic and this political scientist, that I make little
attempt to discuss the cornucopia of complex social issues in this narrative.
316
Patricia Hampl, "Memory and Imagination," in The Fourth Genre,
Robert L. Root, Jr. and Michael Steinberg, editors, Allyn & Bacon, USA,
1999. pp. 297-305.
317
318
Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public, Transaction Publishers, New
Brunswick, 1997(1927), pp.11-63; Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism and
Socialism, 1944. Such was the situation, or at least such was my view, at
least, for the years in the first century of the Formative Age.
297

Given the insurmountable nature of the private citizen's public role the
question in our day has become, what is the role of the private citizen in our
pluralistic modern community? To have opinions on everything from
staggeringly complex international issues to intimate personal questions
involving babies, abuse and abortion, family and fertility, ecology and
euthanasia? For the most part I do not tackle such issues, such questions.319
If I did my 2500 pages would take you all right out of the ball park.
Wanting and needing coral, pearls and rare salts the student of
autobiography so often gets shells and sea-weed and cloudy water in the
ocean where autobiographies are published. I hope this account furnishes
more than sea-weed, more than shells. I hope those that walk along the
beach of this autobiography find rare ocean delights of imperishable value.
That is what I hope readers will find here. That is what I looked for in the
autobiographies of the famous, the rich and the daring. But, they could not
satisfy nor appease my hunger and, in the end, I got a small collection of
beach detritus, smooth rocks, pieces of fish bone and coloured glass.
Needing to be oceanographers, needing degrees in aquatic zoology or
319
There are unnumbered issues in: health, medicine, law, ethics, sex, food
and sexuality, inter alia which I either totally avoid in this book or just touch
on periferally.
298

botany, needing a highly refined aesthetic sense, we so often have to settle
for building sand castles in the sand and strolling casually along the beach
with our brains addled by life’s minutiae, trying to find in the fresh salty air
some new life for our souls. Needing more than the sun-warmed sand we
seem to stand in our separate solitudes, strangers in so many ways to
ourselves and to life itself. There is, it seems to me anyway, an
irreconcilable gap between expectations and outcomes, at least in some areas
of life. Sometimes, too, outcomes exceed the expectations; the ocean deeps
contain specimens beyond our wildest imaginations. At the turn of the
millennium this was actually the case. My hope is that this work will add to
this special collection of specimens which oceanographers were truly
finding in the dark depths of the ocean.
Let me make a general comment about aesthetics before going on. It seems
to me that writers and poets, indeed all of us, need increasingly what might
be called a "global aesthetic." While not wanting to go into the kind of
detail that would lead to a separate book and while not wanting to provide
even a cursory outline of advances in astronomical telescopes in particular
and astronomy in general, perhaps as far back as the lives of the Central
Figures of my Faith, I would like to make two or three general remarks here.
299

At least since the beginning of the twentieth century it has been possible for
the general public to be awed by the immensity and seeming lifelessness of
the universe; one of the crucial implications of the technological
developments that made this possible was a modernist human decentering
and re-scaling of the place of man in the world of existence. It is as a result
of this process that writers in recent times began to develop literary
strategies, consciously and unconsciously, that responded to these
developments. From a bounded universe to infinity on all sides has required
an adjustment-to say the least.
General developments in astronomy and specific advances in telescopic
technologies produced an intellectual and cultural environment that provided
writers with possibilities for a radical rethinking of the social and political
structures of their world. The aesthetic and intellectual implications are
simply staggering and beyond the scope of this memoir to elaborate to any
significant degree.320
The Bahá’í Order and its entire concept of
320
One study of the life and writing of Virginia Woolf is interesting in this
context. See:
Peter Naccarato, "Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of
Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy," Bryn Mawr Review of
Comparative Literature, Volume 4, Number 2, Spring 2004.
300

administration had its embryonic development during this massive
reordering of conceptual space and time in our universe.
Edwin Hubble's 1923 photograph of the spiral nebula Andromeda, which
offered a conclusive answer to the question of whether or not the universe
extended beyond the Milky Way, was made available in the first two years
that Shoghi Effendi assumed the mantle of his Guardianship. Hubble's work
extended the boundaries of the universe and lead to the conclusion that this
already vast universe was expanding at an incredible rate. As Hubble's work
reached the general public, it sparked a growing interest in astronomy and
cosmology, evidenced by the growing popularity of the Mount Wilson
Observatory as a bustling tourist attraction.
To return to the theme: sometimes both in life and in reading(surely that is a
false dichotomy) I found that I had simply no expectations at all. When
young, for example, I simply had no idea what to expect from the trip of life
that was in store for me. I took what came my way. Often it is best not to
have expectations. But much of the time they are unavoidable. I hope the
tree of your expectations, your longing, dear reader, does not yield the fruit
of disappointment. I hope, too, that the fire of your hope does not become
301

ashes321
as you search this autobiographical account for some helpful
perspectives on your life and times. I hope there is life here, perspectives of
relevance.
May there be little of the kind of life that begins in romance and high hopes,
like that of Deborah-Kerr’s and Burt Lancaster’s tryst on the sand in the
1953 film From Here to Eternity, and ends, as so much of romance does end,
in sadness and the dashing of hopes. 1953 was a big year for me, too, and for
the narrative at the centre of this autobiography. But my romance, at least
back then, had nothing to do with the erotic and everything to do with an
idea. I hope readers are enticed after a short read of this autobiography.
May they put the book down to cook their evening meal, work in the garden,
watch that movie or attend to their many responsibilities and pick it up again
with enthusiasm. That would indeed give me pleasure. I can but hope.
The wonder of this age is that it has become so varied, so rich, so full of
change and movement and of novelty that it seems to stand in little need of
what I have written here. The great books of history, too, for the most part
stand unread by the hapless millions as they read another 'how-to' book, the
321
Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys, USA, Wilmette, 1952, p.13.
302

latest 'therapy manual,' or some magazine of their choice before browsing
through the local paper or, perhaps, some advertising leaflets placed in their
mailbox. Ironically, at the same time, more history gets read than ever
before. There is more print passing over the eyes of the human community
than ever before in history. Whether that will include this work of mine,
time will tell. Of course, with six billion on earth now and three billion
when I just entered the influences of this new movement in 1953, there are
more people doing just about everything.
Our age provides that cornucopia of stuff, intense, engrossing, distracting,
mundane, secular and spiritual, material to refine and elaborate our
pleasures. In many ways it is easier now to be happy. Pleasantness is
scattered everywhere.322
But so, too, is there horror, anxieties and
uncertainties.323
It is also easier to be sad, easier to have a tragic end, easier
to starve to death. And there are more autobiographies than ever before.
After ten more years of writing and note-gathering, building on the first
edition of this autobiography, I felt I had a second edition. I had altered my
basic narrative only slightly, but I had built up a supporting structure of
322
George Townshend, The Mission of Baha'u'llah, George Ronald, Oxford,
1973(1952), p.91.
323
Richard Sennett, "The New Political Economy and its Culture,"
Hedgehog, Spring, 2000.
303

material that analysed autobiography as a genre. I had a helpful resource of
literally hundreds of thousands of words. I was ready for another assault on
this enigmatic, subtle and, I find, elusive act of writing one’s story. The
elusiveness lies in finding some quintessence of story, some essential
meaning that one can give to one’s experience or, as T.S. Eliot puts the idea
in his poem The Dry Savages:
It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern,
and ceases to be a mere sequence-
Or even development.(lines 85-87)
And again:
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.(lines 93-96)
Some of this elusiveness, this curious creature, that is a person's life is
described by Emily Dickinson in the following poem:
304

The Past is such a curious Creature
To look her in the Face
A transport may receipt us
Or a Disgrace--
Unarmed if any meet her
I charge him fly
Her faded Ammunition
Might yet reply.324
I look on this curious creature, the past, with much more humour and
dispassionateness than once I did and I seek the ‘reply’ of that
‘Ammunition.’ The nostalgia I have often come across for 'the good old
days' distorts the real harshness of the past. There is, too, a fascination for
the incredible story of the evolution of man and his communities. Perhaps
what I have written here in this fifth edition is the start of the release of that
'Ammunition' that Dickinson refers to. "The world is," as Horace Walpole
wrote back in 1776 at the outset of the American Revolutionary War, "a
324
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, editor, T.H. Johnson, 1970,
p.531.
305

comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel."325
It can also
be a rich tapestry to those without an historical sense and don't tend to think
about history, but that tapestry must be composed of threads from other
domains of human experience.
The words of George Orwell about one’s experience as a writer are pertinent
here. “One difficulty I have never solved,” writes Orwell, “is that one has
masses of experience which one passionately wants to write about and no
way of using them up except by disguising them as a novel.”326
So Orwell
gives me some of my rational for this autobiographical work.
As I pass the age of sixty I see much more of the comedy, the subtlety and
the complexity of the human narrative than I once did; the serious tragedy
that I once saw in life has been softened, ameliorated, but not entirely
eliminated, with the years. Humanity's collective adolescence and the
momentous transition of our time have brought and are bringing crises and
turmoil on an unprecedented scale amidst a torrent of conflicting interests. I
look, too, at this curious creature the past, and in particular the forty years of
325
Horace Walpole(1717-1797) in a Letter to Anne, 16 August 1776.
326
George Orwell in “Orwell on Writing,” Jeffrey Meyers, The New
Criterion, October 2003.
306

pioneering that is at the heart of this story, as Hosein Danesh put it in an
essay he once wrote on the subject, as part of the outstanding contribution to
the history of the unity of the world that is the Baha'i pioneering activity.327
But it is an outstanding contribution that I have only just begun to
understand and one the world, as yet, knows nothing of at all.
In some ways the truths associated with pioneering give substance to a
concept of truth expressed in a history text, Making Sense of Modern Times:
"Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its truth
is an event or process. Truth is provisional and changing."328
I'm sure this is
part of truth's relativity. And, of course, there is much more. Emerson wrote
in his essay "The Poet" that half of what makes human beings is their
expression. For me that expression is, significantly, the written word.
Writing and artistic expression in general, Emerson concludes, is an ability
confined to a few. I think that is true of writing, although people express
their creative bents in a wide variety of ways.
327
H. Danesh in Baha'i Scholarship: A Compilation and Essays, 1992, p.66.
328
J.D. Hunter, editor, Making Sense of Modern Times, p.209.
307

Donald Horne, Australian social critic, suggests that we reserve
autobiography "for books that are primarily concerned with the changes,
surprises and shifting around of the self."329
Perhaps he will add my
book to his list. For there has been much shifting and many changes and
surprises insofar as the self, myself, is concerned and much else during
these four epochs. I hope he would not consider my work an
'autoglorification.' There have been continuities in the midst of the ups-
and-downs, the crises and the victories. Like A.B. Facey in his
autobiographical work, A Fortunate Life, there has been a continuous
core to my experience that has remained unchanged despite the changes
and challenges from life. No matter how continuous and how shifting,
I'm sure there will be some who will wish I had devoted this work to,
say, an animal autobiography. Tess Cosslett, of Lancaster University, in
his article Subjectivity and Ethics in Animal Autobiography: Black
Beauty330
and Others, discusses the use made of the autobiographical
genre by humans about their animals.
329
Donald Horne, "Life lines," The Australian Review of Books, May 1998.
330
Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, Internet, May 2003.
308

Given the enthusiasm in our culture for pets many, after they have sampled
this narrative, may wish that my account was about one or several of the
cats in my life, the many dogs or horses that crossed my path, or the
birds, the fish or any one of the host of animals that became part of my
life since I was a child and which David Attenborough and others have
colourfully presented to my eyes and mind over the years. For many,
especially those who seem to love animals more than humans, I’m sure
would prefer my own story was left right out, although it is unlikely that
such a person would ever pick up this narrative and try it on for size
anyway.
309

There is little reference to animals at all in this story, although I did have a
cat around the house off and on from about the age of ten until the age of
fifty. And, interestingly, I became quite fond of cats, spent much time in
their company, particularly because I was often up at night when
everyone was in bed but the cat. Details about my experiences with cats
and with dogs, other peoples' who provided an unpleasant musical
background on many of my evening walks in many towns I lived in, the
occasional bird, animal menageries, visits to zoos, aqua-marines, inter
alia, I virtually ignore because, if nothing else, their significance in my
life has been negligible. If, though, as 'Abdu'l-Baha says, stories
repeated about others are seldom good, a silent tongue is safest,"331
perhaps it would have been better to write more about the animals in my
life and less about myself, at least for those animal lovers. The same
argument could be made about plants and minerals, insects and
vegetation, although that is a more complex argument and I will leave
that for later.
Indeed, as I try to place this Baha’i, this pioneering, experience, 1953-2007,
into some context, I'd like to draw on the writings of Arnold Toynbee in his
331
'Abdu'l-Baha, 'Abdu'l-Baha in London, p.131: quoted in The Pattern of
Baha'i Life, Baha'i Pub. Trust, London, 1970(1948), p. 31.
310

A Study of History, Vol.2 which was first published in 1934 as Baha'i
Administration was taking its initial form in several countries around the
world. Toynbee quotes the eighteenth century philosopher David Hume,
who concluded his essay Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences
with the observation that "the arts and sciences, like some plants, require a
fresh soil; and, however rich the land may be, and however you may recruit
it by art or care, it will never, when once exhausted, produce anything that is
perfect or finished in the kind.332
Toynbee is the great historian of the
inevitable global political unification process, of the world becoming, as
novelist Lawrence Durrell put it: “one place.”333
For some reason, for many
reasons, in August 1962, on the eve of my pioneering venture I felt quite
exhausted or should I say I felt a sense of the tedious, the tedium of the
environment, the environment in which I had lived for the previous dozen
years in my childhood and adolescence. It was the environment where I was
in the porch-swing of my first bones, where I had first settled into myself
and my life and where I stared out at the world with a complex mix of awe,
boredom, confusion and psychological hunger.
332
David Hume in A Study of History, Vol.2, Galaxy Book, 1962(1934),
p.73.
333
Lawrence Durrell in “Durell, Encounter, Deconstruction,” Stephan
Herbrechter, Agora: Online Graduate Humanites Journal, Summer 2004.
311

So much of the I who was then is now forgotten and dismembered. I escaped
or became imprisoned by a natural and obscure process and entered another
world. I am deaf to the sounds of that world. I listen for them now, but they
are silent. I collect fragments from that world, so many bits and pieces, fly
and swim in some place at the back of my brain or perhaps it is the front.
They’ve mapped the brain since I was young. Even now I have lost
yesterday and the day before. They slip away. It all becomes a series of
isolated vignettes, vivid as hypnagogic visions. Great winds over decades
have blown my past away in gusts, in little breezes, leaving patches and
parts of my history and pre-history, like a patchwork quilt that has not yet
been made. No wonder I want to remember, to follow a thread back into
those years, to search for something I already know but have forgotten I
know. I listen not “to” but “for.”334
Women's writing has been said to be
fragmentary, put together out of pieces, as a quilt, for instance, is created out
of scraps, placed in careful relation to one another.335
I feel this way about
my work here.
334
P.K. Page, "Traveller, Conjuror, Journeyman" quoted in Studies in
Canadian Literature, Vol.19, No.1, 1994.
335
Judith Miller, “Montgomery’s Emily: Voices and Silences,” Studies In
Canadian Literature, Vol.9 No.2, 1984.
312

By 1962, then, my bones hankered for a fresh soil. I needed to move on, to
travel, to see the world, what young people have been doing extensively
since the late eighteenth century.336
Each generation in the twentieth century
seemed to travel more; the generation that came of age in the 1960s made a
quantum leap out into the world. While we leaped, or at least after I leaped,
after forty years of leaping, I tried to convey something of the nature of the
leap and of the conventional life that occupied the ground-tone of my days.
For no matter how much the music varies, there is always a ground-tone of
conventionality, like some sort of glue that helps keep us from being
unstuck. And having been unstuck several times, I am more than a little
conscious of the importance of stuckness, of conventionality.
Toynbee draws on the mythology of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition,
among the many sources he draws on, to discuss the stimulus of new
ground. I want to draw on this same mythology as I try to place this
pioneering venture into a fitting context. Toynbee writes that in their
removal out of the magic garden into the workaday world, Adam and Eve
transcend the food-gathering, the hunting and gathering, economy of
336
C. Aitchison, N.MacLeod and S. Shaw, Leisure and Tourism Landscapes:
Social and Cultural Georgraphies, Routledge, London, 2000, p.89. For most
of history travel beyond one's home and environs was a rare occurrence.
313

"Primitive Mankind and give birth to the fathers of an agricultural and a
pastoral civilization. In their exodus from Egypt, the Children of
Israel….give birth to a generation which helps to lay the foundations of the
Syriac Civilization in taking possession of the Promised Land."337
Such is
part of the symbolic significance of, arguably, the first pioneers.
I argue here, and it has insensibly become my conviction with the years, that
Baha'i pioneers around the world are helping to erect, in ways they are quite
unable to conceive or understand, the nucleus and pattern of a future world
Order. It is not an agricultural and pastoral civilization they are building but,
rather, a global civilization. The Promised Land they are taking possession
of for the Lord of Hosts, the blessed Person of the Promised One, they do so
as part of a heavenly army338
and the land is the entire planet. Just as the
highest expression of the civilization that the Israelites represented was to be
found on new ground--in the land of Israel--so, too, does the international
pioneer in this embryonic global civilization find the highest, the finest
expression, the fruit of his own life, in the place he has taken up root, the
new soil.
337
Toynbee, op.cit., p.73. I do not take this story literally but more of a
metaphor for the period after the Neolithic revolution(1200-8000 BC) to the
period of the late second and early first millennium BC(1300-800 BC).
338
'Abdu'l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, Wilmette, 1977, p.47.
314

This autobiography is not born out of the pain of exile, alienation or some
metaphysical homelessness, as is so often the case with autobiographies.339
Rather, it is born out of what you might call the restorative power of
narration, out of a writing process that transforms through a general
autobiographical impulse, an impulse that creates a certain reportage, that
documents a life, a self-story and a time, that serves as a symptomatic or
transfigurative symbolization of an experience, an experience that looks like
it is going to last the rest of my life.340
It is born, too, out of a series of
certain kinds of symbolic markers and consummations that have defined
where I have been in relation to others in my life, both living and dead, that
have served as signposts helping me to make sense of my life in terms of
place and time and to help give it a coherent narrative shape in spite of the
many disorienting, fragmenting, effects of experience. For the project of
one's survival and growth, the contribution to self and society and one's
meaning and purpose all have a place in time and space. And place, unlike a
consumer product, has an organic component, a history, an ecosystem, and a
social body, that inevitably shapes the form and social character, the person
339
Judith M. Melton, The Face of Exile: Autobiographical Journeys, Iowa
City, University of Iowa Press, 1998.
340
Cynthia Merrill, "A Review of The Face of Exile: Autobiographical
Journeys," in a/b: Auto/Biography, Purdue University Press, Winter, 2002.
315

in that place. This project must be understood in its temporal and spacial
dimensions, in addition to whatever metaphysical and ideological
abstractions underpin the whole exercise.
Some may find this context in which I attempt to place this international
pioneering story a little too lofty or pretentious, a little too over-the-top as it
is said these days. And that is an understandable reaction, especially for
those who interpret life in terms of some local landscape, some local region
with family, job and garden occupying centre stage. In the bewildering
range of autobiographical writing now on show some tell their stories in
terms of geography and the nation-state, their homeland, some in terms of
their family and career, others in terms of their private interests and hobbies,
and still others as an expression of their religious, political or social
commitments.
I have always seen my life in terms of some big picture, some metanarrative,
some global story. I feel this international pull and have felt it since my
teens. It grew on me insensibly in the 1950s and early 1960s. I see what I
write as part of a mosaic about a time when the world seemed to be shifting
on its axis, when there was much impoverishment of life and much
316

enrichment. What I write is shaped by narrative paradigms which I select, by
a certain literary plotting, by ideological investments, by the caprices of
memory and forgetfulness and by my own psychic needs. In the process of
writing this autobiography I examine various forces at work in the
pioneering process, the interplay of history and autobiography and the
complex relationship between the autobiographer who lives in history and
the narrative I construct regarding that history. There is, too, some of that
nectar, that celestial life, that divine animal that allows the mind to flow, as
Emerson said in one of his essays, "into and through things hardest and
highest" and the intellect to be ravished "by coming nearer to the fact."341
By
the time I was writing the fourth edition of this autobiography my "habit of
living was," as Emerson called it, "set on a key so low that the common
influences" delighted me.342
I hope the result for readers will be some
evidence of a satisfying interplay of observation, wit, and insight. One can
but hope.
As a child, like virtually everyone else I knew or did not know in the 1950s,
local activity filled my daily life. My imagination played all over this world
and at its fringes. There were then, as there are now, many whose life
341
Emerson, "The Poet."
342
idem
317

occupied some central pivot around things beside the private, the personal
and the familial. Over these last five decades the vast majority of people
whom I have come to know, outside the Baha'i community that has been the
great milieux, the great centrepiece of my own life, have had an individual
ethos, a milieux, a reason d'etre, you might even call it a religion, that is a
composite of: job, family, home and garden and a set of interests, hobbies
and activities to occupy them as pleasantly as possible in life's space and
give it meaning. I have mentioned this before and I will mention it again
because it was such a pervasive part of what you might call the social and
philosophical part of the environment of my life, of what was the
quintessentially conventional core of existence at the mundane level. Some
might call it the individualist ethos and it is all part of a fragmented,
decentred world, a world of perceptual immediacy in an essentially complex,
visual culture of interrelations and interconnections. One historian goes so
far as to suggest that in our study of the past stories should not always be the
raison d’etre or the modus operandi. Given the fact that the past is, in fact, a
fragmented landscape of data, of perceptual immediacy, a landscape that
pre-exists any stories, then the autobiographer does not have to centre his
entire thesis on story; data can be equally important. In the long term, the
longue duree, this narrative may achieve some importance simply in terms
318

of the factual data, the facticity of the whole thing.343
But, no matter how
much data and fact readers will find here there are ample quantities of the
tentative, the hypothetical and reservations heaped high.
I often recreate images of those halcyon days in the 1950s but by 1962 a
new set of continuities were forming around beliefs and a new community.
My identity was reforming around a whole new set of relations between
home, culture, intellectual tradition and nationality, marriage and landscape,
career and the profound changes associated with movement to new places,
what Baha'is had called 'pioneering' for some twenty-five years by 1962.344
In the wider society, a nomadic, voluntary and concentrated movement had
developed in my late childhood and adolescence, the 1950s. It was
expressed as a form of intellectual wandering—the Beat Generation—which
widened to involve youth throughout the Western world. It is not by chance
that the sacred text of this nomadism, a nomadism of refusal, was Jack
Kerouac's On the Road. It was a book that celebrated the epic of the hobos
343
For this concept of history embedded in data see: Karen Bassi, “Things
of The Past: Objects and Time in Greek Narrative,” Arethusa, Vol.38, No.1,
Winter 2005, pp.1-32.
344
The term 'pioneer' became an increasing part of Baha'i vocabulary
beginning in the mid-1930s according to Will C. van den Hoonaard,
Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. See his The
Origins of the Baha’i Community of Canada: 1898-1948.
319

and the diversity of their roaming. And it filtered into my psyche insensibly
so that by the mid-sixties, by the time I was an adult at 21 I too wanted to
get out on the road.
"I walked along the tracks in the long sad October light of the valley, hoping
for an SP freight to come along so I could join the grape-eating hobos and
read the funnies with them,"345
wrote Kerouac. His book is about the
pleasure of movement, the aesthetics of hitch-hiking, hanging around as a
style of life, in trains, buses, trucks, bus stations. Why we do things is , of
course, a complex question but my decision to pioneer in the 1960s had its
roots in a number of sources of which this Beat Generation, it seems logical
to conclude, was one. I certainly did a great deal of hitch-hiking beginning
in 1960 and ending in 1980. These experiences could fill a book in
themselves. They were safe days for hitch-hiking and only people like
Andre Brugiroux continued the habit all around the world.346
Over the years I felt a Babel of my multiple selves being created and writing
this autobiography is, in part, an attempt to harmonize these voices, to thread
345
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Andre Deutsch, London, 1958, p.101.
346
Andre Brugiroux, One People One Planet: The Adventures of a World
Citizen, One World Publications, 1991. Andre has been hitch-hiking for 50
years, 1955-2005.
320

the maze of the past into some tapestry of colour and shape,347
some guiding
ideal of a singularly construed self, some coherent autobiography. The self
as a unified, stable, entity existing through time, is a traditional
autobiographical perspective that, while I have been pioneering since the
1960s, has been unravelled, critiqued and debunked by many theorists of
autobiography. Like the land I walk on, my self is an even more changing, a
more unstable and indefineable entity, because it is ultimately associated
with the soul. The self, of course, appears to the senses as a fixed form.
Writing this autobiography is as much a cognitive self-reconstruction as it is
a performative act. But it is not a fiction, not a giving face; it is, rather, a
document of self-exploration and self-defence, a document of catharsis and
elaboration. It is also what Emerson said was a characteristic of the poet:
being inflamed and carried away by thought and heeding my dream which
holds me "like an insanity."348
The Baha'i Faith, in the course of my pioneering venture, became what
America was to Emerson, a poem. It gave me a departure from routine,
from a life path with the normalities and predictabilities of a kid in southern
Ontario from the lower middle class. It gave to me an emotion that touched
347
Cynthia Merrill, op.cit.
348
Emerson, "The Poet."
321

my intellect and sapped my conventional enthusiasms. An upheaval
occurred in my sensibility, an upheaval that resulted in a new, a fresh
perspective, on life, on living. Its ample vision dazzled my imagination. My
art, my writing, became the path by which I defined "the work." With
Emerson, too, I doubt not "but persist." The impressions of the actual world
do seem to fall, as Emerson put it in the final paragraph of his essay on "The
Poet," like summer rain washing the lines of this narrative account. As they
fall I invent my now from my gaze in transit, a gaze that not only sees, but
critically reads the time, historical and personal, in which my life is inserted.
I then extract from this experience a new horizon for my vision.
The wider society in which I live gives little recognition to the world view
which I feel and think about, although the global nature of society, the ethic
of one world that is part and parcel of the Baha'i teachings is quickly and
confusedly making its appearance as the decades spin by insensibly and
sensibly. The wider society, for the most part, has virtually no conception of
the contribution that I and my coreligionists are making. What I do, I do
virtually entirely in an obscurity that is, thusfar, virtually impenetrable,
although the rise from this obscurity has been taking place slowly over these
epochs. I find it interesting, somewhat surprising, but partly predictable,
322

given the pattern that has repeated itself in the story of western civilization
going back to the Israelites, that religious pioneers have "transformed
themselves" but "continued to live in obscurity." In the case of these same
Israelites this obscurity lasted for, perhaps, seven or eight centuries.349
I see
myself as one of a second generation, during the years 1962 to 1987, of
international pioneers. The first generation of pioneers occupied the years
from just before my parents met in the late 1930s and continued until I was
in my matriculation year at high school.
If the work I do has taken place largely in obscurity it is hardly surprising, as
I have just said, given that the Israelites lived in an equal if not greater
obscurity for over 700 years in the land they moved to as pioneers.350
Actually and ironically, I see my life and its significance largely as one that
has seen a gradual coming out of obscurity or, as the Universal House of
Justice put it in 2002, a "continuing rise from obscurity."351
It is difficult to
judge either my own life or that of the Baha'i Faith in the long term "before
349
Toynbee, op.cit., p.54.
350
The roots, too, of Greece civilization began at the turn of the first
millennium BC with a mingling of influences from Africa, Asia and the
Middle East with those "rising from Greek soil." Ted Hughes," Myth and
Education," The Symbolic Order, editor, Peter Abbs, The Falmer Press, NY,
1989, p.162.
351
The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, 2002.
323

the play is done," as Frances Quarles once wrote.352
Although I take account
of my life every day, and have for years, it is impossible to judge one's
ultimate achievement or lack thereof. The ultimate achievement of this
Faith I have been associated with for fifty years, though, is rich with
promise. There has certainly been, for these several decades, these epochs, a
process of coming out of obscurity both for me and for the Baha'i Faith, but
so much of the inner experience one has as a Baha’i, at least in so many of
the pioneer places I have lived since 1962, is one of the relative obscurity of
the Movement I am associated with.
Perhaps the years I taught in high schools and post-secondary schools in
Australia, 1972 to 1999, saw a personal rise from obscurity take place in my
life.353
More than half my life now has been lived as an overseas pioneer,
from the age of twenty-seven to sixty. More recently the rise out of
obscurity is taking a different form through my writing; perhaps my late
adulthood and old age will see in this creative field what the House of
Justice called this "continuing rise from obscurity" The expression
"continuing rise from obscurity" is an apt one for both my own life and the
352
Frances Quarles(1592-1644), Emblems.
353
A twenty-eight year period, less three years to recuperate from bi-polar
episodes, to do part-time jobs and to work in a tin mine(1979-1981).
324

life of this Cause. In so many ways, I have come to see my life and the life
of the Cause as obverse, like opposite sides of the same coin, as 'Abdu'l-
Baha once described the relationship between this life and the next.
The character of individuals rises and falls with the roles, activities,
practices and customs that make them social animals. And so it is that this
book, this story, will inevitably dwell on the web of relations that have
cultivated and educated me. It will dwell on the circumstances of my time
and my religion, my family and my profession, and how they bear on my
social identity, on the psychological glue that holds me and especially my
religious community together.354
It is not my purpose here to dwell on the
many theories of identity, it is rather to provide a sense of myself as a
person, a story I believe in and am committed to. But however important all
of these ideas are, this autobiography is not essentially a work in
psychology; nor is it a work in sociology, history or literature. It is a
compendium and as such may not satisfy those who want a depth of
perspective deriving from one or more of these social sciences.
354
Todd Gitlin argues that identity comes from the features of new social
movements. The term 'identity' came from the studies of psychologist Erik
Erikson.
325

The distinctions of personal merit and influence are tempered but still
conspicuous in any Baha'i community. We are not, of course, aware of all
these distinctions. Many of them are feeble and obscure. Others are brighter
than the noonday sun. Most of humanity is not conscious of the abilities and
talents of others who cross their paths. Indeed, we all wear differently
constituted blinders for various reasons of time and circumstance. So it was
that there were many, if not most, whom I scarcely appreciated, to whose
true virtues and talents I was insensible. The severe subordination of rank
and office, which often pertains in societies that raise egalitarianism to
unrealistic and undesirable heights of value, which do not see equality for
what it is, a chimera, was not characteristic of this community which
recognized a wide range of statuses and roles resulting from talent and
appointment, election and loyalty, mature experience and selfless devotion.
So it was, therefore, that I came to be more than a little conscious of the very
real abilities of people I came to know as a result of seeing them week after
week in their homes, their lounge-rooms, seeing them serve tea and chat
with the wide variety of humanity that were present in any community of
even a few souls. So, too, did familiarity often dull or prevent my
appreciation of the true worth of many of the friends and associations who
326

were part of my life in this incredibly diverse community in the last half
century. Wittgenstein put this experience of familiarity this way: "The
aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their
simplicity and familiarity."355
The psychological synchronicity required for relationships to achieve any
harmony, I had mastered perhaps as early as my twenties and this attitude
helped me all my life. But there was so much else required for the battles of
life than the application of this somewhat simple concept to relationships.
And there was always, to some extent, an inevitable degree of tension in
inter-relationships.
Baha'u'llah says in a prayer for assistance, assistance for both the individual
and the Cause: "Guide me then in all that pertaineth to the exaltation of Thy
Cause and the magnification of the station of Thy loved ones."356
Life brings
out in our experience, it would appear, events which 'magnify our stations'
and events which 'draw away and hinder' us from 'approaching Thy court.'357
The battle, it also appears, does not end in this earthly life. For, ultimately,
355
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
356
The 'provisional translation' of a prayer sent to me by Roger White
1990(ca).
357
Baha'u'llah in Baha'i Prayers, Wilmette, 1985(1954), p.193.
327

all the battles in life are within and so they have been all my life, no matter
what the external war: WW2, Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq and the Middle East,
the war on poverty, aids and starvation, an aggressive secularism358
and a
multitude of others that have dotted the landscape of my life since 1944.
Much of our inner battle, of course, we never see. That, it seems to me, is
only natural. This autobiography tells as much the inner story of self as it
does the documentation of actual experience,359
and little of those external
wars I have just referred to above.
So many events, or appearances, or accidents, which seemed to deviate from
the ordinary course of nature were often rashly ascribed to the immediate
action of the Deity or the will of God, as I found it so often expressed by my
coreligionists or other believers on other religious paths. The credulous
fancy of the multitude often gives some theistic contour to the shape and
colour, language and motion, to the fleeting, common and sometimes
uncommon events of daily life. I found myself disinclined to attribute such
events to the direct intervention to the Central Orb of the universe.
358
S. Lukes, Emile Durkheim His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical
Study, Penguin Press, London, 1978, p.358.
359
This was also very true of the poet Laura Riding. See: Barbara Adams,
"Laura Riding's Poems: A Double Ripeness," Modern Poetry Studies, Vol.
11, 1982, pp.189-195.
328

Conscious as I was, very early in my Baha'i experience, certainly by 1962 at
the age of eighteen, of the several protocols of Baha'i piety; stranded as I so
often was on uncertainty both before and after trying to enter that rare
Presence--as I attempted to do in prayer; giving expression to a skepticism
which was part of the very spirit of my age, I was a humble petitioner, or so
I tried to be, who was often joyless and empty-handed. A loss of that
innocence and exaltation was also mine as was a sense of the knowingness
of my knowledge.360
Prayer often provided what Shakespeare said it could,
in words he put in the mouth of Prospero in the last lines of the Epilogue of
his last play, The Tempest:
My ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As far as my life is concerned, I feel a little like Mark Twain who wrote: "I
have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I
am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to get on paper
yet….I believe that if I should put in all or any of those incidents I have felt
360
Thanks to Roger White, "A Sudden Music," A Witness of Pebbles,
George Ronald, 1981, p.81.
329

in my life I should be sure to strike them out when I revise the book."361
Twain's hyperbole is delightful here and, although I can only think of several
incidents that caused me to feel a sense of intense and prolonged shame,
incidents that one could argue are worthy of recording in an intimate
autobiography, I, like Twain, would strike them out here, if indeed I had
included them at all in my first edition 12 years ago. Most of the incidents
that caused me to experience a sense of shame, were brief, short verbal
exchanges, remembered for perhaps a few days, a few months or even a few
years, but are now lost to my memory, and thankfully so, in the sands of
time.362
"The tongue," as Baha'u'llah said in a richly textured and profound passage,
"is a smouldering flame." "Excess of speech," He went on, "is a deadly
poison," and I have had more than my several drops over what is now six
decades of life.363
Some of these shame-causing incidents involved the erotic
inclination, or the concupiscible appetite as Baha’u’llah called it, and readers
361
Mark Twain, "Chapters from Mark Twain's Autobiography," North
American Review, September 1906-December 1907, September 2001.
362
The subject of shame can not be dismissed in a few lines. The innocence
of my childhood quickly and inevitably became experience; the joy and
happiness of song often turned to many other emotional notes and tones.
This autobiography deals with these other musical expressions in my life.
363
Baha'u'llah in a fascinating tablet known as "The True Seeker."
330

have these incidents to look forward to the chapters ahead. This
autobiography is not intended as an unburdening or baring of my soul. There
is some psychotherapy here; there is also some history which is awakened,
as Toynbee notes in the opening sentence of his final volume of A Study of
History, "by the mere experience of being alive."364
I engage in some
confessionalism but, it seems to me, it is a moderate amount relative to the
great quantity that could be given the light of day. Some readers, I
anticipate, will regard the confessionalism they read in the pages ahead as
far from moderate; others will say 'he has not gone far enough!' Of course,
confession also means a statement of belief, and this aspect is reflected
throughout this work in more ways than some readers might care to come
across. In addition, confession means a statement of praise. In his
Confessions Augustine constantly gives praise to the God who mercifully
directed his path and brought him out of misery and error. In essence, the
Confessions is one long prayer. While this is not true of my autobiography
there are certainly many notes of praise.
But I write what I do about my personal battle, its failings and its successes,
because, as Elizabeth Rochester once wrote in her personal letter to
364
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol.10, 1963(1954), p. 3.
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Canadian pioneers overseas in 1981, "I believe we Baha'is need to know that
we all experience the effects of the world around us and we all are
vulnerable to stress when things are different from what we are used to.
Baha'u'llah knows it is hard work. We overlook what is there! We are not
called upon to deny the existence of faults or to pretend that we don't know
they are there." Elizabeth shares some of her thoughts about acknowledging
our sinfulness. "How will we learn from one another," she goes on, "if we
are not open enough to acknowledge the process between the discomfort and
the joy?" If I do not let others know that I struggle and have struggled in
the same way that they must struggle, Elizabeth concludes, will they have
the courage to try, to endure, to be steadfast until the victories come?365
Such is the spirit within which much of what I have written in the struggle
department is included. Failures, like successes, are part of the very clay of
life. Guilt, shame, loss and feelings of incompetence and inadequacy are
built into the fabric of my life, all our lives and readers will hear some of my
cry, my admissions, my confessionalism, in the pages ahead.
If, as 'Abdu'l-Baha writes, "stories repeated about others are seldom good, a
silent tongue is safest," and "even good may be harmful if spoken at the
365
Elizabeth Rochester, Pulse of the Pioneer, January 1981, National Pioneer
Committee of Canada, pp.5-7.
332

wrong time and to the wrong person,"366
then I am sure to cause offence to
some in the course of this book. So......I will get the apologies out of the
way right now. Autobiography is an art that can open the passage from
feeling to meaning. It can be a detonator of intellect and will in its attempt to
translate the intensity of the life of human beings through a play with the
familiar, deal with both the ordinary and the deeply felt. I'd like to think I
give to readers a great narrative achieving what great narratives are supposed
to achieve: provide a background readers can understand, present a character
readers can believe in and care about, provide an adventure and tell a story
in which something surprising and yet partly inevitable occurs, which moves
readers, makes them question things they believe in and fills their emotional
selves.367
That's what I'd like to think. I don't think I achieve all these things.
Few stories, narratives, novels, books, autobiographies, do. I please myself
here and, in the process, I hope to please a few readers. I try to provide what
Canadian poet Ken Norris says contemporary poets do not yet achieve: a
unifying vision.368
I try to do, too, what T.S. Eliot confessed that writers
should do. “Meaning,” he wrote, “is the bone you throw a reader while you
366
'Abdu'l-Baha in The Pattern of Baha'i Life: A Compilation, London
1970(1948), p.31.
367
Mary Schendlinger, "Judges' Essay: The Adventure of Narrative," Prism
International, 2002.
368
Ken Norris, "Interview," Quarry, 1988.
333

do your real work upon him.”369
I suppose this raises the question ‘what is
my real work?’ I will leave that to the reader to assess as he or she plows
through the next seven hundred and fifty pages.
I'd like to return to a few more comments from Arnold Toynbee on the
strength of the impression, the affect on the receptivity, the vividness, of
historical circumstances. I have been reading Toynbee from time to time
now for forty years and what he writes is so often pertinent to this
autobiography. Toynbee says that the affects, the strength, of the impact of
historical circumstances is "apt to be proportionate to their violence and their
painfulness." When the process of civilization is "in full swing," he goes on,
then "a thousand familiar experiences" constantly make us aware of our
"goodly heritage."370
At the same time, one can not help feel, from time to
time, that the customs and sanctions of civilization "constitute a thin veneer
over our baser instincts."371
Whether our civility derives from guilt, shame
or religious proclivity in this age, these early epochs of the Formative Age, it
is a civility that slips to the edge and barbarism so often takes its place.
369
T.S. Eliot in “The Meaning of Meaning,” Marion Stocking, Books in
Brief, Vol.53, No.3, Spring 2003.
370
'Abdu'l-Baha, Pattern of Baha'i Life, p.31. Also this "goodly heritage" is a
phrase from Psalms, xvi, 6.
371
Robert M. Young, "Guilt and the Veneer of Civilization," Internet Site,
2001.
334

The Universal House of Justice put it a little differently, but in the same
vein, by saying that we should "take deep satisfaction from the advances in
society."372
As these epochs moved insensibly through the decades of my
pioneering experience more and more people seemed to sink into a slough of
despond and were "troubled by forecasts of doom."373
I, too, and the Baha'i
community were deeply aware of the dark heart we were travelling through,
but there were always those deep satisfactions in the progress we had made
as a society. The Baha'i Faith also leads ultimately to an optimism regarding
the future of humanity but the process of getting to that distant 'golden age'
is fraught with problems with which we must struggle. And so the optimism
is liberally coated with realism. With the years, then, I have become more
than a little sensitive to those "professional optimists" whom Thomas Hardy
spoke of with skepticism and who "wear too much the strained look of the
smile on the skull."374
Perhaps it was the smile of shyness, embarrassment,
of not knowing quite what to say in the heterogeneous social situations
increasingly demanded of people in groups. Perhaps it was the smile that
fills the gap between real love and interest and that which has to be
372
The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, Haifa, 2000, p.144.
373
374
Thomas Hardy in Thomas Hardy: Selected Letters, editor, Michael
Millgate, Oxford UP, 1990.
335

generated in social contexts in order to survive. Perhaps it was more of a
temperamentally asocial tendency, a preference for privacy over interaction
with people. The passion for privacy which increased as middle adulthood
became late adulthood was an important part of the society that nourished
me. In fact, if you could hear the sound of that passion, it would be
deafening.375
By the time my first memories were taking form in this earthly life, in 1947
and 1948, radio was in the first years of its second quarter century and TV
was just starting out on its journey for the masses after twenty years of
technological development.376
My parents were in their teens and twenties
when they listened to their first radio programs in the 1920s; my grandfather
was in his fifties back in that roaring decade. These two mediums brought
an immense quantity of historical impressions into my life and the lives of
millions in the fifty-seven years that constitute my present memory-bank:
375
Robin Leach, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” The Secret Parts of
Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms,
Ron Rosenbaum, Random House, 2000. This enthusiasm for privacy was
not just a characteristic of the rich.
376
This is not the place for a detailed history of the new electronic media but,
generally, the 1920s saw the introduction of radio and the 1940s the
introduction of TV, with the technologies of each being developed
significantly in the 10 to 20 years before their introduction.
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1948-2005.377
In fact, I was a member of that first generation that enjoyed
television, radio, newspapers and magazines, computers and satellite
communication all together, as the basis of a continual swill from a print and
electronic media that was our lot. And we came to enjoy much more: jet
travel, flights in space, a cornucopia of gadgets and devices, a host of
technological conveniences that resulted from advances in the physical and
biological sciences. They all seem to have come trundling into our lives at
different points in the first century of this Formative Age, as Baha'i
administration was spreading out over the planet, especially after 1953 when
this Kingdom of God, this "most wonderful and thrilling motion"378
appeared.
There is, as Toynbee noted in that same eleven volumes of history, "an
automatic stimulus from the social milieux in which a human being grows
up and in which he continues to live and work as an adult."379
But in 1952
for a full three quarters of the human race, on the eve of my first contact
with that revolutionary force that was and is the Baha'i Faith, history
377
I have no memories before the forth year of my life, July 1947 to July
1948.
378
'Abdu'l-Baha in God Passes by, p.351. The opening of the temple in
Chicago in 1953.
379
ibid.,p.5.
337

signified nothing. It was "full of sound and fury," but it had little to no
meaning outside the family and the local community. This picture changed
rapidly in the next half century. It is difficult to summarize the affect here
but, suffice it to say, that the quantity of information that poured into the
eyes, the ears and the minds of increasing numbers of human beings left the
educated portion of the human race--and the uneducated--swimming in a sea
of ideas, events and information. Of course, even as the new millennium
came upon us, half the world was still illiterate and had a minimal access to
electronic media. But the global scene was changing fast. As we strove to
be more precise, even fastidious and scientific in our language, the world got
more complex; people used language casually and so inexactly. We became
much more conscious of ambiguity even as we tried to strip language of its
poetic allusions, its vagueness. I say this because, however precise I try to
be about my life and times, I can not avoid the consequences of the
ambiguous, the complex and the inexactitude of language and life. If we
want to be precise perhaps Arabic should be the lingua franca.
It required a creative stirring of curiosity, a voyage of intellectual
exploration, a response to the challenge of the great complexity of history,
society and life to make the writing of this autobiography an experience
338

similar to that of the excavator of the treasures buried in the Second City of
Troy, Heinrich Schliemann. "It is not from any feeling of vanity,"
Schliemann wrote in trying to explain the origins of his personal story, "but
from a desire to show how the work of my later life has been the natural
consequence of the impressions I received in my earliest childhood."380
This
intellectual exploration into my early days is, like Schliemann's, part of my
effort to show the interconnections of my life and its wholeness. Although I
appreciate the importance of the contribution of these early childhood years
to my life, I do not dwell on them unduly. They are but one of my chief
exhibits or foci, as I try to lay a foundation of understanding for myself and,
if all goes well, for some readers. I might add, though, that it is not only my
early life but my early adult life and middle adult life that has laid and is
now laying the foundation for what lies ahead. It is all, in the end, an
integrated circuit of time and space. This is not to say that there were not
forces which profoundly influenced my educational and professional
pedigree, the constellation of my interests and abilities. Entrenched in
discourses of difference, otherness, nature and nurture I could describe these
forces in great detail. I would like to say a few things about the period of
380
Heinrich Schliemann, Ilios, John Murray, London, 1880, p.1.
339

infancy, though, before I pass on to the later periods of my life. Given its
importance for later life I feel the following few paragraphs are warranted.
In the study of our lives, our memoirs and autobiographies, we often ignore
those small creatures who do not seem to hold out much scholarly promise
in the ethnographic imagination. At a theoretical level babies constitute for
most of those who do write about their lives in detail a non-subject,
occupying negative space that is virtually impervious to the anthropological
gaze. In some ways this is understandable given that hardly anyone
remembers anything from the first two or three years of their lives, years that
constitute infancy. Moreover, those studies that do privilege infants have
been sidelined from mainstream conversations in the social and behavioural
studies, like cultural anthropology, sociology and ethnography, indeed, most
academic disciplines.
Infants still occupy, then, 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 of
infants, to put it bluntly, is still in its infancy. Discussion of the social matrix
of children’s lives at their earliest stages, though, appears to be developing
340

rapidly in several fields of the social and behavioural 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. The field of psychohistory also emerging in
recent decades, coincidentally in the decades of my pioneering life, also
offers much potential.
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. There is much I could add here about
my infancy. Perhaps at a later date I will do so. It seems to me that this is a
useful place to add a few remarks about the period of time in my family up
to my birth in 1944.
The beginnings of my own history and my family history I can only trace
back to the last twenty-eight years of the nineteenth century when my
341

grandparents on my mother's side were born in England in the 1870s. My
father was born in 1895, at the beginning of the last stage of the heroic age,
the beginning of 'Abdu'l-Baha's ministry. I can hypothesize that my great-
grandparents were born in the 1840s and 1850s at the beginning of the
heroic age, but further investigation of the origins and development of my
family would have to take place to decide on a date. Studies of modern
history have various beginning points: 1517, 1789 and the 1840s/50s. It is
not my purpose to provide a secular history here. Such a history is found in
so many other sources and places.
When the Bab declared his mission, then, in 1844 my great-great-
grandparents had been born and in the 1840s and 1850s they gave birth to
my great-grandparents. It was these men and women who married and from
these unions my grandparents were born. My grandfather on my mother’s
side was born in 1872 and my grandmother on my mother’s side in 1877. On
my father’s side, such dates await future genealogical investigation.
As far as I know, I was extracted out of a fine, kind, energetic, religious and
wise--all in various measures depending on which grandparent one is
examining and who is doing the examining—stock. When the name Price
342

and its root, Rhys, first emerged before the Norman Conquest and follows a
complex and circuitous route through the centuries. But it is not my
intention to indulge in any historical study of my family and its name in the
history of the Celts, of Wales or of Ireland and the several main strands of its
genealogy.
It was in Wales where both my grandparents on my father’s side lived, as far
as I know(and I know very little), in 1895 and operated a pub in Martyr-
Tydville. In London in 1895 my grandparents on my mother's side were just
about to meet, to marry and move to Canada in their twenties.
The heroic age, at least the part occupying the period 1844 when Babi
history begins to 1877 when Baha’u’llah’s confinement within the prison
walls of Akka was terminated, was clearly the period in which my grand-
parents on both my mother’s and father’s side were born. My great-
grandparents and great-great grandparents lived significant portions of their
lives in these first several decades of the heroic age. They were born in
these early years of the history of this New Faith or in the days of Siyyid
Kazim(1826-1843); my great-grand-parents had their children and these
children grew into middle-aged adults as the heroic age came to an end.
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Perhaps at some future time I can study my family origins in this period.
For now this short sketch must serve as a 'something is better than nothing'
starting position and provides the briefest of sketches of the century or so,
the general background, to my pioneering life in this new Faith.
A new calendar began in 1844 with the Bab and a new age. In some ways it
is fitting that this autobiography deals very briefly with the first traces of my
family origins in the 1840’s and 1850s. For that is the beginning of the
Baha'i Era. The autobiography which follows takes place in: the heroic
age(1844-1921), the formative age(1921-2007) and for the most part 1953
and after. 1844 was also the year when Karl Marx wrote his first pages and
the first message over a telegraph wire was also sent that year. But, as I said
above, this is not a secular history. It is just a start to my own
autobiography, a brief outline to provide a background to take my family
history to the beginning of the history of the Faith which is such an integral
part of my life.
In 1921 the Formative Age of the Baha’i Era began. The first epoch of this
age, the years 1921 to 1944, were years of significant expansion and
consolidation. The account of this process can be found elsewhere and it is
344

not the purpose of this autobiographical account to outline even briefly this
epoch. My purpose is, rather, to outline the developments within my own
family as far as I am able, as far as my own interest and enthusiasm allow
and as far as my sources provide me with a basis for description.
In 1921 my mother was 17 and my father 26. In all likelihood my father
would have been a returned serviceman. My guess, and it is only a guess,
however calculated, he would have left for the USA at some time in the
early 1920s when millions left Wales due to the then economic depression.
My mother and father had yet to meet and, in all likelihood did not meet
until the late 1930s or very early 1940s: my guess is 1942, in the last years
of the first epoch. In 1921, too, My grandfather, A.J. Cornfield, was just
starting his own four-hundred page autobiography. His oldest daughter,
Florence, would be married at the end of the 1920s. By 1921 my
grandfather had been married for two decades. He would live on well into
the second epoch of the Formative Age before he died in 1957. His wife,
my grandmother, died in 1939. Five years later I was born, in the opening
months of the second epoch.
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An account of the inter-war years is available in the history books and I will
make no attempt to go into any detail on the economic, social and political
developments as they took place in the little more than two decades that
make up this period. Most of the three dozen photographs that I still possess
from this period show my mother or her sister Florence with friends at
Hamilton Beach. By the end of the period, the epoch, in April 1944, my
mother’s sister had three children and my mother’s brother two with one
soon to arrive. So much for a few broad brush strokes.
In 1944, in the months before I was born and as the first epoch was coming
to an end, my mother turned forty years of age and my father fifty. My
grandfather was seventy-two. The war was in its last year. My mother had
been raised by an agnostic father and a strongly theistic Christian mother.
My father’s upbringing is completely unknown to me. But by the end of that
first epoch in 1944 my parents had collected a rich reservoire of life’s
experiences. My father had already been married once, had three children,
and divorced. My mother did not marry until the last year of the first epoch.
It seems to me that the general atmosphere was one of wanting to settle
down with the quiet life. This working class family into which I was born
had pub-owners and coal-miners on my father’s side and a shirt-cutter, a
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farmer and a manual worker on my mother’s side. One’s class identification
has been a fashionable way of gaining an understanding, a lable, for a
person. It’s a start for me too.
I do not know much about these twenty-three years of the first epoch and
what my mother and father actually did. If I worked hard with my memory
bank I might come up with an anecdote or two, but nothing comes readily to
mind as I write these words. Perhaps at a later date I will be able to fill in
some details here. My grandfather’s account, his memoir, breaks off in
1900 and with both my parents long gone I have little to go on to build up a
sketch of this period. My father died in 1965 and my mother in 1978; my
mother’s brother and sister and their spouses have also passed away. My
cousins, the children of my mother’s brother and sister, are alive, but I have
little interest in excavating my parents’ lives through these cousins.
One child survived from my father’s first marriage, a girl, but I have no idea
what happened to her, where she is living and what she is doing. His two
sons were killed in WWII. I was the last fruit of the lives of these two dear
souls who brought me into being and sent me on into existence. During these
two decades and more life seethed, steamed and was forever on the boil for
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Lilian and Fred as they both approached middle age or middle adulthood as
developmental psychologists call the period beginning at forty. The details
of their days back then will remain unknown, fragmented at best, formless,
obscure, ephemeral, trivial. There is little I can make of a few fragments of
the loose-knit material I do possess. To obtain more would be an onerous
chore rather than a pleasant exertion. Any analysis of the two people who
were my parents, in the period between the wars in that first epoch, would be
calculation based on too much improbability, too much uncertainty, a
gesture toward publicity with too few facts to support the gesture. I might
come up with vivid, momentary insights, but I would have to pour them into
a poorly formed receptacle; I would have to spin the yarn on a thread that is
far too thin.
Virginia Woolf says that “if we cannot analyse these invisible presences, we
know very little of the subject of our memoirs.”381
In the first epoch I have
very little to go on to make for useful and genuine analysis. Any writing is
largely futile, filled with hints and glances. The realm is enchanted; it
belongs to me alone to do with what I desire. It is a bowl I can fill again and
381
Autobiography and Questions of Gender, editor, Shirley Neuman,
Frank Cass and Co Ltd., London, 1981, p.103.
348

again, but the contents are hypothetical, shifting, unknown, possess little
vertical thrust, just some linear perspective that informs us of little and
contributes a small amount to our understanding. My inability to analyse
my parents here may be a serious flaw in my overall work. I take some
comfort in the words of William Carlos Williams in the introduction to his
autobiography:
“Nine-tenths of our lives is well forgotten in the living. Of the part that is
remembered, the most had better not be told: it would interest no one, or at
least would not contribute to the story of what we ourselves have been.”382
In the end I write largely for myself. The strangers who read this one day
are an afterthought, although I hope not insignificant, not unimportant.
Those that came before me are, in all likelihood , indifferent, although
perhaps not entirely so. Perhaps those who have gone on take more interest
in the subject that we can possibly be aware of in this life. I hope to make
up for this dearth of data in the autobiography that follows Pioneering Over
Four Epochs. Perhaps by examining myself more deeply I can examine
others with greater understanding. One day I may return to this exercise of
382
The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, MacGibbon and Kee,
1948, forward.
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examining my own roots in this first epoch: 1921 to 1944 and have more to
say that is useful.
The nine years covering this first stage of the second epoch were the years
before my mother had contact with the Baha’i Faith. In 1953 I was nine
years old and in grade four. My autobiographical work Pioneering Over
Three Epochs completed in May 1993, with epilogue II completed in
September 1994, made no attempt to describe the period before 1953. The
first epoch of the Formative Age and the early years of the second epoch
were simply unaccounted for. This brief statement, together with the several
hundred words I have written on the first epoch, will bring the
autobiography up to the year 1953. Although I am still not happy with the
detail, I find the words of William Carlos Williams quite apt in this regard.
They are quoted at the end of that last statement, the statement on the first
epoch, and there is no need to repeat them here.
In the twelve to eighteen month period during which my mother first had
contact with the Baha’i community(1952-3) the Baha’i Faith was pioneered
to over one hundred additional countries. The story is an interesting one and
can be read in other sources. No one in my family, as far as I know, had any
350

knowledge of this Faith until my mother saw an ad in the paper for a fireside
some time in 1952/3. I was eight or nine at the time and my mother forty
nine. We had lived in our home in Burlington for three years and my father
worked for the Roseland Country Club as a custodian with a wide range of
responsibilities. My mother did not work at the time. I can not recall with
any precision, but I think that major differences between my parents had
begun to surface with respect to buying mining stock. We owned one of the
first TVs on the block. I went to church occasionally with my mother and
father. I recall going to the: United, Baptist, Anglican and the Catholic
Church on one occasion. My memories of this period are again few and one
day I hope to add to what I have written here by purusing the photographs I
possess of this period and the memories which are slipping away from me
quickly and need to be preserved.
The Canadian Baha’i community completed its first fifty years of history in
1948. I was four years old then. The American Baha’i community was fifty
years old the year I was born. The Australian Baha’i community was
twenty-three years old in 1944. Baha’i history for these early years, the
years 1944 to 1953, can be pieced together through the letters of the
Guardian to the USA, Australia and Canada. It is not my intention to go
351

down this track at this stage of this ‘retrospective journal.’ Perhaps at a
future time.
The mix of three souls who had a direct bearing on my life in the early years
of the second epoch had come together in the early 1940s. My grandfather
and my mother lived alone starting in 1939 when my grandmother died and
my father joined them when he married my mother in 1943. My mother’s
brother and sister had a secondary influence on me in these years. Although
I know little about my parents in the years before I was born, as I have
already pointed out, and little about my grandfather, I know enough to get
some general characterization. My father, although a man of fifty, was a
highly energetic man; my grandfather a remarkably well-read man and my
mother, a woman of poetic-religious proclivities. These three influences
arguably standout today as the three basic components of my personality
structure.
In the years of the first epoch my father held a range of positions after
coming to North America from Wales. In 1921 my father was, as I said
above, 26 years old. He was employed by the US government in WWII in
some secret service occupation and with the Otis-Fencin Company. I always
352

got the impression as I was growing up that he worked in coal mining
companies in Iowa and other mid-western states, but I never did confirm
these facts about his career, his working life. He got married in the 1920s
and had three children, two of whom were killed in WWII. At some time in
the 1930s he woke up and found Emma, his wife, gone. His roots in Wales,
in Martyr-Tydville, where his parents ran a pub were always obscure to me,
as much then as now. I’ve always had the image of Welsh coal-miners in my
mind’s eye as the central picture of my family on my father’s side in the
nineteenth century. In all likelihood, unless I get back to Wales before I die,
I shall never know.
I know a great deal about my mother’s side of the family, at least in her
father’s line, due to his account of his life until 1900; but little is known
about his life from 1900 to 1944, or my mother’s from her birth in 1904 to
my birth in 1944. I know my grandfather was working as a shirt-cutter in
1921 and that by the late 1930s he had retired from the working world. Just
after retirement his wife died. He continued living in the family home until
the early years after WWII when he moved in with his eldest daughter,
Florence.
353

My mother had left school by 1921 when she was seventeen. She held down
various jobs with various boy-friends in the next twenty-three years. She
worked as a door-to-door saleswoman for some time in the depression years
and she had a nervous breakdown as well, which she treated by resting at
home during the 1930s. She grew close to both her parents and I remember
her often speaking with endearment regarding both her mother and father.
From the age of seventeen to age forty I know remarkably little about the
central woman in my life thusfar, a woman followed closely by my present
wife in terms of longterm influence. Like my father, she could play the
piano well and she often sang in choirs. She had some interest in the Oxford
Group or Moral Rearmament as it was also called. She nearly got married
once or twice or more, but the details I cannot recall. Perhaps I will return to
these subjects at relevant places in this text.
Like the poet Coleridge I see myself as a solitary and gregarious person in
varying measures, in the presence of a fascinating, an enigmatic, a reticent
stranger who is striving to be understood. That stranger is myself. Although
I can write about other people and other things, I write here about myself,
the cri de coeur of the modern author. I feel a strong existential need for
solitary experience. Like the need of the famous travel writer Paul Theroux
354

for what he calls “solitary exercise” and therefore bicycles, sails, canoes and
spends weeks in remote places by himself,383
I find life now, during the years
of putting the final bits of meat on the bones of this autobiography, gives me
a relatively solitary existence compared to my wall-to-wall “people years”
up to 1999 or even the “partial people years” up to 2004.384
As I walk now
past the patches of garden and tidy flower-beds one after another, street after
street or along a beach or in the bush, there is always the feeling of humility
before the very pervasiveness of it all, of existence’s burgeoning reality. I
will always remember, too, walking the streets of so many towns these last
50 years. Sometimes I seemed to float along on the wings of thought;
sometimes I was troubled by the events in my life and was weighted down
by the load of thoughts and emotion for those “people years” came to be
occupied with a different agenda which I shall describe later in this
narrative.
Walking has been the only form of exercise that has stayed with me over
many years. Although it may be the defining aspect of our humanness, this
383
Paul Theroux, Fresh Air Fiend, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
384
The years 1999 to 2004, although not filled as previous years had been
with ‘people responsibilities,’ did have several involvements which I outline
in the chapters ahead dealing with ‘my retirement years.’
355

upright form of locomotion, as Rebecca Solnit tells us,385
I never found it the
defining aspect of my life, just one of the many threads that made up the
warp and weft of my days. I have always found it a contemplative
experience, part of my unstructured time, perhaps part of my very peripatetic
existence, perhaps a form of performance art. But I would not go as far as
Walter Benjamin when he said that: “cities are a language and walking is the
art of learning to speak that language.”386
Walking is, as Solnit says, a most
obvious and yet most obscure act, simple yet little understood, routine and
yet, for me, a fundamental, inextricable part of my life.
What made some of the first and significant impressions on my receptive
mind, quite unbeknownst to me at the time and still difficult to explain and
understand in a satisfying way, even after the passing of five decades, was
the daily exposure to a grandfather who was seventy-two when I was born.
This grandfather, who had come to Canada from England at the age of
twenty-eight, had raised three children and seen four grandchildren arrive in
and around Hamilton in southern Ontario, before I was born. He read
insatiably as he had since his own childhood to kill the various pains of life
and to satisfy his own endless curiosity. The influence of a very attractive, a
385
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Viking, NY, 2000.
386
idem
356

deeply introspective and religious woman, my mother; and a strong, an
energetic and emotional Welshman, my father, provided a triumvirate of
forces that combined to exercise an influence which, to this day, is
mysterious, explanatory and filled with endless hypotheses--and absolutely
no memories. For these were the years 1944 to, perhaps, 1948 when I was
four years old. Crucial to my development were these years but containing
nothing but some faint whispers, grey and subtle plays with space and time,
which I can remember.
1944 was also the scene of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the
religion that my mother enquired into in 1953, the Baha'i Faith. Of course, I
have no memory of that date 1944 nor of the earlier date in April 1937 when
the first teaching Plan, 1937-1944, put 'Abdu'l-Baha's Tablets of the Divine
Plan finally into action. At that earlier date, in 1937, my parents had yet to
meet. They met during that first Plan and my grandfather enjoyed the first
years of his retirement after going from job to job and place to place for so
many years of his adult life as he had done during his childhood. His life, it
would appear, was as gregarious as mine has been, partly from choice, partly
out of necessity. My grandmother, this man's wife, died of cancer two years
into the Plan, in 1939; my mother reached forty and my father forty-nine
357

when the Plan ended in April 1944. Two months later I was born, in the two
year period between Plans, 1944-1946. This pattern of relating my life to
the several Plans for the extension and consolidation of the Baha'i
community I follow occasionally but not religiously in this autobiography.
"During the year 1944," says British philosopher Bertrand Russell in his
own autobiography, "it became gradually clear that the war was ending."387
Hannah Arendt summarized that war as follows: “Sixty one countries
representing three quarters of the world population contributed 110 million
combatants in a struggle which over six years claimed 60 million lives, cost
over $1 trillion dollars, and altered the geopolitical landscape of the globe as
never before. The First War involved half as many combatants, claimed a
third as many lives, and cost a fifth as much in economic terms.”388
The perception that this Great War was coming to an end was certainly the
major event of that year of my birth although, to my mother, the major event
was giving birth to me and it nearly killed her. The following prose-poem
places this event in a wider context. The famous American poet, Robert
387
Bertrand Russell, Autobiogrpahy, Volume 3, Preface.
388
Hannah Arendt at “Great Books,” Malaspina Website, 2005.
358

Penn Warren, says that a poem is “the deepest part of autobiography.”389
Here, then, is the first portion of this deepest part.
-----------------------------------------
A GIFT
In the first weeks of my life, in August 1944, Shoghi Effendi was able to
celebrate the completion of the first Seven Year Plan. He marked the
moment with a gift to the Baha’is of the world. It was the publication of God
Passes By. The book provided “a window on the spiritual process by which
Baha’u’llah’s purpose for humankind is being realized.”1
At the time of this
celebration in August 1944 my mother nearly died from the birth process
that brought me into this world. She was a forty year old Canadian in
Hamilton Ontario Canada who, in August 1944, prayed to be made well with
a promise to her God to give her son to the Lord. -Ron Price, Pioneering
Over Four Epochs, January 17th 2004.
A perspective on the past,
a light on the future,
awakener of capacities,
maker of sense of the world,
389
Robert Penn Warren, Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, 1988, #7231.
359

and my experience of it,
enriches life, a gift, a shaper
of civilization’s long course,
a great work of the mind,
history taken to a new level,
vehicle for understanding
the Purpose of God,
converging as it did
with Revealed Texts,
summoning up the full
mystery and meaning
of one hundred years
of ceaseless sacrifice.1
And my mother’s prayers
in that same month, August,
must have been answered
as all prayers are
with a resounding “yes!”
“I will make you well,
if you give the boy to Me!”
360

And so He did and so you did.
It was a gift for a gift
in a season of gift-giving.
1
The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, pp.69-70.
Ron Price
17 January 2004
----------------------------------------
To the world Jewish community, the first year of my life was the last year of
the holocaust, an event many regard as the nadir of history, an event after
which there could be no more history--or so it seemed to some. For my
father, I can only hypothesize that, since he had just lost two sons in that
same war, sons who were from his first marriage, I was, perhaps, a last glow
of light on his mountain-top as was the marriage relationship he had just
entered. I shall never know, though, for I never asked him in all those years
I spent under his roof before he died at the age of seventy when I was
twenty-one. Although we talked briefly on occasion about his own personal
myth or meaning system, as Carl Jung described the effort to explain one's
life in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, my father was much more
of a doer than a talker.
361

He worked hard at his job, gardened endlessly at home and gradually fell
asleep reading the newspaper in the evenings in the evening of his own life,
but he did not tend to analyse in much detail his life and its meaning, at least
not verbally and not in conversation with me. Indeed, we had few
conversations in all those years I spent in his company, 1944 to 1965. I was
'tin-ribs' who 'tinkered in the trees.' I was the light of his life but such a
strong accolade was never uttered, as he battled on in his final years, glad to
leave this mortal coil when he did in the mid-1960s as I was about to enter
maturity.
I was born, then, during WW2 during what I have come to see as the second
phase of that modern tempest that Shoghi Effendi had described in his book,
The Promised Day Is Come, published in 1941. My mother and father had
been in their teens in the first phase of that tempest, the first world war, 1914
to 1918. My grandparents both entered middle age in that first war. The
remaining years of my life, the years after 1945, occupy the third phase of
that tempest, a phase quite different from the first two phases, a phase which
Henry Miller described as "far more terrible than the destruction" of the first
two wars, the first two phases, with fires that "will rage until the very
362

foundations of this present world crumble."390
It is not my intention to
document any of these three phases of the destructive calamity that visited
humankind in the century I have just left, for this documentation has been
done in intimate detail elsewhere, both visually, orally and in print. I do not
document but I frequently refer to these three phases. I have different
purposes here than mere historical documentation.
This destruction of the third phase, it could be argued, began symbolically, if
not literally, on August 6th
1945, when I was just one year and two weeks
old, with the dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki in Japan. As I have
just indicated, it is not my intention to document the fine details of this
destruction, this destructive process, this third phase has been documented
more than any period in history in volumes that fill libraries all over the
planet, in books too voluminous for any human being to read, except for
some infinitesimal portion for whom modern history is their special interest.
Most people now get their history via television. It's not necessarily a bad
390
Henry Miller in The Phoenix and the Ashes, Geoffrey Nash, George
Ronald, Oxford, 1984, p.55. Miller was also one of the few major writers in
the 20th century to praise the Baha'i Faith.
363

thing for there is so much to know and understand in this new age we are
just entering. 391
There are dozens of history books that describe the process in fine, in
minute, detail. My intention is to draw together my own life, the history of
my times and the religion I began my association with when my mother
started to investigate the ideas of one of its small groups in Burlington
Ontario. It was indeed a small group of a dozen or more people in a religion
that was also a small community then of, perhaps, 200,000 strong globally.
Back then in 1953 nine out of ten of the Baha'is lived in Iran. I had no idea
of this at the time, more than fifty years ago. At the age of nine I had other
things on my inarticulate but quite definite agenda with its eternal-seeming
things in grade four and five, with baseball and hockey and beautiful Susan
Gregory a few houses away at the corner of Seneca and New Streets. In the
early 1950s, my family also had a television set and those years saw the
launching of a "space opera" fad in pop culture. With programs such as
Space Patrol (ABC, 1950-55), Buck Rogers (1950-51), Johnny Jupiter
(DuMont and ABC, 1953-54), Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (syndicated,
391
In an on-going debate among media analysts, some argue history is better
taught by TV than by books; others take an opposite slant.
364

1954-55), and Captain Video392
television had entered science fiction and
fantasy, as well as a global and intergalactic space-time continuum. It was
all very fitting, as I look back, since those years were the years that, from a
Baha'i point of view, the Kingdom of God on earth had also been launched.
For the next nine years, 1953 to 1962, a creative stirring of curiosity, the
beginnings of an arduous journey of intellectual exploration, from about the
age of nine until I was eighteen, served as the personal backdrop of my
pioneering life. I lived with my mother and father in a two-bedroom house.
It is one of the smallest houses I've ever been in. If art critic Kenneth Clark
is right that "nothing significant has ever been created for civilization in a
big room,"393
then there was hope for me, for this house and my bedroom
was the smallest of spaces. At the front of my life, unbeknownst to me at
the time, was the Ten Year Crusade(1953-1963) which took the Baha’i Faith
to the furthest reaches of the world and played a significant part in making
this new Faith the second most widespread religion on earth by the 1990s. I
was no more aware of this Crusade, then, than I was aware of the second
world war which was waging fiercely when I was born. This lack of
392
David Weinstein, "Captain Video: Television's First Fantastic Voyage,"
Journal of Popular Film and Television, Fall, 2002.
393
Kenneth Clark, Civilization, Penguin, NY, 1969; see the television series
by the same name.
365

awareness is often the case with human beings who travel life's paths for, as
I have just said above, there is so much to understand and to know, and so
many different voices claiming the attention of the masses of citizens as they
try to make their way.394
And when one is a child this is especially true.
However peripheral the wide world of politics, the nearby cities like
Hamilton and Toronto, indeed just about everything on planet earth, except
the few blocks I played on near our home and where I went to school, the
small Baha'i community in Burlington insensibly penetrated into the
interstices of my family's life from the age of nine to eighteen, the nine years
before I went pioneering.
For the most part back in what many saw as the quiet fifties, my attention,
my spiritual resources, my curiosity, was channelled into sport, school and
an emerging interest in the opposite sex. The energies of this young child
and adolescent who had just begun the long race of life were, indeed,
stretched to the full during these halcyon days by activities having little to
no connection with any organized religion. The following poem tells a little
about one of the sports, baseball, its context in my life, in modern history
and this new Faith whose connection with my life was a largely peripheral
394
Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition, MacMillan Press, 1997.
366

one during these years. I wrote this poem six weeks before leaving the
classroom and retiring from employment as a teacher at the age of 55 in
1999. So often in life I felt strongly that I just could not stay any longer; I
had to go. Sometimes the reason was obvious; sometimes it was
inexplicable. In 1953/4 I felt strongly that I had to leave softball for
hardball. In 1950 I had to leave our house in RR#1 Burlington. The former
was my choice; the latter had nothing to do with me. Such is part of the
nature of fate, determinism and free will.
I draw on many of my poems in this work for I find the empirical distinction
between prose and poetry is largely an illusory one. In some ways my
poetry is just another pattern I introduce from time to time to illustrate my
story.395
My poetry is as much about things as it is about ideas.396
Before
including some dozen poems, of which two about baseball begin the series,
I'd like to say a few things about poetry. Some readers will find the effect of
my introducing poetry will be to create a multiple, interwoven, narrative
thread, a sort of flexi-narrative, to draw on a term used by Robin Nelson in
his study of television drama. Nelson also points out that television drama
395
Many poets and writers make this same point about the artificial
distinction between the two literary forms.
396
Unlike the famous American poet who said that poetry should be not
about “ideas but in things.”
367

by the 1990s had come to emphasize short-term aesthetic pleasure over
reflective intellectual stimulus. Perhaps my use of poetry will have some of
this kind of short-term aesthetic effect as well. If nothing else my poetry
and prose is a response to the Baha’i Faith in a critical half century of its
growth and to the tempest that has been blowing through society as long as I
and my parents have been alive.397
My poetry, like this narrative, is written
at the very dawn of the Baha’i Era. Some may call this work primitive,
overly complex, overly prolix, over-the-top as they say in the vernacular
these days. It seems to be, though, that this work stands at a pivotal point in
the evolution of Baha’i society from a society just emerging from obscurity
after one hundred and sixty years of history to a society that will emerge into
the glaring light of public recognition.
And so I commence and interpret a story which the reader alone must
complete. I construct what readers must take in actively if they are to read
much of this text. The details I provide make for a type of perfection but, in
397
Nejgebauer points how how American poets “failed to respond to WW2
with anything approaching the greatness of its impact on the destiny of
mankind.” See M. Cunliffe, editor, American Literature Since 1900, Sphere
Books Ltd., London, 1975, p.144. Put another way, one could say that this
autobiography is a response to the Lesser Peace and the associated wars that
began when my father was 19 and my mother 10.
368

the end, perfection is no mere series of details, as Michelangelo once put
it.398
I enter, as I do in the following poems about baseball, with a certain
glow of enthusiasm. The melody of a life escapes; I catch up with it; I
retrace my steps; my life flies again; it disappears; it plunges into a chaos of
emotion and thought; I catch it again; I seize the moment; I embrace it with
delight; I multiply the modulations, the repetitions and a whole series of
symphonies are produced. There is much trial and error as I am driven
relentlessly on day after day, year after year to write this music which I have
played over so many years. Just as Beethoven’s first movement of his
Quartet in F Major consists of “a long F, a turn around it, and a jump down
to C” and “repetitions of it-well over a hundred of them,”399
so does this
autobiography consist of a long life, many turns around some basic notes,
occasionally a jump up or down from the basic pattern and endless
repetition.
To continue this musical analogy I'd like to quote the words of several
conductors because what they say about music and the process of
conducting has many parallels with the writing of this autobiography and of
poetry. Herbert Blomstedt, speaking of composers, says, "everyone has a
398
Daniel Mason, The Quartets of Beethoven, Oxford UP, NY, 1947, p.9.
399
ibid.,p.15.
369

different pace and develops in different ways."400
In some ways this seems as
obvious for conductors as it does for autobiographers but, however obvious
it may be, it is a crucial point. I was really not ready to write about my life
in any meaningful way until I was nearly sixty. Blomstedt also said that
some artists need to work out a way of having a break or they will work
themselves into the grave. At fifty-five I gave up my paid employment as a
teacher out of emotional exhaustion or, as I felt at the time, I would have
worked myself into my own grave. I am also imbued with a forward-looking
spirit, a spirit which gives vision and energy to my often flagging spirit.
Only after determining how I would fill in my own day, rather than having it
filled in by the demands of job, of community, of family and the various
human associations that had come to fill my life, was I able to continue
writing with any real fertility. In the first four years of retirement I was able
to develop my vision of how I wanted to work, what I wanted to say, in what
way I was going to be able to contribute to the growth and consolidation of
the Baha'i community now that the major pattern of the last forty years had
been broken or ended by the inevitabilities of the retirement process.
400
Herbert Blomstedt in Conductors in Conversation: Fifteen Contemporary
Conductors Discuss Their Lives and Profession, Interviews with Jeannine
Wagar, G.K. Hall and Co., Bonston, 1991, p.7.
370

My writing is simply the realization of the vision, an evolving construct
which is itself fertilized by my work, my life and the developments in the
wider Baha'i community, society and the micro-society in which I live,
move and have my being. Like the conducting and the music Blomstedt
talks about in his interview, my writing is "very personal."401
Like
Blomstedt, I strive to be exactly myself. Catherine Comet, says the
conductor must "be able to reconstruct from scratch what the composer
originally did and then put it back together again." That is not a bad way of
expressing what the autobiographer must do. In both cases it takes hundreds
of hours.402
One per cent of the work of conducting is done at concerts. In
writing, the same is the case. Time and experience function to expand the
repertoire so that interesting programs can be put together. This is true in
both music and in writing autobiography. The conductor Margaret Hillis
says she has no more energy left after conducting. She says music bosses her
around, tells her what to do, but it is so beautiful she is prepared to pay the
price. Writing is like this for me.
401
ibid., p.13.
402
Catherine Comet says she needs to put in maybe 200 hours on a score. I
do the same with a chapter or chapters of this work. There are innumerable
parallels between conducting and writing.
371

So, here is one of the first of many poems which will appear in this
autobiography. A critical observer might say the same things about my
poetry as were said by Fannie Eckstorm about the poems of Henry David
Thoreau. Nearly one hundred years ago now she said his poems were “not
resolved into rhythm. It is poetry but not verse...Judged by ordinary
standards he was a poet who failed. He had no grace at metres....his sense
always overruled the sound of his stanzas. The fragments of verse.....remind
one of chips of flint....the maker’s hand was unequal to the shaping of it.”403
I know, too, that poetry does not enjoy in my contemporary society the
legendary significance it has in the former communist block countries or in
South America. Some have even announced the end of poetry. I leave it to
readers who must cope with my poetry, a poetry which may not be verse,
these chips of flint which follow. These prose-poems may be part of a dieing
genre or a burgeoning one but, whatever their degree of popularity, they are
useful to my purposes throughout this autobiography and so I include them.
Unlike that first poet in the western intellectual tradition, Homer, I do not
transmit orally the fame of a long-vanished heroic age. But I do transmit in
403
Fannie Eckstorm, “On Thoreau’s The Main Woods,” A Century of Early
Ecocriticism, editor, David Mazel, University of Georgia Press, Athens,
2001, p.172.
372

writing some of the experience, if not the fame, of the first century of its
formative age.
Poems are, indeed, places to be in, places in their own right; they are
habitable environments that place one in relation to the implied otherness
which voice calls, or re-calls, into presence. Alternatively, they can be
intermediary spaces that relate one to the world. There is an empowering
magic of a poetic voice that projects worlds into being. The mystique of
voice is as old and as various as the ancient myths of creation. Voice opens
an image of various worlds: wondrously fresh, reassuringly or uncannily
familiar. Mental spaces are projected by voice. This can be done by means
of representing segments of the world or by virtue of the poem’s
indeterminate resonance. This resonance can open the reader to the
ineffable, to an infinity which the poem points to beyond itself. What may
be said to motivate much of modern poetry since the Romantics, namely, the
wish for self-generation in and through the poetic utterance itself, is without
doubt part of my motivation as well.404
And so readers will find many
poems here.
404
Eynel Wardi, “A Boy in the Listening: On Voice, Space, and Rebirth in
the Poetry of Dylan Thomas,” Connotations, V9 N2, 1999-2000, pp.190-
209.
373

--------------------------------------------
BASEBALL AND THE BAHA’I FAITH
When a series of programs about baseball, a series called The Big Picture,
began to unfold on television, I quickly came to realize the remarkable
similarity between the story of baseball and the story of the Baha’i Faith,
both of which grew up in the modern age. The game of baseball was born in
America in the 1840s as a new activity for sporting fraternities and a new
way for communities to develop a more defined identity.1
Indeed, there are
many organizations, activities, interests which were born and developed in
this modern age, say, since the French and the American revolutions. The
points of comparison and contrast between the great charismatic Force
which gave birth to the Baha’i Faith and its progressive institutionalization
on the one hand, and the origin and development of other movements and
organizations on the other, is interesting to observe. -Ron Price with thanks
to Ken Burns, “The Big Picture: Part Two,” ABC TV, 18 February 1999;
and 1
John Nagy, “The Survival of Professional Baseball in Lynchburg
Virginia: 1950s-1990s,” Rethinking History, Vol.37.
They both grew slowly
through forces and processes,
events and realities
374

in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries:
baseball and the Baha’i Faith
along their stony and tortuous paths,
the latter out of the Shaykhi School
of the Ithna’Ashariyyih Sect
of Shi’ah Islam.
And it would be many years
before the Baha’i Faith would climb
to the heights of popularity
that baseball had achieved
quite early in its history.
Baseball was a game
whose time had come,
a hybrid invention,
a growth out of diverse roots,
the fields and sandlots of America,
as American as apple pie.
375

And the Baha’i Faith was an idea
whose time had come, would come,
slowly, it would seem, quite slowly
in the fields, the lounge rooms,
the minds and hearts
of a burgeoning humanity
caught, as it was, as we all were,
in the tentacles of a tempest
that threatened to blow it--
and us--apart.
Ron Price
17 February 1999
A second poem, written about a year after retiring, also conveys something
of the flavour of those ‘warm-up days’ when my curiosity about this new
religion was exceeded by curiosity about other things.
A BASEBALL-CRAZY KID
In October 1956 Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitched the only
perfect game in post-season baseball. Yogi Berra was the catcher.1
That
376

same month and year R. Rabbani advised Mariette Bolton of Orange
Australia, in the extended PS of her letter, that it was “much better for the
friends to give up saying “Amen.”2
The following year Shoghi Effendi died
and Jackie Robinson, the first Negro to play professional baseball, retired. I
was completing grades 7 and 8 when all of this took place and, even at this
early age, was in love with at least three girls in my class: Carol Ingham,
Judy Simpson, Karen Jackson and Susan Gregory. I found them all so very
beautiful. Karen was the first girl I kissed.3
-Ron Price with appreciation to:
1
"The Opening of the World Series: 2000," ABC TV; 2
Messages to the
Antipodes, Shoghi Effendi, editor, Graham Hassall, Baha’i Publications
Australia, 1997, p.419; and 3
Ron Price, Journal: Canada: To 1971: 1.1,
Photograph Number 102.
I was just starting grade seven
and still saying amen
occasionally when I went
to that Anglican Church
on the Guelph Line
in Burlington Ontario
with my mother and father
377

and saying grace
just as occasionally.
I watched the World Series,
a highlight of autumn
for a twelve year old
baseball-crazy kid, back then.
And I passed the half-way point
of my pre-youth days1
when I was the only kid
with any connection
with this new world Faith
in these, the very early days
of the growth of the Cause
in the Dominion of Canada.2
1
1953 to 1959: my pre-youth days.
2
In 1956 there were only about 600 Baha’is in Canada. The 400 Baha’is
that started the Ten Year Crusade in Canada became 800 by the time I
became a Baha’i in 1959. In southern Ontario, from, say, Oakville to
Niagara Falls and Windsor, to several points north of Lakes Ontario and Erie
378

in 1956 I was the only pre-youth whom I then knew, or later came to know.
There may have been other pre-youth but at this early stage of the growth of
the Cause in Canada, year fifty-eight of its history, I was not aware of
them.* *
--Canada’s Six Year Plan: 1986-1992, NSA of the Baha’is of
Canada, 1987, p.46.
Ron Price
23 October 2000
The interest of a poem arises, at least for some poetry critics, from its
representation of what passed in the mind of the poet. The piling up of
information about what the poem means is in the end, these same critics
argue, an investigation of the mind that produced it. I'm not sure this is
entirely the case but it is certainly a useful view in relation to the role of
poetry in this autobiography.405
There seems to be a sense of estrangement
or outsidedness of poets and poetry in the society I've been a part of. With
my poetry here, I play a small part in overcoming this alienation. But I’m
sure, in the end, many will find what they read here tediously repetitive,
simply too much to entertain.
405
William Empson expressed this view of poetry. See: Frank Kermode,
"William Empson: A Most Noteworthy Poet," The London Review of
Books, June 2000.
379

Before I continue on with my story, wandering as it does via a circuitous
route, I shall include here a poem about my grandmother, my mother’s
mother, who died five years before I was born, just as the first Seven Year
Plan was completing its first phase, in 1939. My grandfather was 67 at the
time and he was left alone in life with his three grown-up children, one of
whom was my mother. She married five years later at the age of forty, at the
end of that Seven Year Plan. But first this poem about my grandmother:
YOU LOVED KISSING
My grandfather, Alfred Cornfield, to whom I dedicated this narrative, wrote
a four hundred page autobiography covering the period from his birth in
1872 to 1901, his arrival in Canada. In it he briefly describes his wife, my
grandmother, Sarah Cornfield. He said that before they were married she
loved kissing more than anything else. My mother, my grandfather's
daughter, spoke of her mother many times over the years. The following
poem is about this woman, my grandmother, whom I never met.-Ron Price,
Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 17 October 1998
She told me you were kind,
380

a woman who was all heart.
He told me you were no woman
of the world, but you loved kissing.
I never knew you at all,
taken as you were by cancer
in '39 after you had raised
your family and earned a love
that was a legend in its time,
at least in that small family circle.
Now that photograph
looks down from the shelf,
speaking volumes of articulate silence
and a loving-kindness
which joins our hearts in mystery
from your kingdom of immortality,
your glorious paradise,
your retreats of nearness.
Ron Price
381

17 October 1998
-----------------------------------
The craving to write this autobiography has been damned back, only allowed
to trickle in the last two decades, but has accumulated a powerful pressure of
urgency; I'm not sure exactly why, but a major difficulty has been to find a
form, a process, a context, to say what I wanted to say. After a decade of a
narrative effort, 1984-1993 and another of poetry (1992-2002) and resource-
gathering, the third edition gushed out like a fountain in a period of four
months.406
Now I pray to be carried on “by the divine wind of curiosity’s
unflagging inspiration”407
in the years ahead in further editions. Perhaps it
is a curiosity which, as Toynbee argues, has finally generated higher
activities, a mind that has blossomed in a higher flight; a life-long
communion with my Creator, a communion that goes back at least to 1953 at
the age of nine, “like a light caught from a leaping flame,”408
which has
resulted in this extended piece of prose I call my autobiography.
No matter how infinitesimal are the quanta that I examine, no matter the
infinite magnitude and immensity, they all demonstrate infinitely complex
406
Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 3rd Edition. I worked for four
months, an average of four to five hours a day, from January to April 2003.
407
408
Plato,Letters, No.7, 341 B-E.
382

forms. I’ll say a few things here about form, performance and the shape of
this narrative I am creating here:
PERFORMANCE
What excites some writers most in their work is themselves as performers.
Performance is an exercise of power, a very curious one.1
Power, of course,
is a complex, subtle and difficult term to define, unlike authority which is
associated with a role or an institution. Authority can bind people together
due to its association with miracle and mystery and its capacity to hold the
consciences of human beings.2
-Ron Price with thanks to 1
Richard Poirier,
“The Performing Self”, Twentieth Century Literature in Retrospect, Reuben
Brower, ed., Harvard UP, 1971, p.88; and 2
Richard Sennett, Authority, A.A.
Knopf, NY, 1980, pp. 193-195.
This writing of poetry is performance:
like dancing, singing, sport,
part of being fully alive,
like film-making or playing golf,
aspires to some popularity,
some shaping of my self,
is a type of work, discipline,
not easy, but enjoyable
383

or I would not do it.
Some would say this writing
is an exercise in power,
yes a type of power, a type of love,
of endurance, of pleasure,
way of spending one’s leisure-time,
of becoming immortal, now.
Ron Price
7 May 1996
--------------------------------------
MISTY FORMS AND A FROSTY GLAZE
A good third of one’s life is lost to the observer in sleep and dreams, "soft
embalmer of the still midnight," as Keats wrote in 1820. Some, like the
French writer, Marcel Proust, are very sickly and they spend more than an
average number of hours in bed. Some lose many a waking hour from being
sick or from unfortunate and varied habits. The same Proust once sneezed 83
times while composing a three-page letter and this was far from a record for
him. Furthermore, he required that his underpants fit him snugly, held high
above his waist by a special pin. These conditions exacerbated his sleeping
384

problems and that mattered greatly as poor Proust was always in bed. I
could describe at length the activities of my noctural existence; it tires me to
even contemplate them let alone put the details on paper. But they deserve
some attention. Wordsworth's poetry on the subject, his own problems with
sleep and his sister's life and diaries stimulated my interest in devoting some
time to a topic that occupies one-third of one's life.
Two-hundred years ago, in 1807, Wordsworth published his first poems-
sonnets on sleep.409
In these poems and in his autobiographical poem, The
Prelude, he explores the relationship between insomnia, wakefulness and
poetry. Like Wordsworth I have often desired to "be deeply beguiled" by
what he calls sleep's "twinklings of oblivion." As far back as my days at
university(1963-1967) where I first tasted depression, stayed up most of the
night reading and experienced various degrees of emotional turbulence from
sources it would take too long to list and describe, sleep was like a listener
who did not submit to my call, but "sat in meekness like the brooding
Dove." Both the dove and I waited…and waited. I was condemned to
remain awake until the wee hours of many a night and sleep for many a
409
I thank Sara Guyer for much of the material here in her "Wordsworthian
Wakefulness," The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 16, No.1, 2003, pp.93-
111.
385

night in my life. That "dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health,"
was denied me often until late in the night.
Often, like Wordsworth, I would hear "the small birds' melodies" and "the
first Cuckoo's melancholy cry." Often I would "wear the night away."
Without sleep all the morning's wealth has little value, lost in the incessant
tossing and turning, walking about and restlessness. For three decades after
those university years, sleep was problematic due to job and family
problems and successes. By the turn of the millennium I had become so
used to going to bed late that it became a life style-only even later. Not
going to bed until two or three a.m. became the norm.
By my sixties I was getting that sleep which "knits up the ravelled sleave of
care…that balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course."410
But I got it
from 3 to 10 a.m. and 5 to 6 p.m. so that I could read and write for eight of
the 16 hours left. And I followed Dale Carnegie's advice, as far as I was
able, to go to bed only when I was so tired I knew I would sleep. Fatigue, as
Benjamin Franklin once said, is the best pillow. The night had always had a
certain attraction for me; perhaps it was the release I felt of instincts and
410
Shakespeare, Macbeth
386

feelings that came to the fore; perhaps it was the desire to suck more out of
life for there was so much more than could ever be done in the day. As the
hours of night advanced, though, I found that despair advanced as well.
Sleep was like a bridge between that despair of the night hours and the hope
of morning.
The nearest one can get to the other two-thirds of one’s life is the
autobiographical notes of a Montaigne, a Samuel Butler, an Emerson:
conscious intellectual portrayals of introspection and reflection. In the end,
only a fragment of the totality of our living is graspable, engraveable in
words. Most of the pages of our days are lost or only barely graspable, only
partly intuited, grasped intellectually or emotionally. A purely external
selection of materials dominated by chance, by arbitrary choice and
distortions of various kinds is counter-balanced by the value of personal
witness, of small impressions, of a fine sense for the infinitesimal, of a
perception of the significant in the insignificant, of the trivial incident and of
vivid anecdotes, however fleeting and partial they may be. I can see no
point in enumerating a vast array of details connected with either the one-
third or the two-thirds of my life. Neither this autobiography nor my
readers’ lives would benefit from such description.
387

If to these largely external and, for the most part, irrelevant realities the
writer adds the dimension of the inner life and private character one can
unmask a life, reach into its roles, the parts played on the stage of life,
approach the life as closely as can be and give the reader a concentrated
symbol, a genuine picture as well as an inner portrait of a life, an ordinary
life, one that approximates the life of the reader more closely than the
famous, the brilliant, the distinguished achiever and the genius whose
auto/biography so often focuses on the externals. -Ron Price, Pioneering
Over Four Epochs, April 4th
, 1999.
Anyone looking at these poems
sees an essential discontinuity,
a discontinuous story,
a narrative arrangement of reality,
purely fragmentary, purely incomplete,
partly verifiable, buried in cultural history,
lost in this writing, a symbol of endurance,
beyond misty forms, only partly concrete,
spiritual intimations, spiritual pretensions,
388

across a golden bridge to shoreless eternities,
to the inner life through windows
that are unclear and covered
with the frosty glaze of language.
On one of those cold
Canadian winter mornings
those windows reveal a world
that is half beauty, half mystery,
always cold and wet to the touch.
You can only see the real world,
partially and, then, only in special places.
Writers are getting closer
to our inner worlds
as science is unfolding
another set of inner worlds,
for that is where the action is
below the surface, unseen, invisible.
Ron Price
389

4 April 1999
------------------------------------
INFORMING PRINCIPLE OF POETRY
When you write is it for a particular audience or just yourself? Initially, the
thrust of the poem, any poem, seems to be for self, from self, about self. But
as the poem develops the audience widens to include my contemporaries,
those dead and those yet-to-be-born. Sometimes the focus of the poem is
futuristic, utopian; sometimes I go back in time to an individual or a group.
This is part of the wonder of poetry, the ability to write about, include,
virtually anything in existence or in the imagination. Michael Palmer says
the informing principle of poetry is that the poem intends as it comes into
being; it moves toward a particular meaning. That is unquestionably the
way I experience the writing of a poem. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four
Epochs, 31 October 1998.
There are always people writing.
I call them my students;
one day they will be gone.
I have grown tired
of the endless talk, talk, talk
and their piles of writing
390

which has virtually no interest to me
anymore: is so excessively banal,
repetitious, try fifty million pages
over thirty years to dumb the brain.
My wife gives me her critical view now
and I think this is enough, enough to view
this cleaner and tighter form.
Read what I want now--no obligation.
Of course, I like people to read my poetry
but, in this world of confused alarms,
this is not the most important thing to me:
a world where anyone can write a poem
on anything they want and only a few
want to write anything at all.1
1
The irony, the paradox, is that there is now more being written by more
people than ever before in history.
Ron Price
31 October 1998
--------------------------------------
391

THE ONENESS OF FORM AND CONTENT
We must write for our own time, as the great writers did. But this does not
imply that we must shut ourselves up in our words. To write for our time
does not mean to reflect it passively. It means that we must will to maintain
it or change it; therefore, go beyond it toward the future; and it is this effort
to change the world which establishes us most deeply in it, for our world can
never be reduced to a dead mass of tools and customs. What the poet writes
should not always correspond to anything outside the mind of the poet. His
words should bring together apparently unrelated phenomena in a unique
world that is the writer’s own, freed, as far as possible, from the rusty
hegemony of angst. What results is a written expression which is both form
and content. They are one and the same. The general context is an
“independent search for knowledge” and a continual renewal of “one’s
conception or one’s vision of the world.1
-William V. Spanos, “A
Discussion of Eugene Ionesco,” A Casebook on Existentialism, Thomas
Crowell Co., NY, 1966, pp.151-157.
Yes, Eugene........
I write for my time
and a future time.
This is no dead mass of letters,
392

but things from inside my head,
from all over the place,
a unique concatenation
of form and content,
as I renew my vision of the world
and help lay that foundation,
for that apotheosis which I saw
several weeks ago on a warm day
up on a hill in a city in Israel.
The inner essence thereof
I knew was for my time.
I knew this, partly,
from something He wrote,
something eternal, yes, Eugene:
and I was only eighteen, then.
And, now, I'm getting old
and closer, it seems, to the eternal.
Ron Price
24 July 2000
393

------------------------------------
GIVING THE POEM FORM
Much of the writing in western civilization since I became a Baha’i in 1959
and went pioneering in 1962, is what one could call post-Canadian, post-
Australian or post-American, post everything except the world itself. Much
of the technology in America since 1959 has been NASA inspired. The
wiring in my head has been inspired by a new religious technology--the
Baha’i teachings. A global culture, which had been emerging slowly,
perhaps as far back as the period 1475-1500,1
with a global technology
which brought the various centres of culture around the world so much
closer than they had ever been. The literary sensibility is no longer
dependent on a national environment, although writers continue to be
influenced, consciously or not, by their predecessors and the cultural climate
in which they are socialized. To give a poet’s sensitivity and expression a
form suited to his personal proclivities he could study the classical and
contemporary literary monuments,2
indeed the entire intellectual tradition of
the planet. After twenty-five years in the pioneering field(1962-1987) I did
just that, at least as far as I was able.
394

The history of Western European literature and its autobiographical
component until approximately the end of the eighteenth century and into
the 19th could be described as a succession of phenomena which were
generally linked to classical models. In other words, writers consciously or
subconsciously, in a relative or absolute way, respected and followed the
content and forms of a classical canon, a canon rooted in Greece and Rome
or in Christianity, at least in European/Western civilization. In the last two
centuries other models have emerged and this work draws on many aspects
of these newer historical models from the last two centuries.
I have drawn on literary monuments that had impressed me during those
pioneering years: Toynbee, Gibbon, John Hatcher, Roger White, Robert
Nisbet, among so many others. But I think what gave my poetry, my
writing, its vitality was the struggle of my mind over decades to come to
terms with the cynicism and skepticism of modern society vis-a-vis religion
and provide intellectually relevant responses to the questions of the seekers
among my contemporaries.-Ron Price with thanks to: 1
Arnold Toynbee, A
Study of History, Vol. 8, p.115; and 2
Northrop Frye, The Stubborn Structure:
Essays on Criticism and Society, Methuen and Co. Ltd., London, 1970,
p.311.
395

A striking fact about that society
I grew up in back then
and for most of its history
was the domination of narrative form,
a narrative poetic and its impersonal,
bald, dry, statement to portray action.1
A deep moral silence also filled the land,
amidst massive indifference, solitude
and a social ideal that still inhabits our soul.
And now, as the imaginative centre
of Canadian life moved to the metropolis,
and faster in Australia
and for the international Baha’i pioneer
a feeling of nomadic movement
over great distances filled his consciousness,
standards for a world culture of the arts
were insensibly established.
396

They arose out of an almost continuous probing
into the distance and the fixing of one’s eyes
on an ever-changing skyline.
1
my own narrative poetic is, unlike this Canadian tradition of the impersonal
in poetic narrative, highly personal.
Ron Price
22 July 2000
----------------------------------------
I like to think, as I begin this narrative with its poetic inclusions, that
prophets, poets and scholars are chosen vessels “who have been called by
their Creator to take human action of an ethereal kind.”411
But it is my
considered view that, however much I feel I am being called, my spiritual
armament resembles an archer’s who is aiming at a target which is too far
distant to be visible and too close to get a just, a fitting, perspective. As the
years go on, and especially now after forty years on a journey as a pioneer to
the seekers among my contemporaries, I have come to feel the truth of the
words of that Roman poet Horace who wrote at the time of the appearance
of another manifestation of God: “Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou
shalt find it after many days.”412
And if this piece of literature,
411
Toynbee, op.cit. p.36.
412
Horace, “Carmina,” Book IV, Ode 9, lines 25-28.(65 BC to 8 AD)
397

autobiographical literature, is ground-breaking in any way; if it has any
particular kind of originality and is in any way equal to the challenge of the
new internationalism and the new institutions that this Faith I am associated
with, only those mysterious dispensations of time as it hurries by on its
winged chariot will reveal.
I have also come to feel, as Toynbee expressed it so well writing when he
was on the eve of the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth, little did
he know, in 1952, that “It is Man’s task to execute, within the time that God
alots to him on Earth, a human mission to do God’s will by working for the
coming of God’s Kingdom on Earth.”413
The Baha’i Faith provided, through
its Founder, His Successors and now its administrative institutions a strong
sense of divine appointment, of a specific, a guided, direction, in
establishing that very Kingdom. Working now with some psychic
chronometer, with intellect and spiritual creativity defining the working
tempo of my days, I work, as the poet Andrew Marvell expressed it perhaps
somewhat archaically, while “at my back I always hear/Time’s winged
chariot hurrying near.”414
At the same time, I was slowly learning over
several decades one of writing’s secrets, namely, what to put in and what to
leave out. I was learning, too, other things about writing prose and poetry, as
413
414
Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress.”
398

I have expressed them in the following prose-poems. One thing seemed to
come easily and that was prose-poetry which, as Mary O’Neil notes, goes
back to the Renaissance.415
THE BRILLIANCE AND THE WONDER
“In the fact that the subject is a process lies the possibility of
transformation,” writes Catherine Belsey.1
And there is transformation,
several over a lifetime, perhaps innumerable ones, before the final bodily
separation, before the cage is burst asunder and soars into “the firmament of
holiness.”2
The cage is often drawn back to the earth again and again, the
transformation never complete, and then the cage is gone and the soul, that
acme of mature contemplation, continues the journey. While on earth
hounds, claws, ravens and envy stalk the "thrush of the eternal garden" that
is your life.3
-Ron Price with thanks to 1
Catherine Belsey in Writing Selves:
Contemporary Feminist Autobiography, Jeanne Perreault, University of
Minnesota Press, London,1995, p.1; 2
Baha’u’llah, Hidden Words; and 3
Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys, p.41.
415
Mary O’Neil, “ The Fortunes of Avant-Garde Poetry,” Philosophy and
Literature, Vol. 25, No.1, 2001, pp.142-154.
399

While thoughts press on
and feelings overflow
and quick words ‘round me
fall like flakes of snow,
the years go on,
each year adding one
and I grow old,
hardly known and quietly:
drifts of snow the wind has blown
against a wall or house
one day will melt
while new spring sun brings
green grass, flowers bloom
the final transformation of June,1
repeated so often, so regularly,
so predictably, that somehow
the transformation becomes
a part of the air we breath
and we only notice,
for such short times,
400

the brilliance and the wonder
amidst the dogs of the claws of earth.
1
The perspective here is that of the northern hemisphere.
Ron Price
7 September 2000
-------------------------------------------
TRANSFORMED
There is a definite relief in simply writing a poem, in completing it, in
having one's imagination aroused to give life and significance to the world.
In some ways that is enough. In other ways, the poet wants others, as many
others as possible, to speak to other minds, to see and share his expressed
feeling and, hopefully, have them enthuse over what he has written. I would
have liked a wider audience. I may one day get such an audience. But I
think it unlikely. Even the likelihood of obtaining an audience beyond the
grave is, I think, small. I have said a great deal about poetry, about my
poetry, in the more than five thousand poems I have sent to the Baha’i
World Centre Library. Like a spider, I spin my poems out of my own vitals,
out of some inner necessity, so as to catch life. Like a spider, too, I don’t
mass-produce the same poem, at least not yet. I write another poem and
401

another as circumstances and some combination of inner desire and
necessity require.
There is seriousness present; there is lightness. What it means for me, I can
not expect it will mean to others. Thus, I have a sense of my poetry’s worth,
but I am not obsessed by its importance or my own. Life drove me, as it
drove T.S. Eliot, into a wasteland of suffering when I was young, in the first
ten years I was a Baha'i(1959-1969) and, along with other precipitating
influences, it formed, or better, transformed me slowly, insensibly and
eventually, perhaps inevitably, into a person who felt compelled to write
poems. -Ron Price with thanks to T.S. Matthews, Great Tom: Notes
Towards the Definition of T.S. Eliot, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London,
1974, pp.95-96.
I think I felt old at fifty. Dieing, like being born,
I was tired with is a long process.
what you might call Who can say when it really
a bone-weariness. when it really begins?
-ibid., p.169.
But, as Eliot advised,
I still felt like an explorer.
402

I venture out to encounter
life’s last adversary:
the slow decline of old age,
a senescence which explores
the old man, me,
as my friends go through
alarming and not-so-alarming
changes and chances.1
My poetic opus,
my celebratory note,
has been struck to its full.2
And all that’s left one day
will be one final exploration,
one final note
on the keyboard of life.
1
T.S. Matthews, op.cit., p. 170.
2
Over 5000 poems sent to the BWCL
Ron Price
403

30 December 2000
------------------------------------------
The necessary and passive receptivity of so much of life becomes, as it must,
an active curiosity if one is to know anything about one’s life, one’s times,
one’s religion, indeed, if one is to know virtually anything at all. The
mind’s mill must be set and kept in motion by a perpetual flow of curiosity
and this curiosity must be “harnessed to the service of something more
purposeful and creative”416
than pure curiosity itself. There is always
opportunity for rest, for ease, for contemplation, unless one completely
stuffs one's life with activity. But that is not my story now in these early
years of the evening of my life, these golden years, free from so many of the
responsibilities that kept my nose down and my emotions engaged: job and
career, family and friends, sex and love, people in community, for so long.417
Toynbee says our search, our quest, is “for a vision of God at work in
history.” Slowly, unobtrusively, by an endless and sometimes exhausting
seriousness, the teachings of the Baha’i Faith filled in this vision. By the
beginning of my pioneer venture on or about August 20th
1962, at the age of
416
417
It is now nearly five years since I have been freed from employment and
what I came to find excessive community tasks: 1999-2003.
404

eighteen, this vision had taken root in the soil of my life. In the last forty
years the painting, the sculpture, the poem that this vision has taken its form
in, has added light and shadow, colours, tones, texture and literally millions
of words. They could probably be reduced to several bottles of ink. As I
listened and watched a thousand musicians, heard more comedians than I
could count, attended talks, seminars, deepenings and meetings of many
kinds, got my hair cut by old men and young, by beautiful women across
two continents, watched more who-dun-its and documentaries than the mind
can hold, that vision drifted through my mind, again and again and again,
caught the accents of voices too many to remember and touched my heart
like trapped starlight, like fleeting green tints from passing lights that
struggled in the eyes of someone I loved, like the colour of rain. And the
vision kept passing and returning.
This is no settler narrative, the kind that filled many an autobiography in
British and other nations' colonies around the world and in nations as they
expanded west and east, north and south in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. I do refer to my work as a pioneering narrative, though, one of
many which I am confident will be produced in these epochs and in the
many epochs that will succeed them in the decades and, perhaps, centuries
405

ahead. Like many of the settler narratives, this narrative should be seen as a
volatile subject not as something fixed in black and white. The apparent
marginalia that I place, insert into the framework of my story, should not be
seen as a distraction but as part of the main game. I manoeuvre myself into
many corners. The prescriptions and formulations of a pioneer narrative
which authorize my text, so to speak, are many and ill-defined, making
manoeuvring inevitable. This is no archetypal pioneering history for, thusfar,
I have yet to read a thorough and systematic or anecdotal and serendipitous
account of a pioneer. If any exist, they have yet to be published.418
But
whatever is published by Baha'i pioneers in the years to come, I am
confident that the one common denominator, uniting all those who try to tell
their story, will be their devotion to the possibilities and the inevitabilities,
the certainties and the complexities, associated with the Faith they have
taken to the corners of the earth and the thousands and thousands of places
418
I comment on this theme from time to time in this autobiography. For, as I
point out in other places, there have been autobiographies written by Baha'is
in the Formative Age. But, thusfar, they are short accounts or the accounts of
people whose lives are quite out of the ordinary in some way, like Andre
Brugiroux who hitch-hiked more than anyone on the planet, like famous
entertainers such as Dizzy Gillespie or like Baha'is of prominence on the
elective or appointive arms of Baha'i administration. As far as I know, this is
the first autobiography by an ordinary Baha'i without any particular claims
to fame, renoun, wealth, prestige or prominence. Just one of the millions
who make up the warp and weft(or woof) of the Baha'i community. It is
ordinariness, the commonplace, that can weigh us down, or so Goethe once
put it.
406

in between on the great tapestry of this planet. Their writing will be seen in
many ways but, however it is seen, it will be a bi-product and a detailed,
circumstantial, portrayal of their pioneering experience.
In the fifty years since I first came in contact with this new Faith, the years
1953/4 to 2003/4, it has spread around the world and multiplied its numbers
thirty times. I feel a little like the historian Polybius(206 BC to 128 BC)
must have felt when he observed the unification of the Hellenic world within
his own lifetime, between 219 BC and 168 BC, when “almost the whole
world fell under the undisputed ascendancy of Rome.”419
I had observed the
Westernization of the entire planet and the sense of that planet's global
reality. I knew I was at the beginning of what would be a long process. The
transformation of the entire world within the dominion of a single system
was, without doubt, part of the long-term Plan of the Baha’i community. It
would be an exercise that would take place without arms, swords and
uniforms, at least not as far down the road as I could see. It would be an
exercise that would take place for the most part quite unobtrusively with
increasing speed. It may have begun as far back as the years of the
industrial revolution, the agricultural revolution and the American revolution
419
Polybius in the Preface to Oecumenical History since the One Hundred
and Fortieth Olympiad, Book 1, Chapter 1.
407

in the years 1760 to 1780, approximately or even as far back as Columbus in
1492.
Alvin Tofler called it the second and third wave. From my perspective it has
been one long wave since the 1750s, since Shaykh Ahmad was born or, to
choose a personage of greater popularity and renown in the West, since J.S.
Bach died in 1750. But history is a game anyone can play. The possibilities
and the paradigms are just about infinite. For Tofler, though, this immense
wave has swept over humanity in a context of such complexity and over so
many decades and now nearly three centuries, that the average person came,
in my time, to have little to no idea what the overall process was, no idea of
the meaning of the events, except in some microcosmic sense.420
Indeed,
this was hardly surprising. In some ways the decades and, indeed, the next
several centuries were coming at humankind like the sound of a distant train:
the vast majority just could not hear its faint, its light echo in the distance.
The noise of civilization and the jumble of an endless subjectivity produced
a cacophony that completely muffled the sound of distant trains. So few
420
Students came to know, for example, the five causes of WW1 or the three
major causes of the drought. But, insofar, as the flow of civilization, is was
either a mystery; it was approached with complete indifference or educated
people swam in a sea of so many ideas that it prevented any agreement and,
more sadly, often little discussion.
408

heard the distant whistle or the quiet drum-beat of civilization's inherent
pattern. It was the drum-beat of a new revelation, little did the multitudes of
humankind know, at least as the years of new millennium began. One could
scarcely be surprised, though, for there were so many drums beating, so
many orchestras, so much sound on the air-waves. And so it is, it seems to
me anyway, that autobiographical statements, books, like this one which
encodes the concerns and perspectives of one Baha’i, encodes them with
subjectivity and a sense of self-emancipation, constitutes an indispensable
part of the Baha’i project. Autobiography has the potential of being a major
literary form for groups like the Baha’i Faith which in international terms
has a relatively small following. It has the potential for being a medium for
confronting problems of self and of identity and, in the process, of fulfilling
important social needs. Autobiography, this book among others, can be of
use to Baha’is to help them understand what is often a marginalized position
they hold in society and help them appreciate that, however few their
numbers, the battle, the life, the experience, of one of their members can
throw light on the others.
The waves crashing into and over humanity was an exercise, a phenomenon,
that was taking place under my very eyes in the two dozen towns and cities
409

in which I had lived. No one had any idea that this was the Plan; even I and
the Baha’is who lived and had their being in the context of that Plan had a
great deal of trouble keeping their eyes on this particular aspect of the Plan,
so awesome and so obscure was it at the mundane level of their own lives.
Seeing the unification of the planet, the planetization of the globe, the
increasing oneness of the world of humanity, take place with more and more
evidences in my lifetime: this is at the heart of my story. Ironically, it took
place in the context of intense conflict and millions, hundreds of millions, of
deaths. The context did not change, either, in the generation before me, the
generation of my parents, in which two wars decimated the value and belief
system of a whole civilization; or the generation of my grandparents before
that, say, back to the 1870s. A great wind of change seemed to be blowing
and blowing, generation after generation. Perhaps, as Robert Nisbet pointed
out, that wind had been blowing at least since the fifth century BC; or,
perhaps, since the Tree of Divine Revelation was planted in the soil of the
Divine Will with the prophetic figure of Adam.421
This historical question is
far too complex to pursue here in this short space, but the contemplation of
the question and the possible answer can not be divorced from this narrative
and my own life which is at its centre.
421
Shoghi Effendi uses this metaphorical language in his talk delivered by
Ruhiyyih Khanum in Chicago in 1953.
410

Indeed, my pioneering venture, it seems to me in retrospect, has been part
and parcel of the very reconstruction of a civilization that, arguably, began
to occur in the lifetimes of the twin-manifestations of our time and their
precursors.422
That reconstruction, one could argue and I do so here, has
taken place to a significant extent in the context of a Plan, a Plan that was
put into action just seven years before I was born.423
As the culture critic Lionel Trilling once wrote, speaking of the form, the
existence, of a culture: "the form of its existence is struggle." That is
certainly the case with the Baha'i culture. Some artists, Trilling went on,
contain in their personal life the very essence of this struggle and its
contradictions and paradoxes. My life, my autobiography, contains this
essence. Inconsistencies and contradictions are part of the very warp and
weft of life both in my personal life and in what the Baha'i Faith is and was
in this half century under review. I do like to think that this autobiography
does eviscerate that is draws out what is vital or essential in my life, elicits
422
If one goes back to the birth of Shaykh Ahmad in 1753 one could argue
that modern civilization had its roots in these days. To pursue this historical
theme is not the purpose of this autobiography.
423
The Seven Year Plan: 1937-1944, the start of the first epoch of ‘Abdu’l-
Baha’s Plan.
411

the pith, the essence of my days, my journey. Life, at least as I have
experienced it, involves maintaining myself between contradictions that so
often can't be solved by analysis. They can only be presented with due
regard for their virtually insoluble complexity and I do so in this work.
What I write here is one of virtually millions of tangents to a set of
concentric circles that are at the core of this new and emerging society. To
scale the moral and aesthetic heights of what constitutes this new society I
use the ladders of social observation and analysis. And so this
autobiography should not be seen like a novel. Readers should not expect an
interesting story with tension, plot, dialogue and a what's next atmosphere.
Those that want to read a story of escape or adventure, of mystery or science
fiction, of romance or one of innumerable forms of entertainment, are
advised to watch TV, go to the movies or read one of a multitude of books in
any book store or now on the Internet. There is both mystery and romance
here, as there is in the history of the Baha'i community of which this
autobiography is a part, part of that greatest of mysteries going back to
Abraham, but I'm not sure I convey it with the language it requires.424
The
424
Human imagination has difficulty plumbing the depths of the mystery of
individuals like Abraham, Christ, Baha'u'llah and others, their suffering,
their exile, their secret. See: Dorota Glowacka, "Sacrificing the Text: The
Philosopher/Poet at Mount Moriah," Animus, 1997.
412

theme certainly requires more analysis than can be given in an
autobiography like this which has already blown-out to over 850 pages.
I am in some ways like Ralph Waldo Emerson who hardly ever read novels
and hardly ever liked those that came his way.425
In the last twenty-two
years, 1983 to 2005, I even tried unsuccessfully some ten times to write a
novel. Perhaps the future will find a place for the novel in my life. The story
here is of a different ilk and for many I'm sure not their cup of tea. But then,
I'm not writing this to give people what they want, create a reading public
and in the process, perhaps, acquire some fame and glory along the way. If
these elusive acquisitions come my way, fine. I've got nothing against these
attributes of conventional success. But I think it highly unlikely that I will
have the experience that led Lord Byron to say: “I awoke one morning and
found myself famous.”426
I am also conscious of the words of Francis
Bacon: “Fame is like a river that beareth up things light and swollen and
drowns things weighty and solid.”427
As light as I’d like my work to be, it
tends to the weighty and the solid.
425
Marcus Cunliffe, "Literature and Society," American Literature Since
1900, editor, M. cunliffe, Sphere Books Ltd., London, 1975, p.367.
426
Moore, Life of Byron.
427
Famous Quotes on Fame, Internet Site.
413

I often draw on a myth which narrates a complex interaction between
individual and community and a promise of a world at peace, in unity and
imbued with an ongoing progress that is both inspiring and a source of long-
range hope. The essential quality of the Baha'i experience in the first
century and a half of its history came to reside in its expansion and
consolidation and the opportunities that such expansion and consolidation
offered to individuals and communities as the medium in which they could
and did inscribe their destiny. This struggle, for it was nothing if not a
struggle, became central to the myth. It was a myth, though, that would
never be transmuted into an avowedly hopeless quest, although from time to
time a sense of crisis seemed to threaten "to arrest its unfoldment and blast
all the hopes which its progress had engendered."428
It was a myth, too, that
I use as my starting point in many basic ways, for my own story.
I am contributing in my own small way to the fathering and mothering of a
tradition of becoming, a tradition which finds in my own experience the
seeds and the sinews, the warp and woof, of what I am confident will one
day be a compelling and instructive literature. And the myth at the centre of
428
Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, Wilmette, 1957, p.111.
414

this account is what John Hatcher once called the metaphorical nature of
both physical reality and Baha'i history.429
To become a reader of this work one enters a force-field of anxieties and
delights where cultural ideologies intersect and dissect one another, in
contradiction, in consonance and in adjacency. As Firuz Kazemzadeh,
Baha’i historian at Harvard and long-time member of the American NSA,
once said we are one per cent Baha'i and ninety-nine per cent the culture we
live in. In this work the 99 per cent and the 1 per cent blend and flow in a
myriad eddies and tides. Then there are the readers and they will bring to
this work their passions and unreliabilities, their talents and interests, their
desires to escape from the pull of my argument or swim in its
persuasiveness, their pleasure in the use of my language or their preference
for slim books or fictional narrative. There are a tangle of problems which
are fundamental to thinking about and writing autobiography. As this book
proceeds there are shifting sands, moving constructions of agency,
subjectivity and truth as I change with time, place and intent, untethered by
everything except the memory and the imagination that is my life and how I
put it into words. There are, too, highly volatile components and serious
429
John Hatcher has written extensively on this theme as far back as the late
1970s in several books and journal articles.
415

blind-spots to my life story that make the story capable of being played out
in different and quite unpredictable ways to the ones I have chosen.
It is also difficult to invoke various verbal and conceptual totalities
embodied in such words as: marriage, childhood, Baha'i Administration,
Baha'i theology, Baha'i history or even pioneering, oneness and 'the
Writings'. These are all terms which proliferate in my account and make
understandings sometimes more difficult, clumsy and non-specific due to
their very complexity, a complexity that is difficult to negotiate and
describe. Sometimes such terminology hides the ambiguities and the
inconsistencies, the complexities and wealth of detail that exist in much of
life's experiences and they raise in their stead certain obscurities, flatnesses
and grey-coveralls. As Anton Zidjervelt once wrote in his stimulating book,
The Abstract Society, which I read when I was teaching at a College of
Advanced Education in the late 1970s, so much of our world and virtually
all of the conceptual material is abstract making the majority of people
whose minds work best with practical realities lost in a sea of quite
excessive complexity. Still, these abstract terms come in the end to be
416

second nature, part of the air they breath,430
even if not ever fully
understood: democracy, Christianity, Islam, community, politics, inter alia.
There are several reasons why an autobiography like this is useful. One: it is
itself a form of social action and an important one; two: it is a useful source
of evidence for the future, evidence for grounding intellectual claims about
social structures, relations and processes. Three: texts of this nature are
sensitive barometers of social processes, movement and indicators of social
change. And, four: texts of this nature are integral parts of a text-context,
theory-practice nexus. I have drawn here on a paper by Urpo Kovala, a
teacher at the university of Jyvaskyla in Finland.431
I think, though, that
autobiographies, much like conversation and people's oral accounts of their
lives, can feature difficult and sometimes ambiguous engagements with an
accepted, orthodox or mainstream Baha'i story and its history of persecution
and idealism in various modes and mixes. Since there is, as yet, a distinctive
but small literature of autobiography in the autobiographical tradition in the
Baha'i community, a tradition that creates, invents or imagines some
international self for an international community; since there is no
430
Anton Zidjervelt, The Abstract Society, Penguin, 1970.
431
Urpo Kovala, "Cultural Text Analysis and Liksom's Short Story 'We Got
Married," Comparative Literature and Culture: AWWWeb Journal.
417

pioneering self that floats free of social, national, psychological,
sociological, ethnic, and sexual differences; since that self is only constituted
by and through difference and in history, I am forced to script that self in its
relation to others, through adjacencies and through intimacies, through
associations and disassociations. This makes for complexity and it has
produced this ongoing narrative. Those who want a simple story of what I
did and when and how--the normal parameters of an autobiography--will
probably by now have stopped reading this work. I try to portray the vast
invisible inscapes of my life, my society and my religion, but whether they
make interesting reading, I can not tell.
I think it unlikely that there will ever be one compact, professional and
efficient Price Industry, as such an Industry might come to be called some
decades hence. It may loom into existence, if it ever does, with many points
of origin, numerous individual starting points, evolving so unobtrusively, so
obscurely, so slowly as to be unnoticed by the vast majority of readers bent
on absorbing the burgeoning lines of thought that will be increasingly
available to the public. If there is an escalating, a future, absorption in
autobiographical and biographical studies in the Baha'i community, due
partly to a slowly engendered and multiform enthusiasm of readers, due to
418

the privileging of print over performance and the apparent stability or
consistency of the literary script over its theatrical realisation or completion
and due also to an emerging world religion moving completely out of an
obscurity it has been in for a century and a half and more, then this work
may yet find a significant reading public.
“I can call it back,” writes Mark Twain in his autobiography, “and make it as
real as it ever was and as blessed.” But what is real the philosopher Merle
Ponte argues are “the interlocked perspectives” which we must “take apart
step-by-step”432
and relive them in their temporal setting. And just as "the
crossing, the process of departures and distancing from Europe are germinal
in nineteenth century emigrant autobiographies," as Gillian Whitlock notes,
so are these same features germinal in the stories of international pioneers.
The crossing, like the journey of the pioneer, initiates a new consciousness
of the self through emigration;"433
or, as Samuel Beckett wrote in 1931: "We
are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are also no longer even
what we were before the calamity of yesterday."434
There is, too, some of
432
Merleau Ponty in Narrative and the Self, A. P. Kerby, Indiana UP,
Bloomington, 1991, p. 22.
433
Gillian Whitlock, The Intimate Empire: Reading Women's
Autobiography, Cassell, London, 2000, p. 44.
434
Samuel Beckett in " Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel
Beckett's Theatre," S.E. Gontarski, Journal of Modern Literature, Volume
419

what novelist Joseph Conrad calls the detritus of life. There is a detritus that
surrounds the "minute wreckage that washes out of my life into its
"continental receptacles"435
on both of the great landscapes where I have
lived: Canada and Australia. The flotsam of a difficult first marriage, now
partly forgotten but an important, a formative part, of my life and the
recontained shipwreck of its bourgeois domesticity in a second marriage,
may well be minute in my memory now nearly thirty years later, but that
upheaval, like all upheavals, leaves its mark in quite complex and difficult to
describe ways, as do other traumatic events and personal tests. The marks of
life, major and minor, are difficult to paint with words on the emotional
equipment of one's psyche.
I will say no more about this 'sea-change' which has been written about in
great detail by many writers. The words of Roger White, though, are timely
ones here:
CALLED
A word is inundation, when it comes from the sea.-Emily Dickinson
22, Number 1.
435
Joseph Conrad in S.E. Gontarski, op.cit.
420

The shore is safer than the sea,
It does not seethe nor call
Nor buffet and betray who’d quest
Nor heinously appal.
Astute’s the pilgrim on the land
Who never heeds the sea
And resolutely walks away-
It is not so with me.
I gaze upon the bitter wrecks
Mercilessly broken
And gauge my craft and weigh my words
The scheming waves have spoken.436
The confrontation of sharply diverse cultures caught the imagination of the
historian Herodotus(485-425 BC) and the modern philosopher civil-servant
436
Roger White, One Bird One Cage One Flight, Happy Camp, 1983, p.124.
421

Turgot(1727-1781). It was this diversity and this confrontation that helped to
provide the motivational matrix for the writing of their histories. They both
saw in this diversity “a key to the understanding of history.”437
The
confrontation of sharply different cultures has been a phenomenon that goes
back probably hundreds of thousands of years if one draws on the science of
paleo-anthropology438
. More recently, at least since Columbus and the
beginnings of modern history, if one defines ‘modern’ as that period going
back to the end of the Middle Ages, that clash of cultures has been
increasing in extent and intensity. And this clash affects modern writing.
Walter Benjamin once said that the most modern of texts would be made
entirely of other texts.439
While this is not true of this text, it is difficult to
ignore the partial truth of Benjamin's remarks as they apply to this
autobiography. For as I write these words there are more than sixteen
hundred references that I draw on to elaborate my story.
437
Toynbee, op.cit.p.82.
438
Ortega y Gasset, Man and People, 1957, p.159. Gasset points out, among
other things in this chapter, the essentially dangerous nature of all people
outside one's clan everywhere on earth in the thousands of years up to the
emergence of agricultural civilization in 10,000 BP(ca).
439
Walter Benjamn in Teresa Leo, "Finding Poetry: An Interview with Rick
Moody,"
CrossConnect, Internet, 2003.
f i n d i n g p o e t r y: a n i n t e r v i e w w i t h r i c k m o o d y
422

The confrontation of elements within this immense social and psychological
diversity seemed to be coming to another head, to a climacteric, in the half
century that has been both the years of my life and the first five decades of
this Kingdom of God on earth.440
Two of the greatest, the most
bloodthirsty, wars in history had been fought in the thirty-one years, 1914 to
1945, ending just as I had come into the world. It was a period which
coincided with the adulthood of my parents and grandparents. And in the
eight years preceding the inception of that Kingdom, 1945 to 1953, the
atomic bomb had lent a special element to the range and momentum of the
catastrophic aspects of the twentieth century. In a strange and nearly
unbelievable way, it was all part of what the Baha'is came to call the process
of the Lesser Peace.441
Toynbee points to the Peloponnesian War(431 to 404 BC) as the beginning
of the decline of Hellenic and Roman civilization. Perhaps 1914 marks the
beginning of the end of the civilization into which I was born, Western
civilization and the beginning, three years later, of the Lesser Peace and the
440
‘Abdu’l-Baha uses this term quite explicitly on page 351 of God Passes
by,USA, 1957(1944).
441
It could be argued that 1917 and Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points were the
beginning of the Lesser Peace. See The Universal House of Justice, Century
of Light,2000, p.33.
423

new civilization that would emerge from the destructive fires of this age.442
Certainly the organizational aspects of the Cause, teaching plans, the embryo
of Baha’i Administration could be said to go back to these years in the last
half of the second decade of the twentieth century.443
While the old world
began its decline, a new one was taking form. In 1919, at the heart of these
embryonic years, when this new world was taking form and the Lesser Peace
could be said to have just begun, my father was 24, my mother 15 and that
other major influence on my early life, my mother’s father, was 47.444
This
question of decline is a complex one with a host of views surrounding it.
One recent author has argued that the 1960s marked the beginning of “real”
secularization, the “permanent decline” of religion in the form of the
churches and “pervasive Christian culture."445
Certainly the dialogue about
religion has been a very complex one since the 1960s, since I began this
pioneering venture, that it is not surprising that "teaching the Faith" has
442
Of course, one could just as easily select 1789 as that beginning point or
even 1517, or one of several other possibilities in the complex history of
Western society in the modern age.
443
Peter Smith, “The American Baha’i Community: 1894-1917, A
Preliminary Survey,” Studies in Babi & Baha’I History, Vol.1, M. Momen,
editor, Kalimat Press, 1984, p. 157.
444
I could include here my mother’s mother who was 45(ca) and other
members of my family but, it seems to me, that their influence on my life
was too periferal to mention here.
445
Callum Brown in "The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe: 1750-
2000, Cambridge UP, 2003," Reviewed in:Canadian Journal of Sociology
Online, March- April 2004.gh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds.
424

become the complex phenomenon that it has, at least in Australia and
Canada, the fields where I have worked. The literature on secularism,
though, suggests that the shift from a religiously based to a secular society
has been taking place for over 400 years.446
The analysis of what went on in the 1960s is now burgeoning. There was
what you might call an orthodox perspective that continued until the late
1980s before it was challenged by a revisionist school. This school had an
entirely different method of studying the 1960s and came to entirely
different conclusions about its significance. A third approach tried to
adjudicate between these two historiographic positions. It is not my
intention here to dwell on the various systems of meaning and interpretation.
The various interpretations of historians and scholars, the several paradigms
of meaning, are part and parcel of all the decades that this pioneering story is
concerned with and a work like this can not deal with these interpretations in
any detail.447
Although my autobiography is in some ways essentially a
work of history it can not expect to deal with the many permutations and
446
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History: Vol. 5, Oxford UP, 1962, p.411.
447
Gregory Pfitzer, “History Cracked Open: “New” History’s Renunciation
of the Past,” Reviews in American History, Vol.31, 2003, pp.143-151.
425

combinations of the professional schools of history that deal with the same
period of time.
I’ll include two poems here to convey some perspective on these three souls.
What I write here is a far cry, a distant cousin, apparently, to the wide vistas
of history and social analysis I have been writing about above. Readers will
have to bear with me as I dance and dart from the macrocosm to the
microcosm. Apologies to those readers who find my 'darting-and-farting', as
they say in the vernacular here in Australia, frustrating. I think those who
are comfortable with my style thusfar should have little difficulty wading
through the six hundred and fifty pages to come. For those who find my
style, my approach, too weighty, too cumbersome and difficult to take in, I
can only say that, hopefully, there will be a reward for effort. Perhaps, too,
this text would be improved by following the advice of American poet
laureate Louis Gluck who wrote in 1994 that: "Writing is not decanting of
personality." At the start of a volume of essays called Proofs and Theories
she wrote: "The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is, instead,
all that can be envisioned."448
In my case, for the most part, these words are
lived. Gluck's words which follow, written in 2001, could very well describe
448
Louise Gluck, USAToday.com, 29 August 2003.
426

many of my desires at the outset of this autobiography, especially the
solitude I need to work:
Immunity to time, to change. Sensation
Of perfect safety, the sense of being
Protected from what we loved
And our intense need was absorbed by the night
And returned as sustenance.
MY MOTHER
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.
-Wallace Stevens
She was born just after they arrived
from the old country1
on a cold winter day
427

while hope still filled the air of our spirit,
before two wars sucked us a little dry
to put it absolutely mildly.
We really had no idea how sucked
we had been and still don't, not really.
We were left to face a continuing tempest
even in these fin de siecle years.
She came into that northern land
by a lake, below an escarpment,2
and stayed for seventy-four years.
She had one child
in twenty-three years of marriage,
played the piano, was very beautiful
and chanced upon a new Faith
as the ninth stage of history
and the Kingdom of God on earth
were just breaking in
and a new beginning for humankind
was on the way: little did we know.
428

Ron Price
6 December 1996
1
my mother was born in 1904 after her parents arrived from England in
1900.
2
my mother lived in and around Hamilton Ontario all her life.
THINGS GOT AWEFULLY COMPLEX
This poem tries to take an overview of my mother's life. She was 16 in 1920
and living in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The Baha'i Faith had just begun its
story in Ontario, in Toronto, 40 miles away, seven years before. Gertrude
Stein said my mother was part of a lost generation. Stein also felt and wrote
about the ethic of the pioneer.1
My mother, it has always seemed to me in
retrospect, was one of those pioneers Stein wrote about. Fitzgerald said that
generation was bright and with infinite belief. Sometimes my mother lost the
patina of brightness during life's inevitable struggle, as did many of that
generation. Ernest Hemmingway dramatized the disappearance of that
brightness and that belief in The Sun Also Rises in 1926. -Ron Price with
429

thanks to Henry Idema III, Freud, Religion and the Roaring Twenties,
Rowman and Littlefield Pub., 1990, p.135; and 1
William H. Gass, William
H. Gass: Essays By William H. Gass, A.A. Knopf, NY, 1976, p.122.
You were part of what they called
the lost generation, after that first war,
when the spiritual dynamic
seemed to fall out of the bottom,
some spiritual debacle
where the roots of faith
were finally severed
and some kind of secular tree
grew out of depression and more war
and the necessity for something to fill
the all-pervasive spaces and holes of existence.
Things got awfully complex too, for you,
as the years went on and a hundred options
on a hundred trees tried to interpret
what was really happening
430

and the tempest blew and blew
across the face of the earth
through your towns and days.
But not many figured it out,
not many back in the fifties
even tried.
Maybe the war,
and the one before
had shattered their world,
but they didn't really know it
while they watched 'I Love Lucy,'
Westerns and Dragnet
and ate hot dogs.
You had some of that
'what's it all about?' sense,
that search, that endless search,
that pioneer mentality,
otherwise you would not have
431

been there when the Kingdom of God
got its kick-start back in '53.
I wrote the following piece as an introductory statement to my grandfather’s
autobiography. His autobiography, written in the early 1920s, covered the
first twenty-nine years of his life, up to 1901. I place this statement here
because it puts my grandfather’s life in a context that I think is useful and
covers the years 1901 to 1958. It provides, too, a helpful backdrop,
background, mise-en-scene, for my own life and, given the fact that it was
my grandfather's autobiography, an autobiography of his years from 1872 to
1901, that inspired mine, some general statement on his life is pertinent at
the outset of this life-story of mine.
ALFRED CORNFIELD: THE MIDDLE AND LATE YEARS
It has been some twenty years since my grandfather's autobiographical work
The Adventures of Arthur Collins was finally typed and distributed to each
living member of the family.449
Arthur Collins was, of course, Alfred J.
449
I received his autobiography in 1982.
432

Cornfield, and the adventures were his own from 1872 to 1901, from his
birth to his marriage in early 1901. He writes his story in some four hundred
pages, an impressive work for a man who had but two or three years of
formal education in the newly established Board Schools in London in the
first decade after primary education had become compulsory in England by
the Education Act of 1870.450
It is my intention in this brief biographical
piece to complete the account which my grandfather began, which he wrote
in the years 1921-1923 during his forty-ninth to his fifty-first year when his
daughter, my mother, was in her late teens. It is my intention to take his
story from his early adulthood, his marriage at the age of twenty-nine, to his
death in 1958 at the age of eighty-six when I was thirteen.
A common pattern with autobiographies and biographies is to divide a life
into early, middle and late. Often, too, when an autobiography ends without
450
A book of this length, written by an unlettered, largely uneducated, man is
unquestionably impressive. Since the late 18th
century, since Rousseau's
classic autobiography Confessions, autobiography had become a more
common literary form. The French novelist Stendhal, for example, in his
early fifties wrote an account of his first seventeen years in some five
hundred pages. The work is dull, repetitive, often dishonest and boastful.
The twenty-first century reader used to the faster pace and self-exposing
nature of modern novels and autobiographies may find this work of my
grandfather, Alfred Cornfield somewhat dull and repetitive in places, it
seems to me to possess the ring of a self-effacing honesty, humility and is
highly readable.
433

completing a life or leaving a large part of a lifestory untold, some other
literary genre is used to provide for those years unaccounted for in the
original story.451
Applying this early, middle and late division to Alfred
Cornfield's life it could look something like this:
1872 to 1901-early
1901 to 1931-middle
and 1931 to 1958-late
The early part of his life is covered by the account he himself wrote up to his
marriage in 1901. The second and middle part covers the period up to the
birth of his first grandchild and the third and final part covers the period
from that child’s birth in 1931 to Alfred Cornfield's death in 1958. My
intention here is to convey something of the life-story of my grandfather, a
man whom I know so little about after he reached the age of 29 in 1901.
Like so many of us, we come to know someone in our family or an
451
The American writer Henry James divided his life, his autobiography, into
early, middle and late. He wrote it from 1913 to 1917, beginning to write it
at the age of sixty-eight. See Autobiography: Henry James, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1983, p.ix; and The Autobiography
of John Cowper Powys published in 1934 up to the age of sixty. After 1934,
until his death in 1963, Powys' letters provided the base for the account of
the rest of his life.
434

acquaintance, but we never really know them in any meaningful, any
detailed, sense. What follows here is a short statement, a brief description,
of my grandfather’s life from 1901 to 1958, a man I hardly knew.452
THE MIDDLE YEARS: 1901-1931
During these three decades, 1901 to 1931, western civilization went through
the worst war, the most traumatic and horrific experience since, arguably,
the Black Death in 1348 when one in every three people from Iceland to
India perished. History books have documented this period and its Great
War of 1914 to 1918 in great detail. It is not the purpose of this biography
or my autobiography to dwell on the events of history, however briefly,
except insofar as they impinge on the life of Alfred Cornfield and then my
own life. It is my purpose, though, to outline in as much detail as possible
my grandfather's life from the age of twenty-nine to fifty nine, the middle
years of his life until the birth of his first grandchild, Murray, the first son of
his eldest daughter, Florence, who was then thirty.
452
See Alfred Cornfield, A.J. Cornfield’s Story, 1980 for his autobiography:
1872-1901.
435

Six months after Alfred's marriage, in late August of 1901, a severe storm
lashed the city of Hamilton. The green leaves of late summer's trees were
blown from their branches and the Works Department were kept busy
cleaning up the streets. It had been a hot August and now, after this storm,
people sat outside in the evenings looking at the trees "gaunt and leafless as
midwinter" as Alfred describes it in the closing pages of the autobiography
of his early years, the first three decades of his life. Perhaps this storm was a
sign of things to come. For the next fifty-seven years a tempest blew
through the institutions and society of western civilization and it has
continued blowing into the lives of Alfred's grandchildren and great-
grandchildren in the closing decades of the century into the opening years of
the new millennium.
In late 1901 Alfred and Sara had their first child, Florence. Florence was
followed in 1904 by Lillian and in 1908 by Harold. Alfred was thirty-six
when he had his last child and his first son. He was forty-two when the first
WW began and fifty-seven when the depression hit in 1929. I know very
little about his activities during these years except that he worked as a shirt-
cutter while he was writing his autobiography and that he and Sara and their
children moved frequently during the first three decades of the twentieth
436

century living as they did in Hamilton. Searching for a cheaper and better
accommodation, searching for a better job, another job, a more secure job
seemed to be the general story of these years.
I remember my mother, Lillian, telling me about how her father used to stop
off at a butcher on the way home and pick up a steak for the evening meal.
But I do not remember any other anecdotes from these middle years of
Alfred's life: 1901-1931. These brief notes will, for now, have to suffice
until more information comes my way or some inspiration arrives to provide
a base for more details for these Middle Years. The Great War and its
aftermath, 1914 to 1931 decimated the value system of western man.
Whatever beliefs my grandfather had in 1914 at age 42 got completely
catapulted into oblivion by the age of 59 when this stage of his story ends.
His wife’s story was one of belief which seemed to dominate over
skepticism and the belief was in a Christian paradigm of some kind, the
details of which I do not now know and have never known.
I was able to write more on my grandfather's 'later years’ before handing the
story to my cousins Joan Cornfield and David Hunter in 2002 to add what
they could.
437

THE LATER YEARS: 1931-1958
The years from 1931 to 1945 saw the end of the Depression and a second
great war from 1939 to 1945. If belief were annihilated in WW1, optimism
in the future had trouble surviving WW2. Alfred Cornfield was a struggling
young immigrant from England at the turn of the century and by the early
1920s, when he wrote the autobiography of the first twenty-nine years of his
life, his life's struggle had continued for another twenty years. It was
becoming difficult for him to maintain a sense of a bright future, but he did
acquire, insensibly over the decades a philosophical attitude that resulted in
an apparently calm demeanour by the time he was in his seventies. The
storm clouds of war and poverty that kept blowing through western society
from 1929 to 1945 would temper any philosophy of progress and belief in
God even more; at least that was the case for millions. Anything associated
with theistic belief that might have stirred in Alfred's soul had difficulty
breaking in by the late forties when I have my first memories of grandfather.
"There exists in human nature," wrote Gibbon with his long view of the
times, "a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the
438

evils, of the present times."453
Alfred's skepticism was rooted in the
historical experience of the first half of the twentieth century whose evils
were justifiably magnified. Whatever optimism had existed in the West in
the closing years of the nineteenth century, and it would appear from the
writings of many analysts in these years that a good deal of optimism did
prevail, it was bashed out of western man in the first half of the twentieth
century. Still, it rises from the ashes and it was appearent in many forms by
the time I came to write my autobiography. I saw it in many of the forms of
popular psychology, the pleasures associated with materialism, leisure
activities like sport, sex and TV and in a generation for the most part ill-
equipped to interpret the social comotion at play throughout the planet. I
and they listened to the pundits of error while society sank deeper into a
slough of despond; troubled by forecasts of doom, it was unable to do battle
with the phantoms of a wrongly informed imagination.454
These cruel events of history did not seem to affect the beliefs of Alfred's
wife Sara, as I indicated above and as my mother was to inform me in the
late 1950s, some fifteen to twenty years after Sara's death in 1939. Even
453
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Internet
Quotes.
454
The Universal House of Justice, “Ridván Message,” April 1999.
439

Alfred's two daughters, Florence and Lillian, at least as I remember them
and as I now recall their philosophico-religious views in the 1950s,
continued to enjoy the seeds of belief perhaps taking more after their mother
than their father who remained until his death an agnostic. The last years of
my grandfather's life, then, after 1945, from the age of seventy-two to
eighty-six were years of his retirement. He had retired from the world of
employment by the age of sixty-five in 1937, if not before. His employment
history was a chequered one and the thirty-six years from the age of twenty-
nine to sixty-five involved many positions, living in many houses, always
trying to make ends meet, as it were. But my memory yields little of this
period of Alfred's life and my sources of information have, as yet, provided
little supplementary detail.
Alfred lived to see the beginning of the space age, the first man to encircle
the earth in a space vehicle, Yuri Gagarin in the Sputnick in 1957. Alfred
Cornfield died at age eighty-six in 1958. This period is easier to document
since all of Alfred's grandchildren lived during this period and came into
their teens and twenties. His oldest grandchild, Murray Hunter, was twenty-
seven when Alfred died.
440

My first memories of Alfred Cornfield were in about 1948 when I was four.
My memories are from the years 1948 to 1958, a brief time, when Alfred
lived with my mother's sister's family, by then, in Burlington. The memories
are few, but quite graphic: babysitting me on cold Canadian evenings when
my parents went out to choir practice; sitting in his chair in his
bedroom/study on Hurd Avenue in Burlington reading a book; walking over
to our home on Seneca Street from his home on Hurd Avenue; speaking
quietly and gently to my mother or father in our home on Seneca Street in
Burlington. I was thirteen when Alfred died and had just entered secondary
school.
My mother used to tell me things about her father whom she loved deeply
and respected highly. She saw him as one of the best read people she knew
in her life. She saw him as highly virtuous: kind, patient, self-controlled,
thoughtful, wise, courteous, considerate. My memories, again, are sadly, few
and far between. I shall leave this very brief account, having made an initial
effort to put something down on paper. Perhaps when time and circumstance
permit more can be added to this life of Alfred Cornfield.
441

I place these few words, this brief summary of parts of my grandfather's life,
at this point because I have a strong appreciation for his own autobiography.
Immediately after reading it in 1984 and 1985 I began to write my own. My
mother's poetry, too, seemed to finally bear fruit in my own poetry within
two years of her death, hence my inclusion here of this brief account of my
mother's poetry and art. These lines from Shakespeare's sonnets seem
particularly apt here in relation to any understanding I have of the significant
people in my childhood:
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shall see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.455
My view of these my earliest years, my "youth's proud livery, so gazed on
now," as Shakespeare writes in his second sonnet, is nowhere near as bleak
as he goes on to write in that same sonnet. I do not see those years as "a
tottered weed of small worth held" but, rather, as part of a "pure and goodly
issue on the shore of life."456
Often, though, I feel the truth of Shakespeare's
455
William Shakespeare, Sonnets, Number 3.
456
'Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'i Prayers, NSA of USA, 1985, p.106.
442

words about life's stage that it "presenteth nought but shows."457
And, to
conclude these quotations from Shakespeare's sonnets, I like to think that:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.458
This, of course, is my poetry and my prose. I am not in the position so many
old and not-so-old people often are who become obsessed with the episodic
details of their childhood, adolescence or, indeed, of the various stages of
their lives as they review their experiences in retrospect. It is as if, by
recalling many discrete scenes, they will explain who they are to themselves.
While I am conscious of enjoying some understanding by this episodic
review, I am also conscious that understanding lies in so many other of life’s
gardens.
From my first conscious moments, moments I can still remember in 1947/8 I
was absorbed in the indulgences of childhood and then of youth. Insensibly,
in the last years of my teens and early twenties, from 1960 to 1967, I became
absorbed in a variety of life’s activities: getting a degree, sorting out my
457
ibid., sonnet 15.
458
ibid., sonnet 18.
443

erotic-romantic life, the Baha’i Faith, choosing a career and dealing with the
first stages of my bi-polar disorder. I was by temperament moulded in these
critical years to the idea of a spiritual revolution, in the sense of making the
world over and creating a new society. By the age of 23 when I got married,
though, I still had illusions that this process would be easier and faster than
it would be. The next forty years gave me lots of practice at deepening my
understanding of these processes, these realities. The progressive loss of
hope, so characteristic of so many, was not a disease I suffered form.
It is timely to include this brief digression into the life of my grandfather
because his own autobiographical work was read during my third and forth
years in Katherine, 1985-6, and it served as a crucial inspiration to the
beginnings of my own work. Alfred Cornfield’s work was prototypical,
provided a principle of coherence and generativity, a kind of helpful
simplicity of aim and purpose to my own work. His work has served as an
anchor point for what Todd Schultz, an instructor in methods of
autobiography, calls “personalogical inquiry.”459
Having seen how my
grandfather creatively crafted some clarifying coherence in his own uneven
459
William Schultz, “The Prototypical Scene: A Method of Generating
Psychobiological Hypotheses,” Up Close and Personal: Teaching and
Learning Narrative Methods, D. McAdams, APA Press, Washington, D.C.
444

and complex life, I was encouraged to try to anchor my life in a similar
fashion. Of course, there were other anchoring events and this autobiography
describes a number of them.460
These anchoring events, some in one's micro,
one's interpersonal world; some in the macro world of socio-politics, give
one a focus from which to deal with life's labyrinth, its puzzle and from
there to find the golden thread, however elusive it often seems to be.
At this stage of my life I have written little about my grandfather’s days after
1901 and little about my parents. I will close this opening chapter with an
introduction I wrote to a collection of my mother’s art and poetry that I put
together after her passing. This piece will also help to provide some
autobiographical background, a setting, a context, for what follows in the
chapters ahead. The notes here on my mother's life are few, entirely out of
proportion to the significance of her role in my life.
LILIAN PRICE'S 'POETRY AND ART' IN CONTEXT461
460
Renato Barilli, "William Blake at the Origins of Postmodernity,"
coolmedia, internet site. Barilli refers to anchoring events in Blake's life like
the French Revolution.
461
This introduction is found at a website called ‘A Celebration of Women
Writers.” Go to: http://users.intas.net.au/pricerc/24Family&Self.htm#lillian.
445

One of Canada's major writers in the last half of the 20th century, Mordecai
Richler, left Canada in 1950 at the age of 20 for the UK. Among the reasons
he left was his opinion that he could not publish his writings in Canada.
Canadian literature was still in its infancy, then, as a literary genre. It was
about this time that my mother started to write. Except for only occasionally
published pieces, most of my mother's work was unpublished. After some
twenty years of gathering quotations from varied sources(1930-1950) and
more than thirty years of extensive reading, mostly in literature, philosophy
and religion, she began writing poetry. She was about forty-six.
The view of Canadians then, and now, was that they were "nice but solemn."
At least that was how Richler expressed it in an interview fifty years later on
Books and Writing, ABC Radio National(1:00-2:00 pm,18 July 2001) By
the last decade of the twentieth century Canada had found a rich vein of
literature in the form of several major writers on the international stage. By
that time my mother had passed away. But during those years when Canada
was moving from its infancy in literature to the more mature work that was
beginning to be found in bookshops around the world in the years 1950-
1980, my mother produced this body of poetry. It was not the work of a
major poet or even, perhaps, a minor one. But it was the poetry of someone
446

who loved words and who tried to put life's meaning into words. It was the
poetry of someone I loved very much and to whom I owe much more than I
can measure for my own interest in writing poetry as well as a whole attitude
to life.
In the same way that autobiography provided an event of super-saliency in
the life of my grandfather, the writing of poetry served as a similarly salient
event in the life of my mother. Both autobiography and poetry have been
strong influences on my own experience. It is difficult to know just how this
process works but I would accord these events a central status. They help to
counter the looseness of method in autobiography and they help me deal
with the puzzling multiplicity of interpretations that attempt to explain a life.
Some interpretations seem better, more pronounced, even if not definitive.
One strives for a degree of interpretability, continuity and cogent coherence,
for self-defining memories and prototypical scenes. Perhaps, too, as Schultz
argues, it is a manifestation of “the principle of parsimony in action.”462
It
draws webs of meaning together in one concise package, providing a handy
touch point to remind myself who I am.
462
William Schultz, op.cit.
447

Canada's history was arguably not as bloody and angst-ridden as that of the
United States, England or even Australia. Canada's novelists and poets
simply 'mapped the territory' as Richler put it. In 1950, until her death in
1978, my mother, Lillian Price, was mapping her territory through poetry
and, I should add, through art and music.
Building on the work of her father, Alfred J. Cornfield, whose
autobiography was written when she was only sixteen or seventeen but was
not published until 1980, less than two years after my Mother's passing and
twenty-two years after Alfred Cornfield had passed away, Lillian was,
indeed, 'mapping her territory,' as her father had mapped his more than thirty
years before. Whereas he did his mapping in the form of autobiography and
a life of extensive reading, Lillian used poetry for her main artistic medium.
In 1980, by the time I began to write poetry, at least poetry I kept copies of
for the future, my mother had been gone for two years. Interestingly, my
grandfather's work had only been published perhaps three months before I
started writing poetry. By the time I began to write poetry and
autobiography my grandfather had been gone for nearly a quarter of a
century. I write these words to give perspective and context to my mother's
448

work, work that I keep in my study here in George Town Tasmania. I keep
it in a file and in a small booklet I have entitled Poetry: Mother. Around it,
on the walls, are three of her pastel drawings which, with two photographs
of her, are part of her memory, its aliveness, its freshness, even twenty-five
years after her passing. After I left home, first in 1964 and then, when my
father died in May 1965, my mother began to take up art. I do not know the
exact date of the pieces in the collection here, but my guess is that they come
from the years 1965 to 1978. To her musical talents and her poetic
inclinations were now added the artistic in her latter years, after the age of
sixty.
Then, as the 1970s, neared their end, my mother passed away. The many
battles between heart and head, which were the pleasure and pain of her life
and which were at the root of much of her artistic work, were at last over.
Ron Price 18 July 2001
And so, in a rambling sort of fashion I introduce my life and something of
my family in the twentieth century. I'm always by degrees and alternating:
amazed, slightly surprised, impressed, perplexed, bemused, alienated and
449

fascinated by the cross-section of skills, abilities, successes, failures, indeed,
the life-stories of the many members who constitute my family of origin and
family by two marriages. The group is now a burgeoning one of some fifty
people, approximately. I can't even keep track of their names. The
experiences of most of them will never see the light of day in this
autobiography. For most of my life I have not tried to keep a detailed track
of their comings and goings, too occupied have I been with my own and
several, although not all, of the most intimate of my familial relationships.
For the few members of my family of birth or of marriage who have entered
this narrative, except for an even smaller handful, they occupy a relatively
small space.
Now that I am retired I take a distant and dispassionate view of the trail of
people who are part of my consanguineal and affinal sets of relationships.
Australian cartoonist Bruce Petty, when asked to describe "the domestic
trail" of his life, said it was "utterly incoherent" and "a huge mystery."463
I
laughed when I read those words. I liked Petty's honesty here. I think these
phrases apply, in part, to my domestic life. But I would also use other
phrases to characterize the overall picture. For I found all three of these
463
Bruce Petty, "Wisdom Interviews," ABC Radio National, February 8,
2004.
450

foundation stones very anchoring to my spirit and body over the last six
decades. I would not want to dismiss them as facilely as Petty does,
although in my lesser moments I have to agree with him and his
characteristically delightful humour. Perhaps, though, I'll let these
relationships unfold in more detail in the seven hundred pages ahead.
This chapter provides a start to what has become a long story and an equally
long analysis. I hope readers will find the chapters which follow both
entertaining and instructive. If at times they seem a little boring and
mechanical, as so many autobiographies are, I hope that readers will also
find that they are usefully informative from time to time and intellectually
simulating on occasion. I may not lift ticks from the clock and freeze them
as Proust once did and as Vermeer once did in his paintings, but I try to save
some of this swiftly passing life and invest it with a verbal value that time
never permitted me to give it when it was happening. The discipline of
psychoautobiography confines itself to salient episodes, special fragments,
illuminating gestalts, persistent modes of behaviour, formal symmetries and
constellating metaphors in a life. I cover more ground than just the salient
features. I solve enigmas but leave many unsolved and so can not apply
psychoautobiography to what has become a seven hundred page narrative.
451

But there is an informed use of the psychological in this narrative and I hope
it makes for a more well-rounded, a more satisfying life history. There is
also an informed use of the writings and ideas of some of the "greats" of the
western intellectual tradition. The wealth of this tradition provides a
burgeoning base of quotable material. Here is one, again from Shakespeare,
one of the many precepts and axioms which seem to drop casually from his
pen, which I found to be a crucial way of putting my own experience, my
own feelings, especially about those I loved:
In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.464
Baha'u'llah's says much the same thing in different ways, especially when
He refers to the sin-covering eye. Much in relationships depends on this one
quality.
464
Shakespeare, op.cit., sonnet 141.
452

The information I have sought and the experience I have had has been used
and lived over these many decades in the service of a commitment I grew
into, insensibly, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This information and this
experience I now frame as I did while I travelled along the path within the
context of goals I have had, goals which have determined what I needed to
do on the journey. This information and this activity has been part of a life
of committed action, what Kierkegaard called life in the ethical sphere.465
Now, in these early years of retirement, the information I am obtaining in
abundance is supporting an engaged intellectual activity, furthering the
coordination of my action in the Baha'i’ world and the life I live in relation
to that world. My everyday commitments have always had a context within
an overall framework of what ultimately makes sense to me. And that is still
the case providing, as this framework does, the terms of reference in which I
obtain the information I do. There is a passion and energy in my work and
now a harmony; this is no mere dabbling. Kierkegaard says that “will is the
real core of man. It is tireless, spontaneous, automatic and reveals itself in
465
I first came across the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard in 1964 or 1965 at the
University of Waterloo when Elizabeth Rochester gave a talk on the
relevance of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, among other topics. He is a
difficult philosopher to unravel(1815-1855) but his ideas I have found useful
in a general Baha’i perspective.
453

many ways.”466
Seven or eight hours a day in the service of ideas and print is
all my will can muster. There is spontaneity and the automatic in this
exercise of writing and reading. For the remaining seven or eight hours a
day during which I am awake I must turn my will to other things to refresh
my spirit and survive in the world of the practical, the world of people and
places. Like Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau more than a
century before me, I travel widely within the confines of my small town with
and in my mind.467
I confront life in and with my own spirit which is the
most trying battleground life gives us. Only time will tell the extent of my
mastery.
An insidious bi-polar illness, a long list of sicknesses beginning in early
childhood, sadness and melancholy, fatigue resulting from fifty to seventy
hours a week talking and listening, reading and writing, marking and
planning as a teacher; guilt from crimes, follies and sins of a major and
minor nature, baseness, impatience, lack of self-control, lust, indulgences of
466
Kresten Nordentoft, Kierkegaard’s Psychology, trans from Danish by
Bruce Kirmmse, Duquesne University Press, 1978, p.130. In my 3 arch-
lever files on philosophy Kierkgaard only occupies 14 pages of notes, hardly
a just amount given the significance and relevance I have found his ideas in
the last four decades.
467
John Pickard, Emily Dickinson: An Introduction and Interpretation, Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1967, p.31.
454

several kinds, the litany could go on and on; periodic failure in employment,
in marriage, in relationships of various kinds, incapacities on a host of
fronts--and still with this sense of burden, perhaps because of it, there arose
this call to write. Perhaps this writing was simply--or not-so-simply--part of
my "heart melting within me" as it says in the Long Obligatory Prayer. Of
course, the heart did not melt all the time; the burden was not felt like some
great weight over my head every minute of my existence.
Some of my sins I did not want the answer to "so keenly as to burn the
bridges across which the sin continually" came. My entreaty to God to save
me from my sin was mixed with a sense of repentance that was, often, "a
very searching and disturbing affair." The effort to come to grips with many
of my sins has often seemed too demanding. I have prayed long and hard
over several decades but, it seems, that I so often simply(or not so simply)
lack the constitutional fortitude. I can find the right "inward craving,"468
but
the promptings of my passions, their contagion, seems so much stronger
than the control I need to deal with them. And so the battle rages.
468
All the quotations in this paragraph come from the book on prayer which
I have found most helpful since I bought it at the start of the 4th epoch in
1986. It is by William and Madeline Hellaby, Prayer: A Baha'i Approach,
George Ronald, Oxford, 1985, pp. 81-85.
455

I remember back in the mid-1990s, as I was beginning to plan my exit from
the world of endless talk, people and listening as a teacher and Baha'i in
community; I remember that tastes, touches, sights and smells began to take
on a new meaning. I seemed to recapture the past and live in the present with
a greater intensity than I had been able to do in previous years. As the new
millennium opened and I was at last free from meetings and people coming
to me and at me at a mile a minute, the present and especially the past began
to come at me noticeably free of those disappointments and anxieties that
had for so many years accompanied my life. There was the sense of
blossom, of freshness, of new colour, of bright intensity and there was also
the sense of calm and a solemn consciousness.
This consciousness seemed productive of a quiet joy that had not been there
before, perhaps this was partly due to fluvoximine and lithium's soothing
presence in my brain and body chemistry, especially at the synaptic
connections. They were certainly essential but, as I listened to Chopin's
Ballade No.1 in G Minor, Opus 23 and gazed occasionally out of the
window of my study at the lemon tree and the flowers my wife had recently
planted in our front garden here in northern Tasmania, I felt a quiet joy. It
was a joy which resembled that equable temperament that Wordsworth is
456

said to have had and which allowed me to experience the emotions and
events of earlier days, only this time they were recollected in tranquility, in
that "bliss of solitude."469
Canadian poets have been found to express a melancholy, a feeling of
resignation to misery, isolation and the feeling that man is encompassed by
forces beyond his ability to control which strike out repeatedly and blindly
to destroy him. Australian poets have a slightly different take on the
melancholy in life. There is a great upwhelling of humour which plays with
any high seriousness. Heroic action is seen to be futile in both Canada and
Australia. Literary subject matter often becomes so removed from life that
one finds only the residue of personal values, personal relationships and
private worlds – worlds of gloom and despair at that in Canada. In Australia
there is more of the celebration of the commonplace. I don’t want to go into
an extended analysis of the literary in both cultures but, when one adds the
dimension of a Baha’i overlay, a hybrid personality is created, a hybrid such
as myself.
469
William Wordsworth, "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud," William
Wordsworth: Selected Poems, Dent, London, 1986(1975), p.123.
457

I do not so much want to recover the past; this work is not so much an
autobiography of remembrance, although there is inevitably some of that. It
is an autobiography of analysis and reflection. I want to write, also, about
what I have not experienced and about what gives this life of mine meaning
and worth.470
I am not living in this work the way some writers have done
who failed to live in their life. I am certainly appraising my life, my times,
my religion and the myriad relationships involved in such an appraisal, for
appraisal has been for me somewhat of an obsession as these four epochs
evolved and as the content of the appraisal shifted. For some writers, the
great ones, it is style that endures. Lies, subterfuge and dissimulation
become part and parcel of the text. This was true of Proust. For me, my aim
is the essential truth of my life and times, however difficult it may be to find
and describe it. Style is something of which I am hardly conscious.
I am conscious, though, of the epistemological upheaval taking place in the
historical profession and in the field of autobiography. This upheaval has
several major forms. One of these forms is based on the view that there are
only possible narrative representations of the past and none can claim to
470
Remy de Gourmont says "one only writes well about things one hasn't
experienced." I'm not sure if this is true. But I will be writing about both.
(See William Gass, op.cit., p.154.)
458

know the past as it actually was. Of course, some historians maintain that
conventional historical practice can be continued. Others say that the writing
of history must be radically reconceived.471
The historian and literary
analyst, Raymond Williams, says that the word “narrative” “is one of the
most difficult words in the English language.”472
My work may be out of step with the modern consciousness; my sexual
revelations may be tame; my social preoccupations of interest to only a few;
my politics irrelevant to the vast majority; but I like to think there is a rich
and analytical base that is quiet and possessed of what many I’m sure will
find to be a dull but hopefully pleasing silence, a silence which will, in time,
attract some readers from among the loud impatient honks and belches that
occupy so much of the public space these days. For there is, amidst the noise
and tumult, a serious and sophisticated reading audience that has developed
in the last several decades and now includes millions. This work may find a
home among some of these millions. But whether it does or whether it
doesn't for a citizen who acts or a writer who spends periods of time
cloistered from society, the dilemma is the same. It is the dilemma of the
471
Roberta Pearson, “Conflagration and Contagion: Eventilization and
Narrative Structure,” Internet, April 16, 1999. See Alan Munslow,
Deconstructing History, Routledge, London, 1997.
472
Pearson, op.cit., p.1
459

witness. As witness, one asks: "Who am I to say?" Or: "Who am I, if I don’t
say." The more deeply you examine your own life, the more deeply you
enter your times, and from there, history.473
Were we endowed with a longer measure of existence and lived perhaps two
or three centuries, we might cast down a smile of pity and contempt on the
crimes and follies of human ambition. But given the narrow span in which
we live, that we are given, we seem eager to grasp at the precarious and
short-lived enjoyments with which we are blessed. It is thus that the
experience of history exalts and enlarges or depresses and confuses, the
horizon of our intellectual view. In this autobiographical composition that
has taken me some months or years, in this perusal that has occupied me for
some several dozen days of total time, perhaps hundreds of hours, two
centuries have rolled through these pages, with more attention paid to recent
decades and less as the years go back. These are the two centuries since
Shaykh Ahmad began his years as the Bab's precursor in Iran, circa 1804-6.
473
Anne Michaels, "Unseen Formations" 99 in "Re-Membering the (W)holes:
Counter-memory, Collective Memory, and Bergsonian Time in Anne
Michaels’ Miner’s Pond," Kimberly Verwaayen,
www.arts.uwo.ca/canpoetry/
460

The duration of a life or an epoch, my life, is contracted to a fleeting
moment. At the same time, this physical world, which gradually burst with
wonder as the years rolled by, rapidly grew smaller as a result of radio, TV,
the computer and a cornucopia of technological inventions. The grave, I
sensed by my thirties, was ever beside life's achievement, however
unconscious I was of its presence or should I say its absence most of the
time. The success of life's ambition was instantly, or virtually so, followed
by the loss of the prize. Our immortal reason survived as it reflected on the
complex series of calamities and victories which passed before my eyes in
history's larger and multi-coloured garment. The entire panoply and
pageantry of it all faintly dwelt in my remembrance as I went about my daily
duties. So is this true in varying degrees of all of us. And it is this
remembrance that I write about in this autobiography, these fleeting years in
which the Baha'i Faith and the world have been transformed; in which the
processes of integration and disintegration were gathering momentum,
accelerating unobtrusively and yet, ironically, quite conspicuously; in which
the world's landscape daily grew more desolate, threatening and
unpredictable and yet more comfortable physically due to a range of
consumer durables that were not enjoyed by the world's peoples at any time
461

in history and were still not enjoyed by half the population, perhaps three
billion or more.
Liberal relativism and capitalism represent a single, a dominating and
comprehensive world-view, as they have in "Western civilization" during all
these epochs and especially since the fall of communism in the late 1980s.
Against this background, during these several epochs of my life, great
conceptual, political and social changes have taken place in the midst of
terrible suffering. The Faith itself has undergone a succession of triumphs
which are documented elsewhere.474
It would appear an even greater toll of
grief and travail, unimaginably appalling, is in the offing in the remaining
years of this epoch and the epoch to come which will take us to 2144, in all
probability. But there is too, somewhere down the track, a vision of great
glory and beauty for man and society--from a Baha'i perspective.
I think that I have some advantages over the film-maker who tries to reduce
a life to 24 frames per second. Something happens on the way to the screen
that does not happen on the way to the page. Despite the evocations of the
474
I have drawn in this paragraph from ideas found in Century of Light,
Universal House of Justice, Baha'i World Centre, 2001, especially chapters
XI and XII.
462

past through powerful images, colourful characters and moving words, film
so often does not fulfil the basic demands for truth and verifiability used by
writers of history. Film compresses the past into a closed world by telling a
single, linear story with essentially a single interpretation at least such is the
general pattern in the first century of film history. I try to avoid this trap. I
do not deny historical, autobiographical alternatives. I do not do away with
complexities of motivation and causation. I do not banish subtlety. I explore
it in all its paradoxes and nuances. But in a world where most people get
most of their information about history from visual media, I am conscious
that history and one of its sub-disciplines, autobiography, have become
somewhat esoteric pursuits, that a large part of the population not only does
not know much history but does not care that they don’t know. It would
seem that it is becoming difficult for many writers about the past to tell
stories that engage people. At the same time there is a plethora of books that
tell wonderful stories. Film tells stories so very well.475
We are certainly not
short on stories.
475
Robert A. Rosenstone, “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections
on the Possibility of Putting History Onto Film,” American Historical
Review, Vol.93, No.5, December 1988, pp.1173-1185.
463

To render the fullness of the complex, multi-dimensional world in which we
live we need to juxtapose images and sounds; we need quick cuts to new
sequences, dissolves, fades, speed-ups, slow motion, the whole panoply and
pageantry of film to even approximate daily life and daily experience. Only
film can recover all the past’s liveliness. So goes one view. On the other
hand, some critics of film say that film images carry a poor information
load. They say that history is not primarily about descriptive narrative. It is
about debate over what happened, why it happened and what significance it
had. It’s about personal knowledge. What I try to do in this book is get six
each way. In the absence of film’s captivating charm I try to do what film
can’t do or certainly won’t be doing with my life while I am alive. This
book contains much that is the stuff of film, a surface realism, the truth of
direct observation, but I try to reach out to people through the inner life,
through character, through psychology and what is private and not visible or
catchable on camera. In the process I am confident I will catch or contact
some and with others no contact will be made. tis is inevitable.476
476
I draw here on some of the ideas of Russian film makers as expressed in
Donato Totaro, “Art for All Time,” Film-Philosophy, Vol.4 No.4, February
2000.
464

I do with my life what history tries to do with people’s lives. I write and in
the process feel less peculiar and less isolated, less alienated, less lonely.
The wrap-around feeling one gets at the movies, the swamping of the senses,
the feeling of being there, I get in the writing of this autobiography. I also
get elements of reflection, evaluation, argument, weighing of evidence,
dealing with inaccuracies and simplifications. Whether the reader can get
both is another question. The intellectual density of the written word can be
conveyed in film and the senses can be stimulated as much by print as by the
cinema. One can try to do both but to really pull it off is no mean feat.
My work possesses, for me, an escape from the world and its complex of
incidents, demands, compulsions and solicitations of every kind and a
degree of urgency. These external and never-ending minutiae of life, these
incidents, “overtake the mind," as Paul Valery once wrote, "without offering
it any inner illumination."477
Now and in this work the world blows through
me like the wind, as it has blown through my life and my times. Writing this
account is a world of wait and watch, ponder and ponder. Its chief reward is
a stimulating affect on my mind. Sometimes there is exhaustion. But there
477
Paul Valery in William Gass, op.cit., p.159.
465

is and has been a daily renewal which was something I did not get in my last
years of teaching.
By the time I was nearly 55 and ready to retire from teaching I had begun to
taste a "pervasive spiritual strangulation," a disappointment, a fatigue of the
heart, a tedium vitae, an "existential exhaustion." This was my experience in
the 1990s beginning in my late forties and early fifties. It was part of
Shakespeare's experience as conveyed in his sonnets.478
What every human
being does in their inmost thoughts and responses, the play of feeling on
things seen and felt, this is what we find in his sonnets.479
This is what I try
to portray, too, in this narrative. It was not all gloom and doom, though.
There was, as well, as John Updike observed, a new fun in life, "an over-50
flavour."480
This will become evident to readers as they progress through this
book. Perhaps all I had was what Jed Diamond called, in his two books on
the subject, the male menopause,481
which he regarded as the major male
change of life in his whole life. There clearly was an angst, but there also
478
Author Unknown, Quotations from Books about Shakespeare's Sonnets,
December 5th, 1998.
479
Madeline Clark, "The Eternal Self in Shakespeare's Sonnets," Sunrise
Magazine, June/July 1982.
480
Are You Old Enough to Read this Book? Reflections on Mid-Life,
editor, Deborah H. Deford, Readers Digest Books.
481
Jed Diamond, Male Menopause, 1st and 2nd editions, 1993 and 1997
466

was an inner peace, a dichotomy, a contradiction in terms, perhaps
consistent with my bi-polar disorder. In 1998 I began a series of testosterone
injections, not for my libido but for a fatigue which was making me go to
sleep every afternoon. By late 1999, and my early retirement these injections
were discontinued. The fatigue and angst gradually dissipated as the new
millennium opened.
What I write here is closer to history than most dramatic film or
documentary television. Things have to be invented to make stories, the
content of dramatic film, a smooth documentary hour, coherent, intense and
one that can be fitted into a two hour time-slot. The most difficult thing for
many to accept about film is that this most literal of media is not at all
literal. What we see on the screen is less a description than an invention of
the past. But what is here in this autobiography deals with ‘just the facts,
mam.’ It deals with them in a certain fashion to deal with coherence and
incoherence, intensity and boredom, time’s regularities and irregularities. It
deals with history in a way that is new in the history of literature. For
literature until the last century or so has dealt with the upper classes, the
well-to-do, and only since the coming of these two modern Revelations have
467

ordinary, everyday, men and women, even begun to tell their stories or have
them told by others.482
The awful mysteries and the true nature of the institutions of this Faith I
have come to believe in and give a context to in this narrative as well as the
devotional side of my life's experience I have both concealed from the eyes
of the multitudes of humankind. Indeed, it seemed necessary to exercise the
utmost caution, even to affect a certain secrecy, in these early epochs of this
Formative Age when the tenets of this Faith are, as yet, "improperly defined
and imperfectly understood."483
It was a secrecy, a caution, that for me
derived from the implications of the claim of Baha'u'llah, a claim which over
time would involve both opposition and struggle, authority and victory. I
often felt a little like a secret-agent man possessed of knowledge no one
around me had. Sadly, it appeared that those around me, for the most part,
did not want that knowledge. So it was that I possessed only some of the
equation, the analogy, the picture of the secret-agent man. I often felt the
romance and the excitement of the role, however subdued it was by reality.
482
"An Interview With Louis Auchincloss," Atlantic Unbound, October 15,
1997.
483
Shoghi Effendi, Baha'i Administration, Wilmette, 1968(1928), p.140.
468

I am more than a little conscious that I am, like Benjamin Jowett of Balliol
College, "swallowed up in a corporate body"484
which will outlast me. I
possess, then, a kind of derivative immortality. My own life is only an
element in that body's more permanent life. My work, like that of all my
fellow Baha'is, will be carried on by my successors, the generations yet to
come. Our story and the story of our successors will be found in many
places. This is only one small part of that story. For humanity will again
become united around a transcending moral issue and this narrative is a
speck in the long road that is that story. At the moment the transcending
pathfinders among us can not be spotted; society does not appear ready to
risk the acquisition a new path, a new, a common metanarrative. But these
pathfinders will not be going away; they will be waiting to help a confused
society find its way back to a clarity of purpose.485
Of course that society and
the individuals which compose it, must want what the Baha’is have to offer.
I often feel the way a criminal I once watched on his release from years in
confinement. He said at the time that he felt like he was being treated as if
he had been lagging in suspended animation all those years he had been in
prison. His old inmate friends, he said, had similar experiences. They had
484
Leslie Stephen, Studies of a Biographer, Vol.2, Burt Franklin, NY, 1973,
p.158.
485
Gail Sheehy, Pathfinders,Bantam Books, NY, 1982, p.532.
469

all been treated as though they had just returned from a brief trip to the toilet
or out of town for a few hours. Even though they had been in the nick for a
decade, they were greeted casually and their friends had then gone about
their business as if nothing had happened in the interim.
I feel as if I am in possession of a wondrous jewel but it remains
undiscovered, unknown and, for the most part, unwanted. This
autobiography is part of the longstanding effort of the Baha’i community to
take this jewel and, by some mysterious process, breathe a new life in this
"spiritual springtime" and "array those trees which are the lives of men with
the fresh leaves, the blossoms and fruits of consecrated joy."486
At least the
words I put on paper are not in suspended animation, however much I am
and have been during these epochs.
In my dress, my food, my homes, my furnishings, my gardens, my transport,
my employments and enjoyments, I was clearly one of those favourites of
fortune among the global billions who united every refinement of
convenience and of comfort, if not elegance and splendour. So many of
these emoluments soothed my pride or gratified my sensuality, insensibly
486
470

acquired, largely unappreciative of their comforts due to familiarity and their
continuous presence like the very air I breathed. One could not give the
name of luxury to these refinements of mine. Nor could I be severely
arraigned by the moralists of the age for possessing these basics. But I often
thought that it would be more conducive to the virtue, as well as the
happiness of mankind, if all possessed the necessities and none of the
superfluities of life. And one day, it was my view, that would be the case.
Many autobiographies purport to deal with one thing while, in reality,
dealing with something else. Hillary Clinton's recent autobiography was
intended to be about the many controversies and scandals in Bill Clinton's
campaigns and presidency, presumably to get these issues behind her before
she contemplated running for the White House herself. Yet her book skates
over the problems the Clinton administration faced in its rocky debut and in
the impeachment crisis and skims over details of matters like Whitewater
and "travelgate." It expends a startling amount of space on Mrs. Clinton's
trips abroad, on her personal appearance and on what is simply trivia. This
is where her frankness is found; for example, her frank dislike of golf.
471

I hope this book of mine avoids this unfortunate trap of the populist
autobiographer. I hope I achieve what I set out to do.487
There is certainly
little frankness in this work about the trivia in life. Perhaps it would be
better if there had been. Hilary Hammell, in her review of Hilary Clinton's
book in the Yale Review of Books, concludes that Mrs. Clinton may just
have convinced 600,000 people to vote for her in 2008.488
It may have been
that she did not waste her words on trivia. And it may be that this work of
mine should have taken a leaf out of Mrs. Clinton’s work and included much
more of this everyday bone and chouder.
Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times about a book by one
Scott Berg, says that Katherine Hepburn was decidedly unaccustomed to the
art of introspection. Revelations in Scott Berg's biography of Hepburn,
published two weeks after her death, are few and scattered. "Hepburn, I
learned," Mr. Berg writes, "always lived in the moment; and once an event
had been completed, she was on to the next. There was no looking back."489
487
Michiko Kakutani, "Living History: Books of the Times," NY Times.com:
A Review of Zone of Privacy, Hillary Clinton, 562 pages, 27 August 2003.
488
Hilary Hammell, "Review of Living History," Yale Review of Books,
2003.
489
Michiko Kakutani, "Hepburn: The Authorized(It Says Here) Version,"
NY Times.com, 27 August 2003, a review of A. Scott Berg's biography of
Katherine Hepburn entitled Kate Remembered.
472

This work, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, is strongly, decidedly
introspective. It is just about entirely a book that looks back, but with one
eye firmly fixed on the future. My role as witness to, as a contemporary of,
the developments in the Baha'i community in the half-century 1953-2003 is
a major feature of this narrative.490
It is a witness that has an eye on the
future, that feels like it has the very future in its bones.
490
Writers and poets often see themselves in general, in thematic terms. The
Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, for example, saw her role as witness to the
horrors of the twentieth century. This is a major theme in her verse which
she wrote in a ground-breaking, concise modern style. Anna Akhmatova:
Poet and Prophet, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1994; and Anna Akhmatova:
Biographical/Historical Overview, Jill T. Dybka, Internet Site, 2003.
473

VOLUME 1: CHAPTER TWO
"Breaking New Ground"
When people collectively explore, in various ways, the real commitments
that define their lives as human beings, they can create a vision of self-
actualization in their social environment, a new way of expressing what their
world is, who they are and what they ought to be. And when that vision is
already defined in specific terms so that their analysis and discussion is
about the elaboration of that vision, the results can be staggering. It is like a
second coming into being of the self. -Ron Price with thanks to James
Herrick, "Empowerment Practice and Social Change: The Place for New
Social Movement Theory," 1995, Internet, 12 January 2003.
_____________________________________________________________
________
The Baha'i experience has generated a massive quantity of print in the first
two centuries of its experience, if we go back as far as the arrival of Shaykh
Ahmad in Najaf and Karbila in about 1793 and his becoming a mujtahid in
the following years as the beginning point for that history. This generation,
the generation that came of age in the 1960s, has seen a burgeoning quantity
of print become available, more than any generation in history. The
474

Writings of the Central Figures of this Faith and its two chief precursors
produced a mountain of print. What is now a monumental quantity of
official documents, primary source materials like letters and reports from
both within and without the Baha’i community and its efflorescing
institutions around the world, and detailed analyses in book form and on the
internet is bringing to the generations born after WW2 more print than they
can deal with and absorb. -Ron Price, "A Contemporary Baha'i
Autobiography to the Beginnings of Baha'i History: 1993-1793," Pioneering
Over Four Epochs, Internet Document.
_____________________________________________________________
________
But there have been many aspects of the Baha'i experience, its history, the
individual stories of what are now millions of adherents, which have been
resistant to literary and historical representation whether as narrative, novel,
play, poem, letter, diary, biography or autobiography, among the many
genres in which humans convey their experience. Moojan Momen points
out that "Baha'is have been lamentably neglectful in gathering materials for
the history of their religion."1
But as the new millennium approached this
has begun to change.-Ron Price with thanks to 1
Moojan Momen, The Babi
and Baha'i Religions 1844-1944, George Ronald, Oxford, 1981, p.xvii.
475

_____________________________________________________________
________
In volume two of Toynbee’s A Study of History, he discusses the concept or
doctrine that “the ordeal of breaking new ground has an intrinsic stimulating
effect,” and “the stimulating effect of breaking new ground is greatest of all
when the new ground can only be reached by crossing the sea.”491
Toynbee
cites many examples and focuses especially on the Etruscans who “stayed at
home and never did anything worth recording"”and the “astonishing
contrast between the nonentity of the Etruscans at home and their eminence
overseas.” This eminence, he argues, was due to the “stimulus which they
must have received in the process of transmarine colonization.”492
My pioneering experience took me across the sea, first in 1967 across the
Davis and Hudson Straits, extensions of the North Atlantic Ocean; second in
1971 across the Pacific Ocean and third, in 1974, 1978 and 1999 across the
Bass Strait, an extension of the Great Southern Ocean, to live on Baffin
Island, the continental island of Australia and Tasmania, respectively. These
491
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History: Vol.2, Oxford UP, 1962(1954),
p.84.
492
ibid., p.86.
476

pioneer moves could have had the soporific effect that the migration of the
Philistines had on them about the same time as the Israelites were
transforming themselves from nomadic stock-breeders into sedentary tillers
on stony, barren and landlocked highlands and pasture-lands east of Jordan
and south of Hebron.
But I found these moves, like the Volkerwanderungs, that is the wanderings,
of the past, those of the Ionians, the Angles, the Scots and the
Scandinavians, possessed an intrinsic stimulus. For these moves were part
of a modern Volkerwanderung, a national and international pioneering
exodus. My own role in this story was as a part of that national exodus, the
opening chapters of the push of the Baha’i Faith to “the Northernmost
Territories of the Western Hemisphere”493
and Canada’s “glorious mission
overseas.”494
And to put this venture in its largest, its longest perspective and
time frame: my work is at the outset of the second 'period' of a 'cycle' of
hundreds of thousands of years, in a second 'age', over four 'epochs';495
or to
use yet another paradigm, my life is at the beginning of the federated state,
493
Shoghi Effendi, Messages to Canada, p.37.
494
ibid.,p.69.
495
Juan Ricardo Cole, "The Concept of the Manifestation in the Baha'i
Writings," Baha'i Studies, Vol.9, p.36. The terms cycle, period, age and
epoch place one's life in what one might call 'an anthropological, an
evolutionary, perspective.
477

after successive units of political and social organization on the planet: tribe,
chiefdom, clan, city state and nation after homo sapiens sapiens emerged
some 35,000 years ago from a homo sapiens line beginning 3mya.(ca)496
If such are the most general perspectives on time in relation to where I am in
history, the spiritual axis, mentioned by Shoghi Effendi in his 1957 letter,497
and a series of concentric circles define the spacial parameters of my life, in
several interlocked and not unimportant ways. The southern pole of this axis
is "endowed with exceptional spiritual potency."498
Many years of my life
have been lived at several points along the southern extremity of this pole: in
Perth, in Gawler and Whyalla, in Ballarat and Melbourne and in several
towns of Tasmania. All of these points lie at the outer perimeter of the ninth
concentric circle whose centre is the "Bab's holy dust."499
In anatomy the second cervical vertebra is the axis on which the head turns.
Axis also refers to any of the central structure of the body’s anatomy, the
496
In the early 1990s I taught anthropology at Thornlie Tafe College in Perth
Western Australia. In the ten years since I finished teaching
anthropology(1993-2003) I have tried to follow the increasing knowledge of
this field in paleoanthropology. (mya=million years ago)
497
Shoghi Effendi, Letters from the Guardian to Australia and New Zealand,
NSA of the Baha'is of Australia, 1970, p.138.
498
idem
499
Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, Baha'i Publishing Trust, 1965, p.96.
478

spinal column. The term is also used as a positional referent in both anatomy
and in botany. Such is a brief exposition of the analogical importance of
where I have spent my life as an overseas pioneer.500
Living, as I have at the
end of the planet’s axis, endowed with an exceptional spiritual potency, an
axis on which the Baha’i world, it could be argued, turns and serves, the line
between Japan and Australia, as the central structure or positional referent,
of the global community, gives me a crucial spacial orientation the
significance of which only the future will reveal.
My several moves, part of the laying of the foundation for this federated,
this future super-state, resulted in a periodic change of outlook and this
change of outlook gave birth to new conceptions. The process was an
insensible one at first but, over more than four decades, the process resulted
in a change which one could analyse at many levels. It took place in such
small incremental steps, especially in the first ten years of the adventure,
1962-1972. But in the second decade, 1973 to 1983 “new and wonderful
configurations” developed, again, not overnight, but measurably and
500
Perhaps, too, this provides some of the basis for Peter Kahn's hypothesis
that Australia and Japan may one day lead the world spiritually. See Peter
Kahn, American Baha'i News, date unknown. See also Ron Price, "A Dot
and a Circle: An Essay on the Spiritual Axis," File B: Unpublished Essays,
23 November 1991.
479

accompanied by difficulties as well as victories. Indeed, the temple of my
existence was “embellished with a fresh grace, and distinguished with an
ever-varying splendour, deriving from wisdom and the power of thought.”501
Perhaps this puts it too strongly, makes too extensive a claim. It may not
have been wisdom, nor “the dazzling rays” of “a strange and heavenly
power”502
but, rather, a progressive healing of my bi-polar disorder. To
express this fresh grace in practical terms I could use the following concrete
experience: I spent half of 1968 in four mental hospitals receiving eight
shock treatments and all of 1972 as one of South Australia’s most successful
high school teachers.
After six months in several mental hospitals in 1968 and an emotionally
unstable first decade(1962-1972) on the pioneer front, a decade that included
five years of study to prepare for the job, the career, that would give me
access to employment opportunities over a lifetime, opportunities undreamt
of at the time and a decade that included moving from the Canadian Arctic
to far-off Australia, a new world opened. What was clearly discernible in
1971 was “a new horizon, bright with intimations of thrilling developments
501
‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.1.
502
idem
480

in the unfolding life of the Cause of God.”503
Such was the general hope for
my own life, 'intimations of thrilling developments,' as I flew, with my first
wife, Judy, across the North American continent and the Pacific Ocean:
Toronto to Sydney, in early July of 1971. Within two years of these bright
intimations Judy and I were divorced. The first evidences of any kind of
writing ability surfaced in these years. Such are the paradoxes and
contradictions of life which I have lived with, as we all live with as we try to
apply the teachings of this Cause to our daily lives.
In 1967 I had developed an infatuation, a passion, for Judy Gower, the
daughter of the chief executive officer of the Motor Vehicle License Branch
of the Department of Transport in Ontario. She lived in Scarborough, one of
Toronto’s outer suburbs, and it was there we married. My mother gave me
permission to marry, although she saw Judy as a most ordinary person. In
her eyes and mind my Mother thought I could have done better. But I did
not see it this way at all. I found both before my marriage and after as the
years went on, that Judy became more attractive in my eyes, but domestic
trouble intervened. As the seven year marriage went from year to year
tensions arose for both of us, tensions we were both happy to dissolve.
503
481

Eventually a new relationship developed for each of us in those troublesome,
chaotic heyday years of the 1970s in Australia. Judy had many fine qualities
and, given the extent of our relationship, the first intimate one in my life of
any duration beyond a day, she deserves more of a place in this work. But it
is a place that will be found in a future time.
Many theories of self have become useful, as I examine the past
retrospectively, if I am to possess “an adequate definition of self-
conception.”504
The capacity to evaluate the qualitative worth of my desires
and my actions, to express whatever is contradictory, paradoxical, ironic,
complex and difficult if not impossible to understand, are part of creating
accounts, reconciliations and explanations of my life or just small parts of it.
The process is facilitated by the narrative self-conception of autobiography,
a self-conception that surfaces from the interplay between events and the
perception of them re-constructed in narrative form.
There is a multiplicity of narrative frames in this autobiography: gender,
religion, family, nation, history, politics, sociology, psychology, that exist,
all of which govern the narrative I endorse and the associated actions that
504
Michel Ferrari, “Narrative Dimensions of Ethnic Identity,” Journal of the
Piaget Society, Vol. 29, No.1.
482

take place in these pages. There are, too, the narratives of hope and
accomplishment, those of disillusionment and failure, as well as those of
faith and belief as opposed to skepticism and doubt. In each of these, or
some mix of all of them(which it seems is the case with mine), individuals
act to create or fulfil their identities. The narrative serves to frame or orient
action and action transforms the narrative by enriching and validating it. If
the public narrative is consistent with our actions, we can say that self and
identity are authentic.505
If there are opposing narratives, contradictions or
even falsities, you might say that this is simply part of the dynamic nature of
identity, an identity which operates in the context and texture of daily life
with the same contradictions and falsities. For identity is not static, pure and
unadulterated: context and audience are critical variables in what is
inevitably, and certainly for me, a hybrid reality. The writing of this
autobiography is a process of gathering information and testing hypotheses
about myself, my roles and my relationships.
Judy and I flew to Australia to work for the South Australian government as
primary school teachers in Whyalla. By April 1971 when the international
505
idem
483

Baha’i body sent its Ridvan message506
we had been hired and began
planning for our overseas move. The Formative Age of this new Faith was
rapidly approaching the mid-point of its first century. Those "bright
intimations" certainly filled our world as we got ready to move to Australia
in the southern hemisphere. We were hardly conscious of just how far from
home this move entailed. Just how far it was I came to discover in the next
several decades. I only saw my mother once again and my cousins not for
more than thirty years.
However unstable that first decade of pioneering was, the memories I have
of that period constitute what social scientist Peter Braustein calls
“possessive memory.” These memories now exist with me “in a lover’s
embrace.” I feel as if no one else can touch these memories, even if I share
them with others in this autobiography. These memories, in a way, possess
me. I do not possess that "sense memory" that, say, British actor Michael
Caine enjoys in which he can go back to a point in time in his life and relive
the emotional event in the same way. A tearful event will bring tears to
Caine again by the simple but intense contemplation of the memory.507
The
506
In the writing of an autobiography it is often difficult to get the facts
precise and accurate after the passing of many years.
507
Michael Caine, "Parkinson," ABC TV, 9:30-10:30 pm, April 19th, 2003.
484

memory, for me, is very real but the experience is more like Wordsworth's:
"emotions recollected in tranquillity."508
Braustein says of the activists of the sixties that they “experienced a sense of
self-generation so powerful that it became a constituent part of their
identity.”509
My activism was not based on rejection or opposition but,
rather, on the part I played in the development of Baha'i communities in the
ten towns I lived in during the sixties. I was fifteen when the sixties started
and twenty-five when they ended. My pioneering life began during those
years and that “sense of self-generation” is still part of my identity. Identity
is, of course, a complex question and one's identity, my identity, has many
sources. Indeed, the success of identity formation depends on various
personality factors like flexibility, self-esteem, tendency to monitor one's
behaviour, an openness to experience, cognitive competence, social context,
family communication patterns, among other things. It is difficult to write
autobiography based on the view that writing is not an expression of
personality. Some writing is a continual expelling of oneself from the
matter at hand, especially autobiography.
508
509
Peter Braustein in “Who Owns the Sixties?” Rick Perlstein, Lingua
Franca, Vol.6, No.4, 1996.
485

I felt in the sixties, as I do now, that sense of urgency, as if I was an agent in
history. Hippies and student activists made the counter-culture between
1964 and 1968, “by their explicit attack on technology, work, pollution,
boundaries, authority, the unauthentic, rationality and the family,”510
wrote
Ortega y Gasset as he attempted to define the essence of that generation and
its particular type of sensibility.
As I look back over what is now half a century, I perceive the panorama, the
chaos, the picture of discrete events as they roll by my mental window
indiscriminately. Humans and perhaps the primates in their ancestral
heritage, the several progenitors of human beings, of homo sapiens sapiens,
have had this ability for, perhaps, several million years. With the arrival of
the train, though, early in the nineteenth century human beings were able to
triple the distance that had been covered in one’s mental window in a given
period of time throughout all of recorded history by horse and cart. They
could "perceive the discrete as it rolled past the window indiscriminately"
three times faster than in a horse-drawn coach. Wolfgang Schivelbusch says
this is the defining characteristic of the panoramic. In fact he says the really
510
Ortega y Gasset in Ecstasy and Holiness: Counterculture and the Open
Society, Methuen and Co. Ltd., London, 1974, p.19 and p.65.
486

crucial feature of the panoramic is "the inclination to fix on irrelevant details
in the landscape or in the images that pass before the viewer's eye."511
As I scan, in my mind's eye, the multitude of events in the panorama of my
life, I fix first on this event and then on that, as Schivelbusch describes. Of
course, there is some pattern in this autobiography, but there is also much
that is serendipitous, spontaneous, highly discontinuous. Readers may find
this latter quality somewhat disconcerting, especially those readers who are
more comfortable with a sequential, a simple and somewhat predictable and
absorbing narrative sequence. The electronic media in the same half century
that this autobiography is concerned with(1953-2003) have also brought to
the individuals--at least this individual--a profusion, a diaspora, of public
spheres and so very much more of those discrete events rolling past my
window indiscriminately. The imaginative resources of lived and local
experiences have become globalized.
Shoghi Effendi wrote in 1936 that the process of nation-building had come
to an end and, in my early years as a Baha'i, I often wondered at his
meaning. The issue is, of course, complex, too complex to pursue here, but
511
Christian Keathley, "The Cinephiliac Moment," Framework: The Journal
of Cinema and Media, 2000.
487

the window on my world, the imagined community, in the half century of
this narrative, has become the entire planet. "The creation of selves and
identities," as Imre Szeman512
wrote recently, takes place in a volatile and
unstable mixture. The imagination now can play everywhere and instability,
volatility, is part of the result. The autobiography of anyone living in this
period must take cognizance of this colonization of the imagination by the
media and what many call commodity capitalism.513
However serendipitous this account may be, however much I improvise as I
tell my story, as I move the events around in what seems like a loose, easy-
going and fortuitous fashion, my aim is not that of those two famous
American novelists of this period: Kurt Vonnegut Jr and John Updike. The
former's novel Timequake is written with irony, humor and sarcasm to wake
people from their stupor and apathy and to warn them of what awaits if they
do not try to radically transform their society. Likewise, John Updike's
Toward the End of Time presents readers with a future that is so grim and
512
Imre Szeman, "Review of Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization," Arjun Appadurai, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. The
autobiographical implications of the ideas Szeman deals with here are too
extensive to consider in any detail.
513
The literature on commodity capitalism or commodity fetishism is vast
and I make no attempt in these pages to deal with the major systems of
world politics like: capitalism, socialism, communism, liberalism,
conservatism, et cetera.
488

characters that are so repulsive that the very hideous images force them to
either embrace his work masochistically or reject it outright and work
towards preventing the dystopia he describes. Both writers try to jolt their
readers, shock them.514
There is little irony in this narrative, little jolting, little shock tactics, not
anywhere near as much humour as I would like and only a moderate amount
of sarcasm. If there is anything grim, it is my portrayal of aspects of the
society I have lived in since the mid-twentieth century and some aspects of
my life for which the word ‘grim’ is a suitable adjective. This narrative
work is, rather, an attempt to hint at the utopia that I see at the heart of the
Baha'i System, my experience of it at this embryonic stage of its
development and the effort I see that is required to achieve its reality. I am
aware as I write that for the Baha'i the future has never looked so bright and
the Baha'i community has itself been gathering strength all my life.515
And so
my aim is far removed from that of these two famous novelists. I would,
though, very much like to write like James Herriot who, his son observes in
his heartfelt, affectionate memoir, wrote with "such warmth, humour, and
514
Greg Dawes, "Somewhere Beyond Vertigo and Amnesia: Updike's
Toward the End of Time and Vonnegut's Timequake," Cultural Logic,
515
The Universal House of Justice, Letter, May 24, 2001.
489

sincerity that he was regarded as a friend by all who read him."516
Sadly, I
do not have that talent or a topic that, for me, lends itself to such an
endearing style and approach. We all have our limitations and the qualities
that make others great and their writing endearing do not define my writing
or make me who I am. The style is the man and what makes that style is a
quite idiosyncratic mix. Herriot sold 60 million copies of his books in 21
languages. I’m not sure I will even enter the book selling league. People
will not be rolling with laughter in the aisles from an hour spent with me in
this book. Alas and alack!!
I used to work at a College of Advanced Education in the late 1970s where
one of my fellow lecturers in the social sciences aimed to dismantle the
world views of his students, to shake them up, so to speak. I, too, want to do
this, but my method is to be much gentler, to go around to the back door
and, like a surgeon, give said students a new set of lungs without them
feeling the experience, without too much of a jolt. Various fiction writers,
famous and otherwise, assume the roles of performers in their books. At the
centre of brilliantly imagined worlds these writers become actors who put on
dazzling performances. The narrative personae in these works assume roles
516
Jim Wright, The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father, Ballantine
Books, 2000.
490

which often lead readers to question the reliability of their authors. If drama
is the sister-art to life-writing, as some claim it is, then we must consider that
the life-writer can use dramatic technique to shape what and how the reader
imagines. By using stagecraft life-writers have the power to distort or to
enhance the truth about what they are illustrating in their lives.517
As an autobiographer I am conscious of creating a certain narrative persona
and of establishing a context for this dramatic art but, the critical variable for
me, is style. Style is a distinctive selection of words and phrases to express
thought or feeling; it is a certain mental attitude peculiar to myself; it is the
opposite of affectation which is an assumed habit or manner of expression; it
is part and parcel of my very character. "The most perfect development of
style," writes Archibald Lampman, "must be sought in those whose
experience of the world has been full and at the same time in the main
joyous and exhilarating." There has been, he goes on, a certain exquisite
indulgence and graciousness of disposition, a capacity to delight others, to
put others at ease, a happy attitude of mind, impulsive yet controlled.518
517
Brandon Conran and Morley Callaghan: Critical Views on Canadian
Writers, editor: Brandon Conran, McGraw-Hill, Ryerson, Toronto, 1975,
Introduction.
518
Archibald Lampman, "Style," Canadian Poetry, Fall/Winter 1980.
491

It would be a rare soul who could do all these things all the time. And I am
only too conscious of my many inabilities in these several domains
especially the absence of joy from time to time due to a life-time of manic-
depressive illness and the inability to feel joyous when life provides me with
an abundance of problems. If the mark of nobility is to be happy in the midst
of life’s tests, as ‘Abdu’l-Baha once wrote, then I think, at best, I occupy one
of the lower ranks of this new, this spiritual nobility. But I am also
conscious of the exhilarating aspects of my life and of the pleasure, the
stimulus, that I brought to many, especially in my role as a teacher and
lecturer. Lampman continues in many directions one of which is to associate
"true style" with genius, to emphasize the unconsciousness of its acquisition
and the writer being "haunted persistently by certain peculiar ideas." There
is much in Lampman's analysis which resonates with my experience. In the
end only the reader, at least some readers, will discover this style. And only
the reader can impute genius; it would be more than pretentious to claim it
for oneself! But, whatever the case, it is here in this elusive world of style
that my dramatic art lies. Whatever excitement there is in the creation of
this narrative persona it lies not in some conscious dramatic invention for the
stage of life, however brilliantly devised and dazzlingly performed. For
years I have been reaching out for a subject to give coherent form to my
492

"voice." Poetic and non-poetic narrative has helped me find this "voice" in
the last decade and lifted, refined and lifted it again. Form and voice has
brought content into being, as Joyce Carol Oates describes the process.519
And now this autobiography spins in orbit about that kernel of myself, my
society and my religion. In a very general--and yet quite specific sense--the
Kingdom of God is both within and without. To put this idea a little
differently: there is no dichotomy. Every atom in existence is testimony to
the names of God. And every atom of this autobiography springs from my
fascination with the movement of thought, of inner experience. There is here
a braiding together of disparate fragments jotted down and refined and
refined again.
Sometimes the experience of writing this account, like the experience of life,
is euphoric; sometimes it is homely and domestic; sometimes there is the
sense of the ceaseless surge of the sea, of a fierceness of energy; sometimes
I feel as if I am in possession of the heart's foul rag and bone shop, as the
elder Yeats poignantly described his inner life. Sometimes I feel as if I am
obsessively preoccupied with refining perceptions, with analysing. I feel no
need to continue the external journey, occupied as it was with living in some
519
Joyce Carol Oates, "Soul at the White Heat," Critical Inquiry, Summer
1987.
493

two dozen towns over the last forty years, but I do not want my life to end.
This tinkering in the world of thanatos, of the death wish, does occur for
short periods late at night, a residue of this bi-polar disorder. But life’s
journey does not show any signs of ending in this my 66th year, so continue
it I will, as we all must to the end of our days. As Emily Dickinson puts it:
The Brain--is wider than the Sky--
For--put them side by side--
The one the other will contain
With ease--and You--beside--
The Brain is deeper than the sea--
For--hold them--Blue to Blue--
the one the other will absorb--
As Sponges--Buckets--do--
The Brain is just the weight of God--
For--Heft them--Pound for Pound--
And they will differ--if they do--
494

As Syllable from Sound--520
Many autobiographers and analysts of autobiography examine their lives
and the field of autobiography in the context of postmodern theory.
Postmodernism is a movement, a theory, an approach, to life which
encapsulates the arts, the sciences, society and culture, indeed every aspect
of day to day life, but outside the context of a metanarrative.521
I find this
theory useful because it exists as a polarity, one of the ubiquitous,
multitudinous, polarities that define who we are and what we do.
Postmodernism suggests, sees the world, the external world as one of
ceaseless flux, of fleeting, fragmentary and contradictory moments that
become incorporated into our inner life. The modern hero is the ordinary
person and the world is filled with abstract terms. This postmodern society
could indeed be called 'the abstract society.' It is a society filled with a
commercial, private, pleasure-oriented, superficial, fun-loving individual.
520
Emily Dickinson, "Poem Number 632," Complete Works.
521
Tim Woods, "The Naming of Parts," Beginning Postmodernism,
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999. pp.1-17. Critics coincide in
pointing out the impossibility of defining postmodernism which has become
one of the most evanescent and versatile terms of our time. Tim Woods calls
it a "buzzword" stating that in its wide popular reception it is a vague and
misty word used to refer to that which is "more modern than modern."
495

This type of society and this type of individual began to appear, or at least
the beginnings of post-modernism, can be traced back to the 1950s.522
The post-modern in autobiography tends to doubt everything about both self
and society. After examining more than fifty biographies of Marilyn Monroe
the postmodernist is left with plausibilities and inscrutabilities but not
unreserved truth. This school of thought sees, deals with, multiplicity rather
than authenticity as the object of search for the analyst, student of human
behaviour and autobiography. If we ultimately can’t be sure of why we did
what we did in life, can’t be sure of some authenticity, some basic sincerity
and simplicity of explanation in our lives we can not exercise great control
of the process of explaining it retrospectively because of the very
complexity of it all. The post-modernists raise many questions about the
difficulty, if not the impossibility, of doing genuine, real, authentic
biography and autobiography. I find their approach mildly chastening,
certainly provocative and stimulating, if at times discouraging.523
But such
522
A case can be made, of course, for a pleasure-seeking, fun-loving,
philosophy at the heart of life in the 'roaring twenties' and as far back as
periods of classical culture. Cases for the beginning of post-modernism as
far back as 1917, the first time the term was used.
523
A Review of Arnold Ludwig’s “How Do We Know Who We Are? A
Biography of the Self,” Oxford University Press, NY, 1997, in Biography,
Vol. 22, No.3, Summer 1999.
496

an approach provides a general context for the words of John Hatcher to be
applied: “we cannot possibly evaluate what befalls us or anyone else in
terms of whether it ultimately results in justice or injustice or whether it is
harmful or beneficial.”524
There is so much information in this information-loaded society and so
many interpretations that shift and slide that an atmosphere of
meaninglessness or unreality often prevails, of absurdity or the comic, of an
essentially problematic and unresolvable set of human dilemmas. Novelty,
indifference to political concerns, no ideological commitments or beliefs in
any metanarratives, but rather a commitment to hobbies, to entertainment
and a host of pleasurable pursuits and pastimes fill the private space.
Commitment and continuity become less important, except of course a
commitment to a world of the private, the personal and the relationships
contained therein, in their many forms. The analysis of postmodernism in
the social science and humanities literature is extensive and too vast to deal
with here. As a philosophy, a sociology, a psychology, an approach to
literature and life, postmodernism helps furnish an understanding of society
and the individual in the years since the mid-twentieth century, the years of
524
John Hatcher, The Purpose of Physical Reality, Baha’i Publishing
Trust, Wilmette, 1987, p.109.
497

this autobiography.525
Postmodernism is a state that inclines people to self-
reflection, self-apprehension, self-definition. Autobiography is a natural bi-
product of postmodernism and deals with a definition of both self and world
that is outside the traditional metanarratives. This work, this autobiography,
is a mirror of self-reflection and it encodes my life, my struggles and my
joys, my engagements with the many issues which have played on the edges
of my life.
Given both the complexity and the lack of consensus, though, about what
constitutes postmodernism, I am hesitant to deal with the term in any depth
here. I am not hesitant, though, to use Philippe Lejeune's definition of
autobiography as a "retrospective prose narrative written by a real person
concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in
particular the story of his personality."526
Although there are other centres
525
Other philosophies, sociological, literary, economic, historical and
psychological theories are also pertinent to understanding this
autobiography, this life and the lives of people in western society during
these four epochs. But I have chosen not to dwell on these burgeoning
theories in this third edition. Postmodernism, as a word, was first used in the
decade after WW1. But it did not become an intellectual 'movement' until a
period from the late 1950s to the 1970s. There also seem to be several major
interpretations of its origins and development making it too complex a
movement to deal with properly here.
526
Philippe Lejeune, “On Autobiography,” editor: Paul John Eakin, Trans.
Katherine Leary, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 52, Minneapolis, U
of Minnesota Press, 1989.
498

of interest in this work, the focus on my individual life is certainly paramont.
This autobiography also needs to be seen in the context of a wider and
emerging autobiographical experience of many groups and peoples.
Autobiography has undergone great changes during the years with which
this particular story is concerned, the last fifty years of the twentieth century.
It is seen now, much more among women writers, ethnic writers, gay and
lesbian writers, indeed the writings of a host of indigenous and minority
groups on the planet. Since the autobiographical tradition prior to this time
belonged mostly to men and men in the upper classes, women's voices,
particularly "ordinary" women's voices, and men's, ordinary men's voices,
were relatively unheard. In addition, earlier autobiography was typically
motivated by the desire of famous or "special" individuals to record and
preserve significant thoughts and historically important experiences.
Recent autobiographies of the 'ordinary' person, however, appear to grow
most often from the need of people to make sense of their lives, to define
themselves by intellectually mastering their experiences, and to locate their
place in a broader concept of history.527
There is an attempt in autobiography
527
These 'ordinary' people write what might be called 'the new literature of
obscurity.' They bring an immensely varied personal context to their
narratives. Their memoirs nevertheless share the common belief that the act
499

to heighten the ordinary events of life, to translate them into a series of
extraordinary visitations. To do this a certain ardor, energy, is needed.528
But autobiography, for all its potential depth and insight into life, its witness
and contribution to history, is far from commanding a canon. Like
journalism, for different reasons, a canon is difficult to locate in such a
burgeoning and complex field. Any attempt to do so must inevitably be
challenged and reevaluated.529
This is not my task here, although I refer
frequently to the autobiographies of the famous and not-so-famous in history
for their relevance to this work. In the years since I moved to Australia in
the early seventies, though, autobiography as a genre has moved from the
of remembering and reexamining experiences through writing has both
individual value and larger social significance. In constructing, rather than
simply accepting, their life histories, they shape or reinvent themselves as
they shape their texts. Each confronts inevitable change-usual or unusual,
expected or unexpected-but manages through writing not just to endure, but
to understand and grow. Their memoirs illustrate the power of personal
quests to illuminate experience beyond themselves. There are dozens and
dozens of examples. Here are six from the last half century of American
women writers: Kate Simons, Brox Primitive(1982), Annie Dillard, An
American Childhood(1992), Anne Moodie, Coming of Age in Mississippi
(1968), Natalie Kusz, Road Song (1990), Mary Clearman Blew's, All But
the Waltz, Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage.
See The Wyoming Council for the Humanities, Internet, 2003.
528
Louis Untermeyer describes Blake's capacity to "heighten the ordinary."
See: Lives of the Poets: The Story of 100 Years of English and American
Poetry, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1959, p.310.
529
Mitchell Stevens, "Now and Forever: Who Should Enter the Journalistic
Pantheon?” Columbia Journalism Review, July/August, 2003.
500

periphery to the centre of the literary canon.530
Autobiography has an
affinity to advocacy and apology and enables various oppressed or marginal
groups, like the Baha’i community, to claim, to obtain, visibility in the
contemporary historical record.
I write of this theme in other contexts in this work, for this broad theme of
the 'coming out' of ordinary people who otherwise would have been
nameless and traceless, is a part of what is involved in this narrative.
Autobiography, according to Nellie McKay, has been "the preeminent form
of writing in the U.S.A."531
since the seventeenth century. And it has had an
important place in the literary history of other nations, too many to describe
in even the briefest of outlines here. What I do, and one of the things that
distinguishes this autobiographical work, is "borrow", "adapt", and "modify"
different theories, sources and ideas and use them to organize my own
observations and experiences.
530
This question of the literary canon is too complex to deal with here.
some literary critics and historians argue that autobiography has been at the
centre of literature in the west since at least the 17th century.
531
Nellie McKay, "Autobiography," Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's
History, Houghton Mifflin Company, Internet, 2003.
501

José Saramago, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, argues
that for all of us the words we utter between the moment we get out of bed
in the morning and the moment we go back there at night, as well as the
words of dreams and thought, memory and imagination, all constitute a story
that is concurrently rational and crazy, coherent or fragmentary. A story, an
autobiographical narrative, can at any moment be structured and articulated
in a written or an oral form or simply thought out or thought through. And
the story is always only partial; it can never be complete. Even when we do
not write, he continues, we live as characters. We live as characters in the
story that is our life. For we are all on the stage now.532
And if great
literature is, as Ezra Pound once defined it, "language charged with meaning
to the utmost possible degree,"533
this work is, for me at least, great
literature. For it is a work super-charged with meaning. For the reader, of
course, whether this constitutes great literature is another question. Pound
thought the two qualities a writer, a poet, needed were curiosity and a
persistent energy. I certainly bring these two qualities to this work, to my
532
Again, there is an interesting, a fascinating, literature on how the media
has altered our perceptions of self and our sense of the dramaturgical, the
theatrical.
533
Ezra Pound in "Ezra Pound: A One-man Literary Revolution," Michael
Dirda, The Guardian, January 16, 1989, p.9.
502

writing. Time will tell if what I write is deemed great. In some ways this is
not my concern at all.
The life-long project that living has been in the past, in history's endless
caves, due to a career in business, the military, the bureaucracy, a profession,
et cetera, or a belief system or an embeddedness in a family structure in a
place of local habitation is, so often, at least in recent decades-in this tenth
stage of history---not as possible, as likely, now. These careers, these
systems, were often 'for keeps' in what Weber called 'an iron cage,' an
institutional context. This is still common, but not so much the case as it has
been. Career, family and a collection of interests still has centre-stage in the
autobiographical accounts that make it into the public eye. The artistic
products that result contain designs that vibrate in resonance with people's
lives, their interests and the collective centres around which they orient their
lives. But the world within which this autobiographical story is placed is
much more complex than it has been in previous centuries and ages. Such is
my view of history, such is my conceptual borrowing from postmodernism.
Of the half a dozen major theories of learning to develop in the last century
constructivism has, arguably, the most application to this autobiography.
503

Constructivism is based on the view that we construct our world from our
experience and science is, then, for the autobiographer, “the enterprise of
coordinating and arranging this experience.”534
Knowledge, here, is the
reconstruction of our experience and is relative to each person. Science is
simply the systematic use of our rational faculty in its application to
whatever we aim it towards. We make, we define, we construct, our worlds
and that is what I have done here in this autobiography. Family, career and
interests is what makes up the core of the experience of most of us.
Autobiographies, then, inevitably deal with these three foci in some shape or
form--and mine as well.535
To some extent, as the philosopher Bradley notes,
"no experience can lie open to inspection from outside." Sharing is possible
to only a limited extent. We are all alone, imprisoned in our sphere.536
What
we construct, however much it takes place in a social context, has an
important component of seeing things with one's own eyes and one's own
ears. That is why, as I entered the middle years(65-75) of late adulthood, the
years from 60 to 80 in one of the major models of human development, I
534
Alexander Riegler, “Towards a Radical Constructivist Understanding of
Science,” Foundations of Science, vol.6, No.1-3, pp.1-30.
535
The major theories of learning can and are divided into a host of sub-
theories each with their varied emphases on a type of learning, but my
purpose here is not to explore this now extensive field of psychology.
536
J. Hillis Miller, On "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in Poets of
Reality: Six Twentieth Century Writers, Cambridge MA, The Belknap Press
of Harvard UP, 1965.
504

was able to say with William Hazlitt, "I was never less alone than when
alone." I came to like solitude when I gave myself up to it for the sake of
solitude.537
The fantastic, the deeply appreciated, was often just the prosaic
viewed in a fresh light. The everyday world I lived in, the world of strip
malls and highways and back yards, sidewalks and walls: the world of the
quotidian, I occasionally saw anew.
In my own life, my profession had not been tied to a locality. I was a
cosmopolitan rather than a local. Coherence and security came from the
exercise of my skill more than from doing the job in a place which, as
Sennett writes, was often an "empty arena," a place of intermittence, of
lesser loyalty. The career-long project was associated with a location, a place
only in part. A new economic map emerged in the half century I was
involved in the workforce and many older workers felt obsolete as their
working lives came to a close. I wanted out of the workforce by my fifties
and experienced a sense of relief rather than failure when I retired at 55.538
My consanguineal family(birth) became, by stages from the age of 21 to 33
537
These expressions on the experience of solitude come from The Letters
of William Hazlitt, Internet Site, 2004.
538
This concept of a sense of place I come back to in this autobiography
because it is a very central, a very important, part of the whole of life
experience, certainly mine.
505

when my parents passed away, my affinal family(marriage) as the sociology
of the family demarcates the two major types of family. My interests
changed and developed as well and this autobiography provides more detail
in each of these three areas of autobiographical investigation in the more
than eight hundred pages remaining.
As the century was ending, I wanted to attend to the inwardness of my
mental life. This inwardness, this inner world of thought, feeling and wish
had undergone a transformation in the forty years I had been a Baha'i, 1959-
1999. This inner world was not some permanent, inescapable, lifelong and
unchanging reality. By my fifty-fifth year this inner world had gone through
a host of changes; something new had been gradually acquired; it had
accumulated, widened, grown, developed. It was, too, a product of cultural
history, of my religious experience, my reading and study. My poetry, my
writing and especially earlier drafts of this autobiography made me aware
that I could give myself over and up to this inner world and put it into
words. But I was also aware that much of this inner world could not be
articulated by language. I simply had to admit defeat in the face of the
inability of my ear, as Baha'u'llah wrote, "to hear" or for my "heart to
understand." Perhaps, Geoffrey Hartman put the idea aptly when he wrote
506

that "Art represents a self which is either insufficiently present or feels itself
as not presentable."539
Looked at from a certain angle, there are simply few
words for what happens inside us. Looked at from another angle the inner
life is an endless spinning tumbler of verbiage. And so in the midst of this
autobiographical memoir intersecting the discourses of my identity, my
social and historical analysis and my religion, I try to give form to both the
verbiage and to what can not be contained in words.
Locality was important to me especially as a node in a global network.
Place had power through this exercise of talent, but it was not isolated
power. Self had power, but was not a burdensome possession, rather, it was
tangentially connected and yet an integral part of a durable institution with
an important role to play as an emerging organization on the planet. Yes
there was the fleeting, the disjointed and the fragmented; one could not
avoid or ignore these realities of contemporary life. But some of these
fortuitous fragments of reality lodged and embedded themselves in a place,
my human spirit, where they could grow and endure. An attitude of blase
indifference was a necessary defence against emotional overload, but
spontaneous enthusiasm could and was cultivated and expressed in an
539
Geoffrey Hartman, "The Dream of Communication," in I.A. Richards:
Essays in His Honour, editor, Reuben Brower, et al., NY, 1973, p. 173.
507

individual way. As a pioneer, I was often a stranger and, as such, I
possessed, it seemed, an inherent mobility, freedom and a type of
objectivity. People often felt they could confide in me. At the same time, I
was sometimes a little like the European Jew, the "internal other." At other
times I was one of the gang. Strangeness, of course, can enter even the most
intimate of relationships and it has certainly entered mine, all my life. I have
grown to think it is part of life.
'Abdul-Baha seems to be an example of how to overcome this strangeness
and I learned much from His example. I could write more on this process
for strangeness is "one of the most powerful sociological tools for analysing
social processes of individuals and groups."540
For I have been for so many
years, at least forty, a potential wanderer who comes today and is gone
tomorrow, with the possibility of remaining permanently. During all those
years I was a sojourner in other cultures. By the late sixties intercultural
communication was part of university curriculums. I was getting my
learning in real and different cultures: Baha’i, Eskimo, Aboriginal,
Australian, Canadian and the micro-cultures of schools, offices, factories,
540
George Simmel writes extensively on this theme. See also: W.B.
Gudykunst and Y.Y. Kim, Communication With Strangers: An
Approach to Intercultural Communication, McGraw Hill, NY, 1997.
508

assembly lines, mines, taxis, trucks, et cetera, et cetera. People who had
personal intercultural experience often landed jobs in academia. Here their
experience was confirmed, given respectability and legitimated. My
knowledge and experience was usually put down, or so I recall anyway, to
merely the personal or subjective. It was this setting, this intellectual
milieux, that led me getting a post in August 1973 as a Senior Tutor in
Human Relations in Tasmania at a College of Advanced Education. My
sojourn in the world of intercultural experience was, by then, well on the
road.
Australian psychologist and social analyst Ronald Conway once wrote, "The
soul of the Australian is a starving captive in a dungeon created by
generations of either not caring, or dreading to show care". Conway is harsh
and I'm sure many would disagree with his comment. Yet it is the view of
many of our writers, poets and film makers. D.H. Lawrence, a rather
famous visitor to Australia right at the start of the Formative Age, observed
"the disintegration of social mankind back to the elements". He saw, too, in
Australia "a generous but shallow personality" groping vainly for integration
in a society that was "chronically skeptical."541
There are now volumes of
541
Ronald Conway, The Great Australian Stupor, Sun Books, 1971,
p.256.
509

analyses of the Australian psyche which as a pioneer I have had to learn to
deal with. This brief analysis goes some way to explaining the difficulty in
teaching the Faith here. And there is much more to say.
In Canada one could find equally damning quotations like the following:542
Canadians “are a nation of contradictions floating helplessly in a sea of
confusion with no framework for living, with no proper definition of justice
and without a single philosophical clue as to how a nation of civilized men
interacts and sustains itself."543
In the Guardian's letters to Canada and
Australia one can find more honorific quotations to balance these pejorative
characterizations. Between the two poles of opinion and some complex
reality, this pioneer worked his way, plied his trade.
As an international pioneer, I have had to learn how to overcome
strangeness, to make a home of whatever place I inhabited, dwelled in,
occupied, however temporarily and however skeptical and shallow it may
have been. My life-long project was associated with a value system that was
part of my religion and, in retrospect, it appears that has been the case for at
542
Scott Carpenter, The Great Canadian Identity Crisis, Liberty Free
Press, No. 53, January 2000.
543
idem
510

least those forty years. I have been "no owner of soil,"544
not radically
committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the places I
have lived in but, rather, possessing a particular structure of nearness and
distance, indifference and involvement. I have been close but yet far from
the locals. This year, in 2004, I will have been in this town in northern
Tasmania for five years; I will be sixty and strangeness still exists on this
suburban street, in this small town even as I own my home; even as I exhibit
a friendly demeanour; even married as I am to a local. I think strangeness is
part and parcel of the very pervasiveness of existence.
All the world is unquestionably a stage and as I write about my experience
on this stage I have a double intention in mind. Some of this intention is
clear and transparent. Indeed, it is highly desirable that the story the person
tells is recognised as clear and transparent at every stage by the reader. The
intention of the storyteller is also in some ways that of a conjurer, an
unapologetic and unrepentant conjurer, who has no other excuse but his or
her genius. And this genius is only, is simply, some extraordinary luck,
some gift of unmerited grace if you prefer, a gift at some exact moment that
544
Kurt Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, The Free Press, NY, 1950,
pp.402-408.
511

cosmic grace was distributed among the several billion human inhabitants of
the globe or a gift diffused insensibly over a whole lifetime.545
In retrospect, to return to my own story and its thread of events, I now see
my move to the Canadian Artic in 1967 at the age of 23 as, among other
things, part of my rejection of the middle class culture I had grown up in
during the 1950s and which I became more critical of during my further
education in the early to mid-1960s. Of course, this move was part of the
Baha'i community's pioneering thrust as well. It was a thrust I first became
conscious of in the late fifties. The fifties may have given the world silly
putty, Mr. Potato Head, barbie dolls, rock 'n' roll, paint by number and the
first TV shows, but the affluent fifties were alienated years which worried
about communism, the atomic bomb and possessed "a convulsive craving to
be busy."546
This desire to be busy was an important quality because it was
one which contributed to the massive extension of the Baha'i community to
545
Jose Saramago, “Comparative Literature and Culture,” A WWWeb
Journal CLCWeb, Purdue University Press, September 2000.
546
There are now many analyses of the fifties in novels and social science
literature. This quotation comes from D.T. Miller and M. Nowak, The
Fifties: The Way We Really Were, Doubleday and Co. Ltd., NY, 1977.
The quotation goes on to outline a long list of features of the fifties,
formative years for me from the age of 5 to 15.
512

the uttermost corners of the earth. The craving to be busy, in a meaningful
way, has been with me all my life.
But for the most part my identity did not derive from rejection, from
alienation. I was not trying to forget the first or the second Great War, for
they were history to me in the fifties, a history I knew little of as I played on
the street, in the woods, in parks and in my backyard. When in 1960 that
coat of Faith and belief was drawn aside again, as it was in the 1920s after
the first war, "to reveal a changing face, regretful, doubting, yet also looking
for a road to a rebirth,"547
I had begun searching for my own form of
authenticity. By my mid-teens the Baha'i Faith seemed to represent that
form. In 1980 when I read Roger White's poem, New Song I realised
quickly that he had said much about the identity I acquired in those critical
years of the late 1950s and sixties. So, I will quote some of that poem here:
And he hath put a new song in my mouth......
-Psalms 40:3
It was comfortable in the small town smugness
547
ibid., p.18.
513

of your childhood.
You were born securely into salvation's complacent trinity:
A Catholic, Protestant or Jew.
So begins this delightful poem by Roger White. He seems to describe the
tone and texture of my childhood and adolescence. He continues:
The world was small and safe and familiar.
And very white.
No red or black offended
our prim steepled vaults of self-congratulation.
Indians were the bad guys who got licked in movies,
Dying copiously amid candy wrappers
And the popcorn smell of matinees.
.........
Yes, it was comfortable then.
.........
When you heard that God had died, you wondered
Whether it was from sheer boredom--
514

...........
The tempest came in your twelfth or fifteenth year,
a clean cold wind
and you were left like a stripped young tree in autumn
with a cynical winter setting in
and nothing large enough to house your impulse to believe.
The need lay as quiet, unhurried and insidious as a seed
Snowlocked in a bleak and lonely landscape.
So White describes my personal condition from about the age of ten or
twelve to fifteen, the years 1954 to 1959. "The need' was there to believe. It
"lay as quiet" as a seed and grew, germinated. The tempest blew into my
life at eighteen, a little later than it did in White's poem, his life. But, in the
years 1959 to 1962, fifteen to eighteen, I caught a glimpse of the Bab “in the
clearing smoke of the rifles in the barrack-square of Tabriz." I heard His
"new song./Up from the Siyah-Chal it rose."548
I could draw many parallels
between my own life and the one described by White here. Perhaps at a
future juncture, in a future edition of this work I will do so.
548
Roger White, "New Song," Another Song Another Season, George
Ronald, Oxford, 1979, pp.116-118.
515

Manic-depression, or what is now called a bi-polar disorder, afflicts 1.5 to 2
per cent of the population. It also afflicts its sufferers in quite different ways.
During the years 1962 to 1980 I had half a dozen major episodes as they are
called. Only two of them required hospitalization and the worst were in the
1960s. Robert Lowell, the famous American poet, was hospitalized for most
of his episodes which occurred each year from 1949 to 1974. In a book
about his life, Lowell describes a bi-polar disorder as follows: “that terrible
condition in which the mind is bombarded by more sensation than it can
accommodate, when associations succeed one another so quickly that the
mind feels stretched to the breaking point, painfully drawn out as though
forced through the tiny aperture of a needle’s eye.”549
But, thanks to lithium
treatment in 1980, I was finally sorted out, well just about. Fluvoxamine,
twenty-two years later, put the finishing touches on this treatment by
medication550
leaving only a manageable residue of emotional/mental
difficulties by the time I came to write this fourth edition.
549
Katheirne Wallingford, Robert Lowell’s Language of the Self,
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1988, p.35.
550
The story associated with my several medications and my response to
them I do not go into, for the most part, in this narrative. Like so many
aspects of life, if I dwelt on the fine detail of my response to these
medications, this autobiography would results in many volumes of prose.
516

Due to the most extreme of my episodes in 1968, I had to leave the Canadian
Arctic and return to Ontario in June of 1968. Here is a poem, a reflection on
the process of pioneering, written over thirty years later. It is a poem that
puts this Arctic part of my venture, August 1967 to June 1968, in
perspective. I wrote about:
THE PULL OF PIONEERING
I would not want anyone to be under any illusions regarding the pioneering
experience, at least the experience that was mine and many others in the last
half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I would not want to
see future men and women looking anxiously back in history’s landscape, in
its towns, villages and cities, farms and rural aspects, and large and small
organizations for non-existent excitements and the thrill of adventure due to
some mythic pioneering identity, some imaginary creation, some literary and
artistic representation of pioneering that had a particular potency in the
collective imagination but was false. Some internal and external view of
pioneering created by pioneers and travel teachers whose poetry and fiction,
whose prose and story creates an idealised and Romantic myth, I want to
counter and clarify. I would want the pull of pioneering, the quest for the
517

heart of its potential experience to be a realization that, although one
detaches oneself completely from one's normal social environment, much of
life can and often does remain the same. -Ron Price with thanks to C.
Aitchison, N. MacLeod and S. Shaw, Leisure and Tourism Landscapes:
Social and Cultural Geographies, Routledge, London, 2000, p.89.
It's been an adventure, mate;
you could even make it
into one of those movies
for the evening escape.
This story is unscripted,
flawed and plausible,
only the predictable wonder
of an ordinary life,
none of the tedium of
the choiceless invulnerability
of the movie-evening-hero,
none of the glitter and gloss.
518

You can't edit your life
to emerge in celluloid safety
with that toothpaste-ad-smile finish,
sliding smoothly from scene to scene
with that sense of story-writ-large
across the two hour coloured show.
This one you have to make
which, like nature, is slow
and seemingly uneventful,
the hero quietly enduring.
The big story is on the inside;
the technicolour manipulation
is largely unbeknownst to all,
silent, rich, self-created
or not there at all.
Ron Price
2 November 2000
519

The next poem focuses more sharply on that Arctic adventure twenty-eight
years after it ended. The word 'transformation' has much meaning for me
when I view life over many decades. A different person emerges, perhaps
several times in life but, in the short term, in the day-to-day grind, I would
use the term epiphany to describe some intense experience but not
transformation. We each describe our life in different ways for we are, as
that 18th century autobiographer Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, "sometimes
vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous and sublime."551
GONE FOREVER
Genuine self-revelation is a rare gift, almost a creative gift. How alien, how
remote, seem most people's memoirs, autobiographies and confessions from
the real current of their actual days. Some autobiographies use self-
revelation as a form of social protest, a form of victim narrative. Sylvia
Plath's poem The Bell Jar(1950's) is one of the earliest examples. More
recent victim narratives are about self-promotion, sensationalism and self-
disclosure: here oppressors and victims all tend to blurr. Perhaps many who
read my work will find it alien and remote, just not enough juices, not
551
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions: Book 1, 1782, p.1.
520

enough heat, not enough to turn you on, a little too analytical thank you very
much. While my memoirs are focussed, my experience tells me, they are
also in a context with too much analysis for many people’s liking. For this
and many other reasons they will not become popular. If popularity were my
main concern I would be troubled.
If my memoirs were more like those who wrote of their travels on the
Oregon, the Santa Fe or the Cherokee Trail, among many others; the
adventures of many of the explorers in Australia or in any one of the many
parts of western civilization in the 18th
and 19th
centuries; indeed, the lives,
actions and adventure stories of which there are thousands extant, I'm sure
success would have been mine--or at least mine more easily. Perhaps, too, I
should have followed American humorist Will Rogers' advice. He said,
partly in jest and partly seriously, "When you put down the good things you
ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did do, that's
memoirs."552
Perhaps I’ve left out too many bad things. Perhaps, as well,
my memoirs could have been liberally laced with photos, sketches,
emoticons, a wide range of visual enrichments that have become available to
552
Will Rogers in "Writing Changes Everything: A Review of '627 Best
things Anyone Ever Said About Writing,'" Deborah Brodie in BookPage,
1997.
521

writers in recent decades. For this more audio-visual age I'm sure these
embellishments would have been an asset to the acceptance and success of
this work.
I have tried to connect my work as far as possible to the real current of my
times, my days and my religion. Such efforts are sometimes called vintage
memoirs. Such memoirs celebrate a period of time with music, the arts,
books, furniture, architecture and a wide selection of cultural adornments
like: clothing, foods, technology, inter alia. These vintage memoirs place
the person in the context of material culture and for those more interested in
the culture and less in the person, this is an excellent technique. My efforts
in this direction are meagre.
I don't go anywhere near, say, the in/famous Howard Stern, the radio 'shock-
jock' who introduced a new radar of naughtiness into media society. Most of
his public revelations are, for me, private things. I'm not into exploiting
myself to make a buck, to introduce self-tabloidization, pseudo-victimization
or anti-victimization.553
There is no resemblance whatsoever between my
553
Freya Johnson and Annalee Newitz, "The Personal is Capital:
Autobiographical Work and Self-Promotion," Bad Subjects, Issue # 32,
April 1997.
522

memoirs and, say, those of bystanders, war heroes, prostitutes, criminals and
celebrities. There are literally thousands of memoirs becoming available
now from ordinary people inhabiting history's troubled waters to the
ordinary among my contemporaries. I'm just one of a million, the ordinarily
ordinary, the humanly human.
Autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in an intricate
process of self-discovery and self-creation.1
The self at the centre of all
autobiographical narrative is in some basic, subtle and quite mysterious
ways a fictive structure. But whether fictive or non-fictive, there has been at
the centre of this narrative an explicit avowal, an acceptance, of the
embodiment of moral authority in the Central Figures of the Baha'i Faith and
Their elected successors, the trustees of a global undertaking, the Universal
House of Justice. There was, too, a facticity at the centre of this work. This
is not a work of self-creation as readers come across so frequently in the
entertainment business.2
-Ron Price with thanks to: 1
Fictions in
Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention, Author Unknown,
Princeton UP, 1985, p.3; and Joe Lockard, "Britney Spears, Victorian
Chastity and Brand-name Virginity," Bad Subjects: Political Education for
Everyday Life, October 2001.
523

I have often written poems about his past. This one, written some twenty-
eight years after the event that it is concerned with, attempts to summarize
my year among the Eskimo and some of its meaning in retrospect. -Ron
Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 27 April 1996.
Like some shot out of the night,
a blast from the past,
from a frozen land
where big pioneering began,
where I was worn to a frazzle,
burnt to a crisp and at forty below!
Taken away on a jet and put in a net,
like a bird in a cage,
frightened on every page,
my brain burning with rage;
slowly it soothed
and the cold Artic air
became a thing of the past,
some moment in time,
524

like a memory sublime
with adventure writ high
and many a long sigh,
long before I was to die.
Some passing few months,
over in the blink of an eye,
there, for a time, I nearly died.
Ron Price
27 April 1996
This poem, one of the few rhymng poems that I have written, for I don't
seem to enjoy rhyming poetry. It always feels contrived. But it does say
something about that experience I had at the age of 23 on Baffin Island.
However intimate my autobiography, I see my life as part of a universal
history, a history that Lord Acton, one of the great modern Western
historians described in a letter he wrote to the contributors to The Cambridge
Modern History, dated March 12th
1898. His vision of universal history
contains some of the perspective within which I write about my own
525

mundane and ordinary life. Acton wrote: "By universal history I understand
that which is distinct from the combined history of all countries….a
continuous development…not a burden on the memory, but an illumination
of the soul. It moves in a succession to which the nations are subsidiary.”554
In the twentieth century a succession of universal histories followed:
Spengler's in 1918, H.G. Wells' in 1919; Toynbee, who began his
monumental work, in 1921;555
and Eric Hobsbawn’s four volume work
completed in 1996, among others.
In a strange and certain way pioneering, and especially international
pioneering which was three years into the future from this experience among
the Eskimo, lifts one into this universal history. Perhaps that is why I have
found reading Toynbee so stimulating over more than four decades of
pioneering. There is another historical paradigm that I have found useful for
interpreting my times, my life, my religion, all that I have seen in history
and anticipated in the future. It is what could be called “the decline and fall”
paradigm. Saint Jerome, while writing his 'Commentary on Ezekiel', in 410
AD said that he was “so confounded by the havoc wrought in the West and
554
Lord Acton in A Study of History, Vol.1, 1934, p.47.
555
Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West; H.G. Wells, Outline of History and
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History.
526

above all by the sack of Rome" that long did he remain silent, "knowing it
was a time to weep.”556
So, too, is our time a time to weep. With Rumi, the
Persian poet, we are justified in saying: "do not mock the wine, it is bitter
only because it is my life." The generations of the twentieth century have
seen, heard or read about billions dieing. Is this a taste of things to come?
Whatever wine of pleasure and comfort we in the West have enjoyed in
these decades, and there have been many pleasures and comforts, there is a
tincture of bitterness, of sadness, of sorrow, of melancholy, in the cup from
the immense and tragic sufferings which have afflicted the human condition
in our time, the generations born in the twentieth century.
Toynbee sees the period of what historians call the ‘fall of the Roman
Empire in the West’ as “vultures feeding on the carrion or the maggots
crawling in the carcass”557
of that society. Roman society, argues Toynbee,
especially in the days of the Empire(that is after 31 BC), was moribund. So,
too, I would argue is our own society. The society we live in in terms of its
traditional political and religious institutions is moribund. There are vultures
feeding on the carcass of all its traditional institutions all over the planet. In
556
St. Jerome quoted in The Two Cities: the Decline and Fall of Rome as
Historical Paradigm, Jaroslav Pelikan.
557
Toynbee, op.cit.(vol.1) p.62. The period of Roman history known as ‘The
Empire’ began in 31 BC and ended, it is often argued, in 476 AD.
527

such a climate autobiographers like myself must be on guard that, as
William Maxwell says, "in talking about the past" it is possible that we may
"lie with every breath we draw."558
The story, the history, is complex and
one can easily get one's interpretations of the reality of our circumstances
wrong. Our views are, so often, not so much lies as Maxwell saw it, but
simply or not-so-simply errors.
We also need to develop, as Dr. Johnson did centuries ago, an acute
sensitivity to artificiality in our writing and to the very nature of our
analysis. In a resonant phrase by language theorist and social philosopher
Roland Barthes, ours is a ‘Civilization of the Image.’559
To get behind the
image, away from the pervasive penetration of the image, requires the
penetration of imagination, creativity, understanding and insight. I hope I
provide some of these items in the recipe, the mixture, here.
Doomsdaying, present to a greater or lesser extent in all ages, has become a
chief mode or form of social activity in modern culture. The ancient
Romans are often compared to the Americans in what Patrick Brantlinger
558
William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow, Knopf, NY, 1980, p.27.
559
Marty Fairairn, “Reawakening Imagination,” Film-Philosophy, Vol. 4 No.
17, July 2000.
528

calls a “negative classicism.”560
We have developed, many argue, some of
the negative features of classical civilization. The serious literature of most
Western countries, at least since 1914 writes W. Warren Wager, has been
“drenched with apocalyptic imagery.”561
It is not my purpose here to outline
the optimistic and utopian or the pessimistic and dystopian scenarios that
have filled the print and electronic media in my time, though Brantlinger
does one of the best jobs of doing so. The analyses of our social, economic,
political and psychological cultures now available are burgeoning and often
enlightening. Indeed, I could devote a special chapter to what I see as
relevant commentary and from time to time I will refer to some theory, some
theorist, some commentary, some analysis. But I do not want to burden
readers or myself with analysis. Readers will probably find I have provided
more than enough analysis in my own individual way.
But, like Leon Edel, the chief biographer of American writer Henry James, I
feel as if "my life has been the quintessence of what I have written......The
way I am and the way I write are a unity."562
So, analysis is, for me, just part
560
Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as
Social Decay, Cornell UP, Ithaca, p.17.
561
Wager in Brantlinger, op.cit., p.39.
562
Leon Edel, Henry James' Letters: Volume IV: 1895-1916, Belkham Press,
London, 1984, p.15.
529

of the story, part of me, my thought, who I am. For the self is not a thing,
but the meaning embodied in a man, in a life.563
Just as our Western world emerged out of the chaos of the break-up of the
Roman Empire and “the deep sleep" of the interregnum(circa AD 375-
675)”564
which followed, so is a global civilization emerging out of the
break-up of the traditional societies all around the world including our own
western society. We, too, have a deep sleep565
in our own time in the midst
of the break-up of the old world. The roots of faith, without which no
society can long endure, have been severed. Perhaps they were severed in
that blood bath of WW1;566
perhaps the severing was completed in WW2
just as I was born, but certainly in the half century that it has been my
privilege to serve in this embryonic chrysalis church, the institutional matrix,
the embryo, of a new world Order, the chord of Faith has been cut. In many
ways, this chord has been recreated, rebuilt, reshaped around a thousand
563
Josiah Royce in Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing,
Aaron Fleishman, 1983, p.9.
564
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol.1, 1962(1934), p. 39.
565
This is quite a complex sociological and psychological question, the state
of individual paralysis or deep sleep that afflicts so many millions. Perhaps I
will pursue it in another edition.
566
For a succinct summary of the effects of WW1 see Edward R. Kantowicz,
The Rage of Nations, Cambridge, 1999, p.138. Perhaps the equivalent of the
years 375-675 AD will be 1914-2214 AD or 1789-2089 AD.
530

alternative faiths, sects, cults, isms and wasms creating a sense of confusion
and noise that is part of the new set of problems of these epochs.
The policy of the many governing bodies, as far as they concerned religion,
was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits
of the superstitious part of the citizenry. The various modes of worship,
which prevailed in this emerging global society, like the Roman world two
thousand years before, were all considered by most of the people, at least
the people who inhabited the landscapes where I lived during these epochs,
with equal indifference or on some basis or principle of exclusivity or
preference. Most philosophers, intellectuals and academics saw the
multitude of religions as equally false. There were many, though, among the
great masses of humanity, who saw these religions, or at least one, as true,
useful, pernicious, absurd or simply the leftovers of a previous age.567
The
blight of an aggressive secularism often replaced inherited orthodoxies and a
unsatisfying religious heritage. Such was part of the climate that was the
backdrop for these epochs.
567
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Internet
Quotations.
531

But, however one analyses the process of social disintegration, the death of
an old Order and the birth of a new one that is characterizing this age, for me
the great historian and sociologist, Reinhardt Bendix puts my life and this
pioneering experience in its primary and, what you might call, its existential
setting. He quotes Jacob Burkhardt's emphasis on "man suffering, striving,
doing, as he is and was and ever shall be"568
at the centre of the process. In
autobiography this centre is inevitable whether one acknowledges a
transcendental Centre or no centre at all.
The revolution of our time, as historian Doug Martin put it in a simple but
pointed turn of phrase, “is in essence spiritual.”569
It is also universal and
out of our control, he went on in what I always found a style of writing that
has had a significant impact on my thought. Martin was one of the many
influences on my life570
that led, by the 1990s, to produce the following
568
Jacob Burkhardt in Reinhardt Bendix, Kings and People: Power and the
Mandate to Rule, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978, p.265.
Burkhardt was a 19th century historian.
569
Doug Martin, “The Spiritual Revolution,” World Order, Winter 1973-4,
p.14.
570
As early as 1960 I listened to the talks of this high school teacher. I heard
him in various venues: in Toronto, Hamilton and Chattam, in summer camps
and institutes until 1967. From the 1970s to the 1990s I read his several
journal articles and, by the turn of the millennium, I was reading his talks on
the Internet. There is no question in my mind that he has been one of the
formative intellectual influences on my life.
532

poems, poems that played with concepts of civilization, society and the
future.
THE GENUINE ARTICLE
The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset writing about the Roman Empire
said that "the heads of the most powerful state that existed....did not find
any legitimate legal titles with which to designate their right to the exercise
of power...they did not know the basis on which they ruled....at the end of
the whole thousand-year process which is Rome’s history, its chief of state
went back to being just anybody. Hence the Empire never had any genuine
juridical form, authentic legality, or legitimacy. The Empire was essentially
a shapeless form of government...without authentic institutions....but the
famous Roman conservatism resided in the fact that a Roman knew what
law is....it is that which cannot be reformed, which cannot be varied. -Jose
Ortega y Gasset, An Interpretation of Universal History, WW Norton, NY,
1973, p.120, 197 and 293.
We may eventually learn that
nothing in life is meaningless;
533

that it has all happened
with one grand purpose,
one unifying scheme;
that the tragedy of history all fits,
is not purely fortuitous,
not a set of chance-couplings,
on-and-on forever.
And that a genuine legitimacy
is a slowly evolving entity
like man himself, or homo erectus,
or the events of the Carboniferous:
you need several thousand years.
Developing out of a prophetic
an exemplary charisma,
the legitimacy of its institutions
found in a routinization
that has successfully negotiated
the first century and a half of its life:
534

Is this the genuine article, the key
to the puzzle of history?
Ron Price
10 January 1996
CIVILIZATION SLIPPING
During the 1980s, the concept of globalization began to permeate a diverse
body of literature within the social sciences. An intellectual fascination with
globalization, in which daily processes were becoming increasingly
enmeshed in global processes, contributed in subtle ways to that rampant
force that seemed to be part of the dark heart of this transitional age. During
these dark years, too, perhaps as far back as the 1960s, it became obvious
that the controlling strain of my character was clearly emotional. It would
have been impossible for me to work as a teacher and serve in the Baha'i
community as a pioneer if my character had not been dominantly emotional.1
For both these 'jobs' came to diminate most of my life. The other parts of my
nature merged into or were contained in an earnest expression of devotion to
535

God and man in a framework defined by this new Faith. -Ron Price,
Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 29 October 1997 and 1
Alfred Marshall, "On
Arnold Toynbee: Marshall Studies," Bulletin,Vol.6, editor, John Whitaker,
pp.45-48, 1996. The mystical and the emotional seem to be strongly linked.
While I was watching the slippage
of civilization into its heart of darkness,
like some kind of secondary reality
or should I say primary reality,
out there, on the box, periscopes up,
bringing it in through the tube,
some intensity was sucked out,
down, in, away from my heart,
day-after-day, hour-by-hour,
year-by-year, until now
a strange quietness invades my soul,
an easy peace, as I watch
the endless succession of signs
in an endless conversation with life,
where an uneasiness, cold and dark,
536

whispers through the spaces,
the rooms and high into the trees,
harrowing up the souls of the inhabitants
like some mysterious, rampant force.
Ron Price
29 October 1997
GLOBAL CIVILIZATION AND ITS SPIRITUAL AXIS
Civilization lies in an awareness shared by a whole people. And we, all six
billion of us, are slowly acquiring a common awareness.1
Increasingly, the
cities of the world in which I had been born and lived during these epochs,
began to fill like Rome, the capital of that ancient empire or some great
monarchy of old, with travellers, citizens and strangers from every part of
the world. Some introduced and enjoyed the favourite customs and
superstitions of their native country. Some abandoned them. The sound and
the clamour, the diversity of appeal, the richness and the confusion of
cultures was incessant. In the midst of all this cultural diversity, the decline
and the diversification of authority, an authority which once had been
537

transmitted with blind deference from one generation to another, now
provided opportunities for human beings everywhere to exercise their
powers and enlarge the limits of their minds.
The name of Poet was in most places forgotten, although their number
increased with every passing decade. Many of the orators were like the
sophists of old. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened
the face of learning. At the same time learning was advancing by leaps and
bounds the world over. If a man were called to fix the period in the history
of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy
and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, not name that time which
elapsed during the epochs of this Divine Plan serving as the background for
this autobiography. Although the benefits of this period to many millions of
people have been obvious and impressive, a sense of optimism has not
resulted. A slough of despond has resulted from the troubled forecasts of
doom and the light of the twentieth century is hardly appreciated. The vast
array of changes and the complexity and the relativistic ethos of the times
makes humanity, for the most part, ill-equipped to interpret the problems of
society.2
And so the sense of drift, of chance and a social determinism
comes to possess a stronger presence. –Ron Price with thanks to 1
Thomas
538

Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries, Ticknor and
Fields, NY, 1984, p.143; 2
The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 156, p.4
and Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Internet
Quotations.
It kept moving west,
civilization on the move,
centre of gravity:
Fertile Crescent, Greece, Rome,
north and west Europe,
then North America.
And He kept sending Them:
One by One,
every thousand years or so.
And where now is the centre
as we go global?
Everywhere?
Yes, He's popped Them
all over the place,
539

but did not tell us
until just recently.
Can we prevent extinction
so we don’t go the same way
as the Easter Islanders,
or the Anastazi Indians?
Where will our children be
after the disappearance
of the tropical rainforest in 2030?
Or all the primary products in 2050,
in a global population
of twelve billion in 2040 or 2060
when they are sixty or eighty
and we are long gone?
Perhaps civilization will continue
its drift west into the middle of the ocean!
Perhaps that spiritual axis
540

he told us about before he died,
just after the first satellite
showed us ourselves as round ball,
this federated ship, beginning to sail
behind its powerful lights of unity,
for there is a manifest destiny
beyond this tempest blowing,
which will take us, crying, pleading,
bleeding humanity to the blessed mansions
of a global father and motherland.
Ron Price
19 January 1997
So much that we do in life we know we could have done better. Our sins of
omission and commission are legion. It is not my intention to commiserate
on the long list of my failings; the world will not benefit from such a litany.
This autobiography is not quintessentially confessional. From time to time,
though, I mention some failing, some sin; an autobiography would hardly be
an autobiography without one or two or three of such confidences. It may
541

just be that history is the essence of innumerable autobiographies, however
confessional they may be; however private, silent, obscure and ordinary;
however glamorous and in touch with the seats of authority and influence.
If I felt the world needed more sins of omission and commission to lighten
and enlighten its burden I might include many more than I have. But the
world is drowning in the dust of sin and is not in need of my dark
contributions here to clarify its direction and deepen its appreciation of my
life. Some of the words of Roger White are pertinent here. “My nurtured
imperfections,” White says he has come to see as “not so epically
egregious/as to embarrass the seraphim ruefully yawning/at their
mention;/nor will my shame, as once I thought,/topple the cities, arrest the
sun’s climb.”571
I would like to quote a poem by Emily Dickinson which puts so much that
we do in life, whatever our role and place in society, in perspective. Her
poem is philosophical, theological, psychological and speaks to both our
hearts and minds:
A Deed knocks first at Thought
571
Roger White,”Lines From A Battlefield,” Another Song, Another
Season, George Ronald, 1979, p.111.
542

And then--it knocks at Will--
That is the manufacturing spot
And will at Home and well
It then goes out to Act
Or is entombed so still
That only to the ear of God
Its Doom is audible.572
It is not my intention to get my readers to see things the way I see them. I
like to think that this life story is open to interpretation in ways other than
those which I intend or don't intend. As philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, points
out in discussing autobiography “a Work does not only mirror its time, but it
can open up a world which it bears within itself.” It opens up possibilities,
he goes on, for others to recompose their lives and their own life stories.”573
Readers should also be aware in their reading of autobiography what Irving
Alexander calls "identifiers of salience.” These are psychologically
important features of autobiography that can help readers understand
572
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, editor, T.H. Johnson, 1970,
p.536.
573
A. Nelson in Paul Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of
Revaluation,” Essays on Biblical Interpretation, London, SPCK.
543

autobiographical texts more fully. These salient features include: primacy,
uniqueness, frequency, negation, omission, errors, incompleteness and
isolation.574
I deal with all of these factors of salience, but not in a
systematic, ordered, way; rather, readers will find these features dealt with in
a spontaneous fashion each in its own way in the chapters which follow.
"Wars and the administration of public affairs," wrote Gibbon, "are the
principal subjects of history." During these epochs this view has been
challenged by historians with other views of history and this autobiography
sees history quite differently as well.575
In whatever way that the
autobiographer views history, though, this old and established discipline is
one of autobiography’s major contributing fields of study; several other
social sciences occupy subsidiary fields. Tedium and anxiety, suffering and
tribulations of various kinds can be found on the east of these fields rising
574
Author Unknown, "Saliency Cues," Internet, 30 March 2003. The
literature that attempts to explain and interpret autobiography has become, in
the last 20 years especially, massive.
575
it is not my intention to survey the many approaches to the study of
history but there are several which focus on aspects of the story that do not
involve war. The annales school and the work of F. Braudel is but one
example.
544

like the sun to bring new challenges to both myself and humankind and an
obituary waits patiently on the west.576
I would like to comment briefly on 'primacy' and 'uniqueness' before
continuing on my way in this narrative. My life, this autobiographical
statement, takes place in a world that is "shatteringly and bewilderingly
new," that is part of the "break-up" of civilization in a divide greater than
any, arguably, since the neolithic revolution.577
Like the neolithic revolution
which was spread over several thousand years, so too is the one we are
experiencing. It is not confined to these four epochs but is, rather, one
whose time frame is difficult to define with any precision.
Some put the break-up of the old civilization in the early twentieth or late
nineteenth centuries; others in the middle of the nineteenth century.578
We
are, it seems to me, unquestionably in a new and radically different world
and this autobiography is part of this modernist, postmodernist,
576
I thank Philip Guedaila, British Writer 1889-1944, for this idea which he
expressed quite differently in relation to biography.
577
This great divide, this catastrophic shift, took place in the decades after
the passing of Baha'u'llah. So argue Malcohm Bradbury and James
McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature: 1890-1930,
Penguin, 1991, p.20.
578
Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, London, 1967, p.9.
545

unprecedented, catastrophic and unpredictable world, a world which eludes
precise characterization. Surrounded as I am with imperfect fragments of my
life, sometimes concise, often obscure, sometimes contradictory and often
clear elements of fact in space and time, I am reduced to a vast exercise of
collecting, comparing, and conjecturing. Such is the nature of
autobiography, the nature of much of life in our time. And it must be asked:
is this particular autobiography symptomatic of the general, the typical, story
of the pioneer, international or otherwise? Or is each story so idiosyncratic
and particular, so unique and individual, that one person's story is not of
much value in conveying the general narrative for a community moving
unobtrusively onto the global stage? There is for each Baha'i writer of
autobiography a dialectic between the banal, the vacuous, the ordinary and
what holds intense significance, what are vital and delightful moments of
being as Virginia Woolf calls them. Another dialectic of equal importance is
that between the culturally common, the shared values and beliefs, the unific
and the whole and the culturally idiosyncratic, heterogeneous, divergent and
partial. Readers of this work will, inevitably, get some of both sides of both
dialectics.
546

I have tried in my day-to-day experience to implement a way of life that has
a very wide embrace. Containing the diversity of human types that this way
of life incorporates, it also contains a philosophical system, far from
systematized yet. This philosophy is not a dead piece of furniture. It is
something that, as Johann Gottleib Fichte said, “we accept or reject as we
wish; it is a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it.”579
Any of
the difficulties I have experienced in implementing this philosophy in my
relations with others are a reflection, as William James once put it, “of a
certain clash of human temperaments.” Temperament is often the source
and cause of an individual’s biases more than any of his more strictly
objective premises. Temperament “loads the evidence" for us "one way or
the other.” It is this temperament that individuals come to trust in themselves
and they are often suspicious of the temperaments of others.580
The
psychological sources of this temperamental orientation are important and
complex. They are also beyond the scope of this narrative to deal with in
579
Johann Gottleib Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, trans. Heath and
Lachs, Appleton-Century, Crofts, 1970(1794), p.16.
580
William James, Pragmatism, World Publishing Co., 1970(1907), P.19. Of
course temperament is not the only reason why I fail to live up to the many
ideals of my philosophy. The reasons are many and beyond the scope of this
narrative. However fascinating these reasons may be and however often I
allude to them during the course of this study, they remain far too complex
and varied to pursue here.
547

any depth, although some of my own are explored from time to time, if not
systematically at least in an ad hoc, serendipitous fashion.
Some writers refer to this temperament as ‘inner biography’ or ‘psychic
constitution.’ I don’t want to dwell on this theme of relationships too
extensively here for the issues are subtle and require much analysis and
attention to grasp and, even then, they are often elusive. A poem or two is
appropriate, though, to expand on this complex subject. I deal with the
sometimes elusive, sometimes quite specific and obvious factors involved in
understanding self and its failings in my poetry. Poetry started out as a
simple handshake with my life twenty-five years ago and has become
something of an arm-wrestle. Simplicity may derive from knowing little and
thinking less, from a certain philosophical view as was the case of
Thoreau,581
or from a sharp focus on one thing. Emerson once wrote, “great
geniuses have the shortest biographies.”582
After a century and a half since
Emerson wrote these words and many massive biographies and
autobiographies, he may have revised his words.
581
“Simplify, simplify, simplify,” was one of H.D. Thoreau’s famous
aphorisms.
582
R.W. Emerson, “Quotations on Biography,” Famous Quotations on
Biography, Internet Site.
548

When one talks about philosophies of life one can't help imbibing something
of the overall cultural philosophy of the country one lives in. Australian
playright, David Williamson, commenting on the contrast between the
Australian and the American philosophical ethos said the following about
the American story structure: "I think that they(Americans) do very much
have that story structure firmly in their heads, that the hero must start out,
must go through a series of challenges, each of which he or she overcomes,
and becomes a better and stronger person at every turning point, and finally
ends up the film a true hero."583
Going on to comment on how Australian
writers told their stories he said: "Now I think Australia and Australian
writers tend to believe that this is a falsified picture of life, that life proceeds
more often according to the neuroses theory where people keep making the
same mistakes over and over again which is more conducive to a comedic
approach than a heroic, dramatic approach."584
After a lifetime in both
countries I think my approach is a bit of both.
583
A modern and, perhaps, definitive, description of the hero's journey is
told by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 3rd printing,
Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1973. I could very easily align
my life with his many stages and phases. However simple this exercise is, I
feel it is all a bit 'iffy,' pretentious and more suited to individuals with more
claims to fame.
584
David Williamson, "Wisdom Interviews," ABC Radio National,
February 22, 2004.
549

PROJECT OF THE SELF
According to Ulrich Beck, the most dominant and widespread desire in
Western societies today is the desire to live a 'life of one's own'. More and
more people aspire to actively create an individual identity, to be the author
of their own life. This involves an active process of interpreting their own
experiences and generating new ones.585
The ethic of individual self-
fulfilment and achievement can be seen as the "most powerful current in
modern societies." The concept of individualisation does not mean isolation,
though, nor unconnectedness, loneliness, nor the end of engagement in
society. Individuals do not live in society as isolated individuals with dear
cut boundaries. If they ever did, now they exist as individuals interconnected
in a net work by relations of power and domination. This is how Edmund
Leach put it.586
585
The literature on this process is now extensive. See M.D. Berzonsky, "A
Constructivist View of Identity Development," Discussions on Ego Identity,
J. Kroger, editor,Hillsdale, NJ, 1993, pp.169-203.
586
Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication, Cambridge UP,
Cambridge, 1976, p.62.
550

Individuals are now trying to 'produce' their own biographies. This is partly
done by consulting 'role models' in the media. Through these role models
individuals explore personal possibilities for themselves and imagine
alternatives of how they can go about creating their own lives. This is also
done partly by reading history, for it is in history that some theoretical
framework can be found. It is also done partly by reading biography, for
here the autobiographer can find himself at every turn. In effect, it is one
grand experiment or project of the self, with strategies for self and
reinventing self, as it is often said in contemporary parlance. -Ron Price with
thanks to Judith Schroeter, "The Importance of Role Models in Identity
Formation: The Ally McBeal In Us," Internet:www.theory.org.uk, 11
October 2002.
I define myself in community
which is not the same as being
surrounded by people ad nauseam,
nor does it mean doing what I want
as much of the time as I can
or being free of difficulties,
stresses and strains--
551

which seem unavoidable.
I've been creating my own biography--
my autobiography--for years
and getting very little sense
of who I am from the media
and their endless role models.
I've been in a community
with two hundred years
of historical models
and literally hundreds,
of people I have known
who have shown me
qualities worth emulating,
helping to make me
some enigmatic,
some composite creature.
Ron Price
552

11 October 2002
The lives of others, that is biographies, often shelter autobiographical
features within them. We collect these features or, at least we can, into
bunches of flowers, ones that brought sweetness into our life and present
them, as Andre Maurois suggested, as an offering. He suggested the offering
be made to “an accomplished destiny.”587
Saul Bellow places excellent
snatches of autobiography into his novels. I might put it a little differently
and suggest the offering, snatches or extensive passages, be made to “the
souls who have remained faithful unto the covenant of God and fulfilled in
their lives His trust.”588
MORE THAN A TRACE
Zygmunt Bauman, one of the leading sociologists at the turn of the
millennium, wrote in his book In Search of Politics(Polity Press 1999, 1988,
p.54) that "sufferings which we tend to experience most of the time do not
unite their victims. Our sufferings divide and isolate: our miseries set us
apart, tearing up the delicate tissue of human solidarities." In the Baha'i
587
Andre Maurois, “Quotations on Biography,” EntWagon.com
588
Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, p.161.
553

community, as a pioneer in isolated localities, small groups and larger
Assembly areas, in my family and in the wider community, I have found this
to be only partly true during the more than forty years 'on the road,' so to
speak.
"Belief in the collective destiny and purpose of the social whole," Bauman
continues, gives meaning to our "life-pursuits." Being part of a global
collectivity with highly specific goals, purposes and a sense of destiny has
not only given meaning to my life-pursuits but it has tended to unite me with
my fellows even when isolated from them. I do not mean to imply that this
collectivity is a homogeneous, univocal entity. I am only too conscious of its
immense diversity. But my existence within this collectivity, however
diverse, gives me a special sense of consecrated joy; the consecration comes
from the difficulties endured and shared. Although these difficulties seem to
tear that "delicate tissue" that Bauman refers to, they also provide some of
that chord which binds. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 29 July
2002.
Often it was largely in my head,
that tissue of solidarity,
554

especially in Frobisher Bay,
Whyalla or Zeehan,
on the edge of a universe.
But always, they visited me
when I was sick, somehow
they were always there,
even when they left me alone.
For this is a polity which
gives you lots of space
when you need it and,
you can always go and get it
because there's so much out there:
solitude and sociability
in these vast and spacious lands.
Life is no mere sequence
of instantaneous experiences
without a trace left behind.
555

Here is a trace with my inscription
of lived time on astronomical time.
This is no singular, self-same identify,
shared or common ancestral, historical,
self. Fractured and fragmented it is,
spread across two continents,
two countries and four epochs,
cutting events out of flow
turning grief into lamentation
and lamentation into praise,
little by little and piece by piece.
See ibid., p.165.
Ron Price
29 July 2002
I’d like to say a little about the landscape of the Baha’i community that has
been part of my being for more than half a century. I try to map its unique
landscape of vision, hope, relevance, tolerance and aspiration in my poetry.
556

Defined and described in my poetry, then, is a landscape with what I think is
a distinctive voice. It is a deceptively insinuating, complex, quotient with a
quality of religious feeling and thought that is not over-ethereal and that
includes much of the raw material of life, perhaps too much for some. But
the Baha’i community has supplied me with a great deal of raw material, a
little too much at times. My poetry and the Baha’i Faith contains within it a
landscape of human frailty and burnt-out cases of which I am one. Perhaps I
am too honest like those confessional poets of a few years ago. But the
people I have known in this community are ordinarily ordinary, humanly
human.
There is so much that arouses my imagination and that I want to add to this
landscape to paint its picture as accurately as possible. On an initial
inspection of my poetic oeuvre this landscape contains a world, a world I
have set out in over two million words, too much really for most people in
this audio-visual age. With several million words, then, in my prose-poetry
such a conclusion is not surprising. But there is much that is left out for there
is a great deal in life which is of little interest to me. I am no encyclopedic
Leonardo da Vinci. Readers will search in vain for material on a host of
topics that have occupied little of my time and none of my interest.
557

This landscape is distinct, a composite of several climatic, soil and
vegetation zones which geography students find on their maps, with
repeated high and low pressure zones, isohyets, isobars, the familiar
languages of life’s commonalities. These zones, these maps, these terms, all
exist in a vocabularly that contains both an individual ethos and the bonds of
community, bonds which are themselves private renditions, private
perceptions, private needs and private strengths sketched out in a pattern of
interdependent other privacies.
But perhaps most important of all, the foundation of this landscape, was and
is an intense, emotionally and sensually charged outpouring of words that
Horace Holley says “create new faculties.”589
Without such revelations of
the Central Figures of this Cause I have concluded, paradise itself for this
poet would have no appeal. Such revelations have been heaven. Intimate,
detailed, often ephemeral, not always present to my sensory emporium as I
went about the business of my quotidian life, autonomous sources of power
and truth, they captivated, enthralled, held me in awe and required effort on
my part. Indeed, these words, this Word, required that I invest my own
589
John Hatcher, The Ocean of His Words, Baha’i Publishing Trust,
Wilmette, 1997, p.3.
558

creative thought with the aim of understanding and, having understood,
reinvesting that understanding with my own creative action. It was this
action that brought the landscape alive and without that action it often
seemed flat and without meaning. Even with the action there was often
“sparse nourishment” in my “slow years.” Wingless I clambered and
songless I screamed more often than I like to think or admit as I streaked
across the firmament of this mortal coil like some maddened comet.590
TOKENS
Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Keats felt 'the burden of the mystery'
that was part of 'this unintelligible world.'1
This orientation of these romantic
poets fits into what Horace Holley calls "the principle of struggle" which is
our reality, which is deeply rooted in the very being of man. "The first sign,"
writes Holley "of the purification of the human spirit is anguish."2
There is,
too, a great mystery in all of life: no man can sing that which he
understandeth not, nor recount that unto which he cannot attain.3
590
I have drawn here on some of the imagery and phraseology of Roger
White in his book of poems The Witness of Pebbles, 1981.
559

Out of this struggle over many decades I came to feel the following words of
Keats as if they were mine: “When I feel I am right no external praise can
give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of
what is fine.”4
The choice of the word 'reperception' is apt, conveying as it
does the delighted surprise of finding that what I had written from the depths
of my concentration was true to the hopes of my own achievement. After
fifteen years of extensive writing of poetry, 1991-2006, and nearly sixty
years of picking up a pen to write, I could not express my own sentiments
about writing more accurately than Keats does in the above. Even the slip-
shod, unsatisfactory, work that I often write, only confirms the reality of
Keats’ words, what he defines indirectly and underlines eloquently. -Ron
Price with thanks to 1
Stephen Coote, John Keats: A Life, Hodder and
Stoughton, London, 1995, p. 151; 2
Horace Holley, Religion for Mankind,
GR, London, 1956, p.217; 3
Baha'u'llah, Baha'i Prayers, USA, 1985, p.121
and 4
Stephen Coote, op.cit., p.191.
I can, I can, recount His tokens,
tokens that tell of His handiwork.
I see them in the community,
in the proximity and otherness
560

which stirs me: a beautiful face,
an exquisite mouth, such kindness,
a gentle voice, a garden of beauty
and, yet, it wore me out to the bone.
Pleasures they know nothing of,
worlds I can not enter: community
we are just beginning to learn to build.
Emblems of a mind that feeds on infinity,
sustained by transcendence,
attempting converse with a spiritual world
and the generations of humankind
spread over past, present and to come.1
1
Wordsworth, "The Prelude," Book Fourteenth.
Ron Price
23 January 2002
561

I think that pioneering and especially international pioneering has a
transformative affect much like that of the American in its frontier journey
West. A permanent spiritual impress was set upon the national character of
the American nation as it grew and travelled West. A social pull of
prodigious force was exerted on this new state. A distinctive medium, a
spiritual vein, a vast monument was slowly, insensibly introduced over two
centuries into a newly-made American character. It seems to me this is also
happening in the Baha’i community just as insensibly, over several centuries
but on a global landscape, a global enterprize.
Like the Apostles of old charged with the tremendous task of teaching the
whole of humankind a new religion of The Book, the international pioneer is
conscious of the world-wide range of the mission of the Baha’i community.
Over time he also becomes aware of the enhancement of his faculties
through the inpouring of the spirit of God. Of course, he is promised this in
the Baha’i writings as the Christian was promised that he would “receive
power”(Acts 1:8) from the Holy Ghost. It is difficult to comment on the
experience of others; it is difficult to comment on one’s own “enhancement
of faculties.” In this memoir I do so by degree, often indirectly, often
poetically, often insinuating the topic into my narrative as the enhancement
562

insinuated itself in mysterious but quite definitive ways into my life over
several decades of this pioneering experience.
The question about what constitutes genuine understanding or a valid
interpretation of an ongoing life story is a crucial one. Obviously, not all
interpretations are valid. Valid interpretation relies on good guesses, partly
because all our actions are what one could call plurivocal. They are open to
several readings, views, opinions on their meaning or purpose. Guesses only
enable the process of interpretation to begin; it is a necessary step in judging
what is important in life, in one’s own life, in gaining any understanding.
Certitude in so much of the interpretations of our actions, if not all of them,
cannot be demonstrated. The best we can get most of the time are strong
probabilities. And as I have pointed out before in the words of John Hatcher:
“We can not possibly evaluate what befalls us or anyone else in terms of
whether it ultimately results in justice or injustice or whether it is harmful or
beneficial.”591
The fruition of our life and its actions is destined for another
plane of existence. Is it difficult to evaluate this pruning process.
591
John Hatcher, The Purpose of Physical Reality, Baha’i Pub. Trust,
Wilmette, 1987, p.109.
563

There is, then, an ongoing recomposition, involving imagination and critical
reflection, in the writing of autobiography. The story is never ended until we
die and the meaning changes all the time. There are, though, what you might
call valid understandings which possess an internal coherence; they do not
violate the whole of the story; they seem to be authentic, genuine. In the end,
though, as Paul Ricoeur notes, “it is still possible to make an appeal.”592
The
appeal process, Ricoeur argues, belongs in the realm of the poetic, the
metaphorical. “Truth,” he says, “no longer means verification but
manifestation.” Here language is a vehicle of revelation, intuition.593
Ricoeur emphasizes the importance of this “poetic understanding” to project
a new world, to break through, to open. It involves opening or exposing
“oneself to receive a larger self.” Readers will, then, find many a poem that
I use to try and “break through” “open,” to intuit and manifest some larger,
deeper, perspective, 594
to obtain “a radical personal engagement with the
truth claims”595
of my life, my religion and my views of my world. Ricoeur
adds that in autobiographical writing: "The task of hermeneutics is to charter
the unexplored resources of the to-be-said on the basis of the already said.
592
Paul Ricoeur, 1971, p.555.
593
Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” Essays On
Biblical Interpretation, London, SPCK, 1980, p.102.
594
ibid.,p.108.
595
Hans Georg Gadamer
564

Imagination never resides in the unsaid.”596
To put this idea in a slightly
different way: every image of the past that is not recognized and expressed
in the present as one of the present's own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably from our grasp. This autobiography is in some ways my simple
attempt to tie down what tends to be somewhat slippery, somewhat
evanescent. I must admit that I write somewhat in the same vein of Kurt
Vonnegut's smiling, shrug-shouldered, but not unserious admission that all
writers write "in the secret utopian hope of changing the world."597
And, if
this I can not do, I'm happy just to get my story told.
In the pages ahead, then, readers will find imagination and critical reflection
working together. We all take up things differently. We play with the
materials of our world differently. Imagination brings home unreliable and
often shady friends such as dreams, questions, flashes of insight; critical
reflection’s friends are eminently respectable, though often difficult for
imagination to bear. Sometimes they work together well and it is impossible
to tell what is going to come of their intimate collaboration. But the work of
the imagination is in the context of reportage and form. If falsehood is
596
Ricoeur, 1984, p.25.
597
John Barth, "All Trees Are Oak Trees.…," Poets and Writers Magazine,
2003.
565

detected, says Richard Coe, autobiography fails.598
And this is a serious
statement for who can be absolutely honest every minute or every day and
every minute when one writes! Noone: not in everyday life nor in the
writing of autobiography. But, if I am successful here, through poetry,
interviews and anecdotes, I will so personalize this narrative as to actively
engage readers. As the actor Kevin Klein said in relation to ideas and words
he has “stolen,”599
I graft the words and ideas of others if they resonate with
my own experience and, as far as possible, I acknowledge the source. The
result, I trust, is a person who is complex, contradictory and flawed, with
subtle and gross features and qualities that are liked and not liked. The
result, too, is a constant enlarging of my "stock of fresh and true ideas,"600
ideas which nourish my creative activity.
In some ways the question of honesty in life is more accurately a question of
what is appropriate and timely for the occasion. What is disclosed is,
hopefully, suited to people’s ears. In some ways, too, this whole question of
honesty is encompassed by the words of Harold Rosenberg, the famous art
598
Richard N. Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the
Experience of Childhood, Yale UP, 1984, pp.74-5.
599
Kevin Klein on The Jim Lehrer Hour, 8 January 2004, 5:00-6:00 pm.
600
Matthew Arnold, Matthew Arnold, editor, M. Allott and R. Super,
Oxford UP, 1986.
566

critic, who wrote in 1959--the year I joined the Baha'i Faith--that American
art is a tradition of non-tradition. It is a tradition of solitary and isolated
effort. For many international pioneers, and certainly for this one, I find
much of my work, both as a Baha'i and as a person, is indeed a solitary and
isolated effort. This makes it easy for me to see myself in idiosyncratic
terms with a unique tone.601
There is, as far as I know, no autobiography on
anywhere near the scale of this effort by an ordinary Baha'i who is part of
the basic warp and weft of the community. And so I have nothing with
which to compare or contrast my work.
There are, of course, great religious autobiographies I could have drawn on
like those of: George Fox, the "Confessions" of St. Augustine, Saint Teresa's
"Life," Bunyan's "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners," the "Life of
Madam Guyon, Written by Herself," and Joh Wesley's "Journal." They all
lay bare the inward states and processes of the seeking or the triumphant
soul. I do as well, but I would not claim for this autobiography the same
status or ranking as these great works. William James, one of the founding
fathers of psychology, states that religion must be studied in those
individuals in whom it is manifested to an extra-normal degree. I'm not so
601
Harold Rosenberg, "Parable of American Painting," The Tradition of the
New, New York: Horizon Press, 1959.
567

sure. It is certainly one way to study religion. I'm not so sure I would want
my life to be an exemplum for others to emulate. Studying the lives of those
individuals who have a particular genius for religion, for whom religion has
constituted well nigh the whole of life, like the founders of the great
religions and many of the exemplary figures in these great religious
traditions would, I think, be useful. But such a life is not found here. George
Fox, St. Augustine and Saint Teresa, perhaps, are the eminently worthy
characters of this sort. Not Ron Price.
"The world-events which moved rapidly across the stage during the crowded
years of his activity," writes Rufus M. Jones in the preface to George Fox:
An Autobiography, "receive but scant description from his pen. They are
never told for themselves. They come in as by-products of a narrative,
whose main purpose is the story of personal inward experience."602
And so is
this true, for the most part, of my own work, although I give more social
analysis than Fox does in his work. Fox provides a minute study of the
hamlets of his microworld and the sects and cults of the Christian relgion
that existed at the time. Readers will look in vain for such a study in this
autobiography. Fox, according to Rufus, saw everything he wrote of equal
602
Rufus M. Jones, Preface, George Fox: An Autobiography.(1694)
568

importance. I find it difficult to assess the relative significances of the many
sections of this work and leave it to readers to find the mantle of meaning
that is relevant to them and their world.
One problem in assessing and analysing the events of contemporary society
has been in evidence since, arguably, November 12th 1960 when Kennedy
defeated Nixon owing largely to the TV debates.603
Many writers have been
talking about the triumph of the image over the content since the massive
spread of TV in the 1950s. Daniel Boorstein's The Image(1961) introduced
the concept of pseudo-events and before him Kenneth Boulding in a book by
the same name(1956) wrote about pictures becoming a substitute for reality.
Louis Menand thinks the reason for this developing feature of western life is
the pleasure people take in "artificially enhanced reality." People have
difficulty facing "ordinary life, in which the excellent and the extraordinary
are rare and most things are difficult, imperfect, disappointing or boring."604
Needing life to be sweetened, we have the media industry which has grown
up and presented us all with many realities, distractions, allurements and
603
Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960, 1961.
604
Louis Menand, "Masters of the Matrix," The New Yorker, December 29,
2003.
569

trivialities, knowledge and insight.605
But, as St. Augustine warns, we must
guard against enjoying the distractions of the voyage lest we become
stranded in mid-ocean and never really find the far shore.606
At the same time we need to be aware that in our words, too, there is, as
Erica Jong points out, “fiction in autobiography and autobiography in
fiction.” Gustave Flaubert wrote of his character Madame Bovary:
“Madame Bovery c’est moi.”607
Philip Roth’s book My Life as a Man is part
novel, part autobiography, mirroring, describing as it does, the chaos of life.
I could site other examples. Like Louis Armstrong's aim in jazz in the
1920s, I try to tell a story, to convey an intimate experience of life.608
Perhaps if I introduced more fiction into my narrative it would grab the
reader more effectively. But, to a significant extent, I am imprisoned in the
facticity of my life. “History,” wrote Brent Robbins “is the resolute taking
up of one’s heritage as a destiny.”609
This heritage, though, is both facticity
605
The literature now available that analyses the print and electronic media
is burgeoning and this is not the place to delve into the myriad issues
relating to them.
606
St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. NY,
1958.
607
Quoted on February 10th
1985, “Book Review of Erica Jong’s Parachutes
and Kisses,” The New York Times, p.26.
608
"Jazz," ABC TV, 19 November 2003, 11:00-12:00 pm.
609
Brent Robbins, “ Phenomenology, Psychology, Science and History,”
Internet: Existential-Phenomenology Page.
570

and destiny. At the same time, in the academic writing of history or
autobiography, the tendency to produce an untiring positivity, a series of
assertions as to what actually happened, must be countered if the result is not
to be some lock-step, dry tinder-box of events that never get lighted with the
fire of life, of imagination, of soul, of inner life. Like the novelist, say
William Faulkner who wrote about the South in the USA, the
autobiographer possesses an inheritance too. It is impossible to divorce that
writer from his inheritance. For me that inheritance is a composite with the
Baha’i Faith, its community and idea system, as critical components.
My own autobiography tends less toward the novel and more toward
interpretive history, sociology, psychology and philosophy. This book is also
somewhat like the description that the French poet Paul Valery gave of his
books. He said that they were merely a selection from his "inner
monologue.”610
These inner monologues are intended to enhance, to enrich,
the inner life of readers. I try to establish a beachhead in the brain of my
readers by my reactions, my comments, my words that try to etch into the
sensory and the ineffable in life. In the process I supply, furnish, outline a
structure for the amorphousness of life itself. The task is impossible to
610
From The New York Times, 1997: The Internet.
571

achieve. I make a start. This amorphousness is strongly coloured by the past
which is never really dead. It is not even past. "Its reverberations inside the
human mind," as the American novelist William Faulkner wrote, "are
continuous."611
The realization, the understanding, of human experience
seems to be possible only after we have lived it.
“I can only write about myself,” wrote Enid Bagnold at the start of her
autobiography, “But oneself is so unknown. Myself has no outline.”612
This is
arguably the cri de coeur of the modern author. The autobiographical
unravelling is a created thing: part artifice, part work of art, part slippery and
unpredictable discourse. The essential glue in the process of constructing
autobiography is memory which is “a complex cultural and historical
phenomenon constantly subject to revision, amplification and forgetting.”613
There are other glues, though, that are involved in the writing of an historical
account like an autobiography. One such glue is the explanatory power of
culture itself. Meaning construction is at the very nexus of culture, of social
structure and social action. It is this meaning construction that must be the
611
William Faulkner in Bright Book of Life, Alfred Kazin, Little, Brown and
Co., Boston, 1971, p. 28.
612
idem
613
Roger Bromley, Lost Narratives: Popular Fictions, Politics and Recent
History, Routledge, London, 1988, Introduction.
572

explicit target of investigation when writing autobiography, for it is not so
much the events of life but their meaning that is the crucial variable. When
one is involved, as I am in the cultural dimension of historical explanation,614
the culture of my time, my religion and the very landscape of where I have
moved and had my being, are all part of my autobiography. The special
appeal of autobiography that has only arisen in the years of my adult life, is
the fascination with the self and the self’s profound and endless mysteries,
as well as an anxiety about the dimness and vulnerability of that entity,
about its shadowy existence or non-existence in the text and in life615
or,
alternatively, about its dominance, its pervasiveness and its ego-centricity.
There is a strenuous and ceaseless exertion of the intellect here which has
gone on for years, decades, epochs. It is largely a pleasurable exercise and it
occupies the interstices of life for the most part quite pleasantly, although
that is not always the case. This exercise of the intellect is partly a
compensation for the blindness of the heart, its passionate and seemingly
insatiable lifeforce where man often explodes in the service of his passions.
614
Anne Kane, “Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives
as Cultural Structure and Practice,” History and Theory, Vol.39, October
2000, pp.311-330.
615
James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic,
Historical and Bibliographical Introduction”, Autobiography: Essays
Theoretical and Critical, Princeton UP, Princeton, 1980, pp.3-27.
573

As John Ruskin once wrote, the great writer or poet must combine "two
faculties, acuteness of feeling and command of it."616
I have certainly had
my destructive, irrevocable explosions and, like a chronicler, I go back into
the past to put it together again. "Desire,", 'Abdu'l-Baha wrote back in 1875,
"is a flame that has reduced to ashes uncounted lifetime harvests of the
learned." Accumulated knowledge can not quench this flame. Only the holy
spirit or, as Jack McLean puts it, waging a mental jihad can control and
guide this desire.617
And waging jihad, mental or otherwise, has never been
one of my gifts. The government of the passions seems to be a life-long task
which one only partly achieves.
This book has become part of an ongoing project in life, a project that
Edward Said described in his first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of
Autobiography(1966). It was not a career, Said wrote, that a writer should
aim for but rather a project that a writer pours himself into. A series of such
works in turn define who the writer is. And such is this particular work: part
of a project, part of a definition of self. However strenuous and ceaseless
the exercise of the intellect, it is not a mental jihad but, rather, a milder
616
John Ruskin,"The Symbolical Grotesque Theories of Allegory, Artist and
Imagination," Ruskin's Poetic Argument, Cornell UP, 1985.
617
Jack McLean, Dimensions of Spirituality, George roanld, Oxford, 1994,
p.189.
574

exercise of the faculties. There is, though, a type of portraiture which we
usually find in literary autobiographies and biographies. These portraitures
usually focus on their subjects exclusively, reducing to shadows friends,
relatives, and influential contemporaries, and barely sketching in the social
milieu which they inhabited.618
The portrait here in this autobiogrpahy is
certainly guilty, to some extent, of this shadow effect but it does sketch the
social milieux more fully. The landscape of my work is broad; it is filled
with figures, many of them usefully if not minutely articulated and set in
motion. I have written what amounts to a general social history of my times
from a western perspective in the last half of the twentieth century and the
early twenty-first, and in its midst, one can trace the frequently detailed and
sometimes obscure narrative of my life, its dark places made sufficiently
visible, part of a broad canvas, a many-toned-and-textured picture. I have
made a strenuous effort to integrate my life, my society and my religion.
I often speculate, argue from probability and by analogy, and relentlessly
mine passages from poems I have written, notebooks I have gathered, letters
I once wrote and memories that sit vaguely or precisely in my brain for what
618
Graver, Bruce E. "Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet,
Lover, Rebel, Spy," Romanticism On the Net 13 (February 1999). A Review
of: Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy,
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
575

they can yield that is relevant to the text. Robert Gittings wrote, in his The
Older Hardy published in 1978, that "the creative vitality of Hardy's life was
due in large measure to his lifelong self-discipline in reading and note
taking."619
In my own case, as I write these words, I have little doubt that in
the last fifty years I have averaged some four hours per day devoted to
reading, writing and notetaking and whatever creative vitality I possess
derives in significant measure from this long and, on the whole, pleasurable
if disciplined activity.620
One can argue about my conclusions and disagree about the nature of my
evidence, for they are all just one man's view. But I think this work is
arguably one of the important studies in autobiography from a Baha'i
perspective and, if taken seriously, will have a role in shaping the course of
autobiographical and biographical studies in the years to come.
I flesh out my portrait by investigating my family, perhaps too briefly; my
sexuality again perhaps too briefly; my finances hardly at all and my
619
Robert Gittings, The Older Hardy, Heinemann, London, 1978, p.192.
620
This average is a guesstimation. There were, of course, periods in these
fifty years, 1954-2004 when little(0-2 hours/day) was done and periods
when much(8 to 10 hours/day) was done. The years 1974-2004 was a
marked increase over the previous twenty years, 1954-1974. The years from
birth to age 10 saw little reading and little interest in doing so.
576

religious proclivities and involvements more thoroughly than some may like.
I try not to paint, as William Wordsworth did, a poet of calm tranquillity
amidst the storms of his times, a self-conscious creation of a man whose
early life was anything but tranquil. I try not to paint an account of myself,
again as Wordsworth did in that first and great autobiographical poem The
Prelude, which must be handled with care because it leaves far too much out.
Johnson remarks that Wordsworth's portrait is "like one of those
Renaissance paintings with the artist himself represented down in a lower
corner, gesturing toward his subject. Except that, in this case, the subject
turns out to be the poet himself."621
To break through all this self-
fashioning, Johnston adopts a simple rule of thumb for the biographer:
"when there's a choice of possibilities, investigate the riskier one."622
Such a
procedure is bound to create controversy. This rule of thumb should not be
necessary here although, as many writers have found, man is an infinitely
mysterious quotient with endless depths to pursue.
Wordsworth, Johnston maintains, possessed "remarkably low powers of
invention."623
He almost never made anything up. Consequently, there exists
621
Johnston, op.cit. p.13.
622
ibid., p.9.
623
ibid., p.8.
577

in his poetry a rich reciprocal relationship between historical and
biographical data, on the one hand, and the details of his verse, on the other.
This, of course, is not news to Wordsworth scholars. But Johnston's use of
facts and source material to illumine the verse, and then his use of the verse
to provide further facts about Wordsworth's life, is astonishingly new, and
more often than not, convincing. Johnston uses factual data to explain
peculiarities in the poem and shows how, in later revisions, Wordsworth
progressively disguised factual details, usually by substituting vague
generalizations for what was originally quite specific, and he points out clear
differences between the poem and its literary source. These differences,
according to Johnston, provide further clues about Wordsworth's life: where
Wordsworth departed from a literary source, he drew directly from his own
experience. And Johnston then presents further evidence to corroborate this
hypothesis. History, biography, and literary art are inextricably bound
together and must be so for anything like coherent meaning to emerge.
Johnston repeats this procedure time after time, with passage after passage
of Wordsworth's poetry. Evidence from a wide variety of sources is laid out
for us clearly, with the dispassionate detachment of a legal brief, a number
of possible interpretations are set forth, and while always offering his own
preference, Johnston gives his reader space to disagree and dispute, and take
578

up the argument in another forum. Even where his specific conclusions are
not wholly convincing, he has defined the procedures by which future
Romantic criticism must be carried out.624
I quote from this article by Bruce Graver at length because it places my own
work and whatever future it may have in a relevant context. There are a
number of inconsistencies and inaccuracies, as one would expect in the first
printing of a 2500 page memoiristic set of volumes with scholarly
pretentions. One would think, for instance, that an autobiographer who
quotes so liberally from so many sources, as I do, would have these sources
more firmly in hand, but I often have to leave a source incomplete with a
page number not even cited. Some of the so-called facts that I draw on are
clearly or possibly errors of fact. This is often due to my not having access
to the published source or my having found it too difficult to obtain such
access.
My references are sometimes several pages off due to my utilizing of
internet sources rather than the books themselves. These are errors, of
course, that can be easily corrected and, as this autobiography will hopefully
go into further editions, one hopes that such errors will be corrected, if not
624
idem
579

by me then by future editors should they and some publisher arise.
Generally, though, I take as great an interest in the autobiographical process
of writing and am as interested in writerly procedure, as I am in
autobiographical outcome. The cautionary note written by Clive James is
helpful in this context. “One of the basic things a young writer about any
branch of history needs to learn,” James writes in one of his columns, “is
that if a quote sounds good, the person quoted is saying something that
somebody else said first.”625
Autobiographer and poet, poem and autobiography, are so deeply implicated
in each other, and it will be essential, for many years to come, to read the
one beside the other. My portrait, I often feel, is of the something that is not
there. To reveal that something requires a fuller text: letters, poems, essays,
interviews, notebooks. And if Freud is right, that biographical truth can not
be had, this autobiographical statement in all its genres, is an absolutely
critical, fundamental, foundation for any architecture that is to be built.
Should anyone ever want to do so.
625
Clive James, “Famous Sayings,” The Monthly, March 2007.
580

I have been a competent teacher, a kind and, I think, judicious, father and a
compassionate if not especially practical husband. I have come to master the
ability to speak to a group, to keep a good set of minutes and wash dishes
with a regularity I have rarely seen exceeded in other company. I came to
see myself, by the age of sixty, as a talented poet, a disinterested gardener, a
poor cook and a capable note-gatherer and writer. I certainly lacked any
mechanical ability or interest, at least none has surfaced in the course of my
life thusfar. In the mundane necessities of life I also seemed to show little
interest: shopping, the car, the garden, cooking, the finer points of cleaning,
clothes, inter alia. To this core of domestic disinterest I could add many
academic disciplines that have never caught my fancy, for there are so many
and they can not all be investigated with vigour and depth. Generally the
biological and physical sciences, engineering and mathematics and foreign
languages have always had an existence lower on the totem-pole of my
interest--to chose some subjects from a broad field that would and does fill
libraries in the world. But here in this narrative I reveal several worlds to
readers and I trust, in the process, that it will help move people into being
more compassionate. Virginia Woolf once said that "writing improves
society and makes the writer a better person."626
I hope that is the case.
626
Alice Walker, The Same River Twice: Honouring the Difficult, Scribner,
2004.
581

As my wife put it, perhaps eloquently, I lived, at least after my retirement,
largely in a world inside my head, although I came out from time to time to
interact when necessity or pleasure dictated, when the world's getting and
spending required my presence and when people, in some shape and form,
nibbled at what was left of a lifetime of affability and sociability. What I
tried to do in my writing and in this autobiography was, as the literary critic
Alfred Kazin put it, "tell over and over the story" of my life and its fatal
deeds until I found "the obstinate human touch that summed up every
story."627
Kazin goes on to say that he sees himself, and writers in general,
becoming as old as thought itself as they examine their younger selves
rushing through the past. Some, like Faulkner, try to put it all in one
sentence; others need great and long stories. Some like Walt Disney and
Harry Potter’s J.K. Rowling do it simply, without ambiguity and with a wide
audience appeal.628
Others, like myself, write long stories for a coterie.
627
Alfred Kazin, Bright Book of Life, Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 1971,
p.31.
628
Mickey Mouse and Harry Potter are Everyman and their authors catch the
mood of millions even billions with their creations. This work is not of the
Everyman vintage. See “Conversation With Scholars of American Popular
Culture,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture,
Autumn 2003.
582

Benjamin Franklin, one of the first 'moderns' to write his autobiography,
wrote in the eighteenth century and, in the process, constructed a particular
model for what a self should be and do. He constructed a self that served as
an idealized identity: static, unchanging and only altered by the varied
interpretations of his readers.629
This process was repeated over and over
again in autobiographical writing, perhaps until just the other day, during
these four epochs. Now, on the Internet, Franklin’s work is interlinked with
literally thousands of other texts and his work has ceased to be a discrete
document. It has become a fluid text, more fluid than it ever could have been
when it occupied a small space on a library shelf, as it did for perhaps two
centuries. Of course, Franklin is still there in the library, but he is also on
the Internet. There he changes with each reader and each time that reader
accesses his documents. There is now so much more cross-fertilization,
interdisciplinary commentary. The author, the autobiographer, is far less
able to manipulate the reader; for readers have at their disposal more than
ever before the tools for critical analysis. They can construct the author in
new and different ways, explore through quite subtle and sometimes
revolutionary processes, if they have the interest, the motivation. At the
same time, of course, one can argue that the reader is more easily
629
John Palmer, “Brave New Self: Autobiographies in Cyberspace,” Internet,
2002.
583

manipulated than ever.630
That is partly why a gender theorist like Judith
Butler631
has come to see identity as free-floating, as the dramatic effect of
our social performance or, for that matter, our performance while alone. This
performance, this identity, Butler sees as shifting and changing with the
contexts of our lives.
And so the memories I live with and by, my spiritual self, which is at bottom
simply the effort of my memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, into
effort, into vision, into patience, into a host of qualities, into a survival
pattern for the future, I cast down in this story, this narrative, which I write
down for readers, piece by piece, paragraph by paragraph. The ownership,
the boundaries of this text, have become fragile in the expanding circle of
information that has become instantly or at least easily accessible in
cyberspace and in life's burgeoning reality of this new age. I can and I do,
place my story firmly in the context of my culture. This is not the story of an
isolated individual but rather a person within an intricate societal network
where self-teaching occupies centre stage. Like Saul Bellow I'm sure I
630
This issue of manipulation is a complex one dealt with by media and
culture theorists and not possible for me to go into it in any detail here.
631
Judith Butler(b. 1956) became famous for her book Gender
Trouble(1990). She teaches comparative literature and rhetoric at the
University of California.
584

influence myself far more than I am influenced by others,632
although
collectively and over the decades there is an immense, an immeasurable
influence from others, writers and non-writers, friends and associations.
Perhaps these influences are due to the fact that thinking is "the most
accessible form of virtue."633
There is an urgency to my thoughts and my
recent writings, including this autobiography, and I have found several
narrative and analytical, poetic and prose forms for their expression. I will
conclude this chapter now with some prose-poems to illustrate some of
what I am saying here:
UNITY OF CULTURE
W.B. Yeats' last poetry was "the fulfilment of his whole life; it made him
write about our times as no other poet has."1
He had seen the world he
wanted and the woman he wanted move further and further away; he saw,
too, that his work and his misery had been useless. R.F. Price's poetry,
especially after 1992, was especially fulfilling. He, too, had had his misery,
632
Alfred Kazin, op.cit. p. 132.
633
ibid., p. 134.
585

his sense of uselessness, his sense of the world moving away, even his desire
for the world to move away and disappear entirely. This, among other
things, was what brought poetry near and, by 2004, in six thousand poems.
-Ron Price with thanks to Randall Jarrell, "The Development of Yeats's
Sense of Reality", Kipling, Auden and Co: Essays and Reviews: 1935-1964,
Carcanet, 1981, pp.97-99.
You had wanted that unity of culture
and only got that bitterness
and a fanatic for a lover.
The world had been split in pieces
in a bundle of fragments
with specialized abstractions.
And you thought you could
bring it together through your poetry,
your sense of life and vigour.
And all you got was one long struggle
586

with reality—which is all some get
if the cause is worth fighting for,
for others a consecrated joy.
Unity is this dark age,
this formative age,
this age of transition
is a slow working out,
a tortuous, stony road.
Accepting this, then,
everything is easier.
This is really the only fight
to accept, to quit life
and then reenter it,
becoming one with all creation
and tasting some of that joy.
Ron Price
21 June 1998(begun)
587

21 January 2004(finished)
SOCIALITY AND SOLITUDE
We must be others if we are to be ourselves. For the imaginations which
people have of one another are the solid facts of society. To observe and
interpret these imaginations must be one of our chief aims. The definition of
our inner life and private character must, in the end, be partly a product of
how we see and interact with others. At the same time we can't put everyone
else in our books. There is only so much of life and of others that can be
assimilated, absorbed, made a part of our life. Because we have a strong
reading taste for a background which is solid, for documentation, for
accuracy, for likenesses we are familiar with, we are often confused about
the borders between art and life, between social history and fiction, between
gossip and satire, between the journalist’s news and the artist’s discovery.
What I write about here is the spillage, the leftovers, the excess, the
largeness and passion of temperament and much that is on the borders. In the
end most of life seems to be on a border somewhere bearing the mere
semblance of reality. -Ron Price with thanks to George Herbert Mead,
588

Charles Horton Cooley and Shoghi Effendi Rabbani in Reflexivity and the
Crisis of Western Reason: Logological Investigations Volume 1, Routledge,
NY, 1996, p. 267; and Guidance for Today and Tomorrow, George Ronald,
Oxford.
So much of who we are
is socially constructed,
through detours
into the referential perspectives,
the attitudes of others
we come back to ourselves.
It is as if we are enveloped in others,
in their encompassing signs and voices
and we are literally made from words
and speech which interweave themselves
into our being and we rise,
differentiate and evolve.
We respond to our own responses,
making our experience and the self
589

which emerges in this process.
Networks of social interaction
produce highly complex
individual self-understandings,
enhanced creative existence.
We are socially constructed realities,
needing large helpings of solitude
for our highly divergent minds.
Ron Price
6 December 1997
THE SOCIAL FABRIC
Whatever kind of life a writer lives, what he writes is infinitely more
important than the way he lived. This remark was made of the great Russian
poet Pushkin1
and it has been said of others. I’d like to think it is true of me
for, as I approach the last years of middle age, I am only too aware of my
590

many accumulating sins of omission and commission. I would like to take
refuge in this writing; I would like to think of it as a wondrous legacy, as
part of the important traces left behind from my age. That’s what I’d like to
think. But I can not afford this luxury.
The vulnerability of the soul is only too apparent. How often, Baha’u’llah
declares, at the hour of the soul’s ascension ‘the true believer’ can descend,
speaking metaphorically, to ‘the nethermost fire.’ How we live, the
composite of inner and outer activity, is unquestionably important. But this
poetry will remain, whatever I have done or not done in life, as a series of
pictures of what I trust is meticulously observed spiritual experience.2
At the
heart of both my poetry and my life, is mystery, loss and victory, sadness
and joy. -Ron Price with thanks to Robin Edmonds, 1
Pushkin:The Man and
His Age, Macmillan, London, 1994, p. 240; and 2
H. Summers in The
Autobiographical Passion: Studies in the Self on Show, Peter Steele,
Melbourne UP, 1987, p.79.
Is there some authoritative sway
of imaginative perspicacity here,
which cannot let go of what it finds
591

uniquely precious,
nor leave isolated
what it finds congenial, collegial,
but which must stitch together
across the wounds
of a psychic and a social fabric
the fibres of private and public meaning?1
I write to overcome death,
in a state, as I am,
of intense expectation of it,
in these lingering moments
of a life that will be over
in less than the twinkling of an eye.
1
Gerald Manley Hopkins in Peter Steele, op.cit., p.113.
Ron Price
3 May 1999
NEW STRUCTURE
592

After reading and indexing my poetry from 1980 to 1995 I feel as if the
entire body of work is "Warm-Up." The period September 1992 to June
1995 inclusive I shall now call "The Golden Dome." It is phase three of my
'warm-up.' The period July 1995 to May 2001, nearly six years, I shall now
call "The Terraces." Reading my poetry from phase three, perhaps the first
time I have read it as a whole body of work, allowed me to make the first
overall assessment of my poetry from this phase of its development. It still
seems to be, for the most part, 'juvenilia,' immature and, except for the
occasional poem, singularly unimpressive. I have, though, established a
new general structure, sequence, order, for my poetry during the years 1980
to 2001, a twenty-one year time span. It is a structure in which I have
utilized the names of the general phases of architectural development for the
Shrine of the Bab and the gardens and terraces which embellish it. -Ron
Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 17 April 2001.
I am that modern hero
who preserves and maintains
a face of my own--no epic,
no universal epic,
593

but an epic of sorts;
no romantic hero--just
a personal self now formed
around more than twenty years
of poetry symbolically developed
as the Shrine of the Bab was developed
over more than one hundred years.
And here I have access to such power
as can generate the attitudes and names
of God1
as citizen and philosopher,
as public and private poet and person
in this the beginning of the fifth epoch.
1
Thomas Lysaght, "The Artist as Citizen," The Creative Circle: Art,
Literature and Music in Baha'i Perspective, editor Michael Fitzgerald,
Kalimat Press, 1980, pp. 121-157.
Ron Price
18 April 2001.
594

And so, to go back to my story and its sinuous line, water was crossed,
perhaps for the last time in my life in August 1999.634
As the fifth epoch
went through its third month in April 2001 when I wrote this poem, I had
been in Tasmania for nearly four years. I had no plans to cross any more
water and find some new stimulus by breaking more new ground as Toynbee
had referred to in his Study of History as a key to creating astonishing
contrasts in our life. But, as the gerontologists were informing us at the start
of this new millennium, many of my generation could last well into their
second century. So, who knows what would transpire in my life in the years
of late adulthood and old age. Perhaps a future edition of this autobiography
will be able to provide some brilliant inventiveness and help tidy-up and
synthesize some of the loose ends that have resulted from jumping off at so
many and so various places in my life story, from such a wide variety of
social analysis and from what I'm sure for some readers will see as the
unfortunate results of this writer's divergent brain.
Famous anthropologist Clifford Geertz sees human beings as animals
suspended in webs of significance they themselves have spun. Those webs
are essentially the cultures human beings live in and they are composed of
634
I would, of course, cross the Bass Strait many times in the years ahead to
go to some event on mainland Australia.
595

strands, strands that are their personal histories. These histories, these
stories, these autobiographies, help us understand and explore these cultural
webs and their many and myriad connections that ultimately make up their
communities. Personal stories themselves, when shared with audiences, are
often signatures of cultures in capsule form. They contain archetypes and
standards for acceptable cultural behaviour. The great anthropologist Claude
Levi-Strauss once maintained that through the stories of a culture, the stories
we ourselves tell, the entire culture is accessed and interpreted in a
meaningful way. The storyteller gives her or his listeners such interpretation
in subtle and entertaining ways, and in ways far more important than the
mere ethnography or ethnology of a social group.
596

The discourse, the impulse, of autobiography and that of ethnography can be
combined and is in the sub-discipline of autoethnography. Autoethnography
is an alternative to a tendentiously-characterized and conventional
autobiography, on the one hand, and to a exoticizing, native-silencing brand
of anthropology, on the other. Autoethnography is simply a form of self-
narrative that places the self within a social context. As an autobiographical
revision of ethnography it may aim at giving a personal accounting of the
location, the life, of the self by making the ethnographer the subject-object
of observation. It involves the ethnographic presentation of oneself as the
subject which is usually considered the ‘object’ in the ethnographer’s
interview. The standard model of the personal memoir or autobiography
supports a liberal-individualist ideology and tends to isolate the author-
subject from community, although not entirely so for this would preobably
be impossible. Works by women and members of historically oppressed
groups often resist the hegemony of this individualist approach and tend to
give more weight to the social formation or inscription of the self and to the
ways in which the author-subject negotiates the terms of their insertion into
the identity-categories their culture imposes on them.
597

Where the representation of cultures is concerned, critics are enthusiastic
about autoethnography’s intricate interplay between the introspective
personal engagement found in autobiography and the self-effacement
expected of ethnography’s cultural descriptions. The impulse for self-
documentation and the reproduction of images of the self pervade our
everyday practice. The common business of social existence is the occasion
for endlessly resourceful and enlightened dramatizations of self. We are
each in our own way articulate exegetes of the politics of selfhood.635
Readers will find here one such interplay by one such exegete.
One of the tacit aims of the personal history performer is to disseminate such
information and interpretation through channels that are more spiritual and
more subconscious than the anthropologist's cold ethnographic narrative.
When people engage in the telling of their personal histories, a spirit of
communitas pervades the entire attending group, regardless of the various
backgrounds each individual member of the group possesses. Communitas is
a feeling of equality, a profundity of shared, vital and spiritual involvement
635
James Buzard, “On Autoethnographic Authority,” The Yale Journal of
Criticism
598

that a group experiences in the process of ritual or quasi-ritual activities. It is
this spirit that is part of the goal of the autobiographer, the teller of the story.
It is my hope that readers encounter here feelings of communitas. This
writing, this activity has the goal of reasserting shared paradigms and
celebrating the known and common social structures that exist around us in
the Baha’i community. Communitas is an important step in bringing people
together, and in a world in which diversity and variety are not only
becoming more prevalent, but are also becoming increasingly sought after, it
is vital in creating individuals who value others and other cultures. It is my
view that the paradigms of Baha’i culture are shared through the telling of
our personal histories. My personal and individual interpretations of life and
the moral and ethical codes that accompany these interpretations are also
shared in this story. Society and the individual are brought together in a
synergy of experience for both the teller and the audience, for me and
readers. This is part of the magic of personal history performances. The
telling of personal histories has an advantage over many other arts in
creating a culturally sharing atmosphere since it is so ephemeral and so
personal an art. But it is in this atmosphere created between my words and
599

my readers, that answers to so many of life's questions will be found, if any
indeed are to be found, not so much in the overall text.
Through storytelling, other cultures and differing personalities can actually
be accessed and shared in real and entertaining ways, with narrative that
sparks interest in and personal involvement with characters from diverse and
varying backgrounds. The art of autobiography demands interpretation and
the recasting of the naked experiences of life; interpretive theory and a sense
of design bring loose and meaningless facts into some order, some
framework. And there is always the ineffable, as I reiterate from time to time
in this narrative.
By telling my story, as I do here, others can participate in the process of
reaffirming qualities of the human, the personal, in a society that sorely
needs it as it becomes further technological and impersonal. In fact, if such
story telling, such autobiographical statement, ceased to exist, meaningful
and artistic communication would also cease to exist and the very
foundations of vital sharing would collapse and society with it. Tellers of
personal histories are givers. They give their stories to others, hoping that in
some way, other individuals' lives will be improved. They are intended to be
600

service-oriented, unselfish exercises that seek to make others happy. I gladly
make this story available to others. When the imagination is stirred and
feelings and attitudes are explored and reaffirmed, the most fulfilling type of
entertainment occurs. The personal history performer brings images and
visions of people and places to life for her or his listeners. Such engagement
does not numb the mind, although one can never write iron-clad guarantees.
Movies or television often stimulate and often numb the faculties.
Storytelling demands that the audience share with the teller in creating the
pictures, scenes, actions and emotions of the story. This is not always
attainable. The mind may be stimulated and exercised; the listener and teller
may leave the experience invigorated and energized or bored to death.
The ways I have responded to public figures both inside and out of the
Baha'i community, the feelings these many people have evoked, the
interpretations of life they invite or inflict, the meanings they embody in the
few or many interactions that take place, these are not shadows cast upon a
wall but the very stuff of my experience. It may all be like a vapour in the
desert; it may be in reality a dream and not the water of life at all; indeed, it
may be mere illusion, as Baha'u'llah says, but it is the metaphorical vehicle
within which I am intended to grow and acquire virtues for mysterious
601

purposes beyond the grave. And so, to decry the human inadequacies and the
faults and failings of my fellow beings or the lack of response of my
contemporaries, however natural this voice of complaint may be, simply
betrays an unwillingness to reckon with, to understand, the realities of this
postmodern world.636
I would like to say some things about community, both the Baha'i
community and the various collections of individuals I have had association
with over the last half a century. I will begin with three poems, some ideas
from Georg Simmel one of the finest analysts, I have found, of sociability
and some of my own experience as a way of introducing some general
comments about the social dimension of this autobiography:
TRIUMPH
It is the nature of sociability to free concrete interactions...and to erect its
airy realm...the deep spring which feeds this realm and its play does not lie
in...forms, but exclusively in the vitality of concrete individuals, with all
636
I have borrowed here from Drake Bennett, "The Nixon Enigma," The
American Prospect, Vol.14, No.9, January 10, 2003. this is a review of
David Greenberg's Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image, WW Norton,
2002.
602

their feelings and attractions, convictions and impulses....Yet it is precisely
the serious person who derives from sociability a feeling of liberation and
relief. -Geoege Simmel, The Sociology of George Simmel, Kurt Wolff(ed.),
Collier-Macmillan, NY, 1964.
This is unquestionably the community,
an instrument of mega-proportions
with a community feeling that will
triumph over everything and become
as natural as breathing, necessity itself....
So: what is crucial is
our subjective orientation
toward the community
in all its manifold aspects.
This is our elan vital;
this is our therapy, our centre,
our norm, our basis of judgement,
our overcoming of antisocial dispositions,
our indestructible destiny.
603

Here is creative tension:
the individual and community,
much talked about dichotomy
that stifles our capacity for joy;
where we are learning new bases,
new instrumentalities for happiness
after centuries of darkness;
where guilt and innocence play
in a drama whose roots are largely unseen;
where the alone and the lonely are found
in a complex web of social interstices;
where the greatest theatre of all
plays life on the stage
and we play with a required courtesy,
hopefully genuine, a certain reservedness,
but not as stiff and ceremonial as the past.
It seems purely fortuitous: the harmony,
contact and dissonance, the easy replaceability
604

of everyone we meet, the democracy we play at.
And we must play on the stage as players
with our parts-not indifferent-interesting,
fascinating, important, even serious,
with results: after the action,
the play of several acts with many scenes
and exchangeability. Ourselves, our self,
our personality may just vanish
or become coated with the many colours
of ‘otherness’.
Enter thou among My servants,
And enter thou My paradise.*
For here you must lose your self
to find community
and we have much to learn
about loss of self.
It is here we shall find
the community feeling that will triumph
over everything, as naturally as breathing.
605

Ron Price
1 December 1995
* Seven Valleys, (US, 1952), p.47.
These are perspectives on conversation, on the social, written after more
than thirty years on the pioneering road. In the first years, the first decade,
1962 to 1972, I found the conversational milieux, a source of great, perhaps,
chronic, frustration. There was pleasure, too, but frustration made up many
of its threads. The intensity and frequency of this seemingly chronic
frustration waned with the years and became, too, a much less frequent and
less intense experience after my retirement in 1999.
LIQUID CRYSTAL PING PONG
When life touches us
poems appear like bruises
-Roger White, “Bruises”, Occasions of Grace, 1994, p.164.
606

“Surely, this game evening
was not bruising.”
-Participant in a game evening organized by a friend for a group of nine.
The candle splutters in the cool evening air;
it has been a hot day, one of the first of the summer.
The air is so refreshing, it matters not if
the games this evening,
the basis for tonight’s sociability,
are somewhat tedious.
This is another of those
‘make the best of it’ settings;
you get better at it with the years,
even become a bit of the entertainer,
synthesizer, unifier, charmer, raconteur
(for that has been your ostensible goal)
in one of these planned or thrown together,
four hour, eight hour stage performances,
leg-on-leg, the finest and subtlest dynamics
607

of broad, rich, oft-repeated, social existence.
The girl beside me, Kate,
catches the warm light
on her brown legs and hair.
Her eyes are the colour of rain.
I’m sure the frangipani frequent her boudoir.
We talk, so briefly;
we could have talked long, dined,
perhaps had an evening swim and made love,
but not in this world and probably not the next.
The art in art, he said, consists in:
having the courage to begin,
the discretion to select
and the wisdom to know when to stop.
I have gone too far, for some,
not far enough for others.
But what of me?
What of my many selves
608

that I’ve been trying to bring together
into some wholeness, an integration,
in a perpetual balancing act,
an unstable reconciliation of forces
in my psychic life, a battle that
once tore at my edges, but now
provocative stimulation,
challenge and response,
assertion and withdrawal,
no erotic push or poetic madness.
And so we chat; we play the evening’s games.
The air cools, the balmy breeze blows Kate’s hair
across a thousand stars. Like liquid crystal
our words dance in unpredictable patterns,
as if blown by the wind
in serendipitous, if unremembered,
weavings, gropings and groupings,
never too turbulent.
I think of a way to make a quick exit
609

for I have tired of conversational ping-pong
in a group of nine. It is an old game for me,
at least since 1962. I’ve never played it well,
although I’m better at it now,
just about comfortable.
I play it better in groups of two.
It requires a brilliant inventiveness,
after 255 minutes of backs-and-forths
I exit as courteously as possible.
8 January 1996
And, finally, a third poem:
LET’S GO ALL THE WAY
Described below is an evening spent in the home of an Australian couple. It
was a typical evening. The conversation flowed smoothly and quickly. On
other occasions, with other couples, the conversation is often not as
flowing. This couple is one which my wife and I have known for about five
610

years. I have tried to describe, as graphically as possible, the nature of the
evening and the difficulty of talking about the Cause in any meaningful
sense. The evening represents one venue, one situation, one typical teaching
activity in a person’s home. It must be repeated ad nauseam across Australia
and has been for many decades. -Ron Price, 11:00 am., 1 January 1996,
Rivervale WA.
Well, there’s a five hour
whiz-around-everything-under-the-sun
evening, occasionally coming up for gas
conversations, all very stimulating
as long as you can keep feeding
the machine with verbal fodder
just to maintain the pace at all times
with lots of food and drink thrown in
for good measure and sociability.
How many evenings I’ve had
like this in twenty-five years
on the international pioneer stage
611

in the Antipodes: Australia.
By God, I can talk
with the best of them now,
shift conversational gears1
with razor-sharp speed,
touch down on the serious
or the inner life just to measure
the waters, mention the Cause
once or several times en passant
just to see if someone
would like to pick up on it,
play mental gymnastics,
a pot pourri, keeping it light,
humorous, dexterous,
from here to eternity.
I question the mileage gained,
the meaning, the purpose, the value
of endless discussions about trivia.
Make friends, you say,
612

get to know people, lay the foundation,
make a start, lay before these contacts
your inner life and private character
which mirror forth in their manifold aspects
the supreme claim of the Abha revelation.2
You become the entertainer, the raconteur,
the man-for-all-seasons, everybody’s somebody,
bouncing the verbal ball for five hours;
maybe there’s an infinitesimal glimmer,
the smallest of look-sees
into the inner chambers
of each other’s hearts, minds and souls.
Perhaps to the extent that
the outer is a reflection of the inner,
we make a start, build a bridge.
How many only saw the outer life of ‘Abdu’l-Baha?
Only a few seemed to see what Howard Ives saw.
So, too, do we dance around each other’s outer shells.
613

After twenty-five years of playing
pass-the-parcel in lounge rooms
and gardens all across Australia
I’ve become quite adept.
I’ve heard that faith is patience to wait;
I wonder if my inner life
will ever be good enough
and I ponder at the nature of a society
which rarely gets beyond the outer layers
of the parcel.3
I’m tempted to yell:
take it off! take it off! Let’s go all the way!
Ron Price
1 January 1996
1
"The ability to change topics easily and quickly is part of the nature of
social conversation." Georg Simmel, op.cit., 1964.
2
Shoghi Effendi, Guidance for Today and Tomorrow. This quotation is part
of one of the more famous of the Guardian’s statements. It begins: “Not by
614

the force of numbers...” Shoghi Effendi says that our success in teaching
ultimately rests on our inner life and how that inner life mirrors, in its
manifold aspects, the teachings of Baha’u’llah.
3
pass-the-parcel is a children’s game that can also be played by adults and
consists of passing a small article, wrapped up in many layers of paper, from
one person to the next. The person who has the parcel when the music stops
takes off one layer of paper and then must leave the game. The person who
is never caught with the parcel when the music stops wins. The game
usually generates lots of laughs and excitement and the pace is quite fast. I
have a theory, developed from twenty-five years of playing this game-as a
pioneer-that social evenings like the one described above are just that,
social. We take layers of ourselves off. The Baha’i should not attempt to get
into anything serious insofar as the Cause is concerned, or indeed any other
serious topic for that matter in the course of the first few evenings. People
seem to find it difficult to take off too many layers to pursue the serious, the
inner person.(See the writings of sociologist George Simmel on sociability
for a theoretical/analytical discussion of what I am saying here). Serious
stuff comes outside this context on a one-to-one basis or a special meeting
convened for seriousness because the person has indicated their interest or
you have spontaneously invited them. These are just a few reflections on a
615

‘fireside’ situation I have been in so many times and which this poem
attempts to describe.
I often think, as I look back on the multitude, the seemingly millions, of
fleeting, fragmentary, ephemeral dissolves, moments into which life can be
seen and described in retrospect, that it is process that one should emphasize
again and again, not product, the fortuitous and not-so-fortuitous fragments
of reality with the aid of psychological microscopy and sociological
detachment even aloofness and a fine mix of an alternating and modulated
intense concern and blase indifference. And just as the metropolitan
consumer has come to feel at home, even stimulated, amidst a fragmented
multiplicity of objects and styles, goods and services, which overlap and fill
a world, so too does the individual, so too has this individual, come to feel at
home in this world of variegation. And, if not at home, in this work I at least
demonstrate that I am capable of capturing how I have experienced
contemporary reality and the meaning that radiates from the multitude of
points in time and space along the many continuums of my existence.
During these several decades of pioneering adventure I have developed a
passionate feeling, an intense collection of thoughts, for the human condition
616

and this narrative allows me to give expression to this collection, to
construct a totality from the great number of fragments. This account is,
though, not so much the story of a unique individual but "an individual in a
community," in an intersecting set of social circles, in a world where I am
perpetually confronted by a multiplicity of cultural objects: ideas from
religion to a pervasive secularism, from science to custom, internalized yet
alien, in fixed yet coagulated form, subjective and intimate, restless and
distant, meaningful yet incapable of being fully assimilated.637
And so is this
the experience of my contemporaries throughout the world I have inhabited
these many years. The six variables of social analysis used by Simmel could
very well be mine: size, distance, position, valance, self-involvement,
symmetry.638
But my cage of the future and its impending doom, my
prediction of the atrophy of the soul, partly fulfilled by the hundreds of
millions of deaths that occurred in the century before I wrote and the
cancerous materialism that gripped western civilization, I have replaced by
the vision, the dream, the reality of the flourishing of a new religion and its
637
Georg Simmel in "Simmel's Ambivalent View of Modern Culture,"
Glenn Goodwin, Internet, 2002.
638
The insights of Georg Simmel are highly relevant to this work, but I do
not want to dwell on them too much, thus skewing this autobiography in a
particular analytical direction.
617

succession of triumphs639
in the last century and a half but, more
importantly, in the half century that is at the basis of this narrative.
Some of this personal story, some of my experience, may be of help to
readers by means of a type of healing process which, if I gave it a name,
would be 'understanding.' "My name is Ron and I'm a Baha’i who has
battled along this road," could be the beginning to my story. Hopefully,
some readers will experience healing through a sense of understanding, as
they read my story and reflect on the frustration, the damage and the hurt
they have had in their lives. For the Baha’i community is engaged in a very
serious business: the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. It is no
tea-party, although sometimes it may feel like that and there is certainly a lot
of tea consumed in the process. It is impossible to be involved in an exercise
of such importance, such seriousness, such global dimensions and such
intensity without people being hurt from time to time. It’s really part of the
process no matter how hard we try; in fact the harder we try, often the more
hurt comes our way. Again, that too is part of a bigger process.
639
The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, Baha'i World Centre,
2001, p. 141.
618

In trying to tell you my story I’d like to draw on the words of one of
Canada’s famous editors, Peter C. Newman. I found Linda Richards’ review
of his autobiography in January Magazine. His autobiography is called Here
Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power. The last words in
his book are: “We non-fiction writers are like sailors, infected with the germ
of distance, who can never be tamed or domesticated; only rented on
occasion, but never bought. Those of us who have gained some measure of
credibility practicing this mad craft thrive on a pretend intimacy that spawns
betrayal. However friendly an interview, however intimate the revelations,
we writers remain temporary sojourners in a strange land.”640
Newman was
married four times so he may have been difficult to domesticate. I, on the
other hand, feel that two marriages over nearly forty years have
domesticated me significantly, although my wife might put this in a more
comprehensive perspective. Credibility is also only partially established.
Betrayal, what there has been of it in my life, would require a more detailed
discussion to establish the forms of its existence and what it has meant in my
daily life. Again, I think my wife might offer views on this that might be
more useful to readers.
640
Linda Richards, “Survivor,” January Magazine, November 2004.
619

There is something about telling others about our disappointments that heals.
A broken relationship, a sad heart, personal trials and tests demand that we
tell the story to our closest confidant. There is some of that in this work,
although I would not call what I write, as I mentioned before, a confessional.
I do put my heart on my arm occasionally, but I don’t stick it out with all its
warts and bruises. Some of us need to sing the blues to help us get over
them. Some stories from our lives we carry around and they feed us with
damaging, confusing and inaccurate information. These stories need to be
told, and then replaced with healing, accurate, positive stories that are based
on understanding and insight, stories that maintain the factual basis of our
life but facts that are rooted in ‘wisdom and the power of thought, that are
embellished with a fresh grace, distinguished with an ever-varying splendour
and the new and wonderful configurations of existence.’
Perhaps, to some extent, Theodore Adorno, the critical theorist of the
Frankfurt School was right: thinking and writing domesticate our explosive
impulses; they sublimate anger.641
They channel painful emotion in the
direction of socially critical thought. They purge the tensions of life, which
might otherwise be purged by sport, an active sex life, soap opera or any one
641
Matt Connell, "Childhood Experience and the Image of Utopia," Radical
Phlosophy, Issue 99, January/February 2000.
620

of a multitude of socially functional gratifications. You pays your money
and you takes your choice, as my philosophy professor used to say. But
whatever we do to deal with life's tensions it is often the case that "to reach
our goals we are forced to precede along increasingly long and difficult
paths with the connection between ends and means often elusive, veiled,
obscured and entirely lost.642
While parents or others may have told us "you can't," others will help us
replace this negative story with the "I can" story. The dichotomy, of course,
is not simple for, as the Alcoholics Anonymous motto emphasizes, there are
things we cannot change and we need to have the wisdom to accept the
things we can’t change. Our lives will reflect this new story of success,
these new understandings. Telling stories that are dark and painful and that
embody new understandings give us a chance to realize that we are in the
middle of our great Life Story, and that the future contains the hope of
possibility. Personal stories are for sharing and for hearing and for seeing
and for feeling. As the storyteller, as I paint with words and the gestures of
meaning the varying sensory images in my personal history, readers'
imaginations will I hope take them to often faraway places, let them meet
642
S. Mestrovik, Durkheim and Postmodern Culture, 1992, p. 37.
621

people they have never met or remember those whose voices have become
faint in their memories, and give them an understanding of experiences they
may or may not have experienced. This is all accomplished by a portrayal of
both the familiar and the unfamiliar-made-familiar as the teller identifies,
internalizes, and then portrays the images and events in the story.643
There has developed in the last half century or so what some have called a
"culture of celebrity." Its roots can be traced back to the 1830s, Charles L.
Ponce de Leon has suggested. Leo Braudy in The Frenzy of Renown: Fame
and Its History traces the roots of this Western preoccupation with fame and
the public person back to Roman times. It is not my intention in writing this
autobiographical work to join this frenzy, this cult of celebrity, this
preoccupation with fame. I would lament any fame or renoun that came
with celebrity status because it would cost me the anonymity that I have
come to enjoy, to prize, especially since my retirement in 1999. Indeed it
seems to me that I may achieve the fate of one, Victor Serge. Outside a
small but devoted fraternity of admirers, he is now, nearly sixty years after
643
James P. Carse, Getting Through the Day: Strategies for Adults Hurt as
Children; Nancy J. Napier, Sacred Stories; Charles and Anne Simpkinson,
editors, Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1993; Sam and Fox Keen, Your
Mythic Journey, Anne Valley Fox, 1996 and David Sidwell, Dept of
Theatre Arts, The Utah State University Oral History Program.
622

his death, an obscure presence, dimly remembered and little read. A sad
fate this very well may be for a remarkable writer, a writer who suffered, it
seems to me, much more than I have, as yet. But I have my doubts whether
Serge is rolling, turning or being concerned in any way in his grave or in
some heavenly place that the pen cannot tell nor the tongue recount.644
And so this is not an autobiography that is aimed at making a contribution to
the cult of celebrity. I shall not rise into the stratosphere of celebrity with a
luminosity of any intensity. I am not going to try to keep reality at bay
which seems to be the main function of reality television.645
I do not
accumulate here a temendous wealth of detail concerning every aspect of my
existence. I do not construct a personality as it might be done in the
entertainment industry. There is some of the warts and all, some
observations through my bedroom keyholes but, for the most part, readers
will find here a deliberate eschewing of the celebrity model with its appeal
to voyeurism and some happiness-fantasy in a mythical past, with a
magnification and veneration that rewrites history. I do not glossily slide
without nuance over the surface of my life; I do not overrate the significance
644
For a brief discussion of this Russian writer(1890-1947) see Matthew
Price, “Show and Tell,” Bookforum, Winter 2003.
645
Bill Nichols, Blurring Boundaries: Questions of Meaning In
Contemporary Culture, Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1994, p.54.
623

of ordinary people in my life, although I do probe into motives and
psychologies as far as I am able. I recognize in the process, though, that no
single perspective is adequate for either the autobiographer or the historian
in their task to describe or judge human motives.
This is not a book about gossip or a book that is motivated by--and harbours-
great resentments. I have my regrets and my share of remorse, but it is a
modest quantity in the great scheme of life. Walter Winchell, the columnist
who invented modern gossip in the 1920s and became its most famous
practitioner, understood the powerful subtext of gossip as a form of
empowerment. Having grown up poor, uneducated, and Jewish, essentially
an outcast, he nursed deep resentments himself, and he realized that by
exposing the rich, powerful, beautiful, and famous, he could draw on larger
public resentments. Gossip was a form of democratization — a great
leveller. It demonstrated that the celebrated were no better than the rest of us
and sometimes much worse. Or, put another way, it allowed people to feel
better about themselves by feeling worse about those who had so much
more. While I would not want to claim that I have been free of
resentments--who could--or totally immune or aloof from all the gossip I
624

have heard in my life--and I’ve heard my share--this book is virtually free of
these subjects or at least tries to be.
The Hippocratic Oath also serves me well in this autobiography.
’Whatsoever things I see or hear concerning the life of man, in any
attendance on the sick or even apart therefrom, which ought not to be voiced
about, I will keep silent thereon…’, such words from the Hippocratic Oath
that founds the doctor's confidential relation to his patient also founds my
relation to my readers. Of course, ‘strictly confidential’ means in practice,
both for me and virtually everyone else I’ve known, no ‘absolute’ or ‘strict’
confidentiality. In the absolute sense, for so many reasons, confidentiality
does not exist.
According to a recent article in a psychoanalytic journal “strict
confidentiality did exist until the 1960s, but since then we are witness to its
degradation..’646
Readers will have to look far and wide here to read the
disclosures of those whom I knew and who had the right to speak about their
life assured that their disclosures would be held in strictest confidence.
Within the dynamic vicissitudes of life, given life’s complexities, subtleties
646
Christopher Bollas, “On The Loss of Confidence in Psychoanalysis,”
International Psychoanalytic Association Newsletter, Volume 8, Issue 2,
1999.
625

and enigmas I give utterance to some aspects of people’s personal lives
because my remarks seem timely, although I’m confident that not everyone
will find my remarks suited to their ears. You can not win them all, so goes
one colloquial saying downunder.
The secrets of significant Baha’is or not-so-significant ones, periodic strip
searches of myself and others are not my line, although I do exploit the
dynamic of resentment and hope from time to time inevitably in this account
of life’s flotsam and jetsam. In one thousand pages I think it is impossible to
totally free of the unsavoury and the disreputable, the stuff of so much that
is contemporary autobiography, although I think I side-step most of what has
appeared on my path in these pages. Stakeouts, chases and subterfuges, the
stuff in the sandwich of television and cinema thrillers are simply omitted
from this narrative even though my life has not been entirely free of such
entertainment for the voyeur.647
This may disappoint some readers. There is
something about celebrity narrative and gossip that is so easily digested, so
accessible, containing little of the complexity of real life and none of the
amplitude of great literature. It is essentially ephemeral, useful for a
647
Neal Gabler, “The Rise and Rise of Celebrity Journalism,” Columbia
Journalism Review, July/August, 2004.
626

voracious media but ultimately irrelevant. Much in the print and electronic
media is in this category.
Perhaps much of this autobiography will also be irrelevant but it won’t be
because of the gossip it contains or the pitch, however veiled, however
unconscious or however overt, to celebrity. In the first generation which
was exposed to television and the second exposed to radio, I have had my
fill of hype. More than fifty years of it now has sensitized me to its noise, its
overstatement, its preference for entertainment over edification, its function
to distract with trivia. Although I am aware of the burgeoning literature over
the pros and cons of TV, I tent to lean toward the views of Neil Postman in
his book Amusing Ourselves To Death.(1985).
Readers of this autobiography may complain about the ease with which I
dismiss certain parts of my society, my religion and my life. While I think
there is much to admire in this lengthy work, I fear there may be much to
frustrate this same reader and place that admiration in a more balanced
perspective. I find it impossible not to skim across great chunks of my life,
my society and the Baha’i Faith with significant details simply left out. Not
keeping a record of events as the days, months and years passed; keeping
627

little documentation for the first forty years and virtually none for the first
twenty, I surely miss out much detail. I trust I make up for this failing by
conveying some of the spirit of my life and weaving what life I have
described in an entertaining way.
But given the dominance of celebrity, its presence, on the public landscape
over such a long period of time, over two thousand years and more, I can’t
help but reflect on the significance of even my very limited preoccupations
with this often insidious germ. However unconsciously this germ occupies
my attention, even if I do not want to admit to its presence, still it creeps in.
Perhaps there is an inevitability to the existence to these kinds of tendencies
in any autobiography.648
They certainly play a part in the long history of
autobiography and readers may find some of these inevitable tendencies
slipping in here. With more than six hundred pages to go in this account,
perhaps readers would be advised to wait, to read a good deal more before
they try to answer this question, this issue of my concern with fame. I felt a
certain ambivalence about my celebrity status while I was a teacher for
many years and would probably do so again should it come my way.
648
The literature on celebrity, fame, popularity, renoun has burgeoned in the
last several decades; indeed, Greek civilization has its concerns with these
themes as well, especially in the fifth century BC.
628

Abraham Maslow points out that "our organisms are just too weak for any
large doses of greatness." He continues: "The person who says to himself,
'Yes, I will be a great philosopher and I will rewrite Plato and do it better,'
must sooner or later be struck dumb by his grandiosity, his arrogance."649
Man's true greatness and distinction, Baha'u'llah informs us, "lieth not in
ornaments or wealth, but rather in virtuous behaviour and true
understanding."650
"Man's highest distinction," Baha'u'llah goes on, "is to be
lowly before and obedient to his God; that his greatest glory, his most
exalted rank and honor, depend on his close observance of the Divine
commands and prohibitions.651
If there is any general context for whatever
work I accomplish on this earth, these quotations provide a starting point.
The famous War Poet of WW1, Robert Owen, expressed the view that: "I
want no limelight and celebrity is the last infirmity I desire."652
With this
view I completely concur, although I would add that, if such celebrity
649
William Todd Schultz, "The Riddle That Doesn't Exist: Ludwig
Wittgenstein's Transmogrification of Death," Internet Article: Source
Unknown.
650
Baha'u'llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah, Page: 57.
651
`Abdu'l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, Page: 71.
652
Robert Owen, Memoir, 1931, p.33.
629

accrued, in the process, to the glory of this Cause of God, I would welcome
such an 'infirmity.' I think it unlikely, though, that I will ever face this issue.
I'd like to turn now in the third chapter to a discussion of the collection of
letters that has gradually been accumulated during my pioneering experience
for the last forty years. Perhaps they will reveal part of some unconscious
preoccupation with fame, although my conscious mind thinks this unlikely.
I'm confident the discussion of my letters will reveal, what is also the
intention of this long narrative to reveal, namely, that full understanding of
social phenomena and of our own dear lives is impossible. "We can, though,
recognize the unalterable, irreducible role of the religious impulse,"653
as
expressed through the one Power that can fulfil the ultimate human longing
of the minds and hearts of the people of the world.654
Letters often provide
the roundest portrait of an individual that can be found. There is some truth
in this, but my several thousand letters are not found here for reasons of
prolixity.
This brief overview of some three thousand letters suggests a context. These
letters represent the expression, among other things, of my religious values,
653
Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition, Heinemann, 1966, p. 261.
654
The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, Haifa, 2001, p.144.
630

embedded in social relations, in one of the multitude of social forms with its
infinitely manifold contents. Readers will find in both this general overview
of my letters and the letters themselves, should they ever be published, a
strange mixture, a melange, of my attempts at selfless devotion and the
multitude of my human desires that are far from selfless; my pretensions, my
efforts, to acquire, to develop humility's necessary spirit and the many forms
of enthusiasm and elation, joy and pleasure, of sensual immediacy and
spiritual abstractions. Some might call these emotional elements 'the
religious frame of mind.' At least Georg Simmel expressed it this way.655
He
equated this frame of mind with piety. Without this pietas, it was Simmel’s
view, society would be impossible. It was and is the essential bond by
which society is held together. It was certainly one of the bonds that held
my life together. There were many others.
Virtually all these letters, and since about 1995 emails, have been elicited,
socially necessitated in some way or part of some promotional exercise for
the Cause or my poetry. Occasionally and more frequently with the years,
though, a letter is entirely proffered, an exercise in spontaneous giving, an
655
R. Nisbet, op.cit., p.262.
631

exercise for the fun of going surfing on the waters of language or the waters
of life, to meet a soul as best as one could with words.
In a review of some 50,000 war letters from the 1860s to the 1990s, Vivian
Wagner wrote recently in Book Page that: “One of the few positive things
that can be said about war is that it inspires good correspondence.”656
Much
is hidden, she goes on, between the lines. Much, too, is revealed that tells of
what it means to be human and to endure. I am sure this is equally true of
the literally hundreds of thousands of letters written during the great spiritual
drama the Baha’i community has been engaged in during the several Plans
over these four epochs. Most of these letters, of course, will never see the
light of day. I’m sure, though, there will be more than a few which will
survive: here are some.657
656
Vivian A Wagner, “A Review of Andrew Carroll’s War Letters:
Extraordinary Correspondence From American Wars, Scribner, 2001 in
Book Page, 2001.
657
632

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