Pioneering Over Four Epochs

In order for the French novelist Marcel Proust to seriously begin writing his famous novel In Search of Lost Time he had to create an imaginary deadline.1 So writes Christine M. Cano an associate professor of French and comparative literature at Case Western Reserve University. Proust found this seriousness, created this sense of urgency, Cano argues, by coming to see and understand his writing in the context of a race against and a defiance of time. In this way he confronted the temporality of his life, his writing, his publishing and whatever he read by producing this 3200 page novel, a novel which resists simplification and cursory analysis. In this confrontation with time Proust found the sense of urgency that he needed; he found an intensity and a build-up of meaning in relation to what he was writing. It was an urgency which lasted until the end of his life in 1922.

Proust gave a sense of fixity to the facticity of his life by the process of writing. His writing provided a context for his many selves and the precariousness he felt in living. This precariousness of life and its endless processes of change and duration was dealt with by means of the written word, Proust’s novel. Writing helped him to deal with the strong sense he had of his existence as an entity which was soon to run out. By slowly coming to perceive his life in terms of its transformation into a work of art, by recapturing it, his past moment by moment, he aimed to bring the myriad of those moments in that past life under a microscope.

He felt that he was halting time and wrestling it from the flux of change and duration. By fixing the events of his life forever in a semblance of eternity, sub specie aeternitatis, much like the work of a photographer, he created what for some readers was a romantic reminiscence in a plotless labyrinth, in a vast ediface of a life and autobiography. For other readers, Proust’s literary creation felt like a conspiracy against them, a conspiracy of words with their “clumsy centipedalian crawling of interminable sentences.”2

I, too, had had a sense of urgency from my childhood. I always seemed to be in a rush as my father pointed out to me frequently especially at dinner-time when I was gobbling-up yet another evening meal. By my mid-thirties this sense of urgency was supplemented by a death-wish, due mainly to the affects of bipolar disorder. This death-wish was especially strong just before going to bed. The effect of this combination, death-wish and sense of urgency, was to create in my mind by the early 1980s at about the age of 40, these same imaginary deadlines, this race against time, this sense of the precariousness of my present state and so propel me into thinking that these words, the ones I had written that day or any day--might just be my last. This death wish was delimited when, in 2001, I went on a new mood stabilizer in combination with an anti-depressant medication. At about this time a new energy was unleashed into my literary life, an energy that was arguably a bi-product of this new medication.

Proust warmed-up to write his great opus of some 3200 pages by nineteen years(1890-1909 circa) of writing reviews, fiction and doing translations. Having been thus prepared, he worked on his seven volume work of novelistic-nostalgia, a work acknowledged by some as the greatest piece of fiction by the greatest novelist of the 20th century. The work took him from 1909 to his death in 1922. I, too, warmed-up to the writing of my autobiography with at least nineteen years of literary plodding(1983-2002 circa). By the literary recreation of my life, by the transformation of the transformation that had been my life, by the immersion of myself in memories of what was lost and what was gained in the process of living my life over more than six decades, I slowly came to see my lifetime as the only adequate unit in which to express in writing my succession of selves. I slowly acquired an irresistible autobiographical impulse; it took possession of me by degrees throughout the 1980s and 1990s and, by 2002, this impulse showed no sign of diminishing. Seven years later in 2009 at the age of 65 it had captured my life. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 January 2009 with thanks to 1Christine Cano, Proust’s Deadline, University of Illinios Press, 2006 and 2Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust: Chapter 1, Penguin.

I can hear them say: life is too short
and Price is too long. And who can
blame them? Millions of words and
more pages than I would even want
to try and count any more. There are
two kinds of writer-poets which I try,
quite unconsciously, to combine---or
so it seems to me, thanks to Aciman’s
review of Proust in that fine journal:
The New York Review of Books....1

The swallow’s quick, agile, speedy
travel across long, tireless stretches
of the world, taking that world in in
the ways whales gulp down plankton;
with mistakes easily corrected, bad
times put to good use, judgements
which are unwise just tweaked here
and there in some implacable line of
words where the only pieces that are
thrown away are printer-problems or
are items lost in cyberspace due to a
pressing of those little wrong keys.....

and

The snail’s slow, deliberate and fussy,
cramped and burrowing self, ingesting
choice bits down some multichambered
spiral and with an appetite for a whorled,
eternally whorled, vision. This snail, too,
was my second writer-poet-persona-anima.

I took this swallow and this snail into my
bunker, announced to the world my with-
drawal and retreat, sealed myself as far as
it was possible in my study and periscopes
up proceeded to yield again and again to my
demon, to my thought and to write on every
thing that struck my fancy to the point of an
exhaustion, producing as I went, carnivorous
vines that devoured its owner and led out to all
the corners of the earth’s world-wide cyberweb.

I yielded to a dense tropical growth within me;
I had a chart and a course; there was nothing in
it—tragic or reluctant—this quasi-abdication—
this focus on a single point’s--effective force;
for my work embodied a vision of a persona
which was not the same as the one I displayed
in quotidian reality. Writing was the product
of a work in progress, a discovery-creation,
where multiple desires-motivations converged
on my actions and inactions, impeding or, yes,
stimulating their execution, lending some type
of overdetermined quality to highly descriptive
and overwhelming attribution. But, still, this
work was not some excrescence of some sort
of psychological case-history, at least not yet.2

1 Andre Aciman, “Proust’s Way?” The New York Review of Books, Vol.52, No. 19, 1 December, 2005.
2 Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust: Chapter 1, Penguin.

Ron Price
5 January 2009

There is very little on film or television that moves me to laughter. I am often amused, tickled, impressed by the cleverness of some comedian but, if I watch a whole program I am out of spirits half way through and distinctly disjointed by the last phase of the sequence. As the piece progresses, my laughter becomes mechanical and each chuckle intensifies my ill-at-easeness. At the end of the program I feel flat and empty. I also feel I have wasted my time. There are some comedians who seem to keep tickling my fancy. Seinfeld is one of them. -Ron Price with thanks to G.B. Shaw on Oscar Wilde in Bernard Shaw: A Critical View, Nicholas Grene, MacMillan Press, London, 1984, p.4.

Laughter is idiosyncratic, canned,
a commercial product. I feel it inside,
welling-up, fast, a spontaneous explosion,
frequently in Seinfeld, a program of skits
about nothing, trivia, the spaces in relationships,
self-centered human beings. I dig the absurd,
my laughs and millions of others
in this most popular of programs,
where the energies of comedy are harnessed,
dynamically: do we understand ourselves
in the end? Society? I create nothing.
I invent nothing. I imagine nothing.
I see the drama and laugh at everyday nothingness.
Can I call these laughs spiritual relaxation?
Filling my pocket full with the most delightful emptiness
and the weight of the day lifts, exploded into thin air.

Ron Price
16 August 1998

When I retired by stages from FT, PT as well as casual and volunteer work as a teacher, during the years 1999 to 2005, I found that I was able to watch a marvellous range of educational and visual material on TV. I had drawn on TV, video and film resources as stimulus in my work as a community and classroom teacher, adult educator, tutor and lecturer in the years 1967 to 2005; I had watched my share of TV and cinema in the years 1948 to 1967 as a child, adolescent and young adult in that first generation, 1950 to 1970, to be able to enjoy both mediums.

One of the many educational programs was from German television director Heinrich Breloer who made a docudrama for TV entitled: The Manns: Novel of a Century. It was aired on German television in 2001. It is the saga of an extraordinary family that stamped Germany, its culture and its era like no other. Six hours of viewing, it examines the history of Germany’s most celebrated literary family: the Manns. This program made its TV debut in Australia in 2006 in the early years(60-64) of my late adulthood as human development theorists define the years 60 to 80.

Thomas Mann, his writing and his career have interested me since I first come across his diaries in the 1990s while still a teacher in Western Australia. Like many subjects that came across my desk and my reading as a student, as a teacher and as a member of society living through the tempestuous decades from the 1960s through the 1990s, my study of the life and writing of Thomas Man had to go on hold. This man had to be put in the pending, impending, in the “to be examined later in life” category.
This TV mini-series-docudrama, renewed, awakened and enhanced my interest, precipitated and refreshed my curiosity, in a life that the great philosopher Goethe said was “a striking example of the repeated puberty characteristic of genius.”1 In literary technique as well as in the work of the rational faculty, Mann experienced a richness, a daring and a purely intellectual excitement to a greater depth and with much more significance than has been generally realized.—Ron Price with appreciation to 1Henry Hatfield in Thomas Mann, New Directions, 1962(1951).

Even with my well-developed,
highly enhanced skepticism
which sixty-years of television(1)
watching has produced in the
application of a rational faculty
to this highly believable medium;

Even though I am more than a little
aware of the fundamental difference
between: stage, printed page and TV,
all of which have some unmistakable
politico-social and potentially distorting
point of view arranged for an audience;

Even though I knew little about this figure:
his diaries, his novels, his letters, his life,
his eloquent, outstanding humanism, his
courageous espousal of democracy, his
transcription of the raw materials of his
experience, personal history, into form:
his literary and autobiographical writings
as novels, his utter-productive absorption
in self and society, his observational skills
and relentless reporting anchoring his
imaginations and inventions in the soil
of facticity and his will to live to write--1

in spite of all of this—my interest was piqued
in a man who wrote three pages every day,
who read ravenously, who sought harmony
among the peoples of the world, who tried
to express the tenderness, beauty and pro-
fundity of life and who strove to create an
inner unity out of all his creative powers in
the great experiment that is existence itself.2

(1)1948-2008
1 Peter Gay, “A Life of Thomas Mann,” The New York Times, 19 August 2008.
2 Associated Press, “Thomas Mann Dies At 80,” 13 August 1956 in The New York Times On The Web.

Ron Price
19 August 2008

There are now several hundred thousand readers engaged in parts of my internet tapestry, my literary product, my creation, my immense pile of words across the internet--and hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success possible. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard cover publishers, where it had been without success when I was employed full time as a teacher, lecturer, adult educator and casual/volunteer teacher from 1981 to 2001, these results would never have been achieved.

I have been asked how I have come to have so many readers at my website and the tapestry of writing I have created across the internet. Let me clarify and describe my tapestry of writing in more detail, a tapestry which for millions of internet users is just another form of ‘published’ writing in addition to the traditional forms. The literally hundreds of thousands of readers I have at locations on my tapestry of prose and poetry, a tapestry I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft across the internet, are found at over 4000 websites where I have registered: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views and sites to place essays, articles, books, ebooks, poems and other genres of writing. I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed my literary products and engage in discussions now with literally hundreds of people, little by little and day by day. I enjoy these results without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success. The last seven years of internet posting have been immensely rewarding. When one talks one likes to be listened to and when one writes one likes to have readers.

It is almost impossible to carry literary torches as often as I do through a crowd, whether on the internet or in the traditional hard and soft-cover forms, without running into some difficulties. My postings singe the beards of some readers and my own occasionally. Such are the perils of dialogue, of apologetics, of writing, of posting. Much of writing and dialogue in any field of thought derives from the experience each of us has of (a) an intimate sharing of views in some serendipitous fashion or (b) what seems like a fundamental discrepancy between what each of us thinks and what some other person thinks. In some ways, the bridge of dialogue is immensely satisfying; in other ways the gulf is often unbridgeable. When the latter is the case and when a site is troubled by my posts, I usually bow out for I have not come to a site to engage in conflict, to espouse an aggressive proselytism or to spam, a term with as many definitions, it seems, as people who use the word. And so for now, I remain, yours sincerely, Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania, Australia.

Reading about the work of cartoonist Gary Larson and how he works I could not help compare and contrast his modus operandi and my own with respect to writing prose and poetry. Larson draws inspiration from similar sources to my own: interests, experiences and memories. He is sensitive about his readers and whether they understand his work. And so is this the case with me and my literary opus. I have one eye on my readers most of the time, but another on the world and all that is therein. Sometimes I shut one eye and open the other; at other times I open both eyes one, I like to think, to “the hallowed beauty of the Beloved.”

Both Larson and I like our work to speak for itself but, after years in classrooms explaining things to students, I am not bothered if I have to discuss my work. This, though, I rarely have to do. I’m not popular enough to have to so engage my mental powers. Larson is never comfortable analysing his cartoons. We are both painstaking about making our work unambiguous. One interesting sub-set of his work is cartoons about cartoons and, for me, poems about poetry. Ideas for his work and mine can and do come from anywhere. Being a cartoonist is a solitary life as it is being a poet, but there are fewer really successful cartoonists. Few poets and few cartoonists get rich.-Ron Price with thanks to Jackie Morrissey in The Complete Far Side: Volume One: 1980-1986, by Gary Larson, Andrews McMeel Publishing, Kansas City, 2004, pp. viii-xiii.

Yes, things that just drift into
your head, Gary, little musings
when one is alone with one’s
thoughts and I, too, jot them
down. But, unlike you, Gary,
I get lots of ideas from others,
indeed, a veritable cornucopia
of sources. But we both had our
door openers, eh Gary? Mine was
Roger White, the unofficial laureate
poet of the international Baha’i
community in the 1980s and ‘90s.

But I must most deeply thank the
internet, a world-wide-web that
got my work out-there or my words
would have remained gathering dust
in my files forever. And, finally,
like Larson’s Humour Police, his
readers, and my Poetry Police, my
readers, who hover around and let
me know in no uncertain terms that
I have crossed some invisible line
into total obscurity or obsolescence
and that I am just wasting my time.

Ron Price
14 December2007

PS. I also want to thank: (a) my son for loaning me the biggest, fattest book I’ve ever held in my hands or on my lap, The Far Side, Volume 1, and for continuing to make me laugh as he has done since he was just a little chap; and (b) my wife whose honesty, persistence and her multitude of other qualities have made her my indefatigable collaborator.

Just three months before my own pioneering life began in August 1962 on the homefront in the Canadian Baha’i community, Vita Sackville-West passed away. A pioneer herself, in quite a different sense of course than my own pioneering experience, she was born just months before the passing of Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Baha’i Faith, in 1892.

In many ways her pioneering life was a polar-opposite, certainly a strikingly different one, to my own adventure across two continents. Her first love affair was with a house, then a husband, then several lesbian relationships, one of which was with the famous writer Virginia Woolf and, finally, with a garden at Sissinghurst Castle in rural Kent. My love affairs were with baseball, then the Baha’i Faith and finally with an assortment of people and things: Judy Gower and Christine Sheldrick in two marriages, a long career in teaching and, finally, with learning and the cultural attainments of the mind. In this last category, especially writing and especially poetry, Vita Sackville-West and I shared an equal love and passion.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 11 January 2008 with thanks to ABC TV: “National Trust: Garden Treasures,” 10 Jan. 2008, 6:00-7:00 p.m.

I never shared your love of gardening,
Vita, nor your ardent Latin temperament.
My garden was always one of words like
yours tended tenderly and now famously
famous. My temperament was Welsh—
English, coloured by a bipolar disorder.
We both ran against convention’s grain,
possessed an exuberance, complexity of
character, a strong marriage and wrote
endless reams of poetry over many years.

In the process we both produced a rich
and varied body of work amidst life’s
turmoil but, in the end, whatever we did
and whatever we were--first and foremost
we were poets—wouldn’t you say, Vita?

I must say, though, Vita, you were in
the major league of writers while I was
but a minor player with a minor role, in
a minor key. Time will tell, of course,
eh Vita? What do you think Vita from
your place now in the land of lights
where gardens of endless splendour
adorn your days, I trust, Vita, I trust.

You changed the face of gardening1
while I spread the seeds of a new Order
that would, in time, change the face of
this earth, containing as these seeds did
the fruits and blossoms of consecrated joy
and enable their gardeners to labor serenely,
confidently and unremittently, as you did in
your garden, to produce a Place of exquisite
and most delightful beauty for the millions.

1 Victoria Glendinning, Vita; the Life of V. Sackville-West, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1983.

Ron Price
11 January 2008
______________
That's all for now....

VOLUME 1: CHAPTER ONE

Some Introductions and Genres

"Not beginning at the Beginning...."

Dispositions are plausible responses to the circumstances individual Baha'is found themselves in and these dispositions led to the gradual emergence from obscurity of their religion in the last half century. The story here is partly of this emergence and partly it is my telling of own life-story. For I have gone on writing for years, perhaps as much as two decades now, in relative obscurity doing what I think is right.

I am intentionally not going to begin at the beginning. Autobiographies which I’ve had a look at seem to be exercises that begin in as many different places as there are authors. Sometimes first memories are found on page one and the account proceeds chronologically if not logically until the last syllable of their recorded time, their allotment on earth, at least up to the time of the writing of their said autobiography. This is not my intention here. Anyway, when does one really begin a journey, a friendship, a love affair? Beginnings are fascinating, misunderstood, enigmatic. I’ve written much about beginnings and the more I write the more elusive they become. But there comes a moment, a point, when we realize that the journey has started and we had not realized it. As we travel along we mark historical moments which we weave into our narrative. They often change, our view of them that is, as we grow older: these rites de passage, these coming of age moments. Unlike the Roman historians of the republican days who wrote their histories annalistically, that is year by year in sequence, this work is much more varied and informal with a slight tendency to write by plans and epochs. It is important, too, that life, my life, not be seen as simply journey and not life. The two are not mutually exclusive.

My ideal doctor for this journey, wrote the late Anatole Broyard, would be “my Virgil, leading me through my purgatory or inferno, pointing out the sights as we go. He would enter into the world of sin or sickness and accompany this pilgrim, this patient through it.” Virgil was Dante's imagined guide in the Divine Comedy. My Virgil, my ideal doctor, in this autobiography is, without doubt, Baha’u’llah; my Divine Comedy is this autobiography. The parallel is, of course, not exact, but it has its relevant points of comparison.

In this context I should add that the three great shapers of my nature were Baha’u’llah, ‘Abdu’l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi. There were others who unquestionably did much shaping, namely my parents and the two women I married, but from an intellectual and spiritual standpoint I would have to give the first three places to these central figures of the Baha’i Faith.

I strive for my account to possess narrative lines that move forward, like lines in music, lines that keep their listeners waiting for and wanting resolutions. At the same time I think it's vital for many lines to develop at once, as in a fugue, so that when one narrative line resolves itself, another is already developing. I frankly do not know how I am going to approach this story, though I have no trouble finding historical moments and various lines of development. There are always in the background to my life ever-present plans, new beginnings, fresh initiatives, systematic advances,"leaps and thrusts," triumphs and losses, vistas of new horizons and dark clouds. There is also, as I have moved around two continents over the second half of the twentieth century, the tracing of an end of Empire, an end of an age, an order, a politico-social system and the arrival of a new kind of order. This new order is rootless, without a centre and constantly shifting on the one hand; and rooted, centred and global on the other. They allow one to explore, to write of a place, to explore foreign societies and new ideas at a crucial time in history--a time of beginnings. The Baha’i order & the people in it which I had identified with and participated in personally as far back as 1953 were caught between an old order they had sloughed off, had ceased to pin their hopes on, and a new one they had yet to mature.

At the outset I want to emphasize the inadequacy of language to match and give sequence to life’s experience. This poem of Emily Dickinson’s expresses this idea well:

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –
As if my Brain had split –
I tried to match it -- Seam by Seam –
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before –
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls -- upon a Floor.

Thinking seriously about autobiography or, indeed, any intellectual discipline, requires us to acknowledge our ignorance of the subject. This is a prerequisite. Our past, any past, is another country, a place that exists in our imaginations and in those uncertain and often unreliable echoes of our lives that we trace in words, in places and in things. There is, then, an inscrutability which paradoxically lies at the heart of this work. I say paradoxical because the more one describes one’s life the more mysterious it gets. I return again and again, taking the reader with me, to absences, spaces in my knowledge, my memory, my construction. I recognize that the act of making this my life, into a whole, from the pieces I have left from my past is necessarily a creative one, an act of imagination, what one writer calls "the dialectic between discovery and invention." In the process I transform my history and the history of my times, from something static into something lived. I am not imprisoned in some imagined objectivity; rather, I reenter the moment, the hour, the days and the years and imagine it as something experienced from multiple perspectives, simultaneously acknowledging its erasures and silences. This book compels me to think again about my life and readers to think about theirs. I know I cannot capture in words all the minute particulars of my place and time. I know that however I chronicle the linear time of my life or however I philosophize about its deep time, la duree as Henri Bergson called it, when viewed sub specie aeternitatus, the whole scheme is evanescent, like a vapour in the desert. Still, I make more than a little effort here to explore my views about contemporary life and values and in the process of exploration I define my thinking about the transient and the eternal, the contingent and the absolute.

I don’t see my life or make any claim to my life being necessarily representative of that of an ideal Baha’i or a Baha’i pioneer. This is not an exemplum. Claims to representativeness, it seems to me, are at best partial. I find there is something basically unstable or slippery about experience or, to put it in even stronger terms, in the words of Baha’u’llah, there is something about experience that bears only “the mere semblance of reality.” There is something about it that is elusive, even vain and empty, like “a vapour in the desert.” There are so many exegetical and interpretive problems that accompany efforts to tie down the meaning of a life, of an experience, of a relationship. There is something divided, duplicitous, something that has happened but has yet to be defined and described or, as is usually the case, never described, at least not in writing, depending of course on the experience of the person and their literary skills. There are innumerable and indispensable points of reference in a life and yet so many of them take on the feeling of a mirage, as if they are not really there, like a dream, particularly as the years lengthen into later adulthood and old age.

In many ways this narrative belongs in the company of the thousands of individual and communal narratives of the Baha’i community. But there are several narrative frames that exist and operate in tandem in this autobiographical work. My family and friends, most of whom are not Baha’is, my students over the years and the literally thousands of people I have come to know will find the narrative frames in this autobiography exist in tandem. In life and in autobiography the same story must often be adapted for different audiences that value different things and will judge one’s story by different criteria. Narratives must necessarily be censored for specific audiences or for ourselves. The censoring that must be done here, must be done by readers. This narrative that I am endorsing by placing it in the public domain contains a multitude of stories, perspectives and narrative lines suited for some but not for others. The individual, therefore, in accordance with the demands of each situation, each portion of this autobiography, must do the validating of opposing narratives about myself. Two opposing narratives, sets of actions, apparently contradictory behaviours, demonstrate the dynamic nature of identity. It is not static and we all do all sorts of things that to the people we meet are upsetting, wrong, confusing, etcetera. What I am trying to conceptualize here is the pastiche, the fluid, nature of my multiple self-identities that have emerged in my lifetime. Some are suppressed at different times, depending on the cultural demands or constraints of a particular context or audience; some are given expression at other times. These identities are context driven. Behavioural repertoires are not always easy to adjust as one moves from social setting to social setting. Culture shock or acculturative stress often arise and this narrative which follows is the story of some of these shocks and stresses.

Meaning is not something one can wrap up and walk away with. Often the mind's sensitivity to meaning is actually impaired by fixed notions or perspectives. It seems that often we must see things for ourselves, again and again, sometimes in community with its endless heterogeneity, sometimes in our solitude. For community is not always pastoral dream of innocence and togetherness and solitude is not always enriching. Here, as in music, there is an alternation between fast and slow and joyful and sorrowful; there's an ebb and flow to the emotional structure.
______________enough for now___________________________

Coming across Samuel Johnson’s essay on Conversation has stimulated this comment on the same subject after the experience of nearly forty years of pioneering over three epochs. “The faculty of giving pleasure is of continual use” says Johnson. Those who are able to give pleasure in this way are frequently envied and when they leave they are missed, he goes on in closing the first paragraph of his useful and pithy analysis. In my early years of teaching the Cause, of employment, of moving from place to place, I was not able, on entering a room, to bring a sense of felicity; when I left my departure was not lamented. My presence did not inspire gaiety nor enliven people’s fancy.

This inability was not due to lack of knowledge or a proportional lack of virtue; for in the first years of my service to the Cause as a pioneer I completed my high school, my university and my vocational training. I prayed frequently, read the Writings and, indeed, as I often point out to my son, my friends and associates, when the opportunity arises, I felt more virtuous than after these many years of life’s practice. Insensibly, after a decade as first a homefront and then an overseas pioneer, I found myself able to entertain, to give that pleasure which Johnson speaks of and which is, indeed, essential if one is going to be an effective teacher, either in classrooms or in a wide variety of other places promoting the teachings of Baha’u’llah. A forgiving eye, a sin-covering eye, as ‘Abdu’l-Baha calls it, is essential; for noone wants to be under the watchful eye of someone who feels some uncontestable sense of superiority. And I did feel that in those early years in the field. I felt a sense of moral superiority: clear, graphic, open, subtle, insinuating.

I did not possess a “wit whose vivacity”, as Johnson puts it, condemned “slower tongues to silence.” Gradually, I was able to hold my tongue and let others say their piece. My knowledge was not dominant, domineering; my critical eye was not pervasive; my reasoning did not condemn those whose minds were more idle. For to do so, as I was only too well aware, would be to obtain praise and even reverence from my fellows, but I would have been avoided and even feared. My words would not have attracted the hearts which was the essential prerequisite of the teaching process, in or out of classrooms. My aim was to please. And please I did. From February 1972, after ten years in the field, to April 1999 there was a reciprocality in the conversational process, mutual entertainment, but nothing too quick, too sprightly, too imaginative, nothing to distort the face without a deeper gladness of the heart underneath, as Johnson emphasizes in his criticism of the overly bright and enthusiastic.

Of course, there are usually many views of just how one is doing in life. My wife offers a more moderate, a more moderating tone and perspective on just how successful I am and have been, than my own more enthusiastic view. Many of my students found me a gentleman who approached saintliness, extreme knowledgeability and a delightful sense of humour. Other students would have gladly confined me to oblivion as a useless weed. One can not win the day in every way with everyone. We are all many things to many people. At the very least the pioneer must learn the art of loving, of pleasing, of bringing pleasure, reach as many hearts as he can. This was my own aim, my own particular approach. This is a long and extensive subject but, to start, he at least must have gladness in his heart and it is this gladness that is infectious, that attracts by example. But, again, this must not be carried too far, with too much intensity, too much brightness. A certain moderation of tone and demeanor is helpful.

Indeed, as Johnson goes on, a good-natured personality is important to bring to the conversational milieux. To take on board criticism, to be unmoved by whatever confusion and folly surrounds him and to be willing to listen; these are all essential and useful traints. All of this brings, promotes, induces, a certain cheerfulness, and sometimes friendship.

Of course, conversation is not all. Some of the ablest conversationalists I knew over those years, for the most part in the tenth and final stage of history, were people who suffered a great deal and found human interaction very frustrating. Although I was able to connect with hundreds of people in the small country town of Katherine from 1982 to 1986, I was not able to connect with my boss and I suffered a great deal from my inability to deal with him effectively. My talents in Perth did not enable me to work happily with the LSA in Belmont. After a dozen years in Perth I was worn out in spite of any verbal talents I had acquired.

There is a rhythm in life, in both conversations and in the flow of pleasure and pain to our sensory receptors; and our happiness in life depends to a very large extent on the depth of our understanding of this life process and our capacity to regulate our own life to its rhythm. Opportunity without capacity produces stress. The pioneer is given many opportunities to find out the limits of his or her capacity. Stress is just part of the ride.

MY CUP OF PUBLISHING TEA

Most of the following went onto the internet in the Baha’i Five Year Plan, 2001-2006. Most of it is free of any cost, although some self-publishing material costs from $3 to $20 at lulu.com and eBookMall. There are three general categories of printed matter I have placed on the world wide web. These categories are:

1. Books:

1.1. The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature: The Poetry of Roger White. This 400 page ebook is available at Juxta Publishing Limited and can be downloaded free of charge.
1.2. A paperback edition of the above book is available at Lulu.com for $11.48 plus shipping costs from the USA. This self-publishing site also has a four volume work, a study in autobiography, entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs which is 2500 pages long. I will be making it available as an ebook and in paperback for $10 to $20 per volume very soon after it is reviewed by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Australia, Inc. The charges are set by Lulu.com

2. Internet Site Postings:

Many of my essays, poems and a myriad of different kinds of postings/writings in smaller, more manageable, chunks of an A-4 page or less in size--or a little more--is all free and can be accessed by simply: (a) going to any one of approximately 2000 sites or (b) typing some specific words into the google(or one of many other) search engines as follows:

2.1 Approximately 2000 Sites:

I post at a wide range of poetry, literature, social science and humanities sites across a wide range of subjects, topics and intellectual disciplines in both popular and academic culture. The list of these sites(some 60 pages of them @30 sites per page) is available to anyone interested by writing to me at: ronprice9@gmail.com. But a simpler method of accessing my postings is to:

2.2 Type Sets of Words At Google:

There are literally hundreds of sets of words now that will access my writing at various sites. If you type, for example, Ron Price, followed by any one of the following words or word sequences: (i) poetry, (ii) literature, (iii) religion, (iv) Baha’i, (v) history, (vi) Shakespeare, (vii) ancient history, (viii) philosophy, (ix) Islam and (x) Australia Bahai, et cetera et cetera you will get anywhere from a few sub-sites to over 300 sub-sites arranged in blocks of ten sites. The main problem with this way of accessing what I have written is that my work is side by side with dozens of items from other writers and posters who have the same name as mine, the same topic or some other key word that is the same. I have counted some 15 other Ron Prices. You may find their work more interesting. There are some wife bashers, car salesmen, evangelists, media celebrities, a pornographer or two, a fascinating array of chaps who have different things to flog, so to speak, than my offerings.

3. Specific Sites With Much Material:

Some sites have hundreds of pages of my writing and these sites are a sort of middle ground, a different ground, between the above two major categories. The Baha’i Academics Resource Library, for example, has more of my material than at any other site. My writings are listed there under: (a) books, (b) personal letters, (c) poetry, (d) biographies and (e) essays, among other categories/listings. The Roger White book is here under “Secondary Resource Material>Books>Item #114” as is a lengthy slice of my autobiography. I find this site useful personally, but some of the poetry is not arranged in a visually pleasing form--yet. Some readers may find the layout of my material at tis site annoying.

There are some sites at which my writing is found in a very pleasing form with photos and pictures and general settings to catch the eye. Some site organizers have their location beautifully arranged. I leave it to readers to read what pleases them and leave what doesn’t.

Concluding Comments:

I had no idea when I retired from full-time employment in 1999, from part-time work in 2003 and from most volunteer work in 2005, to devote my time as much as possible to writing and promoting the Cause and, of course, all sorts of other causes within this umbrella framework--that the internet would be as fertile a base for my offerings as it has become. There are literally millions of words that I have written and posted on this international web of words in the last seven years---since I stopped teaching in Tafe WA in the first week of April 1999.

From the early eighties to the early years of this new millennium I tried to get published in a hard cover or in a multitude of magazines and journals in the periodical press. But I had little to no success. My guess is that in the years ahead the world will be awash with books and postings from thousands/millions of people like me. What I write may not be your cup-of-tea. In that case drink someone else’s tea from someone else’s cup. But for those who may enjoy my writings, I hope the above is a useful outline.

Ron Price
3 April 2007