THE BASIS FOR AND THE CONTENT OF MY OFFER OF DOCUMENTS

TO THE NATIONAL BAHAI ARCHIVES OF AUSTRALIA

Preamble:
This statement of some 125 pages and 55,000 words is a description of the documents I sent to the National Australian Bahai Archives belonging, as they do, to the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahais of Australia. My decision as to which documents I have decided to send to these archives and which ones, therefore, were eventually accepted by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahais of Australia, is based on the description and definition of the nature of these archives as outlined in the Australian Bahai Archives Acquisition Policy.1 I want to thank the Archives Department of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahs of Australia for sending me on 28 November 2008 some guidelines concerning individuals making donations to the archives.1 I see all of the documents I sent to the Australian National Bahai Archives as part of the fulfillment of my role in Canadas international pioneering experience, its national diaspora or exodus of Bahais in its glorious mission overseas.2 I also see these documents as part of a record of my contribution to the spread of the Bahai Faith in southern Ontario in Canadas most southerly towns as far south as Windsor and Essex county Ontario--through a series of homefront pioneering moves before and after participating in the opening chapters of the push of the Bahai Faith to the Northernmost Territories of the Western Hemisphere.3 It is in this context, the context in which I see these documents, that this offering is made to both the NSA of the Bahais of Canada. Such are the most general perspectives on the place of my pioneering experience and my role in the Cause as both a homefront pioneer and an See the email to Ron Price(28/11/08) from the Archives Department of the NSA of the Bahais of Australia Inc. containing as it did guidelines for individuals making donations of these national archives. This email of 28/11/08 was sent to me in response to my emails of 22/11/08 and 27/11/08 to the Archives Department in connection with what documents I might send to the national Bahai archives of Australia. 2 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to Canada, p.69.
1 2 3

ibid., p.37.

international pioneer. I am now living: (a) at the southern end of the spiritual axis mentioned by Shoghi Effendi in his 1957 letter4 and (b) in the outer perimeter of a series of concentric circles, circles which define the spacial parameters of my life, in several interlocking and important ways. The southern pole of this axis where I now live, where I have lived and where in all likelihood my body will one day be buried is "endowed with exceptional spiritual potency."5 Many years of my life have been lived at several points along the southern extremity of this pole, this spiritual axis: in Perth and South Hedland Western Australia, in Gawler and Whyalla South Australia, in Ballarat and Melbourne Victoria and in several towns of Tasmania as far south as Zeehan. All of these points lie, too, at the outer perimeter of the ninth concentric circle whose center is the "Babs holy dust."6 The following is a brief statement, a brief outline, of the documents that seem to me to be of relevance to a national archive. It goes without saying, of course, that the decision to house this material in the Canadian Bahai archive, in the end, is to be left with the NSA of the Bahais of Canada. I look forward to hearing from the Archives Department in Canada where I have decided to make this donation of documents. And finally it also goes without saying that I will be happy when whatever eventuates from this offer of a gift to the national archives. Although it was accepted and then housed in the NBAA by the end of 2010, time will tell what happens to all this paper. If the decision is that my material is not deemed relevant, in the long term, that is fine with me. I look forward to further communication in relation to this statement in the years ahead when I will have ceased to inhabit this earthly life. A. Archives Defined as National In Significance: Further to my emails of 27 and 28 November 2008 that I received from the National Bahai Archives(NBA) Coordinator in Australia, Margaret Anderson, in response to my own emails of 27 and 22 November 2008, I sent to her three categories of material for the NBA of Australia to consider as gifts to the NBA of Australia. They were categories defined as of national significance in their email to me of 28 November 2008, quoting as they did from the National Bahai Archives Policy: Acquisitions Guidelines. I outline those same three categories here and Shoghi Effendi, Letters from the Guardian to Australia and New Zealand, NSA of the Baha'is of Australia, 1970, p.138. 5 idem 6 Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, Baha'i Publishing Trust, 1965, p.96.
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eventually heard from Margaret in the weeks and months ahead in connection with this donation, this gift to the NBAA. 1. Journals and diaries of pioneering activities; 2. Correspondence with Bahai friends which is about Bahai subjects, events and activities; and 3. Published and unpublished works. B. More Detailed Delineation of the Content of My Contributions, My Gifts, In The Above Three Categories of Material to the National Bahai Archive: The first category of individual papers that I discuss below is journals. Whether my journals show the development of the Bahai community in Canada or Australia as mentioned as the defining feature for what the Archives Department look for in Journals I leave, of course, to that department and the NSA. The letter of 14 January 2008 from the Archives Department of the NSA of the Bahais of Canada stipulated three general categories of material. In the statement Managing Archives, in its first paragraph it was emphasized that: archives are natural bi-products of action not self-conscious documents put together for the purpose of transmitting information to posterity. The Archives Department may see my journals in this latter context and, if so, I will understand their decision to regard these journals as not purely archival material. Given that this statement is written for LSAs, it may be that my journals are, therefore, more relevant for a national archive. I left this decision to the NBAA.

B.1 Journals or Diaries:

Preamble: What follows is a summary of my journals or diaries, for I use the terms interchangeably even though I am aware that fine distinctions are made by specialists in the field of diary and journal-making, themselves subsections of life-writing, life-narrative, autobiography and memoir writing. These journals are not those of an artist with paint, a sculptor with clay, but one of an artist in the medium of words. This summary is made after 25 years of diary/journal keeping, January 1984 to January 2009. Those who work in the more familiar art mediums of painting and sculpture, pottery or one of the various forms of design, may find my post useful,
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such is my hope. As I have said before in other contexts than this, keeping a journal/diary I have found difficult. I know many others do as well, artists and people in all sorts of walks of life. The Australian artist Donald Friend's work with his art journal has been helpful to me in this vein, in the vein of keeping and maintaining a diary. Also of value to me have been the diaries of Juliet Thompson, Agnes Parsons and a range of other diaries and quasi-memoiristic resources that have appeared online in recent years.7 INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 5 OF MY DIARY After twenty-five years of haphazard diary keeping(1984-2009)8 and an equally haphazard twenty-three years of dream recording(1986-2009)9, there looms ahead of me the shadow of a type of diary that my work may attain to: part of the shadow is prospective and the other retrospective. What, indeed, will I make of this loose, drifting material of my life, as Virginia Woolf calls the material in her diary and which very accurately describes mine, however incomplete, however irregular are my entries, however superficial the content often is. Do I want this diary to be so elastic as to embrace anything solemn, slight, beautiful or ugly that comes to mind, sort of a capacious hold-all? Will this diary, this journal, this particular way of conveying my memoir, when all is said and done and the roll is called up yonder, assuming there is a roll and there is an upyonder where diaries play any part at allwill this diaristic memoir resemble a place where I have flung a mass of odds and ends, some with reflective ardour and great meaning, some with fatigue and sadness, some with guilt and shame, some with a sense of their utter triviality, their tedium and life's? The purpose of this overview of my diary, updated exactly twenty-five years after making episodic entries and introducing, as it does, the 5th volume of this diary, is to analyse, give definition and pattern to the autobiographical memory that I have put on paper across my lifespan in the form of diary.10 I use other genres of writing to record memory, but I The Barbers Diaries, Irene Lancaster's Diary, The Story of My Heart by Ali Furutan among other diaristic, memoiristic and autobiographical resources. 8 19 January 1984 to 19 January 2009 2 See my Journal, Volume 3.1.
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Johannes J.F. Schroots and Cor van Dijkum, Autobiographical Memory Bump: A Dynamic Lifespan Model, Dynamic Psychology: An International, Interdisciplinary Journal of Complex Mental
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deal here with the genre of journal or diary. Autobiographical memory, in so far as it relates to my journal, can be broadly defined as a type of episodic memory for information related to the self, both in the form of retrospective and prospective memories, as well as aims, goals and expectations. If this retrospective, episodic account relates to the retrieval in the present of memories, experiences or past events, then prospective autobiographical memory is concerned with the retrieval of expectations, anticipations or future events which likewise are connected in some way with the present. On the basis of what I have written here in these 25 years, it would appear that a collection of flotsam and jetsam, as Woolf says, has been put on record. This material has been born from a vaster collection of life's flotsam and jetsam, some of which is meaningful to me in the moment or at least hopefully so but, ultimately and possibly, about as useful and valuable to others as the eye of a dead ant. I hope this is not the case but, as T.S. Eliot once wrote, one has to be prepared that all which one has written may become a dead letter. I get a sense of order in putting all this on paper. That is its own intrinsic reward. I am sure this is the case for many, artists and others. Suzette Henke describes how many diarists come to their diaries out of shattered lives, out of a need to relive their lives in terms of some dream, some myth, some endless story which they compose.11 This is not the case with me but, as my fifties wore on and turned into my sixties, I seemed to wear on if not out. I did not burn-out but my wings had been clipped and my edges were frayed. I seemed to lose some of lifes heat and there was some shattering. It was a shattering of the social nature I had manifested for several decades, indeed as far back as I could remember, perhaps as far back as my first memories 60 years ago. It is difficult to define just what it is that lies under this diary, what is its raison detre or what are its raisons detres. One of the leitmotifs which binds the diary together into a coherent whole, if indeed it has coherence and wholeness, is my life as a pioneer and travel teacher. There are many things that motivate me to want to add an extra level to an already present story, my autobiography or memoir,12 was conveyed Processes, 2004. 11 Suzette Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Womens Life Writing, St. Martins, NY, 1999, pp.56-7. 12 My autobiography entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs is 2600 pages and in 5 volumes. These five volumes are currently being
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by Shakespeare in sonnet 94: For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds.13 My diary or journal is much more confessional than my autobiography or memoir. My pioneering story needed to be written, or such was my own felt need. It has now been written; it is now complete as far as the 6th edition and a truncated version of it can be found at Bahai Library Online. Bahais are advised, though, not be confess their sins unless, of course, they spontaneously desire to do so and in this regard they are quite free. My journal is much more confessional. By the age of fifty I had certainly collected lots of deeds whose memories were not endearing. Perhaps by means of memoir, autobiography, poetry and diary I was trying to work some magic to reflect the self I wanted to be. Such was the case with that famous diarist Anais Nin. I dont think it was the case with me, though there was some of Anais Nins aim in my own. My diary or journal tended to be the place of my most confessional writing and, for that reason alone if for no other, it deserved to exist on its own. It was and is a genre of particular use to me as a writer for its several purposes which this brief essay attempts to outline. As this diary has developed over a quarter of a century, it has served simply to help me to describe my life, not especially to deal with accounts of personal complexities like the desire to fight or flight, nor to battle on, nor adopt some defensive escape, nor as a strategy to cope with traumatic personal history, although I have often experienced all of these inner wantings to escape, to battle on or deal with trauma of different kinds. To want to cut and run and great inner fear or anxiety of some kind were common enough occurrences in my more than six decades of living thusfar. For I was, in part at least, the traumatized soul that Phyllis K. Peterson describes in her book Assisting the Traumatized Soul.14 It was Bahaullah though, not Shakespeare, who I think put his finger on the reason for the shift in my life activity as my fifties wore on and became incrementally my sixties. Excess of speech is a deadly poison and its affects last a lifetime, the Founder of the Bahai Faith wrote in the 19th century. I had had an excess of lifes verbal art and its twistings and turnings in the 60 years of my memoried life: 1947/8-2007/8. Of course, there is much more in the motivational matrix that led to the writing of this diary and I deal with this complex matrix as far as I am able and as reviewed by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahais of the Untied States of America. 13 Shakespeare, Sonnets, No.94. 14 Phyllis K.Peterson, Assisting the Traumatized Soul, BPT, Wilmette, 1999.
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much as I desire in this introduction to Volume 5 of this diary and at other places in my writings for those who are interested in following-up on this theme, the raison detre for this diary. I did not desire to take part in that conversational/verbal part of life as my late adulthood(60-80), grew insensibly and incrementally, annalistically as the Romans would have written it, into their middle years, 65 to 75. As the year 1984-1985 opened and I began this diary at the age of forty, more than 30 years after my association with the Bahai Faith began and more than 20 years after my pioneering life had begun in Canada. I found myself in possession of a talent, a gift, perhaps an unmerited grace. I had been conscious of its developing nature since, perhaps 1972, my first year as a high school teacher. In 1984 I was writing a column in the Katherines local newspaper15 of 800 words every week. I wont deal with the origins of this writing activity in the local paper nor the development by sensible and insensible degrees in the dozen years before 1984 going back to 1971 when I arrived as an international pioneer from Canada to Whyalla in South Australia. I had always liked the base, the origin, of art, in unmerited grace, as the unofficial poet laureate of the Bahai Faith back in the 1980s, sometimes emphasized. Annie Dollard used this uplifting phrase or idea, although the question it deals with is far from simple. Writing had been a talent which had grown slowly with the years, first as a student, then as a teacher, then as a writer in publications of various kinds. It was in the sheer exercise of this gift and harnessing it to life's service and the causes that concerned me that was part of the motivating base for producing a diary, although much more could be said here and interested readers can find more of my comments on this theme in my other writings. My diary became, in part, a textual testimony, a form of scriptotherapy, a testimonial, an episodic narrative, a form of defence and assertion, albeit partial and temporary. It became, along with the other genres of my writing, a form of living, a way of spending my time, my life, the way I wanted to. I could make some comparisons and contrasts of my work with the work of others. I found the diaries of others provided helpful perspectives on my own writing, but I will not deal with this subject here for the literature on diaries and journals is now burgeoning. And all of this dairy writing was not therapy.

15

The Katherine Advertiser, Katherine, Northern Territory, Australia.

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These five volumes of my journal are found in eight two-ring binders and two arch-lever files. Three of these binders contain photographs with some commentary and one of the files contains comments on some of my dreams. I have made a periodic attempt to write a retrospective diary for the years 1844 to 1984, but thus far the attempt has had limited success. I dont want to leave the impression that diary writing is a fertile field. Far from itfor me. Much of my efforts at a diary are now and have been for many years dry, uninspiring, far from encouraging. Henry David Thoreau's fine Journal, kept from 1839 to 1861, gave expression to Thoreaus view, his vision of the destiny of America in terms of life in death. That became a dominant feature of my writing as far back as the 1980s, the feature of life in death. I am confident that will be a strong part of the experience of many generations of the North American pioneer-the Bahai pioneer that is. There are times in this account when I focus on the inner self, my experiences, my community; there are other times when I focus on my society, the land, a more open perspective. I seem to be a more tolerant person than Thoreau, although I confess that by the time I retired at 55 I had begun to tire of people and conversations about the ordinarily ordinary. Like Thoreau, I rarely have the public in mind when I write, although I do have a future public in mind as the Australian artist Donald Friend did in his diary. In the last century over one billion deaths have occurred from trauma of different kinds or so some historians claim, and so it is not surprising that an individual diary should be seen in terms of life in death. But readers will have to wait for my demise to read more on this theme. I only want to allude to it here. Henry Miller arguably the first writer to use the F word long before it broke out in the media in the 1960s, was one of the few post-WW2 American writers of note who wrote praiseworthy things about many of the things I hold dear, especially the Bahai Faith. He also wrote, somewhat prophetically: "When the destruction brought about by the Second World War is complete," wrote Miller, "another set of destruction will set in. And it will be far more drastic, far more terrible than the destruction which we are now witnessing. The whole planet will be in the throes of revolution. And the fires will rage until the very foundations of the present world crumble."16 Not a happy note to include in the introduction to a volume of my journal, but certainly interesting and written back in the early 1940s! Geoffrey Nash, The Pheonix and the Ashes, George Ronald, Oxford, 1984, p.55.
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Decades ago people would have trouble comprehending Miller's idea here, but not anymore. In the case of some of my retrospective diary work making entries is difficult. For, when I write about events taking place forty years ago, I cannot rely on closeness to the event. I must rely on what Peter Braustein calls possessive memory. Possessive memory, writes Braustein in his history of the counter-culture, leaves the person and his memories in a lovers embrace. The person is in possession of his memories, and no one else can touch them; at the same time, his memories are in possession of him. Braustein applies this idea to those activists in the sixties who experienced a sense of self-generation so powerful that it became a constitutive part of their later identity. Without going into the many contradictory views that have emerged in sixties studies, there is little doubt that I experienced several early stages of my own variety of activism in the sixties. I was 15 when the sixties started and 25 when they finished. My adult life began during those years and that sense of self-generation is still a part of my identity even now. If it wasn't I don't think I could keep writing. Like many of the sixties generation, I felt as if I was an agent of history and I still do.17 In writing my life story in the last years of my fifties and now early sixties, I came to realize more than I ever had before, perhaps for the first time in any full sense, that the success I had achieved in life grew not only from my own hard work and certain favourable circumstances of my environment, but from the foundation provided by my parents and my grandparents on my mothers side. The journey of understanding, like the journey of life itself, is an emotional one that I have tried to write about with honesty and with a fresh eye for those primary relationships in my life: father-son, mother-son and grandfather-grandson, wife-husband, among several others I could possibly include.18 Of course, not all is emotion, again thank goodness. There is intellect, reason, the cultural attainments of the mind and a host of other qualities that psychologists enumerate in their studies of personality and that historians describe in their study of the past.

Rick Perlstein, Who Owns the Sixties? Lingua Franca, Vol.6, No.4, 1996. 18 With thanks to Jim Huber, A Thousand Goodbyes: A Sons Reflection on Living, Dying and the Things That Matter Most, Thomas Nelson, 2001.
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I still do not feel I have found the flow, the filling up of the springs, the raising to higher levels of the streams of thought that could make of this journal a document worth preserving for future generations. Perhaps I will find that flow in the second 25 years of my journal writing. The accumulating grist of my life has really yet to be ground and made into a fertile soil for literary productivity in the first 25 years of writing this journal. They may, in fact, never get ground properly. Thusfar, poetry and narrative, essays and notes have stolen most of the material. They have taken the literary stage of my life and left this diary-prose always waiting in the wings. But, as I said above, the confessional element here may attract a future reader whose interest is, not so much prurient, as passionate and in possession of a solemn consciousness, a wellspring of celebratory joy. There is some material here to satisfy to some extent those prurient interests, but the wellspring of my celebratory joy, rooted as it has become in my solemn consciousness, offers to future readers a type of confessionalism that is moderate and intoxicated by the wine of another cup. These intoxications I leave to readers of this diary should it ever be published. This Journal does have less concern for form than my poetry and for that reason there is potentially an easier flow, once the flow begins, at least a flow in a different direction to other genres I use for my writing. I have mentioned before that Henry David Thoreau has been invaluable in helping my diary writing, but I still await that flow in this diary, a flow that has come to my 6500 poems upstream somewhere, but not here downstream in this diary. This diary seems to meander downstream in one of those u-shaped bows one reads about in geography books. The flow so often stops as if one of the Australian droughts finally took away all its water, all the water of life. In Thoreau's last years, from the late 1850s to his death in 1862, he wrote with energy and control, but with little interest in getting into print. I hope this becomes true for my Journal, a repository of lots of energy and creativity with no eye on posterity, in my own latter years, ones that I cannot yet anticipate caught up as I am in getting through today. There is a type of unity in death, thought Thoreau. We need to learn how to die in order to learn how to live was his view. Part of this process, as far as my Journal is concerned, is the pleasure of serendipity. The only thing we leave behind, Thoreau thought, was ourselves. This Journal is just that: myself. It is as if one wants ones leaves to survive, ones autumnal hints and the reds, browns and golds of autumn before winter comes and takes it all away. In my case I often feel as if winter has come to my Journal and no leaves can be found on its branches. Life is
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sometimes cold and dry. This is certainly the case if I measure my life by my Journal. Although there is an intoxication of joy in these journals there is also the dry wretch, despair, disappointment and a personal sense of loss. But there are other indices of measurement that readers may use for these journals, if these journals ever see the light of day after my passingand thank goodness for these more moderate measurements of journalistic-diaristic value. Thoreau said that Emerson was more familiar with his work than he was. Im sure that, should this material ever be published, there will be those who become more familiar with it--and perhaps with me--than I. I lose touch with this Journal as one often does with aspects of ones life: with those one loves, with one's feelings which also seem to dry up especially in areas which were once rich, wet and alive. Perhaps this is a way to develop friends in the next life and be ready to meet them when they, or rather I, arrive. I follow this theme too in my journals. Thoreau said that the best growth in trees is in their old age, with harmony and regularity. He also said good deeds act as an encouragement to yourself, to your artistic pursuits, your writing. May I build up a niche of good deeds and may my tree grow best in the years ahead. Diaries can track the contemporaneous flow of public and private events. They are not given all of a piece, all at once as in a book, such as a life history might be. But rather, they are written discontinuously, either daily or over longer intervals of time and as such provide a record of an ever-changing present. Other types of autobiographical texts or life documents such as letters, rather than documenting the present, tend towards making retrospective sense of a whole life or towards retelling significant moments, epiphanies or crystallizations of experience. This proximity to the present, the closeness between the experience and the record of experience means that there is the perception at least that diaries are less subject to the vagaries of memory, to retrospective censorship or reframing than other autobiographical accounts.19 Still, there are in my letters much that others might place in a diary and so it is that my letters and diary might be seen as all of one piece. I certainly think there is a variety of potential historical value in these folders that contain my Journals or Diaries and the unfolding aspects of my life. It is a potential I have hardly begun to realize as yet in these first five diary-volumes. There is, I like to think, something unique, some H. Elliott, The Use of Diaries in Sociological Research on Health Experience, Sociological Research Online, V.2, No.2, 1997.
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unique contribution to my overall autobiographical opus: Pioneering Over Four Epochs, that has begun to reveal itself after twenty-five years of making entries. A description of "a life without secrets and without privacy" wrote the great Russian poet Boris Pasternak, describing as he did the life that was his and on display in society in its different forms like some "show window" is simply "inconceivable," he concluded. For me, this privacy is essentially the life of the mind and many things I have not revealed in the other forms of autobiography. But the revelation, this inner life, comes in my journal. This inner life includes aspects of personal life that one might term revelations: those elements of human experience that seem most private, most hidden, most personal, most shameful, most embarrassing, a source of most guilt and those things that do not tend to be divulged in the normal course of interpersonal life. They are revealed episodically in these journals when time and the inclination have combined to allow me to record them in written form. They are often that sort of entry that has concerned many a writer and artist and which these artists and writers have wanted to burn either before or after their demise from this mortal coil. But, as I said above, there is in my journal what might be called an affective spectrum of experience with emotions and activity at the other end of the continuum: joy, ecstasy, fervid love, rapture, intense desire, inter alia. I have tried to eliminate the trivial from what I write, but this is difficult for so much of life necessarily deals with trivialitys many particularities and their ephemerality. When one tries to put one's experience on paper the trivial seems to abound in detail and this is one reason among many why most people never keep a journal. The mere contemplation of the exercise of writing down what one does is more than the average person can bear; indeed, the activity amounts to an inner revulsion, for many reasons. It is just too tedious for words, both the process and the content. And this is not just due to the average persons distaste for writing. But enough on this sad but complex theme in this introductory statement. I have no intention of writing in public places like this about all the boredom and the chowder, as the famous singer and songwriter Paul Simon calls some of the aspects of life; nor do I intend to write about all of my sins of omission and commission, all the points of shame and guilt that rise up from my life like a forest of trees. But many of them I do write about in my Diary. Whether I deserve to have had these experiences, whether they came to me as a result of destiny, circumstance, capricious passion, whether I can even grasp the causative
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factors that gave rise to them at all or whether I cant, I am not a believer in the virtues of public confession, beyond a certain point. There are times for public confession, public to some degree, for the spontaneous acknowledgment of wrongs I have committed or faults in my character. There are times when I would like someone, usually a close companion of some sort, to forgive me or accept me even with my faults. That point or points tends to be, for me at least, when I admit to personal struggle and battle in the hope that my admission may help others with their battle and struggle. Those who are keen to read the more confessional intimacies of my life and in more detail than they will find in my other published writings, introductions to various genres and in many other places in my oeuvre, can read about them in the posthumous collection of my Journals, should my executors decide they are relevant and helpful to a public audience. Readers who have followed the series of introductions to my several volumes of journals will by now realise that much of what is written here in this introduction is virtually the same as the introduction to volume 4 of my journal. I have also written many of these words both before and after officially opening this volume 5 of my journal three years ago on January 20th 2006. It seemed useful to begin the contemplation of the 5th volume of this diary before that opening date of January 20th 2006. Volume 4 was becoming too full to continue using that 2-ring binder. The size of my volumes, the extent of the entries, is based on the room in each arch-lever file or two-ring binder for the entries I place. It is now nearly 37 years ago that I arrived in Australia as an international pioneer(12/7/71) from Canada. After 36 months(20/1/06 to 1/6/09) now of making entries in this Volume 5 of my Journal, I conclude this introduction and leave the processes of making further entries and writing more complete introductions to those mysterious dispensations of a Watchful Providence. If Providence is not that watchful in my personal direction and if that Providence has other things to do than to be concerned with the intimacies of my life on a daily basis, I can at least recount the tokens that tell of the glorious handiwork of the universe in which I am an infinitesimal part and some of the fiery, painful aspects of its immensity. Finally, I leave to reason and virtue their steady and not so uniform course while the extravagant wanderings of my vice and folly continue their path down destinys corridors with my free will giving me opportunities of wonder and delight and closing other doors of possibility as I travel. As this awful, awkward and tangled scene in what is perhaps history's greatest climacteric plays itself out before my eyes in these epochs of my pioneering life, I conclude this introduction to my Diary
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Volume 5. And I leave it to the Archives Department and the NSA of the Bahais of Canada to decide whether this diary that is discussed here would be a useful addition to the National Bahai Archive of Canada. -Ron Price, 20 January 2009. -----------------------And now to the second category of individual papers--original correspondence, as mentioned in the letter of 14 January 2008 from the Archives Department of the NSA of the Bahais of Canada. The first category of individual papers that I discussed above was journals. I turn now to letters. Whether my letters show the development of the Bahai community in Canada or Australia as mentioned as the defining feature for what the Archives Department look for in Journals I leave, of course, to that department and the NSA. The letter of 14 January 2008 from the Archives Department of the NSA of the Bahais of Canada stipulated three general categories of material. In the statement Managing Archives, in its first paragraph it was emphasized that: archives are natural bi-products of action not self-conscious documents put together for the purpose of transmitting information to posterity. The Archives Department may see my letters in this latter context and, if so, I will understand their decision to regard these journals as not purely archival material. Given that this statement is written for LSAs, it may be that my letters are, therefore, more relevant for a national archive. I leave this decision, of course, as I mentioned above, to you.

B.2 Letters:
MASTER FILE TO MY COLLECTION OF LETTERS Preamble: The outline of the categories of my letters below is the one that presently exists, that is, in January 2009. This outline tends to get altered from time to time due to the changing nature of what is still a live collection of letters. Very few of these letters are on the world wide web, perhaps as many as six to a dozen--Ive never counted--because these letters are either personal, administrative or professional in some way or another. I prefer to keep the great body of this material confidential until at least my passing. At the present time there are 50 years of letters(1959-2009) in the collection, the 50 years that I have been a member of the Bahai community. But very few of these letters come from the years before 1979; far less before 40 years ago in 1969 and none before 1959. These letters are found in some 25 volumes under eleven major sections or
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categoies with the headings as indicated. Since 2001 I have added another section of letters, a 12th--the email. That catefory is divided into many sub-section in my computer directory. The email is a hybrid form of letter or, perhaps, a replacement since the email has come to take the place of letters in the last decade or so. This 12th section now exists in an additional 25 volumes and is not categorized below as is the first 25 volumes of letters in this master file. Outline: I. Personal Correspondence 1. Volume 1: 1967-1984 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. Volume 10: 2005-2006 11. Volume 11: 2006-2007 12. Volume 12: 2008-2009 Writing to/from Bahai Institutions, Magazines/Journals, Individuals Baha'i World Centre, Universal House of Justice National, Regional and Local Institutions

II. II.1 II.2

2.2.1 NSA of the Bahais of Australia 2.2.2 Hands of the Cause 2.2.3 Continental Board of Counsellors/Auxiliary Boards 2.2.4 BROs, RTCs and Regional Councils 2.2.5 LSAs and Groups(Reg and Unreg) 2.2.6 National Committees of the NSA of Australia 2.2.7 Other NSAs 2.2.7.1 NSA of USA and Its Comittees 2.2.8 The George Town Bahai Group III.1 Contacts with Publishers, Magazines, Journals and Online Sites Volumes 3.1 to 3.17 (over 4000)
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III.2 International Institutions: II.3.1 Office of Public Information II.3.2 International Teaching Centre II.3.3 Bahai World Centre Library II.3.4 Office of Economic and Social Development II.3.5 Bahai World Centre IV Communications with Canada: Volumes 4.1 to 4.3 V. Communications With Roger White: 1981-1992 VI. 1. Association for Bahai Studies: Australia 2. Association for Bahai Studies: Canada 3. Bill Washington 4. Judy Hassall 5. Writing Articles for Magazines:1980s. 6. Dialogue Magazine: Role as Arts and Culture Editor VII.1 Baha'i History in WA and the NT Vol.1-3 Letters, Essays and Notes: Vols. 1-4 (sent to the Regional Council of the NT) VIII Additional/Particular Individuals 1. Antoinette Edmonds 2. Graham Hassall 3. Gary Olson IX. Correspondence In Relation to Writing Novels/Essays 1. From 1987 to 1991(see Unpublished Writings Vol.3 File No1) X. Correspondence in Relation to Job Hunting 1. Some letters and material for the Years 1961 to 2001 XI. Some Special Correspondence: 1. annual emails/letters

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I have written introductions to all of these volumes and some of them are at Bahai Library-Online in the Personal Letters Section. The first edition/draft of the above outline was made at about the time of the opening of the Terraces in the autumn or winter of 2001 as I was about to enter the 40th year of my pioneering life. That draft has been revised several times since. -20/1/09 This collection of letters, what has become by degrees a voluminous epistolarium, comes from my Bahai life, 1959 to 2009, from my years as an adolescent and then as an adult at the early, middle and late stages of that part of human development as the psychologists call them. Now, into the early years of the evening of my life, the early years(60-65) of late adulthood(60-80), I post this reflection on a lifetime of writing letters within the context of my society, my Bahai life and especially my pioneering life. Although I have not been able to locate any letters before 1962, before my pioneering life began, the first letter I recall writing was in 1959, some 50 years ago, to a fellow Bahai in Japan. 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 worldwide-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 and some association or other. Readers will find here in this outline mainly general commentaries on my letters and letters 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. Another 10,000 letters and assorted items of correspondence were written in connection with my employment from the early 1960s to the early years of the new millennium, but virtually none of them were kept. The number of emails received in the first two decades of email correspondence(1989-2009) was beyond counting, but 99% of it was deleted. The small number of emails that required a response in some detail were kept as were the responses. On my demise some or all of this collected correspondence that can be accessed may be published. We
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shall see. I shall not see for I shall have gone to the land of those who speak no more, as The Bab put it so succinctly. He might have added to the land of those who write no more. Those mysterious dispensations of Providence and my executors will determine what happens to this lifelong collection of attempts to connect with the minds and hearts of others by means of the traditional letter and its modern variants. Note: beginning in August 2007 all correspondence of significance was kept in my computer directory/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 religion, 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 1782 to 1792(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! Many, if not most, of the epistolary communications of more than two centuries of Babi-Bahai history are now lost to historians and archivists. Saving letters is not a popular sport and, some would argue, neither is writing them. But, still, the epistolary paper trails of this newest of the
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worlds great religious systems spread back, as is obvious, to well before the French revolution in 1789 and these trails are significantly more than just a trace. No other religion has placed so subtle and significant a value on this method of exchange, writes Bahiyyih Nakhjvani in her book Asking Questions.(George Ronald, Oxford, 1990, p.6. 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 communication 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 deficiencies 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 believable, 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
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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. There is, too, some doubt, some questionableness, as to whether anyones letters should be taken as a reliable guide to biography and still less to history. Letters often tell us more about postures that replace relationships than about the relationships themselves. Sharon Cameron points this out in her analysis of Emily Dickinsons letters in her book: Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre(Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore, 1979, p.p.11-12). Some writers of letters spring to an intimacy in their correspondence that they do not possess in reality, in their day-to-day life. I am one of those now in my sixties, for I am not particularly keen on intimacy any more, at least outside of cyberspace. Life has given me decades of it and I have grown tired after the many years of conversation and the many degrees of intimacy that went with it. In letters I can spring to an intimacy and then forget it in a moment. Such was the experience and view of George Bernard Shaw, as voluminous a letter-writer as there ever was. Shaw once said: a full life has to be cleared out every day by the housemaid of forgetfulness or the air would become unbreathable. Shaw went on to add that an empty life is peopled with the absent and the imagined and the full life--well, I'll let you examine the life of Shaw and draw your own conclusions to this somewhat complex question of what constitutes a full life.(Frank Kermode, The Uses of Error, Collins, London, 1990, p.253. I'm sure this quite provocative thought of Shaws is partly true, especially in our age of radio, television and assorted media that did not exist in Shaws time when the letter was, arguably, one of the chief means of civilized discourse. No matter how carefully crafted and arranged a letter is, of course, it is harmless and valueless until it is activated by the decoding reader. This was a remark by one Robert McClure in another analysis of Emily Dickinsons letters(The Seductions of Emily Dickinson, p.61). I leave this introduction at BARL, the following commentary and whatever letters I have written that may be bequeathed to posterity to these future decoding readers. I wish them well and I wish them a perceptiveness in order to win, to attain, from the often grey, familiar and accustomed elements of the quotidian in these letters, any glow, flare and light in these 5000 pieces of writing, written at a time which may well prove to be the darkest hours in the history of civilization when a new Faith expanded slowly, imperceptibly in some ways and emerged from an obscurity in which it had long languished since its inception in the 19th century and
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its earliest historical precedents in the mid-to-late 18th century. Over these four epochs in which my own life and letters found their place in history(1944-2021), as the first streaks of a Promised Dawn gradually were chasing away that darkness; and as this Cause slowly became a more familiar and respected feature on the international landscape, these letters became, for me, an example of my attempt, however inadequate, to proclaim the name and the message of Bahaullah. 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 cannot 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. My letters surprise me. If earnestness and sincerity could give them immortality they would be immortal; sadly in letter-writing as in life earnestness and sincerity, however dogged and plodding, are rarely enough. If thirst for contact and intimacy could give them immortality they would be immortal. Sadly, again, thirst is not always present and intimacy is not always desired and even when they are present in letters, these qualities are never enough as a basis for the longevity or the popularity of a corpus of letters mixed as letters always are with a quotidian reality that is enough to bore most human beings to death. The boredom is sufficient to prevent nearly all readers from ever getting past a brief examination of the cover of a book of such letters on library shelves. If immortal they be, it will be due to their association with a Cause that is, I believe, immortal. These letters will possess a conferred immortality, conferred by association, as the Hebraic and the Greek traditions would have expressed it each in their own historic and cultural contexts. 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.
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The letters will float unread on some literary bath-water, back-water. Letters, in some ways, possess the shapeless urges of the unconscious and try to catch the movement of the mind of the writer amidst a practically practical and a humanly human everydayness. They often remain, for most readers, just that: shapeless and beyond the mind and the interest of the general, the ordinary, reader. Often neither the recipient nor posterity take any interest in the individual product or the entire epistolary collection, as the case may be. Even when given a fine shape, as the letters of Queen Victoria have been given, they come over time to catch fewer and fewer peoples eyes. Still, her letters give ample testimony to her character, her everyday life and the times. One does not write a letter to increase ones popularity and if, as Eliot implies, one writes with one eye on the future, when that future arrives one will be pulling up the proverbial daisies. Inventiveness 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 philosophical 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. Sometimes, especially in the first three decades of my letter writing, say, 1958 to 1988, a letter will contain a certain inwardness and at other times I gamble with an intensity of emotional expression. And so, by the 1990s and the turn of the millennium, I had gradually, insensibly, found a voice, a balance, to put my emotions and thoughts into a form I was comfortable with. Although I had been socialized in a literary milieux in my childhood and adolescence(1944-1963) and emerged from that milieux in the first years of my young adulthood(1965-1974), confidence in my literary ability was slow in developing and did not really take on any
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solid form and shape until I was 28(1972) and living in Whyalla South Australia as an international pioneer for the Canadian Bahai community. Confidence, though, is no guarantee of the ability to connect with a reader or readers. I am sure some found my emails and letters far too long for their tastes and interests. One advantage of a long letter I found was that I was able to express an idea, even mention the Cause in some tangential fashion. In a shorter letter this would not have been possible given the social and cultural climate in which I was writing. Occasionally, someone shocked me with their feedback, especially on the internet and I slowly learned to package my words in small doses on most of the sites on the WWW. Shock is often a useful antidote for some policy one is pursuing or some behaviour one is exhibiting in letter writing or in other areas of life. 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 fruition, ultimately, is destined for another plane of existence. But, still, we do judge and we do evaluate, as I do here in this lengthy analysis at the Bahai Academic Resources Library Site. Some 10,000(circa)letters were written in connection with job applications, job inquiries and on the job responsibilities: 1960-2008. An uncountable number of emails were received and sent in the years 19882008 but, as I say above, 99% of them were deleted. Virtually none of the communications from the job world were kept, except for a few in two two-ring binders. Very few letters or items of literary memorabilia remain from the years 1953 to 1967. Even if ninety-nine-hundredths of the emails I received were sent to oblivion since 1988, a small but significant body of this hybrid type of letter was kept in the two decades, 1988-2008. One day all of the introductions I wrote to each of the many volumes of my letters and emails, internet posts and replies and the several general statements concerning my letters may be included in a collected letters since half a century has been spent in my Bahai life and in the pioneering process writing letters. For this first edition of The Letters of Ron Price: 1957/8-2007/8 on BARL the above outline and comment on the overall layout and organization of my letters and emails that I have written and received and thrown away and deleted will suffice.

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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: 1. extant letters or fragments of letters that I have written or received, in public repositories or private collections including my own collection, that have been examined in the original manuscript or typescript, in photocopy or email; 2. published letters written or received for which no extant originals have yet been located; and 3. unlocated letters for which varying types of evidence--photocopies, emails and complete or partial typed transcriptions have been located. The database of information for these three categories of letters, at this stage far from complete, aims to contain the following fields or information bases for each written and received item:(a ) year and date, (b) addressee, (c)place and (d) original. It is hoped that the terms: manuscript, typescript, postcard, photocopy, typed copy, handwritten script, email or some combination of these terms (for instance typed copy of handwritten script) will accompany each item. Minimal descriptive informationfragment or mutilatedis provided parenthetically where relevant. The technicalities of presentation when complete are those of convention; namely, (a) intrusions into the text are marked by square brackets; (b) spelling and punctuation is to be silently corrected; (c) some mannerisms are to be maintained; (d) dates are to be made uniform and (e) et cetera. I have provided below some analysis and some illustration, some context for whatever creativity is to be found by readers when and if this collection is ever published. Letters are always, it seems to me, exemplary illustrations of a writers creative capacity and the significance of his epistolary skills. I do not claim that my letters are masterpieces of the letter-writing art. If they disclose a personality that is well and good, but the world has millions of personalities now disclosed for the public eye, stories of individuals overcoming tribulation and achieving success. Another such story is not required. And I have no intention nor do I wish to make any claim to my life being a representative of that of an ideal Bahai or a Bahai pioneer. This is not an account of an exemplum. Claims to representativeness, it seems to me, are at best partial and at worst highly misleading to those who might glean some context for
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mentorship. I find there is something basically unstable or slippery about experience or, to put it in even stronger terms, in the words of Bahaullah, there is something about experience that bears only the mere semblance of reality. There is something about it that is elusive, even vain and empty, like a vapour in the desert. There are so many exegetical and interpretive problems that accompany efforts to tie down the meaning of a life, of an experience, of a relationship. There is something divided, duplicitous, something that has happened but has yet to be defined and described or, as is usually the case, never described, at least not in writing, depending of course on the experience of the person and their literary skills. There are innumerable and indispensable points of reference in a life and yet so many of them take on the feeling of a mirage, as if they are not really there, like a dream, particularly as the years lengthen into later adulthood and old age. Some of the disclosure that takes place in a selection of letters can make the world better off, but this is not always the case and I certainly could not guarantee a positive result for my disclosures here. For most people, of course, the exercise, my disclosures, are totally irrelevant. If these letters disclose something of the Bahai Faith, some new perspective over these four epochs, I will feel that this amassing of correspondence has been worthwhile. These letters of mine are not so much examples of carefully crafted writing as they are of unstudied informality, spontaneous indiscretions and a certain cultivated civility. I like to think these letters possess a wonderful chameleon-like quality for it is necessary that I reshape myself for each correspondent. Each letter is a performance and an impersonation. These letters contain many voices. On the occasions when I send out form letters, at Christmas and Ayyam-i-Ha, this diversity and variety is not achieved. For some respondents to my letters my reshaping is not appreciated or enjoyed, indeed, no response was forthcoming at all to many of my letters. As in the world of interpersonal interaction, of verbal exchange, so in the world of letters: not every communication is meaningful to both parties and, as in the world of the teacher that I was for years, not every comment of mine was returned. 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
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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 assume 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 opaque 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 favourite fare in the popular periodical press, journalistic studies and at book launches except perhaps 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 George Simile 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
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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 I'm 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 sceptical 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 description or a discretionary comment. But no final judgement. These letters present a divergent and unfussed, an unconnected and bewildering mass of material. The collection is just too immense, the expression too forcible, the factual matter too inescapable for my intellect or the readers to close down any questions with definitiveness, decisiveness and precision--with answers. Rather, it seems to me, these letters open questions up and enlarge what is and was a narrow circle in which nature has confined me. If complete answers are found they simply carry the seeds of more questions. As the years went on, too, my thoughts became more complicated and, although my perspective could be said to remain the same, it was within such a different context that my letters came to be written. From the late fifties and early 1960s, to the years as they passed over the decades, my letters might as well have been written by a different person. The questions I dealt with changed from decade to decade, person to person and my inclusion of the responses to my letters provides a thorough contextualization not so much to my influence, an
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entity which is difficult to measure at best and at worst quite irrelevant to my reasons for including them, but to the letters themselves and the backdrop they provide to a period over several epochs of various urgent and interlocking challenges, painstaking and frustrating individual and community work when the Bah' Faith increased by 30 times, from 200 thousand in 1953 to six million in 2009. Writing often draws attention to itself. This is especially true of letters where attention often does not pass through to the subject but gets stuck on the personality of the writer. For ours is an age, par excellence, of the celebrity. The awkward and tangled reality of the past, though, is displayed for all to see from my perspective in these letters. The surface of my past gazes out upon history, from my letters with all their quotidian dryness, everydayness, tedium and boredom. The past seems to elude the net of language as that language gets caught up in minutiae, in the tedious and the toilsome. And anything called certainty is endlessly deferred, although there are pockets of certainty enough to go on and give us a feeling that the sky will not fall down. At least not in my time. 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
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biting the electronic dust each week, if not each day, I offer this collection of letters as one mans record of his age. I should say something about self-deception, since there is in letterwriting an inherent straying away from what actually happens, however slightly or innocently, a quiet but discernible progression from fact to fiction. Self-deception, lying, secrecy, forgetfulness, confusion, gaps: they are all part of the story and our processing of the story. Everything we communicate, some analysts argue, is an orientation towards what is secret without ever telling the secret. As Henry Miller puts it: I am I and I have thought unspeakable thoughts and done unthinkable things. One aim in writing letters is to aim for artistic coherence and ethical satisfaction as we attempt to integrate, analyse and identify one of the countless versions, todays, this moments and hours part of our story and its inevitable secrets. This is unending work-poetic work-and it is central to self-creation. In other ways the self-deception is accidental, incidental. As Yeats put it: I have changed nothing to my knowledge; and yet it must be that I have changed many things without my knowledge; for I am writing after many years and have consulted neither friend, nor letter, nor old newspaper. There were three men went down the road As down the road went he: The man he was, The man folks saw, The man he wished to be. -Source Unknown Our ultimate aloneness in the universe is a truth which some find frightening. This aloneness is a part of the core experience in writing letters, autobiography or anything else. It is part of our very raison detre. It may just be that one of the best routes to self-forgetfulness, which Abdul-Baha says is at the heart of self-realization, is through selfunderstanding on the road travelled by means of writing letters among other forms of activity. I have drawn on the following three sources for some of the above. (1) Henry Miller in Confessions and Autobiography Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, editor, James Olney, Princeton, 1980, p.122.

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(2) James Olney, Some Versions of Memory/Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology of Autobiography, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, editor, James Olney, Princeton UP, 1980, p.262. (3) Quoted in The Stories We are: An Essay on Self-Creation, William Lowell Randall, University of Toronto, 1995, p.345. _____________ SERENDIPITOUS LETTER WRITING AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY 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 dont think I was at all conscious of letter writings hermeneutic influence until at least 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. AUTOBIOGRAPHY: ANALYSIS YET AGAIN

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I have provided a succinct narrative account of my life.1 It is chronological; the factual material is ordered, sequential. But, clearly, sharpness of detail, revealing anecdote, even suspense and analysis of motivation are given with insight and style much more effectively in my poetry. There is so much poetry now, some 6500 poems spread over at least 2000 pages. This collected and compendious mass of material, if it is ever to provide a basis for biography in the future, must be shaped, interpreted, given perspective, dimension, a point of view. The narrative that any biography possesses must be given life. It is like so many PhD theses which transfer dry bones from one graveyard to another but lack individuality and vitality. Such a biographer, if he or she is ever to exist, must provide the creative, the fertile, the suggestive and engendering fact, an imaginative, a referential dimension. Such an analyst must enact a character, a place, a time in history. He will do this through language, through imposing a formal coherency on my material, although inevitably there will be present the incurable illogicalities of life, as Robert Louis Stevenson called the inconsistent, the unresolved paradoxes of life. He will give the reader a portrait not an inventory. This is what any biographer must do. I do this in my autobiographical poetry. I provide many pictures, many moods, many sides. Details balloon; they repeat; they illuminate. I discover things about my life, but I do not invent them. I have done little discovery in writing this autobiography thusfar. As Plutarch and Boswell, two of history's most famous biographers, demonstrated: "anecdote rather than history teaches us more about the subject."2 I see my narrative as the home of history and my poetry as a source of rich anecdote. It was for this reason I turned to poetry as a reservoir of autobiography; it seemed to teach, to convey, much more than narrative. Claude Levi-Strauss helps us to understand why several poems about one object, or person, provide more significance or meaning than a narrative when he writes: 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
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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 Bah' experience in what the Bah's 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. From a Bah' perspective my poetry will undoubtedly possess a moral appeal associated with overcoming hardship, a quality that characterized most nineteenth century biography. But the moral framework, while retaining a certain simplicity, is expressed in a portrait of complexity, refinement, mystery, a slumbering world, my own idle fancies and vain imaginings and the streaming utterance of a new Revelation. Freud commented that biographers choose their subjects 'for personal reasons of their own emotional life.' 3 I'm sure this is equally, if not more, true of autobiographers. After criss-crossing Australia as an international pioneer and teaching in the northernmost and southernmost places in Canada-all of this over thirty-seven years, I have watched this emerging world religion grow perhaps fifteen times. I have taught in schools for over thirty years and feel a certain fatigue. I must write this poetry for the same reason a foetus must gestate for nine months. I feel, with Rilke, a great inner solitude and that my life and history is itself a beginning, for me, for my religion and for the world. I want to suck the sweetness out of everything and tell the story. I sigh a deep-dark melancholy along with this sweetness, but keep it in as far as I am able. I am lonely and attentive in this sadness. My poetry gives expression to this process and to my destiny which comes from within. My poetry is the story of what happens to me. For the most part "life happens" and one must respond to the seemingly inevitability of it all, although the question of freedom and determinism is really quite complex. Reality, I record in my poetry, comes to me slowly, infinitely slowly. My poetry records this process. My poetry is an expression of a fruit that has been ripening within me: obscure, deep, mysterious. After years it now comes out in a continuous preoccupation as if I have, at last, found some hidden springs. It is as if I have been playing around the
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edges, with trivia, with surface. Finally something real, true, is around me. I stick to my work. I have a quiet confidence, a patience, a distance from a work that always occupies me. And so I can record a deep record of my time. I am preparing something both visible and invisible, something fundamental. This part of it is called autobiography. -------------------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. ------------------------------------AUTOETHNOGRAPHY The discourse, the impulse, of autobiography and that of ethnography is combined in autoethnography. Autoethnography is an alternative to a tendentiously-characterized and conventional autobiography, on the one hand, and to a exoticizing, native-silencing brand of anthropology, on the other. Autoethnography is simply a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context. As an autobiographical revision of ethnography it may aim at giving a personal accounting of the location of the self by making the ethnographer the subject-object of observation. It involves the ethnographic presentation of oneself as the subject which is usually considered the object of the ethnographers interview. The standard model of the personal memoir, the autobiography, supports an liberal-individualist ideology and tends to isolate the author-subject from community. Works by women and/or members of historically marginal or oppressed groups often resist the hegemony of the individualist account and give more weight to the social formation or inscription of selfhood and to the ways in which the author-subject negotiates the terms of his or her insertion into the identity-categories their culture imposes on them. Where the representation of cultures is concerned, critics commend autoethnographys intricate interplay of the introspective personal engagement expected of an autobiography and the self-effacement expected of ethnographys cultural descriptions. The impulse for selfdocumentation and the reproduction of images of the self pervade our everyday practice. The common business of social existence is the
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occasion for endlessly resourceful and enlightened dramatizations of self. We are each in our own way articulate exegetes of the politics of selfhood.-Ron Price with thanks to James Buzard, On AutoEthnographic Authority, The Yale Journal of Criticism,Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2003. 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. ---------------------------------------------PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS: MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME ONE: CHAPTER THREE: LETTERS (Part of this Chapter) The very texture of history..... 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. Although there is this curious intangibility that makes up any attempt to describe who we are, mens beliefs in the sphere of human conduct are part of their conception of themselves and are intrinsic to their picture of the world. Both these beliefs and this conduct can be found expressed again and again in my letters.-Ron Price with thanks to Isaiah Berlin

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quoted by Robert Matuozzi, When Bad Things Happen to Other People, Philosophy & Literature, Vol.25,No.1, 2001, pp. 173-177. On the dust jacket of The Selected Letters of Marcel Proust: 1880 to 1903 the publishers, Doubleday and Company, have written letters are the strongest indicators of personality, perhaps the purest form of autobiography. We look at them as a means of knowing the author as a human being, of gaining perspectives on his life and work and, perhaps, divining the secret foundation of his creativity. I think there is some truth in this remark. There is also, from my own experience, some truth in the sentiments of Thomas Wolfe who is quoted by Elizabeth Nowell in her introduction to the Selected Letters of Thomas Wolfe a writer writes a letter in order to forget it. Once down on paper, I find, the emotion or experience loses its compulsive force and can be stored away and forgotten. I have stored away some 5000 letters in over fifty volumes. Since beginning to collect these letters in 1967(with some retrospective findings and recollections going back to 1957) I have come to see them as an autobiographical tool. I leave it to readers to assess just where this autobiography is strongest and where it is weakest, where it is useful and where it is irrelevant. This is difficult for me to assess. If this autobiography works for readers, it will not be because I have filled it with facts, with details, with the minutiae of life documented with great enthusiasm and eagerness in letters to friends and a variety of institutions. Success in this life narrative that has been going down on paper over many a year will be due to its basis, its centeredness, in ideas, the quality of the writing and this narratives connection with an emerging world Faith. If it becomes a success, at least in the short terms, at least in the next, say, several decades, as I have indicated before, in all likelihood that success will still be one that resonates with only a few people. But whether it resonates with many or a few, I believe, as Gilroy and Verhoeven argue, these letters are marked by and sent to the world. They counter, too, tendencies to flatten out the uniqueness of the individual in some falsely understood egalitarianism or sense of human equality. The Bahai teachings make clear that equality is a chimera. Our uniqueness as individuals derives from our constitutive relation with others, from our living in community, indeed, a number of factors. The epistolary form was long associated in the western tradition with the feminine and the history of female subjection. As far back as Cicero in the first century BC, it was associated with everyday speech. Here in this autobiography my letters function as a crucial form of communication in the teaching and consolidation work of a pioneer. Indeed, one could say
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that my story, the narratability of my life, my very uniqueness, arises within the context of an interaction process that the letter goes along way to illustrate. The following Latin expression contains some truth: vox audita perit littera scripta manet--The voice heard vanishes, the letter written remains. The dynamics of epistolary writing have been much studied in recent years. Analysts who read and study letters see them as something more than simple documents of a particular time and place. They, or at least some, see the letters as text that are only partly susceptible to explication or decipherability. Such documents bear a different relation to the world for a future reader than for the writer at the point when the letter was originally written. In some ways this is only stating the obvious. The act of reading a collection of published letters is inevitably shaped by a series of decisions made by both the letter-writers themselves and the readers. Letters are often exchanged, perhaps for years, usually without either participant considering them as an exercise leading to publication. There are at least two people I wrote to over more than ten years and a subcollection of these letters would fill a sizeable book but, when they were written it was for the immediate purpose at hand not with the view to being read at some future time. T.S. Eliot puts this process well: 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 subcollection 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 calibre 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. Eliot goes on:We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have written. There are several components in what we could call this selective and personal epistolary machine: the act of
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writing, the act of reading and the world of interpretation. To focus on reading is to bring to light the complexity of the communication process, to recall that not all of a readers questions are going to be answered by reading the said letters. Readers may only have partially formulated questions in their minds or, perhaps, they may not even understand their own questions. Any message, including a letter, encounters a scrambling process upon entering the readers zone of associations and responses. I wish readers well dealing with the inevitabilities of scrambling which they will have to deal with in my letters. There is a conceptual intersection in each letter between reader, writer and world. And it is a busy intersection. And the discourse that takes place at these intersections possesses a paradoxical entwinement of minds and words. This is true of snail-mail or fiber-optic-borne email. Like the view at a busy intersection, much of what is seen is predictable while at the same time the specific details are to a large extent unknown or seen so differently by each spectator. A recent essay that I wrote introducing a volume of letters gathered in the first years of my retirement will serve to illustrate many of the things Id like to say about this overall collection of letters. They were letters written just before and just after the completion of the Arc Project in 2001. I think, as Emerson wrote, that letters often put things better than verbal communication and provide perspectives that are timely here in this ongoing autobiographical statement. The letters of James Boswell, to chose for comparison one historical example from collections of letters, open a window onto the real man, a man hidden behind his great biography, his biography of Samuel Johnson. Of course, one must be sensitive, too, to epistolary disguise, posing, theatrical attentiveness to the social presentation of self, concern for appearances, standardization of responses and what might be called mannerisms in letter writing. As in life, there are many selves which write letters, many social conventions, courtesies, honesties, et cetera. and there are many worlds about which a writer writes. It is the fate of those who toil at many of lifes employments, particularly the more introspective arts of which letter writing is one, to be driven more by the fear of evil, sin, personal inadequacy, regret and remorse, the sense of disappointment and the many discouraging aspects of life, than they are attracted by the prospect of good, of virtue, of praise or of victory, of giving pleasure and peace to readers. Many of the scribblers on the journey of life, ones I have met and ones I have not, are often exposed more to censure, with little hope of praise. They feel the disgrace of their miscarriages, the insufficiency of their language and the
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punishments they might receive or have received for their neglect of duty, principle or person. Their success, if any, has often been, if not usually, without applause and their diligence has reaped no external reward. Also, as Susan Sontag noted parenthetically in her preface to Letters: Summer 1926, the greatest writers invariably demand too much of, and are failed by, readers. It would be pretentious for me to claim to be a great writer, but I have been aware of the implicit and explicit demands I may make on readers and of the importance of keeping my expectations low. I have tried for many a year to put these principles into practice for Sontag is right. Among these unhappy mortals are the writers of letters. Humankind seems to consider them like pioneers of literature doomed to work in societys private spaces with their home in little mailboxes and, more recently, in optic space. Every other author aspires to publication and praise. Letter writers, while they may enjoy a certain wild exuberance, must resign themselves to the tyranny of time and fashion--and the mind of one or, at the most, several readers. Each letter has no hope of a mass audience. There on the page they must disentangle perplexity and regulate lifes confusion for themselves and their lone readers. They must make choice out of boundless variety and do it without any established principle of selection. They must detect adulterations without a settled test for purity. It happens, and especially in letter writing, that in things difficult there is danger from ignorance and there are so many difficult and complex things in life. In things easy there is danger from confidence and there are many an aspect of life that is easy and hardly requires any thought. The mind, afraid of greatness, and disdainful of littleness, hastily brushes over the more important aspects of life and/or dwells far too little on the everyday. It withdraws itself from painful epistolary dialogue and from the search required and so passes with scornful rapidity over tasks not adequate to its powers. Sometimes it feels too secure to exercise caution or too anxious for vigorous effort. It is afflicted by a literary idleness on plain and simple paths; and is often distracted in the labyrinths of life and interpersonal exchange. Dissipation stalks his literary intentions as words roll off his pallet onto the page. Readers may wonder what these phrases I have just written have to do with the art of writing letters. I leave you to ponder. In an age when little letter writing goes on, I'm not sure how much meaning readers need to find here in these complex epistolary ideas.

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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 centred 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 repels 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
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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. As I have pointed out on previous occasions I wrote and received letters going back as far as about 1962 when this pioneering journey began; before this back to the age of 13 in 1957 as a Bahai youth and junioryouth as the period before 15 is now called a few letters were written. But I have not kept the letters from the earlier period before 1967, except a rare item of the species. There were many letters after 1967, at least up to
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about 1980, which were destroyed. Some of these may be in private hands but, since I have no fame, no significance in the general public eye, it is unlikely that many, if any, letters are being kept privately by their recipients. The most assiduous search will, in all likelihood, not come up with the discovery of any epistolary manuscripts. I find it interesting and more than coincidental that virtually the entire corpus of my letters comes from a period that began with what the Universal House of Justice in 1967 called the dark heart of the age of transition. Even the letters before 1967 which were not kept come from a period that the Guardian described in 1957 as one hovering on the brink of self-destruction. Such was the widest context for that first letter to Hiroshi Kamatu in Japan in 1957. 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. If one tried to get a picture of the hey-day of my letter writing I think it would be in the 1980s when I lived, first in Zeehan on the west coast of Tasmania, and then in the north of Australia, north of Capricorn, although in the early years of the new millennium, after my retirement, there was a new lease on letter-writing life in the form of emails. I do not have any interest in going through this collection of letters that I wrote north of Capricorn or, indeed, from the full period 1957 to 2002, now in over 50 2-ring binders and arch-lever files. Perhaps a future day will see me making some minute analysis of the extent and the content of these letters. Perhaps, should their potential value become more evident to me, I shall take a more serious interest in them. Thusfar I have made only the occasional annotation to these letters. As the first editor of this collection, I have given them order and shape; I have set them in context, but I have made no attempt to correct their errors, to improve their expression or comment on their individuality: whom I wrote to, why I wrote and under what circumstances. I have, though, taken a very general interest in the collections of letters of other writers to help provide useful perspectives on my own collection. I have opened a file of introductions to collections of letters obtained from
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books of the letters of famous writers and have kept additional notes on the genre because I think in the years ahead I may write a history drawing on letters, mine and those of other Bahs in the world during these four epochs. The analysis of the letters of other writers also helps me enrich and understand the context of my own pieces. These letters are like arrows from the same quiver. I send them just as high and far as I can. In my journal it is the same. Perhaps these letters and my journal are simply the product of a peculiar self-centredness. Their appeal Im sure will not be due to my wit, my humour, the adventurousness or the romance of this narrative, but rather( if there is to be any appeal at all) to the ordinariness of the content and, most importantly and as I have indicated before, their association with this new global Cause. Their appeal for me, for me as the writer, is the sense of surprise. V.S. Naipaul said the same thing in his nobel prize lecture given in 2001. 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 minute of life just to get from one day to another in one piece: fed, housed and clothed-and hopefully loved. Im 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 beis 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 Im not sure this is entirely true, it certainly is in part. Maugham puts this idea a little differently. I had an impression, this is Maughams summing up of the writer Thomas Hardy, that the real man, to his death unknown and lonely, was a wraith that went a silent way unseen between the writer of his books and the man who led his life, and smiled with ironical detachment at the two puppets. Somewhere in all of this lies the real writer, the real me. Is this real me to be found in the id, the unconscious, the reflexes, the hormones, in a socialization process, the roles of a protean man, in feeling good? This complex question really requires a book on its own, but I think from a Bahai perspective the real me is best found in thought and action guided by the behavioural principles of this Cause to put the case as succinctly as I can.

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This is not a collection of letters of a famous person or to famous people, like the collections of letters of Einstein to President Roosevelt, or the collection of Jane Austens letters or those of, say, one of the Presidents, Prime Ministers or other prominent members of the community. My collection has no curiosity value like the letters to Santa Claus or to lovers or to mothers or from children, suicide victims or entertainers to an assortment of people. Whatever significance this collection has is tied-up with the emergence of a new world Order and a new religion and whatever future that religion may have. These letters bear the traces of contemporary historical practices, literary styles and tastes and they are surrounded by what could be called the envelope of contingency. In this sense they are communications to and with the world, with society, however personal and private they may appear to the casual observer. There are few communications with famous people either in the Bahai world or out. Outstanding thinkers, artists, political figures, scientists or significant Bahais on the elected or appointed side of the Cause will not be found here. The pivotal figures of these epochs are virtually absent. 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. These letters are, for me at least, part of a potential global epistolary collection, part of the literary expression of a global diaspora, a national and an international pioneering movement, that was only in its second generation when I got into the field in the 1960s. The recent eighteenvolume series on global diasporas and the six volume work of the International Library of Studies of Migration, will, in all likelihood, have no mention of the Bah diaspora when they are completed. The former is or will be made up of original works, while the latter is a collection of previously published articles on selected themes. International migration and diasporas have come to constitute distinctive fields of inquiry and there is considerable overlap between them.

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The study of international migration is broader in scope and partially subsumes diaspora studies. Diasporas arise from international migration. Constant interaction between diasporic communities in dozens of sovereign states and with various homelands is one of the defining features of this international migration. After nearly seven decades of international pioneering as part of an international teaching Plan, this interaction and these many diasporas seem to me, in many ways, to have just been initiated and only briefly been given any academic study. The major events of this pioneering venture, the various processes concerning its growth and development, and aspects of the diasporic life of, say, Bahs from North America in Australia would necessarily interest only a small body of people at this stage of that groups history. Indeed, at this early stage, however massive the exercise involved, and the global pioneering venture is indeed a massive one, the significance of collections of letters is hardly appreciated as yet; indeed, I would think for most people including the pioneers themselves there would be very few collections of letters extant. What are termed Bah studies or international Bah pioneering studies will one day, though, I am confident, be a part of an extensive study of the great Bah international diaspora of the last sixty-seven years(19372004), a full two-thirds of the first century of the Formative Age. So I am inclined to think, anyway. These letters are part of what is, in fact, a grand narrative. Specific letters relevant to the history of the Cause in the Northern Territory(NT) I kept for two decades(1982-2002) in special files as resource material to help me write the Bah history of that region. I have now given them to the Regional Bah Council for the Northern Territory. Much more collecting of letters written by Bahs in the NT could be done by history writers and archivists with greater enthusiasms than I now possess and I hope some day such an exercise will be accomplished. In the disintegration of society that is part of the essential backdrop to these letters and the contrasting integration, the generation that took part in the pioneering venture of the years 1962 to 1987, marks the first years of the tenth and final stage of history. It is a stage coextensive with a crucial stage in the institutionalization of the charismatic Force, the routinization of that charisma to use Webers term, in the Universal House of Justice. If these letters appear to indicate an aloofness from the controversies of the day, from the endless issues that occupied the front pages of the newspapers and the images and sounds from the electronic media; if they
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refrain year after year from any association by word or deed with the political pursuits of the various nations of the world, with the policies of their governments and the schemes and programmes of parties and factions, it is because this is the advice, the position, taken by the leaders of my Faith following principles and practices laid down by the Founders and leaders of this Faith beginning in the 1840s. I, too, following these considered views, have tried to further the aims of what is to me a beloved Cause and to steer a course amid the snares and pitfalls of a troubled age by steering clear of partisan-political subjects. Many writers do the same. They steer clear of politics and go in for sex, religion, humour, theology, inter alia, in their writing. They belong to no lit crit school, have no followers and simply cannot be easily labelled politically. What does occupy the Bah 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. I am reminded, in this context, of the words of Roger White from A Sudden Music. White says that the highest service a Bah can often render is to simply do the thing under his nose that needed doing. For me, writing letters was often this thing. And so it was, that over time, as the years went on, what was once seen as a trifling exercise took on a patina of gentle significance, perhaps even the sense of letters being a small example of what the Universal House of Justice called nobler, ampler manifestations of human achievement in their discussion of the subject of freedom of thought. If I was not a good cook, a good gardener, a good mechanic, a good painter, indeed, if I did not operate successfully in so many areas of life, as indeed most of us can say about so many domains of activity, I could at least write a letter and do it well, at least such was my personal view. Perhaps, like one of the greatest letter writers of all
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time, Voltaire, I would do most of my best and significant work in the years ahead. He did his best writing from the age of 64 to 84. Ive always appreciated the words of Evelyn Waugh in terms of this particular capacity to write letters. Beware of writing to me, he once said, I always answer. He referred to his letter writing habit as an inherited weakness, part of his great boringness. It was partly due, he said, to never going out or telephoning. Like Thoreau my life showed a devotion to principle, but by the time I was sixty I was only too conscious of just how far my life had been from the practical application of that principle. I have little doubt that were many more individuals, more sincere and more genuine in their devotion to that same principle or principles, than I have or would be. As Clausewitz notes in his series of essays On War to be faithful in action to the principles laid down for ourselves this is our entire difficulty. The many things to which the Duchesss 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 selfeducated 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, I'm 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. Letter writing has occasionally been a routine, perfunctory, exercise; occasionally a joy, a pleasure, a delight; occasionally part of some job or community responsibility. Letters were the very texture wrote Henry James of Emersons history. There is certainly a texture here that is not present in the other genres of my wide-ranging autobiography. Some letter-writers are janus-faced and some, like Truman Capote, the author of Capotes letters in Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote are three-faced. There was the face for gay friends, the face for non-gay friends, and the face for the friends he made in Kansas while writing In Cold Blood. I think I have a multiple-faced letter writing persona:one for Bahais of a conservative type, one for a more liberal orientation, one for those who are Bahai in name only, one for youthful types, one for old
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people and one for...and on goes the list, the persona. Letter writing partly overcomes, together with my writing in other genres, the ancient enmity between life and the great work. And it was apparent that, if I was to achieve any great work, it would be in bits and pieces spread out over many years, many decades. Like the great work of inner life and private character, achievements in my life seem to have been small steps backward and forward. The texture of these largely private communications is also a result of a new written form, the email, a form which was present in Volume 5 of my personal letters as well, but makes a strong appearance in this Volume 6(the year I retired from full-time work) of these letters. Nine out of ten communications by then were emails not letters. I think the first email I received was in 1990 or 1991, but I have kept few emails before the midto-late 1990s when email traffic began to replace the letter and, for me at least, by 2000 the telephone to a significant extent. Even the emails over the last dozen years, 1995-2007, were largely deleted. So much of what has come in since the email entered my life has not been worth keeping in my archive. Like the ten thousand letters I wrote in the organizations which employed me over more than 40 years and which either lie in files now or are on the scrap-heap, the detritus, of one of historys myriad paper-trails no one will ever follow, a vast quantity of emails I have received have disappeared in an electronic void. Their electronic successors, like the mobile phone and text messages, have not been part of my experience in their early years of operation and so there will be nothing in this collection of messages over 50 years from these additions to the electronic industry and their communications functions. 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 Bah Era. They
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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 education 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 Bah Faith made a significant leap forward in its numbers and in the maturity of its community. Often, to the Bahs 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
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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 Those storytellers came along in the convincing guise of highly literate specialists: newsreaders, commentators, scientific and artistic experts as well as writers and producers with their endless capacity to generate stories in the form of movies, interviews, who-dun-its, soap-operas, a cornucopia of stuff that rested the eyes and stimulated the mind in varying degrees. It was here in the media that the sophists of ancient Greece were reborn. The sophists with their emphasis on the power of the intellect arose as Greek society in the fifth century BC was becoming more complex. They were rootless people without any commitment to community. And they are very much like many of the worldly wise who come upon the scene and pontificate, publicize and entertain millions but, unlike Socrates of old, they generally have no commitment to community except in the most generalized sense. Our troubled times approximate more closely the conditions of Greece and Rome and comparisons like those I make to the sophists are useful. The media now tend to direct not only our knowledge of the world but our knowledge of ways of knowing it. And the new sophists play an important role in this mix. Not to mention this important aspect of contemporary social and intellectual life in an autobiography of this nature would be a serious omission.

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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 media had many functions. It allowed me to get back to my writing day after day, having been gently and alternatively amused, stimulated, entertained and informed. I could see why millions had no need to write letters for they had had sufficient human contact on TV. Those with a higher degree of need for a particular type of sociability could use the telephone and/or join one of many volunteer organizations that came to be dotting the landscape by the time I retired. As I mentioned above though, by the year 2000, I seemed to be writing more letters than ever. By nine o'clock at night my eyes and mind were so tired from reading and writing--usually at least a six to eight hour minimum of the days time and a ten hour maximum--that I was happy to consume televisions products. With an average of two hours of TV consumption nightly I could finish my eight hour reading-writing day after 11 pm and before 3 am. Millions of my words were slowly permeating some of the literally millions of internet sites. Yes, I was writing more letters than ever. Perhaps this is why so many events in my life, events that could be stories, did not become stories. Bah holy days, Feasts, deepenings, secular holidays by the bundle, a seemingly infinite number of birthdays, annual dinners, suppers for friends, good-grief, the list of repeated activities one engages in over lifes years could go on and on. Over fifty years at, say, fifty events a year, makes for at least 2500 special days, special occasions. And little of it appears here in these letters. One might ask why? Is it the repetition, the routine, the sameness? Is it that these events are part of the very texture of life and, like the air, are difficult to write about in a book like this. They come to occupy two or three lines in a letter; they become the base of an occasional poem; they fill hundreds, thousands of hours of life with a million eventualities. At best, they provide suggestive openings for readers of a letter, unobtrusive patterns of juxtaposition, recurrence, contrast and familiarity out of which fresh and unpredictable understandings may emerge.
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There is something about the routines, the repetition of events in the ordinary life of the individual and I refer to this repetition frequently in this autobiography, that is like the experience of the criminal in prison. The crim discovers on his release that he is not the only one to perceive the lagging of time in terms of suspended animation. His old friends do also. They act as though he has returned from a brief trip to the toilet or out of town for a few hours, even though he may have been in the nick for a decade, greeting him casually and then going about their business. Ones actions so frequently point to somewhere, some time, when and where one has been before and frequently. One often resumes a relationship as if one has only, as Withnell puts it in that humorous turn of phrase, been to the toilet. This is part of the backdrop that often gives one the feeling that little change has occurred in ones being, behaving. It is this terrible sameness that takes the experience of writing a letter completely out of the realms of meaningful activity and is, perhaps, one of the main reasons why relatively little takes place. My letters were, among other things, strands of experience woven into patterns, patterns in a channel, a channel that in the early years of my retirement became filled with electronic signals; they came to fill many arch-lever files and binders and, after 2007, lists of items in my computer directory. They were an expression of an art, a means of communication. By the time Volume 4 of this collection of personal correspondence was gathered in 1995 I had, as I have indicated, become exhausted by personal contacts. Perhaps this was due in part to my proclivity for solitude in contrast to a more social inclination, a more social mode of existence that had been such a strong part of my life for half a century. I was more inclined to think that this social disinclination was due to many things in a list too long to enumerate here. This may be part of the reason for any apparent aloofness and any insistence on solitude that is found in either my letters or my poetry, especially after about 1995 when I was in my early fifties. In 1985 a second volume of personal correspondence was opened. Part 1 of Volume 1(1957-1974) and Part 2(1974-1984) of Volume 1 opened the series. The first fifty years of my letter-writing life had their home by 2007. The several themes which analysts might want to follow through the letters had begun to be apparent. My autobiography arose out of the juxtaposition of several temperamental disinclinations that rose up in my life over several decades and came to a head in the years 1992/3 to 2002/3. Curiosity about the future and the afterlife among other interests also played their part. Evelyn Waugh says that it is in these temperamental disinclinations that
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one finds the origin of autobiography. Perhaps, like Rilke, I had been for decades too responsive for my own peace of mind.(1) Perhaps my letters are, like Rilkes, an indication of a great need of imparting the life within me.(2) Perhaps they are simply a matter of pouring experience into a mould to obtain release, to ease the pressure of life. When inspiration to write poetry lagged I often turned to correspondence. It was a handicraft, a tool among several others, that could keep me at work in constant preparation for the creative moments.(3) As the social dimensions of my psycho-social life were waning by the mid-1990s and, like Rilke, I began to thirst for solitude, the wider world was experiencing 56 wars being fought around the globe. Among other devastating effects, these conflicts created at least 17 million refugees and left 26 million people homeless. Another 300 million individuals suffered because of disasters not related to war. This state of affairs, following the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the proclamation of a new world order, indicated serious disarray among the community of nations. And yet, each day dedicated human beings -- among them international civil servants, government officials, nongovernmental workers, and a broad spectrum of volunteers -- continued to cope with complex and seemingly intractable problems, in efforts to alleviate suffering and advance the cause of peace. This wider drama, a drama that was always present in the background as my own life winding its way down the road, was simply beyond ones imagination to understand in any detail. I got broad pictures, but the details were usually complex, overwhelming and elusive. 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 fibre 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

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better in my poetry which Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko said is the poets true autobiography. These letters, it seems to me, stand in sharp contrast to what Frederic Jameson refers to as the four losses that are symptomatic of our age of postmodernism. These losses have come to characterize our society increasingly since the 1970s: the suspension of subjective inwardness, referential depth, historical time and coherent human expression. These letters in some basic ways define my identity and my communitys by telling the story of myself, the community I have been part of and the events of the time. There is clearly referential depth here, subjective inwardness, the story of a search, an open-ended drama of personal narratives, a sense of the complexity of these historical times. There is also here in these letters what Roland Barthes calls an image of literature to be found in ordinary culture. This image, he goes on, is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism consists for the most part in saying that my failure is the failure of Ron Price the man. The explanation of a work, he concludes, is always sought in the man or woman who produced it....in the voice of a single person, the author confiding in us. 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. Although epistolary fiction enjoyed its greatest popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time when letters were central to daily life, this style of writing still has a place and a popular one it would seem. Letter stories are about communication and they are effective in framing our modern concerns: the struggle to find meaningful stories, relationships, and lives amid the social and moral disarray of the era and the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, artist and audience, private and public domains. My own letters accomplish this similar framing exercise.

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Written and received over nearly fifty years, my collection of letters delineates the themes of our time as do the themes of the stories in Other Peoples Mail. Offering seventeen stories written by a culturally diverse group of authors, Other Peoples Mail represents what letter tales, at their best, can do. They may be written from the Canadian wilderness, a private school in Geneva, a concentration camp, or beyond the grave. They may be comic or satirical, poignant or tragic, but all are united in their distinctive format. For letters are distinctively individual. Other Peoples Mail is the first collection of its kind. It is a unique and important anthology. Pools highly informative introduction explores the nature of letter fiction. Literature and writing instructors may find in this lively anthology a useful resource. My collection offers a single perspective, a single individual, a single background to a life, a distinctive format, at times satirical, at times poignant, tragic, humorous and lively and, no doubt and inevitably--as collections of letters are for most people--boring and therefore unread. In that tidal-wave of print and visual stimulation that occupies todays world, collections of letters, for the most part, slip into a quiet niche, unknown and unnoticed and not missed. It often takes many years after a persons death for the entire collection of a writers letters to be published. It took 125 years for Gustav Flauberts letters to be fully published in five volumes. Even assuming my letters get published and, if I was to follow in Flauberts footsteps, readers could anticipate the publication of the full oeuvre of my letters in, say, 2150!--or thereabouts!! 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 I'm 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 Bah Faith in the Northern Territory: 1947-1997; I also completed
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my book The Emergence of a Bahai 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). During this same period a feeling of approaching apocalypse was tending to drown out humanist beliefs in history as the progressive development towards a better world. Endtimes or apocalyptic thought and theory, of course, is not new. Some argue that it was formulated for a popular audience for the first time in 1970,(5) but I wont go into detail here on the evolution of this line of thought which is really quite complex. Bahs, of course, remained optimistic but often the battle tired the spirit and, in some cases, at least in mine, turned that spirit to letter-writing. I would like to think that readers will begin with an endless pile of words but end up with a world. Perhaps it is a world which will endure, a trace from the twentieth century and beyond into the twenty-first that will last forever. _______________________________FOOTNOTES________________ 1 Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892-1910, trans: J. Greene and M. Norton, WW Norton, NY, 1945, p. 12. 2 idem 3 idem 4 ibid.p.13. 5 John Sutherland, Apocalypse Now, Guardian Unlimited Books, June 2003 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. (1)Mary Dearborn, The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller, Harper Collins, London, 1991, p.12.

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I have read or browsed through many books of the collections of the letters of famous and not-so-famous writers and have found them enlightening. They have served to provide stimulating perspectives for my own work. Keats, the nineteenth century poet, seems to be the most attractive of the letter writers, at least for those like myself who write poetry. He seems likeable, lovable, someone we would enjoy travelling with. But you would have to get him young for he was dead at 26. Unlike Shakespeare or even Jane Austin, who remain impersonal, elusive, inscrutable, enigmatic, we feel we know Keats through his letters. He does not hide himself. My letters clearly bring me closer to a Keats or an Emily Dickinson, than a Shakespeare, although I know I shall never be in the league of any of these great writers. Dickinson tended to blend poetry and prose in her letters and, in the last decade this has been true increasingly of my letters. I strive to fashion a lively interchange between poetry and prose and, as yet, I have really only just begun this process with any effect. A cosmic and cosmopolitan range in the written word is as evident in the literary homebodies like Socrates, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson as in the literary travelers like Xenophon, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Having been both a homebody and a traveller perhaps I might more easily find that range. Ceremony and necessity, vanity and routine often require something to be written. To be able to disentangle oneself from these inevitable and several perverters of epistolary integrity is not always possible. A letter is addressed to a single mind of which some of the prejudices and partialities are known and must therefore please. The pleasing process is not always by favouring others, but sometimes by opposing them. If a man keeps his thoughts at a level of generality in his letters he is safe; and most hearts are pure while temptation is away. It is easy to awaken generous sentiments in privacy, to despise death when there is no danger and to glow with benevolence when there is nothing to be given. When such ideas are formed they are easily felt and they sprinkle letters with their declarations There is, indeed, no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse. What we hide from ourselves,we do not show to our friends.(Leslie Stephen, Samuel Johnson,MacMillan & Co., Ltd. NY, 1900). I feel an immense kinship with that American philosopher and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau. Much of my sense of kinship derives from my awareness of my differences from him. He had a hunger, as John Burroughs points out, for health and the wild, wilderness, wild men, Indians. He felt close to the subtle spirits in this wilderness. He lived life delicately, daintily, tenderly. Burroughs said he was unkind. By contrast,
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I see myself as kind, one of the kind Canadians 'Abdul-Bah refers to in His immortal Tablets, although my affinity for the wild and the wilderness is clearly not as strong as Thoreaus, indeed, at the age of 60 it hardly exists. But I have his hunger, although it expresses itself differently. It is an isolating hunger, as Thoreaus hunger isolated him. My hunger is not for health or the wild but, rather, for knowledge and civility. When younger, until the age of about forty, I hungered for health. By my mid-fifties I hungered for solitude. In my late teens and twenties I hungered for sex. After working in the garden, I hunger for water. Since I eat a very light breakfast, by two in the afternoon I hunger for lunch. Our hungers change with the time of day and the season, with the stage of our life and our psychological needs. By my years of middle adulthood,forty to sixty,knowledge became, increasingly, my great desire. By sixty the symptoms of my bi-polar disorder were, for the most part, treated. I yearned, too, for that quiet civility with which genuine engagement with my fellow men could be enjoyed. It was a yearning, though, which was quiet and possessed of an instinctive reticence. Perhaps this reticence was due to a fatigue with much conversation and the many traces of moral and intellectual laxity that not only stained my life but the name of the Faith I regarded as holy and precious. For, as Shoghi Effendi stated so boldly at the start of the first Plan in 1937, the controlling principle in the behaviour and conduct of all Bahs has implications for modesty, purity, cleanmindedness, moderation and the daily vigilance in the control of ones carnal desires. Any thorough examination of the last fifty years of my life, 1953 to 2003, would reveal that I am far from casting that sleeve of holiness over all that hath been created from water and clay. I see myself as modest but not prudish but, sometimes, modesty and moderation gave way to an excessiveness and a lack of control of sexual thoughts, feelings and associations. This is a separate subject I cover in more detail in my journal, my diary. But let me make a few general comments on the subject of sex here. On the subject of my sex life I think I could put the matter into a general context with the observation that for me, as for the famous autobiographers Pepys and Boswell, no seduction, no sexual experience, was complete until I had recorded its details in my diary. What is a complete account for me, of course, is in a class of its own and quite distinct from the accounts of either Pepys or Boswells sexual proclivities. My sex life, quite apart from my writing and the intellectual labor that has gone into it and however stimulating it may be to the reader will be found revealed in my unexpurgated diaries published, if they ever are,
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long after my death. Much of my behaviour in life I would define as cyclical and repetitive. My dedicated toil in life, a toil that often led to successes of various kinds, was often followed by an orgy. But it was an orgy of exhaustion, depression, a deepening relationship with Thanatos and, sometimes anger,frustration & disappointment. This was not always the case, but to avoid these words would present a picture of my life far less than honest. 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 twentythree to my surprisingly late-discovered masturbatory 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 lifes 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. As the literature on personality disorders indicates, we all have certain tendencies in the direction of various negative symptoms and adaptations, or disorders as they are termed in the literature. After more than forty years of the periodic study of psychology, I am aware of my tendencies toward some of the major types of disorder: psychotic, neurotic and extravert and some of their respective sub-types. This dark side of my personality I am more than a little conscious of after 60 years of living. But my tendencies, my symptoms, are all partial. Except for bipolar disorder, I do not fit into any pure type, any particular disorder, any full characterization. As I say, if I did possess any full-blown disorder, and there is no doubt I did due to my bi-polar tendency, it is now, for the most part, ancient history. How these tendencies, many and several, affected
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my letter-writing is difficult to assess. I'm not sure how valuable such an assessment would be and to do so here is beyond the scope of this analysis of my letter writing. Sometimes my letters reveal a melancholy cast of mind or hide a personal belief that I am a contemptible animal. For, as Bahullh wrote, we all have our backs bowed by the burden of our sin and from time to time we need to feel that our heedlessness has destroyed us. This need is particularly apparent when we say the Long Obligatory Prayer. Sometimes my letters reveal a host of other characteristics: humour, delight, pleasure, joy, fun, insight and understanding, et cetera. But whatever my letters reveal if they were effective they needed to possess a sensitive understanding of the language appropriate to each relationship. I strove to make my letters relaxed, nearly colloquial and natural so as to establish a relationship with the correspondent comparable to that in private conversation. To put this another way, I tried to write letters as I spoke. The humour that was lacking in my young adulthood developed in my middle adulthood as my sense of disillusionment and discouragement also developed. Humour, wrote the celebrated Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock, is a comforter which reconciles us to realities over ideals. This comforter possesses a thread of melancholy and my letters reflected this in my middle age and beyond, or so it seemed to me, as I became more aware of my limitations and failures and as I exhibited a seeming kindly contemplation of lifes sorrows and incongruities and as I also exhibited, from time to time, that sense of utter futility that occasionally embraces the most optimistic of our race. Id 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 its 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. Thats what Id like to think. Id 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 Bah 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
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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 Bah 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, addonto 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. Signs of the continuous evolution of a lifelong scheme of devotion are difficult to describe without appearing to be fanatical or obsessive or unduly pious, in a world that has lost any interest in piety. Years even decades of concentrated effort are easy to accumulate but the evidences of that effort are not as easy to amass given the hurried, the frenetic, excitements of modern society which militate against any pretensions of devotion to a single purpose. Daily life, indeed, ones entire life, tends to
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be fragmentary because we live in a perpetual hurry. And even when not in a hurry we get inundated in our daily life by a host of usually disconnected, sometimes interesting and stimulating but so frequently, if not always, fragmentary events and happenings, news and entertainment. If a life of devotion involves any serious writing as mine clearly does, the vast accumulation of materials and the demand for exhaustive inquiry often overpowers the potential and would-be-conscientious writer. Should he or she go down the literary trail it often becomes difficult to maintain vivacity and spontaneity. If writers can not bring the stars of the universe closer, if they cannot wake their fellow human beings up, give them a certain morning freshness and elan, some sparkle of understanding, they might be advised to pursue other lines of work. Some letter writers make other subjects the centre of their discussion. The letters of the poet Elizabeth Bishop are about loss. Each letter writer brings to the table his life and, although I would like to bring the universe closer and share sparkles of understanding, these lofty goals are rarely attainable. One must settle for a mode and manner closer to the earth, to everydayness, to the boredom and the chowder, as Paul Simon put it in one of his songs. Elizabeth Bishops letters are certainly closer to the earth and, when they sparkle, it is a sparkle of a talented and intellectually sophisticated person. 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!!

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Here are two letters below taken somewhat at random from my collection. Readers will not find here in my autobiography or on this BARL site much of my letter collection, but I include these samples to illustrate various themes. The first is written to a radio station program presenter for a discussion program on a particular theme: the topic of early retirement. It seemed a fitting topic for, at the time of writing the letter, I had been retired from my career for eighteen months. I strive to address both the universal and the individual in my letters, both the quick and the dead as Dickinson put it referring to the living souls and the dead of spirit, the quotidian and the philosophical. I try to leave meaning unsettled or open-ended, organized but not a simple step-by-step series of prose assertions. I often bow to convention, to cliched phrases, like the ending of letters which are often more conventional courtesies than content. Quoting from just four letters will minimize the revelation of many of my unsuspected foibles, weaknesses, inconsistencies and faults. Indeed, I like to think these letters will not seriously diminish the admiration of readers for whatever gifts, strengths and attainments I have been endowed. The admiration of readers for whatever a writer writes is very difficult to assess in the earliest stages of his public appearance, especially on a medium like the internet. All letter writers have a landscape, a background, a mise-en-scene: perhaps some great city, like Boswells historic London; or the city of the Covenant, New York, like some early 19th century Bahais; or some rural milieux of beauty like Wordsworths Lake District; or some intense social activity like Evelyn Waughs twentieth-century London; or a world of travelling like D.H. Lawrence; or a particular correspondent as did Joseph Conrad; or some of what the writer thinks and feels as was the case with Alexander Pushkin. There is a little of many landscapes or backgrounds in my correspondence, spread as it is over fifty years. I could, should it be my want, dwell on the significance of landscape in much more detail than I have. For a half of my life, some thirty years, for example, I lived within a mile of a lake, a bay or a river. For another twenty years I drove with my family for an hour or less to get to a beach, to a place I could swim. The beach became, during these years, a centre of activity especially in the summer months, at least some of the time. I could say much more here; I could write about the various city landscapes; the tundra, the savanna, the temperate regions and their affect on my life, the mutual interaction. I will conclude this all-to-brief discussion on landscape with Emersons words: The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in the beholders. I enclose one letter written to a radio station in Australia. The following letter to the program presenters of an ABC Radio series Life Matters is
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one of a type that I sent over the years to various people in the media to drop a gentle note from the sweet-scented stream of eternity into someones lap. It was a form of teaching I was able to do but, like so many forms, it was always difficult to measure its effectiveness, its result. ----------Dear..... The program Life Matters today, Wednesday October 4th, was on the themeTaking Time Out. I wont 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. Eighteen months ago I retired after 30 years as a teacher in primary, secondary and post-secondary institutions. I was fifty-five and, with community obligations outside my classroom in the evening and on weekends, I felt talked-and-listened-out. I felt I had had enough. I wanted some time out. I wanted to give some time to what had become a personal, a private, interest in reading and writing poetry. In the last 18 months I have had six to ten hours a day given to this engaged, alone, solitary, stimulating exercise. 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 Id 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 Bahai community and my wifes 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. I would not go back to the work-a-day world. After a lifetime of talking and listening, I knew at 55 I had had enough of what by then had felt like years of full time engagement with others. I wanted time out to engage in interests that did not involve people at all. I got it. After 18 months I feel the story has just begun. And it has. I would like now to engage readers in the multiplicity of experience my life in the Bahai community and in the many worlds that life has taken me to since I became associated with it back in 1953. My adventure over five decades has been an emotional and physical one, an adventure of intellectual growth, of culture-shock and of

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creative achievement. Can my letters express these experiences and engage readers as a result? 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 its 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. This next letter is one written to my family members thirty-one years after leaving Canada, thirty-five years after leaving southern Ontario and nearly forty years since I had seen any of them. Eight months before writing this letter I did have a visit with my cousin, my mothers sisters son, David, himself a retired teacher as well, and his wife, Barbara. -------------Dear... 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
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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. I feel as if I have completed the first stage of my final domestic training program that qualifies me for shared-existence with Chris in matters relating to hearth and home. I seem to have been a difficult student but, after nearly four years of being under-foot we seem to have worked out a reasonable modus vivendi(those four years of Latin in high school were unquestionably of some value). The in-house training had been rigorous, to say the least, but I received a passing grade-which was all I was after! And now for the second stage. My step-daughters continue their work, Vivienne as a nurse in the ICU at the Launceston General Hospital(20 hrs/wk) and Angela in public relations for an international firm centred in Bali. Thankfully Angela did not suffer from the recent bombings in a place that had been seen(until the bombings) somewhat paradisiacally in the Indian Ocean, although even Bali has had its traumatic problems in the last few decades as a brief history of the place will reveal. I wonder if there are any places in the world left which havent been significantly touched by the changing landscape and the traumas of our times. Angela travels for a real estate firm selling time-share apartments. Lives seem to be busy, active things, for those you know well, those whose lives are intertwined with your own and I could write chapter and verse on all the comings and goings of family and various close friends. But I think this will suffice for an annual letter. I continue writing, an activity which was one of the main reasons I retired at the early age of 55. After nearly four years away from the work-a-day world, I get the occasional magazine and journal article published(listed on the Net in section 24 part (v) of my Website). Its all just smalltime
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stuff you might call it, nothing to make me famous or rich, sad to say. My website is now spread over 15 locations on the Inter- net. The simplest spot to locate my material is at http://users.intas.net.au/pricerc or go to the Yahoo search engine. You can also find me at the Poetry Superhighway. Then go to Individual Poets Pages and type Ron Price. I also finished a book of some 80 thousand words on the poetry of a Canadian poet who passed away in 1993:Roger White.You can locate this book at http://bahai library.org/books/ white. Of course, much of this material may not interest you. Poetry is not everyones game even if its spiced with lots of prose. Dont feel any obligation to check it out, just if it interests you. It will give you an idea of some of the stuff that goes on in my head, for what its worth. Other than these Internet developments my day to day habits and activities are much the same as last year at this time: walks, presenting a radio-pro- gram, 2 hours of teaching/ week, two meetings(school/Bah)/month, radio/TV programs to take in, lots of reading, etc You may find my writing a little too subjective, introspective. Like Thoreau I seem to be more interested in the natural history of my thought than of the bird life, the flora and fauna that I find here in Tasmania. I read recently that Thoreau took twelve years to identify a particular bird. I found that fact comforting. I understand, for I have the devil of a time remembering the names of the birds, the plants and the multitude of insects that cross my path and my horizon from month to month. But what I lack, what interest is deficient with respect to the various forms of plant and animal life here in the Antipodes, I make up for in my study of the varied humanities and social sciences. In the three decades of my teaching career I have acquired, if I acquired nothing else, a passion for certain learnings, certain fields of study. My study is littered, I like to think ordered, by files on: philosophy, psychology, media studies, ancient and medieval history, modern history, literature, poetry, religion, inter alia. I move from one field to another from day to day and week to week and I can not imagine ever running out of gas, of enthusiasm, interest. Thus, I occupy my time. If J.D. Salinger is right in his claim that theres a marvellous peace in not being pyblished it looks like much peace lies in waiting for me. 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
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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. For Ron, Chris and Dan Price PS Ill send this a little early again this year to avoid the Christmas rush of letters/cards and emails. ------------------------My letters, it seems to me, do not have that naturalness and general amiability that the poet Matthew Arnold possessed. He was endowed with a sunny temper, a quick sympathy and inexhaustible fun. I have some of these qualities and more now that I do not have to struggle with a bi-polar disorder, the endless responsibilities of job and a large Bah community. Arnold was endowed with self-denial; indeed it was a law of his life; he taxed his ingenuity to find words of encouragement when he wrote letters. I do, too, but I dont tax myself too much. They come quite naturally really, but self-denial is not a quality that I feel particularly well endowed with. Perhaps I was once, but less so in recent years. As the years have gone on into late middle age, I have slowly discovered, as William James put it, the amount of saintship that best comports with what I believe to be in my powers and consistent with my truest mission and vocation. We were both men who were, for the most part, free from bitterness, rancour and envy and, it seems to me, this is reflected in our letters. But the inhibition of instinctive repugnances, perhaps one of saintships most characterisitc qualities, is difficult to determine by an examination of a persons letters.

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I take much pleasure from most of my letter writing which obviously the poet Samuel Johnson did not. I dont 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. Here is an introduction I wrote to a collection of letters to Bahai institutions in Canada going back to 1979. By 1979 I had been an international pioneer for eight years and a pioneer for seventeen. This letter I keep in a two-volume, two two-ring binder, set to institutions and individuals in Canada. ------------------------INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 4.1 OF MY LETTERS 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 Im 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
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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 Lord Melbourne, writing about George Crabbe, indicated that I am always glad when one of those fellows dies, for then I know I have the whole of him on my shelf.3 There is certainly a type of person, perhaps many, a variety of selves, a type of prose, that is unique to the letter. I sensed I had something of Roger White when I had even the few letters he wrote to me in one file on my shelf. The sombre and weird outlook in Dickinsons poetry, by no means the prevailing condition of her mind, is not pre- sent in her gay and humorous letters. For those inclined to judge White too harshly or strongly from some of his poetry, if they read his letters, they would get quite a different picture of that wonderful poet. I leave it to future commentators to evaluate this dichotomy between my correspondence and the other genres of my writing, should they wish to do so. No amount of imaginative activity can recreate a genuine experience of things and letters convey the timbre and tone, the texture and the reality of genuine experience. The necessary narrative ability in writing a letter to order and unify the past, present and future, coloured by words and the imaginative function that dances with them seems to be a rare and creative gift. But, as Sharon Cameron notes in her analysis of Emily Dickinsons letters, they may tell us more about postures that replace relationships than the relationships themselves however creative and imaginative they may be. 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 Whites letters. Are there no letters? Theres nothink I like better than a read of a good letter. Look and see, Mrs. Goosgog, if you cant find me a letter.Im inclined to feel melancholy at this time of night.4-The Ham Funeral The TV, video and the DVD probably 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 emails 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, Im sure the letter/email is now in safe hands, even if nine69

tenths of the production is not worth saving or pondering over after an initial read. And so here, in this small volume, the reader will find my correspondence (i) with the Canadian magazine Bahai Canada going back to 1985, fourteen years after I arrived in Australia as an international pioneer, (ii) with the International Pioneer Committee as far back as 1979 and (iii) from National Convention communications with pioneers overseas from 1990. With its companion Volume 4.2 any interested reader will get a correspondence from Canada to and from a pioneer overseas in the third, forth and one day soon fifth epochs of the Formative Age. Perhaps at a future time I will provide a more extended analysis of this collection, but for now this material is at least placed in a deserving context for future readers. 2 See my collection of unpublished essays. they are now in the Bahai Academic Resource Library. I have written a 2000 word essay on the funnies and wee-wisdoms email style. 3 Christopher Ricks, Becketts Dying Words, Oxford UP, NY, 1996, p.205. 4 David Marr, Patrick Whites Letters, Random House, 1994, p.vi. 10 February 2000 Such are the introductory words to another volume of letters, one of many introductions 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. INTRODUCTION TO FILE OF JOB APPLICATION LETTERS: 2 JOB APPLICATIONS A WEEK FOR 50 YEARS: JOB HUNTING 1957-2007 The 3000 word statement which follows describes my transition from employment and the job-hunting process(1957-2007) to retirement and the pursuit of a leisure life devoted to writing(1999-2009). The years 1999 to 2007 marked the years of transition. The information and details
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in my resume, a resume I no longer need or use in any direct sense in the job-hunting world after fifty years of use, but which I occasionally post here on the internet or mail to friends, should help anyone wanting to know something about my personal and professional background, my writing and my life. This resume might be useful, in some residual capacity, but not so much to assess my suitability for some advertised or unadvertised employment position. This resume might be useful for some readers to assess the relevance of some statements I make on the internet, statements on a wide variety of topics at a wide variety of internet sites. If I feel there is a need for readers to have some idea of my background, my credentials and my experience; if I feel that it would be useful for them to have a personal context for my remarks at an internet site, I post that resume. I never apply for jobs for anymore, although I have registered at several internet sites whose role is, among other things, to help people get jobs. Perhaps this process of registration at such sites is engaged in with some sense of nostalgia, out of habit, out of an inability to stop applying for jobs after five decades of persistent and strenuous efforts. These decades of efforts were aimed at obtaining jobs, better jobs, jobs more suited to my talents, jobs that paid better, jobs that freed me from impossible situations that I had become involved with in some work-scene I was ensconced in--along the road of life. I stopped applying for full-time jobs, as I say, in September 2007 and part-time ones in December 2003. I also disengaged myself from most volunteer or casual work four years ago in 2005 so that I could occupy myself as: an independent scholar, a writer, a poet, indeed, what some might call a man of leisure in the Greek tradition. At the age of 64, then, on the eve of the Australian Old Age Pension, six months in fact away from that formal condition of old age, I have become self-employed as a writer-poet, an independent scholar. I have gradually come to this role in the years after I left full-time employment in 1999, ten years ago. Not being occupied with earning a living and giving myself to 60 hours a week on average in a job as was the case from 1982 to 1999; and not being occupied with giving many other hours to community activity, as I had been for so many years as was the case from at least 1988 to 1999, marked a turning point in my life. I became able to devote my time to a much more extensive involvement in writing and reading material of my own choice. Writing is for most of its votaries a solitary, hopefully stimulating, but not always pleasurable leisure-time, part-time or full-time pursuit. In my
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case in these first years(60-65) of late adulthood(60-80), writing and its companion activity research and reading has become full-time about 60 hours a week. This activity is for me and for the most part an enriching and enjoyable pursuit. I have replaced my former paid employment and extensive activity with people in community with a form of work which is also a form of leisure, namely, as I say: writing and reading independent scholarship. Inevitably the style of one's writing and what one reads is a reflection of the person, their experience and, often, their philosophy. On occasion, I set out a summary of my writing, my employment experience, my resume, in an attachment to this brief essay, this introductory statement, this commentary on the job application process which occupied my life for five decades: 1957-2007. If as that famous, although not always highly regarded, psychologist Carl Jung writes: we are what we do, then some of what I was and am can be found in that attachment, that resume and its several appendices. That document may seem over-the-top as they say these days since it now occupies some 30 pages and many more pages if the appendices are also included. Half a century of various forms of employment as well as community, leisure and volunteer activity in the professional and not-so-professional world, all this time in many places produced a great pile of stuff. It also produced what used to be called by several different names: ones curriculum vitae, ones CV, ones bio-data sheet or ones resume. This document is now, at least as I see it, more of a lifeline, a life-narrative, a memoir, an autobiography-of-sorts. As I say, I make the list of this stuff available to readers of this account, this essay, when appropriate, when requested and, occasionally, when not appropriate. I update those many pages to include recent writing projects I have completed or am in the process of completing during these first years of my retirement from fulltime, part-time and most volunteer activity. My 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 bit of gadding about, another slice of a quasipioneering, peripatetic existence, a moving from town to town, from one state or province to another, from one country to another, one piece of God's, or gods', earth to another piece of it. And so it was that I was able to come to work in another organization, gain entry to another portion of my life and enjoy or not enjoy a new world.

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The process, I often thought, was not unlike a modern form of a traditional rite-de-passage. To some extent I came to take on what often seemed like another personality, another me in the long road to discover if, indeed, there was a Real Me underneath all this coming and going. I'm sure this process will continue, will also be the case in all its many forms in these 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 to continue for some reason I can not, as yet, anticipate. This continued movement, though, seems highly unlikely as I go through these early years(60-65) of late adulthood and head into the last stages of my life, from sunset and early evening to nights first hours and then, finally, the last hours of night, the final syllables of my recorded time. This process, this rite de passage expressed in the form of yet another job in another place seems, for the moment, to have come to an end. Time, of course, will tell. The last five years(60-65) are as I indicated above the first ones of late adulthood, a period developmental psychologists call the years from 60 to 80. In this first decade of my retirement(1999 to 2009), 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(1965-1984) and middle(1984-1999) adulthood when job, family and the demands of various community projects kept my nose to the grindstone as they say colloquially in many parts of the world. With the final unloading of much of the volunteer work which I took on when I first retired, in the years from 1999 to 2005; with the gradual cessation of virtually the entire apparatus and process of job-application by 2007; with my last child having left home in 2005; with a more settled home environment than Ive ever had by 2007 and with a new medication for the bipolar disorder that afflicted my life since my teens, also by 2007, the remaining years of my late adulthood beckon bright with promise. My resume reflects the shift in role, in my lifespan activity-base and lists the many writing projects Ive been able to complete in this first decade of independent scholarship and full-time writing. The process of frequent moves and frequent jobs which was my pattern for fifty years, 1949 to 1999, 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, a domain, a bailiwick as politicians often call their electorate. Such people and other types as well often have very few jobs in their lifetime. Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth, nor is a long list of jobs, although a great degree of inner change, extensive inner shifting, is
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inevitable from a persons teens through to their late adulthood even if they sat all their lives on the head of a pin, one of the theologico-philoso-phical metaphors associated with angels and often used in medieval times. This process of extensive change is even more true in the recent decades of our modern age at this climacteric of history in which change is about the only thing one can take as a constant--or so we are often led to believe because it is so often said in the electronic media. For many millions of people during the half century 1957 to 2007, my years of being jobbed and applying for jobs, 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 in a new form of travelling-pioneering, globe-trotting, pathfinding of sorts, as part of historys long story, my applying-for-job days, some five decades from the 1950s to the first decade of the new millennium. My resume altered many times, of course, during those fifty years. It is now, for the most part and as I indicated above, not used in these years of my retirement and especially since 2007, except as an information and bio-data vehicle for interested readers, 99.9% of whom are on the internet at its plethora of sites. This document, as I say above, a document that used to be called a curriculum vitae or a CV, until the 1970s, at least in the region where I lived and dwelled and had my being, is a useful backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry. Some poets and writers, artists and creative people in many fields, though, regard their CV, resume, bio-data, lifeline, life-story, life-narrative, personal background as irrelevant, simply not necessary for people to know, in order for them to appreciate their artistic work. These people take the philosophical, indeed, somewhat religious position, that they are not what they do or, to put it a little differently and a little more succinctly, "they are not their jobs." I frequently use this resume at various internet locations on the World Wide Web when I want to provide some introductory background on myself. I could list many new uses after decades of a use which had a multifactorial motivational base: to help me get a job, to get a new job, to help me make more money, to enrich my experience and to add
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something refreshing to my life as it was becoming increasingly stale for so many reasons in the day-to-day grind, to help me get away from supervisors and from situations I could not handle or were a cause of great stress, to help me flee from settings where my health was preventing me from continuing successfully in my job, to help me engage in new forms of adventure, pioneering, amusement, indeed, to help me survive lifes tests in the myriad forms that afflict the embattled spirit, et cetera, et cetera, inter alia, inter alia, inter alter, inter alter. The use of the resume always saved me from having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. One could photocopy it and mail it out with the covering letter to anyone and everyone. The photocopier became a common feature of the commercial, business and government world in the 1960s just as I began to send out the first of the literally thousands of job applications that I would over the next forty years: 1967-2007. One didnt have to write the application out each time; one did not have to say it again Sam in resume after resume to the point of utter tedium. The photocopier itself evolved as did the gestetner, one of the photocopiers predecessors. There were many ways one could copy one's basic data. For a time, my mother used to type applications for me. I became entrenched in the job market in the 1960s. This entrenchment was so very much like trenchwarfare back in that Great War of 1914 to 1918--when millions died, were simply mowed down on the European continent in a process whose meaning we have yet to fully plumb. But, however little or much we have come to understand the meaning and significance of WW1, we--my generation--have come to experience a new warfare. As Henry Miller, one of the first to get away with using the "F" word in his trilogy: Sexus, Nexus and Plexus, expressed back in 1941 the new warfare of my generation: "a war far more terrible than the destruction" of the first two wars, the first two phases, with fires that "will rage until the very foundations of this present world crumble." It is not my intention to document any of these three phases of the destructive calamity that visited humankind in the century I have just left, for this documentation has been done in intimate detail elsewhere, both visually, orally and in print. I do not document but I frequently refer to these three phases. I have different purposes here than mere historical documentation. My job application process was clearly, at least as I look back over half a century of the process, part of that third war. Applying for jobs as extensively as I did in the days before the email and the internet came on board in the early 1990s, became an activity, for me,
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that sometimes resembling a dry-wretch. Four to five thousand job applications from 1957 to 2007 is a lot of applications! At least since the mid-1990s, a few clicks of ones personal electronic-computer system and some aspect of lifes game could go on or could come to a quick end over a set of wires under the ground, the electronic world of cyberspace. During that half-century of job-hunting years I applied, as I say, for some four to five thousand jobs, an average of two a week for each of all those years! This is a guesstimation, of course, as accurate a guesstimation as I can calculate for this fifty year period. The great bulk, 99.9% of those thousands of letters involved in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, exhausting and frustrating process, I did not keep. I did keep a small handful of them, perhaps half a dozen of all those letters, in a file in my Letters: Section VII, Sub-Section X, a part of my autobiographical work which is now entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs. This autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs goes for 2600 pages in five volumes and, due to its length, will not likely be read while I occupy space on this mortal coil. Much of my autobiography, portions of it, are now found, though, on the internet at a multitude of sites where in nano-micro-seconds anyone can find portions of my writing in addition to my autobiography or my resume. I am known in a multitude of microcosms, microworlds, miniworlds, where neither name nor fame can reach me, and where all the problems that go with any degree of celebrity status in our fame-hungry world will pass me by into cyberspace, into an electronic ether. Given the thousands of hours over so many years devoted to the jobhunting process; given the importance of this key to my venture across two continents, two marriages, with at least two personalities being the bipolar person that I am; given that this new style of pioneering, voyaging-via-employment, venture in our time has been at the core of my life with so much that has radiated around this core; given the amount of paper produced, the amount of energy expended and the amount of money earned and spent in this great exercise of survival; given the amount of writing done in the context of those various jobs, some of this employment-related correspondence seemed to warrant a corner in the written story of my life. It seemed appropriate, at least it was my desire as I recently entered the years when I no longer applied for jobs, to write this short statement(not short enough, I can hear the say) fitting all those thousands of unkept resumes and job-applications into a larger context as well as all those letters, emails and internet posts written in connection with trying to
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make connections with others, into some larger framework of action and meaning. For those who would like to read more on this theme, I invite them to go to the internet site: Bahai Library Online>Secondary Source Material>Personal Letters>The Letters of RonPrice: 1957-2007. If such readers prefer, they can simple google: Ron Price Letters and more of this story will become available with only a few clicks. Updated on: 1/1/09 3000 Words Writing in a different vein, making comparisons and contrasts between my letters and those of other writers could occupy a book if I so desired. But I shall be brief here. I shall make some remarks about Robert Frosts letters, writing as he was at the beginning of the evolution of Bahai administration in the USA. Randall Jarrell says that Robert Frosts letters unmask him at least partially. They also show that his life was as unusual as his poetry. Im not so sure that is true of me and my life. It is very hard to judge your own work and your life. Jarrell also says that Frost was very concerned to know what others thought of his work and whether he was any good.1 This subject of the reactions of others to my work, particularly my poetry, also interests me, but I know that this is always an unknown land filled with so many different reactions from total indifference to great enthusiasm. I must leave the evaluation of my letters to future readers. For I cant imagine any interest being shown in my letters except perhaps when I am so old as not to care a jot or a tittle what people think and that will, of course, require the rapid evolution of the Bahai system in society. And that is very difficult to gauage in the decades ahead, say, up to 2044 when I will be 100 years of age and the Bahai Era two centuries old. Now that I have passed out of the shadow of decades of manicdepression, or the bi-polar tendency as it is now called, thanks to two medications: lithium carbonate and fluvoxamine; now that I have passed out of the shadow of a working-meetings-talk-and-listen week of 50 to 60 hours, there is an emotional steadiness to my everyday experience that generates, that provides, a subtle and a quiet exquisiteness that augers well for the years ahead and for the writing program that I am presently embarked upon. Even at my weakest and most exhausting moments which in the past were often filled with the wishes of thanatos, the depths of depression can not be visited. It is as if there is a wall of emotional protection that wont let my spirit descend into the depths, even though death is sometimes wished for late at night, from midnight to dawn, out of a certain tedium vitae and a complex of factors Im not sure I fully understand myself. William Todd Schultz, in his analysis of the life of
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Ludwig Wittgenstein, wrote that wishing to die can connote a wish to be rid of the superegos tormenting presence. It can be paired with an uncompromising sense of duty. The lacuna of death is actually preferred to the anguish of living under the scrutiny of an endlessly demanding internal judge. There is some of this in my experience of thanatos but, after more than forty years of experiencing this feeling of wishing to die, I think it has more to do with my chemistry than psychology and more to do with the id than the superego. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine what really happened in life, as distinct from simply what the evidence obliges me to believe. What is known in ones life or in history is never fixed, finished or independent. Our life, like history itself, is created, revived, re-enacted, re-presented again and again in our minds eye. All autobiographers can do, or their fathers the historians, is to shape the rudimentary collection of ideas about the multi-coloured and multi-layered narrative of life into an intelligible idiom. Some of the events are understood better than when they happened, when they were lived, and some are not. Some are completely forgotten and some one goes over in ones mind ad nauseam. Some become part of the great mystery that is life and some become part of the great foam and chaff that disappears on the shore of the sea. Some of my life can fit into the model, the framework, I give to it. Some can not be fitted into any pattern, any grand design or sweeping theme, no matter how I chop and analyse the experiences. Whatever unity and pattern there is, I must construct myself; it is I who confer any novel coherence onto the whole, any shifts of direction in lifes expression, any understanding on the changes and chances of the world; it is I who will write about the passing day, the trivial, the necessary, the distracting bits of infill that accompany my life as the universe moves through its incredible journey through space and time. My relationship with my wife is more comradely and affectionate, more united, after years of difficulties, after nearly forty years of difficulties in two marriages. We are more accepting of each others peculiarities, shortcomings and eccentricities. There is lots of space between us as we share the solitude of life, as Rilke describes it in his Letters and there is, too, a fresh spark of delight that accompanies the familiarity. I could write extensively about my wife, so important is she to this entire story. But were I to do so it would lead to prolixity. So, instead, I will write about her from time to time as the occasion arises in what has become a 2500 page book.

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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: That sacred Closet when you sweep-Entitled Memory-Select a reverential Broom-And do it silently. Twill be a Labour of surprise-Besides Identity Of other Interlocutors A probability-August the Dust of that Domain-Unchallenged--let it lie-You cannot supersede itself. But it can silence you. 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-A fairer House than Prose-More numerous for Windows-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.
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Pure autobiographies are written, wrote Friedrich Von Schlegel, by those fascinated by their own egos as was Rousseau; or by authors of a robust or adventuresome self-love as was Cellini; or by born historians and writers who regard their life as material for future historians and writers; or by pedantic minds who want to order their lives before they die and need a commentary on their life. I suppose there is some of me in each of these characterizations of the autobiographer. I might add the following caveat of the famous New York Times journalist James Reston who once said: I do not think thinking about yourself is a formula for happiness.If he is right then I am far from discovering that formula. Let me include two poems about this autobiographical process because, it seems to me, the process is as important as the content of autobiography. It may be that for some readers, my poetry and not my letters, will be more useful to their intellectual and emotional sensibilities. There may be some, too, who will be concerned about the possibilities and the impression created by a too liberal use of the effacing pencil by editors. For this laissez-faire age and all its liberal eccentricities and effusions may not last forever. My letters, with all their editorial shortcomings, of which I willingly take my full share right at the source in various ways, constitute the nearest approach to a narrative of my life if one does not have the autobiography,any biography that is in time produced, and my poetry. The following two prose-poems provide a context for some of this letterwriting: -----------------HONEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A POETIC CONTEXT FOR LETTERS 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 circumlocutions to be easily encapsulated in a newspaper or television
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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 Can we have a dialogue with all that is and would be? Can we enjoy a special happiness in the energy of contemplation, honoured as we are with the two most luminous lights in either world? Can we work with this structure and this Plan. travelling as we do or staying put in this one place? Two great tendencies seem to fill the mind: mystery and analysis before the ever-varying splendour and the embellishment of grace from age to age. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FEVER Prices attitude to his poetry was not unlike that of Sylvia Plaths. 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 Prices 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 Plaths 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
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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, in the natural world, self-conscious,< uneasy, an unreal relation to the grass, better to withdraw, you thought, and did, right out of it into oblivion.1 Ive earned my place, especially now, after all these years; theres a sacredness here and in the grass; theres a glory in this day, the day in which the fragrances of mercy have been wafted over all things2 and there is the in-dwelling God to counter the scorn, contempt, bitterness and cynicism that fills the space and time of so many of the spaces of modern life. Part of the entire stream, the river of life; part of a global sanctification, far from any emotional cul-de-sac, any bell jar, close to truths irrefutable and exciting drama, but far, far from the Inaccessible, the Unsearchable, the Incomprehensible: no man can sing that which he understandeth not.3 I belong here, Sylvia, in this incredible universe. I was just getting launched when you were bowing out; youd been trying to bow out since 19534 when Id just breathed the first words and the Kingdom of God on earth had begun in all its glorious unobtrusiveness. 1 Sylvia Plaths suicide in 1962 2 Bahaullah, Tablet of Carmel. 3 Bahaullah, Bahai Prayers, p.121.
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4 Plaths first attempt at suicide was in 1953. --------------------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. Carlyle writes eloquently concerning the value of letters, the careful preservation of them, the authentic presentation of them and an adequate elucidation of them by future critics. In this age of speed, of the email, of the burgeoning of communication in all its forms, I hesitate to wax enthusiastic about the value of letters. Instead I simply leave them for a future generation and wait to see what those mysterious dispensations of Providence will bring. So much of life is waiting. Indeed, as one definition of faith I always liked put it: faith is the patience to wait. For a perspective on this theme of faith I conclude this chapter with a letter and a poem, one of the few poems I have written thanks to Emily Dickinson which I feel has been successful. She was a great letter-writer, a great sufferer and an enigmatic person which, in the end, I think we all are. ANGELS The unseen heroism of private suffering surpasses that to be found on any visible battlefield...the lonely souls unnoticed though agonized struggle with itself....the struggle for higher life within the least believer partakes of the same basic ingredients as the most heroic....The ordinary self must respond to the dull pain at the heart of its present existence. -With thanks to Benjamin Lease and Geoffrey Nash in Emily Dickinsons Readings of Men and Books, MacMillan, London, 1990, p.69 and The Heroic Soul and the Ordinary Self Bahai Studies, Vol.10, p.28 and 25, respectively. Success is counted sweetest when life has given all, even if in bits and pieces amidst its ever-present call. A nectar goes right into the marrow of the bone
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as if destroying cancer in the centre of ones home. There is an outer victory; tis measured every day, tho so frequently its defeat that faces us when we pray. Then there is whats inner; few can define its charms, slowly distant strains of triumph burst free of all alarms. All those many losses on all those battlefields proceed this plumed procession, a rank of angels heals. 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-Bah 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 Here is a letter, the penultimate letter to those colleagues I worked with in the teaching profession in Perth sent eighteen months after I left the classroom and at the start of my fortieth year of pioneering, written from Tasmania where I began the years of my retirement. 8 September 2000 It has been nearly a year since I wrote to you folks at the Thornlie Campus of the SEMC of Tafe but, since I have been thinking recently of the place where I spent more than ten years teaching, I felt like writing. John Bailey, now a retired Tafe teacher, writes occasionally, as do several of the Bahais and others that Chris and I got to know in Perth. Sometimes we get a phone call and, on one occasion, a visit from a student. So we keep in touch in one way or another. Most emails and letters end, though, within the first few years after moving from a town or city. Such are the perils of living in two dozen towns over your adult life.
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There was, though, one chap I wrote to for a dozen years from 1980 to 1992 and we never even met. He was a poet who lived in Israel at the time and passed away in his early sixties, in 1993. 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! Im 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 dont 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 dont 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 Bahais of Launceston; and there are activities in the Bahai 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
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the day. Things are warming up now in the early days of spring, but wont 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 wifes 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 do not miss teaching, although I enjoyed it immensely for most of the time I was in Perth. I get my kicks from writing and reading, a lot of little things, and the slower pace of life. I think one needs to get some intellectual/psychological/emotional sub- stitute for whatever one gets from the teaching profession, if one is not to hanker after it when its gone. Of course, we are all different and must work out our own game plan, so to speak. I have been thinking of Thornlie Tafe, where I spent ten pretty intense years, in the last week or so when Ive 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; Id 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 cant 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
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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. In the foreword to a collection of the letters of poet Robert Frost, Louis Untermeyer wrote that Frosts letters provided a portrait of a man and his mind and a gradually unfolding and ungarded autobiography. The same could be said of the collection of my own letters and the thousands of pages found therein. There are vivid pictures of character and personality and glimpses into life, art and the meaning of the Bah experience over several epochs found in these letters. But whether a future reader can find me in my art, my letters, is questionable. Freud did not think it was possible and an able novelist like Henry James challenged his future biographers to find him in his art, his novels and his letters and in his many moods. How important it is to be able to find and isolate, explore and connect, a person and his community in these epochs is a question that will or will not have significance in the decades and centuries to come. As epoch followed epoch, first the third epoch, then the fourth and finally the fifth, as this autobiography finally found its form, western culture became increasingly complex, although there were strong currents of conformity, perhaps as there always had been and as there always would be for the social animal who was man. I like to think, although it is difficult for me to measure, that there was a gradual evolution in my personal letter writing style, evidence of a search for delicacies of feeling and the intricacies and subtleties of human beings in community. This was true of the letters of Henry James, wrote Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James. I find it difficult to discern the quality of my own letters but, as the outward battle of life, a battle that I had been engaged with at least since the start of my pioneering experience in 1962, lost its fire and its heat as the the millennium turned its corner, as I went on new
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medications for my bipolar disorder and as I did not have to deal with the pressures of job and community life, my interior world felt vivified and redeemed. The former enthusiastic temper of espousal that I poured into people and relationships sometimes with that rapturousness of life that James writes about and sometimes with all sorts of other emotional stuff, I came to pour into the intellectual side of life by the year 2000 Some biographers and autobiographers regard a judicious selection of letters as the most useful and succinct aid to their task that there is. Im not sure if that is the case, although it may be true for some people. Benjamin Franklin, for example, lived much more than he had time to write the story that he was perpetually telling. This is not to say that he did not accomplish much of his mission in life without using persistent, practical prose as his primary tool. As he once said: If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing about. It seems to me quite impossible to write all of life, certainly all of mine, into the shape and form of a series of letters, no matter how numerous. The electronic age has made our communications more audible and therefore, in some ways, more ephemeral and so I must confess to some skepticism regarding the future of my letters or, indeed, the future of the vast majority of letters that have been written in this new age of the print and electronic media that has emerged in the first century of the Formative Age.(1921-2021). At the same time, I am forced to admit that I have just lived through one of the most enriching periods in the history of the Bah Faith and who knows, who can measure and define, the nature and extent of ones achievements? We, into whose hands, as Shoghi Effendi once wrote, so precious a heritage has been entrusted have helped in our own small ways to advance the Cause toward its high destiny in this the greatest drama in the worlds spiritual history. 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
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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 historys 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 mention the ordinary man, in closing this section on letters, because underpinning this autobiography is the view that ordinary people doing ordinary things within the context of the Baha community can and do play an important part in contemporary history, unbeknownst to the majority of humankind. Letter-writing is just part of this ordinariness; indeed, ordinariness is enshrined in the published collections of letters. This ordinariness makes for what is for most people tedious reading. Contemporary readers avoid collections of letters. This essay does not try to resurrect the letter from its insignificant place in the lives of pioneers around the world. That would require a much greater force than this simple essay. But, it seems to me, I have provided a context for the 5000 letters, emails and postings on the internet. The letters that I have written, it is my considered opinion, will remain in the dust-bin of history unread by the great majority of humankind. Given the burgeoning quantity of print human beings are and will be faced with in their lives I think that

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conclusion I have come to here is a reasonable one. Time, of course, will tell. Id like to offer the following light note on a type of email I have received in abundance in the last two decades. I have entitled this brief essay: A SUB-GENRE OF EMAILS and it was sent to the many people who wrote to me by email as the twentieth century came to a close. 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. Funwisdein, the editor mentioned in the following paragraph, in the end, rejected my contribution to his book, but encouraged me to try for his next collection so impressed was he with the quality of the short essay which follows. I trust you enjoy it, too, even if it is a little longer than my normal missives. And, if you dont enjoy it, I hope you at least tolerate its presence. For we must all, in and out of the world of emails, increasingly learn to tolerate each others eccentricities, thus making the world an easier place to live in. WEE-WISDOMS AND FUNNIES: A SUB-GENRE OF THE EMAIL INDUSTRY For this essay on a sub-genre of emails over the years 1989 to 2009 see my files. -------------------------------------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 notso-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
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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 SECTION VII OF PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS 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 poets correspondence is the raw material of biography: the poets first hand perceptions, unguarded, unpolished, and uncensored. Its 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. In the letters between some writers, there is often a persistent and passionate debate around some issue. The 450 letters written between 1953 and 1985 that are collected in The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, edited by Albert Gelpi, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and Robert J. Bertholf, curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection at SUNY Buffalo are an example of such a debate. Its a huge argument, Gelpi says. It brings the correspondence to a remarkable personal as well as literary climax because these two poets, who were so
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close, who thought of themselves as anima and animus to each other, as brother and sister. Suddenly, says Gelpi, these poets found themselves having to recognize that there were actually fundamental disagreements between them about what poetry is, how the imagination works and how poetry functions in society. Thusfar, in my eight volumes of personal correspondence and many other volumes to particular institutions and individuals, there is very little of what you might call sustained debate. There is often disagreement, but the disagreement is usually dealt with in one or two letters at the most. Disagreement is rarely if ever sustained. This is not to say that there are not many areas in which my correspondents and I disagreed, but for the most part the areas which were critical were simply not discussed beyond a minimal exchange often by means of indirectness, humour and what might be called the Australian cynical beneath surface style which criticizes as it smiles with a cleverness that I have come to enjoy and appreciate more than I did on my arrival in these Antipodes. Sometimes the inferences pile up in a letter and the surface of the exchange gets broken more than desired. 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 Bahaullah, a sort of tangent to the immense quantities of correspondence contained in Bahai administrative archives. Of course, time will tell regarding the relevance of these letters in the years ahead as Bahaullahs 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.
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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 doesnt 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. By November 2004 my postings on the internet had become so extensive as to be in a category of correspondence on its own. As I have indicated, most of this internet posting I have not included here. It simply became too much to copy and file. This was true not only of the irrelevant material, some 90 to 95 per cent of the two to four hundred emails I received everyday, but even the 5 per cent that was of value. If these electronic sites become archives themselves, then one day my material can be retrieved by an assiduous researcher, if it is deemed to be of value. So it was that most of the internet material, probably ninety-five percent of it, I deleted. I have kept what I see as relevant to this ongoing collection. The other ten sections/divisions of my letters have also been added-to during this time, but each of these other sections has their own story and I do not deal with it here. It may be that all of these letters and emails may become a grey residue, as I said above, at a local tip, freeing my executors from the burden of what to do with all the paper. And it may be that the contents here will be a useful archive for a Cause that has
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gone from strength to strength and, as one writer put it several decades ago, will come to conquer the world by storm. Ron Price November 15 2004 1 This introduction has been written and revised half a dozen times since the inception of this volume 9 fifteen months ago. SECTION VII OF PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS SECTION/DIVISION 1: INTRODUCTION VOL 9 OF PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE After twenty-two years of a vague, largely unconscious and undirected process of letter collection, 1960 to 1982, there began an intense, directed letter collecting activity that has continued for a further twenty-two years, 1982 to 2004. 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 mothers letters going back an additional seven years to November 1960. I had been a member of the Bahai Faith for 13 to 14 months at the time of the first letter in my Mothers 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 mothers 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. With the small handful of letters that I noticed recently written to my mother by others going back to November 1960 and which can be found in Volume 1 of this larger collection of correspondence, this body of letter-writing could be said to go back 44 years(1960-2004). The great bulk of this correspondence, though, goes back only twenty-two years to the time Chris, Dan and I moved north of Capricorn. There is very little in the collection before 1982 and even less before 1974, some thirty years ago now. Those first 15 years(1967-1982) of letters, or 22 if one includes my mothers letters, barely made a dint in the epistolary world. As I say, it was not until the middle years of the Seven Year Plan(1979-1986), our going north of Capricorn in 1982, that I began making any conscious effort to seriously collect my incoming and outgoing letters.
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So much for outlining the general time-frame for these letters. The vast majority of Bahais 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 poets correspondence is the raw material of biography: the poets first-hand perceptions, unguarded, unpolished, and uncensored. Its 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 Bahaullah 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, Im sure I kept material that would be of no use

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to anyone. On the other hand Im 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. An ordinary politician, indeed any person in the public eye or in some bureaucratic position that had to deal with community concerns often resorted necessarily to scribbling a code for the appropriate form-letter response that would go out from some organizational word-factory. Many other people I have known personally use the telephone to achieve whatever intimacy is required. As the years went on into my fifties and sixties I avoided the telephone and, except in my place of employment, I rarely resorted to the use of form-letters.(5) President Reagan, the man who became known as The Great Communicator, thought it was his duty to write individually to everyone who wrote to him and so, in the process, wrote some 10,000 letters in his lifetime. The only person I have known like this in Australia was Philip Adams. I am not in their league but, when I did write a letter, I felt as Reagan did, that I was writing to a
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friend. I also like to think that my letters had some of the quality of those of Phillip Adams: a succinct and pithy content of thought and argument. Im 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 Bahai 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 Bahai 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 mothers knee more than half a century ago. Id like to think that readers will also enjoy what is a shrewd mix of practicality with ideological conviction. Thats what Id 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. Perhaps one of the many mentors who have influenced my writing, Alistair Cooke, who wrote in conversation and spoke in prose and who perfected the journalism of personal witness,(6) has left his mark on my letters. I like to think so. His sentences never seem to be dull; he never loses touch with narrative, with the writer as storyteller, with the importance of context and history. I dont think I have ever been in his league nor will I ever acquire his skills. I have often felt my writing dull. Ones own percpetions of the quality of ones work is often no measure of its real worth. Ernest Hemmingway also felt his letters dull and stupid and they were far from that. Writers like Cooke and Hemmingway, among others, were instrumental in providing me with a set of goals in my letter writing. I leave it to readers to assess whether, like Cooke, my letters are both diary and
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testament in addition to being analysis and commentary. As the years went on, though, I was like Hemingway, a confirmed, habitual and even compulsive correspondent. Letter writing increasingly became a necessity. Unlike Hemingway, my letters did not detract from my potential novel writing. They may have kept me from writing poetry or essays. My epistolary effervescence, which began in the 1980s, was in some ways a form of relaxation to warm up my brain, a form of play in a way, an antidote to other more serious concentrations. Unlike Hemingway, too, I keep one eye on posterity when I write; Hemingway felt it would take care of itself.(7) ______________________________FOOTNOTES_________________ 1 I say arguably because Im not sure exactly when my mother first began her involvement with the Bahai Faith in 1953/4. 2 Kevin Larimer, First-Class Mail: A Poets Letters, Poets and Writers Magazine, 3 Roger White, Another Song Another Season, George Ronald, Oxford, 1979, p.111. 4 Reagan: A Life in Letters, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, 2004. 5 Except of course at Christmas and the Ayyam-i-Ha/Naw-Ruz period when I regularly used a form letter. 6 Alistair Cooke: Letter From America: 1946-2004, Allen Lane, Camberwell,, Victoria, 2004, p.xvi. 7 Ernest Hemingway: Selected letters: 1917-1961, Carlos Baker, editor, Charles Scribners Songs,NY, 1981, pp.ix-x. 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 mans narrative and a womans 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.
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This collection of letters and its many sub-categories is part of the authors effort to compensate for the tendency of his fellow Bahais throughout the history of their Faith not to leave an account of their lives, their times, their experiences, as Moojan Momen has made so clear in his History of the Babi-Bahai Religions: 1844-1944. This epistolary narrative is yet one more attempt, along with the other several genres by this writer, to provide a prose-poetry mix of sensory and intellectual impressions to try to capture the texture of a life, however ineffably rich and temporarily fleeting.-Ron Price with thanks to Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, editor, Writing the Female Voice: Essays in Epistolary Literature, Pinter Publishers, London, 1989. I have written introductions to many of the above thirty-five volumes to set a context for the guesstimated correspondence of 3000 letters. One day I may include these introductions here, but it is unlikely. For this third edition of my Web Page in May 2003, though, the above outline and comment, in addition to the following two brief essays, will suffice to provide a framework for an activity that has occupied many hours of writing during my pioneering life. May 2003 MORE THOUGHTS ON MY COLLECTION OF LETTERS By the year 2003, thirty-five years after the first letter arrived in my collection, 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 Bah 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. Lawrences letters(Vol. 1: 1901-1913), James T. Boulton discusses the major influences on Lawrences life. These influences are reflected in his letters. Indeed, as Aldous Huxley comments, Lawrences 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
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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 Bah in Greenland. It is difficult to measure the affect of these people on my development. And one might add, so what? Who cares? Whats the point? In the short term and, as I write these words, there appears to be little point. The relevance, if there is any, is tied up with the progress and advancement of the Bah Faith in the 21st and succeeding centuries. D.H. Lawrence is now famous and so his letters became important. The relevance of this collection lies in the hands, or the arms, of the future, in the development of the Cause in this and successive centuries. In addition, the place, the part, played by and the significance given to, international pioneers in that development by future historians and analysts will also be a factor in deciding, ultimately, whether this collection will come to have any value at all. I would like to think that this exercise in collection and preservation has been worthwhile but, of course, it is impossible to predict. By that future time, Im sure, this issue will not be a concern to me, at least I assume that to be the case when one moves beyond the grave. My collection of letters begins first, while I was pioneering on the domestic front in northern Canada in 1967. But it was not until I arrived in Tasmania in 1974 that the body of letters begins to any significant extent. By then I had begun a serious relationship with a woman who would be my second wife, Christine Sheldrick. After more than 30 additional years since then this collection does paint my life in a way no other body of my writing does. I am not trying to cultivate an image in these letters as some letter writers have done in the past. Reading about D.H. Lawrences letters reminded me of the nature and value of an epistolary portrait, especially a portrait containing expressive vividness, energy and imaginative resourcefulness. James Boulton says these were qualities in Lawrences letters. I would like to guarantee readers that these qualities were present in my letters. But I could hardly make such a claim
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and retain any claim to humility. Humility is a quality I admire and I do not want to lose all possibility of laying claim to possessing it. Indeed, the history of the letter is the history of portraits and relationships, communities of sentiment and life stories.(1) Would this collection be of any use to the Bah community a century from now? Would there be any value in this literary memorabilia, in these warm and unpolished thoughts from the brain Reading about Katherine Mansfields letters I came across a remark by Lytton Strackey. He said that great letter writers write constantly, with recurring zest. One of the few famous writers in the twentieth century to say praiseworthy things about the Bah Faith, Henry Miller, preferred writing long letters to friends to any other kind of writing. But who reads collections of his letters today? Special interest groups in the community? The years 1975 to 2000 saw a vast production of my letters, but I am not so sure this production will continue. Time will tell of course. Strackey points out that a fascinating correspondence results from the accumulated effect of a slow, gradual, day-to-day development, from a long leisurely unfolding of a character and a life. I like this idea, but it remains to be seen just how long this life, this collection will be. 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. I have enjoyed two particular collections of letters outside of Bah literature: the letters of Rainer Maria Rilke and those of John Keats. Both these men were poets. Both say a great deal about writing poetry. I have also kept two files of quotations on the subject of letter writing and collections of letters from over three dozen writers. While all of this has been useful to me, I am quite unsure what use my own letters will be to others either now or in the future, beyond, of course, their immediate use and function at the time of writing. It is interesting that, as yet, the now extensive body of Bah literature and commentary has no collection of letters to enrich the collection, outside those of the central figures of course. Perhaps such collections will be part of a future phase of the intellectual development of this tenth stage of history, but in the meantime, beofre and if such collections are made, I can take pleasure,
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from time to time when ideas flow fast and abundantly, when I am unable to sleep, when I am alone, rested and relaxed, in a certain firing of the soul through these letters. 1 Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe: 1500-1850, Cambridge UP, 1999.---Written 1996-2003.

B.3 Published-Unpublished Works:

SECTION IV OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Characters/Biographies-24 short sketches INTRODUCTION Twenty-five years ago now, in 1981, I took my first excursions into writing biography. Those excursions became part of, first, The History of the Bahai Faith in Tasmania: 1924-80 and; second, The History of the Baha'i Faith in the Northern Territory: 1947-1997. The short biographies I wrote in the 1980s and 1990s are, for the most part, now in the archives of the Baha'i Council of Tasmania and the NT. Some of these short sketches of human personality are in this file, a file which has increased in size since it was first created in the early 1990s. Some are on the internet at bahai-library.org. They have all become part of a larger work Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Section IV. But they will not be included here in this autobiography which I am posting on the internet since the people are, for the most part, still living. In addition, the notes in this file on the subject of biography, which I began to collect thirteen years ago in 1993, have begun to assume a far greater extent, a wider ambit than was initially planned due to the plentiful resources available on the Internet. Perhaps, in time, I may write more biographical material, hopefully material in greater depth of expression than I have done thusfar and hopefully from a more fertile base than I have been able to discover in my first attempts in the 1980s and the 1990s. Whatever biographies I write, they will be part of Section IV of my larger work, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. This biography file has developed into a more substantial resource in recent years and a brief examination of the table of contents will show the range of relevant sub-topics. This biographical interest provides some balance, although I must confess very little so far, to all the autobiographical material I have collected in other
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files and any impression of my narcissistic tendencies which critics may be inclined to dwell upon. The material here I hope will prove useful in my efforts to write biographies in the years ahead as part of Section IV of my autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Ron Price March 3rd 2006 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------SECTION V Published Essays-Volumes 1-4 VOLUME 1(1977-1993) This Volume VOLUME 2(1983-1986) Katherine Parts 1&2 VOLUME 3(1993-2003) VOLUME 4(2004-2009) These four volumes make up Section V of a larger work, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. They contain, for the most part, the writings I have been able to publish during the forty-seven years of my pioneering experience, 1962-2009. The first 16 years of that experience(1962-1978) contained some published writing, but I have not been able to obtain copies of it for this collection. In the main, that published work, was essentially short pieces in College of Advanced Education newsletters and magazines from 1974 to 1978 and other magazines and literature of educational institutions I was associated with as far back as my days at McMaster University from 1963 to 1966. In the 1980s and 1990s much more work was published and that work is found in volumes 1-3. In the early years of the new millennium, 2004 to 2009, a veritable explosion of published work occurred on the Internet, too much work to include it all here. It was an explosion that had its earliest stages as part of Volume 3, but it really took off in Volume 4. After 47 years in the pioneering field, I often wonder what will happen to all these essays, essays thrown into these files somewhat haphazardly and kept in some arrangement as best I can. The days of publication have come on with great force in the last three or four years and often, it seems, the whole idea of keeping a collection of published essays rings of
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a waste of time. The historical significance of the Cause pushes me in the direction of keeping archival material of this nature. If, in the end, the exercise has no value. Well, so be it! -----------------------------------------------------------------------INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 2 OF MY PUBLISHED WRITINGS More than twenty years ago the essays in this collection, Volume 2 of my published essays, appeared in the newspapers of a small town in the Northern Territory of Australia. I had pioneered there in July of 1982 and there I remained until March of 1986. Looking back it would appear that whatever gifts I had been given as a writer, they were first in evidence in this small town, Katherine. The articles appeared from May 1983 to March 1986. In the twenty-one years of my pioneering life before 1983, I had completed my formal education and had had fifteen years of working life behind me. My writing ability certainly had surfaced but not in any significant way and certainly not with any publications of note. A meticulous researcher may be able to find articles I placed in the two colleges of advanced education where I taught, in newspapers in Tasmania and Victoria and in Bahai magazines and archives in the period up to 1983. He may also be able to find written material I wrote of necessity as a teacher with the Education Department of South Australia or even at university in Canada or with the Education Departments of the NWT or in Ontario. But I think now that such a research would have little success. Samuel Johnson wrote, thirty years before he died, that time, which puts an end to human pleasures and sorrows, has likewise concluded the labours of this Rambler.20 So many of Johnsons labours involved writing. Twenty years after writing these essays, time has yet to put an end of my literary labours. I really was just making my start twenty years ago. Those who find my autobiography, my poetry, my notes and efforts at a novel of little interest, may enjoy some of these essays. Some argue that the essay is bot another form of autobiography and I think there is some truth in this. In the first century of the Formative Age(1921-2021) it was difficult getting explicitly Bahai material in the print and electronic media. Some individuals were successful. These essays are evidence of one small
Bertrand Bronson, editor, Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, Poems, Selected Prose, third edition, Holt, Rinehardt and Winston, NY, 1952, pp.164-168.
20

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success, although for the most part the essays do not deal explicitly with Bahai content. Indirection was usually the only way to get into the media at all, unless the content had something to do with Iran or a Bahai building. As the twenty years from 1986 to 2006 continued apace I found the experience American writer Henry James had became increasingly my own. The distinction between living, writing and reading, wrote Tony Tanner in his analysis of the life of Henry James, were beginning to become blurred.21 James saturated himself with and immersed himself in his won writing. Such had certainly become the case with me by 2006 and Katherine was a critical phase in this development. A job, a family, Bahai community activity kept me from total immersion until the turn of the millennium. Im not sure I could claim James sacrificial vicariousness or the heroic proportions found in some of the literary achievements of many of the writers and scholars of history, but I felt comfortable with the notion of an epic work, a magnum opus, an extensive literary output which, in fact, my writing had become twenty years after leaving this small town on the edge of the back of beyond in Australia. Some of these essays deal with why I write and I have included some of the articles by Harold Ross, Shiva Naipaul and Norman Podhoretz since they contain some useful perspectives that I have emulated. In addition, in the last twenty years, it is clear that the theme of writing, why I write and what writing means to me has been an ongoing one, one that perhaps got its start in Katherine in the Northern Territory. I have placed the articles by these influential essayists in section three of part one of this collection. I had just begun in the mid-1990s, when I wrote my first introduction to these essays, my study of the genre of autobiography and James Olneys words rang true to me as I wrote that first introduction in December 1996: autobiography can advanced our understanding of the question how shall I live?22 These essays, Im sure, play a small part in this direction. Ron Price April 18th 2006 Tony Tanner, Henry James and the Art of Fiction, University of Georgia Press, London, 1995, p.29.
21

James Olney, Metaphor of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography, Princeton UP, 1972, p.xi.
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VOLUME 5: Statement on Internet Publishing: This article is an update on the accounts I gave(10/04 and 9/06) for the Australian Bahai summarizing my experience on the internet. It is experience on the internet aimed at teaching and consolidation activities. I write this article due to the richness and the extent of this teaching activity, activity far beyond my expectations when I began 10 years ago. These have been ten years since I took an early retirement from full-time work as a teacher in a Tafe college in Perth. After fifty years of high sociability, of what in retrospect felt like half a century(1949-1999) of endless talking and listening, I had a personal need for solitude. I also had a need to write. One could not engage in the extent of internet writing and interaction with others that I do without a desire to write. It also helps to have teaching the Cause as the dominating passion of ones life. Discouragement can easily set in when writing on the internet as it does in teaching activities off the internet. One always needs to keep searching for a niche to focus ones teaching initiatives. This is true both on and off the internet. Many retirees play golf or take-up lawn-bowling; some pursue an active interest in a hobby; others do more gardening than ever before, become involved in one or more of the multitude of volunteer organizations, watch more TV or get depressed from lack of meaningful activity. Some Bahais I have known do travel teaching, pioneer to some far-off place or just go down the road to a new locality. Indeed, there is now emerging what might be seen as a second life, a retirement profile, since life expectancy is increasing every year. The forty years of a working life(20-60) can now be followed by forty years of retirement, if one lasts that long(60-100) and jojns the ranks of the centenarians on the planet. If one wants to focus on something beside a job, family life and hobbies in which to centre ones daily timeframe, there is a world of options now in the 21st century. So it was at the age of 55, when I took an early retirement, I had a strong need to both write and free myself from that extensive talking and listening scene that had characterized my life for decades. Playing with words had been a lifetime activity. It was how I got my qualifications, spent my career, paid the bills and provided the life-blood, the bed-rock of my familys material needs and my financial contributions to the Cause. After nearly five decades of trying to teach the Cause to those among my contemporaries with little overt success, I thought I might have more success with the written word as well as the spoken word. My wife and I took a sea-change, a term that early retirement in a quiet place
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has come to be called in recent years. Tasmania seemed to be a good place since it was also where my wife grew up. I now have several hundred thousand readers engaged in parts of my internet tapestry, my literary product, my creation, my immense pile of words across this world wide web. This amazing technical facility, this interlocking network across the planet, has made this literary success possible. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft cover publishers, where it had been without success when I was employed full time as a teacher, lecturer, adult educator and casual/volunteer teacher from 1981 to 2001, these results would never have been achieved. And the teaching value to a Bahai who had been engaged for decades in this often, if not always, difficult art of conveying the message to others, was immense and rewarding. I have been asked how I have come to have so many readers at my website and on this tapestry of writing I have created across the internet. My tapestry of writing is just another form of published writing in addition to the traditional forms in the hands of publishers that had been my aim for decades. This tapestry might more accurately be described as a jig-saw puzzle of writing that would take publishers some months to locate, if they wanted to collate all the pieces of this literary effort into one epic work, one large jig-saw puzzle for sale in book shops. The literally hundreds of thousands of readers I have at locations on this tapestry of prose and poetry, a tapestry I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft across the internet, are found at over 4000 websites where I have registered: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views. They are sites to place essays, articles, books, ebooks, poems and other genres of writing. I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed my literary products there and engaged in discussions with literally thousands of people, little by little and day by day. I enjoy these results without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success. When one talks one likes to be listened to and when one writes one likes to have readers. It is almost impossible, though, to carry literary torches, indeed, literary tools of any kind, as I do through internet crowds or in the traditional hard and soft-cover forms, without running into some difficulties. My postings singe the beards and the emotional networks of some readers and my own occasionally. Such are the perils of dialogue, of apologetics, of writing, of posting, indeed, I might add, of living. Much of writing and dialogue in any field of thought derives from the experience each of us has of: (a) an intimate or not-so-intimate sharing of
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views in some serendipitous fashion and (b) what seems like a fundamental harmony or dissonance between what each of us thinks and what some other person thinks. The bridge of dialogue can take one into rich rivers of discourse or into gulfs over the valleys of life that are unbridgeable. When the latter is the case and when a site is troubled by my posts, I usually bow out for I have not come to a site to engage in conflict, to espouse an aggressive proselytism but, rather, to stimulate thought and, as I say, share views. Sometimes I am banned from a site before I have a chance to bow out for I have flouted the conventions of that site in some way or another. As in daily life one can say too much or too little; one can be too abrasive or too evasive; too judgemental or too non-committal. Internet communities are like micronations. Some are not governed at all; a sort of literary chaos reigns. The posts and images at these sites represent the worst features of contemporary literary society: loud, crass, illiterate and completely devoid of what you might call an etiquette of expression. Others are governed by tyrannical rule. This tyranny often leads to a whimsical enforcement of arbitrary rules and law. Personally and emotionally induced muscle flexing operates at such sites in the hands of moderators, administrators and site entrepreneurs. Still other site organizers try to hit a middle ground between these two extremes. Readers will find at my internet site(http://www.users.on.net/~ronprice/) a large body of poetry and prose spread over some 1800 pages and 450,000 words. One of the definitions of a book is: 300 pages and 75,000 words. This gives readers at my site the equivalent of six books. This material was written either from my home in George Town in northeast Tasmania from 1999 to 2008 or while living in Belmont, a suburb of metropolitan Perth in Western Australia from 1995 to 1999 in my final years as a full-time teacher, lecturer and member of a large Bahai community. For many this is far too much print and on seeing it, intellectual indigestion sets in and readers run for cover. At Bahai Library Online, only one of the myriad of sites where I post my work some 100,000 clicks have been registered at my writing. After trying to write novels and science-fiction unsuccessfully for another twenty years for a popular but not academic market from 1983 to 2002, I published a book on the poetry of a Canadian, Roger White. A little of that book is found at my website. Anyone wanting to read that book can download its entire 300 pages at: http://bahai-library.org/books/white. After working on my memoirs or autobiography from 1984 to 2003, yet
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another twenty year block of time, I finally came up with an autobiographical context and style I was happy with and readers can access some of this 2600 page, 5 volume work, on my webpage. They can also go to eBookMall or Lulu.com and download various parts of that work in the form of what are now called ebooks, that is, books in electronic form. Also included at what is now the 3rd edition of my web site are several essays, interviews, book reviews and an assortment of autobiographical and analytical material which I have included as introductions or embellishments to the forty-three categories of poetry and commentary listed on the access page of my website. The cornucopia of places on the world-wide-web where I post contains sites to place: essays and articles, books and ebooks, poems, pieces of autobiography, items of a diary and journal, dream experiences and genres of work with new names for a new age. The topics I write on and about range from: sport and entertainment, gardening, domestic and family life, poetry and literature, sociology and psychology, history and philosophy, society and culture and on and on goes the list of subjects, topics, disciplines and fields of study and interest to potential readers. I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed my literary products there and engaged in discussions with thousands of people, little by little and day by day, one by one, a few at a time and often hundreds or even thousands in one proverbial blast. This new medium has provided a milieux for teaching undreamt of in the first fifty years of my association with the Cause, 1953-2003. I trust the above summary of my experience provides a useful perspective for others to engage in this field, this very fertile field for teaching. It is a field which has been built for the world, of course, but especially for the Bahai community and its quintessential teaching function in these days of the new paradigm of growth and development. As it is often said these days, if you build it, they will come. Many things have been built in the wider society for the Bahais and, over the decades, members of the wider society have entered this new society, slowly one by one, one heart at a time as we often say these days. -------------------------------SECTION VI OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY Unpublished Essays-Volumes 1-2 ..................1979-2009 SECTION VI.1 UNPUBLISHED ESSAYS/WRITINGS VOLUME 1: 1979-2001
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION These essays, Volume 1, were first gathered together in 1996, some 17 years of mostly unpublished, but also some published, pieces. There were, of course, essays written before 1979 back as far back as 1957/8, 21 years before the first essay appearing here. Except for a small handful of pieces, none of these essays has survived here or in other collections of my writing. I continued adding essays to this collection after 1996 and, by April 2001 and the opening of the Five Year Plan, 2001-2006, I had come to need a second volume since there was no more room in the first arch-lever file. The second volume, Volume 2, contains essays for the period April 2001 to the end of the Five Year Plan, 2006-2011. A great number of the essays in this second volume were placed on the internet and I consider these in the published category. In 1979-80 I found myself unemployed for at least half of the time. After five years teaching in post-secondary education(1974-78), six years teaching in primary and secondary education(1967-1973) and ten years as a student at the start of my pre-pioneering and pioneering life(1957-1967) when I wrote or read an uncountable number of essays none of which has survived, I began writing essays that, for various reasons, I began to keep. Volume 1 of these essays(1979-2001) contains some 120 pieces. I was 35 years of age when I wrote the first piece for The Tasmanian Mail and 56 when I wrote the last piece in this file, a piece for a BahaI conference on The Creative Inspiration. Some of the pieces here did get published in the end and some essays have second copies for give-aways(B.2) A special section of unpublished essays were were in connection with publicity for Bahai buildings then under construction around the world(A.2.2) Ron Price August 20th 2006. -------------------------------Unpublished Novels-Volumes 1 to 3 ............1983-2006 INTRODUCTION TO FILE NO.1 In 1983 I began to write various forms of prose: historical fiction, short stories, autobiographical pieces, etc.(See section 1) At the end of 1983 I began to work on a novel. This file contains those earliest
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efforts and correspondence with several people who provided feedback, the last one in file number 2 being from one of my students in 1993. For eight years, until 1991, I worked on three major attempts. Two of these attempts(Teh Final Hour and Light Upon Light) and the correspondence in connection with these attempts are in this FILE/VOL. NO.1. FILE/VOL. NO.2 contains the work on one special piece The Glorious Journey, ,my last effort in 1989-90. Ron Price 30 May 2001 INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME/FILE NO.2 This file contains some two years, 1989-1990, of efforts to write a novel/science fiction piece. The result was entitled The Glorious Journey. This file is the companion piece to 'file no.1' which contains my other efforts from 1983 to 1991. File no.1 also contains some correspondence in connection with these efforts. Ron Price 30 May 2001 SECTION VIII OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY Poetry---------Booklets 1 to 61 ..................1980-2009 OUTLINE OF RON PRICES COLLECTION OF POETRY What follows is an outline of the titles of the booklets of my poetry and the dates when the poetry in these booklets was written. I have also included a brief description of where I have sent these poetry booklets. There are some six thousand five hundred poems in this collection and some two million words. Five thousand of these poems are in the Bahai World Centre Library. In these sixty-one booklets there are 28 years of poetry, 1980-2008, written after nine years on the homefront(1962-1971), nine years internationally(1971-1980) as a pioneer. During those 18 years of writing the occasional poem, I kept none. A. Booklets: This poetry is divided into several sections named after the several stages associated with the construction of the Shrine of the Bab and the beautification of the surrounding properties. These several sections of
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poetry are entitled: The Tomb's Chambers, The Arcade, The Golden Dome, The Terraces and The Mountain of God. BOOKLET NO. BOOKLET NAME WHEN WRITTEN

1. THE TOMB'S CHAMBERS: ----1987 Warm-Up: The Tombs Chambers August 1980 to 2 March

The above booklet of poetry was not sent to anyone or any group. It was kept as part of my personal juvenilia. But, after twenty-five years in the pioneer field, the following booklets of poetry were sent to the Bahai World Centre Library or some Bahai institution or community. 2. THE ARCADE 1 Warm-Up: The Arcade June 1987 to 22 August 1992

3 THE GOLDEN DOME 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Pioneering Over Three Epochs 2 Jan 1992 to 22 December 1992 Swiftly Changing Tides 4 January 1993 to 22 April 1993 The Priceless Treasury 22 April 1993 to 5 July 1993 A Yet Greater Impetus 11 July 1993 to 29 August 1993 The Darkest Hours Before the Dawn 4 Sept 1993 to 11 Nov 1993 Instruments of Redemption 12 Nov 1993 to 30 December 1993 In Ever-Greater Measure 1 January 1994 to 20 April 1994 Time Capsules 27 April 1994 to 11 September 1994 The Emergence of a Bahai 18 September 1994 to 28 November 1994 Consciousness in World Literature 11 Intensest Rendezvous 4 December 1994 to 14 December 1994 12 Soldiering On 16 December 1994 to 5 January 1995 13.1 Vista of Splendour 23 March 1995 to 4 May 1995 13.2 The Prelude 4 May 1995 to 30 May 1995 4 THE TERRACES: 14 15 16 17 18 Mysterious Forces 1 June 1995 to 29 June 1995 Apple Green 2 July 1995 to 10 September 1995 The Hunt for Ground Cover 13 Sept 1995 to 3 December 1995 Emerald Green 7 December 1995 to 23 January 1996 The Strong Room 26 January 1996 to 8 April 1996
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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 5. 44 45 46 47 48 49

Tapestry of Beauty 9 April 1996 to 30 April 1996 In Loving Memory 3 May 1996 2 June 1996 Ivy Needlepoint 6 July 1996 26 August 1996 Tender Packages 30 August 1996 to 3 November 1996 The Art of Glorification 6 November to 8 January 1997 Canadas Glorious Mission Overseas 10 Jan to 14 Feb 97 (sent to IPC of the NSA of the Bahais of Canada) A Small Contribution...Befitting Crescendo 19 Feb to 25 May 97(sent to the NSA of the Bahais of Australia) An Imperishable Record of Intn Service 26 May to 31Aug 97(sent to several LSAs in southern Ontario) At the Crest 3 September 1997 to 28 November 1997 Elegance 29 November 1997 to 4 January 1998 A View from the Roof Garden 6 January 1998 to 2 Feb 98 Lines, Curves and Concentric Circles 3 Feb 1998 to 13/4/98 Silver Green & Grey...& Flame Orange 14 April 98 to 7/8/98 As Elegant As 8 August 1998 to 9 November 1998 Panorama Roads Monumental Gates 7 Nov 98 to 10 Jan 99 Impression of a Deeper Curve 12 January 99 to 18 March 99 Cascading Down 20 March 1999 to 16 May 1999 Who Is Writing the Past? 18 May 1999 to 6 July 1999 The Field Is Indeed So Immense 29 August 1999 to 9 July 99 This Dawn and That Dawn 31 October 1999 to 31 August 99 Epic 1 November 1999 to 25 December 1999 A Celebration of Forty Years 27 Dec. 1999 to 15 March 00 A Bahai Poet of the 4th Epoch 22 March 2000 to 18 May 2000 39 19 May 2000 to 12 September 2000 Finished At last 14 September 2000 to 31 December 2000 THE MOUNTAIN OF GOD: Fifty Years from F.O.G. 30 December 2000 to 13 April 2001 (sent to the IPC of the NSA of the Baha'is of Canada) Thirty Years of International Pioneering 14 April 01 to 12 July 2001 (sent to the IPC of the NSA of the Baha'is of Canada and the NSA of the Baha'is of Australia) Forty Years of Pioneering: 62-02 13 July 2001 to 15 Nov 02 Some Poetry from the Fifth Epoch 20 Nov 2001 to 30 Jan 2002 (sent to the Baha'i Institute of Learning for WA) Out From Under the Bushel 31 January 02 to May 14 02 (sent to the Baha'i Centre for South Australia) The Fiftieth Anniversary Plus One 2 June 02 to 30 Aug 02 (sent to the Baha'i Centre for Canberra in the Australian
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50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61.

Capital Territory) Twenty Years On 7 September 2002 to 5 November 2002 (sent to the Baha'i Council of the NT) Forty Years On 6 November 2002 to 21 March 2003 (sent to the Baha'i Council of Victoria) Half Way Point in the Five Year Plan: A Poetic Note Struck 22 March 2003 to 21 October 2003 (sent to the Baha'i Council of Queensland) This Rising Vitality 19 December 2003 to 27 July 2004 (sent to the Local Spiritual Assembly of the Bahais of Burlington Ontario) Pioneers Report: In Memory of Lulu Barr 11 Aug 04 to 16/3/05 (sent to the Bahai Community of Hamilton Ontario) Pioneers Report: In Memory of Nancy Campbell, Fred & Lillian Price March 21st 2005 to July 26th 2005. (sent to the Bahai Community of Hamilton Ontario) Pioneers Report: In Memory of Jameson & Gale Bond & Dorothy Weaver 27 July 2005 to August 31st 2005 (sent to the Iqaluit/Frobisher Bay Bahai Community) In Loving Memory of George Spendlove September 2nd 2005 to December 9th 2005 (sent to the Toronto Bahai Community) The Inner Life and The Environment: A Gateway not a Carpark December 20th 2005 to April 9th 2006 (sent to the Bahai Council for Tasmania) Steeled Through Experience April 12th 06 to Nov 30 06 (sent to the NSA of the Baha'is of Canada) Bahai Gold December 6th 2006 to August 17th 2007 (sent to the Ballarat LSA) Threading Lights........of An Infinite Grace September 18th 2007 to 15 August 2008 (Given to Christine Price)

B. Some Background Information on the Booklets: The booklet entitled Warm-Up: The Tombs Chambers was not sent to the Bahai World Centre Library(BWCL). It contained some 35 poems. I kept this booklet in my study. But after 25 years in the pioneering field, this poetic inclination increased and, unable to publish my poetry in the

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secular press, I sent it out to Bahai institutions in Canada and Australia. The following paragraphs describe how and who and when and where. The next several booklets of my poetry were not given titles originally, as far as I recall; and, although they were placed in covers, they were not initially given what has become the standard format for each of my booklets of poetry, the plastic folder/cover. I eventually gave titles to all the booklets and each one is in a plastic cover in my personal collection. I hope, too, that one day the pages can be numbered, a table of contents for each booklet can be arranged and an index can be provided to cover all the poetry. This is a somewhat daunting task given the sheer quantity of material. Since there are still relatively few readers of my poetry in these years of the first century of the Formative Age, there is little need to complete such an exercise for publishing and marketing purposes. And, of course, there may never be such a need. Booklets 1 to 23 were all sent to the BWCL. Booklet 24 was sent to the International Pioneer Committee of the NSA of the Bahais of Canada in celebration of eighty years of the revelation of the Tablets of the Divine Plan and Canadas glorious mission overseas. Booklet 25 was sent to the NSA of the Bahais of Australia in celebration of the contribution of overseas pioneers from other countries to the Australian Bahai experience, the fortieth anniversary of the spiritual axis and the Guardians last letter to Australia. Booklet 26 was sent to the LSA of the Bahais of Burlington, to be shared with several LSAs in Southern Ontario, where I became a Bahai in the 1950s and enjoyed some of my initial Bahai experience in the early 1960s. I sent Booklets 27 to 43 to the BWCL. Booklet 46 celebrated forty years of my pioneering life: 1962-2002 and was presented to the Regional Bahai Council for Tasmania to celebrate its first year in office. Booklet 45 I sent to the International Pioneer Committee(IPC) of the NSA of the Bahais of Canada and the NSA of the Bahais of Australia in celebration of my thirty years of international pioneering, Booklet 44, entitled Fifty Years From F.O.G.,(an expression used in Canada for Feet-on-the-Ground.) sent in April 2001 to the IPC of the NSA of the Bahais of Canada celebrated the current fifty years of international pioneering, the current situation of international pioneers inthe-field beginning with Alan Pringle in Costa Rica who arrived there in 1951. Booklet 47 was sent to the LSA of the Bahais of Melville to celebrate the first anniversary of the opening of Western Australias new Bahai
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Centre of Learning which opened in May of 2001. Booklet 48, celebrates the first anniversary of the opening of the new Bahai Centre on Brighton Road in South Australia and Booklet 49 the opening of the Bahai Centre in Canberra and the beginning of the second half century of Bahai experience in Australias national capital. Booklet 50 was sent to the Bahai Council of the Northern Territory thanking them for including my History of the Bahai Faith in the NT: 1947 to 1997 in their newsletter Northern Lights. Booklet 51 was sent to the Bahai Council of Victoria in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the election in 1963 of the Universal House of Justice. Booklet 52 was sent to the Bahai Council of Queensland to mark the half-way point in the Five Year Plan, October 2003. Booklet 53 was sent to the Bahai community of Burlington Ontario, my Bahai community of origin, in celebration of more than forty years of pioneering experience initiated within that community. Booklet 54 was sent to the Bahai Community of Hamilton as a Report from a Pioneer and in memory of the first Bahai in Hamilton in 1939, Lulu Barr. Booklet 55 was sent to the Bahai Community of Hamilton as a Report from a Pioneer and in memory of Nancy Campbell and my parents who served on the first LSA of Dundas in 1962. Booklet 56 was sent to the Bahai community of Iqaluit in Memory of Jameson and Gale Bond and Dorothy Weaver and a celebration of a decision forty years ago to pioneer among the Eskimo/Inuit. Booklet 57 was sent to the Toronto Bahai community 37 years after I left to pioneer. Booklet 58 was sent to the Bahai Council for Tasmania in celebration of the opening of the new Bahai Centre in Hobart in 2007. Booklet 59 was sent to the NSA of the Baha'is of Canada. Booklet 60 to the LSA of the Bahais of Ballarat and Booklet 61 to my wife, Christine Price. C. Concluding Comment: The above outlines twenty-nine years of poetic activity, poetic writing, that has taken place for the most part in my second twenty-five years in the pioneering field. As I bring this up-to-date, we are half-way through another Plan, a Five Year Plan(2006-2011). I look forward to more years of writing as we head toward the completion of the first century of the Formative Age in the next thirteen years(2009-2021). I, too, will complete my own half century of pioneering in the next four years, in 2012. I hope that whoever comes across this poetry gets some pleasure and insight from the experience.--Ron Price January 2009. __________________________ SECTION IX OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
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Notebooks......300...1962-2009 INTRODUCTION TO MY NOTEBOOKS VOLUMES 1 TO 5 & 1 to 300(ca) After completing the first edition of my autobiography in May 1993, I began collecting resources on the subjects of autobiography and memoir, journals and diaries, letters and notebooks. I subsumed all of this material, this academic and literary study of these genres, under the heading Notebook. By January 2007 I had collected three arch-lever files and six two-ring binders on these subjects. I felt that the first edition(1993) of my autobiography, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, was entirely unsatisfactory. I thought that there must be more to the process of writing such a work, indeed, more to the final product which was my life than what I had then achieved back in 1993. The resources in these nine files represent, then, the efforts of the first 14 years(1993-2007) after the completion of the first edition of my autobiography to draw together a useful body of resources to enrich, to deepen and extend the original edition of that work, indeed, the original concept of autobiography as I had envisaged it back in the years 1984-6 when I took off on this literary journey. The resources in these nine volumes, as well as a host of other resources, have proved invaluable in my efforts to write the second to the fifth editions of Pioneering Over Four Epochs. This autobiography is now 2500 pages and in four volumes. It is currently being edited by Bill Washington and much of it has been put on the internet in one form or another. These nine files of Notebooks provide an overview of the more than 300 volumes/files/resource booklets that I have put together mostly since my retirement in 1999 but, to some extent, in the years since moving to Perth in 1987. There is also a little material here in these 300 volumes going back to 1956, in those first 2 or 3 years that I heard of the Baha'i Faith from my mother and a small groups of friends in Burlingotn Ontario. I use the collective term Notebooks for all this printed matter. Ron Price 1 January 2007 SECTION X.1 Memorabilia....Volumes 1-5:
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..................1908-2009 MY 'BIG BOOK' A symbol of poet Les Murray's vastly eclectic interests "the Great Book' was a large, hard-covered ledger-book which he had adapted as a scrapbook.1 Into it went postcards, newsclippings, poems he liked, cartoons, inter alia. My mother kept a similar book which was sent to me from Canada when she died in 1978. Not as large as Murray's, it contained the literary memorabilia she had collected from about 1930 to 1955. The symbol of my own eclectic interests can be found today in my study here in Tasmania. Postcards, cartoons and assorted newsclippings are virtually absent from my own "Big Book." But quotations abound in some 300 arch lever files, two-ring binders and smaller files on a host of subjects: history, philosophy, religion, literature, poetry, fiction, drama, psychology, media studies, anthropology, Greek and Roman history, various religious themes, graduate study programs, journals, novel writing attempts, biography, autobiography and much else. inter alia. -Ron Price with thanks to Peter Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Oxford UP, London, 2000, p.255. So this is my 'great book.' I've divided it into a library of files over the years. Part of my soul is there on the shelves of my study, extremely agreeable friends from everywhere in the world, past and present, always at my service; they come and go as I am pleased. Sometimes they are difficult to understand and require special effort on my part. My cares are often driven away by their vivacity. They teach me a certain fortitude. I keep each of them in a small chamber in a humble corner of my room where they and I are delighted by the happy symbiosis
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of my retirement and their presence.1 1 Plutarch, On Books. Ron Price 16 March 2002 INTRODUCTION As the final months and days of Volume 11 of Division 1 of my personal correspondence(26/11/06-26/11/07) came to an end on 26 November 2007, I began to keep the bulk of my correspondence in electronic form and not in hard copy in files. Inevitably, some incoming items did not lend themselves to electronic form, but did lend themselves to keeping. In addition, some items like introductions to various files, some emails and letters and a wide range of archival resources that: (a) did not fit in anywhere else in my system of files and (b) did not lend themselves to being kept in electronic form, but which I wanted to keep in some type of archive, I began keeping in Volume 11. I continued that practice in this volume 12 of varied resources and collected items. It has become obvious, though, with this new development of an electronic letter archive, that much material that I used to keep is no longer kept. This has been true of the very short pieces especially short emails, various items of memorabilia and other odds-and-ends whose content seemed irrelevant to keep for any future use by me or others. This file, Personal Correspondence: Volume 12, did seem to be a relevant place to keep: (a) first and further editions of introductions, (b) first and further editions of other short pieces of writing and (c) some early editions of tables of content, inter alia. The result of these additions to the letters/emails files, was a sort of hotch-potch of stuff. At a future time, I may evaluate where to go with this new development of nonepistolary material which, strictly speaking, does not belong in such a letter file. After one year in this volume 12(26/11/07-26/11/08), there appears to be room in this arch-lever file for at least another year of letters, emails and more of this pot-pourri of resources that seem to possess some archival relevance. -Ron Price, 30/10/08. A CONTRIBUTION TO THE BAHAI COMMUNITY ARCHIVES Over the last three-quarters of a century an explosion of archival material has erupted for the would-be historian of the future. With each passing year the eruption, the explosion, becomes increasingly difficult to deal
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with, overflowing as it does the bounds of our capacity to cope with the effusions. When this great mountain of material is classified and the student begins to focus on the archival body relevant to his own interests and needs, some proportion and framework emerges from the chaos and prolixity of it all. The historian and social analyst must tease both sense and nonsense from all the loose ends, fragments, contradictions and observations, eruptions and explosions that are found in archives. The student of the emerging world Order of Bahaullah has seen, especially in the last forty years, since the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth in 1953, the beginning of that ninth stage of history as the Guardian called the Ten Year Crusade, thousands of archives emerging in local Bahai communities around the world. They offer our knowledge an extra bonus, says Arlette Farge in her book Fragile Lives1. They are not so much the truth as the beginnings of the truth and, she goes on, an eruption of meanings with the greatest possible number of connections with reality. For most of the Bahai community at the local level archives are just so much paper in old boxes. Sometimes there exists an obsessive tendency to admit too much meaning to archives when much of it is irrelevant circularized correspondence that could easily be discarded without any loss. The rare gem is often found amidst such irrelevant material. The historian must learn to see the forrest amidst the mass of trees. History and its documents is made up of so many different lives: impoverished and tragic, rich and joyful, mean and lackluster personalities, saints and heros. There is also a certain grandeur, humour, absurdity and irony. Archives are both seductress and deceptive mirror of reality. They can falsify and distort the object being studied; they can be too facile or too ambiguous a means of entering into a discourse with history. They can tell very little of the real events of Bahai community life. They can often be just a pile of dry bones transferred from one graveyard to another. History has long been enamoured with the great man. More recently it has taken up the cudgels of the average man, women, the disabled, the migrant, the pioneer, and on and on goes the list. All of these prototypes can be found in the archives of local Bahai communities around the world. For anyone taking part in Bahai community life in the last few years of the twentieth century the typical reaction to archives, the boxes of stuff kept usually in someones house in a back room or an attic, or a shed, among other places, is one of a certain weariness. The weariness comes in part from the great mass of apparently irrelevant detail in those boxes and partly from a simple inability to get any
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meaningful perspective on the great historical adventure being engaged in by means of the contemplation of this great weight of paper and memorabilia. It is unfortunately true says Moojan Momen in summarizing the history of memoir writing and archive collecting in the Bahai community, that the Bahais are lamentably neglectful.2 Throughout history, it should be kept in mind, there has been a long and ambiguous relationship with archives. There have been successive tensions down the ages between boxes of documents known as archives and the actual writing of history. The earliest period in the history of western civilization for which we have a great deal of documentation, of archives, is the first century BC in Rome. For the great mass of humanity this archive is of no interest whatsoever. But for the professional ants who deal in Roman history this archive is crucial; it has helped to generate an explosion of archival enthusiasm amongst a coterie in the last several decades. Side by side with this professional enthusiasm there prevails an atmosphere of anarchic confusion in the attitude of western man to his past. We are talking, then, about an old problem: the meaning and relevance of archives. Just as the writing of the Roman poets in that first century BC represents an important part of that rich and ancient archive, so does this poetry represent part(time will tell how important a part) of a modern one of increasing relevance to both historian and social analyst. I see this poetry as an embellishment to a local archive, several where I have lived in Australia and Canada; a contribution to an international archive on pioneers, an archive still in its first century of development; and a small part of a burgeoning base of material the world over which is so extensive now as to virtually swallow the individual in a sea of printed matter. It is impossible to avoid the realm of aesthetics and emotion in dealing with archives, says Arlette Farge in her introductory statement on the subject. In a broad sense the architectural remains of the fifth century BC, or the Egyptian pyramids, are a repository of information, an archive. The realm of aesthetics and emotion is at the heart of these ancient architectural archives. Archives are also an eruption, Farge states; they can be an expression, she says simply, of whim, caprice and tragedy. And, like this poetry and the stuff in those boxes, they can be so much more. It is impossible to assess the relevance of what will one day be an architectural archive, say, in two and a half thousand years. What will be the story told of these generations of the half-light in this first century of
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a Formative Age when a heterodox and seemingly negligible offshoot of an insignificant sect of Shii Islam finished its transformation into a world religion? What will they say of the architectural achievement that helped to give form and beauty to the institutionalized charismatic Force that was about to play a crucial role in the establishment of a global and peaceful civilization? Ron Price 27 December 1996
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Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth Century Paris, Harvard UP,Cambridge, Mass., 1993, Introduction. 2 The Babi and Bahai Religions, 1844-1944: Some Contemporary Western Accounts, Moojan Momen, editor, George Ronald, Oxford, 1981, p.xvi-xvii. SECTION XI Photographs...........1908-2009 INTRODUCTION TO THIS PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM In July 1971 Judy, my first wife, and I moved to Australia from Canada. The photographs from the period before this move belong, for the most part, in other places, mainly in my Journal Volume 1. Some photos from the period before I moved to Australia can be found in my first volume of poetry, entitled, Warm-Up: The Tombs Chambers. There are photographs in these latter two volumes that come from the period 1908 to 1971. There are also photos in this photo album, in Part 2 Section 3 from the period before I moved to Australia.23

(a) The resources: books, volumes, statements, journals, et cetera, mentioned in this introduction, while not immediately identifiable and locatable by readers or my future executors, can all be found in my files. I have organized these files as best I can and there is a pattern and an order, even if it is not immediately identifiable. Once readers and/or, as I say, my future executors become familiar with my arrangement of print materials and resources they will have little difficulty finding the files I refer to in this statement.
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(b) The photos found in Part 2 Section 3 were sent to me by (1) my mothers sisters son, David Hunter and (2) my mothers brothers daughter, Joan Davison(ne Cornfield)
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The photographs found in this volume, part of Section X.I: Photographs of my larger work Pioneering Over Four Epochs, come from various sources and periods of time; firstly, the generation before I was born, my parents generation going back as far as the first two decades of the 20th century, the last years of the Heroic Age from a Bahai perspective; secondly, the years intre des guerres, the first years of the Formative Age, again from a Bahai perspective; thirdly, the chapter of my life before my first marriage, from 1944 to 1967, the year I first left the region in which I was born, that is southern Ontario; fourthly, the period of my first marriage(1967-1975) and, fifthly, the period after my first marriage(1975-to some time in the first half of the 21st century on my passing). This collection was first arranged by my second wife and I about the time of the Bahai Holy Year, May 1992 to May 1993, while we were living in Perth nearly two decades after we first met in February 1974, some six years before I retired form full-time employment. I have added some additional photographs in Part 2 of this album and rearranged the collection into the form it presently possesses during the years 20022007, more than a decade after that initial organization of photos. This album should be seen as a companion piece to: (i) an additional collection of photographs in my study, under volume/folio numbers: 7, 8, 9, 10 and 7.1, 8.1 and 9.1 as well as my Mothers Photographs(1966-78: Volumes 1&2; and (ii) the photos in the first three volumes of my Journal: Volumes 1.0.1, 1.1 and 1.2. My additional journal volumes 2, 3, 4 and 5 are not oriented around photos. They are written accounts of a variety of aspects of daily life. The photos in this binder should also be seen as a companion piece to: (iii) an extensive many-volumed collection of photos that my wife, Chris, keeps in our lounge room and (iv) a scattering of photos throughout the many files, volumes, notebooks, inter alia, in my study and the adjoining room, currently used as a spare bedroom and storeroom. The work, the writing, on the volumes of my journal is incomplete. It is an ongoing exercise(1984-2007), is embellished occasionally with photos but, as I say above, it is not oriented to photos after volume 1. I hope to continue the work on these journal volumes, in both their retrospective aspects, that is before 1984, and their prospective sections, the years after 2007. Gradually during these years after my retirement beginning in 1999 I have had the opportunities, the pleasures, of organizing these photos into some kind of logical arrangement. What I say about my journals is also true of my memoirs/autobiography.
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My retrospective journal is an extension, in some ways, of an initial narrative I wrote in the late 1980s and redrafted to completion in 1993, entitled, Pioneering Over Three Epochs. This journal is also an extension, a companion piece, to my poetry, now in 60 volumes, which I began writing and keeping copies of in 1980, some 27 years ago now. The journal is represented by Section X.2: Journals in my autobiography, Pioneering Over Four Epochs(5th edition). I hope, during the years of my retirement which lie ahead, to provide more extended comment and analysis of these photographs than I already have. These photos make up, as I say above, Section X.1 of my autobiography, my memoirs, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. For now, though, I simply want to write this introduction, this general perspective on just where the photographs and memorabilia in this Volume 1.3 fit into the overall collection of my autobiographical material. Inevitably, were my wife to write this introduction, she would place these photos in a different context. For we are all different. We lead different lives, even and perhaps especially, within any one family. These different perspectives apply to our views of photos, our views of written text and just about everything else, not only for my wife and I, but also for millions and billions of others in relation to their families and their own lives. This introduction is a first start to what may become a fuller and more comprehensive statement, a fuller introduction, as the years go on and as I come to see my life and these photos differently. For we all see our lives differently, not only in the sense I say above, but also in the different stages of our own lives--from our earliest years to our final hours, depending on when we are asked, who asks us and when we write our story. -Ron Price 6 June 2007 ----------------------

Concluding Comments:
I trust that the above three sections provide the detail you require for the documents I am offering here to the Canadian National Bahai Archives. My decision as to which documents I have decided to send to these archives and which ones, therefore, may eventually be accepted by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahais of Canada is based, as I indicated in my preamble to this statement, on the description and
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definition of the nature of these archives as outlined in the Canadian National Bahai Archives Policy.1 I want to again thank the Archives Department for their assistance in helping me decide what to send to these archives. I look forward to hearing from you in the weeks ahead and will be happy with whatever eventuates in connection with this offer of material for the national archive. If you decide, for whatever reasons, that this material is not appropriate that is fine with me. But if, on the other hand, some of this material is deemed relevant that would give me great pleasure. I leave all of this with you in the weeks, months and years ahead as I head into the middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++), if I last that long. Yours, in His service

Ron Price George Town Tasmania 7253 Australia ---------------c.c. My own files.

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