An Epilogue to My Epilogue

This piece is from the opening paragraphs of the last chapter of my memoirs.-Ron Price, Tasmania.

AN EPILOGUE TO MY EPILOGUE

The process by which a memoir or a poem emerges is partly the way Robert Frost puts it succinctly and which I quote approvingly here: “Sight, excite, insight.” Like all good aphorisms this is only partly true. There is so much more to the process. I write about this process here, indeed, at many places in this book. “By the time you start to compose, more than half the work has been done," wrote Irish Poet Seamus Heaney. "The crucial part of the business is what happens before you face the empty page," he continued, "before the moment of first connection, when an image or a memory comes suddenly to mind and you feel the lure of the poem-life in it.” Most of the writing in this memoir took place in my late fifties and early sixties. Much of the work, the living, had indeed been done: half, three-quarters, nine-tenths? The living, the thinking, two to five decades of preliminary writing, imagining, sometimes dry, sometimes fertile, literary experience--all of this set the stage.

If experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes, I'd had plenty of that. My hope is that not too many readers will find these volumes of memoirs unapproachable due to their length, their vocabulary, their overly analytical nature, the absense of a simple and interesting storyline, the relative absense of the traumatic conveyed in narrative form--society's violence and sex and mine--the short supply of romance and the kind of adventure that readers have come to expect in a good novel or TV program. If I possessed the humour and masterly narrative style of, say, a Garrison Keilor this work could be more enchanting and hypnotic. Sad to say, I do not. Readers will get what they see here. I am what I am and my style is what it is. Hopes and wishes are never quite enough to determine an outcome, although they help me travel along the road.

If one is to stay creative and remain tuned-in to the richness of being, of living, of reflecting and anticipating, as one must if one is writing one's autobiographical story in the seventh decade of their life; and if one is not to yield to depressing tones of déjà vu, one has to admit it is the fragment that offers an opening onto potential meaning. The fragment is imagination's stimulus to the opening of windows. For things in their meaningfulness, address us in a certain way. This is part of what we could call the realm of responsiveness, a realm that is an encounter, an encounter that is essentially a linguistic relationship. To put this another way: it is a way of saying things that keeps the process fresh for the writer. But, in the end, all is not words; poetry and thinking belong together in speech and in their devotion to the relation which is silent in all our speech. Wallace Stevens expressed the wonder of the world and its shining by means of the poetic word in the following lines of his poem "The Idea of Order at Key West:"

It was her voice that madeThe sky acutest at its vanishing.She measured to the hour its solitude.She was the sole artificer of the worldIn which she sang. And when she sang, The sea, Whatever self it had, became the selfThat was her song, for she was the maker.

Stevens knew that there is no world other than the one we create, the one of which we are the makers. And I have made a world here in this memoir. It is I who must inhabit it and, as in the daily routine of life, it seems to me that if there is no joy, no happiness it is hardly worth the exercise. The fragment, in this case the sea in Stevens' poem, does not deal with wholeness, although it may contribute to the completed account. Only through the fragment can one have access to a way of being that is dynamic, pluralistic and self-regenerating. To say this a little differently: lived experience is a critical shaping force in our lives. In some ways, this is only saying the obvious.

We must, as well, find some mythogenic zone, sone interior metanarrative through which we can sift our own experience, learn what we are and achieve some degree of unity with others. This unity is found in the context of a constant conversation between unity and disunity, a conversation in which juxtaposition plays with omission and collision. And often, no matter how much we understand the dynamics of our situation, we still get hurt and feel exasperated. No matter how strong our beliefs they must face the tribunal of our experience as a whole. In that tribunal analysis gives us the grammar for our concepts. But analysis is faced with the conundrum that at each moment of life's becoming that moment escapes our attempts to comprehend it.

Ours is a culture of the fragment, like life itself, and the Bahá’í Faith is a culture of the unity of fragments. Like the baroque, the postmodern--our world--shares above all a taste for mixing, palimpsesting, hybridization and discontinuity. Some of the distinct features of both the baroque and the postmodern are: self-irony, self-parody, saying one thing and meaning another, a rejection of static definition, ambiguities of definition, a constant or at least a periodic, crisis of identity which people seem to have to go through, a sense of incompleteness in which the culture and the individual are never fully capable of explaining themselves. Some of the distinct features of the Bahá’í Faith are its spiritual history, everywhere unfolded in the manner of a new and a single symphony, in a grand fortissimo now, in our time, with new harmonies and dissonances, irresistably advancing to some kind of mighty climax out of which another great movement will, in time, emerge. I have always enjoyed a quality that I think it is useful for writers to have, namely, a sense of history. Some writers have it and some don't. The American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote between the two wars had this sense.

By my late fifties and early sixties I had become what Robert Scanlan in his review of Susan Sontag's play Alice in Bed called a graphimaniacal phenomena. I turned all of my minutest experiences into words-about-experience. My experience had become much like that of Marcel Proust who transmuted his life, during years he spent in a cork-lined bedroom, into an all-but-endless narrative discourse that could and would be cut off only by his death. Some consider Proust's death a mercy, and the now fashionable metaphor, "the death of the author," has come to characterize the modern condition of fiction. The historical Alice James, Henry James' sister, on whom the play Alice James is based, left no doubt that she welcomed the literal death that would bring her acute physical and emotional torments to a close. I, too, will welcome my literal death for different reasons than Alice James.

This work I like to think, although I may be somewhat presumptuous in doing so, has some similarities to Virgil's Aeneid, Rome's national epic written in the years 29 to 19 BC. Just as Virgil's work envisaged a golden age so does this work; just as his work was permeated with the lack of reconciliation in the new Roman Empire just formed, so is this work permeated with the tragedy of the slowness of response of humanity to the Revelation of Baha'u'llah, the slough of despond and the social commotion at play on the planet, the troubled forecasts of doom, the phantoms of a wrongly informed imagination at this crucial turning point in history, a turning point represented by these four epochs. As Virgil's Ecologue opened up new perspectives, I like to think this work will do the same. Some read the Aeneid with an optimistic view and others have gloomy readings. Inspite of my own forecasts of gloom and doom, I see my work as essentially positive, optimistic and with a view that sees a bright future for humanity. When Virgil wrote Rome was at the start of an empire, a system, a new order, and Virgil was preoccupied with the notion of unity as were the Romans after a century of wars and violence.
I see myself as writing in the context of "the first stirrings of that World Order of which the present Administrative System is at once the precursor, the nucleus and pattern." As the Romans needed insight into their predicament not cleverness, so is this our need. As I live and write in Australia I sometimes think that the essentially comic spirit of the Romans has been passed on by history's circuitous forces to the Australians. As I watch decade after decade of entertainment dispensed by the print and electronic media, I can't help but agree with that delightful American critic Gore Vidal that laughing gas is pumped into the lounge room of Australians, indeed all western countries, on a nightly basis. I suppose if you are going to go down, you might as well do so laughing.

In my early adulthood I was critical of this endless private pleasure but with the years, and certainly with the onset of late adulthood, I came to appreciate what Thomas Hardy called the "instinct toward self-delight." Some have this quality with an exuberance that bubbles up. I have more delight now that I do not have to deal with the pains and pangs associated with bi-polar disorder, with full-time work, with the idiosyncrasies of people in groups and with my incapacities for dealing with a wife and children.