Puse, Mark Diego C. Pol Eco Current World Issues T-Th

Puse, Mark Diego C. Pol Eco Current World Issues T-Th 6:30-8:00 201314530 Prof. Edwin Padrilanan The effects of the fall of the USSR. Objectives: to tackle and discuss the different effects and implications of the fall of USSR I. Introduction To better understand the implications and effects of the downfall of the USSR, we must first take a look on how the state was formed along with its ideologies and principles as a governing body, and what caused its downfall and demise as a state. Once established, we can hypothesize the legacy left by the USSR be it good or bad. A. A history on the USSR on how it came to be. The History of the Soviet Union begins with the end of the Tsardom of Russia, for hundreds of years†¦show more content†¦Under Lenin, the country nationalized the country’s industry particularly manufacturing and banking, and distributed lands among his people, those who oppose his ideology and rule were either executed or sent to concentration camps in a campaign known as the Red Terror. In 1924, 2 years after the formation of the Union, Vladimir Lenin died. Although the founder of the Union died just two years after the formation of the Union, his legacy lived on, his cult of personality was used throughout the history of the USSR to promote the political ideology known as Marxist-Leninism. After Lenin’s death, another revolutionary Bolshevik, Joseph Stalin gained power despite the serious opposition of Lenin in his final years, this information was kept from the public, and Stalin ultimately became a dictator in the Soviet Union, he focused on the rapid expansion of the industrial power of the Union, making it one of the major economic power during the time, although Stalin’s plan was successful in its first 5 years as the Leader, his success would come with a severe cost, millions were unjustly imprisoned in Labor camps known as Gulags, the crisis of Famine was spreading throughout the Union killing millions, during the 1930’s Stalin implemented a campaign known as the Great Purge to execute or exile anyone who is a potential threat to the ideology of communism this include

Religion in School Publicized or Privatized Essay example

There are many people in the world, in fact at this moment there are 6,877,185,416 with a newborn child gasping for its first breath every ten seconds. With that said many may follow a religion or worship a higher power. Not everyone follows the same religion as there are twelve major religions and over 1,200 around the world (Wilson, 2006, p.11). Having religion included in the public school system is one of the most difficult issues to debate. When should the separation of church and state come into play? The fact that not everyone holds the same religious faith brings up the question of whether religion should be either public or privatized in schools. This essay will explain the history and background of religion in public†¦show more content†¦This may be extremely offensive to non-religious students or students that follow a different religion than the one forced upon, which could ultimately bring numerous complaints from parents. School prayer has been a growing issue for many years because of this. Although the constitution grants us freedom of religion, many parents, families, and individuals, are against the practice of religion in public schools. Section III. – Liberal vs. Conservative Viewpoints A) LIBERAL STANDPOINT Liberalists feel that the government is meant to create ways to guarantee that its citizens are not in need, therefore, making it so that everyone has equal opportunities and freedoms. Today’s basic Liberal elitist would look at religion in public schools in a fairly negative way. Liberals believe that making prayer or any other religious activity a part of the school curriculum is both invasive and unconstitutional. Children and students, especially at younger ages in elementary school, are sponges for information. They will listen to adults and by having a daily prayer or practicing religion in school would make them feel as if they need to participate in it. Conservatives may argue that prayer and religion in public schools are completely voluntary, but what five to twelve year old child will view it that way? Liberalists believe that it is unconstitutional for schools to schedule worship as an official part ofShow MoreRelatedInternational Management67196 Words   |  269 Pagesto this book and specifically to this edition. Of course, instructors also have access to Create (www.mcgraw-hillcreate. com), McGraw-Hill’s extensive content database, which includes thousands of cases from major sources such as Harvard Business School, Ivey, Darden, and NACRA case databases. Along with the new or updated â€Å"International Management in Action† boxed application examples within each chapter and other pedagogical features at the end of each chapter (i.e., â€Å"Key Terms,† â€Å"Review and DiscussionRead MoreOrganisational Theory230255 Words   |  922 PagesOrganization theory is central to managing, organizing and reflecting on both formal and informal structures, and in this respect you will find this book timely, interesting and valuable. Peter Holdt Christensen, Associ ate Professor, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark McAuley et al.’s book is thought-provoking, witty and highly relevant for understanding contemporary organizational dilemmas. The book engages in an imaginative way with a wealth of organizational concepts and theories as well as providesRead MoreOne Significant Change That Has Occurred in the World Between 1900 and 2005. 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The History of Antigua Free Essays

The history of Antigua Antigua is an island where people wake up early to go to work or to school but most of the people who live there go to the market on Market Street. The name of Antigua and Barbuda’s capital is St. Johns. We will write a custom essay sample on The History of Antigua or any similar topic only for you Order Now The language that is spoken in Antigua and Barbuda is English. The date that this country came into existence was November 1, 1981. The notable people who live in Antigua are Eric Clapton who is a guitar player, Giorgio Armani, and Ken Follett. The major landforms that are in Antigua and Barbuda are the Boom Point, the Devils Bridge and Mount Obama. There are also some major cities in Antigua such as Cedar Grove, Old Road, and Boland. The culture around Antigua is incredible. The clothes that the citizens wear have a condition to the tropical living. There are a lot of Holidays in Antigua that New Jersey doesn’t have like Good Friday, Carnival Monday, National Heroes day, and Whit. Antigua sells a lot of different kinds of foods at the market as corn, chilies, guava, and mangos. The music in Antigua is a dabble of everything from reggae, to soca to zouk; styles are easily appreciated whether at a barbeque or playing online bingo. The kinds of religions that are in Antigua are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews. The government uses the Parliamentary System. Antigua’s population is at 89,612 and counting. The native animals that live in Antigua are the Antiguan Racer, Redonda Anole, Antiguan Ground Lizard, and the Barbuda Warbler. The name of the flag is Antigua and Barbuda. If you ever visit Antigua here are some travel tips. First, the taxes are the same as in the United States. There is 10-15% depending on the service. Second, the electricity, part of the island is 110 volts and the remainder is 220 volts. Most of the hotels have both voltages available. This has been the research of Antigua and Barbuda. Research Paper How to cite The History of Antigua, Essay examples

Addendum or epilogue Essay Example For Students

Addendum or epilogue Essay ADDENDUM OR EPILOGUE Having completed my autobiography or, at least, completed a fifth edition in a form that is satisfactory to me in the first two volumes and keeping in mind that I will in all likelihood make additions to it in the years ahead, I want to write a sort of addendum or epilogue in the pages which follow. I write in part because I want to contribute to the world and audiences read my work in the hope, among other reasons, of finding a new perspective. Therefore, one of my aims is to try and make my perspective newÃÆ' ¢Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚ ¬Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬?stake out a territory that requires my voice. I feel I have done this in the territory of the Bahai Faith and autobiography. I may find that, inspite of the best intentions, inspite of my own perception of the quality of this work and the pleasure I take in reading it, my work may not engage the readers in the Bahai community as much as Id like to see happen. I think engagement entails defining a common enterprise that newcomers and community veterans can pursue as they try to develop their interpersonal relationships. I think I do this quite well. But as readers continue in their interacting trajectories in the community and as they continue to shape their identities in relation to one another, they may not find this book that useful. While engagement can be positive, a lack of mutuality in the course of engagement with this book can create relations of marginality, mine and others, that can reach deeply into peoples identities. Im really not sure how successful I have been in the enterprise of truly engaging my readers. Of course, time will tell, but I must admit to my suspicions which may be mainly a function of age. I like to see imagination, which is a process of expanding the self by transcending time and space and creating new images of the world and the self, as something which entails others locating their sense of engagement in a broader system and defining a personal trajectory that connects what they are doing to an extended personal identity of themselves. Id like to think this autobiography extends the meaning of artifacts, people and actions within the personal spheres of peoples lives, people who read this book. That is what Id like but, again, Im not so sure that I have succeeded in this respect. The sheer proliferation of the objects, diversions, and possibilities for, life in modern society has made modern society, as Walter Lippmann pointed out after WW1 in his book The Phantom Public, not visible to anybody, nor intelligible continuously and as a whole. Abundance has in some ways blunted not only the meaning of experience but also the pleasure to be found in abundance itself. In spite of these complexities and enigmas, the past, my past, has occurred. It has gone and can only be brought back again by this autobiographer or by historians and social scientists working in very different media: in books, articles, documentaries, inter alia. The actual events, of course, can not be brought back. The past has gone and history is what historians make of it and autobiographers when they go to work. In Re-thinking History, Keith Jenkins describes history as a discourse that is about, but categorically different from, the past. And so it is that my autobiography is categorically different from my past. As the distinguished historian E. H. Carr put it: facts of the past exist independently of the mind of the historian, but historical facts are only those data selected from the past that a historian finds relevant to his or her argument. The historian can never know the past as it really was, but only how it might have been, since our information about the past is partial and inevitably mediated. It seems to me this is true, a fortiori, of the autobiographer. Neither I nor the historian enjoys the scientists luxury of being able to conduct and replicate experiments about the past, my past, under controlled conditions. I can test one theory about my life against another theory, as can the historian about some aspect of history. This allows me, as autobiographer, and historians, to develop theories that are more viable. But we can never establish the truthfulness, the validity, of that theory. History and autobiography are both attempts to explain our experience of the present by constructing a viable account of the past, such that if it had taken place then the present we live in would be the case. History is not an attempt to account for the way things were, but to account for the way things are. When I say that my life has been full of joy and sorrow I eliminate this apparent contradiction or, indeed, any such contradiction, by analysing my life and dividing it into the joyous parts and sorrowful parts. This I have done by discussing these aspects, but I have not precisely quantified these two emotions. My life has been joyous in some respects and sorrowful in others. If, however, life is left whole and is not analysed in respect to these emotions, a myriad of contradictions is often left because that is the nature of the reality in which we live. While imagination can lead to a positive mode of belonging, it can also result in disconnectedness and greater ineffectiveness; it can be so removed from any lived form of life and activity, membership and meaning, that it detaches the identities of readers and leaves them in a state of uprootedness. Readers can lose touch with their sense of social efficacy by which their experience of the world can be interpreted as competence. While that is not my desire, my autobiography may in the end be just a slippery slope in the direction of discontent and disorientation. Good intentions, as they say, are often the road to greater problems. As a teacher of literature, of English and the social sciences, I know only too well that many students turn off some of the best writers. I, too, am not immune from this experience. In the end, of course, one writes and sends ones efforts out into the universe and takes what comes. Alignment is a term applied to writing and to autobiography. It entails negotiating perspectives, finding common ground, defining broad visions and aspirations, walking boundaries and reconciling diverging fields of interest. Alignment requires shareable frameworks and paradigms, boundary items and concepts that help to create fixed points around which to coordinate activities, an oeuvre, a life. It can also require the creation and adoption of broader discourses that help give a literary enterprise some life, some vitality and meaning and by which the microcosm of local actions can be interpreted as fitting within a broader framework. However, alignment can be a violation of a persons sense of self that crushes their identity. In some ways, at least for me, alignment is the penquot;s obedience to a line already traced in the mind, if not on the page. To fully participate in community life in the sense that is at the heart of this autobiography each Bahai must find ways to engage in the work, the enterprize in their won individual way. They will do some things that others do, that other community members do, but they must be able to imagine their own work as being an important part of a larger enterprise. And they must be comfortable that the larger enterprise and its smaller components, the many conventions of that community, are compatible with the identities they envision for themselves. Being a part of the community, then, is not simply a matter of learning new skills, new attitudes and new values, but also of fielding new calls for identity construction. This understanding of identity suggests that people enact and negotiate identities in the world over time. For identity is dynamic and it is something that is presented and re-presented, constructed and reconstructed in interaction. The individual experience of power derives from belonging, but it also derives from exercising control over what they belong to, what they participate in, what they read, indeed, an entire panoply and pageantry of activity. Each individual is heterogeneously made up of various competing discourses, conflicted and often contradictory scripts. Their consciousness is anything but unified. I emphasize this because in the great wealth of literature now available to the Bahai community both in-house literature and the burgeoning material now available in the marketplace, my book occupies a small place, possesses no particular authority and competes with a print and electronic media industry. In order to survive and do well in most of the print and electronic media a writer must develop the ability to put things simply and effectively, in a manner that everyone can understand. Such a writer has maybe a minute and a half to two minutes if ones talking TV to explain a complex subject or a series of short verbal expositions if its an interview; even a book, if it is to find a large readership in the mass circulation market, must be as simple as possible. If you think that cant be done, youre wrong. However, so many academics and intellectuals are steeped in academic jargon that they cant pull it off. I hope this book is not an example of the latter, of someone who could not pull it off. Im afraid simplicity and brevity are not marks of my literary style. So, perhaps, I fail here. I knew of a senior academic who was asked to appear on a local TV station. She showed up with six or seven books and they had little pieces of paper stuck in the books for purposes of quotation. The whole interview was over in less than two minutes; she never read any of her quotations and she was frustrated that she just couldnt make her points. She didnt understand that if youre going to play in the media ballpark, you have to play by their rules, not your own. I like to think that this book, this autobiography, has allowed me to have my six books and their quotations and that the role of this book does not include a two minute TV summary or an interview of ten minutes on an arts program. On the other hand, I could probably write a ten second autobiographical-ad grab, summarize what Im all about in one or two minutes and be interviewed for any appropriate length of time. Maybe it will ever happen before I die. There are many different kinds of self-referential writing. I have incorporated some of them in what is for me a surprisingly large work invoking Whitmanquot;s I am large, I contain multitudes, as an appropriate presiding spirit for the genre. Whatever largeness I claim to possess, it is the same largeness we all possess in relation to ourselves. We all must live in our own skins for all our days and the sense of our largenessor our smallness for that matteris a result of our bodily manifestation, our physical proximity to self. In the multitude of methods and genres of studies of Bahai history and experience, teachings and organization, autobiography is either tentatively acknowledged, invoked by negation or simply passed over in silence. It is one genre that is, for the most part, conspicuous by its absence from any bibliography. This has begun to change in the last decade or two. This piece of writing is part of that change. So often we commiserate over the lack of history writing or, as Momen puts it, how lamentably neglectful in gathering materials for the history of the Bahai Faith we have been. History writing and the transmission of the narrative of a group has often been a problem. It wasnquot;t until the 1850quot;s, writes Russell Shorto in his review of Nathaniel Philbricks Mayflower that William Bradfordquot;s narrative of the founding of Plymouth in 1620 was finally published. Only then, after 230 years, did the story of the first years of the history of the USA enter the historical record. While Momen may be right, there are many ways to look at the gathering of historical documents. Just how this autobiography will appear in the grand scheme of things only time, only history, will tell. This autobiography comes from the historical experience within four epochs in the first century of the Formative Age. While my work makes no attempt, no pretense, to being a history of the period, it does attempt to express the experience of one man. How relevant this will be for future generations I leave to those mysterious dispensations of Providence which I often refer to in this now lengthy book. The details of my experience in this new Faith and the details associated with its origins and development in the various Bahai communities I lived in or was associated with in a broad sense could be said, if one wanted to be critical, to represent quot;intentional history,quot; a form of social memory which establishes both the image of the past that the community wishes to transmit and its resulting corporate identity. And I suppose it is difficult to avoid this problem, this tendency, entirely. No matter how frustrating my experience has beenÃÆ' ¢Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚ ¬Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬?and there is no question that I have suffered as so many have done because of the Bahaquot; communityI love this community and a bias toward it is unavoidable. I have gone a long way toward my goal of presenting this community as honestly and accurately as I can, or so it seems to me. The mechanics of constructing the past, my past, my real historical memories and contemporary, homoeostatic dynamics of the Bahai community are closely intertwined in the formation and ongoing formation of the metanarrative that is Bahai history. This is inevitable. For historys first historian, Herodotus, there were no official versions. What mattered to this Greek historian was the local nature of his information, in all its complexity. Some local, some polis idea of its past was a shared possession, rooted in cult and a complex ongoing tradition. For me, on the other hand, there is an official, a written history and it is this history which matters. What also matters, although in quite a different sense, is the local, complex, ongoing, nature of my information, the personal, the complex, the individual, the local, story. Much of my poetry in this autobiography has a similar emphasis to Homerquot;s and the poetry of many another poet in the sense that it is about: the poetry of the past. I use poetry to help me navigate the labyrinth of personal connections, -isms, and the historical nexuses which often seem too complicated for me to find my way through. I hope readers find here a lucidity that helps them cope with the complexity. To make one more comparison between the experience of the Bahais and the founding fathers of America in 1620 Id like to quote what Philbrick says about these founders, namely, that they began to see that they were traversing a mythic land, where a sense of community extended far into the distant past. It took time for them to appreciate the significance of the Indian religious tradition. Relations with the Indians were the axis, says Philbrick, for a history of the Pilgrims. In time the Pilgrim colony became caught up in massacre and sadness; one could reasonably conclude that this underscores the danger of believing that God guides onequot;s hand. I used to think the relationship with indigenous peoples was the critical axis of the Bahai community in our time. That was one of the main ideological reasons for going to live, first among the Inuit and then among the Aboriginals. But as time, as my life, has moved on, I am more of the view that a critical axis is the power of understanding. There are other axes, too, but this subject is too long for an exposition on the relevant themes here. For the Bahais, during the four epochs that was the temporal framework for my experience and that of my community, they too faced crises, as great or greater than those faced by the American Pilgrims. They were crises that threatened to arrest the communitys unfoldment from time to time and, as Shoghi Effendi once said threatened to blast all the hopes which its progress had engendered. Therequot;s something terribly feminine about novel writing, John Fowles once wrote. When you create characters, he went on, all processes are analogous to childbirth, including postnatal depression. When a book is reviewed, it is like the weaning of children. Youquot;re kicked about or even praisedand the book is separated from you. At a conscious level, this may be painful. But at an unconscious level, this leaves one freeto write another novel. What Fowles says here about novels has been partly true of my experience of writing this autobiography. The main difference is that this book is still connected to me by a literary umbilical chord. I will go on working on it for some time to come: until Im tired of it or I die. Fowles goes on to say something which I think is also true of writing autobiography, at leastpartlyfor me. He says: The novel is an impossible voyage. Itquot;s a mystery why you keep doing it. He asked, Why is an unhappy ending considered more artistic than a happy ending? and then answered himself, In some ways the unhappy ending pleases the novelist. He has set out on a voyage and announced, I have failed and must set out again. If you create a happy ending, there is a somewhat false sense of having solved lifequot;s problems. For me, the question of endings has not come in to this autobiography. Obviously, I am still alive and could be here for another 30 or 40 years. My story, my autobiography could be only half or two-thirds over. And happiness, for me, has no relationship with the glitter and tinsel of an affluent society or the superficial adjustments to the modern world envisioned by humanitarian movements or publicly proclaimed as the policy of enlightened statesmanship. H appiness is much more of a paradoxical thing, a conundrum, a galimaufery-to chose a name from a BahÃÆ'ƒÂ ¡quot;ÃÆ'ƒÂ ­ folk groupa mixture of unlike things. I have set out many times on this autobiographical journey. It is a mysterious journey, an impossible one in some ways. This journey could be divided into three aspects: the spatial, the temporal and the intellectual. I divide and mix the three for the sake of convenience. The three are textually interconnected. The temporal journey meshes with the experience of space to shape the protagonistquot;sÃÆ' ¢Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚ ¬Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬?thats meintellectual development. Henri LeFebvre sees space as active, not a passive surface and has three components: perceived, conceived and lived space. Trying to keep the three points of the triad straight is not as important, at least for my argument, as is maintaining a sense of their interlocked relation. Lived, perceived, and conceived space folds into and spins across its several forms, working together to accomplish the production of spaces: place, space, landscape, and location as instreets, homes, rooms, fields, buildings, people, inter alia, and become embodied with stories, memories, and all sorts of meanings. Although the world is indeed increasingly well connected, we must hold this in balance with the observation that most people live intensely local lives. This has been true for me throughout these epochs, although in the realm of thought I have been travelling all my pioneering life. Cultural geography is concerned with those aspects of land and space, in both the micro and the macro sense, that shape peoplequot;s ideas about themselves, and give to their identities a characteristic expression. Landscape is really an all-embracing concept. It includes virtually everything around us and has manifest significance for everyone. This sub-section of geography, the cultural sphere, formulates the complex strategies of identification that function in the name of a people nd a nation. It is here that the recollection, the sense, of home and belonging are constructed and create an imagined and/or a real community. There results from this study of land and space a collectiveness that is addressed in different ways by different peoples, that is part of their identity and that structures belonging. I have mentioned this from time to time in this autobiography, but it has not occupied much of my attention. This is probably due to the many places I have lived rather than one which has helped to form my identity. This whole question of the sense of identity has been part and parcel of the western literary tradition going right back to Homer and the Old Testament writers. Early poetry of the eighth century BCE, Hesiod, Homer and the tradition they belonged to, has as a major theme the identity of Greek people, whether united in a military expedition as in the Iliad or as a geographical system in the Catalogue of Ships. My poetry and my autobiography is concerned, too, with the notion of identity, the identity of the Bahai community and my own identity both within that community and without. It is this aspect of my identity that I give more of my attention to in this work. The decision to pioneer internationally in 1971, to go abroad as we used to say, a decision I made with my first wife or, more honestly, because of my first wife, after graduating from college in 1967 and teaching for three years, represented an embrace of the challenges and pleasures of the unfamiliar. This reorientation was also a form of disorientation, for the new that floods in from all sides pulls old assumptions off their moorings. Just as a compelling theory may force students to fall back on what they know, only to find that the theory has changed the way in which they consider this knowledge, so the experience of living on a foreign continent makes one both look homeward and realize that home will never be the same. The lesson I have learned during my 35 years as an expatriate is perhaps best described as a semantic one: home, Canada, and North America ceased forever to be synonyms in my mind. Even if home still lies over there, certain signs of it greet the eyes of Canadians abroad no matter where we go. Anesthetics EssayOnly the occasional Bahai activity, family interchange, conversation with a friend, daily interaction with my wife and the inevitable trips to town to shop, to put up posters and to go the library and attend to the several domestic activities that are part of life for everyman took me into the social domain. I had come to see life more as an affair of solitude diversified by company than an affair of company diversified by solitude. For fifty years1954-2004 it had been the other way around. With early retirement the tables and the millennium had slowly been turning. As they turned I slowly approached the heartland of my story across the familiar slopes of my earthly life, its actions and thoughts. I tell it in a way which gives me an invigorating sense of briskness and phrase-relishing. As the epochs advanced I had an increasing and an insatiable spirit of activity. By the fifth epoch the spirit was channeled virtually in its entirety into a sedentary and literary life. In the process I defined my world. I hope readers enjoy my definition and the way I go about putting it together. Like Johnsons dictionary 250 years ago, it is an ambitious work. But whether it will influence generations as Johnsons work did, I can only hope. He wrote to escape the pain of life; I wrote to escape societys endless chat. An autobiography, like a novel, stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium, said William Golding when he received his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service both an autobiography and a novel renders. Golding went on to say: It performs no less an act than the rescue and the preservation of the individuality and dignity of the single being, be it man, woman or child. No other art, I claim, can so thread in and out of a single mind and bodyand so live another life. It does ensure that at the very least a human being shall be seen to be more than just one billionth of one billion.. And if the potential reader is not interested in what I have preserved here he need not read my work, need not pick it up. He is free to stop at any juncture. I hope the fact that this work is not just a humdrum inventory of personal recollections should encourage the disinclined reader. But neither is this work a series of casually scanned or, like Flauberts novels, savagely chosen details in a frozen gel of chosenness. Pioneering Over Four Epochs is a portmanteau of personal history, the BahÃÆ'ƒÂ ¡quot;ÃÆ'ƒÂ ­ Faith and endless opinionizing; it is a pinata of literary references and a galimaufery of stuff that I try to beat into shape with the stick in/of my brainsometimes successfully, sometimes not. The Cause is going to need pioneers for many generations to come. As I have been writing this lengthy statement of my pioneering experience I have often felt that my story is but one of the first to make it onto paper from the generations beginning in 1937. Some narratives, some genres, like westerns and gangster stories, are dead or are dieing out. The political agenda changes with the seasons, although some problems seem to be perennial. My father used to say there is always trouble in the Middle East. When the news came on and he was in his latter years, he would leave the room muttering about the endless warfare in Israel. That was in 1960. Nearly fifty years later the story is the same. And the historian AJP Taylor said it was wisest never to have an opinion about the Middle East. The pioneer, in its many forms, has a long life ahead of it and a long life behind it. Since literature takes as its subject all human experience, and particularly the ordering, interpreting, and articulating of experience, it is no accident that the most varied literary projects find instruction in the great mass of literature and its history and that the results of these projects are relevant to thinking about literature. What is true for literature, is also true for the other arts, such as painting and film andÃÆ' ¢Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚ ¬Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬?autobiography. The reader should also keep in mind as he reads this work that there is what autobiographers calls the interstitial selfÃÆ' ¢Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚ ¬Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬?the self that emerges in lifes multitude of interstices, some in discourse, others in private. Sometimes this interstitial self emerges only for a moment to deal with and negotiate a conflict, a particular point in a relationship, indeed, many of lifes situations. Sometimes the person is unaware of some of his interstitial selves. He is drawn back into familiar territory where there is a more stable position, a more familiar self and his interstitial self disappears as fast as it came into being. At other times, this interstitial self is grasped as a way to escape the restrictive discourses that so often arise in social life. In addition to this interstitial self there is another conventional autobiographical term, the hybrid self. This is a self that can be seen as shifting among positions and discourses, sometimes combining them into a true hybrid. At other times I am very aware of the contradictions and contradictory situations in life and that I must maintain quite separate and independent discourses, languages, so to speak, of the self. Then there is the unfound self, a self that seems unfindable. It too me 19 years1984-2003 to finally find a voice that spoke to me of me. Beginnings are often difficult for novelists and autobiographers. People think of writing for years and may, in the end, never pick up their pen. I shall say no more on what can be a complex subject of selves. But it is an important aspect for readers to consider as they delve into this autobiography. Readers need to keep in mind G. K. Chestertons turn of phrase in his discussion of the future of Charles Dickens writings. Chesterton notes that there are a number of important factors which never prevent a man from being immortal. The chief of them, he adds, is the unquestionable fact that they write an enormous amount of bad work. This leads a man to being put below his place in his own time, but it does not affect his permanent place, to all appearance, at all. Shakespeare, for instance, and Wordsworth wrote not only an enormous amount of bad work, but an enormous amount of enormously bad work. Some of the feedback I have received in the three years since I finished the 3rd edition of this work would indicate that what I have written is just that, an enormously bad work. So, perhaps, my immortality is assured, at least if Chesterton is onto something here. Chesterton goes on to say in his discussion of the future of Dickens writings that it is the very exaggeration of his characters that will immortalize him. The realistic narrators of their time are all forgotten, but the exaggerators live on. Chesterton sites the example of Homer and his characters in the Iliad and Odyssey. I might add the example of the Bab and Bahaullahs writings which to a western ear and the moderate tones of the stiff upper-lip of the English literary tradition, often seem exaggerated. My own work, sadly, aiming as it does for realism, factual detail and accuracy of circumstance, will probably pass through the wings of time and be no more substance than the eye of a dead ant as the Bab, or was it Bahaullah, wrote. On the other hand, Chesterton did leave me with some hope for a place in posteritys literary home. Chesterton also felt that those writers with a poetic inclination had a greater future than those without. So, perhaps, in the end, my poetry will save a place for me in futures rooms amidst its lush or not-so-lush furnishings. Among these furnishings, perhaps on the walls, will be the carefully arranged portraits of my emotional credentials, my intellectual and psychological interests, indeed, a whole gallery of stuff. It is difficult to see what value all these gallery pieces will have but their association with a new Faith which claims to be the emerging religion on this planet will give them a significance I can scarcely appreciate at this early hour. A person is not simply determined and dominated by the pressures of any overarching discourse or ideology such as the secular pluralism in which we as citizens of western democracies are immersed. We are all, I believe, the agents of our own personal discernment capable of identifying and interpreting societys dominant discourse in order to insert himself into it or confront and resist it. The dominant cultural forces within our world do not take away our free willentirely. But just as Darwinism and the Civil War shattered the psyches of Americans living in the last 40 years of the nineteenth century and two great wars and the holocaust shattered those living in the first half of the twentieth century, we in the last half of that century and the early twenty-first have other shattering social and psychological experiences. There cannot be any doubt at all that my own literary corpus can not be appreciated apart from the influences of my age. In an attempt to sketch the course of my literary endeavours it would be futile to detach their succession from the experiences of my personal life, largely determined, as these were, by the revolutionary changes of my time, by other changes in the condition of both Canada and Australia where I have lived, developments in the religion I have been associated with and in the various intellectual shifts and alterations in its centres and capitals around the world. The probing of quot;Canadiannessquot; or Australianness turns out to be a puzzling and somewhat brain-racking exercise in my pioneer situation. But all is not puzzle and probes for the brain. Much of the contemplation is enriching and interesting for the psyche. The world I have grown up in, at least since Norman Vincent Peale wrote what was arguably the first self-help book, has grown accustomed to the standard victim-recovery cycle of modern self-help books. Part of pop-psychology one of the many substitutes for religion in my time, the self-help genre can not be found in the text of this book. Like Proustquot;s masterpiece, I like to think my work is edifying precisely because my struggle goes on and on and just changes its form as the years go on. Unlike Proust, I do get better from illnesses that dot my life. I may not get totally cured and the battle of life may change its form and content but I am never tempted to blame others for my problems. I do not welcome suffering, as Proust seems to do, as an opportunity for thinking up fresh ideas and for entering into a richer relationship with experience. But once it has come and gone I welcome the insights that come in its train. I like to think too that, if self-help sneaks around the intellectual corner, I offer it in the form of a manual, a philosophical guide for the intelligent person. If self-help there be here I hope it is a welcome departure from the usual bellyaching. quot;quot;Our best chance of contentment,quot;quot; Proust writes quot;quot;lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes and emotional betrayals. If we can also avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time and the weather, then some degree of contentment may be ours. quot;quot; Following the nine, the seven or the five steps may also help. For some, especially writers, language itself is the primary arena within which these shattering experiences are coped with and individual assertivenss and agency becomes manifest from behind the angst. For them talk is more important than action, indeed talk itself is action because words determine thoughts and actions. Language is the parent, and not the child, of thought. Men are the slaves of words. This may have been true of the philosopher Kant whom posterity caricatured as a man who was all thought and no life or a man who neither had a life nor a history. Ive come to the view that thought and action, two of the major facets of our lives, can not be separated. The practical and the mystic have become one in our day. My journey is not only the core and central thread of my life story; it is also the recurrent and most enduring principle of my life. Nowhere, throughout the narrative, will one encounter a complacently ensconced pioneer. I have been a migratory and volatile spiri t which has sprung out of the most established and rooted position in a conservative Canadian consciousness. I have often been beaten down by circumstances, depressed by body chemistry and situations, called by that curious combination of sorrow and a strange desolation of hope into a quietness, but complacency has not been a quality I have battled withÃÆ' ¢Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚ ¬Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬?although I must say that complacency sounds restful after some of lifes other battles I have had to contend with. My resistance to the dominant mores of my time has been articulated, made public, and critiqued in several textual identities of which this autobiography is one. The personal agency of my discernment, my autonomy, declares itself it seems to me in this very writing. This writing becomes the site and symbol of my resistance to the dominant ideology of my time and its major cultural manifestations. This resistance takes place with the aid of the great power of retrospect and hindsight and so gives to much of the messiness, order and shape to this work. In the end, though, much is messiness, for not all of thought is ordered, tidy and logically sequential. If I give to my life artistic form and spiritual vision and design in retrospect; if I discover a more profound truth in the context of this vision than an unfertilized collection of facts could deliver, I understand that is part of a design-imposed, meaning-making, process that I give to my life. Perhaps a great deal of what has happened to me is fate, destiny, a certain predestination. Such was the view Henry James took of his life when he wrote his autobiography in the evening of his life. There is little doubt of the importance of fate from a Bahai perspective. I wish I could say in this context that my sentences had a quality of stunning exactitude, lyricism and comedy, an aphoristic concision but, alas, style is not a quality bestowed on me as it was on Flaubert. Perhaps this is because I have not been willing to work at it as obsessively as he. I wish I could also say, too, that I possessed the kind of grand and exuberant personality that the great twentieth century literary critic William Empson is reputed to have possessed. Such a personality would have been handy in so many of the social situations in life. So much of life has been social. That refined, sophisticated, and erudite scholar with his great reckless energy for life, with his willingness to throw his entire self into the interpretation and criticism of literature, William Empson had an energy and passion that informed his critical work and served to renew in the common reader a sense that there is some literature that can matter deeply to all and any of us. Alas, although I shared Empsons energy it did not result in any literary erudition in my case; although, like Empson, I threw myself into my academic life in varying degrees with some success over half a century, I never made it to the major leagues. My destiny was to be a minor poet in the minor leagues. But I enjoyed playing poetic-ball in a small town in the minors. If you love playing ball part of you does not care where. I was certainly not in the same league as Empson, arguably one of the three greatest literary critics in the last several hundred years; although we both had sexual proclivities, his desires seemed to result in greater notoriety than mine. I had certainly experienced shame, fear and guilt in relation to my sexual urges and activities, among other sources of shame. Fear of exposure was very real and, after my young adulthood, I was not able to share my concerns with anyone except my wife. These were battles I fought, for the most part, on my own. Being honest about my failures in the sexual domain seemed impossible outside my immediate marital relationship. There simply was not the context, the relationship for such a degree of intimacy or confessionalism. But these feelings did not keep me away from God as they do many. My sense of unworthiness seemed instrumental in drawing me closer to God, to appreciating His forgiveness, something I was assured of over and over again by Bahaullah. I had right desire, but possessed wayward appetites, a sort of contagion of the lower self, part of an inward war made of thin but tough veils, battles which I often lost, susceptibilities of conscience which were simply not strong enough. I was not willing, or so it seemed, to burn the bridges across which certain sins continually came. In a world like this, in the darkest hours before the dawn, I was confident I had much company, company that ran into the millionsÃÆ' ¢Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚ ¬Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬?if not billions. Alcohol was never a problem for me as it was for Empson. Comparisons with others, of course, are sometimes useful but, as the clichÃÆ'ƒÂ © goes, comparisons are often odious. Autobiographyquot;s ultimate purpose, Henry James felt, was to fix the self for all time, to put forth the idea that the autobiographer matters and that his life is significant in the supposed order of things. I certainly like to think my life matters, that it has meaning in the ultimate scheme of things, that in writing this autobiography I am not merely imposing form on chaos, that all that I think is not merely an exercise in subjectivity, that my life is not so deeply private as to be beyond scientific scrutiny, that it derives its importance from factors beyond that which is unsystematic, even chaotic, uncommunicable and emotional in life. The scientific domain contains an important element of subjectivity and total objectivity is always impossible. One of the key elements of science is that it exists in, indeed generates, a community, a framework, of interpretation. Indeed, the scientist can only function within such a community. That is also true, at least in some ways, for this autobiographer. The community in question for me is the Bahai community. And, more generally, the human community. What makes my work scientific is that I am engaged in a conscious, explicit organization of knowledge and experience. I am not just engaged in making true statements. One can do this in any quiz or games like trivial pursuit. Proof, in scientific terms and in autobiography, means nothing more than the total process by which we render a statement more acceptable than its negation. An important caveat here is that the convictions I bring to this exercise, my feelings of certitude, indeed much that I might call tentative hypotheses for example, are part of a psychological state not part of my knowledge. Certitude can often be had with no knowledge at all and hypotheses are things anyone can make. Our emotions organize themselves around our convictions and become part of our way of life. This is ones faith, ones religion. And we all have a religion in this sense; there exists around this religion or faith a theoretical uncertainty and it exists for all of us. Such is some of the intellectual orientation, some of my foundation view, that I take to this autobiography. Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal, to assert this autonomy, however permanent it may be, than the creative process itself, the process of composition. Verse really does, in Akhmatovaquot;s words, grow from rubbish among other things. To express this same idea more elegantly, one could say that verse grows out of slime the same way as a lotus flower. The roots of prose are no more honorable. But there in the roots can also be found faith and thought the lotus flowers embryo. Without faith and thought no society can long endure and without a common humanity and a practical basis for world order appalling catastrophe threatens to engulf humanity. As this autobiography has come to take form increasingly since I began writing it over twenty years ago, I have felt a measure of literary and psychological power and humility. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that self-narrative is a tool used to gain self-determinacy. This work is also partly an illness narrative, partly a salvation narrative, partly a travel narrative, as autobiographers often call these sub-genres, and partly an act of becoming and re-becoming. Through self-narration I partly re-make myself, re-fashion and re-invent a new understanding of myself. With this story I try to resist the several disabling definitions that could label my life and so to write myself into/with a rhetorical normalcy. Narrative is used as a tool, a technology, that is intended to be a vehicle to freedom, self-definition, and self-expression. Unlike some writers, I have no obsession with being taken seriously. What consumes many words of many writers in an attempt to be taken seriously, consumes little of mine. I have not set this work before the public with the confidence, still less the complacency, of an established master.