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SUMMARY: "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

"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:

Dispositions are plausible responses1 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.2 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 1Joseph 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.
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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.

I frankly do not know how I am going to approach this story, though I have no trouble finding such historical moments and there is always in the background to my life ever-present plans, new beginnings, fresh initiatives, systematic advances, "leaps and thrusts," triumphs and losses, vistas of new horizons and dark clouds. Thinking seriously about autobiography or, indeed, any intellectual discipline, requires us to acknowledge our ignorance of the subject. This is a prerequisite.