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... the philosopher Paul Feyerbands did. He became paralyzed and had to finish his autobiography from an unfortunate bed-ridden state. Other writers become paralysed with the thought of using the first person: a serious dilemma for an autobiographer.
I, too, was reticent to use the first person for the first two decades as I toyed initially with this autobiography. But eventually I found a voice, a voice I was comfortable with. I also found a format that attempted to create what I think is a happy balance between aphoristic nuggets and sustained analysis. I leave it to readers to assess whether I achieved this balance. The profession of writer has acquired something of the ancient professions of travelling salesman and repertory actor.
As I gaze back over the half a century (1949 - 1999) before I took up writing full time I feel as if I acquired or took part in these ancient professions through my several roles of student, teacher, Bah' pioneer and a multitude of geographic, status, career, employment, community and marital situations. Full time writers are often engaged in an endless succession of book festivals and literary conferences which take them round the globe, all of which adds to an air of unreality, with books alone being the hub around which their existence revolves. I, too, went around the globe, or at least from one end in the north to the other end in the south, with books being a critical hub of my life. If I experienced any unreality it was due to a range of factors but attending literary conferences and book festivals was not among those factors. From time to time and partly due to my bi-polar disability I experienced that unspeakable penalty or affliction in which I felt that my whole being had been exerted toward accomplishing nothing. But, insensibly and as the decades wore on, I knew that this feeling, when and if it arose, was transient and in a few hours at most it would disappear.
As my early sixties advanced from year to year I withdrew increasingly, almost entirely, from the society of those about me and gave myself up to a wondrous study of writing and reading. In many ways, my reading in the first six decades of my life was far from as deep as I would have liked it to be but there was so much else going on in my life that I was unable to achieve the depth that I wanted. With the early years of late adulthood I have been able to both read and write more, much more, at last to my satisfaction. I am conscious of William Hazlitt's cautionary note that often, if one reads more, one thinks less.
Perhaps that notion just provided me with an easy way to excuse myself. I find that concentrated and extensive reading seems to come second to writing and the innumerable odds-and-ends of life. It is true for me, as it was for Hazlitt, that I try most earnestly to cultivate the habit of thinking, and detested nothing so much as servile imitation, affectation and their loathsome odour. I wish to think and feel for myself. If I have not drunk deep, hopefully I have at least been an expert taster who makes serendipitous connections. This reading and writing does not take place in a vacuum.
I continue my role of activist, but I play the role differently than I did in the first forty years of my adult life. As someone who surmounted the educational hurdles that kept previous generations in my family solidly working class, I became a credentialed worker, a professional who experienced considerable autonomy and intrinsic worker satisfaction from the 1960 s to the 1990 s. And now that paid-labour of the day does not occupy me as it did for decades, nor does raising a family, nor going to meetings and engaging so frequently in social and community activities, I can write and place the products of my efforts in thousands of internet sites with literally millions of my words. Although a critical observer might see and say that I was simply blowing my own horn, I was blowing the Bahai horn, so to speak. This occupied me virtually all my waking hours. There were many who blew the horn that I blew, albeit differently shaped, different sizes and styles, but many ordinary people and many thinkers and intellectuals, writers and social scientists blew many of the tunes I was trying to blow both in my autobiography and in other works.
Fernand Braudel, for example, of the French annales school, recognised the justice of the sociologist Raymond Aron's observation that 'the phase of civilisations is coming to an end, and for good or ill humanity is embarking on a new phase. ' That phase is one of a single civilisation which could become universal. I dont want to list and comment, quote and analyse, all those who share this global, one world perspective. Suffice it to say, it was a horn which as the epochs advanced was blown by more and more serious students of history's longue due. Some of these students had a grand interpretation of history, a mega narrative, along the lines pursued by Oswald Spengler, H. G.
Wells or Arnold Toynbee. And some did not. Much of the discussion remains nebulous and unsatisfactory. The story, the blowing, is far from over. My years of worrying about the success of my three children and whether they too would enjoy the benefits of education in their professional lives that I enjoyed; whether they were happy in their single or married lives and whether my step-grandchildren were winning their races or successful at school, were for the most part over by the time I entered my early sixties. My wife tended to take care of the worry department in these areas and she did a better job of providing care, therapy and advice when needed.
The messages of conformity and obedience, of working hard to achieve occupational achievement and self-satisfaction, seemed to be more of a pattern in my childrens lives and the lives of my grandchildren for that matter, than it was in mine forty years before. Although all was not smooth in their lives, they did not give me much to worry about as they went on with their lives as busy as beavers. This subject could occupy many more pages and perhaps it will in some future revised edition of this autobiography. I should add here, parenthetically, that I, too, worked hard.
Perhaps such a remark goes without saying; perhaps my inner drive was due partly to my insecurities and my knowing that my achievements never came easily for me. Perhaps my relentless pursuit of the high goals I set myself was part of my bi-polar disorder. Perhaps the origins of my ambitious tendency were to be found in my early childhood and my relationships with hard working parents and conscientious family in general. Perhaps a detailed explanation of the Price and Cornfield family fortunes over time, over previous generations might uncover some explanation for the ardour and effort that characterized my life. The foundation of the two family-trees, Price and Cornfield, going back centuries is virtually unknown to me.
In the last quarter of the 19 th century, though, each family occupied the upper regions of the lower class or the lower regions of the middle class. The recounting of the ups and downs of the generations in these two families, generations I have known something about, is beyond the scope of my knowledge and the purposes of this autobiography. The canvas I paint is broad but it is, for the most part, rooted in subjects I know a good deal about. Readers will find some discussion of my family tree in this autobiography but, on the whole, very little outside those members I actually met and got to know well. History, wrote the historian R.
G. Collingwood, is the science of res gentle and res gentle are the actions of human beings, actions that have been done in the past. The first time in the western tradition that we come across this term res gentle is with the emperor Augustus in 14 AD. It is inscribed on his mausoleum.
It is a memorial of his achievements. It is a type of official, abbreviated autobiography. Autobiography, then, to follow Collingwood's lead, are my own actions in the past. History, Collingwood went on, is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
All history is the history of thought, Collingwood continues, in so far as human actions are mere events, the historian cannot understand them; strictly, he cannot even ascertain that they have happened. They are only knowable to him as the outward expression of inward thoughts. All this is certainly true, a fortiori, of autobiography. The history of my thought and action is the re-enactment of that past thought and action in my own mind.
My autobiography is a continuous process of interaction between myself and the facts of my life, an unending dialogue between my present and my past. I am, in the words of another historian E. H. Carr, just another dim figure trudging along, but the point at which I find myself in this trudging procession determines my angle of vision and just how dim or how sharp that vision is over the past. In addition, as autobiographer, I am not dredging up everything only what I see as relevant. A good many people simply want to know about the past, my past and my view of things for the emotional or intellectual satisfaction I provide.
The extent to which an autobiographer fulfils the useful social function of helping people know something better, to that extent does he contribute to the complex of non-practical activities which make up the culture of a society. When and if I stimulate and satisfy the imagination of my readers, I do not differ essentially from the poet or artist. There is an emotional satisfaction of a high order to be gained from extending the comprehending intelligence of people to include elements of the past. Like all rational activities, the study, the reading, of a well written autobiography, an autonomous enterprise and activity in itself, can contribute to the improvement of man. It does so by seeking the truth within the confines of its particular province and that province is the rational reconstruction of the past.
I do not want to dwell excessively on the middle class psychology, either in its individual or collective expression, that played in the centre and at the fringes of my life as an adult since the mid-sixties. Nor do I want to place here a political analysis, an analysis that took society from a politics of the left in the sixties and seventies and then to the right in the following twenty years. Even though my adult life was lived with this psychological and political background, I feel I have alluded to these themes enough in the previous mountain of words. I have drawn here on one of the better analyses of my culture and my class, my status group and its values and beliefs, an analysis that was first published in 1989, just as I was about to complete my last decade of professional employment as a teacher. Like Gustave Flaubert, the originator of the modern novel who spent much of his life in one house and a great deal of that time in one room I, too, spend much of my time now in a room in a house in the oldest town in Australia at the end of the Tamar River in northern Tasmania.
Only the occasional Bahai activity, family interchange, conversation with a friend, daily interaction with my wife and the inevitable trips to town to shop, to put up posters and to go the library and attend to the several domestic activities that are part of life for everyman took me into the social domain. I had come to see life more as an affair of solitude diversified by company than an affair of company diversified by solitude. For fifty years (1954 - 2004) it had been the other way around. With early retirement the tables and the millennium had slowly been turning. As they turned I slowly approached the heartland of my story across the familiar slopes of my earthly life, its actions and thoughts. I tell it in a way which gives me an invigorating sense of briskness and phrase-relishing.
As the epochs advanced I had an increasing and an insatiable spirit of activity. By the fifth epoch the spirit was channeled virtually in its entirety into a sedentary and literary life. In the process I defined my world. I hope readers enjoy my definition and the way I go about putting it together. Like Johnsons dictionary 250 years ago, it is an ambitious work.
But whether it will influence generations as Johnsons work did, I can only hope. He wrote to escape the pain of life; I wrote to escape society's endless chat. An autobiography, like a novel, stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium, said William Golding when he received his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character.
That is the service both an autobiography and a novel renders. Golding went on to say: It performs no less an act than the rescue and the preservation of the individuality and dignity of the single being, be it man, woman or child. No other art, I claim, can so thread in and out of a single mind and body -- and so live another life. It does ensure that at the very least a human being shall be seen to be more than just one billionth of one billion...
And if the potential reader is not interested in what I have preserved here he need not read my work, need not pick it up. He is free to stop at any juncture. I hope the fact that this work is not just a humdrum inventory of personal recollections should encourage the disinclined reader. But neither is this work a series of casually scanned or, like Flaubert's novels, savagely chosen details in a frozen gel of chosen ness. " Pioneering Over Four Epochs is a portmanteau of personal history, the Bah' Faith and endless opin ionizing; it is a pinata of literary references and a gallimaufry of stuff that I try to beat into shape with the stick in / of my brain -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
The Cause is going to need pioneers for many generations to come. As I have been writing this lengthy statement of my pioneering experience I have often felt that my story is but one of the first to make it onto paper from the generations beginning in 1937. Some narratives, some genres, like westerns and gangster stories, are dead or are dieing out. The political agenda changes with the seasons, although some problems seem to be perennial. My father used to say there is always trouble in the Middle East.
When the news came on and he was in his latter years, he would leave the room muttering about the endless warfare in Israel. That was in 1960. Nearly fifty years later the story is the same. And the historian AJP Taylor said it was wisest never to have an opinion about the Middle East. The pioneer, in its many forms, has a long life ahead of it and a long life behind it. Since literature takes as its subject all human experience, and particularly the ordering, interpreting, and articulating of experience, it is no accident that the most varied literary projects find instruction in the great mass of literature and its history and that the results of these projects are relevant to thinking about literature.
What is true for literature, is also true for the other arts, such as painting and film and autobiography. The reader should also keep in mind as he reads this work that there is what autobiographers calls the interstitial selfe self that emerges in lifes multitude of interstices, some in discourse, others in private. Sometimes this interstitial self emerges only for a moment to deal with and negotiate a conflict, a particular point in a relationship, indeed, many of lifes situations. Sometimes the person is unaware of some of his interstitial selves. He is drawn back into familiar territory where there is a more stable position, a more familiar self and his interstitial self disappears as fast as it came into being. At other times, this interstitial self is grasped as a way to escape the restrictive discourses that so often arise in social life.
In addition to this interstitial self there is another conventional autobiographical term, the hybrid self. This is a self that can be seen as shifting among positions and discourses, sometimes combining them into a true hybrid. At other times I am very aware of the contradictions and contradictory situations in life and that I must maintain quite separate and independent discourses, languages, so to speak, of the self. Then there is the unsound self, a self that seems unfordable.
It too me 19 years (1984 - 2003) to finally find a voice that spoke to me of me. Beginnings are often difficult for novelists and autobiographers. People think of writing for years and may, in the end, never pick up their pen. I shall say no more on what can be a complex subject of selves. But it is an important aspect for readers to consider as they delve into this autobiography. Readers need to keep in mind G.
K. Chesterton's turn of phrase in his discussion of the future of Charles Dickens writings. Chesterton notes that there are a number of important factors which never prevent a man from being immortal. The chief of them, he adds, is the unquestionable fact that they write an enormous amount of bad work. This leads a man to being put below his place in his own time, but it does not affect his permanent place, to all appearance, at all. Shakespeare, for instance, and Wordsworth wrote not only an enormous amount of bad work, but an enormous amount of enormously bad work.
Some of the feedback I have received in the three years since I finished the 3 rd edition of this work would indicate that what I have written is just that, an enormously bad work. So, perhaps, my immortality is assured, at least if Chesterton is onto something here. Chesterton goes on to say in his discussion of the future of Dickens writings that it is the very exaggeration of his characters that will immortalize him. The realistic narrators of their time are all forgotten, but the exaggerators live on. Chesterton sites the example of Homer and his characters in the Iliad and Odyssey. I might add the example of the Bab and Bahaullah's writings which to a western ear and the moderate tones of the stiff upper-lip of the English literary tradition, often seem exaggerated.
My own work, sadly, aiming as it does for realism, factual detail and accuracy of circumstance, will probably pass through the wings of time and be no more substance than the eye of a dead ant as the Bab, or was it Bahaullah, wrote. On the other hand, Chesterton did leave me with some hope for a place in posterity's literary home. Chesterton also felt that those writers with a poetic inclination had a greater future than those without. So, perhaps, in the end, my poetry will save a place for me in futures rooms amidst its lush or not-so-lush furnishings. Among these furnishings, perhaps on the walls, will be the carefully arranged portraits of my emotional credentials, my intellectual and psychological interests, indeed, a whole gallery of stuff. It is difficult to see what value all these gallery pieces will have but their association with a new Faith which claims to be the emerging religion on this planet will give them a significance I can scarcely appreciate at this early hour.
A person is not simply determined and dominated by the pressures of any overarching discourse or ideology such as the secular pluralism in which we as citizens of western democracies are immersed. We are all, I believe, the agents of our own personal discernment capable of identifying and interpreting society's dominant discourse in order to insert himself into it or confront and resist it. The dominant cultural forces within our world do not take away our free will -- entirely. But just as Darwinism and the Civil War shattered the psyches of Americans living in the last 40 years of the nineteenth century and two great wars and the holocaust shattered those living in the first half of the twentieth century, we in the last half of that century and the early twenty-first have other shattering social and psychological experiences. There cannot be any doubt at all that my own literary corpus can not be appreciated apart from the influences of my age.
In an attempt to sketch the course of my literary endeavours it would be futile to detach their succession from the experiences of my personal life, largely determined, as these were, by the revolutionary changes of my time, by other changes in the condition of both Canada and Australia where I have lived, developments in the religion I have been associated with and in the various intellectual shifts and alterations in its centres and capitals around the world. The probing of 'Canadianness' or Australianness turns out to be a puzzling and somewhat brain-racking exercise in my pioneer situation. But all is not puzzle and probes for the brain. Much of the contemplation is enriching and interesting for the psyche. The world I have grown up in, at least since Norman Vincent Peale wrote what was arguably the first self-help book, has grown accustomed to the standard victim-recovery cycle of modern self-help books.
Part of pop-psychology one of the many substitutes for religion in my time, the self-help genre can not be found in the text of this book. Like Proust's masterpiece, I like to think my work is edifying precisely because my struggle goes on and on and just changes its form as the years go on. Unlike Proust, I do get better from illnesses that dot my life. I may not get totally cured and the battle of life may change its form and content but I am never tempted to blame others for my problems. I do not welcome suffering, as Proust seems to do, as an opportunity for thinking up fresh ideas and for entering into a richer relationship with experience. But once it has come and gone I welcome the insights that come in its train.
I like to think too that, if self-help sneaks around the intellectual corner, I offer it in the form of a manual, a philosophical guide for the intelligent person. If self-help there be here I hope it is a welcome departure from the usual bellyaching. ''Our best chance of contentment, '' Proust writes ''lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes and emotional betrayals. If we can also avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time and the weather, then some degree of contentment may be ours. '' Following the nine, the seven or the five steps may also help. For some, especially writers, language itself is the primary arena within which these shattering experiences are coped with and individual assertiveness and agency becomes manifest from behind the angst. For them talk is more important than action, indeed talk itself is action because words determine thoughts and actions. "Language... is the parent, and not the child, of thought...
Men are the slaves of words. " This may have been true of the philosopher Kant whom posterity caricatured as a man "who was all thought and no life" or a man who neither had a life nor a history. Ive come to the view that thought and action, two of the major facets of our lives, can not be separated. The practical and the mystic have become one in our day. My journey is not only the core and central thread of my life story; it is also the recurrent and most enduring principle of my life.
Nowhere, throughout the narrative, will one encounter a complacently ensconced pioneer. I have been a migratory and volatile spirit which has sprung out of the most established and rooted position in a conservative Canadian consciousness. I have often been beaten down by circumstances, depressed by body chemistry and situations, called by that curious combination of sorrow and a strange desolation of hope into a quietness, but complacency has not been a quality I have battled with although I must say that complacency sounds restful after some of lifes other battles I have had to contend with. My resistance to the dominant mores of my time has been articulated, made public, and critiqued in several textual identities of which this autobiography is one. The personal agency of my discernment, my autonomy, declares itself it seems to me in this very writing.
This writing becomes the site and symbol of my resistance to the dominant ideology of my time and its major cultural manifestations. This resistance takes place with the aid of the great power of retrospect and hindsight and so gives to much of the messiness, order and shape to this work. In the end, though, much is messiness, for not all of thought is ordered, tidy and logically sequential. If I give to my life artistic form and spiritual vision and design in retrospect; if I discover a more profound truth in the context of this vision than an unfertilized collection of facts could deliver, I understand that is part of a design-imposed, meaning-making, process that I give to my life. Perhaps a great deal of what has happened to me is fate, destiny, a certain predestination. Such was the view Henry James took of his life when he wrote his autobiography in the evening of his life.
There is little doubt of the importance of fate from a Bahai perspective. I wish I could say in this context that my sentences had a quality of stunning exactitude, lyricism and comedy, an aphoristic concision but, alas, style is not a quality bestowed on me as it was on Flaubert. Perhaps this is because I have not been willing to work at it as obsessively as he. I wish I could also say, too, that I possessed the kind of grand and exuberant personality that the great twentieth century literary critic William Empson is reputed to have possessed. Such a personality would have been handy in so many of the social situations in life.
So much of life has been social. That refined, sophisticated, and erudite scholar with his great reckless energy for life, with his willingness to throw his entire self into the interpretation and criticism of literature, William Empson had an energy and passion that informed his critical work and served to renew in the common reader a sense that there is some literature that can matter deeply to all and any of us. Alas, although I shared Empson's energy it did not result in any literary erudition in my case; although, like Empson, I threw myself into my academic life in varying degrees with some success over half a century, I never made it to the major leagues. My destiny was to be a minor poet in the minor leagues. But I enjoyed playing poetic-ball in a small town in the minors. If you love playing ball part of you does not care where.
I was certainly not in the same league as Empson, arguably one of the three greatest literary critics in the last several hundred years; although we both had sexual proclivities, his desires seemed to result in greater notoriety than mine. I had certainly experienced shame, fear and guilt in relation to my sexual urges and activities, among other sources of shame. Fear of exposure was very real and, after my young adulthood, I was not able to share my concerns with anyone except my wife. These were battles I fought, for the most part, on my own.
Being honest about my failures in the sexual domain seemed impossible outside my immediate marital relationship. There simply was not the context, the relationship for such a degree of intimacy or confessional ism. But these feelings did not keep me away from God as they do many. My sense of unworthiness seemed instrumental in drawing me closer to God, to appreciating His forgiveness, something I was assured of over and over again by Bahaullah. I had right desire, but possessed wayward appetites, a sort of contagion of the lower self, part of an inward war made of thin but tough veils, battles which I often lost, susceptibilities of conscience which were simply not strong enough. I was not willing, or so it seemed, to burn the bridges across which certain sins continually came.
In a world like this, in the darkest hours before the dawn, I was confident I had much company, company that ran into the millions if not billions. Alcohol was never a problem for me as it was for Empson. Comparisons with others, of course, are sometimes useful but, as the clich goes, comparisons are often odious. Autobiography's ultimate purpose, Henry James felt, was to fix the self for all time, to put forth the idea that the autobiographer matters and that his life is significant in the supposed order of things. I certainly like to think my life matters, that it has meaning in the ultimate scheme of things, that in writing this autobiography I am not merely imposing form on chaos, that all that I think is not merely an exercise in subjectivity, that my life is not so deeply private as to be beyond scientific scrutiny, that it derives its importance from factors beyond that which is unsystematic, even chaotic, un communicable and emotional in life. The scientific domain contains an important element of subjectivity and total objectivity is always impossible.
One of the key elements of science is that it exists in, indeed generates, a community, a framework, of interpretation. Indeed, the scientist can only function within such a community. That is also true, at least in some ways, for this autobiographer. The community in question for me is the Bahai community. And, more generally, the human community.
What makes my work scientific is that I am engaged in a conscious, explicit organization of knowledge and experience. I am not just engaged in making true statements. One can do this in any quiz or games like trivial pursuit. Proof, in scientific terms and in autobiography, means nothing more than the total process by which we render a statement more acceptable than its negation.
An important caveat here is that the convictions I bring to this exercise, my feelings of certitude, indeed much that I might call tentative hypotheses for example, are part of a psychological state not part of my knowledge. Certitude can often be had with no knowledge at all and hypotheses are things anyone can make. Our emotions organize themselves around our convictions and become part of our way of life. This is ones faith, ones religion.
And we all have a religion in this sense; there exists around this religion or faith a theoretical uncertainty and it exists for all of us. Such is some of the intellectual orientation, some of my foundation view, that I take to this autobiography. Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal, to assert this autonomy, however permanent it may be, than the creative process itself, the process of composition. Verse really does, in Akhmatova's words, grow from rubbish among other things.
To express this same idea more elegantly, one could say that verse grows out of slime the same way as a lotus flower. The roots of prose are no more honorable. But there in the roots can also be found faith and thought the lotus flowers embryo. Without faith and thought no society can long endure and without a common humanity and a practical basis for world order appalling catastrophe threatens to engulf humanity. As this autobiography has come to take form increasingly since I began writing it over twenty years ago, I have felt a measure of literary and psychological power and humility.
Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that self-narrative is a tool used to gain self-determinacy. This work is also partly an illness narrative, partly a salvation narrative, partly a travel narrative, as autobiographers often call these sub-genres, and partly an act of becoming and re-becoming. Through self-narration I partly re-make myself, re-fashion and re-invent a new understanding of myself. With this story I try to resist the several disabling definitions that could label my life and so to write myself into / with a rhetorical normalcy.
Narrative is used as a tool, a technology, that is intended to be a vehicle to freedom, self-definition, and self-expression. Unlike some writers, I have no obsession with being taken seriously. What c
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