Epilogue To My Autobiography: Part 1

ADDENDUM OR EPILOGUE

Having completed my autobiography or, at least, completed a fifth edition in a form that is satisfactory to me in the first two volumes and keeping in mind that I will in all likelihood make additions to it in the years ahead, I want to write a sort of addendum or epilogue in the pages which follow. I write in part because I want to contribute to the world and audiences read my work in the hope, among other reasons, of finding a new perspective. Therefore, one of my aims is to try and make my perspective new-stake out a territory that requires my voice. I feel I have done this in the territory of the Baha'i Faith and autobiography.

I may find that, inspite of the best intentions, inspite of my own perception of the quality of this work and the pleasure I take in reading it, my work may not engage the readers in the Baha'i community as much as I'd like to see happen. I think engagement entails defining a common enterprise that newcomers and community veterans can pursue as they try to develop their interpersonal relationships. I think I do this quite well. But as readers continue in their interacting trajectories in the community and as they continue to shape their identities in relation to one another, they may not find this book that useful. While engagement can be positive, a lack of mutuality in the course of engagement with this book can create relations of marginality, mine and others, that can reach deeply into people's identities. I'm really not sure how successful I have been in the enterprise of truly engaging my readers. Of course, time will tell, but I must admit to my suspicions which may be mainly a function of age.

I like to see imagination, which is a process of expanding the self by transcending time and space and creating new images of the world and the self, as something which entails others locating their sense of engagement in a broader system and defining a personal trajectory that connects what they are doing to an extended personal identity of themselves. I'd like to think this autobiography extends the meaning of artifacts, people and actions within the personal spheres of people's lives, people who read this book. That is what I'd like but, again, I'm not so sure that I have succeeded in this respect.

While imagination can lead to a positive mode of belonging, it can also result in disconnectedness and greater ineffectiveness; it can be so removed from any lived form of life and activity, membership and meaning, that it detaches the identities of readers and leaves them in a state of uprootedness. Readers can lose touch with their sense of social efficacy by which their experience of the world can be interpreted as competence. While that is not my desire, my autobiography may in the end be just a slippery slope in the direction of discontent and disorientation. Good intentions, as they say, are often the road to greater problems. As a teacher of literature, of English and the social sciences, I know only too well that many students turn off some of the best writers. I, too, am not immune from this experience. In the end, of course, one writes and sends one's efforts out into the universe and takes what comes.

Alignment is a term applied to writing and to autobiography. It entails negotiating perspectives, finding common ground, defining broad visions and aspirations, walking boundaries and reconciling diverging perspectives. Alignment requires shareable frameworks and paradigms, boundary items and concepts that help to create fixed points around which to coordinate activities, an oeuvre, a life. It can also require the creation and adoption of broader discourses that help give a literary enterprise some life, some vitality and meaning and by which the microcosm of local actions can be interpreted as fitting within a broader framework. However, alignment can be a violation of a person's sense of self that crushes their identity.

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To fully participate in community life in the sense that is at the heart of this autobiography each Baha'i must find ways to engage in the work, the enterprize in their won individual way. They will do some things that others do, that other community members do, but they must be able to imagine their own work as being an important part of a larger enterprise. And they must be comfortable that the larger enterprise and its smaller components, the many conventions of that community, are compatible with the identities they envision for themselves. Being a part of the community, then, is not simply a matter of learning new skills, new attitudes and new values, but also of fielding new calls for identity construction. This understanding of identity suggests that people enact and negotiate identities in the world over time. For identity is dynamic and it is something that is presented and re-presented, constructed and reconstructed in interaction. The individual experience of power derives from belonging, but it also derives from exercising control over what they belong to, what they participate in, what they read, indeed, an entire panoply and pageantry of activity. Each individual is heterogeneously made up of various competing discourses, conflicted and often contradictory scripts. Their consciousness is anything but unified. I emphasize this because in the great wealth of literature now available to the Baha'i community both in-house literature and the burgeoning material now available in the marketplace, my book occupies a small place, possesses no particular authority and competes with a print and electronic media industry.

There are many different kinds of self-referential writing. I have incorporated some of them in what is for me a surprisingly large work invoking Whitman's "I am large, I contain multitudes," as an appropriate presiding spirit for the genre. Whatever largeness I claim to possess, it is the same largeness we all possess in relation to ourselves. We all must live in our own skins for all our days and the sense of our largeness--or our smallness for that matter--is a result of our bodily manifestation, our physical proximity to self. In the multitude of methods and genres of studies of Baha'i history and experience, teachings and organization, autobiography is either tentatively acknowledged, invoked by negation or simply passed over in silence. It is one genre that is, for the most part, conspicuous by its absence from any bibliography. This has begun to change in the last decade or two. This piece of writing is part of that change.

So often we commiserate over the lack of history writing or, as Momen puts it, how "lamentably neglectful in gathering materials" for the history of the Baha'i Faith we have been. History writing and the transmission of the narrative of a group has often been a problem. "It wasn't until the 1850's," writes Russell Shorto in his review of Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower that "William Bradford's narrative of the founding of Plymouth in 1620 was finally published." Only then, after 230 years, did the story of the first years of the history of the USA enter the historical record. While Momen may be right, there are many ways to look at the gathering of historical documents. Just how this autobiography will appear in the grand scheme of things only time, only history, will tell. This autobiography comes from the historical experience within four epochs in the first century of the Formative Age. While it makes no attempt, no pretense, to being a history of the period, it does attempt to express the experience of one man. How relevant this will be for future generations I leave to those mysterious dispensations of Providence which I often refer to in this now lengthy book.