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Gray hair and decades of practice notwithstanding, the poet who lacks a unique and compelling voice remains in the backwater of poetic flows and sounds. Every person has a unique, potentially compelling history and genetic makeup, but powerful, unique and delightful voices are rare. This is partly due to a lack of what we could simply call talent, and partly due to the restrictions caused by the socialization process. The overly socialized voice may sound sophisticated, kind, efficient, even charming, but it is rarely compelling, never refreshing, unique and always hollow in some way.
Some schools of thought take as one of their basic assumptions that we cannot transcend our experiences. One of the founders of such a school, Ernst von Glasersfeld, put that assumption this way: "knowledge, no matter how it is defined, is in the heads of persons, and the thinking subject has no alternative but to construct what he or she knows on the basis of his or her own experience." What we make of experience constitutes the only world we consciously live in. It can be sorted into many parts: things, self, others, and so on. It can and it does change from day to day. But all kinds of experience are essentially subjective and, though I may find reasons to believe that my experience may be like yours, I have no way of knowing how much it is like yours and, if I never meet you, as is the case with most of my readers, I must leave the drawing of parallels to others. The experience and interpretation of language is the place where these parallels are drawn.
This memoir/autobiography could safely be placed within this school of thought. Walt Whitman states in his journal, "There is no trick or cunning, no art or recipe, which you can have in your writing but which you do not possess in yourself." If this is true, as I believe it is, the only way to write with a unique and compelling voice is to have—or develop—a unique, compelling personality. Whether I have such a voice or such a personality I must leave to others to decide.
There has been a remarkable rise to prominence of public intellectuals and talk about public intellectuals over the last decade or so(1990-2006) in Australia, years I have been working on this autobiography. New ways of thinking about history and the nation, issues and the individual and new kinds of public ethical discourse have been put into circulation. The radical constructivism that I mentioned above has been part of this new way of thinking. History and the social sciences, psychology and the humanities as battleground for the telling of one's story is certainly preferable to the great Australian silence. The process has been building up for decades and I don't want to monitor here the details of this rise to prominence in the last few years. This has been done elsewhere.
The issue, too, is not altogether clear. There are many perspectives on the subject. Robert Dessaix's collection, Speaking their Minds (1998), a series of discussions with public intellectuals based on an earlier ABC radio series from 1996-97 suggests an abundance in public intellectual life. Close to forty individuals get to speak in the book. But the occasion of the series and Dessaix's framing comments are stated throughout, almost obsessively, in the language of crisis. Many would say this has not changed ten years later. Some writers argue that memoir has become the preferred mode of Australian public intellectuals, as a form of reflection and self-reflection driven by a sense of crisis or moral anxiety about the past.
The memoir is a performative genre. It evokes the process of ethical reflection. However provisional and open-ended, however much it denies some role as exemplar, it offers itself implicitly as exemplary. As has become obvious in the proliferation of print in cultures where new books are readily available that there is a receptive audience of self-fashioning readers which is disposed towards the kind of ethical work that essays and memoirs typically perform. There has been an increasing value given to the spaces and styles opened up in the public culture by such writing and reading. The writing and discussion of memoirs in recent decades has, as I say, increased significantly.
With a few exceptions what enables certain figures rather than others to rise to prominence as successful writers in this domain of the memoir is not so much the value of the research these writers do as their performance of writerly qualities. I'm not so sure I rate well here. Real intellectuals, real writers, transcend professional or disciplinary boundaries. I'm sure this is true of my work. But my performance has yet to be given much public scrutiny. In some ways, it matters not, the sense of urgency, of crisis, of international concern which hardly existed when I arrived in Australia as an international pioneer in 1971 has grown by leaps and bounds through the performance of many an articulate and concerned thinker and by the sense of social crisis that has filled the air-waves in the last few decades.
I'm sympathetic to the suggestion that we'd be better off abandoning the term public intellectual altogether and simply referring to different functions within the knowledge class: academic, journalist, teacher, talk-show host, historian, archivist, producer and so on. Knowing and seeing are universal activities and not confined to any set of roles. What happens when what you see seems to touch you with a grasping contact, even though it may be from a distance; when the matter of seeing is a sort of touch, when seeing is a contact at a distance? What happens when what is seen imposes itself on your gaze, as though the gaze had been seized, touched, put in contact with appearance? Maurice Blanchot asks these questions and some memoir writers answer them in a very moving way. I think our time involves more seizing and touching. But the issues are complex. I have done my seizing here and time will tell if I have done much touching.
Recent writing in Australia and elsewhere has been characterised by a turn to a personalized or autobiographical narrative mode. This personal turn can be seen as part of a trajectory, from the 1980s onwards, of an interest by the humanities and social sciences in everyday experience and memory, especially that of minoritarian constituencies—such as working class subcultures, women, youth, racial and ethnic minorities and new religious movements--in my case the Bahá’í Faith. During the 1980s and 1990s there was also an increased interest in ethnography. Some of the work in this broad anthropological field drew on personal narratives in an effort to examine the polarities between public and private memory, objective and subjective modes of discourse and specialized knowledge and everyday life. In the end this memoir, however diverse the sources, was one long story. Like the work of film director Robert Altman who saw his many films as one long film, my memoir and its hundreds of anecdotes are just part of one long life.
I do not want to dismiss the everyday as trivial. It is something, as Maurice Blanchot emphasizes, "most difficult to discover." Some put the study of the quotidian at the centre and others at the periphery of their analysis in the fragile art of writing history; some want to diminish the weight given to actors, the major players and the significant events that one finds within traditional autobiographical narrative and give that weight to the great accumulation of details, data, statistics and insights from many of the social sciencific disciplines. The everyday can not be analysed from the point of view of a single discipline in the social sciences. Such details of everyday life and such insights from these social sciences should not be seen as fleeting realities, non-essential aspects of life, but rather as part of a shadowy, rich, undocumented zone that exists everywhere and whose quantity is immense, staggering. It is a zone characterized mainly by routine; it is hardly noticed and is fillled with the minute fluctuations of life.
This world of the everyday also possesses a long range durability. This durability is the location for much of the stuff of history, stuff of our daily lives, which seems to unfold, as if in slow motion, even at the limits of any movement at all. This perceived immobility, it seems to me, is the source and origin of much of the pessimism, the flatness, the tedium vitae that exists for people as they travel through life. The realignment of thought, if and when it takes place in this micro world, is usually quite invisible. Sociohistorical reality must deal with and overcome the invisible residue in this world of the immobile and face the facts of this world of minutae. It is here that life is devalued, that the inner life and private character lives and has its being and is so very hard for others to touch, to affect, even if they swim in its waters frequently.
For me, though, writing about everyday reality does not result in painstakingly detailed, repellantly trivial descriptions of my comings and goings in my time in history, in these epochs. I am not writing about some normative everyday existence associated with middle-class living. My interpretation of history and of my life does not result in some whimsical focus the minutae of my interests, hobbies, eating habits and general personality predispositions. Even if I was able to place that focus and those several minutae in some colourful belle-lettristic style, this has not been my purpose as a memoirist. My intent is not to transfer dry bones from one graveyard to another, to outline in however interesting a fashion the repetitive facets of my existence in the world of people, places and things in such a way that everyday life becomes for readers everyday death. There is what you might call an anarchy of the chiaroscuro of the everyday, a secret, intersticial activity to daily life that is beyond the reach of the state and indeed, any institutional form, an ensemble of scripted, entrenched, human activities iin which individuals seek out departures from banalized norms far from the specter of the eternal recurrences of life and their rhythms, forms and practices.
My interpretation does not focus on the most alientating aspects of life of which there have been many and which I do dwell on occasionally but not ad nauseam; nor do I dwell on what you might call the utopian features and ideas of which there have also been many in my life.
The familiar, the everyday, the quotidian, is not as well known to each of us as we might think. The philosopher Hegel noted this at the time Shaykh Ahmad was exercising his rhetorical skills in Iran and Iraq and instilling fear into the hearts of his coreligionists as he prepared the way for the Báb. It is this everydayness which we must recreate everyday or at least find a way to transform our own lives in our own particular idiosyncratic way in the locus of the quotidian, in the totality of the day's interactions to counter the various rhythms that engender monotony and boredom and all the feelings which the word alienation implies.
In Proust "remembrance progresses from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier." In my work, in this memoir, memory progresses from large to largest detail, from the largest to the infinite, while that which it encounters in this macrocosm grows even mightier. And there is some of Proust's style as well. There is also some of that intellectual liberty which Orwell says comprises "the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers."
Many books have drawn on a series of life-story interviews in order to describe what the authors called a "social construction of reality." This term came from sociology and argued that the personal/private zone is impacted upon and formed by social relations. To theorise from experience, as I have done in this memoir, it is difficult to insist on a separation between the public sphere and life in the more private realm where one thinks and acts, believes and feels. My own approach, my own way of integrating public and private spheres of life in my autobiography, has been to draw on interviews, letters, essays and poems, inter alia. In this way I have been able to investigate the material daily relations of religion and belief and the dailiness of religious experience, mine and others in my commmunity.
I have been interested in demonstrating, in particular, not only how my religious experience was lived, but also how it was seen and, more often, in my immediate social and political networks, not seen. I have always liked Hannah Arendt's view of modern political thought; namely, that it was "the endless effort of human beings to make sense of what they experience, to get their minds round the things that confronted them, the activities they engaged in, and above all the events that happened among them." Her work is pre-eminently political thought, not in the sense of being the application of some partisan position to political material, but in the sense of representing the free play of an individual mind round politics, making sense of political events and placing them within an unfolding understanding of all that comes within that mind’s range.
Personalised embodied narratives, like my memoir, foreground the particularity of the everyday and the struggle, as Arendt describes it here, to make sense of experience and to engage in the particularities of life. More Baha’is began writing their histories, writing of this engagement, in recent decades. There were still not many who did this, but there have always been a few throughout Bahá’í history who did. I have identified a lack of what might be called a literary, an autobiographical, particularism, in Bahá’í literature, a lack I saw my project as addressing to some extent. I am not the first to identify this lack, a lack first in the heroic age(1844-1921) and then in the first epochs of the Formative Age(1921-1986). Although there has not been a significant increase in memoir and autobiographical writing by Baha'is in the epochs beginning in 1986 when I began my own work, there has been a greater articulation of the life and community processes by which Baha’is came to understand the social forces that made them who they are. There was much more to be done and more that would be done in memoir writing in ensuing epochs.
But whatever was done, whatever memoir and autobiographical writing became part of the public sphere, I could not help but be reminded of a comment on the impossibility of capturing and classifying reality, of containing the inherent mystery of life: “Everybody’s running around with a butterfly net in their hand trying to capture smaller or larger aspects of it, but the butterfly keeps getting out of the net”.
Sometimes the social sciences call the process of catching oneself--self reflexivity. It is a type of analysis and specification of one's religiousness, produced in response or reaction to personalised writing by Baha’is. This personalized turn in the writing of the last quarter-century: life stories and personalized essays, poetry and letters, etc has become a dominant part of recent literary production, as I say, since the 1980s. Some see the whole exercise as one of self-absorption. Historians who study their own nation--especially when it is as large and self-absorbed as America and Australia--tend to be parochial. Such solipsism is unfortunate since the ability to compare one's country to other societies facilitates efforts to zero in on questions of underlying causation in the history of that country. This same problem arises for the memoirist and autobiographer with their inevitably narrow compass and their unwillness or inability to maintain critical distance.
One of the new schools of history, the New historicists, try to disrupt the typical notion of history as usual and its practice. They focus on undisciplined anecdotes because they want to interrupt the Big Stories, the meganarratives. These historians sought the very thing that made anecdotes ciphers to many historians. They sought a vehement and cryptic particularity that would make one pause or even stumble on the threshold of history. And that is what I seek again and again here in this work, the anecdote, the cipher, the event of the microcosm.
The personal address, the words--verbal and in writing--of Baha’is seems to me in part predicated rhetorically upon an ethical imperative to reply. It is an imperative that may be slow in coming. It may never come in our time, but it will come more and more as the decades pass. It is my belief that in time the reply will be more forthcoming. The significance of the personal process of self-naming that I am involved with here in this memoir, this coming to consciousness about my identity is not the same as transforming it. Whatever transformation has taken place in my life it has been slow and unobtrusive and it is my guess that the reply to my work will be in the same vein. To place this question of transformation in the widest context I'll quote what is perhaps political philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s most brilliant insight namely that “the practical world can never be wholly transformed” – that human existence is transitory, fleeting, a moment in eternity where man is imprisoned within the practical and its on-going demands." But we have come a long way since Neanderthal. Transformation is a relative term.
Since the 1980s there has been an anxiety and sense of indignity for Baha’is speaking on behalf of their co-religionists in Iran. But there has been little public anxiety about Bahá’í community life in any other areas of our wider society. The characterisation of my Bahá’í identity draws on the notion of a performing and multiple subject. "I plunge back into the 'I'", one could say, "in order to examine the condition of its making." But the process has little public significance--in the macroworld. The carving out of an identity is something I have enacted both in my poetry, in the many essays I have published over the past thirty years, in my letters, my notebooks and this memoir. The exercise has been largely a private one; the macroworld in which it took place is not one to accord me any celebrity status and understandably so and there are elements of fragility and fixity in this identity which make the carving process a lifelong one and an intricate and complex one--always incomplete.
The basis for morality lies not so much in self-identity as it does in the exposure to others; not self-recursion, but constitutive incompleteness; not a final subjective narrative, but the continual desire and attempt to not close down the task of narrative itself. This is a complex idea for morality is complex and I don't want to expatiate on the subject too much. The very emergence of ethics is in the “willingness to acknowledge the limits of acknowledgement itself.” Humility is in this perspective the very cornerstone of a new sense of ethics and constant critique of self constitutes the walls that are built upon it. We constantly have to renegotiate and repeat. We define and then we see; we make out assumptions and they determine so much of our story. Recognition in daily life itself presupposes structures in our heads that cover over the singularity of the other we are trying to “see.”
The ‘I’ cannot give a final or adequate account of itself because it cannot return to the scene of address by which it was and is inaugurated. I experience a certain foreignness to myself and this foreignness is, paradoxically, an important source of my ethical connection with others. My investigation, my memoir, takes up many important questions which I address to myself and others in this work: 'how did I become a Baha’i?' and 'how was my life experience affected by my beliefs and commitments?' These are but two of the questions. This project of examining the conditions of the making of myself, my identity, takes the form of a conversation with itself.
Human reason considers all sorts of questions in the course of its journey through life, indeed, these questions impose themselves on our minds with a restless inevitability which the mind is unable to resist. These questions present themselves to our nature and they seek an answer. For many of the questions, though, there are no words, no answers, at best only subtle intimations. The heart does not understand and they transcend every faculty of the mind.
