VOLUME FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

(Part 1)

As we approach the end of this somewhat rambling autobiography,

the inclusion of this essay seemed perfectly appropriate. So much

of my life has been a 'life-in-community' that I thought I would

give some of the last words on the subject to that brilliant tactician

of the personal and interpersonal, 'Abdu'l-Baha, who survived a

most difficult community and advised us on how to live in

community in our time. As our own communties have been, are

and will be challenges for us to live in this analysis of some of

'Abdu'l-Baha's final words before He passed away several years

later will be timely. This section of my autobiography, then, will

deal with biography, ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s treatment of the subject and,

then, a few brief notes of mine.

1

"A Study in Community," Pioneering Over Four Epochs," 2003. 1

"With penetrating detail, crisp style and emphasis on the

compression of facts; with vivid images, usually not more than

three or four pages, with a concision of explanation or

commentary, with a specific point of view, a style of biography has

continued from classical times into the twentieth century. This is

biography in miniature. It has a certain bias toward the person over

the event, toward art as smallness of scale, toward structuring the

confusions of daily life into patterns of continuity and process.

There is a broad intent to sustain an interpretation or

characterisation with facts teased, coloured, given life by a certain

presentation and appraisal. Facts about the past are no more history

than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are an omelette. They must be

whipped up and played with in a certain fashion." -Ron Price with

appreciation to Ira Bruce Nadel, “Biography as Institution,”

1 This essay was originally written March 2000 and significantly edited in a second draft on May 2001 for the Baha'i newsletter ABS(English Speaking Europe) Issue 35. An important portion was added at the end of this second draft after reading Derek Pearsall's comments on The Canterbury Tales.

2

Biography, Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1984,

pp.13-66.

______________________________________________________

_________

Nadel, whom I quote in the opening passage of this essay, goes on

to say that the “recreation of a life in words is one of the most

beautiful and difficult tasks a literary artist can perform."2 Freud

said the recreation of a life, the getting at the truth of a life, can not

be done; and if someone does do it, as inevitably biographers try,

the result is not useful to us.3 People have been trying to write

about the lives of others for millennia and, even if Freud is right,

they will probably go on doing it anyway. ‘Abdu’l-Baha gives the

exercise a parting shot, to put it colloquially, in the evening of his

life, when He was in His early seventies. His work, Memorials of

the Faithful, is squarely in the tradition Nadel describes above:

commemorative, didactic, ethical, psychological. His is a work of

2 Ira Bruce Nadel, "Biography as Institution", Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984, pp.13-66.3 Sigmund Freud in Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay, W.W. Norton and Co., NY, 1988, p.xv-xvi.

3

art as well as information, a work of pleasure as well as truth. His

is a work of selection, as biography must be if the reader is not to

be snowed in a mountain of useless detail. He unravels the

complexities of seventy-seven lives and in doing so he answers

Virginia Woolf’s questions: ‘My God, how does one write a

biography?’ and ‘What is a life?’ If one can not answer these

questions, Woolf wrote, then one can hardly write a biography.4

The act of reading Memorials of the Faithful is an opportunity to

see how ‘Abdu’l-Baha answers Virginia Woolf’s seminal questions

about life, how He answers them again and again in the more than

six-dozen of His biographies in miniature. Biographers and

autobiographers arguably have one freedom, a freedom that

overrides the genetic and social forces that determine so much of

human life.5 It is the freedom to tell the story, the narrative, the

freedom to explain a life, any life, even one’s own life to

themselves and others the way they desire. This freedom is part of

4 Virginia Woolf in Nadel, op. cit., p.141.5 Arnold Ludwig, How Do We Know Who We Are? Oxford UP, Reviewed in New Scientist, 8 November 1997.

4

that active force of will that ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote, in his pithy

summation of the historico-philosophical issue of ‘freewill and

determinism,’6 is at the centre of all our lives.

Of course, it is incontrovertible that what has happened in a life has

happened. There is no going back to change any one of the events,

decisions or results. Life bears the stigmata of finality in a certain

sense. There has been a relentless succession of facts, at once

inflexible and in some ways arbitrary. All story-tellers are slaves to

these facts, if their story is to enjoy the imprimatur of truth.

Charles Baudelair once wrote that a biography “must be written

from an exclusive point of view, but from the point of view which

opens up the greatest number of horizons."7 There are many ways

in which one could define the point of view in this subtle and

deceptively simple book. The point of view is that of a lover of

6 'Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, 1978, p. 198.7 Charles Baudelair in Baudelair, Claude Pichois, Hamesh Hamilton, 1987, London, p.xiv.

5

Baha’u’llah, one who wants to be near Baha’u’llah, one who wants

to serve Baha’u’llah. The point of view is really quite exclusive.

All the men and women in this biographical pot-pourri were lovers

of the Manifestation of God, the most precious Being ever to walk

on this earth, or so they believed, and they all had some

relationship with Him during the forty year period of His ministry:

1852-1892.

Restlessness is a dominant theme, a strong characteristic, in the

lives of many people 'Abdu'l-Baha describes. They 'could not stay

quiet', 'had no rest', were amazingly energetic', 'awakened to

restless life', 'plagued by yearning love'. Nabil of Qa'in was

'restless, had no caution, patience or reserve'.8 Shah Muhammad-

Amin "had no peace" because of the love that smouldered in his

heart and because he "was continually in flight'.9 This restlessness

'Abdu'l-Baha sets down among a galaxy of other qualities and a

8 'Abdu'l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, Wilmette, 1970, p.9 ibid.,p.51

6

multitude of other people. Some of the most outstanding believers

had this restlessness. Tahirih was 'restless and could not be still'.

Quietness is also valued highly. One does not have to be a great

talker to attract the attention of 'Abdu'l-Baha. Quietness also has its

place in Baha'i community life. There are people who are 'inclined

to solitude' and keep 'silent at all times'. They possess an 'inner

calm'. They are souls 'at rest'.

The gregarious types and the type who keeps to himself are part of

this quintessential dichotomy, a dichotomy that was as much a part

of 'Abdu'l-Baha's world as it is our own, although there seem to be

a slight preponderence, a dominance, of the gregarious person.

Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad both kept to themselves and "away

from friend and stranger alike".10 Mirza Muham- mad-Quli

"mostly...kept silent". He kept company with no one and stayed by

himself most of the time, alone in his small refuge".11 The more

10 ibid., p.46.11 ibid., p.73.

7

sociable type, like Haji 'Abdu'llah Najaf-Abadi "spent his days in

friendly association with the other believers."12 Ismu'llahu'l-Asdaq

"taught cheer- fully and with gaiety".13 "How wonderful was the

talk,"says 'Abdu'l-Baha of Nabil of Qa'in, "how attractive his

society".14

There are all of the archtypes that the various personality theorists

have given us in this century. In addition to Jung's introvert and

extrovert, there is the artist, the suffering artist-soul within us all,

Mishkin-Qalam. He survives in all his seriousness, as we might,

with humour. There are the types who William James describes in

his Varieties of Religious Experience: the personality

constitutionally weighted on the side of cheer and its opposite, the

somber, more reflective even melancholic type. The two

carpenters, Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad were examples of the

former.15 The examples we find of the latter were often the result

12 ibid.,p.71.13 ibid.,p.6.14 ibid.,p. 5315 ibid.,p.73

8

of the many difficulties these lovers of Baha'u'llah were subjected

to and it wore them "to the bone."16

‘Abdu’l-Baha addresses all of us, all of us on our journeys while

He describes many of those He came to know in His life. For He

is describing not only the lives of these men and women in the

nineteenth century, He is describing us in our time. He is

addressing us on our own travels. He addresses the restlessness in

us all. He speaks to us in our victory and our loss. He speaks

about what Michael Polanyi calls the tacit dimension, the silent

root of human life, which is difficult to tap in biographies, the inner

person. This private, this inner person, is the one whom He writes

about for the most part. He sets this inner life in a rich

contextualization, a socio-historical matrix. He describes many

pilgrimages and you and I are left to construct our own. We all

must shape and define our own life. Is it aesthetically pleasing?

Intellectually provocative? Spiritually challenging? ‘Abdu’l-Baha

shapes and defines these lives given the raw-data of their

16 ibid.,p.96.9

everydayness added up, added up over their lives as He saw them.

How would He shape my life? Yours? How would we look in a

contemporary anthology of existences with ‘Abdu’l-Baha as the

choreographer and the history of our days as the mise en scene?

Some of the lives of the obscure, the ordinary and representative

members of the Baha'i community are recovered for history and for

much more. Their private aspirations and their world achivements,

their public images and their private romances, their eventual

successes and their thwarted attempts are lifted onto the pages of a

type of Baha'i scripture. 'Abdu'l-Baha is setting the stage, the

theatre, the home, in these pages, for all of humanity. The

extrovert is here, the introvert, those that seem predisposed to

cheerfulness and those who seem more melancholy by nature. All

the human dichotomies are here, at least all that I have come across

in my own journey. They are the characters which are part and

parcel of life in all ages and centuries, all nations and states, past,

present and, more importantly, future. Here is, as one writer put it,

10

the rag-and-bone-shop, the lineaments of universal human life, the

text and texture of community as we all experience it in the

crucible of interaction. It is somewhat ironic that the host of

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s contemporaries that we find here were resurrected

and for us, found, at a time when the lost generation between 1914

and 1918—were getting lost in the trenches of Europe.

Memorials of the Faithful is what might well be this age’s

Canterbury Tales, that compendium of personalities who

exemplify, as William Blake once put it, “the eternal principles that

exist in all ages.”17 We get a Writer Who delights in other people

but Who has an active and incisive mind, a practicality that He

brings to bear on what are often difficult personalities. He dwells

only on the essentials; His purpose is inveterate; His feelings

sincere and intense; they never relax or grow vapid during His

cursory analyses. He is exquisitely tender, but clearly wily and

17 William Blake in Geoffrey Chaucer: Penguin Critical Anthologies, editor, J.A. Burrow, 1969, p.82.

11

tough to survive in the burly-burly life of exile, prison and the

unbelievable difficulties He had to bear along life’s tortuous path.

Interest in biographies of Baha’is in the 19th century Iranian Bahá'í

community is not exactly a booming business these days. But that

time will come sensibly and insensibly in the decades ahead as this

new world Faith comes to play a critical part in the unification of

the planet. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s work is more than a little prescient.

The heroic age was coming to a close when ‘Abdu’l-Baha put His

pen to paper; and it was over by the time the Haifa Spiritual

Assembly published this His final book.18 A remanant remained,

Baha’u’llah’s sister, the Greatest Holy Leaf who died in 1932.

‘Abdu’l-Baha had played a prominent role in the epic that was the

heroic age. He played a dominant role in writing that epic’s story.

Memorials of the Faithful is an important part of that epic. This

epic tradition was not essentially oral but quintessentially written: a

written tradition par excellence. Since The Growth of Literature by

18 If one considers the Tablets of the Divine Plan a book, then Memorials of the Faithful was 'Abdu'l-Baha's penultimate book.

12

the Chadwicks(1924-1926) the heroic epic has been seen in

literature’s epic studies “as a cultural rather than a literary

phenomenon.”19 The Baha’i epic has grown out of a complex and

fascinating set of cultural conditions. Indeed ‘Abdu’l Baha’s work

has contributed to the resolution of problems involving the

relationship, the transition, between oral narrative and written text.

But this relationship is a question to occupy epic enthusiasts and is

not our principle concern here.

Within three to four months of completing this last of His books,

‘Abdu’l-Baha had begun His Tablets of the Divine Plan20, the

action station within which the community He was addressing

could put into practice all the good advice He had given it in His

Memorials of the Faithful. Like The Will and Testament, though,

19 Heroic Epic and Saga: An Introduction to the World’s Great Folk Epics, editor, Felix J. Oinas, Indiana UP, London, 1978, p.1.20 He began writing His Tablets of the Divine Plan on March 26th 1916; Balyuzi informs us in his biography of ‘Abdu’l-Baha that He worked on Memorials in the last half of 1915(p.417).

13

it may take a century or more to grasp the implications of this

surprisingly subtle and, deceptively simple, book.

In the next two decades we shall see the end of the first century of

the Formative Age. Perhaps the time has come to begin to

seriously grasp the implications of these shining pages from

‘Abdu-l-Baha and His interpretive genius.

We do not know much about the circumstances of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s

writing, at least I don’t. Some writers we know, like Beethoven,

are intensely physical people who seem to fight their thoughts onto

the page, splattering the ink, breaking nibs, even ripping the paper

in the process. Beethoven had none of the serene penmanship of a

Bach or the hasty perfection of Mozart or the quasi-mathematical

constructs of Webern. But we do know some things. We know, for

example, that ‘Abdu’l-Baha often worked all night with a large part

of the night devoted to prayer and meditation. It was then He did

His writing; He was too busy to scribble down things in the

14

daytime as some writers do. He had a short sleep after lunch. After

writing one of the biographies he would often read or tell the story

at one of the meetings in the next few days. Now, we can read

them in a book or access them on the internet, in very readable

English, in authorized translations. Gone is the Persian and Arabic

in which He wrote; gone is ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s innimitable script or

that of one of His secretaries. Having flashed onto the screen with

the speed of light or into the book in some electronic form with

every character proportional, every paragraph in alignment, these

words, written six years before His passing, are now free to

penetrate our own lives as the lives He wrote about penetrated His.

FOOTNOTES

The material on Chaucer that follows was obtained from Derek

Pearsall's The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography,

Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, pp. chapter 6. The following is not a

quotation.-Ron Price, Tasmania

The whole organization of Chaucer's narrative is in the historical

lattice-work of a world of ecclesiastical routines and needs.

15

'Abdu'l-Baha's narrative, played as it is in the lives of seventy-

seven souls, exists in the interstices of lives transformed by a

manifestation of God. Instead of the ubiquity of the Christian Faith

and its practices we have a new religion emerging in the soil of

people's lives. Both books give us a narrative of faith. Women are

dominant in Chaucer and men in Memorials of the Faithful. Both

books provide us with a spiritual journey. There is a gusto and

carnivalesque spirit, a contempt for marriage and sexual urges, in

Chaucer while none of this is to be found in 'Abdu'l-Baha's work.

There is no sense of social and moral commitment in Canterbury

Tales. Chaucer's London is a turbulent and dangerous place; so too

in 'Abdu'l-Baha'is world. He writes of the domestic world rather

than the politics of power. Both men possess a remarkable

acuteness of observation; there is little of the sense of outrage.

Chaucer makes a magpie-like raid on scholarly texts, perhaps more

from conversations. The pilgrims are infinitely various. The sense

16

of dramatic vitality is so strong the temptation to read the tales as

principally an expression of the characters of their tellers is strong.

Chaucer is a self-concealing and evasive character. This father of

English poetry is a figure who eludes the biographer's grasp even

more fully than Shakespeare. There are no private letters or

journals, no anecdotal reminiscences of friends, and precious few

autobiographical clues in the poems themselves. The tools for

understanding Chaucer are literary history, philology and the

history of patronage and court politics in the 14th century. These

disciplines need to be part of a biographer’s strong suit if he or she

is to excel in their recreation of Chaucer’s life. In dealing with the

life of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá none of these problems exist for the

biographer.

Chaucer’s audience in the imagination is "a miscellaneous

company, of lettered London men, to be appropriately scandalized

and delighted by the Wife of Bath and the fabliaux, flattered by the

17

invitation to share in a gentleman scholar's easily carried burden of

learning and intrigued by the novel expose of London low life in

the Cook's Tale. The audience is, probably exclusively an audience

of men. ‘‘Abdu’l-Bahá has no audience until 1928 more than a

decade after He has finished writing the book.

A mission to Genoa and Florence on the king's service in the early

1370s was especially important for Chaucer’s poetic development

because it gave him the opportunity to discover the riches of Italian

literature. Fifteen years later he began writing The Canterbury

Tales his maturer reflections upon the life of men and women in

society and in the Christian faith. They were written in the last

dozen years of his life, 1387-1400. He was almost entirely

occupied with writing 'The Canterbury Tales' in these last years.

For Chaucer poetry was an accomplishment and a vehicle for self-

display, a means for his advancement at court rather than an

activity of his profession. His poetry benefited his career and vice-

18

versa: his earlier works, coinciding with his French connections,

were influenced by French poetry, notably the great allegorical

love vision of the Roman de la Rose, while his middle period,

inspired by the Italian journey, was dominated by his version of the

Troilus and Cressida story, written in imitation of Boccaccio's

treatment of the same subject.21

He refrained from direct allusion to public events and it is difficult,

unsafe, to make any deductions about specific connections between

his life, his works and the events of the time. Some scholars prefer

to see his work as chaotic and inexplicable.

The comparisons and contrasts with the work of 'Abdu'l-Baha

make a fascinating study to those interested in both Chaucer and

the Baha'i Faith. But even those who hold no particular interest in

Chaucer can find the contrasts and comparisons valuable in helping

them understand the work of this Central Figure of the Baha'i Faith

21 Jonathan Bate, “Slim Biography and Slim Pickings: A Review of Peter Ackroyd’s Chaucer,” Telegraph.co.uk, 29 March 2004.

19

writing as He was at the very beginning of the Lesser Peace and the

new Age the world was entering in all its tragic swiftness, amazing

perplexity and fascinating juxtapositions.

In my nearly fifty years of pioneering and sixty involved as I have

been in the Baha'i community, I find this seminal work of 'Abdu'l-

Baha’s absolutely crucial in my attempt to understand and deal

with the complexities and problems that arise in Baha'i community

life. It is as if 'Abdu'l-Baha has given me the Baha'i community in

microcosm. Although He wrote the book nearly a century ago, it

speaks to me about my life and so I pass the dialogue I have had

with this book to you, dear reader….and a final word on

Chaucer….

NO STRUGGLE TO INVENT

Chaucer had a simplicity and directness of style. He was able to

step into a child’s mind and an adult’s; indeed, he could take on the

life, the mood and the personality of anyone or anything he knew

or could know. That is the basis of the vividness, the individuality

20

of his characters. He pleads authenticity, faithfulness to actual life

and speech. -Ron Price with thanks to Collier’s Encyclopedia and

Encyclopedia Britannica.

Oh Father of English poetry-

the King’s English-when English

was finding its East Midland dialect

and first being used in Parliament,

some six hundred years ago1, whose

poetry was in the language of the man-

in-the-street, with simplicity, naturalness,

freshness and vitality—which we have

recently rediscovered in our time and

which I strive for in my poems and in

what I write of history and character in

my pioneering tale, pilgrimage-like across the

world, painting some realistic portraiture, with

no struggle to invent, only to suit my purpose.

21

1George H. McKnight, The Evolution of the English Language:

From Chaucer to the Twentieth Century Dover Publications Inc.,

NY, 1968(1928), p. 18.—25/5/97.

__________________

VOLUME 5

CHAPTER 6

(Part 2)

INTRODUCTION TO SECTION IV OF MY

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

“BIOGRAPHIES”

It is fitting that the following short descriptions of my efforts at

biography should be preceded by an analysis of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s

biographies. Twenty-eight years ago now, in 1981, I took my first

excursions into writing biography. I had, of course, written little

pieces for my students since the beginning of my teaching career in

1967. Those excursions beginning in 1981, though, became part

of, first, The History of the Baha’i Faith in Tasmania: 1924-80 and;

22

second, The History of the Baha'i Faith in the Northern Territory:

1947-1997. The short biographies I wrote in the 1980s and 1990s

are, for the most part, now in the archives of the Baha'i Councils

for Tasmania and the NT. Some of these short sketches of human

personality are in a file I keep in my study, a file which has

increased in size since it was first created in the early 1990s, but

this increase is due to the resource, the source, material I have

added to the file not more biographies themselves.

Some of the sketches I wrote in those two decades are on the

internet at the site bahai-library.org. They have all become part of

a larger work Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Section IV. But they

will not be included here in this edition of my autobiography which

I am posting on the internet since the people I have written about

are, for the most part, still living.

In addition, the notes in this file on the subject of biography, which

I began to collect sixteen years ago in 1993, have begun to assume

a far greater extent, a wider ambit than was initially planned due to

23

the plentiful resources on the subject of biography available on the

Internet. Perhaps, in time, I may write more biographical material,

hopefully material in greater depth of expression than I have done

thusfar and hopefully from a more fertile base than I have been

able to discover in my first attempts in the 1980s and the 1990s.

Whatever biographies I write, they will in time be part of Section

IV of my larger work, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. This

biography file has, as I say, developed into a more substantial

resource in recent years and a brief examination of its table of

contents will show the range of relevant sub-topics. This

biographical interest provides some balance, although I must

confess very little so far, to all the autobiographical material I have

collected in other files; perhaps, too, readers will also find in them

some balance and help avoid any impression of my narcissistic

tendencies which critics may be inclined to dwell upon. As I say,

hopefully, this material may prove useful in my efforts to write

24

biographies in the years ahead as part of Section IV of my

autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs. --3/3/06.

____________________________________

Beginning in 1993, after living in Perth for five years and after

more than 30 years in the pioneering field, I began making notes on

people I knew. For various reasons I found the experience

unsatisfactory and, by 1997, I had discontinued the process. It was

my second effort at writing biography, the first being a similar

period of four years in Katherine. These latter notes are found in

the several volumes of writing on 'The History of the Baha'i Faith

in the N.T. and the Northwest of WA.:Vol.2 Part 1.' I also wrote a

few short biographies in 2000 to 2002 when finalizing that same

history.

After some 20 years of occasional efforts at writing biography, I

had the experience Anthony Trollope and Henry James had with

their efforts.1 They became disenchanted with the process.

Limited to historical narrative they became bored even dismayed

by the exercise. My essential problem was that I hardly knew any

25

of the individuals well enough to chart their biographies. The

exercise of delving into historical documents involving those who

were dead or having extended conversations with individuals who

were still living, I realized was beyond my interest, my enthusiasm

and, perhaps, my ability. After the initial sketches I had drawn in

the years 1981 to 2001 I simply ran out of details to extend my

accounts. -Ron Price with thanks to Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction,

Fact and Form, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1984, pp. 137-8, 8/7/03.

BIOGRAPHY: A BRIEF ANALYSIS

In writing biography and autobiography one is confronted with a

number of questions: what is its place in history? Is it simply a sort

of sophisticated entertainment, a bedside companion better handed

over to novelists? Is it a scholarly pursuit in itself? Is it a generator

of cases to help us explain, in this case, aspects of the psychology,

sociology or philosophy of religion? Is it a window through which

we can learn to tackle existential questions in life, through which

we can identify ourselves with others, come to understand

26

ourselves emotionally and intellectually and help change and create

ourselves?

The approach I take to both autobiography and biography is that

these genres can help us reorient ourselves, our familiar ways of

looking at things in unfamiliar terms, by the power of a certain

strangeness. The exercise may also help us to become the new

human beings we would like to be. There is, as Michael Polanyi

emphasizes, a private, tacit passion at the root of much in life. It is

a passion that is difficult to explore in an individual’s life, is tinged

with the personal, keeps the world at a distance and can often be

seen chiefly only in the written works of the person. The ‘real

individual’, the unique self, the argument goes, can only be seen in

what he or she writes.

James Wood writes in the Guardian22 about English writer Martin

Amis’s book Experience: “it is an escape from memoir; indeed, an

escape into privacy.” Although the book seems at first glance to be

exhibitionistic in reality, Wood emphasizes, it is a retreat into the

22 James Wood, “Experience: Martin Amis,” The Guardian, 20 May, 2000.

27

provinces of himself." And so is this true of my work, or so it

seems to me. My work does not vibrate with an atmosphere of

wounded privacy as much autobiography does.

Some analysts of the written word argue that it is of no help to the

reader to understand the state of mind, the personal life, of the

writer concerned. Still others see the individual only in a socio-

historical context, as the product of their times, as part of a

sociological discourse or matrix, a rich contextualization, a

historical situatedness. The historian, Wilhelm Dilthey saw it the

other way around: individuals construct their own society and,

therefore, each person, each writer, lives in a different society even

if, ostensibly, in reality, they occupy the same territorial space.

The implications of the post-structuralist thinking and the

deconstructionists is that the subject matter, the person, is a product

of language, a language construct, a product of the text and its

incarnated vocabularies. Any attempt at a unitary identity, at any

definition of a self, is a simple error since the self is constantly

28

shaped by forces of ideology, changing its representation with each

situation it faces. This view of the self makes the view of the

coherence of the person---a myth. In reality the self is a

discontinuity, beyond documentation, essentially unknowable in its

many variations, unrecoverable. The best thing to do is to avoid

trying to construct a narrative line, a central focus. Given the

slipperiness of language, language's need to create non-referential

figures to construct the self, no real, individual 'face' is possible.23

24

Of course, this was not the view of Virginia Woolf who argued in

her Collected Essays, Vol.4 that the age of biography had just

begun. Woolf wrote this at the start of the Formative Age in

Baha’i history in the 1920s aware as she was of the writings of

famous historians and biographers like Plutarch and Thucydides in

previous ages. Woolf would have agreed with Nadel that “the

recreation of a life in words is one of the most beautiful and

23 Helen M. Buss, Canadian Women's Autobiography in English: And Introductory Guide for Researchers and Teachers, CRIAW, Ottawa, 1991.24

29

difficult tasks a literary artist can perform.”1 Part of this beauty

and part of this difficulty is the fact that these qualities are rooted in

individual difference and idiosyncrasy, as A.L. Rowse emphasizes

in his study of Matthew Arnold.2

Such are some of my thoughts on biography in these first years of

my retirement. I have for the most part lost my interest in writing

biography after 3 periods, 3 attempts in the last 20 years. –Ron

Price with thanks to 1 Ira Nadel, op.cit., p.152 and 2A.L. Rowse,

Matthew Arnold: Poet and Prophet, Thames and Hudson, London,

1976, p.160. –2002.

BAHA’I BIOGRAPHY: AFTER 15 YEARS OF THINKING

ABOUT IT 1981-1996

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Autobiography is the unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about

other people. -Oscar Wilde in The Oxford Book of Quotations,

John Gross, OUP, 1983.

30

As he worked at the Decline and Fall, Gibbon became convinced

that the true character of men was so complex and elusive that it

could be only tentatively described....If even a contemporary could

not unravel the complexities of character, what could a historian

hope for?.....Gibbon became increasingly reticent about judging

character and motivation. Gibbon presents history as preeminently

a construction, a literary work with aesthetic rather than systematic

order and coherence. -David P. Jordan, Gibbon and His Roman

Empire, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1971, p.5.

Whoever turns biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment,

to hypocrisy, to embellishments…..for biographical truth is not to

be had and, even if one had it, one could not use it.”-Sigmund

Freud in Freud: A Life For Our Time, Peter Gay, WW Norton &

Co., NY, 1988, pp. xv-xvi.

This is an anthology of existences. Readers will find here lives of a

few lines, of a few pages, more than a few pages on occasion.

31

Readers will find adventures gathered together in a handful or

several handfuls of words. There is such a contraction of things in

the process of writing about these lives that one does not know

whether the intensity which traverses them is due more to the

vividness of the words or to the violence of the facts which jostle

about in them. There is a series of singular lives here, created

through I know not what accidents of life what strange poems.

This is what I wanted to gather together and this is what I got in a

sort of literary herbarium. -Werner Sollors, editor, Book’s Name Is

Unknown, Oxford University Press, 1989, p.155.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some time in 1981, as accurately as I can estimate after the

evolution of fifteen years, I began to write the history of the

Tasmanian Baha’i community. It was the first such exercise in

Tasmania and in my own life, as far I know. I also started to write

poetry about that time. The first poem I have in my collection was

written in August 1980. On 23 July 1982 I left Tasmania and

arrived in Katherine. I immediately set about collecting materials

32

for a history of the Baha’i Faith in the Northern Territory. I also

continued writing a few poems from year to year. I collected great

quantities of information and made brief biographies as part of a

narrative history. I have since sent all the material, all of my

writing, to the Baha'i Council of the NT or the, then, RTC of

Tasmania.

As I point out in the introductory biographical sketches, pieces

written over the last two years(1994-1996), I have not had much

success in writing Baha’i biography. I did write many short pieces

and had each person’s agreement to the piece I wrote about them.

It is a sensitive exercise this biography business. I take some

comfort in reading about Edward Gibbon’s reticence about judging

character and motivation. To him, people, like history, were

constructions, significantly his constructions. What he did was

attempt to unravel the complexities of character, however elusive

they might be. He did this en passant, as he composed his history

33

of the Decline and Fall. I do my writing about individuals en

passant, as I compose my Pioneering Over Four Epochs.

In a book whose name is now lost to me, Werner Sollors refers to

pieces of biography as “an anthology of existences...a few lines or

a few pages...gathered together in a handful of words...” That is

certainly the simplest characterization of a process I have scarcely

begun in these fifteen years. The annotation to my collection of

twenty-five years of letters collected while in Australia(1971-

1996), has yielded little fertility, as far as biography is concerned.

I hope in the coming years, the last half of the second decade of my

effort to write biographical material, that I will have more success

than the meagre twenty pages I have thusfar accumulated and

whatever additional pages are currently housed in the archives of

an LSA and a RTC. -1997

NOTE ON AUTO/BIOGRAPHY

34

Montaigne says, in discussing human changeability, "He that

would judge of a man in detail and distinctly, bit by bit, would

oftener be able to speak the truth."(Second Book of Essays, p.1) It

is difficult, he goes on, to find men who have "formed their lives to

one certain and constant course, which is the principle design of

wisdom." Vice, he argues, is essentially irregularity, lack of

constancy. My mood swings give to my life a lack of constancy

that is with me even now from morning to night. Since the age of

eighteen, I have been a teacher of the Baha'i cause to the best of my

ability. This is one of the constants in my life, although aspects of

my work for this Cause have been sporadic. Service on LSAs, for

example, I have found to be an exercise that changes from year to

year. One would need a profile over a whole life to get an accurate

picture of this soul, or any soul. Unable to do this I have, for now,

discontinued writing biography. Leslie Stephen says that “reading

a biography often leaves one pretty much in the dark as to the

person biographised.”1 I can understand why. -Ron Price with

thanks to 1Leslie Stephen, Biography. –June 1996(ca)

35

YET ANOTHER INTRODUCTION

When I first came to Perth in 1987-8 I began a series of

biographical sketches. By 1992 I had ceased making these

sketches. I took up the pen again in 1993 writing sketches of

Baha’is in Perth, but I ceased this exercise in 1996/7. On May 17th

1991 I sent three volumes of notes to the Darwin LSA and ceased

any work on the “History of the Baha’i Faith in the NT and

Northwest Australia”. That effort had contained a good deal of

biographical material I had written from 1982 to 1987. About one

decade, then, of biographical work came to an end in that Holy

year.

There were several reasons for this: (i) the response to what I had

written seemed so far from enthusiastic as to be possibly

detrimental to the Cause, in spite of the best of British intentions;

(ii) my new interest in autobiography, essays and poetry, emerging

clearly by 1992 and (iii) the difficulty of getting material from the

36

people I did get to know in Perth. There seemed to be a positive

disinclination on the part of most people I met to have anything

about them written at all. Over the first five years in Perth I wrote

approximately ten pages of material on several people I had got to

know.

I began collecting notes and photocopies of information about

biographies and, by early 1996, I had collected some sixty pages of

interesting resource material. Biographies began appearing, about

the time I began writing extensively in the early 1980s: in the

Baha’i community. I was not interested in taking on any serious

book-length exercise, but I was interested in writing short character

sketches. Most of what I was reading about biography applied to

major studies.

Like Andre Maurois, perhaps the world’s greatest biographer

thusfar, I was searching for the formula for the short character

sketch. Perhaps I should read collections of essays. I have and I

37

will. In the meantime some of the literature on biography is useful

to me in defining my perspectives. J.A. Symonds, for example,

says there is an “undefinable flavour of personality...which repels

or attracts, and is at the very root of love or dislike.(Virginia

Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol.2, The Hogarth Press, London, 1967,

p.273) Virginia Woolf says we get glimpses of that personality, but

never really find it. The vast majority of lives remain nameless and

traceless to history, she goes on.(p.221)

She traces a brief history of biography, but it is not my intention to

review that history here. I think I have, to some extent, achieved in

some of the sketches I have written, the intensity of poetry and

something of the excitement of drama in the context of fact.

Perhaps I will rediscover this process in future efforts. I am only at

the beginning of my efforts, as biography itself, as Woolf points

out, is only at the beginning of its journey. I shall strive, in the

years ahead, to make some good mini-biography, if that is an

appropriate term for my end products, my outlines, sketches, my

38

fertile facts, my creative facts. Perhaps something can live on in the

depths of the mind, some bright scene, some startling recognition.

Perhaps something useful, significant, can be found; perhaps, like

Boswell, I can invest the ordinary facts with “a kind of

hyperactuality and heightened import.” (Wimsatt, Images of

Samuel Johnson, p.359)

Perhaps a man should not live longer than what he can

meaningfully record; like a farmer, he should plant only what he

can gather in. Writing biographies can give me another feather in

my bow, so to speak. Thusfar, the initial enthusiasm has become a

laborious drudgery and so I have discontinued the exercise of

writing biography. I am so disinclined to participate in much social

intercourse that it is not surprising that writing biographies does not

take place. I felt a strong affinity to Nathaniel Hawthorne and

particularly the description of his life in The Centenary Edition of

the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vol. XV(p.61). Here George

B. Loring discusses Hawthorne’s anti-social proclivities which may

39

be a useful basis for novel writing but not necessarily for biography

writing.

A third period of biographical writing followed in the early years of

the new millennium, 2000-2001, as I put the finishing touches on

The History of the Baha’i Faith in the NT: 1947-1997. When this

task was complete my interest in writing biography ceased again,

although I still studied the subject and kept notes on the genre.

Biography was a challenge to both my reason and imagination. It

called for attack. I really had to pounce on it, fasten my teeth in its

gristle, worry it and drag it around in circles if I wanted to come

out on top. This I had no desire to do. The sense of attack never

entered my being after some early wrestling in the 1980s and

1990s. I pounced on it for three short periods, grabbed it with my

reason and imagination and dragged it around. Perhaps one day I’ll

get it between my teeth again when the need or the desire arises.

Perhaps next time I’ll really get on top of it; at the moment, though,

I’m not holding my breath. Indeed, one of the many lessons that

40

writing biography, poetry and narrative has taught me over the last

two decades is that no literary or poetic expression, be it epic, lyric,

narrative or something that falls in between them, can exist in any

meaningful way without a receptive community.--10/1/97—5/3/06.

VOLUME 5

CHAPTER 6

(Part 3)

One of the most famous of poets during these four epochs, and

especially in the last two, beginning, say, in the 1980s, was John

Ashbery. In 1995 he was referred to as an “essentially ruminative

poet.”25 He turned a few subjects over and over in the wider

perspective of a mythology of self. This could very easily describe

my own work but I aim to have my work yield meanings; whereas,

Ashbery's poetry seems to militate against the very possibility of

articulating them. Although Ashbery turns a few subjects over and

25 Susan Schultz in The Tribe of John Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, editor, Susan Schultz, 1995.

41

over readers have difficulty finding any unifying principles, any

particular tactics, figures or concerns in his poetic output. As

poetry critic Helen Vendler has remarked, "it is popularly believed,

with some reason, that Ashbery’s style itself is impenetrable, that it

is impossible to say what an Ashbery poem is about.” 26

As one critic argues: "What is at stake in the criticism of Ashbery

is the meaning and status of what it is to be 'American.' One could

very well frame the meaning and status of my work around my

Bahá'í identity. The central concern of both mine and Ashbery's

poetic career could very well be defined as the self-world

relationship. With this in mind, I present to readers the following

prose-poems.

THE BIOGRAPHY OF A GENERATION

26 Helen Vendler in “Reports of looting and insane buggery behind altars: John Ashbery's queer politics - gay poet,” John Vincent, Twentieth Century Literature, Summer 1998.

42

Price's autobiographical poem can be read, in some ways, as the

biography of a generation, the generation that came of age in the

sixties, grew into middle age in the eighties, into what some human

development theorists call late adulthood, the years 60 to 80, in the

first decades of the twenty-first century and into old age in the

years beyond 2525. William Wordsworth's poem The Prelude

could be read as the biography of the romantics of the 1790s who

grew into old age, if they lived that long, in the years after 1850--

although a man was old much sooner in 1850 than he is today.

More importantly, though, as far as my autobiography is

concerned, Wordsworth’s Prelude is the most sustained self-

examination in English poetry and its real importance lies in not

what it tells of the past but what is promises of the future. Such is

the view of Stephen Gill in William Wordsworth: A

Life(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989,) and, as Gill goes on to say,

Wordsworth’s “rewriting stems from a determination to treat his

poems as living presences and to change or discard what no longer

seemed adequate(ibid., p81).

43

The case is obviously an arguable one and, at best, only partly true

as a comparison. In the case of Wordsworth or Price, the mind, the

imagination, is a binding, sympathetic medium and the poems

which come out of their poetic matrix speak with or against the

historical grain. Their lives and those of their contemporaries or

coreligionists are at the heart of their inner life which is given a

primary place in the ideology of both men, in the creation of their

personal identities and it is the place where the important changes

of life take place, albeit slowly and unobtrusively. -Ron Price,

Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 6 April 2009.

Yes, perhaps, in some ways,

to each man his own story.

Mine is quite precise in places,

but there's a matrix here for

everyone to tell of their own.

Mine, growing out of the first epochs

44

of this Formative Age has a certain:

tone, mode, manner, content, style,

relevance, timeliness and scope---

bound together in this sympathetic

medium, this inner space for and

about the seekers my contemporaries--

and me and what it all means for, if it

means nothing to me, it is nothing.

Ron Price

6 April 2009

(updated from 3/2001)

WANDERING

We each map a unique landscape of thought, frailty, drama,

bewilderment and belief. The biographies of our life, if any are

ever written, are other people’s stories and descriptions of our map.

Norman Sherry, in the second volume of his biography of the

famous novelist Graham Greene, writes that Greene "seemed

45

homeless just wandering the streets" in a state of "acute

solitariness." This was a period in the 1950s when Greene was in

a condition of "great unhappiness and great torment. Manic-

depression reached its height in that period." Sherry continues:

“Greene wheeled obsessively around the world." With alcohol and

women he sought to kill the despair and the formidable desire for

self-annihilation that rose up within him. He was "compelled to

wander the earth until death; an unending traveller, an unending

writer, he laboured like Sisyphus."1 It seemed in his nature to go

beyond permitted limits.2 -Ron Price with thanks to Norman

Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene: Vol.2: 1939-1955, Jonathan

Cape, London, 1994, 1pp.507-508 and 2p.258.

I, too, have wandered my streets

in a state of acute solitariness during

many of these my pioneering days.

I've had my torment and unhappiness,

but have now, in the evening of my life,

left behind me that very debilitating chaos,

46

darkness and fear;1 obsessively I have drunk

the air and killed despair with His sweet-scented

streams, tasted even in my hair with its fragrance

in my prayer and with my medications oh so fair—

without which God knows what I would have dared!

I, too, will wander until death, an unending traveller,

an unending writer and labour like Sisyphus at the door,

but the stone, the weight, will one day be no more.

Many, too, wander with their morbid predilection

for the darker sides of life—not surprising in a time

after two wars, millions of dead in the fields and

millions more to come—trying to put it together,

each finding the cosmic drama in their own way,

creating their forms, their styles in this slough of

despond with the phantoms, so very often, of their

wrongly, so very wrongly, informed imaginations.

47

1 my manic depression was successfully treated first in 1968, then

in 1980, again in 2001 and, finally, I trust, in 2007: four medication

regimes to remove most of the fear, the darkness and the despair.—

15/12/01 updated 18/6/’09.

-------------------------------

A FRESH IMPULSE

The five years which followed my drive to Yerrinbool from

Ballarat in December 1977; and the five years which followed my

first days at university in September 1963 were without doubt the

years of my life in which I experienced the most intense and

extensive depression, confusion and disorientation. These years of

internal and external crises, of varying severity were devastating in

their immediate effects. Each of these five year periods resulted in

the complete breakdown in my capacity to earn a living and

function in day-to-day society. But by December 1982 and

September 1969, it could be argued, these crises were beginning to

release a corresponding measure of divine power. My life could

and did continue unfolding my potential, my capacity. A fresh

48

impulse had been lent to this process of unfoldment by these same

crises, at least that is a dominant view I now take looking back

from these years of my late adulthood.

It took me some years to understand what could be called a 'life

process;' some years to begin to regulate my life to its rhythm. It

became my view, my understanding, slowly with the years, that my

very happiness as a Baha'i depended, in part at least, on the extent

to which I understood this life process. -Ron Price with thanks to

the NSA of the Baha'is of Canada, "Letter to All Pioneers," Pulse

of the Pioneer, January 1979, p.2.

I was stimulated to write the above paragraph by reading a

paragraph in a biography of the English novelist Thackeray(1811-

1863), the first novelist to "hold a mirror up to real life," or so one

literary critic put it. It was a paragraph written by this same critic

which began "......The five years which followed his night flight to

Paris were bitter and restless ones for Thackeray." (Ann Monsarrat,

49

The Uneasy Victorian: Thackeray the Man, Cassell, London, 1980,

p.121) For some reason my own mind immediately switched, on

reading this line about Thackeray, from his bitter five years to

some of my own.

I believe my journey, intellectual and otherwise, becomes more

complete through the study of biography. Our personal troubles

are, partly, public problems. Such was the view of sociologist

C.Wright Mills in his Sociological Imagination(1959) written the

year I became a Baha'i.

It's about linking happiness

to understanding, keenness

of our tests, the test to be

happy and confident both

within and without the Baha'i

community, a whole of life process.

But...no forcing, you're not responsible

50

for the present condition in the community,

only a small part. Trust to the life processes

set in motion within our life in this Cause and

in your own dear life which seems to take the

whole of life to decode, process, interpret.

Ron Price

22 January 2002

updated 18/6/09

-----------------------------

A POET AT LAST

Stephen Coote writes in his biography of John Keats that Keats

"was battling to preserve the integrity of his vision, and what he

described as the pride and egotism of the writer's solitary life

formed as a protection against the intrusion of merely practical

matters."1 Keats saw his development as an inward process, a long

and patient observation of the rhythms of his consciousness. True

poetry, he believed, came from this, not from manufacturing verse

for the marketplace.

51

Price had battled for years, at least until the early years of the new

millennium, to acquire that solitary life which was protected from

the intrusion of the endless and inevitable practical matters of life.

As 1999 evolved insensibly to 2006, he was able to move beyond

those endless volunteer activities and responsibilities which

occupied so much of his time in his middle adulthood. By 2006 he

had been able to focus on the inward processes of development that

accompanied writing for at least eight hours a day keeping practical

intrusions to a limit. He felt he had written about that process as

much as he had written poetry itself. Poetry, he had concluded,

was impossible to define. At best, it served for him as a form in

which he could deal with that first attribute of perfection which

'Abdu'l-Baha describes, and which it was his task to acquire, in The

Secret of Divine Civilization: learning and the cultural attainments

of the mind.2 -Ron Price with thanks to Stephen Coote, John Keats:

A Life, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1995, p.268; and 'Abdu'l-

Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.35.

By the time I had arrived here

52

in this town by a river by the sea,

at the bottom of the Antipodes,

I had defined and refined that

inward process and the rhythms

of my consciousness and mind.

I had found the form in which

I could deal with the vast tracts

of learning and those cultural

attainments of mind’s lifeline.

I occasionally toyed with essays,

with novels but, in the end, turned,

always returned to this form and

these processes which enabled me,

at last, to declare myself a poet.

I did not so much collapse into

late adulthood, although there was

53

some of that tedium vitae, as die

to my former self as much as I was

able, but so much still remained like

honey and poison making me seek

from a cup a pure and limpid water.

Ron Price

January 2002 to March 2006

(updated 6/3/09 and 18/6/09)

--------------------------

A STRONG CONSITUTION?

This afternoon, in mid-summer here in Tasmania, I sat under a tree

near the beach at Low Head on Bass Strait and read Roy Campbell:

A Critical Biography by Peter Alexander.(1982). This South

African poet(1901-1957) had, according to Alexander, a

magnificent constitution. According to the famous psychiatrist,

Laurens van der Post, Campbell was a man "born on fire." He

could only live by burning himself out: drinking much and eating

54

and sleeping little. It is difficult, it seems to me, to determine what,

in fact, is a 'magnificent constitution.'

Have my history of manic-depression, the slow development of a

mild emphysema, a certain psychological fatigue as I came into my

sixties and, perhaps, several other illnesses like pneumonia and

some polio-like disease contracted in my childhood, had the effect

of weakening my constitution? Is writing millions of words a sign

of a strong constitution? I don't know, but I do know I have

experienced varying degrees of burn-out several times in my life.

It would appear that, like Campbell, burning myself out was part of

my central life experience, although the causes of the burn-

out(mine and Campbell’s) were quite different. It would appear

that, in this the early evening of my life, I have learned to live

without burn-out and without its tragic consequences thanks to

psychiatry’s medications. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four

Epochs, 22 January 2002(updated 6/3/09).

A million impressions,

55

impressed themselves

over these several epochs

in the last half-century,1

pressed themselves upon me

and annihilated me2 as Keats

said;3 I surrendered, lost myself

to these poetic acts of creation,

acts of love4 in which I imagined

myself intensely, merging with a

great sea of life beyond the me and

becoming one: mystic, seer, poet...

integrated circuits with the past

containing the seeks of its future.

1 1952-2002

2 Looking back it would appear that at least 3 reconstructions of

personality were required: 1968, 1979/80 and 1999; inevitably

there were some continuities, one of which was poetry in 1999.

3 Keats, Letters, 27 October 1818

56

4 The World of Poetry, p. 92.

Ron Price 22 January 2002

AM I WORTH SAVING?

"A biographer can be a most uncomfortable visitor for a living

author and his family. Skeletons clatter in all our closets;

everyone's life has black patches, shames and sorrows: no one, you

would think, would willingly submit to Judgement Day come

early." So writes Peter F. Alexander at the start of his book Les

Murray: A Life in Progress(Oxford UP, 2000). But when such an

author, like myself for example, is a virtual unknown; when he has

never published a book; when virtually no one in the literary world

has ever heard of him, then such a discomfort would not be

experienced by that author. Indeed, such an unknown author

would probably think to himself that no one in his lifetime would

ever venture to seriously consider writing a biography about him at

all. Skeletons in his closet and the darker side of his life would,

therefore, concern him not a twit, for he would know that no writer

57

would ever be likely to probe into his private life while he was

alive. Such is the way I feel as I approach the age of sixty-five.

When I eventually pass from this mortal coil, though, I would be

more than happy to grant any aspiring biographer complete access

to everything: manuscripts, letters, diaries, various documents

private and public, even accounts now found on the internet and

memorabilia of all sorts. I would be equally happy for such a

biographer--should he or she ever exist--to interview whomever

they want and as frequently as they want, ever mindful of the

courtesies required of such potential intrusions into other people's

lives. I would like to think that such biographers should feel free to

prod, probe and uncover whatever they could find, for we are seen

by others in such varied ways. Such is the attitude, I currently

hypothesize, that I shall possess after my demise as I gaze at this

world from the domain of light. -Ron Price with thanks to Peter

Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Oxford UP, 2000, p.9.

Should I give full and exclusive

58

access to my voluminous papers?

How easy should I make detective

work for the possibly impertinent,

not especially skilled, wanting to save

a life for future generations? Am I the

sort of man you might want to see live

again and dance in the pages of a book?

If you know of my battle on the road,

will it help you with yours? Whatever

will help future generations. Do you

need all my sordid details, my hind parts

and their contemplation and an exploration

of mountains of trivia?...whatever will help

and only if it helps......

Ron Price

16 March 2002

--------------------------

59

PS I have come to feel the way the Russian writer Boris Pasternak

did when he wrote on January 15th 1960 three months after I

became a Baha’i: “the artist starts to get to love his new design and

it seems to him that the slowly developing work is larger and more

important than he.” For me this ‘work’ is both my life and my

writing.-Evgeny Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years:

1930-1960, Collins Harvill, London, 1990, p.244.

---------------------

CONNECTIONS

The sociologist C.Wright Mills tried to make his readers aware of

the intricate connection between the patterns of our own lives and

the course of world history, as ordinary men do not usually know

what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming

and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part.

They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the

interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and

world.1 The Baha'i Faith, in contrast, gives to its votaries an

historical consciousness that is both providential and humanistic,

60

that stimulates the process of making connections and finding

patterns between individual lives and the course of history.-Ron

Price with thanks to 1C.W. Mills, the Sociological Imagination,

1959, p.4.

A lot of things relate

to a lot of things, big-

and-little-pictures in

this tenth stage of history

and a lot of isms and wasms

have collapsed as explanations

of the world and ourselves.1

Meanwhile, there has been

an influence not dwelling

elsewhere in literature or

philosophy that shatters the

cup of speech that we cannot

contain-we cannot dam the sea.2

61

This influence asks us to stretch

ourselves beyond the here-and-now

and present awareness, subtlely

reminding us of what we already

know in the big world that has made

us what we are, as sub-creators in our

own understanding of our own life.

1 Immanuel Wallerstein, "Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An

American Utopian," Theory and Society, Vol.15, 1986, pp.465-

474.

2 Horace Holley quoted in the Ocean of His Words, J. Hatcher,

Wilmette, 1997,p.3.

Ron Price

8 November 2002

---------------------------

CONSTRUCTED

"The world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as

62

reality by the ordinary members of society in the subjectively

meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in

their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these

members."1 The French sociologist, Emile Durkheim did not see

it this way. The world of everyday life, for Durkheim, could

never be said to originate in the thoughts and actions of

"members" because everyday life is irreducibly external to any

individual or plurality. It is always already there when one

enters it, as a child, or as an adult when one, for example, joins

the Baha'i Faith or moves to a new Baha'i community as a

pioneer. The implication is that the social world is made of

historically constituted positions or situations through which

people move and differently exist.2 In my poetry I have tried to

both describe the world I've lived in and the one I have created

in, assuming as I do that both have some reality, especially a

metaphorical one. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Peter Berger and

Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality, 1967,

pp. 19-20; and 2Herve Varenne, "The Social Facting of

63

Education: Durkheim's Legacy," Journal of Curriculum Studies,

Vol.27, 1995, pp.373-389.

There's an intersection here

of self and other, biography

and history requiring some

virtuosity to get at it, at the

story, subtle and mysterious.

Much of the data is slippery,

elusive, tentative, something

that has seized my life,

startling and bewildered,

sometimes wrenching:

is there an essential whole?

Are there patterns and nodes?

64

Is the truth of my story deeper

than my life itself? Have I

provoked and illuminated it?1

1 R. Bullough and S. Pinnegar, "Guidelines…of Self-Study,"

Educational Researcher, Vol.30, No.3, pp.13-21.

Ron Price 12/11/'02.

---------------------------

LIFE-ENHANCEMENT

In the prelude to his biography of Henry Moore, Roger Berthoud

tells of Moore's life-enhancing quality. Both Moore's personality

and his work, Berthoud writes, had this quality. "One felt the

better," he continues, "for having talked to him or for having

contemplated his creations."1 There is no doubt that in my life I

possessed this life-enhancing quality. I possessed it in many of my

years as a teacher. But I did not possess it all the time. You just

have to ask either of the women I married. I did not possess it with

65

all my students; I'm sure there would have been dozens of students

over those thirty-five years who were not impressed with my

qualities as a person or as a teacher. For, as a pioneer, I was in

many ways just an average bloke, certainly no saint and, if

distinguished, only from time to time and not as a consistent

feature of my life from the word go to woe. -Ron Price with thanks

to Roger Berthoud, The Life of Henry Moore, Faber and Faber,

London, 1987, p.15.

I, too, Roger, am more complicated

than I seem and am also addicted

to this poetic work, as my restless

mind wanders over the world's mystery

settling for the partial and incomplete

portion that is our lot due to life's

contingencies, mysteries and paradoxes.

For whatever truths I find there's so much

that is provisional, with an emphasis here

66

but not there.1 And whatever confidence

I have found there is worry still about the

apparently trivial, this complex and difficult

product that I have created to market2

in the interstices of these my latter days.

1 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Hogarth Press, 1991(1940), London,

p.xi.

2 Roger Berthoud, op.cit., p.13.

Ron Price 14 December 2002

------------------------------------

MACRO-MICRO

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be

understood without understanding both. Yet men do not usually

define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and

institutional contradiction. The sociological imagination enables

its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its

meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of

individuals. The first fruit of this imagination and the first lesson

67

of the social science that embodies it is the idea that the individual

can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by

locating himself within this period, that he can know his own

chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals

in his circumstances. We have come to know that every individual

lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives

out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical

sequence. -Ron Price with thanks to C.W. Mills, The Sociological

Imagination, 1959, pp.3-10.

There's a massive complexity here.

But, at the core, there's been a fine

compression, an intensification of

global consciousness, making of this

world a single place, coexistence in a

single spot, humankind's oneness, yes,

taking off, by stages, since 1475, 1875,

1975 with more and more world images

in this single place.….since I was playing

68

baseball and we went to outer space and I

joined the Baha'i Faith by stages beginning

with that most wonderful and thrilling motion

which appeared from that point of light the spirit

of teaching…..1 Half a century, since then, since

that inception of the Kingdom of God on earth2

when I was nine and John and Hattie Dixon

served us rose-hip tea in that little town by that

great lake in southern Ontario’s golden triangle.

1'Abdu'l-Baha in God Passes By, p.351.

2 idem. The completion of the temple in Chicago inaugurated this

inception.

Ron Price 8 November 2000

------------------------------

PROJECT OF THE SELF

According to Ulrich Beck, the most dominant and widespread

desire in Western societies today is the desire to live a 'life of one's

own'. More and more people aspire to actively create an individual

69

identity, to be the author of their own life. The ethic of individual

self-fulfilment and achievement can be seen as the "most powerful

current in modern societies." The concept of individualisation does

not mean isolation, unconnectedness, loneliness or the end of

engagement in society. Individuals are now trying to 'produce'

their own biographies. This is partly done by consulting 'role

models' in the media. Through these role models individuals

explore personal possibilities for themselves and imagine

alternatives of how they can go about creating their own lives.

They are, in effect, experimenting with the project of the self, with

strategies for self. -Ron Price with thanks to Judith Schroeter, "The

Importance of Role Models in Identity Formation: The Ally

McBeal In Us," Internet, 11 October 2002.

I define myself in community

which is not the same as being

surrounded by people ad nauseam,

nor does it mean doing what I want

as much of the time as I can or being

70

free of difficulties, stresses and strains--

which seem unavoidable. I've been

creating my own biography--my own

autobiography--for years and getting

very little sense of who I am from the

media and their endless role models.

I've been in a community with two

hundred years & fifty years of models

historical models and hundreds, over

the years, of people I have known who

have shown me qualities worth emulating,

helping to make me some enigmatic and

composite creature on this God’s earth.

Ron Price

11 October 2002

----------------------------

SOCIAL SEDIMENTATION

71

Experiences become sedimented in that they congeal when they are

recollected as recognizable and memorable entities. For me, they

become part of my autobiographical poetry and narrative.

Intersubjective sedimentation occurs when several individuals

share a common biography, the experiences of which become

incorporated in a common stock of knowledge. This social

sedimentation can become recognizably objective and shared by

others in a sign system. Language becomes the basis and the

instrument of a collective stock of knowledge. It becomes the

depository of a large aggregate of collective sedimentations. The

objective meanings of institutional activity are conceived of as

''knowledge'' and transmitted as such. With the full

institutionalization of charisma in 1963 in the Baha'i community,

the institutional transmission of knowledge has been mostly in the

form of letters. It is difficult to achieve consistency between

institutions and the forms of transmission of knowledge pertaining

to them. But, for the most part, this transmission in the Baha'i

community has possessed a consistency and a logical coherence.

72

The problem of logical coherence in the transmission of this

knowledge arises first on the level of legitimation and secondly on

the level of socialization. In the Baha'i Faith the former is not a

serious problem. -Ron Price with thanks to "Sociology Notes from

Reading in the 1990s," 15 November 2002.

We've been sedimented,

this community and I,

for several decades, but

noone is kidding no one

that the sharing of His Signs

is a totally consistent, smooth,

run from year to year. Yes,

there is grace and favour to

joyously press on in battle;

then, too, there is whimpering,

fright, trembling and shaking.

There are veils which shut me out.1

73

There is a life congealed in recollection,

a thousand memorable entities and an

aggregate of sediment with seeds sown

in a forest of wild trees, pebbles with

some fruit and rare precious stones.2

1 'Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, p.181.

2 'Abdu'l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, 1977, p.87…..Ron Price

16/11/02.

----------------------

SOME CONTINUOUS COMPOSITE WHOLE

The spiritual, mental and emotional autobiographies of the vast

majority of human beings who have ever lived have never been

recorded. For many thousands of people in the last two centuries,

though, a detailed, a scanty, a fascinating or a tedious record has

been left. In recent decades writing biography and autobiography

has become somewhat of a popular sport or discipline. In the case

of a very few, people like the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, the

preservation of documents about the self has been carried to the

74

point of mania. With Flaubert, the student of the individual

creative process has a microscopic view for perhaps the first time

in history of the development of the creative process in one

individual. My own particular poetic narrative presents what I am

to myself, how I see myself and how I have lived with this self for

sixty-five years. I go about this exercise with a certain style. Style

to me was what it was to Flaubert "the rendering of content in a

form in which both style and content would be one."1 Style is the

filter, the means, of rendering externality. -Ron Price with thanks to

Benjamin F. Bart, Flaubert, Syracuse UP, 1967, Preface and 1p.340.

Style is, ultimately, a matter of the precise

words used and their arrangement in some

structure, some form, some continuous,

composite whole, a physiological-anatomy,

in the cultural repository of history.1

Content, the work, came to me insensibly

over several years so that, now, it is the work

75

of my whole life. It is always on my mind.

I am always preparing for it. Even my rests

are rests for the work ahead down the road.

1 Some of Flaubert's view of 'style'

Ron Price

13 April 2002

--------------------------------

MY 'BIG BOOK'

A symbol of poet Les Murray's vastly eclectic interests "The Great

Book' was a large, hard-covered ledger-book which he had adapted

as a scrapbook.1 Into it went postcards, newsclippings, poems he

liked, cartoons, inter alia. My mother kept a similar book which

was sent to me from Canada when she died in 1978. Not as large as

Murray's, it contained the literary memorabilia she had collected

from about 1930 to 1955.

The symbol of my own eclectic interests can be found today in my

study here in Tasmania. Of postcards and cards there are few; of

76

cartoons and assorted newsclippings there are more. The absences,

the empty spaces, in my Big Book are voluminous, for one cannot

record it all. Quotations abound in some 300 arch lever files, two-

ring binders, A-3 loose-leaf and other sized files on a host of

subjects: history, philosophy, religion, literature, poetry, fiction,

drama, psychology, media studies, anthropology, Greek and

Roman history, various religious themes, graduate study programs,

journals, novel writing attempts, biography, autobiography and

much else. inter alia. -Ron Price with thanks to Peter Alexander,

Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Oxford UP, London, 2006, p.255.

So this is my 'great book.'

I've divided it into a library

of files over the years.

Part of my soul is there

on the shelves of my study,

extremely agreeable friends

from everywhere in the world,

77

past and present,

always at my service;

they come and go

as I am pleased.

Sometimes they are difficult

to understand and require

special effort on my part.

My cares are often driven away

by their vivacity. They teach me

a certain fortitude. I keep each of them

in a small chamber in a humble corner

of my room where they and I

are delighted by the happy symbiosis

of my retirement and their presence.1

1 Plutarch, On Books.

78

Ron Price

16 March 2002

That’s all folks!

THE LIGHTHOUSE

In discussing the character of a man, there is no course of error so

fertile as the drawing of a hard and fast line. We are attracted by

the salient points, what seems to stand out in his life, and seeing

them clearly and repeatedly we jump to conclusions. That is

natural. These conclusions may even have some validity. These

qualities that stand out may be likened to a lighthouse guiding our

way in the night or, in the day, serving as a landmark in our travels.

But they are only a guide. They tell us little of the surrounding

landscape, none of the geology, the history, the botany, the

79

geography of the nearby terrain. This is even more true of a man's

life, so far removed from the general sketch, the highlights, which

at best are all that is usually passed down to succeeding

generations.

The man of letters on the other hand is, in truth, ever writing his

own biography or autobiography. What is in his mind he declares

to the world, to whoever reads his works. If he finds a readership,

if his work is well written, this memoir, this biography, this

autobiography will be all that is necessary. It will take us far

beyond that lighthouse into geology, history, botany, geography--a

total view. -Ron Price with thanks to Anthony Trollope, The Life

of Cicero, quoted in Trollope, Victoria Glendinning, Pimlico,

London, 1993, p.v.

There are some lighthouses here.

I've set them out along the coast

to guide your way through the night

80

of my life and there has been much

night, black clouds and darknesses.

I've also provided rich and varied

collections of flora and fauna

to tell you something

of the living tissue of my days,

some of its green shoots,

its flowers, its bright colours

and some of its exotic texture.

I've even left you a map

to help you connect

with nearby towns and villages;

for I have belonged to a community

where people knew me

and would tell you something of me.

81

But, again, do not jump to conclusions

about the nature of my person and self.

What I have left behind can only,

like the lighthouse, guide your travels.

I have tried to be faithful

to the Covenant of God,

to fulfil in my life His trust

and in the realm of spirit

obtain the gem of divine virtue.1

But how successful I have been

that is a mystery to me, as much as thee.

1 Baha'u'llah, Hidden Words, Introductory passage.

Ron Price

17 January 2002

82

THE AGE WE LIVE IN

It is not so much authorial ego or that I am a compulsive self-

historiographer which compels me to document my life more fully

than most. All this poetry is my workshop where my awareness of

life expresses itself quintessentially. I also see myself as part of a

global pattern, a representative figure, part of a mytho-historical

process which may be of use to future generations. I was born into

a new age with the Kingdom of God just beginning when I was

nine years old. In my lifetime the Baha'i administrative process,

the nucleus and pattern for a new Order, went through a radical

growth period. I have been committed to the promises and

possibilities of this new way of Life.1 As F. Scott Fitzgerald was

committed to and had a belief in American life in the 1920s, as

American was going through new beginnings so, too, do I feel

strongly, passionately, a new commitment, a new belief and new

beginnings.

83

George Bull points out in his introduction to his massive biography

of the life of Michelangelo that people are often best understood

"in the crowded context of the significant changes and continuities

of the age."2 The age I have lived in and through has also faced

"significant changes and continuities." My life, I have little doubt,

can be understood, too, as Michelangelo's and so many others have

been understood, in this same general context of their age. -Ron

Price with thanks to 1 Matthew Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945,

p.vii; and 2George Bull, Michelangelo: A Biography, Viking Press,

1995, p.xviii.

I, too, saw myself as coming

at the end of a complex

historical process

that had its beginnings

in the district of Ahsa,

84

those birds flying over Akka

and those Men with beards

and I identified with it.

I was born near the start

of yet another Formative Age:

would it last as long as the Greeks?1

I understood profoundly well

the claims of this new belief

as you did the claims of your craft.2

I was, like you, fortune's darling

in this new age and I was, too,

the shell-shocked casualty

of a war that was more complex

than any of us could understand.

1 Their Formative Age lasted from 1100 to 500 BC; this one began

23 years before I was born.

85

2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the major American writer between

the wars: 1919-1939.

Were my poetry to become significant enough in the public domain

I would certainly like to direct the attention of scholars to

adaptations of and responses to its contents in music, drama, dance,

and the visual arts. I’m confident that studies of my poetry in

music, for example, could take the form of, say, something like

Aaron Copland’s song cycle of 12 of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.27

Copland completed this creative work in 1950. While the poems of

Dickinson that Copeland chose centered about no single theme,

they treated of subject matter particularly close to Miss Dickinson:

nature, death, life, eternity. It was Copeland’s hope, nearly a

century after Dickinson’s poems were conceived, to create a

musical counterpart to Emily Dickinson’s unique personality.

However desirable such an exercise might be to my spirit, I leave

27 Dorothy Z. Baker, “Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson:

A Reading of Dissonance and Harmony,” The Emily Dickinson Journal, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2003.

86

that activity to a posterity that I can scarcely imagine. Whatever

aspects of my work that a future age might seek to highlight

through song or indeed any other form of the creative and

performing arts is, for me, a tantalizing consideration that can

scarcely occupy any of my time at present, indeed, it seems

somewhat pretentious to do so. I can not help but offer one thought

in this direction; namely, that the poems which a future composer,

for example, might select would, of necessity, be filled with the

dissonant noises of the life of these four epochs. A counterpoint

was developing, of course, but they were still early days, early days

of the Kingdom of God on earth.

I have never understood music and my experience of it in a

vacuum, as a pure structure of sounds as if fallen from the stars

onto my faculty of musical perception. Music seems rather

inextricably embedded in my several forms of life, forms that are,

as it happens, essentially linguistic. Music is necessarily

apprehended, at least in part, in terms of the language and linguistic

87

practices that define me and my world. These words, this memoir,

has for me a musical context and texture.

Music is manifested, as the philosopher Wittgenstein once wrote,

by a complex of behaviours, such as illustrative gestures, apt

comparisons, suitable hummings, and appropriate movings,

incarnations, of thought. Gesture, in music, can be defined as "a

movement that may be interpreted as significant."28 So is this true

in words, in writing. Indeed all the musical terms seem to me to

have literary analogues. Some analysts of music see gesture as

affecting performance and experience more directly than the

thematic and harmonic categories of conventional analysis. Gesture

is seen as central to the performer’s conception of the musical

work--and mine.

Performers, like writers, attend primarily to the ‘shape’ of a piece.

Shape is analogous to structure but it tends to be more dynamic

28 Jerrold Levinson, "Musical Thinking," The Journal of Music and Meaning, Fall 2003.

88

through its sensitivity to momentum, climax, and ebb and flow,

comprising an outline, a general plan, a set of gestures unfolding in

time. I say this because these considerations lie at the background

and in the texture of my work.

To say one final thing about gesture, its definition in musical terms

has some application to my writing and so I include it here in full:

"a holistic concept, synthesizing what theorists would analyze

separably as melody, harmony, rhythm and meter, tempo and

rubato, articulation, dynamics, and phrasing into an indivisible

whole. For performance, these overlapping strands must be further

melded into a smooth, and at some level undivided, continuity.

That melding is achieved most efficiently by means of an

apparently natural, human gesture. Performers strive to create a

shaping and shading of each phrase that is more than the sum of the

motivic and harmonic units of which they are composed."

89

Gestural analysis in music, like analysis of this memoir, should

focus on short events---motifs, figures or short phrases. The sense

of unity in a composition and in this work is forged through a

recognition of the gesture’s internal continuity and coherence, and

of the interconnections between gestures. This enables performers

like myself to recognise and project seemingly disparate and

distinct “motifs” as manifestations of the same “gesture”. This

work is like one single gesture.

Language, like music, is manifested in a complex of behaviours.

Both music and language are forms of thought. Understanding

music should therefore be analogous to understanding language.

Both are a matter of use, that is, of knowing how to operate with

the medium in question in particular contexts of communication.

This 'knowing' is not about propositional knowledge but, rather,

about behavioral and experiential abilities and dispositions. Hence,

if music is thought, we should naturally come to understand it as

we come to understand thought in words. This is done not by

90

learning how to decode or decipher it, but by learning how to

respond to it appropriately and how to connect it to and ground it in

our lives. How I respond to language and how readers respond to

my language is at the core of this memoir.

Intelligible music stands to literal thinking in precisely the same

relation as does intelligible verbal discourse. If that relation is one

that takes its form in expression, then music and language are, at

any rate, in the same, and quite comfortable, boat.29 The performer

and certainly this writer allows the articulation, accentuation, even

the tempo to be different from page to page or on every few notes

if that seems to be the natural shape of the lines. Everything is

dynamic, fluid, in flux. That is certainly how I felt as I wrote this

memoir.

Musical performers who over-emphasize their gestures through

exaggerated emotional expression are similar to an actor who

29 idem91

accompanies every movement with exaggerated facial and bodily

expressions. I am conscious of having over-emphasized some

gestures in this work as I have also over-emphasized some gestures

in my life. This is not surprising given the bi-polar nature of my

experience, my various enthusiasms and their gestural

performances which undoubtedly have disrupted the overall

architecture of my life and both enhanced and disrupted its

continuity.

Musical sounds and these words flow in the same world and,

although these comments comparing music and writing say nothing

about my life, they are an appropriate inclusion as this memoir

winds its way to its conclusion.

VOLUME FIVE

CHAPTER SEVEN

ABOUT MY POETRY

92

I find writing poetry is somewhat like the way a stream flows down

from the mountain to the sea, its course changed by every boulder

it comes across, which never goes straight for a minute unless the

terrain dictates otherwise. It follows one law, is always loyal to that

law which, curiously, is no law. There is nothing for it to do but

make the trip to the sea.-Ron Price with thanks to Alfred Kazin in

Mark Twain, Harold Bloom, editor, Chelsea House, 1986, pp.132-

33.

______________________________________________________

93

I have tried in my poetry to overcome the problem that Milton

refers to in Paradise Lost. I spoke, I wrote poetry and other genres

and, in the process, defined the who, the where, the cause. I trust

that very little of my poetry verges on the incoherent,1 although I

have had enough people in the last 15 years(1990-2005) either

express the fact they did not understand what I wrote or they

simply did not enjoy my poetry enough to bother commenting;

perhaps they did not want to hurt my feelings by being honest.-Ron

Price with thanks to John Redmond, “Review of Les Murray’s

Subhuman Redneck Poems, Jacket, Vol.1, 1997.

My self I then perused, and limb by limb

Surveyed, and sometimes went, and sometimes ran

With supple joints, and lively vigour led:

But who I was, or where, or from what cause,

Knew not; to speak I tried, and forthwith spake,

My tongue obeyed and readily could name

What e'er I saw.

94

- Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII, pp. 253-73

______________________________________________________

Finally, before I include some of my poetry here, I would like to set

its context in the framework of epic poetry and epic history, the

epic story of the Baha’i Faith.

EPIC JOURNEY/EPIC CONTEXT

I remember reading how both Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon

acquired the initial inspiration and concept for the magnum opus of

their lives: A Study of History in the case of Toynbee and The

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the case of Gibbon.

Three years ago I began to think of writing my own epic poem and

fashioned some ten pages as a beginning. The poetic work of my

own life, my epic, I have come to see in terms of all the poetry I

have written, the poetry I have sent to the Baha’i World Centre

Library and what I have entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs.

95

I have begun to see all of this poetry somewhat like Pound’s

Cantos which draws on a massive body of print, or the Confucian

Analects, a word which means literary gleanings. The Cantos, the

longest poem in modern history, over eight hundred pages and

written over more than fifty years(1916 to 1968ca), are a great

mass of literary gleanings. So is this true of my poetry. The

conceptualization of my work as epic has come long after its

beginnings. My poetry slowly defined itself as an epic after half a

dozen years of intense and extensive writing and more than 30

years of occasional writing. I began to see my poetic opus as one

immense poem. I like to think this poetry gives voice to the Baha’i

culture I’ve inhabited all these years.

I see my poetic epic as furnishing, among other things, a host of

images. The images I provide are those which should be seen

within the context of that famous definition of image that Pound

wrote in 1913: "An 'image' is that which presents an intellectual

96

and emotional complex in an instant of time.”30 Understood in this

way, image does not seem to be distinguished in any special way

from a traditional understanding of it. Something very similar was

stated by Poe in his explanation of poetic character found in

writing: "A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by

elevating the soul.”31 To a large extent, this is so since the poetic

character of human beings is universal and their poetic works seek,

above all, to excite our emotions: "If we are moved by a poem, it

has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are

not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.”32 For many, if not

most, my poetic epic will be to most people, in Eliot’s terms,

meaningless.

Pound was twenty-nine when he began to write his epic. I was fifty

three when I began to see all my poetry, poetry I began writing at

the age of thirty-six or, perhaps, as far back as eighteen, as part of

30 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, editor, T.S. Eliot, Faber and Faber, London, 1954, p.4. 31 ibid., p.71.32 T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, Faber and Faber, London, 1957, p.30.

97

one immense epic. Pound was acutely conscious that the cultural,

the historical tradition had broken down and he was searching for a

new basis, “new laws of divine justice.”1 His task was to

reassemble this tradition or, at least, search in history where not

only the fall from innocence was located but also the locus for the

process of redemption could be found. I, too, was aware of this

breakdown. I, too, felt the need to reassemble history, not as

Pound did, but rather to find truths which were perennial but not

archaic within the broad framework of a new Revelation from God,

a Revelation which defined and described the continuities and was

Itself the basis for redemption.

Written now, for the most part, over a little more than eight

years(1992-2000), the epic I am writing covers a pioneering life of

39 years. It also covers much more. I have now sent 39 booklets to

the Baha’i World Centre Library: one for each year of this

pioneering venture. But the epic journey that is at the base of this

poetic opus is not only a personal one of over forty years back to

98

the time I became a Baha’i, it is also the journey of this new

System, the World Order of Baha’u’llah, which has its origins as

far back as the 1840s and, if one includes the two precursors to this

System, as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century when

many of the revolutions and forces that are at the beginning of

modern history have their origin: the American and French

revolutions, the industrial and agricultural revolutions and the

revolution in the arts and sciences. Generally, the way my

narrative imagination conceives of this epic is itself an attempt to

connect this long and complex history to my own life, as far as

possible, to that of the religion to which I belong. I have sought

and found, in recent years, a narrative voice that contains

uncertainty, ambiguity and incompleteness among shifting fields of

reference and of a certainty mixed with and defining itself by the

presence of its polar opposite, doubt.

Since this poetry is inspired by so much that is, and has been, part

of the human condition, this epic it could be said has at its centre

99

Life Itself and the most natural and universal of human activities,

the act of creating narratives. When we die all that remains is our

story. I have called this poetic work an epic because it deals with

events, as all epics do, that are or will be significant to the entire

society. It contains what Charles Handy, philosopher, business

man and writer, calls the golden seed: a belief that what I am doing

is important, probably unique, to the history and development of

this System. This poetry, this epic, has to do with heroism and

deeds of battle in their contemporary and historical manifestations.

It involves a great journey, not only my own across two continents,

but that of this Cause as it has expanded across the planet. The epic

convention of the active intervention of God and holy souls from

another world; and the convention of an epic tale, told in verse, a

verse that is not a frill or an ornament, but is essential to the story,

are found here. I think there is an amplitude in this poetry that

simple information-giving lacks; there is also an engine of action

that is found in my inner life more than in its external story. In

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some ways, this is the most significant aspect of my work, at least

from my point of view.

In the Greek tradition the Goddess of Epic Poetry was Calliope,

one of the nine sisters of the Muses. The Muses were the

inspiration of artists. Calliope was the mother of Orpheus who was

known to have a keen understanding of both music and poetry. We

know little about Calliope, as we know little about the inspiration

of the Muses, at least in the Greek tradition. In the young and

developing poetic and artistic tradition of the Baha’i Faith, on the

other hand, although gods and goddesses play no role, holy souls

“who have remained faithful unto the covenant of God” can be a

leaven that leavens “the world of being” and furnishes “the power

through which the arts and wonders of the world are made

manifest.”(Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, 1956, p.161.) In addition,

among a host of other inspirational sources, the simple expression

‘Ya’Baha’ul’Abha’ brings “the Supreme Concourse to the door of

life” and “opens the heavens of mysteries, colours and riddles of

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life.” (‘Abdu’l-Baha, Source Unknown) Much could be said about

inspiration but I shall leave the topic with the above brief analysis

and comment.

Mary Gibson says in Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the

Victorians(Cornell U, 1995, p.96) that one question was at the

centre of The Cantos. It was the "question of how beauty and

power, passion and order can cohere." This question was one of

many that concerned Pound in the same years that Baha'i

Administration, the precursor of a future World Order, was coming

to assume its embryonic form in the last years of the second decade

of this century, a form that would in time manifest those qualities

Pound strove in vain to find in a modern politico-philosophy.

At the heart of my own epic is a sense of visionary certitude,

derived from a belief in an embryonic World Order, that a cultural

and political coherence will increase in the coming decades and

centuries around the sinews of this efflorescing Order. Wallace

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Stevens’ sense of the epic “as a poem of the mind in the act of

finding what will suffice”(Jay Parini, editor, the Columbia History

of American Poetry, Columbia UP, NY, 1993, p.543) is also at the

centre of my conceptual approach. This epic is an experimental

vehicle containing open-ended autobiographical sequences. It is a

didactic intellectual exploration with lines developing with

apparent spontaneity and going in many directions. The overall

shape is in no way predetermined. In many respects, this long

poem is purely speculative philosophy, attempting to affirm a

romantic wholeness on a fragmented world, something Walter

Crane tried to do in the 1920s. This long poem, or seemingly

endless series of poems, is an immense accumulation of fragments,

like the world itself, but they are held together by a unifying vision.

So, too, was Pound’s epic.

Pound was intent on developing an “ideal polity of the mind”.

This polity flooded his consciousness and suggested a menacing

fluidity, an indiscriminate massiveness of the crowd. The polity

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that is imbeded in my own epic does not suggest the crowd,

probably because the polity I have been working with over my

lifetime has been one that has grown so slowly; the groups I have

worked in and with have been small. My style, my poetic design,

though, is like Pound’s insofar as I use juxtaposition as a way to

locate and enhance meanings. Like Pound, I stress continuity in

history, the cultural and the personal. At the heart of epic poetry

for Pound was “the historical.” Also, for Pound, was a new world

order based on the poet’s own visionary experience. It was part of

the reclaiming job that Modernist poets saw as their task, to regain

old ground from the novelists. But, unlike Pound, I see new and

revolutionary change in both the historical process, in my own

world and in the future. The visionary experience that will guide

world order is not mine, but that derived from the Central Figures

of my Faith.

Those who are quite familiar with the poem Leaves of Grass may

recall that Walt Whitman often merges himself with the reader.

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His poem expresses his theory of democracy. His poem is the

embodiment of the idea that a single unique protagonist can

represent a whole epoch. He can be looked at in two ways: there is

his civic, public, side and his private, intimate side. While it would

be presumptuous of me to claim, or even to attempt, to represent an

entire epoch, this private/public dichotomy is an important

underlying feature of this epic poem (Harold Bloom, The Western

Canon, Harcourt, Brace and Co., NY, 1994, pp.447-78). I also like

to think that, while this poetry has a focus on my own experience,

this experience is part and parcel of the experience of my

coreligionists around the world.

In my poetic opus, my poetic epic, Pioneering Over Four Epochs,

the reader should sense a merging of reader and writer, a political

philosophy, a sociology, a psychology, a global citizen--something

we have all become. There is in my poetry a public and a private

man reacting to the burgeoning planetization of humankind, the

knowledge explosion and the tempest that has been history’s

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experience, at least as far back as the 1840s, if not the days of

Shaykh Ahmad after he left his homeland in those halcyon and

terrifying years of the French Revolution.

There is much more than verse-making here, though. Here is the

ruling passion of my life: the Baha’i Faith, its history and

teachings. It seemed to wrap and fill my being during my

pioneering life, the process beginning as far back as 1953 when my

mother first heard of the Faith. Indeed, I came to see myself as part

of what ‘Abdu’l-Baha called that “heavenly illumination” which

flowed to all the peoples of the world from the North American

Baha’i community and would “adorn the pages of history” (Citadel

of Faith, p.121). My story inevitably became part of that larger

story of the Baha’i Faith and, again, that larger story which is

history itself. Stephen Sicari suggests that the structural principle

in Pound is “the search for unity.”3 If I had to define the structural

principle behind my own sharply fragmented, multifarious material

with its vivid multiplicity and diversity, it would be my attempt to

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express the unity I found and that I believe lies behind and in the

world of creation.

For it is the narrative imagination that is at the base of this epic

poetry. As far as possible I have tried to make it honest, true,

accurate, realistic, informed, knowledgeable. As I develop my

story through the grid of narrative, I tell my story the way I see it,

through my own eyes and my own knowledge, as Baha’u’llah

exhorted me in Hidden Words. I leave behind me traces, things in

the present which stand for absent things in the past. The

phenomenon of the trace, Paul Racour writes, is similar to the

relationship between lived time and astronomical time, a

relationship at the basis of calendar time. For history is

“knowledge by traces”, as F. Simiand puts it (Paul Ricoeur,

“Narrative Time”, Philosophy Today, Winter 1985). And so, I

bequeath my traces.

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The traces I bequeath are also, to continue an important theme of

the epic tradition, those of the wandering hero. It is a hero, a

wanderer, with many dimensions described in many contexts. It is

a journey of redemption to union with God, as it was for Dante. It

is a journey of adventure and finding my home, as it was for

Odysseus. It is a journey that attempts to embody my vision of the

Baha’i world order, as the poet Virgil tried to articulate his vision

of Augustus’ order during the crucial years of the establishment of

the Roman Empire(29-19 BC). It is a personal epic, a personal

journey, an inner journey, within the tradition of William

Wordsworth and his Prelude. There are elements of the Miltonian

epic here with the foregrounding of the author, his weaknesses and

his strengths, in what is par excellence, a theological-religious

journey. And there is the monumental journey of Baha’u’llah over

forty years which acts as a metaphorical base for my own journey.

The wanderer I draw on is, in other words, a flexible, elastic, figure

who allows me to include in my epic poem virtually anything that I

want to include in the text.

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And so the wanderer that I describe in my epic is a composite. But

this wanderer is not in search of the Path; rather, he has found the

Path and the wandering takes place on the Path. The wandering

through the sea of historical, sociological, literary and other texts,

books and articles, etc. is all part of the experience, the context, the

definition, of the Path, for this particular journeyman. For the

reader will come across many references, many texts, many

quotations here. They are laid on a Baha’i-paradigm-map; I am not

alone, as Pound was, relying on his own wit and courage with no

framework of guidance and meaning within which to sift history’s

and experience’s immense chaos into some order. I find that the

actual writing of the poem assumes characteristics of the epic

journey itself. This was true for Pound, for Dante and, in all

likelihood, the mythical Homer.

It may be that my journey on this Path is only half over and that

this epic found its initial conceptualization at the mid-point of my

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Baha’i life. If I live to be ninety-five, my journey within this

framework of belief has just passed the half way mark (age 15 to

95, a period of eighty years, with age 55 the half-way point). So I

like to think that what I have now, after only eight years of intense

writing of poetry, is what Pound had: “a dazzling array of finely

wrought fragments straining in their own unique way to achieve

order and unity”4 through the deployment and development of this

image of the wanderer in its many forms. That is what I like to

think. Time will tell, though, if I can sustain and define in precise

and dazzling terms the structural, the organizational, principle

enunciated above. This structural principle is based on a view of

my poetry as: the expression of my experience, my sense, my

understanding, in the context of my wandering, my journey and of

the concept of the Oneness of Mankind. Can I continue to

develop this epic, beyond the start I have given it, to a satisfying

conclusion in the years ahead?

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FOOTNOTES

1 Stephen Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition: Dante and the Modern

World, State University of New York Press, 1991, p.10.

2 Robert Nisbet, Social Change and Social History, 1969. In this

book the sociologist Nisbet describes the metaphor of change and

its pervasiveness since the age of the Greeks(1200-400 BC).

3 Stephen Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition: Dante and the Modern

World, State University of New York Press, 1991, p.x.

4 ibid., p. xiii.

Ron Price

28 March 2002

PART ONE OF MY SPECIAL EPIC POEM

At the centre of this wondrous epochal shift

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is a cultural story of saints, martyrs and

messengers and endless connective tissue

with past and present. Heroic exemplars,

deep in history back to the enlightenment,

say, in Bahrain, the core of the vision

with the force to slowly actualise a reality,

new political and social harmonies

and disharmonies. My own ordering of history

here in its legitimate and beauteous form

with law and design, touchstones of order,

writ large across chaotic and energised

multiplicity, the endless disasters of time,

extinctions and near-extinctions,

the human slaughters and the pain

as I connect, in situ, my subjectivity

and history with meaning—yes, yes,

a place of refuge, partly in desire,

in mind or imagination and in the Beauty

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of the Unseen shining forth above the horizon

of creation1 and in creating myself through

commitment to a complex personal synthesis,

through a relationship with myself

in a fascinating and difficult elaboration2,

inventing, producing myself with this poetic art.

And all these endless particulars cohere,

far beyond a personal order,

an autobiographical imposition

from this finite brain

in a dramaturgical translation,

a richly allusive, highly imagistic in-gathering,

not simply for some love of nature,

but to unlock a beauty and a truth,

to taste a choice Wine

with the fingers of might and power

and slowly establish a spiritual kingdom

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in a physical form-order and beauty linked,

power and love united yonder, world's away,

around history's bend. Hesitation and doubt

I have heard and seen by gallon measure,

things that throw consternation into the hearts of all men—

and so the showers of tests come to pass

to free us from the prison-cage of self and desire,

to help us attain the meads of heavenly delight,

with gifts from the Unknowable Friend,

those shudders of awe that are mostly a quiet shimmer

and shake, a tightness, dynamic tension;

all my days surrounded by this growth,

this organism, two generations now, incipient,

beginnings of a System, potentialities

and interrelationships of component parts

only partially understood, often like sinking

in a miasmal ooze, but a good terror, this one,

as we have inched our consequential and necessary way

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toward a humbling summit only seen,

with the secret of conquering a greater world than ourselves

only little known, and so we prayed. I seem to have prayed

for years, over three epochs, and then ran into the door

of meditation and it opened into another world.

I have seen devotion, beyond human strength,

exhausting, making heroes of many men.

I watched my moods like a cat as I pursued this path,

convinced of the significance of my days sub specie aeternitatis

at the core of my art, my poetic, the oneness of my experience.

I trust its connection with the Royal Falcon on the arm of the

Almighty.

I have thrown my life away in this great cause

but, as my arm has arched and flung, there was

down in my heart something sung, some voice

that met my joy and tears in great fatigue with all the years.

Truth here was what one long endured with persistence,

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feet and passion sure, some burning vitality of mind

and heart, an intensity that once threatened to tear me apart.

I had my time with sexual heat, a blazing contact,

direct and real. It nearly sucked my life away with lust

the core of search. It tried to kill my loneliness and isolation.

Beyond, beyond the horrors and fears, to make some meanings

of our years we turn to sex, to self, to God

so as not to wither on this sod. And me no less.

And if, by some mysterious dispensation of Providence,

we feel we can play a part in changing the world,

not just get a grip on it and so endure it with a taste of joy,

with a taste of destiny minimising that everlasting self-concern,

the fierce inner pressure of problems with no solution

or with just transient existence, we can live with our guilt,

with sin, with our evil doings having our heart

melting all our life. This is the feeling of redemption.

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And so there is a grimness here, and redeeming belief,

supernatural sanction. There has been a speed, a power,

a talent, a fertility-one matchless time-after forty years of

wandering between two holy years-a single human self

struggling to become what he is capable of becoming,

to know who he is, a lot of pennies dropping without

an endless recitation of the quotidian, unremarkable fact.

Some rich burgeoning, some rich hermeneutic tradition

opening up for all to see, read and understand,

like some elaborate systems theory which defines social reality

in terms of relations: right back to his birth, the birth of the

universe

and endless other births and deaths and relationships

among relationships, networks of information that only I can bring

into some integration, dynamic analytic distinctions

of complexity, instability, quantity and quality...for this

universal human community, the end and object

of the highest moral endeavour, has at its root needs

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and interests universally similar. We must free ourselves

from history’s conceptual jails in this remade world

and keep remaking it.

And so an intensified global interconnectedness,

a post-international, post-industrial transformation

is taking place under our eyes and, what, three

hundred million will have starved from 1969 to 1999,

since Paul Ehrlich wrote his Population Bomb?

Global historical civilization, being born amidst

chaos and middle class complacency, is reconstituting

the world as one place. Do we not need, therefore,

some universal truths, perennial but not archaic?

Do we not need some philosophical stance with

which to view modernity and post-modernity?

Some sense of the ultimate becoming, some teleological

evolutionary scheme? Some utopian vision

within which to frame the struggle? Yes, yes, yes:

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some magnetising value core, firey furnace,

magnetising our convergent efforts,

as Durkheim might have said.3

And while I have answered “yes’ to all of this

since at least the days when we sent the first

men into space and since the Zeal of the Lord

passed on, I have enjoyed and feared a constant

swing between ecstasy and exhaustion, the heavy-

weight and lightning speed, galactic, radiance in the

smallest of patches and dull emptiness: overwhelmed,

dazzled and awed, a rush of images, a flow of phrases,

needing this epic form to express the burgeoning,

the out-pouring, the excess, the prison of the longue duree,

the patterned, the inchoate, the world beyond

the commonplace and the self-evidentnesses of view;

needing synthesis, mediation, unification of ideas

among the children of men.

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But my sense of the beauty everywhere has been

so long clouded by so many things, emotions,

intensities, the pulse of a greater dynamism beats

with a heavier heart. The Bridge, the basis of that

new dynamism, is that new unity, innocence and

freedom which we first saw in Shaykh Ahmad

when he left his home in northeast Arabia in 1794;

when Robespierre was in power and Pitt was the

Prime Minister of England. Trying to create a tradition

where none existed, the Committee of Public Safety,

guillotined 10,000 seen as some kind of moral revolution

in the making, after Rousseau. But the moral revolution

that would last for centuries was proceeding to Najaf and

Karbila to begin its long road, becoming the leading mujtahid:

the Bridge was an idea, a terror struck in the hearts of the Sufis,

while that other terror issued dechristianization decrees and

relentlessly uprooted public order. And so this poem begins

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in the early dawn of this modern age, over two hundred years,

with appropriate quantities of analysis and introspection,

bewildered and bedazzled as I am by it all, pushing through

all the ramifications of thought, burning myself up, candle-like,

drop-by-drop the wick will come in time to only a pool of wax

on this table and I shall be gone, across the Bridge, home.

History’s weakness and my own is found here

amidst the blaze of visionary sense

and an infinitude of correspondences:

a mystic on the loose, synthesizing, mediating,

watching the slow realization of vision in action,

seeing this Bridge and these White Buildings4

across a span from ancient Greece and Rome

to our own age, this one on a hill. This bridge

takes you up and down to ideals as remote

as Arctic winds but as close as your life’s vein.

But I do not try to speak to a whole culture, here,

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Hart, and its infinite fragmentation, only to a coterie

on its way to the fulfilment of His vision

set in a world of diamond words, sweet-scented streams

of His eternity, an orderly matrix of values.

This is no diversionary flight, scheme, temporary assuaging

of a longing, magical society of dreams, life’s flickering grace,

but some battle for the conquest of men’s souls

but oh so gently, as the teacher distils eternity

from the transitory with a spark of heroism amidst decadence,

a filtering of the harsh refuse of modernity,

conscious of a new savagery in the midst of civilization,

the endlessly arbitrary and fortuitous, the hasty grasp

and exploitation of ephemera, of the momentary.

And so the teacher learns not to take the fleeting moment

too seriously, to be detached, while at the same time pouring

forth all his concentration into the thing in front of his nose.

If the pioneer can do this he has the world by the tail—

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and boredom, distraction and an over-excited worldliness

are problems far beyond him. For he has new nourishing food—

the food of knowledge—duration with a purpose

as deep as the ocean and as wide as the sea,

realising the ideal lines will be completed

beyond this momentary reality. And so I capture it all

in this written portraiture, capture the fleeting,

the transient and the eternal, the inevitably fragmentary

phenomenal world in a metaphysical unity,

gradually letting it ripen-or it captures me,

and I warm it over, gestate it for some future public.

In this forest of symbols, voluptuous labyrinth,

sometimes ghostly landscape of damnable

and not-so-damnable pleasures and professions

we must close our eyes to luxury and attachments

to the material world and long, as I have long longed,

for eternal life. The real department store,

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the primal landscape of consumption,

the secret labyrinth of dreams

is the jewelled wisdom of this lucid Faith.5

End of Part One

COMMENTARY AND CONTEXT ON AMERICAN AND

BAHA’I HISTORY AND MY POETRY: AS EPIC

These, and other similar incidents connected with the epic story of

the Zanjan upheaval, characterized by Lord Curzon as a "terrific

siege and slaughter," combine to invest it with a sombre glory

unsurpassed by any episode of a like nature in the records of the

Heroic Age of the Faith of Baha'u'llah. -Shoghi Effendi, God

Passes By, p. 46.

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Epic: narrative poem of heroic type or scale; poem of any form

embodying the conception of the past history of a nation or group

of people.-Dictionary

______________________________________________________

The number of long epic poems written the world over is

increasing. World history and the history of its many nation states

is characterized by epochal statements and epics of various kinds as

far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Declaration of

Independence and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address were both epochal

if not epic statements, to choose but two from American history

and one could choose many others from the history of other

nations. Then there are epic movies like Birth of a Nation and

Gone With the Wind and epic figures from cinema, like John

Wayne. John Wayne himself directed a film on an epic event, the

Alamo. He also wrote a book on the making of this film. He

called it "The Making of the Epic Film." Epic, it seems, comes up

everywhere when one thinks about America and increasingly in

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relation to all sorts of historical and contemporary events in today’s

world. It also comes up in relation to my poetry and the Baha’i

Faith and that is my reason for writing. I have brought it up.

This continent and this world has epic voyages, battles, wars,

figures, poems, prose. Calling up all the titles of books from recent

decades that contain the word "epic” in the catalogue of a good

library will reveal scores of books. The same is true on the

internet. The word is now applied indiscriminately to appropriate

and inappropriate subjects. Does the story of United Methodist

preaching or the study of the genitals of boll-weevil properly

warrant the label "epic"? Yes and no. The question has become

complex. We speak of "epic" not only in the strict sense of a long

poem on certain topics, with certain characteristics more or less

based on the founding epics of our Western epic tradition, Homer's

Iliad and Odyssey. We speak of epic in a broader sense, as a story

recounting great deeds, typically in wars or battles or on dangerous

voyages or as an application, an example of the definition that

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begins this essay. The use of the term "epic" has spread out in a

burgeoning fashion from these points, these definitions, these

senses.

One is not surprised, therefore, that Robert Hughes' huge current

book on American art, American Visions, is subtitled The Epic

History of Art in America. Hughes tells us, in a TV interview, that

the subtitle is the publisher's. Is then the association of "epic" with

things American all just a matter of merchandising, American

hype, the spirit of P.T. Barnum? Are we dealing only with the epic

of American salesmanship, which almost all foreign visitors to

America have commented on, or is there something about America

that properly summons up the idea of "epic"? One would not

expect a book on British art, for example, to be subtitled "the epic

of British art," though there are of course wonderful buildings,

paintings, and sculptures in Britain. Is that only a matter of

characteristic British understatement? Perhaps. And yet, when one

rolls the phrases around on one's tongue, the strong impression

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cannot be denied: Whatever the crass motives of the publisher of

American Visions or of filmmakers who dub many a film "epic,"

epic seems to suit America and American topics better than it suits

many other countries. Epic becomes America–in the sense in

which Eugene O'Neill used the term, in his great play, Mourning

Becomes Electra. Was his play an epic?33

The artist Willem de Kooning who was born, raised, and educated

in Holland has an interesting comment on what happens when one

sees oneself as American, rather than, say, Dutch. It's a certain

burden, this American-ness. If you come from a small nation, you

don't have that burden. “When I went to the Academy and I was

drawing from the nude,” says de Kooning, “I was making the

drawing, not Holland. I feel sometimes an American artist must

feel like a baseball player or something–a member of a team

writing American history.” Certainly Hughes would agree.

33 I wish to thank Nathan Grazer, Professor Emeritus of Education at Harvard University for a great deal that makes up this article. See “American Epic: Then and Now,” Nathan Glazer, Public Interest, Spring 2004.

128

America's size, its newness, its wonders engaged many American

artists in the nineteenth century. They took up the American

landscape not only as a subject but as a duty. In the early twenty-

first century, it is still some particular idea of America–today,

however, generally evoked satirically, ironically, critically,

indignantly–that seems to motivate much of the oversized work of

contemporary American artists. And then there is the "great

American novel,” an obsession with some novelists, and the fact

that America's greatest poet writes in a grand, elevated style about

America. Indeed, his work is labeled by some an epic, as in James

Edwin Miller's Leaves of Grass: America's Lyric Epic of Self and

Democracy."

I did not take up writing about the Baha’i Faith as a subject, as a

duty but, rather, as something which engaged my mind and perhaps

to an extent as an obsession, as a member of that team which is

writing about the Baha’i Faith. As someone who grew up in the

northern half of America, of North America, in what we used to

129

call the Dominion of Canada when I was a kid, I have little trouble

identifying myself with the epic experience, the epic history of the

Baha’i Faith. With six thousand poems and several million words

under my epic belt, so to speak, I feel tied to, part and parcel of,

this epic experience which for me goes back to 1753 and the birth

of Shaykh Ahmad--a quarter of a millennium ago. My life, since

1967, has been part of “The historic mission beyond the confines of

the Dominion,” and part of the “push to the outposts of the Faith to

the northernmost territories in the Western Hemisphere.”34 The

greatest drama in the world’s spiritual history, the Baha’i story, is

an epic of mamouth proportions. My writing is simply one of the

infinite number of expressions of this story.

America as "epic" raises the question, what is unique, what is

central, about the American experience that deserves the epithet

"epic"? The same question can be raised in relation to the Baha’i

experience as an international community, in the form of its more

34 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to Canada, NSA of the Baha’is of Canada, 1965,p.vi.

130

than 200 national communities and in the lives of its some six

million adherents. It reminds me of another, soberer effort to get to

what is unique about America, the discussion of "American

exceptionalism," conducted principally by sociologists. Seymour

Martin Lipset has recently collected and updated a considerable

body of his writings on this subject, one that has engaged him for

many years: American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword.

Daniel Bell has also pondered American exceptionalism in The

End of Ideology and elsewhere. The issue, as they discuss it, arises

because of the interesting question of why there has been no major

socialist movement in the United States and what makes the USA

unique among advanced industrial societies.

The question was perhaps first raised in 1906 by the German

sociologist and economist Werner Sombart. There is little that we

would consider distinctive about America that has not been raised

to explain the failure of socialism to develop here. Thus Bell writes

that Sombart "pointed to the open frontiers, the many opportunities

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for social ascent through individual effort and the rising standard of

living," and goes on to give many other reasons why socialism

didn't take in America. "In the end," Bell writes, "all such

explanations have fallen back on the natural resources and material

vastness of America." And Lipset writes, "Political exceptionalism,

the failure of socialist parties in the United States, has been

explained by numerous factors–so many that the outcome seems

overdetermined.” He then goes on to list no less than 12

significant features of the United States, societal and political, that

could explain the absence of a major socialist movement and its

unique role and function in the world.

The theme of American exceptionalism is related to the topic of

America as epic because as a concept this notion of exceptionalism

provides, in part at least, an explanation for what is unique about

America, what makes it so successful economically and so

dynamic socially. American exceptionalism directs us to look at

basic values, institutions and social forces which since the 1940s

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have made the USA the strongest, the most prominent nation on

earth. Exceptionalism is part, then, of the subject of epic in

America. One could build similar arguments about the uniqueness

of other nation states or, indeed, the Baha’i Faith.

The epic proper recounts great and terrible deeds, founding ages.

One sometimes reads that with Milton or Wordsworth, or

Whitman, the intellectual or spiritual development of the poet–

Blake's "mental fight"–replaced the struggles of warriors as the

proper subject of epic scope in narrative poetry. The sequence of

Achilles, Rinaldo, Wordsworth or Whitman brings to mind

Carlyle's unintentionally funny list of "heroes," which begins with

the Norse God Odin and ends with Samuel "Dictionary" Johnson.

Often moral courage and physical courage go hand in hand when

one is examining the epic in history, although not everyone would

agree with this line of thought.

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Deeds, inner explorations of feelings, discoveries to improve the lot

of man, the world of the epic has broadened. The proper subject of

epic can now be found just about anywhere. Some are troubled by

this democratization of something that historically had an elitist

image in literature. Some literary critics, who after all are often the

first people to discuss what makes an epic, who set up its canons of

legitimacy, assert that the purely personal is no subject for epic.

Perhaps they are right. I am happy to include my poetry in the

category ‘epic’ because it is inspired by and about the history of the

Baha’i Faith. Although much of my poetry is personal, it is not

only personal. It is also about what is unique, what is special,

significant, original about Baha’i history and Baha’i experience.

Both this experience and my poetry, I would argue, participate in

the concept epic. Were my life and thought not tied to the Baha’i

Faith it is doubtful that I would have associated it with the notion

of epic. Indeed, it is doubtful that I would have written any of it at

all.

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Walt Whitman, despite his insistence on the purely personal nature

of his achievement, incorporated within his poetry the entire

American experience of his time. He wrote: "Leaves of Grass ...

has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and other

personal nature–an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a

human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century,

in America) freely, fully, and truly on record. Note Whitman’s

determined reference to time and place. And Whitman wrote

elsewhere, "I contain multitudes within myself and these were the

multitudes of America. As Samuel Beer has argued in an

interesting essay, Whitman reaches out much further into a political

community than the typical poet. In my poetry I do the same, but I

reach out into the Baha’i community not the American people at

Whitman did.

Wordsworth or any one of a host of poets in the last 200 years,

contemporary Americans and others, record their personal

responses and personal development. They are not celebrating a

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nation, its democracy, its multifariousness, and, as American art

does, its variety and newness. They are not celebrating or

commemorating the events of the history of a nation or a group as I

am doing in my poetry in relation to Baha’i history. They are

quintessentially individualists. I suppose one could argue that that

is the other epic theme in recent centuries: the theme of the

individual. Wordsworth’s Prelude is certainly an epic venture and

it’s all about him and his critique of the age--not unlike my own

work here.

This is not to say, of course, that poets of the last 200 years have

not had any political, religious or group affiliation: no group

identity. Everyone belongs to a group in some way or another.

The theme of "America as epic" directs us to think, initially, not

about the multiplicity of America and Americans but of a single

dominant story, carried by heroes. The epic of America, dominant

until at least the 1930s and 1940s, has been in recent decades

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eclipsed by another and quite different "epic of America." It is a

multicultural America with a host of epics.

For Baha’is who are also poets the epic that arises in their poetry is

the history and the culture of their Faith and in the 1930s and 1940s

that epic started to take form as the American Bahai community

expanded to include all of its states, to be “a national unit of a

world society.”35

The first American epic, dominant until at least the first teaching

Plan(1937-1944) emphasizes the newness, the vastness, the

openness of America–the freedom thereby granted Americans. It is

the old, or at least the older story, about America. Connected with

it are such terms as the American idea, or the American creed, or

the American dream, or Manifest Destiny. It is true that the frontier

as a continuous line of settlement to the West no longer existed by

1890. It was in the first few years of the 1890s that the first Baha’i

35 Horace Holley, Baha’i Centenary, 1944, p.100.137

pioneers arrived on American shores, precursors of the pioneers

who would later leave America’s shores. That first American epic

and the epic in Baha’i history associated with the heroic age, one

could argue, lasted into the 1930s when Baha’i administration

advanced to assume a form which allowed it to focus on a national,

an international teaching Plan. It was here, in this international

teaching Plan, that the second stage of the Baha’i epic emerged.

There was still much of the West to be settled even after 1890;

there was to come an overseas expansion expressing very much the

same values; and then there was the brief "American Century,"

carrying forward similar and related values. The second epic,

which I place in opposition to the first, is a somewhat more

problematic epic. It emphasizes racial and ethnic diversity,

whether in an optimistic or pessimistic mood. The first epic was

connected with an ever available frontier denoting free land, free

institutions, free men. The second epic is city-centred and finds its

frontiers, if any, within a physically completed society. The first is

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the epic of the forests, the prairies, the plains. It is the epic of

discoverers, explorers, pioneers, of Columbus, Daniel Boone, and

Lewis and Clark, of the Oregon trail, the Mormon trek, the

transcontinental railway. The second celebrates quite different

voyages: the middle passage, the Trail of Tears, the immigrant

ship, the underground railway, the tenement trail from slum to

suburb. The first is the epic of the Anglo-Saxon, the Scotch-Irish,

in lesser degree the German and the Scandinavian. The second is

the epic of the Native Americans, the Africans, the "new

immigrants" from southern and eastern Europe, the new

immigrants of the last three decades, cast generally as the victims

of the protagonists of the first epic.

The first epic has not fully lost its power to evoke response in

American consciousness, and the second is not entirely new but has

been with us from the beginning, even if hardly noted. From a

Baha’i perspective that first epic is, as I said above, synonymous

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with the Heroic Age(1844-1932).36 Whitman is a bridging figure

from the first to the second and maintains an optimistic stance

embracing both. ‘Abdu’l-Baha or the Guardian or even the Greatest

Holy Leaf serves as the bridging figure from this first to the second

stage of epic in Baha’i history.

One sees, in the last few decades, a transition in which the first

epic, once dominant, becomes recessive, while the second asserts

its problematic claims as the epic of America ever more sharply.

Here, too, in these same decades the Baha’is, just one group in a

host of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith groups, find

expression for the epic in which my own life has been involved. It

is here that my poetry finds its place as part of that faith-epic. The

second Baha’i epic or at least its second stage also asserts its

problematic claims in the epochs of the Formative Age, thusfar.

36 Baha’u’llah’s sister, the Greatest Holy Leaf, died in 1932, the last remnant of the Heroic Age.

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One can select many symbolic events to mark the change from

phase one to phase two of the epic experience both in American

and in Baha’i history. In American history consider the contrast

between the writings of two presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and

John F. Kennedy. Roosevelt wrote of the frontier, the "winning of

the West." He celebrated the expansion of American power and

settlement westwards, and the projection of America's power

beyond our continental boundaries, much of which he engineered

as president. During his presidency, the greatest stream of

immigrants in American history was entering the country. He saw

immigrants as adding to the strength of America, filling its

factories and mines and armies. But he did not celebrate diversity.

He insisted on a full Americanization. "We freely extend the hand

of welcome and of good fellowship to every man and woman, no

matter their creed or birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on

becoming a good citizen, but we have the right and it is our duty to

demand they shall indeed become so." David Brooks, quoting this

passage in an article in the Weekly Standard, comments: “That

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meant, in Roosevelt's eyes, the immigrant had to leave Old World

quarrels behind. It meant he had to learn English–We believe that

English and no other language is that in which all school exercises

should be conducted.... We have no room in a healthy American

community for a German-American vote or an Irish-American vote

and it is contemptible demagoguery to put into any party platform

[rhetoric] with the purpose of catching such a vote."

The tone changes with John F. Kennedy, another friend of

American power and of immigration. He wrote A Nation of

Immigrants, lauding the immigrant contribution to the United

States, and he and his brother sought to open the doors of America

wider to immigrants. The first Roosevelt, when he thought of

immigrants, thought of a growing and ever stronger America that

needed manpower. His successor president thought rather of

appealing to a new electorate or of displaying compassion for the

victims of a troubled world. One will detect a marked change as

one moves from the first to the second. Kennedy did not use the

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term "Americanization": It would not have rung right even in 1958,

and, today, it is quite banned from politics. Every president since

Kennedy, Democrat or Republican, has lauded immigrants and

immigration. President Reagan presided over the rededication of

the Statue of Liberty, a great national festival. Long before, the

meaning of the Statue had been quite transformed from that

originally intended. It was no longer "Liberty Enlightening the

World," but "Liberty welcoming the immigrant."

The Baha’i epic associated with its heroic age is not the same as the

epic associated with its Formative Age. The potentialities that the

creative force of that first 77 years-that heroic age-had planted in

human consciousness, in the consciousness of Baha’is, would

gradually unfold. My life and the life of my parents would see the

first century of that unfolding. The poetry I have written, while

inspired by that heroic age, is written in the main about the epochs,

the four epochs, of my life in the Formative Age.

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In a recent book by Nathan Glazer We Are All Multiculturalists

Now, Glazer tries to understand and to analyze the change in how

we envisage America in our schools and what it teaches about our

past. In explaining the book to various audiences he has sought to

find an emblematic expression of the very different time when

there was no great argument as to what we meant by "the epic of

America"–when no hint of the great change of the last few decades

was yet evident. He explained that the title of Theodore Roosevelt's

first great success as a writer and historian, The Winning of the

West, characterized this earlier period. It is a title that without

restraint or second thoughts or apology celebrates the American

epic of expansion. Today, the title The Winning of the West would

lead us to think immediately of whom we won it from–the Indians,

the Mexicans, the environment. Its celebratory note would grate on

us. But it does tell us what the epic of America once was.

Perhaps its equivalent in Baha’i literature is The Dawnbreakers,

with its thrilling passages and the splendour of its central theme

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which gives the chronicle its great historic value and its high moral

power. Beginning with nine years marking the “most spectacular,

most tragic, most eventful period of the first Baha’i century,”37 this

heroic, this apostolic, age ended with the passing of ‘Abdu’l-Baha

in 1921. In the 1920s and 1930s Baha’i administration and Baha’i

teaching Plans came to take on a central focus in this second stage

of the Baha’i epic.

To place The Winning of the West in its time: The first volumes

were published in 1889 when Roosevelt was only 31. He had

already served as a New York state legislator, had written a well-

received book on the War of 1812 and a biography of the frontier

statesman Thomas Hart Benton, had turned himself into a ceaseless

advocate of the strenuous life, had ridden with cowboys on cattle

ranches in the Dakota Territory on the western frontier when Indian

wars were still a reality, and had written a book of his experiences

there. That experience led him back to earlier frontiers in American

37 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, Wilmette, 1957, p.3.145

history. As Harvey Wish tells us: The task of writing four volumes

of The Winning of the West ... had to share his time and energy

while he served as an active member of the United States Civil

Service Commission and then as President of the New York City

Board of Police Commissioners. He investigated slums,

sweatshops, and graft.... In 1895-6, he managed to issue his final

two volumes while campaigning for McKinley ... for which he was

rewarded by receiving the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

He went on to become governor of New York, vice-president, and,

upon the assassination of McKinley, president in 1901. Despite his

auspicious beginnings as a historian, he was never to complete The

Winning of the West as he had originally intended. The completed

volumes end with the acquisition of Louisiana and Lewis and

Clark's exploration of the vast new territories that had been added

to the United States. The Winning of the West was republished

again and again, in many editions, even before Roosevelt became

president, but I note that the last full printing was in 1927. Harvey

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Wish's little volume of selections from the four volumes, from

which I have quoted, was published in 1962, and the book was,

surprisingly, reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 1995,

perhaps another signal of a modest Theodore Roosevelt revival.

We should be aware that the book was greatly respected in its time

and for decades after, and not only by popular and literary critics

but by the leading academics of the day.

Roosevelt did do a remarkable amount of research in archives and

wrote the book from primary sources, not secondary materials.

Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard admired it. Frederick Jackson

Turner, the propounder of the enormously influential thesis on the

role of the frontier in the shaping of American society, also praised

it. He wrote three reviews of it as successive volumes appeared.

Turner's own seminal paper, "The Significance of the Frontier in

American History," was presented in Chicago in 1893 (after

Roosevelt's first few volumes had been published) during the great

Chicago fair celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus's

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discovery of America, as it was once described. Indeed, the

contrast between the celebration of the 400th anniversary of

Columbus's voyage and our embarrassed effort to deal with the

500th anniversary is symbolic of the change I am trying to

characterize. It was clear then that the opening of the West was the

great theme of American history to almost everyone who thought

seriously about it at the time and that its closing, as noted by the

Superintendent of the Census on the basis of the findings of the

census of 1890, had to portend some significant changes.

Of course, the opening of the towns, localities, states and all the

countries of the world to the Baha’i Faith by its pioneers was also a

great theme of Baha’i history. And that theme can be found

expressed again and again in my poetic-epic, an age of pioneering

from the 1920s and 1930s onward. My poetry is a work of

unabashed religious enthusiasm and I know it will not attract many

because of this. The Winning of the West is a work of unabashed

nationalism. It is a nationalism that exalts the role of one element

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of the American population and takes bare notice of the others.

There is no political correctness in The Winning of the West, of

course. The first volume is labeled, "The Spread of the English-

Speaking Peoples," and will remind us of one of the books by a

later great nationalist leader, Winston Churchill, who wrote a

multi-volumed history of the "English-speaking peoples."

Roosevelt begins: "During the past three centuries, the spread of

the English-speaking peoples across the world's waste spaces has

been not only the most striking feature in the world's history, but

also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its

importance."

Today, we would sit up and notice that the lands over which the

English-speaking peoples spread are called "waste spaces." We

would think of all the people who already lived there when the

English-speaking peoples arrived. The Indians to Roosevelt are

"savages." They are cruel and treacherous, by our standards of

course, but Roosevelt does not take much account of the standards

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of "the other": "Not only were they very terrible in battle, but they

were cruel beyond all belief in victory.... The hideous, unnameable,

unthinkable tortures practised by the red men on their captured

foes, and on their foes" tender women and helpless children, were

such as we read of in no other struggle, hardly even the revolting

pages that tell the deeds of the Holy Inquisition." (In these latter

days, Roosevelt might also be condemned for male chauvinism

because of the way he refers to women.) Roosevelt respects the

Indians for their warrior prowess, but has no regret over the

outcome.

The history of the border wars ... makes a long tale of injuries

inflicted, suffered, and mercilessly revenged. It could not be

otherwise when brutal, reckless, lawless borderers, despising all

men not of their own color, were thrown into contact with savages

who esteemed cruelty and treachery as the highest virtue, and

rapine and murder as the worthiest of pursuits. Looking back, it is

easy to say that much of the wrong-doing could have been

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prevented; but if we examine the facts to find out the truth, not to

establish a theory, we are bound to admit that the struggle could

not possibly have been avoided. Unless we were willing that the

whole continent west of the Alleghenies should remain an

unpeopled waste, the hunting ground of savages, war was

inevitable. And after examining briefly Indian claims that they

were the first present and the possessors of the soil, Roosevelt

writes:

“The truth is the Indian never had any real title to the soil; they had

not half so good a claim to it, for instance, as the cattlemen now

have to all eastern Montana, yet no one would assert that the

cattlemen have a right to keep immigrants off their vast unfenced

ranges. The settler and the pioneer have at bottom had justice on

their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing

but a game preserve for squalid savages.”

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I hope it is not necessary to emphasize that my point is not to

expose the prejudices or blind spots of an earlier time, but to

present as clearly as possible how a representative great American,

an historian as well as a national leader (Roosevelt was, in time, to

serve as president of the American Historical Association), thought

of what was noteworthy, great, and of epic character in American

history. And here we must say something more of Roosevelt's view

of the protagonists of this epic, the pioneers.

The pioneers are, of course, representative of the English-speaking

peoples, but they are also a new people shaped by the experience of

colonization and settlement in a new and dangerous place. "At the

day when we began our career as a nation we already differed from

our kinsmen of Britain in blood as well as in name." The original

English stock, which Roosevelt points out was already the result of

a mixture of peoples, mingled with and absorbed into itself

immigrants from many European lands, and this process has gone

on since. It is to be noted that, of the new blood thus acquired, the

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greatest proportion has come from Dutch and German sources, and

the next greatest from Irish, while the Scandinavian element comes

third, and the only other of much importance is the French

Huguenot.

But then he adds, remarkably for 1889, when the sources of

American immigration had recently undergone a great change,

from northern and western Europe, to eastern and southern:

"Additions have been made to the elemental race-strains in much

the same proportion as those originally combined." He defines the

guiding, leading, pioneering element more sharply:

“The backwoodsmen were American by birth and parentage; but

the dominant strain in their blood was that of the Presbyterian

Irish–the Scotch-Irish as they were often called.... It is doubtful if

we have wholly realized the importance of the part played by that

stern and virile people.... They form the kernel of the distinctively

and intensely American stock who were the pioneers of our people

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in their march westward, the vanguard of the army of fighting

settlers, who with axe and rifle won their way from the Alleghenies

to the Rio Grande and the Pacific.”

They are the heroes of the epic. They were not to be displaced for

another 50 years. But, of course, new elements were being added

to the American population, in great number, and they were not

pioneers, except metaphorically. Willa Cather titled her novel, O

Pioneers!, but they were not pioneers in the same sense as the

Scotch-Irish who crossed the Alleghenies, fought Indian wars in

the Old Northwest and Southwest, conquered Texas from Mexico,

made the way clear for German and Scandinavian farmers who

followed after. Perhaps Cather's Norwegian settlers in Nebraska

could, to some extent, be incorporated into this American epic. But

then, what of the newcomers crowding the cities in the 1890s and

1900s and 1910s?

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Turner had propounded the most influential thesis in American

history in 1893. By 1914, he had to take notice of a great change in

America: “If we look about the periphery of the nation,

everywhere we see the indications that our world is changing. On

the streets of ...New York and Boston, the faces we meet are to a

surprising extent those of Southeastern Europe.... It is the little

Jewish boy, the Greek or Sicilian, who takes the traveller through

historic streets, now the home of these newer people ... and tells

you in his strange patois the story of revolution against

oppression.”

In this same address, a commencement speech at the University of

Washington, Turner creates a striking image of these two worlds in

contact. It seems Turner had to pass through the Harvard museum

of social ethics–an early expression of sociology at Harvard which

no longer exists–in order to get to the room in which he lectured on

the history of the westward movement: The hall is covered with an

exhibit of the work of the Pittsburgh steel mills, and of the

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congested tenements. Its charts and diagrams tell of the long hours,

the death rate, the relation of typhoid to the slums, the gathering of

all Southeastern Europe to make a civilization at that centre of

American industrial energy and vast capital that is a social tragedy.

As I enter my lecture room through that hall, I speak of the young

Washington leading his Virginia frontiersmen to the magnificent

forest at the forks of the Ohio. Where Braddock and his men ...

were struck by the painted savages in the primeval woods, huge

furnaces belch forth perpetual fires and Huns and Bulgars, Poles

and Sicilians, struggle for a chance to earn their daily bread, and

live a brutal and degraded life. He writes "Huns" but presumably

means Hungarians.

We will note little reference to African Americans or slavery in

Theodore Roosevelt or Frederick Jackson Turner: The epic of the

westward movement had little to say of them. Roosevelt did write

that the early settlers, "to their own lasting harm, committed a

crime whose short-sighted folly was worse than its guilt, for they

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brought hordes of African slaves, whose descendants now form

immense populations in certain portions of the land." But slavery

plays no great role in his story: He makes little distinction between

the frontiersmen pushing out from Pennsylvania, or from Virginia

and the Carolinas, and indeed asserts that they made little

distinction. They were all mountain men, and the issue of whether

slave or free was of no great moment then. It was before the great

conflicts over whether the new western states were to be slave or

free. Turner depreciates the significance of slavery as against the

significance of the frontier in American history: "Even the slavery

struggle ... occupies its important place in American history

because of its relation to Westward expansion."

This perspective astonishes us today: It is as if once the conflict

over whether new states were to be slave or free was settled by the

Civil War, race was no longer of great consequence in American

history. Indeed, during the first half of the 20th century, the

question of race, urgent as it was for black Americans, was little

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noted by others. If there was an alternative epic to the epic of

westward movement, it was then (as in measure it still is) the Civil

War and the destruction of southern plantation society, seen

entirely from the point of view of the slaveholder. And so, the first

great American movie epic is The Birth of a Nation, and the

greatest is Gone With the Wind.

In 1931, a popular historian of the day, James Truslow Adams,

published a one-volume history of America and boldly titled it, The

Epic of America. Published by a leading Boston publisher, it was a

Book-of-the-Month club selection; it still makes interesting reading

today. The attitudes of more significant figures such as Theodore

Roosevelt and Frederick Jackson Turner are still dominant, if

somewhat cruder, in the year before the election of Franklin Delano

Roosevelt. It is still the epic of westward expansion and manifest

destiny, now generalized into the American dream, that is "the epic

of America." When Adams writes of "three racial frontiers in the

West" around 1800, he does not have in mind white interaction

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with Indians and Africans. He has in mind the French and the

Spanish and the English. His three racial frontiers remind me of the

"historical convergence of European, African, and Native

American people" which stands at the beginning of American

history, according to the recently proposed National Standards for

History. The historically important "races" have undergone a

radical change.

Adams, a New England writer and the author of such previous

books as The Founding of New England, Revolutionary New

England, New England in the Republic, and The Adams Family,

finds no problem in celebrating the culture of the antebellum South.

"The type of life which now evolved in the South was in many

ways the most delightful America has known, and that section has

become in retrospect the land of romance."

William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist weekly, The Liberator, is to

Adams "fanatical," as is John Brown. The Civil War was not

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merely a question of slavery. It was a question of interpretation of

the fundamental compact between the states ... whether property

guaranteed by the Constitution was safe or not...; whether an

agrarian civilization could preserve its character...; whether a

section of the country should be allowed to maintain its own

peculiar set of cultural values or be coerced to conform to those of

an alien and disliked section...; a question of what would become

of liberty if union were to mean an enforced conformity.

Yet the epigraph at the beginning of the book is from Whitman:

"Sail–sail thy best, ship of democracy." One does detect a muddle

here, but no more of a muddle than characterized American

democracy as a whole at the time. We will also have to tut-tut over

Adams's treatment of the new immigrants, as they still were in

1931: "These Slavs, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, Italians, Russians,

Lithuanians, Jews ... were of a very different type from the Irish,

British, Germans and Scandinavians." More were illiterate. They

were also "much more 'foreign' in their background and outlook

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than those who had come previously, and less assimilable to our

social life and institutions." Though they were peasants, "they did

not seek to become farmers and to establish homes in this country,

but congregated in huge racial groups in the larger cities, or

became operatives in factories and mines." They preferred to

accept day wages, maintain their old low standard of living, and

even go below that, to save as much money as possible.... The

earlier immigrants had come to make homes, raise their standard of

living, and become citizens; these new ones came as birds of

passage.... This also kept them from the desire to assimilate

themselves to American social life, to learn English, and to adapt

themselves to American ways.

And yet, there is the quotation from Whitman, and he writes of the

prophets of American democracy, that only Emerson "glimpsed the

real essence of Americanism and its dream of democracy....

Whittier was too concerned with the problem of the slave, and, like

Lowell, who would have sacrificed the union because of his dislike

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of the South, saw America too much in terms of sectional evil.

And the muddle only increases. After his criticism, typical of the

time, of the new immigrants–and progressives as well as

conservatives indulged in it–Adams ends his book with a vision of

the American dream and one of these new immigrants dreaming it

on the steps of the Boston Public Library:

“That dream ... has evolved from the hearts and burdened souls of

many millions, who have come to us from all nations. If some of

them have too great faith, we know not yet to what faith may attain,

and may hearken to the voice of one of them, Mary Antin, a young

immigrant girl who comes to us from Russia.... Sitting on the steps

of the Boston Public Library, where the treasures of the whole of

human thought had been opened to her, she wrote: "This is my

latest home, and it invited me to a glad new life.... The past ...

cannot hold me, because I have grown too big; just as the little

house in Polotzk, once my home, has now become a toy of

memory, as I move about at will in the wide spaces of this splendid

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palace.... America is the youngest of nations, and inherits all that

went before it in history. And I am the youngest of America's

children, and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage....

Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future."

So we see new epics being born even while the old one is being

celebrated. And by the time the Baha’is began to use the term

pioneer, just as their first teaching Plan(1937-1944) was about to be

set in motion, “the whole majestic past and the shining future”

awaited them. In 1951, Oscar Handlin, who was to become the

major historian of American immigration, and the leading figure in

a generation of historians studying the old and the new

immigration, summed up his vision of immigration in a book titled

The Uprooted. (The second edition of 1973 bears on its cover the

subtitle, The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that made the

American People. The first sentence of the book reads: "Once I

thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I

discovered that the immigrants were America."

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The eclipse of the first "epic of America" seemed complete.

Theodore Roosevelt would not have used the term "immigrant" to

refer to his Dutch ancestors or to the frontiersmen he celebrated.

They were colonists, settlers, pioneers–immigrants were something

else. The notion that we were all immigrants was still somewhat

surprising in 1951, though Franklin Delano Roosevelt, speaking to

the Daughters of the American Revolution, who had refused to

allow Marian Anderson to sing in their hall in 1939, did say, “We

are all immigrants, and the descendants of revolutionists.”

However, this was then still a surprising and provocative thought.

Twenty years after Handlin published The Uprooted, it was only

common wisdom, or commonplace. A half-dozen presidents and a

hundred judges inducting new immigrants pronounced we were all

a nation of immigrants. And desperate efforts were being made to

induct the non-immigrants–Native Americans, as the Indians had

become, and the African-American descendants of slaves–into

American epics that had ignored or disdained them.

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It was not long before Handlin was alarmed at the terms of

inclusion. Supplementing The Uprooted, 20 years after its original

publication, in the Spring of 1971, Handlin wrote: “a committee of

the United States Senate held hearings on an amendment to the

higher education act. In the parade of witnesses, there were no

dissenters. From many different parts of the country, representing

many different organizations, they reiterated an identical woeful

refrain: ‘We have been made victims!’”

The tone was varied, from undiluted bitterness to a plaintive

awareness of offsetting gains. But unfailingly the complaints

expressed a tone of deprivation which was also a sense of

emptiness, the ache of which required stilling. America had created

the void by the theft of their ancestors; now the victims needed the

healing pride of ethnicity.

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Handlin was speaking of the hearings on legislation that would

assist ethnic groups in developing curricula on their culture and

history which could be used in schools. No Mary Antins appeared

to celebrate the openness of America, the pleasures and rewards of

integration–which inevitably does mean the loss of the past. No

Theodore Roosevelt was present to insist that that is what America

expected of immigrants. The single story was becoming many

stories. Black studies at the time were spreading rapidly and were

soon to become a fixture in the academy, along with Latino, Asian-

American, and Native-American studies. The women's movement

had exploded in the universities. No one in 1971 realized what a

sturdy trunk of academia it would shortly become, nor that it would

be joined by gay and lesbian studies. Perhaps other forms of

diversity that we are not yet conscious of will become equally

sturdy growths. The one grand epic has been succeeded by many

fragmentary little epics. One great theme of epic is the founding of

a nation, as in The Aeneid. The new fragments of nations create

epics that celebrate the destruction of a domineering and false

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oneness by a manyness; and we wonder whether that means also

the fragmenting of a nation.

This brings us up to date in considering America as epic. The epic

of the frontier closed a long time ago. Many have worried about

what succeeds it. Let us project America overseas, some said, in

imperialist conquest, or in fighting tyranny, or in improving the

lives of other peoples. We have now withdrawn from the empire,

though a few pieces remain. We face no great tyranny, and our will

in facing even small tyrannies is not strong. We are now doubtful

about our capacity to improve the lives of other peoples. The new

frontier, we are told, must be education, or space, or good group

relations. How often have we heard it said: How come we can

reach the moon and not improve our cities or race relations?

Clearly, it must be easier to reach the moon, and that does require

heroes and is a subject of epic stature. I doubt whether the

improving of group relations can replace the conquest of a

continent as the subject of epic. Of course, we can live without an

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American epic. But that does diminish us, and it is easy to

understand why some of our poets, artists, writers, and historians

keep on trying.38

And for the Baha’i community the heroic-age stage of its epic has

long passed. ‘Abdu’l Baha provides the linkage between the two

stages in His Memorials of the Faithful and, perhaps, the Greatest

Holy Leaf who died in 1932. ‘Abdu’l-Baha addresses all of us, all

of us on our journeys while He describes many of those He came to

know in His life in that heroic age. For He is describing not only

the lives of these men and women in the nineteenth century, He is

describing us in our time. He is addressing us on our own travels.

He addresses the restlessness in us all. He speaks to us in our

victory and our loss. He speaks about what Michael Polanyi calls

the tacit dimension, the silent root of human life, which is difficult

to tap in biographies, the inner person. This private, this inner

person, is the one whom He writes about for the most part. He sets

38 Nathan Glazer, “American Epic: Then and Now,” Public Interest, Spring 2003.

168

this inner life in a rich contextualization, a socio-historical matrix.

He describes many pilgrimages and you and I are left to construct

our own. We all must shape and define our own life. Is it

aesthetically pleasing? Intellectually provocative? Spiritually

challenging? ‘Abdu’l-Baha shapes and defines these lives given the

raw-data of their everydayness added up, added up over their lives

as He saw them. How would He shape my life? Yours? How

would we look in a contemporary anthology of existences with

‘Abdu’l-Baha as the choreographer and the history of our days as

the mise en scene?

Some of the lives of the obscure, the ordinary and representative

members of the Baha'i community are recovered for history and for

much more. Their private aspirations and their world achievments,

their public images and their private romances, their eventual

successes and their thwarted attempts are lifted onto the pages of a

type of Baha'i scripture. 'Abdu'l-Baha is setting the stage, the

theatre, the home, in these pages, for all of humanity. The extrovert

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is here, the introvert, those that seem predisposed to cheerfulness

and those who seem more melancholy by nature. All the human

dichotomies are here, at least all that I have come across in my own

journey. They are the characters which are part and parcel of life in

all ages and centuries, all nations and states, past, present and, more

importantly, future. Here is, as one writer put it, the rag-and-bone-

shop, the lineaments of universal human life, the text and texture of

community as we all experience it in the crucible of interaction.

And here, in this autobiography and this poetry is some more of the

text and texture of the Baha’i community and an ordinary life set

into the rag-and-bone shop of life, however epically I might want

to envisage it. Language becomes here the means of reconstituting

the past state of an element of Baha’i culture and its context. At

the same time my language is a way of detaching, of distancing the

past from a person who is most committed to reconstituting it.

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It is difficult in an autobiography not to make oneself the central

figure of the text. Seen as a whole, this text describes an ascent

from childhood, through adolescence to adulthood and old age. In

some ways this ascent only touches all the peaks and periods of my

life and then begins the long and slow decline with its attendant

troughs, a decline that has just begun at this stage of writing, a

decline into an inevitable physical enervation and death, shadowed

and enlightened by the memory of the Baha’i community’s

experience over several epochs. The global Baha’i community was

created in my lifetime, spreading from a small group of countries

and a relative handful of centres, to well over 200 countries and

territories and 1000s of centres.

The millennial hope, the dream of the destiny of the Baha’i

community, began to take a more definite shape in my lifetime.

The Baha’i story is much fuller than it was in its first century,

1844-1944. The Central Figures of this Faith occupy more space;

their somewhat austere figures never stray from their importantly

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narrow roles as charismatic founders, lawgivers and interpreters.

Baha’u’llah comes to us in the Baha’i literature as a quietly

brilliant youth, divine revelator and a man in full, a matchless hero

equal to every occasion. And yet although, or perhaps because, we

see him in that narrow role, we somehow never get a complete

picture of him. His story, in the Baha’i historical narrative, is often

fragmentary and elliptical. He remains slightly, perhaps

necessarily, elusive. Marked by accounts, terse notations, motives

sometimes left unstated, gestures and phrases whose meanings

we've lost, He can not be grasped even in the first century after His

passing. Trying to grasp him, we embrace a vapour.

Like every true dancer, I have been a figure of constant change:

vivid, elusive, unforgettable. Perhaps it takes a poet to do justice to

such mutability, but not this poet. An author of many volumes of

poetry might be an apt choice for an autobiography: "The Life of

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Ron Price.” I have read the autobiographies of many others in my

lifetime and I do not feel confident as I engage in such an attempt.

Unable to write biographies of any of the Central Figures or even

of one of the saints, heroes, martyrs or significant Baha’is in the

first two centuries of its history, I use Baha’i history, its narrative

account for other purposes. I use it to illumine my own life and its

experience. I supplement that history in places with secular history

and, in the process, I try to bring alive the only person I know at all

well—myself. In episode after episode, I braid a narrative together

with literary interpretation and psychological conjecture, drawing

out patterns of correspondence, filling gaps in a record which

would have got lost had I not taken pen to paper. I like to think

my work is characterized by acutely engaged speculation. Perhaps

it would not have mattered if this account had got lost or if it had

never been told at all, for I have only been one of the multitude of

the warp and weft of a community of Baha’is, a community which

sees itself as the core of an emerging world religion.

173

Mostly bypassing but occasionally touching the accretions of,

perhaps, 40 centuries of religious piety and veneration, peering

behind what is often a spare record of action and speech and at

other times a burgeoning historical record bordering on anarchic

confusion, I seek to discern the feelings and intentions of the

living person that I have been and am now, this thing which I call

myself.

It's a risky business, fleshing out remote historical figures into what

are often essentially novelistic characters. I have long recognized

this as a student of biography. This is no less true of figures close

to us and, perhaps, even most true of our own dear selves. My

kindness, a trait ‘Abdu’l-Baha says is a Canadian characteristic and

exhibited on many an occasion in the first sixty years of my life,

may be rooted in guilt or show, policy or love, all of these or none.

Behind the facts of life and the human qualities of its actors, lie a

swarming mass of causes. Part of the role of the historian, the

174

psychologist or the autobiographer is to turn the microscope

sensitively to the minute causality in life and its often subtle and

obscure effects.

I hope that readers find my characterological insights interesting

and my literary arguments astute. Corners of the Baha’i myth, the

historical metaphor, light up with the glow of my imagination and I

hope they light up those of readers. My life, it seems to me

anyway, grows increasingly strong as it moves from my early years

to the years of middle and late adulthood, but weakness runs along

beside it never to be entirely trampled underfoot. My individual

perspective on the quite revolutionary transformation of the Baha’i

community from a small, western, post-Christian culture of

individuals to the early stages of a visible, enumerated, global and

inclusive civilization, is, I like to think, a tour de force of historical

imagining and the experience of any Baha’i who has been a part of

this cause for several decades.

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Most importantly, I like to think, in writing this book I achieved

my stated goal of making the Baha’i Faith more accessible without

making it cease to be refreshing, exotic in a sense and or a delight

to the mind. Any history, any figure, about so remote a culture as

19th century Iran, must always remain somewhat remote to the

votaries of future generations. Some might argue that a work of

this kind ought not be attempted in the first place, that to embroider

Baha’i history and its text is slightly false and, if not false, at least

presumptuous to a degree. But what I do here is squarely within the

historical tradition of narrative elaboration, even if my methods and

sensibility are unmistakably modern. Whatever may be said of my

life and my community, my family background and Baha’i history,

what I write it is a kind of creative engagement that makes this

history live and endure. At least that is my hope.39

And, finally, some poems:

39 Some of the insights here were obtained from: William Deresiewicz,”The Life of David: King for 3,000 Years,” The New York Times.com, October 23, 2005 for its review of Robert Pinsky’s book on King David.

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ASPIRATION AND OCCUPATION

“Poet” names an aspiration not an occupation...Once a poem is

resolved, I lose the sense of having written it. I can remember

circumstances, but not sensations, not what it felt like to be writing.

This amnesia is almost immediate and most complete when poems

are written quickly, but in all cases it occurs. Between poems I am

not a poet, only someone with a yearning to achieve. What is it that

I want to achieve? It is that same concentration again. -Louise

Gluck, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Ecco Press, NY,

1994, p.125.

I lose the sense of

even having written it.

It’s like someone else’s.

It surprises me;

I may remember some trace element,

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some vague origin, circumstance.

Yes, being a poet, like being a Baha’i,

is an aspiration.

It often feels like an occupation

because of the intensity, energy,

time, thought, devoted to the process,

especially when the flow comes

as fast as it has in recent years.

I must stop now:

it makes me tired

even thinking of it.

Ron Price

15 October 1995

It is difficult to live to the age of sixty and not have death touch

you in different ways. In addition to several family members who

have passed on, I pray for more than fifty Hands of the Cause and

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seventy-five friends and people who have been important to me

over the years. Due to my belief system the emotional disarray that

often touches people when loved ones die has been rare and short-

lived. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, the founder of modern language

theory, I have since about 1980 had a certain preoccupation with

death.40 There have been times when the word obession seemed an

appropriate one in relation to my feelings about death, but since my

treatment with fluvoxamine in 2002, the experience of death as

impending only occurs at night for short periods of time. When I

wrote the following poem nearly ten years ago now I had what was,

in some ways, an obsession with the subject of death.

AT LAST

From Sappho to Dickinson, Rossetti, and the nightingales, death

has been an imaginative obsession for many women poets-an

obsession resumed in the twentieth century by poets like Millay,

40 William Todd Schultz, “The Riddle That Doesn’t Exist: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Transmogrification of Death,” Internet, 8 January 2004.

179

Mina Loy and Laura Riding, Smith and Plath,1 male poets like John

Berryman and Jack Kerouac and other writers like James Agee,

Poe and Magritte. Knowing this pleased me because, since 1980,

death has both haunted and attracted me. Somehow it did not seem

right and yet, in another sense, it seemed the most natural of

obsessions. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of

Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, University

of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p.291.

These words, these prayers, so many deeds,

so many years have helped dissolve those walls

which thankfully separate us from them:

you wouldn’t want to go around hallucinating,

would you? Enmeshed as we are

in each other’s lives and will be,

through these words, this unpopular art

which can’t be hung for all to see

or moulded like that stone statue,

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or turned into fine sound over time,

but will remain on paper

after the dilapidation of dilapidations,

after the night wind wimpers,

the leaves are all gone

and we come forth and on

with fragrances just beyond

and we slowly emerge,

exposed to our essential life,

this real world, at last.

Having grappled so long,

so long with bits of paper

and what they all were saying,

a clearness fell over the river,

so smooth with a thousand diamonds

sun-studding: you could see them

as you drove along the river,

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even in the night, a thousand eyes

but one mind, at last, at last,

even if the heart aches

for one has been there

so many times before.

Somewhere in the stale familiarity,

half-dead, weary-sings

something tastes of home,

just around the corner,

beyond that cloud

where the sun is breaking,

strong and clear:

at last.

Ron Price

2 July 1995

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It is timely that I refer to Wiggenstein as this autobiography comes

near to its end. This major twentieth century philosopher saw the

object of philosophy as “the clarification of thoughts.”41 Surely, if

nothing else, this autobiography is intended to do the same thing. It

tries to make what is opaque and blurred the centre of clarity and

sanity, of health and understanding to the mind. Like Wittgenstein,

too, I see no division between my life and this work. It is all of a

piece. I may not be able to remedy all the deep emotional

difficulties in my life by untangling them philosophically, as

Wittgenstein thought he could do. Lucidity, joy, wonder, the

mystical, are all important to me as they were to Wittgenstein, too

much to go into detail here.

But as I pass sixty and go into the first months of my sixty-first

year, with the great bulk of my bi-polar illness behind me I do not

anticipate suffering the way many do after the age of sixty. I have a

strange premonition that the worst is behind me. Unlike Mark

41 Bertrand Russell, “Preface,” Tractatus, 1922.183

Twain, whose life from age 60 on was blasted by calamity and

sorrow; unlike the cinema director Alfred Hitchcock who was

plagued by alcohol and depression from sixty-five until his death at

the age of eighty, unlike many others in their declining years of late

adulthood, I see my life as just beginning, albeit a different life

than the one I have known, but one I am looking forward to with

relish. This is not to say that fatigue, exhaustion and anxiety will

not afflict me and forces at large in the world will not assail me. I

may require the perserverence I have seen in my wife for the last

twenty years.

KIN AND KITH

"The generation born in the mid-forties...were the most indulged,

cared for and ‘liberated’ children in history...the narcissistic trend

began in the 1920s...These between-wars folk were the parents of

the post-World-War-II generation....who formed the ‘hippie

generation’... still relentlessly ego-absorbed generation."1 These

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two generations have been the main pioneers of the second, third

and fourth epochs.

-Ron Price with appreciation to Ronald Conway, The Rage for

Utopia, Allen and Unwin, 1992, pp. 146-148.

There’s nothing like a parting

to make you feel a piece.

Nothing like a starting

to make you ill-at-ease.

Partings are a sorrow;

I think I’ll keep them few,

as I head down the home stretch

to the newest of the new.

‘Cause one day we’ll part forever

on this terrestrial coil;

we’ll make this the last one

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on this our earthly soil.

I may not talk with you so deeply

that you feel connected with,

but I’ll learn that one some day,

as we become both kin and kith.

I think Conway has touched the core

of a certain ego-absorption

at the heart of all these plans

that make difficult their adoption.

It also makes it difficult, dear,

to grow close as you would like to.

It may just be this narcissism

which I must overcome too.

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Ron Price

10 July 1995

I would like to make one or two parenthetical remarks here before

continuing and concluding with more of my poetry. Part of the

way I view language and thus the way I view the writing of this

autobiography is reflected in the way the philosopher Wittgenstein

views language. He sees it as a game consisting of varied and

various relationships among different strategies, approaches,

multiple interacting conditions, ways and means not simply a

configuration or tradition based upon "empirical stability." As I

have pointed out earlier in this lengthy work, there is a basic

facticity, empirical stability, in my life, my society and my religion

that one can not get away from this. But they are no more history

than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are an omelette, as that student of

biography Ira Nadel noted with his humorous edge. One needs

Wittgenstein’s culinary talent in the autobiographical kitchen. This

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poetry provides readers with some of the basic constituents of the

language game and the multiple conditions as I see them.

EX NIHILO

There’s a mystery in poetic writing, some kind of creation ex

nihilo, from within, but within bounds, the bounds of your way of

living, of who you are. It’s like magic, a varying splendour, a

stirring of atoms to find connections to release compulsions and

find other selves. Scratch the itch of disconnection, the soup of this

and that sometimes feeble, pathetic self, sometimes rich, fertile self

in the core and an architectural correctness, balance, density,

emerges: as if from the journey of one’s life-long, tortuous,

sometimes lost. In the end you’ve preserved something of yourself

and you wonder why. It’s quite mysterious. -Ron Price with

thanks to Sue Woolfe and Kate Grenville, Making Stories, Allen

and Unwin, St. Leonards, NSW, 1993.

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UNINTERRUPTED POETRY

The writer, unable to chose his language, can no more choose his

style, this necessity of his mood, this rage within him, this tumult

or this tension, slowness or speed, which comes to him from a deep

intimacy with himself, about which he knows almost nothing, and

which give his language as distinctive an accent as his own

recognizable demeanour gives his face....a language inseparable

from our secret depths, that which, therefore, should be closest to

us, is also what is least accessible to us...to encounter and then to

silence the empty depths of ceaseless speech...of uninterrupted

poetry. -Maurice Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, editor: Michael

Holland, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995, pp.146-149.

The revolution has come: the break!

It twists and turns

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in metaphorical equivalents

at special times, at any time

it seems appropriate;

for the whole history has,

what shall we call it,

mythological significance?

This is the new myth!

The end of history has arrived!

Yes, this is the eternal Return

and world shaking, world reverberating

institutions have come, born, growing

in a majestic process launched in 1953

within a rhythmic life pattern

of fundamental happiness

which itself contains anxiety and grief

and a time for healing in those secret depths

of ceaseless speech and what seems to be

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uninterrupted poetry.

Ron Price

7 December 1995

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, while I was writing

this autobiography, science was turning away from regular and

smooth systems in order to investigate more fragmented, more

chaotic phenomena. So, too, in the study of the writing of

autobiography there was an increasing consciousness of its

complexity, ambiguity, indeed, its chaotic content. There is

certainly an element of the fragmented, of the chaotic in my own

life. Sometimes the feeling of fragmentation is pervasive and

sometimes it is short-lived, momentary. Rather than seeing form,

literary or physical, as something divided into the classical binaries

of order and entropy, form now is often regarded as a continuum

expressing varying degrees of pattern and repetition, elements that

are at the core of structure, any structure. At one end of the

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continmuum we find extreme order, pattern and traditional forms

and at the other end we find gibberish, chaos and disorder.

Fragmentation is something we all experience and it is found

between life’s extremes. Fractal autobiography works in the ground

between these extremes of life. Digression, interruption,

fragmentation and lack of continuity, then, are part of the normal

world of autobiography. Fractal comes form the Latin for

fragmented or broken: hence the term fractal autobiography.

As architect Nigel Reading writes, "Pure Newtonian causality is an

incorrect, a finite view, but then again, so is the aspect of complete

uncertainty and infinite chance." The nature of reality now is

somewhere in between. One writer called this interplay between

chance and causality, a dynamical symmetry. It occurs to me that

this shift in focus from a simple, a polarized view of life to a more

dynamic, more complex, more chaotic view is something that is

expressed in, can be found in, literature as postmodernism. In any

case, the poetry, the autobiography, I am calling fractal shares

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many defining traits with that contested term: postmodern. Some

contemporary poetries and genres of autobiography show an

allegiance to romantic, confessional or formalist traditions. Fractal

poetry, fractal aesthetics, fractal autobiography describe one feature

of my literary topography. When poets and autobiographers

address aesthetics, their own work inevitably shades their views.

But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of

new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of

the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between

them. In postmodernism one read, watched, listened, as one had

done for decades before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks,

presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. There is a generation

gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 1980.

Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-

modernism defines the real implicitly as the self, myself, now,

‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus pseudo-modernism suggests that

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whatever it does or makes is reality and a pseudo-modern text may

flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form.

Postmodernists saw the eclipse of grand narratives and pseudo-

modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics

raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all

social activity. This new world is monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-

explaining, all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably

recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and

conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or

sold.

This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly

uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile

playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern

cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically

superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the

state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the

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neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism,

pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new

weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the

keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there

is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or

place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.42 I

outline briefly the shift from postmodernism to pseudomodernism

which has occurred in the time I have been writing this memoir

because my writing is, to some extent, a reflection of this change.

But I do not want to go beyond these few, these brief remarks.

Conversion and a religious conversation prevails in my poetry. It

is part of an archtypal pattern because it represents part of a

maturing process and a move toward self-discovery. It is part and

parcel of this autobiography, unavoidably, I find. It is part of a

personal life, which Anais Nin says, if it is lived deeply moves

beyond the personal.1-Ron Price with thanks to Suzanne

42 Alan Kirby, "The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond," Philosophy Now, 2006.

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Nalbantian, Aesthetic Autobiography, MacMillan, 1994, p.6; and

1Anais Nin in ibid.,p.171.

CICERO(106-43 BC)

A poet must be clinical, dispassionate about life. The poet feels

much less strongly about these things than do other men...one finds

realized (in Auden’s work) a verbal and intellectual pleasure so

pure that one feels as if the lowly human faculty of mere enjoyment

had been somehow ennobled. -Frederick Buell, W.H. Auden As a

Social Poet, Cornell UP, London, 1973, p.41.

Cicero came long ago,

at a critical juncture,

he urged his combative peers

to end their recriminative posture,

political moralist who saw the

value of philosphy in politics,

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an idealist in an age of extremes,

complex personality

who saw kindness as a means to

justice, the goal of society.

The main branches of society must

work together, love each other

for this is the foundation of law

which holds society together.

Popular Assemblies, like today,

no longer expressed the will of the people,

no longer aspired to higher culture,

honesty, propriety: for real politics

was a way of life.

Ron Price

10 June 1995

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Source S.E. Smethurst, “Politics and Morality in Cicero”, The

Phoenix, Vol. 10/11, 1955-57, pp.111-121.

RULING CONCEPTIONS

If poetry is an intellectual/intuitive act it is not a random

indeterminate process, but is governed by a previsional end....there

must be a ruling conception by which it knows its quarry: some

foresight of the work to be done, some seminal idea. -James

McAuley in Meanjin, Summer 1953, vol.xii, p.433.

The conception here’s been getting more detailed,

massive, as the decades have come on since 1953.

The conception was extraordinary, then,

with the ten stages of history and the ten year crusade

just having begun the Kingdom of God with a bang,

a quiet one, not much of a bone crusher,

pretty unobtrusive then, even now,

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with that conception described in a thousand books,

too much for most.

And the LSA Handbook getting so big

you needed a degree in law

or big biceps just to carry it to the meeting.

By God, the quarry! Nothing less than

the spiritual conquest of the planet,

the conquest of self and the attainment

of a tranqill heart:

and a thousand other mysteries

waiting to find form..

Ron Price

16 December 1995

CONTEMPORARY MODERN

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Of the many currents of contemporary modern poetry in Australia I

have selected Bruce Dawe’s poetry and particularly his book of

poems No Fixed Address, published in 1962, as the starting point.

This title is taken from one of his first poems, written back in 1954,

by the same title. It is a suitable starting point for 1962 was the

year when this pioneering venture got its start. By the time I

began writing poetry seriously there were, arguably, 40 to 50 years

of a tradition of the colloquial to build on, to help me on my way.-

Ron Price from information in A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary

Australian Poetry, Geoff Page, University of Queensland Press,

1995, p.2.

They started to say it differently,

to use the colloquial, the vernacular,

the everyday stuff as early as 1962,

if not before, when I had started my

pioneer life, quite early.

Had many fixed addresses.

200

I counted them once:

37 in twenty-five towns.

You had been writing for some time

with that ‘No Fixed Address’

the first that I knew about:

that one who in solemn state

lies garlanded in gin,

part of a poetic legacy

that takes us back to the beginning

of the Kingdom of God on earth.

The whole world started to change its spots

in that ninth stage of history when, coincidentally,

I entered the field. And now I’m trying to say it

using the new form, wave, style, humour, normality

of the ordinary, unpretentiousness, highest spirituality.

A late starter, building on thirty or forty years

201

of other writers of contemporary modern.

Ron Price

9 December 1995

ELOQUENCE

Indifference to response of the immediate audience is a necessary

trait of all artists that have something new to say. They say what

they have to say...Communicability has nothing to do with

popularity...no man is eloquent save when someone is moved as he

listens....Those who are moved feel, as Tolstoi says, that what the

work expresses is as if it were something one had oneself been

longing to express...the artist works to create an audience to which

he does communicate. -John Dewey, Art as Experience, Capricorn

Books, NY, 1958(1934), p.105.

Complete and unhindered communication,

202

in a world of gulfs and walls

that limit our experience of community,

can be found in some works of art.

Was that why I cried in looking

at your paintings on the wall

when normally art galleries

make me sleepy?

Was that why I wrote so many essays

about Roger White’s poetry,

though noone would publish them?

Is that why I write all this poetry,

to serve the unifying forces of life

breaking out all over this planet?

Ron Price

23 December 1995

CRYSTAL COOL WATER

203

The poet is a hunter consciously and aggressively active in the

hunting process of composition. The poetry is what’s hunted down

and transformed by that process in a wilderness of language...The

poet is an intermediary hunting form beyond form, truth beyond

theme through woods of words tangled and tremendous....through a

forest of mystic meaning. -John Taggart, Songs of Degrees:

Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, University of

Alabama Press, London, 1994, p.174.

Myriads of mystic tongues find utterance

in one speech and myriads of hidden mysteries

are revealed in a single melody*

and the poet hunts in forests of mystic meaning,

searching for the tongues of utterance,

pursued by hounds,

clawed by talons,

204

with pitiless ravens lieing in wait on the mountain side.

And while he hunts other hunters stalk

and assault him in the bright meadows of his search.

His head falls to the earth, even brims with blood,

but Peace comes at last and the dark night of tangled

trees is no more, only the tall independent pines,

so straight and tall and spacious, with the sun

falling though their intersticies on the book

of his own self, dead at last in a summit of glory,

left behind on the earth beside the crystal cool water

that the Cup-Bearer bringeth! In the journey unto

the Crimson Pillar on the snow-white path.

Ron Price

11 October 1995

*Baha’u’llah, Hidden Words, Arabic, 16.

** Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, pp.55-59.

205

RECREATING COMPLEXITY: SIMPLY, DEEPLY

The poetic idea unites aspects of existence that ordinarily remain

unconnected, and in this lies its value. The secret of genius is

perhaps nothing else than this greater availability of all experience

coupled with larger stores of experience to draw on. -I. A.

Richards, Practical Criticism, 1929.

Experience is never limited...it is an intense sensibility, a kind of

huge spiderweb, of the finest silken threads suspended in the

chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in

its tissue. -Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Partial Portraits,

1888.

I think of experience as acting, not upon, but in and with the poet-I

conceive the poet, not as having, but as being, his experience. -

H.W. Garrod, Poetry and the Criticism of Life, 1931.

206

Guessing the unseen from the seen,

tracing the implications of things,

judging wholes from patterns,

feeling the whole and sensing corners,

travelling underground to get at the mountain,

imagination supersaturated,

dropping stuff all over the place:

vivid concentrations, realer than real,

intensified in the memory,

truth not yet achieved.

Precision instrument for storing impressions,

instant and complete,

trusting imagination and memory,

showing the world reflected in broken glass

to sharpen it for the reader, if he can;

recreating a complex world:

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simply, deeply.

Ron Price

18 September 1995

Pioneering across two continents, from south to north, over more

than forty years has imbued me with a certain creative spirit. It

was a spirit that was expressed within the context of a

disintegrating civilization with a sophisticated individualism at its

core and a more sophisticated sense of unity at the core of a new,

emerging, global civilization whose nucleus and pattern were to be

found in the Baha’i community.43 The differences between the two

were increasingly accentuated by proximity. During all these years

I lived with what could be called “a frontier feeling." The "frontier

feeling" is evident in this autobiography, in my poetry and several

other genres. It is not defiant, not bellicose toward my neighbours,

but manifests the spirit of friendliness and goodwill. In my

43 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. 8, Oxford UP, 1963(1954), pp. 3-11.

208

eagerness to experiment, to push the boundaries of consciousness,

and to restlessly, ceaselessly innovate over those four decades I

became intimately familiar with as much of the intellectual culture

that my academic proclivities allowed. This border spirit, this

frontier feeling, this pioneer orientation intensified my antipathy

for and estrangement from much that was in my culture. This

antipathy for or, perhaps more accurately as the years went on,

exhaustion with so much that was part of this disintegrating

civilization became an important component of the creative agon

and the raison d'être of my lifelong campaign within the Baha’i

community and its teaching and consolidation programs operating

at a global level. The other component of the cultural limen of this

growing Baha’i civilization could be “aptly described as the

hospitable threshold of an ever open door.”44 This threshold was a

humble one, but it was secure.

44 ibid., p.3.209

This creativity, this expression of psychic energy, as Toynbee goes

on to describe it, is at its maximum when the society that is the

transmitting agent is a civilization in the process of disintegration

and decomposition. I have often wondered just where the accretion

of energy came from beginning right at the start of this pioneering

process in 1962. Is Toynbee providing a theoretical underpinning

for what might be called a psychological explanation of my

creativity, in part related to my bi-polarism? I do not know; I

simply offer the theory here as this autobiography comes to its

close. There were so many cross-currents that operated between

the individual and society, between my own life and the wider life

of society and that flowed into the life of the pioneer, this pioneer.

One such current was put in a clever way by Paul Tillich. Arguably

the twentieth century’s greatest Protestant theologian, once said

that when citizens believe they have no effect on the life of society,

the result is favorable to religion but bad for democracy.45 In

45 Paul Tillich in “Play in Tarbox: A Review of John Updike’s Couples, The New York Times on the Web, April 7th 1968.

210

Canada and Australia I think it was bad for both. The lives of these

citizens became locked in job, family and play and the bigger

social picture is one that was just talked, viewed on TV and in the

media about but never or rarely acted upon. The big picture, of

course, was complex and filled with so many issues. I have written

on this theme elsewhere and so will leave its complex tentacles

here.46

But now to some prose-poetry beginning with that poet-activist

James Dickey:

JAMES DICKEY: SOMETHING THAT MATTERS

Dickey wants to change the reader; he wants to use the poem as a

medium through which the reader is raised or torn out of himself

into a larger, more energized state of being...This is a poetry that

forces the reader to know he is in the presence of a kind of truth at

46 Ron Price, “Responses to Circle of Unity,” dialogue, Spring 1986, pp.37-8, among other places.

211

which (he) could not have arrived at by himself. -Bruce Weigl and

T.R. Hummer,”Introduction”, The Imagination as Glory: The

Poetry of James Dickey, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1984,

p.2.

...a curious tension exists between poetry and belief, idea, principle,

or reason. That is, while we hear a good deal about poetry’s need to

be based upon an explicit view of the meaning of existence, we are

often very bored and exasperated by the poetry which testifies to

such a view. -Howard Nemerov, William Blake in Poetry and

Fiction: Essays, Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, 1963, p.vii.

You want to get the reader in,

move him about emotionally,

intuitively, physically even,

out of complacency, drift,

help them find their real lives,

combating the malaise, do some purging,

212

undistorting, unblunting: your poem

is something that matters--

a two hundred year old romantic dream--

and we’ve been moved.

Some transforming, healing,

life-affirming impulse:

pretty ambitious stuff, eh?

From an initial repulsion

Through acceptance to a full embrace--

sounds like something I’d like

to pull off, too!

Can we call you a poet

of the second and third epochs?

A foundation poet for the Kingdom

of God on earth? I don’t know, James,

but I like what you’re into, so much of it:

the dramatic confrontation of self and guilt,

213

the presence of such joy as to remove self-pity--

good gear, James, good gear!

The search for the energizing Truth:

now there’s a goal worth pursuing.

How are you coming now, James,

in your redeeming search of the depths?

That divine intermediary?

Is it more than the poem?

More than imagination?

Is there something beyond

these sacred and resplenent tokens

from the planes of glory?

Is there something beyond

the green garden of these blossoms

in the lands of knowledge, beside

the orient lights of the Essence in the

mirrors of names and attributes?*

214

2 October 1995

*Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, pp.3-4.

DOMESTICATION

Since I went pioneering in 1962 there has been what Robert Bly

calls “a domestication of poetry”. “That’s one metaphor” says Bly

“to explain the amazing tameness of the sixty to eighty volumes of

poetry published each year, compared with the compacted energy”

of the poetry that came from the “wild knots of energy” of the

poetry going back at least to the 1920s. --Robert Bly, “Knots of

Wild Energy: An Interview With Wayne Dodd”, American Poetry:

Wildness and Domesticity, Harper and Row, NY, 1990, p.300.

We have never before faced what it’s like in the culture when

hundreds of people want to write poetry and want to be instructed

in it...We know how to instruct a hundred engineers, or computer

215

technicians...We don’t know how to instruct in the area of poetry.

-Robert Bly, ibid., p.318.

Such a burgeoning, multiplicity,

everything happening at once.

But, you know Robert,

I’ve met a lot of engineers

who aren’t too happy with their instruction.

We’ve got much to work out in this

incredible planetary fertilization,

bifurcated merging, cross-fertilization,

exploding tempest, increased intensity,

desperately troubling times.

Wondrous leaps and thrusts cross-firing:

leaving people bewildered,

agonized and helpless.

Those knots of wild energy, we had them too,

216

as the great Order began to form back then

in the first two epochs of this Formative Age:

Our earliest pioneers1 had what you might call

a conflagrant holy urgency.

I came in on the firey end

of that ninth stage of history

and caught the comet’s burning ice

and after thirty years I try to translate it

into a poetry of dazzling prospects,

a poetry of two more epochs.

Is it wild, Robert? Is it wild?

I was wild; I was. And I, too,

have been domesticated.

1 1921 to 1961: 40 years

Ron Price

217

16 October 1995

ACCEPTING UNKNOWINGNESS

I suspect that the greatest poetry is, as a rule...a concise and simple

way of saying great things...this does not necessarily mean ‘un-

complex’ or ‘easy to understand’. Not everything or everyone is

always concise and simple; even the simplest souls have complex

moments. -With appreciation to John Livingston Lowes and C.Day

Lewis in The World of Poetry, Phoenix House, London, 1959,

pp.133-134.

You’re not looking for some top-40 tune here,

or a delightful ditty like:

What shall we do with a drunken sailor?

Some easy style, light reading,

a little amusement, to be taken over breakfast

218

with your morning paper, come on mate!

What do you take me for? I’m not a comedian

with a quick fix, instant laugh, insight guaranteed.

I bring you a certain darkness in which I labour

to enshroud you, certain fluctuations and associations

which I melt down for your purpose and make distant

for you to reach for: buy those spectacles,

for this is no dead vacuum, floundering place, dimness.

You must cultivate your poetic receptivity,

accept unknowingness when it comes, as you would

in those mysterious places, the faces of friends,

those you love and associates you hardly know.

Ron Price

20 September 1995

THE ABODE OF DUST TO THE HEAVENLY HOMELAND

219

Dickey’s sense of personality (is)....a series of imagined dramas,

sometimes no more than flashes of rapport, kinships with....the

apocalyptic...in which personality is gained only when reason is

rejected...The process of increasing self-consciousness...as every

existential role in the universe must...be abandoned...reverence for

life...his own personal history as an analogue to...an exploration of

twentieth-century....a fundamental helplessness of man....the poet a

shaman, a specialist in ecstacy, a participant in the divine... -Joyce

Carol Oates, “The Imagination of James Dickey”, The Imagination

as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, University of Illinois Press,

Urbana, 1984, p.68, p.72

The main thing in poetry is the discovery of an idiom and the

exploitation of it over an area of thought for a long time. -James

Dickey in Jane Bowers-Martin’s, “Jericho and God’s Images”, The

Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, Bruce Weigl

220

and T. Hummer, editors, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1984,

p.150.

Poetry is a happening in depth...at that level of the personality

where things really matter...it is as divine intermediary between

you and the world that poetry functions, bringing with it an

enormous increase in perceptiveness, an increased ability to

understand and interpret the order of one’s experience....the

pleasure...the gift of being able to...get as far into a great good

place-the poem itself-as one can...

-James Dickey, “The Energized Man”, ibid., pp.164-165.

The terror that many feel

in the silence of infinite spaces

when the wind blows whistling

through the edges of the doors

and windows on a cold rainy night

at the edge of a great sandy desert

221

in a new suburban house

with the garden not-yet-planted,

or in a thousand other infinite spaces

on this whirling ball,

I have not often felt.

I have for many a long year,

since somewhere in my teens,

seen the universe as a benign place

and a meaningful one, purposeful,

a direction to an evolutionary process

and poetry, imagination, aliveness

fill the space, give me a feeling

I have lived and defined that order,

meaning, purpose, reality.

I have sensed I am nothing.

Out of this nothingness I attempt to become.

222

In this attempt I begin to live, to write

and to use my imagination to enrich

all that I live for and believe,

all that I see in this dizzying universe

of suns, moons, space--

this abode of dust on my way to

the heavenly homeland.

Ron Price

2 October 1995

*Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, (US, 1952), p.4.

LUSCIOUS FIELDS OF GRAIN

I had already reached the conclusion that we are in no wise free in

the presence of a work of art; that we do not create it as we please

223

but that it preexists in us and we are compelled, as though it were

by a law of nature, to discover it because it is at once hidden from

us and necessary. -Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things

Passed, trans. by C.K. Scott Moncrieff.

Several of Roger White’s poems I have taken and reworked the

themes. I felt a little like Proust. I felt I was somehow finishing off

the sculpting process, tidying up the edges, expanding on White’s

pithy language. I was discovering something else in the form which

was hidden and waiting to come out. Here is one that came out. -

Ron Price, 9:00 am, 29/12/95, Rivervale, Western Australia. See

Roger White, “It is an Easy Thing to Love the Dead”, The Witness

of Pebbles, p.58.

I have loved the dead for years,

have talked to them in prayer

with occasional answering tears.

224

It is not difficult to love these souls

who can not wound or tell a lie.

They seem to satisfy some need

as we are told they can perform a deed,

a deed of miraculous force from their

special place right near the Source.

They are like some fruit beyond the seed

which small and dry would never yield-

we thought-such a full and luscious field

of grain to help us here, to help us gain.

Now who would argue with a rose?

Who’d expect a tree to turn up its nose?

Both were grown, so long, so free,

with quiet charm for all to see.

Do not tell of pain and dung

of tortured sap and spirit wrung.

Ron Price

225

29 December 1995

I define my poetry, my autobiography, my individuality in the

context of a community of individuals. Ben Franklin did as much

as America was laying its foundations47 and I do the same as the

Baha'i Faith lays its foundations in country after country, especially

during these four epochs and especially in Canada and Australia

where I have lived my life. I think, too, that my autobiography and

my autobiographical poetry is as much a literary strategy as it is a

generic category; it is like some reminiscent fieldwork on myself

where I take a leap. It is not so much a leap into the past as it is an

introduction of invention into my existence in a complex layering

of vastly disparate elements.48 If there was ever resentment in my

life and for years there was, healing and reconciliation has come,

partly through autobiography's protean forms, partly through prayer

47 Kenneth Dauber, The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Politics From Franklin to Melville, University of Wisconson Press, 1990, p.33.48 Peter Steele, Autobiographical Passion. Melbourne UP, 1989, p.107.

226

and partly through those mysterious dispensations of a watchful

Providence.

227

<a href=l23></a>

VOLUME FIVE

CHAPTER EIGHT

SOCIAL TOPICS OF RELEVANCE

You will find below a series of poems on topics of individual and

social concern involving history and issues of contemporary

relevance. Although this autobiography attempts to explore the

history and issues of the four epochs, I don't think it does so quite

as comprehensively as I wanted when I set out on my writing

journey seventeen years ago. And so I include in this chapter some

poems to compensate for this inadequacy. It is impossible for any

soul to possess that "qualification of comprehensive knowledge"49

that 'Abdu'l-Baha speaks of, although some in the Baha'i

community seem to have acquired an amazing breadth of

49 'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970(1925), p.36.

228

knowledge.50 I have always found economics beyond me,

beginning with the two weeks in September 1963 when I enrolled

in an introductory economics course before withdrawing and taking

Spanish in its stead. The physical sciences, especially physics, have

always eluded me and the biological sciences seemed to possess an

enormous and intricate specialized vocabulary. Foreign languages

after my eighteen birthday became quite uninteresting and that

Spanish course was dropped after a month of trying to memorize a

long and tiresome vocabulary. Mechanical subjects, trades areas,

engineering, mathematics and other disciplines from what became

in this half century a burgeoning list all moved to the periphery of

my life and danced around in a region of nearly total obscurity.

And so it is that whatever contribution they might make to an

understanding of social problems has been lost to me.

______________________________________________________

50 I could list here some of the Baha'is I have known directly or indirectly during these four epochs, but I will leave it to history and its writers to expand on this aspect of my times.

229

I draw on a wide but limited field of knowledge, limited to the

social sciences and humanities for the most part, for the following

poems. I lower myself into my "divinely ordained solitude," not

like a swimmer into freezing water as Rilke did, but into some river

where poems arrive as they did to Rilke: suddenly, in urgent bursts,

like visitations. A crystalline voice does not ring through the gale,

as it did with Rilke but, rather, like a baby arriving down the birth

canal and a release of a weight, a strain, a train, of thought falls

onto the paper. These poems seem part of a great granary; each

poem has its own afterlife, an afterlife that I discover

serendipitously as the days and the years go by. Some of this

afterlife is blissful, joyful and some has a plainness, an everyday

simplicity that is as ordinary as the ordinary life I once lived. The

afterlife is my own; the meaning is my own and, if readers find

something helpful or pleasureable here, that is a bonus.

1. ENVY AND LUST:

230

LOTS OF WORK STILL TO DO

You think it horrible that lust and rage

Should dance attendance upon my old age;

They were not such a plague when I was young:

What else have I to spur me into song?

-W.B. Yeats in On Poetry and Poets, T.S. Eliot, Faber and Faber,

London, 1947, p.257.

Can it be that I do not envy any more?

No desire to be young or handsome?

No desire to receive some recognition

by being elected or appointed?

Perhaps a wishing that I might have

become something more: purer?

more independent? more courageous?

Horace said those who envy grow thin.

231

That’s why I’m getting chubby.

Found: a sign for the absence of

the least trace of envy--chubby

old men and women. No, that can’t be.

I’ve been envying all my life.

There was always someone better

at something than me. Now, well,

I just don’t care. Is this the root

of my spiritual gainer: insouciance?

The contextual nuances for envy

are multitudinous and I must confess

that occasionally, even now,

admiration finds envy’s trace element

like a cold wind from the Arctic blowing

faintly, so faintly across my face.

I nearly miss it; it goes so fast,

but it stick’s for an instant in my liver,

232

or is it my kidney, unbeknownst.

Envy’s microscopic trace, extracted,

purple? black? colourless? only the

psychoanalytic-geologist would know for sure.

There’s been a thinning going on

underneath my nose leaving my

wanting faculty highly pruned, sorted.

What, pray, has slaked my envy?

Has that primary envy of my mother’s

breast just run out of gas?

This theological problem, abating,

perhaps is taking a new form: pride.

Good God, no! Desire’s quiet new receptacle.

Erudition, those who can amuse,

who have money to travel,

those who have radiant acquiescence,

233

courage--the list seems endless,

quieter but endless.

Lots of work still to do.

Ron Price

28 November 1995

My wife has helped me in achieving whatever 'spiritual

tranquillity'51 I have achieved in a marriage relationship, but this

was achieved only when I learned to enjoy her soul and not lust

after her body, a process too long to describe here. Pushkin said

this and it was also my own experience. The plethora of women's

and men's magazines now on the market, life-style magazines like

Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, Women's

Weekly, inter alia which deal with relationships, marriage, sex and

love have not been of much value to me; for I have never been

much of a reader of this dense forest of reading material. Nor have

51 Robin Edmonds, Pushkin: The Man and His Age, MacMillan, London, 1994, p.132.

234

the other dense forests of magazines: cars, fishing, food, domestic,

fashion and on-and-on contributed much to my life, spiritual or

material. This is not to say, of course, that I have not been affected

by this plethora of an often engrossing trivia, a quotidian reality

which bathes the senses of everyday man with its enticing

attractions.

The car, for example, which Roland Barthes sees as the equivalent

of the Gothic cathedrals, with their magical spirit and utility, has

given me much pleasure and practical value over more than 40

years since I first got my license at the beginning of my pioneering

life in 1962.(Mythologies, 1967, p.99.)52

2. SUICIDE AND DEPRESSION

52 I could write much more about the car, domestic appliances, furniture, clothes, inter alia but, for the most part, they were cultural appurtenances which were just a natural part of my environment and, although useful and a source of comfort and pleasure, they occupy a basically periferal and not a central part in this autobiography.

235

EXPANSE

‘Tis a dangerous moment for anyone when the meaning goes out of

things and Life stands straight-and...yet no content comes. Yet such

moments are. If we survive them they expand us. -Emily

Dickinson, Prose Fragment 49.

I clutched at sounds

and groped at shapes

and still my heart did groan

in some endless wilderness

it wailed, lamented bone.

I could not find the golden lines,

silver or hyacinth--only a base metal

from which I made a nail

for my sackcloth shirt and tail.

236

I felt it in the afternoons

when the light angled low;

it left a scar; it left a hurt

deep down, a feeling, woe.

‘Twas a sense of full despair

and it hung like weighted rocks.

When it went I felt expanse,

Immortality, like darkness

leaving from the grass and

all creation in a dance.

Ron Price

25 June 1995

Stephen Gill writes, in his analysis of the poetry and life of

William Wordsworth, that the poet doesn't deal with fact but with

the poetry of the imagination. The brain, he says, generates its own

cues for recalling memories. And so it is that the recreation of the

237

self hinges on infusing mental states into the environment and on

the ability to change the self-image in beneficial directions so that

one can undertake the arduous task of a poetic vocation. Gill, of

course, is writing about Wordsworth, but I have found over the

years that much that applies to Wordsworth and his writing applies

to me and my writing. The self, writes Gill, is a biproduct of a

reality monitoring process; it is perceptually driven and reflectively

generated. Autobiography became for Wordsworth what it has

become for me, a way of watching over my conduct, of giving it

shape, of inventorying and stylizing daily behaviour and of

constructing identity. As I attempt to comment on the several

issues that I do in this chapter the commentary of Stephen Gill is

highly relevant.53

3. REGRET AND REMORSE

53 Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford UP, NY, 1980.238

VICTORY THROUGH FAILURE

Nothing is more fruitful for man than the knowledge of his own

shortcomings.

-’Abdu’l-Baha, Promulgation, p.244.

...you cannot lay remorse upon the innocent nor lift it from the

heart of the guilty. Unbidden shall it call in the night, that men may

wake and gaze upon themselves.

-Kahlil Gibran, Prophet, p.43.

Unbidden it called this morning, early,

heavy it laid upon my pillow and climbed

around my ears like a sleepy mosquito

who was only into dull roars. It headed

for my eyes and my shutting them had no

239

effect as it climbed right on into my brain,

slowly eating its way to my heart, stopping

on its way to burn my liver if it could-and it did.

I looked upon myself like some prisoner

whose regret was like some jail-cell barring

me from joy and colouring my morning with

the nethermost fire of remorse. I would be here

again, I thought, for I was so far from the

immortal Wine. And yet, and yet, I would

not be estranged from this Cause and these

vicissitudes of fortune would not draw me away

from my Goal: I hoped! I hoped! I hoped!

For I found meaning here, right here, in

these tribulations. I was not radiant, not happy;

I had not learned this yet, but I had learned

to search for meaning and this would have to do

240

and I did. The radiance came later, years later.

Weary, I stood at the window at dawn and watched

the rising sun. Slowly my eyes gladdened, invaded

and sustained with the fresh meaning of gold

and the subtle tempter, for the moment, slipped away.

My sense of fitness returned. Perhaps this fire

would be removed; perhaps it would go on for years.

For great forces churned inside me and tore me apart

and had all my days. Tremendous energies were

often released. I trust this will happen again perhaps

through my failures, yet again, yet again.

Ron Price

16 December 1995

241

One of the twentieth century's famous feminists, Simon de

Beauvoir,54 wrote that in writing her autobiography she wanted to

create an identity of her own and win for herself an ethical centre.

She knew that in this struggle she was not successful in all

respects. So is this true of me as I go about commenting on these

issues and struggling with my struggles in this poetry and in my

life.

Identity in many ways has come to mean for me what it is for the

post-structuralist,55 namely, a site of contesting selves: past self,

present self, public self, private self. I as a writer must choose

and/or invent a speaking self.

4. COMMUNITY

A NECESSARY INSTABILITY

54 Karen Vintges, "Beauvoir's Autobiography: Autofiction or Self-Technique,? Labyrinth, Vol.1 No.1, Winter 1`999.55 Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single meaning or one singular existence. Instead, every individual reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning and existence for a given text.

242

The community should not be like a chain which is only as strong

as its weakest link, but like a garment whose fibers, the warp and

weft, may be ever so slender, numerous and intimately connected.-

Ron Price with appreciation to Charles S. Pierce, Collected Papers

5.264.

Some see the meaning of life

As making a contribution to the community,

for here the creative personality

is born and matured;

it is the gift of evolution,

the ordering of inequality,

the integration of the individual,

where restraint and self-control

are part of self-esteem.

One day community feeling

will triumph over everything

that opposes it, as natural

to man as breathing,

243

the scientific inevitability

of social harmony

slowly overcoming the force

of antisocial dispositions

now so preponderant in the world,

at least in certain places.

Perhaps a Ciceronian stoicism

to start with and a widening

secular spirituality, as the blank page

whirls about in the winds of the spirit

and we come to understand cognition,

the social restraints

which limit our options,

define our choices

and generate what seems to us

as a restriction of potential.

Ron Price

244

26 June 1995

"Our years come to an end like a sigh," so it says in the Psalms(90).

"They are soon gone and we fly away." Much of the landscape of

my life, however much it has involved a search for solitude and

peace, it has also involved a great deal of the landscape of

community. One of the first epic's based on community and

individualism in the western intellectual tradition was Homer's

Odyssey. Amidst what were once a thousand entertaining and

instructive episodes for western readers, the hero, Odysseus, is

hardly ever absent from the story. His lonely voyage, part and

parcel of the emerging Greek city state that he and it was, in

strangely mixed scenes of human existence, I have over the years

felt a strong identity with. For I too have travelled, part and parcel

of an emerging global Order in our time, an Order that was, like

Odysseus', hundreds of years in the future before it would reach its

apotheosis. There was a strangeness to it, an excitement, a sense of

the bizarre. It was written, too, in the Formative, the Iron, Age of

Greek culture. Perhaps, as history specialist Anthony Andrewes

245

writes, "the very instability and incoherence of Greek political

institutions" led to "a political evolution which was denied to other

cultures."56

One often sensed this instability in these early years of the

evolution of the Baha'i administrative Order, especially working as

I have so frequently over the last forty years with the new

institutions which Baha'u'llah has created with an inventiveness

and brilliance that only a Manifestation of God could possess.

There was a fragility not unlike the flowers of the garden. But,

then, it was difficult to get a right and proper sense of historical

perspective, for it took hundreds of years before the golden age of

Greek culture finally arrived. And we, the Baha'is, in this first

century of the Formative Age, are really right at the beginning--

about the time that Odysseus was on his voyage. At least one could

argue the case. And so I do, as I comment from a historical

56 Anthony Andrewes, Greek Society, Penguin, Melbourne, 1987, p.xxiii.246

perspective on this poetry, dealing as it does with some of the

issues of our day.

5. SOCIAL PROBLEMS

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY

Because of American poet Wallace Stevens’s emphasis on the

importance of the imagination, he is sometimes criticized for being

little in touch with social issues and political realities.1 Some who

read Price's poetry extensively may find, may conclude, a similar

out-of-touchness in its content. Certainly there are relatively few

poems about particular and explicit social problems like: war,

poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, and refugees among so

many others. At the same time, I write about the agitations of

private life and the torments of public questions. It seems to me

247

that there also exists in my poetry what John Brenkman calls a

utopian power.2 This power derives from, or lies in, my poetry’s

many concrete connections and its language of of everyday practice

and living with its relevant social contexts. As I see it, my poetry

does not aim to separate itself from those contexts or to set itself

above them. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Alan Shucard, Modern

American Poetry: 1865-1950, Alan Shucard, et al., Twayne

Publishers, Boston, 1989, p.149; and 2John Brenkman, Culture

and Domination, 1987, p.108.

I write about social and political issues,

in context, finding a context, searching

for a context, concerned as I am with

expressing my experience within this

new Order, with defining its reality, its

ambience, its future, its past, its present

construct, with giving language to all

that I am and all that is this System

248

represented in this poetry of heightened

visual, imaginative, intellectual sensibility,

giving words to things others never notice

in the everyday, paying attention to colours,

shapes, textures, objects, time’s relationships

that are right in front of me, hard, clear, real:

incorporating and integrating into the what

the what that is me and the when, where, why.

What can we call it:

the social construction of reality?

Ron Price

24 June 1995

Updated: 4/12/07

The sociologist Alvin Gouldner says that in life, in society, the

norm of anonymity is "a necessary adjunct" to what he calls "the

249

short-take society wherein one goes from one short-take role to

another." Between these short-takes one must "be accorded civil

inattention and encouraged quickly to change roles" not to sustain

relationships.57 There is no doubt that throughout a large part of

one's life this is true, but there are situations where most of us have

to deal with relationships that are not short takes. These are found,

for me, in marriage, in some jobs and in some experiences of the

Baha'i community.

Edward Sampson writes that "what is meant is continuously being

reframed by what is...said."58 One could put the same idea this

way: "how do I know what I think until I see what I've said?" The

self is a product of the social arrangements which support it. The

nature of those supports themselves are increasingly, although not

always, multiple and fragmentary, temporary and without depth.

Viewed from this perspective even the mind becomes a form of

57 Alvin Gouldner in The Dramaturgical Society, Internet, 10 October 2002.58 Edward Sampson in "The Self and its Constructions: A Narrative Faith in the Postmodern World," Barbara J. Socor, Narrative Psychology: Internet and Resource Guide, 1996-2003,Vincent W. Hevern.

250

social myth and the self-concept is removed from the head and

placed within the sphere of social discourse. Max Weber

observes59 that both for sociology and for history the object of

cognition is subjective meaning. This subjective meaning is both

the basis for and the complex of action. The point here is not that

"anything goes," but rather that "everything is contingent"; not that

there are no rules, but that the rules that do exist are decidedly

"historically and culturally situated." At the same time, from a

Baha'i perspective, I am inclined to the view that there are essential

metaphysical verities and these verities are eminently prone to

potentially endless revisions. These revisions ensure that "the self

is not an organic thing that has a specific location but is, rather, a

dramatic effect arising diffusely from the scene that is

presented..."60 This autobiography and the way I see my life has

been significantly affected by this 'social constructionist' line of

thinking.

59 ibid.60 Irving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p.253.

251

PERSONAL REMINISCENCES

All attempts to write about persons or events, however important,

to which the poet is not intimately related in a personal way are

now doomed to failure....Auden’s elegies are linguistic homes in

which the dead continue to abide, their words and ideas held fast

among the words and ideas of the living poet. -Jahan Ramazani,

Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney,

University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, pp.201-203.

I often wondered why writing about, say,

Julius Caesar or Churchill, was so difficult;

or even the old starving China boys that my

mother used to talk about when trying to get

me to eat my vegetables, or the disaster in old

Dneipropetrovsk or Novosibirsk, or those old

Chukchi people and their rain dance: one needs

some kind of intimacy really.

252

We each have different worlds.

Now, Mr. Auden, I find writing begins

both from the sense of separateness in time

and the sense of continuity

of the dead, the living and the still-to-be-born.

It all goes on and on, virtually, forever,

Although my short span will soon end

and, as you say, these words are like

carving my initials on my desk,

maybe someone will read them one day:

‘tis a type of rising from the dead,

or as some say...an ever-advancing civilization.

If this is too pretentious then

just some personal reminiscences,

253

just reminiscences, Mr. Auden.

Ron Price

30 June 1995

THE GREYING OF THE RED AND YELLOW PERIL

We grew up at a time

when Karkhov, Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk

were black foot-prints in the snow

-Bruce Dawe, “What Lies on Us”, Sometimes Gladness, 3rd

edition, Longman, 1988, p.142.

Some of us grew up at a time

when Krushev, Kiev and Kennedy

were part of the language of the big world

that we only ever partly understood at best.

254

The yellow beast and her red friend

gradually became greyer and greyer

and then the whole thing fell apart

in a brave new world

for which most of us

had lost whatever bravery we had.

By then, I’d lived in so many houses,

in so many towns, known too many

women and thousands of people

that I was never shocked by headlines

or news from the lighted chirping box

and its anonymous deaths,

or private griefs

immortalized yet again

for the zillionth time on film.

I clean my teeth and wind the clock

255

for I am still living.

I have just returned from another evening

where I watch merchandised desire

and rented embraces exhaust the night air,

where frightened cries rise occasionally

and pierce the quiet suburban landscape.

What is happening now

that the land has become grey

and the red and yellow hues

do not threaten us still?

What does all this mean

for us who have seen a century

bathed in blood and tears

on television and in movies?

Ron Price

17 December 1995

256

This would be a good juncture to make some comments on

television and the movies, mediums that have become very

infuential in the half century that this autobiography is concerned

with. I have collected three arch-lever files of notes on the media

from the recent times that I taught media studies and I could wax

eloquent. Instead I will include another poem here. It was inspired

by a documentary.

SAINTSHIP

After ten years you go beyond feeling.

-C. Chessman, BBC, 1993, ABC TV, 30 November 1995: Great

Crimes and Trials of the Twentieth Century. Chessman was a man

waiting on death row in California from 1950 to 1962, in the years

I was preparing, little did I know it, for a lifetime of pioneering.

257

After thirty-three years in the field

your feelings learn to protect themselves

with humorous asides and saying ‘no,’

dwelling in some inner landscape

where the Master rides, lightly rides:

in the mountains you reach for Him.

You cloak yourself in a privacy

which sometimes tastes of dignity

and a hint of spiritual charm

like a herbal remedy, ever so distant,

ever so subtle, dry even.

Sometimes you feel like a delectable,

mysterious sauce, piquant,

puzzlingly attractive,

lingers on the tongue,

surprising their taste buds

with unexpected combinations

258

of colourful, scented, ingredients.

You meet the human need

for delighted astonishment,

but sadly(thankfully?) only sometimes.1

So much of it is dry paperland

with no more juice

than some of those useless lemons,

that is why you admit people to friendship slowly.

You had to after winning

all those popularity contests

which you didn’t even want to enter:

So you perfected evasion into an art form;

kept away the bore, the pedant, the obtuse,

the fake, the chatterbox, the loud,

just about everyone: gave them the slip

when they blundered uninvited

with their chit-chat into your personal space,

259

with their well-intentioned catechism of things

that would be good for you.

For the cosmic patriotism of this Cause

and its enthusiastic temper of espousal

can get a little thin,

unless one is constitutionally sanguine

and possesses a congenital amnesia,

an incapacity for even transient sadness,

a temperament organically weighted

on the side of cheer,

fatally forbidden to linger,

even momentarily, on the dark side.

But you, and many of them,

have a different susceptibility

to emotional excitement,

to the impulses and inhibitions

260

that they bring in their train.

This rank-and-file believer,

part of the warp and weft,

an ordinary chap,

seems to have softened with the years,

has unobtrusively acquired

an incapacity for those sacrificial moods

that once inspired his being;

perhaps he has just learned

to inhibit his instinctive repugnances

and has acquired a firece contempt

for his own person

which he is learning to moderate

in both his private and public domains.

Is this how one discovers and measures saintship?

261

1 When I look at some celebrities especially comedians, like Robyn

Williams, I wonder how what seems like their infinite capacity to

delight others must have a wear and tear factor on their lives.

Ron Price

30 November 1995

6. CRISES

PERSISTENCE

The way that we perceive and react to an event or crisis is largely

responsible for the ultimate effect of that event upon us. If we can

understand and make sense out of an event...the impact of that

event will be less dreadful. -A. Ghadirian, ‘Human Responses to

Life Stress and Suffering’, Baha’i Studies Notebook, 3, 1-2, 1983,

p.50.

262

One constant in a world of variables

--they’d be there come rain or shine.

Not many, mind, but someone was always there.

My mother always said they were the only people

who’d have a picnic in the rain:

they’d bargain with the sun.

It must be all those birds collapsing over Akka

which you hear about in their history:

all that blood, sweat and tears.

Yes, you find persistence here,

fed by the blood of those martyrs

and enough joy to take you the distance.

Ron Price

263

17 December 1995

7. DEATH

WOULDN'T HE?

These apocalyptic elegies are indeed not conventional expressions

of consolation but triumphant outbursts directed...to the dead and

Emily Dickinson’s own anguish...an anguish distilled...into

triumph.1 Here, in this poem below, is my own triumphant outburst

with my usual cautionary note derived from Baha'i theology

regarding our final moments. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Benjamin

Lease, Emily Dickinson’s Readings of Men and Books: Sacred

Soundings, MacMillan, London, 1990, p.xvii.

All across the world they lie

behind grey stone

264

and obscurest graveyards

in places noone’s heard

on the edge of town.

Yes, heaven’s humble handful

and not-so-humble,

among simple stones

and not-so-simple.

Hardly heroes, hardly known:

servants, gentlemen, ladies,

every conceiveable type,

they're all here behind stone.

Words carved by unknown hands:

Pioneer Canada Nine Year Plan.

He’d planned his. Knew who he was.

Identity grew into stone

that would last a thousand years.

He was going to end this one befittingly;

265

I mean it was his life, himself,

his mirror of some eternal hyacinth

growing forever in a garden

of eternal splendour, forged,

cut diamond-edged, glittering whiteness

on that snow-white path so close,

touching that Crimson Pillar

and trustworthiness’s pillar of light.

He would, at least, feel it.

Wouldn't he?

Ron Price

28 October 1995

Perhaps the inclusion at this point of some lines from one of Emily

Dickinson's apocalyptic elegies, an elegy that is not so much a

triumphant outburst as it is "anguish distilled" into a quiet triumph.

In poem number 1142 she opens with the lines:

266

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House supports itself.

It is logical to assume that 'the House' here is the human soul. The

Baha'i might add that "The House supports itself" with the help of

God and prayer. Dickinson concludes this pithy piece as follows:

A past of Plank and Nail

And slowness--then the Scaffolds drop

Affirming it a Soul.

Dickinson provides here a succinct phrase to capture, to express,

for me and for her a discernible shape to this poetic work.

Seemingly diffuse and sprawling, there is an intellectual depth in

267

her literary eccentricity--and in mine. At least there is depth for

me---and hopefully for readers who chance by the rivers of thought

this work contains. In the last two decades of Dickinson's life,

1863-1883, the idea of finishing a poem became repugant to

Dickinson.61 For me, the idea of finishing this autobiography is,

not so much repugnant, as unrealistic. There are always things to

add, to take away and to alter and I'm sure this will be the case as

long as I live and can function.

8. SEX

THE SMILE

The chronic cleavage between love and sexual desire is a disease of

western man. Here in Australia was a Canadian who got lots of

practice of learning to love women whom he desired sexually but

61 Paula Bennett, Emily Dickinso: Woman Poet, University of Iowa Press, 1990, p.42.

268

did not give that desire sexual expression. Here was a Canadian

with a face like the back side of a spoon, etched with a smile, with

a cautious reserve and the flavour of irony every time he tasted his

world and his words. -With thanks to Robertson Davies and his

comments on writing on The ABC program Writers and Writing,

25 June 1995, 8:00-8:20 pm.

I’d learned to smile and say cheese

as good as anyone else in that country

of bland faces like the back of a spoon;

and when I finally learned that skill,

after getting rid of my depressions,

well, not quite, they lingered long,

I left for Australia where in that dry land

people’s faces and mouths tell stories,

some of which you wished you didn’t know.

269

Scratch that smiling exterior

of a Canadian face and underneath

you get a gem of fascinating complexity.

I’ve been discovering one all my life

with the help of Australians

who are much more frank, funny

and facially expressive:

bodies are alive here.

They've been jumping out at me

in classrooms where I teach,

on the street when I walk

or drive around, even on TV

and in my own house where

she's been jumping out at me

for nearly thirty years.

The whole place is alive

with body language.

270

The women have been turning me on

so much I’m like a spinning top.

But I always have my Canadian face

to smile at the world:

the cheerful Canadian, the good-guy,

the nice guy.

It’s too much work for most people

to get to know what’s behind the smile,

but I don’t mind. I’m busy enough

getting to know me. That’ll keep me busy

the rest of my life and, with age,

the temptations have not been hitting me

in the face as much

Ron Price

25 June 1995

271

9. APOCALYPSE

WRITING BEFORE THE DAWN: SUSAN SONTAG

These are the darkest hours before the break of day. Peace, as

promised, will come at night’s end. Press on to meet the dawn.-

Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, 1993.

The present age lives by a scenario in which apocalypse looms and

it doesn’t occur...And still it looms. -Susan Sontag in Susan

Sontag: the Elegiac Modernist, Sohnya Sayre, Routledge, NY,

1990, p.147.

But how does one tell the tale of an apocalypse that was so long in

coming and promises to be as long in going? Where to begin and,

more importantly, where to end as we live in and live out of it? It

would seem, at first, a slow apocalypse but, in the end, it may

appear fast. Time perspectives are often mysterious. Given its

272

impalpability, its lubricity, can this protracted apocalypse be

grasped, or only sensed faintly as we slip listlessly through it? Oh,

and by the way, is this apocalypse real, or merely a rhetorical

device to be activated by millenarians, debunked by critics, and

ignored by everyone else? Is "Apocalypse" but a way to connect a

vast constellation of other metaphors, whose referents are

themselves finally just the vague grumblings and grim

presentiments of a culture perennially fixated on the chances of its

own demise? - Andrew McMurry, “The Slow Apocalypse: A

Gradualistic Theory of The World's Demise,” Postmodern Culture,

V6 N3, May, 1996.

In these early years of

the last stage of history

you have written, written,

like so many, pouring

a flood of knowledge

onto a world drowning,

273

drowning apocalyptically.

I always admired your work,

your endless, obsessive work

and your insights: tragedy is

the way we acknowledge

the world’s implacability.*

The House referred to it as

a ‘discouragingly meagre’ response.

Then, there was your succinct statement

on comedy as a precarious ascendancy.*

You wrote so much.

Most people I’ve ever met

just stay out of the ball park

or way out in left field;

you become the lone figure

in the lonely landscape,

you who have been writing

274

since the beginning of this

Kingdom of God on earth.**

You knew, then, that thought was

in ruins and your eschatological mentality

and concern for religious redemption

never found its way near

the Nightengale of Paradise

Who sang upon the Tree of Eternity.

Your melancholy, your seriousness,

your death of history, of self, of culture,

your homelessness, your autobiographical

thinking***, heroic amidst the ruins,

seeking to simplify, not trusting----

all in an apocalyptic mood

which looms while we wait,

a stealth apocalypse plodding

camouflaged among us hiding

275

among us in plain site, looming

in these last dark minutes and hours

before the break of dawn.

* Susan Sontag, ibid., p.90.

** Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By(US, 1957), p.351; the

beginning was 1953.

***Sohnya Sayre, ibid., p.128; all thinking has an autobiographical

aspect says Sohnya.

October 3 1995

10. RETIREMENT

SOME UNHEARD VOICE

"Called in my late fifties to this high office/for a record term..."1 I,

too, felt called by my late fifties after the feeling had grown for

perhaps a decade. By that time I did not have to spend time with

276

the responsibilities of job and endless meetings.-Ron Price with

thanks to 1Bruce Dawe, “The Vision Splendid”, Sometimes

Gladness, 3rd edition, Longmans, 1988, p.183.

Called in my fifties to this high office

for what is coming to look like a record term,

I receive no honours for my grey hairs

or my endless combination of words;

perhaps this is because I seek no honours,

only this late afternoon sunlight glittering

like sparks of stubble over all of creation,

a vitalizing fragrance, too,

like some dawning-place, some day-spring,

some transmutation of grief into blissful joy.

Replenished from deep springs,

perhaps the Ancient of Days,

277

or some unheard voice

from a burning bush, some bounty

beyond the ken of mortal mind or heart*,

I sing in the company of the most exalted angels,

but still I hesitate and halt, still I shake

to my very foundation, still my sorrow

and tears accompany by blissful joy.

Ron Price

19 December 1995

* Baha’u’llah, The Tablet of Carmel

11. MARRIAGE AND SOCIABILITY

A FORTRESS FOR WELL-BEING

278

Many people visit others out of a desire to have company, be

sociable, pass the time, etcetera. Many others, at the other end of

the social spectrum, are lonely and in need of company. Another

group of people don’t want any company and are happy with their

own. Working out your own ‘sociability index’ is important to your

peace of mind, sense of social tranquillity and personal integrity. -

Ron Price with thanks to George Simmel in The Sociological

Tradition, Robert Nisbet, Heinemann, 1966, p.308.

I think if I had a free and healthy and lasting organization of heart

and lungs as strong as an ox’s so as to bear unhurt the shock of

extreme thought and sensation without weariness, I could pass my

life very nearly alone, though it should last eighty years.

-John Keats, In a Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 24 August

1819.

Give me a call sometime; didn’t I tell you

279

the greatest journey in life is to relieve

the sorrow-laden heart.1

If you’re ever feeling a little low,

drop in, no need to give me a call,

unless you want.

I find when I say this not many drop in,

so don’t get the idea that you are imposing

on my time. I’m not the most popular fellow

with everyone and their dog dropping in.

My wife keeps my spirits pretty good,

quite an understanding lady really

and I find I can talk to my son,

like a friend, when sadness visits me.

So we’ve got a, what ‘Abdu’l-Baha called,

a fortress for well-being2 here,

a safe haven, a quiet place,

280

a silent garden where only birds

and blowing branches can he heard.

Can I say a wave of tenderness is here?

Mostly. There are barriers here

which we do not pass:

each in separate solitudes,

in separate rooms much of the time,

You will find greater and lesser pearls

in the corners of our rooms,

in our garden and hidden away

in shallow seas and rivulettes

that run through our lives.

Set free in a diamond studded array,

kept secret mostly, modestly arranged,

for God hath set all things free

from one another

that they may be sustained

by Him alone,

281

and nothing in the heavens

or in the earth, but God,sustains them.3

1 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, source not known

2 other quotations from marriage prayers

3 The Bab, from His Tablet El Kadir(The Mighty)

Ron Price

29 December 1995

12. WAR

In recent years, at least since the late 1980s and 1990s, the subject

of warfare has become more popular, partly because war and terror

are back in the social picture, partly because the whole of the last

century has seen one war after another, partly an end of history

climate of apocalypticism, partly because we increasingly see a

relationship between our own daily activity and war, partly

282

rhetorical inflation, partly endless media hype and partly because

of an increasingly loaded language with warfare terminology:

military-industrial complex, consciousness industry, territories,

borders, logistics, defences, inter alia.62

DAYTON’S TEMPORARY BOND AND TV'S SCATTER GUN

The first peace talks in my life, the first end-of-war talks were in

1945 at Yalta. There were then a series of peace talks in Korea, in

Viet Nam, in relation to the Cold War, in the Balkans, in the Arab-

Israeli War, the list seems endless. As I write this poem there are

peace talks going on nearly sixty years after the first ones in my

life. "Why were there peace talks in Dayton Ohio?"-Ron Price with

thanks to Alister Cook, “Message from America,” ABC Radio,

Sunday, 26 November 1995, 7:15 pm and 21 February 2003.

62 Paul Mann, "The Nine Grounds of Intellectual Warfare," Postmodern Culture, V6 N2, January, 1996.

283

The Wright Bros would not have believed it;

we did not believe it:

peace in the Balkans-at last!

Is it a sign of things to come?

If we can sort out this knot

anything is possible.

Who would have thought you could fly?

Who would have thought we’d get peace

in our time?

They’re turning in their graves now;

they’re turning; things are turning.

There’s a turning of the wheel,

some kind of vital axle’s here,

some kind of vital oil

as a peaceful Order emerges.

It’s an oil ignited in the Siyah-Chal;

284

gone now around the world,

a light that’s far beyond those fairies,

far beyond Dayton’s temporary bond.

far from TV's endless scatter gun.

Ron Price

26 November 1995

13. CIVILIZATION

In Kenneth Clark's discussion of civilization he says there are three

"essential ingredients:"63 leisure, movement and independence.

'Abdu'l-Baha puts the focus on "purity, independence and

freedom." This poem explores some of the core problems of

civilization at a quite personal level, more personal and deeper for

me than is usually examined in the media.

63 Kenneth Clark, op.cit., p.140.285

This poetry is

an emotional response

to the truths of revealed religion

in an hour when

my contemporaries

are looking for different truths.

While I tried to understand

these great truths

I moved thirty-six times,

possessed a restless

insatiate curiosity and,

by the time I was sixty,

all I wanted was tranquillity,

the experience of fine discrimination

and the capacity to discover truth

through the delicate balance of words.

286

Purity seemed to elude me

as the years went on

and I became increasingly

encrusted with the

soil and soot of a body

of staggering incapacity.

Ron Price

29/5/03.

VOLUME FIVE

CHAPTER NINE

287

PRAISE AND GRATITUDE

I'd like to close this autobiographical work with some poetry,

poetry that is an expression of praise and gratitude for the

developments that have taken place on Mt. Carmel. In many ways

these developments express, symbolically, the achievements in the

half century that this autobiography describes: in my life, in my

religion, in the Baha'i community and as a hope for humankind.

Autobiographies written by Baha'is during these years, and there

have not been many, extend what you might call a hypothetical

hermeneutics1 to correlate the events of Baha'i history with

episodes in their own lives. And this is what I do in both narrative

and poetry. -Ron Price with thanks to Linda Peterson, Victorian

Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation, Yale UP,

London, 1986, p.61.

______________________________________________________

APPLAUSE

288

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

and dances...

-William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”.

Walking through these gardens green,

red-pebbled paths and cypress sheen,

He saw those marble columns tall,

a Parthenon reborn; he raises a call

back to the Greeks!

whom for many a year he seeks.

Such a brilliance to the eye,

continuous with the stars who die,

but only after many years

and then their light goes out, my dears.

289

All of history here he saw,

the future too in one draw

of breath, one cast of eye.

The whole world around it danced so high

He nearly missed the wealth this view had brought

because he had not really thought.

Often when he sits or lies

there comes upon his inward eyes

this flash of beauty like a dream

mountain fresh, torrent, stream.

Then his heart fills up at last;

his rivers run, his mind moves fast.

After years of working for a Cause

his eyes taste sweetness, hands applause.

Ron Price

19 June 1995

290

GESTATION

When artists speak about the gestation period for their work I like

to think of a long, medium and short term period. In my own case

the long term gestation involved my grandfather, my mother and

my father. These were the primary influences on my life in the first

half of the twentieth century. Of course, one must also add the

socio-historical influences from this period: the two wars, the

decline of tradition, the new media, et cetera. The medium term

influences involved my career as a teacher, my pioneering and

experience in the Baha’i community, say, from about 1953 to 1978;

and short term gestation and influences, especially Roger White

and the writing of poetry from 1978 to 1992, my years in the north

and west of Australia: 1982 to 1999 and, finally, the Arc Project on

Mt. Carmel from 1987 to 2000. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over

Three Epochs, 18 July 2000.

291

Gradually, an emotional engagement,

an imaginative reconstruction,

a crystallizing of attention,

of life’s waiting,

a linguistic enactment,

a private and colloquial voice

an expression of the paradisical

substratum of experience

in a dark and complex age

of the isolation of the individual

of the individual in community

of an emptying out of an articulate self

to clarify and define the Other,

of a lifelong pursuit of a speech

fitting to one’s life,

of an insistent and intense personal presence

in touch with a spiritual world

and with human society,

292

of inner brightness and darkness,

the precious and the painful,

from place to placelessness,

from now to then,

from here to there

in the power and depth of my solitude.

Ron Price

18 July 2000

Anyone who has got to this final chapter in my story would

probably agree that "a man's true life is not the sum of the events of

his life."64 As authority moved from revelation to reason and

experience in the last two to three centuries, a paradigmatic shift

took place in the writing of autobiography. From a sense of some

objective story, out there, writers became aware that their lives

became more private even as they brought them into the public eye,

64 Ana Hartle, The Modern Self in Rousseau's Confessions, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1983, p.39.

293

the public domain, by the act of writing. The story oscillated

between the presence and absense of the self. That has certainly

been my experience in writing this work. I feel as if I have

artistically arranged the phenomena of my life for aesthetic,

intellectual and moral purposes, for education and reality testing.

But I have been honest. I have not hidden behind the lives of

uncles, aunts, fathers, mothers, a host of significant individuals

who have come into my life or my interests.

The Baha'i Faith, some may feel, has occupied too much of a

central place. But I put it there and did so intentionally. I have

enjoyed writing this account; it has not been distasteful to put

myself at the centre of the stage, although I have been incapable of

the "striptease of autobiography"65 that it has become for so many

and which has also become the taste of a vast readership. For me,

there has been what William James called "a rage for privacy"66

65 Ric Throssell, Wild Weeds and Wild Flowers: The Life and Letters of Katherine Suzannah Pritchard, Angus and Robertson, 1990(1975), p.ix.66 ibid., p.x.

294

and this has balanced whatever confessionalism has been part of

my work. Autobiographers tend to leave out what makes them

uncomfortable. The famous Helen Keller, in her autobiography of

1903, omits the sadness and rage she suffered due to her blindness

and deafness.67

SMALL DIFFERENCES MAKE THE DIFERENCE

The completion of the Human Genome Project, the great

achievement that it is, is coinciding with the completion of the Arc

Project. Both events change and will change the way we think

about ourselves. Just as small differences between our genome and

those of other animals and plants reveal what make us uniquely

human and profoundly different from animals and plants, so do

small differences between the Baha'i Faith and other Faiths make it

the unique and profoundly different phenomen- on that it is. Both

Projects have resulted in great gifts, powerful tools, for humanity's

67 Roger Bishop, "A Review of 'Helen Keller: A Life'." Dorothy Herrmann, in BookPage, 1998.

295

use. Both Projects will help human beings find their place in the

complex systems that make up the great adventure of life in this

universe. Both Projects were launched by inspired visions, visions

that were based on the belief that the pursuit of large-scale

fundamental problems in the life-sciences or in religion was and is

in the interest of humanity. Both Projects are not endings but

beginnings of a new approach to biology on the one hand and

global cooperation, peace and a new future on the other. Both

Projects are identified with extraordinary new power and with the

treatment of dis- ease, one a physical disease and the other

spiritual. Both are associated with a true internationalism which

has developed significantly during these my pioneering days. -Ron

Price with thanks to Barbara R. Jasny and Donald Kennedy, "The

Human Genome," Science, Vol. 291, No. 5507, 16 February 2001,

p.1153.

We get another perspective

on all the life on earth

296

and on this small and insignificant religion

we have played a part in all these years.

Small differences make

all the difference:

a written Revelation,

a clear statement of succession.

My God, these two factors alone

make it unique and pure.

The unity of life, of religion,

is so obvious, so clear, so true:

I see it on that Hill of God,

still the cynosure of a very few.

Ron Price

24 February 2001

297

A NEW POETIC INFLUENCE

The Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi, which the West comes

closest to in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, places the

accent in artistic expression, in its aesthetic philosophy, on the

rustic, the raw, the rough, on the imperfect, the impermanent, the

incomplete, on nothingness, emptiness, detachment. Since much of

my poetry contains accents similar to the tone and texture, meaning

and feeling, conveyed by these words; since I have long felt a

certain identity with the writings of Henry David Thoreau, that

pioneer of yesteryear who also wrote extensively about his

everyday experience in the bush, in the rustic places where he lived

by himself; since the Writings of the Baha'i Faith, and of

Baha'u'llah in particular, also dwell on that same mystical quality

of nothingness and emptiness, of detachment and the wilderness of

remoteness: this particular Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi has a

peculiar relevance to my own writings. -Ron Price with thanks to

298

"The Comfort Zone," ABC Radio National, 3 March 2001, 9:00-

10:00 am.

Only recently has it been confirmed

that this galaxy has a billion planets,1

only just the other day while

the Arc Project was being completed,

filling out our world with light,

with fragrances of mercy wafted

as they are over all created things,

over that myriad of planets.

And here, in these words,

I shed a unique light on the lives

of men and women of four epochs,

these protean beings who strike

a thousand postures in their lives

and change their spots swifter

than the twinkling of an eye.2

299

1 Interview with an astronomer at the American Association for the

Advancement of Science(AAAS) on "The Science Show," ABC

Radio National, 12:10-1:00 pm, 3 March 2001.

2 Robert Louis Stevenson, "Modern History Sourcebook: Samuel

Pepys," 1886. He discusses the chameleon nature of human beings

in his introduction.

Ron Price

3 March 2001

GROWTH 1

Yesterday I wrote a poem, Growth, on my life and the development

of that fragrance until 1962. This morning I felt like continuing

that theme with a focus on the development of my beliefs, that

fragrance. The task seems too difficult to get the required depth.

In the poem below I have set an overall outline but the depth, the

detail, the kind of achievement that Wordsworth attains in his The

300

Prelude I do not seem able to produce, as yet. I have a model in

Wordsworth but my personal achievement in that direction must,

for now, remain elusive. Perhaps one day I will come back to this

theme, this poetic package. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four

Epochs, 28 March 2001.

The only one on campus: '63-'66,

nearly lost the plot

in a mix of depression, sex,

career questions, confusion,

lectures, note taking and exams.

Was saved, in the end,

by Martin and Bond,

put on track,

got a direction,

centred my passion,

still fought fear

301

and depression,

broke the umbilical cord.

Survived those four years

in one piece,

launched to the north,

a real pioneer this time

with a marriage under my belt

to help me make it through.

Lasted, what, nine months?

A mild schizo-affective state!

Patched up and sent out after six

for a final two-and-a-half year

stint by Lake Ontario.

Restored my batteries,

kept my marriage,

302

continued my career,

pioneered again,

a few hours from Toronto,

taught the Cause, thanks

to the Eastern Proc Team,

put Picton on the map.

Fifty years after His passing1

I was in Australia

and praying again

to light up Whyalla

and my life,

both exploded

into more success

than I could imagine.

Divorce and two years

in South Australia

303

led to Tasmania, Victoria,

the NT, WA and back to

Tasmania and a thousand

upon thousand events

taking me to 57,

the opening of the Arc Project

and the Terraces.

Always the fragrance

has been there,

but to follow its journey

as Wordsworth followed his

must wait until another day.

1 'Abdu'l-Baha: 1921-1971

Ron Price

28 March 2001

304

The longer I lived with the details of my life, and I lived with them

in some written form for two decades(1984-2004), the more I

realized that these isolated observations and experiences needed to

be pulled together to gain any profundity, any solidity, any

cohesion, any perspective, any overall pattern and meaning.68 And

they needed to be pulled together quite differently than they had

been the first time or the second. For on both these occasions I felt

that something was missing, something important that I could not

quite put my finger on but something that, if I did not find it, the

whole structure of the narrative would simply lack a soul. Up to

that point, I felt as if all I had really done was transfer dry bones

from one graveyard to another, albeit with some order, some

system and some reverence. Autobiography has been an evolving

literary genre: historically, philosophically69 and in recent times,

poetically. And it has evolved in my own approach over two

decades. Now it seems, as Suzanne Nalbatian describes it in her

68 The poet William Carlos Williams says this much in The Last Words of William Carlos Williams, R. J. Ceras, Associates UP, London, 1995, p.17.69 William Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography, p.9.

305

analysis of autobiography, that this "book is a product of different

selves"70 than the one which I manifested in my habits, in society

and in my vices.

This is really not surprising given that the uniqueness of a place, a

locality, a person, an idea, a life, a love, is constructed out of many

particular interactions, articulations, social relations, social

processes, experiences and understandings. A large proportion of

those relations, experiences and understandings are actually

constructed on a far larger scale than what we can define or

describe at any given moment. The place, the idea or the

relationship is built out of such a complex construction, such a

large scale and so many dimensions, which change so frequently

with the years, that the entire concatenation of people, events and

places often seems like a dream, a vapour, an illusion. This

70 Suzanne Nalbatian, Proust in Aesthetic Autobiography, MacMillan, 1994, London, p.62.

306

autobiography and this poetry tries to capture some of this vapour,

this mirage in the desert, and turn it into water.71

MELANCHOLY'S ANTIDOTE

In 1601, four hundred years before the opening of the Arc Project,

the Terraces on Mt. Carmel, William Shakespeare completed his

composition, his most famous play, Hamlet. The phenomenon of

the character of Hamlet is, as leading Shakespearian analyst Harold

Bloom writes, "unsurpassed in the West's imaginative literature."1

Given the preeminent importance of the process of teaching to the

growth and development of the Baha'i community, in the following

poem I have given my proto-typical teacher in the Baha'i Faith

during that teaching Plans beginning in 1937 the persona of

Hamlet. I have drawn on Harold Bloom's study of Hamlet for

71 D. Massey, ‘Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’, in J. Bird, et al. (eds), Mapping the Futures, Routledge, London, 1993.

307

much of the text of my poem. I have also made one crucial

alteration or inclusion to this persona, the experience of "the most

exquisite celebratory joy."2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Harold

Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Penguin, NY,

1998, p.384; and 2The Universal House of Justice, Letter 3 April

1991.

Hamlet is so endlessly suggestive,

his ever-growing inner self

and his infinite consciousness,

often sees himself as a failure,

a failed, tragic protagonist,

an earlier self had died

and a new one born,

in a sea of constant change,

a graciousness in mourning,

the centre of a solemn consciousness

everywhere and tentativeness

308

the peculiar mark

of an endlessly burgeoning world,

so continuously alive,

a breaking wave of sensibility

pulsating onward.

His bewildering range of freedoms

we can see in ourselves

providing as they do

a will-to-identity

and his sinuous enchantment,

his global self-consciousness,

of two hundred years now.

He needs humanity

to give honour and meaning

to his life for we are not alone.

He lets everything be

309

and trusts in God

to balance, siphon,

the anxiety,

as he makes us see

the world in other ways.

He makes successful gestures

and so do we with our inwardness

in the theatre of the mind

in the inmost self,

our necessary disinterestedness

where the only enemy is self.

But for us there is joy,

melancholy's antidote.

Ron Price

14 May 2002

310

DYNAMIC SYNCHRONIZATION

By the early 1990s the Arc Project was making large holes in the

side of Mt. Carmel. Evoking images of paradise, of the land of

milk and honey, of the blessed isles, of the promised land, of the

Elysian fields, among other pastoral surroundings associated with

this holy place, in the minds of believers around the world, it was

assuming a place of immense proportions in the mind's eye of the

faithful. During this same period of time, in 1993, the Hubble

Spacecraft was fixed in the heavens. As the Arc Project headed to

completion in 2000 and 2001, Hubble sent back data that allowed

astrophysicists to determine with some accuracy the age of the

universe at 12 billion years. Some 40,000 galaxies could be

observed in the sky behind a curvature the size of a grain of sand

and there was a vast increase in the knowledge of the origins of

stars. The Sun and the Moon were also studied during the

construction of the Arc Project telling us much more about these

heavenly bodies. The Sun's polar regions were investigated during

311

this period. Asteroids and comets were also examined in more

detail than ever before. Mars and Saturn also came under the

astronomers' microscopes. -Ron Price with thanks to The Internet:

Planetary Science Spacecraft, 24 June 2002.

They1 said we stood on the threshold

of the last decade

of the radiant twentieth century.

The prospects were dazzling:

little did we know

we'd be able to go back

and see our origins

12 billion years ago.

Yes, there was an acceleration

of spiritual forces then

as May 1992 approached.

The suddenness, the speeding-up,

312

the transformational impact

on my poetic output,

the new feelings of delight

on the dry soil of my heart

and a certain bewilderment

which I have been trying

to understand since those

winter months when

it really began,2

made me slowly realize

that, at last, I could

not do everything

on this long, slippery

and tortuous path

as that dynamic synchronization

at last approached.

1 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message 1990.

313

2 In the winter months of June to August 1992 I wrote 35 poems,

the precursors to an immense poetic unfolding of about 600 poems

each year for the next ten years: 1992-2002.

-Ron Price 27 June 2002

MEDITATION ON BAHA’I WORLD CENTRE

It could be argued and I often do that the first visual evidences of

this new democratic theocracy that is the Baha'i Faith are situated

in the buildings, terraces and gardens on Mt. Carmel. Of course

structures of various kinds go back to the turn of the twentieth

century, indeed, the years after the passing of Baha'u'llah in 1892.

Just as the early seventeenth century in Holland and the works of

painters like Rembrandt witnessed "the first visual evidence of

bourgeois democracy"72 and "a group of individuals (came)

together and (took) corporate responsibility," so too is this the case

with the Baha'i community around the world.

72 Kenneth Clark, op.cit., p.139.314

...............my voice proclaims

How exquisitely the individual Mind

...............to the external World

Is fitted.

-William Wordsworth, “The Recluse”, William Wordsworth:

Selected Poems, Walford Davies, editor, Dent, 1975, p.132.

Here I behold a mind that

feeds upon infinity, a mind

sustained by direct transcendent

power and holds converse with

a spiritual world of past, present

and to come: epoch to epoch,

past recorded time.

Here I see days gone by

returning from those first

315

glimmerings at the dawn of this Age,

enshrined now: the spirit of the Past

for our future’s restoration.

The characters are, now, fresh and visible

in this spot of time with its distinct pre-eminence

and its renovating virtue whereby

our minds are nourished and

invisibly repaired.

Here are those efficacious spirits

who have profoundest knowledge

of leavening of being and

of the workings of One Mind,

the character of this Great Apocalypse

and the types and symbols of eternity,

gathered, as they are, among solitudes sublime.

Here we find our better selves,

316

from whom we have been long departed,

and assume a character of quiet

more profound than so many of

the pathless wastes where we have

long walked, too long, its roads.

Here, too, I hear at last my song which

with its star-like virtue shines to

shed benignant influence,

make a better time,

more wise desires and

simpler and humbler manners.

Perhaps some trace of purity may

come with me and guide and cheer me

with Thy unfailing love

which I forget.

Ron Price

317

19 June 1995

And so I refer frequently to my poetry to explain my personal life

and I refer to my personal life to explain my poetry. This is a

common technique among poets.73 Somehow when a writer writes,

and this is no less true when writing autobiography, he must lift up

to his imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny

of the senses, close to the nose. This is what gives his writing, his

craft, his life, the kind of breath which is not artificial, not dry, but

savoured with an intensity, a spontaneity, a creativity that in some

strange way purifies, improves and filters thought. It takes

autobiography from where it has been for so many years, in what

Allen Shapiro calls "the dark continent of literature,"74 and gives it

new light, if not for many of the readers, at least for some of the

writers.

73 Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs, editor, Jeffrey Meyers, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1988, p.1.74 Allen Shapiro in The Author In His Work, editor, L. Martz, Yale UP, 1978, p.319.

318

DISTINCTIVE VOICE

Distinctive voice is inseparable from distinctive substance...we will

feel, as we read, a sense that the poet was not wed to any one

outcome....the reader is freely invited to recreate in his own

mind....the true has about it an air of mystery or

inexplicability ........the subject of a serious poet must be a life with

a leaning, life with a tendency to shape itself... -Louise Gluck,

“Against Sincerity”, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Ecco

Press, Hopewell, N.J., 1994.

Every atom in existence is distinctive

especially these Hanging Gardens:

we’ve got distinctive substance here

and some of us have been waiting

a long time-try forty years-for this

apotheosis of the Ancient of Days

in a holy seat, at last a genuinely

319

holy seat in a world of seats, seemingly

endless seats: the light of the countenance

of God, the Ruler of the Kingdom of Names

and Fashioner of the heavens hath been

lifted upon thee.*

Here is a world where affliction is married

to ecstasy, suffering defined with virtuosity,

colour mounts on colour, temperatures mix

and pure gold comes from the alchemist,

pure fire, pure spiritual energy so that:

my pages stain with apple-green;

my letters are written in chrysolite;

words find marble, gates and shrines

embedded in diamonds and amethyst.

What is this molton gold, ink burnt

grey, revelation writing? ....cheering

thine eyes and those of all creation,

320

and filling with delight all things

visible and invisible.* Yes and no,

always, it seems, yes and no.

Conflagrant worlds interacting:

the myth is tragic here. A grandeur

that is magnetic, but even here,

the meaning must be found.

Can you see the scars, the evidence:

there’s been emotion here to the

essence of our hearts. I try to name,

localize, master, define that scar,

but it is beyond my pen, beyond the

poignant inadequacy of my strategems.

No response of mine goes deep enough.

This poetry of functional simplicity

will never reach Zion, the City of God,

but I will try: May my life be a sacrifice

321

to Thee, inasmuch as Thou hast

fixed Thy gaze upon me,

hast bestowed upon me Thy bounty,

and hast directed toward me Thy steps.*

14/10/95.

* Tablet of Carmel

EMBALMED

Here are the early stages of a civilization that will create and

experience beauty, that will rise above the cacophony in which the

world now seems to be drowning. As T. S. Eliot looks back to the

Greeks, the Renaissance, the creative peaks of the past, R.F. Price

looks ahead with a vision implicit in the architectural

configurations on Mt Carmel. Ron Price in appreciation to Alan

Shucard, Fred Moramarco and William Sullivan, Modern

American Poetry, G.K. Hall and Co., Boston, 1989, p.101.

322

Perhaps ‘the modern’ could go back

to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase(1912),

the symbol of the international exhibit of art

in New York, the root of the manifestation

of ‘the modern’ in America(1913)

and ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s 239 days in the West.

The big guns had come and changed the world:

Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein and

the broidered Robe of Light

hearing the wondrous accent of the Voice

that cometh from the Inaccessible

to our urban, industrial, democratic,

fragmented, scientific jungle

of motion, speed, urbanity, machinery

and billions of human beings.

Here was the nest of the modern in poetry,

323

where intellectual and emotional complexes

were presented in an instant in time:

containers for ideas and feelings,

poetic sensuousness, hard and clear,

a firey intensity, prose poems,

awakening, invigorating, confusing,

some Hellenic turning,

some nature turning,

some turning, twisting, revolving,

evolving trying to describe our world:

bewildered, agonized, helpless,

invading by some wind

into the remotest and fairest places

and wasting as it germinated.

Poetry created aesthetic objects

out of words, reassembling language,

detached and leading anywhere, everywhere:

324

hymns to possibility, not just gibberish,

idiosyncratic flux, slangy informality,

surprising peculiarity of things.

Eliot advised writers to develop

an historical sense, back into the entire

western intellectual tradition,

my relation to the dead and the unborn:

to escape from the subjective into system, order.

And so I did TS, so I did, a system just being born

back then: 1912, 1919, 1922--goodness, you were

right there, then, at the start with J. Alfred Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go..(*).

325

That meaninglessness was being replaced,

paralysis, confusion, social falsity, anxiety

and we see the mermaids singing each to each.

...I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us and we drown.(*)

And we drown, dreaming figures, as in a dance.

Silently adoring, embalmed in awe

and pentilekon marble, released to marvel

the magic Dust that noone ever sees.

Ron Price

326

23 June 1995

(*) TS Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, in TS Eliot:

Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, London, 1954, pp.11-16.

There will be, I am inclined to think, many who will read this work

and find it not to their taste. And I am reminded of what one writer

said of T.S. Eliot and his poem The Wasteland, perhaps the most

famous poem of the twentieth century. That poem, The Wasteland,

he wrote “was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant

grouse against life." What a reader gets from a work is quite an

idiosyncratic reality. It is something I have little control over once I

have let loose this work. In the end a writer must please himself.

Gibbon became an autobiographer for the same reason he became

an historian: to see a pattern, a plan in what might appear from a

distance to be a welter of haphazard, chaotic or contradictory

327

experience.75 I have done the same. I do not expect my readers to

see the same pattern.

DISTANT GARDENS

The second century(1944-2044) is destined to witness...the first

stirrings of that World Order, of which the present Administrative

System is at once the precursor, the nuc- leus and pattern-an Order

which, as it slowly crystallizes and radiates its benign influ-

ence...will proclaim the coming of age of the whole human race. -

Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, pp.72-73.

The Parthenon, or whatever, is universal because it can

continuously inspire new personal realizations in experience. It is

simply as impossibility that any one today should experience the

Parthenon as the devout Athenian contemporary citizen exper-

ienced it...The enduring art-product...was called forth by something

75 L. Martz, editor, The Author In His Work, Yale UP, London, 1978, p.325.328

occasional, something having its own date and place. But what was

evoked is a substance so formed that it can enter into the

experience of others and enable them to have more intense and

more fully rounded out experiences of their own. -John Dewey,

Art as Experience, Capricorn Books, NY, 1958(1934), p. 109.

And so it is universal

and will go on being so

down the halls of time,

enriching and intensifying

the experience of those

who are willing to share in its beauty,

to experience it as something new,

something mine,

to which I give the meaning,

reordering colour and shape

in relation to myself,

to experience delight and overcome

329

the inchoate, restricted, apathetic, tepid,

fearful, conventional, routine

through some expansion, intensification,

fullness: ordering matter through form,

on this journey to these far places,

these distant gardens.

Ron Price

23 December 1995

GUITAR + SHOCKS = POETRY

"Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing

now, he must dig down deeper. One would say that the shock of

suffering and vision breaks down, one after another, the living

sensitive partitions behind which his identity is hiding. He is

harassed, he is tracked down, he is destroyed...He dies and is

reborn in and with poetry.....He discovers an essentially free,

330

objectless, creativity in poetry. With each poem, the poet creates a

world and savours it." Such are Maritain's words and they have a

certain resonance with my own thoughts, except I still can sing and

do, although not often. -Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in

Art and Poetry, New American Library, NY, 1953, pp.130-177.

I was soaked in music in the ‘60s

and like a wandering minstrel

for twenty-five years

I took that ubiquitous guitar,

moved to sing, to song,

the pioneer singer.

But the shocks kept coming;

the fires died.

There was nothing left to sing,

except dry bones deep down

on the edges of my tongue,

331

somewhere in my heart.

In my brain a new music did I find,

a certain verbal sound

filled with thought and meaning

deep in the womb,

of some poetic intuition

with tact, subtlety,

to express the inexpressible

in common speech, human voice:

close to my heart,

defining what my thoughts are like,

conferring nobility on words.

Still did I sing old songs

for old folks,

last notes dredged-up

for occasions

332

to try to bring a little joy

to withered faces,

last breaths before death

carried them away.1

1 So it was that once a month I joined a small choir of 4 to 8 people

who sang at Ainsley House for senior citizens here in George

Town.

Ron Price

22 December 1995/

25 April 2003.

UNSURPASSED HOLINESS

Ours is the duty.....to play our part, however small, in this greatest

drama of the world’s spiritual history. -Shoghi Effendi, 21 March

1930, in The World Order of Baha’u’llah, USA, 1974, p.26.

333

Even when all these marble edifaces

with their inaccessible mysteries,

their attendant gardens are complete

we are still faced with ordinary dust.

The domestic orange trees

will still be as unendearing as ever,

contented perhaps in their green universe,

having been taught submission

(you can tell by their roundness).

The geraniums will still be

as pedestrian and obtuse as ever.

The only thing you’ve got here, mate,

is what you have lavishly invested

with your aspiration and belief.

You can grow weary of nightingales

and peacocks, the uselessness of words,

334

the fruitlessness of speculation.

You’ll find here among the frail petals

no formula for perfection.

The disinterested cypresses,

even though they point heavenward,

will offer no certain answer to your questions.

The jasmine may captivate your senses

and paralyse your will,

but the sense of urgency will not leave you

nor this place for some time;

for the hour is perilous and dark

and the rush of history is moving

toward the climax of a spiritual drama

of staggering magnitude

which so few are yet aware: be warned!

Just resume your ordinary life

335

with its deadlines and schedules.

The taxi will soon speed you

to your destination.

The airport can sell you a postcard

of the place which will soon be the stage

for the enactment of several critical acts

in a play of unsurpassed holiness.

Have a safe trip home.

Ron Price

28 December 1995

I CAN SEE YOU NOW

I have found it difficult in the last several years to get my mind off

the Arc that is being built on Mt Carmel. It fills me with profound

pleasure and ardent expectations.

-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 23 December 1995.

336

For if we look back at one hundred years of an unexampled history

of unremitting progress, we also look forward to many centuries of

unfolding fulfillment of divine purpose...incrementally realized.... -

Universal House of Justice, Ridvan, 1992, p.1.

I can see you now: close and distant,

near and far, with pregnant and tragic import,

loosening and tightening,

expanding and contracting,

separating and compacting,

soaring and drooping,

rising and falling,

dispersive and scattering,

hovering and brooding,

unsubstantial lightness,

massive blow--

such is the stuff you are made of,

337

up on that hill, over there,

infinitely diversified,

but I can express you here:

the significant, the relevant,

compressed and intensified

in some exalted rising, surging

and retreating, the sudden thrust,

the gradual insinuation

until I am obsessed with your wonder

and can hardly take my mind off of you:

the enduring, the voluminous, the solid,

room, filling, power, energy of position

and motion, rightness in placing.

And so I am in poised readiness

to meet your surrounding forces,

to persist, to endure with some energy

and some opportunity for action

338

with my unique experience,

gradually letting you yield to me

in the changing light and moods,

your enduring sacredness

and charm and your monumental

register of cherished expectations.

Ron Price

23 December 1995

A SWEET NEW LIFE

"People entering Gothic cathedrals left behind their life of material

cares and seemed to pass into a different world,"76 writes Kenneth

Clark as he makes his feelings of the arts contagious in his book

Civilization. In other ages buildings were constructed simply to

give pleasure. Twentieth century wars have destroyed many of

76 Kenneth Clark, op.cit., p.166.339

these buildings in a fit of modern barbarism. As this was taking

place, as this barbarism was hacking into the evidences of

civilization humans had erected over many centuries, a small and

embryonic community that followed the teachings of its prophet-

founders, the Bab and Baha'u'llah, began to erect new symbols of a

new civilization.-Ron Price with thanks to Kenneth Clark,

Civilization, Pelican Books, 1969, p. 167.

It was an age of minarettes

that staggered the imagination,

built high into the sky,

immense heaps of stone

and glass and aluminium.

It was also the end

of the Heroic Age

and the start

of the Formative Age

340

and they used this social art,

architecture,

to help us lead fuller lives,

to touch life at many points,

to give us that douceur de vivre,

that sweetness of life

at places all over the world.

Ron Price

29 May 2003

If Evelyn Waugh is right when he says that "nobody wants to read

other people's reflections on life and religion, but the routines of

their day, properly recorded are always interesting,"77 then this

book has little hope to ever see the light of day. Perhaps, following

Waugh or a writer like Thomas Mann, I should really make that

diary with all its confessionalism the focus of this and future

77 Evelyn Waugh, The Voyageur in Us All, Inside the Dust Jacket.341

writing. As this work has come to see the light of day at sites like

the Baha'i Academics Resource Library, bahai-library.org website

in August 2003 and the website: bahaindex.com in November 2003

and the Baha’i World Centre Library, among several other sites

like lulu.com and eBookMall where hard cover and electronic

copies can be purchased, I tend to think that there is little hope that

it will find a wide appeal, a high degree of popularity. Such is life!

At the very least writing this work has offered, like knitting, a

therapeutic relaxation for me, but for others well....who knows?

Shaping one’s life, Virginia Woolf writes, involves shaping

something that in many ways has no shape at all. I seem to have a

need to recall things that have gone too far, gone too deep, sunk

into this life or someone else’s and become part of mine. I seem to

have a need to recall dreams, things surrounding me, half-articulate

ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and by night, shadows

of people one might have been, unborn selves.78 That would be an

78 Virginia Woolf, “Famous Quotations on Autobiography,” EntWagon.com342

interesting autobiography, interesting at least to me: the story of

someone I might have been. Sadly, joyfully, inevitably, I must

settle for this story of the person I have been.

This narrative is partly an experiment with a means, a way, of

defining my experience of a religious and cultural heritage, a

heritage which has been bound up with the Baha’i Faith for over

fifty years. Through this writing, this autobiography, this literary

production, I attempt to turn my small part in what may very well

become one of the world’s most significant but, as yet, quite

obscure diasporas—in which several hundred thousand people in

the last 160 years have moved their home, their place of residence

voluntarily or through some unavoidable force of circumstance, for

a religious motive, for a religion, a new world Faith--into an act of

personal memory, part of an institution of cultural memory. This

narrative records my confrontation with both a native and a host

culture, a Baha’i and a non-Baha’i culture, a confrontation that has

been part of a total, a life, experience since 1953.

343

What I have tried to do here is to understand this pioneer condition,

accept its many dimensions and explain it to others who have

enough interest to read this work. I resort in these pages to an act

of narration as an expression of the hybrid nature of this global

phenomenon, a phenomenon of voluntary or not-so-voluntary

migration, migration that has taken place both in my Canadian

homeland and overseas, internationally. It is also a phenomenon

which in its individual details is usually documented in a very a

cursory manner or is often never written about at all and is simply

forgotten by history and public memory.

The monument of this new, this as yet obscure, pioneer history is

not the fair farm land and the human habitation and settlement as it

was in previous centuries. The new archives are not the words and

lines on mouldering stone head-boards above a humble grave.

These new archives do not belong to an emigrant and the partner of

his exile sustained through their lowly but heroic struggle with the

344

wintry or hot and sultry wilderness by mutual affection. The new

archives are not old barns now fallen apart from disuse or long

fences now seemingly as ancient as the hills. I would like to say a

few words here about the new archives I have become associated

with as a pioneer of an embryonic institutional environment.

Over the last three-quarters of a century, since the time my parents

first met at the Otis Elevator Company in the late 1930s, an

explosion of archival material has erupted in this Baha’i world for

the would-be historian of the future. With each passing year the

eruption, the explosion, becomes increasingly difficult to deal with,

overflowing as it does the bounds of our capacity or our interest in

these early decades of the institutonal environment with which it is

associated to cope with its effusions. When this great mountain of

material is classified and the student begins to focus on the archival

body relevant to his own interests and needs, some proportion and

framework will emerge from the chaos and prolixity of it all. The

historian and social analyst must tease both sense and nonsense

345

from all the loose ends, fragments, contradictions and observations,

eruptions and explosions that are found in these archives. Indeed,

the present generation is hardly able to deal with this eruption, nor

have any of the generations which have created this mountain of

paper-archive-even begun to examine it with any seriousness,

occupied as they are with creating and developing the institutional

matrix that this great archival body clothes with its often hidden

meaning.

The student of the emerging world Order of Baha’u’llah has seen

or will see, if he desires to make a serious study of this world-

embracing mountain of paper, in the thousands of archives

emerging in local Baha’i communities around the world especially

in the last half century, since the beginning of the Kingdom of God

on earth in 1953, the beginning of that ninth stage of history as the

Guardian called the Ten Year Crusade, the still early stages in the

evolution of what the future will come to see as the nucleus and

pattern of the new World Order.

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"Archives offer our knowledge an extra bonus", says Arlette Farge

in her book Fragile Lives.79 They are not so much the truth as the

beginnings of the truth and, she goes on, "they are an eruption of

meanings with the greatest possible number of connections with

reality." For most of the Baha’i community at the local level in

these epochs, archives are just so much paper in old boxes.

Sometimes there exists an obsessive tendency to admit too much

meaning to these archives when much of their contents is irrelevant

circularized correspondence that could easily be discarded without

any loss. But there are innumerable rare gems to be often found

amidst the detritus and the irrelevant material. The historian must

and will learn to see the forrest amidst the mass of trees.

History and its documents are made up of so many different lives:

impoverished and tragic, rich and joyful, mean and lackluster

79 Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth Century Paris, Harvard UP,Cambridge, Mass., 1993, Introduction.

347

personalities, saints and heros. There is also a certain grandeur,

humour, absurdity and irony to the parade and its varying

semblances reflected in these documents gathering dust in rooms

and garages, attics and now computer directories all across the

planet. Archives are both seductress and deceptive mirror of reality.

They can falsify and distort the object being studied. They can also

be too facile or too ambiguous a means of entering into a discourse

with history. They can tell very little of the real events of Baha’i

community life. They can often be just a pile of dry bones

transferred from one graveyard to another. But like the increasingly

scientific tools of the archeologist, the skills of the archival

historian can reveal much light. In the future--or so I believe—

they will reveal much light.

History has long been enamoured with ‘the great man’. More

recently it has taken up the cudgels of ‘the average man’, ‘women’,

‘the disabled’, ‘the migrant’, ‘the pioneer’, and on and on goes the

list, the litany, of the ordinarily ordinary and the humanly human

348

personages of history. All of these prototypes can be found in the

archives of local Baha’i communities around the world. For anyone

taking part in Baha’i community life in the epochs that are the

backdrop for this memoir, and especially as the millennium turned

its corner just the other day so to speak, the typical reaction to

archives, as I say, is a perception of them as just boxes of stuff kept

in someone’s house in that back room, attic or shed, among other

places. There is a certain ennui, a certain world-weariness that is

experienced by the very contemplation to these mini-mountains of

correspondence. The weariness comes in part from the great mass

of apparently irrelevant detail in those boxes and partly from a

simple inability to get any meaningful perspective on the great

historical adventure being engaged in by means of the

contemplation of this great weight of paper and memorabilia.

"It is unfortunately true" says Moojan Momen in summarizing the

history of memoir writing and archive collecting in the Baha’i

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community, "that the Baha’is are lamentably neglectful."80 Perhaps

in the last five decades, Moojan, they have turned a corner. Time

and history will see, Moojan. Throughout history, it should be kept

in mind, there has been a long and ambiguous relationship with

archives. There have been successive tensions down the ages

between boxes of documents known as archives and the actual

writing of history. The earliest period in the history of western

civilization for which we have a great deal of documentation, of

archives, is the first century BC in Rome. For the great mass of

humanity this archive is of no interest whatsoever. But for the

professional ants who deal in Roman history this archive is crucial;

it has helped to generate an explosion of archival enthusiasm

amongst a coterie of students of Roman history in the last several

decades. Side by side with this professional enthusiasm there

prevails an atmosphere of anarchic confusion in the attitude of

western man to his past.

80 The Babi and Baha’i Religions, 1844-1944: Some Contemporary Western Accounts, Moojan Momen, editor, George Ronald, Oxford, 1981, p.xvi-xvii.

350

We are talking, then, about an old problem: the meaning and

relevance of archives. Just as the writing of the Roman poets in that

first century BC represents an important part of that rich and

ancient archive, so does this poetry of mine represent part(time will

tell how important a part) of a modern archive of increasing

relevance to both historian and social analyst. I see this poetry as an

embellishment to a local archive, several archives where I have

lived in Australia and Canada; a contribution to an international

archive on pioneers, an archive still in the first century of creation,

collection and development; and a small part of a burgeoning base

of material the world over which is so extensive now as to virtually

swallow the individual in a sea of printed matter were he or she to

take a serious interest in the material.

"It is impossible to avoid the realm of aesthetics and emotion" in

dealing with archives, says Arlette Farge in her introductory

statement on the subject. In a broad sense the architectural remains

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of the fifth century BC or the Egyptian pyramids, are a repository

of information, an archive. The realm of aesthetics and emotion is

at the heart of these ancient architectural archives. Archives are

also an eruption, Farge states; they can be an expression, she says

simply, of whim, caprice and tragedy. And, like this poetry and the

stuff in those boxes, they can and are so much more.

It is impossible to assess the relevance of what will one day be the

architectural archive of the Baha'i Faith, say, in two and a half

thousand years. What will be the story told of these generations of

the half-light in this first century of a Formative Age when a

heterodox and seemingly negligible offshoot of an insignificant

sect of Shi’i Islam finished its transformation into a world religion?

What will they say of the architectural achievement that helped to

give form and beauty to the institutionalized charismatic Force that

was about to play a crucial role in the establishment of a global and

peaceful civilization?

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This autobiography takes half a century of personal accounts of

events in the realm of memory and locates connecting points

between ancestral, family, societal and religious history along

linking lines in an attempt to create a unified whole, a synthesis in

time and space. And so it is, that in the context of reproducing my

history and my family's history, this autobiography is critically

rewriting a new version, a variant, of the story of my community,

my Baha’i community. At the same time a dialogue is created both

within and without the Baha’i community, a dialogue about its

memory, its contents and discontents. I have seen the dialogue

begin and its future looks so very rich, part of the greatest drama in

the world’s religious history I have no doubt.

This writing could be said to exist as a text, as "literature engagée,"

which contributes in its own way to new didactic readings of

Baha’i history, its politics and sociology, its psychology and the

poetry of its community, indeed, what it means to be a Baha’i in

the first century of the Formative Age. There are many layers of

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circumstantial memories in the Baha’i community, a multiplicity of

narratives, multiple voices, multiple interpretations of the same

story. The ones that are written down—and there are myriad now

in a host of books, journals and magazines—are for the most part

short and sweet or not-so-sweet as the case may be; some are of

medium length, a few pages, and they can be found in all sort of

publications and a very few, like this one, are long-and hopefully

sweet.

Partly, too, I have aimed to create but one expression, one means

for the construction of history and culture, not an offical one, just a

personal one, but one that is a shared process based on a collective

effort, a shared process that excludes no one and involves anyone

who has the interest and the desire to take part.81 It must be kept in

mind in all of this, and as I have intimated before, that there is an

impossibility of autobiography as the narrative of a unified self

81 Imed Labidi, “A Review of Azade Seyhan’s Writing Outside the Nation,” in Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, Volume 4, Number 2, Spring 2004.

354

unless it be a unity in multiplicity. The narrator and the subject of

narration are only the same person in a certain sense; the narrator's

memory is only partly a reliable guide to the past. The person who

writes about their past is at bottom only partly the person of the

past.82 This autobiographical exercise has created an essential,

original, coherent autobiographical self which, in many ways,

simply did not exist before the moment, the years, of self-narrating.

However coherent this autobiographical self is, it possesses

fragmentary, subjective, unstable, constructed and mobile aspects

as well. These aspects are less an intrusion than they are a constant.

Whatever continuity we grasp, there is much in our life that is

beyond grasping and even the continuities can be described in

multiple versions with multiple perspectives making an “official”

version virtually impossible.

82 Gertrude Stein points this out in her now famous autobiography published in August 1933 and discussed by her in her 1937 publication right at the start of the first Seven Year Plan. For an excellent discussion of her autobiography see: Phoebe Stein Davis,“Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of National Identity in Gertrude Stein's: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," Twentieth Century Literature, Spring 1999.

355

Ernest Renan explains that what bonds peoples of a nation together

is their shared ability to forget.83 I find that a comforting notion,

even if paradoxical, especially as I head into my latter years, years

characterized so much by forgetting. Perhaps this forgetting is a

sign of things to come in that Undiscovered Country we all go to in

the end, a place with both mysterious rememberings and

forgettings.

________________

83 Ernest Renan, "What is a Nation?" Trans. Martin Thom, Nation and Narration, editor, Homi K. Bhabha, Routledge, NY, 1990. pp. 8-22.

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