An Interview With Australian-Canadian Hybid Poet Ron Price

[RonPrice]

INTERVIEW FOCUSING ON POETRY & PHENOMENOLOGY

I have written a great deal on my philosophy of poetry. It is a philosophy of organism, drawing on A.N. Whitehead, in which creativity is guided by purpose and is expressed by two capacities: loving and knowing. It is a philosophy which draws on many thinkers, writers, artists, sculptors, philosophers, historians, sociologists, psychologists, too many to summarize here. This interview, though, focuses on one particular philosophy which is a part of my approach to poetry. It is a complex one with very large words, but I want to give it special attention, special focus here. In addition, this interview closes with a brief discussion of some of the psychology underlying my poetry. Please note that this is a simulated interview.

Interviewer(I):

Over the years you have been aware of the philosophy of phenomenology as an influence on your poetry but, more recently, it has become more obvious, more articulate, more specifically influential. Could you describe this development, this increasing focus on, and inspiration from, phenomenology?

Price(P):

Yes, it wasn’t just phenomenology. During all my teaching life my focus was in the social sciences. It wasn’t until the last decade of my career as a teacher than the humanities, literature and poetry, found a place. And they found a place in an interdisciplinary mix. I came across phenomenology when I was teaching sociological theory in the mid-1990s. I had been writing poetry seriously for two or three years by then. I had just started working on a collection of poetry that came to be called The Terraces. The relationship between the poetry I was writing and the ideas in phenomenology did not really begin to come together, to connect, until after I had retired from teaching in 1999. It was then that I was able to focus on the philosophy of phenomenology and underpin my writing with a clear and articulate set of ideas albeit complex and not all that easy to put into words. Anyone familiar with my work will know that many strands of philosophy and psychology, indeed from a number of the social sciences, make up the basis of my writing, but phenomenology has come into focus more recently, say, in 2000 and 2001. I think it is interesting that this happened just as the Arc Project was completed. Phenomenology involves the study of how perception shapes a person’s reality and the tapestry of beauty that was created in the 1990s on Mt. Carmel had a profound affect on me—as a man who was coming to the end of his working-employment life, to the end of the process of raising three kids and was devoting his time increasingly to writing.

I: The history of the philosophy of phenomenology goes back to the early years after the passing of Baha'u'llah. I understand you see an interesting parallel development between significant events in the history of this philosophy and the history of the Baha'i Faith and your own life.

P: Yes, phenomenology began as a movement, a strand, a field, in philosophy about three years after the passing of Baha'ullah and spread, like the Baha'i Faith did, to many countries in the next few decades. One of the first major books in the field was published when 'Abdu'l-Baha was on His western tour, in 1913. It was called Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl. A second major book by Martin Heidegger was translated into English and published the year I began my pioneering life, 1962. It was called Being and Time. Phenomenology is now in the first decade of its second century. I don't want to highlight or summarize this history here. The story is too long. The above will suffice for now.

I: I believe there are several tendencies or stages in this multidisciplinary movement called phenomenology. Your poetry seems to fit into two of them: existential phenomenology and hermeneutical phenomenology. The first, the existential strand, focuses on the issues and questions of existence; the second on systems of interpretation. It draws on thinkers like: Heidegger, Marcel, Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur. For the most part, their writings came after WW2. Do you see this as an accurate overview?

P: Yes, I don't have any trouble with that. But when you start to examine the details of the writings of these thinkers and how their ideas are expressions of the philosophy of existential phenomenology or hermeneutical phenomenology you get into a long and complex story. It is hard enough just saying the words, the basic terms. A poetry which is based on an existential phenomenology emphasizes the tension between existence and essence. It also emphasizes choice, responsibility, freedom and the joys and angst of existence. A poetry which draws on a hermeneutical phenomenology emphasizes the poet's interpretive systems, his flexible orienting frameworks, his own changing perspectives, the illumination and the dark patches in individual experience and a concern for and an interest in virtually every aspect of existence--on some sliding scale of varying degrees of course.

Let me outline some core ideas, core concepts, in phenomenology to give you an idea of what it is about. There is an emphasis on 'pure description.' In my poetry, therefore, I place a strong emphasis on the pure description of experience. In phenomenology there should be an attempt to manifest what is hidden in ordinary, everyday existence. In my poetry, then, I try to get at what might be called the structure of everydayness, an interconnected system of things, ideas, roles and purposes and an introspective examination of my own intellectual processes as they experience the phenomena of existence. That's enough of a mouthful for now.

I: There seems to me to be a very strong social construction to reality, what you might call a sociological phenomenology. The means by which humans orient themselves to life situations through their stock of knowledge, their store of experience, their structure of experience, the historical patterns of life-experience, the landscape of judgements by which they fix their place in the world, the inner stream of consciousness. All these strands of thought seem to be involved in what phenomenology is all about.

P: You put it well. There are many ways of expressing phenomenological philosophy. One of these ways is by means of the discipline of sociological theory. Much of it seems to be useful in expressing what I am trying to do in my poetry. The process involves what it means to be human, to be alive, to find meaning within life; it involves pursuing concepts; it involves the possibilities that flow from perceiving, believing and thinking. It involves truth as process and emerging as a person in the process of describing experience. Many of the names I mentioned earlier in this interview one can find in the field of philosophy or in sociological theory. I have found in the years since I wrote my first poem in the early 1960s, that there is a strong interdisciplinary tendency in the social sciences. My poetry is partly a reflection of this.

I: For Heidegger an intricate and mysterious connection existed between finding a sense of self and the natural world. He sought refuge from the pervasive hauntings of the idle chatter of town and group life. This was also true of Thoreau. This is also true in your poetry as well, is there not, a search for solitude, a fatigue with chatter?

P: Yes, both Thoreau and Heidegger sought refuge in withdrawal from the social domain, into nature, into solitude, into silence, into reflection, into writing, into moments of vision of what it means to be human, to ask the questions in order to situate oneself in the world, to pluck the finer fruits of life, to move beyond the factitious cares and the superfluously coarse labours of life, beyond the slumber, the mindless mechanical motions of living, and so enter the poetic, the divine life. In a perpetual openness, like Thoreau and Heidegger, my life becomes my stage and I become both actor and audience. And involvement in what Horace Holley calls 'the social religion' requires the kind of solitude and silence I am talking about here from time to time. In life one needs both: the social and the solitary. Over the last 60 years I’ve had plenty of both.

I: So your life becomes your amusement, your novelty, a drama of many scenes with fresh and often not so fresh prospects every hour. You become the artisan of your own reality in which you hear faint echos of simplicity winding their way through the paths of complexity in your everyday life. Your poetic understandings revolve around the mystery, the simplicity and the complexity of being itself. This poetry also revolves around analysis and juxtaposition. Life itself becomes a poetic dwelling, with its sometimes mundane and simplified moments, its sometimes etherial and complex moments. They all sing and reverberate the meaning of one’s existence. That is how Timothy Riley describes the process in his article "Heidegger and Thoreau: Questing for the Authentic Translation of Dasein." Does this come close to your way of experiencing it?

P: I like the way you put it. It's a little complex, but then phenomenology as a philosophy of poetry is not simple. Phenomenology provides for poetry a philosophic-poetic base which creates, as Heidegger puts it, a world space that sees the extraordinary in the ordinary. It also involves seeking our humanness, our mortality, in a relation to the immortals which in a Baha'i context is a relation to the Central Figures of the Cause and those who have been faithful to the Covenant and have passed on to the next life. They are the sources of inspiration for the poet who is a Baha'i. They are also the source of inspiration to Heidegger, although he would call them angels or muses. The poet occupies his private space only by simultaneously occupying the space of meaning belonging to the wider community. Community and privacy is a dichotomy that must be integrated in the life of the poet as well as anyone else.

I: There is another aspect of poetry that has its roots in a philosophy or sociology of phenomenology and that is its subjective orientation. Subjective meaning in the interpretation of social action, of history, of life and of reflexivity is at the centre of this poetic philosophy. Would you agree?

P: There is no question about the essentially subjective nature of this poetry. There is also an objective aspect, a facticity, the kind of objectivity that Ricoeur emphasizes. The self which writes or is written about exists in an institutional system, a complex of relationships, dwells in a pattern of social control exerted by the poet, the person himself and by others. This self is defined and described through the centrality of language as the organizing medium of the lived-in-world. There is an essential precariousness, an ultimately symbolic aspect, to the definitions of reality, to the social worlds, described by the poet. Truthfulness lies in this mix, in this complex web. And I like to think for my particular philosophy there is some truth in every manifestation of existence, of the human spirit, however polarized, eccentric and apparently absurd that manifestation is. Synthesis, amplification, engendering, context—all these are words that are representative of my aim not obliteration, criticism, blight.

I: Of course, there is much more to the philosophical underpinnings of your poetry. Could you comment briefly on these other bases?

P: I have written thousands of words on the philosophy behind my poetry. I seem to have developed a concern for writing poetry and for commenting on its nature, its purpose, its philosophy, its direction, et cetera. I would encourage readers to dip into my poetry. I've got some two hundred thousand words at a website: poetry and prose. It explains a great deal of what I'm trying to do. Phenomenology is a key but, for me, there are many keys. The whole thing is far too complex to reduce it to one approach, no matter how big the word is and how subtle, intricate and useful its reach. I like to think the philosophy behind my poetry goes back to both Plato and Aristotle and the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, at least in the Western tradition.

I: We could approach this whole business of the underpinnings of your poetry by means of psychology instead of philosophy or sociology. What sorts of things would you say, if we were to take this approach?

P: In my four years of tertiary education and training(1963-1967) I studied psychology in three courses. In the 1970s and 1980s I taught psychology six or seven times as part of social science and behavioural studies programs and twice as courses in psychology itself. The notes from all these courses are lost to me now. From 1992 to 1994 I taught an introduction to psychology unit at Thornlie Tafe College in Perth. I kept a core of the notes from that course when I retired in 1999. In the decade since last teaching psychology I have widened the scope of my notes, especially since my retirement in 1999.

I have found psychology to be a fertile field of study during these initial years of my retirement. As was so often the case when I taught a subject, I never really had a chance to get my teeth into it with one eye on the student and another on just getting "up" on the basic course content. Now that is still the case but for quite different reasons, the main one being an interest in a host of other subjects as well, subjects that occupy my attention across a wide spectrum of disciplines.

There is always so much to learn and the focus on. It has been forty-two years since I first came across this subject at university in the autumn of 1963 and it would appear this interest will continue well into the future. It certainly provides some useful foundations to my poetry. But what specifically would you like me to focus on here?

I: There are so many ways of looking at it. Why don’t we do the same as we did with philosophy and sociology, that is, look at some of the theoretical stances, ideas, concepts in psychology that you find useful, relevant to your writing of poetry?

P: Fine. Back in those eight months of 1963-64 when I was first introduced to psychology we just touched on the field of theories in psychology. Even now I recall the following from that first dalliance with psychology: learning theories, personality theories, trait theory. As the years went on: leadership, interpersonal, socio-historical, cultural, gestault and transpersonal theories, good-god, the list is as long as your arm. I think each one of these theories contributes something to my understanding of self, society and my value system—the basic content of my poetry writing. I don’t think I could even begin here and provide a succinct statement. I’d need several pages,

I: Okay; let’s take a different tack. Let’s look at some of the major thinkers who have had an influence of some significance.

P: Fine. I’ll list a core of psychologists but, again, it might be difficult to be brief in articulating their influences. Adler, Freud, Jung, Fromm, May, Rogers, Erikson, Piaget. I’ll stop there because these eight men have written enough stuff to sink a ship and each of them has at least two or three central ideas that I can not ignore in their influence on both what I write and how I write it.

I: Fair enough. Why don’t you pick your favorite over the years and talk about his influences?

P: That would be easy. I have enjoyed Rollo May, the man who introduced existential psychology to America. I came across his book Love and Will in about 1970. I had started writing poetry in the early sixties and, by 1970, I had entered the longest period when I actually wrote no poetry, the years 1964-1979. But when I did start again in the 1980s and 1990s, I found May’s analysis of self, society, values, beliefs and attitudes in his many books very helpful. In 1992 Roger White sent me a copy of May’s The Courage to Create. It was about the psychology of the creative process, about courage, about much that is involved in living, working, loving and being. It is difficult to summarize May. I think the best I can do is encourage others to read his books.

I: I think that’s enough for now. There is so much we can explore and we will do so in future interviews. I’ll come back to these issues and I look forward to future exchanges on the philosophy and the psychology underpinning your poetry, Ron

P: No problemo, as the governor of California once said.
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FOOTNOTES

The bibliography that could be written here is extensive. The reader is advised, should he or she want to follow-up on the subject of phenomenology, to go to a good university library or look it up on the Internet using some of the key words from this interview.

Ron Price, Begun: 23/12/01
Completed: 11/6/05.

[Belinda]

Re#1

[RonPrice]

I appreciated your Thoughtful Comment, Socialist. I will include two of my prose-poems in response--make that 1 poem since it is a long one for this little box-Ron in Tasmania
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THE LAST WORD

In order for the novelist Marcel Proust to seriously begin writing his famous novel In Search of Lost Time he had to create an imaginary deadline.1 Proust did this by coming to see and understand his writing as a race against and a defiance of time. In this way he confronted the temporality of his writing, his publishing, and whatever he and others read by producing a novel which resists simplification and analysis. In this confrontation with time Proust created a sense of urgency, an intensity and a build-up of meaning in relation to what he was writing at any particular time.

Proust gave a sense of fixity and facticity to his life’s precariousness and the inevitability of its endless process and duration by using writing. Writing helped him to see his life as an existence which was soon to run out. By slowly coming to perceive his life in terms of its transformation into a work of art and by trying to recapture his past moment by moment, he aimed to bring the myriad of moments in his life under a microscope, to halt time and wrestle it from the flux of duration. By fixing the events of his life forever in a semblance of eternity, sub specie aeternitatis, much like the work of a photographer, he created what for some was a romantic reminiscence in a plotless labyrinth, in a vast ediface of a life and autobiography; and what for others felt like “a conspiracy against readers” with its “clumsy centipedalian crawling of interminable sentences.”2

I, too, had had a sense of urgency and was always in a rush as my father pointed out to me especially at dinner-time when I gobbled-up yet another evening meal. By my mid-thirties this sense of urgency was supplemented by a death-wish, due mainly to the affects of a bipolar disorder, a wish which was especially strong just before going to bed. The effect of this combination, this death-wish and this sense of urgency, was to create in my mind these same imaginary deadlines, this race against time, this sense of the precariousness of my present state and so propel me into thinking that these words, the ones I had written that day, might just be my last.

Proust warmed-up to write his great opus of some 3200 pages with nineteen years(1890-1909 circa) of writing reviews, fiction and doing translations. From 1909 to his death in 1922 he worked on his seven volume work of nostalgia, a work acknowledged by some as the greatest piece of fiction by the greatest novelist of the 20th century. I, too, warmed-up to the writing of my autobiography with at least nineteen years of literary plodding(1983-2002 circa). By the literary recreation of my life, by the transformation of the transformation that had been my life, by the immersing of myself in memories of what was lost and what was gained in the process of living my life over more than six decades, I slowly came to see my lifetime as the only adequate unit in which to express my succession of selves. It was an irresistible autobiographical impulse; it took possession of me from 2002 and showed no sign of diminishing seven years later at the age of 65. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 January 2009 with thanks to 1Christine Cano, Proust’s Deadline, University of Illinios Press, 2006 and 2Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust: Chapter 1, Penguin.

I can hear them say: life is too short
and Price is too long. And who can
blame them? Millions of words and
more pages than I would even want
to try and count any more. There are
two kinds of writer-poets which I try,
quite unconsciously, to combine, or so
it seems to me, thanks to Mr.Aciman’s
review of Proust in that fine journal---
The New York Review of Books.1

The swallow’s quick, agile, speedy
travel across long, tireless stretches
of the world, taking it in the ways
whales take in water and plankton,
with mistakes easily corrected, bad
times put to good use, judgements
which are unwise just tweaked here
and there in some implacable line
of words where the only pieces that
are thrown away are those which had
problems with the printer or were lost
in cyberspace because I pressed those
wrong keys---and then---the snail’s
slow, deliberate, fussy, cramped and
burrowing into itself, ingesting choice
bits down some multichambered spiral
and with an appetite for a whorled vision.

1 Andre Aciman, “Proust’s Way?” The New York Review of Books, Vol.52, No. 19, 1 December, 2005.

Ron Price
4 January 2009
_________________
married for 42 years, a teacher for 35 and a Baha'i for 50

[Belinda]

Swallows, whales and snails have no consciousness of transience. Arguably , then, they are not conscious in the important way that humans are conscious. Proust was, of course, conscious of transience which is what his nostalgia was all about. Too much nostalgia is not good for my health.Ghosts are great as characters in scary stories, but not in real life.
_________________
Socialist

[RonPrice]

To Each Their Own, eh Belinda. To write autobiography, obviously nostalgia is useful. But it is not everyone's "bag," as they say, as you say.-Ron


_________________
married for 42 years, a teacher for 35 and a Baha'i for 50

[Belinda]

Indeed it's good to write about nostalgia because nostalgia is a human experience.Also a good poet can evoke nostagia in the same way that a Christmas carol, or the scent of woodsmoke, or the song of a robin in the autumn, replay the feeling of the sad transience of beauty.

What is an autobiography for if not to write it for the benefit of readers?
_________________
Socialist

[RonPrice]

Thanks again, Belinda, for your comment. I'll include below some recent thoughts on the process of writing autobiography. The essay is somewhat long for an internet post on a thread but you can skim and scan as you desire--read what catches your fancy so to speak.-Ron in Tasmania
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ESSAY ON AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In 1995 I wrote my first essay on the nature of autobiography. It was some two years after completing the first edition of my own autobiography, a work which had taken me eight years to write(1984-1993). I am now working on the 6th edition of that autobiography more than twenty-five years after the inception of this project in 1984. I trust this 6th edition will be the final one, but only time will tell. I was overwhelmed for many years by a sense of the complexity of the task, by feelings of indifference for the process of putting my life story on paper and by a vision of the magnitude of the task at hand if it was to be of any relevance to readers as well as, in some ways more importantly, to me. I struggled to find an authentic, inspired response for my words, for the phrasing, for my voice as it is often called. This struggle to achieve the right feeling in my writing life, something we all have to do as well in our non-literary daily lives, was—as I look back now—an essential prerequisite for this autobiographical enterprize.

For ten years, from 1993 to 2003 I lost a sense of direction in writing my autobiography and was unable to move beyond that first edition which I had found, as I said, very unsatisfactory. During these same ten years, though, I read about autobiography and after reading studies of process and method, of philosophy and psychology, of the sociology and literary problems in autobiography, I was able to write a cohesive and, for me anyway, stimulating second edition. I certainly hope that this work will become of practical use to my fellow-man in the decades and even centuries ahead and of use to me as I add to it in these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood as the developmental psychologists called the years of the lifespan from 60 to 80. Vision creates reality, as one of my co-religionists once said. This idea of the future relevance of my work seems presumptuous and this sense of my/its presumptuousness at first militated against the pursuit of the goals I began with when I set out to write this autobiography in 1984. But I pursued these goals anyway and that emotional and intellectual problem, hurdle, was overcome, at least for the most part.

Since I found the study of autobiography more interesting that the writing of it in the years 1993 to 2003, I wrote a series of essays on the nature of autobiography during those years and continued to write about autobiography as the years went on. This is the first in that series begun some time in mid-1995. I wrote and revised a series of some fourteen essays in the fourteen years: 2005-2009. I have the long range aim of drawing my ideas together into some meaningful whole in future essays. This essay, now revised several times, just gets the analytical ball rolling so to speak. Each of these 14 essays is about 2500 words—on average as of 10/10/’09.

Even as a retired person with far fewer responsibilities on my plate than during my forty years of employment(1961-2001) and forty years of student life(1949-1989), my day-to-day life still takes me into corners of activity that keep me away from the kind of serious and extended academic pursuits that this brief essay and other writing involves. I settle for short forays into this autobiographical-analytical field. My several years teaching creative writing at a local Seniors School, these last years as a volunteer-teacher; my several years as a presenter of radio programs for the LSA of Launceston; my work in a local singing group and my work for the local Baha’i Group kept me busy until 2003 to 2005. My wife's illness over many years, my solo-singing work at an aged-care facility, the inevitable family duties and obligations of home and hearth however minimal, a necessary amount of physical activity to keep a sound mind in a sound body, fatigue in the evening and afternoon after more than eight hours of reading and writing or a poor sleep the night before--and an endless assortment of odds and ends that inevitably crop up in life--have kept me from continuing this simple task at any degree of depth beyond what I have done and in all likelihood will do.

The concentration, the focus, the time I have been able to devote to all of my research and independent scholarship, my writing and reading, my study and editing, my filing and the wide range of clerical activity has been improving as the years of my late adulthood(60-80) have entered their middle half(65-75). After ten years of warming-up, from the age of 55 to 65 after taking an early retirement, I have developed some excellent routines for serious scholarship and writing.

In the last four years, by 2005, I was able to free myself from virtually most of life’s encumbrances, except those necessary to maintain my physical existence in a home and in a relationship. The years 1999 to 2005 became, then, a second stage, a transition stage, before an even fuller retirement at the age of 60--and fuller still by 65--from the demands of social, employment and community life. After years, decades, of being up-front in family life, in employment, in classrooms, in Bahá'í community life, of being a person who wanted to be up-front, to give talks in Bahá'í communities and who wanted to excel as a teacher, I became, by degrees into my late fifties and mid-sixties, what we used to call a "back-room boy", beavering away to as great an effect as possible but with little personal fanfare and little public face—except in my case on the internet at literally 1000s of sites.

Being free to write autobiography and to study its labyrinthine channels in the literature, in the sub-discipline of literary studies in which autobiography is found, has made me aware of the errors, omissions, even lies, that are part of the fiction or imposture that many theorists see at the centre of autobiography. One of the main trains of thought in the literature on autobiography emphasizes these problems in writing autobiography. The creative writer turns to autobiography out of some creative longing that can not be satisfied through fiction, but it is impossible to avoid inaccuracies and impossible to avoid other problems and blind spots which the enthusiastic autobiographer is simply not aware of. These blind spots and problems make of autobiographical writing something far less a reality, far less true accounts of people’s lives than writers are aware of as they write their story.

Autobiographers find some peculiar closeness and intensity of effect as they write, but it is difficult in writing autobiography to keep history and fiction distinct. The Russian writer Nabokov says that the tracing of images of one’s personal life into intricate harmonies is what autobiography does. In the process hard edges of facticity rub off. Writers try to repossess the realities of their past from what often appears to be a sterile and even fictive world. They try to repossess that past to which they have often sacrificed themselves, lived their days or, if lucky, lost themselves in literature, in life and in living, as if in some perpetual orgy, as the writer Flaubert put it in one of his letters.

The historical transaction that is autobiography does not contain the total freedom or imaginative response of, say, poetry or fiction. Unreliability is an inescapable condition of autobiography given the play of freedom and imagination that is involved. The reader can watch the writer wrestle with truth but only to a degree because, for the most part, the reader does not know what the truth is. Readers must rely on the autobiographers and their version of the truth of their lives. Errors, omissions, even lies, are part of the fiction or imposture that is autobiography—at least to some extent. Such has been one of the main trains of thought in the literature on autobiography in the last several decades. It is difficult in writing autobiography to keep history and fiction distinct; it is also impossible to avoid various kinds of inaccuracies.

I don’t invent anything when I write. I can't write fiction. I’ve tried and end up in a dry gulch. I got to 30,000 words once in a sci-fi piece back about 1990. It's very interesting to me that a novelist can just walk down the street and see some stranger and make up a whole story and take off into a novel or like Harold Pinter he can take off into in a play. That doesn't happen to me.

I am not shy or retiring when it comes to advocating a new literary project. I can be both vociferous and voracious in my writing and it seems to me that my writing speaks for itself. It’s a vehicle for my energy and voraciousness. I pursued my various missions in life with a determination which almost always saw results to some degree for the fifty years from 5 to 55. Most of my missions after the age of 55 became results on the internet measured in nanoseconds and spread across thousands of sites.

In the Baha’i community quantitative results have always been slow--for decades and all my life--and they are still slow as measured by an increase in numbers of new Baha’is at the local or even at the cluster level here in northern Tasmania. I give to this Faith, though, even now in the evening of my life when virtually no one ever joins the Cause locally perhaps two dozen hours per month in cultivating relationships with people in this town and engaging in Bahá'í activity at the local level. All of my life is not writing and reading, however hermetically sealed my life is or however private and asocial I prefer it to be.

For many writers today the only meaning is meaninglessness. If God is gone and the big questions are unanswerable, even unaskable, then experience remains both the subject of writing and the stuff in which, rather than from which, redemption must be seized. The paradigmatic writer of what might be called this immanentist ethos was Wordsworth whose Prelude is the epic of imagination's redemption of matter. Modern writers since Wordsworth have built on his ground. I, too, build on Wordsworth but my foundation has much much more. My foundation is built on a new Revelation, the latest Revelation in the Abrahamic tradition. I have accepted a particular body of theological knowledge.

The material in my 62 booklets of poetry and in my 2500 page autobiography allows for an ongoing reshaping of my self. I constantly select anew and the selections, while not feeling richer than the ones that went before certainly provide a varied portrait and set of vignettes, while giving a clear focus to my autobiographical and poetic centre.

It is important for the critic to understand the organizing principle or purpose behind the work of an autobiographer. For the conscious shaping of a life, an informing purpose, principle, context, must exist behind the work. A voyage of genuine self-discovery is an essential component of such a work for the writer. It certainly was for me; it enabled me to rise from the ashes of a dried-out first edition, an edition I could well have thrown away. But in the second edition of my memoiristic autobiography my literary voyage began to take place in a narrative past juxtaposed with a dramatic present. Confession, apology and memoir came to exist side by side as various contradictory and often unstable selves battled it out. This battle ground was part of the very fertility and the freshness that resurrected that first edition.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self, a book about the modern identity, notes an "essential link between identity and a kind of personal orientation to life and its spaces. To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space. There are signs that the link with spatial orientation lies very deep in the human psyche." The multiple-self that is born from or expressed in my poetry--open to the world, embedded in it but capable of seeing the many levels of its reality--is the self of a post-national world, an interdependent and interconnected world, indeed, one world, a oneness that exists in and behind the anarchous confusion.

These are just some of the ideas I wanted to put down as part of one, of the first, in this series of essays on the autobiographical process. These ideas are just some found in an array of writing which has appeared in the literature on autobiographical writing especially since the decade 1950 to 1960 when my Bahá'í pioneering-travelling life began in earnest. I summarize much of my reading in these essays for those with an interest in the process, the exercise, of writing autobiography. I hope a few here on the internet find my words of some value to them, if not in their own effort to write their autobiography, at least as part of their general interest inventory.

Ron Price
First written on 5 May 2005 and
updated/edited occasionally until 10/10/’09
(2200 words)
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married for 42 years, a teacher for 35 and a Baha'i for 50

[Belinda]

[RonPrice]

Thanks, again, Belinda for your succinct and thoughtful response. For anyone wanting to know about the Baha'i Faith they can log onto the official international Baha'i site at: bahai.org. Indeed there is an extensive Baha'i presence on the internet and one can google all sorts of stuff and read to one's heart's and one's mind's content or discontent, as the case may be.-Ron
_________________
married for 42 years, a teacher for 35 and a Baha'i for 50