Readers are still in chapter one, one of the longest of the 30 chapters:
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Paul Ricoeur's Spiral of Mimesis accounts for how people complete texts by asking, "Does this narrated world share a horizon with my world?" Only when the answer is "yes" does the text seem authentic. "The opaque depths of living, acting and suffering," which is how Ricoeur describes our quotidian world, can be configured narratively to make that world livable, but only when the text is authentic. And authenticity he sees as the result when the world of the text shares a horizon with the world of readers. Time will tell just to what extent readers find this work of mine 'authentic,' find it helps make sense of the big stew of life, the deck of cards and the hand we all get dealt with and which changes every time we play. Jerry Seinfeld was able to put the everyday events of life centre-stage: "life's minutiae, people's foibles, and mankind's quotidian moments of angst," but this autobiography needs more than the minutiae, for I am no comedian. My range of material must go far beyond foibles, angst and the acute observations of small moments in life in this very Jewish of sit-coms. The qualities of the main actors in Seinfeld: their shared immaturity, amorality, narcissism, unrelatedness, and general ill-will toward others, I trust are not found here, beyond the modicum of these negative qualities most of us share. In order to climb into the depths," Wittgenstein once said, "one does not need to travel very far; no, for that you do not need to abandon your immediate and accustomed environment." In writing this work and in the years on the horizon my intention is not to travel at all. I have done enough of that in the first half century of my life.
Ricoeur describes what I write, it seems to me, as follows: "a concordant discordance of ambiguities and perplexities" which I try to resolve hypothetically, narratively. The "followability" of the story is the test of its authenticity, says Egan. I go along with this, but not all the way. Many can't follow Shakespeare or the the writers of the Old Testament or a host of other authors, but that does not make what they write inauthentic. Authenticity has other features.
J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, once wrote that “God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter.” Here, then, are some of my roses and, inevitably, some weeds from what is sometimes called episodic memory. I hope that, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, I do not rob this story of its reality by making "it too true." Also, if Wilde is correct when he says that "the interesting thing about people in good society....is the mask that each one of them wears," then I hope that I at least describe accurately that mask and, however partially, reveal the world that is underneath. For, as Wilde says again, "we are all of us made of the same stuff" and differ only in accidentals. But oh, what accidentals!
The wilderness of western society in which I have lived and had my being over forty years as a pioneer was much more demanding and wild, requiring a persistence and understanding that I had not anticipated at the dawn of my manhood in the early 1960s. This wilderness has been intricate and complex, subtle and, for the most part, seemingly impenetrable in any direct sense to the teachings of the Cause I espoused. This is not to say that many, a multitude, of seeds were not sown, “like the infinitude of immensity with the stars of the most great guidance,” as ‘Abdu’l-Baha puts it so beautifully in the opening paragraph of the Tablets of the Divine Plan. I did indeed find, as ‘Abdu’l-Baha went on to write in His opening tablet, that “heavenly outpourings” descended and “radiant effulgences” did appear in my life and in my society. This autobiography is, in many ways, a tribute to those effulgences and those outpourings. The evidences are all around the world in beautiful Baha'i edifaces and in thousands of communities that simply did not exist in 1953 when this story begins.
But there was also a dark heart to the age and to my life; there were millions of “gray, silent rocks,” a dreary and desolate scene, a vast, titanic, catastrophic tempest that “remorselessly gained in range and momentum” throughout all the years that this narrative is concerned with. During these years "the queen of consumer durables," the term Martin Pawley gives to the television, became the principle assassin of public life and community politics. Between catastrophe and the consumer, Pawley puts it in colourful language, stands the goalkeeper, the person who bring you the news. "He will tell you when a shot is coming your way." While that may have been true in the broad arena of global conflict or even community crime, this goalkeeper did not protect me from the shots in a battle that was essentially spiritual and only partly within my control.
The difficulty is that this public realm became less and less experienced and more and more reported on. The public realm became more and more complex in this half century. Or so it seemed. Affluence concealed the atomization and fragmentation of society. People's choices favoured privacy and anonymity over the very idea of community. Private goals triumphed over public ones. I liked Pawley's analysis when I came across it in 1975 while I lived in Melbourne and so I refer to it here.
The origin of the vast upheaval which I have only briefly alluded to here has been the subject of unending academic and public discussion. It is a phenomenon that goes beyond demands for reform. Indeed, new vocabularies have been formulated to depict the crisis. The revolution is said to be "cultural." The challenge is said to be to the "quality" of life. The search is often said to be for "relevancy" or "authenticity." The picture is "postmodern" and requires "deconstruction." And on and on goes an endless analysis drowning the subject in a sea that few can swim in and even fewer want to swim in. However suggestive such terminology, such distinctions, may be they remain "tragically inadequate to grasp the reality of experience in these several epochs. The crises and tragedies I faced as a youth, in my marriages, in my jobs and my health were all part of the only real war in my life, the war within the individual and the news was like some kind of secondary reality with its tertiary battles and sound bites.
How shall we excuse the supine inattention of the vast majority of humankind to those evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence in the personages of two prophets or God-men for the modern age? Is it due to humanity's lack of reason or the simple failure of its several senses? During the century of the Bab, Baha'u'llah and His eldest Son, and the many incredible personalities who could be designated as apostles or as Their first disciples, the doctrines which They preached were confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame did indeed walk, the blind did see, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, daemons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were often suspended for the benefit of this embryonic community. But the sages and indeed the ordinary masses of West and East, North and South have, for the most part, turned aside from this aweful spectacle, and, pursuing their ordinary occupations of life, of work and of study, have, for over a century and a half, appeared unconscious of the wondrous miracles associated with the lives and works of the Central Figures of this new Faith. There were and are innumerable reasons and this narrative deals with some of them in a serendipitous fashion.
The form and style of this work are not incidental features. A view of life is told. The telling itself, the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader's sense of life--all of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life's relations and connections. "Life is never simply presented by a text," writes Martha C. Nussbaum, "it is always represented as something." In the case of this autobiography, the Baha'i Faith is presented en passant in the context of my life and the society I experienced in the half century 1953/4-2003/4. The Baha'i Faith gives to my mind and imagination as they body forth, or so Theseus tells us in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: "The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” The mystery of existence, its paradoxical and complex form, is given "a local habitation and a name."
This modern age has seen a host of miracles partly due to the inventions of technology, partly due to the explosion in knowledge, partly due to the sheer expansion in population from about one billion when these two manifestations of God were born to the present six billion. Whatever the case, whatever the reasons, however slow may appear the growth of this Movement during the half-century I have been associated with its expansion and consolidation, this Cause seemed to me to develop to a degree that, in many ways, far exceeded my expectations.
From time to time in this five volume work I refer to The Prelude by William Wordsworth, the first and the major long autobiographical poem in the history of modern English literature. I refer to it because it contains a number of useful comparisons and contrasts with this work. The theme of Wordsworth's long poem is "the loss of the paradise of childhood" and the regaining of that paradise through the power of the developing imagination. I certainly deal with the loss of my childhood; I deal with the power, the experience, of a developing intellect and imagination. I also deal with the regaining of that paradise in the years of a different prelude, the years in which there was an entry-by-troops into the Bahai Cause. The fifty year period from 1953 to 2003 witnessed a growth of the Baha'i community from two-hundred thousand to nearly six million. And it appeared as I wrote these several editions of this narrative work that this period of prelude before a mass conversion would continue in the years ahead, as far as I could prognosticate anyway, until at least the end of the first century of the Formative Age in 2021 and probably well beyond. To Wordsworth the transformation of the world was through the mind of the writer, the poet. This is unquestionably true and this autobiography is, in some ways, a testimony to the "new and wonderful configurations" that derive from the luminous lights of the mind.
There is little description of the pastoral, of place, of setting, of locale, in my poetry or my prose. I do not record in minute detail the landscapes, what I saw and heard, on Baffin Island in northern Canada, along the Tamar River in Tasmania or in any of the several dozen cities, towns and hamlets where I have lived, visited, moved and had my being. I do not measure these earthly days, as Wordsworth and the nature poets often have done, by the mountains, the stars and the river valleys I have gazed upon, however inspiring, lofty and pleasant the verdure and grandeur. The minutiae of nature, the myriad sense impressions, the sunshine and shadow where gaiety and pensiveness so often met, the solitude and silence, the noise and the tumult that occupied my hours and days, the industrial, the technological, the machine: there is so much that I have not described, that I have not even attempted to enter a word about. Natural history in its many spectacular forms, wildlife, geological and archeological history were presented in didactic, anthromomorphic and, more recently, computer-generated forms and, although I did not take a serious study of natural history and the relevant sciences involved, I certainly enjoyed decade after decade of inspiring, truely beautiful and informative productions on television.
Landscape, or place, always includes the human presence, of course, and, in fact, is centred around it. Place is where our embodied selves experience the world, receive its nurturance and energy. Place is where, as David Abram wrote, "the sensing body is....continually improvising its relation to things and to the world." Place is also an agent, a locus of action and significance. The purpose of nature, of landscape, of scenery, at least for me, is not visual so much as mental. It evokes memory, fuses present emotions to remembered occasions.
By the 1940s and 1950s both Australians and Canadians "accepted as conventional wisdom that the local territory in which they lived was a defining force in their lives and their nationality." In my lifetime such a view was expressed over and over again ad nauseam. But in the last forty years, during my pioneering journey, uncertainty has crept into any simplistic identity associated with land, with region. Other bases of identity have come to occupy the attention: the arts, the media, ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, wealth, social and political issues, inter alia. Region was not as important as it had been two, four or six generations before, in the first centuries of the history of these enormous countries. But place could not be ignored even if the bases of identity were more diverse, more complex, more confused. "Identity is a conceptual structure," writes Berzonsky, "composed of postulates, assumptions, and constructs relevant to the self interacting in the world." Identity functions as an attempt to explain oneself, to enhance self-understanding, to provide an account of my core beliefs and purposes.
My schooling is yet another of the many aspects of life I hardly mention. The curriculum in both Canadian and Australian schools was inherited from Great Britain, and consequently it was utterly untouched by progressive notions in education at least until the early 1960s when I graduated from high school. We, that is Canadians, took English grammar, complete with parsing and analysis; we were drilled in spelling and punctuation; we read English poetry and were tested in scansion; we read English fiction, novels, and short stories and analyzed the style. Each year we studied a Shakespearean play committing several passages to memory. If I had been a student in Australia, the story would have been the same.
I might have been living in Sussex or Wessex or Essex or Norwich for all the attention we paid to Canadian poetry and prose. It did not count. We, for our part, dutifully learned Shakespeare's imagery drawn from the English landscape and from English horticulture. We memorized Keats's "Ode to Autumn" or Shelley on the skylark without ever having seen the progression of seasons and the natural world they referred to. This gave us the impression that great poetry and fiction were written by and about people and places far distant from Canada. We got a tincture of Canadian prose and poetry, of course. We knew we had some place. We were so big; we had to have some psychological existence. The educational process gave us some appreciation for the Canadian landscape and its culture. It was not as tidy or green as England's. It deviated totally from the landscape of the Cotswolds and the Lake Country or the romantic hills and valleys of Constable. If I had been given an Australian education I would have had even less of an appreciation of my native land back in those years before and just after WW2.
In Canada in the 1950s textbooks were often written by Canadians. This was not true in Australia. In mathematics, for example, Australian kids studied arithmetic and simple geometry, five times a week. The textbooks were English and the problems to be solved assumed another natural environment. It was possible to do them all as a form of drill without realizing that the mathematical imagination helped one explore and analyze the continuities and discontinuities of the order which lay within and beneath natural phenomena. I could say so much more about those eighteen years of institutionalized education in Canada, as I could about so many other aspects of life, but I must of necessity limit the details, the story, to a confined space and quantity. And, whatever inadequacies these years in school may have had, I look back at them fondly, as a broad expanse of time that preceded and initiated my life as a Baha'i pioneer.
In 1967, like Dustin Hoffman in the 1967 film The Graduate, I graduated from university, suffered through the party given for me by my mother, dealt with my fears of the plastic society I was entering and continued my search for an identity outside the bland, material, suburban existence of my parents and friends. Unlike Dustin Hoffman, Benjamin Braddock in the film, I was able to define myself outside that suburban environment. My Baha'i pioneering identity was reinforced a hundred-fold by a move, three months after graduating, in August 1967, to Frobisher Bay in Canada's Northwest Territories, about as far removed from plastic North American suburbia as possible, without leaving the continent and its island tributaries.
The fluid and impermanent nature of relationships with the minimum of formality that Tocqueville said characterized democracies were certainly part of these years in both school and in all the other aspects of life. Tocqueville's analysis said much about my time. The individual, he wrote, shuts himself tightly within a narrow circle of domestic interests and excitements and from there "claims the right to judge the world." As social, community, ties loosened, they became more impersonal, Tocqueville said, and "domesticity was reinforced." I could expatiate at length on the insights this French scholar made in the decade before the Bab's declaration in 1844, but it is not my intention to offer a long, detailed, sociological analysis of my time. The search for the secret, the basis, for a just social order for human beings was part of Tocquville's search as it has been for political philosophers and theorists as far back as the pre-Socratics and the prophets of the Old Testament. The search for a just social order in the years of this prelude would continue though, it seemed, on some predestined path, a path in which a tempest was blowing with great force and a path in which a new social order was given an articulate expression in the writings of a new world Faith. My task was to help give this Order physical expression in the communities where I lived. And this I did in embryonic form in town after town across two continents.
The tempest that was blowing through the global society that this narrative takes place in was so severe that its very origins, its significance and its outcome were, for the most part, impenetrable. Most of the people I came to know, to have any association with, outside the Baha'i community, in Canada and Australia, in these years of the prelude, were caught up, in a host of ways, by this great onrushing wind. Whatever was available at the banquet table of the Lord of Hosts would simply have to wait as the great masses of humanity continued to be swept along by this tempest, this onrushing gale-force-wind which was altering the very basis of society, its content and structure. The tempest was simply so immense; the upheavals so extreme, that the average person or the greatly endowed, the intelligent and the ignorant were swept along by its devastating and complex forces.
I muse, with American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote 65 days after the Bab declared His message to Mulla Husayn: “When we see how little we can express, it is a wonder that any man even takes up a pen a second time.” But I have tried as many have tried. And I have tired. I do not dwell on the various tensions in relationships: in classrooms where I taught, in homes where I lived and in offices, mines, mills and factories where I was employed. I mention the tensions and pass on. The element of dramatic tension, then, which is essential to any drama and which could be defined as "the gap between a character and the fulfillment of his purpose," is present but it is highly diffuse, diverse. It has been present in the constraints I have faced in life and in the pursuit of the resolution of my several purposes. As one analyst of drama put it: "drama is the art of constraint." But the drama here does not transport the reader into a fictional world, either metaphorically or literally.
The drama here is mostly the common, everyday stuff. I can not claim that my drama is particularly unique or is capable of holding the interest of the reader due to its unusual qualities or fascinations. This is no pretend world of fictional characters in which readers have to suspend disbelief, as Coleridge once put it. The reader's relationship with me and what I have written is infinitely negotiable and the meanings that emerge are dynamic and shifting. Perhaps I can contribute here, a little to some future prudence, a prudence which Plutarch once described as: "the memory of the past, the understanding of the present and the anticipation of the future."
There is a bewilderingly luxuriant and immensely complex aspect to the human condition. It offers many illegible, contradictory and paradoxical clues. There is often only a superficial unanimity in the attitudes and values, the behaviour and thoughts of the members of any of the groups I have been associated with in life. If what I write earns "the judgement of gratitude and sympathy," as Matthew Arnold described the reaction of readers to writers who help them and give them what they want, I will also have won the day. But I'm not sure if I will achieve this. There is a gentle and, perhaps, not-so-gentle advocacy here as I attempt to transform circumstances into consciousness. There is much digression, some disproportionate, which is one of the prime luxuries and blemishes of this work. It is difficult, if not impossible, to consider every particle and fragment of this work in relation to some overall design. There is metanarrative here, there is micronarrative, but not everything can be connected to its design. Vicarious experience, the stock-in-trade of television narrative, can be found here but its presentation is not as effective as the visual medium. The cultural fantasies that mediate reality for TV viewers in dramas, sit-coms, comedies, inter alia are not found here with the same effect. The cultural landscape upon which viewers map their desires and aspirations day after day in front of the lighted chirping box may be added to here in this Rocky Mountain of print.
In movies such as Oliver Stone's JFK, Edward Zwick's Glory and Spike Lee's Malcolm X the director has an audience far greater than any documentary or autobiographical work. An autobiographical work, this work, can, if desired, clearly present all of the facts from both sides of the spectrum. The content of films such as those mentioned above usually presents one version of the story, the only one that many will see, read or know about. The directors of such films, knowing that they have a captive audience, can therefore choose which facts that they place in their film to create the myth or message that they wish to create and leave out the facts and events that, although important and relevant, go against their beliefs and destroy the myth they wish to create. Those directors who somehow manage to entertain the masses and make an argument are very special. They can stimulate the study of history but, more often, they simply entertain. Oliver Stone, Edward Zwick and Spike Lee are three directors who possess the talent to entertain and present an argument successfully, making it difficult for others, concerned with the truth but with less money and no talent for directing or writing a film, to argue against their views.
Such "historical" film directors cleverly create myths to promote their own beliefs or sometimes mischievous speculation and the average movie goer, faced with no other opinion than the one on the screen, generally believe that myth as reality. As film director of my own life in this autobiography I try to avoid clever myth creation, mischievous speculation and manipulation of a captured audience. Given that readers will have no other opinions on my life than the ones presented here, although they will certainly have other opinions on the Baha'i Faith and society, I am certainly aware how much I am in control of the story and of the truth, of my own history. I am aware, too, that, although history and my life can be studied scientifically, the field is immensely complex--both history and my life--and immensely subtle.
However vast, self-evident and urgent the field is, and surely one's life is all of these things, generating a certain anxiety as one proceeds in its examination; however esoteric and divisive it also seems, thus precluding any unified approach to its examination and perhaps even any general and organized, any systematic and intense, interest: if there is to be any concerted action towards the goal, a map for the journey must be found and applied. Vague sentiments of good will, however genuine, will not suffice. Some basic understanding of principles and processes, of ethics, philosophy, ontology and history, indeed a host of fields of knowledge are required if the seeker, the writer, is to even approach the first "attribute of perfection" and its "qualification of comprehensive knowledge" that 'Abdu'l-Baha exhorts us to attain. If any coordinated progress is to be achieved there is much to be done. I make a start as we all must this side of the grave.
The literary architecture here requires some foresight; if it is to be rich and expressive it must subsume the irregularities and afterthoughts of day to day life into some kind of harmonious whole. It must acknowledge the uncertainties and the ambiguities which I and others have lived with, at least since the appearance of the two-God men of our age. This task is as difficult to do in real life as it is in writing about real life. If my work is to be at all useful to people of our time it must define and describe the nature of our "frantic need for guides through the jungle of modernity." The experience of modern times is swathed in paradox, ambivalence, anxiety, shifting perspectives, and nostalgia. People everywhere are getting run over. Can this work offer a stimulating analysis, a framework of understanding? Can it be useful, paradoxically, to people who seem to have no need for guides at all. Sadly, in our time, there is so much said about everything that there is little assurance about anything, except perhaps the great material and technological apparatus of society which brings to those who can afford it comforts never known in all of history. And so I hold no high hope for the results, the affects, of what I write here for it is not part of that immense scientific apparatus.
Composing an autobiography is somewhat like constructing the interior architecture of the houses I’ve lived in, the landscapes of the towns and providing small character sketches of the people I’ve got to know well. Various people, my readers in this case, will pass through the houses, landscapes and sketches I construct and say, 'Oh, that’s a nice house, a pleasant room, but what a hideous window over the kitchen table, what a dull suburb.' Only writers really live in their autobiographies. So much of what works best about them are things that people who come to dinner, who pass through, never know about or see." The comments of readers have, at best, only a partial relevance. I think this is a fitting, an apt, analogy. At the same time I do not give to these interior architectures the same degree of meaning and intensity, anything like the same amount of dialogue that is often present in autobiographies involving a mother and daughter. The space within the house that `housed' a daughter's childhood often possesses poetic images and maternal features that never seem to come into the interior spaces of the houses of my life and the important relationships that took place there.
The distinctions of personal merit and influence are tempered but still conspicuous in any Baha'i community. The oneness of humankind does not imply that the distinctions between people are feeble or obscure. Neither does the concept of oneness imply that the abilities and talents of everyone who cross our paths be ignored. The severe subordination of rank and office, which often pertains in societies that raise egalitarianism to unrealistic heights of value, which do not see equality as the chimera it is, was and is not characteristic of the Baha’i community. The Baha'i community recognizes a wide range of statuses and roles resulting from talent and appointment, election and pure ability, and it sees oneness as more of an integrated multiplicity than any conception of sameness.
I hope there is here little of that 'twotwaddle' that William Gass said Freud wrote and little of those strange illusions which seem to cloud the clear skies of literary relevance. Marx thought religion encouraged the illusions and the self-delusion of the working class. With Naipaul, I believe this role of providing illusions and stagnation has been passed to politics. Hopefully, then, this work will be free of this contamination. Relevance is essential in works like this to the creative and productive lives that read it. Inspite of the fact that I have the feeling that we all have from time to time; namely, that life possesses a hopelessly insignificant aspect, an impossible to comprehend reality, in the grand scheme of things, I want to venture on the sea of autobiography avoiding as far as I can the many familiar formulae used by autobiographers. Readers will respond to this work the way audiences do to film: in patterns of meaning and symbols, not as simple stimuli or messages. I trust, too, that in stepping back and reading this, readers will see themselves by distancing themselves from their own lives and by being implicated in what they read. For I think there is more here than “the clothes and buttons” of a man, as Mark Twain described biography. And much more than some gray transit “between domestic spasm and oblivion.” I present the picture of a grand scheme, what the sociologists call a grand narrative, but I do not suggest in the process any easy answers, simplistic formulae for sorting out the problems of the world in all their staggering complexity.
I feel a little like a tourist guide taking a bus-load of people through the historic places, the interest sights and the beautiful spots in some part of the country in order to make a package-tour of several days. The aim is to both entertain and inform the travellers and send them on their way with their time having been pleasantly occupied. Like the guide and the tour, I do not take my readers everywhere. In fact most of the places in the urban-rural complex that this bus travels through and around are never seen by the tourists for fear of boring them to death with repetition and the tedium of endless streets in the city and field-after-field in the country. But in the midst of these repetitious scenes and the dullest of exteriors which are about as interesting as the eye of a dead ant, there is drama, comedy and tragedy. It’s just a matter of digging it out, ferreting it out, going down and in, behind the windows and doors of a dozing world which often is just watching TV, doing some house-cleaning, some gardening or, perhaps, having a meal at the time.
I also feel somewhat like a combination of tourist and traveler, a distinction Paul Theroux makes in his new book Fresh Air Fiend. Tourism---sightseeing---is expected to be fun. You do it in large groups; it's very companionable; it's comfort- able and it's very pleasant. Travel has to do with discovery, difficulty, and inconvenience. It doesn't always pay off. There's a strong element of risk in travel. This distinction is a useful one but I won’t expand on it here but rather leave it to the reader to make his or her individual interpretation of the differences from their experience. I have also discovered that in writing this autobiography, although I deal very much with the past, I am also describing the future. There's something prophetic about the process of delaing honestly with life. When you see your life, your society and your religious philosophy and you describe it as far as possible without stereotypes and preconceptions, but with subtlety, what you write can seem like prophecy.
One day in the not-too-distant future I hope I will be content to lie beneath a quiet mound of grass and a small monument of stone. But in the meantime, I am not content just to go into the hereafter, however joyful or regretful I may be on that journey into eternity; I do not seem content with the role of a thoroughly commonplace, nameless and traceless existence which, to some extent, is the lot of all of us or nearly all. I seem to be drawn to autobiography as a bee to a honey-pot. Perhaps I should regret, as some readers may be in the end, that I did not apply my abilities to more useful fields.
Why should anyone care what the merits of an obscure Baha'i are, one who came to live at the ends of the earth, the last stop before Antarctica? Can it really matter that he lived in 25 towns and 40 houses, is now on a disability pension and all of this over a period of several epochs during the growth of a new world religion which has been emerging from obscurity during his lifetime? Does it contribute any benefit to humankind to have a printed version of his particular form and intensity of navel gazing?
We all walk through our lives partly blindfolded. This is partly due, as Oscar Wilde once noted, to a certain "extraordinary monotony," itself a product of an underactive imagination and inner life. There is simply too much to take in. You could call it a cultivated blindness, as Wilde does, or a cultivated inattention, as some media analysts refer to the way we watch television. The principle of selectivity was crucial, universal and inevitable. The news, extensively canvassed in the popular press, in specialist journals and at the turn of this century and millennium on the internet; meticulously documented in the electronic media, however unsatisfactorily to the proclivities and prejudices of many, was just one of the multitude of things that occupied people's minds in various degrees. Endless happenings, trivial and not-so-trivial events, a great sea of minutiae occupied people's minds in various degrees, with various degrees of meaning and significance. The events of family life, of jobs and the multitude of human interests, quite understandably, filled the space available, both for me and those who were in my company. The relationships were often intense and nurturing opportunities to grow and often, on reflection, fragile and tenuous.
As I pondered this reality of life, I mused about the impossibility of the thoughts and events of one life, in one autobiography, in my autobiography, ever finding a place in the minds of just about everyone or indeed anyone on the planet. These thoughts might reach a coterie, a small coterie as I have already said above, and that’s about all. Half the art of storytelling, of course, no matter who the story reaches, is to keep the story free from too much of that deluge of information and too great a quantity of the plethora of explanation one acquires as one walks down life’s path. If this art is practiced well, readers will be left free to interpret things the way they understand them. I'm not sure how well I do this. I try to please readers. Writing is somewhat like talking; hopefully someone is listening and wants to listen. I leave the reader free to interpret the way he or she wants but, along the way, I provide great dollops of explanation and plentiful helpings of information and analysis. I try to do this with the same art that good cinema possesses: "the art of the little detail that does not call attention to itself."
I provide an episodic structure, careful selectivity and analysis. The reader can enter, can gain access to the text by any one of many entrances, none of which is the main one. Readers could begin at the beginning or in the last chapter. there is no pre-ordained sequence to follow. I like readers to feel they have gained something on their own and to feel that all I have done is help them along the way. But, like George Bernard Shaw, I can no more write what people want than I can play the fiddle to a happy company of folk dancers." The balance between pleasing people and pleasing myself, between honesty and tact is as difficult in writing as it is in life. While I portray some of my own secrets and desires, understandings and analyses in this text, readers, it is my hope, will find themselves. I can but hope. I like to think that there is an honesty in my descriptions that is the backbone of judgment and that arises from a simple, frank determination to get to the bottom of places, people and experience and to understand them truly.
As a stenographer of reality, as a mirror of the world I lived in, this autobiography does less distorting than a novel, which often manipulates, modifies and exaggerates truths about the past in deference to cultural , literary and highly personal pressures. There is more caution required, at least it can be so argued, of a reader vis-a-vis a novel than an autobiography, at least this one, if the reader is trying to get a picture of the past. Often great novels are not realistic; they distort and, as Peter Gay argues, they have done history a disservice. I do not claim that my experience, my view, my vision, is necessarily shared with other Baha’is, except in the broadest of outlines and except insofar as all Baha’is share the Book and its Interpreter and the Universal House of Justice in a pattern of centres and relationships in their lives. But certainly my desire to share my experience is, in principle, part of what it means to be human. For human life, even in its most individualistic elements, is a common life. "Human behaviour always carries," as John Macmurray wrote, "in its inherent structure, a reference to the personal Other. And you, dear reader, are that 'Other.'
I trust the reader will not find here any gnashing of teeth, any strutting and stridence, any fretting and fulminating as, like Marzieh Gail, I summon up remembrance of things past, my early life, the Baha'i communities and the general society I have lived in over the last half a century. In the process I hope to sketch something of what T.S. Eliot said was the great need of modern man: a larger polity. But my sketch is not an in-depth socio-historical study, a politico-economic treatise; it is autobiography by traces, history by traces, as F. Simiand defines history. I give the reader vestiges left behind by the passage of a human being through four epochs in a Baha'i timetable, a Baha'i framework of the passage of history. Details crystallize, images are isolated, moments are seen that fascinate, as I gaze back in time. There is a certain fetishizing of otherwise ordinary, fleeting, evanescent, subjective, variable moments. What is seen and discussed here is in some ways "in excess of what was lived." It is a little like what film critic Paul Willemen claims of the cinephiliac moment: "what is seen is in excess of what is being shown." It is not choreographed for you to see; it is a kind of addition, a synergetic-add-on that is the result of thought, the "new and wonderful configurations" of these epochs.
The starting point here is something like Carlyle’s analogy between the history of the world and the life of the individual. In my case a history of modern civilization and of my religion which has grown up in the light of modern history occupies the central place alongside my own life. The Victorians saw their age as an age of transition and so, too, is our time one of transition, we who have inherited the interpretations of our time by the Central Figures of the Baha'i Faith and Their trustees, the international governing body of the Baha'i community. I impose a pattern on this age of transition, a pattern which is partly unidirectional and partly cyclical. It possesses the halo of inevitability but not the patina of triumphalism. It has grown out of the Baha'i conception of history and it gives direction and meaning to the immense dislocation of these times. It possesses, too, a sense that history is coherent, rational and progressive. I am conscious that this view can be disputed but I am confident that my views flow logically from the texts and its authoritative interpreters who inspire what I write. I don't think my contribution to the study of history is important in any way but I think the mix of the humanities and the social sciences I bring to the study of the individual in society is, if not unique, at least possessed of a certain originality, an original mix of Baha'i ideology and large dollops of historical and social theory found among the wide range of theories and theorists. While not possessing the cognitive originality of any of the great writers and poets, I believe there is something here that is intrinsically useful in sensibility, perception and conception. I hope, too, that some Baha'is will find inspiration here as they seek to understand the Baha'i model of social and political engagement rooted as it is in a distinctly Baha'i socio-theological framework.
For the New Historicist school of history, this work will be seen as an agent of ideology, conforming as it does to a particular vision of history. For this school sees ideology as prior to history, sees this autobiography as a representation of the culture, the Baha'i culture, from which it emerged. The lives of the obscure, the ordinary and the unknown members of society at any given historical period some have argued can never be satisfactorily recovered. I possess a different take on this theme. It is my view that their inner world can be penetrated, can be recaptured. Michelle Johansen takes a similar view in her analysis of an obscure London librarian. This autobiography, like Johansen's, examines the life of an essentially obscure person, in my case someone who has held many jobs in and out of teaching, lived in many places and been involved for more than half a century with a religious group that claims to be the nucleus and pattern of an emerging world religion, a religion in the first century of its Formative Age.
The use of the first-person voice is always a conscious narrative choice. In the writing of history its official use is restricted. The "I" of the historian is usually absent. It is simply not invoked. Subjectivity is the great unmentionable in historical narratives. Historians are not encouraged to relate their personal reactions, motivations, emotions, dreams or other imaginative connections between their reading, research, and writing or envisioning. But this work is only partially a history. The use of the first-person seems natural here.
Traces are left, a trace remains. Thus we can speak of remnants of the past in the same way or a different way, from the way we speak of relics or monuments. And so I hand over to the contingencies of preservation or of destruction this autobiography. Like all traces, it now stands for a past, mine and society's, mine and my religion's, an absent past. The past may be absent but this trace, this writing, is and will be(I hope) present, thus, in a certain way, preserving the past even though that past is gone, even though it no longer exists. I feel drawn to the mystery of both the past and the future. Somehow, the very mystery of being, of the present, is tied up there.
We all see different aspects of life as expressions of an ultimate journey, especially for those of us who see life in terms of eternity. But the whole question of ultimate journey has so many many meanings to people. In some definable and indefinable way these expressions are symptomatic of what life is all about to each person. Some see the quintessence of life’s journey best through the medium, the mediating role, of film; some hear it in music or in one of the other creative and performing arts; some see in nature the supreme moving impulse in creation; some find it in love and relationships; some in learning and the cultural achievements of the mind. The list, were I to try and make a comprehensive one, could be continued on and on. For we are creatures of heterogeneity and, more than knowing ourselves directly, we seem to know about ourselves by knowing about other things. At the same time knowing who one is is at a basic level not a cause of trouble, unless one has psychological or neurophysiological illnesses.
I was one of those, like many others, for whom the ultimate journey was observed, defined, expressed through many forms. My experience of some of these forms is described in the following narrative now approaching eight hundred pages. This narrative has become larger than I had originally anticipated. However long it has become, it seems suited to my particular literary and psychological needs. Whether readers find this length suitable to their tastes is another matter. In the history of western literature there have been two dominant motifs or themes: the quest or journey and the stranger. This autobiography fits comfortably into this long tradition.
I sometimes think this autobiography is a little like the poetry of the metaphysical poets. T.S. Eliot says that in this poetry "a degree of heterogeneity of material is compelled into a unity by the operation of the poet's mind." Such poets are constantly amalgamating disparate experience, literally devouring that experience and in doing so they modify their sensibility and form new wholes. In the process an originality and a clarity results which you might call my autobiographical point of view or, in the case of the metaphysical poets, the poet's point of view. Eliot writes that "our standards vary with every poet" and this is also the case with every autobiographer. Refering to the poet John Dryden, Eliot writes that his "unique merit consists in his ability to make the small into the great, the prosaic into the poetic, the trivial into the magnificent." While I would like to be able to do this in this autobiography and, while I feel I do achieve it on occasion, I do not think I achieve this transformation on a regular basis. I create the objects I am contemplating, namely myself, my society and my religion, through the employment of memory, reason and will, thrusting each of them into whatever nourishes me and finding, as best I can, the aptest expression for my feelings and thoughts.
Perhaps I could say I am 'rendering' the past as a painter renders. I have rendered my life, given it a certain transparency, refigured my world, re-described it, appropriated it, re-enacted it, reeffectuated the past in the present. I have brought things out into the open, the way we all do when we tell stories about ourselves. I have transformed my life in the sense that an examined life is a changed life, a different life. So many Baha'is have achieved great things for their Faith. Many have achieved little. The portion of some and the portion of others varies as to their respective receptacles. Comparisons may be partly odious, but they are inevitable.
In the kingdom of fiction, novels, stories and science fiction, the constraints of historical knowledge have been suspended or considerably loosened and played with. There is a great freedom to explore imaginative variations of history, of the past in these literary forms. In autobiography I do not enjoy this luxury but, still, reconstructing the past needs the help of imagination. Just as fiction has a quasi-historical component, so too does autobiography have a quasi-fictional component. History and fiction intersect in autobiography in the refiguration of time, in that fragile mix where the facts of the past and human imagination join in an effort to produce the deepest observations and the liveliest images, to enlarge the narrow circle of experience and to penetrate the complexities of life. As Canadian writer Margaret Atwood once wrote "the mind is a place where a great deal happens." I hope readers find a lot happens here.
The British sociologist, Anthony Giddens, wrote that a person's identity is "not to be found in behaviour, nor in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going." That person must continually integrate events and sort them into an ongoing story about the self. He must, and in this case the self is a 'he', "have a notion of how he has become who he is and where he is going." There is a process of selecting and of discarding memories, a partly robust and partly fragile set of feelings and self-identity. As I keep my story going, as I posit some degree of unity and continuity over time, some degree of autonomy and responsibility, I describe the somebody I have become, the doer-deciding, not being decided for, the person who thinks, wills and acts.
Perhaps Sir Francis Drake put it more strikingly and eloquently in his prayer:
O Lord God!
When Thou givest to Thy servants
to endeavour any great matter,
Grant us to know that it is
not the beginning
But the continuing of the same
to the end,
Until it be thoroughly finished,
Which yieldeth the true glory…..
Autobiography is interpretive self-history and an interpretive self-history that goes on until one’s last breaths. It is a dialogue with time and I have spent various periods of the last twenty years(1984-2004) trying to give my experience a cast, a shape, and make a coherent intervention into my past not just write a chronicle of elapsed events. As I do this I find I nourish the past, anticipate the future and face unavoidable existential realities like death, my own limitations and failures. While my account is ostensibly about myself, I like to think that it becomes, in the end, about the reader. For there is a complex symbiosis here between me and you and the many readers not yet born. "I'll live in this poor rime," as Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 107. Every writer worth his salt likes to think, hopes, as the Bard wrote in the last couplet of this sonnet, that
………thou in this shalt find thy monument
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.
It is difficult to present an orderly account of one's story, one's "monument." Frankly, though, I don’t think orderliness is crucial. As the American novelist Henry James once wrote, back in 1888, the crucial thing is to be saturated with life and in the case of this autobiography: my life, my times and my religion. Time has a corrosive quality and produces a certain vacancy of memory. Space and time are, as de Quincey once wrote, a mystery. They grow on man as man grows and they are “a function of the godlike which is in man.” What I tell here is some of this mystery. Conjoined to this vacancy of memory, paradoxically, is its function as a medium through which time passes, as part of the very basis of one's creative energy and part of a "perpetual benediction."
I am conscious of what the writer and philosopher H.L. Mencken wrote about autobiography, namely, that no man can “bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and as a believer, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends or even to his wife.” She, like servants of old, though, are most likely to see the true colours of a man or a woman. Honest autobiography, Mencken wrote, is a contradiction in terms. All writers try to guild and fresco themselves. There may be some guilding here, but I think I make an improvement on most biographies which A.J. P. Taylor said were mostly guesswork. There is a tone of tentative enquiry in this work; there is inevitably some guesswork; there is a recognition that truth is often elusive and subtle. I have chosen the title and the theme 'pioneering over four epochs' advisedly. There is some fundamental connection with my life's journey, my soul, that is contained in these words which now roll off my tongue with deceptive but now familiar ease.
I have taken, too, Taylor's advice on politics. Taylor wrote that "the only sane course is never, never, to have any opinions about the Middle East." If anything, I point toward a way; I urge and encourage, but I do not offer answers to complex political questions by taking sides, criticizing governments or taking positions on various crises and issues. If anything, my book is a timely, timely for me if not for many others, anecdotal and impressionistic examination of the historical origins of the Baha'i alternative in my time, an alternative embedded in my life and my four epochs. Life's sense and nonsense have pierced me with a feeling, a view, that much of existence is strange and absurd; that there is much which is vain and empty in those impressions which passs through our sensory emporiums; and that there is much that is wonderfully awesome and staggeringly mysterious. History for millions is more nightmare and panorama of futility and anarchy. So many millions of human beings seem ill-equipped to deal with the forces of modernity. The resulting social commotion, the resulting disarray is evident all around us.
As my own days pass swifter than the twinkling of an eye, I offer here in this autobiography something of my experience with the relentless acceleration of forces in the dynamic span of epochs that have been the background of my life. I offer, too, layers of memories that have coalesced, that have condensed, into a single substance, a single rock, the rock of my life. But this rock of my life possesses streaks of colour which point to differences in origin, in age and in the formation of this rock. It helps to be a geologist to interpret their meaning and I, like most people, have no advanced training or study in geology. So it is that my memories have fused together and they are not fully understood. Perhaps by my latter, my later, years; perhaps in an afterlife, in that Undiscovered Country when I enter the land of lights, then, I will understand.
I could begin, for example, with my first memory in 1948. I remember making a mud-pie in the spring; perhaps the snow was still on the ground or the April rains had come after a Canadian winter. Perhaps it was March or perhaps it was April of 1948 as the Canadian Baha'i community was just completing the first fifty years of its history. Perhaps it was on that weekend of the 24th and 25th of April 1948 when the first National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Canada was elected by 112 Baha'is in Montreal. That's when I'd like to think my first memory occurred in real time. But, alas, I do not have a unified, factually accurate, version of that first event in my mind's eye. I am saddled, as we all are, with a host of variations of what happens to us, what is around us and what it all means.
We can only connect with a portion of our own lives and of the great mass of facts and details that makes up the history of our time. Even if one assumes that we can explain human personality totally in terms of culture, there is only so much culture one can analyse and synthesize, find personally meaningful, interesting enough to consider at all. The writer, the historian, the autobiographer, all analysts of the modern condition and of the human beings in it, must face limitation. They must face minutiae and avalanches of information. I could take refuge in a more distant past as many do these days and tell of my mother's and father's life going back to the turn of the century, or of my grandparents on my mother's side in England or on my father's side in Wales in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Or I could write an account of my great-grandparents' lives taking readers back to the beginning of this New Era in the 1840s. Few people exhaust the surface, much less the contemplation, of their own experience, how much less that of their forefathers. The years before my birth I shall mention from time to time if and when I feel they illuminate the theme I am pursuing.
The days of my life are gone, at least as far as late middle age or middle adulthood as some human development theorists call the years from 40 to 60. Some of these days return as if from the dawn of my life and, as Wordsworth expressed it so beautifully, "the hiding places of man's power/Open: I would approach them, but they close." I scarcely see them at all, Wordsworth continues, but he says he tries to "give substance and life to what he feels," thus "enshrining…the spirit of the past/For future restoration." And so, writing this autobiography is, in some ways, a job of restoration, restoration over four epochs. I leave the previous epochs of the Formative and Heroic Ages to the pens of others, the thousands of others whose lives were lived in the years after the beginning of this New Era in 1844. These earlier years will, as I say, get only the occasional mention when they function to illuminate the present or the future. For this autobiography focuses on a history that has been part of my bones: the first six decades of the second Baha'i century.
In a recent edition of the journal Cultural Logic I came across the following quotation which expresses, in some ways, what I am attempting to accomplish here. The author wrote: “I am speaking my small piece of truth, as best as I can. We each have only a piece of the truth. So here it is: I'm putting it down for you to see if our fragments match anywhere, if our pieces, together, make another larger piece of the truth that can be part of the map we are making together to show us the way to get to the longed-for world.
So many changes have taken place both in public space and private thought that the world I set out in in 1962 as my pioneering life began has been transformed. One mundane and in some ways trivial example in public space is described by R. Shields: “Hyper-realities are found in malls, restaurants, hotels, theme parks; in self-contained fictional cities such as Disneyland, in California, Tokyo and Paris, and Disney World, in Florida; and in real cities such as Los Angeles and Miami. All are facades woven out of collective fantasy. The original for these, of course, is Disneyland, built in the mid-1960s. It is tempting to laugh off all of this as an amusing curiosity, but shopping malls are the most frequented urban social spaces in North America now.” They play a pivotal position in the lives of billions of consumers and are a new focus of communities.” And as one writer put it: shopping is the most creative act western man performs. In my forty years of putting up posters, 1964-2004, I could always rely on the shopping mall to say no to my request to put up a poster. It was an out-of-bounds zone to any kind of political or religious activity. I have no intention or interest in describing my shopping activities in malls or, indeed, in any other commerical establishments over the years, although I must have put up several thousand posters in smaller shops: newsagents, florists, hardare stores, delis, retaurants, inter alia, and had light-hearted and easy-going relationships with many a shop-keeper. I’m sure I could write a small book on my experiences putting up all these posters. And in a society which is nothing if not a consumer society, much could be said about my shopping experiences, even if they were minimal and occupied an essentially periferal part of my life.
In the macro-political domain there were a core of events which took place in the more than four decades of pioneering experience that affected the climate of western thought. One of the more recent was in 1989, two centuries after the French Revolution, which did more than merely terminate the bipolar balance of terror that had kept the peace for nearly half a century; the fall of the Berlin Wall brought to an end the older ideological equilibrium and the habit-encrusted formulation of issues which went with it. The concepts my generation used to describe the world after WW2 urgently needed to be reformulated after 1989. And they have been reformulated in the last fifteen years, 1989-2004, in a much more complex global community. This is not to say, of course, that everything changed in 1989. Many aspects of the world in the years 1945 to 1989 have remained the same, but the tendencies were exacerbated. “The wealthiest and poorest people,” according to a U.N. Human Development Report of 1996, “are living in increasingly separate worlds.” The three billion in 1945 has become six billion and the hostile camps of WW2 have changed their complexions, their names, their features. But it is not my aim to discuss the socio-political world in great detail in this work. The reasons for war now are different from those seventy or ninety years ago in the last two major world wars and I am confident they will change their spots yet again in this new millennia.
The generation born in and after WW2 have watched that war on television and at the cinema for half a century. It is not my aim here to document the kalaedoscope of opinions and attitudes to the great wars of the first half century, suffice it to say that there seem to be as many changes, shifts in view, as there have been decades since 1945. One notable cultural theme that emerged in American society as it entered the twenty-first century, for example, was the glorification of the generation that had endured the Great Depression and heroically sacrificed to win World War II. A virtual sanctification occurred in best-selling books, in TV programs and at the movies. As I have watched this latest vintage of 'war-movies,' I wondered at just how my generation would be analysed and discussed half a century from now both inside and outside the Baha'i community. The generation that came of age and fought in WW2 was been called, by one recent author, “the greatest generation any society has ever produced.” For me and my generation that came of age in the 1960s, the story remains to be written. Perhaps this autobiography is part of that writing.
“Without a revolutionary theory, “wrote Lenin, “there can be no revolutionary movement.” I have been convinced the Baha’i teachings provides both; but the revolution is spiritual, evolutionary and, like Christianity 2000 years before, slow to work itself out in the context of society. There is a repetitive aspect to both life and history that gives rise to the cyclical aspect of religion. Comments like the following of British novelist E.M. Forster(1879-1970) reveal the repetitive aspect of life: “Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it, one is obliged to exaggerate in the hope of justifying one’s own existence.” While I find this statement a little over the top, to say the least, there is undoubtedly some truth to it, a truth based on the repetitious nature of life, the routine, the weariness, some of what the Romans called life's tedium vitae. It is one reason, among many, that most people would never think of writing an account of their lives and, if they did, they would find it difficult to get any readers or, more importantly, publishers to put their book on the marketplace. Of course, this may be equally true of my book. I'm sure some would have no trouble seeing my book among the more tedious reads.
If there is a tendency to exaggeration in writing, as in life, this is part of what for me is a complex and intense reaction to the Baha'i community, to my experience of it and to my life in society over this last half century. At the same time I feel George Orwell’s words on the subject of exaggeration are pertinent to what I write. Orwell, arguably the twentieth century’s most influential prose writer, once wrote: “I think I can say that I have exaggerated nothing except in so far as all writers exaggerate by selecting.” What Orwell also wrote regarding order and sequence in a book also applies to this work. “I did not feel,” he wrote, “that I had to describe events in the exact order in which they happened, but everything I have described did take place at one time or another.”
Part of my instinct over the years has been to run from life, physically and imaginatively. This tendency to r
