Instalment of My Memoirs

AN EPILOGUE TO MY EPILOGUE1

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. 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:"2

It was her voice that made3

The sky acutest at its vanishing.4

She measured to the hour its solitude.5

She was the sole artificer of the world6

In which she sang. And when she sang, 7

The sea, Whatever self it had, became the self8

That was her song, for she was the maker.9

Stevens knows that there is no world other than the one we create, the one of which we are the makers. 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.10

Ours is a culture of the fragment and the Bah&#;í Faith is a cultiure 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 crisis of identity which people seem to have to go through, a sense of incompleteness in which the culture and the individual never fully engages in explaining itself. Some of the distinct features of the Bah&#;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.11

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 that my psyche is attempting to draw you through a labyrinth such that you begin to experience 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 your lives within it will address you all the more. Perhaps you will understand these meanings and respond or answer, first, through a fuller understanding and then by relating and behaving in a different way that you have in the past. Writers like me inevitably have hopes for their work. And my hope is that my words will serve as a conduit.12

Radical constructivism is a school of thought that takes as its basic assumption that we cannot transcend our experiences. It has been defined by the school’s founder, Ernst von Glasersfeld, in the following terms: "knowledge, no matter how it is defined, is in the heads of persons, and that 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 kinds, such as 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 that it is the same. The experience and interpretation of language is no exception." This memoir/autobiography could safely be placed within this school of thought.13

There has been a remarkable rise to prominence of public intellectuals and talk about public intellectuals over the last decade in Australia, the 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 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 ten years. This has been done elsewhere. 14

The issue, too, is not altogether clear. There are many perspectives. 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.15

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 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 been profound and exceptional. With a few exceptions what enables certain figures rather than others to rise to prominence as successful writers in this domain 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, well, it has yet to be given much public scrutiny. But, in some ways, it matters not, the sense of urgency, of crisis, of international concern which hardly excisted 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. 16

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.17

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 Bah&#;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. 18

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 macrocoasm 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." 19

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. 20

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.21

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 Bah&#;í history who did. I have identified a lack of what might be called a literary, an autobiographical, particularism, in Bah&#;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. 22

But whatever was done, whatever memoir and autobiographical writing became part of the public sphere in the years ahead, 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”. 23

Sometimes the social sciences call the process of catching oneself--self-reflexivity. It is a type of reciprocal specification of 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. 24

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. It is my belief, though, 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. 25

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 Bah&#;í community life in any other areas. The characterisation of my Bah&#;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 and the macroworld in which it took place is not one to accord me any celebrity status and understandably so.26

The basis for morality is not self-identity, but 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. 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.” 27

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. 28

My memoire deploys an intimate, personal tone; it is alternately dispassionate and passionate, peaceful and troubled, certain and doubtful. The first-person narrative has a directness and immediacy that transports my readers(or such is my hope) into the private realm of the immediate social relations of what some writers call 'the urban quotidian.' Its main project takes as its subject the psycho-emotional work of being a Bah&#;í. I stage, I describe, the initial coming-to-consciousness of my life, my difference, that is my being a Baha’i, in a scene of private space—in the Bah&#;í community of Burlington Ontario in the 1950s.29

Bertrand Russell's three volume autobiography, published in the years 1967 to 1970, at the start of the letter writing section of this work, has in its prologue words that lend credence to its characterization as an epic. "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair." There was an epic quality to my work, a quality I have discussed above. There were governing passions in my life as well. I could characterize them as: knowing, loving and doing. This autobiography is, in a way, a testimony to this trilogy. There was sufficient passion, deriving from these three forces, to drive a lifetime of engagement in relationships, in issues and in the mundane. There was also sufficient detachment to allow me to modify my views and change my positions; without an element of intellectual flexibility I would have been in trouble in these changing times. 30

Russell describes the stages "in the slow abandonment of many of the beliefs that had come to him in the moment of 'conversion' in 1901" before he was thirty. The process, he says, was as much the result of private experience as of world events; but the important point is that the change was a result of conscious reflection on experience–an experimental process that involved both principled engagement in the world and the possibility of modifying principles on the basis of experience. The beliefs I had acquired in my teens and twenties were, for the most part, never abandoned, but they certainly experienced an icy chastening, a deeper understanding, a finer tuing, so much so that in many ways they seemed like different beliefs. We all experience life differently and someone's autobiography offers opportunities to readers to help define their own experience. Russell says, for example, in discussing his relationship with his first wife, Alys Smith: "I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realised that I no longer loved Alys." As Schroeder points out in his review of Russell's work, Russell often had abrupt insights, theoretical and practical, and they were often "followed by a long period of struggle, often punctuated by additional abrupt insights." He had married at 22 and the marriage began to fall apart before he was thirty. I'm not sure if I ever fell out of love with my first wife, but I tired as did she, of arguing, of differences, of many things. There was that experience of abruptness, that Russell had, and a long struggle. I think with my second wife there was more of a gradual deepening of the relationships with the years, after an initially abrupt sexual enthusiasm.31

Reading Russell's work made me realize how little I commented on significant relationships outside my family. Santayana, T.S. Eliot, A.N. Whitehead and D. H. Lawrence, among other famous people, come in for some critical scrutiny in his three volume work. Perhaps, at a later date, I may return to my work and fill in the gaps of the significant others who influenced my life. "In old age," wrote Russell "one becomes more aware of what has, and what has not, been achieved. What one can further do becomes a smaller proportion of what has already been done, and this makes personal life less feverish." Perhaps in some of these less feverish moments I may have cause to reflect on many things that I have left out of this work.32

The affective realm of everyday life informs my understanding, my experience, of being a Baha’i. The everyday is incorporated into the project of my autobiography by my drawing on numerous theorists and my exploration of the narrative styles of various autobiographical modes and the personalised essays that go with them. The investigations of experience that took place in the social sciences throughout the last quarter-century1980s are part of a wider interest in the everyday which developed in sociology, history, anthropology and philosophy from the 1950s onwards--from virtually the time that the story behind my own autobiography began, associated as it has been with my Bah&#;í experience. This wider interest of the social sciences, focusing as it did on ordinary people as distinct from and in relation with the grand narratives of the nation and civilization, industrialism and modernity, religion and psychology has also been called 'the politics of the everyday'. I call it the politics of my everyday. 33

This latter phrase refers to the power relations of everyday transactions—in the home, the workplace and other locations. The interaffective and intercorporeal detail of these 'micropolitical' transactions remains largely unremarked and invisible in official discourses. It is remarked upon in this work.34

The quotidian is the sphere of embodied practices of habituation and interpersonal relations; it is also the mode in which is enacted the primary social relationship with the stranger. Most of those we meet in life are, in fact, strangers. They get little direct coverage here except in a philosophical sense. The everyday has historically been defined in negative terms, that is, according to what it is not. It has been distinguished, for example, from the epic and monumentalising narratives of history and science, from the rational and cognitive processes of philosophy; from the putative rigors of scholarship; from the formality and officialdom of institutions; from the aura of the sacred, the exotic and the uncanny. Historically there has always been a hierarchical opposition between the everyday and the official discourses of public life. However, rather than being oppositional to these categories, the everyday has a determinate and supplementary relation to them, at least in this work. 35

The everyday is not essentially different from and other than these categories. Rather, it embodies the familiarisation and routinisation--as well as the effect--of these categories. In other words, rather than being an exclusive realm the everyday paradoxically both includes and excludes each of the many macro-categories. It is from the everyday that the ideas, ratiocination and abstract concepts constitutive, for example, of philosophy and science emerge; conversely, we can only define the everyday through the specialised discourses of science, philosophy etc. The everyday, moreover, is not reducible to simply pure or raw data from which these discourses are produced. 36

The everyday underlines, shapes and informs the modes of rationality which are said to transcend it. Formal and official discourses and institutions, in turn, inform and shape everyday life. In my case these words and organizations, these frameworks and institutions were: the family, a host of work places, the wider institutions of my society and, of course, the Bah&#;í Faith. 37

The conventional playing out of the relationship between these two levels which, historically, has been hierarchised, gendered and contestatory contains, in my memoir, a new understanding of everyday life as a transformational zone in which heterogeneous forms of knowing and doing intersect. Rather than being mutually exclusive, these heterogeneous zones inform each other. Rather than being seen as redundant and trivial, insignificant and empty or rich and meaningful, as the case may be, everyday life can be thought of as a field in which the macroworld, such as that found in official, national and international domains, becomes a world, tangential and translated in an ongoing sense into the human and the everyday. 38

Studies of the everyday across several disciplines, especially the several social sciences, have drawn on life stories. Scholarly writing on the Bah&#;í community, writing which variously deploys life story, autobiography, personalised narratives and interviews, can be seen as part of this continuum. If everyday life can be seen as the realm of the reproduction of the person, personalised experience in the Bah&#;í community related through writing does the work of scrutinizing the reproduction of this experience at the microsocial level. 39

If everyday life can be understood as a transformational realm characterised by the intersection of heterogeneous knowledge, then the personalised, critical experience of a Bah&#;í conveyed in writing can be seen as a point of intersection between everyday practices of the self, on one hand, and the discursive reproduction of specialised knowledge, on the other. 40

My concern in this epilogue is to situate the personal turn in recent memoir writing and its related theory within its discursive, cultural and literary contexts and to speculate about the ethical work it aims to effect. My interest lies in the dialogue and exchange between the traditions of literary and scholarly production and in the rhetorical transformations of the scholarly narrative modes of writing by Baha'is about many topics. I try to resist, as far as I can, the claim that this personal or self-reflexive turn in critical writing detracts from the overall literature in either the social sciences in general or the Bah&#;í Faith in particular. I have explored the idea that the discursive shift in the textualities of Bah&#;í writing reorients both the subject and object in the wider, the scholarly enterprise. 41

My purpose in discussing the critical, autobiographical, writing of Baha'is is, therefore, to identify and situate this writing within a specific historical moment. Identities are learned at a certain historical moment and Bah&#;í identities emerge within specific contexts. Mine is found here and I like to think I provide the intellectual and literary tools to help others locate their identity as well. 42

Autobiographical and personalized modes of Baha'i writing often investigate what, after Blanchot, one could call the several insufficiencies of our lives. These modes of writing tend to be critical of the humanist notion of a self-identical subject which exists independent of others. They scrutinise instead the dependency of the self on others. We have to be on our guard lest we live on a high-octane view of ourselves, of yesterday and of history. 43

We've been led to believe, for example, that the Wild West was dominated by gunslingers who left a trail of bodies in their wake. In truth, Billy the Kid and Jesse James were anomalies. Cowboys were peaceful chaps and few pioneers had guns. Americans want to believe otherwise because they want the past to be exciting. The gun-toting cowboy also fits in well with America's image of itself and thus reinforces that image: he's an independent, self-willed type who took fate by the scruff of the neck and carved out a life for himself on the rough frontier. It is unsettling to believe that the West was settled by bankers, accountants, land speculators and lawyers who spent more time behind a desk than astride a horse. In a more practical sense, the belief that the frontier was rough leads naturally to an assumption that life remains rough today and that, in order to survive, cowboy qualities remain essential. America's obsession with guns and the belief that they are essential to survival is a direct manifestation of this cowboy myth. 44

The same process is also at work in so many walks of life. The popular taste in historical documentaries for the unusual, the exciting or the bizarre results in a perception of history as one characterised by catastrophe, or, at the very least, by constant dramatic change; the perception and definition of politics by the continued view of question time; the emphasis on the heroic few who gave their lives in religion, in war and in other ways and a deemphasis on the many who lived in slow and uneventful lives by producers who place greater emphasis upon the dramatic quality of a program than on its historical accuracy. As a result of these distortions, we fail to appreciate the importance of mundane events and the tremendous influence that stability and tradition have in the shaping of our lives. Autobiographers have to watch out for this same tendency. Some studnets of literature call it the synecdotal tendency which comes to view the whole by some or one of its parts.45

The difference between history and the past is that the latter is what actually happened–-including the way people lived their often mundane lives; whereas, the former, history, focuses on the extraordinary--the often bizarre events which disturb normality. Great events are like fireworks displays on the 4th of July--loud, colorful, and exciting, but very brief disturbances to the quiet calm that surrounds us. Visions of the past are distorted because bizarre events are given disproportionate attention. Since history is one of the building blocks of personal and national identity, we end up with a warped image of the past and of ourselves. This is an interesting theme about which I will say no more here. 46

Memory is a key issue in self-creation. Memory is in some ways but the name for one's relation to oneself, or the affect on self by self. If the everyday is the sphere of the habitual, then memory has a definitive role in the cyclical practices of quotidian realities. The everyday could be defined as the experience of modernity in the private sphere and, as such, a new mode of duration. The everyday is the locus of primary social relationships with its occasional heightened drama, its occasional taking things to histrionic extremes and a squeezing out of tears. If everyday life seems melodramatically inclined, it is perhaps due to the myth of nations like Australia and Canada being nations in adolescence. 47

Much of the drama and melodrama on television is, for me, but an arrested form of unswerving regularity and consistency, like some electronic ritual, theatre of nostalgia, a genre that is emblematic of some of those thrilling, yet comforting, days, episodes, experiences, of yesteryear. Nostalgia is a repetition, a return of the past to the present and it has many forms in life in the media of which the who-dun-it and much of the amusement and distration of TV are but its varieties. The a nalysis of print and electronic media reveals a whole world of understanding and critique to the daily consumers of its products that we are and I leave readers to follow-up on my comments should they be keen.48

This business of habituation and habit is a critical one in my life. “By a seeming paradox," writes philosopher John Dewey, "increased power of forming habits means increased susceptibility, sensitiveness, responsiveness. Thus even if we think of habits as so many grooves, the power to acquire many and varied grooves denotes high sensitivity, explosiveness. Thereby an old habit, a fixed groove if one wishes to exaggerate, gets in the way of the process of forming a new habit while the tendency to form a new one cuts across some old habit.” In these early years of my late adulthood I have habituated many of my life's activities; I have acquired many fixed grooves with the aim of developing of writing activities to their fullest. This theme of habituation could be applied to many areas of my life down the years with many permutations and combinations. Perhaps at a later date I will do so.49

Memory and its supplement, forgetting, are key issues in contemporary writing about autobiography. The act of remembering many conditions and situations is like trying to recall an experience that you slept through. Art-making, in which realm we can include writing, is a mode of attention. Autobiographical writing often focusses on memory, the body, and divided and dislocated forms of subjectivity. It investigates forgetting and remembering. To remember is to remember roles, statuses, beliefs and values. My own writing on memory and affect draws on processes of repetition, interruption and a range of forms and strategies that, together, make up this total enterprise. There are numerous theorists using a range of interruptive narrative effects including the layering and interweaving of narrative modes. Memory is a complex process of stories without end. Memory is entwined with subjectivity and it is difficult to envisage our lives in the total sense. So much that we live is not legible or readable. Our personal museum sees each artefact embedded with memory; each artefact speaks of these memories, but each artefact is only partially rendered readable. At one end of the continuum of our relation to life's artifacts is mystery and meaning and at the other end our world is flattened to a double of our interior archive. We are doomed to undergo the same experience over and over. We turn and turn and turn in what Blake calls the “same dull round.” There was some of this in my life: in the long summers of my late childhood and early teens, when I was afflicted by depression and dancing around in many of the interstices of my life from time to time. After one has immediately perceived the image of something and mediately apprehended it as a consonance of whole and parts, one is not always struck by its shimmering claritas, its radiance as this thing and nothing else, its unique whatness, quidditas. All is not Blake's luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state, an enchantment of the heart. Life has many shades of delight and tedium.50

Philosophy, said Walter Benjamin, is the representation of ideas, and so is autobiography. By 'poetics' I mean that we necessarily understand or try to understand identity and belonging, or not belonging, through cultural forms: through representation as in genre, myth, novel, poem, allegory, parable, anecdote, story, sayings, metaphors, riddles. The autobiographical I is never itself in a pure sense because it always represents itself through culture; the autobiographical eye can never perceive directly much less remember directly; further, there are continuous inner journeys that beckon deep within oneself to the scattered islands and mirages. I think of myself as a pathological hermit, yet one can make long voyages in the mind, prompted and pursued by desires entwinedly utopian and dystopian. No matter how social or how hermitic one is we all come from the “not yet” and head for “no more.” I always liked the way Hannah Arendt put this idea.51

There is in my work, like my life, elements of derangement and a cultivation of both the art and the pathology of madness. My quest is inevitably accompanied by farce, delusion, self-parody, self-mocking, comic stories of my own incompetence, humiliation and banality.52

I feel that I belong to histories, as much or more than to a place or a land. I know that histories are always torn, always bitter, always replete with contradictions and inconsistencies, rich and flexible with many twistings and turnings. As my pioneering life progressed, it dawned on me insensibly, that I was part of a Promised Land, a Promised Land that was slowly evolving in the womb of a travailing age. I was also part of a journey, a journey by a community that offered riches of knowledge and experience that I scarcely appreciated. It was a journey with topological features of so many kinds: landscapes, seascapes, skyscapes, cityscapes, beachscapes, snowscapes, tundrascapes, among others. I have journied, or so it seems, towards a state of belonging, of closeness and intimacy or one of not-belonging, distance and estrangement.53

I have sometimes felt haunted and tormented and sometimes felt enriched and full. My mind has to live with its fragments, ruins, shadows, ambiguity and contradictoriness and so much that is good. I grew up in Ontario with the USA just down the road a few miles, on the edge of a province and a country. It was also where my parents and grandparents lived. I saw my grandfather every week throughout my years of primary school. I recall much else, much I have already related. 54

Many Australian writers, critics and academics have turned to autobiographical writing as a means of self-expression and cultural and social reflection in the last decades. Germaine Greer, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Robert Dessaix, Ruby Langford and Bernard Smith are each located very differently as Australian thinkers and yet each is part of the landscape of autobiographical writing. It is a landscape I, too, have joined in these same years, years I would call a zone of contemporary autobiography.55

I never very rarely hated, as some writers, some scribblers, of autobiography do. I have had a wide constellation of emotions but hatred has rarely crossed the path of my heart. I think, for the most part, those I knew both inside and outside my family, were largely indifferent to my writing. They never would have said so directly. In some ways I felt I existed on the end of that easy tolerance which one finds in Australia and, as Phillip Adams says, is largely due to indifference. This indifference one comes to except with relative equanimity because it is so very pervasive. Adams is partly right, but I think this attitude of indifference is a quite complex phenomenon that is born of many more roots and social processes. 56

Over the years I have turned my social world into a theoretical, hypothetical, sort of critical paparazzo. For years I had hoped for that special, authentic shot at the title, as the boxing world called it, as I stumbled through the social world, through the shrubbery of my life. But, insensibly throughout my forties and fifties, I lost my enthusiasm for making it big, for becoming a hero. Gradually, I acquired an interest in keeping my social profile low. On the internet I acquired, somewhat unbeknowst and unobtrusively, a profile I had never anticipated. 57

Rarely has anyone attempted to find first-hand information about my writing and my life. But on the internet this happens to an extent that always surprises me. I do not vigorously and efficiently rebuff any enthusiasm. It all takes place in quiet corners of cyberspace. In daily life I often move closer and closer to people and have for years, but they generally ask nothing about my writing. I feel as if there is a taboo around my work, a background of reticence, as if I am protected from enquiry and discussion. It may remain that way as long as I live. It was not as if I had, like some writers, a profound distaste for public disclosure of facts about my life. I have published all over the internet all sorts of details about my life and about a host of issues. By the age of 60 as the world wide web was developing its many opportunities for publishing I took the view that I should not be one of those who kept the private only for family and friends. There was little that was the business only of the writer and of the writer's family, friends and perhaps medical advisers. I have not developed that deeply ingrained habit of non-disclosure of information about me that I have frequently come across among writers among people in many other walks of life.58

Some autobiographers and memorists spawned an academic industry devoted to analysis of the autobiographies. Questions such as to what extent they were true or misleading and whether or not they were designed to conceal more than they revealed were common in the literature. Some critics went so far as to suggest that autobiographical work was devised to cover some undisclosed skeleton in the oedipal closet. I certainly have my skeletons but, as Pasternack once said, a life without secrets would be unbearable. The French sociologist/philosopher Jean Baudrillard argues that analysis has become as real as `the real,' an identical copy, thereby effacing realness. He would call my life story a simulation, a copy without a determinable original. Certainly, the original is only recoverable by me through some kind of simulation, to choose Baudrillard's words. The sign is reality, in Baudrillard's analysis. The reality is the sign. There is no difference. This is Baudrillard's persepctive and it certainly is a ftting one to describe and nature and reality of my memoire. 59