Wordsworth's 'Dreaming' and Mine: A Synchronicity...here I compare and contrast a sort of dreaming in my life and Wordsworth's
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Through a close reading of Wordsworth’s first autobiographical sketches made in his late twenties and dating from October 1798 through April 1799, one can demonstrate how Wordsworth creatively remembered his childhood. The context of this memory was in terms of the development of the powers of his imagination. In this six month period we find Wordsworth's earliest autobiographical attempt to trace the ontogeny of his imagination back to the dream state, to play, and to perceptual and conceptual blending.

I did not engage in such a serious tracing of my childhood until my early sixties. But I profited from one of the first attempts at poetic autobiography in Wordsworth’s The Prelude. It is interesting that Wordsworth's poetic and autobiographical efforts coincided with the earliest years of Shaykh Ahmad's sense of his "unerring vision", his "fixed purpose" and his "crushing responsibilities" associated as they were with a new Revelation.


I could add the results of cognitive neuroscience, drawing on memory research, sleep research, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, to add an evolutionary history of fictional cognition to my own autobiography as Wordsworth did to the origin and development of his work. An accurate, honest and successful unfolding of the imagination, one could argue, is only possible when accompanied by adequate monitoring systems. An author must possess the capacity to distinguish between what originates in his perception and what is the response of his memory. The resulting tapestry must be sufficiently complex to permit the formulation of a hypothesis about the self which may not be scientifically tested but at least possess some sweet reasonableness.


In a commentary on this first period of composition Wordsworth wrote that his autobiographical self-as-being arose as a virus within his source monitoring system. This investigation by Wordsworth of his early years is a complex one and I don’t want to go into any more detail here. I find the same is true of the origins of my own imaginative function: its unfolding is complex. And the monitoring systems that existed at the time of its earliest unfolding are difficult to trace. I hope that readers find here at least some of that sweet reasonableness even if I do not elaborate on the theme I have introduced here dealing with imagination and memory.

When I say that my life has been full of joy and sorrow I do not see this as an apparent contradiction but simply as a reality of all our lives. If I analyse my life I can divide it into 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. The whole of life, when analysed in respect to these emotions, could be seen as contradictory and paradoxical. The nature of the reality of our lives is to deal with these endless polarities. Like an oyster we must do what we can to heal the ugly wounds of life by turning life's grains of sand into beautiful pearls. Much has been written about these polarities of life and I do not want to add to the philosophical library here.


Biologists estimate that there are about 5 to 100 million species of organisms living on Earth today. Evidence from morphological, biochemical, and gene sequence data suggests that all organisms on Earth are genetically related, and the genealogical relationships of living things can be represented by a vast evolutionary tree, the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life then represents the phylogeny of organisms, that is, the history of organismal lineages as they change through time. It implies that different species arise from previous forms via descent, and that all organisms, from the smallest microbe to the largest plants and vertebrates, are connected by the passage of genes along the branches of the phylogenic tree that links all of Life. In the broadest of senses, then, my autobiography would be one encompassing all of life. I must, of necessity here, limit my analysis and discussion.


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; their view of reality can be distorted. Imagination is a great power and a difficult one to rule. While that is not my desire, my autobiography may in the end be just a slippery slope in the direction of idel fancies, vain imagination, discontent and disorientation. Good intentions, as they say and as I have said before, 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 some of the best writers and the greatest wisdoms right off their radar. I, too, am not immune from this experience. In the end, of course, one writes and sends one’s 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 people’s sense of self, something that crushes their identity. In some ways, at least for me, alignment is "the pen's obedience to a line already traced in the mind, if not on the page."


It seems to me that, in some respects, I am completely unable to write anything about much that is quintessential in life, nor will I ever be able. For, as Baha’u’llah writes, "myriads of mystic tongues find utterances in one speech and how many are the mysteries concealed in a single melody but, alas, there is no ear to hear nor heart to understand." The garment of words can only contain so much. There is much knowledge that can not be put into words like the content of many of the arts and sciences. Mysticism itself finds its origins in this notion. No sensible man will venture to express some of his deepest thoughts in words, especially in a form which is unchangeable. So much that is said and thought here is as potentially changeable as the wind which blows and the clouds which change their patterns in the sky from minute to minute and hour to hour. A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living, as Virginia Woolf once said.
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There is a remarkable but simply coincidental temporal synchronicity between the sequence that led to Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem and my poetic autobiography. During the harsh winter of 1798-1799 Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in Goslar and despite extreme stress and loneliness he began work on his autobiographical poem The Prelude. During the southern hemisphere winter of 1999 I retired from full-time work to write full-time and work on my autobiography, the first edition of which I had completed in 1993. In 1793 Wordsworth published his first poetry in his collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. In 2003/4 I began expanding my work and in 2004 I sent an 800 page edition to the Baha’i World Centre Library. In 1804 Wordsworth began expanding his autobiographical work. By 2005 I had completed the 5th edition of my work as Wordsworth did his work 200 years before in 1805. He continued to work on The Prelude until his death in 1850 and it was my intention to do the same until my passing whenever that might be. The Prelude, it is often said, was the single most important British nineteenth-century poem as far as academic English has been concerned.