CONFLATION: Rembrandt

[RonPrice]

Some artists, notably and famously Rembrandt, the most important in Dutch history, painted self-portraits which in their unique way form an intimate autobiography, one without vanity and with the utmost sincerity.1 Some writers and poets try to do the same. Certainly that is one of my autobiographical aims in my five volumes of memoirs. Like Rembrandt, I interpret sacred and metaphorical history, its new myth for a new age in the light of my human experience. My emotional and intellectual response to this history and its sacred text, based on my belief in the truths of its religion as revelation is found in prose-poem after prose-poem and in volumes of my prose. Experience, reason and belief have been and are for me, as far as was and is possible within my limitations, a unity in multiplicity.–Ron Price with thanks to 1E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, Phaidon 1995, p.420.

For you, Rembrandt, portraiture
was a primary theme and so it is
for me, but my work, conflation
of autobiographical prose-poetry
does not embody democratic,
republican sentiment as yours
did in France in the 19th century
but a democratic theocracy that
has just stuck its head above the
ground, energized slowly in the
womb of a travailing age and in
a fully institutionalized indeed
routinized charismatic Force
with a dynamic and fascinating
role to play in the unification,
plantelization of humankind at
this climacteric of history in the
four epochs that are my very life.

Ron Price
10 July 2008
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In my posts at this thread, I recommend to readers who prefer the internet convention of short posts that they just stop reading when their eyes start to glaze-over. Alternatively, such readers may prefer to skim and/or scan my posts. I do this all the time. Often I just don't read the post. Like books in the library, they don't mind not being read. Books themselves, like posts here, are just words on a page and have no feelings to be hurt by the indifference of readers.-Ron

[RonPrice]

After No Replies in Two Years, I.....submit the following piece of writing on the subject of autobiography with its tangential connections with many concepts used by artists. I trust that some readers here at ConceptArt.org find the following essay of some personal value.-Ron Price, Australia
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY: ANALYSIS YET AGAIN

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
-A. E. Housman, “A Shropshire Lad”

Pam Cook defines nostalgia as "a state of longing for something that is known to be irretrievable, but is sought anyway.” Nostalgia can also be defined as a yearning for the return of past circumstances and events and/or a pain or longing to return to an idealized "home." In memory, of course, the past can return even brighter than it was when originally experienced.

I have provided a succinct narrative account of my life in my autobiography and memoirs. It has elements of nostalgia; it is chronological; the factual material is ordered, sequential and goes for 2600 pages and five volumes. But, clearly, sharpness of detail, revealing anecdote, even suspense and analysis of motivation are given with more insight and style, much more effectively--from my point of view anyway--in my poetry. I have so much poetry now, nearly 7000 poems spread over thousands of pages and perhaps four million words, that this collected and compendious mass of material, if it is ever to provide a basis for biography in the future, must be shaped, interpreted, given perspective, dimension, a point of view.

Such a biographer must provide the creative, the fertile, the suggestive and engendering fact, an imaginative, a referential dimension. Such an analyst must enact a character, a place, a time in history. He will do this through language, through imposing a formal coherency on my material, although inevitably there will be present the incurable illogicalities of my life, of life, as Robert Louis Stevenson called the inconsistent and the unresolved paradoxes of life. And we all have them. That future biographer, should he or she ever arise, will give readers a portrait of my life not an inventory. This is what any biographer must do. I do this in my autobiographical poetry in a way that suits me, suits my tastes and the way I see my life from the perspectives of late middle age(55-60), early adulthood(60-65) and the middle years(65-75) of this late adulthood. I provide many pictures, many moods, many sides of one man. Details balloon; they repeat; they illuminate. I discover things about my life, but I do not invent them.

Thomas Carlyle, 19th century essayist and historian, had views of biography that appeal to me. He saw biography as possessing an inspiration that could be and should be both scientific and poetic. Biography should be scientific because we all have problems in living and these problems are both the same and different. We are all, he said, “indentured to live.” Biography has a poetic interest because it calls for “the sympathy of mortal hearts into action.” For Carlyle, the artistic merit of both biography and autobiography was in direct proportion to the extent to which the experience that was represented therein functioned as a moral influence on the community which reads it.

The Canadian poet P.K. Page(1916- )once wrote autobiographically about her life: “Is it I who am forgotten, dismembered, escaped, deaf, uncollected? Already I have lost yesterday and the day before. My childhood is a series of isolated vignettes, vivid as hypnagogic visions. Great winds have blown my past away in gusts leaving patches and parts of my history and pre-history. No wonder I want to remember, to follow a thread back in order to search for something I already know but have forgotten I know.” Like Page, I am conscious that I am multiple with many many roles in my 65 years of life thusfar. Who was that child of four or five? Who am I now, this man on an old age pension living in the oldest town on the oldest continent.

Like Page, I am interested in the possibility of reaching another realm beyond this world where masks are inescapable and follow us until our last breaths. Like Page, I am interested in the conditions in which my self, my personality, my mind and temperament were formed. I want to understand my experience and how I have come to conceptualize it. Many cultures have conceptualized the human being as multiple. Sometimes the division is between a waking and a dreaming self or between an ordinary space-and-time-bound self and a spirit self that could transcend those boundaries. Often the divisions involve a guardian angel, a daemon or some other forms of personal contact with the divine and the immortal. As I write about this life that has gone, I am reminded of the words of Albert Einstein about relativity: “when you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.” There are endless permutations and combinations to the relativity that is one’s life and not all of them are as simple as red hot coals and nice girls.

Christianity has emphasized the division between body and soul and, since Descartes, Western culture has used and struggled with the dualism of body and mind. The search for the self and the flight from it form a central dialectic of modem culture. The religion I have been associated with for nearly six full decades has had an immense impact on my sense of self, my meaning systems, my life-purpose, my values, beliefs and attitudes. It is impossible to try and even summarize this impact in a few lines here. It would take a book. Indeed, it has taken a book and that book is now in five volumes. It is called my autobiography and it is entitled: Pioneering Over Four Epochs. My website of 450,000 words, the equivalent of six books at 75,000 words to use a standard definition of a book, also examines this impact as does my 300 page study of the poetry of Roger White.

I need all this verbiage, this literary exposiiton, because, in the simple conversations I have so often I often feel somewhat the way Aldous Huxley felt when he said: “It is a little embarrassing that, after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.” Some recent literary critics suggest that writers wrestle with what the Scottish novelist Neil Gunn's Highland River refers to as "sounds in the empty spaces of history.” There are so many various and barely audible vibrations of narrative that exist among millions of my coreligionists. They exist, these personal stories, amidst the monolithic sounds of official historiography and the many main threads of Bahá'í history going back far into the nineteenth century and before. They exist. They were, for the most part and until quite recently, relatively few in number. Not everyone, indeed, very few, want to write their story. But with the internet and with the vast increase in Bahá'í publications in the last three decades, there is much more for Baha’is to read about their history, stories that are autobiographical and biographical.

There are unique individuals who bestow on mankind a legacy of artistic greatness. Some of these souls also engender an almost insatiable desire to know more about them, the circumstances in which they lived, worked and what motivated them to such levels of achievement. Some were reserved and humble people who avoided fame and fortune, sustained primarily by their magnificent accomplishments. This autobiography, mine, is about a man who avoided the limelight as far as he was able but, being a teacher and lecturer as well as a Bahá'í, who aimed to give the Faith he had espoused a greater public face, it was difficult to avoid some kind of limelight.

This avoidance of being noticed was even more true in his first decade of writing on the internet: 1999 to 2009. The internet, I found, spread me out across thousands of sites in nanoseconds and, thus, fame and success, notoriety and renown were kept to a bare minimum. Writing my biography, if it is ever written, will be a challenging exercise because of the sheer amount of resources I have made available. I have not done this intentionally but, rather, out of sheer coincidence, the accidence of circumstance. Those mysterious dispensations of Providence, perhaps.

I feel a little like the explorer John Franklin who wrote a journal of his 1825-27 expedition. He was so conscious that the journal would subsequently become the basis for a popular narrative that he sometimes composed the journal as though he were addressing not the British Admiralty which just wanted a factual report, but a general audience interested in travel writing; for example, he frequently addressed his audience as "the Reader" and once excused himself from a lengthy description of the winter at Great Bear Lake because "the ordinary and uniform occurrences of a winter’s residence would prove anything but amusing or instructive to the general Reader." Obviously, as the Admiralty did not read official journals for amusement, Franklin had his future audience in mind.

Franklin's revision of the 1825-27 accounts involved converting the measured delineations of geographic locale intended for the Admiralty into picturesque landscapes designed for an audience craving travel literature. At other times, Franklin transformed the navigational tools used for geographical discovery into devices suitable to the landscape artist's needs. Such alterations represented a changed attitude in Franklin. Unable to rely solely on the events of his expedition, he felt he had to address the tastes of the audience that he anticipated would read his book. He felt he had to become an author and not simply a recorder of geographical information useful to the Admiralty.

I do not write for future audiences quite as explicitly and, may I say, flagrantly or overtly as Franklin did. I have that audience in mind, but my special audience is myself. I try to get the experience right as I see it. As Plutarch and Boswell, two of history's most famous biographers, demonstrated: "anecdote rather than history teaches us more about the subject."1 I see my narrative as the home of history and my poetry as a source of rich anecdote. It was for this reason that, by the 1990s, I turned to poetry as a reservoir of autobiography; it seemed to teach, to convey, much more than narrative not only about me but about anything I wanted to say about any topic. The anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, helps us to understand why several poems about one object, or person, provide more significance or meaning than a narrative when he writes:

“To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it...Being smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable....it seems to us qualitatively simplified.”2

One can not know everything about anyone, even oneself. The mountain of detail would sink a ship and would not enlighten anyone. The task of achieving comprehensiveness not only is impossible, it is irrelevant. But there are intelligible dimensions of one's life and it is these dimensions that my poetry deals with best. Imagination is critical in writing biography. Some writers see invention more important than knowledge. Inevitably, there is an element of invention, of moving beyond the factual, but my own preference is to use imagination in a framework of factual experience, as far as possible. I do this in all my genres of writing, except perhaps my efforts at fiction writing.

To read my poetry should be to immerse oneself in the first several decades of Baha'i experience in what the Baha'is see as 'the tenth stage of history' and, especially, that time when the spiritual and administrative centre on Mt. Carmel received its richest, its definitive, elaboration and definition within what was arguably the Faith’s first global public image. Such immersion should also take place within several other unifying nodes of experience as expressed in and through my poetry. I have drawn these nodes to the reader's attention from time to time in the introductions to some of my poems.

From a Baha'i perspective my poetry will undoubtedly possess a moral appeal associated with overcoming hardship, a quality that characterized most nineteenth century biography. But the moral framework, while retaining a certain simplicity, is expressed in a portrait of complexity, hopefully refinement, undoubtedly mystery and also a slumbering world as well as my own idle fancies and vain imaginings. The streaming utterance of a new Revelation lies at the back of it all.

Freud commented that biographers choose their subjects 'for personal reasons in their own emotional life.' 3 I'm sure this is equally, if not more, true of autobiographers. While criss-crossing Australia as an international pioneer from north to south and east to west and after teaching in the northernmost and southernmost places in Canada-all of this over fifty-six years(1953-2009), I watched this emerging world religion grow, multiply numerically, perhaps 30 times. I have taught in schools for thirty-five years, lived in two dozens towns and feel a certain fatigue. I must write this poetry for the same reason a foetus must gestate for nine months. I feel, with Rilke, a great inner solitude and that my life and history is itself a beginning, for me, for my religion and for the world. I want to suck the sweetness and some of the bitterness and darkness out of everything and tell the story.

I sigh a deep-dark melancholy but keep it in as far as I am able. I am lonely and attentive in this sadness. My poetry gives expression to this process and to my destiny which comes from within. My poetry is the story of what happens to me. For the most part "life happens" and one must respond to the seeming inevitability of much of it, although the question of freedom and determinism is really quite complex. Reality, I record in my poetry, comes to me slowly, infinitely slowly. My poetry records this process. My poetry is an expression of a fruit that has been ripening within me: obscure, deep, mysterious. After years it now comes out in a continuous preoccupation as if I have, at last, found some hidden springs. It is as if I have been playing around the edges, with trivia, with surface. Finally something real, true, is around me. I stick to my work. I have a quiet confidence, a patience, a distance from a work that always occupies me. And so I can record a deep record of my time. I am preparing something both visible and invisible, something fundamental.

Ron Price
Began on 25 September 1998
and updated on 10/10/’09.
--------------------FOOTNOTES-----------------------------------
1 Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984, p.60.
2 idem
3 ibid., p.122.
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That's all folks!