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Abstract:
The poetry here is related to the 10 Year Crusade: 1953-1963. I began my pioneering life during this period and this poetry brings together secular, Bahá'í and personal history.
Notes:
Shoghi Effendi said, in one of his last letters during this Crusade, written in April 1957, that global society was "hovering on the brink of self-destruction." There was a certain urgency in this time period; there was Ike Eisenhower, rock and roll, Mr. Clean, Doris Day and luxury without stress. One of the greatest periods in the expansion of the Bahá'í Faith occurred at this time. The Kingdom of God on Earth began in this period--in 1953. These poems were written about themes and events, ideas and activities in the years of this Plan and the 2nd epoch(1944-1963) of the Formative Age.
Crossreferences:
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| My association with the Bahá'í Faith began at the very start of this period: 1953 to 1963. This poetry is about the themes, the content, the history, the sociology of this ten year period and the 2nd epoch of the Formative Age. RULING CONCEPTIONS If poetry is an intellectual/intuitive act it is not a random indeterminate process, but is governed by a previsional 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 in Meanjin, Summer 1953, vol.xii, p.433. The conception here’s been getting more detailed, massive, as the decades have come on since 1953. The conception was extraordinary, then, with the ten stages of history and the ten year crusade just having begun the Kingdom of God with a bang, a quiet one, not much of a bone crusher, pretty unobtrusive then, even now, with that conception described in a thousand books, too much for most. And the LSA Handbook getting so big you needed a degree in law or big biceps just to carry it to the meeting. By God, the quarry! Nothing less than the spiritual conquest of the planet, the conquest of self and the attainment of a tranqill heart: and a thousand other mysteries waiting to find form.. Ron Price 16 December 1995 EARLY DAYS In April 1959 the first space astronauts were selected for the NASA space program.-SBS TV, Women Space Pioneers, 7 June 1996, 4:30 pm. While the USA was laying the foundation, preparing for the selection of its first astronauts, the Baha’i community was completing the first quarter-century of its international teaching program and I was preparing to be a youthful recruit to what were, then, the first thousand Baha’is in Canada. I was beginning a life in space, a spiritual space, in the last years of a Ten Year Crusade, while these astronauts were beginning their program aimed at putting a man on the moon. These were early days for NASA and early days for me: an adventure we could not imagine, then, that would take us in a journey through our solar system and me in a connection with a different solar system whose Sun was energizing the whole world to a degree unapproached at any stage in the course of its existence on this planet.1 Ron Price 7 June 1996 1. Shoghi Efendi, God Passes By, USA, 1957, p.244. WINDOWS With William Carlos Williams I think you can make a poem out of anything that is felt. I strive to achieve a certain naturalness of style, as if I was talking to you. At one level I feel that what I write is not poetry at all but, on another level, it feels right and it is just what I want to say. I aim at the kind of magnificent rhythms of solitude and togetherness, of contemplation and action, that characterize Mother Tessa Bielecki’s poetry. -Ron Price, a comment on my own poetry. What a writer has to say about his “poems” and their subterranean waters is often dangerous. It may even be scientifically inaccurate. -Walter de la Mare in Forewords and Afterwords, W.H. Auden, Faber and Faber, London, 1973, p.390. By nine you knew how it was, but had no idea of how it might be, for you had seen only your home, your mother’s brother’s and sister’s and I Love Lucy: it was 1953, then. All ordinary enough, then, even now, looking back over forty years ago. Somehow, inexplicably, it was all transformed, viewed a certain way. For 1953 was quite a big year,* not only for us, but for the whole world, unbeknownst, except for a few, even now. Yes, viewed a certain way, a vision transforms the view, the room, their faces, their workaday, unfrivolous faces, their astigmatic, dense virtue blunted from years of trying, trying. I see, not the prosaic linoleum and that homely knot, but some lustrous, unbearable, burnished beauty set in far down distant tracks on days of blissful joy, of heavenly delight.** His hopes, and hers, had dried up with the vegetables in the cellar and by the time death came they were sealed in jars, but you could have seen them through the windows to their soul and their last words: it’s his turn now to hold the torch and I will give you everything I have.** * 1953: beginning of the Kingdom of God on Earth, ten year crusade, ninth stage of history, completion of Mother Temple of the West. ** Baha’u’llah’s words on the afterlife. *** My father’s last words, followed by my mother’s. Ron Price 3 January 1996 PIONEERS COMING OUT 1 September 1962 This was the first day of my pioneering life, although I could take it back to about August 20th when I left Burlington to go to a Bahá'í camp at Kashabog in northern Ontario. I was eighteen and I was about to start my matriculation year at high school. The world was warming up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 1 September 1992. When I started pioneering, wandering as I was between two worlds: one dead, the other having just been born, seeking my own identity, trying to give birth to myself, so tentative, so new, so fragile, so alone and by myself in a vast and spacious land: marginal, inferior, inadequate, mute, invisible, just-about-non-existent, dissolving, a nobody. That’s how it was back then at the end of the Ten Year Crusade when I was 18. I felt like some quintessence of nothingness, some empty shell, cavity, social vacuity, humanly crippled, passive, like a water colour which does not exist, at the end of a conversation, an after-thought, with a tongue half in shadow and half like a frozen bone. I passed through groups like a breeze at room temperature, unobtrusively blank, could be a missing person noone missed, modest, in the picture somewhere, difficult to say where precisely, but you can find me if you look long enough. I'm that fellow you can hardly see, right there--see? PS Thirty years after pioneering, at the age of 48, my world had been transformed so many times. I was a different man, different person. So many had come out in these years: women, blacks, ethnics, lesbians, gays and another generation of pioneers. I’d been crushed and blown to the ends of the earth, but a new man had been born, a new gold of some worth, a chalice of pure light had made me drunk from far up in the north way down to places that stunk. Part of a new race of men slowly coming to birth; it’s gone on to great progress in these first decades at the end of this tenth stage of history. We’re mapping the cosmos and the human brain as knowledge expands beyond what anyone can attain: the fruit of these years with the rain coming down, in a dark heart of transition with a whole world of new sound. The journey’s been swift; the journey’s been long, on a tortuous road with my paths yet to lift me up and away to a world quite beyond, to that sweet undiscovered country, far away from this abyss. Ron Price 1 September 1992/ 16 June 1996 ALWAYS HE WAS THERE The opening chapter of Canada’s glorious Mission overseas began, it would appear, in 1953 and coincided with the years of the Ten Year Crusade. The years 1917 to 1953, thirty six years, could be seen as a prelude, or hiatus, to that opening chapter. This poem comments in a slightly obscure and indirect way on a facet of those years of prelude. -Ron Price The overseas pioneer seems to rely more than most on some form of contact with his or her home country. Over the years that contact often becomes a tenuous one as the pioneer remains in the field decade after decade. Ali-Aghsar symbolizes, it seems to me, the faithful soul who makes sure the mail gets through to its destination. But more than that, he symbolizes trustworthiness of response at the other end, part of that umbilical cord of survival for the pioneer. -Ron Price It’s not everyman who has his own postman. Two men, stunned by life’s blows, brought together by those mysterious dispensations of Providence, friends, a servant and a master, in those prelude years before the opening of that glorious Mission overseas. Always he was there, that lion-hearted soul in the forest of the love of God; always he was there to bring those few letters, cables, reports to that humble King of the world in those years before that Mission began, those prefatory years, prelude, precursor, vanguard times, preparatory to the great exodus that would slowly build Plan by Plan, chapter by chapter. This Ali-Asghar: vigilant, distinguished, old and bent, almost blind, always he was there as was his king, his earthly lord and master, burdened with the work, always the work, and an infinite capacity to take on more and more, becoming aged before his time with an endless exegesis and that endless pile of paper. Ron Price 30 January 1997 THE APPROACHING INTERREGNUM1 As these forty years of the glorious Mission overseas opened Shoghi Effendi wrote a seven-and-a-half page letter to the American Baha’is, in many ways a report on the progress of the Ten Year Crusade and an announcement of goals, aims and objectives, as this Crusade approached the half-way point. -Ron Price. See Citadel of Faith, pp. 151-158. We knew you2 had the lion’s share as our own glorious overseas Mission had just begun and that inexorable march of events was hastening us all to our destiny, half way through that ninth stage of history and that great list of enduring achievements in that embryonic World Order which was skirting around the edges of my life, in those early years of my adolescence. He wanted that spirit recaptured to ensure the continual flow of pioneers, to speed up the day of the impending contest between the Cause and the exponents of obsolescent doctrines. And so this was the scene at the opening of the fourth phase of the Ten-Year Plan and the convocation of the intercontinental conferences, after six decades of American Baha’i history, aimed at reconsecration and wiping out the inevitable deficiencies which bogged down the operation of the Crusade, as the initial epoch of the Divine Plan closed, an interregnum of bewilderment and despair opened and the long second epoch yawned before me with no idea of what was in store. Ron Price 22 January 1997 1 Peter Smith, The Babi and Baha’i Religions: From Messianic Shi’ism to a World Religion, George Ronald,, Cambridge, 1987, p.132. 2 The Canadian Baha’is were aware that the American Baha’is had the dominant share of the tasks. A NEW RELIGION BREAKS OVER THE ARBITRARY “I” The central question “Why am I me?” comes after Rabbit awakes with the excited conviction that he must found a new religion. Updike was puzzled by the arbitrariness of the omnivorous and somehow preexistent “I” specifically situated as it was amidst the billions of other specks in the universe. -John Updike, Rabbit, Run, 1960, discussed in Desperate Faith, Howard Harper, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1967, p. 168. You were a clever dude, John, looking as you were for the thing behind everything and seeing, as you did, the death of God again in your generation --and this, all this in your smooth poetic statement1 describing the suburban wasteland, as a new religion was breaking on the scene, just seen, as unobtrusive as a summer breeze, while you watched the English muddle through, patching things up with responsibility rippling out over the water and slowly, slowly, vanishing. Ron Price 12 April 1998 1 John Updike broke out into the literary world in the middle years of the Ten Year Crusade, while I was investigating the Baha’i Faith. His first works The Poorhouse Fair(1958), The Same Door(1959), Rabbit, Run(1960) and The Centaur(1963), among others, were written while the Baha’i community was still significantly less than half a million in number globally, but thinly and widely spread. THE STAGES and THE TRANSFORMATION There’s a huge absense at the centre of the world. -A remark overheard in a discussion of post-modernism on ABC Radio National, 24 December 1998. There are many ways to look at modernism and its sequel post-modernism. I would rather like to lay the Guardian’s ten stage historical paradigm onto this dichotomy. I would argue that stages two to six of the Guardian’s ‘ten stages of history model’(Chicago, 1953) could be seen as part of the ‘modernist period’, the Bab’s declaration to the passing of Baha’u’llah. Stages seven to ten, the ministries of ‘Abdu’l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi and the leadership of the Baha’i community by the Universal House of Justice could be seen as part of the ‘post-modernist’ period. -Ron Price Modernism could be said to have arrived at 11 minutes after sunset on the 23rd of May 1844 and been succeeded, on the 12th of November 1892 by post-modernism. I would go on to divide these two periods into stages for description: Modernism May 23rd 1844 at 11 minutes after sunset: the seed of the tree of divine revelation; 1844-1852: the crushing of the seed; 1852 October and November: the igniting of the oil from the seed; 1852-1863: the gradual unfoldment of light; 1863-1892: the further spread of the light; Post-Modernism 1892-1921: the ministry of that ‘indissoluble link’ 1921-1953: the ministry of the bough that hath branched from the Twin Holy Trees. 1953-1963: the ten year crusade, the ninth stage of history 1963-1998: the tenth stage of history And while these stages were running their course an unyielding rage against the official order raged; the certitudes of religion died; we learned to transcend ourselves through art; an ordered world disappeared; the spectator was overwhelmed; time and space touched infinity; an anti-bourgeois, anti-order and purpose, anti-morality and rationality ethic spread like fire; tradition became moribund and a radical disjunction between social structure and culture foreshadowed the end of patriarchy, Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism. The reality of surface, style, pastiche and wordplay made politics a media spectacle while private withdrawal screamed its obscure psychology and the public realm was less and less experienced and more and more reported on while the demands of a sexual morality were utterly at variance with the massive propaganda of eroticism everywhere apparent. The queen of the consumer durables, TV, the princip assassin of public life, made community as historically understood but one of many communities with different sets of obligations which reached everywhere and nowhere, here and there, with public apathy and private desire in a dance of death and social issues never understood. While social fragmentation and atomization ran hand in hand with terror and chaos.1 Ron Price 24 December 1998 1 some of this poem was influenced by the ideas in Martin Pawley, The Private Future,Thomas and Hudson, London, 1973. A SENSE OF SPIRITUALITY COMING THROUGH During the years of the first Baha’i teaching Plans, 1937 to 1953, George VI was King of England. He was crowned three weeks after the beginning of the teaching plans on 21 April 1937. The next monarch, Elizabeth I, was crowned about six weeks after the beginning of the Ten Year Crusade. George VI said he felt a sense of spirituality coming through when he was crowned in 1937. This poem was inspired by a TV program entitled George VI from which I gleaned some of this poem’s main theme. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1999. The Seven Year Plan had just been formulated when you were crowned in Westminster Abbey.1 Taking England through its worst crisis of the monarchy since 1688,2 you took on a job you did not want and it killed you in the end, after sixteen years. Not unlike the job he3 took on and we take on which killed him and will kill some of us and many more after us in a new form of martrydom4 that will pave the way to a new world, a new society, a new System which is filled with men and women who feel Someone Else is with them.5 1 12 May 1937. A few days before, the American Convention delegates completed their formulation of the Seven Year Plan. 2 George VI’s brother abdicated the throne and married an American woman. The throne fell to George VI a man who felt totally inadequate to do the job. 3 Shoghi Effendi’s thirty-six years at the helm killed him. 4 Many Baha’is around the world I have often felt are worthy of this term; not everyone is called or required to this level of service. It is partly a choice and partly a gift. 5 George VI said he felt the presence of Someone Else with him when he was being crowned. Ron Price 3 December 1999 A MYSTERIOUS DISPENSATION OF PROVIDENCE? Events in world history can often be directly corelated with developments in the history of the Baha’i community. Although any direct influence would not be accepted as valid in any court of historians, the parallels between Baha’i history and events in the world are interesting to observe for those who are Baha’is. This poem attempts to draw a parallel between the discovery and implementation of the polio vaccine from 1953 to 1955 on the one hand, and some of the messages of Shoghi Effendi and events in the Baha’i community he was outlining in those same messages between 1953 and 1955, on the other. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1999. That year the whole earth resounded with the praises of the majesty and glory of this Divine Message1 and a most wonderful and thrilling motion2 appeared in the world— at the same time as Salk was finalizing a vaccine that would lead to the cure for polio. This was part of that turning point in American Baha’i history, American Baha’is in time of world peril.3 Was this discovery one of those mysterious dispensations of Providence: water for that which has been planted in the hearts of men.4 What took away that paralysing fear at the outset of what he then called the Kingdom of God on Earth?5 Was it, I hasten to suggest, the propelling forces guiding the operations of this newly-launched, unspeakably potent, world-encompassing crusade? 6 1 the Baha’i Holy Year: 1952-1953 saw the Cause taken to over 100 new countries. 2 ‘Abdu’l-Baha in God Passes By, p.351: the completion of the Temple in Chicago. 3 messages given by Shoghi Effendi in 1953 and 1954. The year 1953 was the last one with high number of deaths from polio. In 1954 vaccinations began in earnest. 4 Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, Wilmette, 1965, p.139. This passage was quoted by Shoghi Effendi in July 1955, three months after the public announcement of the ‘cure for polio.’ 5 Shoghi Effendi said 1953 was the year of the inception of the Kingdom. 6 1953-1963: the Ten Year Crusade: also the ninth stage of history from a Baha’i perspective. Ron Price 28 October 1999 MY POETIC ORIGINS: 1953 In the nature of your poetry’s origins lies the judgement of the poetry, so argues Rilke. The origins of this poetry lies in one of the critical turning points in history when a form of life and its institutions have been increasingly felt to cramp and obstruct the most vigorous productive forces alive in a society: economic, social, artistic and intellectual. This form of life was, and is, unable to resist these forces. The year 1953 symbolizes for me the year my poetry finds its origins; the year my mother found the Baha’i Faith. -Ron Price with thanks to Isaiah Berlin in Turgenev: Fathers and Sons, Penguin, 1983(1065), p.49. One of the artistic, turning points of history: 1953 when the political and religious orthodoxies of my age were cramping and obstructing the new forces of life emerging all over the planet. This turning point involved as it did: the completion of the mother-temple of the West, the completion of the foundation form for the Shrine of the Bab, the extension of the Cause to over one hundred new countries, the beginning of the Ten Year Crusade and the Ninth Stage of History…. when the emergence of the: nuclear age, computer age, DNA age, post-war age, post-modern age, rock-and-roll age and a host of others were literally tearing the fabric of an old world, an old society, apart. Ron Price 4 September 1999 ONE STORY Price’s poetic contribution is significant because it is so richly autobiographical and tells one story, one individual story, from the thousands of possible pioneering stories which began during that important period of the Ten Year Crusade, an account of one of the multitude of threads in the warp and weft of a slowly evolving community, a poetic narrative of one of the builders and defenders of an embryonic world Order, one of the many champions of a precious but infant Faith, one of the multitude of relatively unknown but sustained responses to a decades-long and strenuous enterprise, a small part, a trace, of that ‘heavenly illumination’ streaming to all the people of the world to establish the throne of the Kingdom of God, one of the potential crusaders who rushed into the arena of service, one of the individual participants in an incomparably glorious, mysteriously guided, teaching campaign that would continue over several epochs.-Ron Price drawing on Citadel of Faith: Messages to America: 1947-1957, Shoghi Effendi, Wilmette, 1965, pp.120-121. In those earliest years(1953-1962) of late childhood and adolescence my world in Canada passed through grave peril, crises of extreme seriousness, dangerously underestimated, but inevitable and God-sent.1 And here was I part of a new leaven, while I watched rock ‘n roll get born and my mother and father go through some very painful times together. And slowly, unobtrusively, I saw unseen legions, rank upon rank pouring forth from their Kingdom on high the full measure of their celestial strength.2 Ron Price 15 April 1999 1 Some of the phrases in this first stanza come from Shoghi Effendi’s message to the “American Baha’is in Time of World Peril”(July 1954), Citadel of Faith, Wilmette, 1965, pp.122-127. During the years 1953-1962 I was nine to eighteen years old. 2 I did not actually see these ‘unseen legions’ but, when I look back over nearly fifty years, I can think of many ‘metaphorical angels’ who poured out their strength on me. THE TRAGIC MOMENT For baseball fans in Brooklyn New York the moving of their team the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the winter of 1957/8 was ‘the most tragic moment’ in their baseball lives. That same winter, in November 1957, Shoghi Effendi died unexpectedly in London. This was for the Baha’i community ‘the most tragic moment’ in its collective community life.-Ron Price. Mickie Mantle hit a ball 565 feet four days before the Ten Year Crusade began1 and Shoghi Effendi died as the Dodgers were getting ready to move to LA half way through that crusade. They were big years for baseball, big years for the Baha’is as they took their religion to more than 100 countries, well on the way to being the second most widespread religion on the face of the earth. Willy Mays, Jackie Robinson, Yogi Berra, Casie Stengel, Mickie Mantle, Pee Wee Reese, Whitey Ford...the galaxy of names goes on and on .....toward another Roll of Honour: Gail and Jameson Bond, Sohail Samandari, Dick Stanton, Mr. and Mrs. Jenabi Caldwell, Charles Dunning...... the galaxy of names goes on. No home runs, no big catches, no fame, no big money, but a perpetuation of the memory of the exploits of the spiritual conquerors of territories on the planet.1 .......Ron Price 18 March 1999 1 17 April 1953; the Ten Year Crusade began on 21 April 1953 2 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to the Baha’i World: 1950-1957, Wilmette, 1958, pp. 50-51. Note: these years,’53-’58, were the first contact my family had with the Cause. I was in love with baseball at the time and played pee-wee and bantam baseball. TV AND THE TEMPEST During the decade of the Ten Year Crusade, which Baha’is see as the ninth stage of history, television swept into the homes of hundreds of millions of people. This poem describes what was in many ways a wonderful invention, an invention that brought the possibilities and pleasures of culture, education and entertainment to people everywhere in the West. By the time the tenth stage of history began in 1963, people everywhere could also watch the social breakdown of society which this poem describes by means of contrasting images of darkness and tempest. These contrasting images of social upheaval that beset these same people during this ninth stage of history were graphically analysed by the Guardian outlined in his letters in the several years before he died.-Ron Price with appreciation to Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, Wilmette, 1965. A whole world opened before the eyes of millions in that ninth stage of history, with the technology set up during that eighth stage. Becoming one psychologically has been taking place slowly, with His sweet-scented streams of eternity giving humans so much more pleasure, culture, entertainment than they had ever drunk before; with the fruits of the tree of His being given them to taste; and with His other hand, He sucked the spirit unobtrusively, and not so unobtrusively, out of all traditional orthodoxies, so seductively that the world moved into a dark heart; and the tempest, that had been sweeping across the surface of the earth for some time--- perhaps more than a hundred years---was gradually leaving humankind everywhere: bewildered, agonized and helpless,1 as he said it was, as he said it would be, as we see it now, as we saw it then. Ron Price 13 December 1999 1 Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day Is Come, p.1. ONE ACT IN THE DRAMA My wife and I stayed in Cottesloe, a suburb of Perth, for a week with my son and step-daughter, leaving 28 years(just about to the hour) after my arrival in Australia on 12 July 1971. This week allowed us to finish off loose ends from twelve years in Perth and to get ready for our drive to the east. I enjoyed several delightful walks along Forrest Street down to the Indian Ocean. This poem was written while sitting on a park bench looking out at the ocean. Like many of my poems written out of doors, this one was changed significantly when I got back to the flat and typed it out. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1999. I sat listening to the ocean waves lap the shore, watched bathers and surfers in the winter waters, big ships out at sea, a vollyball game in progress, people strolling in the sand and on paths along the ocean front. I felt like I was on holiday at the end of seventeen years of seed planting in the north and west of Australia, an exercise impossible to measure, to evaluate, to judge and yet we try to gauge its meaning with impossible yard sticks, inadequate measuring rods, searching for ways to quantify our lives to our satisfaction. I walked along the ocean front and bought a sausage roll and Solo Lemon and wondered if: La Tropicana Cafe, Mandarin Restaurant, Cottelsoe Beach Hotel, Blue Waters Cafe and the Essentials Deli/Newsagent would still be there in half a century. I said the Greatest Name, perhaps two dozen times and asked myself a question: was all this effort in the Path of God worth it? Did all that dry dock have some value? For in many ways it seemed so useless.. There came back a resounding answer from the waves rolling in, as if from eternity: Yes, by the Lord God! Yes! It was but one Act in the drama that is my life, a small part, this one about waiting1 in the greatest drama in the world's spiritual history. 1Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which was being played for the first time at the outset of the Ten Year Crusade, is strangely symbolic for much of what many people had to learn how to do-and productively-in the last half of the 20th century:wait and fill in their time in a meaningful way. Poetry became for me a type of acting or, some might say, a meaningful form of waiting. Ron Price 10 July 1999 BASEBALL-CRAZY KID In October 1956 Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitched the only perfect game in post-season baseball. Yogi Berra was the catcher.1 That same month and year R. Rabbani advised Mariette Bolton of Orange Australia, in the extended PS of her letter, that it was “much better for the friends to give up saying “Amen.”2 I was just settling into grade seven at the time and, even at this early age, was in love with at least three girls in my class: Carol Ingam, Judy somebody and a dark-haired, physically well-developed beauty whose name I have completely forgotten.3 -Ron Price with appreciation to 1The Opening of the World Series: 2000; for 2Messages to the Antipodes, Shoghi Effendi, editor, Graham Hassell, Baha’i Publications Australia, 1997, p.419; and 3Ron Price, Journal: Canada: To 1971: 1.1, Photograph Number 102. I was just starting grade seven and still saying amen occasionally when I went to that Anglican Church on the Guelph Line in Burlington Ontario with my mother and father and saying grace just as occasionally. I watched the World Series, a highlight of autumn for a twelve year old baseball-crazy kid, back then. And I passed the half-way point of my pre-youth days1 when I was the only kid with any connection with this new world Faith in these, the very early days of the growth of the Cause in the Dominion of Canada.2 It was a new form of politics, none of that partisan stuff and it would have an important part in the poltiical future of the Dominion of Canada. 1 1953 to 1959: my pre-youth days. 2 In 1956 there were only about 600 Baha’is in Canada. The 400 Baha’is that started the Ten Year Crusade in Canada became 800 by the time I became a Baha’i in 1959. In southern Ontario, from, say, Oakville to Niagara Falls and Windsor, to several points north of Lakes Ontario and Erie in 1956 I was the only pre-youth whom I then knew, or later came to know. There may have been other pre-youth but at this early stage of the growth of the Cause in Canada, year fifty-eight, I was not aware of them.* *--Canada’s Six Year Plan: 1986-1992, NSA of the Baha’is of Canada, 1987, p.46. Ron Price 23 October 2000 MY ILLUMINANTS Virginia Woolf, in an essay on reading a book, gave some useful advice which applies equally to reading poetry. Firstly, reading for the pure love of reading is its own reward and should be done without advice, following our own instincts, reason and conclusions. Secondly, due to the complexity of the art of reading, it requires the rarest imagination, finesse of perception and judgement. Thirdly, our taste, our sympathy, our nerve of sensation, our idiosyncrasy, our sense of intimacy with the poet, these are our illuminants. Fourthly, we should compare what we read with the best that is available in the field. Fifthly, the poet usually makes no claim to be ‘great,’ nor does he see his poetry as a work of art, only the record of a fleeting, a vanished, a forgotten moment in a life, in a faltering and feeble accent, the relic of someone’s days cast out to moulder. -Ron Price with thanks to Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read A Book?” Gateway to the Great Books, William Benton, toronto, 1963, pp. 5-14. These fleeting, soon-to-be-forgotten days, recorded here in diverse ways, are set out to convey a tone, a mood, not just bare facts or some common good. From the years when I was first made, during that momentous Ten Year Crusade, to that dark heart of an age of transition when I felt an overwhelming sense of mission. And ever onward through a paradigmatic shift when I began to enjoy through His grace that gift: to interpret, to console, to sustain, to kindle my soul, to delight, to help me define and understand my goal. I laid it all beside His word and forms, brought it all together fresh as early morns. Through the darkest hours before the dawn, I had a light to guide me until the storm had gone. Ron Price 15 November 2000 REWRITING THE NARRATIVE OF THE SELF Before the first years of my pioneering in the early sixties, in my late teens, it was broadly expected that a man would get married and support a wife; anyone who did not do so was regarded as in some way suspect. During these past four decades many men, millions of them in the West, became wary of being drawn into marriage and meeting its economic demands.1 Beginning, perhaps, with the beatniks and hippies, who seemed to scorn the work-ethic and conventional domestic relationships, a formerly patrilineal, nuclear, family slowly developed matrilineal tendencies with the children possessing the major tie to the mother and her family. The father’s role became more periferal, indifferent. The loser, so often in these new arrangements, was the exploited single mother and her children. Sexual experimentation, since these early sixties, led to matrilineal family structures and a high degree of sexual freedom for the male. There was for millions of these people, necessarily, a cognitive and emotional coming to terms with their psychological past, a rewriting of the narrative of self.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Linda and John Walbridge, “Baha’i Laws on the Status of Men,” World Order, Fall 1984, pp. 34-35; 2Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies, Polity Press, 1992, p. 103 and p.151. There have been millions rewriting their self, their who and what they are and were, then and now, redefining, reorganizing, their story. For the story must go on and only they could write it; only they could keep it going in the face of biological, social, economic, spiritual constraints, the sine qua non, of their lives. And so does my story go on from those years.... Those inter regnum years1 when we went off to Dundas and began to create and consolidate nuclei, crystallize assemblies,2 all across the land and then another land, in diverse theaters, winning fresh recruits, slowly yet steadily during that elongated prelude—for it has all been part of that prelude-- before that revolutionizing and enigmatic mass conversion.3 1 term given to the years November 1957 to April 1963 in the history of the Baha’i Faith. 2 Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, p.115. 3 ibid., p.117. This ‘prelude’ has witnessed ‘entry-by-troops’, a process which began, as far as I know in the decade before I went pioneering, that is, in the Ten Year Crusade: 1953-1963. The first entry-by-troops I know of occurred in Canada among Indian tribes in the prairie provinces. in the mid-1950s. Ron Price 16 January 2000 THE PRELUDE, THEN THE MASSES The world empire of Rome was a negative phenomenon. It would be quite untrue to say that the Romans conquered the world. They merely took possession of something that was lying about for anyone to pick up. There have been, of course, petrified remains of empire the world over for hundreds and thousands of years. There have been shapeless masses from which the soul has departed, the used-up material of a great historical past. -Ron Price with thanks to Oswald Spengler, 1922, in Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 7A, 1954, p.56. Unity of mankind was not the first craving and anguish of human beings that emerged inb the last half of this century, during the three epochs it was my priviledge to serve this new Cause, although it may have had its sharpest manifestation after WWII, just before and after the beginning of the Ten Year Crusade. As Huxley argued in his Brave New World, people wanted the quiet life, the easy life, the happy life, not beauty or truth. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 6 August 2000. I want to say a few things here about the prose-poem because the form which my following pieces takes is more prose than poetic. I could insert the following pieces in a more traditional poetic form, but I choose not to here. The prose-poem is a form I like to use a lot, because it blends poetry and prose, without being purist about either. The prose-poem is still a somewhat controversial form that some poets will even deny exists. It had its origins, arguably, 150 years after it's origin in the prose-poems of Bertrand and Lautremont and Baudelaire. It can do things with words that more boxed-in forms cannot. One can move between poetic syntax and tone, into more prose-like sections, and back again, at will. I use it in several ways, the one here being dense poetic prose. One of the 20th century's exponents of the prose-poetic form is Antoni Artaud, a revolutionary figure in the literary avant-garde of his time(1896-1948). He created a new, multigenre, form in which essay, dictation, poem, letter, dream, and glossolalia, in varying combinations, are present in a single work. I draw on his examplefor several reasons one of which is that Artaud symbolizes for all the generations of our time an exceptional fidelity to a very great belief, a life devoted to a cause and an unflinching persistence in extolling the cause.-Ron Price with thanks to:(1) Clayton Eshleman, The American Poetry Review, Jan/Feb 2005. Let me add a little history of this form before I include some examples from my own work. The earliest writer credited with writing prose-poems, as a distinct genre, is Aloysius Bertrand, whose collection of prose poetry, Gaspard de la Nuit, was published in 1842. The prose-poem emerged in part as a reaction against the strict rules and conventions, and definitions, of French Neoclassicism. Originally the idea was to write in a poetic prose using elements of language considered more typical of pure poetry: rhythm, metaphor, surprising imagery, rhyme, musical form. But it was Charles Baudelaire who gave the form its characteristic shape and definition, when he introduced his collection of prose-poems, Paris Spleen, by asking: Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough to adapt itself to the impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience? Paris Spleen was published in 1869, two years after Baudelaire died. Only two years later, Artur Rimbaud, then 17, was trying his hand at the form. His seminal book of prose-poems, Illuminations, was published in 1886, by which time Rimbaud had long since given up poetry. We have a clue to what Rimbaud was thinking from letters he wrote in may of 1871. Rimbaud wrote: "To arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, that is the point. The sufferings will be tremendous, but one must be strong, to be born a poet: it is no way my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought..." I found these words heuristic, seminal,stimulating because of my own bipolar disorder which certainlydisordered my senses. I wont go in to detail here. Suffice it to say that Rimbauds words struck a chord. He went on to add: "The poet searches his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it: it seems simple: in every brain a natural development is accomplished. . . . The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, a prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses." After these beginnings, the prose-poem explodes. It seems to be a form many poets find congenial precisely because it allows them to say things not possible in the more constricted conventions of traditional verse. It expands both mind and perception, as Rimbaud intimated, and allows one to view life from new and different angles. Under Modernism, the prose-poem becomes more explicitly anti-authoritarian again, because it is flexible enough to transcend convention. Even a partial list of poets who have tried their hands at the prose-poem can make up a list of some of the greatest writers of the past 150 years: Stephane Mallarme, Guillaume Apollinaire, Antonin Artaud, Andre Breton, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rene Char, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Lawrene Durrell, Oscar Wilde, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Italo Calvino, James Wright, Robert Bly—to name only a few. Anthologies of prose-poems sometimes attempt to trace its history as well as provide a sample of more contemporary pieces. Such anthologies highlight the prose-poems variety and history, so rather than getting many pieces by the most important prose-poem writers, we get a few by very many writers. One anthology along this line is: Models of the Universe: An anthology of the Prose-Poem. It is edited by Stuart Friebert and David Young, Oberlin College Press, Oberlin, Ohio, Field Editions, 1995. Here is an excerpt from the editors introduction: The prose poem is a very special invention, like a chair that flies or a small dish that produces food for forty people. In turning to it the poet seems to put aside the discreet or flamboyant costume of poetic identity and, in a swift and unpredictable gesture, raids the other world, the world of prose, subverting categories and definitions, defying the drag of the prosaic, turning everything inside out for a moment. It shouldn't happen, this gesture; it upsets the makers of categories and the givers and second-guessers of prizes. If poets don't even stay where we put them, among their lines, then there is no way to account for and contain their doubtful magic, their darting forays into the language whose meanings and habits we work so hard to categorize and make stable. Poetic innovators and explorers write prose-poems because adventurers and innovators also tend to ignore the rigid boundaries of categories and rules. Innovation almost always comes from the margins, the yawping barbarians at the gates, not from the center of the mainstream. Indeed, these works "upset the makers of categories." But if there is an upset here, the problem is not with the prose-poem as a form, but rather with too-rigid definitions of what poetry is or isn't. When I encounter a category that is too rigid, a boundary that is too fixed, I feel the grip of death around my throat, around the singer's throat, the lark's throat. I want to ask, what is the maker of such a rigid boundary afraid of? For fear is at the root of such rigidity, always. The usual dictatorial regime that would try to dismiss, diminish or deride the makers of prose-poems is a regime based on fear of change, fear of difference, fear of---ultimately---wildness. In the end, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." That means inner wildness, too, not only the national parks. Real poetry is not tame, polite, mannered, or snivellized. That's a battle we still fight against the forces of entropy. Prose-poetry is a tactic of real poetry, then. This wildness is aptly summarized by the editors of Models of the Universe: They conclude with the following comment: "That prose poems still provoke snarls and yelps is an excellent sign of their fundamental health and success. We are identifying a tradition that is not only fun to review as history but alive and well and trying on disguises at Woolworth's at this very moment. And so here are some of my prose-poems in my own particular rendition-application of this poetic form: THE FIFTIES In the fifties, the decade my family contacted and joined the Bahai; Faith in Canada, this new Faith grew slowly from under three hundred to nearly a thousand. In the United States, in the same period, the various forms of Christianity grew from strength to strength according to Robert Elwood in his book The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace. The fifties were, he wrote, the decade of Catholic triumphalism, of mass evangelism within Protestantism and of the rise of the Black Church as a platform for the nascent Civil Rights movement. -Ron Price with thanks to Robert Elwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace, reviewed on "The Religion Report," ABC Radio National, 18 April 2001, 8:30-9:00 am. It was a booming business below the border when my family contacted a new world religion with a temple in Chicago in the fifties in this most conservative culture.1 Ours was a much quieter world back then, little of that mass evangelism, Billy Graham never came near us, not as far as I remember. There was none of that Catholic triumphalism from New York to L.A., at least none that I could see, not that I was looking that hard back then when life was simple and safe and sweet-at-home, at least most of the time. All I wanted to know in those days of Ike Eisenhower and Doris Day was who was playing on Saturday, whether the Maple Leafs were still at the top of the National League and whether the Tiger Cats game was being televised this week. Slowly a new wind blew, I guess from about '53. It was nothing flash, natural, organic, as everyday as the hot soup the Dixons brought over when we were sick. And slowly I began thinking about those birds flying over Akka, about history since the Enlightenment, early Christianity especially around Nicea and the future of mankind. And I tasted from sweet-scented streams, always wondering just what they were And my little blue prayer book seemed to get thinner and thinner before I gave it away to an Eskimo, Josephee Teemotee in, what was it, '67? 1 Canada is well-known for its conservatism in the first half of the twentieth century. Ron Price 18 April 2001 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 THE KING OF COOL Steve McQueen became one of the greatest celebrity actors while I was in my teens and twenties. At the start of the 9th stage of history, at the start of what the Baha’is call the Kingdom of God on Earth in 1953, McQueen appeared in his first film Girl On The Run; he had been studying acting in New York in 1952 at the age of 22. He starred in many famous films. The year I became a Baha’i, 1959, he was in Never So Few); the year of the election of the apex of the Baha’i administrative order in 1963 he was in The Great Escape and the year I pioneered to Australia, 1971, Le Mons. He died six months after I finally was treated for bi-polar disorder in 1980. McQueen was then aged 50 and I was 36. His films continued to be popular and reruns are often seen to this day on television. In the 9th and 10th stages of history, the half century from 1953 to 2003, McQueen has been a significant presence in the film industry, an anti-hero and “The King of Cool.” -Ron Price with thanks to SBS TV, “Steve McQueen: The Essence of Cool,” 7:30-9:05 p.m., 25 February 2007. Did we enjoy you because of some repressed or unconscious desires? Or were our reasons more complex and contradictory? Was it some visceral combination of looking and hearing, enticements of voyeuristic sexual pleasure, or a spectator’s orienting and discovery, intriguing setting, narrative suspense, some structure of sympathy, empathy, a form of play & inevitable distraction?1 You’ve been around right from my late childhood and even now I see you on TV in reruns. Have you helped me organize my world through those creatures, those plays of invention, unconstrained imagination and fantasy that made you rich, then tragic and then dead? Do you flash upon my inward eye when in my bliss of solitude? Do you have any place at all in the recesses of my mind and heart? When I wander lonely as a cloud through life do you give me any shape, coherence or vividness? Sadly, as the Kingdom of God on Earth wound its way through the first half century of its life, you excited with a flutter and dance for a time and then were gone. But, for a time, you cherished your daily life with2 a certain truth and gave it to us moment by moment on the screen. 1 Carl Plantinga, “Movie Pleasures and the Spectator’s Experience: toward A Cognitive Approach,” Film and Philosophy, Volume II, 1994. 2 The aim of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude was also expressed in these same words and more: “meditations passionate from deep recesses in man’s heart.” Ron Price 26 February 2007 CALMING LIFE'S WHIRLPOOL I came across Doris Lessing in an interview on “Books and Writing,” an ABC Radio National program, on 16 January 2000, then again on SBS TV on 18 September 2000. On that latter date she referred to my generation as self-indulgent and unself-critical. With the years, Lessing went on to say, this self-indulgent generation of mine had many casualties as former personal certainties that it had held died and systems, empires and parties lost their credibility, their meaning and even their existence. Lessing also informed her listeners that she thought most writers were mildly depressed. When asked what her most joyous moments were she said they were “at the beginning of each book.” I agree that a certain melancholia, a certain pensiveness, a certain level of emotion recollected in tranquillity, are present during the writing process. In November 2000 I came across a statement by Lessing in an article entitled: “Writing the Self: Selected Works of Doris Lessing,” Deep South, Vol.2, No.2, Winter 1996, p.12. She had just completed, but not yet published, the second volume of her autobiography Walking in the Shade. Of autobiography, she said: "it helps calm life’s whirlpool." In the next several years I found Lessing's words accurate. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 February 2007. You were just finishing your story, your two volumes in '94 and '97 while I was just starting to put my story down. Of course, you'd done those semi-autobiographical novels, indeed, you've been writing since I was a child and recording my first memories back in '47 and '48 & '49. Producing our lives we were, Doris, by an infinite chain of signifiers and constructs. Some therapeutic self- discovery as we were spinning our yarn, as it were, in the current of life.1 You ended your story in '62, just as I was beginning mine, my pioneering over four epochs. Finishing your story at 43 you were and me--starting mine at 43 and taking it back to the age of 18. 1 Lynda Scott, "Similarities Between Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing," Deep South, Vol.3 No.2, Winter 1997. Ron Price 4 February 2007 SINGING OF 'THE JUDGEMENT DAY' After a long siege from various physical and emotional ailments, Judy Garland was hospitalised in 1959. I became a Bahai that year. Garland was the most famous female entertainer during the years of the second epoch of the Formative Age, 1944-1963. She had been the image of the "typical American teenager"1 when my mother became a Bahai in 1953. Garland died in 1969 from an overdose of sleeping pills, six years after the democratic theocracy at the base of the Bahai system had been established, that 'blissful consummation' referred to by Daniel.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Stephen Harvey in Colliers Encyclopedia, Vol 10, pp.579-80; 2 See Shoghi Effendi, God passes by, 1957, p.151. I was growing up, Judy, when you were winning all those accolades. And when I became a Bahai you were at the bottom of the barrel and you rolled in and out of that barrel until you died ten years later, alone and desolate, a world away from your kids and a million miles away from your inner self which you never found in your roller-coaster ride through fame and glory. But along the way you tried to teach us how to be happy, to put on our best show as we all got ready for that judgement day1 which was spreading around the world during your life2 and ours in those years at the start of this Formative Age. 1 Judy sang about this 'judgement day' but she, like the wider society in which she sang and performed, had no idea of its relation to this new religion, the Bahaullah Faith. 2 Judy Garland's life, 1922-1969, occupied the years of the first half century of the Formative Age(1921-1971), especially during her years of success after 1935 when the teaching Plans began to unfold and extend the nucleus and pattern of a new World Order which had just been given its 'first architectural shaping' by Shoghi Effendi based on principles laid down by his Grandfather, Bahaullah. Ron Price 18 June 2001 THE DRAMA OF INVISIBILITY In 1959, Alfred Ayer, the foremost advocate of logical positivism, published an anthology of essays written by bright men earlier in the century who had committed themselves to reconstructing philosophy uncontaminated by metaphysics. The book was called Logical Positivism. In the next three years several books were published demolishing the pretensions of positivism. Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions were two of these books. Philosophy swims in metaphysics like a fish swims in water. At the time, the years 1959 to 1962 being my first three as a Bahai, I was beginning to swim in new metaphysical waters. I knew nothing of logical positivism or metaphysics, but I was clearly attracted to the poetry and the narrative I found in the Bahai Faith. It was poetry and narrative that invited reflection on the nature of my culture and humanity itself. -Ron Price with thanks to Evan Cameron, "Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies," Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 21, No.2, pp.492-494; and Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," Critical Inquiry, Summer 1981. The story was simply there, like life itself: international, transhistorical, transcultural--- not really a problem, rather--a solution. Helped me translate knowing into telling, took my life, what I'd done and fashioned a form, structures of meaning, but slowly, faintly, like a star. The story was translated into my world in southern Ontario by the lake on Seneca Street where I played baseball without fundamental damage to me or the story. And so it was that I began that drama, only possible with those whom you share a common history, a drama of the invisibility of interior experience, the place where feelings lie hidden and we have few words, if any, for what happens inside us, where we feel defeat at the problem's enormity, where we have trouble naming what we see. Ron Price 7 September 2001 DRIVING ON OUTSIDE THE MARKET On "Arts Today" the work of Australian sculptor Robert Clipel was discussed. Clipel died in 2001 at the age of 81 and a retrospective exhibition was arranged to commemorate, to celebrate, to inform the community of his work. There are some similarities between his work, what drove him and his philosophy and my own. For this reason I write the poem below. He was a most inventive and self-directed individual, highly cerebral, highly intellectual. His creative drive sought expression in his work and was the most important aspect of his life over several decades. He was strongly drawn by the multitude of possibilities around him to give them expression in art, his art. His central aim was to build up a language of forms, a language that was diverse, individualistic, new, self-critical, coherent and combined the technological with nature. His interest was in producing art not marketing it. He was unquestionably a man obsessed with his vision and his art. -Ron Price with thanks to "Arts Today," ABC Radio National, 10:05-11:00 am, 14 January 2002. I came to my work much later, Robert. I'll have to live to be a hundred to get in my several decades of art. So, I'll just have to take it a step-at-a-time. Everything I heard today about you animates me and my work, except perhaps that aim to synthesize the technological and nature. I'm into one big meta-synthesis, Robert. and the possibilities around me just go on and on and on as I link them to this thrusting creative drive. Perhaps when I'm gone there will be one great retrospective and someone can market all of this, these thousands of poems, this obsession, this vision, this art. Ron Price 14 January 2002 THE LAST MONTHS OF THE TEN YEAR CRUSADE: A COMMENT Until the summer of 1962 I had found much happiness and pleasure in the company of my high school friends, soul-mates is too strong a term; in the pursuit of sport, baseball, hockey and football; in my efforts to secure high grades at school and in the tranquillity and security of my parental home. With that move in August of 1962 to Dundas, the diaspora of my old friends and the loss of all that was familiar, I was jettisoned into a new world in which I had to find new oars. In some ways my new oars were the problems associated with just getting through my final year of high school. This occupied my time and left me with little else to worry about; even the occasional party, dance, or association with girls was so periferal and short-lived that these events were just a bubble in an otherwise hermetic existence with books, classes and the struggle to pass nine subjects and nine three hour examinations. In June 1963 I did pass and with a great sigh of relief. A new pattern and architecture had begun to emerge in my mind by the end of 1962, if not before, what G.K. Chesterton called 'the landscape of our dreams.' This landscape, he went on, was covered with the flora and fauna of our own secret planet. I had certainly begun to build, to design, to occupy this place in my mind with the vision, the words, the books, of this new religion I had been increasingly involved with since 1953. I had no conscious sense of direction for my life when the Universal House of Justice was elected in April 1963 but I had, by the simple process of elimination, confined my career direction to some aspects of the arts and not the sciences. One of English dramatist Harold Pinter's biographers, Michael Billington, says that "you don't live at home till your early twenties without developing an awareness of private space or a fear of unwanted invasion."1 When my father died in May of 1965, I moved out of this private space for ever. I don't recall ever fearing 'unwanted invasion.' But that 'awareness of private space' has been a strong one all my life, if I think of it. When I read David Malouf's description of his early life in his autobiographical 12 Edmonstone Street I am very conscious of this space and its affect on my life. Billington goes on to write about Pinter's "rage against the world." It was also a rage for life, a rage to do something, to achieve something. With the onslaught of the manic phase of my manic-depression, as early as December 1963, my life was inhabited by a certain rage as well. But by July-August 1964 the rage had died and I was plunged into the depressive side of my bi-polar tendency. Whatever rage, whatever manic, proclivities I exhibited in these early years of pioneering, 1962 to 1967, they were channelled into getting through my academic studies in history, philosophy and sociology, into one of four serious relationships and of four minor flirtations, with young women at university, the changing situation in the lives of my parents where I lived for most of that time and the early years of my interest in the Bahai; Faith. Beer drinking, pub crawling, nights out with the boys, types of partying were not part of the rage. The whole trip and whatever rage it contained was pretty serious. There was for me, during these years of the early to mid-sixties, a developing awe and determination to study the Bahai writings. A reverence for them coupled with an increasing enthusiasm for their content, a systematic examination of their art and a desire to understand what they meant. These writings required an effort to understand what they had to say to me and my world. I was certainly "painstaking" and "conscientious." This study went on during these five years of difficult personal transition, problems and personal maturation. 1Michael Billington, The Life and Work of Hrold Pinter, Faber and Faber, London, 1996, p.27. One critical experience that defined the direction I was to go in as I entered university was my effort to grasp matriculation physics. From early September to some time in November 1962 I tried to disentangle the mysteries of physics and the difficulties associated with 32 feet per second per second, et cetera. I must have spent an average of an hour each night in my homework sessions for nearly three months doing physics 'problems.' But it was to no avail; I knew I was not going to pass physics if I stayed in that course, so I switched to history several weeks before the Christmas exam. I got the highest mark in the class, an 80, and I never attended one class. This seemed to confirm to me that the arts and not the sciences was the direction of my career as I entered university in September of 1963. How accurate that confirmation was hardly mattered because without physics in my grade 13 marks the entire world of the sciences was just not available for me to pursue. If there was a golden period in my young life, it was the period up to my eighteenth birthday in July 1962. In retrospect it seems to me like some kind of lost paradise of simplicity, of wall-to-wall sport, school and endless indulgence, punctuated with the occasional family crisis, the frustrations and attractions associated with the presence of beautiful young girls and the need for money, mine and my parents. I had been a somewhat solitary and introverted child of parents who could well have been my grandparents due to their late marriage, but during my late primary and high school years I blossomed. I was the apple of my parents' eye and was their lovingly indulged only son. Although my father would fly into a rage during a chat with my mother about some issue, usually a financial one, it was all in the context of his love and interest in our welfare. My home was always open to my friends and, after 1953, to the Burlington Bahai community. Books, music, gardens and writing were things treated with respect in these now seemingly remote but halcyon days. In August 1962 I left Burlington, its paradisiacal simplicity and its familiarity. Those golden years were replaced by the academic demands of matriculation, by the absence of the old friends I had cultivated for a dozen years, by the confusions and depressions of my university years in a new town and by a cold wind which set in. These were the years, too, of my first entanglements with those beautiful girls. However one describes the contrast, those simple days of youth had gone. I had indeed pioneered. The process, though, was as insidious as a seed. I was not conscious, in any way, that these were my years of preparation for the road ahead. I had begun to sing a new song and it had become more intense, more important, in this new town. But it was so clouded in difficulties that I found it difficult to sing.1 -Ron Price with thanks to Roger White, "New Song," Another Song Another Season, George Ronald, Oxford, 1979, pp.117-118. |
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