Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
In addition to the 5000 letters, there are 5000 emails and internet posts. I
have not kept the internet posts. They are scattered throughout the world-
wide-web and, in many cases, will be untraceable. Virtually this entire
body of epistolary material was written during the dark heart of an age of
transition, an age which was my life, perhaps the darkest in history.
This collection of 10,000 items including those hybrid forms of letter, the
email and internet post, which emerged as a new millennium was
opening, are written by and to a homefront(1962-1971) and then an
international pioneer(1971-2009). They are communications written to: a
friend, a colleague, a fellow Bahai, a person or persons at one of 1000s of
sites on the internet, a Bahai institution at the local, national or global
level; one of a multitude of other organizations, a family member or some
association in an unnumbered set of contexts. Readers will find here at
BLO mainly general commentaries on my letters and the letter as a genre,
prose-poems on letters, mine and those of others in history and literature.
Except for the occasional letter the body of my correspondence is not
included here.
Note: Beginning two years ago, in August 2007, I kept all correspondence
of significance in computer files; the only hard copies kept were an
assortment of quasi-epistolary and literary material that did not seem to
have a logical place in my computer directory.
The thousands of letters and thousands of hours that this homefront and
international pioneer for the Canadian Bahai community has spent
writing letters, emails and internet posts in the last fifty years, 1959-2009,
I dedicate to the great letter writers in Bahai history. I dedicate these
hours and these communications to the Central Figures of this Faith,
Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice--individuals and
institutions that have produced a treasure house of correspondence.
Then there are the many whose names are on Bahai lists but who have
played little to no part in the Bahai community in their years of
membership; as well as the not-so nameless and traceless, each of whom
has their story and their varying degrees of writing and who, collectively,
have written what I have little doubt are literally billions of letters, emails
and written communications of an epistolary nature. To these I also
dedicate my collection of letters. If I also include in my dedication, the
massive quantities of correspondence that has been written by the
institutions of this Cause on the appointed and elected side of its
administrative structure; and the epistolary work of the two chief
precursors of this Faith, those two chief luminaries in the earliest history
of this emerging world relgion, and those who also wrote letters in
responding to the seeds these precursors sowed and were involved in
different ways in the earliest days of the history of this new Faith as far
back as the time that Shaykh Ahmad left his home in N.E. Arabia in 1770
to 1783(circa)---the letters of this multitude to whom I dedicate my own
epistolary efforts might just reach to a distant star if they were laid side
by side!
At some future time, when the tempests we are living through in these
early decades and, perhaps, centuries of the Formative Age of this Faith,
an Age which began in Bahai history in 1921, are over and a relative calm
has been produced in the affairs of men, historians, archivists,
biographers and analysts of many a kind will possess a literary and
epistolary base of a magnitude undreamt of in any previous age for an
analysis of the times, the epochs of the first two centuries of this Bahai
Era(B.E. beginning in 1844) and the century of its precursors, 1744-1844.
My focus here is not on this wide and many-genred literary base,
however, it is on the letter and, more recently, the email and internet
postings of many kinds, kinds resembling the letter in many basic ways.
Letters give us a direct and spontaneous portrait of the individual and
they are also useful in providing an analytical resource for social and
institutional analysis. I could include here, diaries and journals since they
are letters, of a sort, letters to oneself, a book of thoughts to and by
oneself. But these genres, too, are not my focus in this review of my
letters and this form of communicaton that are part of the history of this
Cause.
As the poet and philosopher Emerson once said: My tongue is prone to
lose the way; not so my pen, for in a letter we surely put them
better.(Emerson, Manuscripts and Poems: 1860-1869) This pioneer, in a
period going back now fifty years, has often found that one way of doing
something for another was: to write a letter, since the mid-1990s send an
email and, since the late 1990s, post on the internet. Not endowed with
mechanical skills and proficencies with wood and metal; not particularly
interested in so many things in the popular culture like sport, gardening,
cooking, heavy doses of much of the content in the print and electronic
media; indeed, I could list many personal deficencies and areas of
disinterest, I found the letter was one thing I could do and write and in the
process, perhaps, document some of my sensory perceptions of the
present age, perceptions that were relevant to the future of a religion
whose very bones spoke of a golden age for humankind which was
scarcely believeable, but was worth working for and was at the basis of
my own philosophy of action in this earthly life. Hopefully my letters
would evince some precision and, perhaps, for a future age they would be
of value. I often wondered, though, how useful this interest, this skill, was
in its apparent single-mindedness for it was not, as a I say, a popular
sport! The exercise resulted, too, in a collection of many a dusty volume
of paper which, as T.S. Eliot once put it with some emphasis, may in the
end amount to an immense pile of stuff with absolutely no value or
purpose.
These letters illustrate, and are part of, the struggle, the setbacks, the
discouragements over these same epochs and especially the years after
the unique victory that the Cause won in 1963 which has consolidated
itself(Century of Light, p.92) in further victories over more than four
decades(1963-2007), the period when virtually all these letters were
written. These various communications are also, from my point of view
anyway, part of the succession of triumphs that the Cause has witnessed
from its very inception. However exhausting and discouraging the
process has often been--and it has often been--I can not fail to take deep
satisfaction on a number of fronts: one of these fronts is these letters and
the mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence that, for me if not
for others, are revealed therein.
The American poet, Theodore Roethke, once said that an incoherent yet
sincere piece of writing often outlives the polished product. I'm not sure
how much this truth, if truth it be, applies to letters. Letters have enough
of a problem surviving and even more of a problem ever being read in
some fine collection usually made after a writer's death and, if one adds
inarticulateness to the recipe, the salt may just lose all of its savour.
Inventivess and humour are two wonderful assets and, if they are
possessed by a letter writer, the letter can come alive. The letters of the
poet Roger White possessed these qualities and they had a narrative
momentum without which his letters would have grown static and
repetitive. Sadly, I have often felt that my letters expose the limits of my
literary, my epistolary and certainly my humorous sensibility. My letters
often grow limp, or so it seems to me, perhaps because I have often felt
limp; or they become crowded with quasi-mystical, quasi-intellectual,
abstractions as I have tried to deal with concepts that I only half
understand and ideas far beyond my philosphical and literary capacity to
put into words. In some of my earliest letters, letters to my first wife
which we used to call my love-letters, written in the early months of
1967, I fell back into an emulation of the Guardian's writings, hardly
appropriate Judy and I often felt later, when we read them on a quiet
Sunday afternoon, to express my feelings for her. Of course, the feelings
they expressed were ideological and intellectual and not aesthetic and
romantic. These letters were, in the end, thrown away.
Letter writing is a little like gambling; you have to stake a great deal,
everything it often seems, on one throw. Unlike gambling you often have
no idea whether you won or lost. But this is often the case in relationships
and in life: one cannot possibly evaluate what happens to our letters, to
our acts, to our lives--or anyone elses--in terms of whether they will
result in justice, harm or benefit--since their frution, ultimately, is
destined for another plane of existence. But, still, we do judge and we do
evaluate, as I do here in this lengthy analsysis at the Bahai Academic
Resources Library Site.
The outline below of the categories for the collection of my letters began
to take form in the first decade of my retirement from FT
employment(1999-2009), especially after the official opening of the Arc
Project on Mt. Carmel in 2001. This collection tends to get altered from
time to time due to the changing nature of what is still a live body of
work. Only the occasional letter is found here at the Bahai Academics
Resource Library or on the internet in various places since these letters
are either personal, professional or private. I prefer to keep this body of
writing confidential until at least my passing. At the present time there are
some 50 volumes under ten major Sections delineated below by roman
numerals. Section III below contains my contacts with sites on the
internet and there are some 25 volumes of site contacts at: site
homepages, forums, discussion boards, postings, replies, inter alia. The
headings, the categories, of the letters are as follows:
I. Personal Correspondence:
1. Volume 1: 1959-1984
2. Volume 2: 1985-1988
3. Volume 3: 1989-1994
4. Volume 4: 1995-1996
5. Volume 5: 1997-1999
6. Volume 6: 1999-2001
7. Volume 7: 2002-2003
8. Volume 8: 2003-2004
9. Volume 9: 2004-2005
10. NSA and National Committees of the Bahais of the United States
Vol 4.1
Vol 4.2
Vol 4.3
V. Roger White:1981-1992
Vols. 1 to 4
VI.2 Individuals
1. Bill Washington
2. Judy Hassall
3. Gary Olson
4. Toni Edmonds
5. Graham Hassall
Vol. 1 to Vol.4
1. Dialogue
1. 1960 to 2001
2. 2001 to 2008
1. 1960 to 2005
There are three categories of my letters that one day may be found in the
event of my demise and in the event that such a search is desired:
The next section of this somewhat long posting here at BARL comes
from chapter 3 of my memoirs. Not all of chapter 3 is included here, but
enough to give a taste and a critique of the letter-writing process from the
point of view of this Bahai who began his pioneering life 46 years ago in
1962 and who wrote his first letter to a Japanese Bahai youth in 1959--or
so I recall with some doubt as I write these words more than 50 years
later. It seems to me that those who read these letters one day, if they ever
do, will have difficulty grasping the nature of my personality inspite of,
or perhaps because of, the extensive literary base I have provided. The
only impeccable writers and the only personalities we feel we understand,
William Hazlitt noted nearly two centuries ago, are those who never write
and people we have only briefly met. I would add to Hazlitt's analysis
here that we often feel we understand a personality, but it is always in
part. Getting to know people is a bit of a mystery at the best of times
whether they are beside you on a bus, a train, a kitchen table or a bed.
One is always adjusting ones mask for correspondents and, in the process,
one creates a series of self-portraits, a mosaic of true and false, real and
unreal. The quality and maturity of my relationship with others is, as
William Hatcher pointed out 25 years ago, the best measure of spiritual
progress and growth, acquiring the capacity for such mature relationships
depends essentially on an intense inner life and self-development. And
the measure of ones spirituality depends on much else, too much else to
venture an analysis of in this brief statement. The letter is a reflection of
this inner life but, in the end, it is but a reflection of a spirituality which
lies at the centre of ones heart and soul.(William Hatcher, The Concept of
Spirituality, Bahai Studies, Vol.11, 1982, p.25.)
I asssume that human personality is essentially unknowable, that it is the
revelation of a masquerade in a stage play--for all the worlds a stage. This
is not to say that there are not some aspects of life that are revealed
through letters, but readers must keep in mind that they are dealing with
fragmentary, often ambiguous and decidedly opague material over which
they will be unable to wield any kind of imperial authority and
comprehension. Whatever insights they gain in readings, they will be
inevitably partial and will have a distinct tendency to crumble in a
epistolary world that is often obtuse, dull and vulnerable from or within
the onslaught of the quotidian. Collections of letters are not the most
favorite fare in the popular periodical press, journalistic studies and at
book launches except perghaps in the form of letters to the editor. They
exist, letters that is, in a somewhat secret, fenced off area of privacy, an
island of subjectivity, where even the external world is experienced as an
inner world. This, the sociologist Georg Simmel once said, is the essence
of modernity.
Readers will find, too, that however much a letter reveals the springs of
action, there exists a nice and secret world to which he or she is never
privy. Oftentimes neither is the writer aware of his motivational matrix,
for mystery abounds in our worlds. The writer, namely myself in this
case, turns his letter like a historical microscope with some sensitivity
and with some attention to minute causality, but it is a causality he never
fully grasps and a sensitivity he only attains to partially. The road these
letters describe Im not sure I would ever have entered (either the road of
the letters or the road of the analysis) if I had known of its length when I
wrote that first letter fifty years ago.
Performance struggles with ideal when one writes and when one lives.
That is the name of the game. My choice and my command of language,
to whatever degree of imperfection and perfection I attained, were the
fruit of exercise and with the arrival of more leisure in my mid-fifties that
exercise was able to find much fuller expression. Some of the facts of my
past, my religion and my society are presented in these letters in a
language that is rich in a type of coherence and a type of embedded
comment. I like to think that the cumulative effect of this comment is to
predispose readers in favour of a particular interpretation of reality and
the world. But my more skeptical self is more inclined to the view that a
collection of letters is not likely to change the world view of readers no
matter how open and receptive they may be. The stubborn testimony of
unexceptionable facts, the facts of my life, gradually bring me to the bar
of history and the sober discretion that I trust these same facts embody
are a statement about my present age and hour. At the bar there is no final
verdict only a series of temporary assessments and at the bar where
individuals read these letters there will be combinations of the non-event,
the boring, the occasional bright spark or low flame, perhaps a burning
sensation or two, a little indigestion, a wishing and a willing that is
beyond my pen to even attempt a descriptionor a discretionary comment.
But no final judgement.
I think there is little doubt that these four epochs are the scene for the
greatest and most aweful period in the history of humankind. Gibbon
once said this of Rome in the 2nd century AD. My account here of the
immensity and wonder of this period is an account from a quite personal
and limited perspective. It is an account, too, which renders my version of
a vision and my interpretation of a plot and script that derives from two
god-men in the 19th century. My letters are pregnant with delightful
observations that are as deep and as shallow as the person I am and they
are pregnant as well with the most trivial images and thoughts as watery
and limpid as amniotic fluid. For my letters, like the letters of most
others, contain what is often called telephone talk, talk which nullifies
serious artistic or psychological exchange, talk about lifes simplicities,
talk about lifes conventionalities like the weather and the events of daily
life.
Readers may find my letters something like the way that Carlyle found
Scotts letters. They are never without interest, he pointed out, yet they are
seldom or never very interesting. Id like to think that my letters might
impart something of my soul, my joys and anxieties, and something that
may engage the sympathies and pleasures of those who happen upon
them in their journey. In an age in which communication has become
more audible, with animated and electronic emails and sound systems
improving in quality decade by decade, it seems that communication has
also become more, or at least often, ephemeral; with billions of emails
biting the electronic dust each week, if not each day, I offer this collection
of letters as one mans record of his age.
-Source Unknown
It was Charles Darwin's custom to file all his letters received and when
his slender stock of files ("spits" as he called them was exhausted, he
would burn the letters of several years, in order that he might make use of
the liberated "spits." This process, carried on for years, destroyed nearly
all letters received before 1862 at the age of 53. After that date he was
persuaded to keep the more interesting letters, and these are preserved in
an accessible form.
For different reasons my letters before 1979, in other words the first 20
years of my correspondence, are few in number. The concept of saving
letters grew on me slowly over more than two decades.
We all grow old and live in a matrix of groups, networks, institutions and
communities. These are part of the core substance of the letter, although
even the student of the epistolary genre can be guilty of serious omissions
and patterned distortions when he or she writes his or her letter. The
introspector and retrospector in letter writing can give us rare access to
inner experience from their position of aloof detachment and passionate
engagement. Monopolistic access to my own inner life has found many
grooves and at least one or two of those patterned distortions away from
letter writing and toward religion. I hope the time has not yet come, as
Virginia Woolf said can come, when I may have forgotten far more of
significance than I can remember. Certainly I am far from the position
Heinrich Boll was in when he wrote that “not one title, not one author,
not one book that I held in my hand has remained in my memory.”
The letter is both the ultimate Insider and the ultimate Outsider in
applying scientific understanding and insight to the self, the interplay of
sequences of status-sets, roll-sets and intellectual development. What
results is not so much a condensed description than a step toward
elucidation.1 I feel as if I have just made a start in the first two decades of
my attempt at an analytical discussion of the letter and my letters in
particular. After five decades of dipping in and out of letter writing I don’t
think I was at all conscious of letter writings hermeneutic influence until
atleast the late 1980s when the Arc Project had been officially announced.
If the letter appeared in my life it was accidentally, serendipitously and
hardly worth any analysis, but that began to change as this Cause I have
now been associated with for more than half a century was finally
emerging from the obscurity in which it had languished for a century and
a half.--Ron Price with thanks to 1Sociological Lives: Social Change and
the Life Course, Vol.2, editor, Matilda White Riley, Sage Publications,
London, 1988.
To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its
parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it...Being
smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable....it seems to us
qualitatively simplified.3
One can not know everything about anyone, even oneself. The mountain
of detail that one does know would sink a ship and would not enlighten
anyone. The task of achieving comprehensiveness not only is impossible,
it is irrelevant. But there are intelligible dimensions of one's life and it is
these dimensions that my poetry deals with best. Imagination is critical in
writing biography. Some writers see invention more important than
knowledge. Inevitably, there is an element of invention, of moving
beyond the factual, but my own preference is to use imagination in a
framework of factual experience, as far as possible. To read my poetry
should be to immerse oneself in the first several decades of Bahá'í
experience in what the Bahá'ís see as 'the tenth stage of history' and,
especially, that time when the spiritual and administrative centre on Mt.
Carmel received its richest, its definitive, elaboration and definition.
There are several unifying nodes of experience for my poetry, in addition
to the above. I have drawn them to the reader's attention from time to
time in the introductions to some of my poems.
FOOTNOTES
1 When this essay was written, the 2nd edition of my autobiography was
floundering in such a state that I was just about to give up writing it. An
80 page first edition was completed five years before this essay was
written and it felt highly unsatisfactory.
2 Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY,
1984, p.60.
3 idem
4 ibid., p.122.
16/3/97-28/9/98
AUTOETHNOGRAPHY
______________________________________________________
The above essays contain just some of the ideas that I came across in the
literature on autobiography. I have drawn on just some of the array of
writing which has appeared in autobiographical literature especially since
the decade 1950 to 1960. This literature has transformed our
understanding of autobiography. --5/5/05
___________________________
Perception, reflection and social interaction are at least three of the many
psychologically diverse contexts in which the word self appears in our
everyday discourse. Autobiography is an important part of the narration
of this self and this autobiography, like all autobiographies, finds its home
in all of these contexts.1 But since the reality of man is his thought and
what endures, after life has completed its course, is the soul, it is hardly
surprising that there is a curious intangibility,2 an inherently spiritual
abstraction, associated with defining, with expressing, who we are. And it
is hardly surprising that this work of mine, this autobiography, contains a
great deal that is better described as thought and not so much that one
could describe as action. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Jens Brockmeier and
Donald Carbaugh, editors, Narrative and Identity: Studies in
Autobiography: Self and Culture, John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2001;
and 2Hannah Arendt in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood,
Adriana Cavarero, Routledge, NY,2000, p.ix.
The desire to write a letter, to put down what you dont want anybody else
to see but the person you are writing to, but which you do not want to be
destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to
read, is ineradicable. (T.S. Eliot, English Poets As Letters Writers, From a
lecture given in 1933 at Yale University) Certainly the extensive
collection of my letters sent and received to these two individuals might
take a future reader into the hearts and minds of three people at a unique,
a significant, time in history and shed light on the period in question in
ways that other genres of writing cannot and will not do. This sub-
collection could be said to be (a) a dramatization of the appreciation of
one man for the poetry of the most significant poet of the epochs under
review and (b) the effort of one Bahai to explore his Faith en passant,
indirectly, to a friend, colleague and fellow retiree. These two
interlocutors are not so much possessed of a literary caliber superior to
others I wrote to, although in most cases that was true, but the
correspondence went on for many years, more years than that of others.
A large work is difficult because it is large, even though all its parts might
singly be performed with facility; where there are many things to be
done, each must be allowed its share of time and labour, in the proportion
only which it bears to the whole; nor can it be expected, that the stones
which form the dome of a temple, should be squared and polished like the
diamond of a ring. Those who have much leisure to think, will always be
enlarging the stock of ideas, and every increase of knowledge, whether
real or fancied, will produce new words, or combinations of words. When
the mind is unchained from necessity, it will range after convenience;
when it is left at large in the fields of speculation, it will shift opinions. If
any custom is disused, especially the literary, the words that express that
custom often perish with inactivity. As any opinion grows popular, it will
innovate speech in the same proportion as it alters practice. Since I retired
from full time work in 1999 my mind has been unchained but, as yet, my
opinions are not popular. They are, though, growing in the public place at
a faster pace than ever. I leave it to readers to assess the junction, the
intersection, between my letters and the pace of change in society on the
subjects that occupy both me and that wider milieux. By 1999 my life had
become more speculative than active, more literary, than people centered
with its endless listening and talking. This shift in my literary and daily
avocation is strongly reflected in the quantity and content of my letters
and coalesced in my first extensive publications on the internet.
In the hope of giving longevity to that which my own nature repells me,
forbids me, to desire, namely, the fame of my letters and my immortality
through them, I have devoted this collection of letters, the labour of years,
to the honour of my religion and as a testimony to one of my lifes
achievements. There is a glory to life from its arts and its letters. Whether
I shall add anything of my own writings to these arts and letters, to
English literature, must be left to time. Much of my life has been lost
under the pressures of illness, lack of direction, a certain frivolity, jobs
that were fill-ins, conversations that seemed to go nowhere, activities that
functioned largely to fill in time, the desire to be entertained regularly and
daily, inter alia. Much of my days have been trifled away.
Much time each day has been spent in provision, in functioning, for the
tasks of the day that was passing over me, doing what was in front of my
nose. I have not thought my daily labour wasted; I have not thought my
employment useless or ignoble. If, by my assistance, foreign nations and
distant ages might gain access to the propagators of knowledge and
understand the teachers of truth, or if my labours might afford light to
some of the multitude of the repositories of learning, then my
employment will be more worthwhile than any contemporary
achievement. For vision and a sense of the future inspires so much that I
do. When I have been animated by this wish, I look with pleasure on my
collection, however defective, and deliver it to the world with the spirit of
a man that has endeavoured well. Useful diligence in the microcosm of
letter writing may in the end prevail.-Ron Price with thanks to Samuel
Johnson, Preface to the Dictionary From Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary
of the English Language, London, 1755, Edited by Jack Lynch.
I wrote the essay which follows as part of the second edition of this
autobiographical work, a second edition I worked on from 1993 to 2003.
It was one of my essays that was, in that process of ten years in the
evolution of this autobiography, simply gathered into an appendix and not
integrated into the body of that edition. In the third edition I achieved a
better integration of material, of my autobiographical resources. My
imaginative function became more fertile in the third edition. As the poet
Wallace Stevens writes, referring to imagination: I am the necessary
angel of earth/Since, in my sight, you see the world again, I am seeing the
world again with greater vividness than I once did. Robert Graves, a
prolific letter writer, saw his letters as a sort of spontaneous
autobiography and his poems as his spiritual autobiography. I like the
distinction. Perhaps, one day, a selection of letters from my spontaneous
autobiography will become available.
Here, then, is some of that essay.....As the 38th, 39th and 40th years of
pioneering took their course in the first years of my retirement, 1999 to
2002, I wrote some of the following about the letter-writing experience....
Across the line of time I thought I would try to make a brief summary of
this letter writing experience, an experience which goes back to the first
letter I received from the international pioneer Cliff Huxtable in St.
Helena in 1967. Cliffs wife Cathy had just died at the age of thirty-five.
Cliff is still in St. Helena thirty-five years later. He has remarried. He
never wrote again. I replied but I did not keep a copy of the letter; indeed
I kept few of my personal letters until about 1982, twenty years into the
pioneering venture.
By those dates, from 1957 to 1967, “a mood of cultural crisis: a sense that
something had gone terribly wrong in the modern world, something that
we could neither assimilate nor put right,” had entered our psyches. One
writer called our society a post-traumatic culture. Indeed there have been,
since the fifties and sixties, a host of characterizations of the shift, the
crisis, of these days. It was in many ways an insensible process without a
beginning date, but it was like a tempest which blew and blew decade
after decade, a tempest that had already begun in the lives of my parents
and, arguably, my grandparents.
Some of that surprise comes from the fact, says Naipaul, that the self that
writes is not the everyday self. They are very different. The everyday self
is essentially superficial and, if not superficial, it is at least domestic and
practical and must deal with the minutae of life just to get from one day
to another in one piece: fed, housed and clothed-and hopefully loved. I’m
not so sure about this characterization of the double self, but that sense of
surprise I find on every page I write and this surprise certainly possesses
an appeal. It helps to keep me going, keep me writing. “The secretion of
ones innermost life, written in solitude and for oneself alone, that one
gives to the public,” writes Naipaul. “What one bestows on private life—
in conversation, however refined it may be—is the product of a quite
superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by
putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world. While I’m
not sure this is entirely true, it certainly is in part.
That is not to say that fascinating personalities are not present, that
individuals with great charm are not found among the pages, that
devotion and faith, patience and understanding are not here. There is a
storehouse of humanity, a kalaidescope of personalities, here that I met on
my journey. There was a certain excitement which I found pleasant but
transitory and, as I look back over it, not something I would want to
repeat or make permanent. There is something tumultuous about
existence and these letters reflect that quality. This tumultuous quality is
due to many causes that are not my purpose to describe here. Even the
most intimate of relationships contains a trace of strangeness and,
inevitably, this is reflected in letters.
What does occupy the Baháí often appears trifling. Such is the feeling I
have frequently had in relation to these letters. The words of Thomas
Henry Huxley, the nineteenth century biologist and educator, I find
encouraging. He opened his autobiography with a quotation from a letter
from a Bishop Butler, a bishop of the episcopal seat of Aukland, to the
Duchess of Somerset. The bishop wrote: And when I consider, in one
view, the many things . . . which I have upon my hands, I feel the
burlesque of being employed in this manner at my time of life. But, in
another view, and taking in all circumstances, these things, as trifling as
they may appear, no less than things of greater importance, seem to be put
upon me to do. As archaic, as anachronistic, as the style of the good
bishops words may be, the point for me is important, namely, that Huxley
saw his autobiography, even the humble letter, as something put on him
to do, by the interpositions of a watchful Providence, the eye of a
necessary Fate or the simple needs of circumstance, however trifling it
appeared to be.
The many things to which the Duchess’s correspondent here refers are the
repairs and improvements of his episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if
Huxley, the first great apologist of Darwinian evolution, this largely self-
educated man, one of Englands founders of primary schools for all, this
father of eight children, this coiner of the term agnostic, saw himself as
an instrument of the deity. But, like the good Bishop Butler, Im sure he
felt he had things of great importance to do and that they had been put
upon him. Even the humble letter. Virginia Woolf wrote that it was not
until the nineteenth century that self-consciousness had developed so far
that it was the habit of men to describe their minds when they wrote their
letters and their autobiographies. I write in this new tradition, although I
am conscious, as Woolf puts it plainly, of the worlds notorious
indifference. And it may be many years, if ever, before this collection of
letters has any interest to even a coterie of people.
In the early years of retirement, 1999 to 2002, I rarely used the telephone.
In retirement I had come to find the telephone an intrusion after more
than forty years of my finding it a pleasure, a convenience or a necessity.
Of course, I still owned a telephone and answered it when circumstances
required with courtesy and kindness and, when possible,with humour &
attentiveness.
A great deal of life is messy work offering to the artist irrelevant,
redundant and contradictory clutter. Much of letter writing falls into this
category; it spoils a good story and blunts the theme, like much of
conversation, much of life, it is random, routine and deals with the
everyday scene, ad nauseam. But these letters tell of a life in a way that is
unique, not so much as a collection of letters, for collections are a
common genre over the centuries, but as a collection of letters in the
third, forth and fifth epochs of the Formative Age of the Baháí Era. They
present pictures that tell of a concrete reality, a time and an age, that I
hope will stand revealed to future readers. For these epochs were
characterized by what Toynbee calls a schism in the soul in an age of
social disintegration. A fully seasoned universal state with its supreme
authority and its supreme impersonal law, argues Toynbee, were not part
of the cosmology and the basic unit of social organization, for humankind
in this half century, although some serious and significant beginnings to
that process were made in that direction.
What is here in these letters and in my other writings is, in part, some
signs and signals of the embryo of that unit of social organization at the
global level. The Bahai Faith has been central to my education, my
ambitions and my assumptions as far back as the early 1960s and late
1950s. Much of this educatyion was peripatetic and that of an autodidact.
What is here is spiritual autobiography and psychological revelation in a
different literary form than my poetry and it tells of a period during which
the Baháí Faith made a significant leap forward in its numbers and in the
maturity of its community. Often, to the Baháís working in their personal
lives and in their communities this maturity and this growth was either
not evident or not appreciated. So often it was the struggle itself that
dominated their perspectives, their emotional life and their thoughts.
Often, too, readers awareness of the many Ron Prices that make up my
life and whatever maturity I have or have not attained is sharpened by
their dip into the pool of my letters. But perhaps most importantly the
number of collections of letters from international pioneers during this
period may not be that extensive given the busyness of peoples lives and
what seems to me to be a quite natural disinclination to keep letters
beyond a salient few of some personal importance. If, as Anthony
Burgess suggests, artists must be judged not merely by excellence, but by
bulk and variety, then at least Id be in the running, if ever I should want to
be running. Sometimes, though, bulk compromises quality. Perhaps that
is the case here. I leave that to readers to judge. As yet my literary
landscape has not been surveyed professionally or by amateurs. I
certainly hope I escape the fate of Burgess, at least as it was held in the
hands of biographer Roger Lewis who wrote: From an aesthetic
viewpoint, all of Burgess relentless productivity was one vast waste of
words and paper. But one never knows for sure.
Film critic Gerald Peary notes in his essay on the biography Clint: The
Life and Legend, there are at least two Clints. I think it is fair to say there
are probably more than two Clint Eastwoods. There are certainly more
than two Ron Prices with hopefully a golden thread joining all the selves
as well as threads of many other colours. On the internet I found by the
year 2007 at least 50 Ron Prices: car salesmen, writers, poets, evangelists,
Deans, Board Members,harpists,insurance salesmen, etc. etc.
After more than fifty years of excessive contact with human beings, the
quiet, only child, the self who had learned in his early childhood(up to
1949) how to occupy himself in a solitary way, seemed to want more of
that solitude. Price was ready by the turn of the millennium for
televisions more metonymic contact with others. He found in this
medium, a medium which had been part of his life on and off for half a
century, that all of those storytellers, priests, wisemen and elders which in
many ways had become lost to society in the years of its disintegration in
the previous century and especially in recent decades, the decades of his
life, had become restored to cultural visibility and to oral primacy in his
nightly fare on TV and in the daily fare of radio programs. With
embellishments from the internet and books, embellishments which were
usually more satisfying to the mind, he felt little need for any human
contact at all. And society, he felt, seemed to have little felt need, for his
story, drowned as society had become in a plethora of stories, day after
day, night after night and year after year from the tidal wave of
productions of the print and electronic media
A new nonliterary culture had come to exist at about the same time that
my pioneering life began. “Its existence, not to mention significance,
most literary intellectuals are entirely unaware, wrote Susan Sontag in her
groundbreaking 1965 essay, One Culture and the New Sensibility. While
this work does not focus on this complex theme, the presence of a large
group of people in my society, a group who reads to such a limited extent,
is a simple reality of life whose implications I can not possibly dwell on.
Readers, if interested in this topic, can examine this article by Skinner
and his discussion of the new sensibility of a non-literary culture. This
not literary sensibility had implications for my letter writing, but I will
not go into them here.
The drama of my life became largely an inner one as the 1990s came to
an end. The external battle, its pleasures and anxieties, went on but in a
much more subdued form. Perhaps, like Thoreau, I lacked a certain
breadth and coarseness of fiber and by my fifties I came to prefer, as
Thoreau had been all his life, to be more isolated from my surroundings,
more insular and solitary. I came by my late fifties to plant myself near
the sea with a granite floor of principle beneath me, although often there
were layers of intervening clay and quicksand which, even in my
solitude, seemed to entrap me. Of course, that trap was the one I had seen
all my life: the trap of self, of ego, of natures insistent self and of lifes
inevitable complexities. Was I too quick or too slow to answer lifes call,
too inclined or not inclined enough to switch off its insistent urgings?
Lacking the right words for the right time or failing to come up with the
right verbal package did I rush in where angels feared to tread? Was this
equally true in the letters I wrote? One could not always frame the words
to say-it-right in every letter and email. I hope, I believed, I was saying it
better in my poetry which Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko said is the
poet’s true autobiography.
While the art and craft of letter writing have declined in this century,
letter stories have thrived. Cast as love letters and Dear John letters, as
thank-you notes and suicide notes, as memos and letters to the editor, and
as exchanges with the United States Post Office, examples of epistolary
fiction have been published by the hundreds, among them the work of
many of our most notable authors. Why has this form of fiction writing
remained so popular? Gail Pool, the editor of Other Peoples Mail says it
has something to do with the rhetorical question: Who is immune to the
seduction of reading other peoples mail? I like to think my letters offer a
similar seduction. That is what Id like to think. Time, of course, will tell.
The tangled root and the tranquil flower is here: cool detachment,
indifference, and an anguish of spirit.4 I leave it to future readers to find
these roots and flowers, these several temperaments. I trust their search
will have its own reward. I hope, too, that this opening comment on
Volume 6 of my personal correspondence in Section VII of Pioneering
Over Four Epochs sets an initial perspective of some value. These words
above written on several occasions from 1999 to 2002 for the third and
fourth editions of this autobiography were completed after living for
more than four years in George Town Tasmania. Some writers move to
enclaves where many other writers live. Brooklyn USA is a good
example. George Town, with its small population of perhaps 6000, has
hundreds of gardeners; people who fish, water ski and go boating can be
found in abundance. So can artists, cooks, cleaners, factory workers, inter
alia. But writers are a rare lot and Im happy with it this way.
During the time the letters in this particular part of the collection were
written I began work on some thirty-two instalments on The History of
the Baháí Faith in the Northern Territory: 1947-1997; I also completed
my book The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature,
organized and refined the second edition of my website Pioneering Over
Four Epochs into fifteen hundred pages and gathered together a body of
resources for what became the third edition of my autobiography which I
wrote later in the twenty-first to twenty-fourth months of the Five Year
Plan(2001-2006).
_______________________________FOOTNOTES________________
_______________________
2 idem
3 idem
4 ibid.p.13.
Ron Price
17 February 2003
PS. The genre that Henry Miller enjoyed writing most was the letter.
Long letters to close friends, wrote Mary Dearborn,(1) were his favourite
pieces of writing. I must add that I, too, have come to enjoy this form of
writing much more since retirement, but they are rare occurrences these
long letters, if one defines a long letter as, say, four typed pages, 2000
words, or more. The attitude that many have in my time is: why write it if
I can say it on the telephone? Many are like famous Samuel Johnson who
wrote letters with great difficulty and reluctance. And although I take
delight in conversation over limited periods with some people, I am
equally happy now to have little to no conversation except with my wife.
However fine, too, that my letters may be, the greatest of lifes arts is the
art of living.
The record of my sexual life, however appetizing readers may find it, is
remarkably thin on the ground. Readers should not get their hopes up too
high as they contemplate a future reading of my post-humously published
diaries. In applying my customary powers of literary exposition to more
than half a century of sexual activity with a thoroughness that leaves little
to the imagination would require more space here, inspite of what I often
felt to be its insufficiency, than I really want to devote to the subject.
From my earliest erotic enthusiasms in childhood and my loss of virginity
in the arms of my first wife on my wedding night at the age of twenty-
three to my surprisingly late-discovered masterbatory abilities in middle
age, my sexual exploits are given the kind of detail that would satisfy the
most ardent voyeur, well, at least some ardent voyeurs. I leave readers
with such interests and the readers who acquire a taste for what I write
here, with a reward at the end of the tunnel of my life. Stay tuned, your
persistence will yield its just deserts. My sexual achievements or lack
thereof, my career in fornication, like many of my forays into aspects of
life’s burgeoning variety of pursuits and however stimulating they may be
when well-written-up, will, it seems to me, in the end contribute little to
nothing to my literary reputation or an understanding of the pioneering
life. I was, like Henry Miller, enthralled by women.(Erica Jong in the
Devil at Large, 1993) This enthrallment is a story in itself and relatively
little of that story is found in my letters.
I’d like to think that, at the other end of the emotional spectrum, my
letters could be read in the same way Katherine Suzannah Pritchard read
those of Miles Franklin: “Every literary nerve in me thrills to your lovely
breezy way of saying things….And it’s almost as good as a yarn with you
to read one. I just simmer and grin to myself when I do: with a sense of
real contact with you.” That’s what I’d like to think. I’d like to think, too,
that others might learn not to be too tedious in the exposition of whatever
Gospel they may be espousing, particularly that associated with the two
nineteenth century God-men at the centre of the Baháí paradigm. But I
am more inclined to think these letters simply preserve a record of a life
in the context of a period of four epochs in the historical development of
a new world Faith. Perhaps I give my life and times a fresh and novel
colouring; perhaps my writings will enjoy a coterie of the worlds readers
interested in the great experiment of which I am but a part. Again, Id like
to think so. But it is difficult to know. In a world of mass entertainment, a
diversified print and electronic media, collections of letters dont rate
highly on the scale of popular interest, as Ive already said. Thats just a
simple fact. A coterie of people, it seems to me, may take an interest in
these letters one day. One day in a world of say, twelve billion, in which
the Baháí Faith is playing an important role in a future world Order, that
coterie may be a significant number. We shall see.
These letters “hang there,” as Thomas Carlyle wrote of the letters of
Oliver Cromwell, “in the dark abysses of the Past: if like a star almost
extinct, yet like a real star; fixed, once a piece of the general fire and light
of Human life.” These letters also play some part in answering Carlyles
key biographical questions: how did the subject influence society, and
how did society influence the subject? My letters may indeed become
extinct. Certainly their present state of influence resembles extinction
more than influence of any kind. The nine hundred letters of Cicero
written in the middle of the first century BC were one of the first,
arguably the first, in history to give us an understanding of the times. Of
course he had, and his society had, no telephone, fax, email, computer, et
cetera, to convey messages. The letter was, for perhaps two and a half
millennia, much more crucial as a genre of communication. Somewhere
in the nineteenth century, gradually, letters, like biographies, became
much more human and revealing, not like the wax figures they had been.
After perhaps a century and a half of this fresh wind, my letters join, add-
onto this new tradition. Perhaps readers will find here: the creative fact,
the fertile fact, the engendering fact. One can but hope. However much
my life and my thinking have been focussed on a single point, elaborated
across a wide field of action and behaviour, I would think my letters are a
good illustration of the application, the delineation, of this focus. During
these four epochs there was so much happening in the public and private
spheres to fragment daily life. My letters, it seems to me, provide a lens
that magnifies many of my autobiographical gestures and throw light on a
life, a time and a religion in a way that my general autobiography does
not. So did Ciceros and, as famous as he has been, now he is read only by
a coterie.
Elizabeth Bishop once said that she felt sorry for people who could not
write letters. I do not share Bishops feeling. She also said she felt that
writing letters was like working without working. Yes, that is so for me. If
I shared Bishops feelings for non-letter writers, I would feel sorry for
most of the human race--and sometimes I do, but it is for so many
reasons. Im not sure how many people want to read about the fabric of a
persons life as conveyed in a letter; after half a century of TV and a
century of movies it seems to me people find out about the fabric of
peoples lives in so many ways. After 50 years of writing letters, I tend to
the skeptical and slightly cynical side about their value. I hope I am
wrong.
For, as Lord Altrincham noted with some humour and some truth,
“autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less
reprehensible.” He could have added that the mundane nature of so much
that is daily life makes for a tedious story for much of the time, tedious
because so repetitive, so pervasive, so common, so quotidian. This may
be the reason some writers completely abandon writing about the
personal; why diaries in our age are rare and why letters and the study of
them, especially ones own--may in fact be unique!!
6 Reece Street
George Town
Tasmania 7253
4 October 2000
Dear Rebecca
The program Life Matters today, Wednesday October 4th, was on the
theme“Taking Time Out.” I won’t try to summarize all the points made
by the guests: Ester Buchholz, Margaret Murton and Gavin Smith and the
many callers discussing as they were, what one speaker called “the
neurosis of our time: a lack of aloneness.” I will briefly tell of my own
experience here in this letter. Fit in what you can when, and if, you read
this letter.
The person who takes on such a ‘time-out’ over extended periods of time
needs to know themselves, though. I knew I had to cater to my social
side. I could not cut it all out or I’d get some kind of withdrawal
symptoms. So I spend time helping organizing the local seniors’ group; I
have a radio program for half an hour a week; I am involved with the
Baha’i community and my wife’s family here in northern Tasmania. All
of these activities together do not involve a lot of time, but they give me
that needed social contact, that balance between solitude and being with
others, which I find essential to my comfortableness.
Gerontologists are talking about our living to well over 100 if we take
care of ourselves. They talk, too, of the loneliness of the aged. I see no
evidence of that emotional construct on my horizon but, who knows, I
could be back with people one day. For it’s possible that, at 55, my life is
just half over. While my mother was the dominant person in my life until
my twenties; my first wife in my twenties as well and my second wife the
dominant person to this day. Like the women in Lawrences life, these
women in mine were all of independent mind, resolute and highly
articulate. My correspondence, however, does not really deal with these
important relationships; or does it deal with other important relationships
in my life, like those of my father, my uncle and a small handful of
academic Bahais, among others. Admittedly, too, my letters come
nowhere near the honesty and completeness with which Lawrence
disclosed his personality. I feel quite confident that no one in the future
will say of my letters, what James Boulton said of the letters of
Lawrence, namely, that they were masterpieces of the letter-writing art
and an unexampled expression of his creativity.
Time seems to go by faster as you get older, you hear it said so often, and
it certainly seems to be the case. Ill soon be sixty and I assume, as long as
I am in good health and I have a range of interests, the years will spin by
irretrievably from my grasp as one writer put it. And so is this true of all
of us. And so the time has come again for the annual letter to what is for
me about a dozen or so friends and relatives, the periodic up-date of
events in this swiftly passing life. At one level not a lot seems to take
place: the same routines, habits and activities fill the days as they did this
time last year. At another level a great deal takes place. On the
international and national landscape the events continue to be of
apocalyptic/ cataclysmic proportions as they have been off and on it
would seem since 1914--or, as the sociologist Robert Nisbet argued
persuasively , since about 500 BC. Mark Twain once said that to write
about everything that took place would make a mountain of print for each
year. James Joyce produced several hundred pages to describe one day in
his book Ulysseys. Ill try to reduce the mountain of life to a small hill or
two in this email.
Chris and I have been here in George Town at the end of the Tamar River
in northern Tasmania for three years and three months. Daniel has been
with us and working at the Australian Maritime College as a research
engineer for two of these years. He is happier with his job now than he
was in the first year, although occasionally he applies for another job
somewhere for graduate engineers; Chris is not suffering from ill-health
quite as much as this time last year, having received some useful
medication from her doctor and treatment from an osteopath. Both Dan
and Chris plug along battling with the forces that destiny or fate, divine
will or predestination, free will or determinism, circumstance or
socialization throw up for them to deal with from day to day.
One delightful event this year which Id like to comment on was a visit
with my cousin Dave Hunter, his wife Barb as well as Arlene, the wife of
another cousin, John Cornfield. I had not seen any of my family members
for some forty years and we had a day in Melbourne travelling hither and
yon, eating delicious meals and getting caught up on many years of life. I
found I had an appreciation for my family that had got lost in the mists of
time living as I have been since my mid-twenties first in the far-north of
Canada and then on a continent far removed from North America. There
is nothing like forty years absence to make the heart grow fonder and
give one a fresh appreciation for ones family.
As you all get stuck into winter(at least those of you in Canada who
receive this email), summer is just beginning here with temperatures
going into the mid-twenties in the daytime occasionally on the hottest
days and the low-to-mid teens at night. This is about as hot as it gets in
any part of the summer in this section of northern Tasmania. I look
forward to your annual letters again this year in the weeks ahead and to
the news from your life and your part of the world. Am happy to write
again in another email to anyone wanting to write occasionally in more
detail on whatever subject but, if that does not eventuate, I look forward
to writing to you again at the end of 2003. I trust the up-coming season
and holiday is a happy one and the Canadian winter(or the Australian
summer, as the case may be) is not too extreme this yearGreetings and
salutations.
I take much pleasure from most of my letter writing which obviously the
poet Samuel Johnson did not. I don’t think my letters have that “easy
power” which those of Henry James possessed. Indeed, so much of their
content, it seems to me, is repetitious. In a large collection of letters, like
a large collection of life, repetition it seems to me, is unavoidable. I am
encouraged, though, by some of the remarks of language philosopher
Roland Barthes. He says that readers learn how to acquire the experience
of those people they are reading. Rather than being consumers of my
letters, then, they become producers. This is partly because literature, of
which letters and autobiography are but a part, takes in all human
experience, ordering, interpreting and articulating it. Readers learn to set
aside many of the particular conditions, concerns and idiosyncrasies
which help define them in everyday affairs.
And so I have hope that what may be for many readers a banal collection
of decades of letters, may be for others a body of print that will arouse a
response in the reading self, the reading system, the meaning, the identity,
system, of others. Perhaps, too, that response will be something quite
significant, something that their interpretive principles allow them to see
and that even a relaxation of cultivated analytical habits which often
happens while reading a letter may help them to see. Of course, whatever
reasonable arguments I present, whatever challenges to magnanimity I
raise, they are, again, as William James puts it so succinctly, “folly before
crocodiles.”
Who knows what will become of all these letters, now contained in some
fifteen volumes of assorted sizes and contents. “Letters enabled Emily
Dickinson to control the time and place of her relationships,” writes
James Lowell in his introduction to a volume of her letters.1 I’m sure
they have a similar function for me; I have become even more conscious
of this as the email grew and developed throughout the 1990s and became
a more important part of my life and as my world of employment became
a world of retirement filled as it was with writing and reading. I do not
keep a copy of all my emails, only the main ones. Since so many emails
are of the short and snappy variety, basically a form of entertainment, the
funny and the wee-wisdom, as I call them, the variety which exercises
that control which Lowell speaks of in a light way, an important part of
this new variety of my correspondence I simply do not keep a record of in
my files. I suppose, though, that since they are never recorded in the first
place, it will never be missed.2
Letters at one time in history had a function, at least in the more literate
quarters, that is conveyed in the following quotation from David Marrs
introduction to a collection of Patrick White’s
letters.
Are there no letters? There’s nothink I like better than a read of a good
letter. Look and see, Mrs. Goosgog, if you can’t find me a letter.I’m
inclined to feel melancholy at this time of night.4-The Ham Funeral
The TV, video and the DVD proably have this entertaining function now,
largely replacing any function the letter may have had to keep people
amused. As I indicated above, the letter may even have been on the verge
of extinction had it not been for the email’s resurrecting role. As the
1990s progressed, the email came to dominate the landscape and replace
the letter. With the world population doubling in these three epochs, too,
I’m sure the letter/email is now in safe hands, even if nine-tenths of the
production is not worth saving or pondering over after an initial read.
Ron Price
10 February 2000
Such are the introductory words to another volume of letters, one of many
introductons written in the fourth decade of this pioneering venture.
Again on this subject of the letter let me add this short essay in relation to
a special type of letter, the job application, which was arguably the
dominant form of letter I wrote during all my pioneering and job-seeking
life, 1961-2003.
Not being occupied with earning a living and giving myself to 60 hours a
week in a job and many other hours to community activity marked a
turning point for me so that I could devote my time to a much more
extensive involvement in writing. Writing is for most of its votaries a
solitary, hopefully stimulating but not always pleasurable leisure-time-
part-time-full-time pursuit. In my case in these early years of my late
adulthood, writing is full-time about 60 hours a week.1 I have replaced
paid employment and activity with people in community with a form of
work which is also a form of leisure, namely, writing and reading.
Inevitably the style of one's writing and what one reads is a reflection of
the person, their experience and their philosophy. On occasion, I set out
this experience, this resume, in an attachment to this brief essay, this
introductory statement on the history of my job application process.2 If,
as Carl Jung writes, we are what we do, then some of what I was could
and can be found in that attachment. That document may seem over-the-
top as they say these days since it now goes on for more than 20 pages,
but for nearly half a century of various forms of employment, years in the
professional and not-so-professional job world produced a great pile of
stuff/things. As I say, I make it available to readers of this account, when
appropriate, and I update it to include many of the writing projects I have
taken on during these first years of my retirement from full-time, part-
time and volunteer activity.
The resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement, the
document, the entry ticket which has opened up the possibilities of
another adventure, another pioneering move to another town, another
state or country, another location, work in another organization, another
portion of my life. I'm sure that will also be the case in the years of my
late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++) should, for some reason,
movement to yet another place or, indeed, from place to place be
necessary or desired. But this seems unlikely as I go through these early
years of late adulthood and head into the last stages of my life.
In the last three years which are the first of my late adulthood, a period
from 60 to 80; and in these early years of my retirement(1999 to 2007), I
have been able to write to a much greater extent than I had ever been able
to do in those years of my early and middle adulthood from 1965 to 1999
when job, family and the demands of various community projects kept
my nose to the grindstone as they say colloquially. And now, with the
final unloading of much of the volunteer work I took on from 1999-2005,
with my last child having left home in 2005 and a more settled home
environment than I’ve ever had, the years of late adulthood beckon bright
with promise. My resume reflects this shift in my activity-base.
The process of frequent moves and frequent jobs which was my pattern
for forty years is not everyone's style, modus operandi or modus vivendi.
Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and
their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines
of a relatively small place and, perhaps, a very few jobs in their lifetime.
Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth,
nor is a long list of jobs, although some degree of inner change, some
inner shifting is just about inevitable, or so it seems to me, especially in
these recent decades. For many millions of people during the years 1961-
2003, my years of being jobbed, the world was their oyster, not so much
in the manner of a tourist, although there was plenty of that, but rather in
terms of working lives which came to be seen increasingly in a global
context.
This was true for me during those years when I was looking for
amusement, education and experience, some stimulating vocation and
avocation, some employment security and comfort, my adventurous years
of pioneering, my applying-for-job days, the more than forty years from
1961 to 2003. My resume altered many times, of course, during those
forty plus years is now for the most part, as I indicated above, not used in
these years of my retirement, except as an information and bio-data
vehicle for interested readers, 99% of whom are on the internet at its
plethora of sites.
____________________________FOOTNOTES___________________
__________
(3) Beginning with the summer job I had in the Canadian Peace Research
Institute in 1964, I wrote an unnumbered quantity of: summaries, reports,
essays, evaluations, subject notes, inter alia, in my many jobs. None of
that material has been kept in any of my files and, over 40 years, it
amounted to literally millions, an uncountable number, of words.
Note: Since about 1990 thousands of emails have been sent to me and
replies have been written but, like the job application, most have been
deleted from any potential archive. For the most part these deleted emails
seem to have no long term value in an archive of letters. They were
deleted as quickly as they came in. Of course there are other emails,
nearly all of the correspondence I have sent and received since about
1990 to 1995 which would once have been in the form of letters, is now
in the form of emails. They are kept in my letter-files. (See the internet
site 'Bahá'í Library Online' and the 'Personal Letters' section for an
extended discussion of this aspect of my life: writing letters.)
__________________________________
Id like to insert four poems here and depart somewhat from the epistolary
theme. A poem of Emily Dickinson is timely as the opening poem, timely
in relation to all the sad aspects of the past which she says can “silence”
us, if we give them too much of our time, if we “challenge” them.
Dickinson, who writes a very useful juxtaposition of prose and poetry in
her letters, prose that opens into poetry and poetry that opens into
prose,writes:
Entitled “Memory”--
And do it silently.
Besides Identity
Of other Interlocutors
A probability--
Unchallenged--let it lie--
And in a short poem that talks of her desire for a fairer house for her
expression than prose alone could build, she writes:
I dwell in Possibility--
Superior--for Doors--
I like that attitude to letters that Dickinson describes. Her letters construct
possibility. I like, too, that attitude to the past that Dickinson describes so
succinctly in the above poem. There is a reverence, a sacredness, to
memory, a need to let it lie in its august state, a recognition that it is a
source of our identity, a need for silence while following its paths and
always the possibility that it can take over your life if you let it and, of
course, often you do. For, however sacred it may be, there is an enormous
tangle to our days, a tangle, as Germaine Greer describes it, “of telling,
not telling, leading, misleading, allowing others to know, concealing
things from others, eavesdropping, collusion, being frank and honest,
telling lies, half-truths, white lies, letting out some of our story now, some
of it later, some of it never.
HONEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Kevin Hart, a poet who lives in Australia, says that writing poetry is
about retrieving something you have lost. When you write a poem you
lose that thing again, but you find it by writing about it--indirectly. This
indirection involves, among other things, finding how to write about this
lost person, place or thing in your life.1 One thing I find I lose frequently
and have to retrieve, recreate, find again in a new, a fresh way, a way with
hopefully more understanding than when I last passed by, is history, mine
and all that is the worlds. I need a narrative, a chronological, base to bring
out the truth of the past; I need silence to contemplate the sources of
inspiration and know- ledge; I need to be able to tell a good story in my
poetry for this is what will give it enduring literary worth. A good story, it
seems to me, is one thats a little too complicated, twisted and
circumlocuitous to be easily encapsulated in a newspaper or television
story. Oliver Goldsmith once said, the most instructive of all histories, of
all stories, would be each mans honest autobiography.2 That may be true
but it depends on just how the story is told. -Ron Price with thanks to
1Kevin Hart, Poetica, ABC Radio National, 2:05-2:45 pm, 3 November
2001;and 2MarkS.Phillips,Reconsiderations on History and
Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of
Eighteenth-Century Britain, The Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.57,
No.2, pp.297-316
honoured as we are
in either world?
Can we work
travelling as we do
Ron Price
3 November 2001
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FEVER
Price’s attitude to his poetry was not unlike that of Sylvia Plath’s. He saw
himself as an artisan. He was an artisan with an idea. All of his poems
began with an idea, a concept, a something; at worst the beginning of a
poem was what Roger White called a poor connection on a telephone
line. But it was a connection. Sometimes the connection was sharp and
clear. He was happy to flow down whatever river the water was willing to
go down, to make whatever product he could make, as long as it
exhausted all his ingenuity in the process, as long as the water flowed to
the sea becoming part of that great body of life. Sometimes Price’s poetry
was confessional, showed the indictment of immediate experience. Some
of his work was what Robert Lowell once described, in reference to the
poetry written in the last year of Plath’s life, as the autobiography of a
fever. Sometimes Price would disappear into his poem and become one
with it. In poetry Price found his lie could defeat the process of easy
summary. -Ron Price with thanks to Stanley Plumly, “What Ceremony of
Words,” Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath, editor, Paul
Alexander, Harper & Row, NY, 1985, pp.13-17.
You were always an intruder, then,
of modern life.
Ron Price
23 February 2000
Id like to think that one day I might have some of the experience that
Thomas Carlyle had back in 1866, as the very outset of a new Revelation
that Carlyle had absolutely no awareness of in the England of his home.
In that year, two months after the death of his wife, he was reading some
of her letters from the year 1857. He said he found in those dear records a
piercing radiancy of meaning. Carlyle wanted his own letters preserved as
a record of his life so that his record would be as full as possible.
as if destroying cancer
in the centre of one’s home.
29 October 1995
And so, at the end of several thousand letters, at the end of all the battles
and the losses, I anticipate that there will be \\\\\\\"a rank of angels\\\\\\\"
who will, as \\\\\\\'Abdu\\\\\\\'l-Bahá puts it in so many different ways in
His Memorials of the Faithful, be there as I am \\\\\\\"plunged into the
ocean of light.\\\\\\\" And there, \\\\\\\"lapped in the waters of grace and
forgiveness\\\\\\\" I shall review my days on this earthly plane which
passed as swiftly as the twinkling of a star. I trust I will be able to recall
that I made my mark at what was a crucial turning point of a juncture in
human history the like of which never came again in the story of human
civilization. Will I be able to recall, at that future time, a time beyond
time in that Undiscovered Country, deeds that have ensured for me
\\\\\\\"celestial blessings?\\\\\\\" Will there be regrets and remorse? Will
letters continue to be written in that place? Who knows
8 September 2000
It has been 18 months since teaching my last class in Human Services and
12 months since my wife, Chris, and I moved to George Town in
Tasmania. Time flies! I’m glad I pulled the plug when I did at the ripe old
age of fifty-five. The time was right for me. It felt right in leaving and the
first 18 months have confirmed that was the right decision. Twenty-nine
years in the game was enough for me. Centrelink and the several private
employment providers don’t put any significant pressure on you here in
northern Tasmania, a region of high unemployment. The concept of
‘mutual obligation’ has not resulted in me taking on any jobs I don’t
want. I have a Web Page which is considered ‘an embryonic business’ by
Centrelink; I also work for a home tutoring organization in Victoria and
am the President of the George Town School for Seniors. The total time
per month, in recent months, on all of these ‘exercises’ together is about
two to three hours. Of course, in addition to the above, I must apply for 3
jobs/fortnight and that takes, roughly, two hours a week of various forms
of paper-schuffling. It is a pleasing change from the mountains of
marking and endless talking and listening.
When I left the classroom in early April last year I was really emotionally
worn-out, in ‘emotional labour,’ I think was the term I came across on a
Four Corners program about Call Centres I saw a few weeks ago. It was
not just a fatigue with teaching but, it would appear in retrospect, a
fatigue with a range of other social obligations I was involved with in
Perth. Wall-to-wall talking and listening. Now, after 18 months, I have
just enough social contact to satisfy my needs for sociability and enough
time in solitude to cater to that other side of me. I have a weekly radio
program on the local community radio station which I run for the Baha’is
of Launceston; and there are activities in the Baha’i community in
Tasmania to keep me in touch with humanity and prevent me from
becoming the total hermit which part of my personality seems to need at
the moment. I write lots of poetry and prose, read lots of books, walk 45
minutes every day and argue more with my wife, who has been going
through meno- pause and giving me the biggest challenge of my early
time of retirement.
George Town is a town of about 8000 people. I look out my lounge room
window (the whole wall is window) and can see the Tamar River, the
Bass Strait and the Asbestos Mtns(soon to be renamed). Winter
temperatures go down to zero to five at the low end and ten to fifteen in
the day. Things are warming up now in the early days of spring, but won’t
get to the high temperatures of Perth, perhaps thirty degrees once or twice
during the whole summer. We are half an hour from Launceston and other
critical points on the Tamar River where my wife’s family lives. My
family, consisting now only of cousins and their children in Canada,
might as well be on another planet. One perfunctory letter a year is the
only contact left now. Moving many thousands of miles from home, after
thirty years, tends to limit intimacy in most cases. Absence makes the
heart grow fonder, only to a point, I guess.
I have been thinking of Thornlie Tafe, where I spent ten pretty intense
years, in the last week or so when I’ve been out for my walks in the bush
near my home here in George Town, and so I decided to write. If any of
you feel like writing do so; I’d love to hear from you. But I know you are
all busy and getting in gear for the last term of another year. After living
in so many towns since I left my home town in 1962, I find the places I
have lived in become a little like chapters in a book, slices of memory.
Time moves us all on, whether peripatetic creatures like myself or more
sedentary types who live and die in the same city. I have happy memories
of Thornlie from 1989 to 1999; one leaves a little of oneself wherever one
dwells. And so I write this letter.
I wish you all well in your own careers and in your personal lives. May
you all be survivors and, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, if you can’t find
much happiness perhaps you can settle for measures of pleasure that you
can tease out of existence. I will enclose 3 or 4 poems to that end. Cheers!
Ron Price
encl.: poems(4)
I will not include those poems here, but I will quote the prolific letter
writer Anais Nin who said that the living moment is caught and in
catching this moment, by accumulation and by accretion, a personality
emerges in all its ambivalences, contradictions and paradoxes--in its most
living form. Some of me the reader will find here in this chapter. If
readers want any more of the personas they have found here, they are
advised to go to my collections of letters. And there they will find the
dispersed and isolated facts of my life and some of continuitys threads.
But there is much in my life that is not in my letters. My childhood,
adolescence and, indeed, much of my adulthood is just not there, for there
are no letters for long periods of my life. Readers are best advised to go
to films of the period, the print & electronic media and books from the
last half of the twentieth century. These letters and my life provide only a
small window. Although much of the electronic media is bubble and
froth, light and noise and, although its mindlessness may be having a
negative affect on western civilization, there is much there that can
supplement rather than supplant the civilization of the book and fill in a
picture of society and life that my letters, no matter how comprehensive
and exhausting, simply can not describe.
And the humble letter may just endure. For this Cause is, indeed, one
constructed around the letter, a veritable treasure-house of
correspondence, in words that I opened this posting at the BARL. No
other religion, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani notes, has placed so subtle and
significant a value on this method of exchange. And so I live in hope that
the life I have lived and expressed as it is in the letters I have written,
becomes of some use to the Bahai community. The boundaries within
which I write I have set out in these letters. The energies out of which I
write find their source in my religion; my experience in late middle age
and the early years of late adulthood enables these energies to express
themselves in this literary craft. The passion to write or erotic passion
seems to come unbidden although there are often specific stimuli to
arouse the energies in both of these domains. The structures within which
the poetic and the literary flashes that fall onto the paper are defined and
described are, I hope, intellectually interesting. I have worked over the
years to make them more distinctive. But I know from my many years as
a teacher that appreciation of distinctiveness is entirely in the mind of the
beholder, the reader.
The political action of ordinary people in relation to the transformation of
the cultural and political landscape of Europe since the Reformation in
1517 has become a serious object of historical study. This historical study
is recent. In the years since I have been pioneering, that is since 1962,
ordinary people have come to occupy a much more central place in
history’s story. Such study naturally takes issue with previous scholarly
interpretations relying as they did on elite-centred accounts of the big
changes of the last five hundred years. This emphasis on ordinary people
explicitly undermines these elite-centered accounts of both the
Reformation and the consolidation of the peculiarly European system of
states. It also brings into question the explanation of other developments
and changes in western society in the last five centuries. In a far more
constructive sense, however, these more recent studies of the role of
ordinary human beings have broken the exclusive claims of rulers and the
ruling class to political and cultural sovereignty. The ordinary citizen, by
boldly entering political arenas that had been legally closed to them,
helped to shape the cultural and political landscape of modern Europe. In
the last forty years this fact has been at last recognized.
I hope you enjoy this little piece of gentle satire, analysis and comment. It
will serve as a more detailed response to your many emails over recent
months. Now that I am not teaching sociology and the several social
sciences, as I had been doing for so many years; now that I am not having
my mind kept busy by a hundred students a week, other things come into
the gap: like responding to emails.
The following is a digest of Prices twenty-one pages that did not make it
into Funwisdums new book. Price is a prolific writer and, although he is
neither famous nor rich, he churns out some provocative stuff from his
word-factory on the Tamar River, at Port Dalrymple, in northern
Tasmania.
CARRY ON GANG
But instead I feel a little like the marriage guidance counsellor who has
been married six times. He has never been able to pull-it-off, marriage
that is, but he has had a lot of experience trying.
For some fifteen years, during this educative process, I used to give out a
summary of the wisdom of the ages on several sheets of A-4 paper to the
approximately one hundred students I had every term or semester.
Thousands of intending students of leisure and life and I went through the
material to see if we could come up with the wisest of the wise stuff,
practical goodies for the market-place and the inner man/woman. For the
most part I enjoyed the process. Giving and receiving advice was a buzz.
Of course, it had to be done in a certain way for advice givers and jokers
can be as tedious as they are valuable and entertaining.
Now that I approach the evening of my life, the wisdom continues to float
in, unavoidably, inevitably, perhaps to an extent I even encourage it.
From emails and the internet, among other sources, material is obtained
from:
Unlike some of the other academic fields like, say, the biological and
physical sciences, the social sciences(the disciplines in which the wisdom
literature is now located are either old-like history, philosophy and
religion--or young like economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology,
human relations, etc.) are all inexact, highly subjective and infinitely
more complex than the physical and biological sciences. Everybody and
their dog can play at dispensing their wisdoms, with the dogs sometimes
providing the best advice in the form of close friendships, at least for
some people with canine proclivities. Unlike the physical and biological
sciences, though, knowledge and experience is not required. Anyone can
play the game. Often the untutored and apparently ignorant and those
who have read nothing at all in the field, can offer humble wisdoms and
funnies which excel the most learned, with or without their PhDs. So be
warned: its a mine field, this advice and wisdom business. A great deal of
useless stuff gets attractively packaged. Many ideas are like many
attractive young women; the beauty is only skin deep, as it were.
The result for many practitioners who would really like to be both wise
and entertaining is the experience of a field that resembles a mud-pie,
poorly constructed and not of much use to humanity, although lots of
laughs are had and wisdom gets distributed liberally. The industry, the
word factories, pour out their wisdoms and their humour with greater
frequency with every passing day.
I felt like having a little think about this sub-genre of emails at this ten
year mark and this half-way point(if I live to be 98!) in what you might
call my wisdom/advice-lifeline, as I, and you, continue to imbibe the
endless supply of resources available from the endless supply of word
factories. I hope the satire here is gentle and does not bite too hard or at
all. Canadians are on the whole nice people who try to perform their
operations on their patients in such a way that they leave the hospital
without the suspicion they have even been operated on, but with the new
glands fully installed for daily use. Like the pick-pocket and the burglar, I
want to get in there and out without alerting anyone to my work. The
New Testament calls it the act of: The Thief in the Night. But, again, this
is a prophecy capable of many interpretations, as all prophecies are.
I send this your way in response to your many emails in recent months.
There are, perhaps, a dozen people now who are into this sub-genre and
who send me this special type of material in the course of a normal year.
This dozen sends me many delightful pieces, more it seems as the years
go by, including photos to embellish the content of the wisdom and
humour.
I feel, after so many years of giving it out as a teacher, it is only fair that I
now receive it all as graciously as mine was accepted by my students over
those many years. Like my in-class jokes, some of the material I receive
is funny, some not-so-funny; some is wise, some not-so-wise. But, then,
you cant win them all. Both wisdom and humour are irrepressible. So,
carry on gang.
George Bernard Shaw used to say that I can no more write what people
want than I can play the fiddle. So he wrote what he thought people
needed. What people need and what they want are usually not the same.
Many found George presumptuous. I hope what you find here is not in
the same category as Shaws, presumptuous that is. I hope, too, that this
somewhat lengthy read has been worth your while. If not, well, you now
have:
(ii) print and save for pondering because its wise, clever and something
quite personal from the sender;
(iv) save the very good bits and delete the rest;
(x) dont think about what Ive written; just dismiss it as the meanderings
of a man moving speedily toward his last years of middle adulthood(the
40 to 60 block).
August 20 2003
Life is a densely knit cluster of emotions and memories, each one steeped
in lights and colours thrown out by the rest, the whole making up a
picture that no one but the person who experiences that life could dream
of undertaking to paint or to write. Experience comes in and is left to rest
in memory and the writer crystallizes it in expression where it happens to
fall or at some point later in life,perhaps in a letter. As long as the wear
and tear of the act of living and its discriminating processes do not tax the
mind and emotions the letters go on in an endless cycle of vivid and not-
so-vivid, incessant and often uneventful adventure. I find the daily drama
of my work now that I have given up FT, PT and casual/voluntary
employments, with all the comfort and joy that the work of the
imagination brings me, hardly appears with more than a faint undertone
in whatever conversation my letters are engaged. And even when I am
also engaged in some sociable pursuit or act of urbanity, my heart lives in
its solitude, in the shrine of its labour and the intensity and serenity of its
occupation. Writing letters, now in these years free of just about all the
employments mentioned above, is such an occupation. The love of
tranquillity and its association with writing grew, as it did for the
philosopher David Hume, far more rapidly than my years.
INTRODUCTION TO LETTERS
SECTION 1: VOLUME 8
PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE
This volume was begun at the start of my 42nd year of pioneering, just
before the mid-point in the Five Year Plan(2001-2006). It was completed
in November 2004 three months into my 43rd year of pioneering. This
volume takes me and any readers who care to follow this journey to the
end of my 37th year of letter collecting. The first letter I received and that
I kept in this total collection was on December 1st 1967, although I
noticed recently a small handful of letters written to my mother going
back to November 1960 which can be found in volume 1 of this larger
collection.
Barry Ahearn, a professor of English at Tulane University and the editor
of the letters between poets Zukofsky and Williams, says that a poet’s
correspondence is the raw material of biography: the poet’s first hand
perceptions, unguarded, unpolished, and uncensored. “It’s a way of
recovering the warts-and-all humanity of these individuals.” These poets,
Ahearn goes on, “are writing things about themselves which they might
not otherwise.” Ahearn also edited selections of letters between Pound
and Zukofsky, published by New Directions in 1987, and
Pound/Cummings: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E.E.
Cummings, University of Michigan Press, 1996. The contrasts and
comparisons between my correspondence and the letters of these poets is
interesting, but not my purpose to examine here in this introduction.
Whereas Levertov and Duncan wrote one or two letters a month for thirty
years, the longest correspondents thusfar in my life have been Roger
White at 12 years and John Bailey at, perhaps, 8. Roger and I wrote some
five or six times a year while John and I write once a month. Then there
were many other correspondents with many patterns: singles, twos, short
and intense, long and infrequent. A student of these letters will find
innumerable patterns and non-patterns.
Gelpi says that Levertov and Duncan were both too strong and too honest
and too committed to poetry to obfuscate or to simply pass over issues.
They end up really arguing it out,” Gelpi says. White, Bailey and I deal
with issues much more subtlety. In these letters readers will get glimpses
of creative origin and process, the nuts and bolts of various articulate
minds engaging in the act of writing prose and poetry, writing emails and
letters, trying to sort out a host of problems, ideas and issues. These
letters/emails offer a much fuller understanding of whatever publications
I have produced and will produce. They also offer, I would also argue, a
useful insight into the development of the World Order of Baha’u’llah, a
sort of tangent to the immense quantities of correspondence contained in
Baha’i administrative archives. Of course, time will tell regarding the
relevance of these letters in the years ahead as Baha’u’llah’s Order gains
in strength and influence in the world. In the end all these letters may
become simply dust and ashes at the local tip.
Readers will see me sometimes groping and fumbling, sometimes
confidently writing, sometimes making tentative steps and then bold steps
toward trying to grasp the merits of what another person is saying. Often
I am completely misunderstood, but so is this such a common experience
in daily life when nothing is written at all. In personal letters I often drop
my guard; whereas in a more public face, in some public articulation of
ideas, such an exposure doesn’t take place, at least not the kind of real
human hesitation that contains real human fear. And if it does, if I adopt a
confessional mode I often regret it, as I do in everyday life. Often, too,
there is a drawing close. One can never be too sure. Such is life. There is
a limit to ones personal revelations. Teaching and consolidation has taken
many forms over these four epochs: 1944-2021. Many of these forms are
found here.
As this 43rd year of pioneering opened in the last three months, this
introduction to Volume 8 of Section 1 of my letters: Personal
Correspondence, a volume which I began fifteen months ago, came to be
filled more quickly than previous volumes of personal correspondence. I
had originally planned in a vague sort of way that this arch-lever file
would last for at least two years, but the great volume of internet site
material, postings, replies to my postings and emails prevented this from
occurring. There has developed insensibly in the last several years a
burgeoning of emails and they have filled the space available in this file
very quickly.
2004
1 This introduction has been written and revised half a dozen times since
the inception of this volume 9 fifteen months ago.
SECTION/DIVISION 1:
INTRODUCTION VOLUME 9
OF PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE
This volume was begun at the start of my 44th year of letter collecting.
Since I first wrote the introduction to the last volume of personal
correspondence, Volume 8, I have discovered some of my mother’s letters
going back an additional seven years to November 1960. I had been a
member of the Baha’i Faith for 13 to 14 months at the time of the first
letter in my Mother’s small handful of letters. This file, Volume 9 of my
personal correspondence, begins with 18 months left in the current Five
Year Plan(2001-2006). The beginnings of this file also coincide with the
third month of the 43rd year of my pioneering, the first month of the 46th
year of my membership in this Faith and, arguably, the end of the 50th
year since the beginning of my association with this Faith through my
mother’s first contact with the Cause in 1953.(1) As I pointed out at the
outset of the previous Volume of this collection, the first letter I received
and that I kept in this collection was on December 1st 1967.
So much for outlining the general time-frame for these letters. The vast
majority of Baha’is will leave no letters, will provide no historical
material by means of this useful genre. There will, though, be a core of
inveterate letter writers. I quoted in that last introduction to my personal
correspondence, Volume 8, a Barry Ahearn, professor of English at
Tulane University and the editor of the letters between poets Zukofsky
and Williams, who said that a poet’s correspondence is the raw material
of biography: the poet’s first-hand perceptions, unguarded, unpolished,
and uncensored. “It’s a way of recovering the warts-and-all humanity of
these individuals, because they are writing things about themselves which
they might not otherwise,” says Ahearn. Ahearn also edited selections of
other warts-and-all letters, those between Pound and Zukofsky, published
by New Directions in 1987, and Pound/Cummings: The Correspondence
of Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings, University of Michigan Press,
1996.(2) Readers will certainly find lots of warts in my writings, but
whether they will find that many of the greater, the uglier, warts in my
letters is another question since, as Baha’u’llah once wrote and as I was
sensitive to when I wrote: “not everything that a man knoweth can be
disclosed; not everything that can be disclosed is timely and not every
timely utterance is suited to the ears or eyes of the reader.”
Keen students of biography may find some rich and varied warts in my
Journals which, as the years go on and I am more comfortable to confess
what I am still not comfortable to confess in my letters, may curl their
mental toes. It may be, though, as Roger White writes in his poem “Lines
from a Battlefield,” my “nurtured imperfections” are “not so epically
egregious” and the angels will simply yawn at their mention.(3) For the
most part, what is found in my personal correspondence is of a moderate,
tempered, hopefully judicious, expression of thought. I may not have
exercised a rigorous discipline on my words while I have given vent to an
individuality, a spontaneity and, I think, a certain degree of equanimity.
I hope I have been a source of social good, for that has been my aim. By
the time I came to write this introduction at the outset of the accumulation
of yet another collection of letters/emails/postings in November 2004, I
was receiving 300(circa) emails a day, most of which I simply deleted.
Perhaps as many as a dozen emails were kept and responded to each day,
although I never kept a statistical tabulation of the incoming and outgoing
items. For the most part, only items of some literary, informational,
social, religious, philosophical or historical significance were kept in my
files although, here too, I’m sure I kept material that would be of no use
to anyone. On the other hand I’m sure I did not file material that may
well have been useful to future historians and archivists.
In the burgeoning world of print, on the internet and in daily life, I could
not help but wonder, as I have oft-expressed before, what value this
collection of mine would be to anyone. But I shall persist and hope it has
some worth. As I indicated in the introduction to my last volume there
was coming to be just too much to keep track of. I shall return to this
introduction at a later date and an appropriate time and finalize these
words to Volume 9 of my personal correspondence before Volume 10
appears on the horizon probably some time in 2006.
The sheer repetition that appears in these letters will give ammunition to
any admirers and any critics who come along in the years ahead. My
admirers, I hope, will delight in seeing the constancy and firmness of a
core of my opinions across the years. I have only rarely found any
withering pressure to yield vis-a-vis this core. Those who become my
critics will see a frequent repetition of familiar themes and facts as
confirmation of a supposed, an apparent, lack of creativity, perhaps even
a simple-mindedness. Who knows what they will say if, indeed, they say
anything at all. In parsing my arguments, though, I hope that both
admirers and critics do not overlook what I hope they see as genuine
sincerity and doggedness in my letter collection. I often tired of writing
out again and again the same arguments and sentiments. Staleness not
freshness often dogged my path so that I did not enjoy the experience of
that phenomenal letter-writer of my time, President Ronald Reagan, who
felt when he wrote a letter that “he was expressing his views for the first
time.”(4) I experienced some of this useful emotional and intellectual
feeling but not as frequently as I would have liked.
I’m not sure that my letters offer examples of the toughness, discipline,
and canniness that the President exemplified in his letters and which were
required in his extensive dealings with the public. His public geniality
masked these qualities. I leave it for critics to assess whether these
qualities are present in my letters. I tend to think that these qualities were
masked by humour but this is too difficult and complex a subject to
assess in this space.
Finally, I am conscious that my letters could be used both to my
disadvantage and to the disadvantage of the Baha’i Faith if they were to
fall into the hands of severe critics, enemies of the Cause and that
permanent lynch mob that the world creates out of its bosom and the
depths of its heart. For evil men, as the Guardian once wrote, we will
always have with us. And so I entrust these letters to the appropriate
Baha’i institutions on my passing. There is much to be pondered in my
letters including my day to day efforts as a practitioner of the protocols of
a religious piety originally imbibed at my mother’s knee more than half a
century ago. I’d like to think that readers will also enjoy what is a shrewd
mix of practicality with ideological conviction. That’s what I’d like to
think but it is difficult to assess oneself in these areas. My nuanced view
of man, society and religion might also be useful to readers--or so I hope.
I hope these letters will also bring to future readers a subtlety, a
stimulation and a pleasure that will enhance their work for this Cause in
the decades ahead as it comes to play a greater and greater part in the
unification of the planet.
_______________________________FOOTNOTES________________
___________________
1 I say ‘arguably’ because I’m not sure exactly when my mother first
began her involvement with the Baha’i Faith in 1953/4.
December 4 2004
The history of the epistolary form could be seen as the history of the man
who explores, discovers and philosophizes, while the woman awaits his
messages, responds to his actions of conquest, seduction and
abandonment. Indeed the core of epistolary literature has been described
as a man’s narrative and a woman’s reaction to that narrative, her
monument to his passages through her life. Other analyses of epistolary
narratives are descriptions of scenarios driven by seduction, erotic love or
male dominance. Such is not the case of this collection of letters. If
anything, the general context for these letters could be said to be a
cultivation of friendship. Such could be said to be one of my lofty aims.
The Greek philosopher Isocrates once wrote that not all eternity could
blot out the friendships of good men. The older I got, though, the more
enigmatic the notion of friendship became. Still, I think the body of my
letters reveal much about the friendhips I did achieve, their meaning, their
complexity, their range and much else.
May 2003
By the year 2003, thirty-five years after the first letter arrived in my
colleciton, I had gathered, amassed, collected, some 35 volumes of letters
and these volumes are listed above. I often wondered about the relevance
of attempting to keep such a collection. Would it be of any use to future
historians of the Cause examining as they might be the Baháí experience
in the last half of the twentieth century? Would this collection be seen by
some readers of this web or, indeed, any future readers of this collection
should there be any such readers, as an inflated attempt to blow ones own
horn, so to speak? Just an exercise in pretentious egotism?
In the introduction to the Cambridge edition of the collection of D.H.
Lawrence’s letters(Vol. 1: 1901-1913), James T. Boulton discusses the
major influences on Lawrence’s life. These influences are reflected in his
letters. Indeed, as Aldous Huxley comments, Lawrence’s life is written
and painted in his letters. I feel this is only partly true of me and my
letters. There are very few letters in my collection before I was forty
years of age. Virtually all the letters I wrote to my mother(1966-1978)
are, in the main, lost; all the letters I wrote to old girlfriends like Cathy
Saxe and Judy Gower in the 1960s are gone. Both of these women had a
formative influence on my development as a person. Our relationship was
mediated by the teachings and philosophy of the religion we had so
recently joined in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They would have been
interesting documents had they been kept and they would be viewed in a
different perspective with the passage of time. My mother was the
dominant figure in my life, at least until I was 22. Judy Gower became
my first wife and dominated the personality landscape until I was 29.
There were other women, but I did not write to them, at best only on a
rare and occasional basis: Dorothy Weaver, Heather Penrice, Terry
Pemberton-Pigott, Kit Orlick. With them I had varying degrees of
intimacy as my adolescent male friendships slowly disappeared. Dorothy
went on to marry Bill Carr, the first Baháí in Greenland.
Behind the entire collection lies a passion, not so much a passion for life,
although that was true in the years up to say 48 to 50, but a passion for
experiencing the deeper realities, deeper implications at the roots of my
Faith. I seem to waver from a fragility and vulnerability to an enthusiastic
involvement, from an aloofness, a coolness, to a white-hot intensity.
There is present in these letters the evidence of an urge to the immoderate
as well as an indifference to so much that is life in the world of popular
culture. One certainly does get a picture of a slowly unfolding life.
2000-2001
The future of the Cause as well as the context within which these letters
were written is very great, at least that is my belief. These days are
precious. In these days in which I have worked for the development of
this Faith in the last half of the twentieth century, when these letters were
written, the individual Baháí, myself included, while believing in the
future greatness of the Cause, was confronted daily by the apparent
insignificance and the small numbers of his particular Baháí Group. The
contrasting immensity, pervasiveness and complexity of the wider society
in which he worked made it difficult for him to see a letter written or a
meeting attended in terms of any special significance. But this will not
always be the case as these years of the Formative Age advance.
These letters are, among other things, strands of experience woven into
patterns, patterns in a channel, a channel that is letter writing, an
expression of my art, a means of communication. By the time this
collection, Volume 6: 2000-2001, begins I had become exhausted by
personal contacts. This was my reason for any apparent aloofness and any
insistence on solitude that is found in either my letters or poetry. Perhaps,
like Rilke, I had been too responsive for (my) own peace of mind.1
Perhaps the letters are an indication of a great need of imparting the life
within (me.).2 Perhaps they are simply a matter of pouring experience
into a mold to obtain release, to ease the pressure of life. When
inspiration to write poetry lagged I often turned to correspondence. It was
handicraft, a tool, among several others, that could keep me at work in
constant preparation for the creative moments.3 For the drama of my life,
certainly by the time this volume of letters begins, was largely an inner
one. The external battle went on but in a much more subdued form. The
tangled rootand the tranquil flower is here: cool detachment and an
anguish of spirit4 and much more of the former than the latter. I leave it
to future readers to find these roots and flowers. I trust their search will
have its own reward.
Most of the correspondence with any one individual in the thirty-five
years of collected letters(or 50 depending on the definition of the
beginning point) was short, from, say, a week to three months.
Occasionally a more frequent correspondence was struck up and lasted
for several years: there are perhaps half a dozen correspondents in this
category. On rare occasions a correspondence continued for many years:
Roger White for a dozen years and Masoud Rowshan for nineteen. Much
of what I call institutional correspondence goes on for many years,
twenty years or more. Perhaps in my dotage I might analyse this
collection of letters in more detail. For now, though, these letters will
have to sit in their files getting dusted on a monthly basis.
2 idem
3 idem
4 ibid.p.13.
Ron Price
26 August 2001
Anyway, thats all for now. Its back to the winter winds of Tasmania,
about 3 kms from the Bass Straight on the Tamar River. The geography of
place is so much simpler than that of the spiritual geography readers at
this site are concerned with, although even physical geography has its
complexities. Whom the gods would destroy they first make simple and
simpler and simpler. I look forward to a dialogue with someone. Here in
far-off Tasmania--the last stop before Antarctica, if one wants to get there
through some other route than off the end of South America--your email
will be gratefully received.
UNSUSPECTED BENEFITS
After reading some 20 pages of letters from the Universal House of
Justice on The Study of the Baháí Faith, I was reminded of a great many
other letters over the years. I tried to summarize my reaction to the
content of these and other House letters which I have kept in three two-
ring binders going back to the mid-1970s after purchasing the first two
volumes of the letters of the Universal House of Justice in Wellspring of
Guidance and Letters: 1968-1973. The following poem represents one
such reaction, one summary.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs,
22 May 1998.
to an emergency,
Ron Price
22 May 1998
Virginia Woolf was never confident for long about who she was. She was
frightened that the centre of her personality would not hold. The protean
nature of her personality caused her to be lured by the vast elements of
nature, earth, sky and sea, which would protect her. She was a spider; her
letters were her web. The whole composition, her collected letters, was
spun in a hall of mirrors. It took a certain courage for her to enter that hall
which might be filled with terror, with a nightmare, a funhouse of
distortions, all part of her manic-depressive episodes. Many strands of her
identity were attached to her many friends through the letter. The horrid,
dull, scrappy, scratchy letters she said were those letters we write only to
those for whom we possess real affection. In writing letters you have to
put on an unreal personality, except to those who are your intimate loved
ones, and even then there are the limitations of this swiftly passing world.
It is rare that you can really tell it all. When we say we know someone it
is our version of them, a version which is an emanation of ourself.
Friends, defined in letters, were therefore part of her fragile stability.1 For
me, they are part of a changing kalaidoscope which is difficult to tie
down. 1 Virginia Woolf in Congenial Spirits: The Letters of Virginia
Woolf, The Hogarth Press, London, 1989, p.xii.
as you did
to the waters.
I am a many-coloured thing
in my letters,
no funhouse of distortions.
Ron Price
21 May 1999
1 Virginia Woolf committed suicide by drowning in 1941.
2 With the gradual use of lithium as a medication for those with the bi-
polar tendency in the late 1960s and 1970s, the distortions in that ‘hall of
mirros’ which Woolf experienced became ancient history for most manic-
depressives.
3 Letters play a very significant part in the edification and the guidance of
the believers.
Ron Price
21 May 1999
The sheer repetition that appears in these letters will give ammunition to
any admirers and any critics who come along in the years ahead. My
admirers, I hope, will delight in seeing the constancy and firmness of a
core of my opinions across the years. I have only rarely found any
withering pressure to yield vis-a-vis this core. Those who become my
critics will see a frequent repetition of familiar themes and facts as
confirmation of a supposed, an apparent, lack of creativity, perhaps even
a simple-mindedness. Who knows what they will say if, indeed, they say
anything at all. In parsing my arguments, though, I hope that both
admirers and critics do not overlook what I hope they see as genuine
sincerity and doggedness in my letter collection. I often tired of writing
out again and again the same arguments and sentiments. Staleness not
freshness often dogged my path so that I did not enjoy the experience of
that phenomenal letter-writer of my time, President Ronald Reagan, who
felt when he wrote a letter that “he was expressing his views for the first
time.”4 I experienced some of this useful emotional and intellectual
feeling but not as frequently as I would have liked.
I’m not sure that my letters offer examples of the toughness, discipline,
and canniness that the President exemplified in his letters and which were
required in his extensive dealings with the public. His public geniality
masked these qualities. I leave it for critics to assess whether these
qualities are present in my letters. I tend to think that these qualities were
masked by humour but this is too difficult and complex a subject to
assess in this space.
It has been said that mans most important actions usually proceed from
mixed and dubious motives with virtue and vice equally distributed and
hardly ever mutually exclusive. Im not sure if this is the case as one
student of the decline of the Roman empire and of the works of Edward
Gibbon pondered to himself. But certainly in my case, in the case of a
person I have come to know perhaps altogether too well, I know of the
virtue and of the vice that was part of my life and was revealed, also in
part, in my letters. I do not tell it all in my letters or even in my journals
but I think I strike a balance between dull chronicle and rhetorical
declamation as I proceed with what you might call a philosophical history
which some regard as the highest form of historiography. For I give
meaning to my letters in the same way I give meaning to history, to the
washing of dishes or the attention to the removal of waste matter from my
body or my house. Impartiality is an impossible goal; subjectivity
inevitable and judgement often held in suspense as I offer in my letters a
range of options to my readers.
My letters will reveal for the reader, when and if they are published later
in this century or one of the next,an endless success of engagements with
the past in which the dramatis personae were never fully able to fathom,
control or command the events. Perhaps, though, through the diligence
and accuracy with which I attempted to document my times in a very
personal, idiosyncratic way and record the transactions of my past for the
instruction of future ages, the crimes and follies, the misfortunes and
failures will be attested to in a different way. For I would like to think that
my words would be for use not ostentation and that they would provide
multiple layers of insinuation, innuendo and hidden meaning. For my
letters provide no answer book only the meaning I give it and, in the end,
only the meaning readers give my letters.
_______________________________FOOTNOTES________________
__________________
1 I say ‘arguably’ because I’m not sure exactly when my mother first
began her involvement with the Baha’i Faith in 1953/4.
6 Four months before the conclusion of this volume, on July 29th 2005, I
came across a review of some of the collected letters of Francesco
Petrarch. I have appended to this introduction(Appendix #1) my
interpretation of that review and its relevance to my own collection of
letters.
Ron Price
Appendix #1:
Petrarch’s letters are divided into two sections: the Familiares(350) and
the Seniles(128). They are both monuments of Petrarch’s epistolary
activity, to humanism in the 14th century and to Petrarch’s own special
vitality and constellation of interests. Even after nearly 700 years there is
no critical text for the entirety of the collection of Petrarch’s letters. If it
has taken that long for society to possess a critical overview of Petrarch’s
extant letters, it is most probable that my own letters will never find a
place in critical epistolary literature. Not that I mind really for I write
these introductory pieces, overviews of my own letters, to help me place
my own life in perspective in what are the darkest hours in history. I do
keep one eye on the generations to come but it is not a glance with much
weight, with what you could call a long and steady look because the
whole question of the value of this oeuvre is too iffy for words.
We can learn much from these letters about the details of Petrarch’s life
as we can about mine. Petrarch was never concerned to simply reveal
himself to his correspondents. On the other hand, I find self-revelation in
letters in often essential if one is ever to gain any degree of intimacy. The
model of Seneca’s treatise-like epistles was always at least as important
as that of Cicero’s familiar letters, to Petrarch. I have never considered
using the letter in any treatise-like way. Perhaps at a future time. My
letters seem to exist at some half-way point between intimately personal
and essay-like, between the style of the letters of Mozart and those of
Richard Wagner.
Petrarch’s tendency to let a letter swell into a treatise informs the
structure of the Seniles. There are a number of letters on single topics
which occupy an entire book, alternating with books composed of
numerous shorter letters. For example, Book 7 comprises Petrarch’s
exhortation to Pope Urban V to return the Holy See to Rome; Book 9
consists of complementary letters to the Pope and his secretary Francesco
Bruni, congratulating them on the accomplishment of that move; the two
letters of Book 12 to Giovanni Dondi carry on a polemic against
physicians; in Book 14 Petrarch instructs Francesco da Carrara on the
qualities of a good prince. From this point of view too, his ‘Letter to
Posterity’ acquires a special importance as one last epistolary treatise to
culminate the pattern: a treatise on the self. My autobiography and my
poetry serves this function.
We also become aware of just how much Petrarch loves what he feels he
must renounce. I, too, have loves that I should renounce but, if I dealt
with them here, this introduction would become far too long. These
words about my letters already possess a prolixity which will keep
virtually all readers far from whatever insights they possess. In his final
letter, a letter to Boccaccio, Petrarch becomes truly moving in his
valediction “Farewell, dear friends, Farewell, dear letters.” This is a
fitting end to his life of letters and to mine, for now.—Ron Price with
appreciation to Francesco Petrarch, “Letters of Old Age” and to Stephen
Murphy for his review in Italica Press on the Web.
Since my retirement in 1999 I have written a great deal more in all the
genres of my writing. In my years of full-time employment and student
life as far back as the late 1940s, if I take the analysis as far back as the
years of middle childhood, the notebook dominated my writing life. Then
the essay and several attempts at a novel as the years went on. The extent
of my writing in all other genres in the last dozen or so years(1992-2005)
has exceeded whatever I had done before. This is especially true of
letters.
Publishing houses, magazines and many writers freely admit they have no
coherent system for saving e-mail, let alone saving it in a format that
would be easily accessible to scholars. Biography, straight up or
fictionalized, is arguably one of todays richest literary forms, but it relies
on a kind of correspondence thats increasingly rare, or lost in cyberspace.
The impact on future scholarship is not something that Ive spent much
time thinking about, Remnick said. “As much as I respect lots of
scholarship in general, what matters most is the books and not book chat.
Somethings obviously been lost, even though I dont think its the most
important literary thing we could lose. This may be the case for me and
my letters and the final result of all this worry-warting may be that it all
simply bites the dust and all the issues about what to save and what to
erase may prove irrelevant, immaterial, in the ‘who could care less’
basket.
Book chat or no, irrelevance or not, great letters are great literature. In
Robert Lowells letters, for instance, the mundane quickly opens up into
whole worlds of feeling. I think our letters on the agency tax-money must
have crossed,Lowell wrote Elizabeth Hardwick, his soon-to-be ex-wife,
in 1971. Through long hours of revising, a leisurely bath and a quick
dressing, I have been thinking about our long past, he continued. Not
having you is like learning to walk. Some entire books dont convey as
much raw emotion as those eight words do . I feel the same is true of
some of my correspondence. In the end, of course, the significance of
what I write is so intimately tied up with the growth and development of
the Baha’i Faith as the emerging world religion on the planet.
Ron Price
I want to draw on some of the experience of one of the world’s first letter
writers, Cicero(106 BC-43 BC). The information comes from Frank Frost
Abbott’s book Commentary on Selected Letters of Cicero(Boston. Ginn
and Co. 1909). The letters were written between the years 68 BC and 43
BC. As there was no postal system in the middle of the first century BC,
letters had to be sent by ones own messengers or the messengers of ones
friends. This made the composition of a letter a more serious matter in
Ciceros day than it is in ours. But his letters were not always studied
productions: some of them were written while he was travelling; others
between the courses at dinner.
These words about letter writing just before the time of Christ provide a
useful contrast with my own experience. In my case there were a very
few letters written while travelling or while eating dinner and, of course,
the whole process is as fast as the speed of light now.
When a letter was ready to be sent, it was rolled up; a thread was wound
about the middle of it and sometimes passed through the papyrus itself,
and a seal was attached to the ends of the string. Abbott spends some time
describing the process of writing letters, the technology involved and the
courtesies that attended the exercise. I could go into a similar description
and analysis, but with the literally billions of emails and letters written in
my lifetime, I’m sure there is no need to add anything on these matters
here.
A study of Cicero’s letters involves a study of his life and his philosophy.
Such a study comments also on Cicero’s style and his general purposes in
writing. Letter writing at that time was considered a ‘supreme literary
art.’ Our knowledge of the late Roman Republic was due in significant
measure to Cicero’s 900(ca) letters. There is little doubt that knowledge
of our time can be significantly improved by a knowledge of my letters,
although I like to think there is some historical and social value in them,
especially to the Baha’i community.
AMBIGUOUS MOSAIC
Ron Powers, in his biography Mark Twin: A Life, writes that in their old
age men employ what is left of their skills. Mark Twin employed what he
had left of his skill in writing. At the age of 61 he was financially ruined,
creatively exhausted, emotionally broken, his wife Olivia was chronically
frail and his daughter Susy had just died. But his writing, his thinking and
his reading continued until his death 12 years later. There was serenity
and peace, writes Powers, in Twain’s old age. And there was much else as
Powers tells us in his 700 page biography and as others have told in theirs
about this ‘Voice of America.’ -Ron Price with thanks to Geoffrey Wolff,
“Mark Twain:Voice of America,” The New York Times, October 2nd
2005.
Ron Price
Ron Price
Mrs. Lettre’s Introduction runs to over fifty pages. Rightly observing that
the Price-Bailey correspondence represents the only extensive exchange
between Price and a trusted literary friend which covers the entire span of
Price’s mature creative life. Lettre shows how the letters bear both on the
poet’s literary career and on his private life at a time (1997 to 2010) of
great poetic activity for him and changes in his personal, professional and
Baha’i community life. As anyone who has read the Price-Bailey
correspondence in manuscript knows, the letters offer detailed insights to
several of the books that began to be published in the years after 2056/7
on both Price and on many other individuals and developments in the
Baha’i community back at the turn of the century. The correspondence
also offers insights into Price’s family life and aspects of his ill health and
his private life. This private life emerges as quotidian and touchingly so--
on occasion. Attitudes to various political and social questions, his fellow
poets, and so on, are also part of this special collection of letters.
CAPTURING EXPERIENCE
Layton had an exalted view of his work and this view came to be echoed
by influential critics by the 1960s. I had no such view of my work,
although writing poetry gave me great pleasure. Layton wrote in what
George Woodcock called “the little zoo of Canadian letters.”1 I wrote in
another zoo, certainly smaller than the Canadian one, a little zoo at the
other end of the world. Layton wrote with “the ferocity of a ring-tailed
roarer,” said Woodcock. I was not sure how to characterize my work with
such convincing and graphic words.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Peter
Hunt, “Irving Layton, Pseudo-Prophet—A Reappraisal,” Canadian Poetry
Studies, No.1, 1977.
1 Layton wrote his first major poem in Montreal in 1944, the year I was
born and in the Ten Year Crusade(1953-1963), my first ten years of
association with the Baha’i Faith when I was 9 to 19, he was his most
prolific.
Ron Price
Letters from the period of my childhood and youth, 1944-1965, and any
of my art-work, are non-existent. There are two letters, both written by
others to my mother, from this period, but none of the letters I wrote to (i)
a pen pal, Hiroshi Kamatu, in Japan, (ii) to a girl in Georgetown, Cathy
Saxe or (iii) anyone else whom I can not even recall now.-Ron Price with
thanks to 1R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn and His World, Princeton UP,
Princeton, N.J.,1991, p.26.
Ron Price
September 10th 2005
ULTIMATE PERSPECTIVE
For someone like myself who has an archive of over 5000 letters, the
archaeological research in what has come to be called the Cave of Letters,
has a special interest. The first research was done in this cave near the
Dead Sea in Israel in 1960/1 and the letters which were found came from
132 AD(ca). No research was done again until 1999. My own cache or
cave of letters was amassed during this time(1960-2005) and can be
found, not in a region of karst topography, but in a small room in a small
town at the end of the Pacific rim, the last stop on the way to Antarctica.
Like those ancient cave documents from the period of time of the Second
Revolt of the Jews against the Romans just one century after the
crucifixion of Christ which chronicle what life was like two millennia
ago, my letters document the life of an international pioneer at another
important time in history, the first four epochs at the beginning of the
Kingdom of God on earth(1953-2021).
These letters in the Cave of Letters from nearly 1900 years ago are part of
a priceless collection of artefacts. State-of-the art archaeological
technology has enabled historians to add a substantial amount of new
information to the existing bases of knowledge from the second century
AD. It is difficult to see how my letters can provide anything like the
same function given the multitude of sources of information about our
contemporary way of life or, more particularly, the way of life of the
international Baha’i in the first century of the evolution of Baha’i
administrative institutions.-Ron Price with thanks to “Lost Worlds:
Ancient Refuge in the Holy Land,” SBS TV, 7:30-8:30 pm, September
4th 2005 and “2000 Excavation of The Cave of Letters,” Internet Site,
2001.
YEATS AND ME
There are several complicating factors for readers in their appreciation of
my poetry and the several genres of my writing. One is that it helps
readers to possess what you might call a memory-bank of names,
symbols and personal references planted, propagated and grafted in one
careful arrangement of ordered writing or simply in place in their brain.
Without this possession readers are at a distinct disadvantage in gaining
any depth of understanding of my work.
1 Yeats in 1937
-Ron Price
The hungering for immortality, for fame and renown, not so much in the
next life but in this has been a part of the yearning of the heart of many a
human being since the dawn of civilization. In some ways this hunger is a
natural yearning, a normal human desire. I come across examples of its
expression frequently in my study, my reading. This evening, in a book
about the life of a leading Roman in the first century BC, I came across it
in the first two lines of the introduction. The immortality Cicero hungered
for has been achieved not by what he did but by what he wrote in the
years 63 to 43 BC, “the sheer bulk and variety of his writings.”1 He is
accessible to us today and so he remains of unique interest. He projects
himself into posterity through his extant correspondence of 900 letters.-
Ron Price with thanks to(1)D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Cicero, Duckworth
and Co. Ltd., London, 1971, p.ix.
an intellectually pretentious,
Ron Price
I saw the following piece in the New York Times.com which I read
occasionally. I began to read this internet newspaper just this year. The
article about some of the letters of T.S. Eliot caught my fancy because it
gave rise for the first time to some thought as to the monetary value my
letters might have at some future time. Of course, it is not a subject that
there is any point contemplating because, should my letters ever have any
money value, I will by then be long gone from this mortal coil.
The growth and influence of the Baha’i Faith fifty years after my passing
is very difficult to measure. Whatever value my letters have—and it is
impossible to estimate any value—will depend on the place of this Cause
in the years ahead and the value of the contribution of the international
pioneer in Baha’i history. If I assume, for practical purposes, that I die in
2021 at the age of 77, then fifty years after that point in time would take
humanity to 2071 or BE 227.
As the New York Times.com pointed out in this article about some of the
letters of T.S. Eliot which I came across today, August 12th: “nearly 50
typed letters, some illustrated and including poems, from T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965) to his first godson, Tom Faber, are to be sold by the Faber
publishing family on September 20th 2005 at auction at Bonhams in
London. Thomas Erle Faber (1927-2004), who became a physicist and a
member of the board of Faber & Faber Publishers, was the son of Eliots
friend and publisher, Geoffrey Faber. Private and largely unpublished,
these letters enjoy an estimated value of about $50,000. They are to be
sold, along with 84 other letters to Eliots friend Enid Faber, the wife of
Geoffrey. Also for sale are (a) inscribed first editions of Eliots work and
(b) a silver pocket watch, given to Eliot, then 12, for Christmas 1900 and
passed on to Tom Faber a boy of 13. -Ron Price with thanks to Lawrence
Van Gelder, “T. S. Eliot Letters Are to Be Auctioned,” New York
Times.com, 12/8/’05.
Where will I be
when another 70 years
1 1937-2007; 2007-2077
ANODYNE
I had just begun to have some success in my writing life in 1972/3, but it
would be another twenty years before my period of literary fruition really
took off in the early 1980s and moreso in the 1990s. And as I write this I
have had 38 years of marriage, have never fought the duels Pushkin did
and have played a small part in laying the foundation for an extensive, a
massive, literature in the social sciences and humanities written by
Baha’is.
dog-biscuit of a land
On April 21st 1937 the Seven Year Plan began in the North American
Baha’i community, although it had been mentioned for nearly a year by
then in the letters of Shoghi Effendi.1 One week later, on April 28th
1937, Saddam Hussein was born. He became President of Iraq from 1979
to 2003. In 2003 Saddam was deposed by the US and its allies. On
December 13th 2003 he was captured and, as I write this prose-poem, he
is about to stand trial before the Iraq Special Tribunal later this year. In
the last ten days of April 2006 the formal Baha’i teaching Plans begun in
1937 will enter their 70th year as will “the world’s best known and most
hated Arab leader.”2 -Ron Price with appreciation to 1Shoghi Effendi,
Messages To America: 1932-1946, Wilmette, 1947, p.7 and to 2Gerald
Butt, Middle East Analyst, BBC News, 4 January 2001.
Ron Price
Jack Kerouac had an evolving set of etymologies for the term beat. In The
Origins of the Beat Generation originally published in Playboy in 1959,
Kerouac wrote: The word beat originally meant poor, down and out,
deadbeat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in subways. But he added that in the
1950s the word gained an extended meaning to denote people who had “a
certain new gesture or attitude which I can only describe as a new more.
Kerouac suffused the “beat” label with positive connotations; he later
extended the word beat,” giving it a religious significance.
For Kerouac the importance of the beat label lay in its openness of
signification among other purposes. He returned to it in the 1960s several
times to pour new meanings into it. In several letters he claims to have
shown that beat was the Second Religiousness of Western Civilization as
prophesied by Oswald Spengler. This second phase always takes place in
the late stage of a civilisation. This second phase, he stated, possesses
something of the beatific, the sublime, but it coexists with coldhearted
times of urban skepticism and cynicism. This religiousness is the
reappearance of an earlier spiritual springtime in history. It also becomes
well-rooted and grounded in the culture. To Kerouac, the Beats were also
saints in the making, walking the Earth doing good deeds in the name of
sanctitude and holiness.
These beats only lasted until 1949 Kerouac said in another context, in one
of his many interpretations of the term, an interpretation he gave toward
the end of his life in 1969. Kerouac also said that “the beats” was just a
phrase he had used in his 1951 written manuscript of On the Road to
describe young men who run around the country in cars looking for odd
jobs, girlfriends and kicks. In 1958 a San Francisco columnist Herb Caen
coined the phrase beatnik to denote members of the growing Californian
bohemian youth culture which Caen associated with new barbarian
tendencies in America. The appellation “beatnik” came to enrage Kerouac
in the last decade of his life: 1959- 1969. By the late 1960s Kerouac was
denouncing the youth culture which had followed his example. To
Kerouac they had gone off the road, so to speak. Kerouac continued to
flirt with numerous religious systems, but he became in that last decade
of his life someone who preferred to stay at home, no longer King of any
Road or King of any Beats. –Ron Price with thanks to Bent Sørensen,
“An On & Off Beat: Kerouacs Beat Etymologies,” philament: An Online
Journal of the Arts and Culture, April 2004.
You1 were never impressed
1 Jack Kerouac(1922-1969).
3 The term hippie was first used in a newspaper on September 6th 1965.
Six weeks before I had just turned 21. The term began to be used
extensively by mid-1967.
TOUJOURS TRAVAILLER
Treasures lie beneath God’s throne and poets have the key: so says an
Islamic tradition. During the more than a dozen years I have written
poetry extensively, I have come to see part of my role as helping other
poets travel in company. Poets who are my contemporaries and poets yet-
to-come do not need to travel in isolation. My work can help them define
where they are going and where they have been. My thoughts can help
other poets regenerate, refresh their perspectives; they can help them
infuse creativity into their voice and their lives. They can help them see
that a mighty effort is required in order to acquire an abundant share of
the poetic art. To put this another way: the poet must strive night and day,
resting not for a moment,1 as ‘Abdu’l-Baha puts it; or, as the sculpture
August Rodin wrote: toujours travailler.2 -Ron Price with thanks to
‘Abdu’l-Baha in The Creative Circle, editor, Michael Fitzgerald, Kalimat
Press, 1989, p.182; and Rodin “Always Work,” in Letters To a Young
Poet, R.M. Rilke, WW Norton, NY, 1962, (1934), p.95.
Ron Price
EPISODES
Daryl’s wife has died and he has moved into a home for senior citizens in
the last few months. I take him into George Town for various personal
purposes: to do some banking, to visit the house he rents, to go to a
second hand shop, to newsagents or just to have a cup-of-coffee. About 3
pm I take him back to his room at the seniors’ home in Ainslie House.-
Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, April 18th 200 5.
Today it was banking
2Thomas Turners third of a million word diary has been reduced to one
hundred and thirty thousand words for this book. Turner kept the diary
from the age of 24 to 35. Drink and marital inharmony troubled him and
he tells us of his guilt and remorse. He wrote to record the
misdemeandors of others,to justify his actions and ensure they were
correctly remembered. His preoccupations were parochial as are most
diarists in most times.-Ron Price with thanks to The Diary of Thomas
Turner: 1754-1765, editor, David Vaisey, OUP, NY, 1985.
Ron Prices two million word autobiography, spread over several genres,
will be difficult to reduce, although a compendium of all its genres may
convey the most accurate autobiographical picture. He was never troubled
with drink, drugs or even money in any serious way. Although he had to
deal with the misdemeanors and idiosyncrasies of others, as we all do, in
the long run of life they came to occupy little role in his writings, unlike
his grandfather’s work which partly inspired his own. The compendium
of human inadequacies and weaknesses which is part of our lot on earth
was like those dustmites that occupy much of life’s domestic space but, in
the end, they remain unseen and insignificant. While contributing much
to the environment, they seem, looking back, to be irrelevant. Price’s
work, at least part of it, could easily be included in that sub-genre of
autobiography: justification literature.
Ill-health and marital discord, inharmony, kept him busy during his two
marriages. From 1967 to 2000, at different periods, in different degrees of
intensity, with different rough edges knocked off, his tests, his battles, his
challenging experiences, his frustrations appear from time to time in his
writings. These preoccupations, far reduced in intensity as the millennium
turned its corner, are evident in his poetry, his letters, his autobiography,
his essays and his journals. These preoccupations are not excessive. By
the time he began to write seriously in the 1980s his health was excellent
and his marital life far less troublesome.
New and not-so-new difficulties emerged in the 1980s and 90s: with
personalities, with a certain weariness from overwork, in his marriage and
from the general nature of lifes travail which we all experience in various
degrees. Finally, in George Town, in his retirement, the hassels of life had
slipped to the perifery. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, April
18th 2005.
THEY CAME
They came as separate poems and when I had what seemed like a sizeable
number, I think it was usually somewhere between about fifty and a
hundred, I made them into a little booklet. The plastic binding cost me
five dollars at a local Xerox shop; the paper and the ink cartridge had
another cost, lets say seven or eight dollars all up. From 1992 to 2004 I
produced 53 booklets of some 6000 poems. It works out to a little more
than a poem a day. I started writing poems back in 1962 at the age of
eighteen with Cathy Saxe who lived in George Town Ontario. Then, in
1980, I started saving the poems I wrote. I was thirty-six at the time. At
48 I became even more serious about poetry. It was then 1992. As far as
direction in my poetry was concerned, well, I really didn’t know where it
was going. I had, from time to time, several senses or intimations of
direction and, after one period of strong intimation in the mid-1990s, I
organized my poetry into four time periods, each with a different heading
or title drawing on the historical construction of the Shrine of the Bab and
its embellishments in the gardens and terraces on Mt. Carmel as my
metaphor, my physwical analogue.
I don’t write books of poetry as books. I don’t write them like, say, my
autobiography, or my critical work on the study of Roger Whites poetry. I
dont lay them out like my website, my letters, my essays or my attempts
at novels. My poetry has some inner evolution which, even after 42 years,
is essentially mysterious.-Ron Price,Pioneering Over Four Epochs,May
12,2004.
banalities in life
a habitation--something more
Ron Price
May 12 2004
RSI
But in my writing:
it deserves.1
What I write can be called
always be missing
as I struggle obsessively
to give expression
Ron Price
REVOLUTION
Forty-five years ago in 1959, the year I became a Baháí, there was a film
released that was made in England called The Devils Disciple. The film
was set in 1777 in the days just prior to the surrender of the British to
American troops at Saratoga. 1777 was in the middle of the American
Revolutionary War(1775-1783). And 1959 was, of course, days of a quiet
revolution in my own life centred as it was at the time on baseball,
schoolwork, ice-hockey, girls, on the endless indulgence that was
growing up in the fifties in the middle class in Canada and on a new
religion that had blown into my life thanks to my mothers continuous
combination of curiosity and need. -Ron Price with thanks to Candidus,
Hollywoods Treatment of the 18th Century,The Colonial Movie Critic,
April 2004.
Ron Price
April 28 2004
NO POWER-POINT PRESENTATION
We know that only some of our Baha’i life can be reduced to a set of
numbers, lines with arrows on the end, circles and squares, triangles,
rectangles and different coloured icons such as those that can be found in
power-point presentations. We who are actually engaged in what often
resembles a battle, a battle of community and inner psychic life with its
demands and responsibilities, with its conflicts, its joys and pleasures
know there is often little consonance between what we experience, what
we actually feel and what we read. They blend together in a mix that
requires some skill to paint in words or colours, in some artistic form.
What we experience we often feel to be inconsequential, idiosyncratic,
subtle, too personal to us as individuals to ever share, although this
experience is often deeply etched on our remembering minds. A flood of
everything from the trivial and inconsequential to the intensely
meaningful comes into our sensory emporium. An intricate and coloured
pattern on a Persian carpet, a beautiful woman whose features delight the
eye week after week, a dominating personality whom we are happy to see
the end of after every meeting, a particular way that someone performed
some simple act, exhibited some gesture or said a prayer: all of this and
more than we can ever convey comes swimming in as we read the words
of the authorized interpreters of this Revelation.
Human beings in the Baha’i community are not highly trained machines2
as are their equivalent numbers in the army, navy or marine corps. Guns,
swords and military technology are replaced by a spiritual weaponry that
is impossible to quantify, to measure, but subtle and often powerful in its
operation. There are, though, some characteristics that fighting men and
women and Baha’is share in common. They involve at least three
disparate and even contradictory energies: inconsequential observations,
technical concentration and fear. For fear it seems is impossible to totally
eradicate from human interaction. The interplay of these energies are such
that after the events it is difficult for the individuals to produce a
conclusive and comprehensive account of their part in the activity or
battle. Any one battle or activity is a composite of the experiences of all
those who take part and any attempt to reconstruct the story as a whole
must be a synthesis of contradictions or, at the very best, a hypothetical
reconstruction based on near-agreement.-Ron Price with thanks to 1
Glenford Mitchell, “The Literature of Interpretation: Notes on the English
Writings of Shoghi Effendi,” World Order, Winter 1972-73, p.20; and
2J.E. Morpurgo, Barnes Wallis: A Biography, Ian Allan, London, 1981, p.
267.
and then...
I have been drawn into gardens of such fruit, such orient lights.
Ron Price
26 May 1995
Should there ever be such a thing as The Ron Price Papers, they will be
somewhat like those of C.Wright Mills which are a vaguely indexed
collection of over 90 archival boxes containing a variety of documents
including:1 lecture notes, notes for his use when writing, notes on a wide
range of topics in the humanities and social sciences, clippings and
assorted pieces from newspapers and journals, much photocopy material,
correspondence to and from a wide variety of people over more than forty
years, letters and emails to publishers and internet sites where his work
was found and where he tried to publish, inter alia. Like Mills papers,
too,arguably these files are a manifestation of (his) method of working.2
-Ron Price with thanks to 1 and 2 The University of Texas Archive and
Kim Sawchuk, C. Wright Mills: A Political Writer and His Fan Mail,
Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol.26, No.2, 2001.
of lifes odds-and-ends
making it impossible to be
Ron Price
1 October 2003
THE ICEBERG
social observation,
imaginative rendering,
sensitively-apprehended
experience, searching
In a world overwhelmed
malicious anecdotes,
assertiveness.
Here is a document
9 May 2003
THE COMMONPLACE
is the everyday
to make me feel
there is so much
disappointments and
public tragedies,
that is replete
with historical
and religious allusions
2 September 2003
I often call my work poetry but, in many ways, it is essentially the same
as my prose except that it is arranged on the page somewhat differently.
Once set down on paper my poems are sent out into the world and belong
to that world. Many things that are personal to me, that have meaning to
me, are to be found in my verse. True poetry springs from what a
particular man feels and thinks at a particular time in relation to some
particular thing, idea, event or person. For me, too, a particular mood
with its necessary choreography establishes much of the raison detre of a
poem. There is a Price associated with my essays, another with my letters
and still another can be found in my diary, in my attempts at a novel, at
history writing, at autobiography and biography. Of course, there is only
one Price and it should be kept in mind that the central vision that
informs all his work is a poetic vision. It is in his poetry that the reader
can begin to see Price whole, see his essence, if indeed the essence of a
human being can be seen in this earthly life. -Ron Price with thanks to
Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems: 1923-1967, Allen Lane, London,
1972, pp.xiii-xv.
I have tried over the years
and straightforwardly,
a certain sanity,
a certain simplicity,
readability, pleasure
Ron Price
15 April 2002
emotional tendernesses
be unsuspecting
Ron Price
Ron Price
17 September 1995
DISTINCTIVE VOICE
14/10/95.
* Tablet of Carmel
It is necessary, even good, to lie down in the rag and bone shop of the
heart, where all the ladders start, from kissing to horrid strife. -Paraphrase
of Sandra Gilbert, Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrence,
Cornell UP, London, 1972, p.221.
10 October 1995
NO ENTRY-BY-TROOP
Ron Price
30 December 1995
If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself,
tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, since for
the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place. -R.M.
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 17 February 1903.
Ron Price
November 2001
TAKING ON IMMORTALITY
*I was thinking of Shoghi Effendi here. Ruhiyyih Rabbani, who knew the
Guardian in an intimate sense that noone else did, says seven lines from
the end of her Priceless Pearl that “The man had been called by sorrow
and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness.” Henry Adams once said
in one of his letters(1) that “The inevitable isolation and disillusionment
of a really strong mind--one that combines force with elevation--is to me
the romance and tragedy of statesmanship.”(1) Letters of Henry Adams:
1835-1918, 2 Vols., Houghton Mifflin, 1930, Vol.1, p.314.
Ron Price
26 December 1995
verbal polemic.
One day, I trust, I’ll see this weakness
Ron Price
8 July 1995
BLUSHING
Thomas Turners third of a million word diary has been reduced to one
hundred and thirty thousand words for this book. Turner kept the diary
from the age of 24 to 35...Drink and marital inharmony troubled him and
he tells us of his guilt and remorse. He wrote to record the
misdemeandors of others, to justify his actions and ensure they were
correctly remembered.His preoccupations were parochial as are most
diarists in most times. -Ron Price, comment on The Diary of Thomas
Turner: 1754-1765, editor, David Vaisey, OUP, NY, 1985.
Prices one to two million word autobiography, spread over several genres,
will be difficult to reduce, although a compendium of all his genres may
convey the most accurate autobiographical picture. He was never troubled
with drink, drugs or even money in any serious way. But ill-health and
marital inharmony kept him busy over the years from 1968 to 1999 at
different periods and in different combinations. These preoccupations, far
reduced in intensity, are evident in his diary, his poetry, his letters and his
journal. The preoccupations are not excessive. By the time he began his
writing in 1983 his health was excellent and his marital life far less
troublesome. New and not-so-new difficulties emerged in the 1980s and
90s: with personalities, with a certain weariness from overwork, in his
marriage and from the nature of lifes travail. These preoccupations are
not dominant in his letters and are essentially parochial ones.-Ron Price,
“Comment on My Autobiography,” Pioneering Over Three Epochs,
unpublished, 1999.
Ron Price
28 April 1996
Ron Price
7 February 1996
STANDARD BEARERS
Ron Price
4 October 1996
THE BABE
Ron Price
23 December 1996
WHO I AM
the man I was and am, like some chiseled marble of Phidias;
Ron Price
24 March 1996
This brief analysis can not do justice to the many dimensions that
collections of letters from Baha’i international pioneers embrace,
although I hope what I write here contributes in a small way by
conveying something of the diversity and complexity of the subject. I am
only discussing somewhat impressionistic- ally a few of the functions of
the letters of pioneers and the relationships between them and certain
aspects of the process of pioneering. I also want to discuss certain
features of the letters as texts, examine some of their contexts and
subtexts, and try to explain some of the complex ways in which this
correspondence came into existence. My remarks here are limited,
though, for this is a short essay and deals with its subject in a general and
personal way making no attempt to be comprehensive, well-researched or
extensively analysed. I seek to shed light on some of the experiential
aspects of emigrant letter writing over two centuries and pioneer
letter/email writing and receiving in the period: 1971-2021, the period in
which I was myself an international pioneer.
A collection of letters like my own are so unlike any of the nineteenth
century collections from European or United Kingdom migrants to the
colonies, the new world, any world outside of the Eurocentric world
migrants had been born in. Their letters, their history, production and
reception, intersected with, contributed to and were shaped by key
contemporaneous developments in that part of the nineteenth century in
which their letters were written. These included the conspicuous increase
in literacy, the emergence of mass print culture and formal state-based
education, the expansion of the postal service and of reading and letter-
writing in general, the social and cultural practices of the time together
with the growth of instructional literature devoted to a range of cultural
and educational pursuits.
Some emigrants in the 19th and pioneers in the 20th wrote only very
occasionally and the number who wrote regularly in both centuries was
perhaps smaller still. The email certainly resulted in an explosion in the
sheer quantity of written communication from pioneers and among the
general population and I am confident that this sheer quantity would one
day be reflected in the letters and emails of pioneers. Further, the
importance attached to the act of writing to people on either side of the
Atlantic and/or the Pacific varied from family to family and changed over
time. For so many families, one of the most intense consequences of
emigration was disintegration or, perhaps the word ephemeralization, is
better. The situation was often created in which connections with family
and friends were broken or they became tenuous at best. There were also
other important elements to the process of maintaining correspondence
that could complicate matters and even restrict the letter’s effectiveness in
keeping families together and keeping friendships alive. If letters were
chains that bound distant kith and kin and connections with Baha’i
communities of origin, they were often fragile or poor links for many a
pioneer. Even when the links were strong, the letters and emails were
often thrown away and became of no use to future historians.
Pioneer and migrant correspondence was a multi-faceted, complex and
sometimes ambiguous, even contradictory phenomenon. There is no
doubt that the relationship between the letter writing of some emigrants
and some pioneers was characterised more by apathy, neglect and
avoidance than by emotional intensity and deep psychological need.
Some people preferred gardening, watching TV and engaging in any
number of a cornucopia of activities that popular and elite culture had
made available in the late twentieth century. The hobby apparatus of
many a leisure time activity became immense as the 21st century turned
its corner. So many people really did not like to write and when they did
they saw its only significance in personal terms, in terms of their
relationship with the person they were writing to. This was only natural.
Some writers take great pleasure in conversing with old friends and
associations; it helped to distract him from his depressions and other
physical and psychological maladies. Samuel Johnson was such a
conversationalist. But he disliked writing letters. Many other litterateurs
disliked taking up the pen to write a letter. I, on the other hand, enjoy
writing letters and, with the years, have come to prefer it to conversation.
I have for years taken pleasure in the verbal arts, but I came to tire of
conversation. I rarely write to anyone now whom I used to know in
Canada before 1971, except my first wife. I rarely write to anyone I knew
before the 1980s. I seem to have written letters more copiously after the
age of 50, after 1994. I would like to think that the recipients of my letters
might cling to them and to my memory as the recipients of the letters of
Henry James. But, alas and alack, I think it most unlikely. In our age of
mass communication with a burgeoning of messages of every sort, letters
and emails I think, even interesting and entertaining ones, get lost in the
avalanche. The collection of Henry James’ letters constitutes one of the
greatest self-portraits in all literature. My letters are not in James’ league,
although the paint brush of life can play on the canvas with some success.
As I can not say too frequently, the value of this portrait is only insofar as
it is part of the growth and development, as it contributes to the
understanding, of the Baha’i community over these several epochs.
In the same way that James created his life in his writing, I feel I do the
same. This is true in my letters in its own peculiar way and in my poetry,
in a sort of poetic fashioning of experience. There was an incessant
adventure, an inner cycle of vivid activity, by the time I took up writing
as a full-time passtime at the turn of the millennium. And this is reflected
in my letters, at least that is how I felt and experienced this epistolary act
—increasingly as the decades ran their natural course and as letters
became a more copious outpouring. As many-sided as my letters may be,
they tend to show only one side of my self. This is my impression,
although I leave this assessment to readers--for it is difficult for me to
comment on this facet of my letters.
As I have pointed out before, there is much in life that never appears in
my letters. In recent volumes of my letters, though, my life possessed a
calm it had not had before. I’m not sure this reality, this fact, is obvious
from reading my letters. A new happiness has unquestionably entered my
life since the turning of the millennium and the sheer quantity of the
correspondence that I have kept has increased partly owing to this very
pleasant feeling. That the main source of this happiness was due to first
an anti-depressant medication in 2001, then a combination of an
antipsychotic medication and a new anti-depressant medication in 2007.
For those who crave context and history, these letters may function to
serve that purpose, not so much as a series of sensational, humorous or
even especially interesting events that I document, but more as a part of
some rounded culture, some personal life and its passions, manners and
some of its intimate flavours.
I’d like to think my letters were something like those of Alistair Cooke
over the years 1946 to 2004, conversation that was conveyed in prose, the
journalism of personal witness that never loses touch with narrative, with
the letter-writer as storyteller. But I am not in Cooke\\\\\\\'s league. I am
an amateur compared to Cooke and I do not have an audience of 22
million; I do not possess a flattering readership. The great bulk of my
emails and all my letters have an audience of one. Like Cooke, though,
even when the content of a letter is about some crisis or other; even when
it was necessary that I must wax solemnly about the times in society or
events in my own life which have grave/sad implications, I never felt that
I was intended to put off those things in life I was presumably designed to
enjoy. And so my letters probably have a bias for the positive rather than
the melancholy, the entertaining and the somewhat intellectual rather than
the trivial and the tawdry. But readers should not expect too much
entertainment in my letters; there are other mediums to seek out if they
want entertainment.
In the end, though, I find as I browse through all this epistolary stuff, that
I am glad to leave it to someone else to make special selections of my
letters, to see what it all means and to provide a base for some marketable
commodity. I have absolutely no interest in commenting on any of the
specific letters other than the occasional explanatory comment as I slip a
letter into the collection. And now that the rest of this collection is in an
electronic form perhaps there will be a new spirit, a new ethos, a new me.
We shall see.
Ron Price
Updated:26/8/07
Inevitably, much that was incoming did not lend itself to electronic form
or to placement in this file and was simply deleted. This has been the case
with much/most email resources since I began receiving this new form of
communication some twenty years ago, 2008-1988, circa.
Ron Price
26 November 2008
Just at the time when the collections of Welsh migrant letters were first
being published in the 1960s, my first letters as a Baha’i pioneer in
Canada--a pioneer with a Welsh ancestry--were being written and
collected. A continuity was taking place of little to no significance to the
outside world or even within the Baha’i community at the time, a
continuity that began in Wales in the 19th century. Perhaps in the long run
it would be a continuity with some significance. Time would tell. Alan
Conway’s collection of letters from Welsh migrants published in 1961,
The Welsh in America: Letters from the Immigrants appeared just as my
own collection was taking in its first letter, a collection at the time that I
was not even aware I had begun amassing. By the time H. S. Chapman’s
article about letters from Welsh migrants “From Llanfair to Fairhaven,” in
Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society and Field Club and
Letters from America: Captain David Evans of Talsarnau, my own
collection of letters were beginning to assume a substantial body of
material for future archivists and historians, writers and analysts. I
belonged to a religion within which the letter had assumed more than an
insignificant role, indeed, a very prominent one, and those mysterious
dispensations of Providence would determine whether my letters and
those of other international pioneers would take on any significance in
some future epoch. As a non-betting man, I was inclined to the view that
one day they would.
This brief analysis can not do justice to the many dimensions that
collections of letters from Baha’i international pioneers embrace,
although I hope what I write here contributes in a small way by
conveying something of the diversity & complexity of the subject. I am
only discussing somewhat impressionistically a few of the functions of
the letters of pioneers and the relationships between them and certain
aspects of the process of pioneering. I also want to discuss certain
features of the letters as texts, examine some of their contexts and
subtexts, and try to explain some of the complex ways in which this
correspondence came into existence. My remarks here are limited,
though, for this is a short essay and deals with its subject in a general and
personal way making no attempt to be comprehensive, well-researched or
extensively analysed. I seek to shed light on some of the experiential
aspects of emigrant letter writing over two centuries and pioneer letter
and email writing and receiving in the period: 1971-2021, the period in
which I was myself an international pioneer.
Men like Hemingway make up their own rules because they need to win;
they think they know it all, such was the view of Philip Kolb in his study
of the letters of another writer. They are difficult to please and friendships
with them are arduous. If Hemingway and Shipman had been on a sports
team, Hemingway would have no doubt led the team in scoring and
probably penalty minutes. The media would have camped out in front of
his locker. Shipman would have led the team in assists and would have
come and gone without many people noticing. But even the Hemingways
of life need good friends. Without them the game is not worth the play.1
One of the extensive, if not interesting, letter writers in history was one,
Horace Walpole. For some time he contemplated writing a history of his
times but after twenty years of consideration, he gave the idea up and
decided to write another kind of history based on letters.2 Each of the
friends he wrote to was “particularly connected….with one of the
subjects about which he wished to enlighten and inform posterity.”3
There is little doubt that I could approach a history of my times through
the vehicle of the letter. But it would be a particularly idiosyncratic
history, not your comprehensive view of an age. It would be a more
personalized, more subjective, exercise. I would have to approach it
through the vehicle of those I knew, knew in varying degrees. After only
a brief reflection I think such an exercise would be beyond my capacity
and, more importantly, my interest.
Sadly, if not thankfully, most people who have taken the time to write to
me have done so infrequently and I am not sure if I could add much to an
understanding of my times through their meager correspondence. Most
people prefer gardening, watching TV, reading, arts and crafts, various
forms of exercise, nice long sleeps and good food. Epistolary activity is
not on their list of enthusiasms. Then, too, I often wonder if one ever
really knows anyone in life even when one shares a good deal of ones
correspondents enthusiasms. If one wants depth and breadth, one just
about needs an afterlife. And for that purpose I think many would still
decline the offer and prefer the quiet, obscure and unemotional dalliances
of oblivion. This side of the grave, it seems, we know in part and we
prophesy a much smaller, an infinitessimal, part.
Ron Price
(updated 27/11/07)
1 Ron Price with thanks to Robert Risch, “Evan Shipman: Friend and
Foil,” The Hemingway Review, Vol. 23, No.1, Fall 2003.”
Preamble:
I have tried in what follows--in this 21,000 word document--to provide
both a developmental outline of my site acquisition and posting process at
websites in the years 2001 to 2008. I also try to provide reasonably
comprehensive lists of websites where I have posted my writing, made
postings with Baha’i content and responded to people about some aspect
of the Bahá’í Faith and other and often related issues. Some of the sites
are ‘information only’ sites, perhaps as many as 10% of the total found
here, mostly in list #1 of the five lists, but they are information sites
which have a potential for posting Baha’i content down the track and/or
provide information relevant to this internet task of Bahá’í teaching or so
it seemed at the time I placed the site on the list.
The information below is, for the most part, for my own record. I do not
expect the average person who reads it to take it all in. I have sent a copy
of this list to a very small handful of people/institutions: (a) whom I
thought would find it useful and/or (b) have asked to have a copy of this
list. Readers should not make any attempt to grasp the detail here since it
goes to 110 A-4 pages as of 1 July 2008. Their interest, if they have any
at all after they have seen it as an email attachment, would best be in
terms of a general overview and each person will get a different sense of
that overview and its meaning and relevance to the teaching work.
Readers are advised to just pass on when the going gets tough, when the
labyrinth of information gets too twisted and complex to take in. They
should just try and obtain the most general of pictures of what they find
here and the 1000s of hours of time represented by what is located on
these approximately 4000 sites.
In addition, there are many sites where I post my writing and engage in
Baha’i-related dialogue on issues and with content which are not included
here. When one deals with a number of sites of the order of 4000 and
when they are listed and commented on briefly as I do here, it is only too
obvious that the exercise is a massive one involving literally millions of
words. The processes involved in my internet publishing are complex and
extensive and I try in this document to provide a comprehensive picture
of my activity for anyone who is interested. Keeping a detailed, accurate
and comprehensive list of all my postings has become beyond my
capacity or interest. But a sketch is found here for anyone taking some
general interest, a sketch of these 110 A-4 pages, and the sketch is
sufficiently detailed to be of use to anyone who does take a serious
interest in my work on the internet.
I have written what follows for my own interest and record keeping so
that I may find information I need to keep up with utilizing my particular
pattern of internet posting. Without some record accessibility of data, to
what I have done and what I might do in the future is not as easy and
convenient. The following outline is one I have written and revised
several times in the last seven years: 2001-2008 to keep it up to data and
because I really think I am onto something very valuable in the teaching
work. It is exciting to me and, if I can transfer some of this excitement to
others, that would be valuable in its own right.
My story on the internet began insensibly in the 1990s. The story goes
through to 2008 with a special focus on the two Five Year Plans: 2001-
2006 and 2006-2011. There are now, as I indicated above, about four
thousand sites involved in this exercise and, given this massive number of
sites, my presence at most of them is relatively thin because I try to
scatter the seeds wide, so to speak. This is not always the case, though,
and at some sites I have a strong presence and literally thousands of
people access my writings.
There are 110 A-4 pages of: (a) descriptive prose explanation and (b)
internet sites to give readers a taste, a sample, of the sites involved1 and
how I go about what I am doing on the internet. These lists1 will serve as
my base for a future of internet posting and teaching that I find very
satisfying. Teaching the Faith, the Bahá’í Faith, has always been a very
important part of my life. This list will serve, too, as a base/framework
for any interested person to find out more about this internet work, the
latest chapter of my individual teaching initiative.-Ron Price-Updated
1/7/’08.
___________________________________________________________
________________________________
___________________________________________________________
LIST #1 2001-2004:
In July 2003 I divided this large list into several subsidiary lists, created
to give some specificity, some individual subject location, to what had
become a burgeoning, unmanageable, list. These subsidiary lists, taken
together, were still unwieldy, but it served as a sort of library of locations
when and if I wanted to draw on the information or log into a site and do
a posting. These subsidiary lists are now located in various files: religion,
the Baha’i Writings, Canadian poetry, Australian poetry and Baha’i
history, inter alia. This list below served as the core, the outline, of my
site acquisitions or site activity two years after I had made a start with
that original list of internet sites in the winter of 2001.
In May 2001 the 2nd edition of my website went online and the Baha’i
World Centre officially opened the Terraces and the Arc Project. I use this
date as a measuring time/rod/demarcation point for my work on the
internet in these early years of my retirement from the teaching
profession, 1999-2007. This 2nd edition of my website did coincide with
the onset of my record keeping. In fact both my website and my
recording began within the ten day period: 21/5/01-1/06/01.
By 2004 I had added many more sites and developed what I came to call
my Publishing Volume 12. This Volume 12 can now be found in 18 Parts
which I will refer to later in this account. This second list, this Volume 12,
is a list I refer to in my computer directory as “List #2." I devoted most of
my internet site attention to this Volume 12 as the early months of 2004
advanced. By April 2004 I was devoting virtually all my time to Volume
12. By October 15th 2004 Volume 12 had more than 500 additional sites,
by June 30th 2005 it had more than 1000 and by April 21st 2006, five
years into the original exercise, I stopped counting.1
I write all of this, as I say, largely for my own information, just to keep a
record of how this exercise evolved. I realized, too, that: (a) what I was
doing had a significance to me that I had not anticipated and (b) a written
statement might be useful one day if, in fact, what I was doing did take on
a significance that I was already strongly intimating. The story is here if I
ever need it for some purpose. I have sent, unrequested, copies or partial
copies to several individuals and Bahá'í institutions just to give them an
idea of the work I am doing. Thusfar, I have received only one
encouraging response, from the NSA of the Baha’is of Australia Inc. on 9
October 2007.
___________________________________________
1 This List #1 below of 1000 sites(not included here) is not complete and
as time goes on it becomes more incomplete as more sites get added. I
update this List #1 infrequently. I have lost interest in keeping my
computer file completely up-to-date because of the very burgeoning
nature of the exercize. It has proved difficult to keep an exact figure of
how many postings I do at each site and when and what the content was
at each site. This is due to the number of sites on all the lists, that is, List
#1 to List #5. With well over 4000 sites in all the lists it is unlikely that
most readers will have any interest at all in the names of the sites or, for
that matter, this general outline. But I write this overview for the reasons I
have already indicated.
Ron Price
1 July 2008
STAGE 2: A Comment
1. Introduction:
By 1 July 2008 when the new teaching Plan(2006-2011) was two years
and two months old(April 2006-June 2008), the process of searching out
sites, forums in the social sciences and humanities, in popular culture and
to a lesser extent in the biological and physical sciences, forums for
posting and publishing various items of my writing, various material in
relation to the Baha’i Faith, responding to issues raised on the sites by
others and engaging with specific individuals at these sites, had
developed far more than I had anticipated on 21 May 2001 at the start of
the whole process.
At the start of this site and internet searching process seven years
before(2001-2008), I simply had no idea of what it would lead to in the
teaching work. My own website went into its second edition on May 21st
2001, the date of the official opening of the Terraces. My website’s first
edition went from 1997 to 2001 and had virtually no value in the teaching
work.
In the embryonic years of my internet life, the decade 1991 to 2001, I had
no idea of the potential for placing my writings on this world wide web or
interacting with others in relation to the Cause, my writing or, indeed, any
other subject. In those years the internet was essentially a source of
information and a basis for emails.
As the seventh year of searching out sites for posting or publishing items
was coming to its end, I found myself keeping only a very general record
of my postings at sites where I was a registered member. To even log in to
all the sites, as I have pointed out above, at a greater rate than once/month
had become impossible even if I devoted, say, 10 to 12 hours to this
internet process each day. I do not possess the energy or enthusiasm for
this extended type of application.
This activity, of acquiring and servicing sites principally, especially, for
Baha’i teaching, came to occupy my time intensively in 2003 & 2004. In
early 2004, after completing my third book, the fourth edition of my
autobiography Pioneering Over Four Epochs, I looked for an extensive
writing outlet and the internet satisfied this search. From 2005 to 2008
my activity at websites actually decreased, though, because: (1) of what I
can only call internet fatigue and (2) I had turned to non-internet writing:
poetry and autobiography.
I kept going back to this posting process when I was unable to work on
my book or books, when I was not moved to writepoetry, when I got tired
of reading and when I wanted “little writing and posting jobs” that I knew
would contribute in their own way to the teaching work. During these
internet-posting-days-or-hours I usually spent from 2 to 10 hours; the
variation was and is large. Although it is possible to quantify the time I
spend posting poems, essays and comments of various kinds on what are
called threads at internet sites, I do not keep an actual daily time record.
It is more simple to say I have three main activities: writing, posting and
reading and I alter them to preserve my sanity and because I simply get
tired of any one activity if pursued beyond a certain length of time. The
average is, as I say, about 8 hours a day devoted to these three activities
in total.
2. Developmental Background:
The first edition of this particular list of sites, sites especially devoted to
publishing and posting(1) in 2001/2 was a very short list consisting of
only a small handful of locations. A second edition in 2003 became a
third edition in April 2004. That original list of a few sites in 2001 had
burgeoned to over 800 sites by January 1st 2005 and to over 1000 by May
21st 2005. The contents of what became eleven files(8 arch-lever files
and 5 two-ring binders) and well over 1000 sites is now divided into 18
parts, a division that evolved naturally and was not based on any inherent
system. As the sites were contacted and their forum outlines copied, filed
and used for recording my postings, the collection of resource/site
information, et cetera was brought together into these several volumes.
This list, like the first list described in the first document(List #1)
became, as I say above, too lengthy a list to really service properly. It
required the work of other Baha’is and so I placed a notice/article in the
Australian Baha’i Bulletin which appeared on October 12th 2004 across
Australia. I also presented a workshop at the Tasmanian Summer School
on “The Art of Using the Internet.” There was no response to my notice
in The Bulletin and no evidence of any increased presence of Baha’is
other than myself at the vast majority of the sites, except of course at
specifically Baha’i sites, ten months after the advertisement. The
participation of Baha’is at websites is difficult to assess when one is
talking about 2000 sites. The sheer magnitude of the task/process, the
number of sites and the vast quantity of participants over all these sites is
simply beyond any one person to assess participation levels by the
thousands of Baha’is on the internet.
3. Future Development
In the months and years that lie ahead I’m sure this base of over 4000
sites will be extended into further parts and volumes. I hope, too, that the
other 1000 or more archival/information sites will find my presence there
more extensively than thusfar. But, as anyone can appreciate, well over
4000 sites to post Baha’i material in some kind of teaching capacity is too
much of a bite to chew, as one might put it colloquially. This activity is
clearly a publishing and teaching device that has assumed impossible
dimensions. There is always work, publishing work and teaching the
Cause in the process. Perhaps, too, I will develop a system for servicing
the sites with more frequency and thoroughness, especially if others
become involved in this activity which I am confident they will in the
years ahead even if this involvement is not part of any coordinated
exercise and even if, at present, I have not engaged anyone else in a
similar level of activity.
There is necessarily a life other than posting stuff on the internet. It could
be argued that I spread myself too thin and should aim for depth and not
breadth and that may be true. Posting at sites has a certain serendipitous
quality just like teaching the Cause in everyday life. On the internet, so in
life, I have scattered seeds far and wide, but not necessarily deep/in one
place. Depth, of course, is always difficult to measure and all I want to do
in this brief outline is give readers a general picture of my website
activity.
___________________________________________________________
_______________________FOOTNOTES________________________
2 In the six year period before the first edition of my own website, from
1991 to 1997, and the four years after the creation of the 1st edition of my
website, from 1997 to 2001, I began to search out and contact websites.
This was the first decade of my use of the email facility as well. These
were embryonic years and I have no record of any results, any sites listed
from this decade of beginnings. Of course I was still employed
professionally as a teacher in Tafe until 1999 and as a volunteer teacher
with a School for Seniors until 2004 or actively engaged in community
work of different kinds until May 2005. I dropped these involvements at
various times in the years 1999 to 2005.
From 1999 to 2001, during the first two years of my retirement, I began
to set up my systems: files, categories, internet order and form, etc. here
in George Town for future writing and work on the internet. In these first
two years I really only began to see, insensibly for the most part, the
potential for publication and teaching in this medium. But as the 2nd
edition of my website went on-line in May 2001, at the start of the Five
Year Plan(2001-2006) and at the same time as the opening of the
Terraces, I began to see the internet potential for ‘seed planting.’ By April
2006 I was spending virtually all my time reading and posting on the
interent; and in writing articles, essays and books generally.
___________________________________________________________
List #2:
INTERNET SITES IN 19 PARTS (15 arch-lever files & 8 two-ring
binders)
A SUMMARY STATEMENT
Most of the internet site information below was gathered after I stopped
writing the 4th edition of my autobiography, Pioneering Over Four
Epochs at Ridvan 2004. In late May 2004 I initiated the 5th edition of that
book and a copy was placed in the Baha’i World Centre Library. Work on
that 5th edition has continued from time to time as inspiration and
relevant content has come to mind. Posting on internet sites came centre
stage in 2004, but after several months of posting the spirit became
exhausted with the process and had to move on to other activity. What is
found here on this list below in Volume 12: Parts 1 to 19, was initiated in
2004 and continues to 1 July 2008 as I make this summary statement.
On 23 May 2008 I will have been engaged in this exercise for seven years
since the opening of The Terraces(23/5/01), the opening of the 2nd
edition of my website and since recording my postings on the internet.
The internet site titles/ headings from over 4000 sites now in 2008 I have
listed in a document of some 110 pages. They can be obtained from me
under separate cover. As the months and years go on, of course, more
sites, will be added.
There are some 1000 sites(a guesstimation) put together from 2001 to
2008 which are for the most part only information sites. No posting is
done to these sites, no dialogue, no interaction—just information is
obtained. This list is comprised of both Baha’i sites and other interest
group sites for information and publication and I have not included it
here.1 I have subtracted these 1000 sites from the total of all my sites
giving a working base of some 4000 sites at which to post, interact and
teach.
Each Baha’i who makes the effort to register and post at internet sites will
obviously do so on the basis of his or her own interests and capacities.
My list inevitably will not be another person’s list. But the following list
of sites will give anyone who is interested in posting Baha’i material and
what for them is ‘Baha’i related material’ an idea of the sites on which I
am ‘working.’ Feel free to write to me for more advice on how you might
take advantage of this immense teaching opportunity. -Ron Price, 1
March 2008.
___________________________FOOTNOTES____________________
1 There are several lists of sites now which taken together come to over
five thousand sites. Some are Baha’i information sites and some useful
sites for posting Baha’i related material. I have not included them all
here; they are available to anyone who is interested. I have included
here(above and below) a total of some 110 pages of A-4 size(font 14)
material.
2 Given the range and extent of the internet sites I have posted at; and
given the limitations of time and energy, the presence of the Baha’i Faith
at most of these sites is still (a) embryonic, (b) slight and (c) requires
much more development/interaction/postings to be noticeable or
significant in any quantifiable sense. To put it another way, the Baha’i
presence at these sites is still coming out of obscurity. But, for the most
part, the history of these sites is coextensive with my own involvement.
The years 2000/2001 and after were, in many ways, beginning years for
many, if not most, of the sites. I am pleased that I was able to get
involved in these foundation years.
These five arch-lever files had their origins decades ago, but it was not
until the formation of a Working Group for the development of the Arts in
the Australian Bahá'í Community in 2003 that these particular files came
into existence. Now in 2008 after five years, these resources have their
present form as set out in their respective Tables of Contents.
Volume 1.1 deals with film sites; volume 1.2 with general Baha’i sites.
Volume 2 consists of section 2.1 contains material from Mark Foster’s
Site. Volume 2.2.1(Volumes 1 and 2) has resources from the
Jollyroger.com site. Volume 2 is not concerned explicitly with the Arts in
Australia. There is a broad relevance of Jolly Roger and Mark Foster to
the Arts as I see them and work with them on the Internet. It was this that
inclined me to include them here under the head: The Baha’i Faith and
The Arts.--28 February 2008.
2. The following code indicates the frequency with which the topic has
listed item/posts that I wrote.(Excellent:E;Very Good:VG; Good/Fair:G;
Average:A; Poor:P; No use:N)
Philosophy-G/E lithium-F
George Town(E)
Thucydides-F essays-F
Belmont-F
There are also many writers, thinkers and people with other skills and
under other topic areas as well as many other subjects one could add here,
too many to list. Here are a few more:
A.3 Total List #5: 1350. I have selected 1000 as a working base for list #5
to bring the grand total of all my lists/sites to a total of 5000. I find it
difficult to come to an accurate number/total for lists #4 & #5. My guess
is that list #5 could be anywhere from 1000 to 15,000 or even many
more.
_____________________
There are literally hundreds of sets of words now that will access my
writing at various sites. If you type, for example, Ron Price, followed by
any one of the following words or word sequences: (i) poetry, (ii)
literature, (iii) religion, (iv) Baha’i, (v) history, (vi) Shakespeare, (vii)
ancient history, (viii) philosophy, (ix) Islam, (x) Australia Bahai and (xi)
pioneering over four epochs, et cetera, et cetera, you will get anywhere
from a few sites to over 150 sites arranged in blocks of ten internet
locations. This last site, “pioneering over four epochs”, is a particularly
fertile set of words to type into the google search engine.
The main problem with this latter way of accessing what I have written is
that my work is side by side with the items of other writers and posters
who have the same name as mine and/or the same topic. I have counted a
dozen other Ron Prices and I'm sure there are more. You may find their
work more interesting than mine! There are some wife bashers, car
salesmen, evangelists, media celebrities, a pornographer or two, indeed, a
fascinating array of chaps who have different things to sell and advertise
than my offerings.
Some sites have hundreds of pages of my writing and these sites are a
sort of middle ground, a different ground, between the two major
categories I have outlined above. The Baha’i Academics Resource
Library(BARL) for example, has more of my material than at any other
site. My writings are listed there under: (a) books, (b) personal letters, (c)
poetry, (d) biographies and (e) essays, among other categories/listings.
The Roger White book is at BARL under “Secondary Resource
Material>Books>Item #114.” I find this site useful personally, but some
of the poetry is not arranged in a visually pleasing form. Some readers
may find the layout annoying.
There are some sites at which my writing is found in a very pleasing form
with photos and pictures and general settings to catch the eye. Some site
organizers have their location beautifully arranged. I leave it to readers to
read what pleases them and leave out what doesn’t. When one posts as
much as I do one often writes too much, says the wrong things or upsets
an applecart or two. It's part of the process. In cyberspace, as in the real
world, you can't win them all. The pioneering over four epochs word
sequence is, as I’ve said, a useful word package to access some 150 sites
with my writing and has no competition from other ‘Ron Prices.’
Concluding Comments:
What I write may not be your cup-of-tea. In that case drink someone
else’s tea from someone else’s cup. There is something for everyone these
days in both hard and soft cover and on the intertnet. If you don’t like my
work or someone else’s go to sources of printed matter you like. One
hardly needs to say this, but I do not expect what I write to be everyone’s
cup-of-tea.
For those who already do or may come to enjoy my writings, I hope the
above is a useful outline/overview. For those who don't find what I write
attractive to their taste, as I say, the above will give you a simple handle
to avoid as you travel the net. I wish you all well in your own endeavours
in the path of writing or whatever path your travel down.
Ron Price
Last Updated
.....10/9/’08
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