A Bit of A Memoir

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 not 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