VOLUME FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

(Part 1)

As we approach the end of this somewhat rambling autobiography, the

inclusion of this essay seemed perfectly appropriate. So much of my life

has been a 'life-in-community' that I thought I would give some of the last

words on the subject to that brilliant tactician of the personal and

interpersonal, 'Abdu'l-Baha, who survived a most difficult community

and advised us on how to live in community in our time. As our own

communties have been, are and will be challenges for us to live in this

analysis of some of 'Abdu'l-Baha's final words before He passed away

several years later will be timely. This section of my autobiography,

then, will deal with biography, ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s treatment of the subject

and, then, a few brief notes of mine.

"A Study in Community," Pioneering Over Four Epochs," 2003. 1

"With penetrating detail, crisp style and emphasis on the compression of

facts; with vivid images, usually not more than three or four pages, with a

1 This essay was originally written March 2000 and significantly edited in a second draft on May 2001 for the Baha'i newsletter ABS(English Speaking Europe) Issue 35. An important portion was added at the end of this second draft after reading Derek Pearsall's comments on The Canterbury Tales.

concision of explanation or commentary, with a specific point of view, a

style of biography has continued from classical times into the twentieth

century. This is biography in miniature. It has a certain bias toward the

person over the event, toward art as smallness of scale, toward structuring

the confusions of daily life into patterns of continuity and process. There

is a broad intent to sustain an interpretation or characterisation with facts

teased, coloured, given life by a certain presentation and appraisal. Facts

about the past are no more history than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are

an omelette. They must be whipped up and played with in a certain

fashion." -Ron Price with appreciation to Ira Bruce Nadel, “Biography as

Institution,” Biography, Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin’s Press, NY,

1984, pp.13-66.

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Nadel, whom I quote in the opening passage of this essay, goes on to say

that the “recreation of a life in words is one of the most beautiful and

difficult tasks a literary artist can perform."2 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.3

People have been trying to write about the lives of others for millennia

2 Ira Bruce Nadel, "Biography as Institution", Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984, pp.13-66.3 Sigmund Freud in Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay, W.W. Norton and Co., NY, 1988, p.xv-xvi.

and, even if Freud is right, they will probably go on doing it anyway.

‘Abdu’l-Baha gives the exercise a parting shot, to put it colloquially, in

the evening of his life, when He was in His early seventies. 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.4

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.5 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

4 Virginia Woolf in Nadel, op. cit., p.141.5 Arnold Ludwig, How Do We Know Who We Are? Oxford UP, Reviewed in New Scientist, 8 November 1997.

active force of will that ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote, in his pithy summation of

the historico-philosophical issue of ‘freewill and determinism,’6 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 in a certain sense.

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."7 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, or so they believed, and they all had some

6 'Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, 1978, p. 198.7 Charles Baudelair in Baudelair, Claude Pichois, Hamesh Hamilton, 1987, London, p.xiv.

relationship with Him during the forty year period of His ministry: 1852-

1892.

Restlessness 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'.8 Shah Muhammad-Amin "had no peace" because of the love

that smouldered in his heart and because he "was continually in flight'.9

This restlessness 'Abdu'l-Baha sets down among a galaxy of other

qualities and a multitude of other people. Some of the most outstanding

believers had this restlessness. 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

8 'Abdu'l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, Wilmette, 1970, p.9 ibid.,p.51

preponderence, a dominance, of the gregarious person. Ustad Baqir and

Ustad Ahmad both kept to themselves and "away from friend and

stranger alike".10 Mirza Muham- mad-Quli "mostly...kept silent". He kept

company with no one and stayed by himself most of the time, alone in his

small refuge".11 The more sociable type, like Haji 'Abdu'llah Najaf-Abadi

"spent his days in friendly association with the other believers."12

Ismu'llahu'l-Asdaq "taught cheer- fully and with gaiety".13 "How

wonderful was the talk,"says 'Abdu'l-Baha of Nabil of Qa'in, "how

attractive his society".14

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 survives 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 opposite, the somber, more reflective even melancholic type. The

two carpenters, Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad were examples of the

former.15 The examples we find of the latter were often the result of the

10 ibid., p.46.11 ibid., p.73.12 ibid.,p.71.13 ibid.,p.6.14 ibid.,p. 5315 ibid.,p.73

many difficulties these lovers of Baha'u'llah were subjected to and it wore

them "to the bone."16

‘Abdu’l-Baha addresses all of us, all of us on our journeys while He

describes 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 addresses 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 aesthetically 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?

16 ibid.,p.96.

Some of the lives of the obscure, the ordinary and representative

members of the Baha'i community are recovered for history and for much

more. Their private aspirations and their world achivements, their public

images and their private romances, their eventual successes and their

thwarted attempts are lifted onto the pages of a type of Baha'i scripture.

'Abdu'l-Baha is setting the stage, the theatre, the home, in these pages, 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 dichotomies 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. It is

somewhat ironic that the host of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s contemporaries that we

find here were resurrected and for us, found, at a time when the lost

generation between 1914 and 1918—were getting lost in the trenches of

Europe.

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.”17 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.

Interest in biographies of Baha’is in the 19th century Iranian Bahá'í

community is not exactly a booming business these days. But that time

will come sensibly and insensibly in the decades ahead as this new world

Faith comes to play a critical part in the unification of the planet.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s work is more than a little prescient.

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

this His final book.18 A remanant remained, Baha’u’llah’s sister, the

Greatest Holy Leaf who died in 1932. ‘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

17 William Blake in Geoffrey Chaucer: Penguin Critical Anthologies, editor, J.A. Burrow, 1969, p.82.18 If one considers the Tablets of the Divine Plan a book, then Memorials of the Faithful was 'Abdu'l-Baha's penultimate book.

part of that epic. This epic tradition was not essentially oral but

quintessentially written: a written tradition par excellence. Since The

Growth of Literature by the Chadwicks(1924-1926) the heroic epic has

been seen in literature’s epic studies “as a cultural rather than a literary

phenomenon.”19 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 three to four months of completing this last of His books,

‘Abdu’l-Baha had begun His Tablets of the Divine Plan20, 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, deceptively

simple, book.

19 Heroic Epic and Saga: An Introduction to the World’s Great Folk Epics, editor, Felix J. Oinas, Indiana UP, London, 1978, p.1.20 He began writing His Tablets of the Divine Plan on March 26th 1916; Balyuzi informs us in his biography of ‘Abdu’l-Baha that He worked on Memorials in the last half of 1915(p.417).

In the next two decades we shall see the end of the first century of the

Formative Age. Perhaps the time has come to begin to seriously grasp

the implications of these shining pages from ‘Abdu-l-Baha and His

interpretive genius.

We do not know much about the circumstances of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s

writing, at least I don’t. Some writers we know, like Beethoven, are

intensely physical people who seem to fight their thoughts onto the page,

splattering the ink, breaking nibs, even ripping the paper in the process.

Beethoven had none of the serene penmanship of a Bach or the hasty

perfection of Mozart or the quasi-mathematical constructs of Webern. But

we do know some things. We know, for example, that ‘Abdu’l-Baha

often worked all night with a large part of the night devoted to prayer and

meditation. It was then He did His writing; He was too busy to scribble

down things in the daytime as some writers do. He had a short sleep after

lunch. After writing one of the biographies he would often read or tell the

story at one of the meetings in the next few days. Now, we can read them

in a book or access them on the internet, in very readable English, in

authorized translations. Gone is the Persian and Arabic in which He

wrote; gone is ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s innimitable script or that of one of His

secretaries. Having flashed onto the screen with the speed of light or into

the book in some electronic form with every character proportional, every

paragraph in alignment, these words, written six years before His passing,

are now free to penetrate our own lives as the lives He wrote about

penetrated His.

FOOTNOTES

The material on Chaucer that follows was obtained from Derek Pearsall's

The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography, Blackwell, Oxford,

1992, pp. chapter 6. The following is not a quotation.-Ron Price,

Tasmania

The whole organization of Chaucer's narrative is in the historical lattice-

work of a world of ecclesiastical routines and needs. 'Abdu'l-Baha's

narrative, played as it is in the lives of seventy-seven souls, exists in the

interstices of lives transformed by a manifestation of God. Instead of the

ubiquity of the Christian Faith and its practices we have a new religion

emerging in the soil of people's lives. Both books give us a narrative of

faith. Women are dominant in Chaucer and men in Memorials of the

Faithful. Both books provide us with a spiritual journey. There is a gusto

and carnivalesque spirit, a contempt for marriage and sexual urges, in

Chaucer while none of this is to be found in 'Abdu'l-Baha's work.

There is no sense of social and moral commitment in Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer's London is a turbulent and dangerous place; so too in 'Abdu'l-

Baha'is world. He writes of the domestic world rather than the politics of

power. Both men possess a remarkable acuteness of observation; there is

little of the sense of outrage. Chaucer makes a magpie-like raid on

scholarly texts, perhaps more from conversations. The pilgrims are

infinitely various. The sense of dramatic vitality is so strong the

temptation to read the tales as principally an expression of the characters

of their tellers is strong.

Chaucer is a self-concealing and evasive character. This father of English

poetry is a figure who eludes the biographer's grasp even more fully than

Shakespeare. There are no private letters or journals, no anecdotal

reminiscences of friends, and precious few autobiographical clues in the

poems themselves. The tools for understanding Chaucer are literary

history, philology and the history of patronage and court politics in the

14th century. These disciplines need to be part of a biographer’s strong

suit if he or she is to excel in their recreation of Chaucer’s life. In dealing

with the life of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá none of these problems exist for the

biographer.

Chaucer’s audience in the imagination is "a miscellaneous company, of

lettered London men, to be appropriately scandalized and delighted by

the Wife of Bath and the fabliaux, flattered by the invitation to share in a

gentleman scholar's easily carried burden of learning and intrigued by the

novel expose of London low life in the Cook's Tale. The audience is,

probably exclusively an audience of men. ‘‘Abdu’l-Bahá has no

audience until 1928 more than a decade after He has finished writing the

book.

A mission to Genoa and Florence on the king's service in the early 1370s

was especially important for Chaucer’s poetic development because it

gave him the opportunity to discover the riches of Italian literature.

Fifteen years later he began writing The Canterbury Tales his maturer

reflections upon the life of men and women in society and in the

Christian faith. They were written in the last dozen years of his life,

1387-1400. He was almost entirely occupied with writing 'The

Canterbury Tales' in these last years.

For Chaucer poetry was an accomplishment and a vehicle for self-

display, a means for his advancement at court rather than an activity of

his profession. His poetry benefited his career and vice-versa: his earlier

works, coinciding with his French connections, were influenced by

French poetry, notably the great allegorical love vision of the Roman de

la Rose, while his middle period, inspired by the Italian journey, was

dominated by his version of the Troilus and Cressida story, written in

imitation of Boccaccio's treatment of the same subject.21

He refrained from direct allusion to public events and it is difficult,

unsafe, to make any deductions about specific connections between his

life, his works and the events of the time. Some scholars prefer to see his

work as chaotic and inexplicable.

The comparisons and contrasts with the work of 'Abdu'l-Baha make a

fascinating study to those interested in both Chaucer and the Baha'i Faith.

But even those who hold no particular interest in Chaucer can find the

contrasts and comparisons valuable in helping them understand the work

of this Central Figure of the Baha'i Faith writing as He was at the very

beginning of the Lesser Peace and the new Age the world was entering in

all its tragic swiftness, amazing perplexity and fascinating juxtapositions.

In my nearly fifty years of pioneering and sixty involved as I have been in

the Baha'i community, I find this seminal work of 'Abdu'l-Baha’s

absolutely crucial in my attempt to understand and deal with the

complexities and problems that arise in Baha'i community life. It is as if

'Abdu'l-Baha has given me the Baha'i community in microcosm.

21 Jonathan Bate, “Slim Biography and Slim Pickings: A Review of Peter Ackroyd’s Chaucer,” Telegraph.co.uk, 29 March 2004.

Although He wrote the book nearly a century ago, it speaks to me about

my life and so I pass the dialogue I have had with this book to you, dear

reader….and a final word on Chaucer….

NO STRUGGLE TO INVENT

Chaucer had a simplicity and directness of style. He was able to step into

a child’s mind and an adult’s; indeed, he could take on the life, the mood

and the personality of anyone or anything he knew or could know. That is

the basis of the vividness, the individuality of his characters. He pleads

authenticity, faithfulness to actual life and speech. -Ron Price with

thanks to Collier’s Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.

Oh Father of English poetry-

the King’s English-when English

was finding its East Midland dialect

and first being used in Parliament,

some six hundred years ago1, whose

poetry was in the language of the man-

in-the-street, with simplicity, naturalness,

freshness and vitality—which we have

recently rediscovered in our time and

which I strive for in my poems and in

what I write of history and character in

my pioneering tale, pilgrimage-like across the

world, painting some realistic portraiture, with

no struggle to invent, only to suit my purpose.

1George H. McKnight, The Evolution of the English Language: From

Chaucer to the Twentieth Century Dover Publications Inc., NY,

1968(1928), p. 18.—25/5/97.

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