RonPrice

The month I separated from my first wife, the film The Way We Were was released. It was October 1973 and I was living in Australia. That marriage had begun six years before in Canada. I did not see the film until several years later. I don’t remember when but this afternoon, in another October nearly 40 years later, during my retirement from the job world, I chanced to see two or three short segments of that film.1 I won’t give you the story of the plot or all the details leading to its release because you can easily google all the details about the film at several internet sites. I was especially interested, though, in the beginning of the story which was told in flashback. It was the story of a Katie Morosky and Hubbell Gardiner, who met at college on 3 June 1937. It was about this time that my parents first met. They both worked at the Otis Elevator Company in Hamilton Ontario. In that year, 1937, the Baha’i teaching Plan, a Plan I have been associated with for nearly sixty years, was first implemented in North America. Morosky and Gardiner met again after WW2. They fell in love and married. By then, my parents had also married and I was one to two years old. Arthur Laurents(1917-2011), an American playwright, stage director and screenwriter, wrote the original screenplay which became, eventually, the movie. While an undergraduate at Cornell University, Laurents was introduced to political activism by a member of the Young Communist League. This student was the model for Laurents, of Katie Morosky, a fiery campus radical who organized rallies and a peace strike. The memory of her fervour remained with Laurents long after he lost touch with Morosky and Cornell University. Laurents also wrote the 1958 musical West Side Story and the 1959 musical Gypsy, based on the memoirs of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. In 1962 Laurents directed the film I Can Get It for You Wholesale which helped to turn the then-unknown Barbra Streisand into a star. How Streisand and Robert Redford become the two main characters in the film I watched this afternoon and which began with this experience of Laurents in 1937 is a complex story which can also be found at Wikipedia.2 --Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC1, 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. and 2Wikipedia, 8 October 2011. You1 were beginning to find success in my first years of contact with this new Faith,2 & it was coincidental that The Way We Were was released in the same month my first wife and I came to separate……..A whole new success story resulted for Streisand and Redford and a whole new life trajectory opened for me Downunder where I would lay my bones long after that movie The Way We Were.3 1 Arthur Laurents wrote the screenplay West Side Story which opened in 1958 2 My first association with the Baha’i Faith was 1953 and I joined in 1959 3 October 1973 Ron Price 9 October 2011

The following is a revision of some thoughts on Herman Melville after watching Moby Dick on ABC1(8 and 15 May, 8:35 to 10:00 p.m.). Kerry Saunders, a Peabody Journalism Award winner, was interviewed by Alan Saunders back on 30 June 2007 and he stated in that interview that Moby Dick(1851) was a metaphor for the American ship of state which was driving toward destruction, the destruction seen a decade later in the Civil War(1861-1865). The book was also a metaphor for the emptiness of reality, part of what came to be called existentialist philosophy, a philosophy that was emerging and would emerge in the 19th century with the two philosophers Nietzsche(1844-1900) and Kierkegaard(1813-1855).-Ron Price, 15 May 2011. THE HEALING ROAD I first came across the ideas of sociologist Emile Durkheim while studying sociology at university from 1963 to 1967. Many of his ideas I have always thought were relevant to a Baha'i perspective, a perspective I have entertained and that has evolved since the 1950s. This French sociologist’s ideas certainly reflect my experience of intellectual, artistic and literary pursuits, what 'Abdu'l-Baha called "learning and the cultural attainments of the mind."[1] Just as Baha'i administration was taking its first form under the guidance of Shoghi Effendi in the 1920s, Durkheim wrote that "the love of art, the predilection for artistic joys, is accompanied by a certain aptitude for getting outside ourselves, a certain detachment or disinterestedness. We lose sight of our surroundings, our ordinary cares, our immediate interests. Indeed, this is the essence of the healing power of art. Art consoles us because it turns us away from ourselves."[2] After forty years of travelling- pioneering, I find here peace and supper, as if after a very long day's work. Yes, Herman, this is its own reward.[3] Just a simple artistry in these poems, part of my search for the right idiom and the best ways of meet life's lot. I do not feel like Frost, stricken as he was and intensely conscious, suspicious of my struggle……A healing came, to me, at last, Herman, at long last……And all that gloom, and obsession, temper, rage, depression—it softened with the years and at last an easy sleep without the pain—dulled it was, life's sharp-ragged edges…../ And my style could lighten and take an easier road without that heat and load; it could brighten, that road.[4] Ron Price 22 September 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------- ONE HAD TINTED CRIMSON In the year after the Bab was martyred Herman Melville published Moby Dick. Some have regarded this book as the greatest work in American fiction. Melville began writing this book in the late 1840s, perhaps 1849 at the earliest. He said he loved all men who dived. Any fish could swim near the surface, but it took a great whale to go down five miles. Melville also thought that comfortable beliefs needed to be discarded. He could not himself believe and he was uncomfortable in his disbelief.-Ron Price, a summary of an essay and an encyclopaedia article on Melville. Melville must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius.....Melville has succeeded in investing objects.....with an absorbing fascination...Moby Dick is not a mere tale of adventure, but a whole philosophy of life, that it unfolds.---Henry F. Chorley, in London Athenaeum, 25 October 1851; and London John Bull, 25 October 1851. My Revelation is indeed far more bewildering than that of Muhammad....how strange that a person brought up among the people of Persia should be empowered by God....and be enabled to spontaneously reveal verses far more rapidly than anyone….-The Bab in Selections from the Writings of the Bab, Haifa, 1976, p.139. They both went down deep into the ocean of mystery, a mystic intercourse had possessed them with some subtle-penetrating grandeurs, intensities, strangenesses, absorbing fascination, profound reflections, a whole way of life in their words, a certain eccentricity of style, an object of ridicule, a kind of old extravagance, bewildering, and that very transcendental tendency of the age, that 19th century age. But One had musk-scented breaths... written beyond the impenetrable veil of concealment...oceans of divine elixir, tinted crimson with the essence of existence…..Arks of ruby, tender.... wherein none shall sail but the people of Baha...1 Ron Price 18 February 1999 1 The Bab, Selections from the Writings of the Bab, Haifa, 1976, pp.57-8. [1] 'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.35. [2] Emile Durkheim, Moral Education, Free Press, 1961(1925), p.268. [3] Herman Melville, Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851. Melville wrote that after a hard day's work it was enough of a reward to sit down in peace and enjoy one's supper. This could also be true of hardship, if some anxiety prevailed over something over which one did not seem to have any control. It was, indeed, reward enough just to sit and enjoy some peace and something to eat. Amen, Herman, amen. [4] While I wrote these last two stanzas I was thinking of: (a) the heat in Robert Frost's poetry and the inner battles he had to fight. See Selected Letters of Robert Frost, editor, Lawrence Thompson, Jonathan Cape, London, 1965, Introduction; and ( the healing I received in 1980 and 2002 from two different medications for my bi-polar tendency.

I just noticed that this sub-section was for people at this site to introduce themselves so....here goes.-Ron EMPLOYMENT-SOCIAL-ROLE POSITIONS: 1943-2011 2010-2011-Retired and on a pension in George Town, Tasmania 1999-2009-Writer & Editor, Poet & Publisher. Retired Teacher & Lecturer, Tutor & Adult Educator, Taxi-Driver & Ice-Cream Salesman, George Town Tasmania Australia 2002-2005-Program Presenter City Park Radio Launceston 1999-2004-Tutor &/or President George Town School for Seniors Inc 1988-1999 -Lecturer in General Studies & Human Services West Australian Department of Training 1986-1987 -Acting Lecturer in Management Studies & Co-ordinator of Further Education Unit at Hedland College in South Hedland WA 1982-1985 -Adult Educator Open College of Tafe Katherine NT 1981 -Maintenance Scheduler Renison Bell Zeehan Tasmania 1980-Unemployed due to illness and recovery 1979-Editor External Studies Unit Tasmanian CAE; Youth Worker Resource Centre Association; Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour Tasmanian CAE; Radio Journalist ABC---all in Launceston Tasmania 1976-1978 -Lecturer in Social Sciences & Humanities Ballarat CAE Ballarat, Victoria 1975 - Lecturer in Behavioural Studies Whitehorse Technical College, Box Hill Victoria 1974 -Senior Tutor in Education Studies Tasmanian CAE Launceston, Tasmania 1972-1973 -High School Teacher South Australian Education Department 1971-Primary School Teacher Whyalla South Australia 1969-1971 Primary School Teacher Prince Edward County Board of Education Picton Ontario Canada 1969-Systems Analyst Bad Boy Co Ltd Toronto Ontario 1967-68 -Community Teacher Department of Indian Affairs & Northern Development Frobisher Bay NWT Canada 1959-67 -Summer jobs-1 to 4 months each- from grade 10 to end of university 1949-1967 - Attended 2 primary schools, 2 high schools and 2 universities in Canada: McMaster Uni-1963-1966, Windsor Teachers’ College-1966/7 1944-1963 -Childhood(1944-57) and adolescence(1957-63) in and around Hamilton Ontario 1943 to 1944-Conception in October 1943 to birth in July 1944 in Hamilton Ontario 2. SOME SOCIO-BIO-DATA TO 2011 I have been married twice for a total of 44 years. My second wife is a Tasmanian, aged 65. We’ve had one child: age 34. I have two step-children: ages: 46 and 41, and three step-grandchildren, ages 18, 15 and 1. All of the above applies in 2011. I am 67, am a Canadian who moved to Australia in 1971 and have written several books--all available on the internet. I retired from full-time teaching in 1999, part-time teaching in 2003 and volunteer teaching/work in 2005 after 35 years in classrooms. In addition, I have been a member of the Baha’i Faith for 52 years. Bio-data: 6ft, 230 lbs, eyes-brown/hair-grey, Caucasian. My website is found at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/ You can also go to any search engine and type: Ron Price followed by any one of a number of words: poetry, forums, religion, literature, history, bipolar disorder, psychology, sociology, Baha’i, inter alia , to access my writing________________________

IMAGINATION, CREATION & PSYCHIC INTEGRATION “Man may be, in a figurative sense, in prison, but he has also been given a large bunch of keys and several files. The fundamental and undeniable fact about the imagination is that its purpose is to intensify the life in man.” So wrote the prolific English writer Colin Wilson(1931-).1 His book is, he says, “a study of the inaccuracies of the imagination, because the inaccuracies of different imaginations tend to cancel one another out, and what is left is a perception of the general laws of imagination. Hence this book could be called an attempt at a classification of unrealities, with a view to defining the concept of reality.” –Ron Price with thanks to 1Colin Wilson, The Strength to Dream, 1962. You published this book when I was getting ready to write my university entrance examinations and beginning my travel-pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community. I did not read and begin to enjoy this book until I was teaching literature to another set of university entrance kids. Imagination is a great power of my soul but stands in need of guidance&control to be part of an eternal act of creation for this world is all one continued vision of fancy, imagination, psychic integration.1 1 William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Oxford UP, London, 1954, chapter 13 quoted in Dimensions of Spirituality, J.A. McLean, George Ronald, Oxford, 1994, pp. 194-5. Ron Price 5 November 2011

Apologies for those who found the above somewhat obscure. Poetry is often this way, especially when one is dealing with complex problems, especially when one is, as this thread indicates, dancing to a different drummer.-Ron Price, Australia

Just a final note: ----------------------- ROUTINIZATION OF CHARISMA The Romans all loved or hated Augustus didn't they? The same with kings and queens: there was a personality factor, something extraordinary, personal, often something divine. These authority figures elicited responses of awe, deference and devotion. They range from frenzy-creating preachers to quiet, meditating sages. An inherent instability was part of their authority, their charisma. -Ron Price with thanks to Douglas Barnes, "Charisma and Religious Leadership", Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1978, 17(1), 1-18. We had our prophetic revelation, our charisma, our unified world view, our consciously integrated, meaningful attitude to life1, our perceived extra-ordinariness, our doctrine, mission, constructed beyond-the-human, a gift of grace, of history, of God, otherness, revolutionary and then, then: routinized, depersonalized, adhering not to persons, but to institutions, authority,1 central order-relating events, a legitimating force, the function of the need for order in what we could call: charismatic community with its collective excitement, transforming the inherently so precarious into a superhuman facticity that seems eternal, free of disenchantment---one. 1 In the Baha’i Faith authority is invested in institutions and power, a much more subtle and indefineable entity, is to be found in individuals. This power could be expressed in host of ways. It could be seen as energy. Man provides the energy and God provides the guidance. Ron Price 7 November 1997 1 Max Weber, some aspects of charisma.

Max Weber observes that both for sociology and for history the object of cognition is subjective meaning. This subjective meaning is both the basis for and the complex of action. The point here is not that "anything goes," but rather that "everything is contingent"; not that there are no rules, but that the rules that do exist are decidedly "historically and culturally situated." REENCHANTMENT The great sociologist, some say the greatest, Max Weber, wrote about the reenchantment of the world. The phrase has come to be used in many contexts by sociologists and philosophers, scholars and social scientist specialists in various disciplines. This writer, this poet, sees the reenchantment of the world as having its beginnings with the Enlightenment and the birth of Shaykh Ahmad in the middle of the 18th century. By that time all the traditional religions were well into the winter of their lives, although there were many cold and sunny, bright and often windy days to come. From my perspective or at least one way of expressing this perspective, this reenchantment has been underway for over 250 years. Reenchantment has a host of forms: industrialism, capitalism, socialism, liberalism, conservatism, democracy, communism, science and romanticism to choose but nine of its many manifestations. The core and centre of this reenchantment is to be found in the Baha’i Faith, although this will not be evident for some time. The process is similar to the way Christianity became the core of the reenchantment of the Greek and Roman world. The very nature of matter, new models of scientific knowledge, explosions in knowledge, in material goods and in population are all part of this reenchantment. To even begin to write about the transformation that has occurred in the last two and a half centuries when this reenchantment has been taking place would require a book.-Ron Price with thanks to Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism, University of Virginia Press, London, 2004, p.17. They all got a slice of the action, all got a piece of the cake, as the essential revolution proceded quietly, obscurely, largely unnoticed, in the hearts of millions who dropped out of a socio-political world they long ago found meaningless. Some of the routines have gone on; some of the laws have been obeyed, but the roots of faith have been severed, unbeknownst, seductively, insinuated by revolutionary, spiritual, forces that are entirely out of human control. And here I am in this place in early adulthood amidst diverse living things and natural forms, beneath the sky, light’s alternations and rhythms of the seasons, in community worldwide now, open to the advent of the divine and beckoning the messengers of the godhead’s reenchantment.1 1 Kate Rigby, op.cit., p.84. Ron Price January 16th 2006

Belated apologies for taking 8 months to respond, Slightly art-freakish! So true: "Very few human beings are open to new ideas that conflict with their deep core of beliefs." Eventually, though, as the sociologist Max Weber theorized in his sociology of religion, a secular ethic becomes spiritualized and a new world religion becomes dominant.-Ron Price, Tasmania -----------------------------------------

In life all one does is scratch the surface of knowledge. This afternoon I scratched the surface after a late lunch, or perhaps it was an early evening meal. I was alone and everyone was away celebrating mothers’ day. In the late afternoon ABC1 television usually has what my wife and I have come to call “an arty-farty” segment. From 3:45 to 4:30 p.m. I watched an interview with an American writer and illustrator of children’s literature: Maurice Sendak.1 He is best known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, published in 1963.-Ron Price with thanks to “Tell Them Anything You Want,” ABC1 TV, 8 May 2011. Life takes a meaning beyond your books, eh Maurice? But to achieve something so great as to give permanent satisfaction…. that is a test of the emotions, eh Maurice? Your weakness and torments fade away….. you say---when you go into your study and create. This is your true happiness, magic & you do it well and you know it, eh Maurice? I know what you mean Maurice. My story is a little different than yours, of course, none of the fame and wealth……but the transcendence and the concentration and the feeling…..“I’m a lucky man.” Your needle got stuck in childhood and mine got stuck in a new world Faith back in my teens and it has been stuck there ever since.(1) We won’t take ourselves too seriously, eh Maurice? We’ll laugh along the way and keep our sufferings In low gear. Thanks Maurice for being there, thanks. The Baha’i Faith Ron Price 8 May 2011

I was just getting back into the teaching profession in the first week of September 1969 when the name Gaddafi was in the news. I was far too busy moving into my flat in Picton Ontario, preparing to teach in the rural community of Cherry Valley, and opening another Baha’i locality in the then Nine Year Plan.1 I was still recovering from writing-off my car the week before to really take in the bloodless coup d’etat against King Idris.2 Gaddafi was 27 in 1969 and I was 25. I was also still recovering from my own bloodless coup, a mental health disorder in four psychiatric hospitals the year before, a spell of security work driving an armoured truck and several months of unsuccessful employment as a systems analyst with the Bad Boy Company in Toronto Ontario. I was eager to get back into the teaching profession which I had left in June of 1968. This small town in southern Ontario seemed just right. It was about six weeks after the first men had landed on the moon.-Ron Price: references--1Baha’i Teaching Plan from 1964 to 1973; and 2Wikipedia, 22 February 2011. Gaddafi was just a name in the news back then, news which blows at you from some lighted chirping box or an unlighted one known as a radio….So much comes at us all as we go about our jobs, our marriages, so many acts in the day-to-day world as we all try to survive the tempest blowing in our world with the speed of light before life ends in that twinkling of an eye. You’ve been a busy man, Muammar, since 1969, and so have I these..... 40 years. They called you the new Che Guevara of the age, and even the King of Kings of Africa. I wonder if you and I will make it into old age, a period in the lifespan which human development psychologists call those years after 80. I have a better chance than you. They tell me there are a total of 37 spellings of your name, Muammar!1 The end, your end, it appears, is nigh! 1 An article published in the London Evening Standard in 2004 lists a total of 37 spellings of his name, and 32 spellings are known at the Library of Congress. Ron Price 22 February 2011 Updated for: ArtFreaks.com Forums On: 24/8/'11

Occasionally I like to hang out late in the evening watching a good doco....here is a prose-poem about such an experience.-Ron Price, Australia -------------------------------------- Ronald Reagan(1911-2004) was a busy fellow from the beginning of the Baha

In our world of the knowledge explosion and burgeoning information far beyond the capacity of any ordinary mortal to keep up on more than a sliver, a small portion, of it all, I was not surprised when yet another artist--unknown to me--was given a TV bio-pic1 last night. Lucian Freud, now 89, has been at the game of life more than two decades than I. He has gained a pre-eminence among British artists, a celebrity status, far beyond anything I will achieve even if I live to be a centenarian. Jurgen Habermas has achieved a celebrity status in the field of sociology, but people with little knowledge of sociology will not know of this intellectual giant. One also needs to know more than a little about the field of history to be familiar with Peter Gay, and I could go on and on through the fields of knowledge to mention names with which only those who are connoisseurs or scholars in those fields are familiar.

Clive James, man of many talents, roles and names to fame, admits that on some occasions when he spoke he did not know what he was talking about. One can’t know the details about all the things one talks about over the many decades of living or one would have to confine oneself to only a few subjects. Your conversational life would be tedious. Clive has tried to absorb anything and everything that's new or rather, almost everything. He says that he can't abide hip-hop. The motivation behind his huge body of work: essays, poems, books, inter alia--is partly, he says, his sense of responsibility which began in childhood. He also has had a desire to: (a) use his time well and ( experience the pleasures and fruits of solitude. James's literary and verbal artistry lies in his ability to seem both casual and careful on the one hand and serious and well-read on the other. He observes an imperfect world with acerbic off-handedness and humour. He displays a formidable erudition and a giddy love of pop culture. So much of our culture, its history and its present, infuses James's prose and his wit blossoms when he is interviewed. Writers, James emphasizes, often speak with a special pontificating voice. That voice, James continues, strives for integration and a certain judiciousness even in its doubts. That voice also purports to contain the distilled wisdom of a lifetime's experience. Almost always, he says, that voice of the writer is at odds with the personality from which it emerges. “In my case the discrepancy is so glaring that even I can spot it,” he says engagingly with a proverbial twinkle in his eye. He introduced one of his columns about the mess that exists in his study and on his desk with the following question: “Are we able to think clearly when surrounded by mess because chaos is inherent in all our minds, even those of the great writers and thinkers?--Ron Price with thanks to “Denton: Elders,” 30 November 2009, ABC1, 8:00-8:30 p.m. and several interviews and columns of Clive James available on the internet. It’s always a pleasure, Clive, although I can’t say I’ve read all your 30 books;there is too much else which catches my.... fancy, my mind and emotions... You said a good deal tonight which pleased my sensory and intellectual emporium...your words about creativity & sex; your comments about our wide- wide-world thrown off with an insouciance and concern, with a humour and seriousness as.. befits your life in the world of erudition and pop-culture- entertaining the mass as you’ve travelled your road during these epochs: you are my contemporary Clive, just a little bit older and so much more well-read: how on earth did you do it, Clive?? How did you do it, Clive????? Is this all there is, Clive, this life? Ah well, we can’t agree on every line of thought, can we Clive, eh??(1) (1) my Bahá'í beliefs posit an afterlife. But whatever one believes regarding an afterlife, in the end, we are all agnostics, since belief and knowledge are different things. Ron Price 1 December 2009 Updated for artfreaks.com On: 3/12/'10 ------------------------