An autobiographical-Academic Note (Earth, experience, religion, Baha'i, Roman)

[RonPrice]

This would be a good site to combine the academic and the experiential, the philosophical and what you might call the autobiographical. Many sites of a religious and philosophical nature seem to be either academic or they tell of people's experiences. It seems to me there is a place for both. The experiential, it seems to me anyway, often needs a good helping of the academic to take the experience out of the ordinary, the repetitive and the humdrum; and the academic needs to be personalized, given some context if people's lives, especially the life of the writer of the piece.

With this in mind I am going to attempt to post here several autobiographical-academic pieces. I hope they stimulate dialogue and stimulate other writers to combine the best of both the academic and the experiential-autobiographical. These are still the early days of the internet, world-wide-web, sites and they are evolving slowly/quickly to meet the needs of an evolving humanity or, at this stage, part of that humanity. Here is my first piece:
_________________
"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:
______the following paragraph opens my 800 page autobiography......

Dispositions are plausible responses 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. 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 Joseph 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.
______________________________________________

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.
________________________
Tune in for more at my next posting.....