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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
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Emile Durkheim, Herman Melville, and The Bab: Some Reflections
RonPrice posted a topic in Literature
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. -
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