Pioneering Over Four Epochs, The first few pages of my autobiography Options

[Guest_RonPrice_*]

"Not beginning at the Beginning...."

My individual journey from the promised land, from my home in Canada, my home town in Burlington Ontario, from one promised land to another and then another I have written in the form of a 800 page autobiography. It took me twenty years to write this piece and in the pages which follow I have included some of chapter one, the introduction. I hope readers find some pleasure here and there:

Dispositions are plausible responses1 to the circumstances individual Baha'is found themselves in and they led, in toto and inter alia, to the gradual emergence from obscurity of their religion over these four epochs.   The story here is partly of this emergence and partly it is myself telling my own life-story, as Nietzsche writes in his life story, in his famous autobiographical pages of Ecce Homo.2 For I have gone on writing for years, perhaps as much as two decades now, in relative obscurity doing what I think is right. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Joseph Kling, "Narratives of Possibility: Social Movements, Collective Stories and Dilemmas of Practice," 1995, Internet; and F. Nietzsche in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, Adriana Cavarero, Routledge, NY, 2000, p.85.  :StarWars1:  :StarWars1:
_
I am intentionally not going to begin at the beginning. Most autobiographies that I have examined thus far seem to be sequential exercises beginning with the author's first memories and proceeding logically until the last syllable of their recorded time, their allotment on earth,  at least up to the time of the writing of their said autobiography.  This is not my intention here.  Anyway, when does one really begin a journey, a friendship, a love affair? Beginnings are fascinating, misunderstood, enigmatic.  I’ve written many poems about various beginnings and the more I write the more elusive they become. But there comes a moment, a point, when we realize that we are already well on the way; we know the journey has definitely started.   And as we travel along we mark historical moments which we weave into our narrative. They often change, our view of them that is, as we grow older: these rites de passage, these coming of age moments, these transition periods, these passages, these crises, calamities and victories.  Unlike the Roman historians of the republican days who wrote their histories annalistically, that is year by year in sequence, this work is much more varied and informal with a slight tendency to write by plans and epochs.

I frankly do not know how I am going to approach this story, though I have no trouble finding such historical moments and there is always in the background to my life ever-present plans, new beginnings, fresh initiatives, systematic advances, "leaps and thrusts,"  triumphs and losses, vistas of new horizons and dark clouds.   Thinking seriously about autobiography or, indeed, any intellectual discipline, requires us to acknowledge our ignorance of the subject.  This is a prerequisite.  Our past, any past, is another country, a place that exists in our imaginations and in those uncertain and often unreliable echoes of our lives that we trace in words, in places and in things. There is, then, an inscrutability which paradoxically lies at the heart of this work. I return again and again, taking the reader with me, to absences, spaces in my knowledge, my memory, my construction. I recognize that the act of making this my life, into a whole, from the pieces I have left from my past is necessarily a creative one, an act of imagination, what one writer calls "the dialectic between discovery and invention."  In the process I transform my history and the history of my times, from something static into something lived.  I am not imprisoned in some imagined objectivity; rather, I reenter the moment, the hour, the days and the years and imagine it as something experienced from multiple perspectives, simultaneously acknowledging its erasures and silences.  This book compels me to think again about my life and readers to think about theirs.  :holly:

[Guest_Cathy_*]

This is a unique approach to writing one's autobiography.  I'm looking forward to seeing where you go with the rest of this.  I have found it interesting and well-written thus far.

Cathy~  :lovie:  :cloud9:

[Guest_Cailean_*]

It's dry - but it's not a short story, it's an autobiography, so I don't think that's in any way a detriment. Slightly confused by some of the numerals appearing in the second paragraph.

2 For I have gone on writing for years, perhaps as much as two decades now, in relative obscurity doing what I think is right. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Joseph Kling

Mebbe just a formatting error, but I was having flashbacks from a book I read with a character known as "3Jane".

Otherwise, it works rather well, it's catchy and tight enough to leave enduring interest. And by all means, don't start at the beginning :) I've always found that my stories, since I've not properly sat down and created anything like an autobiography, usually start somewhere in the middle and work themselves to the beginning and the end. If the method suits you, and works, then by all means, do so! :) There are definitely writing rules, but if one is comfortable with breaking them, and knows the consequences, sometimes a greater piece can be created.

You are very forthright in your affirmations of faith, and I kudos that. Baha'i seems to be a most benevolent following, and for that, it has my respect.

May your life get a little better every day, fellow Australian. Blessed be.

Cailean.

[Guest_Jox_*]

Hello again, Ron.

Cailean is right - the formatting error is there when sub and super scripts are posted from text onto Ikonboard / PhP (the software / ISP which carries this site).

(Maybe use brackets to compensate?)

Your academic references underpin the very academic nature of your approach. I'm not sure that I would say the work, hitherto, is very readable in the usually accepted sense. It is never (in that style) going to rival a celeb's biography in the book sales lists. However, it is literate which is an improvement over most published autobiographies.

I found the part you posted rather too introspective (even for an autobiography). However, it is really a foreword, not the autobio, proper. It is the bit I would skip. I never read forewords until the end, at least. If I've enjoyed the book I'll go back and read all the notes, foreword etc. If not I won't bother.

So I'd be interested to read some of your autobiography "proper," so to speak.

Best wishes, James.

[Charon]

RonPrice,

I agree with Cailean and Jox, with one exception.  I do read the forewords in all books, as it usually helps set the stage on what the writer was thinking when he wrote his piece.  Some, as James has indicated, have been extremely dry, terribly dry, almost to the point I didn't want to read the book.  

I figured the numbers were some form of subscript, although I had trouble matching them up.

I also agree with Cailean, start where ever you desire, it is your story.  Why follow the rules, your idea might become the new rules.

I like your last line, with one exception - is it is huge assumption to state that your book will force readers to think about their lives.  I would suggest you hook the reader by using the word desire or similar term.

Otherwise interesting, and intriguing.

Charon

[Guest_RonPrice_*]

Thanks folks for your reflective responses. I'll post some prefaces I wrote over the years at the risk of being even drier than I already am. Perhaps after the tsunami one does not mind a bit of dryness.-Ron
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PIONEERING
OVER FOUR EPOCHS

The Fifth Edition


An autobiographical study
and a study in autobiography



By RonPrice
TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS


VOLUME 1:
INTRODUCTIONS AND GENRES

Chapter 1                      Introduction 1

Chapter 2                      Introduction 2
                     
Chapter 3                       Letters

Chapter 4                       Diary/Journal/Notebooks

Chapter 5                       Interviews

Chapter 6           A Life in Photographs

VOLUME 2:
PRE-PIONEERING

Chapter 1          Ten Year Crusade Years: 1953-1963

Chapter 2           Pre-Youth Days: 1956-1959

Chapter 3                       Pre-Pioneering Days: 1959-1962

VOLUME 3:              
HOMEFRONT PIONEERING

Chapter 1                      Pioneering: Homefront 1: 1962-1964
                                     
Chapter 2                              Pioneering Homefront 2: 1965-1967

Chapter 3                              Pioneering Homefront 3: 1967-1968

Chapter 4                              Pioneering Homefront 4: 1968-1971

VOLUME 4:          
INTERNATIONAL PIONEERING  :wall:

Chapter 1                       International Pioneering 1: 1971-1973

Chapter 2                                International Pioneering 2: 1973-1974

Chapter 3                                International Pioneering 3: 1974-1978

Chapter 4                                International Pioneering 4: 1978-1982

Chapter 5                                International Pioneering 5: 1982-1988

Chapter 6                                International Pioneering 6: 1988-1996

Chapter 7                                International Pioneering 7: 1996-2003
               
Chapter  8                      Epilogue

VOLUME 5:
COMMENTARIES, ESSAYS AND POEMS
                                           

Chapter 1                         Credo and Resumes

Chapter 2                         Pioneering An Overview

Chapter 3                         Anecdote and Autobiography

Chapter 4                         Autobiography as Symbolic Representation

Chapter 5                                  Essays on Autobiography

Chapter 6                          A Study of Community

Chapter 7                           About Poetry

Chapter 8                                   Social Problems

Chapter 9                                   Praise and Gratitude
                 


sections below:  (found in these volumes)


SECTION I               Pre-Pioneering

SECTION II              Homefront Pioneering

SECTION III             International Pioneering

sections below:   (not found in these volumes)

The material below is found in other locations and, although not included in this autobiography, it could be useful for future autobiographical, biographical work and historical work.

SECTION IV Characters/Biographies: 24(ca) short sketches  

SECTION V Published Work    : Essays-150:
                                                                     See(a) Resume Vol.5 Ch 1 above and
                                                                           (B) Section V: Volumes 1&2
                                                                                   of private collection.
                                                                                         
SECTION VI Unpublished Work: Essays-Volumes 1 & 2---125 essays
                                                                                    ....................1979-2004
                                                                   Novels-Volumes 1 to 3---12 attempts
                                                                                  .......................1983-2001

SECTION VII Letters: Volumes 1 to 35: 3000 letters(ca)... 1967-2004

SECTION VIII Poetry: Booklets 1-52: 6000 poems(ca)........ 1980-2004

SECTION IX   Notebooks: 150(ca)........................................1966-2004

SECTION X.1 Photographs: 12 files/booklets/folios.............1908-2004
SECTION X.2           Journals: Volumes 1 to 4.................................1844-2004

SECTION XI              Memorabilia...................................................1962-2004


DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the Universal House of Justice in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of its first election in April 1963 and to Alfred J. Cornfield, my grandfather, whose autobiography was an inspiration to the one found here. :pharoah2



PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION

In early April 2004, six months after creating a fourth edition of this work, a hard copy, the first in the public domain as far as I know, was made by Bonnie J. Ellis, the Acquisitions Librarian, for the Baha’i World Centre Library. The work was 803 pages at that point.  Anyone wanting to read this fixed edition, this hard copy, of the fourth edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs will find it, then, in the Baha’i World Centre Library.  That fourth edition of April 2004 is now the base from which additions, deletions and corrections have been, are being and will be made in the months and years ahead. Anyone coming across the latest Internet edition with these changes will come across what is for me the fifth edition of my work, an edition which, although it also contains some alterations from time to time, I trust will be the final edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs.  

I would like to think that this book requires more exposition than criticism. Or to put it more precisely, I would like to think that it demands that the critical faculty of readers be connoisseurial, that they employ that faculty not to cavil but to discern what is distinctive and enduring here.  That is what I would like to think, but I am confident that should this lengthy work attain any degree of popularity it will inevitably receive its share of criticism.   I like to think that this autobiographical work forces readers to re-examine their received ideas on this genre. I like to think,too, that the inflated reputations that are a constant part of literary discourse in this field of literature are placed in a more balanced perspective by the approach I have taken to this work. For I aspire, as the literary critic Rebecca West once put it, to artistry, not just a simple aimiability and any authority this work achieves I like to think derives from this artistry and its truth.

I hope, as well, that readers will find here a conceptual density that gives pleasure and instruction.  Those who enjoy philosophical argument may enjoy this book more than those looking for a good yarn.   This work may repel those who have a low toleration for compact, complex ideas piled on one after another.  But whether the reader enjoys or is repelled by this work, this study of the past from a particular perspective, an autobiographical one, is one way of understanding the present. Such is my aim. It is easy I find to please myself when I write; the challenge and the greatest pleasure lies in writing for the pleasure of others.

The last additions to this fifth edition were made on the Holy Day commemorating the Ascension of ‘Abdu’-Baha, BE161, November 28 2004.  As I was making these additions I came across the words of a Paul Johnson: "....balanced, well-adjusted, stable and secure people do not, on the whole, make good writers or good journalists.  To illustrate the point, you have only to think of a few of those who have been both good writers and good journalists: Swift, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens, Marx, Hemingway, Camus, Waugh, just to begin with."
I’m not sure if I deserve to be ranked with this group of famous men, however much I might like the idea.  I’m not sure either if I could describe myself as balanced, well-adjusted, stable and secure.  I leave both of these evaluations to readers who would like to try to answer these questions and, in the process, hopefully enjoy the process of doing so.

Ron Price
November 28 2004

PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION

After completing the third edition of this work on July 9th 2003, in commemoration of the 153rd anniversary of the martyrdom of the Bab, I continued to polish, to edit, to add and to alter its basic structure and format. By the celebration of the anniversary of the Birth of Baha'u'llah on November 12th 2003, due to the many changes I had made, it seemed timely to bring out this fourth edition. The second edition had been essentially the same as the first edition which I had completed ten years before in 1993, although I added in the intervening period, in the years 1993 to 2003, a series of appendices and notebooks containing a substantial body of resources that I could draw on from the vast literature that had become available on the autobiographical process and on life-writing as well as from the social sciences and humanities on the various themes I wanted to pursue in my work. And I did just that in writing the third edition.  

In 2003 I wrote what was essentially a new autobiography of over seven hundred pages with over thirteen hundred footnotes.  In this fourth edition of some three hundred and fifty thousand words I have divided the text into five volumes and it is now found on the internet at several sites and especially at www.bahaindex.com which highlighted this autobiography at its news site on November 4th 2003 and the Baha'i Academics Resource Library, located on the internet at bahai-library.com.  It has taken me nearly twenty years to satisfy my autobiographical and literary self; perhaps now this self has the maturity to exercise its skills judiciously and so enlighten the public. I hope so.  To attempt to enlighten anyone these days, though, rings of a certain pretentiousness  and so I make this last comment with some caution.  I know that the artist Andy Warhol expressed the feelings of many people in these days of electronic media when he said that ‘words are for nerds.’   I am not anticipating a great rush to this text. Words are a poor resource for capturing complexity, as Leonardo da Vinci once said, but they are our chief tools for such a capture.

I plan to continue working on this fourth edition in the months ahead and, when a substantial, a sufficient, number of changes, additions and deletions have been made and/or when some unforseen development occurs I'll bring out a fifth edition.  This exercise will depend, of course, on being granted sufficient years before "the fixed hour" is upon me and it is my "turn to soar away into the invisible realm."   Readers will find below, then, the fourth edition of my autobiography Pioneering Over Four Epochs with whatever changes, additions and deletions I have made after November 12th 2003.  For the most part, readers will find here augmentations of the third edition rather than revisions or corrections, very much what the first essayist Michel Montaigne said he did with the editions of his Essays.   Readers will also find in this work an application of what I call the Reverse Iceberg Principle: 10% cold hard facts on the surface and 90% analysis, interpretation, imagination.

This edition represents a reconciliation of a certain zestful readiness of my imaginative life with the practical concerns and the challenging demands of the world of teaching, parenting, marriage, Baha'i community activity and various social responsibilities.  It is a reconciliation that could not have occurred, though, had the demands of job, community and family not been significantly cut back to a minimum. The swings in my bi-polar cycle and the practical demands of life for a long time ennervated and depleted whatever energies I could have poured into writing this autobiography.  But after my retirement from the teaching profession nearly five years ago and after the final stage of the treatment of my bi-polar disorder during these same years, a whole new energy system unfolded, productive tensions between self-creation and communal participation, enabling me to put together these seven hundred pages in the course of one year.   I feel a little like that towering literary giant of my time Doris Lessing who, in a recent interview, said: “all kinds of circumstances have kept me pretty tightly circumscribed. What I've done is write. I used to have a very great deal of energy, which, alas, seems to have leaked away out of my toes somewhere.”  

I hope I have not just built an autobiographical skyscraper to adorn the literary skyline.  I hope that at least a few readers will take an elevator up to my many floors and check out some of the multitude of offices hidden away.  After travelling up and up at the press of a button, readers I hope will find some useful resources for their everyday lives, at least for the life of their minds.  As one of the 'writingest pioneers' I hope I provide some pleasureable moments to anyone brave enough to take on the 800 pages here.  The kind of pleasure I am talking about is the fine delight that follows thought, as Gerard Manley Hopkins once put it.

My imagination, my creativity, for many years had been unable to convey my life's experience and thought in writing in a personally satisfying way.  But as the new millennium opened its first doors, with energies that yearned to express themselves through the art of writing, I was able at last to satisfy the autobiographical impulse. And the impulse led me on many paths but only one direction--deeper.   This book became, in a way, the crystallization of a way I wanted to write.   Out of the privacy of my thought and writing I was able to make more and more and more of my life;  it was a 'more' that was not based quintessentially on the social dimension of life as my life had been hitherto for virtually all of my pioneering experience. It was, though, a 'coaxing of a context'  out of my experience and the history of my times and of my religion.   The result is the edition you read here completed several months before my sixtieth birthday.  I offer this edition of my work in celebration of the birth of that Holy Tree  near day-break 186 years ago this morning.  

I do not try to fix this autobiography into a single frame; I do not try to write my own story with a sense of closure and definitiveness.   Nor do I write with a great emphasis on disclosure and confession; I do not try to 'jazz-it-up', make it more than it is.  I'm not tempted to give it a glamour it does not possess but I do strive to find its meaning, the meaning in what is already there.  My story is based on remembrance, memory, yes, unavoidably, first-person reportage, necessarily. There are an unlimited number of possible narratives that could be constructed as reporter on my life.  What readers have here could be called an interpretation, an adaptation, an abridgement, a retelling, a basic story among many possible basic stories.  It is neither true nor false, but constructed.   And it has meaning because, as the poet Czeslaw Milosz writes, “it changes into memory.”

There is some ordering of the incidences and intimacies of this specific, individual life into a narrative coherence giving readers some idea of what it was like to be me, some idea of what my inner, private, mental life was like.  This private life is for the most part illegible; we live it and fight it alone.  I have tried to make this inner life, as much as possible, as legible as possible.  The sense of self which has emerged in the process of writing this work is two-fold.  One is that private, mysterious, difficult to define self about whom it seems impossible to boast about.   This self is an enigma, a mysterious who that I am, a transient entity, ceaselessly re-created for each and every object with which the brain interacts. Along with this transient entity, though, there is what seems like a second self, what one writer called an autobiographical self.    It is this self which gives this autobiography some narrative flow; it is the self of everyday life, the surface existence. It is not trivial but is really quite important in a different way than that more enigmatic self.

If, in opening both my narrative self and my inner self to others, readers may see ways to describe and give expression to their lives and in so doing be open further to the immense richness of life's experience, that would give me pleasure.  For, as 'Abdu'l-Baha wrote in the opening pages of The Secret of Divine Civilization, "there is no greater bliss, no more complete delight"  than "an individual, looking within himself, should find that....he has become the cause of peace and well-being, of happiness and advantage to his fellow men."

I make no claim, though, to my life being some apotheosis of the Baha'i character as, say,  Benjamin Franklin's autobiographical persona was of the prevailing conception of the American character back in the eighteenth century.  Baha'i character and personality, it is my view, is simply too varied to be said to receive an apotheosis or typification in someone's life. Franklin, and many autobiographers since, have been interested in self-promotion and in being an exemplar for the edification and moral improvement of their community, exempla as they are known in the western religious traditions.   I have taken little interest in the former or the latter as I proceded to write this work. The Baha'i community has acquired many exempla in the last two hundred years  and only one true Exemplar.  If this work plays some role, however limited, in developing an "aristocracy of distinction," as Franklin's did, and in contributing to "the power of understanding,"  as this great Cause goes on from strength to stength in the years ahead, I would welcome such a development. To think that this work could play a part, however small, in the  advancement of civilization, may be yet another somewhat pretentious thought, but it is a hope, an aspiration, consistent with the system of Baha'i ideals and aims which has been part of my ethos, my philosophy of life, for at least some forty-five years now.

And finally, like Franklin, I leave a great deal out of this autobiography, a great deal about my times, my religion and myself.  I make no apologies for this any more than I make any apologies for living, although my sins of omission and commission are legion and sufficiently extensive to warrant a few apologies to particular individuals I have known along the way.  Conscious of the problem in autobiographical literature of the "aggrandisement of the self," I stress the very ordinariness of my life, my part of a larger, collective, community memory and the coherence of my life around a host of themes.  Most of life's experience has been left out, as Mark Twain informed us. This is an inevitability, part of the nature of any autobiography.  Perceptual gaps, cognitive omissions, lacuna of many kinds prevent an accurate or complete account of reality. But, because we are seldom aware of the lacuna, we believe our cognitions accurate.  Clocking in at a burgeoning eight hundred pages, as I write these additional words to this autobiography's fourth edition, this work is, I'm sure, too much for most readers.  In fact, it may be that I have tried to say, to take on, too much. If that is the case some future editor can cut it back to a manageable portion and readers may be advised to read part rather than all of this text.

Ron Price
November 12th 2003


PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

Forty years ago this week the Baha'i community elected, for the first time, its international body, the Universal House of Justice.  The timing for the completion of this third edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs  has been fortuitous since I have dedicated this book to these Men of Baha, as the Baha'is sometimes call this body at the apex of their administrative Order.  The completion of the third edition of this work, this autobiography, in the last few days, coinciding as this completion does with the election of that international governing body for the ninth time, has been encouraging.   Over these last two decades I have often been inclined to discontinue this whole exercise.  With the writing of this third edition a renewed hope has entered the picture.

After nearly twenty years of working on this autobiography or narrative non-fiction as it might be called, I feel, at last, that it has a form worthy of publication and so I have entered it here on my website: bahaipioneering.bahaisite.com/   It has been nearly twenty years, too, since I first read my grandfather's autobiography, a book written in the first two years of the Formative Age, 1921-1923, by a man who had just turned fifty years of age.  The book was the account of the first twenty-nine years of his life, 1872-1901.  Written, as I say, at the beginning of the Formative Age of the Baha'i Faith, this work, of more than one hundred thousand words, by a formally uneducated, self-educated man, was an inspiration to me and my writing.  And so I have also dedicated this book to my grandfather, Alfred J. Cornfield.  

I have now written perhaps more than two hundred thousand words about the first fifty-eight years of my life, twice as many years and twice as many words as those in my grandfather's autobiography.   I see this edition as a working base for an ongoing exercise in autobiography and autobiographical analysis and an exercise, too, in applying the multitude of insights from a lifetime of reading in the social sciences and humanities.  When enough changes to this third edition have been made, a fourth edition will take its place some time in the years, or perhaps just months, ahead.  Perhaps, too, like Edward Gibbon I'll complete six editions before this earthly life is out. Gibbon's autobiography, of course, became significant because of its association with his famous work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  

The significance of this work, if indeed it comes to possess any significance at all, will be due to my association with a Movement that claims to be the emerging world religion on the planet.  I completed a first edition of this work ten years ago in May 1993. I dedicated it to the Universal House of Justice on that occasion, as I do here in this edition.  A second edition contained additional sentences and paragraphs, alterations and a wealth of quotations and essays on the subject of autobiography as well as a dozen or so updates to take the story into this my fifty-ninth year of life and my forty-first as a pioneer.  I was trying in this second edition, although I don’t feel I was in any way successful at that stage, to write the kind of sentences Henry David Thoreau advocated: “Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new impression; sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as Roman aqueducts; to frame these, that is the art of writing . . . [a style] kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without digesting.”   Well, it’s good to have a lofty aim. In the third edition I began, at least so it is my impression, to achieve this goal.

As I worked on the second edition I was often inclined to leave the account there and break-off the writing.  But something kept pulling me toward a more extended, a deeper, treatment of my life and times in the context of my religion.  This third edition was written in the first four months of 2003.  Drawing on much of the resource material I had gathered on the subject of autobiography in the previous ten years, I was finally able to tell my story in a way that was satisfying, if far from perfect.  I look forward to further developments to this autobiographical work in the months, the years and the decades ahead.  Should I be granted a long life in which to recount the 'tokens that tell of His glorious handiwork,' it will be interesting to see what changes there will be, what will be added and what will be taken away, in future editions.   The significance of my efforts, what they ultimately will reveal and have revealed, what those mysterious dispensations of Providence will uncover from behind the veil of silence that seems to ultimately cover the lives of most people on this mortal coil, is a mystery.  Providence has ordained for my training every atom in existence. Some of the evidences of that training experience are here in this book.

In writing this third edition, I seem to have found at last a successful strategy for writing something longer than a few pages, longer than an essay or a poem, literary forms that somehow got fixed by my many years as a student and lecturer in academic institutions and by my own inclination and need to write short pieces for personal pleasure and/or practical necessity.  And if, in the beginning at least, in this work, the result is a slightly complex and involved style, perhaps it is because I have found life to be complex and involved. I have learned, at last, that revising can be a pleasure and that even the clumsiest initial draft can take on a life of its own in subsequent drafts.   A revision, for me, seems to function in a multitude of ways: simplification, the achievement of greater depth and complexity due to a penetration, a digging beneath appearances to something I see as a greater reality or truth; indeed, something quite new as well as a refining of the old.

I have discovered too that spinning out ideas and experiences is not only idiosyncratic but also something usefully connected with what others have said.  Each spinning seems to require its own web and the search for fixed points of reference is part of the struggle for coherence, completeness and the autobiographer’s attempt to penetrate, to dig, beneath those appearances to something closer to reality.  As a result, I like to think that each sentence of Pioneering Over Four Epochs is a "flower in a crannied wall," as a poet once wrote.   The crannied wall of autobiography has been a popular one in the last several centuries, since the Reformation in the sixteenth century, but especially in the last four decades, in the years of this pioneering venture.  Many thousands of people in my lifetime have turned to this genre as a means of self-expression and cultural and social reflection.    I would not be the first person to see in my own life a mirror of the times.  The famous work The Education of Henry Adams, a text that appears and reappears periodically in the literature of our age, makes much the same claim for its subject.

Autobiography is a genre of literature that is arguably the most popular of all genres in the Western tradition, at least since the Enlightenment. But books, like civilizations and life itself, are fragile things and, however splendid, often come to mean little in the hearts and minds of a people. Like that flower in a crannied wall, however beautiful and however strongly it may cling to the crevice in the wall, in time it comes to flower no more with no evidence at all of its existence.  It is possible that the abyss of history, so deep as it is,  may bury this whole exercise.  Writers must face this possible reality, no matter how much hope they may entertain for their works.  

I came to see, as I wrote, that a dialectical use of experiential, historical, religious and philosophical themes and positions is the most reliable way of anchoring one's experience, one's thoughts and arguments and making them more stable and complete. Of great benefit, too, in this the longest of my pieces of writing, has been the many disciplines of the social sciences and humanities and a continued dialogue and even controversial exchange with contemporaries, a controversy that must be characterized by an etiquette of expression and a judicious exercise of the written and spoken word.  On paper, as in life, the phenomenon of freedom of thought "calls for an acute exercise of judgement."   One must not say too much nor too little. One must find one's own checks and balances, one's own insights into the dynamics of expression.  This edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs is part of that search for these dynamics, these checks and balances and as acute an exercise in judgement as is possible given the blooming and buzzing confusion that so much of life represents to us as we travel this often stony, tortuous and narrow road to what we believe or hope is, ultimately, a glorious destiny.  It is understandable how writers like Conrad and Naipaul can see human destiny in terms of darkness, weeping and the gnashing of teeth.  If it were not for the political-religious idea at the centre of the Baha'i Faith with which I have sketched a framework of meaning over the terra incognita of life for virtually all the years of this story, I would not be able to create in comfort.  I might very well see life, as so many writers do, as little more than a groteque farce.

The shape within which these dynamics operate, the genre of autobiography, is like water. It is a fluid form, with varied, blurred, multiple and contested boundaries, with characteristics some analysts say that are more like drama than fiction, containing constructed more than objective truth.  So it is that other analysts of autobiography see it as "the creation of a fiction."   This is an understandable conclusion if a writer tends to stress the perspective Baha'u'llah alludes to when He writes that life bears "the mere semblance of reality," that it is like "a vapour in the desert."  Whatever universality exists in this text it comes from my association with the writings of this prophet-founder of a new religion rather than any of my specific pretensions to findings and conclusions that I like to think bear relevance to everyone.  What I offer here is an interpretation, a voice, seemingly multivocal, that struggles to obtain the attention of others.  In some ways what readers will find here is a series of interpretations, identifications, differentiations, in tandem, in tension, in overlap, to one another, each registering their own significances.  There is some of Thoreau’s famous statement in my work: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”   And there is much effort here to please, to walk with people where they are.


I hope readers will find they do not have to penetrate elaborate sentences, wade through arcane terminology and deal with excessive jargon.  I hope they will not find here a heaving mass of autobiographical lava as so often at the centre of autobiographies.   But with nearly 800 pages this document may prove more useful as a piece of archival history rather than something for contemporaries to actually read.  I certainly aim to please and, as in life, I'm sure I will do that only some of the time.  I try to please through this piece of analytical and poetic narrative which I have created not so much on paper as in my innards, out of the living tissue of my life.   And it is the autobiographical theorist James Olney who defines this process of creation best:

"Autobiography is a metaphor through which we stamp our own image on the face of nature.  It allows us to connect the known of ourselves to the unknown of the world. Making available new relational patterns it simultaneously organizes the self into a new and richer entity so that the old known self is joined to and transformed into the new and heretofore unknown self."  

This new and richer entity is the result of a carefully edited version of personal experience and my particular version of reality that I place before my readers so as to indicate the persepctive from which this narrative is being written.  This narrative depends on the deferred action of my memory and is based on the view that the writing is worth the risk however complex the task.  

May 1st 2003

PREFACE  TO THE SECOND EDITION

It has been nearly ten years since I finished the first edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Since that time I have added a large body of my poetry among other additions, deletions and alterations. The size of the original work has been increased many fold.  Time has moved on and my life is being lived in another epoch, the fifth, necessitating a new name for this work: Pioneering Over Four Epochs.  Here is the story, then, of more than forty years of pioneering experience: 1962-2002 and fifty years of association, 1953-2003, with a Movement which claims to be--and I believe it is--the emerging world religion on the planet.  I like to think, with the historian Leopold von Ranke, that “self-imposed discipline,” and there has been some in producing this work, “alone brings excellence to all art.”  If that is the case, then there is some excellence here. There is here, too, some of what Proust called "true impressions",  hints from life's realities, persistent intuitions which require some art form, some form like writing, so that we are not left with only the practical ends of life which, although necessary, are never really sufficient to living.

The choice of subject is a deeply emotional affair.  Poetry and history are, in this work, allies, inseparable twins. But there are other brothers and sisters that anchor and define this autobiography: philosophy, sociology, the everyday, religion, inter alia.  Style, too, is, as the historian Peter Gay emphasizes, the bridge to substance, to all these family members.  I hope readers enjoy the walk across this bridge as I have enjoyed this organized, disciplined and certainly emotional encounter with some of the substance of my life and times and the many family members, friends, students and myriad associations I have had in life.

It is the belief of some writers, some thinkers, some human beings, that there is nothing new under the sun or perhaps, to put their view more accurately, there is nothing new to say about the human condition. The greats of history, the Shakespeares and the Sophocleses have already said it inimitably, brilliantly. At best, it seems to me, this is only a partial truth. The historian, the critic, the autobiographer, among others, interprets and reinterprets the human condition and, although, the human condition has elements that stay the same(plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose)much changes.  For, as it is said, you can not step into the same river twice. There is, then, much more to say, much more that is new. At least that, in summary, is my view.

I think that some may find this book peculiar. Such was the view of the autobiography of the nineteenth century novelist, Anthony Trollope.  Late Victorians found his book cantankerous and they had trouble absorbing its contents. For many reasons, not associated with cantankerousness in my case, I don't think many will find this book of mine absorbing.  Although, like Trollope, I chronicle some of life's daily lacerations upon the spirit.  I also move in channels filled with much that comes from flirtations with the social sciences: history, psychology, sociology, anthropology and several literary studies. My book has come to assume what many, I'm sure, will experience as unmanageable proportions. Five hundred pages and more is a big read for just about everyone these days.  Readers need to be especially keen to wade through that much print.  Perhaps at a future time I will divide the text into parts, into a series of volumes. But even then, in the short term, this world is a busy place and lives are confronted with so much to read, to watch, to do and to try to understand. This work will, I think, slip into a quiet niche and remain, for the most part, unread. I hope I am proved wrong.

I like to think, though, that should readers take on this work they may find here the reassurance that their battles are my battles, that we are not alone and that the Cause is never lost.  Most readers coming to this book, I'm inclined to think, already believe these things. But what I offer here could be seen as a handrail, if that is desired, a handrail of the interpretive imagination. Here, too, is a handrail informed by my experience, my life's basic business of shunting about and being shunted about, carelessly and not-so-carelessly, for more than half a century in the great portal that is this Cause.  Finally, I like to think this handrail is coated with an essential compassion and what writer Trollope wife Joanna says is the monument of a writer, a hefty dose of humility. That's what I'd like to think and, with Plato, I’d like to think that I am "a good writer(who) is a good man writing.” But of course one never knows this sort of thing for sure.

Ron Price
22 January 2003
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

What began in 1984 as an episodic diary and in 1986 as a narrative of pioneering experience covering twenty-five years has become an account covering thirty-one: 1962-1993.  Coincidentally, I have finished this third and what I hope is the final draft of this first edition in time to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the first election of the Universal House of Justice. This short account of some seventy-five pages has been dedicated to this institution which I have tried to serve, successfully and unsuccessfully, as one noted analyst once put it, like a precisioned instrument, since April 1963. Often the instrument has been dulled by life, by incapacities, by the tests that are part of our existence. Sometimes, one is conscious that the instrument has developed a sharpness, a sensation that at best is part of an unmerited grace.

Readers will find here what could be called a descriptive and analytical narrative, a narrative that intensifies in its personal meaning my life here on earth and has, thereby, a restorative function.  By the time I came to finish this work I felt a strong need for a restoration of my psyche. This was in 1992-93.  There is no doubt that my writing, my art, has shaped my experience, lending it style and direction. Life in turn informs this art giving it variety, giving it a granite base.   I have also used other genres to tell my story: diary, letters, essays, poems, fiction, photographs, notebooks and memorabilia.  They can be found in other places, none of which are yet available in published, in some available, form.  Together, all the genres, all the writing, several million words in all, paint the story of a life, a life that is far from over, far-light years-from perfection, but in many ways typical of the thousands of lives, of people who have pioneered in the three epochs that are the backdrop for this account.  And the act of writing is, as one writer put it, "a high, this writing thing, a kind of drug, and once you experience it nothing else is ever the same."  "Ordinary life," that writer went on, "seems like a prison sentence in comparison to the freedom of writing"   That puts it a little strongly but I agree with the general sentiment.  But however one characterizes writing it is difficult to grasp its origins.  As Freud once wrote, "Before the problem of the artist analysis must alas lay down its arms."

My story is unique. The story of the experience of each pioneer is unique. Under the guidance of the trustee of that global undertaking set in motion nearly a century and a half ago, men, women, children and adolescents have scattered across the planet to its most remote corners. Few write their accounts, their experiences, their journey and try to tell of its pulse, its rhythm, its crises and victories.  Whether from humility and a feeling that writing autobiography is somehow an inappropriate exercise, perhaps too self-centred; whether from a lack of interest in writing or the simple inability to convey experience in a written form; whether from the tedium of the everyday and its routines and responsibilities which come to occupy so much of their time; whether from the responsibilities and demands of life or simply the battles which pioneers inevitably face in their path of service: most of the stories never get told.  This is one that I hope will make it.

For many years I thought it would be better to keep this story under wraps, keep it from seeing the light of day.  Perhaps, I thought, it would be better published posthumously, if it was to be published at all. Alternatively, it could be kept in some local spiritual assembly or national spiritual assembly archive and retrieved by some scholar or archivist as a curiosity, a sample of a work written in the darkest heart of an age of transition.  This may be, in fact, what eventuates.  At this stage, as I complete the first edition, it is difficult to know what will become of this document.  

At this stage of the autobiographical process, too, I am not concerned about publishing this piece of writing.  This writing provides some helpful perspectives on the pioneering process and on teaching and consolidation in the first decades of what Shoghi Effendi called the tenth stage of history.  I hope whoever has the opportunity to read this account will find themselves entertained and stimulated by a man who paused, as Henry David Thoreau  did at the dawn of this new era, to give as full an account, a report if you like, of his experience.  I think it is a good read. It was certainly a pleasure to write.  It is a start, at least, to a story which I hope to continue in the years ahead in future editions.  

Memories are things, nouns if you like, which we all have.  Remembering is an activity, a verb if you like or more accurately a gerund.  It is more like a book in the process of being written, something that seems, in part at least, made up.  Remembering is not analogous to a book that I read or create from a printed script. Remembering is a problem-solving activity, where the problem is to give a coherent account of past events.  Memory itself is both the problem and the solution to the problem, if indeed the problem can be solved at all. Memories are also, as John Kihlstrom suggests, "a special class of beliefs about the past."  Belief, Kihlstrom argues, is the phenomenal basis of remembering.

April 12th 1993

SUMMARY AND OVERVIEW OF VOLUMES ONE TO FIVE OF THIS WORK

Anyone wanting to get a bird's-eye view of the 800 pages in this book need only go to
Volume 1 which is essentially a life-overview; volume 2 a discussion of my pre-pioneering days during the Ten Year Crusade: 1953-1963; volume 3 examines homefront pioneering: 1962-1971 and volume 4: international pioneering: 1971 to 2004; finally, volume 5 the chapter titles. The 30 headings at the outset of the chapters give anyone with little time a quick picture of the contents of this autobiographical work. Volume 1 is contains essays on pioneering, some special poetry and a detailed resume and bio-data. Three hundred and fifty thousand words is a big-read. Those who come to this site can dip in at any place. There is no need to begin at the beginning. The author wishes whose who do come upon this lengthy piece of writing much pleasure, much insight and a feeling that time spent reading this is time well-spent.  This work can not
be adequately understood as merely the story of my life. Were this just my story, I'm not sure I ever would have written it in the first place, however personally meaningful or useful my life has been.

[Guest_Jox_*]

Hi Ron,

Good to see you around again.

You seem to have posted something extra in the thread where we're trying to crit your original posting. Since the date given of “new” writing seems to pre-date your original posting on this thread, I assume they are different.

I don't know if you received my PM asking if you'd be so kind as to respond to your critics - I see you have said "thank you." in this thread but have not seen a reply from you in a PM.

People did read-through your work and take the trouble to comment so they - well, I for one - would appreciate it if you were so kind as to address those comments, please.

Naturally, you are perfectly free to decline all suggestions and no one would think any the worse of you for that (I've done that from time-to-time, too). However, I do think it behoves us to show we've considered what people say and briefly say "thanks but no thanks, because...," before we post new material - especially in the same thread (Better in a new thread anyway, by the way, else all become confused).

So, looking forward to your comments. If you'd like to move your second posting to a new thread just ask Cleo.

Best wishes, James.

[Cleo_Serapis]

Hello Ron and welcome to MM!

Interesting read!

I wanted to remind you that here at MM we have 'forum rules' that need to be enforced for the better of all members of our site.

In this forum 'Stonehenge' each member that creates a 'new topic' must follow our rule of:

The *1:3:1 rule applies here. You may post (1) thread every (3) days with at least (1) comment to another's work.
Post no more than 1 tile(thread) per 3 day period - with the required 1 reply.

I just wanted to let you know (in case you are new to critique forum boards) the most important factor that that we pride ourselves on here is in our member interaction.

We trust that you will reply to the comments in your threads as well as to other's works before posting again in Stonehenge. This is a requirement to membership. Also, please refrain from posting a new topic within a post so as not to confuse us...


If you have any questions, please feel free to PM me or reply here.

Thanks so much!
Lori

[Cybele]

Good morning Ron,

I have not yet finished reading your tile for the simple reason that I come here to read SHORT stories - which after all, is what this tile is designed for. A whole book is very time consuming and eats into the spare time we devote to our own works.

I know that lots of our members write excellent novels but do not expect us to have either the expertise or even the time to read through a whole book and offer crits. We are for the most part, poets, and we leave the short story writing to the experts. From our small knowledge we offer our thoughts on their writing and they are gracious enough to reply.

Should there be any evidence that you return this courtesy, I am sure more people would be willing to read any SHORT stories you may wish to post here.

Kindest regards

Grace

[Guest_RonPrice_*]

Thanks folks for all your feedback. I think Cybele is right: this last posting is too long. I've been on the net for two years now and I should have learned my lesson by now about long postings. I shall try to keep future ones short. Perhaps I have a tendency to be long-winded as a retired teacher who has lost his 'audience' so to speak!  :speechless:  

On the issue of 'two comments-postings' of mine on the works of others for each of my pieces of work, I think I have attended to that now as the first month at this site turns the corner. Let me know if I have not done that and I'm happy to respond. I need to develop a better recording system since I live at a number of sites.  Perhaps I'll just stay with poetry as Cybele suggests--very appropriately.

Cailean's comments about the excessive introspection are pertinent and appropriate and, for that reason among many, I don't think my work will do well in the book sales department, if it ever gets into a book store at all. The book goes to 850 pages, took 25 yeasrs to write and was largely written to satisfy my own proclivities(with part of one eye on a potential reading public). I think I have posted enough here at Mosaic Musings. I will now return to poetry and leave this wordy autobiography which can be found at various sites by typing the words "Pioneering Over Four Epochs" at virtually any search engine.  I have 100s of poems and lengthy bits of autobiographical prose at dozens of sites for any keen readers who have been enticed by what they've read thusfar.

I certainly did appreciate the feedback, though. I appreciated its honesty, its courtesy and tact, its directness and the several practical bits of advice. I shall file them all away. I've had about half a dozen other bits of feedback before and the feedback here confirms what was said by others.  :pharoah:

When one writes 850 pages of stuff one needs life-giving criticism. We all do. Noddings of the head by others like sheep about "how nice the work was" or "how much they liked it" et cetera while helpful for the ego-especially if true- has a limited value for self-improvement. So carry on gang, those 1000s of hours I spent were not all in vain, however dry, long-winded, slightly evangelical and, arguably, at the wrong part of the site and/or in the wrong order, they may have been.

I shall see you all in the poetry wings in the days and months ahead.    -Ron Price, Tasmania.

:blues: :blues: