Jazz and Autobiography

[RonPrice]

This emphasis on and use of the tangential is evident in much fiction: Joyce, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner are obvious examples. The narrative line has tended to weaken, merge with, and be dominated by, the sum of variations. This is also true in much autobiography. Each narrative step in a great deal of modern writing is likely to provoke many sidewinding pages before the next narrative step is taken. A lot of the power of many writers is to be found in these sidewindings. In addition, a writer’s side-glances or, as Emily Dickinson called the process, 'looking aslant on the world', are equally important. What happens in jazz when the melody merges with the improvisations and the improvisations dominate has been happening in fiction and autobiography for some time now.

This is certainly true in both my autobiography and my poetry. There is some narrative in my autobiography and there is a sense of continuity which is clear, but there are also variations, improvisations, sidewindings, side-glances and impulses from within. These variations, I know from experience, are too much for many readers. But as in daily life, one can not connect with everyone.

There is another element of this memoir that some readers may have trouble connecting with. That is its epic quality. I see this work as an epic in its own right and as a small part in a much bigger epic involving the origin and development of the Baha’i Faith and its community.

"All historical epics," as Benjamin Friedlander notes in his analysis of Bahá’í poet Robert Hayden's epic, "are first of all affirmations of community." While there is affirmation here, my rendition of epic is more a simple preoccupation with a continuing historical tradition which I played a part of during four epochs. Like Hayden's America and his failed attempt at an epic of the Negro comunity, my epic rendering of community--the Bahá’í community--is, partly, a problem with many algebraic variables but no one solution. I do not see my work as either failure or success but, rather, work in progress/process. This work and my life has been captive by the fascination of those things, mixed of light and darkness, that are the passing phenomena of this spacially and temporally conditioned universe of names and forms that I have absorbed in my life. The shaping force of civilization is lived experience and at the heart of this epic is just that: inner experience--mine, peculiar and private, at a particular juncture in history. Community is problematic, enigmatic and the sine qua non of this memoir. But I can't help but agree with the sentiments of Joseph Campbell when he says: "each individual is the centre of a mythology of his own." As Baha'u'llah says, we each must find for ourselves the indwelling God, the Thou at the centre of our world--and the crossover, for the Bahá’í, the cornerstone of community, is symbolized by Baha'u'llah.

Many historians make of their work, the content of their work, an epic. Herodotus, to continue drawing on his history, makes of the Persian wars a great epic. These wars are for him a “struggle between barbarism and civilization projecting this back into events long after they occurred.” The Baha’i epic is ideally suited to be the screenplay for a Cecil B. DeMille epic film, but it will be some time before the Baha’i narrative is seen in this context of epic. My own view is that the entire history of this Faith, beginning with the lives of its two precursors reads uncannily like a dramatic presentation of history on celluloid. But I leave that for future directors, producers and cinematographers.

[RonPrice]

It has been more than two years since I posted this item on Jazz and Autobiography and, since noone has responded, I will add a further item which may interest some readers at this site or on the internet generally.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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SOME OF THE "flotsam and jetsam" IN MY COLLECTIONS
OF LETTERS, NOTEBOOKS, INTER ALIA

Many of the more famous jazz musicians have “dossiers” that is collections of memorabilia. The following article reminded me of the possible dossiers of the greats in the jazz world in the last century.
This evening I came across the following article: "Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp: In Resonance---The Duchamp Dossier." I found the article in an electronic journal on the internet. The journal was called Other Voices, the issue was September 1998. The "dossier" was on display as part of The Menil Collection in Houston Texas USA from January 22 to May 16, 1999. These were the last days of my full-time employment as a teacher after 30 years in the profession. These were the last months before I began to organize my own "dossier" after forty years as a Bahá’í. Since the "dossier" discussed in Other Voices had similarities to my own massive dossier, opus, oeuvre, or at least to some of the material in my collection of letters and notebooks, I drew on that article to write the following:
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The expatriate Frenchman Marcel Duchamp met the American artist Joseph Cornell in New York in the early 1930s. In the early 1940s Duchamp engaged Cornell to assist him in assembling the deluxe editions of Duchamp's new project, the miniature "museum" of his work, commonly referred to as the Boîte-en-valise. At this time Cornell also began to formally assemble his Duchamp Dossier, a work that contains 118 items ranging from Mona Lisa postcards, dry-cleaning receipts, and correspondence, to Boîte-en-valise fragments, readymades, and a study by Duchamp for his Allégorie de Genre. Cornell's Duchamp Dossier thus provides a particularly rich source of insight into both artists' creative lives during several crucial decades.

I'm not sure what would be put in, say, a miniature dossier, a special collection, a set of memorabilia that might stand out quite separately from the general run-of-the-mill of the resources and materials in my files. I would leave that to some executor, some collector, some archivist, etc. if such a thing was desired. I would not even entertain the idea were it not for the significance of the embryonic Bahá’í Order I have been associated with for some 56 years. I write this in anticipation that there may just be some significance in all this paper, a significance I can scarcely appreciate at this early hour in the historical process.

The Duchamp Dossier (c. 1942-53) was discovered in Cornell's studio shortly after his death in 1972. Unlike many of his other dossiers, this one was never shown publicly and remained unpublished in Cornell's lifetime. Cornell compiled most of the material for the Dossier during the years 1942 to 1946, although it includes some items from the 1930s and 1950s.

Were my collection, compiled at various times in my pioneer life, 1962 to 2009, to be discovered and gathered into a separate place, a special dossier, it might possess: lists of articles and internet sites, parking tickets; domestic notes from my wife and son, to do lists, advice pieces from: my wife to me, to my son and me to them; instructions on how to do a,b or c; Bahá’í agendas, newspaper clippings from friends---and on and on this itemized pot pourri might go.

Many items in the Dossier document discussed in this article included: Duchamp's written requests for more Boxes and an improvised receipt based on the cover of a Long Island Railroad conductor's booklet. Individual elements of Duchamp's Box-in-Valise, the reproductions of his early paintings, for example, can also be found in the Duchamp Dossier.

Cornell was an avid correspondent and the Dossier derives much of its flavor from the postal system: stamps, telegrams and postcards, for example. We find several communications from Duchamp, a note from the art dealer Julien Levy, and remnants of envelopes bearing intriguing return addresses such as that of the artist Piet Mondrian. A group of nine letters from Mary Reynolds, Duchamp's longtime companion, reveals her own close friendship with Cornell and her delight in the works of art that Cornell sold and gave to her. With typical brevity, Duchamp relied on a postcard to inform Cornell of his imminent departure from New York at the end of the war: "Au revoir / affecteusement / Marcel." I, too, have my postal items, communications to an odd-assortment of people and brief responses from me to a wide collection of individuals.

The above short amended article, drawing heavily as it does on the article in Other Voices, conveys a context for the substance of some of the flotsam and jetsam of my paper world and I leave it to some future person and future time to give whatever order, whatever place, it deserves, if any.

Ron Price, Tasmania