Ron Price

DEFINITION OF MODERN: A WESTERN CONTEXT

There is a great deal written about just what the term modern history refers to.  The first paragraphs here are written to provide what you might call some definition, some framework, some guidelines, to the term.  I leave it to readers who come to this site to read more extensively than the few paragraphs I have provided below if they want a discussion of the nuances of the term 'modern history.'  For my purposes in this sub-section the term modern history describes the historical timeline after the Middle Ages. The end point to the Middle Ages is seen in several possible perspectives, at least for what you might call Eurocentric history.

For Europe as a whole, the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 is commonly used as the end date of the Middle Ages. Depending on the context, other events, such as the invention of the moveable type printing press by Johann Gutenberg, circa 1455, the fall of Muslim Spain or Christopher Columbus's voyage to America, both in 1492, can be used for that purpose.  For Italy, 1401, the year the contract was awarded to build the north doors of the Florence Baptistery, is often used.  In contrast, English historians often use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period of the Middle Ages. For Spain, the death of King Ferdinand II in 1516 is often used. The Germans, the Russsians, the Belgians, inter alia, all have their own historical views on this subject.

LATE MIDDLE AGES AND EARLY MODERN HISTORY

The term "modern" was coined shortly before 1585 to describe the beginning of a new era. The European Renaissance, about 1420–1630, is an important transition period beginning between the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, which started in Italy.  The term "Early Modern" was introduced in the English language in the 1930s to distinguish the time between what we call Middle Ages and time of the late Enlightenment, say, after 1800, when the meaning of the term the Modern Age was developing its contemporary form.  It is important to note that these terms stem from European History. 

The beginning of the modern era started approximately in the 16th century(1500-1600).  Many major events caused Europe to change around the turn of the 16th century, starting with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the fall of Muslim Spain and the discovery of the Americas in 1492, and Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation in 1517. In England the modern period is often dated to the start of the Tudor period with the victory of Henry VII over Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, as I mentioned above.  Early modern European history is usually seen to span from the turn of the 15th century, through the Age of Reason and Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century.

DEFINITION OF MODERN: A GLOBAL CONTEXT

In other parts of the world, such as Asia and in Muslim countries, in the vast expanse of Russia east of the Urals, in the vast expanses of South and Central America, in Africa, in the many island groups on the planet like Melanesia and Polynesia among others, in the circumpolar regions like the Arctic and Antarctica---the term Modern History is applied in a very different way. The application, though, is still and often but in the context with their contact with European culture in the Age of Discoveries.

I have found, as far back as my university days in the years, 1963 to 1967, the works of Arnold Toynbee provided me with the kind of global context for a history of civilizations. I have written much on Toynbee for I spent nearly 50 years reading his complex and difficult works. Go to this link for more on Toynbee:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_J._Toynbee  I have also been influenced by the writings of other historians since I have spent half a century teaching history and/or reading it as a student: 1961-2011. I will write more on these influences at a later time in the development of this website.

EARLY MODERN AND LATE MODERN HISTORY

Modern history can be further broken down into the early modern period and the late modern period after the Great Divergence. The Great Divergence, a term coined by Samuel Huntington in 1996, and also known as the European miracle, a term coined by Eric Jones in 1981, refers to the process by which the Western world, that is, Western Europe and the parts of the New World where its people became the dominant populations, overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged irrefutably during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilization of the time, eclipsing Qing China, Mughal India, and Tokugawa Japan.

The process was accompanied and reinforced by the Age of Discovery and the subsequent rise of the colonial empires, the Age of Enlightenment, the Commercial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution and finally the Industrial Revolution.  Scholars have proposed a wide variety of theories to explain why the Great Divergence happened, including government intervention, geography, and customary traditions. Before the Great Divergence, the core developed areas included China, Western Europe, Japan, and India. In each of these core areas, differing political and cultural institutions allowed varying degrees of development. China, Western Europe, and Japan had developed to a relatively high level and began to face constraints on energy and land use, while India still possessed large amounts of unused resources. Shifts in government policy from mercantilism to laissez faire liberalism aided Western development.

Technological advances, such as railroads, steamboats, mining, and agriculture were embraced to a higher degree in the West than the East during the Great Divergence. Technology led to increased industrialization and economic complexity in the areas of agriculture, trade, fuel and resources, further separating the East and the West. Europe's use of coal as an energy substitute for wood in the mid-19th century gave Europe a major head start in modern energy production. Although China had used coal earlier during the Song and Ming, its use declined due to the shift of Chinese industry to the south, far from major deposits, during the destruction of Mongol and Jurchen invasions between 1100 and 1400. The West also had the advantage of larger quantities of raw materials and a substantial trading market. China and Asia did participate in trading, but colonization brought a distinct advantage to the West.

CONTEMPORARY HISTORY AND POSTMODERN HISTORY

Contemporary history describes the span of historic events that are immediately relevant to the present time. In contrast to the pre-modern era, Western civilization made a gradual transition from premodernity to modernity when scientific methods were developed.  This led many to believe that the use of science would lead to all knowledge, thus throwing back the shroud of myth under which pre-modern peoples lived. New information about the world was discovered via empirical observation, versus the historic use of reason and innate knowledge.

"Postmodernism"is a term coined 1949 and described a movement more in art than a period of history. Although the term was usually applied to the arts, but not to any events of the very recent history, this changed over the next decades when the term postmodernity came into useage.  This latter term was coined to describe the major changes in the 1950s and 1960s in economy, society, culture, and philosophy.  Sometimes distinct from the modern periods themselves, the terms "modernity" and "modernism" refer to a new way of thinking, distinct from medieval thinking. "Contemporary" is applied to more recent events because it means "belonging to the same period" and "current". Here again definitions, their beginning point, their evolution and their meaning have become the subject of lengthy discussions.

A STUDENT AND TEACHER OF HISTORY

I will not attempt to summarize all the modern history courses I studied and taught in the years, say, 1955 to 2005. In those 50 years, though, I studied history at the primary, secondary and tertiary level and taught history as well at all those levels.  I do not, as yet and here in this sub-section of my site, comment on so much of what is modern history over the last approximately 500 years.  If readers go to some of the links I have suggested they will be able to read some of my posts on modern history in cyberspace. I leave this to the inclination of readers.

Most people, in my experience as a teacher and student, have little knowledge of history, ancient or modern, And so it is that what I write above has little resonance with most readers. My aim in future posts will be to provide some perspective on all this voluminous detail about which the average person knows so little and has, in some ways quite logically, such little interest.  Our world offers up for the votaries of all faiths, of the votaries of all positions on the intellectual ladder of knowledge and belief, and the interests of all people who take any interest in history at all---a cornucopia of resources on virtually everything. The result is a sort of print-glut and information overload and, in the end, a sort of intellectual miasma of stuff combined with popular culture, the morning news, a concern for diet and health and one's bodily functions. Often, too, the result is, as one writer put it, a situation in which: "whom the gods would destory they make simple, and simpler and simpler." The questions the modern world faces havce become staggeringly complex with or without a knowledge of history.

LATE 20TH CENTURY HISTORIOGRAPHY

Two books have appeared—Tim Harris’s Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (2006) and Steven Pincus’s 1688: The First Modern Revolution (2009)—and they are very different.  But despite the differences they are both expressions of one of the deepest tendencies of late-twentieth-century historiography: the impulse to expand the range of inquiry, to rescale major events and trends into larger settings, and to seek heightened understanding at a more elevated and generalized plane.  In every sphere of historical study—intellectual, cultural, political—the scope of inquiry has broadened. Large-scale comparisons and parallels are explored, national stories become regional, and regional studies become global. One traces the winding filiations of ideas and religious commitments through diverse nations and cultures and across great spaces; one thinks in terms of oceanic “worlds”: Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian. Both Pincus and Harris have relocated the “submerged” fragments of the Glorious Revolution into large, transnational, and multicultural unities that allow for explanations that are fuller, more complex, and more coherent than any we have had before.

TWO WORLD WARS and THEIR AFTERMATH: 1945 TO 2011

For interesting perspectives on: (c) the post-WW2 world of Europe, (b)  the twentieth century, its two main wars and the effect of Churchill on the entire process; as well as (a) the 21st century Western/American attitude to war go to:

(a)http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/may/01/what-have-we-learned-if-anything/ 

(b) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/may/29/churchill-and-his-myths/?page=1 and

(c) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/feb/14/the-problem-of-evil-in-postwar-europe/

OVERVIEW OF HISTORY IN TWO PARTS: 1789 TO 1989 AND 1990-2010

For Tony Judt's review of Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life by Robert B. Reich go to The New York Review of Books(12/'07) at this link: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/dec/06/the-wrecking-ball-of-innovation/?page=1  The review begins with:

During what Reich calls the “Not Quite Golden Age” of American capitalism, from the end of World War II through the 1970s, American economic life was stable and in comfortable equilibrium. A limited number of giant firms—like General Motors—dominated their predictable and secure markets; skilled workers had steady and (relatively) safe jobs. For all the lip service paid to competition and free markets, the American economy (in this respect comparable to the economies of Western Europe) depended heavily upon protection from foreign competition, as well as standardization, regulation, subsidies, price supports, and government guarantees. The natural inequities of capitalism were softened by the assurance of present well-being and future prosperity and a widespread sentiment, however illusory, of common interest. “While Europeans set up cartels and fussed with democratic socialism, America went right to the heart of the matter—creating democratic capitalism as a planned economy, run by business.”(1)

But since the mid-Seventies, and with increasing ferocity in recent years, the winds of change—”supercapitalism”—have blown all that away. Thanks to technologies initially supported by or spun off from cold-war research projects—such as computers, fiber optics, satellites, and the Internet—commodities, communications, and information now travel at a vastly accelerated pace. Regulatory structures set in place over the course of a century or more were superseded or dismantled within a few years. In their place came increased competition both for global markets and for the cataract of international funds chasing lucrative investments. Wages and prices were driven down, profits up. Competition and innovation generated new opportunities for some and vast pools of wealth for a few; meanwhile they destroyed jobs, bankrupted firms, and impoverished communities.
(1) This is hardly an original claim, of course. As the Nobel-winning economist James Tobin observed some years ago, "It was a bunch of planners—Truman, Churchill, Keynes, Marshall, Acheson, Monnet, Schuman, Macarthur in Japan—whose vision made possible the prosperous postwar world." World Finance and Economic Stability: Selected Essays of James Tobin, Edward Elgar, 2003, p. 210.

POETRY AS HISTORY

The following definitions or conceptions of history enable the reader of my poetry to see it as history.  Benedetto Croce(1866-1952), an Italian critic, idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician, wrote that "all history is contemporary history."   Given the very contemporary quality to nearly everything I write, the reader can not help but taste some of history's story in what has become a voluminous collection of my writing as I head for old age, the years after I reach 80 in 2023.  Jacob Burkhardt(1818-1897), an historian of art and culture, saw history as "contemplation based on sources."

This comes even closer to a view of history that encompases my poetry.  History is the experience of people, and R.G. Collingwood(1889-1943), British philosopher and historian, saw it as "the history of thought." Leopold von Ranke(1795-1886), the German historian considered to be one of the founders of modern source-based history. said "history is concerned with things as they really happened; whereas British historian Arnold Toynbee(1889-1975) said it was "a search for light on the nature and destiny of man." So much of my poetic opus can be seen in the light of these views of history: my poetry, then, is history in addition to being many other things.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 28 March 2001 to 3 August 2011.

In these thousands of poems
there is but one poem-the search
for what is fundamental-enduring
and essential in my life-experience
and understanding of society & so
much more about religion & myself.

There is surprise in my words and I
find out what I think on my pilgrimage
toward all that is eschatological, toward
the discovery of truth & the production
of knowledge, truth, reality and this life.

For I deal with the peculiarities
of my time, place and character
and I transcend these restrictions
only with reference to a vast sea
of knowledge which threatens to
drown me in its swirling eddies.

And so I connect a life of facts
with a system of reality making
history speak through me, like,
somewhat of a craft, beyond
Eurocentrism, my part of world(1)
history, any history, any views.(2)

(1) This view of history was challenged in the late 1950s. See Geoffrey Barraclough, Main Trends in History, Holmis & Meier Pub., NY, 1978.
(2) Here I draw on the Dutch historian Huzinga in 1936.

Ron Price
29 March 2001 to 20 November 2011

RADIANT AXIS OF BEAUTY

Pilgrimages must have begun to be made by Mankind whereever and whenever one single shrine came to surpass its neighbours in prestige to a degree that moved the regular local votaries of the neighbouring shrines to reinsure their claim on the good graces of the numina(1) by paying occasional or periodical visits to the preeminent shrine as well. -Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 1963(1954), Vol. 9, p.97; (1) a Latin term for a mythic or legendary figure guiding the course of events in a particular place or in the whole world. The term was originally used in Roman philosophical and religious thought.

Haramayn, Jerusalem, Bodh Gaya,
Najaf, Karbila, Mecca, Medina, all
cynosures of worlds apart through
time.........Wu-T’ai Shan, Omei, too,
gradually accumulating mana, while
Canterbury, Walsingham, Kurasan,
Lourdes, Lisieux gave birth to shrine
worlds on pilgrimage-horizons, holy
grounds like Nazareth or Bethlehem,
pristine sacredness, soul-resorts, spurs
to superhuman effort, to deft practitioners
to protocols of piety, rehearsed petitioners,
who even now, as they enter some rarified
Presence on some sacred mount, feast their
eyes, gathering memories for the time when
they must leave that holy mountain, perhaps
Carmel’s bony spine & this radiant axis of a
surpassing beauty....

Amidst the sandy convolutions of that landscape
and its grainy, parched surface where hot winds
mutter apocalyptically a gleaming world arises
for some; for others just another tourist site.

Ron Price
26 December 1997 to 3 August 2011

THANKING A READER AT THIS SITE

I want to thank Yvonne Perkins for the idea of posting a review of some book on history at this site. Although I have posted many comments on books written in the last decade and decades, no solid or extensive commentary on one book is found on this modern history page at this website. The following post, I trust, makes up for part of this deficiency.  I hope in the months ahead to post a more extensive review on a book about history written in the last decade as Yvonne would like to see. I do encourage Yvonne and others to have a glance at my many commentaries on history at many internet sites. Most of the commentaries are in the form of prose-poems.  The links to these sites are found on this page.

EDWARD GIBBON AND ARNOLD TOYNBEE: A Personal Perspective

About five years before Shaykh Ahmad(1743-1826), a critical person whose writings now form part of the spiritual heritage of the Babi-Baha'i religion, left his home in Bahrain, Edward Gibbon completed his six volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  The year was 1788. It was the eve of the French revolution and the eve of a spiritual revolution that was to lead to a new Revelation.  This, of course, is a Baha'i historical perspective.  Some time in 1960 Arnold Toynbee put his pen down and his Reconsiderations to his ten volume magnum opus, A Study of History, was complete. Toynbee found Gibbon’s work a model and an inspiration. So, too, did Shoghi Effendi, the leader of the Baha'i Faith from 1921 to 1957 who inherited that spiritual heritage beginning arguably with Shaykh Ahmad.  Shoghi Effendi's writings have always been for me one of the models for my own writing as were Edward Gibbon's, a fortiori.

In September 1921, about two months before the death of ‘Abdu’l-Baha(1844-1921) another inheritor of that same spiritual heritage, Shoghi Effendi was studying at Oxford.  In that same month Arnold Toynbee had an inspiration while travelling on a train. This inspiration was the last, the final, inspiration that led to his A Study of History. He wrote his 11 volume tour de force (11 if one includes his Reconsiderations) during the years of what Baha'is call the Guardianship: 1921-1957.  As far as we know, Shoghi Effendi never read Toynbee. It took Gibbon some sixteen years, and Toynbee some thirty-two, to complete their massive, their life's work for which they are now known to history and especially to historians, at least some historians. 

Gibbon's Decline and Fall had a profound effect on the Guardian, on his translations and, arguably, on his conception of history and life. The latter, the then leader of what was in the 1920s a new religious Movement of perhaps 80,000 adherents worldwide, began to write his voluminous, his many 1000s of letters, some of which were made into books as well as his book God Passes By published in August 1944, the same month as I was born.   Shoghi Effendi's writings were to effect the thoughts of my generation, the generation of Baha'is that came of age in the Ten Year Crusade(1953-1963).  His writings also affected the first plans of the Universal House of Justice in the half century 1963 to 2013.  Inevitably, only a small fraction of that generation was affected by Toynbee since his whole language was, like Gibbon’s, complex and difficult for the reader.  As the decades moved insensibly toward the close of the twentieth century fewer and fewer students had the skills to read Toynbee but, since more and more were graduating in history and the social sciences, a coterie got exposed to Toynbee. A coterie also got exposed to the teachings of the Baha'i Faith. I was one.

SOME OF TOYNBEE'S VIEWS

Toynbee saw the first world war as the opening stage of a period that was like the Peloponnesian War of 431 to 404 BC. In that period in Greek history democracy came to an end, war punctuated the life of the city states and peace eventually came at a heavy price. Three-quarters of a century later Alexander conquered the world in 323 BC. The pattern may repeat itself in a different form in the twenty-first century as the first stirrings of World Order lead the World Order of Baha’u’llah to a position of much greater strength, prestige and influence than it has had in the first two centuries of its existence on this planet. The evolution of global order, assuming global order does in fact evolve, is a process which has only begun in the last century.  Any global federation, part of Toynbee's vision for humanity's survival, is still a long way off and only time, of course, will tell what pattern unfolds in global history in the 21st and succeeding centuries.

The Baha’i community has just left the first century and a half of an obscurity in which its history was enshrouded. Toynbee and Gibbon function as stimulating historians to a generation, my generation, which came of age of age in the first decades of the office of the Universal House of Justice, the trustees of the legacy of two prophets of God in the nineteenth century--to simple state a Baha'i theological view.  Two universal historians, the first at the dawn of this new age as the French revolution was about to take place, and the second at the dawn of the period known to Baha’is as the Kingdom of God on Earth, the period after 1953, have strongly influenced my reading and writing since my days at university in the 1960s.

As the Baha’i community moved through its international teaching plan, starting in 1937, Toynbee was there waiting in the wings, so to speak. Three volumes were out in 1934 and the tenth volume in 1954 as that great Crusade was getting warmed up and taking this new Faith to every corner of the globe.  A universal history up-dated for a global community: 6,290 pages and over three million words was Toynbee’s master work. His master passion, his torment, his labour and his pleasure coincided with the global plans and global energies of an emerging world religion. That so few could and did enjoy Toynbee's work was no more insignificant than the reaction of the masses to Shakespeare. In a world that was getting more education as the decades went by there was every reason to hope, especially if imbued with Baha’i philosophy, that Toynbee’s days of being appreciated were just beginning.

I have written before on Toynbee and I will likely write about him again. I had no idea when I bought those 10 volumes in the McMaster University bookshop in 1964 that they would influence my thinking as much as they have in the last half century. The volumes are worn and much the worse for wear, but they have become old friends.

Ron Price
30 March 1996 to 1 October 2011

Some of my internet posts below on modern history:

http://wheelercentre.com/videos/video/making-history-mark-mckenna-on-manning-clark/
(contains an excellent interview with the biographer of Manning Clark, Mark McKenna-2011)

http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/-frank-dikoetter-the-china-from-1959-to-1961

http://www.unitedstateshistoryforum.com/showthread

http://www.historum.com/american-history/26512-neutron-bomb
(readers can find over 100 posts at this site by clicking: (a) on my photo, (b) on the word 'statistics,' and then on the words (c) 'Find all posts by RonPrice.'

http://www.westerncivforum.com/index

http://www.allempires.com/forum/forum
(click on my name and then on the words "Find members posts" for several of my posts on this forum--and then 'search by user name')

http://www.politicsandcurrentaffairs.co.uk/Forum/us-politics-forum/107754-kennedys-looking-back.  
(I have 60+ posts on aspects of history and politics, but you must be registered at this site to read them)

http://www.historum.com/american-history/25610-kennedys-retrospective 
(click on my photo, then on the word statistics, & then on the words "Find all posts by RonPrice" to read some 100 posts at this site)

http://bahainews.ca/en/110419-electionprocess

https://www.dropbox.com/home#/History
(can't access my posts unless readers are registered at this site)

http://www.politic.co.uk/19561-bloody-sunday-30-january-1972-derry.

http://www.sffworld.com/blog/7217.html

http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/1745

http://bahai-library.com/Ronprice

Some internet sites of good friends and others: (a) some at which I have posted comments and (b) some of which I have had correspondence on the subject of modern history and interdisciplinary subjects:
http://www.ted.com/talks/neil_macgregor_2600_years_of_history_in_one_object.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TedtalksHD+%28TEDTalks+HD+-+Site%29&utm_content=Google+International

http://www.markfoster.net/jccc/soclinks.html

http://grahamsbahaiblog.blogspot.com/

Some internet forums at which I have posted dozens of comments on aspects of modern history:
http://www.simaqianstudio.com/forum/index

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/search.

http://www.historum.com/ancient-history/21007-pocock-gibbon-history.    
(click on my photo, then on the word statistics and then on the words "find all posts by Ron Price)

http://www.allempires.com/forum/search_results_topics.

A VACUOUS WASTELAND

The year I became an international pioneer for the Canadian Baha'i community, 1962, the famous Australian historian Manning Clark published the first volume of what became his 6-volume A History of Australia. The last volume, number six, was published twenty-five years later in 1987 just as I was about to begin my last dozen years of FT teaching in Western Australia. Clark hoped through his history to take his readers up into the high mountains so that they might catch a glimpse of the great river of life. Clark believed that the twentieth century had become a wasteland, a kingdom of nothingness, where spiritual struggle had been abandoned for the vacuity of modern popular culture.  I had similar hopes and aspirations to Clark in my writing not only in history but in other disciplines.  It was my experience, in those first twenty-five years of living in Canada and Australia(1962-1987), that it was virtually impossible, except for a precious few, to interest my fellow human beings in the spiritual truths of a Revelation that I believed embodied the soul which modern society needed for its salvation. -Ron Price with thanks to Manning Clark,  A History of Australia: An Abridgement, Michael Cathcart, Penguin Books, 1995(1993), pp.x-xii.

I, too, have some beautiful books
for this kingdom of nothingness,
this vacuous wasteland,
but during these years
and your years, too, Manning,
they will sit unread
except by the few
who embraced the Cause,
who aim to stimulate, to enrich
the cultural attainments of the mind.

We try to bring new readers
to the frontier where music
takes over from the words
as they rise above the sound
of phrases and letters
and transcend the murmer
of syllables and sounds.
But how few, thusfar,
how lamentably few.

Ron Price
29 August 2001

DIFFERENT DEMONS

In 1844 the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, according to Manning Clark in his A History of Australia: Volume 3, was engaged in a "mystical communion with the Australian bush." Clark writes that Leichhardt sensed in those Australian "plains of desolation what he was seeking in life." That same year Leichhardt set out for what is now the Northern Territory. I lived in this Northern Territory for four years, 1982 to 1986. 

Leichhardt's journey helped create an image of Australia as "a land of mingled sublimity and beauty."  He returned to Sydney in 1846.(1)   In 1848 Leichhardt disappeared somewhere on the vast Australian continent. Leichhardt's efforts were part of a fifty year exploration, 1830-1880, that overcame much of the terra incognita that was the outback of Australia.(2) It may be that the Baha'i community is engaged in overcoming a different terra incognita, a process that may take at least two centuries, if not more: 1920-2120++. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)Manning Clark, A History of Australia: Vol.3, Melbourne UP, 1973, pp. 339-340; and (2) Ian Cameron, The History of the Royal Geographical Society: 1830-1980.

We have our terra incognita
and our ghastly blank land.(1)
What will be our Overland
Telegraph Line to take the(2)
'scarcely conceiveable' to
the 'practically possible?'

There's pleasure here
in this land, this vast
spiritual wilderness
with its special kind of
aloneness which preoccupies
me with the writing of a story
in which I freely & continuously
analyse, observe, reflect, describe
& record the experience of 4 epochs.

I have helped to start a voyage
of wonder, mystery and vision
in this second half of the first
century of the Formative Age,
so different from those explorers
who had to deal with the demon
of drought, aridity and indifference.
Mine is a demon of a different ilk.

1 Ray Erickson, Ernest Giles: Explorer and Traveller: 1835-1897, Heinemann, Melb., 1978, p.41.
2 1872.

Ron Price
22 February 2002

IDIOSYNCRASY

Perhaps I will get around to reading Manning Clark's A History of Australia: Volumes 1-6 in the latter years of my latter years. It is still too much for me, too detailed an account for someone like me who likes a general picture and has so much that he wants to read from an immensely burgeoning world of print.  But I have found some of the things Clark says provide useful ways of putting my task as a poet in perspective. I try to say, in my poetry, 'what the heart doth say' about one of the great passions of my life--the complex interrelationships between my society, my religion and my own experience. My poetry attempts to describe the experience of one man pioneering and travelling for and in a new Faith across two continents over four epochs of the first century of the Formative Age.  Here, in what has become a massive poetic opus, is a putting into words of what one man saw when he opened a window on his experience richly coloured as it was by his religion and the story of his society.   I have, like Clark and Thomas Hardy before me, watched "that pattern among general things" which my own temperamental idiosyncrasies move me to observe.-Ron Price with thanks to Manning Clark, A History of Australia: Vol. 3 and 6, Preface, 1973 and 1987.

We pay a terrible price
for our fatal flaws---
as you put it when
you were finishing up
your great work.

The one precious gift
we need is to read
the direction of the
river of life and
I have poured much
into that reading.

I have poured my life
into this 'holy crusade.'
It has fortified my days,
but left me worn at the edges
as the light was finally
installed on the hill
in the Vineyard of the Lord.

It wasn't, as Clark concluded,
that no one knew the direction
of the river or had anything to say.(1)
Too many people thought they knew
and even more had something to say.

If I did not have the aid
of those Men of Baha,
I would drown in that
blood-dimmed tide
of passionate intensity(2)
and endless, absolutely
endless, opinions filling
the spaces of the print
and electronic media today.

(1) Clark, Vol.6, op.cit., p.500: written on or about May 13th 1987.
(2) W.B. Yeats: in his famous prophetic poem The Second Coming. See the following link for some interpretations of that poem:

http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/yeats/yeats

Ron Price
22 February 2002

STUPENDOUS

Kahlil Gibran once wrote that Bahá'u'lláh’s Arabic writings were the most stupendous literature that ever was written. Of ‘Abdu’l-Baha he wrote that “for the first time I saw form noble enough to be a receptacle for the Holy Spirit.” This Lebanese writer who has sold more books than all the American poets from Auden to Whitman died in 1931. But he possesses a spectacular durability and a burgeoning reputation. In my early years as a teacher, back in 1968, a film was made about Gibran. It was called “The Broken Wings.”

When I retired from teaching thirty years later in 1999 I was given one of the latest biographies on Gibran, one of the two that had come out in 1998. Gibran had hung around in the popular marketplace all my adult life. From my earliest years in which books became important, somewhere in about 1962, Gibran’s soulful, doleful portrait stared at me from desks when I studied history and philosophy; it followed me into primary and high schools and would pop up in the most unpredictable places from Baffin island to Zeehan Tasmania. Gibran was, it seemed, an institution and a phenomenon and the author of the most widely-read book of the 20th century.1-Ron Price with thanks to Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins, Kahlil Gibran: Man and Poet, Oneworld, Oxford, 1998.

You seem to have followed me
like a shadow, like some second-
cousin in my religious life, out
there in the book shops, a copy
with a friend kept in their bag
or on a home-shelf. You died
just when we were getting our
organization together around
the finest writing in Arabic ever
created by the pen of a human.

You had the cadences of the King
James Version in tantalizing paradox,
eternal pronunciamentos, some said
a patented blend of emptiness and
pretension from a man who craved
tranquillity and obscurity back home.

But the age was becoming more complex
and your simple solutions would not do,
would not be enough for our troubled age.
Ours was an age for falcons and eagles
not the simple, sweet flying birds,
aphorisms for the unpredictable tempest
that was shaking our world apart.
Still, you were eloquent and beautiful
and your lonely voice reached millions,
for you had touched the world of the
Imagination that would save us all,
the world of that stupendous writing
from the greatest Being to have lived.

Ron Price
June 2nd 2006