VOLUME ONE:

CHAPTER THREE: LETTERS

"The very texture of history....."

Abstract: Very few of my letters are on the internet since they are either

personal, private or professional and I prefer to keep them confidential until

my passing from this mortal coil. I now have about 10,000 letters, emails

and internet posts in 50 volumes.

Notes: This collection of letters, what has become by degrees a voluminous

epistolarium, comes from my Bahai life, 1959 to 2009, from my years as an

adolescent and then as an adult, at the early, middle and late stages of that

part of human development as the psychologists call them. Now, into the

early years of the evening of my life, the early years of late adulthood, I post

this reflection on a lifetime of writing letters within the context of my

society, my Bahai life and especially my pioneering life. Although I have

not been able to locate any letters before 1962, before my pioneering life

began, the first letter I recall writing was in 1959, some 50 years ago, to a

fellow Bahá’í-youth in Japan.

In addition to the 4000 letters, there are 6000 emails and internet posts. I

have not kept the internet posts. They are scattered throughout the world-

wide-web and, in many cases, will be untraceable. Virtually this entire body

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of epistolary material was written during the dark heart of an age of

transition, as the Universal House of Justice characterized our time back in

1967. It is an age which was my life, perhaps the darkest in history but also,

paradoxically, an age bright with promise.

This collection of 10,000 items including, as I say, those hybrid forms of

letter--the email and internet post--which emerged as a new millennium was

opening are written by and to a homefront(1962-1971) and then an

international pioneer(1971-2009). They are communications written to: a

friend, a colleague, a fellow Bahai, a person or persons at one of 1000s of

sites on the internet, a Bahai institution at the local, national or global level,

one of a multitude of other organizations, a family member and some

association or other. Readers will find here mainly general commentaries on

my letters and letters as a genre, prose-poems on letters, mine and those of

others in history and literature. Except for the occasional letter the body of

my correspondence is not included here.

Another 10,000 letters and assorted items of correspondence were written in

connection with my employment from the mid-1960s to the early years of

the new millenium, but virtually none of them were kept. The number of

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emails received in the first two decades of email correspondence(1989-2009)

was beyond counting, but 99% of these emails were deleted. The small

number of emails that required a response in some detail were kept as were

the responses and they were kept in my computer directory after August

2007. On my demise some or all of this collected correspondence may be

published. Some of it may be kept in the national Bahá'í archices of

Australia if they are interested. We shall see on both these counts. I shall not

see for I shall have gone to the land of those who speak no more, as The Bab

put it so succinctly. He might have added to the land of those who write no

more. Those mysterious dispensations of Providence and my executors will

determine what happens to this lifelong collection of attempts to connect

with the minds and hearts of others by means of the traditional letter and its

modern variants.

Note 2: beginning in August 2007 all correspondence of significance was

kept in my computer directory files; the only hard copies kept were an

assortment of quasi-epistolary and literary material that did not seem to have

a logical place in my computer directory.

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Note 3: Some of this section of my autobiography is found under “Personal

Letters” at the Baha’i Academics Resource Library. The description there is

as follows: Letters of Ron Price: 1958-2008 Pioneering Over Four Epochs:

Section VII—Letters by Ron Price Editor:Bill Washington Published in

Pioneering Over Four Epochs: An Autobiographical Study and a Study In

Autobiography Section VII: Letters "

The thousands of letters and thousands of hours that this homefront and

international pioneer for the Canadian Bahai community has spent writing

letters, emails and internet posts in the last fifty years, 1959-2009, I dedicate

to the great letter writers in Bahai history. I dedicate these hours and these

communications to the Central Figures of this Faith, Shoghi Effendi and the

Universal House of Justice--individuals and institutions that have produced a

treasure house of correspondence. Then there are the many whose names are

on Bahai lists but who have played little to no part in the Bahai community

in their years of membership; as well as the not-so nameless and traceless,

each of whom has their story and their varying degrees of writing and who,

collectively, have written what I have little doubt are literally billions of

letters, emails and written communications of an epistolary nature. To these

I also dedicate my collection of letters. If I also include in my dedication, the

massive quantities of correspondence that has been written by the

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institutions of this Cause on the appointed and elected side of its

administrative structure; and the epistolary work of the two chief precursors

of this Faith, those two chief luminaries in the earliest history of this

emerging world relgion, and those who also wrote letters in responding to

the seeds these precursors sowed and were involved in different ways in the

earliest days of the history of this new Faith as far back as the time that

Shaykh Ahmad left his home in N.E. Arabia in 1770 to 1783(circa)---the

letters of this multitude to whom I dedicate my own epistolary efforts might

just reach to a distant star if they were laid side by side!

Many, if not most, of the epistolary communications of this nearly two and a

half centuries of Babi-Bahai history are now lost to historians and archivists.

Saving letters is not a popular sport and, some would argue, neither is

writing them. But, still, the epistolary paper trails of this newest of the

worlds great religious systems spread back, as is obvious, to well before the

French revolution in 1789 and these trails are significantly more than just a

trace. No other religion has placed so subtle and significant a value on this

method of exchange, writes Bahiyyih Nakhjvani in her book Asking

Questions.(George Ronald, Oxford, 1990, p.6.)

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At some future time, when the tempests we are living through in these early

decades and, perhaps, centuries of the Formative Age of this Faith, an Age

which began in Bahai history in 1921, are over and a relative calm has been

produced in the affairs of men, historians, archivists, biographers and

analysts of many a kind will possess a literary and epistolary base of a

magnitude undreamt of in any previous age for an analysis of the times, the

epochs of the first two centuries of this Bahai Era(B.E. beginning in 1844)

and the century of its precursors, 1744-1844. My focus here is not on this

wide and many-genred literary base, however, it is on the letter and, more

recently, the email and internet postings of many kinds, kinds resembling the

letter in many basic ways. Letters give us a direct and spontaneous portrait

of the individual and they are also useful in providing an analytical resource

for social and institutional analysis. I could include here, diaries and journals

since they are letters, of a sort, letters to oneself, a book of thoughts to and

by oneself. But these genres, too, are not my focus in this review of my

letters and this form of communicaton that are part of the history of this

Cause.

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As the poet and philosopher Emerson once said: My tongue is prone to lose

the way; not so my pen, for in a letter we surely put them better.(Emerson,

Manuscripts and Poems: 1860-1869) This pioneer, in a period going back

now fifty years, has often found that one way of doing something for another

was: to write a letter, since the mid-1990s send an email and, since the late

1990s, post on the internet. Not endowed with mechanical skills and

proficencies with wood and metal; not particularly interested in so many

things in the popular culture like sport, gardening, cooking, heavy doses of

much of the content in the print and electronic media; indeed, I could list

many personal deficencies and areas of disinterest, I found the letter was one

thing I could do and write and in the process, perhaps, document some of my

sensory perceptions of the present age, perceptions that were relevant to the

future of a religion whose very bones spoke of a golden age for humankind

which was scarcely believeable, but was worth working for and was at the

basis of my own philosophy of action in this earthly life. Hopefully my

letters would evince some precision and, perhaps, for a future age they

would be of value. I often wondered, though, how useful this interest, this

skill, was in its apparent single-mindedness for it was not, as a I say, a

popular sport! The exercise resulted, too, in a collection of many a dusty

volume of paper which, as T.S. Eliot once put it with some emphasis, may in

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the end amount to an immense pile of stuff with absolutely no value or

purpose.

There is, too, some doubt, some questionableness, as to whether anyones

letters should be taken as a reliable guide to biography and still less to

history. Letters often tell us more about postures that replace relationships

than about the relationships themselves. Sharon Cameron points this out in

her analysis of Emily Dickinsons letters in her book: Lyric Time: Dickinson

and the Limits of Genre(Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore, 1979, p.p.11-12).

Some writers of letters spring to an intimacy in their correspondence that

they do not possess in reality, in their day-to-day life. I am one of those now

in my sixties, for I am not particularly keen on intimacy any more, at least

outside of cyberspace. Life has given me decades of it and I have grown

tired after the many years of conversation and the many degrees of intimacy

that went with it. In letters I can spring to an intimacy and then forget it in a

moment. Such was the experience and view of George Bernard Shaw, as

voluminous a letter-writer as there ever was. Shaw once said: a full life has

to be cleared out every day by the housemaid of forgetfulness or the air

would become unbreathable. Shaw went on to add that an empty life is

peopled with the absent and the imagined and the full life--well, I'll let you

examine the life of Shaw and draw your own conclusions to this somewhat

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complex question of what constitutes a full life.(Frank Kermode, The Uses

of Error,Collins, London, 1990, p.253. Im sure this quite provocative

thought of Shaws is partly true, especially in our age of radio, television and

assorted media that did not exist in Shaws time when the letter was,

arguably, one of the chief means of civilized discourse.

No matter how carefully crafted and arranged a letter is, of course, it is

harmless and valueless until it is activated by the decoding reader. This was

a remark by one Robert McClure in another analysis of Emily Dickinsons

letters(The Seductions of Emily Dickinson, p.61). I leave this introduction at

BARL, the following commentary and whatever letters I have written that

may be bequeathed to posterity to these future decoding readers. I wish them

well and I wish them a perceptiveness in order to win, to attain, from the

often grey, familiar and accustomed elements of the quotidian in these

letters, any glow, flare and light in these 5000 pieces of writing, written at a

time which may well prove to be the darkest hours in the history of

civilization when a new Faith expanded slowly, imperceptibly in some ways

and emerged from an obscurity in which it had long languished since its

inception in the 19th century and its earliest historical precedents in the mid-

to-late 18th century. Over these four epochs in which my own life and letters

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found their place in history(1944-2021), as the first streaks of a Promised

Dawn gradually were chasing away that darkness; and as this Cause slowly

became a more familiar and respected feature on the international landscape,

these letters became, for me, an example of my attempt, however

inadequate, to proclaim and name and the message of Bahaullah.

These letters illustrate, and are part of, the struggle, the setbacks, the

discouragements over these same epochs and especially the years after the

unique victory that the Cause won in 1963 which has consolidated

itself(Century of Light, p.92) in further victories over more than four

decades(1963-2007), the period when virtually all these letters were written.

These various communications are also, from my point of view anyway, part

of the succession of triumphs that the Cause has witnessed from its very

inception. However exhausting and discouraging the process has often

been--and it has often been--I can not fail to take deep satisfaction on a

number of fronts: one of these fronts is these letters and the mysterious

dispensations of a watchful Providence that, for me if not for others, are

revealed therein.

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My letters surprise me. If earnestness and sincerity could give them

immortality they would be immortal; sadly in letter-writing as in life

earnestness and sincerity, however dogged and plodding, are rarely enough.

If thirst for contact and intimacy could give them immortality they would be

immortal. Sadly, again, thirst is not always present and intimacy is not

always desired and even when they are present in letters, these qualities are

never enough as a basis for the longevity or the popularity of a corpus of

letters mixed as letters always are with a quotidian reality that is enough to

bore most human beings to death. The boredom is sufficient to prevent

nearly all readers from ever getting past a brief examination of the cover of a

book of such letters on library shelves. If immortal they be, it will be due to

their association with a Cause that is, I believe, immortal. These letters will

possess a conferred immortality, conferred by association, as the Hebraic

and the Greek traditions would have expressed it each in their own historic

and cultural contexts.

The American poet, Theodore Roethke, once said that an incoherent yet

sincere piece of writing often outlives the polished product. I'm not sure how

much this truth, if truth it be, applies to letters. Letters have enough of a

problem surviving and even more of a problem ever being read in some fine

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collection usually made after a writer's death and, if one adds

inarticulateness to the recipe, the salt may just lose all of its savour. The

letters will float unread on some literary bath-water, back-water. Letters, in

some ways, possess the shapeless urges of the unconscious and try to catch

the movement of the mind of the writer amidst a practically practical and a

humanly human everydayness. They often remain, for most readers, just

that: shapeless and beyond the mind and the interest of the general, the

ordinary, reader. Often neither the recipient nor posterity take any interest in

the individual product or the entire epistolary collection, as the case may be.

Even when given a fine shape, as the letters of Queen Victoria have been

given, they come over time to catch fewer and fewer peoples eyes. Still, her

letters give ample testimony to her character, her everyday life and the

times. One does not write a letter to increase ones popularity and if, as Eliot

implies, one writes with one eye on the future, when that future arrives one

will be pulling up the proverbial daisies.

Words in Air(Faber 2008): The complete correspondence between two

American poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, is a deep and

abundant treasure-trove of letters. It is an unrivalled collection of letters for

lovers of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. They will relish the advent of this

bulky 800-pager. Added to her equally extensive collected letters, One Art

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(Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1994), these volumes allow us direct access to her

private voice, and we can construct a vivid sense of Bishop as a person, in

all her benign and complex aspects. Perhaps the greatest tribute one can

offer to such a wonderful letter writer as Bishop who outshines Lowell is

that it makes us wish we had known her. The same is true of Keats, Byron,

Sydney Smith, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Dickens, Nancy Mitford and

a select few others. These letters form the perfect accompaniment to one of

the most precise, thoughtful and beautiful poetic oeuvres of modern times.

Whether this will be true of my letters in relation to my poetry only time will

tell and future readers in that future age.

Inventivess and humour are two wonderful assets and, if they are possessed

by a letter writer, the letter can come alive. The letters of the poet Roger

White possessed these qualities and they had a narrative momentum without

which his letters would have grown static and repetitive. Sadly, I have often

felt that my letters expose the limits of my literary, my epistolary and

certainly my humorous sensibility. My letters often grow limp, or so it

seems to me, perhaps because I have often felt limp; or they become

crowded with quasi-mystical, quasi-intellectual, abstractions as I have tried

to deal with concepts that I only half understand and ideas far beyond my

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philosophical and literary capacity to put into words. In some of my earliest

letters, letters to my first wife which we used to call my love-letters, written

in the early months of 1967, I fell back into an emulation of the Guardian's

writings, hardly appropriate Judy and I often felt later, when we read them

on a quiet Sunday afternoon, to express my feelings for her. Of course, the

feelings they expressed were ideological and intellectual and not aesthetic

and romantic. These letters were, in the end, thrown away.

Sometimes, especially in the first three decades of my letter writing, say,

1957 to 1987, a letter will contain a certain inwardness and at other times I

gamble with an intensity of emotional expression. And so, by the 1990s and

the turn of the millennium, I had gradually, insensibly, found a voice, a

balance, to put my emotions and thoughts into a form I was comfortable

with. Although I had emerged from a literary milieux in my adolescence and

young adulthood(1957-1971) confidence in my literary ability was slow in

developing and did not really take on any solid form and shape until I was

28(1972) and living in Whyalla South Australia as an international pioneer

for the Canadian Bahai community. Confidence, though, is no guarantee of

the ability to connect with a reader or readers. I am sure some found my

emails and letters far too long for their tastes and interests. One advantage of

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a long letter I found was that I was able to express an idea, even mention the

Cause in some tangential fashion. In a shorter letter this would not have been

possible given the social and cultural climate in which I was writing.

Occasionally, someone shocked me with their feedback, especially on the

internet and I slowly learned to package my words in small doses on most of

the sites on the WWW. Shock is often a useful antidote for some policy one

is pursuing or some behaviour one is exhibiting in letter writing or in other

areas of life.

Letter writing is a little like gambling; you have to stake a great deal,

everything it often seems, on one throw. Unlike gambling you often have no

idea whether you won or lost. But this is often the case in relationships and

in life: one cannot possibly evaluate what happens to our letters, to our acts,

to our lives--or anyone elses--in terms of whether they will result in justice,

harm or benefit--since their fruition, ultimately, is destined for another plane

of existence. But, still, we do judge and we do evaluate, as I do here in this

lengthy analysis at the Bahai Academic Resources Library Site.

MASTER FILE TO MY COLLECTION OF LETTERS

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The outline below of the categories for the collection of my letters has

existed for the last half-dozen years(2001-2007)--since the official opening

of the Arc Project on Mt. Carmel. This collection tends to get altered from

time to time due to the changing nature of what is still a live body of work.

Only the occasional letter is found here at the Bahai Academics Resource

Library or on the internet in various places since these letters are either

personal, professional or private. I prefer to keep this body of writing

confidential until at least my passing. At the present time there are some 50

volumes under ten major Sections delineated below by roman numerals.

Section III below contains my contacts with sites on the internet and there

are some 25 volumes of site contacts at: site homepages, forums, discussion

boards, postings, replies, inter alia. The headings, the categories, of the

letters are as follows:

I. Personal Correspondence:

1. Volume 1: 1957-1984

2. Volume 2: 1985-1988

3. Volume 3: 1989-1994

4. Volume 4: 1995-1996

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5. Volume 5: 1997-1999

6. Volume 6: 1999-2001

7. Volume 7: 2002-2003

8. Volume 8: 2003-2004

9. Volume 9: 2004-2005

10.Volume 10: 2005-2006

11.Volume 11: 2006-2007

12 Volume 12: 2007-indefinite

II. Writing to/from Baha’i Institutions

1. Magazines/Journals

2. Individuals

3. Baháí World Centre

4. Universal House of Justice

5. International Teaching Centre

6. NSA of the Baha’is of Australia

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7. Hands of the Cause

8. Continental Board of Counsellors

9. BROs and RTCs

10.1 LSAs; 10.2 Auxiliary Board Members and 10.3 Assistants

11. National Committees of the NSA of the Bahais of Australia

12. NSA and National Committees of the Bahais of the United States

III. Contacts with Publishers, Magazines and Journals

Vol 3.1 to 3.11

Vol 3.12.1 to 3.12.16

Vol 3.13 to 3.17

IV. Communications with Canada:

Vol 4.1

Vol 4.2

Vol 4.3

V. Roger White:1981-1992

Vols. 1 to 4

VI.1 Association of Bahai Studies

1. Association for Baha’i Studies: Australia

2. Association for Baha’i Studies: Canada

Vols.1 and 2

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VI.11 Other:

3. Bill Washington

4. Judy Hassall

5. Writing Articles for Magazines:1980s

6. Dialogue Magazine: Editor of Arts and Culture

VII. 1. Baháí History in WA and the NT

Vol. 1 to Vol.4

-Letters, Essays and Notes

VIII Other Individuals:

1. Dennis MacEoin: Issues and Essays

2. Graham Hassall

IX. Correspondence For Writing Novels/Essays

1. From 1987 to 1991

X Correspondence For Job Hunting

1. 1960 to 2007

XI. On-The-Job Correspondence

1. 1960 to 2007

Some 10,000(circa)letters were written in connection with job applications,

job inquiries and on the job responsibilities: 1957-2007. An uncountable

number of emails were received and sent since about 1987 but, as I say

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above, 99% of them were deleted. Virtually none of the communications

from the job world were kept, except for a few in two two-ring binders. Very

few letters or items of literary memorabilia remain from the years 1953 to

1967. Even if ninety-nine-hundredths of the emails I received were sent to

oblivion since 1987 a small but significant body of this hybrid type of letter

was kept in the last two decades, 1987-2007. One day all of the

introductions I wrote to each of the many volumes of my letters and emails,

internet posts and replies and the several general statements I wrote

concerning my letters may be included in a collected letters since half a

century has been spent in my Bahai life and in the pioneering process

writing letters. For this first edition of The Letters of Ron Price: 1957-2007

on BARL the above outline and comment on the overall layout and

organization of my letters and emails that I have written and received and

thrown away and deleted will suffice.

There are three categories of my letters that one day may be found in the

event of my demise and in the event that such a search is desired:

1. extant letters or fragments of letters that I have written or received, in

public repositories or private collections including my own collection, that

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have been examined in the original manuscript or typescript, in photocopy or

email;

2. published letters written or received for which no extant originals have yet

been located; and

3. unlocated letters for which varying types of evidence--photocopies, emails

and complete or partial typed transcriptions have been located.

The database of information for these three categories of letters, at this stage

far from complete, aims to contain the following fields or information bases

for each written and received item:(a) year and date, (b) addressee, (c)place

and (d) original.

It is hoped that the terms: manuscript, typescript, postcard, photocopy, typed

copy, handwritten script, email or some combination of these terms (for

instance typed copy of handwritten script) will accompany each item.

Minimal descriptive information—fragment or mutilated—is provided

parenthetically where relevant.

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The technicalities of presentation when complete are those of convention;

namely, (a) intrusions into the text are marked by square brackets; (b)

spelling and punctuation is to be silently corrected; (c) some mannerisms are

to be maintained; (d) dates are to be made uniform and (e) et cetera.

I have provided below some analysis and some illustration, some context for

whatever creativity is to be found by readers when and if this collection is

ever published. Letters are always, it seems to me, exemplary illustrations of

a writers creative capacity and the significance of his epistolary skills. I do

not claim that my letters are masterpieces of the letter-writing art. If they

disclose a personality that is well and good, but the world has millions of

personalities now disclosed for the public eye, stories of individuals

overcoming tribulation and achieving success. Another such story is not

required. And I have no intention nor do I wish to make any claim to my life

being a representative of that of an ideal Baha’i or a Baha’i pioneer. This is

not an account of an exemplum. Claims to representativeness, it seems to

me, are at best partial and at worst highly misleading to those who might

glean some context for mentorship. I find there is something basically

unstable or slippery about experience or, to put it in even stronger terms, in

the words of Baha’u’llah, there is something about experience that bears

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only “the mere semblance of reality.” There is something about it that is

elusive, even vain and empty, like “a vapour in the desert.”

There are so many exegetical and interpretive problems that accompany

efforts to tie down the meaning of a life, of an experience, of a relationship.

There is something divided, duplicitous, something that has happened but

has yet to be defined and described or, as is usually the case, never

described, at least not in writing, depending of course on the experience of

the person and their literary skills. There are innumerable and indispensable

points of reference in a life and yet so many of them take on the feeling of a

mirage, as if they are not really there, like a dream, particularly as the years

lengthen into later adulthood and old age. Some of the disclosure that takes

place in a selection of letters can make the world better off, but this is not

always the case and I certainly could not guarantee a positive result for my

disclosures here. For most people, of course, the exercise, my disclosures,

are totally irrelevant. If these letters disclose something of the Bahai Faith,

some new perspective over these four epochs, I will feel that this amassing

of correspondence has been worthwhile.

These letters of mine are not so much examples of carefully crafted writing

as they are of unstudied informality, spontaneous indiscretions and a certain

cultivated civility. I like to think these letters possess a wonderful

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chameleon-like quality for it is necessary that I reshape myself for each

correspondent. Each letter is a performance and an impersonation. These

letters contains many voices. On the occasions when I send out form letters,

at Christmas and Ayyam-i-Ha, this diversity and variety is not achieved. For

some respondents to my letters my reshaping is not appreciated or enjoyed,

indeed, no response was forthcoming at all to many of my letters. As in the

world of interpersonal interaction, of verbal exchange, so in the world of

letters: not every communication is meaningful to both parties and, as in the

world of the teacher that I was for years, not every comment of mine was

returned.

The next section of this somewhat long posting here at BARL comes from

chapter 3 of my memoirs. Not all of chapter 3 is included here but enough to

give a taste and a critique of the letter-writing process from the point of view

of this Bahai who began his pioneering life 45 years ago in 1962 and who

wrote his first letter to a Japanese Bahai youth in 1957. It seems to me that

those who read these letters one day, if they ever do, will have difficulty

grasping the nature of my personality inspite of, or perhaps because of, the

extensive literary base I have provided. The only impeccable writers and the

only personalities we feel we understand, William Hazlitt noted nearly two

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centuries ago, are those who never write and people we have only briefly

met. I would add to Hazlitt's analysis here that we often feel we understand a

personality, but it is always in part. Getting to know people is a bit of a

mystery at the best of times whether they are beside you on a bus, a train, a

kitchen table or a bed. One is always adjusting ones mask for correspondents

and, in the process, one creates a series of self-portraits, a mosaic of true and

false, real and unreal. The quality and maturity of my relationship with

others is, as William Hatcher pointed out 25 years ago, the best measure of

spiritual progress and growth, acquiring the capacity for such mature

relationships depends essentially on an intense inner life and self-

development. The letter is a reflection of this inner life but, in the end, it is

but a reflection of a spirituality which lies at the centre of ones heart and

soul.(William Hatcher, The Concept of Spirituality, Bahai Studies, Vol.11,

1982, p.25.)

I assume that human personality is essentially unknowable, that it is the

revelation of a masquerade in a stage play--for all the worlds a stage. This is

not to say that there are not some aspects of life that are revealed through

letters, but readers must keep in mind that they are dealing with fragmentary,

often ambiguous and decidedly opaque material over which they will be

unable to wield any kind of imperial authority and comprehension. Whatever

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insights they gain in readings, they will be inevitably partial and will have a

distinct tendency to crumble in a epistolary world that is often obtuse, dull

and vulnerable from the onslaught of the quotidian. Collections of letters are

not the most favorite fare in the popular periodical press, journalistic studies

and at book launches. They exist, letters that is, in a somewhat secret, fenced

off area of privacy, an island of subjectivity, where even the external world

is experienced as an inner world. This, the sociologist Georg Simmel once

said, is the essence of modernity.

Readers will find, too, that however much a letter reveals the springs of

action, there exists a nice and secret world to which he or she is never privy.

Oftentimes neither is the writer aware of his motivational matrix, for

mystery abounds in our worlds. The writer, namely myself in this case, turns

his letter like a historical microscope with some sensitivity and with some

attention to minute causality, but it is a causality he never fully grasps and a

sensitivity he only attains to partially. The road these letters describe I'm not

sure I would ever have entered either the road of the letters or the road of the

analysis, if I had known of its length when I wrote that first letter fifty years

ago.

Performance struggles with ideal when one writes and when one lives. That

is the name of the game. My choice and my command of language, to

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whatever degree of imperfection and perfection I attained, were the fruit of

exercise and with the arrival of more leisure in my mid-fifties that exercise

was able to find much fuller expression. Some of the facts of my past, my

religion and my society are presented in these letters in a language that is

rich in a type of coherence and a type of embedded comment. I like to think

that the cumulative effect of this comment is to predispose readers in favour

of a particular interpretation of reality and the world. But my more skeptical

self is more inclined to the view that a collection of letters is not likely to

change the world view of readers no matter how open and receptive they

may be. The stubborn testimony of unexceptionable facts, the facts of my

life, gradually bring me to the bar of history and the sober discretion that I

trust these same facts embody are a statement about my present age and

hour. At the bar there is no final verdict only a series of temporary

assessments and the discretion results in no final judgement.

These letters present a divergent and unfocused, an unconnected and

bewildering mass of material. The collection is just too immense, the

expression too forcible, the factual matter too inescapable for my intellect or

the readers to close down any questions with definitiveness, decisiveness

and precision--with answers. Rather, it seems to me, these letters open

questions up and enlarge what is and was a narrow circle in which nature has

27

confined me. If complete answers are found they simply carry the seeds of

more questions. As the years went on, too, my thoughts became more

complicated and, although my perspective could be said to remain the same,

it was within such a different context that my letters came to be written.

From the late fifties and early 1960s, to the years as they passed over the

decades, my letters might as well have been written by a different person.

The questions I dealt with changed from decade to decade, person to person

and my inclusion of the responses to my letters provides a thorough

contextualization not so much to my influence, an entity which is difficult to

measure at best and at worst quite irrelevant to my reasons for including

them, but to the letters themselves and the backdrop they provide to a period

over several epochs of various urgent and interlocking challenges,

painstaking and frustrating individual and community work.

Writing often draws attention to itself. This is especially true of letters where

attention often does not pass through to the subject but gets stuck on the

personality of the writer. For ours is an age, par excellence, of the celebrity.

The awkward and tangled reality of the past, though, is displayed for all to

see from my perspective in these letters. The surface of my past gazes out

upon history, from my letters with all their quotidian dryness, everydayness,

28

tedium and boredom. The past seems to elude the net of language as that

language gets caught up in minutiae, in the tedious and the toilsome. And

anything called certainty is endlessly deferred, although there are pockets of

certainty enough to go on and give us a feeling that the sky will not fall

down. At least not in my time.

I think there is little doubt that these four epochs are the scene for the

greatest and most awful period in the history of humankind. Gibbon once

said this of Rome in the 2nd century AD. My account here of the immensity

and wonder of this period is an account from a quite personal and limited

perspective. It is an account, too, which renders my version of a vision and

my interpretation of a plot and script that derives from two god-men in the

19th century. My letters are pregnant with delightful observations that are as

deep and as shallow as the person I am and they are pregnant as well with

the most trivial images and thoughts as watery and limpid as amniotic fluid.

For my letters, like the letters of most others, contain what is often called

telephone talk, talk which nullifies serious artistic or psychological

exchange, talk about life's simplicities, talk about life's conventionalities like

the weather and the events of daily life.

29

Readers may find my letters something like the way that Carlyle found

Scott's letters. They are never without interest, he pointed out, yet they are

seldom or never very interesting. Id like to think that my letters might impart

something of my soul, my joys and anxieties, and something that may

engage the sympathies and pleasures of those who happen upon them in

their journey. In an age in which communication has become more audible,

with animated and electronic emails and sound systems improving in quality

decade by decade, it seems that communication has also become more, or at

least often, ephemeral; with billions of emails biting the electronic dust each

week, if not each day, I offer this collection of letters as one mans record of

his age.

PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS

VOLUME ONE:

CHAPTER THREE: LETTERS

The very texture of history.....

Perception, reflection and social interaction are at least three of the many

psychologically diverse contexts in which the word self appears in our

everyday discourse. Autobiography is an important part of the narration of

this self and this autobiography, like all autobiographies, finds its home in

30

all of these contexts.1 But since the reality of man is his thought and what

endures, after life has completed its course, is the soul, it is hardly surprising

that there is a curious intangibility,2 an inherently spiritual abstraction,

associated with defining, with expressing, who we are. And it is hardly

surprising that this work of mine, this autobiography, contains a great deal

that is better described as thought and not so much that one could describe as

action. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Jens Brockmeier and Donald Carbaugh,

editors, Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography: Self and Culture,

John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2001; and 2Hannah Arendt in Relating

Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, Adriana Cavarero, Routledge,

NY,2000, p.ix.

Although there is this curious intangibility that makes up any attempt to

describe who we are, men’s beliefs in the sphere of human conduct are part

of their conception of themselves and are intrinsic to their picture of the

world. Both these beliefs and this conduct can be found expressed again and

again in my letters.-Ron Price with thanks to Isaiah Berlin quoted by Robert

Matuozzi, “When Bad Things Happen to Other People,” Philosophy &

Literature, Vol.25,No.1, 2001, pp. 173-177.

31

On the dust jacket of The Selected Letters of Marcel Proust: 1880 to 1903

the publishers, Doubleday and Company, have written “letters are the

strongest indicators of personality, perhaps the purest form of

autobiography. We look at them as a means of knowing the author as a

human being, of gaining perspectives on his life and work and, perhaps,

divining the secret foundation of his creativity.” I think there is some truth in

this remark. There is also, from my own experience, some truth in the

sentiments of Thomas Wolfe who is quoted by Elizabeth Nowell in her

introduction to the Selected Letters of Thomas Wolfe “a writer writes a letter

in order to forget it.” Once down on paper, I find, the emotion or experience

loses its compulsive force and can be stored away and forgotten. I have

stored away some 5000 letters in over fifty volumes. Since beginning to

collect these letters in 1967(with some retrospective findings and

recollections going back to 1957) I have come to see them as an

autobiographical tool. I leave it to readers to assess just where this

autobiography is strongest and where it is weakest, where it is useful and

where it is irrelevant. This is difficult for me to assess.

If this autobiography works for readers, it will not be because I have filled it

with facts, with details, with the minutiae of life documented with great

32

enthusiasm and eagerness in letters to friends and a variety of institutions.

Success in this life narrative that has been going down on paper over many a

year will be due to its basis, its centeredness, in ideas, the quality of the

writing and this narratives connection with an emerging world Faith. If it

becomes a success, at least in the short terms, at least in the next, say,

several decades, as I have indicated before, in all likelihood that success will

still be one that resonates with only a few people. But whether it resonates

with many or a few, I believe, as Gilroy and Verhoeven argue, these letters

are marked by and sent to the world. They counter, too, tendencies to flatten

out the uniqueness of the individual in some falsely understood

egalitarianism or sense of human equality. The Bahai teachings make clear

that equality is a chimera. Our uniqueness as individuals derives from our

constitutive relation with others, from our living in community, indeed, a

number of factors.

The epistolary form was long associated in the western tradition with the

feminine and the history of female subjection. As far back as Cicero in the

first century BC, it was associated with everyday speech. Here in this

autobiography my letters function as a crucial form of communication in the

teaching and consolidation work of a pioneer. Indeed, one could say that my

story, the narratability of my life, my very uniqueness, arises within the

33

context of an interaction process that the letter goes along way to illustrate.

The following Latin expression contains some truth: vox audita perit littera

scripta manet--The voice heard vanishes, the letter written remains.

The dynamics of epistolary writing have been much studied in recent years.

Analysts who read and study letters see them as something more than simple

documents of a particular time and place. They, or at least some, see the

letters as text that are only partly susceptible to explication or

decipherability. Such documents bear a different relation to the world for a

future reader than for the writer at the point when the letter was originally

written. In some ways this is only stating the obvious. The act of reading a

collection of published letters is inevitably shaped by a series of decisions

made by both the letter-writers themselves and the readers. Letters are often

exchanged, perhaps for years, usually without either participant considering

them as an exercise leading to publication. There are at least two people I

wrote to over more than ten years and a sub-collection of these letters would

fill a sizeable book but, when they were written it was for the immediate

purpose at hand not with the view to being read at some future time. T.S.

Eliot puts this process well: The desire to write a letter, to put down what

you don't want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but

34

which you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved

for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. (T.S. Eliot, English Poets As

Letters Writers, From a lecture given in 1933 at Yale University) Certainly

the extensive collection of my letters sent and received to these two

individuals might take a future reader into the hearts and minds of three

people at a unique, a significant, time in history and shed light on the period

in question in ways that other genres of writing cannot and will not do. This

sub-collection could be said to be (a) a dramatization of the appreciation of

one man for the poetry of the most significant poet of the epochs under

review and (b) the effort of one Bahai to explore his Faith en passant,

indirectly, to a friend, colleague and fellow retiree. These two interlocutors

are not so much possessed of a literary calibre superior to others I wrote to,

although in most cases that was true, but the correspondence went on for

many years, more years than that of others.

Eliot goes on:We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and

we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read

what we have written. There are several components in what we could call

this selective and personal epistolary machine: the act of writing, the act of

reading and the world of interpretation. To focus on reading is to bring to

light the complexity of the communication process, to recall that not all of a

35

readers questions are going to be answered by reading the said letters.

Readers may only have partially formulated questions in their minds or,

perhaps, they may not even understand their own questions. Any message,

including a letter, encounters a scrambling process upon entering the readers

zone of associations and responses. I wish readers well dealing with the

inevitabilities of scrambling which they will have to deal with in my letters.

There is a conceptual intersection in each letter between reader, writer and

world. And it is a busy intersection. And the discourse that takes place at

these intersections possesses a paradoxical entwinement of minds and

words. This is true of snail-mail or fiber-optic-borne email. Like the view at

a busy intersection, much of what is seen is predictable while at the same

time the specific details are to a large extent unknown or seen so differently

by each spectator.

A recent essay that I wrote introducing a volume of letters gathered in the

first years of my retirement will serve to illustrate many of the things Id like

to say about this overall collection of letters. They were letters written just

before and just after the completion of the Arc Project in 2001. I think, as

Emerson wrote, that letters often put things better than verbal

communication and provide perspectives that are timely here in this ongoing

autobiographical statement. The letters of James Boswell, to chose for

36

comparison one historical example from collections of letters, open a

window onto the real man, a man hidden behind his great biography, his

biography of Samuel Johnson. Of course, one must be sensitive, too, to

epistolary disguise, posing, theatrical attentiveness to the social presentation

of self, concern for appearances, standardization of responses and what

might be called mannerisms in letter writing. As in life, there are many

selves which write letters, many social conventions, courtesies, honesties, et

cetera. and there are many worlds about which a writer writes.

It is the fate of those who toil at many of life's employments, particularly the

more introspective arts of which letter writing is one, to be driven more by

the fear of evil, sin, personal inadequacy, regret and remorse, the sense of

disappointment and the many discouraging aspects of life, than they are

attracted by the prospect of good, of virtue, of praise or of victory, of giving

pleasure and peace to readers. Many of the scribblers on the journey of life,

ones I have met and ones I have not, are often exposed more to censure, with

little hope of praise. They feel the disgrace of their miscarriages, the

insufficiency of their language and the punishments they might receive or

have received for their neglect of duty, principle or person. Their success, if

any, has often been, if not usually, without applause and their diligence has

37

reaped no external reward. Also, as Susan Sontag noted parenthetically in

her preface to Letters: Summer 1926, the greatest writers invariably demand

too much of, and are failed by, readers. It would be pretentious for me to

claim to be a great writer, but I have been aware of the implicit and explicit

demands I may make on readers and of the importance of keeping my

expectations low. I have tried for many a year to put these principles into

practice for Sontag is right.

Among these unhappy mortals is the writers of letters. Humankind seems to

consider them like pioneers of literature doomed to work in societys private

spaces with their home in little mailboxes and, more recently, in optic space.

Every other author aspires to publication and praise. Letter writers, while

they may enjoy a certain wild exuberance, must resign themselves to the

tyranny of time and fashion--and the mind of one or, at the most, several

readers. Each letter has no hope of a mass audience. There on the page they

must disentangle perplexity and regulate life's confusion for themselves and

their lone readers. They must make choice out of boundless variety and do it

without any established principle of selection. They must detect

adulterations without a settled test for purity.

38

It happens, and especially in letter , that in things difficult there is danger

from ignorance and there are so many difficult and complex things in life. In

things easy there is danger from confidence and there are many an aspect of

life that is easy and hardly requires any thought. The mind, afraid of

greatness, and disdainful of littleness, hastily brushes over the more

important aspects of life and/or dwells far too little on the everyday. It

withdraws itself from painful epistolary dialogue and from the search

required and so passes with scornful rapidity over tasks not adequate to its

powers. Sometimes it feels too secure to exercise caution or too anxious for

vigorous effort. It is afflicted by a literary idleness on plain and simple

paths; and is often distracted in the labyrinths of life and interpersonal

exchange. Dissipation stalks his literary intentions as words roll off his pallet

onto the page. Readers may wonder what these phrases I have just written

have to do with the art of writing letters. I leave you to ponder. In an age

when little letter writing goes on, I'm not sure how much meaning readers

need to find here in these complex epistolary ideas.

A large work is difficult because it is large, even though all its parts might

singly be performed with facility; where there are many things to be done,

each must be allowed its share of time and labour, in the proportion only

39

which it bears to the whole; nor can it be expected, that the stones which

form the dome of a temple, should be squared and polished like the diamond

of a ring. Those who have much leisure to think, will always be enlarging

the stock of ideas, and every increase of knowledge, whether real or fancied,

will produce new words, or combinations of words. When the mind is

unchained from necessity, it will range after convenience; when it is left at

large in the fields of speculation, it will shift opinions. If any custom is

disused, especially the literary, the words that express that custom often

perish with inactivity. As any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech

in the same proportion as it alters practice. Since I retired from full time

work in 1999 my mind has been unchained but, as yet, my opinions are not

popular. They are, though, growing in the public place at a faster pace than

ever. I leave it to readers to assess the junction, the intersection, between my

letters and the pace of change in society on the subjects that occupy both me

and that wider milieux. By 1999 my life had become more speculative than

active, more literary, than people centred with its endless listening and

talking. This shift in my literary and daily avocation is strongly reflected in

the quantity and content of my letters and coalesced in my first extensive

publications on the internet.

40

In the hope of giving longevity to that which my own nature repels me,

forbids me, to desire, namely, the fame of my letters and my immortality

through them, I have devoted this collection of letters, the labour of years, to

the honour of my religion and as a testimony to one of my life's

achievements. There is a glory to life from its arts and its letters. Whether I

shall add anything of my own writings to these arts and letters, to English

literature, must be left to time. Much of my life has been lost under the

pressures of illness, lack of direction, a certain frivolity, jobs that were fill-

ins, conversations that seemed to go nowhere, activities that functioned

largely to fill in time, the desire to be entertained regularly and daily, inter

alia. Much of my days have been trifled away.

Much time each day has been spent in provision, in functioning, for the tasks

of the day that was passing over me, doing what was in front of my nose. I

have not thought my daily labour wasted; I have not thought my

employment useless or ignoble. If, by my assistance, foreign nations and

distant ages might gain access to the propagators of knowledge and

understand the teachers of truth, or if my labours might afford light to some

of the multitude of the repositories of learning, then my employment will be

more worthwhile than any contemporary achievement. For vision and a

sense of the future inspires so much that I do. When I have been animated by

41

this wish, I look with pleasure on my collection, however defective, and

deliver it to the world with the spirit of a man that has endeavoured well.

Useful diligence in the microcosm of letter writing may in the end prevail.-

Ron Price with thanks to Samuel Johnson, Preface to the Dictionary From

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, London, 1755,

Edited by Jack Lynch.

I wrote the essay which follows as part of the second edition of this

autobiographical work, a second edition I worked on from 1993 to 2003. It

was one of my essays that was, in that process of ten years in the evolution

of this autobiography, simply gathered into an appendix and not integrated

into the body of that edition. In the third edition I achieved a better

integration of material, of my autobiographical resources. My imaginative

function became more fertile in the third edition. As the poet Wallace

Stevens writes, referring to imagination: I am the necessary angel of

earth/Since, in my sight, you see the world again, I am seeing the world

again with greater vividness than I once did. Robert Graves, a prolific letter

writer, saw his letters as a sort of spontaneous autobiography and his poems

as his spiritual autobiography. I like the distinction. Perhaps, one day, a

42

selection of letters from my spontaneous autobiography will become

available.

Here, then, is some of that essay.....As the 38th, 39th and 40th years of

pioneering took their course in the first years of my retirement, 1999 to

2002, I wrote some of the following about the letter-writing experience....

Across the line of time I thought I would try to make a brief summary of this

letter writing experience, an experience which goes back to the first letter I

received from the international pioneer Cliff Huxtable in St. Helena in 1967.

Cliffs wife Cathy had just died at the age of thirty-five. Cliff is still in St.

Helena thirty-five years later. He has remarried. He never wrote again. I

replied but I did not keep a copy of the letter; indeed I kept few of my

personal letters until about 1982, twenty years into the pioneering venture.

As I have pointed out on previous occasions I wrote and received letters

going back as far as about 1962 when this pioneering journey began; before

this back to the age of 13 in 1957 as a Bahai youth and junior-youth as the

period before 15 is now called a few letters were written. But I have not kept

the letters from the earlier period before 1967, except a rare item of the

species. There were many letters after 1967, at least up to about 1980, which

43

were destroyed. Some of these may be in private hands but, since I have no

fame, no significance in the general public eye, it is unlikely that many, if

any, letters are being kept privately by their recipients. The most assiduous

search will, in all likelihood, not come up with the discovery of any

epistolary manuscripts. I find it interesting and more than coincidental that

virtually the entire corpus of my letters comes from a period that began with

what the Universal House of Justice in 1967 called ‘the dark heart of the age

of transition.’ Even the letters before 1967 which were not kept come from a

period that the Guardian described in 1957 as one hovering on the brink of

self-destruction. Such was the widest context for that first letter to Hiroshi

Kamatu in Japan in 1957.

By those dates, from 1957 to 1967, “a mood of cultural crisis: a sense that

something had gone terribly wrong in the modern world, something that we

could neither assimilate nor put right,” had entered our psyches. One writer

called our society a post-traumatic culture. Indeed there have been, since the

fifties and sixties, a host of characterizations of the shift, the crisis, of these

days. It was in many ways an insensible process without a beginning date,

but it was like a tempest which blew and blew decade after decade, a

44

tempest that had already begun in the lives of my parents and, arguably, my

grandparents.

If one tried to get a picture of the hey-day of my letter writing I think it

would be in the 1980s when I lived, first in Zeehan on the west coast of

Tasmania, and then in the north of Australia, north of Capricorn, although in

the early years of the new millennium, after my retirement, there was a new

lease on letter-writing life in the form of emails. I do not have any interest in

going through this collection of letters that I wrote north of Capricorn or,

indeed, from the full period 1957 to 2002, now in over 50 2-ring binders and

arch-lever files. Perhaps a future day will see me making some minute

analysis of the extent and the content of these letters. Perhaps, should their

potential value become more evident to me, I shall take a more serious

interest in them. Thusfar I have made only the occasional annotation to these

letters. As the first editor of this collection, I have given them order and

shape; I have set them in context, but I have made no attempt to correct their

errors, to improve their expression or comment on their individuality: whom

I wrote to, why I wrote and under what circumstances.

45

I have, though, taken a very general interest in the collections of letters of

other writers to help provide useful perspectives on my own collection. I

have opened a file of introductions to collections of letters obtained from

books of the letters of famous writers and have kept additional notes on the

genre because I think in the years ahead I may write a history drawing on

letters, mine and those of other Baháís in the world during these four epochs.

The analysis of the letters of other writers also helps me enrich and

understand the context of my own pieces. These letters are like arrows from

the same quiver. I send them just as high and far as I can. In my journal it is

the same. Perhaps these letters and my journal are simply the product of a

peculiar self-centredness. Their appeal I’m sure will not be due to my wit,

my humour, the adventurousness or the romance of this narrative, but rather(

if there is to be any appeal at all) to the ordinariness of the content and, most

importantly and as I have indicated before, their association with this new

global Cause. Their appeal for me, for me as the writer, is the sense of

surprise. V.S. Naipaul said the same thing in his nobel prize lecture given in

2001.

Some of that surprise comes from the fact, says Naipaul, that the self that

writes is not the everyday self. They are very different. The everyday self is

46

essentially superficial and, if not superficial, it is at least domestic and

practical and must deal with the minutiae of life just to get from one day to

another in one piece: fed, housed and clothed-and hopefully loved. I’m not

so sure about this characterization of the double self, but that sense of

surprise I find on every page I write and this surprise certainly possesses an

appeal. It helps to keep me going, keep me writing. “The secretion of ones

innermost life, written in solitude and for oneself alone, that one gives to the

public,” writes Naipaul. “What one bestows on private life—in conversation,

however refined it may be—is the product of a quite superficial self, not of

the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and

the self that frequents the world. While I’m not sure this is entirely true, it

certainly is in part.

Maugham puts this idea a little differently. I had an impression, this is

Maughams summing up of the writer Thomas Hardy, that the real man, to

his death unknown and lonely, was a wraith that went a silent way unseen

between the writer of his books and the man who led his life, and smiled

with ironical detachment at the two puppets. Somewhere in all of this lies

the real writer, the real me. Is this real me to be found in the id, the

unconscious, the reflexes, the hormones, in a socialization process, the roles

of a protean man, in feeling good? This complex question really requires a

47

book on its own, but I think from a Baha’i perspective the real me is best

found in thought and action guided by the behavioural principles of this

Cause to put the case as succinctly as I can.

This is not a collection of letters of a famous person or to famous people,

like the collections of letters of Einstein to President Roosevelt, or the

collection of Jane Austen's letters or those of, say, one of the Presidents,

Prime Ministers or other prominent members of the community. My

collection has no curiosity value like the letters to Santa Claus or to lovers or

to mothers or from children, suicide victims or entertainers to an assortment

of people. Whatever significance this collection has is tied-up with the

emergence of a new world Order and a new religion and whatever future that

religion may have. These letters bear the traces of contemporary historical

practices, literary styles and tastes and they are surrounded by what could be

called the envelope of contingency. In this sense they are communications to

and with the world, with society, however personal and private they may

appear to the casual observer. There are few communications with famous

people either in the Bahai world or out. Outstanding thinkers, artists,

political figures, scientists or significant Bahais on the elected or appointed

48

side of the Cause will not be found here. The pivotal figures of these epochs

are virtually absent.

That is not to say that fascinating personalities are not present, that

individuals with great charm are not found among the pages, that devotion

and faith, patience and understanding are not here. There is a storehouse of

humanity, a kalaidescope of personalities, here that I met on my journey.

There was a certain excitement which I found pleasant but transitory and, as

I look back over it, not something I would want to repeat or make

permanent. There is something tumultuous about existence and these letters

reflect that quality. This tumultuous quality is due to many causes that are

not my purpose to describe here. Even the most intimate of relationships

contains a trace of strangeness and, inevitably, this is reflected in letters.

These letters are, for me at least, part of a potential global epistolary

collection, part of the literary expression of a global diaspora, a national and

an international pioneering movement, that was only in its second generation

when I got into the field in the 1960s. The recent eighteen-volume series on

global diasporas and the six volume work of the International Library of

Studies of Migration, will, in all likelihood, have no mention of the Baháí

diaspora when they are completed. The former is or will be made up of

49

original works, while the latter is a collection of previously published

articles on selected themes. International migration and diasporas have come

to constitute distinctive fields of inquiry and there is considerable overlap

between them.

The study of international migration is broader in scope and partially

subsumes diaspora studies. Diasporas arise from international migration.

Constant interaction between diasporic communities in dozens of sovereign

states and with various homelands is one of the defining features of this

international migration. After nearly seven decades of international

pioneering as part of an international teaching Plan, this interaction and

these many diasporas seem to me, in many ways, to have just been initiated

and only briefly been given any academic study. The major events of this

pioneering venture, the various processes concerning its growth and

development, and aspects of the diasporic life of, say, Baháís from North

America in Australia would necessarily interest only a small body of people

at this stage of that groups history. Indeed, at this early stage, however

massive the exercise involved, and the global pioneering venture is indeed a

massive one, the significance of collections of letters is hardly appreciated as

50

yet; indeed, I would think for most people including the pioneers themselves

there would be very few collections of letters extant.

What are termed Baháí studies or international Baháí pioneering studies will

one day, though, I am confident, be a part of an extensive study of the great

Baháí international diaspora of the last sixty-seven years(1937-2004), a full

two-thirds of the first century of the Formative Age. So I am inclined to

think, anyway. These letters are part of what is, in fact, a grand narrative.

Specific letters relevant to the history of the Cause in the Northern

Territory(NT) I kept for two decades(1982-2002) in special files as resource

material to help me write the Baháí history of that region. I have now given

them to the Regional Baháí Council for the Northern Territory. Much more

collecting of letters written by Baháís in the NT could be done by history

writers and archivists with greater enthusiasms than I now possess and I

hope some day such an exercise will be accomplished. In the disintegration

of society that is part of the essential backdrop to these letters and the

contrasting integration, the generation that took part in the pioneering

venture of the years 1962 to 1987, marks the first years of the tenth and final

stage of history. It is a stage coextensive with a crucial stage in the

51

institutionalization of the charismatic Force, the routinization of that

charisma to use Webers term, in the Universal House of Justice.

If these letters appear to indicate an aloofness from the controversies of the

day, from the endless issues that occupied the front pages of the newspapers

and the images and sounds from the electronic media; if they refrain year

after year from any association by word or deed with the political pursuits of

the various nations of the world, with the policies of their governments and

the schemes and programmes of parties and factions, it is because this is the

advice, the position, taken by the leaders of my Faith following principles

and practices laid down by the Founders and leaders of this Faith beginning

in the 1840s. I, too, following these considered views, have tried to further

the aims of what is to me a beloved Cause and to steer a course amid the

snares and pitfalls of a troubled age by steering clear of partisan-political

subjects. Many writers do the same. They steer clear of politics and go in for

sex, religion, humour, theology, inter alia, in their writing. They belong to

no lit crit school, have no followers and simply cannot be easily labelled

politically.

52

What does occupy the Baháí often appears trifling. Such is the feeling I have

frequently had in relation to these letters. The words of Thomas Henry

Huxley, the nineteenth century biologist and educator, I find encouraging.

He opened his autobiography with a quotation from a letter from a Bishop

Butler, a bishop of the episcopal seat of Aukland, to the Duchess of

Somerset. The bishop wrote: And when I consider, in one view, the many

things . . . which I have upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being

employed in this manner at my time of life. But, in another view, and taking

in all circumstances, these things, as trifling as they may appear, no less than

things of greater importance, seem to be put upon me to do. As archaic, as

anachronistic, as the style of the good bishops words may be, the point for

me is important, namely, that Huxley saw his autobiography, even the

humble letter, as something put on him to do, by the interpositions of a

watchful Providence, the eye of a necessary Fate or the simple needs of

circumstance, however trifling it appeared to be.

I am reminded, in this context, of the words of Roger White from A Sudden

Music. White says that the highest service a Baháí can often render is to

simply do the thing under his nose that needed doing. For me, writing letters

was often this thing. And so it was, that over time, as the years went on,

what was once seen as a trifling exercise took on a patina of gentle

53

significance, perhaps even the sense of letters being a small example of what

the Universal House of Justice called nobler, ampler manifestations of

human achievement in their discussion of the subject of freedom of thought.

If I was not a good cook, a good gardener, a good mechanic, a good painter,

indeed, if I did not operate successfully in so many areas of life, as indeed

most of us can say about so many domains of activity, I could at least write a

letter and do it well, at least such was my personal view. Perhaps, like one of

the greatest letter writers of all time, Voltaire, I would do most of my best

and significant work in the years ahead. He did his best writing from the age

of 64 to 84.

I’ve always appreciated the words of Evelyn Waugh in terms of this

particular capacity to write letters. Beware of writing to me,” he once said,

“I always answer.” He referred to his letter writing habit as “an inherited

weakness,” part of his “great boringness.” It was partly due, he said, to

“never going out or telephoning.” Like Thoreau my life showed a devotion

to principle, but by the time I was sixty I was only too conscious of just how

far my life had been from the practical application of that principle. I have

little doubt that were many more individuals, more sincere and more genuine

in their devotion to that same principle or principles, than I have or would

54

be. As Clausewitz notes in his series of essays On War to be faithful in

action to the principles laid down for ourselves this is our entire difficulty.

The many things to which the Duchess’s correspondent here refers are the

repairs and improvements of his episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if

Huxley, the first great apologist of Darwinian evolution, this largely self-

educated man, one of Englands founders of primary schools for all, this

father of eight children, this coiner of the term agnostic, saw himself as an

instrument of the deity. But, like the good Bishop Butler, I'm sure he felt he

had things of great importance to do and that they had been put upon him.

Even the humble letter. Virginia Woolf wrote that it was not until the

nineteenth century that self-consciousness had developed so far that it was

the habit of men to describe their minds when they wrote their letters and

their autobiographies. I write in this new tradition, although I am conscious,

as Woolf puts it plainly, of the worlds notorious indifference. And it may be

many years, if ever, before this collection of letters has any interest to even a

coterie of people.

Letter writing has occasionally been a routine, perfunctory, exercise;

occasionally a joy, a pleasure, a delight; occasionally part of some job or

community responsibility. “Letters were the very texture” wrote Henry

55

James “of Emerson’s history.” There is certainly a texture here that is not

present in the other genres of my wide-ranging autobiography. Some letter-

writers are janus-faced and some, like Truman Capote, the author of

Capote’s letters in Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote are

three-faced. There was the face for gay friends, the face for non-gay friends,

and the face for the friends he made in Kansas while writing In Cold Blood.

I think I have a multiple-faced letter writing persona: one for Baha’is of a

conservative type, one for a more liberal orientation, one for those who are

Baha’i in name only, one for youthful types, one for old people and one

for...and on goes the list, the persona. Letter writing partly overcomes,

together with my writing in other genres, the ancient enmity between life

and the great work. And it was apparent that, if I was to achieve any ‘great

work,’ it would be in bits and pieces spread out over many years, many

decades. Like the great work of inner life and private character,

achievements in my life seem to have been small steps backward and

forward. The texture of these largely private communications is also a result

of a new written form, the email, a form which was present in Volume 5 of

my personal letters as well, but makes a strong appearance in this Volume

6(the year I retired from full-time work) of these letters. Nine out of ten

communications by then were emails not letters. I think the first email I

56

received was in 1990 or 1991, but I have kept few emails before the mid-to-

late 1990s when email traffic began to replace the letter and, for me at least,

by 2000 the telephone to a significant extent. Even the emails over the last

dozen years, 1995-2007, were largely deleted. So much of what has come in

since the email entered my life has not been worth keeping in my archive.

Like the ten thousand letters I wrote in the organizations which employed

me over more than 40 years and which either lie in files now or are on the

scrap-heap, the detritus, of one of historys myriad paper-trails no one will

ever follow, a vast quantity of emails I have received have disappeared in an

electronic void. Their electronic successors, like the mobile phone and text

messages, have not been part of my experience in their early years of

operation and so there will be nothing in this collection of messages over 50

years from these additions to the electronic industry and their

communications functions.

In the early years of retirement, 1999 to 2002, I rarely used the telephone. In

retirement I had come to find the telephone an intrusion after more than forty

years of my finding it a pleasure, a convenience or a necessity. Of course, I

still owned a telephone and answered it when circumstances required with

courtesy and kindness and, when possible, with humour & attentiveness.

57

A great deal of life is messy work offering to the artist irrelevant, redundant

and contradictory clutter. Much of letter writing falls into this category; it

spoils a good story and blunts the theme, like much of conversation, much of

life, it is random, routine and deals with the everyday scene, ad nauseam.

But these letters tell of a life in a way that is unique, not so much as a

collection of letters, for collections are a common genre over the centuries,

but as a collection of letters in the third, forth and fifth epochs of the

Formative Age of the Baháí Era. They present pictures that tell of a concrete

reality, a time and an age, that I hope will stand revealed to future readers.

For these epochs were characterized by what Toynbee calls a schism in the

soul in an age of social disintegration. A fully seasoned universal state with

its supreme authority and its supreme impersonal law, argues Toynbee, were

not part of the cosmology and the basic unit of social organization, for

humankind in this half century, although some serious and significant

beginnings to that process were made in that direction.

What is here in these letters and in my other writings is, in part, some signs

and signals of the embryo of that unit of social organization at the global

level. The Bahai Faith has been central to my education, my ambitions and

my assumptions as far back as the early 1960s and late 1950s. Much of this

58

education was peripatetic and that of an autodidact. What is here is spiritual

autobiography and psychological revelation in a different literary form than

my poetry and it tells of a period during which the Baháí Faith made a

significant leap forward in its numbers and in the maturity of its community.

Often, to the Baháís working in their personal lives and in their communities

this maturity and this growth was either not evident or not appreciated. So

often it was the struggle itself that dominated their perspectives, their

emotional life and their thoughts.

Often, too, readers awareness of the many Ron Prices that make up my life

and whatever maturity I have or have not attained is sharpened by their dip

into the pool of my letters. But perhaps most importantly the number of

collections of letters from international pioneers during this period may not

be that extensive given the busyness of peoples lives and what seems to me

to be a quite natural disinclination to keep letters beyond a salient few of

some personal importance. If, as Anthony Burgess suggests, artists must be

judged not merely by excellence, but by bulk and variety, then at least Id be

in the running, if ever I should want to be running. Sometimes, though, bulk

compromises quality. Perhaps that is the case here. I leave that to readers to

judge. As yet my literary landscape has not been surveyed professionally or

59

by amateurs. I certainly hope I escape the fate of Burgess, at least as it was

held in the hands of biographer Roger Lewis who wrote: From an aesthetic

viewpoint, all of Burgess relentless productivity was one vast waste of

words and paper. But one never knows for sure.

Film critic Gerald Peary notes in his essay on the biography Clint: The Life

and Legend, there are at least two Clints. I think it is fair to say there are

probably more than two Clint Eastwoods. There are certainly more than two

Ron Prices with hopefully a golden thread joining all the selves as well as

threads of many other colours. On the internet I found by the year 2007 at

least 50 Ron Prices: car salesmen, writers, poets, evangelists, Deans, Board

Members, harpists,insurance salesmen, etc. etc.

After more than fifty years of excessive contact with human beings, the

quiet, only child, the self who had learned in his early childhood(up to 1949)

how to occupy himself in a solitary way, seemed to want more of that

solitude. Price was ready by the turn of the millennium for televisions more

metonymic contact with others. He found in this medium, a medium which

had been part of his life on and off for half a century, that all of those

storytellers, priests, wisemen and elders which in many ways had become

60

lost to society in the years of its disintegration in the previous century and

especially in recent decades, the decades of his life, had become restored to

cultural visibility and to oral primacy in his nightly fare on TV and in the

daily fare of radio programs. With embellishments from the internet and

books, embellishments which were usually more satisfying to the mind, he

felt little need for any human contact at all. And society, he felt, seemed to

have little felt need, for his story, drowned as society had become in a

plethora of stories, day after day, night after night and year after year from

the tidal wave of productions of the print and electronic media

Those storytellers came along in the convincing guise of highly literate

specialists: newsreaders, commentators, scientific and artistic experts as well

as writers and producers with their endless capacity to generate stories in the

form of movies, interviews, who-dun-its, soap-operas, a cornucopia of stuff

that rested the eyes and stimulated the mind in varying degrees. It was here

in the media that the sophists of ancient Greece were reborn. The sophists

with their emphasis on the power of the intellect arose as Greek society in

the fifth century BC was becoming more complex. They were rootless

people without any commitment to community. And they are very much like

many of the worldly wise who come upon the scene and pontificate,

61

publicize and entertain millions but, unlike Socrates of old, they generally

have no commitment to community except in the most generalized sense.

Our troubled times approximate more closely the conditions of Greece and

Rome and comparisons like those I make to the sophists are useful. The

media now tend to direct not only our knowledge of the world but our

knowledge of ways of knowing it. And the new sophists play an important

role in this mix. Not to mention this important aspect of contemporary social

and intellectual life in an autobiography of this nature would be a serious

omission.

A new nonliterary culture had come to exist at about the same time that my

pioneering life began. “Its existence, not to mention significance, most

literary intellectuals are entirely unaware, wrote Susan Sontag in her

groundbreaking 1965 essay, One Culture and the New Sensibility. While

this work does not focus on this complex theme, the presence of a large

group of people in my society, a group who reads to such a limited extent, is

a simple reality of life whose implications I can not possibly dwell on.

Readers, if interested in this topic, can examine this article by Skinner and

his discussion of the new sensibility of a non-literary culture. This not

62

literary sensibility had implications for my letter writing, but I will not go

into them here.

The media had many functions. It allowed me to get back to my writing day

after day, having been gently and alternatively amused, stimulated,

entertained and informed. I could see why millions had no need to write

letters for they had had sufficient human contact on TV. Those with a higher

degree of need for a particular type of sociability could use the telephone

and/or join one of many volunteer organizations that came to be dotting the

landscape by the time I retired. As I mentioned above though, by the year

2000, I seemed to be writing more letters than ever. By nine oclock at night

my eyes and mind were so tired from reading and writing--usually at least a

six to eight hour minimum of the days time and a ten hour maximum--that I

was happy to consume televisions products. With an average of two hours of

TV consumption nightly I could finish my eight hour reading-writing day

after 11 pm and before 3 am. Millions of my words were slowly permeating

some of the literally millions of internet sites. Yes, I was writing more letters

than ever.

63

Perhaps this is why so many events in my life, events that could be stories,

did not become stories. Baháí holy days, Feasts, deepenings, secular

holidays by the bundle, a seemingly infinite number of birthdays, annual

dinners, suppers for friends, good-grief, the list of repeated activities one

engages in over lifes years could go on and on. Over fifty years at, say, fifty

events a year, makes for at least 2500 special days, special occasions. And

little of it appears here in these letters. One might ask why? Is it the

repetition, the routine, the sameness? Is it that these events are part of the

very texture of life and, like the air, are difficult to write about in a book like

this. They come to occupy two or three lines in a letter; they become the

base of an occasional poem; they fill hundreds, thousands of hours of life

with a million eventualities. At best, they provide suggestive openings for

readers of a letter, unobtrusive patterns of juxtaposition, recurrence, contrast

and familiarity out of which fresh and unpredictable understandings may

emerge.

There is something about the routines, the repetition of events in the

ordinary life of the individual and I refer to this repetition frequently in this

autobiography, that is like the experience of the criminal in prison. The crim

discovers on his release that he is not the only one to perceive the lagging of

time in terms of suspended animation. His old friends do also. They act as

64

though he has returned from a brief trip to the toilet or out of town for a few

hours, even though he may have been in the nick for a decade, greeting him

casually and then going about their business. Ones actions so frequently

point to somewhere, some time, when and where one has been before and

frequently. One often resumes a relationship as if one has only, as Withnell

puts it in that humorous turn of phrase, been to the toilet. This is part of the

backdrop that often gives one the feeling that little change has occurred in

ones being, behaving. It is this terrible sameness that takes the experience of

writing a letter completely out of the realms of meaningful activity and is,

perhaps, one of the main reasons why relatively little takes place.

My letters were, among other things, strands of experience woven into

patterns, patterns in a channel, a channel that in the early years of my

retirement became filled with electronic signals; they came to fill many arch-

lever files and binders and, after 2007, lists of items in my computer

directory. They were an expression of an art, a means of communication. By

the time Volume 4 of this collection of personal correspondence was

gathered in 1995 I had, as I have indicated, become exhausted by personal

contacts. Perhaps this was due in part to my proclivity for solitude in

contrast to a more social inclination, a more social mode of existence that

65

had been such a strong part of my life for half a century. I was more inclined

to think that this social disinclination was due to many things in a list too

long to enumerate here. This may be part of the reason for any apparent

aloofness and any insistence on solitude that is found in either my letters or

my poetry, especially after about 1995 when I was in my early fifties. In

1985 a second volume of personal correspondence was opened. Part 1 of

Volume 1(1957-1974) and Part 2(1974-1984) of Volume 1 opened the

series. The first fifty years of my letter-writing life had their home by 2007.

The several themes which analysts might want to follow through the letters

had begun to be apparent.

My autobiography arose out of the juxtaposition of several temperamental

disinclinations that rose up in my life over several decades and came to a

head in the years 1992/3 to 2002/3. Curiosity about the future and the

afterlife among other interests also played their part. Evelyn Waugh says

that it is in these temperamental disinclinations that one finds the origin of

autobiography. Perhaps, like Rilke, I had been for decades too responsive for

my own peace of mind.(1) Perhaps my letters are, like Rilkes, an indication

of a great need of imparting the life within me.(2) Perhaps they are simply a

matter of pouring experience into a mould to obtain release, to ease the

66

pressure of life. When inspiration to write poetry lagged I often turned to

correspondence. It was a handicraft, a tool among several others, that could

keep me at work in constant preparation for the creative moments.(3)

As the social dimensions of my psycho-social life were waning by the mid-

1990s and, like Rilke, I began to thirst for solitude, the wider world was

experiencing 56 wars being fought around the globe. Among other

devastating effects, these conflicts created at least 17 million refugees and

left 26 million people homeless. Another 300 million individuals suffered

because of disasters not related to war. This state of affairs, following the

end of the Cold War in 1989 and the proclamation of a new world order,

indicated serious disarray among the community of nations. And yet, each

day dedicated human beings -- among them international civil servants,

government officials, nongovernmental workers, and a broad spectrum of

volunteers -- continued to cope with complex and seemingly intractable

problems, in efforts to alleviate suffering and advance the cause of peace.

This wider drama, a drama that was always present in the background as my

own life winding its way down the road, was simply beyond one’s

imagination to understand in any detail. I got broad pictures, but the details

were usually complex, overwhelming and elusive.

67

The drama of my life became largely an inner one as the 1990s came to an

end. The external battle, its pleasures and anxieties, went on but in a much

more subdued form. Perhaps, like Thoreau, I lacked a certain breadth and

coarseness of fibre and by my fifties I came to prefer, as Thoreau had been

all his life, to be more isolated from my surroundings, more insular and

solitary. I came by my late fifties to plant myself near the sea with a granite

floor of principle beneath me, although often there were layers of

intervening clay and quicksand which, even in my solitude, seemed to entrap

me. Of course, that trap was the one I had seen all my life: the trap of self, of

ego, of natures insistent self and of lifes inevitable complexities. Was I too

quick or too slow to answer lifes call, too inclined or not inclined enough to

switch off its insistent urgings? Lacking the right words for the right time or

failing to come up with the right verbal package did I rush in where angels

feared to tread? Was this equally true in the letters I wrote? One could not

always frame the words to say-it-right in every letter and email. I hope, I

believed, I was saying it better in my poetry which Russian poet Yevgeny

Yevtushenko said is the poet’s true autobiography.

68

These letters, it seems to me, stand in sharp contrast to what Frederic

Jameson refers to as the four losses that are symptomatic of our age of

postmodernism. These losses have come to characterize our society

increasingly since the 1970s: the suspension of subjective inwardness,

referential depth, historical time and coherent human expression. These

letters in some basic ways define my identity and my communitys by telling

the story of myself, the community I have been part of and the events of the

time. There is clearly referential depth here, subjective inwardness, the story

of a search, an open-ended drama of personal narratives, a sense of the

complexity of these historical times. There is also here in these letters what

Roland Barthes calls an image of literature to be found in ordinary culture.

This image, he goes on, is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his

life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism consists for the most part in

saying that my failure is the failure of Ron Price the man. The explanation of

a work, he concludes, is always sought in the man or woman who produced

it....in the voice of a single person, the author confiding in us.

While the art and craft of letter writing have declined in this century, letter

stories have thrived. Cast as love letters and Dear John letters, as thank-you

notes and suicide notes, as memos and letters to the editor, and as exchanges

69

with the United States Post Office, examples of epistolary fiction have been

published by the hundreds, among them the work of many of our most

notable authors. Why has this form of fiction writing remained so popular?

Gail Pool, the editor of Other Peoples Mail says it has something to do with

the rhetorical question: Who is immune to the seduction of reading other

peoples mail? I like to think my letters offer a similar seduction. That is

what Id like to think. Time, of course, will tell.

Although epistolary fiction enjoyed its greatest popularity in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries, a time when letters were central to daily life, this

style of writing still has a place and a popular one it would seem. Letter

stories are about communication and they are effective in framing our

modern concerns: the struggle to find meaningful stories, relationships, and

lives amid the social and moral disarray of the era and the blurred

boundaries between fact and fiction, artist and audience, private and public

domains. My own letters accomplish this similar framing exercise.

Written and received over nearly fifty years, my collection of letters

delineates the themes of our time as do the themes of the stories in Other

Peoples Mail. Offering seventeen stories written by a culturally diverse

group of authors, Other Peoples Mail represents what letter tales, at their

70

best, can do. They may be written from the Canadian wilderness, a private

school in Geneva, a concentration camp, or beyond the grave. They may be

comic or satirical, poignant or tragic, but all are united in their distinctive

format. For letters are distinctively individual. Other Peoples Mail is the first

collection of its kind. It is a unique and important anthology. Pools highly

informative introduction explores the nature of letter fiction. Literature and

writing instructors may find in this lively anthology a useful resource. My

collection offers a single perspective, a single individual, a single

background to a life, a distinctive format, at times satirical, at times

poignant, tragic, humorous and lively and, no doubt and inevitably--as

collections of letters are for most people--boring and therefore unread. In

that tidal-wave of print and visual stimulation that occupies todays world,

collections of letters, for the most part, slip into a quiet niche, unknown and

unnoticed and not missed. It often takes many years after a persons death for

the entire collection of a writers letters to be published. It took 125 years for

Gustav Flauberts letters to be fully published in five volumes. Even

assuming my letters get published and, if I was to follow in Flauberts

footsteps, readers could anticipate the publication of the full oeuvre of my

letters in, say, 2150!--or thereabouts!!

71

The tangled root and the tranquil flower is here: cool detachment,

indifference, and an anguish of spirit.4 I leave it to future readers to find

these roots and flowers, these several temperaments. I trust their search will

have its own reward. I hope, too, that this opening comment on Volume 6 of

my personal correspondence in Section VII of Pioneering Over Four Epochs

sets an initial perspective of some value. These words above written on

several occasions from 1999 to 2002 for the third and fourth editions of this

autobiography were completed after living for more than four years in

George Town Tasmania. Some writers move to enclaves where many other

writers live. Brooklyn USA is a good example. George Town, with its small

population of perhaps 6000, has hundreds of gardeners; people who fish,

water ski and go boating can be found in abundance. So can artists, cooks,

cleaners, factory workers, inter alia. But writers are a rare lot and Im happy

with it this way.

During the time the letters in this particular part of the collection were

written I began work on some thirty-two instalments on The History of the

Baháí Faith in the Northern Territory: 1947-1997; I also completed my book

The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature, organized

and refined the second edition of my website Pioneering Over Four Epochs

into fifteen hundred pages and gathered together a body of resources for

72

what became the third edition of my autobiography which I wrote later in the

twenty-first to twenty-fourth months of the Five Year Plan(2001-2006).

During this same period a feeling of approaching apocalypse was tending to

drown out humanist beliefs in history as the progressive development

towards a better world. Endtimes or apocalyptic thought and theory, of

course, is not new. Some argue that it was formulated for a popular audience

for the first time in 1970,(5) but I wont go into detail here on the evolution

of this line of thought which is really quite complex. Baháís, of course,

remained optimistic but often the battle tired the spirit and, in some cases, at

least in mine, turned that spirit to letter-writing. I would like to think that

readers will begin with an endless pile of words but end up with a world.

Perhaps it is a world which will endure, a trace from the twentieth century

and beyond into the twenty-first that will last forever.

_______________________________FOOTNOTES___________________

1 Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892-1910, trans: J. Greene and M. Norton,

WW Norton, NY, 1945, p. 12.

2 idem

3 idem

4 ibid.p.13.

73

5 John Sutherland, Apocalypse Now, Guardian Unlimited Books, June 2003

Ron Price

17 February 2003

PS. The genre that Henry Miller enjoyed writing most was the letter. Long

letters to close friends, wrote Mary Dearborn,(1) were his favourite pieces of

writing. I must add that I, too, have come to enjoy this form of writing much

more since retirement, but they are rare occurrences these long letters, if one

defines a long letter as, say, four typed pages, 2000 words, or more. The

attitude that many have in my time is: why write it if I can say it on the

telephone? Many are like famous Samuel Johnson who wrote letters with

great difficulty and reluctance. And although I take delight in conversation

over limited periods with some people, I am equally happy now to have little

to no conversation except with my wife. However fine, too, that my letters

may be, the greatest of lifes arts is the art of living.

-(1)Mary Dearborn, The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller,

Harper Collins, London, 1991, p.12.

I have read or browsed through many books of the collections of the letters

of famous and not-so-famous writers and have found them enlightening.

They have served to provide stimulating perspectives for my own work.

74

Keats, the nineteenth century poet, seems to be the most attractive of the

letter writers, at least for those like myself who write poetry. He seems

likeable, lovable, someone we would enjoy travelling with. But you would

have to get him young for he was dead at 26. Unlike Shakespeare or even

Jane Austin, who remain impersonal, elusive, inscrutable, enigmatic, we feel

we know Keats through his letters. He does not hide himself. My letters

clearly bring me closer to a Keats or an Emily Dickinson, than a

Shakespeare, although I know I shall never be in the league of any of these

great writers. Dickinson tended to blend poetry and prose in her letters and,

in the last decade this has been true increasingly of my letters. I strive to

fashion a lively interchange between poetry and prose and, as yet, I have

really only just begun this process with any effect. A cosmic and

cosmopolitan range in the written word is as evident in the literary

homebodies like Socrates, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson as in the

literary travelers like Xenophon, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.

Having been both a homebody and a traveller perhaps I might more easily

find that range.

Ceremony and necessity, vanity and routine often require something to be

written. To be able to disentangle oneself from these inevitable and several

75

perverters of epistolary integrity is not always possible. A letter is addressed

to a single mind of which some of the prejudices and partialities are known

and must therefore please. The pleasing process is not always by favouring

others, but sometimes by opposing them. If a man keeps his thoughts at a

level of generality in his letters he is safe; and most hearts are pure while

temptation is away. It is easy to awaken generous sentiments in privacy, to

despise death when there is no danger and to glow with benevolence when

there is nothing to be given. When such ideas are formed they are easily felt

and they sprinkle letters with their declarations There is, indeed, no

transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication

than epistolary intercourse. What we hide from ourselves,we do not show to

our friends.(Leslie Stephen, Samuel Johnson,MacMillan & Co., Ltd. NY,

1900).

I feel an immense kinship with that American philosopher and naturalist,

Henry David Thoreau. Much of my sense of kinship derives from my

awareness of my differences from him. He had a hunger, as John Burroughs

points out, for health and the wild, wilderness, wild men, Indians. He felt

close to the subtle spirits in this wilderness. He lived life delicately, daintily,

tenderly. Burroughs said he was unkind. By contrast, I see myself as kind,

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one of the kind Canadians 'Abdul-Bahá refers to in His immortal Tablets,

although my affinity for the wild and the wilderness is clearly not as strong

as Thoreaus, indeed, at the age of 60 it hardly exists. But I have his hunger,

although it expresses itself differently. It is an isolating hunger, as Thoreaus

hunger isolated him. My hunger is not for health or the wild but, rather, for

knowledge and civility. When younger, until the age of about forty, I

hungered for health. By my mid-fifties I hungered for solitude. In my late

teens and twenties I hungered for sex. After working in the garden, I hunger

for water. Since I eat a very light breakfast, by two in the afternoon I hunger

for lunch. Our hungers change with the time of day and the season, with the

stage of our life and our psychological needs.

By my years of middle adulthood, forty to sixty, knowledge became,

increasingly, my great desire. By sixty the symptoms of my bi-polar disorder

were, for the most part, treated but the story went on and I treat that story in

another place in this memoir. I yearned, too, for that quiet civility with

which genuine engagement with my fellow men could be enjoyed. It was a

yearning, though, which was quiet and possessed of an instinctive reticence.

Perhaps this reticence was due to a fatigue with much conversation and the

many traces of moral and intellectual laxity that not only stained my life but

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the name of the Faith I regarded as holy and precious. For, as Shoghi

Effendi stated so boldly at the start of the first Plan in 1937, the controlling

principle in the behaviour and conduct of all Baháís has implications for

modesty, purity....cleanmindedness...moderation...and the daily vigilance in

the control of one’s carnal desires. Any thorough examination of the last

fifty years of my life, 1953 to 2003, would reveal that I am far from casting

that sleeve of holiness over all in my life that has been created from water

and clay. I see myself as modest but not prudish but, sometimes, modesty

and moderation gave way to an excessiveness and a lack of control of sexual

thoughts, feelings and associations. This is a separate subject I cover in

more detail in my journal, my diary. But let me make a few general

comments on the subject of sex here.

On the subject of my sex life I put the matter into a general context with the

observation that for me, as for the famous autobiographers Pepys and

Boswell, no seduction, no sexual experience, was complete until I had

recorded its details in my diary or journal. What is a complete account for

me, of course, is in a class of its own and quite distinct from the accounts of

either Pepy’s or Boswell’s sexual proclivities. My sex life, quite apart from

my writing and the intellectual labor that has gone into it and however

stimulating it may be to the reader will be found revealed in my

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unexpurgated diaries published, if they ever are, long after my death. Much

of my behaviour in life I would define as cyclical and repetitive. My

dedicated toil in life, a toil that often led to successes of various kinds, was

often followed by an orgy. But it was an orgy of exhaustion, depression, a

deepening relationship with Thanatos and, sometimes anger, frustration &

disappointment. This was not always the case, but it was not possible to

avoid these words due to my bipolar disorder and the account of my

experience of this disorder presents a fuller picture of my life and one that is

far more complete and honest.

The record of my sexual life, however appetizing readers may find it, is

remarkably thin on the ground. Readers should not get their hopes up too

high as they contemplate a future reading of my posthumously published

diaries. In applying my customary powers of literary exposition to more than

half a century of sexual activity(12-64) with a thoroughness that leaves little

to the imagination would require more space here, inspite of what I often felt

to be its insufficiency, than I really want to devote to the subject. From my

earliest erotic enthusiasms in childhood and my loss of virginity in the arms

of my first wife on my wedding night at the age of twenty-three to my

surprisingly late-discovered masterbatory abilities in middle age, my sexual

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exploits are given the kind of detail that would satisfy the most ardent

voyeur, well, at least some ardent voyeurs. I leave readers with such

interests and the readers who acquire a taste for what I write in the region of

my erotic inclinations, with a reward at the end of the tunnel of my life. Stay

tuned, your persistence will yield its just deserts. My sexual achievements or

lack thereof, my career in fornication, like many of my forays into aspects of

life’s burgeoning variety of pursuits and however stimulating they may be

when well-written-up, will, it seems to me, in the end contribute little to

nothing to my literary reputation or an understanding of the pioneering life.

I was, like Henry Miller, enthralled by women.(Erica Jong in the Devil at

Large, 1993) This enthrallment is a story in itself and relatively little of that

story is found in my letters.

As the literature on personality disorders indicates, we all have certain

tendencies in the direction of various negative symptoms and adaptations, or

disorders as they are termed in the literature. After more than forty years of

the periodic study of psychology, I am aware of my tendencies toward some

of the major types of disorder: psychotic, neurotic and extravert and some of

their respective sub-types. This dark side of my personality I am more than a

little conscious of after 60 years of living. But my tendencies, my symptoms,

are all partial. Except for bipolar disorder, I do not fit into any pure type, any

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particular disorder, any full-blown personality disorder or characterization.

As I say, if I did possess any full-blown disorder, and there is no doubt I did

due to my bi-polar tendency, it is now, for the most part, ancient history but

still dragged into my modern world and those who are interested in this

disorder in my late adulthood can read of it in another place in my memoir.

How these tendencies, many and several, affected my letter-writing is

difficult to assess. I’m not sure how valuable such an assessment would be

and to do so here is beyond the scope of this analysis of my letter writing.

Sometimes my letters reveal a melancholy cast of mind or hide a personal

belief that I am a contempible animal. For, as Baháulláh wrote, we all have

our backs bowed by the burden of our sin and from time to time we need to

feel that our heedlessness has destroyed us. This need is particlarly apparent

when we say the Long Obligatory Prayer. Sometimes my letters reveal a

host of other characteristics: humour, delight, pleasure, joy, fun, insight and

understanding, et cetera. But whatever my letters reveal if they were

effective they needed to possess a sensitive understanding of the language

appropriate to each relationship. I strove to make my letters relaxed, nearly

colloquial and natural so as to establish a relationship with the correspondent

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comparable to that in private conversation. To put this another way, I tried to

write letters as I spoke.

The humour that was lacking in my young adulthood developed in my

middle adulthood as my sense of disillusionment and discouragement also

developed. Humour, wrote the celebrated Canadian humorist Stephen

Leacock, is a comforter which reconciles us to realities over ideals. This

comforter possesses a thread of melancholy and my letters reflected this in

my middle age and beyond, or so it seemed to me, as I became more aware

of my limitations and failures and as I exhibited a seeming kindly

contemplation of lifes sorrows and incongruities and as I also exhibited,

from time to time, that sense of utter futility that occasionally embraces the

most optimistic of our race.

I’d like to think that, at the other end of the emotional spectrum, my letters

could be read in the same way Katherine Suzannah Pritchard read those of

Miles Franklin: “Every literary nerve in me thrills to your lovely breezy way

of saying things….And it’s almost as good as a yarn with you to read one. I

just simmer and grin to myself when I do: with a sense of real contact with

you.” That’s what I’d like to think. I’d like to think, too, that others might

learn not to be too tedious in the exposition of whatever Gospel they may be

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espousing, particularly that associated with the two nineteenth century God-

men at the centre of the Baháí paradigm. But I am more inclined to think

these letters simply preserve a record of a life in the context of a period of

four epochs in the historical development of a new world Faith. Perhaps I

give my life and times a fresh and novel colouring; perhaps my writings will

enjoy a coterie of the worlds readers interested in the great experiment of

which I am but a part. Again, Id like to think so. But it is difficult to know.

In a world of mass entertainment, a diversified print and electronic media,

collections of letters dont rate highly on the scale of popular interest, as Ive

already said. Thats just a simple fact. A coterie of people, it seems to me,

may take an interest in these letters one day. One day in a world of say,

twelve billion, in which the Baháí Faith is playing an important role in a

future world Order, that coterie may be a significant number. We shall see.

These letters “hang there,” as Thomas Carlyle wrote of the letters of Oliver

Cromwell, “in the dark abysses of the Past: if like a star almost extinct, yet

like a real star; fixed, once a piece of the general fire and light of Human

life.” These letters also play some part in answering Carlyles key

biographical questions: how did the subject influence society, and how did

society influence the subject? My letters may indeed become extinct.

Certainly their present state of influence resembles extinction more than

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influence of any kind. The nine hundred letters of Cicero written in the

middle of the first century BC were one of the first, arguably the first, in

history to give us an understanding of the times. Of course he had, and his

society had, no telephone, fax, email, computer, et cetera, to convey

messages. The letter was, for perhaps two and a half millennia, much more

crucial as a genre of communication. Somewhere in the nineteenth century,

gradually, letters, like biographies, became much more human and revealing,

not like the wax figures they had been. After perhaps a century and a half of

this fresh wind, my letters join, add-onto this new tradition. Perhaps readers

will find here: the creative fact, the fertile fact, the engendering fact. One

can but hope. However much my life and my thinking have been focussed

on a single point, elaborated across a wide field of action and behaviour, I

would think my letters are a good illustration of the application, the

delineation, of this focus. During these four epochs there was so much

happening in the public and private spheres to fragment daily life. My

letters, it seems to me, provide a lens that magnifies many of my

autobiographical gestures and throw light on a life, a time and a religion in a

way that my general autobiography does not. So did Ciceros and, as famous

as he has been, now he is read only by a coterie.

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Signs of the continuous evolution of a lifelong scheme of devotion are

difficult to describe without appearing to be fanatical or obsessive or

unduely pious, in a world that has lost any interest in piety. Years even

decades of concentrated effort are easy to accummulate but the evidences of

that effort are not as easy to amass given the hurried, the frenetic,

excitements of modern society which militate against any pretensions of

devotion to a single purpose. Daily life, indeed, ones entire life, tends to be

fragmentary because we live in a perpetual hurry. And even when not in a

hurry we get inundated in our daily life by a host of usually disconnected,

sometimes interesting and stimulating but so frequently, if not always,

fragmentary events and happenings, news and entertainment. If a life of

devotion involves any serious writing as mine clearly does, the vast

accumulation of materials and the demand for exhaustive inquiry often

overpowers the potential and would-be-conscientious writer. Should he or

she go down the literary trail it often becomes difficult to maintain vivacity

and spontaneity. If writers can not bring the stars of the universe closer, if

they cannot wake their fellow human beings up, give them a certain morning

freshness and elan, some sparkle of understanding, they might be advised to

pursue other lines of work. Some letter writers make other subjects the

centre of their discussion. The letters of the poet Elizabeth Bishop are about

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loss. Each letter writer brings to the table his life and, altough I would like to

bring the universe closer and share sparkles of understanding, these lofty

goals are rarely attainable. One must settle for a mode and manner closer to

the earth, to everydayness, to the boredom and the chouder, as Paul Simon

put it in one of his songs. Elizabeth Bishops letters are certainly closer to the

earth and, when they sparkle, it is a sparkle of a talented and intellectually

sophisticated person. Still, the letters reveal an Elizabeth Bishop which she

allowed her friends to see. She proved herself a most attractive and

compelling friend. Her letters often focused on the everyday.

Elizabeth Bishop once said that she felt sorry for people who could not write

letters. I can’t say that I share Bishop’s feeling. I would not be able to keep

up with my correspondence even though most people who have been in my

life are not letter writers. Bishop also said she felt that writing letters was

like working without working. Yes, that is so for me, sometimes the work is

harder than others. If I shared Bishop’s feelings for non-letter writers, I

would feel sorry for most of the human race--and sometimes I do, but it is

for so many reasons. I’m not sure how many people want to read about the

fabric of a person’s life as conveyed in a letter; after more than half a

century of TV(1949-2009) and more than a century of movies(1895-2009) it

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seems to me people find out about the fabric of peoples lives in so many

ways. After 50 years of writing letters, I tend to the skeptical and slightly

cynical side about their value at least to most people. I hope I am wrong. It

is clear from Bishop’s imaginative and colorful correspondence that letter-

writing was a kind of release. And so it is for me.

For, as Lord Altrincham noted with some humour and some truth,

“autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less

reprehensible.” He could have added that the mundane nature of so much

that is daily life makes for a tedious story for much of the time, tedious

because so repetitive, so pervasive, so common, so quotidian. This may be

the reason some writers completely abandon writing about the personal; why

diaries in our age are rare and why letters and the study of them, especially

ones own--may in fact be unique!!

Here are two letters below taken somewhat at random from my collection.

Readers will not find here in my autobiography or on this BARL site much

of my letter collection, but I include these samples to illustrate various

themes. The first is written to a radio station program presenter for a

discussion program on a particular theme: the topic of early retirement. It

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seemed a fitting topic for, at the time of writing the letter, I had been retired

from my career for eighteen months. I strive to address both the universal

and the individual in my letters, both the quick and the dead as Dickinson

put it referring to the living souls and the dead of spirit, the quotidian and the

philosophical. I try to leave meaning unsettled or open-ended, organized but

not a simple step-by-step series of prose assertions. I often bow to

convention, to cliched phrases, like the ending of letters which are often

more conventional courtesies than content. Quoting from just four letters

will minimize the revelation of many of my unsuspected foibles,

weaknesses, inconsistencies and faults. Indeed, I like to think these letters

will not seriously diminish the admiration of readers for whatever gifts,

strengths and attainments I have been endowed. The admiration of readers

for whatever a writer writes is very difficult to assess in the earliest stages of

his public appearance, especially on a medium like the internet.

All letter writers have a landscape, a background, a mise-en-scene: perhaps

some great city, like Boswells historic London; or the city of the Covenant,

New York, like some early 19th century Bahais; or some rural milieux of

beauty like Wordsworths Lake District; or some intense social activity like

Evelyn Waughs twentieth-century London; or a world of travelling like D.H.

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Lawrence; or a particular correspondent as did Joseph Conrad; or some of

what the writer thinks and feels as was the case with Alexander Pushkin.

There is a little of many landscapes or backgrounds in my correspondence,

spread as it is over fifty years. I could, should it be my want, dwell on the

significance of landscape in much more detail than I have. For a half of my

life, some thirty years, for example, I lived within a mile of a lake, a bay or a

river. For another twenty years I drove with my family for an hour or less to

get to a beach, to a place I could swim. The beach became, during these

years, a centre of activity especially in the summer months, at least some of

the time. I could say much more here; I could write about the various city

landscapes; the tundra, the savanna, the temperate regions and their affect on

my life, the mutual interaction. I will conclude this all-to-brief discussion on

landscape with Emersons words: The difference between landscape and

landscape is small, but there is a great difference in the beholders.

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

6 Reece Street

George Town

Tasmania 7253

4 October 2000

Dear Rebecca

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The program Life Matters today, Wednesday October 4th, was on the

theme“Taking Time Out.” I won’t try to summarize all the points made by

the guests: Ester Buchholz, Margaret Murton and Gavin Smith and the many

callers discussing as they were, what one speaker called “the neurosis of our

time: a lack of aloneness.” I will briefly tell of my own experience here in

this letter. Fit in what you can when, and if, you read this letter.

Eighteen months ago I retired after 30 years as a teacher in primary,

secondary and post-secondary institutions. I was fifty-five and, with

community obligations outside my classroom in the evening and on

weekends, I felt ‘talked-and-listened-out.’ I felt I had had enough. I wanted

some time out. I wanted to give some time to what had become a personal, a

private, interest in reading and writing poetry. In the last 18 months I have

had six to ten hours a day given to this engaged, alone, solitary, stimulating

exercise.

The person who takes on such a ‘time-out’ over extended periods of time

needs to know themselves, though. I knew I had to cater to my social side. I

could not cut it all out or I’d get some kind of withdrawal symptoms. So I

spend time helping organizing the local seniors’ group; I have a radio

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program for half an hour a week; I am involved with the Baha’i community

and my wife’s family here in northern Tasmania. All of these activities

together do not involve a lot of time, but they give me that needed social

contact, that balance between solitude and being with others, which I find

essential to my comfortableness.

I would not go back to the work-a-day world. After a lifetime of talking and

listening, I knew at 55 I had had enough of what by then had felt like years

of full time engagement with others. I wanted time out to engage in interests

that did not involve people at all. I got it. After 18 months I feel the story has

just begun. And it has. I would like now to engage readers in the multiplicity

of experience my life in the Bahai community and in the many worlds that

life has taken me to since I became associated with it back in 1953. My

adventure over five decades has been an emotional and physical one, an

adventure of intellectual growth, of culture-shock and of creative

achievement. Can my letters express these experiences and engage readers

as a result?

Gerontologists are talking about our living to well over 100 if we take care

of ourselves. They talk, too, of the loneliness of the aged. I see no evidence

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of that emotional construct on my horizon but, who knows, I could be back

with people one day. For it’s possible that, at 55, my life is just half over.

While my mother was the dominant person in my life until my twenties; my

first wife in my twenties as well and my second wife the dominant person to

this day. Like the women in Lawrences life, these women in mine were all

of independent mind, resolute and highly articulate. My correspondence,

however, does not really deal with these important relationships; or does it

deal with other important relationships in my life, like those of my father,

my uncle and a small handful of academic Bahais, among others.

Admittedly, too, my letters come nowhere near the honesty and

completeness with which Lawrence disclosed his personality. I feel quite

confident that no one in the future will say of my letters, what James

Boulton said of the letters of Lawrence, namely, that they were masterpieces

of the letter-writing art and an unexampled expression of his creativity.

The following letter to the program presenters of an ABC Radio series Life

Matters is one of a type that I sent over the years to various people in the

media to drop a gentle note from the sweet-scented stream of eternity into

someones lap. It was a form of teaching I was able to do but, like so many

forms, it was always difficult to measure its effectiveness, its result.

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This next letter is one written to my family members thirty-one years after

leaving Canada, thirty-five years after leaving southern Ontario and nearly

forty years since I had seen any of them. Eight months before writing this

letter I did have a visit with my cousin, my mothers sisters son, David,

himself a retired teacher as well, and his wife, Barbara.

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

Dear Dave and Barb

Time seems to go by faster as you get older, you hear it said so often, and it

certainly seems to be the case. Ill soon be sixty and I assume, as long as I am

in good health and I have a range of interests, the years will spin by

irretrievably from my grasp as one writer put it. And so is this true of all of

us. And so the time has come again for the annual letter to what is for me

about a dozen or so friends and relatives, the periodic up-date of events in

this swiftly passing life. At one level not a lot seems to take place: the same

routines, habits and activities fill the days as they did this time last year. At

another level a great deal takes place. On the international and national

landscape the events continue to be of apocalyptic/ cataclysmic proportions

as they have been off and on it would seem since 1914--or, as the sociologist

Robert Nisbet argued persuasively , since about 500 BC. Mark Twain once

said that to write about everything that took place would make a mountain of

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print for each year. James Joyce produced several hundred pages to describe

one day in his book Ulysseys. Ill try to reduce the mountain of life to a small

hill or two in this email.

Chris and I have been here in George Town at the end of the Tamar River in

northern Tasmania for three years and three months. Daniel has been with us

and working at the Australian Maritime College as a research engineer for

two of these years. He is happier with his job now than he was in the first

year, although occasionally he applies for another job somewhere for

graduate engineers; Chris is not suffering from ill-health quite as much as

this time last year, having received some useful medication from her doctor

and treatment from an osteopath. Both Dan and Chris plug along battling

with the forces that destiny or fate, divine will or predestination, free will or

determinism, circumstance or socialization throw up for them to deal with

from day to day.

I feel as if I have completed the first stage of my final domestic training

program that qualifies me for shared-existence with Chris in matters relating

to hearth and home. I seem to have been a difficult student but, after nearly

four years of being under-foot we seem to have worked out a reasonable

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modus vivendi(those four years of Latin in high school were unquestionably

of some value). The in-house training had been rigorous, to say the least, but

I received a passing grade-which was all I was after! And now for the

second stage.

My step-daughters continue their work, Vivienne as a nurse in the ICU at the

Laun- ceston General Hospital(20 hrs/wk) and Angela in public relations for

an international firm centred in Bali. Thankfully Angela did not suffer from

the recent bombings in a place that had been seen(until the bombings)

somewhat paradisiacally in the Indian Ocean, although even Bali has had its

traumatic problems in the last few decades as a brief history of the place will

reveal. I wonder if there are any places in the world left which havent been

significantly touched by the changing landscape and the traumas of our

times. Angela travels for a real estate firm selling time-share apartments.

Lives seem to be busy, active things, for those you know well, those whose

lives are intertwined with your own and I could write chapter and verse on

all the comings and goings of family and various close friends. But I think

this will suffice for an annual letter.

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I continue writing, an activity which was one of the main reasons I retired at

the early age of 55. After nearly four years away from the work-a-day world,

I get the occasional magazine and journal article published(listed on the Net

in section 24 part (v) of my Website). Its all just smalltime stuff you might

call it, nothing to make me famous or rich, sad to say. My website is now

spread over 15 locations on the Inter- net. The simplest spot to locate my

material is at http://users.intas.net.au/pricerc or go to the Yahoo search

engine. You can also find me at the Poetry Superhighway. Then go to

Individual Poets Pages and type Ron Price. I also finished a book of some 80

thousand words on the poetry of a Canadian poet who passed away in

1993:Roger White.You can locate this book at http://bahai library.org/books/

white. Of course, much of this material may not interest you. Poetry is not

everyones game even if its spiced with lots of prose. Dont feel any

obligation to check it out, just if it interests you. It will give you an idea of

some of the stuff that goes on in my head, for what its worth. Other than

these Internet developments my day to day habits and activities are much the

same as last year at this time: walks, presenting a radio-pro- gram, 2 hours of

teaching/ week, two meetings(school/Baháí)/month, radio/TV programs to

take in, lots of reading, etc

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You may find my writing a little too subjective, introspective. Like Thoreau

I seem to be more interested in the natural history of my thought than of the

bird life, the flora and fauna that I find here in Tasmania. I read recently that

Thoreau took twelve years to identify a particular bird. I found that fact

comforting. I understand, for I have the devil of a time remembering the

names of the birds, the plants and the multitude of insects that cross my path

and my horizon from month to month. But what I lack, what interest is

deficient with respect to the various forms of plant and animal life here in

the Antipodes, I make up for in my study of the varied humanities and social

sciences. In the three decades of my teaching career I have acquired, if I

acquired nothing else, a passion for certain learnings, certain fields of study.

My study is littered, I like to think ordered, by files on: philosophy,

psychology, media studies, ancient and medieval history, modern history,

literature, poetry, religion, inter alia. I move from one field to another from

day to day and week to week and I can not imagine ever running out of gas,

of enthusiasm, interest. Thus, I occupy my time. If J.D. Salinger is right in

his claim that there’s a marvellous peace in not being published it looks like

much peace lies in waiting for me.

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One delightful event this year which Id like to comment on was a visit with

my cousin Dave Hunter, his wife Barb as well as Arlene, the wife of another

cousin, John Cornfield. I had not seen any of my family members for some

forty years and we had a day in Melbourne travelling hither and yon, eating

delicious meals and getting caught up on many years of life. I found I had an

appreciation for my family that had got lost in the mists of time living as I

have been since my mid-twenties first in the far-north of Canada and then on

a continent far removed from North America. There is nothing like forty

years absence to make the heart grow fonder and give one a fresh

appreciation for ones family.

As you all get stuck into winter(at least those of you in Canada who receive

this email), summer is just beginning here with temperatures going into the

mid-twenties in the daytime occasionally on the hottest days and the low-to-

mid teens at night. This is about as hot as it gets in any part of the summer in

this section of northern Tasmania. I look forward to your annual letters again

this year in the weeks ahead and to the news from your life and your part of

the world. Am happy to write again in another email to anyone wanting to

write occasionally in more detail on whatever subject but, if that does not

eventuate, I look forward to writing to you again at the end of 2003. I trust

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the up-coming season and holiday is a happy one and the Canadian winter(or

the Australian summer, as the case may be) is not too extreme this

yearGreetings and salutations.

For Ron, Chris and Dan Price

PS Ill send this a little early again this year to avoid the Christmas rush of

letters/cards and emails.

My letters, it seems to me, do not have that naturalness and general

amiability that the poet Matthew Arnold possessed. He was endowed with a

sunny temper, a quick sympathy and inexhaustible fun. I have some of these

qualities and more now that I do not have to struggle with a bi-polar

disorder, the endless responsibilities of job and a large Baháí community.

Arnold was endowed with self-denial; indeed it was a law of his life; he

taxed his ingenuity to find words of encouragement when he wrote letters. I

do, too, but I don’t tax myself too much. They come quite naturally really,

but self-denial is not a quality that I feel particularly well endowed with.

Perhaps I was once, but less so in recent years. As the years have gone on

into late middle age, I have slowly discovered, as William James put it, “the

amount of saintship that best comports” with what I believe to be in my

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powers and consistent with my “truest mission and vocation.” We were both

men who were, for the most part, free from bitterness, rancour and envy and,

it seems to me, this is reflected in our letters. But the inhibition of instinctive

repugnances, perhaps one of saintship’s most characterisitc qualities, is

difficult to determine by an examination of a person’s letters.

I take much pleasure from most of my letter writing which obviously the

poet Samuel Johnson did not. I don’t think my letters have that “easy power”

which those of Henry James possessed. Indeed, so much of their content, it

seems to me, is repetitious. In a large collection of letters, like a large

collection of life, repetition it seems to me, is unavoidable. I am encouraged,

though, by some of the remarks of language philosopher Roland Barthes. He

says that readers learn how to acquire the experience of those people they

are reading. Rather than being consumers of my letters, then, they become

producers. This is partly because literature, of which letters and

autobiography are but a part, takes in all human experience, ordering,

interpreting and articulating it. Readers learn to set aside many of the

particular conditions, concerns and idiosyncrasies which help define them in

everyday affairs.

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And so I have hope that what may be for many readers a banal collection of

decades of letters, may be for others a body of print that will arouse a

response in the reading self, the reading system, the meaning, the identity,

system, of others. Perhaps, too, that response will be something quite

significant, something that their interpretive principles allow them to see and

that even a relaxation of cultivated analytical habits which often happens

while reading a letter may help them to see. Of course, whatever reasonable

arguments I present, whatever challenges to magnanimity I raise, they are,

again, as William James puts it so succinctly, “folly before crocodiles.”

Here is an introduction I wrote to a collection of letters to Baha’i institutions

in Canada going back to 1979. By 1979 I had been an international pioneer

for eight years and a pioneer for seventeen. This letter I keep in a two-

volume, two two-ring binder, set to institutions and individuals in Canada.

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 4.1

Who knows what will become of all these letters, now contained in some

fifteen volumes of assorted sizes and contents. “Letters enabled Emily

Dickinson to control the time and place of her relationships,” writes James

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Lowell in his introduction to a volume of her letters.1 I’m sure they have a

similar function for me; I have become even more conscious of this as the

email grew and developed throughout the 1990s and became a more

important part of my life and as my world of employment became a world of

retirement filled as it was with writing and reading. I do not keep a copy of

all my emails, only the main ones. Since so many emails are of the short and

snappy variety, basically a form of entertainment, the funny and the wee-

wisdom, as I call them, the variety which exercises that control which

Lowell speaks of in a light way, an important part of this new variety of my

correspondence I simply do not keep a record of in my files. I suppose,

though, that since they are never recorded in the first place, it will never be

missed.2

Lord Melbourne, writing about George Crabbe, indicated that “I am always

glad when one of those fellows dies, for then I know I have the whole of him

on my shelf.”3 There is certainly a type of person, perhaps many, a variety

of selves, a type of prose, that is unique to the letter. I sensed I had

something of Roger White when I had even the few letters he wrote to me in

one file on my shelf. The sombre and weird outlook in Dickinson’s poetry,

by no means the prevailing condition of her mind, is not pre- sent in her gay

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and humorous letters. For those inclined to judge White too harshly or

strongly from some of his poetry, if they read his letters, they would get

quite a different picture of that wonderful poet. I leave it to future

commentators to evaluate this dichotomy between my correspondence and

the other genres of my writing, should they wish to do so. No amount of

imaginative activity can recreate a genuine experience of things and letters

convey the timbre and tone, the texture and the reality of genuine

experience. The necessary narrative ability in writing a letter to order and

unify the past, present and future, coloured by words and the imaginative

function that dances with them seems to be a rare and creative gift. But, as

Sharon Cameron notes in her analysis of Emily Dickinsons letters, they may

tell us more about postures that replace relationships than the relationships

themselves however creative and imaginative they may be.

Letters at one time in history had a function, at least in the more literate

quarters, that is conveyed in the following quotation from David Marrs

introduction to a collection of Patrick White’s letters:

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Are there no letters? There’s nothink I like better than a read of a good

letter. Look and see, Mrs. Goosgog, if you can’t find me a letter. I’m

inclined to feel melancholy at this time of night.4-The Ham Funeral

The TV, video and the DVD proably have this entertaining function now,

largely replacing any function the letter may have had to keep people

amused. As I indicated above, the letter may even have been on the verge of

extinction had it not been for the email’s resurrecting role. As the 1990s

progressed, the email came to dominate the landscape and replace the letter.

With the world population doubling in these three epochs, too, I’m sure the

letter/email is now in safe hands, even if nine-tenths of the production is not

worth saving or pondering over after an initial read.

And so here, in this small volume, the reader will find my correspondence (i)

with the Canadian magazine Baha’i Canada going back to 1985, fourteen

years after I arrived in Australia as an international pioneer, (ii) with the

International Pioneer Committee as far back as 1979 and (iii) from National

Convention communications with pioneers overseas from 1990. With its

companion Volume 4.2 any interested reader will get a correspondence from

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Canada to and from a pioneer overseas in the third, forth and one day soon

fifth epochs of the Formative Age.

Perhaps at a future time I will provide a more extended analysis of this

collection, but for now this material is at least placed in a deserving context

for future readers.

2 See my collection of unpublished essays. they are now in the Baha’i

Academic Resource Library. I have written a 2000 word essay on the

“funnies and wee-wisdoms” email style.

3 Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words, Oxford UP, NY, 1996, p.205.

4 David Marr, Patrick White’s Letters, Random House, 1994, p.vi.

Ron Price

10 February 2000

Such are the introductory words to another volume of letters, one of many

introductons written in the fourth decade of this pioneering venture.

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Again on this subject of the letter let me add this short essay in relation to a

special type of letter, the job application, which was arguably the dominant

form of letter I wrote during all my pioneering and job-seeking life, 1961-

2003.

INTRODUCTION TO FILE OF JOB APPLICATION LETTERS

LETTER WRITING 2 JOBS A WEEK FOR 42 YEARS JOB HUNTING

1961-2003

The information and details in my resume, a resume I no longer use in the

job-hunting world, should help anyone wanting to know something about

my personal and professional background, my writing and my life. This

resume might be useful for the few who want to assess my suitability for

some advertised or unadvertised employment position which, I must

emphasize again, I never apply for anymore. I stopped applying for full-time

jobs six years ago in 2001 and part-time ones in 2003. I also left the world of

volunteer activity, except for work in one international organization,

claiming as it does to be the newest of the world's great religions of history,

the Baha’i Faith, two years ago. The age of 63, then, sees me self-employed

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as a writer-poet. I gradually came to this role in the years after I left full-time

employment in 1999, eight years ago.

Not being occupied with earning a living and giving myself to 60 hours a

week in a job and many other hours to community activity marked a turning

point for me so that I could devote my time to a much more extensive

involvement in writing. Writing is for most of its votaries a solitary,

hopefully stimulating but not always pleasurable leisure-time-part-time-full-

time pursuit. In my case in these early years of my late adulthood, writing is

full-time about 60 hours a week.1 I have replaced paid employment and

activity with people in community with a form of work which is also a form

of leisure, namely, writing and reading.

Inevitably the style of one's writing and what one reads is a reflection of the

person, their experience and their philosophy. On occasion, I set out this

experience, this resume, in an attachment to this brief essay, this

introductory statement on the history of my job application process.2 If, as

Carl Jung writes, we are what we do, then some of what I was could and can

be found in that attachment. That document may seem over-the-top as they

say these days since it now goes on for more than 20 pages, but for nearly

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half a century of various forms of employment, years in the professional and

not-so-professional job world produced a great pile of stuff/things. As I say,

I make it available to readers of this account, when appropriate, and I update

it to include many of the writing projects I have taken on during these first

years of my retirement from full-time, part-time and volunteer activity.

The resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement, the

document, the entry ticket which has opened up the possibilities of another

adventure, another pioneering move to another town, another state or

country, another location, work in another organization, another portion of

my life. I'm sure that will also be the case in the years of my late

adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++) should, for some reason, movement to

yet another place or, indeed, from place to place be necessary or desired. But

this seems unlikely as I go through these early years of late adulthood and

head into the last stages of my life.

In the last three years which are the first of my late adulthood, a period from

60 to 80; and in these early years of my retirement(1999 to 2007), I have

been able to write to a much greater extent than I had ever been able to do in

those years of my early and middle adulthood from 1965 to 1999 when job,

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family and the demands of various community projects kept my nose to the

grindstone as they say colloquially. And now, with the final unloading of

much of the volunteer work I took on from 1999-2005, with my last child

having left home in 2005 and a more settled home environment than I’ve

ever had, the years of late adulthood beckon bright with promise. My resume

reflects this shift in my activity-base.

The process of frequent moves and frequent jobs which was my pattern for

forty years is not everyone's style, modus operandi or modus vivendi. Many

millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and their life's

adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines of a relatively

small place and, perhaps, a very few jobs in their lifetime. Physical

movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth, nor is a

long list of jobs, although some degree of inner change, some inner shifting

is just about inevitable, or so it seems to me, especially in these recent

decades. For many millions of people during the years 1961-2003, my years

of being jobbed, the world was their oyster, not so much in the manner of a

tourist, although there was plenty of that, but rather in terms of working lives

which came to be seen increasingly in a global context.

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This was true for me during those years when I was looking for amusement,

education and experience, some stimulating vocation and avocation, some

employment security and comfort, my adventurous years of pioneering, my

applying-for-job days, the more than forty years from 1961 to 2003. My

resume altered many times, of course, during those forty plus years is now

for the most part, as I indicated above, not used in these years of my

retirement, except as an information and bio-data vehicle for interested

readers, 99% of whom are on the internet at its plethora of sites.

This document, what I used to call a curriculum vitae or CV, is a useful

backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry, although

some poets regard their CV, resume, bio-data, lifeline, life-story, personal

background as irrelevant to their work. For they take the position we are not

what we do or, to put it a little differently and a little more succinctly, "we

are not our jobs." I frequently use this resume at various website locations on

the Internet when I want to provide some introductory background on

myself, indeed, I could list many new uses after forty years of only one use--

to help me get a job, make more money, enrich my experience add some

enrichment to my life, etcetera. The use of the resume saves one from having

to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. One doesn't have to say it all again in

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resume after resume to the point of utter tedium as I did so frequently when

applying for jobs, especially in the days before the email and the internet. A

few clicks of one’s personal electronic-computer system and some aspect of

life’s game goes on or comes to a quick end at the other end of the electronic

set of wires, as the case may be.

During those job-hunting years 1961-2003 I applied for some four thousand

jobs, an average of two a week for each of all those years! This is a

guesstimation, of course, as accurate a guesstimation as I can calculate for

this forty year period. The great bulk of those thousands of letters involved

in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, quite exhausting and frustrating

a process, I did not keep. I did keep a small handful of perhaps half a dozen

of all those letters in a file in the Letters: Section VII, Sub-Section X of my

autobiographical work, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Given the thousands

of hours over those forty years devoted to the job-hunting process; given the

importance of this key to the pioneering venture that is my life; given the

amount of paper produced and energy expended; given the amount of

writing done in the context of those various jobs,(3) some of the

correspondence seemed to warrant a corner in the written story of my life.(4)

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It seemed appropriate, at least it was my desire, to write this short statement

fitting all those thousands of resumes into a larger context. The things we do

when we retire!(5)

____________________________FOOTNOTES______________________

(1) This involves reading, posting on the internet, developing my own

website and writing in several genres.

(2) My resume is only included with this statement when it seems

appropriate, on request or in my autobiography.

(3) Beginning with the summer job I had in the Canadian Peace Research

Institute in 1964, I wrote an unnumbered quantity of: summaries, reports,

essays, evaluations, subject notes, inter alia, in my many jobs. None of that

material has been kept in any of my files and, over 40 years, it amounted to

literally millions, an uncountable number, of words.

(4) The Letters section of my autobiography now occupies some 25 arch-

lever files and two-ring binders and covers the period 1960 to 2007. I

guesstimate the collection contains about 3000 letters. This does not include

these thousands of job applications and their replies, thousands of emails

now and an unnumbered quantity of in-house letters at places where I was

employed. I have kept, as I say above, about half a dozen to a dozen of these

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letters and none of the approximately 10,000 documents I wrote in the years

1961 to 2003.

Note: Since about 1990 thousands of emails have been sent to me and

replies have been written but, like the job application, most have been

deleted from any potential archive. For the most part these deleted emails

seem to have no long term value in an archive of letters. They were deleted

as quickly as they came in. Of course there are other emails, nearly all of the

correspondence I have sent and received since about 1990 to 1995 which

would once have been in the form of letters, is now in the form of emails.

They are kept in my letter-files. (See the internet site 'Bahá'í Library Online'

and the 'Personal Letters' section for an extended discussion of this aspect of

my life: writing letters.)

__________________________________

That's all folks!

Writing in a different vein, making comparisons and contrasts between my

letters and those of other writers could occupy a book if I so desired. But I

shall be brief here. I shall make some remarks about Robert Frosts letters,

writing as he was at the beginning of the evolution of Bahai administration

in the USA. Randall Jarrell says that Robert Frosts letters unmask him at

least partially. They also show that his life was as unusual as his poetry. Im

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not so sure that is true of me and my life. It is very hard to judge your own

work and your life. Jarrell also says that Frost was very concerned to know

what others thought of his work and whether he was any good.1 This subject

of the reactions of others to my work, particularly my poetry, also interests

me, but I know that this is always an unknown land filled with so many

different reactions from total indifference to great enthusiasm. I must leave

the evaluation of my letters to future readers. For I cant imagine any interest

being shown in my letters except perhaps when I am so old as not to care a

jot or a tittle what people think and that will, of course, require the rapid

evolution of the Bahai system in society. And that is very difficult to gauage

in the decades ahead, say, up to 2044 when I will be 100 years of age and the

Bahai Era two centuries old.

Now that I have passed out of the shadow of decades of manic-depression,

or the bi-polar tendency as it is now called, thanks to two medications:

lithium carbonate and fluvoxamine; now that I have passed out of the

shadow of a working-meetings-talk-and-listen week of 50 to 60 hours, there

is an emotional steadiness to my everyday experience that generates, that

provides, a subtle and a quiet exquisiteness that augers well for the years

ahead and for the writing program that I am presently embarked upon. Even

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at my weakest and most exhausting moments which in the past were often

filled with the wishes of thanatos, the depths of depression can not be

visited. It is as if there is a wall of emotional protection that won’t let my

spirit descend into the depths, even though death is sometimes wished for

late at night, from midnight to dawn, out of a certain tedium vitae and a

complex of factors Im not sure I fully understand myself. William Todd

Schultz, in his analysis of the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, wrote that

wishing to die can connote a wish to be rid of the superegos tormenting

presence. It can be paired with an uncompromising sense of duty. The

lacuna of death is actually preferred to the anguish of living under the

scrutiny of an endlessly demanding internal judge. There is some of this in

my experience of thanatos but, after more than forty years of experiencing

this feeling of wishing to die, I think it has more to do with my chemistry

than psychology and more to do with the id than the superego.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine what really happened in life,

as distinct from simply what the evidence obliges me to believe. What is

known in ones life or in history is never fixed, finished or independent. Our

life, like history itself, is created, revived, re-enacted, re-presented again and

again in our minds eye. All autobiographers can do, or their fathers the

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historians, is to shape the rudimentary collection of ideas about the multi-

coloured and multi-layered narrative of life into an intelligible idiom. Some

of the events are understood better than when they happened, when they

were lived, and some are not. Some are completely forgotten and some one

goes over in ones mind ad nauseam. Some become part of the great mystery

that is life and some become part of the great foam and chaff that disappears

on the shore of the sea. Some of my life can fit into the model, the

framework, I give to it. Some can not be fitted into any pattern, any grand

design or sweeping theme, no matter how I chop and analyse the

experiences. Whatever unity and pattern there is, I must construct myself; it

is I who confer any novel coherence onto the whole, any shifts of direction

in lifes expression, any understanding on the changes and chances of the

world; it is I who will write about the passing day, the trivial, the necessary,

the distracting bits of infill that accompany my life as the universe moves

through its incredible journey through space and time.

My relationship with my wife is more comradely and affectionate, more

united, after years of difficulties, after nearly forty years of difficulties in

two marriages. We are more accepting of each other’s peculiarities,

shortcomings and eccentricities. There is lots of space between us as we

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share the solitude of life, as Rilke describes it in his Letters and there is, too,

a fresh spark of delight that accompanies the familiarity. I could write

extensively about my wife, so important is she to this entire story. But were I

to do so it would lead to prolixity. So, instead, I will write about her from

time to time as the occasion arises in what has become a 2500 page book.

Id like to insert four poems here and depart somewhat from the epistolary

theme. A poem of Emily Dickinson is timely as the opening poem, timely in

relation to all the sad aspects of the past which she says can “silence” us, if

we give them too much of our time, if we “challenge” them. Dickinson, who

writes a very useful juxtaposition of prose and poetry in her letters, prose

that opens into poetry and poetry that opens into prose, writes:

That sacred Closet when you sweep--

Entitled “Memory”--

Select a reverential Broom--

And do it silently.

‘Twill be a Labour of surprise--

Besides Identity

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Of other Interlocutors

A probability--

August the Dust of that Domain--

Unchallenged--let it lie--

You cannot supersede itself.

But it can silence you.

And in a short poem that talks of her desire for a fairer house for her

expression than prose alone could build, she writes:

I dwell in Possibility--

A fairer House than Prose--

More numerous for Windows--

Superior--for Doors--

I like that attitude to letters that Dickinson describes. Her letters construct

possibility. I like, too, that attitude to the past that Dickinson describes so

succinctly in the above poem. There is a reverence, a sacredness, to memory,

a need to let it lie in its august state, a recognition that it is a source of our

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identity, a need for silence while following its paths and always the

possibility that it can take over your life if you let it and, of course, often you

do. For, however sacred it may be, there is an enormous tangle to our days, a

tangle, as Germaine Greer describes it, “of telling, not telling, leading,

misleading, allowing others to know, concealing things from others,

eavesdropping, collusion, being frank and honest, telling lies, half-truths,

white lies, letting out some of our story now, some of it later, some of it

never.

“Pure autobiographies are written,” wrote Friedrich Von Schlegel, “by those

fascinated by their own egos as was Rousseau; or by authors of a robust or

adventuresome self-love as was Cellini; or by born historians and writers

who regard their life as material for future historians and writers; or by

pedantic minds who want to order their lives before they die and need a

commentary on their life.” I suppose there is some of me in each of these

characterizations of the autobiographer. I might add the following caveat of

the famous New York Times journalist James Reston who once said: “I do

not think thinking about yourself is a formula for happiness.”If he is right

then I am far from discovering that formula.

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Let me include two poems about this autobiographical process because, it

seems to me, the process is as important as the content of autobiography. It

may be that for some readers, my poetry and not my letters, will be more

useful to their intellectual and emotional sensibilities. There may be some,

too, who will be concerned about the possibilities and the impression created

by a too liberal use of the effacing pencil by editors. For this laissez-faire

age and all its liberal eccentricities and effusions may not last forever. My

letters, with all their editorial shortcomings, of which I willingly take my full

share right at the source in various ways, constitute the nearest approach to a

narrative of my life if one does not have the autobiography,any biography

that is in time produced, and my poetry.

HONEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Kevin Hart, a poet who lives in Australia, says that writing poetry is about

retrieving something you have lost. When you write a poem you lose that

thing again, but you find it by writing about it--indirectly. This indirection

involves, among other things, finding how to write about this lost person,

place or thing in your life.1 One thing I find I lose frequently and have to

retrieve, recreate, find again in a new, a fresh way, a way with hopefully

more understanding than when I last passed by, is history, mine and all that

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is the worlds. I need a narrative, a chronological, base to bring out the truth

of the past; I need silence to contemplate the sources of inspiration and

know- ledge; I need to be able to tell a good story in my poetry for this is

what will give it enduring literary worth. A good story, it seems to me, is

one thats a little too complicated, twisted and circumlocuitous to be easily

encapsulated in a newspaper or television story. Oliver Goldsmith once said,

the most instructive of all histories, of all stories, would be each mans honest

autobiography.2 That may be true but it depends on just how the story is

told. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Kevin Hart, Poetica, ABC Radio National,

2:05-2:45 pm, 3 November 2001;and 2MarkS.Phillips,Reconsiderations on

History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of

Eighteenth-Century Britain, The Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.57,

No.2, pp.297-316

Can we have a dialogue

with all that is and would be?

Can we enjoy a special happiness

in the energy of contemplation,

honoured as we are

with the two most luminous lights

in either world?

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Can we work

with this structure and this Plan.

travelling as we do

or staying put in this one place?

Two great tendencies

seem to fill the mind:

mystery and analysis

before the ever-varying splendour

and the embellishment of grace

from age to age.

Ron Price

3 November 2001

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

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FEVER

Price’s attitude to his poetry was not unlike that of Sylvia Plath’s. He saw

himself as an artisan. He was an artisan with an idea. All of his poems began

with an idea, a concept, a something; at worst the beginning of a poem was

what Roger White called a poor connection on a telephone line. But it was a

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connection. Sometimes the connection was sharp and clear. He was happy to

flow down whatever river the water was willing to go down, to make

whatever product he could make, as long as it exhausted all his ingenuity in

the process, as long as the water flowed to the sea becoming part of that

great body of life. Sometimes Price’s poetry was confessional, showed the

indictment of immediate experience. Some of his work was what Robert

Lowell once described, in reference to the poetry written in the last year of

Plath’s life, as the autobiography of a fever. Sometimes Price would

disappear into his poem and become one with it. In poetry Price found his lie

could defeat the process of easy summary. -Ron Price with thanks to Stanley

Plumly, “What Ceremony of Words,” Ariel Ascending: Writings About

Sylvia Plath, editor, Paul Alexander, Harper & Row, NY, 1985, pp.13-17.

You were always an intruder, then,

in the natural world, self-conscious,

uneasy, an unreal relation to the grass,

better to withdraw, you thought,

and did, right out of it into oblivion.1

I’ve earned my place, especially now,

after all these years; there’s a sacredness

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here and in the grass; there’s a glory

in this day, the day in which the fragrances

of mercy have been wafted over all things2

and there is the in-dwelling God

to counter the scorn, contempt,

bitterness and cynicism

that fills the space and time

of so many of the spaces

of modern life.

Part of the entire stream, the river of life;

part of a global sanctification,

far from any emotional cul-de-sac,

any bell jar, close to truth’s irrefutable

and exciting drama, but far, far

from the Inaccessible, the Unsearchable,

the Incomprehensible: no man can sing

that which he understandeth not.3

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I belong here, Sylvia,

in this incredible universe.

I was just getting launched

when you were bowing out;

you’d been trying to bow out since 1953(4)

when I’d just breathed the first words

and the Kingdom of God on earth

had begun in all its glorious unobtrusiveness.

1 Sylvia Plath’s suicide in 1962

2 Baha’u’llah, Tablet of Carmel.

3 Baha’u’llah, Baha’i Prayers, p.121.

4 Plath’s first attempt at suicide was in 1953.

Ron Price

23 February 2000

I’d like to think that one day I might have some of the experience that

Thomas Carlyle had back in 1866, as the very outset of a new Revelation

that Carlyle had absolutely no awareness of in the England of his home. In

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that year, two months after the death of his wife, he was reading some of her

letters from the year 1857. He said he found in those dear records a piercing

radiancy of meaning. Carlyle wanted his own letters preserved as a record of

his life so that his record would be as full as possible.

Carlyle writes eloquently concerning the value of letters, the careful

preservation of them, the authentic presentation of them and an adequate

elucidation of them by future critics. In this age of speed, of the email, of the

burgeoning of communication in all its forms, I hesitate to wax enthusiastic

about the value of letters. Instead I simply leave them for a future generation

and wait to see what those mysterious dispensations of Providence will

bring. So much of life is waiting. Indeed, as one definition of faith I always

liked put it: faith is the patience to wait.

For a perspective on this theme of faith I conclude this chapter with a letter

and a poem, one of the few poems I have written thanks to Emily Dickinson

which I feel has been successful. She was a great letter-writer, a great

sufferer and an enigmatic person which, in the end, I think we all are.

ANGELS

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The unseen heroism of private suffering surpasses that to be found on any

visible battlefield...the lonely soul’s unnoticed though agonized struggle

with itself....the struggle for higher life within the least believer partakes of

the same basic ingredients as the most heroic....The ordinary self must

respond to the dull pain at the heart of its present existence. -With thanks to

Benjamin Lease and Geoffrey Nash in Emily Dickinson’s Readings of Men

and Books, MacMillan, London, 1990, p.69 and “The Heroic Soul and the

Ordinary Self” Baha’i Studies, Vol.10, p.28 and 25, respectively.

Success is counted sweetest

when life has given all,

even if in bits and pieces

amidst its ever-present call.

A nectar goes right into

the marrow of the bone

as if destroying cancer

in the centre of one’s home.

There is an outer victory;

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‘tis measured every day,

tho so frequently its defeat

that faces us when we pray.

Then there is what’s inner;

few can define its charms,

slowly distant strains of triumph

burst free of all alarms.

All those many losses

on all those battlefields

proceed this plumed procession,

a rank of angels heals.

Ron Price

29 October 1995

And so, at the end of several thousand letters, at the end of all the battles and

the losses, I anticipate that there will be a rank of angels who will, as Abdul-

Bahá puts it in so many different ways in His Memorials of the Faithful, be

there as I am plunged into the ocean of light. And there, lapped in the

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waters of grace and forgiveness I shall review my days on this earthly plane

which passed as swiftly as the twinkling of a star. I trust I will be able to

recall that I made my mark at what was a crucial turning point of a juncture

in human history the like of which never came again in the story of human

civilization. Will I be able to recall, at that future time, a time beyond time in

that Undiscovered Country, deeds that have ensured for me celestial

blessings? Will there be regrets and remorse? Will letters continue to be

written in that place? Who knows!

Here is a letter, the penultimate letter to those colleagues I worked with in

the teaching profession in Perth sent eighteen months after I left the

classroom and at the start of my fortieth year of pioneering, written from

Tasmania where I began the years of my retirement.

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

8 September 2000

G’day from Tasmania!

It has been nearly a year since I wrote to you folks at the Thornlie Campus

of the SEMC of Tafe but, since I have been thinking recently of the place

where I spent more than ten years teaching, I felt like writing. John Bailey,

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now a retired Tafe teacher, writes occasionally, as do several of the Baha’is

and others that Chris and I got to know in Perth. Sometimes we get a phone

call and, on one occasion, a visit from a student. So we keep in touch in one

way or another. Most emails and letters end, though, within the first few

years after moving from a town or city. Such are the perils of living in two

dozen towns over your adult life. There was, though, one chap I wrote to for

a dozen years from 1980 to 1992 and we never even met. He was a poet who

lived in Israel at the time and passed away in his early sixties, in 1993.

It has been 18 months since teaching my last class in Human Services and

12 months since my wife, Chris, and I moved to George Town in Tasmania.

Time flies! I’m glad I pulled the plug when I did at the ripe old age of fifty-

five. The time was right for me. It felt right in leaving and the first 18

months have confirmed that was the right decision. Twenty-nine years in the

game was enough for me. Centrelink and the several private employment

providers don’t put any significant pressure on you here in northern

Tasmania, a region of high unemployment. The concept of ‘mutual

obligation’ has not resulted in me taking on any jobs I don’t want. I have a

Web Page which is considered ‘an embryonic business’ by Centrelink; I also

work for a home tutoring organization in Victoria and am the President of

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the George Town School for Seniors. The total time per month, in recent

months, on all of these ‘exercises’ together is about two to three hours. Of

course, in addition to the above, I must apply for 3 jobs/fortnight and that

takes, roughly, two hours a week of various forms of paper-schuffling. It is a

pleasing change from the mountains of marking and endless talking and

listening.

When I left the classroom in early April last year I was really emotionally

worn-out, in ‘emotional labour,’ I think was the term I came across on a

Four Corners program about Call Centres I saw a few weeks ago. It was not

just a fatigue with teaching but, it would appear in retrospect, a fatigue with

a range of other social obligations I was involved with in Perth. Wall-to-wall

talking and listening. Now, after 18 months, I have just enough social

contact to satisfy my needs for sociability and enough time in solitude to

cater to that other side of me. I have a weekly radio program on the local

community radio station which I run for the Baha’is of Launceston; and

there are activities in the Baha’i community in Tasmania to keep me in touch

with humanity and prevent me from becoming the total hermit which part of

my personality seems to need at the moment. I write lots of poetry and

prose, read lots of books, walk 45 minutes every day and argue more with

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my wife, who has been going through meno- pause and giving me the

biggest challenge of my early time of retirement.

George Town is a town of about 8000 people. I look out my lounge room

window (the whole wall is window) and can see the Tamar River, the Bass

Strait and the Asbestos Mtns(soon to be renamed). Winter temperatures go

down to zero to five at the low end and ten to fifteen in the day. Things are

warming up now in the early days of spring, but won’t get to the high

temperatures of Perth, perhaps thirty degrees once or twice during the whole

summer. We are half an hour from Launceston and other critical points on

the Tamar River where my wife’s family lives. My family, consisting now

only of cousins and their children in Canada, might as well be on another

planet. One perfunctory letter a year is the only contact left now. Moving

many thousands of miles from home, after thirty years, tends to limit

intimacy in most cases. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, only to a

point, I guess.

I do not miss teaching, although I enjoyed it immensely for most of the time

I was in Perth. I get my kicks from writing and reading, a lot of little things,

and the slower pace of life. I think one needs to get some

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intellectual/psychological/emotional sub- stitute for whatever one gets from

the teaching profession, if one is not to hanker after it when it’s gone. Of

course, we are all different and must work out our own game plan, so to

speak.

I have been thinking of Thornlie Tafe, where I spent ten pretty intense years,

in the last week or so when I’ve been out for my walks in the bush near my

home here in George Town, and so I decided to write. If any of you feel like

writing do so; I’d love to hear from you. But I know you are all busy and

getting in gear for the last term of another year. After living in so many

towns since I left my home town in 1962, I find the places I have lived in

become a little like chapters in a book, slices of memory.

Time moves us all on, whether peripatetic creatures like myself or more

sedentary types who live and die in the same city. I have happy memories of

Thornlie from 1989 to 1999; one leaves a little of oneself wherever one

dwells. And so I write this letter.

I wish you all well in your own careers and in your personal lives. May you

all be survivors and, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, if you can’t find much

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happiness perhaps you can settle for measures of pleasure that you can tease

out of existence. I will enclose 3 or 4 poems to that end. Cheers!

Ron Price

encl.: poems(4)

I will not include those poems here, but I will quote the prolific letter writer

Anais Nin who said that the living moment is caught and in catching this

moment, by accumulation and by accretion, a personality emerges in all its

ambivalences, contradictions and paradoxes--in its most living form. Some

of me the reader will find here in this chapter. If readers want any more of

the personas they have found here, they are advised to go to my collections

of letters. And there they will find the dispersed and isolated facts of my life

and some of continuitys threads. But there is much in my life that is not in

my letters. My childhood, adolescence and, indeed, much of my adulthood is

just not there, for there are no letters for long periods of my life. Readers are

best advised to go to films of the period, the print & electronic media and

books from the last half of the twentieth century. These letters and my life

provide only a small window. Although much of the electronic media is

bubble and froth, light and noise and, although its mindlessness may be

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having a negative affect on western civilization, there is much there that can

supplement rather than supplant the civilization of the book and fill in a

picture of society and life that my letters, no matter how comprehensive and

exhausting, simply can not describe.

In the foreword to a collection of the letters of poet Robert Frost, Louis

Untermeyer wrote that Frosts letters provided a portrait of a man and his

mind and a gradually unfolding and ungarded autobiography. The same

could be said of the collection of my own letters and the thousands of pages

found therein. There are vivid pictures of character and personality and

glimpses into life, art and the meaning of the Baháí experience over several

epochs found in these letters. But whether a future reader can find me in my

art, my letters, is questionable. Freud did not think it was possible and an

able novelist like Henry James challenged his future biographers to find him

in his art, his novels and his letters and in his many moods. How important it

is to be able to find and isolate, explore and connect, a person and his

community in these epochs is a question that will or will not have

significance in the decades and centuries to come.br>

As epoch followed epoch, first the third epoch, then the fourth and finally

the fifth, as this autobiography finally found its form, western culture

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became increasingly complex, although there were strong currents of

conformity, perhaps as there always had been and as there always would be

for the social animal who was man. I like to think, although it is difficult for

me to measure, that there was a gradual evolution in my personal letter

writing style, evidence of a search for delicacies of feeling and the

intricacies and subtleties of human beings in community. This was true of

the letters of Henry James, wrote Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James.

I find it difficult to discern the quality of my own letters but, as the outward

battle of life, a battle that I had been engaged with at least since the start of

my pioneering experience in 1962, lost its fire and its heat as the millennium

turned its corner, as I went on new medications for my bipolar disorder and

as I did not have to deal with the pressures of job and community life, my

interior world felt vivified and redeemed. The former enthusiastic temper of

espousal that I poured into people and relationships sometimes with that

“rapturousness of life” that James writes about and sometimes with all sorts

of other emotional stuff, I came to pour its juices and energies into the

intellectual side of life by the year 2000.1

11 I am going to insert here an extensive footnote that describes the backdrop to my years 2002-2009 when letter writing took on a new dimension and the intellectual replaced the social. By 2002, as I entered my fifty-ninth year, I was able to experience in my daily habit of work a contentment, an inborn religious placidity, which owing to the manic-depression and its several treatment regimes in previous years and decades, had never been able to

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Some biographers and autobiographers regard a judicious selection of letters

as the most useful and succinct aid to their task that there is. Im not sure if

that is the case, although it may be true for some people. Benjamin Franklin,

fully express itself. I combined with this contentment, paradoxically, a divine discontent, a mobile sensibility, a restlessness. The result was a quiet, habitual, a systematic industry, a sensuousness, an exceptional susceptibility to the flash of thought "upon that inward eye"2 within the bliss that was my solitude.(2 Wordsworth, "Daffodils")

After six to ten hours of the expression of this literary, this intellectual, sensibility, an exhaustion set in, usually at night, after midnight. That winter of my discontent which had been so frequent in the decades of my life was “now made glorious summer,”? was now turned into a summery contentedness—but not all the time. The regime of medication that began in 2001 and yet another in May 2007 for my bipolar disorder combined with the obsession that was my writing to produce the following set of symptoms:

.....a new pattern of behaviour that had become apparent after fourteen months on this new medication package(5/07 to 7/08) contained the following details which I will list as follows: (a)alternating periods of fatigue, shortage of breath and sleepiness on the one hand; and energy and enthusiasm on the other—often within a few minutes making any sustained work/activity beyond one to two hours difficult to maintain; (b) staying awake to very late hours, say, 2 or 3 a.m., or sleeping and getting up virtually all night and then sleeping from, say, 5 or 6 a.m. to 10 or 11 a.m. with an hour or two of sleep in the day all within a context of short bursts of reading and writing each day adding up to an 8 hour total of literary work per 24 hour period—and short bursts of other activities(domestic, social and, personal) adding up to another 8 hours, (c) a certain excessiveness/speed in speech patterns, a lack of moderation, a lack of control and an overly, overtly emotional state and over-the-topness, so to speak, which is more problematic when I am in those social situations I have described above, social situations of more than two to four hours of interaction; (d) a speeding in situations that do not require speeding like:

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for example, lived much more than he had time to write the story that he was

perpetually telling. This is not to say that he did not accomplish much of his

mission in life without using persistent, practical prose as his primary tool.

As he once said: “If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and

washing dishes, making a cup of coffee, and other domestic and daily activities just in normal everyday settings; (e)quick alterations in energy levels, for example, hyperactive in the morning, and completely fatigued by midday; and(f) OCD, obsessive-compulsive behaviour: straightening & squaring bits of paper, magazines & newspapers on tables and desks and other forms of tidiness much more than in previous years(although my psychiatrist does not see this as OCD behaviour); (g) urinating on average every 80 minutes(again, my psychiatrist says this is normal for my medical condition after 27 years on lithium?); (h) a nightly dream pattern that is more extensive than ever before in my life leaving me with a dense-and-heavy, somewhat disoriented, feeling on waking; and (i) perhaps most importantly, a feeling of emotional and psychological weariness as well as a tedium vitae from the long and many scars left from years of battling with BPD; and an alternating quiet tranquillity at other times in the day, a tranquillity very useful to the act of writing.

As I reread the above statement with its nine symptoms, I think to myself that this description is a little ‘over-the-top’ as they say in Australia, but the list is, nevertheless, accurate. The statement seems a little over the top because I am not used to placing all of the symptoms in one paragraph. Some of the above traits, patterns or symptoms, of course, are problems everyone has in different degrees. Some of these symptoms are not even deserving of emphasis; not even pathological nor a sign of disability, nor do they require treatment. But they are: (1) the present constellation of symptoms of my bipolar disorder and (2) a cause of concern in some ways more to my wife who has to live with me than they are to me. Being the battler that she is and my personal carer in more ways than one, she grumbles and grouses more than usual as a result of my eccentricities and, perhaps in part, as a result of hers. I’m often not sure. This is the worse side-affect of my behaviour on her, but over time she has come to

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rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing

about.

understand my behaviour more and more.

The significant others in one’s life are an important source of relevant feedback and since I have been on this new medication my wife has informed me on many occasions of: (a) an increase in OCD behaviour, (b) an increase in speeding and an intensity of various types of what she calls frenetic activity/passivity and (c) an eccentricity, an over-the-topness or inappropriateness of verbal responses in social situations. For these reasons, due to my wife’s sensitizing me to my abnormalities and eccentricities, I summarize my symptoms here. I will return to this theme later in this autobiography and provide more of this ongoing story, this description of my present and recent physical, mental and emotional states as well as my symptoms on this new medication regime, a regime I began in the first week of April 2007 and settled into with both medications in mid-May 2007.

For the above reasons it is my view that holding down a full or part-time job would be unwise and it has been unwise since I was 55 in 1999. My psychiatrist supports me in this view as does my GP each of whom are happy to provide testimonials in support of my decision not to: (a) apply for jobs any more and (b) serve on any volunteer bodies requiring extensive/long periods of social interaction. Being on the Disability Services Pension does not require me to work and this has been the case since May 2001 when I was 57. I should reiterate, though, that my psychiatrist does not regard the symptoms (c) to (i) above as problems of a serious or even minor nature, insofar as the excesses of my BPD are concerned.

During the three years 2005 to 2008 I brought most of my volunteer work/activity to an end due to the presence of the range of symptoms I have outlined above. Social and community responsibilities, situations and activities that go too long, as I indicated above, are emotionally exhausting

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It seems to me quite impossible to write all of life, certainly all of mine, into

the shape and form of a series of letters, no matter how numerous. The

electronic age has made our communications more audible and therefore, in

some ways, more ephemeral and so I must confess to some skepticism

and I have no desire to take part in them any more. I always avoid, if at all possible, what would once have been my community and social commitments. In 12 months I will go on the Australian Old Age Pension and the issue of employment FT, PT or casual/volunteer work will not exist.

As I say above, I have now been on this new medication package for more than one year (5/07-7/08). The last half-hour consultation with my psychiatrist was on 30/11/07. He outlined an option to my then 150 mg. of effexor/day; namely, to reduce the medication from 150 mg. to 75 mg. + 37.5 mg.(2 tablets). The next option/reduction, he advised, would be to one 75 mg. when I desired to do so. He suggested that we could then review the case at my next visit. We decided this option of a reduction in the effexor levels in two stages was necessary due to my excessive sleepiness.

The other symptoms I outlined at the last visit to my psychiatrist were not considered problems to deal with insofar? as medication alterations were concerned. Three weeks after that consultation on 30/11/07, I decided to reduce the effexor levels from 150 mg. to 112 and ½ mg.? I remained on this reduced effexor level for nearly five months, that is from 24/12/07 to 12/5/08. Since: (a) I was still sleepy too much of the time and (b) I felt the need to regularize/routinize my nighttime sleeping patterns, on 12 May 2008 I reduced the effexor level to 75 mg. per day. I will report the results of this medication shift in the weeks and months ahead as changes in my behavioural patterns and life-routines become apparent: after nearly three months(12/5/08 to 30/7/08), though, I am (a) getting five to eight hours of sleep per 24 hour period and (b) my wife says “I am clearer—in my eyes,” by which she means there is greater clarity and less sleepiness in my physical/facial expression. Having just enough medication to allow me to feel stable and then to occasionally tweak the meds a little as needed is something I will look into at the next visit to my psychiatrist.

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regarding the future of my letters or, indeed, the future of the vast majority

of letters that have been written in this new age of the print and electronic

media that has emerged in the first century of the Formative Age.(1921-

2021). At the same time, I am forced to admit that I have just lived through

one of the most enriching periods in the history of the Baháí Faith and who

Altering the brain and its chemistry through medication, alters so many things about one’s life that in some basic ways one becomes a different person much more so since the brain is the central data processing unit in the body.? This ongoing story has been, is and will be partly about that different person I have become as a result of my BPD and the medication changes. I hope the above account is as much use to others as it has been to me in writing it over these several editions and their many drafts in the last few years. It will be necessary, of course, to make alterations to the above document in the months and years ahead to: (a) include new information and new perspectives on my past experience, (b) add to the document as changes to my life occur that are related to my BPD, (c) maintain as comprehensive and succinct a story as possible; and, finally (d) to bring those to whom I write this account up-to-date on this story.

There are now 100s of people at some 90 BPD, D, mental health, general health and other internet sites for whom and to whom I write this account or part of it. Most of the correspondence that ensues from this posting takes place, as I said above, only at the internet sites. There are, as well, a very small handful of personal friends and relations to whom I have sent this story for a range of personal purposes. Some in this latter group want to know this story. I feel it necessary, for various reasons, to inform others so that they have a better understanding of my present situation and past condition. But whatever the reason for my utilizing/writing this account, its contents have become of value to many others who suffer from this disorder, similar disorders or, indeed, have other problems of the human condition that possess a traumatic or quasi-traumatic quality. I have written a more extensive, a longitudinal, account of my BPD over 66 years and this account is found in one of the final sections of this memoir.

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knows, who can measure and define, the nature and extent of ones

achievements? We, into whose hands, as Shoghi Effendi once wrote, so

precious a heritage has been entrusted have helped in our own small ways to

advance the Cause toward its high destiny in this the greatest drama in the

worlds spiritual history.

And the humble letter may just endure. For this Cause is, indeed, one

constructed around the letter, a veritable treasure-house of correspondence,

in words that I opened this posting at the BARL. No other religion, as

Bahiyyih Nakhjavani notes, has placed so subtle and significant a value on

this method of exchange. And so I live in hope that the life I have lived and

expressed as it is in the letters I have written, becomes of some use to the

Bahai community. The boundaries within which I write I have set out in

these letters. The energies out of which I write find their source in my

religion; my experience in late middle age and the early years of late

adulthood enables these energies to express themselves in this literary craft.

The passion to write or erotic passion seems to come unbidden although

there are often specific stimuli to arouse the energies in both of these

domains. The structures within which the poetic and the literary flashes that

fall onto the paper are defined and described are, I hope, intellectually

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interesting. I have worked over the years to make them more distinctive. But

I know from my many years as a teacher that appreciation of distinctiveness

is entirely in the mind of the beholder, the reader.

The political action of ordinary people in relation to the transformation of

the cultural and political landscape of Europe since the Reformation in 1517

has become a serious object of historical study. This historical study is

recent. In the years since I have been pioneering, that is since 1962, ordinary

people have come to occupy a much more central place in history’s story.

Such study naturally takes issue with previous scholarly interpretations

relying as they did on elite-centred accounts of the big changes of the last

five hundred years. This emphasis on ordinary people explicitly undermines

these elite-centered accounts of both the Reformation and the consolidation

of the peculiarly European system of states. It also brings into question the

explanation of other developments and changes in western society in the last

five centuries. In a far more constructive sense, however, these more recent

studies of the role of ordinary human beings have broken the exclusive

claims of rulers and the ruling class to political and cultural sovereignty. The

ordinary citizen, by boldly entering political arenas that had been legally

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closed to them, helped to shape the cultural and political landscape of

modern Europe. In the last forty years this fact has been at last recognized.

I mention the ordinary man, in closing this section on letters, because

underpinning this autobiography is the view that ordinary people doing

ordinary things within the context of the Bahaí community can and do play

an important part in contemporary history, unbeknownst to the majority of

humankind. Letter-writing is just part of this ordinariness; indeed,

ordinariness is enshrined in the published collections of letters. This

ordinariness makes for what is for most people tedious reading.

Contemporary readers avoid collections of letters. This essay does not try to

resurrect the letter from its insignificant place in the lives of pioneers around

the world. That would require a much greater force than this simple essay.

But, it seems to me, I have provided a context for the 5000 letters, emails

and postings on the internet. The letters that I have written, it is my

considered opinion, will remain in the dust-bin of history unread by the great

majority of humankind. Given the burgeoning quantity of print human

beings are and will be faced with in their lives I think that conclusion I have

come to here is a reasonable one. Time, of course, will tell.

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Id like to offer the following light note on a type of email I have received in

abundance in the last two decades. I have entitled this brief essay: A SUB-

GENRE OF EMAILS and it was sent to the many people who wrote to me

by email as the twentieth century came to a close.

I hope you enjoy this little piece of gentle satire, analysis and comment. It

will serve as a more detailed response to your many emails over recent

months. Now that I am not teaching sociology and the several social

sciences, as I had been doing for so many years; now that I am not having

my mind kept busy by a hundred students a week, other things come into the

gap: like responding to emails.

Funwisdein, the editor mentioned in the following paragraph, in the end,

rejected my contribution to his book, but encouraged me to try for his next

collection so impressed was he with the quality of the short essay which

follows. I trust you enjoy it, too, even if it is a little longer than my normal

missives. And, if you dont enjoy it, I hope you at least tolerate its presence.

For we must all, in and out of the world of emails, increasingly learn to

tolerate each others eccentricities, thus making the world an easier place to

live in.

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WEE-WISDOMS AND FUNNIES: A SUB-GENRE OF THE EMAIL

INDUSTRY

Ron Price, Wee-Wisdoms and Funnies: A Sub-Genre of the Email Industry,

Human Communication in the Twenty-First Century, editor, Harry

Funwisdum, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 45-63.

The following is a digest of Prices twenty-one pages that did not make it into

Funwisdums new book. Price is a prolific writer and, although he is neither

famous nor rich, he churns out some provocative stuff from his word-factory

on the Tamar River, at Port Dalrymple, in northern Tasmania.

Receiving so many funnies and words-of-wisdom as I do week after week

from a small coterie of people, I thought I would try to respond more

befittingly than I normally do with my perfunctory and usually brief set of

phrases and sentences, if indeed I respond at all. What you find below is a

more reflective piece that sets all these wisdoms and funnies I receive from

you--and others--in some perspective, a perspective that derives in large

measure from my years as a teacher/lecturer and from some forty years now

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of imbibing funnies and wisdoms from a multitude of sources. Indeed, it is

probably these years as a teacher that have resulted in my habit, engrained

after all these years, of responding to any and all incoming mail/email. I

enjoyed teaching but, as the years approached thirty-in-the-game, I got tired

of much of what was involved in the process. Some of the emails and letters

I receive now are somewhat like pieces of work I used to have to mark. Like

making comments on the work of students, I think it important to respond to

such emails and letters with courtesy and with honesty. This is not always

easy for courtesy and honesty do not sit easily together, especially if the

content of the received material is neither funny nor edifying, as is the case

with so much of the material I receive.

It has been ten years since the email became part of my daily life. This short

think-piece is a reflection on an aspect of the email industry as well as a

celebration of the many advantages of this wonderful, although not always

rewarding or intellectually engaging, mechanism of technology. I think I

write this for me more than I do for you, since the thrust of so much of this

sub-genre of email communication does not, for the most part, require any

reflection, or anything more than a minimum of reflection. I really wanted to

have a think about an aspect of this industry that has engaged my attention

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for some of these last ten years. Quick hits, so many emails are, like jokes

themselves-affections arising from the sudden transformation of a strained

expectation into nothing, as the philosopher Emmanuel Kant once defined

laughter. Perhaps, they are a sign of a mind lively and at ease, as Emma once

said in Jane Austins book by the same name. These quick hits require quick

responses, if any at all.

Is this humour and wisdom? Or is it the trivialization of the human battle, as

the literary critic Susan Langer once defined so much of the output of the

electronic media factories? After ten years(1991-2002)( minus a few months

of travelling to Tasmania) of receiving what I guesstimate to be some 2500

pieces of this type of email, I felt like writing this little piece on one of the

aspects of the genre. I hope you dont find it too heavy, too much thinking,

too long without the quick-natural-lift, message or laugh that is part of the

particular sub-genre of emails I am concerned with here. In the end you may

see me as too critical but, as I used to say to my students, that is the risk you

take when you open your mouth or write.

CARRY ON GANG

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I have been giving and receiving various forms of advice/wisdom for some

40 years now, 2002 back to 1962 when life began to assume a more serious

aspect for me in my late teens and when school, sport, girls and

entertainment found some competition from serious ideas in lifes round of

activities. First as a student imbibing humour and wisdom from the several

founts of knowledge and laughter I was then exposed to or that I investigated

as a youth(teens and twenties); and then as a teacher/lecturer in the social

sciences(including human relations, interpersonal skills, conflict resolution,

negotiation skills, working in teams, a list of subjects as long as your

proverbial arm)I received and dispensed advice and wisdoms in a multitude

of forms. I was clearly into the advice and wisdom business. It was part of

the very air I breathed. I should by now be a fount of unusually

perspicacious aphorisms from the wisdom literature of history, or at the very

least run wisdom workshops for the lean and hungry. In addition I should

have an accumulation of jokes/funnies to keep everyone laughing in

perpetuity.

But instead I feel a little like the marriage guidance counsellor who has been

married six times. He has never been able to pull-it-off, marriage that is, but

he has had a lot of experience trying.

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For some fifteen years, during this educative process, I used to give out a

summary of the wisdom of the ages on several sheets of A-4 paper to the

approximately one hundred students I had every term or semester.

Thousands of intending students of leisure and life and I went through the

material to see if we could come up with the wisest of the wise stuff,

practical goodies for the market-place and the inner man/woman. For the

most part I enjoyed the process. Giving and receiving advice was a buzz. Of

course, it had to be done in a certain way for advice givers and jokers can be

as tedious as they are valuable and entertaining.

Now that I approach the evening of my life, the wisdom continues to float

in, unavoidably, inevitably, perhaps to an extent I even encourage it. From

emails and the internet, among other sources, material is obtained from:

(i) the wisdom literature of the great historical religions;

(ii) the wisdom of the philosophical traditions(outside religion);

(iii) the wisdom of popular psychology and the social sciences(usually from

the fields of (a) human relations, (b) interpersonal skills, (c) pop-psychology,

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(d) management and organizational behaviour and (e) endless funnies from

known and unknown word factories.

Unlike some of the other academic fields like, say, the biological and

physical sciences, the social sciences(the disciplines in which the wisdom

literature is now located are either old-like history, philosophy and religion--

or young like economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, human

relations, etc.) are all inexact, highly subjective and infinitely more complex

than the physical and biological sciences. Everybody and their dog can play

at dispensing their wisdoms, with the dogs sometimes providing the best

advice in the form of close friendships, at least for some people with canine

proclivities. Unlike the physical and biological sciences, though, knowledge

and experience is not required. Anyone can play the game. Often the

untutored and apparently ignorant and those who have read nothing at all in

the field, can offer humble wisdoms and funnies which excel the most

learned, with or without their PhDs. So be warned: its a mine field, this

advice and wisdom business. A great deal of useless stuff gets attractively

packaged. Many ideas are like many attractive young women; the beauty is

only skin deep, as it were.

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The result for many practitioners who would really like to be both wise and

entertaining is the experience of a field that resembles a mud-pie, poorly

constructed and not of much use to humanity, although lots of laughs are had

and wisdom gets distributed liberally. The industry, the word factories, pour

out their wisdoms and their humour with greater frequency with every

passing day.

I felt like having a little think about this sub-genre of emails at this ten year

mark and this half-way point(if I live to be 98!) in what you might call my

wisdom/advice-lifeline, as I, and you, continue to imbibe the endless supply

of resources available from the endless supply of word factories. I hope the

satire here is gentle and does not bite too hard or at all. Canadians are on the

whole nice people who try to perform their operations on their patients in

such a way that they leave the hospital without the suspicion they have even

been operated on, but with the new glands fully installed for daily use. Like

the pick-pocket and the burglar, I want to get in there and out without

alerting anyone to my work. The New Testament calls it the act of: The

Thief in the Night. But, again, this is a prophecy capable of many

interpretations, as all prophecies are.

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I send this your way in response to your many emails in recent months.

There are, perhaps, a dozen people now who are into this sub-genre and who

send me this special type of material in the course of a normal year. This

dozen sends me many delightful pieces, more it seems as the years go by,

including photos to embellish the content of the wisdom and humour.

I feel, after so many years of giving it out as a teacher, it is only fair that I

now receive it all as graciously as mine was accepted by my students over

those many years. Like my in-class jokes, some of the material I receive is

funny, some not-so-funny; some is wise, some not-so-wise. But, then, you

cant win them all. Both wisdom and humour are irrepressible. So, carry on

gang.

George Bernard Shaw used to say that I can no more write what people want

than I can play the fiddle. So he wrote what he thought people needed. What

people need and what they want are usually not the same. Many found

George presumptuous. I hope what you find here is not in the same category

as Shaws, presumptuous that is. I hope, too, that this somewhat lengthy read

has been worth your while. If not, well, you now have:

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.....ten choices (and many more combinations of choices) regarding what to

do next:

(i) delete the above;

(ii) print and save for pondering because its wise, clever and something quite

personal from the sender;

(iii) read it again now, then delete it;

(iv) save the very good bits and delete the rest;

(v) none of these;

(vi) all of these, if that is possible;

(vii) write your own think-piece on this sub-genre of emails;

(viii)send me a copy of your writing on this sub-genre of emails for(a) my

evaluation(1)or (b) my pleasure;

(ix) dont send it to me; and/or

(x) dont think about what Ive written; just dismiss it as the meanderings of a

man moving speedily toward his last years of middle adulthood(the 40 to 60

block).

(1) using(a) the scale: A+(91-100), A(81-90) and A-(75-80); B+(71-

74),B(68-70) and B-(65-67); C+(60-64, C(55-59) and C-(50-54); D(25-49

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hold and try again) and E(0-24 attend a workshop on wisdoms and funnies;

and (b) anecdotal feedback.

August 20 2003

Life is a densely knit cluster of emotions and memories, each one steeped in

lights and colours thrown out by the rest, the whole making up a picture that

no one but the person who experiences that life could dream of undertaking

to paint or to write. Experience comes in and is left to rest in memory and

the writer crystallizes it in expression where it happens to fall or at some

point later in life,perhaps in a letter. As long as the wear and tear of the act

of living and its discriminating processes do not tax the mind and emotions

the letters go on in an endless cycle of vivid and not-so-vivid, incessant and

often uneventful adventure. I find the daily drama of my work now that I

have given up FT, PT and casual/voluntary employments, with all the

comfort and joy that the work of the imagination brings me, hardly appears

with more than a faint undertone in whatever conversation my letters are

engaged. And even when I am also engaged in some sociable pursuit or act

of urbanity, my heart lives in its solitude, in the shrine of its labour and the

intensity and serenity of its occupation. Writing letters, now in these years

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free of just about all the employments mentioned above, is such an

occupation. The love of tranquillity and its association with writing grew, as

it did for the philosopher David Hume, far more rapidly than my years.

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

INTRODUCTION TO LETTERS

SECTION 1: VOLUME 8

PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE

SECTION VII OF PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS

This volume was begun at the start of my 42nd year of pioneering, just

before the mid-point in the Five Year Plan(2001-2006). It was completed in

November 2004 three months into my 43rd year of pioneering. This volume

takes me and any readers who care to follow this journey to the end of my

37th year of letter collecting. The first letter I received and that I kept in this

total collection was on December 1st 1967, although I noticed recently a

small handful of letters written to my mother going back to November 1960

which can be found in volume 1 of this larger collection.

Barry Ahearn, a professor of English at Tulane University and the editor of

the letters between poets Zukofsky and Williams, says that a poet’s

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correspondence is the raw material of biography: the poet’s first hand

perceptions, unguarded, unpolished, and uncensored. “It’s a way of

recovering the warts-and-all humanity of these individuals.” These poets,

Ahearn goes on, “are writing things about themselves which they might not

otherwise.” Ahearn also edited selections of letters between Pound and

Zukofsky, published by New Directions in 1987, and Pound/Cummings: The

Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings, University of Michigan

Press, 1996. The contrasts and comparisons between my correspondence and

the letters of these poets is interesting, but not my purpose to examine here

in this introduction.

In the letters between some writers, there is often a persistent and passionate

debate around some issue. The 450 letters written between 1953 and 1985

that are collected in The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov,

edited by Albert Gelpi, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and

Robert J. Bertholf, curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection at SUNY

Buffalo are an example of such a debate. “It’s a huge argument,” Gelpi says.

“It brings the correspondence to a remarkable personal as well as literary

climax because these two poets, who were so close, who thought of

themselves as anima and animus to each other, as brother and sister.”

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Suddenly, says Gelpi, these poets “found themselves having to recognize

that there were actually fundamental disagreements between them about

what poetry is, how the imagination works and how poetry functions in

society.”

Thusfar, in my eight volumes of personal correspondence and many other

volumes to particular institutions and individuals, there is very little of what

you might call sustained debate. There is often disagreement, but the

disagreement is usually dealt with in one or two letters at the most.

Disagreement is rarely if ever sustained. This is not to say that there are not

many areas in which my correspondents and I disagreed, but for the most

part the areas which were critical were simply not discussed beyond a

minimal exchange often by means of indirectness, humour and what might

be called the Australian cynical beneath surface style which criticizes as it

smiles with a cleverness that I have come to enjoy and appreciate more than

I did on my arrival in these Antipodes. Sometimes the inferences pile up in a

letter and the surface of the exchange gets broken more than desired.

Whereas Levertov and Duncan wrote one or two letters a month for thirty

years, the longest correspondents thusfar in my life have been Roger White

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at 12 years and John Bailey at, perhaps, 8. Roger and I wrote some five or

six times a year while John and I write once a month. Then there were many

other correspondents with many patterns: singles, twos, short and intense,

long and infrequent. A student of these letters will find innumerable patterns

and non-patterns.

Gelpi says that Levertov and Duncan were both too strong and too honest

and too committed to poetry to obfuscate or to simply pass over issues. They

end up really arguing it out,” Gelpi says. White, Bailey and I deal with

issues much more subtlety. In these letters readers will get glimpses of

creative origin and process, the nuts and bolts of various articulate minds

engaging in the act of writing prose and poetry, writing emails and letters,

trying to sort out a host of problems, ideas and issues. These letters/emails

offer a much fuller understanding of whatever publications I have produced

and will produce. They also offer, I would also argue, a useful insight into

the development of the World Order of Baha’u’llah, a sort of tangent to the

immense quantities of correspondence contained in Baha’i administrative

archives. Of course, time will tell regarding the relevance of these letters in

the years ahead as Baha’u’llah’s Order gains in strength and influence in the

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world. In the end all these letters may become simply dust and ashes at the

local tip.

Readers will see me sometimes groping and fumbling, sometimes

confidently writing, sometimes making tentative steps and then bold steps

toward trying to grasp the merits of what another person is saying. Often I

am completely misunderstood, but so is this such a common experience in

daily life when nothing is written at all. In personal letters I often drop my

guard; whereas in a more public face, in some public articulation of ideas,

such an exposure doesn’t take place, at least not the kind of real human

hesitation that contains real human fear. And if it does, if I adopt a

confessional mode I often regret it, as I do in everyday life. Often, too, there

is a drawing close. One can never be too sure. Such is life. There is a limit to

ones personal revelations. Teaching and consolidation has taken many forms

over these four epochs: 1944-2021. Many of these forms are found here.

As this 43rd year of pioneering opened in the last three months, this

introduction to Volume 8 of Section 1 of my letters: Personal

Correspondence, a volume which I began fifteen months ago, came to be

filled more quickly than previous volumes of personal correspondence. I had

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originally planned in a vague sort of way that this arch-lever file would last

for at least two years, but the great volume of internet site material, postings,

replies to my postings and emails prevented this from occurring. There has

developed insensibly in the last several years a burgeoning of emails and

they have filled the space available in this file very quickly.

By November 2004 my postings on the internet had become so extensive as

to be in a category of correspondence on its own. As I have indicated, most

of this internet posting I have not included here. It simply became too much

to copy and file. This was true not only of the irrelevant material, some 90 to

95 per cent of the two to four hundred emails I received everyday, but even

the 5 per cent that was of value. If these electronic sites become archives

themselves, then one day my material can be retrieved by an assiduous

researcher, if it is deemed to be of value.

So it was that most of the internet material, probably ninety-five percent of

it, I deleted. I have kept what I see as relevant to this ongoing collection. The

other ten sections/divisions of my letters have also been added-to during this

time, but each of these other sections has their own story and I do not deal

with it here. It may be that all of these letters and emails may become a grey

161

residue, as I said above, at a local tip, freeing my executors from the burden

of what to do with all the paper. And it may be that the contents here will be

a useful archive for a Cause that has gone from strength to strength and, as

one writer put it several decades ago, will come to conquer the world by

storm.

Ron Price November 15

2004

1 This introduction has been written and revised half a dozen times since the

inception of this volume 9 fifteen months ago.

SECTION VII OF PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS

SECTION/DIVISION 1:

INTRODUCTION VOLUME 9

OF PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE

After twenty-two years of a vague, largely unconscious and undirected

process of letter collection, 1960 to 1982, there began an intense, directed

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letter collecting activity that has continued for a further twenty-two years,

1982 to 2004.

This volume was begun at the start of my 44th year of letter collecting. Since

I first wrote the introduction to the last volume of personal correspondence,

Volume 8, I have discovered some of my mother’s letters going back an

additional seven years to November 1960. I had been a member of the

Baha’i Faith for 13 to 14 months at the time of the first letter in my Mother’s

small handful of letters. This file, Volume 9 of my personal correspondence,

begins with 18 months left in the current Five Year Plan(2001-2006). The

beginnings of this file also coincide with the third month of the 43rd year of

my pioneering, the first month of the 46th year of my membership in this

Faith and, arguably, the end of the 50th year since the beginning of my

association with this Faith through my mother’s first contact with the Cause

in 1953.(1) As I pointed out at the outset of the previous Volume of this

collection, the first letter I received and that I kept in this collection was on

December 1st 1967.

With the small handful of letters that I noticed recently written to my mother

by others going back to November 1960 and which can be found in Volume

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1 of this larger collection of correspondence, this body of letter-writing

could be said to go back 44 years(1960-2004). The great bulk of this

correspondence, though, goes back only twenty-two years to the time Chris,

Dan and I moved north of Capricorn. There is very little in the collection

before 1982 and even less before 1974, some thirty years ago now. Those

first 15 years(1967-1982) of letters, or 22 if one includes my mother’s

letters, barely made a dint in the epistolary world. As I say, it was not until

the middle years of the Seven Year Plan(1979-1986), our going north of

Capricorn in 1982, that I began making any conscious effort to seriously

collect my incoming and outgoing letters.

So much for outlining the general time-frame for these letters. The vast

majority of Baha’is will leave no letters, will provide no historical material

by means of this useful genre. There will, though, be a core of inveterate

letter writers. I quoted in that last introduction to my personal

correspondence, Volume 8, a Barry Ahearn, professor of English at Tulane

University and the editor of the letters between poets Zukofsky and

Williams, who said that a poet’s correspondence is the raw material of

biography: the poet’s first-hand perceptions, unguarded, unpolished, and

uncensored. “It’s a way of recovering the warts-and-all humanity of these

164

individuals, because they are writing things about themselves which they

might not otherwise,” says Ahearn. Ahearn also edited selections of other

warts-and-all letters, those between Pound and Zukofsky, published by New

Directions in 1987, and Pound/Cummings: The Correspondence of Ezra

Pound and E.E. Cummings, University of Michigan Press, 1996.(2) Readers

will certainly find lots of warts in my writings, but whether they will find

that many of the greater, the uglier, warts in my letters is another question

since, as Baha’u’llah once wrote and as I was sensitive to when I wrote: “not

everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed; not everything that can be

disclosed is timely and not every timely utterance is suited to the ears or

eyes of the reader.”

Keen students of biography may find some rich and varied warts in my

Journals which, as the years go on and I am more comfortable to confess

what I am still not comfortable to confess in my letters, may curl their

mental toes. It may be, though, as Roger White writes in his poem “Lines

from a Battlefield,” my “nurtured imperfections” are “not so epically

egregious” and the angels will simply yawn at their mention.(3) For the most

part, what is found in my personal correspondence is of a moderate,

tempered, hopefully judicious, expression of thought. I may not have

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exercised a rigorous discipline on my words while I have given vent to an

individuality, a spontaneity and, I think, a certain degree of equanimity.

I hope I have been a source of social good, for that has been my aim. By the

time I came to write this introduction at the outset of the accumulation of yet

another collection of letters/emails/postings in November 2004, I was

receiving 300(circa) emails a day, most of which I simply deleted. Perhaps

as many as a dozen emails were kept and responded to each day, although I

never kept a statistical tabulation of the incoming and outgoing items. For

the most part, only items of some literary, informational, social, religious,

philosophical or historical significance were kept in my files although, here

too, I’m sure I kept material that would be of no use to anyone. On the other

hand I’m sure I did not file material that may well have been useful to future

historians and archivists.

In the burgeoning world of print, on the internet and in daily life, I could not

help but wonder, as I have oft-expressed before, what value this collection of

mine would be to anyone. But I shall persist and hope it has some worth. As

I indicated in the introduction to my last volume there was coming to be just

too much to keep track of. I shall return to this introduction at a later date

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and an appropriate time and finalize these words to Volume 9 of my

personal correspondence before Volume 10 appears on the horizon probably

some time in 2006.

The sheer repetition that appears in these letters will give ammunition to any

admirers and any critics who come along in the years ahead. My admirers, I

hope, will delight in seeing the constancy and firmness of a core of my

opinions across the years. I have only rarely found any withering pressure to

yield vis-a-vis this core. Those who become my critics will see a frequent

repetition of familiar themes and facts as confirmation of a supposed, an

apparent, lack of creativity, perhaps even a simple-mindedness. Who knows

what they will say if, indeed, they say anything at all. In parsing my

arguments, though, I hope that both admirers and critics do not overlook

what I hope they see as genuine sincerity and doggedness in my letter

collection. I often tired of writing out again and again the same arguments

and sentiments. Staleness not freshness often dogged my path so that I did

not enjoy the experience of that phenomenal letter-writer of my time,

President Ronald Reagan, who felt when he wrote a letter that “he was

expressing his views for the first time.”(4) I experienced some of this useful

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emotional and intellectual feeling but not as frequently as I would have

liked.

An ordinary politician, indeed any person in the public eye or in some

bureaucratic position that had to deal with community concerns often

resorted necessarily to scribbling a code for the appropriate form-letter

response that would go out from some organizational word-factory. Many

other people I have known personally use the telephone to achieve whatever

intimacy is required. As the years went on into my fifties and sixties I

avoided the telephone and, except in my place of employment, I rarely

resorted to the use of form-letters.(5) President Reagan, the man who

became known as The Great Communicator, thought it was his duty to write

individually to everyone who wrote to him and so, in the process, wrote

some 10,000 letters in his lifetime. The only person I have known like this in

Australia was Philip Adams. I am not in their league but, when I did write a

letter, I felt as Reagan did, that I was writing to a friend. I also like to think

that my letters had some of the quality of those of Phillip Adams: a succinct

and pithy content of thought and argument.

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I’m not sure that my letters offer examples of the toughness, discipline, and

canniness that the President exemplified in his letters and which were

required in his extensive dealings with the public. His public geniality

masked these qualities. I leave it for critics to assess whether these qualities

are present in my letters. I tend to think that these qualities were masked by

humour but this is too difficult and complex a subject to assess in this space.

Finally, I am conscious that my letters could be used both to my

disadvantage and to the disadvantage of the Baha’i Faith if they were to fall

into the hands of severe critics, enemies of the Cause and that permanent

lynch mob that the world creates out of its bosom and the depths of its heart.

For evil men, as the Guardian once wrote, we will always have with us. And

so I entrust these letters to the appropriate Baha’i institutions on my passing.

There is much to be pondered in my letters including my day to day efforts

as a practitioner of the protocols of a religious piety originally imbibed at my

mother’s knee more than half a century ago. I’d like to think that readers will

also enjoy what is a shrewd mix of practicality with ideological conviction.

That’s what I’d like to think but it is difficult to assess oneself in these areas.

My nuanced view of man, society and religion might also be useful to

readers--or so I hope. I hope these letters will also bring to future readers a

169

subtlety, a stimulation and a pleasure that will enhance their work for this

Cause in the decades ahead as it comes to play a greater and greater part in

the unification of the planet.

Perhaps one of the many mentors who have influenced my writing, Alistair

Cooke, who wrote in conversation and spoke in prose and who perfected the

journalism of personal witness,(6) has left his mark on my letters. I like to

think so. His sentences never seem to be dull; he never loses touch with

narrative, with the writer as storyteller, with the importance of context and

history. I dont think I have ever been in his league nor will I ever acquire his

skills. I have often felt my writing dull. Ones own percpetions of the quality

of ones work is often no measure of its real worth. Ernest Hemmingway also

felt his letters dull and stupid and they were far from that.

Writers like Cooke and Hemmingway, among others, were instrumental in

providing me with a set of goals in my letter writing. I leave it to readers to

assess whether, like Cooke, my letters are both diary and testament in

addition to being analysis and commentary. As the years went on, though, I

was like Hemingway, a confirmed, habitual and even compulsive

correspondent. Letter writing increasingly became a necessity. Unlike

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Hemingway, my letters did not detract from my potential novel writing.

They may have kept me from writing poetry or essays. My epistolary

effervescence, which began in the 1980s, was in some ways a form of

relaxation to warm up my brain, a form of play in a way, an antidote to other

more serious concentrations. Unlike Hemingway, too, I keep one eye on

posterity when I write; Hemingway felt it would take care of itself.(7)

_______________________________FOOTNOTES___________________

1 I say ‘arguably’ because I’m not sure exactly when my mother first began

her involvement with the Baha’i Faith in 1953/4.

2 Kevin Larimer, “First-Class Mail: A Poet’s Letters,” Poets and Writers

Magazine,

3 Roger White, Another Song Another Season, George Ronald, Oxford,

1979, p.111.

4 Reagan: A Life in Letters, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson,

and Martin Anderson, 2004.

5 Except of course at Christmas and the Ayyam-i-Ha/Naw-Ruz period when

I regularly used a form letter.

6 Alistair Cooke: Letter From America: 1946-2004, Allen Lane,

Camberwell,, Victoria, 2004, p.xvi. 7 Ernest Hemingway: Selected letters:

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1917-1961, Carlos Baker, editor, Charles Scribners Songs,NY, 1981, pp.ix-

x.

Ron Price

December 4 2004

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

The history of the epistolary form could be seen as the history of the man

who explores, discovers and philosophizes, while the woman awaits his

messages, responds to his actions of conquest, seduction and abandonment.

Indeed the core of epistolary literature has been described as a man’s

narrative and a woman’s reaction to that narrative, her monument to his

passages through her life. Other analyses of epistolary narratives are

descriptions of scenarios driven by seduction, erotic love or male

dominance. Such is not the case of this collection of letters. If anything, the

general context for these letters could be said to be a cultivation of

friendship. Such could be said to be one of my lofty aims. The Greek

philosopher Isocrates once wrote that not all eternity could blot out the

friendships of good men. The older I got, though, the more enigmatic the

notion of friendship became. Still, I think the body of my letters reveal much

about the friendhips I did achieve, their meaning, their complexity, their

range and much else.

172

This collection of letters and its many sub-categories is part of the author’s

effort to compensate for the tendency of his fellow Baha’is throughout the

history of their Faith not to leave an account of their lives, their times, their

experiences, as Moojan Momen has made so clear in his History of the Babi-

Baha’i Religions: 1844-1944. This epistolary narrative is yet one more

attempt, along with the other several genres by this writer, to provide a

prose-poetry mix of sensory and intellectual impressions to try to capture the

texture of a life, however ineffably rich and temporarily fleeting.-Ron Price

with thanks to Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, editor, Writing the Female Voice:

Essays in Epistolary Literature, Pinter Publishers, London, 1989.

I have written introductions to many of the above thirty-five volumes to set a

context for the guesstimated correspondence of 3000 letters. One day I may

include these introductions here, but it is unlikely. For this third edition of

my Web Page in May 2003, though, the above outline and comment, in

addition to the following two brief essays, will suffice to provide a

framework for an activity that has occupied many hours of writing during

my pioneering life.

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May 2003

THOUGHTS ON MY COLLECTION OF LETTERS

By the year 2003, thirty-five years after the first letter arrived in my

colleciton, I had gathered, amassed, collected, some 35 volumes of letters

and these volumes are listed above. I often wondered about the relevance of

attempting to keep such a collection. Would it be of any use to future

historians of the Cause examining as they might be the Baháí experience in

the last half of the twentieth century? Would this collection be seen by some

readers of this web or, indeed, any future readers of this collection should

there be any such readers, as an inflated attempt to blow ones own horn, so

to speak? Just an exercise in pretentious egotism?

In the introduction to the Cambridge edition of the collection of D.H.

Lawrence’s letters(Vol. 1: 1901-1913), James T. Boulton discusses the

major influences on Lawrence’s life. These influences are reflected in his

letters. Indeed, as Aldous Huxley comments, Lawrence’s life is written and

painted in his letters. I feel this is only partly true of me and my letters.

There are very few letters in my collection before I was forty years of age.

Virtually all the letters I wrote to my mother(1966-1978) are, in the main,

lost; all the letters I wrote to old girlfriends like Cathy Saxe and Judy Gower

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in the 1960s are gone. Both of these women had a formative influence on my

development as a person. Our relationship was mediated by the teachings

and philosophy of the religion we had so recently joined in the late 1950s

and early 1960s. They would have been interesting documents had they been

kept and they would be viewed in a different perspective with the passage of

time. My mother was the dominant figure in my life, at least until I was 22.

Judy Gower became my first wife and dominated the personality landscape

until I was 29. There were other women, but I did not write to them, at best

only on a rare and occasional basis: Dorothy Weaver, Heather Penrice, Terry

Pemberton-Pigott, Kit Orlick. With them I had varying degrees of intimacy

as my adolescent male friendships slowly disappeared. Dorothy went on to

marry Bill Carr, the first Baháí in Greenland.

It is difficult to measure the affect of these people on my development. And

one might add, so what? Who cares? Whats the point? In the short term and,

as I write these words, there appears to be little point. The relevance, if there

is any, is tied up with the progress and advancement of the Baháí Faith in the

21st and succeeding centuries. D.H. Lawrence is now famous and so his

letters became important. The relevance of this collection lies in the hands,

or the arms, of the future, in the development of the Cause in this and

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successive centuries. In addition, the place, the part, played by and the

significance given to, international pioneers in that development by future

historians and analysts will also be a factor in deciding, ultimately, whether

this collection will come to have any value at all. I would like to think that

this exercise in collection and preservation has been worthwhile but, of

course, it is impossible to predict. By that future time, Im sure, this issue will

not be a concern to me, at least I assume that to be the case when one moves

beyond the grave.

My collection of letters begins first, while I was pioneering on the domestic

front in northern Canada in 1967. But it was not until I arrived in Tasmania

in 1974 that the body of letters begins to any significant extent. By then I

had begun a serious relationship with a woman who would be my second

wife, Christine Sheldrick. After more than 30 additional years since then this

collection does paint my life in a way no other body of my writing does. I

am not trying to cultivate an image in these letters as some letter writers

have done in the past. Reading about D.H. Lawrence’s letters reminded me

of the nature and value of an epistolary portrait, especially a portrait

containing expressive vividness, energy and imaginative resourcefulness.

James Boulton says these were qualities in Lawrences letters. I would like to

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guarantee readers that these qualities were present in my letters. But I could

hardly make such a claim and retain any claim to humility. Humility is a

quality I admire and I do not want to lose all possibility of laying claim to

possessing it. Indeed, the history of the letter is the history of portraits and

relationships, communities of sentiment and life stories.(1) Would this

collection be of any use to the Baháí community a century from now?

Would there be any value in this literary memorabilia, in these warm and

unpolished thoughts from the brain

Reading about Katherine Mansfield’s letters I came across a remark by

Lytton Strackey. He said that great letter writers write constantly, with

recurring zest. One of the few famous writers in the twentieth century to say

praiseworthy things about the Baháí Faith, Henry Miller, preferred writing

long letters to friends to any other kind of writing. But who reads collections

of his letters today? Special interest groups in the community? The years

1975 to 2000 saw a vast production of my letters, but I am not so sure this

production will continue. Time will tell of course. Strackey points out that a

fascinating correspondence results from the accumulated effect of a slow,

gradual, day-to-day development, from a long leisurely unfolding of a

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character and a life. I like this idea, but it remains to be seen just how long

this life, this collection will be.

Behind the entire collection lies a passion, not so much a passion for life,

although that was true in the years up to say 48 to 50, but a passion for

experiencing the deeper realities, deeper implications at the roots of my

Faith. I seem to waver from a fragility and vulnerability to an enthusiastic

involvement, from an aloofness, a coolness, to a white-hot intensity. There is

present in these letters the evidence of an urge to the immoderate as well as

an indifference to so much that is life in the world of popular culture. One

certainly does get a picture of a slowly unfolding life.

I have enjoyed two particular collections of letters outside of Baháí

literature: the letters of Rainer Maria Rilke and those of John Keats. Both

these men were poets. Both say a great deal about writing poetry. I have also

kept two files of quotations on the subject of letter writing and collections of

letters from over three dozen writers. While all of this has been useful to me,

I am quite unsure what use my own letters will be to others either now or in

the future, beyond, of course, their immediate use and function at the time of

writing. It is interesting that, as yet, the now extensive body of Baháí

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literature and commentary has no collection of letters to enrich the

collection, outside those of the central figures of course. Perhaps such

collections will be part of a future phase of the intellectual development of

this tenth stage of history, but in the meantime, beofre and if such

collections are made, I can take pleasure, from time to time when ideas flow

fast and abundantly, when I am unable to sleep, when I am alone, rested and

relaxed, in a certain firing of the soul through these letters.

1 Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe: 1500-1850, Cambridge

UP, 1999.

Written 1996-2003.

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME SIX OF PERSONAL LETTERS

2000-2001

As this 38th year of pioneering opens up I thought I would try to make a

brief summary of this letter writing experience, an experience which goes

back to the first letter I received from Cliff Huxtable on St. Helena in 1967

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while I was living on Baffin Island. As I have pointed out on previous

occasions there were letters received and mailed going back as far as about

1957, but I have not kept the letters from the period before 1967. There are

many letters after 1967, at least up to about 1980, which were destroyed.

Some of these may be in private hands but, since I have no fame, no

significance in the general and public eye, it is unlikely that any of my letters

are being kept in private hands.

If one tried to get a picture of the hey-day of my letter writing I think it

would be the twenty years: 1981 and 2001. Certainly the first two decades of

my letter writing, 1961-1981, were relatively sparse compared to the

following twenty years. I do not have any interest in going through this

collection of letters in some thirty two and three ring binders. Perhaps a

future day will see me making a more minute analysis of the extent and the

content of these letters. Perhaps, should their potential value become more

evident to me, I shall take a more serious interest in my letters. Thusfar I

have made only the occasional annotation to my letters. I have also taken

only a very general interest in the collections of letters of other writers. I

have opened a file of introductions to collections of letters by some 40

writers and have kept additional notes on the genre from the writings of

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other letter writers. As the Cause has gone from strength to strength in the

last several decades, indeed as it has been transformed in the years I have

been associated with the Baháí Faith: 1953-2003, I seem to waver from

seeing significance in the whole idea of keeping a collection of letters, to

seeing the exercise as a pretentious, if not meaningless, act.

Letter writing has occasionally been a routine, perfunctory, activity;

occasionally a joy, a pleasure, a delight; occasionally part of some job or

community responsibility. Letters were the very texture wrote Henry James

of Emerson’s history. There is certainly a texture here that is not present in

the other genres of this wide-ranging autobiography. This texture is also a

result of a new writtten form, the email, a form which was present in

Volume 5 of these personal letters as well, but one that makes a strong

appearance in this sixth volume of these personal letters.

A great deal of life is messy work offering to the artist irrelevant, redundant

and contradictory clutter. Much of letter writing falls into this category; it

spoils a good story and blunts the edge. Like much of conversation it is

random, routine and deals with the everyday scene, ad nauseam. But these

letters tell of a life in a way that is unique, not so much as a collection of

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letters, for collections are a common genre over the centuries, but as a

collection of letters in the third, forth and fifth epochs of the Formative Age

of the Baháí Era in the first several decades of the tenth stage of history

when the Faith expanded some 12 times. They present pictures that tell of a

concrete reality, a time and an age, that I hope will stand revealed to future

readers. For what is here is, in part, spiritual autobiography and

psychological revelation in a different literary form than my poetry.

The future of the Cause as well as the context within which these letters

were written is very great, at least that is my belief. These days are precious.

In these days in which I have worked for the development of this Faith in the

last half of the twentieth century, when these letters were written, the

individual Baháí, myself included, while believing in the future greatness of

the Cause, was confronted daily by the apparent insignificance and the small

numbers of his particular Baháí Group. The contrasting immensity,

pervasiveness and complexity of the wider society in which he worked made

it difficult for him to see a letter written or a meeting attended in terms of

any special significance. But this will not always be the case as these years

of the Formative Age advance.

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These letters are, among other things, strands of experience woven into

patterns, patterns in a channel, a channel that is letter writing, an expression

of my art, a means of communication. By the time this collection, Volume 6:

2000-2001, begins I had become exhausted by personal contacts. This was

my reason for any apparent aloofness and any insistence on solitude that is

found in either my letters or poetry. Perhaps, like Rilke, I had been too

responsive for (my) own peace of mind.1 Perhaps the letters are an

indication of a great need of imparting the life within (me.).2 Perhaps they

are simply a matter of pouring experience into a mold to obtain release, to

ease the pressure of life. When inspiration to write poetry lagged I often

turned to correspondence. It was handicraft, a tool, among several others,

that could keep me at work in constant preparation for the creative

moments.3 For the drama of my life, certainly by the time this volume of

letters begins, was largely an inner one. The external battle went on but in a

much more subdued form. The tangled rootand the tranquil flower is here:

cool detachment and an anguish of spirit4 and much more of the former than

the latter. I leave it to future readers to find these roots and flowers. I trust

their search will have its own reward.

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Most of the correspondence with any one individual in the thirty-five years

of collected letters(or 50 depending on the definition of the beginning point)

was short, from, say, a week to three months. Occasionally a more frequent

correspondence was struck up and lasted for several years: there are perhaps

half a dozen correspondents in this category. On rare occasions a

correspondence continued for many years: Roger White for a dozen years

and Masoud Rowshan for nineteen. Much of what I call institutional

correspondence goes on for many years, twenty years or more. Perhaps in

my dotage I might analyse this collection of letters in more detail. For now,

though, these letters will have to sit in their files getting dusted on a monthly

basis.

I hope this opening comment on Volume 6 of Section VII of Pioneering

Over Three Epochs sets an initial perspective of some value. These words,

begun on 1 September 1999, were continued on several occasions and

completed on 26 August 2001 after living for nearly two years in George

Town.

1 Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892-1910, trans: J. Greene and M. Norton,

WW Norton, NY, 1945, p. 12.

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2 idem

3 idem

4 ibid.p.13.

Ron Price

26 August 2001

I have only recently been able to free myself of the demands of employment

and the various volunteer activities that occupied me for so may years. In

order to pursue, with that same unclouded happiness, the literary activity that

Henry James pursued at the core of his faith, I seek out the same triangle of

forces he sought out: silence, seclusion and a solitude that yields

concentration. Often, too, like James, my letters do not engage in the activity

of persuasion or proselytising. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps

the main one is that people generally seem immune if not actively hostile to

efforts to engage their overt religious sympathies and convictions.

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The matters which deeply concern me usually do not find a place in my

letters, although they do come to occupy some niche--as postings on the

internet did about bipolar disorder and apologetic discussions on the Bahai

Faith found a place on many an internet thread. So let me say one or two

things about apologetics, the kinds of things I often opened my postings on

many an internet site. the following paragraphs are an example of such a

posting, a posting that appeared many times on the internet.

Apologetics is a branch of systematic theology, although some experience

it’s thrust in religious studies or philosophy of religion courses. Some

encounter it on the internet for the first time in a more populist and usually

much less academic form. As I see it, apologetics is primarily concerned

with the protection of a religious position, the refutation of that positions

assailants and, in the larger sense, the exploration of that position in the

context of prevailing philosophies and standards in a secular society.

Apologetics, to put it slightly differently, is concerned with answering

critical inquiries, criticism of a position, in a rational manner. Apologetics is

not possible, it seems to me anyway, without a commitment to and a desire

to defend a position. For me, the core of my position I could express in one

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phrase: the Bahai Revelation. With that said, though, the activity I engage in,

namely, apologetics, is a never ending exercise.

The apologetics that concerns me is not so much Christian apologetics or

one of a variety of what might be called secular apologetics, but Bahai

apologetics. There are many points of comparison and contrast, though,

which I wont go into here. Christians will have the opportunity to defend

Christianity by the use of apologetics; secular humanists can argue their

cases if they so desire here. And I will in turn defend the Bahai Faith by the

use of apologetics. In the process we will both, hopefully, learn something

about our respective Faiths, our religions, which we hold to our hearts

dearly.

At the outset, then, in this my first comment on apologetics, my intention is

simply to make this start, to state what you might call my apologetics

position. This brief statement indicates, in broad outline, where I am coming

from in the weeks and months ahead.-Ron Price with thanks to Udo

Schaefer, Bahai Apologetics? Bahai Studies Review, Vol. 10, 2001/2002.

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Id like now to make some final comments in outlining my basic orientation

to Baha’i apologetics. Critical scholarly contributions or criticism raised in

public or private discussions, an obvious part of apologetics, should not

necessarily be equated with hostility. Often questions are perfectly

legitimate aspects of a persons search for an answer to an intellectual

conundrum. Paul Tillich once expressed the view that apologetics was an

answering theology.(Systematic Theology, U. of Chicago, 1967, Vol.1, p6.)

I have always been attracted to the founder of the Bahai Faiths exhortations

in discussion to speak with words as mild as milk with the utmost lenience

and forbearance. I am also aware that, in cases of rude or hostile attack,

rebuttal with a harsher tone may well be justified. It does not help an

apologist to belong to those watchmen the prophet Isaiah calls dumb dogs

that cannot bark.(Isaiah, 56:10)

In its essence apologetics is a kind of confrontation, an act of revealing ones

true colours, of hoisting the flag, of demonstrating essential characteristics

of faith. Dialogue, as Hans Kung puts it, does not mean self-denial.(quoted

by Udo Schaefer, Bahai Apologetics, Bahai Studies Review, Vol.10, 2001/2)

Schaefer goes on: A faith that is opportunistically streamlined, adapting to

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current trends, thus concealing its real features, features that could provoke

rejection in order to be acceptable for dialogue is in danger of losing its

identity.

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without

getting someones beard singed. In the weeks that follow, my postings will

probably wind up singing the beards of some readers and, perhaps, my own

in the process. Such are the perils of dialogue, of apologetics. Much of Bahai

apologetics derives from the experience Bahais have of a fundamental

discrepancy between secular thought and the Bahai revelation on the other.

In some ways, the gulf is unbridgeable but, so too, is this the case between

the secular and much thought in the Christian revelation or, for that matter,

between variants of Christianity or secular thought itself. That is why, or at

least one of the reasons, I have chosen to make postings at this site. In

addition, this site invites debate.

Anyway, thats all for now. Its back to the winter winds of Tasmania, about 3

kms from the Bass Straight on the Tamar River. The geography of place is

so much simpler than that of the spiritual geography readers at this site are

concerned with, although even physical geography has its complexities.

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Whom the gods would destroy they first make simple and simpler and

simpler. I look forward to a dialogue with someone. Here in far-off

Tasmania--the last stop before Antarctica, if one wants to get there through

some other route than off the end of South America--your email will be

gratefully received.

Apologetics, though, I rarely engage in in letters or emails. On the internet

there are many opportunities for such engagement. But I will not be posting

examples of this engagement here.

Let me post two prose-poems thought as we come to the concluson of this

rather long item at BARL.

UNSUSPECTED BENEFITS

After reading some 20 pages of letters from the Universal House of Justice

on The Study of the Baháí Faith, I was reminded of a great many other

letters over the years. I tried to summarize my reaction to the content of

these and other House letters which I have kept in three two-ring binders

going back to the mid-1970s after purchasing the first two volumes of the

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letters of the Universal House of Justice in Wellspring of Guidance and

Letters: 1968-1973. The following poem represents one such reaction, one

summary.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 22 May 1998.

Where does one fit this1 in?

On the one hand is the words sweetness

from the lips of the All-Merciful

and, on the other, is all else;

on the one hand

a system emerging inexorably

from obscurity and, on the other,

narrow and limited understandings;

bringing into visible expression

a new creation and a painfully slow,

often unsuspected, manifestation of benefits.

Oh, to be au courant with the varied learning of the day

and the great events of history,

so as not to prove unequal

to an emergency,

and possess comprehensive knowledge.2

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For there are so many emergencies,

so many complex interrelationships

and principles to keep us busy

in these epochal days at the dark heart.

Ron Price

22 May 1998

1 Extracts from Letters of the Universal House of Justice on Issues Related

to the Study of the Baháí Faith, May 1998,published in Baháí Canada,pp.1-

20.

2 Abdul-Bahá, Secret of Divine Civilization, USA, 170, p.36.

3 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, USA, 1957, p. 111.

STRANDS OF MANY-COLOURED GLASS

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Virginia Woolf was never confident for long about who she was. She was

frightened that the centre of her personality would not hold. The protean

nature of her personality caused her to be lured by the vast elements of

nature, earth, sky and sea, which would protect her. She was a spider; her

letters were her web. The whole composition, her collected letters, was spun

in a hall of mirrors. It took a certain courage for her to enter that hall which

might be filled with terror, with a nightmare, a funhouse of distortions, all

part of her manic-depressive episodes. Many strands of her identity were

attached to her many friends through the letter. The horrid, dull, scrappy,

scratchy letters she said were those letters we write only to those for whom

we possess real affection. In writing letters you have to put on an unreal

personality, except to those who are your intimate loved ones, and even then

there are the limitations of this swiftly passing world. It is rare that you can

really tell it all. When we say we know someone it is our version of them, a

version which is an emanation of ourself. Friends, defined in letters, were

therefore part of her fragile stability.1 For me, they are part of a changing

kalaidoscope which is difficult to tie down. 1 Virginia Woolf in Congenial

Spirits: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press, London, 1989,

p.xii.

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We inhabit a selfhood in our letters

and reach out, condensing life,

therefore, falsifying it,

becoming more or less

than what we are,

as you did

before you gave yourself

to the waters.

I am a many-coloured thing

in my letters,

something both real and unreal

in that many coloured glass of eternity,

no hall of mirrors, nightmare,

no funhouse of distortions.

I had them all long ago;2

now in a web of many strands

emanating from those writers of letters

who have filled my life

with their epistolary delights.

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Ron Price

21 May 1999

1 Virginia Woolf committed suicide by drowning in 1941.

2 With the gradual use of lithium as a medication for those with the bi-polar

tendency in the late 1960s and 1970s, the distortions in that ‘hall of mirros’

which Woolf experienced became ancient history for most manic-

depressives.

3 Letters play a very significant part in the edification and the guidance of

the believers.

Ron Price

21 May 1999

By November 2004 my postings on the internet had become so extensive as

to be in a category of correspondence on its own. As I have indicated, most

of this internet posting I have not included here. It simply became too much

to copy and file. This was true not only of the irrelevant material, some 90 to

95 per cent of the two to four hundred emails I received everyday, but even

the 5 per cent that was of value. If these electronic sites become archives

themselves, then one day my material can be retrieved by an assiduous

researcher, if it is deemed to be of value.

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So it was that most of the internet material, probably ninety-five percent of

it, I deleted. I have kept what I see as relevant to this ongoing collection. The

other ten sections/divisions of my letters have also been added-to during this

time, but each of these other sections has their own story and I do not deal

with it here. It may be that all of these letters and emails may become a grey

residue, as I said above, at a local tip, freeing my executors from the burden

of what to do with all the paper. And it may be that the contents here will be

a useful archive for a Cause that has goes from strength to strength and, as

one writer put it several decades ago, comes to conquer the world by storm.

Ron Price November 15 2004

The sheer repetition that appears in these letters will give ammunition to any

admirers and any critics who come along in the years ahead. My admirers, I

hope, will delight in seeing the constancy and firmness of a core of my

opinions across the years. I have only rarely found any withering pressure to

yield vis-a-vis this core. Those who become my critics will see a frequent

repetition of familiar themes and facts as confirmation of a supposed, an

apparent, lack of creativity, perhaps even a simple-mindedness. Who knows

what they will say if, indeed, they say anything at all. In parsing my

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arguments, though, I hope that both admirers and critics do not overlook

what I hope they see as genuine sincerity and doggedness in my letter

collection. I often tired of writing out again and again the same arguments

and sentiments. Staleness not freshness often dogged my path so that I did

not enjoy the experience of that phenomenal letter-writer of my time,

President Ronald Reagan, who felt when he wrote a letter that “he was

expressing his views for the first time.”4 I experienced some of this useful

emotional and intellectual feeling but not as frequently as I would have

liked.

An ordinary politician, indeed any person in the public eye or in some

bureaucratic position that had to deal with community concerns often

resorted necessarily to scribbling a code for the appropriate form-letter

response that would go out from some organizational word-factory. Many

other people I have known personally use the telephone to achieve whatever

intimacy is required. As the years went on into my fifties and sixties I

avoided the telephone and, except in my place of employment, I rarely

resorted to the use of form-letters.5 President Reagan, the man who became

known as The Great Communicator, thought it was his duty to write

individually to everyone who wrote to him and so, in the process, wrote

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some 10,000 letters in his lifetime. The only person I have known like this in

Australia was Philip Adams, although I’m sure there are many others. I am

not in their league but, when I did write a letter, I felt as Reagan did, that I

was writing to a friend, although I often pondered on the meaning of that

term. I also like to think that my letters had some of the quality of those of

Phillip Adams: a succinct and pithy content of thought and argument.

I’m not sure that my letters offer examples of the toughness, discipline, and

canniness that the President exemplified in his letters and which were

required in his extensive dealings with the public. His public geniality

masked these qualities. I leave it for critics to assess whether these qualities

are present in my letters. I tend to think that these qualities were masked by

humour but this is too difficult and complex a subject to assess in this space.

Finally,6 I am conscious that my letters could be used both to my

disadvantage and to the disadvantage of the Baha’i Faith if they were to fall

into the hands of severe critics, enemies of the Cause and that permanent

lynch mob that the world creates out of its bosom and the depths of its heart.

For evil men, as the Guardian once wrote, we will always have with us. And

so I entrust these letters to the appropriate Baha’i institutions on my passing.

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There is much to be pondered in my letters including my day to day efforts

as a practitioner of the protocols of a religious piety originally imbibed at my

mother’s knee more than half a century ago. I’d like to think that readers will

also enjoy what is a shrewd mix of practicality with ideological conviction.

That’s what I’d like to think, but it is difficult to assess oneself in these

areas. My nuanced view of man, society and religion might also be useful to

readers--or so I hope. I hope these letters also will bring to future readers a

subtlety, a stimulation and a pleasure that will enhance their work for this

Cause in the decades ahead as it comes to play a greater and greater part in

the unification of the planet.

It has been said that mans most important actions usually proceed from

mixed and dubious motives with virtue and vice equally distributed and

hardly ever mutually exclusive. Im not sure if this is the case as one student

of the decline of the Roman empire and of the works of Edward Gibbon

pondered to himself. But certainly in my case, in the case of a person I have

come to know perhaps altogether too well, I know of the virtue and of the

vice that was part of my life and was revealed, also in part, in my letters. I

do not tell it all in my letters or even in my journals but I think I strike a

balance between dull chronicle and rhetorical declamation as I proceed with

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what you might call a philosophical history which some regard as the

highest form of historiography. For I give meaning to my letters in the same

way I give meaning to history, to the washing of dishes or the attention to

the removal of waste matter from my body or my house. Impartiality is an

impossible goal; subjectivity inevitable and judgement often held in

suspense as I offer in my letters a range of options to my readers.

My letters will reveal for the reader, when and if they are published later in

this century or one of the next,an endless success of engagements with the

past in which the dramatis personae were never fully able to fathom, control

or command the events. Perhaps, though, through the diligence and accuracy

with which I attempted to document my times in a very personal,

idiosyncratic way and record the transactions of my past for the instruction

of future ages, the crimes and follies, the misfortunes and failures will be

attested to in a different way. For I would like to think that my words would

be for use not ostentation and that they would provide multiple layers of

insinuation, innuendo and hidden meaning. For my letters provide no answer

book only the meaning I give it and, in the end, only the meaning readers

give my letters.

_______________________________FOOTNOTES___________________

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1 I say ‘arguably’ because I’m not sure exactly when my mother first began

her involvement with the Baha’i Faith in 1953/4.

2 Kevin Larimer, “First-Class Mail: A Poet’s Letters,” Poets and Writers

Magazine,

3 Roger White, Another Song Another Season, George Ronald, Oxford,

1979, p.111.

4 Reagan: A Life in Letters, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson,

and Martin Anderson, 2004.

5 Except of course at Christmas and the Ayyam-i-Ha/Naw-Ruz period when

I regularly used a form letter.

6 Four months before the conclusion of this volume, on July 29th 2005, I

came across a review of some of the collected letters of Francesco Petrarch.

I have appended to this introduction(Appendix #1) my interpretation of that

review and its relevance to my own collection of letters.

Ron Price

November 27th 2005

Appendix #1:

Petrarch’s letters are divided into two sections: the Familiares(350) and the

Seniles(128). They are both monuments of Petrarch’s epistolary activity, to

humanism in the 14th century and to Petrarch’s own special vitality and

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constellation of interests. Even after nearly 700 years there is no critical text

for the entirety of the collection of Petrarch’s letters. If it has taken that long

for society to possess a critical overview of Petrarch’s extant letters, it is

most probable that my own letters will never find a place in critical

epistolary literature. Not that I mind really for I write these introductory

pieces, overviews of my own letters, to help me place my own life in

perspective in what are the darkest hours in history. I do keep one eye on the

generations to come but it is not a glance with much weight, with what you

could call a long and steady look because the whole question of the value of

this oeuvre is too iffy for words.

Petrarch’s Seniles are not simply those letters which belong chronologically

to the late part of Petrarch’s life, 1304-1374. Although the date 1361 when

Petrarch was 57 can be taken to mark the beginning of the collection known

as the Seniles, Petrarch included in the Familiares letters written after that

date, and in the Seniles, other letters written before that date. What this fact

suggests is Petrarch’s concern with the overall design. The sense of the

structural architecture of his epistolary collection is as evident as in his

poetry. If I was to divide my extant collection into a similar two sections,

with 45 years under my letter-belt, so to speak, it may just be timely to begin

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the Seniles. For I am now 61 and have just entered late adulthood to use a

term from development psychology. Old age is nearly 20 years away and if,

God should grant me a long life it is just possible that I could have another

45 years, taking me and my letters to the age of 106. Given the advances in

medicine that is just a possibility.

Petrarch’s ‘Letter to Posterity’(ca 1372), which is as close as he came to an

autobiographical narrative, is one of several letters he wrote to dead figures

from history. When I came across this idea it had an instinctive attraction to

me, although time will tell if I implement it. Lots of ideas in life never get

beyond the ‘that’s a good idea,’ stage. There is a symmetry to Petrarch’s

letters, letters which address the past and those which address the future.

They encapsulate what you might call his time travel one of his literary

passions. They also imply the concomitant of his love for past and future, a

concomitant which one can easily see in reading the letters, namely, a

distaste and even loathing for the present. The Seniles gain their special

pathos from the oscillation between such moments of praise and blame.

These same polarities exist in my writing, more so in my poetry and essays

than in my letters, I think. But without rereading these letters I must say that

I’m not really sure.

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We can learn much from these letters about the details of Petrarch’s life as

we can about mine. Petrarch was never concerned to simply reveal himself

to his correspondents. On the other hand, I find self-revelation in letters in

often essential if one is ever to gain any degree of intimacy. The model of

Seneca’s treatise-like epistles was always at least as important as that of

Cicero’s familiar letters, to Petrarch. I have never considered using the letter

in any treatise-like way. Perhaps at a future time. My letters seem to exist at

some half-way point between intimately personal and essay-like, between

the style of the letters of Mozart and those of Richard Wagner.

Petrarch’s tendency to let a letter swell into a treatise informs the structure of

the Seniles. There are a number of letters on single topics which occupy an

entire book, alternating with books composed of numerous shorter letters.

For example, Book 7 comprises Petrarch’s exhortation to Pope Urban V to

return the Holy See to Rome; Book 9 consists of complementary letters to

the Pope and his secretary Francesco Bruni, congratulating them on the

accomplishment of that move; the two letters of Book 12 to Giovanni Dondi

carry on a polemic against physicians; in Book 14 Petrarch instructs

Francesco da Carrara on the qualities of a good prince. From this point of

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view too, his ‘Letter to Posterity’ acquires a special importance as one last

epistolary treatise to culminate the pattern: a treatise on the self. My

autobiography and my poetry serves this function.

The topics treated in Petrarch’s texts are representative of the more

important concerns of Petrarch’s later years. His quarrel with physicians, for

example, amounts to an obsession. I, too, have my obsessions. As my wife

sees it, I possess a worry and self-absorption that is exceeded only by her

worry. Self-absorption lay behind much of my volition and action--and the

thick web of my letter writing. My letters are important, though, not for their

revelations of any particular psychological tendencies or particular views of

the times or of history nor to indicate how I came to think my thoughts or

take my actions during these epochs but, rather, for their association with a

movement that I believed was slowly, imperceptibly and inevitably going

t6o take the world by storm. I shall leave this subject of obsessions, self-

absorptions and psychological tendencies and see what becomes of them in

the next 37 years as I head for centenarian status in 2044! At the opposite

pole in what might be unkindly called his garrulousness, Petrarch

increasingly expresses a resolve to be brief in his correspondence.

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Plutarchs resolve to turn his mind toward eternal life creates an ongoing

counterpoint with his earthly literary urge, an urge which is not only an

opinionated old man’s inability to be silent, but lies more fundamentally in

his sheer pleasure of reading and writing. At the same time, we obtain

glimpses of the practical obstacles to his correspondence, such as the

interference of border guards. I have no problem with border guards as some

of my fellow co-religionists from Iran have had. Life, I’m sure, will unfold

for me different practical obstacles in my life as life unfolded different

obstacles for those Iranian who began to populate the Bahá'í communities in

the West in significant numbers after 1979.

We also become aware of just how much Petrarch loves what he feels he

must renounce. I, too, have loves that I should renounce but, if I dealt with

them here, this introduction would become far too long. These words about

my letters already possess a prolixity which will keep virtually all readers far

from whatever insights they possess. In his final letter, a letter to Boccaccio,

Petrarch becomes truly moving in his valediction “Farewell, dear friends,

Farewell, dear letters.” This is a fitting end to his life of letters and to mine,

for now.—Ron Price with appreciation to Francesco Petrarch, “Letters of

Old Age” and to Stephen Murphy for his review in Italica Press on the Web.

PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS

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VOLUME 10 PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE

With the opening of this arch-lever file of personal correspondence there

now exists ten volumes of personal letters to individuals for future

biographers, analysts of embryonic Baha’i institutions and communities and

interested parties of various ilks. This volume of letters opens the 23rd year

of my extensive letter collecting and the 46th since the first letter in this

collection found its place in volume 1 and was dated November 27th 1960.

For the most part these letters are a casual, although to some extent,

systematic collection. In recent years I have also added some non-epistolary

material because it seemed appropriate and I will leave it to assessors to sift

out this material, to keep it in appendices, to simply include it as part of a

varied type of letter/communication or to delete it as desired. The decision as

to how to organize this assortment of resources I leave in the hands of

anyone who takes a serious interest in it. To decide what to do with it all

belongs to them.

In some ways my collections of writing are themselves manifestations of my

effort to make my life subservient to a personal need to be a letter writer, a

poet, an essayist, a note-taker, as Dylan Thomas’s writing efforts were part

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of his self-appointed task to make his life subservient to his need to be a

poet. This is a subtle idea and quite complex and I deal with it more

extensively in my writing, especially my poetry, from time to time over the

years. But the idea, however intricate, delicate and subtle, needs to be given

an airing occasionally in these periodic reviews of my letters.

There is, it seems to me, an unavoidable self-consciousness in my approach

to the business of writing since perhaps the 1980s. This self-consciousness

was also the case with the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas as I pointed out above

as Paul Ferris states in his introduction to Thomas’s collection of letters.

This self-consciousness has done Thomas some harm at the hands of his

critics--as Ferris notes in his discussion of the analysis of Thomas’s critics

from the 1960s and 1970s. However self-conscious I may have been in

providing future readers with a ringside seat at a period in the cultural

transformation of the Bahai community and in offering them an insiders

view of the birth and development en passant of its community in the West I

can not see this as doing any harm. Who knows, though, what will befall

both my community and my letters in a future epoch?

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Perhaps my somewhat dogged sense of living within the confines of a self-

constructed role as a writer in the first century of the Formative Age will

prove my undoing. As a writer, I revel in the context of a range of a complex

set of implications both for me and for the Baha’i community of which I am

a part. Perhaps this will bring me some “harm” as well in the long term. Of

course, if this harm ever occurs, I will be long gone from this mortal coil. In

the short term the problem is irrelevant at least insofar as any public is

concerned occupied as it is with a host of problems that this same public

does not in any way connect with this new and revolutionary Cause.

Since my retirement in 1999 I have written a great deal more in all the

genres of my writing. In my years of full-time employment and student life

as far back as the late 1940s, if I take the analysis as far back as the years of

middle childhood, the notebook dominated my writing life. Then the essay

and several attempts at a novel as the years went on. The extent of my

writing in all other genres in the last dozen or so years(1992-2005) has

exceeded whatever I had done before. This is especially true of letters.

In the most general of senses, I see my letters as “a kind of spiritual journal.”

Robert Gittings says this of the letters of John Keats written at the time of

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the birth of Baha’u’llah and the Bab. There is an obsessive quality in some

of Keats’ letters, occasionally a sign of morbidity and despair and many

signs of self-control and the lack thereof. This is also true of my own letters

and journals. Like Keats, I try to face my difficulties, fight my battles and

get on with the journey. I do not always do this successfully. There is

obviously an effort, occasionally if not often, to put on a good face for the

sake of the recipients of the letters, for the purpose of stressing the positive

and to try to confront the disapppointments of life with that stiff upper-lip

and persistence which is part of the English tradition.

I would like to draw extensively here on the words of Rachel Donadio who

discusses the email in her article in the New York Times because so much

that is in my collections of letters in recent years is in the form of an email.

“Back in the 20th century,” Donadio writes, “it was often lamented that the

telephone might put an end to literary biography. In lieu of letters, writers

could just as easily gab on the phone, leaving no trace. Today, a new

challenge awaits literary biographers and cultural historians: the e-mail. The

problem isnt that writers and their editors are corresponding less, its that

theyre corresponding infinitely more -- but not always saving their e-mail

messages.

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Publishing houses, magazines and many writers freely admit they have no

coherent system for saving e-mail, let alone saving it in a format that would

be easily accessible to scholars. Biography, straight up or fictionalized, is

arguably one of todays richest literary forms, but it relies on a kind of

correspondence thats increasingly rare, or lost in cyberspace.

My correspondence is not lost. I keep a goodly measure of it in each of my

collections of letters. I like to think that my correspondence reflects a

sensitivity to, an appreciation of, the idiosyncracies of the recipients of my

emails. Writing is like talking and, in the process, one tries to create some

impression. With the passing of time, whatever talking I have done will have

gone into the ether, but this writing, these letters and emails, will reveal

much about my life and my times. Many of my poems sprinkle the pages of

my emails in an impromptu, often impulsive and serendipitous fashion,

although I often do not keep a copy of the whole of a letter with all of its

poems. Worrying about trees and the extent of print one produces became a

concern in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 2004 alone Farrar, Straus & Giroux, to chose but one publisher, put out

The Letters of Robert Lowell” and a biography of the critic Edmund Wilson

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that draws on his letters. The list of publications that draw on

correspondence is extensive. But that doesnt necessarily mean that

publishing companies are saving their own communication with writers.

This is also true of many a writer. A great deal of personal communication is

just going down the proverbial tube. Since the email became part of my life

some 15 years ago(1990-2005) I have tried to save emails that are

significant, relevant or important in some way for the tasks at hand. I have

written about this subject before and I do not want to go into detail here. But

this subject does need to be given an airing occasionally.

I try to save substantive correspondence about issues concerning books were

working on, or about our relations with authors, but Im sure I dont always

keep the good stuff, particularly the personal interchanges, which is

probably what biographers would relish,Jonathan Galassi, the president and

publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said. He made this comment via e-

mail, of course, like most of the editors and writers who might make a

comment on such an issue. I dont think weve addressed in any systematic

way what the long-term future of these communications is, but I think we

ought to,” Galassi continued. I include these comments here in the

introduction to Volume 10 of my personal correspondence because virtually

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everything in the last few volumes of personal correspondence is now an

email. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule and I have commented

upon them before.

Random House Inc., whose imprints include Alfred A. Knopf, Doubleday

and Bantam Dell, has not set any email guidelines. At present Random

House Inc. does not have in place a distinct corporate policy for archiving

electronic author-publisher correspondence, and we have yet to establish a

central electronic archive for housing publishing material, Stuart

Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, noted. Each of our publishing

divisions decides what author-publisher correspondence and materials they

wish to retain. W. W. Norton doesnt have a policy for saving e-mail

messages or letters, leaving it to the discretion of editors, and Harcourts

archiving policy doesnt yet govern e-mail communication. So, it appears, I

have lots of company in my new problem, a new problem that arose in the

1990s and especially since my retirement in 1999.

Although David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said he considers

the collected letters of Harold Ross, the magazines founding editor, the best

book Ive ever read about The New Yorker, you wont see Remnicks collected

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letters or e-mail correspondence, any time soon.Oh, God forbid, Remnick

said. For one thing, The New Yorker routinely purges messages from its

system. And I do the same; I have to with over 200 emails coming in every

day from the many websites I am a member of in the last several years.

Deborah Treisman, who as The New Yorkers fiction editor is in

communication with most major living writers, confessed she doesnt always

save her messages. Unfortunately, since I havent discovered any convenient

way to electronically archive e-mail correspondence, I dont usually save it,

and it gets erased from our server after a few months, Treisman said. If

theres a particularly entertaining or illuminating back-and-forth with a writer

over the editing process, though, I do sometimes print and file the e-mails.

The fiction department files eventually go to the New York Public Library,

she said, so conceivably someone could, in the distant future, dig all of this

up.

The impact on future scholarship is not something that Ive spent much time

thinking about, Remnick said. “As much as I respect lots of scholarship in

general, what matters most is the books and not book chat. Somethings

obviously been lost, even though I dont think its the most important literary

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thing we could lose. This may be the case for me and my letters and the final

result of all this worry-warting may be that it all simply bites the dust and all

the issues about what to save and what to erase may prove irrelevant,

immaterial, in the ‘who could care less’ basket.

Book chat or no, irrelevance or not, great letters are great literature. In

Robert Lowells letters, for instance, the mundane quickly opens up into

whole worlds of feeling. I think our letters on the agency tax-money must

have crossed,Lowell wrote Elizabeth Hardwick, his soon-to-be ex-wife, in

1971. Through long hours of revising, a leisurely bath and a quick dressing,

I have been thinking about our long past, he continued. Not having you is

like learning to walk. Some entire books dont convey as much raw emotion

as those eight words do . I feel the same is true of some of my

correspondence. In the end, of course, the significance of what I write is so

intimately tied up with the growth and development of the Baha’i Faith as

the emerging world religion on the planet.

Designed for constant and instant contact, e-mail messages inevitably have a

different tone from postmarked missives that allow correspondents the time

to ruminate and percolate, to apply a critical eye to their own lives. Often

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less nuanced, more prosaic, written in haste and subject to

misunderstandings, e-mailed thoughts are microwaved, not braised. It often

occurs to me that e-mail may render a certain kind of literary biography all

but obsolete, Blake Bailey, the author of a biography of Richard Yates and a

forthcoming one of John Cheever, said. The messages are too ephemeral:

people write them in a rush without the sort of precision and feeling that

went into the traditional, and now utterly defunct, letter. 95% of the emails I

receive are certainly ephemeral and oblivion is the only place for them and

that is where they go within the day they are sent. But there is much in the

emails I write and receive that is not in this ephemeral category. And these

emails are found here.

Unless one possesses the emails or letters at the other end of the

conversation or dialogue one misses a great deal. I have tried, where

possible, to keep copies of relevant correspondence at both ends. One misses

a great deal, too, when all one possesses is the advocacy or the judgement of

the letter-writer. It is often difficult to find out the truth of an idea or a

situation in one’s own household; people who live in the same house often

have completely different stories to tell. A number of views is often

necessary, but not possible when one is dealing with the contents of a letter.

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The copiousness of letters is no guarantee of what is authentic, true and

accurate. Perhaps, as a major biographer of Wagner, Ernest Newman, said:

“There can never be too many documents.” He might have added: there can

never be a final truth.

Ron Price

November 27th 2005

THE LETTER: A HISTORICAL NOTE

I want to draw on some of the experience of one of the world’s first letter

writers, Cicero(106 BC-43 BC). The information comes from Frank Frost

Abbott’s book Commentary on Selected Letters of Cicero(Boston. Ginn and

Co. 1909). The letters were written between the years 68 BC and 43 BC. As

there was no postal system in the middle of the first century BC, letters had

to be sent by ones own messengers or the messengers of ones friends. This

made the composition of a letter a more serious matter in Ciceros day than it

is in ours. But his letters were not always studied productions: some of them

were written while he was travelling; others between the courses at dinner.

These words about letter writing just before the time of Christ provide a

useful contrast with my own experience. In my case there were a very few

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letters written while travelling or while eating dinner and, of course, the

whole process is as fast as the speed of light now.

When a letter was ready to be sent, it was rolled up; a thread was wound

about the middle of it and sometimes passed through the papyrus itself, and

a seal was attached to the ends of the string. Abbott spends some time

describing the process of writing letters, the technology involved and the

courtesies that attended the exercise. I could go into a similar description and

analysis, but with the literally billions of emails and letters written in my

lifetime, I’m sure there is no need to add anything on these matters here.

A study of Cicero’s letters involves a study of his life and his philosophy.

Such a study comments also on Cicero’s style and his general purposes in

writing. Letter writing at that time was considered a ‘supreme literary art.’

Our knowledge of the late Roman Republic was due in significant measure

to Cicero’s 900(ca) letters. There is little doubt that knowledge of our time

can be significantly improved by a knowledge of my letters, although I like

to think there is some historical and social value in them, especially to the

Baha’i community.

AMBIGUOUS MOSAIC

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Ron Powers, in his biography Mark Twain: A Life, writes that in their old

age men employ what is left of their skills. Mark Twin employed what he

had left of his skill in writing. At the age of 61 he was financially ruined,

creatively exhausted, emotionally broken, his wife Olivia was chronically

frail and his daughter Susy had just died. But his writing, his thinking and

his reading continued until his death 12 years later. There was serenity and

peace, writes Powers, in Twain’s old age. And there was much else as

Powers tells us in his 700 page biography and as others have told in theirs

about this ‘Voice of America.’ -Ron Price with thanks to Geoffrey Wolff,

“Mark Twain:Voice of America,” The New York Times, October 2nd 2005.

Something had gone out of me,

too, Sam, by the ripe age of 61.

But, ironically, I felt my creativity

to be just beginning. I felt a little thin

on the ground to put it colloquially.

It’s as if I had an excess of speech,

like some deadly poison, taking

the stuff out of me. I, too, have

a frail wife, Sam, but we lean on

each other in different ways, Sam.

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I’m comfortable on my disability

pension after a life of shape-shifting

from the Arctic to the Antipodes.

My decades, like yours, have been

contested, exploratory, blood-soaked,

Sam and my warring personalities

have finally got some resolution.

My letters and journals, like yours,

are clue ridden, although with 100

thousand letters, with their strike-overs,

legible erasures and endless notes,

you left more clues to who you were.

No microcosm, your world, all over

creation and mine, too, in 37 houses

and 22 towns over two continents.

I had my years, like you, as a showman

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in classrooms creating an ambiguous mosaic,

inspired by sights, sounds and processes,

especially those of a new religion, Sam.

Ron Price

October 3rd 2005

AN ESPECIAL NEARNESS

In his short life(1795-1821) John Keats passed through periods of extreme

restlessness and depression, tragedy and illness. Keats’ poetic life was very

short(1814-1821), but he was gradually able to find a tone of voice for

thinking aloud in verse and for fitting his meditations on the meaning and

purpose of life into a formal and flexible poetic.

During these seven years he made an increasingly conscious effort to make

himself more effective as a poet. All his experience, reading and thought

was used for poetical purposes. He tried to shape every new influence

toward a study of poetry and toward his particular and developing notion of

poetry. The result was that his writing shows “an almost instant transmission

of impressions, thoughts, reading and ideas into poetry.”1 So was this my

aim and the following prose-poem links Keats’ poetic efforts and my own. -

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Ron Price with thanks to Robert Gittings, Selected Poems and Letters of

Keats, Heinemann, London, 1981(1966), p. 8.

I, too, worked toward a method

for dealing with life’s complexity

as my own engagement with life

deepened with age so that I could write

frankly about myself and about poetry.

My enveloping desire was to express

my excitement, curiosity and interest

in writing and find ways of expression

for my own growth, for the incredible

changes and chances of the world,

so that I may soar in an atmosphere

of an especial nearness which sooner

or later will influence my own soul.

Ron Price

September 24th 2005

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BEARING FRUIT

The following is a hypothetical book and is entitled An Annotated Edition of

the Correspondence Between Ron Price and John Bailey(1997 to 2010). It is

edited and has a 50 page introduction by Mrs. Belle Lettre. It is published in

Ottawa Ontario by Tecumseh Press, 2080, pp. 252. The book contains a

selection of 50 letters by each writer from an archive of 320 letters. The

correspondence between Price and Bailey has until now been generally

available mainly in the selective and unreliable editions of Arthur Setlet:

Ron Price’s Letters to John Bailey (1997-2010) and The Letters of John

Bailey to Ron Price (1997-2010), which were published in 2056 and 2057.

Belle Lettre’s Annotated Edition of the Correspondence, which meticulously

reproduces transcriptions of 50 of the 320 available letters between the two

men, together with copious annotations, a lengthy and intelligent

Introduction, various Appendices (including facsimiles of several letters), an

Index, and a Bibliography, is a most welcome addition to Canadian poetry

and Baha’i studies.

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Mrs. Lettre’s edition has an appealingly modest and workman-like quality.

At a time when the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council is

funding editions of/about early Canadian prose and poetry works in the

Baha’i community it is rewarding to see a volume such as Belle Lettre’s

Annotated . . . Correspondence which has, to judge by its acknowledgments

pages, been created and published through the painstaking efforts of an

energetic and enthusiastic committee and a relatively small grant from the

Ontario Arts Council’s subsidiary, Baha’i Studies in Ontario.

Mrs. Lettre’s Introduction runs to over fifty pages. Rightly observing that the

Price-Bailey correspondence represents the only extensive exchange

between Price and a trusted literary friend which covers the entire span of

Price’s mature creative life. Lettre shows how the letters bear both on the

poet’s literary career and on his private life at a time (1997 to 2010) of great

poetic activity for him and changes in his personal, professional and Baha’i

community life. As anyone who has read the Price-Bailey correspondence in

manuscript knows, the letters offer detailed insights to several of the books

that began to be published in the years after 2056/7 on both Price and on

many other individuals and developments in the Baha’i community back at

the turn of the century. The correspondence also offers insights into Price’s

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family life and aspects of his ill health and his private life. This private life

emerges as quotidian and touchingly so--on occasion. Attitudes to various

political and social questions, his fellow poets, and so on, are also part of

this special collection of letters.

A valuable aspect of Lettre’s Introduction is its discussion of the different

uses made of the Price-Bailey correspondence by critics and biographers

from Carl Cannot to Munro Cando as far back as the beginning of the

second century of the Formative Age in 2021. It is a discussion which, from

a particular, although limited perspective, offers an overview of features and

perspectives on Baha’i history and sociology which have, in a peculiar and

unfortunately limiting way, been dominating the discussion of developments

in Baha’i history in the 4th and 5th epochs. The sequence of letters is

remarkably readable and the editor has done a discreet, methodical and

judicious job.–Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, September 19th

2005.

I’d like to think there was something

enduring in all these letters, John.

I know it is of absolutely no importance

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to you and the way you see ultimate things.

But I’d like to think that those 1300 pages

and more than half a million words can

bear some ultimate fruit down journey’s

long, stony and tortuous road. I would.

–Ron Price, September 20th 2005.

CAPTURING EXPERIENCE

Irving Layton, one of Canada’s most famous 20th century poets,

“experienced a mingling of scorn and neglect in his earlier years,” wrote

Peter Hunt in his lengthy 1977 essay on Layton in the journal Canadian

Poetry Studies.1 This scorn and neglect greeted Layton’s poetic output in the

1940s and early 1950s. By 1956 Layton was receiving the accolades of

eminent critics. In 1959 he won the Governor-General’s Award for his book

A Red Carpet for the Sun. That year I became a Baha’i after six years

association with this new Faith. I did not write my first poem until 1961 and

did not begin to write poetry at all seriously for another 30 years until the

early 1990s.

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If as another poet, Roger White, wrote in his poem Notes On Erosion,

“neglect will foster love’s thrusting growth,” perhaps neglect will have a

similar function with respect to poetry. For those same 30 years(1961-1991)

I neglected poetry and for the next 15 years(1991-2006) society neglected

me and my poetry. To scorn and neglect Layton responded aggressively,

attacking those who attacked him and who criticized his vision and

craftsmanship. I did not have this problem. For those 45 years I was not

surprisingly and not sufficiently well-known nor significant in a literary and

public sense to be either neglected or scorned.

Layton had an exalted view of his work and this view came to be echoed by

influential critics by the 1960s. I had no such view of my work, although

writing poetry gave me great pleasure. Layton wrote in what George

Woodcock called “the little zoo of Canadian letters.”1 I wrote in another

zoo, certainly smaller than the Canadian one, a little zoo at the other end of

the world. Layton wrote with “the ferocity of a ring-tailed roarer,” said

Woodcock. I was not sure how to characterize my work with such

convincing and graphic words.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Peter Hunt,

“Irving Layton, Pseudo-Prophet—A Reappraisal,” Canadian Poetry Studies,

No.1, 1977.

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So many liked your work;

I was too young back then,

when you really got going

in that poetic Canadian zoo.

Criticism continued coming

your way all along the road,

at least in the years before

I really got going to climb

those poetic mountains

with appreciation’s spirit,

with a gift of language far

too inadequate to the task.

Yearly you were capturing

Canadian experience and

the poet’s long vocation

with your fusion of joy,

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thought and intense feeling

or, as others said, with a

stunted, distorted view of life.

And all the while I was capturing

experience, too, my life’s1 and

that of a new world religion.

1 Layton wrote his first major poem in Montreal in 1944, the year I was born

and in the Ten Year Crusade(1953-1963), my first ten years of association

with the Baha’i Faith when I was 9 to 19, he was his most prolific.

Ron Price

September 13th 2005

LETTERS FRUITION AND LIFE

Felix Mendelssohn(1809-1847) composed letters in his youth, 1819-1830,

“filled with both drawings and vivid descriptions of nature, architecture and

people.”1 The philosopher Goethe(1749-1832) also included drawings in

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some of his letters. Goethe’s drawings, in his letters and in other places, are

now gathered into six volumes. This combination of forms, art and prose,

was not something readers will ever find in my correspondence. Drawing,

painting, what might be called the figurative arts in general, were for the

most part not creative expressions in my life.

Letters from the period of my childhood and youth, 1944-1965, and any of

my art-work, are non-existent. There are two letters, both written by others

to my mother, from this period, but none of the letters I wrote to (i) a pen

pal, Hiroshi Kamatu, in Japan, (ii) to a girl in Georgetown, Cathy Saxe or

(iii) anyone else whom I can not even recall now.-Ron Price with thanks to

1R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn and His World, Princeton UP, Princeton,

N.J.,1991, p.26.

There was no evidence back then

in those years up to 1965 that

artistic mediums really liked me.

Most of us don’t ever get going

in our early years anyway: seeds

are planted for the future harvest.

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So many seeds were planted then

in those two Seven Year Plans,

that Ten Year Crusade and, then,

as the Nine Year Plan began by

my mother and father, my aunt,

my grandfather and uncles and

more Baha’is than I can remember

and a world in gestation: the Kingdom

of God on earth had begun, a new wind

was blowing, rock ‘n’ roll had started

with its new rhythms and blues and tones.

Perhaps the first fruition began in early

October of ’65, ten weeks into maturity,

with the embryo of my pioneering life

taking form, finally taking a rich form

30 years later when a special rendezvous

of the soul, a special inner life, a special

quickening wind, amplified and clarified

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my perspectives and the brightest emanations

of Baha’u’llah’s mind became available at last:

that Unerring Balance, that Straight Path, that

source of true felicity, given tangible form,

part of the confirming assistance from another

world in ever-greater measure, part of that

befitting crescendo and those eternal traces.

Ron Price

September 10th 2005

ULTIMATE PERSPECTIVE

For someone like myself who has an archive of over 5000 letters, the

archaeological research in what has come to be called the Cave of Letters,

has a special interest. The first research was done in this cave near the Dead

Sea in Israel in 1960/1 and the letters which were found came from 132

AD(ca). No research was done again until 1999. My own cache or cave of

letters was amassed during this time(1960-2005) and can be found, not in a

region of karst topography, but in a small room in a small town at the end of

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the Pacific rim, the last stop on the way to Antarctica. Like those ancient

cave documents from the period of time of the Second Revolt of the Jews

against the Romans just one century after the crucifixion of Christ which

chronicle what life was like two millennia ago, my letters document the life

of an international pioneer at another important time in history, the first four

epochs at the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth(1953-2021).

These letters in the Cave of Letters from nearly 1900 years ago are part of a

priceless collection of artefacts. State-of-the art archaeological technology

has enabled historians to add a substantial amount of new information to the

existing bases of knowledge from the second century AD. It is difficult to

see how my letters can provide anything like the same function given the

multitude of sources of information about our contemporary way of life or,

more particularly, the way of life of the international Baha’i in the first

century of the evolution of Baha’i administrative institutions.-Ron Price with

thanks to “Lost Worlds: Ancient Refuge in the Holy Land,” SBS TV, 7:30-

8:30 pm, September 4th 2005 and “2000 Excavation of The Cave of

Letters,” Internet Site, 2001.

I wonder if azimuths, inclinations,

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station sketches, computer programs,

cross-sectional maps, survey data,

archaeological and geophysical analyses,

digital pulseEKKOTM100 and 1000 GPR

systems and their resulting profiles using

antennae frequencies of 100 and 450 MHz

and a backpack transport system…….

..….and radar stratigraphic analysis

to investigate both lateral and vertical

geometry of reflection patterns;

archaeological probes using endoscope,

metal detector and other excavation

techniques. Two dimensional electrical

resistivity and tomography analysis----

…all of this just might reveal something

that the present generation of analysts

would not be inclined to even examine.

For the meaning of history is not so much

234

in the living but in retrospect as new fields

emerge, new meaning systems have their day,

and this earthly life finds its ultimate perspective.

-Ron Price September 5th 2005

YEATS AND ME

There are several complicating factors for readers in their appreciation of my

poetry and the several genres of my writing. One is that it helps readers to

possess what you might call a memory-bank of names, symbols and personal

references planted, propagated and grafted in one careful arrangement of

ordered writing or simply in place in their brain. Without this possession

readers are at a distinct disadvantage in gaining any depth of understanding

of my work.

A second complicating factor is that I have written a great deal about myself.

Like the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, I have also written thousands of letters, large

autobiographical accounts, innumerable essays, published and unpublished,

introductions to various pieces of work, millions of words in prose-poetic

form, explanatory notes, talks, the beginnings of novels. How far can I be

235

trusted as a reporter on my own life, the life of my society and of my

religion? Should all of my writings be considered as ancillary parts in one

large self-construction, but possessing no objective reliability. These are

questions that can be legitimately asked about the oeuvre of Yeats. Alasdair

D.F. Macrae asks these questions in the introduction to his book on Yeats,1

but gives no categorical answer. –Ron Price with thanks to A.D.F. Macrae,

W.B. Yeats: A Literary Life, MacMillan, London, 1995, p.3.

These same questions

can be asked about my works

with many possible answers

for these words of mine are

not rootless flowers but are

the speech of a man, standing

alone and by himself for years,

at the beginnings of his community,

on a path no other man has gone,

accepting his own thoughts

and those of a thousand others,

giving his life and his words

236

to the world as we all do

each in our own ways.

At the opening of that

Seven Year Plan you1 said

the poet writes of his life,

out of its tragedy, remorse,

lost love, loneliness, no bundle

of incoherence or accident and

not everything about everything.

But I am not a reliable assessor

of those several proportions

that make up the me that is me

and the changes and chances

of these my earthly days are

far from tidy, patterned, glib,

formulaic…many rags & bones.

1 Yeats in 1937

-Ron Price

August 31st 2005

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IMMORTALITY

The hungering for immortality, for fame and renown, not so much in the

next life but in this has been a part of the yearning of the heart of many a

human being since the dawn of civilization. In some ways this hunger is a

natural yearning, a normal human desire. I come across examples of its

expression frequently in my study, my reading. This evening, in a book

about the life of a leading Roman in the first century BC, I came across it in

the first two lines of the introduction. The immortality Cicero hungered for

has been achieved not by what he did but by what he wrote in the years 63 to

43 BC, “the sheer bulk and variety of his writings.”1 He is accessible to us

today and so he remains of unique interest. He projects himself into posterity

through his extant correspondence of 900 letters.-Ron Price with thanks

to(1)D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Cicero, Duckworth and Co. Ltd., London,

1971, p.ix.

Letter writing was a supreme literary art

in those years before Christ was born

and we know more of Rome’s history

238

in these years thanks to these letters.

Or, should we say, thanks?

Patterson says Cicero is

an intellectually pretentious,

thoroughly heartless slumlord

who is unreservedly, unashamedly

fond of his own glory and, sadly,

the major source of information

on one of the most vital periods

of our intellectual-classical past?1

What sort of fame is this?

His moral code, his philosophical

refuge, succeeded by the life----

four decades later----of a man

who wrote a letter, not one word.

1 Orlando Patterson, Freedom, 1991, p.232.

Ron Price

239

August 30th 2005

LETTERS FROM A NARROW WORLD

I saw the following piece in the New York Times.com which I read

occasionally. I began to read this internet newspaper just this year. The

article about some of the letters of T.S. Eliot caught my fancy because it

gave rise for the first time to some thought as to the monetary value my

letters might have at some future time. Of course, it is not a subject that there

is any point contemplating because, should my letters ever have any money

value, I will by then be long gone from this mortal coil.

The growth and influence of the Baha’i Faith fifty years after my passing is

very difficult to measure. Whatever value my letters have—and it is

impossible to estimate any value—will depend on the place of this Cause in

the years ahead and the value of the contribution of the international pioneer

in Baha’i history. If I assume, for practical purposes, that I die in 2021 at the

age of 77, then fifty years after that point in time would take humanity to

2071 or BE 227.

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As the New York Times.com pointed out in this article about some of the

letters of T.S. Eliot which I came across today, August 12th: “nearly 50

typed letters, some illustrated and including poems, from T. S. Eliot (1888-

1965) to his first godson, Tom Faber, are to be sold by the Faber publishing

family on September 20th 2005 at auction at Bonhams in London. Thomas

Erle Faber (1927-2004), who became a physicist and a member of the board

of Faber & Faber Publishers, was the son of Eliots friend and publisher,

Geoffrey Faber. Private and largely unpublished, these letters enjoy an

estimated value of about $50,000. They are to be sold, along with 84 other

letters to Eliots friend Enid Faber, the wife of Geoffrey. Also for sale are (a)

inscribed first editions of Eliots work and (b) a silver pocket watch, given to

Eliot, then 12, for Christmas 1900 and passed on to Tom Faber a boy of 13. -

Ron Price with thanks to Lawrence Van Gelder, “T. S. Eliot Letters Are to

Be Auctioned,” New York Times.com, 12/8/’05.

Where will this Cause be

when another 70 years

of this Plan have been

put into a divine framework?1

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Where will I be

when another 70 years

of my life have been

put into its divine framework?

Gone from this darksome

narrow world, I will have

hastened away to the land

of lights and, I trust, will

have found infinite rewards;2

of course, one never knows

for sure, for certain, beyond

doubt, question and ifyness.

1 1937-2007; 2007-2077

2 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, p.101.

Ron Price

August 13th 2005

242

ANODYNE

Pushkin(1799-1837) was the founder of modern Russian literature and

Russia’s greatest poet. In 1829 at the age of 29 he fell in love with a

beautiful 16 year old girl. In 1830 Pushkin was having one of his most

prolific periods of writing and that year he proposed marriage to this

beautiful Petersburg socialite, Natalya Goncharova. He had finally received

her agreement after an agonizing period of trying to convince her family that

he had the means to be a good match. But she was both jealous of Pushkin

and something of a flirt. His letters to her alternate between snarky rebukes

of her affairs and exasperated explanations of why he cant make it back

home. Their marriage lasted only five years. Pushkin died in January 1837.

Pushkin wrote to his young wife-to-be in that fall of 1830 as follows: “I

wake up at seven oclock, drink coffee and lie in bed until three oclock. At

three oclock, I go riding, take a bath at five and then have a supper of

potatoes with barley kasha. I read until nine oclock. This is what my days

look like, each just like the last.” While lying in bed Pushkin was

singlehandedly founding modern Russian literature. -Ron Price with thanks

to Author Unknown, “Internet Sites on Aleksandr Pushkin,” Internet, 2005.

243

I found this account particularly interesting because 144 years later in 1973

when I was 29 I, too, fell in love with a young girl. She was 15 and her name

was Anne. She had been in my humanities grade 10 class at Para Hills High

School in South Australia where I was a teacher. For some eight months we

got to know each other on a strictly platonic level. But in early October 1973

after my first wife and I separated, Anne and I began a sexually intimate

relationship that lasted until late December. She, too, was fickle and I

discovered this in the third month of our affair bringing it crashing to a halt.

Who knows what unhappiness, like Pushkin, I would have had if our affair

had become a marriage?

I had just begun to have some success in my writing life in 1972/3, but it

would be another twenty years before my period of literary fruition really

took off in the early 1980s and moreso in the 1990s. And as I write this I

have had 38 years of marriage, have never fought the duels Pushkin did and

have played a small part in laying the foundation for an extensive, a massive,

literature in the social sciences and humanities written by Baha’is.

I had dried out in a dry

244

dog-biscuit of a land

after freezing in Canadian

winters and she was waiting

for me like some angel-touch:

young, fresh, firm and willing.

And I was dizzy with desire,

lost after making shifts from

Baffin to semi-desert country.

He gave me to her or, perhaps,

her to me, a gift, anodyne

to ease life’s pain that had come

too sharply of a sudden-shock.

And ease it did, helped me move

to the end of the Antipodes where

I would find more angels, more than

I had ever seen, who would ease life’s

pain and give it to me slowly drop-by-

drop for the rest of my life: but still

245

that holy passion stirred me

in the country of my inner self

as I continued on the journey

to the Desired Unknown Country.

Ron Price July 29 2005

AN OBSCURE AND COMPLEX WAR

On April 21st 1937 the Seven Year Plan began in the North American

Baha’i community, although it had been mentioned for nearly a year by then

in the letters of Shoghi Effendi.1 One week later, on April 28th 1937,

Saddam Hussein was born. He became President of Iraq from 1979 to 2003.

In 2003 Saddam was deposed by the US and its allies. On December 13th

2003 he was captured and, as I write this prose-poem, he is about to stand

trial before the Iraq Special Tribunal later this year. In the last ten days of

April 2006 the formal Baha’i teaching Plans begun in 1937 will enter their

70th year as will “the world’s best known and most hated Arab leader.”2 -

Ron Price with appreciation to 1Shoghi Effendi, Messages To America:

246

1932-1946, Wilmette, 1947, p.7 and to 2Gerald Butt, Middle East Analyst,

BBC News, 4 January 2001.

The charismatics have a triumphalism;

Saddam Hussein fed triumphalist slogans

as he was fattened by fawning praise.

Triumphalism is as common as the air.

His life has been one long war while

we engaged in a different war

supported and reinforced by ideals:

ideals forces and lordly confirmations,

attacking as we did fortifications, castles,

right and left wings, lines of the legions,

right to the centre of the powers of earth,1

such was our vision, our goal and our acts.

Our war, though, was unobtrusive, unreported,

unbeknownst to those masses of humankind.

Confrontation2 was and is not the game

247

of our vanguard, our standard-bearers

this radiant army of the Lord of Hosts

in this gigantic task, on this immense field,

where the privilege is immeasurable,

infinitely precious and the concentration

of energies and resources involves no guns,

no swords, no uniforms as our spiritual

destiny unfolds in a manner that is as

glorious as it is obscure, as transformative

as it is beyond our capacity to understand.

1 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, USA, 1977, pp. 47-48.

2 Saddam means “one who confronts” in Arabic.

Ron Price

August 2nd 2005.

HOMO LUDENS *Man the player.

Jack Kerouac had an evolving set of etymologies for the term beat. In The

Origins of the Beat Generation originally published in Playboy in 1959,

248

Kerouac wrote: The word beat originally meant poor, down and out,

deadbeat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in subways. But he added that in the

1950s the word gained an extended meaning to denote people who had “a

certain new gesture or attitude which I can only describe as a new more.

Kerouac suffused the “beat” label with positive connotations; he later

extended the word beat,” giving it a religious significance.

For Kerouac the importance of the beat label lay in its openness of

signification among other purposes. He returned to it in the 1960s several

times to pour new meanings into it. In several letters he claims to have

shown that beat was the Second Religiousness of Western Civilization as

prophesied by Oswald Spengler. This second phase always takes place in the

late stage of a civilisation. This second phase, he stated, possesses something

of the beatific, the sublime, but it coexists with coldhearted times of urban

skepticism and cynicism. This religiousness is the reappearance of an earlier

spiritual springtime in history. It also becomes well-rooted and grounded in

the culture. To Kerouac, the Beats were also saints in the making, walking

the Earth doing good deeds in the name of sanctitude and holiness.

249

These beats only lasted until 1949 Kerouac said in another context, in one of

his many interpretations of the term, an interpretation he gave toward the

end of his life in 1969. Kerouac also said that “the beats” was just a phrase

he had used in his 1951 written manuscript of On the Road to describe

young men who run around the country in cars looking for odd jobs,

girlfriends and kicks. In 1958 a San Francisco columnist Herb Caen coined

the phrase beatnik to denote members of the growing Californian bohemian

youth culture which Caen associated with new barbarian tendencies in

America. The appellation “beatnik” came to enrage Kerouac in the last

decade of his life: 1959- 1969. By the late 1960s Kerouac was denouncing

the youth culture which had followed his example. To Kerouac they had

gone off the road, so to speak. Kerouac continued to flirt with numerous

religious systems, but he became in that last decade of his life someone who

preferred to stay at home, no longer King of any Road or King of any Beats.

–Ron Price with thanks to Bent Sørensen, “An On & Off Beat: Kerouacs

Beat Etymologies,” philament: An Online Journal of the Arts and Culture,

April 2004.

You1 were never impressed

with the hippies who had

250

evolved during those Plans

of the 1940s and 1950s2

from the beatniks-hipstirs.

I was 21, 22 and 23 when

hippie was catching on3

in its two strands: art/

bohemian and peace/

civil rights. And it was

reaching its height when

I was among the Eskimos,

experiencing a mild schizo-

affective disorder and trying

to teach primary school kids.

These hippies had dropped out

of a world they found meaningless,

played with sex, drugs & rock-‘n’-roll

while I played with a new religion---

but for some of us the play was as

251

serious as it could be: homo ludens.4

1 Jack Kerouac(1922-1969).

2 Plans: 1946-1953 & 1953-1963.

3 The term hippie was first used in a newspaper on September 6th 1965. Six

weeks before I had just turned 21. The term began to be used extensively by

mid-1967.

4 The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga discusses the seriousness of play, the

role of play, in culture in his book Homo Ludens(1938).

Ron Price

TOUJOURS TRAVAILLER

Treasures lie beneath God’s throne and poets have the key: so says an

Islamic tradition. During the more than a dozen years I have written poetry

extensively, I have come to see part of my role as helping other poets travel

in company. Poets who are my contemporaries and poets yet-to-come do not

need to travel in isolation. My work can help them define where they are

going and where they have been. My thoughts can help other poets

regenerate, refresh their perspectives; they can help them infuse creativity

252

into their voice and their lives. They can help them see that a mighty effort is

required in order to acquire an abundant share of the poetic art. To put this

another way: the poet must strive night and day, resting not for a moment,1

as ‘Abdu’l-Baha puts it; or, as the sculpture August Rodin wrote: toujours

travailler.2 -Ron Price with thanks to ‘Abdu’l-Baha in The Creative Circle,

editor, Michael Fitzgerald, Kalimat Press, 1989, p.182; and Rodin “Always

Work,” in Letters To a Young Poet, R.M. Rilke, WW Norton, NY, 1962,

(1934), p.95.

Letting divine impulses flow

into our beings is surely at

the heart of the poetic game.

These heavenly suseptibilities

are a magnet attracting

the Kingdom’s confirmations,

opening doors of meanings

and healing waters, unbeknownst.

Unbeknownst, too, are those

intermediaries, like rivers, who

bring the leaven which leaveneth

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within the powers of reflection,

industry, work, study and prayer

on the longest road of life: art.

Ron Price

March 15th 2005

June 14th 2005

EPISODES

Life is full of literally hundreds if not thousands or even millions of episodes

that would result in a mountain of paper, as Mark Twain noted, if we were to

write them all down for posterity. Some of these episodes last only a few

seconds, minutes, hours or days; some last for years or decades. Some of

these episodes are recorded in my letters and they dramatize, in some ways,

the kaleidoscopeic turbulence of the world I lived in and about which I wrote

over these four epochs. The episode that has led to my writing the following

prose-poem has been a series of Monday afternoon visits to a seniors’ home

here in George Town. About 1:30 in the afternoon I pick up a 66 year old

man named Daryl MacArthur whose family history goes back to the first

254

convicts in Tasmania. I first met Daryl when he lived three doors down from

my home and we went for our daily constitutional along local streets: Reece,

South, Mary and White. That was nearly six years ago in 1999.

Daryl’s wife has died and he has moved into a home for senior citizens in

the last few months. I take him into George Town for various personal

purposes: to do some banking, to visit the house he rents, to go to a second

hand shop, to newsagents or just to have a cup-of-coffee. About 3 pm I take

him back to his room at the seniors’ home in Ainslie House.-Ron Price,

Pioneering Over Four Epochs, April 18th 200 5.

Today it was banking

and a lawyer, a cup of

coffee and a chat on

this fresh autumn day

with a slight wind

blowing our 126 years

through a little episode,

hardly a chapter or a page,

not even a paragraph in

255

the great book of life,

perhaps part of a sentence,

although always difficult

to assess ultimate meaning.

Got myself into the library

for forty minutes while Daryl

had his meeting with a lawyer.

Must have browsed through

half a dozen books especially

Paterson’s In From the Front.1

That war inspired his best writing:

genial and graphic description,

swift and vigorous prose,

making his brilliant letters,

exquisite, enthralling missives

part of the history of our time.

And my letters, I thought,

256

inspired by another war:

what would someone say

about them spread over

the first decades of the last,

the tenth stage of history?

Not the end or the beginning

of the end, but the end of

the beginning of history’s

endless succession of episodes

when some of the world’s

dramatis personae were able

to see the outlines of a new,

a golden age on the horizon,

lofty summits of achievement,

far beyond the valley of misery

and shame where pundits said

we were slowly sinking deeper

in a slough of despond as a tempest

blew us all like a mighty wind of God

remorseless, deranging, bewildering.2

257

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

1 William Curnow, On A.B. Paterson: In From the Front, MacMillan,

Sydney,2002, p.1. The war here was the Boer War.

2 Thomas Turner’s third of a million word diary has been reduced to one

hundred and thirty thousand words for his book. Turner kept the diary from

the age of 24 to 35. Drink and marital inharmony troubled him and he tells

us of his guilt and remorse. He wrote to record the misdemeandors of others,

to justify his actions and ensure they were correctly remembered. His

preoccupations were parochial as are most diarists in most times.-Ron Price

with thanks to The Diary of Thomas Turner: 1754-1765, editor, David

Vaisey, OUP, NY, 1985.

Ron Price’s many-millioned word autobiography, spread over several

genres, will be difficult to reduce, although a compendium of all its genres

may convey the most accurate autobiographical picture. He was never

troubled with drink, drugs or even money in any serious way. Although he

had to deal with the misdemeanors and idiosyncrasies of others, as we all

do--as they had to deal with his--in the long run of life the personality

proclivities that were part of his peregrinations came to occupy little role in

his writings, unlike his maternal grandfather’s autobiographical work which

had partly inspired and given rise to his own. The compendium of human

258

inadequacies and weaknesses which is part of our lot on earth was like those

dustmites that occupy much of life’s domestic space but, in the end, they

remain unseen and insignificant. While contributing much to the

environment at the time one had to deal with them, they seem, looking back,

to be irrelevant. Price’s work, at least part of it, could easily be included in

that sub-genre of autobiography: justification literature.

Ill-health and marital discord, inharmony, kept him busy during his two

marriages. From 1967 to 2000, at different periods, in different degrees of

intensity, with different rough edges knocked off, his tests, his battles, his

challenging experiences, his frustrations appear from time to time in his

writings. These preoccupations, far reduced in intensity as the millennium

turned its corner, are evident in his poetry, his letters, his autobiography, his

essays and his journals. These preoccupations are not excessive. By the time

he began to write seriously in the 1980s his health was excellent and his

marital life far less troublesome.

New and not-so-new difficulties emerged in the 1980s and 90s: with

personalities, with a certain weariness from overwork, in his marriage and

from the general nature of lifes travail which we all experience in various

259

degrees. Finally, in George Town, in his retirement, the hassels of life had

slipped to the perifery. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, April 18th

2005.

THEY CAME

They came as separate poems and when I had what seemed like a sizeable

number, I think it was usually somewhere between about fifty and a

hundred, I made them into a little booklet. The plastic binding cost me five

dollars at a local Xerox shop; the paper and the ink cartridge had another

cost, lets say seven or eight dollars all up. From 1992 to 2004 I produced 53

booklets of some 6000 poems. It works out to a little more than a poem a

day. I started writing poems back in 1962 at the age of eighteen with Cathy

Saxe who lived in George Town Ontario. Then, in 1980, I started saving the

poems I wrote. I was thirty-six at the time. At 48 I became even more

serious about poetry. It was then 1992. As far as direction in my poetry was

concerned, well, I really didn’t know where it was going. I had, from time to

time, several senses or intimations of direction and, after one period of

strong intimation in the mid-1990s, I organized my poetry into four time

periods, each with a different heading or title drawing on the historical

construction of the Shrine of the Bab and its embellishments in the gardens

and terraces on Mt. Carmel as my metaphor, my physwical analogue.

260

I don’t write books of poetry as books. I don’t write them like, say, my

autobiography, or my critical work on the study of Roger Whites poetry. I

dont lay them out like my website, my letters, my essays or my attempts at

novels. My poetry has some inner evolution which, even after 42 years, is

essentially mysterious.-Ron Price,Pioneering Over Four Epochs,May

12,2004.

Back in the 80s

I took little interest

in rhyming bed & head:

there were enough, I thought,

banalities in life

without my adding to them.

There was so much

I did not need to know:

the Hang Seng, the FTSE

the price of gold,

the price of a new hoe.

261

My eye, as Shakespeare said,

was in a fine frenzy rollinG

from earth to heaven and

heaven to earth........,with

my imagination bodying forth,

turning things I did know

into a shape, giving them a name,

a habitation--something more

than airy nothing.

Ron Price

May 12 2004

RSI

After 18 years as a student, 30 years as a teacher, 5 years as a writer and

uncounted and uncountable hours typing minutes, letters, reports, comments,

essays, just about every conceiveable genre of writing, I finally acquired just

two months before the age of sixty, what is known as RSI, repetitive strain

262

injury, or as it is also known, cumulative trauma disorder. Im surprised I did

not acquire this disorder earlier in my life, having sat as I have for thousands

of hours with my fingers over a typewriter, a word-processor or with a

simple pen in hand, endlessly turning the pages of a book. I began, in late

May of 2004, a series of exercises to counteract RSI symptoms: the tightness

in my neck and back, soreness in the arms especially at the shoulder joints.

These exercises were prepared for the most part by my son, Daniel, and

others I got off the Internet.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, June

13th, 2004.

While writing poetry I worry:

a little about the affects of RSI

the accomplishments of others

and pleasing my wife and son

and others who cross my path.

But in my writing:

my job is simply or not-so-simply

to learn to accept what occurs to me

and to give it the dignity and worth

it deserves.1

263

What I write can be called

many things: poems,

messages, pieces of language,

parts of a long work,

a long statement, an epic,

a very long poem,

low level wisdom literature,

with parts that will

always be missing

as I struggle obsessively

to give expression

to the complexities and

incredible wonder of it all.

1 Peter Stitt, The World’s Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets,

University of Georgia Press, 1985, p. 98.

Ron Price

June 14th 2004

264

REVOLUTION

Forty-five years ago in 1959, the year I became a Baháí, there was a film

released that was made in England called The Devils Disciple. The film was

set in 1777 in the days just prior to the surrender of the British to American

troops at Saratoga. 1777 was in the middle of the American Revolutionary

War(1775-1783). And 1959 was, of course, days of a quiet revolution in my

own life centred as it was at the time on baseball, schoolwork, ice-hockey,

girls, on the endless indulgence that was growing up in the fifties in the

middle class in Canada and on a new religion that had blown into my life

thanks to my mothers continuous combination of curiosity and need. -Ron

Price with thanks to Candidus, Hollywoods Treatment of the 18th

Century,The Colonial Movie Critic, April 2004.

I must have missed that one

as I have come to miss most

of the films of the 20th century

which is not to say I have not seen

an eye-full of stuff since

265

the Kingdom of God on earth

had its silent and unobtrusive start

back in 53 when that temple

in Chicago was finished and

that superstructure of the Babs

Sepulcher in Haifa was completed.

I was on my way to being

a disciple of another kind

in a religion that was on its way

to being the religion for humankind.

And in 59 I only saw movies at

the Roxy Theatre down by the lake

where Id been a marquee

with my bag of metal-letters.

Maybe The Devils Disciple

just did not come to town:

maybe I was at a fireside that night

or the snow was drifting at 20 below

or maybe I had a grade ten exam

266

or maybe I had to play ice-hockey.

The dust of time has hidden this

from view as the revolution has proceeded.

Ron Price

April 28 2004

NO POWER-POINT PRESENTATION

In the Guardian’s letters and the messages of the Universal House of Justice

there is a sense of order, pattern and precision given to Baha’i Plans,

programs and community life. We read again and again about a sequence of

activities, a progression and development and direction and guidance in the

foreground and background of these texts as the Baha’i community is forged

in what might be called ‘the crucible of transformation.’1 We experience

whatever hardships and tribulations are part of our life together; they exist

subtlely and not-so-subtlely in the spaces of the foreground and background

of these communications as we read colouring them with the patterns of our

lives.

267

We know that only some of our Baha’i life can be reduced to a set of

numbers, lines with arrows on the end, circles and squares, triangles,

rectangles and different coloured icons such as those that can be found in

power-point presentations. We who are actually engaged in what often

resembles a battle, a battle of community and inner psychic life with its

demands and responsibilities, with its conflicts, its joys and pleasures know

there is often little consonance between what we experience, what we

actually feel and what we read. They blend together in a mix that requires

some skill to paint in words or colours, in some artistic form.

What we experience we often feel to be inconsequential, idiosyncratic,

subtle, too personal to us as individuals to ever share, although this

experience is often deeply etched on our remembering minds. A flood of

everything from the trivial and inconsequential to the intensely meaningful

comes into our sensory emporium. An intricate and coloured pattern on a

Persian carpet, a beautiful woman whose features delight the eye week after

week, a dominating personality whom we are happy to see the end of after

every meeting, a particular way that someone performed some simple act,

exhibited some gesture or said a prayer: all of this and more than we can

268

ever convey comes swimming in as we read the words of the authorized

interpreters of this Revelation.

Human beings in the Baha’i community are not highly trained machines2 as

are their equivalent numbers in the army, navy or marine corps. Guns,

swords and military technology are replaced by a spiritual weaponry that is

impossible to quantify, to measure, but subtle and often powerful in its

operation. There are, though, some characteristics that fighting men and

women and Baha’is share in common. They involve at least three disparate

and even contradictory energies: inconsequential observations, technical

concentration and fear. For fear it seems is impossible to totally eradicate

from human interaction. The interplay of these energies are such that after

the events it is difficult for the individuals to produce a conclusive and

comprehensive account of their part in the activity or battle. Any one battle

or activity is a composite of the experiences of all those who take part and

any attempt to reconstruct the story as a whole must be a synthesis of

contradictions or, at the very best, a hypothetical reconstruction based on

near-agreement.-Ron Price with thanks to 1 Glenford Mitchell, “The

Literature of Interpretation: Notes on the English Writings of Shoghi

269

Effendi,” World Order, Winter 1972-73, p.20; and 2J.E. Morpurgo, Barnes

Wallis: A Biography, Ian Allan, London, 1981, p. 267.

The above prose piece is today’s prose-poem!

Ron Price, June 21. 2004.

BIG TASKS AHEAD

It is my hope that I can exploit whatever physical durability, whatever

strengths of constitution, whatever endowments conferred by birth that I

possess to their maximum advantage in the years and, perhaps, decades that

remain to me. Longevity is not always a blessing. But if God grants me the

years of a centenarian I will still be here in 2044, with more than four

decades of life left. If I am to be catapulted into international renown such a

rise to fame must take place in the first four decades of this new millennium.

The following prose-poem is a meditation on this theme of fame among

other things. I have been, by any measure of literary success, a late bloomer.

I have written three books in the first five years of my retirement, age 55 to

60, and posted hundreds of essays, poems and communications of varying

length on the internet, but none of this will be a source of fame and renown,

270

at least not in this earthly life. As I head into my sixties, I feel as if I have

served my apprenticeship: as reader, as writer and as a person who has

experienced the world and what it has to offer. I am ready for whatever big

tasks lie ahead. Beside postings on the internet, itself a bottomless pit of

publication, I have no idea what the big tasks are that may lie in my path.-

Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 16th 2004.

THE EARLY BUDS ARE OUT

If this unearthly Love has power to make

my life immortal and to shake ambition

into some fitting portal where I brim

my measure of contentment and with merest whim

search, poorly, after fame, then ‘tis a Love

that I shall keep ‘til the call from above-

and then...

-With thanks to John Keats, “Endymion,” lines 843-47.

These things of beauty will be joys forever

and their loveliness will increase

271

far down the centuries and ages.

Eras will not see these wonders pass into nothingness.

Dreams and quiet places sweet and still

will fill these marbled flower gardens

binding us to primal points of holy seat

made for our searching. Such beauty

moves us far beyond incipient sadness;

takes this young sprouting freshness

canalized in energy-lamps everywhere

in the vineyard. Some created grandeur

cools in the hot season and sprinkles

our air with musk-rose blooms,

strengthening our loins in this

submissive and now natural worship.

Such wonder, too, for and with the dead

who have entered the garden of happiness,

now circling ‘round us in mystic intercourse,

yes, in circles here--all so dear like the moon

which haunts then cheers as clear bright light

272

seeming to bind our very souls subtle but tight.

This place, I prefer it have no name,

its music brings a joy to valley and plain.

The early buds are out now: milk in pails

is coming down the lane while lush juicy fruits

are being brought in by sail in little boats.

I’ve got one. I steer it in many quiet hours

down deeper streams where I hear bees

which hum in globes of clover over there.....

Autumn brings its universal tinge of sober gold

to this world on mountain side wherein I hold

such thought that can only be described as bliss.

The trumpets have already blown and, now, my path

is dressed in green, in flowers, indeed a marble bath.

Those assembled ‘round the shrines had looks of veneration,

‘twould be here for many years to come, each generation

would have its awed face, companions in a mountain chase.

273

I therefore reveal unto thee sacred and resplendent tokens

from the planes of glory to attract thee into the court

of holiness, nearness and beauty, and draw thee to a station...

I have been drawn into gardens of such fruit, such orient lights.

For here is the heavenly abode in the Centre of earthly realities

and here I am, as if led by some midnight spirit nurse

of happy changes toward some magic sleep, toward

some soaring bird easing upward over the troubled sea of man.

The words found here sound a strange minstrelsy,

have tumbling waves in echoing caves:

a silvery enchantment is to be found

in this mazy world with its new song,

its upfurled wings which renovate our lives.

Try them! You may open your eyelids

and feel a healthier brain. Some influence

rare goes spiritual through this Damsel’s hand;

it runs quick, invisible strings all over the land

making of fame and renoun far lesser lights

unless they be for the exaltation of this Cause1

274

and that attack to the very center of earth’s powers.2

1 From a prayer by Baha’u’llah sent to the author by Roger White.

2 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, Wilmette, 1977, p.48.

Ron Price

26 May 1995

Revised 16 November 2004

PS This prose-poem found its initial inspiration in a series of articles from

the journal Bookforum. When I come across a new journal on the internet, I

first make a quick survey of all available articles that I want to read in the

journal; then I make a list of the ones I want to photocopy. Then I read and

write from this photocopied base. This particular poem was born in an article

by Richard Wolin, Socratic Apology. It was about the hermeneutical scholar

Hans-Georg Gadamer who died in 2002 at the age of 102. I had first come

across this scholar in the 1990s when I taught sociological theory-Ron Price,

16/11/04.

THE RON PRICE PAPERS

275

Should there ever be such a thing as The Ron Price Papers, they will be

somewhat like those of C.Wright Mills which are a vaguely indexed

collection of over 90 archival boxes containing a variety of documents

including:1 lecture notes, notes for his use when writing, notes on a wide

range of topics in the humanities and social sciences, clippings and assorted

pieces from newspapers and journals, much photocopy material,

correspondence to and from a wide variety of people over more than forty

years, letters and emails to publishers and internet sites where his work was

found and where he tried to publish, inter alia. Like Mills papers,

too,arguably these files are a manifestation of (his) method of working.2 -

Ron Price with thanks to 1 and 2 The University of Texas Archive and Kim

Sawchuk, C. Wright Mills: A Political Writer and His Fan Mail, Canadian

Journal of Communication, Vol.26, No.2, 2001.

I really did not get going

until late middle age1

when teaching, all those meetings

and such a myriad collection

of lifes odds-and-ends

did not consume my energies

276

making it impossible to be

scrupulous, systematic, one-eyed

about all this writing and publishing.

I never rose at 4 am2 for coffee

except to have pee and hug the pillow,

especially after I was properly medicated,

but by 9 am I could get going

on what was, on average, a six hour day

and, at least, a forty hour week.

And I dont think you could

ever call the letters I received

fan mail, although some people

appreciated the letters I sent them.3

1 Mills, a famous sociologist and author of The Sociological

Imagination(1959), died at 46. It would be ten years after this, at the age of

56, before my files began to emerge with anything you could call a system.

2 Mills rose at 4 am habitually to work on his files.

277

3 The author of the article I draw on here is particularly interested in eight

archival boxes of mail in The C. Wright Mills Papers from people who were

only known to Mills on the basis of a texual relationship. This author called

these letters Mills fan mail.

Ron Price

1 October 2003

THE ICEBERG

The words of American writer Thomas Wolfe in the 1920s in relation to his

book Look Homeward Angel could very well be applied to my

autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Wolfe wrote: “I have

never called my book a novel. To me it is a book such as all men may have

in them. It is a book made out of my life, and it represents my vision of

life...”1 Whereas Wolfe’s book and his vision was put down at the age of

twenty, mine was defined more precisely and in great detail closer to the age

of sixty. -Ron Price with thanks to Thomas Wolfe in American Literature

Since 1900, editor, Marcus Cunliffe, Sphere Books, London, 1975, p.55.

278

What have we here:

detached commentary,

social observation,

imaginative rendering,

sensitively-apprehended

experience, searching

for a life, my life,

which would have been buried,

private, individual, inner,

concrete and subtle.

In a world overwhelmed

by the accelerating pace

at this climacteric of history,

I have set it down, my days,

avoiding petty animosities,

malicious anecdotes,

brash narcissistic confidence

and its arrogant, unattractive

279

assertiveness.

Here is a document

to be judged only by its art,

not how many home runs I hit,

how many letters I wrote,

how successful or unsuccessful

I have been as a teacher over

what feels like several epochs.

As Hemmingway said back in ’37,

as that war was hotting up:

a man alone aint got no bloody chance;

and as Scott Fitzgerald said

in that same year that Picasso

launched his Guernica,1

rigorous selection was required

by putter-inners like me;2

seven-eighths of the iceberg

is still below the water.

280

1 Perhaps the most famous painting of the century was completed in April

1937.

2 Dennis Welland, “The Language of American Fiction Between the Wars,”

American Literature Since 1900, Sphere Books, London, `1975, pp.48-55.

Ron Price

9 May 2003

THE COMMONPLACE

Some writers, poets, have a deeply melancholic strain, theme or current in

their work, one that could be seen as an expression of a difficult childhood

and an adolescence of misery. The famous poet Philip Larkin was such a

man(1922-1985). He made his poetic debut in 1945. Larkin was the most

famous of the Movement poets in Britain in the ninth(1953-1963) stage of

history. He was undoubtedly the preeminent poet of his generation, at least

in the U.K. In the first two decades of the tenth stage of history(1963-1983),

Larkins fame continued.

281

Larkin never married. Philosophically, he saw life in terms of boredom,

pessimism and fear, especially fear of death. His vision of life was imbued

with the tragic. He focused on intense emotion, was obsessed by universal

themes, the commonplace and the often dreary details of his life, as Thomas

Hardy had been at the turn of the same century. -Ron Price with thanks to

Michael Walker,Just an Ordinary Muse,A Review of Collected Poems,

Philip Larkin; and Collected Letters, Philip Larkin, editor Anthony Thwaite,

Faber and Faber.

Part of the essence here

is the everyday

and the ordinary way.

There is darkness too,

but enough light

to make me feel

there is so much

that is worth recording

and soothes private

disappointments and

public tragedies,

282

that tells the wonder

of the simple things,

that is replete

with historical

and religious allusions

and takes place

when the inspiration arises.

There is hope, too, that

I will one day be read.

Age softens regret,

but increases its quantity.

Still I feel I found a place

where I could say:

this is my proper ground.

Here I shall stay

with that Special One

Who has an instant claim

on everything I own.1

283

1Philip Larkin, Places,Loved Ones.

2 September 2003

THE NECESARY CHOREOGRAPHY

I often call my work poetry but, in many ways, it is essentially the same as

my prose except that it is arranged on the page somewhat differently. Once

set down on paper my poems are sent out into the world and belong to that

world. Many things that are personal to me, that have meaning to me, are to

be found in my verse. True poetry springs from what a particular man feels

and thinks at a particular time in relation to some particular thing, idea, event

or person. For me, too, a particular mood with its necessary choreography

establishes much of the raison detre of a poem. There is a Price associated

with his essays, another with his letters and still another can be found in his

diary, in his attempts at a novel, at history writing, at autobiography and

biography. Of course, there is only one Price and it should be kept in mind

that the central vision that informs all his work is a poetic vision. It is in his

poetry that the reader can begin to see Price whole, see his essence, if indeed

the essence of a human being can be seen at all in this earthly life. -Ron

284

Price with thanks to Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems: 1923-1967, Allen

Lane, London, 1972, pp.xiii-xv.

I have tried over the years

to write more clearly, plainly

and straightforwardly,

stripping away the ornate,

the ornament and the cleverly

inventive, aiming toward

a certain sanity,

a certain simplicity,

readability, pleasure

and enjoyment with tools

made of things akin to myself

like conviction, humiliation,

anguish1 and consecrated joy.2

1 ibid., p.259.

2 Abdul-Bahá, Secret of Divine Civilization, Last Lines.

Ron Price

285

15 April 2002

Thats all for now!

THIS IS NOT AN ARRIVING

Love is...a high inducement to the individual to ripen...it is an exacting claim

on him...love is burden and apprenticeship....(not) light and frivolous

play...something new enters us in our sadnesses...the future enters into us

this way in order to transform itself in us; therefore, be lonely and attentive

when you are sad. In this way, destiny goes forth from within people, not

from without into them. -Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, W.W.

Norton, NY, pp.54-65.

Go into yourself and cleanse.

The list is long and will keep

you busy with its regularity

and it must be done

or your house, your home,

will not enjoy effulgent glories,

286

infinite and unseen grace,

divine knowledge or immortality.

What is this cleansing? A scouring

of your memory and imagination

of what is idle in the talking department

and what you hear

on that internal telephone receiver.

Accept your aloneness here,

your trust in God

and your holding to him

and try to do what you know

you should do--simple, that simple.

Can you hear the tremulous after-ring

of memory clarifying the message

of all that is unclear, undefined,

unknown, pointing toward a fate, a destiny,

like a wide, wonderful web that is finally

threading your life with its tender hand

287

and binding you with a million

infinitely fine lines, to focus you

like some precisioned instrument,

ready now, although often bloody

in the exchange? But you clean it off:

the bright red imaginings,

hot with heart’s intensity;

washing worldly affections,

clean and smooth with flowing water

from the tap of your mind.

Can you clear your eyes of all those

perceptual confusions, sadnesses,

emotional tendernesses

that make you feel

so very useless and inadequate?

All is gestation and bringing forth,

pregnant with pain and soon-to-be-born,

hopes for the future; all is waiting

with deep humility and patience

288

for developing clarity, ripening,

waiting for the sap: no forcing here.

It will come. It will come.

This is not an arriving;

be unsuspecting

and love the difficult, the unsolved,

as you grow in and through them.

Use experience, here and now,

to rally toward exalted moments later,

toward the cleansing, the grace,

the quaffing of wisdom, the emptying out.

Life must be seen as difficult, serious

and approached with reverence:

not all this lightness, frivolity,

endless playing. Creative thoughts

come from many thousands of nights

and days of love and striving, endlessly:

filling thoughts with sublimity and exaltation.

289

The surface is so often bewildering;

go to the depths where meaning unfolds

like the petals of roses, a jacaranda

at last will be in bloom. Everyday

is a new beginning as we suck

the sweetness out of the trivial,

the profound and the funny;

while Thy servants who have gone,

work through us as part of our destiny,

as predisposition, as pulsation, gesture

rising out of the depths of time,

helping us hold to what is difficult.

Ron Price

FRESH CENTRE OF RICHNESS

I have a faculty...for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years,

and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred.-Thomas

Hardy, Notebooks, in The World of Poetry: Poets and Critics on the Art and

290

Functions of Poetry, Clive Sansom, selector, Phoenix House, London, 1959,

p.26.

Some would say that’s not a good idea, Thomas;

confusing burying with repressing is understandable.

For me burying is an unconscious process

associated with memory, so that remembering

is like creating something anew,

not always mind you, experiencing it

for the first time, again and again.

If I have any gift as a poet it is this

and it extends from strong experiences

to minute observations. This is the fresh centre

of richness which feeds imagination,

feeds the present with charged particles,

with blood and bone, with glance and gesture

and the poem rises and goes forth like a phoenix

from ashes where emotion lies burried,

exhumed fresh and tasted as if in some other world

by some other me, as if for the first time.

291

Ron Price

17 September 1995

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

292

in a holy seat, at last a genuinely

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,

and filling with delight all things

293

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

to Thee, inasmuch as Thou hast

fixed Thy gaze upon me,

hast bestowed upon me Thy bounty,

294

and hast directed toward me Thy steps.*

14/10/95.

* Tablet of Carmel

INFINITELY TENDER HAND

Give me anything which is from God. Desire or anger or communion of

saints or even hurt. But nothing any more of the dreariness and the

mechanism of man. -D.H. Lawrence, The Collected Letters of D.H.

Lawrence, Harry Moore, editor,, 1962, p.950.

It is necessary, even good, to lie down in the rag and bone shop of the heart,

where all the ladders start, from kissing to horrid strife. -Paraphrase of

Sandra Gilbert, Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Cornell

UP, London, 1972, p.221.

Give me fresh rain and an ocean to see,

a waterfalls tumbling gown to the sea

near the dusky dwelling of my solitude

and the sweet-sounding lamentation

295

of the multi-coloured rag and bone shop

of my heart where surfaces bewilder,

multiplicity and complexity confuse.

I seek a tranquill voice deep down,

to lighten the burden of homelessness,

try to raise the submerged sensations

of an ample past in this state

of unutterable aloneness where

that after-ring of memory and

the wide web of an unfolding destiny

guided by an infinitely tender Hand.

Ron Price

10 October 1995

NO ENTRY-BY-TROOP

The poetic view of life consists in...the extraordinary value and importance

of everybody I meet....when the mood is on me. I....see the essential glory

and beauty of all the people I meet....splendid and immortal & desirable.

-Rupert Brooke in: A Letter to F.H. Keeling, September 1910.

296

My productiveness proceeds in the final analysis from the most immediate

admiration of life, from the daily inexhaustible amazement at it.-R.M. Rilke,

Selected Letters.

In one Baha’i community where we experienced entry-by-troops I had the

experience I describe below. The poem is factually based, although an

element of poetic license trims the edges. -Ron Price, 5:50 pm., Saturday, 30

December 1995, Rivervale, WA.

She really was a beauty;

one of those women I always

wanted to take to bed with me.

And here I was in her lounge room,

late at night and alone and she

wanting it and telling me so.

It’s funny the sort of people

you attract to the Cause in these

early epochs of its global spread.

297

You think it might be those spiritual

types you read about, saintly women

who have always been waiting for the truth.

This bed-wise woman was

no Mary of Magdala, but she had

her garden of pleasure, her perfume,

her glistening hair, smooth-armed,

gold-bangled, fingers slender, knowing

the words men like to hear.

Marking me tonight, probably

knowing I was beyond her wiles,

part of some new marble dream

I’d brought to town with its words

of soft rain for the dry and stoney hills;

somehow she knew it could not be.

Not these words, they could not

penetrate her urgent desire,

298

her full warm breasts

and her endless curves

with that sweet new life

for which she could live

and some day die

in a greater fullness and joy

than she could imagine.

And so I passed her by;

my days of infidelity had not come yet.

Someone else would teach me the lessons

that could have been mine that night.

Ron Price

30 December 1995

DRY GRASS AND THE KINGDOM

299

Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and

precision approachable by no other means.-F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in

English Poetry.

If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself,

tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, since for the

creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place. -R.M. Rilke,

Letters to a Young Poet, 17 February 1903.

I can remember those days when I was young,

dry grass under a tree where we sat in summer

and wondered what to do on long hot days:

you could only play so much baseball

and it was too early to go swimming.

We all sat there: George, Benny, Ken Pizer.

Life had hardly started yet--1953--

the beginning of an age, a Kingdom,

celebrated with Monopoly, Sorry,

swimming and endless sittings under this tree.

We were not troubled by war, women or

300

the wickedness of the world.

Scientific discoveries interested us not,

as long as we could watch our television

programs at the end of the day and

our parents didn’t argue.

Secret disquietudes, inner lonelinesses,

the tensions of a society on the edge of

self-destruction did not touch us

on this dry grass under the tree.

Ron Price

November 2001

TAKING ON IMMORTALITY

When One has given up One’s life

The parting with the rest

Feels easy, as when Day lets go

Entirely the West

-Emily Dickinson, number 853.

301

How many tears have fallen here,

how many little sighs.

There’s more to come of tragedy

and romance too beneath the skies.

They’re at the heart of human hearts,

as they wither and in time die.

They are the seed of solemn consciousness

without which joy would never come or fly.

Thank God for that joy; it rains

on some and washes sighs away.

For others sorrow dries them out.

Romance and tragedy lay their hands

on them and make them ready to depart:

they’ve died and can do no more,

*I was thinking of Shoghi Effendi here. Ruhiyyih Rabbani, who knew the

Guardian in an intimate sense that noone else did, says seven lines from the

end of her Priceless Pearl that “The man had been called by sorrow and a

302

strange desolation of hopes into quietness.” Henry Adams once said in one

of his letters(1) that “The inevitable isolation and disillusionment of a really

strong mind--one that combines force with elevation--is to me the romance

and tragedy of statesmanship.”(1) Letters of Henry Adams: 1835-1918, 2

Vols., Houghton Mifflin, 1930, Vol.1, p.314.

Ron Price

26 December 1995

ROOT OUT WEAKNESS

The sky wears masks of smoke and gray

The orchestra of winds performs its strange, sad music

Embittered wine rises from fowl deeds.

Its dregs can root out my weakness. -With thanks to Emily Dickinson in

Woman of Letters, Leaves Turco,State University of NY Press, 1993, pp.40-

1.

Some deeds are so lonely

they taste of bittered wine.

303

I’ve walked with them on back-side streets

sorting out their place and time.

I’ve sat with them to cogitate:

what brings them to the fore?

Like some disease they do attack

and peace goes out the door.

For me these lonely deeds are born

in the recesses of my heart,

in anger and depression

they found a good kick-start.

As the years go by I’ve learned

to avoid them like a lion,

but from time to time they come

and remorse takes me far from my Zion.

Sad regrets go to the root

and weed out a weakness

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which seems endemic.

Life provides a practice field

for a process far from simple

verbal polemic.

One day, I trust, I’ll see this weakness

in a new perspective, a new strength

will have emerged

and me, much more selective.

Ron Price

8 July 1995

BLUSHING

Thomas Turner’s third of a million word diary has been reduced to one

hundred and thirty thousand words for this book. Turner kept the diary from

the age of 24 to 35...Drink and marital inharmony troubled him and he tells

us of his guilt and remorse. He wrote to record the misdemeandors of others,

to justify his actions and ensure they were correctly remembered.His

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preoccupations were parochial as are most diarists in most times. -Ron Price,

comment on The Diary of Thomas Turner: 1754-1765, editor, David Vaisey,

OUP, NY, 1985.

Prices one to two million word autobiography, spread over several genres,

will be difficult to reduce, although a compendium of all his genres may

convey the most accurate autobiographical picture. He was never troubled

with drink, drugs or even money in any serious way. But ill-health and

marital inharmony kept him busy over the years from 1968 to 1999 at

different periods and in different combinations. These preoccupations, far

reduced in intensity, are evident in his diary, his poetry, his letters and his

journal. The preoccupations are not excessive. By the time he began his

writing in 1983 his health was excellent and his marital life far less

troublesome. New and not-so-new difficulties emerged in the 1980s and 90s:

with personalities, with a certain weariness from overwork, in his marriage

and from the nature of lifes travail. These preoccupations are not dominant

in his letters and are essentially parochial ones.-Ron Price, “Comment on

My Autobiography,” Pioneering Over Three Epochs, unpublished, 1999.

Gawler was right beside a famous

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wine producing area: the Barossa.

But I was interested in a different wine

and I was as high as one can get

on some complex combination

of spiritual and material ambition:

not entirely unhealthy or healthy.

I got a kick in the spiritual teeth that year,

but hardly appreciated its true significance

as I headed for higher heights in places

I had never heard of and successes

I had not yet dreamed. The price I paid

were deep scars to my spiritual credentials,

irrecoverable, irremediable, part of the burden

of my sin, the source of my melting heart,

my boiling blood and my blushing soul.

Ron Price

28 April 1996

THE MIND, WITHOUT COPROREAL FRIEND

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The Letter hangs there in the dark abyss of the Past: if like a star almost

extinct, yet like a real star, fixed; about which there is no cavilling possible.

-Jane Welsh in The Collected Letters of Thomas Carlyle, Vol.1: 1812-

1821, Duke UP, Durham North Carolina, 1970, p.xii.

A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone

without corporeal friend.

-Emily Dickinson in Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story,

Jerome Loving, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1986, p.ix.

She lived on the edge of my life

where uncles and aunts live, mostly;

in a place I visited every so often,

up past the long hill in a town called

Waterdown, a funny name really, when

you think of it. I haven’t thought about

that town for years, really. She was

more my aunt when I was young, little,

just a little boy, an adolescent. Then I

moved and moved and moved, further

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and further away until she became a letter.

She got old; she was already old; she became

a grandmother, then great-grandmother,

terribly old to a little boy, but I got older

and I became a grandfather myself, well,

a step-grandfather, really. And I, too, became

a letter: two fixed stars, almost extinct,

but real stars. And, if that’s all you’ve got,

that’s all you’ve got: something visible,

a picture of the soul, perhaps that’s bit strong,

agents of intimacy, yes, I like that; immortality,

the mind, without corporeal friend. That’s a bit

archaic(only Emily Dickinson would say that).

But it has a certain ring to it, the more you roll

it around in your mouth and your mind.

Ron Price

7 February 1996

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STANDARD BEARERS

In its original version “I Love Lucy” debuted Monday October 15 1951 at

8:00 pm. It ran until May 6 1957. -Patricia Mellencamp,High Anxiety:

Catastrophe, Scandal, Age and Comedy, Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1992, p.

322.

Shoghi Effendi appointed the first contingent of Hands of the Cause on

December 24 1951 and the final contingent in October 1957.-Baha’i World,

Vol XIV: 1963-1968, pp.449-455.

While you were laying the foundation

for the Kingdom of God on earth

in those, your final years,

another foundation was being laid

for an industry that would sweep the world by storm.

The three camera, living room, laugh track,

studio audience format has endured

all these years as have those contingents

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now in their final days

having protected and propagated

for well-nigh half a century,

our standard bearers.

That zany, off-key, star, vaudeville comedian,

dispenser of popular culture in those years

when the Kingdom of God on earth

was getting its kick-star---Lucille Ball---

part of Desilu Productions,

the biggest production facility in the world, then,

was entertaining millions as you were writing

those brilliant letters telling us of our culture

and where it was at, then,

on the edge of oblivion,

and where our Cause was,

especially at its Centre

which you planned for them and us,

this Ark of humanity.

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Ron Price

4 October 1996

THE BABE

The history of the career of George Herman(“Babe”) Ruth can be divided

into two basic stages: 1920 to 1927 and 1928 to 1935.....by 1935 Ruth had

left the Yankees and his youthful vitality, energy and hitting prowess never

returned. He died in 1948.-Ron Price, from a summary of Ruth’s life in

Collier’s Encyclopedia, Vol.20, p.306.

The development of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the

USA can be divided into two basic stages: 1922 to 1926 and 1927 to

1936....by 1936 the National Assembly...and the national committees and

Local Spiritual Assemblies were sufficiently strong to come together for the

execution of an international missionary program.-Loni Bramson-Lerche,

“Development of Baha’i Administration”, Studies in Babi and Baha’i

History, Vol.1, Kalimat Press, Los Angeles, 1982, pp.260-275.

The year after He came west the Babe’s

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career began and as that Order began to

take its first shaping in the late teens and

during that haitus, before the international

teaching campaign began, the Babe’s career

came to its maturity and end. His batting

average was .378 the year of the beginning

of a conscientious and active following of

Baha’i laws and teachings in 1924, just about

fully organized beyond a loose movement; and

as the “World Order Letters” came out year after

year his career slowly came to an end. As he came

to his retirement, the Cause emerged from dealing

with its endless minor problems to propagation and

unifying its own community in its Formative Age while

a beauty not matched by any domical structure since

Michelangelo’s dome on the Basilica of St. Peter emerged

as each of the 735 home runs were hit by the Babe.

Ron Price

23 December 1996

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WHO I AM

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that

it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your

character....There is the mortifying experience....the forced smile which we

put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation

which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved.... grow

tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”.

That is all very well, Mr Emerson,

if you do not live in, do not cultivate,

a community. The forced smile, the

undisclosed knowledge, the timing of

remarks, the suitability to the hearer,

the dead letters, moments, hours, days,

those smiles, the control of spontaneity,

the tight muscles---are all part of life

in community. But so, too, is the magnetism

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of originality; its lustre is transferred to self-

reliance, the spontaneous baffling star shooting

its ray of beauty even into the trivial.

As you say, Mr. Emerson, the power men possess

to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No

man can come near me but through my act.* We

must resist our temptations and enter into a state

of war so that our prayers can become soliloquies of

jubilation not means to effect private ends. For the

secret of fortune is joy in our hands.and perserverence

which the angels themselves swiftly attend, even here,

even in my own home where I travel from in my mind

in the pursuit of self-culture, for that first attribute of

perfection. I have travelled for this Cause and found

the man I was and am, like some chiseled marble of Phidias;

now with the cumulative force of all life’s cultivation

a deep peace has come, a testimony to His principles,

and so, too, a weariness from years and years of work

and some of that sorrow and a strange desolation of

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hopes**. This makes up some of my quietness, part

of who I am in community, my spontaneity and reserve.

Ron Price

24 March 1996

* Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”.

** Ruhiyyih Rabbani, The Priceless Pearl, 1969, p.451.

Thats all for now

PIONEEING OVER FOUR EPOCHS

VOLUME 11 PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE

With the opening of this arch-lever file of personal correspondence there

now exists eleven volumes of personal letters to individuals for future

biographers, analysts of embryonic Baha’i institutions, communities and

interested parties of various ilk. This volume of letters opens the 24th year of

my extensive letter collecting and the 47th since the first letter in this

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collection found its place in volume 1 and was dated November 27th 1960.

For the most part these letters are a casual although, to some extent,

systematic collection. These volumes of what I have called personal

correespondence are part of a wider collection of letters to and from:

(I)Baha’i institutions,(II) publishers on and off the internet, (III.1) Baha’i

magazines and journals,(III.2) Non-Baha’i journals and magazines, (IV)

individuals: (a) in Canada and (b) particular/special individuals in my life

like Baha’i writers, inter alter, (V) places of employment and (VI) family

and friends regarding annual letters/emails.

More than two dozen arch-lever files and 2-ring binders are now part of this

collection containing only communications with internet sites in their

myriad forms. Some dozen or more files are found in connection with the

other topics/subjects listed above. Unlike telephone calls and conversations,

letters can be bundled, tied with ribbons, stored for decades or, as in my

case, placed in binders of different sizes and kept fresh, dried-out and worn

but enduring—each one unique—to tell a future age about these epochs I

have lived in and through.

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Although I have never made a numerical count of all these communications,

my guesstimations would be: 6000 emails and postings on the internet and

4000 emails and letters to friends and others. I leave the exercise of counting

this collection to future students of the Cause should the subject be of any

value and interest. Whatever future students and casual readers do with this

resource it is much more than voyeurism.. The person or persons who make

some selection of these letters for publication purposes will perform a type

of exercise in literary archaeology disclosing layers of a past, their past, to

reveal who they are and how they came to be who they are, at least in part.

In recent years, especially since my retirement from full-time work in 1999

and especially since bringing part-time work and most of my volunteer work

to an end at different times in the years 2001 to 2005, I have added more

non-epistolary material because it seemed appropriate and I will leave it to

future assessors to sift this material, to set up and separate out a series of

relevant appendices, to simply include this non-epistolary resource as part of

a varied type of letter/communication or to delete it as desired and if

preferred. The decision as to how to organize this assortment of resources I

leave in the hands of anyone who takes a serious interest in these resources

in the years ahead either before or after my passing, as the case may be. To

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decide what to do with it all will belong, in the end, to others than myself.

Of course, whether these letters even become an addition for some future

understanding of what made up the Baha’i community and its people back in

the early epochs of the 10th stage of Baha’i history, remains to be seen.

The Day of the Covenant, November 26th, is an auspicious occasion in the

Baha’i calendar. It has been my intention to open this and future arch-lever

files of personal correspondence, each one numbered in a successive

numerical series, on this special day and, perhaps, or so it seems from the

collections in recent years, on an annual basis. But after nine months of

collecting letters/emails in this volume of letters, I came to a decision that

had been insensibly forcing itself on my epistolary life, namely, to keep all

correspondence electronically. My wife has been concerned at the

burgeoning nature of the files in my study and the adjoining spare bedroom.

The rest of this collection will, then, be kept—not in these paper/hard cover

files—but in cyberspace, as they say.

I would like to be able to give a certain specialness to my letters other than

their association with this embryonic World Order. If I could do, for

example, what Julius Caesar did when he wrote letters while in battle, I’m

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sure such an exercise would give a patina of significance to what many may

find to be a dry-as-dust collection. In war he had disciplined himself to be

able to dictate letters while on horseback. He gave directions to others to

take notes, as Oppius informs us. Baha’u’llah, we are also informed, often

kept several secretaries busy when He revealed letters among other genres.

‘Abdu’l-Baha often stayed up all night writing letters. It is thought that

Caesar was the first who contrived a means for communicating with friends

by cipher or code when the press of business left him no time for a personal

conference about matters that required dispatch and there was some urgency

to his matters. Indeed, the history of epistolary communication is filled with

interesting anecdotes. My anecdotes, suffice it to say, are simple and far

from exciting. Although I often felt a sense of urgency while writing my

letters, the matters were hardly earth-shattering when viewed in a wider, a

societal, context.

Some readers may find the narrative part of my autobiography, now in four

volumes and 2500 pages, overly analytical, even alien and remote. Perhaps

these letters may bring the real current of my life and times alive and with

that once rare gift for self-revelation, a gift that seems now to be more

common, more evident. With Carlyle, it would be my wish that these letters

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would preserve as full a record of my life as possible. Carlyle knew the

value of letters in biography as I know only too well; he knew, too, that

collections of letters often went unread. Carlyle had much to say about the

value of letters, but I will not draw on his many views of letters nor quote

from the 6000 letters in his extant collection. I will note, though, Carlyle’s

opinion that ill-health, fatigue and overwork strongly detracted from the

quality of his letters. Indeed, I rarely write at all when these situations visit

me.

Some writers take great pleasure in conversing with old friends and

associations; it helped to distract him from his depressions and other

physical and psychological maladies. Samuel Johnson was such a

conversationalist. But he disliked writing letters. Many other litterateurs

disliked taking up the pen to write a letter. I, on the other hand, enjoy writing

letters and, with the years, have come to prefer it to conversation. I have for

years taken pleasure in the verbal arts, but I came to tire of conversation. I

rarely write to anyone now whom I used to know in Canada before 1971,

except my first wife. I rarely write to anyone I knew before the 1980s. I

seem to have written letters more copiously after the age of 50, after 1994. I

would like to think that the recipients of my letters might cling to them and

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to my memory as the recipients of the letters of Henry James. But, alas and

alack, I think it most unlikely. In our age of mass communication with a

burgeoning of messages of every sort, letters and emails I think, even

interesting and entertaining ones, get lost in the avalanche. The collection of

Henry James’ letters constitutes one of the greatest self-portraits in all

literature. My letters are not in James’ league, although the paint brush of

life can play on the canvas with some success. As I can not say too

frequently, the value of this portrait is only insofar as it is part of the growth

and development, as it contributes to the understanding, of the Baha’i

community over these several epochs.

My letters, too, contain an Australian-American simplicity that is essential in

much of my communication. Whatever simplicity is there I acquired in the

hard knocks of the classroom and Bahá’í community life. There is some

complexity, some delicacies of feeling and intricacies of mind, that can be

found across the pages of my letters. Some of that complexity I acquired in

my reading. If life is no mere succession of facts and much more “a densely

knit cluster of emotions and memories, each one steeped in lights and

colours thrown out by the rest, the whole making up a picture that no one but

oneself could dream of undertaking to paint,” then my letters come close to

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that painting. They are also, as the Globe and Mail informed us in 2002 in

introducing the book The Book of Letters, “history on the

fly….unselfconscious witnesses that bring history gloriously to life” or, I

might add, ingloriously.

In the same way that James created his life in his writing, I feel I do the

same. This is true in my letters in its own peculiar way and in my poetry, in

a sort of poetic fashioning of experience. There was an incessant adventure,

an inner cycle of vivid activity, by the time I took up writing as a full-time

passtime at the turn of the millennium. And this is reflected in my letters, at

least that is how I felt and experienced this epistolary act—increasingly as

the decades ran their natural course and as letters became a more copious

outpouring. As many-sided as my letters may be, they tend to show only one

side of my self. This is my impression, although I leave this assessment to

readers--for it is difficult for me to comment on this facet of my letters.

As I have pointed out before, there is much in life that never appears in my

letters. In recent volumes of my letters, though, my life possessed a calm it

had not had before. I’m not sure this reality, this fact, is obvious from

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reading my letters. A new happiness has unquestionably entered my life

since the turning of the millennium and the sheer quantity of the

correspondence that I have kept has increased partly owing to this very

pleasant feeling. That the main source of this happiness was due to first an

anti-depressant medication in 2001, then a combination of an antipsychotic

medication and a new anti-depressant medication in 2007. For those who

crave context and history, these letters may function to serve that purpose,

not so much as a series of sensational, humorous or even especially

interesting events that I document, but more as a part of some rounded

culture, some personal life and its passions, manners and some of its

intimate flavours.

I’d like to think my letters were something like those of Alistair Cooke over

the years 1946 to 2004, conversation that was conveyed in prose, the

journalism of personal witness that never loses touch with narrative, with the

letter-writer as storyteller. But I am not in Cooke\\\\\\\'s league. I am an

amateur compared to Cooke and I do not have an audience of 22 million; I

do not possess a flattering readership. The great bulk of my emails and all

my letters have an audience of one. Like Cooke, though, even when the

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content of a letter is about some crisis or other; even when it was necessary

that I must wax solemnly about the times in society or events in my own life

which have grave/sad implications, I never felt that I was intended to put off

those things in life I was presumably designed to enjoy. And so my letters

probably have a bias for the positive rather than the melancholy, the

entertaining and the somewhat intellectual rather than the trivial and the

tawdry. But readers should not expect too much entertainment in my letters;

there are other mediums to seek out if they want entertainment.

In the end, though, I find as I browse through all this epistolary stuff, that I

am glad to leave it to someone else to make special selections of my letters,

to see what it all means and to provide a base for some marketable

commodity. I have absolutely no interest in commenting on any of the

specific letters other than the occasional explanatory comment as I slip a

letter into the collection. And now that the rest of this collection is in an

electronic form perhaps there will be a new spirit, a new ethos, a new me.

We shall see.

Ron Price 26th November 2006 Updated:26/8/07

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INTRODUCTION VOLUME 12 PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE

Beginning with volume 11 of Division 1 of my personal correspondence and

as the final months of that volume came to an end in November 2007, I

began to keep the bulk of my archival correspondence only in electronic

form. Inevitably, some incoming items did not lend itself to electronic form.

Such incoming items that did not lend themselves to electronic form, I did

keep in Volume 11 and I will continue that practice in this volume.

It has become obvious, though, with this new development of an electronic

letter archive, that much material that I used to keep is no longer kept. This

is especially true for the very short pieces, items of memorabilia and other

odds-and-ends whose content seems irrelevant to keep for any future use by

me or others.

Ron Price

26 November 2007

LETTER WRITING: THE PIONEER & A LONG TRADITION

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I want to add this short essay as a sort of addendum to my comments on

letter writing, my letter writing and the letter writing of pioneers because it

provides some historical context particularly for me as a person of Welsh

ancestry and it seems particularly relevant to both my autobiography and my

collection of letters. I am indebted in my writing of this short essay which

follows to a Bill Jones and his article Writing Back: Welsh Emigrants and

their Correspondence in the Nineteenth Century in the North American

Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 5, No.1, Winter 2005. Jones points to a

remark made by Eric Richards in relation to British and Irish people who

moved to Australia in the nineteenth century that migrants were “more likely

to reflect on their condition and their lives than those who stayed at home.”

I’m not sure if pioneers in the Baha’i community did more reflecting on their

condition and lives than those who stayed at home, but there is no question I

did a sizeable amount of reflecting and I documented a portion of it in my

letters, after about 1995 in my emails and after I retired in 1999 in posts on

the internet. I am also inclined to think that, as the decades advance and as

collections of the letters and emails of pioneers like myself take form, they

will reflect mutatis mutandis Eric Richards’ comment. It is true of most

European peoples, whose histories took on an international dimension as

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result of nineteenth-century migrations, that emigrant letters became the

largest and arguably the most important source for an insight into the

mentalities, activities and attitudes of ordinary migrants. Commentators have

long emphasised the importance of emigrant letters in illuminating the

human and personal aspects of the experience of migration. The comparison

and contrast between emigrant letters and those of Baha’i pioneers is

heuristic and, I would think, an inevitable exercise in any exploratory study

of the role of the letter in the evolution of the Bahai community and its

embryonic Administrative Order.

Just at the time when the collections of Welsh migrant letters were first

being published in the 1960s, my first letters as a Baha’i pioneer in Canada--

a pioneer with a Welsh ancestry--were being written and collected. A

continuity was taking place of little to no significance to the outside world or

even within the Baha’i community at the time, a continuity that began in

Wales in the 19th century. Perhaps in the long run it would be a continuity

with some significance. Time would tell. Alan Conway’s collection of letters

from Welsh migrants published in 1961, The Welsh in America: Letters

from the Immigrants appeared just as my own collection was taking in its

first letter, a collection at the time that I was not even aware I had begun

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amassing. By the time H. S. Chapman’s article about letters from Welsh

migrants “From Llanfair to Fairhaven,” in Transactions of the Anglesey

Antiquarian Society and Field Club and Letters from America: Captain

David Evans of Talsarnau, my own collection of letters were beginning to

assume a substantial body of material for future archivists and historians,

writers and analysts. I belonged to a religion within which the letter had

assumed more than an insignificant role, indeed, a very prominent one, and

those mysterious dispensations of Providence would determine whether my

letters and those of other international pioneers would take on any

significance in some future epoch. As a non-betting man, I was inclined to

the view that one day they would.

This brief analysis can not do justice to the many dimensions that collections

of letters from Baha’i international pioneers embrace, although I hope what I

write here contributes in a small way by conveying something of the

diversity & complexity of the subject. I am only discussing somewhat

impressionistically a few of the functions of the letters of pioneers and the

relationships between them and certain aspects of the process of pioneering.

I also want to discuss certain features of the letters as texts, examine some of

their contexts and subtexts, and try to explain some of the complex ways in

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which this correspondence came into existence. My remarks here are

limited, though, for this is a short essay and deals with its subject in a

general and personal way making no attempt to be comprehensive, well-

researched or extensively analysed. I seek to shed light on some of the

experiential aspects of emigrant letter writing over two centuries and pioneer

letter and email writing and receiving in the period: 1971-2021, the period in

which I was myself an international pioneer.

A collection of letters like my own are so unlike any of the nineteenth

century collections from European or United Kingdom migrants to the

colonies, the new world, any world outside of the Eurocentric world

migrants had been born in. Their letters, their history, production and

reception, intersected with, contributed to and were shaped by key

contemporaneous developments in that part of the nineteenth century in

which their letters were written. These included the conspicuous increase in

literacy, the emergence of mass print culture and formal state-based

education, the expansion of the postal service and of reading and letter-

writing in general, the social and cultural practices of the time together with

the growth of instructional literature devoted to a range of cultural and

educational pursuits. In the case of my letters, only a few were written back

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to my country of origin and the few that were were not written essentially to

explain to anyone or convince anyone of the value of this new country as a

pioneer destination for them. My letters, for the most part, were produced

and intersected with developments in my country of destination. The affects

of the spread of media technology: TV, coloured TV, DVDs, video and, by

the 21st century, large-screen plasma TVs, the computer, inter alia; social

and political developments locally, nationally and internationally; the

decline of letter writing and the increase in the use of the email; the

expansion of the Baha’i community from, say, 200 thousand in 1953 to, say,

800 thousand in 1971 and to nearly six million in 2003, indeed, the list of

influences is and has been endless. This brief statement can not do the

subject justice. I leave that to future writers and students of the subject of

letter writing and pioneering in the Baha’i community.

Numerous scholars have emphasised that the writing and receiving of letters

had a high priority for those emigrants who engaged in correspondence over

100 years ago. Without denying the importance of emigrant letters in any

way, however, we should be careful not to exaggerate and over-romanticise

their significance to all emigrants and to the emigration process in general.

This is equally true of the letters and the emails of pioneers in the last half of

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the first century of our Formative Age: 1971-2021. Undoubtedly they have

immense importance as the main, if not the only, practical method of

keeping in touch with relatives, friends and neighbours back in the Old

Country or country of origin. Yet letters and emails also had certain

limitations that undermined their effectiveness in these regards. Not every

emigrant or pioneer wrote letters and emails. The pleasure taken in the act of

writing was not universal. In the 19th century not everyone could write; in

the last half of the 20th century virtually everyone could write, at least in the

western world, but new influences kept many from writing more than the

perfunctory communication.

Some emigrants in the 19th and pioneers in the 20th wrote only very

occasionally and the number who wrote regularly in both centuries was

perhaps smaller still. The email certainly resulted in an explosion in the

sheer quantity of written communication from pioneers and among the

general population and I am confident that this sheer quantity would one day

be reflected in the letters and emails of pioneers when such collections were

eventually made. Further, the importance attached to the act of writing to

people on either side of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific varied from family to

family and changed over time. For so many families, one of the most intense

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consequences of emigration was disintegration or, perhaps the word

ephemeralization, is better. The situation was often created in which

connections with family and friends were broken or they became tenuous at

best. There were also other important elements to the process of maintaining

correspondence that could complicate matters and even restrict the letter’s

effectiveness in keeping families together and keeping friendships alive. If

letters were chains that bound distant kith and kin and connections with

Baha’i communities of origin, they were often fragile or poor links for many

a pioneer. Even when the links were strong, the letters and emails were often

thrown away and became of no use to future historians.

Pioneer and migrant correspondence was a multi-faceted, complex and

sometimes ambiguous, even contradictory phenomenon. There is no doubt

that the relationship between the letter writing of some emigrants and some

pioneers was characterised more by apathy, neglect and avoidance than by

emotional intensity and deep psychological need. Some people preferred

gardening, watching TV and engaging in any number of a cornucopia of

activities that popular and elite culture had made available in the late

twentieth century. The hobby apparatus of many a leisure time activity

became immense as the 21st century turned its corner. So many people

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really did not like to write and when they did they saw its only significance

in personal terms, in terms of their relationship with the person they were

writing to. This was only natural. Personal preference and circumstances as

well as factors far beyond the control of emigrants/pioneers and their

families could limit the effectiveness of the letter/email as a means of

communication. Yet, for other transnational families, the letters received in

and sent from the country of origin were all as precious as life itself. Written

correspondence was the principal means of sustaining that transnationality

and a future age would collect and analyse this sustaining force and this

often ephemeral reality. The practice of writing, receiving and responding to

letters in the 19th century and, say, until what Baha’is called the ninth stage

of history beginning in 1953--to a country of origin from, say, America,

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Patagonia, South Africa and elsewhere was

an essential element in the process of emigration and pioneering and the

lived experience of emigrants/pioneers. It had a centrality that was lost,

though, in the second half of the twentieth century and the second half of the

first century of the Formative Age(1971-2021) as the letter was challenged

by mass use of the telephone and, later, e-mail, and by cheaper and faster

overseas travel. I would suggest that because of their richness as literary

artifacts, their symbolic importance and their revelatory power, the position

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that the written communications of pioneers beginning in the nineteenth-

century and continuing until, say, 1953, should occupy, is prominent. These

letters should be found, if not the very best place in the house of the Baha’i

literary heritage, then at least a significant one that might draw the visitor’s

eye as the threshold is crossed. Further, like families and friends in the

nineteenth-century, we need to bring emigrant and pioneer letters out to

study them more often, to pass them around and scrutinise and discuss their

contents. My view is that it will be some time before this kind of

scrutinizing takes place and, when it does take place, it will be in some

academic environment not in popular circles. In a very real sense those large

and laden letters that take wing across the oceans, still await — and deserve

— our responses—perhaps our children’s children!

In his introduction to a collection of 840 of Waughs 4500 letters of Evelyn

Waugh, Mark Amory makes the point that one of the ideal conditions for

letter-writing in our time is any one or a combination of: adventure, boredom

and idleness. While these three conditions virtually never coexisted in my

life; boredom and idleness did in my late childhood, when I was 10 or 11. It

was other ideal conditions than these that led to my letter writing. Amory

also notes that letter-writers often have libellous passages which must be

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taken out. I should not think this will be a problem with my correspondence.

Although libel is not a subject that has entered my mind in my letters and I

am confident that it will have no place in the future of my letters, the subject

of friendship has, indeed, occupied my mind as a letter writer and it is to this

subject that I now turn to close this subject here at the BARL.

SOME THOUGHTS ON FRIENDSHIP IN:

LETTERS/EMAILS AND INTERNET POSTS

These many volumes contain letters and emails, communications with many

a person over many a year. The correspondence with some barely exists;

there is at most one letter from many individuals over many years. The

correspondence with others takes place off and on for varying lengths of

time. Robert Risch, a student of writer Ernest Hemingway, describes the

letters between Ernest Hemingway and Evan Shipman, a correspondence

with a particular type of person who got on with Hemingway, a difficult

chap at the best of times or so it is said. I include the following two

paragraphs of Rischs words here as an opening note on the subject of

friendship in letters, emails and internet posts.

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Evan Shipman’s letters to American novelist Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961)

reveal a strong kindness running through his actions and his manner. Ernest

Hemingway and Evan Shipman shared many of the same interests and

activities and they are apparent in their correspondence: “Paris in the 1920s,

being short of money, loving art, writing and adventure, reading the same

books, Spain, war injuries, friends doing well, friends doing not so well,

families of culture, mothers they disappointed, fathers with whom they

bonded, having their work criticized at times unkindly,”1 are but a few.

Most of th e time, each man reacted to these things in very different ways,

yet they remained friends. Hemingway may have lost as many friends as he

found in his life, but the friendship he shared with Shipman went the

distance. Men like Hemingway make up their own rules because they need

to win; they think they know it all, such was the view of Philip Kolb in his

study of the letters of another writer. They are difficult to please and

friendships with them are arduous. If Hemingway and Shipman had been on

a sports team, Hemingway would have no doubt led the team in scoring and

probably penalty minutes. The media would have camped out in front of his

locker. Shipman would have led the team in assists and would have come

and gone without many people noticing. But even the Hemingways of life

need good friends. Without them the game is not worth the play.1

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This correspondence between Hemingway and Shipman tinctured as it is

with fame and literary renown, was totally unlike that between myself and

the recipient of this very short essay, John Bailey. This man, to whom I have

written more letters than any other person in my several decades on this

mortal coil, could always be relied upon to send me in his letters: quotations

from the humanities and social sciences, words of wisdom from known and

unknown sources, elements of the quotidian, reminiscences from our

common experience in the teaching world and the world of Western

Australia where I spent 13 years and accounts of his annual trips with his

wife after he had retired. He was a type of correspondent, as I found all of

my correspondents, unique unto himself. He was not demanding. I have

written to demanding personalities; I have written for demanding

personalities and even now, after the evolution of more than two decades, I

think of that writing to the demanding, the critical and those who were

usually pushing some barrow of a partisan-political nature with distaste,

coolness and some degree of emotional alienation.

The only competition John Bailey had from other correspondents in my

epistolary life, in terms of frequency and duration of writing, was with a poet

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who has now passed on, Roger White. Roger and I corresponded from 1981

to 1992. John and I have been writing now from 1996 to 2007. Roger, too,

was not demanding, not judgmental; there was a lightness in his authorial

step even when dealing with serious content. This was also true of the letters

I received from John Bailey.

Acquaintances and familiarities, occasional contacts, some little intercourse,

wrote the essayist Montaigne over 400 years ago, these are what people

commonly call friends and friendships. But he says, these are not

friendships. Friendships involve: being mutually taken with one another,

being endeared, being confirmed by judgement and length of time, one soul

in two bodies. Friendship of this type is remote and rare. I’m not sure if I

have ever experienced such friendship. Indeed, after these many years, I’m

not sure I would even seek out such a friendship. I think the type of

friendship I have and which I cultivate in my letters and emails, is a

friendship that lies somewhere between the two types that Montaigne

describes. The subject is a complex one, though, and requires more time than

I desire to devote at this juncture.

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One of the extensive, if not interesting, letter writers in history was one,

Horace Walpole. For some time he contemplated writing a history of his

times but after twenty years of consideration, he gave the idea up and

decided to write another kind of history based on letters.2 Each of the

friends he wrote to was “particularly connected….with one of the subjects

about which he wished to enlighten and inform posterity.”3 There is little

doubt that I could approach a history of my times through the vehicle of the

letter. But it would be a particularly idiosyncratic history, not your

comprehensive view of an age. It would be a more personalized, more

subjective, exercise. I would have to approach it through the vehicle of those

I knew, knew in varying degrees. After only a brief reflection I think such an

exercise would be beyond my capacity and, more importantly, my interest.

Sadly, if not thankfully, most people who have taken the time to write to me

have done so infrequently and I am not sure if I could add much to an

understanding of my times through their meager correspondence. Most

people prefer gardening, watching TV, reading, arts and crafts, various

forms of exercise, nice long sleeps and good food. Epistolary activity is not

on their list of enthusiasms. Then, too, I often wonder if one ever really

knows anyone in life even when one shares a good deal of ones

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correspondents enthusiasms. If one wants depth and breadth, one just about

needs an afterlife. And for that purpose I think many would still decline the

offer and prefer the quiet, obscure and unemotional dalliances of oblivion.

This side of the grave, it seems, we know in part and we prophesy a much

smaller, an infinitessimal, part.

Recently I came across the letters of Petrarch(1304-1374), poet and

historian, precursor to the Renaissance. He wrote, to my surprise, letters to

dead figures in the past. I had already begun to think of what Virginia Woolf

called posterity’s “featureless face,” those not-yet-born, as I approached the

age of 50 over a decade ago. Generations yet unborn insensibly became part

of my perspective. During the years, what I now think of as my warm-up

years of letter-writing, 1957 to 2007—50 years, I became more interested in

posterity, in those not-yet-born, in the generations that would come after me.

The idea had germinated, but the idea of writing to those who had died or

those not yet born had never crossed my mind. I would have to sit on these

ideas for the moment.

Many of my notebooks, more than 300 now in total, consisted of

photocopied material and I am not sure what relevance they would have to a

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future age. But my correspondence—that is a different subject. Time will tell

what eventuates in this direction, the direction of letters and emails,

friendship and letters, those from the past and those not-yet-born. I don’t like

writing novels, short stories, scripts for the media, advertising pieces, nor

books except on a very few topics. It seems the letter at least has found a

place in my life amidstmy poetry. If I only write to those now living while

being inspired by those who have left this mortal coil and while keeping one

eye on the future this will take me to my final end.

Ron Price December 19th 2005 (updated 27/11/07) 1 Ron Price with thanks

to Robert Risch, “Evan Shipman: Friend and Foil,” The Hemingway

Review, Vol. 23, No.1, Fall 2003.” 2 Horace Walpole, Letters, Vol.1-16,

editor, Paget Toynbee, Yale UP. 3 Virginia Woolf, Collected Letters, Vol.1,

1966(1925), London, p.102.

A recent essay that I wrote introducing a volume of letters gathered in the

first years of my retirement will serve to illustrate many of the things I'd like

to say about the overall collection of letters. I think, as Emerson wrote, that

'letters often put things better'2 than verbal communication and provide

perspectives that are timely here in this ongoing autobiographical statement.

2 R.W. Emerson, Manuscript Poems: 1860-1869.

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The letters of James Boswell, to chose for comparison one historical

example from collections of letters, open a window onto the real man, a man

hidden behind his great biography, his biography of Samuel Johnson.3 Of

course, one must be sensitive, too, to epistolary disguise, posing, theatrical

attentiveness to the social presentation of self, concern for appearances,

standardization of responses and what might be called mannerisms in letter

writing.4 As in life, there are many selves which write letters, many social

conventions, courtesies, honesties, et cetera.

I wrote the essay which follows as part of the second edition of this

autobiographical work, a second edition I worked on from 1993 to 2003. It

was one of my essays that was, at that point in the evolution of this

autobiogrpahy, simply gathered into an appendix and not integrated into the

body of that edition. In the third edition I achieved a better integration of

material, of autobiographical resources. My imaginative function became

more fertile in the third edition. As the poet Wallace Stevens writes,

referring to imagination: "I am the necessary angel of earth/Since, in my

3 Boswell's "Letters to Temple," discovered in the 1850s and written over a forty year period from the 1750s to the 1790s.4 Grover Smith, editor, The Letters of Aldous Huxley, Harper and Row, NY, 1969, p.1.

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sight, you see the world again," 5I am seeing the world again with greater

vividness than I once did. Robert Graves, a prolific letter writer, saw his

letters as a sort of 'spontaneous autobiography' and his poems as his 'spiritual

autobiography.'6 I like the distinction. Perhaps, one day, a selection of letters

from my spontaneous autobiography will become available. Susan Sontag

said, in an interview over 30 years ago, that many people are only interested

in books by writers of fiction that are their letters and diaries.7 She went on

to say that many people now feel that an account of the world, of the wider

society is beyond most of us, but an account of the self and how one sees the

world, a putting oneself on the line—this is possible. If Sontag is correct

then perhaps there is some hope for the more than two dozen files of letters

that have come to occupy all the space in my study.

As the 38th, 39th and 40th years of pioneering took their course in the first

years of my retirement, 1999 to 2002, I wrote some of the following about

the letter-writing experience. There is little need here, as there is little need

5 Wallace Stevens, quoted in The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture, Richard Kearney, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988, Forward. 6 Paul O'Prey, Between Moon and Moon: Selected Letters of Robert Graves: 1946-1972, Hutchinson, London, 1984, p.1.7 Susan Sontag, “Interview,” Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum, June 1975.

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in other aspects of the letter section of this autobiography, to suppress

indecencies or to correct punctuation, although a good editor might want to

tidy-up some of my phrasing.

"Across the line of time I thought I would try to make a brief summary of

this letter writing experience, an experience which goes back to the first

letter I received from the international pioneer Cliff Huxtable in St. Helena

in 1967. Cliff's wife Cathy had just died at the age of thirty-five. Cliff is still

in St. Helena thirty-five years later. He never wrote again. I replied but I did

not keep a copy of the letter; indeed I kept few of my personal letters until

about 1982, twenty years into the pioneering venture and fifteen years after

receiving that letter from Cliff. During those years there were many words

in letters, words that if kept would have opened worlds.

"As I have pointed out on previous occasions I wrote and received letters

going back as far as about 1962 when this pioneering journey began, but I

have not kept the letters from the earlier period before 1967.8 There were

many letters after 1967, at least up to about 1980, which were destroyed.

8 I have since located several items of my mother’s correspondence going back to 1960 and I also have several dozen of her poems from the 1950s which tell a story in their own way, a story of my family’s first contact with this new Faith, among other topics.

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Some of these may be in private hands but, since I have no fame, no

significance in the general public eye, it is unlikely that many, if any, letters

are being kept privately by their recipients. I find it interesting, more than

coincidental, that these letters come from a period that began with what the

Universal House of Justice in 1967 called ‘the dark heart of the age of

transition.’ By that date, by 1967, “a mood of cultural crisis: a sense that

something had gone terribly wrong in the modern world, something that we

could neither assimilate nor put right,” had entered our psyches. One writer

called our society a post-traumatic culture.9 Indeed there have been, since

the fifties and sixties, a host of characterizations of the shift, the crisis, of

these days.

"If one tried to get a picture of the hey-day of my letter writing I think it

would be in the 1980s when I lived, first in Zeehan on the west coast of

Tasmania, and then in the north of Australia, north of Capricorn, although in

the early years of the new millennium, after my retirement, there was a new

lease on letter-life in the form of emails. I do not have any interest in going

through this collection of letters that I wrote 'north of Capricorn' or, indeed,

9 Kirby Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties, The Johns Hopkins UP, London, 1998. Of course, one could use this term for different time periods in these first epochs of the Formative Age going back to the years after WW1: 1914-1918.

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from the full period 1967 to 2001, now in over thirty two-ring binders and

arch-lever files. Perhaps a future day will see me making some minute

analysis of the extent and the content of these letters. Perhaps, should their

potential value become more evident to me, I shall take a more serious

interest in them. Thusfar I have made only the occasional annotation to

these letters.

"I have, though, taken a very general interest in the collections of letters of

other writers to help provide useful perspectives on my own collection. I

have opened a file of 'introductions to collections of letters' obtained from

books of the letters of famous writers and have kept additional notes on the

genre because I think in the years ahead I may write a history drawing on

letters, mine and those of other Baha'is in the world during these four

epochs. But that activity is far off. In the meantime these letters are like

"arrows from the same quiver." I send them "just as high and far" as I can. In

my "journal it is the same."10 Perhaps these letters and my journal are

simply the product of a peculiar self-centredness. Their appeal I’m sure will

not be due to my wit, my humour, the adventureousness or the romance of

this narrative, but rather( if there is any appeal at all) to the ordinariness of

10 John Burroughs, "Henry D. Thoreau: Part 1," The Thoreau Reader, from: Century, July 1882.

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the content. Their appeal for me, for me as the writer, is the sense of

surprise. V.S. Naipaul said the same thing in his nobel prize lecture given in

2001.

Some of that surprise comes from the fact, says Naipaul, that the self that

writes is not the everyday self. They are very different. The everyday self is

essentially superficial. I’m not so sure about the double self, but that sense

of surprise I find on every page I write and this surprise certainly possesses

an appeal. “The secretion of one's innermost life, written in solitude and for

oneself alone, that one gives to the public,” writes Naipaul. “What one

bestows on private life—in conversation, however refined it may be—is the

product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can

only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the

world."11 While I’m not sure this is entirely true; it certainly is in part.

Maugham puts this idea a little differently. "I had an impression," this is

Maugham's summing up of the writer Thomas Hardy, "that the real man, to

his death unknown and lonely, was a wraith that went a silent way unseen

between the writer of his books and the man who led his life, and smiled

11 Proust in The New York Review of Books, Volume 34, Number 7, April 23, 1987.

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with ironical detachment at the two puppets."12 Somewhere in all of this lies

the real writer, the real me. Is this real me to be found in the id, the

unconscious, the reflexes, the hormones, in a socialization process, the roles

of a protean man, in feeling good? This complex question really requires a

book on its own, but I think from a Baha’i perspective the real me is best

found in thought and action guided by the behavioural principles of this

Cause which like some measuring rod, some precisioned instrument, provide

a focus, a way of indicating when one is wide of the mark. Of course, this

instrument, however accurate, is not a simple tool with incremental and

sequential marks on it. Complexity haunts both everyday life and the

imagination.

"This is not a collection of lettters of a famous person or to famous people,

like the collections of letters of Einstein to President Roosevelt, or the

collection of Jane Austen's letters or those of, say, one of the Presidents,

Prime Ministers or other prominent members of the community. My

collection has no curiosity value like the collected letters to Santa Claus, to

lovers or to mothers or letters from children, suicide victims or entertainers

to an assortment of people. Whatever significance this collection has is tied-

12 Somerset Maugham in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 34 No.7, April 23 1987.

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up with the emergence of a new world Order and a new religion and

whatever future that religion may have. These letters bear the traces of

contemporary historical practices, literary styles and tastes and they are

surrounded by what could be called "the envelope of contingency."13 In this

sense they are communications to and with the world, with society, however

personal and private they may appear to the casual observer. Perhaps, like

the autobiography of Helen Keller, The Story of My Life(1903), which

contains some of Keller's letters as well as those of others, some of my

letters and those of my recipients may be included to form a more complete

sense of this work.

"It is certain," wrote one of England's Lord Chancellors, "that no works have

done more service to mankind, than those which have appeared in the shape

of a letter, written upon familiar subjects and never intended to be published.

It is this that makes them so valuable. "I confess for my own part," he went

on, "that letters which are very elaborately written, and originally intended

for the press, are generally the most insignicant, and very little worth any

person’s reading.14 If the Lord Chancellor is right, I hope readers will not

13 Townsend Ludington, Journal of Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, Biography, University of Hawaii, Fall 2002, pp.685-687.

14 Lord Chancellor Hardwicke in "Dickinson's Epistolary Naturalness,"

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find my letters too elaborately written. I'm sure they will find some of them

a little too elaborate, too ornate for their liking. But by that time I will have

ceased to exist in this earthly life and will not be too concerned for the

degree of elaborateness in my earthly correspondence.

"These letters are, for me at least, part of a potential global epistolary

collection, part of the literary expression of a global diaspora, an

international pioneering movement, that was only in its second generation

when I got into the field in the 1960s. The recent eighteen-volume series on

global diasporas and the six volume work of the International Library of

Studies of Migration,15 will, in all likelihood, have no mention of the Baha'i

diaspora when they are completed. The former is or will be made up of

original works, while the latter is a collection of previously published

articles on selected themes. International migration and diasporas have come

to constitute distinctive fields of inquiry and there is considerable overlap

between them.

Logan Esdale, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. 14, Number 1, Spring 2005. 15 Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1997.

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"The study of international migration is broader in scope and partially

subsumes diaspora studies. Diasporas arise from international migration.

Constant interaction between diasporic communities in dozens of sovereign

states and with various homelands is one of the defining features of this

international migration. After nearly seven decades of international

pioneering as part of an international teaching Plan, this interaction and

these many diasporas seem to me, in many ways, to have just been initiated

and only briefly been given any academic study.16 The major events of this

pioneering venture, the various processes concerning its growth and

development, and aspects of the diasporic life of, say, Baha'is from North

America in Australia would necessarily interest only a small body of people

at this stage of that group's history. Indeed, at this early stage, however

massive the exercise involved, and the global pioneering venture is indeed a

massive one, the significance of collections of letters is hardly appreciated as

yet; indeed, I would think for most people including the pioneers themselves

there would be very few collections of letters extant.

"What are termed Baha'i studies or international Baha'i pioneering studies

will one day, though, I am confident, be a part of an extensive study of the

16 The only studies I have seen thusfar have been of Iranian Baha’is in North America and Australia.

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great Baha'i international diaspora of the last sixty-seven years(1937-2004),

a full two-thirds of the first century of the Formative Age. One could add

the letters from that hiatus period going back to 1919 when the Tablets of

the Divine Plan were first released and those from the period 1894-1919

which included a great deal of movement in that embryonic Baha’i

community. This study of letters is for a future time. So I am inclined to

think, anyway. This cache of my correspondence is part of what is, in fact, a

grand narrative. Those people to whom I have written and who have replied

need feel no concern, no threat, by being published. Virtually none of my

letters are published or posted on the internet. One day they may and by that

time I, the recipients of my letters and any other parties referred to will be

long gone from this mortal coil.

"Specific letters relevant to the history of the Cause in the Northern

Territory(NT) I kept for two decades(1982-2002) in special files as resource

material to help me write the Baha'i history of that region. I have now given

them to the Regional Baha'i Council for the Northern Territory. Much more

collecting of letters written by Baha'is in the NT could be done by history

writers and archivists with greater enthusiasms than I now possess and I

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hope some day such an exercise will be accomplished.17 In the disintegration

of society that is part of the essential backdrop to these letters and the

contrasting integration, the generation that took part in the pioneering

venture of the years 1962 to 1987, marks the first years of the tenth and final

stage of history. It is a stage coextensive with a crucial stage in the

institutionalization of the charismatic Force, the routinization of that

charisma to use Weber's term, in the Universal House of Justice.

"If these letters apppear to indicate an aloofness from the controversies of

the day, from the endless issues that occupied the front pages of the

newspapers and the images and sounds from the electronic media; if they

refrain year after year from any association "by word or deed with the

political pursuits" of the various nations of the world, "with the policies of

their governments and the schemes and programmes of parties and factions,"

it is because this is the advice, the position, taken by the leaders of my

Faith18 following principles and practices laid down by the Founders of this

Faith beginning in the 1840s. I, too, following these considered views, have

17 A series of 33 instalments: Ron Price, "The History of the Baha'i Faith in the NT: 1947-1997," appeared in the Baha'i Council newsletter Northern Lights from 2000 to 2003.18 "Political Non-Involvement and Obedience to Government: A Compilation of some of the Messages of the Guardian and the Universal House of Justice," Peter J. Khan, NSA of the Baha'is of Australia, 1992(1979), p.26.

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tried to further the aims of what is to me a beloved Cause and to steer a

"course amid the snares and pitfalls of a troubled age"19 by steering clear of

partisan-political subjects. Many writers do the same. They steer clear of

politics and go in for sex, religion, humour, theology, inter alia, in their

writing. They belong to no lit crit school, have no followers and simply

cannot be easily labelled politically.

"What does occupy the Baha'i often appears trifling. Such is the feeling I

have frequently had in relation to these letters. The words of Thomas Henry

Huxley, the nineteenth century biologist and educator, I find encouraging.

He opened his autobiography with a quotation from a letter from a Bishop

Butler, a bishop of the episcopal seat of Aukland, to the Duchess of

Somerset. The bishop wrote: "And when I consider, in one view, the many

things . . . which I have upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being

employed in this manner at my time of life. But, in another view, and taking

in all circumstances, these things, as trifling as they may appear, no less than

things of greater importance, seem to be put upon me to do." As archaic, as

anachronistic, as the style of the good bishop's words may be, the point for

me is important, namely, that Huxley saw his autobiography, even the

19 ibid.,p.16.

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humble letter, as something "put on him to do," by the interpositions of a

watchful Providence, the eye of a necessary Fate or the simple needs of

circumstance, however trifling it appeared to be.

"I am reminded, in this context, of the words of Roger White from A Sudden

Music. White says that the highest service a Baha'i can often render is to

simply do "the thing under his nose that needed doing."20 For me, writing

letters was often this 'thing.' And so it was, that over time, as the years went

on, what was once seen as a trifling exercise took on a patina of gentle

significance, perhaps even the sense of letters being a small example of what

the Universal House of Justice called "nobler, ampler manifestations of

human achievement" in their discussion of the subject of 'freedom of

thought.'21 If I was not a good cook, a good gardener, a good mechanic, a

good painter, indeed, if I did not operate successfully in so many areas of

life, as indeed most of us can say about so many domains of our activity, I

could at least write a letter and do it well, at least such was my personal

view. Unlike the French writer Gustav Flaubert’s 13 volumes of

20 Roger White, A Sudden Music, George Ronald, Oxford, 1983, p.71. 21 The Universal House of Justice, "Letter to the Baha'is of the USA," 29 December 1988.

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correspondence which often serve as a friend to aspiring writers22 my work,

in whatever number of volumes it is eventually set, may serve as a profitable

bit of historical material for an archive but not as an exemplum of epistolary

quality. If it is deserving it will find a sanctuary in some local or national

Bahá’í archive.

I’ve always appreciated the words of Evelyn Waugh in terms of this

particular capacity to write letters. "Beware of writing to me,” he once said,

“I always answer.” He referred to his letter writing habit as “an inherited

weakness,” part of his “great boringness.” It was partly due, he said, to

“never going out or telephoning.”23 "Like Thoreau my life "showed a

devotion to principle," but by the time I was sixty I was only too conscious

of just how far my life had been from the practical application of principle. I

have little doubt that were many more individuals, more sincere and more

genuine in their devotion to that same principle or principles, than I have

been or would ever be. As Clausewitz notes in his series of essays On War

22 Mario Vargas Llosa in “The Perpetual Orgy,” The Complete Review, 2003. 23 Evelyn Waugh, 30 March 1966, in a letter to Diana, Lady Mosely.

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"to be faithful in action to the principles laid down for ourselves" this is our

"entire difficulty."24

"The "many things" to which the Duchess’s correspondent here refers are the

repairs and improvements of his episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if

Huxley, the first great apologist of Darwinian evolution, this largely self-

educated man, one of England's founders of primary schools for all, this

father of eight children, this coiner of the term 'agnostic,' saw himself as an

instrument of the deity. But, like the good Bishop Butler, I'm sure he felt he

had "things of great importance" to do and that they had been "put upon

him." Even the humble letter. Virginia Woolf wrote that it was not until the

nineteenth century that "self-consciousness had developed so far that it was

the habit of men to describe their minds"25 when they wrote their letters and

their autobiographies. I write in this new tradition, although I am conscious,

as Woolf puts it plainly, of "the world's notorious indifference."26 And it

may be many years, if ever, before this collection of letters has any interest

to even a coterie of people.

24 Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, editor M. Howard and P. Paret, Princeton UP, Princeton, NJ, 1976, p.17. The first systematic study of war written in a series of essays between 1816 and 1827.25 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own in David Richter, (ed.), op.cit., p.553. 26 idem

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When and if interest is ever taken in this collection of epistolary material,

writers will not have to go down some of the avenues they have had to do in

fictional accounts. Sifting through rubbish, burglary, grave robbing and

murder have been some of the melodramatic forms found in fiction.27 For

many autobiographies letters occupy a critical, an essential, part of the text.

Given the massive nature of this autobiography, I can say that it certainly

does not depend on letters for whatever success it achieves in the public

domain. The problem of the thin autobiography is not one I face.

"Letter writing has occasionally been a routine, perfunctory, exercise;

occasionally a joy, a pleasure, a delight; occasionally part of some job or

community responsibility. “Letters were the very texture” wrote Henry

James “of Emerson’s history” and mine. There is certainly a texture here

that is not present in the other genres of my wide-ranging autobiography.

Some letter-writers are janus-faced and some, like Truman Capote, the

author of Capote’s letters in Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman

Capote are three-faced.28 There was the face for gay friends, the face for

27 Brenda Niali, “The Trunk in the Attic,” National Library of Australia, 2006.28 Joseph Epstein, “A Lad of the World: Truman Capote and the Cost of Charm,” The Weekly Standard, 12 June 2004.

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non-gay friends, and the face for the friends he made in Kansas while

writing In Cold Blood. I think I have a multiple-faced letter writing

persona: one for Baha’is of a conservative type, one for a more liberal

orientation, one for those who are Baha’i in name only, one for youthful

types, one for old people and one for.....and on goes the list, the personae.

Perhaps the most common face, certainly one of the more common ones,

that my letters possessed was the one written to put a good face on things for

the sake of the recipients. Such was the face Mozart put on his letters, so we

are informed in the preface to a 1928 collection of his letters.29

Letter writing partly overcomes, together with my writing in other genres the

"ancient enmity between life and the great work." 30 And it was apparent

that, if I was to achieve any ‘great work,’ it would be in bits and pieces

spread out over many years, many decades, very much like the spread of the

letters itself. This spread, this texture, is also a result of a new written form,

the email, a form which was present in Volume 5 of my personal letters as

well, but makes a strong appearance in this Volume 6 of these letters. Nine

out of ten communications by then were emails not letters. I think the first

29 Hans Mersmann, Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., NY, 1928, p.vii.30 Nicole Krauss, “Review of Two Books on R.M. Rilke,” The Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum, Summer 2000.

360

email I received was in 1990 or 1991. I have kept few emails before the mid

1990s when email traffic began to replace the letter and, for me at least, by

2000 the telephone as well, at least to a significant extent. In these early

years of my retirement I rarely used the telephone. I had come to find the

telephone an intrusion after more than forty years of my finding it a

pleasure, a convenience and a necessity. Of course, I still owned a telephone

and answered it when circumstances required with courtesy and kindness

and, when possible, humour and attentiveness. For the most part I left it to

Chris or Daniel while he still lived at home.

"A great deal of life is messy and this messiness offers to the artist

irrelevant, redundant and contradictory clutter. Much of letter writing falls

into this category; it spoils a good story and blunts the theme, like much of

conversation, much of life, it is random, routine and deals with the everyday

scene, ad nauseam. But these letters tell of a life in a way that is unique, not

so much as a collection of letters, for collections are a common genre over

the centuries, but as a collection of letters in the third, forth and fifth epochs

of the Formative Age of the Baha'i Era. They present pictures that tell of a

concrete reality, a time and an age, that I hope will stand revealed to future

readers; they tell of one person’s experience, at least one way he conveyed

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that experience to others regarding the nature and meaning of half of that

century which was a great turning point in history. And they shall not

trouble taxpayers as, say, David Williamson’s memorabilia did, since no

library will be paying for them, at least not while I am alive. Beyond the

grave, of course, one can not tell.

As early as 1913, aged only 27, D. H. Lawrence wrote: ‘I seem to have had

several lives, when I think back. This is all so different from anything I have

known before. And now I feel a different person…..Life unsaddles one so

often.' Before he died at the age of 44 he went on to live several more lives,

all of which are well represented in Cambridge University Press’s edition of

his correspondence, originally published between 1979 and 2000.31 I have

now lived 18 more years than Lawrence and the number of lives behind me

and ahead of me are innumerable. Like Lawrence I have been "unsaddled"

many a time with life's experience so different so many times, in so many

periods and phases of my life.

31 Hugh Sevens, "D. H. Lawrence Letter-Writer," The Cambridge Quarterly, V.35, No.1, 2006.

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“These epochs were characterized by what Toynbee calls "a schism in the

soul in an age of social disintegration." A fully seasoned universal state with

its supreme authority and its supreme impersonal law, argues Toynbee, were

not part of the cosmology and the basic unit of social organization for

humankind in this half century. Some serious and significant beginnings to

that process were made in that direction. What I saw as the implications of

what occurred during this time can be found here in my letters as I tried to

grasp the significance of the historical transformation of my time. The most

turbulent period of history was at the background of my life and the life of

my parents.

"What is here in these letters and in my other writings is, in part, some signs

and signals of the embryo of that unit of social organization at the global

level. What is here is spiritual autobiography and psychological revelation

in a different literary form than my poetry and it tells of a period during

which the Baha'i Faith made a significant leap forward in its numbers and in

the maturity of its community. Often, to the Baha'is working in their

personal lives and in their communities this maturity and this growth was

either not evident or not appreciated. Often, too, readers' awareness of the

many Ron Price's that make up my life and whatever maturity I have or have

363

not attained is sharpened by their dip into the pool of my letters. But

perhaps most importantly the number of collections of letters from

international pioneers during this period may not be that extensive given the

busyness of people's lives and what seems to me to be a quite natural

disinclination to keep letters beyond a salient few of some personal

importance.

“If, as Anthony Burgess suggests, "artists must be judged not merely by

excellence, but by bulk and variety,"32 then at least I'd be in the running, if

ever I should want to be running. Sometimes, though, bulk compromises

quality. Perhaps that is the case here. I leave that to readers to judge. As yet

my literary landscape has not been surveyed professionally or by amateurs.

I certainly hope I escape the fate of Burgess, at least as it was held in the

hands of biographer Roger Lewis who wrote: "From an aesthetic viewpoint,

all of Burgess' relentless productivity was one vast waste of words and

paper."33 While the events of my life were transpiring a series of soul-

stirring events were taking place on Mt. Carmel; auspicious beginnings were

taking place, part of a revolutionary vision, a creative drive, a systematic

32 "A Review of Roger Lewis' Anthony Burgess: A Life," in Times Literary Supplement, 2003.33 idem

364

effort. My activity at the periphery was inspired by this revolutionary vision.

My efforts were but one humble effort to comprehend the magnitude of what

was being so amazingly accomplished at the centre of my Faith.

_____________________________________________________________

Film critic Gerald Peary notes in his essay on the biography Clint: The Life

and Legend, there are at least two Clints.34 I think it is fair to say there are

probably more than two Clint Eastwoods. There are certainly more than two

Ron Price's with hopefully a golden thread joining all the selves as well as

threads of many other colours. After fifty years of excessive contact with

human beings the quiet, only child, the self who had learned in his early

childhood how to occupy himself in a solitary way, seemed to want more of

that solitude again. He came to rely on writing, especially letters and emails

for much of his contact with other people. The result was that his emails

became, as the new millenium approached after nearly 40 years of collected

letters, a combination of Mozart's style: intimately personal, practical

conversational and unstudied and Richard Wagner's more essayistic letter

format with its desire to fulfill and express.

34 Gerald Peary, "Essay on Clint: The Life and Legend," March 2000, Internet Site.

365

I was ready by the turn of the millennium for television's more metonymic

contact with others. I found in this medium, a medium which had been part

of my life on and off for half a century, that all of those storytellers, priests,

wisemen and elders which in many ways had become lost to society in the

years of its disintegration in the previous century and especially in recent

decades, the decades of my life, had become restored to cultural visibility

and to oral primacy in a nightly fare on TV and in the daily fare of radio

programs. With embellishments from the internet and books embellishments

which were usually more satisfying to the mind, I felt little need for any

human contact at all. And society, I felt, seemed to have little felt need, for

my story, drowned as society had become in a plethora of stories, day after

day, night after night and year after year from the tidal wave of productions

of the print and electronic media.

Those storytellers came along in the convincing guise of highly literate

specialists: newsreaders, commentators, scientific and artistic experts and

writers and producers with their endless capacity to generate stories in the

form of movies, interviews, who-dun-its, soap-operas, a cornucopia of stuff

that rested the eyes and stimulated the mind in varying degrees. It was here

in the media that the sophists of ancient Greece were reborn. The sophists

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with their emphasis on the power of the intellect arose as Greek society in

the fifth century BC was becoming more complex. They were rootless

people without any commitment to community. And they are very much like

many of the worldly wise who come upon the scene and pontificate,

publicize and entertain millions but, unlike Socrates of old, they generally

have no commitment to community. Our troubled times approximate more

closely the conditions of Greece and Rome and comparisons like those of

the sophists are useful. The media now tend to direct not only our

knowledge of the world but our knowledge of ways of knowing it.35 And the

new sophists play an important role in this mix. Not to mention this

important aspect of contemporary social and intellectual life in an

autobiography of this nature would be a serious omission.

A new nonliterary culture had come to exist at about the same time that my

pioneering life began. “Its existence, not to mention significance, most

literary intellectuals are entirely unaware," wrote Susan Sontag in her

groundbreaking 1965 essay, "One Culture and the New Sensibility."36 While

this work does not focus on this complex theme, the presence of a large

35 Richard V. Ericson, et al., Negotiating Control: A Study of News Sources, Open UP, Milton Keynes, 1989, p.257.36 Susan Sontag quoted in “McLuhan’s World and Ours,” David Skinner, The Public Interest, Winter 2000.

367

group of people in my society, a group who reads to such a limited extent, is

a simple reality of life whose implications I can not possibly dwell on.

Readers, if interested in this topic, can examine this article by Sontag and

her discussion of the new sensibility of a non-literary culture.

The media had many functions. It allowed me to get back to my writing day

after day, having been gently and alternatively amused, stimulated,

entertained and informed. I could see why millions had no need to write

letters for that human contact,37 except perhaps those with a high degree of

need for sociability. As I mentioned above though, by the year 2000, I

seemed to be writing more letters than ever. By nine o'clock at night my

eyes and mind were so tired from reading and writing--usually at least a six

hour minimum of the day's time--that I was happy to consume television's

products. Millions of my words were slowly permeating some of the literally

millions of internet sites. Yes, I was writing more letters than ever.

Perhaps this is why so many events in my life, events that could be stories,

did not become stories. Baha'i holy days, Feasts, deepenings, secular

37 Mary Ellen Brown & Linda Barwick, "A Review of the book 'Film, TV and the Popular,'" Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, Vol.1, No.2, 1987. Brown and Barwick quote this idea from: J. Fiske and J. Hartley, Reading Television, London, Methuen, 1978, p. 126.

368

holidays by the bundle, a seemingly infinite number of birthdays, annual

dinners, suppers for friends, good-grief, the list could go on and on. Over

forty years at, say, fifty events a year, makes for at least two thousand

special days. And little of it all appears here. One might ask why? Is it the

repetition, the routine, the sameness? Is it that these events are part of the

very texture of life and, like the air, are difficult to write about in a book like

this. They come to occupy two or three lines in a letter; they become the

occasional poem; they fill hundreds, thousands of hours of life with a

million eventualities. So much of life, as I say many times in this memoir,

never gets written down in any way.

There is something about the routines, the repetition of events in the

ordinary life of the individual and I refer to this repetition frequently in this

autobiography--that is like the experience of the criminal in prison. "The

crim discovers on his release that he is not the only one to perceive the

lagging of time in terms of suspended animation. His old friends do also.

They act as though he has returned from a brief trip to the toilet or out of

town for a few hours, even though he may have been in the nick for a

decade, greeting him casually and then going about their business."38 One's

38 Eddy Withnell, "Doing Time-The Temporal Reality of the Criminal's Existential World," Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol.1, No.1, May

369

actions so frequently point to somewhere, some time, one has been before

and frequently. One often resumes a relationship as if one has only, as

Withnell puts it in a humorous turn of phrase, "been to the toilet." This is

part of the backdrop that often gives one the feeling that little change has

occurred in one's being, behaving.

My letters were, among other things, strands of experience woven into

patterns, patterns in a channel, a channel that in the early years of my

retirement became filled with electronic signals and, in the end, many arch-

lever files, an expression of an art, a means of communication. By the time

Volume 4 of this collection of personal correspondence in 1995 I had, as I

indicated, become exhausted by personal contacts. Perhaps this was due in

part to my male proclivity for solitude in contrast to a female inclination to a

more social mode of existence. I was more inclined to think that this social

disinclination was due to many things in a list too long to ennumerate here.

This may be part of the reason for any apparent aloofness and any insistence

on solitude that is found in either my letters or my poetry, especially after

about 1995. My autobiography arises out of this temperamental

1983.

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disinclination more than a loss of curiosity about the future which Evelyn

Waugh says is the origin of autobiography.

Perhaps, like Rilke, I had been "too responsive for (my) own peace of

mind."1 Perhaps my letters are, like Rilke's, an indication of a "great need of

imparting the life within"2 me. Perhaps they are simply a matter of pouring

experience into a mould to obtain release, to ease the pressure of life. When

inspiration to write poetry lagged I often turned to correspondence. It was a

"handicraft", a tool among several others, that could keep me "at work in

constant preparation for the creative moments."3

“In the 1860s and increasingly in the 1870s,” writes Sarah Wider in her

analysis of Emily Dickinson’s letters, “poems figure as integral parts of the

letters. In several cases, the poem is the letter itself, standing between the

traditional opening and closing of the letter form.”39 Private though she was,

in her correspondence and her poetry, Dickinson still wrote with an audience

in mind, one for whom she performed. This was true of my letters and

39 Sarah Wider, “Corresponding Worlds: The Art of Emily Dickinson's Letters,” The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol.1 No.1. at: www.colorado.edu.

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poems in the 1990s and increasingly in the years of the new millennium.

Often I just sent poems to people and kept no record of the communication.

Reading a letter was, to Dickinson, a “reverential, private act." I find some

of both the reverence and the privacy seems tarnished in theat calamitous

20th century. The customary burning of letters allowed the dead to take their

secrets to the grave and overcome any inevitable vulnerabilities. Poems, on

the other hand, were not usually burned. “There is no absolute privacy,”

Henry James wrote in the 1890s, “save of course when the exposed subject

may have wished or endeavoured positively to constitute it." He concludes

that artists in particular “are well advised to cover their tracks." To

“constitute absolute privacy” one stoked the fire. Twice near the end of his

life, in 1909 and in 1915, James burnt piles of letters and notebooks.40

Perhaps I should do the same but, on the assumption that these letters might

be useful to posterity, I shall desist.

As my psychological life was waning in its expression of the social, the

social dimension of life, yet again, by the mid-1990s, the wider world was

experiencing 56 wars being fought around the globe. Among other

40 Logan Esdale, "Dickinson's Epistolary Naturalness," The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol.14, No.1, Spring 2005.

372

devastating effects, these conflicts created at least 17 million refugees and

left 26 million people homeless. Another 300 million individuals suffered

because of disasters not related to war. This state of affairs, following the

end of the Cold War in 1989 and the proclamation of "a new world order,"

indicated serious disarray among the community of nations. And yet, each

day dedicated human beings -- among them international civil servants,

government officials, nongovernmental workers, and a broad spectrum of

volunteers -- continued to cope with complex and seemingly intractable

problems, in efforts to alleviate suffering and advance the cause of peace.

This wider drama, a drama that was always present in the background as my

own life wound its way down the road, was simply beyond one’s

imagination to understand in any detail. I got broad pictures, but the details

were always elusive.41 This was true, it seems to me, for nearly everyone.

For, as Baha’u’llah makes clear in one of the many themes He enunciates,

“myriad of mystic tongues find utterance in one speech.” And many are the

mysteries concelaed in a single melody and few ever understand.

41 William Shawcross, Deliver us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict, Simon and Schuster, 2000. This book gives a perspective on world affairs after the end of the Cold War.

373

The drama of my life, beginning insensibly as the 1990s came to an end, was

largely an inner one. The external battle, its pleasures and anxieties, went on

but in a much more subdued form. Perhaps, like Thoreau, I lacked "a certain

breadth and coarseness of fiber" and by my fifties I came to prefer, as

Thoreau had been all his life, to be more isolated from my surroundings,

more insular and solitary. I came by my late fifties to plant myself near the

sea with a granite floor of principle beneath me, although often there were

layers of intervening clay and quicksand which, even in my solitude, seemed

to entrap me. Of course, that trap was the one I had seen all my life: the trap

of self, of ego, of nature's insistent self. Was I too quick or too slow to

answer life's call, too inclined or not inclined enough to switch off its

insistent urgings? Lacking the right words for the right time or failing to

come up with the right verbal package did I rush in where angels reared to

tread? Was this equally true in the letters I wrote? One could not always

frame the words to 'say-it-right' in every letter and email. I hope, I believed,

I was saying it better in my poetry which Russian poet Yevgeny

Yevtushenko said is the poet’s true autobiography.

These letters, it seems to me, stand in sharp contrast to what Frederic

Jameson refers to as the four losses that are symptomatic of a

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postmodernism. These losses have come to characterize our society

increasingly since the 1970s: the suspension of subjective inwardness,

referential depth, historical time and coherent human expression.42 These

letters in some basic ways define my identity and my community's by telling

the story of myself, the community I have been part of and the events of the

time. There is clearly referential depth here, subjective inwardness, the story

of a search, an open-ended drama of personal narratives, a sense of the

complexity of these historical times. There is also here in these letters what

Roland Barthes calls an "image of literature to be found in ordinary culture."

This image, he goes on, "is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his

life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism consists for the most part in

saying that" my failure is the failure of Ron Price the man. "The explanation

of a work," he concludes, "is always sought in the man or woman who

produced it....in the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us.43

There are, too, the inevitable commonplaces of correspondence and

courtesies not content. There are the clichéd phrases which lead the reader

42 Frederic Jameson, " Postmodernism and Consumer Society," Postmodern Culture, editor, H. foster, Pluto Press, 1985, pp.111-126. Jameson is one of postmodernism’s most influential writers.43 Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," Image-Music-Text, Fontana, 1977, p.143.

375

familiarly and unthinkingly to the letter’s closing and its signature. One

can’t avoid these in letter writing any more than one can in life.

While the art and craft of letter writing have declined in this century, 44 letter

stories have thrived. Cast as love letters and Dear John letters, as thank-you

notes and suicide notes, as memos and letters to the editor, and as exchanges

with the United States Post Office, examples of epistolary fiction have been

published by the hundreds, among them the work of many of our most

notable authors. Why has this form of fiction writing remained so popular?

Gail Pool, the editor of Other People's Mail says it has something to do with

the rhetorical question: "Who is immune to the seduction of reading other

people's mail?" I like to think my letters offer a similar seduction. That is

what I'd like to think. Time, of course, will tell.

Although epistolary fiction enjoyed its greatest popularity in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries, a time when letters were central to daily life, this

style of writing still has a place and a popular one it would seem. Letter

stories are about communication and they are effective in framing our

44 The email has had a stimulating effect on written communication. Much of the communication is tedious, of poor quality, of little use to the literary historian, but that has probably been true of much letter writing throughout history.

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modern concerns: the struggle to find meaningful stories, relationships, and

lives amid the social and moral disarray of the era and the blurred

boundaries between fact and fiction, artist and audience, private and public

domains. My own letters accomplish this similar framing exercise.

Written and received over nearly forty years, my collection of letters

delineates the themes of our time as do the themes of the stories in Other

People's Mail. Offering seventeen stories written by a culturally diverse

group of authors, Other People's Mail represents what letter tales, at their

best, can do. They may be written from the Canadian wilderness, a private

school in Geneva, a concentration camp, or beyond the grave. They may be

comic or satirical, poignant or tragic, but all are united in their distinctive

format. For letters are distinctively individual. Other People's Mail is the

first collection of its kind. It is a unique and important anthology. Pool's

highly informative introduction explores the nature of letter fiction.

Literature and writing instructors may find in this lively anthology a useful

resource.45 My collection offers a single perspective, a single individual, a

single background to a life, a distinctive format, at times satirical, at times

poignant, tragic, humorous and lively and, no doubt and inevitably--as

45 Gal Pool, editor, Other People's Mail, 1999.

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collections of letters are for most people--boring and therefore unread. In

that tidal-wave of print and visual stimulation that occupies today's world,

collections of letters, for the most part, slip into a quiet niche, unknown and

unnoticed and not missed.

"The tangled root" and "the tranquil flower" is here: cool detachment and an

anguish of spirit.4 I leave it to future readers to find these roots and flowers. I

trust their search will have its own reward. I hope, too, that this opening

comment on Volume 6 of my personal correspondence in Section VII of

Pioneering Over Four Epochs sets an initial perspective of some value.

These words above written on several occasions from 1999 to 2003 for the

third and fourth editions of this autobiography were completed after living

for more than four years in George Town Tasmania. Some writers move to

enclaves where many other writers live. Brooklyn USA is a good example.46

George Town, with its small population of perhaps 6000, has hundreds of

gardeners; people who fish, water ski and go boating can be found in

abundance. So can artists, cooks, cleaners, inter alia. But writers are a rare

lot and I'm happy with it this way.

46 "Interview with Alden Mudge: A Reivew of Charles Seibert's A Man After His Own Heart," Crown, Book Page Interview, 2004.

378

During the time the letters in this particular part of the collection were

written I began work on some thirty-two instalments on 'The History of the

Baha'i Faith in the Northern Territory: 1947-1997;' I also completed my

book The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature,

organized and refined the second edition of my website Pioneering Over

Four Epochs into fifteen hundred pages and gathered together a body of

resources for what became the third edition of my autobiography which I

wrote later in the twenty-first to twenty-fourth months of the Five Year

Plan(2001-2006).

During this same period a feeling of approaching apocalypse was tending to

drown out humanist beliefs in history as the progressive development

towards a better world. End- times or apocalyptic thought and theory, of

course, is not new. Some argue that it was formulated for a popular audience

for the first time in 1970,5 but I won't go into detail here on the evolution of

this line of thought which is really quite complex. Baha'is, of course,

remained optimistic but often the battle tired the spirit and, in some cases, at

least in mine, turned that spirit to letter-writing. During this climacteric of

history I began to insert into my letters sections of my autobiography as well

as poems and essays from my computer directory. By making such

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insertions I disrupted my reader's expectations, denied them the security of

familiar expectations and closure in some of my letters. But I tried to keep as

much of convention in my letters to maintain enough of a feeling of

comfortableness in my readers.

_____________________________________________________________

1 Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892-1910, trans: J. Greene and M. Norton,

WW Norton, NY, 1945, p. 12.

2 idem

3 idem

4 ibid.p.13.

5 John Sutherland, "Apocalypse Now," Guardian Unlimited Books, June

2003

Ron Price

17 February 2003

PS. The genre that Henry Miller enjoyed writing most was 'the letter.'

"Long letters to close friends,"1 were his favourite pieces of writing. I must

add that I, too, have come to enjoy this form of writing much more since

retirement, but they are rare occurrences these long letters, if one defines a

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long letter as, say, four typed pages, 2000 words, or more. I suppose the

attitude is: wy write it if you can say it on the telephone. -1Mary Dearborn,

The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller, Harper Collins,

London, 1991, p.12.

_____________________________________________________________

I have read or browsed through many books of the collections of the letters

of famous and not-so-famous writers and, for the most part, have not found

them enlightening, although the introductions to several collections have

provided very stimulating perspectives for my own work. Keats, the

nineteenth century poet, seems to be the most attractive of the letter writers.

He seems likeable, lovable, someone we would enjoy travelling with. Unlike

Shakespeare or even Jane Austin, who remain impersonal, elusive,

inscrutable, enigmatic, we feel we know Keats through his letters. He does

not hide himself. My letters clearly bring me closer to a Keats or an Emily

Dickinson, than a Shakespeare, although I know I shall never be in the

league of any of these great writers. Dickinson tended to blend poetry and

prose in her letters and, in the last decade this has been true increasingly of

my letters.47 I don’t go as far as Dickinson, though, who “exploded habits of

47 Sarah Wider, "Corresponding Worlds: The Art of Emily Dickinson's Letters," The Emily Dickinson Journal, Internet site 'Literary Journals.'

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standard human intercourse in her letters.”48 But, even as she does this she

also used the letter as a flexible form that could be shaped to suit every

occasion. The letter provided Dickinson with a way of establishing

common ground between herself and her correspondents. And so it does for

me.

I strive to fashion a lively interchange between poetry and prose and I try, as

far as possible, to say things clearly to my readers. I’d like to think some of

my letters, like Dickinson’s, ”are caskets of jewels," as a reviewer for the

Boston Transcript wrote, "Not a shell, but contains its pearl. There are

phrases that are poems in epitome."49

A cosmic and cosmopolitan range in the written word is as evident in the

literary homebodies like Socrates, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson as in

the literary travelers like Xenophon, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.

Having been both a homebody and a traveller perhaps I might more easily

find that range. I invite readers to search out my letters one day when they

become available. It is unlikely that they will find any pearls but, perhaps, a

48 Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson, www.writing, upenn.edu.49 Ella Gilbert Ives' review, "Emily Dickinson: Her Poetry, Prose and Personality," in The Boston Evening Transcript 5 October 1907, included in Blake and Wells, 71-78.

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nugget or two of some kind. They will find a self-portrait coloured and

enriched by inconsistencies, self-contradictions and partial concealments for

these are the realities of human experience. How relevant this self-portrait is

to their understanding of a new Faith and a society in the history of these

readers I will have to let time tell.

I feel an immense kinship with that American philosopher and naturalist,

Henry David Thoreau, in so many respects. His hunger, as John Burroughs

points out, was for health and the wild, wilderness, wild men, Indians. He

felt close to "the subtle spirits" in this wilderness. He lived life delicately,

daintily, tenderly. Burroughs said he was unkind. By contrast, I see myself

as kind, one of the kind Canadians 'Abdu'l-Baha refers to in His immortal

Tablets, although my affinity for the wild and the wilderness is clearly not as

strong as Thoreau's. But I have his hunger, although it expresses itself

differently to Thoreau's. It is an isolating hunger, as Thoreau's hunger

isolated him. My hunger is not for health or the wild but, rather, for

knowledge and civility. When younger, until the age of about forty, I

hungered for health. By my mid-fifties I hungered for solitude. In my late

teens and twenties I hungered for sex. After working in the garden, I hunger

for water. Since I eat a very light breakfast, by two in the afternoon I hunger

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for lunch. Our hungers change with the time of day and the season, with the

stage of our life and our psychological needs. When I look back at more

than sixty years of living there seems to be an element of wildness which I

trust I have tamed significantly.

By my years of middle adulthood, forty to sixty, knowledge became,

increasingly, my great desire, although I saw significant manifestations of

this desire as early as the age of 30 when I worked as a teachers' college

lecturer. By sixty the symptoms of my bi-polar disorder were, for the most

part, treated. I yearned, too, for that quiet civility with which genuine

engagement with my fellow men could be enjoyed when that engagement

was either necessary or desired. Perhaps this was due to a fatigue with much

conversation, my sense of an immense ignorance and my awareness of a

strong strain of grossness and the many traces of moral laxity that not only

stained my life but the name of the Faith I regarded as holy and precious.

As Shoghi Effendi stated so boldly at the start of the first Plan in 1937, "the

controlling principle in the behaviour and conduct of all Baha'is" has

implications for "modesty, purity....cleanmindedness ...moderation...and the

daily vigilance in the control of one's carnal desires." Any thorough

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examination of the last fifty years of my life, 1953 to 2003, would reveal

that I am far from casting that "sleeve of holiness over all that hath been

created from water and clay."50 I see myself as modest but not prudish but,

sometimes, modesty and moderation gave way to an excessiveness and a

lack of control of sexual thoughts, feelings and associations. This is a

separate subject I cover in more detail in my journal, my diary. But let me

make a few general comments on the subject of sex here.

On the subject of my sex life I think I could put the matter in the same

general context as Pepys and Boswell did in their now famous

autobiographies. For these two giants of the autobiographical world, Pepys

and Boswell, no seduction, no sexual experience, was complete until it had

been recorded in detail in their diary. What is a complete account for me, of

course, is in a class of its own and quite distinct from the accounts of either

Pepys's or Boswell's sexual proclivities. My sex life, quite apart from my

writing and the intellectual labor that has gone into it and however

stimulating it may be to the reader, can be found revealed in my

unexpurgated diaries published, if they ever are, long after my death. Much

of my behaviour in life I would define as cyclical and repetitive. My

50 These quotations come from The Advent of Divine Justice, Shoghi Effendi, Wilmette, 1966(1939), pp.24-26.

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dedicated toil in life, a toil that often led to successes of various kinds, was

often followed by an orgy. But it was an orgy of exhaustion, depression, a

deepening relationship with Thanatos and, sometimes anger, frustration and

disappointment. This was not always the case, but to avoid these words

would present a picture of my life far less than honest.

The record of my sexual life, however appetizing readers may find it, is

remarkably thin on the ground. Readers should not get their hopes up too

high as they contemplate reading my post-humously published diaries. To

apply what I like to think are my customary powers of literary application to

more than half a century of sexual activity with a thoroughness that leaves

little to the imagination would require more space here, inspite of what I

often felt to be an insufficiency of this erotic enthusiasm, than I really want

to devote to the subject. From the observation of my earliest erotic desires

in childhood, to the loss of my virginity in the arms of my first wife on my

wedding night at the age of twenty-three, to my surprisingly late-discovered

masterbatory abilities in middle age, my sexual exploits are given the kind

of detail in my diary that would probably leave the most ardent voyeur

unsatisfied, well, at least most ardent voyeurs given the nature and range of

explicit art and pornography now available in society. I do leave my

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readers, though, the ones who acquire a taste for what I write here, with a

reward at the end of the tunnel of my life. Stay tuned, your persistence may

yield its just deserts. My sexual achievements or lack thereof, my career in

fornication, like many of my forays into aspects of life’s burgeoning variety

of pursuits and however stimulating they may be when well-written-up, will,

it seems to me, in the end contribute little to nothing to my literary

reputation or an understanding of the pioneering life.51

In my letters there is surprisingly little on the subject of sex, but enthusiasts

who would seek out every jot and tittle on the subject will find their own

reward. In the midst of the Parthian war Aurelius found time to keep a kind

of private diary, his famous "Meditations", or twelve short books of

detached thoughts and sentences in which he gave over to posterity the

results of a rigorous self-examination. Others, in the midst of other wars,

have also kept diaries. My war, of quite a different nature and occupying a

period of some twenty-three years, resembles more the meditations of this

ancient Roman emperor than the exploits of military people and their guns,

swords and uniforms.

51 Hilton Kramer, “The Edmund Wilson Centenary,” The New Criterion, Vol.13, 1995. I am indepted to Kramer for some of his approach to the subject of Wilson’s sex life.

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As the literature on personality disorders indicates, we all have certain

tendencies in the direction of various negative symptoms and adaptations, or

disorders as they are termed in the psychological literature. After more than

forty years of the periodic study of psychology, I am aware of my tendencies

toward all the major types of disorder: psychotic, neurotic, introvert and

extravert and their respective sub-types. This dark side of my personality I

am more than a little conscious of after 60 years of living. But my

tendencies, my symptoms, are all partial; I do not fit into any pure type, any

particular disorder, any full and single characterization. If I did possess any

full-blown disorder, and there is no doubt I did due to my bi-polar tendency,

it is now, for the most part, ancient history. How these tendencies, many and

several, affected my letter-writing is difficult to assess. I'm not sure how

valuable such an assessment would be and to do so here is beyond the scope

of this analysis of my letter writing.

Sometimes my letters reveal a melancholy cast of mind or hide a personal

belief that I am a contempible animal.52 For, as Baha'u'llah wrote, we all

52 James Boswell expressed similar sentiments in "James Boswell: A Brief Biography and Bibliography," Internet, 2003.

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have our backs "bowed by the burden of our sin"53 and from time to time we

need to feel that our "heedlessness has destroyed us." This need is

particularly apparent when we say the Long Obligatory Prayer. Sometimes

my letters reveal a host of other characteristics: humour, delight, pleasure,

joy, fun, insight and understanding, et cetera.

I’d like to think that, at the other end of the emotional spectrum, my letters

could be read in the same way Katherine Suzannah Pritchard read those of

Miles Franklin: “Every literary nerve in me thrills to your lovely breezy way

of saying things….And it’s almost as good as a yarn with you to read one. I

just simmer and grin to myself when I do: with a sense of real contact with

you.”54 That’s what I’d like to think. I’d like to think, too, that others might

learn not to be too tedious in the exposition of whatever Gospel they may be

espousing, particularly that associated with the two nineteenth century God-

men at the centre of the Baha'i paradigm.55 But I am more inclined to think

these letters simply preserve a record of a life or a period of four epochs in

53 Baha'u'llah, "Long Obligatory Prayer,"Baha'i Prayers, NSA USA, Wilmette,1985 (1954), p.14.54 Katherine Suzannah Pritchard, Letter To Miles Franklin 25 October 1949, quoted in As Good As a Yarn With You, editor Carole Ferrier, Cambridge UP, 1992, p.ii.55 J. C. Powys, In Spite Of: A Philosophy for Everyman, Village press, 1974(1953), p.118.

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the historical development of a new world Faith. Perhaps I give my life and

times "a fresh and novel colouring;"56 perhaps I make the whole world

interested in the great experiment of which I am but a part. Again, I'd like to

think so. But it is difficult to know. In a world of mass entertainment, a

diversified print and electronic media, collections of letters don't rate highly

on the scale of popular interest, as I've already said. That's just a simple fact.

A coterie of people, it seems to me, may take an interest in these letters. One

day in a world of say, twelve billion, in which the Baha'i Faith is playing an

important role in a future world Order, that coterie may be a significant

number. We shall see.

These letters “hang there,” as Thomas Carlyle wrote of the letters of Oliver

Cromwell, “in the dark abysses of the Past: if like a star almost extinct, yet

like a real star; fixed …once a piece of the general fire and light of Human

life.”57 These letters also play some part in answering Carlyle's key

biographical questions: how did the subject influence society, and how did

society influence the subject?58 My letters may indeed become extinct.

56 John Burroughs, "Henry D. Thoreau: Part 2," Thoreau Reader, 2003.57 The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Volume 1:1812-1821, Duke UP, Durham North Carolina, 1970, p.xii.58 Michael J. Kiskis, “A Review of Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, Scott E. Casper, Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999, p.xiv.

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Certainly their present state of influence resembles extinction more than

influence of any kind. The nine hundred letters of Cicero written in the

middle of the first century BC were one of the first, arguably the first, in

history to give us an understanding of the times. Of course he had, and his

society had, no telephone, fax, email, computer, et cetera, to convey

messages. The letter was, for perhaps two and a half millennia, much more

crucial as a genre of communication. Somewhere in the nineteenth century,

gradually, letters, like biographies, became much more human and revealing,

not like the wax figures they had been. After perhaps a century and a half of

this fresh wind, my letters join, add-onto this new tradition. Perhaps readers

will find here: the creative fact, the fertile fact, the engendering fact. One

can but hope. However much my life and my thinking have been focussed

on a single point, elaborated across a wide field of action and behaviour, I

would think my letters are a good illustration of the application, the

delineation, of this focus. During these four epochs there was so much

happening in the public and private spheres to fragment daily life.59 My

letters, it seems to me, provide a lens that magnifies many of my

autobiographical gestures and throw light on a life, a time and a religion in a

way that my general autobiography does not.

59 'Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, 1978, p.111: "it is necessary to focus one's thinking on a single point, so that it will become an effective force."

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Many of life's tensions were disguised and other revealed by my epistolary

life. My foibles, my weaknesses and faults were sometimes hidden and

sometimes exposed in my letters. My private evaluation expressed from

time to time in my letters mostly placed me lower than my coreligionists,

colleagues and friends, although on occasion on a par and on even rarer

occasions above. My unbalanced emotional storms and strains occasionally

found expression in my letters, as did my fears, but not as often as in my

life. My struggle for artistic fulfillment had been encroached upon by many

of the sturm und drung of life and this story is reflected in my letters. My

letters provided, as other genres of my writing, that stay against confusion,

which creative acts often serve to perform. They also serve, as far as future

readers are concerned, to indicate how I take myself, carry myself, toward

my ideas and deeds. Over the many years of gathering letters there have

been mercurial changes in mood and temperament, in joyful and dark

periods, in doubts and assurances. Tone and manner, mode and motive,

degree of moderation and excess, etiquette and kindness, tact and honesty all

varied enormously and readers must be on guard that they should ever take

one mood as an indication of a fixed attitude or orientation on my part.

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Signs of the continuous evolution of a lifelong scheme of devotion are

difficult to describe without appearing to be fanatical or obsessive or

unduely pious, in a world that has lost any interest in piety. Years even

decades of concentrated effort are easy to accummulate but the evidences of

that effort are not as easy to amass given the hurried, the frenetic,

excitements of modern society which militate against any pretensions of

devotion to a single purpose. Daily life, indeed, one's entire life, tends to be

fragmentary because we live in a perpetual hurry, at least that part of the

world where I have lived my days. And even when not in a hurry we get

inundated in our daily life by a host of usually disconnected, often

interesting and stimulating but so frequently, if not always, fragmentary

events and happenings, news and entertainment. If a life of devotion

involves any serious writing as mine clearly does, the vast accumulation of

materials and the demand for exhaustive inquiry often overpower the

potential and would-be-conscientious writer. Should he or she go down the

literary trail it often becomes difficult to maintain vivacity and spontaneity.

If writers can not bring the stars of the universe closer, if they cannot wake

their fellow human beings up, give them a certain morning freshness and

elan, some sparkle of understanding, they might be advised to pursue other

lines of work. For, as Lord Altrincham noted with some humour and some

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truth, “autobiograpy is now as common as adultery and hardly less

reprehensible.”60

It is interesting to note, by way of contrast with the western emphasis on

life-writing, that scholars of the Orient have written thousands of books,

theses, and dissertations about the Middle East, Islam, and Arab/Islamic

culture. Their writings exceed by far what Arabs and Muslims have written

about themselves, particularly in the modern age. Most of what the world

today knows about Arab/Islamic culture, even much of what Arabs and

Muslims know about themselves, has come by way of the writings of

Orientalist European and American scholars.61 It will be interesting to see

how both the Muslim culture and the Baha’i culture evolve in our generally

westernizing world—how they evolve in terms of autobiographical writing.

Until recently, there has certainly been a strong disinclination of Baha’is

worldwide to write about themselves. I have been quite conscious of this

reality as I went about my autobiographical business in this lengthy work.

60 Lord Altrincham, Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, 1988, #7246.61 Sharif Kanaana, “The Arab Ear and the American Eye: A Study of the Role of the Senses in Culture,” Cultural Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Folklore and Popular Culture, Vol 4, 2005.

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Here are four letters taken somewhat at random from my collection. Readers

will not find here in this autobiography much of my letter collection, but I

include a few to illustrate various themes. I should say, before including

them for the hopeful delectation of readers, that they show clearly that I do

not assume a mask, as writers often do, although I do resort on occasion to

irony and humour, perhaps as a self-defense or a kind of guardedness, or

even as a dramatic posture. I do not see these techniques of letter-writing as

masks but rather in mu ch the same way as dialogue in everyday life. They

are not so much masks as variation of the self that is me.

The first letter is written to a radio station program presenter for a discussion

program on a particular theme: the topic of early retirement. It seemed a

fitting topic for, at the time of writing the letter, I had been retired from my

career for eighteen months. I strive to address both the universal and the

individual in my letters, both the quick and the dead as Dickinson put it

referring to the living souls and the dead of spirit,62 the quotidian and the

philosophical. I try to leave meaning unsettled or open-ended, organized but

not a simple step-by-step series of prose assertions. I often bow to

62 idem

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convention, to cliched phrases, like the ending of letters which are often

more conventional courtesies than content.

All letter-writers have a landscape, a background, a mise-en-scene: perhaps

some great city, like Boswell's historic London; or some rural milieux of

beauty like Wordsworth's Lake District; some intense social activity like

Evelyn Waugh's twentieth-century London; a world of travelling like D.H.

Lawrence; a particular correspondent as did Joseph Conrad; or some of what

the writer thinks and feels as was the case with Alexander Pushkin. There is

a little of many landscapes or backgrounds in my correspondence, spread as

it is over nearly forty years now. I could, should it be my want, dwell on the

significance of landscape in much more detail than I have. For a third of my

life, some twenty years, for example, I lived within a mile of a lake, a bay or

a river. For another twenty years I drove with my family for an hour or less

to get to a beach. The beach became, during these years, a centre of activity

especially in the summer months, at least some of the time.63 I could say

much more here; I could write about the various city landscapes; the tundra,

the savanna, the temperate regions and their affect on my life, the mutual

interaction. I will conclude this all-to-brief discussion on landscape with

63 John Fiske, "Surfalism and Sandiotics: The Beach in OZ Culture," Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol.1 No.2, 1983.

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Emerson's words: "The difference between landscape and landscape is

small, but there is a great difference in the beholders."64

6 Reece Street

George Town

Tasmania 7253

4 October 2000

Dear Rebecca

The program Life Matters today, Wednesday October 4th, was on the theme

“Taking Time Out.” I won’t try to summarize all the points made by the

guests: Ester Buchholz, Margaret Murton and Gavin Smith and the many

callers discussing as they were, what one speaker called “the neurosis of our

time: a lack of aloneness.” I will briefly tell of my own experience here in

this letter. Fit in what you can when, and if, you read this letter.

64 Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: the Mind on Fire,

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Eighteen months ago I retired after 30 years as a teacher in primary,

secondary and post-secondary institutions. I was fifty-five and, with

community obligations outside my classroom in the evening and on

weekends, I felt ‘talked-and-listened-out.’ I felt I had had enough. I wanted

some time out. I wanted to give some time to what had become a personal, a

private, interest in reading and writing poetry. In the last 18 months I have

had six to ten hours a day given to this engaged, alone, solitary, stimulating

exercise.

The person who takes on such a ‘time-out’ over extended periods of time

needs to know themselves, though. I knew I had to cater to my social side. I

could not cut it all out or I’d get some kind of withdrawal symptoms. So I

spend time helping organizing the local seniors’ group; I have a radio

program for half an hour a week; I am involved with the Baha’i community

and my wife’s family here in northern Tasmania. All of these activities

together do not involve a lot of time, but they give me that needed social

contact, that balance between solitude and being with others, which I find

essential to my comfortableness.

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I would not go back to the work-a-day world. After a lifetime of talking and

listening, I knew at 55 I had had enough of full time engagement with

others. I wanted time out to engage in interests that did not involve people

at all. I got it. After 18 months I feel the story has just begun. And it has.

Gerontologists are talking about our living to well over 100 if we take care

of ourselves. they talk, too, of the loneliness of the aged. I see no evidence

of that emotional construct on my horizon but, who knows, I could be back

with people one day. For it’s possible that, at 55, my life is just half over!

Cheers

Ron Price

George Town

Tasmania

This letter to the program presenters of an ABC Radio program “Life

Matters” is one of a type that I sent over the years to various people in the

media to drop a gentle note from the sweet-scented stream of eternity into

someone's lap. It was a form of teaching I was able to do but, like so many

forms, it was always difficult to measure its effectiveness, its result.

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This next letter is one written to my family members thirty-one years after

leaving Canada, thirty-five years after leaving southern Ontario and nearly

forty years since I had seen any of them. Eight months before writing this

letter I did have a visit with my cousin, my mother's sister's son, David,

himself a retired teacher as well, and his wife, Barbara.

Dear Dave and Barb

Time seems to go by faster as you get older, you hear it said so often, and it

certainly seems to be the case. I'll soon be sixty and I assume, as long as I

am in good health and I have a range of interests, the years will spin by

'irretrievably from my grasp' as one writer put it. And so is this true of all of

us. And so the time has come again for the annual letter to what is for me

about a dozen or so friends and relatives, the periodic up-date of events in

this swiftly passing life. At one level not a lot seems to take place: the same

routines, habits and activities fill the days as they did this time last year. At

another level a great deal takes place. On the international and national

landscape the events continue to be of apocalyptic/cataclysmic proportions

as they have been off and on it would seem since 1914--or, as the sociologist

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Robert Nisbet argued persuasively65, since about 500 BC. Mark Twain once

said that to write about everything that took place would make a mountain of

print for each year. James Joyce produced several hundred pages to describe

one day in his book Ulysseys. I'll try to reduce the mountain of life to a

small hill or two in this email.

Chris and I have been here in George Town at the end of the Tamar River in

northern Tasmania for three years and three months. Daniel has been with us

and working at the Australian Maritime College as a research engineer for

two of these years. He is happier with his job now than he was in the first

year, although occasionally he applies for another job somewhere for

graduate engineers; Chris is not suffering from ill-health quite as much as

this time last year, having received some useful medication from her doctor

and treatment from an osteopath. Both Dan and Chris plug along battling

with the forces that destiny or fate, divine will or predestination, free will or

determinism, circumstance or socialization throw up for them to deal with

from day to day.

65 Robert Nisbet, Social Change and History, 1969.

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I feel as if I have completed the first stage of my final domestic training

program that qualifies me for shared-existence with Chris in matters relating

to hearth and home. I seem to have been a difficult student but, after nearly

four years of being 'under-foot' we seem to have worked out a reasonable

modus vivendi(those four years of Latin in high school were unquestionably

of some value). The in-house training had been rigorous, to say the least,

but I received a passing grade-which was all I was after! And now for the

second stage….

My step-daughters continue their work, Vivienne as a nurse in the ICU at the

Laun- ceston General Hospital(20 hrs/wk) and Angela in public relations for

an international firm centred in Bali. Thankfully Angela did not suffer from

the recent bombings in a place that had been seen(until the bombings)

somewhat paradisiacally in the Indian Ocean, although even Bali has had its

traumatic problems in the last few decades as a brief history of the place will

reveal. I wonder if there are any places in the world left which haven't been

significantly touched by the changing landscape and the traumas of our

times. Angela travels for a real estate firm selling time-share apartments.

Lives seem to be busy, active things, for those you know well, those whose

lives are intertwined with your own and I could write chapter and verse on

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all the comings and goings of family and various close friends. But I think

this will suffice for an annual letter.

I continue writing, an activity which was one of the main reasons I retired at

the early age of 55. After nearly four years away from the work-a-day

world, I get the occasional magazine and journal article published(listed on

the Net in section 24 part (v) of my Website). It's all just smalltime stuff you

might call it, nothing to make me famous or rich, sad to say. My website is

now spread over 15 locations on the Internet. The simplest spot to locate my

material is at http://users.on.net/~ronprice/or go to the virtually any search

engine and type the words: Pioneering Over Four Epochs. I also finished a

book of some 80 thousand words on the poetry of a Canadian poet who

passed away in 1993: Roger White. You can locate this book at http://bahai-

library.org/books/white. Of course, much of this material may not interest

you. Poetry is not everyone's game even if it's spiced with lots of prose.

Don't feel any obligation to check it out, just if it interests you. It will give

you an idea of some of the stuff that goes on in my head, for what it's worth.

Other than these Internet developments my day to day habits and activities

are much the same as last year at this time: walks, presenting a radio-pro-

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gram, 2 hours of teaching/ week, two meetings(school/Baha'i)/month,

radio/TV programs to take in, lots of reading, etc…

You may find my writing a little too subjective, introspective. Like Thoreau

I seem to be more interested in the natural history of my thought than of the

bird life, the flora and fauna that I find here in Tasmania. I read recently that

Thoreau took twelve years to identify a particular bird. I found that fact

comforting. I understand, for I have the devil of a time remembering the

names of the birds, the plants and the multitude of insects that cross my path

and my horizon from month to month. But what I lack, what interest is

deficient with respect to the various forms of plant and animal life here in

the Antipodes, I make up for in my study of the varied humanities and social

sciences. In the three decades of my teaching career I have acquired, if I

acquired nothing else, a passion for certain learnings, certain fields of study.

My study is littered, I like to think ordered, by files on: philosophy,

psychology, media studies, ancient and medieval history, modern history,

literature, poetry, religion, inter alia. I move from one field to another from

day to day and week to week and I can not imagine ever running out of gas,

of enthusiasm, interest. Thus, I occupy my time. If J.D. Salinger is right in

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his claim that "there's a marvellous peace in not being published,"66 it looks

like much peace lies in waiting for me.

One delightful event this year which I'd like to comment on was a visit with

my cousin Dave Hunter, his wife Barb as well as Arlene, the wife of another

cousin, John Cornfield. I had not seen any of my family members for some

forty years and we had a day in Melbourne travelling hither and yon, eating

delicious meals and getting caught up on many years of life. I found I had an

appreciation for my family that had got lost in the mists of time living as I

have been since my mid-twenties first in the far-north of Canada and then on

a continent far removed from North America. There is nothing like forty

years absence to make the heart grow fonder and give one a fresh

appreciation for one's family.

As you all get stuck into winter(at least those of you in Canada who receive

this email), summer is just beginning here with temperatures going into the

mid-twenties in the daytime occasionally on the hottest days and the low-to-

mid teens at night. This is about as hot as it gets in any part of the summer

in this section of northern Tasmania. I look forward to your annual letters

66 J.D. Salinger in "A Review of the Book ' The 627 Best Things Anyone Ever Said About Writing,'" Deborah Brodie in BookPage, 1997.

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again this year in the weeks ahead and to the news from your life and your

part of the world. Am happy to write again in another email to anyone

wanting to write occasionally in more detail on whatever subject but, if that

does not eventuate, I look forward to writing to you again at the end of 2003.

I trust the up-coming season and holiday is a happy one and the Canadian

winter(or the Australian summer, as the case may be) is not too extreme this

year.

Greetings and salutations

Ron

For Ron, Chris and Dan Price

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

PS I'll send this a little early again this year to avoid the Christmas rush of

letters/cards and emails.

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

My letters, it seems to me, do not have that naturalness and general

amiability that the poet Matthew Arnold possessed. He was endowed with a

sunny temper, a quick sympathy and inexhaustible fun. I have some of these

qualities and more now that I do not have to struggle with a bi-polar

disorder, the endless responsibilities of job and a large Baha'i community.

Arnold was endowed with self-denial; indeed it was a law of his life; he

406

taxed his ingenuity to find words of encouragement when he wrote letters. I

do, too, but I don’t tax myself too much. They come quite naturally really,

but self-denial is not a quality that I feel particularly well endowed with.

Perhaps I was once, but less so in recent years. As the years have gone on

into late middle age, I have slowly discovered, as William James put it, “the

amount of saintship that best comports” with what I believe to be in my

powers and consistent with my “truest mission and vocation.”67 We were

both men who were, for the most part, free from bitterness, rancour and envy

and, it seems to me, this is reflected in our letters.68 But the inhibition of

instinctive repugnances, perhaps one of saintship’s most characterisitc

qualities, is difficult to determine by an examination of a person’s letters.

I take much pleasure from most of my letter writing which obviously the

poet Samuel Johnson did not.69 I don’t think my letters have that “easy

power” which those of Henry James possessed.70 Indeed, so much of their

content, it seems to me, is repetitious. In a large collection of letters, like a

67 William James, Variety of Religious Experience, editor martin marty, Penguin, 1982(1902), p. 377.68 Letters of Matthew Arnold: Vol. 1:1848-1888, MacMillan, NY, 1895, pp.viii-x.69 Johnson refers to his “reluctance” to sit down to write in the Preface of Letters of Samuel Johnson, editor, G. Birkbell, Oxford UP, 1892.70 Leon Edel, Henry James Letters, Vol.1:1843-1875, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass., 1974, p.xiii.

407

large collection of life, repetition it seems to me, is unavoidable. I am

encouraged, though, by some of the remarks of language philosopher Roland

Barthes. He says that readers learn how to acquire the experience of those

people they are reading. Rather than being consumers of my letters, then,

they become producers. This is partly because literature, of which letters and

autobiography are but a part, takes in all human experience, ordering,

interpreting and articulating it. Readers learn "to set aside many of the

particular conditions, concerns and idiosyncrasies which help define them in

everyday affairs."71

And so I have hope that what may be for many readers a banal collection of

decades of letters, may be for others a body of print that will arouse a

response in the reading self, the reading system, the meaning, the identity,

system, of others. Perhaps, too, that response will be something quite

significant, something that their interpretive principles allow them to see and

that even a relaxation of cultivated analytical habits which often happens

while reading a letter may help them to see. Of course, whatever reasonable

71 Walter Slatoff in On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism, Jonathan Culler, Cornell UP, Ithaca, 1982, p.41.

408

arguments I present, whatever challenges to magnanimity I raise, they are,

again, as William James puts it so succinctly, “folly before crocodiles.”72

_____________________________________________________________

Here is an introduction I wrote to a collection of letters to Baha’i institutions

in Canada going back to 1979. By 1979 I had been an international pioneer

for eight years and a pioneer for seventeen. This letter I keep in a two-

volume,73 two-ring binders, with others sent to institutions and individuals in

Canada.

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 4.1

Who knows what will become of all these letters, now contained in some

fifteen volumes of assorted sizes and contents. “Letters enabled Emily

Dickinson to control the time and place of her relationships,” writes James

Lowell in his introduction to a volume of her letters.1 I’m sure they have a

similar function for me; I have become even more conscious of this as the

email grew and developed throughout the 1990s and became a more

important part of my life and as my world of employment became a world of

retirement filled as it was with writing and reading. I do not keep a copy of

all my emails, only the main ones. Since so many emails are of the short

72 William James, op.cit.,p.353.73 The two volumes are numbered 4.1 and 4.2.

409

and snappy variety, basically a form of entertainment, 'the funny' and 'the

wee-wisdom', as I call them, the variety which exercises that control which

Lowell speaks of in a light way, an important part of this new variety of my

correspondence I simply do not keep a record of in my files. I suppose,

though, that since they are never recorded in the first place, it will never be

missed.2

Lord Melbourne, writing about George Crabbe, indicated that “I am always

glad when one of those fellows dies, for then I know I have the whole of him

on my shelf.”3 There is certainly a type of person, perhaps many, a variety

of selves, a type of prose, that is unique to the letter. I sensed I had

something of Roger White when I had even the few letters he wrote to me in

one file on my shelf. The sombre and weird outlook in Dickinson’s poetry,

by no means the prevailing condition of her mind, is not pre- sent in her gay

and humorous letters. For those inclined to judge White too harshly or

strongly from some of his poetry, if they read his letters, they would get

quite a different picture of that wonderful poet. I leave it to future

commentators to evaluate this dichotomy between my correspondence and

the other genres of my writing, should they wish to do so. No amount of

imaginative activity can recreate a genuine experience of things and letters

410

convey the timbre and tone, the texture and the reality of genuine

experience. The necessary narrative ability in writing a letter to order and

unify the past, present and future, coloured by words and the imaginative

function that dances with them seems to be a rare and creative gift. But, as

Sharon Cameron notes in her analysis of Emily Dickinson's letters, they may

"tell us more about postures that replace relationships than the relationships

themselves"74 however creative and imaginative they may be.

Letters at one time in history had a function, at least in the more literate

quarters, that is conveyed in the following quotation from David Marr's

introduction to a collection of Patrick White’s letters: “Are there no letters?

There’s nothink I like better than a read of a good letter. Look and see, Mrs.

Goosgog, if you can’t find me a letter. I’m inclined to feel melancholy at this

time of night.4 -The Ham Funeral

The TV, video and the DVD probably have this entertaining function now,

largely replacing any function the letter may have had to keep people

amused. As I indicated above, the letter may even have been on the verge of

extinction had it not been for the email’s resurrecting role. As the 1990s

74 Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1979, pp. 11-12.

411

progressed, the email came to dominate the landscape and replace the letter.

With the world population doubling in these three epochs, too, I’m sure the

letter/email is now in safe hands, even if nine-tenths of the production is not

worth saving or pondering over after an initial read.

And so here, in this small volume, the reader will find my correspondence (i)

with the Canadian magazine Baha’i Canada going back to 1985, fourteen

years after I arrived in Australia as an international pioneer, (ii) with the

International Pioneer Committee as far back as 1979 and (iii) from National

Convention communications with pioneers overseas from 1990. With its

companion Volume 4.2 any interested reader will get a correspondence from

Canada to and from a pioneer overseas in the third, forth and one day soon

fifth epochs of the Formative Age.

Perhaps at a future time I will provide a more extended analysis of this

collection, but for now this material is at least placed in a deserving context

for future readers.

1 James R. Lowell in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Vol.1, T.H. Johnson,

editor, Belknap Press, 1958, p.xix.

412

2 See my collection of unpublished essays. they are now in the Baha’i

Academic Resource Library. I have written a 2000 word essay on the

“funnies and wee-wisdoms” email style.

3 Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words, Oxford UP, NY, 1996, p.205.

4 David Marr, Patrick White’s Letters, Random House, 1994, p.vi.

Ron Price

10 February 2000

Such are the introductory words to another volume of letters, one of many

introductons written in the fourth decade of this pioneering venture.

_____________________________________________________________

And finally, on this subject of the letter, let me add this short essay in

relation to a special type of letter, the job application, which was arguably

the dominant form of letter I wrote during all my pioneering and job-seeking

life, 1961-2001.

INTRODUCTION TO FILE OF JOB APPLICATION LETTERS

413

This is Section X of the 'Letters' part of my autobiographical work

Pioneering Over Four Epochs. 99.9% of the letters which I wrote in

connection with job seeking are not in this file. They have long since bitten-

the-dust, to put it colloquially. Indeed there is very little in the way of

correspondence here in this two-ring binder. This file was opened on the

day of my last interview with 'Mission Employment', the private provider

whose role was to help me get a job. I was told in my last interview with

them, in May 2001, that I would be able to receive a Disability Pension right

away and I would no longer have to look for work. And so the job-hunting

period of my life had ended: 1961-2001.

This file contains all that might be useful at some future time in connection

with getting a job, should the desire to resume some kind of employment,

full or part-time, return to my sensory repertoire. This file will also serve as

my archival file on the 'job hunting' topic, a process I began in about May of

1961 to obtain a summer job while I was in high school. Previous 'jobs'

included being a newspaper boy, collecting soft drink bottles, cutting grass,

etc. Taken together, jobs and student life combined to make a total of 38

years. In the summer of 1961 the Soviet Union entombed East Berlin behind

a shameful wall and embarked on a new round of hydrogen bomb tests.

414

These affairs of state occupied some distant horizon, as they tended to do all

my life, however close they became through the eyes of television and the

analysis of the print and electronic media. Nuclear war, we were informed

by James Reston of the New York Times that same summer was not

unthinkable. It was being thought about and planned as I played my second-

to-last season of baseball.

I have now been on a Disability Service Pension for three years and it does

not appear that I will be seeking employment in the near or even distant

future, although I may take up some Baha'i service position one day. If

historian Michael Oakeshott is right when he says that great achievements

are often accomplished "in the mental fog of practical experience,'75 then it

may be that I achieved great things over these years, for there was certainly

plenty of that mental fog during these 38 years. Part of this fog is the very

nature of recollected experience itself which seems to function like a text

perpetually modified by memory. Composition is, then, always a re-vision

of experience: memory lane ia always a revision lane.

75 Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, Cambridge, 1933, pp. 320-321,

415

During the forty year period, 1961 to 2001, I was out of work for four years

due to illness and my inability to obtain a job. During the years 1961 to

1967 I worked at summer jobs for an average of three months each year and

was a student for those same years. This student life could be quantified as:

9 x 6=54 months or 4 1/2 years. My student/ working life, going back to the

age of 15, totalled 38 years beginning in 1959. I was employed for 32 years

and a student for 6 years. So summarizes some of the quantitative aspects of

my working/student life. During those 38 years, about 75 per cent of the

fifty year student/working life period, 1961-2011, I applied for some 4000

jobs, an average of about two a week for the 38 years or a little more than

one/week for 50 years.

There were, too, literally thousands of letters written and received while

employed during the thirty-two years of this forty year period, 1961 to 2001.

If I had collected them into an archive they would tell another story, many

stories. If I searched all my files I might come up with three or four such

letters. This aspect of my life and the events associated with them will

remain unexamined or at least not examined with the aid of the

correspondence.

416

One day I may write a more complete statement in relation to 'job hunting'

and the contents of this file but, for now, this will suffice to provide a

general overview of an activity that occupied a central part of my life for

forty years and was one of the major three or four of life's 'tasks.' Making

one's experience, fragmentary and in a jumble as it often is, into an

intelligible form requires some trimming and shaping. To see and find

coherence, pattern and a self-contained world of ideas and events requires

some sort of intellectual organization. The historical past, both the big

picture of history and the microworld of one's own life, is often complex in

the extreme. Unity of feeling and a clear outline often eludes the would-be-

autobiographer or historian.76

As I write these words, some five years short of my sixty-fifth birthday and

three years after going onto the disability pension, it looks like I could

summarize the fifty year period, 15 to 65, as follows: 38 years

student/working, 4 years unemployed/ill and 8 years retired/on a disability

pension/writing/etc.

76 Many historians, after studying the record of the past for their entire lives, see no pattern or meaning, make no conclusions. H.A.L. Fisher and M. Oakeshott are just two twentieth century historians for whom this is true.

417

Ron Price

May 2004

_____________________________________________________________

Randall Jarrell says that Robert Frost's letters "unmask" him "at least

partially". They also show that "his life was as unusual as his poetry." I'm

not so sure that is true of me and my life. It is very hard to judge your own

work and your life. Jarrell also says that Frost was very concerned to know

what others thought of his work and whether he was "any good."1 This

subject of the reactions of others to my work, particularly my poetry, also

interests me, but I know that this is always an unknown land filled with so

many different reactions from total indifference to great enthusiasm. I must

leave the evaluation of my letters to future readers.77 For I can't imagine any

interest being shown in my letters except perhaps when I am so old as not to

care a jot or a tittle what people think.

Now that I have passed out of the shadow of decades of manic-depression,

or the bi-polar tendency as it is now called, thanks to two medications:

lithium carbonate and fluvoxamine; now that I have passed out of the

77 Randall Jarrell, Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964, Carcanet Press, Manchester,1981, p.368.

418

shadow of a working-meetings-talk-and-listen week of 50 to 60 hours, there

is an emotional steadiness to my everyday experience that generates, that

provides, a subtle and a quiet exquisiteness that augers well for the years

ahead and for the writing program that I am presently embarked upon. Even

at my weakest and most exhausting moments which in the past were often

filled with the wishes of thanatos, the depths of depression can not be

visited. It is as if there is a wall of emotional protection that won’t let my

spirit descend into the depths, even though death is sometimes wished for

late at night, from midnight to dawn, out of a certain tedium vitae and a

complex of factors I'm not sure I fully understand myself. William Todd

Schultz, in his analysis of the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein,78 wrote that

"wishing to die can connote a wish to be rid of the superego's tormenting

presence." It can be "paired with an uncompromising sense of duty. The

lacuna of death is actually preferred to the anguish of living under the

scrutiny of an endlessly demanding internal judge." There is some of this in

my experience of thanatos but, after more than forty years of experiencing

this feeling of wishing to die, I think it has more to do with my chemistry

than psychology.

78 William Todd Schultz, op.cit.

419

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine "what really happened" in

life, as distinct from simply "what the evidence obliges me to believe."

What is known in one's life or in history is never fixed, finished or

independent. Our life, like history itself, is created, revived, re-enacted, re-

presented again and again in our mind's eye. All autobiographers can do, or

their fathers the historians, is to shape the rudimentary collection of ideas

about the multi-coloured and multi-layered narrative of life into an

intelligible idiom. Some of the events are understood better than when they

happened, when they were lived, and some are not. Some are completely

forgotten and some one goes over in one's mind ad nauseam. Some become

part of the great mystery that is life and some become part of the great foam

and chaff that disappears on the shore of the sea. Some of my life can fit into

the model, the framework, I give to it. Some can not be fitted in to any

pattern, any grand design or sweeping theme, no matter how I chop and

analyse the experiences. Whatever unity and pattern there is, I must

construct myself; it is I who confer any novel coherence onto the whole, any

shifts of direction in life's expression, any understanding on the changes and

chances of the world.79

79 Michael Oakeshott, British political historian of ideas puts it this way in his Experience and Modes, p.142.

420

My relationship with my wife is more comradely and affectionate, more

united, after years of difficulties, after nearly forty years of difficulties in

two marriages. We are more accepting of each other’s peculiarities,

shortcomings and eccentricities. There is lots of space between us as we

share the solitude of life, as Rilke describes it in his Letters80 and there is,

too, a fresh spark of delight that accompanies the familiarity. I could write

extensively about my wife, so important is she to this entire story. But were I

to do so it would lead to prolixity. So, instead, I will write about her from

time to time as the occasion arises in what has become a 750 page book.81

A poem of Emily Dickinson is timely here, timely in relation to all the sad

aspects of the past which she says can “silence” us, if we give them too

much of our time, if we “challenge” them. Dickinson, who writes a very

useful juxtaposition of prose and poetry in her letters, prose that opens into

poetry and poetry that opens into prose, writes:

That sacred Closet when you sweep--

Entitled “Memory”--

80 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans M.D. Norton, WW Norton and Co., NY,, 1954(1934), p.59.81 As I write these words it is November 2003 and since beginning this fourth edition in July of 2003 I have added many paragraphs to the text.

421

Select a reverential Broom--

And do it silently.

‘Twill be a Labour of surprise--

Besides Identity

Of other Interlocutors

A probability--

August the Dust of that Domain--

Unchallenged--let it lie--

You cannot supersede itself.

But it can silence you.82

And in a short poem that that talks of her desire of a "fairer house" for her

expression than prose alone could build, she writes:

I dwell in Possibility--

A fairer House than Prose--

More numerous for Windows--

82 Emily Dickinson, Poem Number, 1273.

422

Superior--for Doors--

I like that attitude to letters that Dickinson describes. Her letters construct

"possibility." I like, too, that attitude to the past that Dickinson describes so

succinctly in the above poem. There is a reverence, a sacredness, to memory,

a need to let it lie in its august state, a recognition that it is a source of our

identity, a need for silence while following its paths and always the

possibility that it can take over your life if you let it and, of course, often you

do. For, however sacred it may be, there is an enormous tangle to our days,

a tangle, as Germaine Greer describes it, “of telling, not telling, leading,

misleading, allowing others to know, concealing things from others,

eavesdropping, collusion, being frank and honest, telling lies, half-truths,

white lies, letting out some of our story now, some of it later, some of it

never."83

“Pure autobiographies are written,” wrote Friedrich Von Schlegel, “by those

fascinated by their own egos as was Rousseau; or by authors of a robust or

adventuresome self-love as was Cellini; or by born historians and writers

who regard their life as material for future historians and writers; or by

83 Germaine Greer, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, Penguin, London, 1990, p.172.

423

pedantic minds who want to order their lives before they die and need a

commentary on their life.”84 I suppose there is some of me in each of these

characterizations of the autobiographer. I might add the following caveat of

the famous New York Times journalist James Reston who once said: “I do

not think thinking about yourself is a formula for happiness.”85 If he is right

then I am far from discovering that formula.

Let me include three poems about this autobiographical process because, it

seems to me, the process is as important as the content of autobiography.

HONEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Kevin Hart, a poet who lives in Australia, says that writing poetry is about

retrieving something you have lost. When you write a poem you lose that

thing again, but you find it by writing about it--indirectly. This indirection

involves, among other things, finding how to write about this lost person,

place or thing in your life.1 One thing I find I lose frequently and have to

retrieve, recreate, find again in a new, a fresh way, a way with hopefully

84 Friedrich Von Schlegel, the Athenaeum Fragments, No. 196.85 Richard Norton Smith, A Review of John F. Stacks' "Scotty: James Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism," Columbia Journalism Review, Nov-Dec 2002.

424

more understanding than when I last passed by, is history, mine and all that

is the world's. I need a narrative, a chronological, base to bring out the truth

of the past; I need silence to contemplate the sources of inspiration and

know- ledge; I need to be able to tell a good story in my poetry for this is

what will give it enduring literary worth. A good story, it seems to me, is

one that's a little too complicated, twisted and circumlocuitous to be easily

encapsulated in a newspaper or television story. Oliver Goldsmith once

said, "the most instructive of all histories, of all stories, would be each man's

honest autobiography."2 That may be true but it depends on just how the

story is told. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Kevin Hart, "Poetica," ABC Radio

National, 2:05-2:45 pm, 3 November 2001; and 2 Mark S. Phillips,

"Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and

the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain," The Journal of the

History of Ideas, Vol.57, No.2, pp.297-316.

Can we have a dialogue

with all that is and would be?

Can we enjoy a special happiness

in the energy of contemplation,

honoured as we are

425

with the two most luminous lights

in either world?

Can we work

with this structure and this Plan

travelling as we do

or staying put in this one place?

Two great tendencies

seem to fill the mind:

mystery and analysis

before the ever-varying splendour

and the embellishment of grace

from age to age.

Ron Price

3 November 2001

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FEVER

426

Price’s attitude to his poetry was not unlike that of Sylvia Plath’s. He saw

himself as an artisan. He was an artisan with an idea. All of his poems

began with an idea, a concept, a something; at worst the beginning of a

poem was what Roger White called a poor connection on a telephone line.

But it was a connection. Sometimes the connection was sharp and clear. He

was happy to flow down whatever river the water was willing to go down, to

make whatever product he could make, as long as it exhausted all his

ingenuity in the process, as long as the water flowed to the sea becoming

part of that great body of life. Sometimes Price’s poetry was confessional,

showed the indictment of immediate experience. Some of his work was

what Robert Lowell once described, in reference to the poetry written in the

last year of Plath’s life, as the autobiography of a fever. Sometimes Price

would disappear into his poem and become one with it. In poetry Price

found his life could defeat the process of easy summary. -Ron Price with

thanks to Stanley Plumly, “What Ceremony of Words,” Ariel Ascending:

Writings About Sylvia Plath, editor, Paul Alexander, Harper & Row, NY,

1985, pp.13-17.

You were always an intruder, then,

in the natural world, self-conscious,

427

uneasy, an unreal relation to the grass,

better to withdraw, you thought,

and did, right out of it into oblivion.1

I’ve earned my place, especially now,

after all these years; there’s a sacredness

here and in the grass; there’s a glory

in this day, the day in which the fragrances

of mercy have been wafted over all things2

and there is the in-dwelling God

to counter the scorn, contempt,

bitterness and cynicism

that fills the space and time

of so many of the spaces

of modern life.

Part of the entire stream, the river of life;

part of a global sanctification,

far from any emotional cul-de-sac,

any bell jar, close to truth’s irrefutable

428

and exciting drama, but far, far

from the Inaccessible, the Unsearchable,

the Incomprehensible: no man can sing

that which he understandeth not.3

I belong here, Sylvia,

in this incredible universe.

I was just getting launched

when you were bowing out;

you’d been trying to bow out since 19534

when I’d just breathed the first words

and the Kingdom of God on earth

had begun in all its glorious unobtrusiveness.

1 Sylvia Plath’s suicide in 1962

2 Baha’u’llah, Tablet of Carmel.

3 Baha’u’llah, Baha’i Prayers, p.121.

4 Plath’s first attempt at suicide was in 1953.

Ron Price

23 February 2000

429

I'd like to think that one day I might have some of the experience that

Thomas Carlyle had back in 1866, as the very outset of a new Revelation

that Carlyle had absolutely no awareness of in the England of his home. In

that year, two months after the death of his wife, he was reading some of her

letters from the year 1857. He said he found in those "dear records a piercing

radiancy of meaning." Carlyle wanted his own letters preserved as a record

of his life so that his record would be "as full as possible."86

Carlyle writes eloquently concerning the value of letters, the careful

preservation of them, the authentic presentation of them and an adequate

elucidation of them by future critics. In this age of speed, of the email, of the

burgeoning of communication in all its forms, I hesitate to wax enthusiastic

about the value of letters. Instead I simply leave them for a future generation

and wait to see what those mysterious dispensations of Providence will

bring. So much of life is waiting. Indeed, as one definition of faith I always

liked put it: faith is the patience to wait.

86 The Collected Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, Vol.1: 1812-1821, Duke UP, Durham North Carolina, 1970, p.xi.

430

For a perspective on this theme of faith I conclude this chapter with a letter

and a poem, one of the few poems I have written thanks to Emily Dickinson

which I feel has been successful. She was a great letter-writer, a great

sufferer and an enigmatic person which, in the end, I think we all are.

ANGELS

The unseen heroism of private suffering surpasses that to be found on any

visible battlefield...the lonely soul’s unnoticed though agonized struggle

with itself....the struggle for higher life within the least believer partakes of

the same basic ingredients as the most heroic....The ordinary self must

respond to the dull pain at the heart of its present existence. -With thanks to

Benjamin Lease and Geoffrey Nash in Emily Dickinson’s Readings of Men

and Books, MacMillan, London, 1990, p.69 and “The Heroic Soul and the

Ordinary Self” Baha’i Studies, Vol.10, p.28 and 25, respectively.

Success is counted sweetest

when life has given all,

even if in bits and pieces

amidst its ever-present call.

431

A nectar goes right into

the marrow of the bone

as if destroying cancer

in the centre of one’s home.

There is an outer victory;

‘tis measured every day,

tho' so frequnetly it's defeat

that faces us when we pray.

Then there is what’s inner;

few can define its charms,

slowly distant strains of triumph

burst free of all alarms.

All those many losses

on all those battlefields

proceed this plumed procession,

a rank of angels heals.

432

Ron Price

29 October 1995

And so, at the end of several thousand letters, at the end of all the battles and

the losses, I anticipate that there will be "a rank of angels" who will, as

'Abdu'l-Baha puts it in so many different ways in His Memorials of the

Faithful, be there as I am "plunged into the ocean of light."87 And there,

"lapped in the waters of grace and forgiveness"88 I shall review my days on

this earthly plane which passed as swiftly as the twinkling of a star. I trust I

will be able to recall that I made my mark at what was a crucial turning point

of a juncture in human history the like of which never came again in the

story of human civilization. Will I be able to recall, at that future time, a

time beyond time in that Undiscovered Country, deeds that have ensured for

me "celestial blessings?"89 Will there be regrets and remorse? Will letters

continue to be written in that place? Who knows!

87 'Abdu'l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, Wilmette, 1970, p.21.88 idem89 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 156.

433

Here is a letter, the penultimate letter to those I worked with in the teaching

profession in Perth sent eighteen months after I left the classroom and at the

start of my fortieth year of pioneering, written from Tasmania where I began

the years of my retirement.

6 Reece Street

George Town

Tasmania 7253

Email Address: pricerc@tas.quik.com.au

8 September 2000

G’day from Tasmania!

It has been nearly a year since I wrote to you folks at the Thornlie Campus

of the SEMC of Tafe but, since I have been thinking recently of the place

where I spent more than ten years teaching, I felt like writing. John Bailey,

now a retired Tafe teacher, writes occasionally, as do several of the Baha’is

and others that Chris and I got to know in Perth. Sometimes we get a phone

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call and, on one occasion, a visit from a student. So we keep in touch in one

way or another. Most emails and letters end, though, within the first few

years after moving from a town or city. Such are the perils of living in two

dozen towns over your adult life. There was, though, one chap I wrote to for

a dozen years from 1980 to 1992 and we never even met. He was a poet

who lived in Israel at the time and passed away in his early sixties, in 1993.

It has been 18 months since teaching my last class in Human Services and

12 months since my wife, Chris, and I moved to George Town in Tasmania.

Time flies! I’m glad I pulled the plug when I did at the ripe old age of fifty-

five. The time was right for me. It felt right in leaving and the first 18

months have confirmed that was the right decision. Twenty-nine years in

the game was enough for me. Centrelink and the several private

employment providers don’t put any significant pressure on you here in

northern Tasmania, a region of high unemployment. The concept of ‘mutual

obligation’ has not resulted in me taking on any jobs I don’t want. I have a

Web Page which is considered ‘an embryonic business’ by Centrelink; I also

work for a home tutoring organization in Victoria and am the President of

the George Town School for Seniors. The total time per month, in recent

months, on all of these ‘exercises’ together is about two to three hours. Of

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course, in addition to the above, I must apply for 3 jobs/fortnight and that

takes, roughly, two hours a week of various forms of paper-schuffling. It is

a pleasing change from the mountains of marking and endless talking and

listening. And while all this is happening in my micro-world, several million

white-collar jobs, from financial services to hardware and software computer

design, will be permanently exported from the developed world to East Asia

and other points in the developing world in the next decade.90 This sort of

polarity, dichotomy, between my private and personal world and the events

across the planet among its six billion people is staggering in its complexity.

this autobiography only dips occasionally into that macro world. To do

otherwise would result in prolixity.

When I left the classroom in early April last year I was really emotionally

worn-out, in ‘emotional labour,’ I think was the term I came across on a

Four Corners program about Call Centres I saw a few weeks ago. It was not

just a fatigue with teaching but, it would appear in retrospect, a fatigue with

a range of other social obligations I was involved with in Perth. Wall-to-

wall talking and listening. Now, after 18 months, I have just enough social

90 Engardio, Pete, Bernstein, Aaron and Kripalani, Manjeet, The New Global Job Shift, Business Week Online, February 3, 2003. Available online at: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_05/b3818001.htm

436

contact to satisfy my needs for sociability and enough time in solitude to

cater to that other side of me. I have a weekly radio program on the local

community radio station which I run for the Baha’is of Launceston; and

there are activities in the Baha’i community in Tasmania to keep me in touch

with humanity and prevent me from becoming the total hermit which part of

my personality seems to need at the moment. I write lots of poetry and

prose, read lots of books, walk 45 minutes every day and argue more with

my wife, who has been going through meno- pause and giving me the

biggest challenge of my early time of retirement.

George Town is a town of about 8000 people. I look out my lounge room

window (the whole wall is window) and can see the Tamar River, the Bass

Strait and the Asbestos Mtns(soon to be renamed). Winter temperatures go

down to zero to five at the low end and ten to fifteen in the day. Things are

warming up now in the early days of spring, but won’t get to the high

temperatures of Perth, perhaps thirty degrees once or twice during the whole

summer. We are half an hour from Launceston and other critical points on

the Tamar River where my wife’s family lives. My family, consisting now

only of cousins and their children in Canada, might as well be on another

planet. One perfunctory letter a year is the only contact left now. Moving

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many thousands of miles from home, after thirty years, tends to limit

intimacy in most cases. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, only to a

point, I guess.

I do not miss teaching, although I enjoyed it immensely for most of the time

I was in Perth. I get my kicks from writing and reading, a lot of little things,

and the slower pace of life. I think one needs to get some

intellectual/psychological/emotional substitute for whatever one gets from

the teaching profession, if one is not to hanker after it when it’s gone. Of

course, we are all different and must work out our own game plan, so to

speak.

I have been thinking of Thornlie Tafe, where I spent ten pretty intense years,

in the last week or so when I’ve been out for my walks in the bush near my

home here in George Town, and so I decided to write. If any of you feel like

writing do so; I’d love to hear from you. But I know you are all busy and

getting in gear for the last term of another year. After living in so many

towns since I left my home town in 1962, I find the places I have lived in

become a little like chapters in a book, slices of memory.

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Time moves us all on, whether peripatetic creatures like myself or more

sedentary types who live and die in the same city. I have happy memories of

Thornlie from 1989 to 1999; one leaves a little of oneself wherever one

dwells. And so I write this letter.

I wish you all well in your own careers and in your personal lives. May you

all be survivors and, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, if you can’t find much

happiness perhaps you can settle for measures of pleasure that you can tease

out of existence. I will enclose 3 or 4 poems to that end.

Cheers!

Ron Price

encl.: poems(4)

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

I will not include those poems here, but I will quote the prolific letter writer

Anais Nin who said that "the living moment is caught and in catching this

moment, by accumulation and by accretion, a personality emerges in all its

ambivalences, contradictions and paradoxes--in its most living form."91

Some of me the reader will find here in this chapter. If readers want any

more of the personas they have found here, they are advised to go to my

91 Anais Nin, The Personal Life Deeply Lived, p.157.

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collections of letters.92 And there they will find the dispersed and isolated

facts of my life and some of continuity's threads. But there is much in my

life that is not in my letters. My childhood, adolescence and, indeed, much

of my adulthood is just not there, for there are no letters for long periods of

my life. Readers are best advised to go to films of the period, the print and

electronic media and books from the last half of the twentieth century. These

letters and my life provide only a small window. Although much of the

electronic media is bubble and froth, light and noise and, although its

mindlessness may be having a negative affect on western civilization, there

is much there that can supplement rather than supplant the civilization of the

book and fill in a picture of society and life that my letters, no matter how

comprehensive and exhausting, simply can not describe.

In the foreword to a collection of the letters of poet Robert Frost, Louis

Untermeyer wrote that Frost's letters provided a "portrait of a man and his

mind"93 and "a gradually unfolding and ungarded autobiography." The same

could be said of the collection of my own letters and the thousands of pages

found therein. There are vivid pictures of character and personality and

92 These letters are, for the most part, unpublished, although a comment on them is found on my webpage at section 9.93 Louis Untermeyer, The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, Jonathan Cape, London, 1964, p.vi.

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glimpses into life, art and the meaning of the Baha'i experience over several

epochs found in these letters. But whether a future reader can find me in my

art, my letters, is questionable. Freud did not think it was possible and an

able novelist like Henry James challenged his future biographers to find him

in his art, his novels and his letters and in his many moods.

As epoch followed epoch, first the third, then the fourth and finally the fifth,

as this autobiography finally found its form, western culture became

increasingly complex, although there were strong currents of conformity,

perhaps as there always had been and as there always would be for the social

animal who was man. I like to think, although it is difficult for me to

measure, that there was a gradual evolution in my personal letter writing

style, evidence of a search for delicacies of feeling and the intricacies and

subtleties of human beings in community. This was true of the letters of

Henry James, wrote Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James.94 I find it

difficult to discern the quality of my own letters but, as the outward battle of

life lost its fire and its heat by the turn of the millennium, the interior world

felt vivified and redeemed. The former enthusiastic temper of espousal that I

poured into people and relationships with that “rapturousness of life” that

94 Leon Edel, editor, Henry James Letters, Vol. 1: 1843-1875, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass., 1974, p.xxxiii.

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James writes about, I came to pour into the intellectual side of life by the

year 2000.

Some biographers and autobiographers regard a judicious selection of letters

as the most useful and succinct aid to their task that there is.95 I'm not sure if

that is the case, although it may be true for some people. Benjamin

Franklin, for example, lived much more than he had time to write "the story

that he was perpetually telling."96 This is not to say that he did not

accomplish much of his mission in life without using persistent, practical

prose as his primary tool.97 As he once said: “If you would not be forgotten,

as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do

things worth the writing."98

It seems to me quite impossible to write all of life, certainly all of mine, into

the shape and form of a series of letters, no matter how numerous. The

electronic age has made our communications more audible and therefore, in

95 Jerome H. Buckley, "Newman's Autobiography," Newman After a Hundred Years, Ian Kerr and Alan Hill, editors, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990, p.98.96 Carl Van Doren, editor, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiographical Writings, Viking Press, NY, 1945(1868), p.vi.97 H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, Doubleday, 2000. 98 idem

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some ways, more ephemeral and so I must confess to some skepticism

regarding the future of my letters or, indeed, the future of the vast majority

of letters that have been written in this new age of the print and electronic

media that has emerged in the first century of the Formative Age.(1921-

2021). At the same time, I am forced to admit that I have just lived through

"one of the most enriching periods"99 in the history of the Baha'i Faith and

who knows, who can measure and define, the nature and extent of one's

achievements? We into whose hands, as Shoghi Effendi once wrote, "so

precious a heritage has been entrusted"100 have helped in our own small ways

to advance the Cause toward its high destiny in this the greatest drama in the

world's spiritual history.

And the humble letter may just endure. For this Cause is, indeed, one

constructed around the letter, a veritable treasure-house of correspondence.

No other religion, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani notes, "has placed so subtle and

significant a value on this method of exchange."101 And so I live in hope!

99 The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, 2001, p.99.100 Shoghi Effendi, "Epilogue," Dawnbreakers, p.667.101 Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, Asking Questions: A Challenge to Fundamentalism, George Ronald, Oxford, 1990, p.6.

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The life I have lived, and expressed as it is in the letters I have written, has

made this art of writing possible. The boundaries within which I write I have

set out in these letters. The energies out of which I write find their source in

my religion and my experience in late middle age and these energies enable

me to work hard at this literary craft. The passion to write or erotic passion

seems to come unbidden although there are often specific stimuli to arouse

the energies in both of these domains. The structures within which the

poetic, the literary, flashes are put are, I hope, intellectually interesting. I

have worked over the years to make it more distinctive. But I know from my

many years as a teacher that appreciation of distinctiveness is entirely in the

mind of the beholder, the reader.

The political action of ordinary people in relation to the transformation of

the cultural and political landscape of Europe since the Reformation in 1517

has become a serious object of historical study. This historical study is

recent. In the years since I have been pioneering, that is since 1962, ordinary

people have come to occupy a much more central place in history’s story.

Such study naturally takes issue with previous scholarly interpretations

relying as they did on elite-centred accounts of the big changes of the last

five hundred years. This emphasis on ordinary people explicitly undermines

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these elite-centered accounts of both the Reformation and the consolidation

of the peculiarly European system of states. It also brings into question the

explanation of other developments and changes in western society in the last

five centuries. In a far more constructive sense, however, these more recent

studies of the role of ordinary human beings have broken the exclusive

claims of rulers and the ruling class to political and cultural sovereignty. The

ordinary citizen, by boldly entering political arenas that had been legally

closed to them, helped to shape the cultural and political landscape of

modern Europe.102 In the last forty years this fact has been at last

recognized.

I mention the ordinary man, in closing this section on letters, because

underpinning this autobiography is the view that ordinary people doing

ordinary things within the context of the Baha'i community can and do play

an important part in contemporary history, unbeknownst to the majority of

humankind. Letter-writing is just part of this ordinariness; indeed,

ordinariness is enshrined in the letter making published collections of letters,

for the most part, tedious reding to contemporary readers. This essay does

not try to resurrect the letter from its insignificant place in the lives of

102 Wayne to Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics

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pioneers around the world. That would require a much greater force than this

simple essay. But, it seems to me, I have provided a context for the 3000

letters and what are now hundreds of emails and 'postings' on the internet.103

I have written which, it is my considered opinion, will remain in the dust-bin

of history unread by the great majority of humankind. Given the burgeoning

quantity of print human beings are and will be faced with in their lives I

think that conclusion is reasonable. Time, of course, will tell.

______________________________________________

Appendix 1 To Volume 1 Chapter 3

I wrote the following little bit of prose which I have entitled "Wee-Wisdoms

and Funnies: A Sub-Genre of the Email Industry" due to the many emails

I've received of this type. My guess is about 5% of all emails from 1991 to

2005. This 14 year period from the onset of emails in 1991 to their present

dominance of my correspondence contained a sub-genre of emails that I felt

requried a more extended analysis than I had yet given it, a more detailed

reply to the individuals whose form of communication was characterized by

103 There are now some three to four dozen forums, discussion sites, Baha'i and other at which I regularly put poetry and prose. Although these are not letters, as such, they function somewhat like letters.

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the use of this sub-genre. This essay deserves a place in this chapter on

letters in my autobiography. I hope you enjoy the read.

To: All senders of 'Wee-wisdoms and Funnies'

I hope you enjoy this little piece of gentle satire, analysis and comment. It

will serve as a more detailed response to the many emails I have received

over recent months and years, for some email correspondents, more than a

decade. When you are not teaching sociology and the several social

sciences, as I have been doing for so many years; when you are not having

your mind kept busy by a hundred students a week, other things come into

the gap: like responding to emails. Emails need to be given some sort of

analysis-at least the genre I am concerned with here, given their increasing

frequency as a form of communication. This piece is probably a little too

long at least from the perspective of the general orthodoxy of email

communication. Perhaps you could see this as one of the long articles on the

internet that you need to copy for future reading, rather than one of those

'quick-hit-emails' you receive as part of your daily quota. Then, with this

framework in mind, perhaps, your emotional equipment will be able to make

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a positive adjustment to the lengthy, some might say verbose, piece of

communication that this is.

Dr. Funwisdum, the editor mentioned in the following paragraph, in the end,

rejected this contribution to his book, but encouraged me to try for his next

collection so impressed was he with the quality of the short essay which

follows. I trust you enjoy it, too, even if it is a little longer than my normal

missives and those you usually receive and even if it is a little too critical of

the genre it is concerned with. If you don't enjoy it, I'm sure you will at least

tolerate its presence. For we must all, in and out of the world of emails,

increasingly learn to tolerate each other's eccentricities, thus making the

world an easier place to live in.

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

WEE-WISDOMS & FUNNIES:

A SUB-GENRE OF THE EMAIL INDUSTRY

Ron Price, "Wee-Wisdoms and Funnies: A Sub-Genre of the Email

Industry," in Human Communication in the Twenty-First Century, editor,

Harry Funwisdum, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 45-63.

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The following is a digest of Price's twenty-one pages that did NOT make it

into Dr. Funwisdum's new book. Price is a prolific writer and, although he is

neither famous nor rich, he churns out some provocative stuff from his

word-factory near the mouth of the Tamar River, at Port Dalrymple, in

northern Tasmania.

EXTENDED ABSTRACT OF ESSAY

FOR INTERNET SITES AND READERS (BELOW)

I receive many 'funnies,' funnies in the form of words or images, and 'words-

of-wisdom,' which take many forms, week after week and have for nearly a

decade and a half now. I receive them from a small coterie of people and I

thought I would try to respond more befittingly than I normally do with my

perfunctory and usually brief set of phrases and sentences. I try to respond

to all direct communications of this style, although since about 1995 there

has been an increasing amount of what is often called junk mail which

required no response. I have also joined several hundred sites which post

my poetry and essays and this entails receiving about 300 emails per day

most of which requires no response--for to respond would leave me with no

time for anything else in life.

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What you find below is a more reflective piece that sets all these wisdoms

and funnies I receive from an assortment of individuals in some perspective,

a perspective that derives in large measure from my years as a

teacher/lecturer and from well-nigh half a century now of imbibing funnies

and wisdoms from a multitude of sources. It is probably these years as a

teacher that have resulted in my habit, engrained after all these years, of

responding, if I can and if it is necessary, to any and all incoming

mail/email. I enjoyed teaching but, as the years approached thirty-in-the-

game, I got tired of much of what was involved in the process. Some of the

emails and letters I receive now are somewhat like pieces of work I used to

have to mark. Like making comments on the work of students, I think it

important to respond to such emails and letters with courtesy and with

honesty. This is not always easy for courtesy and honesty do not sit easily

together, especially if the content of the received material is neither funny

nor edifying, as is the case with so much of the material I receive. Emily

Dickinson once wrote: “What a Hazard a Letter is! When I think of the

Hearts it has scuttled and sunk, I almost fear to lift my Hand to so much as a

Superscription.”104

104 Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 Volumes, editors: Thomas Johnson and Theodore Ward, Belknap Press of Harvard UP,

450

It has been ten years(1995-2005) since the email became part of my daily

life, after a several year warm up in the early 1990s(1990-1995) while I was

a Tafe teacher. This short think-piece is a reflection on an aspect of the email

industry as well as a celebration of the many advantages of reading the

products of this wonderful, although not always rewarding or intellectually

engaging, mechanism of technology. I think I write this for me more than I

do for others, since the thrust of so much of this sub-genre of email

communication does not, for the most part, require any reflection, or at least

a minimum of reflection. I really wanted to have a think about an aspect of

this industry that has engaged my attention for some of these last ten years.

Quick hits as so many emails are, like jokes themselves-"affections arising

from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing," as

the philosopher Emmanuel Kant once defined laughter, on occasion stir the

mind. Perhaps, they are a sign of "a mind lively and at ease,” as Emma once

said in Jane Austin's book by the same name. These quick hits require quick

responses, if any at all. Many of the emails--both the funnies and the wee-

wisdoms--are funny or wise and sometimes both. But given their frequency

over a decade now, I felt like making some 'statement' about them.

Cambridge, 1958.

451

Is this humour and wisdom? Or is it the trivialization of the human battle, as

the literary critic Susan Langer once defined so much of the output of the

electronic media factories? I hope you don't find this little 'think-piece' too

heavy, too much thinking, too long without the quick-natural-lift, message

or laugh that is part of a particular sub-genre of emails these days. In the end

you may see me as too critical but, as I used to say to my students, that is the

risk you take when you open your mouth or write.

GETTING TO THE POINT

CARRY ON GANG

In a more general sense, I have been giving and receiving various forms of

advice/wisdom for some 50 years now, 2002 back to 1952 when my mother

began to read passages each morning to me from The Daily Word, a

publication of the Unity School of Christian Thought with its world centre in

Madison Wisconson, if I recall correctly after all these years; and Baha'i

prayers from a religion that had been in Canada then for a little more than

fifty years. Life began to assume a more serious aspect in the years of my

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late childhood and, then, in my teens: school, sport, girls and entertainment

found some competition in life's round of activities from the more earnest

side of life. First as a student imbibing wisdom from the several founts of

knowledge I was then exposed to or that I investigated as a youth(which I

have always defined as those in their teens and twenties); and then as a

teacher/lecturer in the social sciences(including human relations,

interpersonal skills, conflict resolution, negotiation skills, working in teams,

a list of subjects as long as your proverbial arm)I received and dispensed

advice and wisdoms in a multitude of forms. I was clearly into the advice

and wisdom business right from the dawn of my life. It was part of the very

air I breathed.

I'm sure even in those years of unconsciousness, in utero and in early

childhood, I had my very earliest experiences of wee wisdoms, although

funnies were in short supply during the war and shortly thereafter, at least in

my consanguinial family. My mother was one of those seekers, always

willing to try on a new idea if it came into town. And now, twenty-five years

after her passing, I have a small books of the wee wisdoms she collected in

those embryonic years. I should by now be a fount of unusually

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perspicacious aphorisms from the wisdom literature of history, or at the very

least run 'wisdom workshops' for the lean and hungry.

The funnies department was never as extensive or successful as the wee-

wisdom section. Right from my first exposure to jokes about: Newfees,

Polocks and the Irish or the genitals of males and females, I generally found

much of the humour distasteful back in my late chilhood and adolesence.

Although I must confess that thirty years of living in Australia has taught me

a rich appreciation of the funny side of life probably due to the humour that

lurks below the surface of so much of Australian culture or inevitably

bubbles to the surface in this essentially pleasure-loving people. Here

humour is compulsory. By now,I should have an accummulation of jokes-

and-funnies to keep everyone laughing in perpetuity.

But instead I feel a little like the marriage guidance counsellor who has been

married six times. He has never been able to pull-it-off, marriage that is, but

he has had a lot of experience trying. For some fifteen years, during that part

of my educative process as a teacher--and educative it was--I used to give

out "a summary of the wisdom of the ages" on several sheets of A-4 paper to

the approximately one hundred students I had every term or semester.

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Thousands of intending 'students of leisure and life' and I went through the

material to see if we could come up with the 'wisest of the wise' stuff,

practical goodies for the market-place and the inner man/woman. For the

most part I enjoyed the process. Giving and receiving advice was a buzz,

particularly when it was sugar-coated with humour. Advice-giving can be a

tedious activity and the advice can act as a weight even if it is good advice,

unless the context is right. Humour often makes it so.

Now that I approach the evening of my life, the wee-wisdoms and the

funnies continue to float in, unavoidably, inevitably. From emails and the

internet,among other sources, material is obtained from by my interlocators

from:

(i) the wisdom literature of the great historical religions;

(ii) the wisdom of the philosophical traditions(outside religion); and

(iii) the wisdom of popular psychology and the social sciences(usually from

the fields of (a) human relations, (b) interpersonal skills, (c) pop-psychology,

(d) management and organizational behaviour and (e) endless funnies and

wee-wisdoms from known and unknown word factories.

455

The social sciences, the disciplines in which so much of the wisdom

literarture I receive is now located--the social sciences are either old like

history, philosophy and religion, or young like economics, psychology,

sociology, anthropology, human relations, etc.. Unlike some of the other

academic fields, say the biological and physical sciences, all these social

sciences are inexact, highly subjective and infinitely more complex than the

physical and biological sciences. Everybody and their dog can play at

dispensing their wisdoms, with the dogs sometimes providing the best

advice in the form of close friendships, at least for some people with canine

proclivities. Unlike the physical and biological sciences,too,knowledge and

experience is not required. Anyone can play the game. Often the untutored

and apparently ignorant and those who have read nothing at all in the field,

can offer humble wisdoms and funnies which excel the most learned, with or

without their PhDs. So be warned: it's a mine field, this advice and wisdom

business.

The result for many practitioners who would really like to be both wise and

entertaining is the experience of a field that resembles a mud-pie, poorly

constructed and not of much use to humanity, although lots of laughs are had

and wisdom gets distributed liberally. The industry, the word factories, pour

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out their wisdoms and their humour with greater frequency with every

passing day.

I felt like having a little think about this sub-genre of emails at this ten year

mark and this half-way point(if I live to be 108!) in what you might call my

wisdom/advice-lifeline, as I, and you, continue to imbibe the endless supply

of resources available from the endless supply of word factories. I hope the

satire here is gentle and does not bite too hard or at all. Canadians are on the

whole nice people who try to perform their operations on their patients in

such a way that they leave the hospital without the suspicion they have even

been operated on at all, but with the new glands, new body parts, fully

installed for daily use. Like the pick-pocket and the burglar, I want to get in

there and out without alerting anyone to my work. The New Testament calls

it--or so one could argue--the act of: 'The Thief in the Night.' But, again, this

is a prophecy capable of many interpretations, as all prophecies are.

I send this your way in response to the many emails I've received in this sub-

genre in recent months/years. There are, perhaps, a dozen people now who

are 'into this sub-genre' and who send me this special type of material in the

course of a year, some with a zeal bordering on the religious. This dozen

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sends me many delightful pieces, more it seems as the years go by, including

photos, images, attachments of various kinds and colours, to embellish the

content of the wisdom and humour.

I feel, after so many years of giving it out as a teacher, it is only fair that I

now receive it all as graciously as mine was accepted by my students over

those many years. Like my in-class jokes, some of the material I receive is

funny, some not-so-funny; some is wise, some not-so-wise. But, then, you

can't win them all. Both wisdom and humour are irrepressible. So, carry on

gang.

George Bernard Shaw used to say that "I can no more write what people

want than I can play the fiddle." So he wrote what he thought his readers

needed. What people need and what they want are usually not the same.

Many found George presumptuous. I hope what you find here is not in the

same category as Shaw's, presumptuous that is. I hope, too, that this

somewhat lengthy read has been worth your while. If not, well, you now

have:

.....ten choices regarding what to do next:

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(i) delete it;

(ii) print and save for pondering because it's wise, clever and something

quite personal from the sender;

(iii) read it again now, then delete it;

(iv) save the very good bits and delete the rest;

(v) none of these;

(vi) all of these, if that is possible;

(vii) write your own think-piece on this sub-genre of emails;

(viii) send me a copy of your 'writing on this sub-genre of emails' for(a) my

evaluation(1)or (b) my pleasure;

(ix) don't send your evaluation to me; and

(x) don't think about what I've written; just dismiss it as the meanderings of

a man moving speedily toward his last years of middle adulthood(the 40 to

60 block).

And, if time permits from your busy life, and

(1) using(a) the scale: A+(91-100), A(81-90) and A-(75-80); B+(71-

74),B(68-70) and B-(65-67); C+(60-64, C(55-59) and C-(50-54); D(25-49

459

hold and try again) and E(0-24 attend a workshop on 'wisdoms and funnies');

or the feedback form often called (b) anecdotal--give my think-piece a rating

and forward it to Dr. Funwisdom.

I remain yours

___________________________________

The following prose-poems involve the letters of others and my own. They

will extend the remarks I have made above about my letters and place my

letters and my autobiography in a helpful context.

STRANDS OF MANY-COLOURED GLASS

Virginia Woolf was never confident for long about who she was. She was

frightened that the centre of her personality would not hold. The protean

nature of her personality caused her to be lured by the vast elements of

nature, earth, sky and sea, which would protect her. She was a spider; her

letters were her web. The whole composition, her collected letters, was spun

in a hall of mirrors. It took a certain courage for her to enter that hall which

might be filled with terror, with a nightmare, a funhouse of distortions, all

part of her manic-depressive episodes. Many strands of her identity were

460

attached to her many friends through letter. The “horrid, dull, scrappy,

scratchy letters” she said were those letters we write only to those for whom

we possess “real affection.” In writing letters you have to put on an unreal

personality, except to those who are your intimate loved ones, Woolf argued.

When we say we know someone it is our version of them, a version which is

an emanation of ourself. Friends, defined in letters, were therefore part of

her fragile stability. -1Virginia Woolf in Congenial Spirits: The Letters of

Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press, London, 1989, p.xii.

We inhabit a selfhood in our letters

and reach out, condensing life and,

therefore, falsifying it, becoming more

or less than what we are, as you did

before you gave yourself to the waters1.

I am a many-coloured thing

in my letters, something both

real and unreal in that many

coloured glass of eternity,

no hall of mirrors, nightmare,

461

no funhouse of distortions.

I had them all long ago;2 now

in a web of many strands emanating

from those writers of letters

who have filled my life

with their epistolary delights.3

Ron Price

21 May 1999

1 Virginia Woolf committed suicide by drowning in 1941.

2 With the gradual use of lithium as a medication for those with the bi-polar

tendency in the late 1960s and 1970s, the distortions in that ‘hall of mirros’

which Woolf experienced became ancient history for most manic-

depressives.

3 Letters play a very significant part in the edification and the guidance of

the believers.

Ron Price

21 May 1999

462

______________________

AT SPEED AND IN THE DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN

This poetry is by one of those who, were it not for his writing, would

probably be left out of history, one of the seventy to ninety percent of the

population who are neither rich, nor influential, not one of the major players

on the stage, not famous as a writer or artist, just one of the many threads in

the warp and weft that make up the Baha’i community, who strove within

the limits of his incapacity while he was alive to spread the Baha’i teachings

among his contemporaries and to be an example of its teachings.

This document, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, in its many genres, may be

useful in reconstructing the lives of the people of this age, the last three

quarters of the first century of the Formative Age. There has been,

throughout history, an inarticulateness on the part of the many that usually

results from a shortage of community records, an inability to write, a lack of

interest in leaving any record, a view that history is made by people in or

with power, a perception that one’s life is unimportant, insignificant.

463

This lack of records is clearly being remedied in our ‘paper age’, this ‘age of

analysis’ with seemingly endless correspondence, computers, cassette and

video tape. But the task of recreating our present age and how it felt to live

in these times to those living in them may not be as easy to achieve as one

might think. Individual statements, autobiographies, especially from the

ordinary believer who lacks fame, rank, status or wealth are not among the

sort of books that publishers seriously entertain for their markets. So, there

is little payoff, so to speak, in putting your story down on paper, if you are

one of the ordinary ‘blokes.’ Whatever is written of this nature seems to

achieve its usefulness decades, if not centuries, later, when the history of the

period in question is written.

Future historians must construct the pattern of our time through selection,

suggestion and implication. Often the further historians get away from the

period about which they are writing, the better they will be able to write

about it. I trust what historians and sociologists find here will be of some

use, especially the letters which this section of my autobiography is

especially concerned with. -Ron Price with thanks to J.F.C. Harrison, The

Common People: A History from the Norman Conquest to the Present,

Flamingo Paperbacks, London, 1984, Introduction.

464

Seeing how long it has taken

for the writings, diaries, letters,

poetry and historical records of

our first century to get published,

I bequeath this my magnum opus

to posterity, testifying as I do to

the complexity of the task for an

ordinary believer, an international

and homefront pioneer in the 2nd,

3rd and 4th epochs, to recount in

some meaningful way the endless

flux of events that make up his Baha’i

experience and that of his fellows over

four decades, or more in this century.

It seems, as I look back over all these years

in the field, like I have spun a thin tissue, a

web, across two continents, from pole to pole,

in this darkness before the dawn, by some

465

instinctual force, some feeling, with the mind

on all-ahead-full, but always running, a new

rung every second, making one of a thousand

designs: the funnel, orb, dome, bowl, tub or purse.1

Using the same principles and materials,

forms that will evolve over generations

perhaps millennia or more. And here I am

right at the start, in the first quarter-century

in nearly all the communities I have lived.2

Ron Price

10 May 1999

1 Guy Murchie describes the variety of webs spiders seave at speed “in the

darkness before the dawn.”(Seven Mysteries of Life, p.250.)

2 Except Toronto Ontario, where I lived for a few months in 1969 and which

had had a Baha’i community for more than half a century, all the other

communities I worked in, about two dozen, were in their first twenty-five

years of their Baha’i experience, as far as I know.

________________

466

THE LEAST REMNANT

Dostoevski, as far back as 1845, was the impressionable literary lion of

cultivated Petersburg society and the recipient of flattering adulation from

all sides. It succeeded in turning his head and opening the floodgates of a

boundless vanity. His letters are filled with a manic exhuberance and self-

glorification. They exhibit an unbridled conceit and a dangerous lack of

self-control. He said he felt drunk with his own glory. He was irritable and

hauty in tone with obvious feelings of superiority in conversation.

Price did not receive any significant flattering adulation until the age of

twenty-nine, in 1973. He was to receive great buckets of praise and

compliments off and on, mostly on, for the next quarter of a century as a

teacher and lecturer in South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, the Northern

Territory and Western Australia. Of course, the praise and adulation took

place, just about entirely, in classrooms. The result was not so much the

opening of floodgates of a boundless vanity, as the opening up of feelings of

success in the teaching enterprise which had occupied him in various ways

since 1962 as a pioneer. He was not drunk with his own glory, a difficult

thing to do anyway in a country like Australia where self-glorificaiton was

467

culturally anathama; but he often felt drunk with meaning, filled to

overflowing with the significance of things. This was why, for most of the

last twenty-five years, Price had ten or more books on the go and often as

many as twenty-five. He had a passion to know and understand through

certain kinds of print. But, again and for the most part, he received no

brownie points for his enthusiasm and activity.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over

Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1999.

The least remnant

of vanity and envy,

yes, perhaps a remnant

here and there

in some seductive,

insinuating form,

inevitable really

given the occasional

sheer torture of existence,

the human fragility

and the amount of energy

poured into the Work

468

day after day,

year after year,

decade after decade:

for this was serious business,

the dominant passion

of his life.

Ron Price

29 September 1999

_______________________________

VORTICES

John Press writes that “The origin of most poems worthy of the name will be

either in an image or in a rhythm rather than in a concept, a thought, or a

feeling.” It would seem that John Keats’ experience was the opposite.

“Keats’ writing” says Gittings “is an almost instant transmutation of

impressions, thoughts, reading and ideas into poetry….the poems are far

from being a poetic diary of his life. They enrich the original impulse with a

complete thought of their own. He regarded most of his day-to-day reading

as ‘study’ for poetry. Some of his poetry was a record of his own poetic

469

nature….writing frankly about himself and about his poetry.” By the early

years of the new millennium most of my reading was, in fact, study for

poetry and, like Keats, it was a record of my poetic nature, a narrative about

myself and about my poetry -John Press, The Fire and the Fountain, Barnes

and Noble Inc., Boston, p.166 and Robert Gittings, Selected Poems and

Letters of John Keats, Heinemann Books Ltd. London, 1981(1966), pp.8-11.

I think I’m about fifty-fifty;

I’m taking some very ordinary feelings

and putting them into poems;

taking sinewy reason and

obscure states of being

concealed inside

and putting them into poems;

taking what are often flat, banal

utterances in calm, neutral tones;

what are sometimes sense experiences

of remarkable acuteness and

writing about them with poignancy.

I’m taking intellectual and emotional

470

complexes, vortices and clusters of ideas

and endowing them with energy, with words.

Ron Price

28 August 1999

______________________________________

A DATA BASE

Beginning in 1937 in the U.K. a project known as Mass Observation has

continued to provide a data base, an archive, information about the opinions

and experiences of the average Briton. Hundreds of people, mostly women,

kept diaries of their observations on subjects initially required by the

government for the war effort. The project was discontinued in the early

1950s and started again in 1981 at the University of Sussex. There now

exists at this university an archive of hundreds, thousands, of pages of

detailed observations by alert, intelligent people telling some of the story of

the daily experiences of ordinary people in Britain in the twentieth century.

-Ron Price with thanks to LNL Radio, 10:40-11:00 pm, 21 September

2000.

471

Beginning in 1937 in the Baha’i community a project known as the Seven

Year Plan, based on the initial outline in the Tablets of the Divine Plan, has

continued under many different names. Hundreds of people, many thousands

now, moved to different parts of the world to establish, to extend, to teach,

the Baha’i Faith. Many hundreds of these people kept diaries and collections

of letters, wrote autobiographies and poetry to convey the stories, the

experiences of their lives. An archive now exists, spread out over dozens of

places around the globe, which will one day provide a useful base, resource,

for future historians wanting to write a history of the first four epochs of the

Formative Age. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 21 September

2000.

_______________

AN ARCHITECT OF A MANSION

Many writers and poets are only too aware of the potentially disruptive

powers and propensities of the mind. They need, they demand, to be

disciplined. Much of my poetic style, I select, for this reason among others.

My evolving literary manner, my prayers, my letters and my actions do not

reflect the activity and turbulence of my mind. The writing creates an

orderly surface, disguising the inner turbulence and inner generation.

472

Writing for me is a place of self-effacement, of relief, of imaginative and

moral insight, a place for the comments of a man matured by years of

various torments, weaknesses vand failures, even if this may not seem to be

the case to readers! For time and education beget experience; experience

begets memory and memory begets judgement and fancy; judgement begets

the strength and structure and fancy begets the ornament of my many poems.

Rhyme keeps the fancy under control and, since my poetry has little rhyme,

judgement is freer to wander on its course, finding similarities and

distinctions and giving expression to my theme. -Ron Price with thanks to

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London,

1995, p.253.

The mansion of my days,

over these three long epochs

does not possess tidy,

well-proportioned rooms

but a mix of the familiar

and the topsy-turvey

and a carving, an etching,

of a grand inheritance

473

into social, civic and public form,

part of the earliest shaping,

the defining of a sensibility

in the complex whirlwind,

a tempest that threatened

and is still, today, to tear

us all apart, even unto the

remotest parts of the world.

Ron Price

29 October 2000

__________________________

BEGINNINGS

Vincent van Gogh wrote that “in the late spring the landscape of Arles gets

tones of gold of various tints: green-gold, yellow-gold, pink-gold, and in the

same way bronze, copper, in short starting from citron yellow all the way to

a dull, dark yellow colour like a heap of threshed corn. And this combined

with the blue-from the deepest royal blue of the water to the blue of the

forget-me-nots, cobalt.”1 Van Gogh’s correspondence was unique; no painter

474

has ever taken his readers through the processes of his art so thoroughly, so

modestly, or with such descriptive power. Van Gogh was inventing a

landscape as it invented him; in his incessant letters he catelogued and

categorized his work. Much of his work, especially his work at Arles, was a

rhapsodic outpouring of creative energy. Work and seriousness is the real

image of Van Gogh. It is here that the critic could see the beginnings of

modern art.2-Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art

and Artists, Harvill, London, 1990, 1pp. 143-144; and 2p.132.

Ron Price describes the colours of a different landscape in the darkest hours

of declining western civilization and an emerging global civilization; the

colours of the centuries that saw the emergence of both these civilizations;

and the tones and tints that he saw in the emergence of the first truely global

religion. Price describes the colours of his own life from his deepest,

blackest depressions to his golden, his blue, his amethyst and yellow joys;

and the play of these colours, his personal subjectivity, on other sets of

colours he saw reflected in his society, his culture, his religion and his

world. Everyone tells their story in a different way. Here is a story, taken

over four epochs: 1944 to 2006; here is a religion. Price provides his readers

with a thorough account of the processes by which he works. The detail is

475

descriptive; the tone, he likes to think, is modest. There is work, seriousness,

rhapsody here in Price’s poetry and another beginning: several decades of

emergence from obscurity of the newest of the world’s religions. He uses

letters like van Gogh; he also uses other genres, and readers are advised to

wait for his demise so that they can read them in full. -Ron Price, Pioneering

Over Four Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 2006.

This is a moral act;

it expresses my whole

sense of being in the world.

Striving for accuracy I must

be indifferent to the errors

of this poetic fecundity,1 for

I am not writing the history

of my age, but telling of the

uniqueness of my time

with an engine for describing

a world in metamorphosis,

with an immediacy that creates It is unlikely that this

poetry,

476

a theatre of characters and events, these letters, essays, diaries,

will find a home of popularity in this world of forms and

familiar and not-so familiar; cultural burgeoning will

find

for a world of divergence, a home—at least not yet.

dissociation of gaze and empathy

induced by the mass media;

in a world of frenetic passivity.

1 Robert Hughes describing August Rodin in Hughes, op.cit., p.132.

Ron Price

15 January 2000

23 June 2006

THE CAULDRON

“Henry Adams’s capacity for friendship,” wrote Lionel Trilling in 1952 in

an essay about this nineteenth century American intellectual, “was one of the

most notable things about him, and it is of course a decisive element of the

greatness of his letters.” Trilling goes on to refer to the nineteenth century

477

as “the great age of friendship” when men had “close, continuing

communication with each other.” Adams was, he asserts, “the last man, or

perhaps the last American, to have had actual friendships.” As a pioneer and

travel teacher, I find the process by which my friendships are created and

endure quite complex to describe.

-Ron Price with thanks to Lionel Trilling, “Adams At Ease,” The Oxford

Book of Essays, editor, John Gross, Oxford UP, NY, 1991, pp.522-523.

This subject is, for this pioneer,

travel-teacher, a complex one;

for one who, for years, found

and still finds it easy to throw

his emotional and creative

energies into relationships,

shared frames of meaning,

reified by means of belief,

interest, simply living in the age.

The messy, fuzzy, contradictory,

inexplicable realities, nonlinear,

478

everchanging, remarkable

geometries of friendships,

regularities of coherence,

exist now across two continents.

That seething cauldron1

of coalescing, diverging,

emerging, reuniting patterns,

with its bewildering, often

unpredictable speed,

where friendships emerge

and come to exist

in the longue duree, life-line

that bridges several epochs,

with social reality in a maze

of mutually created social identities

and my own transformation caught

in a stable and quite unstable mix.

479

1 it only seethes when one analyses it deeply. A surface, day-to-day, casual

glance at all these relationships presents a relative calm cauldron with little

activity going on.

Ron Price

12 December 2000

_____________________________

COMMUNION

J. Hillis Miller, in his analysis of the writings of novelist Joseph Conrad,

informs us

that Conrad saw the habit of profound reflection as, ultimately, pernicious in

its effects because it led to passivity and death, to the dark side of a somber

pessimism and to the view of his own personality as ridiculous and an

aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknowable. -Ron Price with

thanks to J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality, Belknap Press, 1965, pp.33-34.

The desire, as I see it, Mr. Miller,

is to obtain His bounty and tender,

so tender, mercy; to be a recipient

480

of a leaven that will leaven

the world of my being,

furnish it with writing power

and to be given the honour of His nearness.

The dark side of existence, indeed,

my corrupt inclination

is due to my failure

to achieve this communion.

It is a hopelessly appauling process,

Mr. Miller,

quite beyond the profoundest reflection.

1 This poem draws on a prayer of the Bab in Baha’i Prayers, p.151.

Ron Price

20 June 2000

RISING TO REALITY

481

This poem was written while waiting to see the film Mission Impossible II,

playing in Perth at the Greater Union Theatre in Innaloo. It was also playing

in Haifa at one of the six theatres in the city while we were on pilgrimage. I

went with my wife, my son and my step-daughter as the winter solstice was

approaching in the southern hemisphere. It was probably the last movie we

would see in Perth.

-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 20 June 2000.

To devote oneself to writing, however, is to engage in the most unreal action

of all. This was how Joseph Conrad felt, echoing the poet Baudelaire, who

also saw the process as possessing an unreality. Both writers had a sense of

intellectual doubt of the ground on which writing stood. When writing was

difficult, this sense of doubt entered their very arteries and penetrated their

bones. It gave them a feeling of the emptiness, the nothingness of the

writing process. Perhaps this explains who, for many writing letters or

emails feels artificial, unreal, undesireable. -Ron Price with thanks to J.

Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth Century Writers, The Belknap

Press of Harvard UP, Cambridge Mass., 1965, p.36.

I think you’re partly right, Joseph,

482

but the sense of unreality is no more

than in any other activity

when one is tired, depressed,

worn to a frazzle or engaged

in the more unpleasant side of life,

when sadness and despondency

touch our brow. Vanity, emptiness

and the mere semblance of reality

are part of life’s many currents

that make up the river of our days.

And so, Joseph, one must not deny

that the glimmering, superficial

and ephemeral surface of life

we will always have with us,

as we strive to rise above

the words and letters,

the syllables and sounds of His Word

and especially as we watch movies

like the one I am about to watch.

483

Ron Price

20 June 2000

_____________________________

EMBELLISHING AN ARCHIVE

The minutes Price took as LSA secretary, in Whyalla in 1971/2, in Kew in

1975, in Ballarat from 1975 to 1978, in Belmont as various times from 1990

to 1997 as well as some notes, reports and letters he wrote while serving on

the Baha’i Groups and RTCs in places like Zeehan, Katherine, Launceston,

South Hedland and George Town, among others, on a great many aspects of

Baha’i community activities were models of attention to detail, of

articulateness, of tact and appropriateness, at least he thought so. If they had

any weaknesses it might be their signs of haste that had been part of his life

style in general for many years, and evidences of a certain fatigue with the

process of writing administrative material in any form. Such forms of

writing, Price thought, surely do not reveal the ‘real man?’ They reflect part

of him, at the most, a small part. As important as many of these documents

may have been at the time to both Price and the group concerned, Price

could not imagine these pieces in their several topic areas contributing much

484

to general human interest at a future time, although they may have some

value to a future age as part of the various archives in which they finally

rested. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 26 August 2000 to 23

June 2006.

Are there any rare gems amidst

that archival mountain of circularized

memoranda, letters, reports

and seemingly irrelevant piles of paper

in box after box, out by the toilet block,

the shed or the empty back room near

the back door which gets heavy use?

Hour after hour went by in the lives

of the saints, the heros and the ordinary

mortals as they poured over this ambiguous

discourse with history, this deceptive mirror

of reality which often told little of the real

community, life, relationships and sadness.

485

For the most part these are and were, ordinary

humans: no great man theory of history here,

just boxes of stuff rarely looked at, never read:

part of the anarchic confusion in our attitude

to the past. For, always, there is much else to do.

And so I embellish this archive with a poetic narrative

that may live on and gather less dust amidst the rubble

of the fourth and fifth epochs and their grandeur:

when a new garden appeared and transformed

a religion with pretensions to being the chrysalis

church of a new age in the last years of this

incredible twentieth century.

Ron Price

26 August 2000 to

23 June 2006

I want to add this short essay entitled LETTER WRITING: THE PIONEER

& A LONG TRADITION as a sort of addendum to my comments on letter

486

writing, my letter writing and the letter writing of pioneers because it

provides some historical context particularly for me as a person of Welsh

ancestry and it seems particularly relevant to this autobiography. I am

indebted in my writing of this short essay which follows to a Bill Jones and

his article Writing Back: Welsh Emigrants and their Correspondence in the

Nineteenth Century in the North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 5,

No.1, Winter 2005.

Jones points to a remark made by Eric Richards in relation to British and

Irish people who moved to Australia in the nineteenth century that migrants

were “more likely to reflect on their condition and their lives than those who

stayed at home.”105 I’m not sure if pioneers in the Baha’i community did

more reflecting on their condition and lives than those who stayed at home,

but there is no question I did a sizeable amount of reflecting and I

documented a portion of it in my letters and, after about 1995, in my emails.

I am also inclined to think that, as the decades advance and as collections of

the letters and emails of pioneers take form, they will reflect mutatis

mutandis Eric Richards’ comment.

105 Eric Richards, Voices of British and Irish Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Australia, in Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants: A Social History of Migration, editors: Colin G. Pooley and Ian D. White, Routledge, London, 1991, p. 20.

487

As is true of most European peoples whose histories took on an international

dimension as result of nineteenth-century migrations, that emigrant letters

became the largest and arguably the most important source for an insight

into the mentalities, activities and attitudes of ordinary migrants.

Commentators have long emphasised the importance of emigrant letters in

illuminating the human and personal aspects of the experience of

migration.106 The comparison and contrast between emigrant letters and

those of Baha’i pioneers is heuristic.

106 For important discussions on emigrant letters, their strengths and limitations as a historical source and the ways scholars have utilized them, see Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America, University of Miami Press, 1972, pp. 1-31; David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia; David A. Gerber, Correspondence in Twentieth-Century American Scholarship,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 16, No. 4, Summer 1997, pp. 3-34; idem, “Ethnic Identification and the Project of Individual Identity: The Life of Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald,” Immigrants and Minorities, Vol. 17, No. 2, July 1998, pp. 1-22; and idem, “Epistolary Ethics: Personal Correspondence and the Culture of Emigration in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 19, No. 4, Summer 2000, pp. 3-23; Eric Richards, “Annals of the Australian Immigrant,” in Visible Immigrants. Neglected Sources for the Study of Australian Immigration, ed. Eric Richards, Richard Reid, and David Fitzpatrick, ANU, Canberra, 1989, pp. 7-22. My thinking on both 19th century emigrant letters and my own letters has benefited greatly from the insights contained in these studies.

488

Just at the time when the collections of Welsh migrant letters were first

being published in the 1960s, my first letters as a Baha’i pioneer in Canada--

a pioneer with a Welsh ancestry--were being written and collected. A

continuity of little to no significnace to the outside world or even within the

Baha’i community at the time was taking place, a continuity that began in

Wales in the 19th century. Perhaps, in the long run it would be a continuity

with some significance. Time would tell. Alan Conway’s collection,

published in 1961, The Welsh in America: Letters from the Immigrants

appeared just as my own collection was taking in its first letter.107 By the

time H. S. Chapman’s article108 about letters from Welsh migrants “From

Llanfair to Fairhaven,” in Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society

and Field Club and Letters from America: Captain David Evans of

Talsarnau, my own collection of letters were beginning to assume a

substantial body of material for future archivists and historians, writers and

analysts. I belonged to a religion within which the letter had assumed more

than an insignificant proportion and those mysterious dispensations of

107 Alan Conway, editor, The Welsh in America: Letters from the Immigrants, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1961.108 H. S. Chapman, “From Llanfair to Fairhaven,” in Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society and Field Club, pp. 147-57, 1986 and Letters from America: Captain David Evans of Talsarnau, 1817-1895(Aled Eames, Lewis Lloyd, and Bryn Parry, editors), Gwynedd Archives Service, Caernarfon, 1995

489

Providence would determine whether my letters and those of other

international pioneers would take on any significance. As a non-betting man,

I was inclined to the view that one day they would.

This brief analysis can not do justice to the many dimensions that collections

of letters from Baha’i international pioneers embrace, although I hope what I

write here contributes in a small way by conveying something of the

diversity and complexity of the subject. I am only discussing somewhat

impressionistically a few of the functions of the letters of pioneers and the

relationships between them and certain aspects of the process of pioneering.

I also want to discuss certain features of the letters as texts, examine some of

their contexts and subtexts, and try to explain some of the complex ways in

which this correspondence came into existence. My remarks here are

limited, though, for this is a short essay and deals with its subject in a

general and personal way making no attempt to be comprehensive, well-

researched or extensively analysed. I seek to shed light on some of the

experiential aspects of emigrant letter writing over two centuries and pioneer

letter/email writing and receiving in the period: 1971-2021, the period in

which I was myself an international pioneer.

490

A collection of letters like my own are so unlike any of the nineteenth

century collections from European or United Kingdom migrants to the

colonies, the new world, any world outside of the Eurocentric world

migrants had been born in. Their letters, their history, production and

reception, intersected with, contributed to and were shaped by key

contemporaneous developments in that part of the nineteenth century in

which their letters were written. These included the conspicuous increase in

literacy, the emergence of mass print culture and formal state-based

education, the expansion of the postal service and of reading and letter-

writing in general, the social and cultural practices of the time together with

the growth of instructional literature devoted to a range of cultural and

educational pursuits.

In the case of my letters, only a few were written back to my country of

origin and the few that were were not written essentially to explain to

anyone or convince anyone of the value of this new country as a pioneer

destination for them. My letters, for the most part, were produced and

intersected with developments in my country of destination. The affects of

the spread of media technology: TV, coloured TV, DVDs, video and by the

21st century large-screen plasma TVs, the computer; social and political

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developments locally, nationally and internationally; the decline of letter

writing and the increase in the use of the email; the expansion of the Baha’i

community from, say, 200 thousand in 1953 to, say, 800 thousand in 1971

and to nearly six million in 2003, indeed, the list of influences is and has

been endless. This brief statement can not do the subject justice. I leave that

to future writers and students of the subject of letter writing and pioneering

in the Baha’i community.

Numerous scholars have emphasised that the writing and receiving of letters

had a high priority for those emigrants who engaged in correspondence over

100 years ago. Without denying the importance of emigrant letters in any

way, however, we should be careful not to exaggerate and over-romanticise

their significance to all emigrants and to the emigration process in general.

This is equally true of the letters and the emails of pioneers in the last half of

the first century of our Formative Age: 1971-2021. Undoubtedly they have

immense importance as the main, if not the only, practical method of

keeping in touch with relatives, friends and neighbours back in the Old

Country or country of origin. Yet letters and emails also had certain

limitations that undermined their effectiveness in these regards. Not every

emigrant or pioneer wrote letters and emails. The pleasure taken in the act of

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writing was not universal. In the 19th century not everyone could write; in

the last half of the 20th century virtually everyone could write, at least in the

western world, but new influences kept many from writing more than the

perfunctory communication.

Some emigrants in the 19th and pioneers in the 20th wrote only very

occasionally and the number who wrote regularly in both centuries was

perhaps smaller still. The email certainly resulted in an explosion in the

sheer quantity of written communication from pioneers and among the

general population and I am confident that this sheer quantity would one day

be reflected in the letters and emails of pioneers. Further, the importance

attached to the act of writing to people on either side of the Atlantic and/or

the Pacific varied from family to family and changed over time. For so many

families, one of the most intense consequences of emigration was

disintegration or, perhaps the word ephemeralization, is better. The situation

was often created in which connections with family and friends were broken

or they became tenuous at best. There were also other important elements to

the process of maintaining correspondence that could complicate matters and

even restrict the letter’s effectiveness in keeping families together and

keeping friendships alive. If letters were chains that bound distant kith and

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kin and connections with Baha’i communities of origin, they were often

fragile or poor links for many a pioneer. Even when the links were strong,

the letters and emails were often thrown away and became of no use to

future historians.

Pioneer and migrant correspondence was a multi-faceted, complex and

sometimes ambiguous, even contradictory phenomenon. There is no doubt

that the relationship between the letter writing of some emigrants and some

pioneers was characterised more by apathy, neglect and avoidance than by

emotional intensity and deep psychological need. Some people preferred

gardening, watching TV and engaging in any number of a cornucopia of

activities that popular and elite culture had made available in the late

twentieth century. The hobby apparatus of many a leisure time activity

became immense as the 21st century turned its corner. So many people really

did not like to write and when they did they saw its only significance in

personal terms, in terms of their relationship with the person they were

writing to. This was only natural.

Personal preference and circumstances as well as factors far beyond the

control of emigrants/pioneers and their families could limit the effectiveness

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of the letter/email as a means of communication. Yet, for other transnational

families, the letters received in and sent from the country of origin were all

as precious as life itself. Written correspondence was the principal means of

sustaining that transnationality and a future age would collect and analyse

this sustaining force and this often ephemeral reality.

The practice of writing, receiving and responding to letters in the 19 th

century and, say, until what Baha’is called the ninth stage of history

beginning in 1953--to a country of origin from, say, America, Australia,

Canada, New Zealand, Patagonia, South Africa and elsewhere was an

essential element in the process of emigration and pioneering and the lived

experience of emigrants/pioneers. It had a centrality that was lost, though, in

the second half of the twentieth century and the second half of the first

century of the Formative Age(1971-2021) as the letter was challenged by

mass use of the telephone and, later, e-mail, and by cheaper and faster

overseas travel. I would suggest that because of their richness as literary

artifacts, their symbolic importance and their revelatory power, the position

that the written communications of pioneers beginning in the nineteenth-

century and continuing until, say, 1953, should occupy, is prominent. These

letters should be found, if not the very best place in the house of the Baha’i

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literary heritage, then at least a significant one that might draw the visitor’s

eye as the threshold is crossed. Further, like families and friends in the

nineteenth-century, we need to bring emigrant and pioneer letters out to

study them more often, to pass them around and scrutinise and discuss their

contents. My view is that it will be some time before this kind of

scrutinizing takes place. The time is not yet. In a very real sense those large

and laden letters that take wing across the oceans and land masses of varying

sizes still await — and deserve — our responses—perhaps the response of

our children’s children!

_______________________________

VOLUME 1:

CHAPTER FOUR:

DIARIES AND THE TURN TO POETRY

I have revised my article on journals/diaries and this revision is found in

section INTERNATIONAL PIONEERING8 Part B.

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

"Enormous piles of trivia......"

One's identity is tied to an interpretive appraisal of one's personal past as it

takes place in autobiographical narrative and it is inseparable from

normative ideas of what a life is or what it is supposed to be, if it is lived

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well.1 Of course, this identity which I construct is not the same as the

objective reality, the complex reality, outside me. Knowing myself in some

direct, simple and final sense is just not possible. I construct my

understanding of who I am; it is a process of creation, of discovery, in a

complex interaction of inner and outer realities. And no matter how much I

accent my own life, a strong sense of community runs through all this

writing. Regardless of the autobiographical ‘I,’ the persona of self in so

much of this narrative, the voice that speaks represents a community, a

people, the Baha'is.

This identity is being increasingly expressed in this new millennium in the

form of memoir which, as critic James Atlas wrote, is displacing the novel.

People want to read "nonfiction about ordinary people."2 -Ron Price with

thanks to 1Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative,

Routledge, London, 1993; and 2 James Atlas, New York Times Magazine,

quoted in Proteus: A Journal of Ideas, Vol.19, No.2, Fall 2002.

_____________________________________________________________

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After twenty-five years of haphazard diary keeping(1984-2009)109 there

looms ahead of the shadow of my diary. It is a type of diary that I have kept

up episodically already, but it has been difficult to maintain with any

consistent degree of regularity. Some of my diary’s shadow is prospective

and some is retrospective. I say 'shadow' because there is so much that has

been done and so much more that I could have done, could have written.

The retrospective part is my attempt to 'diarise' the parts of my life when I

kept no diary. Such an exercise possesses problems but, perhaps, no greater

problem than the act of writing an autobiography already has been. The

human proclivity to be nostalgic and to idealize the past or just to record its

mundanities is built in to any effort to write a retrospective diary. The

prospective part of this diary lies in the future and, in recent years, shows no

sign of fulfillment or at least no sign of extensive daily entries being made.

Writing accounts of the connections and activities of the everyday seems, so

often, trivial and ephemeral. As Baudelair once wrote “the more the artist

turns an impartial eye on detail the greater is the state of anarchy.” Although

I don’t think this applies to all artistic work it is certainly my experience as I

109 The Journals of Ron Price, Unpublished Manuscript, Vol.1.1(1844-1971); Vol.1.2(1971-1987); Vol.2(1987-1993); Vol.3(1994-1999); Vol.4(2000 to 2004); Vol.5(2005-2009).

498

go about keeping a diary. To avoid this sense of the anarchous and the trivial

some analysts suggest immersion in the details of daily life and not keeping

one’s distance from it as the key to any real literary success. Rodin, the

sculptor, said that diary writing should be an exertion but not a chore—a fine

distinction in some ways, although he added that it could also be seen as a

solitude-cure. I like this distinction but I have yet to experience much of the

curative effects of diary-keeping. One writer wrote that the ultimate goal of

a diary is self-realization and that quest involves tortuous repetitions of death

and rebirth. Yes, tortuous repetitions indeed. Perhaps if I could simply see

such daily record in the same way that Benjamin Franklin saw his

autobiography: individuality in the context of a community of individuals—I

might find the vitality, the context and the life-forces to put pen to paper on

a daily basis.

Perhaps some of this problem I am having with diary writing is a similar one

to that faced by Virginia Woolf. Woolf wrote in 1919 that “This diary

writing does not really count as writing.” “I have just reread my years of

diary writing,” she went on, “and am much struck by the rapid and

haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost

intolerably over the cobbles.”110 Still, her diary, and I like to think mine, is

110 Virginia Woolf quoted in Katie Holmes, “‘This diary writing does not really count as writing': women's writing and the writing of history,” Women

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laced with touches of brilliance, ‘diamonds in the dustheap,' as Woolf called

them. Katie Homes, after fifteen years of reading the diaries of women and

their endless references to apparently domestic trivia as well as insistent

daily details, began to realise that the material before her was in fact rich,

varied and fresh. If I could experience this same freshness about my

experience perhaps I could give my diary a new vitality, one that I have yet

to discover.

Through her reading of the diaries of many women Katie Holmes believed

she found a way that women asserted the worth of their work within a

culture which rendered such labour marginal and insignificant. I believe I

have found a way to break down the tidy divisions between artful

autobiography or memoir on the one hand and the artless “serial

autobiography” of the diary or journal on the other, between a certain type of

transcendence and immediacy. But the process is going to take time—

perhaps many more years of using my diary like a strainer to purify, improve

and filter my thoughts.

The contract of trust between the diarist and the reader, the notion that the

text is authentic is something that, for me anyway, I already apply to my

Writing: Views & Prospects 1975-1995, National Library of Australia.

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memoir. I like to think that the literary devotee will find beautifully crafted

language in my somewhat prosaic journals, that this devotee will find more

than “mumble” and more than mere quantity of language to signify intensity

and meaning. Craft in the literary composition of memoir can lead to clever

and crafty narratives. If a diarist possesses virtuosity in dealing with

quotidian reality, he can overcome much of life’s obscurities and apparent

irrelevancies and give the diary a veracity and meaning. Well-articulated

diary statement can often lure the narrative historian in search of the

quotable quote away from narrative. While looking for those quotes such a

historian can be lured away from the central concerns of my journal for

narrative and daily detail.

Autobiography and biography drag when they become preoccupied with the

minutiae of their subject's days. It is for the diarist to be meticulous and the

auto/biographer to prune some of these details while expanding upon others.

I can appreciate this sentiment of living for writing, but for me it is not in

some meticulous daily diary. It is in a different genre. The Russian, Boris

Pasternak, was not inclined, and neither am I, to write about the smallest

impulses, the most trivial details of everyday life in his dairy or anywhere

else. This excessive, indeed, entire occupation or preoccupation with

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everyday stuff, is the lifeblood of most diaries that become publishable and

which I have tried to read and read about. The diary of Thomas Mann was

of this sort.111

Virginia Woolf describes the shadow of her diary briefly in one of her

essays. What will I make of the loose, drifting material of my life, as

Virginia Woolf calls the material in her diary and which very accurately

describes mine. Do I want it to be so elastic as to embrace anything solemn,

slight, beautiful or ugly that comes to mind, a capacious hold-all? Will it,

when all is said and done and the roll is called up yonder, resemble a place

where I have flung a mass of odds and ends, some with reflective ardour or

with little energy and enthusiasm at all, some with fatigue and sadness, some

with a sense of consecrated joy? The diary has the power to bring meaning

to the otherwise random assaults of daily life. Mundane moments in life can

reveal life’s “luminous halo.” These moments of an ordinary mind on an

ordinary day can be made new, can intimate a rich spiritual world, a world

connected to the everyday. Such was Woolf’s view as expressed in her

essay Modern Fiction. A diary like this is a receptacle in which to pour

vivid, momentary insights and a way of ordering day-to-day experience—

111 Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918-1939, Andre Deutsche, 1983, London, p.vii.

502

perhaps as good or better than three or four hours of TV in the evening, an

experience which keeps millions of people busy night after night for decades

of their lives. It’s not so much the imperfect words on the faint blue lines or

on the computer monitor, as the feeling time and again of returning to a

place from which one can continue to spin onto the same thread which is

one’s life.

Woolf kept a diary for forty-four years, two decades longer than the one I

now have written and that is now in my possession. Her diary is now

published along with her letters in twelve volumes. Publishing the two

genres together has some merit but this is something I feel no need to

comment on at this stage of my life and I leave it to publishers to make such

a decision if, indeed, the decision to publish such material ever arisesin my

case. Susan Sellers, in her essay on Woolf’s diaries and letters,112 says that

people tend to scour Woolf’s diaries for insights, but the diaries are rarely

read in their own right. I like to think, of course, that my diary may one day

be scoured for insights. I have attempted to capture my life in my several

genres of writing and perhaps readers can capture parts of their lives that are

112 Susan Sellers in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, editors, Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, Cambridge UP, 2000, p.109.

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slipping irretrievably from their grasp in one or more of the genres of my

writing. Time will tell.

Woolf’s diary was extraordinary and so much more than mine has been or

may ever be. Sometimes her diary seems like a lover hidden in a tower, the

provider of an intimacy unthinkable in her ordinary life, as Robert Kiely

wrote in 1982 in the New York Times in reviewing the publication of the 4 th

volume of her diaries. On one occasion she apologises to her diary for using

it to write of her aimlessness. But even aimlessness once turned into phrases

and sentences, assumes a shape. Spontaneity, freshness, truthfulness--

qualities Woolf sought to capture in all her writing--can appear as elusive to

the diarist as to the novelist. They have certainly been elusive to me and,

even having Woolf as a model or indeed many other writers who used the

diary, does not seem, as yet, to be of much value to me in my own diary

work.

Woolf’s need to pour herself out to her diary often has an urgency of pent-up

passion: ''Alone at last.'' And when the world encroaches too much, her

apologies are tender and poignant: ''I can spare only ten minutes.'' At other

times the diary seems to provide a God for the unbeliever, a blank face

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inviting meditation and recollection. Some of Woolf's longest and most

reflective entries have about them the serenity, composure and absolute

honesty of prayer. There is a glow with the immediacy of reaction and a

depth of reflection; there is also the occasional roughness which is part of

the charm.

Thusfar, though, as I approach the ripe age of 65 in late adulthood, it seems

to me that readers will find more insights in my prose-poetry than in my

diary. The American writer Alfred Kazin once wrote in his journal “writing

is my life, the one steadiness I have,”113 I find a similar steadiness but not in

the form of journals. Orwell urged readers to keep a diary—as Winston

Smith does in Orwell’s novel 1984—not only to recover and preserve the

past, but also to maintain an accurate perspective on the truth: “To see what

is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps

towards this end is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of

record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some

particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that

one ever held it.”114 I don’t disagree with Orwell but, thusfar, in twenty-five

113 Roger Bishop,“An Interview With Alfred Kazin,” Book Page, 2004. (About Kazin’s Lifetime Burning in Every Moment, Harper Collins, 2004.)114 Jeffrey Meyers, “Orwell On Writing,” The New Criterion, October 2003.

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years of diary keeping, life’s struggle in the direction of diary keeping has

not yielded much success. Something significant began to emerge in the

early years of the new millennium, but only time would tell if I would be

able to sustain that diaristic emergence and its various entries. It was a genre

that could make a useful contribution to this autobiography. It could convey

my mind’s dispassionate observations and the doleful records of my heart, as

Dostoevsky’s diary did.(The Diary of a Writer, F.M. Dostoevsky,

Introduction: Joseph Frank, Peregrene Smith Books, Salt Lake City, 1985,

p.vii)

My experience thusfar is somewhat like the concern of Anais Nin who

wrote: “the danger of putting art into a diary is that it might kill its greatest

quality—its naturalness.” My aim in the years ahead in my diary-writing is

to satisfy my compulsive need to know what lies hidden beyond the confines

of the obvious, the sensory, the immediately conscious realities of life.

Poetry has become my diary at least in the last thirty years(1980 to 2009).

And so too has my narrative autobiography, my memoir, my first person

story of an ordinary person, myself, that I have been working on for 25

years(1984-2009). I have found both narrative coherence and continuity

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through several autobiographical genres including letters, essays and

notebooks. Taken together they counteract some of the fragmentary,

impersonal nature of much of modern life and reconstruct much of le temps

perdu. There is in so much of modern life an incessant stimuli, the exposure

of feelings to contrasting excitations, rapidly changing, closely compressed,

often annoying, contradictory and paradoxical, requiring from time to time a

withdrawal from this outer world, a retreat from what you could call a blaze

attitude into a protective reserve, a seclusion from stimuli and, most

important to me since the age of fifty-five, a more ardent journey in an

intellectual life, a journey I could take back to 1962 when my pioneering life

began and my year of matriculation studies kept me busy four hours every

evening after five hours of classes in the day.

There is even a slight aversion to, a strangeness in, a repulsion from and a

vast indifference to recording much that takes place in modern life. The

pleasures and delights, the fascinations and multiplicity of interests exist

side-by-side with the aversions and indifferences mentioned above. This

dichotomy, this polarity, of inner psychic life, the enormous impact of so

many stimuli and the forces of modernity accounts in part for the withdrawal

into diary, into writing, into poetry, into art and the "fateful struggle,"

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perhaps the most fateful we all experience in our time between the two ways

of defining ourselves: in community and in solitude.115 The two are

inextricably bound together. “Thought alone carried out in solitude,” wrote

Camus, “is a frightening adventure.” Yes, Albert, I agree in part, but if it

was mainly that I would stop now. For me the experience is largely a

pleasurable one.

Arendt once wro te in what I initially found to be a puzzling, paradoxical, set

of words that our narratable self, our life-story cannot be equated with or be

a product of a line of narrative. To put this idea another way: our life, who

we are, our identity, is not reducible to the contents of our story or what we

have done. It is rather something that is interwoven with our autobiography

and coincides in complex and subtle ways with "the uncontrollable narrative

impulse of memory which produces the text."116 This story, this narration,

"reveals the finite in its fragile uniqueness." Indeed it sings its glory and tells

of its tragedy. But one does not live in order to "leave behind a design, a

destiny, an unrepeatable figure of one’s existence." To tell a story is not our

"only aspiration deserving of the fact that life was given us." But telling

stories says something about the meaning of life and "the fleeting mark of a

115 R. Nisbet, op.cit. p.311.116 Hannah Arendt in Cavarero, op.cit.p. xvi.

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unity that is only glimpsed." "It is the gift of a moment," Cavarero writes,

"in the mirage of desire."117 To put it even more strongly: our story and the

world are "like a vapour in the desert which the thirsty dreameth to be water

but, on coming upon it, he finds it to be mere illusion."118 The Bee Gees put

it a little differently after five decades in the world of popular music when

they said “this is where we came in.”119 I certainly feel an element of this,

but I also feel a sense of great personal transformation as well.

"What makes a figure is the lore," the Jungian psychologist James Hillman

declared. Lore may be created out of this narrative over the decades but, in

the years immediately ahead, those of my lifetime and beyond, whatever lore

has been created thusfar in my life will have been dissipated by my living in

22 towns from the Canadian Arctic to the island state of Tasmania, the last

stop if one was taking a trip to Antarctica via the western Pacific rim. By

the time anyone takes an interest in this work I and those whom I have

known will in all probability be dead. I am not likely, then, to have the

experience of the poets of the Beat Generation, say Ginsberg and Kerouac

for whom lore made them more than they were. With people like Richard

117 Adriana Cavarero, op.cit., p. 3.118 Baha'u'llah, Baha'i Writings.119 “The Bee Gees: This is Where I Came In,” ABC TV, 2:30-3:30 pm, 25 January 2004.

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Nixon and a host of others: you can't get rid of them. There is no way to

forget them, because of the lore. Freud and Jung are full of lore. They are

very much alive as figures in the imagination. We keep on learning from

them, through the lore. Of course, ultimately, one can not tell if lore will in

time accummulate around what one has written.

Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as something

which concerns it, which is not capable of living in my memory in the

present, threatens to completely disappear, slipping irretrievably from my

grasp. Walter Benjamin pointed this out back in 1940.120 My job as a

writer, a poet, an autobiographer, in these several epochs, writing this diary

in the last half of the first century after the Heroic Age ended in 1921,

becomes one of finding ways of drawing the veil away from the vast

proceedings of my time and exposing, illuminating, some specific portions

of it. The events of my life and time were horrific in some ways, but it was

not my intention to describe these horrific events in any detail. This has been

done by many others in a host of print and electronic media. The tedious

aspects of my time were not too tedious and those aspects of life which did

120 Walter Benjamin,. "Theses on the Philosophy of History(1940)”, trans. Harry Zohn. Contemporary Literary Criticism, editors: Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, Longman, NY, 1994, p.447.

510

possess a certain inevitable tedium I draw a veil over as the autobiographer

must. I am only providing a partial view for that is all one man can ever do

and see. There was a chaos in my time, as it seems to me there has been at

all times. On this chaos I wanted to impose order and form. I wanted to

define the dancing star, as Nietzsche calls the order and form we impose on

that chaos and which we can see if we but look with the eye of wonder.

Some of the training provided by a mysterious Providence I have found to be

of help here. For every atom of existence and the essence of all created

things were at my disposal, so Baha’u’llah informed me in Hidden Words. I

wanted to tell some of the story of that training.

Some of the more uncommon aspects of my life can be found in my diaries

and, should these diaries ever be published, these uncommon features will

lure some readers. The older I get, though, the more I find that what I once

saw as uncommon, is as common as air. What was not talked about much

when I began my pioneering life in 1962 is now part of the public domain in

all its detail: mental illness, suicide, sexual proclivities, indeed, all the seven

deadly sins that flesh and the psyche is heir to and which plague us all in

varying degrees and patterns. Readers will find some detailed reporting of

these normal minutiae of living and the many insoluble dilemmas I have

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faced but, probably, not enough to suit the special interests of those who

prefer to dwell on the darker side of life.

I think of a writer's temperament-and certainly mine-as being incapable of

experiencing suffering or joy without analyzing it. The famous short-story

writer Maupassant also said this. Even describing a landscape, which I

rarely do and when I do I don’t do well, can seem a hopelessly difficult task.

Woolf once wrote: ''It is all very well saying one will write notes but writing

is a very difficult art. One always has to select. Thinking what to write, it

seems easy; but the thought evaporates.”

Perhaps the fragility, the elusiveness, the illusionary nature of life, is why I

have found diaries tedious in the composition, often pointless even as I make

the entry. Diaries tell more about what we don't know and don't experience

and when we come to write it seems as if the banalities are all we have to

enter, to record. Is this part of the reason why so few people even keep a

diary in these days of profound changes in a world where history is so little

understood? Is this why, according to Hannah Arendt again, it is others

who must tell our story? There is a tendency to anaesthesia, to banality,

implicit in the development of our technological society and the diary can

512

counter some of this. Indeed, there is much in our society that can and does

counter these negative tendencies, that expand our horizons, enlarge our

imaginative faculties and sympathies. I like to think that the diary can

animate and enlarge my response to 'the other' rather than cloistering it and

this inspite of my culture’s suspicion of what a person might do when they

turn inward.

James Boswell's 'London Journal’ covered a major portion of his life and

filled more than 8000 manuscript pages. I could site chapter and verse of

many other diaries and diarists. Perhaps there is hope for my own; readers

should not get discouraged by my comments thusfar. And if my journal, my

diary, can not do it, perhaps my poetry can and indeed my other genres of

writing. In the several years before I began my diary in 1984 I was able to

weild my pen more than ever before in writing published essays, history and

the many literary demands of my job at the time in the Northern Territory

and in the Bahá'í community..... Here is a poem that deals with diaries.

THE EFFERVESCENCE OF THE SOUL

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Some diarists, writers of memoirs, autobiographers, have very little from the

hand of destiny or, even if they have, they are not able to turn what they

have been given to much meaning--and if they find great meaning they are

not able to put it into written form. The exercise of introspection and of

soliciting the external tale of one's own life-story into some literary form

does not become part of people’s experience easily or so it would seem.

Everyone finds some meaning in their lives, but it can not always be turned

into a written form. With death giving chase to older members of the

community who possess the ability to write and with huge or not-so-huge

ambitions shouting to get out in many younger members of the same

community with similar skills, these writers turn their memoir or

autobiography into a universe over which they are the sole ruler and in

which they are the only subject.

The diary, the memoir, the autobiography, becomes like an addiction, a

lover, a basis for scientific investigation of the self. But so often the result is,

sadly, just an enormous pile of trivia, of words of ‘distressing insignificance’

as Andre Gide calls them. -Ron Price with thanks to Thomas Mallon, A

Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries, Ticknor and Fields, NY,

1984, p.286.

514

Some call it the poor man’s art1

with a slowly accumulated past,

helps make the shrinking future

bearable as if one is writing for

some “you,” some person one

has never known, will never

quite know—all of us it seems.

Here you can create a life,

your flesh is made word

while time’s wing’d chariot

hurries near and you hold on,

cheating the clock and death

without knowing you cheat.

Some find therapeutic relaxation

in this art, this happily lawless

enterprise, like knitting,

unpremeditated scribbling,

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writing on a blank page,

some suggestive morsels,

authorized version of inner life,

a sort of chronicle of everything,

an effervescence of the soul---

surely all this trivia cannot be

associated with the soul, surely?

Ron Price

7 October 1996

1 the art of personal reminisence in a written form.

The diary is an underrepresented and loosely conceptualized genre and can

be looked upon as a more ‘fluid’ type of autobiography. It constitutes a

valuable basis for the investigation of the strategies and influences that make

up the multiple processes of our identity-construction.121 Several possible

purposes have been suggested for a diary: expression, reflection, memory

and creation. But in today's email world diaries "are virtually an archaic art

form," says Australian writer Barry Oakley.122 They go back to Greek and

121 Leena Kurvet-Käosaar Hannah Arendt, Chair of Comparative Literature, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia, “Autobiographical Writing from the Feminist Perspective: Comparative Analysis of the Diaries of Aino Kallas, Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin," Doctoral Dissertation.122 Barry Oakley, Minitudes, Text, 2000.

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Roman times. In recent centuries groups like the Society of Friends kept

diaries instead of going to confession. The diary can provide a type of

historical artifact that gives readers access to the dividing line between

public and private. A hundred years ago there was a great gulf between the

two spheres; it is a gulf which has been reduced in the recent epochs of this

Formative Age. Diaries are not so much the incarnations of privacy they

once were. But all art is autobiographical, as Federico Fellini once said, and

a diary is a form of art. One day this diary, if published, will belong to

everyone and not just me.

I am not so concerned with the exposure of private aspects of my life,

although readers will find something here to titillate the curious and

investigating reader. I am more concerned here to explore the genre of the

diary or journal to suck out of it the potential I think it possesses but which I

have thusfar been unable to tap and may, in fact, never tap. I think, too, that

the Baha’i community in the future may benefit from successful literary

excavation in this domain. My playing here with the concept of the diary

and the possibilities of writing it interest me for their historical value in the

Bahá'í community. It is impossible for me to remember a week at a stretch

and to put the major details on paper, even if I could remember the details,

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without boring any reader who came across such a description, would test

my literary abilities and capacilities and I would be found wanting. Woolf

referred to such descriptions as “too flat.”123 If the diary is ever to have any

value, this writer, any writer, must be constantly thinking of the quality of

the writing.

The diary has a noble and interesting lineage, a long and distinguished

history. But, over the years my diary has felt more archaic than noble, more

tedious than stimulating, no matter whether I took a highly organized and

systematic approach like Ira Progoff recommended or whether I took a more

subjective and idiosyncratic approach as Anais Nin recommended. Perhaps

if I had engaged myself and my potential readers in detailed episodes of the

erotic or detailed explanations of the non-erotic in my daily life I would have

been able to untap new sources of fertility, fresh enhancements, tantalizing

flirtations with and for the reader. If Boswell was right "that a man should

not live more than he can record, as a farmer should not have a larger crop

than he can gather in,"124 I should have given up diary keeping long ago, for

I have lived far more than I could ever record. In this sensate culture, to use

123 Virginia Woolf in Susan Sellers, op.cit., p. 111. 124 James Boswell in A Preface to the Life, Richard Schwartz, University of Wisconson Press, Madison, 1978, p.39.

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a term from the sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, the diary offers an opportunity

for a short period of reflection on something about the day, something worth

saying about something that took place in a short span of time.

However noble and distinguished the history of the diary is, it was not until

the early modern period, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in

England,125 that the diary became a popular form of personal document.

Networking—a community of diarists--increasing literacy, the desire to

record life as it proceeds, not in the retrospective sense as an autobiography

does, family connections over the generations—were all reasons for the

spread of diaries initially between 300 and 500 years ago. The most well

known friendship between diarists in this period existed between Samuel

Pepys and John Evelyn. I will refer to these men later.

Walt Whitman, inspired by such a view, left two and a half million words

covering the last four years of his life, 1888-1892, by allowing Horace

Traubel to record everyday conversations, correspondence and activities as a

form of biography. It was a biography resembling a diary and it provided

125 I make no attempt here to provide a history of the diary across the world’s cultures; I make a few remarks to provide some context for the history of the diary. That is all. There is an extensive literature on diaries, like most subjects by the 21st century.

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"the pulse and throb of the critter himself,126 his real life in short scraps.

Such a way of getting at autobiography or biography, Whitman felt,

counteracted the smartness, the cleverness, the impudent knowingness,

which he disdained in so much writing. Perhaps, too, it was a way

Whitman could counter his particular belief that: “I am large, I contain

multitudes.”127 I wonder if Whitman would find my autobiography infected

with an impudent knowingness? Certainly these words of Whitman do not

represent the presiding spirit for this work. Hopefully I will find some

golden mean between impudence and an excessive humility and the people,

places and things I have lived and loved, thought and observed can remain

alive forever. Perhaps the diary will help awaken me to life in a permanent

and new form. It is difficult, impossible, for me to assess at this stage.

The textual maze which exists in Whitman's nine editions of Leaves of

Grass: its massings, its accumulations, its additions, deletions, revisions and

rearrangements, is counteracted or at least supplemented in some ways by

the four years of notes, diary-like, taken by Traubel. His diary is, perhaps,

126 Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Vols. 8 and 9, Feb. 1891-September 1891, ed. J. Chapman and R. MacIsaac, Bentley.127 Tom Smith, “A Review of Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography,” in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Articles(full text) on Internet Site, 2004.

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his effort to monumentalize himself, to give to his life a last invocation. I

think it is unlikely that my diary will ever achieve such a lofty height. But

Whitman's work is suggestive of possibilities as are the many articles and

essays I have found in the last several years in the literature on diaries. In the

last half century there has been an exponential growth in the scholarly

attention to diaries. Of course, my problem with diaries has nothing to do

with not editing or glossing over, making inappropriate, unwise or even

dishonest selections from the day’s events. My problem, the one most

diarists have and those who never make a diary, is making any entry at all

from day to day. What is often, to the serious diarist, their “only confidant”

is to the vast majority of people a not very attractive confident. The simple

inability to make of a literary form something as intimate as a confidant is a

basic problem for diarists.

Had I kept a comprehensive diary it would reveal the many things I have

never been good at or interested in: gardening, cooking, mechanical work,

building, interior decoration, shopping, physics, fishing, outdoor camping,

shooting, playing basketball or soccor, cricket or water polo. Good God! The

list is endless. It is highly unlikely that when and if this journal is ever

published “many statues will come down,” as the Duke of Wellington is

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reported to have said. For not only have I not written about many areas

where I had no interests, I have not written a great deal about so many where

I did have interests. Unlike the Duke of Wellington, though, I don’t have to

worry about statues of myself falling down or staying up. If my textual

memorial ever comes to exist it does not appear that my diary will make a

significant contribution to its construction—at least not yet. And readers

will be saved what is usually an endurance race, the act of having to read the

endless trivia that occupies the dailiness of most diaries.

If my letters are added to my diary, as Woolf’s were, then the scribbling I

have done to others will be added to the scribbling I have done in my diary

and that, I hope, will be of more value. Precisely delineated vignettes can

leave one’s life untouched and the reader double-guessing or they can be

high revealing. My writing is at the dawn, at the emergence, of a Bahá'í

consciousness in literature and all of my writing is exploratory. I am not so

much worried, as some artists are, about my place in a future literary

pantheon but I would like my scribbling to be of value, of use, to the battles

that will occupy my coreligionists in the decades and even centuries ahead.

522

To record my impressions of a deepening, a Feast, a conference, a study

circle, a devotional meeting, a cluster meeting, an LSA meeting, a meeting

for prayer, a gathering for purely social purposes; my impressions of special

committee meetings or any one of a myriad of institutional meetings

associated with the Cause, with the many schools where I worked as part of

the teaching profession or with some sector of any one of a number of

organizations I worked in as a volunteer during and my years of

employment--the years 1961 to 2001--and to do this with regularity, would

certainly have filled up many a diary.

There have been thousands of Baha'is and others in the world of work and

leisure whom I got to know during these epochs(1944-2021) who did keep

up a very active regimen of activity in their lives, but they never recorded

their impressions, never placed in unembroidered detail the authenticity of

the event, the truth of a reminiscence. No long-suffering and tolerant diary

ever came to exist for the vast majority of those whom I knew in my life or

even those whom I did not know. What may have got written to soothe the

soul, record one’s ups and downs or fill in odd moments of time before or

after their experience of the mass media of TV and radio, never saw the light

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of print, never were put into words. The lighted chirping box sooths the

savage breast but does not stimulate the inner literary man.

If these souls, wonderful and not-so-wonderful, were ever inclined to write

some memoir, some diary, some journal, as a few did on occasion, there was

often a tendency to a nostalgic glossing over, a coloured selectivity and an

adding of numerous and minute details retrospectively. I never felt I was

unearthing some fictivity, some fabrication, when on rare occasions I came

across such literary efforts. I usually saw the exercise as one of the author

writing about what they would have liked to experience rather than what

they did. This is a natural and all-too-human experience. Other anecdotalists

tended to dwell on the negative, the woe, doom and gloom.

Joy and meaning found their way into diaries but balanced reportage was

rare and genuine interest for a reader even rarer. And extensive annotation,

annotation that explained a wide range of allusions, references, private

codes, shared intimacies and details about people, places and things is

virtually non-existent. I have made a beginning on occasion but found the

process tiresome in the extreme.

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Inconvenience, a failure to appreciate the significance of the event, a lack of

desire to put those sort of experiences in writing--there are many reasons

why there are few descriptions of these sorts of events being left to posterity

by the great masses of the faithful or not-so-faithful. There is something

about routine, repetition and what for each person is a complex and unique

set of circumstances, that make so much of life’s events simply impossible

for nearly everyone to record in any way at all. For millions of people it is

impossible to write about the daily routine because they don’t like to write

or they are simply too busy with other ways to fill the time. Among the few

that do put pen to diary paper, the exceptions that prove the rule, there is

sometimes found a rich addition to our understanding of a period, an event, a

person. Some diarists also like to read their diaries for their own amusement.

That is not, as yet, the case with me. Perhaps, if I become famous, like

Dickens, Hardy and Ruskin, I will both make more diary entries and read the

ones I have written. At the age of 65, as I write these words, it does not look

like this will be the case.

“Too much repetition of even the most delightful acts,” writes John Style,

“will take the fun away....just as desire dispels the inertia of the mundane

life, so the mundane, like rust that never sleeps, perpetually encroaches

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upon...the joy of momentary fulfillment.”128 And, if this does not occur I am

inclined to add, when votaries of the diary go to write about the series of

delightful acts there is a step-down transformer affect, a watering down, a

simple inability to convey the delight into words that others might enjoy. I

have often thought that repetition and the sheer difficulty of experiencing

something meaningful, something significant, something truly alive, is what

gets in the road of people keeping some sort of literary record of their days

and, when true joy does occur, it is rarely recounted in writing in a diary in a

way that transmits the joy. The task is not easy. Often, too, diaries need

condensation and revision and it is a rare soul who is willing to go through

such an exercise. I have had no desire to subject my diary to these

treatments. If I live to be over 100, though, I may find in the 35 years

remaining the necessary desire.

Some biographies are essentially animations of diaries and letters and others

may be able to use the material I have left behind more than I have been able

to do. If Oscar Wilde was right and “a man’s face is his autobiography,”129

128 John Style, “Stop Keeping Count,” How Vernon escapes a mundane sex-life in Martim Amis’ Let Me Count The Times,” Journal of Mundane Behaviour,Vol.3, No.1, 2002. For an interesting analysis of this theme in relation to sex see this article by Style.129 Oscar Wilde in Oscar Wilde, H.M. Hyde, 1976, chapter 9.

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then many a story can and might yet be told from the photographs I have left

behind and the prose in all the genres of my writing. I am sure, though, that

there are millions of faces which will remain undescribed and unillumined

by me and by the words of other writers and poets, philosophers and

academics. The literary critic Paul De Mann asserts that through

autobiography one's name is made as intelligible as one’s face.

Autobiographical personification represents an imaginary, absent, or

deceased person speaking or acting. And long after the face is gone the

words will remain and their animated and amalgamated forms. They may

remain, though, as the Roman poet Horace once wrote, “unknown and

unwept, extinguished in everlasting night,” in the main because they simply

have no “spirited chronicler.” And those who own the faces are usually not

likely to produce the memoirs that might have given them an earthly

immortality. For, as the famous English novelist George Meredith once

said, memoirs are like the backstairs of history and few seem to want to

describe and give an account of those stairs. Indeed, there is much that one

could list as part of those backstairs, extensions of memoirs you might call

them: cheque-stubs, grocery lists, a range of financial statements, doctors

reports, insurance and government forms, great accummulations of personal

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documents of various kinds, accummulations which get higher as the years

get longer. But the thought of keeping them as an archive for most of us is as

tedious and repulsive as it is meaningless. Much of life’s meaning is in the

moment, the short time span and its attendant activities that are our interests.

To attempt to give this multitude of time spans some autobiographical

existence is simply pointless and would yield an exhausting prolixity for

most—but with the diary there is hope!!

Some of these documents and papers, the memorabilia of my life would or

could be immensely revealing, but virtually all of them, like some vast

landscape of gray detritus, will remain condemned to oblivion, to dust and

ashes, as if they had never existed at all. Often the best of a person can be

found in these gray non-entities, but to pour over them for insights, for

statements of a person’s character, for the goings-on of someone’s life, often

results in simply giving attention to the pettiness of their lives and the

irrelevance of the multitude of the sources. Teasing sense and nonsense

from what is often chaotic and prolix, often trivial even if once important,

among the its-and-bits of paper scattered in the personal and archival files of

individuals, either before or after their deaths, would test the energies and

interests of most dedicated would-be researchers should they ever get on the

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path of some biographical investigation. Naturally, they do not even tread

the path or want to tread the path and these details of people’s lives, along

with virtually all of the other details that never make it to paper disappearing

into oblivion’s like vast reaches of snow which know no bounds. The paper

remains just so much stuff in old boxes, the last stage on the road to

oblivion’s boundless reaches. How can these insufficiently crafted

documents, the humble tenant of a variously coloured plain with its many

rooms, sounds and deeds be heard to say, to possess and to be of any value

to anyone?

Some are now arguing that to understand the legitimacy of a culture we need

to investigate its relation to archives, the sites for the accumulation of

records. Reason that plays with archives and one of its special genres, the

diary, is a kind of reason which is concerned with detail; it constantly directs

us away from the big generalizations down into the particularity and

singularity of the event. The focus that draws on archives, diaries and their

reasoning processes is less interested in archiving the lives of the good and

the great and more interested in the detail of mundane everyday life. The

archive is a specific place in which we deposit diaries, records, documents,

photographs, film, video and all the minutiae on which culture is inscribed.

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The walls of the archive are placed around the everyday, the small world in

which they were born and they extend, over time, to embrace a much wider

domain.

Sometimes, on rare occasions, an account of a period, a portion of time, is

produced. The first century BC in Rome was probably the first century

which created a great stock-pile of resources for a future age. This stock-

pile is often referred to as history. Sadly, perhaps predictably, the vast

numbers, the great mass of humanity has little or no interest in this stockpile.

For the professional ants who deal in Roman history, a small coterie, this

archive of knowledge is crucial. Along with this professional enthusiasm

which has actually increased, become more pervasive, during recent epochs,

there prevails an atmosphere of anarchic confusion, apathy and disinterest,

in the attitude of western man to this first blossoming, the first eruption, of

memoirs and archives, known as part of Roman history. In the end,

therefore, there is a fragility in the lives of those who even get around to

producing their memoirs,130 even if the analysis is perceptive and detailed.

However fragmentary and private the diary may appear, it often belongs

130 Arlette Farge discusses this fragility in Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth Century Paris, Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass., 1993, Introduction.

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together as part of one piece of a writer’s oeuvre. I deal with this subject

later in my memoir.

My diary has largely fallen into disuse in the last several years, although as I

have indicated above I have been able to amass a good deal of diary studies

on the internet to help me gain a more comprehensive view of their role and

function. When I make a diary entry there is a feeling of dullness and poor

writing and, if I am pleased about the entry, I am disinclined to make

another and another. So the diary falls into disuse with only the rare period

of recrudescence. Making diary entries seems like a type of housecleaning,

a getting rid of garbage, a sort of exhibitionism, a running on and to what

end?131 There is an inevitable retrospective gaze in diary keeping, a type of

self-confinement in the solipsistic sphere of recent and personal memory. I

have always sensed that somehow my diary concealed rather than revealed

who I was. My diary felt like what Arendt called a “radical model of the

unreliability of every autobiography."132 Occasionally, if I examine its

contents, going back as it does more than twenty-two years, and/or if I

examine in a wider retrospective form my entire life back into previous

131 Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, "Self-Analysis Enhances Other-Analysis," Journal for Psychological Study of the Arts, January 1999, A Hyperlink Journal.132 Adriana Cavarero, op.cit., p. 14.

531

generations, I see gleams of light and fascination. I certainly think there is

potential there, a potential far from being realized as yet in its first five

volumes, a potential for something unique, for some unique contribution to

my overall autobiographical opus: Pioneering Over Four Epochs. The

retrospective side, the side that goes back to my youth, begun with some

enthusiasm several years ago, has yet to really amount to much other than

the occasional entry. The fact that I have a diary at all, suggests a desire on

my part to tell my story in this particular way but, for the most part, it would

appear that this desire for narration must become, what Arendt calls,

Sophoclean, biographical, not autobiographical.133

There is, as I have said, an inevitable fragmentariness to diary keeping and,

for some, a philosophical, transcendental, content, somewhat characteristic

of the writing that has accompanied drug-taking over the centuries.134 This

is certainly true, at least in part, of my diary writing, although the only drugs

I take are for my bi-polar tendency and they slow down my mental activity

and its imaginative function not speed it up in colourful directions. Looking

back to the beginning of my efforts to write a diary in the early 1980s, I

133 Adriana Cavarero, op.cit., p.15.134 Marcus Boone, The Road of Excess: discussed on "Books and Writing," ABC Radio National, 7:25-8:15 pm, 2 March 2003.

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think one of the reasons I turned to poetry and autobiographical narrative

was my dissatisfaction with the diary, my diary. Many of my entries are a

reflection of my practice of writing down sentences, photocopying pages

from what I am reading and eventually including them in a prose-poem, a

diary entry, an essay. I found over many years that I integrated this material

into genres other than the diary. My method is diaristic in practice. I

scrupulously record but the product is not a diary. Indeed, in this work as a

whole, I push the envelope--as they say these days--of autobiography as a

single genre producing a multi-genre container, a protean instability, that is

the nature of this work.

"The best one can hope for," writes Simon Brett in his Faber Book of

Diaries, "ís to present an entertaining selection."135 Selectors would have to

eliminate the repetitious, for the diary is traditionally the home of the

repetitious and this is true no less of my own occasional reportings. I would

hope, though, that selectors might find what Brett calls "serendipitous

juxtapositions of material."136 I hope, too, they would come across some

versatility, the variety of roles the diary can fulfil: confessional, apologia, a

135 I'm confident an entertaining selection could be made, although it would inevitably reflect the selector's interests.136 Simon Brett, The Faber Book of Diaries, Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1986, p.ix.

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venting of spleen and a colouring of reality, a bald record of facts and a

seesawing of emotions, a chronicle of the aspirations and the

disillusionments of time. There is no doubt that the diary provides an

experimental canvas for a writer's identity, for his personality. There is so

much of what Sallie Munt calls the "visiting self which leans into the

experience of others,"137 listens and tries to learn. This thread of "the

visiting self" goes back, right back to my first memories. For so much of

life involves listening and, as Gore Vidal once said in an interview or

perhaps it was in one of his historical novels, "one of life's most painful

tasks is listening."

Should my diary ever be published I trust readers will not find in its pages

the self-righteous, hectoring, frequently insufferable smugness that

characterizes so much religious verse and autobiography and is essentially

contrary to my temperament. For I am only too conscious that, as Tom

Dooley once wrote, so very many people in my life are "like children

growing up in an alcoholic household. They're hungry for trust. They want

to believe. They want the truth to be out there. But experience has made

137 Kimberly Chabot Davis, "An Ethnography of Political Identification," Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Vol. 8, No.1, 2003, pp. 3-11.

534

them too cynical to believe anything."138 And so, to some extent, as I write

these words, I have in my mind's eye, some of those wonderful people I have

known in my life, people whose cynicism and skepticism are as thick as a

brick. After a lifetime of hearing and experiencing broken promises and so

often confronting unbridgeable gaps between ideals they believe in,

practices they know will never be achieved and ideals never attained either

in themselves or in others--that abound in their families, their body politic

and in the places where they live, work and have their being--I am

disinclined to hector or moralize to myself or my fellow men. I am, rather,

more inclined to see both myself and my fellows as multiple, dynamic,

constantly shifting splinters and mosaics, not as immaculate, monolithic and

consistent wholes. We are all subjects in process somewhat like the many

other processes in life.

The great majority of people I have known in my life possess a high degree

of cynicism and skepticism. Their doubts and their incapacity to commit to

a belief system like the Baha’i Faith has complex and very real roots. Many

of these people have very positive and enthusiastic attitudes to a wide range

of personal activities like: gardening, maintaining their home and their

138 Editorial, Eclectica, August/September, 1998.

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family or improving their tennis, their boating or their artistic skills and they

were usually intensely pleasure-loving people. But to expect them to sign on

the dotted line, to make a commitment to a religious organization like the

Baha'i Faith, was a completely unrealistic expectation on my part. I was

soon to learn and to learn insensibly by degrees in the nineteen fifties and

sixties that my high expectations were in some respects quite unrealistic.

But my expectations became, by degrees, more realistic, more tempered,

adjusted to the realities of the western culture I lived, moved and had my

being in for half a century by the time I wrote these words. I’m not sure

how much this tempering will be reflected in my diary because by the time

my evangelistic proclivities were tempered I had been a Baha’i for thirty

years and my diary had just got off the ground.

So many seemed to get their meaning systems topped up by the print and

electronic media and its secular and spiritual humanism, by a belief in nature

or an enthusaism for one or a number of life’s activities. The Baha’i Faith

became just one more of literally dozens of claimants in a pluralistic

spiritual home whose throne was not to be given to any one group in western

society during my lifetime. My diary is, in some ways, an account of this

slow growth of a new religion and the background of cynicism, skepticism,

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indifference, inter alia, that I lived with for more than half a century. Given

the significance, the future potential, of this Faith I was associated with

during these years, perhaps I should try to leave the unruly fragments, the

literary remains, “the packets and sacks of paper covered with writing,”139

as Kierkegaard’s recently published journals were described, in a greater

degree of order. This is unlikely to happen to a greater extent than I have

already done. I tend to think that any attempt to fix or define the text of my

diary will, in the end, be disrupted in the end by the many alternative

possibilities and multifarious operations of what I have written anyway. My

diary offers no simple sequence of unembroidered disclosures, no simple set

of conventions of omniscient perspective with their definitive summations of

people and plot. It is more of what Woolf encouraged diarists to include:

“the waste paper basket, conduit pipe, cesspool, treasure house, larder and

pantry, drawing and dining room of my existence.”140 And it is less than this

literary prescription of Woolf’s. I am too conscious a writer to let such

freedoms predominate in my writing.

139 Niels J. Cappelorn, et al., Written Images: Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals, Notebooks, Sheets, Scraps and Slips of Paper, Princeton UP, Princeton, 2003.140 Susan Sellers, op.cit., p.117.

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Going back to the start of the Heroic Age, as I do in that first volume of my

journal, was an imaginative thrust, but whether it will yield much of an

autobiographical nature, yield much of value for this journal, this diary, only

time will tell. My idea, my plan, in my first volume, was to recreate the

years before 1984, the year I began making my first, my regular and

irregular, my periodic and episodic entries into the journal.141

I have added some photographs going as far back as 1908 and a brief sketch

of my family history going back to 1844. But there is little flesh on the

bones of this long era and its several epochs and stages: 1844-1921, 1921-

1944, 1944-1962 and 1962-1987. It is my hope that in the years of my late

adulthood and old age I may take advantage of this diary-form and add some

detail, some comments perhaps on the many moments in le monument

psychoanalytique of my life. But, as anyone following my poetry or my

autobiography will realise, much of what I want to say is being said in my

poetry and my narrative. And it may remain so. Immersed as I am in the

naturally spontaneous auto-narration of memory(as we all are), self makes

its home in this familiar place. I become, through my story, what I already

was.

141 Ron Price, Journal, Vol.1.1: 1971-1987. My first entry that I have on record is January 19th 1984.

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I seem to go through this process much more comprehensively, effectively

and efficiently, through genres other than the diary or journal. I both

discover and create myself more clearly, more usefully, in my poetry and

narrative, even in my letters and essays. If, as M. Brodie writes,

“autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has

become,”142 then perhaps the diary has its place. I fear, though, that my

diary is too philosophical for most people’s taste.

Here is a short essay I wrote introducing that retrospective part of my diary

from 1971 to 1987. I wrote this essay on two occasions, in 1996 and in

2000:

"The value to future historians of this resource, a lengthy manuscript divided

into many pieces, the episodes of a diary, from a pioneer during the second,

third and fourth epochs, is difficult to assess, caught-up as I am somewhere,

perhaps, near the middle of the experience.143 Only time will test the

usefulness of all that I have put together illustrating as it does the complex

relationship between a human being, his life-story and the society in which

142 F.M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 1945, Chapter 19.143 If I live to 95 to 100 or more then I am now in the middle of my pioneering venture.

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that story takes place. This is an intimate construction of a self that narrates

his self to himself and to others who will one day read the story, for this

story, this writing, is all I will leave behind, however real or artificial the text

is.144 In some ways, as Carolyn Heilbrun puts it, "we live our lives through

texts."145 An autobiography, it can be said, swallows up my life in a

monolithic statement. I try to counter this reality as best I can. I try to

provide a multi-vocal account. For in whatever way I write my story, there

is always so much more and so many other ways of telling the story. Perhaps

Cavarero is right when she says that "autobiography does not properly

respond to the question 'who am I?"146 It can’t, at best only in part. Perhaps I

should deal with this retrospective part of my diary through a more

novelistic, a more imaginatively creative genre. Works like John Updike’s

From the Journal of a Leper suggest to me that there may be more effective,

more telling ways of dealing with the retrospective part of this journal.147

Perhaps at some future time I may find these creative ways.

144 Roland Barthes says that a text does produce the essence of who someone is. If we are, in reality, souls, then this may be true.145 Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life, Norton press, NY, 1988, p.36.146 Adriana Cavarero, op.cit., p. 45.147 John Updike, Problems and Other Stories, AA Knopf, 1979. His short story in the form of a journal kept by a leper illustrates the mysterious nature of human perception.

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Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, there began to appear in the Baha’i

community, some quite reflective books on the experience of Baha’is in this

Formative Age. From my own experience, David Hofman’s George

Townshend(1983) or even The Priceless Pearl(1969) by Ruhiyyih Khanum

was a beginning point in this direction of commentary on the inner

landscape of people’s lives. A new era of introspective writing opened up

and I think my own contribution here will become but a small part of what I

am confident will be a burgeoning field of biography, autobiography, essay,

report, indeed, a host of printed matter that will threaten to swamp any

interested historian, reviewer or analyst in the future.

“Cyril Mango says in his introduction to Byzantium that “...these texts, 'the

fifty thousand manuscripts in libraries from the Byzantine period(324-1453

AD)', have a strangely opaque quality; and the more elegant their diction, the

more opaque they become. That is not to say they misinform us: on the

contrary, Byzantine historians and chronicles have a reasonably good record

for veracity. They give us the external husk of public events; we look in vain

for the underlying realities of life. If we turn to epistolography, a genre that

was assiduously cultivated throughout the existence of the Empire, we are

541

even more disappointed: instead of personal reflections, we are offered

erudite cliches. Only on rare occasions is the curtain raised.”148

“If there has been any tendency for this to occur in the world of Baha'i

manuscripts, the great mass of letters that all Baha'i communities have begun

to collect in their archives in the last several decades since the growth, the

initial flowering, of Baha'i administration in the years since the teaching

Plans began in 1937 and its burgeoning in the 1950s and 1960s---and,

indeed, this is a possibility---perhaps what is found in introspective works

like those cited above, autobiographies like this and diaries and collections

of letters like my own, will compensate, counter, any tendency to opacity.

With the decline in letter writing on the part of a good many of the people of

this age and with the tendency of many of the existing letters to be 'official'

and 'concerned with business and policy,' there is often little that has

'personal' value. The email, of course, has arisen in the last decade and it

seems to represent a renaissance in letter writing.

“Given the plethora of written communication from Baha’i institutions,

especially as these four epochs have advanced insensibly during my life,

148 Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1980, p.7.

542

communication which has what you might call 'an opaque, institutional,'

quality; given the disinclination of most of the people I have ever met in the

Cause to write the story of their experiences, what I write here may enrich

the archives for a future person examining the first century of the Formative

Age(1921-2021). We shall see. Certainly this new world religion became,

by my late adolescence and early adulthood, the central preoccupation of my

life. Through its paradigms and sifting mechanisms I explore the major

issues of life and, in this autobiography, I report what I have found through

what is my "letter to the world." For me, this diary, represents a very small

part of this letter. Much more is found, as I have said before, in my poetry

which is the quintessence of my autobiography.

“This section of my journal, 1971 to 1987, has been written in retrospect,

since I did not begin to keep a journal even on rare occasions until 1984,

when I was aged 39, some thirty years after beginning my Baha'i experience.

It is an exercise that has, as yet, not yielded much fruit. Perhaps the years

ahead will be more successful. In 1971 I arrived in Australia aged 27 and by

1984 I had been living north of Capricorn for eighteen months. During

those years I remarried, had one child, took care of two step-children,

enjoyed an interesting career as a teacher and lived in four states and

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territories of Australia; indeed, my autobiographical narrative and my poetry

tell a great deal about this period.

“The prospective side of these journals has received only the occasional visit

in recent years. And, if this pattern continues, it may be that this volume,

Volume 5, becomes, in the end, my last volume. This will certainly be the

case unless I feel moved to add more than I have in the last several years. I

am only too aware that, although I can produce what might be called an

autobiographical self, a self-portrait of sorts, in these pages, I am unable to

reproduce a real self which reflects a continuous inner truth and shares the

beauty and ugliness of life. There is some of what you might call my

attempt to record what the Puritans and Pietists could have called my

‘progress in piety.’ But this is not a popular sport in the public domain

given puritanism’s bad press in recent decades.

There is little, too, of those critical portraits of others which my grandfather

wrote in his autobiography. The viciousness of some of Woolf’s portraits,

her uninhibited evaluations, will not be found anywhere in my diary or my

autobiography or my letters for that matter. The weak-spots and foibles of

others do get a mention in passing but if readers are looking for stimulating

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reading of this kind, they will look in vain. If there is any tendency to some

ferocious depiction, it is usually modified, reversed, cooled off in subsequent

entries or communications. I think, too, as I gaze in retrospect at all the

years of written comment on others that what has been negative has been the

product of frustration, has rarely been an actual expression in my social

intercourse and, conditioned not to be openly critical of others, I desire to

give it a home in my diary expecting it will never be read in my lifetime.

There is little of that diversity of material that Leonardo da Vinci kept in his

celebrated diary. There is little of the recorded conversations and sexual

exploits that James Boswell recorded in his memorable diaries. I do not

preserve with any taste for this restricted form of exhibitionism, a chronicle

of my days and my little adventures. The meticulous care and enviable

precision that has characterized many thousands of diaries in the last two

centuries readers will not find here, except on rare occasions it seems. The

congenial habit of writing which enriched the modicum of leisure I enjoyed

for many years and which I now enjoy for great quantities of time I reserve

for the most part for my poetry. And, although, there is much about my life

here, I desire much of the time to eliminate myself, think about other things

545

and eradicate the “I” in favour of some all-embracing we with all of its life

and all of its art.

I have been faithful, assiduous, to my silent friend. But that friend is not the

diary, except on the rarest of rare occasions. Perhaps it is because I see the

exercise somewhat as Daphne DuMaurier once saw it: “self-indulgent.”149

Or perhaps I see it to some extent, as Quentin Crisp did, “an obituary in

serial form with the last instalment missing.”150 “Factors that are involved in

the growth of people are exceedingly elusive and I don't seem to be able to

deal with them as well in my diary as in poetry. It seems just too difficult to

make entries on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis. After more than

twenty-five years of thinking about it and making occasional entries, there is

little evidence that the diary is going to be a fertile field for this

autobiography. I have a good deal of company in this regard for many

people have a similar problem. And many others who are able to diarize

with regularity gather up endless piles of trivia, dreamy adolescent fantasies

and egotistical meanderings. For others, too, the diary was their

conversation, their society, their companion and their confidant. Perhaps

149 Daphne DuMaurier, Myself When Young in Creative Quotations, Internet Site.150 Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant, 1968, Chapter 29.

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mine may function in these ways at some future time in the later evening of

my life.

“A description of a life without secrets, and without privacy” wrote Boris

Pasternak, describing only the life that is on display in society in its

different forms like in some show window is "simply inconceivable,” he

concluded. For many the diary has been the target of affection, of sensual

infatuation; indeed, some seem to have virtually lived for their diary. For it

was here that the secrets of life were revealed in all their boldness and

honesty. The famous Russian diarist Marie Bashkirtseff was such a person.

This talented and ambitious woman lived in and for her diary. Perhaps this is

because the process begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

One diarist I came across in my reading and whose name I did not record in

my notes, “knew who she was only because she kept a diary.”

I am often alone now but not lonely. For me, privacy is essentially the life of

the mind. That is what is found in my diary, my journals, when time and the

inclination combine to allow me to make some entry. And there is so little

there, thusfar. The maelstrom of my life, it must be said, is found elsewhere:

not in my diary. And the maelstrom that I write of is largely an intellectual

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one, a life of ideas, of the wider world and of relationships. And I deal with

that in this book, this narrative, little by little, page after page--with a

moderate confessionalism, with a ruminative self that examines my spiritual

state and with the hope that others may some day find these words useful.

Confessionalism has become somewhat the rage in the last decade or two , if

not longer. This applies not only to autobiography in a written form. Tracey

Emin explores the influence and treatment of autobiography in her

confessional feature film Top Spot.151 She draws primarily on observations

by Michel Foucault, Susanna Egan and Anthony Giddens. There is an

inherent appeal to confessionalism in its many art forms. In some ways it

seems particularly relevant and certainly more and more common within

today’s society. My moderate confessionalism is right at home among the

more extreme forms and formats. My diary, what there is of it, gives me

and readers my life reshaped by recollections, omissions, distortions and

illusions. In many ways this work is not a true account, a true picture of my

151 Christine Fanthome, “The Influence and Treatment of Autobiography in Confessional Art: Observations on Tracey Emin’s Feature Film Top Spot,” Biography, Vol. 29, No. 1, Winter 2006, University of Hawaii Press, p.30.

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life. It is, rather, a true picture of what in a series of moments I feel impelled

to reveal and for these reasons of all materials available to biographers at a

future time, diaries and autobiographies could be considered the most

inaccurate. The famous writer Somerset Maugham said we would die of

embarrassment if every detail of our private life was held up for public

examination. I keep my most confessional of writing for my journal and not

for the main narrative autobiography and, if my executors think that the

publication of this journal would be useful to a future age, they are left free

to publish it. But for now such self-scutiny in written form is too scarry for

inclusion in a form that I would make public while I am alive. I would feel

too ashamed of myself.

The American author Evelyn Waugh advised diarists not to write their

opinions about life and art and especially about themselves. He suggested

that they just “give the relevant facts”152 and let readers make their own

judgements. Nor do I follow the advice of T.S. Eliot who once said of

Henry James that 'He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it.'153 If that

is the unlikely and ultimate compliment for an author, this work would not

152 Evelyn Waugh, “A Review of Stephen Spender’s Autobiography,” Tablet, London, May 5th, 1951. 153 "Interview with Joseph Epstein," Yale Review of Books, 2003.

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receive it. This narrative is soaked with ideas as is my diary thisfar.

“Readers will find disclosed in what I do write in my diary an active

emotional investment in sympathetic and silent introspection, in pent-up

feelings and unrealized wishes. They will find, I trust, a balance between

emotional excess and reserve, between effusions of hope and self-esteem

between self-critical comments and feelings of despair. I like to see in the

little diary that I have thusfar kept: frankness and familiarity, emotional

honesty but little sentimentality, a moderate vitality of feeling not repression

nor abandon. That’s how I’d like to see my various entries; I leave it to

readers to make their own particular assessments on what I have achieved

and written there.

“These were some of my thoughts in the early stages of Volumes 4 and

5(2000-2010) of my diary. I may come back to these thoughts, these words,

at a future time to make some more detailed comments as I expand on this

introduction to these fourth and fifth volumes, but for now these words will

suffice. The canvas on which I have sketched my self-portrait and my

portrait of these epochs has expanded with the years but that canvas has yet

to include the diary as a significant source of paint and colour to any

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significant extent and there is no invention, even the diary, for getting an

immediate and exact transcript of experience in any of its myriad forms.

“For most diarists, it would appear, the diary is not essentially a reflective

instrument. Like the Earl of Cadogan, most diarists regard day to day or

even periodic self-examination in the form of a diary as a waste of time. The

recapture of atmosphere or even evocative descriptions, purely topographical

reporting, are for most practitioners of this historic art not part of its

essential purpose. The diary is, for them and for most of its practitioners, a

place for matter-of-fact material to the point of banality. So, in the end, one

gets a corner of a person's life: weather, a practical grip on the essentials of

daily life. Sometimes the person revealed in the diary is the antithesis of the

person people meet in life.154 The result is that most diaries are really of

value only to the study of history and then the history of the quotidian,

everyday life. In life and in diaries there are many houses in which we

dwell: the house of food, family, landscape, flora and fauna, friendships,

jobs, hobbies, interests, inter alia. There are many central facts at the core of

people's diaries: pain and pleasure, failure and success, commitment and

dalliance, ability and inadequacy, crime and punishment. The French

154 The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan: 1938-1945, editor, David Dilks, G.P. Putnam's Sons, NY, 1972, pp.16-19.

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expression l'invention du quotidien: arts de faire can be translated into

English as ‘the practice of everyday life’ and this practice can be conveyed

in so many ways, sadly with little beyond the quotidian. The diary acts as a

filter, but what the writer puts through that filter can usually be measured in

micro-milli-grams; as befits the filter, one can put the big stuff in, but that’s

not generally its function.

Another central fact that appears from time to time in this narrative is my

meditation on how my surroundings have shaped my life and how I in turn

give form and meaning to them. I don’t think I do a particularly good job of

describing the human background around my life: family, friends, Baha’is,

teachers, academics, work colleagues, neighbours, students, childhood and

adolescent companions, important/significant people. At least I do not feel I

achieve the depth that these various individuals and groups deserve but, alas,

one can only do so much in 1000 pages.155 Some autobiographers deal with

this issue by focusing on the stages in a person’s life, the kind of person that

existed in each stage and the people in one’s circle at those times. I’ve

155 I have developed in the last two decades(1983-2005), in Section IV of my autobiography, a series of biographies on people I have known. At this stage they are essentially notes and are not integrated into the main text of my autobiography, Pioneering Over Four Epochs.

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written short character sketches of perhaps two dozen people and then

concluded that the process of mini-biography was not for me.

“Your average reader would just never get near a diary and, if he did, he'd

drop it soon enough after a boring tour of a few pages of dairy trivia. For a

diary is not a novel or a biography, a colourful magazine or a human interest

story in the daily paper. For the student of history, of course, the diary

represents a house of possibility: military diaries, travel diaries, fictional

diaries and intimate reminiscences by all sorts of people, reflect the inner

movement of a human life, successive cycles of self, spontaneous accounts

suited to the temperaments of their writers, spontaneous accounts that reflect

many a human temperament. For the psychoanalyst the diary can often tell

much about a person's inner life, their emotional investments, their

capacities, their talents and their weaknesses, their joys and tragedies, their

sexual bewilderments and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Sometimes our psychopathology is friendly to our creativity; the disturbance

is productive. This is often true of writers and it is certainly true of me. The

journey from psychopathology to creative writing, though, is a complex one

to describe and I shall not pursue that road here. The diary can give voice to

what is painful and what is taboo and I give it that voice occasionally

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dealing with: mental illness, sexual intimacies and the many sins of omission

and admission.

“Some diarists put their most intimate secrets into print and then, like

Evelyn Waugh, have to destroy the contents.156 Waugh refers to his 'quite

incredibly depraved' morality, his undergraduate homosexual experiences.

Occasionally I put some of my own 'intimate-dark-secrets' on paper; I insert

them in my diary; they occupy a few pages, a succinct account of, say, an

erotic core. The sense of shame, Baha'u'llah says, is confined to a few, but

Rosamund Dalziell in her book Shameful Autobiographies discusses how

shame shapes us all.157 I may not reveal many of my dark secrets and the few

I do reveal may lead others to a confrontation of shame in themselves.

Certainly to Dalziell shame is the driving force in many Australian

autobiographies. My own presentation and representation of shame in my

life is important; I would agree with Dalziell here. But, as she continues,

shame seeks concealment. It is central to problems of identity. The

autobiographical confrontation with shame can and does heal deep wounds,

as Dalziell argues. In my own case, I have found the exercise of writing this

156 Evelyn Waugh's Diaries, referred to in Evelyn Waugh, A Biography, Christopher Sykes, London, 1975, p.48.157 Rosamund Dalziell, Shameful Autobiographies: Shame in Contemporary Australian Autobiographies and Culture, Melbouren UP, 1999.

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narrative one of increased understanding, part of that general literary attitude

of 'how do I know what I think until I see what I've said.' This aphorism

applies as much to my dark secrets as it does to my general life.

“Hermann Kesten, in his introduction to the diaries of Thomas Mann,158

informs us that Mann's interest in himself was based on his desire to know

others better. His penetrating interest in himself helped him portray others

more convincingly. Many of his diaries he burned because he wanted to get

rid of that part of his past which was "a mass of secret, very secret, writings

lying around."159 Although secret, although intimate, he felt they were the

most human of what he had written, all-too-human. I have very little in this

category, although there are some things I have written about that I have

included in my diary in intimate detail and I might be advised to burn them

too. I do not feel the same way that Mann did about what to put into a diary.

Mann wrote that:

I love this process by which each passing day is captured, not only its

impressions, but also, at least by suggestion, its intellectual direction and

content as well, less for the purpose of rereading and remembering than for

158 ibid., p.vi.159 idem

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taking back, reviewing, maintaining awareness achieving perspective.160 “I

achieve these things through my poetry, although I do not attempt to capture

each day, as Mann does. If I felt the way Mann did there would be more in

this diary for a future age. Whatever degree of self-revelation and self-

description I want to achieve is, for me, best achieved as I keep saying

through poetry. Mann's extant diaries came to occupy a great bulk. The

banality, the indiscriminate agglomeration of everyday detail, the constant

repetition of physical and psychological detail and everyday happenings,

what for Mann was the photograph of a life, is impossible for me to record.

It simply seems pointless and, more importantly, it is largely painful to

record this quotidian reality. It is not that the daily life itself is painful, far

from it. But the process of writing about it for the consumption by a coterie

or a mass seems totally irrelevant. I am not trying to fill in a vaccuum of

loneliness or a great store of unoccupied hours. I do not draw on it for future

novels. I have been occupied for years with quite intense relationships and

the solitude of these years now in late middle age and late adulthood is a

blessing. I fill in the spaces of this blessing with writing about three large

and sweeping concepts: my religion, my society and myself. Although I

don’t feel as Virginia Woolf did about much of her diary, namely that it “is

160 idem

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vilely written,” I do feel that it hardly counts as writing. And, poor reader, it

will be a Herculean task wading through so much of what I have written in

diary or any other form.

“I want to live my life and I also want to write about it. Most people seem

to have little to no interest in writing in general and writing about their lives

in particular. The physical act of making the kind of recordings found in

most diaries is actually psychologically quite uncomfortable for me;

recording mundane material, however insightfully written down, is simply

beyond me, beyond my desires. The surface of life acts as a stimulus, but I

am more interested in what is below the surface. It is not the events of my

life that I find fascinating but their interpretation. My energetic

temperament, my varied activity over so many years serves as a backdrop

for the real life, the inner life. The circumstances of my life could have quite

easily ended in failure due to ill-health or unemployment; or in the kind of

career success that would have prevented me from ever putting pen to paper.

But through a mysterious and not-so-mysterious set of circumstances I was

able, by my mid-fifties, to devote a very substantial amount of my time to

intellectual and literary pursuits. In the years 1999 to 2006, for example, I

could work an average of six to ten hours a day, inspite of the hectic and

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hurrying pace of modern technological society. Often, especially in my

lower moments, I could not help agree with the sentiments of Franz Kafka

who wrote that: "In the fight between you and the world, bet on the

world."161 Without a group ethos, without agreement on a plan, a way, a set

of principles, there is no way the lone individual could do this alone, achieve

what I wanted the world to achieve. The diary, however private it is, in

many important ways is essentially a tribute to the group, to the community.

“Perhaps part of the reason for my discomfort in writing about the quotidian

is an attitude similar to that of the twentieth century writer and philosopher

H.L. Mencken who wrote that "in the end every man of my limited

capacities must be forgotten utterly. The best he can hope for is a transient

and temporary postponement of the inevitable."162 Like myself, Mencken

spent endless hours writing; writing absorbed him, as it does me. These

words of Mencken struck a chord of familiarity with my sensory equipment.

It is said that within two and, at the most, three generations, there will be no

one on earth who will even remember I have been here, unless I create

something or something is written down about me of some note. I feel the

161 Franz Kafka in "The Ethics of (Mis)representation", Larry Gross, Image Ethics, p.201.162 The Diary of H.L. Mencken, editor, Charles Fecher, A.A. Knopf, 1981 quoted in The Guardian, January 21st, 1980.

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way Mencken did about so much of what has been my life. Perhaps, too,

and much more basically, we simply cannot know our own life.

As Hannah Arendt might add, "only those of others,"163 only others, as I've

said above, may be able to tell our story and reveal our identity. That may be

true now but in the long haul, in a hundred years, unless something is written

down, the traces that will be left behind by others will be discouragingly

meagre. Baha'u'llah says we should look within and find Him standing

within us "mighty, powerful and self-subsisting." For the qualities, the

talents, the abilities, we possess are, indeed, a gift. They are all gifts. They

are not "us." They are "gifts." It is these gifts that we expose to the gaze of

others, to the world of appearances, the world of corporate materiality and

its perceptible concreteness, its sensed reality, its embodied uniqueness.

They are difficult for us to see; they seem hidden and when I go to write of

them in my diary they seem banal, empty, hardly visible. In the interactive

exhibition of life which Baha'is call 'the Baha'i community,' among other

names, we strive to know what is significantly unknowable, unmasterable,

invisible.

163 Hannah Arendt, op.cit., p.17.

559

Still there is the impulse to self-revelation, to action. For action is, as Hegel

once wrote, "the clearest illumination of the individual."164 The heightened

impulse to self-revelation can result in great deeds but the meaning of those

deeds is not in the story which follows. The story saves the deeds from

oblivion; it immortalizes them. For actions are fragile things: they appear,

are consumed and are gone. But the poet and the historian save them,

interlace them, recount what has happened in the shared space of

appearances and, when I am gone, this story will be left. But little of it will

be in this diary. This protagonist will be found elsewhere. The protagonist of

this narrated story, this agent of a life of action, leaves behind his story. My

story is not one of wild animation or of an especially vital energy. My

energy is on the whole quietly expressed. There is no bold and vivid dance

to lift the reader into a world of fame and celebrity. But the reality, the

origin, of the story is the thought and the action that took place in this world

of appearances. The story is a series of events not a text, not words on

paper.165 It is an irrefutable aspect of my life not so much in terms of a

guarantee of a post mortem fame, but in terms of something unrepeatably

unique.

164 Hegel quoted in Cavarero, op.cit., p.22.165 Adriana Cavarero, "The Paradox of Ulysses," Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, Routledge, NY, 2000, pp. 17-31.

560

“The American poet William Carlos Williams put the transient

insignificance of this life more succinctly in the foreword to his

autobiography:

"Nine-tenths of our lives is well forgotten in the living. Of the part that is

remembered, the most had better not be told; it would interest no one, or at

least would not contribute to the story of what we ourselves have been. A

thin thread of narrative remains, a few hundred pages, about which clusters,

like rock candy, the interests upon which the general reader will spend a few

hours. The hidden core of my life will not be easily deciphered."166

So...here is a 1000 pages of a thin thread of narrative, my rock-candy.

“I do not assume there is going to be a coterie of souls hanging onto my very

words, those words about my life which have aspects which are difficult to

decipher. But if a coterie does arise to trumpet this Cause and my words, if

that does happen and my words are of benefit to people at a future time, that

is well and good. If not, let these words become dust and ashes. Within

two, or is it three, generations anyone who actually knew me will have died.

166 William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, MacGibbon and Kerr, 1948, Foreword.

561

This is true of all of us, as I have indicated before. The vast majority of

humankind have been nameless and traceless and it appears they will remain

so. Time will tell if these words of mine will live on, if the vicissitudes of

my odyssey in this external world or the battles of my inner consciousness

will find any degree of immortality.

“Virginia Woolf describes the essays about self written by the philosopher

Montaigne. His diary was the essay. He told the truth about himself, and

invented and reinvented himself in a series of essays. This was in about

1580. In the end, writes Woolf, "his book was himself."167 For me, my book

is my poetry and to a lesser extent my essays, my interviews, my diary or

journal, my letters, my efforts at writing a novel, my notes on various

subjects and finally my autobiographical narrative. My self is articulated in

and by historical particulars which this diary seems unable to provide. The

forensics of remembrance are part of what has become a bewildering

quantity of autobiographical material and the diary is only a small part of

that material. I kept no diary, except a small retrospective edition as I

indicated above, until I was in my forties. What happened to me and my

society in the years 1944 to 1984 or to 2006, then, can best be found in other

167 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol.3, The Hogarth Press, London, 1967, p.19.

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genres of history and literature, psychology and sociology, the print and

electronic media, not in any diary for these years, except for a few miniscule

and sometimes not-so-miniscule entries.

Readers may not find much of the quotidian here, but they will find pieces of

my political and social philosophy, my religious views and some of my

sociological and psychological orientations. There may be none of the

partisan political, party programs, sectarian and factional interests and their

clamorous and contending interests, but there is much of the political in the

sense described by that historian of ideas Michael Oakeshott. "The whole

impetus of the enterprise" of political philosophy, Oakeshott stated in his

introduction to a 1947 edition of Hobbes' Leviathan:

"....is the perception that what really exists is a single world of ideas, which

comes to us divided by the abstracting forces of circumstance; is the

perception that our political ideas and what we may call the rest of our ideas

are not in fact two independent worlds, and that though they may come to us

as separate text and context, the meaning lies, as it always must lie, in a

unity in which the separate existence of text and context is resolved."168

168 Michael Oakshott in Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, Oxford, 1947, p.ix.

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As an example of this unity of two separate worlds let me comment on my

everyday walk, a walk I have done everyday of thirty to forty-five minutes

for at least the last decade. I can not remember when I began the daily habit,

although I can recall walking with my mother after doing my homework in

high school as far back as 1962 when this pioneering life began. Each of the

everyday activities on which I could focus in detail, but primarily walking,

talking, and reading/writing the three activities that occupy me more than

any other in these years of my retirement, can be seen as metaphorically

related to the other two. Walking is a mode of reading the spatial

environment. It is a meditative-prayerful state. Reading is a mode of

journeying. I travel through history, throughout the globe and into the future.

Speaking involves narrativisation which links space together in diferent

ways than walking or reading.

These metaphorical links are not merely fortuitous. In fact it is this

inherently metaphorical nature of physical reality that helps these activities

contribute to a sense of myself as a unfied being. These activities, like

metaphor itself, cut across established boundaries and hierarchies in daily

life. They explain the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. For metaphor is a

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tool of intelligence, perhaps its most important tool.169 In so doing it helps

us see this phenomenal world, not as an end in itself, but as a means of

seeing the unity in our experience and gaining access to the spiritual realm.

Everyday life thus comes to possess a creative potential and in the mobility

of metaphor itself everyday practices become inventive.170

Such is some of my own political philosophy expressed through the mouth

of a prominent twentieth century thinker. I juxtapose this snippet of

philosophy with some of my experiences as a teacher from the 1970s to

1990s. Many of my male students when teaching in high schools and in

post-secondary colleges were fascinated by motor-bikes and the outlaw biker

motor cycle movies, beginning with the Wild One in 1953171 and ending in

the early 1970s, chopper-operas as one reviewer called them. Such media

material may provide these students, these bikie-enthusiasts with a greater

connection with the fifties and sixties than reading this autobiography and

going with me on the several backward glances I take at these years. If it is

history and general and detailed social comment on my early decades in

169 Louis Simpson, An Introduction To Poetry, St, Martin’s, NY, 1967, p.6.170 Michael Sheringham, "Michel de Certeau: The Logic of Everyday Practices." XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics 7.1 (2000): pp.28-43. 171 Andrew Syder, "Ripped from Today's Headlines: The Outlaw Biker Movie Cycle," Scope: On-Line Journal of Film Studies, 2002.

565

society(say 1944-1964) that readers want they are probably best advised to

go elsewhere. I provide some, but not enough to satisfy and appease the

hunger. The potential of the diary, too, at least for me, I just have not been

able to exploit.

“I write to transport myself, to approach the ineffable and there, on the rarest

occasions, I tremble and cry. There is a happiness which is paradisiacal,

silent and just about impossible to share.172 I have yet to come close to this

sort of experience while making entries in my diary. Sometimes a diary or

journal can help describe the spiritual path. Even with all the guidance and

illumination of a particular spiritual path, the process, the factors involved in

personal growth seem exceedingly elusive. After more than forty years as a

Baha’i and a Baha'i on the journey of a pioneer I am faced with an intangible

growth process that has gone on over the years. Active germination of this

process often takes place, so the Baha’i writings emphasize, at the low end

of a seemingly negative phase of a psychological cycle, that is, during

calamities and crises: the tests.

172 Wendy Weiner and George Rosenwald, "A Moment's Monument: The Psychology of Keeping a Diary," The Narrative Study of Lives, R. Josselson and A. Lieblich, editors, Sage Pub. Inc., London, 1993, p.117.

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“This autobiography is an attempt to establish a personal relation with this

elusive phenomenon of growth, this subtle movement and the changes in my

life. It is an attempt to establish an instrument capable of drawing together

the contents of my life and to compress then into a manageable space. This

may allow me, hopefully, to put the change process, the quality of

movement, of my life under the microscope. It is the closest I can get, with

the other several genres of my writing, to intimate documentation of a full

life, or nearly full, within the protective and nurturing wings of this new

world religion.173

Readers will get neither a bittersweet tale of a charmed lamplit past, nor a

narrative that is a dark figure of loss, fragmentation and loneliness. Rather,

they will get a poem revised and revised and revised. They will also get a

diary sketchy and limited. They will get thousands of letters, ten attempts at

a novel, perhaps 300 essays and over 300 binders and files of notes on

unnumbered topics. Some, if not much, of this material was written hastily;

some of it is superficial. The haste and the superficiality is partly due to the

vast quantities of print that became available during these epochs and the

173 With thanks to Ira Progoff, The Intensive Journal Process as an Instrument for Life, from notes gathered for a Creative Writing course I offered to Evening Classes in the 1990s at Thornlie Campus, SEMC.

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virtual impossibility of achieving what 'Abdu'l-Baha called "the necessary

qualification of comprehensive knowledge."174 The sheer speed of the age

and its postmodern quality, a quality and a word which came into western

vocabulary for the first time in the 1950s and 1960s, define speed and

superficiality as inevitable features of life in the years of this pioneering

venture.175 But whatever the conception of this work, it is conceived in

terms of an imaginative migration of the spirit, a migration that tries to

capture half a century of experience with an emerging new religion.

“This autobiographical work is indeed an instrument capable of mirroring

the inner process of the psyche. A diary can be even more helpful in this

direction, but it would appear not to be helpful yet as I approach the years of

late adulthood. The diary is loose and unstructured, spontaneous and a

reflection of my particular temperament. It reflects the inner movement of

life in ways not-yet-suited to my particular ways of writing; hence the

absense of any significant degree of continuity and structure. Hence, too,

174 'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p. 36.175 The literature on post-modernism is massive and it is quite impossible for me to attempt even a cursory overview of this view of life. Various writers see the word first appearing at various times. The earliest I have seen is 1917 which, if we could agree on this date, would make all of the years since 'Abdu'l-Baha's Tablets of the Divine Plan years of post-modernism.

568

there is little of it available to readers.176 But autobiography in the wider

sense of life-writing, with continuity and structure, readers will find here

aplenty.

"The road is before us!" Walt Whitman proclaims in “Song of the Open

Road,” asking us to drop everything in an endless journey on: "The long

brown path before (us) leading wherever (we) choose.” Whitman’s poem, in

fact, all of his work establishes the model for an American attitude toward

life’s journey. It is an attitude that is not oriented around an end to be gained,

but a never-ending movement, expansive, restless, and difficult. It was an

attitude I observed a great deal in the decades of this study. My life echoed

some of this attitude raising to a certain extent the specter of endless

autobiography but, for the most part, my work was goal directed and

expansive only within a context. Although I felt I could go on refining this

work of autobiography, I also felt I could not keep writing endlessly beyond

the 1000 pages that it had become.

176 This autobiography contains little of my diary or journal. I have five volumes of diary in my study and perhaps, one day, these volumes will be incorporated into this autobiography.

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"In Paul Bowles' 1949 novel, The Sheltering Sky, considered by some to be

one of the great accomplishments in fiction of the first years of my life, is a

novel that transfixes readers with its presentation of a bleak landscape and

the gradual swallowing of its characters into death and cultural strangeness.

Bowles chose the title Without Stopping for his autobiography. It’s a title

that indicates that he never arrives and never returns and that he engages in a

continuous passage. He seems to echo his maternal grandfather who “never

slept twice in the same town” during his own years of travel. Bowles

scarcely seems to pause, though those pauses can be months, even years,

long. That continuous passage, a characteristic he largely shares with other

writers like Henry Miller, allows us to see the three characteristics of

passage: danger, trance, and failure, in all of his travel. Incessant movement

through incessant dangers, in a dream-like trance, and becoming lost to the

activities of home are the themes of much of Bowles’ writing.

"Bowles’ actual method of composing is one that literary historians can

better discuss. Like most autobiographers Bowles himself is uninterested in

the factual; his autobiography is an autobiogony, a creation of the self. What

he creates is a self who writes in a manner essentially connected to passage,

without stopping. He must write without reference points, without the

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conscious, by allowing random events to hold the pen and by opening the

doors of the unconscious by whatever means he can including cananabis.

Only the unconscious can write about death, he says; in fact, in passage,

even a passage lasting decades, any activity must be a death, a rupturing of

the usual, the accomplished, a rupturing of home. The unconscious can write

about death because the unconscious is death.177 While I give much more

importance to the conscious, the rational faculty, I try to open doors of

perception by means of prayer, meditation, study and the cultural

attainments of the mind. There has also been for years the feeling of no

stopping, except of course, for sleep which deeply beguiles with its

twinklings of oblivion and in those meditative moments. There is also the

feeling of creating myself, of autobiogony.

“My autobiography is, for me, a single instrument, a single form, far from

succinct, spread over several genres, and it reconstructs the range and

movement of my life, aspects of the religion I have believed in and features

of the society I have lived in. It is encompassing and open-ended. My

version of reality is conveyed here among these millions of words.

177 Frederick J. Ruf, "The Ride of Passage: The Pursuit of Danger, Trance, and Failure in Mark Twain, Paul Bowles, and Us," Journal of CRT, Vol.1 No.2.

571

Generally my work is more therapeutic than confessional. My silent past is

recreated. I reenact the drama of my life. I have a springboard to dive into

the past and the rest of my life. I reread my past and create, in subtle and

difficult to define ways, my future. But, thusfar, I seem to achieve these

goals more happily through poetry than diary. I insert much of what I have

to say at a juncture of history and psychology, history and memory,

psychohistory and autobiography.178 Much, if not most, of history I do not

include. History presents evidence of great change and discovery, but it also

presents us, as Alexander Herzen noted, with “the autobiography of a

madman.”179 So it appears from some perspectives. To Nietzsche society

presented him, not with madmen, but with “cultivated philistines.” To

Flaubert the world gave him and us a vulgar bourgeoisie. History presents to

others the expectation of apocalypse. There are many large-scale

interpretations of the past.

Some diarists, like Evelyn Waugh, have a taste for exaggeration and

fantasy.180 Indeed, exaggeration appears to be a major problem in

autobiography generally. Perhaps this is because, as Oscar Wilde once

178 There are a number of scholarly journals that emphasize these same junctures. History and Memory is one such journal.179 Alexander Herzen, Dr. Krupov, Creative Quotations, Internet.180 Evelyn Waugh's Diaries, Preface, 1976.

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wrote: "Where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is

no love there is no understanding. It is only about things that hold interest

for a person, that they can give a really unbiased opinion; and this is no

doubt the reason why that unbiased opinion is always valueless."181 I think

Wilde is a little over the top here, but his words exhibit a clever turn of

phrase containing some truth.

The diarist, on considering publication, must cut out libellous or offensive

passages. There is a need to protect the privacy and reputation of the diarist.

No future publisher will have that problem with the little there is in my diary

entries. If excisions are to be made it will be to protect readers from

boredom. A cautious abbreviation here and there, the removal of phrases and

sentences, I would think, would be a wise editorial move. I have tried to

avoid ample and excessive accounts of various activities in my diary entries.

Repetition has been limited but is, inevitably, unavoidable. Any records of

social engagements, indeed, anything of a trivial nature that would weary a

reader, or myself, in conveying the anecdote, is best left out and, for the

most part, this is what I do. Ultimately, autobiography, as Samuel Goldwyn

181Oscar Wilde in Robin Markowitz, "Reconstructing Michael Jackson:Close Readings of pop-works," Stranger in a Strange Land: Internet Site, April 2004.

573

once said, is best written after one is dead.182 I have taken Goldwyn’s advice

here and kept most of my diary for posthumous publication, if published at

all down the future’s long road.

Nietzsche once said that three anecdotes were enough to describe a man

perfectly, to illustrate the truth of a person's life, especially those who love

privacy and solitude.183 If this were true then certainly this diary will reveal

three anecdotes, but I am inclined to think that much more is required and,

even then, the entity, the man, remains somewhat elusive. An autobiography

like this needs to have shape. Life, it is often said, has none. If this is true

then it explains the problems autobiographers have in giving it shape, in

presenting themselves.

“One of the reasons that my narrative autobiography insensibly was replaced

by poetic autobiography after 1993--and then integrated into that narrative--

was that, as Maurice Blanchot writes, “the phenomenon of recall, the

metamorphosis it heralds in the transmutation of the past into the present,

the impression that a door has just opened onto a peculiar realm of the

182 Samuel Goldwyn in Arthur Marx, Goldwyn: The Man Behind the Myth, 1976, Prologue.183 Leopold Duran, Graham Greene: Friend and Brother, Harper Collins, London, 1994, p.xiii.

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imagination” was a more frequent occurrence when I wrote poetry. Writing

poetry, among other things, revived such moments of the past and was a

response to a very basic inspiration. The imagination takes possession of

what is basic in my life during the act of writing poetry. Truth palpitates, at

least occasionally, at these moments of writing. These rare moments, which

have been occurring on average once or twice a day for the last ten years, are

secret centres where time is reborn from its own ashes in mysterious flashes

of luminosity and timelessness, freed from its own tyranny. But these

occurrences are not confined to the experience of that day and so 'diary'

seems an inappropriate vehicle for these processes I have just described.184

These occurrences are also not so much determinants of my present

memory, although one can't deny past events, as it is my adult personality

that determines what I remember and how; it is also social organization and

interpersonal context which gives a "persistent framework into which all

detailed recall must fit."185 Maurice Halbwachs argues all our memories are

collective except dreams and, he concludes, "we are never alone."186

184 With thanks to 1Maurice Blanchot, The Siren’s Song: Selected Essays, Harvester Press, Brighton, 1982, pp.69-78.185 F.C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1932.186 Maurice Halbwachs(1877-1945). 1925, quoted in Kihlstrom, op.cit.

575

“The reimagining, the reimaging of my past and the world's, of at least some

elements of it and the present--the act of autobiography--is expressed for me

at the threshold of various genres. One of the essential difficulties writers,

and especially autobiographers, have is that they are several people, several

personalities, in one. There are the developmental personalities, the people

they are at different stages of their life. There are the personalities they are

as a result of the several roles they have at any one time in their lives. In

addition, there are the opinions that others have of them and these often

range from the sublime to the ridiculous. The autobiographer is caught at

the centre of a web of contradictory voices. It is impossible to avoid some

confusion in this jungle of options, variations and differences. In the midst

of this confusion is found my voice, an indulgent, digressive first-person

voice which follows the lure of my thoughts and meditations among the

currents, pools and eddies of fact and metaphor. I'm sure some readers will

occasionally want to tap me on the shoulder and say, "hey, man, get on with

the story."

Some autobiographers, some diarists, write a description of the constant war

they fight with these conflicting selves.187 My own life has sometimes been

187 Samuel Pepys is a good example. See Stephen Coote, Samuel Pepys: A Life, Hodder.

576

a war, sometimes a battle, sometimes a game, sometimes a laugh, sometimes

a search for pleasure, for meaning, for entertainment. In some ways the

fight, the inner war is, as Robert Owen once wrote, dulce et decorum est. In

other ways it possesses a fatigue that aches one's very bones. The poet

William Blake puts this fight in a context which has both a degree of

romance and a degree of truth and so I quote it here:

I will not cease from Mental Fight

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand

'Til we have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land.

And, I should add, "In Australia's dry dog biscuit of a land" and "In Canada's

frozen wastes and icy stands." The infusion of the practical as a result of

years of being a classroom teacher, of attending Assembly meetings dealing

as they always do with people in everyday situations, of being in a marriage

and raising children all tend to give a texture of reality to what I write, if not

to my readers at least to myself. This immersion in the practical made me

quite conscious that I could never claim to be a great man or an outstanding

citizen(whoever could make such a claim, anyway?), but it just might help to

577

make what I write significant. For what I write about is within the context

of a Movement with a great future. Any greatness I achieve will be due to

my association with this Movement. But I shall have to leave this decision,

the relevance of what I write, to history. I shall never know. It seems

pretentious to even consider the question.

The process and the content that the autobiographer and especially the diarist

is engaged in is, as I have often emphasized above, often trivial, sometimes

disturbing, part of an apocalyptic age and I think one of the greatest possible

consciousness-altering activities available. But this activity is not, at least for

me, part of my writing in my diary.188 Reminiscing takes a richer form, for

me, elsewhere. Autobiographical introspection finds a happier, deeper, home

in other places. If great memoirs are the result of style, in the main, readers

must look elsewhere. But wherever one looks, like Samuel Johnson, my

writings teem with self-references, with efforts to be acquainted with myself,

with some moral analysis of my psychological predicaments, with what one

could call my spiritual autobiography.189

188 Thanks to Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, editor, P.A. Sitney, Station Hill Press, 1981, p.32.189 Richard Schwartz, op.cit., p.79.

578

Autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in an intricate

process of self-discovery and self-creation. The self at the centre of all

autobiographical narrative is the product of a partly fictive structure and

process. It is shaped by the needs of the present: memory and imagination

come to these needs like a bee to a honey pot. For this reason, in part, an

autobiographer like Ghandi saw a hollowness in his pretensions. For this

reason, too, autobiographers spar with their readers and potential judges, as

Erikson notes, “at least between the lines.” Thusfar my sparing is largely on

pages outside my diary.190 The changes, surprises and shifting ground of life

and self, which spar with an inner man and an outer world, will be found in a

thousand other places.

“The fate of ideas living against the grain,” writes William Carlos Williams

“have always held me breathless.” So wrote Williams at the age of sixty-

eight after what he called “a more or less uneventful existence.” So much of

the day to day scene falls into this uneventful category; although it may be

eventful in the daily run of life it is difficult to see the event and write about

it as an event of some significance, some note, something worthy of

190 Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention, Princeton UP, 1985, p.3; and 2 Erik Erikson, On the Nature of Psycho-Historical Evidence: Explorations in Psycho-History, R.J. Lefton, Simon and Schuster, 1974, p.54.

579

recording for posterity. What is meaningful is so often an inner event, an

inner journey. The external voyage is usually so common as to end in a

tedious repetition should the writer decide to put the event on paper. "I can't

seem to get beyond a somewhat superficial discussion of what's going on," is

a common complaint.191 And it is a complaint that I have voiced as well,

especially in the first twenty years of this autobiographical exercise. But,

once the writer gets behind and beyond the literal and into the figurative

aspects of the external voyage, of voyaging, what Philip Edwards calls "The

Metaphorical Voyage,"192 a new, a whole, world opens. This 'voyage

metaphor' can be seen in the writings of Baha'u'llah all the way back to

Homer in the western intellectual tradition.

As a pioneer of a new idea, a new message, I would like to think that I have

made some small contribution to the ever-advancing civilization that is

enshrined in the Baha’i conception and philosophy of history. I would like to

think, on balance, too, that there has been a personal accretion of virtue but

that is difficult to quantify and evaluate. Something, though, has grown in

the soil of my heart and mind and I see it in what I write on the page. It

191 "The Veech Journal Pages: Writing a Diary as a Journal," The History of Journals, Internet, 2001.192 Philp Edwards, Sea-Mark: The Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton, Liverpool UP, 1997.

580

could be discussed in my diary, but I seem to prefer poetry for this

discussion. There is a great virtue in both solitude and in the community

activity of helping to lay the foundations of this new Order of Baha’u’llah.

The relationship between this solitude, this isolation, this contribution to the

new Order and “the days of blissful joy” off in some future place and which

Baha'u'llah describes as pertaining to the afterlife are impossible to

describe.193

There is here, though, in this autobiography what the Australian writer

Donald Horne says autobiography can do quite well: handle the complex

development of a particular person's intellectual ideas. I think my diary helps

a little here toward that end.194 And the end, in this regard, is achieved via a

circuitous route, unsystematically, in an enigmatic process that is difficult

even for this author to understand.

Another possibly useful embellishment to this autobiography are the some

300 notebooks: files, arch-lever and two-ring binders, on such subjects as

ancient history, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, media studies,

193 Thanks to the poet William Carlos Williams in the forward to his Autobiography(MacGibbon and Kee, 1948).194 Donald Horne, "Life Lines," The Australian Review of Books, May 15 1998, p.10.

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personal writing, post-graduate studies, literature, poetry, Baha’i files,

writing, autobiography and biography, miscellaneous, letters, et cetera. I

can’t imagine anyone keeping this material, although it provides insights

into my spiritual pilgrimage and into my reading, an activity which has

given many of my days a solidity and value that was invaluable. It is a type

of diary, a type of academic journal. I will not try to summarize this vast

collection of material here but, when and if this autobiography comes to see

the light of day, I would like to emphasize that the absence of this body of

notebooks, if absent it becomes, would be a loss in the overall understanding

of a life, my life. There is simply too much of this type of material to keep

in the event of my demise given that I possess niether name, nor fame nor

rank but, perhaps a list of the titles of the files and binders would be useful:

BOOKLETS/FILES THAT WERE USED AFTER RETIRING IN 1999

AGE 55:

The booklets listed below contain information of value to any

comprehensive autobiographical or biographical study. Of the nearly 100

booklets/files currently on my shelves the ones listed below were not used in

my professional teaching up to 1999. Other files, now long thrown or given

582

away, were essentially notes I used and lecture resources for in-class work

until I retired in 1999. These 'other' files are listed under 'subjects taught' in

my resume in section 24(v) of my website.

Another category of 'other' files were academic courses I taught before 1999

and which continued to be part of my studies after retiring in 1999. History,

sociology, literature, media studies, philosophy, psychology, anthropology

and religion, inter alia, occupied about 50 of my 'other' files.

1. Notes/Quotes: Vol.A and Vol. B

2. Notebook: 1 and 2: Autobiography/Journal

And Letter Writing

3. Published(2 vols) and Unpublished(2 vols) Writing

4. Conferences Booklet

5. Roger White: Essays/Book: 6 volumes

6. Sing Alongs

7. Novels/Sci Fi: Vol.1-3(1983-2001)

8. Journal: 7 Volumes(2 of which are photos)

9. Dreams

10. Baha’i Model

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11. Publishers: Vol.1-6

12. Pioneering Over Four Epochs(2nd edition) 1 copies;(1st edition)-1

copy.

13. Pioneering Over Three Epochs: original set of notes

14. Individuals:Biography

15. Epic

16. Letters: 21 volumes

17. Necrology: Recent Reading

18. 27 brown A3 size-files on 27 topics

19. Mother

20. Baha’i History

21. A.J. Cornfield's Story

22. Emails: Family and M. Knopf

23. Baha'i Resources, Talks, etc.

24. Published Articles: Newspapers

25. Essays: For Loan

26. Website/Internet/Computer File

27. Universal House of Justice Letters: 3 Volumes

28. ABS Newsletters

29. Book Ordering

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30. George Town School for Seniors: 3 volumes

31. Post-Graduate Studies: 5 Volumes

32. Outback/NT Baha'i History: Returned to the NT

Baha'i Council

Ron Price 20 January 2003

The private record of notes taken, materials gathered and written in personal

and scholarly mills which often grind exceedingly small, with their apparent

concern with intellectual minutiae, over four decades and for my own

immediate purposes reveal many things. They show the workings of my

mind, for what that may be worth and for me, it is worth much. They show

me in my private workshop. For those who are interested they show

someone who became over the epochs a compulsive note taker, note maker

and preserver. I will leave it to posterity to analyse further the voluminous

contents of these notes, should posterity ever desire to do so.195

195 The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, editor, Richard H. Taylor, MacMillan Press Ltd., London, 1978, p.xiii. The 'notebooks' of various writers, like Hardy, have in the last half century been subjected to an interesting commentary. Readers will also find a greater elaboration of my notebooks in another rplace in this autobiography.

585

Compartmentalizing or dissociating one's various online identities can be an

efficient, focused way to manage the multiplicities of selfhood. William

James, one of the greatest of American psychologists, talked about how the

normal mind operates in a "field" of consciousness in which one's awareness

shifts among different hot spots of ideas, memories, and feelings. Role

theory in social psychology speaks about how a successful life is an efficient

juggling of the various tasks and positions we accumulate and develop from

childhood through adulthood. Cyberspace living is yet another manifestation

of this shifting, juggling manoeuvre. It gives people the opportunity to focus

on and develop a particular aspect of who they are. It may even give people

the chance to express and explore facets of their identity that they do not

express in their face-to-face world. Most people in my interpersonal world

never see the much more intellectual, serious, spiritually inclined person that

I exhibit on the Internet at my website. In some ways the Internet work is

like a diary revealing a private area for the most part not discussed with

others. It is a rich world with its excitements, its pleasures, its enhancements

and its dangers to a spiritual life as well.196

196 John Suler, "Identity Management in Cyberspace,"1996, Internet, 31 December 2002.

586

Those who read my diary, indeed any part of this autobiography, will know

of a man who is only partly seen in the outer world by his colleagues and

friends. It is curious, I find, but many relationships seem to have little to

gain from face-to-face meetings.197 Many diaries seem to benefit little from

the exploration of a writer's mind and soul. Kafka's diary, writes Heinz

Palitzer, "neglected the reality around him."198 For him the weather, who did

what and when were essentially trivia. Dostoevski's diary is 1200 pages long

and "far from recording daily events, either in the author's life or in that of

his society, it mostly consists of sustained sermons and harangues."199 So,

perhaps there is hope for my diary yet!

Albert Stone, in his introduction to The American Autobiography: A

Collection of Critical Essays, says that autobiography is the most democratic

province in the republic of letters. It mirrors and creates the social, historical

and aesthetic varieties of our national experience and increasingly, it seems

to me, our international experience. It is the artistic effort to rescue the self

197 Kevin Hart, "Shared Silence," The Australian Review of Books, Undated Reviews of Jacques Derrida, "Politics of Friendship" and Maurice Blanchot, "Friendship." 198 Heinz Palitzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox, Cornell UP, NY, 1962, p.29.199 Ronald Hingley, Dostoevski: His Life and Work, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY, 1978, pp.172-3.

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from time’s flux and fix it in words forever. It is the history of changing

self-concepts. It aims to recreate the self in-its-world by patterning the past

into a present symbolic and literary, historical and sociological, truth. The

result is that readers can find out how people, events, things, institutions,

ideas, emotions and relationships have become meaningful to a single mind

as it uses language to pattern the past. After writing 80,000 words of my

own autobiography, I new I had conveyed a core of the facticity of my life,

but not the substance of my own transformation. Some of this transformation

I am proud of and some aspects of my development have clearly been in a

negative direction or, at least, manifested in the reality of my life the

potential for the negative that was there right at the start.200 Although the

diary can reveal much of this process I have revealed much more of this in

other genres of my work. The diary is yet to be, for me, a deft quotient.

In this reconstruction, review, analysis, of my life, the tension that can exist

between ‘the paralysis of fact’ and ‘the heightening of life’ in that

borderland self between fact and fiction, is largely absent. I have not seized

the fleeting moment as diarists do in their writing and imprisoned my

writing in the day to day facts of my life. I have seized it in a different

200 Albert Stone, editor, The American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1981, pp.2-8.

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sense, a sense that a perusal of my poetry will reveal. I have made a

continuing effort over many years “to integrate the theory and practice of my

own life in a manner that facilitates constructive continuance,” as we all do

in our own haphazard ways. I have found that my life story is incomplete

and episodic and, therefore, I have turned to poetry to provide experiential

self-continuity. This poetry provides the remobilization of memory in the

service of the living more effectively, for me, than the diary or journal. It

also provides freshness of surface and depth of retention in the process of

recall.201

There is some inner judge to which we must submit and whether we

manifest this submission in diary or in poetry matters not. "Nor is there

anything sweeter than the chime" writes Montaigne, "of his approval."202

Montaigne wanted to conceal nothing or pretend nothing about himself. I

find, in life and in writing, I can only say certain things. The guidance of the

Baha'i writings, namely, that "we are forbidden to confess to any person"

operates as a principle of living--and writing. I am not interested in

201 Wendy J. Weiner and George C. Rosenwald, “A Moment’s Monument: The Psychology of Keeping a Diary”, in The Narrative Study of Lives, editors, R. Josselson and A. Lieblich, Sage Publications, London, 1993, p.56.202 Virginia Woolf, op.cit.,p.23.

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commenting on my faeces as Montaigne was in his Essays or expatiating, as

so many autobiographers and biographers do, on the various and several

activities of my penis or someone's vagina over the last half century after I

discovered in 1965 at the age of 21 that these organs were a source of an

immensely stimulating pleasure in addition to their normal anatomical

functioning. Unlike Montaigne I do some concealing but, like Dylan

Thomas, I reveal some of this secret domain, although I can't compete with

Thomas' twenty year orgy of drunkenness and lechery and his particular

eccentricities like the occasion when he got his penis stuck in a two-ounce

honey pot.203 But, then, I don't think I'm quite the complex and disagreeable

figure that Thomas seemed to be and which Andrew Lycett's new biography

describes.204 Over a lifetime there are so many unusual, strange and unique

events that occur to other parts of the anatomy as well, giving the genitals a

bit of a run for their money, but I can't see any virtue in angling these sort of

details into this story as a means of either entertainment or a way of

illuminating the decades of my life.

203 Imre Salusinszky, "Shooting Star," Weekend Australian, January 24/5, 2004, p.8.204 Andrew Lycett, Dylan Thomas: A New Life, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003, 434 pp.

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The hazardous enterprise of living takes place on a day-to-day basis that is

so much of the time not experienced as hazardous at all at least for those of

us in the West, like myself, who come from the middle classes. My aim,

among the many aims I have, is to achieve that "miraculous adjustment" of

all my wayward parts, the wayward parts of my body, mind and soul. I live

them openly before my eyes, and to some extent here before your eyes, dear

reader. I only give you part of that "enthralling spectacle" of my life. An

autobiography provides some continuity to the fragments of life, gives life a

place to be in, a habitable environment that places me in a relationship to

implied and stated otherness and gives me defined spaces, indices, that relate

me to the world. But place, like self, resists simple formulation. There is

something non-specific about the world, perhaps it is its very pervasiveness,

its enormity, its infinite space and time, that autobiography, and especially

poetic autobiography, helps to provide a fixity, a shape, a ground of being

for, a presence, a sustained, temporal embodiment, an emotional

centeredness, a mental fix in a great space.

To put this another way the places I have lived, the people I have known, the

ideas I have thought, the religion that has centred my being all amount to an

idea, to thought, as I sit here at the age of sixty. For many writers their

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homeland, their country, exists more as an idea than as a system of

government, a federation of states, a set of landscapes or even as a

geographical location. This is also true of my religion, my loved ones,

indeed, all of life. Is this but another way of saying what ‘Abdu’l-Baha once

said: the reality of man is his thought?

To Montaigne there was no answer to the mystery of life, no explanation.

That is true for this Baha'i, as well, although there are intimations in the

writings of the Central Figures of the Baha'i Faith that point the way. We are

all surrounded, drowned in mystery. There is ordained for our training,

"every atom in existence and the essence of all created things."205 Perhaps in

my late adulthood and old age some of this mystery will be found in my

diary. As yet, readers will not find a great deal there, for alas there is no ear

to hear nor heart to understand, nor writer to put it into words. I did not even

begin to write a journal until I was forty-three. Compared to, say, the

Catholic philosopher Newman who "kept diaries and journals from his early

youth onwards,"206 my effort could be said to be a little late. But compared to

the vast majority of people in today's fast-moving world who keep no diary

205 Baha'u'llah, Hidden Words.206 Jerome H. Buckley, "Newman's Autobiography," Newman After a Hundred Years, Ian Kerr and Alan Hill, editors, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990, p.98.

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at all, I could be said to slightly ahead of the normal or average, maybe even

streets ahead.

Compared to, say, St. Augustine whose autobiographical channel was set in

the ancient world and was "the first to see his life as a synthetic enactment of

the heroic lives honoured in his religion,"207 my channel is clearly set in the

modern world and in the lives of a new Heroic Age. My life, I like to think,

mirrors some of these lives, some of these souls from the Heroic Age of my

Faith, whom I honour and whose virtues I synthesize and reanact in my own

way in these four epochs, as one of the descendents of the Dawnbreakers,

perhaps. If I possessed the penetrating analytical mind of, say, an Eliot; the

iconoclastic energy of, say, an Ivor Winters; the balanced judgement of, say,

an Allen Tate; the brilliant style and ingenious wording of, say, Randall

Jarrell, then readers could enjoy in this autobiographical work a compelling

discernment, an abundant invention, a formidable intelligence, a brilliant

perception and an effortless erudition. The journey would indeed be

unforgettable. Alas and alack, readers must suffer a certain aridity which,

perhaps, comes from a little too much analysis of myself, my times and my

religion.

207 Aarom Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography: the Language of Self-Writing, 1983, p.57.

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I'll close this commentary on the diary with a quotation and a comment from

the diary that is in my computer:

Henry Miller wrote: "At the last desperate moment-when one can suffer no

more!-something happens which is in the nature of a miracle. The great

open wound which was draining the blood of life closes up, the organism

blossoms like a rose."1 In 1992, after a series of tests and trials going as far

back, perhaps, as 1962, there was, it seems to me now in retrospect, the

beginning of a blossoming like a rose. That blossoming was poetry and a life

devoted to writing.208 I had started a diary, in 1984 perhaps eight years

before this poetic blossoming. But unlike famous diarists like Pepys and

Swift, who recorded their daily life virtually hour by hour, my diarizing

resembled more, what V.S. Pritchett calls, the Great Snail. Prudery,

accident, a life filled with a host of odds and ends and the anticipation of the

tedium of keeping a diary have kept the English speaking world far removed

from the great diaries of writers like Pepys and Boswell. Perhaps the

extensive and fascinating diaries of these men were due to the fact that they

208 Henry Miller in The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller, Mary Dearborn, Harper and Collins, London, 1991, p.248.

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were lapsed Puritans and they owed "something to the Puritan tradition of

the diary as a training of conscience."209

Conscience certainly plays a part in what I write and a sense of the tedium

involved in trying to translate my daily activities and thoughts into writing

about the everyday keeps me away from diarizing about this infinite oddity

that is life with its endless repetitions. Unlike Thoreau, who kept a diary, a

journal as he called it, from 1837 to 1861, and who said that "no experience

is too trivial for me,"210 I see so much of the day to day as simply not worth

commenting upon. And so, again, dear reader, I leave you with a life that is

found much more in other places. I leave behind no ornate exercise in

etiquette and few startling revelations from the day's intimacies.

I have no incentive to make my story especially interesting through

embellishment, accentuation or exaggeration; nor do I want to reveal more

than a few of my secrets. That instrument that the famous diarist Anais Nin

used to help her know herself and create herself I do not yet use to any

significant extent. I achieve those aims elsewhere. I do not reveal it all, nor

209 V.S. Pritchett, The Complete Essays, Chatto and Windus, London, 1991, p.1057 and p.1059.210 Henry David Thoreau in Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau's Journal, Sharon Cameron, Oxford UP, 1985, p.61.

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do I tell of it endlessly as Nin did over decades of her life in one of the

longest diaries in the history of that genre.

Before concluding this section on diaries and journals, I'd like to add a small

section, a short commentary on the memoir. The term "memoir" has been

applied to any autobiography, yet strictly speaking, memoirs are

autobiographies of a special kind. While autobiographies usually relate the

career of an author from birth to maturity or old age, stressing exploits and

achievements, memoirs tend to focus on specific occasions or themes. Both

are reflections of a struggling self, but in this more limited sense, memoirs

suggest a closer kinship with the reflective first-person novel, the only

perceptible difference being the criterion of truth. Many problems and events

in people's lives can give rise to memoirs, indeed, there is a wide cluster of

memoirs on related themes: themes peculiar to women's lives, themes of

confession and religious awakening, or themes about the horrors of the

1930s, '40s, and beyond, penned by both perpetrators and victims. If it were

not for the medium of the memoir that links us closely with visionary

monologues evoking various periods of history, our sense of specific periods

of time, some hazy but unforgotten world would be sadly deficient.

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Presidents, prime ministers and celebrities of various kinds, often write their

memoirs after leaving their place on the stage of life. Off the centre stage,

they can come back by means of their memoir. Sometimes the memoir helps

improve their image; sometimes it has no effect; sometimes it takes decades

before the perspective on their life is acquired and, even then, that

perspective changes with the centuries. Sometimes the general view of the

person changes inspite of not because of the memoir.211

Displacement is an overwhelming twentieth-century experience which

touches a raw nerve of many memoirs of our time. Sometimes the

relationship between the remembered and recreated self is extraordinarily

close. There are aspects of my work that resemble the memoir. I leave it to

readers to make their assessment should they wish to do so. In some ways

the issue is not significant.212

211 For a recent discussion of this issue of memoirs see the discussion of Bill Clinton’s memoirs made public on June23, 2004. These memoirs of 900+pages and other presidential memoirs were examined in “The |Jim Lehrer Hour,” SBS TV, 5:00-6:00 pm, June 22, 2004.212 Ralph Freedman, CLCWeb, Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal, Book Review Article, Vol. 4, No. 3, September 2002.

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"Autobiography," wrote the poet Wallace Stevens "is the supreme fiction."213

For someone like me who is striving to tell it straight, this is a challenging

idea from Stevens. If he is right, that all my life, no matter how I tell it, is a

fiction then perhaps it is in the sense that Baha'u'llah once wrote: that life is

like "a vapour in the desert which the thirsty dreameth to be water, but when

he comes upon it he finds it to be mere illusion." But there is so much more

to this whole concept. Indeed, the Baha’i experience, at least the experience

of many Baha’is, was much richer than its expression in print, rich as that

may have been from time to time. The modesty, the reticence, the reserve,

the quietness, the tendency, so often, to look and listen, to a certain kindness

provided them with time and space for organizing and reorganizing their

responses to a world in flux. For the most part, those responses did not take

the form of a written memoir or autobiography.

There comes a time in our lives which Joseph Campbell, expert student of

mythology, says raises the curtain, opens the window of meaning.214 It is a

call. In the process of responding to this call we undergo the mystery of

transfiguration. He says it is a rite, a moment, of spiritual passage, which,

213 A. Robert Lee, editor, First Person Singular-Studies in American Autobiography, Vision Press, London, Inside Cover.214 Joseph Campbell, “The Power of Myth,” PBS TV, 1985. Campbell says: “the Truth is one; the sages speak of it by many names.”

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when complete, amounts to a dying and a birth. For me, the familiar life

horizon in Burlington had been outgrown as I turned eighteen. The old

concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns didn’t fit any longer. They tired me,

fatigued my spirit. They were like the pebbles on a path I had walked along

too many times. They did not become imbued with the nostalgia of

familiarity; they became imbued with the dust of staleness. The time had

come for the passing of a threshold, for a change of scene, an adventure. I

had no idea what was to come, what was in store as I finished my exams in

grade 12, played my last games of baseball in the juvenile league, filled the

slot machines for Frank Duff in Dundas or went for evening walks with my

mother in the months of spring and summer in 1962.

Typical of the circumstances of the call, writes Campbell, are the dark forest,

the great tree, the babbling spring. And there is in the background of all of

this the underestimated appearance of the carrier of the power of destiny.

For me, the Great Tree and the underestimated power of destiny was this

new Faith I had been playing with on the edge for perhaps a decade in late

childhood and adolesence. At the time, in 1962, I had absolutely no interest

in keeping a diary, as some young people are want to do. That desire was

more than twenty years away on another continent.

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The herald of this archtypical adventure I was about to embark on, wrote

Campbell, is quite often something or someone who is dark, loathed,

terrifying, with evil in the eyes of the world, a beast, a mysterious stranger.

This is an indication of the herald's connection with the Other, the Sacred

Power. For me, this herald was ‘a mysterious stranger,’ a new Faith. It

represented something quite beyond the ordinary, the everyday, the routine,

the familiar. It had a connection, I was only too aware, with the Sacred, the

Other. Crossing the boundary, the wilderness, the desert, the sea, the forest,

the hidden room, the cave, and the mountain, as I was about to cross, or

begin to cross, are typical boundary markers delimiting the rational and

civilized from the non-rational, unconscious, and relatively chaotic forces

that bear upon our existence as human beings. And the chaotic was about to

hit me insensibly in the next several years. In order to put this Faith at the

centre of my life I knew I had to cross a boundary; I had to leave the

ordinarily ordinary. Crossing boundaries is always a religious action and

calls for rituals, Campbell argued. Boundary crossings are dangerous.

Guardians guard the border. At the border of this crossing was my mother.

By 1963, by the summer of that year, just after the Universal House of

Justice had been elected, she had resigned from the Cause and advised me to

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do the same. It would have been useful, in retrospect, to record some of my

thoughts and activities as I experienced them in these early formative years

in a diary. But I did not. Hopefully, I will attempt this exercise as a

retrospective, as I indicated above, in much more detail than I have thusfar.

The archetypal hero, writes Campbell, may have any one of several typical

battles to fight. He may have to fight a brother, battle a dragon, be

dismembered by demons or wild animals, be crucified, or be abducted. The

hero may have to make the dangerous night-sea journey, descend into the

whale's belly, or be taken on a miraculous journey through the heavens, the

underworld, or enchanted realms. The journey into the underworld in search

of the lamp of knowledge and power is a dangerous undertaking. Danger

always lurks on the borders where life is making a transition from one state

to another. Such a hero is like the novelist Ernest Hemmingway who was a

man pursued, a writer not able to outrun his demons.215

Danger and demons certainly lurked in my world as I journeyed to the next

town. It was a danger that lasted for at least six years in its initial chapter,

although in some ways, the danger is still with me. In the forty years since I

215 Michael Reynolds, Hemmingway: The Final Years, Norton, 1999.

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arrived in that first, that next town, I have been in the whale’s belly, gone on

many a night-journey, been dismembered and gone on miraculous trips

through the heavens. And so is this true of all Baha’is, each in their own

way, although they may never put their experiences on paper, in a diary or

any other literary form. But, certain attainments of the soul and the intellect

are impossible, wrote Thomas Mann, without disease, without insanity,

without spiritual crime.216 This idea is too complex to pursue here.

A great prize was won in the next town. The hero in Campbell’s version of

this mythical journey inevitably came into good fortune and won a great

treasure. And I did. I won two university degrees, a wife, a good job,

eventually, good health and the religious experience in a new Faith that has

been beyond any initial imagination I might have had. Campbell says this

fortune may take the form of a sacred marriage in which the hero becomes

the prince wedded to a king's daughter, as with Aladdin. For me the sacred

marriage was a commitment to this new religion. Moses marries the

daughter of the priest of the Mountain of Sin, the Moon God. The hero may

find reconciliation with a father from whom he has been alienated as in the

case of the Indian Hero Twins who brave many trials before coming at last

216 Thomas Mann at: www.littlebluelight.com

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to the house of their father the Sun who acknowledges them as worthy sons.

The hero may be transformed into a god as with mortal Psyche who is given

the ambrosia after her successful completion of the four impossible tasks.

Satan declares that Jesus is the Son of God and obeys him as God's chosen

king as the other angels come to be Jesus' ministers, as Matthew was. The

hero may steal a great treasure as did Bilbo the Hobbit who stole the dragon

Smaug's treasure in The Hobbit. One way or another, the hero achieves the

pearl of great price. Indeed, I did find this pearl. A new source of energy

was discovered and I was duty-bound to take it back into society. This was

the pioneering process that I had embarked upon and would stay as the

central part of the journey of my life for decades to come. One goes back,

one returns, many times in the long and drawn out process of withdrawal

and return. I certainly did. But I needed to record this story in poetry and

narrative, somehow the diary just could not do it for me. Unlike Benjamin

Franklin, who had no objection to a repetition of his life from its beginning

and who asked only that in that second life he might enjoy the advantages of

being able to make some corrections to the first,217 I have no desire to repeat

this exercise of life, making deletions and amendments of any kind. If I had

217 Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, part 1, p.1.

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a choice between oblivion and reincarnation, be it tree, flower or bee, human

or animal, I would chose the eternal peace of the former.

In the return the hero must eventually come back into the ordinary world

bearing great energy to be used for the renewal of society. Moses returns to

Egypt to liberate his people from slavery. Jesus emerges from the wilderness

to begin a public career of healing, exorcism, and teaching. Bilbo the Hobbit

comes back to Bagshot Row in the Shire to become a solid citizen, a pillar of

the community who unsuspectingly holds the Ring of Power that is the key

to the great events of his age. The return is also a border crossing and danger

threatens here too. The crossing must be negotiated with care. The hero may

escape, be resurrected, be rescued by outside forces, or fight a battle at the

border as he seeks to return home. Sometimes I have found that the return

has been so dangerous that the negotiation has proved impossible and a

rescue was required: a woman, a hospital, a retreat, a move to another town.

And in my case the return has rarely been recorded in a diary, although I

have been able to write of it in poetry and narrative forms.

The basic hero pattern and its motivational base, may be supplemented by a

variety of other, ancillary, motives. At any stage in the journey, the hero may

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encounter unanticipated help. Wise old men and wise old women appear to

give sage advice, to pose helpful riddles, or to give a magic implement. Help

may come in many forms; helpful animals, plants, or objects are not

unusual. The cosmos itself may be working for the hero; so may an

assortment of gods and goddesses; for example, Odysseus is aided, guided,

and protected by Athena. In my life there were many old men and women as

well as many not so old whom I met in and out of the Baha’i community in

my travels. I was protected by the Central Figures of a New Faith and Their

words of guidance and protection, aid and assistance.

Tests are the essence of the heroic journey. The hero must prove his or her

worth. The tests tend towards the impossible. The Baha’i road is, if nothing

else, a testimony to the impossible journey. Ordinary mortals could not

hope to solve these problems which only the hero can solve. Remember The

Sword in the Stone which only King Arthur may remove? The test may

range from solving a riddle, as with Oedipus and Bilbo, to making a

dangerous cosmic journey as in the cases of Gilgamesh and Psyche

descending into the Underworld. I’ve certainly had my riddles to deal with.

Don’t we all?

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In the midst of these heroic and mock-heroic journeys is what might be

called "a key ideological myth" of our time. It is an ideological myth that is

pervasive in all superhero comics since the 1930s, since just after the first

teaching Plan was initiated in 1937. This myth is basically that "the normal

and everyday enshrines positive values that must be defended through heroic

action."218 And the defence must be exercised over and over again. In

comics the status quo is what is defended. In my life it is not the

preservation of society but its recreation that is the goal of whatever heroic

action I am able to muster and it is a recreation that is taking place amidst

the terror and tumult of a divided world.

Flight is as prevalent as the helpers and the tests. Fear is always present as a

threat to the hero. Helplessness is frequently the case. Sometimes only flight

will avail the hero in the face of the absolutely impossible task. In the final

analysis, the hero is always pitted against superior powers, archetypal forces,

whom he can never overthrow. His or her task is to gain the great prize and

then to escape. I have often felt my life was a series of gaining prizes and

then escaping. As I write these words I have escaped yet again to a place of

withdrawal, retirement. The impossible task remains, always remains.

218 Christian L. Pyle, "The Superhero Meets the Culture Critic," Internet Essays, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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Frequently, the hero returns with a great prize like a herb that bestows

immortality, a magic cure, the aqua vitae, or other enchanted brew. The

medicine of immortality, the Writings of this Faith, that I found long ago

and have enjoyed for these several decades is, in many ways, the key to my

immortality. I am the hero who has been to the centre of the cosmos from

which all power emanates. Of course, philosophically and theologically

these issues are complex and I don't want to go into the implications here.

For the Centre here is this religion of the Bab and Baha’u’llah. Campbell

says that this hero is in touch with the source of energy and life. Jesus as the

Christ, the guide of the soul, tells the woman at the well in Samaria:

"Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who

drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I

will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life."

(John 4:13-14) Baha’u’llah may have added: “possess a pure, kindly and

radiant heart that thine may be a sovereignty ancient, imperishable and

everlasting."

The basic hero story can be elaborated by multiplying any or all of the above

features. The embellishments to this story are myriad. And so are mine. We

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can have a very brief presentation of Parzifal, for example, or an elaborate

romance, but it is still the same hero story. As the centuries passed, the

Arthurian romance increased in its elaboration. Mallory's Le Mort de Arthur

is around 1500 pages while the simplest Parzifal story is only a couple of

paragraphs long. The test that we have to apply to each of these is simply,

"Are the basic themes which define the story present?" For example, what

themes have to be present for a story to be The Story of Little Red Riding

Hood? Clearly, there must be Little Red Riding Hood, a mother's warning, a

journey through the forest to grandmother's house, an encounter with the

wolf, and a confrontation with the wolf as an imposter for the grandmother,

and a liberating figure like the woodcutter. All other factors are

embellishments that lengthen and enhance our enjoyment of the story. In my

life there has been a mother’s warning, the journey, the encounter, the

imposter, the liberating figure. And very little of the great cosmology,

mythology, paradigm of this Cause is to be found in my diary, at least not

yet. In some ways, though, I often feel as if the universe is unfolded within

me, as it says in the Quran and this universe is a composite of a million

threads.

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Quite frequently, we find that stories have overlays of rationalization and

moralizing as a result of scribes seeking to bring the symbols and images

into the world of fact, a move which often kills the images. As stories get

longer, they tend to acquire such moralizing and rationalizing layers. As

readers, we must learn to see through and beyond these rationalizations and

moralizations. We must keep to the scent of the Questing Beast. We must

find the liberator, or what has been the point?

If, as Harre and Secord, Shotter and Gergen argue, "the individual is nothing

but how he or she appears in the eyes of others;" if "the individual is not the

sole active being in a world of objects;" if "human agency is defined by the

picture one presents, not of oneself, but to others; if "conversation is the

basic social reality,"219 then this diary requires an audience to determine

identity, to mould the diary entry or the autobiography according to the

values which define the group. I look forward to the arrival of such an

audience. But I will not hold my breath.

219 These are some of the postulates of the ethogenic school of narrative psychology. A useful summary of this school is found in "Narrative Partitioning: The ins and outs of identity construction," Kevin Murray in Rethinking Psychology: Volume 1-Conceptual Foundations, Sage, 1995.

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After more than four years of making the occasional contribution to Volume

4 of my diary and after 20 years, 3 months, 1 week and 3 days since the

outset of the process of diary-making on January 19th 1984, I leave this

introduction at this point. Perhaps I will return to the themes above at a

future date when my diary has begun to assume a form consistent with the

directions and intentions I have outlined but in more detail than I has thusfar

attained. Writing has become for me what writing was for that leading man

of letters Alfred Kazin "my life." Perhaps the diary will become a more

important part than it has been thusfar. I have become attached to the way I

write and with a slight change of focus I should be able to make the diary a

stronger part of this autobiography.220 For there is a basis for such a

direction, such a change of focus. Kazin expressed it in his journal when he

wrote: “I shall always be more a mystery to myself than others are to me.”

Kazin felt that one could never know oneself in a perfect sense. This theme

is echoed in the Baha’i writings again and again. The diary can certainly be a

tool for exploring this mysterious territory. It could also be a tool to explore

“the moral temperature” of the Baha’i community and my society.221 I have

harldy begun in these areas. Perhaps Kazin’s journals suggest a possible

220 Neil Simon, A Memoir: The Play Goes On, Simon and Schuster, 1999. Simon makes this same point about attachment to a way of writing in this autobiographical work.221 Roger Bishop, “Interview With Alfred Kazin,” op.cit.

610

direction for my own: a blend of autobiography, history, criticism,

sociology, psychology, a truely interdisciplinary mix, distilled summa of my

engagement of all that is the world given my limitations, my incapacities.

VOLUME 1:

CHAPTER FIVE

"Defining who we are......"

One quality of the narrative textures of autobiographies is their ability to

create a fabric of cohesion and plausibility around a person's life. It is all

part of meaning construction that evokes the teleological order of a life. Like

clothes, fabrics, on a body; like jobs we hold and relationships we invest our

hearts in, this autobiography can help define who I am and give meaning,

pleasure and protection to the self that I am and the life that I both have

lived, live now and will live.-Ron Price with thanks to K.M. Langellier,

"Personal Narrative, Performance and Performativity: Two or Three Things

I Know For Sure," Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol.19, pp.125-144.

611

In the first ten years of my writing poetry I simulated some nineteen

interviews. It is not the intention of this chapter to include all the interviews;

but perhaps three, one from the early years of my writing of poetry and two

from the more recent years will suffice. I've given a lot of interviews; so, I

worry a little about repeating myself. I try to remember what I've already

said and what I still haven't said. Out of concern that I will repeat

something, I really do try to diversify the content, the responses, which so

often overlap.222

A volume of interviews with the same person--and these interviews could

make a small volume of about 30,000 words--functions as a sort of mirrored

reception of my work, for the most part a reception by and within my own

critical faculty but also a reception that is slowly emerging in the public

space. These interviews also reveal a history of how I see the development

of my work and myself. As readers see similar questions repeated and

answered, as they see some of the questions and answers change over time

and with the appearance of each new body of poetry and prose, readers will

perceive both an evolving critical response as well as the developing nature

of the interviewee's assessment of how his work has been viewed and

222 Federico Fellini, Translated by A. K. Bierman, Bright Lights Film Journal.

612

responded to. The cumulative evidence this provides out-weighs the fact that

there is inevitable repetition in a collection of this nature. The repetition

confirms that the reception possesses a certain shape and is not simply an

assortment of disparate responses. I have cut back on this repetition here,

significantly, by including only three of the interviews. This problem of

repetition, though, with respect to the content of interviews is one that many

artists far more popular than I am have to face in the public space of the

artistic world.223 I mention this aspect of the interviews at the outset because

even with three interviews there is an inevitable repetition and I want to put

this factual reality in context.

Before the interviews, though, I'd like to introduce this section with two

short essays and two poems that I drew on for presentations at Baha'i

conferences in the 1990s.

In 1999, at a Baha'i Conference in Melbourne on Creative Inspiration, I

provided for those who attended the workshop on poetry some essays, the

script from some interviews, as well as some twenty poems, which

223 For a brief discussion of this problem see: David Callahan, "Jane Campion: Interviews: A Book Review," Journal of Popular Film and Television, Winter, 2004.

613

attempted in their different ways to illustrate something of both the inner life

and the creative inspiration. I’d like to quote from some of this material, as

a way of introducing this chapter that focuses on interviews. I have also

updated that material so that it covers more adequately the first major decade

of my poetry writing: 1992-2002 and the second stage of writing this

narrative autobiography, 1993-2003, what I came to call the second edition.

If, as Thomas Mann writes, poets are inclined to excess not excellence, then

this movement away from poetry is a wise one.224

POETRY AS A SOURCE OF SOCIAL GOOD

If my booklets of poetry, some fifty, written over the decade 1992-2002,

help to establish nothing else it will be my search for a context in which

relevant fundamental questions about the undoubted right of the individual

to self-expression, the societal need for legitimate and just authority and our

need as individuals for solid thinking about the organic change in the very

structure of society that the world has been preparing for but has not yet

experienced—can be examined. In nearly six-thousand poems, a massive

224 Thomas Mann in: www.littlebluelight.com

614

corpus, this search for a context for the examination of fundamental

questions may not be so obvious. For I try to do a great deal in this poetry.

The fluid and elastic qualities that underpin the expression of freedom

assume a different latitude from one mind to another. Indeed in this Faith

there are “unique methods and channels”(1) for the exercise and

maintenance of freedom. The very meaning of freedom has been deepened,

its scope extended. The very fact that my writing poetry, an expression of

art, is elevated to an act of worship augers well for the “enormous prospects

for a new birth of expression in the civilization anticipated by His World

Order.”(2)

Much, if not virtually all, of my poetry is about personal experience, a

personal view of some sociological or historical process or fact. I see this

poetry as essentially lyrical, as capable of expressing a sense of

commonality and, for me, unparalleled intimacy. Some of what I write

could be termed confessional. The first person “I” is vulnerable, dealing as

it does with varying degrees of self-revelation. But even in the second and

third persons there is the poet’s view, less direct, self-revelation less

obvious. The poetry is self-serving; the reader is invited to share in my

615

experience, in my thoughts. The poetry also serves the community, however

self-focussed my poems are, and they all are to some extent. They deal with

the universal and with the growth and development of that universal Force

and Cause behind these poems. They deal with community. And the quest

for community, it would seem, has always involved some conflict, some

anxiety. They deal with the self and as Jack Steele, pioneer in cyborg space

exploration, argues the self is multiple, a little more tightly organized than

the multiple personality. We are different people in different circumstances.

We cultivate these personalities for protection and sometimes the protective

coating is not sufficient and we lose control or we react in ways that others

perceive negatively.

The protective coatings I had cultivated by my late teens were penetrated by

a thousand forces: illness, incapacity to deal with children in classrooms,

relationships in my family, in my marriages, in relationships, et cetera et

cetera. "When the outer battle is lost," as William James puts it so

eloquently, the inner world is redeemed and vivified. My battle, my

experience of outer loss, of calamity, of crisis, of inadequacy and failure,

especially in the years from my late teens to my mid-thirtees, but also in the

next quarter century to the age of sixty, was extensive. There was much

616

basis, much food, to feed whatever constitutionally sombre personality I had

started out with in the 1940s. There was much basis, too, for feeding my

constitutionally sanguine personality which drew on and emphasized the

opposite aspects of what presented itself to my eyes.225 The opportunities to

inhibit instinctive repugnances and genetic predispositions to depression, as

well as instinctive urges and temptations continued to present themselves all

my pioneering life, beginning in the first six months of the tenth and last

stage of history which we entered in April 1963. Opportunities to be

vigilant, striving to overcome a test of some sort, seemed to present

themselves again and again. This is a theme I return to often in this

autobiography.

Perhaps I did not develop sufficient contempt for my own person in the war

that is life. I certainly felt like giving up frequently over those forty years. I

seemed to have to discover again and again 'the amount of saintship which

best comported with what I believed to be my powers and felt to be my

truest mission and vocation.'226 I was able, for the most part, to exercise

control over what were some of life's sweetest delights, the physical

225 William James, Variety of Religous Experience, editor, James Marty, Penguin, 1982(1902, Longmans), p.75. I have drawn here on ideas I have found useful for over twenty years.226 ibid., p.377.

617

sensations that were available from the opposite sex, because I knew they

would check my spiritual and moral development. My higher indignations

were elicited, as James put it.227 This, in many ways, is a separate story and

I come back to it frequently in this narrative.

I strive, of course, for moderation, refinement, tact and wisdom in any of my

poetic expressions of human utterance. But for everything there is a season.

Thusfar, the season of my poetic writing in public has been minimal. I have

been quite happy that the public utterance of my poetry, at poetry readings,

has been minimal. I have written about this before in the five interviews

recorded in previous booklets of poetry. Baha’u’llah, Himself, reinforces

this idea in the maxim that: Not everything that a man knoweth can be

disclosed...nor can every timely utterance be considered as suited to the ears

of the hearer.” As the Universal House of Justice says in its expatiation on

the theme of speech and freedom “an acute exercise of judgement” is called

for. Perhaps when, and if, I become “public property” I will have acquired

more of that quality of acute judgement.

227 ibid., p.264.

618

The freedom of the poet to declare his conscience and set forth his views is

at the root of the foundation of this Order, but poetry of a negative quality

should be strictly avoided to prevent confusion and discord reigning in

community life and to remedy divisiveness. The process of criticism is

baneful in its effect and, therefore, the nature of my poetry is intended to

counteract dissidence which I see as “a moral and intellectual contradiction

of the main objective animating”(3) my words. But often what I write is

simply ordinary speech, sometimes emotionally loaded, raised to a high

level, the highest level I can, of expressiveness. I strive for what the Greeks

called kairos: tact, discretion, prudent restraint, maturity, for the quality the

poet Pindar expressed.(4) For humanity today needs that communitas

communitatum and this Faith, the Baha’i Faith, has an important role to play

in this unifying process. This poetry is part of that wider process, that wider

phenomenon. Whatever criticism I engage in, I see as a form of

autobiography which, as Oscar Wilde once said, is the best kind of

criticism.228

228 Bert Cardullo, "A Legendary Film and Theatre Critic, Stanley Kauffmann, Looks Back Over A 40-Year Plus Career," Bright Lights Film Journal, 2004.

619

I seek a judicious exercise in my writing. I try to be sensitive to content,

style, sound, tact, wisdom, timeliness in order to “give birth to an etiquette

of expression”(5) worthy of that term 'maturity', which Pindar possessed,

and which this age must strive to attain. There must be a discipline here in

this poetry if it is to attain the status of being a “dynamic power in the

arteries of life.”(6) If my words are to attain “the influence of spring" and

cause "hearts to become fresh and verdant”, they shall have to be seen as

“acceptable to fair-minded souls.”(7) I can not make such a claim of my

poetry, yet.

I am sensitive to my poetry's tenderness, as I am to the tenderness of the

Cause which motivates so much that underpins my poetry. The rigorous

discipline that must be exerted when putting print before the public eye, I

have not exerted, not entirely. For I have assumed that, for the most part, the

public will not see most of my poetry, at least for some time to come. But I

strive to speak the words of both myself and my fellow human beings as part

of a whole; this autobiography serves the whole. It resonates in the

immediate and the concrete, in the inner and the outer values of our lives, or

in some sociohistorical framework. However idiosyncratic and

autobiographical a particular poem may appear it is related to the totality, the

620

cosmic, the grand-scale, the great system of time and place. For mine is the

poetry of a metanarrative. Hopefully different readers will be cheered or

saddened in different ways as my poems drift through diverse human

situations.

Spontaneity, initiative and diversity must be encouraged, but everything in

its time, the right time under heaven, so to speak. The individual in this

Cause is “the focus of primary development”(8), but within the context of

the group; for the individual is essentially subordinated to the group. The

individual should be seen as a source of social good. This is his most

supreme delight. This is the essential context for poetry. When, and if, this

occurs my poetry will find its right and proper place in community life.

Dealing as my poetry does with the fragile, confused and ever to be

rediscovered and redefined self, the place of the inner life and private

character, the delight to which I refer will, hopefully, be associated with

understanding, with intellect and wisdom, the two most luminous lights in

the world of creation.(9)

I have become, over the years, very sensitive to the affect of criticism in

public and private life. It took forms in my early life which were seminal and

621

had long-lasting affects: my parents arguing, the explicit and implicit

criticism of others regarding my Baha'i beliefs beginning in my mid-teens,

authoritarian teachers, indeed, until the 1960s society had a strongly

authoritarian veneer, the Baha'i teachings on criticism. They all played a

crucial part in sensitizing me to criticism. Strangely, my wife tells me I don't

handle criticism well. But that is a separate topic.

Ron Price

1997-2004

** 1,2,3,5,6, 7 and 8: all of these references are found in the letter from the

Universal House of Justice to the followers of Baha’u’llah in the United

States of America, 29 December 1988. 4. Joan Aleshire, “Staying News: A

Defense of the Lyric”, Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, editors,

Gregory Orr and Ellen B. Voigt, University of Michigan Press, 1966, pp. 28-

47. 9. ‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, USA, 1970,

p.1.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: ANALYSIS YET AGAIN

622

By 1992 I had written a succinct narrative account of my life. It was

chronological; the factual material was ordered, sequential. But, clearly,

sharpness of detail, revealing anecdote, even suspense and analysis of

motivation are given with insight and style much more effectively in my

poetry. There is so much poetry now, some 4000 poems spread over at least

2000 pages, but this collected and compendious mass of material, if it is ever

to provide a basis for biography in the future, must be shaped, interpreted,

given perspective, dimension, a point of view. I have begun to think of this

material as one epic or one long poem, if epic is to pretentious a term, part of

the literary evolution of the long poem, an evolution that has made great

strides since the 1970s,229 incorporating other genres along the way.

If biography does arise from this autobiographical mix, hopefully it will

provide the creative, the fertile, the suggestive and engendering fact, an

imaginative, a referential dimension. Such a biographer must enact a

character, a place, a time in history. He will do this through language,

through imposing a formal coherency on my material, although inevitably

there will be present the incurable illogicalities of life, as Robert Louis

Stevenson called the inconsistent, the unresolved paradoxes of life. He will

229 Smaro Kamboureli, On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1991, p.205.

623

give the reader a portrait not an inventory. This is what any biographer must

do. I do this in my autobiographical poetry. But I provide many pictures,

many moods, many sides. Details balloon; they repeat; they illuminate. I

discover things about my life, but I do not invent them.

As Plutarch and Boswell, two of history's most famous biographers,

demonstrated: "anecdote rather than history teaches us more about the

subject."1 I see my narrative as the home of history and my poetry as a

source of rich anecdote. It was for this reason I turned to poetry as a

reservoir of autobiography; it seemed to teach, to convey, much more than

narrative. Claude Levi-Strauss helps us to understand why several poems

about one object, or person, provide more significance or meaning than a

narrative when he writes:

To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its

parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it... Being smaller,

the object as a whole seems less formidable....it seems to us qualitatively

simplified.2

624

One can not know everything about anyone, even oneself. The mountain of

detail would sink a ship and would not enlighten anyone. The task of

achieving comprehensiveness not only is impossible, it is irrelevant. But

there are intelligible dimensions of one's life and it is these dimensions that

my poetry deals with best. Imagination is critical in writing biography.

Some writers see invention more important than knowledge. Inevitably,

there is an element of invention, of moving beyond the factual, but my own

preference is to use imagination in a framework of factual experience, as far

as possible. To read my poetry should be to immerse oneself not only in the

Baha'i writings but also in the first several decades of Baha'i experience in

what the Baha'is see as 'the tenth stage of history'230 and, especially, that time

when the spiritual and administrative centre on Mt. Carmel received some of

its initial, its richest, its definitive, elaboration and definition. There are

several unifying nodes of experience for my poetry, in addition to the above.

I have drawn them to the reader's attention from time to time in the

introductions to some of my poems. Perchance readers may experience the

elusive fragrance of these Writings.

230 The years in and after 1963 until well into the future, perhaps to late in the millennium we have just entered.

625

From a Baha'i perspective my poetry will undoubtedly possess a moral

appeal associated with overcoming hardship, a quality that characterized

most nineteenth century biography. But the moral framework, while

retaining a certain simplicity, is expressed in a portrait of complexity,

refinement, mystery, a slumbering world, my own idle fancies and vain

imaginings and the streaming utterance of a new Revelation. I have often

read that certain writers were attracted to light: Dickens and Dante are

examples. By the time I came to write much of this work I had lived much of

my life in a world of light, for such is the environment of so much of

Australia. So it was that I enjoyed the dark, the cloudy, the rainy, the

evening and the night as conducive to writing as the day, if not more so.

Freud commented that biographers choose their subjects 'for personal

reasons of their own emotional life.' 3 I'm sure this is equally, if not more,

true of autobiographers. After criss-crossing Australia as an international

pioneer and teaching in the northernmost and southernmost places in

Canada-all of this over thirty-six years, I have watched this emerging world

religion grow perhaps fifteen times. I taught in schools for nearly thirty

years and came by the twentieth to feel a certain fatigue, what in Latin is

called a tedium vitae. It seems that I must write this poetry for the same

626

reason a foetus must gestate for nine months. I feel, with Rilke, a great inner

solitude and that my life and history is itself a beginning, for me, for my

religion and for the world. I feel as if I have sucked the sweetness out of life

and tasted of its bitter fruits and now it is time to tell the story. Yes there is a

bitter-sweetness in my taste now just seventeen months short of sixty. I

have a quotation from the poet Rumi in my notes: "do not mock the wine; it

is bitter only because it is my life." For me this overstates the bitterness; for I

have found enough sweetness in life, from His sweet-scented streams,

among other sources.

I sigh a deep-dark melancholy from time to time, but keep it in as far as I am

able as I mix with others. Only my wife and son, who live with me now,

hear of this melancholy and this is usually late at night. I am lonely and

attentive in this sadness, this solemn consciousness. For it is the on-going,

the becoming of life, that produces its sadness. But it is a sadness, a

solemnity which is also, which is itself "the wellspring of the most exquisite

celebratory joy."231 My poetry gives expression to this process and to my

destiny which comes from within. My poetry is the story of what happens to

me. For the most part "life happens" and one must respond to the seemingly

231 The Universal House of Justice, Letter, April 3rd, 1991.

627

inevitability of it all, although the question of freedom and determinism is

really quite complex. Readiness is all as Shakespeare says in Hamlet.

Reality, I record in my poetry, comes to me it seems slowly, infinitely

slowly. My poetry records this process. My poetry is an expression of a

fruit that has been ripening within me: obscure, deep, mysterious. After

years it now comes out in a continuous preoccupation as if I have, at last,

found some hidden springs. It is as if I have been playing around the edges,

with trivia, with surface. Finally something real, true, is around me. I stick

to my work. I am, like Herman Melville, my sole disciple.232 I have a quiet

confidence, a patience, even a distance from a work that always occupies

me. And so I can record a deep record of my time. I am preparing

something both visible and invisible, something fundamental. I feel as if I

am preparing this as part of a larger process which some mysterious

Providence has let me play a part, has let me "draw nigh" during these

several epochs.

I’m also what English poet Roy Fisher calls ‘a gregarious hermit.’233 I was

an only child and so learned to keep myself company at an early age, but

232 Herman Melville's underlining of his copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Moses From an Old Manse.233 Roy Fisher, “Roy Fisher In Conversation With John Trantor,” Jacket #1, 2001.

628

there was a greagarious element in my childhood just about from the word

go. There is and was a strong gregarious element characteristic of my life,

say, from 5 to 55 and a more hermit-like existence after 55, after I retired

from full-time teaching. I still enjoy people, but in smaller doses. It is part

of the reason I have come to poetry late in life. I have come to desire

solitude and at the age of 60 I have bundles of it. This is an essential element

for any significant writing.

Ron Price

25 September 1998

(update June 22nd 2005)

1Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984,

p.60.

2idem

3 ibid, p.122.

And so here is some of that ripening fruit which I refer to above. One poem

is about those earliest years of Baha'i experience and another is a more

philosophico-historical piece. Often, as Hugh Davies suggests, the soil in

629

which poetry grows is characterized by intellectual confusion.234 I like to

think this is not true of my own poetry, embedded in this autobiography. I

like to think that I express in poetry a body of beliefs that grows out of real

intellectual work. This is not to say that my behaviour is always consistent

with the ideals and ideas, the standards and models, set out in the writings of

the Baha'i Faith. Sometimes the gap is a cause of anxiety, discouragement

and disappointment. As readers assess the extent of my success as a writer,

I assess the success of my 'living the life.'

I feel a little like W.B. Yeats who wrote after feeling that so much of his life

had been a failure:

Now that my ladder's gone,

I must lie down where all my ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Many of the ladders of my life seemed to lie broken on the ground by the

1990s and, were in not for the 'fragrances which were wafted over all created

234 Hugh S. Davies, The Poets and Their Critics, Hutchinson, 1969(1943), p.36.

630

things' all I would have had, too, would have been that rag-and-bone shop of

the heart.

A GOLDEN BALL

During a brief span of time, some nine years, so greatly enriched as they

were by the moving narrative, the immortal chronicle, of the lives of the

twin-prophets of the nineteenth century, the Bab and Baha'u'llah, the

episodes of the first act of the awkward and precious drama that has been my

life, can now be surveyed with some understanding and equanimity. These

years from the age of fifteen to twenty-four can now be seen as something

more than an endless succession of engagements with the society and life

around me in which I could not fully fathom, control and command events;

in which I was the victim, apparently, of body chemistry and socialization

influences; in which the light of a new religion became a flame and sent me

across a vast and cold Canadian sky from Windsor in the south to Frobisher

Bay in the north before I perished, as any critical observer may have

hypothesized at the time, in a mental hospital on the shores of Lake Ontario

not far from my home town. As a historian, the historian, of my life I can

631

now give these years their meaning, perhaps not their final meaning, but

certainly a meaning they did not possess back in those years 1959 to 1968. -

Ron Price with thanks to Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, Wilmette, 1957,

p.3.

I was a nice boy,

one of the nicest

you could imagine.

I pleased everyone I knew,

especially myself,

for it seemed to me

life was one long indulgence.

And then the first pains came

and the winter of life set in

faster than a cold wind

bringing the first snows

and blanketing everything

with a white disguise,

with freezing ice.

632

I'd had a golden ball,

or so I thought, for years,

made of sensitivity, receptivity,

responsiveness, cooperation,

nonaggression, but I lost it

in those winter winds.

Perhaps it froze under the snow.

Perhaps those winds blew it away.

Then, unobtrusively,

on the way to or far up in

the Canadian north country,

where the world freezes

just about permanently,

I glimpsed that ball,

kept it within reach

in my new-dark world

of aloneness and fear.

It had golden thread.

633

I could see it in the distance

when I went for walks:

just, out there, sometimes

across Lake Ontario.

I held it in my sights

with dear life, intense.

I was becoming one of

that new race of men,

little did I know it.

Ron Price

26 January 2002

A NEW NOTION

Until the nineteenth century little meaning was attached to age, nor to time

as we measure it today. Time and place were not separated as they are now.

Evening began when the cows came home. Households, guilds, churches

and community were the great determinants in people's lives. People's lives

were largely circumscribed by place. Life was lived day-to-day and year to

634

year, within "that small parenthesis." The notion of a continuous lifetime

proceeding in a timely and sequenced manner, in stages from birth to death

with some degree of planning was simply unavailable for generations which

had little control over their lives. In the nineteenth century there emerged,

first in northwestern Europe, the concept of the good life as a journey of

continuous spiritual development.1 -Ron Price with thanks to John Gillis, A

World of their Own Making: A History of Myth and Ritual in Family Life,

Oxford UP, 1997, p.52.

It arose first in the merchant classes

and those patriarchal households,

in Protestant inner-worldly asceticism

and in the writings of those prophet-

founders of an emerging world religion,

all in the nineteenth century.

Sacred and resplendent tokens

to attract us from this place of dust

to the heavenly homeland,

to the court of holiness;

635

seeking every company,

fellowship with every soul,

consorting with people

of the immortal realm,

looking for Israfil

in the jewelled wisdom

of this lucid Faith

to bestow the spirit

on the mouldering bones

of this existence.1

1 Much of the phrasing in the 2nd stanza of this poem comes from

Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952.

Ron Price

8 January 2002

Although my poetry is strongly autobiographical, it is my hope that the story

of my experiences will find a startling parallel in the lives of readers. I hope,

too, that the narrative I write does not contain every fault which Russell

636

Lowell said Edmund Spenser's poetic narrative contained.235 I'm sure it

contains some faults if not all.

And now for the first of three interviews which I include in this chapter of

my autobiography. The interviews are from the years 1999 to 2002. I hope

readers find some refreshing perspectives here, not just on poetry but on

writing, on life and on the religion and society that have affected in so many

ways my thoughts and my days and how they were lived.

SEGMENTS FROM INTERVIEWS IN 1999

INTERVIEWER(I):

Carlyle, the British historian, says that no great man lives in vain. The

history of the world is but the biography of great men. What are your views

on this concept?

PRICE(P):

235 ibid., p.61.

637

One can not ignore the role of great men and great women but, if anything,

this poetry is a testimony to the contribution of the not-so-great. One of the

poems in this collection, a collection I have entitled Cascading Down1 after

“15 small pools of water in the centre of the two sets of stairs leading from

the Entrance Plaza to Terrace one.”(Baha’i Canada, Baha, BE 156, p.5),

answers this question in part. I refer you to that poem: “At Speed and in the

Darkness Before the Dawn” in which I have drawn heavily on J. Harrison’s

book The Common People.2 Obviously, Baha’i history has great souls. Our

history is a documentary to them; but it is also a history of the ordinarily

ordinary and a greatness that comes from the humble and the unrecognised.

This poetry is as much a tribute to this latter category, as the former. I see

myself, in some ways, as a symbol of the ordinary.

Before continuing this interview, though, I would like to include the two

references in the above section. The first reference is to a booklet of poetry,

the thirty-fifth in the series, the last I wrote while living in Perth Western

Australia.

1INTRODUCTION TO BOOKLET NUMBER THIRTY FIVE

638

What we have in these several genres, and especially in this poetic matrix, is

a meticulous examination of a life(1944-1999) over several epochs of the

first century of the Formative Age. Mine is a unique approach to

autobiography within the existing body of Baha’i literature and commentary.

I speak from the interior of a life so that others may imagine themselves

speaking; I also speak from the merely local and time-bound perspectives of

the eighth, ninth and early tenth stages of Baha’i history. I address both the

externals of my life and our times as well as my unknowable inside, the

inner life and private character.

For me this poetry is partly a romance of epic proportions. It is a romance

that is also a tragedy and triumph, a vocabulary and a perspective, an

interdependence of diverse points of view that lie along the linking line of

my life’s response in the space inhabited by my thinking and moving soul.

It is not the poetry of “white heat”,1 as Emily Dickinson described her work

in 1862, or “faithful self-abandonment” as George Walley describes the

poetic process.2 It is, rather, the poetry of a certain mysterious quietness

that descended on my life after three decades of pioneering(1962-1992) a

Cause that is the spiritual underpinning of the whole oeuvre. Perhaps it was

what Dickinson described in:

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..............................the vivid Ore

Has vanquished Flame’s conditions,

It quivers from the Forge

Without a colour, but the light

Of unanointed Blaze.

By the early 1990s I had had some forty years of contact with this new Force

with pretensions to being the newest of the world’s great religions. The

wider society I worked in and through, however, was largely unresponsive to

its radical, its subtle, its new message. After three decades of pioneering its

teachings among my contemporaries I seemed “called by sorrow and a

strange desolation of hopes into quietness”, as Shoghi Effendi had been in

his later years.3 At least, my experience, by 1993, had some similarities to

his state, what you might call ‘spiritual fatigue.’ Only in my case it was a

much more minor key than his. This factor, among a complex of other

reasons, was what turned me to poetry. I think. It is difficult to know for

sure.

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I strive, as far as possible, to be understood in what I write. For I see my

poetry as history, biographical source material, autobiography, an archive of

our times. Like talking and wanting to connect, this poetry aims itself at an

audience, an audience that is not yet. I try to surprise, “Truth’s superb

surprise”, to provide “expression kind” and to say it all in a gradual and

gentle form that is honest and direct.4 I would like to think that I am forging

a link, one of many, for future generations to see into our times, the traces of

our times by means of simple links of human experience. This is my aim. It

is not so much a longing to be known, to acquire some of fame’s fragile

glory, some posthumously conferred immortality, but rather a perspective

that sees-

The Poets light but lamps-

Themselves-go out-

The Wicks they stimulate-

..........

Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their

Circumference-6

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With Dickinson, I see my poetry as disseminating something of the

‘circumference’ of both my time and my own life. The subject, the content,

gives my voice, my poetry, form. To achieve this I need to focus on my ego.

This is natural, a necessity, as natural as being centred in one’s own brain, in

one’s own body. In the end, we must all nourish ourselves. It is all part of

that self-love which ‘Abdu’l-Baha says is the very clay of man. And it must

be done in both solitude and with people. My poetry is my fascination with

the movement of my mind, my thought, my interior experience. I try to

make of my dieing, immortality.7 For the last several years, since the Holy

Year in 1992, this activity, this writing of poetry, has seemed ceaseless, a

part of me like my own face. Hopefully, the winter of my life, the years

ahead, will be “as arable as (this) Spring.”8

I have moved on a teaching stage as wide as two continents, closer than

most people get to the two poles9 of this bi-polar world. I have experienced

the intensities that come from possessing a bi-polar tendency, formerly

known as manic-depression, and can appreciate the view that my ‘quietness’

is simply a part of the levelling out of this tendency due to lithium carbonate

treatment. By 1992 I had come to accept this treatment with equanimity

after a decade of struggling to accept its necessary part of my life. I have

spent a good deal of my time looking inward and this writing of poetry

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seemed to offer an opportunity to retreat to my innermost being, to that

interior to which He summons us. Perhaps my poetry was a symbol of a

recommitment to the Covenant, a rededication to duty, a revitalizing of my

energy for teaching, that the Universal House of Justice wrote about10 when

my commitment to poetry was just emerging. Time would tell.

Thirty-seven years after leaving home, of moving from place to place, for

the Cause, for career, for psychological necessity, I trust I will feel no need

to leave home, to move any more. My soul’s passions can be as readily at

hand in one’s home, as elsewhere; although more moves may be inevitable

in the last years of middle and late adulthood and old age. This poetry, then,

is but one attempt, however inadequate, to describe the effects on one

person, a pioneer within the framework of Baha’i administration, of this new

Revelation from God. It is my hope that my own effort will assist others in

their efforts to define, to express the mystery of the interrelationship

between their lives and a religion with the future in its bones, between the

flower of their lives and the garden of the Cause.

Poetry comes unbidden, like flashes of good luck, some whelling up from

within. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani expresses the process best in her “Artist,

Seeker and Seer”11 where she talks of ‘the cleansing of the heart with the

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burning of the spirit’.12 I am not particularly conscious of possessing ‘a

clean heart’; like everyone's it is only partly clean. She goes on: “the heart

can recognize the relationship between dissimilarities, can reflect the

patterns in which the blinding shapes and colours of human conscience

revolve, and see a glimpse of certitude...”13 Astonishment and wonder

certainly fill the veins, but so too does a sense of powerlessness,

nothingness, a burden of sin and a heedlessness which threatens to destroy

one’s life, if one lets it.

I express the Beauty I have seen in my poetry. My poetic form, my method,

is an expression of “a form of seeing”14 that reflects the motions of my

heart. It is a motion that has had the aspiration of ‘the true believer’: of

search, of earnest striving, of longing desire, of fervid love, of rapture, of

ecstacy.15 It is a motion, too, which increasingly observes “the patterns of

our lives” as they “unfold through the dazzling coloured mansions of our

Lord”;16 or to put what Nakhjavani is saying in a different poetic context, the

river of my life has come to dance in the sunlight of this new Revelation.

There are mysterious subtleties of colour dancing in this sunlight. There is

an abundance of life, of sight and sound, threading my life, my darkness,

with the colours of day. My poetry is but one more attempt “to find a fit

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vessel in which to sail on this light-filled and shoreless ocean of Baha.”17 As

yet, this vessel is inaccessible, an interior, a private skiff, as far as the wider

world and its audiences are concerned. Small parts of my opus are relevant

and interesting to a mass audience; indeed, I have shared it with small parts

of that audience in my contact with it in my personal and professional life.

It is difficult to know just where I am in the acquisition of my poetic voice.

Perhaps a retrospective examination of my work one day will reveal that I

have found it. I tend to think I have but, after only seven years of intensive

writing of poetry, I am disinclined to say definitively. But whatever state I

have achieved in the development of a distinctive voice, a body of poetry

quite unlike any other has been created. It is the expression of a unique, a

highly individual life. All of us have such lives, really when one examines

them at the micro level, however similar they may be when examined in

general terms. Mine is just one of the millions of potential lives that could

be recorded autobiographically, diaristically. The main difference is that

mine has been given definition and description in this autobiography. My

quest is at once epistemological, personal and emotional. I like to see my

quest as Everyman’s, with my own particular colour, texture, tone, manner

and mode, my own story.

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As I gaze at my production of poetry over the last seven years, over four

thousand one hundred poems, I am struck by its amplitude. I celebrate and

commemorate hazardous states of the psyche, the wholeness of the psyche,

the mysterious integration of the psyche that one could theologically define

as grace, the balance between the known and the unknown in life. I am a

proselyte for a new belief, a belief with a public character; I am also a

person whose belief wants to express itself in art, in a deeply introspective

and private way. I trust, though, that the different colours of a deeply inlaid

skepticism, a cynicism, a pessimism and an optimism painted over half a

century now of listening and observing, will provide a rich texture for any

simple statement of dogma that is necessarily present in my poetry.

This gaze at my poetry, like any gaze in life, is at times arousing, at times a

source of fatigue and, depending on the situation, may lead to an

intensification of my work or withdrawal from it. If my gaze is returned, as

it only can be by another human being or animal and as it has so often been

over more than thirty years by my wife, it has a special significance and is

sometimes experienced as a kind of intimacy and mutual access with a

particular charm and a quiet meeting of minds. The gaze can be a longing

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erotic look as it once was between us as lovers as sex-partners, or it can be

unspoken rapprochement communicated with a depth of vision or just a

simple assurance. This gaze can also be a mere surface probing for what is

pre-conceived, a superficial stare which confirms a stereotype, or a look of

stale familiarity. One could examine a whole life in terms of the varying

types of stare.

Many poets have a central theme. I suppose if I were to pick one from an

off-the-cuff first impression of my work it would be: the Baha’i Faith and

me. Indeed both are the raison d’etre for my poetry. Take away these two

topics and there is little left. We are all unique people and our unique

personality constructs taken through the sifting mechanism of the Cause in

this first century of the Formative Age produce a quality of individual

personality and vision unlike no other: a heightened sense of the mind’s

uncharted possibilities; a triumphant sense that the solitary soul can define

its own “Superior instants” as Emily Dickinson called them; and a story of

pain, anguish and powerlessness that can produce, paradoxically, an artistic,

a spiritual, abundance.But I must be cautious, as Gibbon notes in his history,

for there "exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the

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advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times."236 In these

present times there were many evils to magnify, if I wanted to do so.

May 1999

FOOTNOTES

1. Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, Number 365.

2. George Whalley, Poetic Process, Cleveland: A Meridian Book, 1967,

p.xxv.

3. Dickinson, op.cit.

4. Ruhiyyih Khanum, Priceless Pearl, p.451.

5. Emily Dickinson, op.cit., Number 1129.

6. Number 883.

7. Emily Dickinson in Joyce Carol Oates, “Soul At White heat: The

Romance of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry”, Critical Inquiry, Summer 1987,

Internet, p.6..

8. ibid.,p.7.

9. 63 north and 42 south: Frobisher Bay NWT to Queenstown Tasmania

10. Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 1992, p.6.

236 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Internet Quotations.

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11. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, “Artist, Seeker and Seer”, Baha’i Studies, Vol.10,

pp. 4-5.

12. Baha’u’llah, Hidden Words, Persian Number 8.

13. Nakhjavani, op.cit., p.4.

14. ibid.,p.5.

15. Baha’u’llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah, p.267.

16. Nakhjavani, op.cit.,pp.5-6.

17. ibid.,p.6.

And now to that book referred to at the opening of this interview.

2AT SPEED AND IN THE DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN

This poetry is by one of those who, were it not for his writing, would

probably be left out of history, one of the seventy to ninety percent of the

population who are neither rich, nor influential, not one of the major players

on the stage, not famous as a writer or artist, just one of the many threads in

the warp and weft that make up the Baha’i community, who strove within

the limits of his incapacity while he was alive to spread the Baha’i teachings

among his contemporaries and to be an example of its teachings. As the

difficulties of his life continued in different ways over forty years of

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pioneering, poetry was produced like some diamond transformed from coal.

This is often the case with writers. As the fog and pestilential smell of

London thickened in the middle of the nineteenth century, the private life of

Dickens got more and more difficult and his novels poured out of him giving

vent to the harm he felt he had been afflicted with.237 While I, too, felt

saddened by life's various forms of travail, I did not feel it ultimately to be

tragic; nor did I feel harmed or injured by life. I often felt tired, sometimes

despondent but, by the time I penned this work most of my despondency had

been removed by the treatments I had received for my bi-polar tendency.

This document, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, in its many genres, may be

useful in reconstructing the lives of the people of this age, the last three

quarters of the first century of the Formative Age. There has been,

throughout history, an inarticulateness on the part of the many that usually

results from a shortage of community records, an inability to write, a lack of

interest in leaving any record, a view that history is made by people in or

with power, a perception that one’s life is unimportant, insignificant.

237 Peter Ackroyd,"Dickens," ABC TV, 7:30-8:30 pm, 1 June 2003.

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This lack of records is clearly being remedied in our ‘paper age’, this ‘age of

analysis’ with seemingly endless correspondence, computers, cassette and

video tape. But the task of recreating our present age and how it felt to live

in these times to those living in them may not be as easy to achieve as one

might think. Individual statements, autobiographies, especially from the

ordinary believer who lacks fame, rank, status or wealth are not among the

sort of books that publishers seriously entertain for their markets. So, there

is little payoff, so to speak, in putting your story down on paper, if you are

one of the ordinary ‘blokes.’ Whatever is written of this nature seems to

achieve its usefulness decades, if not centuries, later, when the history of the

period in question is written.

Future historians must construct the pattern of our time through selection,

suggestion and implication. Often the further historicans get away from the

period about which they are writing, the better they are able to write about it.

I trust what historians and sociologists find here will be of some use. -Ron

Price with thanks to J.F.C. Harrison, The Common People: A History from

the Norman Conquest to the Present, Flamingo Paperbacks, London, 1984,

Introduction.

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Seeing how long it has taken

for the writings, diaries, letters,

poetry and historical records of

our first century to get published,

I bequeath this my magnum opus

to posterity, testifying as I do

to the complexity of the task

for an ordinary believer,

an international and homefront pioneer

in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th epochs,

to recount in some meaningful way

the endless flux of events

that make up his Baha’i experience

and that of his fellows

over four decades, or more

in this century and beyond.

It seems, as I look back

over all these years in the field,

like I have spun a thin tissue,

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a web, across two continents,

from pole to pole,

in this darkness before the dawn,

by some instinctual force, some feeling,

with the mind on all-ahead-full,

always running, a new rung every second,

making one of a thousand designs:

the funnel, orb, dome, bowl, tub or purse.1

Using the same principles and materials,

forms that will evolve over generations

perhaps millennia or more.

And here I am right at the start,

in the first quarter-century

in nearly all the communities

where I have lived and had my being.2

Ron Price

10 May 1999

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1 Guy Murchie describes the variety of webs spiders weave at speed “in the

darkness before the dawn.”(Seven Mysteries of Life, p.250.)

2 Except Toronto Ontario, where I lived for a few months in 1969 and which

had had a Baha’i community for more than half a century, all the other

communities I worked in, about two dozen, were in their first twenty-five

years of their Baha’i experience, as far as I know.

To return to that interview..........

I: Is there much in your poetry about your family history and its relationship

with the Cause?

P: The first two poems in the collection of poetry I sent to the World Centre

were written in the first week of September 1992. They were addressed to

my mother who passed away in 1978. She started investigating the Baha’i

Faith in 1953. One of the poems in this collection was inspired by my

grandfather’s autobiography, A.J. Cornfield’s Story, about his early life from

1872 to 1901. I refer you to this poem: “1953: A Turning Point in History”

to partly answer this question. There are, of course, many other poems that

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involve my family history. It is impossible to separate family history from

one’s autobiography, whether that autobiography is poetic narrative or

simple narrative prose. I know nothing at all of my family history before

1872 and so, as yet, there is no poetry about it. Something may come up that

is based on history in Wales, England and France. Time will tell. We could

hold a separate interview on the influences of family; I have referred to some

of them in the first eleven interviews. But I think this is enough for now.

I: Have you written many poems about specific contemporary events in the

political, social, economic and historical worlds?

P: Only very occasionally. I think there are a number of complex interacting

factors that, for various reasons, make writing poetry about “the news”

difficult. There is something about “the news” that has an air of fantasy, of

make-believe, about it. There is also the problem of making sense of the

recent past. Kosovo or East Timor are good examples, to chose two from a

potential multitude. You really have to give the issue a great deal of time to

unravel the complexity. There is just so much going on that the mind is on

overload. Getting a precise knowledge seems just about impossible except

for the specialist. There is no cultural and classical consensus any more and

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there hasn’t been, perhaps since the beginning of the Formative Age in 1921,

perhaps since the 1950’s and the onset of postmodernism; so what the

individual gets is an enormous plethora of opinions, a pastiche, incoherence,

with little sense of overview. As the French sociologist/philosopher Jean

Baudrillard puts it: it has became very difficult to plot reality, or even get a

sense of who you are. Any poems I do write in this area of social analysis

tends to be ‘big picture’, ‘whole culture’, ‘wide angle’ stuff.

I: It’s interesting with some poets that almost all of their work deals with

their own actual experiences from day to day, so it’s extremely personal in

that sense. And yet the good ones never use their poetry to puff that up into

anything important. It’s just there as material?

P: Yes and of course I like to think there is no puffing up of my personality

in my poetry, no self-indulgent pomposity. Autobiography--so much, if not

all, of my poetry is autobiographical--is there in poem after poem serving a

function, the function is essentially witness, as testimony, witness as analyst,

commentator. This person, even the person I take on when I take on a

persona or speak for someone else, serves as the base for a certain

genuineness, authenticity, bona fide, that somebody was there. That guy

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actually put his life where his brain was. And that guy’s life was mine. That

is of interest to me much more interest than reading juicy stories and novels.

I: I understand you have just retired from teaching. What is the experience

like thusfar?

P: Yes I’ve had over six weeks thusfar, what you might call the honeymoon

period of retirement. The first thing I notice is that I’ve slowed down. I

wrote a poem this morning about the hibiscus(see my files for: ‘Flame Out’).

The poem would not have been written under normal circumstances because

I needed to be in low gear, enough to stop and have a good look, especially

standing out in the rain trying to write the poem. I also get a good forty

minutes of brisk walking238 in every day. I’ve never been able to do that

before. Walking has always been a prayerful-meditative process right from

my first memories of walking back about 1960. In the memoirs of some

writers, walking is a metaphor for the spiritual and intellectual journey of

their lives. For me walking provides a period of withdrawal and

concentration on the Baha’i writings that I have memorized.

238 Canadian overseas Baha’is were advised in a letter about the year 2000 the advantages of simple walking every day and many books echoed this advice. See: Maggie Spilner, Prevention’s Complete Book of Walking, Rodale Books, 2000.

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In addition, my lifelong passion for reading and the tremendous burst of

creativity which began for me in 1992 has had a chance to be indulged and

extended. I’m getting to know my wife again after years of running past her

on my way to work, meetings, or something that I had to do. We are also

getting ready to move to Tasmania so I’m useful around the house in

preparation for the departure.

I: Spike Milligan says his father said that he would rather tell him stories

about himself that were exciting but a lie, than tell him stories that were

boring but true. For some of us the incurable romantic never dies. Is there

any of this romanticism in your poetry?

P: My mother used to say to me, I remember, back in the early 1960s before

I went pioneering, that the Baha’i Faith was a good religion for me because

of the strong element of the theatre in its framework of activities. The social

dimension of life and the arts inevitably involves a certain theatricality. As I

said, too, in my introduction to Roger White’s Occasions of Grace there is in

the Baha’i ethos, at least there is for me, a stong element of the cry of all

Romantic artists since the industrial revolution: I don’t want comfort; I want

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God; I want poetry; I want real danger; I want freedom; I want goodness; I

want sin. Well, I’m not so sure about the real danger any more; I'd like to

avoid sin as much as possible as the evening of my life beckons, but a

certain amount of sin, or the shadow life as Jung calls it, seems integral to

existence; and I do like my bourgeois comforts. So I suppose I’m just a part

Romantic on these qualified terms.

I: How are your ideas born, where does the energy come from and how do

they develop into poems? Do you know what you’re doing? Are you

perfectly secure in your writing?

P: Ideas for poetry are born of intuition, there’s a lightness right at the start,

a quickness, a feeling of “connection, of yes, of aha, there’s something here,

this is good, I like this.” The poem is an effort at taking these feelings, this

brightness and giving it form, development, substance, more than the airy-

nothing, the vagueness, the potentiality which it is at that starting point and

which it will be, if I don’t work on it and give it shape.

The energy comes from books, from experiences, from being in a room

alone and being with others in social situations. It produces a sprawling

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canvass, a narrative that is difficult to categorize. It mingles scholarship and

reminiscence, polemic and personal history. Ideas come in a myriad of ways.

The poem becomes a stopping point in my journey, a brief visible moment, a

resting place in that same journey, a sustained note, a punctuation mark, a

point I can look back on later in life in quite a different way than the normal

memory trip. The whole exercise of writing the poem is usually quite

spontaneous, quite fast, although on occasion the poem takes two or three

hours to take form. I think, too, it is born from the repetitious aspect of life.

There is translation involved, a translation of the world into language. For

me, the poem is part memoir and part criticism, a little like that Monday

morning quarterbacking that Susan Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times

Book Review called that ‘fabulous genre.’239

I feel a strong sense that I know what I am doing. I also have an equally

strong sense of security, but it is always mysterious, the process of writing a

poem. With each poem, or group of poems, I define the process more

sharply, more definitively, more comprehensively. In writing poems I pay a

lot of attention to what I am doing, to giving the process a description. I

would say, looking back over what must be at least two million words now,

239 Quoted in”Writing Was Everything,” Internet Site: Harvard University Press, 2005.

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that there is an ongoing poetic analysis of process, of content, of

relationships between what I am doing and both myself, my Faith and my

society which are the three corners of the geometric triangle that is my

poetry. The sense of security is not arrogance, superiority, or self-

righteousness. It is a composite feeling that is firstly inspired by my

religious commitment, the faith that is built on this commitment, something

that is reflected in all the appropriate protocols of piety I know as a faithful

petitioner and practitioner. It is also a feeling that takes me out to sea, with

my spirit wrung, with remorse on my wings, with an open wet world beyond

which I do not always approach with courage, often with sadness, for I am

aware of my cowardice, for I am human. My poetry is born from experience

and trying to put this experience into words.

I: Obviously, then, you see your own life in, and as, your poetry?

P: Yes, I often feel I am the path which is outlined in my poetry. It is a line

of movement between the many places, many towns I have lived in and

travelled through, the many experiences I have had. It is a path, a line,

conditioned by my thoughts, feelings, indeed everything that has happened

to me. Not all of it is down on paper, but what is not there will disappear

661

into oblivion and be no more, eventually. What is there is my line; I walk

my line. We all walk our own line; it is the easiest thing a human being can

do to put our mark on a place—and the hardest! My words have a

substantive actuality about them for my poems are autobiographical and I

bring my society and my Faith into relation with my self. I don’t do this in

all my poems but many of them I do.

Every work of art, every poem, has its own mysterious sense of purpose

about it, except for the works of those, I suppose, who see their work as

devoid of purpose. This purpose comes partly from the traces of energy used

in the making of the work. There is an energy connected with the spiritual

path as defined in the Baha’i teachings. There is an energy in aloneness and

its simplicity. We lose what William Hazlitt called "our importunate,

tormenting, ever-lasting personal identity....and become a creature of the

moment, clear of all ties."240 I become connected with the universe through

a world of books, words, the internet, the lamp on my desk, ideas, silence,

sometimes a little music. Hazlitt goes on to say that in this state of solitude I

"baffle the prejudice and disappoint the conjecture" of the stranger on the

240 William Hazlitt, On Going A Journey, 1822.

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street who ponders who I am. More importantly, I begin to be an object of

curiosity and wonder to myself.241

Purpose is also connected with a withdrawal of energy and its defining,

delimiting, function. Purpose also comes from the viewer’s own inner

journey in relation to mine, to me, the provider of the poetry. I try to keep

all channels of sensitivity open, to experience things as keenly and

immediately as possible and to explore as deeply into reality as I can. My

poetry, in the end, should be a conveyor of this feeling ; for, as Pound once

said, only emotion endures.

I: Tell us a little about some of your thoughts on poetry.

P: Writing poetry is like finding your place in a room, in a group, on a street,

in a town, in a state, in a country, in the world. Finding your place, bringing

the physical things around you into the right, the most suitable, relationship.

The process is dynamic; so is the process of writing poetry. You have to find

the right set of words and when you find it, you move on to another poem, to

another part of life. It’s like making everything your friend, making it

241 idem

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familiar, even when you’ve never seen it before. You do the same with

people, so you are comfortable wherever you go in the world, as long as

you’re not freezing or roasting. The process of writing poetry is a poeticizing

of your world, of a translation of the familiarization and the estrangement,

yes, estrangement, because you can’t win it all. You are going to hurt, be

hurt, feel alone, afraid, joyful, et cetera. Writing poetry is part of the

individual’s response to the Orphic poet's injunction to "Build, therefore,

your own world."242 Some poets build a world of writing one day a week.

John Ashbery is one such poet. Keats used to write until early afternoon and

then go for a walk. Every poet constructs a world for their writing. That

world is often partly constructed for them. Mine certainly was by 1992; in

the next decade I simply refined that world, made it more organized and

effective.

I: Do you always feel happy when writing poetry?

P: Most of the time it is an exercise in concentrated pleasure. Effort, my life,

my world, come together in a pleasing mix. This is what keeps me at it day

242 Quoted in: “Emerson and Thoreau as American Prophets of Eco-wisdom,” Ann Woodlief, 1990, on The American Transcendentalism Web, 2004.

664

after day, year after year. Also, by the time I had started writing poetry

seriously, I was tired of a lot of things in life. Poetry was clearly a new lease

on life. I’m happy and relaxed when I write; occasionally, when something

has got under my skin and I’m feeling sad, despondent, unhappy, or

whatever, writing poetry is like a conduit for this negativity. I usually work

it out, like someone else might do a physical workout. Of course, some

problems, as Jung says, are never worked out. I write poetry because it has

deep meaning to me; the most profound, sublime feelings come to me, from

time to time, when I work in the privacy of my chamber. I hope this

sublimity comes through to the reader.

INTERVIEW NUMBER FIVE WITH RON PRICE

This is the fifth interview in fifteen months. It resulted from reading a series

of interviews with Edward Albee over the twenty-five year period 1961 to

1987 and published in Conversations With Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin,

University of Mississippi Press, London,1988. Knowing as I do that these

are historic days, days of infinite preciousness in the brief span of time

before the end of the century, days of urgent and inescapable responsibility

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as I strive toward my God-promised destiny in the midst of a spiritual

drama,1 provided a motivational matrix for the comments that follow.

1Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, 1997.

Questionner(Q):Are you conscious of influences on your poetry?

Price(P): Yes and no. My religion, my reading, ‘big’ events in my life,

people(family, friends, associations) are each and all immense influences on

what I write. Given the time and the inclination I’m sure I could point to

literally hundreds of poems that have direct links to one of these four

influences. That’s the ‘yes’ part. The ‘no’ part would go something like this:

often I begin a poem and I have no idea how it will end and I have no idea

just where it came from, the germ of the idea. It’s like the birth of a baby and

you did not know you were even pregnant. Keats put it well in a letter he

wrote in 1820 and which I often quote, or paraphrase. Once a poet gets to a

certain intellectual maturity ethereal finger-paintings can be engendered,

voyages of conception he calls them, which arise out of the most mundane

experiences.

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I must say, too, that I feel a proud identification with the Baha'i heritage

which, arguably now, goes back two centuries or more. It informs my quest

for a better world. My whole sense of belonging, or being part of something

important, something far bigger and greater than I will ever be, indeed, and

my entire life experience has allowed me to develop a world view which

transcends any specific situation I find myself in; for example, the many

years I have spent pioneering in remote places where my wife and I and my

children and sometimes a few others, were the only Baha'is. I extrapolate

my referential framework of Baha'i philosophy and its politico-sociological

thought and this extrapolation gives me an understanding of the roots of the

unfolding world-wide crisis that I have lived through, that my parents lived

through and, perhaps, as far back as the history of human beings on this

planet.

My enthusiastic subscription to Spinoza's concept of the organic unity of

God, man, and nature which proclaims the world's moral regeneration;

indeed much in the whole history of philosophy, I find relevant to the Baha'i

vision, the basis for a vast synthesis which I'm confident will take place in

the centuries ahead. My faith in the Baha'i teachings, not merely as the basis

of an international movement, but as the materialization of universal ideals

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of brotherhood and peace, also informs everything I write. Even my own

writing is an attempt, as W.B. Yeats once wrote, to hammer my thoughts

into unity. I’m not sure that synthesis is what I do. I’m more of a magpie-

like borrower. The process is partly 'inspirational,’ partly metaphorical and

partly constitutive.

Q: Are there any serious problems with the interview method?

P: The viewer or the reader who comes across a transcript must keep in mind

that answers change. Truth is relative. Individuals change. Ways of thinking

about things go through processes of complete overhauling. As Edward

Albee put it in an interview in 1980 with Peter Adam, an interviewee finds

as he is giving an answer, one he has given many a time, and in mid-stream

he realizes he does not believe that answer any longer, or it is just not true.

It's part of that idea "how do I know what I think until I see what I've said."

The interviewer also has to keep in mind that we all have many selves, many

‘positions’, we are many things to many different people. I find a position,

a point of view, evolves with each poem; it’s an organic process.

Also, the concept that the spark of truth comes from the clash of differing

opinions means that the interviewee often will play the devil’s advocate just

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to generate that truth spoken of above. I've played that role as a teacher to

precipitate that spark, that verbal polarity. The observer may often wonder

'just what is it that Price does think?' This coincidentia oppositorium, the

coincidence or conjunction of opposites, is often essential to human

consciousness, to the arriving at the truth. Often an agreeable disposition,

no matter what the opinion, is also important in human interaction. But the

tragic contradictoriness of the Self and of God which is experienced as the

dark night of the soul and the coincidentia oppositorium, one of the crucial

archetypes of the human psyche, this is one of the ultimate challenges to

human growth we all face. Loving those we dislike or who dislike us; being

willing to live through the dark night of the soul after one has received the

joy of light--these test the metal of a saint. I’ve never been impressed with

the degree of my sainthood, the extent of my capacity to sacrifice, my

willingness to endure difficulties. I might rate my response to these

challenges and tests to my human growth at best with a bare pass of 50%,

just squeaking in over the line.

A sociologist with what is called 'the interactionist perspective' might say

something like “a sense of self results from the process of interaction.”

Putting this a little differently, he might say the interviewer strongly

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influences the way the interviewee comes across. There are many things that

affect an apparently neutral or objective interview. There’s a whole literature

available now on the subject of interviewing. I often play the devil’s

advocate game when my wife and I are in company. My wife used to find it

quite annoying, but she’s used to it now, well nearly. We’ve been married

for 22 years now.

Q: Do you prefer the ambiguities of life or the simple, clear and factual in

your poetry?

P: You really need both in poetry. They compliment each other over and

over again. As Carl Jung says most of the really important things in life

don’t admit to answers. It’s better that way, he argues, they give us

something to work on right to the end of it all. They help us grow. The

endless analysis of issues helps to fill life’s spaces in with challenges,

enigmas, paradoxes that the mind can play with forever; for so much of the

everyday is factual and beyond analysis, the routine, the sensory, better just

enjoyed without too much thought.

Q: What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

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P: I don’t consider writing as work. I like to read, eat, drink, sleep, walk; I

actually like my job as a teacher; I enjoy relationships, some of the time; I

enjoy shopping, although my wife would never believe that; I enjoy driving

in air-conditioning on a hot day; I like swimming, sauna-bathing, good grief,

I could go on and on. “The usual stuff,” as Edward Albee put it when he was

asked the same question.

Q: Why did you stop sending your poetry to the Baha’i World Centre

Library?

P: After sending nearly 3000 poems in less than five years--1992-1997--I

felt a little pretentious that so much of my work was being stored there and

me not being either famous or rich. I felt I had expressed my enthusiasm to a

sufficient degree for the marvellous developments on the Arc and it was

time to leave it off, so to speak. I got the idea of sending my poetry to other

places and this is what I plan to do since it is really impossible to get my

poetry published at the various publishing houses around the Baha’i world.

Q: Do you think much of your audience as you write?

P: They drift somewhere out on the periphery. Our society is largely a film

and television culture with poetry just about irrelevant, ‘cauterized,

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coterized’. Millions write the stuff, on the net, in little magazines, probably

more poetry being written than in all history. But, like the theatre, it’s not

mainstream, although when I read Pamela Brown’s description of poetry as

‘close to popular culture’, I understand what she’s driving at.1 My concern

is with the reality, the honesty, the poem I’m writing. It’s quite an

introspective process. It’s not about popularity. I’m in there but the

audience hardly exists, except in a posthumous sense. I like to think what I

write may be valued, as W.H. Auden put it once, by some future generation.

Time will tell.

Q: The Polish poet Cszeslaw Milosz said that poetry should be written rarely

and reluctantly under unbearable duress and only in the hope that good

spirits choose us for their instruments. Your poetry would seem to testify to

the opposite of this philosophy?

P: I like the last part of the idea. I like the concept of being a channel for

good spirits beyond the grave, although it is always difficult to know for

sure when you are serving in such a capacity. As far as the frequency of

writing is concerned, I think that is quite an idiosyncratic issue. The opus of

each poet is different; the published portion varies from virtually nothing to

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many volumes; for still others, like Emily Dickinson, it all gets published

after their death. For still others it happens, like Keats, when they are young,

like a flood; or like me, in middle age, another flood. In some ways I think

poetry chooses you; it is not forced. I think the confluence of the death of

Roger White and the anchorage I found here in Perth after years, two

decades, of moving from town to town and job to job allowed my poetry to

find a home in this world.

I must say, though, that Milosz has put his finger on part of the essence of

poetry-the pain of life, the suffering in human existence. And much of the

key for dealing with it is an acceptance that it is part and parcel of life. But

this is only part of the story. There is also the public pain in this dark heart

of an age of transition, as the Guardian calls our times. There is also the joy,

the adventure, the knowledge and understanding and so much, much more.

Q: Do you plan any of your poetry? Do you worry about where the next one

will come from?

P: Ralph Waldo Emerson used to worry about the ending of his creativity. I

come across this idea from time to time in reading about other poets, not

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frequently, but occasionally. The only time I worried significantly about

creativity was when I used to argue with myself about taking lithium which

seemed to have an effect on my creative edge. That was in the 1980s, by the

‘90s I did not concern myself at all with the creativity-lithium nexus. If I

lose interest in writing poetry, I will probably miss it because it has been

such a source of pleasure, for at least five years now. One can’t predict this

sort of thing in life any more than one can plan the next poem. Poems seem

to pop out of some intuitive, cognitive-emotional zone. The only planning

that takes place is while I write but, even then, the whole thing usually

comes pretty fast, like the rushing current of a river. It is very cathartic. I am

also inclined to agree with Mark Van Doren who wrote: "what poems are

about, their ideas, is more important than the words."243

I don’t have time to worry about the process, although occasionally I

agonize over a phrase, an ending, a word. I’ve been averaging a little under

two poems a day for five years. I’m awake for about 16 hours a day and two

poems does not sound like much: a poem every eight hours, some 500

minutes. One could argue that this is not that prolific. But given the fact

that I’m a teacher, a parent, a husband and am involved in the local Baha’i

243 Mark Van Doren, "Robert Frost's America," Atlantic Monthly, June 1951, pp.32-34.

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community, I would not want the process to be any faster. When I retire in a

few years perhaps the production rate will increase.244 I’m not sure who

controls the assembly line. I have a central role and certainly push alot of

buttons. Perhaps, if the stuff is not very good I can blame Ford!

Q: Gwen Harwood the Australian poet who died two years ago in Hobart

said she did not think about her position in the literary field; she did not

intellectualize about her writing. You appear to do some intellectualizing

about your work. How would you describe your attitude to your writing?

P: I don’t really have a position in the literary field, not yet anyway. I am a

solitary person after I leave my various professional and public

responsibilities. I am not against the idea of a public definition, fame or

wealth and if it comes my way that will be fine, but I don’t seek it out. One

of the reasons I have put these interviews together, though, is that I think

about what I write. I seek out a sense of definition, a sense of an articulated

perspective. I want to be able to put into words what I’m trying to do. It is

part of being a wordsmith, part of the autobiographical process. But it is not

just an autobiographical surge of the spirit. What I write here is, among

244 After four years of retirement it would appear that poetry production has actually dropped because I am spending more time writing prose.

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other things, part of the common task we all have to trying to express our

spiritual understandings to each other.

Gwen calls herself a Romantic. She said she thought it was “a nice thing to

be called.”2 I’ve always thought of W.B. Yeats as the last of the Romantics,

although certain Romantic tendencies linger: the desire to reform humanity,

messianic interests. I have such interests. It would be difficult for a Baha’i

not to have them. These interviews express a certain intellectualization of

what I do, where I’m at. My writing is also a bi-product of tranquillity,

emotions recollected in tranquillity as Wordsworth put in 200 years ago.

After three decades of the hectic, the problems of maturity, marriage and

career I feel a certain peace, what one poet called the golden years.

Q: Why do you write poetry when you are obviously an effective

communicator in your profession as a teacher? I would have thought you’d

had enough ‘communicating’ at the end of the day.

P: Yes, for twenty years, beginning in 1973, I’ve seen myself as an effective

communicator in the classroom. Student evaluations of my work also

support my own view and I enjoy the teaching process immensely. But I

have found communication in my two marriages has not been easy. Also the

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general difficulty I have had, and the rest of the Baha’i community in the

West, in communicating the Baha’i teachings to the people we contact each

day—and the importance given by the Baha’i community to this teaching

process—creates a pressure that the Baha’i lives with year after year. I think

writing poetry has partly been a response to this pressure and the tensions in

my two marriages over more than twenty-five years. Also, no matter how

popular one is as a teacher, there are inevitably tensions associated with

one's professional life as a teacher. I also read an average of a book a day

and have for years and my mind just gets so full of stuff-in addition to the

endless output of the media and what one gets from the seemingly endless

conversations with people-that I need some outlet. Ideas build up, float

around, scratch about. I should say something, too, about Rilke in closing

because so many things he said in his ‘advice to poets’ explain the reasons I

write.3

Q: Why the sudden outburst in poetry in your late 40s and early 50s?

P: By my late forties I’d written 150,000 words of published essays in

Katherine when I wrote for newspapers in the Territory. I’d also written

enough academic essays to sink a ship, although I still did not have a

Master’s Degree. I’d tried writing sci-fi, but ran out of ideas and found it too

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demanding. I think I got to 40,000 words one summer holiday; I even went

off my lithium in the hope that the creative edge would be sharper. But I

found the exercise too onerous. A lady in California, Betty Conow, who had

edited some of my essays at the request of Roger White, suggested I write

poetry. I had been doing a little poetry writing, perhaps two dozen poems a

year from mid-1980 to early 1992. Then the surge started. In the last four

months of 1992 I wrote 75 poems; in 1993, 700 poems; in 1994, 708 poems;

from 1995 to April 1997 another 1500 poems. I have tried to answer this

question in other interviews in other ways. This is yet another stab at it.

Q: Would you say your poetry is strongly ‘message oriented’?

P: Some of it is clearly didactic. I’ve got something to say, about a thousand-

and-one things. There are probably several major themes which I’ve

commented on before in other interviews(Volumes 17, 20, 21 and 24) I try

to be humorous when it comes naturally; I try to contextualize the message

in history, in my own life and ideas. But I don’t worry too much about how

people are going to react. Of course, one can’t completely ignore the

reactions of others or social intercourse would come to a standstill. I did in

the early years of my writing and I think the worry was useful because I

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wound up simplifying my poetry so people could understand it and, in the

main, I achieved this. I’ve had several public readings of my poetry in

Fremantle and I was well received. I felt like I was in a classroom. Of

course, not everyone is going to understand what you write and there will

often be interpretations of your words that you had no intention of putting in.

But I think you have to let it go, let it travel on its own, wild and free so to

speak.

Q: How would you label yourself as a poet?

P: I don’t like labels. I’m a Baha’i who writes poetry, or should I say I’m

trying to be a Baha’i and I try to write poetry. I find the term ‘poet’ a little

pretentious. Even with the terms ‘husband’ and ‘father’ I sense a gap. They

are roles you only partially fill. Being a poet is not a career position, a career

move, part of a trajectory. It’s an occasional experience. It is not loaded with

expectations; you don’t have to prove anything. Occasionally when I read in

public I feel like a performer, an entertainer. The label ‘poet’ is not one I

wear comfortably. In some ways writing is more what you hear than what

you write. Labels tie things down too much; I want to savour the experience

in all its complexity and expansiveness in a living world. A poem can not be

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summed up in a glance, any more than a painting. It needs time and patience.

The more time and patience, the more labels disappear. I don’t like to see a

break between the aesthetic, the poetic, the sociological, the historical, the

psychological. The whole of existence is multi-dimensional,

interdisciplinary, incredibly complex and utterly simple all at once. It can’t

be reduced to some label, although I like Judith Rodriguez’s definition of

poetry as “the habit of squeezing for the essence.”4

Poetry has a long history now of movements, positions, ideas, approaches,

styles. It’s like many other disciplines there is alot going on in them when

you start to get into them. I’m teaching a course now in sociological theory;

I used to teach philosophy. I took an eclectic approach to these subjects and I

do the same with poetry.

Q: You have been asked many times about the influence of the Baha’i Faith

on your poetry. Could you answer this question again?

P: Some poets are ambivalent about the influence of religion. Fay Zwicky

thinks of religion as one great confidence trick, for example. Other poets are

clearly Christian in some way or other; sometimes the influence is obvious;

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sometimes it’s indirect. Sometimes poets talk about how Taoism or

Buddhism influences their perspectives. Anyone who reads my poetry to any

extent will know that the Baha’i teachings, its history, its organization, its

philosophy, etcetera are manifest again and again in my poetry. In fact, I

would say if you are not interested in the Baha’i Faith you would have to cut

away, what, fifty to ninety per cent of my poetry? So much of what I write is

inspired by, a comment on, a wrestle with, some aspect of this Cause that I

have belonged to for nearly forty years.

Also, it is my view that no sage in modern times has conceived a more

exalted or a juster System than that which evolved out of the ideas of

Baha'u'llah. His reason was always guided by His belief that He was

unerringly guided and that His imagination was totally in tune with the

powers and wisdoms of Divinity Itself. When I viewed, even with a

complacent temper the extent of His wisdom; when I exercised my various

faculties of memory, of fancy and of judgment, in the most profound

speculations of which I was capable or in the most important labours which

had devolved to my duty, and when I reflected on that which would

transport me into future ages, far beyond the bounds of death and of the

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grave, I was lost in awe at the contemplation of this precious Being. No

influence could exceed that influence on my work.

Q: How do you cope with all the personalities that come into your life?

P: I try to cut off when I’m finished with the ‘duty’ side of my life. I’m a

little like Keats in the sense that I absorb alot of my environment when I’m

out in it. It’s like being fully turned on, ultra-receptive; things impinge,

sometimes quite acutely. So I try to turn that whole world off and read and

write. This way I can control the input totally. I like to think this will be a

permanent diet when I retire. For now I can only get a few weeks, a few

days, a few hours, of solitude. I desire invisibility for the next dip into the

jungle of life and all its complexity and stimulation. When I have had

humanity in and out of every corner of my being, then I seek silence,

solitude. It’s then that I read about poetry, but I rarely read poetry itself. I

want to listen to my own voice; the voice of others gets in the road, or it’s

just plain uninteresting. But some poetry you want in your head so you read

and reread it: Shakespeare, Dickinson, Keats, Dawe, etcetera.

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Q: You plan to read at the July 1997 Conference on Global Governance in

Perth?

P: Yes, I have not read publicly in the Baha’i community yet. I’ve given

many Baha’is a poem or two, or more. I’ve read a poem once or twice in

Belmont at a Feast or a deepening. I’ve written many essays about poetry,

especially Roger White’s. I’ve got nearly 3000 of my poems at the Baha’i

World Centre Library. I’ve read publicly, as I’ve said before, at a cafe in

Fremantle. But no official exercise like this conference in Perth. I read rarely

because I find it limits the text of my poetry; it is too oriented to the trivial,

to entertainment. It must be if it will be heard and enjoyed. It limits the

reader’s reaction by imposing the author’s view, although being a teacher

I’m used to doing that. You have to when you’re on the stage with an

audience. I’m not a performance poet, although on those occasions when I

have been ‘performing’, it has been quite successful. I enjoy pleasing people

but, after twenty-seven years of teaching on a thousand platforms, it does not

have the turn-on it used to do. I prefer the page, the book, kept, preserved.

I think my general lack of interest in self-promotion, voyeurism as some call

it, begins in the desire for solitude. I'm not interested in being a personality.

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I've done this for nearly thirty years as a teacher and lecturer. Public reading

tends to put a portrait around the poetry. Tagore or White would have

preferred a focus on the poetry not the personality. Some publishers prefer it

that way too. They don’t even put photographs in with the poetry. Maybe in

the next five years of writing poetry I may find myself with a more public

profile. We shall see.

Q: Tell us a little about your concept of the imagination and how it works in

your poetry.

P: I think imagination functions firstly in terms of history. If I think of it,

virtually all of my poetry is about remembering, remembering the past and

projecting a future. There is in my poetry what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur

calls a 'depth hermeneutic' of historical imagination. I am involved deeply in

a reinterpretation of our cultural memory, my society's, my religion's and

myself. The remembrance of things past is a motive power in the struggle I

and my fellow Baha'is are involved with in changing the world. I am

involved with breaking the stranglehold of dominant and modern ideologies;

I am involved with taking the struggle to the very centre of the world past

the right and left wings of the hosts of all the countries. My ethical and

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poetic imagination is involved with telling and retelling the story of myself

and my religion. I know my story is never complete. In the process there is a

great deal of pleasure and delight associated with what, for me anyway, is

authentic learning. The task of the imagination and out of all this learning is,

what you might call, the creation of a narrative identity. For this identity is

not a fait accompli.245

Q: Thank you again for your time. I have lots more questions but no more

time. I wish you well, Ron, in the years ahead and to many more years of

writing poetry.

P: Thank you; I hope the buzz continues to enrich my middle years.

Ron Price

25 April 1997

1 Pamela Brown in A Woman’s Voice: Conversations with Australian Poets,

Jenny Digby, University of Queensland Press, 1996, p.183.

245 For an expansion of some of these ideas see: Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture, University of Minnesota press, Minneapolis, 1988, p. 395.

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2Gwen Harwood in A Woman’s Voice: Conversations With Australian

Poets, Jenny Digby, University of Queensland Press, 1996, p. 45.

3 R.M. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, W.W. Norton and Co., 1962(1954).

4Judith Roriguez, ibid., p.164.

Ron Price

23 April 1997

INTERVIEW 19

The interview below is intended to provide some helpful perspectives in

relation to my poetry. Anyone interested in following-up on this interview,

in obtaining more details on my approach to poetry, can read a number of

the other 18 interviews, book reviews, history, poetry, etc. available on the

Internet at a great many sites, especially the sites under 'pioneering over four

epochs.

Note: All 'interviews' are simulations and this one was prepared as part of a

package inclusion in a booklet called Twenty Years On for the Baha'i

Council of the Northern Territory late in 2002.

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Interviewer: (I) Would you say your poetry has evolved, especially in the

last twenty years, to serve specialized uses that cannot be served by other

means?

Price: (P) Poetry, for me, serves many uses: some academic, some

exegetical, interpretive, imaginative, some narrative, some active, some

polemical, some autobiographical, some creative, some communal-

community oriented, some confessional, some conversational, some identity

defining: my identity, my society, my religion, my ideas. I think I can

achieve these ends, serve these uses or purposes in other forms of writing

but not as efficiently, as conveniently, as succinctly, as through poetry.

I've tried novels, some dozen efforts in the last twenty years but the furthest

I've got is about 30,000 words, perhaps twice; I've tried autobiographical

narrative twice: 30,000 and then 60,000 words in a second edition. Maybe

someone will publish it long after I've gone. I've kept a journal, a diary, off-

and-on, even retrospectively, becoming a narrative in the century 1944 going

back to 1844. This loose, drifting material of life, as Virginia Woolf calls it,

this place where one flings a mass of odds and ends, I only turn to

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occasionally, perhaps half a dozen times a year these days. Maybe I'll utilize

this genre in my later adulthood. I've never counted the words but it occupies

four volumes here in my study.

Essays give my poetry the only real competition it needs to concern itself

with. I must have 150 essays unpublished and another 150 published. I tend

to turn to the essay for some extended piece of thinking and writing. It is

about as extended as I want to be, say, two or three thousand words. This

amounts to two to three hundred thousand words. I write short, two to three

hundred word, items for magazines and letters to family and friends,

publishers and magazines. Finally, I keep notes on a myriad subjects in

over one hundred binders in my study. I think there is some truth in the

view that whatever you study, you become. From many of my teachers I

have learned. Many of my teachers have been in the pages of books. I have

had countless teachers of this genre. I find that I have been transformed in a

way that I just could never have imagined in my early or middle adulthood.

What I once found just too difficult to understand became within my

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competence; what might have shocked or appalled a previous self I came to

accept.246

But, without question, poetry is king for me and has been for ten years:

1992 to 2002.

I: Could you comment on the notion of form in your poetry?

P: Over these ten years a poem has become for me, firstly, a combination of

prose and poetry. I usually introduce a poem with a prose preface, often

quite a long preface, one of fifty to a hundred words and sometimes two

hundred or more words. I think my poetry has as its first major feature this

prose-poetry form. Perhaps the word category is better than form; it is

certainly another word I'd use to provide some typology, some

organizational model for what I call poetry. My poems are conversational,

autobiographical. They are my way of telling the story, a story, my story, or,

as Robert Pinsky calls it, they are each a thing in itself, not a member of

246 Colin Campbell, “On Intellectual Life, Politics and Psychoanalysis:A Conversation with Gad Horowitz,” CTheory: An International Electronic Review of Books on Theory, Technology and Culture, 2003. Of course, there have been a myriad teachers outside of books. This theme alone could consume a book or books in themselves.

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some category. Each poem is an organic crystallization of experience and

thought. It involves the play, the interplay, of imagination and thought. The

result is the experience of the power to discover form.247 For me, though, a

poem's content is largely, though not entirely, independent of its form. I

agree with poetry critic Jonathan Holden who says that the main anxiety of

modern or postmodern poetry is "anxiety with respect to poetic

convention."248 What is the most suitable form for my verse, for what I want

to write? Since there is no sure sense of what poetic form should be, what

are the most favourable conditions for my poetry? In the last ten years I

found a form, a style, that was suited for where I was at in my life--a man in

his fifties on the edge of retirement from his profession--249and where society

was at, if I can be so presumptuous to define such a complex thing.

I: Since so much of your poetry could be labelled conversational poetry,

could you tell us a little about how you see it in overview?

247 Jonathan Holden, Style and Authenticity in Postmodern Poetry, University of Michigan Press, Columbia, 1986, p.124. 248 Jonathan Holden, Style and Authenticity in Postmodern Poetry, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1986, p.11.249 Of course, I could define in much more detail just where I was in life when poetry came to occupy centre stage. Poetry is, as Harold Bloom argues, "a solitary art." And my work has become increasingly solitary as the years have gone on, with less and less of the social and more and more of aloneness.

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P: In conversational poetry the poet or the speaker in the poem is not famous

or well known. They are ordinary men and women, unless the persona they

create for a particular poem is famous in some way. In my case the ordinary

person is myself sharing the same quotidian life as my readers. If I am to get

the attention of the reader I must establish some element of extraordinariness

in my poem, in my conversation. Unless it is at least equal in value in some

way to the best or the most useful conversation, the poem has no raison

d'etre. I'm sure that is the main reason why most of what I write, what most

poets write, fails to attract a readership. People find other art forms, other

activities including conversation, quite simply more attractive, more

engaging. For the most part, there is little I can do about that.

Though writers have a readership, what it comes down to is several thousand

or million individual contracts between individual people. It's much more

private, more intimate, than other forms of artistic expression, at least I tend

to think so. Wordsworth and many since him in the last two centuries wrote

conversational poetry, but their language is now seen as hackneyed and

obsolete, at least for most readers. Wordsworth's vision was lofty but it does

not capture the modern imagination in its private, intimate, space.

691

Conversation contains essentially the same poetic features as literary, poetic,

texts or so some analysts argue. And so people move on from Wordsworth

in a more contemporary poetic idiom.

I certainly have vision in my poetry but getting the attention of readers is no

simple art today, no matter how conversational. My free-verse, narrative,

conversation poem or voice, what you could also call 'prose lyric,'

establishes its authority, its arousal of interest, by means of some narrative,

some ethical, tone inherent in the voice and sensibility of the poem. It's very

informality and familiarity is its strength. Another type of conversational

poem is the rhetorical, with its heightened and dignified language. It is

digressive, abstract, meditative, speculative, philosophical in type. It

establishes itself through an aesthetic, intellectual voice.

I colour my conversation like some stained-glass window which colours the

daylight and, whereas conversation is generally lost to history, I see my

poetry as more enduring since my intentions are to a large extent communal.

My work is part of a texture of community, in this case the Baha'i

community, with its pretensions, aspirations, to a long range future and role

to play in the history of global civilization.

692

The evolution of nearly half a century has instructed me not to press too

closely the mysterious language of prophecy and revelation that is part of

my Faith. The concept and, I believe, the reality, of the sublime language of

revelation is productive of the most salutary effects on the faith and practice

of the Baha'is, who live in the inspired expectation of that period, that

golden age, when the globe itself, and all the various races of humankind,

will gather together in one human family under the authority and guidance

of their divine Judge and Lawgiver. My poetry is, in some ways, the

quintessential opposite, the polar opposite of the language of prophecy and

revelation. In the most general sense my poetry is an expression of what

Freud says about knowledge that it "begins with perception and ends with

response."250 My poetry is part of my life's response to seemingly endless

perception. My perceptual world is densely, ubiquitously filled with

processes and interactions, constantly modifying each other and unfolding in

unexpected ways. Because of this I know I often miss the simple physical

reality in front of my nose; it’s a sort of visual illiteracy.

250 Michael Arfken, "The Psychology of Self-Deception as Illustrated in Literary Characters," Janus Head, 2001, Internet.

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I: The poet Robert Hillyer251 sees poetry as a more natural form of

expression than prose. Poets often turn to what you might call non-literary

analogues such as conversation, confession and dream to recover some of

the favourable conditions for poetry. Do you agree with Hillyer?

P: He certainly tells it as I experience it. Of course, not everyone sees it the

same way. But there is certainly a naturalness to poetry for me,

unquestionably. There is a naturalness for me in writing letters and essays

too, but little naturalness in writing novels and diaries. Poems furnish a

subtler vocabulary than other forms of writing for my experience, for how I

want to write about my life, any life, anything. My poetry is not narrowly

self-involved, although some critics may find it so. It is not self-pitying and

whiningly confessional, although occasionally it may slip into that niche.

There is playfulness here and a facing of life's issues squarely, at least

sometimes, like everyone else. I have been hurt, cowed and intimidated

along with the rest of my fellow man by various situations in life and this

rich, but not so happy experience, is reflected in my poetry. Yes, to answer

your question, I think my poetry has that naturalness.

251 Robert Hillyer in Jonathan Holden, op.cit., p.11.

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I: Do you think interviews like this help others to get into your poetry more

easily?

P: I'm sure some will find interviews like this invaluable. They help provide

a critical context and introduce readers to poems that might have eluded

their notice. Here is someone explaining a context for his poetry and giving

readers a certain illumination often before they have even seen the poetry.

My aim is to enlarge the vision, the appreciation, of the reader. It is all part

of trying to win over the readers. They have a lot of people vying, playing

for their attention. I know I have to work at it and, even if I work hard and

do my darndest, the great bulk of the reading public in these early years of

the twenty-first century is going to pass me by.

It's a ticklish business trying to describe poetry, trying to find the right

words. The effect on a reader of a fully achieved poem, if there is such a

thing, can be no more rationally explained or methodized than a composer

can explain a haunting melodic line, although one can try--and many do--I

among them. All of my consciousness, all of the meaning I find and the self

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I construct from this is all dependent on my habits of attention, as William

James puts it.252

I have found there to be a dizzying effect of wearing one hat and then

another, of spreading my attention across so many fields and so many

personalities, so many places and so many jobs. I think this can be mitigated

by taking stock of myself in this process of writing autobiographical poetry.

Becoming a well-developed, well-rounded, happy and well-oriented being is

no easy task. For some it is more difficult than others. To know thyself is an

old bit of advice and I think it still is a useful one to heed. All good inquiry

starts with a good and thorough self-examination. Developing the self-as-

an-instrument in research or in therapy, getting to know oneself is a rather

useful enterprise. Self-referential curiosity can be rather awkward at first,

but it is well worth the work (and play) in the long run if one really wants to

become a more self-aware person.253 Perhaps self-referential is a better term

than autobiographical. And-again-to answer your question-I think

interviews are a tool in this process, whatever you call it.

252 Michael Arfken, op.cit.253 Ronald J. Chenal, "Questionnaire for an Autobiographical Portrait of a Practicing Therapist and Researcher," The Qualitative Report, Volume 2, Number 4, December, 1996.

696

But sometimes think I have analysed my self and my poetry too much, that I

have not learned to shut up. So, perhaps, on that note, I'll shut up.

I: T hanks again, Ron, for your time. I'm sure we will pick up some of these

threads again at a future interview. Happy writing!

So, there you have it, three interviews from the nineteen that I simulated in

the ten year period 1992-2002. This was the fourth decade of my pioneering

and it represents a certain fruition of my life, or should I say another type of

fruition. As my professional life as a teacher was ending this new life was

being born. As I began to settle into a life of writing, poetry offered a

window to this new experience, an experience of a much more sedentary and

solitary existence. I seemed, like Don Quixote, to be a pursuer of wonder254

and my adventures to a great extent were happening in the silence of my

study. After forty years of moving from town to town, community to

community, it may be that I was going to stay put for the last decades of my

existence.

254 Roger Solomon, Desperate Storytelling, University of Georgia Press, London, 1981, p,15.

697

If readers are finding a certain degree of irregularity, of discontinuity, of

fragmentariness in my story thusfar, in these first five chapters, they should

keep in mind that these are qualities that tend to be found in women's

autobiographies.255 The reality of life is for the most part also one of

discontinuities and fragments. The straight line from cradle to grave with all

the wins and losses stuck in the middle is not what readers will find here.

The only place I have ever been able to locate life in little bundles of tidy

regularity is the resume, the CV. There is an emphasis, here, on the personal,

the inner-man, the interpersonal, in the female story-line and not on

professional attainments. My work, it seems to me, has certain female

characteristics. Perhaps, right from the start, the female was more a part of

my life than in the typical male. My mother wanted me to be a girl and had

pink clothes waiting for me.

Sallie Munt calls the self which leans into the experience of others and

listens and learns, the visiting self. The teaching profession, teaching the

Cause, indeed, so much of life involved this 'visiting self.'256 Over forty

255 Welty: A Life in Literature, editor, Albert Devlin, University Press of Mississippi, London, 1987, p.230. So there you have three interviews. I think they provide some useful views on this autobiography. I hope you, too, find them useful.256 Kimberly Chabot Davis, "An Ethnography of Political Identification," Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Vol. 8, No.1, 2003,

698

years or more it exerted a wear and tare on my psyche. And, as I say in other

contexts of this autobiography, after the age of fifty-five I limited this

visiting self to a more circumscribed social domain. I became more like

Thomas Edison who wrote in his autobiography that he never sought out

society; but society never ceased to seek him. I exercised a mild social

engagement, partly as a result of responsibilities in the Baha’i community,

part due to family activity and partly a result of other tasks and pleasures I

took part in.

VOLUME 1: CHAPTER SIX

A LIFE IN PHOTOGRAPHS

1908-1953 and 1953-2010

pp. 3-11.

699

I always think photographs abominable and I don't like to have them around,

particularly not those of persons I know and love.-Vincent van Gogh, "Letter

of September 19th, 1889," The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.

“The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.” –Camilla

Paglia, “The Magic Of Images,” 2002 Lecture.

The question is never about whether or not you are impressed with the

images, the photographs, the cinematography, the colours and the mood

music. The question is about whether you can keep your head when you are

impressed with that visual world, the apparent raison d’etre or MO, as they

say in the who-dun-its, that lies behind the visual experience.--Ron Price

with thanks to Clive James, “Splurge of the Swastika,” New York Times

Book Review, March 25, 2007.

Due to the physical action of light and the chemical action of development

there is a tangible link between what was photographed, through the

developing process to the gaze of the viewer. It is a process involving

something that has been, due to the photograph as an object, due to the

action of light, due to radiations that ultimately touch me and due to the

photograph being something for the gaze, the visual memory, of the viewer.

700

The photograph of a missing being, Susan Sontag says, touches me like the

delayed rays of a star.-Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.

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

At the age of sixty-six I now possess a dozen albums of photographs of

various sizes and shapes. They could represent a significant aspect of any

autobiography I might want to write. This essay, this part of a chapter of

this book, tries to put all these photographs in perspective, tries to provide

readers with my personal hermeneutics of the visual, at least that part of the

visual that got packaged into these twelve albums in a culture which gives

hegemony to the visual, the audio-visual. More generally, too, I provide

here in this part of my memoir a fragmented, an episodic, examination of the

phenomenon of seeing. What the famous Italian film director Federico

Fellini said about film could also apply to my photographs only with an

opposite emphasis. "My films are not for understanding,” said Fellini,

“They are for seeing."257 This essay, though, is about understanding and

understanding through the visual.

The French sociologist and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, said that "no

matter which photographic technique is used, there is always one thing, and

257 “An Interview With Federico Fellini,” Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 26.

701

one thing only, that remains: the light. Photography is the writing of light

and this light is the very imagination of the image.258 Baudrillard sees his

photographs as making the world a little more enigmatic and unintelligible,

as exposing the very unreality of the world of appearances. Any photograph

is never of any “real” world, but rather, it is a record of the momentary

appearances behind which the real hides. To him, the world is essentially

illusion. I certainly sense this as I look back over nearly 100 years of

photographs in my dozen albums.

Of all the great fictional heroines, Emma Bovary in Flaubert’s famous novel

Madame Bovary is probably the one about whose appearance readers are

most likely to disagree. We cannot, as with Dickens, refer to some fixed

engraving in an early edition, since Flaubert hated and forbade illustrations

of his works. Readers of some future biography of my life, should one ever

be written, may enjoy some of the photos in my collection, photos from my

childhood, adolescence as well as early, middle and late adulthood. I leave

all of this aspect of my life to my literary executors should any arise from

the ashes of my life after I leave this mortal coil.

258 Jean Baudrillard, “Photography, Or The Writing of Light”in Ctheory.net, 2001:http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=126

702

Our contemporary culture of digitization and image-glut actually can shrivel

the ethical force of photographs of whatever type even if they are intended to

elicit compassion, sensitivity or the milk of human kindness. In an age in

which spectacle has come centre-stage and even usurped the place of reality

in some ways, photographic images still have the power to evoke shock and

sentiment. Photographs are the fragmentary emanations of reality, the

punctual and discrete renderings of truth, rather than the uniform grammar

of a consistently unfolding tale. I would hesitate, then, to draw on my

collection of photographs, however numerous, however bright and shiny,

colourful and clear, as evidence of the unfolding tale of my life. They relay

and transmit diffuse assemblages of affect, without necessarily appealing to

the coherent, narrative understanding of an interpretive, rational

consciousness.

The photographic frame is not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation;

it is itself actively interpreting, even forcibly making a statement. Sontag

wrote that where "narratives make us understand, photographs do something

else. They haunt us." Our age, she goes on, is one in which "to remember

is more and more not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture."

703

Given the sheer sweep of the visual image in contemporary culture and

politics, I struggle to come to terms with the nature of memorialization in all

its forms effected by photographs. I ponder as to what is the kind of affect

relayed by photographic images as discrete and punctual fragments of

reality, the reality that is my life. What, I ask myself, is the semiological

universe, the symbols and mths, that are being called into play by such a

myriad of dissociated transmissions of affectivity?

The culture of 'image-glut' gives us a harried and in fact beleaguered

document of reality. I am on my guard that these words of mine do not turn

into something that is little more than a frustrated rant against the inhuman

multiplication not just of images, but of the sometimes sacrilegious settings

in which we see them. The place of the image in an era of information-

overload, and the capacity of the image in such a landscape to infinitely, and

perhaps "irrationally," multiply its significations in relation to continuously

mobile variations gives me cause to ponder. To photograph is to frame and

to frame is to exclude. My dozen volumes of photos have indeed excluded

most of my life.259

This would be true a fortiori of the effigy. Of all the religious and artistic

treasures which a visitor may see at Westminster Abbey, the collection of

259 Manisha Basu, Review of Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others,

704

eighteen funeral effigies in the Museum is perhaps the most intriguing.

Carved in wood or in wax, these full-sized representations of kings, queens

and distinguished public figures, many of them in their own clothes and with

their own accoutrements, constitute a gallery of astonishingly life-like

portraits stretching over more than four centuries of British history. Can

only the dead astonish us by seeming “life-like”? Is there something lifelike

in this memoir? Perhaps even the living can induce the uncanny effect of an

effigy from time to time—but in print. Modern celebrities, of course, do this

all the time and a whole industry has been created to cater to these ‘life-like’

forms and their antics.

This class of lively royal artefacts from merry and not-so-merry old England

trouble the finality they serve to commemorate. English royal effigies are an

historic prefiguration of modern celebrity. The funeral effigy did its work in

part by materializing in death a well-known likeness, symbolizing, at a

moment of high ritual expectancy, the general image that all the subjects of a

monarchy might reasonably be expected to hold in their minds’ eyes. I

mention the above because I can not see any purpose at all not only to an

effigy of myself but even photographs.260

260 Joseph Roach, “Celebrity Erotics: Pepys, Performance and Painted Ladies,” Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 16, No.1, 2003.

705

Kodak has closed its film laboratories and processing plants in Britain and

the United States since the turn of the millennium. At this point in the

twenty-first century, however, we can still look back on 150 years of a

familiar and domestic photographic technology; and I can look back on 100

years of black-and-white prints, the changing record of my affinal and

consanguineal family's life, my Bahá’í family or at least that part of it that

got in front of a camera. While I was on this earthly plane a wide range of

friends and associations beginning in 1947 are seen on this same plane. The

power of revelation due to photography is undeniable. My photos look back

on a very small section of 102 years(1908-2010) of that century within the

confines of my family, friends and many of the landscapes where I have

lived, moved and had my being.

I have been working on this essay on photography for more than a decade

now, since the late 1990s. It finally has a form that is useful and, although

not entirely satisfactory, it is appropriate to include it in this autobiography.

Much more work on this essay is required, but its relevance to my

autobiography has at last some clarity to me and so I include it in this sixth

edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs. I have found the content of this

essay one of the most intricate and complex of all the sections of this

706

autobiographical narrative but, because the ideas are important to me--and I

hope to some readers--I want to include them. The ability of photography to

record some of the types of the minutiae of social life makes it an ideal

method for dealing with a number of aspects of the autobiographical process

and some of the complexity and richness of the human situation. Many

people see much more in photos than they ever do in written text; for these

people, my photographs and the commentary are helpful, indeed,

indispensable. Of course, as Andre Malreau once said, “Images do not make

up a life story; nor do events. It is the narrative illusion, the biographical

work, that creates the life story.”261

The human tendency to look at, to be drawn to, the pictures, the photos,

before the print seems universal--at least in my experience. If I had the

technological competence and the money, I'd include many of the photos.

Sadly readers will find none in this work, this sixth edition. Some photos can

be found at my webiste for those who are keen to follow the visual line.

261 Timothy Dow Adams, "Introduction: Life Writing and Light Writing; Autobiography and Photography" MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 40, Number 3, Fall 1994, pp. 459-492.

707

Vision and perception are active ingredients in the creation of understanding.

When we observe something, then we reach for it; we move through space,

touch things, feel their surfaces and contours. Our perception structures and

orders the information given by things into determinable forms. We

understand because this structuring and ordering is a part of our relationship

with reality. Without order we couldn't understand at all. The world is not

just raw material; it is already ordered merely by being observed. And

photography helps in this ordering process; indeed, our very way of looking

at so much of the world is now determined, in part at least, by photographs.

Photography gives us an immense amount of experience that normally

would be outside our range. The fragment is so often elevated from

irrelevance to positions of some priviledge. We are able to see what we

looked like as children for the first time in the last century and a half, since

the birth of the Babi and Baha’i revelations. The photos are full of vanished

details of the way life was lived – the styles of chairs, of clothes, of hats and

bathing costumes, of accessories like spectacles – and of a wide range of

intriguing bits of human activity. As one critic put it, photographs may

stimulate, inspire, or seem to document autobiography, but whether they in

fact do so is another question.

708

____________________________

Here are two prose-poems that place this subject of photography in what I

hope is a helpful perspective:

______________

TELLING THE STORY

Most of us, without particularly meaning to, have accumulated--from

commercials, from ads in magazines, from picture books, from movies--a

mental archive of images of the West, a personal West-in-the-Mind’s eye, in

which we see an eternal pastoral, very beautiful but usually unpeopled.

These potent images, pelting us decade after decade, finally implant notions

about how the West was explored and developed, in a word, won that are

unrealistic. Photography has helped to redress the balance little by little

with its rich but disordered resource. Over the last seventy years studies of

various kinds and the occasional autobiography, like We Pointed Them

North(1939), have helped to alter the picture that is engraved on all our

brains from TV and the movies: Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey, the Lone Ranger,

Butch Cassidy, et al.-Ron Price with thanks to Larry McMurtry, “High

Noon”, a review of The New Encyclopedia of the American West, editor

Howard R. Lamar, Yale UP, in The Australian Review of Books, December

1998, pp.17-19.

709

The enterprise began, perhaps as early as 1894 when the first Baha’is landed

in America from the Middle East, or even when the Letters of the Living

travelled throughout Iran in 1844 and thereafter. The twenty-five years from

1894 to 1919 was a precursor to the year 1919 when the Tablets of the

Divine Plan were read. These years were also a precursor to the pioneering

program that began in 1919 and is now nearly a century old. It is a program

that is immensely diverse and operates at local, regional, national and

international levels. It is important, as the Baha’i community comes to

describe this vast and complex story, that the story, the history of this

pioneering diaspora avoids the tendency to and the affinity with the

reverential writers of medieval England to endless edification and to what is

called hagiography. There is a need to emotionally individualize stories so

that readers will not have to wade through hundreds of pages of reverential,

pious and lifeless prose. -Ron Price with thanks to Edward Morrison,”When

the Saints Come Marching In: The Art of Baha’i Biography”, Dialogue,

Vol.1 No.1, Winter 1986, pp.32-35.

Defining character,

determining worth,

touching on the personal,

710

bringing people out of

verbal concrete,

through understanding.

Needing an eye

for telling detail,

a certain dramatic power,

analysis and interpretation,

with incisiveness and conviction,

with no doubt about its being true,

a willingness to deal with the unpleasant,

for we need more than a glimpse.

We need the story of the saintliness

in all its unsaintliness.

It is as difficult to write

a good life as to live one.

We want to know we are not alone:

for the community is its own ritual,

the greatest drama in the world of existence,

711

something forever new and unforeseen,

devoid, in writing, of appearances and pretentions,

a mysterious development, this writing, of many values,

conveying to the reading public insight

and a knowing who they are into their lives.

For a great life does not make a great book.

Ron Price

1 February 1999

___________________________

A DOCUMENT, A RECORD

The Metropolitan Museum of Art held a retrospective in April 2000 on the

photographical work of Walker Evans. I know nothing about Mr. Evans, but

his photography was an interesting document on his times, a record of his

days and years, the sentiments and styles in the first half century of

American history and a personal autobiography. The brief summary I saw,

perhaps ten minutes, on The News Hour with Tim Lehrer went by so quickly

I did not catch it all. But it had something to say, indirectly, about my own

autobiographical work. -Ron Price with thanks to The News Hour with Tim

Lehrer, 5:00-6:00 pm, 7 April 2000.

Showing my world as I see it:

712

a poet warrior, heavily armed

with the stuff of my life,

my world, my religion—

my playful and not-so-playful

energies, moods and desires--

a document over three epochs,

a record of my days,

not so plain and simple,

clear and visually straight

from the shoulder as Evan’s work.

But, with Keats, an almost instant

transmutation of impressions, thoughts,

reading and ideas into poetry, well,

what some might call poetry, what

I might see as a study for poetry.1

1 See Robert Gittings, Selected Poems and Letters of Keats, Heinemann

Books Ltd., London, 1981(1966), pp.8-11.

Ron Price

7 April 2000

713

(revised for:

‘This So Called Life’

18/2/06)

______________________

The Gestalt psychologist attests that only the organization of materials into a

concrete and meaningful image can fully express and communicate the

whole of universal experience. Without this direct portrayal of awareness

and nature, the art stands incomplete within the natural world, and therefore

is nothing. All continued human activity, of which photography is but one,

requires a supply of activating energy, and no energy comes forth without a

motive. The effect of photography is not what I see in, say, my vacation

snapshots, but a tendency to see only the present as something that exists;

our human energy seems to focus on the now. And of course only the

present can be photographically recorded. The rest of time, the past and the

future, exists only in the imagination. Old pictures show an old present.

Photograph albums tend to produce in the viewers a permanent now, a

continuous present. I think this was, not so much a dominant attitude that I

came across in reading about photography, but a daring and useful

affirmation of an idea.

714

The writings found among media theorists and in the humanities and social

sciences are sprinkled with such affirmations and often tend toward a

provocative style of writing and thinking about photography and its

substance. The result of this analysis is often, at least for me, gross

overstatements, particularly when media developments are causally related

to other social-cultural or political phenomena. Even accepting a certain

overstatement, though, I find my twelve albums of photographs262 do record

a series of ‘present moments’ that are useful in reflecting on my

autobiographical experience. All of this visual material does not capture the

complexity; they transcend it, compress it, repress it. The paradox inherent

in the presence of photography within autobiography is the photographs’

tendency to simultaneously document and yet undercut the narrative.

During these four epochs, 1944 to 2021, the camera has been for many the

official family recorder. Film, video and the digital camera have come into

play in the fourth(1986-2001) and fifth(2001--?) epochs. But for most in

the West, in the cultures where I have spent my time and life, the camera has

been a silent witness to many of the important stages in their lives, from

262 This number is difficult to be absolutely accurate and it changes with time. In 2006 there were photos in some 24 albums including the ones my wife organized and cared for like her garden plants.

715

birth to death. Photography’s social functions are integrally tied to the

“ideology of the modern family” and the medium allows for and provides a

sustenance for an “imaginary cohesion.” The photographed family can

easily show us what they wish the family to be, though this may not often be

the case in reality. Photography operates at the junction between personal

memory and social history and it requires an engaging narrative to act as the

key to unlock the intricacies and complex nature of the “true” family behind

the iamge. This memoir will function partly as that engaging narrative but,

since my focus is only peripherally—and not centrally--on my family, its

intricacies and complex nature will not be unveiled here beyond a few broad

brush-strokes.263

In my consanguineal(birth) family and the two affinal(marriage) families I

have been a part of, there are between one hundred and two hundred souls,

depending on how far I extend the relationships on those family trees. There

were about a dozen ‘significant others’ on that tree and I write about them

all, but not in the detail that you might think that a 2600 page memoir should

give, might give, to such a group.

263 Jason Toh, “Framing History:Displaying the Singapore Family through Photography,” The Heritage Journal, Vol.2, 2005.

716

Often, for reasons of vanity or because they know they are not particularly

attractive, some people often dislike the way they look in photographs. Inga

Clendinnen, Australian historian, thinks that photographs challenge and

corrupt memory. Most of us, she goes on, remember individuals through

time as a sort of moving collection of lights, vague images or an indistinct

melody. If you think of how you might describe people who've mattered to

you it's never in terms of a static photograph. I find this to be very true of

my own experience. People, of course, will be in your memory bank, but it

is as an action not an image. It will be as a glance, a movement; it will be a

sensation you get when you see them or think of them. It might be a

particular feeling of happiness or sadness. It's a bit like a distinctive melody

that surrounds them. Clendinnen thinks that photographs cannibalise this

complicated moving memory, this sequence of indistinct memories we all

have. Photographs fix these memories into a form. For Clendennin

photographs are a violation of the actuality she wants to cherish in her

memory.264

We all lose things in life; we all change out of sight. Memories fade. All

methods of recording past actualities are imperfect, every one of them.

Human memory, written texts, photographs. All of them are deficient in

264 Robin Hughes, “Interview with Inga Clendinnen,” Internet Site, November 10th 2000.

717

some way. Clendennin says she just doesn't much like the way she looks in

photographs and she doesn’t much like the falsification of experience that

she thinks is entailed in photographs. Of course, she is expressing her own

views and others will inevitably have different views. I think these views

throw my own collection of photographic memorabilia into perspective.

In photographs it is not only the content that has the impact, but it is also the

capability of the photograph to bring the receiving human body, thanks to

the sensual stimuli, into a state of physical distraction, if not of sheer trance.

The seductive power of photographs in particular and media in general lies

in their suggestion that it is possible for us to become pure intensities of

feeling. We connect to photographs and media out of a desire for a direct

experience of something that is not ourselves. This is also true of print.265

But with photography you only have to see, you don’t have to say. You do

not need any narrative or analytical skill.

Some analysts contend that all perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is

also intuition, all observation is also invention and, therefore, by implication,

it is not words which are the primary ingredients of thinking but the entire

265 Rudi Laermans, “Understanding Media Theory: Language, Image, Sound, Behavior,” Image and Narrative, (Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative), Issue 11, 2005.

718

repetoire of the senses. Since language precedes perception, perceiving and

thinking are indivisibly intertwined. A person who paints, writes, composes,

dances, indeed engages in any art form, including I hasten to add, life itself,

thinks with his senses. And so our memories, in this context, become like a

series of still photographs, a film strip, a film, a musical score, a mysterious

and often chaotic sensory complex.

In my first album, a collection of some forty photographs for the years 1908

to 1953, fifteen of which are friends of my mother and people I do not know,

there are some twenty-five photographs of my mother and various members

of her family. The photographs provide something of a pictorial backdrop

for the transition period from my grandfather’s autobiographical story which

ended in 1901 to my own. His story, that part of his life that he wrote in an

autobiography, ended at the turn of the twentieth century and is kept in a

green two-ring binder in my study.

My own pioneering story I take back to 1962 and my association with the

Baha’i Faith goes back to 1953. Other aspects of my story go back to 1944,

the year of my birth and even as far back as 1844 when I try to connect my

family history to that of the history of this new world religion. Some aspects

of my social analysis go much further back than that.

719

_____________________________

NARRATIVE THOUGHT TO THE RESCUE

The visual imagery of the mind appears to be both more complex and less

systematic than the visual imagery of cinema. Images viewed through

conscious effort are more often indistinct and elusive. Even the faces of

loved ones are often difficult to recall. They sidestep the mind’s gaze if their

images are actively pursued. Long familiarity renders such objects too

complex and heterogeneous for a single image to suffice. Such faces

become, in our mind, multidimensional, ambiguous and possessed of a

breadth and complexity that photography and film condense and strip away.

This is also true of sensory experience in general.

Because of the elusiveness of sensory experience a mode of thinking comes

into acton, into play, called narrative thought.1 Narrative governs the

disposal of objects and actions in time without which memory and language

would be impossible. Most of our experience can be assigned a place in our

narrative history or at least its potential, although some of our life is clearly

and inevitably incoherent. -Ron Price with thanks to David MacDougall,

“Films of Memory”, Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from Visual

720

Anthropology Review:1990-1994, editor, Lucien Taylor, Routledge, NY,

1994, p.266.

Just as film and documentary makers

are often uneasy about their narratives,

so are the autobiographers among us

as we try and reconstruct our lives, our

narratives, our stories. Some, of course,

seem less troubled. Often a celebratory

stance is adopted towards one’s memory,

masking uncertainty, an emptiness at the

heart of such authorship, a fundamental lack

of conviction; reminiscence is usually treated

as fragmentary, rarely as omniscience which

is presumed arrogance. The richness inside

people’s memories is often unattainable and

is supplanted with endless illustrative material,

with physical experience, primary stimuli and

photographic iconography. These usually

do not serve to integrate society, encapsulate

ideology or create social order; rather they give

721

us the unalterable record of appearance and place

and a more profound place in our memory.

I would like to think that this story will

allow more than the record of appearance

and place and will contribute in a rich way

to that ultimate integration of society.

Ron Price

11 April 2000

______________________________

TWO MEN BEYOND THE KEN

In June 1826 Shaykh Ahmad, the leader of the Shaykhis, passed away at the

age of about 75 near Medina. Leadership of this community passed to Siyyid

Kazim. At the same time, in the same year, the "first successful recording of

nature"1 took place in France using a modified lithographic technique. Was

this just a coincidence? -Ron Price with thanks to Gisele Freund,

Photography and Society, David Godine, Boston, 1980, p. 22.

I see them through the eye of time

So distant is their story;

Yet in memory's warming lens

722

They're cherished for their glory.

Viewed through yet another glass

The focus is quite clouded;

For these men of so long ago

On history's line they're shrouded.

Bathed in the few details we've got

Attraction and repulsion,

The image is not distortion-free

But eternal is the emulsion.

The first glimmerings

Of the dawn of a new day,

In their midst were born Two Men

Who would say and write

Words beyond the ken

Of men and of angels.

Ron Price

29 October 2003

_______________________________

The photographs I refer to in this essay can all be found in Volume 1 of my

Journal and they give a perspective that goes back to the start of the Baha'i

723

Era. There is little in my account for that century 1844-1944. These photos

allow me to be somewhat of a trourist in both my own life and in the lives of

some others. They allow me to, in a way, symbolically possess these

people. They also beautify, make aesthetically pleasing, a world, a reality, I

know little about, even if it is in miniature. There is a poignancy in these

photos for they are of people who are all now dead, but who occupied the

centre and the periphery of my life when I was was born.

"The effort of thinking which is at work in every narrative configuration,"

wrote Paul Ricoeur, "is completed in a refiguration of temporal experience."

These photographs provide help in the narrative configuration of the years

before I was born and the early years of my childhood. Although I am

unable to refigure the early years of my own experience and the years before

I was born with even the briefest, the flimsiest, sense of totality, these photos

provide some knowledge in terms of traces.266 They take me back to the last

dozen years of the Heroic Age of my Faith in an indirect sort of way to that

eternal present that I mention above.

These photographs provide a means of capturing the past, fragmenting it and

removing it from any fixed context, except of course, that continuous present

266 I thank Paul Ricoeur for these ideas. See his Time and Narrative, Vol.3, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985, Introduction.

724

that I have alluded to above. Photographs, writes one film theorist, suspend

images “between the silken promise of liberation and nostalgia at loss of

anchorage.”267 In this promise of liberation, the world is called upon to live

up to its images, but there is no single way to capture, to encapsulate, the

world in all its complexity even if that world is the lives and times of my

family in the first half of the twentieth century. There is always a process of

selection. There is always, at least for this selection of photos, a touch of

pathos and pensiveness mixed with my inability or difficulty to negotiate my

displacement from these years before I was born and my early childhood.

But still: they quietly pierce my vision. They also help maintain, integrate

and enhance my cultural identity through their role as one of my society’s

main symbol systems. They seem to be part of me.

These forty photographs serve as a pictorial backdrop which both reveals

and conceals, which both heightens the expression of my family's life and

paralyzes by fact and the absense of fact. These photos both pass and fail in

their mnemonic function.268 They are both mobilization of memory in the

service of my life and framers, fixers and freezers of the objects as the

267 Scott McQuire, “Reply to Longacre,” Film-Philosophy, vol.6 No.40, November 2002, p.55.268 Norma Elia Cantu, Canicula: Snapshots of a Girlhood on La Frontera, 1995, Internet, 2000.

725

objects float free of their context. The paradox inherent in the presence of

photography within autobiography is that the photographs have a tendency

to simultaneously document and yet undercut the narrative. The

photographs, as I say, both reveal and conceal.269 Adams suggests that

photography "may stimulate, inspire, or seem to document autobiography,"

but that word "seem" is crucial.270

The intellect, in order to act upon reality, must thus reduce reality, the world

it senses, to a series of frozen moments. Unlike intuition which deals with a

differentiated and an undifferentiated flow of reality, of images, the intellect

extracts objects from motion in order to evaluate the action which it might

perform upon them, restoring an abstract idea of motion upon them after the

fact, like lines drawn between points on a graph.

I tend to make confident determinations about the content, the incidents, in

these photos and am hardly aware that these determinations are, for the most

part, conjectural, approximate imports scanned quickly by my gaze over the

269 Timothy Dow Adams, "Heightened by Life" vs. "Paralyzed by Fact", Photography and Autobiography in Norma Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera,1995, p. 57.270 Timothy Dow Adams, Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography, Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000, p. xxi.

726

many scenes. There is, as John Berger notes, "an innate ambiguity in the

photograph,"271 a pseudo-intimacy, an inferential status which is, sometimes

at least, softened by the warmth of the sense of usefulness to the spectator.

However intimate, however soft the gaze, though, we are not ourselves made

contemporaries of events by a vibrant construction and reconstruction of

their intertwining. If history is "a reenactment of the past," to use an

expression of R.G. Collingwood,272 then photographs certainly help.

Photographs certainly help in the reenactment of past thought in my own

mind which, arguably, is as close as one often gets to the reality of history.

If, as the philosopher Heidegger once wrote, "The fundamental event of the

modern age is the conquest of the world as picture,”273 these photographs of

mine are of more than little significance.

Then there are the dozen or so more recent albums with literally hundreds of

photos. Perhaps, as the years go on, I will make a more complete analysis of

271 John Berger in The Priviledged Eye: Essays on Photography, Max Kozloff, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1987, p.4.272 R.G. Collingwood in Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol.3, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985, p.144. 273 Heidegger, quoted in Ben Packer's "A Review of Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy," Ariella Azoulay, MIT Press, 2004.

727

them. But that is not my intent at this early stage of the discussion. I want,

rather, to find a context in which relevant questions about photography can

be discussed and understood by myself and, hopefully, others who come

across this essay on the subject. It seems to me there are many

misconceptions about photography and photographs and, while not claiming

to sort them all out, I would at least like to allude to them as part of placing

the photographs in my life into some useful perspective.

When I try to reconcile the multitude of images in my memory with the

photographic images, I come to understand that photography, even the most

documentary type of photography, communicates through the confluence of

objective and subjective factors, through the connection of photographic

images with memory images. Thus, they are never purely objective or

transparent. Once I know and accept this fact, no photograph can be

accepted, categorically, as hard and factual evidence. So it becomes difficult

to agree with actress Lauren Bacall when she says that one’s “whole life

shows in your face.”

728

I will make here some parenthetical remarks on the postcard274 which has

served a multiplicity of uses and functions and which is enmeshed in a

tangle of relationships which it is not my purpose here to elaborate upon. A

century ago the postcard was in its golden age. During these four epochs,

the years 1944 to 2010, it became a periodic experience for most people and

certainly for me. I have not saved many in my collection of photographs

and memorabilia but assiduous biographers, researchers and students of this

autobiography will find a few scattered throughout my collection of letters.

However small a place postcards have in my collection of life’s goodies,

they deserve a place, a comment, in this section of my autobiography

devoted as the subject is here to photos. Aesthetic appreciation of the

picture motifs lay behind the postcard's popularity in general, although they

also had symbolic purposes. The aesthetic dimension played a major role in

its widespread use for greetings, in its function as a souvenir from tourists

and friends to authenticate their journey and consequently as a type of status

claimer and friendship confirmer.

274 Bjarne Rogan, “An Entangled Object: The Picture Postcard as Souvenir and Collectible, Exchange and Ritual Communication,” Cultural Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Folklore and Popular Culture, Vol.4, 2005.

729

For some the postcard possessed an enormous popularity as a collectible and

people collecting things was a strong current in popular culture. In my teens

I collected stamps until the age of 21 or 22, but as far as I recall I was not a

collector of any other cultural items during my life except files in my study

on various academic subjects. For a short period in the early years of the

20th century the picture postcard eclipsed the world's number one collectible,

the postage stamp. The two latter uses—souvenir and collectible—are

closely entangled.

Even if communication was the raison d'être of picture postcards, they

seldom carried a substantial, linear message. New information was relatively

scarce—from the sender to the addressee. As a communication medium, the

card carried messages more or less void of information; they served mainly

as a sign of life and a reminder of social relationships. The picture postcard

was predominantly a carrier of what might be termed "activity-oriented"

communication, the purpose of which is to confirm, mobilize, or strengthen

social relationships. The cards functioned as social glue, the exchange

principle was immediate reciprocity. By the time I came to write this

autobiography photographs and images in general were being transferred by

the millions digitally on computers at least on the part of the planet where I

730

lived. Perhaps at a future time I will go into this type of postcard and the

multitude of images falling before my eyes and the eyes of billions in our

increasingly globalized society. This work is both autobiography and social

analysis. Such is my dual aim and only partly achieved as any reader who

has got this far will recognize.

If Time magazine's nine New York-based photo editors can sift through

some 15,000 pictures a week, selecting about 125 for each issue,275 surely I

can sift through a lifetime of several hundred photos and select a few for

autobiographical use? The task is not difficult, but I question the relevance

of the process and that is what I discuss here in this brief essay. My task is

partly to distance myself from my own love of photographs in order to

reflect accurately on the dozen or so booklets of images and now digitized

images in my computer.276 This business of reflection is critical.

"Photography is a way for me to preserve the part of me that is only me,"

wrote Tipper Gore in her new book Picture This: A Visual Diary(Broadway

Books, 2004). Yes, Tipper, "a way, but only a small part of me."

275 Caroline Howard, "Photographers at Work: Picking Shots," Columbia Journalism Review, July/August, 2002.276 Jim Roberts, "Introduction: Imagistic Information," Enculturation, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1998.

731

I place these photographic images from 1908 onwards in various visual

categories and frameworks and, as I do, I place myself with the images in a

sort of photographic archive. And the photographs which flooded my world

after 1953 and which I now can view with ease and convenience in a series

of a dozen albums provide me with a reality that, for the most part, I can no

longer touch. There is a certain magic I experience as I look at these

pictures from my life in their quiet place on the bookshelf. They are, not so

much a place of images as they are a place of thoughts or, perhaps better, a

place of mnemonic devices. Indeed, their highest merit is their

suggestiveness, the suggestion of a beauty, a character, a place, which the

photo itself does not reveal but only suggests.

It is as if a camera was nervously clicking over the surface of my life and my

job now is to piece together, to paint, to translate from feeling to meaning

and find some overall pattern in this kalaedoscope of images. It is as if,

while the camera caught fresh moments of my life, my task now is to keep a

freshness of vision as I write amidst a vast, a pervasive and immense

incoherence, with impressions always outstripping my capacity to analyse

the data. I need to possess a similar degree of sensitivity as the plates

732

possess and the developing equipment that photography requires to record

my own impressions of life.

In 2009 I arrived at the age of 65 and my last particular photo album was

becoming filled to its maximum intake. People in my world had begun to

send me digital photos enough to fill this and future photograph albums to

overflowing. Those who could afford it, and who had the interest, in the

first years of this new millennium, had begun to make videos of their

family/personal lives; still others had telephones with visual images of the

person they were talking to. There were large screen TVs, computer

monitors, CDs, mini-discs, indeed, a cornucopia of new technology that was

making the old world of the photograph in an album, the idea of keeping

even the digital photo in an album, somewhat passe even declasse.277

Time would tell just how I would respond to this change, this diversification,

this amplification, in the technology of photography that had insensibly

altered the rationale for the very existence of the old photo album. Photo

albums had been delighting the eye, had been part of my memorabilia, for

well nigh 60 years. As I write these words, two months after my 66 th

277 One rarely sees this word, declasse--acute accent on the last e--in literature these days, but it seems applicable here; it means lowered in social significance, relevance and standing.

733

birthday, I have decided to continue to put digital photos in future albums on

the same basis as those photos from cameras that I and my family have been

doing since early in the 20th century. But I did not exercise this practice with

much diligence. Instead, I simply kept a section of my computer directory

for digital photos.

Due to the physical action of light and the chemical action of development

there is a tangible link from what was photographed, something "that has

been", from the photograph as object, through the action of light, "radiations

that ultimately touch me," to the gaze: "the photograph of the missing being

which,” as Sontag says, “will touch me like the delayed rays of a star."278

There may be a pseudo-intimacy and an ambiguity to the photograph, but

there is also something wondrous and mysterious.

In 1839, at its invention, the photograph was considered a 'pencil of nature'

transcribing reality directly. But this belief in the objective state of the

photograph did not last long.279 The photograph did continue to meet

modern man's need to express his individuality and shape his visions. It did

278 Melody Davis, "Androgyny and the Mirror: Photographs of Florence Henri:1927-38," Website: Photography and the Uncanny.279 Rebecca Butterfield, "Photography and the Politics of Representation," Course Outline, University of Pennsylvania, 2003.

734

so with immediacy. It did not evoke the world; it represented it and it did so

with tremendous power.280 Photographs circulated in unprecedented numbers

in the epochs associated with this autobiography and satisfied the desire for

the authentic.

"There is no visual analogue in time," as Max Kozloff notes, "between what

we call character or even mood and outward demeanor."281 Moments of

serenity are often nominal and discomfort is often not far-off, if not actually

present behind the photographic facade. Photographs can and do illuminate

the microhistory of our sociability and offer insights into our social and

psychological reality. The narrative and the photographs I add create as

much as reflect reality. It is understandable, it seems to me, why so many

people in this audio-visual world of modern technology try to define their

lives visually with photographs, videos, films and a variety of memorabilia.

James Agee, in his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, expresses his

disillusionment with the ability of words to express, to define, his life, any

life:

280 Gisele Freund, Photography and Society, David Godine, Boston, 1980, p.216. 281 ibid., p. 14.

735

If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the

rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of

speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of

excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would

murmur, yes, but is it art? And I could trust a majority of you to use it as

you would a parlour game.....A piece of the body torn out by the roots might

be more to the point.282

Agee gives the body an important place in his attempt to define his life.

Often, for other autobiographers, though, the body is nearly effaced in a

tradition, the Platonic, that opposes the corporeal to the spiritual and defines

the self as essentially spiritual. But I would not want to ignore the body,

where my soul has come to dwell and will dwell for as long as I live on this

mortal coil. Surgeons, cosmeticians, hairdressers, fashion designers and an

army of sales people with something for every conceiveable part of my

anatomy and the microworld within which I dwell inscribe an idealized body

and a spiritual, cultural body. Indeed, there is a vast multitude in the world

who have a great deal to say about this body of mine and its environs and

282 James Agee(1941) in "Writing and Experience: Let us Now Praise Famous Men, Again," Niall Lucy, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, Vol.5, No.1(1991).

736

they have photographed this world, put it on video and in film and it is

difficult for an autobiography to ignore this vast panoply and pageantry of

data. This is especially true of an autobiography from a member of the

generation that came of age in the 1960s. Stanley Kauffmann, the great film

critic, says that generation was the most film hungry and film informed in

the first century of film.283

In the approximately ten thousand autobiographies written during my life,

just in North America, the human body tends to play second fiddle to

thought, action and the events of the time.284 My autobiography is no

different in this respect. If I was to examine the body, though, and place it

on the stage more than I have, this would be a fitting section in the

examination of the photograph, the photographs in my life. But looking at a

body is seeing a body and seeing is understanding and this is an assumption

that is based on a model of the mind which sees human consciousness as a

mirror of the world, as a tabula rasa at birth and learning as taking place in a

predictable and developmental path from birth onwards. The reality is far

283 Bert Cardullo, "Stanley Kauffmann Looks Back Over a 40-Year Plus Career," Bright Lights Film Journal, 204.284 Shirley Neuman, "Autobiography and the Construction of the Feminine Body," Autobiography and Postmodernism, Kathleeen Ashley, editor, University of Massachusettes Press, Amherst, 1994.

737

different. In reality the mind is a representational process which is defined

and measured through reflection.285 And any discussion of the photographs

in my life must be centred on reflection, my reflection, not bodies, objects,

things.

But I say little about my body here and in the rest of this autobiography. I

mention my body in passing in connection with my health and some of my

interests. But my body and its activity in sport, at a series of health studios

where I tried to keep fit, in its scenarios with yoga and meditation, in

walking, in jogging, in taking vitamins and minerals, in maintaining my

house and garden, in what I ate and drank and in the many things I did with

my body from brushing my teeth, to cutting my hair and nails, inter alia---

this long list of items simply plays no significant part in this autobiography.

The struggle of life is the struggle of the human condition and the body;

there can be no end to the stories it generates. Perhaps in a future

autobiography I will tell more of these stories.286

285 Ron Burnett, Cultures of Vision: Images, Media and the Imagination, IUP Press, 1995.286 Camilla Paglia in Sexual Personae writes “we cannot escape our lives in these fascist bodies.”

738

Their importance in popular culture can not be denied. The attention played

to this list of activities associated with the body in the media and in

conversation seems endless and I would be the last one to deny their value,

their relevance, to our lives. But, insofar as I might want to write about this

relevance in my autobiography, they amount to a stream of bubbles that float

away in the air in a child's play. But readers will learn little to nothing here

about these normal human interests in the late twentieth century insofar as

my life is concerned. There is no need to provide more information on these

topics; the burgeoning print and media culture can take care of this for me

and for any readers who come this way.

AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHT

Photography did not happen all at once, as some miraculous by-product of

the industrial era. It is instead an assemblage, a weave, of elements that

came together gradually over millennia, beginning when humans first began

to explore and quantify the nature of visible space. Under an optical

definition and description of photography, it takes no leap to trace this

burgeoning modern art form back to classical Greece and earlier.

Convention says that photography in its modern form emerged in the

nineteenth century, specifically in the 1820s, when Joseph Nicephore

discovered light-sensitive chemicals that would capture the image projected

739

within a camera obscura, a dark box. Photography comes from a Greek

word meaning 'to draw with light.'-Ron Price with thanks to Ali Hossaini,

Archaeology of the Photograph, Internet, 8 January 2003.

He1 was drawing with light,

too, in those years of

the Triple, Holy Alliance,

of international stability,2

of two men-of-God

walking on the earth

drawing Their light

onto all men,

that they could not see.

But, of course, they did see.

All sorts of new things

came tumbling into

their existence that

Metternich and Goethe favoured

and that artists and poets

ate their hearts out

740

to envisage in life.3

Light was pouring into

this new global society

and human beings

would be drawing with it

endlessly in the years to come.

1 God

2 union of three continental autocracies in 1820, the so-called 'Holy

Alliance.' H.A.L. Fisher, A History of Europe, Vol2, p.962.

3 ibid., p. 963.

Ron Price

8 January 2003

___________________________________

PHOTOGRAPHY’S AMBIGUITY

Often, for reasons of vanity or because they know they are not particularly

attractive, some people often dislike the way they look in photographs.

Their best sides, most attractive selves, are not fixed in the photo and some

undesirable image is presented to the world. Inga Clendinnen, Australian

historian, as I pointed out earlier thinks that photographs challenge and

corrupt memory. Most of us, she goes on, remember individuals through

741

time as a sort of moving collection of lights, vague images or an indistinct

melody. If you think of how you might describe people who've mattered to

you it's never in terms of a static photograph. I find this to be very true of my

own experience. People, of course, will be in your memory bank, but it is as

an action or actions not an image or images. It might be as a glance, a

particular movement; it might be a sensation you get when you see them or

think of them. It might be a feeling of happiness or sadness, nostalgia or

warmth. For some people the memory is associated with a distinctive

melody and this melody surrounds the person in question. Clendinnen

thinks that photographs cannibalize and oversimplify this complicated

moving memory, this sequence of indistinct memories that we all have.

Photographs tend to fix our memories into a form and it is a form at a time

and place. For Clendennin photographs are a violation of the actuality she

wants to cherish in her memory. -Ron Price with thanks to Inga Clendinnen,

“Interview,” Internet Site, November 10th, 2001.

Yes, Inga, a lot of what you say

is true, but there is so much more

to this business of the photograph.

They quietly pierce my vision.

They also help maintain, integrate

742

and enhance my cultural identity

through their role in society’s

main symbol systems.

They seem to be part of me.

This pictorial backdrop

both reveals and conceals.

They mobilize my memory.

They simultaneously document

and yet undercut the narrative.

They reduce and enhance reality

in frozen moments, a pseudo-intimacy.

They help us in a reenactment,

the conquest of the world as picture,

but I say: is this really me….or you?

The first photograph in my collection

is from 1908--the year He was set free.

Then a flood came in and after ’53:

photos for me and a new and vibrant

wind for all humanity, or so He said.

743

Can I keep the freshness of those instants

in the world around me amidst vast and

pervasive incoherence and complexity?

Can those radiations still touch me?

Ron Price

April 9th 2006

________________________________

The photographer Lucien Clergue would probably agree about the

importance of the place of the body in photography. Clergue is an author of

photographic essays, stories told by the use of images.287 Clergue and his

camera are there to tell of the march of time, to bear witness, to be awed, to

define a theme, to document, probe, question, intuit, to record transitory

signatures and signs. He is a poet with a camera and this is what I would

like to do with the collection of the photos I have gathered about me after

sixty years of living and in more than a dozen binders, folios and booklets.

Like Clergue, I understand some of the interrelatedness and

interdependence, the unity of man and what I want here is my own

photographic essay. I want to combine the views of those observers who are

287 Lucien Clergue, Langage Des Sables(Language of the Sands), Marseille, AGEP, 1980, Preface.

744

captivated by, and those who are critical of, the photograph's capacity to

present the realities of life.

There is no question that words often fail us, in life and in writing

autobiography. But pictures often fail us, too. They can't quite do it either, if

one is talking about comprehensiveness and totality. Roland Barthes' third

book in his autobiographical trilogy,288 Camera Lucida: Reflections on

Photography, I found to be a useful comment on the visual, the

photographic, context in relation to my family and my life and the

limitations of the photograph.

His book is a meditation on an absence inherent in photography. Barthes

wrote before radical manipulation of the image had become a standard

practice in photography as the twentieth century came to an end. Barthes is

only interested in photographs insofar as they depict something that was

there at a particular and past time and is now entirely gone or has changed

out of sight. He is particularly eloquent on one special photograph which he

deliberately does not reproduce in his book. It is a photograph of his

288 Roland Barthes' other two autobiographical works are: A Lovers Discourse and Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida was published in 1982.

745

beloved mother who died shortly before he began to write his book in the

late 1970s. Barthes does not try to elaborate any grand theory of

photography, but he does write quite unashamedly about himself in Camera

Lucida. He writes about his loss and suffering in life and he writes about

how this loss is echoed and prefigured in the photographs that he holds dear.

In the explosion of autobiographies in the last two decades, photographs

have played an important part, had a special place, especially among the

marginalized groups and sub-cultures that thousands of recent

autobiographies are identified with. As they evoke minority literatures,

cultures and subjectivities, they place before the readers an array of

photographs. Perhaps I should do the same. We shall see. I’m not sure just

what visuals I will add to this work.

Barthes is able to write as movingly and beautifully about people he does

not know and has never met as he does about those in cherished

photographs, those of his mother and others he loves. He doesn't reproduce

any photographs in his book because, as he says, these photographs exist

only for him. Barthes wouldn't feel much at home in the digital age. For all

his academic reputation as a whip-cracking avant-gardist, his most powerful

and convincing writing always involves a yearning for the past. He almost

746

manages to make nostalgia seem not only respectable but a sine qua non of

life. His generosity prevents him from imposing this point of view on

everyone else. That's what makes him a great writer. If I can achieve in part

what Barthes achieves in dispassionateness, my work in this far from neatly

typified genre will be a success.

Barthes recognized the linkage between haiku and photography. He

undertook to define the essence of photography. He found the photographs

that “animated” him and that he in turn “animated” consisted of two co-

present elements: Studium and Punctum. According to Barthes, Studium is

an extent, an extension of a field, which we perceive quite familiarly as a

consequence of our knowledge, our culture (Barthes, 1981, p.25). It is by

Studium that one takes a kind of human interest in many photos that refer to

a classical body of cultural information, photos that educate, signify,

represent, inform, and reveal the photographer’s intentions. The second

element, Punctum, will break or punctuate the Studium(Barthes,1981, p. 26).

Punctum rises out of the scene, seeks out the viewer, disturbs the Studium,

wounds, pricks and stings the viewer. It is very often a detail.

747

According to Barthes, Punctum has the power to expand, to provoke a satori,

a measure of spiritual enlightenment. A detail overwhelms the entirety of

my reading; it is an intense mutation of my interest. By the mark of

something, the photograph is no longer ‘anything whatever.’ This something

has triggered me, has provoked a tiny shock, a satori, the passage of a void.

This brings the photograph, certain photographs, close to the Haiku."

(Barthes, 1981, p.49). “The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its

usual blah-blah: ‘Technique,’ ‘Reality,’ ‘Reportage,’ ‘Art,’ etc.: to say

nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into

affective consciousness.” (Barthes,1981, p.55).

Jewish and Catholic religious practices raise questions about the difference

between the function of memory and the use of images as a memento mori

to retrieve the past. For Baha'is photographs pertaining to their religion have

come to possess an important significance. Are photographs able to

recuperate or recapture the "essence" of the person or the idea we love?

Clearly to some extent, but it is the qualities that are recaptured not the

essence. Do photographs invigorate our memories and 'prove' that a person

existed? They do a bit of both. I shall try to address these questions by

discussing more of Roland Barthes' writings on photography. I also want to

748

examine Seigfried Kracauer's analysis of the photograph and the function

mental images have in mediating between the past and the present. I shall

rely on three of Kracauer's publications in which photography is discussed.

An essay called "Photography" was written in his early Weimar period, in

1927, his book Film Theory(1960) which starts with a short summary of the

history of photography and, almost forty years after that initial essay on

photography, History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969).289

I will discuss the difference between Kracauer's early and late writings in

relation to Barthes' writings on photography, which can also be divided

roughly into two periods. In Barthes' early writings on photography his

semiotic and structuralist approaches to language and culture influenced his

289 The three main texts of Siegfried Kracauer that I rely on are: "Photography," in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Cambridge, MA, 1995, pp.47-64; Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Princeton, 1997; and History: The Last Things before the Last, New York, 1969. My reading of Kracauer's theories is indebted to several rich essays published in a special issue on Kracauer in New German Critique, no. 54, Fall 1991. The following articles were especially helpful: Gertrud Koch, "`Not yet accepted anywhere': Exile, Memory, and Image in Kracauer's Conception of History," pp. 95-110; Inka Mülder-Bach, "History as Autobiography: The Last Things before the Last," pp.139-58; Heide Schlüpmann, "The Subject of Survival: On Kracauer's Theory of Film," pp.111-26; and Miriam Hansen,"Kracauer's Early Writings on Film and Mass Culture," pp.47-76. See also D. N. Rodowick, "The Last Things before the Last: Kracauer and History," New German Critique, no. 41, spring/summer 1987: pp.109-39.

749

reading290 of photographs in articles such as "The Photographic Message"

(1961), "The Third Meaning" (1970) and "Rhetoric of the Image"(1964). But

in Camera Lucida (1980) Barthes' writing became more personal and this

impacted upon his reading of photographs as being capable of transparency.

And, of course, the question of the reading of photographs is what this essay

is all about.

I shall illustrate this theoretical discussion(a discussion I do not want to

become too complex, too theoretical and too abstract)291 with a sample of

photographs from a family album given to me by my mother, Lillian Price.

She took most of the photographs or received copies of them from others

during the years 1908 to 1953. My mother labelled some of the photos with

dates and names and in other cases she did not. The first photograph was of

her sister in 1908 when my mother was four and the last photo was in 1953

just before my mother's fiftieth birthday. Thus, during her childhood and

adolescent years into the first years of middle age taking photographs

290 Structuralism emerged in the years just after 'Abdu'l-Baha returned from His western tour: 1914-1915. It has many features perhaps the most dominant of which is that it is the structure of language that determines the way we understand things.291 Much of the discussion of photography, like that of cinema, is so esoteric as to preclude any serious examination of its contents, leaving the average reader right 'out to lunch,' so to speak.

750

occupied her leisure time, among a host of other activities. Perhaps

collecting this small group of photos was her own way of immortalizing

herself and rekindling the first several decades of her life, up to the time she

began to be involved with the Baha'i Faith. But I think this is unlikely. The

photos seem to be a haphazard, random, somewhat serendipitous, collection

of odds and ends. In this my deeply singular attempt to inscribe my times,

my religion and my individuality, I also paint a vast mosaic which I trust

resonates with a world that is far, far, from my own self. I trust, too, that it

provides a multiple perspectival set of positionings and understandings

within a genre and genres. My mother's photographs are just a part of that

paint, part of that mosaic.

This set of photographs serves as the pictorial base for nearly half a century,

the half century before my family began its association with the Baha’i

Faith. If I draw on the philosophy of Lucien Clergue to explain people's use

of photos, though, then these photographs become much more than a

historical package of photos. They approach what Joseph Campbell

described in his book The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth

and as Religion. There is a vitality to symbols, to photographs, as metaphors,

not simply ideas or things, but "a sense of actual participation, a realization

751

of transcendence, infinity and abundance." Campbell says, as he continues

discussing these symbols, they open "the mind and heart to the utter wonder

of all being." It is a spectacle "known to the mind and beheld by the eye"

and, he concludes, you exclaim "ah...as a recognition of divinity." Perhaps

this is much like that "reverence for life" that Albert Schweitzer

experienced.292

I want to balance these other-worldly notions, these transcendental feelings,

with the ideas of Seigfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes. In the process I

hope to achieve a more balanced view of the nature and function of this

collecton of photographs and, at the same time, provide a relevant comment

for my own autobiography. To begin somewhat at random with one of the

photogrpahs I have selected my grandfather sitting on the porch of the first

house I lived in in Hamilton Ontario. The click of the camera has frozen

him and removed him from the flow of time or fixed him in the flow of time.

The year is about 1940. The pose, on the other hand, belonged to a more

predictable rhetoric of gestures; it enabled sitters to assume a social pose,

which they thought was expected of them by their peers, or to adopt an

attitude they imagined other respectable people had performed in the past.

292 D. Schiller, The Little Zen Companion, Workman Publishing, NY, 1994, p. 202.

752

The pose is not as stiff as those of the previous century. There is the

beginning of a more relaxed demeanor, perhaps the result of WW1 which

took some of civilization's stiffness out of those stiff upper lips.

_________________________________

This subject is complex and the following prose-poems will give you, dear

reader, a breather. These two poems are the only example, as far as I recall,

of poems that I lay side-by-side in which one is a slight revision of the other.

____________________

VISUAL AND NON-VISUAL DIARIES1

During the years 1927 to 1936 an American photographer, Ansel Adams,

became one of the most beloved figures in American photography. He

began to slow down in his late fifties,1 but continued to work for another

quarter century. When he died in 1984 he had become the first mass-

marketed fine arts photographer in the world. He was obsessed by

photography and worked everyday, all day, unless he was sick. -Ron Price

with thanks to “Ansel Adams: Part 2,” ABC TV, 10:50-11:45 p.m. 11

December 2005.

I, too, slowed down about the same age

as you, lost the big urge, the endless drive,

753

the sine qua non that had kept my nose

to the proverbial grindstone as long as

your nose was down and at ‘em, I suppose

about 30 to 40 years depending on how

you define and describe the time, the years.

I, too, had a wife like yours, well two,

both good women they were and are,

but it took me--as it took you--years

to work out a modus operandi in Latin

or modus vivendi. In the long run

it was a rock of stability, steadiness,

practicality so I could pursue,

in the caverns of my creativity

and its tracery, its skimming

flickerings of light, the several

imperative interests, the types of

revelation that became part of

my very creative structure.

754

And so it was that in our late fifties

we moved the goal posts and went

on with our obsessions, but in a form

more suited to our needs, aspirations

and capacities-with an aesthetic

imbued with emotion, to create

works that went beyond their subjects

and captured an inspired moment,

as a reminder of experience, in a diary

of sorts, yours visual and mine of words.

Ron Price

December 12th 2005

________________________________

VISUAL AND NON-VISUAL DIARIES

During the second stage(1927-1936) in the development of Baha’i

Administration in North America, a stage which enabled that Baha’i

community to launch a series of teaching Plans(1937-1963) an American

photographer, Ansel Adams became one of the most beloved figures in

American photography. He began to slow down in his late fifties,1 but

continued to work for another quarter century. When he died in 1984 he had

755

become the first mass-marketed fine arts photographer in the world. He was

obsessed by photography and worked everyday, all day, unless he was sick.

-Ron Price with thanks to “Ansel Adams: Part 2,” ABC TV, 10:50-11:45

p.m. 11 December 2005.

I, too, slowed down about the same age

as you, lost the big urge, the endless drive,

the sine qua non that had kept my nose

to the proverbial grindstone as long as

your nose was down and at ‘em, I suppose

about 30 to 40 years depending on how

you define and describe the time, the years.

I, too, had a wife like yours, well two,

both good women they were and are,

but it took me--as it took you--years

to work out a modus operandi in Latin

or modus vivendi. In the long run

it was a rock of stability, steadiness,

practicality so I could pursue,

in the caverns of my creativity

756

and its tracery, its skimming

flickerings of light, the several

imperative interests, the types of

revelation that became part of

my very creative structure.

And so it was that in our late fifties

we moved the goal posts and went

on with our obsessions, but in a form

more suited to our needs, aspirations

and capacities-with an aesthetic

imbued with emotion, to create

works that went beyond their subjects

and captured an inspired moment,

as a reminder of experience, in a diary

of sorts, yours visual and mine of words.

Ron Price

December 12th 2005

________________________________

757

Given the fact that my grandfather had just retired, this relaxed pose is

somewhat logical. But given the fact that his wife, my grandmother, had just

died, perhaps, on second thought, it is not. It is utterly impossible, really, to

know how he felt at the time or indeed what was going on in his outer life let

alone his inner life, for that matter. And I think that is true for virtually all

the photos from these years 1908 to 1953.

"Is this what grandfather looked like?" I might ask, as Kracauer asks of the

grandmother at the start of the "Photography" essay, as though he was

actually scrutinizing a photograph. The question instills doubts about the

capability of photography to represent the essence of a person and cajoles us

into remembering people. Several issues are at stake. Kracauer argues that

"were it not for the oral tradition, the image alone would not have sufficed to

reconstruct his grandmother's identity." Only subjective memory and

knowledge of the grandmother, transmitted by generations of her family,

could lead to a true understanding of her personality. Once her

contemporaries are gone, who can attest that this is truly a photograph of a

particular grandmother? Maybe it is simply someone who resembles her? In

fact, in the course of time, the grandmother turns into just "any young girl of

1864." One's love, as Shakespeare writes, "shall in my verse ever live

758

young,"293 but in a photograph? Ah, there's the rub! No one in my life on

this side of a great ocean has ever met my grandfather, indeed, has never met

anyone in my famly except my mother and that for a period of several weeks

nearly thirty years ago.

Moreover, once the person dies the mimetic function of the photograph

changes its role and function, for there is no longer a need to compare the

image to its referent. Most of the people in this collection of forty photos are

now dead. My grandfather's calm demeanor may have been arrested and

attested to by the camera but "no longer refers to the life from which it has

been taken. Likeness has ceased to be of any help. The smiles of mannequins

in beauty parlors are just as rigid and perpetual," writes Kracauer.294

Grandfather's old-style garments become a metaphor for the disparity

between fashion and history. Kracauer claims that "photography is bound to

time in precisely the same way as fashion. Since the latter has no

significance other than as current garb, it is translucent when modern and

abandoned when old."295

293 Shakespeare, Sonnets, No.19.294 Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography," pp. 47-48.295 ibid., p.55. Historians of fashion, of course, have many other opinions on this subject.

759

In making an analogy between photography and fashion, Kracauer was

targeting the proliferation of current-event photography in the Weimar

Republic. He perceived the surge of photographs in the illustrated press as a

sign of a culture afraid of death. Mechanical reproduction replicated a

culture that was attuned to fashion and technical innovation, enabling the

snapshot to create a world that had taken on a "photographic face." In this

self-satisfied narcissistic mood of self-replication the flood of photographs

"sweeps away the dams of memory and the sheer accumulation of

photographs aims at banishing the recollection of death, which is part and

parcel of every memory image."296 In this sort of mood, photography is

unable to resurrect the dead because even the recent past appears totally

outdated. I wonder what Kracauer would say in our media-saturated world?

Kracauer finds memory images, pictures we put in our head as a result of

thought, far more useful than photographs. History can only be brought

back through the medium of subjectivity. He sees Proust's mémoire

involontaire as the perfect model. A person is able to condense or embellish

memory, unlike the photograph that in the passage of time only appears to

darken, decay and shrink in proportions. The camera is capable only of

296 ibid., p.59.

760

capturing a brief moment that accentuates space rather than temporality. The

medium of subjective memory, however, can shatter the space-time

configuration in order to piece the salvaged fragments together into a new

meaningful order. When my grandfather sat in front of the camera, sometime

perhaps during WW2, he "was present for one second in the spatial

continuum that presented itself to the lens." And it was this aspect and not

my grandfather "that was eternalized."297

In contrast, the memory image is capable of giving the impression of the

whole person because it condenses the subject into a single unforgettable

image: "the last image of a person is that person's actual history," writes

Kracauer. It is presented by the monogram "that condenses the name into a

single graphic figure which is as meaningful as an ornament." Another form

of condensation takes place in the making of a painting. The history painter

does not paint his subject in order to present him in a naturalistic setting, but

instead, through many sittings, aims to achieve an idea-image that captures

the spirit of the sitter. Photography, on the other hand, is limited to showing

us the appearance of the subject. It does not enable us to penetrate through

the outer veneer to find the essence of the subject. This superficiality extends

297 idem

761

to the inability of photography to divulge the process of cognition of history.

Kracauer regards photographs as a heap of garbage, as merely able to

stockpile the elements of nature without a selective, a reflective, a

subjective, process. Perhaps, though, the photo can stimulate the reflective

side of the observer. For now, I leave this interesting question open and

unresolved in its fascinating complexity.

In the closing pages of his essay "Photography" Kracauer makes an

unexpected turn in his argument. Photography is given a role in the study of

history. Suddenly, there is an advantage in the mute surface appearance of

the photograph whose essence was impenetrable to probing. The photograph

becomes an object that can signify meaning in hindsight, especially after

people have died. Moreover, in Kracauer's dialectical fashion, the fault he

found in photography's capacity to simply stockpile the elements of nature

becomes an asset once the photographs are piled and viewed en masse "in

unusual combinations, which distance them from human proximity."

Photography can yield information that had hitherto gone unnoticed. In

writing that "it is the task of photography to disclose this previously

unexamined foundation of nature," Kracauer anticipates Benjamin's

definition of photography's optical unconscious; namely, that it enables an

762

image to store and release meanings that were neither perceived by the

photographer nor recognized by his peers.298 Kracauer notes that "for the

first time in history, photography brings to light the entire natural cocoon;

for the first time, the inert world presents itself in its independence from

human beings." Perhaps this is why, among the commonly expressed

attractions of the extremely hazardous careers of war photographers, was the

feeling of being part of history and the sense of their importance beyond just

supplying illustration for magazines or newspapers.299

The natural cocoon of my mother's and father's lives, the lives of my

grandparents, my uncle's life, two of my aunts' lives, some of my cousins'

lives is, in Kracauer's perspective, brought to life. Their inert world does

indeed present itself "in its independence from human beings." These images

store and release meanings, fresh meanings to my eyes, meanings not

present long ago when the photos were taken. Information never noticed

before or forgotten is revealed to the observer. Photography is able to

change perspective through showing us aerial views and bringing "crockets

298 See Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography," in A. Trachtenberg, ed., Classical Essays in Photography, New Haven, 1980, p. 203.299 Peter Howe, "Exposure to Light: The Photographer's Eye in a Digital World," July/August 2002, Columbia Journalism Review.

763

and figures down from Gothic cathedrals,"300 and people out of the past

down from their remote locations beyond our lives. In this collection of

photos between 1908 and 1953 perspectives on: seasonality, on the texture

of life in Canada between the wars, on the beauty of my mother and her

sister in her teens and twenties, on a grandfather twenty-five years younger

than I ever knew him, perspectives on cars, my mother's boyfriends, my

mother's sociability and much more, come into focus. I could provide a

much more specific analysis here but I think it would depart more than I

already have from the confines of my autobiography, confines as I have

defined them.

Without a healthy market for the photographs, without some clear direction

for their future value, even the most personally useful work, there is a risk of

descending into a spiral of irrelevance. And the great catcher and coach of

the New York Yankees was right when he said that everything is difficult to

predict, especially the future and, for me, the future of these photographs.

Although, if I had to put my money down, I would say that the spiral of

irrelevance might be the winning horse inspite of all their present source of

pleasure and delight and their mnemonic relevance.

300 Kracauer, "Photography," p. 62

764

There is a tension between photography's capacity to negate history by

dwelling on the moment and its capacity to open up new ways of

interpreting reality. Once the interest in redeeming the singular subject

disappears, leaving no need for the photographs to perform the task of

resurrecting the dead as a memento mori, then the function of the archive

becomes important. The collection of photographs, lying and waiting to be

sorted, evokes a context of homeless images. In reality, though, my life has

not been that of the classic homeless mind: the emigre' in search of roots, the

secular skeptic yearning for a faith and a Messiah. The roots of faith, without

which no society can endure, found a home in my mind as early as the 1950s

and there they have been growing for some 50 years. This is not to say that

this home has never been troubled. This autobiography documents this

trouble.

One can suddenly find a new order in the images, an order that enables

reality to be examined critically through the use of film montage, the

photographic collage, and through adopting a surrealistic approach that

estranges reality or an approach that brings them close. The photographic

collage can possess a certain estrangement from reality, a certain

765

homelessness or, as in my case, I give them all a home in my mind's eye, as

best I can, a home touched by the warmth of nostalgia and memory. On one

level, nostalgia seems to indicate an obessive engagement with the past.

However, nostalgia more amply colludes with various temporalities to

assume -- or to construct -- continuity. One manner in which this happens

suspends the forward linear movement of past, present and future. The

longing for place, for the past, although apparently taking the mind and spirit

back in time, in reality defines a past which is always implicated with

various temporal frameworks and further serves to erase or to freeze the

passage of time. Even if places brand people, one cannot reduce a person to

his place. A place rarely corresponds to externals anyway.

I could also, should it be desired, add creative, eye-catching drawings and

paintings, both my mother's and my second-wife's. They would not appear

as often as photographs to illustrate this narrative, but they could enrich the

total package for some readers. Or I could add some poetry, as I do in one

small collecton of photos from a trip my second wife and I took from Perth

WA to Tasmania.

766

In Camera Lucida which Barthes described as his "last investigation," as

though he envisaged his own unexpected death shortly afterwards, his

writing became more personal. He searches for the quintessential image of

his mother which he criticizes photography for not being able to provide

him. The photograph of his mother which he eventually finds becomes his

guide, like Ariadne's thread, for his entire desire to understand the meaning

of photography. This "last investigation" into photography leads him to

characterize photographs as wounds that are capable of resurrecting very

strong personal traumas. His search for his mother's photograph starts on a

November evening, shortly after her death.301 He sits in her apartment

looking through some photographs with very little hope of "finding" her.

Barthes believed that one of the agonizing features of mourning was that no

matter how many times one might study old photos they would not be able

to summon up the people concerned "as a totality."

Barthes only finds fragments of his mother that he is also able to recall from

his memory. They are unable to produce "a living resurrection" of her

beloved face. Photographs from her distant past make him realize that

301 The subject of the death of Roland Barthes' mother is treated in Jacques Derrida's "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty," ed. Hugh J. Silverman, New York, 1988, pp. 259-343.

767

history separates him from her. He sees her now in ways he had never

witnessed during his lifetime. I, too, am separated from my mother and the

photos, in some ways, do not bring her near, do not produce that "living

resurrection."

"Is History not simply that time when we were not born?" asks Barthes, and

adds, "I could read my nonexistence in the clothes my mother had worn

before I can remember her." "Grandmother's garments" as seen in Kracauer's

essay, take on a different meaning for Barthes. Seeing a photograph of his

mother from 1913 leads him to remark that "there is a kind of stupefaction in

seeing a familiar being dressed differently." Like the peculiar effect the old

clothes were shown to have on contemporary spectators, in Kracauer's essay,

Barthes too realizes that his mother is "caught in a History" of taste that

distracts him from his personal view of her. However, unlike Kracauer, he

does not perceive the photograph as a timeless testimony of the way people

looked, as some intact remanant on a body that has turned into a mannequin.

The clothes, for Barthes, only reinforce the materiality of the subject's body

as he notes that clothing too is "perishable," making "a second grave for the

loved being" who is visible in the photograph. This leads him to conclude

768

that a photograph of a person whose existence preceded our own constitutes

the "very tension of history" because its existence relies on our ability to

consider, observe and contemplate it. In order to look at it, though, we must

be excluded from it."302 History, as the time that existed "before me," is

what interests Barthes because it cannot entail any anamnesis, any of his

personal recollection.

Barthes paradoxically searches in photographs for the monogrammatic, the

definitive image of his mother. Kracauer argued, of course, that only

subjective memory would give Barthes his mother. "The last image of a

person is that person's actual history." Nonetheless, Barthes reverses

Kracauer's axiom when he finally finds the essential photograph of his

mother, not in the last images from her life but in the earliest photograph of

her as a child, which serves more as a premonition of what she will become

than as an indication for him of what she had been. Barthes is in fact caught

in a division between pre-self history, the photograph of his mother before

he was born, and anamnesis, his recollections of his mother. The photograph

shows her at the age of five with her brother at the age of seven standing by

302 Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 63-65.

769

a wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, known in those days as a

Winter Garden.

I find these comments by Barthes and Kracauer illumine the understanding

of my own experience of photographs especially those between 1908 and

1953 but also, increasingly, those after 1953, after my family's first contact

with the Baha'i Faith. One day I may outline a greater range of personal

reflections on these photos; but that time is not now. At this stage of this

essay I simply want to outline some general perspectives on photographs

since there are so many that provide a useful resource for this autobiography

and because they have played such an important source of pleasure in my

life.

Some photographs move away from the ordinary and instead present some

unique, utopian, being.303 Where does this utopian being exist? Possibly

somewhere beyond the camera's mechanical ability to record a presence.

While Kracauer relied on a metaphysical and materialist reading of images

in his early writings, Barthes made use of phenomenology304 to combine a

303 ibid., pp. 70-71.304 Phenomenology is a philosophical movement beginning about 1913-15 that is dedicated to describing the structures of experience.

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concrete reading of photographic objects with the need to emphasize the role

that mental intentions like reception, retention and projection perform on

them. In L'Imaginaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, to whom Barthes dedicated Camera

Lucida, makes a distinction between the photograph, the caricature, the sign

and the mental image, in a section aptly titled "The Image of the Family."

A photograph can show us people's features but still fail to show character

because it lacks life and does not reflect the varied expression that is their

real physical reality. A mental image may be equally imperfect because it

lacks clarity. The person we see in the photograph may invoke a completely

different image to that of the person we know in our minds. Hence, we

become aware of our ability to animate the photograph, "of lending it life in

order to make an image of it." This is precisely the process I have gone

through in my own reading of the old photographs whose corners have been

blunted from having been cut and pasted into an album.

"Photography," writes Barthes, "began historically as an art of the person, of

identity, of civil status, of what we might call, in all senses of the term, the

body's formality."305 The nature of photography was founded in and by the

305 ibid., p. 79.

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pose. What makes the photograph different from any other type of art is that

it is a certification of a presence. The simple paradigm of life/death is

reduced to a click of the camera that separates the pose from the final print.

In early societies, Barthes notes, memory, the substitute for life, became

associated with the eternal. Memory and immortality were part of the same

package. But by making the photograph, a mortal thing, into the general and

somehow natural witness of what has been, modern society has renounced

the monumental, the immortal aspect of the photograph; or, to put it another

way, the photo has for many become a symbol of immortality for their own

belief in immmortality is either non-existent or very weak, simply a vague

hope.

The same century, the nineteenth, invented history in the modern sense and

photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive

formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time and

reduces it to a set of facts and meanings. The photograph is a certain but

fugitive testimony. Everything today prepares us for this impotence, this

absence of duration, this absense of a sense of history. The age of the

photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations,

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explosions, in short, of everything which denies ripening.306 And so it is that

historical perspective is often absent for millions. Of course, this is not the

case for everyone and what I say here is not universal. For others, the

photograph embellishes, enhances, history, gives it texture, illumination.

Photography and death represent a complex relationship. Looking at the

persons in the photograph can bring them to life in the mind of the viewer.

"Photography has something to do with resurrection," writes Barthes; yet

photographers determined to capture actuality are also described as "the

agents of death," despite the fact that they may stage photographs to give the

impression of life to ward off death. Kracauer similarly described the

purpose of the proliferation of photography magazines in Germany after

WW1. They distracted people from the fear of dying because they

emphasized current events and not historical ones. The most crucial analysis

of photographs that Barthes undertakes involves providing photography with

a grammatical tense. I don't think most people today see photos in terms of

their being a distraction from death or in terms of grammar. Death, it seems

to me, for most people, hardly if ever comes into it. Perhaps, though,

Barthes is right in theory at least. I leave this issue up in the air for now.

306 ibid., p. 92.

773

The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, what has been.

In front of a photograph our consciousness does not necessarily take the

nostalgic path of memory. The experience of the photos is often like

inscriptions we find on gravestones. The photograph is never in essence a

memory. It is indefinite and often blocks memory, is a counter-memory.

Photographs often shock us precisely because they are incapable of

retrieving the past. All they can do is to attest that a "now" in the past

existed. If this autobiography ever comes to "matter," insofar as it inhabits,

or stands for, one of the commonly acknowledged vectors in the field of

cultural production: literary artistry, bio-history, autobiography, socio-

history, psycho-history, it will not be due to embellishments from the world

of photography.

When one realizes that in a photograph one is looking at a person who

looked at, say, Napoleon or Baha'u'llah, there is a triangulation, a triangular

time-formula. Sometimes there is a dizzying of consciousness in this

triangulation. Present, historical time and the time of the photographer, all

this under the instance of `reality' produces this dizzying effect. It is a sort of

hall of mirrors. Baha'is have this sort of experience with the myriad

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photographs that have been taken of historical figures in the history of their

Faith going back to the 1840s, in the first decade after the invention of

photography.

Barthes refers to the ability of the historical photograph to contain a "defeat

of time" that alludes to a double absence. Forty years after writing his

"Photography" essay, Kracauer returned to the subject in his books Theory

of Film and History: The Last Things before the Last. The Proustian

subjective process of mémoire involontaire that Kracauer relied on in his

early writings is replaced by an image of photographic self-alienation to

describe the condition of detachment that is necessary for the sense of

knowing history. Photographs of the past bring about a return of the people

in the photographs.

From a Proustian point of view, Barthes sees some scenes in our life

experience as lending themselves to becoming a photograph because the

passivity of the observer is likened to the notion of the camera as an

objective mirror. Kracauer disagrees with this and claims that these

experiences are more complex. He sees photography as combining a

"realistic" and a "formative" approach. The nineteenth-century definition of

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the subjectless camera that merely records the world is replaced with the

belief that the camera is able to convey the subjective creative will of the

photographer through his choice of filters, camera angles and printing styles.

The new and old identities, which we all have, reside together in a state of

flux and uncertainty that ensures we will never belong to the community to

which we now belong in the same way we once did. The condition of being

somewhere and nowhere and of carrying one's past identity into new

surroundings produces a sensibility where the old is replaced by the new.

This is the realm of the stranger that Kracauer claims gives us the felling of

having ceased to belong. It is the mode of existence of that of the stranger.

And so we look at our previous existence with the eyes of one "who does not

belong to the house"307 of someone who is not the person they once were.

The experience is universal and somewhat enigmatic to say the least.

The next turn in Kracauer's argument is to compare the stranger with the

historian and his methodological approach to the study of the past. The

photographic relationship between the "realistic" and the "formative"

approaches are compared to the "passive activity" of the historian's journey

307 Kracauer, History, pp. 83-84.

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during the research and interpretation of historical material. When the

historian sifts through the primary material he resembles the stranger as his

thoughts ambulate between the past and the present with no fixed abode.

The historian must be detached and self-effaced at the first stages in order to

prevent his theoretical ideas from obstructing the "unexpected facts" that

turn out to be "incompatible with his original assumptions."

The historian's subjectivity enters at the stage of interpreting the material.

A gray area exists between the ability of the material to do its own talking

and the historian's subjective skills as a story teller. For Kracauer, self-

effacement does not imply a quest to reach an objective state of knowledge.

Instead, objectivity is replaced by "unmitigated subjectivity." The historian's

journey does not imply an ability to divide history into universal abstractions

and neat epochs. He is free to move from the present to the past as he pleases

and, to use a reference to mythology, "he must return to the upper world and

put his booty to good use." Elsewhere in History Kracauer cites another

example of the historian's journey from darkness to light to describe this

freedom of mobility:

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"Like Orpheus the historian must descend into the nether world to bring the

dead back to life. How far will they follow his allurements and evocations?

They are lost to him when, re-emerging into the sunlight of the present, he

turns for fear of losing them. But does he not for the first time take

possession of them at this very moment, the moment when they forever

depart, vanishing in a history of his own making?"

History is thus perceived as the moment in which the past is petrified into an

image. Orpheus's journey from darkness to light evokes, one could argue,

the process of printing a photograph. The image is developed in the dark

room. A precise amount of time marks the journey in which it emerges from

the paper, making its way to visibility like Euridyce's ascent to reality, the

return of the dead. We have here an impatient photographer who

prematurely turned on the light to see the photograph before it has been

transferred from the developer to the fixative bath that protects it from

fogging. The image simply vanishes. Both Orpheus and the photographer

are tested for their patience; their faith relies on a prerequisite to wait. Both

take hold of reality precisely at the moment when they lose sight of it.

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In his article on the photographic paradox Thierry de Duve discusses the

distinction between photographs that act as "pictures" and those that act as

"events."308 The photograph as "picture" is an autonomous representation of

reality that curiously ceases to refer to anything outside itself, especially

when it is framed and hung on a wall; here it represents the real as a frozen

gestalt. The photograph as "event," in contrast, makes us aware that it is only

a fragment from reality, which calls attention to the fact that something has

been frozen precisely because life is continuing outside the frame. The

photo-portrait is an example of a "picture": "whether of a live or a dead

person, the portrait is funerary in nature, like a monument. Acting as a

reminder of times that have died away, it sets up landmarks of the past." But

the real landmarks, the forming crucibles, were not photographs but, rather,

complex socio-historical processes and traumatic inter and intrapersonal

events whose intensity clarified and crystallized my values and attitudes to

life.

Many photographs give the impression that something has been witnessed

that no longer exists; such photographs produce a paradoxical effect of

capturing life but not being able to convey it. Hence, "whereas the snapshot

308 Thierry de Duve, "Time Exposure and the Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox," October,Summer 1978: pp.113-25.

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refers to the fluency of time without conveying it, the time exposure petrifies

the time of the referent and denotes it as departed." De Duve claims that the

portrait "picture" is conducive to the family album because "time exposure is

congenial with the ebb and flow of memory" as it "does not limit its

reference to the particular time when the photograph was taken, but allows

the imaginary reconstruction of any moment of the life of the portrayed

person to be imagined." Hence, the charm of a photo album relies on the fact

that while each photograph is a landmark in a person's lifetime, memory is

able to shuffle "in between landmarks, and can erect on any of them the

totality of this life."

Knowledge of the people in the photographs and the ability to recount

anecdotes about their lives affects our way of looking at them and causes the

inevitable question to be raised: is the oral testimony of equal or more

importance than the photographs themselves? Aided by memory, especially

by autobiography, and visiting the residences of people we knew who are no

longer alive appears to give us a special access to the past. Three tenses

jockey for position in some portraits. These three tenses of the photograph

could be described as: an event in the present, an event that people want to

document for posterity and a celebration that actually takes place now. The

780

connection between photography and fashion, a photograph from the recent

past that "claims to be alive" can appear more outdated than the

representation of a past that existed long ago.

It is not the passage of time that creates the comical tension between the

present and the past. The effect of prolonged sitting often gives the

impression that photographs were set up to last for a long time. A photo

enters almost unnoticed into immortality; the forms which it assumes befit

the qualities of the photo. According to Benjamin, the stiff pose betrayed

the condition of impotence of an entire generation in the face of technical

progress in the mid-nineteenth century. The direct look of the sitters

encapsulated them in their cocoon while the stillness that was required of

them by the long exposure was felt in the general impression of silence they

exuded. "The procedure itself," wrote Benjamin, "caused the models to live,

not out of the instant, but into it." During the long exposure they grew, as it

were, into the image. Benjamin evokes an image of becoming that recalls

the actual way the figures emerge on the photographic paper during the

developing stage.

781

De Duve's definition of time exposure recalls how nineteenth-century

caricaturists depicted the photographer standing by his camera with little to

do but to look at his watch until the exposure was over. Could the duration

of time exposure be visible in the enforced stillness of the sitters? The

mystery of making a photograph, according to Stanley Cavell, "lies not in

the machinery which produces it, but in the unfathomable abyss between

what subjects it captures and what is captured for us." There is what might

be called a metaphysical wait between exposure, exhibition and the absolute

authority or finality of the fixed image. The image of the photographer

waiting passively for the long exposure to be completed is, of course, gone

now with modern photographic technology. It is replaced with the click of

an instant in time. And that, of course, is what we get now: an instant in

time, preserved.

Even in candid photographs there is a process of selection. This led

Kracauer to describe the street photographer as an "explorer" with a

melancholic disposition, strolling aimlessly in the streets intent on finding

his elegiac objects. Their sudden abduction from reality recalls the way

Proust described photography's "affinity for the indeterminate. Proust saw

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photography as unable to be entirely selective and its role, he saw, was

mainly to record "unshaped nature" as it appeared in all its disorderly details.

Of all the photographs I have I chose particular ones for my desk for several

reasons. One snapshot is, for me, a remarkable feat because the

photographer had succeeded in providing a pose, a photograph of my

mother's family when she was, perhaps, twelve years old. It is the only

photograph from that period in which my mother's family members are all

present. This was a type of photograph I could never have had of myself

because I was an only child, although I suppose there is an equivalent one

of my mother and father and I taken in about 1956 in colour when I was

twelve. By looking at either of these photos I am able to project my deep

affection for a person who had introduced me to life. They enable me to

identify with the person my mother was and the person she was nearly thirty

years before I was born.

In my own childhood there was a joy in life. I make up my mother's life

when I see her there on my desk. In the photograph of my father who

occupies another place on my desk, the city, Hamilton, was a text of signs

that enabled his mind and body to engage in activity that I know little of to

783

recount his past. He was a walking ball of energy who comes to life when I

see him in this photo. Childhood memories connect people, including my

former self, with particular places. These people were so much of my world.

I can see him on the small green couch in the evening. I see his head, in the

photograph of my mind's eye, nodding over the newspaper. He expended

his energy, as he always did, during the daylight hours. Then his head goes

goes up and the residues of energy bring him back to life for an hour or two.

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas puts this same idea quite simply in his poem

Reminiscences of Childhood: "This sea-town was my world."309 So,too, was

my small town by the lake.

These photographs produce for me my own Proustian moment. When I first

saw them my entire attention was captivated by the erectness of my father's

posture and my mother's beauty. These features exist here only because the

camera was able to fix then and remove them from time. They both

transported me to different periods of my life. The feeling of comfort and

security I had received from my father as a child was recalled as a

remembered sensation of getting my hair rubbed.

309 Dylan Thomas, "Reminiscences of Childhood (First Version)," as included in On the Air With Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts, editor, Ralph Maud, NY, New Directions, 1992, 3 the 1945 version.

784

Transitional objects, animate and inanimate, such as the snow or books on a

shelf confer security and comfort. I recognize the objects as "not-me" during

a period when I started to realize that I was separate from my mother,

perhaps, 1947. The association of my life with books, certainly the first

visual association, provides me me with a symbolic representation of my

mother and my life, which enables her to exist in my mind even when she is

not present, when she has been dead for more than a quarter of a century.

This is the beginning of my capacity to distinguish between reality and

phantasy and it opens up an intermediate area of experience, which enables

me to keep inner and outer experience, subjectivity and objectivity, illusion

and reality both separate and yet interrelated. Thus I can speculate that these

two photos can serve to keep memories alive and, particularly, help give me

a sense of my mother's and father's immortality. I could say more about the

photos of my mother and father but I will leave that to a later date. In this

essay I want to get a context for analysis.

At first we detect a slight animosity regarding the limitations of the

photographic surface in Kracauer's "Photography" essay. Unlike the ability

of the monogram to condense a person's past into a single image, "in a

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photograph, a person's history is buried as if under a layer of snow." Barthes

expressed similar frustration when looking at his mother's Winter Garden

photograph. He noted that if we scrutinize a photograph long enough we

wish to turn it over as if to learn more by looking behind it; and if we blow it

up and enlarge its details we expect it to provide more meaning. Such was

the case with the photograph of my mother's family blown up by my

mother's brother's daughter and sent to me in 2002. In fact, however hard

we look we discover nothing more because the knowledge of the photograph

is already construed at first glance. Kracauer's criticism was odd considering

that only a year earlier, in his influential essay "The Mass Ornament," he had

celebrated the importance of surface manifestations in reality as being

capable of revealing unnoticed aspects of popular culture that were

neglected by historians. The significance of surface details became pertinent

in Kracauer's writings. Once he shifted from the subjective-memory process

as being the sole model for recuperating the past to realizing that reality and

history were fragmented and random experiences that did not rely on

chronological time, surface details became more important.

For this reason photography, especially the snapshot, came in handy because

it emphasized the discontinuous aspects of reality; it enhanced the need to

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delve into the particular and overcome any tendencies for abstraction and

generalization that Kracauer abhorred in the study of history and philosophy.

It took Kracauer a few more decades to readdress these issues in Theory of

Film. Here he proposes a "material aesthetics" approach to the study of film

based on the premise that the medium has no connection with the realm of

art. By placing it as a direct continuation of photography's affinity to the

"visible world around us," he claims that cinema's aim is to record "physical

reality" because it pays special attention to capturing the transient

atmosphere of "street crowds, involuntary gestures, and other fleeting

impressions." Such chapter subheadings as "The Unstaged," "The

Fortuitous," "Once Again the Street," and "Concept of Life as Such" reveal

Kracauer's preoccupation with the elusiveness of physical reality, which he

wishes to redeem by rescuing forgotten and despised elements of mass

culture from oblivion.

Barthes preferred photography to films precisely because of the inherent

limitations he found in the surface of photographs. "Such is the photograph,"

writes Barthes, "that it cannot describe in words what it lets us see in

images." The inability of photography to redeem reality is already visible in

the photographic surface that Barthes describes as a "flat death." What made

787

Kracauer so ardent about the ability of film to bring things to life was

precisely the limitation Barthes found in it: "Film can no longer be seen as

animated photographs: the having-been-there gives way before a being-there

of the thing; which omission would explain how there can be a history of the

cinema, without any real break with the previous arts of fiction, whereas the

photograph can in some sense elude history." Barthes refuses to consider

photography as a progressive continuation of perspectival experiments in art

that have taken place ever since the fifteenth century. He wishes to break

away from history and start to consider photography from the vantage point

of the nineteenth century, by conferring on it a special status, made possible

by the modern invention of a chemical solution that is able to fix images

forever.

The affinities and differences between Kracauer and Barthes are even more

fascinating in wake of the criticism they received for being "realists" in their

dealings with photography. How could a historian and film critic, who

professes to want to analyze cultural codes, rely on the optical impressions

of unmediated realistic details as a means of redeeming reality? What

exactly did the avid semiotician imply when he claimed that, although the

788

reading of images takes into consideration cultural codes, the photograph is

inherently an image without a code?

It is perplexing that both Kracauer and Barthes take pleasure in seeking

details that give the impression they exist for themselves, as though their

transparency is due to the impression they give of not being an outcome of a

formative approach or a contemplative gaze. I press this point because,

ironically, the discovery of these realistic details relies on the most

subjective process of detection that emphasizes the receptive process of a

unique and individualized subject far more than the quality of the object

under scrutiny or its meaning in reality. Kracauer offered a solution to this

paradox by giving the example of Marcel and discussing the way that

formative and realist approaches in photography can coexist. Barthes does

the same thing by comparing the mechanical and personal aspects of

photography. The scene in a photo is captured mechanically, not humanly.

The mechanical is here a guarantee of objectivity. Man's interventions in the

photograph: framing, distance, lighting, focus, speed, all effectively belong

to the plane of connotation; it is as though in the beginning (even if utopian)

there were a brute photograph (frontal and clear) on which man would then

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lay out, with the aid of various techniques, the signs drawn from a cultural

code.310

Barthes adopted this subjective/objective model to the methodology of

reading images. In "The Photographic Message" he makes a distinction

between "denotation" and "connotation." The former represents the brute

facts we see in photographs, and the latter the coded messages that the

photograph implies. In his essay "The Third Meaning," these sets of terms

were then exchanged for the difference between the "obvious" and the

"obtuse." The obvious meaning governs the semantic relations between

denotation and connotation while the obtuse meaning represents the ability

of details to grab hold of his attention without his being able to place them in

any fixed interpretation.

Kracauer recalls being fascinated by the representation of the surfaces of

reality already as a child. In his youth he had scribbled a title for a future

paper on cinema: "Film as the Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life."

The use of the word "marvel" to denote the moments of the everyday that

are usually not noticed reminds us that the everyday relies on repetition,

310 Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image," p. 44.

790

giving the impression, as Maurice Blanchot pointed out, that it was not

invented but has always existed. Kracauer responded in particular to

Lumière's first films and mentioned such scenes as the arrival of the train in

the station, the workers leaving the factory, and especially the shot of leaves

rippling in the wind. These scenes were described by him as "detached

records" that "resembled the imaginary shot of the grandmother which

Proust contrasts with the memory image of her." Here, again, Kracauer uses

the impassive detached observer to define the qualities of images in nature

that suddenly reveal themselves after having persistently been veiled by

ideologies.311

Barthes too was enticed by this sort of optical allure. Writers on Barthes

appear to have overlooked the obvious analogy between how he described

his relationship with his mother and the fascination he had for the uncoded

aspects of photography. He intricately defines portraits according to how the

pose is construed in social terms but never reveals the real person. In order

to impress upon us the experience of unmediated reality that exists as such,

and unlike Kracauer's emphasis on the optical experience, which leaves the

311 Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp.92 ands 100; Steven Ungar, "Persistence of the Image: Barthes, Photography, and the Resistance to Film," in Steven Ungar and Betty R. McGraw, eds., Signs in Culture, Iowa City, 1989, pp. 139-55.

791

spectator always alienated from the object of his vision, Barthes emphasizes

the concrete relationship between the photographic object and its referent.

Kracauer did not compare history and photography to prove a mimetic

relationship between them but only one of affinity and correspondence.

Barthes was not at all interested in the analogical relations between

photography and reality that other forms of art, like drawing, were capable

of having. Both writers stressed the problematic connection between the

photograph and the referent by opening up a new territory for investigation

that examines the space between reality and representation, the present and

the past, the act of observation and the process of imagination; a space

whose intermediary appeal recalls the character of Kracauer's evocative

definition of the anteroom area. In the last chapter of History Kracauer

examines the relationship between philosophy and history. He concerns

himself with the difference they pose between the need to define absolute

truths and relative truths, between generalized concepts and concrete

particular details. Kracauer disregards the "either/or" distinctions between

philosophy and history and suggests a "side by side" approach that enables

polarities to coexist. Anteroom thinking designates this sort of approach of

attentive openness and waiting that recalls the stranger's "extraterritorial"

792

sensibility. The relationship between history and photography is defined by

Kracauer in terms of the anteroom area. Both realities are of a kind which

does not lend itself to being dealt with in a definite way," because both elude

"the grasp of systematic thought." The anteroom area defines the way

history and photography "share their provisional character with the material

they record and explore," and this especially concerns the levels of reality

that Kracauer analyzes in the study of the daily.312

I believe that the image of this intermediary area, typified by the dialectical

possibility of the side-by-side approach, can serve as representative of all the

issues discussed in this article. Kracauer's subjective/ objective stance

toward the analysis of reality; the formative/realist approach to photography;

the active passivity of Marcel the lover and the detached observer are

examples.

I have tried to find a concrete image for this space in photography and films.

In Camera Lucida it exists in the simple example Barthes gives to explain

that reality and photography are intertwined by a special relationship,

another sort of skin, which makes photography belong to "that class of

312 Kracauer, History, p.19.

793

laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying

them both: the window pane and the landscape." But an even more pertinent

example exists in the realm of film. The cinematic dissolve that is used to

signal the passage of time superimposes two images. The transition between

these images is often imperceptible on the screen unless its motion is

arrested on the editing table: there in the blurred space that reveals the

relationship between cinematic movement and stilled images. This space

between the image that has not fully departed and the new one that has not

yet been fully formed, this combination image is formed whose beauty and

particularity cannot be foretold is an optical no-man's land that cannot be

grasped and belongs to no one. It is a space of freedom and distraction that

presents a pure optical experience that makes the real unreal.

This collage of forty photos which I have referred to replaces narrative as

mechanism for understanding or, perhaps more accurately, these images

serve as memory's only or at least useful tool for a period of time lost now to

history.313 These photos enable me "to negotiate" my "displacement from

313 Except in the brief biography and autobiography I have written for this period and except for the collection of my mother's poetry and memorabilia. See "The Poetry and Art of Lillian Price," and "A.J. Cornfield's Story," Unpublished Manuscripts, George Town, Tasmania, 2003, 1980, respectively.

794

the past. They are nostalgic items coloured with pensiveness, each with a

point that pierces our vision." As I gaze on these photos I indulge myself in

a "sentimental yearning for an irrecoverable past."314 These photographs are

traces of moments in life, traces captured by cameras. The photograph

mechanically repeats what could never have been repeated in day-to-day

existence. Is what is real defined by what is empirical, what is observed? If

so, this 650 plus page autobiography is quite deficient. For I record little of

"everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing,

decoration, styles of travelling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving

toward particular groups of people, the looks, the poses, the glances, styles

of walking, watching TV and other symbolic details that exist in the day to

day lives of either myself or the many others I have known. As Niall Lucy

notes, they are the least understood.315

When the first photograph in my collection was taken, the Baha'i Faith had

been in Canada for ten years. 'Abdu'l-Baha would arrive just a few miles

away four years later when His train stopped in Hamilton in 1912. These

photographs preserve my family life as far back as 1908 through their simple

314 Ron Price, Summary of the words of an Iranian in Los Angeles, December 12th 1998.315 Tom Woolfe in The New Journalism, quoted in Niall Lucy, op.cit.

795

representation of life. They allow me to relate, perhaps as simple mnemonic

devices, to people who are now dead and environments which have been

completely transformed in my time. My words can not embody these people

but they can describe them. Readers do not have to suspend disbelief in

what is the effect of my own meditation, mediation, my own individual anti-

authoritative human consciousness.

This autobiography, thusfar, provides no photographs and this chapter says a

few things about why. The first photo in my collection was taken in 1907/8

when my mother was three or four, when her brother, Harold, was perhaps

one and her sister, Florence, six or seven. My father at this same time was

twelve or thirteen and most likely living in Wales, but no pictures of him

from this period are available; in fact no pictures of my father exist before

1944. I've often wondered if this was because he belonged to a secret

service organization and would never talk about it in the years I was growing

up. My mother is in fifteen of the photos and all of the others in this sub-set

of twenty-five photographs, are of her family. I have tried to put together

something of the story of my family in the years 1844 to 1944. We all

engage with the world in different ways. For some this engagement involves

lengthy introspection; for others there seems to be little reflection.

796

Perceiving the reality of self and world is no simple matter. The photograph,

transferring awareness to memory, imperceptibly shifting our gaze and our

attention to material previous stored, we tend to reconstruct our present in a

manner more fitting to our gaze, to what we are recalling in the photograph.

Again the process is complex and I do not want to dwell on the matter to too

great an extent here.316 Perhaps at a future date some of these photos will

embellish this autobiography.

Readers will find my attempts at a brief overview of my family in the

century 1844-1944 in sections 3.A.1 and 3.A.2 of my unpublished Journal:

Volume 1.1. This overview will remain in perpetuity in the archives of my

family until and if they are required elsewhere. Perhaps in a future edition

of this autobiography some of my Journal will see the light of day. But,

except for the occasional foray into my Journal, this book will not deal with

this enriching source of possible autobiographical material and its

accompanying photographs.

The photographs in section 2 of my Journal: Volume 1.1 will serve, one day,

perhaps, to help provide more detail than I have been able to gather in the

316 Christopher Frost, "The Psychology of Self-Deception as Illustrated in Literary Characters," Janus Head, 2001.

797

last few years. A start has been made, though, to a process, to a period of

history, of family history, which I hope I will be able to outline in much

more detail in the early decades of the twenty-first century, decades which

will see my own life draw to a close. I will have, I trust, more time to write

relevant and embellishing autobiographical detail. Future members of my

family or other interested parties may be able to ferret out information I am

unable to obtain. I wish such seekers well in their efforts to extend my

family's autobiographical efforts well into the third and possibly fourth

century.317

I often feel the way literary critic and contemporary philosopher Susan

Sontag does about photographs. The main effects of photographs, she writes,

are to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in

which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted

into an item for aesthetic appreciation. The camera becomes a huge

repository of secrets and the result of its fervent, eloquent and learned

exploration is to discover for us that everyday reality is possessed of a chill.

The language accompanying the photograph is, so often, banal, obtrusive

317 With my grandfather's work beginning in 1872 and with my own efforts there is autobiographical writing within my family during three centuries. If great-grandchildren continue writing into the twenty-second century four continuous centuries will be 'down on paper.'

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and strips everyday life of reality, giving us, in its place, a cold and distant

surface, a spacial configuration at a moment in time with pretentions of a

reality that no one can touch.

Perhaps this view of Sontag's is a little too strong for the average taste. I find

her ideas provocative. They make me think about photographs and their

functions. That some people find the photograph possessed of reality,

possessed of a close, warm, personal creation, a taste of immortality, of a

transcendent dimension, one can not deny. But there is so much more to a

person. It is like saying that I am this body you see before you and nothing

else. What of mind, what of spirit, what of soul, what of all that is not

capturable on camera! One of the functions of my poetry, my writing, is to

try to capture this soul that the photograph only hints at from some camera

obscura, some darkened chamber. This Journal contains many photographs

which I trust receive some illumination in this way318 and some exposition of

the inky recesses of my soul, hopefully not overly internalized, hopefully not

in the form of slate-slabs which grate on readers' nerves and fail to find any

internal rhythm.

318 Ron Price with thanks to Susan Sontag in A Susan Sontag Reader, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1982, p. xii.

799

To part with photographs is to forget. Photographs are a mnemonic archive

that enables us to negotiate our displacement from the past and our

placement in the future. They are nostalgic items coloured with pensiveness,

each with a point that pierces our vision. Viewers' memory traces are

developed through photographs; their sentimental yearning for an

irrecoverable past is indulged. There is recuperative power in this process of

temporal and spacial transference.319 The vicissitudes of life seem to be

reduced if not eliminated as we gaze at the photographs. Life's brevity seems

to be partly an illusion. We achieve an immortality here, an at-oneness with

all time, an annihilation of the years.320 Walter Benjamin says that the person

who views a photograph "feels an irresistible urge to search the picture for

the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and Now, with which reality has

seared the subject." 321 And so I do. But readers of this autobiography will be

spared that exercise. Even though many of these photos are outside my

experience, I still may be seized by these images of the past or some details

within them, the ephemeral cultural detritus that photography illuminates so

319 Ron Price, A summary of the words of an Iranian in Los Angeles and his views of old photographs, 12 December 1998.320 Richard N. Coe, "Truth, Memory and Artifice," When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood, Yale UP, London, 1984.321 Walter Benjamin, "A Small History of Photography," One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London, NLB, 1979, p.243,

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effortlessly. Even though they are beyond the reach of my intellect in some

ways they open-up new spaces, quasi-memories.

"It is not the person who steps out," writes David Frisby, "but what can be

stripped away from him."322 Instead of being an aid to memory and

knowledge photos often function to encourage the opposite tendency.

Photos, writes Frisby, gobble up our world. They snatch our world from

death; total presentness is established and history is absent inspite of the

sense of reality conveyed by the photograph. It is a reality we can no longer

touch. We experience nostalgia, the inevitability of separation, mystery and,

sometimes, bitterness. We experience a feeling of magic. Sometimes

narcissism is fostered, Baudelaire once wrote.323

But just as a photographer cannot take the subject as it is, the viewer should

not assume that what he or she sees is what it seems. In art there is

something more than the appearance. There is the power of symbol. As

Turner said, "Photography can use fact as a metaphor to create new fact."324

322 David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin, Polity Press, 1985, p.155.323 Baudelaire in Donald Kuspit, The New Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s, Da Capo Press, NY, 1983, p.404.324 Photographers' Gallery, Reading Photography: Understanding the Aesthetics of Photography, Pantheon Books, NY, 1977, p. 77.

801

Another well-known photographer, Jonathan Bayer, said, "Good

photographic images intrigue, present a mystery, or demand to be read. They

are constructs of frustrations and ambiguities which force the viewer to

actively interact with the photograph."325 Prominent art critic Berger holds a

similar view that photography is a "quotation from appearance rather than a

translation,"326 because extraction from context produces a discontinuity,

which is reflected in the ambiguity of a photograph's meaning.

However critical one is of photographs, the family portrait and the photo

album assume a significant place in people's homes. Although the photo

may give an undue emphasis to the outer world, they can also become part

of a balanced inner and outer experience. "The best part of beauty," wrote

Francis Bacon, "is that which no picture can express."327 Photos are

suggestive and, if they do not suggest much more than is in the photos, they

have little use or power. Diane Arbus puts the idea in a clever way: "A

photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you

know."

325 ibid.p.9.326 John Berger and Mohr Berger, Another Way of Telling, Pantheon Books, NY, 1982, p. 128.327 Quotations in Photography, Internet, January 2003.

802

Psychologist Rudolf Arnheim considers photography an improper medium

to express a person's personality. In one of his many books on aesthetics

and psychology he has said that the "presence of a portrait photographer's

camera tends to paralyze a person's expression, so that he becomes self-

conscious, inhibited, and strikes an unnatural pose. Candid shots are

momentary phases isolated in time and space from the action and setting of

which they are a part. Sometimes they are highly expressive and

representative of the whole from which they are taken. Frequently, they are

not. Furthermore, the angle from which a shot is made, the effect of lighting

on shape, the rendering of brightness and color values, as well as

modifications through retouching, are factors that make it impossible to

accept a random photograph as a valid likeness."

Arnheim also criticizes photography for lacking visual dynamic and carrying

disorganized natural accident because it is from "outside in." Photography

can not truly express a person's essence because the photographer intervenes

and manipulates the media. Actually, artificial procedures in photography

such as switching angles and retouching might contribute to a valid likeness.

Furthermore, psychologists generally agree that one's personality is

situational rather than stable. It is doubtful that we can find one "right"

803

representation of anyone's personality. On one occasion perhaps a snapshot

of a natural accident shows an expressive gesture of a person vividly, but at

another time a picture taken in a studio setup may manifest his/her essence

clearly. Sometimes a painter can reveal the very nature of a person in a

particular situation, but a photographer might handle this job better under

another circumstances.328

Photos are enticements to reverie, wrote Susan Sontag. They are like a

woodfire in a room. They have a surface heat but there is something beyond

them, something we intuit, some inexhaustible invitation to deduction,

speculation and fantasy. "The very muteness of what is, hypothetically,

comprehensible in photographs," writes Sontag, "is what constitutes their

attraction and provocativeness."329 Reality is interminably rich, its

vertiginous treasure can not be exhausted by photographs, by language, by a

life.330

Like the ice of Antarctica, a photograph holds on to things that we often are

not aware of, that we might have simply discarded or forgotten. Like that ice

328 R. Arnheim, Toward a Psychology of Art, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1979, p.55.329 Susan Sontag, op.cit.330 G.K. Chesterton, cited in "The Visualizing Capacity of Magical Realism: Objects and Expression in the work of Jorge Luis Borges," Lois Parkinson Zamora, Janus Head, 2002.

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which holds frozen water, a photograph is still and silent, containing the past

moment without overt comment or judgment. But unlike that ice, a photo is

not an unreflecting eye. Rather, by virtue of its being a highly specific

reflection, a physical emanation of the referent, it cannot be sterile, like the

unseen water contained in the ice; photos are not turned inwards on their

dark selves. They are turned to the light. As soon as an image has an

audience to whom it is revealed, it becomes fertile with the imaginations of

its viewers.

Susan Sontag describes it in this way: "Photographs, which cannot

themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction,

speculation and fantasy." Furthermore, Sontag, who deplores the fact that

the camera has promoted the value of appearances, sees this suggestiveness

of the photograph as its saving grace: "The ultimate wisdom of the

photographic image is to say: There is the surface. Now think--or rather

feel, intuit--what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this

way.331 Narrative and analysis give more understanding, says Sontag,

because they escape the prison of appearances and they travel on the road of

explanation, of function and purpose.

331 Susan Sontag, On Photography, Farrar, NY, 1973, p. 23.

805

Here Sontag differs markedly from Roland Barthes, her one-time mentor,

who highly values and prioritizes appearance rather than function, surface

rather than understanding. Barthes is fascinated by photographs as surfaces

which magically attest to a reality beyond understanding and reason’s

apparently persuading but often beguiling forces. The surface of a photo is a

reality which resists interpretation into anything other than its own "pure

contingency," that is its fortuitous, unplanned, incidental, somewhat-chancey

happening.332

These two attitudes to photography spring from different epistemologies,

different theories of the nature and scope of knowledge. One theory is based

on function and the other on appearance. If photographs can be seen as a

product of both the realm of a physical reality that one should attempt to

fathom as best one can, on the one hand; if photographs can be seen as a

product of the realm of artifice, coincidence, chance and life’s fortuitous

connections on the other, then their ultimate status and meaning is

ambiguous.

As physical emanations of a past referent, they are endowed with an uneasy

authority. Photographs appear to offer assurances of identity and clarity; at

332 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, Hill, NY, 1981, p. 28.

806

the same time they undermine the very attempt to control experience by

demonstrating that to freeze time and space is to render them, to some

extent, obsolete. Thus the photograph can be seen as a metaphor for the life-

giving and death-dealing enterprise of both true narrative and fictional story

creation.

Moreover, the referential nature of the photographic subject intensifies the

relationship between viewer and the artifact. A subject may pose, thus taking

an active part in the creation of the photograph. I am interested in the

implications of the photo's participation in past and present, nature and

culture, continuity and discontinuity, activity and passivity. I try to clarify

these distinctions in my analysis of their role in my memoirs.

On the one hand I can see my photographs as just flashes of things, moments

I know and have experienced or episodes I want to find out more about.

Through this method, this emphasis, this use of my photos, I can look at

people's lives, my life, over a number of years without aiming at continuity.

It’s catching my life in snapshots. I don't need to see that I am developing

and arriving somewhere. 1 just see myself living in flashes, from time to

time, from moment to moment.

And so the stories I relate about myself or others, using this photographic

model, this way of placing my life in pictorial form, will change over time,

807

as I make different "editions" of my life. None of these stories in my life

will need to connect--all of them are realities unto themselves—so goes this

model of life portrayed visually. This conviction that life can be best

understood as a series of flashes is paralleled by the assertion that one way

life is perceived is in short sharp visual images which leap away from me

even as I look at them.333

Since, on the other hand, I am also concerned with continuity and pattern

over time, then I order my photographs into a meaningful relationship with

past and future. Using this approach to my photographs the story of my life

becomes my attempt to gain control over it by making connections with the

past, and my dealings with the "short sharp visual images" that are my

photographic totems. These photos come to represent, in miniature, my

dealings with life as a whole. Clearly this need to create temporal patterns

predisposes me, my memoir, toward novelistic-narrative rather than a short-

story format. My 12 volumes of photos are a tribute to this way of looking

at my photographic collection.

333 Margaret Laurence, "Gadgetry or Growing: Form and Voice in the Novel," A Place to Stand On: Essays By and About Margaret Laurence, ed. George Woodcock, NeWest, Edmonton, 1983, p.88.p. 88.

808

"Life," writes Sontag, "is not about significant details, illuminated a flash,

fixed forever. Photographs are.” I understand this dichotomy and so it is

that my memoirs both aim to understand my life and by contrast, to centre

my writing upon "significant details." My photographs invite imaginative

extension. Photographs act for me in a way that constantly refers to far

more than they show. Even as arbitrary fragments taken from time and

place they evoke the greater whole from which they are abstracted.334

Objects are by nature symbolic, bathed with significance beyond mere

functionality; no surface, then, is mere surface, because the more vividly a

surface can be seen, the more light shines from it to irradiate, not only itself,

but also itself in relation to the world around it. The use of surface details to

reveal the essential is a central aspect of my style, although my descriptive

faculty needs to be sharpened. This interest in surfaces focuses upon the

impenetrability of a certain face, indeed, of much of the physical reality I

see. Within my narrative stories the notion of an image, stilled and passive,

is often to be held in tension with that of another image with which it seems

to be in contradiction. This particular narraitve that is my life centres on the

334 Ian Jeffrey, "Photographic Time and 'The Real World'," in Jonathan Bayer, Reading Photographs: Understanding the Aesthetics of Photography, Pantheon, NY, 1977, p. 86.

809

tension between the photograph and the photographer, the image and my

eye. The only way in which reality can be "held still and held together--

radiant, everlasting" is in that kind of art in which "as honest an attempt " as

possible has been made "to get at what is really there," in all its mystery and

dullness, its depth and its simplicity; and this is the kind of art that some

writers, I among them, most admire.335

Writing is problematic. As James Agee pointed out in an interview

published in the Partisan Review in 1939, writing "draws in to the point of

a pin and it spreads out flat like a quoit. Some of the time you are writing

for all men who are your equals and your superiors, and some of the time for

all the deceived and captured, and some of the time for nobody. Some of the

time you are trying to communicate but not necessarily to please."336

I am concerned to decipher a pattern over time and I am also interested in

the unresolvable enigmas of each moment. I am drawn to the analogy

between the power of the camera to capture instantaneous images and the

nature of perception, which works in short, sharp flashes. The challenge is

in presenting ambivalent reality as something constantly to be reshaped into

a personal truth. But reality, for me, is also incorrigibly plural, and its

335 J.R. (Tim) Struthers, "The Real Material; An Interview with Alice Munro," Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, ed. Louis K. MacKendrick, ECW, Downsview, 1983, p.6.336 James Agee in Niall Lucy, op.cit.

810

plurality can most readily be apprehended through paradoxical physical

appearances. Because the photograph both invites and defies interpretation,

it holds out microcosmically the ground of my writing. It may be that the

pictures must be accepted as discrete mysteries, whose validity is to be

experienced through a heightened appreciation of their otherness. My

position is that the pictures, the photos, must be seen, made, into a pattern

that takes account of time: this emphasis on the necessity of narrative

context points up the similarities between Sontag's epistemology and my

literary conerns. The photograph is the realised image from within the

negative "black eye"; and yet, as Sontag asserts, "Photographs do not

explain; they acknowledge.” As a result, they make available to the writer a

real past, framed and held out for her to respond to, without predetermining

that response. The photograph "cannot say what it lets us see.” It is the

business of the writer to enable us to see more acutely, and to see beneath.

Whether this is primarily a spatial or a temporal extension will depend upon

the epistemological position of the artist.

Several years ago, just after retiring from my professional work as a teacher,

I organized some of my photos into the context of my Journal. I wrote this

introduction to my collection of photographs:

811

INTRODUCTION TO THIS PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM

In July 1971 my first wife, Judy, and I moved to Australia from Canada. The

photographs from the period before this move belong in other places, mainly

in my Journal Volume 1.1, although some can be found in my first volume

of poetry, entitled, Warm-Up: The Tomb’s Chambers. The photographs in

these two volumes come from the period 1908 to 1971, before the

international pioneer experience that my book Pioneering Over Four Epochs

attempts to describe.

The photographs found here, part of Section VIII of this larger work

Pioneering Over Four Epochs, in what is in some ways the second chapter of

my life, were arranged by my second wife, Chris. They are a rearrangement

of an initial organization of photos I put together in the early 1990s. They

are also a companion piece to: (i) an additional collection of photographs in

my study, under volume numbers: 5, 7.1, 8, 8.1, 9.1, 10 and Mother(1/2);

and (ii) the four volumes of my Journal, Volumes 1.2, 2, 3 and 4.

The work, the writing, on the volumes of my journal is incomplete. I hope

to continue the work on them, in what might be called ‘a retrospective

autobiography’, gradually during the years of my retirement. This

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‘retrospective journal', is an extension, in some ways, of an initial narrative I

wrote in the late 1980s and redrafted to completion in 1993, entitled,

Pioneering Over Three Epochs. This journal is also an extension, a

companion piece, to my poetry, now in forty volumes, which I began writing

in 1980.

I hope, during the years of my retirement ahead, to provide some comment

and analysis of these photographs but, for now, I simply want to write this

introduction, this ‘general perspective’ on just where these photographs fit

into the overall collection of my autobiographical material. Inevitably, were

my wife to write this introduction, she would place these photos in a

different context. For we are all different; we lead different lives, even--and

perhaps especially--within any one family.

This introduction is a ‘first start’ to what may become a fuller and more

comprehensive statement, as the years go on and as I see my life differently,

as we all do from our earliest years to our final hours. As I gather together

my thoughts for an autobiography, I continue to ponder just exactly what, if

any, photos I will include. If the reader finds in the final text of this work no

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pictures to embellish the narrative, the the ideas of Susan Sontag, especially

her ideas on photography, will tell why.337

Reality is the given-the donnee-of photography. The pictures set the limit on

what and how much the photographer can transform into a personal creation.

Baudelaire once said of photography that its "major negative psychic effect

was its encouragement of narcissism, the most regressive and involuted of

psychic tendencies."338 That is probably true, too, of autobiography.

Hopefully, though, these tendencies can be dealt with by this practitioner to

his own satisfaction and the satisfaction of his readers.

I am aware how much pleasure most people get from photographs. People

often seem drawn to the photos in a book before they read the book and,

often, instead of reading the book. Perhaps this is because, as Harold Bloom

remarked, "reading is a solitary transport which we desperately try to

communicate to others. But we can't do it."339 If this book ever gets

published, then, some photos may be included. And, if they are not included,

337 Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.338 Baudelaire in Donald Kuspit, The New Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s, Da Capo Press, NY, 1993, p.404.339 Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in Society, Methuen NY, 1987, p.65.

814

then readers will have some understanding of my attitude to these pictures of

life.

My narrative is `built' around my life as a house surrounds and contains

memories of experiences.340 But no matter how many photos I might have

used to embellish this autobiography giving my house a colourful and

attractive exterior, no matter how many letters, interviews, items of

memorabilia or even if I used a video or a DVD as part of my back-up

material, all narratives in relation to my self are necessarily acts of

negotiation between my individuality, my personal life and the various

collectivities that have made up my world. The strategies I employ in this

negotiation represent some of the central features of this text.

Autobiographers must identity and analyse these strategies for in many ways

they form a critical base for the structure of the text. They are much more

complex than inserting some photographs, labelling them appropriately and

having readers enthuse over them.

The photos of Egyptian monuments that we’ve all seen and that haven't

changed significantly in 3,000 years illustrate some of what I am trying to

340 Jo Marin puts it this way in: Jo Malin, The Voice of the Mother: Embedded Maternal Narratives in Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiographies, Southern Illinois UP, Carbondale, 2000. p. xiv.

815

say here. The sand goes up and down a little around the edges of these great

blocks of stone, but the things themselves have lasted and lasted and lasted.

Perhaps in the photo somebody has moved and made a little blur, perhaps it

was a camel driver, or a tourist. Our lives are like these blurs, blurs on the

face of things. We are like dark smears on unchanging stone and even

things of no great intrinsic merit like a chair or a lamp in the corner of this

room have a very good chance of outlasting you and me. Objects have an

enduring quality; they are so impressively permanent. Books. Look at the

way books last. They may get a little yellow, but they're still there.

Some autobiographers focus their critical energies on the ideological

program underlying the basis of the collectivity to which they have devoted

their lives. I have certainly devoted some of my energies, some of this

autobiographical enterprize, to the description and elaboration of this

ideological framework. The Baha'i ideological and intellectual apparatus

and the framework of a western nation state and its vast array of institutional

appurtenances has certainly occupied my attention again and again in this

narrative. I construct myself, see myself, not only as part of various

collectivities but as separate from them. I like to think I achieve a balance

between these two general orientations. I do not see these collectivities as

816

entities that are homogeneous or univocal in form and content as some make

them out to be. My life as I describe it is part of these various collective

identities and my narrative strategy sets my life in these contexts. This is an

intentional strategy I take like other strategies, neither more nor less natural

than those employed by individualist authors who play-down collectivities

and play-up some individualist ethos that has governed their lives.341

VOLUME 2:

Pre-Pioneering

CHAPTER ONE

"Ready to begin at the beginning....."

Art and a certain literariness are built into the very fabric of life; narrative

cognition has a basic poetic quality and is part of the creation of meaning.

By writing autobiography we open the way toward a more expansive and

serviceable conception of truth as well as a more humane conception of

human lives, our own lives and how to approach and understand them.-Ron

341 The literature on the nature and philosophy of the photograph is now burgeoning. I will refer to one article here, an article with a highly academic flavour. I had originally intended to incorporate some of its contents into this part of my autobiography. But I feel I have said enough, perhaps too much. That article can be found in the electronic journal Excursions, Vol. 1, No. 1, June 2010, pp.123-142. It is entitled: “Writing the World: Photographing the Text of the Landscape” and it is by Gina Wall.

817

Price with thanks to Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory,

Narrative, Routledge, London, 1993.

_____________________________________________________________

Having set a bit of a stage, provided some perspectives, wandered about in a

philosophical and literary way and suggested a backdrop for this

autobiographical study in the first six chapters, I am now ready to begin at

the beginning. It is not a beginning that tells of my family background

going back to 1844. I have set that out in my Journal: Volume 1.1342 and I do

not want to repeat that exercise here. It is not a beginning that goes back to

my birth in July of 1944, two months after the centenary of the inception of

the Babi Faith and just as WW2 was beginning to end its gruesome story.

The beginning that is the genuine beginning for this story I have selected

somewhat arbitrarily and somewhat pointedly in 1953 when my family had

its first contact with what was then more aptly described as a Movement and

now is more aptly described as a world Faith, the Baha'i Faith.343

One of autobiography's trade secrets is that writers can find meaning in

anything if they look hard enough. Contemplate the work of art which is

342 Not yet published and unlikely to be published, at least before I depart from this mortal coil.343 Arnold Toynbee in 1952/3 referred to it as one of the two 'religions of Western civilization' in his A Study of History.

818

your life and patterns inevitably emerge, echoes, resonances, allusions which

can be brought out and amplified through exegesis. Through an interpretive

conceit the autobiographer simultaneously deconstructs and rebuilds, unveils

and augments another writer’s metaphors, another writer’s vision and

thoughts. Part attention to detail, part science, part a merging of mind and

heart, the autobiographical exegesis allows a writer to enter and extend the

context of his work of art. I find I can draw on useful reductions of book

reviews, a half a millennium of minutiae that have accumulated in the social

sciences and humanities and revelatory appraisals and analyses of the

autobiographical process that have emerged especially since the completion

of the mother temple of the west in 1953.

The literary and art critic, sociologist and philosopher, Walter Benjamin

describes two kinds of experience. One kind can be integrated into our lives

and the other is "merely lived through."344 This latter category is

characterized by ahistoricity, repetition, sameness, reactiveness, a liquidation

of what could be called the cultural achievements of the mind. This

autobiography deals with both these kinds of experience. As I go back to the

beginnings of this story, this narrative of my pioneering life, both kinds of

344 Walter Benjamin, quoted in "Clockwork Orange and the Aestheticization of Violence," Internet Film Reviews, 2002.

819

experience come onto the stage and are dealt with. It is also my intention as

I survey these days "to cauterize the exposed tissue of too-easy hope"345 and

too high and unrealistic short-term expectations that are so often offered by

the dogmatic ameliorists in our midst. Although I feel a sense of

responsibility in what I write, I do not feel that burden of messianic

responsibility which artists have often felt. Writing has become, as I near the

age of sixty, simply a part of that dominating passion of my life which is to

"teach the Cause" in whatever way seems most fitting, most suitable to my

talents and capacities. I think I felt the weight of that messianic

responsibility much earlier in my life.

The years have softened the edges of my sensory emporium and I feel a

kindness to myself I did not feel in my more rigorous, more emotionally

intense and more enthusiastic days. My work, however imbued with and

centred in autobiographical narrative, is a plea for largeness and difficulty,

modulation and complexity, variousness and possibility.346 I plea, too, for

the many-sidedness of man. As I point out elsewhere, were my wife, my

son, my mother-in-law, my step-dauthers or, indeed, one of many who have

known me and found me wanting in one or many ways to write my

345 See Peter Rawlings, "Trilling Unlionized," Essays in Criticism, 2001.346 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 1950.

820

biography there would be much revealed that is not revealed here. This is the

second sustained piece of writing in my life and I hope it has provided a

grounding for sustained works in the years to come. It is so easy to get

caught up in the endless details of the quotidian, the burgeoning material

coming out of just about every aspect of intellectual thought and the

responsibilities of home, family and community.

Writing for some people, at least some people like me, is a little like

handwriting, having a bowel movement or blowing your nose. It comes out

of you no matter what you do—unless you are coimpletely stuffed, your

fingers are broken or you’ve injured your nose. But you have to feel, as

John Updike says, that you're going off in a fresh direction. You have to be

in some way excited, and in a way frightened. You say to yourself: can I do

this? Without that “can-I-do-it?” feeling, you can't do it. What you wind up

doing is producing something that you've already done. Updike says “It

doesn't get easier, this setting out again. You use up those first 20 years of

you life one way or another, and the material you collect in adulthood

doesn't have that---it's not that magical. You have to give it magic. You have

to substitute wisdom and experience for passion and innocence.'' 347 I would

347 John Updike in “The Origin of the Universe, Time and John Updike,” Mervyn Rothstein, The New York Times on the Web, November 21st 1985.

821

not put it quite that way because I’m not John Updike; I did not come to

writing as early or as easily or as famously as he. I did not begin to invest

that magic into life by writing until my fifties.

The matching of words to images was known as ekphrasis in ancient times,

when the Greeks and Romans practiced it as a genre of literature. It went

well beyond the mere description of pictures and statues, such as were given

by the geographer and traveler Pausanias, who included accounts of these in

the course of describing distant sites. Rather, it was the counterpart of

illustration, made to fit to passages of poetry or prose images, with the

picture conveying the same effect as the words.

The great set piece of ekphrasis from the ancient world is the verbal re-

creation of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, an account so stupendous that

it is difficult not to suppose that Homer saw himself competing with the

maker of the shield himself, though a god. A great ekphrasis is thus a work

of art in its own right, but while Homer's word picture of the shield may be

as dazzling as the shield itself would have been, it is impossible to imagine

what the shield can have looked like from his description, and I have never

822

seen a Greek vase painting of Achilles with his armor in which the artist

even tried to show it.

Thusfar, I have not engaged in any ekphrasis, no verbal or written re-

creation of any object in my life.

Botticelli undertook to re-create the lost ''Calumny'' of Apelles, perhaps the

most famous painting of antiquity, from a brilliant ekphrasis by the poet

Lucian, but the transit from words to pictures is sufficiently treacherous that,

were the vanished masterpiece found tomorrow, it would resemble its

Renaissance version only at the most abstract level. This cannot, of course,

merely be because of the incommensurability of words and pictures; if all

we knew of Homer were verbal paraphrases, however artful, of the books of

the ''Odyssey,'' it would be unimaginable that the text itself could be

generated from these. Nevertheless, finding the thousand words said to be

equivalent to a single picture has continued to challenge writers with an

extracurricular interest in the visual arts. Sadly or not-so-sadly this activity

of ekphrasis has yet to challenge me.

I have never had what could be called an intense in painting and sculpture. I

taught sociology at the School of Art in Launceston in 1974; I walked

823

through art galleries more times than I can count. Ekphrasis presented

itself as an inevitable outlet for my polymorphous literary energies and

hence a good many art pieces were put into characteristically fine language.

Opulently reproduced images were given ekphrastic description which after

all is something more and less than critical characterization of works of art.

Criticism yields enhanced understanding of the work, whereas ekphrasis

often yields but enhanced understanding of the writer, and his or her

preoccupations. My psychological drove my eye from work to work in many

an exhibition until a deep understanding of the art emerged, or so it was my

hope.

A good many of my essays and poems really register the lookings of an

artistic flaneur, who uses pictures as occasions for ruminative ekphrasis. In

some ways my essays and poems are an evocation of my life in this era,

these four epochs and of the value I drew from his visits to various places

and media where art was exhibited. The essay is genuinely ekphrastic in

that it conveys through words the feeling about all sorts of subjects that the

canvas itself expresses. Indeed, the canvas, unglazed and exposed, strikes

the author as vulnerable in a way that must be a projection of my feeling

toward so many of the topics and subjects.

824

Neither will these essays hold great urgency for those whose concerns with

art connect with the great critical issues of today. Still, for artists, past and

present, whose concerns resonate with what I sought in those ''pious, joyful,

and ignorant'' visits I had , I like to think that I am exactly the writer to put

words to their images. Some of the essays beyond question are as frivolous,

slight and self-indulgent

For some, museums and art galleries were like temples where they might

refresh their own sense of artistic purpose. I think, by my sixties, television

had this function. By the 1990s my medium had become words. And by 9 or

10 in the evening I was exhausted from writing and reading. I knew of

nothing so arbitrary in writing, a regal whimsy enforced by the largeness of

life. Television relaxed and refreshed: educational programs, who-dun-its

and I was ready for two or three more hours of work.

"There are two very natural propensities which we may distinguish in the

most virtuous and liberal dispositions," Gibbon wrote over two centuries

ago, "the love of pleasure and the love of action." To the love of pleasure

we may ascribe most of the agreeable, to the love of action we may attribute

most of the useful and respectable, qualifications. The insensible and

825

inactive disposition we must reject, by the common consent of mankind, as

utterly incapable of procuring any happiness to the individual, or any public

benefit to the world, although this disposition is indispensable from time to

time, ending as it usually does, at least for me, in sleep. Gibbon notes, 348

with some of his typical wit and skepticism, that for the early Christians it

was not in this world that they were "desirous of making themselves either

agreeable or useful." Baha'is on the other hand, although believing strongly

in an afterlife, see the betterment of this world as one of their primary duties.

A strong 'this-worldly attitude' has certainly played an important part in the

evolution of my life and the writing of this autobiography.

I really did not take my family's, my mother's, involvement in this new Faith

very seriously at first, back in the 1950s. The people were friendly and the

ideas basically reasonable even to my middle to late childhood and early

adolescent brain. More importantly, though, I liked the food you got when

you went to the meetings in other people's homes; even when the meetings

were in our family's home the food, the tucker as they call it in Australia,

was better than you'd ever get in a normal evening. But my heart had just

begun its long scenario with baseball. School, girls, TV, family life, the

348 Edward Gibbon, op.cit.

826

everyday stuff that occupies most nine year olds filled my head. It would be

another nine years before I began to take this Movement at all seriously.

Perhaps in those nine years I was learning baseball’s metaphor of life as I

would one day learn Aussi Rules’ and cricket's metaphor in an Australian

context.349

"A beginning," the orientalist Edward Said wrote, "methodologically unites

a practical need with a theory, an intention with a method."350 A beginning,

Said went on to say in much more simple words, is chosen. And this is for

me the beginning of my autobiography. We are a people, we Baha'is, of

messages and signals, of allusions and of direct and indirect expression. We

seek each other out but, because our interior is nearly always to some extent

occupied and interrupted by others and by life's continuing demands, we

have developed a technique of speaking through the given, expressing things

obliquely and, to my mind, often so mysteriously as to puzzle even

ourselves. But still, we strive for directness, and this narrative is part of my

striving.

349 Robert Benson, One Man, Nine Innings: A Love Affair With Baseball, Tarcher/Putnam, 2001. The metaphorical implications of various national games are interesting to examine, although I do not intend to examine them here.350 Edward Said in "On Edward Said," Michael Wood, London Review of Books, October 23, 2003.

827

I have written many poems about these earliest days of my family's coming

into contact with the Baha'i Faith at a time when over ninety per cent of all

the Baha'is in the world lived in Iran. Here are three poems written in the

years just before retiring from full-time teaching, over thirty years after my

pioneering life began and more than forty years after the Baha'i Faith first

came into my life.

DROPPING PEARLS ON FOREIGN SHORES

This poem is essentially a meditation on ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Tablet to the

Baha’is of the Northeastern States in the Tablets of the Divine Plan and my

own role as an overseas pioneer. It is also, as Barthes says below, an

attempt to integrate, unify and synthesize my own life into some coherent

whole, to construct, to define, my particular version of reality.1 -Ron Price,

Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 19 June 1996; and 1 Linda Hutcheon in

"Writing the Self: Selected Works of Doris Lessing," Lynda Scott, Deep

South, Vol.2 No.2, Winter 1996, p.2.

828

Narrative does not show, nor imitate, nor represent. Its purpose is to produce

a spectacle. At the very least: language is produced. There is an adventure in

language. To put it another way: stories are not lived but told. Their function

is integrative.

-Roland Barthes in Narrative and the Self, Anthony Paul Kerby, Indiana

UP, Bloomington, 1991, pp.93-94.

One spring, while Hattie Dixon

was bringing hot soup and rose hip tea,

surrounded by more than

a superficial propriety

in those seemingly halcyon years

when deepest needs and wants

remained always unexpressed:

the fifties....

And the Canadian Baha’i community

was launching the opening chapter

in its glorious Mission overseas,1

my mother started going to firesides.

829

I, too, enjoyed the hot coffee and apple-pie

on cold Canadian winter evenings

becoming, unobtrusively, insinuatingly

part of that overseas mission,

little did I know, then.

So it is that I now measure the origins

of my overseas pioneering identity:

generation no. 1: 1953-1978.

So easy it is to spell out these years

dropping pearls on foreign shores

from the great sea of His Name.

How difficult to quantify, to judge

the quickening, the variegation,

the radiant effulgences,

the portion and the share,

the blessing of the seed.

I don’t think I ever can,

830

but I try to fix my gaze

upon the favours and bounties.2

And I do, I shall, I will, I forget,

I despair and I do not understand.

I seem to need reminding

again and again and again.

Ron Price

19 June 1996

1 Messages To Canada, Shoghi Effendi, NSA of the Baha’is of Canada,

1965, p.69.

2’Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, USA, 1977, p.7.

1953

By the 1950s it was clear that the British Empire, long the world centre of

power, was a thing of the past, even though Queen Elizabeth was coronated

that year. Russia and the USA had become the centres of a bi-polar world.

831

These two countries were at the centre of the secular world as it was defined

in 1953 when the Kingdom of God on earth made its obscure, its

unobtrusive, debut. Oscar Wilde had noted, more than half a century before,

that “the only excuse for making a useless theory is that one admires it

intensely.” I find that over the years I have come to admire, to be

immensely drawn toward, this association of 1953 with the beginning of the

Kingdom of God on earth. This date has a number of personal and historical

meanings for me in association with what I call my "1953 theory." -Ron

Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1999.

Quite a year that coronation year:

Stalin’s death,

Churchill's unsuccessful

quest for peace,

the completion of the

Mother-temple of the West

and the Shrine of the Bab

and the inception of

the Kingdom of God on earth,

an old world dieing,

832

a new one being born.

Ron Price 15 July 1999

1953: A VERY BIG YEAR

The year October 1952 to October 1953 marked a Holy Year

commemorating the centenary of the birth of the Mission of Baha'u'llah. -

Ron Price: see Shoghi Effendi, Messages to the Baha'i World: 1950-1957,

USA, 1958, p.50.

Patti Page's 'Doggie in the Window'

was the best-selling song in America;

Frank Sinatra's 'Lean Baby,'

a new country and western,

Willie Thornton's Hound Dog

and the Drifters' Money Honey

were all turnin' them on,

makin' it big in music's world.

833

A most wonderful and thrilling motion1

appeared, back then, in the world of existence

and the Kingdom on earth began

with the opening of the greatest

architectural creation since the Gothic.2

That year my mother saw an ad

in the Burlington Gazette

and began going to firesides.

I was in grade four,

in love with Susan Gregory

and on the eve of my baseball career.

1 'Abdu'l-Baha predicted that this would occur with the completion of the

mother Temple in Chicago. This occurred in 1953: God Passes by, p.351.

2 So said George Gray Barnard, widely respect sculptor in the USA: God

Passes by, USA, 1957, p.352.

Ron Price

6 July 1998

834

Burlington was a quiet conservative town in 1953, indeed the whole country

had a conservative temperament. But, as the Canadian philosopher and

cultural historian George Grant was to observe, it was impossible to build a

conservative nation on a continent right beside the most dynamic nation on

earth.351 I comment on this conservatism in the following two poems:

A MINEFIELD

Most Canadians dislike and mistrust any great show of cheerfulness.

Australians are the same. The uncertainty of the weather makes Canadians

morose, haunted, apprehensive. Perhaps the cynicism and skepticism in

Australia is due to the unalleviating glare of the sun and the dryness.

Canadians once battled their furnaces in the winter and the weeds and

mosquitoes in the summer, as late as the fifties; Australians swatted flies in

the summer, ran to the beach to cool off, where they swatted flies some more

and worried about bush fires. Still do. In the winter they kept warm by their

electric heaters and fireplaces.

351 George Grant in Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture, Anansi, Toronto, 1982, p.67.

835

If a national literature develops out of such experience, if a civilization or a

religion grows and flourishes, it evolves through different stages in relation

to that experience. People go over to gas and the coal-furnace becomes a

relic; people move into small flats and never fight weeds again. Air-

conditioners become plentiful and then you can be comfortable at 50 degrees

celsius. People become less affected by climate with the comforts of

modern life and the basis for a literature, civilization and religion shifts.

-Ron Price with thanks to Robertson Davies, Major Canadian Authors: A

Critical Introduction, University of Nebraska Press, London, 1984, pp. 197-

211.

A consciousness had grown

in the quiet backwaters of our1 lives,

so silently, so inarticulately,

so unbeknownst to even

our most exemplary members;

it slowly just emerged,

stuck its head above the ground,

found form, words, shape, texture,

direction, a place in the sun.

836

It was scarcely visible back then,

but you could get your teeth into it

and your mind: some of us could.

There was a philosophy there

in a minefield of gems and rare metals

where great wealth could be amassed

and great distinctions made

between a mysterious loftiness

and the many degrees of baseness.

Ron Price

14 February 1998

1 I am referring here to the Baha’i community.

THE FIFTIES

In the fifties, the decade my family contacted and joined the Baha'i Faith in

Canada, the period when the opening scene of the initial act of the great

837

drama ahead was played out, this new Faith grew slowly from under three

hundred to nearly a thousand. In the United States, in the same period, the

various forms of Christianity grew from strength to strength according to

Robert Elwood in his The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace. The fifties were, he

wrote, the decade of Catholic triumphalism, of mass evangelism within

Protestantism and of the rise of the Black Church as a platform for the

nascent Civil Rights movement. -Ron Price with thanks to Robert Elwood,

The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace, reviewed on "The Religion Report," ABC

Radio National, 18 April 2001, 8:30-9:00 am.

It was a booming business

below the border

when my family contacted

a new world religion

with its temple in Chicago

in the fifties

in that conservative culture.1

Ours was a much quieter world

back then, little of that

mass evangelism,

838

Billy Graham never came near us,

not as far as I remember.

There was none of that

Catholic triumphalism

from New York to L.A.,

at least none that I could see,

not that I was looking that hard

in my childhood and adolescence

when life was simple and safe

and sweet-at-home,

at least most of the time.

All I wanted to know in those days

of Ike Eisenhower and Doris Day

was who was playing on Saturday,

whether the Maple Leafs or Canadians

were still at the top of the National League

and whether the Tiger Cats game

was being televised this week.

839

Slowly a new wind blew,

I guess from about '53.

It was nothing flash,

natural, organic, as everyday

as the hot soup the Dixons

brought over when we were sick.

And slowly I began thinking

about birds flying over Akka,

about history since the Enlightenment,

early Christianity especially around Nicea

and the future of mankind.

And I tasted from sweet-scented streams,

always wondering just what they were.

And my little blue prayer-book

seemed to get thinner and thinner

before I gave it away to an Eskimo,

Josephee Teemotee in, what was it, '67?

840

1 Canada is well-known for its conservatism in the first half of the twentieth

century.

Ron Price

18 April 2001

1953 marked the beginning of the ninth stage of history according to an

outline of history presented in a talk written by Shoghi Effendi and

presented by Ruhiyyih Khanum in Chicago that same year. 1953 also

marked the first year that the "first impulse of a momentous Revelation"352

was communicated to me thanks to my mother. I was only nine. I read a

copy of that talk of Shoghi Effendi's in 1966 or 1967 when I was living in

Windsor, going to teachers' college and learning about Eskimos from Jamie

and Gale Bond. In 1953 the religion, the Baha'i Faith, was nine decades old

after a fiery beginning from 1844 to 1853 surrounding the Babi Faith.

There were about two hundred thousand adherents in 1953. It had grown in

the sixty years, 1892 to 1953, from some fifty thousand. By 1963 it would

grow to about four hundred thousand and as I write this, at the end of a fifty

352 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, p.7.

841

year association(1953-2003) with this emerging world religion, there are

between five and six million followers of Baha'u'llah in the world. I provide

these general statistics and the picture of the growth of the Baha'i

community over these several decades because this autobiography emerges

from a matrix of concerns: my religion, my family, my society, my sense of

identity. In saying this I say a great deal and what I say unfolds in the pages

ahead. And just as the popular sci-fi series like Star Trek is positioned

"within the workings of an always-already ideological(and scarcely neutral)

system,"353 so, too, is this autobiography positioned within an ideological

system, an ideological system that is partly my religion, partly an inherited,

a socialized system of values from parents, teachers and society and partly a

complex web of beliefs and attitudes that have grown and evolved, changed

and differentiated as the decades have advanced obtrusively and

unobtrusively. It must be said, too, that this autobiography is positioned in

an opinionated and passionate life, a life that has been on a steep learning

curve for nearly sixty years, a life which has sought to influence others

primarily through speech, a life which has tried to achieve some degree of

moderation but, I often feel, without much success.

353 "The Political Aesthetic: Nation and Narrativity on the Starship Enterprize," Internet, April 12, 2003.

842

Freud's An Autobiographical Study first appeared in America in 1927. Two

themes run through these pages: the story of Freud's life and the history of

psychoanalysis. They are intimately interwoven. An Autobiographical Study

shows how psychoanalysis came to be the whole content of Freud's life.

This book also assumes that no personal experiences of his are of any

interest in comparison to his relations with that science. At the end of his life

Freud returned to the investigation of interests that held his attention as a

youth, that of culture. There can no longer be any doubt that psychoanalysis

will continue; it has proved its capacity to survive and to develop both as a

branch of knowledge and as a therapeutic method. The number of its

supporters has considerably increased. Some supporters lay most stress upon

clarifying and deepening our knowledge of psychology, while others are

concerned with keeping in contact with medicine and psychiatry. From the

practical point of view, some analysts have set themselves the task of

bringing about the recognition of psychoanalysis at the universities and its

inclusion in the medical curriculum, whereas others are content to remain

outside these institutions and will not allow that psychoanalysis is less

important in the field of education than in that of medicine.

843

I mention Freud's autobiography because there are some interesting parallels

with my own. In some ways it could be said that two themes run through

my pages: the story of my life and the story of the Baha'i Faith. They are

intimately interwoven. This autobiographical study shows how the Baha'i

Faith came to occupy virtually the whole content of my life. I did a great

deal that did not have any apparent relation with the Baha'i Faith but, as I

gaze back over these fifty years since my mother first saw an advertisement

in the Burlington Gazette, there is no doubt that there has been one

dominating passion, however quietly brewing under some cloak of triviality,

some allurements and attractions of the wider world or some human interests

that kept me occupied with family, job or any one of innumerable activities.

There is an assumption in this work that no personal experiences of mine are

of any relevance outside of their relation with this emerging world religion.

This may sound somewhat puritanical, fanatical and extreme, but my life is

only a single organism, the story of a single creature. It would be

presumptuous, it seems to me, given that I have made no earth-shattering or

even mildly significant contribution to the overall human condition beyond

what millions of others like myself have contributed, to claim that my story

is worth recording in the long-haul of history. During my life I have

844

returned again and again to an investigation of the contemporary relevance

of this Faith I joined back in the 1950s, to an investigation of the realities of

its literature and its community that held my attention as a youth and kept

that attention in the decades of my adult life. There can no longer be any

doubt that the Founders of this Faith will continue, as the famous

psychologist Rollo May once said, to have a great influence on the human

race. It has proved its capacity to survive and to develop both as a world

religion and as an historical reality. The number of its supporters has

considerably increased in the half century that this autobiography is

concerned with.

A condition of entrenched scepticism amused many an inquisitive mind as

the decades of these epochs insensibly rolled along. The practice of

superstition was so congenial to the multitude that, it was difficult to awaken

them from their pleasing visions. So urgent is the necessity of believing

something, that the fall of old, time-honoured and powerful strongholds of

orthodoxy and systems of mythology, in this case a multitude of brands of

Christianity and of parties of partisan-politics, a fall which was increasingly

manifest during these epochs, was succeeded by the introduction of other

modes of superstition. A belief in God seemed to be substituted by a belief

845

in anything. But along with this credulity was a cynicism that was

entrenched and pervasive. If political journalism extended to autobiography

there would sure to be a psycho-analysis of me and my work, cynical

evaluations of who I was and why I was doing all this navel-gazing and a

skepticism that would require me to find a minder, a group of handlers and

stage-men sensitive to image and impression management. Thankfully

political journalism does not come into this work and, given the few readers

that I anticipate in this earthly life, I don't have to have one eye of the

entrenched and deepening skepticism of humanity. I like to think, though,

that autobiography is somewhat like the way Phil Graham, in a speech to

Newsweek overseas correspondents, described journalism: "the first draft of

history."354

Some of the supporters of this new Faith that became an increasingly

important part of my life in the 1950s lay much stress upon clarifying and

deepening their knowledge of its significance. Others were concerned with

its contact with other religions and with the multitude of publics in the wider

society. From a purely practical point of view many, if not most, of its

coreligionists set themselves the task of bringing about the recognition of the

354 Marsha Vande Berg, "Interview with Katharine Graham," Book Page, 1997.

846

Baha'i Faith by one or more of a host of the specific publics that occupied

contemporary society. Many of its promoters set themselves the task of

establishing its inclusion in the many curriculums of the educational systems

around the world. Others were content to work outside the burgeoning

institutional framewords of the world and, forming relationships with friends

and associations, strangers and individuals, in a vastly expanding global

population, sought to share its teachings among their contemporaries. 355

There exists in our society, at least in that portion of history in which my

parents and I have been alive, an insatiable desire for an image of ourselves

which is somehow true. We represent and re-represent this image so often

that our world becomes papered with many versions of our own reality. The

fictional loses its distinction from the real. Often the fantastic, the unreal, the

copy, the image, reigns and our job becomes one of consumption or, as Neil

Postman expressed it critically, Amusing Ourselves to Death.356 There are

millions now, as I write this, consuming an average of seven hours a day of

355 The New York Freudian Society, Abstracts of the Standard Edition of the Psychological Sigmund Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb, editor. From: Volume XX: An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Lay Analysis and Other Works, 1925-1926. Some of the ideas here applied to Freud and his work in psychoanalysis, the dominating passion of his life. I found the parallel to my own narrative relevant and so I included it here. 356 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985.

847

television. Perhaps this process of the consumption of versions of reality

and of ourselves became stronger and stronger after the passing of

Baha'u'llah and the beginnings of film in 1896; then after 1919 when the

Tablets of the Divine Plan began to be implemented at about the same time

as radio came on-line; then after television increasingly became a part of our

lives after 1937 when the Teaching Plan was first implemented and; then

finally, after 1953, when the Kingdom of God on earth began to be realized.

Society could be said, from a Baha'i perspective, to be disintegrating as all

these forms of audio-visual communication became part and parcel of our

way of life. Thereby hangs a tale which I will return to several times in this

narrative. The superficially innocuous fantasy and entertainment movies and

TV programs have continued to escalate in frequency and popularity with

the decades. Their immense appeal may, in fact, constitute an especially

sensitive index for collective intrapsychic and cultural tensions. They may

be more fundamentally undermining and radical than serious works of social

criticism as we 'amuse ourselves to death,' as Neil Postman put it.357 It is

difficult to escape from this vast pool of oral and visual narrative that has

swum into our lounge-rooms and onto our cinema screens during these

357 Neil Postman's book by this same name and Harvey Roy Greenberg's, "Introduction: Fantastic Voyages," Journal of Popular Film and Television, Fall, 2002.

848

several epochs. But, given the amount of time I have spent imbibing this

material since 1953, some attention must be paid to these mediums of

influence.358 I trust, in imbibing more than half a century of media product, I

have not become the spin doctor of my own life with my own pseudo-events

and photo-ops to market a virtual reality version of myself to the public.

It is argued by some media analysts that radio began its decline in the 1950s

with the advent of TV. In fact, one writer, sees the night of September 30,

1962, when the last network radio show, "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar," went

off the air, the voice of radio -- big-time, old-time radio, the home of

comedy, drama, music, and news -- was stilled forever.359 But, be that as it

358 G. Egerton and M. Marsden, "The Teacher-Scholar in Film and Television," Journal of Popular Film and Television, Spring, 2002. This article argues for the increasing dominance in our media world: of image over word, of stylized life over life, of learning as seeing over reading and of advertising--infusing our life with unprecedented rapidity and impermanence. I find the issues complex ones but, given the fact that I have watched between 20 and 40 thousand hours of television in the last 50 years, I try to at least examine the issues briefly in this autobiography. With 18 years of institutionalized learning under my belt, at 1000 hours per annum, it would appear that I have watched at least as much television as hours of schooling, perhaps twice as many hours.I think it interesting that the roughly half a million hours that make up the fifty year period 1953-2003 could be divided as followed: sleep 170,000 hours, leisure/social/games/play: 90,000, family/marriage/children/domestic: 90,000, work: 60,000, TV: 25,000, writing/study: 25,000, schooling: 20,000, meetings/Baha'i activity: 20,000.359 Gerald Nachman, Raised On Radio, Pantheon Books,

849

may, radio continued to have an important role in my life even more than 40

years later. On September 30th 1962, without any records in my possession,

but with my little blue radio, a world of music came into my life to help me

endure the rigours of four hours homework in my matriculation year.

As space travel, satellites and the computer came into our lives during this

pioneering account, we entered the 'dark heart of this age of transition.' An

old world clearly has been dieing since the message of Baha'u'llah was first

enunciated as far back as the 1860s and a new one has been forming right

under our noses. I am not blaming the media and technology, but the

processes of disintegration and integration that are taking place in our time

are complex and very difficult to analyse and clarify. This autobiography

takes place in the midst of this disintegrating-integrating process, this

process in which a new world is being formed. In the midst of this

complexity I would like to bring to my writing what Joseph Conrad said

Mencken brought to his, an astonishing vigor. "Mencken's writing," wrote

Conrad, "was like an electric current." "In all he writes, continued Conrad,

"there is a crackle of blue sparks like those one sees in a dynamo house

amongst revolving masses of metal that give you a sense of enormous

850

hidden power. For that is what he has . . . ."360 With such writing skills

someone might actually read this weighty tomb.

The perpetual stream of strangers and provincials that once flowed,

according to Gibbon, into the capacious bosom of Rome, now flowed into

the lounge-rooms of everyone who had a TV and before that the radio. And

virtually everyone in my world was fully connected to these electronic

media by the time I went pioneering in 1962. By 1962 most people were

getting their news from TV, at least in western societies.361 So much in this

world of mine became for millions and by degrees, strange or odious,

stimulating and attractive, fascinating or boring. Not that this was a new

experience; it was just that there was so much more of it. Millions who were

guilty or were suspected of crime, might hope, in the obscurity of an

immensely burgeoning world and its immense number of huge cities, to

elude the vigilance of the law. Another group which became larger with the

years, found themselves a celebrity, a centre of media attention or simple

popularity for a few minutes or seconds. There were so many sub-groups in

360 Les Payne, "Party Of One: The Continuing Relevance of the Ultimate Outsider," Columbia Journalism Review, Issue 1: January/February 2003.361 Lawrence K. Grossman, "CJT At the Movies: The Enduring Power of Pictures: Dallas, November 1963," Columbia Journalism Review, Issue 6, November- December, 2003.

851

this pluralistic society. Not only was it a society of groups, it was a society

of the isolated individual and family.

In such a varied conflux of peoples, nations and institutions, every teacher,

either of truth or of falsehood, every founder, whether of a virtuous or a

criminal association, might easily multiply his disciples or accomplices. The

result was a world packed with information, events and personalities,

committed and uncommitted, a world that simply overwhelmed the average

person in a sea of activity that was impossible to take in and synthesize into

some concrete whole. Escape was often the only answer and, if one could

hear the sound of this escape, it would be deafening. The reality was,

though, that this great escape was silent and obscure, subtle and complex.

For the most part, the silent escape of the great populations of the west was

barely conscious to the mind or visible to the senses. As they walked their

suburban streets with only the sound of barking dogs at night and a strange

assortment of people by day, a curious, a pervasive and mysterious

normality prevailed.

Perhaps what I describe here, however inadequately, was part of the

disintegrating process in the West. There were, of course, many aspects of

852

this disintegrating process. There was also a pervasive and positive

integrating process at work. I began to feel both as early as 1947/8, although

I would not have been able to put it in those words. The theme is a difficult

one to pursue and I will return to it from time to time during this narrative.

For now, let us return to 1953.

Just before my ninth birthday, in July of 1953, in the early months of my

mother's involvement with this new Faith, Shoghi Effendi wrote an

important letter to the American Baha'is.362 In it he said, writing about the

process of entry by troops, that it would "be a prelude to that long-awaited

hour when a mass conversion....as a direct result of a chain of events,

momentous and possibly catastrophic in nature....will revolutionize the

fortunes of the Faith, derange the equilibrium of the world and reinforce a

thousandfold the numerical strength as well as the material power and the

spiritual authority of the Faith of Bah'u'llah." In the early 1960s that process

of entry by troops began in Canada and it has been occurring at various

places around the planet over the last forty years. I experienced some of the

more numerically successful manifestations of the process, first in Picton

362 Shoghi Effendi, "A Turning Point in American Baha'i History," Citadel of Faith, Wilmette, 1965, p.117.

853

Ontario in 1970 and, second, in Whyalla South Australia in 1972. The

following poems tell of some of that second experience:

NO ENTRY-BY-TROOP

The poetic view of life consists in...the extraordinary value and importance

of everybody I meet....when the mood is on me. I....see the essential glory

and beauty of all the people I meet....splendid and immortal and desirable.1

This poetic view is reinforced by Renan's words2 "What one says of oneself

is always poetry." 1-Rupert Brooke in: A Letter to F.H. Keeling, September

1910; and 2Earnest Renan's comment on Goethe's Dichtung and Wahrheit in:

Georges Gusdorf, "The Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," in Olney,

editor, Autobiography, Princeton UP, Princeton, 1980, p.42.

My productiveness proceeds in the final analysis from the most immediate

admiration of life, from the daily inexhaustible amazement at it. -R.M.

Rilke, Selected Letters.

In one Baha’i community where we experienced entry-by-troops I had the

experience I describe below. The poem is factually based, although an

854

element of poetic license trims the edges. Some poets, some writers, do not

let you past the front door of their lives. I, too, have my reservations. But I

let you in, give you a cup of tea and chat. The many privacies of life I keep,

as most of us do with most people who come to our door.363 On the two

occasions when entry-by-troops became part of my life, it felt like the whole

world coming through my front door.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three

Epochs, 5:50 pm., Saturday, 30 December 1995, Rivervale, WA.

She really was a beauty;

one of those women I always

wanted to take to bed with me.

And here I was in her lounge room,

late at night and alone

and she wanting it

and telling me so.

It’s funny the sort of people

you attract to the Cause

363 David Lavery discusses the private life of poet Wallace Stevens in "In a Single Man Contained: Wallace Stevens as an Autobiographical Poet," Internet Site.

855

in these early epochs

of its global spread.

You'd think it would be

those spiritual types

you read about, saintly women

who have always been

waiting for the truth,

usually thin and old

and with false teeth,

at least that's the way

you used to think.

This bed-wise woman

was no Mary of Magdala,

but she had her garden of pleasure,

her perfume, her glistening hair,

smooth-armed, gold-bangled,

fingers slender, knowing the words

men like to hear.

856

Marking me tonight, probably

knowing I was beyond her wiles,

part of some new marble dream

I’d brought to town with its words

of soft rain for the dry and stony hills;

somehow she knew it could not be.

Not these words, they could not

penetrate her urgent desire,

her full warm breasts

and her endless curves

with that sweet new life

for which she might live

and some day die

in a greater fullness and joy

than she could imagine.

And so I passed her by;

my days of infidelity

had not come yet.

857

Someone else would teach me

the lessons that could have been

mine that night.

Ron Price

30 December 1995

The role my mother had in these earliest years of involvement with this new

Faith, in the years 1953 to 1963, was indispensable for my own eventual

participation in its activities. Although six years elapsed before that initial

impulse of this new Revelation grew into an enrollment and I enlisted under

the banner of this new-born Faith, it would be more than a dozen before

there was anything in my life that could be termed a galvanizing into action

and any sense of a "perilous and revolutionizing mission"364 in which I, too,

like the dawnbreakers of old, scattered far and wide. The following three

poems tell something of that indispensability, something of those early days

and something of the texture of those times in my life. Self-portraits in

autobiography, if they are worth their salt, are more about constructing and

reconstructing than recording. Genuine and useful, relevant and stimulating

364 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, p.8.

858

self-portraits tell of the psyche and a curious and quite indefinable mixture

of the sense of self-worth or its absence, of how you wish to be perceived

and of how you are perceived by self and others. The writer must transcend

the bounds of what he likes and dislikes and as dispassionately as he can in

the construction he is involved with proceed along a subtle and complex

course of calculation, choices and manipulation.

William Hazlitt, whom J. B. Priestley saw as one of the finest writers in the

English speaking language, says that to be well-spoken of a writer "must

enlist under some standard; he must belong to some coterie. He must get the

esprit de corps on his side

The manipulation I am involved with in this definition of a self-portrait is

not so much the kind associated with journalism which so often churns out

propaganda but rather the kind involved with moving information and ideas

around to get the thing, the feeling, the story, right, the way I want it, am

happy with it. The discipline I need to do this "means organizing and

orchestrating a panoply of inner resources so that they cohere."365 The

experience is as close to the sublime as I have come in my life, although I

365 Richard Sennett, Authority, A.A. Knopf Inc., NY, 1980.

859

am conscious that there are other routes to the sublime beside writing.366

Perhaps, in the end, in the final analysis, Gusdorf is right when he says of

the autobiography that it "tells us about the autobiographer in the moment of

his engagement in the act of composition."367 The person over a lifetme may

simply elude us--and me. My whole life did not go through some

transformation, some epiphany, in the act of writing this work, but the

process did feel like part of some larger orchestration. I would certainly like

to be able to declare in some coda to this memoir that somewhere on high "a

subtle but definite nod has been given”368 and, on occasion, I did feel some

moving Force. But assuming that one has received the nod of the Infinite is

a little too pretentious an experience for my liking.

Robert Lowell's words about a poet could apply equally to an

autobiographer; namely, that the poet is someone who "having nothing to

366 The satisfaction of certain primary needs like hunger, thirst, sex and safety, inter alia, contains elements of the sublime, as do aesthetic, ethical and religious experiences. Humans, of course, can experience the sublime in many ways. See: The Aestethic Experience of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture, Johns Hopkins University, Balitmore, 1991, p.38.367 Georges Gusdorf, "The Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," in Autobiography, Olney, editor, Princeton UP, Princeton, 1980, p.22.368 Sven Birkerts in "The Man Who Would Be Sven," Dale Peck, Maisonneuve Magazine Association, March 2004.

860

do, finds something to do."369 Lowell, in another context, once remarked

that "trying to write himself into his poetry" led inevitably to his failure as a

poet.370 I hope this is not true of me and my work. We shall see.

AN IMPERISHABLE FRAGRANCE

Louise Hay, elder of Hay House and author of many books, was interviewed

today on ABC Radio National. (“New Dimensions”, 24 December 1998,

9:05-10:00 am.) She seemed to be saying so many things my mother said

long ago as she exercised her pervasive influence on my childhod and

adolescent development. My mother was also influenced by many religious

philosophies and groups in her eclectic wanderings from The Unity School

of Christian Thought, to The Uniting Church, to Buddhism, to The Baha’i

Faith, among other paths. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 24

December 1998.

I heard my mother talk this morning

about all those things she used to say:

369 Helen Vendler, "Randall Jarrell, Child and Mother, Frightened and Consoling," The New York Times, February 2, 1969.370 William Doreski, Robert Lowell"s Shifting Colours, Ohio UP, 1999, p. 218.

861

affirmations, health and healing,

positive thinking, prayer and meditation,

loving yourself, avoiding criticism,

seeing only the good---and it sounded

like such a familiar track.

But I wondered, as I sat back,

then and now,

about the immensely complex

world we have created

and the need for

a profound and massive dose of Truth

from an Exalted Soul

in accents of majestic power,1

as has been the case throughout history

when a flame of divine wisdom

summoned the people to the river

of everlasting life.2

For a spiritual and imperishable fragrance3

must draw us as we are tried and tested,

862

as we lose and as a melancholy tries us

in the claws of earth’s dark sepulchres.

Ron Price

24 December 1998

1 Baha’u’llah, The Book of Certitude, USA, 1970(1931), p. 24

2 ibid., p.9.

3 ibid.,p.8.

The Australian writer Thomas Bernhard points out in his book Gathering

Evidence that "we are drawn back in adult life to scenes of childhood

unhappiness."371 The early to mid 1950s had their times of unhappiness

around our home: arguments between my parents, verbal violence that used

to send shivers of fear and discomfort through my mind and heart as I

listened to my mother and father argue from my place in the bedroom a few

feet from the lounge-room where my father’s stentorian voice could be heard

and what we would call today domestic-verbal violence so frequently

occurred; my mother's special venom for the rich in the town we lived, for

371 Quoted in Michael Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, Faber and Faber, London, 1996, p.7.

863

religious hypocrisy. This poem goes back to those years and transforms

those fearful times and memories and withering social comment into

feelings quite the opposite. It looks at the good times back then and places

the negative in an understanding eye.

MY CHILD CLOAKED IN MYSTERY

I now look on the period since the age of 48 as the greatest period of

creativity in my life. Perhaps its source was in the many jig-saw puzzles I

made in my middle to late childhood, or the tulips I drew by the hundreds

when I was four or five. I had enjoyed those activities, but for some reason

stopped doing them. I think it was their repetitiveness; I got bored with

them. This recent creativity after age 48 may be a simple desire to move

beyond those simple, mechanical tasks.

I'm not sure whether the explanation of the source of this new creativity is to

be found in old memories or in trusting hunches and intuitions about my

childhood and adolescence. Perhaps in part it is. Whatever the case, as Leon

Edel writes "autobiography and ars poetica are one."1 -Ron Price with

thanks to John Bradshaw, Home Coming: Reclaiming and Championing

864

Your Inner Child, Judy Piatkus,, London, 1990, p.280; and 1Leon Edel,

"Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man," Internet Article.

There are probably many things

in those early years

that could explain the sources

of this poetic burgeoning:

two generations of writing,

books and more books,

my mother reading poetry

in the garden; I can see her now

with Edna St.Vincent Milay

under the tree,

my grandfather's poem 'Seagull',

a restless energy that got tired of sport

and eventually career,

needed some place to go,

or perhaps it was not so much

these things, but:

865

a great weariness of life,

an emptiness that I fill

with this sweetness of words,

this airy substance,

this vibration of utterance

in which I create a spiritual world,

some result whatever the thought,

some of my childhood

cloaked in mystery,

a dance of aloneness,

a sacred silence

where my mother is gold,

my father silver-haired

and we hold each other close,

absorbed, encircled, included

in all the colours of life

back in those first years

of the Kingdom of God on earth.1

1 the first years of the Kingdom of God on earth were in the years after 21

April 1953.

866

Ron Price 1 November 1997

As 1953 passed insensibly into 1954. The firesides that my mother went to

and which Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to call his talks over the radio

back in the 1930s continued to be part of my mother's evening activities. In

the cold winter nights of January and February of 1954 friendly firesides at

the home of John and Hattie Dixon became a regular part of this fifty year

old woman's routine. I played third base that summer and waited to start

grade five at East Burlington Primary School. From 1954 right the way

through to 1962 I had little contact with books outside the requirements of

primary and high school curricula. This poem conveys some of that non-

book experience. This poem is part of a self-portraiture, a self-portraiture

that is part of a tradition going back to Albrecht Durer(1471-1528) and

Rembrandt van Rijn(1606-1669) in art and to St. Augustine and his

precursors in Greece, rome and the Hebraic tradition in print in the fifth

century AD and the thousand years before.

They all tried to capture the fluctuating fortunes of life as they tried to

fashion themselves. And when they were engulfed by death's inevitable call

867

they left something of themselves, however pitiful or glorious, that would

"float on untouched."372 So it is that here I give my final touch.

TOO BUSY TO READ BOOKS

In the early years of my contact with the Baha’i Faith, especially the years

just before and after I became a Baha’i--say the five years from 1957 to

1963—several books of popular sociology and social criticism were

runaway bestsellers. Three of these were by Vance Packard: Hidden

Persuaders(1957), Status Seekers(1959) and Waste Makers(1960). Other

books like Sociological Imagination(1959) by C.Wright Mills, The Feminine

Mystique by Betty Friedan and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring captured the

attention of a coterie of sociologists and of a whole nation. These years,1957

to 1963, were my teenage years and I was too busy with my life to get into

these sorts of books. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs,

Unpublished Manuscript, 7 December 1998.

I was too busy growing up,

trying to get through high school,

372 Barrett Mandel, "Basting the Image with a Certain Liquor: Death in Autobiography," Soundings, Vol.57(1974), pp.175-188.

868

pitching a ball game on the mound

for the Burlington bantam, midget

or juvenile teams and dealing with

my fascination for Susan Gregory,

Carol Ingham and other girls

whose names I’ve long forgotten.

I was too busy reading religious books

due to my mother’s proclivities

which I had imbibed,

as natural as breathing

and I came across them

later at university-1963 to 1967-

with so many other books

that I drowned in print,

in bubbled-awe and wonder.

But all was not delight

for a depression filled my heart,

found its origins in my body,

869

in its chemistry and,

if I had been more clever,

I probably would have

figured out how to end it all.

Ron Price

7 December 1998

Friedan described a contemporary disease that was "a slow death of mind

and spirit." The problem for millions had a name, often obscure and little

understood: its name was boredom. Robert Louis Stevenson said that

"books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless

substitute for life." I say that books are often a much more satisfying

experience than many of those things we call life. I often choose books to

the other things that life offers. In time I came to the view that reading books

is as much life as gardening or cooking, or talking or eating. As Bahiyyih

Nakhjavani writes: "we can no longer separate the 'active' and the

'contemplative' facets of our lives."373 It's all one now. Given the

373 Bahiyyih Nakhjvani, "Artist, Seeker and Seer," Baha'i Studies, Vol.10, p.16.

870

pervasiveness of boredom in recent decades, the capacity to fill one’s time in

in a meaningful way at least keeps the mind and spirit alive.

And this poem conveys some of my orientation to teaching, an activity

which began in these birth-pang years of 1953 to 1962, but which continued

on for the rest of my life. Many of the things, the activities, the interests, the

hopes and aspirations of my life, began in these years before pioneering and

they simply continued on in the decades of this pioneering experience.

MY LOVE IS NO LESS

Wisdom seems to dictate a cautious approach to teaching, far removed from

the more evangelical enthusiasms of the door-to-door salesman. It is not so

much a question of finding the correct way, the right way but, rather, what is

appropriate to the situation. This differs from person to person and is the

resultant, the product, of the interpersonal and historico-cultural dynamics of

each situation. -Ron Price, Reflections on a Lifetime of Teaching, 8:37 am,

Thursday, 19 December 1996, Rivervale, WA, Australia.

My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming;

871

I love not less, though less the show appear:

-Shakespeare, Sonnets, Number 102.

When they’re well-reared,

like a good tree, they seem

to come straight and tall

into life with their branches

flowing over with a rich luxuriance,

sweet colours, blossoms and fruits,

an untutored innocence, a fresh charm,

pure and goodly issue grown,

rooted into earth’s soil, unconsecrated,

unsensitized, yet, not yet simple

and sincere through seasoned burning

and reason’s fiery-lights, unsullied,

mirrors dust-free, waiting, uncrowned,

yet, with that diadem

of a far-off and eternal life.

Then, a tarnish comes;

872

the blossoms wither

or the flowers die in autumn,

sometimes never to return again,

sometimes coming back with sweet new life

and a reconsecration, a joy even, unknown before,

some inner disposition, some shadow of bounty,

yes, tender now and simple, a strengthening

by some perpetual force,

an empowering to raise other trees

to that new life;

but there's an inner drying, notes of loss,

shame and battles lost,

perfection’s imperfection;

sweet’s grown common do not possess that old delight

and I do not publicly enthuse, though my love is no less

than ever it has been in former days of joy

when I was young and wet

and my tongue did publish everywhere.

19 December 1996

873

If there was a golden period in my young life, it was the period up to my

eighteenth birthday in July 1962. In retrospect it seems to me like some kind

of lost paradise of simplicity, of wall-to-wall sport, school and endless

indulgences, punctuated with the occasional family crisis, the frustrations

and attractions associated with the presence of beautiful young girls and the

need for money, mine and my parents. I had been a somewhat solitary child,

with a balance of introversion and extroversion, with parents who could

well have been my grandparents due to their late marriage. But during my

late primary and high school years I blossomed, the years just before and

just after I became a Baha'i. I share with you these innocent and somewhat

intimate aspects of my life; I convey briefly some of my faults and frailties,

as easily as I might show you some family photographs, because they are

what distinguishes me as a separate, private and unique individual. Partly,

too, the ambiguous legacy of confessional poetry, a notable confessional

strain, has persisted in its influence into this new century. Some, after

reading this lengthy work, might add: exhaustively and exhaustedly.

I was the apple of my parents' eye and was their lovingly indulged only son.

Although my father would fly into a rage during a chat with my mother

874

about some issue, usually a financial one, it was all in the context of his love

and interest in our welfare and, perhaps, a temper that had been in his Welsh

ancestry for centuries. Perhaps my father's anger was a combination of an

emotion built up in the coal mines in Wales since the industrial revolution. I

don't know, but this Welsh sturm und drung and centuries of patriarchy that

would not endure with such pervasiveness into the new millennium on the

horizon. I think my parents stayed together because that's what parents did

in those days. But their difficult years in the 1950s became a more mature

and quiet, a more loving relationship by the 1960s. My home was always

open to my friends and, after 1953, to the Burlington Baha'i community.

Books, music, gardens and writing were things treated with respect in these

now seemingly remote but halcyon days.

These years up to 1962 and the beginning of my pioneering life were marked

by several episodes of particular importance. The first was my mother's

contact with this new Faith; the second was the passing of Shoghi Effend;

the third was my joining the Baha'i Faith in 1959; the fourth was my father's

conversion in 1960; the fifth was the initial collision of irreconcilable forces:

those of this new Faith and those of an aggressive secularism and a

cancerous materialism, a collision I would face again and again thoughout

875

my life and would require me to face a pervasive conviction that life is not

essentially spiritual and that religion is, for the most part, irrelevant.

In August 1962 I left Burlington, its paradisiacal simplicity and its

familiarity. Those golden years were replaced by the academic demands of

matriculation, by the absence of the old friends I had cultivated for a dozen

years, by the confusions and depressions of my university years in a new

town and by a cold wind which set in. These were the years, too, of my first

serious entanglements with those beautiful girls. However one describes the

contrast, those simple days of youth had gone. I had indeed pioneered. The

process, though, was as insidious as a seed. I was not conscious, in any way,

that these were my years of preparation for the road ahead, for the lifetime of

pioneering. I had begun to sing a new song and it had become more intense,

more important, in this new town. But it was so clouded in difficulties that I

found it difficult to sing.374

Although devotion had raised, and a newfound, newborn eloquence

inflamed, a fever in my mind and a belief in my soul, I gave way insensibly,

occasionally, to other more natural hopes and fears of the human heart, to

374 Ron Price with thanks to Roger White, "New Song," Another Song Another Season, George Ronald, Oxford, 1979, pp.117-118.

876

the love or simple sensuality of life, the apprehension of pain and its

dislocating affects, and the horror of what came to be called manic-

depression. Revelations that I include here, however personal, however inner

and private, embrace a larger social vision; revelation exceeds, excells over

narcissism. There is a universal resonace over self-referential anecdote. At

least that is how I see it, how I intend it. The impersonal and the personal are

intricately braided and difficult if not useful to separate. Perhaps, too, the

motions of the mind in all writing are autobiographical.

As I try to sketch these days, these years, I feel somewhat like Rembrandt

must have felt as he tried to find a fit, a persona, that best aligned with his

propensities at the time. Beginning in 1621 Rembrandt embarked on a new

trajectory and to fashion different independent self-portraits.375 Beginning in

the mid-1980s, at the start of the forth epoch, I, too, began to write about my

life, my life as student, as teacher, as Baha'i, as poet and writer, as husband,

as father, as friend, as curiosity. Rembrandt revealed in his poses both

artifice and honest disclosure, both professional ambition and personal

thoughts. Do I provide the same range for my readers? There is richness and

ambiguity in writing as there is in any profound conversation. It is not

375 Steven Platzman, Cezanne: The Self-Portraits, Internet June 10, 2002.

877

simplicity that readers will have difficulty penetrating in this work, it will be

complexity. I wish my readers well. I wish them the persistence that I sense

they will need.

Every discipline is made up of a set of restrictions on thought and

imagination. This is no less true of autobiography. This narrative, Pioneering

Over Four Epochs, acts as an enormous container for the exploration of the

pitfalls and inadequacies, the techniques and strategies, entailed in my effort

to construct a writing subject or self. This self I have created stands out in

relief against a background of conventions, traditions and roles. My identity

could be seen as a site of several contesting selves: past self, present self,

public self, private self, and I have to choose, create, some composite that I

feel is as accurate as possible. The self is not carved from a tabula rasa, but

from a bag of buried and not-so-buried language and experience.

Autobiographical creativity can scarcely exist without a substantial sense of

self and a conviction, at least for the moment one is writing, that what one is

producing is worthwhile. The "self" in a text is, I find, a tenuous and

ambiguous device, overshadowed by the power of narrative. Wherever I go,

my story marches ahead of me, announces me, declares and expresses,

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hopefully, some aspect of my self. Whether that self is the embodiment of

myself as a true seeker is another question. For "when a true seeker taketh

the step of search in the path leading unto the knowledge of the Ancient of

Days, he must, before all else, cleanse his heart......from the obscuring dust

of all acquired knowledge."376

"There is no value-neutral mode of emplotment, explanation or even

description of any field of events, whether imaginary or real. The very use

of language itself implies or entails a specific posture before the world, a

posture which is ethical, ideological, or more generally political. Not only

interpretation but also all language is politically contaminated, writes

Hayden White.377 So is this true of my autobiography, but the political

contamination is non-partisan. In this work there is some orderliness, but

there is much irregularity, cross-pollinating and boundary blurring between

genres. In a world which erases so much, the life of the ordinary and unsung

individual is inevitably obliterated, if not in the short term certainly as the

generations succeed one another in this contingent world. And so I bring to

376 Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, USA, 1956(1939), p.264. The impllications of this Tablet of the True Seeker for my own life and its expression in this autobiography are profound. I leave the implications for another edition of this work.377 Hayden White, The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore, 1978, p. 129.

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this work an assault of unsorted reflections which will, I assume, become

frozen in time, caught, pinned in a particular version of my life. The process

is also and inevitably problematic. This process of writing, like most major

things of significance in our life, will never be completed. "If one says

'unfinished,'" writes the potter Bernard Leach, "life continues, movement

goes on."378 The real issue here in this autobiographical work was like the

real issue for Leach in making potttery: how to release my inner life into the

outward work, not seeking rarity or understatement but just my own true self

in an atmosphere of easy playfulness of mind and positive assurance.379 Do I

creatively evoke the stumblings of a writer's inner life?

When Roland Barthes, philosopher and specialist in language analysis,

writes that "the author is never more than the instance writing, just as the 'I'

is nothing other than the instance saying 'I'" I can see his logic. Barthes also

writes: "the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres

of culture." As I write these words about a time more than forty years ago,

the connection between that person back in Canada so long ago and the one

sitting here in Australia, nearly sixty years old, seems tangential, obscure,

subtle and mysterious. Barthes goes on to say that "language knows a

378 Bernard Leach, Hamada. potter, Kodansha Int. Ltd., NY, 1975, p.89. 379 ibid., p. 118.

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'subject' not a 'person' and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation

which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices to

exhaust it.380 And yet, the person I write about is, for me, also a subject.

However elusive the idea of uniqueness of voice may be; however

overpopulated my words are with the intentions of others, there is still some

self, some soul perhaps, which the acme of mature contemplation forces me

to admit exists. However tangential my connection with that elusive and

mysterious self of yesteryear, the connection is there in memory, in

language, in imagination, in that "blissful abode of the Divine Presence," in

that "wine of reunion" which in these years--beginning in 1953--I was just

starting to quaff, in "the chalice of the beauty" of my Lord.381

Perhaps Barthes is partly right: I know a subject. The person who was back

then entering that blissful abode has long since demonstrated his poverty, his

powerlessness. He has been emboldened by the forgiveness, the redemptive

power, of this new Faith. His evanescent soul has been, these many years,

"seeking the river of everlasting life." 382

380 Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, editor, David Lodge, Longman, NY, 1988, p.169.381 Baha'u'llah, "Tablet of Ridvan," Gleanings, Wilmette, 1956(1939), p.32.382 Baha'u'llah, "Long Obligatory Prayer," Baha'i Prayers, Wilmette, 1985, p.11.

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And so, over these many years, He has heard "my groaning and my wailing,

and the lamentation of my heart."383 He has heard that cry "Here am I. Here

am I." My life is full of things to ponder as I look back over those days. The

person and the subject seem inextricably intertwined. The roles I have

played in life, their meaning and significance, must be understood in the

context of institutions, the interpretive framework I adopt, consciously and

unconsciously, the hermeneutic that is mine, the big picture, the

metanarrative, the orientation to life of which they are a part.384 That I have

done this thusfar and will continue to do so throughout this book should be

obvious. There is what you might call "a natural subjectivity to any

autobiography."385 Its truth, the truth of the genre, resides in this subjectivity

and, for the most part, this subjectivity is formed by the interpretive

framework I have referred to above.

To put this idea yet another way, the making of the self is called its

narrative. The reenactment of the past in the present is the reanactment in a

383 ibid.,p.13.384 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Penguin Books, 1970(1959).385 Martin Kohl, "Biography: Account, Text, Method," Biography and Society, editor, Daniel Bertaux, Sage Publications, Inc., Beverley Hills, CA, 1981, p.70.

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context which gives it a new quality. That is why telling stories of our lives

brings new significances to them and a new texture of meaning which is

constantly reaffirmed and transformed in the flux of life. What the

autobiographer has is a sequence of mutually interrelated themes that form a

dense network of interconnected cross-references. These define an overall

construct or framework within which cumulative and relevant experiences

are narrated. As Franz Fanon once put it: "In the world through which I

travel, I am endlessly creating myself."386 If this cannot be done, the

autobiography is faced with a tedious collection of material that he can

neither make into any coherent story nor endow with any life and

significance, at least on paper.

As "the propelling forces mysteriously guiding the operations"387 of the Ten

Year Crusade continued throughout these earliest years of my involvement

with a small group of people called Baha'is in a small town in southern

Ontario on the edge of Lake Ontario, my own life insensibly grew into late

adolescence and my pioneering life began. I had absolutely no idea at the

time the significance of that Ten Year Crusade immersed as I was in the

386 Franz Fanon in Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture, Francoise Lionnet, Cornell UP, London, 1989, p.69.387 Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, Wilmette, 1965, p.132.

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typical agenda of a white, lower middle class male who lived in a small

town and was about to move to another small town about ten miles away.

Some cultural and social historians say that, psychologically at least, the

fifties did not end until the assassination of President Kennedy on November

22nd 1963. By then the Ten Year Crusade had ended, my pioneer life had

begun and what, for the Baha'i community, the tenth and final stage of

history had begun.

"The new generation," wrote sociologist Daniel Bell describing the age-

group I belonged to at the time, "with no meaningful memory of the old

debates, and no secure tradition to build upon, found itself seeking new

purposes within a framework of political society that had rejected,

intellectually speaking, the old apocalyptic and chiliastic visions."388

Writing at the very time I joined the Baha'i Faith, Bell wrote about the

yearning, the searching for a cause, the difficulty in defining the content of

the cause they sought, the stultifying aspects of contemporary culture that

could not be redressed in political terms.

388 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, The Free Press of Glencoe, Glencoe, Ill., 1960, Conclusion.

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Many of the young sought passion in some form that was not ideology. The

'new Left' had passion and energy, but it had little definition of the future. I

certainly became conscious of that in my short dalliance with it in 1965

when my days of protesting, carrying banners and placards and sleeping on

the steps of the American Consulate in Toronto got my picture on the front

of Hamilton's major daily paper, The Spectator. The Baha'i Faith certainly

offered vision and protesting was not a part of its style, its thrust into

society, the focus of its energies. It had nothing to do with the left or the

right. It certainly felt real enough when I watched the members of the

Burlington Baha'i community in my parents' lounge-room, when I read some

of its literature, when I felt the hunger-pains on fasting as was required for

all Baha'is over fifteen, when I'd given up baseball and sport and the

familiarity of a home town and found myself alone in the back streets of

another small town in the autumn of 1962 praying as I never had before.

The theatre I had entered had nothing to do with party politics, with partisan

policies and protesting. Baha'i theatre took place mostly in lounge-rooms

back then, at least for me, and, as my pioneering life evolved, I found it

became part of the very life I breathed, wherever I went. Baha'i theatre was

my life, speaking metaphorically of course. But in 1962, on the eve of that

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venture in bringing illumination "with the lights of the Kingdom,"389 I had no

sense of theatre. I was, in some ways, just a kid trying to finish high school.

And I find now, as I write about this period over forty years ago, that I

locate, mysteriously, the soul of those moments, those months and years.

Indeed, my identity depends on what I identify in these moments and "that

which identifies"390 with me. As Bryne describes the process in his article

that I refer to here, the exercise is difficult to put into words.

I had little sense, then, in my late teens of any significant interest in or talent

for writing; indeed, until perhaps the 1970s, when I was nearly thirty,

writing proved a difficult exercise. There was certainly no early blossoming

of talent in that area. I have in the intervening years, the last thirty years,

become as W.H. Auden put it: "so convinced of the permanent value of

(this) work that I am certain the world sooner or later will recognize it."391

This conviction is tied to my belief in the future of the Cause I have spent

my life a part of. In fact, divorced from this Cause, these writings would, I

am of the conviction, slip into a state of oblivion and irrelevance. What is

389 'Abdu'l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, Wilmette, 1977, p.5.390 Edward Byrne, "Examining the Poetry of Confession and Autobiography," Valparaiso Poetry Review, 2003.391 W.H. Auden in W.H. Auden: Forewords and Afterwords, Faber and Faber, London, 1979, pp.316-7.

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written here I see as a gift form God and it is written "for the glory of (His)

Cause and the loftiness of the state of (His) servants."392 But, strangely,

necessarily, predictably in some ways given the nature of Baha'i philosophy,

I do not seek fame; indeed, I would be happy to see these writings

"published anonymously."393

The French philosopher Henri Bergson claimed that experience of the world

was a flowing continuum of inseparable moments that could not be divided

into a sequence of events or moments of apprehension. If he is right then my

efforts above to begin the story of my life and outline the sequence of events

that make up this narrative autobiography will not reveal what Bergson

called the duration or duree of life. This duree can only be grasped by

intuition not rational intellect. Perhaps, then, my poetry really is closer to the

pith, the reality, of the tale. Perhaps, too, memory is not entirely a retrieval

process into an archive of memorial traces. Perhaps it is not so much a

search within the confines of one's own mental enclosure as a recollection, a

search for bird-like, material figures, impressions, in the external world.394

392 Baha'u'llah, Tablet, provisional translation.393 W.H. Auden, op.cit., p.90.394 Katherine Elkins, "Middling Memories and Dreams of Oblivion: Configurations of a Non-Archival Memory in Baudelaire and Proust," Internet, 2002.

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Whatever memory is and whatever the best way to retrieve experience and

write about it, readers here will get both a life-sequence and an

impressionistic tour, perhaps even, would that be possible, a tour de force.395

In the opening lines of the autobiography of that Quaker George Fox, where

he writes describing the period of his boyhood, 1624-1648, are the words:

"That all may know the dealings of the Lord with me, and the various

exercises, trials, and troubles through which He led me, in order to prepare

and fit me for the work unto which He had appointed me, and may thereby

be drawn to admire and glorify His infinite wisdom and goodness, I think fit

(before I proceed to set forth my public travels in the service of Truth)

briefly to mention how it was with me in my youth, and how the work of the

Lord was begun, and gradually carried on in me, even from my childhood."

Although this is not the religious idiom of our time, I am comfortable with

the tone here and could very well include the same sentiments regarding my

life in its early stages.396

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