Earth, Africa, Apollo 11
As long ago as a couple of decades I thought of creating a literary journal named “The Globe,” but the time never seemed right, and I knew the required effort would interfere with my own study and writing. Being a very solitary individual and writer, I knew too I did not possess the gregariousness and patience needed to draw together a group of people of similar worldview, literary, artistic, political, and so on, that a publication must have. From very early as a writer, I realized I was largely on my own. Only Robert Hayden and I were able to understand one another, and even then I felt he failed to confront many issues of the highest import, especially in terms of the Baha’i Faith and its cultural and historical implications, especially its fanaticism, hidden out of view from the general public and even most Baha’is. The few other young Baha’i would-be artists I knew or heard of were hopelessly naive and incapable of independent thought and reflection. They had drunk the Kool-Aid, as proffered, nescient of the actual history of Abdul-Baha in the West. There were no other people of sympathetic vision, aesthetic, moral, spiritual, political, in terms of the United Nations or a cooperative body like it, to which I could turn and work together to create “The Globe.” The prevailing literary ethos of nihilism, as always, was entirely closed off in its conventional assumptions.
So I continued on my way. Solitude, study, reading and confronting the masters, wavering between the deepest ravages of self-doubt and despair and the exhilaration of vision and inspiration, writing as I could, struggling year after year to find and chart a different course, one true to my experience of life, attempting to embrace all of humanity, or as much of it as I might reach.
And now a new form comes along, over the last several years or decade, now well established, and the time is right for me to turn to and use it, enabling me to pick back up, as it were, in electronic form, the writer’s journal I left off from nearly thirty years ago, back then, after a decade of writing one. Perhaps this is The Globe I’ve wanted for so many years. And a way to speak to humankind.
