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If one is to stay creative and remain tuned to the richness of being, of living, of reflecting and anticipating, as one must if one is writing one's autobiographical story in the seventh decade of his life and one is not to yield to depressing tones of déjà vu, one has to admit it is the fragment that offers an opening onto potential meaning and imagination's stimulus that opens windows. For things in their meaningfulness, address us in a certain way. This is part of what we could call the realm of responsiveness, a realm that is an encounter, an encounter that is essentially a linguistic relationship. But all is not words, poetry and thinking belong together in speech and in their devotion to the relation which is silent in all our speech. Wallace Stevens expresses the wonder of the world and its shining by means of the poetic word in the following lines of his poem "The Idea of Order at Key West:"
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the sole artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang,
The sea, Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.
Stevens knows that there is no world other than the one we create, the one of which we are the makers. And I have made a world here in this memoir. The fragment, in this case the sea, does not deal with wholeness, although it may contribute to the completed account. Only through the fragment can one have access to a way of being that is dynamic, pluralistic and self-regenerating; and only through the metanarrative of our own experience can we learn what we are and achieve some degree of unity. This unity is found in the context of a constant conversation between unity and disunity, a conversation in which juxtaposition plays with omission and collision. And often, no matter how much we understand the dynamics of our situation, we still get hurt and feel exasperated. And no matter how strong our beliefs they must face the tribunal of our experience as a whole. In that tribunal analysis gives us the grammar for our concepts. But analysis is faced with the conundrum that at each moment of life's becoming that moment escapes our attempts to comprehend it.
Ours is a culture of the fragment, like life itself, and the Bahá’í Faith is a culture of the unity of fragments. Like the baroque, the postmodern--our world--shares above all a taste for mixing, palimpsesting, hybridization and discontinuity. Some of the distinct features of both the baroque and the postmodern are: self-irony, self-parody, a rejection of static definition, ambiguities of definition, a constant or at least a periodic, crisis of identity which people seem to have to go through, a sense of incompleteness in which the culture and the individual are never fully capable of explaining themselves. Some of the distinct features of the Bahá’í Faith are the spiritual history, everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony in a grand fortissimo now, in our time, sounding together, irresistably advancing to some kind of mighty climax out of which another great movement will, in time, emerge.
This work I like to think, although I may be somewhat presumptuous in doing so, has some similarities to Virgil's Aeneid, Rome's national epic written in the eyars 29 to 19 BC. Just as Virgil's work envisaged a golden age so does this work; just as his work was permeated with the lack of reconciliation in the new Roman Empire just formed, so is this work permeated with the tragedy of the slowness of response of humanity to the Revelation of Baha'u'llah, the slough of despond and the social commotion at play on the planet, the troubled forecasts of doom, the phantoms of a wrongly informed imagination at this crucial turning point in history, a turning point represented by these four epochs. As Virgil's Ecologue opened up new perspectives and I like to think this work will do the same. Some read the Aeneid with an optimistic view and others have gloomy readings. Inspite of my own forecasts of gloom and doom, I see my work as essentially positive, optimistic and with a view that sees a bright future for humanity. When Virgil wrote, Rome was at the start of an empire, a system, a new order, and Virgil was preoccupied with the notion of unity. I see myself as writing in the context of "the first stirrings of that World Order of which the present Administrative System is at once the precursor, the nucleus and pattern." As the Romans needed insight into their predicament not cleverness, so is this our need. As I live and write in Australia I sometimes think that the essentially comic spirit of the Romans has been passed on by history's circuitous forces to the Australians. As I watch decade after decade of entertainment I can't help but agree with that delightful American critic Gore Vidal that laughing gas is pumped into the lounge room of Australians on a nightly basis. I suppose if you are going to go down, you might as well do so laughing.
As you, dear reader, move through the words, the fragments, the volumes of this work, you will think, dream and analyse with me. You will contour yourself to the disjunctures, inconsistencies, ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the language of my therapeutic and non-therapeutic forum. Know that here in these words-of-suffering, words-of-compassion, words of simple and complex thought my psyche is attempting to draw you through a labyrinth such that you begin to reflect on your own frustrations, doubts, duplicities and suspicions in regard to the inexhaustibility of interpretation on the many fronts of your own lives. It is my hope that you begin to recapitulate with a more finely tuned exactitude, the play of subtleties and pluralities found in the texts of your own lives--texts and lives which have all too often been dismissed as societally and therapeutically irrelevant or simply not thought about by you and by others. I would like to think that, as a result of reading some of the things here, the meaningfulness of phenomenal existence and readers' lives within it will address them all the more. Perhaps readers will understand these meanings and respond or answer, first, through a fuller understanding and then by relating and behaving in a different way than they have in the past. If understanding does not increase, perhaps my words, as Wordsworth says, will "uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe." So many of the world's words serve, he says, as "a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve." Or the words are simply lost in history's vast abyss due to disinterest, the burgeoning of print and the tempest that is our time. Perhaps, to put it another way, this work will serve as a catalyst of intellectual complexity.
Writers inevitably have hopes for their work. And my hope is that my words will serve as a conduit. Once readers get into my book, interest in the world I detail, along with its troubled times, themes and personalities, will I trust be whetted sufficiently to read -- or at the very least skim -- on and on.
This epilogue to my epilogue is one final reflection on my life, my work and my religion. I hope this reflection is not too complex for readers. As diverse and as apparently fractured as it all is, it is umbilically connected in one body and from it, in time, I trust a living and breathing entity will emerge for the reading public. The sifting and winnowing of my life's experience, swimming as it has in a different amneotic fluid, has taken place over many years.
The poet Byron expressed the view that his writing derived from a painful intensification of self and the desire for relief from it. To withdraw himself from himself, to be releaved from what he saw as his "cursed selfishness," this was his sole, his entire, his "sincere motive in scribbling at all." While I find there is some truth in this explanation for the origins of my writing, there is so much more to it; indeed, the raison d'etre is quite complex. It is a subject I have gone into from time to time throughout this memoir and I shall say no more about it here.
In the process of writing this memoir I became more conscious of something that had struck me from time to time over the years but the business of life prevented me from plumbing its reality and significance; namely, the fact that every human creature is so constituted as to be a profound secret and mystery to every other. It is a solemn consideration that when I walk along the street in the small town where I live at night, or when I enter a great city at night when the traffic has died down and the lights brighten and soften the landscape, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest to it! In any of the burialplaces of this city through which I pass or in my own small town there lies a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them.
In Shakespeare's play Hamlet the performance of thought, thinking, takes places in the form of inaction, of delay. The play is about a man who thinks. Hamlet's disposition to think and his indisposition to act, his intellectual activity and his aversion to action is at the centre of the play. We have here a man prone to thinking who seems incapable of acting and proportionally the more he thinks, the less he acts. Psychological readings of the last two centuries have blown plot and genre out of the critical waters. These readers have internalized the focus on character so that delay is not a plot device but a symptom of psychic conflict and the conjunction of tragic and comic heightens not social division but psychic conflict. This memoir is, in some ways, about a man thinking. This introspectivity to me, though, is but another form of action. As I see it, "we can no longer separate the active and the contemplative facets of our lives. Practicality and mysticism possess a oneness of vision and form." So too is this true of smooth surfaces and ruffled edges in life. They both can be pressed into cultural and autobiographical service, but they are inherent parts of the warp and weft of one's life.
Poets and writers often interpret criticism of their poems, their works, as criticism of themselves. I think they are onto something. However loudly some poets, like Rabindranath Tagore, proclaim the poem to be separate from the poet, people respond to poems as if they are real people speaking. I became conscious of this at the start of my massive production of poetry in 1992-3. For more than a decade I had written a good deal of awefully complex stuff and some readers told me so. For ten years, too, I had written a first edition of this memoir, but it was so tedious, so boring, I could hardly bear reading it.
The poetical, the memoir, is personal. There is no getting away from it. When a reader has an aversion to a poet's style that aversion, it seems to me, is partly an aversion to the personality that style presents. Style, it is often said, is the man and, even if style is different for each poem or each edition of a memoir, as I like to think is the case with mine, a man's style like the man himself is not always liked by all. "The most perfect development of style," wrote the Canadian poet Archibald Lampman, " must be sought in those whose experience of the world has been full and at the same time in the main joyous and exhilarating." "Full" is a relative term and "in the main" is difficult to define precisely: 51%, 75%. It would take some time to discuss the full implications of some of these elusive terms.
Some writers, famous people and memoirists produce, or have produced as part of the studies that arise after their passing, an account of the key actions, people, places, events and actors in their lives. Such literary texts draw on copious or not-so-copious biographical works as well as published letters, manuscripts and the many genres of writing from their lives. For the study of the specialized and often impressive range of topics in the life and works of such individuals--and in the case of poets for each of the major/minor poems and each of their prose works, such literary texts are unquestionably useful. I leave to posterity the creation of such a text. And, if such a text is ever desired, I have left my creations, of whatever quality they possess, in at least a reasonable order. As I have indicated before and as mark Twain noted in his autobiographical writing, most of the details of day-to-day life are left out. As I chronicle my pioneering moves, my family's comings and goings, my jobs, my relationships, inter alia, I do not, for example, itemize the hotels I stayed in, the parks I played and walked in, my lodgings and their decor, the endless lists of costs, expenditures and excursions, my favorite haunts and on-and on--one could list so many of life's trivial and not-so-trivial details, all with quite profuse descriptions if one so desired. But to what purpose?
I leave, then, a text, an oeuvre, a corpus, with socially and politically edifying aims and I leave to posterity whatever speculation on my tastes and predilections, it may want to entertain and whatever meticulous research it may want to undertake in order to create, what for them, for some future generation, is a more intelligible narrative. It is a book which contains as in a teaspoon or several teaspoons the essence of those waters from which the many-coloured fountains of whatever eloquence, exhortation, wisdom and understanding I have learned spring. I do not enslave this narrative work in minutiae and any excavation desired by future historians I leave entirely to them to fill the gaping holes in a life and its unnumbered hours. I could it I so desired, for example, present an inadvertant hodgepodge of primary sources, prolonged excerpts from letters, from journals,from an undifferentiated and differentiated mass of the chattering voices of these epochs. I feel I have done enough of that to suit my tastes, if not those of my possible future readers.
