MY ANNUAL EMAIL
My annual letter or email is found at the links below. I have placed this annual email in the broader context of: (a) my website and (b) this sub-section on autobiography for those who are interested. I keep this annual communication, this annual email, to friends and family as well as to a wide variety of associations, known and unknown, up-dated during the year. Anyone wanting to read about the general picture of the goings-on in my life's activities and my family, at least the central people in my family's inner circle--some of the significant others as they say in psychology--can see this general picture in my two annual messages: one for 2011/2 and one for 2012/13.
In the 23 weeks(3/12/'11 to 15/5/'12) that my annual post for 2011/12 has been at the 2 sites, the two links, below---it has received 1550 hits. This is one measure, the main type of internet quantifier, of the extent to which this post has been clicked-on if not read and, if read, not necessarily in its entirety. That annual email went through 6 editions during those 23 weeks. Having more than 1500 hits is a modest figure in cyberspace where many successful sites, many internet entrepreneurs and administrators, as well as many who aim at what is sometimes called a maximization of search engine optimization techniques---get millions of hits. If I was into popularity, fame and wealth, as I say on my home page, I'd pack up and invest my time in other activities than writing due to my realization that fame, celebrity status and wealth will always elude me.
The first edition of my annual email was written at the beginning of December 2011. It was a survey for that year of my activities and those of some of my family members. The 2nd edtion was written as both a survey of 2011 and an introduction to the up-coming year 2012. That 2nd edition can be found at this link: http://www.theforumsite.com/users/ronprice/journal/80828. The 3rd and 4th editions were written for the Baha'i celebrations of Ayyam-i-Ha(26/2/'12-1/3/'12) and Naw-Ruz(21/3/'12), respectively. The 5th edition of my annual email for 2011/12 was written for Easter, 8/4/'12, and the Passover, 6/4/'12 to 14/4/'12 in the Christian and Jewish communities, respectively. The 6th edition was written for the Ridvan period, held from 21/4/'12 to 2/5/'12. Ridvan is one of the several annual Baha'i festivals or celebrations. That 6th edition of my annual email is found at: http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=233038
The 2nd edition of my annual email for 2012 was updated on 15 May 2012. It has already received 250 hits. It is found at this link:http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?p=3452639#post3452639
MORE ON MY ANNUAL EMAIL
The information contained in the e-mail to whom it is sent, and to whom it is made available in cyberspace, is not intended to be confidential. This message does not need to be protected by privacy acts or any other legal rules. The retention, dissemination, distribution or copying of my e-mail is not strictly prohibited. I place this annual email in cyberspace at my website for ease of access by readers since it provides a personal aspect to my website, a website which already has a strong autobiographical flavour as is obvious to any reader who spends much time at my site, a site I have now had for the last 16 years. I recommend that anyone not wanting to receive the email, the post, found at the above link, simply delete it from their mail box when, and if, I send it to them. It goes without saying, of course, that those who are not interested in this annual communication, and to whom I do not send this email personally, will simply not click on the above link.
I have been writing an annual communication to friends and family since 1967 when I left southern Ontario. I grew up in a part of Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe. At the age of 18 I began my pioneering-travelling life for the Canadian Baha'i community and moved to several places in that Golden Horseshoe before my first wife and I went to live on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic in 1967. Since then, some 45 years ago, I have been writing to friends and family most years, but not to everyone in my family and not to all my friends. There were people, both in my family and among my friends, who liked to write and our correspondence became more regular. Beginning in 2011, though, I placed this annual email, the annual update on my personal life, at 2 internet sites at which I've been posting my writing for several years.
WHY HAVE THIS EMAIL ONLINE
In placing this annual email online as well as having a website at all, I follow the advice of that encyclopaedic British historian Arnold Toynbee (1898-1975) who wrote that: "It is a paradoxical, but profoundly true and important, principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it." I leave it to readers who come to this site to work out some of my many and more ambitious goals beyond what may be obvious here, beyond what I write here, both in this section of my website and in its entire composition.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: CONFESSIONALISM
Jean Jaques Rousseau(1712-1778) was a major Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. Readers who would like to have some idea of the meaning of the term 'Romanticism' can go to this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism should they desire. Rousseau had a political philosophy that heavily influenced the French Revolution, as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought. For more on Rousseau go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau.
Rousseau wrote at the beginning of his novelistic Confessions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_%28Rousseau%29 “I am not made like anyone with whom I have ever been acquainted, perhaps like no one in existence.” Although I think this is true of each of us, I make no effort to sustain some illusion of my preternatural extraordinariness. Far from it. At this website, now in its 16th year on the world-wide-web, and in my writings in general, I make more of an effort to sustain the view that each of us has more in common with others than the differences. The differences, of course, are often a source of tensions and trials, difficulties and ordeals. Such is life. But so, too, are these differences a source of much of the rich and delightful side of human experience.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: BASED ON A VISION
The world is headed in the next several centuries of this 3rd millennium, such is my view, for a community of communities, a communitas communitatum, a world unified and at peace. That is the vision which inspires my writing and this vision utilizes, therefore, what the French call the "longue durée." This is an expression used by the French Annales School of historical writing to designate their approach to the study of history. This approach gives priority to long-term historical structures over short term events. The sociologist and economist François Simiand(1873-1935) called the short term study of history: histoire événementielle, "eventual history." The short term time-scale is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist; whereas, the longue durée concentrates on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures over centuries. This way of dealing with history attempts to establish broader syntheses of what is known as prosopography to historians, namely, the investigation of the common characteristics of a historical group whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable. For more details on this view go to:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_dur%C3%A9e
This vision, my long term view for humankind, which looks back as well as forward, can be found expressed in the following poem I wrote several years ago and placed at an internet site known as Hub Pages: http://ronprice.hubpages.com/hub/From-HomoHeidelbergensis-To-Utopia-500-000-BP-To-500-000-AD This vision, or at least part of it, is also inspired by and based on several other historians and sociologists. A Study of History is a 12-volume magnum opus of British historian Arnold J. Toynbee which he began in 1921 and finished in 1961. I purchased these volumes while at university as a history and philosophy student in 1964/5. It took me many years to be able to read Toynbee with some ease. Initially, indeed for some years, I found his writing tortuous and complex. Toynbee has never been easy for the average student. In the 1960s I was that average high school, university and graduate student. In the 40 years of writing his study of history Toynbee traced the development and decay of all of the major world civilizations in the historical record. Toynbee applies his model to each of these civilizations, detailing the stages through which they all pass: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration. For more on the subject of Toynbee's A Study of History go to:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History
MYSELF AS WORLD CITIZEN
When anyone asked him where he came from, he said, ‘I am a citizen of the world.’
—Diogenes Laertius(3rd century A.D.), Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
Laertius refused to be defined by his local origins and local group memberships, so central to the self-image of a conventional Greek male; he insisted on defining himself in terms of more universal aspirations and concerns. The Stoics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism who followed his lead developed his image of the kosmou politês or world citizen more fully, arguing that each of us dwells, in effect, in two communities—the local community of our birth, and the community of human argument and aspiration. Seneca(4 BC-65 AD) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger was part of this Stoic tradition and he wrote in his On Leisure that "what is truly great and truly common is found when we look neither to this corner nor to that. It is found when we measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun.” It is this international, this global, community that is most fundamentally the source of our moral obligations.
Montaigne(1533-1592) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne was led to exclaim that he wished that instead of one Laërtius in the history of philosophy there had been a dozen. Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential writers of the French renaissance, a recent term used to describe a cultural and artistic movement in France from about 1475 to 1675. Arguably the first essayist, Montaigne was known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and, for some, he is thought of as the father of modern skepticism. With the decline of classical studies in the last half century, especially in the context of popular culture, people like Laertius and Montaigne are virtually unknown figures but, I mention them here, because their internationalism is not a new phenomenon on our planet. Internationalism has morphed into many new forms in our age, our 21st century.
With respect to the most basic moral values such as justice, “we should regard all human beings as our fellow citizens and neighbors.” So wrote the Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and middle Platonist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonism Plutarch. Plutarch(46-120 AD) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutarch is known primarily for his Parallel Lives, Customs and Mores, and The Life of Alexander. We should regard our deliberations, he argued, as first and foremost deliberations about human problems of people in particular concrete situations. We should not regard our problems as growing out of a national identity that is altogether unlike that of others.
These early internationalists knew that the invitation to think as a world citizen was, in a sense, an invitation to be an exile from the comfort of patriotism and its easy sentiments. To see the ways of life in our national community as the main source of justice and the good and not as only one of the many ways that nations and their people see truth, leads to international problems. It did then as it does now. The accident of where one is born is just that, an accident; any human being might have been born in any nation. Recognizing this, his Stoic successors held, we should not allow differences of nationality or class or ethnic membership or even gender to erect barriers between us and our fellow human beings. We should recognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect. For more on this essay given in 1994 by Martha Naussbaum(1947-)an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics, go to:http://bostonreview.net/BR19.5/nussbaum.php
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: AN EXERCISE IN SELF-UNDERSTANDING
Autobiography is, for me at least, an exercise in self-understanding, self-forgiveness and, if one is young enough with more years to live---and I trust I am and I have---an exercise to help one strive for whatever goals have been part of one's beliefs, values and attitudes---but are not yet attained. The observing “I” of autobiography tells the story of the observed “I,” the self who I was at different stages in the lifespan. I tell the story of my life not as an investigative journalist or reporter might tell the story of his subject, exposing for the wide-wide-world all my warts and sins of omission and commission for a voyeuristic world. I tell my story as a kind and loving mother as well as a just and understanding father might.
As an/the older narrator I look back at my younger self with tenderness and pity, empathizing with my sorrows and understanding the reason for my sins. My critic's, my journalist’s, my analyst's habits I trust will inhibit my self-love, at least to some extent. My aim is to understand self, and this is no easy task. There are some who analyze their life and put their analysis down on paper with a much heavier hand than I have done. It may be that I have been far too kind to myself as I have come to view myself in my 5 volume and 2600 page memoir. There are others, other writers, who take a much more critical stance than that kind and gentle mother, that judicious and loving father that is the basis, it seems to me, of the empathic nature of my own retrospection. Susan Sontag(1933-2004), an American essayist, literary icon, and political activist was such a person and I leave it to readers to inquire into her personal, highly critical self-introspections.
Readers might like to start reading some of Sontag's heavy-journalistic-introspectiveness thanks to Lauren Elkin. I found Elkin's comments on Sontag's Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 were a helpful introduction. Elkin is a writer, literary critic, and Ph.D. candidate in English literature at the Université de Paris VII and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She writes about books and French culture on her blog, Maîtresse. She lives in Paris. For her comments on Sontag and some quotations from Sontag's journals go to this link: http://quarterlyconversation.com/susan-sontag-reborn-journals
NARCISSISM and REFLEXIVITY
I trust that readers will not view my autobiography, this sub-section of my website, my entire website, or the magnum opus that is my total body of writing, as an exercise in narcissism. Narcissism is a term with a wide range of meanings depending on whether it is used to describe a central concept of psychoanalytic theory, a mental illness, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait. Except in the sense of primary narcissism or healthy self-love, "narcissism" usually is used to describe some kind of problem in a person's or in a group's relationships with self and others. In everyday speech, "narcissism" often means egoism, vanity, conceit, or simple selfishness. Applied to a social group, it is sometimes used to denote elitism or an indifference to the plight of others. In psychology, the term is used to describe both normal self-love and an unhealthy self-absorption due to a disturbance in the sense of self. I trust, too, that whatever narcissim is attributed to me is seen as this normal self-love. Self-love is something that is kneaded into the very clay of man, the very basis of an individual human life. For more on this subject go to:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism
I prefer the term reflexivity to narcissism. In sociology, a subject I have been studying and teaching for half a century(1963 to 2012), reflexivity means an act of self-reference where examination or action bends back on, refers to, and affects the entity instigating the action or examination. Reflexivity in sociology commonly refers to the capacity of a person to recognize forces of their socialization and alter their place in the social structure. A low level of reflexivity would result in an individual shaped largely by their environment and their society.
A high level of social reflexivity would be defined as an individual shaping their own norms, tastes, politics, desires, and so on. Personal reflexivity involves a person, a writer and poet like myself, reflecting upon how my beliefs, values, experiences, interests, political commitments, wider aims in life, and social identities shape my life and writing. This further involves my reflecting on ways in which my writing may have changed me as a writer, as a poet, and as a person over the lifespan. For more on the subject of reflexivity go to:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_%28social_theory%29
Epistemological reflexivity is an approach to reflexivity based on epistomology, a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, scope and limitations of knowledge. Such an approach requires that the writer consider: decisions about the process and the act of his writing, his chosen methods and aims in writing, the information and experience on which his writing is based, the methods of his analysis, and the ways in which all of these factors create "boundaries" and "frameworks" for his act of writing.
This is the basis for what might be called an action-oriented writing context. The writer works through his lifetime of experience, reflects on his experience, and theorizes about this experience. These are all critical concerns in epistemological reflexivity. Questions such as: "what matters to me as a writer," "how do I understand power and authority," and "how wide are the implications of the content and context of my writing" are key concerns among many others. These questions illustrate the extent to which I as a writer need to pay attention to detail and context, aims and ambitions in the writing process.
MY AIM
My aim, at least one of the many aims in writing this autobiography, is to understand the many selves I have had and have been in the course of my eight decades of living. "The unexamined life is not worth living," wrote or rather spoke Socrates 2500 years ago. I write about other people, places, and things as part of this autobiography, and I try to do this with affection and with warmth, with understanding and insight. Readers who want to read more about my autobiography can go to my old website in the top righthand corner of this page; or they can just read more of this website or delve into my 1000s of internet posts---or do all three. Everything I write is autobiography in one shape or form. so is this true of everything everyone writes, so argue some literary critics.
As that inimitable and wondrous Samuel Johnson(1709-1784): poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer emphasized: writers should be willing to examine everything about themselves in an attempt to get hold of human nature. Socrates put it a little differently 2500 years ago, as I said above and to reiterate: the unexamined life is not worth living. I was raised to insist, and as I ventured forth into the wide-wide world I continued with this belief, namely, that a life that was not based on serious reflection was without any doubt not worth living. Yet I was aware that such a reflection could possibly impede the living of a life if the aim of that life was, to put it in the vernacular, "to have fun." For many, too much thinking is seen as a bad thing.
SUSAN SONTAG
There were some humans who write autobiographically, memoiristically, and are far from kind to themselves. They are harsh critics of their lives. Susan Sontag(1933-2004), American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist, had such a critical tendency. Serious and introspective, with daily and hard-headed thinking, she lived her life decade after decade. The first volume of her Journals(1947-1963), which she saw as a medium for creating herself, reveal a person far different from the ordinary, everyday people who are the common lot, the types, we meet most of the time on our journey through life. She was not 'into' some slack acceptance of comfort and ease; she did not leave herself alone, but was continually trying to do better, to work harder, to refine her character and her world of action. She was very hard on herself; she willed herself into a strength of vision and ambition of literary voice; she laboured to create a self she could love, and it was clearly a work of serious labour. The greatest intellectual project in her life was herself. I am sure some would say she examined her life far too minutely. "Give it a rest, Susan," I can hear my easy-going Australian friends saying.
RONALD CONWAY, OSCAR WILDE AND SHAKESPEARE
I long ago struggled to understand the psyches of those whom the psychologist Ronald Conway(1926-2009) said are caught in the land of the long weekend and the great Australian stupor. By the time I had been in classrooms for half a century as a student and teacher, I no longer struggled to understand such psyches. I have met so many, indeed, multitudes for whom too much thought, too much analysis, about their life and the life of their society was not on their daily routine of activity. Australia and Australians are a pleasure-loving, activity oriented people. Like Oscar Wilde they make of pleasure and fun, activity and doing things, going places and meeting people---the wellsprings of their happiness. Shakespeare put the preferences of such people for action and not thought, for activity and not analysis in the following words of his famous solliloquy "to be or not to be." That distinguished Bard wrote, toward the end of that famous passage, about those whose lives are more introspective than action oriented, more the thinkers than the doers. These are not the Aussies I have lived with now for over four decades. Generally, if one can generalize, the more introspective souls seem to be destined, as Shakespeare puts it in Hamlet, to have:
........................the native hue of resolution
...sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
-Hamlet, Act III, Scene I, lines 84-88.
Of course there is much more to say about the general character of Australians, about the general personality of the people in any of the approximately 200 nation states, but I will not take-on that complex subject here.
THE DEAD THE LIVING AND THE NOT-YET-BORN
The dead can extend feelings across the divide separating the living from the ever after. This is clear in the Baha'i writings. It is also a view that many writers have who do not believe in an afterlife. They can do this especially if they think of it in advance, before they actually die. They come to see their writing sub specie aeternitatus. They live in hope that their writing will contribute, in some way or other, to the great conversation that is existence. This is unquestionably true of 1000s of writers who have long gone from the world.
Ideas for me have always been a kind of emotion, something I felt and cared about in the way that most people do about feelings like sadness or love. My writing goes back to the beginning of my life—and even before the beginning—of my life. Ideas and the need for historical explanations have run deep in my life. I remember the first feeling of need in this area as far back as senior high school, perhaps 1962, half a century ago. The beginning of this process was extended in my four years at university: 1963-67. The past slowly, sensibly and insensibly, became an engine of my thoughts. Of course, this is obviously true from our first memories and for me, therefore, as far back as the late 1940s. Memory and history as well as many other disciplines played a part in this engine that is my life. Memory is not for me a certainty, but I cling to it as a lifeline in my writing. I hope I never have an illness that takes away my memory. It is an entry-point into a type of intellectual, an introspective and retrospective bubble---and a form of independence which I hope I can keep until my demise.
MEMORY COLLABORATION AND NON-PARTISANSHIP
To retrieve a memory sometimes I have to ask others or read something. My writing is, then, a work of memory and a work of collaboration. My writing depends on vast quantities of notes, references, materials, charts, facts, and information gleaned from hundreds of sources. Some of my information is painstakingly transcribed and ordered and, sometimes, it is just thrown-together in files. My books, the ones I have written and all of which are works in progress, are both inside me and outside me; they are organic and they grow with time. My books could also be described as clarifications of what I have been thinking and feeling.
My politics is not the politics of disability or partisanship, even though I have had to deal with bipolar disorder and other disabilities as well as partisan politics for the last 50 years, if not longer. Listening to the views of partisan politicians is the experience of everyman in the West unless he shuts himself completely away from the print and electronic media. My politics is not that of a special interest; my politics is about collective responsibility and the duty of us all to each other. It is non-partisan.
I have spent my life, at least since the mid-1960s, trying to remedy the obscurity, the elitism, the trahison des clercs, the compromising or betrayal of intellectual integrity and moral standards--my own and others. I have done this and I now do this by teaching, thinking and writing as clearly as I am able, as well as trying to be as honest as I possibly can with myself. Being alone also helps, indeed it is essential for me as a writer and poet, editor and publisher. My idea of what it means to be an intellectual is rooted in my sense of aloneness, my staying apart from the crowd and of keeping my own counsel. But I have also had a strong sense of community since those same 1960s, if not earlier, in both the Baha'i community and in the many communities in which my personal life has been enmeshed as far back as I can remember---the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Now, nearly 70, I usually evaluate an event or problem alone, on its own facts, and not according to any blueprint except, of course, the blueprints that exist in the various fields of knowledge. Blueprints also come to exist as a result of the perceptions and understandings that I have absorbed over a lifetime. Writing involves the physical self—pens, paper, keyboards—the touch connecting the mind to the page; it has a rhythm and a feel, a posture and pacing, a pulse through the body. This sense of place, feeling and self is crucial. -Ron Price with thanks to Jennifer Homans “Tony Judt: A Final Victory,” 22 March 2012, The New York Review of Books.
JOHN OSBOURNE AND I
John Osbourne(1929-1994) English playwright, screenwriter, actor and critic of the Establishment, it is said, never had any real subject but himself. In Look Back in Anger, a broadly political rage against the nuclear arms race, the ruling class, and the welfare state is inextricably intertwined with attacks on lovers, friends, and family. In the play’s most famous speech, Jimmy seems to be angry about having nothing to be angry about: “There aren’t any good, brave causes left.” In a year when Khrushchev denounced Stalin, the first airborne H-bomb was dropped on Bikini Atoll, the US Supreme Court ruled against the segregation of public buses, Martin Luther King’s house was bombed, the French prime minister resigned over the Algerian war, Polish miners were shot down by Soviet troops, Fidel Castro launched his invasion of Cuba, General Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and the Hungarian uprising broke out, this was a peculiarly blinkered claim. His play, Look Back in Anger, is almost pure autobiography, and as John Heilpern makes clear in his biography, the anger in it is so deeply personal, with such singular causes, as to make nonsense of it as politics.
Osbourne’s view of the world was always narrow. “The only life I can explore—or begin to even chart—is my own,” he wrote in his notebook in 1972. Given the strongly autobiographical nature of my own writing, these words of Osbourne are of interest to me; paradoxically my writing and my interests are also global as well as astronomical and astrophysical. Osbourne's life, as John Heilpern’s chatty, engaging, and passionately sympathetic 2007 biography shows, is fascinating, if often repellent. But Osbourne’s inability to transcend it makes him a paradoxical figure: the most significant minor playwright in the history of English theater. Osbourne was a very different man to me. The contrasts are, for me, quite startling. In so many ways Osbourne provides a polar opposite to who I am, to the way I am. For some comments on Heilpern's biography of Osbourne go to:http://www.armchairinterviews.com/reviews/john-osborne-the-many-lives-of-the-angry-young-man
In the 1950s and ’60s Osbourne was easily Britain’s best-known playwright. I joined the Baha'i Faith at the time, finished university and began my career as a teacher. I did not know Osbourne even existed so occupied was I with my own agenda, with surviving a schizo-affective disorder and the academic and personal demands on my life. Osbourne grew rich as co-producer and Oscar-winning screenwriter of Tony Richardson’s “Tom Jones” (1963). He earned more money than he knew what to do with. He bought a house in Belgravia and a Bentley, employed secretaries, servants and chauffeurs. I always had enough money on which to survive, but I was never in the financial big-leagues.
By the 1970s, this famous writer of the 1950s and 1960s, was swallowing one bottle of vodka and a couple of bottles of wine every day, along with unreckonable amounts of Champagne and codeine and amphetamine. He never again wrote anything so good or popular as the four plays of the 1950s and the last of them finished in 1964. He spent his last years in a big house near the hilly Welsh border, struggling with bad health and debts. Time will tell how I will spend the last years of my life, but it will not be in a big house.
DIVINE DISCONTENT
I do not possess Shakespeare's or Johnson's intellectual grace or their ability to capture a moral point, coin it with its exact weight and density at the right moment, and freshly imprint it with a human face. They were both a writer’s writer who beckoned individual creative power and brought both dignity and self-sufficiency, professionalism and the supreme importance of individual conscience to the writing game. There is a grandeur in Shakespeare and Johnson's work that comes, arguably, from their oppressed spirit, their divine discontent and, arguably, from their spirits in search of a home and never finding it. Neither of these men knew great peace, but they always suspected that their journey was common to humanity. The subject of the personalities of these two men is far too complex and extensive to deal with here, but I mention these great writers as a form of contrast and comparison with my own life and writing. I circle around these men to gain helpful perspectives on my own life.
I have enjoyed, or so it seems to me, much more peace than either Shakespeare or Johnson, perhaps due to the miracle of modern chemotherapy and the mircale of a new Revelation both of which were not available to humankind until the last two centuries. But their divine discontent I have known for decades. I have longed, as far back as I can remember, for things I will never obtain and this longing, this enemy, this robber of my quiet I have shared with these men of commitment.
OBSESSIONS and COMPULSIONS
Authors need obsessions; it’s their immoderate and uncontainable, rational and irrational preoccupations that feed their creative energies. On any obsessive-compulsive disorder spectrum that one finds in psychiatry, at least according to one of my psychiatrists, I am at the very low end at about a 1 or 2(out of 10), although my wife might disagree. I have a strong attraction and drive, a degree of compulsion and enthusiasm, of infatuation and of one-tracked mindedness, a passion and preoccupation, a penchant and a predisposition, with what is for me the magic and magnetism that is writing and what might be called the cultural attainments of the mind.
The best writers can lead readers to share their manias. By the time I came to the role of writer and poet on a full-time basis I was in my late middle age(55-60) and the early years of late adulthood(60-67). Late adulthood is the period from 60 to 80 according to one model of human development. By the age of 60 I had acquired a number of manias and I have found readers in cyberspace to share these manias. Actually, I don't use the word mania in the sense that it is used in psychiatry. For a description of mania in the field of psychiatry go to this link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mania I have had mania twice in my life in the psychiatric sense as part of my bipolar disorder. I would not wish mania, at least the variety of mania that I had, on anyone. It was no tea-party.
I use the word mania in the more colloquial sense as: compulsion, craving, craze, desire, enthusiasm, fascination, idée fixe, infatuation, obsession, on the brain, partiality, passion, preoccupation. After a dozen years of writing online and possessing obsessions about all sorts of things of which writing is the central-linch-pin, I have discovered a reading public I could scarcely have imagined in my 50 years of student and employment life: 1949-1999. Obsessive-compulsiveness, at least some degree of this human characteristic, what in some ways is a disorder, has characterized my life since my early childhood. For more on this subject of writers and obsessions go to:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/books/review/what-elizabeth-taylor-did-for-womens-rights.html?scp=1&sq=Camilla%20Paglia&st=cse For more on Johnson go to this link:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/oct/08/the-powers-of-dr-johnson/?page=1
MEMORY
Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov(1899-1977), the Russian novelist, called his book about his childhood years, and in this incantatory title we can hear our human dread of forgetting. “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” reads the book’s first sentence. The crack of light may be described as memory itself—that fickle and unreplicable network of experience and associations from which we construct who we are, who others are, and what we may expect from them and from ourselves. The neurosystem in which a vertiable cascade of memory occurs, with its branches and transmitters and ingeniously spanned gaps, has an improvised quality that seems to mirror the unpredictability of thought itself. It is an ephemeral place that changes as our experience changes, to the point where we are incapable of remembering the same event in exactly the same way twice.
"Memory," Sue Halpern, in her book Can’t Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research(2008), reminds us, “is not an archive,” nor does it record in real time. Memory lives in the brain “in chemical traces, traces that can fade and can be augmented.” Memory depends on one’s experience and observation. The intensity of an experience may sharpen the memory of it, while making it even less accurate. During situations of extreme stress, for example, the body is flooded with damaging amounts of the hormone cortisol, causing communication relayed by neurotransmitters and other chemicals in the brain to break down. For more go to this link:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/arts/24iht-idbriefs24B.13164161.html
ORDINARY AND INSIGNIFICANT INDIVIDUALS
Old-style historians used to focus on kings and great statesmen, on the deeds and words of the famous and the eminent, on wars, on victories and defeats, on crashes and crises, scandals and miracles; only the most eloquent geniuses had access to the witness box in the court of History; the humble voices of the anonymous masses, the confused rumble of everyday life, were entirely lost to posterity, except under the microscope of some specialist, except for the few readers. For history from the perspective of ordinary people go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Improving_State_of_the_World, to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_history and/or to:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_history
Until the 20th century the whole question of literacy was and still is highly complex as this essay indicates:http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001460 Even now in 2012 some 15% of the world's population of more than 7 billion are illiterate, or functionally so. In 1970 it was 40%. Of that portion of the world's population which can read a great per centage can only read at a minimal level of functionality. For more on this subject go to:/146061e.pdf, or to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy and/or to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy
I AM ONE OF THOSE ORDINARY INDIVIDUALS
Modern historians, of at least some schools of historiography, are now attempting to redress the focus on kings and wars, the famous and the rich, the state of the study of history and its affairs, by drawing information from more diverse sources and by allowing more space to what would previously have been deemed too ordinary and insignificant to deserve recording. There is now a vast body of my writing for future historians and biographers, for example, that will help them understand my own personality and my psychology and, in the process, my own times, if anyone should so desire. My life will not be some elusive entity as the vast majority of the personalities and individual psychologies of my fellow believers, and as virtually everyone I have known in my life, who will remain somewhat elusive.
My writings—in its many genres from miscellaneous memoirs to poetry—form a considerable mass, the exploration of which will be quite daunting, yet I hope always rewarding in some way or other to the serious student of my time and age. At the same time I am not a celebrity, a person of distinguished achievement in some field, just part of that warp and weft, that thread, that tapestry of insigificant people who represent the vast majority of humankind: neither rich nor famous. If, though, as one of those first environmentalists Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone," I am a wealthy man.
THIS WRITER'S WORK FOR FUTURE BIOGRAPHERS AND HISTORIANS
The historical period which some future biographer will invite readers to consider through my eyes will be of exceptional interest, the first five epochs from 1944, virtually the entire second century of the Formative Age of the Baha'i Era, when the Baha'i Faith grew from an insignificant Movement on the far periphery of an emerging global, planetizing, culture and civilization, to a player of some note in the affairs of humankind, from perhaps 100 thousand adherents, mostly in Iran in 1944, to many millions spread over the entire surface of the Earth by 2044. My autobiography in its many forms will provide a small supplement to the vast array of information available on these five epochs, this second century of the Formative Age.
Beginning in the 1990s, especially after 1992, an auspicious juncture in the history of the Baha'i Faith, the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the ascension of Baha'u'llah, the accumulated potential for further developments in both the progress of the Baha'i community and my own writing was, in retrospect, incalculable. The onrushing, the quickening, wind to which the House of Justice referred in April 1992 seemed to be blowing through my life, veniliating my modes of thought, renewing, clarifying and amplifying my perspectives. As the Arc Project on Mt. Carmel proceded throughout the 1990s and was officially completed in 2001, a rush of ceasless literary activity, some new potency, that had begun for me in 1992 continued and began to consolidate itself. In these last two decades, then, 1992 to 2012, a foundation for the years ahead, for the last years of my late adulthood and old age, has been laid. This foundation of millions of words, a 2600 page autobiography and 7000 poems, among other writings has been laid: (i) after a warm-up period of pioneering and travelling from 1962 to 1992, and (ii) after more than 40 years of writing: 1950 to 1992.
BEING A WRITER: A MODEST PRETENSION
The majority of a writer's work, if not all of it, both prose and poetry, a writer outgrows and outlives. If he or she dies young the writer outgrows his or her work by the process of what you might call natural attrition. As I head for the age of 70, I am happy to pass on this magnum opus, this massive oeuvre, to those who take an interest in it, to future generations. Should no one take an interest in what I have written, I am prepared that all of my work will come to have been of no long term value to society. As T.S. Eliot(1988-1965) put it, a writer has to be prepared that everything he has written may prove to have been, in retrospect, an utter waste of his own time. T.S. Eliot was arguably the 20th century's most famous poet. He gave this advice so that writers might be saved from possible bitterness and disappointment, from discouragement that their work might not be recognized or that they might fail to attain any success or achievement.
To be a writer and author, a poet and a publisher, roles I have taken on in my late middle age(55-60) and the early years(61-67) of late adulthood, are for me modest pretensions, but they are engrossing roles which now occupy me full-time. By 1997 I had begun to see my total output as part of a great epic, and this notion of my work as epic had begun at the very outset of the new culture of learning and growth, the new paradigm, in the Baha'i community now two decades in the making: 1996-2016.
It has been a part of the function of my education, both my self-education and my formal education in schools, to help me to escape--not from my own time, for I am bound by that--but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of my own time. Hence my interest in so much that has been the humanities and social sciences, as well as, more recently, the biological as well as the physical and applied sciences. So much of my writing is imbued with these many burgeoning disciplines. This interest and my writing does not pay well. In my dozen years of FT writing(1999 to 2012) I have received about 13 cents per annum. I receive a Canadian and Australian pension which I began receiving 3 years ago at the age of 65. These pensions total about $1200/fortnight; I also live in a house that is paid for and valued at about $300,000. If this were not the case, if I only had my pensions, and the $2000 I have in my bank account with a little stock, my financial situation would be strained to put it mildly. I would not be living on the street with the world's homeless people now numbering in the millions, nor would I be in the proverbial poor-house. As things stand I am comfortable; I am able to pay the bills that come in, and I trust this will remain the case until I pass from this mortal coil sometime, in all likelihood, by mid-century, that is by 2050. If I live to mid-century I will be 106!
MARK TWAIN AND ME
“The truth is,” the famous American author and humorist Mark Twain (1835-1910) told a friend, “that my books are simply autobiographies.” He meant this in the sense that his books: novels and journals. travelogues and letters, inter alia---are stocked not only with fictional versions of people he had known, including himself, but also with his views on just about every conceiveable subject. Starting around the age of forty, circa 1875, he made his first tentative efforts at a memoir of the conventional kind. Already famous as the author of The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It (1872) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), he had reason to think that there was money to be made from such a memoir. A big spender and a bad investor, Mark Twain needed money virtually all the time. At first he did not advance very far with the project of his memoir. He allowed only a few bits of his memoiristic ramblings into print in the form of magazine pieces now and then before he died.
Like Mark Twain, I also got a few bits of my memoiristic ramblings into print about the age of 40 and I received $5.00/week for them from a newspaper proprietor in the small town of Katherine in Australia's Northern Territory. I was famous in that little town which was a little like being famous on the moon from a national, to say nothing of a global, perspective. Beginning in my late 50s, in the decade, 2001 to 2012, I published extensively. But there was neither fame nor wealth to be had by this exercise in cyberspace.
The first posthumous sections of Mark Twain's memoirs, what became in time his autobiography, were published in 1924 in a sanitized form 14 years after his death by his first biographer Albert Bigelow Paine. Later Bernard DeVoto included parts of the memoir in his compilation entitled Mark Twain in Eruption (1940), and then the memoir appeared more authoritatively in a book entitled The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1959). This book's editor, Charles Neider, presented that scattered memoir's materials “in the sequence which one would reasonably expect from autobiography.” According to another view: "Mark Twain provided twenty-five individual chapters of his autobiography to the North American Review during 1906 and 1907. The material was chosen by Twain in collaboration with George Harvey, then editor of the North American Review, and Twain had the final say on what material would be included. “Chapters from My Autobiography” can be considered the one text of his life story that Mark Twain offered the reading public. That text appeared in book form in 1990 as Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography; a second edition appeared early in 2010."See this link:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/07/twain-twain/
MARK TWAIN AND ME: PART 2
Since my autobiography or memoir was also begun, like Mark Twain's, around the age of forty, and since all of my writing is, as was Mark Twain's, "simply autobiography," I encourage readers to go to the following link to read about the more than 700 page Volume 1--of a projected three volume work--of Mark Twain's autobiography just published in 2011. Mark Twain hoped his autobiography was something that would have a life of at least 1000 years. The famous 20th century poet W.H. Auden( 1907-1973) was interested in having his writing of use to future generations or, as he put it so graphically, "the words of a dead man can be modified in the guts of the living. " I rather like these ideas in relation to my own work but, as that fine poet T.S. Eliot(1888-1965) points out, and as I have already indicated above, writers need to be prepared for the possibility that all of their writing may, in the end, come to naught.
Joseph Conrad(1857-1924), one of the great English novelists, expresses the same idea a little differently. "Good artists," he writes, "should expect no recognition for their toil and no admiration for their genius." Their toil, Conrad continues, can only with great difficulty be appraised and their genius cannot possibly........I leave the rest of this idea of Conrad's to readers should they take an interest in his views on the talents of writers. Perhaps all my writing may go down the internet gurgler into some endless ether of cyberspace, or sewer of deleted content. The following link will put much of my own work in at least one of its many possible perspectives, what you might call a Mark Twain, or more accurately, a Samuel Leghorn--for that was his real name--perspective.http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/24/his-own-best-straight-man/
This website and my writings in general exhibit my tendency, my non-enslavement to consecutiveness in writing which most writers are chained to in different ways. That is, I write as I think, and as all men think, without sequence, without eloquence, with only one eye on what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside what I am saying occurrs to me, I invite it into my page. “When you recollect something that belonged in an earlier chapter," Mark Twain advised his brother who was thinking of writing his autobiography, "do not go back, but jam it in where you are.” The more he worked at his own memoir, the more he took his own advice. That is also the way I work, or at least one of the main ways I work, both at this website and in many other places in my writing. Although with the wonderful advances in the technology available to a writer: the word-processor and the internet, I can often go back and rework a piece with a few clicks of the mouse sitting as it does beside my keyboard. Thus I have Mark Twain's modus operandi and the word processor working in tandem as well as the methods and styles of other writers to draw on from this vast cornucopia of sources---the world-wide-web.
SECRET TO THE WAY I WORK
All writers have some secret about the way they work. Mark Twain, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Truman Capote, Charles Simic, Jean Jacques Rousseau and many other writers wrote in bed. Vladimir Nabokov even kept index cards under his pillow in case he couldn’t sleep some night and felt like working. What could be more natural, at least for some, than scribbling a love poem with a ballpoint pen on the back of one’s beloved? Edith Sitwell supposedly used to lie in a coffin in preparation for the far greater horror of facing the blank page. Robert Lowell wrote lying down on the floor. Many people write on the floor. I’ve written in bed, on the floor and many other places, but I prefer the big rotatable chair my son bought for me after I retired. It sits in front of my computer monitor and keyboard in my study. At least that has been the case in the last dozen years since I took to writing full-time. I think, though, that the core of my secret, the secret to the way I work, is that I have little interest in doing anything else except reading from the vast cornucopia of literature now available in cyberspace. Quotidian reality continues to occupy my time as does sleeping and I take a great deal of interest and pleasure in both these occupations, occupations which take care of two-thirds of the day with their assortment of tasks and necessities: eating and drinking, sleeping and resting, walking and listening to music, socializing and being silent, removing waste material from my body and my home and, on occasion chatting to my wife about what must be talked about in any marriage of several decades.
By the time I came to writing FT at about the age of 60 in the first years of the 21st century---computer technology had advanced to such an extent that all I needed was: a quiet, safe and comfortable place, free from distractions like the telephone and visitors, as well as the sound of dogs, radios and televisions. I needed, of course, my computer, a refrigerator and a kitchen with food, a wife who provided the minimum of company I needed and who kept the appearance of our suburban garden respectable, at least 8 hours sleep in a 24 hour period, a place near my study to go to the toilet due to my phase 3 moderate chronic kidney disease and, finally, but most importantly, I needed my active brain to reflect on my seven decades of living and the vast information industry at my fingertips.
LITERARY FORM: WILLIAM JAMES AND ME
It is fruitless to search for a high degree of coherence and a strong narrative line in my work, although what I write is not totally devoid of these characteristics. The verbal arts like the poetry and prose that I write is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become. Whether what I write will "become" anything that gives pleasure over time to many others in the future of humankind, only time will tell. I have seen my task over the years in many ways. One of these ways is to locate an literary-artistic shape amid what often seems, as the psychologist William James put it, the blooming and buzzing chaos of reality. Literary form gives focus to content; for this reason I use a variety of literary forms to deal with a wide range of content.
The context for James' remark is: "The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails all at once, feels it as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, the location of all things that we see in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space. There is no other reason than this why the hand I touch and see coincides spatially with the hand I immediately feel." For more on Mark Twain and this somewhat complex idea about perception go to: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/24/his-own-best-straight-man/
MY MEMOIRS: MARK TWAIN AND W. H. AUDEN
Part 1
Sometimes this many-genred autobiography of mine feels like a letter to posterity in the sense of Twain and Auden(1907-1973) as I indicated above. At other times, reading what I have written feels like I am eavesdropping on a conversation I am having with myself. Unlike Samuel Leghorn, alias Mark Twain, there are never any financial considerations in my literary work. Approaching the age of seventy, I have mortality on my mind. I'm sure some readers will find my work what some have already found it: "a disjointed and largely baffling bore," "a ratbag of scraps," or "as if they are trapped in a locked room with a garrulous old coot." But I also like to think that some of those now alive and some of those not yet born may find my many-mansioned work, this now enormous house of words, a gift from a time-traveler whose voice is and will remain amazingly fresh. I hope that is the case for at least a coterie who find that a taste of my work will wet their whistles for a good solid meal of my writing. Writers like to have readers in a similar way that talkers like to have listeners.
In writing about the past as I do in my memoirs, writing about my life, my society and my values and beliefs--in a word my religion--the power of association is very important as I snatch mouldy dead memories out of their graves and make them live and walk. So often in life, whether talking or writing, we have two opinions: one is private and it is wise not to express, and another one which is the one we use and wear to please those present or the readers. In my autobiography, and in daily life, I try to steer a middle ground between the two. Any picture of oneself as a self-consistent creature is a false picture. I like to see myself as a connoisseur of my own contradictions as well as the contradictions and paradoxes, the enigmas and inter-relationships of existence, as someone who reinvents himself to some extent everytime he writes.
Part 2
We are each and all houses divided, especially in this age, these times of tempest and trials, catastrophes and chaos and we do our best to deal with our internal divisions and the divisions external to ourselves in the public domain. Much of my writing is aimed at helping others overcome these divisions, internal and external. I hope to play some small part in this complex and never ending process of achieving unity in diversity. For without unity in diversity there is only chaos and anarchous individuality. There is, of course, plenty of that, even with the unity in diversity which I espouse philosophically, religiously and cognitively.
To put one of the aims of my writing I will draw on the way that Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden once put his aim: "A real book is one that reads us." Of course, I know more than anyone that what I write will only be of value to a few. I am not trying to be a great man, but I am trying to be a craftsman, a wordsmith, working at the edge of what is his best writing, constructing phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence a total oeuvre.
I am also trying to express by means of my writing the appeal that reason, the senses, tradition and intuition have had as far back as I can remember in determining what is true. I also write to express my need for a form of authority that expresses a balance in my life and its journey, a balance between autonomy and obedience. I believe that I have preserved within myself the autonomy of a free thinker—or at any rate a thinker who has freely chosen to subordinate himself to the ideas and dictates of a system of authority. To put this another way: I have long had a Faith, a belief system with its certitude that also, paradoxically, preserves an internal sense, a context, for freedom and doubt. Writing is, for me, one of my many vices and addictions. It is both an illusory and a real release, "a presumptuous taming of reality,”as American novelist and poet John Updike(1932-2009) once put it, an activity to channel the driving forces of an intellectual curiosity.
My curiosity and my work ethic are not anywhere near as ferocious as Updike's or many other writers who have produced dozens of books. I also lack his seeming superhuman facility. The portion of some lies in a thimble and others in a gallon-measure, as Baha'u'llah put it so succinctly in the last half of the 19th century writing as He did from the periphery of western civilization. T.S. Eliot’s dictum for a critic was: “the only method is to be very intelligent." I've never been sure just where I stood on this ground, that measuring-rod of intelligence. In literature, in the world of writing where I now have millions of words, quantity tells us nothing in itself about quality. Neither does the feedback of others which can, and in my case does, vary from high praise and enthusiasm to fierce criticism, rejection or indifference.
MY INTERNET WRITING
For my writing at over 200 forums and discussion sites on the internet go to the following link. Some of the forums or discussion sites are those of several other Ron Prices, but 9 out of 10 of the Ron Prices readers will find at the sites are locations at which I have posted. You can also access these forums by just googling the words: RonPrice forums
http://www.google.com.au/#q=Ron+Price+forums&hl=en&prmd=ivnso&ei=eipiTtmeHOugmQWF2JSECg&sqi=2&start=60&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=37eab15de4a12b66&biw=960&bih=497
MARILYN MONROE and ME
Unlike Marilyn Monroe who gave more, some photographers argue, to the still camera than oneone else in the first century and a half of photography(1826-1976), I give very little to cameras in these years of my late adulthood, the years 60 to 80 according to some human development psychologists. According to the photographer Richard Avedon, Marilyn "gave more to the still camera than any actress—any woman—I’ve ever photographed….She was able to make wonderful photographs with almost any photographer, which is interesting—and rare.”-Richard Avedon. See the following link:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/marilyn/ On the subject of photography I have written the following at some internet sites:
http://www.movieweb.com/u/ronprice
http://www.actnow.com.au/Members/RonPrice(scroll down)
ON PHOTOGRAPHY
Here are two paragraphs on photography from an essay I have yet to post on the internet:
"It is not the person who steps out in a photograph," wrote sociologist David Frisby(1944-2010), "but what can be stripped away from him."(1) Instead of being an aid to memory and knowledge, photos often function to encourage the opposite tendency. Photos, wrote Frisby that world authority on German social thought, gobble-up our world. They snatch our world from death; total presentness is established and history, paradoxically, is absent inspite of the sense of reality conveyed by the photograph. It is a reality we can no longer touch. We experience nostalgia, the inevitability of separation, mystery and, sometimes, bitterness. We experience a feeling of magic. Sometimes narcissism is fostered, Baudelaire once wrote.(2)
However critical one is of photographs, the family portrait and the photo album, and for many now their internet blog, Facebook page or computer-directory of digital photos, assume a significant place in people's homes. Although the photo may give an undue emphasis to the outer world, it can also become part of a balanced inner and outer experience. "The best part of beauty," wrote Irish-born artist British figurative painter Francis Bacon(1909-1992), "is that which no picture can express."(3) Photos are suggestive and, if they do not suggest much more than is in the photos, they have little use or power. Diane Arbus(1923-1971), American photographer and writer, puts the idea in a clever way: "A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know."
------------------FOOTNOTES--------------------
(1) David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin, Polity Press, 1985, p.155.
(2) Baudelaire in Donald Kuspit, The New Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s, Da Capo Press, NY, 1983, p.404.
(3) Quotations on photography, Internet, January 2003.
BIOGRAPHIES OF MY LIFE: PART 1
Thanks to the existence of my detailed chronological autobiographical study and analysis, future biographers can pursue a more thematic, or some selectively emphatic approach to my life should they so desire to utilize what I have written. There now exists a burgeoning resource base in the international Baha'i community for future biographers, but there are few extensive autobiographies written by Baha'is during the five epochs 1944 to 2021 on which this international community can draw at some future time. The few that do exist can be---time will tell of course if they will be---invaluable tools to assist in understanding and assessing the Baha'i experience during these epochs, these decades after the two great wars of the 20th century and the immense shifts in the value and belief bases of society in these same decades.
What the famous Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden(1907-1973) once wrote in relation to his daily writing---has become true of my daily round in this the evening of my life: "To me the only good reason for writing is to try to organize my scattered thoughts of living into a whole, to relate everything to everything else." Of course, as that American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France, Gertrude Stein(1874-1946) once wrote "everything is not related to everything." So I have to chart the stormy waters of my existence and the tempest taking place in the global society I am part of in my own way. We all have to do this drawing on whatever resources are at the disposal of each of us or, more accurately, that we know that are at our disposal as we chart the stormy waters and the serene surfaces of life's ocean. The French realist painter Gustav Courbet(1819-1877) sketched many self-portraits in his life, as his attitudes and beliefs, values and experiences changed. One could say that he sketched his autobiography. I do the same by means of my writing.
There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large and so fascinating that every new biography of their lives that comes along catches-up their enthusiasts all over again. A life of the Brontës, of Dr. Johnson, of Byron, or of Dickens has gripped millions over and over again, generation after generation, as social attitudes and academic orthodoxies change, and the strong views adopted by one epoch become no longer fashionable, as new material becomes available and old material comes to be seen in a different light. There are other writers and artists whose lives are not necessarily that large but views of them change for similar reasons. The publication of Courbet’s collected letters in 1992, put an end to the popularly held view of him as a somewhat boorish provincial who had taken Paris by storm with his pictorial genius. My own letters, the letters of a man whose personality and life is certainly not large or that fascinating, are now in the National Baha'i Archives of Australia. Will their publication more than 100 years after my passing result in a similar change of views of my life? Who knows! As I say, I shall be long gone by then and shall not care a whisker.
BIOGRAPHIES OF MY LIFE: PART 2
At best I see myself as a minor poet, a minor author; many have got caught-up in my internet ramblings in the last decade; the statistics that I have seen on the internet have made this clear. In the thousands of my posts which I have placed at innumerable sites, my little gems of delight, if gems they be, can be found. There are readers who find them to be gems and readers who find them to be grains of sand. That is the way with the offerings of all writers. It's good to aim for the stars when one writes, but it is also good to have one's feet grounded solidly on terra firma with realistic assessments of the reception of one's work. As I sketch over the terra incognita of life to whatever extent I can, whereever I must, I enjoy the process whoever reads what I write.
Within months or even years of my demise, my death, I do not expect the first biographies to be appearing, if any appear at all. I am informed that in 1871, within a year of his death, the first volume of the cornerstone of the Dickens biographical industry was published: the long, personal, revelatory Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster. As I hope to be enjoying the first, and I trust the long, years of my life in the World Beyond, I shall not be waiting to examine that biographical industry developing, as I say if one develops at all. I trust that whatever waiting I have had to do will be done before my death. My mother used to say: "son, most of life is waiting." Indeed, how right she was. But the Undiscovered Country, as Shakespeare called the Land of Lights, I trust is another question, another kind of experience with 'waiting' left far behind.
“The pale forewarned victim,” Henry James wrote in relation to each of our lives and the attempts by others to write biographies of them, “with every track covered and every paper burnt and every letter unanswered, will, in the tower of art, the invulnerable granite, stand, without a sally, the siege of all the years.” In my autobiography and its many genres: poetry and letters, narrative and analysis I have left much "invulnerable granite" which may become quite vulnerable. Go to this link for the changing views of the "invulnerable granite" that was the life of American novelist Henry James(1843-1916): http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/books/review/Leavitt2-t.html?pagewanted=all
HAVING READERS IS A BONUS FOR A WRITER
Having readers is a bonus when one is enjoying the process of writing; it's somewhat like gardening or many an artisitic pursuit. "What must grow, ever anew, day in and day out," wrote the American essayist, poet and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882), "is one’s inner genius, which his essay on self-reliance defines thus: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.” In this respect many of the bloggers of our age have a great deal of Emersonianism in them, little do they know. Self-expression through writing was an almost organic need of Emerson's, as if his genius received its daily bread from his pen. For over fifty years he spent a good part of his time writing in his journals, fostering the growth of that forever embryonic inner-self whose health depended on it.
“Writing is always my metre of health," Emerson wrote, "writing which a sane philosopher would probably say was the surest symptom of a diseased mind.” Emerson was like many other thinkers who were first and foremost writers. So was Frederick Nietzsche (1844-1900). They do not belong among the ranks of philosophers. For real philosophers writing is a type of annotation, rather than the flower of their thought. It is primarily for their prose that we read Emerson or Nietzsche. I will not, indeed at this stage I cannot, say why people read my work. I leave this question unanswered here and will, perhaps, come back to it at a later date. If I am fortunate to get in 50 good years of writing, as Emerson did, I will be at least 77, 87, 97 or 107--when I die---depending on just when I define the beginning of my "good years" of writing.
GORE VIDAL AND ME
SURPRISED BY JOY
Not everyone's mind ends in words as mine does. Some minds end in their hands: on keyboards, on violin strings, in pieces of wood, on potters' wheels, paint brushes. Other minds end in their eyes: nature lovers, lovers of beauty in its many forms; still others have minds that end in their feet and legs: ballerinas, dancers, skaters, runners and many athletes. I have always been remorselessly curious, relentlessly analytical, a wordsmith, although I did not seem to even begin to blossom, to flourish as a writer until my late thirties. Then an intellectual and literary self-definition began to take form in essays I wrote and published in Katherine, a small town in Australia's Northern Territory at the age of forty. This literary self-defintion had been slowly brewing, sensibly and insensibly, in the 30 years from 1953 to 1983.
I took myself seriously as a writer right from the start but, having been in Australia for thirteen years by the time I was being published, I had discovered a certain lightness, a sense of humour, a counter to whatever gravitas was found in my writing. Writing became, partly, performance, dazzle. Not everyone saw the dazzle, of course; it was a quiet dazzle. My dazzle did not have the public flare and quality of performance of essayists like a Gore Vidal, a Clive James, or a host of others. Having lived with TV for perhaps a dozen years by the time those essays were published, I often pictured myself as a type of celebrity. I wrote, to some extent, as if I was a celebrity, a serious one who would never be famous or rich but had something to say. Writers are impressionable people, living out in book-chat land which is what Gore Vidal likes to call the place where we clerks of literature scratch away. We are impressionable, and so we can get seduced rather too quickly. Until the ealry years of this 21st century Vidal wrote vigorously witty prose, with a graceful erudition and an ability to attack a misguided point of view by coming up with the facts. He could also be funny enough to make us laugh out loud. He has served as one of my many mentors. -Ron Price with thanks to Peter Conrad, "The Public Intellectual", ABC Radio National, 21 June 1998, 5:05-6:00 PM.
Some thinkers have become
media buffoons, hired clowns;(1)
others endlessly serious with a
gravitas, gravitas, gravitas---on
those endless talking head shows:
scholarly, erudite, too much for the
folks who like their seriousness in
a context of lots of tongue-in-cheek.
Some write as if they are changing the
world, reality, remaking existence, and
filtering things through imagination as
they tell us, in fact, we will not perish.
And I write but am never sure of what's
going down, spontaneous, and quietly
calculated, not knowing, and surprised
by joy, with seduction through language,
and a mysterious power which talks to
me, but the talking is like some leaven(1)
that leaveneth the world of being and
furnisheth the power through which the
arts and wonders of the world are made
manifest: subtely and so unobtrusively,
so seductively, yes, very seductively!!!
(1) Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, Wilmette, 1956(1939), p.161.
Ron Price
21 June 1998 to 19 May 2012
1 Peter Conrad, an Australian writer who left Tasmania in 1968 to live in England, says Gore Vidal is such a clown. Conrad overstates this aspect of Gore Vidal. Vidal has been, for me, a stimulating writer and talker. By the 1960s he had become one of the finest essayists in the English-speaking world. I've learned something from his provocative style and his erudition, his humour and his satire. In the decade that I've been publishing in cyberspace, though, something seems to have happened to Vidal and his writing. Google has 140,000 pages on his writing---what one columnist calls Vidal's paranoia. See this link for a 2009 article entitled Gore Vidal Has Lost His Mind: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-j-davis/gore-vidal-has-lost-his-m_b_336814.html
------------------------
THE FALL OF '59
Gore Vidal(1925) is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. He is known for many things: his cool, satirical analyses of the rich, the famous and the powerful; his writings as a novelist, cultural critic and historian. He once said to his friends and associates: "when an interviewer or a biographer asks you questions about me tell them anything, whatever comes into your mind." He does not seem to have anything to hide; he possesses a simple and self-admitted arrogance. He does not seem to have a dark side to hide but, then, that may be because he does not want to talk about himself, about his inner life, about any personal, psychological self-investigation. For that reason he is a person of dangerous attraction. He is funny, entertaining, engaging and, sigificantly, an unknown quantity. He writes about the modern conscience searching for truth in a world bereft of the ancient wisdom of the gods, searching for truths that are perennial but not archaic.-Ron Price with thanks to Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal: A Biography, Doubleday, NY, 1999, pp.459-462.
I became a Baha'i
in the lounge-room
of Rod and Doreen Willis;
you decided to run for Congress
and put that novel Julian
on hold--in that fall of '59.
You knew, then, that Jack Kennedy
would be a formidable candidate
for the Democratic presidential
nomination in 1960 and I knew
I Ioved Susan Gregory,
the Toronto Maple Leafs
and getting high marks at school.
That fall you wrote the first draft
of The Best Man, appeared in talk
shows and were acceptably irreverent
in your professional media-projections.
I settled in to an ordinarily ordinary year
in grade ten in the fall of '59 & casually,
although with a quiet sense of the great
importance of the act, signed that card
declaring my belief in what I came to see
and understand as the greatest drama in
the world's long and very spiritual history.
Ron Price
23 August 2001 to 15 May 2012
----------------------------------------------------
TRENCHANT CYNICISM
I find the cyclic theory of history attractive: theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, chaos, theocracy. I find the present chaos-pluralist-diversity model preferable to theocracy. -Gore Vidal, Books and Writing, ABC Radio, 26 January 1997, 7:30-8:20 pm.
Vidal is entertaining, urbane, informative in the most delightful way with his tongue firmly in his cheek most, no, virtually all of the time. The arrogance, the tendency to speak as if he knows for sure, is counterbalanced by his charm and a certain erudition. How far, I ask, can Vidal take me? As Vidal heads for 90 years old, I think he has taken me as far as I can go. How far can the noblest distraction, reading, take me? Reading, on the other hand, can take me life's distance as long as I don't get dementia. In the end, one must look within, in the solitude of one’s own heart and mind. It is there that I have come to enjoy Vidal but, like everyone else, one can only go so far and one has to define one's own signature. -Ron Price with thanks to Joseph Epstein, Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing, WW Norton and Co., NY, 1985, p. 392.
You are made to measure for the humorous
under-belly of Australia where nothing is taken
seriously except gardening, sport, entertainment,
cooking, and...... You, the arch-entertainer who
lays whole worlds low with a smile and a chuckle
and a knowledge that leaves a person thinking:
"this guy knows!" But one is never quite sure
‘cause one knows so little about his pile of facts.
Democracy which is not democracy because it’s
paid for by corporate America no matter what
party; and where Clinton and Gore paid out
some two billion in getting elected and it's
advertising that sells its version of the truth
to billions as truth, a disease that has spread
world-wide now. Is truth always coated in his
type of trenchant cynicism as you laugh all
the way to the end of the interview on the TV.
Ron Price
26 January 1997 to 15 May 2012.
--------------------------------------------------------
DO NOT COURT DISAPPOINTMENT
At the risk of repeating myself I want to emphasize yet again that it is good to keep the advice of that great 20th century poet T.S. Eliot somewhere above one's writing desk. "Write as if everything you put down on paper in the end might come to naught." One does not want to court the discouraging, the disheartening, emotions of disappointment. If one aims for wealth and fame disappointment can easily come to one's life. Disappointment and discouragement can eat at one's soul. After a dozen years of extensive publication of my work in cyberspace, and more than 30 years of the appearance of my work in the print media, only $1.49 in royalties have come my way--enough for a small chocolat bar or the rate of 15 cents per year! With fame spread across the invisible ether and spaces of the Internet I have no illusions of the potential of my writing and myself to achieve fame and wealth. I will take what comes, whatever that may be, as I head into what I trust are the liberating winds of old age(80+), if I last that long. The ship of my life may sink on the rocks of some unforeseen dementia but, as the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly was reported to have said on his way to the gallows in NSW in 1880: "such is life."
My writing has yielded many results, though. Eliot's cautionary note is not something I must take literally. In the years 1949 to 1999, my writing helped me achieve a B.A., a B.Ed., part of an M.A. and four partly completed graduate diplomas. These qualifications helped provide a basis for half a century of student and employment achievements and these, in turn, helped me to earn a living, raise three children and participate in various ways in community life. In the last dozen years, 2000 to 2012, my writing has given me great pleasure and has enriched the years of my retirement. It was far, very far, from a waste of time.
THE FAMOUS CONTEMPORARY POET JOHN ASHBERY AND ME
A collection of a poet's poetry is the public presentation of a person’s privacy, his vision of his privacy, as well as a comment on the collectivity, the society in which he is a part. We are all part of a planetizing, increasingly integrated and interdependent global community. The poems of the famous American poet John Ashbery(1927-), what one poetry critic calls poetry's true visionary and chronicler of our time, have always kept their secrets, sometimes defiantly so, even as he and his poems have become better and better known. This is quintessentially true of my work, although I am far from being the public poet that Ashbery is. Indeed, I am not in his league. I play the role of a minor-minor poet. As the famous Russian writer Boris Pasternak(1890-1960) once wrote: "a life without secrets is simply unimaginable." So, with Ashbery, I keep my secrets. Don't we all. Readers who like my work, or his, feel included in our secrets. I like to think that my readers feel included in my life and whatever secrets I have made public.
Whole Ashbery poems, some might argue his entire corpus, has become famous for being unreadable, indececipherable, obscure oddities or, worse, hostile to readers. Worst of all some readers see his poetry as one big hoax. None of my poetry falls into the category of complete unreadability or hoax. I never take a hostile stance to my readers, although I'm sure there are many who, on coming across my work, do not feel my writing speaks to them. Ashbery has written about the disgust some people experience while reading him---in his poems entitled: “Not Him Again” or “Thank You for Not Cooperating.” Ashbery is sublimely aware of how his readers experience his poetry. To read more about Ashbery go to this link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ashbery#Poetry_collections
MORE ON JOHN ASHBERY and ME
The accumulation of poems over time, for Ashbery, measures the passing of time, like the accumulation of snow during a storm. He has been writing poetry and publishing it for more than half a century. Ashbery calls his poem “The Skaters” a “poem in the form of falling snow." I have been wriitng poetry since 1962 and collecting what I have written since 1980 and these several million words measure like Ashbery's poetry and if nothing else, the passing of time: 7000 of my poems have passed into booklets in more than 30 years. Poetry, like snowfall, accumulates at variable rates and at uncertain intervals. Ashbery’s poems constantly match their own “moping and thrashing through time” against time’s conventional measures: the day passing into darkness, the passing of the seasons, the wearing down of the body, the blurring of memory. The total design of his work, and mine, is dizzying for most readers especially with the print and image-glut which the world has entered increasingly in the last, say, two decades. with the world wide web and the increasing, the burgeoning, quantity of print and electronic media---among other factors---people now swim in information and entertainment at least in the developed, media enveloped part of the planet.
Our work, Ashbery's and mine is elaborately worked up; it is embellished beyond anybody’s dream of detail. As in the writing of Marcel Proust, readers getting lost is part of the point for the writer. Poetry is like life and getting lost from time to time is at the heart of life. It is also part of what one writer called "the great attempt to capture the way we move through life.” The great writers capture this process and the lesser lights, like myself, capture its traces, only a small part of the process of the way we move through life.
Anything that passes through the room in which Ashbery or I writes can have an impact on our poetry—a telephone call, an event in the media, a photo, inter alia, can divert the progress of a poem. How much more affecting is it going to be, then, when a reader who, perhaps, a decade or so before seemed to turn his back on Ashbery or me, starts passing through our poetry. Attention must be paid by readers of both Ashbery's work and mine to where each of us lives, to the objects with which we surround ourselves, and the interrelationships among the various objects with which we live and about which we have written. The connections that can be be drawn between our physical and poetic environments are central to our work.
The following quotation about Ashbery's work applies to mine: "No detail is too grand or lowly, no style of speech too lofty or base, to be included. Everything is poeticised: the shared details of our social, economic and cultural lives freely mix, and through the poems we are persuaded to view them with fresh eyes. In this way, Ashbery’s attention to every detail of existence is both generous and humble. It is political in the widest sense of the word - democratic, ... empowering .... It is a poetry that gives readers room to think and feel for themselves." (Robert Potts, Guardian, 3/10/01) Go to this link for more of Pott's views:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/mar/10/poetry
ASHBERY AND I PART COMPANY
Both Ashbery and I certainly aim to achieve total identification with readers and their acts of reading. As one analyst puts it, we aim to achieve an equal distribution of sentience between author and reader. But he and I part company on many fronts. He sees himself as radically inscrutable. He is, more thoroughly than any other poet of our era, a reader of his own poems, a decipherer, and suspended in a state of anxious partial knowledge. We all have only partial knowledge and, as poets, we read our own work. But I do not see myself as radically inscrutable. In the first years of my poetic experience my work was indecipherable to many. They told me so.
By the time I began to publish on the internet in the late 1990s, my writing had a clarity and, I trust, a simplicity that it lacked in the 1980s. Ashbery's Collected Poems(1956-87) and his work since then is perhaps best read as autobiography by other means, a turning-on-its-head of autobiographical conventions. Still, it reads like the story of the growth of this poet’s mind. My poetry is, if nothing else, also autobiographical and, like Wordsworth's poem The Prelude, is about the growth of my mind, of my views and of my religion.
In poem after poem Ashbery and I make an attempt to bring reality into something like intelligible shape. Trying and failing, trying and succeeding, in our efforts to make sense of the world and the self as lived, is our subject. Ashbery is what the American poet laureate Robert Frost called poets to try to be: "a man of prowess.” Of course, this is only the case for some readers. His readers had better bring their own prowess to match or they will experience little to nothing. I would not want to make such a claim to be "a man of prowess," for myself or my work. But I am sure that some readers who come upon my work often will have similar experiences to the ones they have with Ashbery's and turn away from it quickly. I know this to be the case after a decade of publishing in cyberspace. Poetry is not for everyone any more than is gardening or cooking, fishing or pottery. As individuals we all turn away from all sorts of things in life: that is part of the nature of freedom and human diversity.
ANTHONY LAPAGLIA
The interview I watched tonight(1) was presented as a seminar to students of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University. In this interview Anthony LaPaglia(b.1959-) was both celebrity and star as well as teacher and mentor. I gained some useful insights for my role in life now in these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood, as a poet and writer. He also shared some of his views on life and his philosophy of living. After retiring from FT and PT employment by 2002, I had enjoyed watching this Australian in the who-dun-it TV series Without A Trace for which he had won several awards.(2) LaPaglia was born the year I joined the Baha’i Faith at the age of 15. Paglia was only 12 when we both lived in South Australia in 1971. I was a high school teacher at the time and living in Gawler and Whyalla, towns in that state of Australia.
When you make a mistake, he said, just move on; forgive yourself, learn from the experience and don’t make a mountain out of a molehill. Actors have their talents to offer and, if a film-maker wants their talents, they can make a deal. I have often felt that way about my own talents, about forgiving myself and about not making a big deal out of insignificant things. He said he learned about himself by taking on different roles. I did, too, only my roles were not those of an actor, but as a person in many different jobs in life and positions in the communities of which I was a part. Paglia said he tried to become that person whose role he was playing as far as he was able. I was reminded of how Peter Sellers stood in the shoes of those he was playing, those roles in which he was acting.
I as a writer have learned about myself and about writing by: (a) reading about other writers and how they have gone about their craft, (b) reading about society and about whatever topic I am currently writing about, (c) by a wide range of experiences over seven decades, and (d) reflecting on my own life, among many other MOs, modus operandi.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)“Inside The Actors Studio: Anthony LaPaglia,” ABC2, 12;10-12:55, 8 September 2011; and (2)See Wikipedia.
I’m not sure I can add much more
in this prose-poem, Anthony, about
that interview, or your life & mine.
You’ve come a long way since those
days in South Australia…You could
have been a student in my class....
Now you are known to millions…...
hundreds of millions on the planet
& you have made buckets of money:
goodonyer, as they say Downunder!!
Ron Price
8 September 2011 to 27/10/'11
Some of my essays, prose-poetic pieces, and online diaries ON THE SUBJECT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY are found at the several internet sites below:
http://www.my-diary.org/users/465760
http://www.my-diary.org/users/465760
http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Series-of-Articles-on-Autobiography
http://www.elderhope.com/modules/d3forum/index
http://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic
http://www.sffworld.com/community/story/1967
http://forums.allaboutjazz.com/showthread
http://bahai-library.com/Ron-price
MY MEMOIRS: PART 2
I have written several editions of my memoirs in the midst of a "series of soul-stirring events" that celebrated the construction and completion of the Terraces on Mount Carmel and in the first two decades of the "auspicious beginning" of the occupation by the International Teaching Centre of its "permanent seat on the Mountain of the Lord." I see my work, too, as a spin-off, part of that generation of spiritual nerves and sinews that is the result of "the revolutionary vision, the creative drive and systematic effort" that has come to characterize more and more the work of all the senior institutions of the Cause." This lengthy life-narrative is also my own humble, perhaps not humble enough, attempt to "comprehend the magnitude of what has been so amazingly accomplished" in my lifetime and in this century just past. However traumatic and horrific, I take deep satisfaction from the advances of humankind in that 20th century and particularly from the processes knitting together the earth's peoples and nations---inspite of appearances and events indicating serious breakdown.
What I write is part of "a change of time," "a new state of mind," a "coherence of understanding," a "divinely driven enterprise." The story and the meaning I give it are crucial to my life for, without them--story and meaning that is--the days of my life would remain, would be, an intolerable sequence of events that make no sense. They would be, at best, a dabbling into things, a sort of entertainment, a search for fun in the midst of love and work with their inevitable pleasures and frustrations. They would express a kind of absurdity which many can and do live with; or like the German-Swiss poet and novelist(1877-1962) Herman Hess the dominant taste of life would be of "nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams" which he said is the content of "the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves."
I would also find this dabbling, this focus on fun and entertainment, a sad and inadequate philosophy, one I could scarcely bear and one I would find difficult to journey through to the end. Telling a story of my life is like a natural echo, an automatic repetition, a rhetorical sequence in my effort to define and link my identity, the who that I am, and to unfold the meaning of it all. In some ways my memoiristic exercise is both more and less than telling a story. It is a conversation with a diverse public: family, friends, the past and the future--and inevitably the present. It is a conversation, an identity, shaped by the events of my time among other forces. Now with literally millions of readers in this world of cyberspace my writing is indeed a conversation, a conversation quite different in some ways, and quite the same in others, from/as that which I have had in real space for the last seven decades.
OVERVIEW OF MY WRITING
Even with an overarching meaning in my oeuvre that is a source of joy and of enchantment, there is still sadness, chaos and absurdity in this conversation, this story, this myriad of messages I send out from my literary life. Self-interrogation joins the self and produces the story of its life by capturing what is basic about the whole thing, what is indispensable, what is marginal and even superficial. The story of American writer and mountaineer, Jon Krakauer's(b. 1954-) climb to the summit of Mt. Everest illustrates some of the irrationality, the absurdity, the puritanical aspects of anything that is the passion of a life. He writes about his "belief in the nobility of suffering and work.....It defies logic." I find this particular theme of profound significance which I may return to at another time. Krakauer also writes, "I can't think of a single good thing that came out of this climb." Even in my lowest moments, gazing retrospectively at my life, I don't feel I can make this tragic claim for the climb that is my life. Still, it is difficult to assess the ultimate value of what one has done in life since the final fruition of one's actions is beyond the grave---in whatever form that beyond and that fruition takes. There is a quintessential mystery to life which no man can hear or understand. Such is part of my take on it all.
Like many writers, especially poets, I continually revise and rework what I have written. This has become especially true in these years of my retirement from jobs and meetings, most community activity and extensive socializing. As my mid-50s turned into my mid-60s I have come to focus on my writing to the virtual exclusion of all else. If this process continues, and I remain healthy enough to continue writing, it will take decades to complete, to write, the final versions of: my poems and essays and much of what is now found at this website. Part of the reason for this necessarily longitudinal literary process, this long take on things, is that one’s relations with one’s country and society, one's relations with those who are one's intimates, as well as one's relations with one's values, beliefs and attitudes---in a word---one's religion, are always complicated. And, if not complcated, they at least require much analysis. They are not simple, however simple one would like them to be. Of course, for some and perhaps for many, both writers and readers, they aim for simplicity and don't want to get into the complexity of things. For them, my take on things and my writing in general is, in all likelihood, of little value.
ME AND ERNEST HEMMINGWAY
If I wrote my autobiography the way the famous American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) did I may have become a more popular, a more successful writer. He wrote almost always about himself, but always in a fictionalized form. I, too, write almost always about myself, but in non-fiction genres. In the beginning Hemingway wrote with some detachment and a touch of modesty: as Nick Adams in the Michigan stories with his boyish young sister in love with him, as Jake Barnes with Lady Brett in love with him, as the wounded Frederic Henry with Catherine Barkley in love with him, as Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and as Renata in Across the River and Into the Trees. He wrote about love, death and the stoicism that he found necessary to survive in his life. Hemingway broke with almost all his literary friends—MacLeish, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, and Sherwood Anderson—although he remained loyal to Ezra Pound. He never had the chance to break with James Joyce. I did not break with my literary friends, but I acquired many by the bucket-full on the internet the more I wrote in the years of the 21st century. These 'friends' were of the quasi-friend status given the multitude than fell into that status by the time I had been in cyberspace for a dozen years by 2012. After a lifetime of deep and meaningful relationships, DMs as I called them, friendship was not of significant concern to me as I headed to the age of 70.
Almost all of Hemingway's likes and dislikes, appraisals, opinions, and advice are in his letters. This is also the case with me although, as I say this, I am not that sure. For an extended statement on my letters go to: http://bahai-library.com/letters_memoirs_poetry_autobiography. It is estimated that Hemingway wrote six to seven thousand letters in his lifetime to a great variety of people. They were often long letters bursting with description, affection, bitterness, complaint, and great self-regard. His letters, whatever their weaknesses for some readers at least, elicit an admiration for the man, whatever his faults, a man who wrote so boldly in his novels.
My letters are not as bold nor laden with bitterness and complaint. For reasons which those who know Hemingway and his writing have yet to explain, something frightful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in the first person. In his fiction, the conflicting elements of his personality, the emotional situations which obsessed him, are externalized and objectified. The result is an art which is severe, intense and deeply serious. But as soon as he talks in his own person, he seems to lose all his capacity for self-criticism and is likely to become fatuous or maudlin…. In his own character of Ernest Hemingway, the Old Master of Key West, he has a way of sounding silly. I trust this has not happened to me for just about my entire corpus of literary effusions are written in the first person. In my first dozen years in cyberspace I have dealt with much criticism of my work and I trust have have exhibited a capacity for self-criticism. If readers find my work in the first person as many found Hemingway's, my writing will need to be ignored by readers. I leave this to readers to assess. For more on this subject go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/13/finest-life-you-ever-saw/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2011+Year+in+Review
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, HENRY JAMES AND ME
Henry James(1843-1916) was an American-born writer, and regarded as one of the key figures in 19th-century literature. He found a “safe inner world” through reading and writing; such a world can be found in many ways; there are many journeys to that safe place. But such a place, such a safe inner world, is not found by, nor is it available to, all writers. James created a vast imaginative terrain which he inhabited with considerable determination, independence, and strength of will. His inner life was, for the most part, hidden as he laid bare the inner lives of others, of his characters. His only sister Alice(1848-1892) had several breakdowns and was significantly dependent on other people. She suffered from psychological and physical ailments which were not easy to diagnose and impossible to cure. They led to her early death from breast cancer at the age of 43. She kept a diary, but Henry James did not. Nowhere do we find his dreams and fears set down. It is clear, though, from his letters about Alice that her fate and her suffering preoccupied him a great deal until her death in 1892. During the years of this preoccupation, he sought fame as a writer and managed a varied and busy social life. From all reports Henry James had a richly complex emotional and creative life.
Tennessee Williams(1911-1983), the American playwright, never found the safe inner world that was the experience of James. He devoted fierce energy to his compulsive scribbling, his obsession with writing. But writing was for him an agony; he found it very difficult. It was not some safe haven. For years, at least until he was 33 in 1944, his writing was not favorably received. His life was full of booze, sex, and drugs. Incoherence and the erratic was written all over his life. This is obvious from his Notebooks, his Journals, which he kept from the age of 25 in 1936 until he was 47 in 1958, and again in the last four years of his life until his death in 1983. Those who keep journals and are happy to see them published, even posthumously, obviously wish to see their private life exposed in the act of its being lived. Most of the journals I have read are eminently and necessarily forgettable. In all likelihood this will be true of mine. Williams' only sister suffered from a mysterious mental illness, perhaps an incipient and undiagnosed schizophrenia; his mother was remote and his father drunk and brutal. Still he was able to say of life that is was "an endlessly glamorous mystery." Those words might serve as the epigraph to his life's work. For me such a set of words could only apply to part of my life but not to its whole.
WHY DO I MENTION THESE WRITERS?
I mention these two writers above because they provide both a comparison and a contrast to my own experience. I won't outline all the contrasts and comparisons here. I could add many other writers and outline the differences and similarities with my own experience. Perhaps at a later date I will do so here, as I have done elsewhere. I have certainly written on this subject in many places in my writings, especially in my poetry, because I find this 'circling around the great writers' is a heuristic exercise for my mind and emotions. For now I will pass on to the famous poet W.H. Auden and some comments about my writing in relation to his.
W.H. AUDEN AND A WRITER'S CHOICES
In writing I make choices, I pay attention to this and ignore that. This process is a reflection of what goes on in my inner life. In activity, in doing things in my outer life, I make choices in the realm of action. In both cases, I am responsible for my choice and I must accept the consequences, whatever they may be. Sometimes I can change the consequences and I need to have the wisdom to know which ones I can change and which ones I can't. It takes little talent to see what lies under my nose, at least that was how W.H. Auden put it. But, he added, "it takes a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ, if one is a writer." I am learning. What I must do now in these years of my retirement from the world of employment, meetings and most social obligations, is the same as what I most want to do---and that is write and learn more about in what direction to point my nose. I see all that I write as part of a single design, a single picture played out in a 1000 art galleries filling all the walls with its myriad variety. I do not have a penchant for drawing my readers’ attention to self-deprecating or even embarrassing autobiographical detail as is the case with many writers, especially those with a certain aggressive posture. I am also aware that I am not necessarily as memorable to those about whom I write as they so clearly are to me.
My writing draws on the ear which tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is often shocked by the unexpected, so Auden put it. It is not the amoral and tragic which shocks me, not after living through the tempest of the last seven decades(1943-2013) and watching and reading about the tempest of the half century before that(1892-1942). What shocks me, and mildly now as I approach the age of 70, is what people say to each other about all sorts of things. Writing also draws on the eye, Auden continued, which "tends to be impatient, craves variety and is bored by repetition." In my case, I find repetition quite comforting. The mind and the intellect, he could have added but didn't, is capable of casting on the mirror of creation new and wonderful configurations, emanations, impulses of thought that can be the cause of peace and well-being, of happiness and advantage to one's fellow man.-Abdul-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1975(1957), pp.1-3.
THE ARCHIVES OF WRITERS
When writers who are Baha'is die sometimes their work lives on in the papers, the manuscripts, the letters, indeed, in a wide range of memorabilia which they donate to some scholarly and secular institution, some Baha'i Centre of Learning or a Baha’i archive at the local, national or international level in the increasing labyrinth of elected and apppointed institutions that have emerged in the last century and more of an evolving and expanding Baha’i administration, the nascent Faith of Baha'u'llah, the harbinger of the New World Order.
This is especially true in the new Baha'i culture of learning ang growth, the evolving paradigm of the last two decades (1996-2016) in the more than 200 national communities and territories around the world. In the last decade, 2001-2011, a number of internet sites have also been created, some by individual Baha'is and Baha'i institutions, and others by a host of interest groups, individuals and institutions, at which writers like myself can post or file their literary work. Such authors are assured, by these various means, of at least a modicum of earthly immortality, as much as one can be assured of anything in this transient and inconstant existence. These several and various archives and this increasing number of institutional-sites on the internet are collecting points for the manuscripts and correspondence of writers and authors, editors and publishers of various ilks. How such collections of papers change hands, find a monetary value if any, and obtain a secure place on some dry set of shelves, boxes and files, or a place in an electronic archive, is the result of a peculiar alchemy between market forces, literary reputations and the growing significance of this Faith, this harbinger of a New World Order.
The typical archive of literary materials of a non-Baha’i writer of some degree of fame and significance, I am informed, was worth between $50,000 and $250,000 in New York or London in 2011. (1) At least that was the information I came across in The New York Times recently. Often that potential archive is not even saleable. The market in literary archives is a rarefied one and it is not my intention to discuss this subject here in any detial. Archives like mine are not saleable in any sense. If there is something extraordinary in a collection on sale, like possibly a cache of letters from the famous poet Sylvia Plath, the market currently draws on what is known as a price/value range. The book/archive seller decides where in that band, that range, the writer’s archive belongs. If an author has a literary correspondence with, say, 10 important people, that makes a big difference to the archive's sale price.
If the Baha’i Faith comes to play a significant role in world affairs in the decades and centuries ahead; if it comes to be what it now claims it will one day be, namely, the emerging world religion on this planet, my archive may come to have some value. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting. If I do, I will die due to a shortage of oxygen. The emergence from obscurity of this new world Faith has been significant in my lifetime, but it has seemed slow in many ways to its votaries in the nearly sixty years in which I have been associated with its growth and consolidation around the planet. When my mother first investigated the Baha'i Faith in 1953, 90 per cent of the 200,000 Baha'is in the world at that time lived in Iran. Nearly sixty years later there are some 5 to 8 million Baha'is found for the most part outside Iran with perhaps 10 per cent of the international Baha'i community in the home of its birth, what used to be called Persia.(2)– Ron Price with thanks to (1) Rachel Donadio, “The Paper Chase,” The New York Times, March 25, 2007; and (2) See Wikipedia for a discussion of the complex subject of Baha'i Faith Statistics.
BAHA'I ARCHIVES
What was once, and indeed until the second epoch of Abdul-Baha's divine plan, beginning as it did in 1963, a lamentably neglectful history of memoir collecting, the gathering of autobiographical documents and correspondence, has become a burgeoning and labyrinthine archive of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of boxes found in the 120,000 localities where Baha'is reside around the world. In the first century of Baha'i history, 1844 to 1944, and the first century of organized Baha'i administration in the West, 1908-2008, if not before, the documentation of this new world Faith has evolved sensibly and insensibly. The Baha'i Faith has become the most documented of the great religions of the world in their first two centuries---having the advantage of being the latest, and growing-up as it has in the light of modern history. And so, although there has been this relative dearth in the recording of events by those who were actually present at significant episodes and circumstances in the history of this new world religion, in some ways the documentation is so extensive as to provide a complex,a prolix, and highly arguable base for what did take place. This is true not only in relation to Baha'i history, but for much of modern history. Even when historians and analysts can agree on the facts, the interpretations are various, arguable and the subject, often, of heated debate.
At this stage in the evolution of the Baha’i community, at least in the parts of the west which I have observed and which I have some general understanding about, and at least until the new electronic archive on the world-wide-web arrived in the last decade or so, the world of Baha’i archives has been for the most part a graveyard of dry bones scattered in the back rooms of the homes of Baha’i communities throughout the world. These archives are, or at least were, for the most part, an irrelevant appendage resulting from hours and hours, indeed millions now, of meetings, discussion and pieces of correspondence sent to and from various levels and agencies, the elected and appointed branches, of a rapidly emerging Baha’i administration and its harbinger status in relation to a New World Order. What I say here about archives is not true of the international Baha'i archives and many of the approximately 200 national Baha'i archives. But in the last half century or more, since the start of the Ten Year Crusade in 1953 when there were only about 1200 local spiritual assemblies on the planet, a guesstimated fifty to one hundred thousand local archives have come to exist. I do not intend in this essay, under this sub-section autobiography, to explore this subject in fine detail. I simply want to make mention of this topic in brief. My own autobiography has been associated with these archives since the 1950s and 1960s in my many roles in the Baha'i administrative apparatus. My roles in this administration have been virtually entirely at the local, the grassroots, level with only the occasional responsibility at other levels and in those agencies of this Cause which utilized my literary abilities.
The Baha'i Faith and its immense archive has, then, by these sensible and insensible degrees, arrived on the historical stage in the last several decades, especially since and arguably, the revolution in Iran in 1979. But the professional ants who deal with this archive are not unlike the historians who deal with Roman history. The vast majority of the public could not care less about the history of Rome in the first century BC, a period in which the historical archive is massive. That same public has as much interest in the Baha’i archive, at this point in this new Faith's history, as they have in that of Roman history or, indeed, that of the eye of a dead ant to chose an analogy used by the Bab in His writings in relation to another matter back in the 1840s. But there are other aspects of this new world Faith which the world is taking an increasing interest in due to the embellishment of its spiritual and administrative centre in Israel, the publication of an extensive literature and an even more extensive commentary in journals and books---to say nothing of the internet--and the sheer growth of this Cause in the 200 countries and territories in which it is now found.
A CONTRIBUTION TO THE BAHA’I COMMUNITY ARCHIVES
Over the last three-quarters of a century, to chose another relevant timeline, since the start of the formal implementation of Abdul-Baha's divine plan in 1937, an explosion of archival material has erupted in Baha'i communities for the would-be historian of the future, the would-be historian of this new world Faith. The comments I make here concern the eruption of Baha'i archives not the outburst of the myriad other archives across thousands of governmental and non-governmental organizations in our emerging planetary civilization. With each passing year this eruption, this explosion, this torrent of information becomes increasingly difficult to deal with, overflowing as it does the bounds of society's capacity to cope with its effusions. This is true, as I say, not only for this world organization, this new world Faith, with members in some 120,000 localities on the planet. When this great mountain of material is classified and the student begins to focus on the archival body relevant to his own interests and needs, some proportion and framework emerges from the chaos and prolixity of it all. The historian and social analyst must tease both sense and nonsense from all the loose ends, fragments, contradictions and observations, eruptions and explosions that are found in archives. These problems are though, as I say, not only problems that exist for Baha'i communities, they are problems faced by humanity which in many ways is now drowning in information.
I recall, but not with fond memories, a job I had in early 1969 with the Lastman's Bad Boy furniture business. I was employed as a systems analyst and my main task was how to simplify the burgeoning documentation of this growing company with stores in Toronto and southwestern Ontario. I was only 24 at the time. Sadly, I did not possess the skills for such a task even though I got the nod for the job from a hopeful interview team. I decided to return to the teaching profession in a field I felt I would have more success. This teaching job was in southeastern Ontario. The subject of archives and documentation, as well as systems of storage and retrieval, though, is not the focus of this short essay. I leave the subject to readers which they can now google to their heart's content.
The student of the emerging New World Order of Baha’u’llah is aware, then, of thousands of archives emerging in local Baha’i communities around the world. If such a student of this new world Faith takes an interest in its activities in the last 60 to 75 years, since the beginning of the Kingdom of God on Earth in 1953, since the beginning of that ninth stage of history as the Guardian called the Ten Year Crusade, or since 1937 as I have indicated above, he will find himself confronted by a mountain, indeed, several mounatins, of archives. Generally, though, the study of archives has only begun to occupy the student of this new Faith. “Archives offer our knowledge an extra bonus”, says Arlette Farge in her book Fragile Lives.(1) They are not so much the truth as the beginnings of the truth and, she goes on, “they provide an eruption of meanings with the greatest possible number of connections with reality.” Those boxes that are beginning to collect in community after community around the world in the emerging institutional framework of the Baha'i community will, in time, provide an immense base for future historians and students of this Cause. At the moment they are, for the most part, being collected for future use. That, of course, is basically what an archive is: it is for future use. That is the purpose it serves.
For most of the Baha’i community at the local level archives are just so much paper in old boxes, or paper in new boxes. Sometimes there exists an obsessive tendency to admit too much meaning to archives when, in reality, much of it is irrelevant circularized correspondence that could easily be discarded without any loss. Indeed, I'm sure it will be discarded at various times in the future. The rare gem is often found amidst such irrelevant material. The historian must learn to see the forrest amidst the mass of trees. History and its documents is made up of so many different kinds of paper and different kinds of lives: meaningless and opaque, impoverished and tragic, rich and joyful, sometimes with mean and lackluster personalities, at other times with saints and heros. There is also a certain grandeur and humour, absurdity and irony amidst all this paper and all these people. Archives are both seductress and deceptive mirror of reality. They can falsify and distort the object being studied; they can be too facile or too ambiguous a means of entering into a discourse with history. They can tell very little of the real events of Baha’i community life. They can often be just a pile of dry bones transferred from one graveyard to another. On a loftier and much more significant level, though, the subject of Baha'i archives and preserving and safeguarding the Sacred Texts is one addressed by Universal House of Justice. I encourage readers with an interest in this topic to go to the internet site Baha'i Library Online. Here an article on this subject can be found. This site has the Internet's largest collection of Baha'i materials and is an important archive in itself.
History has long been enamoured with ‘the great man’. More recently historians have taken-up the cudgels of the average man and woman, the disabled and the migrant, the pioneer, and on and on goes the litany of the sub-groups of ordinary men and women who have come to the attention and interest of historians. The experiences and stories of people from all of these sub-groups can be found in the archives of local Baha’i communities around the world. For anyone taking part in Baha’i community life in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of this 3rd millennium the typical reaction to archives, the boxes of stuff kept usually in someone’s house in a back room or an attic, or a shed, among other places like shelves in tidy and well-organized files and folders, is one of a certain weariness. The weariness comes in part from the great mass of apparently irrelevant detail in those boxes. This weariness is also born from a simple inability to get any meaningful perspective on the great historical adventure being engaged in. The contemplation of the contents of this great weight of paper and memorabilia or digital material, which has become the main archival base in this third millennia, leads to written analysis--and that is for the future.
“It is unfortunately true,” says that Baha'i scholar Moojan Momen in summarizing the history of memoir writing and archive collecting in the Baha’i community in the first century of its history, “that the Baha’is have been lamentably neglectful.”(2) That, of course, is the view of a Baha'i scholar and historian. Not all Baha'is are scholars and historians. The view of the enterprize in which most Baha'is are engaged does not usually translate itself into writing. In the booming and buzzing confusion that is everyday life it is often a wonder that anything is ever written at all given the fact that most people, whether in the east or the west, are not inclined to write much at all. Most people have other interests and are engaged in other activities. As I got into the last half(50-60) of middle age(40-60) and the first half(60-70) of late adulthood(60-80), I become more and more obsessed with writing. Writing became increasingly a compulsion, a supreme solace. As the novelist Somerset Maugham (1864-1965) said: "I write for the liberation of my soul, for freedom. It is my nature to create with words as it is the nature of water to run downhill." So is this true of me. Phrases I come across as I read become a part of me, although I now have so many in so many volumes of my notebooks that they are like a wardrobe of clothes and shoes which I can only make use of to an extent.
THE AMBIGUITY AND RELEVANCE OF ARCHIVES
Throughout history, it should be kept in mind, there has been a long and ambiguous relationship with archives. There have been successive tensions down the ages between boxes of documents known as archives and the actual writing of history. The earliest period in the history of western civilization for which we have a great deal of documentation, of archives, is the first century BC in Rome. For the great mass of humanity, as I have pointed out above, this archive is of no interest whatsoever. But for the professional ants who deal in Roman history this archive is crucial; it has helped to generate an explosion of archival enthusiasm amongst a coterie of Roman historians in the last several decades. Side by side with this professional enthusiasm there prevails an atmosphere of anarchic confusion in the attitude of western man to his past, Roman history or other. Even Plato, as early as the 5th century BC, expressed his skepticism regarding writing as a means of preserving information. He argued that it would replace memory and people would come to rely on writing for information. he was right.
We are talking, then, about an old problem: the meaning and relevance of archives. Just as the writing of the Roman poets in that first century BC represents an important part of that rich and ancient archive, so does this poetry of mine and others represent part(time will, I trust, tell how important a part) of a modern archive of increasing relevance to both historian and social analyst. I see my own prose and poetry as an embellishment to local archives, several where I have lived in Australia and Canada; I see it as a contribution to a national or international archive on pioneers, an archive still in its first or perhaps second, century of development; I see it as a small part, an infinitessimal part of a burgeoning base of material the world over which is so extensive now as to virtually swallow the individual in a sea of printed matter. I keep in mind, though, as I write these words, the comment of T.S. Eliot, namely, that a writer should be prepared to have all his scribblings come to nothing. If writers aim for a posthumous immortality by means of their written words, they may be sadly mistaken. If such immortality is, indeed, achieved, by then such literary enthusiasts will be far beyond this mortal coil.
“It is impossible to avoid the realm of aesthetics and emotion” in dealing with archives, says Arlette Farge in her introductory statement on the subject. In a broad sense the architectural remains of the fifth century BC, or the Egyptian pyramids, are a repository of information, an archive. The realm of aesthetics and emotion is at the heart of these ancient architectural archives. Archives are also an eruption, Farge states; they can be an expression, she says simply, of whim, caprice and tragedy. And, like my poetry and the stuff in those boxes, they can be so much more.
It is impossible to assess the relevance of what will one day be an architectural archive, say, in two and a half thousand years. What will be the story told of these generations of the half-light, of the Baha'is from 1921 to, say, 2121, in the first two centuries of the Formative Age of the Baha'i Faith when a heterodox and seemingly negligible offshoot of an insignificant sect of Shi’i Islam finished its transformation into a world religion? What will they say of the architectural achievement that helped to give form and beauty to the institutionalized charismatic Force that was about to play a crucial role in the establishment of a global and peaceful civilization? Time will tell.
Ron Price
27 December 1996 updated several times to 3 June 2011
--------------------------FOOTNOTES---------------------------------
(1) Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth Century Paris, Harvard UP,Cambridge, Mass., 1993, Introduction.
(2) Moojan Momen, editor, The Babi and Baha’i Religions, 1844-1944: Some Contemporary Western Accounts, George Ronald, Oxford, 1981, p.xvi-xvii.
Some of my internet posts on the subject of autobiography and prose-poems providing a context for autobiography
are found at the links below:
http://internationalforum.freeforums.org/index.php
http://bahai-library.com/Ronprice
https://www.dropbox.com/home#/Autobiography
(readers can not access, as far as I know, the many 1000s of pages I have archived at this site)
http://hubpages.com/hub/Marcel-Proust-and-Autobiography
(to read my 75 posts at this site readers must register at this site)
http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Series-of-Articles-on-Autobiography
(click on the photo for a series of articles on autobiography)
http://www.designcommunity.com/forums/topic
(scroll down for the series of articles)
http://www.buzzle.com/authors
A POSTHUMOUS HYPOTHETICAL: PART 1
The following is a hypothetical, a hypothetical history of my writings collected posthumously. They are the writings I will leave behind at some point before the 2nd century of the Baha'i Era(B.E.) is complete in 2044 unless, of course, I live into my second century. I’m sure my passing will go unnoticed throughout the world for I am but an ordinarily ordinary, humanly human chap living in the Antipodes, at the last stop on the way to Antactica if a person takes the western-Pacific-rim route. Should a university, an academic institute, some Baha'i centre of learning, indeed, one of any number of institutions, buy for a disclosed or undisclosed sum, the entire collection of my papers – all of my several hundred pounds of manuscripts and notebooks, letters and poetry, I will be surprised from my hypothetical place in the world beyond. Should such a world exist and should I be capable of knowing about the event of such a purchase on this mortal coil I will gaze with both wonder and delight. I attempted, during the evening of my life, to place all my extant work into electronic form, so that there would be no need for any hypothetical collection to accrue. I never kept any famous intellectual company or even became famous in any small literary circle to reinforce that sense of artistic destiny which many a writer and poet possesses.
The entire question of a period of exclusive control by a literary estate after my death is not at issue for me. Such control would create the opportunity, and the financial incentive, to assemble fully prepared editions of my work made by specialists informed by my parting instructions. Once work enters the public domain,and most of my work will have done so by the time I die, it can be published by anyone in any form, and the financing of editions requiring editorial care becomes, once again, at the pleasure of benevolent institutions rather than readers. The sheer scale and the marvelous searchability of the recently developing online databases by google and others, promises to bring a whole world of books within the reach of readers who never had access to a great library. And it is my desire to make access to my work as simple and as easy for readers as possible.
The dozens of boxes in which the hundreds of pounds of my writings will be found, should my work, my entire oeuvre, not arrive in electronic files, will contain the definitive archive of this writer and poet, teacher and tutor, Baha’i pioneer and travel-teacher, Canadian-Australian, father of one, step-father of two, step-grandfather of three, grandfather of one, and husband of two women over the years, among the many other roles I acquired in my lifetime. As I pointed out to my son Daniel in October 2011, though, except for a small portion of my writing in hard copy in my study most of my files could be thrown-out on my death without a significant, or perhaps any, loss to posterity. This is due to the fact that virtually everything in my study consists of resources: information photocopied and notes taken, books and journals. The totality of this oeuvre is complex. The documents are often written in chicken-scrawled handwriting that results in making spelling and grammar obscure. Any transcription becomes inevitably untrustworthy and potentially full of errors. To unwrap the package of my resources is in many ways an unwraping of myself: the poetry fragments, the lists, the lecture notes and tangential musings provide a variety of insights into my thinking and my creative processes.
I would expect the process of cateloguing my work, should hard copies be desired, to take at least two years, as a recent Curator of Literary Collections told me in a recent discussion. The collected works of writers which come to be stored in the myriad institutions on the planet is a complex business. But, if only a small portion of my writing was to be kept in perpetuity, the cateloguing process could take little time. Processing and cateloguing could begin shortly after the purchase and the transporting of my archive from my study here in George Town Tasmania. Some institution in Canada, Australia or, indeed, one of what are now over two hundred national Baha'i community archives and innumerable academic institutions, some formally associated with the Baha'i Faith, and most not would then house my opus. Perhaps some portions of my collection, my archive, would be made available to scholars within months of their purchase if the classifying exercise was speedily engaged in if, indeed, my writings were ever purchased at all. If the institution which came to house this collection had the human resources for such speedy classifying and storage for public convenience, of course, the entire exercise could be done in the twinkling of an eye.
The news of said acquisition would not, in all likelihood, be made widely public, mainly because I would not expect that there be significant interest in the collection, at least not in the immediate years after my demise. Anyone who was keen to examine the archive would be able, eventually, to drive down to the town or city concerned to get a sense of what the archive contained. The institution might very kindly offer to display a sample of the material for anyone to see. In the said library at the said institution a scrapbook would be available in which I had gathered: (a) my first documents from the earliest days of my pioneering in 1962, (b) my first publications in the 1970s, a note of congratulations from some correspondents in the 1990s and 2000s, a receipt of payment for the first publication of a poem in the 1990s, the cover of the magazine in which a piece of my writing appeared. There might also be some sad, but very human, evidence of my manic-depressive behaviour/experience from time to time conveyed in a letter or an essay. The efforts of the scholars associated with what might be called the Price Papers Project—which could be based anywhere—may begin to yield a mature understanding of my character and my work. Anyone who really wants to get to know me and my writing can do no better than immerse themselves in the books and papers coming out of the Price Papers Project, which could over time yield many published volumes of correspondence and writings spanning the period from my youth up to and including the 21st century.
There would be a few handwritten drafts of poems, and hundreds of pages of notes in my handwriting. Typewritten manuscripts would be found for all the 6 drafts of my book on the poetry of Roger White and an electronic edition of my own autobiography in its 7 editions. There would be over 7000 poems in 70+ hardcover booklets.
Editing for some writers, like Charles Dickens, was an a full-time second career but the evidence of it in my own work---and it was extensive---by the 3rd millennium would be limited due to the fact that virtually everything I wrote by then was on the internet or in my electronic directory. It was not until that 3rd millennium that the great body of my literary efforts began to find a public place for it was not until then that I had retired and found the time to devote myself to literary activity. The range of hitherto unseen and unpublished material in this collection would keep Price scholars busy for years to come after being made available to the public eye. Some of my personal correspondence might be closed, as required by my Will, until 25 years after my passsing. My letters between, say, myself and some person of note might be viewed 100 years after my passing, also as required by my executors. Like the correspondence between Wordsworth and Coleridge, my correspondence might remain unseen for many decades. Is that possible? Some Professor of Literature might say: “it will help us hire new lecturers in the field, lecturers who will have at their fingertips material that will launch their scholarly careers” if our institution possesses Price's archives. The Price papers join those of X,Y and Z and a small collection from A, since A has not yet made his complete collection of papers available.
There would be no signs of literary sainthood as often happens to writers in secular society. Although the individual is important in a Baha'i society, there is a balance between individual and community. The tendency, therefore, to make of a persona, any person, a celebrity is strongly countered in Baha'i society. Some university may indeed purchase my library, old second-hand cabinets and a wide range of memorabilia, but there would be no campus shrine erected as sometimes happens to the writer of fame in the West in the 20th century. A collected edition of my oeuvre would in time be available in print on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific, supplemented by fat anthologies, scrupulously annotated, of my letters, diaries, essays and reviews. The Price industry might eventually spawn a monthly journal devoted to a minute inspection of my literary corpus. I would think, judging from journals that have sprung-up devoted to the writings of others in the western intellectual tradition, that such an event might occur in, say, the 23rd or 24th century. Learned periodicals would explore the significance of a lemon tree in my imagery, of wasteland and spinifex as well as many other flora and fauna which were part of my life. In Wales, where my name had its origins, there might be, in time, a solemn discussion of my ancestry.
A POST-HUMOUS HYPOTHETICAL: PART 2
If my work was ever to be canonized: several volumes of a definitive, at least five-part, life would come on board. Since there was no authorized biography before my death in the 2nd century of the B.E., nor any delightful memoirs, that definitive work would, hopefully, be short on anecdote but long on scholarship. Its overall tone would be protective, particularly in matters of sex and religion. Hopefully, though, that work would be deeply researched and pondered. It would do me greater service, by transcending hagiography and revealing for the first time the full range of my intellect and experience. The work would cover my career with a relentless roll of detail that would, necessarily try not to to crush the narrative flat. Given the possible compulsion of such a biographer to describe all of my eventful life, and travel to every place I had lived, he or she should not be discouraged by the fact that I had already told much of the story in my autobiography and poetry. Life should not be made difficult for anyone who tried to gain access to the approximately 42,000 items in my archives. I trust that important papers will not vanish. So often documents are removed from the literary estate of a writer after his death, especially documents casting the writer in an unfavorable light, at least in the opinion of his trustees.
The editorial work behind what might be called, the launching of the Price industry or project I would like to think would be immense in scale. Every book that I mention, every painting, every piece of music would be tracked down and accounted for. My movements would be traced from week to week and year to year annalisitically like the Romans once did. Everyone I allude to in my writings would be identified; my principal contacts would receive potted biographies. Some two thirds of the occasional volume in the final corpus of volumes would be given over to scholarly apparatus, principally elucidatory commentary. The standard of the commentary would be of the highest. Within the constraints laid down by Price himself, The Letters of Ron Price would become a model edition.
Philosophically, my intellect was grounded in many sources, whence came the static/dynamic imagery of my writing, the identification of the individual with civilization and much that was the crowd with barbarism, the search for balance and permanence in a world of shrieking chaos. Stylistically, my mind and hand were trained by a list of writers too long to mention here. An obscure book illuminator who taught me aesthetics and logic as a university student would get a mention. My training, plus wide reading in European and classical history and a practical study of art, the social and behavioural sciences, the physical and bilogical sciences, made me a formidably erudite man, but it was an erudition that I never acknowledged, and was never acknowledged by others. I had always been aware that I occupied a space of an infinity of ignorance. Erudition had become, by the 21st century, a complex and arguable entity at best. Learning alone did not account for my ability, say, to write nearly 10,000 prose-poems of many millions of words or many 1000s of letters to every type of person imaginable.
In some ways my story, the account of my life, was not pretty. Although like many writers, I was not constantly tormented by demons, nor did I have to resort to alcohol to soften, or escape from, life's melancholy and tragic side, nor did I have to escape an all-pervading sense of change and decay and require drugs to help me sleep, my lifelong mental health problem of bipolar disorder provided a very dark side, a dark side I have described in a separate book.
I trust there will be some attempt to analyze my humor and quote occasionally from my prose and poetry, lest an essentially somber portrait of my life be conveyed. I trust that biography will be for the serious student who wants to learn as much as possible about the man and is keen to read everything he wrote. There will certainly be no shortage of the latter. That biography will list some 50 major works written in 60 years(1962 to 2022)---a prodigious total, given my lifelong tendency to postpone, redirect, rechannel, and apply my gifts in a myriad forms of work, community activity and a seemingly endless series of non-literary involvements. Of course, the term, "gift" was, as Roger White that former and unofficial poet laureate of the international Baha'i community, emphasized back in the 1980s, but a form of unmerited grace. My writing was never seen as a gift at all by many, if not most, who came upon it. Such a reaction always helped to keep any incipient egotism well in hand.
--------------------------------------------
MY DIARIES AND JOURNALS
My journals do not represent the crowning achievement of my writing career. It is said that the essayist and journal writer Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882) was a more full-bodied, historically situated, moody, and self-questioning author in his journals than in his work as essayist. His journals were the incubator of his sermons, lectures, essays, poems, and translations, almost all of which received their first transcriptions there. Beyond this, they were, as he wrote to his friend Thomas Carlyle, "full of disjointed dreams, audacities, unsystematic irresponsible lampoons of systems, and all manner of rambling reveries, the poor drupes and berries I find in my basket after aimless rambles in woods and pastures."
The operative word is “full.” In addition to such miscellanea, the journals contain detailed accounts of Emerson’s readings, travels, personal relationships, economic transactions, existential crises, professional life, and incessant mood swings. So great was his need for daily expression that on those occasions when he had nothing to say, and they were many, he lamented his listlessness loquaciously. A handful of specialists may feel obliged to trudge through the sixteen massive volumes of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson published by Harvard University but those Journals won't find many other trudgers. As far as my Journals are concerned, they may never be published. I will, though, post several internet locations below at which I make some diary entries and some general comments about my journals and diaries, memoirs and autobiographies:
http://www.my-diary.org/users/465760
http://www.medhelp.org/user_journals/show/1238/2nd-Journal-Entry-1st-Paragraph-of-Volume-3-of-My-Memoirs
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2009/09/20/carl-jungs-red-book/ (sroll down to read my comment)
http://community.artspan.com/showthread.php?t=9291
http://davesgarden.com/community/blogs/t/RonPrice/7913/
http://www.wellness.com/blogs/RonPrice/5491/anais-nin-and-keeping-a-journal/r111nprice
http://bookaholics.yuku.com/forums/15/Diaries-amp-Journals#.To7sDHKw56w
THE BASIS FOR AND THE CONTENT OF MY OFFER OF DOCUMENTS
TO THE NATIONAL BAHA’I ARCHIVES OF AUSTRALIA and CANADA
What follows are some comments on a statement I wrote to the National Baha’i Archives of Australia(NBAA). The statement was 125 pages and 55,000 words and was a description of the documents I sent to the NBAA belonging, as they did, to the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Australia Inc. My decision as to which documents I had decided to send to these archives and which ones, therefore, were eventually accepted by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Australia, was based on the description and definition of the nature of these archives as outlined in the Australian Baha’i Archives Acquisition Policy.(1) It was necessary for the NBAA to send me these guidelines concerning individuals making donations to the archives so that I would have some idea of just what the NBAA housed and what they did not, what that agency of the NSA accepted as a gift and what it did not.
I now see all of the documents I sent to the NBAA as part of the fulfilment of my role in Canada’s international pioneering experience, its national diaspora or exodus of Baha’is in its “glorious mission overseas.” I also see these documents as part of a record of my contribution to the spread of the Baha’i Faith in southern Ontario in Canada’s most southerly towns as far south as Windsor Ontario--through a series of homefront pioneering moves before and after participating in the opening chapters of the push of the Baha’i Faith to “the Northernmost Territories of the Western Hemisphere.” It is in this context, the context in which I see these documents, that this offering was made to both the NSA of the Baha’is of Australia and Canada.
Such were the most general perspectives on the place of my pioneering experience and my role in the Cause as both a homefront pioneer and an international pioneer. I am now living: (a) at the southern end of the spiritual axis mentioned by Shoghi Effendi in his 1957 letter and (b) in the outer perimeter of a series of concentric circles, circles which define the spacial parameters of my life, in several interlocking and important ways. The southern pole of this axis where I now live, where I have lived and where in all likelihood my body will one day be buried is "endowed with exceptional spiritual potency." Many years of my life have been lived at several points along the southern extremity of this pole, this spiritual axis: in Perth Western Australia, in Gawler and Whyalla South Australia, in Ballarat and Melbourne Victoria and in several towns of Tasmania. All of these points lie, too, at the outer perimeter of the ninth concentric circle whose centre is the "Bab’s holy dust." Nine concentric circles also provide the main geometry of the eighteen terraces in Haifa Israel. Just as the identification of a circle presupposes a centre, so the terraces have been conceived as generated from the Shrine of the Báb. The eighteen terraces plus the one terrace of the Shrine of the Báb make nineteen terraces total. Nineteen is a significant number within both the Bahá'í and Bábí religions.
The brief statement, outline, of the documents that seem to me to be of relevance to a national archive is not included here at this website. The decision to house this same material in the Canadian Baha’i archive, in the end, was left with the NSA of the Baha’is of Canada. The Archives Department in Canada was not interested in my donation except a few letters to and from the Canadian poet Roger White. The NBAA was interested and four boxes of my letters from 1960 to 2010 are now housed in the NBAA. And finally, it goes without saying that I was happy with the decision of the Canadian NSA. The decision that my material could not be stored at the National Baha'i Centre in Thornhill Ontario since the Canadian Baha'i community did not have the room at their National Centre was understandable.
-----------------------FOOTNOTES-------------------
(1) The email to Ron Price on 28/11/08 from the Archives Department of the NSA of the Baha’is of Australia Inc contained guidelines for individuals making donations of these national archives. This email of 28/11/08 was sent to me in response to my emails of 22/11/08 and 27/11/08 to the NBAA asking what documents they would like sent to them. By the end of 2010, as I indicated above, four boxes of my letters, from 1960 to 2010, were housed in the NBAA.
SOME LINKS RELEVANT TO WRITERS WRITING
To be exiled, to be a refugee, is not to disappear, nor is it to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller. For one of history's great satirists Jonathan Swift, exile was the secret word for journey. Many of those who have been exiled, were freighted with suffering. All literature carries exile within it, whether the writer has had to pick up and go at the age of twenty or has never left home. Probably the first exiles on record were Adam and Eve. This is indisputable and it raises a few questions: can it be that we’re all exiles? Is it possible that all of us are wandering strange lands? For more on this subject go to this link:http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/apr/13/exiles/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYRblog+December+13+2011&
MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Elfriede Jelinek(1946-), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, suffers from agoraphobia and social phobia, paranoid conditions that developed when she first decided to write seriously. Both conditions are anxiety disorders which can be highly disruptive to everyday functioning yet are often concealed by those affected, out of shame, or feelings of inadequacy. Many writers suffer from a variety of disorders, disorders which have an important relationship with their writing. For me, bipolar disorder(BPD) has had an instrumental role, a creative role, in my writing. Readers can go to the sub-section of this site on bipolar disorder for my account, my story of BPD.
For access to a site with over four dozen essays, books and poems in relation to my autobiography go to the site below. Type the name 'Price' into the search box to obtain access to this body of autobiographical writing. (this site, bahai-library, is currently under repair and readers will have to wait to access these writings): http://bahai-library.com/author.php(Type 'Price' into the search box)