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Abstract:
The first poem that I wrote was at the start of my pioneering life in 1962, but I did not keep any of my poems until 1980. I now have 27 years of poetry in my collection. The poetry here is from the 25th year of this collection of poetry--2005.
Notes:
With this most recent year of writing poetry, it takes to over 6000 the number of poems and two million words(circa). I began to write poetry with more regularity in 1989 and have been writing poetry at a rate of slightly more than one poem per day for some 17 years. My main style is what I call prose-poetry. I have little published poetic work except on internet sites like this one.
Crossreferences:
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Section VIII-Poetry
| After 30 years of writing occasional pieces of poetry(1962-1992), I have now written poetry for 13 years much more extensively and intensively(1993-2005). The poetry here comes from just one year, 2005. It does not represent all the poetry I wrote that year. I hope, in the months and years ahead, to place all the poetry I wrote each year in the respective location at BARL. THIS RISING VITALITY Local Spiritual Assemblies are responding to the fresh demands of this rising vitality.-The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message,April 2004. I have quoted the above words from the Ridvan Message 2004 and it is within this context that I present these booklets of poems to your Assembly and your Baha’i community some forty-two years after pioneering with my mother and father to the nearby town of Dundas. In August 1962, in the last months of the Ten Year Crusade, my mother and father, Lillian and Fred Price, who had become Baha’is during that Ten Year Crusade, moved to Dundas enabling my mother to be closer to her work at McMaster University and enabling the Dundas Baha’i community to form its Local Spiritual Assembly. As it turned out it was my mother’s last year at the University where she had served as a secretary in the Overseas Students Department under a Dr. Duckworth. At least that is how I recall things forty-two years later. My parents remained in Dundas until 1965. That year my father died aged 70 and my mother moved to Hamilton where she died in 1978 at the age of 74. It is not my intention in this introduction to outline the story of my parents’ experiences nor my own as a homefront and international pioneer. I have done that briefly in the attached resumes. I think the story is an interesting one and I have written an 800 page account that is now in the Baha’i World Centre Library. I send you this booklet of poetry in memory of happy times in the Burlington Baha’i community. We all have our individual Baha’i histories and each community has its history. I would like these poems to be seen as a contribution to the Baha’i history of Burlington, as an expression of some of the experiences of a Burlington Baha’i youth from the 1950s and early 1960s who went on to serve the Cause as a pioneer from that community. If these poems could be placed in your Baha’i library I would feel as if a small piece of me is left to posterity, one of the thousands upon thousands of achievements by individual Baha’is from the twentieth century which ‘Abdu’l-Baha Himself said would leave “traces” which would “last forever.”1 1 ‘Abdu’l-Baha in The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, 1995. Ron Price August 20th 2004. 1953 AND 1957: TWO VERY BIG YEARS The famous playwright, Arthur Miller(1915-2005), said in an interview on ABC Radio National just a few months before his death that he ‘barely had room in his head for a thought’1 in the years before university which he began at the age of 19 in 1934. He began to see himself as a writer from about the age of twenty. This statement of Miller’s made me reflect on the origins of the conception of myself as a writer and more especially as a poet. In 1984, at the age of 40, the idea had some reality after perhaps two decades of a slow awakening, an insensible embryogenesis. By the age of 50 in 1994 I had written more than a thousand poems. I had begun to see myself as a poet. -Ron Price with thanks to Arthur Miller on ‘LNL,’ ABC Radio National, 10:20-11:00 p.m., February 14th 2005. Surely that puts it too strongly and not that accurately, Arthur? Surely your brain was as busy as a beaver in those entre des guerres years? But there was no fertilization, crystallization, at least not yet. Perhaps it came unobtrusively, slowly in all those part-time jobs, with your school-teacher mother, your dad’s failed business in ladies’ coats and in Public School #24 in that poor part of New York--Harlem. Perhaps you really took off in ’36-’37 right at the start of that Seven Year Plan when a painfully small band of pioneers was dispatched through the Americas and became a foundation for flourishing communities all over the world--so slowly-- or so it always seemed to us in these epochs. And you kept going and we kept going right into the new millennium with some crucial points along the way: like The Crucible in ’53 right at the start of the Kingdom of God on earth-- little did you know; or in ’57 when Death of a Salesman went to a mass audience on ITA and that hard-working little man who had worn himself out under a mountain of work--died in London. Ron Price February 15th 2005 VALENTINE’S DAY--ICONS On this Valentine’s Day it is appropriate that I write of Charlie Chaplin one of the most loved figures of the twentieth century. Chaplin began to fit comfortably into Baha’i history in the last decade of the Heroic Age, 1911-1921. Chaplin was making them laugh back then and after sixty years of the Formative Age, 1921-1981, a statue of him was erected near that of Shakespeare in London. In 1936, as the American Baha’is began conceiving and devising their first Seven Year Plan(1937-1944), Chaplin produced one of his more famous films Modern Times. It was a comment on the machine age and the limitations of technology. Over more than half a century, 1914 to 1966, the years of his first and last films, Chaplin became an icon. It was an icon that was constructed down to the finest detail. This icon was constructed in a process that expanded and penetrated more and more with the years. At the core of this Chaplinesque iconography was an anti-establishment little fellow who was always in trouble: The Tramp. -Ron Price with thanks to Internet Sites on Charlie Chaplin, February 14th 2005. There’s icons and icons, eh Charlie? I’ve been helping construct one for over half a century, too, Charlie. No technicolour manipulation, cinematography, no digital, DVD, four-speaker, blow them out of the ball-park stuff here, Charlie, although I guess I must confess in recent years, Charlie, say since about ’63 when the apex was finally placed on this new Order, this nucleus and pattern of a new System, that technology has been coming on-line, well--- its everywhere, eh Charlie, at least in the rich part of the world. Yes, icons are everywhere now and we’ve got ours all over the world, too. But still Charlie, we can’t edit our lives so as to emerge in celluloid safety with that toothpaste-ad smile finish. You can only take an icon so far, Charlie: mothers still go crazy, husbands and wives they still split-up, millions still die in wars no matter how smooth the image, eh Charlie, eh?1 1 Chaplin became a very rich man, but there was much sadness in his private life. A recent series on ABC TV( February 6th & 13th, 5:00-5:50 pm, 2005) touched lightly upon the private aspects of Chaplin’s life. Ron Price February 14th 2005 THE SCREAM About 10 weeks before Baha’u’llah passed away the expressionist painter Edvard Munch began one of our age’s most famous works: The Scream. Munch says in his dairy that “he heard this scream from nature.” He almost collapsed from the fright it instilled in him. And so was born this painting The Scream. It was not exhibited until December 1893. The painting was part of a set of eight known as The Frieze of Life(1892-1906). Munch says that The Frieze was his life, its dance, its pathos. This series of Munch’s paintings is imbued with an existential angst, with his convulsive, tortuous existence. He undresses himself before the public emotionally; he reveals his deepest pains. His work portrays a ruthless self-revelation, a dark inner world. Munch’s philosophy was to paint life, his own life, as he lived it, as the direct expression of his experience. Painting was the result, for Munch, of his innermost needs, his innermost experiences. As I look back at Munch, his work and his philosophy of art, I see much that is present in the poetry of my time, other poets and my poetry as well. My poetry is confessional, at least mildly so compared to Munch’s; it is experiential, an examination of my relationships, an examination of my imagination, my life, my loves and a range of existential questions that concern me. I try to portray the impact, the strengthening, the creative effect of my psychic illness. In the process of Munch’s painting and my poeticizing both our inner lives and our age is expressed from some inner necessity and, hopefully, for the pleasure of others.-Ron Price with thanks to “Internet Sites on Edvard Munch,” and “The Private Life of A Masterpiece,” ABC TV, February 6th, 2005, 11:00-11:50 p.m. The dissolution of His tabernacle where His soul abided temporarily, released from life’s restrictions, His radiance no longer clouded by the world and all that is therein, His soul could now energize existence more than ever before.1 Was this prophetic---the scream of release, of the world’s travail, of the tempest that was unleashed, of my angst and his and his and his, of a billion dead, unprecedented, of a suffering, catastrophic, humanity bleeding in a devastating, unimaginable death, then in 1892--and now as we still deal with the resistless fury of a great and mighty wind of God invading our remotest inner life, humankind’s fairest places, rocking its foundations, wasting all that is its life and light and harrowing up the very souls of its inhabitants in all their wretchedness and fear? 1 Baha’u’llah passed away on May 29th 1892 while Munch was working on his painting The Scream. Ron Price February 7th 2005 ARRANGEMENTS The history of the first century of literature in Australia written by Baha’is will not be written by me. This is partly because there are fifteen years left in the first century but, more importantly, I do not have the resources to go about the exercise, the inclination to acquire the resources nor the desire to write such an important work. The emergence, the evidence, of a Baha’i consciousness in the literature produced in Australia, in the literary and poetic tradition of the Baha’i community here has, for the most part, a historical significance more than it has great literary value. Australia was a difficult problem to the first settlers here; the physical and social conditions, the strangeness and weirdness of things and the psychological climate on this continent daunted and repelled the settlers in the first century of Australia’s history, 1788-1888. The Baha’is in their first century, from 1920 to 2020, experienced a similar and dissimilar problem to those early settlers. Laying the foundation for a poetry written by Baha’is and seeing a Baha’i consciousness emerge in poetry and prose, was one that was slow, periodic, complex and one that required several epochs and generations.-Ron Price with thanks to Judith Wright, “ Australian Poetry To 1920,” The Literature of Australia, editor, Geoffrey Dutton, Penguin Books Ltd., 1972(1964), pp.55-90. I write of man in all his aspects, under the garment of eternity, obsessed as I am with the passion for a synoptic view, a unity in multiplicity, amplitude of reference over four epochs in these days of the ninth and tenth stages of history when a charismatic Force was finally institutionalized and I grew from my teens and its frenzied youth into an old man with a serenity, a melancholy a charm, a love of the Muse, a withdrawal, a joy to learn and to understand the very different views, arrangements and human ways expressed in an autobiographical style. Ron Price February 2, 2005. GETTING OFF ON THE RIGHT FOOT Three weeks after my pioneering life began Rudolph Nureyev danced at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London. In June, just before I left Burlington, my hometown, for Dundas just ten miles away, Nureyev danced for the first time on TV. He danced with Dame Margot Fonteyn, the preeminent ballerina in the West, in a BBC production called Music In Camera. Nureyev performed Le Corsaire, the first time this ballet had been performed in Western Europe. His explosive run onto the stage was described as follows: “pale and sinuous, his flying hair surmounted by a single feather in a gold circlet.” And again, critic Alexander Bland continued, “sensuously slow-springed landings, enormous twistings, a mingled arrogance and humility” Nureyev produced with Margot Fonteyn “one of the iconic images of the twentieth century.” 1962 was a milestone year for Nureyev, for the male dancer and for the most famous dance partnership of my time. Nureyev brought ballet to a mass public. More than forty years later, we are still cheering.-Ron Price with thanks to the Internet Sites on Rudolph Nureyev,” January 30, 2005. A virtuoso dancer, born on a train, they say, defected in ’61, the year before my life as a pioneer began, when he was getting warmed up with his first performance in London, when I was still getting warmed-up for my life--dancing a different dance to a different drummer, on a different stage, to different music, with none of the celebrity, renoun or glamour. He came out into film and autobiography and I went into pioneering that year---’62. I was just as much in need of a repertoire, a discipline, an energy, an understanding, a direction, a vision, a spiritual home, a groundwork for my future, my journey. I, too, would have my positions, my succeses, my performances, my touring, my excitement, my fulfillment, my pain, mysturm und grund, my decline in stamina, my change in career, my fresh new direction, my immense airborne thrusts, my utter commitment, my conflict over sexuality, my difficult temperament, my one trip back home and my tireless work: always there was the work, often difficult, often joyful. Ron Price January 30th 2005. 1909 WAS A VERY BIG YEAR! The year ‘Abdu’l-Baha was set free from prison, 1908, the famous ballet dancer Nijinsky was introduced to Sergei Diaghilev, the noted dance patron and member of the Russian nobility. Diaghilev took a group of Russian dancers and singers to Paris in the spring of 1909. Nijinsky was the principle dancer of the troupe. Their first performance was on May 17th 1909. Fifty-seven days after the Bab’s remains were entombed on Mt. Carmel, the ballet world in Paris was taken by storm--by Nijinsky’s technical skills, the expression and beauty of his body, his steel-like strength and featherweight-lightness, his great elevation and incredible gift for rising and seeming to remain in the air. The Ballets Russes was born part of whose aim was to unify dance, music and painting through the medium of ballet. The West had seen the greatest ballet dancer in history. -Ron Price with thanks to DanceWorks, 2001-2004. While You sobbed aloud that day, while You slept not-at-all that night, a troupe of singers and dancers were heading for Paris and half a world away the site was chosen for the construction of that Temple. The roots of faith in the west and the roots of ballet were watered with a vision and energy, a showmanship and iconoclasm without which a new history could not have been rewritten. My mother was five that year and my father fourteen; my grandparents had just had three children who have flowered into my extended family in Canada in the last century; the Canadian department of external affairs was also formed that year Christopher Brennan was recording in poetry one of the few mystical perceptions of creation written in that remote dry land after Baha’u'llah’s passing: 1909-- it was a very big year! Ron Price SEND IN THE CLOWNS: 1 In the generation that was born as the Baha’i Administrative Order was taking its first shaping in those hiatus years 1917 to 1937, the years before the implementation of the first teaching Plan in 1937, Stephen Sondheim was, arguably, consider as the greatest Broadway composer and lyricist. Born in 1930, Sondheim’s first significant work was for West Side Story in 1957. A song from Sondheim’s repertoire that had the biggest impact on me was ‘Send In The Clowns’ which premiered with the musical ‘A Little Night Music’ in 1973. I think I first heard that song in Melbourne in 1975. The story this song was based on was originally set in Sweden in 1900 and Send In The Clowns was sung “as two former lovers once again split up.”1 At the time, my own personal life seemed a perfect analogue for this song. This prose-poem explores my life, Sondheim’s work and the Baha’i Faith in my teens and before. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 “The Songs of Shirley Bassey: Send In The Clowns,” Internet Site, January 2005. Your beautiful writing, Stephen, may not have been so accessible, but it was there for my generation, the first in this final, this tenth stage of history right from your delights-- West Side Story and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum in those years when I was getting warmed up for this pioneering life, getting a kick start back in Ontario back at the beginning of this dream, when a tiny seed was planted, when minor virtues were garnered in that sweeter time and those now nurtured imperfections are not seen as so epically egregious to embarrass the seraphim ruefully yawning at their mention, nor will that shame, as once I thought, topple the cities and arrest the sun’s daily climb.1 1 Thanks to Roger White, “Lines From A Battlefield,” Another Song Another Season, George Ronald, Oxford, 1979, p.111. Ron Price WRITING HISTORY Even the First World War, despite all setbacks, meant a vast expansion for Winston Churchill as both politician and writer. In his historical works the personal and the factual elements have been intimately blended. He knows what he is talking about, well at least sometimes, like everyone else. In gauging the dynamics of events, his profound experience is unmistakable. He is the man who has himself been through the fire, taken risks, and withstood extreme pressure. This gives his words a vibrating power. Occasionally, perhaps, the personal side gets the upper hand. In my poetic idion the personal often gets the upper hand. Balfour called The World Crisis (1923-29) “Winston's brilliant autobiography, disguised as world history.” I would like to be able to say the same of my work, but this is far from the case. With all due respect to archives and documents, there is something special about history written by a man who has himself helped to make it. Churchill was obviously a big player in the game of history and I am one of the billions of ordinarily ordinary, humanly human, two-bit men and women on the scene whose names are for the most part lost to history. -Ron Price with thanks to S. Siwertz, “Presentation Speech for the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature,”in Nobel Lectures, Literature: 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969. In the search for an adequate perspective, a context in which to examine what it was all about; in trying to define the dynamics of the events of my life and times; in my attempt, too, to give my words a vibrating power as they play with salutary truths in their fluid and elastic blend of the personal and the factual, I exude a fundamental gravity1 and a touch of humour absorbed in the Antipodes or, perhaps, in was in my genes, half amused, once appauled, turning frequent somersaults between so many antitheses to get the mode, the manner, the tone, the note, just right, in an atmosphere of pleasure, finding and mastering many of life’s surprises and also getting beaten again and again. 1 Some ideas borrowed here from Siwertz’s contrast between G.B. Shaw and W. Churchill. Ron Price January 19th 2005 WHEREIN LIES GREATNESS? In his great work about his ancestor, Marlborough, Churchill writes, “Words are easy and many, while great deeds are difficult and rare.” Yes, but great, living and persuasive words are also difficult and rare. And Churchill has shown that they too can take on the character of great deeds.1 I have been involved for over half a century with the Baha’i Faith which itself possesses an immense greatness. Any greatness imputed to me as an individual is only the result of my association with this great Cause. “Great is the blessedness of him that hath hearkened to its shrill voice, as it was raised, through the power of truth, before all who are in heaven and all who are on earth.......O people of Baha,”wrote Baha’u’llah and, in another context, Shoghi Effendi wrote that a “great destiny”3 beckoned the believers. 1S. Siwertz, “Presentation Speech,” The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953; 2 Baha’u’llah in Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, p.76; and 3Shoghi Effendi, Dawn of a New Day, p.119. Great is the blessedness of him that hath drawn nigh unto this fire and heard its roaring, drawn nigh unto it through a grace which strengthens. Will I, then, be guided to that which will exalt this Cause and magnify even my own station in this His world and Kingdom where He assists me and destines for me every good through His bounty and grace?1 1 `Abdu'l-Bahá: Bahá'í Prayers, US edition, p. 107. Ron Price January 18th 2005 EMERGING OUT OF OBSCURITY FIFTY YEARS: 1953-2003 In my years before puberty(1944-1956), I hardly remember any musical activity in my life, although both my parents played the piano and sang in choirs, so something musical must have permeated my psycho-emotional skin. The world of popular music gradually came into my life in the early years of the Ten Year Crusade(1953-1959) and this world of sound continued to influence me for some two decades until 1973-79. This popular music had a strong autobiographical, confessional, personal, emotional, introspective quality. I found it in folk, folk-rock and the pop strands. A whole generation of popular music was found here; it was the generation I listened to as an adolescent and as a young adult. Some of it attained a level of universality which helped listeners--like me--identify with its ideas and sentiments. Artists like: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, David Crobsy, Steven Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young, James Taylor, Tom Rush, Phil Ochs and Carly Simon, among a host of others--provided an influence, quite unconsciously, on my artistic sensibilities, my poetry and writing that emerged later and slowly in the next dozen years, 1980-1992. Those four decades, 1953-1992, provided a base for a poetic-fertilization, a poetic-crystallization that resulted in the years that followed, 1992 to 2003. -Ron Price with thanks to “Walk On By: The Story of Popular Song-After the Gold Rush,” ABC TV, 9:35-10:25 p.m., January 13th, 2005. After fifty years of music one can’t help but wonder what actually produced this prolific output of poetry, this wanting to see the world and see it better than ever, concentrating all that I have said and done since birth, all grist for a tumultuous mill, mildly confessional, nothing like Lowell, Plath, Sexton and others from those decades when confessionalism was all the rage in poetry and music and seemed to insinuate itself into my words as they arose with all their autobiographical candor and an unprecedented personal aesthetic that takes emotion and personality, makes and escapes, argues and embraces and tries to tie self and world in one wide embrace of past, present and future in a oneness with all of life. Ron Price January 14 2005 INTENSITY AND DRIVENNESS Poetry, for me, is a means of defining myself, my community, my philosophy and religion to a world which, for the most part, has given me respect and acceptance, a sense of achievement and even affection, but which has also been, for the most part, indifferent to a religion, a movement, that has been at the centre of my system of commitments, the very raison d’etre of my life. My poetry is the autobiographical story of a man who has been an international pioneer of the Baha’i Faith, the story, my interpretation, of the religious community I have been associated with now for half a century and the society in which I have lived for six decades. My writing, which is for me an art form, is also a beautiful world of poetic intensity. After 25 years of writing, I have shared it with a few; I have created something, in some ways, out of nothing; in other ways, out of a whole world of ideas, people, nature, animals, minerals, every atom of existence and the essence of all created things.1 “Creativity is following the urge of the human soul,” said Geoff Bardon, “that tug we probably all feel.”2-Ron Price with thanks to 1 Baha’u’llah, “Persian, Number 29,” Hidden Words; and 2“Mr. Patterns,” ABC TV, 8:30-9:30 p.m., January 12th 2005. < After 200 years you1 began to put it all down, for you had to define, describe all that had gone on since the beginning of time and especially recent time. Yes, there was an intensity; I know what you mean, Geoff. There was an artistic drivenness, a compulsion, an obsession to house the inspiration of soul, to follow the urge, that tug of the heart and mind------ the story, your story, at least since the fifties and the sixties-- and my story too, my story too. 1 The tribes of the Western Desert in Australia put their story down in art, the Western Desert art movement which began in mid-1972. Ron Price January 12 2005 MYSTERIOUS DISPENSATIONS OF PROVIDENCE On Tuesday April 29th 1980, three days before I went into the psychiatric clinic of the Launceston General Hospital, Alfred Hitchcock died.1 He was 80 years old. I was about to experience, at least for about the next ten days, what was for me the last days of real terror in my life. Terror inflicted on the unknowing was one of the themes in Hitchcock movies. Fear was also part of his recipe for movie success. I would have fear many times in life again, but terror was part of my bi-polar illness and on Tuesday I was on the edge of the throes of my last major hypomanic episode. I had first come to hear of and to see Alfred Hitchcock in October 1955 on TV in my family’s lounge room in Burlington Ontario. Hitchcock’s ten year long series of what are now ‘classic’ programs had just begun. Mystery, crime, horror and the supernatural, invariably with a twist in the tale came on week after week for a decade and we have now had forty years of reruns. In October 1955 a premeditated campaign of terror was in process in Iran against the Baha’i community. It was a campaign which Shoghi Effendi had characterized as an ordeal “in pursuance of the mysterious dispensations of Providence.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1 “Internet Site on Alfred Hitchcock,” and 2Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, Wilmette, 1965, p.139. While terror was entertaining TV’s lounge-room troops thanks to the clever fantasizing of famous Alfred Hitchcock then about to enter the last decade of his meteroic career as a director, before his slow and unhappy slide to death in the first fifteen years of my adult life(1965 to 1980)...... the Iranian Baha’i community was entertaining its own terror: not a devastating flood, but a gentle rain on a green pasture; not a calamity but God’s providence a wick and oil unto the lamp of Faith. And, Alfred, as your years went on and you garnered in all that success, the ship of this Faith sailed safely into port well beyond the terrors of the sea which could have taken this Cause right off its course----- the full understanding of the meaning of this is beyond our generation.1 But with that terror overcome, we can now hold nothing back. 1 Century of Light, p. 92. Ron Price January 8th 2005. LIFE’S ESSENTIAL JUICES The pleasures, the joys, the essential juices of life, what gives life its quintessential highs, heights, its finest enjoyments varies over the different stages of one’s life and even from day to day. Very generally, sport and the physical provided the highs in my childhood and teens. Music also began to give me pleasure in my early teens and it did until my early thirties; playing the guitar in the 1980s and 1990s. My career in teaching gave me an intense enjoyment from the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s. Writing, beginning in 1983 and continuing until the present, has been the longest lasting satisfaction in my life. Of course, the bodily needs and wants: hunger, thirst, sexual desire, all provided through their regular, frequent and sometimes rare-periodic satisfactions, a lifetime of very pleasurable joys and juices. When one analyses the above in the microcosm specific enjoyments need to be added and listed: background music when I write, going to sauna baths & swims, certain relationships at certain times with my mother, father, wife and son, among other people, daily walks, the electronic and print media, my home, sleep, bodily elimination, the beauties of nature.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, January 7th 2005. There is one long and abiding stream sweetly-scented beginning high in the mountains of my life which I have not mentioned in the above. There is one fruit on the tree which I have not added to these tastes. There is one crystal spring which I have quaffed from but not added to this list; one broad meadow where I have roamed, one breeze of joy which has passed over me, one paradise of reality to which I have gained admission but which is not set out here, one melody to which I have hearkened, one path of good pleasure not described herein, a myriad invisible spirits to which I have been summoned and which purge, occasionally, from my sight the film of familiarity enabling me to feel the world which I perceive. Ron Price January 7th 2005 I appreciated the feedback I received on the poem ‘My First Kiss’ at the internet site ‘FRIENDLY MUSINGS.’ I revised another poem involving kisses after receiving that feedback. I had been working on that poem off-and-on over a ten year period. It is a much more obscure poem and, for that, I apologize beforehand.-Ron __________________________________________________________________ I appreciated the feedback I received on the poem ‘My First Kiss’ at the internet site ‘FRIENDLY MUSINGS.’ I revised another poem involving kisses after receiving that feedback. I had been working on that poem off-and-on over a ten year period. It is a much more obscure poem and, for that, I apologize beforehand.-Ron __________________________________________________________________ A LOVE SO GRAND Price does not simply describe here the setting sun with its metaphorical 'kisses'--in a subtle and yet graphic manner, but he sketches out a conception of reality which posits a unified whole animated by love. It is a conception of oneness which brings opposites together; it also is a conception of love that helps us define this rather complex word, at least gives us a flavour of its taste. In this poem we read of a luxuriating in the beauty of the sunset. A solemn and tranquil consciousness is evoked, an emergent joy. This is an appropriate expression, joy, for a period of time in our history, one hundred years after The Sun had set, a place of stunning beauty has just been constructed at the same point on our horizon, the Qiblih, as that sunset. -Ron Price, "Personal Comment on 'A Love So Grand,'" Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 8:55 pm, Friday, 29 December 1995, revised 13 August 2001 and again on January 7 2005. ___________________________ I’ll tell you how the sun set, slowly after noon. You didn’t even know it. Then suddenly it was soon. The earth turned on its axis and shade seemed slightly bold, deeper tones of green and touches of pure gold. There was red across the water, way out past the waves; the mountains darkened thoughtfully and slipped into watery caves. What’s a stone to do after being luminous and warm all day? The animals all changed their place if they could speak they'd say: "the sun has gone! the sun has gone!" Out in the gardens, where the flowers play, the sun carressed the leaves, then headed off in her unique way to do just what she pleased. What she did, of course, was set in sediments of stone. No freedom marked her course through all the universe alone. It seemed from this place I sat that we forgot she was going. We could have gone out that evening after the gold had set behind the hills. We could have also watched her presence finally fade and touch the land with her evanescent kisses, so gentle, so light, so exquisite, so grand. Ron Price 28 December 1995 to January 7 2005. ___________________ MORE THAN YOU CAN SHAKE A STICK AT There is no "Christian civilization" or "Christian culture" in the way that there is an "Islamic culture," which you can recognize from Pakistan to Tunisia to Morocco. As the Christian Church took shape historically in new and various social forms over the centuries so, too, is the world order of Baha’u’llah taking shape in a variety of social forms. Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith with that first great decision by the Council in Jerusalem, recorded in Acts 15, which declared that the new gentile Christians didn’t have to enter Jewish religious culture. A similar decision of an Egyptian Court in 1926 acknowledged the independence of the Baha’i Faith from Islam. Just as people no longer knew what a Christian lifestyle looked like after it was established as a non-Jewish religion; just as the converts had to work out, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, a new way of being Christian, so too have Baha’is in these four epochs had to work out, with a great deal of guidance from the Central Figures of their Faith, from Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice, what constituted a Baha’i way of life. --Ron Price with thanks to Andrew Walls, “The Expansion of Christianity: An Interview with Andrew Walls,” The Christian Century, August 2-9, 2000, pp. 792- 799. We’ve got so much to define and shape our life and ways, a calendar, feasts and fasts, forms to order our complex days, tools to instruct, massive, eloquent exegisis translated into deeds, action, heroic and otherwise, ceremonial, informational messages, more praise, exhortation, censure, advice than you can shake a stick at-- and we’re only in the second century. And all of this serving the need of the moment: the future and the present in our individual, collective life--and all of this forges, directs and guides our community, brings system to a sea of fragments in a continuous crucible of transformation free from the drastic consequences of misinterpretation. Ron Price January 2, 2005. A COLLECTIVE FOCUS “Since Alfred Nobel died in 1896,” wrote Winston Churchill for his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, “we have entered an age of storm and tragedy.” I might have added: since the passing of Baha’u’llah in 1892 or the western tour of ‘Abdu’l-Baha in 1912-3, a tempest has been sweeping the face of the earth. Churchill continued: “The power of man has grown in every sphere except over himself. Never in the field of action have events seemed so harshly to dwarf personalities. Rarely in history have brutal facts so dominated thought or has such a widespread, individual virtue found so dim a collective focus.”-Ron Price with thanks to Horst Frenz, editor, From Nobel Lectures: Literature 1901-1967, Elsevier Publishing Company, London, Amsterdam, 1969. The fearful question confronts us: have our problems got beyond our control? 1 Yes, as Douglas Martin put it in 1973/4,2 two years after I moved to Australia as an international pioneer, as the first steps were taken for the erection on Mount Carmel of the Seat in a collective focus raising on this tormented planet the fair mansions of God’s Own Kingdom so we could find surcease from the confusion, the chaos and ruin within the Covenant of the everlasting Father, the Covenant of Baha’u’llah. 1 Churchill, 1953. 2 Douglas Martin, “The Spiritual Revolution,”World Order, Winter 1973-74, p.15. Ron Price January 17 2005 Undoubtedly we are passing through a phase where this may be so. Well may we humble ourselves, and seek for guidance and WHEREIN LIES GREATNESS? In his great work about his ancestor, Marlborough, Churchill writes, “Words are easy and many, while great deeds are difficult and rare.” Yes, but great, living and persuasive words are also difficult and rare. And Churchill has shown that they too can take on the character of great deeds.1 I have been involved for over half a century with the Baha’i Faith which itself possesses an immense greatness. Any greatness imputed to me as an individual is only the result of my association with this great Cause. “Great is the blessedness of him that hath hearkened to its shrill voice, as it was raised, through the power of truth, before all who are in heaven and all who are on earth.......O people of Baha,”wrote Baha’u’llah and, in another context, Shoghi Effendi wrote that a “great destiny”3 beckoned the believers. 1S. Siwertz, “Presentation Speech,” The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953; 2 Baha’u’llah in Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, p.76; and 3Shoghi Effendi, Dawn of a New Day, p.119. Great is the blessedness of him that hath drawn nigh unto this fire and heard its roaring, drawn nigh unto it through a grace which strengthens. Will I, then, be guided to that which will exalt this Cause and magnify even my own station in this His world and Kingdom where He assists me and destines for me every good through His bounty and grace?1 1 `Abdu'l-Bahá: Bahá'í Prayers, US edition, p. 107. Ron Price January 18th 2005 THE TEACHING PLAN UNFOLDS: 1936-38 THE VERY SALVATION OF CIVILIZATION ITSELF WAS AT STAKE At the beginning of the first Bahá'í teaching Plan in 1936 and 1937 Winston Churchill was writing a number of books. The last two volumes of Marlborough: His Life and Times were written as the first teaching Plan began to unfold in 1937-38. As you read this great biography you will realize where much of Churchill's World War II thought and rhetoric came from. The same themes are there: unity through alliance, death to continental tyrants. The first American edition was in six volumes and contained 2550 pages. Churchill's Great Contemporaries was published in 1937. This book contained essays on the great personages of his time and remains a classic. His views are largely derived from personal acquaintance and range over a multitude from late Victorian statesmen: Morley, Rosebery, Joseph Chamberlain, Balfour, Asquith--through notables of the Great War: Hindenburg, the Kaiser, Foch, Clemenceau, Lawrence. and on he went to personalities of the 1930s: Hitler, Roosevelt, Alfonso XIII, George V. A third book was published in 1938: Arms and the Covenant. In America it was called While England Slept. This book contained some of Churchill's most prescient and masterful speeches covering the period from 1932 through to Munich in 1939. Churchill began writing yet another book in this same period, Step By Step, just as Shoghi Effendi began informing the American believers in 1936 of the up-and-coming teaching Plan to commence in April 1937. Churchill's foreign affairs articles from 1936 to 1939 are compiled in this important work. These articles chronicle Britain's loss of air parity, France's decline, and the renascent Germany of Adolf Hitler. -Ron Price with thanks to “Books Written by Winston Churchill,” The Churchill Centre, Internet Site, 2005. Such a busy man and this is only the half of it: article after article appearing in British newspapers in these same year with all the alcohol, the cigars and the sense of immense destiny. And another little man at the other end of that ancient European land had an equally busy pen. He, too, had warned of impending, threatening crises, fraught with peril. Both men saw dangerous hours and days on the horizon made big Plans for the very salvation of civilization: systematic, carefully conceived, rigorously pursued, continuously extended;1 for the field was immense, the task gigantic, the issues immeasureably precious, the time was always short and the obligation sacred. 1 Shoghi Effendi, Messages To America: 1932-1946, Wilmette, 1947, p.7. Ron Price January 19th 2005 1909 WAS A VERY BIG YEAR! The year ‘Abdu’l-Baha was set free from prison, 1908, the famous ballet dancer Nijinsky was introduced to Sergei Diaghilev, the noted dance patron and member of the Russian nobility. Diaghilev took a group of Russian dancers and singers to Paris in the spring of 1909. Nijinsky was the principle dancer of the troupe. Their first performance was on May 17th 1909. Fifty-seven days after the Bab’s remains were entombed on Mt. Carmel, the ballet world in Paris was taken by storm--by Nijinsky’s technical skills, the expression and beauty of his body, his steel-like strength and featherweight-lightness, his great elevation and incredible gift for rising and seeming to remain in the air. The Ballets Russes was born part of whose aim was to unify dance, music and painting through the medium of ballet. The West had seen the greatest ballet dancer in history. -Ron Price with thanks to DanceWorks, 2001-2004. While You sobbed aloud that day, while You slept not-at-all that night, a troupe of singers and dancers were heading for Paris and half a world away the site was chosen for the construction of that Temple. The roots of faith in the west and the roots of ballet were watered with a vision and energy, a showmanship and iconoclasm without which a new history could not have been rewritten. My mother was five that year and my father fourteen; my grandparents had just had three children who have flowered into my extended family in Canada in the last century; the Canadian department of external affairs was also formed that year and Anne of Green Gables came into print: while in the Antipodes Christopher Brennan was recording in poetry one of the few mystical perceptions of creation written in that remote dry land after Baha’u'llah’s passing: 1909-- it was a very big year! Ron Price January 30th 2005 GETTING OFF ON THE RIGHT FOOT Three weeks after my pioneering life began Rudolph Nureyev danced at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London. In June, just before I left Burlington, my hometown, for Dundas just ten miles away, Nureyev danced for the first time on TV. He danced with Dame Margot Fonteyn, the preeminent ballerina in the West, in a BBC production called Music In Camera. Nureyev performed Le Corsaire, the first time this ballet had been performed in Western Europe. His explosive run onto the stage was described as follows: “pale and sinuous, his flying hair surmounted by a single feather in a gold circlet.” And again, critic Alexander Bland continued, “sensuously slow-springed landings, enormous twistings, a mingled arrogance and humility” Nureyev produced with Margot Fonteyn “one of the iconic images of the twentieth century.” 1962 was a milestone year for Nureyev, for the male dancer and for the most famous dance partnership of my time. Nureyev brought ballet to a mass public. More than forty years later, we are still cheering.-Ron Price with thanks to “Internet Sites on Rudolph Nureyev,” January 30, 2005. A virtuoso dancer, born on a train, they say, defected in ’61, the year before my life as a pioneer began, when he was getting warmed up with his first performance in London, when I was still getting warmed-up for my life--dancing a different dance to a different drummer, on a different stage, to different music, with none of the celebrity, renoun or glamour. He came out into film and autobiography and I went into pioneering that year---’62. I was just as much in need of a repertoire, a discipline, an energy, an understanding, a direction, a vision, a spiritual home, a groundwork for my future, my journey. I, too, would have my positions, my succeses, my performances, my touring, my excitement, my fulfillment, my pain, mysturm und grund, my decline in stamina, my change in career, my fresh new direction, my immense airborne thrusts, my utter commitment, my conflict over sexuality, my difficult temperament, my one trip back home and my tireless work: always there was the work, often difficult, often joyful. Ron Price January 30th 2005. GOYA This is my second poem about the artist Francisco Goya(1746-1828) whose works reflected the historical upheavals of his time. As I wrote in my first poem, though, I see his work as reflecting equally, if not more so, the historical upheavals that were to come in the next two centuries. In this sense, as the title of that first poem indicates, the artist is prophetic. In 1819 he was saved from death by his doctor and his painting of his doctor in 1820 was full of warmth and love. But after that painting Goya decorated the walls of his villa with 14 ‘black paintings.’ They were the most sickening images, hellish visions, he ever painted. They are full of figures as if from a nightmarish dream. Robert Hughes argues in his film on Goya for television that Goya’s dark, black, paintings were also a portrayal of the inner life of man.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Robert Hughes, “Goya: Crazy Like A Genius,” SBS TV, 2:50-4:05 p.m., 27 February 2005. Could you see the magnitude of the ruin we were going to bring on ourselves? The surrender to the squalid in ideologies and the mind, the catalogue of dark horrors darker than we’d ever seen-- were these your black paintings? Were the outworn shibboleths and irrelevant theologies, the aggressive secularism and religious obscurantism producing fires of animosity, spiritual gloom & despair which you could see back then? Did you see into my time and its dark heart, the darkest before the dawn? Did you see into my own time like some early warning system? Did you knock at our door and give us your answering shout? Love has to do with meaning; it is as they say: ontological. Ron Price February 27 2005 FULL-FIGURED GALS As I went through my teens and became an adult in 1965, there were many stunningly beautiful women who came across my television and cinema screens: Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Jane Russell and Farrah Fawcette to name a few. This was the ninth and the first years of the tenth stage of history from a Baha’i perspective. In my 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, from the 1960s through the 1990s, many more beautiful women continued to flow into and out of the mass media. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, February 27th 2005. Symbol of an entire sexual revolution they were, each of them in their way-- and I was only twelve, thirteen, fourteen and I kept getting older and they kept coming. Embodiments of steamy sexual desire, smouldering sensuous beauty, lusty busty, leggy, curves everywhere, cleavages deep as the dark oceans, full-figured gals they were, one and all, alluring angels, always seductive, physical powerhouses, big-chested cutiepies, attracted men, photographers and headlines-- didn’t they all? Princesses of pout, icons, countesses of come hither--35-23-35 stats and more, everywhere more, glamour galore, tending to many marriages and troubles, temptresses: who could resist the pulchritude? All my life they’ve been coming, always coming, up and out there, flaunting themselves before my eyes-- incredible things I can only look at, from a great distance, get turned on by, but never, absolutely never, get near, touch. Part of the whirlwind of the senses they were at the other end of dull-everydayness, its continuum of quotidian time meeting as it did like out of some blue the psychedelic, where tension was increased always without resolution, catharsis or any genuine epiphany. Sex: the last frontier, extraordinary incident, outrageous stimulation, instinctual sources of erotic heat, part of some basic permissiveness where one looks longingly in this inchoate world, diffuse, so diffuse, where a truly powerful ideology was just opening up a new vision of life, part of a moral repertoire to be drawn on by all and helping me cope with these awesome sexual, stunning beauties, traces of sand to be washed away eventually by waves, not part of the decline of the West but the end of civilization and a hubris rearing its head with its refusal to accept limits, its sympathy for the abyss, its rage against order, its awareness of apocalypse. And, for me, a substitution of instinct, impulse and pleasure by those essentials of restraint in my years, my life in this post-industrial society1 looked like it was going to take the whole of my life. 1 Daniel Bell, The Coming Of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Future Forecasting, Basic Books, NY, 1973. The birth of this society took place in the years after WW2, the second Seven Year Plan(1946-1953) just after I was born. Ron Price February 28th 2005 TREADMILLS Nineteen years after I became a Baha’i, Cat Stevens, one of the most popular artists of the 1970s, the model sensitive singer-songwriter, embraced Islam. As far as I know he is the only major western singer post WW2 to do so. He released his final album one month before I left Ballarat in December 1978. For many of the years I had been living in Australia, 1971 to 1976, Stevens had been on tour. By 1977 he was exhausted and wanted off the treadmill of celebrity, fame and stardom. His two greatest albums were produced as I was preparing to leave Canada and after my arrival in Australia in 1970-71. Tea For the Tillerman and Teaser And The Firecat, musical productions about man’s search for meaning in a spiritually empty society, were the result of his introspection during and after being hospitalized for TB in 1968-69. I had also been hospitalized for six months in 1968 for a schizo-affective disorder. I experienced a series of mental exhaustions during a 35 year period from 1963-64 to 1998-99, for the most part associated with my bi-polar disorder. At age 55 I wanted off the treadmill I had been on. Cat Stevens devoted himself to his new Muslim faith and worked hard or harder than he had with his music. So was this true of my work after 1999. My new activity was different but it was still exhausting. The source of my fatigue had changed.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, “Cat Stevens-A True Story,” 11:30-12:25 am, February 27th-28th, 2005. I gave myself to this fatigue with a new enthusiasm--- as you did, as you have for the last 27 years. Ours was a search and a finding and a search and a finding both before and after our hospitalizations in ‘68 when whole worlds opened with their fame, their success and their exhausting demands. There was so much more to it all than this celebrity, this popularity. Vision, vision creating reality with form leaving its chambers of unborn designs where chaos gave birth to the creative, to pattern, to new tracts of the cosmos, intellectual passion and the pulses of the brain. Ron Price February 28 2005 PORTRAITS In the 1930s, when the Baha’i community was developing the initial form of its national and local institutions; and the first years of the initial stage of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s vision of America’s spiritual destiny was unfolding in the Seven Year Plan(1937-1944) a sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, carved the faces of four American presidents into the granite surface of Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. They were the largest works of a sculptor on earth. The work, begun on August 10th 1927, memorializes the birth, growth and development of the United States, a country that has a special connection with the development of Bahá'í administration. That same year, 1927, the National Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States began to develop a greater stability,1 a greater measure or degree of authority as part of the Baha’i system of orientation. Authority is, in the end, an act of the intellect, of understanding and the imagination; it is a solidity and security in the binding strength, the bond, the capacity of others to judge and reassure. The institutional evolution of the Baha’i community, of its administration, had attained a new level of development and during those same years, 1927 to 1941, it developed well enough to embark on its first international teaching Plan or, if you prefer, missionary program. When Gutzon Borglum died in 1941 the work, the carving, the portraitures, although not complete, had advanced sufficiently to evoke a sense of awe in those who viewed them. No new carving has been done on the portraits since his death. For some seven decades now viewers, mostly tourists by the millions, have been able to see themselves in the faces of these presidents. The four presidents carved in stone represent all Americans, their courage, dreams, freedom and greatness. The Baha’is, for seven decades, have gazed at a different set of portraits, a different design, a different set of artistic forms, the critical one, the unique aspect of their religion, being their Administrative Order which they see as representing the very “structure of freedom for our Age.”2 It is an Instrument, a portrait, not sculpted in stone but painted by the Hand of Mystery on a canvas with the paint and colour of heroic self-sacrifice. -Ron Price with thanks to “Internet Sites on Mt. Rushmore,” SBS TV, 28 February 28th 2005, 5:00-6:00 p.m.; 1Loni Bramson-Lerche, “Development Of Baha’i Administration,” Studies In Babi & Baha’i History, Kalimat Press, 1984, p.260; and 2The Universal House of Justice, “Letter to the Baha’is of the United States: December 29th 1988.” Sacrifice is not a word we use much downunder, not a word we like to use, a little too top-heavy, over the top, too evangelical for most you might say, eh? Still, determination and the will to struggle are as the soul--- needed then, back then, always in those years entre des guerres, with that stone, with steel-edged pneumatic hammers, drills, bits, grits, dynamite blasting, tons of stone. Persistence, still needed, then and now, for so much of the battle is always lost, then and now: in our strenuous warfare with instincts, our appetitive nature: concupiscible, irascible, the allurements, trivialities that rain upon us daily in our quotidian worlds of endless, necessary minutiae, as we humbly assault our summits, make our vertical ascents past fault and fissure and the immense stone bulwarks of life, the miasmal ooze that drifts daily from the public realm into our private space with its intoxicating and noxious glues. And we who would build this institution, Instrument, administration, based as it is on images, ideas, carved in a different stone where our minds play, pray, slowly learn to counter the fleeting, fragile, fragmentary, fortuitous reality and the blaze indifference which is everywhere and nowhere, hidden, obscure, so very undefineable, like air and water in some synthetic social glue, which is one with the end of effort and the triumph of sensation divorced from any necessary action. Yes, sir, the barbarians have arrived and are in our midst with their traces of strangeness. They enter our most intimate relationships unbeknownst, especially with those we love and our inner being, own dear souls. Sometimes they are a mirage. We see, dream, them as refreshment, but find, in the end, nothing there. Sometimes they offer us rewards, but bring us only toil and trouble. These barbarians sometimes take the form of a thin veil through which we look at our lives thinking we see reality, but no-- illusion is all we are seeing. For, let there be no mistake, this is the darkest hour in human history, the slough of despond and ill-equipped are billions to interpret the play using the phantoms of their imaginations simply on the wrong track, at the wrong site, bewildered by the burgeoning hieroglyphics carved in pain across our planet gravitated, recently, into a neighbourhood. But the dawn is breaking, it’s early morn, the taxi’s waiting, he’s blowing his horn. The call all-aboard has been raised. There’s a train at the station ready to take us close to that immense Carving of Life but, alas, we move away; we always move away. Most of us, it would seem, can only stand so much reality in our face. Like those presidential portraits, life’s awesome size, its enormity overwhelms us. But with its freedom and its dream we carve our own stone, the granite that is our lives, grown from conception in our dear mother’s womb, nurtured, if all goes well, by those founts of gleaming milk eyes and hearts to watch over us and to love us. And so the granite grows and we think it just fleshy tissue, organs and sundry stuff. But we take into eternity, that undiscovered country where we will live forever, our portrait, our image engraved, designed by the Hand of Mystery, painted with the essence of light, moulded with a love which, however much we strive on this earthly path, we will never understand, but it is a portait imprinted on tablets of chrysolite high on the mountain in open characters. 1. Martin Pawley, The Private Future, Thomas and Hudson, London, 1973. 2. My use the term ‘barbarians’ draws on Edward Gibbon’s study of them in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ron Price March 2 2005 THE GRAND DESIGN UNFOLDS In the late 1980s CD technology began to penetrate western consumer markets. By the time I finished three years of presenting a Baha’i radio program One Planet One People for the Launceston Baha’i community in 2005, I had access to over 50 CDs made by Baha’i artists around the world in the previous twenty years. The cassette tape, which had dominated the music market along with the LP and 45 rpm record, during all of my adult life, 1965 to 1985, still had a place. When I handed over the resources to the next radio program presenter in March 2005 there were 60 cassette tapes and no LP records in the resource kit. The two decades 1985 to 2005 had been busy years in media technology. Like some grand design unfolding, the technology for the home, for leisure and business was advancing and its use by the Baha’i community continued apace. The DVD-video became mainstream in 1999, although in our household only my son Daniel bought DVDs. The internet resources had increased significantly since I first had access to them in the early 1990s. The home computer advanced by leaps and bounds in these two decades and I have enjoyed three computers each an improvement on the last. In 2005 virtually all my reading came from the internet and little from books.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, March 4th, 2005. In August of ’62 as I was getting ready to make my first pioneering move the first Galactic Network was discussed at MIT. The idea back then was a globally interconnected set of computers like the internet of today. The story of science and technology in these my pioneering years is immense. While I’ve been pioneering the world has been pioneering and the grand design of God’s Holy Cause unfolded on the foundation of the Kingdom, the framework raised in the first epoch of a Divine Plan and the first two epochs of the Formative Age.1 1 the first epoch of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Divine Plan was 1937-1963. The first two epochs of the Formative Age were: 1921-1944 and 1944 to 1963. Ron Price March 4th 2005 PINNING THINGS DOWN The following poem was written from 3:55 to 4:35 pm while waiting to go to the dentist. It began by my reflecting on how many years I’d been going to the dentist: fifty-five years(1950-2005) and how long I’d been in classrooms: fifty years. I had had my last class as a casual teacher ten months ago in 2004 and I now took very little interest in teaching, in formal education. Occasionally, of course, I ran a class in the Baha’i community. In the seven years 1992 to 1999 I had a triple life: teacher, family and community work and writer. It had been exhausting, had worn me out, had sucked the juices of life right out of me. By early 2005, after six years of retirement, I had given up several of the modest, moderate activities that occupied my time during these first retirement years: my weekly radio program, my casual teaching for the George Town School for Seniors, my regular visits to the library for ten books a week, my Baha’i work editing for a magazine and committee work and activities with my son Daniel who left home at the age of 27. This process of disengagement over the years 1999 to 2005 enabled me to sharply concentrate, to focus as extensively and intensively as possible on the activity that gave me the greatest pleasure and joy, namely, writing. Part occupation, part vocation, part avocation, part hobby, part obsession, part service to a Cause I had been identified with for fifty years, writing became for me, insensibly and by degrees over the years 1974 to 2004 a way of life. If God granted me a long and healthy life, say ninety years, I would have thirty more years to devote to this engaging occupation, hopefully as disengaged from the quotidian and so much that the wider world had to offer which I simply did not want. Of course in my typical sixteen hour day, usually 9 a.m. to midnight, I found I have only been able to work at this occupation of writing for an average of eight hours a day. This was all my brain could cope with in that 16 hours. I also had to deal with several elements in the everyday world which collectively occupied me as follows: the exercise of walking-1 hour, meals-2 hours, domestic work of various kinds-1 hour, chatting to my wife and the people in my life-1 hour, sleep-1 hour and TV-2 hours. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, March 8th 2005. Sometimes, as I have above, and often in curious places such as in a dentist’s reception room to have a tooth pulled out I try to define just where I’m at, where I’ve been and where I’m going. There are so many ways of telling the story of cradle to grave, so many ways of pinning-down all those years gone by, yet to come, all those movings up and down, round and round, in and out, when things contrary to my wishes were ordained and before the blissful joy, the heavenly delight that I like to think will one day be in store for me. Ron Price March 8th 2005 EXALTED BR The poet Archibald MacLeish, in his eulogy at the memorial ceremony in 1967 for the American poet Carl Sandburg, said that poets were not comparable. You cannot, he said, measure one against another. For some poets, their distinctiveness lies in their total oeuvre; for others it lies in one or several of their poems. Sandburg wrote for the American people. I write for the Baha’i community with one eye on humanity or, as Baha’u’llah wrote more poetically although I’m not sure if it is more accurately, I have opened one eye to the world and all that is therein and opened the other to the “hallowed beauty of the Beloved.”1 Sandburg, said MacLeish, was one of those who believed more than he could prove about the future of the human race. It was such people, MacLeish went on, who make the future, who shape that destiny.-Ron Price with reference to 1Baha’u’llah, “Persian: No.12,” Hidden Words. I like that idea Archibald; I like all those ideas. Poetry for me is what you find in my poems, an exalted brooding, a finely-tuned analysis and contemplation, a style of my own, an impress of thought on the spacious highway where I walk, stride, hide, drive, pray and ponder, as I make the future and shape humanity’s destiny or so I would like to believe. Still, in some ways, I think one can compare and contrast the poets of history. Poets, like the rest of us, define themselves in community, in the community of poets--as we all do--in community. Ron Price March 9th 2005 DANCING ON THE TABLES In 1937 the second Five Year Plan(1933-37) in the Soviet Union ended and the first Seven Year Plan(1937-1944) opened in the Baha’i community. Ernest Hemmingway had moved to the centre of the cadre of writers for and in the Communist party. His was the favourite literary name at the Second Writers Congress held in May, just weeks after the opening of the Seven Year Plan in North America. The years 1937-38 were dark. The Terror had moved to a climax. An estimated one to two million people were executed or died in prison or exile in those two years. Of these, 1500 were writers. By the opening of the Seven Year Plan in the spring of 1937 the Moscow “show” trials had been held and the tables were beginning to turn again Russian communism as the holy of holies. -Ron Price with thanks to Daniel Aaron,Writers On The Left, Avon Books, 1969(1961), pp.363-381. Those hiatus years(1917-1937) proved to be the beginning of the end for that leftward turning political messianism and the end of the beginning for that institutionalized charisma with its nucleus and pattern for a new Order just emerging out of the greatest conflict in history. The spring and summer of that annus mirabilis had seen such splendiferous beginnings, writings that would change history.1 The dance with one was about to turn tables as the other was getting its kick start by spiritual descendants of dawnbreakers a century before in a mission of sublimity which would release potentialities mysteriously and generously endowed by ‘Abdu’l-Baha. 1 Karl Marx’s first writings, his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, were written in the summer of 1844; and the Bab’s first writings were made in May and June of 1844. Ron Price March 11th 2005 IMPETUOUS ACTS Dostoevsky once wrote that his “nature was base” and that he was “excessively impetuous.” He went on to say that “Everywhere and in all things I go to the limit. All my life I’ve overstepped the mark.” While I also must acknowledge a certain baseness in my nature, a certain base and appetitive quality, a concupiscence and irascibility which Baha’u’llah says are stages in the development of the soul and which require a daily vigilance and the exercise of self-control, it is a baseness which I have learned to control in some of its manifestations but not in others. I have given expression to this baseness since my teens and, if I include my excessively demanding and irascible behaviour as a child while still at home with my mother, I have sixty years of these impetuous acts, this overstepping of the mark, to my credit or, should I say, debit. -Ron Price with thanks to Ronald Hingley, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, Charles Scribner’s and sons, NY, 1978, p.11. In my early childhood, my early teens my early adulthood, all along the way, right up to these my early years of late adulthood, always some baseness to battle, some excess, some going too far, dispersing myself until I was empty, stale, fed up---with no more to give. What I seek to become determines what I remember in what I’ve been. All this past becomes alive because of what matters in the future and in the process I transcend the present but only momentarily. For the burden of sin, that baseness, and my encounter with it is alive. There is, too, a joy in knowing I am helping to form the structure of a new world. While I give myself to solitude and its accompanying insight, I drive for meaning, pattern wholeness and the strength of that natural animal.1 1 Jacob Bronowski: “No man is human who does not draw strength from the natural animal,” The Face of Violence. Ron Price March 9th 2005 UNBEKNOWNST I saw the last of a two part TV series on the Bronte sisters this afternoon.1 The Brontes are, arguably, literature’s most famous sisters, certainly most famous threesome. Their rise to fame in the literary world and the tragedy of their lives in England could be compared to the rise and the tragic years of the Babi Faith in Persia, all in the same 1840s and early 1850s. Both the Bab and the sisters were all born in the last years of the second decade of the nineteenth century, 1816 to 1819. Until 1848 the Movement of the Bab and the writing of the three sisters enjoyed much success. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were published in 1847. The Cause of the Bab flourished in its early years 1844-1847. But in 1848 and 1849 two of the Bronte sisters died and their brother. In Persia the great massacres of Babis began to take place: 1848-1852. Charlotte died in 1854 at 38. In October 1848 the Babi uprising at Tabarsi began and an insurrectionary period that was to last for four years and with it the loss of the Bab’s popular mass appeal.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC TV, “In Search of the Brontes,” 2:00-3:00 p.m. March 13th 2005; and 2Peter Smith, The Babi and Baha’i Religions, George Ronald, 1987, p.53. The wings of death hovered, consumed the fabric of their lives, took their existence to its lowest ebb and to what end one might ask? They finished their days in obscure, isolated, windswept corners of this earthly realm, this mortal coil, with their talents speeding to their end. Did their deaths set the seal of failure on their lives? Such glorious conceptions, such heroic deeds and, then, gone! What an apparent, a colossal disaster! The flame snuffed out by fate’s finger, swiftly receding into the shadows of omnipotence and oblivion, all hope seemingly vanished. The tide of artistic beauty gone out and, with it, the tide of enthusiasm for a Cause crushed to dust, its devotees cowed and exhausted. Perhaps we see here just a fiery phase of transition on the path to a high destiny, to an ascendancy that would find its inspiration in the desperate, prolonged disappointments of that hour when new notes were sounded. Perhaps the yet unborn, with a cunning that is so mysteriously subtle come to live and have their being implanted by some dispensations of Providence in their very souls, unbeknownst. Ron Price March 13 2005 TOUJOURS TRAVAILLER Treasures lie beneath God’s throne and poets have the key: so says an Islamic tradition. During the more than a dozen years I have written poetry extensively, I have come to see part of my role as helping other poets travel in company. Poets who are my contemporaries and poets yet-to-come do not need to travel in isolation. My work can help them define where they are going and where they have been. My thoughts can help other poets regenerate, refresh their perspectives; it can help them infuse creativity into their voice and their lives. It can help them see that a mighty effort is required in order to acquire an abundant share of the poetic art. To put this another way: the poet must strive night and day, resting not for a moment,1 as ‘Abdu’l-Baha puts it; or, as the sculpture August Rodin wrote: toujours travailler.2 -Ron Price with thanks to ‘Abdu’l-Baha in The Creative Circle, editor, Michael Fitzgerald, Kalimat Press, 1989, p.182; and Rodin “Always Work,” in Letters To a Young Poet, R.M. Rilke, WW Norton, NY, 1962, (1934), p.95. Letting divine impulses flow into our beings is surely at the heart of the poetic game. These heavenly suseptibilities are a magnet attracting the Kingdom’s confirmations, opening doors of meanings and healing waters, unbeknownst. Unbeknownst, too, are those intermediaries, like rivers, who bring the leaven which leaveneth within the powers of reflection, industry, work, study and prayer on the longest road of life: art. Ron Price March 15th 2005 DAN’S PLACE Here we are at another Naw-Ruz, sitting in my son’s lounge-room in his unit at 6-73 Mayne Street in Invermay Tasmania. He has been here for several days in his first home away from home in this old part of Launceston going back as it does to the nineteenth century. The last time he lived in as old a part of a town as this was in 1977-8 in Ballarat across from the Eureka Stockade, the town where he was born. The new Baha’i calendar registers BE 162. The first BE date I remember was 108 or 109, back in the early 1950s, at the dawn, the very dawn of the Kingdom of God on Earth. It was the last year of my middle childhood, 8 years old, or the first year of my late childhood, 9 years old, if I draw on those descriptors from human development models in psychology. Forty years ago in May 1965 I, too, left my family home for the second time. I remember my mother sitting in my lounge-room, bedroom, all rooms-in-one room, above the Dundas Restaurant on Dundas’s Main Street. It was late May or June 1965. Here I am, with a puzzling sense of deja vu, sitting in my son’s lounge-room like my mother wondering what will happen to me next. Dan is trying to work out what sort of job to get, what to study and what to do with his life. I was, too, back in that summer of ’65 forty years ago in May. I became, for that summer of ’65, an electrician’s assistant with Stelco of Canada. The job paid well and helped me with expenses in my third year of university in Honours Sociology. My mother moved down the street, two blocks away, from the family home which we had rented for the final year of my father’s life. My place above the restaurant was a three minute walk from my mother’s and we visited from time to time, had dinner together for some nine months until the spring of 1966. Then mother moved to Hamilton and I moved to Windsor to prepare for a pioneer post among the Eskimo.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, March 21st/22nd, 2005. The last year of the Plan1 opens as another life leaves another nest struggling, as I struggled like a broken-winged bird forty years ago, to sort out life’s persistent moments that never stop coming, inevitably, until the last syllable of our recorded time with all its sound and fury on its way to dusty death--yes: and we get older and older and older and the soul, it seems, not so inevitably, gets kindled and scattering angles, inevitably but unseen, from an Almighty Force, scatter abroad the fragrances of the words uttered by our mouths. Meanwhile, as we strut and fret upon the stage before that final silence when we speak no more, we are tranquil or disturbed as waves from life’s unending ocean of eternal grace and its revelations from some invisible spirit which seems to always summon some, lift some up and cast some down, bowing some backs yet again or bringing them a joy more manifest than before but curiously more hidden, too. Those mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence we will never understand. 1 Five Year Plan: 2001-2006. The fifth epoch opened on January 16th 2001. We are now in the fourth year, second month and sixth day of this epoch. Forty years ago, in May 1965 when my father died(10/5/65ca), we were in the first month of the third year of the 3rd epoch of the Formative Age. Ron Price March 22nd 2005 THE CATALOGUE Martha Gellhorn arrived in Spain in late March 1937 a month before the start of the Seven Year Plan, the first organized teaching campaign in fullfilment of ‘Abdul-Baha’s vision as defined in His Tablets of the Divine Plan. By Ridvan, April 21st 1937, Martha was well on her way to making a start to her incredible 60 year career as a war correspondent. Travel writer, journalist and novelist, Gellhorn was an eloquent witness, a cateloguer, of the wars of the twentieth century. She regarded her writing, as she put it back in 1959, “a form of honourable behaviour” involving readers and herself.1-Ron Price with thanks to Martha Gellhorn, 1959, Internet Sites, 2005. When and where was your anger born, Martha: with that Great--and useless--War to end wars? in a complex nexus with your reformer mother? with that gynaecologist father in St. Louis Missouri in those entre des guerres years? And your honesty, Martha, refreshing now, refreshing then, sure stirred the old pots: you say you got nothing out of sex---- in an age when few women admitted it, then or now, little delight in marriage’s fleeting terms, restive were your amorous worms. Wed or celebate, a hellish torment soon or late--but love, Martha, love won by courage shall endure; love, methinks, is love’s own cure. So it was in your last years--as you still felt the question gnaw: “What chain hath love that rubs me raw?” While the Baha’is went from Plan to Plan for those 62 years--1936 to 1998--you went from war to war: glamorous, a looker, a brave adventurer, an incredible journey--- and so it was for the rest of humankind in those 90 years1 during a catelogue of horrors unknown in the darkest of ages past, a magnitude of ruin beyond belief, but you catelogued it as well as anyone: gudonyer, Martha! < 1 Martha Gellhorn was born in 1908 and died in 1998. Ron Price March 21st, 2005. At the beginning of the Seven Year Plan in 1937 the term symbolic interactionism was coined by Herbert Blumer. Symbolic Interactionism is based on the premises that (i) human beings act on the basis of meaning; (ii) meaning arises out of interaction with others and (iii) an interpretive process, an imaginative reheasal, is used by individuals to deal with their environment. Some call this process the social construction of reality, the social definition of situations. The world we live in has an obdurate quality and the truth we derive is essentially subjective. The roots of this sociological perspective go back to sociologists like Max Weber and George Herbert Mead and pragmatist philosophers like Pierce and Dewey in the nineteenth century. -Ron Price, “Notes on Symbolic Interactionism,” Ron Price’s Notebooks, 2005. While the Kingdom of God on Earth was getting its kick-start in Chicago with a wonderful and thrilling motion from a point of light and a spirit slowly or quickly permeating to the entire world, you1 were pointing your finger at meaning, interpretation, the power of understanding, the advent of entirely new prophets: only these would bring the promised hope of escape from icy darkness, hardness, self-extinction, inner-deadness at the core of the life of culture.2 For the motion was thrilling, the faintest trace, hardly observed, but the clamour, He knew, was coming, the cry, the groaning, would be heard far and near in our intimate quarters where we sat quietly eating our steak and pie. Then, then, the knights would come, knights assisted, strengthened, reinforced in the midst of confusion, noise, tumult, stupendous struggle.3 1 Herbert Blumer, major 20th century sociologist of symbolic interactionism. 2 Max Weber, “Weber and The Search for ‘Interpretation’ and ‘Understanding,’” Ron Price’s Sociology Notes, 1998; and Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1949, pp.72-176. 3 ‘Abdu’l-Baha in The World Order of Baha’u’llah, Shoghi Effendi, 1974(1938), p. 17. -Ron Price March 22nd, 2005 At the beginning of the Seven Year Plan in 1937 the term symbolic interactionism was coined by Herbert Blumer. Symbolic Interactionism is based on the premises that (i) human beings act on the basis of meaning; (ii) meaning arises out of interaction with others and (iii) an interpretive process, an imaginative reheasal, is used by individuals to deal with their environment. Some call this process the social construction of reality, the social definition of situations. The world we live in has an obdurate quality and the truth we derive is essentially subjective. The roots of this sociological perspective go back to sociologists like Max Weber and George Herbert Mead and pragmatist philosophers like Pierce and Dewey in the nineteenth century. -Ron Price, “Notes on Symbolic Interactionism,” Ron Price’s Notebooks, 2005. While the Kingdom of God on Earth was getting its kick-start in Chicago with a wonderful and thrilling motion from a point of light and a spirit slowly or quickly permeating to the entire world, you1 were pointing your finger at meaning, interpretation, the power of understanding, the advent of entirely new prophets: only these would bring the promised hope of escape from icy darkness, hardness, self-extinction, inner-deadness at the core of the life of culture.2 For the motion was thrilling, the faintest trace, hardly observed, then, even now, but the clamour, He knew, was coming, the cry, the groaning, would be heard far and near in intimately where we sat quietly with our steak and pie. Then, then, the knights would come, knights assisted, strengthened, reinforced in the midst of confusion, noise, tumult, stupendous struggle.3 1 Max Weber and Herbert Blumer, major 20th century sociologists of symbolic interactionism. 2 Max Weber, “Weber and The Search for ‘Interpretation’ and ‘Understanding,’” Ron Price’s Sociology Notes, 1998; and Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1949, pp.72-176. 3‘Abdu’l-Baha in The World Order of Baha’u’llah, Shoghi Effendi, 1974(1938), p. 17. -Ron Price March 22nd, 2005 AN UNDERTAKING The last third of the twentieth century, beginning with the year I graduated from university, was ushered in by a set of events: wars, rebellions, assassinations, economic crisis and the election of the apex of the Baha’i administrative order. This Universal House of Justice is the trustee of a global undertaking set in motion over one hundred years ago, an undertaking that has gradually captured the imagination and loyalty of several million people. In 1968 a tremendous impetus to the majestic unfoldment of this new, this Baha’i, system took place and an impetus to the diffusion of spiritual inspiration. That year the Baha’i community established the Continental Board of Counsellors, a further unfoldment of its Administrative Order. The event commemorated the Centenary of Baha’u’llah’s arrival in the Holy Land on August 31st, 1868. A world revolution took place one hundred years later in 1968, so William Martin argues,1 which sparked “a total and irreversible crisis in the entire system of branches of knowledge regarding the social domain,” a system which dated from 1870. A world-systems scholarship centred in the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein was also born that year.1 -Ron Price with thanks to William G. Martin, “Rethinking Current Social Sciences: The Case of Historical Discourses in the History of Modernity,” Journal of World Systems Research, Vol.6, No.3, 2000, p.750 One hundred years, to the week, after Baha’u’llah arrived in Akka, the Baha’is held their first Oceanic Conference in Palermo. At the same time the Democrats held their National Convention in Chicago. The former event was “glorious” and the latter “frightening”. I was recuperating in a hospital at the time. -Ron Price with thanks to Alister Cook and his analysis of Chicago, ABC Radio, 1 September 1996: 7:15 PM. The voyage made by that God-man Baha’u’llah from Gallipolli to the Most Great Prison, forced upon Him, His fourth banishment, made it apparent by all earthly standards that this Cause would founder, wither and die. One hundred years later in commemoration of that journey, while violent disruptions seized the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the Nine Year Plan languished with more than half the goals still to be won, a community in sore need of a spiritual dynamic, a grand momentum to transform sombre notes of disaster into the diapason of triumph, raised its prayers to the Lord of the Age, the Lord of Hosts, the lifegiver of the world at that first Oceanic Conference. While defiant hippies insighted riots in that mammoth city of the plains where the Kingdom of God began unobtrusively only fifteen years before, the majestic unfoldment of a new Order saw one of its most precious assets effloresce to safeguard and promote this Faith: difficult to establish, difficult to understand, organic, complex and requiring time, time. A dynamic synchronization took place as it had been taking place, perhaps, since 1844, this time in June to August of that summer of 1968, a turning point in my own life, in the life of my society. Back then,1 when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated,2 when Paris witnessed a celebration of the imagination, a rejection of Marxism and archaic structures of authority in those riots,3 when those great affairs of the day, those events of history were changing the direction of the lives of humanity, for the most part unbeknownst, I taught grade three Eskimos at a priority pioneering post on Baffin Island for the last time and began a hospitalization in my life’s major episode of a bi-polar disorder.4 Later I was to learn that 1968 was also a new beginning for the Inuit of the Eastern Arctic,5 at least those in Iqaluit6 who gave expression to an energy which had been part and parcel of their spiritual inheritance, part of a superhuman exertion of millennia, a tour de force that seemed to be required by the Inuit and us yet again. 1 21 June 1968, the Appointment of the Continental Board of Counsellors 2 Bobby Kennedy was assassinated on June 8th 1968 3 The Paris riots of May 1968 4 I was hospitalized on the first Monday from early June to early December 1968 5 In an email/letter from Joshie Mitsima, November 13 2004. 6 Eskimo name for Frobisher Bay where I pioneered in 1967-8. Ron Price 26/10/01-22/3/05 COMMUNIFYING As the first Seven Year Plan was opening in 1937, The College of Sociology(Le College de Sociolgie) also opened in Paris. Its founding members included Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris. The College dedicated itself to the study of power, the sacred and myth. They took a special interest in the practice of sacred sociology: "not only the study of religious institutions but of the entire communifying movement within society."1 The communifying movement of society: its festivals, carnivals, monastic and military orders, secret societies, brotherhoods and, implicitly, the sense of community throughout The College of Sociology itself were all included in the ambit of this sacred sociology. There was, too, a certain fascination, ambiguous connection with the ideas of fascism in the thought of some of its founders. The founding members of the College were charged with the urgent task of preserving and regenerating the communal and the sacred element within modernity, an element threatened with extinction by the dissection of society into autonomous, separate spheres of science, politics and the arts. When the contractual logic which governs liberal democratic societies separates people, the sacred survives as an incommensurable, an inadequate, remainder.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Denis Bataille in Hollier, The College of Sociology: 1937-1939, Trans. Betsy Wing, Univ. of Minnesota Press,Minneapolis,1988,p74. I’ll bet they did not even look at the embryonic Baha’i world which was moving toward the end of its first century, defining its structure, creating its ethos, its community, beginning to conscientiously following the laws and teachings of its Great Founders within a global administrative Order, constructing its temples, more than just a loosely connected movement, increasingly unified in doctrinal matters, propagating its system, launching itself on an international missionary program that would last for many generations. Ron Price March 24 2005 MY POSTAGE STAMP In my fifties I had only begun to write seriously, had only begun to give myself up to solitude. At a similar age and after he had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature(1950), William Faulkner looked back at the period of his greatest artistic achievement(1929-1942) and made the comment: I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel.”1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1William Faulkner in “The Making of William Faulkner,” The New York Review of Books, Vol.52, No.6, 2005. I too, William, had my own little postage stamp to write on and about, in and with. I would never exhaust fact or fiction, truth and musings, my pleasure and others. I’d never find out if my work was inspired by talent, some leavening force, simple desire to serve or a concupiscible appetite, a sublimated irascibility, a persistent desire to follow my own abyss of inclinations, a fatigue with conversation and sociability, an immense desire for solitude where I found I was, by my fifties, never less alone than when I was alone and giving myself up to it, Hazlitt-like.1 1 Great 19th century British essayist. Ron Price March 28th 2005 THIS SECRET LIFE It was your belief, William, that the true artist is solitary by nature. Certainly, by the time I began to seriously venture into the land of the artist my nature or my desires had become solitary. I had had my fix of the social and its attendant pleasures, its responsibilities and frustrations. It had been a forty year fix from Baffin Island in Canada to Zeehan in Tasmania, say, 1955 to 1995 or, perhaps more accurately, 1953 to 1993. It was your experience too, William, of a desultory domestic guerrilla warfare as Joseph Blotner called your long and unhappy marriage of more than forty years. I’ve had my share of warfare in two marriages, but I was not soured by these intimate encounters over my forty years, 1967-2005, with 1974 and 1975 ending one and beginning another. You suffered more than I, William, with marriage, with depression, with alcohol, with relationships generally, with your inner daimons, in your battle with destiny, with your anger, with social mores and values. I had my battles too with depression, a bi-polar disorder with the virtual cessation of sex after 15 years of marriage, with an immense fatigue, ennui, with life, but these battles were all episodic, short-lived in the angst they created in my spirit.-Ron Price with thanks to J.M. Coetzee, “The Making of William Faulkner,” The New York Review of Books, April 7th, 2005. You had your binges1 when you could let your mind go, let it stop, let it swim in some misty half-world space, feel the cobwebs slip away, reset your inner, private, clock, let your well refill slowly, unobtrusively and obtrusively as if in a long, deep sleep: incomprehensible addiction, part of who you were, what you’d become. William, something else lets me respond creatively to the historical and social forces of my time as I live through my destiny, persist in trying to understand the impulses that have led me beyond my dreams in this secret life, this dark twin wherein I feel compelled to come to terms with the Baha’i in this emerging global psyche. 1 Faulkner was diagnosed as “An acute and chronic alcoholic” in a psychiatric hospital in Memphis. Some, like his editor in 1952, said it was a tragedy to witness the disintegration of a man. Ron Price March 28th 2005 A TRICHOTOMY NOT A DICHOTOMY One of the commonly expressed existential dichotomies that confronts poets is that between their “life” and their “work”--that is choosing between the activities of their life: family, job, interests, friends, etc. and their writing, their poetry. To put it in a different sequence, in another way, as Tagore did: the poem not the poet. Sometimes poets who choose their life as the centre of their poetic content are accused of self-promotion, egocentricity and a deficiency of humility. For me this dichotomy is only one way to express the way the poet responds to life. The journey for the poet, it seems to me, is one of infinite variety, a striving for unity in multiplicity, for a harmonizing of contrariety: poem, poet, life, work, every atom in existence and the essence of all created things, as Baha’u’llah put it in His Hidden Words, all operate on the poetic landscape. They operate in several triangles or trichotomies of forces: existence, perception and expression; personal life, religion and society; purity, independence and freedom; social sciences, humanities and autobiography, the three temporal perspectives of past, present and future, inter alia. Poetry is the result of the complex interaction of this multiplicity of forces. And so I find, with Stephen Dobyns: “I write poems to find out why I write poems.” -Ron Price with thanks to Stephen Dobyns, “Two Interviews,” The Cortland Review, 2004. Perhaps they blew my way on falling leaves part of that obdurate autumnal canvas that is Canada now and the drama of winter death that I left over thirty years ago. Perhaps they floated my way onto the beach beside the Lake Ontario after that awful war; or drifted over the piano, down from the book shelves of that old man who read even more now in the evening of his life without the worry of jobs and kids and the war. Perhaps they fell off her hands: beautiful, tender, so very fine, that mother who tried to care for that child she had waited for so long entre des guerres with humanity entering the outer fringes of the most perilous stage of its existence. Both of them wrote, but mostly life called them in a thousand ways. Perhaps they were cast into my life on words warmed by those tender ministerings of the Centre of the Covenant and on rays whose radiance was illuminating the surface of the earth, in one of Canada’s more active centres back then and in the opening stage of a transatlantic field of service where I would one day lay my bones. Ron Price March 29th 2005 ENDS AND BEGINNINGS It has been said--by the historian H.A.L. Fisher--that the battle of Waterloo in 1815 was “the last act of a tragedy, the end of one age and the beginning of another.”1 In the same year, 1815, Siyyid Kazim left his home in the province of Gilan to visit Shaykh Ahmad in Yazd before the Shaykh went to Khurasan on a pilgrimage. The young Siyyid was 222 and before leaving for Khurasan Shaykh Ahmad passed the leadership of the Shaykhi School to Siyyid Kazim that same year.3 Like some prelude to this ‘end time’ and ‘new beginning’ Beethoven composed his inspiring Emperor Concerto. -Ron Price with thanks to 1H.A.L. Fisher, A History of Europe,Vol.II, The Fontana Library, 1973(1935), p.959; 2Glenn Cameron, A Basic Baha’i Chronology, 1996, p.3--says he was 18 or 19 in 1815;&3Nabil, The Dawnbreakers, Baha’i Publishing Trust, Wilmette, 1974(1932), p.10-11. No matter who had won that battle1 Napoleon would have succumbed to the united strength of Europe and I suspect no matter who had led2 in that same crucial year of 1815 the world would have succumbed to that great God-man of Persia who faced death and exile in a different Isle of Elba.3 Perhaps that Emperor Concerto4 tells the story of one who struggled with the silence and anguish of this world to get it to yield meaning: one of the most original, most imaginative, most brilliant and most difficult pieces of pure poetry, pathos and triumphant joy-- while a young, pious, gentle, humble youth memorized the Qur’an, a prodigous number of prayers and traditions and composed a commentary that excited the awe and wonder of all. 1 Waterloo 2 Siyyid Kazim 3 The island where Napoleon died 4 Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.5 Ron Price April 2 2005 NEW PROBLEMS After a weekend involving 20 hours of socializing, I was engaged in a 90 minute telephone call on Monday and a 90 minute conversation with a friend on Tuesday. Although none of these experiences were unpleasant, I felt they were part of the slow sucking of my life forces. I did not have to face the various degrees of trauma, the varying severity of calamities and the diverse social entanglements that had been part of the long march in my life from 8 to 58: ill-health, marital tensions, employment pressures, perplexities in my sex life, frustrations in Baha’i administration and Baha’i community, worries in my affinal and consanguineal family, worries in raising my own children and in financial matters, inter alia. All of these problematic aspects of life had been removed from my shoulders. In their place I had been given the joys of creative writing and the creative tension that came from having to endure so many conversations and social activity and a residue of bi-polar problems. I really felt I had no reason to complain & I rarely did, except to my wife. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 17th 2005. This all sounds wonderfully simple in these early years of late adulthood. But it is not by any means the story. It is only one story, part of the story: one can not tell it all, untimely parts, unsuited to the ears of the hearers to tell it all in the finest of detail. There is a kind of knife-edge that does not allow me to go too far both here in this poem and in life. Those 24 hours of talk, talk, talk, listen, listen, listen are just about as much as I can bear—for I am taken to the edge, always to the edge of uttermost exhaustion and fatigue. The divine power released in these new and halcyon days, the liberal effusion of celestial grace, the fresh impulse, the acceleration of my life’s march, winning in the process compelling victories--have brought new crises and calamities which I can not defeat. They will conquer me unless some mysterious dispensation of Providence, some scattering angels sooner or later exercise their influence on my soul. Ron Price November 17th 2005 2 BAHA’I ACTIVITIES: A CONTEXT If Henry David Thoreau could write about the seasons, nature and the micro-events of his life and times in 14 volumes from 1837 to 1861, and if a host of other writers have written about a massive quantity of life’s minutiae in their many published works, I feel confident that the microcosm of my own experience is worthy of some literary expression---associated as it is with the slow growth in the community and institutional development of a prophetic message which I believe has had and will have an enormous impact on this planet in the last century and a half and the decades and centuries ahead. Historian Professor Marilyn Lake1 pointed out today why celebrations and commemorations of the slaughter of WWI become more prominent and more popular as the conflict itself grows ever more distant, some 85 years now. She also pointed out the importance of repetition in this historical process. Repetition is at the core of tradition and history. Amidst all this remembering, she warned, we may be in danger of forgetting some of the essential truths about war. These same comments could apply to the Baha’i community, its history, its celebrations and commemorations both the ones I am involved with and the many more to come.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Marilyn Lake on “National Interest,” ABC Radio National, November 13th 2005. 20 hours of driving and chatting, eating and drinking, waving the Baha’i flag and celebrating a Holy Day, events that take place every year. They deserve a place in this vast collection of writing, poetry, history and autobiography as Alex Miller put it today on Books and Writing.1 Telling your story, creating your life, introspecting, finding a joy, an ecstasy that could not be found any other way even when it deals with the mundane, the ordinarily ordinary, humanly human, such were some of the things Miller said. He also said things that come close to my own experience and I insert them here.2 What's the best thing about being a writer? Not surprisingly one of the most gratifying things about being a writer is the sense of an anonymous readership. The sense of the private conversation being read. I don't want to meet my readers….Being a writer allows me to be solitary for several hours every day! I enjoy the company of my family and friends all the more for this. There is a kind of magic about being in the company of people when one spends most of one's time alone. What's the worst thing about being a writer? I can't think of anything bad about being a writer even though it has its moments of pure agony. It's what I choose to do. I love it. I know it's a great privilege. I admire other writers. Without writing, my life is meaningless. Or at least it seems so. An illusion maybe, but writing makes everything else bearable and worthwhile. I don't know why. 1 Alex Miller, “Books and Writing,” ABC Radio National, 1:05-1:30 p.m., November 13th 2005. 2 Allen and Unwin Website, 2005. Ron Price November 13th 2005. THOREAU If Henry David Thoreau could write about the seasons, nature and the micro-events of his life and times in 14 volumes from 1837 to 1861, and if a host of other writers can write about a massive quantity of life’s minutiae in their many published works, I feel confident that the microcosm of my own experience, associated as it is with the slow growth in the community and institutional development of a prophetic message which I believe has had and will have an enormous impact on this planet in the decades and centuries ahead, is worthy of some literary expression. Historian Professor Marilyn Lake pointed out today why celebrations and commemorations of the slaughter of WWI become more promiment and more popular as the conflict itself grows ever more distant. She points out, too, the importance of repetition in this process, as part of the basis of tradition and history. Amidst all this remembering, are we in danger of forgetting some essential truths about war, she asks. These same comments could apply to the Baha’i community, its history, its celebrations and commemorations.-Ron Price with thanks to Marilyn Lake on “National Interest,” ABC Radio National, November 13th 2005. 20 hours of driving and chatting, eating and drinking, waving the Baha’i flag and celebrating a Holy Day, events that take place every year. They deserve a place in this vast collection of writing, poetry, history and autobiography as Alex Miller put it today on Books and Writing.1 Telling your story, creating your life, Introspecting, finding a joy, an ecstacy that could not be found any other way even when it deals with the mundane, the ordinarily ordinary, humanly human. 1 Alex Miller, “Books and Writing,” ABC Radio National, 1:05-1:30 p.m., November 13th 2005. Ron Price November 13th 2005. THE TRIUMVIRATE Andrew Slack, the captain of the Australian rugby team, The Wallabies, was interviewed on “The Sports Factor” an ABC Radio National program yesterday, November 11th 2005. He made one or two comments that I thought had a bearing, surprisingly, on my approach to writing. He was talking about professional teams and how the players on contract who get paid salaries have to eat, drink and sleep their game. He said that he thought that the professionalization of a sport can dampen the quality of the performance because it occupies so much of the player’s time. While I was listening to Mr. Slack it was about 9 am and I was driving to Scottsdale, a small town of several thousand in the northeast of Tasmania. ABC Radio repeats the program in the evening and I chanced to be driving home that same day and caught the program again. It was during this second hearing that the poetry-rugby connection struck me forcibly.-Ron Price with thanks to Andrew Slack, “The Sports Factor,” ABC Radio National, November 11th 2005. I find I can only devote so much time to this my obsession-triumvirate of: reading, writing, Baha’i. About 8 hours out of 16 allows me to remain fresh each day for more & more. Eating, breathing and sleeping every waking moment---dealing with this triumvirate---would exhaust the fibres of my being. But a little: walking, dishes, cooking, cleaning, chatting, tv and radio, a meeting, a trip to the tip, the shop, the PO, into town, a visit with a friend and I can come back to this trio again and again and again: you are right Andrew. I’m better as an amateur with no salary and no one pushing me but myself. Ron Price November 12th 2005 SECOND BEST Self-doubt is both the originating matrix of modern philosophy and the source of a considerable part of its energy. For the last three or four hundred years, self-doubt has defined the most salient and persistent ambitions of philosophical inquiry. But the vitality and the flavor of our contemporary life are notoriously impaired by modes of radical ambivalence that are more poignant and more urgent, in some ways, than the sceptical inhibitions imposed upon life by Descartes(1596-1650: dubito ergo sum) and his successors. Scepticism for Descartes was a means of arriving at true beliefs. In today’s world scepticism is more of a pervasive attitude of mind than a way of arriving at truth. Needless to say, however, the story of ambivalence is an old one: people have suffered from divided wills, and from being alienated from themselves, for a long time. St. Augustine writes of this in his Confessions 1600 years ago.1 St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin, Penguin Books, London, 1961, p. 172. A unified undivided will, being wholehearted, can be part of a healthy mind: mind and heart on one track. The wholehearted person knows what he wants. He knows where he stands with regard to any conflict of feelings or tendencies within himself, so far as his loving is concerned. He is wholeheartedly invested, convinced. He lends himself to it, identifies with it--without qualification or reserve. This will is purely his own. It is the purity of wholehearted will, the core of self-love kneaded into the very clay of humankind and has a wonderful centre of triumph, excellence and exaltation unchecked by maybe. Spinoza suggested the highest thing for which we can hope is this self-love.1 What is it about an undivided will that qualifies it as the most precious goal of life? Self-abandonment, more valuable than cerebral consent, the heavenly fool, the God-knower, a double-lensed burning glass, artist- seer who produces beauty, the soul’s glimpse of certitude, leaves no word untouched by wonder, invites crimson astonishment to leap through our veins, impelled by urgency that tells of the soul’s flight— not the mind’s ease.2 A divided will is self-defeating. If the will is not divided, no part with which one is identified is opposed to or resists his loving what he loves. He is altogether wholehearted in loving what he loves. Volitional disunity requires us to act in contrary directions at the same time. A deficiency in wholeheartedness is an irrationality that infects our lives. To be free from interference from oneself and others is tantamount to being satisfied with oneself, to being wholehearted. This is not easy to come by and, if you can’t come by it, then cultivate a sense of humour: that’s second best. 1 Harry Frankfurt, “Dear Self,” Philosophers’ Imprint, 2005. 2 Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” Baha’i Studies, Vol.10, pp. 3-5. Ron Price November 6th 2005 MANY RON PRICE’S There are many Ron Price’s on the internet. At one site the reader will be informed that “You've arrived at the internet site for a New Zealand medical drama called Shorthand Street.” It is about the lives and loves of the doctors, nurses, staff and patients at the Shorthand Street Hospital. The character Ron Price first appeared in the episode on July 27th 2004 at 7pm. Ron is a well-dressed, moderately successful, middle-class man in his forties. He is conservative by nature and feels threatened by cultures he doesn’t understand. His wife, Pauline Price, appeared on the same program also for the first time. Pauline is a well-educated, middle-class woman in her forties. Conservative by nature, she has enjoyed being a homemaker for her husband, Ron. They share an interest in gardening and the firm belief that the different races shouldn’t mix. Although she’s aware this is deeply unpolitically correct, Pauline isn’t afraid to air her views. –Ron Price with thanks to “Street Talk: A Website for Shorthand Street.” Other Ron Price’s at various websites include: Ron Price Motors(Subaru) in South San Francisco; a graphic artist Ronald Fullerton Price born in Chicago, Illinois on April 30, 1939 and died in 1998; another Ron Price has written articles on the New Testament for 20 years; there is Ron Price the photographer; a Ron Price who joined the Dallas ISD Board in 1997 and served as secretary and co-chair of its personnel committee; a Ron Price who was born on 5 Nov 1937 in Bradford, W.Yorkshire and educated at the Bradford Grammar School; there is a Ron Price who is Chair of some Radiation Safety Committee; Ron Price, a candidate for the Republican Party and member of the Santa Cruz County Central Committee; and an alleged wife beater. On and on goes the list.-Ron Price with thanks to the many internet sites found under the name of Ron Price. Some names are common and found on the internet like my father’s name: Fred Price dozens of them found in geneological tables and historical sites going back hundreds of years about as common as air like the nameless and traceless millions, about as meaningful as the eye of a dead ant in the ultimate scheme of things. To extract poetry from such a common entity, to make such an entity interesting now there’s the rub. Can I mould this brute matter into form, this ordinary thing into the extraordinary or, in the end, will I create a worthless prose-poem not visited by any aesthetic passion, by any spell and so cast it on readers without pleasure or meaning? Ron Price September 3rd 2005 PUBLISHED AT LAST Yesterday while on the internet I discovered that if I typed my name, Ron Price, into the Google search box or, indeed, the search box of any one of a number of other search engines and then typed some subject like history, sociology, media studies, film studies, among a host of other topics/subjects--and then clicked the right/defined spot, a number of websites would appear, listing ten per page, with my writing located at several dozen sub-sites. There were literally dozens of search engines, dozens of subjects and dozens of sites where my writing could be located in this way. I tried the following subjects with much success: ancient history, jobs, poetry, autobiography, literature, psychology, religion, philosophy, Baha’i, Emily Dickinson, Edward Gibbon, Arnold Toynbee, inter alia. The list seemed to be just about endless. After four years of posting my writings on the internet under many headings and at many sites, in addition to those above, I have ‘published’ enough to satisfy whatever desires I have ever possessed in this connection, in relation to fame and renown and publicizing the name of the Baha’i Faith as much as possible. Like some vast directory, file, archive or library, my writings could be easily located in bite-size, accessible, chunks. After 20 years(1981-2001) of trying unsuccessfully to get publishers to place my ideas under a hard cover and after 40 years of writing(1959-1999: age 15 to 55) with little publishing success, here was my writing spread out all over the world wide web.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, October 3rd 2005. It’s all very autobiographical, but the way I’ve set it all out allows for generalizable, theoretical, expositions, of doctrine and teachings in a personalized, subjectized, individualized perspective---- not at all suitable to autobiography according to Roy Pascal one the major theorists of autobiography in my time.1 There is a desire for exaltation here, an exaltation of a Cause and the magnification of the station of a new, emerging, world community. 1 Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, Harvard UP, Cambridge Mass., 1960, p.182.-Ron Price,October 3rd 2005 THE MOST GREAT PRISON Perhaps once every 12 months during the years 1999 to 2005 my wife and I would go to Hobart from George Town. Our purposes in making this three hour drive were varied: to visit a friend, to go to a doctor, to attend a Baha’i function or spend a day with a Baha’i family. George Town was a beautiful locality of some 7000 people and Hobart a beautiful city of many thousands more. My wife and I lived in a beautiful part of God’s world. By my late fifties and early sixties, though, I took less and less interest in travelling to cities, towns, anywhere really, however attractive the place was, whatever was the function involved or whoever the friend was at the other end. The world I lived in, in these early years of retirement from full-time work and, by 2005, retirement from part-time, casual and nearly all volunteer work---was increasingly an inner one. Looking at scenery, articles in shops, the inside of waiting rooms, or the many attractive women who were part of urban landscapes was not an entirely empty experience; nor was listening to speakers, chatting informally for any number of hours to people I knew or didn’t know and munching a good meal or two without some allure. But whatever meaning, whatever allure, these activities had once possessed over several decades, the intensity, the delight, the significance, the pleasure had been largely drained from my sensory and intellectual emporium by my 60th birthday. Only necessity, obligation, and duty would move me from my home and hearth and its attendant pleasures of habit, taste and mind. It was not that external events like visits and trips were unpleasant affairs; for I found them, on the whole, relaxing, mildly stimulating and usually useful to someone or other beside myself. Nor was it that I had become a complete hedonist taking care of number one, a skill I had refined with finesse over many a year. It was, rather, that at home I was engaged in an activity that had been the passion of my life for some forty years and I felt finally, after more than four decades of slow advance, I was at last getting my teeth into it. As I approached the half-century mark I was able to engage this passion to the fullest and it was so completely satisfying.1 At any rate, here I was in mid-afternoon, just before the Melbourne Cup was about to be run on November 1st 2005, sitting in Wellington Court in downtown Hobart on a clean iron bench outside Connor’s Shoe Repairs while my wife shopped in “Your Habitat,” a shop off the Court, writing these words reflecting as was the desire of the moment on more than five decades of Baha’i experience and the events of this day in the last month of spring in Tasmania. -Ron Price, 1“Teaching Over Five Decades: One Man’s View,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 1st, 2005. Life moves on through the warm afternoon sunshine here in Hobart as life always moves on no matter if it’s a 12 hour annual trip to the city before getting back home whatever was the purpose and whenever in the year or if it’s one of a thousand other things. The Baha’i Centre will soon be ready, perhaps, I hear, six months from now. I can see the building peaking above a world of trees under a blue sky as the sun coats everything with its glitter: it goes by faster than the twinkling of an eye I can’t take it all in: its all too fast. “That’s the city,” I say to myself. With no energy left to join the Baha’is in Launceston for the evening program, we head straight for home and the usual day’s regularities in our Most Great Prison. Ron Price November 1st, 2005. CARICATURE AND INERTIA The French historian Fernand Braudel and the sociologist Raymond Aron held the view that 'the phase of civilisations is coming to an end, and for good or ill humanity is embarking on a new phase' - that of a single civilisation which could become universal.'1 At the same time, he was convinced that the deep structures embedded in regional and national identities were not about to disappear and that for a long time yet, the word civilisation would continue to be used in both the singular and plural.' This view is a consistent one with my understanding of an aspect of the Baha’i view of the future of the term civilization. Braudel’s method and certainly mine as I attempt my poetic analysis of aspects of civilisation is to look first at its geographical situation. Braudel focuses on the economic and urban development of civilizations far more than I do. The sociological and psychological features of a civilization occupy a higher place in my study than in Braudel’s. Despite the caricature that is often drawn of Braudel as a geographical determinist who ignored the agency of individual human beings, he accords roughly equal importance to each of these facets of social organisation. The Baha’i teachings underpinning my poetry are also caricatured from time to time as the basis for some vast system of global uniformity whereas in reality these teaching provide a basis for unity in diversity and a harmony of group and individual goals. It is true that the reader will meet few political leaders in Braudel’s text, but he will find numerous mathematicians, philosophers, scientists and religious thinkers. Readers will meet an immense cross-section of people in Price’s poetry, the people he knew in the Baha’i community and in the wider community as well as the media.-Ron Price with thanks to Norman Etherington, “Review of Fernand Braudel’s A History of Civilizations, Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History, March 1997. After more than 50 years of swimming around in this emerging world religion in the early stages of global civilization and its immense diversity, in the deeply embedded structures of Arctic, Australian and Canadian identities that are not about to disappear in the frozen Tundra, the semi- desert, the savanna, the temperate rainforest or here at the edge of the Tamar River near the Bass Strait in Australia’s oldest town--- I often feel I have come to know every man and his dog in an overwhelming blooming and buzzing confusion that can be partially tamed in some mutual coercion mutually agreed upon, some minimalist behavioural controls—and I’d write the drama that I have seen of individual human action but I don’t have the skill. I feel an inertia which is a great artisan of history’s story in this slow, mute, complicated affair of life in lower depths where I would like readers to taste the bread and smell the rice, sweet-cake, but I can’t. Ron Price October 30th 2005 ENERGIZE: VIRGINIA For some people, the question of the meaning of life closes in on them with age; for others the question arises only periodically and so rarely as to be virtually dispensed with. It does not obtrude. For others the question is answered sufficiently for life to go on without major philosophical obstructions. Everyone gets their daily miracles, illuminations, pleasures, matches struck in the darkness of life’s journey, a good meal, a laugh, the energy from the blooming and buzzing confusion of life, if not every day then many a day. Millions never experience a great revelation; it just never comes. They must make of the moment something permanent, something meaningful. They must give shape to the chaos of life each in their own way. The eternal passing and flowing, the little separate incidents, must be given a stability, a continuity, a unity in the whole, in the interstices of the daily round, the reflections on life and various anticipated futures. For without this whole, this unity, there is a sense of the aimless, the chaotic, the fragmented.-Ron Price with thanks to “Darkness Beyond the Lighthouse: Virginia Wolf, Charles Baudelaire and Literary Modernism,” Nebula, Vol.2 No.3, September 2005. Art is not enough, Virginia. It’s a precarious balance between the transient and the eternal, the contingent and the absolute; alone it can not triumph over life, cannot provide faith’s leap, cannot be the ground of being, the cure for the sense of dread. One needs a centred structure, universe, fundamental ground, immobility, reassuring certitude beyond play, master of anxiety, something solid which does not melt into air, some quintessential meaning, unity, whole, some truth which is perennial but not archaic, some eschatology which is not seemingly arbitrary and mythical, with an abstruse, absurd, literalism. That semi-transparent envelope, that luminous halo which we take from cradle to grave, inner song of Keat’s nightingale with it’s full-throated ease of inspired self-disclosure or a song free from the taint of ego-personal, when life has gone--will this envelope, this song, this halo, be disinfected, purified from the changes and chances of the world, freed from the limitations, restrictions imposed by this earthly life, its influence no longer circumscribed by physical limitations, its radiance no longer clouded by this human temple, will it energize the world to a degree unapproached during its terrestrial days on its way to dusty death.1 1 Virginia Woolf takes up this issue in The Craft of Fiction quoted in Daniel Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, Routledge, NY, 1990, p.4. Ron Price October 27th 2005 |
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