APPENDIX 2

(APPENDIX 1 IS AT THE END OF VOLUME 1)

PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS

SECTION X1: MEMORABILIA:

The following are some initial thoughts on this subject, thoughts put down in

the sixteen years 2005 to 2011, years after the completion of the first edition

of my memoirs or autobiography in 1993. In order for this section XI of my

autobiography PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS, a section devoted to

memorabilia, to have any relevance at all it would seem to me that it would

require a man like Charles Nicholl.

Nicholl was mesmerised by the minutiae of archival evidence. The shreds or

perhaps shards of everyday life preserved accidentally or on purpose for

posterity, and from which the biographer-sleuth could piece together the

parts of a life or enrich a vivid or not so vivid personality which already

existed, at least in part, and perhaps on paper as my work is, and thus make a

more plausible career, a more detailed lifeline, a more interesting narrative

were, to Nicholl, the very breath of life. Each shard of writing deciphered

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from the margins of a manuscript, each artifact, however trivial, determined

for Nicholl a direction for further exploration.

In recent years, only as I approached the age of sixty with a life and a

lifestyle devoted to writing and not having to earn a living and not having to

deal with people in community as extensively as I had for decades, did I

begin to contemplate this topic of memorabilia: relics, portraits,

photographs, memorial items, archival writings, inter alia, the detritus and

leftovers of my material life. The words here in this section of my

autobiography are still quite tentative and preliminary, but they offer some

suggestive directions, some supportive structures to this autobiography—at

least potentially.

Nicholl’s book Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind is an

expansive volume, dense with footnotes and copiously illustrated with

images from the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci. In Nicholl's patient

hands, acres of undervalued and unread material are painstakingly unpicked,

rewoven and moulded into an armature. Together this material is given

coherent shape in the long life of a Renaissance genius. Who will arise to

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unpick, reweave and mould into something useful for posterity all that I have

left behind? If one is not a Leonardo, does it matter?

The more than 7,000 surviving pages of Leonardo’s notebooks are, for

Nicholls, a goldmine of clues to follow, theories more or less tentatively

proposed, with assertions of "fact" boldly risked. I’m not sure anyone will

arise who will see my memorabilia as a goldmine with its own clues to

follow, theories to propose and assertions of fact to be boldly risked. Like

all biographers, future authors who take on any biographical excavation of

my life will have to wrestle with the problem of forming coherence from the

mass of disparate pages I have left behind, no matter how well organized;

from the multitude of fragments of "fact" which give much shape here in my

memoirs and only shadowy shape there in other places in my several genres

of writing. Perhaps there is too much in the archive of my literary

memorabilia. Future authors may come to meditate on single phrases here

and broken passages there of, say, my autobiographical and sociological

annotations.

These annotations and various meditations might come to an end with:

"because the soup is getting cold” or “W anal R funct” short for “Weber

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analysed religion functionally.” These same authors will have to proceed to

build their painstakingly constructed edifice of possibilities on the very large

pile of paper I have kindly provided. If some fact informs my

autobiographical database, some fact like “I ate a bowl of lukewarm soup on

Tuesday 21 February 2001,” this hardly would qualify as an important piece

of biographical data. What seems to make the work of biographers special is

the quality of surprise, of casualness, of some personal feature they are able

to bring to their writing. Into the dry abstractions of my social sciences and

humanities studies, my physical and biological sciences notes, must intrude

moments of simple, daily humanity and moments of insight that biographers

will elicit in order for readers to seriously bother reading their text at all.

Their problem, their challenge, is not simple.

My Dell computer(Pentium 4) Model-optiplex GT280 with its operating

system WindowsXP; my printer, a Xerox DocuPrint Model N17 Network

Laser; my monitor a View Sonic VA1903wmb(model # VS11618--made in

China manufacture date:8’08) with a screen resolution of 1440 x 800 pixels

and a screen size of 15.7 x 10 inches or 39 x 25 cms; my old shoes: sandals,

slippers and runners among other types of foot garments, my several garbage

cans, old hi-fit, inter alia--they will all appear as mythic and as ancient as the

4

remnants unearthed from Pompeii should they be kept and studied by some

future biographer. Other pieces, like my nine clip-boards, my three boxes of

assorted stationery items: paper-clips and sticky-tape, marking pens and

staples, books marks and magnifying-glass could be made to appear like

extinct flora or fauna in a natural history museum; crafted out of balsa wood

and displayed upside down, they could be made to rest as evidence of a

technological ‘survival of the fittest’ game − a stark reminder of the

increasing speed of commodity obsolescence in both my life and the life of

my society.1

that an artist might hope to resuscitate.

One of the earliest decisions of some future library committee, some Centre

of Learning perhaps or some other body responsible for archives, will be

whether or not to form any collection at all of material relating to Ron Price.

Will a memorial to the poet or a body of print be desired for some historical

purpose. Through donation by Ron Price’s executors, this vast memorabilia

will keep busy some institutional body, some appointed group, whose task is

to concern itself with memorabilia, dealing with many thousands of items

depending on how an item is defined. Among the many interesting and

valuable items in my collection are the more than 300 Notebooks, original

1 ilament, June 2005.

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editions of nearly 65 booklets of poetry, original copies of my autobiography

and the several editions of my book on Roger White’s poetry. There are,

too, some 25 volumes of the original manuscripts of letters, although in

2009-2010 I donated them to the National Baha’i Archives of Australia.

Will some publishing house embellish the external surfaces, the special

features of my memoir, such as the shape and size of the book, the design of

the dust jacket and cover, the stock of the paper, that make my memoir, now

entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs, a fascinating and telling popular

cultural curiosity? There will be something resonant and poignant in the

attempt to frame my text as more than a generic, impersonal commodity, as

invaluable, personal memorabilia, as a souvenir or keepsake, as textual

ornament infused with affect, sensation, wonder and curiosity. Whether

such an exercise will ever take place, of course, only time will tell.

The text of my memoir will hopefully possess a resonance of the kind

described by Stephen Greenblatt as "the power of the displayed object to

reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the

viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and

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for which it may be taken by a viewer to stand."2 Who will exploit the

phatic potential, the potential of my memoir to perform a social task, as

opposed to just conveying information?

Over my long life, I lived in about three dozen houses and flats in Ontario,

the NWT and many parts of Australia. In the strange world of competitive

writer shrine-making, I would not think any of them deserved the

designation “Price houses.” Can the writing of an author be understood by

examining his chewed pencils? Can visiting the historic home of a writer be

any substitute for reading his work? Can any piece of real estate, including

our own envious attachments to houses that are better, or cuter, or more

inspiring than our own, be a worthy preoccupation?

Should the places where writers write writers be given any sanctification?

The only way to claim our real inheritance from any writer is by reading

their works. You may feel connected to a writer by seeing some of him

memorabilia, but it is not a substitute for reading his work. Still, the private

life of the living and of the dead has becomes the world’s to plunder. If one

2 Stephen Greenblatt, "Resonance and Wonder," in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics And Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, (Washington: Smithsonian, 1991), p. 42.

7

wants a useful and straightforward guide to writer’s houses all over the

world, I recommend the website writershouses.com, run by A.N. Devers.

My exposed and precarious existential position as Bahá'í pioneer over four

epochs makes my literary practice a risky business, a hazardous proposition.

My uncensored narrative willingness, unprotected textual openness and

emotional fragility only heightens my vulnerability, laying me open to

attack. I dread censure and yet I risk it. Thomas Greene who has written on

what he calls the “vulnerable text” suggests that the symbolic wounding to

which literature is prone may confer upon it power and fecundity.3 My

wounding, symbolic and actual, is part of the source of the narrative power

of this work. Exultation and arrest are dependent on the conditions of the

moment in which it was written, on my fragile and vulnerable emotional

state. As Greenblatt notes, "precariousness is a rich source of resonance.”

My text also has the power to elicit wonder because, writes Greenblatt, it has

"the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to

convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention."4 As

3 Greenblatt cites Thomas Greene, The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature, Columbia University Press, NY, 1986, p. 100.4 ibid., p.42.

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a three-dimensional textual object, at least in a soft or hard-cover book form,

my memoir extends itself to the reader and the wider public in a self-

conscious, commodious gesture. The paratextual display5 that occurs prior

to and outside the textual space of my work Pioneering over Four Epochs

may infuse the book--even though it is an inanimate object--with a kind of

agency, an agency born of desire. This desire is that of the commodity to be

consumed and the desire of the reader to consume, a will to know and to

possess. The desire mobilized by the paratextual is built into my authorial

intent: my own desire to have readers. It is a desire that is acted out in the

commercial process of commodification, exhibition and consumption. This

primarily visual spirit of engagement and exchange is mobilized by

scopophilic6 desire, a need to look and a pleasure in looking at the spectacle

of my pioneering life. The peritextual elements aim to do more than secure

the interest or attention of readers as potential consumers. They aim to

generate a lust as well as a curiosity that is simultaneously erotic, emotional

and intellectual.7

5 The paratextual display of a book is its cover, dust jacket, inter alia.6 The desire to look, literally, the love of looking. The term refers to the predominantly male gaze of Holloywood cinema, which enjoys objectfying women into mere objects to be looked at.7 In The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde notes: "The desire to consume is a kind of lust," Vintage, London,1999, p.10.

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In order to satisfy these urges, the packaging of my text proffers a reified

self-presentation of my life, the promise of a personal and private encounter.

I could arrange for the publication of an audio book version of Pioneering

Over Four Epochs to offer an additional unique opportunity to hear my

voice as I speak from these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood. My

reading could be recorded in my study with the background clatter of my

wife’s movement and "the muffled speech of visitors" captured in the audio

book recording creating the sensation of being there.

The text of my work offers, I trust, physical, mental and emotional

stimulation, the experience of an affecting visual and auditory contact that

fulfills the obligations or requirements of what might be called an aesthetic

contract, a contract to teach, to move, to delight."8 Julian Murphet argues

that whatever the literary work manages to teach us about our contradictory

space will delight and move us at least as much as conventional affective

devices, for in a context such as mine the cognitive itself becomes(such is

my hope) a source of unexpected pleasure.

8 Julian Murphet, Literature and Race in Los Angeles, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, p. 26.

10

That context is, of course, one in which aesthetic pleasure, especially formal

visual and auditory stimulation, is no longer confined to the isolated work of

art, but has spilled out over and saturated social space itself.9 The fleeting,

lightweight "aesthetic pleasure" of Pioneering Over Four Epochs is

incorporated into its commercial intent as a commodity produced for

consumption and generated by the "saturated” social and discursive space in

which my text operates.

The packaging of my work as a product, in book and audio book form,

reveals strategic ornamentation. The graphic display of the dust jacket, the

publisher’s peritext, is dramatic and eye-catching. The direct simplicity of

the front cover denotes verbally and connotes graphically that is it a space of

factual disclosure. As a paratextual device, a vestibular space or threshold,

the dust jacket is an unlocked gateway, metaphorically opening to my life.

As the will to know and have becomes an urgent necessity, an audience of

consumers is corralled, transfixed by my life and my text. Here on view for

our predilection in the publisher’s peritext I stand silent but not absent.

Specularised and spectacularised textually, I am elevated and auctioned.

The detachable, protective, promotional dust jacket of Pioneering Over

9 idem

11

Four Epochs disguises the fabric-bound hardcover book beneath. A

surprising and significant shift from a public to a private surface is enacted

by the removal of this dust jacket. Readers are about to enter a privileged

realm, provoking and tantalising their voyeuristic desire. For Genette, a dust

jacket is a wrapper or wrapping, a paratextual support that resembles

clothing.10

The dust jacket encloses what lies within and the experience of entering the

book becomes a delightful process of un-wrapping (undressing) the favour it

purportedly contains. The reader’s physical introduction to the text is

preparation for and initiation into the process of disclosure that will follow.

The inclusion of photographic mementos accompanied by my own

recollections reinforces the sense of a private record of a life, thereby giving

the book a sentimental keepsake quality. It does not have the aura of a mass-

market release. The publishing strategy, however, might position the book as

a mass-market text and the ready-made marketing campaign guaranteed that

Pioneering Over Four Epochs will be a bestseller. The initial print run for

10 Gregory Jaynes, "To Bankroll his Defense, the Accused Expands the Lucrative O.J. Industry with a Self-Justifying Book," Time Online Edition 6 Feb. 1995. Available from: <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archives/advanced/>.

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the book might be 500,000 copies and the publishers "reserved press time

for reprinting within a week if the demand was there."11

In an interview with Publishers' Weekly, my amanuensis might say that I

had demanded that the tape be made available at an unusually low price.

'because I felt that there were lots of disenfranchised people out there who

could not afford the book. As an item of memorabilia, the text touts its trade

as collectable merchandise and advertises its status as a rare and precious

private memento made accessible to the public.

The packaging of the audio book mimics that of the printed book. The audio

cassette could be mounted inside a cardboard box of a standard paperback

size. The front flap opens like a book to reveal the promotional blurb and to

credit the actors whose voices appear on the tape. The same photograph that

appears on the back of the dust jacket appears on the back cover of the audio

book presentation box. The layout for the front covers of the presentation

box and the audiocassette case are the same as the book with some

additional information at the top and the bottom of the page.

11 Greenblatt cites Thomas Greene, The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature, Columbia University Press, NY,1986, p. 42

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The work of an archivist is, in an obvious sense, historical, drawn to the

signs of history, to documents and manuscripts, to letters and printed matter

of all sorts. But it is not, as has often been implied, the intellectual

equivalent of trainspotting or the study of antiques. The importance of some

historical and literary projects lies in the redrafting of mistakes and errors of

ignorance into pieties, illusions, certitudes and truths and a heritage industry

associated with a particular writer so that he or she emerges from the

paperland and the land of memorabilia.

To mark the centenary of my birth in 2044 or the bicentenary in 2144, a new

edition of the Catalogue of the Price Collection could be published. It could

be arranged in four sections: Editions, Life, Analysis and Memorabilia, as

Robert Burns’ collected works were organized back in 1996, over two

hundred years after his death. More recent acquisitions in that far-off time

could be included on a supplementary card index. Material in the collection

could be available for reference during library opening hours. For security

reasons it could be issued under supervision and readers could contact the

library in advance to discuss their requirements. Visits for groups could also

be arranged. It makes me laugh to even contemplate such pretentious.

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Memorabilia is part of a more general category of collective memory. This

form of memory is a rubric used to describe how social group members

know the past. There is a helpful literature in the social sciences on this

subject, but it is not my intention here to be overly academic, although I will

make a short excavation into the literature. Collective memory is

distinguished from both historical and autobiographic memory. Whereas

historic memory is the past stored and interpreted by social institutions and

autobiographic memory is the memory of events people have personally

experienced, collective memory is a remembering of the past informed by

shared experiences and public narratives. That is, collective memory is

socially constructed by group members and is their present interpretation of

events, persons, and objects from the past. There is not some single

collective memory; there are many. There can be as many collective

memories as groups in society; for example, family, friends, neighbours,

social/civic organizations.

The existence of multiple collective memories is a primary reason why each

individual memory should be examined and discussed. Through discourse,

social group members can begin to understand the meanings members of

other social groups associate with the ownership, collection, or display of

the items of memorabilia of the Baha’i community. The collective memory

15

framework recognizes that certain events, persons, or objects can be

interpreted differently, depending on the perceiver's perspective and whether

the perceiver was directly involved in the events or with the objects.

Collective memory informs understanding of the past and present and

contributes to future expectations. In addition, present interests, needs,

beliefs, and ideals shape views of the past, thus suggesting that group

members selectively retain, interpret, and forget information. Collective

memory may or may not be used as the analytical framework. Collective

memories may affect the sense of the past that persons associate with

material objects.

Researchers have used documents in the popular press and academic

literature and the collective memory framework to analyze the evolution of

images of persons, groups, and even of icons. One genre of collectibles

could easily be Baha’i memorabilia (also referred to as Baha’i collectibles

and Baha’i arcana). Baha’i collectible objects are from the past, the history

of individual Baha’is and their communities and can tell a story about the

meanings ascribed to Australian or American Baha’is or indeed one or more

of many other national groups---by the producers, users, and, perhaps,

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collectors of these objects. Baha’i memorabilia items can be made by, can

refer to, or contain images of Baha’i Americans of Baha’i Australians.

There is evidence of people collecting some forms of Baha’i memorabilia as

far back as the 1820s and 1830s, if not as far back as the middle of the 18 th

century and the birth of Shaykh Ahmad, during the lives of the two

precursors to the Bab lived and had their being. However, my focus is on

contemporary collectors' perceptions of stereotypic depictions of Baha’is.

As yet such depictions have not entered and, indeed, have far from

permeated the world of advertisements and other marketing materials. The

items of interest have primarily been disseminated from the century and a

half, from the 1860s until the 2000s and they also include reproductions of

such objects.

After the 1850s and with the development of colour lithography,

manufacturers and analysts and advertisers used images of Baha’is in

various ways and it was not to sell a plethora of goods and services. Baha’is

were not prominently featured in posters, on product labels, and as

trademarks and product symbols for such diverse items as soaps, liquor,

coffee, and motor oil. Scholars have hardly begun to examine the

17

motivations for the early use of the images of Baha’is in the marketplace.

Some suggest the images were simply used as a marketing technique to gain

attention and amuse potential buyers. Others contend an additional

objective was to "prove" American Baha’is were not only different, but also

eccentric.

In Iran, of course, Baha’is were seen as "objects worthy of torment and

torture.” However, there is almost universal agreement that the vast

majority of the early depictions of Baha’is in the U.S. was visually

attractive; in Iran they were seen as unattractive, often beastly, and revealed

something about the dominant culture's perceptions of and prejudices against

Iranian Baha’is.

Collective memories about Baha’i memorabilia involve the Baha’i producers

of the items, evolving Baha’i culture and subcultures, and individual

consumers who collect the items. Collective memories about Baha’i

memorabilia are both social and fluid; persons actively and constructively

create their own meanings for these objects. This set of themes detected in

the data suggests that informants assign valanced affective and emotional

associations to the images and memories of those images, because the items

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could not be completely understood using only cognitive associations. These

affective meanings were "good" (positive), "bad" (negative), and "ugly but

important." This last category was a juxtaposition of the first two,

seemingly opposing views of the good and the bad.12 Such are some

preliminary remarks about this subject of memorabilia to introduce this

section XI of my autobiography Pioneering Over Four Epochs.

As self-representation, autobiography is perhaps uniquely suited to validate,

to explain and analyse, the experience I have had with my bi-polar disability,

my marital difficulties, my second wife’s ill-health and the many

incapacities that I have had to deal with in my own person and that of others.

Through this written autobiographical work I can counter the negative and

stereotypical representations which I find arise as a result of my own

thoughts and actions as well as those of others. These negative images have

arisen quite naturally, in some ways, in the course of my life in relation to

the problems, inadequacies and personal tests I have mentioned. This

autobiography is partly an attempt to justify and explain myself before the

court of life and it is partly many other things. If this work is ever read to

12 Carol M. Motley, Geraldine Henderson and Menzel Stacey, “Exploring Collective Memories Associated With African-American Advertising Memorabilia: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” Journal of Advertising, Spring 2003.

19

any significant extent by others, I will by then be in the land of those who

speak no more, as the Bab once said. The memorabilia that I have referred

to above will be set in the context of this self-representation.13

The significance of domestic space is analysed by Gaston Bachelard in his

The Poetics of Space.14 In Gaston Bachelard the phenomenal world is

essentially psychological and metaphysical in its workings on the human

mind and spirit. Artists' studios and the domestic spaces where a writer

works are more than simply workplaces. They are part and parcel of his

memorabilia. They represent a privacy where the artistic process can be

nurtured. The interior space and the objects within it, both spatially and

aesthetically contrived, in their mundane and accidental natures, all become

vital components in the artistic process. Bachelard wrote, "The house allows

one to dream in peace … The values that belong to daydreaming mark

humanity to its depths".15

13 G. Thomas Couser, "Disability and Autobiography: Enabling Discourse." Disability Studies Quarterly, 17.4, 1997, p.292.14 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon, Boston, 1958.15 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space,1st English Translation, 1964; and Janet McKenzie,“A Review of Mel Gooding’s Ceri Williams(Moffat, Cameron and Hollis, 2002),” in Studio International, 2003.

20

I find that human figures, especially the female, that enter this space are

invariably experienced in a state of reverie and their surrounding space

encloses a world which is a source of immense physical pleasure. Bachelard

portrays this reverie, this pleasure, in his description of the artist’s space. I

strive not to allo w this physical, this reverie, to claim too great a share of

my attention. The paintings in this house, those of my wife, my wife’s

mother, my mother and others provide restful, quiet, unobtrusive

backgrounds. The visual images of the female that are also part of my

domain are crowded with colour, dramatic in action and intensely attractive.

Although they are merely signs and symbols offered to my eyes, they are

also ideas that stimulate, that allude to, that exist in colourful backgrounds,

gloriously orchestrated in solid blues, greens, reds and yellows, inter alia.

From time to time these female images dominate my visual place drawing

within their symbolic power the walls, books, music, files, my flesh and they

seem to become my very food and drink.

Like Matisse, who was greatly interested in and influenced by flat Islamic

patterning in floor rugs, this space in my study and my home represents a

rich domesticity. It stands for a life enjoyed even, in its way, luxurious. In

the sense that the contents of this study and home contain things which I

need, they are a matter of feeling and spirit. They are both useful and

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beautiful, both functional and practical, both aesthetically pleasing and

perfunctory. Although they bring to me a collection of pleasing forms and

patterns, they are also for the most part unnoticed. They are things which

are the accoutrements of a civilised life, my civilized life, in this sheltered

space, might I say, sheltered workshop.

As a twentieth-century voyageur-cum-pioneer through more towns and cities

than I care to count, my interest, my experience, was partly a celebration of

the new, partly an enjoyment of the familiar, partly an injection of the

present with inspirational possibilities, partly a series of depressions,

anxieties, wins and losses. Against the literary, historical, and cultural

framework of these places and the multitude of things, memorabilia, that

filled their spaces, my pioneer orientation, my beliefs and values set a stage

for the drama that was my life. To the sometimes elegant, sometimes

alluring, sometimes empty and uninspiring landmarks and commodities, my

neighbourhood and town, everyday objects and the quotidian provide an

intellectual and spiritual setting which orient me to the whole of life.

In this house in a small town, two hundred years old, with several thousand

inhabitants on the banks of the Tamar River in northeast Tasmania on the

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oldest continent and arguably the most beautiful and diverse, I am

surrounded by a family of one, my wife, by occasional visitors from the

Bahá’í community, from my family and from the more general community.

I am also surrounded, as I say above, by objects familiar and valued. The

paintings reverberate with colour and with the imprint of my wife’s domestic

and artistic taste. So much of this space speaks to me of her. It possesses a

decorative vigour and gives me a sense of the fullness of good things, sweet

sounds and even of a certain perfume of life itself. They reflect a contained

domesticity. They are deeply tender in feeling, but detached in mood. They

all speak of a life that is so much my wife’s and mine because she is mine

and I belong to her and we share the space and its solitude each in our own

way, thirty-five years down marriage’s track. In addition, the combination

of music, garden, books and the domestic spaces in all their variety operate

on another level. It is a level inhabited by harmonies and dissonances of

colour and shape, of life’s pleasures and its tests.

The artist Vasily Kandinsky informs my view here. Music, Kandinsky once

wrote, can be used to represent reverie but it can also be a dramatic

accompaniment which engages one’s senses. It possesses an intimacy and

symbolic meaning. And so can other objects and activities in this space. A

complex set of signs and an original approach to a range of intellectual and

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artistic shapes, objects which preceded me in time, result in creating a space

that makes connections to aspects of my literary oeuvre. These connections,

it seems to me, are largely unknown, unconscious, subtle, indirect. This

space encompasses many oppositions of subject, theme and mood in its role

as my immediate world of space.

Some people are collectors of everything. Marlene Dietrich was one such

person. At her death there were 25,000 objects and 18,000 images to

auction off, to give to museums, to friends, to family and to worthy and

relevant organizations.16 In some ways we all are collectors of different

things. This short chapter gives attention to my collections. Stamps in my

late childhood and teenage life, books from my late teens for the rest of my

life, files of notes--notebooks--from my forties onward, photographs from

my teens to the present: this covers my collecting spirit and its activities.

Each has its story and, one day, I may tell more of the stories of these

collections of memorabilia.

I have already given some attention to the question, the issue, of

photographs in this autobiography. But I would like to add a few remarks

here. The vast expansion of the historical record into new media between

16 Marlene Dietrich: Photographs and Memories, Random House Inc., 2006.

24

December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001, two dates of immense

significance in North American history, presents serious challenges that will

have to be surmounted in the coming years if future scholars and the public

are to have access to an adequate record of the past. Yet despite the urgency

of dealing with this mutating record, many in the cultural heritage

community have major reservations about digital collecting, due in part to an

understandable aversion to the complicated hardware and software involved,

but more importantly because of some very real concerns about the nature of

online work. At the same time that the web has enabled an exponential

increase in cultural production, some argue that online collecting misses

those older, less educated, or less well-to-do subjects who may not have

access to the necessary technology. Furthermore, the shift from analog to

digital entails a change from well-known and relatively stable forms such as

paper to forms for which the preservation path is unclear.

can be discussed and understood by myself and, hopefully, others who come

across this essay on the subject. It seems to me there are many

misconceptions about photography and photographs and, while not claiming

to sort them all out, I would at least like to allude to them as part of placing

the photographs in my life into some useful perspective. When I try to

reconcile the image in my memory with the photographic image, I come to

25

understand that photography, even the most documentary type of

photography, communicates through the confluence of objective and

subjective factors, through the connection of photographic images to

memory images. Thus, they are never purely objective or transparent. Once

I know and accept this fact, no photograph can be accepted, categorically, as

hard and factual evidence. So it becomes difficult to agree with actress

Lauren Bacall when she says that one’s “whole life shows in your face.”

I will make here some parenthetical remarks on the postcard17 which has

served a multiplicity of uses and functions and which is enmeshed in a

tangle of relationships which it is not my purpose here to elaborate upon. . A

century ago the postcard was in its golden age. During these four epochs,

the years 1944 to 2006, it became a periodic experience for most people and

certainly for me. I have not saved many in my collection of photographs

and memorabilia but assiduous biographers, researchers and students of this

autobiography will find a few scattered throughout my collection of letters..

17 Bjarne Rogan, “An Entangled Object: The Picture Postcard as Souvenir and Collectible, Exchange and Ritual Communication,” Cultural Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Folklore and Popular Culture, Vol.4, 2005.

26

However small a place postcards have in my collection of life’s goodies,

they deserve a place, a comment, in this section of my autobiography

devoted as it is to photos. Aesthetic appreciation of the picture motifs lay

behind the postcard's popularity in general, although they also had symbolic

purposes. The aesthetic dimension played a major role in its widespread use

for greetings, in its function as a souvenir from tourists and friends to

authenticate their journey and consequently as a type of status claimer and

friendship confirmer.

For some the postcard possessed an enormous popularity as a collectible and

people collecting things was a strong current in popular culture. In my teens

I collected stamps until the age of 21 or 22, but as far as I recall I was not a

collector of any other cultural items during my life. For a short period in the

early years of the 20th century the picture postcard eclipsed the world's

number one collectible, the postage stamp. The two latter uses—souvenir

and collectible—are closely entangled.

Even if communication was the raison d'être of picture postcards, they

seldom carried a substantial, linear message. New information was relatively

scarce—from the sender to the addressee. As a communication medium, the

27

card carried messages more or less void of information; they served mainly

as a sign of life and a reminder of social relationships. The picture postcard

was predominantly a carrier of what might be termed "activity-oriented"

communication, the purpose of which is to confirm, mobilize, or strengthen

social relationships main purpose of the cards. The cards functioned as

social glue, the exchange principle was immediate reciprocity. By the time I

came to write this autobiography photographs and images in general were

being transferred by the millions digitally on computers. Perhaps at a future

time I will go into this type of postcard and the multitude of images falling

before my eyes and the eyes of billions in our increasingly globalized

society. But this work is more autobiography than social analysis. Such is

my aim, not wholly achieved as any reader who has got this far will

recognize.

If Time magazine's nine New York-based photo editors can sift through

some 15,000 pictures a week, selecting about 125 for each issue,18 surely I

can sift through a lifetime of several hundred photos and select a few for

autobiographical use? The task is not difficult, but I question the relevance

of the process and that is what I discuss here in this brief essay. My task is

18 Caroline Howard, "Photographers at Work: Picking Shots," Columbia Journalism Review, July/August, 2002.

28

partly to distance myself from my own love of photographs in order to

reflect accurately on the images.19 This business of reflection is critical.

"Photography is a way for me to preserve the part of me that is only me,"

wrote Tipper Gore in her new book Picture This: A Visual Diary(Broadway

Books, 2004). Yes, Tipper, "a way, but only a small part of me."

I place these photographic images from 1908 onwards in various visual

categories and frameworks and, as I do, I place myself with the images in a

sort of photographic archive. And the photographs which flooded my world

after 1953 and which I now can view with ease and convenience in a series

of a dozen albums provide me with a reality that, for the most part, I can no

longer touch. There is a certain magic I experience as I look at these

pictures from my life in their quiet place on the bookshelf. They are, not so

much a place of images as they are a place of thoughts or, perhaps better, a

place of mnemonic devices. Indeed, their highest merit is their

suggestiveness, the suggestion of a beauty, a character, a place, which the

photo itself does not reveal but only suggests. It is as if a camera was

nervously clicking over the surface of my life and my job now is to piece

together, to paint, to translate from feeling to meaning and find some overall

19 Jim Roberts, "Introduction: Imagistic Information," Enculturation, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1998.

29

pattern in the kalaedoscope of images. It is as if, while the camera caught

fresh moments of my life, my task now is to keep a freshness of vision as I

write amidst a vast, a pervasive and immense incoherence, with impressions

always outstripping my capacity to analyse the data. I need to possess a

similar degree of sensitivity as the plates possess and the developing

equipment that photography requires to record my own impressions of life.

In 2009 I arrived at the age of 65 and my last particular photo album was

becoming filled to its maximum intake. People in my world had begun to

send me digital photos enough to fill this and future photograph albums to

overflowing. Those who could afford it, and who had the interest, in the

first years of this new millennium, had begun to make videos of their

family/personal lives; still others had telephones with visual images of the

person they were talking to. There were large screen TVs, computer

monitors, CDs, mini-discs, indeed, a cornucopia of new technology that was

making the old world of the photograph in an album, the idea of keeping

even the digital photo in an album, somewhat passe even declasse.20

20 One rarely sees this word, declasse--acute accent on the last e--in literature these days, but it seems applicable here; it means lowered in social significance, relevance and standing.

30

Time would tell just how I would respond to this change, this diversification,

this amplification, in the technology of photography that had insensibly

altered the rationale for the very existence of the old photo album. Photo

albums had been delighting the eye, had been part of my memorabilia, for

well nigh 60 years. As I write these words, six months after my 65 th

birthday, I have decided to continue to put digital photos in future albums on

the same basis as those photos from cameras that I and my family have been

doing since early in the 20th century. But I did not exercise this practice with

much diligence. Instead, I simply kept a section of my computer directory

for digital photos.

William Burroughs' writes in his novel Naked Lunch: “There is only one

thing a writer can write about and that is what is in front of his senses at the

moment of writing; he is a recording instrument. . . . he can not presume to

impose "story" "plot" "continuity". . . .21 For me the idea of what is in front

of my senses includes memory and imagination. In sum, I could refer to the

total package as my memorabilia. Story, plot and continuity are

unquestionably already there. I do not impose them. But I do recreate them.

The poet Robert Creeley writes about an approach to writing which gets

caught up in sidewindings, improvisations and analyses—and which began

21 William Burroughs in Robert Creeley, The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989.

31

back in the 1950s--as an example of “a loss of coherence in contemporary

American prose.” Many might see this same tendency in my autobiography

since I wander over many subjects in the landscape that is my life, my

society and my religion.

The following poem by John Wieners' "A Poem for Painters” expresses

the abstract aspect of this memorabilia so well. I have rewritten,

recrafted, this poem, but Wieners begins by saying that his poem

contains:

Only the score of a man’s struggle

to stay with what is his own,

what lies within him to do,

without which he is nothing.

I come to this same struggle

knowing the waste and leaving

the rest up to love and its often

twisted faces where my hands

often claw, sometimes touching

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tenderly and sometimes drawing

back as I see blood running there.

It is not the blood of my veins,

but some inner blood that knows

no colour, heat or cold, but has

coagulated for years twisting,

trying, clawing in a million hidden

ways that only some unknown me

some me that no one knows, yet,

is trying to acquire precise definition.

I found Frederika Shulman’s commentary on the film: Eternal Sunshine of

the Spotless Mind in the journal Philament a helpful one. Her article was

entitled: “The Objects of Memory: Collecting Eternal Sunshine,” and it was

useful in extending my thoughts on memorabilia. Shulman introduces her

essay, for it is an essay as much as a film review, with words from Walter

Benjamin: “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion

borders on the chaos of memories.”

33

As an autobiographer I am a collector of memories and this collection has

become, in some ways, a chaos of stuff. For Walter Benjamin his

collector’s passion was books. For Freud, it was antique fetish statues. For

Vladimir Nabakov it was butterflies. For each of us, our collection is

something different: a grandmother’s scrapbook, a father’s baseball card

collection. All these and more can amount to one’s own treasured forms of

memorabilia: records of the past and mementos, souvenirs of time spent and

relationships cherished in the form of collected objects. The urge to collect

the past is by no means a new one, yet it has only recently emerged as a

burgeoning academic discourse. It is a discourse that is grounded in the

interplay of material culture and memory studies and the recuperative

veneration of the study of everyday things. As I say, for me, these everyday

things in this memoir, are memories.

Objects of memory can serve as memorial sites. Pierre Nora(1931- ), a

French historian, says that such sites, such things or people or memoires,

have the power to enable the conflation of the past with the present time,

making lost moments visible once again. Alan Radley, a professor in social

psychology, says memory is a practice through which we “engage with the

material world.”[2] It is within this space that we recuperate the traces of

34

ourselves and of the past even if what we wish to do is forget about it; or, in

fact, erase it.

In the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) an effort is made

to eradicate all traces of the memory of someone’s girlfriend. One of the

characters undergoes a medical procedure to do just that. Objects play a

crucial role in the transmission of the past into the present and so they have

to be eliminated. These artifacts are imbued as agents of memory and as

markers of identity. These artefacts determine the intensity of the memories

associated with each item.

In his review of the film for the Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert suggests,

“at the end of the day, our memories are all we really have, and when they’re

gone, we’re gone.”[4] But is it really that simple? Memory is a sticky thing

and current theoretical consideration would argue it is not quite as prone to

simple, mechanistic ‘forgetting.’ So maybe then it is closer to Benjaminian

terms: memory is itself a process of conflation and construction, an idea

embraced in contemporary scholarly discourse.

In this sense, memory-making is performed consistently not so much in the

recollection of a thing itself, but in the recuperation of the sense of it; the

35

very essences inhabited in collected objects serve as far more than mere

repositories of memory transmission, but as actively engaged sites of

memory practice. As such, objects have the ability to serve as living

testaments to the liminal spaces of time, culture and personal and social

identities. In “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Benjamin, writing on Proust’s

notion of mémoire involontaire, posits that this construct can be understood

as a product of those “contents of the individual past” that serve to “combine

with material of the collective past.”[5] It is within this site of transmission

that memory can be located. What defines personal and collective being

becomes a marker of communal experience.

Timothy Robins points out that in the field of cultural studies memory is

often conceived as a “product of social processes whereby the past is

represented through cultural forms.”[6] For Pierre Nora these forms can be

recognized in such diverse documents as: artworks, souvenirs and

memorabilia. Nora further asserts that lieux de mémoire can be identified

only when they are imbued with “a symbolic aura” which in turn serves to

play a defining role in the ritual of memory.[7]

36

This ritual, as explicated in Benjamin, is derived from the notion that for the

collector “ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to

objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”[8]

Memories become manifest through our personal assemblage. As we engage

with the objects in our ‘relationship archive’ we realize that we often do not

in fact wish to proceed. These objects are part of relationships and to

remove them from our home is, as Kaufman writes, to remove “an emotional

core of our memories.”[9]

Without these reminders the process of forgetting can begin. “As we

eradicate this core, it starts the degradation process. By the time you wake

up in the morning, all memories that have been targeted will have withered

and disappeared.”[10] It is the absence of artefact that makes this process

possible. In this way it becomes clear that objects can be regarded as the

vehicles through which memories are communicated. As Benjamin notes,

“the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its

transmissibility.”[11] So maybe it is not really about forgetting at all, but a

certain kind of co-existence between what is and what was. As Steven

Johnson suggests in his essay about the film, maybe we should not be so

concerned about what we forget but rather, how much we remember.[12]

37

The power of objects is not merely contained in their ability to act as lieux

de mémoire.

Alfred Gell(1945-1997), a British social anthropologist, maintained that

agency is “attributable to those persons and things which are seen as

initiating causal sequences of a particular type, that is, events caused by acts

of mind of will or intention rather than the mere concatenation of

physical events. (13) In this way, social agents can be regarded as “the

source, the origin, of casual events, independently of the state of the physical

universe.”[14] In terms of objects, Gell notes, it is not so much that things

can act independently, but that they are necessarily fashioned by their

owner’s intentions.

In his posthumous Art and Agency (1998), Gell offers the

elegantly simple suggestion that objects be understood in a

manner analogous to social actors enmeshed in relationships

with other social actors. Social agency can be exercised

relative to ‘things’ and social agency can be exercised by

‘things’” (Gell 1998, 16 and 17–18).

38

Susan M. Pearce’s contention is that artifacts must be historically situated in

order to ascertain and maintain their relevancy to the present. In this way

they actually “accumulate meaning as time passes.”[15] Writing in 1994,

Pearce explores the example of a British infantry officer’s jacket on display

at the National Army Museum which she cites as a kind of souvenir:

“nostalgic, backward-looking and bitter sweet.... It serves, also, to sum up,

or make coherent in personal and small-scale terms, an important event” or a

personal narrative.[16]

For Pearce, the red coatee worn by Lieutenant Henry Anderson during the

battle of Waterloo serves to contextualize the historical moment from which

it derives. It is the very personal nature of its connotations that keeps it

relevant today. Likewise, it can be argued that personal moments and

mementos are similarly engaged through peoples’ collected items. What

distinguishes these sites of memory as agents is the process by which

otherwise insignificant things are imbued with personality.

Artifacts can transmit who and what we are via social and cultural myths,

memories and practices. Even if such objects are relegated to the status of

repository of memory they necessarily convey a history much larger than

39

themselves. Artifacts thus bear witness to the past and define our notions of

the present. But we must be forewarned: even if we remove the imbued

object from the equation, memories can be recuperated by their re-

contextualization in the present.

Another observation Pearce makes about the Lieutenant’s jacket proves

highly relevant. The coatee, she notes, serves a “metonymic function” for

the actual battle.[17] Yet, as Pearce indicates, unlike individuals, artefacts

transcend time. They do not die and, therefore, they retain an “‘eternal’

relationship to the receding past, and it is this that we experience as the

power of the ‘actual object’.”[18] In this way, the significance of the jacket

is perpetuated in the memory of the witnesses of the events and their

descendants, long after the battle.

This complex relationship forms “part of an ever-shifting flux of experience

which was passed on as an inheritance to their successors.”[19] From this

operation, we can glean how physical markers of experience in the form of

things are not only metamorphosed into the communicative technologies of

memory but moreover serve to broaden the scope of recollections

themselves as transmuted from the personal realm to that of social memory.

40

As Pearce suggests, “Put in historical terms, the experience of Waterloo, in

all its guises and including its physical souvenirs, becomes part of the

collective consciousness.”[20] It is within these objects, these sites of

transmission, that the past conflates with the present in order to be collected

as markers of memory. It is here that the liminal spaces of individual identity

and culture are negotiated.

Traversing this domain of flux, objects as sites and agents of memory can

also be understood as purveyors of identity. According to Pearce, “In a

world of objects, different people will take different things into their hearts

and minds.” [21] What is important for some will not be for others. As

Benjamin notes, “One has only to watch a collector handle the objects in his

glass case. As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through

them into their distant past as though inspired.”[22] Similarly, James

Clifford observes that objects and their collections have long served as “a

strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture and

authenticity.”[23]

41

In other words, collecting is a small way in which to make the world our

own; or perhaps, usurp someone else’s world. Susan Stewart maintains,

“The collection does not displace attention to the past; rather, the past is at

the service of the collection, for whereas the souvenir lends authenticity to

the past, the past lends authenticity to the collection.”[26] Furthermore,

Stewart contends that within the space of the collection, all time becomes

accessible.[27]

As Stewart notes in her comparison of collecting to other forms of art, its

function “is not the restoration of context of origin but rather the creation of

a new context, a context standing in a metaphorical, rather than a

contiguous, relation to the world of everyday life.”[28] In this way objects

allow identity to be encoded as a means of accessing the past and a way in

which to re-create his world.

Whether as a site, agent, or purveyor of memory, objects and the collections

they comprise serve to inform us of the past in the present and communicate

identities. Memory is a liminal space, made possible through a process of

construction and conflation. In Eternal Sunshine artefacts as sites of

memory seek to transmit the past, enact their own agency and establish

42

identity. Collections of objects are often the key to the process of

transformation: for it is not simply an archive of the past, but it serves to

actively engage it. Here, objects become the open books of memory that

enable us to access the past in the present and to remember even if we would

rather not.

----------------FOOTNOTES FOR THE ABOVE ARTICLE-------------------

[1] Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book

Collecting,” in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin: Essays and Reflections,

Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans. (New York: Schocken Books, 1988),

p. 60.

[2] Alan Radley, “Artefacts, Memory, and a Sense of the Past,” in

Collective Remembering, David Middleton and Derek Edwards, eds.

(London: Sage, 1990), p. 47.

[3] Charlie Kaufman, “The Shooting Script,” Eternal Sunshine of the

Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script, Intro. Michel Gondry, Newmarket

Press, NY, 2004), p. 35.

[4] Roger Ebert, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Chicago Sun

Times, 19 March 2004. Available online at:

http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2004/03/031904.html.

[5] Walter Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations, p.159.

43

[6]Timothy Robins, “Remembering the Future: The Cultural Study of

Memory,” in Theorizing Culture: An Interdisciplinary Critique After

Post-Modernism, Barbara Adam and Stuart Allan, eds., New York

University Press, NY, 1995), p. 201.

[7] Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,”

Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Volume I, Arthur

Goldhammer, trans., Columbia University Press, NY, 1996, p. 1 & p. 14.

[8] Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” op.cit., p. 67.

[9] Kaufman, op.cit. p.38.

[10] idem

[11] Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” op.cit. p.66.

[12] Steven Johnson, “The Science of Eternal Sunshine: You Can’t Erase

Your Boyfriend From Your Brain, but the Movie Gets the Rest of it Right,”

in Slate, 22 March 2004. Available from http://slate.msn.com/id/2097502/.

[13] Ross Bowden, “A Critique of Alfred Gell on Art and Agency, Oceania,

June, 2004.

[14] idem

[15] Susan M. Pearce, “Objects as Meaning; or Narrating the Past,” in

Interpreting Objects and Collections, Susan M. Pearce, ed. (London:

Routledge, 1994), 19.

44

[16] ibid., p.20.

[17] ibid., p. 25.

[18] idem

[19] idem

[20] idem

[21] Susan M. Pearce, “The Urge to Collect,” Interpreting Objects and

Collections, op.cit., p. 157.

[22] Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” p. 61.

[23] James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” The Predicament of

Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Harvard

University Press, London, 1988, p. 218.

[24] Kaufman, op.cit., p.62.

[25] ibid., p. 63.

[26] Susan Stewart, “Objects of Desire,” in Interpreting Objects and

Collections, Susan M. Pearce, ed., Routledge, London, 1994, p. 254.

[27] ibid., p. 254.

---------------------------------------

This examination of the subject of memorabilia is incomplete but a start has

been made to the issues surrounding it. These remarks will serve, for now,

as a concluding word in this autobiography.

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