Autobiography: Part 7

VOLUME FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
(Part 1)
As we approach the end of this somewhat rambling autobiography,
the inclusion of this essay seemed perfectly appropriate. So much
of my life has been a 'life-in-community' that I thought I would
give some of the last words on the subject to that brilliant tactician
of the personal and interpersonal, 'Abdu'l-Baha, who survived a
most difficult community and advised us on how to live in
community in our time. As our own communties have been, are
and will be challenges for us to live in this analysis of some of
'Abdu'l-Baha's final words before He passed away several years
later will be timely. This section of my autobiography, then, will
deal with biography, ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s treatment of the subject and,
then, a few brief notes of mine.
1

"A Study in Community," Pioneering Over Four Epochs," 2003.1
"With penetrating detail, crisp style and emphasis on the
compression of facts; with vivid images, usually not more than
three or four pages, with a concision of explanation or
commentary, with a specific point of view, a style of biography has
continued from classical times into the twentieth century. This is
biography in miniature. It has a certain bias toward the person over
the event, toward art as smallness of scale, toward structuring the
confusions of daily life into patterns of continuity and process.
There is a broad intent to sustain an interpretation or
characterisation with facts teased, coloured, given life by a certain
presentation and appraisal. Facts about the past are no more history
than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are an omelette. They must be
whipped up and played with in a certain fashion." -Ron Price with
appreciation to Ira Bruce Nadel, “Biography as Institution,”
1
This essay was originally written March 2000 and significantly edited in a
second draft on May 2001 for the Baha'i newsletter ABS(English Speaking
Europe) Issue 35. An important portion was added at the end of this second
draft after reading Derek Pearsall's comments on The Canterbury Tales.
2

Biography, Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1984,
pp.13-66.
______________________________________________________
_________
Nadel, whom I quote in the opening passage of this essay, goes on
to say that the “recreation of a life in words is one of the most
beautiful and difficult tasks a literary artist can perform."2
Freud
said the recreation of a life, the getting at the truth of a life, can not
be done; and if someone does do it, as inevitably biographers try,
the result is not useful to us.3
People have been trying to write
about the lives of others for millennia and, even if Freud is right,
they will probably go on doing it anyway. ‘Abdu’l-Baha gives the
exercise a parting shot, to put it colloquially, in the evening of his
life, when He was in His early seventies. His work, Memorials of
the Faithful, is squarely in the tradition Nadel describes above:
commemorative, didactic, ethical, psychological. His is a work of
2
Ira Bruce Nadel, "Biography as Institution", Biography: Fiction, Fact and
Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984, pp.13-66.
3
Sigmund Freud in Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay, W.W. Norton and
Co., NY, 1988, p.xv-xvi.
3

art as well as information, a work of pleasure as well as truth. His
is a work of selection, as biography must be if the reader is not to
be snowed in a mountain of useless detail. He unravels the
complexities of seventy-seven lives and in doing so he answers
Virginia Woolf’s questions: ‘My God, how does one write a
biography?’ and ‘What is a life?’ If one can not answer these
questions, Woolf wrote, then one can hardly write a biography.4
The act of reading Memorials of the Faithful is an opportunity to
see how ‘Abdu’l-Baha answers Virginia Woolf’s seminal questions
about life, how He answers them again and again in the more than
six-dozen of His biographies in miniature. Biographers and
autobiographers arguably have one freedom, a freedom that
overrides the genetic and social forces that determine so much of
human life.5
It is the freedom to tell the story, the narrative, the
freedom to explain a life, any life, even one’s own life to
themselves and others the way they desire. This freedom is part of
4
Virginia Woolf in Nadel, op. cit., p.141.
5
Arnold Ludwig, How Do We Know Who We Are? Oxford UP, Reviewed in
New Scientist, 8 November 1997.
4

that active force of will that ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote, in his pithy
summation of the historico-philosophical issue of ‘freewill and
determinism,’6
is at the centre of all our lives.
Of course, it is incontrovertible that what has happened in a life has
happened. There is no going back to change any one of the events,
decisions or results. Life bears the stigmata of finality in a certain
sense. There has been a relentless succession of facts, at once
inflexible and in some ways arbitrary. All story-tellers are slaves to
these facts, if their story is to enjoy the imprimatur of truth.
Charles Baudelair once wrote that a biography “must be written
from an exclusive point of view, but from the point of view which
opens up the greatest number of horizons."7
There are many ways
in which one could define the point of view in this subtle and
deceptively simple book. The point of view is that of a lover of
6
'Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, 1978, p. 198.
7
Charles Baudelair in Baudelair, Claude Pichois, Hamesh Hamilton, 1987,
London, p.xiv.
5

Baha’u’llah, one who wants to be near Baha’u’llah, one who wants
to serve Baha’u’llah. The point of view is really quite exclusive.
All the men and women in this biographical pot-pourri were lovers
of the Manifestation of God, the most precious Being ever to walk
on this earth, or so they believed, and they all had some
relationship with Him during the forty year period of His ministry:
1852-1892.
Restlessness is a dominant theme, a strong characteristic, in the
lives of many people 'Abdu'l-Baha describes. They 'could not stay
quiet', 'had no rest', were amazingly energetic', 'awakened to
restless life', 'plagued by yearning love'. Nabil of Qa'in was
'restless, had no caution, patience or reserve'.8
Shah Muhammad-
Amin "had no peace" because of the love that smouldered in his
heart and because he "was continually in flight'.9
This restlessness
'Abdu'l-Baha sets down among a galaxy of other qualities and a
8
'Abdu'l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, Wilmette, 1970, p.
9
ibid.,p.51
6

multitude of other people. Some of the most outstanding believers
had this restlessness. Tahirih was 'restless and could not be still'.
Quietness is also valued highly. One does not have to be a great
talker to attract the attention of 'Abdu'l-Baha. Quietness also has its
place in Baha'i community life. There are people who are 'inclined
to solitude' and keep 'silent at all times'. They possess an 'inner
calm'. They are souls 'at rest'.
The gregarious types and the type who keeps to himself are part of
this quintessential dichotomy, a dichotomy that was as much a part
of 'Abdu'l-Baha's world as it is our own, although there seem to be
a slight preponderence, a dominance, of the gregarious person.
Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad both kept to themselves and "away
from friend and stranger alike".10
Mirza Muham- mad-Quli
"mostly...kept silent". He kept company with no one and stayed by
himself most of the time, alone in his small refuge".11
The more
10
ibid., p.46.
11
ibid., p.73.
7

sociable type, like Haji 'Abdu'llah Najaf-Abadi "spent his days in
friendly association with the other believers."12
Ismu'llahu'l-Asdaq
"taught cheer- fully and with gaiety".13
"How wonderful was the
talk,"says 'Abdu'l-Baha of Nabil of Qa'in, "how attractive his
society".14
There are all of the archtypes that the various personality theorists
have given us in this century. In addition to Jung's introvert and
extrovert, there is the artist, the suffering artist-soul within us all,
Mishkin-Qalam. He survives in all his seriousness, as we might,
with humour. There are the types who William James describes in
his Varieties of Religious Experience: the personality
constitutionally weighted on the side of cheer and its opposite, the
somber, more reflective even melancholic type. The two
carpenters, Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad were examples of the
former.15
The examples we find of the latter were often the result
12
ibid.,p.71.
13
ibid.,p.6.
14
ibid.,p. 53
15
ibid.,p.73
8

of the many difficulties these lovers of Baha'u'llah were subjected
to and it wore them "to the bone."16
‘Abdu’l-Baha addresses all of us, all of us on our journeys while
He describes many of those He came to know in His life. For He
is describing not only the lives of these men and women in the
nineteenth century, He is describing us in our time. He is
addressing us on our own travels. He addresses the restlessness in
us all. He speaks to us in our victory and our loss. He speaks
about what Michael Polanyi calls the tacit dimension, the silent
root of human life, which is difficult to tap in biographies, the inner
person. This private, this inner person, is the one whom He writes
about for the most part. He sets this inner life in a rich
contextualization, a socio-historical matrix. He describes many
pilgrimages and you and I are left to construct our own. We all
must shape and define our own life. Is it aesthetically pleasing?
Intellectually provocative? Spiritually challenging? ‘Abdu’l-Baha
16
ibid.,p.96.
9

shapes and defines these lives given the raw-data of their
everydayness added up, added up over their lives as He saw them.
How would He shape my life? Yours? How would we look in a
contemporary anthology of existences with ‘Abdu’l-Baha as the
choreographer and the history of our days as the mise en scene?
Some of the lives of the obscure, the ordinary and representative
members of the Baha'i community are recovered for history and for
much more. Their private aspirations and their world achivements,
their public images and their private romances, their eventual
successes and their thwarted attempts are lifted onto the pages of a
type of Baha'i scripture. 'Abdu'l-Baha is setting the stage, the
theatre, the home, in these pages, for all of humanity. The
extrovert is here, the introvert, those that seem predisposed to
cheerfulness and those who seem more melancholy by nature. All
the human dichotomies are here, at least all that I have come across
in my own journey. They are the characters which are part and
parcel of life in all ages and centuries, all nations and states, past,
10

present and, more importantly, future. Here is, as one writer put it,
the rag-and-bone-shop, the lineaments of universal human life, the
text and texture of community as we all experience it in the
crucible of interaction. It is somewhat ironic that the host of
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s contemporaries that we find here were resurrected
and for us, found, at a time when the lost generation between 1914
and 1918—were getting lost in the trenches of Europe.
Memorials of the Faithful is what might well be this age’s
Canterbury Tales, that compendium of personalities who
exemplify, as William Blake once put it, “the eternal principles that
exist in all ages.”17
We get a Writer Who delights in other people
but Who has an active and incisive mind, a practicality that He
brings to bear on what are often difficult personalities. He dwells
only on the essentials; His purpose is inveterate; His feelings
sincere and intense; they never relax or grow vapid during His
cursory analyses. He is exquisitely tender, but clearly wily and
17
William Blake in Geoffrey Chaucer: Penguin Critical Anthologies, editor,
J.A. Burrow, 1969, p.82.
11

tough to survive in the burly-burly life of exile, prison and the
unbelievable difficulties He had to bear along life’s tortuous path.
Interest in biographies of Baha’is in the 19th century Iranian Bahá'í
community is not exactly a booming business these days. But that
time will come sensibly and insensibly in the decades ahead as this
new world Faith comes to play a critical part in the unification of
the planet. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s work is more than a little prescient.
The heroic age was coming to a close when ‘Abdu’l-Baha put His
pen to paper; and it was over by the time the Haifa Spiritual
Assembly published this His final book.18
A remanant remained,
Baha’u’llah’s sister, the Greatest Holy Leaf who died in 1932.
‘Abdu’l-Baha had played a prominent role in the epic that was the
heroic age. He played a dominant role in writing that epic’s story.
Memorials of the Faithful is an important part of that epic. This
epic tradition was not essentially oral but quintessentially written: a
written tradition par excellence. Since The Growth of Literature by
18
If one considers the Tablets of the Divine Plan a book, then Memorials of the
Faithful was 'Abdu'l-Baha's penultimate book.
12

the Chadwicks(1924-1926) the heroic epic has been seen in
literature’s epic studies “as a cultural rather than a literary
phenomenon.”19
The Baha’i epic has grown out of a complex and
fascinating set of cultural conditions. Indeed ‘Abdu’l Baha’s work
has contributed to the resolution of problems involving the
relationship, the transition, between oral narrative and written text.
But this relationship is a question to occupy epic enthusiasts and is
not our principle concern here.
Within three to four months of completing this last of His books,
‘Abdu’l-Baha had begun His Tablets of the Divine Plan20
, the
action station within which the community He was addressing
could put into practice all the good advice He had given it in His
Memorials of the Faithful. Like The Will and Testament, though,
19
Heroic Epic and Saga: An Introduction to the World’s Great Folk Epics,
editor, Felix J. Oinas, Indiana UP, London, 1978, p.1.
20
He began writing His Tablets of the Divine Plan on March 26th
1916;
Balyuzi informs us in his biography of ‘Abdu’l-Baha that He worked on
Memorials in the last half of 1915(p.417).
13

it may take a century or more to grasp the implications of this
surprisingly subtle and, deceptively simple, book.
In the next two decades we shall see the end of the first century of
the Formative Age. Perhaps the time has come to begin to
seriously grasp the implications of these shining pages from
‘Abdu-l-Baha and His interpretive genius.
We do not know much about the circumstances of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s
writing, at least I don’t. Some writers we know, like Beethoven,
are intensely physical people who seem to fight their thoughts onto
the page, splattering the ink, breaking nibs, even ripping the paper
in the process. Beethoven had none of the serene penmanship of a
Bach or the hasty perfection of Mozart or the quasi-mathematical
constructs of Webern. But we do know some things. We know, for
example, that ‘Abdu’l-Baha often worked all night with a large part
of the night devoted to prayer and meditation. It was then He did
His writing; He was too busy to scribble down things in the
14

daytime as some writers do. He had a short sleep after lunch. After
writing one of the biographies he would often read or tell the story
at one of the meetings in the next few days. Now, we can read
them in a book or access them on the internet, in very readable
English, in authorized translations. Gone is the Persian and Arabic
in which He wrote; gone is ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s innimitable script or
that of one of His secretaries. Having flashed onto the screen with
the speed of light or into the book in some electronic form with
every character proportional, every paragraph in alignment, these
words, written six years before His passing, are now free to
penetrate our own lives as the lives He wrote about penetrated His.
FOOTNOTES
The material on Chaucer that follows was obtained from Derek
Pearsall's The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, pp. chapter 6. The following is not a
quotation.-Ron Price, Tasmania
The whole organization of Chaucer's narrative is in the historical
lattice-work of a world of ecclesiastical routines and needs.
15

'Abdu'l-Baha's narrative, played as it is in the lives of seventy-
seven souls, exists in the interstices of lives transformed by a
manifestation of God. Instead of the ubiquity of the Christian Faith
and its practices we have a new religion emerging in the soil of
people's lives. Both books give us a narrative of faith. Women are
dominant in Chaucer and men in Memorials of the Faithful. Both
books provide us with a spiritual journey. There is a gusto and
carnivalesque spirit, a contempt for marriage and sexual urges, in
Chaucer while none of this is to be found in 'Abdu'l-Baha's work.
There is no sense of social and moral commitment in Canterbury
Tales. Chaucer's London is a turbulent and dangerous place; so too
in 'Abdu'l-Baha'is world. He writes of the domestic world rather
than the politics of power. Both men possess a remarkable
acuteness of observation; there is little of the sense of outrage.
Chaucer makes a magpie-like raid on scholarly texts, perhaps more
from conversations. The pilgrims are infinitely various. The sense
16

of dramatic vitality is so strong the temptation to read the tales as
principally an expression of the characters of their tellers is strong.
Chaucer is a self-concealing and evasive character. This father of
English poetry is a figure who eludes the biographer's grasp even
more fully than Shakespeare. There are no private letters or
journals, no anecdotal reminiscences of friends, and precious few
autobiographical clues in the poems themselves. The tools for
understanding Chaucer are literary history, philology and the
history of patronage and court politics in the 14th century. These
disciplines need to be part of a biographer’s strong suit if he or she
is to excel in their recreation of Chaucer’s life. In dealing with the
life of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá none of these problems exist for the
biographer.
Chaucer’s audience in the imagination is "a miscellaneous
company, of lettered London men, to be appropriately scandalized
and delighted by the Wife of Bath and the fabliaux, flattered by the
17

invitation to share in a gentleman scholar's easily carried burden of
learning and intrigued by the novel expose of London low life in
the Cook's Tale. The audience is, probably exclusively an audience
of men. ‘‘Abdu’l-Bahá has no audience until 1928 more than a
decade after He has finished writing the book.
A mission to Genoa and Florence on the king's service in the early
1370s was especially important for Chaucer’s poetic development
because it gave him the opportunity to discover the riches of Italian
literature. Fifteen years later he began writing The Canterbury
Tales his maturer reflections upon the life of men and women in
society and in the Christian faith. They were written in the last
dozen years of his life, 1387-1400. He was almost entirely
occupied with writing 'The Canterbury Tales' in these last years.
For Chaucer poetry was an accomplishment and a vehicle for self-
display, a means for his advancement at court rather than an
activity of his profession. His poetry benefited his career and vice-
18

versa: his earlier works, coinciding with his French connections,
were influenced by French poetry, notably the great allegorical
love vision of the Roman de la Rose, while his middle period,
inspired by the Italian journey, was dominated by his version of the
Troilus and Cressida story, written in imitation of Boccaccio's
treatment of the same subject.21
He refrained from direct allusion to public events and it is difficult,
unsafe, to make any deductions about specific connections between
his life, his works and the events of the time. Some scholars prefer
to see his work as chaotic and inexplicable.
The comparisons and contrasts with the work of 'Abdu'l-Baha
make a fascinating study to those interested in both Chaucer and
the Baha'i Faith. But even those who hold no particular interest in
Chaucer can find the contrasts and comparisons valuable in helping
them understand the work of this Central Figure of the Baha'i Faith
21
Jonathan Bate, “Slim Biography and Slim Pickings: A Review of
Peter Ackroyd’s Chaucer,” Telegraph.co.uk, 29 March 2004.
19

writing as He was at the very beginning of the Lesser Peace and the
new Age the world was entering in all its tragic swiftness, amazing
perplexity and fascinating juxtapositions.
In my nearly fifty years of pioneering and sixty involved as I have
been in the Baha'i community, I find this seminal work of 'Abdu'l-
Baha’s absolutely crucial in my attempt to understand and deal
with the complexities and problems that arise in Baha'i community
life. It is as if 'Abdu'l-Baha has given me the Baha'i community in
microcosm. Although He wrote the book nearly a century ago, it
speaks to me about my life and so I pass the dialogue I have had
with this book to you, dear reader….and a final word on
Chaucer….
NO STRUGGLE TO INVENT
Chaucer had a simplicity and directness of style. He was able to
step into a child’s mind and an adult’s; indeed, he could take on the
life, the mood and the personality of anyone or anything he knew
or could know. That is the basis of the vividness, the individuality
20

of his characters. He pleads authenticity, faithfulness to actual life
and speech. -Ron Price with thanks to Collier’s Encyclopedia and
Encyclopedia Britannica.
Oh Father of English poetry-
the King’s English-when English
was finding its East Midland dialect
and first being used in Parliament,
some six hundred years ago1
, whose
poetry was in the language of the man-
in-the-street, with simplicity, naturalness,
freshness and vitality—which we have
recently rediscovered in our time and
which I strive for in my poems and in
what I write of history and character in
my pioneering tale, pilgrimage-like across the
world, painting some realistic portraiture, with
no struggle to invent, only to suit my purpose.
21

1
George H. McKnight, The Evolution of the English Language:
From Chaucer to the Twentieth Century Dover Publications Inc.,
NY, 1968(1928), p. 18.—25/5/97.
__________________
VOLUME 5
CHAPTER 6
(Part 2)
INTRODUCTION TO SECTION IV OF MY
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
“BIOGRAPHIES”
It is fitting that the following short descriptions of my efforts at
biography should be preceded by an analysis of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s
biographies. Twenty-eight years ago now, in 1981, I took my first
excursions into writing biography. I had, of course, written little
pieces for my students since the beginning of my teaching career in
1967. Those excursions beginning in 1981, though, became part
of, first, The History of the Baha’i Faith in Tasmania: 1924-80 and;
22

second, The History of the Baha'i Faith in the Northern Territory:
1947-1997. The short biographies I wrote in the 1980s and 1990s
are, for the most part, now in the archives of the Baha'i Councils
for Tasmania and the NT. Some of these short sketches of human
personality are in a file I keep in my study, a file which has
increased in size since it was first created in the early 1990s, but
this increase is due to the resource, the source, material I have
added to the file not more biographies themselves.
Some of the sketches I wrote in those two decades are on the
internet at the site bahai-library.org. They have all become part of
a larger work Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Section IV. But they
will not be included here in this edition of my autobiography which
I am posting on the internet since the people I have written about
are, for the most part, still living.
In addition, the notes in this file on the subject of biography, which
I began to collect sixteen years ago in 1993, have begun to assume
a far greater extent, a wider ambit than was initially planned due to
23

the plentiful resources on the subject of biography available on the
Internet. Perhaps, in time, I may write more biographical material,
hopefully material in greater depth of expression than I have done
thusfar and hopefully from a more fertile base than I have been
able to discover in my first attempts in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Whatever biographies I write, they will in time be part of Section
IV of my larger work, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. This
biography file has, as I say, developed into a more substantial
resource in recent years and a brief examination of its table of
contents will show the range of relevant sub-topics. This
biographical interest provides some balance, although I must
confess very little so far, to all the autobiographical material I have
collected in other files; perhaps, too, readers will also find in them
some balance and help avoid any impression of my narcissistic
tendencies which critics may be inclined to dwell upon. As I say,
hopefully, this material may prove useful in my efforts to write
24

biographies in the years ahead as part of Section IV of my
autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs. --3/3/06.
____________________________________
Beginning in 1993, after living in Perth for five years and after
more than 30 years in the pioneering field, I began making notes on
people I knew. For various reasons I found the experience
unsatisfactory and, by 1997, I had discontinued the process. It was
my second effort at writing biography, the first being a similar
period of four years in Katherine. These latter notes are found in
the several volumes of writing on 'The History of the Baha'i Faith
in the N.T. and the Northwest of WA.:Vol.2 Part 1.' I also wrote a
few short biographies in 2000 to 2002 when finalizing that same
history.
After some 20 years of occasional efforts at writing biography, I
had the experience Anthony Trollope and Henry James had with
their efforts.1
They became disenchanted with the process.
Limited to historical narrative they became bored even dismayed
by the exercise. My essential problem was that I hardly knew any
25

of the individuals well enough to chart their biographies. The
exercise of delving into historical documents involving those who
were dead or having extended conversations with individuals who
were still living, I realized was beyond my interest, my enthusiasm
and, perhaps, my ability. After the initial sketches I had drawn in
the years 1981 to 2001 I simply ran out of details to extend my
accounts. -Ron Price with thanks to Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction,
Fact and Form, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1984, pp. 137-8, 8/7/03.
BIOGRAPHY: A BRIEF ANALYSIS
In writing biography and autobiography one is confronted with a
number of questions: what is its place in history? Is it simply a sort
of sophisticated entertainment, a bedside companion better handed
over to novelists? Is it a scholarly pursuit in itself? Is it a generator
of cases to help us explain, in this case, aspects of the psychology,
sociology or philosophy of religion? Is it a window through which
we can learn to tackle existential questions in life, through which
we can identify ourselves with others, come to understand
26

ourselves emotionally and intellectually and help change and create
ourselves?
The approach I take to both autobiography and biography is that
these genres can help us reorient ourselves, our familiar ways of
looking at things in unfamiliar terms, by the power of a certain
strangeness. The exercise may also help us to become the new
human beings we would like to be. There is, as Michael Polanyi
emphasizes, a private, tacit passion at the root of much in life. It is
a passion that is difficult to explore in an individual’s life, is tinged
with the personal, keeps the world at a distance and can often be
seen chiefly only in the written works of the person. The ‘real
individual’, the unique self, the argument goes, can only be seen in
what he or she writes.
James Wood writes in the Guardian22
about English writer Martin
Amis’s book Experience: “it is an escape from memoir; indeed, an
escape into privacy.” Although the book seems at first glance to be
exhibitionistic in reality, Wood emphasizes, it is a retreat into the
22
James Wood, “Experience: Martin Amis,” The Guardian, 20
May, 2000.
27

provinces of himself." And so is this true of my work, or so it
seems to me. My work does not vibrate with an atmosphere of
wounded privacy as much autobiography does.
Some analysts of the written word argue that it is of no help to the
reader to understand the state of mind, the personal life, of the
writer concerned. Still others see the individual only in a socio-
historical context, as the product of their times, as part of a
sociological discourse or matrix, a rich contextualization, a
historical situatedness. The historian, Wilhelm Dilthey saw it the
other way around: individuals construct their own society and,
therefore, each person, each writer, lives in a different society even
if, ostensibly, in reality, they occupy the same territorial space.
The implications of the post-structuralist thinking and the
deconstructionists is that the subject matter, the person, is a product
of language, a language construct, a product of the text and its
incarnated vocabularies. Any attempt at a unitary identity, at any
definition of a self, is a simple error since the self is constantly
28

shaped by forces of ideology, changing its representation with each
situation it faces. This view of the self makes the view of the
coherence of the person---a myth. In reality the self is a
discontinuity, beyond documentation, essentially unknowable in its
many variations, unrecoverable. The best thing to do is to avoid
trying to construct a narrative line, a central focus. Given the
slipperiness of language, language's need to create non-referential
figures to construct the self, no real, individual 'face' is possible.23
24
Of course, this was not the view of Virginia Woolf who argued in
her Collected Essays, Vol.4 that the age of biography had just
begun. Woolf wrote this at the start of the Formative Age in
Baha’i history in the 1920s aware as she was of the writings of
famous historians and biographers like Plutarch and Thucydides in
previous ages. Woolf would have agreed with Nadel that “the
recreation of a life in words is one of the most beautiful and
23
Helen M. Buss, Canadian Women's Autobiography in
English: And Introductory Guide for Researchers and
Teachers, CRIAW, Ottawa, 1991.
24
29

difficult tasks a literary artist can perform.”1
Part of this beauty
and part of this difficulty is the fact that these qualities are rooted
in individual difference and idiosyncrasy, as A.L. Rowse
emphasizes in his study of Matthew Arnold.2
Such are some of my thoughts on biography in these first years of
my retirement. I have for the most part lost my interest in writing
biography after 3 periods, 3 attempts in the last 20 years. –Ron
Price with thanks to 1
Ira Nadel, op.cit., p.152 and 2
A.L. Rowse,
Matthew Arnold: Poet and Prophet, Thames and Hudson, London,
1976, p.160. –2002.
BAHA’I BIOGRAPHY: AFTER 15 YEARS OF THINKING
ABOUT IT 1981-1996
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Autobiography is the unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about
other people. -Oscar Wilde in The Oxford Book of Quotations,
John Gross, OUP, 1983.
30

As he worked at the Decline and Fall, Gibbon became convinced
that the true character of men was so complex and elusive that it
could be only tentatively described....If even a contemporary could
not unravel the complexities of character, what could a historian
hope for?.....Gibbon became increasingly reticent about judging
character and motivation. Gibbon presents history as preeminently
a construction, a literary work with aesthetic rather than systematic
order and coherence. -David P. Jordan, Gibbon and His Roman
Empire, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1971, p.5.
Whoever turns biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment,
to hypocrisy, to embellishments…..for biographical truth is not to
be had and, even if one had it, one could not use it.”-Sigmund
Freud in Freud: A Life For Our Time, Peter Gay, WW Norton &
Co., NY, 1988, pp. xv-xvi.
This is an anthology of existences. Readers will find here lives of a
few lines, of a few pages, more than a few pages on occasion.
31

Readers will find adventures gathered together in a handful or
several handfuls of words. There is such a contraction of things in
the process of writing about these lives that one does not know
whether the intensity which traverses them is due more to the
vividness of the words or to the violence of the facts which jostle
about in them. There is a series of singular lives here, created
through I know not what accidents of life what strange poems.
This is what I wanted to gather together and this is what I got in a
sort of literary herbarium. -Werner Sollors, editor, Book’s Name Is
Unknown, Oxford University Press, 1989, p.155.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some time in 1981, as accurately as I can estimate after the
evolution of fifteen years, I began to write the history of the
Tasmanian Baha’i community. It was the first such exercise in
Tasmania and in my own life, as far I know. I also started to write
poetry about that time. The first poem I have in my collection was
written in August 1980. On 23 July 1982 I left Tasmania and
arrived in Katherine. I immediately set about collecting materials
32

for a history of the Baha’i Faith in the Northern Territory. I also
continued writing a few poems from year to year. I collected great
quantities of information and made brief biographies as part of a
narrative history. I have since sent all the material, all of my
writing, to the Baha'i Council of the NT or the, then, RTC of
Tasmania.
As I point out in the introductory biographical sketches, pieces
written over the last two years(1994-1996), I have not had much
success in writing Baha’i biography. I did write many short pieces
and had each person’s agreement to the piece I wrote about them.
It is a sensitive exercise this biography business. I take some
comfort in reading about Edward Gibbon’s reticence about judging
character and motivation. To him, people, like history, were
constructions, significantly his constructions. What he did was
attempt to unravel the complexities of character, however elusive
they might be. He did this en passant, as he composed his history
33

of the Decline and Fall. I do my writing about individuals en
passant, as I compose my Pioneering Over Four Epochs.
In a book whose name is now lost to me, Werner Sollors refers to
pieces of biography as “an anthology of existences...a few lines or
a few pages...gathered together in a handful of words...” That is
certainly the simplest characterization of a process I have scarcely
begun in these fifteen years. The annotation to my collection of
twenty-five years of letters collected while in Australia(1971-
1996), has yielded little fertility, as far as biography is concerned.
I hope in the coming years, the last half of the second decade of my
effort to write biographical material, that I will have more success
than the meagre twenty pages I have thusfar accumulated and
whatever additional pages are currently housed in the archives of
an LSA and a RTC. -1997
NOTE ON AUTO/BIOGRAPHY
34

Montaigne says, in discussing human changeability, "He that
would judge of a man in detail and distinctly, bit by bit, would
oftener be able to speak the truth."(Second Book of Essays, p.1) It
is difficult, he goes on, to find men who have "formed their lives to
one certain and constant course, which is the principle design of
wisdom." Vice, he argues, is essentially irregularity, lack of
constancy. My mood swings give to my life a lack of constancy
that is with me even now from morning to night. Since the age of
eighteen, I have been a teacher of the Baha'i cause to the best of my
ability. This is one of the constants in my life, although aspects of
my work for this Cause have been sporadic. Service on LSAs, for
example, I have found to be an exercise that changes from year to
year. One would need a profile over a whole life to get an accurate
picture of this soul, or any soul. Unable to do this I have, for now,
discontinued writing biography. Leslie Stephen says that “reading
a biography often leaves one pretty much in the dark as to the
person biographised.”1
I can understand why. -Ron Price with
thanks to 1
Leslie Stephen, Biography. –June 1996(ca)
35

YET ANOTHER INTRODUCTION
When I first came to Perth in 1987-8 I began a series of
biographical sketches. By 1992 I had ceased making these
sketches. I took up the pen again in 1993 writing sketches of
Baha’is in Perth, but I ceased this exercise in 1996/7. On May 17th
1991 I sent three volumes of notes to the Darwin LSA and ceased
any work on the “History of the Baha’i Faith in the NT and
Northwest Australia”. That effort had contained a good deal of
biographical material I had written from 1982 to 1987. About one
decade, then, of biographical work came to an end in that Holy
year.
There were several reasons for this: (i) the response to what I had
written seemed so far from enthusiastic as to be possibly
detrimental to the Cause, in spite of the best of British intentions;
(ii) my new interest in autobiography, essays and poetry, emerging
clearly by 1992 and (iii) the difficulty of getting material from the
36

people I did get to know in Perth. There seemed to be a positive
disinclination on the part of most people I met to have anything
about them written at all. Over the first five years in Perth I wrote
approximately ten pages of material on several people I had got to
know.
I began collecting notes and photocopies of information about
biographies and, by early 1996, I had collected some sixty pages of
interesting resource material. Biographies began appearing, about
the time I began writing extensively in the early 1980s: in the
Baha’i community. I was not interested in taking on any serious
book-length exercise, but I was interested in writing short character
sketches. Most of what I was reading about biography applied to
major studies.
Like Andre Maurois, perhaps the world’s greatest biographer
thusfar, I was searching for the formula for the short character
sketch. Perhaps I should read collections of essays. I have and I
37

will. In the meantime some of the literature on biography is useful
to me in defining my perspectives. J.A. Symonds, for example,
says there is an “undefinable flavour of personality...which repels
or attracts, and is at the very root of love or dislike.(Virginia
Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol.2, The Hogarth Press, London, 1967,
p.273) Virginia Woolf says we get glimpses of that personality, but
never really find it. The vast majority of lives remain nameless and
traceless to history, she goes on.(p.221)
She traces a brief history of biography, but it is not my intention to
review that history here. I think I have, to some extent, achieved in
some of the sketches I have written, the intensity of poetry and
something of the excitement of drama in the context of fact.
Perhaps I will rediscover this process in future efforts. I am only at
the beginning of my efforts, as biography itself, as Woolf points
out, is only at the beginning of its journey. I shall strive, in the
years ahead, to make some good mini-biography, if that is an
appropriate term for my end products, my outlines, sketches, my
38

fertile facts, my creative facts. Perhaps something can live on in the
depths of the mind, some bright scene, some startling recognition.
Perhaps something useful, significant, can be found; perhaps, like
Boswell, I can invest the ordinary facts with “a kind of
hyperactuality and heightened import.” (Wimsatt, Images of
Samuel Johnson, p.359)
Perhaps a man should not live longer than what he can
meaningfully record; like a farmer, he should plant only what he
can gather in. Writing biographies can give me another feather in
my bow, so to speak. Thusfar, the initial enthusiasm has become a
laborious drudgery and so I have discontinued the exercise of
writing biography. I am so disinclined to participate in much social
intercourse that it is not surprising that writing biographies does not
take place. I felt a strong affinity to Nathaniel Hawthorne and
particularly the description of his life in The Centenary Edition of
the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vol. XV(p.61). Here George
B. Loring discusses Hawthorne’s anti-social proclivities which may
39

be a useful basis for novel writing but not necessarily for biography
writing.
A third period of biographical writing followed in the early years of
the new millennium, 2000-2001, as I put the finishing touches on
The History of the Baha’i Faith in the NT: 1947-1997. When this
task was complete my interest in writing biography ceased again,
although I still studied the subject and kept notes on the genre.
Biography was a challenge to both my reason and imagination. It
called for attack. I really had to pounce on it, fasten my teeth in its
gristle, worry it and drag it around in circles if I wanted to come
out on top. This I had no desire to do. The sense of attack never
entered my being after some early wrestling in the 1980s and
1990s. I pounced on it for three short periods, grabbed it with my
reason and imagination and dragged it around. Perhaps one day I’ll
get it between my teeth again when the need or the desire arises.
Perhaps next time I’ll really get on top of it; at the moment, though,
I’m not holding my breath. Indeed, one of the many lessons that
40

writing biography, poetry and narrative has taught me over the last
two decades is that no literary or poetic expression, be it epic, lyric,
narrative or something that falls in between them, can exist in any
meaningful way without a receptive community.--10/1/97—5/3/06.
VOLUME 5
CHAPTER 6
(Part 3)
One of the most famous of poets during these four epochs, and
especially in the last two, beginning, say, in the 1980s, was John
Ashbery. In 1995 he was referred to as an “essentially ruminative
poet.”25
He turned a few subjects over and over in the wider
perspective of a mythology of self. This could very easily describe
my own work but I aim to have my work yield meanings; whereas,
Ashbery's poetry seems to militate against the very possibility of
articulating them. Although Ashbery turns a few subjects over and
25
Susan Schultz in The Tribe of John Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry,
editor, Susan Schultz, 1995.
41

over readers have difficulty finding any unifying principles, any
particular tactics, figures or concerns in his poetic output. As
poetry critic Helen Vendler has remarked, "it is popularly believed,
with some reason, that Ashbery’s style itself is impenetrable, that it
is impossible to say what an Ashbery poem is about.” 26
As one critic argues: "What is at stake in the criticism of Ashbery
is the meaning and status of what it is to be 'American.' One could
very well frame the meaning and status of my work around my
Bahá'í identity. The central concern of both mine and Ashbery's
poetic career could very well be defined as the self-world
relationship. With this in mind, I present to readers the following
prose-poems.
THE BIOGRAPHY OF A GENERATION
26
Helen Vendler in “Reports of looting and insane buggery behind altars: John
Ashbery's queer politics - gay poet,” John Vincent, Twentieth Century
Literature, Summer 1998.
42

Price's autobiographical poem can be read, in some ways, as the
biography of a generation, the generation that came of age in the
sixties, grew into middle age in the eighties, into what some human
development theorists call late adulthood, the years 60 to 80, in the
first decades of the twenty-first century and into old age in the
years beyond 2525. William Wordsworth's poem The Prelude
could be read as the biography of the romantics of the 1790s who
grew into old age, if they lived that long, in the years after 1850--
although a man was old much sooner in 1850 than he is today.
More importantly, though, as far as my autobiography is
concerned, Wordsworth’s Prelude is the most sustained self-
examination in English poetry and its real importance lies in not
what it tells of the past but what is promises of the future. Such is
the view of Stephen Gill in William Wordsworth: A
Life(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989,) and, as Gill goes on to say,
Wordsworth’s “rewriting stems from a determination to treat his
poems as living presences and to change or discard what no longer
seemed adequate(ibid., p81).
43

The case is obviously an arguable one and, at best, only partly true
as a comparison. In the case of Wordsworth or Price, the mind, the
imagination, is a binding, sympathetic medium and the poems
which come out of their poetic matrix speak with or against the
historical grain. Their lives and those of their contemporaries or
coreligionists are at the heart of their inner life which is given a
primary place in the ideology of both men, in the creation of their
personal identities and it is the place where the important changes
of life take place, albeit slowly and unobtrusively. -Ron Price,
Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 6 April 2009.
Yes, perhaps, in some ways,
to each man his own story.
Mine is quite precise in places,
but there's a matrix here for
everyone to tell of their own.
Mine, growing out of the first epochs
44

of this Formative Age has a certain:
tone, mode, manner, content, style,
relevance, timeliness and scope---
bound together in this sympathetic
medium, this inner space for and
about the seekers my contemporaries--
and me and what it all means for, if it
means nothing to me, it is nothing.
Ron Price
6 April 2009
(updated from 3/2001)
WANDERING
We each map a unique landscape of thought, frailty, drama,
bewilderment and belief. The biographies of our life, if any are
ever written, are other people’s stories and descriptions of our map.
Norman Sherry, in the second volume of his biography of the
famous novelist Graham Greene, writes that Greene "seemed
45

homeless just wandering the streets" in a state of "acute
solitariness." This was a period in the 1950s when Greene was in
a condition of "great unhappiness and great torment. Manic-
depression reached its height in that period." Sherry continues:
“Greene wheeled obsessively around the world." With alcohol and
women he sought to kill the despair and the formidable desire for
self-annihilation that rose up within him. He was "compelled to
wander the earth until death; an unending traveller, an unending
writer, he laboured like Sisyphus."1
It seemed in his nature to go
beyond permitted limits.2
-Ron Price with thanks to Norman
Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene: Vol.2: 1939-1955, Jonathan
Cape, London, 1994, 1
pp.507-508 and 2
p.258.
I, too, have wandered my streets
in a state of acute solitariness during
many of these my pioneering days.
I've had my torment and unhappiness,
but have now, in the evening of my life,
left behind me that very debilitating chaos,
46

darkness and fear;1
obsessively I have drunk
the air and killed despair with His sweet-scented
streams, tasted even in my hair with its fragrance
in my prayer and with my medications oh so fair—
without which God knows what I would have dared!
I, too, will wander until death, an unending traveller,
an unending writer and labour like Sisyphus at the door,
but the stone, the weight, will one day be no more.
Many, too, wander with their morbid predilection
for the darker sides of life—not surprising in a time
after two wars, millions of dead in the fields and
millions more to come—trying to put it together,
each finding the cosmic drama in their own way,
creating their forms, their styles in this slough of
despond with the phantoms, so very often, of their
wrongly, so very wrongly, informed imaginations.
47

1
my manic depression was successfully treated first in 1968, then
in 1980, again in 2001 and, finally, I trust, in 2007: four medication
regimes to remove most of the fear, the darkness and the despair.—
15/12/01 updated 18/6/’09.
-------------------------------
A FRESH IMPULSE
The five years which followed my drive to Yerrinbool from
Ballarat in December 1977; and the five years which followed my
first days at university in September 1963 were without doubt the
years of my life in which I experienced the most intense and
extensive depression, confusion and disorientation. These years of
internal and external crises, of varying severity were devastating in
their immediate effects. Each of these five year periods resulted in
the complete breakdown in my capacity to earn a living and
function in day-to-day society. But by December 1982 and
September 1969, it could be argued, these crises were beginning to
release a corresponding measure of divine power. My life could
and did continue unfolding my potential, my capacity. A fresh
48

impulse had been lent to this process of unfoldment by these same
crises, at least that is a dominant view I now take looking back
from these years of my late adulthood.
It took me some years to understand what could be called a 'life
process;' some years to begin to regulate my life to its rhythm. It
became my view, my understanding, slowly with the years, that my
very happiness as a Baha'i depended, in part at least, on the extent
to which I understood this life process. -Ron Price with thanks to
the NSA of the Baha'is of Canada, "Letter to All Pioneers," Pulse
of the Pioneer, January 1979, p.2.
I was stimulated to write the above paragraph by reading a
paragraph in a biography of the English novelist Thackeray(1811-
1863), the first novelist to "hold a mirror up to real life," or so one
literary critic put it. It was a paragraph written by this same critic
which began "......The five years which followed his night flight to
Paris were bitter and restless ones for Thackeray." (Ann Monsarrat,
49

The Uneasy Victorian: Thackeray the Man, Cassell, London, 1980,
p.121) For some reason my own mind immediately switched, on
reading this line about Thackeray, from his bitter five years to
some of my own.
I believe my journey, intellectual and otherwise, becomes more
complete through the study of biography. Our personal troubles
are, partly, public problems. Such was the view of sociologist
C.Wright Mills in his Sociological Imagination(1959) written the
year I became a Baha'i.
It's about linking happiness
to understanding, keenness
of our tests, the test to be
happy and confident both
within and without the Baha'i
community, a whole of life process.
But...no forcing, you're not responsible
50

for the present condition in the community,
only a small part. Trust to the life processes
set in motion within our life in this Cause and
in your own dear life which seems to take the
whole of life to decode, process, interpret.
Ron Price
22 January 2002
updated 18/6/09
-----------------------------
A POET AT LAST
Stephen Coote writes in his biography of John Keats that Keats
"was battling to preserve the integrity of his vision, and what he
described as the pride and egotism of the writer's solitary life
formed as a protection against the intrusion of merely practical
matters."1
Keats saw his development as an inward process, a long
and patient observation of the rhythms of his consciousness. True
poetry, he believed, came from this, not from manufacturing verse
for the marketplace.
51

Price had battled for years, at least until the early years of the new
millennium, to acquire that solitary life which was protected from
the intrusion of the endless and inevitable practical matters of life.
As 1999 evolved insensibly to 2006, he was able to move beyond
those endless volunteer activities and responsibilities which
occupied so much of his time in his middle adulthood. By 2006 he
had been able to focus on the inward processes of development that
accompanied writing for at least eight hours a day keeping practical
intrusions to a limit. He felt he had written about that process as
much as he had written poetry itself. Poetry, he had concluded,
was impossible to define. At best, it served for him as a form in
which he could deal with that first attribute of perfection which
'Abdu'l-Baha describes, and which it was his task to acquire, in The
Secret of Divine Civilization: learning and the cultural attainments
of the mind.2
-Ron Price with thanks to Stephen Coote, John Keats:
A Life, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1995, p.268; and 'Abdu'l-
Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.35.
By the time I had arrived here
52

in this town by a river by the sea,
at the bottom of the Antipodes,
I had defined and refined that
inward process and the rhythms
of my consciousness and mind.
I had found the form in which
I could deal with the vast tracts
of learning and those cultural
attainments of mind’s lifeline.
I occasionally toyed with essays,
with novels but, in the end, turned,
always returned to this form and
these processes which enabled me,
at last, to declare myself a poet.
I did not so much collapse into
late adulthood, although there was
53

some of that tedium vitae, as die
to my former self as much as I was
able, but so much still remained like
honey and poison making me seek
from a cup a pure and limpid water.
Ron Price
January 2002 to March 2006
(updated 6/3/09 and 18/6/09)
--------------------------
A STRONG CONSITUTION?
This afternoon, in mid-summer here in Tasmania, I sat under a tree
near the beach at Low Head on Bass Strait and read Roy Campbell:
A Critical Biography by Peter Alexander.(1982). This South
African poet(1901-1957) had, according to Alexander, a
magnificent constitution. According to the famous psychiatrist,
Laurens van der Post, Campbell was a man "born on fire." He
could only live by burning himself out: drinking much and eating
54

and sleeping little. It is difficult, it seems to me, to determine what,
in fact, is a 'magnificent constitution.'
Have my history of manic-depression, the slow development of a
mild emphysema, a certain psychological fatigue as I came into my
sixties and, perhaps, several other illnesses like pneumonia and
some polio-like disease contracted in my childhood, had the effect
of weakening my constitution? Is writing millions of words a sign
of a strong constitution? I don't know, but I do know I have
experienced varying degrees of burn-out several times in my life.
It would appear that, like Campbell, burning myself out was part of
my central life experience, although the causes of the burn-
out(mine and Campbell’s) were quite different. It would appear
that, in this the early evening of my life, I have learned to live
without burn-out and without its tragic consequences thanks to
psychiatry’s medications. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four
Epochs, 22 January 2002(updated 6/3/09).
A million impressions,
55

impressed themselves
over these several epochs
in the last half-century,1
pressed themselves upon me
and annihilated me2
as Keats
said;3
I surrendered, lost myself
to these poetic acts of creation,
acts of love4
in which I imagined
myself intensely, merging with a
great sea of life beyond the me and
becoming one: mystic, seer, poet...
integrated circuits with the past
containing the seeks of its future.
1
1952-2002
2
Looking back it would appear that at least 3 reconstructions of
personality were required: 1968, 1979/80 and 1999; inevitably
there were some continuities, one of which was poetry in 1999.
3
Keats, Letters, 27 October 1818
56

4
The World of Poetry, p. 92.
Ron Price 22 January 2002
AM I WORTH SAVING?
"A biographer can be a most uncomfortable visitor for a living
author and his family. Skeletons clatter in all our closets;
everyone's life has black patches, shames and sorrows: no one, you
would think, would willingly submit to Judgement Day come
early." So writes Peter F. Alexander at the start of his book Les
Murray: A Life in Progress(Oxford UP, 2000). But when such an
author, like myself for example, is a virtual unknown; when he has
never published a book; when virtually no one in the literary world
has ever heard of him, then such a discomfort would not be
experienced by that author. Indeed, such an unknown author
would probably think to himself that no one in his lifetime would
ever venture to seriously consider writing a biography about him at
all. Skeletons in his closet and the darker side of his life would,
therefore, concern him not a twit, for he would know that no writer
57

would ever be likely to probe into his private life while he was
alive. Such is the way I feel as I approach the age of sixty-five.
When I eventually pass from this mortal coil, though, I would be
more than happy to grant any aspiring biographer complete access
to everything: manuscripts, letters, diaries, various documents
private and public, even accounts now found on the internet and
memorabilia of all sorts. I would be equally happy for such a
biographer--should he or she ever exist--to interview whomever
they want and as frequently as they want, ever mindful of the
courtesies required of such potential intrusions into other people's
lives. I would like to think that such biographers should feel free to
prod, probe and uncover whatever they could find, for we are seen
by others in such varied ways. Such is the attitude, I currently
hypothesize, that I shall possess after my demise as I gaze at this
world from the domain of light. -Ron Price with thanks to Peter
Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Oxford UP, 2000, p.9.
Should I give full and exclusive
58

access to my voluminous papers?
How easy should I make detective
work for the possibly impertinent,
not especially skilled, wanting to save
a life for future generations? Am I the
sort of man you might want to see live
again and dance in the pages of a book?
If you know of my battle on the road,
will it help you with yours? Whatever
will help future generations. Do you
need all my sordid details, my hind parts
and their contemplation and an exploration
of mountains of trivia?...whatever will help
and only if it helps......
Ron Price
16 March 2002
--------------------------
59

PS I have come to feel the way the Russian writer Boris Pasternak
did when he wrote on January 15th
1960 three months after I
became a Baha’i: “the artist starts to get to love his new design and
it seems to him that the slowly developing work is larger and more
important than he.” For me this ‘work’ is both my life and my
writing.-Evgeny Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years:
1930-1960, Collins Harvill, London, 1990, p.244.
---------------------
CONNECTIONS
The sociologist C.Wright Mills tried to make his readers aware of
the intricate connection between the patterns of our own lives and
the course of world history, as ordinary men do not usually know
what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming
and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part.
They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the
interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and
world.1
The Baha'i Faith, in contrast, gives to its votaries an
historical consciousness that is both providential and humanistic,
60

that stimulates the process of making connections and finding
patterns between individual lives and the course of history.-Ron
C.W. Mills, the Sociological Imagination,
1959, p.4.
A lot of things relate
to a lot of things, big-
and-little-pictures in
this tenth stage of history
and a lot of isms and wasms
have collapsed as explanations
of the world and ourselves.1
Meanwhile, there has been
an influence not dwelling
elsewhere in literature or
philosophy that shatters the
cup of speech that we cannot
contain-we cannot dam the sea.2
61

This influence asks us to stretch
ourselves beyond the here-and-now
and present awareness, subtlely
reminding us of what we already
know in the big world that has made
us what we are, as sub-creators in our
own understanding of our own life.
1
Immanuel Wallerstein, "Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An
American Utopian," Theory and Society, Vol.15, 1986, pp.465-
474.
2
Horace Holley quoted in the Ocean of His Words, J. Hatcher,
Wilmette, 1997,p.3.
Ron Price
8 November 2002
---------------------------
CONSTRUCTED
"The world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as
62

reality by the ordinary members of society in the subjectively
meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in
their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these
members."1
The French sociologist, Emile Durkheim did not see
it this way. The world of everyday life, for Durkheim, could
never be said to originate in the thoughts and actions of
"members" because everyday life is irreducibly external to any
individual or plurality. It is always already there when one
enters it, as a child, or as an adult when one, for example, joins
the Baha'i Faith or moves to a new Baha'i community as a
pioneer. The implication is that the social world is made of
historically constituted positions or situations through which
people move and differently exist.2
In my poetry I have tried to
both describe the world I've lived in and the one I have created
in, assuming as I do that both have some reality, especially a
metaphorical one. -Ron Price with thanks to 1
Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality, 1967,
pp. 19-20; and 2
Herve Varenne, "The Social Facting of
63

Education: Durkheim's Legacy," Journal of Curriculum Studies,
Vol.27, 1995, pp.373-389.
There's an intersection here
of self and other, biography
and history requiring some
virtuosity to get at it, at the
story, subtle and mysterious.
Much of the data is slippery,
elusive, tentative, something
that has seized my life,
startling and bewildered,
sometimes wrenching:
is there an essential whole?
Are there patterns and nodes?
64

Is the truth of my story deeper
than my life itself? Have I
provoked and illuminated it?1
1
R. Bullough and S. Pinnegar, "Guidelines…of Self-Study,"
Educational Researcher, Vol.30, No.3, pp.13-21.
Ron Price 12/11/'02.
---------------------------
LIFE-ENHANCEMENT
In the prelude to his biography of Henry Moore, Roger Berthoud
tells of Moore's life-enhancing quality. Both Moore's personality
and his work, Berthoud writes, had this quality. "One felt the
better," he continues, "for having talked to him or for having
contemplated his creations."1
There is no doubt that in my life I
possessed this life-enhancing quality. I possessed it in many of my
years as a teacher. But I did not possess it all the time. You just
have to ask either of the women I married. I did not possess it with
65

all my students; I'm sure there would have been dozens of students
over those thirty-five years who were not impressed with my
qualities as a person or as a teacher. For, as a pioneer, I was in
many ways just an average bloke, certainly no saint and, if
distinguished, only from time to time and not as a consistent
feature of my life from the word go to woe. -Ron Price with thanks
to Roger Berthoud, The Life of Henry Moore, Faber and Faber,
London, 1987, p.15.
I, too, Roger, am more complicated
than I seem and am also addicted
to this poetic work, as my restless
mind wanders over the world's mystery
settling for the partial and incomplete
portion that is our lot due to life's
contingencies, mysteries and paradoxes.
For whatever truths I find there's so much
that is provisional, with an emphasis here
66

but not there.1
And whatever confidence
I have found there is worry still about the
apparently trivial, this complex and difficult
product that I have created to market2
in the interstices of these my latter days.
1
Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Hogarth Press, 1991(1940), London,
p.xi.
2
Roger Berthoud, op.cit., p.13.
Ron Price 14 December 2002
------------------------------------
MACRO-MICRO
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be
understood without understanding both. Yet men do not usually
define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and
institutional contradiction. The sociological imagination enables
its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its
meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of
individuals. The first fruit of this imagination and the first lesson
67

of the social science that embodies it is the idea that the individual
can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by
locating himself within this period, that he can know his own
chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals
in his circumstances. We have come to know that every individual
lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives
out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical
sequence. -Ron Price with thanks to C.W. Mills, The Sociological
Imagination, 1959, pp.3-10.
There's a massive complexity here.
But, at the core, there's been a fine
compression, an intensification of
global consciousness, making of this
world a single place, coexistence in a
single spot, humankind's oneness, yes,
taking off, by stages, since 1475, 1875,
1975 with more and more world images
in this single place.….since I was playing
68

baseball and we went to outer space and I
joined the Baha'i Faith by stages beginning
with that most wonderful and thrilling motion
which appeared from that point of light the spirit
of teaching…..1
Half a century, since then, since
that inception of the Kingdom of God on earth2
when I was nine and John and Hattie Dixon
served us rose-hip tea in that little town by that
great lake in southern Ontario’s golden triangle.
1
'Abdu'l-Baha in God Passes By, p.351.
2
idem. The completion of the temple in Chicago inaugurated this
inception.
Ron Price 8 November 2000
------------------------------
PROJECT OF THE SELF
According to Ulrich Beck, the most dominant and widespread
desire in Western societies today is the desire to live a 'life of one's
own'. More and more people aspire to actively create an individual
69

identity, to be the author of their own life. The ethic of individual
self-fulfilment and achievement can be seen as the "most powerful
current in modern societies." The concept of individualisation does
not mean isolation, unconnectedness, loneliness or the end of
engagement in society. Individuals are now trying to 'produce'
their own biographies. This is partly done by consulting 'role
models' in the media. Through these role models individuals
explore personal possibilities for themselves and imagine
alternatives of how they can go about creating their own lives.
They are, in effect, experimenting with the project of the self, with
strategies for self. -Ron Price with thanks to Judith Schroeter, "The
Importance of Role Models in Identity Formation: The Ally
McBeal In Us," Internet, 11 October 2002.
I define myself in community
which is not the same as being
surrounded by people ad nauseam,
nor does it mean doing what I want
as much of the time as I can or being
70

free of difficulties, stresses and strains--
which seem unavoidable. I've been
creating my own biography--my own
autobiography--for years and getting
very little sense of who I am from the
media and their endless role models.
I've been in a community with two
hundred years & fifty years of models
historical models and hundreds, over
the years, of people I have known who
have shown me qualities worth emulating,
helping to make me some enigmatic and
composite creature on this God’s earth.
Ron Price
11 October 2002
----------------------------
SOCIAL SEDIMENTATION
71

Experiences become sedimented in that they congeal when they are
recollected as recognizable and memorable entities. For me, they
become part of my autobiographical poetry and narrative.
Intersubjective sedimentation occurs when several individuals
share a common biography, the experiences of which become
incorporated in a common stock of knowledge. This social
sedimentation can become recognizably objective and shared by
others in a sign system. Language becomes the basis and the
instrument of a collective stock of knowledge. It becomes the
depository of a large aggregate of collective sedimentations. The
objective meanings of institutional activity are conceived of as
''knowledge'' and transmitted as such. With the full
institutionalization of charisma in 1963 in the Baha'i community,
the institutional transmission of knowledge has been mostly in the
form of letters. It is difficult to achieve consistency between
institutions and the forms of transmission of knowledge pertaining
to them. But, for the most part, this transmission in the Baha'i
community has possessed a consistency and a logical coherence.
72

The problem of logical coherence in the transmission of this
knowledge arises first on the level of legitimation and secondly on
the level of socialization. In the Baha'i Faith the former is not a
serious problem. -Ron Price with thanks to "Sociology Notes from
Reading in the 1990s," 15 November 2002.
We've been sedimented,
this community and I,
for several decades, but
noone is kidding no one
that the sharing of His Signs
is a totally consistent, smooth,
run from year to year. Yes,
there is grace and favour to
joyously press on in battle;
then, too, there is whimpering,
fright, trembling and shaking.
There are veils which shut me out.1
73

There is a life congealed in recollection,
a thousand memorable entities and an
aggregate of sediment with seeds sown
in a forest of wild trees, pebbles with
some fruit and rare precious stones.2
1
'Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, p.181.
2
'Abdu'l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, 1977, p.87…..Ron Price
16/11/02.
----------------------
SOME CONTINUOUS COMPOSITE WHOLE
The spiritual, mental and emotional autobiographies of the vast
majority of human beings who have ever lived have never been
recorded. For many thousands of people in the last two centuries,
though, a detailed, a scanty, a fascinating or a tedious record has
been left. In recent decades writing biography and autobiography
has become somewhat of a popular sport or discipline. In the case
of a very few, people like the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, the
preservation of documents about the self has been carried to the
74

point of mania. With Flaubert, the student of the individual
creative process has a microscopic view for perhaps the first time
in history of the development of the creative process in one
individual. My own particular poetic narrative presents what I am
to myself, how I see myself and how I have lived with this self for
sixty-five years. I go about this exercise with a certain style. Style
to me was what it was to Flaubert "the rendering of content in a
form in which both style and content would be one."1
Style is the
filter, the means, of rendering externality. -Ron Price with thanks
to Benjamin F. Bart, Flaubert, Syracuse UP, 1967, Preface and
1
p.340.
Style is, ultimately, a matter of the precise
words used and their arrangement in some
structure, some form, some continuous,
composite whole, a physiological-anatomy,
in the cultural repository of history.1
Content, the work, came to me insensibly
75

over several years so that, now, it is the work
of my whole life. It is always on my mind.
I am always preparing for it. Even my rests
are rests for the work ahead down the road.
1
Some of Flaubert's view of 'style'
Ron Price
13 April 2002
--------------------------------
MY 'BIG BOOK'
A symbol of poet Les Murray's vastly eclectic interests "The Great
Book' was a large, hard-covered ledger-book which he had adapted
as a scrapbook.1
Into it went postcards, newsclippings, poems he
liked, cartoons, inter alia. My mother kept a similar book which
was sent to me from Canada when she died in 1978. Not as large as
Murray's, it contained the literary memorabilia she had collected
from about 1930 to 1955.
76

The symbol of my own eclectic interests can be found today in my
study here in Tasmania. Of postcards and cards there are few; of
cartoons and assorted newsclippings there are more. The absences,
the empty spaces, in my Big Book are voluminous, for one cannot
record it all. Quotations abound in some 300 arch lever files, two-
ring binders, A-3 loose-leaf and other sized files on a host of
subjects: history, philosophy, religion, literature, poetry, fiction,
drama, psychology, media studies, anthropology, Greek and
Roman history, various religious themes, graduate study programs,
journals, novel writing attempts, biography, autobiography and
much else. inter alia. -Ron Price with thanks to Peter Alexander,
Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Oxford UP, London, 2006, p.255.
So this is my 'great book.'
I've divided it into a library
of files over the years.
Part of my soul is there
on the shelves of my study,
77

extremely agreeable friends
from everywhere in the world,
past and present,
always at my service;
they come and go
as I am pleased.
Sometimes they are difficult
to understand and require
special effort on my part.
My cares are often driven away
by their vivacity. They teach me
a certain fortitude. I keep each of them
in a small chamber in a humble corner
of my room where they and I
are delighted by the happy symbiosis
of my retirement and their presence.1
78

1
Plutarch, On Books.
Ron Price
16 March 2002
That’s all folks!
THE LIGHTHOUSE
In discussing the character of a man, there is no course of error so
fertile as the drawing of a hard and fast line. We are attracted by
the salient points, what seems to stand out in his life, and seeing
them clearly and repeatedly we jump to conclusions. That is
natural. These conclusions may even have some validity. These
qualities that stand out may be likened to a lighthouse guiding our
way in the night or, in the day, serving as a landmark in our travels.
79

But they are only a guide. They tell us little of the surrounding
landscape, none of the geology, the history, the botany, the
geography of the nearby terrain. This is even more true of a man's
life, so far removed from the general sketch, the highlights, which
at best are all that is usually passed down to succeeding
generations.
The man of letters on the other hand is, in truth, ever writing his
own biography or autobiography. What is in his mind he declares
to the world, to whoever reads his works. If he finds a readership,
if his work is well written, this memoir, this biography, this
autobiography will be all that is necessary. It will take us far
beyond that lighthouse into geology, history, botany, geography--a
total view. -Ron Price with thanks to Anthony Trollope, The Life
of Cicero, quoted in Trollope, Victoria Glendinning, Pimlico,
London, 1993, p.v.
There are some lighthouses here.
80

I've set them out along the coast
to guide your way through the night
of my life and there has been much
night, black clouds and darknesses.
I've also provided rich and varied
collections of flora and fauna
to tell you something
of the living tissue of my days,
some of its green shoots,
its flowers, its bright colours
and some of its exotic texture.
I've even left you a map
to help you connect
with nearby towns and villages;
for I have belonged to a community
where people knew me
81

and would tell you something of me.
But, again, do not jump to conclusions
about the nature of my person and self.
What I have left behind can only,
like the lighthouse, guide your travels.
I have tried to be faithful
to the Covenant of God,
to fulfil in my life His trust
and in the realm of spirit
obtain the gem of divine virtue.1
But how successful I have been
that is a mystery to me, as much as thee.
1
Baha'u'llah, Hidden Words, Introductory passage.
Ron Price
82

17 January 2002
THE AGE WE LIVE IN
It is not so much authorial ego or that I am a compulsive self-
historiographer which compels me to document my life more fully
than most. All this poetry is my workshop where my awareness of
life expresses itself quintessentially. I also see myself as part of a
global pattern, a representative figure, part of a mytho-historical
process which may be of use to future generations. I was born into
a new age with the Kingdom of God just beginning when I was
nine years old. In my lifetime the Baha'i administrative process,
the nucleus and pattern for a new Order, went through a radical
growth period. I have been committed to the promises and
possibilities of this new way of Life.1
As F. Scott Fitzgerald was
committed to and had a belief in American life in the 1920s, as
American was going through new beginnings so, too, do I feel
83

strongly, passionately, a new commitment, a new belief and new
beginnings.
George Bull points out in his introduction to his massive biography
of the life of Michelangelo that people are often best understood
"in the crowded context of the significant changes and continuities
of the age."2
The age I have lived in and through has also faced
"significant changes and continuities." My life, I have little doubt,
can be understood, too, as Michelangelo's and so many others have
been understood, in this same general context of their age. -Ron
Matthew Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945,
p.vii; and 2
George Bull, Michelangelo: A Biography, Viking Press,
1995, p.xviii.
I, too, saw myself as coming
at the end of a complex
historical process
84

that had its beginnings
in the district of Ahsa,
those birds flying over Akka
and those Men with beards
and I identified with it.
I was born near the start
of yet another Formative Age:
would it last as long as the Greeks?1
I understood profoundly well
the claims of this new belief
as you did the claims of your craft.2
I was, like you, fortune's darling
in this new age and I was, too,
the shell-shocked casualty
of a war that was more complex
than any of us could understand.
85

1
Their Formative Age lasted from 1100 to 500 BC; this one began
23 years before I was born.
2
F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the major American writer between
the wars: 1919-1939.
Were my poetry to become significant enough in the public domain
I would certainly like to direct the attention of scholars to
adaptations of and responses to its contents in music, drama, dance,
and the visual arts. I’m confident that studies of my poetry in
music, for example, could take the form of, say, something like
Aaron Copland’s song cycle of 12 of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.27
Copland completed this creative work in 1950. While the poems of
Dickinson that Copeland chose centered about no single theme,
they treated of subject matter particularly close to Miss Dickinson:
nature, death, life, eternity. It was Copeland’s hope, nearly a
century after Dickinson’s poems were conceived, to create a
27
Dorothy Z. Baker, “Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson:
A Reading of Dissonance and Harmony,” The Emily Dickinson Journal,
Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2003.
86

musical counterpart to Emily Dickinson’s unique personality.
However desirable such an exercise might be to my spirit, I leave
that activity to a posterity that I can scarcely imagine. Whatever
aspects of my work that a future age might seek to highlight
through song or indeed any other form of the creative and
performing arts is, for me, a tantalizing consideration that can
scarcely occupy any of my time at present, indeed, it seems
somewhat pretentious to do so. I can not help but offer one thought
in this direction; namely, that the poems which a future composer,
for example, might select would, of necessity, be filled with the
dissonant noises of the life of these four epochs. A counterpoint
was developing, of course, but they were still early days, early days
of the Kingdom of God on earth.
I have never understood music and my experience of it in a
vacuum, as a pure structure of sounds as if fallen from the stars
onto my faculty of musical perception. Music seems rather
inextricably embedded in my several forms of life, forms that are,
87

as it happens, essentially linguistic. Music is necessarily
apprehended, at least in part, in terms of the language and linguistic
practices that define me and my world. These words, this memoir,
has for me a musical context and texture.
Music is manifested, as the philosopher Wittgenstein once wrote,
by a complex of behaviours, such as illustrative gestures, apt
comparisons, suitable hummings, and appropriate movings,
incarnations, of thought. Gesture, in music, can be defined as "a
movement that may be interpreted as significant."28
So is this true
in words, in writing. Indeed all the musical terms seem to me to
have literary analogues. Some analysts of music see gesture as
affecting performance and experience more directly than the
thematic and harmonic categories of conventional analysis. Gesture
is seen as central to the performer’s conception of the musical
work--and mine.
28
Jerrold Levinson, "Musical Thinking," The Journal of Music and
Meaning, Fall 2003.
88

Performers, like writers, attend primarily to the ‘shape’ of a piece.
Shape is analogous to structure but it tends to be more dynamic
through its sensitivity to momentum, climax, and ebb and flow,
comprising an outline, a general plan, a set of gestures unfolding in
time. I say this because these considerations lie at the background
and in the texture of my work.
To say one final thing about gesture, its definition in musical terms
has some application to my writing and so I include it here in full:
"a holistic concept, synthesizing what theorists would analyze
separably as melody, harmony, rhythm and meter, tempo and
rubato, articulation, dynamics, and phrasing into an indivisible
whole. For performance, these overlapping strands must be further
melded into a smooth, and at some level undivided, continuity.
That melding is achieved most efficiently by means of an
apparently natural, human gesture. Performers strive to create a
shaping and shading of each phrase that is more than the sum of the
motivic and harmonic units of which they are composed."
89

Gestural analysis in music, like analysis of this memoir, should
focus on short events---motifs, figures or short phrases. The sense
of unity in a composition and in this work is forged through a
recognition of the gesture’s internal continuity and coherence, and
of the interconnections between gestures. This enables performers
like myself to recognise and project seemingly disparate and
distinct “motifs” as manifestations of the same “gesture”. This
work is like one single gesture.
Language, like music, is manifested in a complex of behaviours.
Both music and language are forms of thought. Understanding
music should therefore be analogous to understanding language.
Both are a matter of use, that is, of knowing how to operate with
the medium in question in particular contexts of communication.
This 'knowing' is not about propositional knowledge but, rather,
about behavioral and experiential abilities and dispositions. Hence,
if music is thought, we should naturally come to understand it as
90

we come to understand thought in words. This is done not by
learning how to decode or decipher it, but by learning how to
respond to it appropriately and how to connect it to and ground it in
our lives. How I respond to language and how readers respond to
my language is at the core of this memoir.
Intelligible music stands to literal thinking in precisely the same
relation as does intelligible verbal discourse. If that relation is one
that takes its form in expression, then music and language are, at
any rate, in the same, and quite comfortable, boat.29
The performer
and certainly this writer allows the articulation, accentuation, even
the tempo to be different from page to page or on every few notes
if that seems to be the natural shape of the lines. Everything is
dynamic, fluid, in flux. That is certainly how I felt as I wrote this
memoir.
29
idem
91

Musical performers who over-emphasize their gestures through
exaggerated emotional expression are similar to an actor who
accompanies every movement with exaggerated facial and bodily
expressions. I am conscious of having over-emphasized some
gestures in this work as I have also over-emphasized some gestures
in my life. This is not surprising given the bi-polar nature of my
experience, my various enthusiasms and their gestural
performances which undoubtedly have disrupted the overall
architecture of my life and both enhanced and disrupted its
continuity.
Musical sounds and these words flow in the same world and,
although these comments comparing music and writing say nothing
about my life, they are an appropriate inclusion as this memoir
winds its way to its conclusion.
VOLUME FIVE
CHAPTER SEVEN
92

ABOUT MY POETRY
I find writing poetry is somewhat like the way a stream flows down
from the mountain to the sea, its course changed by every boulder
it comes across, which never goes straight for a minute unless the
terrain dictates otherwise. It follows one law, is always loyal to that
law which, curiously, is no law. There is nothing for it to do but
make the trip to the sea.-Ron Price with thanks to Alfred Kazin in
Mark Twain, Harold Bloom, editor, Chelsea House, 1986, pp.132-
33.
______________________________________________________
93

I have tried in my poetry to overcome the problem that Milton
refers to in Paradise Lost. I spoke, I wrote poetry and other genres
and, in the process, defined the who, the where, the cause. I trust
that very little of my poetry verges on the incoherent,1
although I
have had enough people in the last 15 years(1990-2005) either
express the fact they did not understand what I wrote or they
simply did not enjoy my poetry enough to bother commenting;
perhaps they did not want to hurt my feelings by being honest.-Ron
Price with thanks to John Redmond, “Review of Les Murray’s
Subhuman Redneck Poems, Jacket, Vol.1, 1997.
My self I then perused, and limb by limb
Surveyed, and sometimes went, and sometimes ran
With supple joints, and lively vigour led:
But who I was, or where, or from what cause,
Knew not; to speak I tried, and forthwith spake,
My tongue obeyed and readily could name
What e'er I saw.
94

- Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII, pp. 253-73
______________________________________________________
Finally, before I include some of my poetry here, I would like to
set its context in the framework of epic poetry and epic history, the
epic story of the Baha’i Faith.
EPIC JOURNEY/EPIC CONTEXT
I remember reading how both Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon
acquired the initial inspiration and concept for the magnum opus of
their lives: A Study of History in the case of Toynbee and The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the case of Gibbon.
Three years ago I began to think of writing my own epic poem and
fashioned some ten pages as a beginning. The poetic work of my
own life, my epic, I have come to see in terms of all the poetry I
have written, the poetry I have sent to the Baha’i World Centre
Library and what I have entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs.
95

I have begun to see all of this poetry somewhat like Pound’s
Cantos which draws on a massive body of print, or the Confucian
Analects, a word which means literary gleanings. The Cantos, the
longest poem in modern history, over eight hundred pages and
written over more than fifty years(1916 to 1968ca), are a great
mass of literary gleanings. So is this true of my poetry. The
conceptualization of my work as epic has come long after its
beginnings. My poetry slowly defined itself as an epic after half a
dozen years of intense and extensive writing and more than 30
years of occasional writing. I began to see my poetic opus as one
immense poem. I like to think this poetry gives voice to the Baha’i
culture I’ve inhabited all these years.
I see my poetic epic as furnishing, among other things, a host of
images. The images I provide are those which should be seen
within the context of that famous definition of image that Pound
wrote in 1913: "An 'image' is that which presents an intellectual
96

and emotional complex in an instant of time.”30
Understood in this
way, image does not seem to be distinguished in any special way
from a traditional understanding of it. Something very similar was
stated by Poe in his explanation of poetic character found in
writing: "A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by
elevating the soul.”31
To a large extent, this is so since the poetic
character of human beings is universal and their poetic works seek,
above all, to excite our emotions: "If we are moved by a poem, it
has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are
not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.”32
For many, if not
most, my poetic epic will be to most people, in Eliot’s terms,
meaningless.
Pound was twenty-nine when he began to write his epic. I was fifty
three when I began to see all my poetry, poetry I began writing at
the age of thirty-six or, perhaps, as far back as eighteen, as part of
30
Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, editor, T.S. Eliot, Faber and
Faber, London, 1954, p.4.
31
ibid., p.71.
32
T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, Faber and Faber, London, 1957, p.30.
97

one immense epic. Pound was acutely conscious that the cultural,
the historical tradition had broken down and he was searching for a
new basis, “new laws of divine justice.”1
His task was to
reassemble this tradition or, at least, search in history where not
only the fall from innocence was located but also the locus for the
process of redemption could be found. I, too, was aware of this
breakdown. I, too, felt the need to reassemble history, not as
Pound did, but rather to find truths which were perennial but not
archaic within the broad framework of a new Revelation from God,
a Revelation which defined and described the continuities and was
Itself the basis for redemption.
Written now, for the most part, over a little more than eight
years(1992-2000), the epic I am writing covers a pioneering life of
39 years. It also covers much more. I have now sent 39 booklets to
the Baha’i World Centre Library: one for each year of this
pioneering venture. But the epic journey that is at the base of this
poetic opus is not only a personal one of over forty years back to
98

the time I became a Baha’i, it is also the journey of this new
System, the World Order of Baha’u’llah, which has its origins as
far back as the 1840s and, if one includes the two precursors to this
System, as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century when
many of the revolutions and forces that are at the beginning of
modern history have their origin: the American and French
revolutions, the industrial and agricultural revolutions and the
revolution in the arts and sciences. Generally, the way my
narrative imagination conceives of this epic is itself an attempt to
connect this long and complex history to my own life, as far as
possible, to that of the religion to which I belong. I have sought
and found, in recent years, a narrative voice that contains
uncertainty, ambiguity and incompleteness among shifting fields of
reference and of a certainty mixed with and defining itself by the
presence of its polar opposite, doubt.
Since this poetry is inspired by so much that is, and has been, part
of the human condition, this epic it could be said has at its centre
99

Life Itself and the most natural and universal of human activities,
the act of creating narratives. When we die all that remains is our
story. I have called this poetic work an epic because it deals with
events, as all epics do, that are or will be significant to the entire
society. It contains what Charles Handy, philosopher, business
man and writer, calls the golden seed: a belief that what I am doing
is important, probably unique, to the history and development of
this System. This poetry, this epic, has to do with heroism and
deeds of battle in their contemporary and historical manifestations.
It involves a great journey, not only my own across two continents,
but that of this Cause as it has expanded across the planet. The epic
convention of the active intervention of God and holy souls from
another world; and the convention of an epic tale, told in verse, a
verse that is not a frill or an ornament, but is essential to the story,
are found here. I think there is an amplitude in this poetry that
simple information-giving lacks; there is also an engine of action
that is found in my inner life more than in its external story. In
100

some ways, this is the most significant aspect of my work, at least
from my point of view.
In the Greek tradition the Goddess of Epic Poetry was Calliope,
one of the nine sisters of the Muses. The Muses were the
inspiration of artists. Calliope was the mother of Orpheus who was
known to have a keen understanding of both music and poetry. We
know little about Calliope, as we know little about the inspiration
of the Muses, at least in the Greek tradition. In the young and
developing poetic and artistic tradition of the Baha’i Faith, on the
other hand, although gods and goddesses play no role, holy souls
“who have remained faithful unto the covenant of God” can be a
leaven that leavens “the world of being” and furnishes “the power
through which the arts and wonders of the world are made
manifest.”(Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, 1956, p.161.) In addition,
among a host of other inspirational sources, the simple expression
‘Ya’Baha’ul’Abha’ brings “the Supreme Concourse to the door of
life” and “opens the heavens of mysteries, colours and riddles of
101

life.” (‘Abdu’l-Baha, Source Unknown) Much could be said about
inspiration but I shall leave the topic with the above brief analysis
and comment.
Mary Gibson says in Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the
Victorians(Cornell U, 1995, p.96) that one question was at the
centre of The Cantos. It was the "question of how beauty and
power, passion and order can cohere." This question was one of
many that concerned Pound in the same years that Baha'i
Administration, the precursor of a future World Order, was coming
to assume its embryonic form in the last years of the second decade
of this century, a form that would in time manifest those qualities
Pound strove in vain to find in a modern politico-philosophy.
At the heart of my own epic is a sense of visionary certitude,
derived from a belief in an embryonic World Order, that a cultural
and political coherence will increase in the coming decades and
centuries around the sinews of this efflorescing Order. Wallace
102

Stevens’ sense of the epic “as a poem of the mind in the act of
finding what will suffice”(Jay Parini, editor, the Columbia History
of American Poetry, Columbia UP, NY, 1993, p.543) is also at the
centre of my conceptual approach. This epic is an experimental
vehicle containing open-ended autobiographical sequences. It is a
didactic intellectual exploration with lines developing with
apparent spontaneity and going in many directions. The overall
shape is in no way predetermined. In many respects, this long
poem is purely speculative philosophy, attempting to affirm a
romantic wholeness on a fragmented world, something Walter
Crane tried to do in the 1920s. This long poem, or seemingly
endless series of poems, is an immense accumulation of fragments,
like the world itself, but they are held together by a unifying vision.
So, too, was Pound’s epic.
Pound was intent on developing an “ideal polity of the mind”.
This polity flooded his consciousness and suggested a menacing
fluidity, an indiscriminate massiveness of the crowd. The polity
103

that is imbeded in my own epic does not suggest the crowd,
probably because the polity I have been working with over my
lifetime has been one that has grown so slowly; the groups I have
worked in and with have been small. My style, my poetic design,
though, is like Pound’s insofar as I use juxtaposition as a way to
locate and enhance meanings. Like Pound, I stress continuity in
history, the cultural and the personal. At the heart of epic poetry
for Pound was “the historical.” Also, for Pound, was a new world
order based on the poet’s own visionary experience. It was part of
the reclaiming job that Modernist poets saw as their task, to regain
old ground from the novelists. But, unlike Pound, I see new and
revolutionary change in both the historical process, in my own
world and in the future. The visionary experience that will guide
world order is not mine, but that derived from the Central Figures
of my Faith.
Those who are quite familiar with the poem Leaves of Grass may
recall that Walt Whitman often merges himself with the reader.
104

His poem expresses his theory of democracy. His poem is the
embodiment of the idea that a single unique protagonist can
represent a whole epoch. He can be looked at in two ways: there is
his civic, public, side and his private, intimate side. While it would
be presumptuous of me to claim, or even to attempt, to represent an
entire epoch, this private/public dichotomy is an important
underlying feature of this epic poem (Harold Bloom, The Western
Canon, Harcourt, Brace and Co., NY, 1994, pp.447-78). I also like
to think that, while this poetry has a focus on my own experience,
this experience is part and parcel of the experience of my
coreligionists around the world.
In my poetic opus, my poetic epic, Pioneering Over Four Epochs,
the reader should sense a merging of reader and writer, a political
philosophy, a sociology, a psychology, a global citizen--something
we have all become. There is in my poetry a public and a private
man reacting to the burgeoning planetization of humankind, the
knowledge explosion and the tempest that has been history’s
105

Autobiography: Part 7

Recomendados

Recomendados

Mais conteúdo relacionado

Mais procurados

Mais procurados (20)

Destaque

Destaque (20)

Semelhante a Autobiography: Part 7

Semelhante a Autobiography: Part 7 (14)

Último

Último (20)

Autobiography: Part 7