Readers are now well along into volume 1, chapter 1:
____________________
Some writers, some people, see pattern and meaning in history and some don’t. But whether one sees some plan, some system, in the great gallery of history or whether one doesn’t the death of 10 million people in some social tragedy, people you've never met, does not have the impact of the death of your sister? The newsworthiness of a handful of deaths in your hometown rates more highly than millions in the next continent. Personal tragedy beats impersonal holocaust every time. Propinquity is one of life’s core princples if one is measuring significance and is a principle determining what to include in an autobiography. This is the theme in Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread. For this and for a host of other reasons this autobiography will deal more with the personal than the social, more with the immediate confines of my circle of activity and to a far lesser extent with the larger picture of world events. Amis’ book gives snatches of autobiography; my book gives snatches of social and historical analysis.
He doesn't have to create these things ex nihilo and he doesn't create for the pure pleasure he gets in creating, in telling the story, although the pleasure he gets in writing takes him, with the poet Paul Valery, a long way. Reading this autobiographical work is somewhat like the experience many people have when listening to a jazz performance. Whatever the musicians are playing, you hear the melody and then it goes away or seems to. The musicians play the overall work against the background of the melody or around the melody or they take the melody off into another zone. Then the melody comes back; listeners recognize it yet again amidst a world of other sounds. This, it seems to me, is one way to see this long--and for me at least--stimulating work. A central narrative thrust is reflected and recreated with ideas and emotional content that take readers away again and again. Like the aural idiosyncrasies of jazz and its spaces and places, my narrative has its own idiosyncratic dimension and I provide the spaces and places for readers to participate. There is a type of intimacy created, but not everyone appreciates that intimacy; not everyone likes jazz and not everyone will like my work.
Most jazz music is created in bands: trios, quartets, quintets, etc. This narrative work establishes some of this sense of a band or group by the frequent references there are in the text. As I write these words I see that there are about two references per page, sixteen hundred in an 800 page text. The vehicle for this work is thus enhanced, enriched, by the solo work of others, rhythm sections that draw on several writers, thinkers and philosophers, etc. as accompaniment. They add complexity, tension, different pulses, staggered patterns, superimpositions, repetitions on a theme, similar statements with an ever changing expression.
To continue this jazz metaphor briefly, I’d like to draw on the words of Mark Isaac, a composer of jazz music. Isaac says that his extensive improvising seems, to some listeners, like a hotch potch. I’m sure some readers here will find my work somewhat of a hotch-potch. Isaac says he plays the music differently each time and every time I go about writing this work, it comes out differently. Some of the harmonies in jazz and in my autobiography are obtuse; some are sharp. The melody line leaves openings for just about anything to come in. There is great discipline and much ease in the process of writing here and in the process of creating jazz music, as well, says Isaac. It often takes weeks to get the music right he argues; this work took twenty years to get it right, to get it into a form I was pleased with. Pleasure, I find, tends to help me take the ride of life and the ride of writing. But, of course, there is more, for pleasure itself is never enough, never the whole story. It occupies only part of life's experience. "Experiences," writes that articulate psychohistorian Peter Gay, "testify to the uninterrupted traffic between what the world imposes and the mind demands, receives and reshapes." We construct our experience, says Gay, and that construction is "an uneasy collaboration between misperceptions generated by anxiety and corrections provided by reasoning and experimentation." There is more to our ideas and actions than meets the eye. Our life, our experience, is at one level simply what it seems to be. It is rooted in external reality. And it is also, paradoxically, not what it seems to be. Much of our life is silent; it seems to take place underground or in some inner ground. "We live in the mind," as the poet Wallace Stevens put the human experience. This autobiography tries to deal with both the obvious and the paradoxical. In some ways, the word 'narrative' could be replaced or added to other words like: view, claim, position, interpretation, world-view or even life. To give the word 'narrative' some kind of pristine prominence at the centre of our authenticity, is too strong an autobiographical direction to suit my tastes. To do so may be impoverishing, pernicious, even damaging psychotherapeutically. Even if, or as, I do centre this autobiography on narrative I am conscious of changes I make to my past, alterations, smoothings, enhancements, shiftings from the raw propositional facts and contexts, all processes that may be neurophysiological inevitabilities. Some analysts of autobiography would advise writers "that the less you do the better."
There is too in all this writing a strange assortment of the satisfied and unsatisfied, the appeased and unappeased, the reconciled and unreconciled. There is also intransigence, difficulty and contradiction. From time to time I try to tell what I’m on about, but it is difficult to write a life.
Most pioneers, in both the secular world and the Baha’i community, have exhausted themselves in external activity or filled their lives with events, comings and goings, that seemed to leave, so often, just about always, no record for future generations. This is not necessarily a bad thing; for we can not all be good gardeners, cooks, car mechanics or, in this case, writers. Over the years I have known many talented pioneers. But as a writer, my task is different. I want to place my readers on a stage, swarming with detail, dense with meaning; I want to give readers some of that constant sense of things and ideas that exist outside themselves and outside myself in my time, in these epochs, as Walt Whitman did when the Baha’i revelation was first bursting on the world a century and a half ago. But these words are not the reality of my experience. The text is not the true and only protagonist of this my finite existence. In the end, at the end of this story, silence speaks; narration is suspended. My role as poet, historian and storyteller comes to an end. In the book of history, a book of single and unique stories interwoven on the landscape of earth, I have made myself into a narrator of a story. I am a protagonist, a pioneer, who has narrated his own story and, in the process, rescued himself from oblivion. I have configured my story in community. I do not swallow or erase the scene I tell of, rather, I describe it, paint it, represent it. I make no claims to being an omniscient narrator who is also inside the minds of my characters, although I am certainly in the mind of one. I try to see the world as I see some of the main players in this story and, as I do, I reproduce their separate streams of consciousness.
My story does not take place on an imagerary landscape like Thomas Hardy's Wessex, but it does reflect a fifty year experience as Hardy's did in a different time and with a different pessimism and sense of tragedy than Hardy's. It is an experience moderated by a phenomenon that has captured my imagination for nearly fifty years and generated the spiritual nerves and sinews to work as I have all my life for the unification of the peoples of the world. Hardy and I share, too, a sense of human destiny or fate which can not be deflected once a human being has taken the step which decides it. To put it another way, if you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere. Those were the words of Thomas Mann. You could even
smell the idea he said.
Autobiographers bring specific words to their narratives, words with great explanatory power and emancipatory potential due to the traditions they live and write within. "The tradition of all the dead generations," wrote Marx, "weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." I'm not sure how accurate this view is but, should this be the case, then the emancipatory potential I speak of in relation to this autobiography may derive from this reality. The Christian, the Moslem, the Marxist, the Baha’i, the secular humanist, among a great many other traditions, reify special words that take on very important meaning for them. Christ, Muhammed, class, freedom, justice, Baha’u’llah, oneness: these are words which can not be divorced from the narrative voice of their respective autobiographers. And so it is that I have my special words, my special vocabulary which will unfold in the pages ahead.
Poets who take their readers on spiritual journeys each have their own special languages. Unlike the great medieval poet Dante Alighieri I do not paint the hell I have experienced in colourful and lively imagery but, like him, I do have my metaphorical dark wood with its sinful aspects. Dante has his virtuous non-Christians placed in Limbo. I have my virtuous non-Baha’is whom I am not confident of placing in any particular theological abode. Perhaps I should be confined to Dante’s second circle where “the lustful were punished by having their spirits blown about by an unceasing wind.” For I too have had my lust’s to battle with, lusts that one can find expressed in Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh in the first and second millennium BC. I always thought Dante was a little hard on flatterers who were “mired in a stew of human excrement.” Dante is so often ridiculed now and so might this work of mine be in the years ahead even if my vocabulary is so very different than Dante’s.
I have written several editions of this work in the midst of a "series of soul-stirring events" that celebrated the construction and completion of the Terraces on Mount Carmel and in the first two decades of the "auspicious beginning" of the occupation by the International Teaching Centre of its "permanent seat on the Mountain of the Lord." I see my work, too, as a spin-off, part of that generation of spiritual nerves and sinews that is the result of "the revolutionary vision, the creative drive and systematic effort" that has come to characterize more and more the work of all the senior institutions of the Cause." This lengthy narrative is also my own humble attempt to "comprehend the magnitude of what has been so amazingly accomplished" in my lifetime and in this century just past. What I write is part of "a change of time," "a new state of mind," a "coherence of understanding," a "divinely driven enterprise." The story and the meaning I give it are crucial to my life for, without them--story and meaning--the days of my life would remain, would be, an intolerable sequence of events that make no sense. They would be, at best, a dabbling into things, a sort of entertainment, a search for fun in the midst of love and work with their inevitable pleasures and frustrations. They would express a kind of absurdity which many can and do live with; or like the writer Herman Hess the dominant taste of life would be of "nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams" which he said is the content of "the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves." I would find this a sad and inadequate philosophy, one I could scarcely bear and one I would find difficult to journey through to the end. Telling a story of my life is like a natural echo, an automatic repetition, a rhetorical sequence in the effort to define and link my identity to who I am; to unfold the meaning of it all. In some ways it is both more and less than telling a story. I t is a conversation with a diverse public: family, friends, the past and the future.
Even with an overarching meaning that is a source of joy, of enchantment, there is still sadness, chaos and absurdity in this conversation, this story. Self-interrogation joins the self and produces the story of its life by capturing what is basic about the whole thing, what is indispensable and what is marginal and even superficial. The story of Jon Krakauer's climb to the summit of Mt. Everest illustrates some of the irrationality, the absurdity, the puritanical aspects of anything that is the passion of a life. He writes about his "belief in the nobility of suffering and work.....It defies logic." I find this particular theme of profound significance which I may return to at another time. Krakauer also writes, "I can't think of a single good thing that came out of this climb." Even in my lowest moments, gazing retrospectively at my life, I don't feel I can make this tragic claim for the climb that is my life.
In the process of writing this autobiography I have come to see myself somewhat like a jazz musician, as I have intimated above. Toni Morrison, a modern novelist, said she saw herself like a jazz musician, as “someone who practices and practices and practices in order to be able to invent and make her art look effortless and graceful.” Another musical analogy to this autobiographical process which I like is the music critic who has an autobiographical orientation to his critical writing about music. Music, like my life, is something I play again and again in my head on my mental CD or LP in decades gone by. Music is particularly conducive to inspiring passion. The reason for this is simple. Music lends itself to repetitive consumption. It is unlikely that most people will read the same book, or watch the same episode of a TV show, or see the same film more than five times. But one's life especially different sections of it, is played virtually continuously, repetitively, just like music, only more so. Each time one plays one's life, like music, one finds similar points of attraction and differences. I like this analogy of music to life; it is capable of endless permutations and combinations of comparison and contrast. Only readers will tell of whatever effortlessness and grace I have achieved in producing my music, whether it charms and pleases them.
Before leaving this musical analogy, though, I would like to draw on the work of culture theorist Judith Butler who places a great emphasis on the role that repetition plays in the stabilizing of identity. The basic premise, Butler states amidst her complex language, is that identities are prone to disintegrate unless they are reinforced regularly. The autobiographical experience, like music, in its repetitive nature has this reinforcing nature, reinforcing our sense of self through language, through sound. Repetition is at the very centre of identity formation, at the centre of an endless construction project. Just as songs "call" listeners to a particular identity, to explorations of their identity, this autobiography "calls" me--or perhaps I call it! And the therapeutic dimension of autobiography arises when readers feel the same or even a different "call."
I do not possess that encyclopedic interest that some seem to have in absolutely everything. This encyclopedic interest was described by Mark Van Doren in 1937 when the first Baha’i teaching Plan was being launched in North America. Given the pervasiveness, the multiplicity, the vast complexity, the multitude of academic and non-academic disciplines, the great ocean of humanity and its immensity, it is only too obvious that I must confine my wandering mind, and I do, in this autobiography. My interests are wide but don't extend to everything in the encyclopedia. I find I must focus my thinking on single points if I want my thought to “become an effective force,” as ‘Abdu’l-Baha emphasized. I mention this theme, this concept, several times throughout this work. I mention, too, the private disorder and the public bewilderment of our times, a subject which the generations I have lived and worked with tire of as this bewilderment knocks them around and around, bit by bit over the decades of their lives. I approach these concerns in a variety of ways and try not to dwell on them. For this narrative is not a piece of sociology, politics or economics. There is more of the personal, the literary, the humanly human, here. Readers, though, especially those with a peculiarly forensic mind, may still find this work far too rambling, with an under-belly that is just too complex and detailed for their liking, too much work and not enough payoff, not enough of the right kind of focused stimulation, the kind they get on TV for example, to suit their tastes. The forensic mind is useful in the who-dun-it detective stories and it is useful here, but it must persist in this long work if it is to come up with useful clues for its existential angst, if it is to derive the pleasure I know is there, the pleasure I find.
Narrative or story construction is an increasingly influential and integrating paradigm in psychology and the social sciences generally. The conceptual foundations of a narrative perspective can be traced thematically and contrasted with more traditional models of human psychological functioning. Autobiographical memory, self-narrative and identity development as well as narrative interpretations of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are all part of a relatively new field. Contributions from the cultural and social constructionist traditions to narrative psychology are relevant to my writing and the full weight of their implications are dealt with in this narrative construction of the person that I am.
Recent advances in narrative research methodologies, particularly those qualitative approaches which focus upon interview and other autobiographical sources of data can be helpful. This autobiography does not deal with all of these aspects of narrative or autobiographical psychology. It draws to some extent on the academic, hopefully not too much, not too esoterically. I am only too conscious of the jargon of academic discourse and of how unfamiliar terminology switches readers off swifter than the twinkling of an eye. For I was a teacher for thirty years and, by the time I retired in 1999, I could just about feel the switch-off process in its first few seconds of mental down-turning with a class of students. The language of the last two paragraphs, I am only too aware, is pretty 'heavy.' I shall endeavour to lighten up and keep the style and tone much less freighted with this specialized language from the social sciences.
Much that is part and parcel of academic discourse is seen by the great mass of humanity as unreality, just a lot of words. And I am sure that no matter how I write this book many readers will find what I write as unreal, over their head, too many words, too long, too heavy. To each his own. As T.S. Eliot once wrote, the world can not bear either too much reality or too little. But the pursuit of truth need not have the additional burden of the use of complex language. I avoid it as much as I can. I am aware, too, that the world finds much academic language quite incomprehensibly. It has become weary of a certain stock-in-trade of ideas, myths, scenarios and problem/issue topics that have been discussed ad nauseam in academic and non-academic literature.
I assume that readers are more versatile, more limber, more educated and want something fresh, some fresh language, something simple but meaningful. But that is difficult to deliver. I think it can only be delivered to a point. For much of life in the end, no matter how much we want to simplify, is complex. "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make simple-simpler and simpler," as Charles Fair once wrote. The world abounds in Terrible Simplifiers.
So much of our understanding of periods of history is limited "by the body of texts which accidently survive." In the half century that this autobiography is concerned with, 1953/4-2003/4, these limitations have been largely lifted and humanity is now drowning in texts that are representative of the times. Throughout history the voice of only a select group, usually white adult males, can be found. Social and editorial conventions within which most public speaking and published writing have taken place tended to mute everyone but this adult male. These conventions have been crumbling during these epochs, though, and this autobiography is, partly, a testimony to this crumbling process.
Given the plethora of books, journals, magazines and programs in the electronic media, everyone finds and enjoys what they prefer. Although I do not see myself as an elitist, I am inclined to think that what I write here will probably appeal to no more than ten per cent of the population and, it is my considered view, that during my lifetime, it will be read by a coterie so small as to be statistically irrelevant. This would have been true a hundred years ago, in 1903 as well. This is not a book for mass consumption. I wish it were. But I know of few people who read the Bible, Shakespeare or any of the great poets for that matter. So if few people read me, I know I am in good company. Everything written these days is for a coterie except the literary products of celebrities.
It seems to me that, as W.H. Auden once wrote, the pleasure of readers and any ensuing literary success gives but small satisfaction, a momentary pleasure or a series of moments, to an author and his vanity or his idealism. What is worth winning, Auden went on, was to be of use to future generations in the inner sanctum of their thoughts, to be a hallowed mentor. Although the society I describe here and my role in it will, in time, be gone forever, something may indeed be left from accounts like the one I provide. I like the emphasis Auden puts on the issues but, of course, it is unlikely that I will ever know if I have been successful in the sense he describes, certainly while I am alive. And not having tasted literary success significantly, publicly, in this life thusfar, I do not know what the level of satisfaction is that might accrue to my ego, my vanity and my idealism should public success come my way.
I like to think, indeed I believe, that it is possible to reach the whirling mind of the modern reader, to cut through the noise and reach that quiet zone. The fact that the great majority of humankind will never read this book does not concern me. If I can find a few in that quiet zone that will be a bonus. For my real reward has been the pleasure I have found in writing this book in the first place. I don't find any pleasure in gardening, in cooking, in fishing, indeed, in a long list of things. Each person must find their own pleasures in life. Sometimes pleasures can be shared and sometimes they can't. We all contribute, it must also be added, each in their own small way, to the big picture that is history. This book is part of my contribution.
For many the threat of death multiplies stories of life; for others it is the simple opportunity to tell an interesting story and tell it well, with or without a moral. For still others it is love for some other: friend, loved one, community. This is a difficult question for me to answer: why do I write this story? There are probably many answers I could give but the one that comes most readily to mind is: to play my part in contributing to an ever-advancing civilization. This sounds somewhat pretentious but, however over-the-top it sounds, it honestly expresses the big-picture, the motivational matrix of my narrative, my metanarrative. I've liked this somewhat elusive phrase since I first came upon it in the late 1950s or early 1960s. I sense in what I write a destiny that proceeds through the events and occurrences of my days. It is a unique destiny; it is partly unmasterable; it is unrepeatable; it is the course my life traces. Some have called this destiny, their daimon. There is clearly in all our lives something we cannot refuse. Perhaps it is the price we pay for our life.
I can interpret my life and try to explain it; I can search out its unity in the events of my life or the hidden substance, the soul, that dwells with this body in some mysterious, indefineable way. I can look inside it and excavate its appearances, discover its interiority and, in the process, hopefully bring my readers closer so that they see me as more like them, more of a friend. But no matter how I examine it in all its complexity and simplicity, I only partly control it, plan it, decide it and make it. There is much that is simply uncontrollable, that has no author, that is solely in the hands of God or what might be called those mysterious dispensations of Providence. As Producer and Director Who defines the mise-en-scene, Who sets the stage and the choreography, He provides the context in which many lives intersect and mine is but one. My life does not result from a story; but this story results from my life. Unscripted, flawed and plausible, this life can not be lived like a novel or a movie. There is no "choiceless invulnerability" in our lives as there is in the edited and celluloid safety of lives on film in what Roger White calls the tedium of their impeccable heroes. But still there is, for the Baha'i, some plan, some form, some idea, some centre, to focus the dazzling and frenetic blooming and buzzing confusion of existence. There is a panorama, a megavision, which for the Baha'i adds an incomparable power of intellection. It provides a bird’s-eye view which Baha'is can assume in an instant, in a lifetime, for their own. It gives them the world to read and not just to perceive. But, as Emerson once observed, even for the hero, for those animated by a passion and a plan, life has its boredom, its tedium, its banalities.
Even with all the plans and programs, there are barricades in the way of the Baha’i who is also an autobiographer, barricades that prevent his understanding. His passionate convictions and the historical experience that forms these convictions, are, as Eric Hobsbawm puts it, part of these very barricades. The road to understanding is not always smooth and untroubled.
In my copy of God Passes By, the 1957 edition which I purchased in the first year of my pioneering experience, 1962, I have written many quotations from Gibbon and commentaries on Gibbon. I wrote the quotations on the blank pages at the beginning and the end of the hard-cover volume I own. There is one quotation, I think it is from J.W. Swain, which goes: "history is an endless succession of engagements with a past in which the dramatis personae were never able to fathom, control and command events." This could equally be said of autobiography. Roy Porter also writes that "diligence and accuracy are the only merits of an historian of importance." While these qualities are certainly of benefit to the autobiographer, the ability to write well and in an interesting way is paramount or no one will ever read his work.
There are other quotations which I have written on the blank pages of this great book by Shoghi Effendi, quotations which apply as much to this narrative as to Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Gibbon's work, writes Keith Windshuttle, is a demonstration that much of history is driven by the influence of unintended consequences, chance and a human passion which "usually presides over human reason." My own work, while finding no conflict with Gibbon's words, demonstrates in addition, I like to think, a Baha'i philosophy of history "which has as its cornerstone a belief in progress through providential control of the historical process." But neither is man "a thrall to an impersonal historical process." He must deal with the forces of fate, perhaps battle with his fate, as Nietzsche once put it, with his socialization and the free will with which he has been endowed. Perhaps, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he will come to have a great influence on his age. Perhaps, like Solzhenitsyn or, perhaps, like Xavier Herbert, he could write for sixteen hours a day to tell his story.
He must battle, too, with a prophetic view of the modern age which can only be "proved" in part and which can be so variously interpreted that agreement is difficult and often impossible to forge among the children of men. The story of personal development, like that of artistic change, is not one of progress, like the development of tools, alphabets, or air conditioners; rather, this development embodies the unique expressions of individual souls situated in their own ages, responding to and emerging from the mesh of experiences and cultural habits unique to them. That unique emotional expression, which consistutes the expressive genius of the individual, speaking out from his own place in the world and in history, is what constitutes art--not a checklist of mimetic requirements--and is at the heart of the story of my personal experience.
