Communications
COMMUNICATION DEFINED
Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast distances in time and space. Communication requires that the communicating parties share an area of communicative commonality. The communication process is complete once the receiver has understood the sender. This all sounds like saying the obvious and it is and the following categories of communication are also, in many ways, just as obvious.
1 Human communication
1.1 Nonverbal communication
1.2 Visual communication
1.3 Oral communication
1.4 Written communication and its historical development
2 Nonhuman communication
2.1 Animal communication
2.2 Plants and fungi
3 Communication cycle
4 Communication noise
5 Communication as academic discipline
FOUR MAJOR COMMUNICATION SHIFTS IN CIVILIZATION
See this link for an excellent overview:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jun/12/the-library-in-the-new-age/
THE INTERNET: COMMUNICATION
In every time and place, people have associated new technologies with moral decline. “Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce,” wrote the American novelist Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862) in 1854, “and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour.......but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.” Similar anxieties have greeted most subsequent inventions, from the automobile to the iPhone: We’re always teetering on the brink of baboondom, always one technological leap away from forfeiting our humanity. Sometimes, though, the pessimists are right to worry. Technology really does affect character. Cultures do change from era to era, sometimes for the worse. Particular vices can be encouraged by particular innovations, and thrive in the new worlds that they create. For an insightful comment on email technology go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/sep/27/pandoras-click/
It isn’t lust or smut or infidelity, though online life encourages all three. It’s a desperate, adolescent narcissism. The idea that modern America and much of the West is in thrall to self-regard dates back to the 1970s, when writers like Tom Wolfe(1931-) and Christopher Lasch(1932-1994) famously critiqued the excesses of what Wolfe dubbed the “me decade.” But a growing body of research suggests that self-involvement is actually reaching an apogee in the age of Facebook and Twitter. According to a variety of sociologists, from San Diego State’s Jean Twenge and Notre Dame’s Christian Smith, to others, the younger generation is more self-absorbed, less empathetic and hungrier for approbation than earlier generations. These trends seem to have accelerated as Internet culture has ripened. The rituals of social media, it seems, make status-seekers and exhibitionists of us all.
I am clearly a well-habituated creature of the online social world, although far less at Facebook than I once was and not at all at Twitter. I have used the Internet’s freedoms to market my writing and post millions of my words across thousands of sites. For many an internet user their problem in cyberspace is their private surrender to lust or ardor, a boasting about their genital and physical endowments, explicit pornographic photos and those of others, a treating of others as bodies. The internet presents many problems which I won't go into here. If I have any failing on the web, it is a pathetic quest for quasipublic validation of my writing, although I have tried to counter this tendency by openly seeking criticism. My internet focus is squarely on my writing. Writers like to have readers and my role on the world-wide-web is as writer and editor, as well as publicist and marketer.
In the age of social media people do not seem liberated from social insecurity. Much of the internet culture is defined by the constant demand to collect friends and status, and perform by marketing ourselves. Writing in the late ’70s, Lasch distinguished modern narcissism from old-fashioned egotism. The contemporary narcissist, he wrote, differs “from an earlier type of American individualist” in “the tenuous quality of his selfhood.” Despite “his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem.” His innate insecurity can only be overcome “by seeing his ‘grandiose self’ reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power and charisma.” This is a depressingly accurate anticipation of the relationship between writer and “followers,” and the broader “look at me! look at meeeee!” culture of online social media, in which nearly all of us participate to some degree or another. Facebook and Twitter did not forge the culture of narcissism. But they serve as a hall of mirrors in which it flourishes as never before — a “vast virtual gallery,” as Rosen has written, whose self-portraits mainly testify to “the timeless human desire for attention.” I want to thank Ross Douthat of The New York Review of Books at the following link for much of the above:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/opinion/13douthat.html?ref=rossdouthat
HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER
Since my days as a lecturer in media studies(1976-1978) at the now University of Ballarat, I have been drawn to the writings of this poet and writer, editor and analyst, Hans Magnus Enzensberger(1929-). While lecturing at this old gold-mining town, Ballarat, Enzensberger's compilation of essays: The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics, and the Media, and his Raids and Reconstructions: Essays on Politics, Crime, and Culture, 1976 came to my attention. The former book had just been translated and published in an English version in 1974 while I was a tutor in education studies at the Tasmanian college of advanced education. Enzensberger refers to "the Industrialization of the mind" to
characterize human mentality as a product of society. He elaborates on the phenomena of the mind-making industry as a product of the last 100 years. The industrialization of the mind is achieved through means of induction and reproduction, and although it can be industrially reproduced, it cannot be industrially produced. As a social product, the consciousness industry cannot be understood in terms of machinery, nor in terms of a buyers and sellers market, or production cost. Its main business is not to sell a product, but rather, to sell the existing order, and "to perpetuate the prevailing pattern of man's domination by man, no matter who runs the society, and by what means.
In our modern society Enzensberger identifies "immaterial exploitation" as a necessary corollary to "material exploitation," whereby material exploitation is no longer sufficient to guarantee the continuity of the system; in order to exploit people's intellectual, moral, and political faculties, they must be developed. The roles of education and mass media then become critical in immaterial exploitation. In fact, Enzensberger identifies education as the most powerful mass media of all. The full realization of the mind industry, however, has hardly begun to be realized. A fully industrialized education system will be characterized by an increasingly centralized curriculum. The growth of the mind industry is faster than that of any other industry. For more on Enzensberger and his ideas go to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/15/hans-magnus-enzensberger-interview and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clgxidzMln8
COMMUNICATION AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Part I
"Coherence and Logic Behind A Long Story: A Philosophy of Autobiography," Ron Price, Unpublished Essay, 6 February 2003 17 October 2011.
For most of my years as a pioneer(1962-2011), the self and its related processes like self-esteem have been a central concern, among many central concerns, of social and behavioural scientists. If one is to be concerned with communication one must inevitably be concenred with self: its nature, its purpose, indeed, many things related to it. Strange to say, though, there is little agreement on just what constitutes the self. It would appear to be a most puzzling puzzle but, however puzzling, it is assumed to be real or unreal, stable or fluid.(1) However described, it is worthy of attention and study. All of life's pleasures and blessings are divine in origin, but none can be compared with this power of intellectual investigation and research, which is an eternal gift producing fruits of unending delight. All other blessings are temporary; this is an everlasting possession.(2) It is, therefore, this aspect of the self, of life that is and has been the focus of my life.-Ron Price with thanks to: (1) "Self and Identity in Everyday Life," International Society for Self and Identity, Author Unknown; and (2) “The Promulgation of Universal Peace: Talks Delivered by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during His Visit to the United States and Canada in 1912,” Wilmette, Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1982, p. 50.
Philosophy gives logic and coherence to what we do, helps provide purpose and rationale, value and significance to our actions, our life. That's the way psychohistorian Henry Lawton put it in his article "Psychohistory Today and Tomorrow." That's a succinct way to see the value of philosophy in providing a foundation of autobiography. Philosophy helps to provide standards of explanation, how we know something and what counts as belonging to our world. Philosophy is the world view, the cosmology, the intellectual raison d'etre for what we do, what writers like myself write. It gives a patina for the scholary and the not-so-scholary sense of self. It gives underlying concepts and assumptions to the reality of the exercise of autobiography and the exercise of answering all sorts of questions in life—like the nature of genius. How and why I do what I do in this exercise of writing my story could be called my philosophy.
But autobiography is somewhat of a hybrid discipline: part history, part psychology, part sociology, part anthropology, part literature, part a lot of things, several intellectual disciplines. As an autobiographer and historian, as a psychologist and sociologist, I use methodology and content from a number of different fields, fields that each have their ways of going about the process of understanding life. Inevitably the person writing the autobiography is at the centre of the narrative. I am the active agent creating my own life, my own history, under the influence of a myriad factors, too many to even begin to outline here. Perhaps part of what I develop is my own "legitimate strangeness," as Michel Foucault(1926-1984), a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas, put it.
COMMUNICATION WITH THE SELF
My intention in this brief essay, this brief exploration of the nature of autobiography is not so much to outline a sophisticated and complex, or indeed a simple philosophy underpinning this autobiography. Rather what I want to do is to include a series of poems which in their collective way will say a great deal about my life and its philosophy, the philosophy behind this autobiography and about the society, the world, in which I lived, moved and had my being over the five epochs(1944-2021) which provide the name of this website.
Here is a poem that gave me great pleasure to write, probably because I had enjoyed the essays of J.B. Priestley(1884-1984) the English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. I had purchased a book of Priestley's essays many years before in a second hand bookshop. I had also enjoyed some five pages of notes I had made, back in the 1970s sometime, which I had read and reread over the last quarter century. But I think what gave me the greatest pleasure in writing this poem was the perspective I gained on understanding myself by the comparisons and contrasts of Priestly's life with my own. This poem, then, provides some sense of perspective on myself. It also provides useful perspectives on communication which is the focus of this part of my website.
PERSONAE
In describing his own public image, this English novelist saw himself as “a mannerless, blundering idiot.” But he also saw himself as: amiable, indulgent, affectionate, shy and rather timid. Had R.F. Price been as splenetic and “bloody rude,” as Priestley, he never would have survived in a classroom teaching the wide range of men and women that he did for over a quarter of a century. Nor would he have survived in the heterogeneous Baha'i communities that have been part of my life from the 1950s to the 2000s. Priestley tended to dump icy water on what could have been “comfortable personal relationships.” Perhaps, if Price had been more of a cold fish with a harsh edge, he would have protected himself from the endless conversations that filled his life for so many years and which, in the end with other factors in his life, wore him down. Priestley was touchy, a victim of his own acerbic eruptions, had a capacity for brooding withdrawals and an ability to slay pompous parasites. He also saw himself as a kind, easy-going chap. Privately, as a family man, he endured long-drawn-out tragedy and illness with what he called a ‘life-enhancing pessimism.’ Behind the various personae which sustained him, behind this rubble of eventually discarded selves, was a loving and compassionate man, or so one can say if one focuses on the good side of Priestley.
R.F. Price, too, had his many selves, his many personae which sustained him through the labyrinthine walks of life he had taken at the several stages in the lifespan. He had his tragedy, his illness and his own life-enhancing humour. His brooding withdrawals, his illnesses, had virtually disappeared or, to put the subject more accurately, during the early years of the evening of his life, the years from 60 to 66, he had learned to manage his bi-polar disorder(BPD). This management he described in a book of 80,000 words and 175 pages which he made available at his website in the Mental Health: Bi-Polar Disorder sub-section. Price saw himself as easy going; many of his students had, in fact, remarked on this quality. Some of his battles remained and he described them in detail in what he called his chaos narrative, the account of his BPD. Some battles he would lose and some he would win in the road he had left to travel. Such was the story of most men and women.
“Reading, study, silence, and thought are a bad introduction to loquacity,” once wrote that great essayist William Hazlitt(1770-1830). That was not true now in his twilight years with his study and silence, thought and reading. The short bursts of his interaction with others were filled with wit and witticisms, although they were not always wise and cautious. But his loquacity was limited and even lacking insofar as lengthy interactions were concerned by the age of 60. More than an hour or two or with the wrong people spelled trouble. -Ron Price with thanks to Vincent Brome, J.B. Priestly, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1988, pp.5-6.
Behind the loving and compassionate personae,
for he had had many endearing, loving, selves,(1)
at the drop of a hat, on the wave lengths of life,
sat Mr. Chameleon, he often called himself........
Behind those “selves”, for surely they were real,
was a quiet man, a quiet boy.....at home with his
family, staying by himself, being in the solitude
of silence, writing, reading, struggling with his
inner demons, the tragic element which strikes
us all, but content, at rest, well-pleased with his
Lord, often joyful, working at his craft, away from
friend and stranger alike, sheltered by that single
One All-Merciful, confident, dignified & blushing
to lift up his face to his wondrous Redeemer......
Ron Price
18 May 1999 to 17 October 2011.
(1) The ‘he’ here is, in fact, ‘myself’ as I sat in the quiet of my chamber some 7 weeks after retiring from full-time employment as a teacher in a profession that I had begun over thirty years before in 1967. I continued altering this prose-poem until 17 October 2011.
THANKING J.B. PRIESTLEY
Priestley said that the writer and, in my case the autobiographer, "projects on to his page a personality not identical with his own, though founded on it." It is a figure made up of elements selected from his life and then rearranged and displayed for his and their aesthetic purpose. The result is an intensely vivid impression of a living individual. I like to think I achieve this but, of course, in the end, each reader makes of the book his own; in effect he recreates the book in his or her own eyes. For the vast majority of people this book has no existence at all for they will never read it, see it on a screen or between covers.
Passing the time pleasantly, Priestley thought, was one of life's major achievements. To this I must concur. Indeed there is a great deal in the Baha'i Writings on this theme, although Baha'u'llah does not put His comments under the heading "how to pass the time pleasantly." In the end we must all apply the Writings to our lives in our individual ways. I have had no intention in writing this book, this five volume autobiography, to provide readers with some 'how to' recipes. "Ultimately all the battle in life is within the individual," wrote some individual on behalf of Shoghi Effendi back in 1943. I remember first coming across this line in a little brown book back in the 1970s. At the time my life was filled with battles and I was losing. I was disobeying Baha'i law and as close to leaving the Cause as I've ever got in the last half century of my association with it. The Watergate crisis was reaching its zenith at the time and the Viet Nam war was finally coming to an end after what had seemed all my life.
Paul Ehrlich and the authors of the book Limits to Growth had just finished warnng us all of the extremities we faced if we did not pull up our socks and began to treat the environment more sanely. We were being told many things, too many to take them all in. And it was in this context that these words fell upon my ears and my mind like a solid gold nugget of truth.
Here are two poems that tell something of my religious and philosophical views of life, views which say much about communication.
ONE ENDLESS SONG
Emily Dickinson speaks, in her poem number 395, of a “fine Prosperity/ Whose Sources are interior”. She says that “Misfortune hath no implement/Could mar it-if it found.” It is the equivalennt, it seems to me, of those who join the Cause, who tend its garden, for life. I would argue, though, that its “sources” can be “marred”; one can never be sure if life’s misfortunes will not “mar” belief. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1999.
There is one kind of feeling
that sometimes is brought down.
It’s sources are interior
like diamonds in the ground.
I came across it early.
It doubled later on.
It looks like going the distance.
In one long endless song.
Life’s misfortunes may mar it.
One can never be too sure.
For belief is in some ways a gift.
Depending, in part, on how pure.
Ron Price
26 July 1999
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ONE COLOUR
One day death will make
the final adjustment,
after years and years of changes
along the way.
Dynasties and systems,
defined and redefined,
lives sown and resown
with different colours.
Death, at last, will yield
one colour, unheralded,
mixed with joy
and this old body
will make its final move
into that hole for those
who speak no more.*
Ron Price
16 & 27 July 1999
*expression used by the Bab in Selections from the Writings of the Bab, 1976.
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The following tells something of my general approach to poetry, what I am trying to write in my autobiography and, therefore, some of my thoughts, indirectly, on communication.
A CERTAIN SORT OF PERSON
Some poets are difficult to narratize. Their biography is elusive; their poetry a formal mask of a personality not a living face vibrant with expression. Such poets make no authorial statements, no poetic analysis or comment, no expressions of principle, no efforts to give their poetry coherence, beyond their poetry which must speak for itself. In the main they subscribe to the “poetry not the man” school. No interviews explain or expand on their work. They contribute nothing beyond their poems to the accumulation of what might be called their ‘industry’, their canonical infrastructure, again, except through their poetry, their literature. Their literary correspondence is either non-existent or only about the mundane and superficial, the everyday. It is difficult, if not impossible, to get a clear image of such a poet; no unary central subject emerges, unless their writing can be seen as the direct personal embodiment of the poet. Often such a poet seems to lack body. Such poetry is simply seen, often, as a separate entity, disembodied from the poet. Biographical and personal speculation on the part of writers, examining such poetry, becomes impossible, if not unwise.
Unfortunately, great art of any kind: intelligible, sane, perceptive, of use to humanity, requires some sensibility, unified or otherwise, to be demonstrated by the artist. To create, to recreate their life, is a beautiful and difficult task. In the end it remains, for all of us, partly mystery, with or without biographical detail. Without the biographical detail one only has the writing, the poetry. That is all some writers want. -Ron Price with thanks to Timothy Morris, Becoming Canonical in American Poetry, University of Illinois Press, Chicago,1995.
My goal is to compress
into these poems
something of the
manifold complexities
of my time, age and life;
and I do it in a certain way
because I am a certain sort
of person with a certain sort
of life1 and I see autobiography
in terms of culture, meanings,
narrative and arbitrary
arrangements of reality,
endurance and the filter
and glaze of language:
with a nostalgia for unity.2
Ron Price
28 December 1999
1 A.A. Milne, It’s Too late Now, 1939.
2 That nostalgia for unity...the essential impulse for the human being.
-Albert Camus in Albert Camus: Philosopher and Litterateur, Joseph McBride, NY, 1992, p.6.
Here are three poems about aspects of the teaching process,a process that was so much a part of my life over these four decades. The first poem takes you, the reader, back to the start of the formal teaching process in plans, the first Seven Year Plan in 1937.
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GUERNICA: A WINDOW OF HOPE AND A WORLD OF CHAOS
Guernica may just be the most important single painting in the twentieth century. It was painted by Picasso in a period from the end of April 1937 to June, the first two months of the first North American teaching campaign: 1937-1944. Guernica, a town in Spain, was bombed in April 1937, the very month that first Seven Year Plan. After more than forty years trying to take this message to my contemporaries I find this apocalyptic painting curiously relevant in its symbolism. The painting graphically portrays the world I have been trying to teach all these years. -Ron Price with thanks to Encarta(R) Encyclopedia, Microsoft Corporation, 27 June 1997; and ABC, TV, "Picasso-Magic, Sex and Death: Sex," 11:05-11:55 pm, 9 February 2003.
Complex symbolism here,
no definitive interpretation,
a world falling apart
back then and now, and now:
a dying horse, a dying age,
system, time; a fallen warrior,
traditional systems of political
and religious orthodoxy falling
from their heights of power;
a mother and dead child,
our century's science and technology
whose child is anarchy;
a woman trapped in a burning building,
civilization in a firey tempest;
a woman rushing into the scene,
a new revelation just begun
spreading its healing message.
A figure leaning from a window
and holding out a lamp,
truth and understanding held out
that all those who look might see.
And so, one view of Picasso’s work,
as a Teaching Plan makes its appearance
after a hiatus of twenty years,
after a new administration
had been created to canalize the forces
unleashed by those immortal Tablets.1
Guernica, a picture of a world in chaos
as the lamp of unity hangs out its shingle
in the obscurest corner,
the only sign of power and life
as the old is destroyed.2
1Tablets of the Divine Plan, ‘Abdu’l-Baha, 1916-17.
2 There are many interpretations of this painting. This last line comes from Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, Viking Press, 1968, p.211.
Ron Price
27 June 1997-9 February 2003
WHO SANG THE SONG?
On July 23 1999 I was 55. That day my wife and I passed through Whyalla where, twenty-seven years before, entry by troops took place transforming that community and the people in it. It was, though, a transformation that is difficult to describe in terms of its affect on the participants. Perhaps this is something better left to an essay.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1999.
By the second half of the Formative Age
six souls had come to live
and then to form this LSA*
as part of a much elongated process,
or so it has seemed to many of us,
of entry by troops.
When I returned 27 years later
I was not able to tell just who was left,
except perhaps dear Kathy.**
As I walked around the town
I had not seen since half my life ago,
a sadness came from I know not where.
Perhaps it was the sense of life
“bearing the mere semblance of reality.”***
Then a wisdom sank in deep,
perhaps from God:
bring life up to a boil,
but keep your temper cool
amidst the toil.
For this life is but mirage,
from birth to death one long birage.
All the work that once went on in this place
would seem, on balance, not to have left a trace.
Is there any point to all of this?
I’d say “By God!
This is something I’d not want to miss!
It can not be measured, yet, by numbers.”
Ron Price
23 July 1999
* these six were joined by three others in 1972.
** Kathy Karavas who had been there before the entry by troops.
*** Baha’u’llah
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A PERSON ON THE MOVE
The lives of learned men have at many times in history been perforce nomadic. From Greek philosophers escaping from the Persians to Germans in modern times, the intellectual has often been a person-on-the-move or on-the-run. Many Baha’i pioneers, striving to exemplify that first attribute of perfection, that ‘Abdu’l-Baha describes in His book ‘Secret of Divine Civilization,’ namely, “learning and the cultural attainments of the mind,” have also been possessed of this nomadic quality. I write this poem from Hong Kong on what may just be the only day in my life spent on the continent of Asia, nearly thirty-eight years from the beginning of what seems a long nomadic road.-Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy,1945, p.402.
Beginning with all that homework
and all those Baha’i books
just ten miles from where I grew up,
a peripatetic existence began
which continued until today:
you could call it travel teaching,
what with all those towns and houses
and thousands of books
and deep and meaningful conversation
trying to spread a seed
in a discouragingly meagre soil,
still a refugee from the Persians
and still the books pouring in
and a striving for the cultural
attainments of the mind.
Ron Price
17 June 2000
There is so much 'out there' in life to deal with. Here is one of my approaches as described in the following two poems.
SOME OF BERGSON
Part of this creative advance into novelty, this utilization of ideas, philosophies and concepts from the past and bringing them to bear on the present in order to structure the future, a process that is at the base of my poetry, has been the incorporation of some of the work of the philosopher Henri Bergson into my own poetic opus and direction. Bergson emphasizes the positive power of time, the fluid continuum of intensity, the flow of reason across the brain and world as a source of creative invention, as a matrix for the affirmation of the rich, multi-levelled embodiment that characterizes our existence as human beings. There is a continuum of creative genetic energy in life. It is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism. I see my poetry as a monitor of my continuous progress indefinitely pursued and my inevitable regress, for life is either progress or regress. There is no standing still, although it often appears that way. -Ron Price with thanks to M. Hansen, “Becoming as Creative Involution? Contextualizing Deleuze and Guallari’s Biphilosophy” Internet Article, 3 January 2001.
This is a dance of the most disperate,
spontaneity paired with receptivity,
autonomy for myself and openness
toward the world: an elan vital1
separateness and communication,
segregation from the whole
and integration with it,
a complex functional system
providing my inner autonomy,
a great variety of inner states,
an active sensitivity exposed,
heterogeneity and individuality,
the more isolated, the more related,
continually in the process of constructing itself.
1 a concept from Henri Bergson
Ron Price
3 January 2001
I’VE SUNG THE SONG I HEARD
“The poet, to lay legitimate claim to the title of poet,” writes Paul Kane in his book Australian Poetry, discussing the history of poetry in Australia, “was constrained to create not only poems, but himself or herself as poet as well-what we have been calling the process of autogenesis...the process of establishing oneself as a poet was inseparable from establishing poetry in Australia.” There were some parallels, I found, to my own work in the late twentieth century. I did not find it the “double burden” of originating both oneself and a tradition, that Kane describes. But I did find the dual process of writing poetry and articulating the process within the context of my society, my religion and my own life fell into place quite naturally. Indeed, I often felt I was caught up in understanding and elaborating the process to a far greater extent than I was in writing poetry. At other times I felt as if all that I wrote was part of one meta-process, meta-narrative. I was striving to establish an identity for myself and my religion in cultural, historical, spiritual terms. I felt the process “to be at once trivial and apocalyptic, vain yet of the greatest consciousness-altering potential,” as Blanchot once described it. -Ron Price with thanks to Paul Kane, Australian Poetry, Cambridge UP, NY, 1996, pp.35-41.
He1 had a prodigious poetic output,
felt neglected and embittered,
thwarted by the world’s indifference,
lonely and in despair,
saw society as the enemy,
constructed an account of his
poetic beginnings,
of his posthumous aims,
in a melancholy mood and view
and it told of what was, what is:
but the song he dreamed about
remained unwritten.
His spirit fancied it could hear
the song it could not sing.2
But their’s is not my story:
I have written of my dream
and sung the song I heard.
I’ve seen the river in the hills.
In the night the rain fills
and the troubled torrent spills.
1 Charles Harpur, the first major poet of Australia, writing in the early years of the Babi and Baha’i Faiths.
2 Henry Kendall wrote this in the last poem of his final volume of poetry.
Ron Price
12 January 2001
Much of our sense of who we are comes by comparisons and contrasts with others whom we are not. Here is one example.
THE GENTLE EDGE
A poet gets a sense of who he is by coming across another poet whom he is not, with whom he shares some things in common and some things not-so-common. John Forbes, an Australian poet who died in the 1990s, remained single all his life and felt his calling to be a poet at the age of only fourteen. He identified with Maoist ideology and even dressed like a working-class Chinese. He would often rewrite a poem ten times. He saw himself as a laid back larrikin. He never found love, requited or unrequited. He felt he did not fit in to the public scene, into the establishment, or even the middle class rung of society with its married people raising their families. He did not think much about everyday things. Forbes was an eccentric. But, like my own style and approach to poetry, he tried to write for the future, tried to mix high and low culture, did an immense amount of reading and was also trying to be a poet for his time. When given the opportunity he could talk the backside off a barn door and showed great enthusiasm for an idea, a piece of prose or a poem. Like many a larrikin Australian his conversation was humorous with a sharp edge, what some might call harsh. My aim, among other aims, on the other hand, was to be humorous but gentle.
-Ron Price, "Poetica," ABC Radio National, 2:05-2:45 pm, 7 July 2001.
You, too, packed in the print
'til it was coming out of your ears
and tucked it in to an eccentricity,
a laid-back larrikinism,
a sense of aloneness
and a sense of a calling.
You felt you had something to say;
you were a real talker, thinker,
an intellectual, Aussie-style,
if there is one,
a comic with a sharp bite.
My sense of a calling came later,
with my own particular brand
of laid-backness, eccentricity,
far from the everyday,
preferred the gentle edge,
the cultural attainment of the mind,
softening, an etiquette of expression,
always with a moderate freedom,
an engendering of perspectives,
encouraging, where I could,
that profound change
in the quality, the standard,
of the public word
which would, must, come.
Ron Price
7 July 2001
There is a complex interlocking between self and other, self and society, self, religion and society. Here is one way of trying to understand this complexity.
THE SONGS I WAS SINGING
Poetry, song and autobiography have been interlinked for millennia. In my pioneering life, beginning in 1962, the music and words of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, the culture of the sixties and my own autobiography come together in an interesting cross-fertilization. Bob Mason's unpublished PhD Thesis on 'The Dialogue Between the Beatles and Bob Dylan'(1) illumined, for me, this triangle of relationships. To take but one of many possible examples, the very month I decided to pioneer among the Eskimo, October 1965, The Beatles' hit "Nowhere Man" was released, as Mason informs us. Most of the Beatles' songs were about their coming to terms with autobiographical issues, about changing society, about drugs(after 1965) and about a dialogue between these megastars. Paul McArtney said, in a song he wrote in the 1990s, that the members of his group, The Beatles, always came back to the songs they had been singing because these songs told them, and everyone else who was interested, where they were at. This is quintessentially true of my own poetry.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)"Arts Today," ABC Radio National, 10:05-11:00 am, 16 January 2002.
I was finally knowing
where I was going to
and feeling as if I could
finally see some light
at the end of the tunnel,
thinking for myself:
none of this bourgeoisie
normality for me,
going where noone
had gone before----1
at least from my corner,
doing what noone expected,
nothing to do with drugs,
helping to change the world
in a way none else could see,2
on my own, breaking the umbilical chord,
no more of the family Christmas and Easter
and endless birthday scenes for me,
no more of the 'daddy,' 'mommy'
and all the old friends for me:
this was my own response to existence.
This was a starting new
and working out my way of being
my take on the world and its load.
I was not a 'Nowhere Man.'
I was 'doing what I wanted to do,'
thinking what I wanted to think,3
or so I thought.
1 Going to live among the Eskimo, away from family and friends, had an absurdity to it in 1965 in the conservative climate I grew up in in southern Ontario.
2 Outside the small circle of Baha'is I knew then.
3 See the George Harrison song: Do What You Want To Do. Ron Price....16 Jan. 2002
When one goes about writing the story of one's life all of history becomes available when one tries to get a handle on one's experience. In writing about yourself, the autobiographer comes to write about so much more. Here is an example.
SOME COMPARISONS
Mozart's description of what happens to him as he composes has some similarities to the process of writing poetry as I experience it. "Once I have my theme another melody comes,"1 Mozart begins. And so it is, for me, with writing poetry. I get the germ of an idea, some starting point, a strong note or theme. Then, another idea comes along linking itself to the first one in a similar way to the linkage of that melody Mozart mentions to his theme. By now there is emerging "the needs of the composition as a whole" both for me and for Mozart. For both of us, too, the whole work is produced by "melodic fragments," by "expanding it," by "conceiving it more and more clearly." Mozart finishes his work in his head. The composition comes to him in its entirety in his head. I finish my work on paper and I have no idea of the ending until the end. The poem below is an example, drawing heavily on the contents of a book.2 -Ron Price with thanks to the (1)ABC Radio National, The Science Show, 10.1.98; and (2)Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600-1830, Manchester UP, NY, 1999.
Even the most uninteresting,
trivial and repetitive,
when seen at a distance
with a lively fancy
and a determination,
with purpose and system
to make the most of life,
can find a mysterious charm,
an entertaining commentary
in the hands of a good writer.
But this is not the work
of a tourist and its trivial,
pointless diversion,
innocent gratification,
pleasureable indolence,
gratifying excitements,
gastronomic indulgences,1
relief from responsibility,
and identity: escape.
I have never been a tourist.2
Always there was the work,
the object worthy of life,
of commentary:
always the profusion
of the incomparable,
so much intensification,
excess, the delights,
the dangers, the restlessness,
a reaching out beyond
the mundane, the observable.
The danger of hyperboles,
accepting, as I know I must,
jarring encounters,
the destabilizing,
troubling elements
than can't be kept at bay,
when calm benevolence
can't be maintained
and the necessary distraction.
1 Except, perhaps, on my two 'honeymoons' for several days in August 1967 and December 1975; and travelling to and settling in to some new places of residence and employment.
2 Tourism in the modern sense began, according to Chard, about 1880.
Ron Price
27 June 2002
And so, with these poems an underlying philosophy becomes more evident. This narrative and this poetry has provided what Doris Lessing called a discourse by which I have constructed my "versions of reality." The other major discourse Lessing describes is fiction.
Some writers like Alfred Corn are clearly uncomfortable with personal disclosure, but still they write autobiography. Corn writes:
"Even now I dread these unmasked statements, their therapeutic slant and trust in fact, failure to scan or use productive rhyme or metaphor. Yet can't deny the will to set out in search of what it is that shaped one witness's imagining of time." Corn needs some degree of secrecy and so do I, although I sense he needs more than I do. His uneasiness is his charm; I don't think that is true of me and my work. I'm not sure where the charm is in my book; I will have to wait for the reaction of readers.
