Encyclopedia of World Biography

[RonPrice]

I was unable to find any references to Virginia Woolf at this site...I must not be engaged in the search section properly.-Ron
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FLUID

What readers make of all this poetry, or some part of it, should they ever delve into it to any depth, will depend, of course, on how they focus and what they bring---what stories and plots and words from their own lives1---to their reading of what I see as an extended poetic narrative, an epic poem. Readers inevitably attribute meaning to words in quite personal ways. Words are themselves not fixed or definite in meaning; they are fluid and functional, not irrevocable things. The inferences, the meanings, behind this epic poem, now composed of nearly six thousand individual poems and two to three million words, can be drawn in so many different ways by both myself and the many readers who come to this oeuvre in the decades--and I like to think--centuries, ahead. For what is here are, as Virginia Woolf expressed it so beautifully, "flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its myriad messages through the brain."2 -Ron Price with thanks to Marguerite Harkness, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Voices of the Text, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1990, 1p.53 and 2p.13.

There's so much messiness,

stuff all over the place

that just keeps accumulating

as the years go by adding up

their days relentlessly, obscurely,

unobtrusively, silently--hardly worth

recording--probably wouldn't if I was

more interested in gardening, or art

or one of a dozen things that keep my

wife busy from dawn to dusk year after year.


But I give all this stuff order, the undisciplined

flux, the fleetingness of thought, the transitoriness

that can't be integrated and made solid--I give it a

shape, a form, and all is form, at least Wilde saw it

that way. And so mysterious connections that rumble

in my private world become shapes on pages and I

can call it poetry.1

1 Drusilla Modjeska, "A mystery of connections," The Weekend Australian Review, December 1, 2002, pp.4-5.

Ron Price 1 December 2002

[RonPrice]

The “recreation of a life in words is one of the most beautiful and difficult tasks a literary artist can perform," writes Nadel an analyst of biographies.(Ira Bruce Nadel, "Biography as Institution", Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984, pp.13-66). Freud said the recreation of a life, the getting at the truth of a life, can not be done; and if someone does do it, as inevitably biographers try, the result is not useful to us. People have been trying to write about the lives of others for millennia and, even if Freud is right, they will probably go on doing it.

‘Abdu’l-Baha gives the exercise a parting shot, to put it colloquially, in the evening of his life. His work, Memorials of the Faithful, is squarely in the tradition Nadel describes above: commemorative, didactic, ethical, psychological. His is a work of art as well as information, a work of pleasure as well as truth. His is a work of selection, as biography must be if the reader is not to be snowed in a mountain of useless detail. He unravels the complexities of seventy-seven lives and in doing so he answers Virginia Woolf’s questions: ‘My God, how does one write a biography?’ and ‘What is a life?’ If one can not answer these questions, Woolf wrote, then one can hardly write a biography.

The act of reading Memorials of the Faithful is an opportunity to see how ‘Abdu’l-Baha answers Virginia Woolf’s seminal questions about life, how He answers them again and again in the more than six-dozen of His biographies in miniature. Biographers and autobiographers arguably have one freedom, a freedom that overrides the genetic and social forces that determine so much of human life. It is the freedom to tell the story, the narrative, the freedom to explain a life, any life, even one’s own life to themselves and others the way they desire. This freedom is part of that active force of will that ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote, in his pithy summation of the historico-philosophical issue of ‘freewill and determinism,’ is at the centre of all our lives.

Of course, it is incontrovertible that what has happened in a life has happened. There is no going back to change any one of the events, decisions or results. Life bears the stigmata of finality. There has been a relentless succession of facts, at once inflexible and in some ways arbitrary. All story-tellers are slaves to these facts, if their story is to enjoy the imprimatur of truth.

Charles Baudelair once wrote that a biography “must be written from an exclusive point of view, but from the point of view which opens up the greatest number of horizons." There are many ways in which one could define the point of view in this subtle and deceptively simple book. The point of view is that of a lover of Baha’u’llah, one who wants to be near Baha’u’llah, one who wants to serve Baha’u’llah. The point of view is really quite exclusive. All the men and women in this biographical pot-pourri were lovers of the Manifestation of God, the most precious Being ever to walk on this earth; and they all had some relationship with Him during the forty year period of His ministry: 1852-1892.

Restless is a dominant theme, a strong characteristic, in the lives of many people 'Abdu'l-Baha describes. They 'could not stay quiet', 'had no rest', were amazingly energetic', 'awakened to restless life', plagued by yearning love'. Nabil of Qa'in was 'restless, had no caution, patience or reserve'.
Shah Muhammad-Amin "had no peace" because of the love that smould- ered in his heart and because he "was continually in flight'. This restless- ness 'Abdu'l-Baha sets down among a galaxy of other qualities and a mult- itude of other people. Some of the most outstanding believers had this rest- lessness. Tahirih was 'restless and could not be still'.

Quietness is also valued highly. One does not have to be a great talker to attract the attention of 'Abdu'l-Baha. Quietness also has its place in Baha'i community life. There are people who are 'inclined to solitude' and keep 'silent at all times'. They possess an 'inner calm'. They are souls 'at rest'.

The gregarious types and the type who keeps to himself are part of this quintessential dichotomy, a dichotomy that was as much a part of 'Abdu'l-Baha's world as it is our own, although there seem to be a slight prepon- derence of the gregarious person. Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad both kept to themselves and "away from friend and stranger alike". Mirza Muham- mad-Quli "mostly...kept silent". He kept company with no one and stayed by himnself most of the time, alone in his small refuge". The more sociable type, like Haji 'Abdu'llah Najaf-Abadi "spent his days in friendly association with the other believers." Ismu'llahu'l-Asdaq "taught cheer- fully and with gaiety". "How wonderful was the talk,"says 'Abdu'l-Baha of Nabil of Qa'in, "how attractive his society".

There are all of the archtypes that the various personality theorists have given us in this century. In addition to Jung's introvert and extrovert, there is the artist, the suffering artist-soul within us all, Mishkin-Qalam. He sur- vives in all his seriousness, as we might, with humour. There are the types who William James describes in his Varieties of Religious Experience: the personality constitutionally weighted on the side of cheer and its op- posite, the somber, more reflective even melancholic type. The two car- penters, Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad were examples of the former. The examples we find of the latter were often the result of the many dif- ficulties these lovers of Baha'u'llah were subjected to and wore them "to the bone."

‘Abdu’l-Baha addresses all of us, all of us on our journeys while He des- cribes many of those He came to know in His life. For He is describing not only the lives of these men and women in the nineteenth century, He is describing us in our time. He is addressing us on our own travels. He ad- dresses the restlessness in us all. He speaks to us in our victory and our loss. He speaks about what Michael Polanyi calls the tacit dimension, the silent root of human life, which is difficult to tap in biographies, the inner person. This private, this inner person, is the one whom He writes about for the most part. He sets this inner life in a rich contextualization, a socio historical matrix. He describes many pilgrimages and you and I are left to construct our own. We all must shape and define our own life. Is it aes- thetically pleasing? Intellectually provocative? Spiritually challenging? ‘Abdu’l-Baha shapes and defines these lives given the raw-data of their everydayness added up, added up over their lives as He saw them. How would He shape my life? Yours? How would we look in a contemporary anthology of existences with ‘Abdu’l-Baha as the choreographer and the history of our days as the mise en scene?

For He is setting the stage, the theatre, the home, for all of humanity. The extrovert is here, the introvert, those that seem predisposed to cheerfulness and those who seem more melancholy by nature. All the human dichot- omies are here, at least all that I have come across in my own journey. They are the characters which are part and parcel of life in all ages and centuries, all nations and states, past, present and, more importantly, future. Here is, as one writer put it, the rag-and-bone-shop, the lineaments of universal human life, the text and texture of community as we all experience it in the crucible of interaction.

Memorials of the Faithful is what might well be this age’s Canterbury Tales, that compendium of personalities who exemplify, as William Blake once put it, “the eternal principles that exist in all ages.” We get a Writer Who delights in other people but Who has an active and incisive mind, a practicality that He brings to bear on what are often difficult personalities. He dwells only on the essentials; His purpose is inveterate; His feelings sincere and intense; they never relax or grow vapid during His cursory analyses. He is exquisitely tender, but clearly wily and tough to survive in the burly-burly life of exile, prison and the unbelievable difficulties He had to bear along life’s tortuous path.

The heroic age was coming to a close when ‘Abdu’l-Baha put His pen to paper; and it was over by the time the Haifa Spiritual Assembly published His final book. ‘Abdu’l-Baha had played a prominent role in the epic that was the heroic age. He played a dominant role in writing that epic’s story. Memorials of the Faithful is an important part of that epic. This epic tradition was not essentially oral but quinessentially written: a written tradition par excellence. Since The Growth of Literature by the Chadwicks(1924-1926) the heroic epic has been seen in epic studies “as a cultural rather than a literary phenomenon.” The Baha’i epic has grown out of a complex and fascinating set of cultural conditions. Indeed ‘Abdu’l Baha’s work has contributed to the resolution of problems involving the relationship, the transition, between oral narrative and written text. But this relationship is a question to occupy epic enthusiasts and is not our principle concern here.

Within about twelve months, perhaps even less, of completing this last of His books, ‘Abdu’l-Baha had begun His Tablets of the Divine Plan, the action station within which the community He was addressing could put into practice all the good advice He had given it in His Memorials of the Faithful. Like The Will and Testament, though, it may take a century or more to grasp the implications of this surprisingly subtle and, decep- tively simple, book.