Autobiography: Installment No.4

Anyone who has actually read the first two volumes deserves a prize for having come this far. If it is any comfort, you persistent few have got through more than half of the conceptual space where identity and meaning meet around the three themes of my life, my society and my religion. If you have read this far, I’m confident that you have gained some pleasure in the read and I am happy for you. Indeed, my very raison d’etre for this autobiography can be found in the pleasure and the understandings you have found thus far.

For many years when I was a teacher I compiled reading material for my students around an eclectic mix of book chapters, journal articles, historical documents, extracts from literary texts, journalism, inter alia. Now, in this autobiographical work, I have followed a similar pattern but put a potpourri into one work. I give to readers a single-authored, multidisciplinary source book for the field of autobiography.

You will find here in the following part of this work an epilogue and some thoughts on letter writing, history, poetry and essays–some of the genres I have used in this work. I will say no more in this introduction to the epilogue other than to leave you with a prose-poem I wrote at the age of 56, a year after I arrived in Tasmania to begin my retirement and a daily-life devoted to writing.

A MIND LIVELY AND AT EASE

It is said that an artist’s work is the sum total of his experience. The artist does not create from a tabula rasa, but from a rich menu of specific and unspecific experience, grey and vague and highly and variously colored. The artist drafts his own destiny as he drafts his music, his art, his sculpture or his poetry, at least in part. And he is never sure, as Stephen Spender puts it, however confident he may be, whether he has misdirected his energy, or whether his poetry is insignificant and irrelevant or great and important.

-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 8 August 2000.

A mind lively and at ease

is a gift of fortune

and gives meaning and value

to perceived experience,

to the deep and rich

satisfaction of my own writing

and to the slow charting of the

progress toward our destiny.

The unperturbed mind

is quickest and can deal

with the vanity of vanities, life,

which we must both accept and

reject, which pierces us with its

nonsense and its strange relations.

1 Jane Austen, Emma.

Ron Price

8 August 2000

ADDENDUM OR EPILOGUE

Having completed my autobiography or, at least, completed a fifth edition in a form that is satisfactory to me in the first two volumes and keeping in mind that I will in all likelihood make additions to it in the years ahead, I want to write a sort of addendum or epilogue in the pages which follow. I write in part because I want to contribute this memoir to the world and I want audiences to read my work hoping, among other reasons, to find a new or at least an altered perspective on their lives. This is probably a somewhat pretentious aim, trying to stake out a fresh territory for readers, a territory that requires my voice, a voice that has similarities to others but is, in the end, uniquely mine. I feel I have done this to some extent in the first two volumes and I hope some readers find some of this uniqueness and enjoy it.

The spiritual ideal underpinning my experience as conveyed in this memoir has captivated, converted and inspired my soul. It is one which I believe will capture many millions and billions in the decades and centuries ahead, irrespective of background and temperament. It was the experience of many, indeed most if not nearly all, of those I came in contact during these epochs to find themselves doubting whether this enterprise of the Baha’is could ever be brought to a successful issue. If they did not doubt, they took little interest. The seductiveness of other systems of ideas and fallacious philosophies which explained the whole machina mundi captivated the intellect and the emotions of the generations I had contact with from the 1950s to the first years of the new millennium.

My approach to this work has many similarities to that taken by the historian and early biographer, Plutarch, who saw the events of his age in personal terms and the individual life in moral terms of progress or regress. Plutarch’s boundless interest in the individual, his sense of the drama of men in great situations is mine. I hope I also possess Plutarch’s wide tolerance, ripe experience and his ability for making greatness stand out in small actions. Alas it is difficult to assess oneself in terms of these qualities.

Autobiographical writing has been redefining the meaning of narrative in recent decades, as the explosion of memoirs by writers such as Frank McCourt, Mary Karr, Dave Eggers and Kathryn Harrison, among others, suggests. Until the last 20 years, coincidentally since the time I begn this narrative, few people without some degree of fame tried to write and publish a memoir. But with the critical and commercial success in the United States of the memoirs of the above authors more and more people have been encouraged to try their hand at this genre. This is but one.

It may be that, ins pite of the best intentions, in spite of my own perception of the quality of this work and the pleasure I take in reading it, my work may not engage the readers in the Baha’i community as much as I’d like to see happen. I think engagement entails defining a common enterprise that newcomers and community veterans can pursue as they try to develop their interpersonal relationships, their teaching opportunities and their own lives. I think I do this quite well, at least I have tried; such is my personal perception of how successful I have been. But as readers continue in their interacting trajectories in their communities and as they continue to shape their identities in relation to one another, they may not find this book that useful. The roads in our life, paved as they are with good intentions, often do not lead anywhere at all.

While engagement with this book may be positive in some ways, a lack of a certain literary and psychological mutuality in the course of the engagement of readers with these pages and these ideas may create relations of marginality, mine and others, that can reach deeply into people’s identities. In the end and at this early stage in the publishing trajectory that this work takes, I’m really not sure how successful I have been. The enterprise of truly engaging my readers will have to wait for the judgment of time and circumstance. I must admit to my suspicions which may be mainly a function of age and the assumptions that time’s occasionally cynical presence laces with skepticism.

Autobiography, unlike novels, does not keep its readers at a distance. The sufferings and tribulations, the successes and wins of the autobiographer’s life are much more immediately part of the reader’s awareness than they are from a novel by the same person. The relationship between a memoir/autobiography and the reader is less mediated and more like a patient/doctor relationship. The writer is on the couch talking: the reader becomes the doctor, reading hopefully with passion and interest, listening as good doctors must, and at the same time putting the story through the mill, as any good doctor would, of his own consciousness, memory and experience. I have often wondered while I have been writing this book whether it will get any readers/doctors at all. The worst that can happen to a narrative, it is often said, is that it remains ‘responseless’.

I have taken a course that another skeptic, David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, took at a much younger age than I. Hume writes in his autobiography that at the age of 23 he “laid that plan of life” which he “steadily and successfully pursued.” He goes on to say that he aimed “to maintain unimpaired” his independency and “to regard every object as contemptible,” except the improvements of his talents in literature.” His first literary efforts, he informs us, fell dead from the press. But, as he says, due to his naturally cheerful and sanguine temper, he very soon recovered from the blows of intellectual and social indifference. In spite of receiving no recognition he continued to prosecute “with great ardor” his studies.

I, too, would have liked at the age of 23 to pursue a literary life but, as I pointed out in earlier volumes, this did not eventuate for many reasons and I had to wait for more than three decades before I could find that fertility and give that concentration which Hume gave to intellectual and literary activity in the early years of his maturity. I, too, like Hume enjoyed a cheerful and sanguine temperament, at least after the problems of a bi-polar disorder were eliminated from my life. By the age of 60 they had been largely sorted out and I was ready to launch that literary career that Hume did in the flower of his early life. Whether I would have the success that Hume enjoyed only time would tell. My continued skepticism was not encouraging, but as the early years of late adulthood insensibly progressed from year to year the energy I expended toward this goal did not desert me linked as it was to the advancement of that Cause I had been associated with now for well over half a century.

Hume took the view that there is no permanent “self” that continues over time. He dismissed standard accounts of causality and argued that our conceptions of cause/effect and argued that relationships are grounded in habits of thinking, rather than in the perception of causal forces in the external world itself. I find this issue of such complexity that to dwell on it further here would lead to prolixity, but Hume’s notion of self is one that writing this memoir has confirmed.

I like to see imagination as a process of expanding the self by transcending time and space and creating new images of the world and the self. Imagination is something which involves locating one’s sense of engagement in a broad, a universal, system and defining one’s personal trajectory of meaning in terms of something that connects what one is doing far beyond oneself. I’d like to think this autobiography extends the meaning of artifacts, people and actions within the personal spheres of people’s lives, at least the people who read this book. That is what I’d like to achieve but, as I pointed out above, I’m not so sure that I have succeeded in this respect. The sheer proliferation of the objects, diversions, and possibilities for life in modern society has made modern society, as Walter Lippmann pointed out after WW1 in his book The Phantom Public, “not visible to anybody, nor intelligible continuously and as a whole.” Abundance has in some ways both blunted and accentuated the meaning of experience and the pleasure to be found in abundance itself. Society, the world, has become one great brontosaurus, some voracious shark, that people who are not used to the sea are trying to dissect and understand. There are elements within this whole that are unprecedented and therefore profoundly shocking and the effects, like those of the shark, are often paralyzing and prostrating.

Still, in spite of the abundance, the burgeoning multiplicities and singularities, of life and its fragmenting, confusing and blunting affects, there have been clear turning points in my life and they represent ways in which I have freed myself in my self-consciousness from my history, its banal qualities and its conventionality. These turning points have been steps toward what Jerome Bruner, one of the great students of autobiography in the late 20th century, calls “narratorial consciousness.” My autobiography involves a description of these turning points not only in my construction of self but also my interpretation of the nature of my society and its culture.

In spite of these complexities and enigmas, the past, my past, has occurred. It has gone and can only be brought back again in thought by this autobiographer or by historians and social scientists working in very different media: in books, articles, documentaries, inter alia. The actual events, of course, can not be brought back. The past has gone, history is what historians make of it and autobiographers, too, when they go about their work. In Re-thinking History, Keith Jenkins describes history as “a discourse that is about, but categorically different from, the past.” And so it is that my autobiography is categorically different from my past. And so it is that my autobiography is not simply a telling of a series of critical incidents.