VOLUME FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
(Part 1)
As we approach the end of this somewhat rambling autobiography,
the inclusion of this essay seemed perfectly appropriate. So much
of my life has been a 'life-in-community' that I thought I would
give some of the last words on the subject to that brilliant tactician
of the personal and interpersonal, 'Abdu'l-Baha, who survived a
most difficult community and advised us on how to live in
community in our time. As our own communties have been, are
and will be challenges for us to live in this analysis of some of
'Abdu'l-Baha's final words before He passed away several years
later will be timely. This section of my autobiography, then, will
deal with biography, ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s treatment of the subject and,
then, a few brief notes of mine.
1
"A Study in Community," Pioneering Over Four Epochs," 2003. 1
"With penetrating detail, crisp style and emphasis on the
compression of facts; with vivid images, usually not more than
three or four pages, with a concision of explanation or
commentary, with a specific point of view, a style of biography has
continued from classical times into the twentieth century. This is
biography in miniature. It has a certain bias toward the person over
the event, toward art as smallness of scale, toward structuring the
confusions of daily life into patterns of continuity and process.
There is a broad intent to sustain an interpretation or
characterisation with facts teased, coloured, given life by a certain
presentation and appraisal. Facts about the past are no more history
than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are an omelette. They must be
whipped up and played with in a certain fashion." -Ron Price with
appreciation to Ira Bruce Nadel, “Biography as Institution,”
1 This essay was originally written March 2000 and significantly edited in a second draft on May 2001 for the Baha'i newsletter ABS(English Speaking Europe) Issue 35. An important portion was added at the end of this second draft after reading Derek Pearsall's comments on The Canterbury Tales.
2
Biography, Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1984,
pp.13-66.
______________________________________________________
_________
Nadel, whom I quote in the opening passage of this essay, goes on
to say that the “recreation of a life in words is one of the most
beautiful and difficult tasks a literary artist can perform."2 Freud
said the recreation of a life, the getting at the truth of a life, can not
be done; and if someone does do it, as inevitably biographers try,
the result is not useful to us.3 People have been trying to write
about the lives of others for millennia and, even if Freud is right,
they will probably go on doing it anyway. ‘Abdu’l-Baha gives the
exercise a parting shot, to put it colloquially, in the evening of his
life, when He was in His early seventies. His work, Memorials of
the Faithful, is squarely in the tradition Nadel describes above:
commemorative, didactic, ethical, psychological. His is a work of
2 Ira Bruce Nadel, "Biography as Institution", Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984, pp.13-66.3 Sigmund Freud in Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay, W.W. Norton and Co., NY, 1988, p.xv-xvi.
3
art as well as information, a work of pleasure as well as truth. His
is a work of selection, as biography must be if the reader is not to
be snowed in a mountain of useless detail. He unravels the
complexities of seventy-seven lives and in doing so he answers
Virginia Woolf’s questions: ‘My God, how does one write a
biography?’ and ‘What is a life?’ If one can not answer these
questions, Woolf wrote, then one can hardly write a biography.4
The act of reading Memorials of the Faithful is an opportunity to
see how ‘Abdu’l-Baha answers Virginia Woolf’s seminal questions
about life, how He answers them again and again in the more than
six-dozen of His biographies in miniature. Biographers and
autobiographers arguably have one freedom, a freedom that
overrides the genetic and social forces that determine so much of
human life.5 It is the freedom to tell the story, the narrative, the
freedom to explain a life, any life, even one’s own life to
themselves and others the way they desire. This freedom is part of
4 Virginia Woolf in Nadel, op. cit., p.141.5 Arnold Ludwig, How Do We Know Who We Are? Oxford UP, Reviewed in New Scientist, 8 November 1997.
4
that active force of will that ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote, in his pithy
summation of the historico-philosophical issue of ‘freewill and
determinism,’6 is at the centre of all our lives.
Of course, it is incontrovertible that what has happened in a life has
happened. There is no going back to change any one of the events,
decisions or results. Life bears the stigmata of finality in a certain
sense. There has been a relentless succession of facts, at once
inflexible and in some ways arbitrary. All story-tellers are slaves to
these facts, if their story is to enjoy the imprimatur of truth.
Charles Baudelair once wrote that a biography “must be written
from an exclusive point of view, but from the point of view which
opens up the greatest number of horizons."7 There are many ways
in which one could define the point of view in this subtle and
deceptively simple book. The point of view is that of a lover of
6 'Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, 1978, p. 198.7 Charles Baudelair in Baudelair, Claude Pichois, Hamesh Hamilton, 1987, London, p.xiv.
5
Baha’u’llah, one who wants to be near Baha’u’llah, one who wants
to serve Baha’u’llah. The point of view is really quite exclusive.
All the men and women in this biographical pot-pourri were lovers
of the Manifestation of God, the most precious Being ever to walk
on this earth, or so they believed, and they all had some
relationship with Him during the forty year period of His ministry:
1852-1892.
Restlessness is a dominant theme, a strong characteristic, in the
lives of many people 'Abdu'l-Baha describes. They 'could not stay
quiet', 'had no rest', were amazingly energetic', 'awakened to
restless life', 'plagued by yearning love'. Nabil of Qa'in was
'restless, had no caution, patience or reserve'.8 Shah Muhammad-
Amin "had no peace" because of the love that smouldered in his
heart and because he "was continually in flight'.9 This restlessness
'Abdu'l-Baha sets down among a galaxy of other qualities and a
8 'Abdu'l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, Wilmette, 1970, p.9 ibid.,p.51
6
multitude of other people. Some of the most outstanding believers
had this restlessness. Tahirih was 'restless and could not be still'.
Quietness is also valued highly. One does not have to be a great
talker to attract the attention of 'Abdu'l-Baha. Quietness also has its
place in Baha'i community life. There are people who are 'inclined
to solitude' and keep 'silent at all times'. They possess an 'inner
calm'. They are souls 'at rest'.
The gregarious types and the type who keeps to himself are part of
this quintessential dichotomy, a dichotomy that was as much a part
of 'Abdu'l-Baha's world as it is our own, although there seem to be
a slight preponderence, a dominance, of the gregarious person.
Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad both kept to themselves and "away
from friend and stranger alike".10 Mirza Muham- mad-Quli
"mostly...kept silent". He kept company with no one and stayed by
himself most of the time, alone in his small refuge".11 The more
10 ibid., p.46.11 ibid., p.73.
7
sociable type, like Haji 'Abdu'llah Najaf-Abadi "spent his days in
friendly association with the other believers."12 Ismu'llahu'l-Asdaq
"taught cheer- fully and with gaiety".13 "How wonderful was the
talk,"says 'Abdu'l-Baha of Nabil of Qa'in, "how attractive his
society".14
There are all of the archtypes that the various personality theorists
have given us in this century. In addition to Jung's introvert and
extrovert, there is the artist, the suffering artist-soul within us all,
Mishkin-Qalam. He survives in all his seriousness, as we might,
with humour. There are the types who William James describes in
his Varieties of Religious Experience: the personality
constitutionally weighted on the side of cheer and its opposite, the
somber, more reflective even melancholic type. The two
carpenters, Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad were examples of the
former.15 The examples we find of the latter were often the result
12 ibid.,p.71.13 ibid.,p.6.14 ibid.,p. 5315 ibid.,p.73
8
of the many difficulties these lovers of Baha'u'llah were subjected
to and it wore them "to the bone."16
‘Abdu’l-Baha addresses all of us, all of us on our journeys while
He describes many of those He came to know in His life. For He
is describing not only the lives of these men and women in the
nineteenth century, He is describing us in our time. He is
addressing us on our own travels. He addresses the restlessness in
us all. He speaks to us in our victory and our loss. He speaks
about what Michael Polanyi calls the tacit dimension, the silent
root of human life, which is difficult to tap in biographies, the inner
person. This private, this inner person, is the one whom He writes
about for the most part. He sets this inner life in a rich
contextualization, a socio-historical matrix. He describes many
pilgrimages and you and I are left to construct our own. We all
must shape and define our own life. Is it aesthetically pleasing?
Intellectually provocative? Spiritually challenging? ‘Abdu’l-Baha
shapes and defines these lives given the raw-data of their
16 ibid.,p.96.9
everydayness added up, added up over their lives as He saw them.
How would He shape my life? Yours? How would we look in a
contemporary anthology of existences with ‘Abdu’l-Baha as the
choreographer and the history of our days as the mise en scene?
Some of the lives of the obscure, the ordinary and representative
members of the Baha'i community are recovered for history and for
much more. Their private aspirations and their world achivements,
their public images and their private romances, their eventual
successes and their thwarted attempts are lifted onto the pages of a
type of Baha'i scripture. 'Abdu'l-Baha is setting the stage, the
theatre, the home, in these pages, for all of humanity. The
extrovert is here, the introvert, those that seem predisposed to
cheerfulness and those who seem more melancholy by nature. All
the human dichotomies are here, at least all that I have come across
in my own journey. They are the characters which are part and
parcel of life in all ages and centuries, all nations and states, past,
present and, more importantly, future. Here is, as one writer put it,
10
the rag-and-bone-shop, the lineaments of universal human life, the
text and texture of community as we all experience it in the
crucible of interaction. It is somewhat ironic that the host of
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s contemporaries that we find here were resurrected
and for us, found, at a time when the lost generation between 1914
and 1918—were getting lost in the trenches of Europe.
Memorials of the Faithful is what might well be this age’s
Canterbury Tales, that compendium of personalities who
exemplify, as William Blake once put it, “the eternal principles that
exist in all ages.”17 We get a Writer Who delights in other people
but Who has an active and incisive mind, a practicality that He
brings to bear on what are often difficult personalities. He dwells
only on the essentials; His purpose is inveterate; His feelings
sincere and intense; they never relax or grow vapid during His
cursory analyses. He is exquisitely tender, but clearly wily and
17 William Blake in Geoffrey Chaucer: Penguin Critical Anthologies, editor, J.A. Burrow, 1969, p.82.
11
tough to survive in the burly-burly life of exile, prison and the
unbelievable difficulties He had to bear along life’s tortuous path.
Interest in biographies of Baha’is in the 19th century Iranian Bahá'í
community is not exactly a booming business these days. But that
time will come sensibly and insensibly in the decades ahead as this
new world Faith comes to play a critical part in the unification of
the planet. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s work is more than a little prescient.
The heroic age was coming to a close when ‘Abdu’l-Baha put His
pen to paper; and it was over by the time the Haifa Spiritual
Assembly published this His final book.18 A remanant remained,
Baha’u’llah’s sister, the Greatest Holy Leaf who died in 1932.
‘Abdu’l-Baha had played a prominent role in the epic that was the
heroic age. He played a dominant role in writing that epic’s story.
Memorials of the Faithful is an important part of that epic. This
epic tradition was not essentially oral but quintessentially written: a
written tradition par excellence. Since The Growth of Literature by
18 If one considers the Tablets of the Divine Plan a book, then Memorials of the Faithful was 'Abdu'l-Baha's penultimate book.
12
the Chadwicks(1924-1926) the heroic epic has been seen in
literature’s epic studies “as a cultural rather than a literary
phenomenon.”19 The Baha’i epic has grown out of a complex and
fascinating set of cultural conditions. Indeed ‘Abdu’l Baha’s work
has contributed to the resolution of problems involving the
relationship, the transition, between oral narrative and written text.
But this relationship is a question to occupy epic enthusiasts and is
not our principle concern here.
Within three to four months of completing this last of His books,
‘Abdu’l-Baha had begun His Tablets of the Divine Plan20, the
action station within which the community He was addressing
could put into practice all the good advice He had given it in His
Memorials of the Faithful. Like The Will and Testament, though,
19 Heroic Epic and Saga: An Introduction to the World’s Great Folk Epics, editor, Felix J. Oinas, Indiana UP, London, 1978, p.1.20 He began writing His Tablets of the Divine Plan on March 26th 1916; Balyuzi informs us in his biography of ‘Abdu’l-Baha that He worked on Memorials in the last half of 1915(p.417).
13
it may take a century or more to grasp the implications of this
surprisingly subtle and, deceptively simple, book.
In the next two decades we shall see the end of the first century of
the Formative Age. Perhaps the time has come to begin to
seriously grasp the implications of these shining pages from
‘Abdu-l-Baha and His interpretive genius.
We do not know much about the circumstances of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s
writing, at least I don’t. Some writers we know, like Beethoven,
are intensely physical people who seem to fight their thoughts onto
the page, splattering the ink, breaking nibs, even ripping the paper
in the process. Beethoven had none of the serene penmanship of a
Bach or the hasty perfection of Mozart or the quasi-mathematical
constructs of Webern. But we do know some things. We know, for
example, that ‘Abdu’l-Baha often worked all night with a large part
of the night devoted to prayer and meditation. It was then He did
His writing; He was too busy to scribble down things in the
14
daytime as some writers do. He had a short sleep after lunch. After
writing one of the biographies he would often read or tell the story
at one of the meetings in the next few days. Now, we can read
them in a book or access them on the internet, in very readable
English, in authorized translations. Gone is the Persian and Arabic
in which He wrote; gone is ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s innimitable script or
that of one of His secretaries. Having flashed onto the screen with
the speed of light or into the book in some electronic form with
every character proportional, every paragraph in alignment, these
words, written six years before His passing, are now free to
penetrate our own lives as the lives He wrote about penetrated His.
FOOTNOTES
The material on Chaucer that follows was obtained from Derek
Pearsall's The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, pp. chapter 6. The following is not a
quotation.-Ron Price, Tasmania
The whole organization of Chaucer's narrative is in the historical
lattice-work of a world of ecclesiastical routines and needs.
15
'Abdu'l-Baha's narrative, played as it is in the lives of seventy-
seven souls, exists in the interstices of lives transformed by a
manifestation of God. Instead of the ubiquity of the Christian Faith
and its practices we have a new religion emerging in the soil of
people's lives. Both books give us a narrative of faith. Women are
dominant in Chaucer and men in Memorials of the Faithful. Both
books provide us with a spiritual journey. There is a gusto and
carnivalesque spirit, a contempt for marriage and sexual urges, in
Chaucer while none of this is to be found in 'Abdu'l-Baha's work.
There is no sense of social and moral commitment in Canterbury
Tales. Chaucer's London is a turbulent and dangerous place; so too
in 'Abdu'l-Baha'is world. He writes of the domestic world rather
than the politics of power. Both men possess a remarkable
acuteness of observation; there is little of the sense of outrage.
Chaucer makes a magpie-like raid on scholarly texts, perhaps more
from conversations. The pilgrims are infinitely various. The sense
16
of dramatic vitality is so strong the temptation to read the tales as
principally an expression of the characters of their tellers is strong.
Chaucer is a self-concealing and evasive character. This father of
English poetry is a figure who eludes the biographer's grasp even
more fully than Shakespeare. There are no private letters or
journals, no anecdotal reminiscences of friends, and precious few
autobiographical clues in the poems themselves. The tools for
understanding Chaucer are literary history, philology and the
history of patronage and court politics in the 14th century. These
disciplines need to be part of a biographer’s strong suit if he or she
is to excel in their recreation of Chaucer’s life. In dealing with the
life of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá none of these problems exist for the
biographer.
Chaucer’s audience in the imagination is "a miscellaneous
company, of lettered London men, to be appropriately scandalized
and delighted by the Wife of Bath and the fabliaux, flattered by the
17
invitation to share in a gentleman scholar's easily carried burden of
learning and intrigued by the novel expose of London low life in
the Cook's Tale. The audience is, probably exclusively an audience
of men. ‘‘Abdu’l-Bahá has no audience until 1928 more than a
decade after He has finished writing the book.
A mission to Genoa and Florence on the king's service in the early
1370s was especially important for Chaucer’s poetic development
because it gave him the opportunity to discover the riches of Italian
literature. Fifteen years later he began writing The Canterbury
Tales his maturer reflections upon the life of men and women in
society and in the Christian faith. They were written in the last
dozen years of his life, 1387-1400. He was almost entirely
occupied with writing 'The Canterbury Tales' in these last years.
For Chaucer poetry was an accomplishment and a vehicle for self-
display, a means for his advancement at court rather than an
activity of his profession. His poetry benefited his career and vice-
18
versa: his earlier works, coinciding with his French connections,
were influenced by French poetry, notably the great allegorical
love vision of the Roman de la Rose, while his middle period,
inspired by the Italian journey, was dominated by his version of the
Troilus and Cressida story, written in imitation of Boccaccio's
treatment of the same subject.21
He refrained from direct allusion to public events and it is difficult,
unsafe, to make any deductions about specific connections between
his life, his works and the events of the time. Some scholars prefer
to see his work as chaotic and inexplicable.
The comparisons and contrasts with the work of 'Abdu'l-Baha
make a fascinating study to those interested in both Chaucer and
the Baha'i Faith. But even those who hold no particular interest in
Chaucer can find the contrasts and comparisons valuable in helping
them understand the work of this Central Figure of the Baha'i Faith
21 Jonathan Bate, “Slim Biography and Slim Pickings: A Review of Peter Ackroyd’s Chaucer,” Telegraph.co.uk, 29 March 2004.
19
writing as He was at the very beginning of the Lesser Peace and the
new Age the world was entering in all its tragic swiftness, amazing
perplexity and fascinating juxtapositions.
In my nearly fifty years of pioneering and sixty involved as I have
been in the Baha'i community, I find this seminal work of 'Abdu'l-
Baha’s absolutely crucial in my attempt to understand and deal
with the complexities and problems that arise in Baha'i community
life. It is as if 'Abdu'l-Baha has given me the Baha'i community in
microcosm. Although He wrote the book nearly a century ago, it
speaks to me about my life and so I pass the dialogue I have had
with this book to you, dear reader….and a final word on
Chaucer….
NO STRUGGLE TO INVENT
Chaucer had a simplicity and directness of style. He was able to
step into a child’s mind and an adult’s; indeed, he could take on the
life, the mood and the personality of anyone or anything he knew
or could know. That is the basis of the vividness, the individuality
20
of his characters. He pleads authenticity, faithfulness to actual life
and speech. -Ron Price with thanks to Collier’s Encyclopedia and
Encyclopedia Britannica.
Oh Father of English poetry-
the King’s English-when English
was finding its East Midland dialect
and first being used in Parliament,
some six hundred years ago1, whose
poetry was in the language of the man-
in-the-street, with simplicity, naturalness,
freshness and vitality—which we have
recently rediscovered in our time and
which I strive for in my poems and in
what I write of history and character in
my pioneering tale, pilgrimage-like across the
world, painting some realistic portraiture, with
no struggle to invent, only to suit my purpose.
21
1George H. McKnight, The Evolution of the English Language:
From Chaucer to the Twentieth Century Dover Publications Inc.,
NY, 1968(1928), p. 18.—25/5/97.
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VOLUME 5
CHAPTER 6
(Part 2)
INTRODUCTION TO SECTION IV OF MY
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
“BIOGRAPHIES”
It is fitting that the following short descriptions of my efforts at
biography should be preceded by an analysis of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s
biographies. Twenty-eight years ago now, in 1981, I took my first
excursions into writing biography. I had, of course, written little
pieces for my students since the beginning of my teaching career in
1967. Those excursions beginning in 1981, though, became part
of, first, The History of the Baha’i Faith in Tasmania: 1924-80 and;
22
second, The History of the Baha'i Faith in the Northern Territory:
1947-1997. The short biographies I wrote in the 1980s and 1990s
are, for the most part, now in the archives of the Baha'i Councils
for Tasmania and the NT. Some of these short sketches of human
personality are in a file I keep in my study, a file which has
increased in size since it was first created in the early 1990s, but
this increase is due to the resource, the source, material I have
added to the file not more biographies themselves.
Some of the sketches I wrote in those two decades are on the
internet at the site bahai-library.org. They have all become part of
a larger work Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Section IV. But they
will not be included here in this edition of my autobiography which
I am posting on the internet since the people I have written about
are, for the most part, still living.
In addition, the notes in this file on the subject of biography, which
I began to collect sixteen years ago in 1993, have begun to assume
a far greater extent, a wider ambit than was initially planned due to
23
the plentiful resources on the subject of biography available on the
Internet. Perhaps, in time, I may write more biographical material,
hopefully material in greater depth of expression than I have done
thusfar and hopefully from a more fertile base than I have been
able to discover in my first attempts in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Whatever biographies I write, they will in time be part of Section
IV of my larger work, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. This
biography file has, as I say, developed into a more substantial
resource in recent years and a brief examination of its table of
contents will show the range of relevant sub-topics. This
biographical interest provides some balance, although I must
confess very little so far, to all the autobiographical material I have
collected in other files; perhaps, too, readers will also find in them
some balance and help avoid any impression of my narcissistic
tendencies which critics may be inclined to dwell upon. As I say,
hopefully, this material may prove useful in my efforts to write
24
biographies in the years ahead as part of Section IV of my
autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs. --3/3/06.
____________________________________
Beginning in 1993, after living in Perth for five years and after
more than 30 years in the pioneering field, I began making notes on
people I knew. For various reasons I found the experience
unsatisfactory and, by 1997, I had discontinued the process. It was
my second effort at writing biography, the first being a similar
period of four years in Katherine. These latter notes are found in
the several volumes of writing on 'The History of the Baha'i Faith
in the N.T. and the Northwest of WA.:Vol.2 Part 1.' I also wrote a
few short biographies in 2000 to 2002 when finalizing that same
history.
After some 20 years of occasional efforts at writing biography, I
had the experience Anthony Trollope and Henry James had with
their efforts.1 They became disenchanted with the process.
Limited to historical narrative they became bored even dismayed
by the exercise. My essential problem was that I hardly knew any
25
of the individuals well enough to chart their biographies. The
exercise of delving into historical documents involving those who
were dead or having extended conversations with individuals who
were still living, I realized was beyond my interest, my enthusiasm
and, perhaps, my ability. After the initial sketches I had drawn in
the years 1981 to 2001 I simply ran out of details to extend my
accounts. -Ron Price with thanks to Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction,
Fact and Form, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1984, pp. 137-8, 8/7/03.
BIOGRAPHY: A BRIEF ANALYSIS
In writing biography and autobiography one is confronted with a
number of questions: what is its place in history? Is it simply a sort
of sophisticated entertainment, a bedside companion better handed
over to novelists? Is it a scholarly pursuit in itself? Is it a generator
of cases to help us explain, in this case, aspects of the psychology,
sociology or philosophy of religion? Is it a window through which
we can learn to tackle existential questions in life, through which
we can identify ourselves with others, come to understand
26
ourselves emotionally and intellectually and help change and create
ourselves?
The approach I take to both autobiography and biography is that
these genres can help us reorient ourselves, our familiar ways of
looking at things in unfamiliar terms, by the power of a certain
strangeness. The exercise may also help us to become the new
human beings we would like to be. There is, as Michael Polanyi
emphasizes, a private, tacit passion at the root of much in life. It is
a passion that is difficult to explore in an individual’s life, is tinged
with the personal, keeps the world at a distance and can often be
seen chiefly only in the written works of the person. The ‘real
individual’, the unique self, the argument goes, can only be seen in
what he or she writes.
James Wood writes in the Guardian22 about English writer Martin
Amis’s book Experience: “it is an escape from memoir; indeed, an
escape into privacy.” Although the book seems at first glance to be
exhibitionistic in reality, Wood emphasizes, it is a retreat into the
22 James Wood, “Experience: Martin Amis,” The Guardian, 20 May, 2000.
27
provinces of himself." And so is this true of my work, or so it
seems to me. My work does not vibrate with an atmosphere of
wounded privacy as much autobiography does.
Some analysts of the written word argue that it is of no help to the
reader to understand the state of mind, the personal life, of the
writer concerned. Still others see the individual only in a socio-
historical context, as the product of their times, as part of a
sociological discourse or matrix, a rich contextualization, a
historical situatedness. The historian, Wilhelm Dilthey saw it the
other way around: individuals construct their own society and,
therefore, each person, each writer, lives in a different society even
if, ostensibly, in reality, they occupy the same territorial space.
The implications of the post-structuralist thinking and the
deconstructionists is that the subject matter, the person, is a product
of language, a language construct, a product of the text and its
incarnated vocabularies. Any attempt at a unitary identity, at any
definition of a self, is a simple error since the self is constantly
28
shaped by forces of ideology, changing its representation with each
situation it faces. This view of the self makes the view of the
coherence of the person---a myth. In reality the self is a
discontinuity, beyond documentation, essentially unknowable in its
many variations, unrecoverable. The best thing to do is to avoid
trying to construct a narrative line, a central focus. Given the
slipperiness of language, language's need to create non-referential
figures to construct the self, no real, individual 'face' is possible.23
24
Of course, this was not the view of Virginia Woolf who argued in
her Collected Essays, Vol.4 that the age of biography had just
begun. Woolf wrote this at the start of the Formative Age in
Baha’i history in the 1920s aware as she was of the writings of
famous historians and biographers like Plutarch and Thucydides in
previous ages. Woolf would have agreed with Nadel that “the
recreation of a life in words is one of the most beautiful and
23 Helen M. Buss, Canadian Women's Autobiography in English: And Introductory Guide for Researchers and Teachers, CRIAW, Ottawa, 1991.24
29
difficult tasks a literary artist can perform.”1 Part of this beauty
and part of this difficulty is the fact that these qualities are rooted in
individual difference and idiosyncrasy, as A.L. Rowse emphasizes
in his study of Matthew Arnold.2
Such are some of my thoughts on biography in these first years of
my retirement. I have for the most part lost my interest in writing
biography after 3 periods, 3 attempts in the last 20 years. –Ron
Price with thanks to 1 Ira Nadel, op.cit., p.152 and 2A.L. Rowse,
Matthew Arnold: Poet and Prophet, Thames and Hudson, London,
1976, p.160. –2002.
BAHA’I BIOGRAPHY: AFTER 15 YEARS OF THINKING
ABOUT IT 1981-1996
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Autobiography is the unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about
other people. -Oscar Wilde in The Oxford Book of Quotations,
John Gross, OUP, 1983.
30
As he worked at the Decline and Fall, Gibbon became convinced
that the true character of men was so complex and elusive that it
could be only tentatively described....If even a contemporary could
not unravel the complexities of character, what could a historian
hope for?.....Gibbon became increasingly reticent about judging
character and motivation. Gibbon presents history as preeminently
a construction, a literary work with aesthetic rather than systematic
order and coherence. -David P. Jordan, Gibbon and His Roman
Empire, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1971, p.5.
Whoever turns biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment,
to hypocrisy, to embellishments…..for biographical truth is not to
be had and, even if one had it, one could not use it.”-Sigmund
Freud in Freud: A Life For Our Time, Peter Gay, WW Norton &
Co., NY, 1988, pp. xv-xvi.
This is an anthology of existences. Readers will find here lives of a
few lines, of a few pages, more than a few pages on occasion.
31
Readers will find adventures gathered together in a handful or
several handfuls of words. There is such a contraction of things in
the process of writing about these lives that one does not know
whether the intensity which traverses them is due more to the
vividness of the words or to the violence of the facts which jostle
about in them. There is a series of singular lives here, created
through I know not what accidents of life what strange poems.
This is what I wanted to gather together and this is what I got in a
sort of literary herbarium. -Werner Sollors, editor, Book’s Name Is
Unknown, Oxford University Press, 1989, p.155.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some time in 1981, as accurately as I can estimate after the
evolution of fifteen years, I began to write the history of the
Tasmanian Baha’i community. It was the first such exercise in
Tasmania and in my own life, as far I know. I also started to write
poetry about that time. The first poem I have in my collection was
written in August 1980. On 23 July 1982 I left Tasmania and
arrived in Katherine. I immediately set about collecting materials
32
for a history of the Baha’i Faith in the Northern Territory. I also
continued writing a few poems from year to year. I collected great
quantities of information and made brief biographies as part of a
narrative history. I have since sent all the material, all of my
writing, to the Baha'i Council of the NT or the, then, RTC of
Tasmania.
As I point out in the introductory biographical sketches, pieces
written over the last two years(1994-1996), I have not had much
success in writing Baha’i biography. I did write many short pieces
and had each person’s agreement to the piece I wrote about them.
It is a sensitive exercise this biography business. I take some
comfort in reading about Edward Gibbon’s reticence about judging
character and motivation. To him, people, like history, were
constructions, significantly his constructions. What he did was
attempt to unravel the complexities of character, however elusive
they might be. He did this en passant, as he composed his history
33
of the Decline and Fall. I do my writing about individuals en
passant, as I compose my Pioneering Over Four Epochs.
In a book whose name is now lost to me, Werner Sollors refers to
pieces of biography as “an anthology of existences...a few lines or
a few pages...gathered together in a handful of words...” That is
certainly the simplest characterization of a process I have scarcely
begun in these fifteen years. The annotation to my collection of
twenty-five years of letters collected while in Australia(1971-
1996), has yielded little fertility, as far as biography is concerned.
I hope in the coming years, the last half of the second decade of my
effort to write biographical material, that I will have more success
than the meagre twenty pages I have thusfar accumulated and
whatever additional pages are currently housed in the archives of
an LSA and a RTC. -1997
NOTE ON AUTO/BIOGRAPHY
34
Montaigne says, in discussing human changeability, "He that
would judge of a man in detail and distinctly, bit by bit, would
oftener be able to speak the truth."(Second Book of Essays, p.1) It
is difficult, he goes on, to find men who have "formed their lives to
one certain and constant course, which is the principle design of
wisdom." Vice, he argues, is essentially irregularity, lack of
constancy. My mood swings give to my life a lack of constancy
that is with me even now from morning to night. Since the age of
eighteen, I have been a teacher of the Baha'i cause to the best of my
ability. This is one of the constants in my life, although aspects of
my work for this Cause have been sporadic. Service on LSAs, for
example, I have found to be an exercise that changes from year to
year. One would need a profile over a whole life to get an accurate
picture of this soul, or any soul. Unable to do this I have, for now,
discontinued writing biography. Leslie Stephen says that “reading
a biography often leaves one pretty much in the dark as to the
person biographised.”1 I can understand why. -Ron Price with
thanks to 1Leslie Stephen, Biography. –June 1996(ca)
35
YET ANOTHER INTRODUCTION
When I first came to Perth in 1987-8 I began a series of
biographical sketches. By 1992 I had ceased making these
sketches. I took up the pen again in 1993 writing sketches of
Baha’is in Perth, but I ceased this exercise in 1996/7. On May 17th
1991 I sent three volumes of notes to the Darwin LSA and ceased
any work on the “History of the Baha’i Faith in the NT and
Northwest Australia”. That effort had contained a good deal of
biographical material I had written from 1982 to 1987. About one
decade, then, of biographical work came to an end in that Holy
year.
There were several reasons for this: (i) the response to what I had
written seemed so far from enthusiastic as to be possibly
detrimental to the Cause, in spite of the best of British intentions;
(ii) my new interest in autobiography, essays and poetry, emerging
clearly by 1992 and (iii) the difficulty of getting material from the
36
people I did get to know in Perth. There seemed to be a positive
disinclination on the part of most people I met to have anything
about them written at all. Over the first five years in Perth I wrote
approximately ten pages of material on several people I had got to
know.
I began collecting notes and photocopies of information about
biographies and, by early 1996, I had collected some sixty pages of
interesting resource material. Biographies began appearing, about
the time I began writing extensively in the early 1980s: in the
Baha’i community. I was not interested in taking on any serious
book-length exercise, but I was interested in writing short character
sketches. Most of what I was reading about biography applied to
major studies.
Like Andre Maurois, perhaps the world’s greatest biographer
thusfar, I was searching for the formula for the short character
sketch. Perhaps I should read collections of essays. I have and I
37
will. In the meantime some of the literature on biography is useful
to me in defining my perspectives. J.A. Symonds, for example,
says there is an “undefinable flavour of personality...which repels
or attracts, and is at the very root of love or dislike.(Virginia
Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol.2, The Hogarth Press, London, 1967,
p.273) Virginia Woolf says we get glimpses of that personality, but
never really find it. The vast majority of lives remain nameless and
traceless to history, she goes on.(p.221)
She traces a brief history of biography, but it is not my intention to
review that history here. I think I have, to some extent, achieved in
some of the sketches I have written, the intensity of poetry and
something of the excitement of drama in the context of fact.
Perhaps I will rediscover this process in future efforts. I am only at
the beginning of my efforts, as biography itself, as Woolf points
out, is only at the beginning of its journey. I shall strive, in the
years ahead, to make some good mini-biography, if that is an
appropriate term for my end products, my outlines, sketches, my
38
fertile facts, my creative facts. Perhaps something can live on in the
depths of the mind, some bright scene, some startling recognition.
Perhaps something useful, significant, can be found; perhaps, like
Boswell, I can invest the ordinary facts with “a kind of
hyperactuality and heightened import.” (Wimsatt, Images of
Samuel Johnson, p.359)
Perhaps a man should not live longer than what he can
meaningfully record; like a farmer, he should plant only what he
can gather in. Writing biographies can give me another feather in
my bow, so to speak. Thusfar, the initial enthusiasm has become a
laborious drudgery and so I have discontinued the exercise of
writing biography. I am so disinclined to participate in much social
intercourse that it is not surprising that writing biographies does not
take place. I felt a strong affinity to Nathaniel Hawthorne and
particularly the description of his life in The Centenary Edition of
the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vol. XV(p.61). Here George
B. Loring discusses Hawthorne’s anti-social proclivities which may
39
be a useful basis for novel writing but not necessarily for biography
writing.
A third period of biographical writing followed in the early years of
the new millennium, 2000-2001, as I put the finishing touches on
The History of the Baha’i Faith in the NT: 1947-1997. When this
task was complete my interest in writing biography ceased again,
although I still studied the subject and kept notes on the genre.
Biography was a challenge to both my reason and imagination. It
called for attack. I really had to pounce on it, fasten my teeth in its
gristle, worry it and drag it around in circles if I wanted to come
out on top. This I had no desire to do. The sense of attack never
entered my being after some early wrestling in the 1980s and
1990s. I pounced on it for three short periods, grabbed it with my
reason and imagination and dragged it around. Perhaps one day I’ll
get it between my teeth again when the need or the desire arises.
Perhaps next time I’ll really get on top of it; at the moment, though,
I’m not holding my breath. Indeed, one of the many lessons that
40
writing biography, poetry and narrative has taught me over the last
two decades is that no literary or poetic expression, be it epic, lyric,
narrative or something that falls in between them, can exist in any
meaningful way without a receptive community.--10/1/97—5/3/06.
VOLUME 5
CHAPTER 6
(Part 3)
One of the most famous of poets during these four epochs, and
especially in the last two, beginning, say, in the 1980s, was John
Ashbery. In 1995 he was referred to as an “essentially ruminative
poet.”25 He turned a few subjects over and over in the wider
perspective of a mythology of self. This could very easily describe
my own work but I aim to have my work yield meanings; whereas,
Ashbery's poetry seems to militate against the very possibility of
articulating them. Although Ashbery turns a few subjects over and
25 Susan Schultz in The Tribe of John Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, editor, Susan Schultz, 1995.
41
over readers have difficulty finding any unifying principles, any
particular tactics, figures or concerns in his poetic output. As
poetry critic Helen Vendler has remarked, "it is popularly believed,
with some reason, that Ashbery’s style itself is impenetrable, that it
is impossible to say what an Ashbery poem is about.” 26
As one critic argues: "What is at stake in the criticism of Ashbery
is the meaning and status of what it is to be 'American.' One could
very well frame the meaning and status of my work around my
Bahá'í identity. The central concern of both mine and Ashbery's
poetic career could very well be defined as the self-world
relationship. With this in mind, I present to readers the following
prose-poems.
THE BIOGRAPHY OF A GENERATION
26 Helen Vendler in “Reports of looting and insane buggery behind altars: John Ashbery's queer politics - gay poet,” John Vincent, Twentieth Century Literature, Summer 1998.
42
Price's autobiographical poem can be read, in some ways, as the
biography of a generation, the generation that came of age in the
sixties, grew into middle age in the eighties, into what some human
development theorists call late adulthood, the years 60 to 80, in the
first decades of the twenty-first century and into old age in the
years beyond 2525. William Wordsworth's poem The Prelude
could be read as the biography of the romantics of the 1790s who
grew into old age, if they lived that long, in the years after 1850--
although a man was old much sooner in 1850 than he is today.
More importantly, though, as far as my autobiography is
concerned, Wordsworth’s Prelude is the most sustained self-
examination in English poetry and its real importance lies in not
what it tells of the past but what is promises of the future. Such is
the view of Stephen Gill in William Wordsworth: A
Life(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989,) and, as Gill goes on to say,
Wordsworth’s “rewriting stems from a determination to treat his
poems as living presences and to change or discard what no longer
seemed adequate(ibid., p81).
43
The case is obviously an arguable one and, at best, only partly true
as a comparison. In the case of Wordsworth or Price, the mind, the
imagination, is a binding, sympathetic medium and the poems
which come out of their poetic matrix speak with or against the
historical grain. Their lives and those of their contemporaries or
coreligionists are at the heart of their inner life which is given a
primary place in the ideology of both men, in the creation of their
personal identities and it is the place where the important changes
of life take place, albeit slowly and unobtrusively. -Ron Price,
Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 6 April 2009.
Yes, perhaps, in some ways,
to each man his own story.
Mine is quite precise in places,
but there's a matrix here for
everyone to tell of their own.
Mine, growing out of the first epochs
44
of this Formative Age has a certain:
tone, mode, manner, content, style,
relevance, timeliness and scope---
bound together in this sympathetic
medium, this inner space for and
about the seekers my contemporaries--
and me and what it all means for, if it
means nothing to me, it is nothing.
Ron Price
6 April 2009
(updated from 3/2001)
WANDERING
We each map a unique landscape of thought, frailty, drama,
bewilderment and belief. The biographies of our life, if any are
ever written, are other people’s stories and descriptions of our map.
Norman Sherry, in the second volume of his biography of the
famous novelist Graham Greene, writes that Greene "seemed
45
homeless just wandering the streets" in a state of "acute
solitariness." This was a period in the 1950s when Greene was in
a condition of "great unhappiness and great torment. Manic-
depression reached its height in that period." Sherry continues:
“Greene wheeled obsessively around the world." With alcohol and
women he sought to kill the despair and the formidable desire for
self-annihilation that rose up within him. He was "compelled to
wander the earth until death; an unending traveller, an unending
writer, he laboured like Sisyphus."1 It seemed in his nature to go
beyond permitted limits.2 -Ron Price with thanks to Norman
Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene: Vol.2: 1939-1955, Jonathan
Cape, London, 1994, 1pp.507-508 and 2p.258.
I, too, have wandered my streets
in a state of acute solitariness during
many of these my pioneering days.
I've had my torment and unhappiness,
but have now, in the evening of my life,
left behind me that very debilitating chaos,
46
darkness and fear;1 obsessively I have drunk
the air and killed despair with His sweet-scented
streams, tasted even in my hair with its fragrance
in my prayer and with my medications oh so fair—
without which God knows what I would have dared!
I, too, will wander until death, an unending traveller,
an unending writer and labour like Sisyphus at the door,
but the stone, the weight, will one day be no more.
Many, too, wander with their morbid predilection
for the darker sides of life—not surprising in a time
after two wars, millions of dead in the fields and
millions more to come—trying to put it together,
each finding the cosmic drama in their own way,
creating their forms, their styles in this slough of
despond with the phantoms, so very often, of their
wrongly, so very wrongly, informed imaginations.
47
1 my manic depression was successfully treated first in 1968, then
in 1980, again in 2001 and, finally, I trust, in 2007: four medication
regimes to remove most of the fear, the darkness and the despair.—
15/12/01 updated 18/6/’09.
-------------------------------
A FRESH IMPULSE
The five years which followed my drive to Yerrinbool from
Ballarat in December 1977; and the five years which followed my
first days at university in September 1963 were without doubt the
years of my life in which I experienced the most intense and
extensive depression, confusion and disorientation. These years of
internal and external crises, of varying severity were devastating in
their immediate effects. Each of these five year periods resulted in
the complete breakdown in my capacity to earn a living and
function in day-to-day society. But by December 1982 and
September 1969, it could be argued, these crises were beginning to
release a corresponding measure of divine power. My life could
and did continue unfolding my potential, my capacity. A fresh
48
impulse had been lent to this process of unfoldment by these same
crises, at least that is a dominant view I now take looking back
from these years of my late adulthood.
It took me some years to understand what could be called a 'life
process;' some years to begin to regulate my life to its rhythm. It
became my view, my understanding, slowly with the years, that my
very happiness as a Baha'i depended, in part at least, on the extent
to which I understood this life process. -Ron Price with thanks to
the NSA of the Baha'is of Canada, "Letter to All Pioneers," Pulse
of the Pioneer, January 1979, p.2.
I was stimulated to write the above paragraph by reading a
paragraph in a biography of the English novelist Thackeray(1811-
1863), the first novelist to "hold a mirror up to real life," or so one
literary critic put it. It was a paragraph written by this same critic
which began "......The five years which followed his night flight to
Paris were bitter and restless ones for Thackeray." (Ann Monsarrat,
49
The Uneasy Victorian: Thackeray the Man, Cassell, London, 1980,
p.121) For some reason my own mind immediately switched, on
reading this line about Thackeray, from his bitter five years to
some of my own.
I believe my journey, intellectual and otherwise, becomes more
complete through the study of biography. Our personal troubles
are, partly, public problems. Such was the view of sociologist
C.Wright Mills in his Sociological Imagination(1959) written the
year I became a Baha'i.
It's about linking happiness
to understanding, keenness
of our tests, the test to be
happy and confident both
within and without the Baha'i
community, a whole of life process.
But...no forcing, you're not responsible
50
for the present condition in the community,
only a small part. Trust to the life processes
set in motion within our life in this Cause and
in your own dear life which seems to take the
whole of life to decode, process, interpret.
Ron Price
22 January 2002
updated 18/6/09
-----------------------------
A POET AT LAST
Stephen Coote writes in his biography of John Keats that Keats
"was battling to preserve the integrity of his vision, and what he
described as the pride and egotism of the writer's solitary life
formed as a protection against the intrusion of merely practical
matters."1 Keats saw his development as an inward process, a long
and patient observation of the rhythms of his consciousness. True
poetry, he believed, came from this, not from manufacturing verse
for the marketplace.
51
Price had battled for years, at least until the early years of the new
millennium, to acquire that solitary life which was protected from
the intrusion of the endless and inevitable practical matters of life.
As 1999 evolved insensibly to 2006, he was able to move beyond
those endless volunteer activities and responsibilities which
occupied so much of his time in his middle adulthood. By 2006 he
had been able to focus on the inward processes of development that
accompanied writing for at least eight hours a day keeping practical
intrusions to a limit. He felt he had written about that process as
much as he had written poetry itself. Poetry, he had concluded,
was impossible to define. At best, it served for him as a form in
which he could deal with that first attribute of perfection which
'Abdu'l-Baha describes, and which it was his task to acquire, in The
Secret of Divine Civilization: learning and the cultural attainments
of the mind.2 -Ron Price with thanks to Stephen Coote, John Keats:
A Life, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1995, p.268; and 'Abdu'l-
Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.35.
By the time I had arrived here
52
in this town by a river by the sea,
at the bottom of the Antipodes,
I had defined and refined that
inward process and the rhythms
of my consciousness and mind.
I had found the form in which
I could deal with the vast tracts
of learning and those cultural
attainments of mind’s lifeline.
I occasionally toyed with essays,
with novels but, in the end, turned,
always returned to this form and
these processes which enabled me,
at last, to declare myself a poet.
I did not so much collapse into
late adulthood, although there was
53
some of that tedium vitae, as die
to my former self as much as I was
able, but so much still remained like
honey and poison making me seek
from a cup a pure and limpid water.
Ron Price
January 2002 to March 2006
(updated 6/3/09 and 18/6/09)
--------------------------
A STRONG CONSITUTION?
This afternoon, in mid-summer here in Tasmania, I sat under a tree
near the beach at Low Head on Bass Strait and read Roy Campbell:
A Critical Biography by Peter Alexander.(1982). This South
African poet(1901-1957) had, according to Alexander, a
magnificent constitution. According to the famous psychiatrist,
Laurens van der Post, Campbell was a man "born on fire." He
could only live by burning himself out: drinking much and eating
54
and sleeping little. It is difficult, it seems to me, to determine what,
in fact, is a 'magnificent constitution.'
Have my history of manic-depression, the slow development of a
mild emphysema, a certain psychological fatigue as I came into my
sixties and, perhaps, several other illnesses like pneumonia and
some polio-like disease contracted in my childhood, had the effect
of weakening my constitution? Is writing millions of words a sign
of a strong constitution? I don't know, but I do know I have
experienced varying degrees of burn-out several times in my life.
It would appear that, like Campbell, burning myself out was part of
my central life experience, although the causes of the burn-
out(mine and Campbell’s) were quite different. It would appear
that, in this the early evening of my life, I have learned to live
without burn-out and without its tragic consequences thanks to
psychiatry’s medications. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four
Epochs, 22 January 2002(updated 6/3/09).
A million impressions,
55
impressed themselves
over these several epochs
in the last half-century,1
pressed themselves upon me
and annihilated me2 as Keats
said;3 I surrendered, lost myself
to these poetic acts of creation,
acts of love4 in which I imagined
myself intensely, merging with a
great sea of life beyond the me and
becoming one: mystic, seer, poet...
integrated circuits with the past
containing the seeks of its future.
1 1952-2002
2 Looking back it would appear that at least 3 reconstructions of
personality were required: 1968, 1979/80 and 1999; inevitably
there were some continuities, one of which was poetry in 1999.
3 Keats, Letters, 27 October 1818
56
4 The World of Poetry, p. 92.
Ron Price 22 January 2002
AM I WORTH SAVING?
"A biographer can be a most uncomfortable visitor for a living
author and his family. Skeletons clatter in all our closets;
everyone's life has black patches, shames and sorrows: no one, you
would think, would willingly submit to Judgement Day come
early." So writes Peter F. Alexander at the start of his book Les
Murray: A Life in Progress(Oxford UP, 2000). But when such an
author, like myself for example, is a virtual unknown; when he has
never published a book; when virtually no one in the literary world
has ever heard of him, then such a discomfort would not be
experienced by that author. Indeed, such an unknown author
would probably think to himself that no one in his lifetime would
ever venture to seriously consider writing a biography about him at
all. Skeletons in his closet and the darker side of his life would,
therefore, concern him not a twit, for he would know that no writer
57
would ever be likely to probe into his private life while he was
alive. Such is the way I feel as I approach the age of sixty-five.
When I eventually pass from this mortal coil, though, I would be
more than happy to grant any aspiring biographer complete access
to everything: manuscripts, letters, diaries, various documents
private and public, even accounts now found on the internet and
memorabilia of all sorts. I would be equally happy for such a
biographer--should he or she ever exist--to interview whomever
they want and as frequently as they want, ever mindful of the
courtesies required of such potential intrusions into other people's
lives. I would like to think that such biographers should feel free to
prod, probe and uncover whatever they could find, for we are seen
by others in such varied ways. Such is the attitude, I currently
hypothesize, that I shall possess after my demise as I gaze at this
world from the domain of light. -Ron Price with thanks to Peter
Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Oxford UP, 2000, p.9.
Should I give full and exclusive
58
access to my voluminous papers?
How easy should I make detective
work for the possibly impertinent,
not especially skilled, wanting to save
a life for future generations? Am I the
sort of man you might want to see live
again and dance in the pages of a book?
If you know of my battle on the road,
will it help you with yours? Whatever
will help future generations. Do you
need all my sordid details, my hind parts
and their contemplation and an exploration
of mountains of trivia?...whatever will help
and only if it helps......
Ron Price
16 March 2002
--------------------------
59
PS I have come to feel the way the Russian writer Boris Pasternak
did when he wrote on January 15th 1960 three months after I
became a Baha’i: “the artist starts to get to love his new design and
it seems to him that the slowly developing work is larger and more
important than he.” For me this ‘work’ is both my life and my
writing.-Evgeny Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years:
1930-1960, Collins Harvill, London, 1990, p.244.
---------------------
CONNECTIONS
The sociologist C.Wright Mills tried to make his readers aware of
the intricate connection between the patterns of our own lives and
the course of world history, as ordinary men do not usually know
what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming
and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part.
They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the
interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and
world.1 The Baha'i Faith, in contrast, gives to its votaries an
historical consciousness that is both providential and humanistic,
60
that stimulates the process of making connections and finding
patterns between individual lives and the course of history.-Ron
Price with thanks to 1C.W. Mills, the Sociological Imagination,
1959, p.4.
A lot of things relate
to a lot of things, big-
and-little-pictures in
this tenth stage of history
and a lot of isms and wasms
have collapsed as explanations
of the world and ourselves.1
Meanwhile, there has been
an influence not dwelling
elsewhere in literature or
philosophy that shatters the
cup of speech that we cannot
contain-we cannot dam the sea.2
61
This influence asks us to stretch
ourselves beyond the here-and-now
and present awareness, subtlely
reminding us of what we already
know in the big world that has made
us what we are, as sub-creators in our
own understanding of our own life.
1 Immanuel Wallerstein, "Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An
American Utopian," Theory and Society, Vol.15, 1986, pp.465-
474.
2 Horace Holley quoted in the Ocean of His Words, J. Hatcher,
Wilmette, 1997,p.3.
Ron Price
8 November 2002
---------------------------
CONSTRUCTED
"The world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as
62
reality by the ordinary members of society in the subjectively
meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in
their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these
members."1 The French sociologist, Emile Durkheim did not see
it this way. The world of everyday life, for Durkheim, could
never be said to originate in the thoughts and actions of
"members" because everyday life is irreducibly external to any
individual or plurality. It is always already there when one
enters it, as a child, or as an adult when one, for example, joins
the Baha'i Faith or moves to a new Baha'i community as a
pioneer. The implication is that the social world is made of
historically constituted positions or situations through which
people move and differently exist.2 In my poetry I have tried to
both describe the world I've lived in and the one I have created
in, assuming as I do that both have some reality, especially a
metaphorical one. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality, 1967,
pp. 19-20; and 2Herve Varenne, "The Social Facting of
63
Education: Durkheim's Legacy," Journal of Curriculum Studies,
Vol.27, 1995, pp.373-389.
There's an intersection here
of self and other, biography
and history requiring some
virtuosity to get at it, at the
story, subtle and mysterious.
Much of the data is slippery,
elusive, tentative, something
that has seized my life,
startling and bewildered,
sometimes wrenching:
is there an essential whole?
Are there patterns and nodes?
64
Is the truth of my story deeper
than my life itself? Have I
provoked and illuminated it?1
1 R. Bullough and S. Pinnegar, "Guidelines…of Self-Study,"
Educational Researcher, Vol.30, No.3, pp.13-21.
Ron Price 12/11/'02.
---------------------------
LIFE-ENHANCEMENT
In the prelude to his biography of Henry Moore, Roger Berthoud
tells of Moore's life-enhancing quality. Both Moore's personality
and his work, Berthoud writes, had this quality. "One felt the
better," he continues, "for having talked to him or for having
contemplated his creations."1 There is no doubt that in my life I
possessed this life-enhancing quality. I possessed it in many of my
years as a teacher. But I did not possess it all the time. You just
have to ask either of the women I married. I did not possess it with
65
all my students; I'm sure there would have been dozens of students
over those thirty-five years who were not impressed with my
qualities as a person or as a teacher. For, as a pioneer, I was in
many ways just an average bloke, certainly no saint and, if
distinguished, only from time to time and not as a consistent
feature of my life from the word go to woe. -Ron Price with thanks
to Roger Berthoud, The Life of Henry Moore, Faber and Faber,
London, 1987, p.15.
I, too, Roger, am more complicated
than I seem and am also addicted
to this poetic work, as my restless
mind wanders over the world's mystery
settling for the partial and incomplete
portion that is our lot due to life's
contingencies, mysteries and paradoxes.
For whatever truths I find there's so much
that is provisional, with an emphasis here
66
but not there.1 And whatever confidence
I have found there is worry still about the
apparently trivial, this complex and difficult
product that I have created to market2
in the interstices of these my latter days.
1 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Hogarth Press, 1991(1940), London,
p.xi.
2 Roger Berthoud, op.cit., p.13.
Ron Price 14 December 2002
------------------------------------
MACRO-MICRO
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be
understood without understanding both. Yet men do not usually
define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and
institutional contradiction. The sociological imagination enables
its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its
meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of
individuals. The first fruit of this imagination and the first lesson
67
of the social science that embodies it is the idea that the individual
can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by
locating himself within this period, that he can know his own
chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals
in his circumstances. We have come to know that every individual
lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives
out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical
sequence. -Ron Price with thanks to C.W. Mills, The Sociological
Imagination, 1959, pp.3-10.
There's a massive complexity here.
But, at the core, there's been a fine
compression, an intensification of
global consciousness, making of this
world a single place, coexistence in a
single spot, humankind's oneness, yes,
taking off, by stages, since 1475, 1875,
1975 with more and more world images
in this single place.….since I was playing
68
baseball and we went to outer space and I
joined the Baha'i Faith by stages beginning
with that most wonderful and thrilling motion
which appeared from that point of light the spirit
of teaching…..1 Half a century, since then, since
that inception of the Kingdom of God on earth2
when I was nine and John and Hattie Dixon
served us rose-hip tea in that little town by that
great lake in southern Ontario’s golden triangle.
1'Abdu'l-Baha in God Passes By, p.351.
2 idem. The completion of the temple in Chicago inaugurated this
inception.
Ron Price 8 November 2000
------------------------------
PROJECT OF THE SELF
According to Ulrich Beck, the most dominant and widespread
desire in Western societies today is the desire to live a 'life of one's
own'. More and more people aspire to actively create an individual
69
identity, to be the author of their own life. The ethic of individual
self-fulfilment and achievement can be seen as the "most powerful
current in modern societies." The concept of individualisation does
not mean isolation, unconnectedness, loneliness or the end of
engagement in society. Individuals are now trying to 'produce'
their own biographies. This is partly done by consulting 'role
models' in the media. Through these role models individuals
explore personal possibilities for themselves and imagine
alternatives of how they can go about creating their own lives.
They are, in effect, experimenting with the project of the self, with
strategies for self. -Ron Price with thanks to Judith Schroeter, "The
Importance of Role Models in Identity Formation: The Ally
McBeal In Us," Internet, 11 October 2002.
I define myself in community
which is not the same as being
surrounded by people ad nauseam,
nor does it mean doing what I want
as much of the time as I can or being
70
free of difficulties, stresses and strains--
which seem unavoidable. I've been
creating my own biography--my own
autobiography--for years and getting
very little sense of who I am from the
media and their endless role models.
I've been in a community with two
hundred years & fifty years of models
historical models and hundreds, over
the years, of people I have known who
have shown me qualities worth emulating,
helping to make me some enigmatic and
composite creature on this God’s earth.
Ron Price
11 October 2002
----------------------------
SOCIAL SEDIMENTATION
71
Experiences become sedimented in that they congeal when they are
recollected as recognizable and memorable entities. For me, they
become part of my autobiographical poetry and narrative.
Intersubjective sedimentation occurs when several individuals
share a common biography, the experiences of which become
incorporated in a common stock of knowledge. This social
sedimentation can become recognizably objective and shared by
others in a sign system. Language becomes the basis and the
instrument of a collective stock of knowledge. It becomes the
depository of a large aggregate of collective sedimentations. The
objective meanings of institutional activity are conceived of as
''knowledge'' and transmitted as such. With the full
institutionalization of charisma in 1963 in the Baha'i community,
the institutional transmission of knowledge has been mostly in the
form of letters. It is difficult to achieve consistency between
institutions and the forms of transmission of knowledge pertaining
to them. But, for the most part, this transmission in the Baha'i
community has possessed a consistency and a logical coherence.
72
The problem of logical coherence in the transmission of this
knowledge arises first on the level of legitimation and secondly on
the level of socialization. In the Baha'i Faith the former is not a
serious problem. -Ron Price with thanks to "Sociology Notes from
Reading in the 1990s," 15 November 2002.
We've been sedimented,
this community and I,
for several decades, but
noone is kidding no one
that the sharing of His Signs
is a totally consistent, smooth,
run from year to year. Yes,
there is grace and favour to
joyously press on in battle;
then, too, there is whimpering,
fright, trembling and shaking.
There are veils which shut me out.1
73
There is a life congealed in recollection,
a thousand memorable entities and an
aggregate of sediment with seeds sown
in a forest of wild trees, pebbles with
some fruit and rare precious stones.2
1 'Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, p.181.
2 'Abdu'l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, 1977, p.87…..Ron Price
16/11/02.
----------------------
SOME CONTINUOUS COMPOSITE WHOLE
The spiritual, mental and emotional autobiographies of the vast
majority of human beings who have ever lived have never been
recorded. For many thousands of people in the last two centuries,
though, a detailed, a scanty, a fascinating or a tedious record has
been left. In recent decades writing biography and autobiography
has become somewhat of a popular sport or discipline. In the case
of a very few, people like the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, the
preservation of documents about the self has been carried to the
74
point of mania. With Flaubert, the student of the individual
creative process has a microscopic view for perhaps the first time
in history of the development of the creative process in one
individual. My own particular poetic narrative presents what I am
to myself, how I see myself and how I have lived with this self for
sixty-five years. I go about this exercise with a certain style. Style
to me was what it was to Flaubert "the rendering of content in a
form in which both style and content would be one."1 Style is the
filter, the means, of rendering externality. -Ron Price with thanks to
Benjamin F. Bart, Flaubert, Syracuse UP, 1967, Preface and 1p.340.
Style is, ultimately, a matter of the precise
words used and their arrangement in some
structure, some form, some continuous,
composite whole, a physiological-anatomy,
in the cultural repository of history.1
Content, the work, came to me insensibly
over several years so that, now, it is the work
75
of my whole life. It is always on my mind.
I am always preparing for it. Even my rests
are rests for the work ahead down the road.
1 Some of Flaubert's view of 'style'
Ron Price
13 April 2002
--------------------------------
MY 'BIG BOOK'
A symbol of poet Les Murray's vastly eclectic interests "The Great
Book' was a large, hard-covered ledger-book which he had adapted
as a scrapbook.1 Into it went postcards, newsclippings, poems he
liked, cartoons, inter alia. My mother kept a similar book which
was sent to me from Canada when she died in 1978. Not as large as
Murray's, it contained the literary memorabilia she had collected
from about 1930 to 1955.
The symbol of my own eclectic interests can be found today in my
study here in Tasmania. Of postcards and cards there are few; of
76
cartoons and assorted newsclippings there are more. The absences,
the empty spaces, in my Big Book are voluminous, for one cannot
record it all. Quotations abound in some 300 arch lever files, two-
ring binders, A-3 loose-leaf and other sized files on a host of
subjects: history, philosophy, religion, literature, poetry, fiction,
drama, psychology, media studies, anthropology, Greek and
Roman history, various religious themes, graduate study programs,
journals, novel writing attempts, biography, autobiography and
much else. inter alia. -Ron Price with thanks to Peter Alexander,
Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Oxford UP, London, 2006, p.255.
So this is my 'great book.'
I've divided it into a library
of files over the years.
Part of my soul is there
on the shelves of my study,
extremely agreeable friends
from everywhere in the world,
77
past and present,
always at my service;
they come and go
as I am pleased.
Sometimes they are difficult
to understand and require
special effort on my part.
My cares are often driven away
by their vivacity. They teach me
a certain fortitude. I keep each of them
in a small chamber in a humble corner
of my room where they and I
are delighted by the happy symbiosis
of my retirement and their presence.1
1 Plutarch, On Books.
78
Ron Price
16 March 2002
That’s all folks!
THE LIGHTHOUSE
In discussing the character of a man, there is no course of error so
fertile as the drawing of a hard and fast line. We are attracted by
the salient points, what seems to stand out in his life, and seeing
them clearly and repeatedly we jump to conclusions. That is
natural. These conclusions may even have some validity. These
qualities that stand out may be likened to a lighthouse guiding our
way in the night or, in the day, serving as a landmark in our travels.
But they are only a guide. They tell us little of the surrounding
landscape, none of the geology, the history, the botany, the
79
geography of the nearby terrain. This is even more true of a man's
life, so far removed from the general sketch, the highlights, which
at best are all that is usually passed down to succeeding
generations.
The man of letters on the other hand is, in truth, ever writing his
own biography or autobiography. What is in his mind he declares
to the world, to whoever reads his works. If he finds a readership,
if his work is well written, this memoir, this biography, this
autobiography will be all that is necessary. It will take us far
beyond that lighthouse into geology, history, botany, geography--a
total view. -Ron Price with thanks to Anthony Trollope, The Life
of Cicero, quoted in Trollope, Victoria Glendinning, Pimlico,
London, 1993, p.v.
There are some lighthouses here.
I've set them out along the coast
to guide your way through the night
80
of my life and there has been much
night, black clouds and darknesses.
I've also provided rich and varied
collections of flora and fauna
to tell you something
of the living tissue of my days,
some of its green shoots,
its flowers, its bright colours
and some of its exotic texture.
I've even left you a map
to help you connect
with nearby towns and villages;
for I have belonged to a community
where people knew me
and would tell you something of me.
81
But, again, do not jump to conclusions
about the nature of my person and self.
What I have left behind can only,
like the lighthouse, guide your travels.
I have tried to be faithful
to the Covenant of God,
to fulfil in my life His trust
and in the realm of spirit
obtain the gem of divine virtue.1
But how successful I have been
that is a mystery to me, as much as thee.
1 Baha'u'llah, Hidden Words, Introductory passage.
Ron Price
17 January 2002
82
THE AGE WE LIVE IN
It is not so much authorial ego or that I am a compulsive self-
historiographer which compels me to document my life more fully
than most. All this poetry is my workshop where my awareness of
life expresses itself quintessentially. I also see myself as part of a
global pattern, a representative figure, part of a mytho-historical
process which may be of use to future generations. I was born into
a new age with the Kingdom of God just beginning when I was
nine years old. In my lifetime the Baha'i administrative process,
the nucleus and pattern for a new Order, went through a radical
growth period. I have been committed to the promises and
possibilities of this new way of Life.1 As F. Scott Fitzgerald was
committed to and had a belief in American life in the 1920s, as
American was going through new beginnings so, too, do I feel
strongly, passionately, a new commitment, a new belief and new
beginnings.
83
George Bull points out in his introduction to his massive biography
of the life of Michelangelo that people are often best understood
"in the crowded context of the significant changes and continuities
of the age."2 The age I have lived in and through has also faced
"significant changes and continuities." My life, I have little doubt,
can be understood, too, as Michelangelo's and so many others have
been understood, in this same general context of their age. -Ron
Price with thanks to 1 Matthew Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945,
p.vii; and 2George Bull, Michelangelo: A Biography, Viking Press,
1995, p.xviii.
I, too, saw myself as coming
at the end of a complex
historical process
that had its beginnings
in the district of Ahsa,
84
those birds flying over Akka
and those Men with beards
and I identified with it.
I was born near the start
of yet another Formative Age:
would it last as long as the Greeks?1
I understood profoundly well
the claims of this new belief
as you did the claims of your craft.2
I was, like you, fortune's darling
in this new age and I was, too,
the shell-shocked casualty
of a war that was more complex
than any of us could understand.
1 Their Formative Age lasted from 1100 to 500 BC; this one began
23 years before I was born.
85
2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the major American writer between
the wars: 1919-1939.
Were my poetry to become significant enough in the public domain
I would certainly like to direct the attention of scholars to
adaptations of and responses to its contents in music, drama, dance,
and the visual arts. I’m confident that studies of my poetry in
music, for example, could take the form of, say, something like
Aaron Copland’s song cycle of 12 of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.27
Copland completed this creative work in 1950. While the poems of
Dickinson that Copeland chose centered about no single theme,
they treated of subject matter particularly close to Miss Dickinson:
nature, death, life, eternity. It was Copeland’s hope, nearly a
century after Dickinson’s poems were conceived, to create a
musical counterpart to Emily Dickinson’s unique personality.
However desirable such an exercise might be to my spirit, I leave
27 Dorothy Z. Baker, “Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson:
A Reading of Dissonance and Harmony,” The Emily Dickinson Journal, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2003.
86
that activity to a posterity that I can scarcely imagine. Whatever
aspects of my work that a future age might seek to highlight
through song or indeed any other form of the creative and
performing arts is, for me, a tantalizing consideration that can
scarcely occupy any of my time at present, indeed, it seems
somewhat pretentious to do so. I can not help but offer one thought
in this direction; namely, that the poems which a future composer,
for example, might select would, of necessity, be filled with the
dissonant noises of the life of these four epochs. A counterpoint
was developing, of course, but they were still early days, early days
of the Kingdom of God on earth.
I have never understood music and my experience of it in a
vacuum, as a pure structure of sounds as if fallen from the stars
onto my faculty of musical perception. Music seems rather
inextricably embedded in my several forms of life, forms that are,
as it happens, essentially linguistic. Music is necessarily
apprehended, at least in part, in terms of the language and linguistic
87
practices that define me and my world. These words, this memoir,
has for me a musical context and texture.
Music is manifested, as the philosopher Wittgenstein once wrote,
by a complex of behaviours, such as illustrative gestures, apt
comparisons, suitable hummings, and appropriate movings,
incarnations, of thought. Gesture, in music, can be defined as "a
movement that may be interpreted as significant."28 So is this true
in words, in writing. Indeed all the musical terms seem to me to
have literary analogues. Some analysts of music see gesture as
affecting performance and experience more directly than the
thematic and harmonic categories of conventional analysis. Gesture
is seen as central to the performer’s conception of the musical
work--and mine.
Performers, like writers, attend primarily to the ‘shape’ of a piece.
Shape is analogous to structure but it tends to be more dynamic
28 Jerrold Levinson, "Musical Thinking," The Journal of Music and Meaning, Fall 2003.
88
through its sensitivity to momentum, climax, and ebb and flow,
comprising an outline, a general plan, a set of gestures unfolding in
time. I say this because these considerations lie at the background
and in the texture of my work.
To say one final thing about gesture, its definition in musical terms
has some application to my writing and so I include it here in full:
"a holistic concept, synthesizing what theorists would analyze
separably as melody, harmony, rhythm and meter, tempo and
rubato, articulation, dynamics, and phrasing into an indivisible
whole. For performance, these overlapping strands must be further
melded into a smooth, and at some level undivided, continuity.
That melding is achieved most efficiently by means of an
apparently natural, human gesture. Performers strive to create a
shaping and shading of each phrase that is more than the sum of the
motivic and harmonic units of which they are composed."
89
Gestural analysis in music, like analysis of this memoir, should
focus on short events---motifs, figures or short phrases. The sense
of unity in a composition and in this work is forged through a
recognition of the gesture’s internal continuity and coherence, and
of the interconnections between gestures. This enables performers
like myself to recognise and project seemingly disparate and
distinct “motifs” as manifestations of the same “gesture”. This
work is like one single gesture.
Language, like music, is manifested in a complex of behaviours.
Both music and language are forms of thought. Understanding
music should therefore be analogous to understanding language.
Both are a matter of use, that is, of knowing how to operate with
the medium in question in particular contexts of communication.
This 'knowing' is not about propositional knowledge but, rather,
about behavioral and experiential abilities and dispositions. Hence,
if music is thought, we should naturally come to understand it as
we come to understand thought in words. This is done not by
90
learning how to decode or decipher it, but by learning how to
respond to it appropriately and how to connect it to and ground it in
our lives. How I respond to language and how readers respond to
my language is at the core of this memoir.
Intelligible music stands to literal thinking in precisely the same
relation as does intelligible verbal discourse. If that relation is one
that takes its form in expression, then music and language are, at
any rate, in the same, and quite comfortable, boat.29 The performer
and certainly this writer allows the articulation, accentuation, even
the tempo to be different from page to page or on every few notes
if that seems to be the natural shape of the lines. Everything is
dynamic, fluid, in flux. That is certainly how I felt as I wrote this
memoir.
Musical performers who over-emphasize their gestures through
exaggerated emotional expression are similar to an actor who
29 idem91
accompanies every movement with exaggerated facial and bodily
expressions. I am conscious of having over-emphasized some
gestures in this work as I have also over-emphasized some gestures
in my life. This is not surprising given the bi-polar nature of my
experience, my various enthusiasms and their gestural
performances which undoubtedly have disrupted the overall
architecture of my life and both enhanced and disrupted its
continuity.
Musical sounds and these words flow in the same world and,
although these comments comparing music and writing say nothing
about my life, they are an appropriate inclusion as this memoir
winds its way to its conclusion.
VOLUME FIVE
CHAPTER SEVEN
ABOUT MY POETRY
92
I find writing poetry is somewhat like the way a stream flows down
from the mountain to the sea, its course changed by every boulder
it comes across, which never goes straight for a minute unless the
terrain dictates otherwise. It follows one law, is always loyal to that
law which, curiously, is no law. There is nothing for it to do but
make the trip to the sea.-Ron Price with thanks to Alfred Kazin in
Mark Twain, Harold Bloom, editor, Chelsea House, 1986, pp.132-
33.
______________________________________________________
93
I have tried in my poetry to overcome the problem that Milton
refers to in Paradise Lost. I spoke, I wrote poetry and other genres
and, in the process, defined the who, the where, the cause. I trust
that very little of my poetry verges on the incoherent,1 although I
have had enough people in the last 15 years(1990-2005) either
express the fact they did not understand what I wrote or they
simply did not enjoy my poetry enough to bother commenting;
perhaps they did not want to hurt my feelings by being honest.-Ron
Price with thanks to John Redmond, “Review of Les Murray’s
Subhuman Redneck Poems, Jacket, Vol.1, 1997.
My self I then perused, and limb by limb
Surveyed, and sometimes went, and sometimes ran
With supple joints, and lively vigour led:
But who I was, or where, or from what cause,
Knew not; to speak I tried, and forthwith spake,
My tongue obeyed and readily could name
What e'er I saw.
94
- Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII, pp. 253-73
______________________________________________________
Finally, before I include some of my poetry here, I would like to set
its context in the framework of epic poetry and epic history, the
epic story of the Baha’i Faith.
EPIC JOURNEY/EPIC CONTEXT
I remember reading how both Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon
acquired the initial inspiration and concept for the magnum opus of
their lives: A Study of History in the case of Toynbee and The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the case of Gibbon.
Three years ago I began to think of writing my own epic poem and
fashioned some ten pages as a beginning. The poetic work of my
own life, my epic, I have come to see in terms of all the poetry I
have written, the poetry I have sent to the Baha’i World Centre
Library and what I have entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs.
95
I have begun to see all of this poetry somewhat like Pound’s
Cantos which draws on a massive body of print, or the Confucian
Analects, a word which means literary gleanings. The Cantos, the
longest poem in modern history, over eight hundred pages and
written over more than fifty years(1916 to 1968ca), are a great
mass of literary gleanings. So is this true of my poetry. The
conceptualization of my work as epic has come long after its
beginnings. My poetry slowly defined itself as an epic after half a
dozen years of intense and extensive writing and more than 30
years of occasional writing. I began to see my poetic opus as one
immense poem. I like to think this poetry gives voice to the Baha’i
culture I’ve inhabited all these years.
I see my poetic epic as furnishing, among other things, a host of
images. The images I provide are those which should be seen
within the context of that famous definition of image that Pound
wrote in 1913: "An 'image' is that which presents an intellectual
96
and emotional complex in an instant of time.”30 Understood in this
way, image does not seem to be distinguished in any special way
from a traditional understanding of it. Something very similar was
stated by Poe in his explanation of poetic character found in
writing: "A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by
elevating the soul.”31 To a large extent, this is so since the poetic
character of human beings is universal and their poetic works seek,
above all, to excite our emotions: "If we are moved by a poem, it
has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are
not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.”32 For many, if not
most, my poetic epic will be to most people, in Eliot’s terms,
meaningless.
Pound was twenty-nine when he began to write his epic. I was fifty
three when I began to see all my poetry, poetry I began writing at
the age of thirty-six or, perhaps, as far back as eighteen, as part of
30 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, editor, T.S. Eliot, Faber and Faber, London, 1954, p.4. 31 ibid., p.71.32 T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, Faber and Faber, London, 1957, p.30.
97
one immense epic. Pound was acutely conscious that the cultural,
the historical tradition had broken down and he was searching for a
new basis, “new laws of divine justice.”1 His task was to
reassemble this tradition or, at least, search in history where not
only the fall from innocence was located but also the locus for the
process of redemption could be found. I, too, was aware of this
breakdown. I, too, felt the need to reassemble history, not as
Pound did, but rather to find truths which were perennial but not
archaic within the broad framework of a new Revelation from God,
a Revelation which defined and described the continuities and was
Itself the basis for redemption.
Written now, for the most part, over a little more than eight
years(1992-2000), the epic I am writing covers a pioneering life of
39 years. It also covers much more. I have now sent 39 booklets to
the Baha’i World Centre Library: one for each year of this
pioneering venture. But the epic journey that is at the base of this
poetic opus is not only a personal one of over forty years back to
98
the time I became a Baha’i, it is also the journey of this new
System, the World Order of Baha’u’llah, which has its origins as
far back as the 1840s and, if one includes the two precursors to this
System, as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century when
many of the revolutions and forces that are at the beginning of
modern history have their origin: the American and French
revolutions, the industrial and agricultural revolutions and the
revolution in the arts and sciences. Generally, the way my
narrative imagination conceives of this epic is itself an attempt to
connect this long and complex history to my own life, as far as
possible, to that of the religion to which I belong. I have sought
and found, in recent years, a narrative voice that contains
uncertainty, ambiguity and incompleteness among shifting fields of
reference and of a certainty mixed with and defining itself by the
presence of its polar opposite, doubt.
Since this poetry is inspired by so much that is, and has been, part
of the human condition, this epic it could be said has at its centre
99
Life Itself and the most natural and universal of human activities,
the act of creating narratives. When we die all that remains is our
story. I have called this poetic work an epic because it deals with
events, as all epics do, that are or will be significant to the entire
society. It contains what Charles Handy, philosopher, business
man and writer, calls the golden seed: a belief that what I am doing
is important, probably unique, to the history and development of
this System. This poetry, this epic, has to do with heroism and
deeds of battle in their contemporary and historical manifestations.
It involves a great journey, not only my own across two continents,
but that of this Cause as it has expanded across the planet. The epic
convention of the active intervention of God and holy souls from
another world; and the convention of an epic tale, told in verse, a
verse that is not a frill or an ornament, but is essential to the story,
are found here. I think there is an amplitude in this poetry that
simple information-giving lacks; there is also an engine of action
that is found in my inner life more than in its external story. In
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some ways, this is the most significant aspect of my work, at least
from my point of view.
In the Greek tradition the Goddess of Epic Poetry was Calliope,
one of the nine sisters of the Muses. The Muses were the
inspiration of artists. Calliope was the mother of Orpheus who was
known to have a keen understanding of both music and poetry. We
know little about Calliope, as we know little about the inspiration
of the Muses, at least in the Greek tradition. In the young and
developing poetic and artistic tradition of the Baha’i Faith, on the
other hand, although gods and goddesses play no role, holy souls
“who have remained faithful unto the covenant of God” can be a
leaven that leavens “the world of being” and furnishes “the power
through which the arts and wonders of the world are made
manifest.”(Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, 1956, p.161.) In addition,
among a host of other inspirational sources, the simple expression
‘Ya’Baha’ul’Abha’ brings “the Supreme Concourse to the door of
life” and “opens the heavens of mysteries, colours and riddles of
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life.” (‘Abdu’l-Baha, Source Unknown) Much could be said about
inspiration but I shall leave the topic with the above brief analysis
and comment.
Mary Gibson says in Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the
Victorians(Cornell U, 1995, p.96) that one question was at the
centre of The Cantos. It was the "question of how beauty and
power, passion and order can cohere." This question was one of
many that concerned Pound in the same years that Baha'i
Administration, the precursor of a future World Order, was coming
to assume its embryonic form in the last years of the second decade
of this century, a form that would in time manifest those qualities
Pound strove in vain to find in a modern politico-philosophy.
At the heart of my own epic is a sense of visionary certitude,
derived from a belief in an embryonic World Order, that a cultural
and political coherence will increase in the coming decades and
centuries around the sinews of this efflorescing Order. Wallace
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Stevens’ sense of the epic “as a poem of the mind in the act of
finding what will suffice”(Jay Parini, editor, the Columbia History
of American Poetry, Columbia UP, NY, 1993, p.543) is also at the
centre of my conceptual approach. This epic is an experimental
vehicle containing open-ended autobiographical sequences. It is a
didactic intellectual exploration with lines developing with
apparent spontaneity and going in many directions. The overall
shape is in no way predetermined. In many respects, this long
poem is purely speculative philosophy, attempting to affirm a
romantic wholeness on a fragmented world, something Walter
Crane tried to do in the 1920s. This long poem, or seemingly
endless series of poems, is an immense accumulation of fragments,
like the world itself, but they are held together by a unifying vision.
So, too, was Pound’s epic.
Pound was intent on developing an “ideal polity of the mind”.
This polity flooded his consciousness and suggested a menacing
fluidity, an indiscriminate massiveness of the crowd. The polity
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that is imbeded in my own epic does not suggest the crowd,
probably because the polity I have been working with over my
lifetime has been one that has grown so slowly; the groups I have
worked in and with have been small. My style, my poetic design,
though, is like Pound’s insofar as I use juxtaposition as a way to
locate and enhance meanings. Like Pound, I stress continuity in
history, the cultural and the personal. At the heart of epic poetry
for Pound was “the historical.” Also, for Pound, was a new world
order based on the poet’s own visionary experience. It was part of
the reclaiming job that Modernist poets saw as their task, to regain
old ground from the novelists. But, unlike Pound, I see new and
revolutionary change in both the historical process, in my own
world and in the future. The visionary experience that will guide
world order is not mine, but that derived from the Central Figures
of my Faith.
Those who are quite familiar with the poem Leaves of Grass may
recall that Walt Whitman often merges himself with the reader.
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His poem expresses his theory of democracy. His poem is the
embodiment of the idea that a single unique protagonist can
represent a whole epoch. He can be looked at in two ways: there is
his civic, public, side and his private, intimate side. While it would
be presumptuous of me to claim, or even to attempt, to represent an
entire epoch, this private/public dichotomy is an important
underlying feature of this epic poem (Harold Bloom, The Western
Canon, Harcourt, Brace and Co., NY, 1994, pp.447-78). I also like
to think that, while this poetry has a focus on my own experience,
this experience is part and parcel of the experience of my
coreligionists around the world.
In my poetic opus, my poetic epic, Pioneering Over Four Epochs,
the reader should sense a merging of reader and writer, a political
philosophy, a sociology, a psychology, a global citizen--something
we have all become. There is in my poetry a public and a private
man reacting to the burgeoning planetization of humankind, the
knowledge explosion and the tempest that has been history’s
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experience, at least as far back as the 1840s, if not the days of
Shaykh Ahmad after he left his homeland in those halcyon and
terrifying years of the French Revolution.
There is much more than verse-making here, though. Here is the
ruling passion of my life: the Baha’i Faith, its history and
teachings. It seemed to wrap and fill my being during my
pioneering life, the process beginning as far back as 1953 when my
mother first heard of the Faith. Indeed, I came to see myself as part
of what ‘Abdu’l-Baha called that “heavenly illumination” which
flowed to all the peoples of the world from the North American
Baha’i community and would “adorn the pages of history” (Citadel
of Faith, p.121). My story inevitably became part of that larger
story of the Baha’i Faith and, again, that larger story which is
history itself. Stephen Sicari suggests that the structural principle
in Pound is “the search for unity.”3 If I had to define the structural
principle behind my own sharply fragmented, multifarious material
with its vivid multiplicity and diversity, it would be my attempt to
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express the unity I found and that I believe lies behind and in the
world of creation.
For it is the narrative imagination that is at the base of this epic
poetry. As far as possible I have tried to make it honest, true,
accurate, realistic, informed, knowledgeable. As I develop my
story through the grid of narrative, I tell my story the way I see it,
through my own eyes and my own knowledge, as Baha’u’llah
exhorted me in Hidden Words. I leave behind me traces, things in
the present which stand for absent things in the past. The
phenomenon of the trace, Paul Racour writes, is similar to the
relationship between lived time and astronomical time, a
relationship at the basis of calendar time. For history is
“knowledge by traces”, as F. Simiand puts it (Paul Ricoeur,
“Narrative Time”, Philosophy Today, Winter 1985). And so, I
bequeath my traces.
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The traces I bequeath are also, to continue an important theme of
the epic tradition, those of the wandering hero. It is a hero, a
wanderer, with many dimensions described in many contexts. It is
a journey of redemption to union with God, as it was for Dante. It
is a journey of adventure and finding my home, as it was for
Odysseus. It is a journey that attempts to embody my vision of the
Baha’i world order, as the poet Virgil tried to articulate his vision
of Augustus’ order during the crucial years of the establishment of
the Roman Empire(29-19 BC). It is a personal epic, a personal
journey, an inner journey, within the tradition of William
Wordsworth and his Prelude. There are elements of the Miltonian
epic here with the foregrounding of the author, his weaknesses and
his strengths, in what is par excellence, a theological-religious
journey. And there is the monumental journey of Baha’u’llah over
forty years which acts as a metaphorical base for my own journey.
The wanderer I draw on is, in other words, a flexible, elastic, figure
who allows me to include in my epic poem virtually anything that I
want to include in the text.
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And so the wanderer that I describe in my epic is a composite. But
this wanderer is not in search of the Path; rather, he has found the
Path and the wandering takes place on the Path. The wandering
through the sea of historical, sociological, literary and other texts,
books and articles, etc. is all part of the experience, the context, the
definition, of the Path, for this particular journeyman. For the
reader will come across many references, many texts, many
quotations here. They are laid on a Baha’i-paradigm-map; I am not
alone, as Pound was, relying on his own wit and courage with no
framework of guidance and meaning within which to sift history’s
and experience’s immense chaos into some order. I find that the
actual writing of the poem assumes characteristics of the epic
journey itself. This was true for Pound, for Dante and, in all
likelihood, the mythical Homer.
It may be that my journey on this Path is only half over and that
this epic found its initial conceptualization at the mid-point of my
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Baha’i life. If I live to be ninety-five, my journey within this
framework of belief has just passed the half way mark (age 15 to
95, a period of eighty years, with age 55 the half-way point). So I
like to think that what I have now, after only eight years of intense
writing of poetry, is what Pound had: “a dazzling array of finely
wrought fragments straining in their own unique way to achieve
order and unity”4 through the deployment and development of this
image of the wanderer in its many forms. That is what I like to
think. Time will tell, though, if I can sustain and define in precise
and dazzling terms the structural, the organizational, principle
enunciated above. This structural principle is based on a view of
my poetry as: the expression of my experience, my sense, my
understanding, in the context of my wandering, my journey and of
the concept of the Oneness of Mankind. Can I continue to
develop this epic, beyond the start I have given it, to a satisfying
conclusion in the years ahead?
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FOOTNOTES
1 Stephen Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition: Dante and the Modern
World, State University of New York Press, 1991, p.10.
2 Robert Nisbet, Social Change and Social History, 1969. In this
book the sociologist Nisbet describes the metaphor of change and
its pervasiveness since the age of the Greeks(1200-400 BC).
3 Stephen Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition: Dante and the Modern
World, State University of New York Press, 1991, p.x.
4 ibid., p. xiii.
Ron Price
28 March 2002
PART ONE OF MY SPECIAL EPIC POEM
At the centre of this wondrous epochal shift
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is a cultural story of saints, martyrs and
messengers and endless connective tissue
with past and present. Heroic exemplars,
deep in history back to the enlightenment,
say, in Bahrain, the core of the vision
with the force to slowly actualise a reality,
new political and social harmonies
and disharmonies. My own ordering of history
here in its legitimate and beauteous form
with law and design, touchstones of order,
writ large across chaotic and energised
multiplicity, the endless disasters of time,
extinctions and near-extinctions,
the human slaughters and the pain
as I connect, in situ, my subjectivity
and history with meaning—yes, yes,
a place of refuge, partly in desire,
in mind or imagination and in the Beauty
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of the Unseen shining forth above the horizon
of creation1 and in creating myself through
commitment to a complex personal synthesis,
through a relationship with myself
in a fascinating and difficult elaboration2,
inventing, producing myself with this poetic art.
And all these endless particulars cohere,
far beyond a personal order,
an autobiographical imposition
from this finite brain
in a dramaturgical translation,
a richly allusive, highly imagistic in-gathering,
not simply for some love of nature,
but to unlock a beauty and a truth,
to taste a choice Wine
with the fingers of might and power
and slowly establish a spiritual kingdom
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in a physical form-order and beauty linked,
power and love united yonder, world's away,
around history's bend. Hesitation and doubt
I have heard and seen by gallon measure,
things that throw consternation into the hearts of all men—
and so the showers of tests come to pass
to free us from the prison-cage of self and desire,
to help us attain the meads of heavenly delight,
with gifts from the Unknowable Friend,
those shudders of awe that are mostly a quiet shimmer
and shake, a tightness, dynamic tension;
all my days surrounded by this growth,
this organism, two generations now, incipient,
beginnings of a System, potentialities
and interrelationships of component parts
only partially understood, often like sinking
in a miasmal ooze, but a good terror, this one,
as we have inched our consequential and necessary way
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toward a humbling summit only seen,
with the secret of conquering a greater world than ourselves
only little known, and so we prayed. I seem to have prayed
for years, over three epochs, and then ran into the door
of meditation and it opened into another world.
I have seen devotion, beyond human strength,
exhausting, making heroes of many men.
I watched my moods like a cat as I pursued this path,
convinced of the significance of my days sub specie aeternitatis
at the core of my art, my poetic, the oneness of my experience.
I trust its connection with the Royal Falcon on the arm of the
Almighty.
I have thrown my life away in this great cause
but, as my arm has arched and flung, there was
down in my heart something sung, some voice
that met my joy and tears in great fatigue with all the years.
Truth here was what one long endured with persistence,
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feet and passion sure, some burning vitality of mind
and heart, an intensity that once threatened to tear me apart.
I had my time with sexual heat, a blazing contact,
direct and real. It nearly sucked my life away with lust
the core of search. It tried to kill my loneliness and isolation.
Beyond, beyond the horrors and fears, to make some meanings
of our years we turn to sex, to self, to God
so as not to wither on this sod. And me no less.
And if, by some mysterious dispensation of Providence,
we feel we can play a part in changing the world,
not just get a grip on it and so endure it with a taste of joy,
with a taste of destiny minimising that everlasting self-concern,
the fierce inner pressure of problems with no solution
or with just transient existence, we can live with our guilt,
with sin, with our evil doings having our heart
melting all our life. This is the feeling of redemption.
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And so there is a grimness here, and redeeming belief,
supernatural sanction. There has been a speed, a power,
a talent, a fertility-one matchless time-after forty years of
wandering between two holy years-a single human self
struggling to become what he is capable of becoming,
to know who he is, a lot of pennies dropping without
an endless recitation of the quotidian, unremarkable fact.
Some rich burgeoning, some rich hermeneutic tradition
opening up for all to see, read and understand,
like some elaborate systems theory which defines social reality
in terms of relations: right back to his birth, the birth of the
universe
and endless other births and deaths and relationships
among relationships, networks of information that only I can bring
into some integration, dynamic analytic distinctions
of complexity, instability, quantity and quality...for this
universal human community, the end and object
of the highest moral endeavour, has at its root needs
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and interests universally similar. We must free ourselves
from history’s conceptual jails in this remade world
and keep remaking it.
And so an intensified global interconnectedness,
a post-international, post-industrial transformation
is taking place under our eyes and, what, three
hundred million will have starved from 1969 to 1999,
since Paul Ehrlich wrote his Population Bomb?
Global historical civilization, being born amidst
chaos and middle class complacency, is reconstituting
the world as one place. Do we not need, therefore,
some universal truths, perennial but not archaic?
Do we not need some philosophical stance with
which to view modernity and post-modernity?
Some sense of the ultimate becoming, some teleological
evolutionary scheme? Some utopian vision
within which to frame the struggle? Yes, yes, yes:
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some magnetising value core, firey furnace,
magnetising our convergent efforts,
as Durkheim might have said.3
And while I have answered “yes’ to all of this
since at least the days when we sent the first
men into space and since the Zeal of the Lord
passed on, I have enjoyed and feared a constant
swing between ecstasy and exhaustion, the heavy-
weight and lightning speed, galactic, radiance in the
smallest of patches and dull emptiness: overwhelmed,
dazzled and awed, a rush of images, a flow of phrases,
needing this epic form to express the burgeoning,
the out-pouring, the excess, the prison of the longue duree,
the patterned, the inchoate, the world beyond
the commonplace and the self-evidentnesses of view;
needing synthesis, mediation, unification of ideas
among the children of men.
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But my sense of the beauty everywhere has been
so long clouded by so many things, emotions,
intensities, the pulse of a greater dynamism beats
with a heavier heart. The Bridge, the basis of that
new dynamism, is that new unity, innocence and
freedom which we first saw in Shaykh Ahmad
when he left his home in northeast Arabia in 1794;
when Robespierre was in power and Pitt was the
Prime Minister of England. Trying to create a tradition
where none existed, the Committee of Public Safety,
guillotined 10,000 seen as some kind of moral revolution
in the making, after Rousseau. But the moral revolution
that would last for centuries was proceeding to Najaf and
Karbila to begin its long road, becoming the leading mujtahid:
the Bridge was an idea, a terror struck in the hearts of the Sufis,
while that other terror issued dechristianization decrees and
relentlessly uprooted public order. And so this poem begins
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in the early dawn of this modern age, over two hundred years,
with appropriate quantities of analysis and introspection,
bewildered and bedazzled as I am by it all, pushing through
all the ramifications of thought, burning myself up, candle-like,
drop-by-drop the wick will come in time to only a pool of wax
on this table and I shall be gone, across the Bridge, home.
History’s weakness and my own is found here
amidst the blaze of visionary sense
and an infinitude of correspondences:
a mystic on the loose, synthesizing, mediating,
watching the slow realization of vision in action,
seeing this Bridge and these White Buildings4
across a span from ancient Greece and Rome
to our own age, this one on a hill. This bridge
takes you up and down to ideals as remote
as Arctic winds but as close as your life’s vein.
But I do not try to speak to a whole culture, here,
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Hart, and its infinite fragmentation, only to a coterie
on its way to the fulfilment of His vision
set in a world of diamond words, sweet-scented streams
of His eternity, an orderly matrix of values.
This is no diversionary flight, scheme, temporary assuaging
of a longing, magical society of dreams, life’s flickering grace,
but some battle for the conquest of men’s souls
but oh so gently, as the teacher distils eternity
from the transitory with a spark of heroism amidst decadence,
a filtering of the harsh refuse of modernity,
conscious of a new savagery in the midst of civilization,
the endlessly arbitrary and fortuitous, the hasty grasp
and exploitation of ephemera, of the momentary.
And so the teacher learns not to take the fleeting moment
too seriously, to be detached, while at the same time pouring
forth all his concentration into the thing in front of his nose.
If the pioneer can do this he has the world by the tail—
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and boredom, distraction and an over-excited worldliness
are problems far beyond him. For he has new nourishing food—
the food of knowledge—duration with a purpose
as deep as the ocean and as wide as the sea,
realising the ideal lines will be completed
beyond this momentary reality. And so I capture it all
in this written portraiture, capture the fleeting,
the transient and the eternal, the inevitably fragmentary
phenomenal world in a metaphysical unity,
gradually letting it ripen-or it captures me,
and I warm it over, gestate it for some future public.
In this forest of symbols, voluptuous labyrinth,
sometimes ghostly landscape of damnable
and not-so-damnable pleasures and professions
we must close our eyes to luxury and attachments
to the material world and long, as I have long longed,
for eternal life. The real department store,
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the primal landscape of consumption,
the secret labyrinth of dreams
is the jewelled wisdom of this lucid Faith.5
End of Part One
COMMENTARY AND CONTEXT ON AMERICAN AND
BAHA’I HISTORY AND MY POETRY: AS EPIC
These, and other similar incidents connected with the epic story of
the Zanjan upheaval, characterized by Lord Curzon as a "terrific
siege and slaughter," combine to invest it with a sombre glory
unsurpassed by any episode of a like nature in the records of the
Heroic Age of the Faith of Baha'u'llah. -Shoghi Effendi, God
Passes By, p. 46.
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Epic: narrative poem of heroic type or scale; poem of any form
embodying the conception of the past history of a nation or group
of people.-Dictionary
______________________________________________________
The number of long epic poems written the world over is
increasing. World history and the history of its many nation states
is characterized by epochal statements and epics of various kinds as
far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Declaration of
Independence and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address were both epochal
if not epic statements, to choose but two from American history
and one could choose many others from the history of other
nations. Then there are epic movies like Birth of a Nation and
Gone With the Wind and epic figures from cinema, like John
Wayne. John Wayne himself directed a film on an epic event, the
Alamo. He also wrote a book on the making of this film. He
called it "The Making of the Epic Film." Epic, it seems, comes up
everywhere when one thinks about America and increasingly in
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relation to all sorts of historical and contemporary events in today’s
world. It also comes up in relation to my poetry and the Baha’i
Faith and that is my reason for writing. I have brought it up.
This continent and this world has epic voyages, battles, wars,
figures, poems, prose. Calling up all the titles of books from recent
decades that contain the word "epic” in the catalogue of a good
library will reveal scores of books. The same is true on the
internet. The word is now applied indiscriminately to appropriate
and inappropriate subjects. Does the story of United Methodist
preaching or the study of the genitals of boll-weevil properly
warrant the label "epic"? Yes and no. The question has become
complex. We speak of "epic" not only in the strict sense of a long
poem on certain topics, with certain characteristics more or less
based on the founding epics of our Western epic tradition, Homer's
Iliad and Odyssey. We speak of epic in a broader sense, as a story
recounting great deeds, typically in wars or battles or on dangerous
voyages or as an application, an example of the definition that
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begins this essay. The use of the term "epic" has spread out in a
burgeoning fashion from these points, these definitions, these
senses.
One is not surprised, therefore, that Robert Hughes' huge current
book on American art, American Visions, is subtitled The Epic
History of Art in America. Hughes tells us, in a TV interview, that
the subtitle is the publisher's. Is then the association of "epic" with
things American all just a matter of merchandising, American
hype, the spirit of P.T. Barnum? Are we dealing only with the epic
of American salesmanship, which almost all foreign visitors to
America have commented on, or is there something about America
that properly summons up the idea of "epic"? One would not
expect a book on British art, for example, to be subtitled "the epic
of British art," though there are of course wonderful buildings,
paintings, and sculptures in Britain. Is that only a matter of
characteristic British understatement? Perhaps. And yet, when one
rolls the phrases around on one's tongue, the strong impression
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cannot be denied: Whatever the crass motives of the publisher of
American Visions or of filmmakers who dub many a film "epic,"
epic seems to suit America and American topics better than it suits
many other countries. Epic becomes America–in the sense in
which Eugene O'Neill used the term, in his great play, Mourning
Becomes Electra. Was his play an epic?33
The artist Willem de Kooning who was born, raised, and educated
in Holland has an interesting comment on what happens when one
sees oneself as American, rather than, say, Dutch. It's a certain
burden, this American-ness. If you come from a small nation, you
don't have that burden. “When I went to the Academy and I was
drawing from the nude,” says de Kooning, “I was making the
drawing, not Holland. I feel sometimes an American artist must
feel like a baseball player or something–a member of a team
writing American history.” Certainly Hughes would agree.
33 I wish to thank Nathan Grazer, Professor Emeritus of Education at Harvard University for a great deal that makes up this article. See “American Epic: Then and Now,” Nathan Glazer, Public Interest, Spring 2004.
128
America's size, its newness, its wonders engaged many American
artists in the nineteenth century. They took up the American
landscape not only as a subject but as a duty. In the early twenty-
first century, it is still some particular idea of America–today,
however, generally evoked satirically, ironically, critically,
indignantly–that seems to motivate much of the oversized work of
contemporary American artists. And then there is the "great
American novel,” an obsession with some novelists, and the fact
that America's greatest poet writes in a grand, elevated style about
America. Indeed, his work is labeled by some an epic, as in James
Edwin Miller's Leaves of Grass: America's Lyric Epic of Self and
Democracy."
I did not take up writing about the Baha’i Faith as a subject, as a
duty but, rather, as something which engaged my mind and perhaps
to an extent as an obsession, as a member of that team which is
writing about the Baha’i Faith. As someone who grew up in the
northern half of America, of North America, in what we used to
129
call the Dominion of Canada when I was a kid, I have little trouble
identifying myself with the epic experience, the epic history of the
Baha’i Faith. With six thousand poems and several million words
under my epic belt, so to speak, I feel tied to, part and parcel of,
this epic experience which for me goes back to 1753 and the birth
of Shaykh Ahmad--a quarter of a millennium ago. My life, since
1967, has been part of “The historic mission beyond the confines of
the Dominion,” and part of the “push to the outposts of the Faith to
the northernmost territories in the Western Hemisphere.”34 The
greatest drama in the world’s spiritual history, the Baha’i story, is
an epic of mamouth proportions. My writing is simply one of the
infinite number of expressions of this story.
America as "epic" raises the question, what is unique, what is
central, about the American experience that deserves the epithet
"epic"? The same question can be raised in relation to the Baha’i
experience as an international community, in the form of its more
34 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to Canada, NSA of the Baha’is of Canada, 1965,p.vi.
130
than 200 national communities and in the lives of its some six
million adherents. It reminds me of another, soberer effort to get to
what is unique about America, the discussion of "American
exceptionalism," conducted principally by sociologists. Seymour
Martin Lipset has recently collected and updated a considerable
body of his writings on this subject, one that has engaged him for
many years: American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword.
Daniel Bell has also pondered American exceptionalism in The
End of Ideology and elsewhere. The issue, as they discuss it, arises
because of the interesting question of why there has been no major
socialist movement in the United States and what makes the USA
unique among advanced industrial societies.
The question was perhaps first raised in 1906 by the German
sociologist and economist Werner Sombart. There is little that we
would consider distinctive about America that has not been raised
to explain the failure of socialism to develop here. Thus Bell writes
that Sombart "pointed to the open frontiers, the many opportunities
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for social ascent through individual effort and the rising standard of
living," and goes on to give many other reasons why socialism
didn't take in America. "In the end," Bell writes, "all such
explanations have fallen back on the natural resources and material
vastness of America." And Lipset writes, "Political exceptionalism,
the failure of socialist parties in the United States, has been
explained by numerous factors–so many that the outcome seems
overdetermined.” He then goes on to list no less than 12
significant features of the United States, societal and political, that
could explain the absence of a major socialist movement and its
unique role and function in the world.
The theme of American exceptionalism is related to the topic of
America as epic because as a concept this notion of exceptionalism
provides, in part at least, an explanation for what is unique about
America, what makes it so successful economically and so
dynamic socially. American exceptionalism directs us to look at
basic values, institutions and social forces which since the 1940s
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have made the USA the strongest, the most prominent nation on
earth. Exceptionalism is part, then, of the subject of epic in
America. One could build similar arguments about the uniqueness
of other nation states or, indeed, the Baha’i Faith.
The epic proper recounts great and terrible deeds, founding ages.
One sometimes reads that with Milton or Wordsworth, or
Whitman, the intellectual or spiritual development of the poet–
Blake's "mental fight"–replaced the struggles of warriors as the
proper subject of epic scope in narrative poetry. The sequence of
Achilles, Rinaldo, Wordsworth or Whitman brings to mind
Carlyle's unintentionally funny list of "heroes," which begins with
the Norse God Odin and ends with Samuel "Dictionary" Johnson.
Often moral courage and physical courage go hand in hand when
one is examining the epic in history, although not everyone would
agree with this line of thought.
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Deeds, inner explorations of feelings, discoveries to improve the lot
of man, the world of the epic has broadened. The proper subject of
epic can now be found just about anywhere. Some are troubled by
this democratization of something that historically had an elitist
image in literature. Some literary critics, who after all are often the
first people to discuss what makes an epic, who set up its canons of
legitimacy, assert that the purely personal is no subject for epic.
Perhaps they are right. I am happy to include my poetry in the
category ‘epic’ because it is inspired by and about the history of the
Baha’i Faith. Although much of my poetry is personal, it is not
only personal. It is also about what is unique, what is special,
significant, original about Baha’i history and Baha’i experience.
Both this experience and my poetry, I would argue, participate in
the concept epic. Were my life and thought not tied to the Baha’i
Faith it is doubtful that I would have associated it with the notion
of epic. Indeed, it is doubtful that I would have written any of it at
all.
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Walt Whitman, despite his insistence on the purely personal nature
of his achievement, incorporated within his poetry the entire
American experience of his time. He wrote: "Leaves of Grass ...
has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and other
personal nature–an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a
human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century,
in America) freely, fully, and truly on record. Note Whitman’s
determined reference to time and place. And Whitman wrote
elsewhere, "I contain multitudes within myself and these were the
multitudes of America. As Samuel Beer has argued in an
interesting essay, Whitman reaches out much further into a political
community than the typical poet. In my poetry I do the same, but I
reach out into the Baha’i community not the American people at
Whitman did.
Wordsworth or any one of a host of poets in the last 200 years,
contemporary Americans and others, record their personal
responses and personal development. They are not celebrating a
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nation, its democracy, its multifariousness, and, as American art
does, its variety and newness. They are not celebrating or
commemorating the events of the history of a nation or a group as I
am doing in my poetry in relation to Baha’i history. They are
quintessentially individualists. I suppose one could argue that that
is the other epic theme in recent centuries: the theme of the
individual. Wordsworth’s Prelude is certainly an epic venture and
it’s all about him and his critique of the age--not unlike my own
work here.
This is not to say, of course, that poets of the last 200 years have
not had any political, religious or group affiliation: no group
identity. Everyone belongs to a group in some way or another.
The theme of "America as epic" directs us to think, initially, not
about the multiplicity of America and Americans but of a single
dominant story, carried by heroes. The epic of America, dominant
until at least the 1930s and 1940s, has been in recent decades
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eclipsed by another and quite different "epic of America." It is a
multicultural America with a host of epics.
For Baha’is who are also poets the epic that arises in their poetry is
the history and the culture of their Faith and in the 1930s and 1940s
that epic started to take form as the American Bahai community
expanded to include all of its states, to be “a national unit of a
world society.”35
The first American epic, dominant until at least the first teaching
Plan(1937-1944) emphasizes the newness, the vastness, the
openness of America–the freedom thereby granted Americans. It is
the old, or at least the older story, about America. Connected with
it are such terms as the American idea, or the American creed, or
the American dream, or Manifest Destiny. It is true that the frontier
as a continuous line of settlement to the West no longer existed by
1890. It was in the first few years of the 1890s that the first Baha’i
35 Horace Holley, Baha’i Centenary, 1944, p.100.137
pioneers arrived on American shores, precursors of the pioneers
who would later leave America’s shores. That first American epic
and the epic in Baha’i history associated with the heroic age, one
could argue, lasted into the 1930s when Baha’i administration
advanced to assume a form which allowed it to focus on a national,
an international teaching Plan. It was here, in this international
teaching Plan, that the second stage of the Baha’i epic emerged.
There was still much of the West to be settled even after 1890;
there was to come an overseas expansion expressing very much the
same values; and then there was the brief "American Century,"
carrying forward similar and related values. The second epic,
which I place in opposition to the first, is a somewhat more
problematic epic. It emphasizes racial and ethnic diversity,
whether in an optimistic or pessimistic mood. The first epic was
connected with an ever available frontier denoting free land, free
institutions, free men. The second epic is city-centred and finds its
frontiers, if any, within a physically completed society. The first is
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the epic of the forests, the prairies, the plains. It is the epic of
discoverers, explorers, pioneers, of Columbus, Daniel Boone, and
Lewis and Clark, of the Oregon trail, the Mormon trek, the
transcontinental railway. The second celebrates quite different
voyages: the middle passage, the Trail of Tears, the immigrant
ship, the underground railway, the tenement trail from slum to
suburb. The first is the epic of the Anglo-Saxon, the Scotch-Irish,
in lesser degree the German and the Scandinavian. The second is
the epic of the Native Americans, the Africans, the "new
immigrants" from southern and eastern Europe, the new
immigrants of the last three decades, cast generally as the victims
of the protagonists of the first epic.
The first epic has not fully lost its power to evoke response in
American consciousness, and the second is not entirely new but has
been with us from the beginning, even if hardly noted. From a
Baha’i perspective that first epic is, as I said above, synonymous
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with the Heroic Age(1844-1932).36 Whitman is a bridging figure
from the first to the second and maintains an optimistic stance
embracing both. ‘Abdu’l-Baha or the Guardian or even the Greatest
Holy Leaf serves as the bridging figure from this first to the second
stage of epic in Baha’i history.
One sees, in the last few decades, a transition in which the first
epic, once dominant, becomes recessive, while the second asserts
its problematic claims as the epic of America ever more sharply.
Here, too, in these same decades the Baha’is, just one group in a
host of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith groups, find
expression for the epic in which my own life has been involved. It
is here that my poetry finds its place as part of that faith-epic. The
second Baha’i epic or at least its second stage also asserts its
problematic claims in the epochs of the Formative Age, thusfar.
36 Baha’u’llah’s sister, the Greatest Holy Leaf, died in 1932, the last remnant of the Heroic Age.
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One can select many symbolic events to mark the change from
phase one to phase two of the epic experience both in American
and in Baha’i history. In American history consider the contrast
between the writings of two presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and
John F. Kennedy. Roosevelt wrote of the frontier, the "winning of
the West." He celebrated the expansion of American power and
settlement westwards, and the projection of America's power
beyond our continental boundaries, much of which he engineered
as president. During his presidency, the greatest stream of
immigrants in American history was entering the country. He saw
immigrants as adding to the strength of America, filling its
factories and mines and armies. But he did not celebrate diversity.
He insisted on a full Americanization. "We freely extend the hand
of welcome and of good fellowship to every man and woman, no
matter their creed or birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on
becoming a good citizen, but we have the right and it is our duty to
demand they shall indeed become so." David Brooks, quoting this
passage in an article in the Weekly Standard, comments: “That
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meant, in Roosevelt's eyes, the immigrant had to leave Old World
quarrels behind. It meant he had to learn English–We believe that
English and no other language is that in which all school exercises
should be conducted.... We have no room in a healthy American
community for a German-American vote or an Irish-American vote
and it is contemptible demagoguery to put into any party platform
[rhetoric] with the purpose of catching such a vote."
The tone changes with John F. Kennedy, another friend of
American power and of immigration. He wrote A Nation of
Immigrants, lauding the immigrant contribution to the United
States, and he and his brother sought to open the doors of America
wider to immigrants. The first Roosevelt, when he thought of
immigrants, thought of a growing and ever stronger America that
needed manpower. His successor president thought rather of
appealing to a new electorate or of displaying compassion for the
victims of a troubled world. One will detect a marked change as
one moves from the first to the second. Kennedy did not use the
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term "Americanization": It would not have rung right even in 1958,
and, today, it is quite banned from politics. Every president since
Kennedy, Democrat or Republican, has lauded immigrants and
immigration. President Reagan presided over the rededication of
the Statue of Liberty, a great national festival. Long before, the
meaning of the Statue had been quite transformed from that
originally intended. It was no longer "Liberty Enlightening the
World," but "Liberty welcoming the immigrant."
The Baha’i epic associated with its heroic age is not the same as the
epic associated with its Formative Age. The potentialities that the
creative force of that first 77 years-that heroic age-had planted in
human consciousness, in the consciousness of Baha’is, would
gradually unfold. My life and the life of my parents would see the
first century of that unfolding. The poetry I have written, while
inspired by that heroic age, is written in the main about the epochs,
the four epochs, of my life in the Formative Age.
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In a recent book by Nathan Glazer We Are All Multiculturalists
Now, Glazer tries to understand and to analyze the change in how
we envisage America in our schools and what it teaches about our
past. In explaining the book to various audiences he has sought to
find an emblematic expression of the very different time when
there was no great argument as to what we meant by "the epic of
America"–when no hint of the great change of the last few decades
was yet evident. He explained that the title of Theodore Roosevelt's
first great success as a writer and historian, The Winning of the
West, characterized this earlier period. It is a title that without
restraint or second thoughts or apology celebrates the American
epic of expansion. Today, the title The Winning of the West would
lead us to think immediately of whom we won it from–the Indians,
the Mexicans, the environment. Its celebratory note would grate on
us. But it does tell us what the epic of America once was.
Perhaps its equivalent in Baha’i literature is The Dawnbreakers,
with its thrilling passages and the splendour of its central theme
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which gives the chronicle its great historic value and its high moral
power. Beginning with nine years marking the “most spectacular,
most tragic, most eventful period of the first Baha’i century,”37 this
heroic, this apostolic, age ended with the passing of ‘Abdu’l-Baha
in 1921. In the 1920s and 1930s Baha’i administration and Baha’i
teaching Plans came to take on a central focus in this second stage
of the Baha’i epic.
To place The Winning of the West in its time: The first volumes
were published in 1889 when Roosevelt was only 31. He had
already served as a New York state legislator, had written a well-
received book on the War of 1812 and a biography of the frontier
statesman Thomas Hart Benton, had turned himself into a ceaseless
advocate of the strenuous life, had ridden with cowboys on cattle
ranches in the Dakota Territory on the western frontier when Indian
wars were still a reality, and had written a book of his experiences
there. That experience led him back to earlier frontiers in American
37 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, Wilmette, 1957, p.3.145
history. As Harvey Wish tells us: The task of writing four volumes
of The Winning of the West ... had to share his time and energy
while he served as an active member of the United States Civil
Service Commission and then as President of the New York City
Board of Police Commissioners. He investigated slums,
sweatshops, and graft.... In 1895-6, he managed to issue his final
two volumes while campaigning for McKinley ... for which he was
rewarded by receiving the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
He went on to become governor of New York, vice-president, and,
upon the assassination of McKinley, president in 1901. Despite his
auspicious beginnings as a historian, he was never to complete The
Winning of the West as he had originally intended. The completed
volumes end with the acquisition of Louisiana and Lewis and
Clark's exploration of the vast new territories that had been added
to the United States. The Winning of the West was republished
again and again, in many editions, even before Roosevelt became
president, but I note that the last full printing was in 1927. Harvey
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Wish's little volume of selections from the four volumes, from
which I have quoted, was published in 1962, and the book was,
surprisingly, reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 1995,
perhaps another signal of a modest Theodore Roosevelt revival.
We should be aware that the book was greatly respected in its time
and for decades after, and not only by popular and literary critics
but by the leading academics of the day.
Roosevelt did do a remarkable amount of research in archives and
wrote the book from primary sources, not secondary materials.
Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard admired it. Frederick Jackson
Turner, the propounder of the enormously influential thesis on the
role of the frontier in the shaping of American society, also praised
it. He wrote three reviews of it as successive volumes appeared.
Turner's own seminal paper, "The Significance of the Frontier in
American History," was presented in Chicago in 1893 (after
Roosevelt's first few volumes had been published) during the great
Chicago fair celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus's
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discovery of America, as it was once described. Indeed, the
contrast between the celebration of the 400th anniversary of
Columbus's voyage and our embarrassed effort to deal with the
500th anniversary is symbolic of the change I am trying to
characterize. It was clear then that the opening of the West was the
great theme of American history to almost everyone who thought
seriously about it at the time and that its closing, as noted by the
Superintendent of the Census on the basis of the findings of the
census of 1890, had to portend some significant changes.
Of course, the opening of the towns, localities, states and all the
countries of the world to the Baha’i Faith by its pioneers was also a
great theme of Baha’i history. And that theme can be found
expressed again and again in my poetic-epic, an age of pioneering
from the 1920s and 1930s onward. My poetry is a work of
unabashed religious enthusiasm and I know it will not attract many
because of this. The Winning of the West is a work of unabashed
nationalism. It is a nationalism that exalts the role of one element
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of the American population and takes bare notice of the others.
There is no political correctness in The Winning of the West, of
course. The first volume is labeled, "The Spread of the English-
Speaking Peoples," and will remind us of one of the books by a
later great nationalist leader, Winston Churchill, who wrote a
multi-volumed history of the "English-speaking peoples."
Roosevelt begins: "During the past three centuries, the spread of
the English-speaking peoples across the world's waste spaces has
been not only the most striking feature in the world's history, but
also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its
importance."
Today, we would sit up and notice that the lands over which the
English-speaking peoples spread are called "waste spaces." We
would think of all the people who already lived there when the
English-speaking peoples arrived. The Indians to Roosevelt are
"savages." They are cruel and treacherous, by our standards of
course, but Roosevelt does not take much account of the standards
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of "the other": "Not only were they very terrible in battle, but they
were cruel beyond all belief in victory.... The hideous, unnameable,
unthinkable tortures practised by the red men on their captured
foes, and on their foes" tender women and helpless children, were
such as we read of in no other struggle, hardly even the revolting
pages that tell the deeds of the Holy Inquisition." (In these latter
days, Roosevelt might also be condemned for male chauvinism
because of the way he refers to women.) Roosevelt respects the
Indians for their warrior prowess, but has no regret over the
outcome.
The history of the border wars ... makes a long tale of injuries
inflicted, suffered, and mercilessly revenged. It could not be
otherwise when brutal, reckless, lawless borderers, despising all
men not of their own color, were thrown into contact with savages
who esteemed cruelty and treachery as the highest virtue, and
rapine and murder as the worthiest of pursuits. Looking back, it is
easy to say that much of the wrong-doing could have been
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prevented; but if we examine the facts to find out the truth, not to
establish a theory, we are bound to admit that the struggle could
not possibly have been avoided. Unless we were willing that the
whole continent west of the Alleghenies should remain an
unpeopled waste, the hunting ground of savages, war was
inevitable. And after examining briefly Indian claims that they
were the first present and the possessors of the soil, Roosevelt
writes:
“The truth is the Indian never had any real title to the soil; they had
not half so good a claim to it, for instance, as the cattlemen now
have to all eastern Montana, yet no one would assert that the
cattlemen have a right to keep immigrants off their vast unfenced
ranges. The settler and the pioneer have at bottom had justice on
their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing
but a game preserve for squalid savages.”
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I hope it is not necessary to emphasize that my point is not to
expose the prejudices or blind spots of an earlier time, but to
present as clearly as possible how a representative great American,
an historian as well as a national leader (Roosevelt was, in time, to
serve as president of the American Historical Association), thought
of what was noteworthy, great, and of epic character in American
history. And here we must say something more of Roosevelt's view
of the protagonists of this epic, the pioneers.
The pioneers are, of course, representative of the English-speaking
peoples, but they are also a new people shaped by the experience of
colonization and settlement in a new and dangerous place. "At the
day when we began our career as a nation we already differed from
our kinsmen of Britain in blood as well as in name." The original
English stock, which Roosevelt points out was already the result of
a mixture of peoples, mingled with and absorbed into itself
immigrants from many European lands, and this process has gone
on since. It is to be noted that, of the new blood thus acquired, the
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greatest proportion has come from Dutch and German sources, and
the next greatest from Irish, while the Scandinavian element comes
third, and the only other of much importance is the French
Huguenot.
But then he adds, remarkably for 1889, when the sources of
American immigration had recently undergone a great change,
from northern and western Europe, to eastern and southern:
"Additions have been made to the elemental race-strains in much
the same proportion as those originally combined." He defines the
guiding, leading, pioneering element more sharply:
“The backwoodsmen were American by birth and parentage; but
the dominant strain in their blood was that of the Presbyterian
Irish–the Scotch-Irish as they were often called.... It is doubtful if
we have wholly realized the importance of the part played by that
stern and virile people.... They form the kernel of the distinctively
and intensely American stock who were the pioneers of our people
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in their march westward, the vanguard of the army of fighting
settlers, who with axe and rifle won their way from the Alleghenies
to the Rio Grande and the Pacific.”
They are the heroes of the epic. They were not to be displaced for
another 50 years. But, of course, new elements were being added
to the American population, in great number, and they were not
pioneers, except metaphorically. Willa Cather titled her novel, O
Pioneers!, but they were not pioneers in the same sense as the
Scotch-Irish who crossed the Alleghenies, fought Indian wars in
the Old Northwest and Southwest, conquered Texas from Mexico,
made the way clear for German and Scandinavian farmers who
followed after. Perhaps Cather's Norwegian settlers in Nebraska
could, to some extent, be incorporated into this American epic. But
then, what of the newcomers crowding the cities in the 1890s and
1900s and 1910s?
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Turner had propounded the most influential thesis in American
history in 1893. By 1914, he had to take notice of a great change in
America: “If we look about the periphery of the nation,
everywhere we see the indications that our world is changing. On
the streets of ...New York and Boston, the faces we meet are to a
surprising extent those of Southeastern Europe.... It is the little
Jewish boy, the Greek or Sicilian, who takes the traveller through
historic streets, now the home of these newer people ... and tells
you in his strange patois the story of revolution against
oppression.”
In this same address, a commencement speech at the University of
Washington, Turner creates a striking image of these two worlds in
contact. It seems Turner had to pass through the Harvard museum
of social ethics–an early expression of sociology at Harvard which
no longer exists–in order to get to the room in which he lectured on
the history of the westward movement: The hall is covered with an
exhibit of the work of the Pittsburgh steel mills, and of the
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congested tenements. Its charts and diagrams tell of the long hours,
the death rate, the relation of typhoid to the slums, the gathering of
all Southeastern Europe to make a civilization at that centre of
American industrial energy and vast capital that is a social tragedy.
As I enter my lecture room through that hall, I speak of the young
Washington leading his Virginia frontiersmen to the magnificent
forest at the forks of the Ohio. Where Braddock and his men ...
were struck by the painted savages in the primeval woods, huge
furnaces belch forth perpetual fires and Huns and Bulgars, Poles
and Sicilians, struggle for a chance to earn their daily bread, and
live a brutal and degraded life. He writes "Huns" but presumably
means Hungarians.
We will note little reference to African Americans or slavery in
Theodore Roosevelt or Frederick Jackson Turner: The epic of the
westward movement had little to say of them. Roosevelt did write
that the early settlers, "to their own lasting harm, committed a
crime whose short-sighted folly was worse than its guilt, for they
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brought hordes of African slaves, whose descendants now form
immense populations in certain portions of the land." But slavery
plays no great role in his story: He makes little distinction between
the frontiersmen pushing out from Pennsylvania, or from Virginia
and the Carolinas, and indeed asserts that they made little
distinction. They were all mountain men, and the issue of whether
slave or free was of no great moment then. It was before the great
conflicts over whether the new western states were to be slave or
free. Turner depreciates the significance of slavery as against the
significance of the frontier in American history: "Even the slavery
struggle ... occupies its important place in American history
because of its relation to Westward expansion."
This perspective astonishes us today: It is as if once the conflict
over whether new states were to be slave or free was settled by the
Civil War, race was no longer of great consequence in American
history. Indeed, during the first half of the 20th century, the
question of race, urgent as it was for black Americans, was little
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noted by others. If there was an alternative epic to the epic of
westward movement, it was then (as in measure it still is) the Civil
War and the destruction of southern plantation society, seen
entirely from the point of view of the slaveholder. And so, the first
great American movie epic is The Birth of a Nation, and the
greatest is Gone With the Wind.
In 1931, a popular historian of the day, James Truslow Adams,
published a one-volume history of America and boldly titled it, The
Epic of America. Published by a leading Boston publisher, it was a
Book-of-the-Month club selection; it still makes interesting reading
today. The attitudes of more significant figures such as Theodore
Roosevelt and Frederick Jackson Turner are still dominant, if
somewhat cruder, in the year before the election of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. It is still the epic of westward expansion and manifest
destiny, now generalized into the American dream, that is "the epic
of America." When Adams writes of "three racial frontiers in the
West" around 1800, he does not have in mind white interaction
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with Indians and Africans. He has in mind the French and the
Spanish and the English. His three racial frontiers remind me of the
"historical convergence of European, African, and Native
American people" which stands at the beginning of American
history, according to the recently proposed National Standards for
History. The historically important "races" have undergone a
radical change.
Adams, a New England writer and the author of such previous
books as The Founding of New England, Revolutionary New
England, New England in the Republic, and The Adams Family,
finds no problem in celebrating the culture of the antebellum South.
"The type of life which now evolved in the South was in many
ways the most delightful America has known, and that section has
become in retrospect the land of romance."
William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist weekly, The Liberator, is to
Adams "fanatical," as is John Brown. The Civil War was not
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merely a question of slavery. It was a question of interpretation of
the fundamental compact between the states ... whether property
guaranteed by the Constitution was safe or not...; whether an
agrarian civilization could preserve its character...; whether a
section of the country should be allowed to maintain its own
peculiar set of cultural values or be coerced to conform to those of
an alien and disliked section...; a question of what would become
of liberty if union were to mean an enforced conformity.
Yet the epigraph at the beginning of the book is from Whitman:
"Sail–sail thy best, ship of democracy." One does detect a muddle
here, but no more of a muddle than characterized American
democracy as a whole at the time. We will also have to tut-tut over
Adams's treatment of the new immigrants, as they still were in
1931: "These Slavs, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, Italians, Russians,
Lithuanians, Jews ... were of a very different type from the Irish,
British, Germans and Scandinavians." More were illiterate. They
were also "much more 'foreign' in their background and outlook
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than those who had come previously, and less assimilable to our
social life and institutions." Though they were peasants, "they did
not seek to become farmers and to establish homes in this country,
but congregated in huge racial groups in the larger cities, or
became operatives in factories and mines." They preferred to
accept day wages, maintain their old low standard of living, and
even go below that, to save as much money as possible.... The
earlier immigrants had come to make homes, raise their standard of
living, and become citizens; these new ones came as birds of
passage.... This also kept them from the desire to assimilate
themselves to American social life, to learn English, and to adapt
themselves to American ways.
And yet, there is the quotation from Whitman, and he writes of the
prophets of American democracy, that only Emerson "glimpsed the
real essence of Americanism and its dream of democracy....
Whittier was too concerned with the problem of the slave, and, like
Lowell, who would have sacrificed the union because of his dislike
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of the South, saw America too much in terms of sectional evil.
And the muddle only increases. After his criticism, typical of the
time, of the new immigrants–and progressives as well as
conservatives indulged in it–Adams ends his book with a vision of
the American dream and one of these new immigrants dreaming it
on the steps of the Boston Public Library:
“That dream ... has evolved from the hearts and burdened souls of
many millions, who have come to us from all nations. If some of
them have too great faith, we know not yet to what faith may attain,
and may hearken to the voice of one of them, Mary Antin, a young
immigrant girl who comes to us from Russia.... Sitting on the steps
of the Boston Public Library, where the treasures of the whole of
human thought had been opened to her, she wrote: "This is my
latest home, and it invited me to a glad new life.... The past ...
cannot hold me, because I have grown too big; just as the little
house in Polotzk, once my home, has now become a toy of
memory, as I move about at will in the wide spaces of this splendid
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palace.... America is the youngest of nations, and inherits all that
went before it in history. And I am the youngest of America's
children, and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage....
Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future."
So we see new epics being born even while the old one is being
celebrated. And by the time the Baha’is began to use the term
pioneer, just as their first teaching Plan(1937-1944) was about to be
set in motion, “the whole majestic past and the shining future”
awaited them. In 1951, Oscar Handlin, who was to become the
major historian of American immigration, and the leading figure in
a generation of historians studying the old and the new
immigration, summed up his vision of immigration in a book titled
The Uprooted. (The second edition of 1973 bears on its cover the
subtitle, The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that made the
American People. The first sentence of the book reads: "Once I
thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I
discovered that the immigrants were America."
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The eclipse of the first "epic of America" seemed complete.
Theodore Roosevelt would not have used the term "immigrant" to
refer to his Dutch ancestors or to the frontiersmen he celebrated.
They were colonists, settlers, pioneers–immigrants were something
else. The notion that we were all immigrants was still somewhat
surprising in 1951, though Franklin Delano Roosevelt, speaking to
the Daughters of the American Revolution, who had refused to
allow Marian Anderson to sing in their hall in 1939, did say, “We
are all immigrants, and the descendants of revolutionists.”
However, this was then still a surprising and provocative thought.
Twenty years after Handlin published The Uprooted, it was only
common wisdom, or commonplace. A half-dozen presidents and a
hundred judges inducting new immigrants pronounced we were all
a nation of immigrants. And desperate efforts were being made to
induct the non-immigrants–Native Americans, as the Indians had
become, and the African-American descendants of slaves–into
American epics that had ignored or disdained them.
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It was not long before Handlin was alarmed at the terms of
inclusion. Supplementing The Uprooted, 20 years after its original
publication, in the Spring of 1971, Handlin wrote: “a committee of
the United States Senate held hearings on an amendment to the
higher education act. In the parade of witnesses, there were no
dissenters. From many different parts of the country, representing
many different organizations, they reiterated an identical woeful
refrain: ‘We have been made victims!’”
The tone was varied, from undiluted bitterness to a plaintive
awareness of offsetting gains. But unfailingly the complaints
expressed a tone of deprivation which was also a sense of
emptiness, the ache of which required stilling. America had created
the void by the theft of their ancestors; now the victims needed the
healing pride of ethnicity.
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Handlin was speaking of the hearings on legislation that would
assist ethnic groups in developing curricula on their culture and
history which could be used in schools. No Mary Antins appeared
to celebrate the openness of America, the pleasures and rewards of
integration–which inevitably does mean the loss of the past. No
Theodore Roosevelt was present to insist that that is what America
expected of immigrants. The single story was becoming many
stories. Black studies at the time were spreading rapidly and were
soon to become a fixture in the academy, along with Latino, Asian-
American, and Native-American studies. The women's movement
had exploded in the universities. No one in 1971 realized what a
sturdy trunk of academia it would shortly become, nor that it would
be joined by gay and lesbian studies. Perhaps other forms of
diversity that we are not yet conscious of will become equally
sturdy growths. The one grand epic has been succeeded by many
fragmentary little epics. One great theme of epic is the founding of
a nation, as in The Aeneid. The new fragments of nations create
epics that celebrate the destruction of a domineering and false
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oneness by a manyness; and we wonder whether that means also
the fragmenting of a nation.
This brings us up to date in considering America as epic. The epic
of the frontier closed a long time ago. Many have worried about
what succeeds it. Let us project America overseas, some said, in
imperialist conquest, or in fighting tyranny, or in improving the
lives of other peoples. We have now withdrawn from the empire,
though a few pieces remain. We face no great tyranny, and our will
in facing even small tyrannies is not strong. We are now doubtful
about our capacity to improve the lives of other peoples. The new
frontier, we are told, must be education, or space, or good group
relations. How often have we heard it said: How come we can
reach the moon and not improve our cities or race relations?
Clearly, it must be easier to reach the moon, and that does require
heroes and is a subject of epic stature. I doubt whether the
improving of group relations can replace the conquest of a
continent as the subject of epic. Of course, we can live without an
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American epic. But that does diminish us, and it is easy to
understand why some of our poets, artists, writers, and historians
keep on trying.38
And for the Baha’i community the heroic-age stage of its epic has
long passed. ‘Abdu’l Baha provides the linkage between the two
stages in His Memorials of the Faithful and, perhaps, the Greatest
Holy Leaf who died in 1932. ‘Abdu’l-Baha addresses all of us, all
of us on our journeys while He describes many of those He came to
know in His life in that heroic age. For He is describing not only
the lives of these men and women in the nineteenth century, He is
describing us in our time. He is addressing us on our own travels.
He addresses the restlessness in us all. He speaks to us in our
victory and our loss. He speaks about what Michael Polanyi calls
the tacit dimension, the silent root of human life, which is difficult
to tap in biographies, the inner person. This private, this inner
person, is the one whom He writes about for the most part. He sets
38 Nathan Glazer, “American Epic: Then and Now,” Public Interest, Spring 2003.
168
this inner life in a rich contextualization, a socio-historical matrix.
He describes many pilgrimages and you and I are left to construct
our own. We all must shape and define our own life. Is it
aesthetically pleasing? Intellectually provocative? Spiritually
challenging? ‘Abdu’l-Baha shapes and defines these lives given the
raw-data of their everydayness added up, added up over their lives
as He saw them. How would He shape my life? Yours? How
would we look in a contemporary anthology of existences with
‘Abdu’l-Baha as the choreographer and the history of our days as
the mise en scene?
Some of the lives of the obscure, the ordinary and representative
members of the Baha'i community are recovered for history and for
much more. Their private aspirations and their world achievments,
their public images and their private romances, their eventual
successes and their thwarted attempts are lifted onto the pages of a
type of Baha'i scripture. 'Abdu'l-Baha is setting the stage, the
theatre, the home, in these pages, for all of humanity. The extrovert
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is here, the introvert, those that seem predisposed to cheerfulness
and those who seem more melancholy by nature. All the human
dichotomies are here, at least all that I have come across in my own
journey. They are the characters which are part and parcel of life in
all ages and centuries, all nations and states, past, present and, more
importantly, future. Here is, as one writer put it, the rag-and-bone-
shop, the lineaments of universal human life, the text and texture of
community as we all experience it in the crucible of interaction.
And here, in this autobiography and this poetry is some more of the
text and texture of the Baha’i community and an ordinary life set
into the rag-and-bone shop of life, however epically I might want
to envisage it. Language becomes here the means of reconstituting
the past state of an element of Baha’i culture and its context. At
the same time my language is a way of detaching, of distancing the
past from a person who is most committed to reconstituting it.
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It is difficult in an autobiography not to make oneself the central
figure of the text. Seen as a whole, this text describes an ascent
from childhood, through adolescence to adulthood and old age. In
some ways this ascent only touches all the peaks and periods of my
life and then begins the long and slow decline with its attendant
troughs, a decline that has just begun at this stage of writing, a
decline into an inevitable physical enervation and death, shadowed
and enlightened by the memory of the Baha’i community’s
experience over several epochs. The global Baha’i community was
created in my lifetime, spreading from a small group of countries
and a relative handful of centres, to well over 200 countries and
territories and 1000s of centres.
The millennial hope, the dream of the destiny of the Baha’i
community, began to take a more definite shape in my lifetime.
The Baha’i story is much fuller than it was in its first century,
1844-1944. The Central Figures of this Faith occupy more space;
their somewhat austere figures never stray from their importantly
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narrow roles as charismatic founders, lawgivers and interpreters.
Baha’u’llah comes to us in the Baha’i literature as a quietly
brilliant youth, divine revelator and a man in full, a matchless hero
equal to every occasion. And yet although, or perhaps because, we
see him in that narrow role, we somehow never get a complete
picture of him. His story, in the Baha’i historical narrative, is often
fragmentary and elliptical. He remains slightly, perhaps
necessarily, elusive. Marked by accounts, terse notations, motives
sometimes left unstated, gestures and phrases whose meanings
we've lost, He can not be grasped even in the first century after His
passing. Trying to grasp him, we embrace a vapour.
Like every true dancer, I have been a figure of constant change:
vivid, elusive, unforgettable. Perhaps it takes a poet to do justice to
such mutability, but not this poet. An author of many volumes of
poetry might be an apt choice for an autobiography: "The Life of
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Ron Price.” I have read the autobiographies of many others in my
lifetime and I do not feel confident as I engage in such an attempt.
Unable to write biographies of any of the Central Figures or even
of one of the saints, heroes, martyrs or significant Baha’is in the
first two centuries of its history, I use Baha’i history, its narrative
account for other purposes. I use it to illumine my own life and its
experience. I supplement that history in places with secular history
and, in the process, I try to bring alive the only person I know at all
well—myself. In episode after episode, I braid a narrative together
with literary interpretation and psychological conjecture, drawing
out patterns of correspondence, filling gaps in a record which
would have got lost had I not taken pen to paper. I like to think
my work is characterized by acutely engaged speculation. Perhaps
it would not have mattered if this account had got lost or if it had
never been told at all, for I have only been one of the multitude of
the warp and weft of a community of Baha’is, a community which
sees itself as the core of an emerging world religion.
173
Mostly bypassing but occasionally touching the accretions of,
perhaps, 40 centuries of religious piety and veneration, peering
behind what is often a spare record of action and speech and at
other times a burgeoning historical record bordering on anarchic
confusion, I seek to discern the feelings and intentions of the
living person that I have been and am now, this thing which I call
myself.
It's a risky business, fleshing out remote historical figures into what
are often essentially novelistic characters. I have long recognized
this as a student of biography. This is no less true of figures close
to us and, perhaps, even most true of our own dear selves. My
kindness, a trait ‘Abdu’l-Baha says is a Canadian characteristic and
exhibited on many an occasion in the first sixty years of my life,
may be rooted in guilt or show, policy or love, all of these or none.
Behind the facts of life and the human qualities of its actors, lie a
swarming mass of causes. Part of the role of the historian, the
174
psychologist or the autobiographer is to turn the microscope
sensitively to the minute causality in life and its often subtle and
obscure effects.
I hope that readers find my characterological insights interesting
and my literary arguments astute. Corners of the Baha’i myth, the
historical metaphor, light up with the glow of my imagination and I
hope they light up those of readers. My life, it seems to me
anyway, grows increasingly strong as it moves from my early years
to the years of middle and late adulthood, but weakness runs along
beside it never to be entirely trampled underfoot. My individual
perspective on the quite revolutionary transformation of the Baha’i
community from a small, western, post-Christian culture of
individuals to the early stages of a visible, enumerated, global and
inclusive civilization, is, I like to think, a tour de force of historical
imagining and the experience of any Baha’i who has been a part of
this cause for several decades.
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Most importantly, I like to think, in writing this book I achieved
my stated goal of making the Baha’i Faith more accessible without
making it cease to be refreshing, exotic in a sense and or a delight
to the mind. Any history, any figure, about so remote a culture as
19th century Iran, must always remain somewhat remote to the
votaries of future generations. Some might argue that a work of
this kind ought not be attempted in the first place, that to embroider
Baha’i history and its text is slightly false and, if not false, at least
presumptuous to a degree. But what I do here is squarely within the
historical tradition of narrative elaboration, even if my methods and
sensibility are unmistakably modern. Whatever may be said of my
life and my community, my family background and Baha’i history,
what I write it is a kind of creative engagement that makes this
history live and endure. At least that is my hope.39
And, finally, some poems:
39 Some of the insights here were obtained from: William Deresiewicz,”The Life of David: King for 3,000 Years,” The New York Times.com, October 23, 2005 for its review of Robert Pinsky’s book on King David.
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ASPIRATION AND OCCUPATION
“Poet” names an aspiration not an occupation...Once a poem is
resolved, I lose the sense of having written it. I can remember
circumstances, but not sensations, not what it felt like to be writing.
This amnesia is almost immediate and most complete when poems
are written quickly, but in all cases it occurs. Between poems I am
not a poet, only someone with a yearning to achieve. What is it that
I want to achieve? It is that same concentration again. -Louise
Gluck, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Ecco Press, NY,
1994, p.125.
I lose the sense of
even having written it.
It’s like someone else’s.
It surprises me;
I may remember some trace element,
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some vague origin, circumstance.
Yes, being a poet, like being a Baha’i,
is an aspiration.
It often feels like an occupation
because of the intensity, energy,
time, thought, devoted to the process,
especially when the flow comes
as fast as it has in recent years.
I must stop now:
it makes me tired
even thinking of it.
Ron Price
15 October 1995
It is difficult to live to the age of sixty and not have death touch
you in different ways. In addition to several family members who
have passed on, I pray for more than fifty Hands of the Cause and
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seventy-five friends and people who have been important to me
over the years. Due to my belief system the emotional disarray that
often touches people when loved ones die has been rare and short-
lived. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, the founder of modern language
theory, I have since about 1980 had a certain preoccupation with
death.40 There have been times when the word obession seemed an
appropriate one in relation to my feelings about death, but since my
treatment with fluvoxamine in 2002, the experience of death as
impending only occurs at night for short periods of time. When I
wrote the following poem nearly ten years ago now I had what was,
in some ways, an obsession with the subject of death.
AT LAST
From Sappho to Dickinson, Rossetti, and the nightingales, death
has been an imaginative obsession for many women poets-an
obsession resumed in the twentieth century by poets like Millay,
40 William Todd Schultz, “The Riddle That Doesn’t Exist: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Transmogrification of Death,” Internet, 8 January 2004.
179
Mina Loy and Laura Riding, Smith and Plath,1 male poets like John
Berryman and Jack Kerouac and other writers like James Agee,
Poe and Magritte. Knowing this pleased me because, since 1980,
death has both haunted and attracted me. Somehow it did not seem
right and yet, in another sense, it seemed the most natural of
obsessions. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of
Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, University
of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p.291.
These words, these prayers, so many deeds,
so many years have helped dissolve those walls
which thankfully separate us from them:
you wouldn’t want to go around hallucinating,
would you? Enmeshed as we are
in each other’s lives and will be,
through these words, this unpopular art
which can’t be hung for all to see
or moulded like that stone statue,
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or turned into fine sound over time,
but will remain on paper
after the dilapidation of dilapidations,
after the night wind wimpers,
the leaves are all gone
and we come forth and on
with fragrances just beyond
and we slowly emerge,
exposed to our essential life,
this real world, at last.
Having grappled so long,
so long with bits of paper
and what they all were saying,
a clearness fell over the river,
so smooth with a thousand diamonds
sun-studding: you could see them
as you drove along the river,
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even in the night, a thousand eyes
but one mind, at last, at last,
even if the heart aches
for one has been there
so many times before.
Somewhere in the stale familiarity,
half-dead, weary-sings
something tastes of home,
just around the corner,
beyond that cloud
where the sun is breaking,
strong and clear:
at last.
Ron Price
2 July 1995
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It is timely that I refer to Wiggenstein as this autobiography comes
near to its end. This major twentieth century philosopher saw the
object of philosophy as “the clarification of thoughts.”41 Surely, if
nothing else, this autobiography is intended to do the same thing. It
tries to make what is opaque and blurred the centre of clarity and
sanity, of health and understanding to the mind. Like Wittgenstein,
too, I see no division between my life and this work. It is all of a
piece. I may not be able to remedy all the deep emotional
difficulties in my life by untangling them philosophically, as
Wittgenstein thought he could do. Lucidity, joy, wonder, the
mystical, are all important to me as they were to Wittgenstein, too
much to go into detail here.
But as I pass sixty and go into the first months of my sixty-first
year, with the great bulk of my bi-polar illness behind me I do not
anticipate suffering the way many do after the age of sixty. I have a
strange premonition that the worst is behind me. Unlike Mark
41 Bertrand Russell, “Preface,” Tractatus, 1922.183
Twain, whose life from age 60 on was blasted by calamity and
sorrow; unlike the cinema director Alfred Hitchcock who was
plagued by alcohol and depression from sixty-five until his death at
the age of eighty, unlike many others in their declining years of late
adulthood, I see my life as just beginning, albeit a different life
than the one I have known, but one I am looking forward to with
relish. This is not to say that fatigue, exhaustion and anxiety will
not afflict me and forces at large in the world will not assail me. I
may require the perserverence I have seen in my wife for the last
twenty years.
KIN AND KITH
"The generation born in the mid-forties...were the most indulged,
cared for and ‘liberated’ children in history...the narcissistic trend
began in the 1920s...These between-wars folk were the parents of
the post-World-War-II generation....who formed the ‘hippie
generation’... still relentlessly ego-absorbed generation."1 These
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two generations have been the main pioneers of the second, third
and fourth epochs.
-Ron Price with appreciation to Ronald Conway, The Rage for
Utopia, Allen and Unwin, 1992, pp. 146-148.
There’s nothing like a parting
to make you feel a piece.
Nothing like a starting
to make you ill-at-ease.
Partings are a sorrow;
I think I’ll keep them few,
as I head down the home stretch
to the newest of the new.
‘Cause one day we’ll part forever
on this terrestrial coil;
we’ll make this the last one
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on this our earthly soil.
I may not talk with you so deeply
that you feel connected with,
but I’ll learn that one some day,
as we become both kin and kith.
I think Conway has touched the core
of a certain ego-absorption
at the heart of all these plans
that make difficult their adoption.
It also makes it difficult, dear,
to grow close as you would like to.
It may just be this narcissism
which I must overcome too.
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Ron Price
10 July 1995
I would like to make one or two parenthetical remarks here before
continuing and concluding with more of my poetry. Part of the
way I view language and thus the way I view the writing of this
autobiography is reflected in the way the philosopher Wittgenstein
views language. He sees it as a game consisting of varied and
various relationships among different strategies, approaches,
multiple interacting conditions, ways and means not simply a
configuration or tradition based upon "empirical stability." As I
have pointed out earlier in this lengthy work, there is a basic
facticity, empirical stability, in my life, my society and my religion
that one can not get away from this. But they are no more history
than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are an omelette, as that student of
biography Ira Nadel noted with his humorous edge. One needs
Wittgenstein’s culinary talent in the autobiographical kitchen. This
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poetry provides readers with some of the basic constituents of the
language game and the multiple conditions as I see them.
EX NIHILO
There’s a mystery in poetic writing, some kind of creation ex
nihilo, from within, but within bounds, the bounds of your way of
living, of who you are. It’s like magic, a varying splendour, a
stirring of atoms to find connections to release compulsions and
find other selves. Scratch the itch of disconnection, the soup of this
and that sometimes feeble, pathetic self, sometimes rich, fertile self
in the core and an architectural correctness, balance, density,
emerges: as if from the journey of one’s life-long, tortuous,
sometimes lost. In the end you’ve preserved something of yourself
and you wonder why. It’s quite mysterious. -Ron Price with
thanks to Sue Woolfe and Kate Grenville, Making Stories, Allen
and Unwin, St. Leonards, NSW, 1993.
188
UNINTERRUPTED POETRY
The writer, unable to chose his language, can no more choose his
style, this necessity of his mood, this rage within him, this tumult
or this tension, slowness or speed, which comes to him from a deep
intimacy with himself, about which he knows almost nothing, and
which give his language as distinctive an accent as his own
recognizable demeanour gives his face....a language inseparable
from our secret depths, that which, therefore, should be closest to
us, is also what is least accessible to us...to encounter and then to
silence the empty depths of ceaseless speech...of uninterrupted
poetry. -Maurice Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, editor: Michael
Holland, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995, pp.146-149.
The revolution has come: the break!
It twists and turns
189
in metaphorical equivalents
at special times, at any time
it seems appropriate;
for the whole history has,
what shall we call it,
mythological significance?
This is the new myth!
The end of history has arrived!
Yes, this is the eternal Return
and world shaking, world reverberating
institutions have come, born, growing
in a majestic process launched in 1953
within a rhythmic life pattern
of fundamental happiness
which itself contains anxiety and grief
and a time for healing in those secret depths
of ceaseless speech and what seems to be
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uninterrupted poetry.
Ron Price
7 December 1995
During the last quarter of the twentieth century, while I was writing
this autobiography, science was turning away from regular and
smooth systems in order to investigate more fragmented, more
chaotic phenomena. So, too, in the study of the writing of
autobiography there was an increasing consciousness of its
complexity, ambiguity, indeed, its chaotic content. There is
certainly an element of the fragmented, of the chaotic in my own
life. Sometimes the feeling of fragmentation is pervasive and
sometimes it is short-lived, momentary. Rather than seeing form,
literary or physical, as something divided into the classical binaries
of order and entropy, form now is often regarded as a continuum
expressing varying degrees of pattern and repetition, elements that
are at the core of structure, any structure. At one end of the
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continmuum we find extreme order, pattern and traditional forms
and at the other end we find gibberish, chaos and disorder.
Fragmentation is something we all experience and it is found
between life’s extremes. Fractal autobiography works in the ground
between these extremes of life. Digression, interruption,
fragmentation and lack of continuity, then, are part of the normal
world of autobiography. Fractal comes form the Latin for
fragmented or broken: hence the term fractal autobiography.
As architect Nigel Reading writes, "Pure Newtonian causality is an
incorrect, a finite view, but then again, so is the aspect of complete
uncertainty and infinite chance." The nature of reality now is
somewhere in between. One writer called this interplay between
chance and causality, a dynamical symmetry. It occurs to me that
this shift in focus from a simple, a polarized view of life to a more
dynamic, more complex, more chaotic view is something that is
expressed in, can be found in, literature as postmodernism. In any
case, the poetry, the autobiography, I am calling fractal shares
192
many defining traits with that contested term: postmodern. Some
contemporary poetries and genres of autobiography show an
allegiance to romantic, confessional or formalist traditions. Fractal
poetry, fractal aesthetics, fractal autobiography describe one feature
of my literary topography. When poets and autobiographers
address aesthetics, their own work inevitably shades their views.
But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of
new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of
the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between
them. In postmodernism one read, watched, listened, as one had
done for decades before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks,
presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. There is a generation
gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 1980.
Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-
modernism defines the real implicitly as the self, myself, now,
‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus pseudo-modernism suggests that
193
whatever it does or makes is reality and a pseudo-modern text may
flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form.
Postmodernists saw the eclipse of grand narratives and pseudo-
modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics
raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all
social activity. This new world is monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-
explaining, all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably
recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and
conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or
sold.
This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly
uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile
playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern
cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically
superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the
state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the
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neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism,
pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new
weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the
keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there
is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or
place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.42 I
outline briefly the shift from postmodernism to pseudomodernism
which has occurred in the time I have been writing this memoir
because my writing is, to some extent, a reflection of this change.
But I do not want to go beyond these few, these brief remarks.
Conversion and a religious conversation prevails in my poetry. It
is part of an archtypal pattern because it represents part of a
maturing process and a move toward self-discovery. It is part and
parcel of this autobiography, unavoidably, I find. It is part of a
personal life, which Anais Nin says, if it is lived deeply moves
beyond the personal.1-Ron Price with thanks to Suzanne
42 Alan Kirby, "The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond," Philosophy Now, 2006.
195
Nalbantian, Aesthetic Autobiography, MacMillan, 1994, p.6; and
1Anais Nin in ibid.,p.171.
CICERO(106-43 BC)
A poet must be clinical, dispassionate about life. The poet feels
much less strongly about these things than do other men...one finds
realized (in Auden’s work) a verbal and intellectual pleasure so
pure that one feels as if the lowly human faculty of mere enjoyment
had been somehow ennobled. -Frederick Buell, W.H. Auden As a
Social Poet, Cornell UP, London, 1973, p.41.
Cicero came long ago,
at a critical juncture,
he urged his combative peers
to end their recriminative posture,
political moralist who saw the
value of philosphy in politics,
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an idealist in an age of extremes,
complex personality
who saw kindness as a means to
justice, the goal of society.
The main branches of society must
work together, love each other
for this is the foundation of law
which holds society together.
Popular Assemblies, like today,
no longer expressed the will of the people,
no longer aspired to higher culture,
honesty, propriety: for real politics
was a way of life.
Ron Price
10 June 1995
197
Source S.E. Smethurst, “Politics and Morality in Cicero”, The
Phoenix, Vol. 10/11, 1955-57, pp.111-121.
RULING CONCEPTIONS
If poetry is an intellectual/intuitive act it is not a random
indeterminate process, but is governed by a previsional end....there
must be a ruling conception by which it knows its quarry: some
foresight of the work to be done, some seminal idea. -James
McAuley in Meanjin, Summer 1953, vol.xii, p.433.
The conception here’s been getting more detailed,
massive, as the decades have come on since 1953.
The conception was extraordinary, then,
with the ten stages of history and the ten year crusade
just having begun the Kingdom of God with a bang,
a quiet one, not much of a bone crusher,
pretty unobtrusive then, even now,
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with that conception described in a thousand books,
too much for most.
And the LSA Handbook getting so big
you needed a degree in law
or big biceps just to carry it to the meeting.
By God, the quarry! Nothing less than
the spiritual conquest of the planet,
the conquest of self and the attainment
of a tranqill heart:
and a thousand other mysteries
waiting to find form..
Ron Price
16 December 1995
CONTEMPORARY MODERN
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Of the many currents of contemporary modern poetry in Australia I
have selected Bruce Dawe’s poetry and particularly his book of
poems No Fixed Address, published in 1962, as the starting point.
This title is taken from one of his first poems, written back in 1954,
by the same title. It is a suitable starting point for 1962 was the
year when this pioneering venture got its start. By the time I
began writing poetry seriously there were, arguably, 40 to 50 years
of a tradition of the colloquial to build on, to help me on my way.-
Ron Price from information in A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary
Australian Poetry, Geoff Page, University of Queensland Press,
1995, p.2.
They started to say it differently,
to use the colloquial, the vernacular,
the everyday stuff as early as 1962,
if not before, when I had started my
pioneer life, quite early.
Had many fixed addresses.
200
I counted them once:
37 in twenty-five towns.
You had been writing for some time
with that ‘No Fixed Address’
the first that I knew about:
that one who in solemn state
lies garlanded in gin,
part of a poetic legacy
that takes us back to the beginning
of the Kingdom of God on earth.
The whole world started to change its spots
in that ninth stage of history when, coincidentally,
I entered the field. And now I’m trying to say it
using the new form, wave, style, humour, normality
of the ordinary, unpretentiousness, highest spirituality.
A late starter, building on thirty or forty years
201
of other writers of contemporary modern.
Ron Price
9 December 1995
ELOQUENCE
Indifference to response of the immediate audience is a necessary
trait of all artists that have something new to say. They say what
they have to say...Communicability has nothing to do with
popularity...no man is eloquent save when someone is moved as he
listens....Those who are moved feel, as Tolstoi says, that what the
work expresses is as if it were something one had oneself been
longing to express...the artist works to create an audience to which
he does communicate. -John Dewey, Art as Experience, Capricorn
Books, NY, 1958(1934), p.105.
Complete and unhindered communication,
202
in a world of gulfs and walls
that limit our experience of community,
can be found in some works of art.
Was that why I cried in looking
at your paintings on the wall
when normally art galleries
make me sleepy?
Was that why I wrote so many essays
about Roger White’s poetry,
though noone would publish them?
Is that why I write all this poetry,
to serve the unifying forces of life
breaking out all over this planet?
Ron Price
23 December 1995
CRYSTAL COOL WATER
203
The poet is a hunter consciously and aggressively active in the
hunting process of composition. The poetry is what’s hunted down
and transformed by that process in a wilderness of language...The
poet is an intermediary hunting form beyond form, truth beyond
theme through woods of words tangled and tremendous....through a
forest of mystic meaning. -John Taggart, Songs of Degrees:
Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, University of
Alabama Press, London, 1994, p.174.
Myriads of mystic tongues find utterance
in one speech and myriads of hidden mysteries
are revealed in a single melody*
and the poet hunts in forests of mystic meaning,
searching for the tongues of utterance,
pursued by hounds,
clawed by talons,
204
with pitiless ravens lieing in wait on the mountain side.
And while he hunts other hunters stalk
and assault him in the bright meadows of his search.
His head falls to the earth, even brims with blood,
but Peace comes at last and the dark night of tangled
trees is no more, only the tall independent pines,
so straight and tall and spacious, with the sun
falling though their intersticies on the book
of his own self, dead at last in a summit of glory,
left behind on the earth beside the crystal cool water
that the Cup-Bearer bringeth! In the journey unto
the Crimson Pillar on the snow-white path.
Ron Price
11 October 1995
*Baha’u’llah, Hidden Words, Arabic, 16.
** Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, pp.55-59.
205
RECREATING COMPLEXITY: SIMPLY, DEEPLY
The poetic idea unites aspects of existence that ordinarily remain
unconnected, and in this lies its value. The secret of genius is
perhaps nothing else than this greater availability of all experience
coupled with larger stores of experience to draw on. -I. A.
Richards, Practical Criticism, 1929.
Experience is never limited...it is an intense sensibility, a kind of
huge spiderweb, of the finest silken threads suspended in the
chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in
its tissue. -Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Partial Portraits,
1888.
I think of experience as acting, not upon, but in and with the poet-I
conceive the poet, not as having, but as being, his experience. -
H.W. Garrod, Poetry and the Criticism of Life, 1931.
206
Guessing the unseen from the seen,
tracing the implications of things,
judging wholes from patterns,
feeling the whole and sensing corners,
travelling underground to get at the mountain,
imagination supersaturated,
dropping stuff all over the place:
vivid concentrations, realer than real,
intensified in the memory,
truth not yet achieved.
Precision instrument for storing impressions,
instant and complete,
trusting imagination and memory,
showing the world reflected in broken glass
to sharpen it for the reader, if he can;
recreating a complex world:
207
simply, deeply.
Ron Price
18 September 1995
Pioneering across two continents, from south to north, over more
than forty years has imbued me with a certain creative spirit. It
was a spirit that was expressed within the context of a
disintegrating civilization with a sophisticated individualism at its
core and a more sophisticated sense of unity at the core of a new,
emerging, global civilization whose nucleus and pattern were to be
found in the Baha’i community.43 The differences between the two
were increasingly accentuated by proximity. During all these years
I lived with what could be called “a frontier feeling." The "frontier
feeling" is evident in this autobiography, in my poetry and several
other genres. It is not defiant, not bellicose toward my neighbours,
but manifests the spirit of friendliness and goodwill. In my
43 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. 8, Oxford UP, 1963(1954), pp. 3-11.
208
eagerness to experiment, to push the boundaries of consciousness,
and to restlessly, ceaselessly innovate over those four decades I
became intimately familiar with as much of the intellectual culture
that my academic proclivities allowed. This border spirit, this
frontier feeling, this pioneer orientation intensified my antipathy
for and estrangement from much that was in my culture. This
antipathy for or, perhaps more accurately as the years went on,
exhaustion with so much that was part of this disintegrating
civilization became an important component of the creative agon
and the raison d'être of my lifelong campaign within the Baha’i
community and its teaching and consolidation programs operating
at a global level. The other component of the cultural limen of this
growing Baha’i civilization could be “aptly described as the
hospitable threshold of an ever open door.”44 This threshold was a
humble one, but it was secure.
44 ibid., p.3.209
This creativity, this expression of psychic energy, as Toynbee goes
on to describe it, is at its maximum when the society that is the
transmitting agent is a civilization in the process of disintegration
and decomposition. I have often wondered just where the accretion
of energy came from beginning right at the start of this pioneering
process in 1962. Is Toynbee providing a theoretical underpinning
for what might be called a psychological explanation of my
creativity, in part related to my bi-polarism? I do not know; I
simply offer the theory here as this autobiography comes to its
close. There were so many cross-currents that operated between
the individual and society, between my own life and the wider life
of society and that flowed into the life of the pioneer, this pioneer.
One such current was put in a clever way by Paul Tillich. Arguably
the twentieth century’s greatest Protestant theologian, once said
that when citizens believe they have no effect on the life of society,
the result is favorable to religion but bad for democracy.45 In
45 Paul Tillich in “Play in Tarbox: A Review of John Updike’s Couples, The New York Times on the Web, April 7th 1968.
210
Canada and Australia I think it was bad for both. The lives of these
citizens became locked in job, family and play and the bigger
social picture is one that was just talked, viewed on TV and in the
media about but never or rarely acted upon. The big picture, of
course, was complex and filled with so many issues. I have written
on this theme elsewhere and so will leave its complex tentacles
here.46
But now to some prose-poetry beginning with that poet-activist
James Dickey:
JAMES DICKEY: SOMETHING THAT MATTERS
Dickey wants to change the reader; he wants to use the poem as a
medium through which the reader is raised or torn out of himself
into a larger, more energized state of being...This is a poetry that
forces the reader to know he is in the presence of a kind of truth at
46 Ron Price, “Responses to Circle of Unity,” dialogue, Spring 1986, pp.37-8, among other places.
211
which (he) could not have arrived at by himself. -Bruce Weigl and
T.R. Hummer,”Introduction”, The Imagination as Glory: The
Poetry of James Dickey, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1984,
p.2.
...a curious tension exists between poetry and belief, idea, principle,
or reason. That is, while we hear a good deal about poetry’s need to
be based upon an explicit view of the meaning of existence, we are
often very bored and exasperated by the poetry which testifies to
such a view. -Howard Nemerov, William Blake in Poetry and
Fiction: Essays, Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, 1963, p.vii.
You want to get the reader in,
move him about emotionally,
intuitively, physically even,
out of complacency, drift,
help them find their real lives,
combating the malaise, do some purging,
212
undistorting, unblunting: your poem
is something that matters--
a two hundred year old romantic dream--
and we’ve been moved.
Some transforming, healing,
life-affirming impulse:
pretty ambitious stuff, eh?
From an initial repulsion
Through acceptance to a full embrace--
sounds like something I’d like
to pull off, too!
Can we call you a poet
of the second and third epochs?
A foundation poet for the Kingdom
of God on earth? I don’t know, James,
but I like what you’re into, so much of it:
the dramatic confrontation of self and guilt,
213
the presence of such joy as to remove self-pity--
good gear, James, good gear!
The search for the energizing Truth:
now there’s a goal worth pursuing.
How are you coming now, James,
in your redeeming search of the depths?
That divine intermediary?
Is it more than the poem?
More than imagination?
Is there something beyond
these sacred and resplenent tokens
from the planes of glory?
Is there something beyond
the green garden of these blossoms
in the lands of knowledge, beside
the orient lights of the Essence in the
mirrors of names and attributes?*
214
2 October 1995
*Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, pp.3-4.
DOMESTICATION
Since I went pioneering in 1962 there has been what Robert Bly
calls “a domestication of poetry”. “That’s one metaphor” says Bly
“to explain the amazing tameness of the sixty to eighty volumes of
poetry published each year, compared with the compacted energy”
of the poetry that came from the “wild knots of energy” of the
poetry going back at least to the 1920s. --Robert Bly, “Knots of
Wild Energy: An Interview With Wayne Dodd”, American Poetry:
Wildness and Domesticity, Harper and Row, NY, 1990, p.300.
We have never before faced what it’s like in the culture when
hundreds of people want to write poetry and want to be instructed
in it...We know how to instruct a hundred engineers, or computer
215
technicians...We don’t know how to instruct in the area of poetry.
-Robert Bly, ibid., p.318.
Such a burgeoning, multiplicity,
everything happening at once.
But, you know Robert,
I’ve met a lot of engineers
who aren’t too happy with their instruction.
We’ve got much to work out in this
incredible planetary fertilization,
bifurcated merging, cross-fertilization,
exploding tempest, increased intensity,
desperately troubling times.
Wondrous leaps and thrusts cross-firing:
leaving people bewildered,
agonized and helpless.
Those knots of wild energy, we had them too,
216
as the great Order began to form back then
in the first two epochs of this Formative Age:
Our earliest pioneers1 had what you might call
a conflagrant holy urgency.
I came in on the firey end
of that ninth stage of history
and caught the comet’s burning ice
and after thirty years I try to translate it
into a poetry of dazzling prospects,
a poetry of two more epochs.
Is it wild, Robert? Is it wild?
I was wild; I was. And I, too,
have been domesticated.
1 1921 to 1961: 40 years
Ron Price
217
16 October 1995
ACCEPTING UNKNOWINGNESS
I suspect that the greatest poetry is, as a rule...a concise and simple
way of saying great things...this does not necessarily mean ‘un-
complex’ or ‘easy to understand’. Not everything or everyone is
always concise and simple; even the simplest souls have complex
moments. -With appreciation to John Livingston Lowes and C.Day
Lewis in The World of Poetry, Phoenix House, London, 1959,
pp.133-134.
You’re not looking for some top-40 tune here,
or a delightful ditty like:
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
Some easy style, light reading,
a little amusement, to be taken over breakfast
218
with your morning paper, come on mate!
What do you take me for? I’m not a comedian
with a quick fix, instant laugh, insight guaranteed.
I bring you a certain darkness in which I labour
to enshroud you, certain fluctuations and associations
which I melt down for your purpose and make distant
for you to reach for: buy those spectacles,
for this is no dead vacuum, floundering place, dimness.
You must cultivate your poetic receptivity,
accept unknowingness when it comes, as you would
in those mysterious places, the faces of friends,
those you love and associates you hardly know.
Ron Price
20 September 1995
THE ABODE OF DUST TO THE HEAVENLY HOMELAND
219
Dickey’s sense of personality (is)....a series of imagined dramas,
sometimes no more than flashes of rapport, kinships with....the
apocalyptic...in which personality is gained only when reason is
rejected...The process of increasing self-consciousness...as every
existential role in the universe must...be abandoned...reverence for
life...his own personal history as an analogue to...an exploration of
twentieth-century....a fundamental helplessness of man....the poet a
shaman, a specialist in ecstacy, a participant in the divine... -Joyce
Carol Oates, “The Imagination of James Dickey”, The Imagination
as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, University of Illinois Press,
Urbana, 1984, p.68, p.72
The main thing in poetry is the discovery of an idiom and the
exploitation of it over an area of thought for a long time. -James
Dickey in Jane Bowers-Martin’s, “Jericho and God’s Images”, The
Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, Bruce Weigl
220
and T. Hummer, editors, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1984,
p.150.
Poetry is a happening in depth...at that level of the personality
where things really matter...it is as divine intermediary between
you and the world that poetry functions, bringing with it an
enormous increase in perceptiveness, an increased ability to
understand and interpret the order of one’s experience....the
pleasure...the gift of being able to...get as far into a great good
place-the poem itself-as one can...
-James Dickey, “The Energized Man”, ibid., pp.164-165.
The terror that many feel
in the silence of infinite spaces
when the wind blows whistling
through the edges of the doors
and windows on a cold rainy night
at the edge of a great sandy desert
221
in a new suburban house
with the garden not-yet-planted,
or in a thousand other infinite spaces
on this whirling ball,
I have not often felt.
I have for many a long year,
since somewhere in my teens,
seen the universe as a benign place
and a meaningful one, purposeful,
a direction to an evolutionary process
and poetry, imagination, aliveness
fill the space, give me a feeling
I have lived and defined that order,
meaning, purpose, reality.
I have sensed I am nothing.
Out of this nothingness I attempt to become.
222
In this attempt I begin to live, to write
and to use my imagination to enrich
all that I live for and believe,
all that I see in this dizzying universe
of suns, moons, space--
this abode of dust on my way to
the heavenly homeland.
Ron Price
2 October 1995
*Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, (US, 1952), p.4.
LUSCIOUS FIELDS OF GRAIN
I had already reached the conclusion that we are in no wise free in
the presence of a work of art; that we do not create it as we please
223
but that it preexists in us and we are compelled, as though it were
by a law of nature, to discover it because it is at once hidden from
us and necessary. -Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things
Passed, trans. by C.K. Scott Moncrieff.
Several of Roger White’s poems I have taken and reworked the
themes. I felt a little like Proust. I felt I was somehow finishing off
the sculpting process, tidying up the edges, expanding on White’s
pithy language. I was discovering something else in the form which
was hidden and waiting to come out. Here is one that came out. -
Ron Price, 9:00 am, 29/12/95, Rivervale, Western Australia. See
Roger White, “It is an Easy Thing to Love the Dead”, The Witness
of Pebbles, p.58.
I have loved the dead for years,
have talked to them in prayer
with occasional answering tears.
224
It is not difficult to love these souls
who can not wound or tell a lie.
They seem to satisfy some need
as we are told they can perform a deed,
a deed of miraculous force from their
special place right near the Source.
They are like some fruit beyond the seed
which small and dry would never yield-
we thought-such a full and luscious field
of grain to help us here, to help us gain.
Now who would argue with a rose?
Who’d expect a tree to turn up its nose?
Both were grown, so long, so free,
with quiet charm for all to see.
Do not tell of pain and dung
of tortured sap and spirit wrung.
Ron Price
225
29 December 1995
I define my poetry, my autobiography, my individuality in the
context of a community of individuals. Ben Franklin did as much
as America was laying its foundations47 and I do the same as the
Baha'i Faith lays its foundations in country after country, especially
during these four epochs and especially in Canada and Australia
where I have lived my life. I think, too, that my autobiography and
my autobiographical poetry is as much a literary strategy as it is a
generic category; it is like some reminiscent fieldwork on myself
where I take a leap. It is not so much a leap into the past as it is an
introduction of invention into my existence in a complex layering
of vastly disparate elements.48 If there was ever resentment in my
life and for years there was, healing and reconciliation has come,
partly through autobiography's protean forms, partly through prayer
47 Kenneth Dauber, The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Politics From Franklin to Melville, University of Wisconson Press, 1990, p.33.48 Peter Steele, Autobiographical Passion. Melbourne UP, 1989, p.107.
226
and partly through those mysterious dispensations of a watchful
Providence.
227
<a href=l23></a>
VOLUME FIVE
CHAPTER EIGHT
SOCIAL TOPICS OF RELEVANCE
You will find below a series of poems on topics of individual and
social concern involving history and issues of contemporary
relevance. Although this autobiography attempts to explore the
history and issues of the four epochs, I don't think it does so quite
as comprehensively as I wanted when I set out on my writing
journey seventeen years ago. And so I include in this chapter some
poems to compensate for this inadequacy. It is impossible for any
soul to possess that "qualification of comprehensive knowledge"49
that 'Abdu'l-Baha speaks of, although some in the Baha'i
community seem to have acquired an amazing breadth of
49 'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970(1925), p.36.
228
knowledge.50 I have always found economics beyond me,
beginning with the two weeks in September 1963 when I enrolled
in an introductory economics course before withdrawing and taking
Spanish in its stead. The physical sciences, especially physics, have
always eluded me and the biological sciences seemed to possess an
enormous and intricate specialized vocabulary. Foreign languages
after my eighteen birthday became quite uninteresting and that
Spanish course was dropped after a month of trying to memorize a
long and tiresome vocabulary. Mechanical subjects, trades areas,
engineering, mathematics and other disciplines from what became
in this half century a burgeoning list all moved to the periphery of
my life and danced around in a region of nearly total obscurity.
And so it is that whatever contribution they might make to an
understanding of social problems has been lost to me.
______________________________________________________
50 I could list here some of the Baha'is I have known directly or indirectly during these four epochs, but I will leave it to history and its writers to expand on this aspect of my times.
229
I draw on a wide but limited field of knowledge, limited to the
social sciences and humanities for the most part, for the following
poems. I lower myself into my "divinely ordained solitude," not
like a swimmer into freezing water as Rilke did, but into some river
where poems arrive as they did to Rilke: suddenly, in urgent bursts,
like visitations. A crystalline voice does not ring through the gale,
as it did with Rilke but, rather, like a baby arriving down the birth
canal and a release of a weight, a strain, a train, of thought falls
onto the paper. These poems seem part of a great granary; each
poem has its own afterlife, an afterlife that I discover
serendipitously as the days and the years go by. Some of this
afterlife is blissful, joyful and some has a plainness, an everyday
simplicity that is as ordinary as the ordinary life I once lived. The
afterlife is my own; the meaning is my own and, if readers find
something helpful or pleasureable here, that is a bonus.
1. ENVY AND LUST:
230
LOTS OF WORK STILL TO DO
You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attendance upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young:
What else have I to spur me into song?
-W.B. Yeats in On Poetry and Poets, T.S. Eliot, Faber and Faber,
London, 1947, p.257.
Can it be that I do not envy any more?
No desire to be young or handsome?
No desire to receive some recognition
by being elected or appointed?
Perhaps a wishing that I might have
become something more: purer?
more independent? more courageous?
Horace said those who envy grow thin.
231
That’s why I’m getting chubby.
Found: a sign for the absence of
the least trace of envy--chubby
old men and women. No, that can’t be.
I’ve been envying all my life.
There was always someone better
at something than me. Now, well,
I just don’t care. Is this the root
of my spiritual gainer: insouciance?
The contextual nuances for envy
are multitudinous and I must confess
that occasionally, even now,
admiration finds envy’s trace element
like a cold wind from the Arctic blowing
faintly, so faintly across my face.
I nearly miss it; it goes so fast,
but it stick’s for an instant in my liver,
232
or is it my kidney, unbeknownst.
Envy’s microscopic trace, extracted,
purple? black? colourless? only the
psychoanalytic-geologist would know for sure.
There’s been a thinning going on
underneath my nose leaving my
wanting faculty highly pruned, sorted.
What, pray, has slaked my envy?
Has that primary envy of my mother’s
breast just run out of gas?
This theological problem, abating,
perhaps is taking a new form: pride.
Good God, no! Desire’s quiet new receptacle.
Erudition, those who can amuse,
who have money to travel,
those who have radiant acquiescence,
233
courage--the list seems endless,
quieter but endless.
Lots of work still to do.
Ron Price
28 November 1995
My wife has helped me in achieving whatever 'spiritual
tranquillity'51 I have achieved in a marriage relationship, but this
was achieved only when I learned to enjoy her soul and not lust
after her body, a process too long to describe here. Pushkin said
this and it was also my own experience. The plethora of women's
and men's magazines now on the market, life-style magazines like
Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, Women's
Weekly, inter alia which deal with relationships, marriage, sex and
love have not been of much value to me; for I have never been
much of a reader of this dense forest of reading material. Nor have
51 Robin Edmonds, Pushkin: The Man and His Age, MacMillan, London, 1994, p.132.
234
the other dense forests of magazines: cars, fishing, food, domestic,
fashion and on-and-on contributed much to my life, spiritual or
material. This is not to say, of course, that I have not been affected
by this plethora of an often engrossing trivia, a quotidian reality
which bathes the senses of everyday man with its enticing
attractions.
The car, for example, which Roland Barthes sees as the equivalent
of the Gothic cathedrals, with their magical spirit and utility, has
given me much pleasure and practical value over more than 40
years since I first got my license at the beginning of my pioneering
life in 1962.(Mythologies, 1967, p.99.)52
2. SUICIDE AND DEPRESSION
52 I could write much more about the car, domestic appliances, furniture, clothes, inter alia but, for the most part, they were cultural appurtenances which were just a natural part of my environment and, although useful and a source of comfort and pleasure, they occupy a basically periferal and not a central part in this autobiography.
235
EXPANSE
‘Tis a dangerous moment for anyone when the meaning goes out of
things and Life stands straight-and...yet no content comes. Yet such
moments are. If we survive them they expand us. -Emily
Dickinson, Prose Fragment 49.
I clutched at sounds
and groped at shapes
and still my heart did groan
in some endless wilderness
it wailed, lamented bone.
I could not find the golden lines,
silver or hyacinth--only a base metal
from which I made a nail
for my sackcloth shirt and tail.
236
I felt it in the afternoons
when the light angled low;
it left a scar; it left a hurt
deep down, a feeling, woe.
‘Twas a sense of full despair
and it hung like weighted rocks.
When it went I felt expanse,
Immortality, like darkness
leaving from the grass and
all creation in a dance.
Ron Price
25 June 1995
Stephen Gill writes, in his analysis of the poetry and life of
William Wordsworth, that the poet doesn't deal with fact but with
the poetry of the imagination. The brain, he says, generates its own
cues for recalling memories. And so it is that the recreation of the
237
self hinges on infusing mental states into the environment and on
the ability to change the self-image in beneficial directions so that
one can undertake the arduous task of a poetic vocation. Gill, of
course, is writing about Wordsworth, but I have found over the
years that much that applies to Wordsworth and his writing applies
to me and my writing. The self, writes Gill, is a biproduct of a
reality monitoring process; it is perceptually driven and reflectively
generated. Autobiography became for Wordsworth what it has
become for me, a way of watching over my conduct, of giving it
shape, of inventorying and stylizing daily behaviour and of
constructing identity. As I attempt to comment on the several
issues that I do in this chapter the commentary of Stephen Gill is
highly relevant.53
3. REGRET AND REMORSE
53 Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford UP, NY, 1980.238
VICTORY THROUGH FAILURE
Nothing is more fruitful for man than the knowledge of his own
shortcomings.
-’Abdu’l-Baha, Promulgation, p.244.
...you cannot lay remorse upon the innocent nor lift it from the
heart of the guilty. Unbidden shall it call in the night, that men may
wake and gaze upon themselves.
-Kahlil Gibran, Prophet, p.43.
Unbidden it called this morning, early,
heavy it laid upon my pillow and climbed
around my ears like a sleepy mosquito
who was only into dull roars. It headed
for my eyes and my shutting them had no
239
effect as it climbed right on into my brain,
slowly eating its way to my heart, stopping
on its way to burn my liver if it could-and it did.
I looked upon myself like some prisoner
whose regret was like some jail-cell barring
me from joy and colouring my morning with
the nethermost fire of remorse. I would be here
again, I thought, for I was so far from the
immortal Wine. And yet, and yet, I would
not be estranged from this Cause and these
vicissitudes of fortune would not draw me away
from my Goal: I hoped! I hoped! I hoped!
For I found meaning here, right here, in
these tribulations. I was not radiant, not happy;
I had not learned this yet, but I had learned
to search for meaning and this would have to do
240
and I did. The radiance came later, years later.
Weary, I stood at the window at dawn and watched
the rising sun. Slowly my eyes gladdened, invaded
and sustained with the fresh meaning of gold
and the subtle tempter, for the moment, slipped away.
My sense of fitness returned. Perhaps this fire
would be removed; perhaps it would go on for years.
For great forces churned inside me and tore me apart
and had all my days. Tremendous energies were
often released. I trust this will happen again perhaps
through my failures, yet again, yet again.
Ron Price
16 December 1995
241
One of the twentieth century's famous feminists, Simon de
Beauvoir,54 wrote that in writing her autobiography she wanted to
create an identity of her own and win for herself an ethical centre.
She knew that in this struggle she was not successful in all
respects. So is this true of me as I go about commenting on these
issues and struggling with my struggles in this poetry and in my
life.
Identity in many ways has come to mean for me what it is for the
post-structuralist,55 namely, a site of contesting selves: past self,
present self, public self, private self. I as a writer must choose
and/or invent a speaking self.
4. COMMUNITY
A NECESSARY INSTABILITY
54 Karen Vintges, "Beauvoir's Autobiography: Autofiction or Self-Technique,? Labyrinth, Vol.1 No.1, Winter 1`999.55 Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single meaning or one singular existence. Instead, every individual reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning and existence for a given text.
242
The community should not be like a chain which is only as strong
as its weakest link, but like a garment whose fibers, the warp and
weft, may be ever so slender, numerous and intimately connected.-
Ron Price with appreciation to Charles S. Pierce, Collected Papers
5.264.
Some see the meaning of life
As making a contribution to the community,
for here the creative personality
is born and matured;
it is the gift of evolution,
the ordering of inequality,
the integration of the individual,
where restraint and self-control
are part of self-esteem.
One day community feeling
will triumph over everything
that opposes it, as natural
to man as breathing,
243
the scientific inevitability
of social harmony
slowly overcoming the force
of antisocial dispositions
now so preponderant in the world,
at least in certain places.
Perhaps a Ciceronian stoicism
to start with and a widening
secular spirituality, as the blank page
whirls about in the winds of the spirit
and we come to understand cognition,
the social restraints
which limit our options,
define our choices
and generate what seems to us
as a restriction of potential.
Ron Price
244
26 June 1995
"Our years come to an end like a sigh," so it says in the Psalms(90).
"They are soon gone and we fly away." Much of the landscape of
my life, however much it has involved a search for solitude and
peace, it has also involved a great deal of the landscape of
community. One of the first epic's based on community and
individualism in the western intellectual tradition was Homer's
Odyssey. Amidst what were once a thousand entertaining and
instructive episodes for western readers, the hero, Odysseus, is
hardly ever absent from the story. His lonely voyage, part and
parcel of the emerging Greek city state that he and it was, in
strangely mixed scenes of human existence, I have over the years
felt a strong identity with. For I too have travelled, part and parcel
of an emerging global Order in our time, an Order that was, like
Odysseus', hundreds of years in the future before it would reach its
apotheosis. There was a strangeness to it, an excitement, a sense of
the bizarre. It was written, too, in the Formative, the Iron, Age of
Greek culture. Perhaps, as history specialist Anthony Andrewes
245
writes, "the very instability and incoherence of Greek political
institutions" led to "a political evolution which was denied to other
cultures."56
One often sensed this instability in these early years of the
evolution of the Baha'i administrative Order, especially working as
I have so frequently over the last forty years with the new
institutions which Baha'u'llah has created with an inventiveness
and brilliance that only a Manifestation of God could possess.
There was a fragility not unlike the flowers of the garden. But,
then, it was difficult to get a right and proper sense of historical
perspective, for it took hundreds of years before the golden age of
Greek culture finally arrived. And we, the Baha'is, in this first
century of the Formative Age, are really right at the beginning--
about the time that Odysseus was on his voyage. At least one could
argue the case. And so I do, as I comment from a historical
56 Anthony Andrewes, Greek Society, Penguin, Melbourne, 1987, p.xxiii.246
perspective on this poetry, dealing as it does with some of the
issues of our day.
5. SOCIAL PROBLEMS
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY
Because of American poet Wallace Stevens’s emphasis on the
importance of the imagination, he is sometimes criticized for being
little in touch with social issues and political realities.1 Some who
read Price's poetry extensively may find, may conclude, a similar
out-of-touchness in its content. Certainly there are relatively few
poems about particular and explicit social problems like: war,
poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, and refugees among so
many others. At the same time, I write about the agitations of
private life and the torments of public questions. It seems to me
247
that there also exists in my poetry what John Brenkman calls a
utopian power.2 This power derives from, or lies in, my poetry’s
many concrete connections and its language of of everyday practice
and living with its relevant social contexts. As I see it, my poetry
does not aim to separate itself from those contexts or to set itself
above them. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Alan Shucard, Modern
American Poetry: 1865-1950, Alan Shucard, et al., Twayne
Publishers, Boston, 1989, p.149; and 2John Brenkman, Culture
and Domination, 1987, p.108.
I write about social and political issues,
in context, finding a context, searching
for a context, concerned as I am with
expressing my experience within this
new Order, with defining its reality, its
ambience, its future, its past, its present
construct, with giving language to all
that I am and all that is this System
248
represented in this poetry of heightened
visual, imaginative, intellectual sensibility,
giving words to things others never notice
in the everyday, paying attention to colours,
shapes, textures, objects, time’s relationships
that are right in front of me, hard, clear, real:
incorporating and integrating into the what
the what that is me and the when, where, why.
What can we call it:
the social construction of reality?
Ron Price
24 June 1995
Updated: 4/12/07
The sociologist Alvin Gouldner says that in life, in society, the
norm of anonymity is "a necessary adjunct" to what he calls "the
249
short-take society wherein one goes from one short-take role to
another." Between these short-takes one must "be accorded civil
inattention and encouraged quickly to change roles" not to sustain
relationships.57 There is no doubt that throughout a large part of
one's life this is true, but there are situations where most of us have
to deal with relationships that are not short takes. These are found,
for me, in marriage, in some jobs and in some experiences of the
Baha'i community.
Edward Sampson writes that "what is meant is continuously being
reframed by what is...said."58 One could put the same idea this
way: "how do I know what I think until I see what I've said?" The
self is a product of the social arrangements which support it. The
nature of those supports themselves are increasingly, although not
always, multiple and fragmentary, temporary and without depth.
Viewed from this perspective even the mind becomes a form of
57 Alvin Gouldner in The Dramaturgical Society, Internet, 10 October 2002.58 Edward Sampson in "The Self and its Constructions: A Narrative Faith in the Postmodern World," Barbara J. Socor, Narrative Psychology: Internet and Resource Guide, 1996-2003,Vincent W. Hevern.
250
social myth and the self-concept is removed from the head and
placed within the sphere of social discourse. Max Weber
observes59 that both for sociology and for history the object of
cognition is subjective meaning. This subjective meaning is both
the basis for and the complex of action. The point here is not that
"anything goes," but rather that "everything is contingent"; not that
there are no rules, but that the rules that do exist are decidedly
"historically and culturally situated." At the same time, from a
Baha'i perspective, I am inclined to the view that there are essential
metaphysical verities and these verities are eminently prone to
potentially endless revisions. These revisions ensure that "the self
is not an organic thing that has a specific location but is, rather, a
dramatic effect arising diffusely from the scene that is
presented..."60 This autobiography and the way I see my life has
been significantly affected by this 'social constructionist' line of
thinking.
59 ibid.60 Irving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p.253.
251
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES
All attempts to write about persons or events, however important,
to which the poet is not intimately related in a personal way are
now doomed to failure....Auden’s elegies are linguistic homes in
which the dead continue to abide, their words and ideas held fast
among the words and ideas of the living poet. -Jahan Ramazani,
Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, pp.201-203.
I often wondered why writing about, say,
Julius Caesar or Churchill, was so difficult;
or even the old starving China boys that my
mother used to talk about when trying to get
me to eat my vegetables, or the disaster in old
Dneipropetrovsk or Novosibirsk, or those old
Chukchi people and their rain dance: one needs
some kind of intimacy really.
252
We each have different worlds.
Now, Mr. Auden, I find writing begins
both from the sense of separateness in time
and the sense of continuity
of the dead, the living and the still-to-be-born.
It all goes on and on, virtually, forever,
Although my short span will soon end
and, as you say, these words are like
carving my initials on my desk,
maybe someone will read them one day:
‘tis a type of rising from the dead,
or as some say...an ever-advancing civilization.
If this is too pretentious then
just some personal reminiscences,
253
just reminiscences, Mr. Auden.
Ron Price
30 June 1995
THE GREYING OF THE RED AND YELLOW PERIL
We grew up at a time
when Karkhov, Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk
were black foot-prints in the snow
-Bruce Dawe, “What Lies on Us”, Sometimes Gladness, 3rd
edition, Longman, 1988, p.142.
Some of us grew up at a time
when Krushev, Kiev and Kennedy
were part of the language of the big world
that we only ever partly understood at best.
254
The yellow beast and her red friend
gradually became greyer and greyer
and then the whole thing fell apart
in a brave new world
for which most of us
had lost whatever bravery we had.
By then, I’d lived in so many houses,
in so many towns, known too many
women and thousands of people
that I was never shocked by headlines
or news from the lighted chirping box
and its anonymous deaths,
or private griefs
immortalized yet again
for the zillionth time on film.
I clean my teeth and wind the clock
255
for I am still living.
I have just returned from another evening
where I watch merchandised desire
and rented embraces exhaust the night air,
where frightened cries rise occasionally
and pierce the quiet suburban landscape.
What is happening now
that the land has become grey
and the red and yellow hues
do not threaten us still?
What does all this mean
for us who have seen a century
bathed in blood and tears
on television and in movies?
Ron Price
17 December 1995
256
This would be a good juncture to make some comments on
television and the movies, mediums that have become very
infuential in the half century that this autobiography is concerned
with. I have collected three arch-lever files of notes on the media
from the recent times that I taught media studies and I could wax
eloquent. Instead I will include another poem here. It was inspired
by a documentary.
SAINTSHIP
After ten years you go beyond feeling.
-C. Chessman, BBC, 1993, ABC TV, 30 November 1995: Great
Crimes and Trials of the Twentieth Century. Chessman was a man
waiting on death row in California from 1950 to 1962, in the years
I was preparing, little did I know it, for a lifetime of pioneering.
257
After thirty-three years in the field
your feelings learn to protect themselves
with humorous asides and saying ‘no,’
dwelling in some inner landscape
where the Master rides, lightly rides:
in the mountains you reach for Him.
You cloak yourself in a privacy
which sometimes tastes of dignity
and a hint of spiritual charm
like a herbal remedy, ever so distant,
ever so subtle, dry even.
Sometimes you feel like a delectable,
mysterious sauce, piquant,
puzzlingly attractive,
lingers on the tongue,
surprising their taste buds
with unexpected combinations
258
of colourful, scented, ingredients.
You meet the human need
for delighted astonishment,
but sadly(thankfully?) only sometimes.1
So much of it is dry paperland
with no more juice
than some of those useless lemons,
that is why you admit people to friendship slowly.
You had to after winning
all those popularity contests
which you didn’t even want to enter:
So you perfected evasion into an art form;
kept away the bore, the pedant, the obtuse,
the fake, the chatterbox, the loud,
just about everyone: gave them the slip
when they blundered uninvited
with their chit-chat into your personal space,
259
with their well-intentioned catechism of things
that would be good for you.
For the cosmic patriotism of this Cause
and its enthusiastic temper of espousal
can get a little thin,
unless one is constitutionally sanguine
and possesses a congenital amnesia,
an incapacity for even transient sadness,
a temperament organically weighted
on the side of cheer,
fatally forbidden to linger,
even momentarily, on the dark side.
But you, and many of them,
have a different susceptibility
to emotional excitement,
to the impulses and inhibitions
260
that they bring in their train.
This rank-and-file believer,
part of the warp and weft,
an ordinary chap,
seems to have softened with the years,
has unobtrusively acquired
an incapacity for those sacrificial moods
that once inspired his being;
perhaps he has just learned
to inhibit his instinctive repugnances
and has acquired a firece contempt
for his own person
which he is learning to moderate
in both his private and public domains.
Is this how one discovers and measures saintship?
261
1 When I look at some celebrities especially comedians, like Robyn
Williams, I wonder how what seems like their infinite capacity to
delight others must have a wear and tear factor on their lives.
Ron Price
30 November 1995
6. CRISES
PERSISTENCE
The way that we perceive and react to an event or crisis is largely
responsible for the ultimate effect of that event upon us. If we can
understand and make sense out of an event...the impact of that
event will be less dreadful. -A. Ghadirian, ‘Human Responses to
Life Stress and Suffering’, Baha’i Studies Notebook, 3, 1-2, 1983,
p.50.
262
One constant in a world of variables
--they’d be there come rain or shine.
Not many, mind, but someone was always there.
My mother always said they were the only people
who’d have a picnic in the rain:
they’d bargain with the sun.
It must be all those birds collapsing over Akka
which you hear about in their history:
all that blood, sweat and tears.
Yes, you find persistence here,
fed by the blood of those martyrs
and enough joy to take you the distance.
Ron Price
263
17 December 1995
7. DEATH
WOULDN'T HE?
These apocalyptic elegies are indeed not conventional expressions
of consolation but triumphant outbursts directed...to the dead and
Emily Dickinson’s own anguish...an anguish distilled...into
triumph.1 Here, in this poem below, is my own triumphant outburst
with my usual cautionary note derived from Baha'i theology
regarding our final moments. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Benjamin
Lease, Emily Dickinson’s Readings of Men and Books: Sacred
Soundings, MacMillan, London, 1990, p.xvii.
All across the world they lie
behind grey stone
264
and obscurest graveyards
in places noone’s heard
on the edge of town.
Yes, heaven’s humble handful
and not-so-humble,
among simple stones
and not-so-simple.
Hardly heroes, hardly known:
servants, gentlemen, ladies,
every conceiveable type,
they're all here behind stone.
Words carved by unknown hands:
Pioneer Canada Nine Year Plan.
He’d planned his. Knew who he was.
Identity grew into stone
that would last a thousand years.
He was going to end this one befittingly;
265
I mean it was his life, himself,
his mirror of some eternal hyacinth
growing forever in a garden
of eternal splendour, forged,
cut diamond-edged, glittering whiteness
on that snow-white path so close,
touching that Crimson Pillar
and trustworthiness’s pillar of light.
He would, at least, feel it.
Wouldn't he?
Ron Price
28 October 1995
Perhaps the inclusion at this point of some lines from one of Emily
Dickinson's apocalyptic elegies, an elegy that is not so much a
triumphant outburst as it is "anguish distilled" into a quiet triumph.
In poem number 1142 she opens with the lines:
266
The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House supports itself.
It is logical to assume that 'the House' here is the human soul. The
Baha'i might add that "The House supports itself" with the help of
God and prayer. Dickinson concludes this pithy piece as follows:
A past of Plank and Nail
And slowness--then the Scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul.
Dickinson provides here a succinct phrase to capture, to express,
for me and for her a discernible shape to this poetic work.
Seemingly diffuse and sprawling, there is an intellectual depth in
267
her literary eccentricity--and in mine. At least there is depth for
me---and hopefully for readers who chance by the rivers of thought
this work contains. In the last two decades of Dickinson's life,
1863-1883, the idea of finishing a poem became repugant to
Dickinson.61 For me, the idea of finishing this autobiography is,
not so much repugnant, as unrealistic. There are always things to
add, to take away and to alter and I'm sure this will be the case as
long as I live and can function.
8. SEX
THE SMILE
The chronic cleavage between love and sexual desire is a disease of
western man. Here in Australia was a Canadian who got lots of
practice of learning to love women whom he desired sexually but
61 Paula Bennett, Emily Dickinso: Woman Poet, University of Iowa Press, 1990, p.42.
268
did not give that desire sexual expression. Here was a Canadian
with a face like the back side of a spoon, etched with a smile, with
a cautious reserve and the flavour of irony every time he tasted his
world and his words. -With thanks to Robertson Davies and his
comments on writing on The ABC program Writers and Writing,
25 June 1995, 8:00-8:20 pm.
I’d learned to smile and say cheese
as good as anyone else in that country
of bland faces like the back of a spoon;
and when I finally learned that skill,
after getting rid of my depressions,
well, not quite, they lingered long,
I left for Australia where in that dry land
people’s faces and mouths tell stories,
some of which you wished you didn’t know.
269
Scratch that smiling exterior
of a Canadian face and underneath
you get a gem of fascinating complexity.
I’ve been discovering one all my life
with the help of Australians
who are much more frank, funny
and facially expressive:
bodies are alive here.
They've been jumping out at me
in classrooms where I teach,
on the street when I walk
or drive around, even on TV
and in my own house where
she's been jumping out at me
for nearly thirty years.
The whole place is alive
with body language.
270
The women have been turning me on
so much I’m like a spinning top.
But I always have my Canadian face
to smile at the world:
the cheerful Canadian, the good-guy,
the nice guy.
It’s too much work for most people
to get to know what’s behind the smile,
but I don’t mind. I’m busy enough
getting to know me. That’ll keep me busy
the rest of my life and, with age,
the temptations have not been hitting me
in the face as much
Ron Price
25 June 1995
271
9. APOCALYPSE
WRITING BEFORE THE DAWN: SUSAN SONTAG
These are the darkest hours before the break of day. Peace, as
promised, will come at night’s end. Press on to meet the dawn.-
Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, 1993.
The present age lives by a scenario in which apocalypse looms and
it doesn’t occur...And still it looms. -Susan Sontag in Susan
Sontag: the Elegiac Modernist, Sohnya Sayre, Routledge, NY,
1990, p.147.
But how does one tell the tale of an apocalypse that was so long in
coming and promises to be as long in going? Where to begin and,
more importantly, where to end as we live in and live out of it? It
would seem, at first, a slow apocalypse but, in the end, it may
appear fast. Time perspectives are often mysterious. Given its
272
impalpability, its lubricity, can this protracted apocalypse be
grasped, or only sensed faintly as we slip listlessly through it? Oh,
and by the way, is this apocalypse real, or merely a rhetorical
device to be activated by millenarians, debunked by critics, and
ignored by everyone else? Is "Apocalypse" but a way to connect a
vast constellation of other metaphors, whose referents are
themselves finally just the vague grumblings and grim
presentiments of a culture perennially fixated on the chances of its
own demise? - Andrew McMurry, “The Slow Apocalypse: A
Gradualistic Theory of The World's Demise,” Postmodern Culture,
V6 N3, May, 1996.
In these early years of
the last stage of history
you have written, written,
like so many, pouring
a flood of knowledge
onto a world drowning,
273
drowning apocalyptically.
I always admired your work,
your endless, obsessive work
and your insights: tragedy is
the way we acknowledge
the world’s implacability.*
The House referred to it as
a ‘discouragingly meagre’ response.
Then, there was your succinct statement
on comedy as a precarious ascendancy.*
You wrote so much.
Most people I’ve ever met
just stay out of the ball park
or way out in left field;
you become the lone figure
in the lonely landscape,
you who have been writing
274
since the beginning of this
Kingdom of God on earth.**
You knew, then, that thought was
in ruins and your eschatological mentality
and concern for religious redemption
never found its way near
the Nightengale of Paradise
Who sang upon the Tree of Eternity.
Your melancholy, your seriousness,
your death of history, of self, of culture,
your homelessness, your autobiographical
thinking***, heroic amidst the ruins,
seeking to simplify, not trusting----
all in an apocalyptic mood
which looms while we wait,
a stealth apocalypse plodding
camouflaged among us hiding
275
among us in plain site, looming
in these last dark minutes and hours
before the break of dawn.
* Susan Sontag, ibid., p.90.
** Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By(US, 1957), p.351; the
beginning was 1953.
***Sohnya Sayre, ibid., p.128; all thinking has an autobiographical
aspect says Sohnya.
October 3 1995
10. RETIREMENT
SOME UNHEARD VOICE
"Called in my late fifties to this high office/for a record term..."1 I,
too, felt called by my late fifties after the feeling had grown for
perhaps a decade. By that time I did not have to spend time with
276
the responsibilities of job and endless meetings.-Ron Price with
thanks to 1Bruce Dawe, “The Vision Splendid”, Sometimes
Gladness, 3rd edition, Longmans, 1988, p.183.
Called in my fifties to this high office
for what is coming to look like a record term,
I receive no honours for my grey hairs
or my endless combination of words;
perhaps this is because I seek no honours,
only this late afternoon sunlight glittering
like sparks of stubble over all of creation,
a vitalizing fragrance, too,
like some dawning-place, some day-spring,
some transmutation of grief into blissful joy.
Replenished from deep springs,
perhaps the Ancient of Days,
277
or some unheard voice
from a burning bush, some bounty
beyond the ken of mortal mind or heart*,
I sing in the company of the most exalted angels,
but still I hesitate and halt, still I shake
to my very foundation, still my sorrow
and tears accompany by blissful joy.
Ron Price
19 December 1995
* Baha’u’llah, The Tablet of Carmel
11. MARRIAGE AND SOCIABILITY
A FORTRESS FOR WELL-BEING
278
Many people visit others out of a desire to have company, be
sociable, pass the time, etcetera. Many others, at the other end of
the social spectrum, are lonely and in need of company. Another
group of people don’t want any company and are happy with their
own. Working out your own ‘sociability index’ is important to your
peace of mind, sense of social tranquillity and personal integrity. -
Ron Price with thanks to George Simmel in The Sociological
Tradition, Robert Nisbet, Heinemann, 1966, p.308.
I think if I had a free and healthy and lasting organization of heart
and lungs as strong as an ox’s so as to bear unhurt the shock of
extreme thought and sensation without weariness, I could pass my
life very nearly alone, though it should last eighty years.
-John Keats, In a Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 24 August
1819.
Give me a call sometime; didn’t I tell you
279
the greatest journey in life is to relieve
the sorrow-laden heart.1
If you’re ever feeling a little low,
drop in, no need to give me a call,
unless you want.
I find when I say this not many drop in,
so don’t get the idea that you are imposing
on my time. I’m not the most popular fellow
with everyone and their dog dropping in.
My wife keeps my spirits pretty good,
quite an understanding lady really
and I find I can talk to my son,
like a friend, when sadness visits me.
So we’ve got a, what ‘Abdu’l-Baha called,
a fortress for well-being2 here,
a safe haven, a quiet place,
280
a silent garden where only birds
and blowing branches can he heard.
Can I say a wave of tenderness is here?
Mostly. There are barriers here
which we do not pass:
each in separate solitudes,
in separate rooms much of the time,
You will find greater and lesser pearls
in the corners of our rooms,
in our garden and hidden away
in shallow seas and rivulettes
that run through our lives.
Set free in a diamond studded array,
kept secret mostly, modestly arranged,
for God hath set all things free
from one another
that they may be sustained
by Him alone,
281
and nothing in the heavens
or in the earth, but God,sustains them.3
1 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, source not known
2 other quotations from marriage prayers
3 The Bab, from His Tablet El Kadir(The Mighty)
Ron Price
29 December 1995
12. WAR
In recent years, at least since the late 1980s and 1990s, the subject
of warfare has become more popular, partly because war and terror
are back in the social picture, partly because the whole of the last
century has seen one war after another, partly an end of history
climate of apocalypticism, partly because we increasingly see a
relationship between our own daily activity and war, partly
282
rhetorical inflation, partly endless media hype and partly because
of an increasingly loaded language with warfare terminology:
military-industrial complex, consciousness industry, territories,
borders, logistics, defences, inter alia.62
DAYTON’S TEMPORARY BOND AND TV'S SCATTER GUN
The first peace talks in my life, the first end-of-war talks were in
1945 at Yalta. There were then a series of peace talks in Korea, in
Viet Nam, in relation to the Cold War, in the Balkans, in the Arab-
Israeli War, the list seems endless. As I write this poem there are
peace talks going on nearly sixty years after the first ones in my
life. "Why were there peace talks in Dayton Ohio?"-Ron Price with
thanks to Alister Cook, “Message from America,” ABC Radio,
Sunday, 26 November 1995, 7:15 pm and 21 February 2003.
62 Paul Mann, "The Nine Grounds of Intellectual Warfare," Postmodern Culture, V6 N2, January, 1996.
283
The Wright Bros would not have believed it;
we did not believe it:
peace in the Balkans-at last!
Is it a sign of things to come?
If we can sort out this knot
anything is possible.
Who would have thought you could fly?
Who would have thought we’d get peace
in our time?
They’re turning in their graves now;
they’re turning; things are turning.
There’s a turning of the wheel,
some kind of vital axle’s here,
some kind of vital oil
as a peaceful Order emerges.
It’s an oil ignited in the Siyah-Chal;
284
gone now around the world,
a light that’s far beyond those fairies,
far beyond Dayton’s temporary bond.
far from TV's endless scatter gun.
Ron Price
26 November 1995
13. CIVILIZATION
In Kenneth Clark's discussion of civilization he says there are three
"essential ingredients:"63 leisure, movement and independence.
'Abdu'l-Baha puts the focus on "purity, independence and
freedom." This poem explores some of the core problems of
civilization at a quite personal level, more personal and deeper for
me than is usually examined in the media.
63 Kenneth Clark, op.cit., p.140.285
This poetry is
an emotional response
to the truths of revealed religion
in an hour when
my contemporaries
are looking for different truths.
While I tried to understand
these great truths
I moved thirty-six times,
possessed a restless
insatiate curiosity and,
by the time I was sixty,
all I wanted was tranquillity,
the experience of fine discrimination
and the capacity to discover truth
through the delicate balance of words.
286
Purity seemed to elude me
as the years went on
and I became increasingly
encrusted with the
soil and soot of a body
of staggering incapacity.
Ron Price
29/5/03.
VOLUME FIVE
CHAPTER NINE
287
PRAISE AND GRATITUDE
I'd like to close this autobiographical work with some poetry,
poetry that is an expression of praise and gratitude for the
developments that have taken place on Mt. Carmel. In many ways
these developments express, symbolically, the achievements in the
half century that this autobiography describes: in my life, in my
religion, in the Baha'i community and as a hope for humankind.
Autobiographies written by Baha'is during these years, and there
have not been many, extend what you might call a hypothetical
hermeneutics1 to correlate the events of Baha'i history with
episodes in their own lives. And this is what I do in both narrative
and poetry. -Ron Price with thanks to Linda Peterson, Victorian
Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation, Yale UP,
London, 1986, p.61.
______________________________________________________
APPLAUSE
288
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
and dances...
-William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”.
Walking through these gardens green,
red-pebbled paths and cypress sheen,
He saw those marble columns tall,
a Parthenon reborn; he raises a call
back to the Greeks!
whom for many a year he seeks.
Such a brilliance to the eye,
continuous with the stars who die,
but only after many years
and then their light goes out, my dears.
289
All of history here he saw,
the future too in one draw
of breath, one cast of eye.
The whole world around it danced so high
He nearly missed the wealth this view had brought
because he had not really thought.
Often when he sits or lies
there comes upon his inward eyes
this flash of beauty like a dream
mountain fresh, torrent, stream.
Then his heart fills up at last;
his rivers run, his mind moves fast.
After years of working for a Cause
his eyes taste sweetness, hands applause.
Ron Price
19 June 1995
290
GESTATION
When artists speak about the gestation period for their work I like
to think of a long, medium and short term period. In my own case
the long term gestation involved my grandfather, my mother and
my father. These were the primary influences on my life in the first
half of the twentieth century. Of course, one must also add the
socio-historical influences from this period: the two wars, the
decline of tradition, the new media, et cetera. The medium term
influences involved my career as a teacher, my pioneering and
experience in the Baha’i community, say, from about 1953 to 1978;
and short term gestation and influences, especially Roger White
and the writing of poetry from 1978 to 1992, my years in the north
and west of Australia: 1982 to 1999 and, finally, the Arc Project on
Mt. Carmel from 1987 to 2000. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over
Three Epochs, 18 July 2000.
291
Gradually, an emotional engagement,
an imaginative reconstruction,
a crystallizing of attention,
of life’s waiting,
a linguistic enactment,
a private and colloquial voice
an expression of the paradisical
substratum of experience
in a dark and complex age
of the isolation of the individual
of the individual in community
of an emptying out of an articulate self
to clarify and define the Other,
of a lifelong pursuit of a speech
fitting to one’s life,
of an insistent and intense personal presence
in touch with a spiritual world
and with human society,
292
of inner brightness and darkness,
the precious and the painful,
from place to placelessness,
from now to then,
from here to there
in the power and depth of my solitude.
Ron Price
18 July 2000
Anyone who has got to this final chapter in my story would
probably agree that "a man's true life is not the sum of the events of
his life."64 As authority moved from revelation to reason and
experience in the last two to three centuries, a paradigmatic shift
took place in the writing of autobiography. From a sense of some
objective story, out there, writers became aware that their lives
became more private even as they brought them into the public eye,
64 Ana Hartle, The Modern Self in Rousseau's Confessions, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1983, p.39.
293
the public domain, by the act of writing. The story oscillated
between the presence and absense of the self. That has certainly
been my experience in writing this work. I feel as if I have
artistically arranged the phenomena of my life for aesthetic,
intellectual and moral purposes, for education and reality testing.
But I have been honest. I have not hidden behind the lives of
uncles, aunts, fathers, mothers, a host of significant individuals
who have come into my life or my interests.
The Baha'i Faith, some may feel, has occupied too much of a
central place. But I put it there and did so intentionally. I have
enjoyed writing this account; it has not been distasteful to put
myself at the centre of the stage, although I have been incapable of
the "striptease of autobiography"65 that it has become for so many
and which has also become the taste of a vast readership. For me,
there has been what William James called "a rage for privacy"66
65 Ric Throssell, Wild Weeds and Wild Flowers: The Life and Letters of Katherine Suzannah Pritchard, Angus and Robertson, 1990(1975), p.ix.66 ibid., p.x.
294
and this has balanced whatever confessionalism has been part of
my work. Autobiographers tend to leave out what makes them
uncomfortable. The famous Helen Keller, in her autobiography of
1903, omits the sadness and rage she suffered due to her blindness
and deafness.67
SMALL DIFFERENCES MAKE THE DIFERENCE
The completion of the Human Genome Project, the great
achievement that it is, is coinciding with the completion of the Arc
Project. Both events change and will change the way we think
about ourselves. Just as small differences between our genome and
those of other animals and plants reveal what make us uniquely
human and profoundly different from animals and plants, so do
small differences between the Baha'i Faith and other Faiths make it
the unique and profoundly different phenomen- on that it is. Both
Projects have resulted in great gifts, powerful tools, for humanity's
67 Roger Bishop, "A Review of 'Helen Keller: A Life'." Dorothy Herrmann, in BookPage, 1998.
295
use. Both Projects will help human beings find their place in the
complex systems that make up the great adventure of life in this
universe. Both Projects were launched by inspired visions, visions
that were based on the belief that the pursuit of large-scale
fundamental problems in the life-sciences or in religion was and is
in the interest of humanity. Both Projects are not endings but
beginnings of a new approach to biology on the one hand and
global cooperation, peace and a new future on the other. Both
Projects are identified with extraordinary new power and with the
treatment of dis- ease, one a physical disease and the other
spiritual. Both are associated with a true internationalism which
has developed significantly during these my pioneering days. -Ron
Price with thanks to Barbara R. Jasny and Donald Kennedy, "The
Human Genome," Science, Vol. 291, No. 5507, 16 February 2001,
p.1153.
We get another perspective
on all the life on earth
296
and on this small and insignificant religion
we have played a part in all these years.
Small differences make
all the difference:
a written Revelation,
a clear statement of succession.
My God, these two factors alone
make it unique and pure.
The unity of life, of religion,
is so obvious, so clear, so true:
I see it on that Hill of God,
still the cynosure of a very few.
Ron Price
24 February 2001
297
A NEW POETIC INFLUENCE
The Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi, which the West comes
closest to in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, places the
accent in artistic expression, in its aesthetic philosophy, on the
rustic, the raw, the rough, on the imperfect, the impermanent, the
incomplete, on nothingness, emptiness, detachment. Since much of
my poetry contains accents similar to the tone and texture, meaning
and feeling, conveyed by these words; since I have long felt a
certain identity with the writings of Henry David Thoreau, that
pioneer of yesteryear who also wrote extensively about his
everyday experience in the bush, in the rustic places where he lived
by himself; since the Writings of the Baha'i Faith, and of
Baha'u'llah in particular, also dwell on that same mystical quality
of nothingness and emptiness, of detachment and the wilderness of
remoteness: this particular Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi has a
peculiar relevance to my own writings. -Ron Price with thanks to
298
"The Comfort Zone," ABC Radio National, 3 March 2001, 9:00-
10:00 am.
Only recently has it been confirmed
that this galaxy has a billion planets,1
only just the other day while
the Arc Project was being completed,
filling out our world with light,
with fragrances of mercy wafted
as they are over all created things,
over that myriad of planets.
And here, in these words,
I shed a unique light on the lives
of men and women of four epochs,
these protean beings who strike
a thousand postures in their lives
and change their spots swifter
than the twinkling of an eye.2
299
1 Interview with an astronomer at the American Association for the
Advancement of Science(AAAS) on "The Science Show," ABC
Radio National, 12:10-1:00 pm, 3 March 2001.
2 Robert Louis Stevenson, "Modern History Sourcebook: Samuel
Pepys," 1886. He discusses the chameleon nature of human beings
in his introduction.
Ron Price
3 March 2001
GROWTH 1
Yesterday I wrote a poem, Growth, on my life and the development
of that fragrance until 1962. This morning I felt like continuing
that theme with a focus on the development of my beliefs, that
fragrance. The task seems too difficult to get the required depth.
In the poem below I have set an overall outline but the depth, the
detail, the kind of achievement that Wordsworth attains in his The
300
Prelude I do not seem able to produce, as yet. I have a model in
Wordsworth but my personal achievement in that direction must,
for now, remain elusive. Perhaps one day I will come back to this
theme, this poetic package. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four
Epochs, 28 March 2001.
The only one on campus: '63-'66,
nearly lost the plot
in a mix of depression, sex,
career questions, confusion,
lectures, note taking and exams.
Was saved, in the end,
by Martin and Bond,
put on track,
got a direction,
centred my passion,
still fought fear
301
and depression,
broke the umbilical cord.
Survived those four years
in one piece,
launched to the north,
a real pioneer this time
with a marriage under my belt
to help me make it through.
Lasted, what, nine months?
A mild schizo-affective state!
Patched up and sent out after six
for a final two-and-a-half year
stint by Lake Ontario.
Restored my batteries,
kept my marriage,
302
continued my career,
pioneered again,
a few hours from Toronto,
taught the Cause, thanks
to the Eastern Proc Team,
put Picton on the map.
Fifty years after His passing1
I was in Australia
and praying again
to light up Whyalla
and my life,
both exploded
into more success
than I could imagine.
Divorce and two years
in South Australia
303
led to Tasmania, Victoria,
the NT, WA and back to
Tasmania and a thousand
upon thousand events
taking me to 57,
the opening of the Arc Project
and the Terraces.
Always the fragrance
has been there,
but to follow its journey
as Wordsworth followed his
must wait until another day.
1 'Abdu'l-Baha: 1921-1971
Ron Price
28 March 2001
304
The longer I lived with the details of my life, and I lived with them
in some written form for two decades(1984-2004), the more I
realized that these isolated observations and experiences needed to
be pulled together to gain any profundity, any solidity, any
cohesion, any perspective, any overall pattern and meaning.68 And
they needed to be pulled together quite differently than they had
been the first time or the second. For on both these occasions I felt
that something was missing, something important that I could not
quite put my finger on but something that, if I did not find it, the
whole structure of the narrative would simply lack a soul. Up to
that point, I felt as if all I had really done was transfer dry bones
from one graveyard to another, albeit with some order, some
system and some reverence. Autobiography has been an evolving
literary genre: historically, philosophically69 and in recent times,
poetically. And it has evolved in my own approach over two
decades. Now it seems, as Suzanne Nalbatian describes it in her
68 The poet William Carlos Williams says this much in The Last Words of William Carlos Williams, R. J. Ceras, Associates UP, London, 1995, p.17.69 William Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography, p.9.
305
analysis of autobiography, that this "book is a product of different
selves"70 than the one which I manifested in my habits, in society
and in my vices.
This is really not surprising given that the uniqueness of a place, a
locality, a person, an idea, a life, a love, is constructed out of many
particular interactions, articulations, social relations, social
processes, experiences and understandings. A large proportion of
those relations, experiences and understandings are actually
constructed on a far larger scale than what we can define or
describe at any given moment. The place, the idea or the
relationship is built out of such a complex construction, such a
large scale and so many dimensions, which change so frequently
with the years, that the entire concatenation of people, events and
places often seems like a dream, a vapour, an illusion. This
70 Suzanne Nalbatian, Proust in Aesthetic Autobiography, MacMillan, 1994, London, p.62.
306
autobiography and this poetry tries to capture some of this vapour,
this mirage in the desert, and turn it into water.71
MELANCHOLY'S ANTIDOTE
In 1601, four hundred years before the opening of the Arc Project,
the Terraces on Mt. Carmel, William Shakespeare completed his
composition, his most famous play, Hamlet. The phenomenon of
the character of Hamlet is, as leading Shakespearian analyst Harold
Bloom writes, "unsurpassed in the West's imaginative literature."1
Given the preeminent importance of the process of teaching to the
growth and development of the Baha'i community, in the following
poem I have given my proto-typical teacher in the Baha'i Faith
during that teaching Plans beginning in 1937 the persona of
Hamlet. I have drawn on Harold Bloom's study of Hamlet for
71 D. Massey, ‘Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’, in J. Bird, et al. (eds), Mapping the Futures, Routledge, London, 1993.
307
much of the text of my poem. I have also made one crucial
alteration or inclusion to this persona, the experience of "the most
exquisite celebratory joy."2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Harold
Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Penguin, NY,
1998, p.384; and 2The Universal House of Justice, Letter 3 April
1991.
Hamlet is so endlessly suggestive,
his ever-growing inner self
and his infinite consciousness,
often sees himself as a failure,
a failed, tragic protagonist,
an earlier self had died
and a new one born,
in a sea of constant change,
a graciousness in mourning,
the centre of a solemn consciousness
everywhere and tentativeness
308
the peculiar mark
of an endlessly burgeoning world,
so continuously alive,
a breaking wave of sensibility
pulsating onward.
His bewildering range of freedoms
we can see in ourselves
providing as they do
a will-to-identity
and his sinuous enchantment,
his global self-consciousness,
of two hundred years now.
He needs humanity
to give honour and meaning
to his life for we are not alone.
He lets everything be
309
and trusts in God
to balance, siphon,
the anxiety,
as he makes us see
the world in other ways.
He makes successful gestures
and so do we with our inwardness
in the theatre of the mind
in the inmost self,
our necessary disinterestedness
where the only enemy is self.
But for us there is joy,
melancholy's antidote.
Ron Price
14 May 2002
310
DYNAMIC SYNCHRONIZATION
By the early 1990s the Arc Project was making large holes in the
side of Mt. Carmel. Evoking images of paradise, of the land of
milk and honey, of the blessed isles, of the promised land, of the
Elysian fields, among other pastoral surroundings associated with
this holy place, in the minds of believers around the world, it was
assuming a place of immense proportions in the mind's eye of the
faithful. During this same period of time, in 1993, the Hubble
Spacecraft was fixed in the heavens. As the Arc Project headed to
completion in 2000 and 2001, Hubble sent back data that allowed
astrophysicists to determine with some accuracy the age of the
universe at 12 billion years. Some 40,000 galaxies could be
observed in the sky behind a curvature the size of a grain of sand
and there was a vast increase in the knowledge of the origins of
stars. The Sun and the Moon were also studied during the
construction of the Arc Project telling us much more about these
heavenly bodies. The Sun's polar regions were investigated during
311
this period. Asteroids and comets were also examined in more
detail than ever before. Mars and Saturn also came under the
astronomers' microscopes. -Ron Price with thanks to The Internet:
Planetary Science Spacecraft, 24 June 2002.
They1 said we stood on the threshold
of the last decade
of the radiant twentieth century.
The prospects were dazzling:
little did we know
we'd be able to go back
and see our origins
12 billion years ago.
Yes, there was an acceleration
of spiritual forces then
as May 1992 approached.
The suddenness, the speeding-up,
312
the transformational impact
on my poetic output,
the new feelings of delight
on the dry soil of my heart
and a certain bewilderment
which I have been trying
to understand since those
winter months when
it really began,2
made me slowly realize
that, at last, I could
not do everything
on this long, slippery
and tortuous path
as that dynamic synchronization
at last approached.
1 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message 1990.
313
2 In the winter months of June to August 1992 I wrote 35 poems,
the precursors to an immense poetic unfolding of about 600 poems
each year for the next ten years: 1992-2002.
-Ron Price 27 June 2002
MEDITATION ON BAHA’I WORLD CENTRE
It could be argued and I often do that the first visual evidences of
this new democratic theocracy that is the Baha'i Faith are situated
in the buildings, terraces and gardens on Mt. Carmel. Of course
structures of various kinds go back to the turn of the twentieth
century, indeed, the years after the passing of Baha'u'llah in 1892.
Just as the early seventeenth century in Holland and the works of
painters like Rembrandt witnessed "the first visual evidence of
bourgeois democracy"72 and "a group of individuals (came)
together and (took) corporate responsibility," so too is this the case
with the Baha'i community around the world.
72 Kenneth Clark, op.cit., p.139.314
...............my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
...............to the external World
Is fitted.
-William Wordsworth, “The Recluse”, William Wordsworth:
Selected Poems, Walford Davies, editor, Dent, 1975, p.132.
Here I behold a mind that
feeds upon infinity, a mind
sustained by direct transcendent
power and holds converse with
a spiritual world of past, present
and to come: epoch to epoch,
past recorded time.
Here I see days gone by
returning from those first
315
glimmerings at the dawn of this Age,
enshrined now: the spirit of the Past
for our future’s restoration.
The characters are, now, fresh and visible
in this spot of time with its distinct pre-eminence
and its renovating virtue whereby
our minds are nourished and
invisibly repaired.
Here are those efficacious spirits
who have profoundest knowledge
of leavening of being and
of the workings of One Mind,
the character of this Great Apocalypse
and the types and symbols of eternity,
gathered, as they are, among solitudes sublime.
Here we find our better selves,
316
from whom we have been long departed,
and assume a character of quiet
more profound than so many of
the pathless wastes where we have
long walked, too long, its roads.
Here, too, I hear at last my song which
with its star-like virtue shines to
shed benignant influence,
make a better time,
more wise desires and
simpler and humbler manners.
Perhaps some trace of purity may
come with me and guide and cheer me
with Thy unfailing love
which I forget.
Ron Price
317
19 June 1995
And so I refer frequently to my poetry to explain my personal life
and I refer to my personal life to explain my poetry. This is a
common technique among poets.73 Somehow when a writer writes,
and this is no less true when writing autobiography, he must lift up
to his imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny
of the senses, close to the nose. This is what gives his writing, his
craft, his life, the kind of breath which is not artificial, not dry, but
savoured with an intensity, a spontaneity, a creativity that in some
strange way purifies, improves and filters thought. It takes
autobiography from where it has been for so many years, in what
Allen Shapiro calls "the dark continent of literature,"74 and gives it
new light, if not for many of the readers, at least for some of the
writers.
73 Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs, editor, Jeffrey Meyers, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1988, p.1.74 Allen Shapiro in The Author In His Work, editor, L. Martz, Yale UP, 1978, p.319.
318
DISTINCTIVE VOICE
Distinctive voice is inseparable from distinctive substance...we will
feel, as we read, a sense that the poet was not wed to any one
outcome....the reader is freely invited to recreate in his own
mind....the true has about it an air of mystery or
inexplicability ........the subject of a serious poet must be a life with
a leaning, life with a tendency to shape itself... -Louise Gluck,
“Against Sincerity”, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Ecco
Press, Hopewell, N.J., 1994.
Every atom in existence is distinctive
especially these Hanging Gardens:
we’ve got distinctive substance here
and some of us have been waiting
a long time-try forty years-for this
apotheosis of the Ancient of Days
in a holy seat, at last a genuinely
319
holy seat in a world of seats, seemingly
endless seats: the light of the countenance
of God, the Ruler of the Kingdom of Names
and Fashioner of the heavens hath been
lifted upon thee.*
Here is a world where affliction is married
to ecstasy, suffering defined with virtuosity,
colour mounts on colour, temperatures mix
and pure gold comes from the alchemist,
pure fire, pure spiritual energy so that:
my pages stain with apple-green;
my letters are written in chrysolite;
words find marble, gates and shrines
embedded in diamonds and amethyst.
What is this molton gold, ink burnt
grey, revelation writing? ....cheering
thine eyes and those of all creation,
320
and filling with delight all things
visible and invisible.* Yes and no,
always, it seems, yes and no.
Conflagrant worlds interacting:
the myth is tragic here. A grandeur
that is magnetic, but even here,
the meaning must be found.
Can you see the scars, the evidence:
there’s been emotion here to the
essence of our hearts. I try to name,
localize, master, define that scar,
but it is beyond my pen, beyond the
poignant inadequacy of my strategems.
No response of mine goes deep enough.
This poetry of functional simplicity
will never reach Zion, the City of God,
but I will try: May my life be a sacrifice
321
to Thee, inasmuch as Thou hast
fixed Thy gaze upon me,
hast bestowed upon me Thy bounty,
and hast directed toward me Thy steps.*
14/10/95.
* Tablet of Carmel
EMBALMED
Here are the early stages of a civilization that will create and
experience beauty, that will rise above the cacophony in which the
world now seems to be drowning. As T. S. Eliot looks back to the
Greeks, the Renaissance, the creative peaks of the past, R.F. Price
looks ahead with a vision implicit in the architectural
configurations on Mt Carmel. Ron Price in appreciation to Alan
Shucard, Fred Moramarco and William Sullivan, Modern
American Poetry, G.K. Hall and Co., Boston, 1989, p.101.
322
Perhaps ‘the modern’ could go back
to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase(1912),
the symbol of the international exhibit of art
in New York, the root of the manifestation
of ‘the modern’ in America(1913)
and ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s 239 days in the West.
The big guns had come and changed the world:
Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein and
the broidered Robe of Light
hearing the wondrous accent of the Voice
that cometh from the Inaccessible
to our urban, industrial, democratic,
fragmented, scientific jungle
of motion, speed, urbanity, machinery
and billions of human beings.
Here was the nest of the modern in poetry,
323
where intellectual and emotional complexes
were presented in an instant in time:
containers for ideas and feelings,
poetic sensuousness, hard and clear,
a firey intensity, prose poems,
awakening, invigorating, confusing,
some Hellenic turning,
some nature turning,
some turning, twisting, revolving,
evolving trying to describe our world:
bewildered, agonized, helpless,
invading by some wind
into the remotest and fairest places
and wasting as it germinated.
Poetry created aesthetic objects
out of words, reassembling language,
detached and leading anywhere, everywhere:
324
hymns to possibility, not just gibberish,
idiosyncratic flux, slangy informality,
surprising peculiarity of things.
Eliot advised writers to develop
an historical sense, back into the entire
western intellectual tradition,
my relation to the dead and the unborn:
to escape from the subjective into system, order.
And so I did TS, so I did, a system just being born
back then: 1912, 1919, 1922--goodness, you were
right there, then, at the start with J. Alfred Prufrock:
Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go..(*).
325
That meaninglessness was being replaced,
paralysis, confusion, social falsity, anxiety
and we see the mermaids singing each to each.
...I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us and we drown.(*)
And we drown, dreaming figures, as in a dance.
Silently adoring, embalmed in awe
and pentilekon marble, released to marvel
the magic Dust that noone ever sees.
Ron Price
326
23 June 1995
(*) TS Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, in TS Eliot:
Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, London, 1954, pp.11-16.
There will be, I am inclined to think, many who will read this work
and find it not to their taste. And I am reminded of what one writer
said of T.S. Eliot and his poem The Wasteland, perhaps the most
famous poem of the twentieth century. That poem, The Wasteland,
he wrote “was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant
grouse against life." What a reader gets from a work is quite an
idiosyncratic reality. It is something I have little control over once I
have let loose this work. In the end a writer must please himself.
Gibbon became an autobiographer for the same reason he became
an historian: to see a pattern, a plan in what might appear from a
distance to be a welter of haphazard, chaotic or contradictory
327
experience.75 I have done the same. I do not expect my readers to
see the same pattern.
DISTANT GARDENS
The second century(1944-2044) is destined to witness...the first
stirrings of that World Order, of which the present Administrative
System is at once the precursor, the nuc- leus and pattern-an Order
which, as it slowly crystallizes and radiates its benign influ-
ence...will proclaim the coming of age of the whole human race. -
Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, pp.72-73.
The Parthenon, or whatever, is universal because it can
continuously inspire new personal realizations in experience. It is
simply as impossibility that any one today should experience the
Parthenon as the devout Athenian contemporary citizen exper-
ienced it...The enduring art-product...was called forth by something
75 L. Martz, editor, The Author In His Work, Yale UP, London, 1978, p.325.328
occasional, something having its own date and place. But what was
evoked is a substance so formed that it can enter into the
experience of others and enable them to have more intense and
more fully rounded out experiences of their own. -John Dewey,
Art as Experience, Capricorn Books, NY, 1958(1934), p. 109.
And so it is universal
and will go on being so
down the halls of time,
enriching and intensifying
the experience of those
who are willing to share in its beauty,
to experience it as something new,
something mine,
to which I give the meaning,
reordering colour and shape
in relation to myself,
to experience delight and overcome
329
the inchoate, restricted, apathetic, tepid,
fearful, conventional, routine
through some expansion, intensification,
fullness: ordering matter through form,
on this journey to these far places,
these distant gardens.
Ron Price
23 December 1995
GUITAR + SHOCKS = POETRY
"Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing
now, he must dig down deeper. One would say that the shock of
suffering and vision breaks down, one after another, the living
sensitive partitions behind which his identity is hiding. He is
harassed, he is tracked down, he is destroyed...He dies and is
reborn in and with poetry.....He discovers an essentially free,
330
objectless, creativity in poetry. With each poem, the poet creates a
world and savours it." Such are Maritain's words and they have a
certain resonance with my own thoughts, except I still can sing and
do, although not often. -Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in
Art and Poetry, New American Library, NY, 1953, pp.130-177.
I was soaked in music in the ‘60s
and like a wandering minstrel
for twenty-five years
I took that ubiquitous guitar,
moved to sing, to song,
the pioneer singer.
But the shocks kept coming;
the fires died.
There was nothing left to sing,
except dry bones deep down
on the edges of my tongue,
331
somewhere in my heart.
In my brain a new music did I find,
a certain verbal sound
filled with thought and meaning
deep in the womb,
of some poetic intuition
with tact, subtlety,
to express the inexpressible
in common speech, human voice:
close to my heart,
defining what my thoughts are like,
conferring nobility on words.
Still did I sing old songs
for old folks,
last notes dredged-up
for occasions
332
to try to bring a little joy
to withered faces,
last breaths before death
carried them away.1
1 So it was that once a month I joined a small choir of 4 to 8 people
who sang at Ainsley House for senior citizens here in George
Town.
Ron Price
22 December 1995/
25 April 2003.
UNSURPASSED HOLINESS
Ours is the duty.....to play our part, however small, in this greatest
drama of the world’s spiritual history. -Shoghi Effendi, 21 March
1930, in The World Order of Baha’u’llah, USA, 1974, p.26.
333
Even when all these marble edifaces
with their inaccessible mysteries,
their attendant gardens are complete
we are still faced with ordinary dust.
The domestic orange trees
will still be as unendearing as ever,
contented perhaps in their green universe,
having been taught submission
(you can tell by their roundness).
The geraniums will still be
as pedestrian and obtuse as ever.
The only thing you’ve got here, mate,
is what you have lavishly invested
with your aspiration and belief.
You can grow weary of nightingales
and peacocks, the uselessness of words,
334
the fruitlessness of speculation.
You’ll find here among the frail petals
no formula for perfection.
The disinterested cypresses,
even though they point heavenward,
will offer no certain answer to your questions.
The jasmine may captivate your senses
and paralyse your will,
but the sense of urgency will not leave you
nor this place for some time;
for the hour is perilous and dark
and the rush of history is moving
toward the climax of a spiritual drama
of staggering magnitude
which so few are yet aware: be warned!
Just resume your ordinary life
335
with its deadlines and schedules.
The taxi will soon speed you
to your destination.
The airport can sell you a postcard
of the place which will soon be the stage
for the enactment of several critical acts
in a play of unsurpassed holiness.
Have a safe trip home.
Ron Price
28 December 1995
I CAN SEE YOU NOW
I have found it difficult in the last several years to get my mind off
the Arc that is being built on Mt Carmel. It fills me with profound
pleasure and ardent expectations.
-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 23 December 1995.
336
For if we look back at one hundred years of an unexampled history
of unremitting progress, we also look forward to many centuries of
unfolding fulfillment of divine purpose...incrementally realized.... -
Universal House of Justice, Ridvan, 1992, p.1.
I can see you now: close and distant,
near and far, with pregnant and tragic import,
loosening and tightening,
expanding and contracting,
separating and compacting,
soaring and drooping,
rising and falling,
dispersive and scattering,
hovering and brooding,
unsubstantial lightness,
massive blow--
such is the stuff you are made of,
337
up on that hill, over there,
infinitely diversified,
but I can express you here:
the significant, the relevant,
compressed and intensified
in some exalted rising, surging
and retreating, the sudden thrust,
the gradual insinuation
until I am obsessed with your wonder
and can hardly take my mind off of you:
the enduring, the voluminous, the solid,
room, filling, power, energy of position
and motion, rightness in placing.
And so I am in poised readiness
to meet your surrounding forces,
to persist, to endure with some energy
and some opportunity for action
338
with my unique experience,
gradually letting you yield to me
in the changing light and moods,
your enduring sacredness
and charm and your monumental
register of cherished expectations.
Ron Price
23 December 1995
A SWEET NEW LIFE
"People entering Gothic cathedrals left behind their life of material
cares and seemed to pass into a different world,"76 writes Kenneth
Clark as he makes his feelings of the arts contagious in his book
Civilization. In other ages buildings were constructed simply to
give pleasure. Twentieth century wars have destroyed many of
76 Kenneth Clark, op.cit., p.166.339
these buildings in a fit of modern barbarism. As this was taking
place, as this barbarism was hacking into the evidences of
civilization humans had erected over many centuries, a small and
embryonic community that followed the teachings of its prophet-
founders, the Bab and Baha'u'llah, began to erect new symbols of a
new civilization.-Ron Price with thanks to Kenneth Clark,
Civilization, Pelican Books, 1969, p. 167.
It was an age of minarettes
that staggered the imagination,
built high into the sky,
immense heaps of stone
and glass and aluminium.
It was also the end
of the Heroic Age
and the start
of the Formative Age
340
and they used this social art,
architecture,
to help us lead fuller lives,
to touch life at many points,
to give us that douceur de vivre,
that sweetness of life
at places all over the world.
Ron Price
29 May 2003
If Evelyn Waugh is right when he says that "nobody wants to read
other people's reflections on life and religion, but the routines of
their day, properly recorded are always interesting,"77 then this
book has little hope to ever see the light of day. Perhaps, following
Waugh or a writer like Thomas Mann, I should really make that
diary with all its confessionalism the focus of this and future
77 Evelyn Waugh, The Voyageur in Us All, Inside the Dust Jacket.341
writing. As this work has come to see the light of day at sites like
the Baha'i Academics Resource Library, bahai-library.org website
in August 2003 and the website: bahaindex.com in November 2003
and the Baha’i World Centre Library, among several other sites
like lulu.com and eBookMall where hard cover and electronic
copies can be purchased, I tend to think that there is little hope that
it will find a wide appeal, a high degree of popularity. Such is life!
At the very least writing this work has offered, like knitting, a
therapeutic relaxation for me, but for others well....who knows?
Shaping one’s life, Virginia Woolf writes, involves shaping
something that in many ways has no shape at all. I seem to have a
need to recall things that have gone too far, gone too deep, sunk
into this life or someone else’s and become part of mine. I seem to
have a need to recall dreams, things surrounding me, half-articulate
ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and by night, shadows
of people one might have been, unborn selves.78 That would be an
78 Virginia Woolf, “Famous Quotations on Autobiography,” EntWagon.com342
interesting autobiography, interesting at least to me: the story of
someone I might have been. Sadly, joyfully, inevitably, I must
settle for this story of the person I have been.
This narrative is partly an experiment with a means, a way, of
defining my experience of a religious and cultural heritage, a
heritage which has been bound up with the Baha’i Faith for over
fifty years. Through this writing, this autobiography, this literary
production, I attempt to turn my small part in what may very well
become one of the world’s most significant but, as yet, quite
obscure diasporas—in which several hundred thousand people in
the last 160 years have moved their home, their place of residence
voluntarily or through some unavoidable force of circumstance, for
a religious motive, for a religion, a new world Faith--into an act of
personal memory, part of an institution of cultural memory. This
narrative records my confrontation with both a native and a host
culture, a Baha’i and a non-Baha’i culture, a confrontation that has
been part of a total, a life, experience since 1953.
343
What I have tried to do here is to understand this pioneer condition,
accept its many dimensions and explain it to others who have
enough interest to read this work. I resort in these pages to an act
of narration as an expression of the hybrid nature of this global
phenomenon, a phenomenon of voluntary or not-so-voluntary
migration, migration that has taken place both in my Canadian
homeland and overseas, internationally. It is also a phenomenon
which in its individual details is usually documented in a very a
cursory manner or is often never written about at all and is simply
forgotten by history and public memory.
The monument of this new, this as yet obscure, pioneer history is
not the fair farm land and the human habitation and settlement as it
was in previous centuries. The new archives are not the words and
lines on mouldering stone head-boards above a humble grave.
These new archives do not belong to an emigrant and the partner of
his exile sustained through their lowly but heroic struggle with the
344
wintry or hot and sultry wilderness by mutual affection. The new
archives are not old barns now fallen apart from disuse or long
fences now seemingly as ancient as the hills. I would like to say a
few words here about the new archives I have become associated
with as a pioneer of an embryonic institutional environment.
Over the last three-quarters of a century, since the time my parents
first met at the Otis Elevator Company in the late 1930s, an
explosion of archival material has erupted in this Baha’i world for
the would-be historian of the future. With each passing year the
eruption, the explosion, becomes increasingly difficult to deal with,
overflowing as it does the bounds of our capacity or our interest in
these early decades of the institutonal environment with which it is
associated to cope with its effusions. When this great mountain of
material is classified and the student begins to focus on the archival
body relevant to his own interests and needs, some proportion and
framework will emerge from the chaos and prolixity of it all. The
historian and social analyst must tease both sense and nonsense
345
from all the loose ends, fragments, contradictions and observations,
eruptions and explosions that are found in these archives. Indeed,
the present generation is hardly able to deal with this eruption, nor
have any of the generations which have created this mountain of
paper-archive-even begun to examine it with any seriousness,
occupied as they are with creating and developing the institutional
matrix that this great archival body clothes with its often hidden
meaning.
The student of the emerging world Order of Baha’u’llah has seen
or will see, if he desires to make a serious study of this world-
embracing mountain of paper, in the thousands of archives
emerging in local Baha’i communities around the world especially
in the last half century, since the beginning of the Kingdom of God
on earth in 1953, the beginning of that ninth stage of history as the
Guardian called the Ten Year Crusade, the still early stages in the
evolution of what the future will come to see as the nucleus and
pattern of the new World Order.
346
"Archives offer our knowledge an extra bonus", says Arlette Farge
in her book Fragile Lives.79 They are not so much the truth as the
beginnings of the truth and, she goes on, "they are an eruption of
meanings with the greatest possible number of connections with
reality." For most of the Baha’i community at the local level in
these epochs, archives are just so much paper in old boxes.
Sometimes there exists an obsessive tendency to admit too much
meaning to these archives when much of their contents is irrelevant
circularized correspondence that could easily be discarded without
any loss. But there are innumerable rare gems to be often found
amidst the detritus and the irrelevant material. The historian must
and will learn to see the forrest amidst the mass of trees.
History and its documents are made up of so many different lives:
impoverished and tragic, rich and joyful, mean and lackluster
79 Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth Century Paris, Harvard UP,Cambridge, Mass., 1993, Introduction.
347
personalities, saints and heros. There is also a certain grandeur,
humour, absurdity and irony to the parade and its varying
semblances reflected in these documents gathering dust in rooms
and garages, attics and now computer directories all across the
planet. Archives are both seductress and deceptive mirror of reality.
They can falsify and distort the object being studied. They can also
be too facile or too ambiguous a means of entering into a discourse
with history. They can tell very little of the real events of Baha’i
community life. They can often be just a pile of dry bones
transferred from one graveyard to another. But like the increasingly
scientific tools of the archeologist, the skills of the archival
historian can reveal much light. In the future--or so I believe—
they will reveal much light.
History has long been enamoured with ‘the great man’. More
recently it has taken up the cudgels of ‘the average man’, ‘women’,
‘the disabled’, ‘the migrant’, ‘the pioneer’, and on and on goes the
list, the litany, of the ordinarily ordinary and the humanly human
348
personages of history. All of these prototypes can be found in the
archives of local Baha’i communities around the world. For anyone
taking part in Baha’i community life in the epochs that are the
backdrop for this memoir, and especially as the millennium turned
its corner just the other day so to speak, the typical reaction to
archives, as I say, is a perception of them as just boxes of stuff kept
in someone’s house in that back room, attic or shed, among other
places. There is a certain ennui, a certain world-weariness that is
experienced by the very contemplation to these mini-mountains of
correspondence. The weariness comes in part from the great mass
of apparently irrelevant detail in those boxes and partly from a
simple inability to get any meaningful perspective on the great
historical adventure being engaged in by means of the
contemplation of this great weight of paper and memorabilia.
"It is unfortunately true" says Moojan Momen in summarizing the
history of memoir writing and archive collecting in the Baha’i
349
community, "that the Baha’is are lamentably neglectful."80 Perhaps
in the last five decades, Moojan, they have turned a corner. Time
and history will see, Moojan. Throughout history, it should be kept
in mind, there has been a long and ambiguous relationship with
archives. There have been successive tensions down the ages
between boxes of documents known as archives and the actual
writing of history. The earliest period in the history of western
civilization for which we have a great deal of documentation, of
archives, is the first century BC in Rome. For the great mass of
humanity this archive is of no interest whatsoever. But for the
professional ants who deal in Roman history this archive is crucial;
it has helped to generate an explosion of archival enthusiasm
amongst a coterie of students of Roman history in the last several
decades. Side by side with this professional enthusiasm there
prevails an atmosphere of anarchic confusion in the attitude of
western man to his past.
80 The Babi and Baha’i Religions, 1844-1944: Some Contemporary Western Accounts, Moojan Momen, editor, George Ronald, Oxford, 1981, p.xvi-xvii.
350
We are talking, then, about an old problem: the meaning and
relevance of archives. Just as the writing of the Roman poets in that
first century BC represents an important part of that rich and
ancient archive, so does this poetry of mine represent part(time will
tell how important a part) of a modern archive of increasing
relevance to both historian and social analyst. I see this poetry as an
embellishment to a local archive, several archives where I have
lived in Australia and Canada; a contribution to an international
archive on pioneers, an archive still in the first century of creation,
collection and development; and a small part of a burgeoning base
of material the world over which is so extensive now as to virtually
swallow the individual in a sea of printed matter were he or she to
take a serious interest in the material.
"It is impossible to avoid the realm of aesthetics and emotion" in
dealing with archives, says Arlette Farge in her introductory
statement on the subject. In a broad sense the architectural remains
351
of the fifth century BC or the Egyptian pyramids, are a repository
of information, an archive. The realm of aesthetics and emotion is
at the heart of these ancient architectural archives. Archives are
also an eruption, Farge states; they can be an expression, she says
simply, of whim, caprice and tragedy. And, like this poetry and the
stuff in those boxes, they can and are so much more.
It is impossible to assess the relevance of what will one day be the
architectural archive of the Baha'i Faith, say, in two and a half
thousand years. What will be the story told of these generations of
the half-light in this first century of a Formative Age when a
heterodox and seemingly negligible offshoot of an insignificant
sect of Shi’i Islam finished its transformation into a world religion?
What will they say of the architectural achievement that helped to
give form and beauty to the institutionalized charismatic Force that
was about to play a crucial role in the establishment of a global and
peaceful civilization?
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This autobiography takes half a century of personal accounts of
events in the realm of memory and locates connecting points
between ancestral, family, societal and religious history along
linking lines in an attempt to create a unified whole, a synthesis in
time and space. And so it is, that in the context of reproducing my
history and my family's history, this autobiography is critically
rewriting a new version, a variant, of the story of my community,
my Baha’i community. At the same time a dialogue is created both
within and without the Baha’i community, a dialogue about its
memory, its contents and discontents. I have seen the dialogue
begin and its future looks so very rich, part of the greatest drama in
the world’s religious history I have no doubt.
This writing could be said to exist as a text, as "literature engagée,"
which contributes in its own way to new didactic readings of
Baha’i history, its politics and sociology, its psychology and the
poetry of its community, indeed, what it means to be a Baha’i in
the first century of the Formative Age. There are many layers of
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circumstantial memories in the Baha’i community, a multiplicity of
narratives, multiple voices, multiple interpretations of the same
story. The ones that are written down—and there are myriad now
in a host of books, journals and magazines—are for the most part
short and sweet or not-so-sweet as the case may be; some are of
medium length, a few pages, and they can be found in all sort of
publications and a very few, like this one, are long-and hopefully
sweet.
Partly, too, I have aimed to create but one expression, one means
for the construction of history and culture, not an offical one, just a
personal one, but one that is a shared process based on a collective
effort, a shared process that excludes no one and involves anyone
who has the interest and the desire to take part.81 It must be kept in
mind in all of this, and as I have intimated before, that there is an
impossibility of autobiography as the narrative of a unified self
81 Imed Labidi, “A Review of Azade Seyhan’s Writing Outside the Nation,” in Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, Volume 4, Number 2, Spring 2004.
354
unless it be a unity in multiplicity. The narrator and the subject of
narration are only the same person in a certain sense; the narrator's
memory is only partly a reliable guide to the past. The person who
writes about their past is at bottom only partly the person of the
past.82 This autobiographical exercise has created an essential,
original, coherent autobiographical self which, in many ways,
simply did not exist before the moment, the years, of self-narrating.
However coherent this autobiographical self is, it possesses
fragmentary, subjective, unstable, constructed and mobile aspects
as well. These aspects are less an intrusion than they are a constant.
Whatever continuity we grasp, there is much in our life that is
beyond grasping and even the continuities can be described in
multiple versions with multiple perspectives making an “official”
version virtually impossible.
82 Gertrude Stein points this out in her now famous autobiography published in August 1933 and discussed by her in her 1937 publication right at the start of the first Seven Year Plan. For an excellent discussion of her autobiography see: Phoebe Stein Davis,“Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of National Identity in Gertrude Stein's: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," Twentieth Century Literature, Spring 1999.
355
Ernest Renan explains that what bonds peoples of a nation together
is their shared ability to forget.83 I find that a comforting notion,
even if paradoxical, especially as I head into my latter years, years
characterized so much by forgetting. Perhaps this forgetting is a
sign of things to come in that Undiscovered Country we all go to in
the end, a place with both mysterious rememberings and
forgettings.
________________
83 Ernest Renan, "What is a Nation?" Trans. Martin Thom, Nation and Narration, editor, Homi K. Bhabha, Routledge, NY, 1990. pp. 8-22.
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357