I've put these postings under separate cover, as it were. It seemed like a simpler and more easily accessible process for readers:
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With David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, and with Edward Gibbon, I have come to regard my life and, indeed, all of history, "as a drama of human passion." For human passion is many things, some associated with sexual love and others with strong emotion and belief. The former perpetuates the species, is a source of immense pleasure and, for me, for most of us, many problematics; the latter is the motivational matrix behind so much of action. Passions are timeless and the circumstances in which they occur are never the same. Beliefs, on the other hand, especially a belief, a commitment, to a new religion, are seen by most, most of those who were part of my lie in some way, as a strange exoticism. And me, as an outsider. My task became to win friends and influence people, to get on some inside, so to speak.
There have been two ruling passions in my life: the Baha'i Faith and learning and the cultural achievements of the mind. I find Abraham Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of needs, which he elaborated during the Ten Year Crusade, goes a long way, at least for me, toward integrating into a helpful perspective my various human needs and passions, desires and wants, which we all have in varying degrees. I won't outline this theory here because any reader can learn about Maslow's theory with a little effort. The erotic, for example, which has been a strong need/passion in my life and requires a separate story all its own to go into the detail this need warrants, fits nicely into Maslow's first level of needs: what he calls physiological needs. I have a health problem, relating to my the physiological needs of my neurological system. The several manifestations of manic-depression relate to the failure to satisfy this need. Maslow's theory is, I find, explanatory, and I leave it to readers to relate Maslow, his theory and his ideas to their own lives: their needs and passions, wants and desires. I could go into an elaborate explanation of my own experience drawing on Maslow. But that is not my purpose here. There are, in addition, other theorists of personality, of human development wo are helpful for autobiographers and I mention them from time to time in the course of this text. With more than seven hundred pages left to read, only readers who perist with this narrative will be exposed to the various theorists I draw upon to give text and texture to this my life.
I build a narrative out of individual agency, the agency of my own actions, the surprises, the events, "the shadows on the high road of an inevitable destiny," and my own sometimes peaceful and secure world, but like Edward Gibbon, "the sheer accumulation and repetition of events" and the unprecedented tempest of my times, in the end, leaves the reader, I am inclined to believe, with patterns and processes, ideas and ideals, philosophy and analysis in a much bigger picture than an isolated, an individual life. And I, along the way, experience an element of surprise. I don't look for it or even anticipate it. It seems to come along like a bonus, the way flowers grow in a garden and one enthuses over them with friends. But the book, this book, as Proust argued, is "the product of a very different self" than the one I manifest in my daily habits, in my social life, in my vices and virtues. The self that writes is a mysterious entity that no amount of documentation can take the reader into. In the end this autobiography must remain incomplete, not because it does not tell all the facts--which is impossible anyway-- but because it deals with a mystery, a human being.
Those things we call interviews, conversations recorded for the public and found in the print and electronic media by the multitude, while not entirely superficial and valuable in their own right for information and entertainment, for the quirks and friendships laid out for us, do not deal with the innermost self which can only be recovered or uncovered by putting aside the world and the social self that inhabits that world. "The secretions of one's innermost self," says Naipaul quoting Proust, "written in solitude and for oneself alone" are the result of trusting to intuition and a process of waiting. In time, with the advance of years, I will come to understand what I have written, although even then not fully.
If the autobiographer is sensitive to the processes of minute causality, he will slowly and inevitably come to see that behind each fact there is a "swarming mass of causes on which he could turn the historical microscope." The fragmentary, ambiguous and opaque material of our days makes it difficult to wield the pen with any kind of authority over our lives. What started off with a sense of my authorial imperium, as was the case at the start of writing this autobiography in the early 1980s, is often the case with writers and was the case with Edward Gibbon. Such a feeling of literary authority often results, though, over the long stretch of writing in an increasing vulnerability. There is, too, some degree of frustration in trying to put words behind the elusive complexities of life and the multitude of unfocused and divergent aspects of one's days. Giving life a unity of form, a unity of literary expression, can beat the best of them. One toils with a performance that struggles endlessly with ideal. I may generate a powerful impression of sequence and it certainly does exist behind the pages of this narrative. But readers may also find that there is just too much to be contained by their intellect in a narrative that contains such frequently competing claims of evidence and experience and such a variety of standpoints. My imagination is always active to enlarge the narrow circle in which nature and circumstance confine it. And enlarge it I do, perhaps by "the revelation of the inner mysteries of God," mixed with that “obscuring dust” of acquired knowledge. It is often difficult to know what is revelation and what is dust, although intuition’s unreliable guide often gives us a feeling of certainty. And there is much, too, that eludes the net of language no matter how active the imagination.
Millions of human beings in the years at the background of this autobiography came to find in cinema insights into their personal life-stories by observing directors' insights into themselves or their society. Perhaps this is partly because in the last century the fusion of the arts, the sciences and technology has been so seamlessly institutionalised by the cinema. Competing world views are fused and inscribed on human consciousness by skilled film directors. Some film directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, to choose one of many, offered film goers a cinematic persona that reflected their own personality. Fassbinder’s films are autobiographical in the sense that they attempt to confer shape and meaning on a chaotic life and a scandalous society, on a catastrophic social and political environment. As Fassbinder said in an interview his films "always place himself at the centre." This literary work Pioneering Over Four Epochs, like Fassbinder's work in cinema, tells of my experience. Other people, other Baha'is, inevitably have a different setting for their lives but, ultimately, there is a sameness, a strong similarity. Like Fassbinder, I tell my story very personally but I give it, as best I can, a universal context.
Film directors all have their signature; no matter how they like the work of other directors, they try to tell their own story in their own way. The generation of important American directors who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Scorsese, Spielberg and Coppola, among others, just after I came of age in the mid-sixties, have told their story citing the influences on their work. So, too, have I told mine in a work that has burgeoned to over 750 pages. The autobiographical documentary film, in TV and on radio, with its themes of self and identity, like autobiography in print, has been a fascination to western film-makers, to journalists, producers and directors since those late sixties. Like Jim Lane's book, which shows the significant role of autobiography in the history and culture of our time, at least in the last three decades, I like to think that my book will play a useful role in understanding how autobiography can assist in illuminating the collective experience of a generation within the Baha'i community, the history and culture of that community and the experience of one individual within it over the last four epochs. The generation that came of age in the sixties was the most affluent, well-fed, well clothed in history but they had, as writer Doris Lessing has frequently pointed out, their own particular and quite severe anxieties and maladjustments resulting from the two greatest wars in history.
This autobiography has my signature and no matter how much I borrow and blend, copy and plagiarize, I draw the lives and experiences, the ideas and concepts of others making them into my own unique recipe. In the details I can not and do not imitate even if I use some of the same ingredients and even if I sometimes borrow with appreciation. I adapt to fit my particular constellation, my interpretation, of reality. No matter how much I draw on the views of others and I do extensively, in the end, as Yale professor Harold Bloom argues, "there is no method except yourself." I react differently, from time to time, from year to year, sometimes with more spontaneity or more reserve, more adventurousness or more caution. I create my own personal world, tell of my own emotional and intellectual cells and their depths. I hope they resonate with readers; I hope they sensitize readers--at least a few. For what is involved here, in addition to the articulation of some of the core parameters of community, is that "introspective consciousness, free to contemplate itself" or a seeing things with one's own eyes and hearing things with one's own ears, that Baha'u'llah links with justice and which I refer to several times throughout this text.
Just a final note from one of the interviews with Fassbinder. I include it because I think film, philosophy and autobiography have, or at least can have, one thing in common and that is the world. Their mutual interrelations are complex and, as Andrew Murphie puts it, hectic and in need of mutual nurturing. He was asked if film making was "a sort of love substitute." His response was that his first take "was more fantastic that the most fantastic orgasm....a feeling indescribable." The finished product, the film we see, is indeed a collage. Sometimes, if not frequently, the visual immediacey of film prevents reflection. All the takes are the materials that have to be reduced and assembled to form the coherent whole of the film. It is this that eventually comes to be the final art-product ready to come to life in the perceptions of viewers. The other finished product, this autobiography, also involves reduction and an assembling of material to form a coherent whole, but there are no problems of visual immediacey. There are no problems either of the collaborative nature of film making. For the most part, autobiography is a solo event. Although, like film, the credits could go on for many minutes--even hours in the case of autobiography. Of course, who would stick around to read such a list of credits, a list, for the most part, totally meaningless to most readers.
I would not put writing in quite the same context as making love. Orgasms are shortly lived experiences; love relationships are complex in different ways to writing, even if one forgets about orgasms and focuses on touching and hugging, gentleness and kindness. Writing and love, it seems to me, have many similarities. Writing goes on for years, for a lifetime like a permanent, long-term loving relationship in marriage. Writing often has a short duration, is episodic, like most of the relationships we have in life. The passion of writing obviously lasts far longer than any single erotic act or collection of them, at least for those writers who keep at it over their lifetime. Both writing and love-making chart the intersection of multiple and often contradictory points of view, different concepts of community and interpersonal understandings and levels of social integration. At one level it all seems so easy, so natural, so organic, love-making and writing that is. At another level both processes are complex, a source of both angst and pleasure and both can, in the end, come to nothing.
I should add, too, in this connection, that memory is filled with images of the nonself, with all sorts of things from the physical, human and religious worlds and a multitude of disciplines that attempt to assimilate this information and these images and these memories enrich and frustrate, deepen and accompany both love and writing. To put some of this another way: in The Ethics of Ambiguity Simone de Beauvoir argues that we are born in the midst of others without whom the world would never begin to take on meaning. For me, writing helps me make of the world much more. For writing helps me to fertilze the solitude that, as Beauvoir adds, is as essential as interrelationship.
Poets, writers and many others, often turn away from the world of objects in their jouissance and they rediscover the non-self within the self; or to put this idea more concretely, self and world are rediscovered in a richer symbiosis. "It is in themselves," as Leo Bersani writes, "that their insatiable appetite for otherness is satisfied." This idea is a complex one; perhaps it is just another way of saying the cultural attainments of the mind, that first attribute of perfection as 'Abdu'l-Baha calls it, have more lasting power than anything associated with the physical.
I should say at the outset that this book will contain an autobiography, several essays about autobiography and generous helpings of poetry. Great poetry has been and will continue to be written about private life: such was the view of John Crowe Ransom, arguably the greatest twentieth century poetry critic. But I would add that poetry is at its grandest when that private domain is linked to some lofty purpose. For me there are several lofty purposes here. The general principles of the subject of autobiography are, as yet, hardly agreed on by either practitioners or theorists of this embryonic discipline. Perhaps these principles never will be. I'm not sure it matters. Like other kinds of history, autobiography has its own styles and themes as they involve in their diverse ways, both settled life and movement, living and teaching, learning and consolidation, development and stasis, a broad range of dichotomies. Then there is the relation of these themes and topics to the social imagination. Imagination is involved with all these dichotomies. Imagination has its own rhythms of growth as well as its own modes of expression. I feel strongly that autobiography, whatever its inherent merits and demerits, is, for some people anyway, an indispensable aid to our knowledge of the history of Baha'i experience. The hundreds, indeed thousands, of life's anecdotes have varying degrees of dramatic immediacy. This autobiography absorbs these anecdotes, all these deeds of commission and omission, into a ceremony of recitation, recreation and renewal. They are seen both as life and as material for art, as part of a material transformed into self-expressive speech, as the utterance of an individual voice and as an aesthetic performance, as the deployment of a perspective and as a form that reverberates with the interpretations of my own consciousness. Perhaps, too, what I write is also a "relational move" by which I try to complete myself "by connecting to the eternal" or some ideal within myself. And if, as James Thurber once wrote, you can fool too many of the people too much of the time, only the few who are very difficult to fool will even bother to read this work. Perhaps there is hope for my work.
Identity is unquestionably central to any autobiography. The theme of identity will appear again and again in this narrative. There are lived identities and identities that one talks about. I like to think there is a balance between these two types of identity in this autobiography. This subjective experience of identity could be said to be a type of unity, a unity produced by the realization of that identity. This unity is a constantly evolving product of my personal decisions and activities or what Nucci calls "the labile self." There is also in this work of my mind a relief of tensions created by my own needs. My mind is given its grammar by the world; my wishes give it a vocabulary and my anxieties its object or so one writer put it. The experience of each of us is different from that of others, sometimes just slightly, sometimes significantly, some might say--totally. To hazard generalizations on a whole group is a risky business, although these generalizations are often a highly instructive witness to one's several worlds.
My experience is only a part, a small part, of the vast intricate mosaic of Baha'i community life, of Canadian life, of Australian life, of the life of a teacher, a parent, a husband, a man of the middle class in the closing decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first. But it is experience which I have, at least in part, recovered, reconstructed and recounted. This experience is also written in the early evening of my life and does not convey that quality of excitement it might have conveyed had I written it forty years ago when my youthful enthusiasms influenced my thinking more significantly. I like to think, though, that my learning is lighter and my humour easier, that I am more the observer and the analyst and my seriousness less heady and intense than it might have been had I written this in early adulthood or the early years of middle adulthood. My historical sensibility has been sharpened by years in-the-field, a pioneering field going back to 1962. But whatever intensity, fierce inner tension and concentrated fighting with the problems of existence there had been in my early and middle adulthood, they moderated with the years, at least in their social expression. In my private world they continued on in residual form, some pithy core which possessed an intensity that was part of my motivational matrix and kept me going at my intellectual tasks for six to eight hours a day.
