Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Chapters 3 & 4

Perception, reflection and social interaction are at least three of the many psychologically diverse contexts in which the word 'self' appears in our everyday discourse. Autobiography is an important part of the narration of this self and this autobiography, like all autobiographies, finds its home in all of these contexts.1 But since the reality of man is his thought and what endures, after life has completed its course, is the soul, it is hardly surprising that there is a 'curious intangibility,'2 an inherently spiritual abstraction, associated with defining, with expressing, who we are. And it is hardly surprising that this work of mine, this autobiography, contains a great deal that is better described as thought and not so much that one could describe as action. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Jens Brockmeier and Donald Carbaugh, editors, Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography: Self and Culture, John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2001; and 2Hannah Arendt in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, Adriana Cavarero, Routledge, NY, 2000, p.ix.

Although there is this curious intangibility that makes up any attempt to describe who we are, men’s beliefs in the sphere of human conduct are part of their conception of themselves and are intrinsic to their picture of the world. Both these beliefs and this conduct can be found expressed again and again in my letters.-Ron Price with thanks to Isaiah Berlin quoted by Robert Matuozzi, "When Bad Things Happen to Other People," Philosophy and Literature, Vol.25, No.1, 2001, pp. 173-177.
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On the dust jacket of The Selected Letters of Marcel Proust: 1880 to 1903 the publishers, Doubleday and Company, have written "letters are the strongest indicators of personality, perhaps the purest form of autobiography. We look at them as a means of knowing the author as a human being, of gaining perspectives on his life and work and, perhaps, divining the secret foundation of his creativity." I think there is some truth in this remark. There is also, from my own experience, some truth in the sentiments of Thomas Wolfe who is quoted by Elizabeth Nowell in her introduction to the Selected Letters of Thomas Wolfe "a writer writes a letter in order to forget it." Once down on paper, I find, the emotion or experience loses its compulsive force and can be stored away and forgotten. I have stored away some 3000 letters in over twenty volumes. Since beginning to collect these letters in 1967 I have come to see them as an autobiographical tool. I leave it to readers to assess just where this autobiography is strongest and where it is weakest. This is difficult for me to assess. I use, as millions now do, my own lived experience to interpret my life, my society and the Book that is at the centre of my religion. Unlike William Blake who uses a series of remarkable illustrations to symbolize his interpretations, I use my writings.

If this autobiography 'works' for readers, it will not be because I have filled it with facts, with details, with the minutiae of life documented with great enthusiasm and eagerness in letters to friends and a variety of institutions. Success in this life narrative that has been going down on paper over many a year will be due to its basis, its centeredness, in ideas, the quality of the writing and the narrative's connection with an emerging world Faith. If it becomes a success, as I have indicated before, in all likelihood it will still resonate with only a few people. But whether it resonates with many or a few, I believe, as Gilroy and Verhoeven argue, these letters are "marked by and sent to the world." They counter, too, tendencies to flatten out the uniqueness of the individual in some falsely understood egalitarianism or sense of human equality. For our uniqueness as individuals derives from our constitutive relation with others, from our living in community and the vibrating tensions between the boundaries of self and other. Emerson says somewhere that individuals melt so fast into each other that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.

The epistolary form was long associated with the feminine and the history of female subjection. As far back as Cicero in the first century BC, it was associated with everyday speech. Here in this autobiography my letters function as a crucial form of communication in the teaching and consolidation work of a pioneer. Indeed, one could say that my story, the narratability of my life, my very uniqueness, arises within the context of an interaction process based on the letter. The following Latin expression contains some truth: vox audita perit littera scripta manet--The voice heard vanishes, the letter written remains.

The dynamics of epistolary writing have been much studied in recent years. Analysts who read and study letters see them as something more than simple documents of a particular time and place. They, or at least some, see the letters as "texts" that are only partly susceptible to explication or decipherability. Such documents bear a different relation to the world for a future reader than for the writer at the point when the letter was originally written. In some ways this is only stating the obvious. The act of reading a collection of published letters is inevitably shaped by a series of decisions made by both the letter-writers themselves and the readers. Letters are often exchanged, perhaps for years, usually without either participant considering them as an exercise leading to publication. There are several components in what we could call an epistolary machine: the act of writing, the act of reading and the world of interpretation. To focus on reading is to bring to light the complexity of the communication process, to recall that not all of a reader's questions are going to be answered by reading the said letters. Readers may only have partially formulated questions in their minds or, perhaps, they may not even understand their own questions. Any message, including a letter, encounters a scrambling process upon entering the reader's zone of associations and responses. I wish readers well dealing with the inevitabilities of scrambling which they will have to deal with in my letters. There is a conceptual intersection in each letter between reader, writer and 'world.' And it is a busy intersection. And the discourse that takes place at these intersections possesses a paradoxical entwinement of minds and words. This is true of snail-mail or fiber-optic-borne email. Like the view at a busy intersection, much of what is seen is predictable while at the same time the specific details are to a large extent unknown.

A recent essay that I wrote introducing a volume of letters gathered in the first years of my retirement will serve to illustrate many of the things I'd like to say about the overall collection of letters. I think, as Emerson wrote, that 'letters often put things better’ than verbal communication and provide perspectives that are timely here in this ongoing autobiographical statement. The letters of James Boswell, to choose for comparison one historical example from collections of letters, open a window onto the real man, a man hidden behind his great biography, his biography of Samuel Johnson. Of course, one must be sensitive, too, to epistolary disguise, posing, theatrical attentiveness to the social presentation of self, concern for appearances, standardization of responses and what might be called mannerisms in letter writing. As in life, there are many selves which write letters, many social conventions, courtesies, honesties, et cetera.

I wrote the essay which follows as part of the second edition of this autobiographical work, a second edition I worked on from 1993 to 2003. It was one of my essays that was, at that point in the evolution of this autobiogrpahy, simply gathered into an appendix and not integrated into the body of that edition. In the third edition I achieved a better integration of material, of autobiographical resources. My imaginative function became more fertile in the third edition. As the poet Wallace Stevens writes, referring to imagination: "I am the necessary angel of earth/Since, in my sight, you see the world again," I am seeing the world again with greater vividness than I once did. Robert Graves, a prolific letter writer, saw his letters as a sort of 'spontaneous autobiography' and his poems as his 'spiritual autobiography.' I like the distinction. Perhaps, one day, a selection of letters from my spontaneous autobiography will become available.

As the 38th, 39th and 40th years of pioneering took their course in the first years of my retirement, 1999 to 2002, I wrote some of the following about the letter-writing experience:

"Across the line of time I thought I would try to make a brief summary of this letter writing experience, an experience which goes back to the first letter I received from the international pioneer Cliff Huxtable in St. Helena in 1967. Cliff's wife Cathy had just died at the age of thirty-five. Cliff is still in St. Helena thirty-five years later. He never wrote again. I replied but I did not keep a copy of the letter; indeed I kept few of my personal letters until about 1982, twenty years into the pioneering venture and fifteen years after receiving that letter from Cliff.

"As I have pointed out on previous occasions I wrote and received letters going back as far as about 1962 when this pioneering journey began, but I have not kept the letters from the earlier period before 1967. There were many letters after 1967, at least up to about 1980, which were destroyed. Some of these may be in private hands but, since I have no fame, no significance in the general public eye, it is unlikely that many, if any, letters are being kept privately by their recipients. I find it interesting, more than coincidental, that these letters come from a period that began with what the Universal House of Justice in 1967 called ‘the dark heart of the age of transition.’ By that date, by 1967, "a mood of cultural crisis: a sense that something had gone terribly wrong in the modern world, something that we could neither assimilate nor put right," had entered our psyches. One writer called our society a post-traumatic culture. Indeed there have been, since the fifties and sixties, a host of characterizations of the shift, the crisis, of these days.

"If one tried to get a picture of the hey-day of my letter writing I think it would be in the 1980s when I lived, first in Zeehan on the west coast of Tasmania, and then in the north of Australia, north of Capricorn, although in the early years of the new millennium, after my retirement, there was a new lease on letter-life in the form of emails. I do not have any interest in going through this collection of letters that I wrote 'north of Capricorn' or, indeed, from the full period 1967 to 2001, now in over thirty two-ring binders and arch-lever files. Perhaps a future day will see me making some minute analysis of the extent and the content of these letters. Perhaps, should their potential value become more evident to me, I shall take a more serious interest in them. Thusfar I have made only the occasional annotation to these letters.

"I have, though, taken a very general interest in the collections of letters of other writers to help provide useful perspectives on my own collection. I have opened a file of 'introductions to collections of letters' obtained from books of the letters of famous writers and have kept additional notes on the genre because I think in the years ahead I may write a history drawing on letters, mine and those of other Baha'is in the world during these four epochs. But that activity is far off. In the meantime these letters are like "arrows from the same quiver." I send them "just as high and far" as I can. In my "journal it is the same." Perhaps these letters and my journal are simply the product of a peculiar self-centredness. Their appeal I’m sure will not be due to my wit, my humor, the adventurousness or the romance of this narrative, but rather( if there is any appeal at all) to the ordinariness of the content. Their appeal for me, for me as the writer, is the sense of surprise. V.S. Naipaul said the same thing in his Nobel Prize lecture given in 2001.

Some of that surprise comes from the fact, says Naipaul, that the self that writes is not the everyday self. They are very different. The everyday self is essentially superficial. I’m not so sure about the double self, but that sense of surprise I find on every page I write and this surprise certainly possesses an appeal. "The secretion of one's innermost life, written in solitude and for oneself alone, that one gives to the public," writes Naipaul. "What one bestows on private life—in conversation, however refined it may be—is the product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world." While I’m not sure this is entirely true, it certainly is in part.

Maugham puts this idea a little differently. "I had an impression," this is Maugham's summing up of the writer Thomas Hardy, "that the real man, to his death unknown and lonely, was a wraith that went a silent way unseen between the writer of his books and the man who led his life, and smiled with ironical detachment at the two puppets." Somewhere in all of this lies the real writer, the real me. Is this real me to be found in the id, the unconscious, the reflexes, the hormones, in a socialization process, the roles of a protean man, in feeling good? This complex question really requires a book on its own, but I think from a Baha’i perspective the real me is best found in thought and action guided by the behavioral principles of this Cause which like some measuring rod, some precisioned instrument, provide a focus, a way of indicating when one is wide of the mark. Of course, this instrument, however accurate, is not a simple tool with incremental and sequential marks on it. Complexity haunts both everyday life and the imagination.

"This is not a collection of lettters of a famous person or to famous people, like the collections of letters of Einstein to President Roosevelt, or the collection of Jane Austen's letters or those of, say, one of the Presidents, Prime Ministers or other prominent members of the community. My collection has no curiosity value like the collected letters to Santa Claus, to lovers or to mothers or letters from children, suicide victims or entertainers to an assortment of people. Whatever significance this collection has is tied-up with the emergence of a new world Order and a new religion and whatever future that religion may have. These letters bear the traces of contemporary historical practices, literary styles and tastes and they are surrounded by what could be called "the envelope of contingency." In this sense they are communications to and with the world, with society, however personal and private they may appear to the casual observer.

"These letters are, for me at least, part of a potential global epistolary collection, part of the literary expression of a global diaspora, an international pioneering movement, that was only in its second generation when I got into the field in the 1960s. The recent eighteen-volume series on global diasporas and the six volume work of the International Library of Studies of Migration, will, in all likelihood, have no mention of the Baha'i diaspora when they are completed. The former is or will be made up of original works, while the latter is a collection of previously published articles on selected themes. International migration and diasporas have come to constitute distinctive fields of inquiry and there is considerable overlap between them.

"The study of international migration is broader in scope and partially subsumes diaspora studies. Diasporas arise from international migration. Constant interaction between diasporic communities in dozens of sovereign states and with various homelands is one of the defining features of this international migration. After nearly seven decades of international pioneering as part of an international teaching Plan, this interaction and these many diasporas seem to me, in many ways, to have just been initiated and only briefly been given any academic study. The major events of this pioneering venture, the various processes concerning its growth and development, and aspects of the diasporic life of, say, Baha'is from North America in Australia would necessarily interest only a small body of people at this stage of that group's history. Indeed, at this early stage, however massive the exercise involved, and the global pioneering venture is indeed a massive one, the significance of collections of letters is hardly appreciated as yet; indeed, I would think for most people including the pioneers themselves there would be very few collections of letters extant.

"What are termed Baha'i studies or international Baha'i pioneering studies will one day, though, I am confident, be a part of an extensive study of the great Baha'i international diaspora of the last sixty-seven years (1937-2004), a full two-thirds of the first century of the Formative Age. One could add the letters from that hiatus period going back to 1919 when the Tablets of the Divine Plan were first released and those from the period 1894-1919 which included a great deal of movement in that embryonic Baha’i community. This study of letters is for a future time. So I am inclined to think, anyway. This cache of my correspondence is part of what is, in fact, a grand narrative.

"Specific letters relevant to the history of the Cause in the Northern Territory(NT) I kept for two decades(1982-2002) in special files as resource material to help me write the Baha'i history of that region. I have now given them to the Regional Baha'i Council for the Northern Territory. Much more collecting of letters written by Baha'is in the NT could be done by history writers and archivists with greater enthusiasms than I now possess and I hope some day such an exercise will be accomplished. In the disintegration of society that is part of the essential backdrop to these letters and the contrasting integration, the generation that took part in the pioneering venture of the years 1962 to 1987, marks the first years of the tenth and final stage of history. It is a stage coextensive with a crucial stage in the institutionalization of the charismatic Force, the routinization of that charisma to use Weber's term, in the Universal House of Justice.

"If these letters appear to indicate an aloofness from the controversies of the day, from the endless issues that occupied the front pages of the newspapers and the images and sounds from the electronic media; if they refrain year after year from any association "by word or deed with the political pursuits" of the various nations of the world, "with the policies of their governments and the schemes and programs of parties and factions," it is because this is the advice, the position, taken by the leaders of my Faith following principles and practices laid down by the Founders of this Faith beginning in the 1840s. I, too, following these considered views, have tried to further the aims of what is to me a beloved Cause and to steer a "course amid the snares and pitfalls of a troubled age" by steering clear of partisan-political subjects. Many writers do the same. They steer clear of politics and go in for sex, religion, humor, theology, inter alia, in their writing. They belong to no lit crit school, have no followers and simply cannot be easily labeled politically.

"What does occupy the Baha'i often appears trifling. Such is the feeling I have frequently had in relation to these letters. The words of Thomas Henry Huxley, the nineteenth century biologist and educator, I find encouraging. He opened his autobiography with a quotation from a letter from a Bishop Butler, a bishop of the Episcopal seat of Auckland, to the Duchess of Somerset. The bishop wrote: "And when I consider, in one view, the many things . . . which I have upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being employed in this manner at my time of life. But, in another view, and taking in all circumstances, these things, as trifling as they may appear, no less than things of greater importance, seem to be put upon me to do." As archaic, as anachronistic, as the style of the good bishop's words may be, the point for me is important, namely, that Huxley saw his autobiography, even the humble letter, as something "put on him to do," by the interpositions of a watchful Providence, the eye of a necessary Fate or the simple needs of circumstance, however trifling it appeared to be.

"I am reminded, in this context, of the words of Roger White from A Sudden Music. White says that the highest service a Baha'i can often render is to simply do "the thing under his nose that needed doing." For me, writing letters was often this 'thing.' And so it was, that over time, as the years went on, what was once seen as a trifling exercise took on a patina of gentle significance, perhaps even the sense of letters being a small example of what the Universal House of Justice called "nobler, ampler manifestations of human achievement" in their discussion of the subject of 'freedom of thought.' If I was not a good cook, a good gardener, a good mechanic, a good painter, indeed, if I did not operate successfully in so many areas of life, as indeed most of us can say about so many domains of activity, I could at least write a letter and do it well, at least such was my personal view.

I’ve always appreciated the words of Evelyn Waugh in terms of this particular capacity to write letters. "Beware of writing to me," he once said, "I always answer." He referred to his letter writing habit as "an inherited weakness," part of his "great boringness." It was partly due, he said, to "never going out or telephoning." "Like Thoreau my life "showed a devotion to principle," but by the time I was sixty I was only too conscious of just how far my life had been from the practical application of principle. I have little doubt that were many more individuals, more sincere and more genuine in their devotion to that same principle or principles, than I have or would be. As Clausewitz notes in his series of essays On War "to be faithful in action to the principles laid down for ourselves" this is our "entire difficulty."

"The "many things" to which the Duchess’s correspondent here refers are the repairs and improvements of his Episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if Huxley, the first great apologist of Darwinian evolution, this largely self-educated man, one of England's founders of primary schools for all, this father of eight children, this coiner of the term 'agnostic,' saw himself as an instrument of the deity. But, like the good Bishop Butler, I'm sure he felt he had "things of great importance" to do and that they had been "put upon him." Even the humble letter. Virginia Woolf wrote that it was not until the nineteenth century that "self-consciousness had developed so far that it was the habit of men to describe their minds" when they wrote their letters and their autobiographies. I write in this new tradition, although I am conscious, as Woolf puts it plainly, of "the world's notorious indifference." And it may be many years, if ever, before this collection of letters has any interest to even a coterie of people.

"Letter writing has occasionally been a routine, perfunctory, exercise; occasionally a joy, a pleasure, a delight; occasionally part of some job or community responsibility."Letters were the very texture" wrote Henry James "of Emerson’s history" and mine. There is certainly a texture here that is not present in the other genres of my wide-ranging autobiography. Some letter-writers are janus-faced and some, like Truman Capote, the author of Capote’s letters in Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote are three-faced. There was the face for gay friends, the face for non-gay friends, and the face for the friends he made in Kansas while writing In Cold Blood. I think I have a multiple-faced letter writing persona: one for Baha’is of a conservative type, one for a more liberal orientation, one for those who are Baha’i in name only, one for youthful types, one for old people and one for.....and on goes the list, the personae. Letter writing partly overcomes, together with my writing in other genres the "ancient enmity between life and the great work." And it was apparent that, if I was to achieve any ‘great work,’ it would be in bits and pieces spread out over many years, many decades.

This texture is also a result of a new written form, the email, a form which was present in Volume 5 of my personal letters as well, but makes a strong appearance in this Volume 6 of these letters. Nine out of ten communications by then were emails not letters. I think the first email I received was in 1990 or 1991. I have kept few emails before the mid 1990s when email traffic began to replace the letter and, for me at least, by 2000 the telephone as well, at least to a significant extent. In these early years of my retirement I rarely used the telephone. I had come to find the telephone an intrusion after more than forty years of my finding it a pleasure, a convenience and a necessity. Of course, I still owned a telephone and answered it when circumstances required with courtesy and kindness and, when possible, humor and attentiveness. For the most part I left it to Chris or Daniel while he still lived at home.

"A great deal of life is messy work offering to the artist irrelevant, redundant and contradictory clutter. Much of letter writing falls into this category; it spoils a good story and blunts the theme, like much of conversation, much of life, it is random, routine and deals with the everyday scene, ad nauseam. But these letters tell of a life in a way that is unique, not so much as a collection of letters, for collections are a common genre over the centuries, but as a collection of letters in the third, forth and fifth epochs of the Formative Age of the Baha'i Era. They present pictures that tell of a concrete reality, a time and an age, that I hope will stand revealed to future readers; they tell of one person’s experience, at least one way he conveyed that experience to others regarding the nature and meaning of half of that century which was a great turning point in history.

"These epochs were characterized by what Toynbee calls "a schism in the soul in an age of social disintegration." A fully seasoned universal state with its supreme authority and its supreme impersonal law, argues Toynbee, were not part of the cosmology and the basic unit of social organization, for humankind in this half century, although some serious and significant beginnings to that process were made in that direction. What I saw as the implications of what occurred during this time can be found here in my letters as I tried to grasp the significance of the historical transformation of my time. The most turbulent period of history was at the background my my life and the life of my parents.

"What is here in these letters and in my other writings is, in part, some signs and signals of the embryo of that unit of social organization at the global level. What is here is spiritual autobiography and psychological revelation in a different literary form than my poetry and it tells of a period during which the Baha'i Faith made a significant leap forward in its numbers and in the maturity of its community. Often, to the Baha'is working in their personal lives and in their communities this maturity and this growth was either not evident or not appreciated. Often, too, readers' awareness of the many Ron Price's that make up my life and whatever maturity I have or have not attained is sharpened by their dip into the pool of my letters. But perhaps most importantly the number of collections of letters from international pioneers during this period may not be that extensive given the busyness of people's lives and what seems to me to be a quite natural disinclination to keep letters beyond a salient few of some personal importance.