Autobiographical Poetry 2005: Booklets 54-57:
Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Section VIII:Poetry

by Ron Price

published in Pioneering Over Four Epochs: An Autobiographical Study and A Study in Autobiography, Section VIII-Poetry
2005

After 30 years of writing occasional pieces of poetry(1962-1992), I have now written poetry for 13 years much more extensively and intensively(1993-2005). The poetry here comes from just one year, 2005. It does not represent all the poetry I wrote that year. I hope, in the months and years ahead, to place all the poetry I wrote each year in the respective location at BARL.



THIS RISING VITALITY



Local Spiritual Assemblies are responding to the fresh demands of this rising vitality.-The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message,April 2004.



I have quoted the above words from the Ridvan Message 2004 and it is within this context that I present these booklets of poems to your Assembly and your Baha’i community some forty-two years after pioneering with my mother and father to the nearby town of Dundas. In August 1962, in the last months of the Ten Year Crusade, my mother and father, Lillian and Fred Price, who had become Baha’is during that Ten Year Crusade, moved to Dundas enabling my mother to be closer to her work at McMaster University and enabling the Dundas Baha’i community to form its Local Spiritual Assembly. As it turned out it was my mother’s last year at the University where she had served as a secretary in the Overseas Students Department under a Dr. Duckworth. At least that is how I recall things forty-two years later.



My parents remained in Dundas until 1965. That year my father died aged 70 and my mother moved to Hamilton where she died in 1978 at the age of 74. It is not my intention in this introduction to outline the story of my parents’ experiences nor my own as a homefront and international pioneer. I have done that briefly in the attached resumes. I think the story is an interesting one and I have written an 800 page account that is now in the Baha’i World Centre Library. I send you this booklet of poetry in memory of happy times in the Burlington Baha’i community. We all have our individual Baha’i histories and each community has its history. I would like these poems to be seen as a contribution to the Baha’i history of Burlington, as an expression of some of the experiences of a Burlington Baha’i youth from the 1950s and early 1960s who went on to serve the Cause as a pioneer from that community.



If these poems could be placed in your Baha’i library I would feel as if a small piece of me is left to posterity, one of the thousands upon thousands of achievements by individual Baha’is from the twentieth century which ‘Abdu’l-Baha Himself said would leave “traces” which would “last forever.”1



1 ‘Abdu’l-Baha in The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, 1995.



Ron Price

August 20th 2004.



1953 AND 1957: TWO VERY BIG YEARS



The famous playwright, Arthur Miller(1915-2005), said in an interview on ABC Radio National just a few months before his death that he ‘barely had room in his head for a thought’1 in the years before university which he began at the age of 19 in 1934. He began to see himself as a writer from about the age of twenty. This statement of Miller’s made me reflect on the origins of the conception of myself as a writer and more especially as a poet. In 1984, at the age of 40, the idea had some reality after perhaps two decades of a slow awakening, an insensible embryogenesis. By the age of 50 in 1994 I had written more than a thousand poems. I had begun to see myself as a poet. -Ron Price with thanks to Arthur Miller on ‘LNL,’ ABC Radio National, 10:20-11:00 p.m., February 14th 2005.

Surely that puts it too strongly

and not that accurately, Arthur?

Surely your brain was as busy

as a beaver in those entre des

guerres years? But there was

no fertilization, crystallization,

at least not yet.

Perhaps it came unobtrusively,

slowly in all those part-time jobs,

with your school-teacher mother,

your dad’s failed business in ladies’

coats and in Public School #24

in that poor part of New York--Harlem.

Perhaps you really took off in ’36-’37

right at the start of that Seven Year Plan

when a painfully small band of pioneers

was dispatched through the Americas

and became a foundation for flourishing

communities all over the world--so slowly--

or so it always seemed to us in these epochs.

And you kept going and we kept going

right into the new millennium with

some crucial points along the way:

like The Crucible in ’53 right at the start

of the Kingdom of God on earth--

little did you know; or in ’57

when Death of a Salesman went

to a mass audience on ITA

and that hard-working little man

who had worn himself out under

a mountain of work--died in London.

Ron Price

February 15th 2005



                                                            VALENTINE’S DAY--ICONS



On this Valentine’s Day it is appropriate that I write of Charlie Chaplin one of the most loved figures of the twentieth century. Chaplin began to fit comfortably into Baha’i history in the last decade of the Heroic Age, 1911-1921. Chaplin was making them laugh back then and after sixty years of the Formative Age, 1921-1981, a statue of him was erected near that of Shakespeare in London. In 1936, as the American Baha’is began conceiving and devising their first Seven Year Plan(1937-1944), Chaplin produced one of his more famous films Modern Times. It was a comment on the machine age and the limitations of technology. Over more than half a century, 1914 to 1966, the years of his first and last films, Chaplin became an icon. It was an icon that was constructed down to the finest detail. This icon was constructed in a process that expanded and penetrated more and more with the years. At the core of this Chaplinesque iconography was an anti-establishment little fellow who was always in trouble: The Tramp. -Ron Price with thanks to Internet Sites on Charlie Chaplin, February 14th 2005.

There’s icons and icons, eh Charlie?

I’ve been helping construct one

for over half a century, too, Charlie.

No technicolour manipulation,

cinematography, no digital, DVD,

four-speaker, blow them out of the

ball-park stuff here, Charlie,

although I guess I must confess

in recent years, Charlie, say

since about ’63 when the apex


was finally placed on this new

Order, this nucleus and pattern

of a new System, that technology

has been coming on-line, well---

its everywhere, eh Charlie, at least

in the rich part of the world.

Yes, icons are everywhere now

and we’ve got ours all over the world,

too. But still Charlie, we can’t edit

our lives so as to emerge in celluloid

safety with that toothpaste-ad smile finish.

You can only take an icon so far, Charlie:

mothers still go crazy, husbands and wives

they still split-up, millions still die in wars

no matter how smooth the image,

eh Charlie, eh?1

1 Chaplin became a very rich man, but there was much sadness in his private life. A recent series on ABC TV( February 6th & 13th, 5:00-5:50 pm, 2005) touched lightly upon the private aspects of Chaplin’s life.

Ron Price February 14th 2005



THE SCREAM



About 10 weeks before Baha’u’llah passed away the expressionist painter Edvard Munch began one of our age’s most famous works: The Scream. Munch says in his dairy that “he heard this scream from nature.” He almost collapsed from the fright it instilled in him. And so was born this painting The Scream. It was not exhibited until December 1893. The painting was part of a set of eight known as The Frieze of Life(1892-1906). Munch says that The Frieze was his life, its dance, its pathos. This series of Munch’s paintings is imbued with an existential angst, with his convulsive, tortuous existence. He undresses himself before the public emotionally; he reveals his deepest pains. His work portrays a ruthless self-revelation, a dark inner world. Munch’s philosophy was to paint life, his own life, as he lived it, as the direct expression of his experience. Painting was the result, for Munch, of his innermost needs, his innermost experiences.

As I look back at Munch, his work and his philosophy of art, I see much that is present in the poetry of my time, other poets and my poetry as well. My poetry is confessional, at least mildly so compared to Munch’s; it is experiential, an examination of my relationships, an examination of my imagination, my life, my loves and a range of existential questions that concern me. I try to portray the impact, the strengthening, the creative effect of my psychic illness. In the process of Munch’s painting and my poeticizing both our inner lives and our age is expressed from some inner necessity and, hopefully, for the pleasure of others.-Ron Price with thanks to “Internet Sites on Edvard Munch,” and “The Private Life of A Masterpiece,” ABC TV, February 6th, 2005, 11:00-11:50 p.m.

The dissolution of His tabernacle

where His soul abided temporarily,

released from life’s restrictions,

His radiance no longer clouded

by the world and all that is therein,

His soul could now energize

existence more than ever before.1

Was this prophetic---the scream

of release, of the world’s travail,

of the tempest that was unleashed,

of my angst and his and his and his,

of a billion dead, unprecedented,

of a suffering, catastrophic, humanity

bleeding in a devastating, unimaginable

death, then in 1892--and now

as we still deal with the resistless fury

of a great and mighty wind of God

invading our remotest inner life,

humankind’s fairest places, rocking

its foundations, wasting all that is

its life and light and harrowing up

the very souls of its inhabitants

in all their wretchedness and fear?

1 Baha’u’llah passed away on May 29th 1892 while Munch was working on his painting The Scream.



Ron Price

February 7th 2005



ARRANGEMENTS



The history of the first century of literature in Australia written by Baha’is will not be written by me. This is partly because there are fifteen years left in the first century but, more importantly, I do not have the resources to go about the exercise, the inclination to acquire the resources nor the desire to write such an important work. The emergence, the evidence, of a Baha’i consciousness in the literature produced in Australia, in the literary and poetic tradition of the Baha’i community here has, for the most part, a historical significance more than it has great literary value. Australia was a difficult problem to the first settlers here; the physical and social conditions, the strangeness and weirdness of things and the psychological climate on this continent daunted and repelled the settlers in the first century of Australia’s history, 1788-1888. The Baha’is in their first century, from 1920 to 2020, experienced a similar and dissimilar problem to those early settlers. Laying the foundation for a poetry written by Baha’is and seeing a Baha’i consciousness emerge in poetry and prose, was one that was slow, periodic, complex and one that required several epochs and generations.-Ron Price with thanks to Judith Wright, “ Australian Poetry To 1920,” The Literature of Australia, editor, Geoffrey Dutton, Penguin Books Ltd., 1972(1964), pp.55-90.



I write of man in all his aspects,

under the garment of eternity,

obsessed as I am with the passion

for a synoptic view, a unity

in multiplicity, amplitude

of reference over four epochs

in these days of the ninth


and tenth stages of history

when a charismatic Force


was finally institutionalized

and I grew from my teens

and its frenzied youth

into an old man with


a serenity, a melancholy

a charm, a love of the Muse,

a withdrawal, a joy to learn

and to understand the very

different views, arrangements

and human ways expressed

in an autobiographical style.

Ron Price

February 2, 2005.



GETTING OFF ON THE RIGHT FOOT



Three weeks after my pioneering life began Rudolph Nureyev danced at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London. In June, just before I left Burlington, my hometown, for Dundas just ten miles away, Nureyev danced for the first time on TV. He danced with Dame Margot Fonteyn, the preeminent ballerina in the West, in a BBC production called Music In Camera. Nureyev performed Le Corsaire, the first time this ballet had been performed in Western Europe. His explosive run onto the stage was described as follows: “pale and sinuous, his flying hair surmounted by a single feather in a gold circlet.” And again, critic Alexander Bland continued, “sensuously slow-springed landings, enormous twistings, a mingled arrogance and humility” Nureyev produced with Margot Fonteyn “one of the iconic images of the twentieth century.” 1962 was a milestone year for Nureyev, for the male dancer and for the most famous dance partnership of my time. Nureyev brought ballet to a mass public. More than forty years later, we are still cheering.-Ron Price with thanks to the Internet Sites on Rudolph Nureyev,” January 30, 2005.

A virtuoso dancer, born on a train,

they say, defected in ’61, the year

before my life as a pioneer began,

when he was getting warmed up


with his first performance in London,

when I was still getting warmed-up


for my life--dancing a different dance

to a different drummer, on a different

stage, to different music, with none

of the celebrity, renoun or glamour.

He came out into film and autobiography

and I went into pioneering that year---’62.

I was just as much in need of a repertoire,

a discipline, an energy, an understanding,

a direction, a vision, a spiritual home,

a groundwork for my future, my journey.

I, too, would have my positions,

my succeses, my performances,

my touring, my excitement,

my fulfillment, my pain,

mysturm und grund,

my decline in stamina,

my change in career,

my fresh new direction,

my immense airborne thrusts,

my utter commitment,

my conflict over sexuality,

my difficult temperament,

my one trip back home

and my tireless work:

always there was the work,

often difficult, often joyful.

Ron Price


January 30th 2005.



1909 WAS A VERY BIG YEAR!

The year ‘Abdu’l-Baha was set free from prison, 1908, the famous ballet dancer Nijinsky was introduced to Sergei Diaghilev, the noted dance patron and member of the Russian nobility. Diaghilev took a group of Russian dancers and singers to Paris in the spring of 1909. Nijinsky was the principle dancer of the troupe. Their first performance was on May 17th 1909. Fifty-seven days after the Bab’s remains were entombed on Mt. Carmel, the ballet world in Paris was taken by storm--by Nijinsky’s technical skills, the expression and beauty of his body, his steel-like strength and featherweight-lightness, his great elevation and incredible gift for rising and seeming to remain in the air. The Ballets Russes was born part of whose aim was to unify dance, music and painting through the medium of ballet. The West had seen the greatest ballet dancer in history. -Ron Price with thanks to DanceWorks, 2001-2004.

While You sobbed aloud that day,

while You slept not-at-all that night,

a troupe of singers and dancers

were heading for Paris and half

a world away the site was chosen

for the construction of that Temple.

The roots of faith in the west

and the roots of ballet were

watered with a vision and energy,

a showmanship and iconoclasm

without which a new history

could not have been rewritten.

My mother was five that year

and my father fourteen;

my grandparents had just had

three children who have flowered

into my extended family in Canada

in the last century; the Canadian

department of external affairs

was also formed that year



Christopher Brennan was recording

in poetry one of the few mystical

perceptions of creation written in

that remote dry land after

Baha’u'llah’s passing: 1909--

it was a very big year!

Ron Price



SEND IN THE CLOWNS: 1

In the generation that was born as the Baha’i Administrative Order was taking its first shaping in those hiatus years 1917 to 1937, the years before the implementation of the first teaching Plan in 1937, Stephen Sondheim was, arguably, consider as the greatest Broadway composer and lyricist. Born in 1930, Sondheim’s first significant work was for West Side Story in 1957. A song from Sondheim’s repertoire that had the biggest impact on me was ‘Send In The Clowns’ which premiered with the musical ‘A Little Night Music’ in 1973. I think I first heard that song in Melbourne in 1975. The story this song was based on was originally set in Sweden in 1900 and Send In The Clowns was sung “as two former lovers once again split up.”1 At the time, my own personal life seemed a perfect analogue for this song. This prose-poem explores my life, Sondheim’s work and the Baha’i Faith in my teens and before. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 “The Songs of Shirley Bassey: Send In The Clowns,” Internet Site, January 2005.

Your beautiful writing, Stephen,

may not have been so accessible,

but it was there for my generation,

the first in this final, this tenth stage

of history right from your delights--

West Side Story and A Funny Thing

Happened On The Way To The Forum

in those years when I was getting

warmed up for this pioneering life,

getting a kick start back in Ontario

back at the beginning of this dream,

when a tiny seed was planted,

when minor virtues were garnered

in that sweeter time and those now

nurtured imperfections are not seen

as so epically egregious to embarrass

the seraphim ruefully yawning

at their mention, nor will that shame,

as once I thought, topple the cities

and arrest the sun’s daily climb.1

1 Thanks to Roger White, “Lines From A Battlefield,” Another Song Another Season, George Ronald, Oxford, 1979, p.111.

Ron Price





WRITING HISTORY

Even the First World War, despite all setbacks, meant a vast expansion for Winston Churchill as both politician and writer. In his historical works the personal and the factual elements have been intimately blended. He knows what he is talking about, well at least sometimes, like everyone else. In gauging the dynamics of events, his profound experience is unmistakable. He is the man who has himself been through the fire, taken risks, and withstood extreme pressure. This gives his words a vibrating power. Occasionally, perhaps, the personal side gets the upper hand. In my poetic idion the personal often gets the upper hand.

Balfour called The World Crisis (1923-29) “Winston's brilliant autobiography, disguised as world history.” I would like to be able to say the same of my work, but this is far from the case. With all due respect to archives and documents, there is something special about history written by a man who has himself helped to make it. Churchill was obviously a big player in the game of history and I am one of the billions of ordinarily ordinary, humanly human, two-bit men and women on the scene whose names are for the most part lost to history. -Ron Price with thanks to S. Siwertz, “Presentation Speech for the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature,”in Nobel Lectures, Literature: 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969.

In the search for an adequate

perspective, a context in which

to examine what it was all about;

in trying to define the dynamics


of the events of my life and times;

in my attempt, too, to give my words

a vibrating power as they play with

salutary truths in their fluid and elastic

blend of the personal and the factual,

I exude a fundamental gravity1

and a touch of humour absorbed

in the Antipodes or, perhaps, in was

in my genes, half amused, once appauled,

turning frequent somersaults between

so many antitheses to get the mode,

the manner, the tone, the note, just right,

in an atmosphere of pleasure, finding

and mastering many of life’s surprises

and also getting beaten again and again.

1 Some ideas borrowed here from Siwertz’s contrast between G.B. Shaw and W. Churchill.

Ron Price

January 19th 2005





WHEREIN LIES GREATNESS?

In his great work about his ancestor, Marlborough, Churchill writes, “Words are easy and many, while great deeds are difficult and rare.” Yes, but great, living and persuasive words are also difficult and rare. And Churchill has shown that they too can take on the character of great deeds.1 I have been involved for over half a century with the Baha’i Faith which itself possesses an immense greatness. Any greatness imputed to me as an individual is only the result of my association with this great Cause. “Great is the blessedness of him that hath hearkened to its shrill voice, as it was raised, through the power of truth, before all who are in heaven and all who are on earth.......O people of Baha,”wrote Baha’u’llah and, in another context, Shoghi Effendi wrote that a “great destiny”3 beckoned the believers. 1S. Siwertz, “Presentation Speech,” The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953; 2 Baha’u’llah in Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, p.76; and 3Shoghi Effendi, Dawn of a New Day, p.119.

Great is the blessedness

of him that hath drawn

nigh unto this fire

and heard its roaring,

drawn nigh unto it

through a grace

which strengthens.

Will I, then, be guided

to that which will exalt

this Cause and magnify

even my own station in

this His world and Kingdom

where He assists me and

destines for me every good

through His bounty and grace?1

1 `Abdu'l-Bahá: Bahá'í Prayers, US edition, p. 107.

Ron Price

January 18th 2005



EMERGING OUT OF OBSCURITY

FIFTY YEARS: 1953-2003

In my years before puberty(1944-1956), I hardly remember any musical activity in my life, although both my parents played the piano and sang in choirs, so something musical must have permeated my psycho-emotional skin. The world of popular music gradually came into my life in the early years of the Ten Year Crusade(1953-1959) and this world of sound continued to influence me for some two decades until 1973-79. This popular music had a strong autobiographical, confessional, personal, emotional, introspective quality. I found it in folk, folk-rock and the pop strands. A whole generation of popular music was found here; it was the generation I listened to as an adolescent and as a young adult. Some of it attained a level of universality which helped listeners--like me--identify with its ideas and sentiments. Artists like: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, David Crobsy, Steven Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young, James Taylor, Tom Rush, Phil Ochs and Carly Simon, among a host of others--provided an influence, quite unconsciously, on my artistic sensibilities, my poetry and writing that emerged later and slowly in the next dozen years, 1980-1992. Those four decades, 1953-1992, provided a base for a poetic-fertilization, a poetic-crystallization that resulted in the years that followed, 1992 to 2003. -Ron Price with thanks to “Walk On By: The Story of Popular Song-After the Gold Rush,” ABC TV, 9:35-10:25 p.m., January 13th, 2005.

After fifty years of music

one can’t help but wonder

what actually produced


this prolific output of poetry,

this wanting to see the world


and see it better than ever,

concentrating all that I have

said and done since birth,

all grist for a tumultuous mill,

mildly confessional, nothing

like Lowell, Plath, Sexton


and others from those decades

when confessionalism was all

the rage in poetry and music

and seemed to insinuate itself

into my words as they arose

with all their autobiographical

candor and an unprecedented

personal aesthetic that takes

emotion and personality,

makes and escapes,

argues and embraces and tries

to tie self and world in one wide

embrace of past, present and future

in a oneness with all of life.

Ron Price

January 14 2005



INTENSITY AND DRIVENNESS

Poetry, for me, is a means of defining myself, my community, my philosophy and religion to a world which, for the most part, has given me respect and acceptance, a sense of achievement and even affection, but which has also been, for the most part, indifferent to a religion, a movement, that has been at the centre of my system of commitments, the very raison d’etre of my life. My poetry is the autobiographical story of a man who has been an international pioneer of the Baha’i Faith, the story, my interpretation, of the religious community I have been associated with now for half a century and the society in which I have lived for six decades.

My writing, which is for me an art form, is also a beautiful world of poetic intensity. After 25 years of writing, I have shared it with a few; I have created something, in some ways, out of nothing; in other ways, out of a whole world of ideas, people, nature, animals, minerals, every atom of existence and the essence of all created things.1 “Creativity is following the urge of the human soul,” said Geoff Bardon, “that tug we probably all feel.”2-Ron Price with thanks to 1 Baha’u’llah, “Persian, Number 29,” Hidden Words; and 2“Mr. Patterns,” ABC TV, 8:30-9:30 p.m., January 12th 2005.

< After 200 years you1 began

to put it all down,

for you had to define,

describe all that had gone on

since the beginning of time

and especially recent time.

Yes, there was an intensity;

I know what you mean, Geoff.

There was an artistic drivenness,

a compulsion, an obsession


to house the inspiration of soul,

to follow the urge, that tug

of the heart and mind------

the story, your story, at least

since the fifties and the sixties--

and my story too, my story too.

1 The tribes of the Western Desert in Australia put their story down in art, the Western Desert art movement which began in mid-1972.

Ron Price

January 12 2005



MYSTERIOUS DISPENSATIONS OF PROVIDENCE



On Tuesday April 29th 1980, three days before I went into the psychiatric clinic of the Launceston General Hospital, Alfred Hitchcock died.1 He was 80 years old. I was about to experience, at least for about the next ten days, what was for me the last days of real terror in my life. Terror inflicted on the unknowing was one of the themes in Hitchcock movies. Fear was also part of his recipe for movie success. I would have fear many times in life again, but terror was part of my bi-polar illness and on Tuesday I was on the edge of the throes of my last major hypomanic episode.







I had first come to hear of and to see Alfred Hitchcock in October 1955 on TV in my family’s lounge room in Burlington Ontario. Hitchcock’s ten year long series of what are now ‘classic’ programs had just begun. Mystery, crime, horror and the supernatural, invariably with a twist in the tale came on week after week for a decade and we have now had forty years of reruns. In October 1955 a premeditated campaign of terror was in process in Iran against the Baha’i community. It was a campaign which Shoghi Effendi had characterized as an ordeal “in pursuance of the mysterious dispensations of Providence.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1 “Internet Site on Alfred Hitchcock,” and 2Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, Wilmette, 1965, p.139.



While terror was entertaining

TV’s lounge-room troops

thanks to the clever fantasizing

of famous Alfred Hitchcock

then about to enter the last decade


of his meteroic career as a director,

before his slow and unhappy slide

to death in the first fifteen years

of my adult life(1965 to 1980)......

the Iranian Baha’i community

was entertaining its own terror:

not a devastating flood, but

a gentle rain on a green pasture;

not a calamity but God’s providence

a wick and oil unto the lamp of Faith.

And, Alfred, as your years went on

and you garnered in all that success,

the ship of this Faith sailed safely

into port well beyond the terrors

of the sea which could have taken

this Cause right off its course-----

the full understanding of the meaning

of this is beyond our generation.1

But with that terror overcome,

we can now hold nothing back.

1 Century of Light, p. 92.

Ron Price

January 8th 2005.



LIFE’S ESSENTIAL JUICES

The pleasures, the joys, the essential juices of life, what gives life its quintessential highs, heights, its finest enjoyments varies over the different stages of one’s life and even from day to day. Very generally, sport and the physical provided the highs in my childhood and teens. Music also began to give me pleasure in my early teens and it did until my early thirties; playing the guitar in the 1980s and 1990s. My career in teaching gave me an intense enjoyment from the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s. Writing, beginning in 1983 and continuing until the present, has been the longest lasting satisfaction in my life. Of course, the bodily needs and wants: hunger, thirst, sexual desire, all provided through their regular, frequent and sometimes rare-periodic satisfactions, a lifetime of very pleasurable joys and juices.

When one analyses the above in the microcosm specific enjoyments need to be added and listed: background music when I write, going to sauna baths & swims, certain relationships at certain times with my mother, father, wife and son, among other people, daily walks, the electronic and print media, my home, sleep, bodily elimination, the beauties of nature.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, January 7th 2005.

There is one long and abiding stream

sweetly-scented beginning high

in the mountains of my life which

I have not mentioned in the above.

There is one fruit on the tree which

I have not added to these tastes.

There is one crystal spring which

I have quaffed from but not added

to this list; one broad meadow

where I have roamed, one breeze

of joy which has passed over me,

one paradise of reality to which

I have gained admission but which

is not set out here, one melody

to which I have hearkened,

one path of good pleasure

not described herein, a myriad

invisible spirits to which I have

been summoned and which purge,

occasionally, from my sight

the film of familiarity enabling me

to feel the world which I perceive.

Ron Price

January 7th 2005



I appreciated the feedback I received on the poem ‘My First Kiss’ at the internet site ‘FRIENDLY MUSINGS.’ I revised another poem involving kisses after receiving that feedback. I had been working on that poem off-and-on over a ten year period. It is a much more obscure poem and, for that, I apologize beforehand.-Ron

__________________________________________________________________



I appreciated the feedback I received on the poem ‘My First Kiss’ at the internet site ‘FRIENDLY MUSINGS.’ I revised another poem involving kisses after receiving that feedback. I had been working on that poem off-and-on over a ten year period. It is a much more obscure poem and, for that, I apologize beforehand.-Ron

__________________________________________________________________

A LOVE SO GRAND

Price does not simply describe here the setting sun with its metaphorical 'kisses'--in a subtle and yet graphic manner, but he sketches out a conception of reality which posits a unified whole animated by love. It is a conception of oneness which brings opposites together; it also is a conception of love that helps us define this rather complex word, at least gives us a flavour of its taste.

In this poem we read of a luxuriating in the beauty of the sunset. A solemn and tranquil consciousness is evoked, an emergent joy. This is an appropriate expression, joy, for a period of time in our history, one hundred years after The Sun had set, a place of stunning beauty has just been constructed at the same point on our horizon, the Qiblih, as that sunset. -Ron Price, "Personal Comment on 'A Love So Grand,'" Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 8:55 pm, Friday, 29 December 1995, revised 13 August 2001 and again on January 7 2005.

___________________________

I’ll tell you how the sun set,

slowly after noon.

You didn’t even know it.

Then suddenly it was soon.

The earth turned on its axis

and shade seemed slightly bold,

deeper tones of green

and touches of pure gold.

There was red across the water,

way out past the waves;

the mountains darkened thoughtfully

and slipped into watery caves.

What’s a stone to do after

being luminous and warm all day?

The animals all changed their place

if they could speak they'd say:

"the sun has gone! the sun has gone!"

Out in the gardens,

where the flowers play,

the sun carressed the leaves,

then headed off in her unique way

to do just what she pleased.

What she did, of course,

was set in sediments of stone.

No freedom marked her course

through all the universe alone.

It seemed from this place I sat

that we forgot she was going.

We could have gone out

that evening after the gold

had set behind the hills.

We could have also watched

her presence finally fade

and touch the land with her

evanescent kisses, so gentle,

so light, so exquisite, so grand.

Ron Price

28 December 1995

to January 7 2005.

___________________



MORE THAN YOU CAN SHAKE A STICK AT

There is no "Christian civilization" or "Christian culture" in the way that there is an "Islamic culture," which you can recognize from Pakistan to Tunisia to Morocco. As the Christian Church took shape historically in new and various social forms over the centuries so, too, is the world order of Baha’u’llah taking shape in a variety of social forms. Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith with that first great decision by the Council in Jerusalem, recorded in Acts 15, which declared that the new gentile Christians didn’t have to enter Jewish religious culture. A similar decision of an Egyptian Court in 1926 acknowledged the independence of the Baha’i Faith from Islam. Just as people no longer knew what a Christian lifestyle looked like after it was established as a non-Jewish religion; just as the converts had to work out, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, a new way of being Christian, so too have Baha’is in these four epochs had to work out, with a great deal of guidance from the Central Figures of their Faith, from Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice, what constituted a Baha’i way of life.

--Ron Price with thanks to Andrew Walls, “The Expansion of Christianity: An Interview with Andrew Walls,” The Christian Century, August 2-9, 2000, pp. 792- 799.

We’ve got so much to define

and shape our life and ways,

a calendar, feasts and fasts,

forms to order our complex

days, tools to instruct,

massive, eloquent exegisis

translated into deeds, action,

heroic and otherwise,

ceremonial, informational

messages, more praise,

exhortation, censure, advice

than you can shake a stick at--

and we’re only in the second century.

And all of this serving the need

of the moment: the future and

the present in our individual,

collective life--and all of this

forges, directs and guides

our community, brings system

to a sea of fragments in

a continuous crucible

of transformation free from


the drastic consequences

of misinterpretation.

Ron Price

January 2, 2005.



A COLLECTIVE FOCUS



“Since Alfred Nobel died in 1896,” wrote Winston Churchill for his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, “we have entered an age of storm and tragedy.” I might have added: since the passing of Baha’u’llah in 1892 or the western tour of ‘Abdu’l-Baha in 1912-3, a tempest has been sweeping the face of the earth. Churchill continued: “The power of man has grown in every sphere except over himself. Never in the field of action have events seemed so harshly to dwarf personalities. Rarely in history have brutal facts so dominated thought or has such a widespread, individual virtue found so dim a collective focus.”-Ron Price with thanks to Horst Frenz, editor, From Nobel Lectures: Literature 1901-1967, Elsevier Publishing Company, London, Amsterdam, 1969.



The fearful question confronts us:

have our problems got beyond our control? 1

Yes, as Douglas Martin put it in 1973/4,2

two years after I moved to Australia

as an international pioneer,

as the first steps were taken

for the erection on Mount Carmel

of the Seat in a collective focus

raising on this tormented planet

the fair mansions of God’s Own

Kingdom so we could find surcease

from the confusion, the chaos and ruin

within the Covenant of the everlasting Father,

the Covenant of Baha’u’llah.



1 Churchill, 1953.

2 Douglas Martin, “The Spiritual Revolution,”World Order, Winter 1973-74, p.15.



Ron Price

January 17 2005



Undoubtedly we are passing through a phase where this may be so. Well may we humble ourselves, and seek for guidance and



WHEREIN LIES GREATNESS?



In his great work about his ancestor, Marlborough, Churchill writes, “Words are easy and many, while great deeds are difficult and rare.” Yes, but great, living and persuasive words are also difficult and rare. And Churchill has shown that they too can take on the character of great deeds.1 I have been involved for over half a century with the Baha’i Faith which itself possesses an immense greatness. Any greatness imputed to me as an individual is only the result of my association with this great Cause. “Great is the blessedness of him that hath hearkened to its shrill voice, as it was raised, through the power of truth, before all who are in heaven and all who are on earth.......O people of Baha,”wrote Baha’u’llah and, in another context, Shoghi Effendi wrote that a “great destiny”3 beckoned the believers. 1S. Siwertz, “Presentation Speech,” The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953; 2 Baha’u’llah in Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, p.76; and 3Shoghi Effendi, Dawn of a New Day, p.119.



Great is the blessedness

of him that hath drawn

nigh unto this fire

and heard its roaring,

drawn nigh unto it

through a grace

which strengthens.



Will I, then, be guided

to that which will exalt

this Cause and magnify

even my own station in

this His world and Kingdom

where He assists me and

destines for me every good

through His bounty and grace?1



1 `Abdu'l-Bahá: Bahá'í Prayers, US edition, p. 107.



Ron Price

January 18th 2005



THE TEACHING PLAN UNFOLDS: 1936-38

THE VERY SALVATION OF CIVILIZATION ITSELF WAS AT STAKE



At the beginning of the first Bahá'í teaching Plan in 1936 and 1937 Winston Churchill was writing a number of books. The last two volumes of Marlborough: His Life and Times were written as the first teaching Plan began to unfold in 1937-38. As you read this great biography you will realize where much of Churchill's World War II thought and rhetoric came from. The same themes are there: unity through alliance, death to continental tyrants. The first American edition was in six volumes and contained 2550 pages. Churchill's Great Contemporaries was published in 1937. This book contained essays on the great personages of his time and remains a classic. His views are largely derived from personal acquaintance and range over a multitude from late Victorian statesmen: Morley, Rosebery, Joseph Chamberlain, Balfour, Asquith--through notables of the Great War: Hindenburg, the Kaiser, Foch, Clemenceau, Lawrence. and on he went to personalities of the 1930s: Hitler, Roosevelt, Alfonso XIII, George V. A third book was published in 1938: Arms and the Covenant. In America it was called While England Slept. This book contained some of Churchill's most prescient and masterful speeches covering the period from 1932 through to Munich in 1939. Churchill began writing yet another book in this same period, Step By Step, just as Shoghi Effendi began informing the American believers in 1936 of the up-and-coming teaching Plan to commence in April 1937. Churchill's foreign affairs articles from 1936 to 1939 are compiled in this important work. These articles chronicle Britain's loss of air parity, France's decline, and the renascent Germany of Adolf Hitler. -Ron Price with thanks to “Books Written by Winston Churchill,” The Churchill Centre, Internet Site, 2005.



Such a busy man and

this is only the half of it:

article after article appearing

in British newspapers

in these same year

with all the alcohol,

the cigars and the sense

of immense destiny.



And another little man

at the other end of that

ancient European land


had an equally busy pen.

He, too, had warned of

impending, threatening

crises, fraught with peril.



Both men saw dangerous

hours and days on the horizon

made big Plans for the very

salvation of civilization:

systematic, carefully conceived,

rigorously pursued,

continuously extended;1

for the field was immense,

the task gigantic, the issues

immeasureably precious,

the time was always short

and the obligation sacred.



1 Shoghi Effendi, Messages To America: 1932-1946, Wilmette, 1947, p.7.



Ron Price

January 19th 2005



1909 WAS A VERY BIG YEAR!



The year ‘Abdu’l-Baha was set free from prison, 1908, the famous ballet dancer Nijinsky was introduced to Sergei Diaghilev, the noted dance patron and member of the Russian nobility. Diaghilev took a group of Russian dancers and singers to Paris in the spring of 1909. Nijinsky was the principle dancer of the troupe. Their first performance was on May 17th 1909. Fifty-seven days after the Bab’s remains were entombed on Mt. Carmel, the ballet world in Paris was taken by storm--by Nijinsky’s technical skills, the expression and beauty of his body, his steel-like strength and featherweight-lightness, his great elevation and incredible gift for rising and seeming to remain in the air. The Ballets Russes was born part of whose aim was to unify dance, music and painting through the medium of ballet. The West had seen the greatest ballet dancer in history. -Ron Price with thanks to DanceWorks, 2001-2004.



While You sobbed aloud that day,

while You slept not-at-all that night,

a troupe of singers and dancers

were heading for Paris and half

a world away the site was chosen

for the construction of that Temple.



The roots of faith in the west

and the roots of ballet were

watered with a vision and energy,

a showmanship and iconoclasm

without which a new history

could not have been rewritten.



My mother was five that year

and my father fourteen;

my grandparents had just had

three children who have flowered

into my extended family in Canada

in the last century; the Canadian

department of external affairs

was also formed that year

and Anne of Green Gables

came into print: while in the Antipodes

Christopher Brennan was recording

in poetry one of the few mystical

perceptions of creation written in

that remote dry land after

Baha’u'llah’s passing: 1909--

it was a very big year!



Ron Price

January 30th 2005



GETTING OFF ON THE RIGHT FOOT



Three weeks after my pioneering life began Rudolph Nureyev danced at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London. In June, just before I left Burlington, my hometown, for Dundas just ten miles away, Nureyev danced for the first time on TV. He danced with Dame Margot Fonteyn, the preeminent ballerina in the West, in a BBC production called Music In Camera. Nureyev performed Le Corsaire, the first time this ballet had been performed in Western Europe. His explosive run onto the stage was described as follows: “pale and sinuous, his flying hair surmounted by a single feather in a gold circlet.” And again, critic Alexander Bland continued, “sensuously slow-springed landings, enormous twistings, a mingled arrogance and humility” Nureyev produced with Margot Fonteyn “one of the iconic images of the twentieth century.” 1962 was a milestone year for Nureyev, for the male dancer and for the most famous dance partnership of my time. Nureyev brought ballet to a mass public. More than forty years later, we are still cheering.-Ron Price with thanks to “Internet Sites on Rudolph Nureyev,” January 30, 2005.



A virtuoso dancer, born on a train,

they say, defected in ’61, the year

before my life as a pioneer began,

when he was getting warmed up

with his first performance in London,

when I was still getting warmed-up

for my life--dancing a different dance

to a different drummer, on a different

stage, to different music, with none

of the celebrity, renoun or glamour.



He came out into film and autobiography

and I went into pioneering that year---’62.

I was just as much in need of a repertoire,

a discipline, an energy, an understanding,

a direction, a vision, a spiritual home,

a groundwork for my future, my journey.



I, too, would have my positions,

my succeses, my performances,

my touring, my excitement,

my fulfillment, my pain,

mysturm und grund,

my decline in stamina,

my change in career,

my fresh new direction,

my immense airborne thrusts,

my utter commitment,

my conflict over sexuality,

my difficult temperament,

my one trip back home

and my tireless work:

always there was the work,

often difficult, often joyful.



Ron Price

January 30th 2005.





GOYA



This is my second poem about the artist Francisco Goya(1746-1828) whose works reflected the historical upheavals of his time. As I wrote in my first poem, though, I see his work as reflecting equally, if not more so, the historical upheavals that were to come in the next two centuries. In this sense, as the title of that first poem indicates, the artist is prophetic. In 1819 he was saved from death by his doctor and his painting of his doctor in 1820 was full of warmth and love. But after that painting Goya decorated the walls of his villa with 14 ‘black paintings.’ They were the most sickening images, hellish visions, he ever painted. They are full of figures as if from a nightmarish dream. Robert Hughes argues in his film on Goya for television that Goya’s dark, black, paintings were also a portrayal of the inner life of man.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Robert Hughes, “Goya: Crazy Like A Genius,” SBS TV, 2:50-4:05 p.m., 27 February 2005.



Could you see the magnitude

of the ruin we were going

to bring on ourselves?

The surrender to the squalid

in ideologies and the mind,

the catalogue of dark horrors

darker than we’d ever seen--

were these your black paintings?



Were the outworn shibboleths

and irrelevant theologies,

the aggressive secularism

and religious obscurantism

producing fires of animosity,

spiritual gloom & despair

which you could see back then?



Did you see into my time

and its dark heart, the darkest

before the dawn? Did you see

into my own time like some

early warning system? Did you

knock at our door and give us

your answering shout? Love

has to do with meaning; it is

as they say: ontological.

Ron Price

February 27 2005



FULL-FIGURED GALS



As I went through my teens and became an adult in 1965, there were many stunningly beautiful women who came across my television and cinema screens: Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Jane Russell and Farrah Fawcette to name a few. This was the ninth and the first years of the tenth stage of history from a Baha’i perspective. In my 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, from the 1960s through the 1990s, many more beautiful women continued to flow into and out of the mass media. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, February 27th 2005.



Symbol of an entire sexual revolution

they were, each of them in their way--

and I was only twelve, thirteen, fourteen

and I kept getting older and they kept coming.

Embodiments of steamy sexual desire,

smouldering sensuous beauty, lusty busty,

leggy, curves everywhere, cleavages deep

as the dark oceans, full-figured gals they were,

one and all, alluring angels, always seductive,

physical powerhouses, big-chested cutiepies,

attracted men, photographers and headlines--

didn’t they all? Princesses of pout, icons,

countesses of come hither--35-23-35 stats

and more, everywhere more, glamour galore,

tending to many marriages and troubles,

temptresses: who could resist the pulchritude?



All my life they’ve been coming,

always coming, up and out there,

flaunting themselves before my eyes--

incredible things I can only look at,

from a great distance, get turned on by,

but never, absolutely never, get near, touch.

Part of the whirlwind of the senses they were


at the other end of dull-everydayness,

its continuum of quotidian time meeting

as it did like out of some blue the psychedelic,

where tension was increased always without

resolution, catharsis or any genuine epiphany.

Sex: the last frontier, extraordinary incident,

outrageous stimulation, instinctual sources

of erotic heat, part of some basic permissiveness

where one looks longingly in this inchoate world,

diffuse, so diffuse, where a truly powerful ideology

was just opening up a new vision of life,

part of a moral repertoire to be drawn on by all

and helping me cope with these awesome sexual,

stunning beauties, traces of sand to be washed away

eventually by waves, not part of the decline

of the West but the end of civilization

and a hubris rearing its head

with its refusal to accept limits,

its sympathy for the abyss,

its rage against order,

its awareness of apocalypse.



And, for me, a substitution of instinct,

impulse and pleasure by those

essentials of restraint in my years,

my life in this post-industrial society1

looked like it was going

to take the whole of my life.



1 Daniel Bell, The Coming Of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Future Forecasting, Basic Books, NY, 1973. The birth of this society took place in the years after WW2, the second Seven Year Plan(1946-1953) just after I was born.



Ron Price

February 28th 2005



              TREADMILLS



Nineteen years after I became a Baha’i, Cat Stevens, one of the most popular artists of the 1970s, the model sensitive singer-songwriter, embraced Islam. As far as I know he is the only major western singer post WW2 to do so. He released his final album one month before I left Ballarat in December 1978. For many of the years I had been living in Australia, 1971 to 1976, Stevens had been on tour. By 1977 he was exhausted and wanted off the treadmill of celebrity, fame and stardom. His two greatest albums were produced as I was preparing to leave Canada and after my arrival in Australia in 1970-71. Tea For the Tillerman and Teaser And The Firecat, musical productions about man’s search for meaning in a spiritually empty society, were the result of his introspection during and after being hospitalized for TB in 1968-69.



I had also been hospitalized for six months in 1968 for a schizo-affective disorder. I experienced a series of mental exhaustions during a 35 year period from 1963-64 to 1998-99, for the most part associated with my bi-polar disorder. At age 55 I wanted off the treadmill I had been on. Cat Stevens devoted himself to his new Muslim faith and worked hard or harder than he had with his music. So was this true of my work after 1999. My new activity was different but it was still exhausting. The source of my fatigue had changed.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, “Cat Stevens-A True Story,” 11:30-12:25 am, February 27th-28th, 2005.



I gave myself to this fatigue

with a new enthusiasm---

as you did, as you have

for the last 27 years.

Ours was a search and a finding

and a search and a finding

both before and after

our hospitalizations in ‘68

when whole worlds


opened with their fame,

their success and their

exhausting demands.



There was so much more

to it all than this celebrity,

this popularity. Vision,

vision creating reality

with form leaving its chambers

of unborn designs where chaos

gave birth to the creative,

to pattern, to new tracts of

the cosmos, intellectual passion

and the pulses of the brain.



Ron Price

February 28 2005



PORTRAITS



In the 1930s, when the Baha’i community was developing the initial form of its national and local institutions; and the first years of the initial stage of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s vision of America’s spiritual destiny was unfolding in the Seven Year Plan(1937-1944) a sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, carved the faces of four American presidents into the granite surface of Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. They were the largest works of a sculptor on earth. The work, begun on August 10th 1927, memorializes the birth, growth and development of the United States, a country that has a special connection with the development of Bahá'í administration.



That same year, 1927, the National Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States began to develop a greater stability,1 a greater measure or degree of authority as part of the Baha’i system of orientation. Authority is, in the end, an act of the intellect, of understanding and the imagination; it is a solidity and security in the binding strength, the bond, the capacity of others to judge and reassure. The institutional evolution of the Baha’i community, of its administration, had attained a new level of development and during those same years, 1927 to 1941, it developed well enough to embark on its first international teaching Plan or, if you prefer, missionary program.



When Gutzon Borglum died in 1941 the work, the carving, the portraitures, although not complete, had advanced sufficiently to evoke a sense of awe in those who viewed them. No new carving has been done on the portraits since his death. For some seven decades now viewers, mostly tourists by the millions, have been able to see themselves in the faces of these presidents. The four presidents carved in stone represent all Americans, their courage, dreams, freedom and greatness. The Baha’is, for seven decades, have gazed at a different set of portraits, a different design, a different set of artistic forms, the critical one, the unique aspect of their religion, being their Administrative Order which they see as representing the very “structure of freedom for our Age.”2 It is an Instrument, a portrait, not sculpted in stone but painted by the Hand of Mystery on a canvas with the paint and colour of heroic self-sacrifice. -Ron Price with thanks to “Internet Sites on Mt. Rushmore,” SBS TV, 28 February 28th 2005, 5:00-6:00 p.m.; 1Loni Bramson-Lerche, “Development Of Baha’i Administration,” Studies In Babi & Baha’i History, Kalimat Press, 1984, p.260; and 2The Universal House of Justice, “Letter to the Baha’is of the United States: December 29th 1988.”



Sacrifice is not a word we use

much downunder, not a word


we like to use, a little too top-heavy,

over the top, too evangelical

for most you might say, eh?



Still, determination and the will

to struggle are as the soul---

needed then, back then, always

in those years entre des guerres,

with that stone, with steel-edged

pneumatic hammers, drills, bits,


grits, dynamite blasting, tons of stone.

Persistence, still needed, then and now,

for so much of the battle is always lost,

then and now: in our strenuous warfare

with instincts, our appetitive nature:

concupiscible, irascible, the allurements,

trivialities that rain upon us daily

in our quotidian worlds

of endless, necessary minutiae,

as we humbly assault our summits,

make our vertical ascents past fault

and fissure and the immense stone

bulwarks of life, the miasmal ooze

that drifts daily from the public realm

into our private space with its

intoxicating and noxious glues.



And we who would build this institution,

Instrument, administration, based as it is

on images, ideas, carved in a different stone

where our minds play, pray, slowly learn

to counter the fleeting, fragile, fragmentary,

fortuitous reality and the blaze indifference

which is everywhere and nowhere,

hidden, obscure, so very undefineable,

like air and water in some synthetic social glue,

which is one with the end of effort

and the triumph of sensation

divorced from any necessary action.



Yes, sir, the barbarians have arrived

and are in our midst with their traces

of strangeness. They enter our most

intimate relationships unbeknownst,

especially with those we love

and our inner being, own dear souls.

Sometimes they are a mirage.

We see, dream, them as refreshment,

but find, in the end, nothing there.

Sometimes they offer us rewards,

but bring us only toil and trouble.



These barbarians sometimes

take the form of a thin veil

through which we look at our lives

thinking we see reality, but no--

illusion is all we are seeing.



For, let there be no mistake,

this is the darkest hour

in human history, the slough


of despond and ill-equipped


are billions to interpret the play

using the phantoms of their

imaginations simply on the

wrong track, at the wrong site,

bewildered by the burgeoning

hieroglyphics carved in pain

across our planet gravitated,

recently, into a neighbourhood.



But the dawn is breaking,

it’s early morn, the taxi’s

waiting, he’s blowing his

horn. The call all-aboard

has been raised. There’s

a train at the station ready

to take us close to that

immense Carving of Life

but, alas, we move away;

we always move away.



Most of us, it would seem,

can only stand so much reality

in our face. Like those presidential

portraits, life’s awesome size,

its enormity overwhelms us.

But with its freedom and its dream

we carve our own stone,

the granite that is our lives,

grown from conception

in our dear mother’s womb,

nurtured, if all goes well,

by those founts of gleaming milk

eyes and hearts to watch over us

and to love us. And so the granite

grows and we think it just fleshy

tissue, organs and sundry stuff.

But we take into eternity,

that undiscovered country

where we will live forever,

our portrait, our image engraved,

designed by the Hand of Mystery,

painted with the essence of light,

moulded with a love which, however

much we strive on this earthly path,

we will never understand, but it is


a portait imprinted on tablets of chrysolite

high on the mountain in open characters.



1. Martin Pawley, The Private Future, Thomas and Hudson, London, 1973.

2. My use the term ‘barbarians’ draws on Edward Gibbon’s study of them in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.



Ron Price

March 2 2005



THE GRAND DESIGN UNFOLDS



In the late 1980s CD technology began to penetrate western consumer markets. By the time I finished three years of presenting a Baha’i radio program One Planet One People for the Launceston Baha’i community in 2005, I had access to over 50 CDs made by Baha’i artists around the world in the previous twenty years. The cassette tape, which had dominated the music market along with the LP and 45 rpm record, during all of my adult life, 1965 to 1985, still had a place. When I handed over the resources to the next radio program presenter in March 2005 there were 60 cassette tapes and no LP records in the resource kit. The two decades 1985 to 2005 had been busy years in media technology.



Like some grand design unfolding, the technology for the home, for leisure and business was advancing and its use by the Baha’i community continued apace. The DVD-video became mainstream in 1999, although in our household only my son Daniel bought DVDs. The internet resources had increased significantly since I first had access to them in the early 1990s. The home computer advanced by leaps and bounds in these two decades and I have enjoyed three computers each an improvement on the last. In 2005 virtually all my reading came from the internet and little from books.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, March 4th, 2005.



In August of ’62 as I was

getting ready to make

my first pioneering move

the first Galactic Network

was discussed at MIT.



The idea back then was

a globally interconnected

set of computers like

the internet of today.



The story of science and technology

in these my pioneering years is immense.



While I’ve been pioneering

the world has been pioneering

and the grand design of God’s

Holy Cause unfolded on

the foundation of the Kingdom,

the framework raised in the

first epoch of a Divine Plan


and the first two epochs

of the Formative Age.1



1 the first epoch of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Divine Plan was 1937-1963. The first two epochs of the Formative Age were: 1921-1944 and 1944 to 1963.



Ron Price

March 4th 2005



         PINNING THINGS DOWN



The following poem was written from 3:55 to 4:35 pm while waiting to go to the dentist. It began by my reflecting on how many years I’d been going to the dentist: fifty-five years(1950-2005) and how long I’d been in classrooms: fifty years. I had had my last class as a casual teacher ten months ago in 2004 and I now took very little interest in teaching, in formal education. Occasionally, of course, I ran a class in the Baha’i community. In the seven years 1992 to 1999 I had a triple life: teacher, family and community work and writer. It had been exhausting, had worn me out, had sucked the juices of life right out of me.



By early 2005, after six years of retirement, I had given up several of the modest, moderate activities that occupied my time during these first retirement years: my weekly radio program, my casual teaching for the George Town School for Seniors, my regular visits to the library for ten books a week, my Baha’i work editing for a magazine and committee work and activities with my son Daniel who left home at the age of 27. This process of disengagement over the years 1999 to 2005 enabled me to sharply concentrate, to focus as extensively and intensively as possible on the activity that gave me the greatest pleasure and joy, namely, writing. Part occupation, part vocation, part avocation, part hobby, part obsession, part service to a Cause I had been identified with for fifty years, writing became for me, insensibly and by degrees over the years 1974 to 2004 a way of life. If God granted me a long and healthy life, say ninety years, I would have thirty more years to devote to this engaging occupation, hopefully as disengaged from the quotidian and so much that the wider world had to offer which I simply did not want.



Of course in my typical sixteen hour day, usually 9 a.m. to midnight, I found I have only been able to work at this occupation of writing for an average of eight hours a day. This was all my brain could cope with in that 16 hours. I also had to deal with several elements in the everyday world which collectively occupied me as follows: the exercise of walking-1 hour, meals-2 hours, domestic work of various kinds-1 hour, chatting to my wife and the people in my life-1 hour, sleep-1 hour and TV-2 hours. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, March 8th 2005.



Sometimes, as I have above,

and often in curious places


such as in a dentist’s reception

room to have a tooth pulled out

I try to define just where I’m at,

where I’ve been and where I’m going.



There are so many ways of telling

the story of cradle to grave,

so many ways of pinning-down

all those years gone by, yet to come,

all those movings up and down,

round and round, in and out,

when things contrary to my wishes

were ordained and before the blissful joy,

the heavenly delight that I like to think

will one day be in store for me.



Ron Price

March 8th 2005



EXALTED BR


The poet Archibald MacLeish, in his eulogy at the memorial ceremony in 1967 for the American poet Carl Sandburg, said that poets were not comparable. You cannot, he said, measure one against another. For some poets, their distinctiveness lies in their total oeuvre; for others it lies in one or several of their poems. Sandburg wrote for the American people. I write for the Baha’i community with one eye on humanity or, as Baha’u’llah wrote more poetically although I’m not sure if it is more accurately, I have opened one eye to the world and all that is therein and opened the other to the “hallowed beauty of the Beloved.”1 Sandburg, said MacLeish, was one of those who believed more than he could prove about the future of the human race. It was such people, MacLeish went on, who make the future, who shape that destiny.-Ron Price with reference to 1Baha’u’llah, “Persian: No.12,” Hidden Words.



I like that idea Archibald;

I like all those ideas.

Poetry for me is what

you find in my poems,

an exalted brooding,

a finely-tuned analysis

and contemplation,

a style of my own,

an impress of thought

on the spacious highway

where I walk, stride, hide,

drive, pray and ponder,

as I make the future and

shape humanity’s destiny

or so I would like to believe.



Still, in some ways, I think

one can compare and contrast

the poets of history. Poets, like

the rest of us, define themselves

in community, in the community

of poets--as we all do--in community.



Ron Price

March 9th 2005



DANCING ON THE TABLES




In 1937 the second Five Year Plan(1933-37) in the Soviet Union ended and the first Seven Year Plan(1937-1944) opened in the Baha’i community. Ernest Hemmingway had moved to the centre of the cadre of writers for and in the Communist party. His was the favourite literary name at the Second Writers Congress held in May, just weeks after the opening of the Seven Year Plan in North America. The years 1937-38 were dark. The Terror had moved to a climax. An estimated one to two million people were executed or died in prison or exile in those two years. Of these, 1500 were writers. By the opening of the Seven Year Plan in the spring of 1937 the Moscow “show” trials had been held and the tables were beginning to turn again Russian communism as the holy of holies. -Ron Price with thanks to Daniel Aaron,Writers On The Left, Avon Books, 1969(1961), pp.363-381.



Those hiatus years(1917-1937) proved

to be the beginning of the end

for that leftward turning


political messianism


and the end of the beginning

for that institutionalized charisma

with its nucleus and pattern for

a new Order just emerging out of

the greatest conflict in history.



The spring and summer of that

annus mirabilis had seen such




splendiferous beginnings,




writings that would change history.1

The dance with one was about to turn

tables as the other was getting its kick

start by spiritual descendants

of dawnbreakers a century before

in a mission of sublimity which would

release potentialities mysteriously

and generously endowed by ‘Abdu’l-Baha.



1 Karl Marx’s first writings, his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, were written in the summer of 1844; and the Bab’s first writings were made in May and June of 1844.



Ron Price March 11th 2005



IMPETUOUS ACTS



Dostoevsky once wrote that his “nature was base” and that he was “excessively impetuous.” He went on to say that “Everywhere and in all things I go to the limit. All my life I’ve overstepped the mark.” While I also must acknowledge a certain baseness in my nature, a certain base and appetitive quality, a concupiscence and irascibility which Baha’u’llah says are stages in the development of the soul and which require a daily vigilance and the exercise of self-control, it is a baseness which I have learned to control in some of its manifestations but not in others. I have given expression to this baseness since my teens and, if I include my excessively demanding and irascible behaviour as a child while still at home with my mother, I have sixty years of these impetuous acts, this overstepping of the mark, to my credit or, should I say, debit. -Ron Price with thanks to Ronald Hingley, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, Charles Scribner’s and sons, NY, 1978, p.11.



In my early childhood,

my early teens

my early adulthood,

all along the way,

right up to these my

early years of late adulthood,

always some baseness to battle,

some excess, some going too far,

dispersing myself until I was empty,

stale, fed up---with no more to give.



What I seek to become determines

what I remember in what I’ve been.

All this past becomes alive because

of what matters in the future

and in the process

I transcend the present but
only momentarily.



For the burden of sin, that baseness,

and my encounter with it is alive.

There is, too, a joy in knowing

I am helping to form

the structure of a new world.

While I give myself to solitude

and its accompanying insight,

I drive for meaning, pattern

wholeness and the strength

of that natural animal.1



1 Jacob Bronowski: “No man is human who does not draw strength from the natural animal,” The Face of Violence.



Ron Price


March 9th 2005



UNBEKNOWNST



I saw the last of a two part TV series on the Bronte sisters this afternoon.1

The Brontes are, arguably, literature’s most famous sisters, certainly most famous threesome. Their rise to fame in the literary world and the tragedy of their lives in England could be compared to the rise and the tragic years of the Babi Faith in Persia, all in the same 1840s and early 1850s. Both the Bab and the sisters were all born in the last years of the second decade of the nineteenth century, 1816 to 1819. Until 1848 the Movement of the Bab and the writing of the three sisters enjoyed much success. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were published in 1847. The Cause of the Bab flourished in its early years 1844-1847.



But in 1848 and 1849 two of the Bronte sisters died and their brother. In Persia the great massacres of Babis began to take place: 1848-1852. Charlotte died in 1854 at 38. In October 1848 the Babi uprising at Tabarsi began and an insurrectionary period that was to last for four years and with it the loss of the Bab’s popular mass appeal.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC TV, “In Search of the Brontes,” 2:00-3:00 p.m. March 13th 2005; and 2Peter Smith, The Babi and Baha’i Religions, George Ronald, 1987, p.53.



The wings of death hovered,

consumed the fabric of their lives,

took their existence to its lowest ebb

and to what end one might ask?

They finished their days

in obscure, isolated, windswept

corners of this earthly realm, this


mortal coil, with their talents speeding

to their end. Did their deaths set

the seal of failure on their lives?



Such glorious conceptions, such

heroic deeds and, then, gone!

What an apparent, a colossal disaster!

The flame snuffed out by fate’s finger,

swiftly receding into the shadows

of omnipotence and oblivion,

all hope seemingly vanished.

The tide of artistic beauty gone out

and, with it, the tide of enthusiasm

for a Cause crushed to dust,

its devotees cowed and exhausted.

Perhaps we see here just

a fiery phase of transition

on the path to a high destiny,

to an ascendancy that would find

its inspiration in the desperate,

prolonged disappointments of that hour

when new notes were sounded.

Perhaps the yet unborn,

with a cunning that is so

mysteriously subtle come to live

and have their being implanted

by some dispensations of Providence

in their very souls, unbeknownst.



Ron Price

March 13 2005



                  TOUJOURS TRAVAILLER



Treasures lie beneath God’s throne and poets have the key: so says an Islamic tradition. During the more than a dozen years I have written poetry extensively, I have come to see part of my role as helping other poets travel in company. Poets who are my contemporaries and poets yet-to-come do not need to travel in isolation. My work can help them define where they are going and where they have been. My thoughts can help other poets regenerate, refresh their perspectives; it can help them infuse creativity into their voice and their lives. It can help them see that a mighty effort is required in order to acquire an abundant share of the poetic art. To put this another way: the poet must strive night and day, resting not for a moment,1 as ‘Abdu’l-Baha puts it; or, as the sculpture August Rodin wrote: toujours travailler.2 -Ron Price with thanks to ‘Abdu’l-Baha in The Creative Circle, editor, Michael Fitzgerald, Kalimat Press, 1989, p.182; and Rodin “Always Work,” in Letters To a Young Poet, R.M. Rilke, WW Norton, NY, 1962, (1934), p.95.



Letting divine impulses flow

into our beings is surely at

the heart of the poetic game.

These heavenly suseptibilities

are a magnet attracting

the Kingdom’s confirmations,

opening doors of meanings

and healing waters, unbeknownst.

Unbeknownst, too, are those

intermediaries, like rivers, who

bring the leaven which leaveneth

within the powers of reflection,

industry, work, study and prayer

on the longest road of life: art.



Ron Price

March 15th 2005



DAN’S PLACE



Here we are at another Naw-Ruz, sitting in my son’s lounge-room in his unit at 6-73 Mayne Street in Invermay Tasmania. He has been here for several days in his first home away from home in this old part of Launceston going back as it does to the nineteenth century. The last time he lived in as old a part of a town as this was in 1977-8 in Ballarat across from the Eureka Stockade, the town where he was born. The new Baha’i calendar registers BE 162. The first BE date I remember was 108 or 109, back in the early 1950s, at the dawn, the very dawn of the Kingdom of God on Earth. It was the last year of my middle childhood, 8 years old, or the first year of my late childhood, 9 years old, if I draw on those descriptors from human development models in psychology.



Forty years ago in May 1965 I, too, left my family home for the second time. I remember my mother sitting in my lounge-room, bedroom, all rooms-in-one room, above the Dundas Restaurant on Dundas’s Main Street. It was late May or June 1965. Here I am, with a puzzling sense of deja vu, sitting in my son’s lounge-room like my mother wondering what will happen to me next.



Dan is trying to work out what sort of job to get, what to study and what to do with his life. I was, too, back in that summer of ’65 forty years ago in May. I became, for that summer of ’65, an electrician’s assistant with Stelco of Canada. The job paid well and helped me with expenses in my third year of university in Honours Sociology.



My mother moved down the street, two blocks away, from the family home which we had rented for the final year of my father’s life. My place above the restaurant was a three minute walk from my mother’s and we visited from time to time, had dinner together for some nine months until the spring of 1966. Then mother moved to Hamilton and I moved to Windsor to prepare for a pioneer post among the Eskimo.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, March 21st/22nd, 2005.



The last year of the Plan1 opens

as another life leaves another nest

struggling, as I struggled

like a broken-winged bird

forty years ago, to sort out

life’s persistent moments

that never stop coming, inevitably,

until the last syllable of our recorded

time with all its sound and fury

on its way to dusty death--yes:

and we get older and older and older

and the soul, it seems, not so inevitably,

gets kindled and scattering angles,

inevitably but unseen, from an Almighty

Force, scatter abroad the fragrances

of the words uttered by our mouths.



Meanwhile, as we strut and fret

upon the stage before that final

silence when we speak no more,

we are tranquil or disturbed

as waves from life’s unending ocean

of eternal grace and its revelations

from some invisible spirit

which seems to always summon some,

lift some up and cast some down,

bowing some backs yet again

or bringing them a joy

more manifest than before

but curiously more hidden, too.

Those mysterious dispensations

of a watchful Providence

we will never understand.



1 Five Year Plan: 2001-2006. The fifth epoch opened on January 16th 2001. We are now in the fourth year, second month and sixth day of this epoch. Forty years ago, in May 1965 when my father died(10/5/65ca), we were in the first month of the third year of the 3rd epoch of the Formative Age.



Ron Price

March 22nd 2005



THE CATALOGUE



Martha Gellhorn arrived in Spain in late March 1937 a month before the start of the Seven Year Plan, the first organized teaching campaign in fullfilment of ‘Abdul-Baha’s vision as defined in His Tablets of the Divine Plan. By Ridvan, April 21st 1937, Martha was well on her way to making a start to her incredible 60 year career as a war correspondent. Travel writer, journalist and novelist, Gellhorn was an eloquent witness, a cateloguer, of the wars of the twentieth century. She regarded her writing, as she put it back in 1959, “a form of honourable behaviour” involving readers and herself.1-Ron Price with thanks to Martha Gellhorn, 1959, Internet Sites, 2005.



When and where was your anger born, Martha:

with that Great--and useless--War to end wars?

in a complex nexus with your reformer mother?

with that gynaecologist father in St. Louis

Missouri in those entre des guerres years?



And your honesty, Martha, refreshing now,

refreshing then, sure stirred the old pots:

you say you got nothing out of sex----

in an age when few women admitted it,

then or now, little delight in marriage’s

fleeting terms, restive were your amorous

worms. Wed or celebate, a hellish torment

soon or late--but love, Martha, love won

by courage shall endure; love, methinks,

is love’s own cure. So it was in your last

years--as you still felt the question gnaw:

“What chain hath love that rubs me raw?”



While the Baha’is went from Plan to Plan

for those 62 years--1936 to 1998--you went

from war to war: glamorous, a looker,

a brave adventurer, an incredible journey---

and so it was for the rest of humankind

in those 90 years1 during a catelogue

of horrors unknown in the darkest of ages

past, a magnitude of ruin beyond belief,

but you catelogued it as well as anyone:

gudonyer, Martha!



< 1 Martha Gellhorn was born in 1908 and died in 1998.



Ron Price

March 21st, 2005.







At the beginning of the Seven Year Plan in 1937 the term symbolic interactionism was coined by Herbert Blumer. Symbolic Interactionism is based on the premises that (i) human beings act on the basis of meaning; (ii) meaning arises out of interaction with others and (iii) an interpretive process, an imaginative reheasal, is used by individuals to deal with their environment. Some call this process the social construction of reality, the social definition of situations. The world we live in has an obdurate quality and the truth we derive is essentially subjective. The roots of this sociological perspective go back to sociologists like Max Weber and George Herbert Mead and pragmatist philosophers like Pierce and Dewey in the nineteenth century. -Ron Price, “Notes on Symbolic Interactionism,” Ron Price’s Notebooks, 2005.



While the Kingdom of God on Earth

was getting its kick-start in Chicago

with a wonderful and thrilling motion

from a point of light and a spirit slowly

or quickly permeating to the entire world,

you1 were pointing your finger at meaning,

interpretation, the power of understanding,

the advent of entirely new prophets: only

these would bring the promised hope of escape

from icy darkness, hardness, self-extinction,

inner-deadness at the core of the life of culture.2



For the motion was thrilling, the faintest trace,

hardly observed, but the clamour, He knew,

was coming, the cry, the groaning, would be

heard far and near in our intimate quarters

where we sat quietly eating our steak and pie.

Then, then, the knights would come, knights

assisted, strengthened, reinforced in the midst

of confusion, noise, tumult, stupendous struggle.3



1 Herbert Blumer, major 20th century sociologist of symbolic interactionism.

2 Max Weber, “Weber and The Search for ‘Interpretation’ and ‘Understanding,’” Ron Price’s Sociology Notes, 1998; and Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1949, pp.72-176.

3 ‘Abdu’l-Baha in The World Order of Baha’u’llah, Shoghi Effendi, 1974(1938), p. 17.

-Ron Price March 22nd, 2005






At the beginning of the Seven Year Plan in 1937 the term symbolic interactionism was coined by Herbert Blumer. Symbolic Interactionism is based on the premises that (i) human beings act on the basis of meaning; (ii) meaning arises out of interaction with others and (iii) an interpretive process, an imaginative reheasal, is used by individuals to deal with their environment. Some call this process the social construction of reality, the social definition of situations. The world we live in has an obdurate quality and the truth we derive is essentially subjective. The roots of this sociological perspective go back to sociologists like Max Weber and George Herbert Mead and pragmatist philosophers like Pierce and Dewey in the nineteenth century. -Ron Price, “Notes on Symbolic Interactionism,” Ron Price’s Notebooks, 2005.



While the Kingdom of God on Earth

was getting its kick-start in Chicago

with a wonderful and thrilling motion

from a point of light and a spirit slowly

or quickly permeating to the entire world,

you1 were pointing your finger at meaning,

interpretation, the power of understanding,

the advent of entirely new prophets: only

these would bring the promised hope of escape

from icy darkness, hardness, self-extinction,

inner-deadness at the core of the life of culture.2



For the motion was thrilling, the faintest trace,

hardly observed, then, even now, but the clamour,

He knew, was coming, the cry, the groaning,

would be heard far and near in intimately

where we sat quietly with our steak and pie.

Then, then, the knights would come, knights

assisted, strengthened, reinforced in the midst

of confusion, noise, tumult, stupendous struggle.3



1 Max Weber and Herbert Blumer, major 20th century sociologists of symbolic interactionism. 2 Max Weber, “Weber and The Search for ‘Interpretation’ and ‘Understanding,’” Ron Price’s Sociology Notes, 1998; and Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1949, pp.72-176. 3‘Abdu’l-Baha in The World Order of Baha’u’llah, Shoghi Effendi, 1974(1938), p. 17.

-Ron Price March 22nd, 2005



AN UNDERTAKING



The last third of the twentieth century, beginning with the year I graduated from university, was ushered in by a set of events: wars, rebellions, assassinations, economic crisis and the election of the apex of the Baha’i administrative order. This Universal House of Justice is the trustee of a global undertaking set in motion over one hundred years ago, an undertaking that has gradually captured the imagination and loyalty of several million people. In 1968 a tremendous impetus to the majestic unfoldment of this new, this Baha’i, system took place and an impetus to the diffusion of spiritual inspiration. That year the Baha’i community established the Continental Board of Counsellors, a further unfoldment of its Administrative Order. The event commemorated the Centenary of Baha’u’llah’s arrival in the Holy Land on August 31st, 1868.



A world revolution took place one hundred years later in 1968, so William Martin argues,1 which sparked “a total and irreversible crisis in the entire system of branches of knowledge regarding the social domain,” a system which dated from 1870. A world-systems scholarship centred in the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein was also born that year.1 -Ron Price with thanks to William G. Martin, “Rethinking Current Social Sciences: The Case of Historical Discourses in the History of Modernity,” Journal of World Systems Research, Vol.6, No.3, 2000, p.750









One hundred years, to the week, after Baha’u’llah arrived in Akka, the Baha’is held their first Oceanic Conference in Palermo. At the same time the Democrats held their National Convention in Chicago. The former event was “glorious” and the latter “frightening”. I was recuperating in a hospital at the time. -Ron Price with thanks to Alister Cook and his analysis of Chicago, ABC Radio, 1 September 1996: 7:15 PM.


The voyage made by that God-man Baha’u’llah

from Gallipolli to the Most Great Prison,

forced upon Him, His fourth banishment,

made it apparent by all earthly standards

that this Cause would founder, wither and die.



One hundred years later in commemoration

of that journey, while violent disruptions

seized the Democratic National Convention

in Chicago and the Nine Year Plan languished

with more than half the goals still to be won,

a community in sore need of a spiritual dynamic,

a grand momentum to transform sombre notes

of disaster into the diapason of triumph,

raised its prayers to the Lord of the Age,

the Lord of Hosts, the lifegiver of the world

at that first Oceanic Conference.



While defiant hippies insighted riots

in that mammoth city of the plains

where the Kingdom of God began

unobtrusively only fifteen years before,

the majestic unfoldment of a new Order

saw one of its most precious assets

effloresce to safeguard and promote

this Faith: difficult to establish,

difficult to understand, organic,

complex and requiring time, time.



A dynamic synchronization took place

as it had been taking place, perhaps,

since 1844, this time in June to August

of that summer of 1968, a turning point

in my own life, in the life of my society.



Back then,1 when Bobby Kennedy

was assassinated,2 when Paris witnessed

a celebration of the imagination,

a rejection of Marxism and archaic

structures of authority in those riots,3

when those great affairs of the day,

those events of history were changing

the direction of the lives of humanity,

for the most part unbeknownst,

I taught grade three Eskimos

at a priority pioneering post

on Baffin Island for the last time

and began a hospitalization

in my life’s major episode

of a bi-polar disorder.4



Later I was to learn that

1968 was also a new beginning

for the Inuit of the Eastern Arctic,5

at least those in Iqaluit6 who gave

expression to an energy which

had been part and parcel

of their spiritual inheritance,

part of a superhuman exertion

of millennia, a tour de force

that seemed to be required

by the Inuit and us yet again.



1 21 June 1968, the Appointment of the Continental Board of Counsellors

2 Bobby Kennedy was assassinated on June 8th 1968

3 The Paris riots of May 1968

4 I was hospitalized on the first Monday from early June to early December 1968

5 In an email/letter from Joshie Mitsima, November 13 2004.

6 Eskimo name for Frobisher Bay where I pioneered in 1967-8.



Ron Price

26/10/01-22/3/05



COMMUNIFYING



As the first Seven Year Plan was opening in 1937, The College of Sociology(Le College de Sociolgie) also opened in Paris. Its founding members included Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris. The College dedicated itself to the study of power, the sacred and myth. They took a special interest in the practice of sacred sociology: "not only the study of religious institutions but of the entire communifying movement within society."1 The communifying movement of society: its festivals, carnivals, monastic and military orders, secret societies, brotherhoods and, implicitly, the sense of community throughout The College of Sociology itself were all included in the ambit of this sacred sociology. There was, too, a certain fascination, ambiguous connection with the ideas of fascism in the thought of some of its founders.



The founding members of the College were charged with the urgent task of preserving and regenerating the communal and the sacred element within modernity, an element threatened with extinction by the dissection of society into autonomous, separate spheres of science, politics and the arts. When the contractual logic which governs liberal democratic societies separates people, the sacred survives as an incommensurable, an inadequate, remainder.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Denis Bataille in Hollier, The College of Sociology: 1937-1939, Trans. Betsy Wing, Univ. of Minnesota Press,Minneapolis,1988,p74.



I’ll bet they did not even look at

the embryonic Baha’i world

which was moving toward


the end of its first century,

defining its structure, creating

its ethos, its community,

beginning to conscientiously

following the laws and teachings

of its Great Founders within

a global administrative Order,

constructing its temples,

more than just a loosely

connected movement,

increasingly unified

in doctrinal matters,

propagating its system,

launching itself on an

international missionary

program that would last

for many generations.



Ron Price

March 24 2005



MY POSTAGE STAMP



In my fifties I had only begun to write seriously, had only begun to give myself up to solitude. At a similar age and after he had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature(1950), William Faulkner looked back at the period of his greatest artistic achievement(1929-1942) and made the comment: I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel.”1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1William Faulkner in “The Making of William Faulkner,” The New York Review of Books, Vol.52, No.6, 2005.



I too, William, had my own

little postage stamp to write

on and about, in and with.

I would never exhaust

fact or fiction,

truth and musings,

my pleasure and others.

I’d never find out if my work

was inspired by talent,

some leavening force,

simple desire to serve

or a concupiscible appetite,

a sublimated irascibility,

a persistent desire to follow

my own abyss of inclinations,

a fatigue with conversation

and sociability, an immense

desire for solitude where I found

I was, by my fifties, never less alone

than when I was alone and

giving myself up to it, Hazlitt-like.1



1 Great 19th century British essayist.



Ron Price

March 28th 2005

                THIS SECRET LIFE



It was your belief, William, that the true artist is solitary by nature. Certainly, by the time I began to seriously venture into the land of the artist my nature or my desires had become solitary. I had had my fix of the social and its attendant pleasures, its responsibilities and frustrations. It had been a forty year fix from Baffin Island in Canada to Zeehan in Tasmania, say, 1955 to 1995 or, perhaps more accurately, 1953 to 1993.



It was your experience too, William, of a desultory domestic guerrilla warfare as Joseph Blotner called your long and unhappy marriage of more than forty years. I’ve had my share of warfare in two marriages, but I was not soured by these intimate encounters over my forty years, 1967-2005, with 1974 and 1975 ending one and beginning another. You suffered more than I, William, with marriage, with depression, with alcohol, with relationships generally, with your inner daimons, in your battle with destiny, with your anger, with social mores and values. I had my battles too with depression, a bi-polar disorder with the virtual cessation of sex after 15 years of marriage, with an immense fatigue, ennui, with life, but these battles were all episodic, short-lived in the angst they created in my spirit.-Ron Price with thanks to J.M. Coetzee, “The Making of William Faulkner,” The New York Review of Books, April 7th, 2005.



You had your binges1

when you could let your

mind go, let it stop,

let it swim in some

misty half-world space,

feel the cobwebs slip away,

reset your inner, private, clock,

let your well refill slowly,

unobtrusively and obtrusively

as if in a long, deep sleep:

incomprehensible addiction,

part of who you were,

what you’d become.



William, something else

lets me respond creatively

to the historical and social

forces of my time as I live

through my destiny, persist

in trying to understand

the impulses that have led

me beyond my dreams

in this secret life, this dark

twin wherein I feel compelled

to come to terms with the Baha’i

in this emerging global psyche.



1 Faulkner was diagnosed as “An acute and chronic alcoholic” in a psychiatric hospital in Memphis. Some, like his editor in 1952, said it was a tragedy to witness the disintegration of a man.



Ron Price

March 28th 2005



A TRICHOTOMY NOT A DICHOTOMY



One of the commonly expressed existential dichotomies that confronts poets is that between their “life” and their “work”--that is choosing between the activities of their life: family, job, interests, friends, etc. and their writing, their poetry. To put it in a different sequence, in another way, as Tagore did: the poem not the poet. Sometimes poets who choose their life as the centre of their poetic content are accused of self-promotion, egocentricity and a deficiency of humility. For me this dichotomy is only one way to express the way the poet responds to life. The journey for the poet, it seems to me, is one of infinite variety, a striving for unity in multiplicity, for a harmonizing of contrariety: poem, poet, life, work, every atom in existence and the essence of all created things, as Baha’u’llah put it in His Hidden Words, all operate on the poetic landscape.



They operate in several triangles or trichotomies of forces: existence, perception and expression; personal life, religion and society; purity, independence and freedom; social sciences, humanities and autobiography, the three temporal perspectives of past, present and future, inter alia. Poetry is the result of the complex interaction of this multiplicity of forces. And so I find, with Stephen Dobyns: “I write poems to find out why I write poems.” -Ron Price with thanks to Stephen Dobyns, “Two Interviews,” The Cortland Review, 2004.



Perhaps they blew my way

on falling leaves part of

that obdurate autumnal

canvas that is Canada now

and the drama of winter death

that I left over thirty years ago.



Perhaps they floated my way

onto the beach beside the Lake

Ontario after that awful war;

or drifted over the piano,

down from the book shelves

of that old man who read


even more now in the evening

of his life without the worry

of jobs and kids and the war.



Perhaps they fell off her hands:

beautiful, tender, so very fine,

that mother who tried to care

for that child she had waited for

so long entre des guerres with

humanity entering the outer fringes

of the most perilous stage of its existence.



Both of them wrote, but mostly life

called them in a thousand ways.



Perhaps they were cast into my life

on words warmed by those tender

ministerings of the Centre of the

Covenant and on rays whose radiance

was illuminating the surface of the earth,

in one of Canada’s more active centres

back then and in the opening stage of a

transatlantic field of service where

I would one day lay my bones.



Ron Price

March 29th 2005



ENDS AND BEGINNINGS



It has been said--by the historian H.A.L. Fisher--that the battle of Waterloo in 1815 was “the last act of a tragedy, the end of one age and the beginning of another.”1 In the same year, 1815, Siyyid Kazim left his home in the province of Gilan to visit Shaykh Ahmad in Yazd before the Shaykh went to Khurasan on a pilgrimage. The young Siyyid was 222 and before leaving for Khurasan Shaykh Ahmad passed the leadership of the Shaykhi School to Siyyid Kazim that same year.3 Like some prelude to this ‘end time’ and ‘new beginning’ Beethoven composed his inspiring Emperor Concerto. -Ron Price with thanks to 1H.A.L. Fisher, A History of Europe,Vol.II, The Fontana Library, 1973(1935), p.959; 2Glenn Cameron, A Basic Baha’i Chronology, 1996, p.3--says he was 18 or 19 in 1815;&3Nabil, The Dawnbreakers, Baha’i Publishing Trust, Wilmette, 1974(1932), p.10-11.



No matter who had won that battle1

Napoleon would have succumbed


to the united strength of Europe

and I suspect no matter who had led2

in that same crucial year of 1815

the world would have succumbed


to that great God-man of Persia

who faced death and exile

in a different Isle of Elba.3



Perhaps that Emperor Concerto4

tells the story of one who struggled

with the silence and anguish

of this world to get it to yield

meaning: one of the most original,

most imaginative, most brilliant

and most difficult pieces of pure

poetry, pathos and triumphant joy--

while a young, pious, gentle, humble

youth memorized the Qur’an,

a prodigous number of prayers

and traditions and composed

a commentary that excited

the awe and wonder of all.



1 Waterloo 2 Siyyid Kazim 3 The island where Napoleon died

4 Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.5



Ron Price

April 2 2005



NEW PROBLEMS
After a weekend involving 20 hours of socializing, I was engaged in a 90 minute telephone call on Monday and a 90 minute conversation with a friend on Tuesday. Although none of these experiences were unpleasant, I felt they were part of the slow sucking of my life forces. I did not have to face the various degrees of trauma, the varying severity of calamities and the diverse social entanglements that had been part of the long march in my life from 8 to 58: ill-health, marital tensions, employment pressures, perplexities in my sex life, frustrations in Baha’i administration and Baha’i community, worries in my affinal and consanguineal family, worries in raising my own children and in financial matters, inter alia. All of these problematic aspects of life had been removed from my shoulders. In their place I had been given the joys of creative writing and the creative tension that came from having to endure so many conversations and social activity and a residue of bi-polar problems. I really felt I had no reason to complain & I rarely did, except to my wife.
-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 17th 2005.

This all sounds wonderfully simple
in these early years of late adulthood.
But it is not by any means the story.
It is only one story, part of the story:
one can not tell it all, untimely parts,
unsuited to the ears of the hearers
to tell it all in the finest of detail.

There is a kind of knife-edge that
does not allow me to go too far
both here in this poem and in life.
Those 24 hours of talk, talk, talk,
listen, listen, listen are just about
as much as I can bear—for I am
taken to the edge, always to the edge
of uttermost exhaustion and fatigue.

The divine power released in these new
and halcyon days, the liberal effusion
of celestial grace, the fresh impulse,
the acceleration of my life’s march,
winning in the process compelling
victories--have brought new crises
and calamities which I can not defeat.
They will conquer me unless some
mysterious dispensation of Providence,
some scattering angels sooner or later
exercise their influence on my soul.

Ron Price November 17th 2005



2 BAHA’I ACTIVITIES: A CONTEXT



If Henry David Thoreau could write about the seasons, nature and the micro-events of his life and times in 14 volumes from 1837 to 1861, and if a host of other writers have written about a massive quantity of life’s minutiae in their many published works, I feel confident that the microcosm of my own experience is worthy of some literary expression---associated as it is with the slow growth in the community and institutional development of a prophetic message which I believe has had and will have an enormous impact on this planet in the last century and a half and the decades and centuries ahead.


Historian Professor Marilyn Lake1 pointed out today why celebrations and commemorations of the slaughter of WWI become more prominent and more popular as the conflict itself grows ever more distant, some 85 years now. She also pointed out the importance of repetition in this historical process. Repetition is at the core of tradition and history. Amidst all this remembering, she warned, we may be in danger of forgetting some of the essential truths about war. These same comments could apply to the Baha’i community, its history, its celebrations and commemorations both the ones I am involved with and the many more to come.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Marilyn Lake on “National Interest,” ABC Radio National, November 13th 2005.



20 hours of driving and chatting,
eating and drinking,
waving the Baha’i flag
and celebrating a Holy Day,
events that take place every year.
They deserve a place in this vast
collection of writing, poetry, history
and autobiography as Alex Miller
put it today on Books and Writing.1

Telling your story, creating your life,
introspecting, finding a joy, an ecstasy
that could not be found any other way
even when it deals with the mundane,
the ordinarily ordinary, humanly human,
such were some of the things Miller said.
He also said things that come close to my
own experience and I insert them here.2

What's the best thing about being a writer?
Not surprisingly one of the most gratifying things about being a writer is the sense of an anonymous readership. The sense of the private conversation being read. I don't want to meet my readers….Being a writer allows me to be solitary for several hours every day! I enjoy the company of my family and friends all the more for this. There is a kind of magic about being in the company of people when one spends most of one's time alone.


What's the worst thing about being a writer?


I can't think of anything bad about being a writer even though it has its moments of pure agony. It's what I choose to do. I love it. I know it's a great privilege. I admire other writers. Without writing, my life is meaningless. Or at least it seems so. An illusion maybe, but writing makes everything else bearable and worthwhile. I don't know why.

1 Alex Miller, “Books and Writing,” ABC Radio National, 1:05-1:30 p.m., November 13th 2005.
2 Allen and Unwin Website, 2005.

Ron Price
November 13th 2005.

THOREAU

If Henry David Thoreau could write about the seasons, nature and the micro-events of his life and times in 14 volumes from 1837 to 1861, and if a host of other writers can write about a massive quantity of life’s minutiae in their many published works, I feel confident that the microcosm of my own experience, associated as it is with the slow growth in the community and institutional development of a prophetic message which I believe has had and will have an enormous impact on this planet in the decades and centuries ahead, is worthy of some literary expression.

Historian Professor Marilyn Lake pointed out today why celebrations and commemorations of the slaughter of WWI become more promiment and more popular as the conflict itself grows ever more distant. She points out, too, the importance of repetition in this process, as part of the basis of tradition and history. Amidst all this remembering, are we in danger of forgetting some essential truths about war, she asks. These same comments could apply to the Baha’i community, its history, its celebrations and commemorations.-Ron Price with thanks to Marilyn Lake on “National Interest,” ABC Radio National, November 13th 2005.

20 hours of driving and chatting,
eating and drinking,
waving the Baha’i flag
and celebrating a Holy Day,
events that take place every year.
They deserve a place in this vast
collection of writing, poetry, history
and autobiography as Alex Miller
put it today on Books and Writing.1

Telling your story, creating your life,
Introspecting, finding a joy, an ecstacy
that could not be found any other way
even when it deals with the mundane,
the ordinarily ordinary, humanly human.


1 Alex Miller, “Books and Writing,” ABC Radio National, 1:05-1:30 p.m., November 13th 2005.

Ron Price
November 13th 2005.


THE TRIUMVIRATE

Andrew Slack, the captain of the Australian rugby team, The Wallabies, was interviewed on “The Sports Factor” an ABC Radio National program yesterday, November 11th 2005. He made one or two comments that I thought had a bearing, surprisingly, on my approach to writing. He was talking about professional teams and how the players on contract who get paid salaries have to eat, drink and sleep their game. He said that he thought that the professionalization of a sport can dampen the quality of the performance because it occupies so much of the player’s time. While I was listening to Mr. Slack it was about 9 am and I was driving to Scottsdale, a small town of several thousand in the northeast of Tasmania. ABC Radio repeats the program in the evening and I chanced to be driving home that same day and caught the program again. It was during this second hearing that the poetry-rugby connection struck me forcibly.-Ron Price with thanks to Andrew Slack, “The Sports Factor,” ABC Radio National, November 11th 2005.

I find I can only devote
so much time to this my
obsession-triumvirate of:
reading, writing, Baha’i.
About 8 hours out of 16
allows me to remain fresh
each day for more & more.

Eating, breathing and sleeping
every waking moment---dealing
with this triumvirate---would
exhaust the fibres of my being.
But a little: walking, dishes,
cooking, cleaning, chatting,
tv and radio, a meeting, a trip
to the tip, the shop, the PO,
into town, a visit with a friend
and I can come back to this trio
again and again and again: you
are right Andrew. I’m better as
an amateur with no salary and
no one pushing me but myself.

Ron Price
November 12th 2005


SECOND BEST

Self-doubt is both the originating matrix of modern philosophy and the source of a considerable part of its energy. For the last three or four hundred years, self-doubt has defined the most salient and persistent ambitions of philosophical inquiry. But the vitality and the flavor of our contemporary life are notoriously impaired by modes of radical ambivalence that are more poignant and more urgent, in some ways, than the sceptical inhibitions imposed upon life by Descartes(1596-1650: dubito ergo sum) and his successors. Scepticism for Descartes was a means of arriving at true beliefs. In today’s world scepticism is more of a pervasive attitude of mind than a way of arriving at truth. Needless to say, however, the story of ambivalence is an old one: people have suffered from divided wills, and from being alienated from themselves, for a long time. St. Augustine writes of this in his Confessions 1600 years ago.1 St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin, Penguin Books, London, 1961, p. 172.

A unified undivided will,
being wholehearted, can be
part of a healthy mind:
mind and heart on one track.
The wholehearted person
knows what he wants.
He knows where he stands
with regard to any conflict
of feelings or tendencies
within himself, so far as
his loving is concerned.
He is wholeheartedly
invested, convinced.
He lends himself to it,
identifies with it--without
qualification or reserve.

This will is purely his own.
It is the purity of wholehearted
will, the core of self-love
kneaded into the very clay
of humankind and has a wonderful
centre of triumph, excellence
and exaltation unchecked by maybe.

Spinoza suggested the highest thing
for which we can hope is this self-love.1
What is it about an undivided will
that qualifies it as the most precious
goal of life? Self-abandonment,
more valuable than cerebral consent,
the heavenly fool, the God-knower,
a double-lensed burning glass, artist-
seer who produces beauty,
the soul’s glimpse of certitude,
leaves no word untouched by wonder,
invites crimson astonishment to leap
through our veins, impelled by urgency
that tells of the soul’s flight—
not the mind’s ease.2

A divided will is self-defeating.
If the will is not divided, no part
with which one is identified
is opposed to or resists
his loving what he loves.
He is altogether wholehearted
in loving what he loves.

Volitional disunity requires us to act
in contrary directions at the same time.
A deficiency in wholeheartedness
is an irrationality that infects our lives.
To be free from interference from oneself
and others is tantamount to being satisfied
with oneself, to being wholehearted.
This is not easy to come by and,
if you can’t come by it, then cultivate
a sense of humour: that’s second best.

1 Harry Frankfurt, “Dear Self,” Philosophers’ Imprint, 2005.
2 Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” Baha’i Studies, Vol.10, pp. 3-5.

Ron Price
November 6th 2005


MANY RON PRICE’S

There are many Ron Price’s on the internet. At one site the reader will be informed that “You've arrived at the internet site for a New Zealand medical drama called Shorthand Street.” It is about the lives and loves of the doctors, nurses, staff and patients at the Shorthand Street Hospital. The character Ron Price first appeared in the episode on July 27th 2004 at 7pm. Ron is a well-dressed, moderately successful, middle-class man in his forties. He is conservative by nature and feels threatened by cultures he doesn’t understand. His wife, Pauline Price, appeared on the same program also for the first time. Pauline is a well-educated, middle-class woman in her forties. Conservative by nature, she has enjoyed being a homemaker for her husband, Ron. They share an interest in gardening and the firm belief that the different races shouldn’t mix. Although she’s aware this is deeply unpolitically correct, Pauline isn’t afraid to air her views.
–Ron Price with thanks to “Street Talk: A Website for Shorthand Street.”

Other Ron Price’s at various websites include: Ron Price Motors(Subaru) in South San Francisco; a graphic artist Ronald Fullerton Price born in Chicago, Illinois on April 30, 1939 and died in 1998; another Ron Price has written articles on the New Testament for 20 years; there is Ron Price the photographer; a Ron Price who joined the Dallas ISD Board in 1997 and served as secretary and co-chair of its personnel committee; a Ron Price who was born on 5 Nov 1937 in Bradford, W.Yorkshire and educated at the Bradford Grammar School; there is a Ron Price who is Chair of some Radiation Safety Committee; Ron Price, a candidate for the Republican Party and member of the Santa Cruz County Central Committee; and an alleged wife beater. On and on goes the list.-Ron Price with thanks to the many internet sites found under the name of Ron Price.

Some names are common
and found on the internet
like my father’s name:
Fred Price dozens of them
found in geneological tables
and historical sites going back
hundreds of years about as common
as air like the nameless and traceless
millions, about as meaningful
as the eye of a dead ant
in the ultimate scheme of things.

To extract poetry from such a common
entity, to make such an entity interesting
now there’s the rub. Can I mould this
brute matter into form, this ordinary
thing into the extraordinary or, in the end,
will I create a worthless prose-poem
not visited by any aesthetic passion,
by any spell and so cast it on readers
without pleasure or meaning?

Ron Price
September 3rd 2005


PUBLISHED AT LAST

Yesterday while on the internet I discovered that if I typed my name, Ron Price, into the Google search box or, indeed, the search box of any one of a number of other search engines and then typed some subject like history, sociology, media studies, film studies, among a host of other topics/subjects--and then clicked the right/defined spot, a number of websites would appear, listing ten per page, with my writing located at several dozen sub-sites. There were literally dozens of search engines, dozens of subjects and dozens of sites where my writing could be located in this way. I tried the following subjects with much success: ancient history, jobs, poetry, autobiography, literature, psychology, religion, philosophy, Baha’i, Emily Dickinson, Edward Gibbon, Arnold Toynbee, inter alia. The list seemed to be just about endless.

After four years of posting my writings on the internet under many headings and at many sites, in addition to those above, I have ‘published’ enough to satisfy whatever desires I have ever possessed in this connection, in relation to fame and renown and publicizing the name of the Baha’i Faith as much as possible. Like some vast directory, file, archive or library, my writings could be easily located in bite-size, accessible, chunks. After 20 years(1981-2001) of trying unsuccessfully to get publishers to place my ideas under a hard cover and after 40 years of writing(1959-1999: age 15 to 55) with little publishing success, here was my writing spread out all over the world wide web.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, October 3rd 2005.

It’s all very autobiographical,
but the way I’ve set it all out
allows for generalizable,
theoretical, expositions,
of doctrine and teachings
in a personalized, subjectized,
individualized perspective----
not at all suitable to autobiography
according to Roy Pascal one the major
theorists of autobiography in my time.1

There is a desire for exaltation
here, an exaltation of a Cause
and the magnification of the station
of a new, emerging, world community.

1 Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, Harvard UP, Cambridge Mass., 1960, p.182.-Ron Price,October 3rd 2005


THE MOST GREAT PRISON

Perhaps once every 12 months during the years 1999 to 2005 my wife and I would go to Hobart from George Town. Our purposes in making this three hour drive were varied: to visit a friend, to go to a doctor, to attend a Baha’i function or spend a day with a Baha’i family. George Town was a beautiful locality of some 7000 people and Hobart a beautiful city of many thousands more. My wife and I lived in a beautiful part of God’s world. By my late fifties and early sixties, though, I took less and less interest in travelling to cities, towns, anywhere really, however attractive the place was, whatever was the function involved or whoever the friend was at the other end.

The world I lived in, in these early years of retirement from full-time work and, by 2005, retirement from part-time, casual and nearly all volunteer work---was increasingly an inner one. Looking at scenery, articles in shops, the inside of waiting rooms, or the many attractive women who were part of urban landscapes was not an entirely empty experience; nor was listening to speakers, chatting informally for any number of hours to people I knew or didn’t know and munching a good meal or two without some allure. But whatever meaning, whatever allure, these activities had once possessed over several decades, the intensity, the delight, the significance, the pleasure had been largely drained from my sensory and intellectual emporium by my 60th birthday.

Only necessity, obligation, and duty would move me from my home and hearth and its attendant pleasures of habit, taste and mind. It was not that external events like visits and trips were unpleasant affairs; for I found them, on the whole, relaxing, mildly stimulating and usually useful to someone or other beside myself. Nor was it that I had become a complete hedonist taking care of number one, a skill I had refined with finesse over many a year. It was, rather, that at home I was engaged in an activity that had been the passion of my life for some forty years and I felt finally, after more than four decades of slow advance, I was at last getting my teeth into it. As I approached the half-century mark I was able to engage this passion to the fullest and it was so completely satisfying.1

At any rate, here I was in mid-afternoon, just before the Melbourne Cup was about to be run on November 1st 2005, sitting in Wellington Court in downtown Hobart on a clean iron bench outside Connor’s Shoe Repairs while my wife shopped in “Your Habitat,” a shop off the Court, writing these words reflecting as was the desire of the moment on more than five decades of Baha’i experience and the events of this day in the last month of spring in Tasmania. -Ron Price, 1“Teaching Over Five Decades: One Man’s View,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 1st, 2005.

Life moves on through the warm
afternoon sunshine here in Hobart
as life always moves on no matter
if it’s a 12 hour annual trip to the city
before getting back home whatever
was the purpose and whenever in the year
or if it’s one of a thousand other things.

The Baha’i Centre will soon be ready,
perhaps, I hear, six months from now.
I can see the building peaking above
a world of trees under a blue sky
as the sun coats everything with its glitter:
it goes by faster than the twinkling of an eye
I can’t take it all in: its all too fast.
“That’s the city,” I say to myself.

With no energy left to join the Baha’is
in Launceston for the evening program,
we head straight for home and the usual
day’s regularities in our Most Great Prison.

Ron Price
November 1st, 2005.


CARICATURE AND INERTIA

The French historian Fernand Braudel and the sociologist Raymond Aron held the view that 'the phase of civilisations is coming to an end, and for good or ill humanity is embarking on a new phase' - that of a single civilisation which could become universal.'1 At the same time, he was convinced that the deep structures embedded in regional and national identities were not about to disappear and that for a long time yet, the word civilisation would continue to be used in both the singular and plural.' This view is a consistent one with my understanding of an aspect of the Baha’i view of the future of the term civilization. Braudel’s method and certainly mine as I attempt my poetic analysis of aspects of civilisation is to look first at its geographical situation. Braudel focuses on the economic and urban development of civilizations far more than I do. The sociological and psychological features of a civilization occupy a higher place in my study than in Braudel’s.

Despite the caricature that is often drawn of Braudel as a geographical determinist who ignored the agency of individual human beings, he accords roughly equal importance to each of these facets of social organisation. The Baha’i teachings underpinning my poetry are also caricatured from time to time as the basis for some vast system of global uniformity whereas in reality these teaching provide a basis for unity in diversity and a harmony of group and individual goals. It is true that the reader will meet few political leaders in Braudel’s text, but he will find numerous mathematicians, philosophers, scientists and religious thinkers. Readers will meet an immense cross-section of people in Price’s poetry, the people he knew in the Baha’i community and in the wider community as well as the media.-Ron Price with thanks to Norman Etherington, “Review of Fernand Braudel’s A History of Civilizations, Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History, March 1997.

After more than 50 years of swimming
around in this emerging world religion
in the early stages of global civilization
and its immense diversity, in the deeply
embedded structures of Arctic, Australian
and Canadian identities that are not about
to disappear in the frozen Tundra, the semi-
desert, the savanna, the temperate rainforest
or here at the edge of the Tamar River near
the Bass Strait in Australia’s oldest town---

I often feel I have come to know every man
and his dog in an overwhelming blooming
and buzzing confusion that can be partially
tamed in some mutual coercion mutually
agreed upon, some minimalist behavioural
controls—and I’d write the drama that I
have seen of individual human action
but I don’t have the skill.

I feel an inertia which is a great artisan
of history’s story in this slow, mute,
complicated affair of life in lower depths
where I would like readers to taste the bread
and smell the rice, sweet-cake, but I can’t.

Ron Price
October 30th 2005


ENERGIZE: VIRGINIA

For some people, the question of the meaning of life closes in on them with age; for others the question arises only periodically and so rarely as to be virtually dispensed with. It does not obtrude. For others the question is answered sufficiently for life to go on without major philosophical obstructions. Everyone gets their daily miracles, illuminations, pleasures, matches struck in the darkness of life’s journey, a good meal, a laugh, the energy from the blooming and buzzing confusion of life, if not every day then many a day. Millions never experience a great revelation; it just never comes. They must make of the moment something permanent, something meaningful. They must give shape to the chaos of life each in their own way. The eternal passing and flowing, the little separate incidents, must be given a stability, a continuity, a unity in the whole, in the interstices of the daily round, the reflections on life and various anticipated futures. For without this whole, this unity, there is a sense of the aimless, the chaotic, the fragmented.-Ron Price with thanks to “Darkness Beyond the Lighthouse: Virginia Wolf, Charles Baudelaire and Literary Modernism,” Nebula, Vol.2 No.3, September 2005.

Art is not enough, Virginia.
It’s a precarious balance
between the transient and
the eternal, the contingent
and the absolute; alone it
can not triumph over life,
cannot provide faith’s leap,
cannot be the ground of being,
the cure for the sense of dread.

One needs a centred structure,
universe, fundamental ground,
immobility, reassuring certitude
beyond play, master of anxiety,
something solid which does not
melt into air, some quintessential
meaning, unity, whole, some truth
which is perennial but not archaic,
some eschatology which is not
seemingly arbitrary and mythical,
with an abstruse, absurd, literalism.

That semi-transparent envelope,
that luminous halo which we take
from cradle to grave, inner song
of Keat’s nightingale with it’s
full-throated ease of inspired
self-disclosure or a song free
from the taint of ego-personal,
when life has gone--will this envelope,
this song, this halo, be disinfected,
purified from the changes and chances
of the world, freed from the limitations,
restrictions imposed by this earthly life,
its influence no longer circumscribed by
physical limitations, its radiance no longer
clouded by this human temple, will it energize
the world to a degree unapproached during
its terrestrial days on its way to dusty death.1

1 Virginia Woolf takes up this issue in The Craft of Fiction quoted in Daniel Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, Routledge, NY, 1990, p.4.

Ron Price
October 27th 2005