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Abstract:
The poetry here deals with some of my experiences with the arts and humanities as well as the print and electronic media as a backdrop to an analysis of my own poetry.
Notes:
I try to connect my own experience and society's to that of the vast world of the arts and humanities, especially as found in the print and electronic media. The relationship of the Bahá'í Faith to various art forms and various media is also explored. In this discussion I also analyse the role and function of my poetry.
Crossreferences:
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| Part 1: A CONTEXT FOR INSISTENT THEMES The most insistent theme in the corpus of Shakespeare's work is the truth about relations among human beings: that community takes precedence over the individual, that power without love is disaster, that the human being is subject to suffering and that however different we all are, we are all alike and there is an ideal social order.-Ron Price with thanks to Charles Harrison, Shakespeare's Insistent Theme, The University of the South Sewanee, Tennessee, 1985, pp.3-11. Bahá'u'lláh's writings contain a wondrous sense of victory in that they contextualize all that we can experience on earth and all that we can know. They offer in the world of religion a theoretical starting point for the search for a context in which certain fundamental questions may be discussed1. There is in this Prophet's work a total sense that this is a "Revelation direct from God", a "mighty torrent that precipitateth itself upon the earth..." The breezes of the All-Glorious taught Him "the knowledge of all that hath been." We have, then, extensive writings laid out on all the facets of that 'insistent theme' that was Shakespeare's, now, in modern dress for all of humankind to follow.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1 Karl Popper,"A Tribute to Karl Popper", The Science Show, 4 July 1998, ABC Radio; and John S. Hatcher, The Ocean of His Words: A Reader's Guide to the Art of Bahá'u'lláh, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1997, pp.14-18. We must, therefore, be open to criticism, as we pause to reflect on the whole picture of this new race of men and its transformative implications, the blending and harmonizing of salutary truths unvitiated here in an integrity, an ultimate foundation, an organic change in the structure of society, slowly unfolding, a fresh manifestation of God in history, an outpouring of heavenly grace, nobler, ampler signs of human achievement, a profound change in the standard of public discussion where dissidence is a moral, an intellectual contradiction in a community whose goal is unity and where etiquette of expression must always be reborn. Ron Price 4 July 1998 Given this contextualization of all that I experience through the collirium of Bahá'u'lláh's writings and those of His appointed Successors and elected trustees, readers will find here some of my reflections on experiences that came my way by way of the several print and electronic media. LIGHTING UP THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS Like Robert Nisbet I think there have been great social changes since at least the Greeks twenty-five hundred years ago. There have been, of course, periods of seismic shift going back long before the emergence of homo sapiens sapiens in 32,000 BP(ca) or in the tens of thousands of years going back to an arguable 100,000 BP. That is one of the major themes of physical and cultural anthropology. I came to Australia in the middle of what may come to be seen as a seismic shift in Western society which took place from about 1963 to 1973. Dennis Altman, Professor of Politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, defined this shift period as the late 60s and early 70s. -Ron Price with thanks to Dennis Altman on "Rethinking Australia", ABC Radio, Sunday, 28 June 1998, 5:05-6:00 PM. The whole period was for me an epochal shift, a seismic shift, with reading spread over more and more and more getting ready for an immense engorgement, laying it all into a Bahá'í paradigm, my Bahá'í paradigm, hot, rich, super exhausting, again and again and again until I found a continual refreshment in this poetry1: cool, quiet, low, on the grass with the dew, in the evening lighting up the sky with diamonds. 1 Melton J. Bates says of Wallace Stevens that as a poet "he enjoyed the godlike prerogation of continually refashioning himself in his poetry." -Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1985, p.ix. Ron Price 28 June 1998 LAOS Part 1: The Most Secret Place on Earth is a 2008 film by German director Marc Eberle. Eberle’s fascination grew with film grew from his teens, and many of those films have ended up serving as major sources of inspiration and enlightenment for him in his personal journey of trying to make sense of the world around him. His personal story, life-narrative, with film is an interesting one unto itself. The film I watched last night dealt with the secret operation waged by the CIA throughout the sixties and early seventies against communist guerrillas in Laos, particularly in the city of Long Chen. I watched this film1 before going to bed. I’ve been recently altering the time when I take my medications in the evening so that I can stay-up later and not go to sleep, which is the effect of these pills from my psychiatrist. This change of time allowed me to watch this film which was on after midnight. After 30 years of conspiracy theories and myth making in relation to Laos, from the 1970s to the 2000s, this film uncovers the story of the CIA's most extensive clandestine operation in the history of modern warfare: The Secret War in Laos. This war was conducted alongside the Vietnam War from 1964 -1973. Part 2: There is now a u-tube piece on this war for u-tube lovers, and there is a detailed outline of the story also available in cyberspace. There is no need for me to tell you the story here; you can read that for yourself or watch the u-tube video. I will, though, simply write this prose-poetic piece as I often do, utilizing poetry’s advantage of succinctness and brevity, and its strong tendency to be written in an autobiographical mode and manner. While the world's attention was caught by the conflict in Vietnam, the CIA built the busiest military airport in the world in neighbouring and neutral Laos. They recruited humanitarian aid personnel, Special Forces agents and civilian pilots to undertake what would become the most effective operation of counter-insurgency warfare.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC1TV, 12:30-1:30 a.m., 20/2/’13. I remember all that talk about the Ho Chi Minh Trail & the bombing of Laos, sending it back into a Stone Age that it had never really left by 1960. I’d been involved in my own little known war, trying to work-out the most effective way to deal with all those ups-and-downs, the books, a strong libidinal urge now and then, words of a new religion which had come into my life back in those early ‘60s. Laos was mixed-in with all the high-school words, birds flying over Akka, a little world of family-friends, sport and fun…..It was like something from another part of the universe, far, far out on the periphery of that world back then when life was beginning— little did I know until last night on TV. Ron Price 20/2/’13 Part 2: THOUGHT’S QUINTESSENTIAL LINE This poem which began this morning when I read a quotation sitting, as it had been, in a file for about nine years, was finished in the afternoon at ‘The Perth Flower and Garden Show 1999’ organized by my step-daughter, Angela Armstrong and her colleague, one Debbie-Anne. It was a warm afternoon in mid-autumn. After touring the grounds and chatting to several people I sat and wrote the following poem. It begins, as most of my poetry does, with a quotation, in this case about memory. It finishes as a contemplation on how we construct our worlds. “Memory is not simply the property of individuals, not just a matter of psychological processes, but a complex cultural and historical phenomenon constantly subject to revision, amplification and ‘forgetting’. Memory is, therefore, a construction. Memories are actively invented and reinvented by cultural intervention.” And then there is the thought, the memory, that can not find its way into words. It precedes language, perhaps existing in some sensory-emotion matrix, and remains beyond language.-Roger Bromley, Lost Narratives: Popular Fictions, Politics and Recent History, Routledge, London, 1988, Introduction. We have our ways to explain and justify, in a word, to legitimate, to stamp approved or not-approved on our worlds, to locate ourselves in a cosmic frame. And so these anecdotes, this autobiography, our story, is not so much an expression of personal experience, as an allegorical exposition of a model of the way we see the world working.1 Herein, we shape the debate; We set the agenda, mould our consciousness, map our framework of meaning, construct scenarios of action, structure our options, our mythology of daily history, our myth of the social order.2 For words are things and a drop of ink can make millions think;3 a drop of air can make millions stare; But these words of mine, although defining space and time, don’t quite capture my lifelong maze, its endless gaze; butterfly-like, fragile and fugitive, my life eludes this net, this sive. Thought in all its vestments fine shapes my life: a taste like wine, sometimes sour, sometimes I dine, a fragrance, just, no words of mine can capture its quintessential line. Ron Price 16 April 1999 1 Meaghan Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies”, Logics of Television, editor, Patricia Mellencamp, Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1990. 2 Margaret McColl, “The Mass Media and Political Behaviour” Government, Politics and Power in Australia, p.236. 3 Byron, Don Juan, quoted in “Max Harris: Browsing”, The Australian. BEGINNINGS Vincent van Gogh wrote that “in the late spring the landscape of Arles gets tones of gold of various tints: green-gold, yellow-gold, pink-gold, and in the same way bronze, copper, in short starting from citron yellow all the way to a dull, dark yellow colour like a heap of threshed corn. And this combined with the blue-from the deepest royal blue of the water to the blue of the forget-me-nots, cobalt.”1 Van Gogh’s correspondence was unique; no painter has ever taken his readers through the processes of his art so thoroughly, so modestly, or with such descriptive power. Van Gogh was inventing a landscape as it invented him; in his incessant letters he catelogued and categorized his work. Much of his work, especially his work at Arles, was a rhapsodic outpouring of creative energy. Work and seriousness is the real image of Van Gogh. It is here that the critic could see the beginnings of modern art.(1)Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists, Harvill, London, 1990,143-144; and (2)p.132. Ron Price describes the colours of a different landscape in the darkest hours of declining western civilization and an emerging global civilization; the colours of the centuries that saw the emergence of both these civilizations; and the tones and tints that he saw in the emergence of the first truely global religion. Price describes the colours of his own life from his deepest, blackest depressions to his golden, his blue, his amethyst and yellow joys; and the play of these colours, his personal subjectivity, on other sets of colours he saw reflected in his society, his culture, his religion and his world. Everyone tells their story in a different way. Here is a story, taken over three epochs: 1944 to 2000; here is a religion. Price provides his readers with a thorough account of the processes by which he works. The detail is descriptive; the tone, he likes to think, is modest. There is work, seriousness, rhapsody here in Price’s poetry and another beginning: several decades of emergence from obscurity of the newest of the world’s religions. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000. This is a moral act; it expresses my whole sense of being in the world. Striving for accuracy I must be indifferent to the errors of this poetic fecundity,1 for I am not writing the history of my age, but telling of the uniqueness of my time with an engine for describing a world in metamorphosis, with an immediacy that creates popularity. It is unlikely that this poetry will find a home, a theatre of characters and events familiar and not so familiar in this world of burgeoning cultural forms, for a world of divergence,but it has found a home. Dissociation of gaze and empathy induced by the mass media in a world of frenetic passivity. 1 Robert Hughes describing August Rodin in Hughes, op.cit., p.132. Ron Price 15 January 2000 In the poetry of Roger White there is what Geoffrey Nash calls a dialectic. It is a dialectic, a dialogue, a contrast, between the ordinary self and the heroic soul, between the often dull exterior of a person and their inner greatness, between the real and/or apparent hegemony of their material condition and the potential and/or real spiritual heroism, between the pain at the heart of life and the denial of its existence. White is challenging us to move beyond our role as anti-hero, to transcend our ordinary self and its protective chrysalis. We may still possess certain vanities and cupidities. We may in the end remain anonymous. But we go through a struggle and therein lies our heroism. White calls us all to "arise and struggle."-Ron Price with thanks to Geoffrey Nash, "The Heroic Soul and the Ordinary Self," Bahá'í Studies, Vol. 10, pp. 23-31. Was it merely coincidental that those superheros began to emerge in that first year of the teaching Plans in 1937-81? That proliferating symbol of human, semi-human, greatness has now wandered across the whole earth devoted to justice in the most ordinary of ordinary circumstances. This superhero1 has a mission to reinvent society with a sense of history and the future.2 He assaults the humbling summits, makes his vertical ascents past fault and fissure. Through the miasmal ooze he painfully inches his consequential necessary way.3 1 Superman emerged in the mass media in 1938 as did the first generation of pioneers during the teaching Plans. 2 Christian L. Pyle, "The Superhero Meets the Culture Critic," Postmodern Culture, Vol.5, No.1, 1994 informs us that the superheros of the print and electronic media in the last sixty years have generally not tried to change society only battle on behalf of the status quo, with little sense of the history or the future. The Bahá'í pioneers, on the other hand, who rise beyond their ordinary self, do try to reinvent the world with a strong sense of both history and the future. 3 Roger White, "Nine Ascending," The Language of There, Canada, 1992, p.34. Ron Price 3 August 2001 Part 3: NOTE IN A BOTTLE “You can’t get to the bottom,” poetry writer and editor Ed Hirsch said in an interview, “of the mysteries of creation.” It is in this inability to get to the depths of mystery, in the fact that we overlook and fail to celebrate the ordinary and in our need to bear witness, to testify to what is beyond art, to what exists in wordless places that this delicate, tender and solitary person, this soul in man, will find the root, the basis, of poetry. The political in a poem has little to do with partisan politics and much to do with bringing the everyday realities into recorded history. The metaphysical, the historical, in a poem often derives from the fact that the poet does not want to describe what he sees, he wants to produce, to construct, the facts and often only from very ordinary situations but, hopefully, with extraordinary thoughts and insights.2 The past exists in a special way through writing not as a being-within-itself.1 This is more important in our time when millions seem to be missing entirely any genuine intellectual experience born of reading, any of the enchantment of poetry, being befriended by the art of poetry, due to the powerful yet distracting effects of the mass media. Here is a poem, a vahid, on this theme. -Ron Price with thanks to Ed Hirsch, “Books and Writing,” ABC Radio National, 7:05-8:00 pm, 26 January 2001; 1 Alfonso Mendiola, “An Ambiguous Connection with the Past: Modernity,” Internet, 20 December 2000; and 2 Helen Gardner, The Metaphysical Poets, Penguin Books, 1972(1957), p. 24. I’ve spilled over from my reading. It just had to gush out. These poetic receptacles are as good as anything, better. You can’t keep in all this sort of stuff and so I write it down for someone, someone I don’t know, for posterity, for whomever finds it, like those notes in a bottle down by the shore sent by someone unknown, never met. But sometimes no one ever finds them. They just float around forever, forever waiting for someone at the other end. No one might ever find me, sealed, stored forever in a bottle, unread. Who will find this bottle by their shore, and take it home to their evening chair, near an open window, near no window, but in bed with a pillow under head? Ron Price 27 January 2001 Part 4: QUALITY? Beginning perhaps in the 1960s there was an explosion in the production of artists, writers, poets, indeed virtually all of the creative and performing arts. By the time I began writing this poem in 2002 there have been some four decades of mass production by creators of various artistic forms: poems, plays, novels, paintings, sculpted works, songs, et cetera. One result has been the creation of millions of pieces of homeless work. They have a home in their place of creation, but they often never find a home in an art gallery, a museum or in a published form. Another result of this excess of artistic performers is inflated reputations and wrongly ignored artists. This is inevitable in the short term. Eagles become the turkeys they really were, in time, in the long term. My own work, for example, simply can not find a home in the mass media. That is true of millions of other artists. But it is in the nature of human beings to discriminate. Some things strike us as better than others: more articulate, more radiant with consciousness, more pleasureable. Experience teaches us to see differences in intensity, meaning, grace, beauty. But quality is not easily quantifiable and everyone has different tastes. The phenomenon of 'quality' is quite complex. Although I have found a home on the internet for much of my work, I may never know whether I was a turkey or an eagle.-Ron Price with thanks to Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint: The Freaying of America, Oxford UP, 1993, pp.193-203. There's some of the 'telling others' here, but mostly it's a working it out for myself, an easy, organized, reverie, a turning of the inward life, an understanding, perchance others may understand, too. Some reality I want to bring into sight, something covered with familiarity's veil, talking to myself, communicating with my own being, with what is partly felt, not quite seen, bringing my life together, scattered across two continents over forty years, in so many towns and so many heads that I need to find something called me. Ron Price 20 January 2002 ELYSIUM Part 1: Elysium is a 2013 American dystopian science fiction action thriller film. It was written, directed, and co-produced by Neill Blomkamp, and starring Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Alice Braga and Sharlto Copley. It was released on 9 August 2013, in both conventional and IMAX Digital theaters; I saw the film on TV on 9 July 2015 here in Australia. In my 16 years of retirement from a 50 year student and paid employment life, 1949 to 1999, I have found that, if I wait, the movies and DVDs that come onto the market eventually turn-up on television. This film takes place on both a ravaged Earth, and a luxurious space habitat on a rotating wheel space station called Elysium. The space station reminded me of the one in 2001 Space Odyssey. The film explores political and sociological themes such as immigration, overpopulation, health care, exploitation, the justice system, and social class issues. Although the film's story is set in 2154, the director-producer has stated that the film is a comment on the contemporary human condition. "Everybody wants to ask me lately about my predictions for the future," the director said, "No, no, no. This isn't science fiction. This is today. This is now." Part 2: I leave it to readers with the interest to find the details about the plot, cast, production, critical reception, and general details. Wikipedia has an informative overview of the film. I have taken an interest in the leading science fiction authors of the last two centuries from Mary Shelley to George Lucas. In many ways these authors have predicted and, accordingly, influenced the development of scientific advancements by inspiring many readers to assist in transforming their futuristic visions into everyday reality. The stories of these two centuries of science-fiction are now told in cyberspace through: film clips, re-enactments, illustrations and interviews. Back in the 1950s I joined the Baha’i Faith which, among other things, is a religion with the very future in its bones. In my 60 years of association with this newest of the Abrahamic religions I have found it has often been criticized as far too utopian with an unrealistic picture of the future. Perhaps this is yet another reason why I have taken an interest in the genre of science fiction. Part 3: You’re getting older Jodi, but there is still plenty of bloom on the rose. Matt’s in his element pushing his body, his exo-skeleton, as far as it could be pushed. I said to myself, as I watched this film: “this is not 2054… this is now.” Science fiction & fact into conversation with one another. I tried to write sci-fi back in the late 1980s, but it was not for me, and neither was novel-writing. I settled for essay-writing, poetry, autobiography, & internet posting on 1000s of topics with millions of words. I was not a writer of sci-fi: no Isaac Asimov, no Robert Heinlein, nor a Jules Verne…We all have to find our place in space, our skills, our abilities, our raison d'etre for living in this time, this climacteric of history. Ron Price 11/7/’15. 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 AN UNLAMENTED DEATH Again and again he must stand back from the press of habit and convention. He must keep on recapturing solitude. -Walter de la Mare, Private View, 1953. He was not a practical man, not adept at gardening, painting, cleaning, cooking, fixing the car or door handles or shopping. His death could hardly be lamented. All he seemed to do was write poetry, I mean just about endlessly. He said he felt an excess of joy, but did not want to talk about it. It was too strange. He was too extreme, impulsive, a victim of his passions. Some he said were jealous, but he did not like to pursue that theme. He was a little too frank to suit some. He seemed to prefer his own company, a recluse, a hermit, had fallen in love with flowers and gardens; he’d often weep at movies which he rarely attended. He cried especially when he saw the Mountain of God on video. We were ready for his death for he said he’d died already many times and looked forward to its face, its new life. Was it suicide? We’ll never know and there’s no disgrace. Besides, I wear his face and he was beyond that kind of place, still in the race. Ron Price 28 December 1995 EXPRESSING YOUR LIFE IN WORDS After thirty years of writing music scores for movies, he still wakes up and wants to do better, to get the better sound, the right mix, to lift the audiences higher. He’s never satisfied, always working, continually being renewed by the process and the result. -Ron Price, A summary of the story of John Barry, composer, as presented on Music for Movies, ABC TV, 27 December 1995, 11:00 pm. If I could put Your life to music what a sound I’d make to tell the story to the heart they’d cry with tears of joy, clear as a bell. If I could paint Your days on canvas what beauty would they find, would lift their faces and their eyes to some Paradise so kind. If I could sculpt Your life somehow and carve it in these stones, I’d place the soul of all Your days, in the chink of people’s bones. But I do not enjoy these skills at all; my game is all with words and there just is no way for me to express Your life in surds. But I will go on trying; until the words do end. Such wondrous vision down so deep and Mount Everest to send me to the heights of bliss, as well as exhaustion’s pit, to help me keep on going strong when I’d just like to sit and quit. Ron Price 27 December 1995 ALPHA POINTS When you1 wrote of the next Augustan age you had no idea in the slightest that a fully institutionalized charisma, a different glory, leading from its strength and pride, Of young ambition eager to be tried ..... A golden age of poetry and power of which that noonday was the beginning hour and about to dawn in the celebration of the Most Great Jubilee. This was no King Arthur presiding over a Camelot, but a new order of the ages. There would be no assassination here, no glamorous fatality, just the slow growth of a prophetic message, unobtrusive, unbeknownst to humankind. Yes, as Mailer said, these were boundary-making times of epochal significance, not in Los Angeles2 , but in London and Haifa, as the ninth stage of history, a grand design3 unfolded. Mailer’s words were already sounding hollow as paeans of joy and gratitude were raised to the throne of Baha’u’llah for those who kept the ship on its course and brought it safe to port4 as the tenth and final stage of history opened its doors to the mighty task ahead and a dream which was never written in shorthand, never truncated, always vast as if we were asked to reach for the stars, a renaissance always in the making, always it is morning and back, then, the beginning hour, the alpha5 point of postmodern history joining the past with the future in one continuous garment of light, corridor of brightness, now, concentric circles irradiating the globe from the holiest spot on earth in an alabaster sarcophagus. 1 Robert Frost wrote a panegryric poem at President John Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. These italicized lines are from that poem and are quoted in The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, p.228. 2 The Democratic Convention of 1960 was held in Los Angeles at the Sports Arena and Norman Mailer, a popular American writer of the time, saw this Convention as “the most important...in America’s history.” The essay in which he expressed this idea was published in 1963 in The Presidential Papers. -ibid. p.229. 3 The Universal House of Justice used this term to express Shoghi Effendi’s unfolding of the meaning of history and of the Cause in his thirty-six year ministry. -Wellspring of Guidance, p.1. 4 The Hands of the Cause in: ibid., p.2. 5 there are a wide range of ‘alpha points’ the poet could draw on in playing with this concept of beginnings. April 1963 is just one such point. Ron Price 7 December 1996 TO IRVING LAYTON My country, my landscape, has been an immense and strange world peopled with the breeze of mystic Heralds, long beards, birds flying dead, heads rolling into lounge rooms, chests pierced with candles, journeys, endless journeys over mountains and oceans, plans, always more plans, books with millions of words and, now, a set of wondrous buildings. This world was often thick and heavy, often joyous and intense. It lay somewhere at the back of my head even when I was at the movies, or making love. It really never went away. Now, another world, another landscape, has been given me, a world of profound beauty, glorious to the senses, magic to the mind. I have plucked a thousand poems, more, from this immensity. I have waited confidently for them to fall like fruit into my lap to taste and treasure. I still wait; I wait now and will wait tomorrow. I’m inclined to think they will come, these infinite treasures, until my last breath. I shall wait and watch in immeasureable thankfulness. Both these countries, worlds, landscapes, have been given to me like great oceans of nearness, gifts, that extend throughout the universe, into history and the future. They bring sweetness, sadness, a host of satisfactions. These worlds, these landscapes, are also like vapours in the desert, illusions, dry rubbish heaps, places of emptiness and travail, as meaningful as the eye of a dead ant, as the Bab once put it. All of it, its richness and its emptiness, I immortalize with a language tinged with vitality, distinction, style and passion, with praise and thanksgiving to a Source I shall never understand.-Ron Price, with thanks to Irving Layton, May 20, 1971, in The Collected Poems of Irving Layton, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1971, Foreward.. Irving, I never knew you, in all those years I was growing up and getting older. I never even saw one of your books until this year, the one you published after I left Canada in ‘71. I’m not into the vigor of criticism, your biting irony, but I do try to marry heaven and hell. You seemed to suffer more, especially when you were a kid. Our landscapes, our country, are oh so different: you from Montreal and me the Hamilton-Toronto complex. You said things well, Irving, I grant you that. You said it straight, light and heavy in the right places, differently than I. Both of us happiest when we compose poems, easily moved to tears; talk of being mad, the pleasures of sex and the poetic sky. Dorothy Parker was before my time; I’m asked to love even those rich cats and you seemed to play-the-field for many more years than I. My values required marriage back then at the start of rock-‘n-roll. in my self-selected and protected world, with such a strange and different landscape. Ron Price 8 April 1996 MY MOVIE The whole of the poet’s experience, screened in the mirror of his memory, seems in retrospect a sequence of movie moments, great scenes in which he is the leading man.-Laurence Goldstein, The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, p.147. All of reality exists to end between the pages of a book.-Mallarme in idem. For this pleasure-loving society there would be some good stuff in this ongoing movie of my life: plenty of skirt followed down the street in comfortable spectorial distance, to satisfy libidinous tendencies in a gospel of eroticism, with prurient presentation, even neurotic desire, a sexual cornucopia, that ever-present orgy for the randy adolescent in wish fulfillment, in clean moronic gaze, the vacant field of the eye’s entire universe. I try to persuade my reading audience to gaze at this page, once empty, before I fill it with my life, with thickly textured phrases infused with the urgency of personal need, no match I know for those technicolor dreams, master narratives for a heterogeneous society, vast, compelling fantasies where love, laughter and a secular aesthetic are the leading industries, where beauty is marketed like a basic food and a former cultural hegemony,1 social consensus, diffused through society, has come apart, more than creeping leftism, after that revolutionary year of 1967 when we entered the dark heart of an age of transition with Bonnie And Clyde and The Graduate, radical social movements and proclamation.2 This page is no match, either, for that principle assassin of public life and community politics, the TV, that commodity of commodities by which a submerged suburbia views, periscope up, sees and understands; and an atomized, fragmented public goes for magical, private, moments over public time with skepticism legitimating withdrawal and the canons of authenticity gone from old politics and religion. And so I write this page to tell the story of a new communitarian form of reconstruction that has the capacity to sustain faith, a truely cosmopolitan universalism, non-sectarian, non-denominational, no simplistic form of ignorant emotionalism, a basis for a world commonwealth, the New Jerusalem, that has been growing unobtrusively around the planet and is about to burst bonds that have held it since its inception in a tapestry of beauty that is spreading its awesome wings over Mt Carmel. Ron Price 7 December 1996 1 this cultural hegemony, many film critics argue, broke down in the 1960s due to a wide range of factors within the film industry and outside cultural factors. 2 In 1967 the Baha’i community launched a global proclamation to celebrate the 100th anniversal of Baha’u’llah’s proclamation to the Kings. ONE TYPE OF DREAM/VISION By 1933 Hart Crane no longer looked to Hollywood for a redemptive transformation. He eventually took his own life, another member of that visionary company fated to end its quest with a silent gesture.-Laurence Goldstein, The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1993, p.55. Some saw those celluloids as refreshment for the exhausted spirit and redemptive change, centering, organizing our capacity for love and joy in an anarchic world overwhelmed by modernity’s tempest, helping us to see history’s picture, beauty and power as people saw their world on cave paintings, hieroglyphs, stained glass windows or pyramids. Were pretty faces icons of the infinite or part of the tyranny of mob sentimentality? Would these madonnas of art render young men forever dissatisfied with reality, lost in innocent curves, wild, young, sweet eyes? Would red, rare silks, falling from their breasts weave magic in men’s eyes and hearts? Would the glamour, exoticism and chic-ness of journalistic form make things seem new? Bring cultural coherence, consensus and order? Make fragmentary clips into political discourse? Do your own thing sound like sheer impulse? Appearances fraudulent, managed, engineered? The world: a smorgasbord, a music hall, an eider- down of unreality where cynicism and pessimism would grow in rich beds of trivialized gimmickry? Ron Price 6 December 1996 SENSUAL FORMS It is one of the defects of revolutionary thought, in this age, so far as poetry is concerned, that it is not assimilable to any great body of sensuous forms.-Allen Tate, The Poetry Reviews of Allen Tate: 1924-1944, Louisiana State UP, London, 1983, p.160. Here is a movement with no dearth of sensuous forms around the planet: classical architecture and modern forms of breathtaking beauty set high in hills at the confluence of continents,in the middle of an ocean and great land-masses. Here are beautifully bound, sensuous, words with metaphyiscal clarity and elegance. Here, too, is a history of blood, sweat and tears, involving the senses intensely, radically. Here is the centre of the ultimate revolutionary thought of modernity. -Ron Price, Comment on the above quotation from Tate, 11 February 1996, 9:30 pm. Long, black hair falls to his waist; such a handsome young man; he should be in the movies; they make them beautiful, too, good lookers; we’ve got them ugly, earthy, plain: all kinds are found here in a sensuous mix that quite takes your breath away, right back to the 1840s and that veil: we deal with the erotic here, hot life. And cool marble in tall pillars as old as the Parthenon, like the Parthenon; nine-sided temples, all-curves, modest, impressive; I’ve touched them for years in photographs, even cried at such sensual beauty, such grace, charm, form, educative. Always neutral print, black and white, increasingly set in colour and photograph: thousands of pages. You can almost touch the martyrs, the century-and-a-half of tears, of joy, of heart rending sorrow. You can almost hear the laughter, the groans, the utter exhaustion. You can taste the cup of the bitter-sweet milk of the blues, the honey and the poison. The senses here are turned right on to a body of sensual forms. Here is poetry, God, danger, goodness, sin and the most ordinary of the ordinary, the most human of the human. Ron Price 11 February 1996 A PARTIAL RECONSTRUCTION For the poet, language is a structure of the external world. The poet considers words as a trap to catch a fleeing, a fleeting, reality. All language is, for him, the mirror of the world. My own poetry mirrors, grows out of, many things. Fleeting, fleeing, reality I try to catch in many forms by means of words. One thing, one reality, I deal with is reconstructed memories of actual persons, places and things. It will take the rest of my life to continue the reconstruction. -Ron Price with thanks to Thomas Francis Lombardi, Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone, Susquehanna UP, London, 1996, pp.12-13. Like some getaway car, shooting fast, slick along the highway, back, back, to some place forever young and fresh; it could be the future, except I know it so well, some colours of the mind, like the movies, only I’m director: everything, caught for a moment right now, sharp editing, drifting out over the surf onto the open sea, shining in the sun all the way to the blue sky: where can I begin and go where the camera can not go, where no man has ever gone before, and boldly? Perhaps, those Eskimo kids in the fall of ’67, when I was young and on fire with the torch which Thou didst kindle, with burning snow and cold day after day, until my brain did burn with some electrical buzz, knockout blow, and I slowly recuperated listening to the top forty on a.m., counting screws in a workshop eating cabbage frequently: my first prayer book gone.1 1 I gave my first prayer book, a blue 1954 American edition of Baha’i Prayers, to the first Eskimo in the District of Franklin to become a Baha’i on 29 May 1968: Josephee Temotee. Ron Price 10 January 1997 A SLOW BURNING The poet is at the movies dreaming the film-maker’s dream but differently; the endless strips of celluloid are, for him, a fire in the dark, a fire of an unconscious enthrallment to his creative conception and a slow burning, a maturing by sensation and watchfulness. -Ron Price with thanks to John Keats, Herbert Read and Franz Kafka in Laurence Goldstein’s, The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbour, 1993, front page; and Herbert Read’s, The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, Faber and Faber, London, 1953, p.57 and 71. There was a revolution taking place back then, unbeknownst to my eye and ear, as Bob Dylan and The Beatles took the world by storm and rock-and- roll was born and I pioneered to the next town and the next and the next, starting in the summer of ’62, as the mantle of poetry passed from Kerouac, Ginsberg and the beats to a whole new voice and I struggled to get through it all, through depression and some kind of mania, bought my first record: Barry McGuire’s ‘The Eve of Destruction’, borrowed by Mother’s ‘The Messiah’ and went off to change the world with those sweet-scented streams, a small prayer book and something, just born then, we called The Universal House of Justice. Ron Price 22 June 1997 AMIDST THE TRIUMPH OF CONFORMITY AND THE DEATH OF INDIVIDUALISM Although the years before my joining the Baha’i Faith were ones with a strong conformist orientation and, although individualism in the movies was moving toward its deathknell, I joined a movement which was, then, small and intense. In a deeply conservative country I took a step which was highly individualistic, but had no conception of just how individualistic my step really was. The late 1950s was a period in which the mask of Faith was being drawn aside in North American society to reveal a search for rebirth. It was a time in which there was a lack of ways to express the deepest suffering. Rock-and-roll woke us up from that dream of the way we were, without negroes or genitalia. Our dream was also one of luxury without stress.-Ron Price with thanks to D.T. Miller and M. Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Were, Doubleday and Co., Inc., NY, 1977. Back in ’62 it was breaking down: a whole structure of moral convictions, as a new world struggled to be born, but I knew little of this as we walked in the evenings in that spring and summer before my world began its slow explosion into meaning over three epochs. Of course, it had been breaking down for some time, perhaps all the years of my growing up. Now I can watch it in old movies, in fleeting encounters with those vague longings, part of collective nostalgia for the way we were, when we were the preeminent victors, before our supremacy began to unravel in rock-and-roll, Vietnam and in an escapist triviality of the endless bread and circuses of our epochs. After forty years of mass terror, and two centuries of vast social change young men and women wanted to break with the past. I made my break in ’59 when I joined this new religion. The setting of the Dead Poet’s Society, before self-realization had become cliche, in a world of simple polarities, when most people were totally unaware of modern poetry and that we’d spent a decade on the eve of destruction. I was in love with baseball, fathers were tyrannical, individualism in the movies a dead letter1 and all the boys wanted to become like John Keating (Robin Williams) in a triumph of conformity. Ron Price 14 April 1997 1Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame, Anchor Press, NY, 1976, p. 177. RIDING AND DRIVING Roy Rogers and his horse, Trigger, went onto celluloid in 1937. Trigger died in 1957. In that twenty year period the Bahá'í community went through the first two decades of its international teaching Plan. When Roy Rogers died in 1998 the Bahá'í community had completed six decades of international teaching in the greatest drama in the world's spiritual history. Roy Rogers and a host of other western heroes, like Gary Cooper and John Wayne, were part of that myth of the frontier as described by Frederick Turner. The international teaching Plan, which promulgated 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Divine Plan(Tablets, 1917), could be seen as an extension of that myth into the Bahá'í teaching ethos, a myth that had been part of American civilization since its birth.-Ron Price with appreciation to Rollo May, The Cry for Myth, W.W. Norton & Co., NY, 1991, pp.91-100; and in commemoration of the passing of Roy Rogers, 7 July 1998 as reported on the evening news, ABC, TV, 7:00-7:30 pm. He was 86. About the same time as we1 started riding they2 started riding across the screen: driving, riding and driving,on the move, a whole culture on the move. It became part of our breeding for our new age, new possibilities, always some change and our absorption in getting and spending.3 They've been riding and driving across our screens for six decades or more, since the movies began, since we began to spread across this continent,this world. Technology taking us and everything else, everywhere--- the great burgeoning. Proteus is rising from the sea and old Triton is blowing his wreathed horn: pioneers, drive and fly to the farthest corners of the earth, exploring the new Order. Ron Price 8 July 1998 1 The international teaching Plan began in 1937 and the Bahá'ís started moving around the world with greater frequency. 2 Heroes in Westerns 3 William Wordsworth, The World is Too Much With Us. HE CLOTHED OUR MYTHS IN MEANING Our literature is the richest source of the presentation of human beings' self-interpretation down through history. So often the reader finds an author who admits to being in selva oscura, in the dark world of sin and ignorance. Dante is such an author in The Divine Comedy. We each have our private hell that must be confronted. We must face our own selves, our responsibilities and accept our limitations, our guilt, our weakness. The western intellectual tradition offers a deep and profound source of insight for our understanding. Part of that source are the new revelations of the Bab and Bahá'u'lláh.-Ron Price with thanks to Rollo May, The Cry for Myth, W.W. Norton & Co., NY, 1991. We'd finished discovering our land by the time you1 came on the scene: hunters and trappers and pioneers and you gave us visions and frontiers and myths for many generations of Lone Rangers and Clint Eastwoods, Buffalo Bills and Daniel Boones to soar to the apex of uncharted heavens with our restless energy and exuberance to double and redouble our magnanimity. We could, then, minister to our transient moods, pluck from our memory lifting joy and rooted sorrows, the written troubles of our brain and clear our breasts of all those perilous appendages which weigh, too, upon our heart and soul.2 You clothed our myths in meaning, enough for us to find invisible choirs of the immortal dead, our heroes, our myths of action, our community where we belong, so that we could take our journey into hell and, in despair, find out who we were on this long, tortuous and stoney path to peace and glory. Ron Price 8 July 1998 1 Shoghi Effendi in 1921 2 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 3 THE SENSE OF EXPECTATION The Prophets enjoyed the gift of interpreting the mind of God even though they were essentially men of the world, practical men. They also had a sense of expectation and of history. For several hundred years the Hebrew prophets maintained a virtually continuous sense of high expectation and salvation.-Ron Price with thanks to Isidore Epstein, Judaism, Pelican,1959,pp.55-64 You grew up in a time when Teheran, Shiraz and Hamadan were just words on the periphery of everything(still are!), like grandparents, Antarctica and Australia. The bad guys were Indians and Communists. You could see the former at the movies and the latter were unseen like bedbugs, bacteria, amoebas and atoms and you could never be sure why it was exactly they were really bad. .......Later, you lived above a restaurant and later still in a big apartment building right across from a whisky distillery which had a smell that would give urine and faeces a run for their money. Here, in Canada’s most southerly city, you met with the Arctic Branch of the National Teaching Committee many times and learned about the Tablets of the Divine Plan, the military metaphor and pioneering north, but not to Alaska, to places you’d never heard of like Pangnirtung and Cape Dorset. It was about this time, too, that your sense of urgency, begun in ’62 when we got as close as we could get to a nuclear exchange,matured with talks about being a precisioned instrument of the Universal House of Justice, with listening to Nancy Campbell talk about hair’s-breadth deviations and with a climate we now call the sixties. Thirty-six years later it just takes a different form as expectation is as high as ever. I remember reading how Old Testament prophets kept the Jews in a state of expectation for several hundred years. We too? How long? How long? We too? Ron Price 13 January 1998 INUNDATION This poem exists as part of my need, the need to assert the poetic enterprise against the cinematic one, the entire electric aesthetic of the electronic media, the entertainment industry and its staggering proportions with an attached fantasy life ranging from the sublime to the grotesque and a consumer's paradise of legitimate and forbidden pleasures. Poetry must clear the ground for its particular pleasures and not attempt to compete with the eternal beings on the screen who are like the Greek gods of old and are like us, but so much larger than life, filling in a meaning where often little exists in empty lives. Our culture is dominantly visual and the ground for poetry is, it would seem, a small patch. -Ron Price with thanks to Laurence Goldstein, The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor,1995, p.173. Film took off1 after the Sun set and TV2 with the beginning of our International Teaching Plan leaving poetry with the small place in the sun which it had long enjoyed, a bright spot right here: like a garden of roses, pearls in an ocean, leaves on a tree, rays of one sun, endless bounties of inner significance and delicate wines of the spirit.3 In this snow-white spot where poetry is read, in silence, where eternity sweeps around me like a sea lapping me with sounds, I am left with an inundation. It came from The Sea. 1 film began as a genre in 1895, three years after the passing of Bahá'u'lláh. 2 many dates are found for the beginning of TV but 1939 is suggested as the "takeoff point." (ibid.,p.251) 3 Bahá'u'lláh, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952, p.30. Ron Price 4 November 1998 TELLING THE STORY Most of us, without particularly meaning to, have accumulated--from commercials, from ads in magazines, from picture books, from movies--a mental archive of images of the West, a personal West-in-the-Mind’s eye in which we see an eternal pastoral, very beautiful but usually unpeopled. These potent images, pelting us decade after decade, finally implant notions about how the West was explored and developed, in a word, won that are unrealistic. Photography has helped to redress the balance little by little with its rich but disordered resource. Over the last seventy years studies of various kinds and the occasional autobiography, like We Pointed Them North(1939), have helped to alter the picture that is engraved on all our brains from TV and the movies: Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey, the Lone Ranger, Butch Cassidy, et al. BLACK HOLES One hundred years ago today the first lights flickered in the first movie house. Cinema had begun. -ABC Radio, 8:15 am, 28 December 1995. Film has basically snuck up on religion and kind of taken mythology. It’s the main area where we play out mythology now, in the cinema. I think that’s what its secret function is. -George Miller, film-maker, talking about his film Babe, 28 October 1995 in The West Magazine, 23 December 1995, p.13. It has been suggested that if we could go inside a black hole, it might be possible to emerge either into a different universe or into a different part of our own universe. -Patrick Moore, The Unfolding Universe, Book Club Associates, London, 1982, p.184. I’ve watched you come out of those dark holes splendidly magnificent, like new worlds, taking us away, billions of us now, to scintillating lights and crackling sound, so perfect, full and unimaginably glorious. You are so much more than a poem; you seem to cancel speculation, your fragrance private, for a public place. For a time you are supreme like some Egyptian pyramid we only look at once, or more times if hooked on your not so subtle magnificence. You multiply my astonishment, so succulent; you embrace me, absorb me in your seemingly incandescent beauty, but only fleetingly: I return to the world as quickly as I left in your celluloid safety. I disappear, and thankfully; while the predictable wonder of my ordinary life, unscripted, flawed and plausible, also disappears. I never emerge in that celluloid safety with my life nicely edited so as to possess only that toothpaste smile. I am eagerly gullible to your technicolour manipulation, your convoluted intrigue, the syncapated chase and the final fall, like dandruff, of the villans or, now, the hero. Like my poems you can last forever: commentary on the time and humankind. A thousand mythologies cross your path. I leave your black hole and enter another. Ron Price 28 December 1995 WHITE BUILDINGS A LOVE POEM TO HART CRANE Hart Crane’s mind, grown strong, sought a poetic principle to integrate the exuberant flood of his impressions...The poems of Hart Crane are facets of a single vision; they refer to a central imagination, a single evaluating power, which is at once the motive of the poetry and the form of its realization...the poet must create order from the chaos with which his associative genius overwhelms him.....necessity, day after tomorrow, will drive men to think personally, poetically, cosmically in order that their survival may have meaning....when that time comes, the message of The Bridge will be taken for granted. -Waldo Frank, Introduction to Hart Crane’s Poem: The Bridge, 1932. Not many read your poem now, Hart. Was that why you threw yourself into the sea? Or was it your organic unity with life? You already were one with the sea anyway. As Waldo said: traditional images, civilization, symbols, were gone and you, as mystic, were out on uncharted waters back then in the ‘20s. As you wrote White Buildings and The Bridge a new symbol system, myth, cosmology, was being born and defined in a new order, just getting fine tuned before the global launch, before your global launch before noon in those warm waters when you became one with death. If you could have seen it Hart! This is the bridge that will carry us into the new age beyond with white buildings, oh so white and new and shining on a hill: the Greeks would have loved it Hart, the apotheosis of the whole western tradition with a vision to take us there, to take us where we’re going. This is not about cinemas, bridges, subways, girders, traffic lights, but some immaculate sigh of stars, condensing eternity and lifting night into our arms.We’re bringing back more than Cathay this time; this time the world, this time the Sun in all its splendour. Another Genoa and a new world waiting for dawn to clear this new frontier and the drama of a spiritual conquest not ever yet seen. It seems the fire’s been modulated, thusfar; the pearls whisper in our hands and gold silently accumulates in the coffers as the land is slowly being cleared for the long war. Burning blue, the sky, calls the whiteness and the green to dance below and gleam like some team with sapphire streams. We can see the shore more clearly now; it beckons but with such complexity and we have tried these pearl-promising waves before and we guess their wet danger in the kingdoms there and in our naked heart where the tongue of fire has burnt me, it seems nearly to my death. For I’ve been on the pioneer side of things these many years, since before they put the apex in where the countenance of the Ancient of Days hath turned towards His holy seat. How many times I’ve turned back spent to the sun-warmed sand. Anguished, alone, burnt-out, needing to rebuild, I could not see those white buildings or the bridge quite as clearly, nor could you, Hart, nor could you. Ron Price 26 September 1995 MORE SUBTLE THAN BOND In Casino Royale there are already the elements for the building of a machine that functions basically on a set of precise units governed by rigorous combinational rules, play situations and side issues. The pleasure lies in watching the trained virtuosity with which the final moment is deferred, how foregone conclusions are reconfirmed by ingenious deviations and how various trickeries make rings around the opponents. The greatest pleasure arises not from excitement but from relief.-Ron Price with thanks to Umberto Eco, "Narrative Structures in Fleming", Gender, Language and Myth: Essays on Popular Narrative, Glenwood Irons, editor, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992, pp. 157-182. In the several genres of Pioneering Over Three Epochs Price describes his experience with a system, an order, a framework, a structure at once precise and vast, articulated in an aesthetic form of great beauty, but immensely various in its application from place to place and situation to situation; indeed often it appeared absurd, impossible of achievement. Some of the goals of both the system and individual life were always far off; some were achieveable, short term entities. Pleasures arose in the most surprising places, partly because of the heterogeneity of the groups, partly because of the changes in experience from decade to decade and because of the relief from the tension that so often arose from place to place. -Ron Price, Comment on Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript. Casino Royale1 came out in 1953 and James Bond has been with us ever since. That same year saw the beginning of the Kingdom of God on Earth and the beginning of the ninth stage of history for this embryonic community. Both build an Order, fight for truth, justice and the rules of the game---- just a different set of rules, a different fight, a different plan, defeat the right and left wings of the hosts of the world with romance, drama, the greatest in the world's spiritual history. But one, thusfar, so subtle, so elusive, so capable of a far different cinematic description, far different than the James Bonds of yesteryear and all their ingenious virtuosity and trickery and bold eroticism. Ron Price 16 October 1998 1 the first James Bond novel by Ian Fleming THERE WAS A NEW WIND BLOWING WITH YOUR LAUGHS, JACK Jack Lemon died today. He was a famous actor of the twentieth century. He was born in 1925. The year I pioneered in 1962 he played in Days of Wine and Roses. He came into prominence during the Ten Year Crusade and was active in the film industry for over half a century in more than one film per year. The persona he developed was of a humorous character usually with some weakness or fault. Like so many of the actors and actresses in the first eighty years of the Formative Age, Jack Lemon served as part of the backdrop, for Bahá'ís who liked watching films, of the texture of the Formative Age. Lemon was part of a system that projected a world, through thematic and social conventions, values and institutions, that seemed natural and self-evident. That world habituted its audiences to accept the basic premises of the social order and its ideology. But, beginning in the 1950s/1960s, the social consensus both in society and in film began to 'come apart.' Jack Lemon and his films were part of this questioning of society's dominant myths and values.1 -Ron Price with thanks to "The Jim Leher Hour," SBS TV, 5-6 pm, 29 June 2001; and 1 M. Ryan and D. Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics of Contemporary Hollywood Film, Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1990, p.3. People began to question, if they had not already, the dominant ways of doing things during those Ten Year Crusade years. That most wonderful and thrilling motion which appeared in the world, that inception of the Kingdom of God on earth1 was blowing onto cinema screens and transforming our world, little did we know. Your work, Jack, back then, back when I had just taken-off into my pioneering world, your Days of Wine and Roses,2 was more than part of some creeping leftism.3 It was part of a permeation of light to the entire planet.1 1 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p.351. 2 Frankly portrayed alcoholism in 1962. 3 one critic's characterization of films in the early to mid-sixties. Ron Price 29 June 2001 ON THE LOOK OUT Raymond Carver was an American short story writer who died at the age of fifty in 1988. He had been a compulsive smoker, drinker, alcoholic, depressive, wife basher(in his first marriage) and winner of many awards for his writing. To do your best and to work hard, Carver argued, is often simply not good enough in life. He was always on the look out for a story and would piece together painstakingly a narrative from the most unlikely constituents. Carver said that he was more interested in the characters in his stories than he was in those who were his reading audience. I enjoyed reading about Carver, whom I had never heard of until yesterday, when his life and work were surveyed on ABC Radio National, “Radio Eye,” 2:00-3:00 pm November 22nd. Carver wrote about ordinary people and his characters were in many ways the centre of his writing life. Much of his writing was autobiographical. And, being so often a loser, his characters and his writing appeal to losers. The following poem is a celebration of Carver and his work and it is dedicated to John F. Kennedy who was assassinated forty years ago yesterday in Dallas Texas when I was just twenty-one. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 23 November 2003. The world seems to me to be drowning in stories with enough narrative to line, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, across the surface of the earth and out into space with the plots, scenarios, the characters, events, the space and time of a myriad pieces of intricate and moving stories of mice and men. Some tell their winning stories in cinema, in music, in words on paper and in books, in a multitude of mise-en-scenes, stage plays choreographed for millions to be entertained, informed, stimulated, educated-- like some immense, Gargantuan Guide to the Perplexed. Ron Price 23 November 2003 PS Carver moves from experience to autobiographical story and I move from experience to autobiography. And I take as much interest in my characters as Carver seems to in his. We are both on the look out for a story, a way of conveying our experience in narrative. A A CORUSCANT ENERGY1 Once ranked number six on Playboy’s 100 sexiest women of the twentieth century and also named the most beautiful woman in the world, Sophia Loren has been acting in movies all my Baha’i life. In the year my mother first had contact with the Baha’i Faith, 1953/4, Loren acted in four films. She had just started her acting career in the early fifties. In the year I joined this Faith, 1959/60, Loren acted in six films; in the year my pioneering life began, 1962/3, she acted in another six. One of these latter films(1962) was Boccaccio where she stared with Anita Eckberg. She won the first Oscar for a foreign language film in 1961. Some regard Loren as the most celebrated actress of the last fifty years(1953-2003). This month Loren turned 70. Both she and I are getting old. -Ron Price with thanks to “The Official Sophia Loren Website,” September, 2004. 1 With appreciation to Roger White for this title from “Death of the Greengrocer,” Whitewash, Haifa, 1982, p.22. This icon of the cinema during my pioneering life, this woman of grace, elegance, beauty and charm, unpretentious, as sexy, as seductive, as they get, she came out of the woodwork and blazed across the screen and blew me away, yet again, one of thousands of beauties that played in the background of my life, all my life really, right from my first memories when I was only three or four, before breasts bud, before groins fill out, jostle and strain toward their imperative destinations. And they still blaze and dance, still jostle and strain keeping the concupiscible appetite on heat, always wanting more than I can get or should get or would get or could get. What’s the big idea anyway? Is it some kind of cosmic joke: sticking this incredible pulchritude in front of my nose and saying: you are only supposed to look. Don’t touch; it’s only for show! It’s to reproduce the species; that’s why there’s such awesome force here. I’ll give you a taste, but don’t ask for more than your lot, your share of this coruscant energy that pops and glitters, spurts and tangles to achieve life’s unthwarted, fecund purpose. -Ron Price, September 25, 2004 ALWAYS THERE ARE CONDITIONS Even though I have tried in the first five years of retirement to distance myself from community, from people, in order to write and recuperate from forty years of intense interactions and the conversational patter that is part of people in groups: given the social nature of the religion I have been associated with for half a century, people still play a large part of my life. In the last 30 days, for example, I have: had a friend/visitor for two days in the house; entertained a married couple, old friends, from Queensland and another couple from Western Australia each for a day; had a good-bye cup-of-coffee with a Canadian chap who had been living in George Town for a few months; put up 70 posters in 70 shops in town and held two Devotional Meetings; attended a workshop to arrange a display of my writing and discuss the arts for one day involving in the process a 90 minute drive; attended a talk in Launceston given by an international speaker; attended a Feast in the home of a local Bahá'í couple; attended two holy day celebrations in my own home; taught four one hour classes in creative writing/philosophy to four students; had the inevitable chats and social intercourse with my wife and son with whom I share this home; and written many communications, postings, on the internet at forums, sites and centres.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 6, 2004. So far this hermitage is peopled and my life is peopled far more than my proclivities would entertain in this first stage of withdrawal from a peripatetic existence and its endless words which had produced a tedium vitae, a need for solitude and a praise which is the practice of this art.1 But this is no rest haven. The war goes on, the battle-ground has changed its mise-en-scene as I try to attack the armies of the world, the right and left wings and carry my attack to the very centre of the powers of the earth.2 No one would guess, of course, in this domestication of warfare that I may gain shining diadems and brilliant jewels in the Kingdom: of course there is no guarantee, for there are always conditions. 1 William Blake expressed this idea about art in Poetry and Fiction Essays, Howard Nemerov, Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, 1963, p.vii. 2 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Tablets of the Divine Plan, p. 48. ---Ron Price 6 May 2004. CINEMATIC COMMENTARY The Ken Kesey(1935-2001) novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was published in 1962. The book was written in 1959, the year I became a Baha’i. This was the year I went pioneering and the year, I can see now in retrospect, that I first experienced the signs of bi-polar disorder. By the time the film version came out in 1975 my first severe bi-polar episodes had come and gone. Dejected institutional submission, one of the main problems faced by the patients in this film/book, was certainly not a problem I faced in the five months I was institutionalized in four hospitals from June to November 1968 for my manic-depressive or schizo-affective disorder as it was also called. The film consistently ranks in the top 15 of the greatest American films. Although I was critical of the film, as was Kesey, for the image it presented of mental hospitals, I did feel the book and the film was a relevant companion piece, a strangely cinematic commentary on my own experience, of the mental illness I faced in the sixties and seventies.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, December 21, 2004. KUBRICK: A TOUCH OF THE INEFFABLE Stanley Kubrick(1928-1999) began directing films the year my family first had its contact with the Baha’i Faith, 1953. I was nine at the time. Kubrick died one week after the release of his last film on March 1st 1999. I was in my last month of my life as a full-time teacher before my retirement at the age of 55. I write this poem because of Kubrick’s qualities as a film maker in the ninth and early decades of the tenth stage of history, the second half of the first century of the history of film: 1895-1995. He was a man obsessed by film. He pushed himself and those he worked with to the limit. He had a passion, an intensity, which turned his perceptions of the world and what was wrong with it into art. His films and my life followed each other in my adolescence and my adulthood. With this television, this documentary, series on Kubrick, I caught a new appreciation of the man and his work. -Ron Price with thanks to SBS TV, “Masterpiece: Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures-Part 3,” 10:00-10:55 pm, June 22, 2004. What was that force within you, Stanley? An impressionability? An obedience to inspiration? a force majeure? A conversation with eternal wisdom? What produced the heart, the core of your experience with cinema? What gave it its existence As you created yourself like a high-tension wire discharging images1 for half a century? You created the world anew, Stanley, from silence, memory and some menacing external vacuity, some otherness, some temporality gushing onto the screen with everything you touched relieving your overburdened mind2 giving everything a touch of the ineffable. 1 Novalis in The Bow and the Lyre, Octavio Paz, University of Texas, Austin, 1956, p.154. 2 Howard Nemerov in The Seamless Web, Stanley Burnshaw, Penguin Press, 1970, p.179. Ron Price June 24, 2004 THE PARADOXICAL REALITIES OF '59 After watching the Peter Weir film Dead Poets Society I read a review by Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times (9/6/89) and a second review in a journal, the Australian Journal of Communication, Vol. 18(1991). Both reviews were highly critical of this film which I had enjoyed. In retrospect, it seems to me that the reviews confirmed my premise of film study; namely, that art can be explained by life and "rationality arises as an elaboration of feeling."1 To be able to convert the substance and riches of a film to one's own use, to draw forth its choicest flowers and with the bee turn all of its cinematic delights into the honey of understanding, that is film study. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 Susanne Langer, Problems of Art, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1957, p.124. A whole structure of moral convictions had begun to come tumbling down-in '59. That was a very big year for it all happened in Dead Poets Society in '59, that same year I became a Bahá'í. A closed and narrow world and its authority of tradition was getting thrust aside for a pop-psyche cliche-- self-realization--and in '59 this idea was still subversive. And liberation did come as it had been coming since a French King lost his head, or since a mother-church became a queendom-divided. For freedom in the sixties, in my adolescence, became impulse. Celebrity and personality became the marrow of the bone while authority became anathema. The suicide of civilization became part of a slough of despond while a paradoxical reality continued its emergence from obscurity for the redemption of humankind.1 1 The Universal House of Justice, May 24, 2001. Ron Price April 17 2004. 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 WONDROUS AND THRILLING MOTION In the 1920s and 1930s, while the American Baha’i community was evolving from an informal network of small groups into a national unit of a world society;1 while it developed from small pockets of ingrown and amorphous communities into a vastly enlarged and well-organized religion with a national consciousness ready to launch itself onto the international stage, as it did in 1937, Greta Garbo’s film career ran its course. There was one film to come after 1939: Two Faced Woman(1941). It was a flop and Garbo retired into a secluded life in New York. Her glamour and her popularity, her indifference to public opinion and her great cinematic instincts made her career unique in the history of cinema.2 -Ron Price with thanks to Loni Bramson-Lerche, “Some Aspects of the Development of the Baha’i Administrative Order in America, 1922-1936,” Studies in Bahá'í and Baha’i History, Vol.1, M. Momen, Kalimat Press, 1984, p. 255. and Greta Garbo, “Britannica Online,” Internet, 2005. You were long gone from the movies by the time I went to the Roxy Theatre on Saturday afternoons in Burlington back in about ’53 when that wonderful and thrilling motion appeared on the banks of Lake Michigan and began unobtrusively permeating all parts of the world in a subtle and pervasive planetization. You, too, had a wonderful and thrilling motion, were a different point of light, a glamorous beauty, a seductive charm when you came online just as this Order came online-- a means to channel our will & energy as millions channelled theirs your way in our culturally-determined, shape- shifting world of love and romance. And in your last years before death took you in 1990--as I was heading into the middle of my middle age-- you were mostly alone with thoughts and you said you liked it that way1 and me too: with my metanarrative and that Order which helps me canalize my energies ‘til time steals its long progress to eternity with so much that memory will never be able to contain nor want to in that Undiscovered Country. 1 “Loving Greta Garbo,” ABC TV, 10:40-11:40 p.m., April 24th 2005. ---Ron Price April 25th 2005 -Ron Price with thanks to Larry McMurtry, “High Noon”, a review of The New Encyclopedia of the Amercan West, editor Howard R. Lamar, Yale UP, in The Australian Review of Books, December 1998, pp.17-19. The enterprise began, perhaps as early as 1894 when the first Baha’is landed in America from the Middle East, or even when the Letters of the Living travelled throughout Iran in 1844 and thereafter. The twenty-five years from 1894 to 1919 was a precursor to the year 1919 when the Tablets of the Divine Plan were read and a pioneering program began that is now eighty years old. It is a program that is immensely diverse and operates at local, regional, national and international levels. It is important, as the Baha’i community comes to describe this vast and complex story, that it avoids a tendency to an affinity with the reverential writers of medieval England, to endless edification and to what is called hagiography. There is a need to emotionally individualize stories so that readers will not have to piously wade through hundreds of pages of lifeless prose.-Ron Price with thanks to Edward Morrison,”When the Saints Come Marching In: The Art of Baha’i Biography”, Dialogue, Vol.1 No.1, Winter 1986,pp.32-5. Defining character, determining worth, touching on the personal, bringing people out of verbal concrete, through understanding. Needing an eye for telling detail, a certain dramatic power, analysis and interpretation, with incisiveness and conviction, with no doubt about its being true, a willingness to deal with the unpleasant, for we need more than a glimpse. We need the story of the saintliness in all its unsaintliness. It is as difficult to write a good life as to live one. We want to know we are not alone: for the community is its own ritual, the greatest drama in the world of existence, something forever new and unforeseen, devoid, in writing, of appearances and pretentions, a mysterious development, this writing, of many values, conveying to the reading public insight and a knowing who they are into their lives. Ron Price 1 February 1999 THE CITY Australia is a country built on the city: the city first and then the country. In America it was the other way around. While living in Australia’d cities I found many delightful parks and gardens to walk in. I will try and summarize the ones I became a little familiar with: King’s Park, the paths along the Swan and Canning Rivers in Perth, Wattle Park and the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, the Botanic Gardens in Ballarat and Hobart, the Cataract Gorge and West Tamar River walking trail in Launceston as well as several lovely spots at some of Australia’s universities: the University of Western Australia, the University of Melbourne and of Adelaide. There are, of course, many other places, but this is all I remember and/or experienced. The world offers the traveller many beautiful places that are green within the city limits. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1999. For millions it’s the buzz of city life they remember, the coming and going, the cafes in the evening, out for dinner at your favorite restaurant, the choice of movies, so much to do: museums, libraries, displays. And then… there are the homeless, the millions who live on the street who never find the delightful walks that I find, who never get loved by a son by a wife the way I have, who never make any sense of their world as it crashed around them with its ton of whiskey, freezing cold air and fire. Ron Price 4 September 1999 THE NEW WAR Post traumatic stress disorder(PTSD) has only been a recognized disorder in psychiatric literature since 1980. I came across it professionally while teaching Human Services and talking to Viet Nam Veterans in the early 1990s. Toward the end of my teaching career(1997-99), which spanned nearly thirty years and which included nearly twenty years of struggling with bi-polar disorder, I began to explore some of the symptoms that were making me want to leave teaching somewhat prematurely at the age of 55. I found that some of them were similar to PTSD. In the last two years of my work as a teacher I felt what is called a ‘numbing of responsiveness’ in PTSD literature. I lost satisfaction in what had normally given me pleasure: teaching in classrooms, attending Baha’i functions. I became less involved in social interactions, felt as if I was just going through the motions, and often felt withdrawn and isolated. I also felt in a state of being constantly alert, a condition which was useful in some ways, because it allowed me to do an immense amount of reading and writing and whenever there was the least threatening or conflict arousing situation I responded to it like a boy scout. In some situations, although not many, I began to overreact, feel threatened or be threatening. Again, these were all part of the symptomotology of PTSD. -Ron Price with thanks to Kolk, Hart and Burbridge, Approaches to the Treatment of PTSD, pp. 1-20, Internet. I don’t have post-traumatic stress disorder like the veterans from other wars, the ones we know, the ones we’ve seen on TV and in the movies. But I have some other disorder from a new kind of war, fought in rooms where all people do is talk, walk around and sit. I got out before it took away all that was my life. It dried me out and bleached my heart and made me seek aloneness and the company of nature, sucked out whatever there was of joy and life’s rapturous dance, made me go in and in and in and now I’m coming back from the war with prayer, meditation, love and a few friends in community. Ron Price 26 October 1999 A PRODUCT Woody Allen, in an interview with Michael Parkinson, talked about his movie making experience. He said that, except for a few of his movies, he had developed a distaste for most of his final movie products. He found that, after working on each of his movies for a year of more, he enjoyed them less and less; he found many of them, in the end, distasteful. There are some aspects of life and of the Baha’i experience which, like Allen’s movie making activity, are in the end not enjoyable, not pleasureable, but you go on doing them: for the reward, for the pleasureable features of the task, putting up with the unpleaseable features along the way, out of a sense of duty or out of necessity or, like Allen, because it has become a habit that occupies your time, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes unpleasantly. -Ron Price with thanks to Woody Allen in Interview on Parkinson, ABC TV, 5 February 2000, 9:30-10:30 pm. You get your holidays; you rest your spirit somewhere: in Switzerland, sleeping on a loved one’s shoulder, in prayer, having a swim or a walk. But always it returns: the weight, the work, the test, the battle. It finds you in the corners of your life, in the deepest recesses of your being and it turns the screw and you must deal with it, each time differently, with actions and with acquiescence. Yes, there is radiance, but not every inch of the way. It’s a product. Ron Price 6 February 2000 NOT EDITED IN CELLULOID SAFETY A poetic point of view is caught from the poets one lives with and the literary influences which have a poetic manner, a style and voice that resonates in one’s life. Through perpetually studying and enjoying certain writers one acquires a sense of their application of ideas to life in verse. While I have caught a poetic point of view from White and Dickenson, Wordsworth and Dawe; while historians like Toynbee and Gibbon and sociologists like Nisbet and Mills have played their part in some individual flower that has sprung up from within me; while philosophers like Russell and Nietzsche, among others; and psychologists like Rollo May and Erik Erikson have all helped me find and articulate a voice, I would also have to acknowledge a range of other influences that make me want to sing, to talk, from my very inmost soul in the highest seriousness, free from simple verbiage and utterance of the ordinary kind. -Ron Price with thanks to Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” Gateway to the Great Books, William Benton, 1963, pp. 38-9. I don’t want to be an actor who finds himself, extends his sense of who he is, on stage or in the movies. Some seem to find their soul, their language, their voice, on screen in its technicolour manipulation and perfect sound. I don’t want to put myself imaginatively into Bonanzaland or play the role of a perennial outsider with a predictable victory in choiceless invulnerability. The final torrid clinch with several along the way with a compliant, mysterious blonde sounds superficially attractive. The predictable wonder of my ordinary life: unscripted, flawed and plausible, my undeclared guilts and my poetry, which like the Greeks, is one with my religion, will not emerge, edited, in celluloid safety. Ron Price 16 November 2000 COMING TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU Neil Gabler, author of the book Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, discussed in an interview on ABC Radio this morning how movies and film have come to define the presentation of self in everyday life, the way people are seeing their lives as a script, a narrative, one long plot in a multitude of settings, indeed, their whole of life as a movie: sub-text and text. After a century of celluloid, after the decline of religion and ideology in this century in the West, the movies have come to provide millions of people with background material, with the metaphor, with the entertainment mix, to help them be the directors, producers, choreographers, writers, editors and, finally, the performers, in the most important movie of them all: the movie of their own life. Gabler says this theatre, or ‘movie metaphor,’ fits in with the emphasis on celebrity in our culture, on performance in politics and on individualism in our philosophy of life. -Ron Price with thanks to “Arts Today”, ABC Radio National, 10:05-10:30 am, 21 March 2000. I have drawn on at least three of sociology’s many theoretical frameworks from time to time in writing my own autobiography: phenomenological, ethnomethodological and reflexive sociology. All of these frameworks draw on what is often called ‘the social construction of reality.’ Life is seen as one big drama, one dramaturgical reality, a world of images, images we incorporate, process and subjectively give ‘truth’ to. Gabler’s ‘movie metaphor’ fit in nicely here. Part of the overall thrust of my poetic autobiography is based on these theoretical frameworks and can easily incorporate the ideas of Gabler and his ‘the movie metaphor.’ -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000. It’s a tiresome old phrase: all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players. You run your ears and eyes over the words so often as you scamper up the ladder of your days that the words just roll on into oblivion, get caught in the bin before you listen to the news, or shave, or have your lunch: have you emptied the bin yet, dear? But there is something useful here, mate; there is, there is. Something to fit all the glory, the boredom and the chouder into one easy framework. Mind you, mind you, have you ever tried writing a movie script? Can you edit your life so as to always emerge in celluloid safety? And how about that toothpaste ad smile? I’m okay as long as my false teeth are in and my wife is not sick. Are you sensible enough to keep commitment right out? What? Now this does require discussion. Too much! God, get that out, write it out, scrub it. This is my movie! The predictable wonder of my ordinary life: unscripted, flawed, plausible: a movie? are you kiddin’? The in-flight thriller tells likeable lies. Expansive with airborne wellbeing we lossen our belts and suspend disbelief eagerly gullible to the technicolour manipulation content with the violence, the predictable victory, the lovers’ final torrid clinch. You’d have to scrub the screen of the colossal lie. Is it a lie? Surely not? To make my movie, mate. How can it be done? I know! I know! Come and see my two million words of the most ordinarily ordinary, the most humanly human, enough script to make a dozen movies, one soon to be screened at a theatre near you: I think about, what, 2153 AD? Ron Price 21 March 2000 COMMUNION J. Hillis Miller, in his analysis of the writings of novelist Joseph Conrad, informs us that Conrad saw the habit of profound reflection as, ultimately, pernicious in its effects because it led to passivity and death, to the dark side of a somber pessimism and to the view of his own personality as ridiculous and an aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknowable. -Ron Price with thanks to J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality, Belknap Press, 1965, pp.33-34. The desire, as I see it, Mr. Miller, is to obtain His bounty and tender, so tender, mercy; to be a recipient of a leaven that will leaven the world of my being, furnish it with writing power and to be given the honour of His nearness. The dark side of existence, indeed, my corrupt inclination is due to my failure to achieve this communion. It is a hopelessly appauling process, Mr. Miller, quite beyond the profoundest reflection. 1 This poem draws on a prayer of the Bab in Baha’i Prayers, p.151. Ron Price 20 June 2000 RISING TO REALITY This poem was written while waiting to see the film Mission Impossible II, playing in Perth at the Greater Union Theatre in Innaloo. It was also playing in Haifa at one of the six theatres in the city while we were on pilgrimage. I went with my wife, my son and my step-daughter as the winter solstice was approaching in the southern hemisphere. It was probably the last movie we would see in Perth.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 20 June 2000. To devote oneself to writing, however, is to engage in the most unreal action of all. This was how Joseph Conrad felt, echoing the poet Baudelaire, who also saw the process as possessing an unreality. Both writers had a sense of intellectual doubt of the ground on which writing stood. When writing was difficult, this sense of doubt entered their very arteries and penetrated their bones. It gave them a feeling of the emptiness, the nothingness of the writing process.-Ron Price with thanks to J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth Century Writers, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, Cambridge Mass., 1965, p.36. I think you’re partly right, Joseph, but the sense of unreality is no more than in any other activity when one is tired, depressed, warn to a frazzle or engaged in the more unpleasant side of life, when sadness and despondency touch our brow. Vanity, emptiness and the mere semblance of reality are part of life’s many currents that make up the river of our days. And so, Joseph, one must not deny that the glimmering, superficial and ephemeral surface of life we will always have with us, as we strive to rise above the words and letters, the syllables and sounds of His Word and especially as we watch movies like the one I am about to watch. Ron Price 20 June 2000 DEATH MIGHT BE LIKE THIS This poem, written after returning to Australia from my nine-day pilgrimage, was a reflection in overview on the experience. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Cotteslow, Perth, 18 June 2000. Pilgrims are given detailed maps of the major places that will form their itinerary. Maps have several roles, one of which is to symbolize relations between places, places that are themselves silent but speak to their readers symbolically. Maps become out of date quickly, whether in the physical world or in the imagination. But the pilgrim needs a map, as up-to-date as it can be, for he moves around a great deal during the nine days. The pilgrim also needs that map of the imagination, in some ways more important than the physical map. It is a map in his mind and heart and is the basis for the meaning he finds in his pilgrimage. The poems in this collection come from the mind and heart; they show part of the territory that is the Baha’i Faith as it exists in my own inner life. Much of that territory remains unexplored, only partly mapped and far from understood. -Ron Price with thanks to P.R. Eaden and F.H. Mares, Mapped But Not Known: The Australian Landscape of the Imagination, Wakefield Press, 1985, p.4. Here I am back on Australian soil after flying around the world and fitting in a nine day pilgrimage amidst all the coming and going, all the inflight meals and movies, all the Israeli fulafal and walks, all the steps on Haifa’s mountainside and all the heat of an Israeli summer. It already seems like a dream, a time that has slipped away into my own personal history, something that has come with great expectation and gone, something experienced in a flurry, in a rush, in a torrent of time and has now become the past, an event to reflect on, a back then, a some time ago. Death might be like this: a reflection on a rush job, and its torrent of time, a wondering what it all meant, a pondering on life’s beauty, on its endless paraphrenalia, on that Face, that Man, all that was belief, the closeness, the distance to that Point of Adoration that you saw and felt in that inner room, in that summer heat, a feeling that any awe had atrophied long ago in all that conversation, all those words, those endless words. Ron Price 18 June 2000 ONE FATAL TENDENCY A poem is a primary product of the creative imagination. The experience that led to the poem can not be easily or directly communicated; that experience must be transformed in such a way as to contain some of the poet’s visionary experience; only then can it be apprehended by the reader. The poem is, in a specific sense, a substitute for the vision; it is a new combination of words or, as Shakespeare put it, “imagination bodies forth/The form of things unknown....(and) Turns them to shapes.” He goes on to say that imagination “gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.” -Ron Price with appreciation to William Shakespeare in The Poetry of Shakespeare’s Plays, E.F. Halliday, Gerald Duckworth and Co., London, 1964(1954), p.18. One tries to attach words to that imagination, to some airy nothing in one’s head, some grey intangibility north of the corpus callosum, to some thing in the world, some complex sequence of sound and sight, a peculiar atmosphere. One fatal tendency in imagination’s gambit is to identify all of one’s self with one interest, object, passion or habit of mind as it swims in the ocean trying to survive amidst the leviathans of the deep and the great wild waves.1 1 This is part of the heart of tragedy’s fundamental trait. See A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, MacMillan, 1971(1904), p.13. Ron Price 13 May 2000 THE GREATEST POEM The Baha’is, who come from virtually all the nations of the earth, have an immense poetical potential. The Baha’i community itself, its history and its future, is, from my own perspective anyway, essentially the greatest poem. The Baha’i Faith is a genuine universalism based on a genuine individualism. As one analyst of ethnicity wrote, we live in a post-ethnic, post-Christian, world and an authentic universalism requires new wine bottles. It also requires people with the capacity and will to believe in them. The gap between the Gospel and the power of positive thingking is as wide as that between genuine religious faith and what passes for such in the old religions and their old institutional wine bottles. -Ron Price with appreciation to ‘a writer on ethnicity’ whose name I did not record in my notes from a course toward a Graduate Diploma in Multi-Cultural Education at the Armidale College of Advanced Educ., Aust.,c.1985. The immense poetic potential here is epic. It developed gradually with the years, as naturally as breathing in that prelude phase, that delay, those days of carefree enjoyment, from that turning point in Baha’i history, the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth, the time of world peril, little did I know, then.1 Pioneering’s historic hour arrived, its significance partially lifted, an infinitessimal glimmer of the effulgence of His Countenance. That blissful consummation2 about to begin, rapt as I was in my studies and the confusion of those academic years.3 They were days that called for heroic deeds, again, little did I really know.4 A protagonist in the greatest drama in human history: destiny’s epic had begun to unfold in my life amidst that old convulsing storm of human life taking us all into its dark heart5 from which we have as yet to free ourselves. 1 1953, a turning point for Baha’i history when my family first learned of the Cause. 2 See Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p.151; re: April 1963. 3 Difficult, confusing and testing pioneering years: 1962-1967. 4 The Universal House of Justice, Wellspring of Guidance, p.80. 5 October 1967. The expression “the dark heart of this age of transition” was first used in a letter of the House of Justice. Ron Price 17 October 2000 THE SECRET AGENT MAN In life and in the arts there are old formula which weave their magic again and again in our lives. One such formula had its birth or perhaps its most significant and popular and modern incarnation in 1953. That was a very big year for the Baha’i community—the completion of the mother-temple of the west in Chicago and the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth. Of course, Ian Fleming, the creator of what has become the world’s most famous secret agent and superhero, James Bond 007, had no idea what that year meant to a global community of some 200,000 Baha’is. It is quite probably that he had never heard of the Baha’i Faith at all back in 1953. But in 1953 his first book Casino Royale appeared and it was followed by 13 more books. In 1962, the first 007 film Dr. No starred Sean Connery. I pioneered for or perhaps in the Canadian Baha’i community that year. I moved to a nearby town in Canada, Dundas, at the far western end of Lake Ontario. My Baha’i life and my pioneering life follow the time trajectory of 007. James Bond films are an outrageously popular fantasy genre with a secret agent man who is handsome and well-known wherever he goes—and who attracts stunningly beautiful women. Real secret agent men, of course, are just the opposite that is, secret types who try to blend in and don’t do things that attract attention. Fleming’s hero is a globe trotter who goes again and again to exotic locations and slugs it out with the bad guys. These stories are tales of leisure which are adventures, scenes of life and death. They are anything but leisure holidays. They are modern fairy tales with 007 as the knight, the villain as the dragon and lots of beautiful women as the maidens.1-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 28th 2005; and 1Christopher Lindner, editor, The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, Manchester UP, 2003. It’s outrageous really to call 007 a spy, a secret agent man. He’s the antithesis of such an individual. But, of course, these books and movies are not about reality are they, Mr. Jones? They’re about mass entertainment; no one is kidding anyone here about these fantasy productions. And no one is kidding anyone when I call myself a secret agent man too, a spy, who came in out of Canada’s cold down to Australia. I was a man who often felt like a spy Without those pretty girls, but who represented a political worldview, a global cosmology, a coming zeitgeist, the spirit of the age that the world was about to enter. I was someone on the outside who had a message for the inside, for all the powers of the world did they but know it— but they didn’t; it was a secret and, just about always, I was the only one who knew it, who was at all privy to it— wherever I went during these epochs. Ron Price May 28th 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. THE NEW WORLD OF CELEBRITIES The year I went pioneering, 1962, Richard Burton had just begun a relationship, the epic romance of the century, with Elizabeth Taylor. Each would eventually divorce their spouses and in 1964 marry. By August 1962 when my pioneering life began, the film Cleopatra had been in the making for more than a year. Taylor and Burton were the first celebrities to have the paparazzi following them wherever they went. At least that was the way English actor-director Guy Masterson put it in an interview on ABC Radio National. Film-makers in 1962-1963 were struggling to get a handle on the epic as an art form. During this struggle they tried Cleopatra, a film first screened in June 1963. Despite its many gargantuan flaws the film remains a compelling story of tremendous spectacle and power. The film went for four hours after being cut from six. It won four oscars. The film delivers visual spectacle on a scale few pictures can rival. By today’s standards the 44 million it cost 20th Century Fox to produce would be $400 million. Seven weeks before Cleopatra was first released in New York, the Universal House of Justice was elected. -Ron Price with thanks to Margaret Throsby, ABC Radio National, October 19th, 2004, 10:00-11:00 am and to the Movie Review Querie Engine(MRQE). There was back then a romance which was promised me with wonder. I lived in hope that it would fulfill the promptings of angels and the voice in the thunder. It had a beauty quite astounding, one of the rarest in its day. Men followed it to catch a glimpse for it was a story that would pay. I, too, followed it, for it was a beauty that would live forever. Mine was not that romance they put in magazines and epic films in technicolour manipulation. Mine was, rather, so exquisite the media never tapped it. It was not about the tribes of war or wealth or indoor plumbing. It had to do with man’s dear soul, a nectar and a honeyed-tongue, desert sand and mountain climb, streaking across a firmament of an indifferent and sleeping world with my compass set for madness, for orient lights, resplendent tokens in always unreached and unseen heights. Ron Price October 27 2004 IMAGES OF INDIFFERENCE 1953 was a big year for the international Baha’i community. The superstructure of the Shrine of the Bab was completed and the Mother Temple of the West in Chicago was also finished or inaugurated as Shoghi Effendi termed its completion. One of the key works, arguably, in the history of the cinema, at least according to the authors of a slim volume in the BFI Film Classics Series was also released that year, Shane. In the movie Shane the great enemy is indifference and, certainly, over a lifetime of pioneering this is also the case. -Ron Price with thanks to Edward Countryman and Evonne von Heussen-Countryman, Shane, London, British Film Institute, 1999. Reviewed in Film-Philosophy, Vol.4 No.24, October 2000. It was a year for totemic images, for simplicity and power. What did these images mean? What was their deeply resonant message and simple narrative? I really had no idea back then when I was in grade four at East Burlington Public School and westerns came on TV in the evening and at the movies on Saturday matinees amidst the popcorn and older kids necking in the back rows. So when Alan Ladd rode out of the mountains in Wyoming to that valley farmstead I did not see individuals buffeted by historic forces, the scramble for land and a massive indifference.1 So when the Baha’is built their temples and shrines in Israel and America I did not see a community, a most wonderful and thrilling motion appearing in the world.2 If there was a Christ-figure in any of this, just about everyone missed Him/It. But noone could miss the beauty in the frontier austerity of Wyoming, in the golden-tipped pinnacles on Mt. Carmel or the temple of light down by Lake Michigan. Their architects knew exactly what they wanted to do and were dedicated with a thoroughness bordering on the obsessive. They all believed, too, in the need for communal belief and action in the face of evil. 1 Bob Sitton sees indifference as the greatest enemy or ‘heavy’ in the film. 2 ‘Abdu’l-Baha in God Passes by, p. 351. Ron Price 16 January 2004 THE ANCHORMAN Walter Cronkite began his journalist work in the American midwest in 1937. This was right at the start of the Baha’i teaching Plan, the Seven Year Plan of 1937-1944. His soothing voice became one of the most familiar sounds on television, first in the 1950s and then beginning in April 1962 when he became the anchorman for the CBS Evening News until 1981, the year of his retirement. Fortunately for readers, since his retirement he has been able to extend his career in journalism and combine it with a lifetime of sailing adventures. The result is his new book which he so generously shares with us two decades after that retirement: Around America: A Tour of Our Magnificent Coastline, Author Norton, 2001. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 2004. You’d just become the CBS anchorman when I took another anchor to the next town in my first pioneering move in what seem now like the halcyon years of the Ten Year Crusade. My anchor, lifted from time to time, and I was off on a great sailing adventure, on an unknown sea in a tempest difficult to define and understand, of unprecedented, unpredictable magnitude. We pressed on, you and I, you in the public eye. Life, reported on or lived, is a dangerous bridegroom and to survive we need to see each day as if going out to war and, at the same time, give ourselves up to intense enjoyment. We must travel light, keep our spirit up, find some philosophy, some method, some attitude of humorous kindness and affection, feel some reverence, some resolute persistence with a chart to sail through the stormy seas. Ron Price June 25, 2004. THE BANQUET TABLE OF THE LORD OF HOSTS This poem was written after seeing the story of the arrival of Solzhenitsyn in Moscow on 21 July 1994 after twenty years living in Vermont, after his expulsion from the USSR in 1974. -”The Homecoming: Alexander Solzhenitsyn”, BBC, 1995 on ABC Television, 8:30 pm, 5 October 1995. It’s a new ball game now, eh Alexander? You settle for hope now, the residue of optimism, enough to keep on going. Memory, like the clickety-clack of the wheels of a train, spin you and us back through all those years and here you are now in Moscow, swept along by the ongoing gales of destiny and a society in chaos: maybe it always was in a crazy twentieth century of Gulags on the way to Light. I remember your leaving Russia back in 1974 and your annoyance with reporters bent on a story and bent on democracy run riot as it seems it will whereever it takes root, for it is as soulless as communism-- as you know. You arrive in Moscow two days before my fiftieth birthday to a fan-fare of publicity much the same as you’d get in New York. Sorokin always said the two systems were more like each other than different, that was long before you left. You don’t really think that reason and the senses can pull it off do you? The Greeks never made it. Nor did the Hebrews and their progeny, perhaps enough for those old days, then. But not for now, not for this blazing new age, its immensity, its accelerating forces, its dazzling prospects, its long, slippery and tortuous road and the treachery worked in men’s hearts. We all must find the context within which to examine the profound questions of the hour. We must find the vehicle for our Age, the correct perspectives, the structure for freedom, the pattern for institutional and individual behaviour, the profound change in the standard of public discussion, an etiquette of expression; indeed, there is a silver lining to the dark picture. What is at the core of this new paradigm of opportunity? Such a vaccuum out there. Such a cry of anquish. Are you too old, Alexander? Will the face of despair and its melancholy, the fortunes of this deranged world keep you away from the banquet table of the Lord of Hosts? 6/10/95. NEW GOLD When the life of the streets perplexed me long ago I attempted to find an answer to it for myself by going literally into the wilderness, where I was so lost to friends and everyone that not five people crossed my threshold in as many years. I came back to do my days work in its day none the wiser. -Robert Frost(1913) in Robert Frost On Writing, Elaine Barry, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1973, p.86. Why I know some people, Robert, who are not able to enjoy their own company for more than a fleeting moment; some actually get quite disturbed by the silence of their own thought or its absence and, eventually, by the television. They’re the sort of people who could not sit on a middan and dream stars*, if you know what I mean. It’s not so much solitude, privacy, some need, as the time and opportunity to sink their teeth into some harmonious silence of the spheres, some momentary sense of transcendence, some replenishing philosophy, some new life, a sense of the miracle of being alive, some simplicity, humility, peace, an awareness of their oneness, an indissoluble bond, oceanic: they seem denied this gift, this station. And others still in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die,** I may feel like this upon a midnight when I my labours done and some, I call it, chemical exhaustion sets in, but now in these last of middle years I’ve found new gold to take me to the final track where I will lay my head one day in some celestial company. Ron Price 20 December 1995 * Joseph Campbell tells the story of meeting a man on a desolate waste of bogs and he said to the man, “It’s rather dull here.” The man said, “Faith, ye can sit on a middan and dream stars.” ** John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale.” DRY GRASS AND THE KINGDOM Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision approachable by no other means. -F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry. If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place. -R.M. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 17 February 1903. I can remember those days when I was young, dry grass under a tree where we sat in summer and wondered what to do on long hot days: you could only play so much baseball and it was too early to go swimming. We all sat there: George, Benny, Ken Pizer. Life had hardly started yet--1953-- the beginning of an age, a Kingdom, celebrated with Monopoly, Sorry, swimming and endless sittings under this tree. We were not troubled by war, women or the wickedness of the world. Scientific discoveries interested us not, as long as we could watch our television programs at the end of the day and our parents didn’t argue. Secret disquietudes, inner lonelinesses, the tensions of a society on the edge of self-destruction did not touch us on this dry grass under the tree. Ron Price November 2001 MY GOLDEN GOWN Love does not give at first the frescoed room richly arrased, low fire at the grate, sumptuous carpets from some fabled loom, -Roger White, “Shelter”, The Witness of Pebbles, George Ronald, Oxford, 1981, p.49. After a million instant friendships and a billion deep and meaningful conversations and a very satisfying companionship with my wife and son that may get even better with the years, I have grown not to want friends any more. I’ve tried this friendship business and it always seems to mean yet more conversations, endless conversations, and I’ve already had a hundred billion of them filling my years with faces, with pleasure and joy and, always, tomorrow’s words, more questions and more words, more churning of the weightless air. Their anguish can not hold me. I turn from their doubts and their towers to flowers and silent concerns. You do not find me at the meeting. My yearning quietly calls amidst the patience and solemnity of the trees. My form of service is not the puzzle it once was, and it once was. I do not know of boredom or the perils of triviality. I people my aloneness with a banquet ready-spread, with brimming cup and lute song, with frescoed room richly arrased, low fire at the grate, sensuous pillows, silver bowl of fruit-heaped plate: a world richer than television and all in the mind. Faith’s bricks and planks and rusted nails that wound I’ve had in many houses, walls and window frames. Fragile shelter once was mine and faint-hearted dread walked with me many years. Now royal lover’s caravan, gold laden, has come to town. I’ve seen it unpacking on the mountain side: my golden gown, my golden gown, oh, at last, my golden gown. Ron Price 11 January 1998 BASEBALL AND THE BAHA’I FAITH When a series of programs about baseball, a series called The Big Picture, began to unfold on television, I quickly came to realize the remarkable similarity between the story of baseball and the story of the Baha’i Faith, both of which grew up in the modern age. Indeed, there are many organizations, activities, interests which were born and developed in this modern age, say, since the French and the American revolutions. The points of comparison and contrast between the great charismatic Force which gave birth to the Baha’i Faith and its progressive institutionalization on the one hand, and the origin and development of other movements and organizations on the other, is interesting to observe. -Ron Price with thanks to Ken Burns, “Baseball: Part Two,” ABC TV, 18 February 1999. They both grew through forces and processes, events and realities in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: baseball and the Baha’i Faith grew along their stoney and tortuous paths, the latter out of the Shaykhi School of the Ithna’Ashariyyih Sect of Shi’ah Islam. And it would be many years before the Baha’i Faith would climb to the heights of popularity that baseball had achieved quite early in its history. Baseball was a game whose time had come, a hybrid invention, a growth out of diverse roots, the fields and sandlots of America, as American as apple pie. And the Baha’i Faith was an idea whose time had come, would come, slowly, it would seem, quite slowly in the fields, the lounge rooms, the minds and hearts of a burgeoning humanity caught, as it was, in the tentacles of a tempest that threatened to blow it apart. Ron Price 17 February 1999 COLOSSUS In October 1962 Peter Orr interviewed Sylvia Plath on BBC television. I had just gone pioneering with my family to the next town a few weeks before at the age of 18. Sylvia committed suicide four months later. She had achieved by the age of thirty a fine artistic virtuosity in her poetry. Her poems arose from a number of sources: a sensuous and emotional experience, a lust for study, an ability to control and manipulate experience, a process of self-communion, a confessional orientation, a peculiar awareness of the burden of her sensibility, an ability to reconstruct how people feel at crucial points in their life, a brooding and tentative mood, verbal precision of a high order, forceful narrative skill and the ebb and surge of passion. -Ron Price with thanks to Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems, editor Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber, London, 1981; Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath, Leonard Sanazaro, editor, 1983; and Alicia Ostriker, The Americanization of Sylvia, 1968. I’ve been piecing you together1 for more than half a century, never quite making it, losing the plot in passion, little indecipherable steps, inch by inch, piece by piece: I wonder how I am going. I have laboured and believed for more than forty years, often crawled like an ant in mourning, black, dead. Rose, too, to heights I’d never thought possible. Where are you now, my friend, after all these years and talk? Are your hands soiled? Is your heart defiled with desire? How far are you from that sacred realm.2 Your hours are married to shadow. There is always some anrchy on the horizon and at night you squat in the cornucopia of your left ear, out of the wind, and listen to the sad music of your heart and mind recounting, yet again, your losses. 1 the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ in this poem is, in fact, myself. See Plath’s poem Colossus. 2 Baha’u’llah, Hidden Words, Persian, 68. Ron Price 12 November 2000 THE GREATEST POEM The Baha’is, who come from virtually all the nations of the earth, have an immense poetical potential. The Baha’i community itself, its history and its future, is, from my own perspective anyway, essentially the greatest poem. The Baha’i Faith is a genuine universalism based on a genuine individualism. As one analyst of ethnicity wrote, we live in a post-ethnic, post-Christian, world and an authentic universalism requires new wine bottles. It also requires people with the capacity and will to believe in them. The gap between the Gospel and the power of positive thingking is as wide as that between genuine religious faith and what passes for such in the old religions and their old institutional wine bottles. -Ron Price with appreciation to ‘a writer on ethnicity’ whose name I did not record in my notes from a course toward a Graduate Diploma in Multi-Cultural Education at the Armidale College of Advanced Educ., Aust.,c.1985. The immense poetic potential here is epic. It developed gradually with the years, as naturally as breathing in that prelude phase, that delay, those days of carefree enjoyment, from that turning point in Baha’i history, the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth, the time of world peril, little did I know, then.1 Pioneering’s historic hour arrived, its significance partially lifted, an infinitessimal glimmer of the effulgence of His Countenance. That blissful consummation2 about to begin, rapt as I was in my studies and the confusion of those academic years.3 They were days that called for heroic deeds, again, little did I really know.4 A protagonist in the greatest drama in human history: destiny’s epic had begun to unfold in my life amidst that old convulsing storm of human life taking us all into its dark heart5 from which we have as yet to free ourselves. 1 1953, a turning point for Baha’i history when my family first learned of the Cause. 2 See Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p.151; re: April 1963. 3 Difficult, confusing and testing pioneering years: 1962-1967. 4 The Universal House of Justice, Wellspring of Guidance, p.80. 5 October 1967. The expression “the dark heart of this age of transition” was first used in a letter of the House of Justice. Ron Price 17 October 2000 SOMETHING BIGGER Price is trying to deepen the Baha’i experience, make it more articulate so to speak, endow it with a meaning and a significance that he sees many to have lost or, indeed, perhaps never to have found. His view of life has a one-sidedness which is both a strength and a weakness. His identification of himself with his Faith is so close that he must write like one whose whole being is part of the process that is its history. Price’s poetry is woven not by instinct, as in the case of Lawrence; not by character or nature, as say, the poetry of Wordsworth or Keats might have been; nor by the events of the day, as the war poets or any one of many moderns might have centred their poetry, but by a certain mysticism, a mysticism Judith Wright defined as the purpose of poetry as early as 1963 in a television interview given that year: poets try to get beyond the events of day-to-day experience into something bigger, something beyond themselves, to find a sudden illumination, an illumination which is like a gift from another world, a gift of meaning, of light, of emotion, in the creative act of language, an act which also involves the rediscovery of the self. -Ron Price with thanks to Sunday Arts, ABC TV, 7 May 2000. A flood of images produced the world of pop art by the time I entered the field back in ’62.1 The empire of signs was all over, exploding on an epic landscape, that had been epic for a hundred years;1 as indeed it had, in another landscape, in another land, half-way around the world. And I’d caught those images by the time I was 18: for I was not into soup cans as metaphor, pretty ladies in the movies, or silk screening fame and ordinary stuff. There was a fascination with death I shared with Warhole, but different. It was a specific facet of history. It was martyrdom, tragedy and heroism, across the sombre sky of Persia, far removed from the death that was consumer culture. 1 The beginning of my pioneering life. 2 This was how Robert Hughes had characterized, in part, abstract impressionist art in the late 1940s and 1950s, and pop art in the 1960s. Ron Price 7 May 2000 SYNCHRONIZATION Between the first regular television programming in England, in 1936, and the first in the USA in 1939, the first Seven Year Plan began in North America in 1937. Radio programs had begun at about the time the Tablets of the Divine Plan had been unveiled in America, in 1919. The promotion, the teaching, the proclamation of the Baha’i Cause was able to be done through radio and television broadcasting when this Cause had developed, had spread, had evolved, to the point that it was able to use them. The timetable of the Cause of God and developments on the planet seemed to be remarkably well-synchronized. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 1 October 2000. They1 were ready to take it global from 1919 when along came radio and television for the two billion people who had come to inhabit the first threads of the web of embryonic planetary civilization that Arnold Toynbee was describing in his Study of History which he took forty years to write in eleven volumes.2 Why, I even went pioneering when the National Space Agency launched the Telstar 1 satellite; and the first live global communications were channeled through outer space3 while the Universal House of Justice was elected for the first time. 1 The Baha’is 2 Arnold Toynbee began writing his Study of History in 1921 and completed his eleventh voilume in 1961. 3 July 10th 1962 lauching of satellite; first commercial programming over satellite in 1965 after the apex of the Baha’i administrative system, the Universal House of Justice was eleected in 1963. Ron Price 1 October 2000 THE HURRICANE The Violent Planet, a television series on the various forms of violence in nature and climate on the earth, presented an analysis of ‘the hurricane.’ The hurricane is like a milder form of the tsunami that rocked southeast Asia this week. Most of us will never experience a tsunami but we will all have severe tests in our personal life. The poem below compares the hurricane, the tsunami, to such a test in our life and my life as an international pioneer over the last three epochs. One of my tests was a divorce. Inevitably, each of us, each pioneer, experiences tests differently, but there are, equally inevitably, general principles, common features to all tests. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000. Born in a far-off place and time, it develops so slowly you can’t see it coming.1 Then, with disarming speed, it starts to suck the heat out of your life. You freeze right to the marrow of your bones. You yield your head, but some root feeds insatiably in the heart’s thin soil.2 And so you live to see another day. A silence comes and tell-tale signs of hell-on-the-horizon. Joy is no more and then—chaos reigns. The spin of the roulette-wheel brings devastation to all that is your life. Huge investments are written off in a day, a few hours, minutes. Your stock market crashes and you analyse it for years, decades, after. ‘What exactly happened in ‘73?’ you ask again and again. You could write a book about it. And you do. You start again from scratch in a new town at the end of the earth, a lovely place where desperation fills your soul. The disaster fades and dies and new life begins. Mother-nature shrugs-off the great pain and it becomes a memory. Opportunity unfolds for sweet new life. I’ve only seen one hurricane in my life- Hazel-when was it, back in ’57?3 But there have been more disasters on TV since I was 13 than I can count and this one-- this tsunami is one of the worst. Ron Price 30 December 2004 1 the divorce from my first wife in 1973-5 after seven years of marriage. 2 Roger White, “Notes on Erosion,” The Witness of Pebbles, p.71. 3 In April 1957, about the same time as hurricane Hazel, although I can not recall precisely after all these years, the Guardian said we were “hovering on the brink of self-destruction.” One divorce is enough in a life, like one hurricane. It was frightening. And the tsunami, compared to that hurricane, is enough to melt your bones. THE BAGGAGE Last night on television that rare phenomenon in programming occurred: a twenty-five minute piece Writers On Writing. I wrote down some of the ideas of various authors that were pertinent to my own writing project. They will serve as an introduction to my poem this morning. Truth is a mobile army of words that attempts to transform the ordinary; it is a wonderful feeling knowing you’ve said it the way you want, that you’ve got it right, that it has worked, that it is the way you want to hear it; autobiography is the bringing together of many voices and experiences into one voice, one unifying statement, however long, that puts it the way you want it put; you have to please yourself when you write, but it doesn’t hurt occasionally to look over your shoulder at the reader; the whole writing exercise begins with a feeling, or an idea, and the rest is an effort, a journey, to put it down on paper with all the baggage that goes with it, that collects, along the way. The following poem is as irregular as the essay. I use the irregular poetic form, my nineteen line vahid. -Ron Price with thanks to “Writers On Writing,” ABC TV, 10:35-11:00 pm., 5 December 2000. A few days ago, on borrowing a book from the library on essays,1 I felt like writing one but, instead, I think I’ll just put down a thought or two here on Montaigne, Hazlitt, Bacon or Lamb to answer the question What do I know? Do I know who I am? in this equally irregular form.2 Keeping close to the weave and texture of my experience, using this unkillable poetic, and, hopefully, with this glowing commonplace, I shall convey the essence of these days with twenty- five days left in the millennium. 1 John Gross, The Oxford Book of Essays, Oxford UP, 1991. 2 Dr. Johnson saw the essay as an irregular writing form. The poem is the same. Ron Price 6 December 2000 TWO POEMS ON NEW YORK The fourth of a five part television series on the history of New York focussed on the rise of skyscrapers and working conditions, especially of women, at the turn of the century in New York. The following two poems arose out of watching this program. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 11 September 2000. MARTYRS FOR A CAUSE Between ‘Abdu’l-Baha laying the Bab’s sacred remains in the Shrine on Mt. Carmel and His departure on His western tour, the General Strike of 1909/10 took place and the great fire in the women’s shirt and waist factory in New York burnt 150 women alive, giving the women’s movement and unionism the biggest shot-in-the-arm in their history and inspired the view that politics was here to help people. A lot happened in those twenty-nine months after ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s release. 1 Between 21 March 1909 and 11 August 1911. Ron Price 11 September 2000 MINARETS OF THE WEST In the last years of Baha’u’llah’s life and during the ministry of ‘Abdul-Baha, years which saw the initial publication of Baha’i books, the initial spread of the Cause beyond Iran and Iraq, high rise buildings, skyscrapers of various heights, made their appearance in the world’s great cities. It was, arguably, the greatest shift in architecture since the Gothic cathedrals. Gigantic, daring, colossal, enormous energy, an architectural shift, biggest since the Middle Ages, cutting edge of a global civilization, leap into modernity, poetry for democracy, a magic cauldron: where did it all come from, this apparition from the future, this new minaret? ......Ron Price 11 September 2000 THE UNDER-DOCUMENTED LABYRINTH We live in over-documented times and many contemporary biographies sink under the weight of their research. For these are days of information overload. But the lives of ordinary Baha’is, at these crucial stages in the development of the Cause, the three epochs I am concerned with in this autobiographical poetry, are certainly not being documented in anything like the detail that will be necessary for any useful biography in decades and centuries to come. Such future biography, if it is to be successful, must satisfy several needs of readers, at least according to a needs-gratification perspective: cognitive, affective, personal integration, social integration and tension release, that is, escape and diversion. To do this with biography in future decades and centuries will require much more material, information, than will, in all likelihood be available in these future times, except for Baha’is with a very high profile in the community at the present time. The story of your ordinary Baha’i will never make it to the shelves, or the Web Pages, in that future century, except in a similar way that the ordinary person has come into the light of secular history in the last several decades.1 Perhaps, though, with the continuing incredible advances in technology, biography will not have to rely on print-texts as much as it has in the past. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000; and 1 There is no question: I’ve been a social explorer out in society investigating and solving problems. But, I’ve been no Maverick, no Lone Ranger, no Roy Rogers riding into town, dealing with some locale problematique, then heading off into the sunset. After two dozen towns a little bit of my soul has been spread around two continents and its: spectacular, bizarre, enigmatic, urban, rural, metal-testing loses, wins, and web of social relations where the empire of the habitual became the matrix of my mental and social life, its labyrinthine phantasamagoria1 and its ordinarily ordinary. 1See “The Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, The Mall and The Television,” Margaret Moore, in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Patricia Mellen, 1990. Ron Price 15 February 2000 HAUNTED Lee Marvin, an American actor who died in 1987 at the age of 43, never really recovered from his war experience. It haunted him all his life according to a recent television documentary.1 In the 1962 film "People Need People" Marvin plays the role of a psychotic. This gave him the opportunity to try to work out some of his anxieties, some of the post traumatic syndrome, perhaps, that he was still experiencing. He was a spiritual warrior, so said someone who knew him well, who could only share his war experience with someone who had also been in the war. In 1962 I was at the very outset of what was to become, six years later, a psychotic experience. I, too, have often felt like a spiritual warrior who has been haunted by his experience of psychological warfare, a frightening psychosis. I rarely can talk about the experience. It has become part of that area of life one rarely or never shares. -Ron Price with thanks to "Lee Marvin," ABC TV, 11:10-12:10 pm, 10/11 June 2001. Do you ever understand yourself, Lee? Do you live with the battle-scars until they put you in your coffin? You were a clever dude, Lee, famous and rich throughout the first quarter-century of this tenth stage of history. While I was trying to get it together, while I was recovering from that great crack in my psyche and working out my life's moves pioneering for this new Faith, you were pulling in the big bucks in movie after movie on the world stage. No one ever called me a spiritual warrior. It is a battle waged in silence, with no big bucks, no fame, no wealth, no rank, only a spectre of solidities whose substances are sand, but a taste of sweet-scented streams from which I drink by hand. Ron Price 11 June 2001 ME OH MY AND MY OH ME Telling stories about people's experience in Australia has just begun in film and television, said Graham Thorburn who teaches drama and directing at the Australian Film and Television School. His remarks were about the history of Australian drama. He could very well have been talking about the stories of western Bahá'ís in recent decades. Of course, the Bahá'ís have lots of stories from their fascinating history and they talk to each other about their private, their individual, stories. In the last ten and, perhaps, twenty years Bahá'ís have also begun to tell their own stories in a more public, a more publicized, way, their stories over the last four epochs going back to the 1950s. What I try to do in my poetry is to write about 'the group story.' I also tell my own, my personal, story. There is, I think, a powerful narrative at the base of what has now become an extensive poetic of nearly 6000 poems and some two million words. There is, too, a nice balance in my poetry and essays between the group, the Bahá'í community in history and the individual, my own, life and the lives of various individuals I have known over four epochs. -Ron Price with thanks to Graham Thorburn on "Arts Today," ABC Radio National, 10:05-11:00 am, 22 October 2001. The first stories I heard were about birds flying over Akka, candles stuck in a martyr's flesh and always there was a prison somewhere. Then, I got older, and heard different stories. There was: Bill Carr up in Greenland, a new crop of stories about 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shofhi Effendi. There always seemed to be new stories about the Central Figures of this Faith of mine. And I got even older and heard stories about: some ordinary people and not-so-ordinary ones, like Mirza Haydar Ali, who travelled here and there, for there always seemed to be travelling in there somewhere. They all kept you going, though, through thick and thin, the ups-and-downs of life. And then a new crop began, I don't know, perhaps about 1980. Pretty good stuff, really inspirational. Do you remember the one about Muriel Sweetbun Udder? And I got older still, passed the magic fifty and well-nigh unto sixty and decided it was time to tell my own story and the story of how I saw it. I wonder if anyone will read this story from, let's see, 1953 to 2003? Me oh my and my oh me! Ron Price 22 October 2001 THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF THE REAL WORLD In 1959 The National Institute of Dramatic Art(NIDA) began in Sydney Australia. It has trained actors and a range of specialists for the theatre, film and television industry in Australia and the world for more than forty years. In 1959 I became a Bahá'í in Canada. I, too, have had over forty years of training for a different industry, education, but one which has taught me assertiveness skills, helped me acquire a strong sense of identity, an appreciation of literature, the arts and the cultural attainments of the mind. The combination of a profession and a religion which gave me a value, belief and attitude base, has been more than an equivalent to what students got an NIDA. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 16 August 2001. They've been churning them out for more than forty years: some of the best actors and actresses in the world, giving them three years training in how to do it, how to be, how to act. My training didn't make me famous or rich: those Feasts, firesides, deepenings, all those towns, pioneering over four epochs and all those years of teaching: learning how to do it, how to be, how to act in the real world at the IIRW: The International Institute of the Real World. Ron Price 16 August 2001 NARRATIVE THOUGHT TO THE RESCUE The visual imagery of the mind appears to be both more complex and less systematic than the visual imagery of cinema. Images viewed through conscious effort are more often indistinct and elusive. Even the faces of loved ones are often difficult to recall. They sidestep the mind’s gaze if their images are actively pursued. Long familiarity renders such objects too complex and heterogeneous for a single image to suffice. Such faces become, in our mind, multidimensional, ambiguous and possessed of a breadth and complexity that photography and film condense and strip away. This is also true of sensory experience in general. Because of the elusiveness of sensory experience a mode of thinking comes into acton, into play, called narrative thought.1 Narrative governs the disposal of objects and actions in time without which memory and language would be impossible. Most of our experience can be assigned a place in our narrative history or at least its potential, although some of our life is clearly and inevitably incoherent. -Ron Price with thanks to David MacDougall, “Films of Memory”, Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from Visual Anthropology Review:1990-1994, editor, Lucien Taylor, Routledge, NY, 1994, p.266. Just as film and documentary makers are often uneasy about their narratives, so are the autobiographers among us as we try and reconstruct our lives, our narratives, our stories. Some, of course, seem less troubled. Often a celebratory stance is adopted towards one’s memory, masking uncertainty, an emptiness at the heart of such authorship, a fundamental lack of conviction; reminiscence is usually treated as fragmentary, rarely as omniscience which is presumed arrogance. The richness inside people’s memories is often unattainable and is supplanted with endless illustrative material, with physical experience, primary stimuli and photographic iconography. These usually do not serve to integrate society, encapsulate ideology or create social order; rather they give us the unalterable record of appearance and place and a more profound place in our memory. I would like to think that this story will allow more than the record of appearance and place and will contribute in a rich way to that ultimate integration of society. Ron Price 11 April 2000 THE PRELUDE According to the Bahá'í Writings, 1953 marked the beginning of a most wonderful and thrilling motion in the world of existence. The spirit of teaching, spreading the Cause of God and promoting the teaching of God, 'Abdu'l-Bahá wrote, would permeate to all parts of the world. 1953 marked, in fact, the inception of the Kingdom of God on earth.1 1953 will also be remembered as the year 20th Century-Fox introduced Cinema-Scope, the widescreen process. Another technical innovation reached its peak in 1953,3-D. Another kind of movie emerged in 1953, the lunatic, goof-ball movie categorized as "psychotronic."2-Ron Price with thanks to 1Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p.351; and 2 "The Club Havana Secret History of Cinema, 1953," Media Zone, Tripod Website, 14 october 2001. While people were getting transported in the new wide-screens, taken off to a world of fantasy their forefathers, their ancestors, would never have dreamed of, I was turning nine, in grade four, and starting my long baseball career at third base in a hot Canadian summer. The Guardian was telling the American Bahá'ís they were at a turning point, trying to finish the superstructure of the Bab's Seculcher on Mt. Carmel. They were also at the beginning of what he called the prelude, a process which would precede mass conversion and would revolutionize the fortunes, the material power and the spiritual authority of the Faith of Bahá'u'lláh.1 1 Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, p.117. 15/10/01. SUSPENSE Film director Alfred Hitchcock produced his film The Birds in 1963.1 The essential element in Hitchcock's films is suspense and it operates on deeper psychological and moral levels than in simple 'who-dun-its.' This suspense was, it seems to me, an appropriate emotion for the year 1963. The hundred year period, 1913-2013, was and would be a traumatic one for humanity. 1963 was the mid-point of this period filled with convulsions precipitated in the world by "the waywardness of a godless and materialistic age."2 One of Hitchcock's most important contributions to cinema was his recognition of the spectator's tendency to identify with the characters on the screen. When The Birds was first screened in 1963, I was just starting out on my pioneering life and I was being asked to "gird (myself) for heroism."3 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Tippy Hedren on "Arts Today," ABC Radio National, 10:05-11:00 am, 8 January 2002 and 2The Universal House of Justice,Wellspring of Guidance, Wilmette, 1969, p.27 and 3p.60. Little did I know, then, and little did his audiences see the metaphorical significance of all those birds attacking and screeching just after the House was elected, trustee of that global undertaking set in motion a century before. In the intimate and private parts of our lives, on that long, stony, tortuous road he'd told us about, that path of the dawnbreakers of a previous age, that catastrophe of undreamed of dimensions, that fire, that consternation, that terror which would come to exist in the hearts of men had indeed come. And still we wondered why the darkness, the world confusion. In our own lives the birds of our hearts too often did not sing, caught-up in the dust-heap of this mortal world: many a talon claweth at this thrush of the eternal garden. Pitiless ravens do lie in wait for this bird of the heavens of God....1 1 Bahá'u'lláh, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952, p.41. -------Ron Price 8 January 2002 ON THE LOOK OUT Raymond Carver was an American short story writer who died at the age of fifty in 1988. He had been a compulsive smoker, drinker, alcoholic, depressive, wife basher(in his first marriage) and winner of many awards for his writing. To do your best and to work hard, Carver argued, is often simply not good enough in life. He was always on the look out for a story and would piece together painstakingly a narrative from the most unlikely constituents. Carver said that he was more interested in the characters in his stories than he was in those who were his reading audience. I enjoyed reading about Carver, whom I had never heard of until yesterday, when his life and work were surveyed on ABC Radio National, “Radio Eye,” 2:00-3:00 pm November 22nd. Carver wrote about ordinary people and his characters were in many ways the centre of his writing life. Much of his writing was autobiographical. And, being so often a loser, his characters and his writing appeal to losers. The following poem is a celebration of Carver and his work and it is dedicated to John F. Kennedy who was assassinated forty years ago yesterday in Dallas Texas when I was just twenty-one. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 23 November 2003. The world seems to me to be drowning in stories with enough narrative to line, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, across the surface of the earth and out into space with the plots, scenarios, the characters, events, the space and time of a myriad pieces of intricate and moving stories of mice and men. Some tell their winning stories in cinema, in music, in words on paper and in books, in a multitude of mise-en-scenes, stage plays choreographed for millions to be entertained, informed, stimulated, educated-- like some immense, Gargantuan Guide to the Perplexed. Ron Price 23 November 2003 PS Carver moves from experience to autobiographical story and I move from experience to autobiography. And I take as much interest in my characters as Carver seems to in his. We are both on the look out for a story, a way of conveying our experience in narrative. THESE THEORETICAL PROJECTIONS Does it make sense to theorize the present when it seems to be changing so fast? It is a gamble. If subsequent developments prove the theoretical projections in this poetic, this narrative account, to be correct, I win. But, if the developments in the wide world of religion and society go in a different direction than the one suggested by this present analysis, this present picture that my words are painting, this does not mean that I automatically lose. Rather, the analysis presented here will become a record of possibilities which were heretofore not realized, a record of the horizon which was visible to me and my coreligionists today but later became unimaginable or necessary to postpone, defer, revise or reconsider.-Ron Price with thanks to Lev Manovich, "Cinema as a Cultural Interface," Internet, 16 June 2003. You've really got to get your frameworks right, get your sites set as spot on as you can; got to try your best to get it right, but.... always be willing to throw away the lot, a lot of what you thought because the whole thing is bigger than you can imagine and more impossibly complex than you ever can take in. But still....while I deal with this impossible dream I will use the colloquial, trapped as I am, as we all are, in the ready-made, the day-to-day, the conventional which fills our minds, divorces us from reality and brings me near, paradoxically, to my own idiosyncratic form of poetry in this dark-heart of an age of transition. Ron Price 18 June 2003 A BATTLE FAR PROLONGED Just as I began my pioneering life in mid-1962 at the age of eighteen, John Frankenheimer's film The Birdman of Alcatraz was released into the cinemas. There is a despair in the film that runs through to the end but there is also, as the film progresses, an evolution of the main character, Robert Stroud, from sour to soulful, violent to sensitive, brutish misanthrope to sweet-hearted intellectual. It is a story that begins in 1912 and ends in 1959 as Robert Stroud leaves Alcatraz, clearly a transformed man, for a more humane prison institution. 1959 was the year I became a Bahá'í in southern Ontario. The film ends on a strong note of redemption and with a life-affirming message. -Ron Price with thanks to Dan Jardine, "Review of The Birdman of Alcatraz," Apollo Review Guide On-Line, 23 April 2004. I loved my mother, too, Robert, although we disagreed to the core even unto the end. Was it those birds that changed your life? Or some underlying curiosity aroused at last? We all have our prisons, eh Robert, from which we must struggle to give meaning to our days? Yours was just ending back in '59 and into those anarchous sixties and mine was just beginning in those pre-pioneering-pioneering years when I was young, fresh and hardly taken my first steps into the battlefield of life. There has been an enchantment to the intransigence and cunning of that consummate foe, life, sometimes an aphrodisiac, sometimes there was fear and exhausting fatigue from a battle far prolonged. Sometimes the camp was in ruins, always the beachhead beckoned and there were auguries of triumph even in my campfire's dwindling plumes, and always the engagement resumed.1 1 Roger White, "Lines from a Battlefield," Another Song Another Season, 1979, pp.111-112. Ron Price April 23 2004 HOMO LUDENS There are thirty systems in the brain involved in the breakdown and reconstruction of the world. They are all interacting with and orchestrating, integrating and synthesizing perception, imagination and memory. They do this in one grand, mysterious, largely unconscious as well as conscious process. -Dr. Oliver Sacks at the Centre for the Mind, ANU, Canberra: on The Science Show, ABC Radio, 6 August 1997, 12:40-1:30 pm. And so this poem is a creature of its own, a playful product of an incredible process where the mind seizes things after they have been dancing around the presence chambers of my brain-homo ludens- forever putting down, orchestrating, reconstructing my world with a delight that is my own, but which I share with billions, creating the grandest show on earth, new and wonderful configurations deriving from wisdom and the power of thought.1 Ron Price 6 August 1997 1 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, USA, 1970(1957), p.1. FAR FROM VIETNAM John Glenn has been untouched by scandal over these thirty-five years and has remained married for fifty-three years. -Alister Cook, Message From America, ABC Radio National, 7:15 pm, 2 March 1997. You had Huston to guide you for those few circuits, keeping you on track in those hazardous trips around the globe. I had Haifa and when the apex of that new Order was installed a fully fledged, institutionalized, charisma rose before my eyes, fixing my gaze and all of creation, bestowing upon me a bounty, quickening my soul through the vitalizing fragrance of Thy Day and the thrilling voice of Thy Pen.1 Then you turned to politics and remained untouched by scandal as the junior senator from Ohio. I turned to a greater intensity of service, was tarnished by my deeds and got burned out far removed from Viet-Nam and the heat of western scandal. Ron Price 2 March 1997 1 Baha’u’llah, Tablet of Carmel. I DIE LISTENING In the most general terms there are two kinds of poetry: poetry to be read and poetry to be spoken. Sometimes the two meet. With music, poetry often becomes more accessible; much of modern ‘top 40’ folk and rock-‘n-roll is poetry of this ilk. Those who do a performance poetry, sometimes called the spoken word or social poetry, are often reacting to the obscurities of modernist and post-modernist poetry. Hence their poetry is often in the vernacular. The beats were some of the first modern poets in this vein. In Australia, the Adelaide Festival beginning in 1960 and American influences from the 1950s helped to foster the beginnings of performance poetry. -Ron Price with thanks to “Writers and Writing”, ABC Radio National, 12 October, 7:30-8:15 pm. There is a magic in reading quietly to yourself with no sound. This is the home of my poetry. I’d go public, but I find when I do--I enjoy it--but I’m not inclined to repeat it, unless I’m pressed of course. But I’m never pressed and I’m happy not to be. Those poetry readings where everyone and their dog gets a shot at the action are so tolerant of people’s incapacity to read that the open stage becomes an incredible bore—like all the times His1 Writings, His art, is mangled to death by people who can’t pronounce, have no idea of stress and tone and I die listening. Ron Price 12 October 1997 1 Baha’u’llah’s, especially at Feasts. These are some of the multitude of situations in life where we must learn to acquire a sin-covering eye. AT LAST From Sappho to Dickinson, Rossetti, and the nightingales, death has been an imaginative obsession for many women poets-an obsession resumed in the twentieth century by poets like Millay, Mina Loy and Laura Riding...Smith and Plath.1 This pleased me because, since 1980 death has both haunted and attracted me. Somehow it did not seem right and yet, in another sense, it seemed the most natural of obsessions. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Jahan Ramazani,Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p.291. These words, these prayers, so many deeds, so many years have helped dissolve those walls which thankfully separate us from them: you wouldn’t want to go around hallucinating, would you? Enmeshed as we are in each other’s lives and will be, through these words, this unpopular art which can’t be hung for all to see or done like that stone statue over there, or turned into fine sound over time, but will remain on paper after the dilapidation of dilapidations, after the night wind wimpers, the leaves are all gone and we come forth and on with fragrances just beyond and we slowly emerge, exposed to our essential life, world, at last. Having grappled so long, so long, with bits of paper and what they all were saying, a clearness fell over the river, so smooth with a thousand diamonds sun-studding: you could see them as you drove along the river, even in the night, a thousand eyes but one mind, at last, at last, even if the heart aches for one has been there so many times before. Somewhere in the stale familiarity, half-dead, weary-sings something tastes of home, just around the corner, beyond that cloud where the sun is breaking, strong and clear: at last. --Ron Price 2 July 1995 MEDITATION ON BAHA’I WORLD CENTRE ...............my voice proclaims How exquisitely the individual Mind ...............to the external World Is fitted. -William Wordsworth, “The Recluse”, William Wordsworth: Selected Poems, Walford Davies, editor, Dent, 1975, p.132. Here I behold a mind that feeds upon infinity, a mind sustained by direct transcendent power and holds converse with a spiritual world of past, present and to come: epoch to epoch, past recorded time. Here I see days gone by returning from those first glimmerings at the dawn of this Age, enshrined now: the spirit of the Past for our future’s restoration. The characters are, now, fresh and visible in this spot of time with its distinct pre-eminence and its renovating virtue whereby our minds are nourished and invisibly repaired. Here are those efficacious spirits who have profoundest knowledge of leavening of being and of the workings of One Mind, the character of this Great Apocalypse and the types and symbols of eternity, gathered, as they are, among solitudes sublime. Here we find our better selves, from whom we have been long departed, and assume a character of quiet more profound than so many of the pathless wastes where we have long walked, too long, its roads. Here, too, I hear at last my song which with its star-like virtue shines to shed benignant influence, make a better time, more wise desires and simpler and humbler manners. Perhaps some trace of purity may come with me and guide and cheer me with Thy unfailing love which I forget. Ron Price 19 June 1995 DOWN HERE WE ONLY START The sense of inner security by no means proves that the product will be stable enough to withstand the disturbing or hostile influence of the environment...More than once everything one has built will fall to pieces under the impact of reality. -C.G. Jung, in The Survival Papers: Applied Jungian Psychology, Daryl Sharp, Quantum, London, 1989, p.145. The heart does not break-aortic- right through the ventricle. It slowly hardens here and there with holes for fatigue and fear. This magic place gets encrusted by a thousand lashes, whip keeps coming down, while singing. The stone and the heart it slowly dies. Shame coats the heart in glory. The universe stands still to hear the little story of this heart who’s last its golden fill. But redemption does come slowly. All things are found in part. Unity within the heart is joy and here-down here-we only start. Ron Price 10 September 1995 THE WORLD WAITS FOR ITS POET For the experience of each new age requires a new confession and the world seems always waiting for its poet. -Emerson in What Can I Say?, p.119. There are more of us these days, Ralph Waldo, more of everything, yes, a new confession and about time, as you could see over a hundred years ago. The world still waits for its Poet, with a capital ‘P’, Whose myriad mystic tongues find utterance in every line and the world, ripe to overflowing, waits until the Poet’s words, clad with wings, are carried fast and far irrecoverably into the hearts of humankind. Perhaps, the lesser poet, scarce deserving a mention, should set himself a key so low that even the most common things should delight and the fragrance in the air that some men breath, should come through rich and perfumed. Ron Price 10 September 1995 THE FLOWERING OF SEEDS In 1909 William Carlos Williams started with writing poetry like Keats and the body of the Bab was placed in a marble sarcophagus in Haifa Israel. So began a fascinating journey of a quintessential American poet and so ended another of risks and perils to enshrine a precious Trust in Its home in the Holy Land. -ABC, Sunday Afternoon: WCW, 25 June 1995 and Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, pp.274-275. You gave us something new: a new poetry for everyman, for what he did, words- these were the units, real, concrete, anything felt, anything amusing makes poetry, you said. You celebrated the new, (logical for a pediatrition) contemplated your loneliness, your world and ours. And you did all this just as a new Order was breaking onto the world, unbeknownst to most, perhaps symbolized when He came to America in 1912 as you were starting to run from the Old to a new voice, as another new Voice was breaking out unobtrusively in the mid-most heart of a new world, Chicago. And now in the midst of that other Old world, the Voice reposes on the Isle of Faithfulness, having been carried ever so surreptitiously to that Mount where mystic influence now radiates for our handiwork and wisdom to adore. A new loveliness seemed to burst out over the arts, raining down, raining down as an old world died with blood pouring out in buckets, as if history was expiring her last breath, perhaps at Verdun and the Somme. Now a beauty, only just seen, can be starred at, leaned on, from above, below, kissed on those ever-sleeping lips, hidden now beneath a Dust of magic Light. A beauty, crystal-concentrate, light in an old spiritual place--you can’t miss it, no one misses it who goes there. Has a grace so contained as to pose no threat. Has a touch of Marxism, a little of the green, a flavour of the liberal and a cup of tradition: something in it for everyone, two-bob each way, some might say. The Age has not figured Her out, perhaps, deserves Her not, but needs Her in these troublesome days of plague-swept streets, chilled hearts and utter unbelieveable complexity. Ron Price 25 June 1995 STATE ART If poetry is an intellectual/intuitive act it is not a random indeterminate process, but is governed by a previsioned end....there must be a ruling conception by which it knows its quarry: some foresight of the work to be done, some seminal idea. -James McAuley, Meanjin, Summer, 1953, Vol. xii, No.4, p.433. Don’t tell me about this extravagance! Do you think it some kind of embarrassing afterthought, a decoration? A propensity for unnecessary embellishment? This is no bedecking of some pretentious woman with precious stones, Pericles-like, back then in the name of an Athenian nationalism. Or did he just want them to love Athens more? Certainly an unusual and audacious exercise by an unusual and audacious man who was both powerful and unassuming as the earth. Yes, you could call it ‘state art’ for a new Order whose first stirrings of world-shaking significance seem a long way off. This is no saviour-in-a hurry like that Pericles of old, Augustus or one of a host of modern isms that are gradually and not-so-gradually burning themselves up in the fires of a disintegrating, a moribund world. This is not like those marble eccentricities of old--big enough to be called vulgar--no way. Big enough to be a vehicle for conveying the powerful prestige of a spiritual message; and small enough to be no threat, to be the integral part of a future, a world civilization, to preserve a beauty as old as our civilization, and a religious message as far back as Adam. No false starts here, no long delays like some of those ancient temples.* The effect here is as public as it was in Greece and Rome, only we’re talking small beginnings for the opening millennium and well beyond. We’re talking silent teachers, quiet messages, getting in quietly like Augustus only straight, up-front to anyone who will listen and no absolutism embellished with some artificial divine afflatus: this is democratic theocracy at its finest. Ron Price 25 December 1995 *The Temple of Artemis at Sardis took 700 years to complete and was never really completed. It looked like a building site for most of this time. This fact would have helped make the Baha’is in Chicago more comfortable about their long-standing, 40 year, exercise building the Mother Temple of the West. PLEASING MYSELF The basis for the following reflection is the article about Mark Toby in Mark Tobey/Art and Belief by Arthur Dahl, pp.1-12. Satisfied with the making of poetry, I find praise and criticism a complex bonus beyond what is excellent and lasting here amidst this continuous production. Pleasing the marketplace seems to be quite irrelevant: larger canvasses, small shows like some public artist; pleasing myself seems to be at the core: settled life and emotions to record the activity of my teeming brain, the stimulating effects of life and the orgy of acquisitiveness in my inner life, inspired by the dynamic of some profound impulse energizing the world to some unapproachable degree.1 Ron Price 28 September 1996 1 Shoghi Effendi said in God Passes By(USA, 1957, p.244) that the soul of Baha’u’llah “could henceforth energize the whole world to a degree unapproached” in His lifetime. THE LIMITS OF SELF ...all Art lies in limit...the artist must always try those limits to the utmost...Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies. It is, first, freedom from myself; from the lie of my all-importance. -W.D. Snodgrass, Critical Essays and Lectures In Radical Pursuit, Harper and Row, NY, 1975, pp. 126-140. We all live our lives somewhere near the limits of this rule and that, always trying, testing those limits. Rules were meant to be broken, I hear you say. Then there is the choice wine unsealed with the fingers of might and power. The days of limits have come, a key word, part of the new paradigm, our new age. It will take us into the future with safety along with that freedom from the prison of self, the greatest prison, for the ‘I’ is not important: I, me and mine must occupy some lesser place; perhaps we will not hear these words spoken much in future epochs. One tires of self, living with it as one does everyday, even the poet who in some places is the custodian of the word tires of his lower nature and all impurities which destroy me. THE LIMITS OF SELF ...all Art lies in limit...the artist must always try those limits to the utmost...Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies. It is, first, freedom from myself; from the lie of my all-importance. -W.D. Snodgrass, Critical Essays and Lectures In Radical Pursuit, Harper and Row, NY, 1975, pp. 126-140. We all live our lives somewhere near the limits of this rule and that, always trying, testing those limits. Rules were meant to be broken, I hear you say. Then there is the choice wine unsealed with the fingers of might and power. The days of limits have come, a key word, part of the new paradigm, our new age. It will take us into the future with safety along with that freedom from the prison of self, the greatest prison, for the ‘I’ is not important: I, me and mine must occupy some lesser place; perhaps we will not hear these words spoken much in future epochs. One tires of self, living with it as one does everyday, even the poet who in some places is the custodian of the word tires of his lower nature and all impurities which destroy me. THIS MONUMENT OF DUST .......................Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I’ll live in this poor rime, While he insults o’re dull and speechless tribes; And thou in this shalt find thy monument When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent. -William Shakespeare, Sonnets, Number 107. Here are the tokens and fruits of communion on a beaten path, having come out of nothingness, one of the victims of his fetters in this dust-heap, catching a fragrance from the everlasting garden, far beyond tinsel and base metal, attempting some faithful orbit around the great-living and dead-and heightened artistic sensibility, amidst secret wisdoms, enigmas, inter-relationships, rules that govern all, the prison we carry around and the blind pit we dig again. Ron Price 3 October 1996 MY TRIBUTARY Each artist thus keeps in his heart of hearts a single stream which, so long as he is alive, feeds what he is and what he says. When that streams runs dry, you see his work gradually shrivel up and start to crack. -Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, editor, Philip Thody, Penguin, London, 1970, p.18. There’s been a stream, scented, I’ve been drinking from since before I came of age. The waters have been sweet and deep, with periodic wastelands when the bed ran dry and the blackest soil filled my soul with fear, disorder and dessication. My own tributary of this stream only began to run in my middle years. Inspiration has run with a force that I barely understand, nor can withstand its roving eye and hand like an interwoven carpet or some meteor travelling through the dark. Will this tributary shrivel after I have expressed my life and all it means at a deeper, more intense, more clear-sighted level than anything I can achieve in the daily round? I think not; for it is a tributary of a great and thundering river whose waters will flow on forever into the sweet streams of eternity: as long as I have the will that will’s this eternal flow; I know many who have not the will that will not will belief. The mood will not strike them here below: I know not why? Ron Price 12 January 1996 AUGUSTUS After watching the two part series “Augustus” on SBS TV(17 and 24 June 2008--11:40 p.m. to 1:15 a.m.) in the last two weeks as another academic year was coming to an end in school systems across the northern hemisphere; after teaching Roman history at a post-secondary technical college in Western Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s; after studying Roman history in high school as part of the grade eleven curriculum in Ontario in 1960-1961 and in the first year of my liberal arts degree in university in 1963-1964 forty-five years ago; after taking an interest in the field of classical studies since those 1960s, albeit a peripheral one among the many subjects that were part of the general and interdisciplinary studies I taught and the general studies in the social sciences and humanities that I read—after all this, in the early evening of my life, as the years of my late adulthood crept along incrementally more quickly, it seemed, with every passing year, I felt like writing this prose-poem. I wanted to try to fit Augustus, Octavian as he was also known, the first Roman Emperor, into a historical context relevant to today, at least relevant to how I had come to see the comparisons and contrasts between Augustus and his time as well as my time, my age and my life. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 27 June 2008. Rome had conquered the world, well, a big chunk of it in the middle East, north Africa and what is now Europe, in the quarter millennium from 250 BC to the time of Christ. Was it a set-up? Setting the world up for the periodic intervention of the divine into human affairs, giving a stage for the spread of the message that would and did change that mise en scene forever. And are we being set up again, in our age and time in the midst, now, of this greatest of spiritual dramas in the world’s history, so very unbeknownst to the generality of men, creeping, as it now is, along the edges of society as that message did 2000 years ago before it captured western civilization for a 1000 years? The most precious Being ever to appear in the world of creation appears from time to time and the light of the Unseen shines above the horizon of celestial might only to be denied, opposed and disputed with in vain words to try to invalidate His claim.1 1 Baha’u’llah, Kitab-i-Iqan, Wilmette, 1950(1931), p.5. Ron Price 27 June 2008 THE FIRST FLOWER In the last months of my career as a full-time teacher, the last months of my part-time and casual teaching as well as into the early years of my full retirement from virtually all volunteer work,1 news was reported of the discovery in northeast China of the earliest flowering plants more than 124 MYA. The print and electronic media, first in scholarly journals and the popular press and then on TV,2 told us about what they called the first flower among the world’s flowering plants. Flowering plants are the dominant vegetation on the planet and they include: flowers, trees and many life sustaining crops. The field of study in which this knowledge, this specialized expertise, can be found is called palaeobotany and palaeobotany is a child, one of the multitude of children, of the Enlightenment. Its founding father was Gasper Maria von Sternberg(1761-1838).3 -Ron Price with thanks to 2the journal Science in 27 November 1998; the National Geographic News, 3 May 2002 and SBS TV, 8:30-9:30 p.m. 17 February 2008; as well as 2 Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 1 Except for my work with the International Baha’i community Yes, you can learn all about this in the world of palaeobotany, or in a newspaper or on TV—all to the level of your capacity and interest. If, as it is often said, people prefer entertainment to edification and put a premium on personality at the expense of issues, they can get a quick TV- hit of that first flower and tree back in the cretaceous period-- Cainozoic era in their fragmentary forms: leaves, stems and branches, stems, trunks, pollen, spores, seeds-- all old ancestors in the evolutionary story of flowers back to dinosaur times. But now, growing in this new age, a new flower has begun to bloom compared to which all other flowers are but thorns; and, yes, a tree is now growing in the world of existence: its boughs and its branches, its stems and its offshoots, its leaves and its trunk will endure as long as those most august attributes and most excellent titles will last,1 attributes and titles of that essence which the wisdom of the wise and the learning of the learned can not comprehend--will never understand. 1 Baha’u’llah, Baha’i Prayers, Wilmette, 1985, p.233. Ron Price 16 April 2008 After watching the first part of a four part series on the history of boxing I was moved to write the following prose-poem. This first part was entitled The Fight: The Rules of the Ring and was screened in Australia on SBS TV on 29 July from 1 to 2 a.m. The series was seen on four consecutive nights at this late hour from 29/7/’08 to 1/8/’08. I wrote this prose-poem to try and capture the personal relevance of this boxing story. I trust readers at this site will enjoy this personalized account even if they do not share all my personal values and beliefs. -Ron Price, Tasmania, Australia. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- KNOCKING THEM OUT Jack Dempsey(1895-1983) was an American boxer who was boxing history’s 9th world heavyweight champion. He held the title from 1919 to 1926. Dempsey's aggressive style and punching power made him one of the most popular in boxing history. On his way to the title Dempsey won nine straight fights in 1917 and 21 out of 22 in 1918, 11 of these by first-round knockouts. In 1919 he won five bouts in a row by knockouts in the first round on the way to fight for the title on 4 July 1919 against Jess Willard. Few gave Dempsey a chance against Willard, a big man 50 lbs. heaver and six inches taller. Many called the fight a modern David and Goliath story. Minutes before the fight Dempsey’s fight manager, Jack Kearns, informed Dempsey that he had wagered Dempsey's share of the purse. He had bet his share of the purse on Dempsey winning with a first round knockout. As a result, the first round of the fight was one of the most brutal in boxing history. Dempsey dealt Willard a terrible beating and knocked him down seven times in the first round. Willard had a broken cheekbone, broken jaw, several teeth knocked out, partial hearing loss in one ear and broken ribs. Some of the most intense minutes in boxing history are found in the fights of Jack Dempsey from 1919 to 1926. On September 23, 1926, at Sesquicentennial Stadium in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, the largest crowd ever, 120,757, saw the 31-year-old Jack Dempsey lose his title to Gene Tunney in a 10 round decision on points. Explaining his battered face to his wife Estelle, Dempsey said--in one of boxing’s most famous lines: "honey, I forgot to duck." I have taken a special interest in these seven years of boxing history for three reasons. Firstly, I have always had an interest in boxing since my father and I watched fights on TV from 1954 to 1962. In March 1962 Kid Peret was killed in the ring by Emile Griffith and my dad and I watched no more fights. Our shared interest in boxing perhaps began with Rocky Marciano’s sixth-round knockout of Rex Layne at Madison Square Garden on 12 July 1951 or with the September 29th 1952 fight between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott the then heavyweight boxing champion. This fight was what boxing experts have considered to be Marciano's defining moment. But my father and I had to wait until 1954 to watch our first boxing match since those first two famous fights in my young life were not televised. The first fights we watched took place over 50 years ago and my memory of them is naturally somewhat rusty. From about 1954 until 1962, when Kid Peret died from his fight with Griffith and on the eve of my pioneering life for the Canadian Baha’i community, my dad and I watched the big championship fights and many Friday night fights on TV sponsored by the Gillett Company. The second reason that I took a special interest in boxing was that just last night1 my interest was reawakened. I saw the first part of a four part television series on the history of the greatest fighters in boxing. The series was entitled 1The Fight: The Rules of the Ring1 and was being televised on SBS TV on four consecutive Tuesdays from 1:00 to 2:00 a.m. beginning 29 July 2008. Thirdly, I found an interesting correlation between the history of the religion I have been associated with for 55 years(1953-2008) and boxing history during those seven years(1919-1926).2 This prose-poem explores that correlation, its comparisons and contrasts. -Ron Price with appreciation to Loni Bramson-Lerche, “Development of Baha’i Administration,” in Studies in Babi & Baha’i History: Volume 1, editor Moojan Momen, Kalimat Press, Los Angeles, 1982, pp.255-300. While Dempsey was knocking them out and heading for the title, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was knocking out His Tablets, getting them ready for their great unveiling in 1919 just before Dempsey got the title. They both kept knocking them out1 in the ring and on paper--slowly--not so slowly. While Dempsey defended his title this movement connected loosely became fully organized building blocks of a future world government at local and national levels, united in doctrinal matters and focussed on teaching as its main aim in all that it did and tried to do. The fight was on and a national consciousness was emerging for the war with those right and left wings of the hosts of the world and a carrying of the attack to the very centre of the powers of the earth by God’s Hosts in a fight that would keep humanity busy for, perhaps, several centuries.2 1 Some 100 tablets were revealed by ‘Abdu’l-Baha for the American Baha’is. See H.M. Balyuzi, ‘Abdu’l-Baha: The Centre of the Covenant, George Ronald, Oxford, 1971, p. 434. 2 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, Wilmette, 1977(1919), p. 48. Ron Price 29 July 2008 I was not quite sure where to post this prose-poetic reflection after listening to this Dean of Architecture being interviewed on the radio.-Ron Price, Tasmania ------------------------ The Dean of Architecture, Planning and Conservation at Columbia University, Bernard Tumey, was talking this morning about his identification with cities and apartment blocks. He has lived most of his life in Paris and New York and he identifies with these cities much more than the countries in which they exist. Listening to this radio interview made me think about the equivalent sources of my own identity. Apartment blocks have been and are now quite peripheral to my sense of identity and place. I have lived for perhaps two years of my 65 years of life in apartment blocks, bocks in three cities. The vast bulk of my life has been spent in houses and large complexes of buildings associated with my places of work. As I scan my memory horizon and collect about myself the accoutrements of my sense of spacial identity: perhaps four dozen houses, some two dozen schools and other places of employment, an equal number of towns and cities, two countries and this planet earth occupy the solid ground of my spacial identity. The pilgrimage, the journey, that is my life dwells in this physical architecture, in these physical places. The religion I have espoused is, architecturally speaking, one that speaks much of origins and destinations but, more than these aspects of life and history, one that speaks of journeys, paths, roads, valleys, processes. At least that is how I have come to identify with the system of meaning at the centre of my life--my religion--with its way of constructing reality by means of words. -Ron Price with thanks to "Arts Today," ABC Radio National, 10:05-11:00 am, 3 January 2002; and John Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: A History of Myth and Ritual in Family Life, Oxford UP, NY, 1997, p.62. There is something about the entire universe that seems so humanly significant. This is not audacious; it's just some natural falling into place, a natural part of that Oneness which is at the centre of my journey, the one I travel in my head in what often seems an ephemeral, fragmentary existence with its convoys of people with whom I have shared my life. And yet, yet, this journey has brought sacred and resplendent tokens which have attracted me to some mysterious place, some road of holiness, nearness and beauty(1) which seems to have no connection with all of the landmarks of my life, in these towns, cities, houses where I have lived my days, my hours and millions of minutes gazing at the surfaces of buildings with some blank and empty visual field burning into my optic nerve and that acqueous humour. (1) Bahá'u'lláh, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952, p.3. Ron Price 3 January 2002 THE DECLARATION OF 1844 I immensely enjoyed the docudrama about the history of the waltz and the father-and-son composers most famous for it.1 Each person watching this piece of musical history, this articulation of the past within media culture, this historical-narrative documentary, will take away their own particular emphasis of the interpretation of events in the story. Narrative has become one of the two or three most difficult words in the English language, say some theorists, and historical narrative is necessarily a mixture of adequately and inadequately explained events, a congeries of established and inferred facts, a representation and an interpretation that passes for an explanation for the main components of a whole series of events. Something happens on the way to the screen from the books, journals, the variety of historical-print resources . -Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC1 TV, 11:00-12:00, “The Waltz King,” 29 June 2008( BBC Wales, 2005) This evocation of the past through powerful images, moving words, colourful characters, in a closed, single, linear world with verifiability and truth like some esoterically mysterious religion and commentators on some sacred texts, performers of rituals for a populace little interested in nuances, little need for scholarly, scientific, measured webs of history found in the books. And so we all take away from these histories as cinematography where being aloof, distanced and critical seem impossible, where we are for a time prisoners of history at twenty- four frames a second. I see 15/10/44 in the Dommayer’s Casino at Hietzing, Vienna where Johann Strauss II made his declaration of independence, his debut, and six months before--the Báb made His declaration and so commenced the most turbulent period of the Heroic Age of the Baha’i Era and the opening of the most glorious epoch in the greatest cycle which the spiritual history of the human race has yet witnessed on this vast and tortured planet. Ron Price 30 June 2008 |
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