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SECTION VI Unpublished Work: Essays-Volumes 1 & 2---170 essays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

My Autobiography: Part 1

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